HAPPINESS.
IF we ask ourselves why there is so much alloy in such popular enjoyments as those of a Bank Holiday, we suppose the answer would be, in nine cases out of ten, that there is always something aggressive about deliberate merry- making. In all the higher enjoyments, there is some mixture of anxiety, some shadow, some kind of pathos or doubtful hope. The theatres would draw very little with pure farce. To say nothing of tragedy, which probably gives a higher kind of delight than comedy, every good comedy must contain some darker threads if it is to interest men deeply. The very meaning of melodrama is that the pathos of real life is intentionally exaggerated in order to pierce the hearts of more or less hide- bound human beings. The most popular musk always has an undertone of pathos. And a novel with no element of sadness in it would never be popular. Men want to be re- minded (though not too vividly) of their worst anxieties and griefs, when they wish to feel to the utmost the range and intensity of their life. Noisy mirth soon wearies them. And the highest enjoyments are certainly those which, like that of gazing on new and impressive scenery, bring at least as much wonder and mysterious emotion into the mind as mere pleasure. It is the glacier, the avalanche, the terrific precipice, which excites the keenest feeling of exaltation, and which ex- cites that deepest feeling precisely because it casts a shadow over the heart. Take any great feat of oratory, and we shall find that it was the pathos or the passionate denunciation of evil motive, which constituted its highest charm. What would poetry be without its "lyrical cry," as Matthew Arnold called it ? What would sculpture be without its Niobes and its Laocoons ? what painting, without its Last Suppers, its martyrdoms, and its Crucifixions? Look where you will among the higher enjoyments of man, and you will always find a dark thread woven into the scenes which command the warmest appreciation. As blank as music without its minor key would be any kind of intellectual pleasure in which there were not many threads of melancholy association care- fully interwoven. It does not appear that man can ever find his highest happiness without being either reminded of past or led to anticipate future woe. Even the triumph is not perfect without its captives; even those who reap in joy revert fondly to having sown in tears. It does not seem that human happiness can be at its highest without at least a background of human fear or grief.
But when we talk of a dark background as if that were simply an artistic expedient for throwing out the brighter colours, we do great injustice to the part which the darker threads of human destiny play in widening, deepening, and exalting the whole sphere of human life. The great Greek critic spoke of tragedy as purifying men by pity and by fear ; and if he had spoken not merely of purifying, but of enlarging and exalting the whole scope of human nature by these agencies, he would have been even nearer to the truth. The real wearisomeness of the noisier enjoyments arises from their power to stupify and stun the finer nature o‘f men, from the tumultuousness of their gaiety, from the narrowness and exclusiveness and almost suffocating character of their mirth. Of two kinds of happiness, one of which morally intoxicates and takes full possession of the senses, while the other heightens them, intensifies the sympathies, stimulates the vision, and lends energy to the imagination, the latter is productive of far greater happiness, even though it makes use of elements of pain to enlarge the sense of power. Virgil was right when he made his hero console his companions for their sufferings by suggesting that a time might come when it would delight them to remember their sufferings, instead of merely re- newing the anguish. And be was right because that memory would be sure to bring with it much more of the impression of a new wealth of life than of the old dread of death. Human nature is half-unconscious, half- unfolded, half latent in all of us, in our earlier life. And that which makes the unconscious power conscious, which evolves that which is in germ, which turns latent into visible and measurable strength, is perhaps more often painful than wholly pleasurable. Noisy mirth, at all events, never effects this awakening. The shrill jollity of a crowd, the common loss of individuality in an ardour of convivial fellowship, gives no new sense of strength or capacity; much rather it benumbs whatever sense of strength and capacity there was in us before. It obliterates anxieties and troubles, but it obliterates also the self-conscious life of every acquired faculty, and benumbs afresh the half-born insight of awaken- ing power.
In truth, it is a great mistake of the psychologists to limit the definition of happiness to the satisfaction of desire. It should include what often involves much more pain than pleasure, much more torment and bewilderment than peace,—that awakening of higher wants, that yearning towards higher life, which is often more of a new summons to suffer than of a new experience of joy. There was a book reviewed in these columns not many months ago, which will illustrate very powerfully what we mean, that story of life beside what the late Mr. Disraeli termed "a melancholy ocean," which had more in it of the essence of both the .lowest and highest side of Celtic life,—the insatiable feeding on mere wind, the stirring of that passion for reality which will not be content with wind,—than all the recent discussions on Irish weakness and Irish idealism of which we have had so many. In " Grania ; or, the Story of an Island,"* Miss Lawless gave us uncommonly little story, but the. story that she did give was the best of all stories, the story with- out an end, and with hardly, indeed, more than a beginning. It was the story of the growth of the craving for the infinite and eternal in one heart that refuses to be fed on anything less than what is infinite and eternal, of the first stirrings and pangs of that awakening in another heart which is almost con- sumed by the spiritual fever and ague of an earthly passion, and the very faint prick of this new desire in a third heart that has hitherto known nothing but the empty and flatulent joy of immeasurable braggadocio and insatiable self-conceit. The little book is all the more striking for the complete absence of anything like " edification "; indeed, it is the de- lineation of ideal cravings by a writer who almost seems to doubt the possibility of their ever finding any permanent and adequate satisfaction. If happiness were only the satisfaction of desire, " Grania " might be called the story of the growth of unhappiness and of nothing else ; and yet it is the growth of an unhappiness which every discerning mind would in- finitely prefer to such satisfactions as were alone possible before the germs of that unhappiness were planted and watered and fostered into life. It is a story written almost by a pessimist, almost by one who despairs of the higher life whose growth she so subtly and powerfully de- lineates; and yet, for that very reason, it impresses us more than if it were the production of an eager spiritual faith. Here, in Inishmaan, the writer seems to say, you will find almost the dreariest kind of life of which this earth, outside the degraded and degenerate world of savage tribes, has any specimen. It is a life of the barest subsistence in every sense, physical or spiritual ; and yet it contains the saint who believes that all the pain and wretchedness are mere preparations for the infinite peace beyond ; the passionate woman who hardly realises the true exaltation and infini- tude of love in the course of her short life, and to whom even that love is a dreaming of dreams ; and finally, the emptiest of mere boasters, who feeds greedily on the east wind, who expatiates in rodomontade as if infinite illusion and infinite life were one and the same thing, though even to his inflated and wind-fed heart the prick of reality penetrates at last, and makes him sensible that there had been something beyond mere words within his reach, and that he had neglected to grasp it, in his craving for that in- digestible diet of vain self-flattery with which the Celtic mind at its lowest ebb is 80 prone to poison itself. " Grania" reads to some extent like the product of literary despair. It hardly holds out more than a faint hope that the awakening of this higher life will have any but a tragic end. But what it does make manifest with a singular vividness, is that the awakening of nobler desires implies a far higher pro- gress than the satisfaction of the lower, that the crumbling away of limited happiness is in some sense far more desirable than its perseverance, that an orgy of conviviality is the happiness of a spiritual pauper, and that even if there be no eternal hope within our reach, eternal hope,—not to say even eternal fear,—is infinitely better than that battening on sense and sound and smoke, with which the bottomless appetite of our too shadowy humanity so frequently strives to fill itself in vain.
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