GILBERT 
 
THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS 
 
THE 
 
 QUEST OF HAPPINESS 
 
 BY 
 
 PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE," "THOUGHTS ABOUT ART,' 
 
 "A PAINTER'S CAMP," "ETCHERS AND ETCHING," 
 
 "HUMAN INTERCOURSE," ETC 
 
 BOSTON 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 
 1897 
 
Copyright, 1897, 
 BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 Simbersttg Ifrcss: 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. A DEFINITION i 
 
 II. THE AUTHOR NEITHER OPTIMIST NOR PES- 
 SIMIST 5 
 
 III. ON THE DUAL NATURE OF HAPPINESS . . n 
 
 IV. ON HAPPINESS AS A GIFT OF NATURE . . 31 
 V. How OUR HAPPINESS is INCOMPLETE . . 52 
 
 VI. THE IMPERFECTION OF THE HIGHER HAP- 
 PINESS 60 
 
 VII. THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEAL ..... 66 
 
 VIII. HAPPINESS AND THE IDEAL 76 
 
 IX. THE SENSE OF REALITY 86 
 
 X. HAPPINESS IN OUR OCCUPATIONS .... 103 
 
 XI. CONGENIALITY OF OCCUPATION 108 
 
 XII. INSUFFICIENCY OF GIFTS 118 
 
 XIII. ON THE QUESTION WHETHER OUR HAP- 
 
 PINESS IN THE USE OF OUR FACULTIES 
 
 is IN PROPORTION TO THEIR STRENGTH . 132 
 
 XIV. THAT EVERY TIME OF LIFE HAS A HAP- 
 
 PINESS PECULIAR TO ITSELF . . . . 138 
 
 XV. OF THE PERFECTION OF THE SENSES . . 150 
 
 XVI. GROUNDS FOR RATIONAL ENCOURAGEMENT . 165 
 
 XVII. SOME REAL EXPERIENCES 175 
 
 259 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IN the "Journal Intime, " that Thomas 
 a Kempis of our century, we are told 
 that " the unfinished is nothing." Was not 
 this the explanation of Amiel's ineffective 
 life ? Did he not glance too disdainfully 
 over the lower world, forsooth because it was 
 "unfinished"? Did he not sit, a too scorn- 
 ful guest, at the bountiful table of the actual, 
 leaving its viands untouched and its wines 
 untasted, dreaming always of a nectar and 
 ambrosia which only the gods on Olympus 
 may taste? 
 
 According to the dictum of the gentle 
 Swiss pessimist we ought to reject Durer's 
 famous crayon sketches, Coleridge's weird 
 " Christabel," and Buckle's magnificent frag- 
 ment, " The History of Civilization." Nor 
 would modern lovers of fiction be permitted 
 to relax their minds over Stevenson's u Weir 
 of Hermiston," or Pater's " Gaston de la 
 Tour." 
 
viii Introduction 
 
 Indeed, Amiel carried this philosophy of 
 " the unfinished " so far as to give up most 
 of the ordinary sources of happiness in life ; 
 he felt their imperfections too intensely; and 
 no one of them exactly corresponded to his 
 own lofty ideal. 
 
 The unfinished work of the world's great 
 men is, however, to many readers, fraught with 
 a peculiar interest and charm. The sketches 
 in some great artist's portfolio may be more 
 suggestive than his masterpiece ; and the im- 
 agination may be more stirred by a head, in 
 outline, than by a carefully finished portrait. 
 
 Amiel's quest for happiness was a quest for 
 an ideal, which he tried to impose upon the 
 outer universe, but which really existed only 
 within his own pure mind. It was this attitude 
 of his mind which was largely responsible for 
 much of the melancholy of his life. He could 
 not or would not see, with the clearness of 
 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, that "the Ideal, 
 when it transforms itself into a hope for the 
 present life, is a sure forerunner of disap- 
 pointment." 
 
 To see the Ideal, and to realize the impossi- 
 bility of attaining it, and then deliberately to 
 set about the task of contenting one's self with 
 
Introduction ix 
 
 the Real, is the chief result of Mr. Hamerton's 
 daring " quest." When and when only " Ideal 
 pleasures are kept well separated from Real- 
 ity " are they conducive to happiness, is 
 what this practical philosopher affirms. 
 
 It is perhaps partly because of its incom- 
 pleteness that we think this last work of Mr. 
 Hamerton's worthy of preservation ; for no 
 completed essay upon the incomplete science 
 of happiness could ever wholly satisfy the 
 insatiate heart of humanity. 
 
 In the " Quest of Happiness " we have the 
 final word of an artist-poet, who was devel- 
 oped by the varied and disappointing experi- 
 ences of life into a philosopher. This, his 
 last message to mankind, is one of encourage- 
 ment. Yet it was written when he was held 
 in the clutches of a mortal disease, and knew 
 that he was nearing the end of life. With a 
 strong sense of the imperfection and uncer- 
 tainty of all things earthly, Hamerton at- 
 tempted to direct the feet of those who were 
 to come after him toward a goal which he 
 knew his own feet would not reach. He 
 paused almost at the gate of the other 
 world to reflect upon the abundant provision 
 for our happiness in this world, and upon our 
 
x Introduction 
 
 ingratitude in being dissatisfied with the ar- 
 rangements of the feast and the shortness of 
 the banquet. 
 
 After completing " The Intellectual Life," 
 Mr. Hamerton purposed writing a book to be 
 called " The Life of the Feelings." This plan 
 he never wholly abandoned. But while en- 
 gaged in the analysis of the general relations 
 between human emotions and human con- 
 duct, he was led to consider their particular 
 significance upon individual happiness. Thus 
 the plan of the " Quest of Happiness " gradu- 
 ally grew in his mind. 
 
 As early as 1891 he wrote to his Ameri- 
 can publishers : " I am hesitating, as to the 
 title of my new book, between ' The Quest of 
 Happiness ' and * Happiness and its Opposite.' 
 In fact, the book is as much a study of unhap- 
 piness as of happiness there is as much 
 shadow as light in it." 
 
 The title having been finally decided upon, 
 the book was begun early in 1891, but was 
 laid aside for many months, owing to the 
 author's removal to Paris and the pressure 
 of other duties. In 1893 Mr. Hamerton re- 
 sumed work upon it, and had nearly com- 
 pleted it, when the theory of " Positive and 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 Negative Happiness " came to him. In devel- 
 oping this theory he believed he had found 
 " The Real Law of Happiness," and at once 
 began to re-write the book. He was still at 
 work on it in November, 1894, when he died, 
 leaving the closing chapters unwritten. 
 
 These last chapters were to be upon " The 
 Influence of the Affections upon Happi- 
 ness ; " and the book was intended to close 
 with an epilogue upon " Unhappiness and the 
 Possibilities of Deliverance." 
 
 The author's theory, expressed in the 
 " Quest of Happiness," was that all unhappi- 
 ness is caused by the non-exercise of natural 
 faculties. The same law he intended to 
 apply to the affections. He purposed consid- 
 ering separately the natural ties of parental 
 and filial love, the love of wife, and similar 
 relationships. These relationships were to be 
 studied in their effects upon individual happi- 
 ness ; and he wished to show that no individ- 
 ual, even though he were denied the exercise 
 of these natural faculties, need be wholly 
 wretched if he possessed one devoted friend. 
 In a chapter of " The Intellectual Life " called 
 " Women and Marriage," this thought is ad- 
 mirably expressed: " Now, although an intel- 
 
xii Introduction 
 
 lectual man may not care to make himself 
 understood by all the people in the street, it 
 is not a good thing for him to feel that he is 
 understood by nobody. The intellectual life 
 is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. Unless 
 he lives in a great capital, the man devoted to 
 that life is more than all other men liable to 
 suffer from isolation, to feel utterly alone be- 
 neath the deafness of space and the silence of 
 the stars. Give him one friend who can 
 understand him, who will not leave him, who 
 will be accessible by day and night, one 
 friend, one kindly listener, just one, and the 
 universe is changed." 
 
 This passage will show any who are un- 
 familiar with " Human Intercourse " and " The 
 Intellectual Life " how much stress Mr. 
 Hamerton laid on sympathetic relationships 
 with other human beings. The ties of blood 
 he cared little about; the ties of the spirit 
 were everything. " There must have been 
 mutual affinities of some kind to make a 
 friendship, while natural relations are all like 
 tickets in a lottery." 
 
 In a chapter of " Human Intercourse," called 
 " The Death of Friendship," Mr. Hamerton 
 speaks of the " inconsiderate or ungentle word, 
 
Introduction xiii 
 
 or unhappy fault of temper, that might have 
 been easily avoided, but which has wounded 
 the kind heart of our friend, and killed the 
 gentle sentiment that was dwelling happily 
 within." " The only way," he writes, " to be 
 quite sure of avoiding this great and irre- 
 trievable calamity is to remember how very 
 delicate friendly sentiments are, and how easy 
 it is to destroy them by an inconsiderate or 
 an ungentle word." 
 
 These quotations will show the direction in 
 which Mr. Hamerton's thought would have 
 moved had he been permitted to complete his 
 plan of the " Quest of Happiness." Among 
 the notes left by him for the uncompleted 
 chapters he refers to the possibility of our 
 improving or increasing our happiness by a 
 careful understanding of our personal needs, 
 together with an appreciation of what we al- 
 ready possess. Some of these notes point out 
 and emphasize the belief that the acquire- 
 ments of old age self-reliance, facility for 
 better work are in most cases adequate 
 compensations for its many drawbacks. 
 
 The classification of the chapters in the 
 "Quest of Happiness "is the work of Mrs. 
 Hamerton ; and she has wisely permitted 
 
xiv Introduction 
 
 the chapter called " Some Real Experiences " 
 to remain, and to end the book. In the 
 re-writing of the " Quest of Happiness " this 
 chapter was marked "rejected," probably be- 
 cause it did not fit into the author's new 
 plan for finishing the book. It is interest- 
 ing, however, and worth preserving, although 
 it has no organic relation to the author's 
 revised plan. 
 
 In offering Mr. Hamerton's unfinished 
 work to the world, his wife has yielded to the 
 urgent wishes of her husband's many admir- 
 ers. The " Quest of Happiness " is not an 
 immature literary effort, but in style it is 
 quite equal if not superior to " The Intellec- 
 tual Life" and "Human Intercourse." It 
 belongs with these books, and shows us Mr. 
 Hamerton, not as an art-critic, but as a prac- 
 tical philosopher. 
 
 It is not easy for us correctly to estimate 
 the wide-reaching influence of a book like 
 " The Intellectual Life." The impression 
 which it has made upon the lives of lonely 
 young students, just graduating from the 
 schools and academies of America, has been 
 a profound and permanent one. It has in- 
 terested a large class of cultivated men and 
 
Introduction xv 
 
 women, but it has also carried a veritable 
 gospel of " sweetness and light " to a multi- 
 tude of earnest book-loving young souls. 
 The unhappy youth, deprived by circum- 
 stances of a longed-for college education, is 
 shown by Hamerton " that any man or woman, 
 of large natural capacity, can reach the tone 
 of thinking which may justly be called intel- 
 lectual ; " and that " the school of the intellec- 
 tual man is the place where he happens to 
 be ; and his teachers are the people, books, ani- 
 mals, plants, stones and earth round about him." 
 
 That much-quoted sentence of Hamerton's 
 which tells us that " the essence of intellec- 
 tual living does not reside in extent of science 
 or in perfection of expression, but in a con- 
 stant preference for higher thoughts over 
 lower thoughts," has become a permanent and 
 invaluable part of the intellectual furniture of 
 scores of minds. 
 
 Little by little our educators are learning 
 that " intellectual living is not so much an 
 accomplishment as a state or condition of the 
 mind in which it seeks earnestly for the high- 
 est and purest thought." This truth the 
 author of the " Quest of Happiness " reiter- 
 ates and emphasizes. 
 
xvi Introduction 
 
 The "double law of the intellectual life 
 high thinking and fearless utterance," Ham- 
 erton learned from Emerson ; and, in plainer 
 speech than Emerson knew, he brought this 
 message to a Gentile world. His lucid thought, 
 and smooth didactic style, combined with his 
 courageous habit of never shrinking from the 
 truth, were qualities which especially fitted 
 him to instruct youthful minds. 
 
 The growing boy or girl who can be per- 
 suaded to " read, mark, and inwardly digest " 
 " The Intellectual Life," " Human Inter- 
 course," and the " Quest of Happiness," will 
 have acquired a working philosophy of life. 
 He will have been taught, not only how to 
 think, but how to live. His mind will be en- 
 riched, his standards of conduct will be ele- 
 vated, and his chances for attaining the high- 
 est kind of success in life will be vastly 
 increased. 
 
 Some critics of Mr. Hamerton's earlier 
 books have pronounced him " a cheery opti- 
 mist ; " but it will be found, by those who 
 study his books impartially, that he was far 
 removed from this ; he had nothing in com- 
 mon with Walt Whitman, who " could not 
 see one imperfection in the universe." 
 
Introduction xvii 
 
 When Sir John Lubbock wrote his agree- 
 able little volumes called " The Pleasures of 
 Life," he was reminded that his own life had 
 been so exceptionally " bright and full " that 
 he had no right to judge the life of others. 
 This criticism has somewhat undermined Lub- 
 bock's optimistic position. A man who dares 
 to write upon the subject of happiness must 
 be able to assure his pessimistic readers that 
 he knows something of the opposite condition 
 of being. 
 
 It is therefore with the purpose of avoid- 
 ing similar criticism that we take the follow- 
 ing facts concerning the disappointments of 
 Hamerton's life from Mrs. Hamerton's inter- 
 esting memoirs of her husband. 
 
 Philip Gilbert Hamerton was born Sept. 
 10, 1834. His childhood was exceptionally 
 lonely and miserable, for his mother died 
 when he was an infant, and he was brutally 
 treated by a dissolute and drunken father. 
 After his father's death the boy was sent 
 to a large public school, where his lack of 
 physical strength, and his morbid sensitive- 
 ness, prevented him from taking part in the 
 usual boyish games ; thus his school life was 
 a solitary one. 
 
 b 
 
xviii Introduction 
 
 A brief and unpleasant career as a soldier 
 a profession for which Hamerton was en- 
 tirely unfitted followed. Always fond of 
 literature and art, Hamerton soon left the 
 army, and determined to be a poet and 
 artist. A small volume, called " The Isles 
 of Loch Awe and Other Poems," appeared 
 in print on the day when he came of age. 
 This volume was published at the author's 
 own expense ; and only eleven copies were 
 sold, out of an edition of two thousand. 
 The fate of this first literary venture was 
 but one of many disappointments which came 
 to Hamerton in his early life. He lacked 
 the passion of the poet and the inspiration 
 of the artist; he had a clear perception of 
 beauty, but the capacity to create beauty was 
 wanting. 
 
 In the last chapters of his autobiography 
 he speaks of the conditions necessary for 
 perfect happiness, and says : " The element 
 lacking in my own case was success in work." 
 After years spent in patiently measuring the 
 height of mountains, and the length of run- 
 ning streams, according to the false advice 
 given art-students by Ruskin, Hamerton 
 learned, through the rejection of three pic- 
 
Introduction xix 
 
 tures, and the candid criticism of his wife, that 
 he had not received the necessary training 
 to make him a landscape-painter. These bit- 
 ter disappointments came to him, close upon 
 the loss of a part of his small income, when 
 the needs of a growing family made some 
 sort of remunerative work imperative. It was 
 at this time that the " Painter's Camp " was 
 written, and accepted by Mr. Macmillan. 
 From the first this book was a success. The 
 freshness of the narrative and the charm of 
 the style were fully appreciated, and an 
 American edition of the book followed almost 
 immediately. Thus success came to him 
 from a direction in which he had not looked ; 
 and the particular kind of success for which 
 he had always longed was never his. Yet all 
 his failures and disappointments proved to be 
 valuable material, which, entering into his 
 experience, fitted him to preach an intelligible 
 gospel of hope to a discouraged world. 
 
 For many years Mr. Hamerton's literary 
 work took the form of art criticism. His 
 "Thoughts on Art," "The Graphic Arts," 
 and " Etchings and Etchers," are well known 
 in England and America. But this is not 
 the place to discuss these books, because the 
 
xx Introduction 
 
 " Quest of Happiness " does not belong 
 with them. It is Hamerton the philosopher 
 the critic of life whom we are studying. 
 It was out of the man's entire life rather than 
 from the artist's mood that the " Quest of 
 Happiness " was written. 
 
 " All hope abandon, ye who enter here ! " 
 is the keynote of much of our modern pessi- 
 mistic literature. From the alluring idealism 
 of Amiel to the dismal cynicism of Nordau, 
 coming down a step further to the bitter 
 " Anatomy of Negation," by Saltus, these 
 several disciples of Schopenhauer do their 
 utmost to deprive us of our faith in the free- 
 dom of the will. Such books are, for the 
 youthful mind, as deadly as is carbonic acid 
 gas for the body ; they produce a slow stupor, 
 a certain paralysis of the motor-nerve centres. 
 
 In strong contrast with this Jin de siecle 
 philosophy comes a wholesome book like the 
 " Quest of Happiness," which bids us quit 
 dreaming of an ideal universe and encourage 
 in ourselves " a sense of reality." 
 
 Mr. Hamerton thinks that the " power of 
 seeing things as they really are, without being 
 biassed by the desire to have them as we 
 think they ought to be, is, of all gifts, the 
 
Introduction xxi 
 
 most desirable, with a view to a rational 
 though not an intoxicating kind of happiness." 
 And his recognition of the practical dangers 
 of the idealist's conception of the universe is 
 the most original feature of his "Quest." 
 The beauty of an ideal and perfect life beck- 
 oned Hamerton ; for his sensitive, delicately 
 poised nature responded to beauty, always 
 and everywhere. But his own melancholy 
 experiences had taught him that " imperfec- 
 tion and uncertainty must characterize all 
 our happiness on this earth." 
 
 He writes that "happiness, enough and 
 much more than I ever expected, has been 
 mine, but it has been various in character, 
 and always very difficult to keep. The ef- 
 fect upon me has been as if an interesting 
 volume were snatched out of my hands when 
 I was in the middle of it, and another substi- 
 tuted, quite as interesting, but not what I 
 wanted at the time." 
 
 By an effort of your will adjust your life to 
 the actual universe as it exists to-day ! Such 
 is the message of this eminently sane philoso- 
 pher. Keep your dreams of an ideal world, 
 and enjoy them, but never for a moment deceive 
 yourself into expecting to Jind those dreams 
 
xxii Introduction 
 
 realized in this necessarily imperfect world, 
 this is the thesis of the " Quest of Happi- 
 
 ness." 
 
 Searching vainly for he "knew not what," 
 and " invoking the while something which 
 had no name, unless it were happiness or 
 death," the lonely Genevese thinker, Amiel, 
 sadly ended his noble and yet pitiful life. 
 A few weeks before his death he wrote 
 these hopeless words : " Satiety, lassitude, 
 renunciation, abdication," a sad comment 
 upon his own wretched life. " The unfin- 
 ished is nothing," he said, and spent his life 
 in grieving over the evident and awful in- 
 completeness of this mysterious world. 
 
 Our clear, coherent English philosopher 
 and the vision-haunted Swiss dreamer had 
 much in common ; both longed for the poet's 
 lyre, but longed in vain. Both had known 
 what it was to fail in their chosen work. Both 
 men felt and faced the tragedy of this life 
 without any constant and illuminating faith 
 in the compensations of a Hereafter. But 
 Mr. Hamerton took counsel with himself, 
 and, instead of lamenting over this world's 
 incompleteness, he perceived that the " unfin- 
 ished " is necessarily present in human af- 
 
Introduction xxiii 
 
 fairs, because it is the essential characteristic 
 of this unfolding, expanding world. The uni- 
 verse itself is unfinished, and furnishes the 
 material out of which, whether we will or 
 not, we must construct our lives. 
 
 The meditations of Amiel, exquisite as they 
 are in literary form, and inspiring in thought, 
 are not wholesome diet for many minds, and 
 are fatal for youthful thinkers. In the " Quest 
 of Happiness," on the contrary, there is a 
 gospel of encouragement, of self-reliance, and 
 disciplined serenity, which sends us forth with 
 new vigor to face an actual though a rather 
 sober-hued world. 
 
 It is with a tender feeling of regret that 
 those who have been scholars in Mr. Hamer- 
 ton's university will read this his final mes- 
 sage, his unfinished valedictory. To them it 
 will be sufficient that they are again per- 
 mitted to feel the old-time, stimulating influ- 
 ence upon their thought, while their instructor 
 himself has gone forth into a country where, 
 to quote his own last words "Justice 
 and Right would always surely prevail." 
 
 In this world Philip Gilbert Hamerton 
 was brave enough to lay aside his youthful 
 dreams and make the utmost possible out of a 
 
xxiv Introduction 
 
 somewhat prosaic experience. Let us hope 
 that he has now entered a country where hap- 
 piness is not found by dwarfing our diviner 
 instincts, but where dreams are found to be 
 realities, and what seemed to be realities are 
 found to have been merely dreams. 
 
 " And then, as mid the dark, a gleam 
 Of yet another morning breaks ; 
 And, like the hand that ends a dream, 
 Death, with the might of his sunbeam, 
 Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes." 
 
 M. R. F. OILMAN. 
 
 SPRINGFIELD, MASS., 
 October, 1897. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 AS the conditions of happiness are studied 
 in detail in the course of the present 
 volume, I intend to confine myself in the pre- 
 face to a confession of faith which, like my 
 study of happiness itself, shall have its nega- 
 tive as well as its positive side. 
 
 To begin with the negative (as naturally the 
 first in order since it clears the ground for the 
 other) : I have no belief in any perfect or ideal 
 happiness in the world of reality, and as my 
 philosophy of the subject is founded exclu- 
 sively on observation, I am strictly limited to 
 human experience as it is known to us directly 
 or indirectly. At the same time I have no 
 confidence in the duration of such happiness 
 as we may actually possess. I see plainly 
 that it may be destroyed at any time by causes 
 over which we have no control, and therefore 
 that it is not to be counted upon, even for a 
 
xxvi Preface. 
 
 day. The two negative words that best char- 
 acterize our happiness from this point of view 
 are therefore imperfection and uncertainty. 
 Nor have I the faintest hope that human 
 beings will ever succeed in removing the im- 
 perfection and uncertainty of their happiness 
 so long as the race endures, as the forces of 
 nature itself are opposed to such an enterprise, 
 and the contest against cosmical conditions 
 must always be ultimately vain. The law 
 applies to all human beings without exception. 
 There are very great differences in the degrees 
 of happiness, but the best of it is imperfect, 
 and the most durable belongs to us only for 
 the moment of fruition. 
 
 To admit this, which I do, as the reader 
 sees, with the utmost candor, is, however, 
 very different from any acceptance of Leo- 
 pardi's pessimist opinion that there is no such 
 thing as happiness at all. To admit that 
 London is an imperfect city, and that it will 
 not last forever, is not the same thing as to 
 believe, with the ignorant inhabitants of 
 Morocco, that there is no such place as Lon- 
 don. On the contrary, the positive side of my 
 
Preface. xxvii 
 
 creed about the matter is as decided, and as 
 firmly rooted in reality, as the negative. I 
 know by my own experience, and by the ex- 
 perience of many others, that the provision for 
 our happiness, even in this world, is most 
 abundant, and that we can generally enjoy it 
 on two conditions, the first of which is that we 
 learn to accept contentedly a sort of felicity 
 that does not correspond with our ideal 
 notions of what ought to be, and the second 
 that we make the best of the present without 
 requiring of it that it shall be the future also. 
 The discontented class of minds that are 
 found in all ranks of society are like guests 
 invited to a sumptuous and superabundant 
 banquet who are out of temper because the 
 arrangements are not exactly what they would 
 have made if the ordering of it had been 
 intrusted to themselves, and also because their 
 invitation, though the hour of departure is not 
 precisely fixed, is yet not absolutely without 
 limits. It seems to me that there is an obvi- 
 ous inconsistency in being dissatisfied with 
 the arrangements and with the shortness of 
 the hospitality at the same time, since if the 
 
xxviii Preface. 
 
 arrangements are so defective it may be as 
 well that the banquet should not be indefi- 
 nitely prolonged. 
 
 The reader is requested to bear in mind 
 that a practical philosophy only considers how 
 men may make the best of circumstances ; it 
 does not undertake either to justify the laws 
 of Nature, or to suggest any means of escape 
 from the ineluctable uniformity of their pres- 
 sure. By a common defect of reasoning it is 
 inferred that if we recognize truths that are 
 not exactly in accordance with the popular 
 taste we wish them to be as we have stated 
 them, and make ourselves morally answerable 
 for them, though they existed thousands of 
 years before we knew anything about them. 
 If asked whether I approve of the laws I 
 should answer that they are so completely non- 
 human, so entirely outside of what men would 
 ever be likely to devise in their own schemes 
 of legislation, that our standards of right and 
 wrong, and even of expediency, are not in any 
 way applicable to them. This is not an 
 attempt to elude the responsibility of an opin- 
 ion; I only mean that nobody is under any 
 
Preface. xxix 
 
 obligation to form an opinion upon a subject 
 that no one entirely understands. When, 
 however, we come to the question of our own 
 happiness, we can speak more decidedly, as 
 that is within the range of our knowledge, and 
 it is probable, indeed, that we are better 
 judges of it than far higher intelligences could 
 ever be if they had not gone through the trials 
 of our human experience. 
 
 The doubt has often been expressed whether 
 it is of any use to concern ourselves about 
 happiness at all. The less we think about it, 
 the less we consciously aim at it, the more 
 probable it is, according to this view, that we 
 shall attain enough of it for our needs. If this 
 is really the case, happiness must be strangely 
 different from all other objects of human 
 desire. Suppose that the object in view is 
 wealth, or learning, or reputation, does it 
 seem probable, in the nature of things, that a 
 fortune will be made the most surely by the 
 man who never calculates, that scholarship will 
 be attained by an idler who never reads, or that 
 fame will be the reward of the infertile and 
 unproductive intellect? The truth is that 
 
xxx Preface. 
 
 those who affirm the uselessness of the pursuit 
 of happiness are generally engaged in follow- 
 ing it themselves, but indirectly ; and I maybe 
 permitted to observe that the directness or 
 indirectness of the road that is taken does not 
 alter the nature of the end. 
 
 As for our success in this pursuit, speaking 
 generally, I should say that it is considerable, 
 but incomplete ; that the happiness we attain, 
 though it is not the ideal, is still worth, and 
 more than worth, the trouble and pains we 
 take for its acquisition ; that if we do not get 
 all the happiness we had counted upon, we get 
 very much that we have never deserved and 
 that has never entered into our calculations; 
 and finally, that owing to certain peculiarities 
 in our nature there are good reasons for be- 
 lieving that complete felicity, supposing it to 
 be possible, would be unsuitable for us, and 
 is therefore undesirable. This is not easy to 
 express, as it seems a contradiction to say 
 that a completely happy man would be less 
 happy than he whose happiness is incom- 
 plete ; but it is one of those cases in which 
 a part may be greater than the whole. 
 
Preface. xxxi 
 
 It is undeniable that the interest of human 
 life, which never ends, is due chiefly to the 
 imperfect and precarious character of our 
 happiness, which even the uneducated know 
 by their own traditions and experience as 
 well as the most learned philosophers. We 
 see, too, that even those who are most for- 
 tunate and enviable cannot keep one sort of 
 happiness very long, but are forced to resign 
 it, with or against their will, after which (sup- 
 posing them to be still fortunate) they pass 
 to a second kind very different from the first, 
 and so to others, always losing those which 
 have gone before. I am, perhaps, not the 
 first to compare this transition to a wander- 
 ing through a series of halls in a great pal- 
 ace, the doors being successively closed and 
 locked behind us; or it might be compared 
 to the building of several houses by the same 
 person after their destruction by some pitiless 
 natural force. 
 
 Besides this consideration there is another 
 of equal importance in the weakness of our 
 own powers of enjoyment, which makes us 
 quite as unable to deal with a great number 
 
xxxii Preface. 
 
 of mental pleasures as a child is unable to 
 eat all that it would like to eat. When the 
 materials of happiness are given in quantities 
 far beyond our powers of appreciation, we 
 feel like a reader in the British Museum be- 
 fore its miles of shelves. His first sensation 
 is that of being delighted but overwhelmed ; 
 then he makes his little selection, sits down, 
 and neglects what he cannot grapple with. 
 Most of us have made the discovery for our- 
 selves that a huge exhibition of pictures does 
 not give more to us than a smaller one, be- 
 cause our receptivity is so limited. In like 
 manner we are driven to the conclusion that 
 happiness itself is a sort of emotion of which 
 the mind may become fatigued, and that in 
 this case the proverb " Enough is as good as 
 a feast " may be amended into " Enough is 
 better for us than a feast." It is obvious, 
 too, that the vigor of the mental powers 
 which dares to recognize the hugeness of 
 the evil there is in the universe, and the ten- 
 derness of heart that sympathizes with the 
 endless suffering, are both of them utterly 
 incompatible with the placid satisfactions of 
 
Preface. xxxiii 
 
 optimism ; yet it is better for a grown man 
 to have a strong brain and a pitiful heart 
 than to keep, in his maturity, the ignorant 
 happiness of a child. 
 
 The whole subject, it may be said, is one 
 of secondary interest, because our personal 
 happiness ought not to be made the object 
 of our existence. I have never said that a 
 care for my own happiness was, or ought to 
 be, my law of life, but the subject goes far 
 beyond the limits of private selfishness. Its 
 importance increases with the range of our 
 influence over others. Its selfish character is 
 already lost when the happiness of a family 
 becomes the object, and it is still more com- 
 pletely effaced when a ruler has in view the 
 general well-being of a nation. The desire 
 for happiness may even impel us to labor for 
 results which would be as advantageous to 
 foreign countries as to our own, and this 
 places it even above the accusation of a 
 patriotic narrowness. Nor is the study of 
 happiness confined, in its beneficent effects, 
 to the human race itself. Some understand- 
 ing of the happiness of animals, such as is 
 
xxxiv Preface. 
 
 easily attainable by any observant person 
 who has the care of them, may diminish the 
 hardship of their position as creatures utterly 
 helpless and defenceless before the superior 
 intelligence of Man and too often the miser- 
 able victims of his carelessness or his cruelty. 
 
THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A DEFINITION. 
 
 HAPPINESS, as the word will be un- 
 derstood in the present volume, means 
 that degree of satisfaction with our existence 
 which, in spite of minor vexations and disap- 
 pointments, makes us willing to go on living 
 as we are now living without any important 
 change. 
 
 This does not prevent the happy person 
 from looking forward to an important change 
 as likely to become acceptable, and even de- 
 sirable, in the future. What I mean is, that 
 he is satisfied with the present, as the present, 
 and does not feel that any important change 
 is urgent. The anticipation of future change 
 may overshadow or it may brighten his pres- 
 ent happiness, but he looks upon it in either 
 
2 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 case as remote, and is not anxious to bring it 
 nearer. 
 
 The test of happiness must be therefore in 
 the strength of the conservative sentiment 
 with regard to what we are and to what we 
 have. 
 
 On applying this test to the lives we see 
 around us, we must admit that there is abun- 
 dant happiness in the world, as the majority 
 of people are at least sufficiently satisfied 
 with their existence to desire its continuance, 
 provided it does not get worse ; and if it gets 
 worse, then they desire the continuance of the 
 deteriorated existence in the hope that it will 
 not get worse still, so as to become positively 
 unendurable. 
 
 It may be objected that my test fails be- 
 cause people are conservative more from their 
 dread of the future than from their apprecia- 
 tion of the present. It is not that they are 
 really happy, but that they are alive to the 
 possibility of becoming still more unhappy 
 than they are. 
 
 I fully admit the extreme difficulty of fixing 
 a point like the freezing-point in the centi- 
 grade thermometer, at which the degrees of 
 happiness are at zero and those of wretched- 
 
A Definition. 3 
 
 ness begin. I may, however, suggest the fol- 
 lowing solution. So long as we prefer con- 
 scious to unconscious existence, I should say 
 that there must be some degree of happi- 
 ness in our lot. Even here, we meet with 
 the new difficulty that some people have a 
 morbid dread and horror of unconsciousness, 
 so that they would rather be unhappy, pro- 
 vided only that they can know it, than lose 
 the sense of existence altogether. 
 
 My test of the presence of happiness (as 
 proved by our willingness to go on living as 
 we do without any important change) is still, 
 I believe, a sufficient practical test. I should 
 say, for example, that if a man is willing to go 
 on working in his profession, and does not 
 look forward to retirement with any eager- 
 ness or longing, it may be taken as good 
 evidence that he is happy in his profession, 
 notwithstanding the many troubles, anxieties, 
 and annoyances from which no profession is 
 exempt. 
 
 The same argument may be applied to 
 many occupations and pursuits that are not 
 professional. If we feel loath to give them up, 
 our unwillingness is good evidence that, on 
 the whole, we have found them conducive to 
 
4 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 our happiness, and yet there is not a single 
 human pursuit that does not bring its own 
 train of vexations. The truth is that we are 
 so constituted as to be able to extract a suffi- 
 ciency of happiness for ourselves from sources 
 that do not offer it in a pure state. This is 
 our great human gift, which accounts for the 
 generally cheerful appearance of mankind, 
 though every one is dissatisfied with some 
 things in his existence that he would order 
 otherwise if he had the power. 
 
Author neither Optimist nor Pessimist. 5 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE AUTHOR NEITHER OPTIMIST NOR PESSIMIST. 
 
 ON the publication of " Human Inter- 
 course " an influential critic accused 
 me of " cheery optimism." This led me to 
 make an examen de conscience as to whether I 
 inclined towards optimism or pessimism, or 
 had nothing to do with either. 
 
 The optimist is a person who for his pri- 
 vate satisfaction shuts his eyes to the evil 
 there is in the world, or habitually endeavors 
 to minimize and understate it to himself and 
 others when he finds it impossible to keep his 
 eyes shut any longer. 
 
 The pessimist takes a dismal pleasure in 
 demonstrating that only fools can enjoy any- 
 thing like happiness, and that even in their 
 case, though they are much favored by their 
 folly, the happiness they suppose themselves 
 to enjoy is a mere illusion that a higher de- 
 gree of intelligence would soon dissipate. 
 
6 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 The pessimist has at his service a formidable 
 armory of arguments derived from such un- 
 deniable facts as the frequency of infirmities, 
 the certainty of death, and the disquieting 
 absence of justice and morality in the natural 
 government of the world. The history of 
 human governments is also very useful for 
 his purpose, as it abounds in examples of 
 tyranny and oppression which made exist- 
 ence so intolerable for their victims that we 
 were certainly better off in our past condition 
 of absolute unconsciousness than they were 
 in living and suffering when they did. 
 
 Neither optimism nor pessimism is untrue 
 in the sense of being founded on false data, 
 since Nature herself supplies an ample basis 
 for both. The error, in each case, is merely 
 the common human error of a one-sided argu- 
 ment. Life is a most precious boon, because 
 it offers all the joys that the poets sing; life 
 is not worth living, because it exposes us to 
 all the evils that philosophers deplore. It is 
 heaven for the fortunate, at some time of 
 their lives ; it is a temporary hell for the un- 
 lucky. I deny neither the heaven nor the 
 hell, but I do not perceive the universal vic- 
 tory of a benignant principle which is the 
 
Author neither Optimist nor Pessimist. 7 
 
 foundation of optimism, nor the sure supre- 
 macy of a malignant principle which is the 
 gloomy religion of pessimism. Looking on 
 the world as it really is, without any pre-con- 
 ceived theory of benevolent or malevolent 
 intentions, I see that there are both happy 
 and miserable existences ; and whilst it seems 
 to me that life, so long as it is happy, is well 
 worth living, and that the interest we take in 
 it is amply justified by all that it has to offer, 
 I confess frankly that there are human lives 
 to which a rational man, if he had the choice, 
 might excusably prefer annihilation. 
 
 There is an important difference, however, 
 between the life of the individual and that 
 of the race. The pessimist's argument is 
 stronger so far as the individual only is con- 
 cerned, but when the individual can be freely 
 sacrificed and treated as of no account, the 
 optimist has a fine field, as he can point to 
 many evidences of an upward and improving 
 tendency in the race that almost seems to 
 justify his dream of a perfected humanity. 
 
 The strength of the pessimist's argument 
 lies in the great probability, amounting very 
 nearly, though not quite, to a positive cer- 
 tainty, that each of us has evil days in store 
 
8 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 for him, and that all our prudence cannot 
 effectually guard against them. As we ad- 
 vance in life the alternative before us is death 
 or decrepitude, and we like neither one nor 
 the other. That which we instinctively desire 
 is the indefinite continuance of everything 
 that we find to be agreeable, especially the 
 active exercise of our faculties. 
 
 To this the optimist has two answers. If 
 he is a religious optimist, he promises the 
 resurrection of the body with all its organs in 
 perfect and permanent health, or else, having 
 abandoned this hope, which was formerly held 
 essential to orthodoxy, he promises an equally 
 perfect life in which bodily organs will no 
 longer be required. If his optimism is phi- 
 losophical rather than religious, he invites us 
 to find consolation in the thought that al- 
 though we ourselves shall be cast aside when 
 useless as so much (probably suffering) lum- 
 ber, a continual renewal is the necessary con- 
 dition of the existence of humanity as a race, 
 so that it is well from the general point of 
 view that each of us should be sacrificed 
 when his time comes. A further consolation 
 is that as the race advances in intelligence 
 our backwardness would impede its progress; 
 
Author neither Optimist nor Pessimist. 9 
 
 therefore it is well that our minds should be 
 preserved only in books, which can so easily 
 be neglected, and will neither vote at elections 
 nor interrupt the conversation of our more 
 advanced descendants at their dinner-tables. 
 Perhaps the best test of a disposition to 
 optimism or pessimism would be the answer 
 to the following questions. 
 
 1. Would you, if you had the power to do 
 so, create a new planet exactly and in all re- 
 spects like the earth, and would you put upon 
 it a race of creatures exactly like prehistoric 
 men, whose descendants should suffer all that 
 men have suffered and enjoy all that they 
 have enjoyed? 
 
 2. Would you, if you had the power, put 
 an end to the suffering on our own planet by 
 the instantaneous and painless extinction of 
 all human and animal life? 
 
 My own answer to the first question would 
 be a decided negative. It does not seem to 
 me that the happiness there is or has been in 
 the world can be taken as a compensation for 
 the cruelty and injustice involved in such 
 proceedings as the persecutions for witchcraft 
 in England or the persecutions for heresy in 
 Spain. 
 
io The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 As to the second question, my answer 
 would be that although unwilling to under- 
 take personal responsibility for the extinction 
 of life, I look upon its sure extinction in the 
 course of nature without the slightest disap- 
 proval and with very little regret. 
 
 Astronomers have sometimes amused them- 
 selves by representing the earth as it would 
 appear from the moon. In these drawings 
 the continent of Africa is visible as in a map. 
 From our own planet we see plainly with 
 a telescope the geography of our satellite. 
 Which is the sadder spectacle, Africa, the 
 scene of untold and unending cruelties, or 
 the desolate lunar landscape of windless 
 mountains that no cloud overshadows, that 
 no stream waters, the land where there are 
 neither sheep nor shepherds, and where no 
 bird sings ? To me it seems that Africa is 
 the sadder sight. 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 1 1 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON THE DUAL NATURE OF HAPPINESS. 
 I. 
 
 THE happiness that we know by experi- 
 ence, that which alone is compatible 
 with the realities of life, is of two kinds, 
 positive and negative. 
 
 Positive happiness is in action and enjoy- 
 ment, especially in those kinds of action and 
 enjoyment for which each of us is best adapted 
 by his constitution. It is the felicity of all 
 energetic natures, and is not given, except in 
 the very smallest measure, to the indolent and 
 unenterprising. 
 
 Negative happiness is in freedom from trou- 
 blesome hindrances and interferances, whether 
 caused by the action of others or by unfavor- 
 able circumstances. 
 
 The importance to us of the two kinds of 
 happiness may perhaps be broadly regarded as 
 very nearly equal, as a life without negative 
 
1 2 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 happiness is restless, whilst without positive 
 happiness it is dull. It varies, however, with 
 individual cases, according to constitution, and 
 with age. Natures that are strong, vigorous, 
 and impetuous can never be contented with 
 mere exemption from evil ; they always eagerly 
 long for positive good, even though it may be 
 accompanied by great evils, and they are will- 
 ing to endure the evils for the sake of it. 
 Placid and peace-loving natures, on the other 
 hand, desire above all things to escape from 
 everything that they dislike, so that to them 
 the negative kind of happiness is really of 
 greater importance than the positive ; and 
 whether they think of it consciously or not, 
 they look to its preservation first of all, they 
 protect themselves as much as possible against 
 the intrusion of troublesome people, and they 
 carefully avoid the burden of wearisome obli- 
 gations. They are the defenders of their own 
 peace. 
 
 These two conditions of feeling may seem 
 to have so little in common that they are not 
 likely to be found in the same man, yet both 
 are possible in one life, at different stages. 
 One may think of nothing but positive pleas- 
 ures and enjoyments in his youth, whilst he 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 1 3 
 
 may gradually come to appreciate mere exemp- 
 tion from evil as he passes through middle life, 
 and value it more and more as he approaches 
 the confines of old age. 
 
 II. 
 
 Unless there is already some assured basis 
 of negative happiness, the pursuit of positive 
 satisfactions, however energetic, is felt to be 
 almost vain ; but if negative happiness is in a 
 great degree assured, then a very small posi- 
 tive satisfaction is keenly appreciated. We are 
 then in the situation of the man who has no 
 debts and no pecuniary claims upon him, 
 which is the state of negative happiness in 
 money matters. To a man in such a situa- 
 tion the arrival of any small sum that can be 
 placed to his credit is a pure good, and gives 
 unalloyed positive satisfaction. 
 
 The negative happiness of our moral con- 
 science is the firm assurance that we have not 
 done wrong. It is a kind of happiness that 
 can be fully enjoyed by no one with regard to 
 the whole of life, but it may be enjoyed with 
 reference to parts of life, to our past actions 
 under certain circumstances or with certain 
 
14 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 people. If, in addition to these satisfactory 
 reflections, we can say to ourselves that we 
 have done some positive good under those cir- 
 cumstances or to those people, then our pleas- 
 ure is pure ; but if it did not begin with a clean 
 record, we may heap up positive merit as 
 much as we like in our own favor, the evil 
 will never really be effaced. We shall be in 
 the position of a man who has wronged a 
 woman and afterward expresses his regret and 
 offers pecuniary compensation. She may 
 accept it, if she is poor, or she may refuse it ; 
 but in either case the wrong is not righted, it 
 is not as if it had never been. 
 
 The value of merely negative happiness as a 
 preparation for the positive may be aptly illus- 
 trated by a comparison with an engraver's 
 plate. We say that the copper is in a perfect 
 condition when it does not show the slightest 
 scratch, so that an impression from it, in 
 that state, would be absolutely blank. The 
 engraver would refuse to work upon a 
 scratched or indented copper because the 
 positive qualities he might give to the plate 
 would be neutralized by the lack of the nega- 
 tive quality of blankness before he began. In 
 one point, however, my comparison fails, for 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 15 
 
 a scratch or indentation can be completely 
 effaced from the copper, whilst the state of 
 negative satisfaction, once lost, can never be 
 restored in a human life. The evil thing is 
 there still, however many good things may be 
 added to it. 
 
 A better comparison, in this respect, may 
 be the following. The negative quality of 
 anything we eat or drink is the absence of all 
 unsuitable ingredients. The mere absence of 
 these, though only a negative virtue, is quite 
 as important as the presence of desirable in- 
 gredients, which is the positive quality of culi- 
 nary preparations. A cup of coffee may be 
 improved by the addition of sugar, but would 
 be spoiled by the same quantity of salt. The 
 lack of negative happiness is like salted coffee, 
 and it is idle to tell us that the coffee is deli- 
 cious in itself so long as we cannot get the 
 salt out of it which no one whose life is spoiled 
 has ever yet succeeded in doing. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the provision of the natural world there 
 is the most lavish generosity as to materials 
 and opportunities for positive happiness, but 
 
1 6 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 very little protection for the negative. It 
 seems as if, to be in accordance with the laws 
 of the universe in which we live, it would be 
 wiser on our part to look to the positive side, 
 that is, to action and enjoyment, rather than 
 to the negative, which is merely security 
 against evil. As it is hardly possible for any 
 of us to protect our lives against the intrusion 
 of disagreeable, and even hateful things, do 
 what we will, had we not better seek for the 
 agreeable things, which are so easily accessible 
 at the cost of a little effort ? 
 
 The answer is partly contained in the com- 
 parison with salted coffee. If the life is spoilt 
 by the absence of negative happiness, the 
 flavor of it is not to be restored by action and 
 enjoyment. The true prudence on our part 
 is to look to the negative side of happiness 
 first, as no power will protect it for us if we 
 do not protect it ourselves. When we have 
 made that tolerably secure (we can never 
 make it absolutely safe), then we may try for 
 whatever positive happiness may seem to us 
 desirable, in the full assurance that a very 
 little of it will be delightful if we can only 
 keep the negative. 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 1 7 
 
 IV. 
 
 The analogy between happiness and morals 
 is so close that we are always tempted to pass 
 from one to the other. At least half of the 
 moral virtues are negative : we are not to do 
 the forbidden things ; we are not to steal, not 
 to commit murder or adultery, not to indulge 
 in covetousness. The right order in moral 
 training is to make sure of the negative vir- 
 tues first, and not to accept positive virtues as 
 a compensation for them. Some of the 
 greatest criminals in history have had positive 
 virtues, such as courage, kindness, and gener- 
 osity, yet we do not call them good men 
 merely because they had some of the positive 
 qualities of goodness. Neither is a man truly 
 happy because he has the ordinary opportuni- 
 ties for action and enjoyment. He may be 
 mentally and physically active, yet fully con- 
 scious that he lacks the negative happiness 
 that is commonly called peace of mind. 
 
 And as in the moral life the negative vir- 
 tues, though necessary, are insufficient, so in 
 happiness the mere exemption from evil is 
 not enough. Even old people, though they 
 
1 8 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 appreciate negative happiness incomparably 
 better than the young, are still dissatisfied if 
 they have nothing above or beyond it. Their 
 too frequent sadness is caused by the loss of 
 positive pleasures, and they commonly show 
 their appreciation of such pleasures by attach- 
 ing immense importance to very small ones, 
 as an old pauper finds delight in a pipe of 
 tobacco or a pinch of snuff, and is miserable 
 if deprived of them. 
 
 V. 
 
 Whilst everybody can more or less under- 
 stand the value of positive happiness, the 
 negative is appreciated only by the experi- 
 enced, or by people thoughtful enough to be 
 almost philosophers. We cannot expect a 
 light-hearted, unreflecting boy to think of the 
 innumerable evils which are spared to him, 
 and by which others have been embarrassed 
 on their path in life. He takes the mere 
 absence of obstacles as a matter of course, as 
 some mariner sailing through what might 
 have been a dangerous channel thinks noth- 
 ing of the rocks that others have blasted to 
 make the passage clear. The whole eager- 
 
On the Dual Natiire of Happiness. 19 
 
 ness of youth is for action and enjoyment, 
 that is, for the positive side of happiness ; it 
 does not give a thought to its good luck in 
 not being destitute, or crippled, or idiotic. 
 In fact, the list of evils from which we have 
 escaped is so very long that we cannot expect 
 young people to remember them, or give 
 them any separate attention. A healthy 
 young man is fortunate in not having this or 
 that disease, but if you tell him that it is 
 lucky he is not consumptive he may wonder 
 what leads you to select phthisis as an ex- 
 ample when there are hundreds of other 
 ailments of which he hardly even knows the 
 names. So it is with accidents. An active 
 young man always goes through a certain 
 number of accidents and, as a general rule, 
 he escapes from any permanent evil conse- 
 quences, after which he thinks no more about 
 them. If you preach to him about his good 
 fortune, or about providential interposition in 
 his favor, your sermon seems to him super- 
 fluous or unpractical, as it is impossible to be 
 active without running risks, and a life of 
 inactivity is not to be thought of. He always 
 sees his happiness on the positive side, as in 
 the excitement of the hunt, and not in his 
 
2O The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 personal safety, which could at any time be 
 secured by preferring a sofa to a saddle. 
 
 The fatal defect of negative happiness, like 
 that of negative virtue, is that, however pre- 
 cious it may be to its fortunate possessor, and 
 however deplorable may be the loss of it, no- 
 body finds it interesting. We are interested 
 in action and success, we are not interested 
 in mere tranquillity. It is this dulness of 
 negative felicity that makes it so indifferent 
 to the young. In later life we become less 
 impatient of dulness, and we have an in- 
 creasing dislike to disturbance. In old age 
 men and women prefer peace, though it may 
 be uninteresting, to every kind of adventure; 
 and then the mere avoidance of evil is re- 
 cognized as a good, though it be only a nega- 
 tive good. 
 
 At all times of life we recognize negative 
 good when suffering from positive evil. The 
 presence of pain makes the mere absence of 
 it seem delightful to the imagination, and 
 when the pain is gone we appreciate our 
 negative felicity very keenly for a short time, 
 after which we fall back into our ordinary 
 condition of indifference to the merely nega- 
 tive, and desire some positive satisfaction. 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 2 1 
 
 Our feelings about negative good fortune 
 manifest themselves clearly when we think of 
 annihilation, a condition intensely repugnant 
 to the instincts which attach us to life, so that 
 in some ages and countries the certainty of 
 eternal torture for the great majority of man- 
 kind has seemed infinitely preferable to it 
 and more consistent with the justice and 
 goodness of the Creator. Yet, however much 
 people may dislike the idea of annihilation, it 
 is evident that it contains the whole of nega- 
 tive good except the consciousness of it, whilst 
 to put as much positive good into active ex- 
 istence would require a perpetuity of health, 
 wealth, youth, and intelligence, all in the 
 highest imaginable perfection. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Before leaving, for the present, this subject 
 of negative happiness, I may say that it would 
 certainly be better for us if we were more gener- 
 ally alive to the value of it. Our indifference 
 to it is a loss to us in this sense, at least, that 
 we miss many a legitimate opportunity for 
 self-congratulation. The Pharisee in the 
 parable ought not to have been proud of his 
 
22 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 supposed superiority to the Publican, but he 
 might fairly be glad that he was not an extor- 
 tioner, not unjust, not an adulterer. So, 
 without being proud of health and wealth as 
 giving him a superiority over the sick and the 
 indigent, a man may reflect with permissible 
 satisfaction on his freedom from disease and 
 debt. 
 
 There is one negative happiness which has 
 been enjoyed by the English people for many 
 centuries : they have not suffered from a 
 foreign invasion. Unfortunately the only 
 English people at all able to realize their good 
 fortune in this respect are either the few who 
 are gifted with extraordinary powers of reflec- 
 tion and imagination, or else those who, like 
 the present writer, have witnessed the effects 
 of an invasion in a foreign country and 
 experienced, in their own minds, all the 
 intensity of the anxiety that attends it. The 
 happiness of not being invaded is purely 
 negative, and therefore, in itself, not easily 
 appreciated. 
 
 In a life full of action and enjoyment, nega- 
 tive happiness consists in not being obliged 
 to do too much work or go through too much 
 excitement. Pleasures themselves become 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 23 
 
 disagreeable when they are imposed upon us, 
 and then we suffer from the loss of the nega- 
 tive happiness we should have enjoyed in soli- 
 tude. I may mention as an example the 
 custom, prevalent in all barbarous states of 
 society, of compelling people to eat and drink 
 more than they want under the pretext of 
 hospitality, but in reality because the vanity 
 of the host is gratified when the guests seem 
 to appreciate what is provided or because he 
 indulges his instinct of domination by forcing 
 people to do anything in accordance with his 
 will and against their own. In a more 
 advanced state of civilization the guest is pro- 
 vided with everything that he is likely to want 
 in the way of eating and drinking, but no 
 pressure is exercised upon him, and his absti- 
 nence does not seem to attract attention. 
 The reason for this change is evident. In a 
 low state of culture positive happiness is alone 
 understood, and as eating and drinking are 
 agreeable, it is assumed that a guest can never 
 have too much of them ; but as culture 
 advances and people become more civilized, 
 they begin to appreciate the value of negative 
 happiness also, and then they rebel against 
 excesses imposed by others. 
 
24 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The slowness of mankind in the apprecia- 
 ation of negative good is strikingly shown in 
 the progress of religious liberty. The positive 
 form of it is one of the first conquests that are 
 made when nations feel an impulse towards 
 freedom ; but the negative is won long after- 
 wards, if at all, and it excites so little enthusi- 
 asm as to seem almost a matter of indifference. 
 The positive form is liberty to meet for reli- 
 gious services and read religious books accord- 
 ing to our conscience ; it is the Protestant 
 claim, and, as we know, it has been success- 
 fully contended for in many European coun- 
 tries, though not in all. The negative form 
 is the liberty not to take part in services 
 and not to be compelled to read books that 
 bear no relation to our views of the govern- 
 ment of the universe. It is the free-thinking 
 claim, and it has rarely been either advanced 
 with much energy and pertinacity or allowed 
 with readiness. It is, however, more gener- 
 ally admitted at the present day than at any 
 previous epoch, and the reason is that the 
 purely negative happiness of not being com- 
 pulsorily a hypocrite is better understood than 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 25 
 
 formerly, and is beginning to be recognized 
 as a right. Perhaps it would have received 
 separate recognition somewhat earlier if it. had 
 not been tacitly included by the Protestant 
 sects in their own claim, so far as they them- 
 selves had need of it, as the liberty to go to a 
 reformed church implies the negative liberty 
 of not hearing mass, and the right to use a 
 Bible implies the right to leave unopened the 
 books that the Church of Rome has substi- 
 tuted for it. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Very little attention has been hitherto paid 
 to the negative side of happiness in educa- 
 tion. It chiefly consists in not being forced 
 to waste energy uselessly in studies for which 
 we have no natural aptitude. The subject is 
 very tempting, but cannot be dealt with in a 
 paragraph. I will only observe, at present, 
 that happiness in our studies is quite as much 
 negative as positive, and that the most in- 
 dustrious student might be made miserable 
 by being kept to uncongenial work. What is 
 wanted to insure greater happiness in intel- 
 lectual pursuits is a wider liberty of choice. 
 
26 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 Happy is the student who works at a task for 
 which Nature made him, and that man is at 
 least negatively happy who is not bound down 
 by the force of circumstances to any study in 
 particular. 
 
 This seems to bring us, finally, to the con- 
 elusion that there must be a sort of happiness 
 in downright ignorance, as the thoroughly 
 ignorant man escapes not only from the wear- 
 ing toil attendant upon the acquisition of 
 knowledge, but also from the sense of insuffi- 
 ciency and imperfection that pursues us in all 
 studies that we have not thoroughly mastered. 
 The decided self-satisfaction that character- 
 izes very ignorant people must be due to their 
 sense of their own negative perfection. With 
 regard, for example, to a language or an art, 
 it is evident that there are two opposite kinds 
 of perfection, or, in other words, two opposite 
 ways of avoiding error; one is to know all 
 about it, and the other is to know absolutely 
 nothing. All blunders lie between these two 
 extremes. I never made a mistake in the 
 Russian language, et pour cause. There is a 
 certain satisfaction in that, though I have no 
 reason to be proud of it. The complaint that 
 might be reasonably made by all school-boys 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 27 
 
 against their masters is that they destroy the 
 negative felicity of complete ignorance with- 
 out substituting for it the positive felicity of 
 attainment, so that they leave the boys on 
 their entrance into manhood with an unpleas- 
 ant and probably an enduring consciousness 
 of imperfection in their minds, unknown to 
 the true Philistine. 
 
 IX. 
 
 If one were asked to define positive and 
 negative happiness each in a single word, he 
 might say that the first was exercise and the 
 second rest. 
 
 Unhappiness, according to this theory, 
 would be always caused either by the denial 
 of exercise to some faculty that demands it 
 and produces uneasiness till it is gratified, or 
 else by the imposition of a greater strain than 
 the faculty is easily able to bear. It is inten- 
 tionally inflicted in both ways for the punish- 
 ment of criminals who have to undergo the 
 restraint of confinement or the effort of hard 
 labor. 
 
 My own belief is that all human happiness 
 and unhappiness may be explained in this 
 
28 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 way, that happy people are wise enough, and 
 have the opportunities to exercise their phys- 
 ical and mental faculties without undue strain, 
 and to take their rest when they need it ; 
 whilst the unhappy, either through their own 
 indolence and mismanagement, or by the 
 effect of circumstances, are prevented from 
 giving due exercise to their powers, or else 
 compelled to overtask them. In this account 
 of the matter the word " faculties " includes, 
 of course, not only the physical and intellec- 
 tual powers, but the sentiments and affections ; 
 and I think it will be found that all cases of 
 happiness and unhappiness come under the 
 two headings of sufficient exercise, with neces- 
 sary rest, or privation of exercise and priva- 
 tion of repose. 
 
 I am fully aware that, at first sight, this 
 may seem a very summary method of dealing 
 with so complicated a subject, but it bears the 
 test of application to real life, which is the 
 only effective test. The reader is aware al- 
 ready that I fully admit the imperfection of 
 all happiness whatever; but this being once 
 granted I firmly believe that the sort of hap- 
 piness which is compatible with realities is in 
 all cases attainable when there is neither any- 
 
On the Dual Nature of Happiness. 29 
 
 thing to hinder one from exercising his powers 
 nor anything to deprive him of the rest which 
 is necessary to his own organism. 
 
 It may be noted that as happiness is of a 
 dual character, so is its opposite, unhappiness. 
 There is a positive and there is a negative 
 unhappiness. When positive, it is caused by 
 some infliction that puts a strain upon endur- 
 ance ; when negative, it is the effect of some 
 hindrance that does not allow us to do that 
 which some natural impulse, some faculty re- 
 quiring its own exercise, is urging us to do. 
 A man may be doubly unhappy by suffering 
 from positive and negative unhappiness at 
 the same time. For example, it may happen 
 that circumstances do not allow him to follow 
 a profession that would exercise his strongest 
 powers, those which most urgently demand 
 exercise, whilst these same unfavorable cir- 
 cumstances compel him to follow some other 
 profession that puts a constant strain upon 
 powers which, in his case, are unequal to the 
 work required of them and, so far from clamor- 
 ing for exercise, ask for nothing but repose. 
 
30 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 X. 
 
 An equal solicitude for the positive and 
 negative sides of happiness is constantly shown 
 in the progress of beneficent legislation, the 
 kind of legislation which has for its object 
 the general welfare of some great community 
 and not the preservation of a dynasty or the 
 interests of a class. 
 
 The work of legislators, when undertaken 
 purely for the public good, is favorable both 
 to activity and rest ; it delivers all innocent 
 occupations from the forbidding interference 
 of an intermeddling authority, and it sets 
 itself as much as possible against slavery by 
 limiting the hours of work. It also protects, 
 as far as it can, the weak and immature 
 against the strain of labor beyond their 
 strength. Legislation of this kind is a clear 
 recognition of the dual nature of happiness 
 as a satisfaction of the two great needs of a 
 living organism. 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 31 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ON HAPPINESS AS A GIFT OF NATURE. 
 I. 
 
 HERE is a criticism that may be antici- 
 pated. It may be said that the quest 
 of happiness is as vain as the endeavor to be 
 a genius, because both happiness and genius 
 are gifts of nature bestowed on some and to 
 others hopelessly denied. The happy nature, 
 it may be said, is happy in a quite unaccount- 
 able way, simply because it is so ; the gloomy 
 nature, amid the sunniest circumstances, will 
 find a means of surrounding itself with its 
 own private veil of darkness. Between these 
 are innumerable intermediate natures, and par- 
 ticularly the alternating one that is brilliant 
 and sombre by turns, not passing gradually 
 from one extreme to the other, as the moon 
 does in her phases, but suddenly, like the 
 opening and closing of a policeman's lantern. 
 To try, then, to attain happiness is of no avail, 
 
32 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 as each of us enjoys exactly that degree of 
 felicity which is in accordance with his natural 
 disposition, and can never, with all his efforts, 
 attain to anything superior. 
 
 II. 
 
 I am willing to accept the comparison of 
 happiness, if not with genius, at least with 
 natural talent; indeed it is a talent, there is a 
 talent for happiness as there is an artistic gift, 
 but it does not seem to me that the fact of 
 variety in natural endowments makes the pur- 
 suit of happiness less interesting, as the object 
 of a rational being is to attain that kind of 
 happiness which is suited to his own mental 
 and bodily organization, and not some other 
 kind suited to another idiosyncrasy, and so for- 
 ever unattainable by him. A child may have 
 a strong natural talent for music, and still, for 
 want of special training, miss the peculiar 
 happiness of a violinist, though Nature had 
 given him the endowments of an accurate ear 
 and a hand so organized as to be perfectly 
 adapted to the instrument. In such a case I 
 should say that the child was born with the 
 potentiality of a violinist's happiness, but no 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 33 
 
 more, and that the attainment of it would have 
 required a long and careful training. My 
 argument is that the pursuit of happiness is 
 vain only when we have in view some kind of 
 felicity for which we are not qualified by our 
 constitution. To take a very broad and gen- 
 eral case, it is evidently useless for English- 
 men to desire French gayety. The English 
 may be, and I believe they are, quite as happy 
 in their own way as the French in theirs, but 
 it is a different way ; they can be steadily 
 cheerful, but true gayety or light-heartedness 
 is beyond them. This being so, an English- 
 man ought to aim at the perfection and preser- 
 vation of his national cheerfulness, whilst a 
 Frenchman may innocently enough encourage 
 (I am speaking figuratively) the champagne to 
 bubble up in his brain, the more so that what 
 seems to us his temporary silliness does not 
 make him less industrious, or less prudent, or 
 less competent in the mechanical and the fine 
 arts. 
 
 A distinction still broader than this, as it is 
 not confined to nationalities, is the distinction 
 between the happiness of the man of action 
 and that of the intellectual and scholarly man 
 whose lot in life is to be a perpetual student. 
 
 3 
 
34 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 The art of living, in these opposite cases, must 
 evidently be to do what is most likely to 
 develop the inborn power, because the power 
 has its own peculiar potentiality of happiness. 
 Thus, we find M. Renan, whose nature was 
 that of a scholar mingled with that of a liter- 
 ary artist, declaring in his old age that his lot 
 had been a happy one, and looking back upon 
 his life with feelings of almost unmingled 
 satisfaction. Yet it was a life that no active 
 Englishman could have endured, being almost 
 entirely deprived of physical activity (Renan 
 took no exercise), and also of that daily excite- 
 ment of contact with the outer world which is 
 enjoyed in practical affairs. Although Renan 
 was not precisely a recluse in the sense of 
 absolute solitude, as from his earliest youth he 
 had lived in communication with other minds 
 in the Catholic Church or out of it, he was 
 shut up in his scholarly pursuits, not as in a 
 prison, but as in a " high-walled garden, green 
 and old/' where he lived and worked content- 
 edly. The gift of Nature, in this instance, 
 was the power of finding happiness in philo- 
 logical science, and in the application of that 
 science to historical research. This happiness 
 was so great that it enabled Renan to endure 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 35 
 
 for many years a loud and continuous cataract 
 of calumnies without taking the slightest 
 notice of them and without losing, for an 
 instant, his inborn chanty and urbanity. 
 
 III. 
 
 A case in strong contrast with that of 
 Renan has come under my own observation. 
 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 in all ranks of 
 society. It was almost impossible to pass 
 the ground floor without hearing the voice of 
 a woman singing, a rich voice, always per- 
 fectly in tune, and remarkable both for the 
 energy and the sweetness of its modulations. 
 
 "Like a high-born maiden 
 
 In a palace tower, 
 Pouring her love-laden 
 
 Soul in secret hour 
 With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower." 
 
 In this case, however, the singer was not a 
 high-born maiden, but a handsome woman of 
 the lower middle class, the mother of eight fine 
 
36 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 children, and the place where she sang was 
 not a palace tower, but a gloomy little kitchen, 
 with an outlook on a narrow courtyard, where 
 she slaved from morning till night, as her 
 husband earned but a small salary, and they 
 could not afford to keep a servant. I like to 
 hear a beautiful voice, and I like to meet with 
 happy people who irradiate our mortal life 
 with their own sunshine, so I made some in- 
 quiries about this songstress of her neighbor, 
 the old lady, who had nothing but good to 
 tell me. Afterwards I made the acquaintance 
 of the songstress herself, and one day I ven- 
 tured 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 their poverty gave her 
 plenty to do she was strong and could bear it 
 easily. 
 
 This good mother must have been endowed 
 with a great natural talent for happiness and 
 the power of finding an ample provision of it 
 in simple and primitive satisfactions. The 
 conjugal and maternal instincts were satisfied 
 to the full, the mind was occupied sufficiently 
 (or at least the attention taken up) with con- 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 37 
 
 slant care for the children, and the body kept 
 in a state of healthy activity by incessant 
 work. I may be told that in such an exist- 
 ence there could be no place for the ideal. 
 Certainly there was no place for mental cul- 
 ture, but ideal satisfactions were found in 
 singing and in religion. There is a certain 
 state of feeling which finds an intense grati- 
 fication in the observances of the Roman 
 Church, and in that state of feeling both the 
 singer and her husband lived habitually. 
 
 This is evidently one of those cases in 
 which the inborn power of being happy owes 
 the liberty of exercising itself quite as much 
 to negative as to positive conditions. The 
 life I have just been describing is beautiful in 
 its harmony and in its devotion ; even the 
 very simplicity of it has a sort of artistic com- 
 pleteness, but its well-deserved felicity, though 
 quite compatible with a musical faculty and 
 with religious sentiment, would be wholly in- 
 compatible with vigorous intellectual powers, 
 as these would require their own freedom and 
 chafe under the restraints and the slavery of 
 a narrow existence, of which every moment is 
 absorbed by trivial duties and obligations. 
 
38 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The gift of physical happiness is much 
 more common than that power to enjoy in- 
 tellectual good fortune which belonged to 
 Renan and has distinguished other kindly 
 tempered philosophers. There are also good 
 reasons for believing that there is a complete- 
 ness in the sense of physical well-being that 
 can never belong to any rational conscious- 
 ness of intellectual superiority. A man may 
 feel himself to be in perfect health and 
 strength without being mistaken in such an 
 estimate of his physical powers, but if any 
 human being believed himself to be impec- 
 cable in his learning or absolutely wise, his 
 opinion of himself would be good evidence 
 that he was neither. And with regard to 
 training, although no doubt the activity of 
 the body is increased by gymnastics, the spon- 
 taneous motions of boyhood, left to amuse it- 
 self as it likes, will sufficiently develop the 
 muscles and promote the circulation of the 
 blood, whereas a boy's mental pursuits, sup- 
 posing him to be left entirely to himself, 
 would do very little for his intellect. As life 
 goes on, the gift of physical well-being may 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 39 
 
 be enjoyed by every one who has ordinary 
 leisure ; it is even enjoyed in physical labor, 
 as well as in games and sports that are prac- 
 tised all over the country ; but intellectual gifts 
 compel their possessors to live in, or near, the 
 centres of intelligence, under penalty, if they 
 live elsewhere, of a mental isolation which is 
 never favorable to happiness. 
 
 One of my friends who had been in the 
 army, but was spending some of the best 
 years of his life as an idler and sportsman, 
 once told me that he sought physical happi- 
 ness only, and did not concern himself about 
 any other. Nature had been most generous 
 to him in all physical endowments ; he was 
 tall, strong, handsome, and naturally very ac- 
 tive. He had gone through the siege of 
 Sebastopol without a wound, and had borne 
 its privations without injuring his digestion. 
 In his retirement he lived almost entirely in 
 the open air, enjoying life in his own way, 
 which was superior to the common way in 
 this, that he was fully conscious of his felicity 
 and intelligent enough to know that physical 
 happiness, for anybody who can be content 
 with it, is more perfect, so long as it lasts, 
 than any that can be derived from intellectual 
 
4O The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 pursuits. As to his right to enjoy himself, 
 his conscience was perfectly at ease ; and in- 
 deed one does not clearly see that he would 
 have been more virtuous if occupied in puz- 
 zling out Plato with a dictionary, for Plato 
 would only have weaned him, without doing 
 him the slightest good. His case was the 
 opposite of that of Lady Jane Grey, who pre- 
 ferred Plato to the hunting field. 
 
 The objection to any entire reliance upon 
 physical happiness is, that it is suspended by 
 illness, even by the slightest illness, such as 
 an ordinary cold, and that it is sure to be 
 steadily diminished by advancing years. Un- 
 der these circumstances the man whose phys- 
 ical happiness was once complete, finds himself 
 exposed without defence to a degree of tedium 
 entirely unknown to the lover of liberal studies, 
 who has always something interesting in view, 
 however imperfect may be his sense of mas- 
 tery in the science that he has chosen. 
 
 My opinion about physical happiness is that 
 we do well and wisely to be fully conscious of 
 it, and to delight in it whilst we have it, but 
 that it is unwise to trust entirely to a kind of 
 felicity that is even more precarious than any 
 other, as it may, at any time, be suspended or 
 even annihilated by accident or disease. 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 41 
 
 V. 
 
 But how if there is a great gift of physical 
 happiness, as when a youth has a magnificent 
 constitution and mighty powers of enjoyment, 
 whilst at the same time there is a total dearth 
 of interest in all pursuits that belong to the 
 region of mind, so that he does not care, and 
 cannot be made to care, about any science or 
 any liberal art ? How is a young man so con- 
 stituted to lay up treasures of knowledge for 
 the solace of his declining years? 
 
 The answer is simply that he does well to 
 accept and enjoy the kind of happiness that 
 belongs to his own nature, and that it is use- 
 less to preach to him about the satisfaction 
 that others, who are differently constituted, 
 may find in occupations that he dislikes. As 
 for his future, it must come in its own way, 
 and though the dulness of it may be inevitable, 
 it may be palliated by minor pleasures. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The excessive constitutional happiness 
 which is known as high animal spirits, might 
 be enviable if it were not a disturbing cause 
 
42 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 in all deliberations that require cool accuracy 
 of judgment. A too great happiness of a 
 constitutional kind may have a dangerous in- 
 fluence on conduct by disposing its possessor 
 to see everything under too favorable a light. 
 To enjoy high animal spirits may be as pleas- 
 ant as the condition of one who has absorbed 
 rather too much champagne. He is not 
 drunk, or even tipsy, but he sees things, for 
 the moment, under aspects more favorable to 
 good fellowship than to the transaction of 
 business. I have observed, too, that the con- 
 dition of high spirits is not good for the 
 attainment of any great object of human pur- 
 suit. A boyish exuberance does not dispose 
 one to settle down seriously to the patient 
 toil required for any arduous undertaking, 
 such as the acquisition of knowledge or of 
 wealth : it inclines us to temporary enjoy- 
 ments, to social pleasures; it makes us agreea- 
 ble to others and to ourselves; it does not 
 provide for any future or dispose us to any pru- 
 dential considerations. Therefore, although 
 such high powers of enjoyment may seem very 
 conducive to happiness whilst they last, they 
 are not conducive to the happiness of a life- 
 time, but are positively detrimental to it if 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 43 
 
 taken as a whole, and for my part I have 
 never desired them, either for myself or for 
 any one who is dear to me. 
 
 VII. 
 
 It seems as if good-tempered and good- 
 natured people were peculiarly endowed for 
 happiness. What is fortunate for them is 
 their generally favorable opinion of others, 
 an opinion that makes life sweeter and more 
 encouraging to those who are able to hold it. 
 
 Another advantage on the side of good- 
 natured people is that they attract and keep 
 affection, but we have to bear in mind that 
 their magnetism operates only on those who 
 have an affectionate disposition to begin with. 
 I remember being criticised by one of the 
 newspapers for having made a distinction 
 between persuasive influences and actual 
 power. I had said that the persuasive influ- 
 ences only operated upon the willing, whereas 
 real power can operate upon the unwilling 
 also. My critic suggested that to be able to 
 command willing deference was the greatest 
 power of all. Certainly such influence is very 
 pleasant to possess, and the kinder a man's 
 
44 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 nature the sweeter it must be to him ; but it is 
 not general enough in its operation to give the 
 sense of power, except over isolated individ- 
 uals. Poets only influence those who have 
 the poetical temperament, the good-natured 
 and tender-hearted only win the respect of 
 those who are tender-hearted like themselves. 
 The vulgar, pushing, and selfish natures, which 
 are very numerous and very active, misunder- 
 stand and despise them. The good-natured 
 man has an advantage in not dissipating 
 nervous force in useless irritation and in con- 
 flict, but as he is habitually over-charitable in 
 his estimates of mankind and too ready to put 
 up with less than the consideration that is due 
 to him, he is likely to be an inefficient defender 
 of his own rights. In this way it may come 
 to pass that although such a man is well con- 
 stituted for serenity in his private thoughts, 
 he is unfit for the battle of life, and therefore 
 likely to suffer externally. An angelic dispo- 
 sition, unless it included the combative cour- 
 age of a St. Michael or a St. George, would 
 certainly not be the most favorable to happi- 
 ness in a public school. 
 
 It may be, too, that the ill-natured, though 
 they lack inward serenity, derive a peculiar 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 45 
 
 satisfaction from distilling the poison of malev- 
 olence, and that it is agreeable to them to lie 
 in wait for their victims and watch for the 
 opportunity to sting. The powers of wit and 
 sarcasm are not associated with good-nature, 
 but with ill-nature. To change the metaphor, 
 I may say that compressed malevolence is the 
 explosive force that sends wit's pointed projec- 
 tiles into the victim's flesh. And as the 
 majority of mankind have a keen admiration 
 for intelligence and malevolence together, so 
 long as they do not operate against them- 
 selves, whilst benevolence is agreeable to them 
 rarely unless they themselves profit by it, the 
 ill-natured person may look forward to a sort 
 of aftermath of satisfaction in the admiration 
 of others which is beyond the expectations of 
 the good. The reader cannot, I am sure, 
 recall to memory a single benevolent saying 
 with the same chances of immortality as the 
 bitter and depreciatory sayings of Carlyle. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 If one had to answer, very briefly, the ques- 
 tion, " What is the happiest nature ? " the 
 answer that most readily suggests itself would 
 
46 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 be, " The most sane, the healthiest in body and 
 mind." 
 
 This answer can only be satisfying for a 
 moment, as there are such wide differences of 
 mental constitution between persons who are 
 equally sane. We may put aside all the more 
 or less insane people (including many who 
 are famous for the brilliancy of their genius) as 
 congenitally disqualified for happiness, but 
 when we come to the healthy natures our 
 difficulty begins. 
 
 There are, let us suppose, three sons in a 
 family, whom for convenience we will call by 
 their Christian names. They are all perfectly 
 healthy in mind and body. John enjoys his 
 own life and lives in the present, not diminish- 
 ing his own satisfaction in living by any trou- 
 blesome degree of sympathy with his less 
 fortunate neighbors. He is rich, and getting 
 richer ; it seems to him only natural that 
 others should be poor, and suffering from the 
 consequences of their poverty, which he does 
 not feel under any obligation to relieve. The 
 same want of imagination that makes him 
 unsympathetic deprives him of any clear view 
 of his own future. He cannot fancy his own 
 old age; still less does he realize the disagree- 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 47 
 
 able idea of death, and though frightened at 
 what he is told at church about eternity, he 
 thinks of it as seldom and dwells upon it as 
 little as possible. I should say that he is con- 
 stituted for a certain kind of happiness, but a 
 narrow kind, and such happiness as he has is 
 not likely to last him through the evening of 
 life, which with his healthy constitution may 
 be prolonged and increasingly dreary. Yet it 
 is undisputable that he has a sound mind in a 
 sound body. 
 
 His brother James is also quite healthy and 
 in a good pecuniary position, but his mind is 
 so sympathetic that it is impossible for him to 
 enjoy to the full his own well-being so long as 
 there are poverty and wretchedness in Eng- 
 land or, indeed, anywhere in the world. His 
 feelings of sympathy give him certain inward 
 satisfactions when he is able either to relieve 
 suffering directly himself or to take a part in 
 public philanthropic undertakings; but, on the 
 whole, the pain of being able to do so little 
 exceeds the pleasure of doing the little that he 
 can. Meanwhile his judgment remains per- 
 fectly sane and clear. The evils that he sees 
 are real, they are not the product of a morbid 
 imagination, and he does not exaggerate them 
 
48 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 in the least. I should say that James is not 
 so well constituted for happiness as his brother 
 John ; he is constituted for a state which is 
 higher and better than happiness, but which 
 is not the same thing and ought not to be 
 called by the same name. 
 
 These two brothers are not alone in the 
 family ; they have a brother Henry, who is as 
 soundly constituted as either of them, but 
 whose intellect is much more powerful and far- 
 reaching. For himself, personally, he troubles 
 his mind very little, and, indeed, never gives a 
 thought to the question whether he is happy 
 or not, or by what means his happiness might 
 be increased. His sympathy with near and 
 special cases of suffering does not seem to be 
 quite so lively and ready as that of his brother 
 James, his real and constant preoccupation 
 being with that great destiny which includes 
 all human destinies. He is saddened by the 
 prediction of Science that all the works of men 
 are destined to ultimate destruction and obliv- 
 ion, and that the race itself must advance to 
 its own extinction, probably through a slow 
 and most melancholy process of degeneration, 
 in which a decadent posterity will gradually 
 lose its hold on all inventions that require 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 49 
 
 a high degree of practical intelligence for 
 their continued use. The same far-seeing 
 disposition makes him anxious from a national 
 point of view. He is disquieted when he 
 thinks of the precarious future of England, 
 with a population dependent on foreign trade 
 and a wealth derived from a mineral now so 
 rapidly extracted and so recklessly spent. 
 He is anxious for the future of religion on 
 account of the unprecedented position of the 
 modern world, which is pulling down its 
 ancient temple before it has decided upon the 
 site or the arcnitecture of the new. These 
 ideas have not the character of morbid halluci- 
 nations ; they may visit, though unwelcome, 
 the brain of a thoughtful man in perfect 
 health, and he has no means of preventing 
 their return. The three brothers whom I 
 have summarily described have all of them 
 equally sound minds, they have no taint of 
 any cerebral ailment, but their chances of hap- 
 piness are very different. The first, John, is 
 well gifted for happiness of a very narrow 
 kind, which no man of high intellect would 
 care for, or willingly accept. The second 
 brother, James, is not so happy as John, 
 because he suffers with and for others; but 
 
50 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 such happiness as he can enjoy by snatches 
 from time to time is of a much more elevated 
 nature, and might be acceptable by a mind of 
 a noble and even of a saintly character. 
 When we come to the third brother, Henry, 
 we find that he is not likely to enjoy much 
 selfish felicity like John, nor even the kind of 
 sympathetic happiness that may sometimes be 
 a compensation to James; his intellectual 
 power is unfavorable to happiness because it 
 is always bringing him face to face with truths 
 that he cannot help rebelling against, even 
 whilst he recognizes them. Yet he is as sane 
 as either of his less gifted brothers, and he has 
 indeed one advantage over both of them, the 
 exulting sense of intellectual force and moral 
 intrepidity. Such happiness as he has is in a 
 great measure dependent on his consciousness 
 of mental power, though he is too intelligent 
 not to be well aware that the power itself is 
 but a temporary possession ; so that even here 
 also there falls a shadow of intellectual sad- 
 ness, and the contentment of simpler and more 
 primitive natures is made impossible for him. 
 The three cases I have just imagined might 
 be multiplied to three hundred without sup- 
 posing in any one of them any real disturb- 
 
On Happiness as a Gift of Nature. 5 1 
 
 ance of healthy equilibrium. So far from 
 finding uniformity of happiness in healthy 
 natures, we should be likely to find the utmost 
 possible diversity, both in the intensity of the 
 feeling enjoyed and in its very essence, one 
 man's happiness being no more like that of 
 another than one kind of wine or music is 
 like another. The most that can be said is 
 that there is a certain potentiality of happi- 
 ness in each of us which we rarely profit by 
 to its full extent, and that this potentiality is 
 probably (to me it seems undoubtedly) much 
 greater in some individuals than in others. It 
 is probable, too, that simple natures have a 
 better chance of realizing the kind of happi- 
 ness which is possible for them than natures 
 of a higher order, as they are in a certain 
 sense nearer to it, so that it comes more fre- 
 quently within their grasp. 
 
52 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 HOW OUR HAPPINESS IS INCOMPLETE. 
 
 BY the extension of our interests in life we 
 are constantly seeking for new kinds 
 of happiness, and at the same time constantly 
 exposing ourselves to new troubles, of which 
 in a narrower existence we might have re- 
 mained ignorant. If, then, complete happi- 
 ness were possible in the world, it would most 
 probably be realized by persons of a very 
 simple nature, leading a very narrow life, and 
 placed in such a situation that their few and 
 limited faculties would find sufficient exercise 
 without the strain of over-fatigue. 
 
 As we extend our interests in life we be- 
 come more and more vulnerable, and vulner- 
 able in new places. The probabilities against 
 the preservation of happiness are therefore 
 continually increasing, even if we suppose it 
 to have been perfect at the beginning. 
 
 The only effectual self-defence would be 
 the utmost possible restriction of our life ; but 
 
How Our Happiness is Incomplete. 53 
 
 even if this were carried to an almost ideal 
 degree, as in the existence of an anchorite, 
 we should be exposed to unhappiness through 
 the craving of our faculties for various kinds 
 of activity which, in such a narrow life, would 
 be denied to them. 
 
 We are, therefore, fatally condemned to 
 some kind of imperfection in our happiness 
 in one of two ways. If we extend the range 
 of our sympathies and activities we expose 
 our peace to many hazards, and if we defend 
 our peace by narrowing our existence we are 
 likely to suffer from unsatisfied desires. There 
 may be much happiness of an imperfect kind 
 in both kinds of life, but the perfection of it is 
 not to be counted upon in either. 
 
 I fully believe, however, that if a very nar- 
 row life begins well and goes on afterwards in 
 a groove that answers to the restricted tastes 
 of the person who has to live it, such a life, 
 however poor it may seem to outsiders, may 
 have better chances of approaching complete- 
 ness in its felicity than a more extended one. 
 The reader will please to observe that the 
 completeness of content may be very different 
 from variety of interest. 
 
 For example, the life of poverty (not anx- 
 
54 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 ious but submissive poverty), along with celi- 
 bacy, extreme temperance, and silence, which 
 is accepted by some of the monastic orders, 
 might approach somewhat nearly to com- 
 plete happiness if the monk were so well 
 persuaded of the truth of his religion as to 
 have no misgivings about the routine of his 
 observances as the best possible employment 
 of his time. It is difficult to imagine any- 
 thing like such completeness of happiness in 
 the life of an active politician incessantly 
 exposed to vexations and disappointments 
 against which no routine of duty, however 
 conscientiously followed, can afford any ef- 
 fective protection. 
 
 I myself happen to know a Dominican 
 monk. I knew him well when he was a boy 
 and entirely uncertain about the choice of 
 a profession. His tendencies were towards 
 those occupations that leave room for the 
 exercise of the idealizing imagination, and 
 he might have become an author or an ar- 
 tist. He soon discovered, however, that there 
 was something unsatisfactory to him in the 
 studies which are necessary to any artistic 
 success, and, though he enjoyed the master- 
 pieces of literature and art, even this enjoy- 
 
How Our Plappiness is Incomplete. 55 
 
 ment was constantly marred by a sense of 
 their insufficiency to happiness. " It is not 
 here/' he said to himself, " that I shall find the 
 refuge that I seek." At length his thoughts 
 turned towards the monastic life, and being 
 at Amiens, where there is a Dominican estab- 
 lishment, he was received into the order. The 
 life he leads is one of the utmost regularity 
 and the most severe discipline. He is now 
 undergoing the eight years of studious prep- 
 aration for preaching, and is practically ex- 
 cluded from intercourse with his own family, 
 the place of his residence being fixed by his 
 monastic superiors. 1 Yet in spite of these 
 restrictions he affirms that he has attained a 
 condition of mind much more nearly ap- 
 proaching to the completeness of happiness 
 than anything he had ever known before. 
 This example entirely confirms my belief that 
 if happiness is to approach perfection it must 
 be of a narrow kind. This Dominican would 
 find his happiness imperilled by the slightest 
 development of his intellect or his affections 
 outside of his prescribed studies and his own 
 white-robed brotherhood. 
 
 The contrast between the restricted and 
 
 1 For four years it will be in the island of Corsica. 
 
56 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 extended life may be more easily brought 
 home to most readers by the familiar com- 
 parison of celibacy with marriage. 
 
 A fairly near approach to the completeness 
 of happiness (without considering its inten- 
 sity or variety) is more probable in the single 
 than in the married state, provided only that 
 the sexual and parental instincts are suffi- 
 ciently tranquil to leave the unmarried person 
 at full liberty to enjoy Jhe advantages of his 
 situation. His chief advantages are in light- 
 ness and readiness for action, and in the ease 
 with which he can defend himself against 
 many evils, I do not say against all. The 
 married state, on the contrary, is heavily en- 
 cumbered for action (this is well illustrated 
 in travelling, for example), and the married 
 man with a family lives in a house that has 
 many entrances for evil, whilst he is not able 
 to bar one of them. 
 
 Another familiar example is the comparison 
 between the professional and the non-profes- 
 sional existence. Here, again, the approach 
 to completeness in happiness is on the side 
 of the more limited activity. To live on an 
 independent income is to escape from all pro- 
 fessional anxieties and vexations. To enter a 
 
How Our Happiness is Incomplete. 57 
 
 profession is to expose one's self to the cer- 
 tainty of such vexations, though it may be im- 
 possible to foresee precisely in what they will 
 consist. If the imperfection of happiness were 
 a sufficient reason for rejecting it, no one ought 
 to go into a profession unless forced into it by 
 sheer poverty, or else in a spirit of self-sacri- 
 fice, like a doctor who has learned medicine 
 to make himself useful to the afflicted. For 
 the same reasons ambition of all kinds ought 
 to be eschewed, as it is impossible for an 
 ambitious person to gratify his aspirations to 
 the full, and therefore he is sure to suffer 
 from the dissatisfaction that accompanies a 
 sense of imperfect attainment. 
 
 In some lives, at the time for the most im- 
 portant decisions, there is liberty of choice 
 between a narrow existence and a more 
 extended one. .It may be possible to avoid 
 marriage and to keep out of professional and 
 public life. The chances in favor of a more 
 perfect though much narrower happiness 
 would be enhanced by these renunciations, 
 and they would be still further increased by 
 renouncing all pursuits that are likely to tor- 
 ment us by the consciousness of imperfect 
 attainment. It is obviously prudent, when 
 
58 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 the perfection of happiness is the object, to 
 avoid those arts, such as music and painting, 
 that require great manual skill, which is likely 
 to be imperfectly acquired. So in languages, 
 as it is almost impossible to learn a foreign 
 language really well, most people are happy 
 only in their own, and may wisely leave for- 
 eign languages to those who are compelled to 
 make use of them. 
 
 The practical decision most commonly 
 taken is in favor of extension rather than 
 restriction in the search for happiness. We 
 are pushed to this by too many surrounding 
 influences for escape to be easy without a 
 great and constant effort of resolution. There 
 is also a powerful internal force in the lively 
 curiosity of youth, a curiosity that must 
 needs satisfy itself at the cost of infinite trou- 
 ble and inconvenience, and which impels us 
 in many directions from which it is afterwards 
 difficult to retreat. 
 
 I should say that the extension of our in- 
 terest may augment the total sum of our 
 happiness, but that it is most detrimental to 
 its purity. The common confusion in this 
 matter is between happiness and knowledge, 
 or culture, as if they were the same, which 
 
How Our Happiness is Incomplete. 59 
 
 they are not. Happiness is much more nearly 
 akin to self-satisfaction than to culture, and 
 self-satisfaction is usually found in its highest 
 perfection in narrow minds and in narrow 
 lives. 
 
60 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE IMPERFECTION OF THE HIGHER HAPPINESS. 
 
 EFE carries us much more towards exten- 
 sion than towards perfection, so that 
 the chances in favor of completeness in our 
 happiness diminish steadily as we grow older, 
 and we finally arrive at a condition in which 
 happiness has to be picked up like precious 
 stones scattered over a vast and otherwise 
 barren area, if it is to be enjoyed at all. 
 
 This being so, it would seem at first sight 
 natural that men should desire to go back to 
 the primitive condition, that of childhood or 
 youth, in which their happiness was more 
 complete ; but they very rarely experience any 
 such desire. We may legitimately infer from 
 this, that although increased knowledge and 
 experience make happiness more and more 
 imperfect, they give, in themselves, some kind 
 of satisfaction that is taken as an equivalent 
 for the loss. 
 
 Perhaps we feel instinctively that the simple 
 
Imperfection of Higher Happiness. 61 
 
 life, with the profundity of its ignorance and 
 its delightful self-satisfaction, is on a lower 
 stage of being than the complex, and that it is 
 impossible to get back to genuine simplicity 
 when once we have passed beyond it. 
 
 Even as a mere matter of prudence, without 
 considering pride, we might set a higher value 
 on the happiness of a mature and cultivated 
 man, with all its imperfection and with the 
 fullest consciousness that its imperfection is 
 inevitable, than on the more perfect existence 
 of a lower type. One reason in his favor is 
 that he is seldom quite crushed by any evil 
 short of utter ruin or incurable disease, and 
 even these evils, terrible as they are, may be 
 mitigated in his case by his broader views of 
 the universe and of the human race, of which 
 he and his misfortunes are insignificant and 
 almost imperceptible incidents. 
 
 What is true for the individual is true also 
 for communities. The ideally happy commu- 
 nity would of necessity be quite primitive. It 
 would have one religion answering exactly to 
 its needs, and one benevolent despot familiar 
 with the wishes and habits of the population. 
 Such a community might enjoy much more 
 perfect happiness than modern England and 
 
62 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 France, with unsettled religious and political 
 ideas that produce dissension and lead to 
 experiments of which a large proportion are 
 always likely to be disappointing. But there 
 is a dark side to the lot of the primitive com- 
 munity, as to that of the primitive individual. 
 If it is unhappy, it is so absolutely, and with 
 very little chance of any immediate relief. If 
 it is unfortunate in its ruler, and if its reli- 
 gious customs are sanguinary and cruel, its 
 chances of even moderate happiness are very 
 small, whereas there is always the hope for an 
 advanced community that a bad ruler may be 
 checked by other political influences, a bad 
 religion at least prevented from persecuting 
 and bad laws amended or repealed. The 
 great power of recovery after misfortunes 
 which has been several times exhibited by 
 modern states, and conspicuously by France, 
 is due to the variety of intellectual and social 
 elements which they contain ; and yet it is this 
 very variety that makes it so difficult for such 
 states, in ordinary times, to preserve internal 
 harmony, the sort of harmony that is easily 
 maintained by a despotic ruler in a primitive 
 and ignorant community and which is in itself 
 a sort of national happiness. No one who 
 
Imperfection of Higher Happiness. 63 
 
 sees things as they are can doubt that the 
 present political happiness, either of France 
 or England, is almost hopelessly incomplete ; 
 yet at the same time it is better for them to be 
 as they are, with all their internal dissensions, 
 than to enjoy a primitive kind of peace in the 
 submissive unanimity of ignorance. 
 
 It is certain that imperfection is the inevi- 
 table characteristic of the higher happiness, 
 whilst perfection, or at least a nearer approach 
 to it, belongs to a lower grade of being. The 
 reason appears to be that as we advance our 
 wants become much more numerous and our 
 consciousness of them clearer. To satisfy them 
 we might require armies and fleets, or the most 
 improbable internal revolution. There is a re- 
 actionary French lady of my acquaintance who 
 is a superior person, with strong patriotic sen- 
 timents and decided political views. Her 
 happiness is very imperfect. To make it per- 
 fect one would have to begin with a huge war 
 for the recovery of Alsatia and Lorraine, and 
 the war would have to be entirely victorious 
 for France. We should also have to destroy 
 the French Republic and re-establish the 
 monarchy in its place. It would be necessary, 
 again, to effect a revolution in the Italian 
 
64 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 Kingdom by completely restoring the tem- 
 poral power of the Papacy. The unhappiness 
 of the lady, so far as it is caused by the pres- 
 ent state of Europe, is due to her compara- 
 tively elevated mental position. Her servants 
 are not troubled by such ideas, beyond a little 
 natural hatred of the foreigner, a sentiment 
 that does not diminish their enjoyment in eat- 
 ing and drinking. 
 
 If from a comparison between one human 
 being and another we pass to a comparison 
 between ordinary man and the very highest of 
 the lower animals, we still see that the more 
 elevated nature is the less likely to preserve 
 the perfection of its happiness. A human 
 mother loses a child and painfully regrets the 
 loss of it ever afterwards. She may still be 
 happy in the love of her husband, and in her 
 other children, but the perfection of happiness 
 is impossible for her. It would require the 
 miracle of restoring the dead to life. A ca- 
 nine mother, as tender for the moment as the 
 human, has lost several litters of puppies and 
 forgotten them. If some have been kept to 
 maturity she meets them without recognition. 
 In either case, the past does not affect the hap- 
 piness of the present. Again, the merely un- 
 
Imperfection of Higher Happiness. 65 
 
 filial conduct of a son is enough to spoil the 
 happiness of human parents, and they become 
 utterly wretched if he does anything shameful 
 or dishonorable. There is no conception of 
 unfilial conduct amongst the lower animals. 
 
 To carry the comparison further down, it is 
 evident that the high nature of the dog makes 
 him feel sentimental privations painfully 
 which to the horse are matters of the most 
 complete indifference. I have often observed 
 my horse after returning from an absence of 
 several days or weeks, but have never been 
 able to detect the slightest sign that he was 
 aware I had been away longer than usual, 
 whilst my dog would show an emotion so 
 intense as to be painful. I remember espe- 
 cially how after one long separation he 
 returned from a solitary little outing of his 
 own and found me, quite unexpectedly for him, 
 sitting in my easy-chair. He did not utter a 
 sound, but rushed to me and laid his head in 
 my lap, kept it there a very long time, and 
 trembled violently at intervals. It was not 
 until the next day that he recovered his joyous 
 ways with me. He had been perfectly miser- 
 able during my absence, a kind of misery due 
 to the very superiority of his canine nature. 
 
 5 
 
66 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEAL. 
 
 THE very imperfection of our happiness 
 an imperfection that we see more 
 clearly after every intellectual advance and 
 that we acknowledge more frankly as we be- 
 come more honest impels us to that exercise 
 of the imagination which creates the poem of 
 an ideal felicity. 
 
 The process by which this ideal is imagina- 
 tively attained is the removal of all that is un- 
 pleasant to us in existence, so that we may 
 give ourselves over to the uninterrupted en- 
 joyment of what is agreeable. This may be 
 achieved ideally, but never otherwise. Even 
 for the merely ideal enjoyment of perfect 
 felicity it is perilous to imagine details, as 
 they are sure to be incompatible with each 
 other, after which the scheme of perfect hap- 
 piness becomes incoherent and the vision 
 fades. 
 
The Origin of the Ideal. 67 
 
 The impossibility of realizing the ideal will 
 be seen at once when we perceive that it is 
 always selfish and personal, it is always the 
 dreamer's own private satisfaction that he has 
 in view. To this he would bend and adapt 
 the convenience of all other beings. In the 
 world of reality this cannot be done; it is 
 easy enough in the world of imagination, so 
 long as the critical faculty remains inactive. 
 
 The ideal condition, for each of us, is the 
 pleasantest age of his own life made per- 
 manent, without any of the defects that par- 
 tially spoiled it in the reality. What was the 
 pleasantest age ? That would vary in differ- 
 ent cases. A likely preference would be for 
 ripe manhood, between thirty-five and forty, 
 and the happiest situation for a man of that 
 age would, according to the most common 
 opinion, be in married life, with a wife still 
 young and charming and merry children 
 around him, his own parents yet living in 
 cheerful old age, not too far from his bright 
 and beautiful home. I omit for the present 
 all possibly vexatious and irritating details. I 
 allow the supposition that the children are not 
 disappointing through any mental or physical 
 infirmity, that the wife is affectionate and 
 
68 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 faithful, the old parents neither exacting nor 
 unjust. Still, in this picture of domestic 
 happiness the only persons likely to be en- 
 tirely satisfied are the husband and the wife. 
 The children do not feel themselves to belong 
 permanently to their home, the boys are 
 already looking forward to fields of military 
 or civil activity, the little girls are fancying 
 themselves at the head of well-kept and ex- 
 pensive establishments, and the old people, 
 however healthy for their years, find their dig- 
 nified tranquillity a miserable substitute for 
 the superior energy of their past. Besides 
 these elder and younger relations, we have to 
 consider the feelings of the servants when 
 estimating the happiness of an entire house- 
 hold. The order and cleanliness of the great 
 country house are kept up by the incessant 
 toil of domestics who lead a life of extreme 
 restraint, many of them at a distance from 
 their native place and separated from all their 
 kindred. They are accustomed to their lot 
 in life, and therefore probably not so unhappy 
 as we should be if we suddenly found our- 
 selves compelled to sacrifice every hour of our 
 liberty for bread and to assume the most def- 
 erential manners towards the indolent pur- 
 
The Origin of the Ideal. 69 
 
 chasers of our time. Still, it is impossible 
 that a servile existence can be one of ideal 
 happiness, for domestics must constantly feel 
 the lack of that independence which is denied 
 to them. Out of a large household we have 
 therefore, hitherto, only been able to find two 
 persons whose existence could be sufficiently 
 near to the ideal for them to desire its in- 
 definite continuance without change. I need 
 scarcely add that the ideal happiness of the 
 master of the house is no more than a supposi- 
 tion, and a very improbable one. In actual 
 life he would be sure to have a constant suc- 
 cession of vexations, apprehensions, and dis- 
 appointments, which however philosophically 
 they may be endured are still quite enough 
 to destroy the perfection and the purity of 
 happiness. 
 
 The most usual practice, and the most 
 favorable to the pleasures of the imagina- 
 tion, is to transfer the conception of ideal 
 felicity to another state of existence. All the 
 laws of Nature can then be easily repealed, 
 and the dreamer can emancipate himself from 
 reality. He is able to traverse the absolute 
 cold of the interplanetary spaces, or to live for 
 an indefinite length of time in a furnace, like 
 
70 The Qiiest of Happiness. 
 
 the blazing surface of the sun, without in the 
 least affecting either his visual or his intellect- 
 ual powers. One of my friends has seriously 
 persuaded himself that after his death he will 
 travel amongst the stupendous mountain scen- 
 ery of the moon, see the rings of Saturn 
 from the surface of the planet, and explore 
 the mysterious "canals" of Mars. The origin 
 of such dreams as these is obviously nothing 
 but a traveller's instinct, which has been insuf- 
 ficiently gratified in the dreamer's terrestrial 
 existence and which rebels against the natural 
 restrictions that deny us all access to other 
 worlds. He is fond of travelling, and has 
 learned the inconvenience of having a body 
 that requires hotel accommodation and luggage 
 that needs a porter. The traveller's ideal 
 would be to wander through the universe as 
 a pure Intelligence, unembarrassed by any 
 impedimenta . 
 
 Instead of the traveller's instinct, it may be 
 the social or the artistic instinct that is the 
 origin of the ideal. Suppose it to be the 
 social. The dreamer finds that in actual life 
 he has not so much society as he would like, 
 or that the quality of the conversation does 
 not answer to his ideal of what conversation 
 
The Origin of the Ideal. 71 
 
 ought to be. He therefore imagines the Ely- 
 sian Fields, where he will walk and talk with 
 Socrates and Plato in an eternity of intellect- 
 ual intercourse. If the artistic instinct is the 
 motive power, the dreamer is probably dissat- 
 isfied with the dismal ugliness of some manu- 
 facturing town and imagines an ideal city of 
 beauty and light situated in the midst of a 
 lovely landscape and watered by crystal 
 streams. 
 
 More commonly still, the conception of 
 ideal happiness has its origin in an imper- 
 fectly satisfied state of the affections, and par- 
 ticularly in the profound dissatisfaction that 
 all very affectionate natures experience when 
 they first open their eyes to the hard fact that 
 natural law is not tender, but inexorable. 
 The idealist then imagines a government of 
 the universe as he would like it to be ; he 
 imagines an affectionate and sympathetic gov- 
 ernment of the universe, of all conceptions 
 the most agreeable to humanity, and the one 
 for which, when it is authoritatively ex- 
 pounded and maintained, human beings are 
 the most unfeignedly grateful. The same 
 needs of our affectionate instincts lead us, 
 when we indulge them, to resuscitate in imag- 
 
72 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 ination all dead persons, friends or relations, 
 who have at any time been dear to us. We 
 do so in a most irrational and inconsistent 
 manner, but the ideal is too delicate a struc- 
 ture to bear any critical investigation. The 
 most obvious contradiction is that different 
 people resuscitate in their imaginations the 
 same dead person at different and incompat- 
 ible ages of his life ; yet how can he be at the 
 same time what he was to his grandmother, 
 who knew him as a baby, and to his grand- 
 son, who knew him only in his age? This, 
 however, only tends to confirm my theory 
 that the ideal is an entirely private indulgence 
 of the imagination, in which each of us fan- 
 cies to himself a world adapted to his own 
 personal sentiments and tastes. The best 
 evidence of this selfish tendency of the ideal- 
 izing imagination is, that it so frequently 
 creates for itself a state of things in which 
 the happiness of many others is to be at least 
 partially sacrificed to its own happiness, as 
 when there is an ideal indulgence in the plea- 
 sures of successful rivalry or domination. 
 
 Ideal dreaming is a habit much more in- 
 dulged in by some persons than by others, 
 and, in the same person, is far more prevalent 
 
The Origin of the Ideal. 73 
 
 at one period of life than at another period. 
 It is common in youth, especially in adoles- 
 cence, much rarer in active middle life, and 
 frequent again in age, which thinks of exist- 
 ence as it might have been without the un- 
 fortunate circumstances that have invariably 
 spoiled it. 
 
 The habit of ideal dreaming always pre- 
 supposes at least some degree of mental 
 culture, however humble, if it be only the 
 religious knowledge of a Russian peasant. 
 It is greatly aided by literary culture of a 
 higher kind, especially by the study of poetry. 
 It is also very much promoted by painting, 
 and still more, perhaps, by music ; in a 
 word, by all the higher aesthetic pursuits and 
 pleasures. 
 
 The consequence might be, that in an age 
 like ours, when literary and artistic culture has 
 become very common, and all artistic pleas- 
 ures very accessible, the habit of ideal dream- 
 ing would be more prevalent than ever ; but 
 this is in a great measure counteracted by the 
 positive tendency of an age which puts men 
 in the closest contact with hard realities, such 
 as industrial work of all kinds and our press- 
 ing social questions. Our contemporaries are 
 
74 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 not impelled so much towards genuine ideal- 
 ism as towards the improvement of what is 
 real, and the desired improvement is usually 
 of a kind that can be effected by intelligence 
 and money. I need hardly observe that there 
 is an essential distinction between these 
 aspirations and the dreams of any genuine 
 idealist. The distinction is that his dreams 
 must always remain dreams, as they are pure 
 poetry, whilst the desires of the practical man 
 are not poetry, but a prosaic conception of 
 what is possible, usually in the form of im- 
 proved machinery for pleasure or for pro- 
 duction, as a finer and swifter yacht or a 
 larger factory, and, speaking generally, a more 
 elaborate and expensive life, of which a great 
 spending aristocracy sets practically the ex- 
 ample. But such an aristocracy, by exhibit- 
 ing the expensive life as a reality, only proves 
 that it is not an ideal, for a true ideal tran- 
 scends all possible realities. The only sense 
 in which expensive living can be called an 
 ideal is when it gains a poetry not its own in 
 the imagination of those who long for it as 
 hopelessly beyond their means, as in the 
 case of some poor poet who fancies all that 
 wealth might be to him if he possessed it. 
 
The Origin of the Ideal. 75 
 
 There is a French song about a would-be trav- 
 eller who longed to visit Carcassonne, but 
 never got there ; to him, therefore, Carcassonne 
 remained an ideal city, which it certainly is 
 not to its inhabitants. 
 
76 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HAPPINESS AND THE IDEAL. 
 
 HPHE true ideal, the state that we desire 
 JL or think that we desire, the state that 
 we vaguely and never precisely imagine, is a 
 dream suggested equally by the charm and 
 by the imperfection of reality. It is at the 
 same time an implied eulogium of the world 
 that we have known and the severest of all 
 possible criticisms upon it. All the mate- 
 rials out of which the idealist constructs his 
 dream are taken from the common world ; his 
 flowers are gathered in our gardens or our 
 woods, his stars have twinkled in our skies. 
 Even the strange and wonderful life that he 
 imagines for us is still, at least in the think- 
 ing and feeling part of it if not in external 
 conditions, exclusively human. Though he 
 presents to us a sublimated and perfected 
 existence, it is made out of the old familiar 
 elements. He marks his appreciation of the 
 
Happiness and the Ideal. 77 
 
 natural world by all that he borrows, and 
 criticises it negatively by all that he omits. 
 He invariably provides for the complete and 
 absolute triumph of his own opinions ; and 
 here even a gloomy idealism enjoys a victory, 
 by anticipation, over the recurrent cheerful- 
 ness of Nature herself, as sunshine can never 
 be permanently banished from the actual 
 world, whereas the idealist is free to make 
 his imaginary one as dismal as he desires. 
 The danger here is that he may endeavor in 
 spite of Nature to make actual life more mis- 
 erable than it need be, and achieve a partial 
 or a temporary success. As in the Scotland 
 of the seventeenth century, the desire for a 
 peculiar perfection may take possession of 
 men's minds, even though most unfavorable 
 to their happiness. In its full completeness 
 it may be incompatible with reality and 
 impracticable, yet the mere endeavor to ap- 
 proach towards it may be enough to over- 
 shadow, in the country where it prevails, the 
 happiness of an age. , There is always, in 
 these cases, a germ-conception out of which 
 the baleful system grows. In Scotland the 
 germ-conception was a peculiar belief concern- 
 ing the mental disposition of the Almighty. 
 
78 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 It was believed, without any evidence, that 
 human happiness was distasteful to Him, and 
 consequently that the pursuit of it was sinful. 
 Still, the pursuit of happiness went forward, 
 as it is impossible for a whole commun- 
 ity to detach itself from the interests of life 
 and live like a Carmelite nun. Even in the 
 gloomiest hour of Scottish asceticism people 
 got married and procreated children, though 
 their children came into a society which had 
 made itself so unpleasant that they might 
 have done better to keep out of it. " To be 
 poor, dirty, and hungry, to pass through life 
 in misery, and to leave it with fear, to be 
 plagued with boils, sores, and diseases of 
 every kind, to be always sighing and groan- 
 ing, to have the face streaming with tears 
 and the chest heaving with sobs ; in a word, 
 to suffer constant affliction, and to be tor- 
 mented in all possible ways, to undergo these 
 things was deemed a proof of goodness, just 
 as the contrary was a proof of evil. It mat- 
 tered not what a man liked, the mere fact 
 of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was 
 natural was wrong. The clergy deprived the 
 people of their holidays, their amusements, 
 their shows, their games, and their sports ; 
 
Happiness and the Ideal. 79 
 
 they repressed every appearance of joy, they 
 forbade all merriment, they stopped all festivi- 
 ties, they choked up every avenue by which 
 pleasure could enter, and they spread over 
 the country an universal gloom." 
 
 In this quotation 1 the most important 
 words are these five : " Whatever was natural 
 was wrong." Yes, that is the inevitable con- 
 sequence of over-indulgence in an ideal ; it is 
 sure to make the natural seem wrong. There 
 was nothing in the land to sadden the minds 
 of its inhabitants. If the climate is rude it is 
 invigorating, and though rain is frequent, 
 especially in the west, it is diversified by fre- 
 quent gleams of sunshine. The cold is neither 
 so intense nor so prolonged as it is in Canada, 
 nor the brief heat of summer so dangerous as 
 in New York. The country has those strong 
 local characteristics which attract and keep 
 patriotic affection; it is rich and fertile in 
 some parts, and where it is barren it is roman- 
 tic and picturesque. With intelligence and 
 industry, which we now see to be by no means 
 wanting in the race, the people of Scotland 
 
 1 From Buckle's History of Civilization, Vol. III. Chap, 
 iv. " An Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the 
 Seventeenth Century. " 
 
8o The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 may live happily in their own country, though 
 the climate does not favor the fig-tree, the 
 olive, or the vine. There was nothing in na- 
 ture to prevent the Scotch from being as 
 happy in the seventeenth century as they are 
 now, but they had the misfortune to fall under 
 the dominion of an anti-natural idea, so that 
 instead of making the best of the nature that 
 was accessible to them they made the worst 
 of it. 
 
 This is only one of many examples which 
 tend to show how dangerous it is to put our 
 minds under the domination of an ideal, and 
 how easily our happiness may be sacrificed to 
 some preconceived notion of our own that has 
 no foundation in reality. The ideal, when it 
 transforms itself into a hope for the present 
 life, is the sure forerunner of disappointment ; 
 if it is to be transformed into hope at all, it 
 should look for its realization beyond the 
 grave, "within the distant Aidenn." Nature 
 has not refused to men the liberty to hope 
 everything, or to fear everything, for another 
 life. In this world, too familiarly known to 
 us, the comparison of the reality with our 
 ideal always drives us at last to the recognition 
 of the unpalatable truth that reality has char- 
 
Happiness and the Ideal. 81 
 
 acteristics of its own which never conform 
 entirely to our human conception of what 
 ought to be. The idealist dreams of a world 
 governed in human ways ; but the system of 
 natural government, from which we cannot 
 escape, is not human, it is something else, so 
 that . the idealist is disappointed. There are 
 several refuges open to him, but terrestrial 
 reality is not one of them. Religion is his 
 best refuge if he finds a religion answering to 
 his needs. The Church of Rome, in particu- 
 lar, has been careful to provide for him an 
 ample choice of austere or sumptuous habita- 
 tions. But even the religious refuge itself 
 may be unfavorable to happiness when it is 
 too gloomy, as we have just seen, or too cold; 
 it may even be less hospitable and offer less of 
 comfort to the human spirit than the hard 
 reality that the idealist would escape from and 
 avoid. The other refuges for the idealist, as 
 I said in another chapter, are poetry, music, 
 and the graphic or the plastic arts. When 
 his own nature is fertile and productive, he 
 finds his best resource in the absorbing labor 
 of artistic production which makes him oblivi- 
 ous of the unsatisfying reality ; but when his 
 
 nature is receptive he reads poetry, listens to 
 
 6 
 
82 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 music, and delights in galleries of pictures. 
 In all such cases, equally, what he is really 
 seeking for is an escape from the actual 
 world. 
 
 When ideal pleasures are kept well sepa- 
 rated from reality, they may be conducive to 
 happiness, and in some cases even necessary 
 to it; but it is a mistake fatal to happiness to 
 confound them with reality itself and to expect 
 to find them in reality. 
 
 The real is much richer in variety and in 
 unexpected interest than the ideal, but it dif- 
 fers from the ideal in its lack of artistic unity, 
 an imperfection which the idealist never toler- 
 ates and invariably banishes from his dream. 
 
 The lover is an idealist. He is not in love 
 with a living reality, though he thinks he is. 
 His happiness, as an idealist, consists in 
 believing a poem to be not only poetical but 
 a fact. True love is a religion, that is, a 
 believed poem, but it is inferior to the celestial 
 religions in expecting its ideal fruition on the 
 earth. The lover seeks this fruition in mar- 
 riage. If his marriage is unhappy, it is a dis- 
 appointment, and there is no more to be said ; 
 but even the happiest marriage is different 
 from the lover's ideal. It is inferior as to per- 
 
Happiness and the Ideal. 83 
 
 fection, because it is full of great or trivial 
 annoyances which are incompatible with per- 
 fection and which the lover had not foreseen; 
 but it is incomparably superior to any ideal in 
 richness and in interest. The woman must 
 have a poor nature who does not, after mar- 
 riage, reveal qualities that her lover had not 
 included in his conception of her gifts. It is 
 like going to live in some beautiful place that, 
 hitherto, we have only read about. We had 
 imagined for it a certain pure and simple 
 charm. Living there, we find unexpected 
 inconveniences, but the neighborhood has 
 become far more interesting to us since it has 
 been our home, as we have made a hundred 
 discoveries that our imagination was unable 
 to foresee. Finally, we perceive that the inter- 
 est of the place, which the tourist thinks he 
 has exhaus >d in one visit, is in reality inex- 
 haustible. Nevertheless, in spite of the su- 
 perior variety of interest in the reality, on 
 comparing it with an imaginative conception, 
 we know that it has one inferiority. The 
 ideal is still the ideal, and from time to time 
 the first impression (which was not true) may 
 recur to us in memory with a magic that no 
 reality can equal. 
 
84 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 I began this chapter by saying that the 
 true ideal is a dream suggested equally by the 
 charm and by the imperfection of reality. 
 We must remember this dream-like character 
 of the ideal if we do not wish to be misled by 
 a vulgar misemployment of the word. People 
 habitually apply the adjective "ideal" to reali- 
 ties that exist in every civilized country but 
 do not happen to be in the possession of 
 somebody who desires them. Things that 
 exist are not ideals at all ; they are only reali- 
 ties beyond one's reach. The commonest of 
 these desired realities is simply the kind of 
 life that is led by wealthy people, essentially 
 in the same way in all civilized countries. 
 When a man of small means desires to live 
 like his rich neighbor, he may say, " My ideal 
 would be to have a stud of horses, a yacht, 
 and a picture-gallery ; " but the possession of 
 these material things is merely a fact that is 
 common in rich countries, it is not an ideal 
 in any true sense. If I indulge my imagina- 
 tion in dreaming of a country where justice 
 and right would always surely prevail, where 
 the weak would never be oppressed nor an 
 honest man incur any penalty for his honesty; 
 a country where no animal would ever be ill- 
 
Happiness and the Ideal. 85 
 
 treated, or killed otherwise than in mercy, 
 that is truly ideal dreaming, because however 
 far I travel I shall not find such a country 
 in the world, and there is not any record 
 of such a country in the authentic history of 
 mankind. 
 
86 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SENSE OF REALITY. 
 
 I SHOULD define the sense of reality as 
 the power of seeing things as they really 
 are without being biassed by the desire to 
 have them as we think they ought to be. 
 
 Such a power is conducive to happiness in 
 two ways. It prevents disappointment by 
 saving us from vain expectations, and it ena- 
 bles us to foresee the most probable con- 
 sequences of actions. A man who has the 
 sense of reality is deprived of the pleasures of 
 illusion, and may so far be less happy than a 
 dreamer; but the moderate amount of happi- 
 ness that he possesses is of a more durable 
 texture, and serves him better in the existing 
 world, such as it is. 
 
 I have just said that the sense of reality de- 
 prives us of agreeable illusions ; but we are not 
 forbidden by it to indulge in the pleasures of 
 the imagination, provided that we know them 
 
The Sense of Reality. 87 
 
 to be imaginary. The realist expels supersti- 
 tion from his conception of the existing world, 
 whilst he admits it and enjoys it in poetry 
 and the fine arts. This imaginative tolerance 
 preserves his mind from becoming too much 
 imprisoned in the actual. Mr. Herbert Spen- 
 cer has described the periodical meetings of a 
 little society of very realistic modern philos- 
 ophers where poetry was often read aloud. 
 Their firm grasp of reality made poetry only 
 more delightful to them. 
 
 Of all gifts, it is just this firm grasp of real- 
 ity that seems most desirable with a view to a 
 rational, though not to an intoxicating, kind 
 of happiness. It is so closely connected with 
 sanity that the insane are always deprived of 
 it. Their misfortune is to be severed from 
 reality and isolated in a world of private and 
 personal illusion, which is not only a much 
 narrower world than the external one, but dif- 
 ferent from it, especially in having no educat- 
 ing power; whereas the reality, when we are 
 in contact with it, is incessantly educating us. 
 
 Still, there is something in reality that does 
 not wholly win the approbation of mankind. 
 It does not satisfy either the artistic or the 
 moral sense, and few are so completely realist 
 
88 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 as not to regret the brutality of natural law, 
 when it manifests itself in the blind destruc- 
 tion of things or persons that can never be 
 replaced. 
 
 The death of Shelley is a poignant exam- 
 ple. The incident belongs to the world of 
 reality ; in a world adapted to human senti- 
 ments the squall would have moderated its 
 force on approaching the poet's little vessel, 
 and so have spared it. We are pained to see 
 the exquisite thrilling consciousness of so rare 
 a genius extinguished by an unconscious force, 
 and it is difficult for us to keep strictly to the 
 reality and not imagine some malignity in 
 nature. The simple truth is, that the wind 
 had no choice as to its own strength or direc- 
 tion, that it knew nothing about human ex- 
 istence or about its own, and that Shelley was 
 not even punished for his imprudence, as a 
 squall can have no idea of penal inflictions. 
 His widow wrote some touching verses on 
 his loss, in which she endeavored, by a poetic 
 fiction, to compensate herself for the indiffer- 
 ence of Nature. The fiction was that the 
 " Spirits of the deep " were grieved by the 
 poet's death, and " raised a wail of sorrow." 
 Even in the prose of a critic the pathetic 
 
The Sense of Reality. 89 
 
 fallacy intrudes. Mr. William Rossetti, writ- 
 ing of Shelley's cremation, says that " it was a 
 glorious day and a splendid prospect, the 
 cruel and calm sea before, the Apennines be- 
 hind." He is writing prose, but still feels some 
 emotion as the scene arises before him, and so 
 he loses, for a moment, the exact sense of re- 
 ality. In reality, the sea is neither kind nor 
 cruel ; it is not even aware of the existence of 
 its own fishes. This reminds me of an expres- 
 sion that has become very common of late in 
 French funeral announcements. People tell 
 you that they have suffered une perte cruelle 
 in the loss of a relation. As it is not the cus- 
 tom to attribute cruelty to Divine Providence, 
 the allusion probably is to the destructive 
 forces of disease, which is imagined as a con- 
 scious torturer and executioner. 
 
 The sense of reality may be greatly 
 strengthened in us by cultivation. The best 
 discipline is to think of some purely natural 
 power as it really is, without permitting our- 
 selves to endow it with human attributes, as 
 savages and childish people habitually do. 
 The sun, for us, is the most magnificent of all 
 comparatively proximate realities. Nobody 
 within the influence of scientific ideas im- 
 
go The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 agines that our great star holds a supreme po- 
 sition in the universe ; he is but as an apple 
 in all the orchards of the world. It would 
 be equally erroneous to assign to him a theo- 
 cratic rank as a minor Deity, for though he 
 sustains and governs life, he does not rule us 
 like a god, but only as a star. Neither does 
 he reign as an intelligent vicegerent of a 
 greater Deity ; still, he is the best and most 
 conspicuous example we have of the practical 
 methods of natural as distinguished from all 
 other government, and this is the reason why 
 he is so valuable to a student of reality. Our 
 human terms of praise and blame are equally 
 inapplicable to him. If we say that he is 
 bountiful the answer at once suggests itself, 
 ' that whilst he radiates into empty space an 
 amount of heat that would suffice for a million 
 worlds like ours, terrestrial creatures are fre- 
 quently frozen to death. Others, it is true, 
 die of heat, apoplexy, or of thirst, and if multi- 
 tudes are impoverished by drought other mul- 
 titudes are ruined by inundations, which are 
 an effect of the sun's action upon the sea. 
 These facts are to be accepted as part of real- 
 ity; but if we keep to reality alone we do not 
 attribute any malevolent intention to the sun : 
 
The Sense of Reality. 91 
 
 we leave that to the poet, who describes a 
 sun-god " burning with wrath," and shooting 
 arrows directly at animals and men, as in the 
 first book of the Iliad. 
 
 The student of reality does not need to 
 enumerate all the good things that we receive 
 from the sun, as we are dependent upon him 
 not only for life itself, but for everything 
 that makes life agreeable. Still, we address to 
 him no thanksgivings, because we do not be- 
 
 o o ' 
 
 lieve that he takes any conscious interest in 
 our welfare. By his influence on the currents 
 of air he favors our sailing-ships, and we do 
 not praise him, or he wrecks them, and we 
 do not curse him. Our practical business is 
 to get as much benefit from him as we can, 
 along with as little evil. We have set him to 
 various great and minor tasks, and we now 
 hope to make in the future a better use of a 
 minute fraction of his wasted heat. All this is 
 very sane, very rational, and much more con- 
 ducive to our happiness than some terrifying 
 mythology. Meanwhile, as usual, the reality 
 turns out to be incomparably more interesting 
 than the myth, and the interest of it increases 
 with every addition to our knowledge. 
 
 It may seem a great descent to come down 
 
92 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 from the sun to the merely human invention 
 of money ; but in the first place money is not 
 so much a human invention as the result of a 
 natural necessity, and therefore in its way a 
 part of nature. Besides this, it might be ar- 
 gued that money, like coal, is an accumulation 
 of solar heat and light. In coal, the trees and 
 other vegetation have done the storing ; in 
 money it is human energy and toil. For both, 
 equally, the sun has supplied the original 
 force, which after accumulation is available 
 again for our comfort. 
 
 The habit of looking upon money as a part 
 of unconscious nature is good evidence that 
 one has acquired the sense of reality. No rea- 
 sonable person expects unconscious nature to 
 be moral or intellectual, so why should we ex- 
 pect money to reward morality and intellect? 
 It may do so in some cases, by accident, but 
 never by rule. I remember seeing a lady 
 who was pointed out to me in a French pro- 
 vincial town as having enriched herself in a 
 peculiar way. She had been married, but had 
 encouraged lovers, and, being prudent, had 
 chosen rich ones, whose gifts she had quietly 
 accumulated, whereby she enjoyed a dignified 
 and comfortable old age. Her lot, so far as 
 
The Sense of Reality. 93 
 
 material comforts are concerned, is much better 
 than that of a starving, used-up governess who, 
 having kept her old mother in the days of her 
 very modest prosperity, has now nothing left 
 for herself. So much for the side of morals ; 
 as to the conscientious use of the intellectual 
 powers, we know how it is in literature. There 
 is no relation between the sale of a book and 
 the honest and often costly labor bestowed up- 
 on it in observation and research. Suppose 
 that a vulgar Frenchman undertakes to write a 
 book on England. He knows that his readers 
 do not want observation and research, what 
 they want is to be amused at the expense of the 
 English ; so he writes in a mocking spirit, in- 
 vents when necessary malevolently, has his jest 
 at everybody from the Queen to a policeman, at- 
 tacks the moral reputation of English girls, and 
 sells a considerable edition. He does harm by 
 increasing international prejudice and ill-will ; 
 he disseminates hatred and uncharitableness ; 
 he prepares in his own small way for a future 
 war between two great nations, but his money is 
 much more easily earned, and with less deduc- 
 tion, than if he had studied the English people 
 seriously. See, too, how the money power en- 
 courages superficial work in the business of 
 
94 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 reviewing books. To review books hastily and 
 without reading them is a paying profession ; 
 to read them first and write a scrupulously 
 just account of them afterwards is the un re- 
 munerative though honorable occupation of 
 the scholarly amateur. 
 
 The blind money power treats painters with 
 an irrational mixture of the narrowest parsi- 
 mony and the wildest extravagance. Too 
 often the parsimony is towards the living artist, 
 whilst the extravagance is profitable to others. 
 We all know how frequently pictures are sold 
 for many times what the painters originally re- 
 ceived for them, the difference going to deal- 
 ers or collectors who had nothing to do with 
 the production of the work of art, truly an 
 " unearned " though enormous " increment." 
 Some instances of this have been especially 
 painful when an artist has been hampered by 
 intense pecuniary anxiety, with his wife and 
 family almost starving at the very time when 
 he was earning for distant strangers from fifty 
 to a hundred pounds an hour. Then there are 
 the inventors who create new forms of industry 
 that enrich entire communities, their own 
 share being miserably small, as in the case of 
 Crompton, the inventor of the spinning mule, 
 
The Sense of Reality. 95 
 
 and Fulton, who first propelled a ship by 
 steam. 
 
 Cases of this kind are the more painful that 
 people who never could have invented any- 
 thing are so often made wealthy without any 
 effort on their own part, the money pouring 
 into their pockets as rivulets, swollen by 
 heavy rains, discharge their waters into a lake. 
 These, however, may be said to grow rich in- 
 nocently, as their wealth comes to them and 
 they only accept it ; but what of the wealth that 
 is accumulated in what is called " the sweating 
 system, " by the abuse of its own power over 
 the poor, and what of the aggressive wealth 
 that is able to erect itself on the ruins of in- 
 numerabe little fortunes, as when a great rail- 
 way speculator is able to ruin a multitude of 
 shareholders and deliberately does it ? 
 
 The student of life who has the sense of 
 reality is not surprised by these phenomena, 
 though he may regret them, and seek for some 
 practical means of limiting their evil effects. 
 For him the money power is a natural force, 
 and therefore inevitably unjust. He does not 
 expect more justice from it than from the solar 
 power, which unconsciously destroys so many 
 innocent victims, and gives comfort to so 
 
96 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 many rascals. As to what now concerns us, 
 the effect of the knowledge of this reality on 
 happiness, it may not be so pleasant as an 
 illusory belief in the justice of natural forces ; 
 but no one who perceives the truth would be 
 willing to exchange his perception of it for an 
 illusion, since the knowledge even of an un- 
 pleasant truth is always felt by us to be more 
 salutary than ignorance of it, and in these 
 cases the truth is far from being absolutely 
 bad. 
 
 The evil done by the unconscious action of 
 the sun, though often on a colossal scale that 
 powerfully impresses the imagination, is still 
 as nothing in comparison with the good that 
 he does constantly and quietly. Without his 
 beneficent (I do not say benevolent) power, we 
 could neither see nor think, w r e could not even 
 breathe. With it, we are what we are, imper- 
 fect but still wonderful creatures, lords of a 
 wonderful world. So with the power of 
 money. It is not cruel ; it is only destitute of 
 intelligence. This stupid power still compels 
 us to help each other every time we try to 
 help ourselves, and has converted mankind 
 from the life of a beast of prey to the life of 
 civilized and industrial communities. Against 
 
The Sense of Reality. 97 
 
 this benefit we have to set such evils as the 
 Panama briberies or the career of a Jay Gould ; 
 but whilst the evils occur like acute diseases, 
 the good of mutual help remains with us from 
 year to year. It is to money, also, that we 
 owe the possibility of dividing our work into 
 specialities with all the fruitful results of such 
 division. We may even observe an increas- 
 ing tendency in the middle classes to use 
 money more and more ; that is, to purchase 
 things which, like bread and beer, were for- 
 merly made at home, and in great cities peo- 
 ple pay small sums of money to be carried 
 over very short distances which their fathers 
 would have traversed on foot. Another char- 
 acteristic of modern urban life is that every 
 amusement, except mere walking in the 
 streets, has to be paid for, and that there are 
 many amusements, whereas in former days 
 they were both few and inexpensive. 
 
 The consequence of these changes which 
 prove to us more and more the utility of 
 money, and especially the very frequent utility 
 of ready money that we are almost incessantly 
 called upon to disburse, is that in modern life 
 the inability to appreciate its use and value is 
 looked upon as the surest proof that one lacks 
 
 7 
 
98 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 the sense of reality, that sense which is the 
 equivalent of sanity. 
 
 When the sense of reality is in its highest 
 perfection it constantly takes account of the 
 action of natural forces and endeavors to 
 make use of them, but without attributing to 
 thorn virtues and vices from which, being un- 
 conscious, they must be absolutely free. There 
 is, for example, that disconcerting natural law 
 by which money flows superabundantly into 
 the coffers of the rich and avoids those 
 places where it would be most desirable, 
 the wretched habitations of the poor. When 
 we have the sense of reality we simply per- 
 ceive how it is that the natural law of interest 
 operates, and there is an end of the matter. 
 We do not argue with money as if it knew 
 what it was doing. 1 Here, again, the sense of 
 reality is favorable to happiness, at least of a 
 tranquil kind, as it spares us all the pain and 
 
 1 An objection may be raised to this passage on the ground 
 that although money is unconscious the holders of it are not. 
 The answer is that the owners of money are compelled to act 
 in obedience to its laws under penalty of sacrificing their own 
 interests to those of others, or to a principle. They do so 
 occasionally, as when they decline to receive interest for 
 money lent, but as a rule they obey the natural law almost as 
 regularly as if they were unconscious agents. 
 
The Sense of Reality. 99 
 
 excitement of useless indignation. It is silly 
 to vex our souls about the senseless forces of 
 the world ; it is prudent to take them as they 
 are, and make the best of them in our own 
 interest. 
 
 The genuine sense of reality is usually asso- 
 ciated with the scientific temper, but there is 
 a false and unwarranted belief in one's own 
 sense of reality which belongs to the simplicity 
 of ignorance. The true Philistine always 
 thinks that his sense of reality is much 
 sounder and stronger than that of educated 
 men. He thinks that educated people excel 
 only in possessing useless knowledge or frivo- 
 lous accomplishments, whilst he himself, the 
 practical man, excels in sterling common 
 sense, the sense that deals with the world as 
 it really is. 
 
 I remember that at one of those times when 
 sun-spots are largest and most visible I had a 
 good opportunity for observing them towards 
 sunset with my glass, and I happened to men- 
 tion them afterwards to a Frenchman, a re- 
 tired man of business, a fairly representative 
 specimen of the rather narrow, practical man. 
 Now, as the sun was not a literary subject, 
 but something visible, it seemed to belong to 
 
ioo The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 the domain of common sense, and my French- 
 man thought he knew about it all that was to 
 be known. He was quite sure that there 
 were no spots on the sun, that there never 
 had been any, and that the spots I had seen 
 were on the glass of my telescope, or in my 
 eye ; in a word, he precisely repeated the con- 
 temptuous observations that were made by all 
 people endowed with common sense when 
 sun-spots were first discovered. I found, too, 
 that he did not believe in the existence of 
 mountains on the moon ; yet if anything in 
 nature is material and substantial, it is surely 
 the lunar mountains, which, as we know, are 
 much loftier than the terrestrial. 
 
 I fear it must be admitted that the illusory 
 sense of reality gives even greater self-satis- 
 faction to its possessor than a more cultivated 
 sense. The Philistine is always sure that he 
 knows all about material things, whereas the 
 scientific student of matter is led into inevi- 
 table speculations, that remove every particle 
 of it from the region of what is absolutely 
 known. 
 
 As to the artistic study of matter, with a 
 view to excellence in the art of painting, it 
 makes us observe all visible realities very 
 
The Sense of Reality. 101 
 
 closely, and in this way brings us nearer to 
 nature, and so makes the visible world very 
 interesting to us, whereby the happiness of 
 living in it is unquestionably increased. But 
 the studies of a painter do not stop at this ele- 
 mentary stage, at which he is most closely 
 and happily in contact with realities and most 
 pleasantly familiar with them. He is led on 
 from substance to effect, and again from ef- 
 fects in nature to purely artistic arrangements 
 which have art in view, and are removed from 
 nature ; and as imaginative illusion plays a 
 great part in fine art when it is highly devel- 
 oped, I should say that the advanced practice 
 of a painter is not nearly so favorable to a 
 sense of reality as his earlier or elementary 
 studies. This, however, must depend upon 
 the kind of excellence which is aimed at in 
 each particular case. In that of Meissonier 
 the sense of reality was sedulously cultivated 
 to the last ; in Turner it was overborne by 
 the idealizing tendency, so that many painters 
 of inferior rank have been closer to reality in 
 their latter years than he was. It will be 
 found, I believe, that those artists in whom 
 the sense of reality remains most vigorous 
 to the last are usually sounder in mind, 
 
IO2 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 and therefore presumably happier than the 
 idealists. 
 
 The happiness attendant upon realism or 
 idealism in the fine arts concerns, however, 
 only a very small and very peculiar class. 
 Artists are most exceptional in being able to 
 win celebrity for themselves by turning beau- 
 tiful illusions into works that other people 
 often admire and even occasionally purchase. 
 In ordinary life there is no compensation of 
 this kind ; there an illusion, however beautiful, 
 is without any other value than the pleasure it 
 may give to the one person who indulges in 
 it. To him it may be a kind of mental hash- 
 ish, to others nothing. But a strong sense 
 of reality is valuable in all human relations, 
 valuable in every kind of business ; and even 
 when we are not engaged in active commerce 
 with mankind it gives a feeling of being at 
 home in the world of material nature, and 
 under the government of natural law, that 
 sets a man upon his feet wherever he happens 
 to find himself. 
 
Happiness in Our Occupations. 103 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 HAPPINESS IN OUR OCCUPATIONS. 
 
 THERE are three sources of happiness in 
 professional occupations. 
 
 The first is the sense of harmony between 
 the occupation and the mental condition of 
 the person who follows it. 
 
 The second is the feeling of efficiency. 
 This is always agreeable in itself, even when 
 the occupation is not precisely congenial. 
 
 The third is the knowledge that the work 
 we are engaged upon, whether agreeable in 
 itself or not, will be rewarded by some benefit 
 to ourselves or others of a nature extraneous 
 to itself. 
 
 Of these three sources of happiness in our 
 employments the first (the sense of harmony) 
 is the most attractive, especially in youth. It 
 seems as if there could be no limit to our 
 happiness when our occupation is precisely in 
 harmony with our tastes. This answers to 
 
IO4 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 the delightful anticipations that precede mar- 
 riages for love. 
 
 As to the second (the consciousness of effi- 
 ciency) it is obvious that it differs from the 
 first in coming much later, as there cannot be 
 any feeling of efficiency until it has been at- 
 tained, and it cannot be attained in anything 
 without great labor in actual practice, which 
 involves a prolonged period of inefficiency. 
 
 The third source of happiness in occupa- 
 tions (the feeling that we are winning an ex- 
 traneous benefit that has nothing to do with 
 the occupation itself) is usually chosen by 
 those who consider themselves, and are con- 
 sidered by others, eminent for their prudence 
 and right reason. To follow an uncongenial 
 occupation with a view to money requires 
 a persistent exercise of will. An occupation 
 so pursued is clearly differentiated from all 
 pleasures. The exercise of will elevates it, 
 and still more when the money earned by it 
 is for others. 
 
 Now, with regard to the probability of dis- 
 appointment, it is the desire for happiness in 
 congeniality of occupation that most exposes 
 us to disappointment, for reasons too nu- 
 merous to be given in this place. 
 
Happiness in Our Occupations. 105 
 
 Satisfaction in efficiency appears at first so 
 positive that it seems as if disappointment 
 were not to be apprehended, as it is difficult 
 to believe that even vanity itself could cherish 
 illusions about efficiency when practice is sure 
 to put it to frequent and incessantly recurring 
 tests. A man must surely know whether he 
 is practically a good swimmer and a good 
 rider, or not; if not, his own misadventures 
 will make him aware of it. The disap- 
 pointment is usually that of hope long 
 deferred and never ultimately realized. The 
 inefficient person hopes that efficiency will 
 come to him in time, with practice, and it 
 does not come; he remains inefficient to 
 the end. That is his form of disappoint- 
 ment. Efficiency itself, when attained, is 
 not disappointing; it is a constant satisfac- 
 tion. The accomplished person may feel 
 vexed that his efficiency does not bring him 
 extraneous honors and wealth, but that has 
 nothing to do with the pleasure of feeling 
 himself accomplished. 
 
 The third source of happiness in occupa- 
 tions, as given above, is the avowed pursuit 
 of an extraneous advantage by means which 
 are possibly not agreeable in themselves, but 
 
io6 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 of which the pleasantness, or the unpleasant- 
 ness, is not taken into consideration. This 
 way of pursuing happiness is greatly superior 
 to the two others in the clear distinction that 
 it establishes between the means that may 
 have to be employed and the end that is 
 steadily kept in view. It is admitted, from 
 the beginning, that the means may be dis- 
 agreeable, so there can be no disappointment 
 about that ; and as the best years of an ambi- 
 tious man are mainly occupied in the pursuit 
 of his objects, he may already enjoy a prospec- 
 tive happiness in the mere hope of their still 
 distant attainment. His peculiar form of dis- 
 appointment usually awaits him towards the 
 close of his career, when the extraneous re- 
 ward that he has received in the shape of 
 honors or fortune is always likely to seem to 
 him an inadequate payment for all that he has 
 done, and an insufficient compensation for all 
 that he has sacrificed. Or he may be disap- 
 pointed in another way : the rewards may be 
 even greater than he had anticipated, yet the 
 pleasure of fruition as far inferior to his hopes. 
 Nevertheless, whilst fully admitting these pos- 
 sibilities of disappointment, I believe that it is 
 safer, as a rule, to seek for happiness in some 
 
Happiness in Our Occupations. 107 
 
 reward outside of our occupations than in the 
 occupations themselves ; but these questions 
 are so important as to deserve fuller con- 
 sideration than could be given to them con- 
 veniently in a single chapter. 
 
io8 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CONGENIALITY OF OCCUPATION. 
 
 SOME experienced people hold the belief 
 that although there may be very wide 
 differences, as to pleasure, between studies or 
 exercises that are undertaken for amusement 
 only, all occupations followed as work are 
 sure to be equally irksome, so that there is, in 
 fact, no reason for choosing one professional 
 occupation in preference to another as far as 
 its inherent agreeableness may be concerned. 
 According to this theory, congeniality of oc- 
 cupation is not worth considering by profes- 
 sional people, though it may be of importance 
 to amateurs. 
 
 I have been in the habit of inquiring, in 
 conversation with workmen, whether they felt 
 any attachment to their occupations and took 
 any pleasure in them, and I found that a kind 
 of general law appeared to reveal itself in 
 their answers. The more the occupation 
 
Congeniality of Occupation. 109 
 
 educated the workman, the more nearly it 
 approached to the nature of an art (not ne- 
 cessarily a fine art), the stronger was the dis- 
 position to become attached to it; whereas 
 mere labor without any educating interest 
 was only gone through with more or less 
 courage and endurance. Thus joiners, as a 
 rule, are attached to their profession, which is 
 constructive and often calls for forethought 
 and ingenuity, and the more difficult the work 
 they have to do the better they seem to like 
 it, provided only that they are not too strictly 
 limited as to time. The materials, too, are 
 interesting from the variety of their natures, 
 and the necessity for treating each wood in a 
 special manner, according to its own constitu- 
 tion. One joiner told me that the only objec- 
 tion he had to his work was that as he liked 
 it, and was almost incessantly engaged upon 
 it, the days and years flew past too quickly, 
 so that his life was made shorter for him than 
 it would have been in idleness. 
 
 Occupations are never, to those who follow 
 them, what outside observers imagine them to 
 be, and it would be impossible for us, even if 
 we tried an occupation for a long time, to feel 
 at home in it as a man does who has worked 
 
no The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 at it steadily since his boyhood. I lived at one 
 time in what was both an agricultural and a 
 mining district, and I remember with what sur- 
 prise I discovered that the miners were at least 
 as much attached to their own occupation as 
 the farmers were to theirs, though it seemed to 
 me, with my love of landscape and the fresh 
 air, that to be much in the fields was poetical 
 and delightful, reminding one of Virgil and 
 Burns, whilst nothing could be more gloomy 
 and depressing than the black and dangerous 
 interior of a mine. Further study of the mat- 
 ter made it clear to me that what the miners 
 liked in their occupation was a certain rough 
 kind of cosiness and comfort, as they were per- 
 fectly independent of wind and weather, and 
 their lamps and fires gave a sort of home-like 
 feeling, especially in the depth of winter. Be- 
 sides, the art of mining has always its own prac- 
 tically scientific interest, which the miners 
 themselves share with the engineers, whilst the 
 personal danger is either made light of from 
 familiarity, or stimulates, without daunting, the 
 courage of brave men. 
 
 Notwithstanding the close confinement of 
 life in factories, it is found in manufacturing 
 districts that there is an attraction in the mills 
 
Congeniality of Occupation. in 
 
 which brings the people from the country round 
 about and soon converts them into an urban 
 population with entirely new habits and tastes. 
 The mill hands, like the miners, escape from 
 the hardships of an out-of-door life and have 
 shelter and warmth, though the warmth is ac- 
 companied by incessant noise and vitiated air. 
 The poor, however, are not usually very sensi- 
 tive to noise, so that they easily get accustomed 
 to it, and impure air does not seem to them 
 a very grave inconvenience, as they seldom 
 attach much importance to sanitary consid- 
 erations in their own homes. It is extremely 
 difficult for us to judge of the degree of 
 happiness which is really compatible with the 
 monotonous labor, the incessant strain of 
 attention, and the long and close confinement 
 attendant upon work in factories. Such a life 
 is so different from the ideal of industry in 
 the conditions most favorable to perfect well- 
 being, that we may easily imagine a factory 
 population to be more unhappy than it really 
 is. It is now many years since I was famil- 
 iar with the manufacturing districts in the 
 north of England, but I well remember that 
 the confinement of the operatives in the mills 
 did not quench the exuberence of their nat- 
 
H2 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 ural gayety any more than the confinement of 
 champagne in a bottle prevents it from bub- 
 bling when uncorked. Their spirit seemed to 
 me very like the spirit of school-boys, which is 
 still full of energy and frolic in spite of the irk- 
 someness of their tasks. In some rare cases, 
 where young people are naturally gifted with 
 intellectual powers that claim their special 
 exercise, the life of a factory worker must 
 seem uninteresting, but the majority of man- 
 kind are disposed to get through work of any 
 description as a mechanical routine, and are so 
 little interested in higher pursuits that the 
 greatest poets and philosophers only bore them. 
 The mechanical regularity of factory work has 
 its compensation for them in the facility that 
 comes from habit and practice, so that if only 
 it be reasonably limited as to hours and the 
 workers are strong enough to bear it, they need 
 not be a particularly unhappy class. It is well 
 known that the girls, as a rule, prefer the fac- 
 tory to domestic service, because in service 
 there is so little absolute freedom, whereas the 
 factory girls are as free as ladies after " th ' 
 mills is lawsed." 
 
 The severe discipline of a too monotonous 
 regularity is always very irksome to the natural 
 
Congeniality of Occupation. 1 1 3 
 
 man, so we all prefer, until we are changed 
 by habit, those occupations in which the nature 
 of the work is varied and its pressure not in- 
 variably the same. This variety is one of the 
 great charms of a rural life, even when there is 
 very little positive amusement. The French 
 peasantry work to excess in hay-time and 
 harvest, but at other times they take life more 
 easily, and in winter have a good deal of 
 leisure, though they get up very early to 
 thresh their corn. The times of over-work 
 are not felt as a hardship, because they do 
 not last very long, and leisure is always wel- 
 come when it comes, though it is enjoyed 
 in semi-somnolence, and not enlivened by any 
 more or less intellectual pursuits. The work 
 to be done in the fields has also a charming 
 variety, one occupation succeeding another as 
 amusements do in the fashionable world, and 
 the mere change in the seasons is in itself a 
 constant source of interest. When I used 
 to live in France, almost all the poorest rural 
 population of the hill country poured down 
 into the Burgundy wine district for the vintage, 
 doing the long journey on foot, much of it in 
 the nights, and enlivening the way with songs. 
 Their work in the vineyards was hard, but it 
 
 8 
 
H4 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 was fairly paid, and the grape-gatherers were 
 better fed than in their ordinary life on the hill 
 farms. When the vintage was over, they 
 would march back homewards, laden with 
 baskets full of grapes, all the weaker travellers 
 so wearied that it was a great charity to give 
 them a lift in any passing carriage. Still, they 
 were passionately fond of this excursion as the 
 most complete change that they enjoyed in the 
 whole year. The hurried visits of Lancashire 
 factory people to the seaside, in cheap and 
 crowded trains, answer to it in our industrial 
 civilization, but they are neither so picturesque 
 nor so natural as that annual pilgrimage from 
 the wooded highlands to the vine-clad lowlands 
 of Burgundy. 
 
 It is an almost invariable rule that the inhab- 
 itants of great cities are much more bound 
 down to one occupation than people who live 
 in the country, and that the further we live 
 from great centres of population, where every- 
 thing is specialized, the more likely we are to 
 enjoy the relief of variety. I have described in 
 another work the amphibious activity of a 
 coachman in Argyleshire who would take his 
 four horses over a mountain road, or his sailing 
 boat across a broad salt-water loch, in the 
 
Congeniality of Occupation. 115 
 
 roughest of weather, with the same skill, and 
 equal security for his passengers. In Paris 
 the omnibus drivers are fastened to their high 
 and solitary seats all day. Rough travel and 
 colonial life both require that the same person 
 should have some skill in many different crafts, 
 but are not exacting as to his attainment of per- 
 fection in any one of them. In great capitals, 
 the monotony of specialized employment im- 
 pels us to seek variety in amusements ; in a 
 primitive existence there are few or no amuse- 
 ments ; it is the serious work of life which itself 
 affords the necessary refreshment of change. 
 
 One of the most frequent causes of unhap- 
 piness in the modern world is the narrow 
 limitation of our choice in professional work. 
 Our choice in amusements is far wider. We 
 amuse ourselves by returning, in play, to the 
 savage state, and become hunters or nomads 
 with tents and canoes, and we practise in a 
 rough way of course always as amateurs 
 the most various primitive arts. All this is 
 delightful and truly recreative, precisely be- 
 cause no great degree of skill is necessary to 
 the sufficient enjoyment of a pastime. When, 
 however, we pass from play to work, we are 
 limited both by technical difficulties and so- 
 
1 1 6 The Qiiest of Happiness. 
 
 cial considerations. The technical difficul- 
 ties bind us, with rare exceptions, to a single 
 pursuit, and the customs of our class leave us 
 very little liberty of choice. I need not do 
 more than refer to the old aristocratic alterna- 
 tive of the Army or the Church, but I may be 
 permitted to express at somewhat greater 
 length my regret that all physical labor 
 should be associated/ in the European middle 
 classes, with the idea of social degradation. 
 Consider how the gifts of Nature are bestowed 
 upon human beings at their birth, how many 
 have good physical gifts, how few, in com- 
 parison, have any great mental powers, and 
 then think how often the good physical gifts 
 are left without exercise of a professional kind 
 from a dread of losing caste ! A strong man 
 who would have been happy all day long as a 
 carpenter or a blacksmith, sits at a desk, and 
 passes what to him is a tedious existence, be- 
 cause he has relatives who are supposed to be 
 genteel. If his occupation is merely dull and 
 mental, the evil is only negative I mean in 
 the privation of bodily exercise but it may 
 be much worse than that by calling for the 
 exercise of faculties that are either wholly ab- 
 sent, or else too feeble for the service that is 
 
Congeniality of Occupation. 117 
 
 required of them. I should say, for example, 
 that if the situation in which such a man finds 
 himself requires a false pretence to the appre- 
 ciation of literature, his misfortune is then 
 more than negative, it has become positive ; 
 or if he has gone into the Church because it 
 is a respectable profession, but without having 
 any religious ideal, then I should say that he 
 has put himself into a false position, from 
 which it is not probable that he will be deliv- 
 ered by acquiring, later in life, the peculiar 
 kind of ideality that is wanting to him. 
 
n8 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 INSUFFICIENCY OF GIFTS. 
 
 THE gifts required for some peculiar kind 
 of happiness in occupations may be 
 insufficient in one of two different ways 
 either they may be all present, but too weak, 
 or some of them may be present in quite suf- 
 ficient strength, whilst others, equally neces- 
 sary to the kind of happiness desired, are 
 entirely absent. 
 
 Amongst the gifts that are very common in 
 a certain limited degree, but extremely rare in 
 any eminent degree, is the power of sustained 
 effort in doing what is felt to be drudgery. 
 The consequence is that few men or women go 
 long and steadily through work that requires 
 drudgery unless they are forced to it and bound 
 to it in some way, usually by pecuniary neces- 
 sity. Young people, in dreaming about occu- 
 pations that they fancy they would like, always 
 omit the drudgery, but Nature never omits it ; 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 1 1 9 
 
 she inflicts it upon us even in those occupa- 
 tions that are supposed, by those who have 
 never seriously followed them, to be purely and 
 absolutely delightful. It may take very differ- 
 ent disguises, but it is always in reality the 
 same that is, a business that has to be gone 
 through with patience. Sometimes the victim 
 has to feign enjoyment at the same time, as 
 in many social functions, or he has to conceal 
 his labor and assume an appearance of ease, 
 as in many kinds of artistic performance and 
 production deceptions that really increase 
 the drudgery which they disguise. 
 
 In the ideal anticipation, all drudgery is, of 
 course, eliminated ; in the reality, every occu- 
 pation has its own peculiar drudgery. Mr. 
 Holman Hunt says that the reason why so 
 many amateurs fail in painting is that they 
 shrink from the drudgery that it demands. 
 The world in general believes that painting is 
 always agreeable, always an amusement, an 
 art d'agrement, as the French say. The in- 
 telligent young man who is bound down to a 
 manual occupation thinks that scholarship 
 must be delightful, and so indeed it is ; but 
 the delightfulness is associated with, or pre- 
 ceded by, a kind of drudgery harder than that 
 
1 20 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 of planing boards, because it requires a more 
 incessant attention. 
 
 But the great reason why there is so much 
 disappointment about the suitableness of a 
 particular occupation to one's natural talents 
 is because we are so apt to believe that we 
 have all the talents required for a particular 
 kind of work, when, in reality, we have only 
 some of them. Those that we do possess may 
 exist in great strength and perfection ; when 
 that is the case, we are all the more liable to 
 be deceived into the belief that we possess 
 also those other talents that are, in reality, 
 wanting to us. Let us consider the various 
 gifts that are all absolutely indispensable to 
 the equipment of a great poet. I enumerate 
 them, for a particular reason, in the inverse 
 order of their importance. 
 
 i. The poetical appreciation of all that we 
 observe ; that is, a sense of the charm of nature 
 and of human life, which is always emotional, 
 and therefore different from the prosaic per- 
 ception of hard fact. This sense is possessed in 
 common by poets and all truly artistic painters. 
 It must also belong to the romantic (as opposed 
 to the scientific and analytic) novelists, and in 
 a considerable degree to musical composers. 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 121 
 
 2. An exquisite sense of the beauty of lan- 
 guage and of the literary value of words, 
 accompanied by the power of selecting those 
 which produce the most musical effect upon 
 the ear, and of arranging them in new and 
 beautiful combinations. This power is also 
 possessed by artistic writers of prose, but they 
 do not cultivate it to the same extent, as they 
 have not the constant musical discipline of 
 metre and rhyme. 
 
 3. The faculty of creative imagination, or, as 
 it is sometimes called, poetic invention. This 
 power exists in various degrees of strength. 
 Milton had less of it than Dante, Dante less 
 than Shakespeare, but it is always present in 
 poets of the first rank, and manifests itself 
 even in their youth ; for example, in the rich 
 though immature poetry of Keats. 
 
 Of these three gifts, the first makes a mind 
 responsive to poetry, and is therefore essen- 
 tially the reader's gift. The sympathetic 
 reader has all the feelings of a poet, and these 
 feelings, which always answer so readily to the 
 call of genius, may awaken in him an illusory 
 creative impulse. He then tries to write po- 
 etry, fails, and is for a time discouraged and 
 unhappy. Yet the bare reality of his situa- 
 
122 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 tion, divested of all illusion, is very good. He 
 is still a privileged person. He has possibili- 
 ties of enjoyment that no critic, however con- 
 temptuous, can take away from him ; he has 
 the faculties that appreciate great poetry, an 
 appreciation which of all intellectual enjoy- 
 ments is the most elevated, the most noble, 
 whilst it is so little costly that it may be had 
 in the highest perfection for a few pence. 
 
 When this gift is joined to the second (the 
 mastery of language) but without creative 
 imagination, the result is a minor poet ; that is, 
 a musical versifier who has poetical thoughts 
 and feelings. Here, again, there is room for 
 a mistaken estimate of one's own powers. 
 The minor poet who constructs his verses 
 skilfully, and has genuine feeling, may excus- 
 ably attribute to himself the complete poetical 
 equipment. The gift and the accomplishment 
 that he possesses are of a high kind, though 
 not of the highest. He, too, is an enviable 
 personage, if he knew his own happiness, as 
 in addition to the pleasure of reading poetry 
 he enjoys the still more active pleasure of 
 sound metrical composition. If poetry were 
 like anything else, the minor bard might be 
 thoroughly happy in his work, having the 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 123 
 
 assurance that it was good of its own kind ; but 
 the contempt which is attached to all metrical 
 writing except the highest (a contempt in 
 great part due to a disinclination to read any 
 poetry whatever) places the minor poet in the 
 position of a producer of something that is not 
 wanted, and this is always trying to one's 
 self-love. 
 
 Another art that easily awakens delusive 
 hopes is that of painting. The desire to paint 
 is excited in us by the love of nature, and 
 especially by an admiration for those fleeting 
 beauties that art may preserve, however im- 
 perfectly, still better than nature herself does. 
 The first of these is that transient human 
 beauty which in life is subject to so many 
 changes. At a later period in the history of 
 art, there comes a desire to preserve some 
 record of the fleeting beauties of landscape. 
 
 This is the true origin of painting. The 
 ambition to win money and fame by means of 
 art is extraneous, and arises later. It has 
 nothing to do with the first impulse. Even 
 after painting has become a recognized avenue 
 to wealth and fame, an aspirant might still 
 find wealth more easily attainable by com- 
 merce, and fame by literature or politics, so 
 
124 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 that the choice of painting would still, in most 
 cases, be dictated by the love of nature ; and 
 we see that in reality it is so. 
 
 This brings us to the most common cause 
 of disappointment in the pursuit of painting, 
 which is the distinction between a love of 
 nature and a feeling of satisfaction in the tech- 
 nical management of pigments. 
 
 Obviously, the love of nature may exist 
 without any special pleasure in glazing or 
 impasto, or any special aptitude for handling. 
 It may even exist without any talent for com- 
 position or any gift of pictorial invention. 
 We may go yet further, and say that the most 
 keenly appreciative enjoyment of natural 
 beauty at the moment of observing it may be 
 utterly distinct from any power of remember- 
 ing it, even for a day. 
 
 Confident in the sincerity of his love of 
 nature (which is only an expression for the 
 enjoyment of natural beauty or sublimity) a 
 youth may go to painting because he wishes 
 to express his feelings and thinks that paint- 
 ing would be the most effective means, not 
 because he has the inborn abilities of a painter. 
 In such a case an artistic disappointment will 
 assuredly be the consequence of hoping for 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 125 
 
 too much from a love of nature in a practical 
 and productive sense. But that love itself 
 remains to the disappointed artistic aspirant, 
 and may still be a source of great happiness to 
 him if he is only able to dissociate it from his 
 artistic failure. Why should he not dissociate 
 the beauties of nature from the difficult man- 
 agement of pigments ground in oil ? A poet 
 makes no unnecessary connection between the 
 two. Byron was an ardent lover of nature 
 and hated painting, the best and the worst 
 indiscriminately. The feelings of Words- 
 worth towards nature, if not so ardent as 
 Byron's, were more tenderly affectionate; if 
 he did not hate painting, he took no interest 
 in the technical craft, nor did he know any- 
 thing about it. He went at once to the 
 thought, when there was any thought; in a 
 word, to the literary interest of the picture. 
 
 I have hitherto only mentioned the love of 
 nature as a frequent cause of false vocations 
 in painting; but this is connected rather with 
 a rural than an urban life. Inhabitants of 
 great capitals, with their easy access to pic- 
 tures, may be led to attempt painting because, 
 for them, the art is interesting in itself. This 
 appears, at first sight, much more promising, 
 
126 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 as the example of human work already trium- 
 phantly executed seems to encourage artistic 
 production much more directly and immedi- 
 ately than nature, which is remote from us and 
 sets no example of artistic execution. Even 
 here, however, there is room for an illusory or 
 false vocation, which, if imprudently followed, 
 must lead to an inevitable disappointment, as I 
 will now proceed to show. 
 
 This is one of those very numerous cases 
 where a distinction has to be established 
 between the receptive and the productive 
 powers. The intelligent lover of pictures 
 answers to the intelligent reader. He is 
 receptive. He may possibly be productive 
 also, but it does not follow that he is. As a 
 general rule (there have been a few rare 
 exceptions) the great producers are not 
 remarkably receptive. We are familiar with 
 the common accusation against writers that 
 they read less, instead of more, than other cul- 
 tivated people. We have heard a similar 
 accusation against painters that they do not 
 appreciate the works of their great predeces- 
 sors, and are usually ignorant of theory and 
 also of the history of art. These accusations 
 are both of them, in the majority of cases, well 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 127 
 
 founded ; the only error is in giving them a 
 malicious character. The greatly productive 
 minds are rarely greatly receptive, because all 
 their energy, or nearly all of it, goes to pro- 
 duction, and they have scarcely any left for 
 appreciation, which they do in a most summary 
 manner and without taking the trouble. to be 
 just. The patient students of art long since 
 executed, the loving critics and students of art 
 history, have an affinity with fine art, that is 
 evident, or they would not spend time and 
 thought over it ; but their artistic intellect is of 
 a purely receptive nature. 
 
 Now, what is the effect of this temperament, 
 receptive as to fine art, on happiness ? In 
 itself, so long as it does not delude its posses- 
 sor by false hopes of a productive success, it 
 is surely a very enviable possession. If I 
 rank it below the love of nature and the love 
 of literature, it is chiefly because natural 
 beauty and literary productions are accessi- 
 ble almost everywhere, whilst good paintings 
 and good statues are accessible, at least to the 
 poor student, only in great cities. But if the 
 student is within reach of works of art, to en- 
 joy them is to possess them. It is the one 
 case in which the French adage "Voir, cest 
 
128 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 avoir " becomes literally true, as the only good 
 of a picture is in the sight of it. Is this 
 nothing ? It is a kind of riches that is want- 
 ing to many an owner of hereditary art treas- 
 ures who, being without it, is disqualified for 
 enjoying the contents of his private galleries. 
 
 When there is no illusion as to the gifts of 
 nature, when we really possess in perfection 
 all the gifts which are needed for the work we 
 have to do, and when the circumstances of 
 our position do not prevent us from devoting 
 our time to the occupation of our choice, the 
 result of such a fortunate combination ought 
 to be a very pure and elevated kind of happi- 
 ness. In actual life it is often spoiled by 
 some perfectly extraneous disappointment. 
 Shelley had the complete equipment of a 
 poet, with full liberty to cultivate his mind 
 and make poems, but his existence was em- 
 bittered by the indifference of the public, the 
 contemptuous hostility of the press, and a 
 feeling of discouraging uncertainty as to his 
 future fame. This is the misfortune of all 
 the artistic occupations the need of a large 
 and appreciative public. Even Turner, who 
 was far more successful in his life-time than 
 artists usually are, is said to have been em- 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 129 
 
 bittered by the attacks of anonymous critics, 
 by the jealousy of rivals, and by the difficulty 
 he found in selling his oil pictures at the time 
 when they were painted. 1 Wordsworth was 
 another disappointed genius, and with better 
 reason, as he could not live by his art, whilst 
 Turner made a fortune ; yet Wordsworth en- 
 joyed all the leisure that is necessary for a 
 poet, with health, and length of days, and the 
 possibility of living amongst the lakes and 
 mountains that he loved. Even Scott's en- 
 joyment of his own immense success was, I 
 will not say embittered, for he was too great 
 to be affected seriously by any such considera- 
 tions, but limited by his modest conviction 
 that his fame could not endure. These in- 
 stances are taken from the roll of celebrated 
 names; amongst obscure artists and authors 
 the instances of disappointment which remain 
 
 1 I have found lately a fresh proof of Turner's early celeb- 
 rity. A friend has given me a guide-book to London entitled 
 " The Picture of London " for 1804. It contains a paragraph 
 on Turner's works beginning with these words : " Mr. Turner 
 is a painter of the first order." Subsequent criticism has 
 only said the same thing more elaborately. This anonymous 
 eulogium was printed when Turner was only twenty-nine years 
 old, and the writer of it cannot have been a follower of Mr. 
 Ruskin, because the author of "Modern Painters" was born 
 fifteen years later, in 1819. 
 
 9 
 
1 30 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 unknown to us must be innumerable. The 
 evil in their lives is the extreme difficulty of 
 enjoying the practice of an art for itself alone, 
 and without reference to the opinion of others. 
 There is also, in most cases, the incessant 
 intrusion of pecuniary considerations which 
 have absolutely nothing whatever to do with 
 the arts we practise, yet which force them- 
 selves on our attention because we all of us 
 have to buy our time with money that must 
 be either inherited, or earned, or stolen. 
 
 The best refuge, so far as happiness only is 
 concerned, would be to cherish in ourselves, 
 as much as possible and as long as possible, 
 the true student-spirit, which takes an interest 
 in a pursuit on its own account without ref- 
 erence to any personal success. I have just 
 said that it is extremely difficult to enjoy the 
 practice of an art for itself alone. It is so 
 because the fine arts appeal to others and 
 attempt to awaken their emotions, so that to 
 write what is never to be printed or to paint 
 what is never to be exhibited seems like talk- 
 ing to rocks and trees. But the study of 
 nature is a pursuit that does not of necessity 
 involve an appeal to the sympathy or admira- 
 tion of any human being, and it is a safe 
 
Insufficiency of Gifts. 131 
 
 refuge. It has been the one remaining hap- 
 piness of many a disappointed artist ; it is the 
 delight of all obscure men of science ; it makes 
 us, so long as we are engaged in it, indepen- 
 dent of the whole human world except our 
 predecessors, who have prepared the way for 
 us, and who, for the most part, were solitary 
 students like ourselves. 
 
132 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 ON THE QUESTION WHETHER OUR HAPPINESS IN 
 THE USE OF OUR FACULTIES IS IN PROPOR- 
 TION TO THEIR STRENGTH. 
 
 THIS question is complicated by several 
 others, so that it is difficult to answer 
 it simply. 
 
 The other considerations that prevent a 
 simple answer relate to the sense of improve- 
 ment, to the satisfactions of successful or the 
 torments of unsuccessful rivalry, to the condi- 
 tion of public opinion, and the degree of im- 
 portance that the individual human being 
 attaches to the opinion of his fellows. 
 
 The comparison of our own powers with 
 those of others continually interferes with 
 our enjoyment. A strong savage lives in a 
 tribe where the majority of warriors are still 
 stronger than he is himself. He is likely, in 
 such a position, to be derided as a weakling, 
 and to have a self-consciousness of weakness 
 
Happiness in Use of Our Faculties. 133 
 
 (implanted in him by his fellow-tribesmen) 
 rather than happiness in his positive strength, 
 such as he ought to have and would have if it 
 were not interfered with by the tribal public 
 opinion. 
 
 Comparatively small powers may be accom- 
 panied by a sense of great satisfaction if only 
 there is a consciousness of increase. Here we 
 have the secret of the happiness of youth, 
 which bears its own present deficiencies so 
 easily because it has the assurance that they 
 are not final. Even in youth, however, dis- 
 couragement may attend progress, because 
 the progress itself, though real, is not suffi- 
 ciently rapid and assured to answer the expec- 
 tations of one's friends, or even one's own 
 legitimate expectations. 
 
 A comparatively weak faculty may some- 
 times give a purer satisfaction than a strong 
 one, because it does not awaken ideas of com- 
 petition. One who rides a bicycle simply for 
 his amusement, or for health, well knowing 
 that he would be nowhere in a race, may get 
 both more amusement and more health out of 
 his exercise than if he were powerful enough 
 to think of breaking " records." It is the 
 same in the exercises of the mind. One who 
 
134 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 writes ordinary letters well may have a satis- 
 faction in his private correspondence far more 
 complete than any that he would ever experi- 
 ence in the open field of literature. In the 
 fine arts, professional workmen, with few ex- 
 ceptions, deride the efforts of the amateur; 
 yet the amateur's disinterested studies, which 
 have no motive but his own enjoyment of na- 
 tural beauty, have at least this in their favor, 
 so far as happiness only is concerned, that 
 they are free from those jealousies and heart- 
 burnings which are so hostile to professional 
 peace of mind. 
 
 There is, in short, no necessity for any re- 
 markable or exceptional strength in a faculty 
 as a condition of our ample enjoyment of its 
 use. Provided only that there is strength 
 enough to permit reasonable exertion without 
 fatigue, the pleasure that accompanies the 
 exertion may be so complete that it is im- 
 possible to imagine any increase of it as a con- 
 sequence of augmented power. A man who 
 walks ten miles easily may enjoy so much re- 
 freshment from his exercise that he could not 
 feel happier in it if he were able to walk fifty; 
 the only difference would be the prolonga- 
 tion, not the intensification, of his pleasure. 
 
Happiness in Use of Our Faculties. 135 
 
 So with our .intellectual labors. A man of 
 ordinary power, well disciplined, can fix his 
 attention steadily to one thing during a sit- 
 ting of two hours, after which he usually re- 
 quires rest or change ; but a man of superior 
 brain-power, like Napoleon at his best, can fix 
 his attention for a whole day or a whole night. 
 It does not follow from this power of pro- 
 longation that Napoleon had a greater pleas- 
 ure than we have in the employment of 
 mental energy, but his pleasure was more pro- 
 longed, and he probably took pride in his 
 remarkable staying power as a means of 
 humiliating others. 
 
 It is one of the consolations of healthy age 
 that, although it cannot do anything to excess 
 without having to pay a penalty afterwards, it 
 can still do most things in moderation, and 
 derive almost as much satisfaction from the 
 limited and reasonable exercise of diminished 
 powers as it once derived from excessive and 
 often unnecessary exertions. 
 
 There is even a satisfaction in the use of 
 what we know to be a moderate power that 
 does not accompany a great one, as the mod- 
 erate power is usually employed either for 
 simple pleasure, or for some unpretending 
 
136 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 kind of utility, whilst great powers lead men 
 to undertake the most burdensome tasks. 
 Even when the powers are equal to the task 
 as they were, for example, in the case of 
 Michael Angelo, they still condemn their 
 possessor to a species of slavery. The slavery 
 of the great artist is undoubtedly one of the 
 noblest in the experience of mankind; but 
 though Michael Angelo exercised his genius 
 and enjoyed a severe kind of happiness in 
 doing so, that painting of the Sistine Chapel 
 was a terrible business, and many a minor 
 artist has passed pleasanter years before his 
 easel than those during which Buonarotti lay 
 toiling on his back. The predominant strength 
 of Napoleon's military genius led him first to 
 the kind of happiness he was able to enjoy, 
 and afterwards past it and away from it ; his 
 generals, who had great military talents also, 
 but of a less imperious order, wished to rest 
 on their laurels after their greatest successes, 
 and would have been happy in the enjoyment 
 of their titles and chateaux if he had only 
 given his consent. Here is an excellent in- 
 stance of the truth that minor talents may be 
 more conducive to happiness than the most 
 brilliant ones, for certainly Napoleon's lieu- 
 
Happiness in Use of Our Faculties. 137 
 
 tenants would have acted wisely in retiring, as 
 a prudent gamester does, whilst luck is still in 
 his favor. 
 
 The possibility of happiness with limited 
 talents does not make it the less necessary 
 that such talents should be genuine of their 
 kind. For a yachtsman to enjoy sailing it is 
 not necessary that he should possess nautical 
 abilities that would bring him distinction 
 amongst the most accomplished yachtsmen; 
 but the genuine nautical instinct is indispen- 
 sable, since without it sailing would be to him 
 no more than an imperfect mode of locomo- 
 tion. The born landsman finds no pleasure in 
 playing the beautiful game with the capricious 
 wind, in which it is sometimes an enemy, 
 sometimes a friend, and often too indolent to 
 be either. 
 
 These considerations help us to a rather 
 cheerful view of life ; for although genius is 
 rare, minor talents of the most various grades 
 are common, and if each of these minor gifts 
 brings a satisfaction in its exercise, there must 
 be an incalculable amount of such humble 
 satisfaction in the world. 
 
138 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THAT EVERY TIME OF LIFE HAS A HAPPINESS 
 PECULIAR TO ITSELF. 
 
 ^ I N HE common belief that happiness be- 
 J. longs to childhood and youth, and is 
 lost in mature age, may be due to a misunder- 
 standing of certain changes in its nature. No 
 one would affirm that it is possible to retain in 
 age, or even in full maturity, the peculiar buoy- 
 ancy that belongs properly and exclusively to 
 youth. That is plainly out of the question ; 
 and there will be no attempt in the present 
 chapter either to underestimate the value of 
 that buoyancy as an element of happiness 
 whilst it lasts, or to represent it as lasting 
 longer than it does in reality. We can only 
 say of it that it belongs to youth, but that it 
 does not constitute the whole of happiness, 
 being only one of its phases. It is like the 
 beauty of spring, which passes away with its 
 own season, yet the end of it, which comes so 
 soon, is not the end of all the beauty of the year. 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 139 
 
 The beauty of summer is not so fresh and 
 flowery, but it is of another kind ; it is fuller, 
 richer, and more lasting. Then comes autumn, 
 which, when it reaches its own perfection (it 
 does not reach it every year), may be the most 
 beautiful of all. Winter is a time of loss ; the 
 leaves that remain to it are " red and sear," its 
 skies are gray and gloomy ; still, even in win- 
 ter itself, though it has neither the light nor 
 the rich foliage of summer, there is a kind of 
 beauty perfectly well known to all true lovers 
 of nature, who do not by any means look upon 
 themselves as disinherited because the more 
 brilliant seasons have successively passed away. 
 This beauty of the year, with the completeness 
 of its changes, is closely analogous to the suc- 
 cessive varieties of happiness in a well-ordered 
 and fairly prosperous human life. The anal- 
 ogy goes even a little further, as it happens 
 in some years that one or other of the seasons 
 may be, so far as beauty is concerned, compara- 
 tively a failure. I have said already that au- 
 tumn does not reach its own perfection every 
 year, and the same may be said of other sea- 
 sons also ; but the beauty of autumn is always 
 peculiarly in danger, because it is so short and 
 evanescent. So, in life, the happiness of one 
 
140 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 age or another may be, and often is, interfered 
 with by adverse circumstances. All that I 
 pretend to maintain is that the time of life, 
 in itself, and considered without reference to 
 accidents, may have a happiness, as each 
 season may have a beauty of its own. 
 
 The most serious argument against this the- 
 ory is that every evil that happens to us in life 
 leaves something permanent behind it ; so that 
 as we get older and older there is a steadily 
 increasing accumulation of evils that weigh 
 upon our spirits and drag them down. For 
 the present, however, I must be permitted to 
 exclude accidents of all kinds, as it is impossi- 
 ble to take into consideration everything that 
 might possibly happen to make life painful to 
 bear or simply unsatisfactory. The worst evils 
 of life have usually an accidental character. 
 A man may marry a woman who has a bad 
 temper, or who is unfaithful, and then marriage 
 will be an evil in his case, or he may have a 
 son who is vulgar and insolent, or dishonorable, 
 and then his paternity will be a plague to him ; 
 but these are accidents, they are not the uni- 
 versal consequences of marriage. So it is with 
 diseases, and with pecuniary misfortunes, and 
 with wounds received in railway accidents or 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 141 
 
 in battle ; such things happen continually, yet 
 since they are not universal we have not to con- 
 sider them as certain evils belonging to this or 
 that period of life. Again, some of the worst 
 accidents happen in what is reputed to be the 
 most joyful and happy period of existence that 
 is, in childhood and youth yet no one ever, 
 on that account, looks upon childhood and 
 youth as miserable and unfortunate. In short, 
 we are not under any obligation to consider 
 accidental evils in any general theory of happi- 
 ness, as it is beyond our powers to estimate 
 them in any general way. Here even statistics 
 do not practically serve us. A certain num- 
 ber of husbands murder their wives annually, 
 a fact that makes no difference in the hap- 
 piness of wives who are kindly treated by their 
 husbands. 
 
 Let us first consider the physical basis of 
 happiness. Leaving diseases out of the ques- 
 tion (many of them attack the young quite as 
 readily as the aged), there are certain constitu- 
 tional changes which do not destroy physical 
 well-being, but produce an alteration in its 
 nature. Between the ages of fifteen and forty- 
 five the constitution loses elasticity and gains 
 firmness. The effect of this upon the mind is 
 
142 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 to replace the delight in very active and restless, 
 and often quite useless, movement, by a sense 
 of satisfaction in powers that may be calculated 
 upon and employed by their possessor steadily 
 in the course of his occupations. The physical 
 exercises of middle age are rarely accompanied 
 by the exhilaration of youth, but they are 
 accompanied by a sense of power which is 
 agreeable, and by a consciousness of being able 
 to do all that is necessary both for health and 
 occupation. Between forty-five and sixty there 
 is usually some decline of strength, but, in a 
 healthy subject, quite enough of it remains to 
 meet all reasonable claims upon it. If the 
 kind of life and the habits of the individual are 
 favorable to the preservation of physical health 
 and strength, there is no reason in the human 
 constitution why life should not afford even 
 considerable physical enjoyment between forty- 
 five and sixty. It is an age that does not for- 
 bid either field sports or travelling of the more 
 independent and active kinds, on horseback, 
 on the bicycle, or on foot. The only rules 
 that a healthy man need trouble himself to 
 observe, as he approaches threescore, are never 
 to allow his physical powers to be lost to him 
 through indolence, and never to strain them or 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 143 
 
 distress himself. The number of gray-headed 
 men to be seen in the hunting-field, and now 
 upon bicycles, is ample evidence that physical 
 exercise may be really enjoyed after middle 
 life and that it still invigorates. To keep these 
 benefits nothing is required but a little pru- 
 dence, and that is surely not a very high price 
 to pay for the inestimable blessing of a well- 
 maintained activity. 
 
 Down to this point I can speak with the 
 authority of experience, and may mention a 
 piece of advice that was given to me by two 
 old men quite independently of each other. 
 They both said that there was a time in life, 
 that varied with different individuals but might 
 be fixed between forty and fifty, when a tend- 
 ency to physical indolence, a love of ease, be- 
 gan insidiously to creep over a man, which 
 if allowed to progress unresisted would make 
 him useless before his time. They both af- 
 firmed that the preservation of active powers 
 in age is very much a matter of the will. And 
 this brings me to a kind of happiness which, 
 from its nature, can only be felt in advancing 
 years ; that is, the self-congratulation on hav- 
 ing preserved, at the cost of some effort, all 
 those precious forces that might have been 
 
144 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 greatly diminished, or even totally lost, with- 
 out it. 
 
 So far, that is to the age of sixty, a healthy 
 man of prudent and active habits has nothing 
 whatever to complain of in the way of phys- 
 ical well-being. His physical sensations may 
 be less lively and exhilarating than they were 
 at sixteen or twenty, but they are still _by no 
 means disagreeable ; they still need not, of 
 themselves, predispose him to anything like 
 melancholy. The real difficulty of happy 
 physical existence comes in the fourth score. 
 Between the ages of sixty and eighty, there is 
 always, even in the soundest constitutions, a 
 marked decline of strength. Here I have not 
 personal experience to guide me, but I have 
 what is next best, the observation of old age 
 in others. The reader will please bear in mind 
 that in this chapter I am considering age only 
 as distinguished from the effects of disease, 
 and therefore must confine myself strictly to 
 sound examples. Diseases occur at all ages, 
 and are too numerous and complex to be 
 taken into account when we are dealing sim- 
 ply with the effects of years. Now, with 
 regard to age, a friend and near relation of 
 mine told me that as he approached fourscore 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 145 
 
 the effect of age upon him was increasing in- 
 dolence and a greater enjoyment of rest; but 
 he was still quite equal to undertake long rail- 
 way journeys alone, and went to London from 
 his residence in the north of England when 
 any matter of business called him. He 
 betrayed a certain slowness and stiffness, and 
 a disposition to remain in an easy-chair when 
 he got into one, but could still walk several 
 miles without fatigue. Another old friend of 
 mine tells me that the inconvenience of old 
 age is not to be able to put on or take off 
 one's overcoat without assistance. If that is 
 all, why not buy a cloak ? When the physical 
 health is perfect in old age according to the 
 laws of change which govern a sound consti- 
 tution, the state is not irritable, as with the 
 diseased, but simply restful, and inclined to 
 somnolence, in which there is no unendurable 
 hardship. In the best cases death comes like 
 sleep, and is merely the cessation of the inter- 
 nal motions. The watch has stopped, and 
 that is all. In less favorable cases, the consti- 
 tution breaks up in a few months, ending with 
 senile decrepitude and death. 
 
 Critics may make the objection that I have 
 represented only the most favorable cases. 
 
 10 
 
146 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 Such a criticism would be just, hitherto, only 
 so far as this, that I have supposed my old 
 men to be free from any positive disease. 
 This, no doubt, is a kind of idealization, since, 
 as a matter of fact, old people do usually suffer 
 from a chronic ailment of some kind, and 
 many diseases develop themselves in mature 
 life which are unsuspected till middle age. 
 My only argument is that if you divide human 
 life into four spaces of twenty years each, a 
 healthy man may enjoy complete physical 
 happiness during three of the four quarters, 
 whilst in the fourth he will become, in the 
 course of nature, more indolent and restful ; and 
 that is not positively an unhappy state if the 
 old man can have and enjoy the rest that he 
 desires, for even resting is in itself a kind of 
 happiness. But if we look to the really 
 exceptional cases, in which sound health is 
 combined with the special gift of longevity, 
 then we find the fourth score of years as good, 
 or nearly so, as the third. One of my friends, 
 at the age of seventy- three, is still fond of 
 travelling, and last year he visited Italy, 
 France, Switzerland, and the United States of 
 America. Another, at seventy-six, is a good 
 pedestrian, and would climb, I will not say 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 147 
 
 any mountain in France or Switzerland, but 
 certainly any mountain in Great Britain. 
 Among celebrities either still living or who 
 have died in our time, there is quite a long 
 list of vigorous old men. It is unnecessary to 
 give names that every reader knows. It is 
 enough to say that in our time the exception- 
 ally healthy and long-lived constitutions seem 
 to have altered the period of decline from the 
 eighth to the ninth decade; that, for them, the 
 eighth is still a time of activity, whilst even 
 the ninth itself is by no means a time of sen- 
 ile decrepitude, but only of quiet occupation 
 in the place of strenuous labor. Whilst I am 
 writing these pages, La Scala is ringing with 
 the success of a merry and joyous opera 
 written by a composer of eighty who gave ten 
 hours a day to personal superintendence of its 
 production, whilst the House of Commons is 
 listening with the most eager attention to an 
 orator of eighty-three who came from Biarritz 
 to London without breaking the journey, and 
 after a rough passage in stormy winter weather 
 held a cabinet council immediately on his 
 arrival. The physical perfection of living is 
 to have good health and much activity till 
 seventy, then gradually less activity and an 
 
148 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 increasing economy of effort till about ninety, 
 when the old man feels tired of living and 
 quietly falls asleep. It may be said that 
 this is an ideal ; if so, it has the advantage 
 over most ideals that it has been in some 
 instances actually realized. It has been twice 
 realized in the Germany of our own time. 
 England and Italy are in a fair way to realize 
 it in Mr. Gladstone and Verdi, whilst it must 
 be remembered that these examples are taken 
 from a most limited class, that of European 
 celebrities, so that if the same proportion of 
 healthy old men is to be found amongst the 
 far more numerous classes of the obscure, 
 there must be thousands of them in the popu- 
 lation of the world. . And next to those who 
 combine health with extreme longevity, there 
 are ten times as many who combine it with a 
 moderate longevity ; that is, who have enough 
 of physical well-being for the enjoyment of 
 life to the age of seventy or seventy-five. Of 
 such an existence, it is certain that every 
 decade has a physical happiness of its own, 
 from the quicksilver restlessness of childhood, 
 through the athletic activity of youth and the 
 quiet confirmed strength and well-directed 
 energy of manhood, to the peace and rest of 
 
Happiness Peculiar to Itself. 149 
 
 age. It is quite true, and I make no attempt 
 to deny it, that the physical happiness of 
 advancing life is much less intense than that 
 of boisterous boyhood ; the river of life no 
 longer leaps in noisy cascades made brilliant 
 with all the colors of the rainbow; it flows 
 more calmly and evenly, and at last slowly and 
 sluggishly, before it loses itself in the infinite 
 sea. The great changes in the nature of our 
 physical well-being are not to be disputed ; I 
 only say that every age has its own well-being, 
 so long as health remains. 
 
150 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 OF THE PERFECTION OF THE SENSES. 
 
 IN the last chapter I assumed that health 
 was preserved to an advanced age, as I 
 wished to consider the effects of age by them- 
 selves without the complications of diseases 
 that may, or may not, take possession of a 
 man and influence his happiness unfavor- 
 ably, at any period of his existence. I still 
 reserve this question of disease, about which 
 there may be much to say on both sides; but 
 for the present there is another condition to 
 be considered, and that is the different de- 
 grees of perfection of the senses in different 
 individuals, all of whom are equally healthy. 
 The eyes may be free from disease, yet short- 
 sighted ; the ears may be healthy whilst the 
 hearing is not acute ; the stomach and intes- 
 tines may do their important work regularly 
 and well, yet at the same time, from a dulness 
 in the organs of taste, there may be a com- 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 151 
 
 plete or partial incapacity for enjoying the 
 pleasures of the table. There is a sense to 
 which I can only allude, yet which is nec- 
 essary to the perfection of physical life in 
 mature individuals as well as to the health 
 and vigor of their descendants, though peo- 
 ple can be well without it, or whilst having it 
 in an inferior degree. And there is certainly 
 another sense which is without any single and 
 definite name, the sense of physical delight 
 in life, in breathing pure fresh air, in feeling 
 cool waters flow over the naked skin, "the 
 exultant sense " of physical sympathy with 
 the rhythmic action of the strong horse that 
 is galloping or leaping beneath one, or of the 
 yacht that rises to the wave, all which may be 
 wanting to a man who is not aware of any 
 deficiency in his health and in whose body a 
 post-mortem examination would not reveal 
 the existence of any ailment. 
 
 Leaving, then, for the present, as we did in 
 the previous chapter, all maladies out of the 
 question, the difference to happiness between 
 the possession of perfect or inferior senses 
 may be far greater than is commonly imag- 
 ined. Let us consider sight first as one of 
 the most precious senses we have ; certainly 
 
152 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 one of the two which do most in the service 
 of our intelligence, and of all our senses the 
 one that best relieves and mitigates the te- 
 dium of solitude. Now, think of the differ- 
 ence between having the eyes of Turner and 
 those, let us say, of Tennyson. In this com- 
 parison I make no reference to the artistic 
 insight of those two great men ; they both, no 
 doubt, possessed this in a very rare degree, 
 though not in the same kind ; I allude simply 
 to their ocular power. There is good evi- 
 dence that Turner in his best years had 
 remarkably strong eyes, and eyes which 
 adapted themselves equally well to different 
 distances. He would throw sketches on the 
 floor and refer to them there, or he would 
 draw minute details in little vignettes on his 
 table. The scale of his own work was quite 
 indifferent to him, and in his study of nature 
 he took the same interest in distances several 
 miles away that he did in the objects of the 
 foreground. His vision, in comparison with 
 ordinary vision, may be described as tele- 
 scopic and microscopic at his own will, and 
 the practice of his art, instead of fatiguing it, 
 only increased its power, as muscles grow 
 larger by use. Our great poet, on the con- 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 153 
 
 trary, was extremely short-sighted, and there- 
 fore subject to all the disabilities which that 
 implies. He can never have clearly seen the 
 most magnificent of all the spectacles of na- 
 ture, the splendor of the constellations when 
 the night air is most pure and transparent and 
 their light comes to us so brightly across the 
 inconceivable distances of space. He must 
 have seen the distances of landscape dimly, 
 and only small objects really well, such as the 
 shell in Maud, or the "flower in the cran- 
 nied wall." Sight of this limited kind, though 
 still far preferable to blindness, is such an 
 exclusion from wide regions of beauty and 
 interest that if it came upon any one who 
 had enjoyed good sight before, he would feel 
 it as a great calamity, or at least as a severe 
 restriction. For example, in the studies of 
 literature and art a short-sighted person may 
 read books, but cannot appreciate painting, as 
 the parts of pictures only come together at 
 their own distance where every touch must 
 tell. The same touches, scrutinized at a dis- 
 tance of a few inches, do not only appear 
 coarse and unskilful, but must be positively 
 unintelligible, so that the most learned execu- 
 tion, if seen too near, might be taken for the 
 
154 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 most ignorant. In nature there is no execu- 
 tion whatever, whereby the short-sighted stu- 
 dent of nature does at least escape from this 
 especial error, but he is driven to the world of 
 detail, and that world, though infinite and 
 inexhaustible, is not the synthesis but the 
 analysis of nature. 
 
 We are so much accustomed to deafness as 
 a result of disease that we think of it rarely 
 as a congenital imperfection, except in those 
 cases of total deafness which attract attention 
 chiefly by the dumbness which accompanies 
 them. There are, however, very various de- 
 grees of excellence in hearing quite indepen- 
 dently of disease. It is, perhaps, impossible 
 to fix any exact standard of normal hearing, 
 though aurists are accustomed to test every 
 new case that is presented to them by means 
 of instruments, such as tuning-forks, or by 
 the ticking of a watch. These tests are vari- 
 able, and there is no sound of any fixed and 
 regular strength amongst the ordinary noises 
 of nature. As a rough test, without any pre- 
 tension to accuracy, we might say that if any 
 one well placed in a concert-room hears all 
 the pianissimi quite easily his hearing may 
 be considered not inferior to the average ; but 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 155 
 
 even this is dependent on the varying voices 
 of the singers and on the acoustic properties 
 of the room. When the imperfection of hear- 
 ing goes so far as to deprive us of the pianis- 
 simo in music it may be almost said to deprive 
 us of music altogether, and the loss of music 
 is not merely the privation of a pleasure, it is 
 the loss of the most powerful and the most 
 ideal stimulant and consolation. I do not pre- 
 tend to be able to explain how music acts upon 
 the human mind, and have never met with 
 any person or any book that could explain it. 
 All I know is, that it requires some memory 
 of sounds, as we could not feel the effects of a 
 passage, or even of a note, unless we remem- 
 bered what had gone before. Yet our recol- 
 lection of music does not need to be very 
 perfect or precise, as we may enjoy a com- 
 position whilst it is being performed without 
 remembering anything definite about it when 
 it is over. When we come to the stimulating 
 or consolatory effects of music, we enter upon 
 a region of the profoundest mystery. All 
 that we know is that no other influence can 
 replace it. I may perhaps add to this, that 
 in my own experience the perfection of the 
 musical influence is felt only when something 
 
156 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 beautiful is to be seen whilst the performance 
 is going on. If it is indoors, a bare concert- 
 room is not enough; the full influence is to 
 be felt under the lofty vaults of some ancient 
 and magnificent cathedral. If the music is 
 out of doors, it is best in some rich landscape 
 with mysterious mountainous distances, espe- 
 cially in late summer, and towards the close 
 of a splendid day. This combination of the 
 aesthetic pleasures of sight and hearing, which 
 is impossible unless both senses are in perfec- 
 tion, may affect our whole estimate of life by 
 elevating it, at least for a time, into the region 
 of the ideal, and by affording us a deliverance 
 from vulgar interests and sordid cares. 
 
 It is true that the perfection of hearing, 
 like that of smell, makes us liable to certain 
 intrusions and inconveniences, against which 
 some degree of deafness would at least par- 
 tially protect us. A dull ear shuts out many 
 importunate sounds and diminishes the force 
 of others. What student has not sometimes 
 regretted that the ears could not be closed as 
 effectually as the eyes? Imperfect sight is 
 always and everywhere a disadvantage : it is 
 as inconvenient for the solitary student as for 
 a general in the field; but imperfect hearing 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 157 
 
 does not in the least interfere with private 
 work in the study : it even aids it by making 
 us more absolutely alone. At this moment I 
 hear a carnage passing, a dog barking, a cock 
 crowing, several sparrows twittering, and a 
 bell ringing. Besides what I actually hear 
 there is the apprehension of other possible 
 noises, a railway whistle, a barrel-organ, or 
 the strident scream of the siren in a steam- 
 barge on the river. A deaf person would 
 escape from these and other annoyances. 
 
 Smell and taste are considered inferior 
 senses, yet their value to us is twofold, as it 
 is both practical and poetic. On the practi- 
 cal side they are servants of science and aids 
 to health (where would chemistry be without 
 them ?) ; on the poetical side they are not only 
 necessary to the appreciation of many pas- 
 sages in the literatures both of oriental and 
 western nations, but what is still more im- 
 portant, they are connected with our personal 
 affections from childhood to old age. To 
 lose the sense of smell is to lose a power 
 which, more than any other, carries us back 
 to our past life. Every one who has this 
 sense in perfection knows that, notwithstand- 
 ing the variety of odors in great cities, each 
 
158 The Quest of Plappiness. 
 
 of them has a special dominant odor of its 
 own. The smell of London is not that of 
 Paris, and on returning to either place after 
 an absence it is the smell, quite as much as 
 the language, that recalls to us our own 
 former residence there, and helps to revive 
 old recollections and associations. So every 
 house acquires its own odor, which is rarely, 
 though it is occasionally, repeated in another. 
 As to the influence of this on happiness, I 
 may say from experience that there is a pro- 
 found pleasure, though a very melancholy one, 
 in meeting with a house-odor that belonged, 
 in years gone by, to some house where we 
 used to be received with kindness, and which 
 is now closed to us by death. 
 
 A few persons are born with the senses of 
 smell and taste more delicate than they are in 
 ordinary human beings. The advantage of 
 this excessive delicacy is not so obvious as the 
 disadvantage of having senses below the aver- 
 age degree of acuteness. A man born with ab- 
 normally keen sight would perceive many very 
 minute details that must interfere with that 
 broader conception of beauty which distin- 
 guishes the master from the student in the fine 
 arts. Such a man would see nature as we see 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses, 159 
 
 it through a field-glass for distant objects, or as 
 we see near things through an engraver's lens. 
 There would be no advantage in so much de- 
 tail if the object were the artistic enjoyment of 
 natural beauty; and although it might be valu- 
 able for the purposes of science, these are already 
 provided for by our opticians. Ordinary vision, 
 good of its own kind, is the most desirable for 
 daily use, particularly as it can be multiplied 
 both in magnifying and in penetrating power 
 by the telescope and the microscope. So, in 
 hearing it may well be doubted whether preter- 
 naturally acute hearing would add anything to 
 the happiness of life. The possessor of such 
 an abnormal faculty would be perpetually dis- 
 turbed by small sounds, and would have diffi- 
 culties of his own in the appreciation of music. 
 It would seem to him violent and rude. I am 
 writing these lines with a lead pencil, and a fly 
 is walking across the page ; if I heard as with 
 a microphone, the noise of the pencil would be 
 a loud scrape, and the footsteps of the fly would 
 sound like those of a dray-horse on a pavement. 
 A multitude of odors and flavors that seem to 
 us so mild as to be matters of indifference 
 would then be potent enough to compel a 
 choice between the pleasurable and the offensive. 
 
160 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 It is probable, therefore, that ordinary human 
 happiness is best assured, so far as the senses 
 are concerned, by the condition of healthy 
 mediocrity. 
 
 The reader will please to observe that the 
 acuteness of the senses themselves has not 
 much to do with that aesthetic cultivation 
 which aids us to discriminate by an operation 
 of the mind. The best evidence of this is that 
 one of the two kinds of seeing may improve, in 
 the same person, whilst the other declines. A 
 painter may gain artistic insight by the prog- 
 ress of his mental culture, whilst at the same 
 time his physical sight is deteriorating through 
 advancing age. An old publisher's sight may 
 not be so good as that of a school-boy, but 
 the publisher might still discriminate between 
 tones and textures in papers that the school-boy 
 would confound together. An old physician, 
 looking through his spectacles, will discern 
 signs of disease that escape every layman's 
 observation. In these and a multitude of sim- 
 ilar cases the sight is really that of the mind, 
 and the eye is only a more or less efficient 
 servant of the mind. 
 
 We have come, then, to the conclusion that 
 so far as the state of the senses has any effect 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 161 
 
 upon happiness, a healthy mediocrity is best. 
 There is no evidence that the happiness of the 
 human race would be increased if what is now 
 an extraordinary keenness of sight and hearing 
 were to become general, or that the happiness 
 of exceptional individuals gains anything by an 
 abnormal development of these senses. Who 
 wants to hear the footsteps of flies or to count 
 the threads in lawn ? 
 
 If, however, there is no great gain to happi- 
 ness in possessing sharper senses than other 
 people, any inferiority to the common average is 
 inconvenient, not so much in itself as because 
 the habits of social existence are founded upon 
 a presumed equality. The average seems to 
 vary with different nations. English manners 
 take it for granted that acute hearing is uni- 
 versal ; voices are low, a few syllables in every 
 sentence are marked by a tonic accent, the rest 
 are scarcely articulated. If the hearing is a 
 little dull, the meaning can only be guessed 
 from the accented syllables that remain. In 
 France the louder speech, the equality of pro- 
 nunciation in syllables, and the clearness of 
 articulation, make a slight degree of deafness 
 a very much smaller inconvenience. It may 
 be desirable, too, in England, to have better 
 
1 62 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 eyes than in France or Italy, on account of the 
 low degree of intensity in light, particularly in 
 the great English towns. The peculiar defect 
 of sight known as daltonism, or color-blindness, 
 has only a negative effect on happiness ; it does 
 not cause any mental suffering to the person 
 born with it who has never known, and will 
 never know any other state, but he is unfortu- 
 nate in missing a pleasure that nature offers 
 abundantly and free of cost. For any one who 
 sees color well, and appreciates it, the not very 
 rare occasions when the coloring of nature is 
 either magnificent or very exquisitely delicate 
 and refined are fully equal, as a pleasure, to 
 a performance of the best music by the most 
 skilful musicians in the world. I have known 
 several persons who were color-blind and whose 
 good spirits did not seem to be in the least 
 degree diminished by their defect. The world, 
 to them, was not a gallery of pictures, but a port- 
 folio of photographs or engravings ; yet they 
 were not more saddened by their loss than those 
 born without an ear for music are saddened by 
 living away from operas and concerts. A dis- 
 ability like daltonism affects happiness only 
 when it becomes practically inconvenient, so 
 as to be a hindrance to professional success, as 
 
Of the Perfection of the Senses. 163 
 
 when a railway servant cannot be employed in 
 some capacities because red and green are alike 
 to him, or a shopman is disqualified for mer- 
 cery because he is unable to distinguish be- 
 tween the tints of ribbons. 
 
 If people were to make themselves unhappy 
 because they miss the pleasures of a sense 
 they do not possess, we might all of us have 
 good reasons for unhappiness, as the whole 
 human race is probably destitute of senses of 
 which it has no conception whatever. We 
 are as unable to imagine the extent of our 
 loss as a dog to realize what he loses by not 
 being able to read. "We have five senses," 
 says Sir John Lubbock, " and sometimes fancy 
 that no others are possible. But it is obvious 
 that we cannot measure the infinite by our 
 own narrow limitations." 
 
 " Moreover, looking at the question from 
 the other side, we find in animals complex 
 organs of sense, richly supplied with nerves, 
 but the functions of which we are as yet 
 powerless to explain. There may be fifty 
 other senses as different from ours as sound 
 is from sight; and even within the bounda- 
 ries of our own senses there may be endless 
 sounds which we cannot hear, and colors as 
 
164 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 different as red from green, of which we have 
 no conception. The familiar world which 
 surrounds us may be a totally different place 
 to other animals. To them it may be full of 
 music which we cannot hear, of color which 
 we cannot see, of sensations which we cannot 
 conceive." 
 
 The other animals are welcome to all their 
 superiorities. Our own senses are enough for 
 us if we use them. In these, as in all our 
 faculties, our happiness lies in exercise and 
 rest. 
 
Rational Encouragement. 165 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 GROUNDS FOR RATIONAL ENCOURAGEMENT. 
 
 IF happiness follows naturally from the due 
 exercise of our faculties, alternating with 
 their sufficient rest, there must be in many 
 cases, though not in all, a possibility of in- 
 creasing it by a closer conformity to its law. 
 
 The unhappy conditions would be those in 
 which the proper degree of exercise and rest 
 was rigorously forbidden, as, for example, 
 in the case of prisoners condemned to insuffi- 
 cient exercise of their mental powers, by the 
 withholding of books and writing materials, 
 and the refusal of permission to see visitors, 
 or to insufficient exercise of their bodily 
 powers by a too close confinement, or else to 
 overwork in hard labor ; and in those lives 
 which are nominally free because there is no 
 legal imprisonment, yet in which the mere 
 force of circumstances condemns the sufferer 
 to injurious, though not primitive, forms of 
 
1 66 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 mental or bodily inactivity, if not, as in some 
 industries, to activity of an excessive and un- 
 healthy nature. Only a blind and determined 
 optimism could refuse to see that the unhap- 
 piness in such cases is real, and that it is 
 inevitable under the conditions ; nor do I in- 
 tend to represent it as less grievous than it is. 
 I only say that in lives of the ordinary kind, 
 where a healthy and moderate use of the 
 faculties is possible to any one with a vigorous 
 will, there is at least this reason for encour- 
 agement, that people may increase their hap- 
 piness if they know how to set about it in the 
 right way. 
 
 To hold out the prospect of a simple in- 
 crease of happiness is far more encouraging 
 in the practical sense than to talk to people 
 of a state of felicity that may be brilliant as 
 the stars in heaven, but is equally beyond 
 their reach. In imperfect health the patient 
 is cheered by the slightest evidence of im- 
 provement, when he listens with scepticism 
 to optimistic promises of absolute restoration. 
 
 The first encouraging reflection is, that 
 there is hardly any situation in which some 
 improvement would not be possible to a 
 man of activity and resource. Then arises 
 
Rational Encouragement. 167 
 
 the objection that such a man would hardly 
 need the guidance of philosophers, that he 
 would seek his happiness in his own way and 
 probably find it, whilst those who do really 
 stand in need of guidance are not likely either 
 to have the intelligence necessary to appre- 
 ciate its value or energy to follow it. We all 
 know the listless people who are unhappy 
 because they are too lazy to be anything else, 
 and the stupid people who have not sense 
 either to discipline themselves, or to accept 
 any discipline imposed by an external au- 
 thority. I am content to leave the hopeless 
 cases to their fate. For the others, which 
 are the majority, it may be fairly urged that 
 activity and resource are possessed by them 
 in different degrees, and that their unhappi- 
 ness might, in most cases, be lessened if they 
 did not underestimate their own powers. No 
 one who understands the conditions of happi- 
 ness would suggest that people should go be- 
 yond their powers. Each of us has his limits, 
 which cannot long be overpassed without con- 
 sequences incompatible with happiness; and, 
 as to the resources of intelligence, if we are 
 born with small resources, neither gods nor men 
 can expect us to act as if they were larger. 
 
1 68 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 The most encouraging reason for making 
 the best of such moderate faculties as we pos- 
 sess is that the prudent use of them, besides 
 actually increasing their strength, soon en- 
 ables us to employ them to much greater 
 advantage. There is no fact in our constitu- 
 tion more encouraging than this. The art of 
 swimming is one of the best examples, be- 
 cause it is an art in which the beginner 
 always expends ten times more energy than is 
 necessary. After practice he finds that the 
 slightest motion will keep him above water, 
 and that he is free to use almost all his real 
 effort for progression. The effect of practice 
 in intellectual pursuits is to make everything 
 easy except the one difficulty against which, 
 for the moment, we happen to be contending, 
 and that difficulty is usually either surmount- 
 able or avoidable. 
 
 A common reason for discouragement in 
 youth is the habit of undervaluing one's nat- 
 ural gifts. This does not often occur in 
 those cases where there is an aesthetic pas- 
 sion or ambition, as when a boy thinks he is 
 born to be a poet or a painter, but it is com- 
 mon as an excuse to one's self for indolence in 
 ordinary studies. A boy persuades himself 
 
Rational Encouragement. 169 
 
 for example, that he has no linguistic abilities, 
 so as to shirk the study of languages. I 
 know by several examples that it is quite pos- 
 sible for such a persuasion to exist along with 
 a faculty that is naturally vigorous but has 
 never yet judiciously been exercised. Or a 
 boy may have half the faculty but not the 
 other half; he may be fitted for reading for- 
 eign languages, but, from lack of mimetic 
 power, may speak them badly or not at all. 
 The linguistic gift may always be known by 
 the power of thinking in foreign tongues, 
 but it is difficult to recognize the presence of 
 this power before the student has supplied 
 himself with a full vocabulary. The same 
 difficulty of ascertaining the presence of fac- 
 ulty in young people applies in different ways 
 to most of their pursuits, except easily learned 
 amusements, as the strength of the natural 
 faculty can only exhibit itself when the tech- 
 nical difficulties have been overcome. It is 
 therefore reasonable for young people always 
 to assume that they have a sufficiency of nat- 
 ural endowment for the work they have to do. 
 By taking this simply for granted and work- 
 ing on in a temper of cheerful determination, 
 they are likely to be both happier and more 
 
1 70 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 successful than if they allowed themselves to 
 be perpetually asking if they are fit for this 
 thing or that. And as this book will probably 
 be more read by middle-aged and reflective 
 people than by boys, let me add a word of 
 protest against the habit of many parents 
 who discourage their children by depreciating 
 their abilities in their presence. That kind 
 of parental depreciation may be, and often is, 
 founded on a mistaken estimate of the boy's 
 nature or on an insufficient appreciation of 
 the difficulties he has to overcome. The 
 right way to deal with him is to make him 
 believe that however arduous may be the 
 mountain he has to ascend, the next step, 
 the step immediately before him, is one that 
 he is qualified to take. He ought always to 
 be told, in the admirable words of Rembrandt, 
 to put well into practice what he already 
 knows, because by so doing he will find that, 
 in due course, those other things will become 
 clear to him which at present seem difficult 
 and obscure. 
 
 In all matters connected with intellectual 
 acquirements and with skill in any of the 
 arts, whether it be a fine art or one of simple 
 utility, the encouraging truth is that either 
 
Rational Encouragement. 171 
 
 knowledge or skill may be increased before 
 the sun of the present day goes down, if we 
 only determine that it shall be so. Without 
 telling anybody, without making any fuss 
 or pretension about the matter, I can, if I 
 choose, know more Greek by dinner-time 
 than I did at breakfast. The increase will 
 not be much, and yet I might hit upon some- 
 thing that would be of frequent recurrence 
 afterwards. If the increase in a single day is 
 small and to the indolent it always ap- 
 pears so small as not to be worth the trouble 
 the wise know the effects of accumulation. 
 If the accumulation itself is unsatisfactory as 
 being unequal to our hopes, there remain the 
 exercise and the benefit one gets from it. 
 
 There is another reason for encouragement 
 in that law of our nature by which a faculty 
 that has no opportunity for exercise gradually 
 becomes less importunate in its claims, and 
 finally ceases to make any demands upon us 
 whatever. What is here called the demand 
 of a faculty for exercise is a kind of uneasi- 
 ness that it sets up in the nervous system, 
 which ceases when the exercise is given, and 
 is succeeded by an agreeable satisfaction, ac- 
 companied by a slight fatigue. If the craving 
 
172 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 for exercise is met by a firm refusal every 
 time that it arises, it troubles us less and less, 
 and it ends by being so feeble a survival of 
 the past desire that we have no longer any 
 difficulty in resisting it. This is the secret of 
 that kind of negative happiness which belongs 
 to asceticism. The ascetic is proud of his 
 power of resistance to the natural craving of 
 the faculties, in reality, after the early strug- 
 gles against nature (which are usually got 
 through when the aspirant is sustained by 
 youthful enthusiasm) the necessity for resist- 
 ance is very small. I do not wish to set up 
 ascetic practices as a model for voluntary imi- 
 tation, my theory of happiness being opposed 
 to asceticism, which I look upon as so much 
 death ; but it is occasionally very advanta- 
 geous to see how others manage to do volun- 
 tarily what we ourselves may be compelled to 
 do against our will. It is encouraging to 
 think that the denial of exercise to some, at 
 least, of our faculties may be possible without 
 permanent unhappiness. For example, the 
 social instincts are strong in most of us, but 
 to indulge them we must be in such a posi- 
 tion that society is accessible ; and there are 
 great numbers of able men who find them- 
 
Rational Encouragement. 173 
 
 selves severed from it either by distance, by 
 poverty, or by some kind of social prejudice, 
 so that they have to get on as well as they 
 can without it. What happens in such cases 
 is usually a gradual decrease in the crav- 
 ing for society, accompanied by a strength- 
 ening of the power of enduring solitude, until 
 finally there is hardly any sense of privation. 
 For this, however, it is absolutely necessary 
 that other faculties should be exercised, and 
 that the lonely man should have other inter- 
 ests, were it only in looking after flocks and 
 herds. He ought to have to do with living 
 creatures of some kind, even quadrupeds, and 
 to see fresh faces from time to time, though 
 they pass by the solitude of his life as ships 
 pass some islet in the ocean. 
 
 The craving for muscular exercise is strong 
 in a healthy boy, who feels uneasy if you fix 
 him to a seat, particularly if he has a Latin 
 book before him. As he grows older the poor 
 lad becomes a clerk, and gets, perhaps, a walk 
 through the streets to the office, the arms be- 
 ing slightly exercised by swinging them, or by 
 carrying an umbrella. A sedentary existence 
 has, however, so far diminished the craving 
 for muscular exertion that the once active boy 
 
1 74 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 now frequently takes the omnibus, and in 
 middle age, when a well-trained man thinks 
 nothing of walking a few miles, he takes it 
 every day. By this time he has no craving 
 for exercise at all, and, though deprived of it, 
 does not suffer from the privation, except in- 
 directly, through the diminution of his phys- 
 ical powers generally, which he accepts as 
 inevitable at his years. I do not set him up 
 as an example of an eminent degree of happi- 
 ness, far from it ; I only say that his ex- 
 istence is more supportable than it would be 
 if he had the need for muscular activity that 
 torments a newly caught and still untamed 
 animal in its cage. His case is like that of 
 ladies who may once have been romping girls, 
 but who, in middle age, content themselves 
 with the motions of a carriage so well hung 
 on responsive springs, and so softly cush- 
 ioned, that whatever exercise they extract 
 from it resembles that of pictorial goddesses 
 reclining on a cloud. Yet, even these rich 
 ladies are not wholly miserable ; their faces 
 wear an aspect of placid resignation to their 
 lot. 
 
Some Real Experiences. 175 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 SOME REAL EXPERIENCES. 
 
 IT may be safely assumed that people know 
 whether they are happy or not. We may 
 accept their testimony on that point quite 
 simply, without inquiring whether, in their cir- 
 cumstances, it is reasonable for them to be 
 happy or the contrary. It seems to me that 
 all testimony of this kind is interesting when 
 we know it to be sincere. The sum of it usu- 
 ally is that the experienced person would be 
 happy if or might have been happy without 
 this or that unfortunate impediment. 
 
 The following experiences are all real, and 
 stated, I believe, in each case, with perfect 
 candor. I am careful to prevent recognition 
 by giving no clue to the persons, some of 
 whom are still living. 
 
 " My experience," said an old gentleman to 
 me, " has been that I never could succeed in 
 getting the special kind of happiness I had 
 
176 The Quest of Plappiness. 
 
 wanted or hoped for, but that other kinds of 
 happiness which I did not want and had never 
 hoped for were supplied to me, in the course 
 of life, most lavishly and abundantly. I there- 
 fore ended by discovering, though it took me 
 a long time to make the discovery, that the 
 right way to enjoy the happiness within my 
 reach was not to form an ideal of my own and 
 be disappointed when it was not realized for 
 that it never was but to accept the oppor- 
 tunities for enjoying life which were offered 
 by life itself from year to year and from day 
 to day. Since I took things in this temper, I 
 have enjoyed really a great amount of happi- 
 ness, though it has been of a kind entirely 
 different from anything I ever anticipated or 
 laid plans for when I was young." He looked 
 back upon life as, on the whole, very well 
 worth living, and enjoyed it still heartily in his 
 old age, but felt no desire to live it over again 
 and accepted the inevitable and natural ending 
 of it with perfect resignation. 
 
 I lately lost a friend who had lived to a very 
 advanced age and whom I had known for forty 
 years. On my observing to him that what 
 seemed to me most unsatisfactory in human 
 life was the frequency with which, in the ordi- 
 
Some Real Experiences. 177 
 
 nary course of nature, men are punished for 
 having done right, he answered that there was 
 a sort of compensation, as they got so many 
 good things they had done nothing to deserve. 
 This, he said, was his own case. Although he 
 had incurred undeserved odium for his philo- 
 sophical opinions and so had been punished 
 socially for being honest, he still enjoyed the 
 full benefits of contemporary civilization which 
 he had done nothing, in the material sense, to 
 advance. He therefore struck a sort of 
 balance, and finding that, on the whole, the 
 sum of benefits was in his favor, he accepted 
 the injustice of his contemporaries without 
 complaint, and found it possible to enjoy hap- 
 piness in spite of it. 
 
 (Perhaps I may add my own reply to my 
 friend's theory. I said that he was able to 
 enjoy happiness because the injustice he suf- 
 fered from was limited to mere odium, but 
 that in the earlier ages it would have passed 
 into active and unrelenting persecution for 
 which the general benefits of civilization would 
 not have compensated him. If I were burn- 
 ing at the stake it would be a small satis- 
 faction to know that the ingenuity of the 
 Americans had invented for themselves a deli- 
 
1 78 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 cious variety of cooling drinks. And even 
 when, in the ordinary ways of nature, a man 
 suffers from excruciating disease, he can find 
 little consolation in the thought that the 
 pleasures of life would be inexhaustible if 
 only he were at liberty to enjoy them.) 
 
 Another old gentleman places happiness 
 entirely in occupation of which he has always 
 found an abundance, both in professional work 
 and in studies. " I have always found life 
 most interesting," he said, " and I can see no 
 reason why its interest should ever end." On 
 my inquiry if he made a clear distinction 
 between pleasant occupation and hard work, 
 his answer was that by occupation he did not 
 mean toil, and that he had never looked upon 
 toil as conducive to happiness in any way. 
 Now, it is unfortunately true that the occupa- 
 tions of most people who have to earn a liv- 
 ing are either toilsome or else tedious. My 
 friend's own case had been exceptionally fortu- 
 nate ; both his professional work and his pri- 
 vate studies had afforded an ample field for 
 the exercise of his extraordinary mental force. 
 In old age and retirement, when his practical 
 energy had diminished, his former pursuits 
 had left a rich material for reflection and in- 
 
Some Real Experiences. 179 
 
 vestigation in a leisure that he intensely 
 appreciated. 
 
 A well-preserved old Frenchman told me 
 that the mere boon of life itself appeared to 
 him infinitely precious. His own happiness 
 was in seeing and thinking, perhaps more 
 especially in seeing. He enjoyed these pleas- 
 ures intensely, even in age, notwithstanding 
 the anxieties and humiliations which in his 
 case had accompanied a transition from easy 
 circumstances to poverty. On the whole, 
 he had enjoyed his existence on earth and 
 should leave this world with the greatest 
 regret, though fully assured of another and 
 still more interesting existence in a future 
 state. 
 
 I have met with several other instances of 
 people who in their old age, and when the 
 time of illusions might be supposed to have 
 passed away, still spoke of happiness as a 
 reality, but I have observed remarkable differ- 
 ences in the mere "love of living" which 
 seems to be a passion in itself quite indepen- 
 dently of the degree of pleasantness that 
 an outsider would attach to the particular 
 existence in question. When the passion 
 is strong, life will in any case seem prefer- 
 
1 80 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 able to non-existence ; but when it is feeble, 
 the greatest luxuries and advantages are in- 
 sufficient to attach people to our world, and 
 the most seductive descriptions of it fail to 
 persuade them. 
 
 An old lady who had often suffered from a 
 nervous ailment that was accompanied, whilst 
 it lasted, by a profound depression of spirits, 
 told me that in spite of this she had cheerful 
 views of life and was fully persuaded of the 
 general preponderance of happiness. She 
 herself derived constant and intense satisfac- 
 tion from the beauties of nature and from the 
 little she knew of the wonderful order of the 
 Universe. In this way she escaped from her- 
 self, except in her hours of gloom, when she 
 was imprisoned, for the time, in her own 
 afflicted personality. 
 
 Occasional melancholy is not inconsistent 
 with a preponderance of happiness ; indeed, it 
 is quite possible to be happy and melancholy 
 at the same time, as a landscape may be both 
 beautiful and sad, or as a piece of music may 
 pass from a major to a minor key and be 
 equally harmonious in both. 'Sir John Lub- 
 bock tells us, in the preface to his " Pleasures 
 of Life," that he himself is " naturally rather 
 
Some Real Experiences. 181 
 
 prone to suffer from low spirits," yet no one 
 can more thoroughly appreciate the lavish 
 abundance of the materials for happiness with 
 which we are surrounded on all sides and 
 which less observant intellects so commonly 
 neglect. 
 
 Much more gloomy views have sometimes 
 been communicated to me. One friend stead- 
 ily maintains that it is impossible for anybody 
 to be happy after the age of thirty-five. Why 
 fix the time of life in such a trenchant and 
 decided manner? On mentioning this to a 
 lady I received the rather saddening answer 
 that she agreed with my friend, but pro- 
 posed as an amendment the insertion of the 
 words " or before," so that the sentence 
 might read as follows : " It is impossible for 
 any one to be happy, after or before, the 
 age of thirty-five." 
 
 One of my friends, who is a bachelor, affirms 
 that it is not possible for any bachelor to be 
 happy. But I have another friend with a much 
 longer experience of celibacy who opines that 
 the very first condition of happiness is complete 
 exemption from conjugal and paternal respon- 
 sibilities. I should say, as to all cases resem- 
 bling one or the other of these two, that the 
 
1 82 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 only error is to make the statement general in- 
 stead of limiting it strictly to the speaker's 
 own personal experience. Each of us is the 
 best possible authority about his own happi- 
 ness, but not worth listening to as to that of 
 others, except when he speaks simply from un- 
 prejudiced observation, as I am trying to do in 
 the present volume. We ought not to attrib- 
 ute our own experience to others, or suppose 
 that they feel as we do. 
 
 There is no pessimism as to the present life 
 more profound than that of some religious 
 people who condemn it because it does not an- 
 swer to a sufficiently pure and elevated ideal. 
 They forget that our present life is not an ideal 
 but a reality, and that to expect in reality the 
 qualities of imaginative poetry is a mistake in 
 criticism. Reality has its own qualities, which 
 are chiefly those of inexhaustible interest and 
 abundance ; but it can never possess the ideal 
 qualities of purity and perfection. As to this, 
 I remember an old lady of moderate but per- 
 fectly independent fortune and the sincerest 
 Christian opinions, who told me in a moment 
 of absolute candor that in her view the only 
 reason for enduring the present life lay in the 
 hope of a better one to come after it. As for 
 
Some Real Experiences. 183 
 
 the existence known to mankind, even when 
 taken at its best, she did not consider it prefer- 
 able to annihilation. The truth is that she had 
 been led to underestimate our earthly happi- 
 ness by allowing her mind to dwell too contin- 
 uously on an ideal existence neither embittered 
 by disappointment nor darkened by the appre- 
 hension of death. 
 
 The lack of desire for life which in this case 
 applied to our earthly existence only, is in some 
 cases, I think I may truly say, in an increas- 
 ing number of cases applied to the future 
 state itself. One philosophic friend has con- 
 fessed to me that he cannot have any desire 
 for a future life in general without possessing 
 accurate information as to the details of his 
 own personal future. He illustrated the sub- 
 ject by supposing an offer made to live over 
 again as a human being. " I might possibly," 
 he said, "accept such an offer if the exact 
 nature of my second human life were clearly 
 explained to me in every detail, and if it 
 seemed positively desirable ; but if the offer 
 were only that I should take a new ticket 
 in the lottery of human life in general, with all 
 its chances of misery and misfortune, I should 
 think it more prudent to decline." In this case 
 
184 The Qiiest of Happiness. 
 
 it is evident that the natural passion for living 
 must have been feeble, for when it is vigorous 
 people will accept any kind of human existence, 
 however intolerable, provided only that they 
 may live and not die. 
 
 Would you consent to live your own life over 
 again, exactly as you have lived, and in every 
 particular ? This is very different from having 
 the experience of a second and different hu- 
 man life with all its freshness of interest. Is 
 any one willing to go through his own life 
 again as a conscientious reader will study a 
 classical author for a second time, without 
 omitting a single word ? The willingness to 
 do this is extremely rare, but there are in- 
 stances of it. One of my friends told his 
 eldest son at the age of eighty, that if it were 
 offered to him to live over again exactly as he 
 had lived he would gladly accept the offer. 
 The reader probably supposes that this man's 
 existence had been peculiarly exempt from 
 evils. On the contrary, he had known some of 
 the worst evils that can possibly happen to 
 humanity. He had been utterly ruined both 
 in purse and health, though he afterwards 
 prospered and recovered. After a happy 
 marriage he had known the long, sad soli- 
 
Some Real Experiences. 185 
 
 tude of the widower. He had been over- 
 burdened with family charges, both in his 
 own house and out of it. The intensity of 
 intolerable anxiety had brought on paralysis. 
 His home life had been poisoned by the dread 
 of famine, and his business life by the shadow 
 of impending bankruptcy. Yet he would have 
 gone through it all again for the pleasure of 
 living once more the earlier and the later 
 happy days! 
 
 When people are too happy in the good 
 things that they have, they take to wishing for 
 something entirely different. This tendency 
 may be a provision of Nature against premature 
 restfulness and stagnation. An acquaintance 
 tells me that his happiness, otherwise almost 
 complete both -before and since his marriage, 
 has been spoiled by his political ambition. 
 Whenever great political events are taking 
 place he longs to have an active share in them, 
 even in foreign countries where an Englishman 
 can do nothing. Many people in our age of 
 culture are making themselves unhappy be- 
 cause, though living in perfect comfort on 
 private means, they are anxious to "become 
 celebrated in literature, or they waste the pre- 
 cious daylight in hopeless efforts to paint pic- 
 
1 86 The Quest of Happiness. 
 
 tures, although there is not the slightest 
 necessity for them either to write or paint. I 
 rather think that towards the close of the 
 nineteenth century it is the art of painting 
 that has produced more unhappiness than 
 any other occupation by the misemployment 
 of time and by the poignant sense of dissatis- 
 faction that follows after futile and unsuccess- 
 ful endeavors. 
 
 Not one of the examples hitherto quoted is 
 taken from my own experience, and to prevent 
 misunderstanding I will now state as frankly as 
 may be possible in a few words what that ex- 
 perience has been. Happiness enough, and 
 much more than I had ever expected, but very 
 various in character, and always very difficult 
 to keep. I mean that the mere blind force of 
 circumstances made it difficult to retain the par- 
 ticular kind of happiness that I enjoyed at a 
 particular time and which (being very conserv- 
 ative by nature) I should have desired to retain 
 much longer. It is true that the lost happiness 
 has every time been replaced by another very 
 different from it, and which I learned to value 
 later, but the effect on me has been as if an 
 interesting volume were snatched out of my 
 hands when I was in the middle of it, and 
 
Some Real Experiences 187 
 
 another substituted, quite as interesting, but 
 not what I wanted at the time. I well know 
 that all happiness must be imperfect, and this 
 is the nature of its imperfection in my own 
 case. 
 
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 er works 
 
 which treat of the Intellectual Life and of Art, although those are admirable in their way. 
 But 'The Unknown River,' 'Chapters on Animals,' and 'The Sylvan Year,' have a sim- 
 plicity, a delicacy, a depth of feeling, and a wealth of literary beauty that are very rarely found 
 united." Boston Correspondent of the Worcester Spy. 
 
 THE SYLVAN YEAR AND THE UNKNOWN RIVER. 
 
 Two volumes in one. i2mo. Price #2.00. 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 THOUGHTS ABOUT ART. New Edition, Revised, with 
 
 Notes and an Introduction. " Fortunate is he who at an early age knows what 
 art is." GOETHE. Square izmo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " The whole volume is adapted to give a wholesome stimulus to the taste for art, and to 
 place it in an intelligent and wise direction. With a knowledge of the principles, which it sets 
 forth in a style of peculiar fascination, the reader is prepared to enjoy the wonders of ancient 
 and modern art, with a fresh sense of their beauty, and a critical recognition of the sources of 
 their power." New York Tribune. 
 
 A PAINTER'S CAMP. A New Edition, in i vol. i6mo. 
 
 Price $1.50. Square 1 2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " If any reader whose eye chances to meet this article has read ' The Painter's Camp,' by 
 Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, he will need but little stimulus to feel assured that the same 
 author's work, entitled 'Thoughts about Art,' is worth his attention. The former, I confess, 
 was so unique that no author should be expected to repeat the sensation produced by it. Like 
 the 'Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,' or the ' Swiss Family Robinson,' it brought to maturer 
 minds, as those do to all, the flavor of breezy out-of-door experiences, an aroma of poetry 
 and adventure combined. It was full of art, and art-discussions too ; and yet it needed no 
 rare technical knowledge to understand and enjoy it." Joel Benton. 
 
 "They ('A Painter's Camp' and ' Thoughts about Art') are the most useful books that 
 could be placed in the hands of the American art public. If we were asked where the most 
 intelligent, the most trustworthy, the most practical, and the most interesting exposition of 
 modern art and cognate subjects is to be found, we should point to Hamerton's writings." 
 The Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 THE UNKNOWN RIVER : An Etcher's Voyage of Discov- 
 ery. With an original Preface for the American Edition, and Thirty-seven Plates 
 etched by the Author. One elegant 8vo volume, bound in cloth, extra, gilt, and 
 gilt edges. Price $6.00. 
 
 " Wordsworth might like to come back to earth for a summer, and voyage with Philip Gil- 
 bert Hamerton down some ' Unknown River' ! If this supposition seem extravagant to any 
 man, let him buy and read 'The Unknown River, an Etcher's Voyage of Discovery,' by 
 P. G- Hamerton. It is not easy to write soberly about this book while fresh from its presence. 
 The subtle charm of the very title is indescribable ; it lays hold in the outset on the deepest 
 romance in every heart ; it is the very voyage we are all yearning for. When, later on, we are 
 told that this 'Unknown River' is the Arroux, in the eastern highlands of France, that it 
 empties into the Loire, and has on its shores ancient towns of historic interest, we do not quite 
 believe it. Mr. Hamerton has flung a stronger spell by his first word than he knew." 
 Scribner's Monthly. 
 
 CHAPTERS ON ANIMALS. With Eight Illustrations by 
 
 J. VEYRASSAT and KARL BODMER. Square i2mo. Price 2.00. 
 
 " This is a choice book. Only such a man as Hamerton could have written it, \yho, by virtue 
 of his great love of art, has been a quick and keen observer of nature, who has lived with and 
 loved animal nature, and made friends and companions of the dog and horse and bird. And 
 of such, how few there are ! Mr. Hamerton has observed to much purpose, for he has a curious 
 ympathy with the ' painful mystery of brute creation,' as Dr. Arnold called it. He recognizes 
 he beauty and the burden of that life which is bounded by so fine and sensitive a mortality. 
 He finds in the uses of the domestic animal something supplementary to his own manhood, 
 and which develops both the head and heart of the good master. > We have been often reminded 
 ot Montaigne in reading this book, as we always associate him with his cat. " Boston Courier. 
 
 2 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 THE LIFE OF J. M. W. TURNER, R. A. Square 12 mo. 
 
 Price $2.00. 
 
 " We have found his volume thoioughly fascinating, and think that no open-minded reat'ef 
 of the ' Modern Painters ' should neglect to read this ' Life ' In it he will find Turner 
 dethroned from the pinnacle of a demi-god on which Ruskin has set him (greatly to the 
 artist's disadvantage), but he will also find him placed on another reasonably high pedestal 
 where one may admire him intelligently and lovingly, in spite of the defects in drawing, the 
 occasional lapses of coloring and the other peculiarities, which are made clear to his observa- 
 tion by Mr. Hamerton's discussion." Boston Courier. 
 
 ETCHING AND ETCHERS. Illustrated with Etchings 
 
 printed in Paris under the supervision of Mr. HAMERTON. A new, revised, and 
 enlarged Edition. Svo. Cloth, gilt and black. Price $5.00. 
 
 " We are not in the habit of overpraising publishers or authors, but we have no hesitation 
 in saying that Mr. Hamerton's 'Etching and Etchers' will henceforth deserve to have, and 
 certainly obtain, a place in every gentleman's library in the country who can afford to buy the 
 book. The subject is treated so conscientiously, there is such a maturity and repose of thought 
 and exposition, and in every page, whether you agree or disagree, so much to think over with 
 luxurious reflection, besides which the illustrations are so valuable and delicately chosen for 
 the object in view, that the book rather resembles the mediaeval labors of life-long devotion, 
 than a nineteenth-century forty-steam-power of ephemeral production." The Spectator. 
 
 THE GRAPHIC ARTS: A Treatise on the Varieties of 
 
 Drawing, Painting, and Engraving in Comparison with each other and with Nature. 
 Square izmo. Price 2.00. 
 
 " Few books have issued from the American press of more deserved and general interest 
 and value. The volume displays a vast amount of artistic knowledge and research, and a 
 thorough familiarity with all the literature of the subject, and with general literature as well, 
 besides showing his own conspicuous and graceful literary accomplishment. It is a volume 
 most to be welcomed, however, for its probable effect in widening the respect for graphic art 
 in its various forms through making men and women of some literary culture better acquainted 
 with its reason and method as well as its beauty. " Chicago Times. 
 
 ROUND MY HOUSE. Notes of Rural Life in France in 
 
 Peace and War. Square i2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " Whatever the subject he chooses, and he is at home with a good many, Mr. Hamerton is 
 pretty sure to write an entertaining book, and this one, which gives an account of his life in 
 France, is no exception. He takes the reader into his confidence, and tells him just how hard 
 it was to find exactly the sort of house he wanted. . . . After describing this tempting place, 
 the author goes on to give his readers just that full record of what he saw in his dai'y life, 
 which is most interesting and useful to an outsider. The merit of this part is, that it so exactly 
 resembles the talk of a sensible man whose tact enables him to know just what his hearers 
 would like to hear." Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 WENDERHOLME: a Tale of Yorkshire and Lancashire. 
 
 Square 1 2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " To those who are familiar with other works by Mr. Hamerton, it may be sufficient, in a 
 general way, to say that ' Wenderholme' is characterized by the same thoroughness, the same 
 simplicity, the same artistic flavor that make ' Round my House' so delightful ; by the same 
 love of nature, the same appreciation of the beautiful, the same refinement that mark 'The 
 Unknown River' and ' A Painter's Camp; ' and there are not wanting evidences of the wide 
 reading, the proofs of culture and earnestness that are conspicuous iu ' Intellectual Life.' "' 
 Cincinnati, O. t Times. 
 
MR. HAMERTON'S WORKS. 
 
 FRENCH AND ENGLISH: A COMPARISON. Square i2mo. 
 
 Price $2.00. 
 
 "As its title indicates, it is in the nature of a comparison; but while its plan accommodates 
 itself to this indication, it makes no attempt to do so stiffly. On the contrary, its treatment 
 is delightfully free and easy. The scope of the work may be gathered from the fact that the 
 comparison of the two peoples refers to their education, patriotism, politics, religion, virtues, 
 custom, society, success, and variety,, this last implying their diversity as peoples, that is, 
 the degrees in which portions of them vary from the common type. But this enumeration 
 utterly fails to give any adequate idea of the intimate knowledge, the multiplicity of details, 
 the shrewd observation of a multitude of matters, and the kindly criticism of a thousand 
 points, which have contributed to make this a most readable book. The subject of the volume 
 is intrinsically interesting, but it is rendered additionally so by the graceful and easy method of 
 its presentation. There is everywhere evidence of the author's extensive knowledge of litera- 
 ture, and his close observation of men, institutions, and manners. At the same time, the 
 topics which come within his range are of the highest importance, and such as are now attract- 
 ing the widest attention. There is not a dull statement nor an uninstructive observation in 
 the book, and in it Mr. Hamerton has made a valuable addition to the volumes on kindred 
 subjects with which he has already delighted readers." Exchange. 
 
 THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS. 121110. $2.00. 
 
 " I know by my own experience, and by the experience of many others, that the provision for 
 our happiness, even in this world, is most abundant, and that we can generally enjoy it on two 
 conditions, the first of which is that we learn to accept contentedly a sort of felicity that does 
 not correspond with our ideal notions of what ought to be, and the second that we make the 
 best of the present without requiring of it that it shall be the future also. The discontented 
 class of minds that are found in all ranks of society are like guests invited to a sumptuous and 
 superabundant banquet who are out of temper because the arrangements are not exactly what 
 they would have made if the ordering of it had been intrusted to themselves, and also because 
 their invitation, though the hour of departure is not precisely fixed, is yet not absolutely with- 
 out limits." From Author's Preface. 
 
 THE MOUNT AND AUTUN. Being a Narrative of a Visit 
 
 to the Site of a Gaulish City on Mount Beuvray, with a Description of the Neigh- 
 boring City of Autun, France. i2mo. $2.00. 
 
 " The major part of this volume records Mr. Hamerton's visit to the site of a Gaulish city 
 on Mount Beuvray, in that delightful portion of Southern France practically unknown to 
 tourists. It is not for the tourist, therefore, that Mr- Hamerton writes, but for the antiquarian 
 and the leisurely traveller. The narrative is full of charming bits of description of the life 
 and interests of the French country gentleman, his host, with the hobby of antiquarian re- 
 search, of the peasants, the country, and of the excavation of the buried city. 
 
 " In the account of the ancient Roman city Autun, its romanesque remains of towers, walls, 
 and theatre, its mediaeval cathedral, its renaissance buildings and its Moslem streets and houses, 
 Mr. Hamerton is at his best, and his narrative is picturesque and replete with information, 
 unfolding a chapter of great interest to archaeologists and students of art. Public Ledger. 
 
 PARIS. In Old and Present Times. Profusely illustrated with 
 
 woodcut engravings and 12 superb full-page etchings. 4to. $6.50. Library 
 
 Edition, with all the woodcuts. Svo. $3.00. 
 
 "Paris is so rich in historical association, so full of important buildings, so carefully planned 
 and arranged, so brilliantly decorated, and so perfectly cared for and kept up, in short, is so 
 clearly the nearest approach yet made to the ideal city, that one is never weary of reading 
 about it. Mr. Hamerton knows his Paris well, her history and her aspect, without being so 
 narrow in his exclusive devotion as the pure Paris-lover gets to be ; and he is a very observant 
 and sagacious judge of architectural effects, even if a little too catholic. The book is in nearV 
 all respects just what that fortunate person needs who means to reside in Paris a while, with 
 leisure to study it ; it can hardly fail to give him generally sound notions of what the famous 
 city has that is most admirable in its external aspects." New York Evening Post. 
 
 4 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 A SUMMER VOYAGE ON THE RIVER SAONE. With 
 
 152 illustrations by Joseph Pennell and the Author. 4to. Cloth, gilt. Price 
 $2.50. 
 
 " Mr. Hamerton has written his book in the easy style of familiar letters addressed to Mr. 
 Richmond Seeley, his 'friend and publisher.' These stand in the place of chapters, and 
 allow the writer greater latitude and more intimacy in the treatment of his subject. The voyage 
 divided itself naturally into two sections. The upper part of the river, from Corre to Chalons, 
 was navigated in a long, narrow barge, called a berricfion, as from the character of the river 
 and the lack of inns a small sailing-boat would have been objectionable. From Chalons to 
 Lyons, Mr. Hamerton descended the Saone, with his son and nephew, in his own steel cata- 
 maran, the Arar. The first part of the book is full of anecdotes of the travellers, their 
 ' Pilot,' their ' Patron,' their domestic arrangements on the barge, their methods of killing 
 time, and their passages of diplomacy and courtesy with bargemen, gendarmes, and other 
 officials. The whole history of their difficulties with the authorities on the question of sketch- 
 ing is given at full length. . . . Four maps and a hundred and forty-eight pen-and-ink draw- 
 ings illustrate the expedition. Of these, a hundred and two are original drawing,", by Mr. 
 Joseph Pennell, tweuty-four compositions by Mr. Pennell after Mr. Hamerton, nineteen 
 original works by Mr. Hamerton, while three are drawings by Mr. Hamerton afte/ Messrs. 
 Jules Chevrier and J. P. Pettitt. Mr. PennelFs work, as might be expected, shines in the 
 qualities of elegance, taste, and judicious finish. He seems to have surpassed all hia previous 
 achievements in daintiness of style and fineness of workmanship. He has found some quaint 
 compositions, chosen from unusual points of view, wherewith to illustrate the appearance of 
 the river seen from the end of a gang of barges." AiJtenceum. 
 
 -PORTFOLIO PAPERS. Square 121110. Price $2.00. 
 
 " Mr. Hamerton has done more to familiarize reading people with the principles and meth. 
 ods of art than any other writer. Mr. Ruskin's genius gave the impulse to a wide-spread 
 interest in art years ago ; and, by a very happy sequence, Mr. Hamerton has appeared to do 
 the secondary work of education. He lacks almost entirely Mr. Ruskin's genius; but he 
 possesses in large measure that sound judgment which Mr. Ruskin often conspicuously lacks, 
 a thorough knowledge ot his subjects, and the rare ability to write from the standpoint of his 
 readers. Mr. Hamerton's great quality as a teacher has been this ability to put himself in the 
 place of the man who is ignorant of art, and expound to him in the simplest fashion things 
 which to Mr. Hamerton himself must be obvious and elementary. In this volume, Mr. 
 Hamerton writes interestingly about five artists, Constable, Etty, Chintreuil, Guignet, and 
 Goya. The volume also contains 'Notes on ^Esthetics,' 'Essays,' and ^Conversations.' 
 Among the subjects 
 in the Fine Arts " 
 these 
 utterance 
 
 jects which appear in the division of ' Essays' arc ' Style,' ' Soul and Matter 
 ts,' 'The Nature of the Fine Arts,' and 'Can Science Help Art?' On all 
 subjects Mr. Hamerton is thoroughly at home ; and the book is, on the whole, the 
 nee of a large-minded and catholic critic and student." Christian Union. 
 
 IMAGINATION IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING. With many 
 
 illustrations and etched frontispiece. i2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " The late Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton's " Imagination in Landscape " is the most valu- 
 able of all his writings, regarded from the teacher's point of view ; for it deals largely with 
 problems which must be encountered in the education of children, although in form it is purely 
 critical, and is intended for the painter and the critic. To them it will be not only provocative 
 of thought ? but of enthusiasm ; for the whole book glows with the author's affection for his 
 art, and with his earnest resolve to penetrate its secrets. The book is small, but it contains 
 twenty essays and twenty-five pictures, examples of qualities mentioned in the text. The fron- 
 tispiece is a photogravure after Chattock's " Footbridge over the Wiley." Saturday Evening 
 Gazette. 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH PAINTERS. An Essay. 8vo. 
 
 Cloth. Full gilt. Price $3.00. Illustrated with the following 16 photogravures 
 after eminent French artists : 
 
 Dante and Beatrice Ary Scheffer. 
 
 Children of Edward IV Delaroche. 
 
 Death of Leonardo da Vinci Ingres. 
 
 Hunting the Wild Goat H. Vernet. 
 
 The Reapers Robert. 
 
 The Gardener Hamon. 
 
 Landscape Troyon. 
 
 Ploughing R. Bonheur, 
 
 Amateur of Pictures Meissonier. 
 
 The Kennel Decamps. 
 
 The First Visit Toulmouche. 
 
 Before the Attack Protais. 
 
 Return of the Flock Jacque. 
 
 My Eldest Sister Bouguereau. 
 
 The Prisoner G'erome. 
 
 The Reading Lesson E. Frtre. 
 
 PAINTING IN FRANCE. After the Decline of Classicism. 
 
 An Essay. 8vo. Cloth. Full gilt. Price #3.00. Illustrated with the following 
 14 photogravures after French artists : 
 
 The Flower Aubert. 
 
 The Confession Tissot. 
 
 Dressing for the Ball De Jonghe. 
 
 Saying Grace Henrieite Browne. 
 
 The Last Friend Janet Lange. 
 
 Fellah Woman Landelle. 
 
 Lighting the Beacon Le Poittemn. 
 
 Maiden of the Abruzzi Jalabert. 
 
 Little Beggar Girl Bntn. 
 
 Parting Ccmpte Calix, 
 
 Once on a Time Lobrichon. 
 
 Study of Trees Corot. 
 
 Deer at the River Courbet. 
 
 Highland Ferry Otto Weber. 
 
 The lamented death of Philip Gilbert Hamerton heightens the value of all his work, and 
 justifies the beauty of the edition of " Contemporary French Painters," if, indeed, there be any 
 need of justifying any degree of luxury when bestowed upon the work of a critic so conscien- 
 tious, so just, so well equipped for his work, and possessed of so much distinction. At a time 
 when a considerable group of Englishmen, tormented by the fear of not being beautiful, or at 
 least novel in expression, was compassing land and sea to find one new praeterite or s^me thrice 
 blessed obsolete compound relic of the Danish invasion, and while their worshippers were deaf- 
 ening all readers with demands for reverence, Mr. Hamerton made himself a style in which the 
 severest of critics can find nothing affected, but which is more easily recognizable than that of any 
 of his painstaking contemporaries. Truth was the main interest with him, and style for truth's 
 sake first, and afterwards for its own; and so, his strength not being dissipated in vanity and 
 frivolity, was felt in undiminished force by the reader. In " Contemporary French Painters" 
 his subject was difficult, because it brought him into controversy with the pupils and disciples 
 of many of the artists whom he criticised, and sometimes he discovered that he had made 
 enemies in quarters where he had expected approbation. Nevertheless, he spoke the truth 
 steadily, and gradually place was made for him, until when death came it found him at the 
 head of his profession, and especially learned in French art. All the pictures are extraordinarily 
 good. One, a landscape by Troyon, is simply marvellous in the luminosity of its atmospheric 
 effects. This book is printed on paper which would have contented its author, and the plates 
 are on paper so heavy that they could be framed if desired. Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 6 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 MODERN FRENCHMEN. Five Biographies : Victor Jacque* 
 
 mont, Traveller and Naturalist ; Henri Perrevve, Ecclesiastic and Orator ; Frangois 
 Rude, Sculptor ; Jean Jacques Ampere, Historian, Archaeologist, and Traveller; 
 Henri Regnault, Painter and Patriot. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. Uni- 
 form with " The Intellectual Life," c. Square i2mo. Price #2.00. 
 
 " Philip Gilbert Hamerton has the faculty (not common to all authors) of making every- 
 thing he touches interesting. Best known as a writer on art, his works upon that subject have 
 come to be recognized as standards. His novels and essays are always full of meat, and his 
 works generally are characterized by a fairness and impartiality which give them peculiar 
 value. His latest work, 'Modern Frenchmen,' is made up of five biographies." Boston 
 Transcript. 
 
 HUMAN INTERCOURSE. Square i2mo. Price 2.00. 
 
 " He has the art of presenting to our minds a hundred paths into which every subject opens. 
 In writing about ' Human Intercourse,' Mr. Hamerton has the always significant facts of 
 
 human nature to deal witn, tnose eternally interesting creatures, men ana women. . . . 
 Occasionally, too, there are sentences that suggest by their felicity the rhythm of poetry. Better 
 than all, in this, as in every one of Mr. Hamerton's works, we feel that we are dealing with 
 nan who, besides his grace, his wit, or his keen observation, is always on the side of simple 
 
 Inded faith in " 
 elphia Press. 
 
 truth and purity of Hying, and possesses a high-minded faith in the power of the Best, and a 
 determination to aid in its final victory." Philadelphia 
 
 LANDSCAPE. Square 12 mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " Mr. Hamerton in sending to his publishers, Messrs. Roberts Brothers, a complete set of 
 proofs for the library edition, says: ' I have done all in my power to make " Landscape" a 
 readable book. It is not mere letter-press to illustrations, or anything of the kind, but a book 
 which, I hope, anybody who takes any interest in landscape would be glad to possess.' . . . 
 The subject is treated from all sides which have any contact with art or sentiment, from the 
 side of our illusions ; our love for nature ; the power of nature over us ; nature as subjective ; 
 verbal description, 'word-painting;' nature as reflected by Homer, as the type of Greek 
 nature-impression ; by Virgil or Latin, Ariosto or Mediaeval ; then as studied by Wordsworth 
 and Lamartine, as types of English and French ; from its relation to the various graphic arts, 
 its characteristics in Great Britain and in France, and from the geography of beauty and art. 
 Mountains are weighed in the art balances ; lakes, brooks, rivulets, and rivers in their degrees 
 of magnitude. Then man's work on rivers and their use in art are considered ; then trees, 
 under their various aspects ; then the effect of agriculture on landscape, of figures and animals, 
 and of architecture. ' The two immensities,' sea and sky. conclude." The Nation. 
 
 Mr. Hamerton's Works (not including "Etchers and Etching," 
 " Paris," " Painting in France," " Contemporary French Painters," 
 and "A Summer Voyage on the Saone") may be had in uniform 
 binding. I7vols. Square I2mo. Cloth, price $34.00 ; half calf, 
 price $68.00. A cheaper edition, 17 vols., i6mo, cloth, Oxford style, 
 $21.25 ; cloth, imitation half calf, $25.50. 
 
 For sale by all booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, on receipt of adver- 
 tised price, by 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 Boston. 
 7 
 
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S WORKS. 
 
 THE EARTHLY PARADISE. 
 
 & <E0IIectf0n 0! ales in Uerse. 
 
 Parts I. and II Vol. I. 
 
 PROLOGUE, MARCH, APRIL, MAY, JUNE, JULY, and AUGUST, 
 
 containing the Stories of 
 
 The Wanderers. The Writing on the Image. 
 
 Atalanta's Race. The Love of Alcestis. 
 
 The Man born to be King. The Lady of the Land. 
 
 The Doom of King Acrisius. The Son of Crcesus 
 
 The Proud King. The Watching of the Falcon. 
 
 Cupid and Psyche. Pygmalion and the Image. 
 
 Ogier the Dane. 
 
 Part III. Vol. II. 
 
 SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, and NOVEMBER, containing the Stories of 
 The Death of Paris. The Man who Never Laughed 
 
 The Land East of the Sun and Again. 
 
 West of the Moon. The Story of Rhodope. 
 
 Accontius and Cydippe. The Lovers of Gudrun. 
 
 Part IV. Vol. III. 
 
 DECEMBER, JANUARY, and FEBRUARY, EPILOGUE, and L'ENVOI, 
 
 containing the Stories of 
 
 The Golden Apples. The Ring given to Venus. 
 
 The Fostering of Aslaug. Bellerophon in Lycia. 
 
 Bellerophon at Argos. The Hill of Venus. 
 
 COMPLETE IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 
 Crown 8vo edition. Green vellum cloth, bevelled boards, gilt top. Pricey 
 $6.00. Popular edition. i6mo. Cloth, neat. Price, $4.50. 
 
 The Life and Death of Jason. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50. 
 Love is Enough ; or, The Freeing of Pharamond. A MORALITY. 
 
 Crown 8vo edition. Green vellum cloth, bevelled boards, gilt 
 
 top. Price, $2.00. i6mo edition. Cloth, neat. Price, $1.25. 
 The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems. Crown 8vo. 
 
 Green vellum cloth, bevelled boards, gilt top. Price, $2.00. 
 'The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs 
 
 Small 4to. Green vellum cloth, gilt top. Price, $2.50. 
 The -ffineids of Virgil. Done into English Verse. Small 4to. 
 
 Cloth. Price, $2.50. 
 
 Hopes and Fears for Art. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25. 
 News from Nowhere ; or, An Epoch of Rest. Being some chap- 
 
 ters from a Utopian romance. With a drawing by Walter Crane, 
 
 entitled "Labour's May-Day." i6mo. Price, $1.00. 
 The Lovers of Gudrun. With Frontispiece from Design by 
 
 Billings. i6mo. Price, #1.00. 
 
 Mailed, postpaid, by ike Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
 
A. CHARMINO OIKT BOOK. 
 
 A SUMMER VOYAGE 
 ON THE RIVER SAONE. 
 
 BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE UNKNOWN RIVER," ETC. 
 
 WITH 162 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL 
 AND THE AUTHOR. 
 
 The material for this work was gathered during two voyages made 
 more than a year ago, in which a good deal of time was spent on the Saone, 
 which is navigable for 235 miles, and which Mr. Hamerton describes as a 
 charming river for boating, as its current is slow, while its scenery is always 
 either very beautiful or else very characteristic in ways that are impressive. 
 The first voyage was made in company with our American artist, Mr. Pen- 
 nell, in a canal-boat eighty-seven feet in length, which was temporarily 
 fitted up as a house-boat. The voyagers ascended the river from Chalon 
 to the highest point where it is navigable, and then returned. The second 
 voyage was made in Mr. Hamerton's own sailing-boat with his eldest son 
 and a nephew as his companions and crew, going from Chalon to Macon 
 and down to Lyons, and then back to Chalon again. These two voyages 
 together covered 470 miles, and were very leisurely done, opportunity being 
 afforded for all the sketching and writing that was desired. The volume 
 contains 148 illustrations and four maps, and is the joint work of the two 
 artists. Mr. Hamerton wrote the narrative, and to Mr. Pennell must be 
 credited most of the illustrations. Of these, 102 from nature are by Mr. 
 Pennell; there are also twenty-four copies by him from original pen- 
 sketches by Mr. Hamerton ; and twenty-two are pen-drawings by Mr. 
 Hamerton himself. 
 
 One handsome Quarto Volume. Cloth, gilt 
 PRICE .... $2.50. 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, 
 BOSTON. 
 
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. 
 
 An Autobiography (1834-1858), and a Memoir (1858-1894) by his Wife. 
 With a Portrait. Demy 8vo. Cloth. Price, $3.00. 
 
 Some ten years before his death, Mr. Hamerton began to write an autobiography, 
 at which he worked intermittently, only living to carry it as far as his twenty-fourth 
 year. But this was the year of his marriage, and Mrs. Hamerton has therefore 
 been able to carry on the narrative with intimate knowledge of all she relates. The 
 volume contains many of Mr. Hamerton's letters, and others of the greatest interest 
 from Mr. Robert Browning, Mr. G. F. Watts, Mr. Peter Graham, and Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson. 
 
 "Mr Hamerton's Autobiography (1834-58) fills about one-third oi a rather substantial 
 volume, and tells the story of the writer's life up to his twenty-fourth year. Fortunately, as 
 it happens, this year was the date of his marriage; so that Mrs. Hamerton, in the Memoir 
 by which she has supplemented her husband's too brief sketch, is enabled to take up the 
 thread of the narrative at the point where he dropped it. The volume thus forms a com- 
 plete and continuous life of a man to whom America owes much both of profit and pleasure. 
 We venture to say (with all deference to the fine rhapsodies of Mr. Ruskin) that Mr. Hamer- 
 ton's books have done more than those of any other writer to spread in this country a taste 
 for sound art and an insight into its principles." The Dial. 
 
 *' The Life of P. G. Hamerton must be considered one of the most interesting biog- 
 raphical works of the year. . . . Personally, Hamerton was a man of the highest character, 
 upright, courageous, magnanimous, and always willing to help others. The strongest praise 
 must be given to this most interesting and valuable book.*' The Sketch, London. 
 
 " Hamerton's memory is not likely to suffer from the mistakes of incompetent biog- 
 raphers. He seems destined to have only two of them, and they are quite the best that could 
 be selected. One is Hamerton himself; the other is his wife. The volume is the result of 
 their ioint labors, and a most interesting and valuable result it is." Saturday Evening 
 Gazette. 
 
 " A worthy monument to the memory of one whose life is a long record of honorable 
 industry and lofty endeavor. . . . One of the most just, sympathetic, and discriminating 
 critics of his generation." Sun. 
 
 " An unusually interesting book. . . . We surely never knew Hamerton as we know 
 him after enjoying this volume." Boston Journal. 
 
 " An uncommonly sane production. ... It would be sure to impress the reader with 
 a sense of its lucidity and its human health it portrays a man." New York Tribune. 
 
 At all Bookstores. Postpaid on Receipt of Price. 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
 
 8 
 
MR. MORRIS'S WORKS. 
 
 The House of the Wolfings. A Tale of the House of the Wolfings 
 and all the Kindreds of the Mark. Written in Prose and in 
 Verse. i2mo. Oxford style. $2.00. 
 
 The story, which is in a strong Homeric vein that immediately commands and 
 holds attention, takes us back to those far-off times when the Goths were contending 
 with the Romans. It is written in both prose and verse, and is thereby made more 
 continuously interesting for the general reader than if it were a purely epic poem. It 
 
 a far-distant past with a picturesque fidelity that is far more impressive than the bald 
 realism which too many believe now to be the highest art in story-telling. It has an 
 imaginative fervor, glow, and color which will cause it to be read and re-read by those 
 who wish to escape from the present into a world of romance and poetry. This 
 literary jewel, with its rich and appropriate setting, should be in the library of every 
 genuine book-lover. Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 The Story of the Glittering Plain. Which has been also called the 
 Land of Living Men, or the Acre of the Undying. I2tno. $1.50. 
 William Morris comes to us again with another of his delightful " sagas," full of 
 life and action and every essential human sentiment. He is a master of such produc- 
 tion, and does not betray himself at any point by a false note or by false color. . . . 
 The saga before us contains a story of happy life and prospective wedded joy broken 
 in upon by capture, of a long and varied search for his loved one by the knight of the 
 tale, of successful return from all dangers, and a final re-entrance into the hall of the 
 kindred in "Cleveland by the Sea." . . . This saga sings itself through from begin- 
 ning to end in a beautiful melody. The prose of it is like music, and the little inter- 
 ludes of song fit their places perfectly. The human life and circumstances of the saga 
 are drawn from ancient Northern times, though no definite sphere is entered; and 
 there is no attempt at historical suggestion, as in "The House of the Wolfings." 
 This is simply a sweet, touching saga of a brave, patient, faithful human love. 
 Public Opinion. 
 
 Poems by the Way. I2mo. $1.25. 
 
 Those who feared that Mr. William Morris would be made less of a poet by his 
 socialism have had ample reason to be disappointed. . . . The originality of this 
 volume is that it contains several poems telling us something which Mr. Morris has 
 hardly told us in print before. . . . The whole volume not only betokens a splendid 
 vitality of gift with surprises yet in store, but recalls at every turn that its author is 
 one of a famous fraternity, of whom one other still survives, and who have been 
 animated, despite all their differences, by a certain common spirit, and endowed with 
 a similar cunning in the craft of song. The Academy . 
 
 The Wood Beyond the World. In a crown 8vo volume, printed 
 on antique English paper, with decorative cover. Frontispiece 
 by E. Burne-Jones. $3.00. 
 
 The charm, or one of the charms, of this last book of his is more easily felt than 
 described, and is only felt in the feelings, we think, by those who are enamoured of 
 the invention which underlies all folk-lore, the element of fantasy, with or without a 
 seeming purpose, containing in itself its excuse for being, and are enamoured at the 
 same time of the simple, homely, idiomatic diction which characterized the early 
 chroniclers and romancers, and of which Malory's " Morte d' Arthur" is a fair 
 example. At the age of sixty, or thereabouts, he is still pouring out his lovely things, 
 more full of the glory of youth, more full of romantic adventure and romantic love, 
 than any of the beautiful poems in his first volume. By the side of this exhaustless 
 creator of youthful and lovely things, the youngest of the poets who have just appeared 
 above the horizon seems faded and jaded. Mail and Express. 
 
 Mailed, postpaid, by the Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
 
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