|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are
you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity.
All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business
point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
heaven for that.
But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
“waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and
earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
learned and articulate boiler.
Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in
boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
foundation.
It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.”
And we share the poet's sense of exile--
In this house with starry dome,
Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
Shall I never be at home?
Never wholly at my ease?
From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the
marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces
infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
of happy and confident adventure.
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