On Leisure

Agreat part of the modern muddle arises from confusion and contradiction about the word "leisure." To begin with, of course, it should never be confused for a moment with the word "liberty." An artist has liberty, if he is free to create any image in any material that he chooses. But anyone who will try to create anything out of anything will soon discover that it is not a leisurely occupation. On the other hand, a slave may have many hours of leisure, if the overseer has gone to sleep, or if there is no work for him to do at the moment, but he must be ready to do the work at any moment. The point is not so much that the master owns his toil as that he owns his time. But there are other difficulties and double meanings about the term, as it is used in a society like ours at present. If a man is practically compelled, by a sort of social pressure, to ride in the park in the morning or play golf in the afternoon or go out to grand dinners in the evening or finish up at night clubs at night, we describe all those hours of his day as hours of leisure. But they are not hours of leisure at all, in the other sense ^ as, for instance, on the fanciful supposition that he would like a little time to himself, that he would like to pursue a quite solitary and even un-

I2S sociable hobby, that he would like really to idle, or, on a more remote hypothesis, that he would like really to think. Now when modern social philosophers are generalizing about labour and leisure and the greater or less degree of liberty for men and women in the modern world, they necessarily lump all these different meanings of leisure together and bring out a result that is not really representative. The weakness of all statistics is that, even when the numbers are generally right, the names are generally wrong. I mean that if somebody says there are so many Christians in Margate or in Mesopotamia, it is obvious that they are assuming that everybody is agreed on what is meant by a Christian. And we have sometimes seen even Christians who appeared to differ on the point. If somebody says that there is a certain percentage of educated people in Heliopolis, Neb., he will very likely say it as firmly as he would say that there are so many negroes in that Nebraskan seat of culture. Whereas it is rather as if he were saying that there were so many opinionated people, which is a matter of opinion. Even the negro question, now I come to think of it, is considerably less concrete than such severe statisticians make it. There are probably almost as many shades of brown as there are shades of education. Before I went to America, I always thought the expression "coloured people" was as fantastic as a fairy-tale 5 it sounded as if some of the people were peacock green and others a rich mauve or magenta. I supposed that it was either a sort of joke, or else a sort of semi-ironical euphemism or parody of politeness. But when I went there, I found that it was simply a dull description of fact. These people really are all colours; at least they are all shades of one col-our. There must be many more coloured people than there are black people. I will not insist on the delicate parallel between colour and culture. I will not inquire whether a completely educated person is a more or less rare and refreshing sight than a completely coal-black negro. I merely point out that when people talk about "educational statistics" and make tables of the condition of culture in Nebraska or anywhere else, there is really nothing in their statements that is exact except the numbers j and the numbers must be inexact when there is nothing to apply them to. The statistician is trying to make a rigid and unchangeable chain out of elastic links.

All this is obvious enough \ but it has been less generally noticed that the same applies to the legal and economic statements made nowadays about work and recreation and the rest. In their nature they deal exclusively with the quantity and not at all with the quality. Least of all has anybody dealt adequately with the effect of a social system on the quality of leisure. When we say lightly about a man in some employment or other, "What holidays does he get?" we only mean it in the sense of "How many holidays does he get?" or "How long are his holidays?" We do not put the question to ourselves in the form, "What sort of holidays does the general system of society allow him to get?" I am not arguing at the moment that anybody is indifferent to the welfare of any other person in particular j or that any other persons, past or present, had better holidays or ideal holidays 5 all that is connected with very much wider controversies. I am only pointing out that the structure of society does determine the nature of a man's leisure, almost as much as the nature of his labour. And I am pointing out that of all such statistical tables the most misleading may be a time-table.

It is obvious enough that there are men in the world who seem to labour in a very leisurely way. It is still more obvious that there are men who seem to enjoy their leisure in a very laborious way. And of course it is a very difficult question of psychology to consider which of them gets the most out of life, or whether either of them gets as much as there is to be got. But when people come to making magnificent and sweeping generalizations about history and progress, when they tell us emphatically that science declares this and that about the relative wisdom or welfare of different societies, it is obvious that these sociological dogmas are very lax and inconclusive indeed. We have no exact way of testing the proportion of people in any society who really enjoy its social institutions more than they would enjoy other social institutions, especially if they had been trained with a diflferent social sense. Nobody knows, for instance, whether the noise of modern London is not actually a friction to the nerves, which diminishes pleasure even while it drives people on to more pleasure. It is no answer to say that the people are driven to become yet noisier in order to forget the noise. It is no answer to the question of whether, as a fact, people would be happier if they had less friction, even if they seemed to have less fun. There is no way of measuring happiness in that scientific sense j and the scientists who try to do it do not prove anything, except that they have never had any. Nobody can prove positively, for instance, whether the strategical excitement of organized games is great enough to outweigh the loss of personal self-determination and adventure. A man can only say which of the two he likes best himself j and I have no difficulty at all in saying that. But in modern schools, for instance, what is called playtime has become a sort of extended work-time, though both have probably been turned into rather more pleasant work. But none of it is so pleasant as playing alone to the sort of child who likes playing alone. Some of it is acutely and painfully unpleasant to that sort of child. It is obvious that sumptuous preparations for playing the latest professional form of American base-ball are no consolation to one who has a solitary genius for playing the fiddle or playing the fool. It may even be questioned whether playing tennis is always a substitute for playing truant. Since education permitted more play, it has perhaps permitted less leisure, and certainly less liberty.

I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing. Of the first we have undoubtedly a vast and very probably a most profitable increase in recent social arrangements. Undoubtedly there is much more elaborate equipment and opportunity for golfers to play golf, for bridge-players to play bridge, for jazzers to jazz or for motorists to motor. But those who find themselves in the world where these recreations are provided will find that the modern world is not really a universal provider. He will find it made more and more easy to get some things and impossible to get others. The second sort of leisure is certainly not increased, and is on the whole lessened. The sense of having a certain material in hand, which a man may mould into any form he chooses, this is a sort of pleasure now almost confined to artists. Private property ought to mean that a man feels about bricks and mortar as an artist feels about clay and marble. It ought to mean that gardening, whether or no it can be landscape-gardening, is as personal as landscape-painting. But this special sentiment can hardly flourish among those who live in public gardens or large hotels. And as for the third form of leisure, the most precious, the most consoling, the most pure and holy, the noble habit of doing nothing at all — that is being neglected in a degree which seems to me to threaten the degeneration of the whole race. It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverendy worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.