The Five Great Philosophies of Life. William de Witt Hyde
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Stevenson do, it gives us the pure and undiluted article as a final gospel of life. The fact that it has proved such a fad during the past few years is striking evidence of the husky fare on which our modern prodigals can be content to feed.
"Come fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of repentance fling:
The bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow.
"Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
To-day of past Regrets and future Fears: To-morrow!—Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n thousand Years.
"I sent my soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd, "I myself am Heav'n and Hell:
"Heav'n but the vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on Fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire."
From this melancholy attempt to offer us Epicureanism as a complete account of life, overshadowed as it is by the gloom of the Infinite which the man who stakes his all on momentary pleasure feels doomed to forego, it is a relief to turn to men who strike cheerfully and firmly the Epicurean note; but pass instantly on to blend it with sterner notes and larger views of life, in which it plays its essential, yet strictly subordinate part.
Of all the men who thus strike scattered Epicurean notes, without attempting the impossible task of making a harmonious and satisfactory tune out of them, our American Pagan, Walt Whitman, is the best example.
"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
"O the joy of manly self-hood!
To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,
To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,
To look with calm gaze or with flashing eye,
To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.
"O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.
"For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating—the joy of death!
The beautiful touch of death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons,
Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.
"O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys."
Whitman, with this wild ecstasy, to be sure is an Epicurean and something more. Indeed, pure Epicureanism, unmixed with better elements, is rather hard to find in modern literature. One other hymn, by Robert Louis Stevenson, likewise adds to pure Epicureanism a note of strenuous intensity in the great task of happiness which was foreign to the more easy-going form of the ancient doctrine. In Stevenson Epicureanism is only a flavour to more substantial viands.
THE CELESTIAL SURGEON
"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:—
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake!
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in."
While we are with Stevenson, we may as well conclude our selections from the Epicurean scriptures in these words from his Christmas Sermon: "Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality: they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say, 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better men."
II
THE EPICUREAN VIEW OF WORK AND PLAY
Pleasure is our great task, "the gist of life, the end of ends." To be happy ourselves and radiating centres of happiness to choice circles of congenial friends—this is the Epicurean ideal. The world is a vast reservoir of potential pleasures. Our problem is to scoop out for ourselves and our friends full measure of these pleasures as they go floating by. We did not make the world. It made itself by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. It would be foolish for us to try to alter it. Our only concern is to get out of it all the pleasure we can; without troubling ourselves to put anything valuable back into it. Since it is accidental, impersonal, we owe it nothing. We simply owe ourselves as big a share of pleasure as we can grasp and hold.
This, however, is a task in which it is easy to make mistakes. We need prudence to avoid cheating ourselves with short-lived pleasures that cost too much; wisdom to choose the simpler pleasures that cost less and last longer. Such shrewd calculation of the relative cost and worth of different pleasures is the sum and substance of the Epicurean philosophy. He who is shrewd to discern and prompt to snatch the most pleasure at least cost, as it is offered on the bargain counter of life—he is the Epicurean sage.
We might work this out into a great variety of applications: but one or two spheres must suffice. Eating and drinking, as the most elemental relations of life, are the ones commonly chosen as applications of the Epicurean principle. These applications, however, the selections from Epicurus and Horace have already made clear.
The Epicurean will regulate his diet, not by the immediate, trivial, short-lived pleasures of taste, though these he will by no means despise, but mainly by their permanent effects upon health. Wholesome food, and enough of it, daintily prepared and served, he will do his best to obtain. But elaborate and ostentatious feasting he will avoid, as involving too much expense and trouble, and too heavy penalties of disease and discomfort. He will find out by practical experience the quantity, quality, and