SUMMING UP BY SOMERSET MAUGHAM

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK SUMMING UP BY SOMERSET MAUGHAM

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life, and for one which there is small help, is someone whom you love no longer loves you. When La Rochcfoucauld discovered that between two lovers there is one who loves and one lets himself be loved, he put in an epigram the discord that must prevent men from achieving in love perfect happiness. However much people may resent the fact and however much deny it there can surely be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands. In the immense majority these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the same object and with advancing years, they atrophy. People are very hypocritical in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do with love!. Affection is created by habit, community of interests and convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration. We are creatures of change, change is the atmosphere we breathe and is it likely that the strongest but one of all our instincts should be free from this law? We are not the same persons this year as the last; nor are those we love. It is a happy choice if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. Mostly, different ourselves, we take a desperate pathetic effort to love in a different person, the person we loved. It is only because the power of love when it seizes us seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last forever. When it subsides we are ashamed, duped, blame ourselves for our weakness, whereas we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our humanity. The experience of mankind has led them to regard love with mingled feelings. They have been suspicious of it. They have as often cursed as praised it. The soul of man, struggling to be free, has except for brief moments looked upon the self surrender that it claims as a fall from grace. The happiness it brings may be the greatest of which man is capable, but it is seldom unalloyed. It writes a story that generally has a sad ending. Many have resented its power and angrily prayed to be delivered from its burden. They have hugged their chains but knowing they were chains hated them too. Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness that to love with all our heart someone who you know is unworthy of our love.

But loving-Kindness is not coloured with that transitoriness which is the irremediable defect of love. It is true that it is not entirely devoid of the sexual element. It is like dancing, one dances for the pleasure of the rhythmic movement and it is not necessary that one should wish to go to bed with one’s partner; but it is a pleasant exercise only if to do so would not be disgusting. In loving-kindness the sexual instinct is sublimated, but it lends the emotion something of its own warm and vitalizing energy. Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists and makes it less difficult to practice those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance which are the passive and not very exhalirating elements of goodness. Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my readers would have recognized with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone already knew.

I have little sense for reverence. But when now and then I have come across real goodness I have found reverence rise naturally in my heart. It has not seemed to matter then that its rare possessors were perhaps sometimes a trifle less intelligent than I should have liked them to be. When I was a small boy and unhappy I used to dream night after night that my life at school was all a dream and that I should wake up to find myself at home again with my mother. Her death was a wound that fifty years have not entirely healed. I have long ceased to have that dream; but I have never quite lost the sense that my living life was a mirage in which I did this and that because that was how it fell out, but which, ever while I was playing my part in it, I could look from a distance and know for the mirage it was. When I look back on my life, with its successes and its failures, its endless errors, its deception and its fulfillments, its joys and miseries, it seems to me strangely lacking in reality. Its shadowy and unsubstantial. It may be that my heart having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with. In default of something better it has seemed to me sometimes that I might pretend to myself that the goodness I have not so seldom after all come across in many of those I have encountered on my way had reality. It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life nor an explanation of it, but an extenuation. In this indifferent universe, with its inevitable evils that surround us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve not as a challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of fate. Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight. But goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy chance if happiness results. Plato, as we know, enjoined upon his wise man to abandon the serene life of contemplation for the turmoil of practical affairs and thereby set the claim of duty above the desire for happiness; and we have all of us, I suppose, on occasion adopted a course because we thought it right though we well knew that it could bring us happiness neither then nor in the future. When then is right action? For my own part the best answer I know is that given by Fray Luis De Leon. To follow it does not look so difficult that human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength. With it I can end my book. The beauty of life, he says, is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business.