There is a complaint which is not to be found in the doctor’s books, but which is, nevertheless, such a common and troublesome one, that one heartily wishes some physic could be discovered which would cure it.
It may be called the nothing-to-do complaint.
Even quite little children are subject to it, but they never have it badly. Parents and nurses have only to give them something to do, or tell them of something to do, and the thing is put right. A puzzle or a picture-book relieves the attack at once.
But after the children have out-grown puzzles, and picture-books, and nurses, and when even a parent’s advice is received with a little impatience, then the nothing-to-do complaint, if it seizes them at all, is a serious disease, and often very difficult to cure; and, if not cured, alas! then follows the melancholy spectacle of grown-up men and women, who are a plague to their friends, and a weariness to themselves; because, living under the notion that there is nothing for them to do, they want everybody else to do something to amuse them.
Anyone can laugh at the old story of the gentleman who got into such a fanciful state of mind—hypochondriacal, it is called—that he thought he was his own umbrella; and so, on coming in from a walk, would go and lay it in the easy-chair by the fire, while he himself went and leant up against the wall in a corner of the hall.
But this gentleman was not a bit more fanciful and absurd than the people, whether young or old, who look out of windows on rainy days and groan because there is nothing to do; when, in reality, there is so much for everybody to do, that most people leave half their share undone.
The oddest part of the complaint is, that it generally comes on worst in those who from being comfortably off in the world, and from having had a great deal of education, have such a variety of things to do, that one would fancy they could never be at a loss for a choice.
But these are the very people who are most afflicted. It is always the young people who have books, and leisure, and music, and drawing, and gardens, and pleasure-grounds, and villagers to be kind to, who lounge to the rain-bespattered windows on a dull morning, and groan because there is nothing to do.
In justice to girls in general, it should be here mentioned, that they are on the whole less liable to the complaint than the young lords of the creation, who are supposed to be their superiors in sense. Philosophers may excuse this as they please, but the fact remains, that there are few large families in England, whose sisterhoods have not at times been teazed half out of their wits, by the growlings of its young gentlemen, during paroxysms of the nothing-to-do complaint; growling being one of its most characteristic symptoms.