VII

WHAT ‘LIVING’ CHIEFLY IS

It is in intercourse—­social, sentimental, or business—­with one’s fellows that the qualities and the condition of the human machine are put to the test and strained.  That part of my life which I conduct by myself, without reference—­or at any rate without direct reference—­to others, I can usually manage in such a way that the gods do not positively weep at the spectacle thereof.  My environment is simpler, less puzzling, when I am alone, my calm and my self-control less liable to violent fluctuations.  Impossible to be disturbed by a chair!  Impossible that a chair should get on one’s nerves!  Impossible to blame a chair for not being as reasonable, as archangelic as I am myself!  But when it comes to people!...  Well, that is ‘living,’ then!  The art of life, the art of extracting all its power from the human machine, does not lie chiefly in processes of bookish-culture, nor in contemplations of the beauty and majesty of existence.  It lies chiefly in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the peace, with those with whom one is ‘thrown.’  Is it in sitting ecstatic over Shelley, Shakespeare, or Herbert Spencer, solitary in my room of a night, that I am ‘improving myself’ and learning to live?  Or is it in watching over all my daily human contacts?  Do not seek to escape the comparison by insinuating that I despise study, or by pointing out that the eternal verities are beyond dailiness.  Nothing of the kind!  I am so ‘silly’ about books that merely to possess them gives me pleasure.  And if the verities are good for eternity they ought to be good for a day.  If I cannot exchange them for daily coin—­if I can’t buy happiness for a single day because I’ve nothing less than an eternal verity about me and nobody has sufficient change—­then my eternal verity is not an eternal verity.  It is merely an unnegotiable bit of glass (called a diamond), or even a note on the Bank of Engraving.

I can say to myself when I arise in the morning:  ’I am master of my brain.  No one can get in there and rage about like a bull in a china shop.  If my companions on the planet’s crust choose to rage about they cannot affect me!  I will not let them.  I have power to maintain my own calm, and I will.  No earthly being can force me to be false to my principles, or to be blind to the beauty of the universe, or to be gloomy, or to be irritable, or to complain against my lot.  For these things depend on the brain; cheerfulness, kindliness, and honest thinking are all within the department of the brain.  The disciplined brain can accomplish them.  And my brain is disciplined, and I will discipline it more and more as the days pass.  I am, therefore, independent of hazard, and I will back myself to conduct all intercourse as becomes a rational creature.’ ...  I can say this.  I can ram this argument by force of will into my brain, and by dint of repeating it often enough I shall assuredly