THE HOLIDAY MANIA.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3809, 20 May 1873, Page 3

THE HOLIDAY MANIA.

* (From the Saturday Review.) Our readers will excuse us for qroting Sir George Cornewall Lewis ; first, because he has only about two sayings to quote. He once remarked that life would be tolerable but for its pleasures. "What a world of truth there is in this saying every employer at this present time will at once acknowledge. It is bad enough when one's head clerk or cashier thinks fit to throw the entire fabric into disorder by taking a month's ' holiday. But, as it is, it would be endurable but for what goes before and what fallows after. Before the eventful time, the holiday-loving individual puts on a jovial and roving air not consistent with habits of steady business except in such perennial forms as I hat of Robinson Crusoe and company. When he comes back he is unendurable. He compels all his comrades to swear that he is "brown;" brownness, after a holiday, being considered quite as essential as cake to a christening, and port wine to a funeral. We have never been able to understand this weakness for brownness. It is, in truth, characteristic of the aristocrats, who are not now-a-days the pale aristocrats they were once called. Whether it is in the desire to look aristocratic, men, so to speak, " go in for brown," we cannot say. That they g<>|in is a fact as indisputable as the other fact that, when they return to business, the brownness pales its ineffectual fires with marvellous rapidity. The superhuman attempts to acquire brownness on a holiday are to be recorded among the marvels of the world. Men who never walked ten miles on a stretch in their lives will exhaust themselves over twenty miles to acquire " brownness." Men who have never been up a hill higher lhan the local Mont Blanc (that is to say, Holt Hill, Tranmere), will make the calves of their legs ache up Welsh hills, in order to acquire " brownness." The pre»ent writer was, in his green term, out with a man at Ramsgate who used , to scrub his nose with a tooth brush in order to get brownness. The experiment was uufortunate, for the friction brought about a state of the skin which led to its peeling off, and the nose was, for a long time afterwards, in a beetroot condition, which caused our wouldbe brown to walk up the Strand with his hands before his face for several months afterwards. There is a serious consequence attending this mania for brownness. It leads to squinting. Men who are always looking at their noses to see if they are getting brown are sure to squint in the end part, if they do not in the beginning. As regards the holiday makers themselAes, what a bore a holiday is. The anticipation itself is enough to cure a man of the holiday weakness. He cannot get his accustomed sleep for thinking of it. The matutinal bacon goes untouched in consequence of it. Habits of years are broken in upon, and, above all, the man thinks he is going to do something wrong. No Englishman of the middle classes ever took a holiday yet without a sense of guilt. For days befoie the starting he has a foreboding apprehension like that which he experiences when his parson is preaching against his favorite vice. " Pleasant, but wrong," is the unexpressed English feeling about holidays, as is the French feeling about a more serious vice. We cannot explain this feeling. We can only assert that it exists, as every reader of this paper can find out for himself. We can only assume that holiday- making ' is essentially wrong, and that to desert the desk even for a short time is the easy descent to Avernus, and, of itself, a proceeding connected with Tophet. All the good little books ws have read as to the operations of conscience do not prick you for nothing. If then, your conscience pricks you about holidays, how do you settle accounts with your conscience ? There is another plague to holidayseekers. Black care sits behind the horseman, as in the Delectus and a Latin author notat present remembered. The holiday maker is a haunted individual. He has a death's head as his feast. He imagines a Bword of Damocles. No wonder he is not happy. There is his trouble. He cannot believe that the concern he is connected with can go on properly in his absence. "He conceives all sorts of catastrophes, and thinks with apprehension that he will return to a heap of commercial ruins, over which he will have to mourn like another double-entry Marius. There is not at this moment any small office boy away from home, upon' his limited leave, who does not wonder to himself what a mess the other boy Jones is making of it ; how he is sticking the postage stamps upside down, and delivering messages at the wrong plaoes. We are all like the boy. "We imagine that the world cannot get on without us. Yet it managed to exist some six thousand years before we lived, and got through a deluge, and a few other little accidents, of which we heard more than enough in our school days. There is no reason to doubt that it will roll merrily on when the present generation is gone the way of Alexander's dust in the grand race to stop bung holes.