LETTER VII.
TO AN ARDENT FRIEND WHO TOOK NO REST.
The regret for lost time often a needless one—Tillier’s doctrine about flânerie—How much is gained in idle hours—Sainte-Beuve’s conviction that whatever he did he studied the infinite book of the world and of life—Harness—Free play of the mind necessary—The freedom of a grain of desert-sand—The freedom of the wild bee.
If we asked any intellectual workman what he would do if his life were to be lived over again, I believe the answer, whatever its form, would amount ultimately to this: “I would economize my time better.” Very likely if the opportunity were granted him he would do nothing of the sort; very likely he would waste his time in ways more authorized by custom, yet waste it just as extravagantly as he had done after his own original fashion; but it always seems to us as if we could use the time better if we had it over again.
It seems to me in looking back over the last thirty years, that the only time really wasted has been that spent in laborious obedience to some external authority. It may be a dangerous doctrine which Claude Tillier expressed in an immortal sentence, but dangerous or not, it is full of intellectual truth: “Le temps le mieux employé est celui que l’on perd.”[11] If what we are accustomed to consider lost time could be removed, as to its effects at least, from the sum of our existence, it is certain that we should suffer from a great intellectual impoverishment. All the best knowledge of mankind, to begin with, is acquired in hours which hard-working people consider lost hours—in hours, that is, of pleasure and recreation. Deduct all that we have learnt about men in times of recreation, in clubs and smoking-rooms, on the hunting-field, on the cricket-ground, on the deck of the yacht, on the box of the drag or the dog-cart, would the residue be worth very much? would it not be a mere heap of dry bones without any warm flesh to cover them? Even the education of most of us, such as it is, has been in a great measure acquired out of school, as it were; I mean outside of the acknowledged duties of our more serious existence. Few Englishmen past forty have studied English literature either as a college exercise or a professional preparation; they have read it privately, as an amusement. Few Englishmen past forty have studied modern languages, or science, or the fine arts, from any obedience to duty, but merely from taste and inclination. And even if we studied these things formally, as young men often do at the present day, it is not from the formal study that we should get the perfume of the language or the art, but from idle hours in foreign lands and galleries. It is superfluous to recommend idleness to the unintellectual, but the intellectual too often undervalue it. The laborious intellect contracts a habit of strenuousness which is some times a hindrance to its best activity.
“I have arrived,” said Sainte-Beuve, “perhaps by way of secretly excusing my own idleness, perhaps by a deeper feeling of the principle that all comes to the same, at the conclusion that whatever I do or do not, working in the study at continuous labor, scattering myself in articles, spreading myself about in society, giving my time away to troublesome callers, to poor people, to rendez-vous, in the street, no matter to whom and to what, I cease not to do one and the same thing, to read one and the same book, the infinite book of the world and of life, that no one ever finishes, in which the wisest read farthest; I read it then at all the pages which present themselves, in broken fragments, backwards, what matters it? I never cease going on. The greater the medley, the more frequent the interruption, the more I get on with this book in which one is never beyond the middle; but the profit is to have had it open before one at all sorts of different pages.”
A distinguished author wrote to another author less distinguished: “You have gone through a good deal of really vigorous study, but have not been in harness yet.” By harness he meant discipline settled beforehand like military drill. Now, the advantages of drill are evident and very generally recognized, but the advantages of intellectual flânerie are not so generally recognized. For the work of the intellect to be clear and healthy, a great deal of free play of the mind is absolutely necessary. Harness is good for an hour or two at a time, but the finest intellects have never lived in harness. In reading any book that has much vitality you are sure to meet with many allusions and illustrations which the author hit upon, not when he was in harness, but out at grass. Harness trains us to the systematic performance of our work, and increases our practical strength by regulated exercise, but it does not supply everything that is necessary to the perfect development of the mind. The truth is, that we need both the discipline of harness and the abundant nourishment of the free pasture. Yet may not our freedom be the profitless, choiceless, freedom of a grain of desert-sand, carried hither and thither by the wind, gaining nothing and improving nothing, so that it does not signify where it was carried yesterday or where it may fall to-morrow, but rather the liberty of the wild bee, whose coming and going are ordered by no master, nor fixed by any premeditated regulation, yet which misses no opportunity of increase, and comes home laden in the twilight. Who knows where he has wandered; who can tell over what banks and streams the hum of his wings has sounded? Is anything in nature freer than he is; can anything account better for a rational use of freedom? Would he do his work better if tiny harness were ingeniously contrived for him? Where then would be the golden honey, and where the waxen cells?