At the best, making one’s living is often a sad affair. Business life is like a dinner at a crowded third-rate hotel, —one’s clothing is so torn in the struggle for place, and there is so much dirt to eat before the dessert is served, that either the appetite turns to nausea, or its satisfaction is followed by indigestion. Hence so many able men prefer permanent positions on small salaries to embarking in affairs on their own account. Many a lawyer will give up a large practice to become a judge on one-third of the income. Politics in the United States is, as a business, notoriously unsafe, but the attraction of fixed salaries overcrowds it with aspirants. The dream of the Socialists
is for all citizens to be salaried. Individual effort, however, alone insures general progress; not to dispense with it, but to favor its pleasurable development, is the real social problem.
The true aim of Occupations of Necessity is to provide us time, not for repose and inaction, as most moralists teach, but for Occupations of Choice. We call these our recreations, amusements, pastimes, favorite studies, hobbies, fads, if you please. In these lie the mainsprings of our felicity; and their character reveals pretty clearly the measure of our capacity for happiness, and the degree of our mastery of its theory. If we pass our leisure in cultivating delusions and pursuing inanities, our enjoyment is that of the insane and the idiotic, and arises not from the health, but from the disease or debility, of our minds. Yet how many men, skillful in securing the means of pleasure, are witless in the use of it!
“Those are the best recreations,” says old Thomas Fuller, “which, besides refreshing, enable men to some other good ends.” His words, though they sound well, are only half-wise. To enjoy to the utmost any favorite pastime or study, it should be pursued for itself alone, and with no ulterior purpose or hope in view. “’Twere to cramp its use, to hook it to some useful end.” Pleasure is nobler than profit, enjoyment is higher than utility, whatever political economists or pulpit orators say to the contrary. I know some men who always explain their relaxations as a part of their serious lives; and others who, if
detected in an act of benevolence, hasten to show that it was prompted by their self-interest; of the two, I admire the latter more.
Success is another name for Perseverance. When Newton was asked how he reached his great discovery, he replied, “By making it incessantly the subject of my thoughts.”
Happiness follows success, provided the latter is rightly achieved and received.