seize it in its pristine loveliness. Genius, in all its bounds, well knows this, and it must be to tempt them to their own destruction that it is leading its false votaries farther and farther away from the saving truth of it. Meantime, in the common walks of life, the work may be for our salvation, for so long as Satan himself could borrow the harp of a Villon or Verlaine we were bound to run after him, and risk hades for the glimpse of heaven he could unfold to us. Now, only, when he drops down into the pit of the pessimist and whines in impotence are we quite ready to part company with him.

CONCERNING HAPPINESS

HERE is no word in any language so idly tossed about

Thy wise and foolish alike as that beguiling word hap

piness. Pursued by everybody and understood by nonetruly achieved by none-happiness is still expatiated upon, inculcated, and estimated, by every writer or speaker who can catch the public ear as if any knowledge of experience could lay back of the effort. The result in recent days has come to be a contradiction of terms which any honest mind must discern for itself. Happiness as a duty, happiness as a task, a "great task," as one honest soul puts it, has come to be the interesting form in which the delicious, elusive and mysterious object of all human hopes and dreams is presented to man's mind. And this in the light of the recognized fact in human experience that what comes unsought, unbought, takes fright at the very idea of becoming a task.

It seems to be the cheering up philosopher who is responsible for this turn of affairs in the kingdom of happiness. The cheerful spirit, the habit of looking on the bright side of things, may indeed be cultivated and make life far more bearable and probably more open to the entrance of the deeper spirit of joy. But it is true still that such labored cheer is not happiness nor worthy to be compared with it in any true sense. Even a modern Christian philosopher

admits this. "The resolute cheerfulness that can be to a certain extent captured and secured by an effort of the will,” he says, "though it is perhaps a more useful quality than

natural joy, is not to be compared with the unreasoning, incommunicable rapture, which sometimes without conscious effort or desire descends upon the spirit like sunshine after rain." The quality of happiness, like mercy, it appears from this, is not strained as the teachers make it, but droppeth like the gentle dew from heaven and requires merely the proper atmosphere to resolve itself in. To say that it can accommodate itself to any condition is unscientific and untrue, and the tendency of such teaching is to embarrass and hinder any saving solution of the problem.

In fact, the thing that makes it look as though happiness, as we count it, was not exactly meant to be our salvation, is that the best of it is liable to pall upon our hands and the hour arrives when the bravest of us begin to question if the game is worth the candle. It is then, too, that the test moment for the menticulturist comes in, and if he has not brought us to a point where we can face life without happiness, the whole foundation of his gorgeous temple crumbles. Has anybody said that it is not happiness, but the courage to bear unhappiness, that humanity stands in need of? If not, life says it at every turn, and with all the sugar coating they put upon the pill it is little more than that the New Thought people are offering us. Ah, they are too wise to dream that happiness can be caught with hook or line of either mind or matter's casting. Something just drops out of the sky or tree top, or perhaps the postman's bag, and there stands the grinning little joy imp and all the universe is a-twitter with him. About the only thing that can be definitely predicated of him is that he is more likely to arrive when you have made up your mind that you can get along without him. Perhaps, however, it is just as well not to tell any lies about not wanting him, and, above all else, not to say that he is dead. There really is some

thing in believing that he exists and is at the heart of true life wherever it is. This, of course, is why the pious ones tell us that he is one with the good, but as they make such a botch about determining what the good is, they are often, as little Alice Carroll has it, "more stupider" than the impious in resolving the problem. Certainly it is only when some of them "turn their backs” that we are able to "sneak happiness" from the so-called impious ones who comprehend the situation.

At the best, happiness is an uncertain commodity, and if you can not find it in the "wind on the heath, brother," or the daisy on the hillside, or most of all, the burning bush by the wayside, don't be too sure that you can evolve it from those diamonds, pomps and "conditions" of the wealthy which the matter-of-fact philosophers are trying to persuade you are the essential part of it. In fact, it is a chance to escape from their "conditions" and chase lightfooted happiness to some gypsy cover for which the majority of these "fortunate" ones are this moment sighing. Wealth and society have pretty effectually armed themselves against happiness and well-nigh chased it off the face of the earth. Nevertheless, the good things of life are not to be despised in the case, and if the menticulturists can show us how to grab them by keeping calm about it there is no use in turning our backs upon them.

It is not every one who has what a Western editor terms the "mental endowment" to be fascinated by the nearness of bankruptcy or take supreme pleasure in finding the invisible line between a sufficiency and a deficiency," and for those who need a little gold dust or carbon, more or less, to put them at ease, it is not ill to know the kind of mental endowment that helps in that direction also. The scientists do say that pessimistic views of the situation secrete a slow

poison in the system that makes the achievement of any desire more difficult, and so perhaps "thinking happiness" is not so irrational a thing after all, unless, of course, one sits down like the old woman in the story and lets the more active aspirer kick over his basket of eggs while he is thinking. Merely to get enough happiness or good cheer into his thoughts to set him moving appears to be the main end of the happy philosophy, and then, by the time the true disciple comes to the place where he finds that he was fooled about happiness, he has recruited enough strength to go on without it. Courage, therefore, is the first and last word of the whole philosophy, and it has been so ever since our first parents fared forth into the wilderness wondering how they could go on with their backs to Eden.