()Icier Thirty Page
THE USE OF LEISURE IV
By PETER DONNELLY
[The writer, whose age is 24, is a labourer in a steel-works] THEY have started a school now to instruct young men in love-making ; they are making a science of court- ship. Our elders started the boom in sciences, we under- thirties have aided its growth by wallowing in their scientific clap-trap ; unless we are very careful we will perish in it. They have organised our lives from being born to being dead. We have a bulging, grandmotherly Government to see that we are educated, inoculated, drilled, insured and kept from the bar when we most need a drink. What the Government omits, other committees of this and that enforce. Now, before our very eyes, they are organising our leisure, even our love-making.
The strange fact is that we allow ourselves to be cut to a pattern with scarcely any protest. The habit of organising has been foisted upon us so insidiously, with its benefits always emphasised, that we have been blind to its draw- backs. Workmen used to have no problem of leisure because they had no time for leisure. But by means of their strong organisation they forced from employers better con- ditions of working, more money and less work. Very few men now work more than forty-eight hours in a week. There remain, therefore, one hundred and twenty hours to be divided between leisure and sleep, and when he is faced with using these the workman meets his problem. He depends upon others to direct his life in so many ways that when he is free from work he can only follow the crowd to whatever amusement cries loudest from the hoardings.
But the use of leisure is an individual thing ; it marks a man and distinguishes him from his fellows. John Smith in the day-time may be just a clerk in a black coat and striped trousers, or a bloke with an oilcan, but in his garden at night, or scraping his fiddle, John Smith is a man. With his bowler hat or his overalls he sheds necessity and takes command of himself. He has been a cog all day, now he is a whole machine. For, excepting a fortunate few, men at work are only cogs. They revolve in the same circle, meet the same people, make the same jokes, wheel the same barrow as they did yesterday and will do tomorrow, if God spares them. Despite the employers of labour who dislike clock-watchers, most of us work not because we like work, but to live. Not the least part of living is using our leisure.
They make a grave mistake who think they use their leisure best when they succumb to the mass hysteria of our day and spend their afternoons watching football, their nights at the pictures. Football is a fine game—if you play it. But how many under-thirties play ? To watch football is an innocuous pastime, but it is silly to allow it to hold you so that all else is excluded from your mind and when you are not watching you must be talking football. Yet there are thousands of workmen who cannot talk on anything but football. The cinema is a medium of fine entertainment, but its value is lost if people go there from habit or because they can think of nothing better to do. It seems that the majority of film-fans are led to the cinema from motives as woolly as these—else why are there so few good pictures ? Why has picture-making continued to be a technique when it should be an art ? The workman lacks that meed of critical ability which makes real appre- ciation possible ; and he, and many who look down their noses at him, lack the nice discrimination, the balance of mind, that are necessary if they would live completely.
That so many have this want is partly the fault of our grandmotherly Government, partly of the people them- selves. The people are to blame because they will not grasp the opportunities that abound. Anyone who is willing can educate himself in these days without the necessity even of joining a class of night students, for every town maintains a library, and the Press and radio provide music, information and comment ad lib. But self-instruction needs great diligence and with no foundation but the three R's men look on it as impossible. Now the Government has admitted the principle of compulsory education, though it has neither the wit nor the will to pursue it. True, children must attend school till they are fourteen years old, but they take from there into manhood the power only to read the " form-book " and reckon the odds. And if they are fortunate enough to go on to a secondary school their heads are crammed with what is necessary to fatten their salaries in after life.
No child is educated at fourteen. Few men have com- pleted their education at forty, for education is the drawing out, the broadening, of the mind, and that is a slow process. But if the Government were to be earnest about education they would raise the school-leaving age at least to eighteen ; give every child a good liberal education, introduce him to the classics of literature, of sculpture, of music, of painting ; guide his nascent tastes and give them room to develop. If a man is not too old to be called to the bar at twenty-six, he is not too old to start shovelling at eighteen ; if Cicero will help a lawyer to plead, surely a navvy will swing a pick none the worse for having looked into Homer.
I do not suggest that we become a nation of ascetic scholars, forsaking everything in the search for knowledge and beauty ; but this world is full of good things that they miss who do not know where to look for them. It is the business of education to indicate where these good things lie : it is the business of a man in his leisure to enjoy them. Men will employ their leisure usefully only after our legis- lators have realised that a school is a place of leisure, not a factory for turning out apprentices. It is this view of education—far more than the War which it is usual to blame —that is responsible for the excesses to which men go in their leisure time under some fond illusion that they are enjoying themselves. Thus, I know men who go in their dirt, direct from work, to the public-house and drink beer till they lie down beside it, not on one Saturday, but week after week ; others spend their time just as wastefully courting the daughters of joy, gluttonously reading cheap novels, wandering bored and aimless about the streets.
The sensible use of leisure requires restraint and the cultivation of the little, important arts of living, like writing a letter, talking, listening, playing with children, wooing a girl. It is remarkable that company is rare which relishes good talking—fine minds exercised to rapier wit by some subject grave or not so grave. Conversation is an art that seems to have perished. Men have no time to talk ; even football is considered ill-discussed unless there is a background of somebody's " Melody-Makers," or " In Town Tonight " from the wireless. It would be hard to know what things men say to their sweethearts, but in these days they choose poor places to say them. I can think of nothing more banal than making love in a " Palais de Danse " except making love in a cinema. Yes I can—in this town many couples prefer making love in the cemetery, so that after all, perhaps there is reason for this school of instruction in courtship, though it will be useful only if it tunes a young man's ear to the singing of the birds of Angus. When we all can hear that singing it will be a sign that we use our leisure well, for our minds will be subtle again and skimmed of dross materialism.
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