HAPPINESS

The trouble is that we can use the Scriptures only as far as they will go, and those we have do not seem to be complete. I have a vague hungry feeling that we have not discovered all of them. There must be a few tablets still buried somewhere thousands of years deep in brighter dust which record a little happiness, something to ease the strain of so many sacrifices and holy joys. I have had such joys. It is like coming up through great tribulations and sitting for a moment beneath your halo with tears on your cheeks. I am not complaining, you understand; it is a grand feeling, but too poignant to be really restful, as if you had been exalted by a deed or a sacrifice and must choose just holiness when you are still in the flesh and feel the mortal need of relaxing some.

I know by the witness of my own spirit that we have missed a Gospel or two which contained the strictly human touch in words. Paul comes somewhere near it in his tender letters to Timothy, but all these apostles were made too grave by their suffering to catch the light of that message we should have. The place where it really belongs is in those passages quoted from Jesus. I am certain they failed to record all he said, or that it has been lost, or that it is still hidden away in the archives of time. He was fearless, merciful, so good at remembering that we are dust, he would have made a little allowance for that kind of happiness humans need; not an indulgence in sin, but an indulgence in life.

I do hope it is not blasphemous to say that I can almost see Jesus in such a mood; His people at ease about Him. It would be a quiet, bright morning before the multitudes began to gather. And He will have looked at these chosen to keep and defend the Word with that blessing look even we can bestow upon children whom we love. And He will have said, ‘Little children, be happy!’ Something like that He must have said, knowing what travails they were to pass through and how greatly they would need the respite of light-heartedness. But nothing of the kind is recorded anywhere in the Bible.

The word ‘happy’ does occur at rare intervals, but it is too fearfully qualified. ‘Happy is the man that feareth alway,’ says Solomon. And Job in great pain catches his breath with this: ‘Happy is the man whom God correcteth.’ And James says, ‘We count them happy which endure.’ All of which means, fortunate are they who are prepared for the worst, take their punishments with meekness, and endure with courage. These are the evidences of a good character and a noble mind, but not my idea of real happiness. One wearies of worrying all the time with his best attributes, especially in plain sight of the wicked, who do seem to flourish without any such attributes. I have never taken this as hard as Jeremiah did; still, I have had my feelings.

One day Jeremiah’s virtues irked him. He was too aloof and lonesome. And he had what you may call an altercation with the Lord:

‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins.’

He goes on reminding the Lord of his own obedience and how he has borne his trials until his sense of outraged justice gets the better of him, and he exclaims, ‘Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter.’

I do not suppose the very treacherous are happy and I have never wanted the wicked pulled out like sheep for the slaughter, but I have always wanted to ask a truly bad man who seemed to be having a good time if he really was enjoying himself.

I have always had a hankering after some cheerful salvation, suitable and sanctifying to me as a human being in this present world, where I know what I am doing and what I want. I feel that I have a buried talent for just happiness, a sort of incandescence of my own nature which longs to shine. It seems to me that I have never made my happy sounds in living. I have missed that laughter which is the speech of a merry heart. But I have heard it many a time in a crowd and always flirted my head around to see who made it. Usually a young person whose burdens are still being borne by others.

But once, I remember, it was an old woman standing in her own dooryard watching two children, serious and absorbed in their play. Such a figure! Tall and gaunt, so straight and finely posed, her homely dress might have been a rag flung over an imperishable ideal. Such a face! Wrinkled, brown, rough, like a crude verse written by somebody like Ossian; the wind and the weather of life had passed over it, but now the sun in her eyes, the simplicity of the deepest wisdom made humorous upon her smiling lips. No comeliness anywhere, but that beauty of honest happiness in every line. I think of her as a song I saw once in the flesh set to a good stout tune of laughter.

I have a distinct recollection of such people through the whole of my life. They do exist--women who have survived all their fears and learned their burdens by heart and stand canonized by that undefeated look of happiness. I have seen someone go by who looked like a joyful traveler on his way to some happiness he had earned, carrying himself, you may say, with the long light stride of a good conscience. At such times I have felt the light of my wings as if I had seen the witness of my own hopes go by.

These are the only people I have ever envied. They have an expression of animation not intellectual, but vital, so different from that conquered look of peace which I am always fearing will settle upon my face before I know what they have learned, not by thinking, but by some happier use they have made of living.

I cannot now recall when this idea first took possession of me, but it was far back in the years--that the life I was living was not mine, but a sentence imposed upon me by fate, to be served faithfully. And then as a reward further on I should have my very own life, which would be different. I was not so concerned as my husband to win heaven. I had an impression then which has persisted with me to this day, that for all we know this life may be a rest the Lord gives us between long spells of eternity. I anticipated some place in my years where happiness would begin, as tired people look forward to a vacation.

Shortly after ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was published, it seemed to me I saw it, as you look a long way down the road and see a wider brighter place where you turn in through a gate and enter your own house. I remember saying something to Lundy about this. We would get away presently from all the cares we had ever had, take a little house in the country and begin to live happy ever after. I remember his silence, the look he gave me. If in the last day when we are called there is one who hears, but cannot rise from his dust, he will have just that look of terrible comprehension.

It comforts me now to remember that not even in this dark time when the shades were deepening about him did I ever raise my hands to heaven and cry, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ I think well of myself that my one concern was to keep him and comfort him as long as I could reach him. Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one thing I have had--the terrible wisdom of love. I cannot doubt that I have received the best of my life and nearly every gift that prospered in me from my association with Lundy. What really troubles me sometimes is whether or not he might have fared better in the spirit if he had been free as a monk to seek his sacrifices and renunciations.

I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it. And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one great anxiety--and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about it by having missed it.

I came nearer to what happiness must be, a sort of deliverance from the things that are, after I began to do creative work. Once I had a pen in my hand and the use of my faculties, the casements of all my darkness were flung wide and I escaped into a very bright, quiet, good world of thoughts. Every memory from my earliest childhood came back to me, luminous substances to be worked into words. It was like weaving love and deeds and the beautiful colors of every sensation upon the loom of my mind. What I accomplished was as nothing to the visions I had. If, as Matthew Arnold claimed, genius consists in the power to recall, I may lay some claim to having genius. In one small room all my lights and darkness came; people that I had seen, but never knew, were suddenly revealed to me, so that I could write down the very secrets of their hearts. Men and women, long since dead, lived again and waited there close as life to be used in case I needed them for a paragraph or two. Things that Lundy had said, poetry and philosophy that he had read to me, piled up like notes on my desk, changed, you understand, by the alchemy of my own mind, but still the parents of my thoughts. When I think of the vast stores of material I have had, the wonder and grief to me is that I have made such a dim and poor use of them.

Once you get away from the Word, any discussion of religion is unprofitable and apt to become acrimonious. For this last page or two I have felt my own spiritual gorge rising, a mean and distasteful sensation which has no place in this record. It is better to go back to my original speculations on happiness.

This is not a thing to tell, for it concerns the more intimate annals of my mind and is set down here with the same apology one should make for shouting in public when in an exalted spiritual mood. But here it is. Many a time when I have filched a grand thought or some finer truth out of life to write down, I am too moved to do it. I get up and pace the floor. I cast a thankful look through the ceiling at my heavenly Father, or I rush bareheaded out of doors in the bleakest weather to cool off this happiness, so that presently I may return and copy it into words.

If this is happiness, I have had it; but my suspicion is that I may have experienced then only the pangs of a great joy. It is not a thing achieved by inspiration, even if you write an epic or paint a noble picture. You have produced something. My idea of happiness is something you get. It is intaking, not creative. You cannot think it. It comes to you in the reality of personal experience, selfish and satisfying. What I want to know is how I have missed it. Is it by some infernally digestive attitude of my mind toward common human experience which consumes my illusions, or is it on account of circumstances over which I have no control, or have I just led myself like a wanderer walking in a blind circle between two worlds?