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+This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be,
+should be read at the end of the book.
+
+I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small
+work, and many reviews of it--some of them nearly as long as the book
+itself--have been printed.  But scarcely any of the comment has been
+adverse.  Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the
+tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not
+impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might
+almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless!  A more
+serious stricture has, however, been offered--not in the press, but by
+sundry obviously sincere correspondents--and I must deal with it.  A
+reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this
+disapprobation.  The sentence against which protests have been made is
+as follows:--"In the majority of instances he [the typical man] does
+not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not
+dislike it.  He begins his business functions with some reluctance, as
+late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his
+engines, while he is engaged in his business, are seldom at their full
+'h.p.'"
+
+I am assured, in accents of unmistakable sincerity, that there are many
+business men--not merely those in high positions or with fine
+prospects, but modest subordinates with no hope of ever being much
+better off--who do enjoy their business functions, who do not shirk
+them, who do not arrive at the office as late as possible and depart as
+early as possible, who, in a word, put the whole of their force into
+their day's work and are genuinely fatigued at the end thereof.
+
+I am ready to believe it.  I do believe it.  I know it.  I always knew
+it.  Both in London and in the provinces it has been my lot to spend
+long years in subordinate situations of business; and the fact did not
+escape me that a certain proportion of my peers showed what amounted to
+an honest passion for their duties, and that while engaged in those
+duties they were really _living_ to the fullest extent of which they
+were capable.  But I remain convinced that these fortunate and happy
+individuals (happier perhaps than they guessed) did not and do not
+constitute a majority, or anything like a majority.  I remain convinced
+that the majority of decent average conscientious men of business (men
+with aspirations and ideals) do not as a rule go home of a night
+genuinely tired.  I remain convinced that they put not as much but as
+little of themselves as they conscientiously can into the earning of a
+livelihood, and that their vocation bores rather than interests them.
+
+Nevertheless, I admit that the minority is of sufficient importance to
+merit attention, and that I ought not to have ignored it so completely
+as I did do.  The whole difficulty of the hard-working minority was put
+in a single colloquial sentence by one of my correspondents.  He wrote:
+"I am just as keen as anyone on doing something to 'exceed my
+programme,' but allow me to tell you that when I get home at six thirty
+p.m. I am not anything like so fresh as you seem to imagine."
+
+Now I must point out that the case of the minority, who throw
+themselves with passion and gusto into their daily business task, is
+infinitely less deplorable than the case of the majority, who go
+half-heartedly and feebly through their official day.  The former are
+less in need of advice "how to live."  At any rate during their
+official day of, say, eight hours they are really alive; their engines
+are giving the full indicated "h.p."  The other eight working hours of
+their day may be badly organised, or even frittered away; but it is
+less disastrous to waste eight hours a day than sixteen hours a day; it
+is better to have lived a bit than never to have lived at all. The real
+tragedy is the tragedy of the man who is braced to effort neither in
+the office nor out of it, and to this man this book is primarily
+addressed.  "But," says the other and more fortunate man, "although my
+ordinary programme is bigger than his, I want to exceed my programme
+too!  I am living a bit; I want to live more. But I really can't do
+another day's work on the top of my official day."
+
+The fact is, I, the author, ought to have foreseen that I should appeal
+most strongly to those who already had an interest in existence.  It is
+always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.  And it is
+always the man who never gets out of bed who is the most difficult to
+rouse.
+
+Well, you of the minority, let us assume that the intensity of your
+daily money-getting will not allow you to carry out quite all the
+suggestions in the following pages.  Some of the suggestions may yet
+stand.  I admit that you may not be able to use the time spent on the
+journey home at night; but the suggestion for the journey to the office
+in the morning is as practicable for you as for anybody. And that
+weekly interval of forty hours, from Saturday to Monday, is yours just
+as much as the other man's, though a slight accumulation of fatigue may
+prevent you from employing the whole of your "h.p." upon it.  There
+remains, then, the important portion of the three or more evenings a
+week.  You tell me flatly that you are too tired to do anything outside
+your programme at night.  In reply to which I tell you flatly that if
+your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your
+life is wrong and must be adjusted.  A man's powers ought not to be
+monopolised by his ordinary day's work. What, then, is to be done?
+
+The obvious thing to do is to circumvent your ardour for your ordinary
+day's work by a ruse. Employ your engines in something beyond the
+programme before, and not after, you employ them on the programme
+itself.  Briefly, get up earlier in the morning.  You say you cannot.
+You say it is impossible for you to go earlier to bed of a night--to do
+so would upset the entire household.  I do not think it is quite
+impossible to go to bed earlier at night.  I think that if you persist
+in rising earlier, and the consequence is insufficiency of sleep, you
+will soon find a way of going to bed earlier.  But my impression is
+that the consequences of rising earlier will not be an insufficiency of
+sleep.  My impression, growing stronger every year, is that sleep is
+partly a matter of habit--and of slackness.  I am convinced that most
+people sleep as long as they do because they are at a loss for any
+other diversion. How much sleep do you think is daily obtained by the
+powerful healthy man who daily rattles up your street in charge of
+Carter Patterson's van?  I have consulted a doctor on this point.  He
+is a doctor who for twenty-four years has had a large general practice
+in a large flourishing suburb of London, inhabited by exactly such
+people as you and me.  He is a curt man, and his answer was curt:
+
+"Most people sleep themselves stupid."
+
+He went on to give his opinion that nine men out of ten would have
+better health and more fun out of life if they spent less time in bed.
+
+Other doctors have confirmed this judgment, which, of course, does not
+apply to growing youths.
+
+Rise an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours earlier; and--if
+you must--retire earlier when you can.  In the matter of exceeding
+programmes, you will accomplish as much in one morning hour as in two
+evening hours.  "But," you say, "I couldn't begin without some food,
+and servants."  Surely, my dear sir, in an age when an excellent
+spirit-lamp (including a saucepan) can be bought for less than a
+shilling, you are not going to allow your highest welfare to depend
+upon the precarious immediate co-operation of a fellow creature!
+Instruct the fellow creature, whoever she may be, at night.  Tell her
+to put a tray in a suitable position over night. On that tray two
+biscuits, a cup and saucer, a box of matches and a spirit-lamp; on the
+lamp, the saucepan; on the saucepan, the lid--but turned the wrong way
+up; on the reversed lid, the small teapot, containing a minute quantity
+of tea leaves.  You will then have to strike a match--that is all.  In
+three minutes the water boils, and you pour it into the teapot (which
+is already warm).  In three more minutes the tea is infused.  You can
+begin your day while drinking it.  These details may seem trivial to
+the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial.  The
+proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the
+feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
+
+"Yes, he's one of those men that don't know how to manage. Good
+situation.  Regular income.  Quite enough for luxuries as well as
+needs.  Not really extravagant.  And yet the fellow's always in
+difficulties.  Somehow he gets nothing out of his money.  Excellent
+flat--half empty!  Always looks as if he'd had the brokers in.  New
+suit--old hat!  Magnificent necktie--baggy trousers!  Asks you to
+dinner:  cut glass--bad mutton, or Turkish coffee--cracked cup!  He
+can't understand it.  Explanation simply is that he fritters his income
+away.  Wish I had the half of it! I'd  show him--"
+
+So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our
+superior way.
+
+We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer:  it is the pride of the
+moment.  Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on
+such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose
+violence proves the interest they excite.  Recently, in a daily organ,
+a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in
+the country on L85 a year.  I have seen an essay, "How to live on eight
+shillings a week."  But I have never seen an essay, "How to live on
+twenty-four hours a day."  Yet it has been said that time is money.
+That proverb understates the case.  Time is a great deal more than
+money.  If you have time you can obtain money--usually.  But though you
+have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you
+cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the
+fire has.
+
+
+Philosophers have explained space.  They have not explained time. It is
+the inexplicable raw material of everything.  With it, all is possible;
+without it, nothing.  The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an
+affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.  You wake up in the
+morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours
+of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!  It is
+yours.  It is the most precious of possessions.  A highly singular
+commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity
+itself!
+
+For remark!  No one can take it from you.  It is unstealable.  And no
+one receives either more or less than you receive.
+
+Talk about an ideal democracy!  In the realm of time there is no
+aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect.  Genius is
+never rewarded by even an extra hour a day.  And there is no
+punishment.  Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you
+will, and the supply will never be withheld from you.  No mysterious
+power will say:--"This man is a fool, if not a knave.  He does not
+deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter." It is more certain
+than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays.
+Moreover, you cannot draw on the future.  Impossible to get into debt!
+You can only waste the passing moment.  You cannot waste to-morrow; it
+is kept for you.  You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
+
+I said the affair was a miracle.  Is it not?
+
+You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time.  Out of it
+you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the
+evolution of your immortal soul.  Its right use, its most effective
+use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling
+actuality.  All depends on that.  Your happiness--the elusive prize
+that you are all clutching for, my friends!--depends on that. Strange
+that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are
+not full of "How to live on a given income of time," instead of "How to
+live on a given income of money"!  Money is far commoner than time.
+When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest
+thing there is.  It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.
+
+If one can't contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a
+little more--or steals it, or advertises for it.  One doesn't
+necessarily muddle one's life because one can't quite manage on a
+thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas,
+and balances the budget.  But if one cannot arrange that an income of
+twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of
+expenditure, one does muddle one's life definitely.  The supply of
+time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
+
+
+Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day?  And when I say "lives,"
+I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through."  Which of us is free from
+that uneasy feeling that the "great spending departments" of his daily
+life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure
+that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in
+attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food?
+Which of us is not saying to himself--which of us has not been saying
+to himself all his life:  "I shall alter that when I have a little more
+time"?
+
+We never shall have any more time.  We have, and we have always had,
+all the time there is.  It is the realisation of this profound and
+neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led
+me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.
+
+"But," someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything
+except the point, "what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a
+day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day.  I do
+all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper
+competitions.  Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only
+twenty-four hours a day, to content one's self with twenty-four hours a
+day!"
+
+To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies.  You are
+precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty
+years.  Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your
+charge for telling me how you do it?  Instead of me talking to you, you
+ought to be talking to me. Please come forward.  That you exist, I am
+convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss.
+Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions
+in distress--that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or
+less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and
+slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into
+proper working order.
+
+If we analyse that feeling,  we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one
+of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration.  It
+is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at
+the feast of all our enjoyments.  We go to the theatre and laugh; but
+between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us.  We rush violently
+for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform
+waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our
+side and inquires:  "O man, what hast thou done with thy youth?  What
+art thou doing with thine age?"  You may urge that this feeling of
+continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and
+inseparable from life itself.  True!
+
+But there are degrees.  A man may desire to go to Mecca.  His
+conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca.  He fares forth,
+either by the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may probably never reach
+Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish
+ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain
+eternally frustrate.  Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him.
+But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring
+to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves
+Brixton.
+
+It is something to have left Brixton.  Most of us have not left
+Brixton.  We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired
+from Cook's the price of a conducted tour.  And our excuse to ourselves
+is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.
+
+If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think,
+see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in
+addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to
+do.  We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to
+maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to
+pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our
+efficiency.  A task sufficiently difficult!  A task which very few of
+us achieve!  A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it,
+as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.
+
+And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our
+powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented
+if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to
+do.
+
+And such is, indeed, the fact.  The wish to accomplish something
+outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course
+of evolution have risen past a certain level.
+
+Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy
+waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to
+disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been called by many names.
+It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge.  And it is so
+strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic
+acquirement of knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits
+of their programme in search of still more knowledge.  Even Herbert
+Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind that ever lived, was often
+forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of inquiry.
+
+I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish
+to live--that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the
+aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape.  They
+would like to embark on a course of reading. Decidedly the British
+people are becoming more and more literary. But I would point out that
+literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that
+the disturbing thirst to improve one's self--to increase one's
+knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart from literature.  With the
+various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to
+those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is
+not the only well.
+
+Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to
+admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed
+dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that
+the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling
+that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to
+do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have "more
+time"; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring,
+dazzling truth that you never will have "more time," since you already
+have all the time there is--you expect me to let you into some
+wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a
+perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting,
+unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid
+of!
+
+I have found no such wonderful secret.  Nor do I expect to find it, nor
+do I expect that anyone else will ever find it.  It is undiscovered.
+When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a
+resurrection of hope in your breast.  Perhaps you said to yourself,
+"This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so
+long in vain wished to do."  Alas, no!  The fact is that there is no
+easy way, no royal road.  The path to Mecca is extremely hard and
+stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.
+
+The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so
+that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of
+twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of
+the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.  I
+cannot too strongly insist on this.
+
+If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by
+ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper,
+you had better give up hope at once.  If you are not prepared for
+discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a
+small result for a big effort, then do not begin.  Lie down again and
+resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.
+
+It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre?  And yet I think
+it is rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the
+will before anything worth doing can be done.  I rather like it myself.
+I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by
+the fire.
+
+"Well," you say, "assume that I am braced for the battle.  Assume that
+I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how
+do I begin?"  Dear sir, you simply begin.  There is no magic method of
+beginning.  If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and
+wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, "How do I begin to
+jump?" you would merely reply, "Just jump. Take hold of your nerves,
+and jump."
+
+As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply
+of time is that you cannot waste it in advance.  The next year, the
+next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as
+unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in
+all your career.  Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring.  You
+can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object
+is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow.  You may
+fancy that the water will be warmer next week.  It won't.  It will be
+colder.
+
+But before you begin, let me murmur a few words of warning in your
+private ear.
+
+Let me principally warn you against your own ardour.  Ardour in
+well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing.  It cries out
+loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and
+more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers.
+It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels
+the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies,
+without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough
+of this."
+
+Beware of undertaking too much at the start.  Be content with quite a
+little. Allow for accidents.  Allow for human nature, especially your
+own.
+
+A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a
+loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence.  But just as nothing
+succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure.  Most people who
+are ruined are ruined by attempting too much.  Therefore, in setting
+out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfortably within
+the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost
+the risk of an early failure.  I will not agree that, in this business
+at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success.  I am
+all for the petty success.  A glorious failure leads to nothing; a
+petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.
+
+So let us begin to examine the budget of the day's time. You say your
+day is already full to overflowing.  How?  You actually spend in
+earning your livelihood--how much?  Seven hours, on the average? And in
+actual sleep, seven?  I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will
+defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight
+hours.
+
+In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure
+in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination.
+I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average
+case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as there
+is no such man as the average man. Every man and every man's case is
+special.
+
+But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose
+office hours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning
+and night in travelling between his house door and his office door, I
+shall have got as near to the average as facts permit.  There are men
+who have to work longer for a living, but there are others who do not
+have to work so long.
+
+Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here;
+for our present purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well
+off as the millionaire in Carlton House-terrace.
+
+Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard
+to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates
+and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests.  In the majority
+of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at
+best he does not dislike it.  He begins his business functions with
+reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as
+he can.  And his engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom
+at their full "h.p."  (I know that I shall be accused by angry readers
+of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughly acquainted
+with the City, and I stick to what I say.)
+
+Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from
+ten to six as "the day," to which the ten hours preceding them and the
+six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.  Such
+an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in
+the odd sixteen hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste
+them, he does not count them; he regards them simply as margin.
+
+This general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy, since it
+formally gives the central prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of
+activities which the man's one idea is to "get through" and have "done
+with."  If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to
+one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how
+can he hope to live fully and completely?  He cannot.
+
+If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his
+mind, arrange a day within a day.  And this inner day, a Chinese box in
+a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a
+day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing
+whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men.
+During those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is
+not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a
+private income.  This must be his attitude. And his attitude is all
+important.  His success in life (much more important than the amount of
+estate upon what his executors will have to pay estate duty) depends on
+it.
+
+What?  You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will
+lessen the value of the business eight?  Not so.  On the contrary, it
+will assuredly increase the value of the business eight.  One of the
+chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental
+faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire
+like an arm or a leg.  All they want is change--not rest, except in
+sleep.
+
+I shall now examine the typical man's current method of employing the
+sixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his uprising.  I
+will merely indicate things which he does and which I think he ought
+not to do, postponing my suggestions for "planting" the times which I
+shall have cleared--as a settler clears spaces in a forest.
+
+In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before he
+leaves the house in the morning at 9.10.  In too many houses he gets up
+at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and 9.9 1/2, and then bolts. But
+immediately he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which are
+tireless, become idle.  He walks to the station in a condition of
+mental coma.  Arrived there, he usually has to wait for the train.  On
+hundreds of suburban stations every morning you see men calmly
+strolling up and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly
+rob them of time, which is more than money.  Hundreds of thousands of
+hours are thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so
+little of time that it has never occurred to him to take quite easy
+precautions against the risk of its loss.
+
+He has a solid coin of time to spend every day--call it a sovereign. He
+must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to lose
+heavily.
+
+Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, "We will
+change you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for
+doing so," what would my typical man exclaim?  Yet that is the
+equivalent of what the company does when it robs him of five minutes
+twice a day.
+
+You say I am dealing with minutiae.  I am.  And later on I will justify
+myself.
+
+Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train?
+
+You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and
+majestically give yourself up to your newspaper.  You do not hurry.
+You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you.
+As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of
+songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man,
+wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred
+and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four.  I am an
+impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French
+dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly.
+I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of
+a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading
+of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with
+rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily
+programme for newspapers.  I read them as I may in odd moments. But I
+do read them.  The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive
+minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly
+immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent,
+withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant.  I cannot possibly allow
+you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness.
+You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you
+have no more time than I have.  No newspaper reading in trains!  I have
+already "put by" about three-quarters of an hour for use.
+
+Now you reach your office.  And I abandon you there till six o'clock.
+I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour
+and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is
+given to eating.  But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose.
+You may read your newspapers then.
+
+I meet you again as you emerge from your office.  You are pale and
+tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to
+understand that you are tired.  During the journey home you have been
+gradually working up the tired feeling.  The tired feeling hangs heavy
+over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud,
+particularly in winter.  You don't eat immediately on your arrival
+home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and
+take a little nourishment.  And you do.  Then you smoke, seriously; you
+see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you
+note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the
+piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty
+minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you
+are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky.  At last you go to bed,
+exhausted by the day's work.  Six hours, probably more, have gone since
+you left the office--gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably
+gone!
+
+That is a fair sample case.  But you say:  "It's all very well for you
+to talk. A man _is_ tired.  A man must see his friends.  He can't
+always be on the stretch."  Just so.  But when you arrange to go to the
+theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the
+suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment;
+you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the
+stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take
+yourself home.  You don't spend three-quarters of an hour in "thinking
+about" going to bed.  You go.  Friends and fatigue have equally been
+forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps
+too short)!  And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to
+sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two
+hours every other night for three months?  Can you deny that when you
+have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that
+is to employ all your energy--the thought of that something gives a
+glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?
+
+What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and
+admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that
+you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal.
+By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours.  I
+do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your
+life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might,
+for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in
+some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.  You will still
+be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic
+scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize
+competitions.  You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five
+hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday.  If you persevere you
+will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some
+sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of
+that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking
+about going to bed."  The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes
+before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not
+living.
+
+But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a
+week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty.
+They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a
+tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but
+I have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to
+work."  This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say.  Tennis is so
+much more urgent than the immortal soul.
+
+I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four hours
+between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to
+business at 10 a.m. on Monday.  And here I must touch on the point
+whether the week should consist of six days or of seven.  For many
+years--in fact, until I was approaching forty--my own week consisted of
+seven days.  I was constantly being informed by older and wiser people
+that more work, more genuine living, could be got out of six days than
+out of seven.
+
+And it is certainly true that now, with one day in seven in which I
+follow no programme and make no effort save what the caprice of the
+moment dictates, I appreciate intensely the moral value of a weekly
+rest.  Nevertheless, had I my life to arrange over again, I would do
+again as I have done.  Only those who have lived at the full stretch
+seven days a week for a long time can appreciate the full beauty of a
+regular recurring idleness.  Moreover, I am ageing.  And it is a
+question of age.  In cases of abounding youth and exceptional energy
+and desire for effort I should say unhesitatingly:  Keep going, day in,
+day out.
+
+But in the average case I should say:  Confine your formal programme
+(super-programme, I mean) to six days a week.  If you find yourself
+wishing to extend it, extend it, but only in proportion to your wish;
+and count the time extra as a windfall, not as regular income, so that
+you can return to a six-day programme without the sensation of being
+poorer, of being a backslider.
+
+Let us now see where we stand.  So far we have marked for saving out of
+the waste of days, half an hour at least on six mornings a week, and
+one hour and a half on three evenings a week.  Total, seven hours and a
+half a week.
+
+I propose to be content with that seven hours and a half for the
+present.  "What?" you cry.  "You pretend to show us how to live, and
+you only deal with seven hours and a half out of a hundred and
+sixty-eight!  Are you going to perform a miracle with your seven hours
+and a half?"  Well, not to mince the matter, I am--if you will kindly
+let me!  That is to say, I am going to ask you to attempt an experience
+which, while perfectly natural and explicable, has all the air of a
+miracle.  My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half
+hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and
+increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal
+occupations.  You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes
+morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical
+health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day,
+and your whole physical outlook changed.  Why should you be astonished
+that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should
+permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind?
+
+More time might assuredly be given to the cultivation of one's self.
+And in proportion as the time was longer the results would be greater.
+But I prefer to begin with what looks like a trifling effort.
+
+It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet
+to essay it.  To "clear" even seven hours and a half from the jungle is
+passably difficult.  For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have
+spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with
+it, however ill-advised that something may have been.  To do something
+else means a change of habits.
+
+And habits are the very dickens to change!  Further, any change, even a
+change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and
+discomforts.  If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven
+hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live
+your old life, you are mistaken.  I repeat that some sacrifice, and an
+immense deal of volition, will be necessary.  And it is because I know
+the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of
+failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble
+beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the
+root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately
+planned deals a desperate wound at one's self-respect.  Hence I iterate
+and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously.
+
+When you have conscientiously given seven hours and a half a week to
+the cultivation of your vitality for three months--then you may begin
+to sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you are capable
+of doing.
+
+Before coming to the method of using the indicated hours, I have one
+final suggestion to make.  That is, as regards the evenings, to allow
+much more than an hour and a half in which to do the work of an hour
+and a half.  Remember the chance of accidents.  Remember human nature.
+And give yourself, say, from 9 to 11.30 for your task of ninety minutes.
+
+People say:  "One can't help one's thoughts."  But one can.  The
+control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible.  And since
+nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing
+hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme
+importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious
+brain is patent.  This idea is one of the oldest platitudes, but it is
+a platitude whose profound truth and urgency most people live and die
+without realising.  People complain of the lack of power to
+concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if they
+choose.
+
+And without the power to concentrate--that is to say, without the power
+to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience--true life is
+impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
+
+Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put
+the mind through its paces.  You look after your body, inside and out;
+you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole
+army of individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you
+to bribe your stomach into decent behaviour. Why not devote a little
+attention to the far more delicate machinery of the mind, especially as
+you will require no extraneous aid?  It is for this portion of the art
+and craft of living that I have reserved the time from the moment of
+quitting your door to the moment of arriving at your office.
+
+"What?  I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the platform, in
+the train, and in the crowded street again?"  Precisely.  Nothing
+simpler! No tools required!  Not even a book.  Nevertheless, the affair
+is not easy.
+
+When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no
+matter what, to begin with).  You will not have gone ten yards before
+your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round
+the corner with another subject.
+
+Bring it back by the scruff of the neck.  Ere you have reached the
+station you will have brought it back about forty times.  Do not
+despair.  Continue. Keep it up.  You will succeed.  You cannot by any
+chance fail if you persevere.  It is idle to pretend that your mind is
+incapable of concentration. Do you not remember that morning when you
+received a disquieting letter which demanded a very carefully-worded
+answer?  How you kept your mind steadily on the subject of the answer,
+without a second's intermission, until you reached your office;
+whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the answer?  That was a case
+in which _you_ were roused by circumstances to such a degree of
+vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant. You
+would have no trifling.  You insisted that its work should be done, and
+its work was done.
+
+By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no
+secret--save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over your
+mind (which is not the highest part of _you_) every hour of the day,
+and in no matter what place.  The exercise is a very convenient one.
+If you got into your morning train with a pair of dumb-bells for your
+muscles or an encyclopaedia in ten volumes for your learning, you would
+probably excite remark.  But as you walk in the street, or sit in the
+corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or "strap-hang" on the
+Subterranean, who is to know that you are engaged in the most important
+of daily acts?  What asinine boor can laugh at you?
+
+I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It
+is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But
+still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate
+on something useful.  I suggest--it is only a suggestion--a little
+chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.
+
+Do not, I beg, shy at their names.  For myself, I know nothing more
+"actual," more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the
+daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose, and
+nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.  Read a chapter--and so
+short they are, the chapters!--in the evening and concentrate on it the
+next morning.  You will see.
+
+Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the fact. I
+can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear.  You are saying to
+yourself:  "This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh
+chapter.  He had begun to interest me faintly.  But what he says about
+thinking in trains, and concentration, and so on, is not for me.  It
+may be well enough for some folks, but it isn't in my line."
+
+It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you.  Indeed, you are
+the very man I am aiming at.
+
+Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most precious
+suggestion that was ever offered to you.  It is not my suggestion. It
+is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who
+have walked the earth.  I only give it you at second-hand. Try it.  Get
+your mind in hand.  And see how the process cures half the evils of
+life--especially worry, that miserable, avoidable, shameful
+disease--worry!
+
+The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour
+a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano.
+Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one's complex
+organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke. Useless to possess
+an obedient mind unless one profits to the furthest possible degree by
+its obedience.  A prolonged primary course of study is indicated.
+
+Now as to what this course of study should be there cannot be any
+question; there never has been any question.  All the sensible people
+of all ages are agreed upon it.  And it is not literature, nor is it
+any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the
+study of one's self.  Man, know thyself.  These words are so hackneyed
+that verily I blush to write them. Yet they must be written, for they
+need to be written.  (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.)  Man,
+know thyself.  I say it out loud.  The phrase is one of those phrases
+with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the
+value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice.  I don't
+know why.  I am entirely convinced that what is more than anything else
+lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man of to-day is
+the reflective mood.
+
+We do not reflect.  I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely
+important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main
+direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon
+the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and
+upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.
+
+And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not?  Have you
+discovered it?
+
+The chances are that you have not.  The chances are that you have
+already come to believe that happiness is unattainable.  But men have
+attained it. And they have attained it by realising that happiness does
+not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from
+the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
+
+I suppose that you will not have the audacity to deny this.  And if you
+admit it, and still devote no part of your day to the deliberate
+consideration of your reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also
+that while striving for a certain thing you are regularly leaving
+undone the one act which is necessary to the attainment of that thing.
+
+Now, shall I blush, or will you?
+
+Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your
+attention.  I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your
+principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary.
+I don't mind.  All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not
+fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct
+can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily
+examination, reflection, and resolution.  What leads to the permanent
+sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to
+burglary.  If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of
+burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for
+them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles
+agree.
+
+As for reason (which makes conduct, and is not unconnected with the
+making of principles), it plays a far smaller part in our lives than we
+fancy.  We are supposed to be reasonable but we are much more
+instinctive than reasonable. And the less we reflect, the less
+reasonable we shall be.  The next time you get cross with the waiter
+because your steak is over-cooked, ask reason to step into the
+cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her.  She will probably tell you
+that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control over the
+cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you
+accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your
+dignity, looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the
+waiter, while producing no effect whatever on the steak.
+
+The result of this consultation with reason (for which she makes no
+charge) will be that when once more your steak is over-cooked you will
+treat the waiter as a fellow-creature, remain quite calm in a kindly
+spirit, and politely insist on having a fresh steak.  The gain will be
+obvious and solid.
+
+In the formation or modification of principles, and the practice of
+conduct, much help can be derived from printed books (issued at
+sixpence each and upwards).  I mentioned in my last chapter Marcus
+Aurelius and Epictetus. Certain even more widely known works will occur
+at once to the memory. I may also mention Pascal, La Bruyere, and
+Emerson.  For myself, you do not catch me travelling without my Marcus
+Aurelius.  Yes, books are valuable.  But not reading of books will take
+the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has
+recently done, and what one is about to do--of a steady looking at
+one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be).
+
+When shall this important business be accomplished?  The solitude of
+the evening journey home appears to me to be suitable for it.  A
+reflective mood naturally follows the exertion of having earned the
+day's living. Of course if, instead of attending to an elementary and
+profoundly important duty, you prefer to read the paper (which you
+might just as well read while waiting for your dinner) I have nothing
+to say.  But attend to it at some time of the day you must. I now come
+to the evening hours.
+
+Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in
+the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to
+idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a
+taste for literature.  This is a great mistake.
+
+Of course it is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, properly to
+study anything whatever without the aid of printed books.  But if you
+desire to understand the deeper depths of bridge or of boat-sailing you
+would not be deterred by your lack of interest in literature from
+reading the best books on bridge or boat-sailing. We must, therefore,
+distinguish between literature, and books treating of subjects not
+literary.  I shall come to literature in due course.
+
+Let me now remark to those who have never read Meredith, and who are
+capable of being unmoved by a discussion as to whether Mr. Stephen
+Phillips is or is not a true poet, that they are perfectly within their
+rights. It is not a crime not to love literature.  It is not a sign of
+imbecility.  The mandarins of literature will order out to instant
+execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the
+influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson.  But that is only their impudence.
+Where would they be, I wonder, if requested to explain the influences
+that went to make Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic Symphony"?
+
+There are enormous fields of knowledge quite outside literature which
+will yield magnificent results to cultivators.  For example (since I
+have just mentioned the most popular piece of high-class music in
+England to-day), I am reminded that the Promenade Concerts begin in
+August. You go to them.  You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I
+regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the
+"Lohengrin" overture), and you enjoy the music.  But you say you cannot
+play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing
+of music.
+
+What does that matter?  That you have a genuine taste for music is
+proved by the fact that, in order to fill his hall with you and your
+peers, the conductor is obliged to provide programmes from which bad
+music is almost entirely excluded (a change from the old Covent Garden
+days!).
+
+Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's Prayer" on a piano
+need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the
+construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a
+week during a couple of months!  As things are, you probably think of
+the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a
+confused agreeable mass of sound.  You do not listen for details
+because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
+
+If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme at
+the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for your
+life's sake.  Yet you admire the C minor symphony.  It has thrilled
+you.  It will thrill you again.  You have even talked about it, in an
+expansive mood, to that lady--you know whom I mean.  And all you can
+positively state about the C minor symphony is that Beethoven composed
+it and that it is a "jolly fine thing."
+
+Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music"
+(which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a
+stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the
+orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you
+would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing
+intensification of interest in it.  Instead of a confused mass, the
+orchestra would appear to you as what it is--a marvellously balanced
+organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an
+indispensable function.  You would spy out the instruments, and listen
+for their respective sounds.  You would know the gulf that separates a
+French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player
+of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is
+the more difficult instrument.  You would _live_ at a promenade
+concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of
+beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.
+
+The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music might be
+laid. You might specialise your inquiries either on a particular form
+of music (such as the symphony), or on the works of a particular
+composer.  At the end of a year of forty-eight weeks of three brief
+evenings each, combined with a study of programmes and attendances at
+concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you would really know
+something about music, even though you were as far off as ever from
+jangling "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano.
+
+"But I hate music!" you say.  My dear sir, I respect you.
+
+What applies to music applies to the other arts.  I might mention Mr.
+Clermont Witt's "How to Look at Pictures," or Mr. Russell Sturgis's
+"How to Judge Architecture," as beginnings (merely beginnings) of
+systematic vitalising knowledge in other arts, the materials for whose
+study abound in London.
+
+"I hate all the arts!" you say.  My dear sir, I respect you more and
+more.
+
+I will deal with your case next, before coming to literature.
+
+Art is a great thing.  But it is not the greatest.  The most important
+of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect--in
+other words, the perception of the continuous development of the
+universe--in still other words, the perception of the course of
+evolution.  When one has thoroughly got imbued into one's head the
+leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only
+large-minded, but large-hearted.
+
+It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief
+of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment
+which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and
+one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy
+that makes bitterness impossible.  One loses, in the study of cause and
+effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always
+shocked and pained by the curiousness of life.  Such people live amid
+human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful
+foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be
+ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!
+
+The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of
+life, adds to life's picturesqueness.  The man to whom evolution is but
+a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he
+can witness in August for three shillings third-class return.  The man
+who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and
+effect, perceives in the sea an element which in the
+day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday was
+boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
+
+He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be solid,
+and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful
+picturesqueness of life.  Nothing will afford a more durable
+satisfaction than the constantly cultivated appreciation of this. It is
+the end of all science.
+
+Cause and effect are to be found everywhere.  Rents went up in
+Shepherd's Bush.  It was painful and shocking that rents should go up
+in Shepherd's Bush.  But to a certain point we are all scientific
+students of cause and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at a
+Lyons Restaurant who did not scientifically put two and two together
+and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the cause of an excessive demand
+for wigwams in Shepherd's Bush, and in the excessive demand for wigwams
+the cause of the increase in the price of wigwams.
+
+"Simple!" you say, disdainfully.  Everything--the whole complex
+movement of the universe--is as simple as that--when you can
+sufficiently put two and two together.  And, my dear sir, perhaps you
+happen to be an estate agent's clerk, and you hate the arts, and you
+want to foster your immortal soul, and you can't be interested in your
+business because it's so humdrum.
+
+Nothing is humdrum.
+
+The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown
+in an estate agent's office.  What!  There was a block of traffic in
+Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under
+the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in
+Shepherd's Bush!  And you say that isn't picturesque! Suppose you were
+to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour
+and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your
+business, and transform your whole life?
+
+You would arrive at more difficult problems.  And you would be able to
+tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest
+straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while
+the longest absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles.  I
+think you will admit that in an estate agent's clerk I have not chosen
+an example that specially favours my theories.
+
+You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance
+(disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street"?
+Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for
+ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would
+be to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.
+
+You are "penned in town," but you love excursions to the country and
+the observation of wild life--certainly a heart-enlarging diversion.
+Why don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the
+nearest gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild
+life of common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate
+the knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at
+last get to know something about something?
+
+You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to
+live fully.
+
+The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that
+curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an
+understanding heart.
+
+I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature,
+and I have dealt with it.  I now come to the case of the person,
+happily very common, who does "like reading."
+
+Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who, bent
+on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three
+times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will
+be well advised to alter his plans.  The reason is not that novels are
+not serious--some of the great literature of the world is in the form
+of prose fiction--the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read,
+and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on
+the part of the reader. It is only the bad parts of Meredith's novels
+that are difficult.  A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down
+a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but
+unexhausted.  The best novels involve the least strain.  Now in the
+cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely
+the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you
+is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and
+that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel.  You do not set your
+teeth in order to read "Anna Karenina."  Therefore, though you should
+read novels, you should not read them in those ninety minutes.
+
+Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It
+produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is
+the highest form of literature.  It yields the highest form of
+pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom.  In a word, there is
+nothing to compare with it.  I say this with sad consciousness of the
+fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.
+
+I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted
+with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going round
+Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose
+the ordeal of public ridicule.  Still, I will never cease advising my
+friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
+
+If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading
+Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general."  It is the
+best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can
+possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval
+torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and
+kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental
+state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently
+desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal.  If the essay so
+inspires you I would suggest that you make a commencement with purely
+narrative poetry.
+
+There is an infinitely finer English novel, written by a woman, than
+anything by George Eliot or the Brontes, or even Jane Austen, which
+perhaps you have not read.  Its title is "Aurora Leigh," and its author
+E.B. Browning.  It happens to be written in verse, and to contain a
+considerable amount of genuinely fine poetry.  Decide to read that book
+through, even if you die for it.  Forget that it is fine poetry. Read
+it simply for the story and the social ideas.  And when you have done,
+ask yourself honestly whether you still dislike poetry. I have known
+more than one person to whom "Aurora Leigh" has been the means of
+proving that in assuming they hated poetry they were entirely mistaken.
+
+Of course, if, after Hazlitt, and such an experiment made in the light
+of Hazlitt, you are finally assured that there is something in you
+which is antagonistic to poetry, you must be content with history or
+philosophy. I shall regret it, yet not inconsolably. "The Decline and
+Fall" is not to be named in the same day with "Paradise Lost," but it
+is a vastly pretty thing; and Herbert Spencer's "First Principles"
+simply laughs at the claims of poetry and refuses to be accepted as
+aught but the most majestic product of any human mind.  I do not
+suggest that either of these works is suitable for a tyro in mental
+strains.  But I see no reason why any man of average intelligence
+should not, after a year of continuous reading, be fit to assault the
+supreme masterpieces of history or philosophy.  The great convenience
+of masterpieces is that they are so astonishingly lucid.
+
+I suggest no particular work as a start.  The attempt would be futile
+in the space of my command.  But I have two general suggestions of a
+certain importance.  The first is to define the direction and scope of
+your efforts. Choose a limited period, or a limited subject, or a
+single author.  Say to yourself:  "I will know something about the
+French Revolution, or the rise of railways, or the works of John
+Keats."  And during a given period, to be settled beforehand, confine
+yourself to your choice.  There is much pleasure to be derived from
+being a specialist.
+
+The second suggestion is to think as well as to read.  I know people
+who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as
+well cut bread-and-butter.  They take to reading as better men take to
+drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their
+sole object being motion.  They will tell you how many books they have
+read in a year.
+
+Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing
+reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading,
+your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.  This means that
+your pace will be slow.
+
+Never mind.
+
+Forget the goal; think only of the surrounding country; and after a
+period, perhaps when you least expect it, you will suddenly find
+yourself in a lovely town on a hill.
+
+I cannot terminate these hints, often, I fear, too didactic and abrupt,
+upon the full use of one's time to the great end of living (as
+distinguished from vegetating) without briefly referring to certain
+dangers which lie in wait for the sincere aspirant towards life.  The
+first is the terrible danger of becoming that most odious and least
+supportable of persons--a prig. Now a prig is a pert fellow who gives
+himself airs of superior wisdom. A prig is a pompous fool who has gone
+out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important
+part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour.  A prig is a tedious
+individual who, having made a discovery, is so impressed by his
+discovery that he is capable of being gravely displeased because the
+entire world is not also impressed by it. Unconsciously to become a
+prig is an easy and a fatal thing.
+
+Hence, when one sets forth on the enterprise of using all one's time,
+it is just as well to remember that one's own time, and not other
+people's time, is the material with which one has to deal; that the
+earth rolled on pretty comfortably before one began to balance a budget
+of the hours, and that it will continue to roll on pretty comfortably
+whether or not one succeeds in one's new role of chancellor of the
+exchequer of time.  It is as well not to chatter too much about what
+one is doing, and not to betray a too-pained sadness at the spectacle
+of a whole world deliberately wasting so many hours out of every day,
+and therefore never really living.  It will be found, ultimately, that
+in taking care of one's self one has quite all one can do.
+
+Another danger is the danger of being tied to a programme like a slave
+to a chariot.  One's programme must not be allowed to run away with
+one. It must be respected, but it must not be worshipped as a fetish.
+A programme of daily employ is not a religion.
+
+This seems obvious.  Yet I know men whose lives are a burden to
+themselves and a distressing burden to their relatives and friends
+simply because they have failed to appreciate the obvious.  "Oh, no," I
+have heard the martyred wife exclaim, "Arthur always takes the dog out
+for exercise at eight o'clock and he always begins to read at a quarter
+to nine.  So it's quite out of the question that we should..." etc.,
+etc.  And the note of absolute finality in that plaintive voice reveals
+the unsuspected and ridiculous tragedy of a career.
+
+On the other hand, a programme is a programme.  And unless it is
+treated with deference it ceases to be anything but a poor joke.  To
+treat one's programme with exactly the right amount of deference, to
+live with not too much and not too little elasticity, is scarcely the
+simple affair it may appear to the inexperienced.
+
+And still another danger is the danger of developing a policy of rush,
+of being gradually more and more obsessed by what one has to do next.
+In this way one may come to exist as in a prison, and one's life may
+cease to be one's own.  One may take the dog out for a walk at eight
+o'clock, and meditate the whole time on the fact that one must begin to
+read at a quarter to nine, and that one must not be late.
+
+And the occasional deliberate breaking of one's programme will not help
+to mend matters.  The evil springs not from persisting without
+elasticity in what one has attempted, but from originally attempting
+too much, from filling one's programme till it runs over.  The only
+cure is to reconstitute the programme, and to attempt less.
+
+But the appetite for knowledge grows by what it feeds on, and there are
+men who come to like a constant breathless hurry of endeavour. Of them
+it may be said that a constant breathless hurry is better than an
+eternal doze.
+
+In any case, if the programme exhibits a tendency to be oppressive, and
+yet one wishes not to modify it, an excellent palliative is to pass
+with exaggerated deliberation from one portion of it to another; for
+example, to spend five minutes in perfect mental quiescence between
+chaining up the St. Bernard and opening the book; in other words, to
+waste five minutes with the entire consciousness of wasting them.
+
+The last, and chiefest danger which I would indicate, is one to which I
+have already referred--the risk of a failure at the commencement of the
+enterprise.
+
+I must insist on it.
+
+A failure at the commencement may easily kill outright the newborn
+impulse towards a complete vitality, and therefore every precaution
+should be observed to avoid it.  The impulse must not be over-taxed.
+Let the pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as
+regular as possible.
+
+And, having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all
+costs of tedium and distaste.  The gain in self-confidence of having
+accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
+
+Finally, in choosing the first occupations of those evening hours, be
+guided by nothing whatever but your taste and natural inclination.
+
+It is a fine thing to be a walking encyclopaedia of philosophy, but if
+you happen to have no liking for philosophy, and to have a like for the
+natural history of street-cries, much better leave philosophy alone,
+and take to street-cries.