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Page 62
So I thought, and this next, that if it were indeed true and beyond
remedy, that no man would work unless he hoped by working to earn
leisure, the hell of theologians was but little needed; for a
thickly populated civilised country, where, you know, after all
people must work at something, would serve their turn well enough.
Yet again I knew that this theory of the general and necessary
hatefulness of work was indeed the common one, and that all sorts of
people held it, who without being monsters of insensibility grew fat
and jolly nevertheless.
So to explain this puzzle, I fell to thinking of the one life of
which I knew something--my own to wit--and out tumbled the bottom of
the theory.
For I tried to think what would happen to me if I were forbidden my
ordinary daily work; and I knew that I should die of despair and
weariness, unless I could straightway take to something else which I
could make my daily work: and it was clear to me that I worked not
in the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it, but
partly driven by the fear of starvation or disgrace, and partly, and
even a very great deal, because I love the work itself: and as for
my leisure: well I had to confess that part of it I do indeed spend
as a dog does--in contemplation, let us say; and like it well
enough: but part of it also I spend in work: which work gives me
just as much pleasure as my bread-earning work--neither more nor
less; and therefore could be no bribe or hope for my work-a-day
hours.
Then next I turned my thought to my friends: mere artists, and
therefore, you know, lazy people by prescriptive right: I found
that the one thing they enjoyed was their work, and that their only
idea of happy leisure was other work, just as valuable to the world
as their work-a-day work: they only differed from me in liking the
dog-like leisure less and the man-like labour more than I do.
I got no further when I turned from mere artists, to important men--
public men: I could see no signs of their working merely to earn
leisure: they all worked for the work and the deeds' sake. Do rich
gentlemen sit up all night in the House of Commons for the sake of
earning leisure? if so, 'tis a sad waste of labour. Or Mr.
Gladstone? he doesn't seem to have succeeded in winning much leisure
by tolerably strenuous work; what he does get he might have got on
much easier terms, I am sure.
Does it then come to this, that there are men, say a class of men,
whose daily work, though maybe they cannot escape from doing it, is
chiefly pleasure to them; and other classes of men whose daily work
is wholly irksome to them, and only endurable because they hope
while they are about it to earn thereby a little leisure at the
day's end?
If that were wholly true the contrast between the two kinds of lives
would be greater than the contrast between the utmost delicacy of
life and the utmost hardship could show, or between the utmost calm
and utmost trouble. The difference would be literally immeasurable.
But I dare not, if I would, in so serious a matter overstate the
evils I call on you to attack: it is not wholly true that such
immeasurable difference exists between the lives of divers classes
of men, or the world would scarce have got through to past the
middle of this century: misery, grudging, and tyranny would have
destroyed us all.
The inequality even at the worst is not really so great as that:
any employment in which a thing can be done better or worse has some
pleasure in it, for all men more or less like doing what they can do
well: even mechanical labour is pleasant to some people (to me
amongst others) if it be not too mechanical.
Nevertheless though it be not wholly true that the daily work of
some men is merely pleasant and of others merely grievous; yet it is
over true both that things are not very far short of this, and also
that if people do not open their eyes in time they will speedily
worsen. Some work, nay, almost all the work done by artisans IS too
mechanical; and those that work at it must either abstract their
thoughts from it altogether, in which case they are but machines
while they are at work; or else they must suffer such dreadful
weariness in getting through it, as one can scarcely bear to think
of. Nature desires that we shall at least live, but seldom, I
suppose, allows this latter misery to happen; and the workmen who do
purely mechanical work do as a rule become mere machines as far as
their work is concerned. Now as I am quite sure that no art, not
even the feeblest, rudest, or least intelligent, can come of such
work, so also I am sure that such work makes the workman less than a
man and degrades him grievously and unjustly, and that nothing can
compensate him or us for such degradation: and I want you specially
to note that this was instinctively felt in the very earliest days
of what are called the industrial arts.
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