Cultivating temperance sounds dull. It’s not a virtue that brings praise or admiration, and it is sometimes mistaken for prudish incuriosity, perhaps because the nineteenth-century temperance movements that flourished in Britain and its colonies, as well as in America, resulted in teetotalism, which came to be associated in the popular imagination with fanaticism and a joyless faddiness. Teetotalism has a better reputation now, but it’s still common to think of it as a monochrome solution to a manageable problem. Temperance is different from this, necessitating not insensitivity to pleasure, but a keen awareness of one’s sensitivity. While it doesn’t preclude our trying the fruits of every tree, it argues for leaving something on the branches for tomorrow.
In Rambler 178, Sam notes that ‘the future is purchased by the present’, before pronouncing with flinty authority that ‘It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification.’ Here, crucially, he identifies happiness as something distinct from pleasure. He also addressed the issue in conversation with Boswell, who was inclined to treat them as the same thing, and during one of his sermons noted gravely that ‘As we extend our pleasures, we multiply our wants’.
In fact, pleasure is to him almost the opposite of happiness. This may strike us as strange, yet it’s a powerful idea. While a neuroscientist might explain pleasure with reference to the mesolimbic dopamine pathway or medium spiny neurons, I’m more likely, if I choose to focus on my awareness of the experience of pleasure, to think of it as a concert of the intellect and the emotions. It’s a subtle collaboration, but also a routine one, with the result that we rarely try to unpick its complexity – perhaps for fear of wrecking it. What’s also apparent is that our pleasures are particular. When we say ‘I like music’ or ‘I enjoy cooking’ we mean ‘I love early Miles Davis’ or ‘I enjoy following recipes from Mary Berry’s Christmas Collection’, not ‘Everything in the Top 40 is fabulous’ or ‘I’d be delighted to fry up some breakfast for you and your fourteen friends’. In the moment of experiencing the pleasure, we are aware of what is causing it, and we can usually see it coming. Sometimes the anticipation of pleasure is more pleasurable than the pleasure itself.
Most of us can think of things that give us pleasure: winning a bet, scoring a goal, quenching our thirst, reminiscing, having an orgasm, looking at a great painting, eating cheese (in my case probably Comté). Some of us derive pleasure from sources that would tend to be considered repellent or bizarre – being spanked, sniffing dirty laundry, inflicting cruelty, cycling up hills – though they aren’t so very different from the more orthodox ones. In these cases, and indeed in almost all cases, pleasure derives from an activity, and the repetition of the activity will ultimately exhaust its rewards. Pleasure is specifically and externally stimulated, and we can think of it as involving gain – something is added to our lives, however briefly, and that something is in the foreground of our experience. Whereas the experience of pain demands that we act to reduce it, the experience of pleasure is not a call for action. It is also affected by how it’s framed: such pleasure as I get from drinking a £5 wine you’ve picked up at the local corner shop will be increased if I don’t see the label and believe it comes from your personal vineyard in Provence.
Happiness, on the other hand, is not fixated on a specific object. Whereas we know where pleasure can be obtained, we have an imperfect understanding of how to make ourselves happy. Anticipation isn’t a part of it, and we can be happy without knowing precisely why. More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle identified three kinds of ‘goods’ (as in ‘beneficial circumstances’) that contribute to happiness: ‘goods of the soul’, such as a sense of being morally or intellectually virtuous; the goods of the body, such as being strong and in excellent health; and external goods, among them friendship and esteem. There are, it’s true, moments of happiness, in which we feel ourselves greeting experience with a particular bounce and brightness, but in broad terms happiness is a quality of existence, a tone rather than an event.
In the Dictionary Sam defined happiness as a ‘state in which the desires are satisfied’, but when he discussed it with Boswell in 1766, he arrived at a different formula – ‘Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.’ This needs some unpacking. First, what is agreeable consciousness? Is the agreement within oneself – my feelings are in perfect harmony – or with others – my feelings are in step with yours? Is it both? Second, what is this business of ‘multiplicity’? It could mean that happiness requires several different stimuli; that it consists not of a single bright emotion, but a constellation of them; that it depends on the good feelings one has right now being maintained; that it comes alive only if the mood is shared, with multiple positive feelings boosting one another and the whole upsurge of affirmative energy proving greater than the sum of its parts; that it somehow involves broadening our repertoire of personal resources, our capacity to act and to have ideas; or that it depends on feeling good all at once about the past, the present and the future.1
Each of these readings is suggestive. But above all, Sam’s talk of the multiplicity of consciousness makes happiness sound like a property of sociability. He says in Idler 41 that ‘Happiness . . . is perceived only when it is reflected from another’, and this is one of several indications that he believes happiness involves a special attention to those around us: we step outside our selves and the petty cravings of egocentricity, blossoming by enabling others to blossom, treasuring the expressive aspect of our relationships rather than their instrumental features. Here I can’t resist quoting the comedian George Burns’s line that ‘Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family – in another city.’ Though this is flippant, it hints at an important idea: the things that do most to make us happy are ones that can touch the very marrow of our lives, but we appreciate them more when at a slight distance from them. The sense of satisfaction and well-being that we derive from our engagements, with family or community or ideas, resides not so much in the moment when those engagements are most intense as in their afterglow.
Aggressively pursuing happiness is a sure way not to achieve it. But happiness is now big business. Perhaps America’s Declaration of Independence is partly to blame, since it enshrines the notion that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. Thomas Jefferson was borrowing from John Locke when he wrote of the rights to life and liberty, yet substituted ‘the pursuit of happiness’ where Locke had the word ‘property’. He meant something different by happiness from what we now tend to understand – something closer to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, namely ‘flourishing’ and the resources that enable one to flourish. But the idea that we have a right to pursue happiness has become a staple of English-speaking culture, and it is often confused with a somewhat different idea – that happiness itself is an entitlement. It’s the latter that has made mechanisms and therapies for achieving happiness into an industry. Among the more benign manifestations are books that prescribe exercises for making oneself happier. One such volume, Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home (2012), has the gratifying subtitle ‘Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life’. Publications of this kind treat happiness as an art and argue that like any other art it can be learned. Many of them embody the wisdom – a catholic term here – of healers and coaches who promote neuroplasticity or reveal why zebras don’t get ulcers. Businesses, governments and swindlers promise to boost our spirits. They profit from the cult of positive thinking, wellness and mindfulness. According to the gurus of industrial beatitude, happiness is a commodity and can therefore be tracked, measured and regulated.
One pernicious effect of this industry is to entrench the belief that unhappiness and negative thoughts are a crime – a toxic aberration for which we need to apologize, rather than a natural part of life. Another, in the end even more sinister, is to foster the idea that each of us is secretly omnipotent, if
only we can master the art of perpetual positivity; rather than liberating us from self-loathing, this philosophy makes us self-obsessed, deadens our powers of empathy and turns us into robotic goons, unable to tell the truth about our disappointments or venture criticism of those around us. Sam has a more realistic understanding of happiness. We cannot expect it to be total; as he says in his life of Addison, ‘Human happiness has always its abatements; the brightest sunshine of success is not without a cloud.’ We do well to focus on the happiness we have, rather than some other chimerical form of it that’s been shoved in our faces: ‘Every man may grow rich by contracting his wishes, and by quiet acquiescence in what has been given him supply the absence of more.’ And we should try to find ways to multiply agreeable consciousness, for ‘That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.’
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In which thought is applied to an awkward question: whether Dr Johnson subscribed to the doctrines of S****ism
As others took more responsibility for entertaining him, and after his pension permanently removed the risk of poverty, Sam was able to indulge his appetite. He enjoyed plum pudding with oyster sauce poured over it, salted flank of beef, hot chocolate with lashings of cream or melted butter, veal pie with plums and sugar. In Scotland he savoured roast kid and, on Skye, complained that the local goose was not to his taste, since the birds ‘by feeding in the sea, have universally a fishy rankness’. Hester Thrale reports that he was so fond of peaches that he would sometimes devour seven or eight large ones as a prelude to breakfast. But episodes of gluttony alternated with periods of carefulness, and eventually the carefulness prevailed. Sometimes he cut meat out of his diet or restricted himself to spinach and potatoes. Sometimes, too, he fasted, though mainly as a preparation for receiving the sacrament, which most years he took only at Easter. ‘I mind my belly very studiously,’ he said, adding that ‘he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else’.
When he refers to minding his belly, the image that comes to mind is of his attending to it, nurse-like, even parental, ministering to its needs yet now and then exercising discipline. The adverb ‘studiously’ makes me think of a critical analysis of the belly’s talk, whether it’s the early rumble of hunger or the growls of digestion, and the overall impression is of a conversation, dense with nuance, between the belly and its supervisor. As someone who occasionally scoffs too much and has tried to be a more circumspect eater, I recognize in Sam’s talk of very studious belly-minding the sound of a person wishing he didn’t have to be so careful.
Like anyone else, he found that certain foods held no appeal. Boswell recalls visiting the Isle of Coll and chancing there on a stone shaped like a small cucumber, and this reminds him of Sam’s explanation of a reference in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, where the pragmatic Mrs Peachum pictures her trusting daughter Polly: ‘And when she’s dressed with care and cost, all tempting, fine and gay, / As Men should serve a cucumber, she flings herself away.’ Sam told him that ‘it has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing’. There’s no indication of how Sam came by this impression, but he may have had in mind the words of Sir Thomas Browne, who argued that ‘cucumbers are no commendable fruits’ on the grounds that they were ‘very waterish’, causing wind and inhibiting the functions of the stomach.
Some of Sam’s ideas about diet can be traced back to The Anatomy of Melancholy. This vast work was not so much an account of melancholy as a collection of strange information about humankind that its author Robert Burton had picked up during his very extensive reading. Published in 1621 and ransacked by several generations of writers and medics, the Anatomy was full of contradictions, but it established a lot of culinary prejudices: that cabbage causes bad dreams, venison ‘begets bad blood’, pork is ‘moist’ and can cause fever, cheese is unsuitable for anyone prone to headaches.
In the eighteenth century, melancholy was regarded as an illness. True, it was sometimes à la mode, and Bath doctors had to treat patients who thought that it made them seem interestingly artistic. But Sam inherited the idea that it was an affliction of the spleen and the liver, the common symptoms of which were wakefulness, convulsions, vertigo and a ringing in the ears, as well as fear, lasciviousness and paranoia – a list he would have read with grim recognition. Hoping to find ways to alleviate the condition, he turned to George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733). This took a broad view of nervous diseases – hysteria, hypochondria and depressive ‘lowness’ – and stressed the relationship between mind, body and spirit. Without referring to madness, Cheyne made it clear, through an account of his own melancholy, that he understood just how debilitating it could be and the extent to which it could impinge on one’s relationships. Sam found his discussion of spasms and convulsions especially pertinent, and went along with the argument that the causes of chronic illness included variable weather, heavy food and a sedentary lifestyle.
Cheyne recommended a diet containing lots of ‘soft, mild, sweet, or at least insipid things’. He also encouraged exercise, though some of the examples he gave wouldn’t satisfy today’s personal trainers: hunting, billiards, bowls, and even riding in a chariot.1 Sam was bothered by Cheyne’s belief that this ‘malady’ was confined to the educated elite, and warned Boswell, ‘Do not let him teach you a foolish notion that melancholy is a proof of acuteness.’ But, like many others, he was impressed by the author’s forthrightness about the roots of his own ailments. Cheyne had arrived in London from Scotland in 1702 and had immediately become a hard-drinking, gluttonous man-about-town. Even after embracing a more austere regime he relapsed – at one point ballooning to thirty-two stone. In The English Malady he drew on a history of personal failings to set out a doctrine of self-improvement. With his emphases on well-being, detoxification, the mental struggle involved in being slim and the opportunity for repairing the soul by reconditioning the body, he anticipated the vast modern literature of dietetic self-help.
Inevitably, Sam was struck by the connection Cheyne drew between disorders of the nerves and ‘corruptions in the habit’. For him, ‘habit’ meant ‘bad habit’. He thought of habits as tyrannical; one needs to guard against them, for if they are not subdued they will stymie all one’s powers of reason. In ‘The Vision of Theodore’, an allegorical tale published in 1748, he pictured Habit as a creature, a monstrous enemy enforcing ‘sordid bondage’. It restricted movement with chains ‘so slender in themselves, and silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived’, but ‘each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when by continual additions they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken’. Here Habit appears at once stealthy and brawny; when opposed, it gets bigger and more potent (like a battle-hardened Pokémon) unless one manages to defeat it completely.
‘Corruptions in the habit’ is at once a catchy phrase and a vague one, but it was a form of words that could serve as an umbrella for Sam’s melancholy, his tics and other nervous disorders – the gesticulations and see-sawing, his anxiety about masturbation, his urge to scrape the joints of his fingers with a knife till they were raw. As he searched for means of controlling these behaviours, of driving out the corruptions, his approach was combative. Yet patience and endurance were necessary, too. The pursuit of personal virtue was something that, as he wrote in the Rambler, called for a ‘constant and determinate’ mindset, and indeed a failure to believe in the value of perseverance was guaranteed to ‘enchain the mind’ (to sluggish mediocrity). It is through what he calls ‘gradual accessions’ and ‘accumulated labours’ that one masters any subject, not least one’s self.
The word that comes to mind here is stoical. Sam would have shuddered to find it being applied to him, as he disapproved of large portions of Stoic philosophy. He considered most of the ancient Stoics
– men such as Chrysippus and Zeno of Citium – haughty in their pretence of ‘exemption from the sensibilities of unenlightened mortals’ and being ‘above the reach of those miseries which embitter life to the rest of the world’. There was something absurd in their refusal to admit being pained by poverty, exile or the end of friendship; for his own part, he preferred to engage with life’s hazards and vicissitudes. Yet he did concede that the Stoic philosophers were ‘very useful monitors’. They were capable of insights that could, with a certain caution, be applied to modern life. Of all these thinkers, the one who most appealed to him was Epictetus, and his appreciation deepened as a result of reading a translation by one of his friends, the poet Elizabeth Carter. This appeared in 1758, and Sam was one of 912 subscribers to the handsome edition; in her introduction Carter expresses reservations about the Stoics’ ‘great arrogance’, but applauds their ‘excellent rules of self-government, and of social behaviour’.2
Born in what is today Pamukkale in southern Turkey, Epictetus moved as a child to Rome, where he was kept as a slave. According to popular myth, his master on one occasion tortured him by twisting his leg, and Epictetus coolly pointed out that if he kept twisting the leg would break; his master ignored him, the leg snapped, and Epictetus responded, ‘There, did I not tell you that it would break?’ This makes him sound insanely unyielding rather than admirably tough, but he’s a practical philosopher, preaching the gospel of resilience. Those of Epictetus’s reflections that survive, after nearly two millennia, do so because they were noted down and published by one of his pupils, Arrian. His Discourses, which appeared around 1,600 years before Sam was born, begin with some thoughts about what is in our power and what is not. He points out that you can’t control the weather or your friends, and that there are limits to how far you can control your body. But you can control what you believe. Most of us spend too much time trying to exercise control over things that are beyond our power, or feeling frustrated about our inability to do so – and not enough time taking responsibility for what we think.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 25