ed
to the use of it; one is that we should have our own wholesome work in
the world, and the second that we should not grow too wholly absorbed
in labour.

No great moral leaders and inspirers of men have ever laid stress on
excessive labour. They have accepted work as one of the normal
conditions of life, but their whole effort has been to teach men to
look away from work, to find leisure to be happy and good. There is no
essential merit in work, apart from its necessity. Of course men may
find themselves in positions where it seems hard to avoid a fierce
absorption in work. It is said by legislators that the House of
Commons, for instance, is a place where one can neither work nor rest!
And I have heard busy men in high administrative office, deplore
rhetorically the fact that they have no time to read or think. It is
almost as unwholesome never to read or think as it is to be always
reading and thinking, because the light and the inspiration fade out
of life, and leave one a gaunt and wolfish lobbyist, who goes about
seeking whom he may indoctrinate. But I have little doubt that when
the world is organised on simpler lines, we shall look back to this
era, as an era when men's heads were turned by work, and when more
unnecessary things were made and done and said than has ever been the
case since the world began.

The essence of happy living is never to find life dull, never to feel
the ugly weariness which comes of overstrain; to be fresh, cheerful,
leisurely, sociable, unhurried, well-balanced. It seems to me that it
is impossible to be these things unless we have time to consider life
a little, to deliberate, to select, to abstain. We must not help
ourselves either to work or to joy as if we were helping ourselves to
potatoes! If life ought not to be perpetual drudgery, neither can it
be a perpetual feast. What I believe we ought to aim at is to put
interest and zest into the simplest acts, words, and relations of
life, to discern the quality of work and people alike. We must not
turn our whole minds and hearts to literature or art or work, or even
to religion; but we must go deeper, and look close at life itself,
which these interpret and out of which they flow. For indeed life is
nobler and richer than any one interpretation of it. Let us take for a
moment one of the great interpreters of life, Robert Browning, who was
so intensely interested above all things in personality. The charm of
his writing is that he