CHAPTER XVII. The Happy Man

THE HAPPY MAN

Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very simple one. It is thought by many, among whom I think we must include Mr. Krutch, whom we considered in an earlier chapter, that happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do not believe that such things are genuine causes of either happiness or unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of one’s own herd. To some people parenthood also is essential. Where these things are lacking, only the exceptional man can achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavour therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centred passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such passions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centred upon ourselves: there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them.

One of the great drawbacks to self-centred passions is that they afford so little variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and is not felt to be so by the recipient.

What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self? So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centred and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine. Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble. If, for example, his trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful, and then proceed, by the kind of technique that we have considered in earlier chapters, to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously. If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinarily unfortunate in his circumstances. If fear is his trouble, let him practise exercises designed to give courage. Courage in war has been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and in intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.

What the objective interests are to be that will arise in you when you have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do not say to yourself in advance, “I should be happy if I could become absorbed in stamp-collecting”, and thereupon set to work to collect stamps, for it may well happen that you will fail altogether to find stamp-collecting interesting. Only what genuinely interests you can be of any use to you, but you may be pretty sure that genuine objective interests will grow up as soon as you have learnt not to be immersed in self.

The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial. I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt, though this is not, of course, universally true, to stress the act rather than the state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent will be widely different, according to his state of mind at the moment. If you see a child drowning and save it as the result of a direct impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If, on the other hand, you say to yourself, “It is the part of virtue to succour the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must save this child”, you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before. What applies in this extreme case applies in many other instances that are less obvious.

There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is recommended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one’s own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of co-ordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society, where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

INDEX

acquiescence, the attitude of, 128

admiration, 86, 106

adolescence often a time of great unhappiness, 129

affection, 175, 177–85, 243

alcohol, 16, 71, 100

altruism, 118–20, 123

America, 49, 51, 130

Angelo, Michael, 216

animals and boredom, 57, 94

anxieties, 77

applause, desire for, 122

aristocracy, one of the advantages of, 137

ascetic element in morality, 100

autobiography, the author’s 18–19

Bacon, Roger, 35–6

belief in a cause, 152–3

birth-rate, decline of the, 193–4

Blake, William, 128

boredom, 18, 57–68, 209

Brontë, Emily and Charlotte, 128

Browning, Robert, 37–8

business man, the, 46–50

Byron, 28

Caution in love, 185

child and envy, the, 83, 87

child and inventiveness, the, 64

China and Japan, 148–9

cities, 190

competition, 91

competitive success and happiness, 50, 52, 55

congenial companionship, 132, 138, 152

conscience, 96–7

conscious upon the unconscious, operation of the, 76, 102, 220–1

constructiveness, 212–14, 217

conventional people, 131

courage, 79, 244–5

craftsman’s joy, the, 150–1

creeds, 241

cure for envy, 86–9

Democracy, 84, 91, 191

diversity of morals and beliefs, 126

drink, 16, 25, 169, 228

drugs, 61–2, 228

Earth, contact with, 66–8, 81

Ecclesiastes, 28–31, 33

effort, 230–4

ego, unimportance of one’s, 74, 123, 222

emotional fatigue, 74–5

enjoyment, 16, 51

environment, 133

envy, 80–95

envy, fatigue as a cause of, 92

excitement, 58, 60, 62, 65, 79–81, 110

external interests, 220, 222

Family, the, 186–207

fanaticism, 222–3

fatigue, 69–81, 92, 220

fear, 77–9, 242, 244

fear of public opinion, 126–39

flat, life in a, 190–1

freedom of the Press, 139

Golden mean, the, 230

gormandizer, the, 158, 165–8

grief, 227–8

Happiness an achievement, 231

happiness and competitive success, 50

happiness, sources of, 143–4, 148–9, 152–7, 166, 174, 197, 208, 210, 217–18, 226, 228–9, 231, 234, 240–5

happiness, the best touchstone for, 110

happiness the only cure for envy, 86–7

hatred, the habit of, 213–14

hatred stirred by propaganda, 94

hedonism, 246

herd, fear of the, 97–8, 126, 131–3

hobbies, 153–4

hope must be impersonal, 236

housewife, the, 188–9, 210

Ibsen, 41–2

idealistic theories, 84, 92, 119

ill-treatment, hallucinations of, 111–13

impersonal interests, 219, 227

individual, problem of the, 17

infantile moral teaching, 99, 101, 104–5

infantile suggestions, 103

insanity, 111, 124

instinctive happiness, rareness of, 93

intelligentsia, young, 148

interest in oneself, 19

interest in persons, 154–5

interest in things, 156

introvert, malady of the, 160, 180

Justice and envy, 92

Krutch, J. W., 28, 32–8, 41–4, 241

Leisure, employment of, 52–3, 55–6

Lenin, 215

Liaisons Dangereuses, 22

love, 36–41, 67, 247

lunacy, 23–4, 111

Malicious gossip, 113–14

marriage, 80–1, 232

Massenmench, Ernst Toller’s, 43

masters and slaves, 191

maternal element in love, the, 21

maxims to prevent persecution mania, 118–25

megalomania, 23–5

mental discipline, 72, 75, 89

minor interests, 219, 229

moderation, 165, 167

Modern Temper, The, Krutch’s, 28, 32–34

modesty, 89–90

monk, the, 19–20

monotony, 64–5

moralist, the traditional, 246–7

motherhood, 204–7

Napoleon, 24

Narcissism, 20–3, 25

nervous breakdown, 75

nervous fatigue, 69–70, 73, 81, 220

Objective interests, 243, 245

oblivion, 169

Œdipus complex, the, 101, 192

opinions of others, the, 136

overwork, 74

Parental affection, 198–9

parental feeling, 41

parenthood, 200–4

parents and children, 192–3

passions and reason, the, 108–10, 166–7

peacocks, 90–1

persecution mania, 111–25

pessimism, 32–4

philosophy of competition, 54–5

physical fatigue, 69

pleasure of work, the, 149–52, 211–12, 216

pleasure, pursuit of, 16, 25, 80–1

pleasures of achievement, 145

pleasures of great men, the, 64

power, love of, 23–4, 119, 203, 233–4

preventatives of persecution mania, 118

propaganda and hatred, 93–4

proportion, sense of, 116, 221–3

Protestantism and sin, 96

Protestants and Catholics, 126–7

psycho-analytic repression, 24

public opinion, tyranny of, 130, 136, 138–9

Puritanism, 54–5

Rationality, 108–9

reading, 52–3, 63

reason, hatred of, 109–10

religion, 225, 241

Religious Orders, 35

religious psychology of sin, 96

resignation, 230–40

Retreat from Parenthood, Jean Aylin’s, 189

Roland, Madame, 84

Russian, the young, 148

Sages of antiquity, the, 36

scientists, happiness of, 145–7

secret of happiness, 157

security, sense of, 176–7

self-absorption, 20, 107, 243, 245

self-centred passions, 242–3

self-confidence, 177

self-deception, 124–5

self-denial, 245–7

self-regarding motives, 120

sense of sin, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 244

sex and sin, 101–2

sex attraction, 67, 184

sex education, 102

sex majority, 232–3

sexual source of envy, 93

Shakespeare, 41–3, 67, 215

sin, consciousness of, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 109, 243

skill, 211, 224

social freedom, 137

social inequalities, 91

social justice, 92

social persecution, 139

social system, the, 17

socialism, equalitarian doctrines of, 91

Solomon, 31–3, 88

Spinoza, 226

spinster, the, 187

sterility and civilization, 194

Stoics, the, 40

struggle for life, the, 45–6

superstitions of childhood, 105

Test of genius, 122

toleration, 139

tragedy, 41–4

tyranny of public opinion, 130

Unhappiness, Causes of, 17–18, 24–5, 27, 111, 127, 155, 185, 208, 220, 231, 235, 242, 244, 247

unhappiness, kinds of, 15–16, 27

unloved, feeling of being, 175–6

unrecognized merit, 121

Vanity, 23, 119

Victorians and love, the, 36–9

Women and external interests, 222

women and zest, 172–4

Wordsworth, 65

work, 208–18, 223

worry, 72–3, 75–8, 237–8

Youth and the tyranny of ignorance, 133–5

Zest, 158–9, 161, 163–5, 169–75, 209, 228

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FOOTNOTES:

Ecclesiastes was not, of course, really written by Solomon, but it is convenient to allude to the author by this name.

Quoted from Coulton’s From St. Francis to Dante, p. 57.

Mistranslated in English as Masses and Men, whereas the correct translation is The Mass-Man.

This whole problem as it affects the professional classes is treated with remarkable insight and constructive ability in The Retreat from Parenthood, by Jean Aylin.

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.

2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original.

3. Italics are shown as xxx.