“BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle.”
“JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another.”
JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lèse_-respectability, to enter on some lucrative
profession, and labour therein with something not far short of
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little
of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so
called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted
that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap
race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination,
votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, it “goes for”
them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it
is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons
in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears
and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate
place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken
Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is
a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and
when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence
physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial
toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise
the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who
have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest.
You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can
be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty
with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this
is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in
favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and
that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one
argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has
written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should never
have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been
a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these
words: “Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of
knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon
books will be but an irksome task.” The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a
few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot
walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they
are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like
the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all
the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the
old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the
class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.
I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such
scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain
other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing
truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of
education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and
turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of
Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it
is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in
the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs
into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and
smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird
will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly
thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not
education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such
an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:—
“How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?”
“Truly, sir, I take mine ease.”
“Is not this the hour of the class? and should’st thou not be plying thy
Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?”
“Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave.”
“Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics?”
“No, to be sure.”
“Is it metaphysics?”
“Nor that.”
“Is it some language?”
“Nay, it is no language.”
“Is it a trade?”
“Nor a trade neither.”
“Why, then, what is’t?”
“Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am
desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where
are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of
Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to
learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace,
or Contentment.”
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking
his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:
“Learning, quotha!” said he; “I would have all such rogues scourged by
the Hangman!”
And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman’s, is the common opinion. A fact is not called
a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the work-house is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience
as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go
hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter
xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is
hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an
intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears,
with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than
many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill
and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious
science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking,
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While
others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which
they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some
really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak
with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have “plied
their book diligently,” and know all about some one branch or another of
accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like
demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and
brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred
and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler,
who began life along with them—by your leave, a different picture. He
has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a
great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for
both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very
recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent
purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the
business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler’s
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He
who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in
their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence.
He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no
out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning
falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but
very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to
the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if
no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the
Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning
hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily
and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity.
The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent
wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this,
a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful
landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and
making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and
the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of
living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see
how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take
pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless
Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It
is no good speaking to such folk: they _cannot_ be idle, their nature is
not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which
are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not
require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to
drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to
wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their
eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at
and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or
alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way,
and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market.
They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye
on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever
people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if
a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and
narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at
forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of
amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait
for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the
boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the
pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt
upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me
as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits,
but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the
very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual
devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by
perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means
certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to do.
To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most
virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the
world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the
walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the
orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches,
do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general
result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and
stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from
place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your
protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for
certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way,
or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose
his friend’s money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts;
and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And
though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name
one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done
without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to
Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service, than
to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good
companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people
in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done
them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish
disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with
the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly,
perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service
would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart’s blood,
like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while
for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because,
like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice
blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a
jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is
conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain
unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so
much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down
the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he
passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had been delivered
from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave
him some money with this remark: “You see what sometimes comes of looking
pleased.” If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both
pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of
smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears
anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the
opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than
a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their
entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We
need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition;
they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great
Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be
happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a
revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not
easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the most
incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your
industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps
indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and
receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he
absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a
garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among
people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous
system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do not
care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in
other people’s lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could
easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they
can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head.
It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than
daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people’s lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to
the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall,
there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc
she should be at home minding women’s work, she answered there were
plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When
nature is “so careless of the single life,” why should we coddle
ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?
Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy’s preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse,
the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many
works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the
price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a
sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal
vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative,
the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in
themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a
gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go
and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy
court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their
temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should
set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid: and fine young men
who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with
white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been
whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous
destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces
was the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is
not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all
they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect
may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they
inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.