FANCY WORK.
WE are inclined to think that people talk less than they did. Monologues are out of fashion. There are a great many " rests " in conversation. The sound of three or four people talking at a distance is less continuous than it was not so very many years ago, and punctuations of laughter or ejaculation seem more frequent. But if among young people there is less determination of words to the mouth, there is certainly no less determination of words to the pen. At the same time, printing was never so dear and getting published was never so difficult. Ex- pression of the mind by means of the pen has become a sort of necessity to a very large class of people, and is, we expect, largely accounted for by the fact that serious discourses and egoistic outpourings, however brilliant, no longer command, so far as social life is concerned, the audience that they did once. They have ceased altogether to be the fashion. Victorian " talk " is a game of the past.
In spite of a rising rate of postage, is it not possible that the art of letter-writing may revive together with diary-keeping ? Good letter-writing entails work, but it is a sort of " fancy work " well worth doing, especially when the keeping-up of friendships by means of frequent visits has become almost impossible. All the new scholars, the men and women whose exceptional abilities have earned for them a first-class education, will have a wholesome fearlessness of pedantry, and, being truly if uncritically in love with literature, they will feel the necessity of imitative composition just as every young musician feels it. Their writing will bring them in no money : it will be simply work which they have " taken a fancy " to do. On the other hand, some of it is bound to be very good. Again, they are certain to write verse, and much, indeed of course most of it, is sure to be rubbish, and of the best, very little can be more than good imitation. A modicum of creative force is, however, dealt out in every decade, and it is quits within the bounds of the possible that a generation pro- ducing few books may become more widely literary than any generation has been before. An era of manuscript, of typewritten masterpieces, and private letters of real value may confront the literary student of the future.
On the same theory it is thinkable that a future 'awaits the amateur actor. The cinemas have hit the legitimate theatre very hard, largely because they produce cheaper entertainment and loose money is very scarce. But the world is not going without the drama, though it may be quite impossible to " stage " it, and though the fortunes to be made by successful pieces become too rare to tempt the ordinary boy and girl. The newly educated will want to act, just to please their fancy, and some of them will want to write something to be acted. What a strange thing it would be if the drama were to come by its own as a social force just as the theatres are begin- ning to cry out in despair ! All this would mean a vast deal of unremunerative work, of what our grandfathers would have called mere " occupation "—a thing done in spare time for love or for fun or whatever word you may choose to describe it by, but it might have an immensely civilizing and humanizing effect upon a great mass of people. In a thousand ways present circumstances are forcing thinking people back upon their own resources. If they want to get pleasure, the greater number of them must get it for themselves, working " for pleasure," as hard necessity makes them work for bread. Those of us who have lived in a very different time can hardly help dreaming that the result will be some great change in the mind of the nation. Some of the evils of industrialism will surely dis- appear, and some of the advantages of an age when origin- ality had more scope will come back. The mechanicalism of ordinary life, at any rate of the life of the middle and artisan classes, is fading away. That a great number of people should be educated who have not the traditions of education is a grief and an ominous sign to more critics of the times than like to speak their minds. They read with dismay the accounts of university honours proving the great mental force hitherto hidden in primary schools which modern facilities for an education lasting throughout the teens instead of stopping at the beginning of them has brought out. Obviously, there is a little to be said for their point of view, but it is a great thing to be freed from the bondage of criticalness. The first generation of educated men have almost always more enthusiasm than critical faculty, and life might be a good deal more entertaining and better worth having if people sought the higher pleasures of life as frankly and uncritically as they seek the lower—made their own poor music and enjoyed it ; wrote their minds out in prose and verse ; held their little mirrors up to nature without scenery, and without ever thinking whether they made themselves ridiculous or not.
Self-consciousness will come out somewhere, seeing that it is in human nature, and, for our part, we should like to see it find vent in the diary habit. What a fund of material for the historian would be forthcoming if one person in every family kept a frank record of events The increased insight into human nature which our grandohildren would get is hardly to be computed. The lack of reticence and lack of respect which characterize the new generation are defects which in the diarist would become qualities. It is the very moment for this form of self-expression. The passion for psycho-analysis proves our point. The diaries of the immediate future would not be made up of things such as our grandmothers concocted in affected imitation of Queen Victoria's simplicity. The truth is in the new generation if discretion is not. A real record of almost any sequence of events is a contribution to literature as well as to history. The fashion, of course, would soon die down. All " fancy work " changes. No work of any sort keeps on unchanged but that which feeds and clothes man. We make up for the terrible monotony of the world's discipline by varying the arrangement of our " off time." After all, it is in off time ' that civilization moves forward, and most men and women live for their " off time " and in their " fancy work." It is a very odd sign of the times that at a moment when no one will do necessary work unless its remuneration is increased, so many people are asking for time in which to do unneces- sary work for nothing
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