AS I WAS SAYING.
BY M. W. CONNOLLY.
How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson.
THERE is something admirably rugged and encouragingly
practical in the sentiments and philosophies of the older
writers that acts on the mind as a potent tonic when
wearied and weakened by the monotonous and anaemic
outpourings of the so-called philanthropists of the present
day. There is something energizing, thew-developing.
This is the age of pulling literature, of crocodile tears, of
simulated tenderness, of counterfeit sympathy, of cry and
clamor and plaint and protest. In politics we call this
practice calamity-howling, whether in tornado-swept
Kansas, blizzard-bitten Iowa or boss-ridden New York.
in literature it is mere charlatanry, mere scagliola, made
for sale. Hamlin Garland makes imaginary journeys
over "Traveled Roads" to tell us of the utter and
intolerable miseries of the Western farmers who live in sod
houses. Raising dollar wheat is not so bad, even in a
sod house. George Cable and Albion Tourges write
sentimental lies about the Southern negroes. Those at all
familiar with the facts know that no people on earth are
happier than the Southern negroes. Arthur Morrison
writes about "The Child of the Jago" and draws tears
from our eyes. Those who have seen the children of the
Jago fight and play, romp and riot would probably be
willing to trade health and peace of mind with any of
them. The list is too long or it might be interesting to
name others who write for the purpose of making people
discontented, to inflame jealousy or arouse envy. It will
be no trouble to recall a host of others. The politician
seeks to "remove the inequalities of life by wise and
salutary laws," meaning that he wants office. The "literary
feller" seeks "to educate the public mind and raise the
public conscience to a higher plane," meaning that he
wants to do the educating, incidentally, and to sell his
books, objectively. To complain that life is "often more
than sad enough, with its inequalities confronting us, its
gilded prizes and its squalors side by side, its burdens
and its trivialties pressing in upon the soul," as does
Marguerite Merington in a late and otherwise excellent
magazine article, is to strike a popular chord, but the
note is false and scabrous, the philosophy less than
commendable. Men are but children of a larger growth and,
like children of a smaller growth, they like to be petted
and pitied and told that the world is not treating them
fairly. No man, rich or poor, is contented, and he enjoys
being told that his failure to reach the goal of his
ambitions and fill to the brim his cup of pleasure is because
of the great impersonal world, or untoward and oppugning
circumstances have prevented him. He enjoys this
sort of thing so much that he will pay handsomely for it
and the charlatan finds a market for his wares. He does
not like the plain truth bluntly stated. No one does. We
do not admire those who wrestle and strive with us.
Nevertheless, they alone strengthen our muscles and,
hence—
. . .
Verily I say: "Ye who listen with credulity to the
whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom
of hope—who expect that age will perform the promises
of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will
be supplied by the morrow," need not attend to the history
of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, except for the passing
pleasure of the reading, because the story can be told in
fewer words, to wit: Happiness is a personal equation
—"what is one man's meat is another man's poison."
Rasselas found the Happy Valley irksome and intolerable.
There never has been a Happy Valley since that could
furnish continuous content to any one. The nearest
approach to happiness comes with juxtaposition to one's
tastes and aspirations. The simpler the tastes and the
less discursive the aspirations, the nearer happiness comes
and the longer it remains. Happiness does not come from
conditions or surroundings, nor are these conditions or
surroundings always understood. Actual conditions do
not reveal themselves to perpicacity much less to casual
observation. The multi-millionaire in his mansion or the
king on his throne, surrounded by all the comforts and
conveniences, all the marvelous treasures, all that is
pleasing to the eye and to the senses, may not be happy
—may be unhappy. The rustic who follows the plow
through furrowed fields, unkempt, clownish, toil-stained,
weary and overworked, may brawl raucous roundelay at
even-tide and enjoy the fullness of earthly bliss. His
neighbor similarly situated may suffer agonies because
his tastes and ambitions are higher. Those who imagine
"plow hands" have no ambitions to gratify know little
of life. Sometimes they aspire to be presidents, and
sometimes they gratify those aspirations, but they never know
happiness. They may be as wise as a dozen Solons, but
they can not provide happiness by legislation. They may
reach the summit of earthly glory and strive to seize the
fulgurant prize that lured them on, only to find a penumbra—
the shadow of a shade. And if conditions are actually
known they prove nothing, generally. Each case
must be specialized. Children and grown people, for that
matter, are subjected to involuntary fasts and oftimes go
hungry, in fact are always hungry, but they suffer less
and are healthier than those who are stuffed and pampered
and sated. The joy of eating when food comes compensates
for the previous scantmess of the fare. There are
deaths from insufficient alimentation; ten to one are the
deaths traceable to over-feeding. There is suffering for
lack of food. There is ten to one more suffering by gouty
and dyspeptic gourmands. The beggar shivers in the cold
for lack of clothing; there is ten to one more suffering from
over-swathing. For pain, actual, excrutiating; for pain
invincible, somber and unutterable, one proud woman
reduced to a last season's frock suffers more than twenty
arrayed in customary rags and tatters. God tempers the
wind to the shorn lamb, but not to the dowdy woman.
The occupant of the cottage or cabin as he hurries home
on Saturday night with his hard-earned store perhaps
envies the occupant of the mansion where lights burn
brightly and music fills the air, but the master of the
mansion may be driven to the verge of insanity in an
unequal contest to keep up appearances and a style of
living that is grinding his heart into dust. Gladly, he
thinks, he would court the modest shelter of the cottage
or cabin but, alas! sorrow and suffering, want and
wickedness might follow him there. From natal bed to
mortuary box happiness escapes us—the faster, the more we
pursue it.
We mistake appearances for realities and misbestow
our sympathy. Had some of the more tender-hearted
met Audubon when he returned from one of his trips in
the forests, his clothing in shreds, his shoes gone, travel-stained and unkempt, alms would have been unhesitatingly
bestowed. And how amused would the great man have
been! He was too great to have been irritated. If, as
it is claimed, human happiness is the aim and object of
philanthropists, they seek the unattainable and destroy
that which they would save. A sudden wrenching from
the one condition to another is misery. The eagle would
rather starve in his native forests than feast in a cage.
The Indian maiden who graduates at Carlisle and who
captures all the medals, returns to her blanket and the
dirt, dogs and squalor of her tribe as soon as she reaches
the reservation. There is a strain of the Huckleberry
Finn in all natures that resents a too sudden metamorphosis
and which will return to its rags, its back alley
and empty cask. Charlatans of the law and of literature
inculcate the idea that a change in conditions means the
acquisition of unqualified bliss, and they assume that the
poor are necessarily unhappy and endeavor to convince
them—not a difficult task, that it is the fault of someone
else that they are not rich! Folly! The hod-carrier
and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags,
who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in
squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never
experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant
grief, until they become possessed of money and mansions
and modern grandeur, only to find themselves coldly
isolated. Sudden wealth has made them too grand for their
former friends, it cannot secure them entrance into the
society which they would affect, or, if it does, they find
themselves ill at ease, out of place, miserable. Those who
imagine that all bliss comes from lucre or legislation know
little and are "ignorant of their own ignorance." They
do not know that "our own felicity we make is final, and
that through the cultivation of individual inherency and
personal sufficiency. They listen to the charlatans who, on
the plea of bringing balm, inflict incurable wounds; who
would bring happiness by sowing the dragon's teeth of
discontent. "Coal-Oil Johnny," who threw away hundreds of
thousands of suddenly acquired dollars, was a philosopher.
The money put him out of harmony with himself. It was
to him a curse. And he wisely rid himself of it. There
is peace and pleasure in the jangling discord and in the
pains of effort, a peace which, otherwise, the world can
not give, a pleasure found nowhere else; and this peace
and pleasure are not to be sought by effort; are not to
be attained by effort; but are found in the effort itself.
There is pleasure in dressing a field or in painting a house,
but not in the dressed field or in the painted house. In
other words, there is pleasure in individual assertiveness
and not in inertia. No doubt either Calypso or Circe was
more attractive than Penelope, but Ulysses was not
content. He had to continue his wanderings even to his own
home, and when he had killed of all the suitors and was
restored to his diplomatic spouse, there were doubtless
days when he wished himself back with the enchantress on
the lovely isle—days when he would have changed places
with his father, Sisyphus, and rolled the ever returning
stone with will and energy. Ease and passivity were a
torture to him.
A picture of life is painted by that wonderful artist,
Gabrielle d'Annunzio, in "The Triumph of Death." Yes,
I hear the hurtling of such missles as "decadent,"
"obscene," "vulgar," "impious." Nevertheless d'Annunzio
is one of the great masters. His pigments may be mud or
muck. His brush is the brush of an Angelo. His finished
product is life itself, breathing, pulsing life, through
which the blood rushes loud enough to be heard. Life in
all its phases, from the loftiest to the lowliest. Demetrius,
wealthy, scholarly, meditative, one would suppose
needed no legislation or literature to make him happy.
He possessed all the world had to give. "A mild,
meditative man, with a face full of virile melancholy, and a
single white curl in the center of his forehead among the
black hair, giving him an old appearance." He sought
earnestly and sedulously for the secret meaning of life.
He tried to reach and unravel its symbols and allegories;
he tried to interpret the furtive gestures which he beheld
in the shadows, and he passed into deeper shadows and
more oppresisve silences through the ghastly gates of
suicide, while his idiotic sister remained to chatter and
grimace. Jaconda remained gibbering and pleased with
the world and with herself. George saw this and he saw
many other things which he could not understand. He
saw "Oreste of Chapelles" firing the simple minds of the
people to fanaticism as he went up and down like a fury.
He saw the pilgrims at the sanctuary and the beggars and
cripples on his return from the sanctuary to Cassalbordino
—horrible monsters, not fashioned, or scarce fashioned in
God's image, and he saw that they had their families and
their belongings with them, that they piteously plead for
alms and that they danced and sung, cursed and caroused,
made merry over the deformities of each other, and
presented a phase of life wholly incomprehensible. Laws or
literature could not increase their happiness. Their
apparent miseries were not real. He saw Colas, ignorant,
stupid, superstitious, but content. He saw Candia, proud
of her fecundity, slaving, singing. He saw Favetta, the
young singer with the falcon-like eyes, the idol of her
friends, simple, modest, happy. He saw the peasants in
their mysterious rites "consecrating the nativity of
bread" in the harvest field. They needed neither laws
nor literature to improve their condition. They were the
happiest of mortals. And he saw the dark tragedies of
this remote world. Liberata carrying her dead child on
her head to the burial place. No laws or literature for
her, poor woman: her baby was dead and her reason was
gone. He saw Riccangela, the widow, on the beach, with
her large rough hands, pouring forth her heart in a wild
monody over the remains of her puny boy, who was
drowned, while the homicidal sea chanted a lugubrious
accompaniment or mocked the agony of the song. George
sought the meaning and the key to life's mysteries and
found them not. Subjective study and spiritual contemplation
drove him mad. They had driven his uncle Demetrious
mad. He recoiled from them and plunged into
life as he found it, endeavoring to extract from it the
honey of happiness, or at least, immunity from misery.
If carnalism could furnish content, one would think George
would have found it. Rich to opulence, young, idle, he
met Hippolyte, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold
in which were mingled perhaps a few tints of faded roses."
He won her and subjected her, "the bloodless, wounded
creature who used to submit with profound astonishment,
the ignorant and frightened creature who had given him
that fierce and divine spectacle—the agony of modesty
felled by vicious passion." He idolized her and idealized
her in the struggle for perfect bliss. He took her to the
deserted abbey and placed on "the summit of the high
marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the
light for centuries," where she burned before his eye in
the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love, and, as
he believed, illuminating the meditations of his soul.
Folly! His apotheosis was a farce. She developed, but
not spiritually. What he supposed was a pure flame of
love proved to be a base erotic fever. The bloom of
pudicity was brushed off. She acquired a strange power
over him; she, the once innocent and frightened creature.
"She possessed the infallible science and knew her lover's
most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move
them with a marvelous intuition of the physical conditions
that depend on them and their corresponding sensations
and their association and their alternatives."
And from the thing of beauty and light, seen with
enraptured eyes as she stood "on the summit of the marble
candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for
centuries, she became a loved and hated thing, "the flower
of concupiscence," "an instrument of low lasciviousness."
The union of these two, perfect in all outward appearances,
blessed with love and leisure, beauty and youth, and
all that wealth could buy, was a mocking and a delusion
because lacking in spirituality, because unsanctified and
unholy. It was a montrous tragedy, this union,
presented on a stage of ashes over a volcano. (Unions in
polite society, where forms are observed, laws obeyed and
customs followed, but where the moving impulse is sorbid,
where the marriage is for money or for social position, do
they, too, not drift toward mutual hate and abhorrence,
to divorce or death? I only ask the question. There
may be more Georges and Hippolytes in the world than
we care to admit). When at last he discovered his true
condition, when he realized that he was in her power
that he could not live with her or without her, that she
obstructed his way of life and his way to death, he caught
her in his arms and hurled both over the precipice upon the
rocks below, making a ghastly ending for a ghastly
tragedy. No law or literature could have brought happiness
to him. He sought it in the various ways, in every
way but the one, simple and only right way—the effort to
confer happiness on others. Frantic intoxications, the
culminations of carnal pleasures, which amount to
unspeakable ecstasies, are mere temporations which are followed
by lassitude, exhaustion and disgust, and these soon
turn to a fiercely implacable hate. The search for happiness,
when carried to the extreme, becomes a torture. The
desire for happiness is selfish, and selfishness is never
happy. Happiness dispensed is like bread cast upon the
water, and will return after many days. Those who seek it
stray from it. All laws and all literature that arouse the
spirit of discontent, of selfishness and of desire for happiness,
are vicious because they defeat the very object which
they seek to accomplish, and make people more miserable
than they were by increasing their capacity for suffering
without a coexistent power to gratify the desires aroused.
What is this George Eliot puts into the mouth of the
radical, Felix Holt? "This world is not a very fine place
for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up
my mind it shan't be the worse for me if I can help it.
They tell me I can't alter the world—that there must be
a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't
lie and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else
shall, for I won't—I will never be one of the sleeks dogs—
I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labor
and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw
myself from the rush and scramble for money and
position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and
say that mankind are benefitted by the push and scramble
in the long run, but I care for the people who are alive
now and will not be living when the long run comes. I
prefer to go shares with the unlucky."
Irrefragible philosophy! The true and the wise proceed
not to stir up the lees of passion and greed and avarice
and ambition. They remain with the world, go with
it in its devious ways and through its torturous windings,
removing the thorns and briars from before naked feet,
shielding the weak, sheltering the naked, encouraging and
dispensing light and hope and love. The true and wise
who love their fellows avoid strife and carnage, and
conflict with the ineluctable, but they meet the inevitable
calmly and courageously. They are superior to laws and
literature. They are supremely blest.
Memphis. Tenn., November 10.