THE VALUE OF A HOBBY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XI, 31 August 1895, Page 250

THE VALUE OF A HOBBY.

Mr G. F. Watts, the Royal Academician, has given / i.ood to the Home Industries and Arts Association, in order to assist the work of helping artisans to cultivate hobbies. At least he says explicitly that his desire is not to promote a training-school, but to help men to provide occupations and interests for their leisure hours. That is an unusually wise, as well as kindly, gift, and one which we hope will be largely imitated. Nothing, we believe conduces so directly to the happiness of life as a distinct and permanent interest in some subject other than that forced on us by circumstances or by professional needs. A hobby is more than a recreation for the mind, it is a protection. It relieves the man who has it from ennui, from the oppressive sense of the sameness of life, and from that tendency to judge everything from a single standpoint, which is the curse of the efficient and the industrious. It hardly matters what it is, a definite kind of reading, or an art, or an outdoor occupation, the result is always the same, a kind of content with life which the man without a hobby lacks. Music is, perhaps, the best of all ; for that is inexhaustible, can be taken up in fragments of time, and when pursued by those who can appreciate it, gives a delight which has the charm of perpetual variety. Those who love music, yet work hard at other things, never tire of their * taste,’ and never, if they can gratify it, find life either tedious or insupportable. They find in it not only pleasure but occupation ; and it is in the conjunction of the two that for the weary true relief consists. So do those who can sketch in sketching, especially if they can do it well enough not to be haunted, as musicians are much haunted, by a sense of defeat in reaching for an ideal. After sketching, we think we may reckon the pursuit of natural history, which, though it tends to the study of small departments of knowledge, is practically inexhaustible, and rouses, besides thought and the pleasure of collecting, the passion of curiosity. Reading we should place fourth among hobbies. It is the resource of the cultured, but it has drawbacks, especially in this, that it tends to become an occupation only, pleasure being impaired by fits of imperfect attention. Your omnivorous

reader, who reads to pass the time, is apt to read without thinking, or criticising, or remembering, and for all

the genuine pleasure he gets, might almost as well be asleep. His reading is, in fact, a mental opiate. The hobby we should place next is gardening, for that also is an occupation, infinitely varied, which cannot end, or to those who enjoy it grow wearisome, and which, of course, in yielding health yields an advantage not belonging either to reading or to music. After these five we should place all the mechanical occupations, like turning, carpentering, bookbinding, working in metal or stone, or indeed any one of the occupations in which thought is required, but not too much thought, the mind and the hand together tending, when experience is complete, to work almost automatically. And, last of all, because it is so fruitless, we should place the writer’s own hobbv of deck-pacing, which is a much commoner and a more entrancing one than is commonly believed. It is indeed, to some men, what sauntering was to Charles 11., —a Sultana Queen whose charm blinds them to its inherent viciousness. From all these the educated, as we see every day, gain a relief which is as good for them as sleep, and the uneducated would gain, as Mr Watts with his poet insight clearly perceives, even more, they having less of the relief from within which comes of many ideas. There is not an artisan in the country who, if he had one of these hobbies, would not be a more contented man less given to acridity of thought, and less disposed to believe in the wrong of inequality of condition. A man can only be happy in his position, be it what it may ; and we have known overworked artisans who, as fiddlers, carvers, inventors in machinery, and antiquarians, have even when gravely pressed by external circumstances, been tranquilly content, while a colleague who is a naturalist, meets every day men who, though totally uneducated, are as naturalists and collectors consciously and, so to speak, actively happy men. All such men benefit at first exceedingly by a little instruction, and are usually eager to obtain it, and we can conceive no philanthropy more useful, or better calculated to sweeten the social system, than that which secures it for them. They will not, when they are started, become Hugh Millers in any noteworthy number ; for that type arises, like genius, and is not made, but they will become happier men, with a sense that the universe has for them something of pleasure. ‘ I aren’t not to say ’jected,’ said one of them, ‘though I

am dismissed, for,’ patting a battered old telescope, *my old friend here ain't pawned yet, nor won’t be.’ That old -astronomer was protected, as we have said, against at least half the ills which fate could inflict on him, and could he have had a year’s irregular instruction, would scarcely have felt even hunger as a reason for discontent. He never, while the stars pursued their courses, could lose the sense of being thoroughly interested, of looking on at an exciting drama to which there could be no end. The man with a hobby like this—and it is not necessary that it should be so noble a one—is never dull, never idle, never tempted to feed upon his own inside, but lives the only life in which pleasure is perpetually recurrent—the interested life, the life iu which unpleasant incident is no more noticed than the soldier was by Archimedes. Really to care about any one thing outside the daily work, be it what it may, so only it be not exhaustible, is to possess, at all events, the second secret of content.