The Art of Loafing

I

‘SITTING for hours in the shade of an apple tree, near the garden hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those honey merchants — sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the late sun to their night-long labors — I have sought instruction from the bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old industrious lesson.

‘And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, overtoiled, utilitarian insects was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last — might I not finally teach them — a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the shining hour?’

This modest and pertinent query, breathed with and into inimical air some ten or a dozen years ago by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, must have brought comfort and encouragement to more than one confessed, confirmed, and conscientious idler like myself. How rarely in these days do we receive the heartening news that there are others of our kind left in a workaday world! Nearly half a century has passed since Stevenson wrote his eloquent brief for our once numerous tribe, and the fact that he considered it. necessary to call it an ‘Apology’ shows which way the wind was blowing even then. Since his day, defenders and apologists alike have grown fewer and fewer in numbers, less and less ample in utterance, more and more despondent in tone. Silence and darkness deepen over us as decade follows decade. Even the poets have lost heart. They sit, like birds under icy hedgerows, numbed and brooding, scarcely daring to twitter lest they betray their presence; and when one of them — more courageous, or, perhaps, merely a little less miserable than the rest — breaks into song, it is usually a mere fragment, like Ralph Hodgson’s

so brief, so furtive, that it is lost at once in the frozen air.

Let the melancholy truth be admitted: idlers and so-called ne’er-dowells have never done less well than during the three fortunately elapsed decades of the present century, and if Henry Ford is right there is little promise of a dawn in the decade at hand. His day, he believes, is to grow only the more dazzlingly bright and our night the more hopelessly black. ‘There is no place in civilization for the idler,’ he says. ‘None of us has any right to case.’ It is presumption, I suppose, for a mere loafer to take issue with one whose lightest word, if there is any such, becomes the inspired gospel of millions; nevertheless, I cannot but dissent. In my opinion he has, unwittingly, made the harshest possible arraignment of the kind of civilization he believes in. I agree, however, with the latter statement. Men have no more right to ease than they have to lives of laborious activity. It is not a question of right, but of privilege.

The surprising thing, to me, is that so few men seem to covet this high privilege any more. Formerly, most men’s desire was so to order their lives that they might join the ranks of the non-spinners and non-toilers as early as possible, before they were too old to enjoy the benefits of so fortunate a state of being. Even as recently as the turn of the century a not inconsiderable number worked to, and largely for, this end. Now all of them toil and vertiginously spin, with or without cause or need, until they are on the brink of the grave.

As for the women, what are they not doing, in these days, to avoid the stigma which attaches to the idler! They were once the ornaments of leisured life, and I use the word in the high sense. They did little or nothing — as nothing is now measured — superlatively well; they knew the fine uses to which leisure may be put. They have since lost their enviable gift so completely that it is hard to believe that they ever possessed it. So far have they strayed from their old gracious manner of life that they now consider mere busyness the queen of virtues, and so they waste their days, and their lives, in numberless occupations most of which have little or no excuse for being, even in the utilitarian sense.

All of which seems to me unfortunate, to say the least. There is so much idling needing to be done in the United States that our case is all but desperate. If I were President I would concern myself very little with the nation’s industry, except to point out the disastrous effects in our time of its monstrous expansion. I would call attention to the deplorable waste of our resources of leisure. At the rate and in the manner in which they are being exhausted, for lack of intelligent direction, another generation will see us bankrupt; for leisure, flagrantly and continually misused, turns into something else, — hopeless boredom, for one thing, — and whatever reserves of it may yet be made available, by means of shorter working days in shorter working weeks, will be of less value to us than the sands of the desert or the thorns on all the prickly pears in Australia; for the raw material of leisure is nothing unless we protect and encourage and profit by the example of our enlightened idlers who know how to convert it to use.

There is no doubt in my mind that a nation in which loafing has ceased to be a virtue has taken a wrong turning somewhere. I wish that we might send an emissary back to learn where the error in direction was made; but the danger there would be that our emissary, having escaped out of the present and having discovered the road not taken, would forget, in his joy, ever to return to enlighten us. In the mind’s eye I see him plainly, entering that lonely, peaceful, bird-frequented highway, loitering through what delightful landscapes, stopping now and then to view what glamorous vistas lie ahead! Ahead of him; but, alas, behind or at least away from us, and never to gladden our eyes, for we might not return even if we would. Our road leads straight on, like a cement pavement — in fact, it is a cement pavement for turning wheels over, and we must get what pleasure we can from the hardness and dangerous smoothness of the pavement itself, and from the speed with which it allows our wheels to turn.

But I see no reason why they should always be turning. Perpetual motion is not exacted even of us, and we may loaf at times if we will. ‘Loafe and invite your soul’ is a good old saying, containing wisdom distilled from the experience of innumerable generations of mankind. Men’s souls, particularly in these latter days, need a deal of inviting. They refuse to be supplicated or commanded; they will not stand and deliver during the lunch hour or between committee meetings. On the contrary, they choose their own time and method of accepting even the most suitable of invitations. Few men seem to realize this; many, indeed, doubt that they have souls. In my opinion the reason for their skepticism is that they have never given themselves time or suitable opportunities to discover whether they have them or not. But it is true that, as a result of the times in which we live, in many cases what once were souls have become so parched and shriveled, so wizened and anæmic, through lack of any vital nourishment, that it is a pity they can’t be extracted, once and for all, like diseased tonsils or an ailing appendix.

Say what you will in disparagement of idlers, they are, or were until recently, in excellent spiritual health. It was axiomatic with them that a healthy soul is a perpetually hungry one, needing great store of life-giving food, and so, as the first necessity of a happy life, they arranged that they should have ample opportunity for providing such food. Thus it was with Henry Thoreau, that Prince of Loafers: was he not justified in ordering his life as he did? He was blessed with a radiantly healthy soul, and knowing this, — or, rather, feeling it from the very core of his being, — he took the surest means of keeping it in health. It is true that the Henry Fords and the Thomas Edisons of his day had no time for him, just as they would have even less time for him now; but let any impartial man open Walden or a volume of his Journals at random and, after reading for an hour or two, decide whether the fruits of his idleness were not at least as valuable to mankind as the fruits of their industry.

II

Never before, in the history of the world, I imagine, has there been a time more favorable than the present, so far as opportunity is concerned, for the advancement of the fine art of idling. The amount per capita of available leisure has increased enormously during the past twenty-five years. How, then, are we to account for the rapidly thinning ranks of idlers, and for the hostile attitude of the public at large toward those who still exist?

The answer to the first part of the question is obvious. As I have said, leisure itself is nothing like so essential as the leisurely type of mind; and machines, and those who aid and abet them, have hurried and harried us out of that. We flatter ourselves that we are much better off than our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who, in pursuit of their crafts and trades, worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day; but we forget that what they considered work we should now consider indolence of the most shameful kind. They had no efficiency experts and ‘engineers’ to watch their every movement lest an ounce of energy or a moment of time should be spent unproductively. With them, social life went hand in hand with industrial and pastoral life. Gossip, stimulating discussion, daydreaming, musing, and fruitful thought were integral parts of the day’s business, and mingled with it as easily and naturally as oxygen with hydrogen. In fact, many of the world’s most illustrious idlers toiled, ostensibly, from dawn till dark. Think of Robert Burns and his contemporaries, of Charles Lamb and his; and how many others one might mention, the fruits of whose laborious days shame those of our abundant leisure. Would that we might return to the fructifying idleness of the sixteen-hour day, and the conditions of life that made it so!

But we are linked, or, rather, riveted and welded to our fate, and if we are to live in comfort, to say nothing of happiness, we must develop a technique of loafing that at least approaches theirs. One fact must be accepted: idleness and industry can never again mingle as they once did. Those who serve machines, either directly or indirectly, must give them undivided and unremitting attention during the six or eight hours of daily slavery exacted. But this lesson — heaven knows! — has already been adequately learned. What has yet to be learned is how to return to life on human terms after the day’s servitude is over.

And this, I think, accounts in part for the generally unfriendly attitude toward confirmed idlers, who, in their efforts to avoid accepting on any terms the conditions of labor demanded by the machines, loaf more than they should, perhaps, or is good for them, and their example offends those more resigned t o such conditions. But at least they have not forgotten how to loaf, and it is unfortunate, it seems to me, that their justifiable resentment against motor cars, radios, motion-picture theatres, miniature golf courses, and other destroyers of leisure is not more widely spread. To be sure, the use of such things has a certain lethal value for those so wretched that they can no longer enjoy conscious life and thought in our industrialized world, but not many of us, surely, are as badly off as that. Self-respect, to say the least, demands that we should refuse to accept these spurious substitutes for idling at the hands of those who now foist them upon us. Worms that we are, or seem to be, I cannot believe that we are as wormlike at heart as they. The trouble with us has been our tolerance, our good nature, a heritage from happier times; and our quite natural bewilderment in the midst of such rapidly changing conditions has given the real worms, who have welcomed and glory in these changes, an advantage over us. As might have been expected, they have so abused their advantage that I firmly believe they will eventually defeat their own end, which is to make all of us as abject worms as they themselves.

If idling is ever to regain its rightful position as one of the arts, — or, better, as the fostering mother of all the arts, — there must be a change of attitude toward its professors and practitioners. Active encouragement they do not need, but toleration is as necessary to them as to other men. ‘Who are these professors?’ you ask. ‘Name some of them.’ There you have me! I feared that question and am not prepared to answer it. So far has the decay of loafing gone in the United States that I cannot think of a single eminent loafer of American birth since Walt Whitman’s time. Lafcadio Hearn was one, but he was born in the Ionian Isles, of Greek and Irish parentage. Although he made heroic efforts to loaf, in New York, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and elsewhere, so great were the odds against him that he at last fled to the island of Martinique, and later to Japan, arriving at this latter country too late, unfortunately, to loaf to full advantage; for there, too, idleness, practised for so many centuries with such beneficial results, was fast falling into disrepute, owing to the influence of Western ideas.

Harvard University had an idler of genius in Professor Santayana, a man splendidly qualified to teach, by both precept and example, the highest branches of the art; but lack of willing students, and of those congenial influences which are the breath of life to a man of his kind, forced him to retire. The College of Business Administration which has risen in the great void — the place, not the room — made by his withdrawal offers sufficient proof that he was not mistaken in his view of the hopelessness of the situation.

There are, perhaps, eminent idlers still living in America whose lights burn clear, steady, and cheering to those who share their retirement. But wide are the gaps between light and light! Small wonder that those who grope through the murk without finding them doubt at times that any lights are there.

What I mean by an idler of the higher categories is, I hope, clear by now. As Francis Thompson said, —

Perhaps he gained his knowledge of stones intuitively, or he may have taken it from the Japanese, who have always been stone worshipers, not alone because of their sense of the beauty of stones as objects, but also, I believe, because of their realization of the tremendous energy latent or simmering within the stones. Poets, the most distinguished of idlers, are such outwardly harmless containers of power, which makes them truly dangerous — not of themselves, but because of the uses to which may be, and is, put the enormous energy of thought they throw off.

The Greeks, who, as idlers, were one hundred per cent literate, so to speak, fully realized the danger of being so; therefore it was a point of honor with them, as well as a matter of self-preservation, to keep all of their potentially harmful ideas in their rightful places, merely as objects of beauty or of curious interest. Our Western world owes Francis Bacon an incalculable debt of obloquy for being the first great teacher of the fatal doctrine that all ideas may be put to practical use. In a by no means fanciful manner of speaking, he is the father of most of our present ills. It was during his century that the road we should now be following was missed, and it was largely through his agency that our forefathers were lured away from it. What an imposing ruin he made of his life! Never has a more kingly idler been self-destroyed. His essay, ‘Of Gardens,’ shows him at a moment when he was following the true bent of his genius.

III

The mention of gardens leads me to sound a more cheerful note. The fact that both private and public pleasure gardens are becoming more numerous and more beautiful every year shows, I think, a growing disposition to loaf that may eventually become something more than a disposition. During a recent journey from San Francisco to New York, and back again by a different route, I was surprised and greatly encouraged at the number of private gardens that may be viewed even from car windows; there are many more of them than there used to be, and they are often found in the most unlikely and needful places. This is particularly true of those lying in the vicinity of great cities. The greed of real-estate owners and promoters has made it almost impossible for men of small means to have gardens of any sort, but there is a limit, apparently, beyond which even the greed of real-estate owners may not go, and so, sometimes, there are postage stamps and pocket handkerchiefs of land that householders may call their own. How much they have learned to make of little! With what loving and patient care they lay out their tiny gardens, taking advantage of the most meagre resources of light and air! No shred or patch of sunlight is wasted. They have lawns the size of hearthrugs, and beds of flowers the brownies might have planted, with graveled paths a handsbreadth wide between them. In rare instances where there is room for a tree, the tree is there; sometimes all other pleasures are sacrificed to that of having its moving leaf-shadows for a carpet, over an earthen or sanded floor. Thousands of these gardens are passed during the course of a journey across the continent where, ten years ago, they were hard indeed to find. Not a few of them are enclosed with vine-covered walls or trellises, and in these, one may be sure, the art of idling is sometimes modestly, if furtively, studied.

As for our public pleasure gardens, many of them are now of princely amplitude, offering the most congenial inducements to idlers, the most varied refreshment in the way of shaded lawns and arbors, walks, lakes, and fishponds; but something is wrong here, for, as you stroll through these green and restful retreats, you will see only men reading newspapers, than which nothing could be more hostile to the cultivation of the proper disposition for idling. Unfriendly spirits are abroad in these gardens, the chief of them, I believe, being the spirit of carbonmonoxide gas, a deadly poison to the pollinating germs of idleness that formerly floated at will even through the air of cities. Were this evil spirit to be exorcised by that powerful magician, Public Opinion, I predict that idlers would soon be as customary a sight in our public parks as rooks in a rookery. The advantages that would spring from so fortunate a circumstance are too numerous for mention.

One other evil spirit should also be exorcised, not from parks alone but from life in general, if idling is ever again to flourish. It too is a gaseous spirit, and vocal, issuing from the radio.

Some months ago I had a harrowing experience with such a spirit. It was in Rochester, Minnesota, a pretty town, though filled to overflowing with ailing mankind drawn there from all parts of the Western Hemisphere by the deserved fame of the Mayo Clinic. I was not ailing, but I began, first, to wish that I were, and then to fear that I was, for all the talk was of disease: its innumerable symptoms and peculiarities, the stages of its progress, and the methods of campaign used against it. Everywhere — in hotels and restaurants, in the shops and the streets, in season and out of season, in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, the one topic of conversation was disease. At first I was interested, then bored, then desolated. I tried to escape by taking country walks, but all the roads were filled by the departing cured, joyously hastening homeward at fifty miles an hour, and the approaching sick, anxiously hastening in, at sixty; and roads, of course, in whatever part of the country, are no longer for the delight of leisurely pedestrians. So I was confined to the town and took refuge in the park; and a refuge, I thought gleefully, it was to prove, for it was then late October, the temperature near freezing, and all of the invalids and convalescents were keeping well within doors.

There was no one in the park except some children covering each other with autumn leaves, and their laughter was as bracing and health-giving as the wan sunshine and the biting air. I sat down on a bench near an open pavilion, used, evidently, for summer concerts, and had just settled myself for a morning of luxurious loafing when a radio, hidden somewhere on the platform of the pavilion, shattered the autumnal silence beyond all hope of repair. This truly infernal machine was provided with an amplifier that was something more than ample. I fled to the farthest recesses of the park, but the unctuous voice of the announcer — the unction magnified one thousand diameters — pursued me wherever I went. During the week that followed, I returned to the park at various hours of the day, early in the morning, even late at night, and, while there were brief periods of respite, no pleasure was to be had from them because of the realization that a demon with an inhumanly human voice was crouched close by, ready to spring, and that soon he would spring. And this demon, I mused bitterly, has somewhere a local and sumptuous habitation and a name; and when, if ever, he retires to rest, no doubt he does so with an easy conscience, a sense of virtue as unctuous as his voice. But he had eaten fern seed at Rochester. One could not get at him to endow him with eternal peace.

Much remains to be said on the subject of idling; in fact, I have scarcely scratched the surface of it; but perhaps a self-confessed loafer may gain more credit for his calling by practising it than by preaching it.

But was my Rochester experience typical, I wonder? Are radios now common nuisances in public parks? If so, is there no other voice of protest to be joined to my feeble cry? Breathing this question into the air in reproachful but gentle, unamplified accents, I descend from the rostrum.

One last pregnant remark while descending. I believe that, had more men occupying strategic positions in American life — financiers, promoters, captains of industry, and the like — been idle by choice during the past thirty years, there would now be vastly fewer of those, in humbler stations, idle of necessity.