THE DREAD OF BOREDOM.
IN the days when it was satisfactory to receive as a birth- day present the latest work by Kingston or R. M. Ballan- tyne, most schoolboys were familiar with the proper method of breaking in wild horses. The intrepid hunter, having success- fully " creased " a handsome and high-spirited mustang (for the locus classicns, ride " The Dog Crusoe "), proceeded to train it to his purpose by riding it until it could not move one leg in front of the other. A t first, naturally, it bolted straight away over the prairie for three or four miles, and nothing he could do had the slightest effect on it. After that, it began to tire a little, and then the horseman had his turn, and insisted on its galloping on until it stopped, dead beaten, docile and obedient. It learnt its lesson not in the first but in the last five minutes.
Possibly the kindlier critics of modern manners whose indignation makes verses or sermons to-day might read the chapter in " The Dog Crusoe " with advantage. The London season will shortly be at its height, and already, as in years gone by, there is a good deal to be heard from the pulpit and elsewhere on the delinquencies of " society." Father Vaughan, for instance, has been explaining to an interviewer the meaning of an " attack " on certain sections and certain phases of London society which he recently made from the pulpit. He is not, of course, covering new ground in denouncing the life in which men and women " spend their days and nights rushing after pleasure," but it would be difficult to find any- thing very new to say on that well-worn subject. " For a man or woman to be dull is the one great sin in society, and practically everything which has any element of seriousness or sacredness is regarded as dull. It is not that the upper classes dislike religion, but that they think they have no time for it, and they are indifferent as to its claims. As things are managed they have no time even for their social duties." It is most of it perfectly true, and yet is the truth of it realised by those to whom the truth matters most ? If they have no time for religion, they have no time for Swifts and Juvenals, or rather for the kindlier criticism which has taken the place of the fierce satire of a more savage day. Perhaps the real opportunity for the preacher comes a little later, when perpetual pleasure has become tiring. Possibly then, at last, he may get the audience he wants to listen to him. He can be justified in holding that he must give out his message in season and out of season ; but it will be not at the beginning of the strain of perpetual pleasure-seeking, but when the strain has reached an almost unbearable point, that there will come the demand for relief. He can then press home the lesson that pleasure-seeking can be a horribly tiring pursuit.
Meanwhile the pleasure-seekers, and even some of their critics with them, are too near the pleasures they look for, too deeply plunged in the circling eddies of the stream, to see what it is that lies beyond the bounds of their pursuit, or where the stream is bearing them. Like the eye of the historian of Napoleon's great marches, the point of vision ought to be "withdrawn to an immense height." From the solitude of immense height the marching of armies becomes a different matter from the personal abilities of generals, or the physical powers of private soldiers. Thin dotted zigzags of ants
o"The national workshops are a fatal expedient. For the generous strength of the arm which labours you have substituted the shameful power of the hand which begs. We have already the unemployment of riches. You have created the unemployment of poverty, a hubdred times more dangerous to itself and to others." crawl infinitely slowly over mountains and valleys which at an enormous height are level plain. Perhaps a portion of the line halts, or turns aside, or moves no longer,—a great general has blundered and lost a thousand men. Perhaps a private soldier drops for want of water,—that is a thing hardly seen ; it does not stop the march of the army. To the watcher at an immense height all that is visible is the dragging progress of hairlike lines of troops ; yet what be sees may be a nation led into captivity. If that is the vision of a huge war, what is the vision of the round of a London season ? A man may go out into his garden and believe that he dis- cerns some purpose in the steady creeping of an army of ants over the gravel walk, but what is be to make of the gyrations of a dancing column of midges ? Ceaseless flying from one .unimportant occupation to another, endless goings to and fro over tiny distances, perpetual making and remaking of plans for doing petty things if possible in some new way, meetings for one moment broken off the moment after ; now and then one of the ephemerals rising a little higher into the sun than the rest ; changing colours of gauzes in changing lights,—what more than that is the distant watcher to discern in the swarm ? He could hardly be expected to guess that each member of the shifting cloud of ephemerals was in reality enjoying a perpetual access of fresh and uninterrupted pleasure ; that there was a meaning and a purpose in each of the thousand little crossings and changings and visits and departures and risings and turnings of wings; that what he saw was in reality the visualisation of a grand escape from boredom.
But the dread of being bored is, for all that, a very real thing. If it is justifiable to talk of an artificial state of society—for whatever stage of development the communities of men have reached, they must be supposed to be undergoing some form of natural evolution—then the most artificial element in the state of an artificial society must be the imagined terrors of dulness. After all, what is it exactly that the flightiest of all the ephemerals know of dulness ? To them dulness is a horror which must be perpetually fled from. In some way or other they connect dulness with lack of change, and, fearful lest it should come upon them unawares, they make perpetual change the ideal state of existence. Whatever they set out to do, whatever plans they prepare, whatever occupation they contemplate, they are obsessed by one single notion, that they must spend the shortest amount of time possible in the doing of it, or the result will be boredom, and boredom is the grand evil. Boredom is for ever waiting for them round the corner. Like children running past the cupboard on the landing, in which lurk bogeys specially designed to catch small boys and girls going upstairs to bed, so they burry up and down all the stairs of life in continual fear lest the bogey of dulness should leap out at them. If the children knew it, there is no bogey in the cupboard, and if their elders could realise it, what they are running away from is not boredom. They would find that out, if they would only stay still long enough to wait for the bogey to jump. They would discover that the bogey is, curiously enough, the one specialist nerve- doctor whom they are for ever trying to discover ; and if they could bring themselves to listen to his advice, and to glance at the pages of his medical dictionary, they would realise that the faster they run from dulness the closer dulness clings to them as they run. They do, indeed, know what dulness is, but they do not know that they know it.
Boredom, in truth, comes from within and not from without. For a man to be perpetually expressing a dread of being bored is merely another method of explaining to the world a profound contempt for his own mental capacities. In pro- testing that he cannot abide the idea of staying in this or that place for more than two or three days together, or is unable to dine with the So-and-sos without physical collapse, or, in short, cannot be content to be merely alive and in possession of his faculties, he only proclaims that he con- siders his faculties very poor possessions. The man whose mental faculties are really worth consideration is able to extract entertainment from what to lesser brains appears the dullest business in the world. The weaker-minded man who laments to his friend that "You're such a lucky man; you never get bored," pays his friend a compliment, but does not appear to realise what a poor figure he cuts himself. He has never had the courage to stand up to the bogey and blow out the light in the turnip-lantern.
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