Idleness and dawdling

Wednesday, January 24th., Cadogan Sqaure, London.

I find that I am not yet out of the wood of my recent article on Balzac wherein I asserted that work did not kill people. Mr James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, has emerged on a weekday with a most scandalous article about this. In calling the article scandalous I refer to its anti-work attitude, not to its personalities which are merely the product of Douglas's characteristic undisciplined didacticism, are innocuous and even touching. I have crossed swords with Douglas before. He it was who called for an immediate ban on "The Well of Loneliness" stating that "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body but moral poison kills the soul." This was an act of stunt journalism, typical of the Sunday Express, which appalled many notable figures in the literary world, myself includud.

Douglas says that people are killed by work. He talks of 'work addicts' who work 'right around the clock', their arteries hardened, their blood pressure high, their heart muscles enfeebled. I have not met one. Nor had I lunatics in mind when I made my assertion. Douglas claims that Dickens died of work. He did not. Dickens, of a very histrionic temperament, had a passion for exhibiting himself, which passion, together with his passion for money, led him to give incessant readings. He continued to give readings even when his health was such that he had to be followed about by a doctor. It was addiction to readings and a scramble for money that killed him. Dickens could have done his work easily enough if he had kept his energy for his work. He didn't. Trollope worked harder than Dickens, and work did not kill Trollope.

If authors die too soon, the reason is that they have not learnt how to live. Few authors know how to treat their bodies sensibly. Witness the number of them who wake uip exhausted and cannot even begin to work until the afternoon: sure proof of an idiotic way of life. Balzac for example. For myself I have not worked in the evening for over a quarter of a century. Nor would I. Some will say that they await inspiration and must work when it is upon them. I say they are self-excusers and fundamentally disorganised.

Douglas's article is scandalous because it is an apology for idleness and dawdling, the sins of an age which exults in cocktails and bed at 2 a.m., after a wanton waste of four to six hours of eternity; an age whose great schools and universities frown on work. Mr Julian Hall in a recently published book endorses H G Wells' phrase about 'the waste of seriousness' at our ancient universities. Hall says that youth is sceptical and that "the sceptic has no sense of certain activities having more claim on him than others." A rather profound remark! There is a difference between work and play, and the latter is relatively unimportant, though not,it seems, to Mr James Douglas.

About the word 'motivate'. I used it last week and have been vituperated for using it by classical scholars, authors, journalists and members of the learned professions. They throw doubt on its authenticity and condemn it as ugly. It is not uglier than irritate, descrate, palpitate, procrastinate, or ipecacuanha. As for authenticity, I contend that it is a good English word, that has been in constant use for sixty years at least, that there is no alternative verb, and that I propose to go on using it. I will not guarantee not to use it next week.