Finally, when we have our great purpose in life, and have overcome the fear of pain and loss, we must learn to see and appreciate the beauty of the world we live in. The man who refuses to be downed by trouble is in a condition to enjoy each bit of good fortune that comes to him, to welcome each as a pure gift or addition to life, and to know that gifts of some sort or other will always come. Holding all things with that looser grasp that is ready to let them go if go they must, he can relish the good things of life the more freely for not having counted on them, as he can the more freely admire the virtues of his friends for not having expected them to be perfect. He can feel the beauty of the world without being dependent upon it, not looking for mortal things to be immortal or human things to be ideal, but whole-heartedly enjoying today what he has today and tomorrow what he shall have to-morrow. The things he cannot have at all, instead of spoiling his happiness in what he has, will rather add to it by forming another dimension of the actual, full of beautiful visions and glorious possibilities. And meantime the real world, of events that actually occur, will not fail, in spite of its flaws and rebuffs, to bring him ever-fresh delights. Let no one minimize these delights. There is more beauty, more interest here in this mundane existence of ours, more inspiration, more inexhaustible possibility of enjoyment than the keenest of us has dreamed of. We need some sort of shaking up to rouse us to the beauty of common things- the freshness of the air we breathe, the warmth of sunshine, the green of trees and fields and the blue of the sky, the joy in exercise of brain and muscle, in reading and talking and sharing in the life of the world; and in such daily things as eating at the family table when we are hungry, or a good night's sleep when we are tired. We need some teacher like Whitman to open our eyes to the beauty not only of flowers but of leaves of grass, to the picturesqueness and significance of so dull a thing as a ferryboat; or like Wordsworth, with his picturing of homely country scenes and events, with his emotion at the sight of the sleeping city- "a sight so touching in its majesty." This sense of the meaning of common things floods most of us at one time or another, and we see what in our blindness we have been overlooking. Go without your comfortable bed for a while, your well-cooked food, your home, friends, neighbors, and you will discover how rich you have been. Your mother's face hinted by some stranger in a foreign land will some day overcome you with the realization of the comfort of her love; and unless you are a crabbed egotist the life of your fellows can furnish you with endless pleasures. It is not necessary to own things to enjoy them; our interests and enjoyments may well overlap and include those of our friends and neighbors, and even those of strangers. The smile of a happy child, a friend's good fortune a sunrise or moonlit cloud-strewn sky, should bring a pure gladness to any one who has eyes to see and heart to feel. We must "Learn to love the morn, Love the lovely working light, Love the miracle of sight, Love the thousand things to do." [Footnote: These lines are Richard Le Gallienne's. Cf. also Matthew Arnold's lines: "Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done, To have advanced true friends and beat down baffling foes? The sports of the country people, A flute note from the woods, Sunset over the sea; Seed-time and harvest, The reapers in the corn, The vinedresser in his vineyard, The village girl at her wheel. . .">[ The true lover of beauty will not need to seek forever-new scenes and objects to admire. He will find that which can feed his heart in the clouds of morning, the blue of noon, or the stars of night. One graceful vase with a flower-stalk bending over to display its drooping blossoms, will fill him with a quiet happiness; the merry laughter of a child, the tender smile of a lover, the rugged features of a weather beaten laborer, will stir his soul to response; a few lines of poetry remembered in the midst of work, a simple song sung in the twilight, a print of some old master hanging by his bedside, a bird-call heard at sunset or the scent of evening air after rain, may so speak to his spirit that he will say, "It is enough!" It is not the number of beautiful things that we have that matters, but the degree in which we are open to their influence, the atmosphere into which we let them lead us. Our hearts must be free from self-seeking, from regret, from anger, from restlessness. The vision comes not always to the connoisseur, comes to him whose life is simple, earnest, open-eyed and openhearted. In the pauses of his faithful work he will refresh his soul with some bit of beauty that tells of attainment, of peace, of perfection. That is a proof to him of the beauty in the midst of which he lives, inexhaustible, hardly discerned; it carries him beyond itself into the ideal world of which it is a sample and illustration; unconsciously during the duties of the day he lives in the light of that vision, and everything is sweetened and blessed thereby.
Can we maintain a steady under glow of happiness?
Happiness—happiness sufficient to make life well worth living is, for most men at least, at most times, a real possibility. To be won it has but to be sought vigorously enough. It is to be sought, however, not primarily by changing one's environment but by changing one's self; not by acquiring new things, but by acquiring a new attitude toward things; not by getting what could make one happy, but by learning to be happy with what one can get. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN YOU! This is not merely a moralist's theory, or an empirical observation; it is a scientific fact. We may restate the matter in psychological language by saying that happiness and unhappiness are responses of the organism to its environment, reactions upon a stimulus, our attitude of welcome or dissatisfaction toward the various matters of our experience. True, we often think of the quality of pleasantness as inhering in the things we enjoy, and speak of troubles and sorrows as objective. But this is only a shorthand way of describing experience. In reality the pleasure we feel in eating when we are hungry or in seeing a friend we love is something added to and different from the taste sensations, or the complex visual perceptions and memory images the friend arouses in us. So a cutting or burning sensation, the thought of a friend's death, or of our failure, on the one hand, and our unhappiness thereat on the other hand, are two distinct things, closely bound together in our minds but separable.
The separation is, indeed, difficult to bring about, because the age long struggle for existence has made unhappiness at physical pain and pleasure at the healthy exercise of our organs or satisfying of our appetite instinctive and immediate, that we may avoid what is harmful to life and pursue what is useful. All our cravings and longings and regrets have this biological value; they are the machinery by which nature spurs us on to better adjustment to the conditions of life. And in learning to do without the spur we must learn not to need it. Discontent is better than laziness, remorse better than callous selfishness, suffering under extreme cold better than recklessly exposing the body till it is weakened. But as soon as we have reached that stage of rationality where we can choose the better way and stick to it without the stinging goad of pain, the pain is no longer necessary and we may safely learn to weed it out.
A few blessed souls we know who have learned the secret, who go about with perpetually radiant face and take smilingly the very mishaps that worry and sadden the rest of us. To some extent this may be merely a matter of better nerves, of less sensitive temperament, of more abounding vitality; but there are many of the weakest and most sensitive among those who have learned that better way; they can turn everything into happiness as Midas turned everything into gold. It is surprising, looking through such a one's eyes, to see how full life is of delight. Yet in the same situations there may be room for endless complaint if "every grief is entertained that's offered." It all depends on the attitude taken. In trouble one man will fall to fretting, while another does what can be done and then turns his thoughts to something else; in discomfort one will lower the corners of his mouth and feel wretched, while the other finds it all vastly amusing; one will have his day quite spoiled by some disappointment which the other takes as a mere incident; one will find the same environment dull and stupid which the other finds full of interest and opportunity; and so out of like conditions one will make an unhappy, the other a happy life. [Footnote: Cf. "In journeying often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watching often, in hunger and thirst, in fasting often, in cold and nakedness . . . yet always rejoicing!" "Rejoicing in tribulation" even, because to the brave man every obstacle and failure is so much further opportunity for courage and contrivance, for matching himself against things. "Human joy," writes the author of the Simple Life, "has celebrated its finest triumphs under the greatest tests of endurance." The Apostle Paul is but one of many who have welcomed each rebuff, and proved that if rightly taken life almost at its worst can be transmuted by courage into happiness.] This, then, is the philosophy of happiness in a nutshell: PUT YOUR HEART INTO DOING YOUR DUTY; DEMAND NOTHING ELSE OF LIFE THAN THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO YOUR DUTY; ENJOY FREELY AND WITHOUT FEAR EVERYTHING GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL THAT COMES IN YOUR WAY.
To acquire and keep this attitude of mind requires of course resolution and persistence. We must rouse ourselves and take sides. We must definitely pledge ourselves once and for all to happiness; and if we] cannot at a leap attain to it, we must still remember that we have committed ourselves to that side. We must pretend to be happy, throw aside all complaining and sighs and long faces; whatever comes, we must remember that we are on trial to preserve our buoyancy, our power not to be downcast. We shall not be able] to disuse our habit of unhappiness at once. But if we stick to our colors and refuse to add to whatever depression masters us by brooding upon it and giving it right of way; if we remember the conditions of happiness stated above, and thrust resolutely from us all thoughts and words incompatible with living according to them, the unhappiness will be gone before we know it. It is a well-known psychological law that if we choke the expression of an emotion, we shall presently find that we have smothered the emotion itself. It may seem like hollow pretense at first, but it will pay to pretend hard; when we have pretended long enough, we shall find we no longer need to pretend. There will always be those, no doubt, who will declare it impossible, and they will continue to be unhappy; there will be many others who will concede the possibility of it, but will not have the determination and persistence to effect it; but there will always be some who will say, "Happiness is possible!" who will set out to get it, and who will get it, as they will deserve to. Some men are born happy, some seem to have happiness thrust upon them, but some achieve happiness. It will not be the same kind of happiness that we had as children, before the shocks of life awoke us. It will be a happiness that meets and rises above pain. Life will always have its tragedies, sickness and separation, pain and sudden death. They are the common inheritance of mankind. But it is not these things in themselves that make life unendurable, it is the way we take them, our fear of them, our worry over them, our longings and rebelliousness, our magnifying and brooding over and shrinking from them; when we resolve to lift our heads and assert our power, we shall find life tragic, yes, but endurable, and full of a deep joy. The little worries and disappointments will cease to trouble us. And the same attitude that enables us to rise above them will, when more staunchly held, lift us over the great sorrows also, and keep alive in us an under glow of joy. An under glow of joy-that is what can be found in life in any but its highly abnormal phases, by conforming to its conditions and taking it for what it is, stuff which, we have to shape into service to the ideal. It should be recognized as the final word of personal morality that a man must train himself to a happiness that is independent of circumstances. We need no mystical painting out of the shadows, no blindness to facts, only a will to serve the right, a readiness to accept the imperfect, and eyes to see the beauty that surrounds us. "If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness, If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face, If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books" and my food, and summer rain, Knocked on my sullen heart in vain. If, in short, we have not disciplined ourselves to happiness, it may well be maintained that we have left undone our highest duty to our neighbor and ourselves. And he may with good reason declare that he has solved the greatest problem of life who can proclaim with Tolstoy, "I rejoice in having taught myself not to be sad!" or with the Apostle Paul, "I have learned in whatsoever state I am therein to be content." Much of the secret of happiness is to be found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and, of course, in the Gospels. Of modern writers, among the most useful are Stevenson and Chesterton. See, for example, Stevenson's Christmas Sermon, and J. F. Genung's Stevenson's Attitude toward Life. Chesterton's counsels are too sattered to make reference practicable.
See also C. W. Eliot, The Happy Life. C. Hilty, Happiness. P. G. Hamerton, The Quest of Happiness. P. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book m, chap, n, sees. 3, 6; chap, iv, sees. 1, 2. H. C. King, Rational Living, chap, x, sec. iv. J. Payot, Education of the Will, book iv, chap. iv. A. Bennett, The Human Machine, chaps, VI; Mental Efficiency, chap. ix. In Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty, Roosevelt's Strenuous Life, and Gannett's Blessed be Drudgery, we get valuable notes; and Carlyle has many, especially ID the latter chapters of Sartor Resartm.