IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS.
IN this holiday season, most people are capable of a certain degree of idleness ; but to understand what idleness really means one should winter on the Riviera da Ponente. There,
holiday and season alike are on a large scale, and so also is Idleness ! Writing in dear old England's soft and sultry air, one reviews with interest a sketch of her features never to be
dissociated from its framework of a large winter hotel at C—. Frame with picture, picture with frame, it is impossible for
the present writer to put them apart. Idleness seems con- nected with that vivid mental idea, evoked by other holiday scenes, of a certain long, high building, with flat surface broken but by balcony and portico ; giving upon the terrace above its garden of palm, bamboo, aloe, and many a flowering shrub, in winter sheltering blossoming tea-roses, anemones, scarlet salvia, overgrown geranium, and gaudy marigold. In the centre of that garden lay the universal tennis-court, and on the broad upper terrace of grating gravel, carriages constantly rolled, invalids and idlers were crawling or lounging when sun was hot and wind was cold. That was how the hotel stood on the hill-side under the Southern sky, looking past the stretching olive country, dotted with white, red-roofed villas, to the shining sea, on the western hand closed by jagged peaks blue with distant cork and pine. It was no mere " inn," that long, high building, with its three hundred inhabitants. It had few " passers-by," though frequently arrivals and departures caused a rush of blue-coated and red-jacketed officials round over-luggaged travellers, and from behind the second door the sharp, considering face of the proprietor peered out. He was taking notes of a kind which would astonish those for the first time entering their temporary home (for nearly all go there for weeks, some, invalids or with invalids, for months, from October to May). Then, day after day, with more or less opportunity for mutual insight, lasting or transitory feuds and friendships, all were thrown together :—persons of differing creeds, tongues, and characters, representing or misrepresent- ing their parentage, increasingly attractive or repellent one to another; to whom small things appeared great, and great things very small,—because over that motley crew reigned Idleness and Ennui.
Idleness and Ennui are by no means inseparable or identical. Like all unpleasant people, Ennui is always ready to make acquaintance, and to charge her distant relation, Idleness, with responsibility for provoking ill-tempers, distorted powers of observation, for languid good and vigorous evil, enfeebled resolution and wasted opportunity. But Idleness is slandered, —and, indeed, has nearly been done to death by writers, them- selves not of her acquaintance, taking their reports from others who apparently had every opportunity for judging of her nature. Dear Idleness ! it is not her nature, but theirs who know not her secret, that has led to such misrepresentation ! Ennui is her evil genius; but where Idleness has power for good, Ennui has none for evil, and Idleness is the most beneficent fairy of modern life—in few places more beneficent than on the Riviera—to the right people. It is true, like many another of our best friends, she needs to be treated with that considera- tion which, according to Doctor Johnson's famous advice, keeps friendships in repair. She is not amiable to people who give her a forced or divided attention in the few hours im- peratively claimed from those worthy of receiving her blessing, and she has no mercy upon rogues and vagabonds. Idleness is a pitiless corrector of those who outstay their welcome in her domains. Whilst punishment avails, she hands them over to Ennui, or else herself undertakes that through a certain enchantment of her own they shall do and say that which is unwelcome in self-defensive society; and such humilia- tion has helped many. But if intruders be utterly hopeless, and continue to take what was never meant for any save temporarily, then she gives the lazy their own way till, com- placently eating at her table almost as at that of Circe, they .grow into self-evident monsters.
But now think of her at work—her good work, only for good people—in that six months' home of ours ! Did she not use well her opportunities ? It was Idleness who improved the manners of that brusque, kind-hearted creature, who when in England was far too hurried for the leisurely graces of womanhood ; it was she who carried to the keen-eyed thinker the elixir of leisure, and, whilst apparently only putting a little colour and flesh upon the countenance, was whispering to the brain ideas which, not then, but months hence, should come to life ; and if, too, here and there, she hinted at thoughts of companionship and love, who will blame her? It was she who exerted all her blandishments whilst Nature stepped in to reinvigorate a life so nearly lost a little while before ; it was she who relaxed the overstretched nerves and overwrought muscles of strong champions of the world's great causes. Never more heartily than in our English and American lives should men speak in praise of Idleness. And so another thought rose up in the very home of Idle. ness. It might be—it was—that to some there, Idleness could not chant that sweet siren-song of restored power : she had perforce sadder offices. Here, for a few, undisturbed by hard hurryings of the busy (though with hours of homesick aspiration), those who nevermore might work, saw even Idle- ness softly fade from the sight of eyes growing dim, as slowly and silently she leaves behind her a holier sister, Peace. Soon, very soon, then, in the garden of outworn bodies across the olive-covered hills, there would be another shining cross of the white marble, recumbent on a roughened block, that bears before name and date the words, " At Rest." There are minds that have their most vivid flashes of remembrance whilst paying tribute to the actual grave. As told in the Journal published last year, Michelet's experiences at the tomb of his friend Poinsot* must be those of many. But to others it has always seemed that what those who are gone once touched and cared for, is to memory of infinitely greater value than any other monument. Yet the conviction was not morbid, nor in those idle days disproportionate, that made some life seem more sad than such death. The feeling became perfectly oppressive, even till it reached- " Such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Mind, the Mind of Man."
Personality obscured by routine was rendered visible not by action but by inaction. Is it all so little, so self-seeking, so much at the mercy of strangers The legibility of the marvellous record of thought upon physique is daily proveable, and it was practised at C— by hundreds—not elsewhere students of human nature—in instinctive search for sym- pathisers and in involuntary avoidance of those who had lived in other environments than their own. Each at leisure scrutinised all. Is there, then, nothing concealable even to human eyes trained to test ? The subtlest moral characteristic stands out as clearly as marked physical traits. If men can but see it,—carefully chosen garments of the purse-proud, slovenliness of the well-born, are momen- tary disguises ; fine sentiments of the shallow, slow move- ments of the strong, do not long hide personality : so, too, apparent idleness and selfishness, or the reverse, do not alter "the rank which angels know,"—nor yet can they who for a little must " stand and wait " conceal the bright wings which mark them as the resting messengers of God. " As thine eye observeth, so art thou observed." Many of those who judge others well enough for practical purposes can give no reasons for a verdict, nor—except in rarest cases—does the observer who gauges a man's position and general amiability, or other- wise, ever attempt to read the habitual thoughts, to measure the life-current, in the soul of his neighbour. Such persons have no idea of the pain given to some by the long lines of faces frequently seen at public meals. Shifting groups in kaleidoscopic circle, viewed day after day, seemed more clearly than ever before to heliograph the warning,—" Man bears with him his own fate," though even there—where old habits were broken up, and most people must form some new links—the finding of the true level of personality that continually went on might have been affected by external circumstances. But, as a rule, the habitual gossipers dealt out a rough justice, though in silence truer judgments are formed, becoming frequently more tender as they increase in trustworthiness. Then, if such penetration gives pain, it also enhances pleasure. Only he of whom the cynic's estimate of human worthlessness is personally true, thinks it universally true. Those who possess the divine insight frequently have the divine pity very strong within them, and so in faint measure understand how both may be extended to infinity.
But the mention of gossip—as much of men as of women—inevitably recalls the by no means imaginary danger to which there is special exposure in idle weeks and months. There is a tendency to degenerate, and in the weak give in, more
Mon Journal. Paris: Calmann Divy. 1938.
or less happily, whilst the strong fret. Mr. Morley, in his " Characteristics,"—earlier still, Mr. Russell Lowell, as he reminded a friend of his—showed why tempers suffer in such a life as this. The best minds require a certain amount of solitude, as bodies require sleep, or fractiousness begins. The more civilised the mind, the more luxurious the life, the greater is the need that man should in some way secure his escape from the trivial round, not giving him " room to deny" himself,—at any rate for any useful purpose. Then, taking Idleness into our confidence rather than de- frauding her of her just rights, it is essential that some space of her leisure should be devoted to her noblest guests,—most ready to abide with us when all, without and within, is still.
It was thus that at times escape had to be made from the long, high hotel, where people lived like bees in a glass-house —sometimes with more stings than honey-making—always busy, doing nothing. In the slowly working, slowly changing courses of our English holiday weather, it seems hard to recall the paradoxes of those summery winter days. But directly those torrents of tropical rain had ceased, one could ascend the rugged little paths upon the angular hills. There were traces of the downpour,—little courses running rapidly over clear sand and solitary, crumbling, yellow rocklets ; the olives shone and trembled in sympathy with dancing water on a tiny pool ; heath and pine, fresh in vivid green, too, showed how rain had fallen,—that was all. The eucalyptus scent, clear and sharp, was stronger than the distant sweetness of the orange-flower as one climbed up—past busy peasants beating black olives from the gnarled, dusky trees—to the deserted shrine, glad to rest beneath its shadow. (The day before having been bitterer than days of English east wind,—that day was hotter than in our July summer when the sun poured down.) How restful, because how solitary, that view of townlets and stretching expanse of villas far below, when crowned by the snowy ranges unseen from lower elevations ! Or, again—(equally, of course, such recreative quietness is appreciated by wanderers over our Scotch hills or English uplands ; but it very vividly contrasted with the petty wear and tear of hourly contact with complete idlers of a Riviera season)—one -would go over the stilled sea to the spring-touched pinewoods of a glorious little island, where an old castle's yellow reflection falls and rises on the calmly dimpling sapphire water. Such an impression of the good qualities of Idleness—especially just now—may come to many another in other scenes, in other ways ; but, somehow, these lessons of Idleness seemed easy to learn as, in reverie or rest, one student left a great writer's text-book lying unstudied on the shores of the Great Sea. Idleness could justify herself in the light from that pale, luminous, low-lying horizon between height and depth of blue ; for she gave space to forget the little, opportunity to learn the great. And so, there, she said : —" I—even I—must teach our teachers what is little, and what is great : my best friend, Work, is sometimes too busy to dis- tinguish between them." Have not our poets, as Mr. Lowell says, all been " idlers in the land"?
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