RECREATION AND SECLUSION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9124, 4 August 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

RECREATION AND SECLUSION.

[SPECTATOR.]

There is a good deal in the habit which townspeople have of living in an atmosphere of humanity, of desiring to have around them, besides the neighbours whom they know, a world of human beings whom individually they do not know, but whose general habits and modes of life are familiar to them. Even literary Londoners, like Dr. Johnston and Charles Lamb, though they were men of culture and given to studious habits, could not bear to miss this half-com-panionship with a flowing and ebbing tide of humanity. The so.it-tide of the country often weighed upon .their spirits. Their minds missed the sense-of moral compression under which men live ill towns, just as their bodies would miss the pressure of the atmosphere, if it, were suddenly lowered by one-third or one-half of its present weight. And what even townsmen of learning and of more or less solitary habits miss much, it. stands to reason that men and women who are hardly accustomed to- spend even ten minutes in the day alone, miss a great deal more, dust as they like to have the feeling that other people are working and walking, and serving and shopping, and doing business of all sorts in close proximity to them when they are at their daily tasks, so they like to have the feeling th.xt other people are laughing and eating and drinking and singing, and going through all the outward show of pleasure, when they are making festival ; indeed, Englishmen at least seem to need the assurance which such companionship gives, even more in amusement than they do in work. They are more doubtful of themselves, or distrustful of themselves, in play than they are in labour. They listen more eagerly for the echo of their laughter than for the vigilant transmission of the watchwords of their daily tasks. They have not the same genius for amusing themselves that they have for work, and are more timid, in consequence, when it comes to asking themselves whether they are happy. Unless they can assure themselves that a great number of other people are really enjoying the same pleasures, they cannot be quite sure that they themselves are enjoying them. Even people who are self-confident enough in the discharge of their duties, are shamefaced about their pleasures, and wait for distinct social continuation of their own hesitating verdict in their favour. We are disposed to think, then, that that section of society which, as it ha- been put, devotes itself in the pursuit of pleasure to discovering the best means of running away from all the other sections of society, and secluding itself from them, is not really a large section, though it may be in its own estimation si very select section. Fastidiousness shows .itself lirst of all in what men understand best, and the busy do not understand the arts of pleasure-seeking half as well as they understand the arts of industry. A good workman will be fastidious about his workmanship long before it occurs to him to be fastidious about his recreations. And if the literary class are almost, more fastidious about their recreations than they are about their daily tasks, it is mainly because their recreations become so essential a preparation for their daily tasks that it is almost impossible to separate the two. And ib is mainly, if not exclusively, the literary class which seeks seclusion in its enjoyments. No one can say that the richer classes do so. They seek, of course, a monopoly of the rarer and more luxurious enjoyments, and would not like to mingle in any pleasures in which they could not secure the physical refinements of which considerable wealth is a condition ; but ting-men, racing-men, sporting-men, betting-men, the men and women who go to lawn-tennis matches and balls and concerts and thejutres and operas, and crowded churches and crowded meetings, and the various religious excitements of the season, are certainly not to be called admirers of seclusion. The truth is that seclusion and recreation are connected together in the minds of but a very small class indeed. A luxurious crowd is a small crowd compared with the crowd of bank holiday-makers ; but it is a crowd, and a crowd quite large enough for individuals to lose themselves in, a crowd quite large enough to refute finally the notion that those who haunt it have the least wish for even the roughest approximation to solitude. The literary class themselves, when they praise seclusion as of the very essence of recreation, use the word in the mildest possible sense. Hardly ever do they mean by it actual solitude ; not very often even the comparative solitude of purely domestic life. Usually they mean by it nothing more than the getting rid of all miscellaneous society, and the selection of a narrower circle of friends amongst whom there is a deeper feeling of mutual confidence and social ease. In other words, they mean by seclusion nothing but a finely sifted society. Nor would such seclusions as this suit the great majority of rich and educated men. They would want a greater rush of life than any such society could afford them, and would gasp for breath in a moral atmosphere so rarefied. If the literary class are of a different mind, and think no recreation worthy of the name which does not leave room for a good deal of genuine study and reflection, and not a little absolute solitude, it is not because they are moreself-dependent than other men, butonly because they cannot get their thoughts clear enough for the purposes of their ordinary work, without getting away from the social life they have to criticise, and surveying it from that moderate distance at which its collective features become more or less distinct and picturesque. For the most part, it is not bank holiday-makers, but men in general, who are gregarious in their pleasures—even more gregarious in their pleasures than they are in their arts and. industries and professional labours.