Читать книгу Lures of Life - Joseph Lucas - Страница 7

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The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy, happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow, "those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who would confine us to the needful.

The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.

Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.

Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will increase my grief."

Happiness is a gift of temperament. The occupation that makes one man happy the day long would be capital punishment to another man. I have known people to possess everything and enjoy nothing; others, who possess little, dwell in paradise. It is a braver thing to extract honey from the hive of life than to leave it rotting in the comb. Alas! these weak-kneed, nervous mortals who are afraid of being too happy: they tremble as they sit at the banquet. They toy with a lean and hungry fate and dare not clasp a full-bosomed blessing. They prefer misery as a diet, with a spice of religion thrown in to flavour it. They fancy self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated, and a grace to be counted for righteousness. We shrewdly detect in such conduct a pose. It lacks the grace of sincerity. Such people, overfed on misery, fatten on it incontinently. It is the diet of a low, melancholy temperament.

There is no standard-pattern happiness planned to suit the temperament of everybody like the map of a city which all travellers follow to find their bearings. Happiness is a city that each person maps out for himself; its highways and byways are of his own engineering and grow to match his own requirements. Happiness is not a sloppy garment like a ready-made coat that you buy in a store. Happiness must be made to fit. In fact, every man makes his own happiness.

We all distil pleasure out of life in our peculiar way. Only our ways differ as the poles asunder. One man cannot understand where the other man's relish for life comes in. What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto on another palate. A famous American millionaire found greater satisfaction in the simple pleasure of attending funerals than in all the superb luxuries which his millions brought him. We do not envy his simple pleasure. It was an innocent method of enjoyment peculiarly his own.

I knew a man who made an income of over £10,000 a year by hard work, and his pleasure was immense in doing it. One half of his relaxation in life was making more income, and the other half his amusement consisted in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance if they spent "tuppence" on a bus fare instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather off the soles of their boots. He never spent "tuppence" himself if he could save it. He drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the sensations of a quick run. People called him a money-making machine devoid of fine feeling. People made a mistake. His nature was highly strung. He was keenly sensitive to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making. It was the poetry, the luxury, the fine art of life all rolled into one, and it quickened the gay emotions within him that seeing a good play, hearing an eloquent sermon or driving a spanking four-in-hand to Ascot on a fine June morning, excites in other people. There are various buttons to press, but they all send the same thrill of earthly pleasure tingling through the human frame. Different hands strike the same chords on the harp of life, and they tremble into song.

Some heroically minded people assert there are only two things in life: duty and happiness. It is not everybody who wants to do his duty--that is a special gift of Providence few enjoy. But everyone wants to be happy, and happiness is the greatest thing of all: other people's happiness as well as our own. We are not all sagacious to discern the angel of duty when she comes mixed in a promiscuous assembly of spirits less honourable than she. They all dress becomingly and smile bewitchingly that you cannot mark her down; her radiance shines no brighter than other luminous spirits that accompany her. We should try the spirits whether they be good or evil ones. However, they move first, and try us with their beauty, their flattery, and their gilded promises. According to the gospel of St. Robert Louis Stevenson, there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

A third thing some people suggest makes life worth living is experience. Experience, they maintain, is a more valuable treasure than happiness; experience is a pearl of great price, and we must sell all we have to possess it. The world is spacious; range it widely, breathe its bracing airs, sail its deep seas in search of experience. Pursue it, and if in the pursuit you are blown about by the fickle winds of fate, the buffeting may be disagreeable, but it is most exhilarating and healthy to the earnest seeker after experience. Provided you are blown, and blown violently, the direction of the gale matters not; the north-easter and the zephyr both teach. Experience builds up character and increases knowledge, though during building operations your wisdom may remain a stationary virtue. If you come out of the conflict with only experience to your credit at the other end of the struggle be thankful. Life is very good. Its chief spoils may be anguish and sorrow, yet experience makes it full and rich.

The logic of this cold philosophy needs consideration before adopting it as gospel. If a dinted shield and a broken sword are the only spoils you bring home from the wars and hang up in the family parlour as trophies of victory, it is not an adequate recompense for the rich and vital experience gained in the fight. Experience was what Don Quixote in the slippered comfort of his home hungered after. It was what he found on his travels, and after passing through much tribulation it was the one prize he brought home with him at the journey's end. Experience many an ambitious man has found to be as an empty goblet to his thirsty lips.

When the Creator was busy in the minting-house He did not cast his creatures all in the same mould, or coin them of the same metal. Some people are of fine temperament, cram full of emotion; they are all feeling, and express their feeling vigorously. Other people are of baser metal. They are stolid, and pass through life neither contented nor discontented with their lot; they are neither happy nor miserable. They are well-regulated clocks running slowly down to the last tick, and then ceasing to tick at all. Monotony is the bane of their existence, blighting it with double dulness. They feel little and say nothing about it. One never knows what hidden compensations life provides for its multitudinous offspring. These torpid people must have a secret well of satisfaction from which they dip refreshing draughts in thirsty moments.

The child of emotion is more vivacious; he has colour, romance, movement. He is of a rarer vintage; there is sparkle in the wine of life. Occasionally the wine turns sour and drops flavour. Disagreeable people do exist for some veiled purpose of Providence, as the species never becomes extinct in the land. In infancy they were rocked in the cradle of discontent, and they have seldom slept out of it since. They have grown up in a nursery of their own. They are highly strung, and have a genius for living in the moment--irritably. Their wit is brilliant, it scintillates like running water in the sunshine, but it cuts like a razor. Everybody within reach of their tongue, even innocent people, feel the whip of their capricious temper. I suppose some grim pleasure feeds their fiery nature when they subdue friend and enemy under them. It is an unenviable pleasure which they enjoy; nobody shares with them, and when their ill-humour dies down it must leave a nasty taste in their mouth.

If you want to be happy, do not expect too much from life. Do not ask more from friendship than you give, for eventually the balance is sure to adjust itself. Do not ask more than your share of good things; if you do exceed the limit, disappointment will dog your footsteps all the day. You cannot expect to be always happy. Trouble and sorrow come to all of us, with a difference. Some people extract comfort out of trouble, and it assuages their grief; others add worry to their woe, and it aggravates their vexation of spirit.

Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board and generate their own electric current as they travel, and after dark, with the great headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly and safe. A contented mind is a dynamo we can carry with us, and it generates its own happiness as we travel. It illumines the journey of life and makes it pleasant to ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling in our company.

Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms encircle you.

If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart's red blood and chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come.