We nosed our way through the crowd, hooting. ‘Maschere!’ the maskers shouted as we passed; and in our goggles and mufflers, we too seemed dressed for carnival. It was a feeble show; a few young women in dominoes, a few noisy students in fancy dress—that was all. I thought of the brilliant shows and masquerades of the past. Charming, no doubt; but one should not regret them. For shows and masquerades are symptoms of bad government. Tyrants pass all their lives at the centre of a gorgeous ballet. An oppressed populace, too poor to pay for amusements of its own, is kept in good humour by these royal theatricals, which are free of charge. And in the course of periodical Saturnalia slaves are able to sublimate their revolutionary feelings in sportive licence. If carnival has decayed, so too has oppression. And where people have pence enough to go to the cinema, there is no need for kings and popes to stage their ballets. Still, it was a very poor show; I felt they might have celebrated our arrival in Bologna a little more worthily.
WORK AND LEISURE
Reformers look forward to a time when efficient social organization and perfected machinery will do away with the necessity for severe and prolonged labour, making possible for all men and women an amount of leisure such as is enjoyed at the present day only by a privileged few. Nobody, in that golden age, will need to work more than four or five hours a day. The rest of every man’s time will be his own, to do with whatsoever he likes.
It is difficult for any sensitive person not to sympathize with these aspirations. One must be most arrogantly certain of one’s own supermanhood before one can complacently accept the slavery on which the possibility of being a superman is based. Poor Nietzsche ended by signing his letters ‘Nietzsche Caesar’ and died in a madhouse. Perhaps that is the price that must be paid—at any rate by the intelligent; for the placidly stupid never pay, just as they never receive, anything—for an unfaltering conviction of superiority.
But sympathy with an ideal need not make the sympathizer uncritical of it; one may feel strongly, but one must not therefore cease to think. The majority of human beings are oppressed by excessive labour of the most senseless kind. That fact may, and indeed should, arouse our indignation and our pity. But these emotions must not prevent us from criticizing the project of those who wish to change the present state of things. The social reformers desire to see a dispensation under which all men will have as much, or nearly as much leisure as is enjoyed by the leisured classes to-day: We may be permitted to doubt, for all our sympathy, whether the consummation is really, after all, so much to be desired.
Let us begin by asking one simple question: What is it proposed that human beings shall do with the leisure which social reorganization and perfected machinery are to give them?
Prophets of the future give fundamentally the same answer to this question, with slight variations according to their different tastes. Henri Poincaré, for example, imagined that the human beings of the future would fill their long leisures by ‘contemplating the laws of nature.’ Mr. Bernard Shaw is of much the same opinion. Having ceased, by the time they are four years old, to take any interest in such childish things as love, art and the society of their fellow beings, the Ancients in Back to Methuselah devote their indefinitely prolonged existences to meditating on the mysterious and miraculous beauty of the cosmos. Mr. H. G. Wells portrays in Men like Gods a race of athletic chemists and mathematical physicists who go about naked and, unlike Mr. Shaw’s austerer Ancients, make free love in a rational manner between the experiments. They also take an interest in the arts and are not above playing games.
These three answers to our question are typical. Different prophets may differ in their estimate of the relative importance of the various activities which make up what is generally known as ‘the higher life’; but all agree that the lives of our leisured posterity will be high. They will eagerly make themselves acquainted with ‘the best that has been thought or said’ about everything; they will listen to concerts of the classiest music; they will practise the arts and handicrafts (at any rate until the time comes when even these occupations seem childish); they will study the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, and meditate on the lovely mystery of the world in which they live.
In a word, these leisured masses of a future which there is no reason to believe enormously remote—indeed, our grandchildren may live to see the establishment of the four-hour day—will do all the things which our leisured classes of the present time so conspicuously fail to do.
How many rich and leisured people are there now living, who spend their time contemplating the laws of nature? I cannot say; all I know is that I rarely meet them. Many of the leisured, it is true, devote themselves to the patronage and even the amateur practice of the arts. But any one who has moved among rich ‘artistic’ people knows how much of this cultivation of the arts is due to snobbery, how shallow and insincere their loudly voiced enthusiasms mostly are. The leisured classes take up art for the same reasons as they take up bridge—to escape from boredom. With sport and love-making, art helps to fill up the vacuum of their existence.
At Monte Carlo and Nice one meets the rich whose dominant interests are play and love. Two millions, according to my guide-book, annually visit Monte Carlo alone. Seven-eighths of the whole leisured population of Europe must concentrate themselves yearly on that strip of the coast. Five thousand jazz bands play daily for their delectation. A hundred thousand motor vehicles transport them from one place to another at great speed. Huge joint-stock companies offer them every kind of distraction, from roulette to golf. Legions of prostitutes assemble from all parts of the globe and enthusiastic amateurs of the gentle passion abound. For four months in the year the French Riviera is an earthly paradise. When the four months are over, the leisured rich return to their northerly homes, where they find awaiting them less splendid, but quite authentic succursales of the paradise they have left behind.
The leisured rich at Monte Carlo are those, I have said, whose chief resources against ennui or serious thoughts are love and play. Many of them are also ‘artistic.’ But it is not, I think, at Monte Carlo that the best specimens of the artistic rich are to be found. To see them at their best one must go to Florence. Florence is the home of those who cultivate with an equal ardour Mah-jongg and a passion for Fra Angelico. Over tea and crumpets they talk, if they are too old for love themselves, of their lascivious juniors; but they also make sketches in water colour and read the Little Flowers of St Francis.
I must not, in justice to the leisured rich, omit to mention that respectable minority of them who occupy themselves with works of charity (not to mention tyranny), with politics, with local administration and occasionally with scholarly or scientific studies. I hesitate to use the word ‘service’; for it has been held up so frequently as an ideal and by such a riff-raff of newspaper proprietors, hard-headed business men and professional moralists from the Y.M.C.A., that it has lost all real significance.
The ‘ideal of service’ is achieved, according to our modern messiahs, by those who do efficient and profitable business with just enough honesty to keep them out of gaol. Plain shopkeeping is thus exalted into a beautiful virtue. The ideal of service which animates the best part of the English leisured class has nothing to do with the ideals of service so frequently mentioned by advertisers in American magazines. If I had not made this clear, my praise might have been thought, if not positively insulting, at least most damnably faint.
There exists, then, an admirable minority. But even when the minority and its occupations are duly taken into account, it cannot honestly be said that the leisured classes of the present time, or indeed of any historical period of which we have knowledge, provide a very good advertisement for leisure. The contemplation of richly leisured life in Monte Carlo and even in artistic Florence is by no means cheering or elevating.
Nor are we much reassured when we consider the occupations of the unleisured poor during those brief hours of repose allowed them between their work and their sleep. Watching other people play games, looking at cinema films, reading newspapers and indifferent fiction, listening to radio concerts and gramophone records and going from place to place in trains and omnibuses—these, I suppose, are the principal occupations of the working-man’s leisure. Their cheapness is all that distinguishes them from the diversions of the rich. Prolong the leisure and what will happen? There will have to be more cinemas, more newspapers, more bad fiction, more radios and more cheap automobiles.
If wealth and education increase with the leisure, then there will have to be more Russian Ballets as well as more movies, more Timeses as well as more Daily Mails, more casinos as well as more bookies and football matches, more expensive operas as well as more gramophone records, more Hugh Walpoles as well as more Nat Goulds. Acting
