The Crown of Wild Olive
poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage
their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the
rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor.
There is, then, no class distinction between idle and industrious
people; and I am going to-night to speak only of the industrious. The
idle people we will put out of our thoughts at once--they are mere
nuisances--what ought to be done with _them_, we'll talk of at another
time. But there are class distinctions, among the industrious
themselves; tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to every
degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human
power--distinctions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach
of man's soul and body.
These separations we will study, and the laws of them, among energetic
men only, who, whether they work or whether they play, put their
strength into the work, and their strength into the game; being in the
full sense of the word 'industrious,' one way or another--with a
purpose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four:
I. Between those who work, and those who play.
II. Between those who produce the means of life, and those who consume
them.
III. Between those who work with the head, and those who work with the
hand.
IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work foolishly.
For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, in our
examination.--
I. Work to play;
II. Production to consumption;
III. Head to Hand; and,
IV. Sense to nonsense.
I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the
classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these
terms,--work and play,--before going farther. Now, roughly, not with
vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' is
an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no
determined end; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done,
and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, at cricket, for
instance. That is as hard work as anything else; but it amuses you, and
it has no result but the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form
of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, in
like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the sake
of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the 'pleasing
thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a secondary sense
(nothing is indeed more useful or necessary); but the use of it depends
on its being spontaneous.
Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the playing class in
England spend their lives in playing at.
The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing
game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at
foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without
purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a
great money-maker what he wants to do with his money--he never knows. He
doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he _may_
get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll
get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no
use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game.
And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other
people is the game. So all that great foul city of London
there,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of
fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore,--you fancy it
is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very
nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's
cricket ground without the turf,--a huge billiard table without the
cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit; but mainly a
billiard table, after all.
Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It
differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money,
while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce
money. There's a great difference between 'winning' money and 'making'
it; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same
thing as making it; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and much
of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of
taxation on carriage or exchange.
Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly
altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses,
gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that
beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now:
but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless
game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through
horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere
call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that is--gambling; by
no means a beneficial or recreative game: and, through game-preserving,
you get also some curious laying out of ground; that beautiful
arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse
and black-cock--so many brace to the acre, and men and women--so many
brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and
surveyors--the angelic builders who build the 'many mansions' up above
there; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that four-square city
with their measuring reeds--I wonder what they think, or are supposed to
think, of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set itself,
as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact for
word, in the persons of those poor whom its Master left to represent
him, what that Master said of himself--that foxes and birds had homes,
but He none.
Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must put the ladies'
game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a
jeweller's in Bond Street a fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without
any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000_l._ And I wish I could tell
you what this 'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia
annually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like it; nay,
I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain have it. You ladies
like to lead the fashion:--by all means lead it--lead it thoroughly,
lead it far enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else
nicely. Lead the _fashions for the poor_ first; make _them_ look well,
and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no
conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time
among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too
irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them.
Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show you if I had
time.
There's playing at literature, and playing at art--very different, both,
from working at literature, or working at art, but I've no time to speak
of these. I pass to the greatest of all--the play of plays, the great
gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play at,--the game of
War. It is entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it,
not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for
any other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt,
but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours: of course we
could fight better in grey, and without feathers; but all nations have
agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats
and balls are very costly; our English and French bats, with the balls
and wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, I
suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to each nation;
all of which, you know is paid for by hard labourer's work in the furrow
and furnace. A costly game!--not to speak of its consequences; I will
say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these
plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work
somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight
fails over the diamonds; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web; the
iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace--_they_ know what
work is--they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a
kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country,
where 'play' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example for
philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the word
'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and
black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of
England, who think 'one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble
man,' this is what you have brought the word 'play' to mean, in the
heart of merry England! You may have your fluting and piping; but there
are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed cannot say to
you, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:' but eternally
shall say to you, 'We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.'
This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and lower'
classes. And this is one which is by no means necessary; which indeed
must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished.
Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of
other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not
for men: that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing
in them: that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may
not lose its moments; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness
that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of
plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we
regard as inspiration, as not to think that 'Son, go work to-day in my
vineyard,' means 'Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we shall all be
workers, in one way or another; and this much at least of the
distinction between 'upper' and 'lower' forgotten.
II. I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor,
between Dives and Lazarus,--distinction which exists more sternly, I
suppose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or Christian, till
now. I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading
two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast
table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about
the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for
fifteen francs,--12_s._ 6_d._,--is nothing for a rich man to give for a
couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on
the same day are worth putting side by side.
'Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, with your permission, we
will call him Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime; art is
considered in that toilet, the harmony of colour respected, the _chiar'
oscuro_ evident in well-selected contrast. In manners he is
dignified--nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing disturbs the placid serenity
of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted _chez_ Bignon.
When the bill came he read, "Two peaches, 15f." He paid. "Peaches
scarce, I presume?" was his sole remark. "No, sir," replied the waiter,
"but Teufelskines are."' _Telegraph_, November 25, 1864.
'Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, passing a dung heap in
the stone yard near the recently-erected alms-houses in Shadwell Gap,
High Street, Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames police-constable
to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid
he was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared