August 21st, 1835
Yesterday I fell in with Lyndhurst, just getting out of his carriage at his door in George Street. He asked me to come in and look at his house, which I did. I asked him what would happen about the Bill. He said, ‘Oh, they will take it. What can they do? If they choose to throw it out, let them do so, I don’t care whether they do or not. But they will take it, because they know it does their business, though not so completely as they desire.’ He said he would alter the qualification, though he did not think it objectionable. I told him I hoped there might be some compromise, and that he and his friends would give way on some of their amendments, and that the Commons would take the rest. Even the ‘Times,’ which goes the whole hog with the Opposition, won’t swallow this (the aldermen), and suggests that it should be withdrawn. Nothing ever was like the outrageous indecency of the attacks upon the House of Lords in the Ministerial papers, and it is not clear that they WHAT IS HAPPINESS? won’t overdo the thing; this kind of fury generally defeats its own object.
August 25th, 1835
At Hillingdon from Saturday till Monday last; began the Life of Mackintosh, and was delighted with Sydney Smith’s letter which is prefixed to it; read and walked all day on Sunday—the two things I do least, viz. exercise my mind and body; therefore both grow gross and heavy. Shakespeare says fat paunches make lean pates, but this is taken from a Greek proverb. I admire this family of Cox’s at Hillingdon, and after casting my eyes in every direction, and thinking much and often of the theory of happiness, I am convinced that it is principally to be found in contented mediocrity, accompanied with an equable temperament and warm though not excitable feelings. When I read such books as Mackintosh’s Life, and see what other men have done, how they have read and thought, a sort of despair comes over me, a deep and bitter sensation of regret ‘for time misspent and talents misapplied,’ not the less bitter from being coupled with a hopelessness of remedial industry and of doing better things. Nor do I know that such men as these were happy; that they possessed sources of enjoyment inaccessible to less gifted minds is not to be doubted, but whether knowledge and conscious ability and superiority generally bring with them content of mind and the sunshine of self-satisfaction to the possessors is anything but certain. I wonder the inductive process has not been more systematically applied to the solution of this great philosophical problem, what is happiness, and in what it consists, for the practical purpose of directing the human mind into the right road for reaching this goal of all human wishes. Why are not innumerable instances collected, examined, analysed, and the results expanded, explained, and reasoned upon for the benefit and instruction of mankind? Who can tell but what these results may lead at last to some simple conclusions such as it requires no vast range of intellect to discover, no subtle philosophy to teach—conclusions mortifying to the pride and vanity of man, but calculated to mitigate the evils of life by softening mutual asperities, and by the establishment of the doctrine of humility, from which all charity, forbearance, toleration, and benevolence must flow as from their source? These simple conclusions may amount to no more than a simple maxim that happiness is to be found ‘in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.’
Semita certe
Tranquillæ per virtutem patet unica vitæ.
The end of the tenth Satire of Juvenal (which is one of the finest sermons that ever was composed, and worth all the homilies of all the Fathers of the Church) teaches us what to pray for—
Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
Healthy body, healthy appetite, healthy feelings, though accompanied by mediocrity of talent, unadorned with wit and imagination, and unpolished by learning and science, will outstrip in the race for happiness the splendid irregularities of genius and the most dazzling successes of ambition. At the same time this general view of the probabilities of happiness must be qualified by the admission that mere vegetation scarcely deserves the name of happiness, and that the highest enjoyment which humanity is capable of may be said to consist in the pleasures of reason and imagination—of a mind expatiating among the wonders of nature, and ranging through all the ‘changes of many-coloured life,’ without being shaken from its equilibrium by the disturbing causes of jealousy, envy, and the evil passions of our nature. The most galling of all conditions is that of him whose conscience and consciousness whisper to him perpetual reproaches, who reflects on what he might have been and who feels and sees what he is. When such a man as Macintosh, fraught with all learning, whose mind, if not kindled into a steady blaze, is perpetually throwing out sparks and coruscations of exceeding brightness, is stung with these self-upbraidings, what must be the reflections of those, the utmost reach of whose industry is far below the value of his most self-accused idleness, who have no self-consolation, STATE OF PARTIES. are plunged in entire darkness, and have not only to lament the years of omission, but those of commission, not only the opportunities neglected, but the positive mischief done by the debasement of the faculties, the deterioration of the understanding, the impairing of the power of exertion consequent upon a long devotion to low, despicable, unprofitable habits and pursuits?
August 27th, 1835
Melbourne has thrown up the Tithe Bill in the Lords, because the Opposition expunged the appropriation clauses. In the Corporation Bill Lyndhurst made still further alterations, such as the Commons will not take (the town clerks and the exclusion of Dissenters from the disposal of ecclesiastical patronage), and as it is the general opinion that they will make no compromise and surrender none of their amendments, that Bill will probably be lost too. What then? asks everybody, and nobody can tell what then, but there is a sort of vague apprehension that something must come of it, and that this collision (for collision it is) between the Lords and the Commons will not be terminated without some violent measures or important changes; if such do take place, they will have been most wantonly and wickedly brought about, but it is a lamentable thing to see the two great parties in the country, equally possessed of wealth and influence, and having the same interest in general tranquillity, tearing each other to pieces while the Radicals stand laughing and chuckling by, only waiting for the proper moment to avail themselves of these senseless divisions. There is something inconceivable, a sort of political absurdity, in the notion of a country like this being on the eve of a convulsion, when it is tranquil, prosperous, and without any grievance; universal liberty prevails, every man’s property and person are safe, the laws are well administered and duly obeyed; so far from there being any unredressed grievances, the imagination of man cannot devise the fiction or semblance of a grievance without there being a rush to correct it. The only real evil is that the rage for correction is too violent, and sweeps all before it. What is it, then, which menaces the existence of the constitution we live under? It is the fury of parties, it is the broad line of separation which the Reform Bill has drawn, the antagonist positions into which the two Houses of Parliament have been thrown, and the Whigs having identified themselves with the democratic principle in one House, in order to preserve their places, and the Conservative principle having taken refuge in the other House, where it is really endangered by the obstinate and frantic violence of its supporters. What was the loud and eternal cry of the Lords, and of all the Conservatives, when the Reform Bill was in agitation? That it was a revolution, that it would place all political power in the hands of the people, that it would establish an irresistible democratic force; and the great body of them justified their refusal to go into Committee on the ground that the Bill was so vicious in principle, so irremediably mischievous, that no alterations could diminish its evil tendency. It is now as clear as daylight that if they had gone into Committee and amended the Bill, they might have obviated all or nearly all the evils they apprehended, for even after the passing of the ‘whole Bill,’ with all its clauses perfect and untouched, parties are so nearly balanced that the smallest difference would turn the scale the other way. They would, however, listen to nothing, and now they feel the consequences of their ruat cœlum policy; but what I complain of is, that after the verification of their predictions, and the realisation of their fears, in the establishment of a democratic power of formidable strength, they do not act consistently with their own declared opinions; for if it be true, as they assert, that their legitimate authority and influence have been transferred to other hands, and that the just equilibrium of the Constitution has been shaken, it is mad and preposterous in them to act just as if no such disturbing causes had occurred, as if they were still in the plenitude of their constitutional power, and to provoke a collision which, if their own assertions be true, they are no longer in a condition to sustain. The answer to such arguments as this invariably is, Are the Lords, then, to be content to yield everything, and must they pass every Bill which the SECLUSION OF SIR R. PEEL. House of Commons thinks fit to send to them purely and simply? Certainly they are not; no such thing is expected of them by any man or any set of men, but common prudence and a sense of their own condition and their own relative strength under the new dispensation demand that they should exercise their undoubted rights with circumspection and calmness, desisting from all opposition for opposition’s sake, standing out firmly on questions involving great and important principles, and yielding with a good grace, without ill-humour, and without subserviency on minor points. They ought, for example, to have followed in the footsteps of Peel in this Irish Corporation Bill, and to have satisfied themselves with making those amendments which he strove for without success in the House of Commons, and no more. As it is, he wholly disapproves of the course they have taken, and so I believe did the Duke of Wellington in the beginning of the discussions, but Lyndhurst took the lead with the violent party, overruled the Duke, neglected Peel, and dealt with the Bill in the slashing manner we have seen.