DISTRACTION AND DIVERSION.
AN English Bank-holiday generally gives the impression that the people of this country value leisure more for the purposes of distraction than for those of diversion. Cer- tainly we betray one of the weakest points in the national character when we invoke a crash of chords or discords to assure us that there is no danger of our being required to possess our souls in patience, just when there is really a bare chance of our having time to possess our souls for a few hours. Mr. Gladstone, in his interesting address on Saturday at the Agricultural Hall, said :—" There is no proper place, no divinely ordered place, upon this earth of ours, for the idle man." But he certainly did not mean to contradict Words- worth's saying :— " Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress ; That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness."
Nine out of ton of the Bank-holiday-makers would be not more but less idle if they could use the Bank-holidays of the year in learning for themselves exactly what a " wise passiveness" means. It surely does not mean giving yourself up to dis- tractions. After the age of childhood, after the age when one tastes of the various competing interests and pleasures of the world, as a bee sips at the various flowers of summer,—to see where the greatest supply of sweet and nutritive food is to be found,—there is no excuse for mere distractions. Children seem to need the mere physical exercise of their various senses, if only to convince themselves of the store of latent energy wain them; and there is, therefore, plenty of excuse for them in the delight afforded by genuine distractions. But men and women need not distractions, but diversions, when they want to renew the energies within them. As Mr. Gladstone said of his friend the great physician, who relieves the strain on his anxiety and attention by reading books on metaphysics and theology in the intervals of his study of disease and his self-questionings as to the most appropriate cure, change of attitude is one of the most effectual sources of rest. Distractions only draw the mind out of itself. Diversions do not draw it out of itself,
but help it to find and develop the true self by relaxing the tension through which it is exhausting itself, and substi- tuting interests which foster the growth of a "wise pas- siveness." Metaphysics and theology are not for every man, but these, or poetry, or meditation of any coherent kind on the mystery of life, are the best avenues to a " wise passiveness." Grown.np men and women ask to find them.
selves, and not lose themselves, in their diversions. They want to loosen the tension of the stretched bow, but not to lose their command of the purposes for which they stretched it, —rather, indeed, to improve and strengthen that command. That is the exact difference between a distraction and a diver-
sion. In a true distraction you lose yourself, you bewilder yourself, you give yourself up to a giddy whirl of sensuous experiences. In a true diversion you remind yourself of what you really are, of what you really care for outside the sphere
of your professional work, of the ideal aims you have in life, of the softer sounds to which the din of the world usually deafens you, of the brighter visions to which the lust of the eye blinds you, of the course you wish to steer, of the nature into which you desire to grow. Distractions exhaust, while true diversions nourish, the soul. Matthew Arnold says of us English men,—
"In cities should we English lie, Where cries are rising ever new And man's incessant stream goes by, —We who pursue Our business with unslackening stride, Traverse in troops with care-filled breast The soft Mediterranean side, The Nile, the East, And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by, And never once possess our soul Before we slie."
And certainly the spectacle of a Bank-holiday is a spectacle which confirms Matthew Arnold's picture of our restless life,
for it shows that an impatient restlessness is even our best-loved rest. Even when the choice of possessing our soul is offered to us, we prefer to drown it in a clash of drums or a shout of laughter. The only way in which we possess our souls is by pursuing the same unchanging occupations from day to day. And we desist from them only to give them new zest, not to give them new meaning. Now zest is merely the sense of fresh appetite with which we return to a meal after a certain interval of fasting; and, so far as we can see, it is only to seek a new zest, not a new ideal, that the great majority of Englishmen put their work behind them, and seek what they are pleased to call " recreation." They do not want to find a fresh clue to life as a whole, but only a revived energy for their ordinary work, and they think that they shall find that best by plunging into a life in every way as different as possible from that which they ordinarily lead, into a life which dissipates, instead of a life which restores, the energies within them. But that is assuredly not to possess their soul, but to find the means of drowning it more effectually in amusements than they have ever been able to drown it in work. In order truly to possess your soul, you must study a "wise passiveness." You must learn to know whither the magnetic needle by which you guide your course
really points. You must learn what desires come upper- most in your mind when there is no urgent call upon your attention; and for that purpose you must provide for a certain interval of serenity, for an arrest of the hurry of life, for a lull in the rapids, for a cessation of distractions. Diversion should be the very opposite of distraction. It should make one feel that there is a real and permanent self behind all the urgency of practical occupations and engagements, a self which will persist after all these occupations and engagements have disappeared. A diversion is a turning-away from the main current of business ; but the object of that turning-away is not to turn away from yourself, but on the contrary to turn towards your truest self, to find the permanent interests for which usually you have no adequate leisure, to recover the aims which the multitude of endless details has obscured or obliterated. No diversion is worth the name which leaves no scope for this recovery of the mind from the pressure of the prevailing preoccupations of life, which does not admit of what Wordsworth meant by a "wise passiveness."
At the same time, it must be admitted that a great deal which looks like, but is not, idleness, is of the very essence of this kind of diversion. Mr. Gladstone is right in saying that there is no room on this earth of our's for real idleness ; but a great deal of pretentious laboriousness is very much more wasteful than a great deal of apparent idleness. Especially is this the case in the region in which Mr. Gladstone himself chiefly labours. More than half the labours of the poli- ticians are, we think, worse than wasted, because they are expended on what had much better have been left alone. Why are politics so feverish, why do they lead to such passionate ebullitions, except that they distract our minds, that they turn our heads giddy, that they help men to lose themselves instead of to find themselves, that they bewilder us instead of purging our eyes and stimulating our calmest con- victions P No one wants true rest more than the politician, and it seems to us that a great deal of the mischievous excite- ment of modern politics is due to the increasing protraction and tension of the political Session. Politicians seem never to reflect that true earnestness is not only consistent with leisurely procedure, but absolutely requires leisurely procedure. All this hurry and fever only ends in doing what has to be undone, or if not undone, proves to be a cause of permanent deterioration in political life. The Speaker is quite right in saying that the prolonged Sessions are a great aggravation of the difficulties of Parliamentary temper; and if that is so, then are they also a great cause of the diminution of Parliamentary wisdom. How can any politician, or even any statesman, possess his soul in patience, who is under the influence of such perpetual agitations, both intellectual and moral, that he is hardly aware whether be has a soul to possess P A large measure of tranquillity and of sedate circumspection, a large opportunity for weighing the relative value of different political ends, and the relative efficacy of different political means, is of the very essence of sane political judgment; and how can even the wisest men in Parliamentary times like these command the means of tranquil reflection and impartial judgment P This generation needs a great deal less of dis- traction than it actually gets, and a great deal more of moral and spiritual peace.
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