How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
by
Arnold Bennett
PREFACE TO THIS EDITION
This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface
must be, should be read at the end of the book.
I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning
this small work, and many reviews of it—some of them nearly if the book
itself—have been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse.
Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my
opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no
weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the
volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however, been offered—not in
the press, but by sundry obviously sincere correspondents—and I must deal with
it. A reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this
disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is as follows:
—"In most instances he [the typical man] does not precisely feel a passion
for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business
functions with some reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy,
as early as he can. And his engines, while he is engaged in his business, are
seldom at their full 'hope'"
I am assured, in accents of unmistakable sincerity, that
there are many business men—not merely those in high positions or with fine
prospects, but modest subordinates with no hope of ever being much better
off—who do enjoy their business functions, who do not shirk them, who do not
arrive at the office as late as possible and depart as early as possible, who,
in a word, put the whole of their force into their day's work and are genuinely
fatigued at the end thereof.
I am ready to believe it. I do believe it. I know it. I
always knew it. Both in London and in the provinces it has been my lot to spend
long years in subordinate situations of business; and the fact did not escape
me that a certain proportion of my peers showed what amounted to an honest
passion for their duties, and that while engaged in those duties they were
really living to the fullest extent of which they were capable. But I remain
convinced that these fortunate and happy individuals (happier perhaps than they
guessed) did not and do not constitute a majority, or anything like a majority.
I remain convinced that most decent average conscientious men of business (men
with aspirations and ideals) do not as a rule go home of a night genuinely
tired. I remain convinced that they put not as much but as little of themselves
as they conscientiously can into the earning of a livelihood, and that their
vocation bores rather than interests them.
Nevertheless, I admit that the minority is of enough
importance to merit attention, and that I ought not to have ignored it so
completely as I did do. The whole difficulty of the hard-working minority was
put in a single colloquial sentence by one of my correspondents. He wrote:
"I am just as keen as anyone on doing something to 'exceed my programmed,'
but allow me to tell you that when I get home at six thirty p.m. I am not
anything like so fresh as you seem to imagine."
Now I must point out that the case of the minority, who
throw themselves with passion and gusto into their daily business task, is
infinitely less deplorable than the case of the majority, who go half-heartedly
and feebly through their official day. The former is less in need of advice
"how to live." At any rate during their official day of, say, eight
hours they are really alive; their engines are giving the full indicated "hope"
The other eight working hours of their day may be badly organized, or even
frittered away; but it is less disastrous to waste eight hours a day than
sixteen hours a day; it is better to have lived a bit than never to have lived
at all. The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who is braced to effort
neither in the office nor out of it, and to this man this book is primarily
addressed. "But," says the other and more fortunate man,
"although my ordinary programmed is bigger than his, I want to exceed my programmed
too! I am living a bit; I want to live more. But I really can't do another
day's work on the top of my official day."
The fact is, I, the author, ought to have foreseen that I
should appeal most strongly to those who already had an interest in existence.
It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it. And it is
always the man who never gets out of bed who is the most difficult to rouse.
Well, you of the minority, let us assume that the intensity
of your daily money-getting will not allow you to carry out quite all the
suggestions in the following pages. Some of the suggestions may yet stand. I
admit that you may not be able to use the time spent on the journey home at
night; but the suggestion for the journey to the office in the morning is as
practicable for you as for anybody. And that weekly interval of forty hours,
from Saturday to Monday, is yours just as much as the other man's, though a
slight accumulation of fatigue may prevent you from employing the whole of your
"hope" upon it. There remains, then, the important portion of the
three or more evenings a week. You tell me flatly that you are too tired to do
anything outside your programmed at night. In reply to which I tell you flatly
that if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your
life is wrong and must be adjusted. A man's powers ought not to be monopolized
by his ordinary day's work. What, then, is to be done?
The obvious thing to do is to circumvent your ardor for your
ordinary day's work by a ruse. Employ your engines in something beyond the programmed
before, and not after, you employ them on the programmed itself. Briefly, get
up earlier in the morning. You say you cannot. You say it is impossible for you
to go earlier to bed of a night—to do so would upset the entire household. I do
not think it is quite impossible to go to bed earlier at night. I think that if
you persist in rising earlier, and the consequence is insufficiency of sleep,
you will soon find a way of going to bed earlier. But my impression is that the
consequences of rising earlier will not be an insufficiency of sleep. My
impression, growing stronger every year, is that sleep is partly a matter of
habit—and of slackness. I am convinced that most people sleep if they do
because they are at a loss for any other diversion. How much sleep do you think
is daily obtained by the powerful healthy man who daily rattles up your street
in charge of Carter Patterson's van? I have consulted a doctor on this point.
He is a doctor who for twenty-four years has had a large general practice in a
large flourishing suburb of London, inhabited by exactly such people as you and
me. He is a curt man, and his answer was curt:
"Most people sleep themselves stupid."
He went on to give his opinion that nine men out of ten
would have better health and more fun out of life if they spent less time in
bed.
Other doctors have confirmed this judgment, which, of
course, does not apply to growing youths.
Rise an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours earlier;
and—if you must—retire earlier when you can. In the matter of exceeding programmers,
you will accomplish as much in one morning hour as in two evening hours.
"But," you say, "I couldn't begin without some food, and
servants." Surely, my dear sir, in an age when an excellent spirit-lamp
(including a saucepan) can be bought for less than a shilling, you are not
going to allow your highest welfare to depend upon the precarious immediate
co-operation of a fellow creature! Instruct the fellow creature, whoever she
may be, at night. Tell her to put a tray in a suitable position over night. On
that tray two biscuits, a cup and saucer, a box of matches and a spirit-lamp;
on the lamp, the saucepan; on the saucepan, the lid—but turned the wrong way
up; on the reversed lid, the small teapot, containing a minute quantity of tea
leaves. You will then have to strike a match—that is all. In three minutes, the
water boils, and you pour it into the teapot (which is already warm). In three
more minutes, the tea is infused. You can begin your day while drinking it.
These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will
not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend
upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
A. B.
I
THE DAILY MIRACLE
"Yes, he's one of those men that don't know how to
manage. Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries as well as
needs. Not extravagant. And yet the fellow's always in difficulties. Somehow,
he gets nothing out of his money. Excellent flat—half empty! Always looks as if
he'd had the brokers in. New suit—old hat! Magnificent necktie—baggy trousers!
Asks you to dinner: cut glass—bad mutton, or Turkish coffee—cracked cup! He
can't understand it. Explanation simply is that he fritters his income away.
Wish I had the half of it! I'd show him—"
So, we have most of us criticized, at one time or another,
in our superior way.
We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the
pride of the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on
such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence
proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged
round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on L85 a
year. I have seen an essay, "How to live on eight shillings a week."
But I have never seen an essay, "How to live on twenty-four hours a
day." Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates
the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain
money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the
Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the
cat by the fire has.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained
time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is
possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an
affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning,
and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured
tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of
possessions. A highly singular commodity showered upon you in a manner as
singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstillable.
And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is
no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never
rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your
infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be
withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: —"This man is a fool, if
not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter."
It is more certain than consoles, and payment of income is not affected by
Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt!
You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept
for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?
You must live on this twenty-four hour of daily time. Out of
it you must spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution
of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of
the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that.
Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! —depends
on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up to date as they
are, are not full of "How to live on a given income of time," instead
of "How to live on a given income of money"! Money is far commoner
than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the
commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.
If one can't contrive to live on a certain income of money,
one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn't
necessarily muddle one's life because one can't quite manage on a thousand
pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas and balances the
budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day
shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one's life.
The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say
"lives," I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through." Which
of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the "great spending
departments" of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? Which
of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or
that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food?
Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself
all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"?
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have
always had, all the time there is. It is the realization of this profound and
neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to
the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.
II
THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE'S PROGRAMME
"But," someone may remark, with the English
disregard of everything except the point, "what is he driving at with his
twenty-four hours a day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a
day. I do all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper
competitions. Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four
hours a day, to content one's self with twenty-four hours a day!"
To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You
are precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years.
Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for
telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking
to me. Please come forward. That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not
yet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to
chat with my companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are
haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and
slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives
into proper working order.
If we analyses that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily,
one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a
source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of
all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it
raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while
we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it
promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: "O man, what
hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?" You
may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is
part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True!
But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His
conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by
the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may
drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of
the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration
may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man
who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never
leaves Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not
left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from
Cook's the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there
are only twenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyses our vague, uneasy aspiration, we
shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do
something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged
to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain
ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to
save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task
sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often
beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not
satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.
And even when we realize that the task is beyond our skill,
that our powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less
discontented if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further
to do.
And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish
something outside their formal programmed is common to all men who in the
course of evolution have risen past a certain level.
Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of
uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to
disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been called by many names. It is
one form of the universal desire for knowledge. And it is so strong that men
whose whole lives have been given to the systematic acquirement of knowledge
have been driven by it to overstep the limits of their programmed in search of
still more knowledge. Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind
that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of
inquiry.
I imagine that in most people who are conscious of the wish
to live—that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity—the aspiration
to exceed formal programmers takes a literary shape. They would like to embark
on a course of reading. Decidedly the British people are becoming more and more
literary. But I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole
field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one's self—to
increase one's knowledge—may well be slaked quite apart from literature. With
the various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to
those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is not the
only well.
III
PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING
Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in
persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a
suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and
that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that
you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and
which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have "more time";
and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that
you never will have "more time," since you already have all the time
there is—you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may
at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by
which, therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things
left undone will be got rid of!
I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to
find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is
undiscovered. When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a
resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself, "This
man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain
wished to do." Alas, no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal
road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is
that you never quite get there after all.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging
one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget
of twenty-four hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the
task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too
strongly insist on this.
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal
by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had
better give up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements and
disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort,
then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call
your existence.
It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and somber? And
yet I think it is rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the
will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel
it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.
"Well," you say, "assume that I am braced for
the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your
ponderous remarks; how do I begin?" Dear sir, you simply begin. There is
no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath
and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, "How do I begin to
jump?" you would merely reply, "Just jump. Take hold of your nerves,
and jump."
As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the
constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year,
the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspool, as
if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which
fact is very gratifying and reassuring? You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose. Therefore, no object is served in waiting till next week, or
even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It
won't. It will be colder.
But before you begin, let me murmur a few words of warning
in your private ear.
Let me principally warn you against your own ardor. Ardor in
well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for
employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager
to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it
perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it
wearies suddenly and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of
saying, "I've had enough of this."
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with
quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your
own.
A failure or so would not matter, if it did not incur a loss
of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like
success, so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined
by attempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of
living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a
day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will not agree
that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty
success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a
petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.
So, let us begin to examine the budget of the days' time.
You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You spend in earning your
livelihood—how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in actual sleep, seven? I
will add two hours and be generous. And I will defy you to account to me on the
spur of the moment for the other eight hours.
IV
THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES
In order to come to grips at once with the question of
time-expenditure in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for
examination. I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average
case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as there is no
such man as the average man. Every man and every man's case are special.
But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office,
whose office hours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning
and night in travelling between his house door and his office door, I shall
have got as near to the average as facts permit. There are men who must work
longer for a living, but there are others who do not have to work so long.
Fortunately, the financial side of existence does not
interest us here; for our present purpose the clerk at a pound a week is
exactly as well off as the millionaire in Carlton House-terrace.
Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man
makes regarding his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which
vitiates and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests. Usually, he does
not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it.
He begins his business functions with reluctance, as late as he can, and he
ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines while he is engaged in
his business are seldom at their full "hope" (I know that I shall be
accused by angry readers of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty
thoroughly acquainted with the City, and I stick to what I say.)
Yet despite all this he persists in looking upon those hours
from ten to six as "the day," to which the ten hours preceding them
and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such
an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd
sixteen hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does
not count them; he regards them simply as margin.
This general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy,
since it formally gives the central prominence to a patch of time and a bunch
of activities which the man's one idea is to "get through" and have
"done with." If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient
to one-third, for which admittedly he has no feverish zest, how can he hope to
live fully and completely? He cannot.
If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely, he
must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese
box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a
day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing
whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During
those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied
with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. This
must be his attitude. And his attitude is all important. His success in life
(much more important than the amount of estate upon what his executors will
have to pay estate duty) depends on it.
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours
will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will
assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things
which my typical man must learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a
continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want
is change—not rest, except in sleep.
I shall now examine the typical man's current method of
employing the sixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his uprising.
I will merely indicate things which he does and which I think he ought not to
do, postponing my suggestions for "planting" the times which I shall
have cleared—as a settler clears spaces in a forest.
In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time
before he leaves the house in the morning at 9.10. In too many houses he gets
up at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and 9.9 1/2, and then bolts. But immediately
he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which are tireless, become idle.
He walks to the station in a condition of mental coma. Arrived there, he usually
must wait for the train. On hundreds of suburban stations every morning you see
men calmly strolling up and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly
rob them of time, which is more than money. Hundreds of thousands of hours are
thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so little of time that
it has never occurred to him to take quite easy precautions against the risk of
its loss.
He has a solid coin of time to spend every day—call it a
sovereign. He must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to
lose heavily.
Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said,
"We will change you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence
for doing so," what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the equivalent
of what the company does when it robs him of five minutes twice a day.
You say I am dealing with minutiae. I am. And later, I will
justify myself.
Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train?
V
TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL
You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you
calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry.
You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your
glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer
pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from
some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of
twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and
two French dailies, and the newsagents alone know how many weeklies, regularly.
I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a
prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of
newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be
read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programmed for newspapers. I
read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to
them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can
one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full
of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly
allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness.
You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no
more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already "put
by" about three-quarters of an hour for use.
Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six
o'clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour
and a half) during the day, less than half of which time is given to eating.
But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your
newspapers then.
I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are
pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to
understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually
working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty
suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter.
You don't eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you
feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you
smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a
book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the
piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes
to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted
with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's
work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office—gone like a
dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!
That is a fair sample case. But you say: "It's all very
well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can't
always be on the stretch." Just so. But when you arrange to go to the
theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs;
you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to
town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not
five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don't spend three-quarters
of an hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and
fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely
long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were
persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two
hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have
something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ
all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense
vitality to the whole day?
What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the
face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that
you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so
doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest
that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your
mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an
hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive
cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for
friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening,
pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of
forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere
you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavor
to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to
yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to bed." The
man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is
bored; that is to say, he is not living.
But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes
thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and
eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a
tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but I
have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to
work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much
more urgent than the immortal soul.
VI
REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE
I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four
hours between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to business
at 10 a.m. on Monday. And here I must touch on the point whether the week
should consist of six days or of seven. For many years—in fact, until I was
approaching forty—my own week consisted of seven days. I was constantly being
informed by older and wiser people that more work, more genuine living, could
be got out of six days than out of seven.
And it is certainly true that now, with one day in seven in
which I follow no programmed and make no effort save what the caprice of the
moment dictates, I appreciate intensely the moral value of a weekly rest.
Nevertheless, had I my life to arrange over again, I would do again as I have
done. Only those who have lived at the full stretch seven days a week for a
long time can appreciate the full beauty of a regular recurring idleness.
Moreover, I am ageing. And it is a question of age. In cases of abounding youth
and exceptional energy and desire for effort I should say unhesitatingly: Keep
going, day in, day out.
But in the average case I should say: Confine your formal programmed
(super-programmed, I mean) to six days a week. If you find yourself wishing to
extend it, extend it, but only in proportion to your wish; and count the time
extra as a windfall, not as regular income, so that you can return to a six-day
programmed without the sensation of being poorer, of being a backslider.
Let us now see where we stand. So far, we have marked for
saving out of the waste of days, half an hour at least on six mornings a week,
and one hour and a half on three evenings a week. Total, seven hours and a half
a week.
I propose to be content with that seven hours and a half for
the present. "What?" you cry. "You pretend to show us how to
live, and you only deal with seven hours and a half out of a hundred and
sixty-eight! Are you going to perform a miracle with your seven hours and a
half?" Well, not to mince the matter, I am—if you will kindly let me! I am
going to ask you to attempt an experience which, while perfectly natural and
explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of
those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest
to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal
occupations. You practice physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and
evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength
are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical
outlook changed. Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a
day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole
activity of the mind?
More time might assuredly be given to the cultivation of
one's self. And in proportion as the time was longer the results would be
greater. But I prefer to begin with what looks like a trifling effort.
It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover
who have yet to essay it. To "clear" even seven hours and a half from
the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice must be made. One may have
spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it,
however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a
change of habits.
And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any
change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and
discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a
half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you
are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition,
will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I
know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I
earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect.
Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an
enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one's self-respect. Hence,
I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously.
When you have conscientiously given seven hours and a half a
week to the cultivation of your vitality for three months—then you may begin to
sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you can do.
Before coming to the method of using the indicated hours, I
have one final suggestion to make. That is, as regards the evenings, to allow
much more than an hour and a half in which to do the work of an hour and a
half. Remember the chance of accidents. Remember human nature. And give
yourself, say, from 9 to 11.30 for your task of ninety minutes.
VII
CONTROLLING THE MIND
People say: "One can't help one's thoughts." But
one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing
whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives
us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to
control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. This idea is one of
the oldest platitudes, but it is a platitude whose profound truth and urgency
most people live and die without realizing. People complain of the lack of
power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if they
choose.
And without the power to concentrate—that is to say, without
the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience—true life is
impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should
be to put the mind through its paces. You look after your body, inside and out;
you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole army of
individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you to bribe your
stomach into decent behavior. Why not devote a little attention to the far more
delicate machinery of the mind, especially as you will require no extraneous
aid? It is for this portion of the art and craft of living that I have reserved
the time from the moment of quitting your door to the moment of arriving at
your office.
"What? I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the
platform, in the train, and in the crowded street again?" Precisely.
Nothing simpler! No tools required! Not even a book. Nevertheless, the affair
is not easy.
When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a
subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards
before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking around
the corner with another subject.
Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have
reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not
despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by any chance fail
if you persevere. It is idle to pretend that your mind is incapable of concentration.
Do you not remember that morning when you received a disquieting letter which
demanded a very carefully worded answer? How you kept your mind steadily about
the answer, without a second's intermission, until you reached your office; whereupon
you instantly sat down and wrote the answer? That was a case in which you were
roused by circumstances to such a degree of vitality that you were able to
dominate your mind like a tyrant. You would have no trifling. You insisted that
its work should be done, and its work was done.
By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there
is no secret—save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannies over your mind
(which is not the highest part of you) every hour of the day, and in no matter
what place. The exercise is a very convenient one. If you got into your morning
train with a pair of dumbbells for your muscles or an encyclopedia in ten
volumes for your learning, you would probably excite remark. But as you walk in
the street, or sit in the corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or
"strap-hang" on the Subterranean, who is to know that you are engaged
in the most important of daily acts? What asinine boor can laugh at you?
I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you
concentrate. It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts.
But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone and concentrate on
something useful. I suggest—it is only a suggestion—a little chapter of Marcus
Aurelius or Epictetus.
Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know
nothing more "actual," more bursting with plain common-sense,
applicable to the daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs,
pose, and nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Read a chapter—and so
short they are, the chapters! —in the evening and concentrate on it the next
morning. You will see.
Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the
fact. I can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear. You are saying to
yourself: "This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh chapter. He
had begun to interest me faintly. But what he says about thinking in trains,
and concentration, and so on, is not for me. It may be well enough for some
folks, but it isn't in my line."
It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you. Indeed,
you are the very man I am aiming at.
Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most
precious suggestion that was ever offered to you. It is not my suggestion. It
is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who have
walked the earth. I only give it you at second-hand. Try it. Get your mind in
hand. And see how the process cures half the evils of life—especially worry,
that miserable, avoidable, shameful disease—worry!
VIII
THE REFLECTIVE MOOD
The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least
half an hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the
piano. Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one's complex
organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke. Useless to possess an
obedient mind unless one profits to the furthest possible degree by its
obedience. A prolonged primary course of study is indicated.
Now as to what this course of study should be there cannot
be any question; there never has been any question. All the sensible people of
all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it any other art,
nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one's self. Man,
know thyself. These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them.
Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush,
being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one
of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone
acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice. I
don't know why. I am entirely convinced that what is more than anything else
lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man of to-day is the
reflective mood.
We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon
genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main
direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share
which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation
between our principles and our conduct.
And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not? Have
you discovered it?
The chances are that you have not. The chances are that you
have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have
attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not
spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the
development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
I suppose that you will not have the audacity to deny this.
And if you admit it, and still devote no part of your day to the deliberate
consideration of your reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also that
while striving for a certain thing you are regularly leaving undone the one act
which is necessary to the attainment of that thing.
Now, shall I blush, or will you?
Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon
your attention. I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your
principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don't
mind. All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not well accord with
principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with
principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution. What
leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are
contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of
burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all
martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.
As for reason (which makes conduct and is not unconnected
with the making of principles), it plays a far smaller part in our lives than
we fancy. We are supposed to be reasonable, but we are much more instinctive
than reasonable. And the less we reflect, the less reasonable we shall be. The
next time you get cross with the waiter because your steak is over-cooked, ask
reason to step into the cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her. She will
probably tell you that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control
over the cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you
accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your dignity,
looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the waiter, while
producing no effect whatever on the steak.
The result of this consultation with reason (for which she
makes no charge) will be that when once more your steak is over-cooked you will
treat the waiter as a fellow-creature, remain quite calm in a kindly spirit,
and politely insist on having a fresh steak. The gain will be obvious and
solid.
In the formation or modification of principles, and the
practice of conduct, much help can be derived from printed books (issued at
sixpence each and upwards). I mentioned in my last chapter Marcus Aurelius and
Epictetus. Certain even more widely known works will occur at once to the
memory. I may also mention Pascal, La Bruere, and Emerson. For myself, you do
not catch me travelling without my Marcus Aurelius. Yes, books are valuable.
But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest
examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do—of a
steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may
be).
When shall this important business be accomplished? The
solitude of the evening journey home appears to me to be suitable for it. A
reflective mood naturally follows the exertion of having earned the day's
living. Of course, if, instead of attending to an elementary and profoundly
important duty, you prefer to read the paper (which you might just as well read
while waiting for your dinner) I have nothing to say. But attend to it at some
time of the day you must. I now come to the evening hours.
IX
INTEREST IN THE ARTS
Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of
idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to
idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste
for literature. This is a great mistake.
Of course, it is impossible, or at any rate very difficult,
properly to study anything whatever without the aid of printed books. But if
you desire to understand the deeper depths of bridge or of boat-sailing you
would not be deterred by your lack of interest in literature from reading the
best books on bridge or boat-sailing. We must, therefore, distinguish between
literature, and books treating of subjects not literary. I shall come to
literature in due course.
Let me now remark to those who have never read Meredith, and
who are capable of being unmoved by a discussion as to whether Mr. Stephen
Phillips is or is not a true poet, that they are perfectly within their rights.
It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of imbecility. The
mandarins of literature will order out to instant execution the unfortunate
individual who does not comprehend, say, the influence of Wordsworth on
Tennyson. But that is only their impudence. Where would they be, I wonder, if
requested to explain the influences that went to make Schakowsky's
"Pathetic Symphony"?
There are enormous fields of knowledge quite outside
literature which will yield magnificent results to cultivators. For example
(since I have just mentioned the most popular piece of high-class music in
England to-day), I am reminded that the Promenade Concerts begin in August. You
go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I regret to say that you
strike your matches during the soft bars of the "Lohengrin"
overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the piano or
the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing of music.
What does that matter? That you have a genuine taste for
music is proved by the fact that, in order to fill his hall with you and your
peers, the conductor is obliged to provide programmers from which bad music is
almost entirely excluded (a change from the old Covent Garden days!).
Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's
Prayer" on a piano need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with
the construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a week
during a couple of months! As things are, you probably think of the orchestra
as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of
sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears
to listen to details.
If you were asked to name, the instruments which play the
great theme at the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them
for your life's sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has thrilled you.
It will thrill you again. You have even talked about it, in an expansive mood,
to that lady—you know whom I mean. And all you can positively state about the C
minor symphony is that Beethoven composed it and that it is a "jolly fine
thing."
Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Kraybill's "How to
Listen to Music" (which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the
price of a stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the
orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you would
next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing intensification of interest
in it. Instead of a confused mass, the orchestra would appear to you as what it
is—a marvelously balanced organism whose various groups of members each have a
different and an indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments and
listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a
French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the
hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more
difficult instrument. You would live at a promenade concert, whereas previously
you had merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at
a bright object.
The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music
might be laid. You might specialize your inquiries either on a form of music
(such as the symphony), or on the works of a composer. At the end of a year of
forty-eight weeks of three brief evenings each, combined with a study of programmers
and attendances at concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you would
really know something about music, even though you were as far off as ever from
jangling "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano.
"But I hate music!" you say. My dear sir, I
respect you.
What applies to music applies to the other arts. I might
mention Mr. Clermont Witt's "How to Look at Pictures," or Mr. Russell
Sturgis's "How to Judge Architecture," as beginnings (merely
beginnings) of systematic vitalizing knowledge in other arts, the materials for
whose study abound in London.
"I hate all the arts!" you say. My dear sir, I
respect you more and more.
I will deal with your case next, before coming to
literature.
X
NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM
Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most
important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect—in
other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe—in
still other words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has
thoroughly got imbued into one's head the leading truth that nothing happens
without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.
It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that
the thief of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment
which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and one
buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy that makes
bitterness impossible. One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd
air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the
curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were
a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached maturity,
one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!
The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the
painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution
is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he
can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is
imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives
in the sea an element which in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapor,
which yesterday was boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to
be solid, and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful
picturesqueness of life. Nothing will afford a more durable satisfaction than
the constantly cultivated appreciation of this. It is the end of all science.
Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up
in Shepherd's Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go up in
Shepherd's Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific students of cause
and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at a Lyons Restaurant who did
not scientifically put two and two together and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube
the cause of an excessive demand for wigwams in Shepherd's Bush, and in the
excessive demand for wigwams the cause of the increase in the price of wigwams.
"Simple!" you say, disdainfully. Everything—the
whole complex movement of the universe—is as simple as that—when you can
sufficiently put two and two together. And, my dear sir, perhaps you happen to
be an estate agent's clerk, and you hate the arts, and you want to foster your
immortal soul, and you can't be interested in your business because it's so
humdrum.
Nothing is humdrum.
The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvelously
shown in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford
Street; to avoid the block people began to travel under the cellars and drains,
and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd's Bush! And you say that isn't
picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question
in London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to
your business, and transform your whole life?
You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would
be able to tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest
straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the
longest straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will admit that
in an estate agent's clerk I have not chosen an example that specially favors
my theories.
You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless
romance (disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard
Street"? Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up
for ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be
to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.
You are "penned in town," but you love excursions
to the country and the observation of wildlife—certainly a heart-enlarging
diversion. Why don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the
nearest gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild life of
common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate the knowledge
thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at last get to know
something about something?
You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in
order to live fully.
The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to
satisfy that curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an
understanding heart.
I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and
literature, and I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person,
happily very common, who does "like reading."
XI
SERIOUS READING
Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so
that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety
minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens
will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not
serious—some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose
fiction—the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good
novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the
reader. It is only the bad parts of Meredith's novels that are difficult. A
good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the
end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least
strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is
precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you
is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that
feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order to
read "Anna Karenina." Therefore, though you should read novels, you
should not read them in those ninety minutes.
Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than
novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It
is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure and
teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with
it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that most people do not read
poetry.
I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were
confronted with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going
around Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sackcloth, would choose
the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends
and enemies to read poetry before anything.
If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to
you, begin by reading Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in
general." It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has
read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval
torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at
forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man
who, after reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some
poetry before his next meal. If the essay so inspires you, I suggest that you
make a commencement with purely narrative poetry.
There is an infinitely finer English novel, written by a
woman, than anything by George Eliot or the Bronte's, or even Jane Austen,
which perhaps you have not read. Its title is "Aurora Leigh," and its
author E.B. Browning. It happens to be written in verse, and to contain a
considerable amount of genuinely fine poetry. Decide to read that book through,
even if you die for it. Forget that it is fine poetry. Read it simply for the
story and the social ideas. And when you have done, ask yourself honestly
whether you still dislike poetry. I have known more than one person to whom
"Aurora Leigh" has been the means of proving that in assuming they
hated poetry they were entirely mistaken.
Of course, if, after Hazlitt, and such an experiment made in
the light of Hazlitt, you are finally assured that there is something in you
which is antagonistic to poetry, you must be content with history or
philosophy. I shall regret it, yet not inconsolably. "The Decline and
Fall" is not to be named in the same day with "Paradise Lost,"
but it is a vastly pretty thing; and Herbert Spencer's "First
Principles" simply laughs at the claims of poetry and refuses to be accepted
as aught but the most majestic product of any human mind. I do not suggest that
either of these works is suitable for a tyro in mental strains. But I see no
reason why any man of average intelligence should not, after a year of
continuous reading, be fit to assault the supreme masterpieces of history or
philosophy. The great convenience of masterpieces is that they are so
astonishingly lucid.
I suggest no work as a start. The attempt would be futile in
the space of my command. But I have two general suggestions of a certain
importance. The first is to define the direction and scope of your efforts.
Choose a limited period, or a limited subject, or a single author. Say to
yourself: "I will know something about the French Revolution, or the rise
of railways, or the works of John Keats." And during a given period, to be
settled beforehand, confine yourself to your choice. There is much pleasure to
be derived from being a specialist.
The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know
people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as
well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink.
They fly through the shires of literature on a motorcar, their sole object
being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful,
fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading,
your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace
will be slow.
Never mind.
Forget the goal; think only of the surrounding country; and
after a period, perhaps when you least expect it, you will suddenly find
yourself in a lovely town on a hill.
XII
DANGERS TO AVOID
I cannot terminate these hints, often, I fear, too didactic
and abrupt, upon the full use of one's time to the great end of living (as
distinguished from vegetating) without briefly referring to certain dangers
which lie in wait for the sincere aspirant towards life. The first is the
terrible danger of becoming that most odious and least supportable of persons—a
prig. Now a prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. A
prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without
knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humor.
A prig is a tedious individual who, having made a discovery, is so impressed by
his discovery that he is capable of being gravely displeased because the entire
world is not also impressed by it. Unconsciously to become a prig is an easy
and a fatal thing.
Hence, when one sets forth on the enterprise of using all
one's time, it is just as well to remember that one's own time, and no other
people's time, is the material with which one has to deal; that the earth
rolled on pretty comfortably before one began to balance a budget of the hours,
and that it will continue to roll on pretty comfortably whether or not one
succeeds in one's new role of chancellor of the exchequer of time. It is as
well not to chatter too much about what one is doing, and not to betray a
too-pained sadness at the spectacle of a whole world deliberately wasting so many
hours out of every day, and therefore never really living. It will be found,
ultimately, that in taking care of one's self one has quite all one can do.
Another danger is the danger of being tied to a programmed
like a slave to a chariot. One's programmed must not be allowed to run away
with one. It must be respected, but it must not be worshipped as a fetish. A programmed
of daily employ is not a religion.
This seems obvious. Yet I know men whose lives are a burden
to themselves and a distressing burden to their relatives and friends simply
because they have failed to appreciate the obvious. "Oh, no," I have
heard the martyred wife exclaim, "Arthur always takes the dog out for
exercise at eight o'clock and he always begins to read at a quarter to nine. So,
it's quite out of the question that we should..." etc., etc. And the note
of absolute finality in that plaintive voice reveals the unsuspected and
ridiculous tragedy of a career.
On the other hand, a programmed is a programmed. And unless
it is treated with deference it ceases to be anything but a poor joke. To treat
one's programmed with exactly the right amount of deference, to live with not
too much and not too little elasticity, is scarcely the simple affair it may
appear to the inexperienced.
And still another danger is the danger of developing a
policy of rush, of being gradually more and more obsessed by what one must do
next. In this way one may come to exist as in a prison, and one's life may
cease to be one's own. One may take the dog out for a walk at eight o'clock and
meditate the whole time on the fact that one must begin to read at a quarter to
nine, and that one must not be late.
And the occasional deliberate breaking of one's programmed
will not help to mend matters. The evil springs not from persisting without
elasticity in what one has attempted, but from originally attempting too much,
from filling one's programmed till it runs over. The only cure is to
reconstitute the programmed, and to attempt less.
But the appetite for knowledge grows by what it feeds on,
and there are men who come to like a constant breathless hurry of endeavor. Of
them it may be said that a constant breathless hurry is better than an eternal
doze.
In any case, if the programmed exhibits a tendency to be
oppressive, and yet one wishes not to modify it, an excellent palliative is to
pass with exaggerated deliberation from one portion of it to another; for
example, to spend five minutes in perfect mental quiescence between chaining up
the St. Bernard and opening the book; in other words, to waste five minutes
with the entire consciousness of wasting them.
The last, and chief's danger which I would indicate, is one
to which I have already referred—the risk of a failure at the commencement of
the enterprise.
I must insist on it.
A failure at the commencement may easily kill outright the
newborn impulse towards a complete vitality, and therefore every precaution
should be observed to avoid it. The impulse must not be over-taxed. Let the
pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as regular as
possible.
And, having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve
it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having
accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
Finally, in choosing the first occupations of those evening
hours, be guided by nothing whatever but your taste and natural inclination.
It is a fine thing to be a walking encyclopedia of
philosophy, but if you happen to have no liking for philosophy, and to have a
like for the natural history of street-cries, much better leave philosophy
alone, and take to street-cries.
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