I repeat that, if men could be so disciplined as to believe in their souls that death must come, then there would be no lost days. Is there one of us who can say that he never lost a day amid this too brief, too joyous, too entrancing term of existence? Not one. The aged Roman—who, by-the-way, was somewhat of a prig—used to go about moaning, "I have lost a day," if he thought he had not performed some good action or learned something in the twenty-four hours. Most of us have no such qualms; we waste the time freely; and we never know that it is wasted until with a dull shock we comprehend that all must be left and that the squandered hours can never be retrieved. The men who are strongest and greatest and best suffer the acutest remorse for the lost days; they know their own powers, and that very knowledge makes them suffer all the more bitterly when they reckon up what they might have done and compare it with the sum of their actual achievement.
In a certain German town a little cell is shown on the walls of which a famous name is marked many times. It appears that in his turbulent youth Prince Bismarck was often a prisoner in this cell; and his various appearances are registered under eleven different dates. Moreover, I observe from the same rude register that he fought twenty-eight duels. Lost days—lost days! He tells us how he drank in the usual insane fashion prevalent among the students. He "cannot tell how much Burgundy he could really drink." Lost days—lost days! And now the great old man, with Europe at his feet and the world awaiting his lightest word with eagerness, turns regretfully sometimes to think of the days thrown away. A haze seems to hang before the eyes of such as he; and it is a haze that makes the future seem dim and vast, even while it obscures all the sharp outlines of things. The child is not capable of reasoning coherently, and therefore its disposition to fritter away time must be regarded as only the result of defective organization; but the young man and young woman can reason, and yet we find them perpetually making excuses for eluding time and eternity. Look at the young fellows who are preparing for the hard duties of life by studying at a University. Here is one who seems to have recognized the facts of existence; his hours are arranged as methodically as his heart beats; he knows the exact balance between physical and intellectual strength, and he overtaxes neither, but body and mind are worked up to the highest attainable pressure. No pleasures of the destructive sort call this youngster aside; he has learned already what it is to reap the harvest of a quiet eye, and his joys are of the sober kind. He rises early, and he has got far through his work ere noon; his quiet afternoon is devoted to harmless merriment in the cricket-field or on the friendly country roads, and his evening is spent without any vain gossip in the happy companionship of his books. That young man loses no day; but unhappily he represents a type which is but too rare. The steady man, economic of time, is a rarity; but the wild youth who is always going to do something to-morrow is one of a class that numbers only too many on its rolls. To-morrow! The young fellow passes to-day on the river, or spends it in lounging or in active dissipation. He feels that he is doing wrong; but the gaunt spectres raised by conscience are always exorcised by the bright vision of to-morrow. To-morrow the truant will go to his books; he will bend himself for that concentrated effort which alone secures success, and his time of carelessness and sloth shall be far left behind. But the sinister influence of to-day saps his will and renders him infirm; each new to-day is wasted amid thoughts of visionary to-morrows which take all the power from his soul; and, when he is nerveless, powerless, tired, discontented with the very sight of the sun, he finds suddenly that his feet are on the edge of the gulf, and he knows that there will be no more to-morrows.
I am not entering a plea for hard, petrifying work. If a man is a hand-worker or brain-worker, his fate is inevitable if he regards work as the only end of life. The loss of which I speak is that incurred by engaging in pursuits which do not give mental strength or resource or bodily health. The hard-worked business-man who gallops twenty miles after hounds before he settles to his long stretch of toil is not losing his day; the empty young dandy whose life for five months in the year is given up to galloping across grass country or lounging around stables is decidedly a spendthrift so far as time is concerned.
I wish—if it be not impious so to wish—that every young man could have one glimpse into the future. Supposing some good genius could say, "If you proceed as you are now doing, your position in your fortieth year will be this!" what a horror would strike through many among us, and how desperately each would strive to take advantage of that kindly "If." But there is no uplifting of the veil; and we must all be guided by the experience of the past and not by knowledge of the future. I observe that those who score the greatest number of lost days on the world's calendar always do so under the impression that they are enjoying pleasure. An acute observer whose soul is not vitiated by cynicism may find a kind of melancholy pastime in observing the hopeless attempts of these poor son's to persuade themselves that they are making the best of existence. I would not for worlds seem for a moment to disparage pleasure, because I hold that a human being who lives without joy must either become bad, mad, or wretched. But I speak of those who cheat themselves into thinking that every hour which passes swiftly to eternity is wisely spent. Observe the parties of young men who play at cards even in the railway-train morning after morning and evening after evening. The time of the journey might be spent in useful and happy thought; it is passed in rapid and feverish speculation. There is no question of reviving the brain; it is not recreation that is gained, but distraction, and the brain, instead of being ready to concentrate its power upon work, is enfeebled and rendered vague and flighty. Supposing a youth spends but one hour per day in handling pieces of pasteboard and trying to win his neighbour's money, then in four weeks he has wasted twenty-four hours, and in one year he wastes thirteen days. Is there any gain—mental, muscular, or nervous—from this unhappy pursuit? Not one jot or tittle. Supposing that a weary man of science leaves his laboratory in the evening, and wends his way homeward, the very thought of the game of whist which awaits him is a kind of recuperative agency. Whist is the true recreation of the man of science; and the astronomer or mathematician or biologist goes calmly to rest with his mind at ease after he has enjoyed his rubber. The most industrious of living novelists and the most prolific of all modern writers was asked—so he tells us in his autobiography—"How is it that your thirtieth book is fresher than your first?" He made answer, "I eat very well, keep regular hours, sleep ten hours a day, and never miss my three hours a day at whist." These men of great brain derive benefit from their harmless contests; the young men in the railway-carriages only waste brain-tissue which they do nothing-to repair. A very beautiful writer who was an extremely lazy man pictures his own lost days as arising before him and saying, "I am thy Self; say, what didst thou to me?" That question may well be asked by all the host of murdered days, but especially may it be asked of those foolish beings who try to gain distinction by recklessly losing money on the Turf or in gambling-saloons. A heart of stone might be moved by seeing the precious time that is hurled to the limbo of lost days in the vulgar pandemonium by the racecourse. A nice lad comes out into the world after attaining his majority, and plunges into that vortex of Hades. Reckon up the good he gets there. Does he gain health? Alas, think of the crowd, the rank odours, the straining heart-beats! Does he hear any wisdom? Listen to the hideous badinage, the wild bursts of foul language from the betting-men, the mean, cunning drivel of the gamblers, the shrill laughter of the horsey and unsexed women? Does the youth make friends? Ah, yes! He makes friends who will cheat him at betting, cheat him at horse-dealing, cheat him at gambling when the orgies of the course are over, borrow money as long as he will lend, and throw him over when he has parted with his last penny and his last rag of self-respect. Those who can carry their minds back for twenty years must remember the foolish young nobleman who sold a splendid estate to pay the yelling vulgarians of the betting-ring. They cheered him when he all but beggared himself; they hissed him when he failed once to pay. With lost health, lost patrimony, lost hopes, lost self-respect, he sank amid the rough billows of life's sea, and only one human creature was there to aid him when the great last wave swept over him. Lost days—lost days! Youths who are going to ruin now amid the plaudits of those who live upon them might surely take warning: but they do not, and their bones will soon bleach on the mound whereon those of all other wasters of days have been thrown. When I think of the lost days and the lost lives of which I have cognizance, then it seems as though I were gazing on some vast charnel-house, some ghoul-haunted place of skulls. Memories of those who trifled with life come to me, and their very faces flash past with looks of tragic significance. By their own fault they were ruined; they were shut out of the garden of their gifts; their city of hope was ploughed and salted. The past cannot be retrieved, let canting optimists talk as they choose; what has been has been, and the effects will last and spread until the earth shall pass away. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; our fatal shadows that walk by us still. The thing done lasts for eternity; the lightest act of man or woman has incalculably vast results. So it is madness to say that the lost days can be retrieved. They cannot! But by timely wisdom we may save the days and make them beneficent and fruitful in the future. Watch those wild lads who are sowing in wine what they reap in headache and degradation. Night after night they laugh with senseless glee, night after night inanities which pass for wit are poured forth; and daily the nerve and strength of each carouser grow weaker. Can you retrieve those nights? Never! But you may take the most shattered of the crew and assure him that all is not irretrievably lost; his weakened nerve may be steadied, his deranged gastric functions may gradually grow more healthy, his distorted views of life may pass away. So far, so good; but never try to persuade any one that the past may be repaired, for that delusion is the very source and spring of the foul stream of lost days. Once impress upon any teachable creature the stern fact that a lost day is lost for ever, once make that belief part of his being, and then he will strive to cheat death. Perhaps it may be thought that I take sombre views of life. No; I see that the world may be made a place of pleasure, but only by learning and obeying the inexorable laws which govern all things, from the fall of a seed of grass to the moving of the miraculous brain of man.
April, 1888.
MIDSUMMER DAYS AND MIDSUMMER NIGHTS.
Soon, with pomp of golden days and silver nights, the dying Summer will wave the world farewell; but the precious time is still with us, and we cherish the glad moments gleefully. When the dawn swirls up in the splendid sky, it is as though one gladsome procession of hours had begun to move. The breeze sighs cool and low, the trees rustle with vast whisperings, and the conquering sun shoots his level volleys from rim to rim of the world. The birds are very, very busy, and they take no thought of the grim time coming, when the iron ground will be swept by chill winds and the sad trees will quiver mournfully in the biting air. A riot of life is in progress, and it seems as if the sense of pure joy banished the very thought of pain and foreboding from all living things. The sleepy afternoons glide away, the sun droops, and the quiet, coloured evening falls solemnly. Then comes the hush of the huge and thoughtful night; the wan stars wash the dust with silver, and the brave day is over. Alas, for those who are pent in populous cities throughout this glorious time! We who are out in the free air may cast a kindly thought on the fate of those to whom "holiday" must be as a word in an unknown tongue. Some of us are happy amid the shade of mighty hills: some of us fare toward the Land of the Midnight Sun, where the golden light steeps all the air by night as well as day; some of us rest beside the sea, where the loud wind, large and free, blows the long surges out in sounding bars and thrills us with fresh fierce pleasure; some of us are able to wander in glowing lanes where the tender roses star the hedges and the murmur of innumerable bees falls softly on the senses. Let us thankfully take the good that is vouchsafed to us, and let those of us who can lend a helping hand do something towards giving the poor and needy a brief taste of the happiness that we freely enjoy.
I do not want to dwell on ugly thoughts; and yet it seems selfish to refrain from speaking of the fate of the poor who are packed in crowded quarters during this bright holiday season. For them the midsummer days and midsummer nights are a term of tribulation. The hot street reeks with pungent odours, the faint airs that wander in the scorching alleys at noonday strike on the fevered face like wafts from some furnace, and the cruel nights are hard to endure save when a cool shower has fallen. If you wander in London byways, you find that the people are fairly driven from their houses after a blistering summer day, and they sit in the streets till early morning. They are not at all depressed; on the contrary, the dark hours are passed in reckless merriment, and I have often known the men to rest quite contentedly on the pavement till the dawn came and the time of departure for labour was near. Even the young children remain out of doors, and their shrill treble mingles with the coarse rattle of noisy choruses. Some of those cheery youngsters have an outing in the hopping season, and they come back bronzed and healthy; but most of them have to be satisfied with one day at the most amid the fields and trees. I have spoken of London; but the case of those who dwell in the black manufacturing cities is even worse. What is Oldham like on a blistering midsummer day? What are Hanley and St. Helen's and the lower parts of Manchester like? The air is charged with dust, and the acrid, rasping fumes from the chimneys seem to acquire a malignant power over men and brain. Toil goes steadily on, and the working-folk certainly have the advantage of starting in the bright morning hours, before the air has become befouled; but, as the sun gains strength, and the close air of the unlovely streets is heated, then the torment to be endured is severe. In Oldham and many other Lancashire towns a most admirable custom prevails. Large numbers of people club their money during the year and establish a holiday-fund; they migrate wholesale in the summertime, and have a merry holiday far away from the crush of the pavements and the dreary lines of ugly houses. A wise and beneficent custom is this, and the man who first devised it deserves a monument. I congratulate the troops of toilers who share my own pleasure; but, alas, how many honest folk in those awful Midland places will pant and sweat and suffer amid grime and heat while the glad months are passing! Good men who might be happy even in the free spaces of the Far West, fair women who need only rest and pure air to enable them to bloom in beauty, little children who peak and pine, are all crammed within the odious precincts of the towns which Cobbett hated; and the merry stretches of the sea, the billowy roll of the downs, the peace of soft days, are not for them. Only last year I looked on a stretch of interminable brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually rolling in upon it with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. There before me was Whitman's very vision, and in the keen mystic joy of the moment I could not help thinking sadly of one dreadful alley where lately I had been. It seemed so sad that the folk of the alley could not share my pleasure; and the murmur of vain regrets came to the soul even amid the triumphant clamour of the free wind. Poor cramped townsfolk, hard is your fate! It is hard; but I can see no good in repining over their fortune if we aid them as far as we can; rather let us speak of the bright time that comes for the toilers who are able to escape from the burning streets.