Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.
In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence; and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us, indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly alive.
Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care a button about being æsthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite, those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on to the grass, are marvellous fine things to look upon....