'Tis no excessive puritanism to say that while pleasure, in the
abstract, is a great, perhaps the greatest, good; pleasures, our
actual pleasures in the concrete, are very often evil.
Many of the pleasures which we allow ourselves, and which all the
world admits our right to, happen to be such as waste wealth and time,
make light of the advantage of others, and of the good of our own
souls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness or
degeneracy--religious and scientific terms for the same thing--in poor
mankind. It means merely that we are all of us as yet very undeveloped
creatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority,
and the bulk of each individual's nature very much in the rear of his
own aspirations and definitions. Mankind, in the process of adapting
itself to external circumstances, has perforce evolved a certain
amount of intellectual and moral quality; but that intellectual and
moral quality is, so far, merely a means for rendering material
existence endurable; it will have to become itself the origin and aim
of what we must call a spiritual side of life. In the meanwhile, human
beings do not get any large proportion of their enjoyment from what
they admit to be their nobler side.
Hence it is that even when you have got rid of the mere struggle for
existence--fed, clothed, and housed your civilised savage, and secured
food, clothes, and shelter for his brood--you have by no means
provided against his destructive, pain-giving activities. He has spare
time and energy; and these he will devote, ten to one, to recreations
involving, at the best, the slaughter of harmless creatures; at the
worst, to the wasting of valuable substance, of what might be other
people's food; or else to the hurting of other people's feelings in
various games of chance or skill, particularly in the great skilled
game of brag called "Society."
Our gentlemanly ancestors, indeed, could not amuse themselves without
emptying a certain number of bottles and passing some hours under the
table; while our nimble-witted French neighbours, we are told,
included in their expenditure on convivial amusements a curious item
called _la casse_, to wit, the smashing of plates and glasses. The
Spaniards, on the other hand, have bull-fights, most shocking
spectacles, as we know, for we make it a point to witness them when
we are over there. Undoubtedly we have immensely improved in such
matters, but we need a great deal of further improvement. Most people
are safe only when at work, and become mischievous when they begin to
play. They do not know how to _kill time_ (for that is the way in
which we poor mortals regard life) without incidentally killing
something else: proximately birds and beasts, and their neighbours'
good fame; more remotely, but as surely, the constitution of their
descendants, and the possible wages of the working classes.
It is quite marvellous how little aptness there is in the existing
human being for taking pleasure either in what already exists ready to
hand, or in the making of something which had better be there; in what
can be enjoyed without diminishing the enjoyment of others, as nature,
books, art, thought, and the better qualities of one's neighbours. In
fact, one reason why there is something so morally pleasant in cricket
and football and rowing and riding and dancing, is surely that they
furnish on the physical plane the counterpart of what is so sadly
lacking on the spiritual: amusements which do good to the individual
and no harm to his fellows.
Of course, in our state neither of original sinfulness nor of
degeneracy, but of very imperfect development, it is still useless and
absurd to tell people to make use of intellectual and moral resources
which they have not yet got. It is as vain to preach to the majority
of the well-to-do the duty of abstinence from wastefulness, rivalry,
and ostentation as it is vain to preach to the majority of the
badly-off abstinence from alcohol; without such pleasures their life
would be unendurably insipid.
But inevitable as is such evil in the present, it inevitably brings
its contingent of wretchedness; and it is therefore the business of
all such as _could_ become the forerunners of a better state of things
to refuse to follow the lead of their inferiors. Exactly because the
majority is still so hopelessly wasteful and mischievous, does it
behove the minority not merely to work to some profit, but to play
without damage. To do this should become the mark of Nature's
aristocracy, a sign of liberality of spiritual birth and breeding, a
question of _noblesse oblige_.