Escape and Other Essays | Page 8

a larger margin, they feared they might be bored, they had made friends, and did not wish to sever the connection, they must provide a little more for their families: the whole programme had insensibly altered. Even so they were still planning to escape from something--from some boredom or anxiety or dread.
And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon them, the value of their work gradually disappeared; they were deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced, and perhaps all the more scrupulously and compassionately in order that they might not guess the lamentable fact that their work was done and that the forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men themselves never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an octogenarian clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was ridiculous to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.
"Why," he said, "it is only quite in the last few years that I feel I have really mastered my work. It takes me far less time than it used to do; it is just promptly and methodically executed." The old man obviously did not know that his impression that his work consumed less time was only too correct, because it was, as a matter of fact, almost wholly performed by his colleagues, and nothing was referred to him except purely formal business.
It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the truth, and that we cannot be content with discerning the principle of it all, which is that our work is given to us to do not for its intrinsic value, but because it is good for us to do it.
The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting one hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that they believe that they are helping when they are merely being kept from hindering.
And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed and planned by writers and artists, lies in the absence of all power to suggest how the happy folk who have conquered all the ills and difficulties of life are to employ themselves reasonably and eagerly when there is nothing left to improve. William Morris, indeed, in his News from Nowhere, confessed through the mouth of one of his characters that there would be hardly enough pleasant work, like hay-making and bridge-building and carpentering and paving, left to go round; and the picture of life which he draws, with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may ask for anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses, with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and vulgar elements of the world unless a very active spirit of some kind has taken its place. Morris himself intended that art should supply the missing force; but art is not a sociable thing; it is apt to be a lonely affair, and few artists have either leisure or inclination to admire one another's work.
Still more dreary was the dream of the philosopher J. S. Mill, who was asked upon one occasion what would be left for men to do when they had been perfected