The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-06-30
NECESSITY OF SELF-DECEPTIoN.
To Destroy Illusions Is to Destroy
 Happiness"

E. F. Benson in the Queen.
 Rudyard Kipling says somewhere that
 Tside" is las necessary to d man as it is to
 billiard ball, and if he will allow us to
 add that, though it is not always neees-
 sary to a billiard ball, 1t is quite always
 necessary to ma1, we will bow our
 heads to the profoundity of the obserNa-
 ton. For confidence. placed or misplaced. Is absolutely esental if we are. with any
 hope of success, to try to tackle this as
 founding monster. all pincers and stings
 and tentacles which we call the world
 We all get tweaked and tumbled about
 enough to shake the confidence of the
 most Justly lion-hearted, and tpus 1t ts
 particularly necessary the less l1n-heart-
 ed we really are, to cultivate some sort of courageous opinions about ourselves. Time and again it will be crushed into fragments round our unlucky heads, and time and again. not patiently, but with feverish haste and jerry built preclpita- ton, we must erect our fimsy editce be- fore the outrageous world makes It's next
 onslaught on us and finds us naked and
 unprotected, and make believe we are well 1 fortified
 l Now in order to be able to do this at l all it stands 10 reason almost that we , should not really know the truth about | ourselves, else the spectacle presented
 would certainly be so disheratenng that we should throw up our hands at once- It is true that there are quantity Of bracing maxims, which urge us to an op- l posite course. A Delphic message tells us to know ourselves Isben bids us destroy our Illusions and other gospel commands us Ito keep the light dry which sounds i as if 1t had something to do with pho- 1 tography, but probably Is really a precept of the same truth-seeking school. But i though all these utterances are unim- peachable in principle, I think that the
 average man who devoted himself to put ! ting fbpm into DraptiFR would find l that he had taken Despair to wife. For i 1t Is he next To impossible to fight when you have your eomrade-in-arms the
 complete knowledge of your own failures. Try and fail. by all means; but after that
 remember to forget Truth is an austere
 goddess throned very high. and heaven forbid that should fail in worship to her. But courage also Is very good thing and what if by fixing our eyes too i steadily on truth we find courage oozing out of LIS from punctured tire2 We should be wise | believe. to inilate our
 selves once more and look at the road for a little instead of the mountain top where Truth sits throned. Because, somehow or other. we really must get on. and on fiat tires we cannot: the affair becomes too bruising and jolting to be supportable. Not that 1t is not wise occasionally to lay bare as far as we can to ourselves the wretched secrets of our own hearts and our miserable shortcomings, but would have these litanies short, though sincere And after all. at the end of the ltnay comes the general thanksgiving. which is much better food for the fighter than the inspection of his own weak places. Let him try to think that, after all he is not quite bad he might have been; there Is the side" that will help him.
 There is no more striking instance of the conversion of a worshiper of truth hap of Ia
 Ibsen For years he was a voice crying in the wilderness" bidding us at any price realize the truth, namely, that social life
 was founded on lies and quagmires of deceit. Brand sacrifices all for truth, for
 the realization of himself as he Is; Norah
 in "rhe Doll House" does the same, the
 "Enemy of the People" breaches an identical message And then, at the end, we have the Wild Duck" and the mes-
 sage of that Is, ito destroy illusions is 7
 to destroy happiness" And 1t is serious
 matter to set about destroying any body z happiness, even our own"
 Here. then. we find corollary that
 certainly follows on the need of self-de-
 cepton, and that is an even greater neeu
 of helping other people to deceive them
 selves. Our poor friend A., let us suppose.
 thinks himself pianist of some power.
 and this Illusion about himself gives him
 many hours of misbegotten joy. But though we may privately say afterward
 that Beethoven must have turned in his
 grave 1t Is a great pity to let the joyous
 A know that. It matters very liIlle
 whether our sensitive ears are tortured
 this is how we probably put it to our
 selves-by a scandalous rendering of the
 andantes; but it matters very much indeed
 if we wantonly extinguish other peoples happiness. Though. as a convinced optt- mist, I believe that there Is an enor- nous quantity of happiness in the world, I am still convinced that we never need provide for the contingency of there be- ing enough. Besides, As happiness quite
 clearly belongs to A: have no more right to take it away Gf l can) than l have to steal any of his possessions. And if it is tempting to leave the room or to screw up my face to an expression of musical outrage when he murders the
 Moonlight I must remember that I am
 reaching offering hands to that which Is not mine On the other hand, if A. does
 not mind my contortions, 1t is clearly
 useless to indulge in them.
 Let us therefore gently deceive ourselves into thinking that we are a little better than we really hapen to be. and are gifted beyond that which nature actually thought fit to endow us. That is the side necessary. But 1t is necessary for others as we'll Let us give an extra twin
 to than, as they nass and reDaan ua