Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or
feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body
and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though
he seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to
whom a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday,
like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege.
But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion
of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye,
the word “recreation” would be like the word “resurrection,” the blast
of a trumpet.
A man, being merely useful, is necessarily incomplete, especially if
he be a modern man and means by being useful being “utilitarian.” A man
going into a modern club gives up his hat; a man going into a modern
factory gives up his head. He then goes in and works loyally for the old
firm to build up the great fabric of commerce (which can be done without
a head), but when he has done work he goes to the cloak-room, like the
man at the club, and gets his head back again; that is the germ of the
holiday. It may be urged that the club man who leaves his hat often goes
away with another hat; and perhaps it may be the same with the factory
hand who has left his head. A hand that has lost its head may affect the
fastidious as a mixed metaphor; but, God pardon us all, what an unmixed
truth! We could almost prove the whole ease from the habit of calling
human beings merely “hands” while they are working; as if the hand were
horribly cut off, like the hand that has offended; as if, while the
sinner entered heaven maimed, his unhappy hand still laboured laying
up riches for the lords of hell. But to return to the man whom we found
waiting for his head in the cloak-room. It may be urged, we say, that he
might take the wrong head, like the wrong hat; but here the similarity
ceases. For it has been observed by benevolent onlookers at life’s drama
that the hat taken away by mistake is frequently better than the real
hat; whereas the head taken away after the hours of toil is certainly
worse: stained with the cobwebs and dust of this dustbin of all the
centuries.