32
Oct. 21, 1898.
I have been reading some of my old diaries to-day; and I am tempted to try and disentangle, as far as I can, the motif that seems to me to underlie my simple life.
One question above all others has constantly recurred to my mind; and the answer to it is the sum of my slender philosophy.
The question then is this: is a simple, useful, dignified, happy life possible to most of us without the stimulus of affairs, of power, of fame? I answer unhesitatingly that such a life is possible. The tendency of the age is to measure success by publicity, not to think highly of any person or any work unless it receives “recognition,” to think it essential to happiness monstrari digito, to be in the swim, to be a personage.
I admit at once the temptation; to such successful persons comes the consciousness of influence, the feeling of power, the anxious civilities of the undistinguished, the radiance of self-respect, the atmosphere of flattering, subtle deference, the seduction of which not even the most independent and noble characters can escape. Indeed, many an influential man of simple character and unpretending virtue, who rates such conveniences of life at their true value, and does not pursue them as an end, would be disagreeably conscious of the lack of these petits soins if he adopted an unpopular cause or for any reason forfeited the influence which begets them.
A friend of mine came to see me the other day fresh from a visit to a great house. His host was a man of high cabinet rank, the inheritor of an ample fortune and a historic name, who has been held by his nearest friends to cling to political life longer than prudence would warrant. My friend told me that he had been left alone one evening with his host, who had, half humorously, half seriously, indulged in a lengthy tirade against the pressure of social duties and unproductive drudgery that his high position involved. “If they would only let me alone!” he said; “I think it very hard that in the evening of my days I cannot order my life to suit my tastes. I have served the public long enough.... I would read—how I would read—and when I was bored I would sleep in my chair.”
Success
“And yet,” my friend said, commenting on these unguarded statements, “I believe he is the only person of his intimate circle who does not know that he would be hopelessly bored—that the things he decries are the very breath of life to him. There is absolutely no reason why he should not at once and forever realise his fancied ideal—and if his wife and children do not urge him to do so, it is only because they know that he would be absolutely miserable.” And this is true of many lives.