THE VALUE OF A HOBBY.
MR. G. F. WATTS, the Royal Academician, has given £1,000 to the Home Industries and Arts Association, in order to assist the work of helping artisans to cultivate hobbies. At least he says explicitly that his desire is not to promote a training-school, but to help men to provide occupa- tions and interests for their leisure hours. That is an unusually wise, as well as kindly, gift, and one which we hope will be largely imitated. Nothing, we believe, conduces so directly to the happiness of life as a distinct and permanent interest in some subject other than that forced on us by circumstances or by professional needs. A hobby is more than a recreation for the mind, it is a protection. It relieves the man who has it from ennui, from the oppres- sive sense of the sameness of life, and from that tendency to jadge everything from a single standpoint, which is the curse of the efficient and the industrious. It hardly matters what it is, a definite kind of reading, or an art, or an outdoor occupation, the result is always the same, a kind of content with life which the man without a hobby lacks. Music is, perhaps, the beat of all ; for that is inexhaustible, can be taken lip in fragments of time, and when pursued by those who can appreciate it, gives a delight which has the charm of perpetual variety. Those who love music, yet work hard at other things, never tire of their " taste," and never, if they can gratify it, lad life either tedious or insupportable. They find in it not only pleasure but occupation ; and it is in the conjunction of the two that for the weary true relief consists. So do those who can sketch in sketching, especially if they can do it well enough not to be haunted, as musicians are much haunted, by a sense of defeat in reaching for an ideal. After sketching, we think we may reckon the pursuit of natural history, which, though it tends to the study of small departments of knowledge, is practically inexhaustible, and rouses, be- sides thought and the pleasure of collecting, the passion of curiosity. Reading we should place fourth among hobbies. It is the resource of the cultured, but it has drawbacks, especially in this, that it tends to become an occupation only, pleasure being impaired by fits of imperfect attention. Your omnivorous reader, who reads to pass the time, is apt to read without thinking, or criticising, or remembering, and for all the genuine pleasure he gets, might almost as well be asleep. His reading is, in fact, a mental opiate. The hobby we should place next is gardening, for that also is an occupation, infinitely varied, which cannot end, or to those who enjoy it grow wearisome, and which, of course, in yielding health yields an advantage not belonging either to reading or to music. After these five we should place all the mechanical occupations, like turning, carpenter- ing, bookbinding, working in metal or stone, or indeed any one of the occupations in which thought is required, but not too much thought, the mind and the hand together tending, when experience is complete, to work almost automatically. And, last of all, because it is so fruitless, we should place the writer's own hobby of deck-pacing, which is a much commoner and a more entrancing one than is commonly believed. It is indeed, to some men, what sauntering was to Charles II.,—a Sultana Queen whose charm blinds them to its inherent viciousness. From all these the educated, as we see every day, gain a relief which is as good for them as sleep, and the uneducated would gain, as Mr. Watts with his poet-insight clearly perceives, even more, they having less of the relief from within which comes of many ideas. There is not an artisan in the country who, if he had one of these hobbies, would not be a more contented man, less given to acridity of thought, and less disposed to believe in the wrong of inequality of condition. A man can only be happy in his position, be it what it may ; and we have known overworked artisans who, as fiddlers, carvers, inventors in machinery, and antiquarians, have even when gravely pressed by external circumstances, been tranquilly content, while a colleague who is a naturalist, meets every day men who, though totally uneducated, are as naturalists and collectors consciously and, so to speak, actively happy men. All such men benefit at first exceedingly by a little instruction, and are usually eager to obtain it, and we can conceive no philanthropy more useful, or better calculated to sweeten the social system, than that which secures it for them. They will not, when they are started, become Hugh Millers in any noteworthy number ; for that type arises, like genius, and is not made, but they will become happier men, with a sense that the universe has for them something of pleasure. "I aren't not to say 'jetted," said one of them, "though I am dismissed, for," patting a battered old telescope, " my old friend here ain't pawned yet, nor won't be." That old astronomer was pro- tected, as we have said, against at least half the ills which fate could inflict on him, and could he have had a year's irregular instruction, would scarcely have felt even hunger as a reason for discontent. He never, while the stars pursued their courses, could lose the sense of being thoroughly in- terested, of looking on at an exciting drama to which there could be no end. The man with a hobby like this—and it is not necessary that it should be so noble a one—is never dull, never idle, never tempted to feed upon his own inside, but lives the only life in which pleasure is perpetually recurrent,— the interested life, the life in which unpleasant incident is no more noticed than the soldier was by Archimedes. Really to care about any one thing outside the daily work, be it what it may, so only it be not exhaustible, is to possess, at all events, the second secret of content.
The only imperfection in Mr. Watts's idea, which we are, we fear, explaining very weakly, is the imperfection which, so far as we know, attaches to every philanthropic project; it is not universally applicable. An immense number of men are incapable of hobbies. They can do their work in the world, and do it often well, but they can find interest in nothing else. Nothing outside their work attracts them, nothing rouses even their curiosity. Frequently they are not dull- witted, and they are often so grievously haunted by the wish to exert themselves, that leisure is to them positive pain; but they cannot for all that take up any hobby whatever, cannot read, cannot garden, cannot betake them- selves to any mechanical occupation, cannot even pace the deck with anything like self-forgetfulness. They are eaten up when off work with a chagrin, gentle or bitter, accord- ing to temperament, which either poisons their lives or drives them to remedies, drink being the worst, which in their reaction only intensify the next fit of spleen. It is supposed that this condition, which we see every day in the old who have worked hard, is peculiar to them, and is a result of retiring from active life, but that is wholly inaccurate. The old, it is true, often suffer from leisure, like retired Indian officers—of all the educated classes, those who are most liable to chagrin—but the malady is not confined to them. It often besets the young. There is not a family in the country without a member whose inability, when at leisure, " to find anything to do," is the despair of his relatives, while it rouses the occupied to constant, and sometimes ill-natured, vaticinations as to his future destiny. It is not the love of idleness which hampers such a man, or the passion for amusement, or any desire for the unattainable; it is an inability to care for any pursuit whatever not forced on him by circumstances. These men often know this themselves, and lament it ; but they never, or very rarely, cure it. We have known in our lives many men, young men too, to whom the daily cessa- tion from work was little better than a misery, who world gladly have remained always at work, and who welcomed any task, however disagreeable, if only it were peremptory, as a positive relief. They cannot read, they do not care for the arts, they have no outdoor pursuits ; in short, leisure is to them an insupportable burden. Their usual ex- planation, when cross.questioned, is that they cannot bring themselves to work "without results," but that only pushes the question back a step further; for why cannot they, when their own comrades and friends and acquaintances find happi- ness in so working P " They are lazy," say the friends they weary ; but the reproof is nine times out of ten only partially deserved. We have known genuinely hard workers, men of implacable industry, who were tormented by this inability to employ leisure, or to feel any interest in any occupation whatsoever except their business. They are per- fectly honest when they say they have no hobbies, and are often, in saying it, miserably conscious of defect. The origin of the evil in them is, we presume, a certain want of the capacity of attention ; for when that is not wanting, mental interest, the power of being absorbed, almost invariably springs up. The cause of that want is as obscure as the 'cause of any other natural predisposition, but that it exists we are certain, as we are that the only artificial -cure is a resolute determination to attend. The man who is resolved to know anything not positively forbidden —as music, for instance, often is—by physical conditions, can almost always in the end give himself a hobby which will at all events terminate the unspeakable pain of having too much leisure. We fancy the poor cannot feel that, because often they are fatigued by the day's work ; but just look at them on Sunday or any holiday, when the weather forbids the attempt to throw off the burden of consciousness by mere uhange of scene ; just hear them talk as they lounge, and you will understand the unhappiness which Mr. Watts, who probably never felt it himself for five minutes, is making his well-planned effort to cure.
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