Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties, and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.”

Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything; results produced at once; something to show, and something that may tell. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’ statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told, once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can. It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than wave succeeds wave.” A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage.

La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day, that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and converse and reading. Rather is this a species of work—at any rate a means for working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise passiveness.

Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained—not indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat; or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes on their feet, and their staff in their hand—eaten in haste, as was the Jewish passover.

The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be “not charmed” with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. “To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages.” He echoes Wordsworth’s lament that

and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes, and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life. It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his preference for “coaching it,” and could have been well content to live upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible to the pleasure of driving fast—stirring the blood as it does, and giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a little too hasty and business-like, “as though we were to be eternally getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money—the means instead of the end.” A distinction is duly recognised between haste and hurry—hurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on “what a horrible thing” it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson made a name (“letters four do make that name”) by his “Recreations.” And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of “Leisure Hours.” In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows his utter contempt for the idler—the loafer, as Yankees term him—who never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded, is the intermission of labour—the blink of idleness in the life of a hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. “But to him it is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical and mental, will not stand it.” Only in leisure, it is further contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever.

It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness and of wide application,

Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours, with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent half-hour.

Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the “dignity of repose.” “We seem,” he said, “to live in the midst of a battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main.” The following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the style of the same author—the author of the “Psalm of Life”—that few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not known to be from one of the “Palm Leaves” of Lord Houghton, who, a quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:

It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period is—sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted, on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new ones—of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. “Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.” Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.

To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which they make in “plain living”—how they practically shorten the days of a man?

The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure—the cultivation of which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us—says of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time for a calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it is “apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery, and can be justified only by necessity.” The very repose of leisure is accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment—it being one of the most communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is produced by a good night’s rest. And this writer contends that to afford such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures, indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon

Nay something better and more abiding than that.

But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on “Short Cuts,” that if a thing is to be done at all, “then ’twere well it were done quickly,” admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor’s dramatic poem declares in the storm and stress of his career,

“The worse for us!” is his good counsellor’s rejoinder: