Section 2 : Part 6

Wisdom and Destiny
by Maurice Maeterlinck

(Page 8 of 14)

When a man of inferior soul endeavours to estimate a great sage's happiness, this happiness flows through his fingers like water; yet is it heavy as gold, and as brilliant as gold, in the hand of a brother sage. For to each is the happiness given that he can best understand. The sage's misfortune may often resemble the one that befalls other men; but his happiness has nothing in common with that which he who is not wise terms happiness. In happiness there are far more regions unknown than there are in misfortune. The voice of misfortune is ever the same; happiness becomes the more silent as it penetrates deeper.

When we put our misfortunes into one scale of the balance, each of us lays, in the other, all that he deems to be happiness. The savage flings feathers, and powder, and alcohol into the scale; civilised men some gold, a few days of delirium; but the sage will deposit therein countless things our eyes cannot see - all his soul, it may be, and even the misfortune that he will have purified.

52. There is nothing in all the world more just than happiness, nothing that will more faithfully adopt the form of our soul, or so carefully fill the space that our wisdom clings open. Yet is it most silent of all that there is in the world. The Angel of Sorrow can speak every language - there is not a word but she knows; but the lips of the Angel of Happiness are sealed, save when she tells of the savage's joys. It is hundreds of centuries past that misfortune was cradled, but happiness seems even now to have scarcely emerged from its infancy. There are some men have learned to be happy; why are there none whose great gladness has urged them to lift up their voice in the name of the silent Archangel who has flooded their soul with light?

Are we not almost teaching happiness if we do only speak of it; invoking it, if we let no day pass without pronouncing its name? And is it not the first duty of those who are happy to tell of their gladness to others? All men can learn to be happy; and the teaching of it is easy. If you live among those who daily call blessing on life, it shall not be long ere you will call blessing on yours. Smiles are as catching as tears; and periods men have termed happy, were periods when there existed some who knew of their happiness. Happiness rarely is absent; it is we that know not of its presence.

The greatest felicity avails us nothing if we know not that we are happy; there is more joy in the smallest delight whereof we are conscious, than in the approach of the mightiest happiness that enters not into our soul. There are only too many who think that what they have cannot be happiness; and therefore is it the duty of such as are happy, to prove to the others that they only possess what each man possesses deep down in the depths of his heart. To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of happiness. It were well if, from time to time, there should come to us one to whom fortune had granted a dazzling, superhuman felicity, that all men regarded with envy; and if he were very simply to say to us, "All is mine that you pray for each day: I have riches, and youth, and health; I have glory, and power, and love; and if to-day I am truly able to call myself happy, it is not on account of the gifts that fortune has deigned to accord me, but because I have learned from these gifts to fix my eyes far above happiness.

If my marvellous travels and victories, my strength and my love, have brought me the peace and the gladness I sought, it is only because they have taught me that it is not in them that the veritable gladness and peace can be found. It was in myself they existed, before all these triumphs; and still in myself are they now, after all my achievement; and I know full well that had but a little more wisdom been mine, I might have enjoyed all I now enjoy without the aid of so much good fortune. I know that today I am happier still than I was yesterday, because I have learned at last that I stand in no need of good fortune in order to free my soul, to bring peace to my thoughts, to enlighten my heart."

53. Of this the sage is fully aware, though no superhuman happiness may have descended upon him. The upright man knows it too, though he be less wise than the sage, and his consciousness less fully developed; for an act of goodness or justice brings with it a kind of inarticulate consciousness that often becomes more effective, more faithful, more loving, than the consciousness that springs into being from the very deepest thought. Acts of this nature bring, above all, a special knowledge of happiness. Strive as we may, our loftiest thoughts are always uncertain, unstable; but the light of a goodly deed shines steadily on, and is lasting.

There are times when deep thought is no more than merely fictitious consciousness; but an act of charity, the heroic duty fulfilled - these are true consciousness; in other words, happiness in action. The happiness of Marcus Aurelius, who condones a mortal affront; of Washington, giving up power when he feared that his glory was leading his people astray - the happiness of these will differ by far from that of some mean-souled, venomous creature who might (if such a thing may be assumed) by mere chance have discovered some extraordinary natural law. Long is the road that leads from the satisfied brain to the heart at rest, and only such joys will nourish there as are proof against winter's storms. Happiness is a plant that thrives far more readily in moral than in intellectual life. Consciousness - the consciousness of happiness, above all - will not choose the intellect as a hiding-place for the treasure it holds most dear. At times it would almost seem as if all that is loftiest in intellect, fraught with most comfort, is transformed into consciousness only when passed through an act of virtue. It suffices not to discover new truths in the world of thought or of fact.

For ourselves, a truth only lives from the moment it modifies, purifies, sweetens something we have in our soul. To be conscious of moral improvement is of the essence of consciousness. Some beings there are, of vigorous intellect, whose intellect never is used to discover a fault, or foster a feeling of charity. And this happens often with women. In cases where a man and a woman have equal intellectual power, the woman will always devote far less of this power to acquiring moral self-knowledge. And truly the intellect that aims not at consciousness is but beating its wings in the void. Loss and corruption needs must ensue if the force of our brain be not at once gathered up in the purest vase of our heart.

About the Author

Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949) was a Belgian poet, playwright, and essayist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.