AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
by Robert Louis Stevenson
BOSWELL: "We grow weary when idle."
JOHNSON: "That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of lese-respectability, to enter on some
lucrative profession, and labor therein with something not far
short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content
when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile,
savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be.
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in
doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the
ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry
itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter
in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult
and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so
many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the
emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. And while such a one is
ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand
his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by
the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass
at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by
the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome
for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success?
It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous
hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your
achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers
have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of
stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of
all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against
industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a
fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them
well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is
certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence;
only there is something to be said against it, and that is what,
on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is
not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has
written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he
should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle
in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape
from school honors with all his wits about him, most boys pay so
dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in
their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true
during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others
to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who
addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come
upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome
task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other
things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible,
by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a
stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty
bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the
Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all
the bustle and glamor of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thoughts.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in
the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures
in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of
Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease,
nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with
such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by
certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while
I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that
mighty place of education, which was the favorite school of Dickens
and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the
Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does
not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go
out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some
tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune
of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there
he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new
perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive
Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such a one, and the conversation that
should thereupon ensue:--
"How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"
"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
"Is this not the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying
thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"
"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it
mathematics?"
"No, to be sure."
"Is it metaphysics?"
"Nor that."
"Is it some language?"
"Nay, it is no language."
"Is it a trade?"
"Nor a trade neither."
"Why, then, what is't?"
"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I
am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and
where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what
manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this
water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me
to call Peace, or Contentment."
Hereupon, Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and
shaking his cane with a very threatening countenance, broke forth upon
this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues
scourged by the Hangman!"
And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not
called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of
your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of
a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all
experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years
ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read
in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter
xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of
fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and harkening
in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more
true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is
certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits
of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and
for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and
palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with
a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week
is out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the
fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to
all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and
know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out
of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry,
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life.
Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically
stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began
life along with them--by your leave, a different picture. He has had
time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great
deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for
both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in
very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots,
and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the
idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the
idler has another and more important quality than these. I mean his
wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of
other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very
ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He
will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and
opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify
himself with no very burning falsehood. His way took him along a
by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is
called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Common-sense.
Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect;
and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise,
he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all
sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in
many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The
shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent
wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath
all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green
and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlors; good people laughing,
drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,
is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies
a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.
Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and
you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have
no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations;
they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its
own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will
even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot
be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those
hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in
the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is
a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they
fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would
suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you
would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very possibly
they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a
flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and
college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have
gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time
they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not
too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a
life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a
listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and
not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he
was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is
smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright
upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as
being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy
habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and
down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an
omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is
only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the
most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it
will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most
beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life
are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world
at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only
the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers
in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands
from the benches, do really play a part and fulfill important
offices toward the general result. You are no doubt very dependent
on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and
signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there
not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors
who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your
dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his
friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts;
and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes.
And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think
I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world
could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was
more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done
him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle
of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion
emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in
the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has been
done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a
churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper
covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half
an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his;
do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the
manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil?
Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your
correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for
your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties
because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and
they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and
there may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element
of sacrifice, the favor is conferred with pain, and, among generous
people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate
as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits
upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other
day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with
so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humor;
one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money
with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased."
If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased
and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling
rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere
but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite
commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a
five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and
their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been
lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh
proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically
demonstrate the great Theorum of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently,
if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should
remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the
workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits,
it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of
Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal
of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers
and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly,
in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some
temper before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well
he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives.
They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without
his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his
fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to
be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden
by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand
fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told
Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered
there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare
gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should
we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional
importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some
dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have
wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe
to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the
wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the
alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco
to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the
proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon
consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the
phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities
necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves.
Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of
no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman
with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and
labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy
court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until
their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though
Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a
pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline,
and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would
you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master
of Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that
this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the
bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not
so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for
all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches
they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they
and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind
freezes at the thought.
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