The hard and strange lesson that I would teach in this chapter is, that dreams of unalloyed bliss are not merely fanciful, they are impossible of realization under any known conditions of life; that pleasure requires pain, joy demands sorrow, as the very condition of its existence; and that these pairs are inseparable twins, the presence of one being bound up in that of the other.
I here promulgate no new discovery in the science of mind, though it has been much overlooked by physiologists, and quite put one side by sanguine optimists in their rosy paintings of the future perfectibility and universal happiness of the human race. More than two thousand years ago Socrates dwelt upon this same uncanny blending of contraries. The jailer, as we are told in the “Phædo,” of Plato, removed the galling iron fetters from the philosopher’s ankles shortly before the cup of hemlock was handed him; and in this brief interval his friends gathered around him for the last farewell.
“And Socrates, sitting on the side of the bed, bent his leg and rubbed it with his hand, and in doing so said,—'How strange a thing, my friends, is that which is called Pleasure! and how oddly it is connected with what is called Pain! Pleasure and Pain do not come to man together; but if a person runs after the one and catches it, he almost immediately catches the other too, as if they were fastened together at one end. I think if Æsop had noticed this he would have compiled a fable to this effect: That the gods tried to reconcile these two opposites, and not being able to do this, fastened their extremities together so that when you take hold of one it pulls after it the other. And so it happens to me now; there was pain in my leg when the chain bound it, and now comes pleasure following the pain.’”
A law of physiology, a law of the whole universe, underlies these homely reflections of the ancient Greek.
On the one side, pleasure and pain are states of feeling totally opposed to each other both in sensation and in physical effect, pleasure being concomitant with an increase, pain with a decrease, of the vital functions; and yet, on the other, there is a unity, or, at any rate, a close analogy of action, under these contrary conditions of mental life. Each is a stimulus to new forms of mental change and biotic motion, though in the one instance the tendency of the new activity is toward a higher concentration of the individual life, and, in the other, toward its diminution or its disaggregation into other and lower forms.
A feeling of pleasure is an exaltation of sensation in some special set of nerves. These are stimulated to an unwonted exercise of their functions; but they can provide this disproportionate energy only by drafts on the general resources of the nervous system; and this must be paid back through exhaustion, fatigue, or, perhaps, actual pain.
A sensation of pain also demands for its presence special and unusual conditions of nervous activity, which also result in exhaustion of the powers of sensation, but, unfortunately, much later than in conditions of pleasure. Pain seems in some sort more our natural element, for we can bear it much longer than pleasure in equal degree. Generalizing on this fact, Schopenhauer reached the dismal conclusion—“The essential elements of all Life are pain and sorrow.”
The mere cessation of pain is in itself a pleasure of considerable degree, as in the case of Socrates relieved from the chafing of his irons; indeed, probably some of the intensest moments of delight are those experienced on a sudden relief from acute suffering, or during the reaction from long privations.
It may not be quite correct to say that all pleasurable sensations are immediately derived from or directly lead to others of a painful character. There are some belonging to the organic life, such as the satisfaction of the desire for food or for muscular exercise, in which mere repose or remission is enough to repay the nervous drafts. But how close these are to pain is visible from the acuteness of the pangs of hunger, or the painfulness of prolonged positions of restraint.
Even exalted esthetic and intellectual pleasures, which seem to leave no sting behind and to require no goad for their advance, constantly make unfelt though heavy drafts on the nervous centres, the results of which, under the various forms of cerebral and spinal exhaustion and degeneration, physicians are obliged to take cognizance of only too often.
So close is the analogy between the two antagonistic sensations, that the one becomes merged into the other without our being able to mark the dividing line between them. A moderate pain may by its active diffusion actually bring a surplus of pleasure, as Professor Bain has remarked; and that an acute sensation of pleasure may pass into one of pain is matter of common observation. Thus, Pain is born of Pleasure, Pleasure of Pain; and memory and association have a tendency to diminish the extremes of each by recalling to the mind the sources from which it sprang. Some physiologists, therefore, refuse to discriminate between such inseparable feelings, and prefer to regard them both as manifestations of the same, calling it the “Pleasure-Pain sensation.”
In all these respects what is true of these sensations also holds good of their analogues in the realm of emotions, as joy and sorrow, mirth and sadness, hope and fear, and the like. Each of these exercises, and by exercising exhausts, some fibres of the nervous system, and thus tends to develop its contrary.
The general law which, as far as it goes, explains these facts is that of the alternation or periodicity of the manifestations of force. This is the fundamental law of the Universe, beyond which no analysis has proceeded. Force, or Power, or Energy, wherever we discern it and under every one of its exhibitions, expresses itself in undulatory or rhythmical movements, pulsations of the primal potency, vibrations of the central harmony, of the universe. In the rise and fall of sensation and emotion the sequences of height and depth are as closely related as are the proportions of the crest and trough in the waves of the ocean, or those of the vibration of the strings of a musical instrument.
Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations, or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a poet,—“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.” The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not happy which has no unhappiness. So Browning, with characteristic insight and strength, puts in the mouth of one of his intensest characters,—“Naught is lacking to complete our bliss, but woe.”
These are not mere paradoxes and literary refinements on scientific facts. All who have entered sympathetically into the deep and tender emotions of the human heart have felt and seen this mysterious and inseparable connection. It is so beautifully set forth in reference to one of the saddest griefs of life by Leigh Hunt, that I must quote his words. They are in his essay on the “Deaths of Little Children.”
“Pain softens into pleasure as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into the brighter.… Made as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient in order that the materials may turn to as fine an account as possible. The loss of children seems to be one of those necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. If none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbors with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood or to womanhood and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.
“Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes; they are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination; lastly, 'Of these are the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
Something akin to the sweetness of these touching reflections is found in Sir Richard Steele’s essay on “The Death of Friends,” whose stately and gracious style seems ever treading a minuet at the court of good Queen Anne:—
“When we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment than to recollect the many we have parted with that have been dear to us.… It is necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory, to lead the mind unto that sobriety of thought which poises the heart and makes it beat with due time, without being quickened by desire or retarded by despair from its proper and equal motion.”
Thus it is that sadness is ofttimes a necessary and the best preparative for gladness. The blacker the shadow, the brighter is the light that casts it. In all pleasurable feelings there must be the alternations from exercise to remission and repose; and in proportion as such feelings are keen, will pain take the place of simple exhaustion. When the waves of emotion are but ripples on the surface of life, stirred by the zephyrs of light desires, the remission will be but a passing sense of fatigue; but when the sensitive heart is shaken to its depths by the mighty winds of passion, then the reaction will be not less profound, and the moments of wild joy will be repaid to the uttermost by periods of dejection and despair. In such temperaments there is danger of the morbid persistence of the period of depression, and ready recourse must be had to diversion and occupation to avoid this considerable peril.
There is a singular but comforting contrast in the influence of time on pleasure and pain and the mental states which correspond to them.
Through repetition and habitual exercise we may become passionately fond of what at first was painful or disgusting. Witness the use of tobacco and all other so-called “acquired tastes.” The physician becomes enamored of the studies of the hospital ward and the dissecting room; persons who are at first sight repulsive become tolerable and then companionable; studies which we take up with dislike later on fascinate us.
How different with pleasures! Their tendency is not upward but downward, gravitating ever toward the lower and painful strata of sensation. Those built on a foundation of previous pain alone escape a merely evanescent existence. How quickly facile loves are sated! Ennui arrives never earlier than when enjoyment is gratuitous. The law, alas, holds good even for our dearest joys; as Mrs. Browning wrote:—
Time, transmuter of all things, turns delight into disgust, and aversion into love, but his metamorphoses constantly warn us that permanence is related to painfulness and duration depends on endurance.
Pain is more natural to us than pleasure. We bear it better. Bad fortune is easier sustained than good. The hour of prosperity is more trying than that of adversity. These are commonplaces, and speak for the universal recognition of this feature of mind.
Our first language is wailing, and our most hilarious laughter brings tears.
Do you say that had the Creative Hand been yours, pain would not have been in the world? Compel my belief in your words by seeing you relieve all pain now in your power to relieve.
The abrupt ending of any deep emotion is unpleasant, even though a sad one. When we have been sailing in the clouds, the descent to earth is always a shock.
Any action, however trifling, assumes an immeasurable significance when we know it is performed for the last time. It evokes the idea of the Irrevocable and the Infinite, of Death and Destiny. Our souls hear the distant dirge, Vale, vale, eternumque vale.
We can always explain our merriment, but often not our melancholy. Glee is concrete and affirmative; dejection is vague and negative; and the negative is unlimited.
The drama of life is a tragedy, for its last scene is always that of the death of the title-role. We take the greatest interest in the spectacle, but rarely care to remember the denouement.
If you love life so much, why complain of ennui? There is nothing like it for lengthening the hours, and thus giving you longer to live.
The more pleasant the moments, the swifter they fly. Perfect happiness would destroy Time.
Many pleasures, like Barbary figs, are gathered at the cost of bleeding fingers.