THE HOURS.
SINCE the very beginning of things the days of the week have been allowed to have separate personalities. Monday has been condemned as no gentleman ; Friday and Saturday have been elected favourites ; Tuesday is a prig; Wednesday a " tweeny " day ; and Thursday something of a nondescript. But although the personalities of the hours are quite as marked, a day appears on the calendar as an undistinguished whole, and only a clock gives it credit for its moods. To treat a day merely as a neatly printed figure is injudicious. It changes with each hour, and it is better, surely, to live by the clock than by the calendar. Any one who takes his day on the authority of so dead a thing as the calendar banging on the wall is missing much pleasure by refusing to yield to the kindly overtures of the competing hours.
The hour after breakfast is the optimist of the day. As you light the first pipe and look through the newspaper, you are going to do great things. There will be no difficulty in correcting all the mistakes of yesterday. You are full of confidence and enterprise. You feel that the world is yours —almost that you have discovered it—and you want it, for the moment, to yourself. You are not willing yet to share it with any one. You have no wish for talk. There are more important things at hand,—the first pipe and the first glimpse of the sun. You are, in fact, almost jealous of the world. You claim it as your own, and you resent any infringement of the monopoly. It does not matter what guests you have at dinner, but it is necessary to be careful about breakfast. Only friends you can rely on should be admitted. Chatter or gossip would be intolerable. You are cheerful and ambitious, and not willing to have your spirits tampered with. Let the wrong man enter—some one who has a querulous complaint to make— and your whole day will suffer. So early a companion must make no protest. Any bitterness or disappointment is not worthy of the hour, and it is better to be alone.
At ten the clock begins to become aggressive, and it is as well to take some notice of it. There are only two hours to noon, and after that the day begins to relax. So it is that from ten to eleven is the hour of effort. It is impossible to see half-past ten without being roused to the necessity of doing something. It is the business hour, and it offers no hospitality to a joke. There is something more cheerful in the striking of eleven. The sound never loses its schoolboy associations. It suggests "break," and an anxious examina- tion of pocket-money, and ginger-beer, and cake, and biscuits, and a hurried game. It is never, even now, when you are older, taken quite seriously. It is the cigarette hour.
From eleven to twelve is the most serious time of the day. No whims are tolerated. As the two hands approach twelve they suggest an almost unpleasant unanimity and seriousness of purpose. There is something awful in their insistence on the fact of noon. The hands have met at the top of the clock for the same purpose, and there is a good deal that is arrogant and repelling in their partnership. At, say, a quarter-past five the clock has a kindly, innocent expression, and suggests no disturbing associations or traditions. Nothing of great importance ever happened at a quarter-past five, and the hour has taken a small part in history. But twelve has a bad record, and is notorious for unpleasant things. Many a criminal, for instance, has waited on the scaffold for the striking of the hour. Charles I. was beheaded at twelve o'clock, and Marie Antoinette was guillotined. It is too forbidding an hour for laughter or enjoyment. It is the most critical time of the day. The brain is cold and accurate and will stand no nonsense. Few plays could hope to please a twelve-o'clock audience, and few books could survive the hour. It is of no convivial value. There is nothing to be done except work. There are no good trains anywhere, no cheerful calls in the streets, no pleasures to be bought. Its passing, there- fore, is hailed with relief. The climax of the day has gone, and it is possible, on the authority of the clock, to start afresh. After twelve come the small innocent hours and afternoon concerts, and later the theatres. The day starts on a new and more high-spirited career. Much of its seriousness goes, and laughter becomes possible. Before one a joke was a thing to be treated with suspicion ; now it is welcomed as a necessity. From one to two, then, is a happy hour, a time of temporary relaxation and talk. There is no danger of being taken quite seriously. It is possible to say things which would have been an offence earlier in the day, and it is easy to make a friend and difficult to lose one. True, the streets of London are still full of hurrying people ; but their haste is prompted by a common human feeling, and by no mere commercial ambition. All these people, it is good to know, are hungry, and if. they could not get lunch there would be a revolution in the evening. So that every one is on the same democratic level; and after the tension of the morning it is a relief to see these hurrying crowds, and to bear them talking cheerfully across white tables. It is the hour of the mutton-chop, and a joke or two, and the shaking of hands, and short partings till the evening.
After two come the open-air hours. It is difficult to see the clock at half-past two without feeling inclined to change into flannels or football things. It is the hour which every one looks forward to at school and University, and one of the unkindly features of the later life is that it comes then to mean so little. The excitement of seeing the clock at half- past two, and knowing that you are due to play cricket or football at three, is better perhaps than anything of its kind that comes after. And the hour never loses its early associations. To look at the clock then is to revive memories of the open air, and walking on to a football field, and all the old delights of the turned-up collar. Only in the country is it easy to enjoy the peaceful hour between three and four. It loses its meaning
a town, and there is nothing to distinguish it from the others. But in the country it is one of the precious hours, when it is possible to relax, and to walk along the roads, or sail a boat on the river. London is not able to give the hour its due, and can only offer you a, matinee, or an evening news- paper with the latest crisis. But a hundred miles or so away there is no need to be concerned with a crisis till the evening, and the afternoon hour is not robbed of any of its peace. By five the day begins to show signs of age, and to develop a tendency to gossip. This does not, perhaps, condemn the hour. If it were not for tea, many things would go undis- covered, and there is often a literary charm in good gossip. It is always good to see six on the clock. It is a cheerful hour, in which plans are made, and trains caught, and seats booked. In spring and early summer, too, it is one of the beautiful hours, an hour of long shadows, and soft lights, and a bland sky. If there had been no six o'clock there would have been no poets.
There is something soothing in a quarter to seven. No one who looks at his watch then can say or do anything unkind. It is impossible to commit a murder or do anything desperate or important. It is the hour of postponement. The evening is about to start, and you will soon be released from the day. You begin to take advantage of to-morrow, and to shift tn•clay from your shoulders. It is the strolling hour, an hour in which you are allowed to walk up and down somewhere,— either on a terrace, or a path, or in a country lane. The most
strenuous man cannot resist the overtures of half-past seven. The clock is irresistible, and hurries you towards your dress- clothes, and makes you careless of everything except the achievement of the tie. And then, of course, dinner and the coming of the kindly nine. No hour is more welcome. It is the official hour of pleasure. Everything starts between eight and nine. And if you are at home the hour has much to offer you. It is the hour of the pipe. No pipe is so inevitable as the one after dinner, in an easy-chair, with matches in your pocket, and the prospect, say, of a game of billiards in half-an- hour, there is nothing, you find, for you to criticise. You are disarmed and incapable of complaint. You have done your best with the day; and now, in the easy-chair, you are content to wait for anything which way come your way. You are no longer, you persuade yourself, a responsible person. The control of the day has been taken from you by the great company of pleasure, and you smoke, and dream, and postpone by authority. Ten may be called "the wishing hour." It is when you wish some one, in the good slang phrase, would look in. You are willing now to share the day. The early morning sense of ownership has gone, and all you want for the moment is to see some one else the other side of the fire. It is the hour of partnership, and of confidences easily exchanged. After ten come the romantic hours. The brain is no longer cold and accurate. It has become detached from the necessary things, and lures you back to old times, and leaves you helpless on the edge of a dream. And with midnight comes the desire for a step into another world, and on the strength of this you do things you would not be capable of earlier in the day. You write letters which you tear up in the morning, and say things which will have no meaning then. But the approach of sleep brings a great feeling of independence. Anxiety has no power. You become sentimental, romantic, poetical ; and it may be necessary to write a minor verse or two.
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