AMUSEMENTS.

One of the most unexpected discoveries that we make on entering the reflective stage of existence is that amusements are social obligations.

The next discovery of this kind is that the higher the rank of the person the more obligatory and the more numerous do his so-called “amusements” become, till finally we reach the princely life which seems to consist almost exclusively of these observances.

Why should it ever be considered obligatory upon a man to amuse himself in some way settled by others? There appear to be two principal reasons for this. The first is, that when amusements are practised by many persons in common it appears unsociable and ungracious to abstain. Even if the amusement is not interesting in itself it is thought that the society it leads us into ought to be a sufficient reason for following it.

The second reason is that, like all things which are repeated by many people together, amusements soon become fixed customs, and have all the weight and authority of customs, so that people dare not abstain from observing them for fear of social penalties.

If the amusements are expensive they become not only a sign of wealth but an actual demonstration and display of it, and as nothing in the world is so much respected as wealth, or so efficient a help to social position, and as the expenditure which is visible produces far more effect upon the mind than that which is not seen, it follows that all costly amusements are useful for self-assertion in the world, and become even a means of maintaining the political importance of great families.

On the other hand, not to be accustomed to expensive amusements implies that one has lived amongst people of narrow means, so that most of those who have social ambition are eager to seize upon every opportunity for enlarging their experience of expensive amusements in order that they may talk about them afterwards, and so affirm their position as members of the upper class.

The dread of appearing unsociable, of seeming rebellious against custom, or inexperienced in the habits of the rich, are reasons quite strong enough for the maintenance of customary amusements even when there is very little real enjoyment of them for their own sake.

But, in fact, there are always some people who practise these amusements for the sake of the pleasure they give, and as these people are likely to excel the others in vivacity, activity, and skill, as they have more entrain and gayety, and talk more willingly and heartily about the sports they love, so they naturally come to lead opinion upon the subject and to give it an appearance of earnestness and warmth that is beyond its real condition. Hence the tone of conversation about amusements, though it may accurately represent the sentiments of those who enjoy them, does not represent all opinion fairly. The opposite side of the question found a witty exponent in Sir George Cornewall Lewis, when he uttered that immortal saying by which his name will endure when the recollection of his political services has passed away,—“How tolerable life would be were it not for its pleasures!” There you have the feeling of the thousands who submit and conform, but who would have much to say if it were in good taste to say anything against pleasures that are offered to us in hospitality.

Amusements themselves become work when undertaken for an ulterior purpose such as the maintenance of political influence. A great man goes through a certain regular series of dinners, balls, games, shooting and hunting parties, races, wedding-breakfasts, visits to great houses, excursions on land and water, and all these things have the outward appearance of amusement, but may, in reality, be labors that the great man undertakes for some purpose entirely outside of the frivolous things themselves. A Prime Minister scarcely goes beyond political dinners, but what an endless series of engagements are undertaken by a Prince of Wales! Such things are an obligation for him, and when the obligation is accepted with unfailing patience and good temper, the Prince is not only working, but working with a certain elegance and grace of art, often involving that prettiest kind of self-sacrifice which hides itself under an appearance of enjoyment. Nobody supposes that the social amusements so regularly gone through by the eldest son of Queen Victoria can be, in all cases, very entertaining to him; we suppose them to be accepted as forms of human intercourse that bring him into personal relations with his future subjects. The difference between this Prince and King Louis II. of Bavaria is perhaps the most striking contrast in modern royal existences. Prince Albert Edward is accessible to everybody, and shares the common pleasures of his countrymen; the Bavarian sovereign is never so happy as when in one of his romantic and magnificent residences, surrounded by the sublimity of nature and the embellishments of art, he sits alone and dreams as he listens to the strains of exquisite music. Has he not erected his splendid castle on a rock, like the builder of “The Palace of Art”?

“A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish’d brass
I chose. The ranged ramparts bright
From level meadow-bases of deep grass
Suddenly scaled the light.
“Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf
The rock rose clear, or winding stair.
My soul would live alone unto herself
In her high palace there.”

The life of the King of Bavaria, sublimely serene in its independence, is a long series of tranquil omissions. There may be a wedding-feast in one of his palaces, but such an occurrence only seems to him the best of all reasons why he should be in another. He escapes from the pleasures and interests of daily life, making himself an earthly paradise of architecture, music, and gardens, and lost in his long dream, assuredly one of the most poetical figures in the biographies of kings, and one of the most interesting, but how remote from men! This remoteness is due, in great part, to a sincerity of disposition which declines amusements that do not amuse, and desires only those real pleasures which are in perfect harmony with one’s own nature and constitution. We like the sociability, the ready human sympathy, of the Prince of Wales; we think that in his position it is well for him to be able to keep all that endless series of engagements, but has not King Louis some claim upon our indulgence even in his eccentricity? He has refused the weary round of false amusements and made his choice of ideal pleasure. If he condescended to excuse himself, his Apologia pro vit sua might take a form somewhat resembling this. He might say, “I was born to a great fortune and only ask leave to enjoy it in my own way. The world’s amusements are an infliction that I consider myself at liberty to avoid. I love musical or silent solitude, and the enchantments of a fair garden and a lofty dwelling amidst the glorious Bavarian mountains. Let the noisy world go its way with its bitter wranglings, its dishonest politics, its sanguinary wars! I set up no tyranny. I leave my subjects to enjoy their brief human existence in their own fashion, and they let me dream my dream.”

These are not the world’s ways nor the world’s view. The world considers it essential to the character of a prince that he should be at least apparently happy in those pleasures which are enjoyed in society, that he should seem to enjoy them along with others to show his fellow-feeling with common men, and not sit by himself, like King Louis in his theatre, when “Tannhauser” is performed for the royal ears alone.

Of the many precious immunities that belong to humble station there are none more valuable than the freedom from false amusements. A poor man is under one obligation, he must work, but his work itself is a blessed deliverance from a thousand other obligations. He is not obliged to shoot, and hunt, and dance against his will, he is not obliged to affect interest and pleasure in games that only weary him, he has not to receive tiresome strangers in long ceremonious repasts when he would rather have a simple short dinner with his wife. BÉranger sang the happiness of beggars with his sympathetic humorous philosophy, but in all seriousness it might be maintained that the poor are happier than they know. They get their easy unrestrained human intercourse by chance meetings, and greetings, and gossipings, and they are spared all the acting, all the feigning, that is connected with the routine of imposed enjoyments.

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure. You dislike accounts and you dislike balls, but though your dislike may be nearly equal in both cases you will assuredly find that the time hangs less heavily when you are resolutely grappling with the details of your account-books than when you are only wishing that the dancers would go to bed. The reason is that any hard work, whatever it is, has the qualities of a mental tonic, whereas unenjoyed pleasures have an opposite effect, and even though work may be uncongenial you see a sort of result, whilst a false pleasure leaves no result but the extreme fatigue that attends it,—a kind of fatigue quite exceptional in its nature, and the most disagreeable that is known to man.

The dislike for false amusements is often misunderstood to be a puritanical intolerance of all amusement. It is in this as in all things that are passionately enjoyed,—the false thing is most disliked by those who best appreciate the true.

What may be called the truth or falsehood of amusements is not in the amusements themselves, but in the relation between one human idiosyncrasy and them. Every idiosyncrasy has its own strong mysterious affinities, generally distinguishable in childhood, always clearly distinguishable in youth. We are like a lute or a violin, the tuned strings vibrate in answer to certain notes but not in answer to others.

To convert amusements into social customs or obligations, to make it a man’s duty to shoot birds or ride after foxes because it is agreeable to others to discharge guns and gallop across fields, is an infringement of individual liberty which is less excusable in the case of amusements than it is in more serious things. For in serious things, in politics and religion, there is always the plausible argument that the repression of the individual conscience is good for the unity of the State; whereas amusements are supposed to exist for the recreation of those who practise them, and when they are not enjoyed they are not amusements but something else. There is no single English word that exactly expresses what they are, but there is a French one, the word corvÉe, which means forced labor, labor under dictation, all the more unpleasant in these cases that it must assume the appearance of enjoyment.[34]

Surely there is nothing in which the independence of the individual ought to be so absolute, so unquestioned, as in amusements. What right have I, because a thing is a pleasant pastime to me, to compel my friend or my son to do that thing when it is a corvÉe to him? No man can possibly amuse himself in obedience to a word of command, the most he can do is to submit, to try to appear amused, wishing all the time that the weary task was over.

To mark the contrast clearly I will describe some amusements from the opposite points of view of those who enjoy them naturally, and those to whom they would be indifferent if they were not imposed, and hateful if they were.

Shooting is delightful to genuine sportsmen in many ways. It renews in them the sensations of the vigorous youth of humanity, of the tribes that lived by the chase. It brings them into contact with nature, gives a zest and interest to hard pedestrian exercise, makes the sportsmen minutely acquainted with the country, and leads to innumerable observations of the habits of wild animals that have the interest without the formal pretensions of a science. Shooting is a delightful exercise of skill, requiring admirable promptitude and perfect nerve, so that any success in it is gratifying to self-esteem. Sir Samuel Baker is always proud of being such a good marksman, and frankly shows his satisfaction. “I had fired three beautifully correct shots with No. 10 bullets, and seven drachms of powder in each charge; these were so nearly together that they occupied a space in her forehead of about three inches.” He does not aim at an animal in a general way, but always at a particular and penetrable spot, recording each hit, and the special bullet used. Of course he loves his guns. These modern instruments are delightful toys on account of the highly developed art employed in their construction, so that they would be charming things to possess, and handle, and admire, even if they were never used, whilst the use of them gives a terrible power to man. See a good marksman when he takes a favorite weapon in his hand! More redoubtable than Roland with the sword Durindal, he is comparable rather to Apollo with the silver bow, or even to Olympian Zeus himself grasping his thunders. Listen to him when he speaks of his weapon! If he thinks you have the free-masonry of the chase, and can understand him, he talks like a poet and lover. Baker never fails to tell us what weapon he used on each occasion, and how beautifully it performed, and due honor and advertisement are kindly given to the maker, out of gratitude.

“I accordingly took my trusty little Fletcher double rifle No. 24, and running knee-deep into the water to obtain a close shot I fired exactly between the eyes near the crown of the head. At the reports of the little Fletcher the hippo disappeared.”

Then he adds an affectionate foot-note about the gun, praising it for going with him for five years, as if it had had a choice about the matter, and could have offered its services to another master. He believes it to be alive, like a dog.

“This excellent and handy rifle was made by Thomas Fletcher, of Gloucester, and accompanied me like a faithful dog throughout my journey of nearly five years to the Albert Nyanza, and returned with me to England as good as new.”

In the list of Baker’s rifles appears his bow of Ulysses, his Child of a Cannon, familiarly called the Baby, throwing a half-pound explosive shell, a lovely little pet of a weapon with a recoil that broke an Arab’s collar-bone, and was not without some slight effect even upon that mighty hunter, its master.

“Bang went the Baby; round I spun like a weather-cock with the blood flowing from my nose, as the recoil had driven the top of the hammer deep into the bridge. My Baby not only screamed but kicked viciously. However I knew the elephant would be bagged, as the half-pound shell had been aimed directly behind the shoulder.”

We have the most minute descriptions of the effects of these projectiles in the head of a hippopotamus and the body of an elephant. “I was quite satisfied with my explosive shells,” says the enthusiastic sportsman, and the great beasts appear to have been satisfied too.

Now let me attempt to describe the feelings of a man not born with the natural instinct of a sportsman. We need not suppose him to be either a weakling or a coward. There are strong and brave men who can exercise their strength and prove their courage without willingly inflicting wounds or death upon any creature. To some such men a gun is simply an encumbrance, to wait for game is a wearisome trial of patience, to follow it is aimless wandering, to slaughter it is to do the work of a butcher or a poulterer, to wound it is to incur a degree of remorse that is entirely destructive of enjoyment. The fact that somewhere on mountain or in forest poor creatures are lying with festering flesh or shattered bones to die slowly in pain and hunger, and the terrible thirst of the wounded, and all for the pleasure of a gentleman,—such a fact as that, when clearly realized, is not to be got over by anything less powerful than the genuine instinct of the sportsman who is himself one of Nature’s own born destroyers, as panthers and falcons are. The feeling of one who has not the sporting instinct has been well expressed as follows by Mr. Lewis Morris, in “A Cynic’s Day-dream:”—

“Scant pleasure should I think to gain
From endless scenes of death and pain;
’Twould little profit me to slay
A thousand innocents a day;
I should not much delight to tear
With wolfish dogs the shrieking hare;
With horse and hound to track to death
A helpless wretch that gasps for breath;
To make the fair bird check its wing,
And drop, a dying, shapeless thing;
To leave the joy of all the wood
A mangled heap of fur and blood,
Or else escaping, but in vain,
To pine, a shattered wretch, in pain;
Teeming, perhaps, or doomed to see
Its young brood starve in misery.”

Hunting may be classed with shooting and passed over, as the instinct is the same for both, with this difference only that the huntsman has a natural passion for horsemanship that may be wanting to the pedestrian marksman. An amusement entirely apart from every other, and requiring a special instinct, is that of sailing.

If you have the nautical passion it was born with you, and no reasoning can get it out of you. Every sheet of navigable water draws you with a marvellous attraction, fills you with an indescribable longing. Miles away from anything that can be sailed upon, you cannot feel a breeze upon your cheek without wishing to be in a sailing-boat to catch it in a spread of canvas. A ripple on a duck-pond torments you with a teazing reminder of larger surfaces, and if you had no other field for navigation you would want to be on that duck-pond in a tub. “I would rather have a plank and a handkerchief for a sail,” said Charles Lever, “than resign myself to give up boating.” You have pleasure merely in being afloat, even without motion, and all the degrees of motion under sail have their own peculiar charm for you, from an insensible gliding through glassy waters to a fight against opposite winds and raging seas. You have a thorough, intimate, and affectionate knowledge of all the details of your ship. The constant succession of little tasks and duties is an unfailing interest, a delightful occupation. You enjoy the manual labor, and acquire some skill not only as a sailor but as ship’s carpenter and painter. You take all accidents and disappointments cheerfully, and bear even hardship with a merry heart. Nautical exercise, though on the humble scale of the modest amateur, has preserved or improved your health and activity, and brought you nearer to Nature by teaching you the habits of the winds and waters and by displaying to you an endless variety of scenes, always with some fresh interest, and often of enchanting beauty.

Now let us suppose that you are simple enough to think that what pleases you, who have the instinct, will gratify another who is destitute of it. If you have power enough to make him accompany you, he will pass through the following experiences.

Try to realize the fact that to him the sailing-boat is only a means of locomotion, and that he will refer to his watch and compare it with other means of locomotion already known to him, not having the slightest affectionate prejudice in its favor or gentle tolerance of its defects. If you could always have a steady fair wind he would enjoy the boat as much as a coach or a very slow railway train, but he will chafe at every delay. None of the details that delight you can have the slightest interest for him. The sails, and particularly the cordage, seem to him an irritating complication which, he thinks, might be simplified, and he will not give any mental effort to master them. He cares nothing about those qualities of sails and hull which have been the subject of such profound scientific investigation, such long and passionate controversy. You cannot speak of anything on board without employing technical terms which, however necessary, however unavoidable, will seem to him a foolish and useless affectation by which an amateur tries to give himself nautical airs. If you say “the mainsheet” he thinks you might have said more rationally and concisely “the cord by which you pull towards you that long pole which is under the biggest of the sails,” and if you say “the starboard quarter,” he thinks you ought to have said, in simple English, “that part of the vessel’s side that is towards the back end of it and to your right hand when you are standing with your face looking forwards.” If you happen to be becalmed he suffers from an infinite ennui. If you have to beat to windward he is indifferent to the wonderful art and vexed with you because, as his host, you have not had the politeness and the forethought to provide a favorable breeze. If you are a yachtsman of limited means and your guest has to take a small share in working the vessel, he will not perform it with any cheerful alacrity, but consider it unfit for a gentleman. If this goes on for long it is likely that there will be irritation on both sides, snappish expressions, and a quarrel. Who is in fault? Both are excusable in the false situation that has been created, but it ought not to have been created at all. You ought not to have invited a man without nautical instincts, or he ought not to have accepted the invitation. He was a charming companion on land, and that misled you both. Meet him on land again, receive him hospitably at your house. I would say “forgive him!” if there were anything to forgive, but it is not any fault of his or any merit of yours if, by the irrevocable fate of congenital idiosyncrasy, the amusement that you were destined to seek and enjoy is the corvÉe that he was destined to avoid.I find no language strong enough to condemn the selfishness of those who, in order that they may enjoy what is a pleasure to themselves, deliberately and knowingly inflict a corvÉe upon others. This objection does not apply to paid service, for that is the result of a contract. Servants constantly endure the tedium of waiting and attendance, but it is their form of work, and they have freely undertaken it. Work of that kind is not a corvÉe, it is not forced labor. Real corvÉes are inflicted by heads of families on dependent relations, or by patrons on humble friends who are under some obligation to them, and so bound to them as to be defenceless. The father or patron wants, let us say, his nightly game at whist; he must and will have it, if he cannot get it he feels that the machine of the universe is out of gear. He singles out three people who do not want to play, perhaps takes for his partner one who thoroughly dislikes the game, but who has learned something of it in obedience to his orders. They sit down to their board of green cloth. The time passes wearily for the principal victim, who is thinking of something else and makes mistakes. The patron loses his temper, speaks with increasing acerbity, and finally either flies into a passion and storms (the old-fashioned way), or else adopts, with grim self-control, a tone of insulting contempt towards his victim that is even more difficult to endure. And this is the reward for having been unselfish and obliging, these are the thanks for having sacrificed a happy evening!

If this is often done by individuals armed with some kind of power and authority, it is done still more frequently by majorities. The tyranny of majorities begins in our school-days, and the principal happiness of manhood is in some measure to escape from it. Many a man in after-life remembers with bitterness the weary hours he had to spend for the gratification of others in games that he disliked. The present writer has a vivid recollection of what, to him, was the infinite dulness of cricket. He was not by any means an inactive boy, but it so happened that cricket never had the slightest interest for him, and to this day he cannot pass a cricket-ground without a feeling of strong antipathy to its level surface of green, and of thankfulness that he is no longer compelled to go through the irksome old corvÉe of his youth. One of the many charms, to his taste, of a rocky mountain-side in the Highlands is that cricket is impossible there. At the same time he quite believes and admits everything that is so enthusiastically claimed for cricket by those who have a natural affinity for the game.

There are not only sports and pastimes, but there is the long reverberating echo of every sport in endless conversations. Here it may be remarked that the lovers of a particular amusement, when they happen to be a majority, possess a terrible power of inflicting ennui upon others, and they often exercise it without mercy. Five men are dining together, and three are fox-hunters. Evidently they ought to keep fox-hunting to themselves in consideration for the other two, but this requires an almost superhuman self-discipline and politeness, so there is a risk that the minority may have to submit in silence to an inexhaustible series of details about horses and foxes and dogs. Indeed you are never safe from this kind of conversation, even when you have numbers on your side. Sporting talk may be inflicted by a minority when that minority is incapable of any other conversation and strong in its own incapacity. Here is a case in point that was narrated to me by one of the three convives. The host was a country gentleman of great intellectual attainments, one guest was a famous Londoner, and the other was a sporting squire who had been invited as a neighbor. Fox-hunting was the only subject of talk, because the squire was garrulous and unable to converse about any other topic.

Ladies are often pitiable sufferers from this kind of conversation. Sometimes they have the instinct of masculine sport themselves, and then the subject has an interest for them; but an intelligent woman may find herself in a wearisome position when she would rather avoid the subject of slaughter, and all the men around her talk of nothing but killing and wounding.

It is natural that men should talk much about their amusements, because the mere recollection of a true amusement (that for which we have an affinity) is in itself a renewal of it in imagination, and an immense refreshment to the mind. In the midst of a gloomy English winter the yachtsman talks of summer seas, and whilst he is talking he watches, mentally, his well-set sails, and hears the wash of the Mediterranean wave.

There are three pleasures in a true amusement, first anticipation, full of hope, which is

“A feast for promised triumph yet to come,”often the best banquet of all. Then comes the actual fruition, usually dashed with disappointments that a true lover of the sport accepts in the most cheerful spirit. Lastly, we go through it all over again, either with the friends who have shared our adventures or at least with those who could have enjoyed them had they been there, and who (for vanity often claims her own delights) know enough about the matter to appreciate our own admirable skill and courage.

In concluding this Essay I desire to warn young readers against a very common mistake. It is very generally believed that literature and the fine arts can be happily practised as amusements. I believe this to be an error due to the vulgar notion that artists and literal people do not work but only display talent, as if anybody could display talent without toil. Literary and artistic pursuits are in fact studies and not amusements. Too arduous to have the refreshing quality of recreation, they put too severe a strain upon the faculties, they are too troublesome in their processes, and too unsatisfactory in their results, unless a natural gift has been developed by earnest and long-continued labor. It does indeed occasionally happen that an artist who has acquired skill by persistent study will amuse himself by exercising it in sport. A painter may make idle sketches as Byron sometimes broke out into careless rhymes, or as a scholar will playfully compose doggerel in Greek, but these gambols of accomplished men are not to be confounded with the painful efforts of amateurs who fancy that they are going to dance in the Palace of Art and shortly discover that the muse who presides there is not a smiling hostess but a severe and exigent schoolmistress. An able French painter, Louis Leloir, wrote thus to a friend about another art that he felt tempted to practise:—

“Etching tempts me much. I am making experiments and hope to show you something soon. Unhappily life is too short; we do a little of everything and then perceive that each branch of art would of itself consume the life of a man, to practise it very imperfectly after all.... We get angry with ourselves and struggle, but too late. It was at the beginning that we ought to have put on blinkers to hide from ourselves everything that is not art.”

If we mean to amuse ourselves let us avoid the painful wrestling against insuperable difficulties, and the humiliation of imperfect results. Let us shun all ostentation, either of wealth or talent, and take our pleasures happily like poor children, or like the idle angler who stands in his old clothes by the purling stream and watches the bobbing of his float, or the glancing of the fly that his guileful industry has made.