THE DISPOSAL OF TIME. T HE ruling of one's physical existence
is a preoccupation of our modern age. We read books and consult our doctors and one another on diets and on our hours of sleep and work. Vegetarianism and the Daylight Saving Bill are manifestations of cognate efforts entirely good in themselves. Perhaps some day, when life becomes even more crowded than now, some University will endow a Chair for the Right Disposal of Time. The professor will hold a position at least as dignified as that of his brother the Professor of Dietetics. For quite as important as the question of food and drink is the question of time. Insufficient time leads to over- work, and what some doctors think the worst disease of our generation—" worry." There is no time to fit things in. We talk of overtaking arrears, but really the metaphor should be reversed; the person who is at fault for want of time feels much more like being pursued than pursuing. The hands of the clock, the hours of darkness (or whatever serves in his mind to symbolise the fact that he is too late) seem to sweep along behind him like an ogre. He is chased like Tam o' Shanter; he exhausts his strength more in apprehension than in labour; and at last, when he is ready to drop, the 'doctors say he is overtaxed, overworked, suffering—yes, this is the true word—from " brain-fag " ; and they prescribe that very fashionable remedy, a rest-cure. Now time is like money, and must be spent like money, with a careful forethought as to ways and means. Indeed, the proverb tells UR that time is money. So every man has his daily budget of time to draw up, and if he is a good chancellor of his own exchequer he must be able to declare a surplus. This is the way in which the problem is most enticingly set before us by Mr. Arnold Bennett, who in his little book "How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day" (The New Age Press, is. net) undertakes to instruct us in the economical budgeting of our days. Some months ago we read a pamphlet in praise of early rising, which left us with the impression (since the pamphlet was written while other men still slept) that the author would have done better to stay in bed, so pompous and unprofitable was his writing. "Nature's soft nurse" might perhaps have nourished his brain and brought him ideas. But Mr. Arnold Bennett does not simply tell us to get up early, calling upon the early bird to disclose the immemorial advantages of doing so (and incidentally, perhaps, forgetting that the worm's point of view is equally venerable), without asking how "getting up early" squares with the rest of our day as we are forced to live it. Mr. Bennett, in fact, does not forget that most men who began to get up earlier would require to go to bed earlier ; nor does he offer his writing as a product and proof of his own virtuous practice. All that be professes to do is to take an "average man's" day as the basis of discussion and to suggest a better arrangement of its parts. Ile tries to draw it more in pro- portion. And be shows that it is not so very crowded, after all. He rather jogs the reader in the ribs, it is true, and he is rather didactic, but he wants to interest the clerk, who could scarcely be induced to converse with a man who men- tioned Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus ; and in this we think that his exposition, of which the power is not at all disguised by the winks and nudges, should certainly succeed. The reader to whom he addresses himself is, we ought to add, in no danger of brain-fag. Mr. Bennett's quarrel with him is that he does not use his brain enough. But an essay on daily time-tables is for all of us.
Mr. Bennett insists upon what we may call the "unspoil- ableness " of the time that lies ahead of. us. When you wake up in the morning "your purse is magically filled with twenty- four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life." And this supply is regular, and comes alike to all. However you misuse it you cannot be penalised for the future ; the supply will be continued to you as long as you live. "You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you." Thus argues Mr. Bennett. But we question this. It is surely not enough, or not the whole truth, to say that the time ahead waits absolutely at your disposal when you turn from idle ways, for the very use of time must depend on the ability to use it which you have acquired. Like a runner who is out of training, the man who has squandered his days cannot Lope to cover the same distance that will be covered by the man who has trained his body carefully and purpose- fully. In this sense a man may very truly be in debt to the future, though Mr. Bennett speaks of debt as impossible. However, let that pass. The "glaring dazzling truth," as Mr. Bennett calls it, is that time is a fixed amount, and the same for all. "You never will have 'more time,' since you already have all the time there is." It is not a question, then, of discovering new fields of time, but of examining your tracks and making notes of possible economies. The recon- struction of your given amount of time is, it seems, almost a work of faith. "Now the great and profound mistake," says Mr. Bennett, "which my typical man makes in regard to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests He begins his business functions with reluctance as late as he can, and he ends them with joy as early as he can Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those Lours from ten to six as 'the day' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and an epilogue. Such an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteen hours." Mr. Bennett, then, insists that the sixteen hours make just as good a " day " as the eight hours. In these sixteen hours a man has "nothing to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men." During these sixteen hours he is free; be is just as well off as a man with a private income. A man must get this fact of the two distinct "days" into his mind ; the longer one is wholly his ; and the knowledge and constant recollection of this must be his "attitude." So far, so good.
But of course it will be said that a man is tired after his first day's work,—after the day by which be earns his living. Moreover, it will be sail that work in the sixteen hours will detract from the value of work during the eight. Mr. Bennett has a short way of dismissing those objections. He says that work during the sixteen hours will increase the value of the work in the other " day "; and as to the complaint of being tired, he simply answers that it is untrue. "What I suggest is that at six o'clock [p.m.] you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know)." In fine, one of the chief things Mr. Bennett wishes to convey to his reader is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. "they do uot tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep." This, of course, is true, but is not remembered by the timid, who are
fearful of "overdoing it." Sleep is sleep, and must not ho broken into. But during the waking hours change--wise change, of course—is rest. Mr. Gladstone had a careful system of change, founded on experience, and lie did not tire till his full old age. Mr. Bennett asks his typical man to give up reading newspapers in the train as he goes to his work in the morning. In this way a man may have, say, half- an-hour to an hour of "priceless solitude" every day,—the complete "solitude" which one may be sure of in a railway carriage where every one else is deep in a newspaper. This time is for reflection, for schooling the mind into thinking of subjects about which one wants it to think. Of course, this injunction will not be obeyed. Few men will dispense with the thrill of not disagreeable apprehension with which they open their newspapers in the morning. It is a counsel of perfection, we fear ; or, again, it is like preaching to opium- smokers or dram-drinkers, to tell the modern man to keep his newspaper for odd minutes, but on no account to give up to it a precious stretch of thirty to sixty consecutive minutes. Yet it would be worth while for any one to give that time up every day to exercising the mind if he could be sure of reducing it to subjection so that it would obey his word of command.
The typical man, according to Mr. Bennett's calculation, has three hours every evening after he has returned home. If he feels inclined to utter the old complaint that he is tired, he is enjoined to remember with what alacrity he would go off to a theatre if a stall were waiting for him ; yet going to the theatre is really very exhausting. • Out of the estimated three hours every evening, Mr. Bennett asks no more than that one and a-half should be set apart every other evening for doing whatever has been supposed to be impossible for want of time or fatigue. All this reclamation of time amounts to only seven and a-half hours a week. "The full use of those seven and a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations." Just as the short physical exercise in the morning sharpens the physical health for the day, so will the brief mental exercise enliven the whole mind's activity. Mr. Bennett does not for a moment ask that his patient should read if he actively dislikes reading. Reading is only one way of improving the mind. A man may prefer to spend his time in drawing or carpentering, or going to a concert, though when all is said, it is difficult to penetrate far into any subject without some help from Looks. Mr. Bennett's little lecture amounts to this : that you must he "born again" to think differently, with a new "attitude," about the value of time, and that then if you look after the minutes the hours will look after themselves. This is obviously not new, yet it is said with force and lucidity. The economy of time postulates control of the mind. Absolutely to direct our thoughts, to think in a vacuum, is not given to us all, but for all we know it might be acquired by us all. Thackeray's imagination was guided only by his pen, as he confessed ; and Hazlitt's morning reflection was rather a brown study than a conscious drilling of ideas. But to try to bring the mind "to heel" is a profitable if humiliating pastime in itself, and if it were done occasionally it would be the end of what Young called "time elaborately thrown away." The very act of considering the disposal of your time—and we take it that a reading of this pamphlet is nothing less—is a challenge to ,effort and a step in grace and strength.
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