| <Saturday Review>
| <Anne Mozley>
| <LEISURE.>
| <Written August 1861.>
| <etext scanned from published work "Essays on Social Subjects">
| <pb n="43">
| THE season is approaching when all busy people to whom fate 
| allows the happiness of periodical relaxation take a holiday. 
| The natural transition from labour is rest ~~ from mental strain 
| and effort, leisure. This, then, being an intellectual and busy 
| age, leisure, as its corrective, should be cultivated and 
| understood. But it appears to us that real leisure is a neglected 
| if not forgotten pursuit ~~ such leisure as gives the charm to 
| Walton's "Angler," as breathes in Mr Dyce's well-known 
| picture of Bemerton, and as is so tenderly and graphically 
| described in "Adam Bede" as belonging to the Sunday 
| afternoons of a past generation. Leisure is, indeed, the natural 
| reaction from work, especially mental work, but it needs 
| some independence and courage to accept it as relaxation in 
| these days. Now that people can do a great deal in a little time, 
| and go far for a little money, mere repose of mind and body, 
| even intelligent repose, seems slow and poor; and thus 
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| labour retains its hold on the busy, only changing its aspect, 
| and calling itself amusement and distraction instead of 
| business ~~ accepted as a substitute for leisure, but by no means 
| fulfilling its functions.
| When Charles Lamb declared that, had he a son, he would call 
| him Nothing-to-do, and he should do nothing, it was the 
| yearning of a mind overwrought in uncongenial work, and 
| deliberately ignoring the nature of leisure. Nothing-to-do 
| would have had no taste for his father's ideal. In fact, it is an 
| accomplishment to be able to enjoy leisure. It needs a mind 
| able for a given time to feed upon itself and to furnish its own 
| delights ~~ a condition of which the idle and the over-busy 
| are alike incapable. It is only the mind disciplined by work 
| that can estimate the charm of leisure; but it must be a mind 
| to which work has been a discipline, not an instinct and a 
| necessity, as it is with some people. What constitutes the 
| desired state is acquiescence in work as a duty, but never 
| being so far engrossed by it ~~ so far its slave ~~ as not to 
| regard leisure as the reward and Sabbatical consummation of 
| labour. On the other hand, Sydney Smith enumerates among 
| the consequences of civilisation a vast number of persons with 
| nothing to do, and those, he says, who have nothing to do, 
| must either be amused or expire with gaping. To recommend 
| seasons of leisure to the victims of blank idleness would be a 
| mockery. Their only notion of pleasure is excitement ~~ to be 
| relieved for a time from the intolerable burden of themselves. 
| We suppose there is no mind so fertile as not to know
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| what this void is, or to be without experience of the need of 
| stimulants from without, and therefore there is 
| <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> who 
| can cheerfully endure long unbroken periods of leisure; but 
| we believe that the richest, fullest minds are the most capable 
| of it, and also find it the most absolute necessity. A great deal 
| of the work of the world is rushed into from the unconscious 
| dread of vacuity. There is no alternative with many people 
| between doing something positive and absolute vacancy. 
| When they stand still from their work, having nothing to fall 
| back upon, they feel idle. Now idleness and the enjoyment of 
| leisure, however often confused, have really nothing in 
| common. Leisure is a process of mental assimilation and 
| digestion for which habit or nature unfits a good many. Busy 
| unreflecting minds never can recognise it as relaxation, and 
| therefore must so far sympathise with idleness that they too 
| must seek in diversion and distraction the counterpoise for 
| their ordinary condition.
| Leisure is the state of receiving impressions without direct 
| deliberate search for them. It implies a mind in a receptive 
| state, all its senses and pores healthily open. What 
| refreshment is equal to this passive reception of new and 
| agreeable images during a period of natural fatigue, allowing 
| the time and scene to inspire their influences without effort or 
| hurry? But it needs not a few requisites to fit a man to be thus 
| ministered to by the occasion. His tastes must be cultivated, 
| and he should have a good faculty of observation; he must 
| not be a man of one idea; he must
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| have a tolerable serenity of temper, and should also possess 
| the quality of patience, permitting surrounding influences due 
| time to work their effects. This faculty of waiting, of taking 
| and giving time ~~ and a longer time than active, over-busy 
| temperaments can believe worth while ~~ is an essential 
| concomitant of all great efforts. Genius cannot do its work 
| without it. Poets and inventors of all kinds cannot 
| accomplish their mission without periods of passive reception 
| of impressions in the gentle trance of leisure which the busy 
| world confounds with idleness and waste of time. We might 
| also claim for love of leisure a conscience free from sudden 
| stings and great alarms, but that this goes beyond our theme. 
| To leisure certainly belongs the power of knowing, what we 
| like ~~ of being aware of our own tastes and affinities. It 
| takes a long time ~~ sometimes a lifetime is not enough ~~ to 
| teach people who are doing what other people do and 
| pursuing a routine, how far they are consulting their own 
| happiness. Almost all the expensive pleasures, the 
| dissipations of life, are committed by persons who have never 
| quietly asked themselves how far they are interested by them 
| or really care for them; but people thrown upon their own 
| resources know immediately when they are bored. The 
| mind which gives itself time to breathe and think is far less 
| liable to these mistakes, if not wholly safe from them, as it is 
| also safe from the danger of possession by a fixed idea. The 
| man who secures to himself intervals of leisure will not often 
| be the victim of hobbies. These will be
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| found to infest minds incapable of thorough, genuine 
| relaxation.
| As we have said, the true idea of leisure is inseparable from 
| work. The only animals that seem capable of it are working 
| animals ~~ working not from instinct, but compulsion. Leisure 
| must occupy an interval with work behind and before ~~ work 
| to look back upon, work in prospect; and we think also it is 
| more complete and more enjoyed with the labour of others 
| before our eyes and impressing the imagination, as we see 
| horses at pasture spending a good deal of their leisure in calm 
| survey of the turnpike road where the drudgery of their lives is 
| passed. The sight of other horses engaged in the toil from 
| which they are exempt, enhances their sense of rest. 
| "L'Allegro," with all rural works and sounds in busy operation, is 
| a poet's exposition of leisure. By a few magic words he brings 
| before us a succession of busy images which we survey in a lull 
| of charmed repose. Tennyson's lotus-eaters, in the land <p> 
| "where it is always afternoon," </p> induce a sympathetic 
| dreaminess of quite a different temper from the refreshing 
| realities of Milton's rustic muse, and have no affinity with 
| leisure. Again, leisure is to be sought and enjoyed in the fishing 
| village, watching the fisherman's strenuous toil and the fitful 
| picturesque business of the whole population, rather than in 
| the watering-place, where everybody is idle. Here, the 
| idleness infects us, and we feel vacant; there, we sympathise in 
| our repose with other men's work, not in selfish immunity, but 
| recognising the law of alternate labour and rest to which we 
| ourselves submit. Soon
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| those athletic workers will abandon themselves to the utter 
| relaxation which only sailors and fishermen can attain to. 
| Soon the village-green and the blacksmith's forge will offer 
| some compensation to the rustic for the day's heat and labour, 
| and soon leisure must give place to work again. The scenes 
| which naturally occur to us as congenial to leisure will imply 
| nature and man working together. The factory and the loom 
| ~~ all that has to do with steam ~~ are too unremitting, too 
| unvarying, too noisy. Even in the labours of nature where 
| man has no part, those effects are most conducive to leisure 
| which are intermitting and homely, or at least familiar in 
| character. The remote, the sublime, and unchanging in scenery, 
| produce exaltation and excitement when people are duly 
| affected by them, but they do not leave us in sufficiently calm 
| possession of ourselves for leisure. Something new, something of 
| the nature of surprise and change, is necessary to all pleasure; 
| but leisure asks for it to be of the least exciting character, felt in 
| new effects rather than in new scenes. Under the influence 
| of leisure, these act on the intelligent mind as first impressions 
| do on childhood. There is no conscious effort, but there is a 
| receptive power which the over-busy temperament never knows. 
| What are <p> "the children sporting on the shore," </p> or 
| <p> "the forty cattle feeding like one," </p> or the humours of 
| the farmyard, or the evolutions and harmonious clamour of a 
| flock of seagulls, to a man who has so much to do before 
| bedtime ~~ so far to go ~~ such a train to catch? Yet how 
| freshening and invigorating are such and a thousand similar 
| sights to a man with
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| a mind and senses awake to them, content for a little 
| while to rest on the present, and let what he sees and 
| hears drive off and exorcise all cares and objects beside! 
| Such being the case, we have often wondered why 
| greater efforts are not made to secure periods of leisure. 
| The busy man, and people who from fashion follow his 
| lead, have spent the spare hours for weeks past in count 
| ing up how much can be done in a given time, how many 
| miles traversed, how many mountains ascended, how 
| much fatigue undergone. Now, we do not wish to disparage 
| travelling, which is sometimes very high, real 
| enjoyment. When it is so, it is worth more than all the 
| money and effort it costs; but sometimes it is only a pursuit after 
| home letters from one end of Europe to another, 
| in which a man might at any moment test the amount 
| of his gains by stopping the whirl of machinery he has 
| set to work and standing still ~~ forming no plans, but 
| resting where he finds himself; when he is very likely 
| to realise that he is not at all amused, and in fact longing to be 
| back at his more congenial work at home. It 
| is true that leisure has an intense aversion to plans, 
| holding that going to pleasure is nothing like having 
| pleasure come to us. To persons of this temper, the 
| questions, <p> "What are you going to do with yourself ? ~~ 
| What are your plans for the day ?" </p> fall like a blow. 
| Perhaps this is partly the reason why plans for the enjoyment 
| of leisure are never formed. Persons who care 
| for it could not take these means to acquire it. So, then, 
| things must remain as they are, and people must go 
| through any amount of weariness and expense to procure
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| excitement, while they are fully aware that the most agreeable 
| hours of their lives ~~ those most pleasant at the time, and 
| leaving most unalloyed memories ~~ belong to some happy 
| period of leisure, especially companionship in leisure, which 
| came then with so little trouble that we wonder why it does 
| not come oftener. But perhaps quiet pleasures are least to be 
| reckoned on; for, after all, they need a mind at ease and in 
| accord with its surroundings. Trouble and care may be 
| forgotten, driven out by other minor worries and anxieties, but 
| an oasis in our own desert may be harder to find. Yet, if it 
| could be managed ~~ if for some short space we could withdraw 
| from our work, not necessarily in body, but in spirit, with some 
| few congenial companions ~~ if we could make sure of a few 
| sunny days of real peace and quiet thought and talk ~~ if this 
| could now and then be tried, we are sure some happy 
| experiments might be wrought out, sending men back to their 
| work with mind and body more refreshed and purses not so 
| emptied as by the more elaborate and conventional arrangement 
| which is the acknowledged type of holiday in our day.