This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable past is part of the désœuvrée condition in the present. People who have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and désœuvrement is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be found.
The désœuvrée woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle. Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amusement in which she indulges. For désœuvrement has that fatal reflex action which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio with its duration.
Women of this class want taking in hand by the stronger and more energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for being farmed out; and désœuvrées women especially want extraneous guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make. An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the désœuvrés members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and adventitious support, it is under another name.
The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish; he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in the Times, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand, the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and go to bed as the clock strikes ten.
This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means désœuvrement; leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies, is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his desk or his counter—back to business and something to do. He wonders, on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is better to wear out than to rust out; that désœuvrement is a worse state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a nobler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:—whereof the main object is how best to get rid of time.
THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD.
We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by shrieking; that much talking necessarily includes a good deal of dilution; and that fuss is never an attribute of strength nor coincident with concentration. Whenever there has been a very deep and sincere desire on the part of a class or an individual to do a thing, it has been done not talked about; where the desire is only halfhearted, where the judgment or the conscience is not quite clear as to the desirableness of the course proposed, where the chief incentive is love of notoriety and not the intrinsic worth of the action itself—personal kudos, and not the good of a cause nor the advancement of humanity—then there has been talk; much talk; hysterical excitement; a long and prolonged cackle; and heaven and earth called to witness that an egg has been laid wherein lies the germ of a future chick—after proper incubation.
Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation if any measure is to be carried the fulcrum of which is public opinion. If you have to stir the dry bones you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not leave off till they have begun to shake. Things which can only be known by teaching must be spoken of, but things which have to be done are always better done the less the fuss made about them; and the more steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent. Purpose is apt to exhale itself in protestations, and strength is sure to exhaust itself by a flux of words. But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the Silences are the least honoured of all the minor gods, and the babble of small beginnings threatens to become intolerable. We all 'think outside our brains,' and the result is not conducive to mental vigour. It is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels in the air, and then look for roots, flowers and fruit, by the process of excitation and disclosure.