And leisure, like its sister, peace, is among those things which are internally felt rather than seen from the outside. (Having written this part of my definition, it strikes me that I have very nearly given away St. Jerome and St. Jerome's lion, since any one may say, that probably that famous leisure of his was just one of the delusions in question. But this is not the case. St. Jerome really had leisure, at least when he was painted; I know it to be a fact; and, for the purposes of literature, I require it to be one. So I close this parenthesis with the understanding that so much is absolutely settled.)
Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined. It has nothing to do with being idle, or having time on one's hands, although it does involve a certain sense of free space about one, as we shall see anon. There is time and to spare in a lawyer's waiting-room, but there is no leisure, neither do we enjoy this blessing when we have to wait two or three hours at a railway junction. On both these occasions (for persons who can profit thereby to read the papers, to learn a verb, or to refresh memories of foreign travel, are distinctly abnormal) we do not feel in possession of ourselves. There is something fuming and raging inside us, something which seems to be kicking at our inner bulwarks as we kicked the cushions of a tardy four-wheeler in our childhood. St. Jerome, patron of leisure, never behaved like that, and his lion was always engrossed in pleasant contemplation of the cardinal's hat on the peg. I have said that when we are bored we feel as if possessed by something not quite ourselves (much as we feel possessed by a stone in a shoe, or a cold in the head); and this brings me to a main characteristic of leisure: it implies that we feel free to do what we like, and that we have plenty of space to do it in. This is a very important remark of mine, and if it seem trite, that is merely because it is so wonderfully true. Besides, it is fraught with unexpected consequences.
III
The worst enemy of leisure is boredom: it is one of the most active pests existing, fruitful of vanity and vexation of spirit. I do not speak merely of the wear and tear of so-called social amusements, though that is bad enough. We kill time, and kill our better powers also, as much in the work undertaken to keep off ennui as in the play. Count Tolstoi, with his terrible eye for shams, showed it all up in a famous answer to M. Dumas fils. Many, many of us, work, he says, in order to escape from ourselves. Now, we should not want to escape from ourselves; we ought to carry ourselves, the more unconsciously the better, along ever widening circles of interest and activity; we should bring ourselves into ever closer contact with everything that is outside us; we should be perpetually giving ourselves from sheer loving instinct; but how can we give ourself if we have run away from it, or buried it at home, or chained it up in a treadmill? Good work is born of the love of the Power-to-do for the Job-to-be-done; nor can any sort of chemical arrangements, like those by which Faust's pupil made Homunculus in his retort, produce genuinely living, and in its turn fruitful, work. The fear of boredom, the fear of the moral going to bits which boredom involves, encumbers the world with rubbish, and exhibitions of pictures, publishers' announcements, lecture syllabuses, schemes of charitable societies, are pattern-books of such litter. The world, for many people, and unfortunately, for the finer and nobler (those most afraid of ennui) is like a painter's garret, where some half-daubed canvas, eleven feet by five, hides the Jaconda on the wall, the Venus in the corner, and blocks the charming tree-tops, gables, and distant meadows through the window.
Art, literature, and philanthropy are notoriously expressions no longer of men's and women's thoughts and feelings, but of their dread of finding themselves without thoughts to think or feelings to feel. So-called practical persons know this, and despise such employments as frivolous and effeminate. But are they not also, to a great extent, frightened of themselves and running away from boredom? See your well-to-do weighty man of forty-five or fifty, merchant, or soldier, or civil servant; the same who thanks God he is no idler. Does he really require more money? Is he more really useful as a colonel than as a major, in a wig or cocked hat than out of it? Is he not shuffling money from one heap into another, making rules and regulations for others to unmake, preparing for future restless idlers the only useful work which restless idleness can do, the carting away of their predecessor's litter?
Nor is this all the mischief. Work undertaken to kill time, at best to safeguard one's dignity, is clearly not the work which one was born to, since that would have required no such incentives. Now, trying to do work one is not fit for, implies the more or less unfitting oneself to do, or even to be, the something for which one had facilities. It means competing with those who are utterly different, competing in things which want a totally different kind of organism; it means, therefore, offering one's arms and legs, and feelings and thoughts to those blind, brutal forces of adaptation which, having to fit a human character into a given place, lengthen and shorten it, mangling it unconcernedly in the process.
Say one was naturally adventurous, a creature for open air and quick, original resolves. Is he the better for a deliberative, sedentary business, or it for him? There are people whose thought poises on distant points, swirls and pounces, and gets the prey which can't be got by stalking along the bushes; there are those who, like divers, require to move head downwards, feet in the air, an absurd position for going up hill. There are people who must not feel æsthetically, in order (so Dr. Bain assures us) that they may be thorough-paced, scientific thinkers; others who cannot get half a page or fifty dates by heart because they assimilate and alter everything they take in.
And think of the persons born to contemplation or sympathy, who, in the effort to be prompt and practical, in the struggle for a fortune or a visiting-list lose, atrophy (alas, after so much cruel bruising!) their inborn exquisite powers.
The world wants useful inhabitants. True. But the clouds building bridges over the sea, the storms modelling the peaks and flanks of the mountains, are a part of the world; and they want creatures to sit and look at them and learn their life's secrets, and carry them away, conveyed perhaps merely in altered tone of voice, or brightened colour of eye, to revive the spiritual and physical hewers of wood and drawers of water. For the poor sons and daughters of men require for sustenance, as well as food and fuel, and intellect and morals, the special mysterious commodity called charm....