FAILURE.

"Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance-Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two; for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more and no less: God's infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. . . . . Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves. - Sartor Resartus, Chapter IX., "The Everlasting Yea."

"SUCCESS" is the title of an interesting article in the last number of the Advocate. The word itself is popular almost everywhere in this country, and we find it here as the index to a view of life that is also widely held, though rarely so frankly stated. This view can be given in a few sentences. The business of a man's life is happiness, which, if not equivalent to, is at least entirely dependent on, success. The attainment of some final object, whatever it is, is thus the great requisite in his life; and, success being insured, the higher the object he seeks, the greater his happiness, it being always kept in mind that no failure is allowed, unless he would feel that he has lived in vain. The moral is not far to seek; rid yourself, as far as possible, of all uneasy desires for what is beyond your reach, and direct all your endeavors towards some goal not so far off but that it may be reached in an ordinary lifetime, and, reaching it, be satisfied. One word, in the preceding, is ambiguous, "happiness"; but it is not necessary to enter into the discussion whether duty is a motive as distinct from the desire for pleasure, for it is easy to see from his article that the author makes a wide distinction between duty and pleasure, and considers happiness the result of the latter alone, which is very wise, if we recognize something higher and more to be desired than happiness in this narrow sense, but not so wise when we find that what the author means is that "a person who in a materialistic age is willing to renounce all pleasures but those derived from the possession of a good conscience and the contemplation of virtue had better retire to the wilds of Mount Athos or to the society of Mr. Ruskin."

Now, how far will the happiness described in this article go towards making a man, in any sense, happy? Suppose a man to succeed in limiting his desires to but one thing, - wealth, let us say, or knowledge; have we not enough examples to teach us that this one thing would never be reached, and that, even supposing it reached, the poor wretch would still have enough soul to render him miserable, "a little grain of conscience" to "make him sour"? And if we seek for happiness, for success, from culture, about which we are so fond of talking, shall we be more likely to obtain it? Is not the very meaning of culture the education of all our faculties, the widening of all our capacities? Yet how impossible to satisfy these capacities, in this life at least! This the author of "Success" recognizes, and the conclusion he comes to is given in the passage already quoted from him, in which he seems to side with those who think we should be better off here if we had no desires that could not be satisfied with terrestrial things, - a state which does not exist, even as Carlyle says in the passage I have quoted.

Happiness, therefore, - such, at least, as this author refers to, - is not to be obtained. Is there anything, then, to save us from utter misery? Let me quote once more from Carlyle.

" 'Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!' cries he elsewhere: 'there is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same HIGHER that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom?' "

Has not this more of the true ring in it than prudential maxims about how to shape one's "career" so as to get the greatest amount of comfort with the least amount of trouble? I think that every one must feel sometimes that certain high desires and beliefs are worth more to him than anything he possesses or can ever hope to possess in this world. And must we not acknowledge that these high desires lead up to something very like "the possession of a good conscience and the contemplation of virtue," which our author affects so greatly to despise? "Affects," I say, for he does not believe the barren creed he professes; he holds to a higher standard for life than he admits; he betrays himself when he speaks of "Thackeray's Warrington, - to our mind, in spite of his failure, the noblest man in English fiction."

This brings us to the question of success. If what has been already said be true, if the noblest part of man's nature makes him long for what can never be attained in this life, if the desire for this and struggle after this are more to be coveted than all temporal prosperity, must not that success, in the narrow sense that this author uses the word, be just the thing not to be desired, and a feeling of failure, notwithstanding the work of a lifetime, be the best proof of a faith worth having? To quote once more from the author of "Success" "There can be no more melancholy object than an unsuccessful man, one who confesses that his life has been a failure." Is it not more melancholy to see a man who has so far forgotten the boundless hopes of his boyhood that he dies with the feeling that he is a successful man, - that the little money he has gotten, the little knowledge he has learned, or the little good he has done entitles him to cry "Plaudite" to all the world? Do not revelation and the words of the greatest men teach us to consider that the highest utterance men can make on leaving the world is a confession of failure, - "We are unprofitable servants, we have done that which it was our duty to do"?