“Zounds! how has he the leisure to be sick?”
A VISITOR strolling through the noble woods of Ferney complimented
Voltaire on the splendid growth of his trees. “Ay,” replied the great
wit, half in scorn and half, perhaps, in envy, “they have nothing else
to do;” and walked on, deigning no further word of approbation.
Has it been more than a hundred years since this distinctly modern
sentiment was uttered,—more than a hundred years since the spreading
chestnut boughs bent kindly over the lean, strenuous, caustic,
disappointed man of genius who always had so much to do, and who found
in the doing of it a mingled bliss and bitterness that scorched him like
fever pain? How is it that, while Dr. Johnson’s sledge-hammer repartees
sound like the sonorous echoes of a past age, Voltaire’s remarks always
appear to have been spoken the day before yesterday? They are the kind
of witticisms which we do not say for ourselves, simply because we are
not witty; but they illustrate with biting accuracy the spirit of
restlessness, of disquiet, of intellectual vanity and keen contention
which is the brand of our vehement and over-zealous generation.
“The Gospel of Work”—that is the phrase woven insistently into every
homily, every appeal made to the conscience or the intelligence of a
people who are now straining their youthful energy to its utmost speed.
“Blessed be Drudgery!”—that is the text deliberately chosen for a
discourse which has enjoyed such amazing popularity that sixty thousand
printed copies have been found all inadequate to supply the ravenous
demand. Readers of Dickens—if any one has the time to read Dickens
nowadays—may remember Miss Monflather’s inspired amendment of that
familiar poem concerning the Busy Bee:—
“In work, work, work. In work alway,
Let my first years be past.”
And when our first years _are_ past, the same programme is considered
adequate and satisfactory to the end. “A whole lifetime of horrid
industry,”—to quote Mr. Bagehot’s uninspired words,—this is the prize
dangled alluringly before our tired eyes; and if we are disposed to look
askance upon the booty, then vanity is subtly pricked to give zest to
faltering resolution. “Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped
them not;” they would be laggards in the field if our faults did not
sometimes spur them to action. It is the pæan of self-glorification that
wells up perpetually from press and pulpit, from public orators, and
from what is courteously called literature, that keeps our courage
screwed to the sticking place, and veils the occasional bareness of the
result with a charitable vesture of self-delusion.
Work is good. No one seriously doubts this truth. Adam may have doubted
it when he first took spade in hand, and Eve when she scoured her first
pots and kettles; but in the course of a few thousand years we have
learned to know and value this honest, troublesome, faithful, and
extremely exacting friend. But work is not the only good thing in the
world; it is not a fetich to be adored; neither is it to be judged, like
a sum in addition, by its outward and immediate results. The god of
labor does not abide exclusively in the rolling-mill, the law courts, or
the cornfield. He has a twin sister whose name is leisure, and in her
society he lingers now and then to the lasting gain of both.
Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mme. de Sévigné and her time, says that we,
“with our habits of positive occupation, can scarcely form a just
conception of that life of leisure and chit-chat.” “Conversations were
infinite,” admits Mme. de Sévigné herself, recalling the long summer
afternoons when she and her guests walked in the charming woods of Les
Rochers until the shadows of twilight fell. The whole duty of life
seemed to be concentrated in the pleasant task of entertaining your
friends when they were with you, or writing them admirable letters when
they were absent. Occasionally there came, even to this tranquil and
finely poised French woman, a haunting consciousness that there might be
other and harder work for human hands to do. “Nothing is accomplished
day by day,” she writes, doubtfully; “and life is made up of days, and
we grow old and die.” This troubled her a little, when she was all the
while doing work that was to last for generations, work that was to give
pleasure to men and women whose great-grandfathers were then unborn. Not
that we have the time now to read Mme. de Sévigné! Why, there are big
volumes of these delightful letters, and who can afford to read big
volumes of anything, merely for the sake of the enjoyment to be
extracted therefrom? It was all very well for Sainte-Beuve to say
“Lisons tout Mme. de Sévigné,” when the question arose how should some
long idle days in a country-house be profitably employed. It was all
very well for Sainte-Beuve to plead, with touching confidence in the
intellectual pastimes of his contemporaries, “Let us treat Mme. de
Sévigné as we treat Clarissa Harlowe, when we have a fortnight of
leisure and rainy weather in the country.” A fortnight of leisure and
rainy weather in the country! The words would be antiquated even for Dr.
Johnson. Rain may fall or rain may cease, but leisure comes not so
lightly to our calling. Nay, Sainte-Beuve’s wistful amazement at the
polished and cultivated inactivity which alone could produce such a
correspondence as Mme. de Sévigné’s is not greater than our wistful
amazement at the critic’s conception of possible idleness in bad
weather. In one respect at least we follow his good counsel. We do treat
Mme. de Sévigné precisely as we treat Clarissa Harlowe; that is, we
leave them both severely alone, as being utterly beyond the reach of
what we are pleased to call our time.
And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, taking his life in his two
hands, disposed of it as he thought fit, with no restless
self-accusations on the score of indolence. In the world and of the
world, yet always able to meet and greet the happy solitude of Gascony;
toiling with no thought of toil, but rather “to entertaine my spirit as
it best pleased,” this man wrought out of time a coin which passes
current over the reading world. And what of Horace, who enjoyed an
industrious idleness, the bare description of which sets our hearts
aching with desire! “The picture which Horace draws of himself in his
country home,” says an envious English critic, “affords us a delightful
glimpse of such literary leisure as is only possible in the golden days
of good Haroun-Al-Raschid. Horace goes to bed and gets up when he likes;
there is no one to drag him down to the law courts the first thing in
the morning, to remind him of an important engagement with his brother
scribes, to solicit his interest with Mæcenas, or to tease him about
public affairs and the latest news from abroad. He can bury himself in
his Greek authors, or ramble through the woody glens which lie at the
foot of Mount Ustica, without a thought of business or a feeling that he
ought to be otherwise engaged.” “Swim smoothly in the stream of thy
nature, and live but one man,” counsels Sir Thomas Browne; and it may be
this gentle current will bear us as bravely through life as if we
buffeted our strength away in the restless ocean of endeavor.
Leisure has a value of its own. It is not a mere handmaid of labor; it
is something we should know how to cultivate, to use, and to enjoy. It
has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from
the pressure of their first rude needs, their first homely toil, and
rise to happier levels of grace and intellectual repose. “Civilization,
in its final outcome,” says the keen young author of “The Chevalier of
Pensieri-Vani,” “is heavily in the debt of leisure; and the success of
any society worth considering is to be estimated largely by the use to
which its _fortunati_ put their spare moments.” Here is a sentiment so
relentlessly true that nobody wants to believe it. We prefer uttering
agreeable platitudes concerning the blessedness of drudgery and the
iniquity of eating bread earned by another’s hands. Yet the creation of
an artistic and intellectual atmosphere in which workers can work, the
expansion of a noble sympathy with all that is finest and most
beautiful, the jealous guardianship of whatever makes the glory and
distinction of a nation; this is achievement enough for the _fortunati_
of any land, and this is the debt they owe. It can hardly be denied that
the lack of scholarship—of classical scholarship especially—at our
universities is due primarily to the labor-worship which is the
prevalent superstition of our day, and which, like all superstitions,
has gradually degraded its god into an idol, and lost sight of the
higher powers and attributes beyond. The student who is pleased to think
a knowledge of German “more useful” than a knowledge of Greek; the
parent who deliberately declares that his boys have “no time to waste”
over Homer; the man who closes the doors of his mind to everything that
does not bear directly on mathematics, or chemistry, or engineering, or
whatever he calls “work;” all these plead in excuse the exigencies of
life, the absolute and imperative necessity of labor.
It would appear, then, that we have no _fortunati_, that we are not yet
rich enough to afford the greatest of all luxuries—leisure to cultivate
and enjoy “the best that has been known and thought in the world.” This
is a pity, because there seems to be money in plenty for so many less
valuable things. The yearly taxes of the United States sound to innocent
ears like the fabled wealth of the Orient; the yearly expenditures of
the people are on no rigid scale; yet we are too poor to harbor the
priceless literature of the past because it is not a paying investment,
because it will not put bread in our mouths nor clothes on our shivering
nakedness. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighed Burton many years
ago, and we have good cause to echo his lament. Until we are able to
believe, with that enthusiastic Greek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that
“intellectual training is an end in itself, and not a mere preparation
for a trade or a profession;” until we begin to understand that there is
a leisure which does not mean an easy sauntering through life, but a
special form of activity, employing all our faculties, and training us
to the adequate reception of whatever is most valuable in literature and
art; until we learn to estimate the fruits of self-culture at their
proper worth, we are still far from reaping the harvest of three
centuries of toil and struggle; we are still as remote as ever from the
serenity of intellectual accomplishment.
There is a strange pleasure in work wedded to leisure, in work which has
grown beautiful because its rude necessities are softened and humanized
by sentiment and the subtle grace of association. A little paragraph
from the journal of Eugénie de Guérin illustrates with charming
simplicity the gilding of common toil by the delicate touch of a
cultivated and sympathetic intelligence:—
“A day spent in spreading out a large wash leaves little to say, and yet
it is rather pretty, too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or to see
it float on lines. One may fancy one’s self Homer’s Nausicaa, or one of
those Biblical princesses who washed their brothers’ tunics. We have a
basin at Moulinasse that you have never seen, sufficiently large, and
full to the brim of water. It embellishes the hollow, and attracts the
birds who like a cool place to sing in.”
In the same spirit, Maurice de Guérin confesses frankly the pleasure he
takes in gathering fagots for the winter fire, “that little task of the
woodcutter which brings us close to nature,” and which was also a
favorite occupation of M. de Lamennais. The fagot gathering, indeed, can
hardly be said to have assumed the proportions of real toil; it was
rather a pastime where play was thinly disguised by a pretty semblance
of drudgery. “Idleness,” admits de Guérin, “_but idleness full of
thought, and alive to every impression_.” Eugénie’s labors, however, had
other aspects and bore different fruit. There is nothing intrinsically
charming in stitching seams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one’s
fingers over a kitchen fire; yet every page in the journal of this nobly
born French girl reveals to us the nearness of work, work made sacred by
the prompt fulfillment of visible duties, and—what is more rare—made
beautiful by that distinction of mind which was the result of
alternating hours of finely cultivated leisure. A very ordinary and
estimable young woman might have spread her wash upon the grass with
honest pride at the whiteness of her linen; but it needed the solitude
of Le Cayla, the few books, well read and well worth reading, the life
of patriarchal simplicity, and the habit of sustained and delicate
thought, to awaken in the worker’s mind the graceful association of
ideas,—the pretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidens cleansing their
finely woven webs in the cool, rippling tide.
For it is self-culture that warms the chilly earth wherein no good seed
can mature; it is self-culture that distinguishes between the work which
has inherent and lasting value and the work which represents
conscientious activity and no more. And for the training of one’s self,
leisure is requisite; leisure and that rare modesty which turns a man’s
thoughts back to his own shortcomings and requirements, and extinguishes
in him the burning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings. “We might make
ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
perfect by the rejection of energy,” says Mr. Oscar Wilde, who delights
in scandalizing his patient readers, and who lapses unconsciously into
something resembling animation over the wrongs inflicted by the solemn
preceptors of mankind. The notion that it is worth while to learn a
thing only if you intend to impart it to others is widespread and
exceedingly popular. I have myself heard an excellent and anxious aunt
say to her young niece, then working hard at college, “But, my dear, why
do you give so much of your time to Greek? You don’t expect to teach it,
do you?”—as if there were no other use to be gained, no other pleasure
to be won from that noble language, in which lies hidden the hoarded
treasure of centuries. To study Greek in order to read and enjoy it, and
thereby make life better worth the living, is a possibility that seldom
enters the practical modern mind.
Yet this restless desire to give out information, like alms, is at best
a questionable bounty; this determination to share one’s wisdom with
one’s unwilling fellow-creatures is a noble impulse provocative of
general discontent. When Southey, writing to James Murray about a
dialogue which he proposes to publish in the “Quarterly,” says, with
characteristic complacency: “I have very little doubt that it will
excite considerable attention, and lead many persons into a wholesome
train of thought,” we feel at once how absolutely familiar is the
sentiment, and how absolutely hopeless is literature approached in this
spirit. The same principle, working under different conditions to-day,
entangles us in a network of lectures, which have become the chosen
field for every educational novelty, and the diversion of the mentally
unemployed.
Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly his veneration for the
old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught his Greek and Latin in leisurely
fashion day after day, with no thought wasted upon more superficial or
practical acquirements, and who “came to his task as to a sport.” He has
made equally plain his aversion for the new-fangled pedagogue—new in his
time, at least—who could not “relish a beggar or a gypsy” without
seeking to collect or to impart some statistical information on the
subject. A gentleman of this calibre, his fellow-traveler in a coach,
once asked him if he had ever made “any calculation as to the value of
the rental of all the retail shops in London?” and the magnitude of the
question so overwhelmed Lamb that he could not even stammer out a
confession of his ignorance. “To go preach to the first passer-by, to
become tutor to the ignorance of the first thing I meet, is a task I
abhor,” observes Montaigne, who must certainly have been the most
acceptable companion of his day.
Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy with insistent and arrogant
industry. He could work hard enough when circumstances demanded it; but
he “always felt an inclination to do nothing,” and not infrequently
gratified his desires. “No man, sir, is obliged to do as much as he can.
A man should have part of his life to himself,” was the good doctor’s
soundly heterodox view, advanced upon many occasions. He hated to hear
people boast of their assiduity, and nipped such vain pretensions in the
bud with frosty scorn. When he and Boswell journeyed together in the
Harwich stage-coach, a “fat; elderly gentle-woman,” who had been talking
freely of her own affairs, wound up by saying that she never permitted
any of her children to be for a moment idle. “I wish, madam,” said Dr.
Johnson testily, “that you would educate me too, for I have been an idle
fellow all my life.” “I am sure, sir,” protested the woman with dismayed
politeness, “you have not been idle.” “Madam,” was the retort, “it is
true! And that gentleman there”—pointing to poor young Boswell—“has been
idle also. He was idle in Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow,
where he continued to be idle. He came to London, where he has been very
idle. And now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever.”
That there was a background of truth in these spirited assertions we
have every reason to be grateful. Dr. Johnson’s value to-day does not
depend on the number of essays, or reviews, or dedications he wrote in a
year,—some years he wrote nothing,—but on his own sturdy and splendid
personality; “the real primate, the soul’s teacher of all England,” says
Carlyle; a great embodiment of uncompromising goodness and sense. Every
generation needs such a man, not to compile dictionaries, but to
preserve the balance of sanity, and few generations are blest enough to
possess him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in the law courts
until he was gray without benefiting or amusing anybody. It was in the
nights he spent drinking port wine at the Mitre, and in the days he
spent trotting, like a terrier, at his master’s heels, that the seed was
sown which was to give the world a masterpiece of literature, the most
delightful biography that has ever enriched mankind. It is to leisure
that we owe the “Life of Johnson,” and a heavy debt we must, in all
integrity, acknowledge it to be.
Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter Scott that he was “making himself
in the busy, idle pleasures of his youth;” in those long rambles by hill
and dale, those whimsical adventures in farmhouses, those merry,
purposeless journeys in which the eager lad tasted the flavor of life.
At home such unauthorized amusements were regarded with emphatic
disapprobation. “I greatly doubt, sir,” said his father to him one day,
“that you were born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut!” and one
half pities the grave clerk to the Signet, whose own life had been so
decorously dull, and who regarded with affectionate solicitude his
lovable and incomprehensible son. In later years Sir Walter recognized
keenly that his wasted school hours entailed on him a lasting loss, a
loss he was determined his sons should never know. It is to be forever
regretted that “the most Homeric of modern men could not read Homer.”
But every day he stole from the town to give to the country, every hour
he stole from law to give to literature, every minute he stole from work
to give to pleasure, counted in the end as gain. It is in his pleasures
that a man really lives, it is from his leisure that he constructs the
true fabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb’s fellow-clerks thought that
because his days were spent at a desk in the East India House, his life
was spent there too. His life was far remote from that routine of labor;
built up of golden moments of respite, enriched with joys, chastened by
sorrows, vivified by impulses that had no filiation with his daily toil.
“For the time that a man may call his own,” he writes to Wordsworth,
“that is his life.” The Lamb who worked in the India House, and who had
“no skill in figures,” has passed away, and is to-day but a shadow and a
name. The Lamb of the “Essays” and the “Letters” lives for us now, and
adds each year his generous share to the innocent gayety of the world.
This is the Lamb who said, “Riches are chiefly good because they give us
time,” and who sighed for a little son that he might christen him
Nothing-to-do, and permit him to do nothing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------