BACK TO WORK.
WITH sighs of regret or relief, the holiday-makers have returned to harness. The...many are sorry, the few are glad. Among those who work for their living, some live for their work ; but for most people work is the price of leisure— of a nice home to sleep in, of a wife at ease, of happy Saturdays and Sundays away from the stir of the City, and of a twelfth part of every year spent in complete freedom. The ordinary man is surprised when he hears some one say that he would like to die in harness. The wish seems to most of us to be an unnatural one ; but it is not uncommonly and quite sincerely expressed. Indeed, there are a few professional men who can hardly be said to enjoy a holiday at all. They look upon any prolonged period of leisure as a species of doctor's stuff which must be taken now and again by men who desire to keep their energies and power of application to the end. They ask nothing of a holiday but health. They ask it of the air, the water, and the prospect-; they seek it in rest, in exercise, and in novelty ; and having got it, they thank God that they need pursue it no longer, and want no more of these delights than can• be supplied by ticket. An occasional play, a few hours spent in a suburban garden, furnish all the change and recreation
they wish for as a relish to nine or ten hours a day of solid hard work. Such workers see the end of the summer outing which they conceive necessary to the keeping up of their strength with real joy. Home is sweet to us all, but most sweet to them. It is the symbol of the habitual, and the habitual means work. They belong to the class who can afford the sort of home they wish for and cannot afford to be much out of it. They are home birds, par excellence. Their household gods smile upon them and tell of the diversions of a full day and the cessation of the conscious effort after enjoyment and the irksome occupation of filling in time. Without toil the world would seem strange to them. Work is the very essence of the familiar, of all that home stands for, and without it they do not care to live. All this of course is a matter of temperament and circumstance, though the work-lover may be tempted, as we all may be, to make a virtue of it. It may—it very rarely does—develop in him the pride which destroys character, and make him regard grind as a synonym for grit. As a rule, however, the type of man we have been describing is not a vain man, and even looks upon his passion for work as a proof of his own mediocrity. He has, he knows, no craving for adventure in any field, and an Englishman is apt to be a little ashamed of contentment. He is often touchingly willing to accord to his sons the distractions he never wanted, and to excuse in his neighbours an appetite for pleasure which he has never felt. He is a humdrum person, he acknowledges to himself, and few men wish for a humdrum son, unless they already have one who is " a bad lot." Of course it cannot be maintained that all men who resent the necessity of a holiday belong to this type. There are feverish workers whose eagerness in harness cannot be curbed. But these inspired workers are as rare as men of genius. Indeed they have a sort of genius, and it is to them that the witticism which declares genius to be nothing but the power of taking pains owes such credence as it has obtained. Ordinary men are deceived by the warmth of their admiration. They watch them removing mountains and credit them with supernatural gifts.
Apart froni this super-energized group of men, there pours back into the workaday world the crowd whcm duty alone spurs to toil, who cast many lingering looks behind them, and who not only do not want to die in harness but hope to be able to spend a long afternoon at leisure when they have finally put it off. No very rich men and no very poor men want to die working. The poor labourer may desire death rather than the workhouse, but that is another matter. He regards work as a means of independence ; he does not hope to continue it till he is old for its own sake. For one reason, very few poor men have opportunity to slake their natural thirst for leisure before old age overtakes them. The hand-worker, whatever his temperament, is likely to be overdone. Even if his daily work is easy, the fact that until very lately vast numbers of men did not get a consecutive week's idleness year in, year out, from twenty to sixty (unless indeed we count as a holiday occasional weeks of idleness and anxiety due to illness or " outof-work "), tells its own tale. A hand-worker's wish for leisure is a physical thing, and becomes of the nature of a passion— a passion which is liable, like other passions, to become now and then too strong for his reason. The end of a short holiday, if it is a real holiday, means to him a return to severe self-control. It means he must, as it were, put down his glass half emptied, his pipe still full, must get up before he has had his sleep out, start again while he is still out of breath. Small wonder if there come a time when he will not return till he has had his fill of slackness; no wonder at all if his sense of duty, sufficient to make him undertake his job, is insufficient at first to make him put his back into it.
The temperament which makes work a delight, not very common in any class, is rarest, we think, among the rich. The people usually spoken of as the leisured class often work very hard, because they are as liable to moral and religious influence, and as open to the temptation of power and advancement, as any one else. They work for an end, however, and not very often for work's sake. They do not desire to die in harness. They are able to fill their leisure with such joys as human nature cannot fail to covet. We do not mean such pleasures as appeal to worthless men. The worthless men in any class are in a tiny minority. Leisure to a rich man need never mean laziness. A poor man may have nothing to do with his off-time but " slack " in it. Not so the man of wealth. He can take his leisure in the sweat of his brow—he generally does. All the mimic labour of the sportsman offers itself to his hand. According to his taste, he can hunt as hard as his savage ancestor hunted for his living, toil upon the sea as the fisherman toils, taste enough danger to suggest the sweets of duty, walk after a ball as far as the postman walks after his living, read with the philosopher, paint with the artist—in fact, do work enough with brain or body to give him an appetite, without ever feeling an anxiety lest he should be unable to satisfy it. Such a man cannot crave for harness, for the routine and discipline of pro. fessional work. As well ask an Exmoor pony to put himself into the shafts and signify his wish to live and die in them. He may prefer work to constant confinement in a stable, but he must look on his choice as a choice of evils.
The majority of men who are neither rich nor poor, who make up what we call the great middle class, taste during their holiday at least some of the rich man's pleasures. They like them very much, they would like more of them, and the beginning of their working year is to them a time of effort and of self-suppression. Harness chafes when it is first resumed in most cases. Perhaps a man, unless he has that supernatural energy, the substitute for genius, to which we have alluded, lacks something if he is tame enough to prefer it to freedom. The men who come back with a sigh of relief are not those of the highest spirit. For all that, we think they are the most to be envied. Since constant work is the lot of ninety-nine-hundredths of the human race, he is luckiest who likes it best ; but there is something a little inhuman about him. He is to the thinking of the ordinary man almost too far removed from Adam.
Previous page
