Escape and Other Essays | Page 8

started in business with
the perfectly definite and avowed intention of making a competence in
order that they might live as they desired to live; that they might travel,
read, write, enjoy a secure leisure. But when they had done exactly
what they meant to do, the desires were all atrophied. They could not
give up their work; they felt it would be safer to have a larger margin,
they feared they might be bored, they had made friends, and did not
wish to sever the connection, they must provide a little more for their
families: the whole programme had insensibly altered. Even so they
were still planning to escape from something--from some boredom or
anxiety or dread.
And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is the
philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us matters
very little to the world, but that it matters very much to ourselves that
we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very feeble-minded
race in this respect, that we require to be constantly bribed and tempted
by illusions. I have known men of force and vigour both in youth and
middle life who had a strong sense of the value and significance of their
work; as age came upon them, the value of their work gradually
disappeared; they were deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced,
and perhaps all the more scrupulously and compassionately in order
that they might not guess the lamentable fact that their work was done
and that the forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men
themselves never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an
octogenarian clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was
ridiculous to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.
"Why," he said, "it is only quite in the last few years that I feel I have
really mastered my work. It takes me far less time than it used to do; it
is just promptly and methodically executed." The old man obviously
did not know that his impression that his work consumed less time was
only too correct, because it was, as a matter of fact, almost wholly

performed by his colleagues, and nothing was referred to him except
purely formal business.
It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the truth, and
that we cannot be content with discerning the principle of it all, which
is that our work is given to us to do not for its intrinsic value, but
because it is good for us to do it.
The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by
a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like
children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we
should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly
father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting one
hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that they believe that
they are helping when they are merely being kept from hindering.
And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and
energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn out
hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may drink
deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon us. The
failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed and planned by
writers and artists, lies in the absence of all power to suggest how the
happy folk who have conquered all the ills and difficulties of life are to
employ themselves reasonably and eagerly when there is nothing left to
improve. William Morris, indeed, in his News from Nowhere,
confessed through the mouth of one of his characters that there would
be hardly enough pleasant work, like hay-making and bridge-building
and carpentering and paving, left to go round; and the picture of life
which he draws, with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may
ask for anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses,
with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served
in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the
caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the
mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because
Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest,
and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough
as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will not be enough to

have got rid of the combative and sordid and vulgar elements of the
world unless a very active spirit of some kind has taken its