CHAPTER I--SOME POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS OF HAPPINESS

Success means the attainment of whatever one has attempted to get. But it is by no means identical with happiness. For when we have obtained what we have sought it may afford no satisfaction whatever. At the age of 27, Professor Huxley received the greatest honor which it is in the power of the representatives of British science to confer, the gold medal of the Royal Society. In the letter to his fiancée, written immediately thereupon, after informing her of the fact, he adds these words: "And now-shall I be very naughty and make a confession? The thing that a fortnight ago (before I got it) I thought so much of, I give you my word I do not care a pin for. I am sick of it and ashamed of having thought so much of it, and the congratulations I get give me a sort of internal sardonic grin." (Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, Vol. I, p. 110.) Sometimes the results are less than nothing-positive bitterness. This is the frame of mind in which Lady Macbeth is shown to us for a brief instant soon after she has reached the summit of her ambition and become queen of Scotland. Her commentary upon her own position is:

"Naught's had, all's spent

When our desire is got without content."

(Macbeth,

Act III, Scene ii.) Happiness means being in a state which is satisfactory in itself. By "in itself" is meant that the state is satisfactory not as a means to some other end, like a visit to the dentist's, but for its own sake. Success is identical with happiness only on condition that we have aimed at and attained those things in life which are really worth while, and -if success is to be complete the most worth while. Any success which does not result in happiness, in some one of its varied forms, for self or for others, is a sham. "To miss

the joy is to miss all. In the joys of the actors lies the sense of any action." (Robert Louis Stevenson: The Lantern Bearers, in Additional Memories and Portraits.) The success, then, that is best worth thinking about and planning for is that which results in deep and lasting joy. Such success, in contradistinction from that which yields only boredom or bitterness, we may call true success. This true, as distinguished from the illusory success, will form the subject matter of this part of our manual.

The introduction to this course opened with the statement, as may be remembered, that at least one-third of those who start in business for themselves end in failure. But difficult as it is to succeed in making a living, it is far more difficult to succeed in living. For the latter includes the former and a very great deal more besides. How far those whom superficial public opinion considers to be at the very summit of success may be from real happiness is shown with terrible clearness by the testimony of all too many. The greatest and most admired actor that America has ever produced was Edwin Booth. He had the appreciation of the public, both critical and uncritical, till he himself could say of his later years that they were "tediously successful." Yet this is the way he felt about his life. In 1888, five years before his death, he wrote to his daughter: "Dick Stoddard wrote a poem called "The King's Bell,' which fits my case exactly. He dedicated it to Lorimer Graham, who never knew an unhappy day in his brief life, instead of to me, who never knew a really happy one. You must not suppose from this that I'm ill in mind or body: on the contrary, I am well enough in both; nor am I a pessimist. merely wanted you to know that the sugar of my life is bitter-sweet; perhaps not more so than every man's whose experience has been above and below the surface." Edwin Booth, by C. T. Copeland-a Beacon Biography-p. 150.) Still less can money make life worth living. Nathan Rothschild, an English member of the famous family, who died

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about 1860, possessed a fabulous fortune, and was said to have perhaps had more influence in Great Britain than the two houses of Parliament taken together. "But with all his colossal wealth he was profoundly unhappy, and with sorrowful earnestness exclaimed to one congratulating him on the gorgeous magnificence of his palatial mansion and thence inferring he was happy: 'Happy! Me happy!"י (Mathews, Getting on in the World, p. 292; cf. further, on Stephen Girard.) Power, position, and fame cannot procure happiness. A few years before his death Bismarck said: "Seldom in my life have I been a happy man;" and Charles V of Spain, one of the most powerful kings that ever lived, said publicly, on giving up his throne, that the greatest prosperities which he had enjoyed had been mixed with so many adversities that he might truly say he had never enjoyed any satisfaction or contentment. It might be urged that the lives of these two statesmen were poisoned with excess of toil and anxiety. The same could not be said, however, of Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV of France. Never have greater luxury and magnificence been at the disposal of any human being. All the resources, material and intellectual, that the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most highly civilized and highly gifted nation of the Seventeenth Century could supply were absolutely at her disposal. In social position, though not of royal lineage, she was, nevertheless, the first lady of the land. Her power was limited only by the will of the king who loved her. Her fame, as a central figure in one of the most brilliant and powerful courts in history, was secure. Yet in a letter to a favorite niece she wrote: "Alas that I can not give you my experience, that I can not show you the weariness of soul by which the great are devoured the difficulty which they find in getting through their days! Do you not see how they die of sadness in the midst of that fortune which has been a burden to them? I have been young and beautiful; I have tasted many pleasures; I have been univer

sally beloved. At a more advanced age I have passed years in the intercourse of talent and wit, and I solemnly protest to you that all conditions leave a frightful void." (Lamartine, Memoirs of Celebrated Characters, Fénelon. Eng. tr. Vol. II, p. 339).

These utterances do not prove that happiness is impossible. For each can be matched by one of the opposite tenor. Thus Benjamin Franklin, in the second paragraph of his Autobiography, writes: "This good fortune, when I reflect on it, which is frequently the case, has indeed sometimes led me to say that if I were left to my choice I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginnings to its end; requesting only the advantage authors have of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. So would I also wish to change some incidents of it for others more favorable. Notwithstanding, if this condition was denied, I should still accept the offer of recommencing the same life."

Franklin was so exceptional a man and led so exceptional a life, that it may be urged he is not a fair witness. We may, therefore, listen to the testimony of a typical successful merchant, Peter Cooper (the founder of Cooper's Institute in New York). When a friend asked him about his belief concerning a future life, he replied: "I sometimes think that if one has too good a time here below there is less reason for him to go to Heaven. I have had a very good time, but I know poor creatures whose lives have been spent in a constant struggle for existence. They should have some reward hereafter. The only doubts that I have about the future are whether I have not had too good a time on earth." (Parton, Captains of Industry, Series I, p. 331.)

Such an attitude towards life may be found equally well among the poor. Hamerton inThe Quest of Happiness, p. 35, writes as follows: "I used to call occasionally upon an old lady who lived in a provincial town in France where she occupied a flat in a large tenement house, inhabited by people

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in all ranks of society. It was almost impossible to pass the ground floor without hearing the voice of a woman singing. (She) was a handsome woman of the lower middle class, the mother of eight fine children, and the place where she sang was a gloomy little kitchen, with an outlook on a narrow courtyard, where she slaved from morning to night, as her husband earned but a small salary, and they could not afford to keep a servant. made the acquaintance of the songstress, and one day I ventured to ask if she could really be as happy as she seemed. The answer was that she had every reason to be satisfied with her lot-she had a good husband, affectionate and healthy children, and though her poverty gave her plenty to do, she was strong and could bear it easily." (Cf. Ibid., Ch. XVII, Some Real Experiences.)

What insignificant causes may be the source of happiness is well shown in Robert Louis Stevenson's essay, The Lantern Bearers; and with greater variety of illustration in James, Talks to Students on Life, II, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology; published separately under the title: On Life's Ideals). How far happiness may be independent of all that we consider its necessary conditions is shown by the case of Helen Keller. See e. g. her autobiography, The Story of My Life, and The Outlook, Feb. 13, 1904, p. 398.

Facts such as these show that we may have to revise more or less completely our conventional ideas about the sources Rather

of happiness. If so, it would not be remarkable. would it be remarkable if this were not true. All the sciences unite in demonstrating that reality is a very different thing from what it appears to be. The oldest of the sciences, geography and astronomy, supply most impressive illustrations of this statement. The former teaches us that the earth is not a flat disk, but a sphere; the latter, that the earth is not the center of the physical universe, but an insignificant planet like Mars swinging with tremendous velocity about that spot of light we