[Fallacy of prescribing cheerfulness.]

Dugald Stewart inculcates Good-humour as a means of happiness and virtue; his language implying that the quality is one within our power to appropriate.

In Mr. Smiles’s work entitled “Self-Help,” we find an analogous strain of remarks:—­

“To wait patiently, however, man must work cheerfully.  Cheerfulness is an excellent working quality, imparting great elasticity to the character.  As a Bishop has said, ’Temper is nine-tenths of Christianity,’ so are cheerfulness and diligence [a considerable make-weight] nine-tenths of practical wisdom.”

Sir Arthur Helps, in those essays of his, combining profound observation with strong genial sympathies and the highest charms of style, repeatedly adverts to the dulness, the want of sunny light-hearted enjoyment of the English temperament, and, on one occasion, piquantly quotes the remark of Froissart on our Saxon progenitors:  “They took their pleasures sadly, as was their fashion; ils se divertirent moult tristement a la mode de leur pays”

There is no dispute as to the value or the desirableness of this accomplishment.  Hume, in his “Life,” says of himself, “he was ever disposed to see the favourable more than the unfavourable side of things; a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year”.  This sanguine, happy temper, is merely another form of the cheerfulness recommended to general adoption.

I contend, nevertheless, that to bid a man be habitually cheerful, he not being so already, is like bidding him treble his fortune, or add a cubit to his stature.  The quality of a cheerful, buoyant temperament partly belongs to the original cast of the constitution—­like the bone, the muscle, the power of memory, the aptitude for science or for music; and is partly the outcome of the whole manner of life.  In order to sustain the quality, the physical (as the support of the mental) forces of the system must run largely in one particular channel; and, of course, as the same forces are not available elsewhere, so notable a feature of strength will be accompanied with counterpart weaknesses or deficiencies.  Let us briefly review the facts bearing upon the point.

The first presumption in favour of the position is grounded in the concomitance of the cheerful temperament with youth, health, abundant nourishment.  It appears conspicuously along with whatever promotes physical vigour.  The state is partially attained during holidays, in salubrious climates, and health-bringing avocations; it is lost, in the midst of toils, in privation of comforts, and in physical prostration.  The seeming exception of elated spirits in bodily decay, in fasting, and in ascetic practices, is no disproof of the general principle, but merely the introduction of another principle, namely, that we can feed one part of the system at the expense of degrading and prematurely wasting others.