bits of those who have,
idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men--at any rate in the
temperate zone--can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born
idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be
added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and
work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it
is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is
to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given
a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it as
_an activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered
life_. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle
does not mean simply virtue: he means excellence in work. It is
impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good
in some particular directions, _at_ some particular thing. And the
particular thing that we are good at is _our_ work, our craft, our
art--or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no
equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing
one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from
doing it well--turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work,
whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still
held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more
virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what
Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special
individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some
particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to
do--some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low
repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness
of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human
progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of
sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and
unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really
well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the
young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say
that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though
it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the
special gifts of its pupils--of trying by scholarships, by Ca