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 as long
as 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 the majority of 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 'h.p.'"
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 the majority of 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 sufficient 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 programme,' 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 are
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 "h.p." The other eight working hours
of their day may be badly organised, 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 programme is bigger than his, I want to
exceed my programme 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 "h.p." 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 programme 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 monopolised by
his ordinary day's work. What, then, is to be done?
The obvious thing to do is to circumvent your ardour for your
ordinary day's work by a ruse. Employ your engines in something
beyond the programme before, and not after, you employ them on
the programme 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 as long as 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
programmes, 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.
CONTENTS
PREFACE, V
I THE DAILY MIRACLE, 21
II THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE'S PROGRAMME, 28
III PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING, 35
IV THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLE, 42
V TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL, 49
VI REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE, 56
VII CONTROLLING THE MIND, 62
VIII THE REFLECTIVE MOOD, 69
IX INTEREST IN THE ARTS, 76
X NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM, 83
XI SERIOUS READING, 90
XII DANGERS TO AVOID, 97
HOW TO LIVE ON
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
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 really 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 criticised, 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 unstealable. 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. Mo 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 consols, 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 have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have
to 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 definitely. 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 realisation 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 analyse 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 analyse 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 realise tat 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 programme 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 programme 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 the majority of people who are conscious of the wish to
live--that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the aspiration
to exceed formal programmes 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 realisation 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 time-table 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 sombre? 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 unspoilt, 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 ardour. Ardour 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
all of a sudden 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, in itself, 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 day's time. You say your
day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually 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 is 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 have to 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 in regard
to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates and
weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests. In the majority of instances
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 "h.p." (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 in spite of 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 absolutely 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 has to 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 has to 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 on 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 news-agents 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 programme 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)
in the midst of 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
endeavour 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
programme 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 programme
(super-programme, 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 programme 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! That is to say, 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 practise 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 has to 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 are
capable of doing.
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 who's profound truth and
urgency most people live and die without realising. 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 behaviour. 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 round
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 on the subject of 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 tyrannise 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 dumb-bells for your muscles or an encyclopaedia
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 concen-
tration, 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 realising 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 fairly 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 sorrow-
fulness 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 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 Bruyere, 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 Tschaikowsky'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 programmes 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. Krehbiel'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 marvellously 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 specialise your inquiries either on a particular form of music (such
as the symphony), or on the works of a particular composer. At the end of a
year of forty-eight weeks of three brief evenings each, combined with a study
of programmes 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 vitalising
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 vapour,
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 scienti-
fically 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 marvellously shown
in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford
Street; to avoid the block people actually 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
absolutely 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 favours 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 wild life-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 f
eeling 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 the
majority of 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 round
Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, 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 would 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 Brontes, 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 particular 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 motor-car, 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 humour. 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 not 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 programme like a slave to
a chariot. One's programme must not be allowed to run away with one.
It must be respected, but it must not be worshipped as a fetish. A programme
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 programme is a programme. And unless it is treated
with deference it ceases to be anything but a poor joke. To treat one's
programme 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 has to do next. In
this way one may come to exist as in a prison, and ones 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 programme 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 programme till it runs over. The only cure is to reconstitute
the programme, 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 endeavour. Of them
it may be said that a constant breathless hurry is better than an eternal doze.
In any case, if the programme 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 chiefest 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 labour 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 encyclopaedia 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.