An Apology For Idlers

BOSWELL: "We grow weary when idle."

JOHNSON: "That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."[1]

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lèse_-respectability,[2] to enter on some
lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short
of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they
have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a
little of bravado and gasconade.[3] And yet this should not be.
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in
doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the
ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry
itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter
in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult
and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so
many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the
emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them.[4] And while such an one is
ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his
resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the
wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at
their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the
disregard of Diogenes.[5] Where was the glory of having taken Rome[6]
for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and
found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a
sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and
when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence
physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial
toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons
despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to
disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against
industry, but you can be sent to Coventry[7] for speaking like a fool.
The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well;
therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that
much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is
something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present
occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to
be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in
Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.[8]

It is surely beyond