HE PROPORTION OF PLEASURE.
-LIVERY thinking man has his own theory as to what pro- !J portion of his time and income he may reasonably give to pleasure. It is not easy to say in which class of life (if we except the very rich) we should get the highest estimate, but we think the more prosperous among the hand-workers would certainly put it higher than the poorer professional men. In saying this we must, however, remember that the latter count their holidays by weeks, while the former count them by days.
Not long ago the present writer listened to a middle-aged woman in a suburban train who was frankly discussing her household economy with special reference to this question. She did not say definitely what her husband's " money " was, but she mentioned the name of the firm for whom he worked, and obviously he was in receipt of a high weekly wage. They lived, she said, in a house which, inclusive of rates and taxes, cost fourteen shillings a week. It was not a comfortable house, but she could not in the neighbourhood get a better one for the money. She described it as being very damp—so damp that she was obliged occasionally to have a fire in " the front room" to preserve the carpet. On washing. days the walls ran with water, and the garden was always too sodden to grow anything. Evidently she would have liked a better home and a higher standard of life. She could not, however, have it short of a more drastic renunciation than she was prepared to make. She and her husband preferred to live uncomfortably and to "enjoy themselves" rather than more monotonously and more at ease. It appeared from her conversation that constantly—i.e., about once a week—she and her husband went up to London to some theatre or music-hall. Counting return tickets, a meal, and fairly good places, they always, so she said, "broke into a pound." The items of expense which she enumerated came together to about fifteen shillings. Thus she was spending upon pleasure as much as she spent upon rent, being all the while dissatisfied with what she got for that rent.
Probably a good many people in a financial position like her own would have blamed her very heartily ; but we are inclined to think that the greater number would have sympathized. Her children were off her hands. She was not bound to consider them. She and her husband had a right to live as they liked. This, we imagine, would be the conclusion of most of her friends and aequaintanoe. In every rank of life there are a growing number of people who think like her ; but perhaps the number is largest in the rank to which she belonged. The pleasure-lovers are on the increase, or so the moralists say. There are still, however, a large minority, largest in the middle class, who rather despise the new point of view. They believe that they do not require pleasure, or even desire it, being quite unconscious that they take a good deal in their own way. In their ears " leisure " and " pleasure " are interchangeable terms. Whether they work with their heads or their hands, and whether, technically speaking, they belong to the rich or the poor, they get enough pleasure to satisfy them out of their standard of living. We mean that they labour daily in order to live in a par- ticular way, and all they ask is some leisure that they may have time to savour that way of life. They are in a sense idealists, and if things go fairly smoothly with them they attain to a very solid happiness. What they feel to be troubles—apart from the tragedies of life—are interruptions. Illness, whether their own or that of those near them, is the worst interruption, but a thousand smaller anxieties and supererogatory dutiesfrom time to time cast shadows upon their admirably kept path. In the course of their business or profession they are a prey perhaps to constant worries, small dis- appointments, thwartings, vexatious occurrences of all sorts ; but that is "all in the day's work." It is only when the day's leisure disturbed that they feel their spirits depressed and their courage ebbing. They live for their leisure. Their work is the price they pay for it—and nothing else. For actual pleasure in the ordinary bowie of the word they have no money. It is to thaw people, whether we find them in trim cottages or charming Louses, that we owe the fact that the Englishman, while (alas !) he can accept as bad conditions of life as any in Western Europe, has attained in every social rank to a higher standard than exists any- where else. Few attain to it, but they represent every class, and to that few it means everything. No working man's house elsewhere for comfort or prettiness can compare with a few of the working men's homes in this country, and all Continentals admit that a portion of the middle class here live more gracefully than any but the very rich in any other country.
Such people as these are social examples, and as such they are perhaps in danger of thinking too highly of themselves. The man who sacrifices standard to pleasure has a good deal to be said for him. No impartial critic can set him beside his more refined brother and identify the pair with Hogarth's idle and industrious appren- tices. The pleasure-lover is often the more energetic worker, and each can bring an accusation against the other, even though both may be forced to admit that half the squalor which disgraces our towns, and the appearance of cheap discomfort which disfigures the poorer parts of our suburbs, can be traced to the love of amusement. But to go back to our point, the man who grudges to spend his income in attaining to the most refined manner of life known to him has much that he may justly say in his own defence. He soon becomes used, he may argue, to any standard of life, and then, unless he suffers real hardship, he likes a low as well as a high one. The man at the bottom of the scale sees no object in sitting down to a properly set table so long as there is enough to eat upon it. It is cheaper to live hugger-mugger, and it leaves himself more money and his wife more time for any entertainment which may come their way. In another class in whioh a properly set table is as much a matter of course as a bed with sheets upon it, the same argument is applied to some other refinement, and so on and so on. People become weary and discontented more for want of variety than for want of the refinements of life. Certainly young people do, and the world is shaking off the patriarchal theory and becoming more and more a world for the young. The young man who lives in a more sordid manner than he need for fifty weeks in the year in order that he may live in luxury for two—we are told that short luxurious holidays are becoming commoner—has gained an experi- ence, has satisfied a curiosity, and feels himself a freer man, a man of the world, a man who has tried more than one method of life. Even those who on one day a week spend what would have improved their way of life during seven may say that money can hardly be better spent, so far as happiness is concerned, than upon something to look forward to, something to counteract the ever-increasing sameness of most men's work. The pleasure-lover need not confine himself to self-defence. He can quite justly seize the offensive and turn upon his critics. "You who boast of your gravity and refine- ment," he may say, "spend a great deal upon pleasure ; only your idea of pleasure is a more subtle one than ours. Something very like social ostentation colours your fine theories. You care a great deal for appearances, whereas we care nothing. Apart from ostentation, the true difference between us is this. You spread your pleasures out and we concentrate ours."
The man in the minority will be home down by numbers, if not by argument. We are, or are becoming, a pleasure-loving people, perhaps because we work so hard that Nature is determined to,, revenge herself. One of the effects of this rather rapid development will, we fear, spring a disappointment on the social optimist. 11 ig h er wages will not, at any rate at first, make any great difference to the standard of life. Those relieved from the galling chains of poverty will want, as it were, to stretch themselves before they rearrange their customs. They will ask variety before they ask comfort— long before they ask refinement.
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