Wisdom and Destiny

by Maurice Maeterlinck

Let us not look to renouncement for happiness till we have sought it elsewhere in vain. It is easy to be wise if we be content to regard as happiness the void that is left by the absence of happiness. But it was not for unhappiness the sage was created; and it is more glorious, as well as more human, to be happy and still to be wise. The supreme endeavour of wisdom is only to seek in life for the fixed point of happiness; but to seek this fixed point in renouncement and farewell to joy, is only to seek it in death. He who moves not a limb is persuaded, perhaps, he is wise; but was this the purpose wherefor mankind was created? Ours is the choice—whether wisdom shall be the honoured wife of our passions and feelings, our thoughts and desires, or the melancholy bride of death. Let the tomb have its stagnant wisdom, but let there be wisdom also for the hearth where the fire still burns.

56. It is not by renouncing the joys that are near us that we shall grow wise; but as we grow wise we unconsciously abandon the joys that now are beneath us. Even so does the child, as years come to him, give up one by one without thinking the games that have ceased to amuse. And just as the child learns far more from his play than from work that is given him, so does wisdom progress far more quickly in happiness than in misfortune. It is only one side of morality that unhappiness throws into light; and the man whom sorrow has taught to be wise, is like one who has loved and never been loved in return. There must always be something unknown to the love whereto no other love has made answer; and this, too, will remain unknown to him whose wisdom is born of sorrow.

"Is happiness truly as happy as people imagine?" was asked of two happy ones once by a philosopher whom protracted injustice had saddened. No; it is a thing more desirable far, but also much less to be envied, than people suppose; for it is in itself quite other than they can conceive who have never been perfectly happy. To be gay is not to be happy, nor will he who is happy always be gay. It is only the little ephemeral pleasures that forever are smiling; and they die away as they smile. But some loftiness once obtained, lasting happiness becomes no less grave than majestic sorrow. Wise men have said it were best for us not to be happy, so that happiness thus might be always the one thing desired. But how shall the sage, to whom happiness never has come, be aware that wisdom is the one thing alone that happiness neither can sadden nor weary? Those thinkers have learned to love wisdom with a far more intimate love whose lives have been happy, than those whose lives have been sad. The wisdom forced into growth by misfortune is different far from the wisdom that ripens beneath happiness. The first, where it seeks to console, must whisper of happiness; the other tells of itself. He who is sad is taught by his wisdom that happiness yet may be his; he who is happy is taught by his wisdom that he may become wiser still. The discovery of happiness may well be the great aim of wisdom; and we needs must be happy ourselves before we can know that wisdom itself contains all.

57. There are some who are wholly unable to support the burden of joy. There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow. It may even be true that permanent happiness calls for more strength in man than permanent sorrow; for the heart wherein wisdom is not delights more in the expectation of that which it has not yet, than in the full possession of all it has ever desired. He in whom happiness dwells is amazed at the heart that finds aliment only in fear or in hope, and that cannot be nourished on what it possesses, though it possess all it ever desired.

We often see men who are strong and morally prudent whom happiness yet overcomes. Not finding therein all they sought, they do not defend it, or cling to it, with the energy needful in life. We must have already acquired some not inconsiderable wisdom to be undismayed at perceiving that happiness too has its sorrow, and to be not induced by this sorrow to think that ours cannot be the veritable happiness. The most precious gift that happiness brings is the knowledge that springs up within us that it is not a thing of mere ecstasy, but a thing that bids us reflect. It becomes far less rare, far less inaccessible, from the moment we know that its greatest achievement is to give to the soul that is able to prize it an increase of consciousness, which the soul could elsewhere never have found. To know what happiness means is of far more importance to the soul of man than to enjoy it. To be able long to love happiness great wisdom needs must be ours; but a wisdom still greater for us to perceive, as we lie in the bosom of cloudless joy, that the fixed and stable part of that joy is found in the force which, deep down in our consciousness, could render us happy still though misfortune wrapped us around. Do not believe you are happy till you have been led by your happiness up to the heights whence itself disappears from your gaze, but leaving you still, unimpaired, the desire to live.

58. There are some profound thinkers, such as Pascal, Schopenhauer, Hello, who seem not to have been happy, for all that the sense of the infinite, universal, eternal, was loftily throned in their soul. But it may well be an error to think that he who gives voice to the multitude's sorrow must himself always be victim to great personal despair. The horizon of sorrow, surveyed from the height of a thought that has ceased to be selfish, instinctive, or commonplace, differs but little from the horizon of happiness when this last is regarded from the height of a thought of similar nature, but other in origin. And after all, it matters but little whether the clouds be golden or gloomy that yonder float over the plain; the traveller is glad to have reached the eminence whence his eye may at last repose on illimitable space. The sea is not the less marvellous and mysterious to us though white sails be not for ever flitting over its surface; and neither tempest nor day that is radiant and calm is able to bring enfeeblement unto the life of our soul. Enfeeblement comes through our dwelling, by night and by day, in the airless room of our cold, self-satisfied, trivial, ungenerous thoughts, at a time when the sky all around our abode is reflecting the light of the ocean.

But there is a difference perhaps between the sage and the thinker. It may be that sorrow will steal over the thinker as he stands on the height he has gained; but the sage by his side only smiles—and this smile is so loyal, so human and natural, that the humblest creature of all must needs understand, and will gladly welcome it to him, as it falls like a flower to the foot of the mountain. The thinker throws open the road "which leads from the seen to the unseen;" the sage throws open the highway that takes us from that which we love to-day to that which we yet shall love, and the paths that ascend from that which has ceased to console to that which, for long time to come, shall be laden with deep consolation. It is needful, but not all-sufficient, to have reflected deeply and boldly on man, and nature, and God; for the profoundest thought is of little avail if it contain no germ of comfort. Indeed, it is only thought that the thinker, as yet, does nor wholly possess; as the other thoughts are, too, that remain outside our normal, everyday life. It is easier far to be sad and dwell in affliction than at once to do what time in the end will always compel us to do: to shake ourselves free from affliction. He who spends his days gloomily, in constant mistrust of his fellows, will often appear a profounder thinker than the other, who lives in the faith and honest simplicity wherein all men should dwell. Is there a man can believe he has done all it lay in his power to do if, as he meditates thus, in the name of his brethren, on the sorrows of life, he hides from them—anxious, perhaps, not to weaken his grandiose picture of sorrow—the reasons wherefore he accepts life, reasons that must be decisive, since he himself continues to live? The thought must be incomplete surely whose object is not to console. It is easier for you to tell me the cause of your sorrow than, very simply, to speak of the deeper, the weightier reasons that induce your instinct to cling to this life whose distress you bemoan. Which of us finds not, unsought, many thousands of reasons for sorrow? It is doubtless of service that the sage should point out those that are loftiest, for the loftiest reasons for sorrow must be on the eve of becoming reasons for gladness and joy. But reasons that have not within them these germs of greatness and happiness—and in moral life open spaces abound where greatness and happiness blend—these are surely not worthy of mention. Before we can bring happiness to others, we first must be happy ourselves; nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy. "It is not seemly that I, who, willingly, have brought sorrow to none, should permit myself to be sad," said Marcus Aurelius, in one of his noblest passages. But are we not saddening ourselves, and learning to sadden others, if we refuse to accept all the happiness offered to man?

59. The humble thought that connects a mere satisfied glance, an ordinary, everyday act of simple kindness, or an insignificant moment of happiness, with something eternal, and stable, and beautiful, is of far greater value, and infinitely nearer to the mystery of life, than the grand and gloomy meditation wherein sorrow, love, and despair blend with death and destiny and the apathetic forces of nature. Appearances often deceive us. Hamlet, bewailing his fate on the brink of the gulf, seems profounder, imbued with more passion, than Antoninus Pius, whose tranquil gaze rests on the self-same forces, but who accepts them and questions them calmly, instead of recoiling in horror and calling down curses upon them. Our slightest gesture at nightfall seems more momentous by far than all we have done in the day; but man was created to work in the light, and not to burrow in darkness.

60. The smallest consoling idea has a strength of its own that is not to be found in the most magnificent plaint, the most exquisite expression of sorrow. The vast, profound thought that brings with it nothing but sadness is energy burning its wings in the darkness to throw light on the walls of its prison; but the timidest thought of hope, or of cheerful acceptance of inevitable law, in itself already is action in search of a foothold wherefrom to take flight into life. It cannot be harmful for us to acknowledge at times that action begins with reality only, though our thoughts be never so large and disinterested and admirable in themselves. 'For all that goes to build up what is truly our destiny is contained in those of our thoughts which, hurried along by the mass of ideas still obscure, indistinct, incomplete, have had strength sufficient—or been forced, it may be—to turn into facts, into gestures, into feelings and habits. We do not imply by this that the other thoughts should be neglected. Those that surround our actual life may perhaps be compared with an army besieging a city. The city once taken, the bulk of the troops would probably not be permitted to pass through the gates. Admission would be doubtless withheld from the irregular part of the army—barbarians, mercenaries, all those, in a word, whose natural tendencies would lead them to drunkenness, pillage, or bloodshed. And it might also very well happen that fully two-thirds of the troops would have taken no part in the final decisive battle. But there often is value in forces that appear to be useless; and the city would evidently not have yielded to panic and thrown open her gates, had the well-disciplined force at the foot of the walls not been flanked by the hordes in the valley. So is it in moral life, too. Those thoughts are not wholly vain that have been unable to touch our actual life; they have helped on, supported, the others; yet is it these others alone that have fully accomplished their mission And therefore does it behove us to have in our service, drawn up in front of the crowded ranks of our sad and bewildered thoughts, a group of ideas more human and confident, ready at all times to penetrate vigorously into life.

61. Even when our endeavour to emerge from reality is due to the purest desire for immaterial good, one gesture must still be worth more than a thousand intentions; nor is this that intentions are valueless, but that the least gesture of goodness, or courage, or justice, makes demands upon us far greater than a thousand lofty intentions. Chiromantists pretend that the whole of our life is engraved on our palm; our life, according to them, being a certain number of actions which imprint ineffaceable marks on our flesh, before or after fulfilment; whereas not a trace will be left by either thoughts or intentions. If I have for many long days cherished projects of murder or treachery, heroism or sacrifice, my hand will tell nothing of these; but if I have killed some one—involuntarily perhaps, imagining he was about to attack me; or if I have rescued a child from the flames that enwrapped it—my hand will bear, all my life, the infallible sign of love or of murder. Chiromancy maybe delusion or not—it matters but little; here we are concerned with the great moral truth that underlies this distinction. The place that I fill in the universe will never be changed by my thought; I shall be as I was to the day of my death; but my actions will almost invariably move me forwards or backwards in the hierarchy of man. Thought is a solitary, wandering, fugitive force, which advances towards us today and perhaps on the morrow will vanish, whereas every deed presupposes a permanent army of ideas and desires which have, after lengthy effort, secured foot-hold in reality.