GETTING A LIVING, AND LIVING
Getting the best and most out of life, I take to be the most rational
object of human existence. Even religion, although it affects to scorn
the phrase, admits the fact; for no man would be religious unless he
were convinced that he thereby added something to his store of
happiness. It is a matter of temperament whether a man treats religion
as a panacea for his mortal troubles, or the 'Open Sesame' of brighter
worlds, but it is quite certain that he regards it as a means of
happiness. I cannot doubt that the anchorites, ascetics, and
cloistered nuns of mediaeval times were happy in their own way,
although it was in a fashion that appears to us highly foolish and
absurd. Even a St. Stylites had his consolations; he was kept warm
upon his pillar by the comfortable sense of his superiority to his
wicked fellow-creatures.
To get the best out of life there must be some adequate fulfilment of
one's best self. Man is a bundle of tastes and appetites, some lofty,
and some ignoble, but all crying out for satisfaction. Wisdom lies in
the discernment of essentials; in just discrimination between false and
true tastes. Man has been a long time upon the earth, and he has spent
his time for the most part in one ceaseless experiment, viz., how he
may become a satisfactory creature in his own eyes. All civilisations
converge upon this point; and we maybe sure that, in their lonely hours
of meditation, the fantastic warder on the great wall of China, and the
Roman soldier pacing to and fro in the porticoes of the Palatine, had
much the same thoughts. Whosoever speaks to man on the art of becoming
happy is secure of a hearing; even though he be the vilest of quacks he
will have his following, even though he were the worst of scoundrels
some will take him for a prophet. In short, we are all the dupes of
hope, and it needs some experience to assure us that our only real hope
is in ourselves. In our own hearts lies the Eldorado which we scour
the world to find; could we but fulfil our best selves we should ask no
other happiness.
The question that soon comes to obtrude itself upon the mind of a
thoughtful man in a great city, is this old persistent question of
whether his method of life is such as to answer to the ideal of
fulfilling his best self? It seemed to me that the inhabitants of
cities were too busy getting a living to have time to live.
Let us take the life of the average business man by way of example.
Such a man will rise early, sleep late, and eat the bread of
carefulness, if he means to succeed. He will probably live--or be said
to live--in some suburb more or less remote from the roaring centre of
affairs. The first light of the winter dawn will see him alert;
breakfast is a hurried passover performance; a certain train must be
caught at all hazard to digestion, and the most leisured moments of the
day will be those he passes in the railway carriage. Once arrived at
his office he must plunge into the vortex of business; do battle with a
thousand rivalries and competitions; day after day must labour in the
same wearisome pursuits, content, perhaps, if at the end of the year he
shall have escaped as by a miracle commercial shipwreck. He will come
back to his residence, night after night, a tired man; not pleasantly
wearied with pursuits which have exercised his complete powers, but
tired to the point of dejection by the narrowness and monotony of his
pursuits. I say he returns to his residence; I scorn to say his home,
for the house he rents is merely the barrack where he sleeps. Of the
life that goes on within this house, which is nominally his, he knows
nothing. In its daily ordering, or even in its external features, he
has no part. He has chosen no item of its furniture; he has had no
hand in its decoration; he has but paid the tradesmen's bills. His
children scarcely know him; they are asleep when he goes off in the
morning, and asleep when he returns at night; he is to them the strange
man who sits at the head of the table once a week and carves the Sunday
joint. It is well for them if they have a mother who possesses gifts
of government, sympathy, and patient comprehension, for it is clear
that they have no father. He gets a living, and perhaps in time an
ample living; but does he live?
It may be said that this picture is exaggerated; on the contrary, I
think it is under-estimated. I have myself known men whose average
daily absence from 'home' is twelve hours; they disappear by the eight
o'clock morning train, and in times of special business pressure it is
not far from midnight when they return. The trains, cabs, and public
vehicles of London convey, day by day, one million three hundred
thousand of these homeless men to their employments in the city. Here
and there a wise man may be found who resents this tyranny of
suburbanism. I know a young business man, who also chances to possess
domestic instincts, for whom suburbanism grew so intolerable that he
took a house in the very heart of London, that he might lunch and dine
with his wife at his own table without neglecting his business
interests. He was a wise man, but he is the only one I know. Counting
the time passed at luncheon and dinner, the later departure in the
morning, and the earlier arrival at night, he is the clear gainer, day
by day, of three to four hours of domestic intercourse. At the end of
the week he has thus added to the credit of his family life
four-and-twenty hours; at the end of a year he has enjoyed more than
fifty full days of domestic intercourse which would have been forfeited
had he continued to live at Surbiton. He has also saved money, for
though the rent he pays in Central London is more than the rent he paid
at Surbiton, yet he has saved the expense of his season-ticket,
lunches, and occasional dinners at a club or restaurant, and cabs to
Waterloo when he was pressed for time. But it is quite vain to urge
such considerations on the average man of business. He would tell you
frankly that nothing would induce him to live in a house within a
stone's-throw of Leicester Square, although it is a far better built
and more comfortable house than the gimcrack villa which he rents at
Surbiton. The gain in domestic intercourse would not attract him, for
he has long ago lost taste for it; and the privilege of lunching with
his family would repel him, for he is deeply suspicious of the virtues
of domestic cookery. Nor, I suppose, would it influence him to tell
him that by living in Central London, he could command without
inconvenience the full attractions of the town, such as concerts,
lectures, theatres, or those special assemblies which are
representative of London life; for he desires nothing of the kind.
Considerations of economy might affect him, but with all his skill at
figures he seldom has the sense to see that the moiety of income paid
yearly to the railway, by himself and his family, goes a long way
toward the doubling of his rent. In short, suburbanism is his fetish;
it is the keynote of his poor respectability, and he is not to be
diverted from it by any reasons which a sane man would regard as
considerable, if not imperative.
The most usual excuse of suburbanism is that it is a good thing for the
wife and family of a business man, though it is a bad thing for him.
It is singular that no one seems to recognise the gross selfishness of
this plea. It is like the plea of the vivisectionist, that vivisection
is a bad thing for a rabbit, but a very good thing for humanity, since
humanity profits by the torture of the rabbit. But for my part I doubt
whether there is any real profit to anybody in suburbanism. There is a
town life, and there is a country life, each of which has peculiar
compensations of its own; but suburbanism is a miserable compromise,
which like most compromises combines not the qualities but the defects
of two antagonisms. Its worst effect is that it sets up in one family
two standards of life, which have nothing in common. After a while it
must happen that there is a serious estrangement of taste, and it is
not surprising if this often leads to a much more serious estrangement
of affection. The air of Surbiton may be a little fresher than the air
of Bloomsbury, but what does this count for if the atmosphere of the
hearth be poisoned? Moreover, among the Anglo-Saxon peoples women are
not encouraged to take any vital interest in the pursuits of their
husbands as they are among the Latin races. I should not be surprised
to find that half the women in the London suburbs do not know the
precise nature of their husbands' occupations. A French woman of the
bourgeois class often has a real aptitude for business. She can manage
a shop, keep accounts, take an interest in markets, and in all
questions of commercial enterprise she is the confidante, and often the
adviser, of her husband. Your English woman of the same class prides
herself rather on her total ignorance of business. It is probable that
in twenty years of married life she has not once visited the warehouse
or the office where her husband earns the income which she spends. She
is 'provided for without the sweet sense of providing.' She sees her
husband elated or depressed by things that have happened in the city;
but to her the reasons of his hope or fear are not communicated, nor
would she understand them if they were. His mind speaks a language
foreign to her; his daily operations in the city have for her only the
remote interest of things that have happened in a foreign country,
which appear too unreal to excite any sincere sympathy or apprehension.
Is this divided life good for either party?
Were some curious observer from another planet to arrive in London, I
think few things would appear to him so extraordinary as a London
suburb at noonday. By ten o'clock in the morning at latest he would
see it denuded of all its male inhabitants. Like that fabulous realm
of Tennyson's _Princess_, it is a realm inhabited by women; and the
only male voice left in the land is the voice of the milk-boy on his
rounds, the necessary postman, and the innocuous grocer's tout. There
is something of the 'hushed seraglio' in these miles of trim houses,
from whose doors and windows only female faces look out. An air of
sensible bereavement lies upon the land. Woman, deprived of her lord
and natural complement, cuts but a poor figure anywhere, but nowhere so
poor as in a wide realm populous with grass widows. By what interests
or avocations, or by what delinquency of duty the tedious hours are
cheated, is not revealed to any male philosopher; but he is a poor
observer who does not recognise something unnatural in this one-sided
life. A few miles away the loud Niagara of London runs swift, and the
air vibrates with all the tumult of the strenuous life of man; but here
the air is dead, unwinnowed by any clamorous wind, unshaken by any
planetary motion. I cannot think this narrow separated life good for
woman, and I am surprised that in these days when woman claims equal
privilege with man, she will submit to it. In the act of getting a
living she also suffers, and loses something of the power to live. If
the distraction of the city hurts the man she is not less injured by
the torpor of the suburb. Let a woman be never so intelligent and
keenly wrought, a suburb will soon enfeeble her, and take the fine edge
off her spirit. Left to the sole society of nursemaids and cooks in
her own house for many hours a day; to the companionship of women
outside her house, whose conversation is mainly gossip about household
difficulties; to the tame diversions of shopping at the nearest
emporium; what power of interest in the larger things of life can be
expected of her? The suburb is her cloister, and she the dedicated
bride of littleness.
This seems a hard saying, but it can easily be verified by observation.
I have myself known women, rich enough to keep a carriage, who had
never been so far as Hyde Park, never visited the National Gallery, and
never sought any finer music than could be furnished by a local
concert. For them, London as an entity did not exist. This
parochialism of suburban life is its most surprising feature. There is
after all some excuse for Mr. Grant Allen's description of London as an
aggregation of villages, when we find that so vast a number of
Londoners really live the life of villagers. But it is not patriotism
that binds them to the soil, nor local pride, as is the case with
genuine villagers; it is rather sheer inertia. Such pride, if it
existed, might do much for the regeneration of great cities, by
creating a series of eager and intelligent communities, which would vie
with one another in civic self-improvement; but this is just the kind
of pride which does not exist. No one cares how his suburb is
misgoverned, so long as rates are not too exorbitant. A suburb will
wake into momentary life to curb the liberal programmes of the
school-board, or to vote against the establishment of a free library; a
gross self-interest being thus the only variation of its apathy. It
soon falls asleep again, dulled into torpor by the fumes of its own
intolerant smugness. For much of this the element of family separation
in suburban life is answerable. The men pay their rates and house-rent
at Surbiton, but they live their real lives within hearing of the bell
of St. Paul's; how should they take any interest in Surbiton? After
all, Surbiton is to them but a vast caravansary, where they are lodged
and fed at night; and one does not inquire too closely into the
internal amenities of his hotel so long as the food is tolerable, and
the bed clean.
Suburbanism is, however, but a branch, though an important branch, of
the larger question, whether in cities men do not ultimately sacrifice
the finer qualities and joys of life to the act of getting a living.
It will perhaps be said that the man with a true genius for business
must in any case live in a city; that he is not discontented with the
conditions of his life; that, all things being considered, he is
probably living the kind of life for which he is best fitted. May not
a writer, who is presumably a person of studious and quiet habits,
misinterpret the life of a business man precisely in the same way that
he misinterprets the life of the poor, by applying to it his own
standards instead of measuring it by theirs? Business, for the man of
business genius, is more than an employment; it is his epic, his
romance, his adventurous crusade. He brings to it something of the
statesman's prescience, the diplomatist's sagacity, the great captain's
power of organising victory. His days are battles, his life a long
campaign; and if he does not win the spoil of kingdoms, he does fight
for commercial supremacy, which comes to much the same thing. No doubt
there is much truth in this putting of the case, though it really begs
the main question. But even if we grant that in the larger operations
of commerce a certain type of genius is required, we must remember that
the men of this order are few in number. Every lord of commerce is
attended by a vast retinue of slaves. Very few of these humble
servitors of commerce can ever hope to rise from the ranks into supreme
command. They must labour to create the wealth of the successful
merchant as a private soldier suffers wounds and hardships that fame
may crown his general. Do these men share the higher privileges of
life? Is not life with them the getting of a living rather than
living? Nay, more; is it not the getting of a living for some one else?
The merchant-prince fulfils himself, for his highest powers of
intelligence are daily taxed to the uttermost; but the case is very
different with that vast army of subordinates, whom we see marching
every morning in an infinite procession to the various warehouses and
offices of London. I have often wondered at their cheerfulness when I
have recollected the nature of their life. For they bring to their
daily tasks not the whole of themselves, but a mere segment of
themselves; some small industrious faculty which represents them, or
misrepresents them, at the tribunal of those who ask no better thing of
them. Few of them are doing the best that they can do, and they know
it. They are not doing it because the world does not ask them to do
it; indeed, the world takes care that they shall have no opportunity of
doing it. A certain faculty for arithmetic represents a man who has
many higher faculties; and thus the man is forced to live by one
capacity which is perhaps his least worthy and significant. This is
not the case in what we call the liberal professions and the arts. The
architect, the barrister, the humblest journalist needs his whole mind
for his task, and hence his work is a delight. The artist, if he be a
true artist, does the one thing that he was born to do, and so 'the
hours pass away untold, without chagrin, and without weariness,' nor
would he wish them to pass otherwise. Many times as I took my way to
the dreary labours of my desk I stopped to watch, and sometimes to talk
with, a smiling industrious little Frenchman, who repaired china and
bronzes in a dingy shop in Welbeck Street. He was an expert at his
trade; knew all the distinctive marks of old china, and could assign
with certainty the right date of any piece of bronze he handled; and to
hear him discourse on these things would have been a liberal education
to a budding connoisseur. I never knew a man so indefatigably happy in
his work; his eye lit up at any special glow of colour or delicacy of
design; he used his tools as though he loved them; and if he dreamed at
night, I doubt not that his canopies were coloured with the hues of
Sèvres, and that bronze angels from the hand of Benvenuto stood about
his bed. Plainly the man was happy because his work engaged his whole
attention; and to every cunning rivet that he fashioned he gave the
entire forces of his mind. Here was a man who not merely got a living
but lived; and I, chained to my desk, knew well enough that his life
was much more satisfactory than mine.
Money has little to do with this problem of satisfactory living; I
think that this was the first discovery I made in the direction of a
better mode of life. My French workman earned perhaps two pounds a
week: I earned four or five; but he bought happiness with his work,
whereas I bought discontent and weariness. Money may be bought at too
dear a rate. The average citizen, if he did but know it, is always
buying money too dear. He earns, let us say, four hundred pounds a
year; but the larger proportion of this sum goes in what is called
'keeping up appearances.' He must live in a house at a certain rental;
by the time that his rates and taxes are paid he finds one-eighth of
his income at least has gone to provide a shelter for his head. A
cottage, at ten pounds a year, would have served him better, and would
have been equally commodious. He must needs send his children to some
private 'academy' for education, getting only bad education and high
charges for his pains; a village board-school at twopence a week would
have offered undeniable advantages. He must wear the black coat and
top-hat sacred to the clerking tribe; a tweed suit and cap are more
comfortable, and half the price. At all points he is the slave of
convention, and he pays a price for his convention out of all
proportion to its value. At a moderate estimate half the daily
expenditure of London is a sacrifice to the convention or imposture of
respectability.
Unless a man have, however, a large endowment of that liberal
discontent which makes him perpetually examine and reexamine the
conditions of his life, he will be a long time before he even suspects
that he is the victim of artificial needs. When once the yoke of habit
is imposed, the shoulder soon accustoms itself to the bondage, and the
aches and bruises of initiation are forgotten. There are spasms of
disgust, moments of wise suspicion; but they are transient, and men
soon come to regard a city as the prison from whence there is no
escape. But is no escape possible? That was the question which
pressed more and more upon me as the years went on. I saw that the
crux of the whole problem was economic, I knew that I was not the
gainer by a larger income, if I could buy a more real satisfaction on
less income. I saw that it was the artificial needs of life that made
me a slave; the real needs of life were few. A cottage and a hundred
pounds a year in a village meant happiness and independence; but dared
I sacrifice twice or thrice the income to secure it? The debate went
on for years, and it was ended only when I applied to it one fixed and
reasoned principle. That principle was that my first business as a
rational creature was _not to get a living but to live_; and that I was
a fool to sacrifice the power of living in securing the means of life.