Vesper Talks to Girls

by Laura A. Knott

You do not need to be reminded of the importance of this subject. Do we not hear on all sides that happiness is what all the world is seeking? Why are men toiling and struggling and warring with each other to heap up wealth except that they believe it will bring happiness? It is probably true that most of the actions of the majority of human beings are directed, consciously or unconsciously, toward happiness as an end. “We keep pleasure in the background of our minds, not allowing it to be seen, yet always hoping for more and more of it,” says one of our modern writers on ethics. Yet I should be sorry to have you believe that pleasure is the summum bonum of life.

All normal, healthy young people are happy. There may be disappointments and sorrows, but the power of rebound is great and happiness returns. The Creator evidently wants us to be happy, and any other theory of life is an unnatural one. The ascetics of the Middle Ages had a mistaken idea of serving God, believing that the more they suffered, the better they were pleasing Him. Our conception of God as a God of love forbids that theory. In children and animals happiness is always a sign of well-being, as it seems to denote absence of ill-adjustment. If a young child appears to be happy, we feel that all is well with it. The frolicsome play of all young creatures is an expression of the gladness that has been implanted within them. The further removed we are from the spirit of gladness, the less are we conforming to one of the deepest laws of our being.

Happiness is good, not only as a sign that all is well with us, just as silence in the machine denotes perfect adjustment, but it is good as productive of something beyond itself. If we are happy, we work better. Happiness has an exhilarating effect. If we are happy, we add to the joy of all about us and thus increase the gladness of the world. Happiness is not only the sign of absence of friction, it removes friction. It is not only an indication of health, but a cause of health. One who enjoys his dinner will digest it better than one who eats from duty. If happiness is, then, so important, we may reasonably ask what we can do to secure it.

We may rightly say that we want all the happiness we can have consistent with other aims. A wrong attitude regarding it is that we must purchase it at any cost, no matter how much we have to ride over the rights of others to secure it. This is the attitude of many young people who have been brought up in affluence and who have formed the fatal habit of thinking that life must bring them whatever they want. One longs to say to such young people that happiness does not depend upon what we have, but upon what we are. The person who is discontented in a hovel would be discontented in a palace, for even there he would have to live with himself. Mrs. Wiggs could not have been happier in a mansion than she was in her cabbage-patch, because her happiness was independent of external things. She made it herself by her attitude toward the world, toward her work, toward her troubles and her blessings. Those, however, who are of an unhappy, discontented nature always attribute their lack of happiness to some definite thing or things which their more fortunate friends have and the possession of which they think would bring complete happiness. In the expressive words of George Eliot, “Dissatisfaction seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried good.”

Happiness is never won by direct pursuit. Just when she seems so close that we are sure we can reach out the hand and grasp her, she is gone, and again we must start in hot pursuit. Many have spent their lives in this way, a bootless chase. It is only when we give up this mad pursuit and attend to our business in life that Happiness comes and makes her home with us. “Pleasure to be got must be forgot.”

But you are happy, so why talk to you about securing something which you already possess, indeed, have never been without? Because there are many kinds of happiness, some far more satisfying and more permanent than others. It is for us to see to it that ours is of a kind that will stand every test. At your stage of life you possess most of the blessings which the world has always regarded as most desirable. If you wish to count them you may begin with youth. To be young means that almost all of life is before you and that no irrevocable mistakes have as yet been made. There are many with misspent lives behind them, who would barter everything they possess for youth and the opportunity to begin all over again. You possess health. What would not the aged and feeble, the crippled, the diseased, give for your vigorous body! Like most of our truest riches, however, health is something we take as a matter of course and do not know the value of until it has departed from us. You have human love. Whoever you are there are those whose world is made brighter because of your presence in it.

Youth, health, love are yours, so why should you not be happy? But I have already said that you are happy. And yet I did not quite mean it. I should probably do you no injustice if I should say that you are not as happy as this splendid trio of blessings would seem to warrant. The reason is that real happiness does not come as a gift. It is achieved happiness that is of most worth.

You have often been told, no doubt, that the school days are the happiest days of life. Some men and women of maturer years are very fond of preaching this doctrine to young people. But it is a wrong and pernicious theory of life, and those who advocate it condemn themselves by their own words, for they show that they have lacked the power to make life richer and deeper as it went on. “I never will believe,” says George Eliot, “that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!”

Getting to the end of school days is not, then, like walking off a precipice. There is much beyond and it is good. To be sure, there will be no more days just like the school days, with their freedom from care, their glorious comradeship, and their stimulus to high endeavor. In future years they doubtless will wear a halo possessed by no others, but this will not mean that they were really the happiest. In fact, if the first twenty years of one’s life have truly prepared one to live, life should constantly grow richer as it moves onward. We should grow happier as we grow older because of two things, increasing power of service, and a growing capacity for enjoyment. Dr. Eliot, ex-President of Harvard University, once defined education as “increasing the capacity for serviceableness and for enjoyment.” In this sense education does not stop with the school days. Each year should reveal new springs of power and should develop within us new resources. Women ought to be even more careful than men to develop such powers and resources, for a man’s active life in the world is much more likely to compel growth in him. How many women there are who, after reaching middle life, when their children are grown up and gone out of the home, find it impossible to secure happy employment for the mind! They might have developed resources and powers which would have given them an ever-increasing interest in life.

We often hear people wish for childhood or youth again. When any one expresses such a wish, he generally means that he would like to be a child or youth again if he could take back with him all the wisdom and all the powers and capacities that the years have brought him in exchange for his vanished youth. But to be a child again, just such a child as he was, and to grow up all over again, making the same unhappy blunders and suffering from the same hard knocks in the process of adjustment to an inexorable universe—who would wish it? As a matter of fact, if we are really wise, we shall never wish that we might repeat any period of life. Always, just beyond and beckoning to us, is the next period, and we should always believe with Browning that “the best is yet to be.” No period of life has or can have a monopoly of happiness.