MASS HOLIDAYS.
TT is certainly one of the greatest misfortunes of a highly organised state of society, that it is so inconvenient for different people to work and play at different times,—that hardly anybody can work quite effectively unless almost everybody else is working too, as well those who supply him with his raw materials, as those whom he supplies, and thus that hardly anybody can afford to take a real holiday, unless a very great number of other persons are making holiday too. A "Bank holiday" means, of course, the legal exemption of a considerable, though not very large, class of persons from the necessity of meeting their ordinary obligations on the day chosen for that holiday ; and of course, therefore, it becomes the most convenient day for hundreds of thousands of other persons who are under no such special obligations, but who are more or less dependent for the discharge of their ordinary duties on the opportunity of cashing notes, getting cheques paid, and discounting bills, to get their holiday also. Moreover, it would be most inconvenient to liberate the Banker from his peculiar obligations at any time which was not one of general holiday, so that Bank holidays are of course fixed for days on which, for other reasons, there are an ny more holiday-makers and many fewer labourers than at any other time. The result of course is that Bank holidays do not so much release any one from the pressure of the throng, as divert the throng to which he belongs from one channel to another. The "pent-up stream of life " which eddies round and round in commercial channels on ordinary days, "leaps downward like a cataract" into the country at the seasons of Bank holidays, and thereby fails to see the country, in the only real sense of the word, at all. A town gone out of town,—a crowd without roofs over their heads,—is no more in the country, than a river which has overflowed its ordi- nary bed is on dry ground. Nor do the country people really see the towns at such a time, for they see them with none of that punctual and methodic bustle which is the essence of town life. You might almost as well expect to see what theatres are like, by day,—without the footlights and the play,—as to see town life by an excursion to London on a Bank holiday. And you might almost as well expect to see what mountains and lakes are like, by lighting up every rood of them with gas, and covering the surface of the latter with halfpenny steamboats, as to see the country by the help of Easter excursion trains, and the many omnibuses and vans which, starting from each station, irrigate the remoter districts with their plentiful rills of travellers. The real effect of the new system is that it turns play into another and often more burdensome sort of work. There is all, and more than all, that fag of making times and engagements fit, which marks the ordinary business life, together with this additional aggravation,—that the machinery in use, being equal to little more than the effective discharge of its average duty, is quite inefficient for the extraordinary strain put upon it by the excep- tional demands of the Bank holiday,—the consequence being delays, disappointments, and a sense of failure which are no parts at all of the ordinary business day. The wise holiday-maker will, if he can, get his holiday when the great majority of his world are hard at work, and will consent to work when the great majority of his world are making holiday ; only this is very hard for ordinary people to manage ; since, for many purposes at least, work is difficult when assistants or collaborateurs make holiday, and for most purposes holiday-making is still more difficult when assistants or collab or- ateurs are hard at work. Work makes work, and hence holiday- making at exceptional times is not easy to contrive. On the other hand, universal holidays make holiday-taking easy, if unfortunately they did not also make the holidays taken no holidays at all, but laborious arrangements for spending time uneasily in seeking what you do not find. Before long, all truly wise persons who have a home they enjoy, will spend the Bank holidays strictly at home, and look for change of place only when there is no such run on the bank of Pleasure as threatens the immediate stoppage of cash payments for the drafts on that bank.
But though, no doubt, for the purposes of change of scene, the system of Bank holidays contains a radical defect, which must ultimately become so conspicuous as to render that mode of employing a universal holiday in the highest degree painful and laborious, yet for the purpose of those quieter social or solitary pleasures which any one can enjoy at home, it has very i great advantages, and no disadvantages except some which are I
mere consequences of selfish and exacting habits of mind. We do, most of us, no doubt, catch ourselves complaining with an air of great injury of the inconvenience of having the most essen- tial shops shut for three or four days together, and often perhaps inveighing against the new-fangled notions which favour "so many holidays and so much racketting about" among the working-classes, whereas the complainers belong to a class accustomed habitually to have more weeks of holiday in the year than the enjoyers of Bank holidays have days, and habitually travel more hundreds of miles for change of scene, than the enjoyers of Bank holidays travel miles. Indeed, complaints of this kind are not very different from the complaints we so often hear of the dullness of Sunday in a great city,—in other words, of the want of all that animation which is due to the labour of the multi- tude,—labour which affects the complainers only as it creates a scene fascinating to their eyes and entertaining to their minds: Yet assuredly we should not enjoy so much the brilliance of the shop- windows and the gaiety of the bustling crowd, if all this brilliance and gaiety represented not the labour of others, but our own incessant efforts. The journalist does not feel a blank when, for a day or two, the symbols of his own labour vanish from before his eyes. The barrister feels no blank when he sees the Courts shut up in which he daily spends more strength than he can afford ; the Member of Parliament even is not sensible of any dullness when he observes, on Wednesday or Saturday evening, the deserted condition of the avenues to the scene of his nightly labours. And so, too, no doubt, that dreariness, ash seems to us, in the London streets, which results from silent manufactories, closed shops, and slender traffic, brings to the wearied shopman or artisan the same sense of relief which the Civil Servant feels on passing the closed gates of his office on public holidays, or the stockbroker in a transient glimpse of the silent halls of 'Change. A spectacle of liveliness which implies our own high-pressure work, is not so much a vision of liveliness as a recollection of fatigue. The desola- tion of London on Sundays and holidays, is desolation to those only who do not lavish their strength on making it brilliant on the working days. And so, too, the annoyance, as it presents it- self to a particular class, of having to provide against the wants of a few consecutive days of shut-up shops, represents to those who work for or in those shops nothing but the feeling of an oasis in the wilderness" of bard work. Indeed, the very same sight, if it embodies a different idea, will have a totally different effect on the mind. The smokeless chimneys of a factory during a lock-out, are probably as painful and melancholy to the operative as the windows of a home which he has lost. Yet the very same sight, if it indicate only the Saturday half-holiday or the Sunday holiday, will be one of pleasurable repose. We may be quite sure, then, that what is dreary and even dismal to those to whom it represents nothing but a lack of entertainment, carries quite different feelings to the hearts of those to whom it represents a respite from overtasking work.
But looking to the vast advantages of universal holidays, like Bank holidays, when the latter are so managed as to extend the few religious holidays which come near them, and the rapidly-growing difficulty of using them as the fitting occasions for universal change of scene, we cannot help regretting the complete, or all but complete, extinction of those ancient holiday-making customs which provided our ancestors with plenty of amusement, without having recourse to that mania for rushing backwards and forwards, between different places, which railways, and railways only, have rendered possible.
It is amusing in reading over the old year-books to observe the severe and rationalising rebukes which these " superstitious " old customs sometimes meet with. For instance, Hone, in the Every-
day Book published in 1826,—just fifty-two years ago,—speaks thus severely of the old traditional Easter custom of " lifting " or "heaving," which was even then all but dead. It seems that on Easter Monday it was a customary game for the men to heave the women, and demand a fee for doing so, while on the Easter Tues- day the women retaliated on the men. The custom was one which in some fashion or other was supposed to have typified the Resur- rection in times long past, but in those times it was but a traditional amusement. Hone, however, is excessively severe on it :—" It
has been handed down to us from the bewildering ceremonies of the Roman Church, and may easily be discountenanced into dis-
use by opportune and mild persuasion. If the children of igno- rant persons be properly taught, they will perceive in adult years the gross follies of their parentage, and so instruct their own offspring, that not a hand or voice shall be lifted or heard from the son of labour in support of a superstition that darkened and dismayed, until the Printing-press and the Reformation ensured
his final enlightenment and emancipation." That is, indeed, ultra-enlightened. On that principle, all the merely traditional customs of every nation might be denounced as the outcomes of dark ages. Not that any definitely childish traditions, which perish from pure want of interest and import, can be re- vived; and of course, the " heaving " custom must be reckoned as amongst these. But it does seem unfortunate that so many traditional amusements which have the momentum of centuries in their favour, should all be displaced by the new and almost morbid passion for change of place, instead of being deepened and broadened into something conveying more of social enjoyment and social significance. The complete extinction of all the Easter amusements,—of which there were once a great many,—the gradual dying-out of the innocent and picturesque quaintnesses of May-day,—the dwind- ling tendency to celebrate the harvest with gladness and solemnity,—the growing flatness of Christmas,—are all un- fortunate symptoms for the true growth of national life and society. All the amusements of old days seem to have merged in the almost rabid appetite for change of scene, a pastime which be- comes more and more difficult and even distressing as the numbers who take part in it increase. Surely this dearth of all faculty for giving new significance to old-fashioned customs, and this merging of all pleasure in the pleasure of looking at new places, is a social symptom of no good omen. It seems to us to imply a failure of real social resources, and a need for the most mechani- cal of all stimulus, the stimulus of complete novelty for the eye. And if this be so, it bodes very little good not merely to the holiday-makers of the future, but to the capacity of Englishmen for finding that new delight in what is old, without which they will rarely find themselves able to enjoy thoroughly even what is new.
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