DÉSŒUVREMENT.

Perhaps we ought to apologize for using a foreign label, but there is no one English word which gives the full meaning of désœuvrement. Only paraphrases and accumulations would convey the many subtle shades contained in it; and paraphrases and accumulations are inconvenient as headings. But if we have not the word, we have a great deal of the thing; for désœuvrement is an evil unfortunately not confined to one country nor to one class; and even we, with all our boasted Anglo-Saxon energy, have people among us as unoccupied and purposeless as are to be found elsewhere. Certainly we have nothing like the Neapolitan lazzaroni who pass their lives in dozing in the sun; but that is more because of our climate than our condition, and if our désœuvrés do not doze out of doors, it by no means follows that they are wide awake within.

No state is more unfortunate than this listless want of purpose which has nothing to do, which is interested in nothing, and which has no serious object in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which merely waits and does not even watch, is the most disastrous that a man or woman can possess. Feverish energy, wearing itself out on comparative nothings, is better than the indolence which folds its hands and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most microscopic and restless perception is more healthful than the dull blindness which goes from Dan to Beersheba, and finds all barren.

If even death itself is only a transmutation of forces—an active and energizing change—what can we say of this worse than mental death? How can we characterize a state which is simply stagnation? Not all of us have our work cut out and laid ready for us to do; very many of us have to seek for objects of interest and to create our own employment; and were it not for the energy which makes work by its own force, the world would still be lying in barbarism, content with the skins of beasts for clothing and with wild fruits and roots for food. But the désœuvrés know nothing of the pleasures of energy; consequently none of the luxuries of idleness—only its tedium and monotony. Life is a dull round to them of alternate vacancy and mechanical routine; a blank so dead that active pain and positive sorrow would be better for them than the passionless negation of their existence. They love nothing; they hope for nothing; they work for nothing; to-morrow will be as to-day, and to-day is as yesterday was; it is the mere passing of time which they call living—a moral and mental hybernation broken up by no springtime waking.

Though by no means confined to women only, this disastrous state is nevertheless more frequently found with them than with men. It is comparatively rare that a man—at least an Englishman—is born with so little of the activity which characterizes manhood as to rest content without some kind of object for his life, either in work or in pleasure, in study or in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain in an unending désœuvrement, a listless supineness that has not even sufficient active energy to fret at its own dullness.

We see this kind of thing especially in the families of the poorer class of gentry in the country. If we except the Sunday school and district visiting, neither of which commends itself as a pleasant occupation to all minds—both in fact needing a little more active energy than we find in the purely désœuvré class—what is there for the unmarried daughters of a family to do? There is no question of a profession for any of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and the idea of woman's work for ladies is utterly inadmissible by the English gentleman who can leave a modest sufficiency to his daughters—just enough to live on in the old house and in the old way, without a margin for luxuries, but above anything like positive want. There is no possibility then of an active career in art or literature; of going out as a governess, as a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only home, with the possible and not very probable chance of marriage as the vision of hope in the distant future. And that chance is very small and very remote; for the simple reason—there is no one to marry.

There are the young collegians who come down in reading parties; the group of Bohemian artists, if the place be picturesque and not too far from London; the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals, who has to make his practice out of the poorer and more outlying clientèle of the old and established practitioners of the place. But collegians do not marry, and long engagements are proverbially hazardous; Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to trouble the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor can at the best marry only one apiece of the many who are waiting. The family keeps neither carriages nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life can be carried, with the house for the stake, is simply the three or four miles which the girls can walk out and back. And the visiting list is necessarily comprised within this circle. There is then, absolutely nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is spent in playing over old music, in needlework, in a little desultory reading, such as is supplied by the local book society; all without other object than that of passing the time. The girls have had nothing like a thorough education in anything; they are not specially gifted, and what brains they have are dormant and uncultivated. There is not even enough housework to occupy their time, unless they were to send away the servants. Besides, domestic work of an active kind is vulgar, and gentlemen and gentlewomen do not allow their daughters to do it. They may help in the housekeeping; which means merely giving out the week's supplies on Monday and ordering the dinner on other days, and which is not an hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a little amateur spudding and raking among the flower-beds when the weather is fine, if they care for the garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if they are strong; and this is all that they can do. There they are, four or five well-looking girls perhaps, of marriageable age, fairly healthy and amiable, and with just so much active power as would carry them creditably through any work that was given them to do, but with not enough originative energy to make them create work for themselves out of nothing.

In their quiet uneventful sphere, with the circumscribed radius and the short tether, it would be very difficult for any women but those few who are gifted with unusual energy to create a sufficient human interest; to ordinary young ladies it is impossible. They can but make-believe, even if they try—and they don't try. They can but raise up shadows which they would fain accept as living creatures if they give themselves the trouble to evoke anything at all, and they don't give themselves the trouble. They simply live on from day to day in a state of mental somnolency—hopeless, désœuvrées, inactive; just drifting down the smooth slow current of time, with not a ripple nor an eddy by the way.

Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society and live in a self-made desert apart though in the midst of the very vortex of life, are alike in the matter of désœuvrement; and we find exactly the same history with them as we find with their country cousins, though apparently their circumstances are so different. They cannot work and they may not play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look at the outside of things—to make one of the fringe of spectators lining the streets and windows on a show day, and this but seldom; or to go once or twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they too just lounge through their life, and pass from girlhood to old age in utter désœuvrement and want of object. Year by year the lines about their eyes deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow paler; while the cherished secret romance which even the dullest life contains gets a colour of its own by age, and a firmness of outline by continual dwelling on, which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was a dream built on a tone, a look, a word—may be it was only a half-evolved fancy without any basis whatever—but the imagination of the poor désœuvrée has clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity would have destroyed.

This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable past is part of the désœuvrée condition in the present. People who have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and désœuvrement is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be found.

The désœuvrée woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle. Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amusement in which she indulges. For désœuvrement has that fatal reflex action which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio with its duration.

Women of this class want taking in hand by the stronger and more energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for being farmed out; and désœuvrées women especially want extraneous guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make. An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the désœuvrés members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and adventitious support, it is under another name.

The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish; he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in the Times, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand, the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and go to bed as the clock strikes ten.

This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means désœuvrement; leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies, is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his desk or his counter—back to business and something to do. He wonders, on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is better to wear out than to rust out; that désœuvrement is a worse state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a nobler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:—whereof the main object is how best to get rid of time.