The Gayety of Life

The Gayety of Life by Agnes Repplier

Agnes Repplier's essay "The Gayety of Life" argues that cheerfulness and mirth are not trivial indulgences but moral obligations and essential contributions to human civilization. Writing in the early twentieth century, Repplier builds her case against the prevailing literary and cultural tendency toward pessimism, gloom, and the relentless cataloguing of life's miseries, contending that such tendencies, however earnestly motivated, constitute a kind of theft from the shared treasury of human happiness. Repplier opens by invoking James Beresford, an Oxford don who compiled a celebrated list of life's minor miseries, and uses him as a representative figure for a wider cultural habit: the eager, systematic attention to grievance and discomfort. She observes that much modern literature resembles this same enterprise on a grander and more solemn scale, with authors and critics praised as courageous truth-tellers for dwelling on suffering, squalor, and social degradation. Repplier challenges this praise, arguing that misery is self-evident and requires no special talent to identify. What demands genuine effort, imagination, and moral courage is the cultivation and preservation of joy. Central to the essay is Repplier's metaphor of a spiritual treasury of laughter and gayety, consciously modeled on the Roman Catholic concept of a treasury of merit built from the good deeds and prayers of the faithful. Just as that treasury provides consolation and strength to those who draw upon it, the accumulated mirth of humanity sustains individuals in their darkest hours. Every person who contributes to this treasury benefits their neighbors; every person who diminishes it, regardless of their philosophical or reforming intentions, commits a sin against their fellow human beings. Repplier directs particular criticism at novelists and poets who use their art primarily as vehicles for depicting wretchedness. She examines the English novelist George Gissing as a prominent example of what she calls the school of black realism, quoting his lurid description of traveling through East London in language so extravagant and unrelenting in its darkness that it loses contact with the actual experience of the people it purports to represent. She contrasts Gissing's vision with the boastful civic pride of a working-class butcher boy encountered in a third-class railway carriage, for whom London was a city of wonders rather than damnation. The anecdote serves to illustrate that suffering people are not necessarily defined by their suffering, and that literature which insists they are does them a disservice. Repplier also challenges the misidentification of melancholy as sympathy. Drawing on Walter Pater's account of Carl of Rosenmold, she distinguishes between a genuine empathy that moves one to protect life's benefactions and a passive, self-indulgent absorption in gloom that ultimately serves neither the observer nor the observed. Much modern poetry, she argues, is the product of this latter disposition, particularly among women writers, whose verse she characterizes as tending toward the dirge. Against these tendencies, Repplier marshals a series of counter-examples and endorsements of cheerfulness. She cites William Hazlitt's tribute to James Northcote, whose invariably agreeable conversation left Hazlitt feeling lighter and more buoyant than any practical service from friends could achieve. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson's famous declaration that there is no duty so underrated as the duty of being happy, and reflects that Stevenson's enduring popularity owed less to his literary skill than to the remarkable fact that he remained a source of gaiety and humor through years of serious illness. Stevenson's example demonstrates that gayety is not the exclusive province of the fortunate or the healthy but can be cultivated as an act of will and offered as a gift. Repplier extends her argument to the practical conduct of social life, suggesting that the most accessible form of contribution to the treasury of mirth is simple restraint: refraining from burdening others with the details of one's health complaints, financial troubles, domestic irritations, and accumulated grievances. She invokes Saint-Simon's observation about Madame de Maintenon, whose enduring hold over Louis XIV rested not on beauty or wit but on a quality he describes as decorous gayety, a consistent cheerfulness of demeanor maintained under all circumstances. This controlled and disciplined good humor, Repplier implies, is not a natural gift but an achievement requiring the same qualities of endurance and courage that are more commonly admired in those who suffer stoically. The essay concludes on a philosophical note, acknowledging that life is not chosen but imposed, that it contains genuine and unavoidable pain, and that the appropriate response to this condition is neither denial nor despair but a courageous embrace of whatever pleasures and laughter it affords. To shrink from life's joys out of excessive caution, to refuse the rose because of the thorn, is characterized as a failure of nerve equivalent to a fear of Pan, a turning away from the vital and animating forces of existence. Gayety, Repplier insists, requires as much courage as endurance, and without courage the battle of life is lost.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1901 · Genre: Essay, Literary Criticism, Humor · 2,946 words

First lines

Grief is the sister of doubt and ill-temper, and, beyond all spirits, destroyeth man. -- _Shepherd of Hermas._

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essays · literary criticism · social commentary · humor · wit · American literature · early twentieth century · cultural criticism · philosophy · manners · society · education

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