Yesterday, to-Day, to-Morrow

THERE are three hundred thousand, or perhaps three million, statues or other simulacra in Asia all wearing the same placid and peculiar smile, which is interpreted to mean that a continuum of happiness is perfectly, though not as a rule easily, attainable. ‘We know the fact that we have the thing.’ There are three hundred thousand, or perhaps three million, faces in America whose eager or intent expression may be interpreted to assert that ‘Happiness is something to do next. Everything not a thrill is a bore. Yesterday is nothing, and to-day is nothing but the beginning of to-morrow.’ I do not know, nor does anyone know, that the ambitious American is less happy, or more happy, than the contemplative Asiatic, who may have only a steadier continuum of the opiate sort of happiness of not being very much alive. There is evidently a persistent idea there, but it may be a human reality to negligibly few. I do not know whether Mr. Hoover with his works and worries behind him, or Mr. Roosevelt with his works and worries before him, is the happier, and neither of the two gentlemen knows, either. Happiness is qualitative as well as quantitative, and cannot be weighed or measured.

Henry Adams thought people were less heterogeneous and more sure of themselves when Chartres Cathedral was built than when he himself was trying to find out what he and the universe were for; but he did not know that they were any happier. I do not know, nor does anyone know, whether there was more or less happiness about in 1880 to 1890 than in 1920 to 1930. The only era one sensitively knows is the era one was young in. It flows into us, soaks into us, and we know it because we share its feelings. As we grow older we grow a shell. Our assent to the new ideas is perfunctory. We admit them, but they do not shape us. We are already shaped. Of an era that we have never lived in at all our ignorance is immeasurably greater than of the era in which we live crustaceously, in a shell. What we see of a dead generation is the empty shell that its ‘dim dreaming life’ was wont to inhabit and has left behind it on the sand.

When one of the younger generation today thinks of the later nineteenth century, he thinks of its books, its houses and their furnishings, its clothes and social customs or taboos, and observes that they differ considerably from his own. He sees ‘ strange creatures with drooping moustaches and trailing skirts.’ When an old man to-day thinks of his youth, he does not see clothes, architecture, taboos — not very much; nor very much the books that were written then. He sees people whom he loved or disliked, and himself containing those sensations. The shell of one generation may differ considerably from the shell of another, but the ‘dim dreaming life’ within is much the same.

In a vague way it may seem probable that the Athenian citizen had a good average of happiness. A subject population can make it very pleasant for highly intelligent subjectors, and more than half the population of Athens were slaves. That is better evidence than the statues of athletes and robust Olympians contrasted with those of wasted saints and wan Madonnas. The average happiness of the early Christians, in the comfort of their ‘Good News,’ may have been higher yet. Gibbon thought the second century the happiest of eras, but he was not thinking of the ‘Good News.’ There were more peace and security then than the world was accustomed to. But the meditations of Aurelius were not cheerful. His kind of consolation was less effective than Saint Paul’s. The era seems to have needed the more drastic medicine.

One may suspect that there is more personal unhappiness in Russia now than in most countries, but there is no way of proving it. Wherever there is enthusiasm, there is also happiness, but the whole elder generation of the bourgeoisie must be fading away in gloom. I do not know, nor does anyone know, whether people would be more, or less, happy under communism than under feudalism or democracy, and we never shall know. One may suspect that any made-to-order society is uncomfortable to begin with, and, if rigid, will become intolerable, but there is nothing oracular in a suspicion. No society ever is ‘made to order.’ A society is not like a house. It is like a tree. You cannot construct a tree. You can plant, fertilize, and spray, but something that is not you makes it live, (‘God giveth the increase.’) No social ultimate is ever as ’planned.’ America was not made to a plan by the makers of the Constitution, who, in fact, did not make the latter. It would not have lived if they had. They took it. It lived because it was vital with customary habits of thinking.

Happiness is mainly a matter of disposition and adjustment. If a hobo is happier than a banker, it is probably less because his problems are simpler than because of the disposition that made him a hobo. One may surmise that the women who chatter and sing as they wash clothes in the Guadalquivir are happier than those who work silently in a laundry on Second Avenue, but it does not follow that American laundresses would be any happier if they were set to washing clothes in a river. Probably there is as much happiness on one economic level as another, but there is no way of testing and measuring it. Comparisons always overlook the hidden compensations and adjustments. Mr. Bernard Shaw seems to think that a good income is needed for virtue as well as for happiness, and Francis of Assisi was of the opposite opinion, that to be good and happy one ought to be poor. Ben Franklin thought that both lay in the Golden Mean.

Sundials used to have two favorite mottoes: Horas non numero nisi serenas, and Pereunt et imputantur; of which the first is a bit fatuous and the second contradictory. Hours that are imputed have not perished, nor have the dark ones been the less counted because the index, at the time, made no shadowy comment upon them. In the long run it has been only the ashen hours of the Man of Uz which have counted. His feastings are dark, but his sorrows shine. At the time it seems important to be happy, but afterward it not infrequently seems more important that one was not. There seems to be no way of balancing these values. But there is this mystical conclusion: that while it is only in to-day that one is alive, and to-morrow seems to be the purpose and direction of to-day, it is by virtue of yesterday that both of them have any substance. Without it, the one is only a flash and the other a vacuum.

We are such stuff as the ages have made us, rather than such stuff as dreams are made on.

Why not, in similar Sinaitic tones borrowed from antiquity: —

It sounds as well, and it makes more sense.

For convenience we speak of eras as such-and-such a century or decade, although the flow of time and history knows nothing of those fictitious confines. But now and then real barriers happen to coincide more or less with the fictitious. Roughly speaking, in America, the nineteenth century lay between the substantial establishment of the Republic and the end of the frontier or free lands. The Third Decade of the twentieth century was roughly bounded by the War and the Depression. However the future analyst may describe its personality, somewhat feverish and disheveled, he wall at least have something with which to begin and end it. His Fourth Decade will probably be a soberer person with less glitter in its eye and more meditation in its temper.

There are those who on the whole will be belter pleased with the aspect of life in that kind of decade. There are others who think of happiness as a return to pre-depression conditions, which a postdepression decade is not likely to supply. The chances of happiness are better for those who look for it where it usually lies, in disposition and adjustment. All around us are people who have already found it, who will admit to tactful inquiry that their income but not their happiness has been diminished. While Conferences and Presidents pursue their well-intentioned and possibly beneficent ways tune glides by and the slow adjustments of myriad lives go on. These are doing, or will do, the main work of recovery — or rather of discovery, of discovery that depression does not depress them and that the new grass is as green as the old.