ghtmare too terrible and too foolish, above all too wakingly true,
to be looked at in the face without flinching. One wonders,
incidentally, how any creature perpetually working from the reasons
given by economists, that is to say, working against the grain, from
no spontaneous wish or pleasure, can possibly store up, in such
exhausting effort, a surplus of energy requiring to be let off! And
one wonders, on the other hand, how any really good work of any kind,
work not merely kept by dire competitive necessity up to a standard,
but able to afford any standard to keep up to, can well be produced
save by the letting off of surplus energy; that is to say, how good
work can ever be done otherwise than by impulses and instincts acting
spontaneously, in fact as play. The reality seems to be that,
imperfect as is our poor life, present and past, we are maligning it;
founding our theories, for simplicity's sake and to excuse our lack of
hope and striving, upon its very worst samples. Wasteful as is the
mal-distribution of human activities (mal-distribution worse than that
of land or capital!), cruel as is the consequent pressure of want,
there yet remains at the bottom of an immense amount of work an inner
push different from that outer constraint, an inner need as fruitful
as the outer one is wasteful: there remains the satisfaction in work,
the wish to work. However outer necessity, "competition," "minimum of
cost," "iron law of wages," call it what you choose, direct and
misdirect, through need of bread or greed of luxury, the application
of human activity, that activity has to be there, and with it its own
alleviation and reward: pleasure in work. All decent human work
partakes (let us thank the great reasonablenesses of real things!) of
the quality of play: if it did not it would be bad or ever on the
verge of badness; and if ever human activity attains to fullest
fruitfulness, it will be (every experience of our own best work shows
it) when the distinction of _work_ and of _play_ will cease to have a
meaning, play remaining only as the preparatory work of the child, as
the strength-repairing, balance-adjusting work of the adult.

And meanwhile, through all the centuries of centuries, art, which is
the type and sample of all higher, better modes of life, art has given
us in itself the concrete sample, the unmistakable type of that
needful reconciliation of work and play; and has shown us that there
is, or should be, no di