CHAPTER XIII. THE INFLUENCE OF LAZINESS ON LONGEVITY. O Idleness, enchanting Idleness! The more we have of thee, the more we love thee; I AM inclined to think that the laziest men live longest. By a lazy man I by no means mean a man who does no work, for the laziest men often do the most. And about such work as they manage to do in literature there is this to be remarked; it is usually terse and pregnant; they are too lazy to dilute their ideas with a myriad words, in the style of the fashionable leader-writer. Very few men know how to laze. The ordinary human being wants a friend to chaff or a girl to flirt with. Put him alone... by which I mean far from people of his own class, in a fishing village on the coast or an agricultural bucolic village in shore . . . and he will not have the remotest idea what to do with himself. He has neither innate resources nor external apprehension. But set a man who knows how to laze in either position. Take the fishing village. He will stroll down to the beach, and watch the sea, and by and by talk to some of the fishermen. He will listen to their talk, with its mixed flavour of brine and tar, and find out all about their wives and children, their histories and expectations. He will suffer himself to be carried to sea in their trawlers, and will watch the process of catching lobsters, and will eat the finest lobster caught for breakfast. And all the while an endless throng, an interminable procession of ideas will pass through his head... ideas forgotten so soon as they arrive, but which have in their passage through the brain refreshed the spirit. Of course we cannot all laze, since there must be somebody to cook dinners and build houses. This, however, is an unimportant consideration-seeing that few people know (or could, indeed, be taught) how to laze, and that the restlessness of modern life makes everybody anxious to indust. Somebody must work, since no machinery has yet been invented to entirely supersede manual labour : and this, I think, is fortunate, because else there would be no chance for men with the power to laze. The picture of Charles Fox, down at his place in the country, lying under a haystack reading Greek, and looking up from the from the page (Aristophanes, let us hope) to watch the birds eating his cherries, is delightful beyond measure. On the other hand, I hear of one living statesman that he delights to ride about on a bicycle—and of another, that he spends his vacation in cutting down trees. Both these occupations show an incapacity to laze. A politician, after the evil air and erratic hours of a session at St. Stephen's, should get as much ozone as he can... but he should laze. To expend himself on heavy exercise is a mistake, unless he is physically a giant. So close is the alliance between mind and body, that the work of a session in the House will take all the physical energy out of a man—and he is singularly unwise if he attempt to restore himself by additional expenditure of physical energy. I remember dining with a member of Parliament when Sir Robert Peel was first minister. At nine o'clock, just as we were thinking of leaving, he came in and sat down to a rumpsteak and a pint of port... the wisest dinner in the world under the circumstances. There was a gridiron in the House in those days. If we regard philosophically what I venture to call the faculty of laziness, it becomes at once evident that it is the result of a complete nature. The man who can laze (having of course a right to laze) is conscious of his power. He knows he can do what he has to do in less time than the ordinary mortal imagines it will take him. He tacitly accepts the margin. That time is his, and nobody has claim on it and during that time, if he be wisely idle, he will mature his powers, and attain a greater speed and mastery of work, and thus broaden his phylactery of idleness. The world has been driven so fast of late, and everybody, from First Minister to shoeblack, has taken to do his work with such an impetuosity of integrity, that my theory of the value of laziness may at first be unpopular. This, however, is the fate of all great ideas, when they happen to be true. And mine is shown to be true by innumerable examples. Go into a boys' school; note the little rascal who does least work, catches most cockchafers and whippings: depend on it he is the best specimen there. Go (if Miss |