THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS. ri OLIDAYS may be a search for
health, but they are chiefly a search for happiness. Among those who spend, say, a month of the year in travel or sport or with their families at the seaside, there must be ninety-nine who confess that their only object is happiness as against one who thinks first of adding to his knowledge or capabilities or reducing his weight. Yet the one in a hundred may possibly achieve happiness (if he is not a pedant, of course) while the ninety-nine faiL It is an old story that the realisation never equals the anticipation. To anticipate happiness as something which can be definitely captured by direct pursuit is likely to end in disappointment. One might think, to hear some people talk, that happiness consisted in suddenly being idle after having been busy for eleven months. Probably we are all tempted to entertain that fallacy,—it is very attractive. But if we could analyse the feelings of the many thousands of worthy British citizens who return to their labours about this time of year, we should probably find it possible to divide them into two classes,—those whose determination to be thoroughly happy had been somehow disappointed, had perhaps yielded to an overcoming consciousness of indigestion, and those upon whom happiness had come unawares while they were trying busily to do some other thing, worth doing, with which the intention of being happy was not very con- sciously connected. Matthew Arnold talked of "an almost bloodthirsty clinging to life," and there is a counterpart to this in an almost painful resolve to be happy. There was once a schoolboy who spent miserable holidays while contem- plating that so many days of the heavenly period had passed and that only so many more remained to be enjoyed.
Life requires an art, and some people say that happiness is the whole of it. But if happiness is an art, it is in many ways an illicit one. Studiously to try to be happy is to assume that one has a right to be happy, and this is to disregard the warnings of numerous sages. But even if it were not an impiety to claim happiness, it would ' still be a futility. Happiness is a matter of temperament•; thousands of people
who have every reason to be happy (as we vainly judge) are unhappy, and thousands who ought, by all the rules, to be
miserable float buoyantly and jauntily on the troubled ocean of their affairs. One can waste a good deal of pity on men who deserve it but do not require it. The writer has one such case in mind. The man's business failed, nor could he rise again for all his efforts; the ill-luck that pursued him was persistent, inexorable. His wife, who had graced his pros- perity, was quite unable to redeem his distress; rather she saddled him with the blame, and became at once a provocation and a hindrance. His daughters made undesirable marriages, and his sons, instead of helping him out of the ditch into which he had fallen, ungratefully relieved his pockets of the chief part of what little remained in them. When the writer met this man just after a particularly heavy shower of major and minor misfortunes, he experienced that kind of embarrass- ment which one has in speaking to a person about a heavy bereavement. But embarrassment was unnecessary. The man's laugh was as light, his face as free from lines, and his step as springy and eager as in the days of his ease. " I've got half-a-crown in my pocket," he said with a slap on his thigh, "and I'm off to see the pantomime." And off he went like a boy.
How little control we have over our moods I And happiness is a mood. If we can turn a mood into an art, by all means let us turn it. But how many of us can do that P By reso- lution we can prevent our moods from being masters of us, but few of us can be masters of them. Our moods are native—born with us—and follow us about as the Furies followed Orestes. One may placate the Furies, as the Athenians did, with a pleasant name, but they will not really be changed.
Perhaps one is ambitious. If so, one can hardly hope to be happy. Contentment with one's position is the negation of ambition. But what man who has any spirit would, after all, expel the pricking daemon within him, and give its place to a dull and stagnant satisfaction with things as they are? Or perhaps one is the victim of " worry,"—a highly subjective thing which has no calculable relation to the visible facts of a man's life. There are people who work sixteen hours out of every twenty-four, and are saved by the steady pulses of a nerveless constitution from ever bearing a trace of the strain. Indeed, there is no strain. Others are genuinely overworked by a pitiful four or five hours a day, because there is never a time when they are free from the crushing thought of their work.
Continually to have the mood of happiness at call would be a kind of dram-drinking or opium-smoking. If happiness is indulged in for its own sake, without reference to one's deserts, it should be an infrequent draught. This is a con- tradiction, no doubt, of much that has been written. R. L. Stevenson argued that we underrated the " duty of being happy," and every one is familiar with books in which the same duty is explained and recommended. But one cannot easily think of happiness in this way, as a thing to be conjured up and worn on the face (perhaps with a beatified look as when one is being photographed) for the good of others. Happi- ness, if a thing of its fugitive essence can be secured, is a result and a reward, and is an inextricable condition of other things. If one does one's work in life, whatever it may be, as well as one can, without being unfair to others and without asking or expecting credit or notoriety for it, one may be happy—or one may not ; at all events, there will be the satisfaction of knowing that the only condition on which happiness is attainable has been fulfilled. Happi: ness comes to us all, or to nearly all of us, in fragments. Nobody can arrange for a whole month's happiness in advance. We may have happier moments in the eleven months than in the one. They may come at a jolly dinner-party, in the exchange of confidences with a friend, in a good " right and left" when shooting, in a clean smite to square-leg, in a couplet of verse or a single page of a book, or the sight of a well-fitting sail close-hauled. But promised joys are the most elusive. He who would sit down to enjoy the sunset, to hear the wind sing in the grass or surge beautifully through trees, to listen to the song of birds or the cries of sea-fowl in a marsh or the note of church bells rising from a valley—he who would do these things to reach happiness will find (certainly if he be alone) that his mood turns to melancholy.
It has sat unfortunate air of paradox, but it is true that one - of the richest moods which is very near to happiness, and into which one can enter almost at will, is melancholy :— " Come let us sit and watch the sky, And fancy clouds, where no clouds be."
Milton, we know, fell under that purifying spell of acquired sadness, and he has described the circumstances :—
"Oft, on a plat of rising ground I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar."
There, like the "pensive Nun," one may " forget himself to marble." Melancholy is not necessarily an ill-conditioned defiance of life. It appealed as much to Samuel Rogers as to Burton, the author of the "Anatomy." On his title-page Burton wrote :—" The Anatomy of Melancholy, what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it : In their partitions, with their several sections, members and sub-sections, philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up." The man who wrote that no doubt loved his melancholy, for all his professed attempts to escape from it. At all events, it is safer to arrive at happiness through melancholy than to frighten happiness away by a direct approach; for, as the proverb says, he that talks much of happiness invites grief.
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