he Chinese love of leisure arises from a combination of causes. It came from a temperament, was erected into literary cult, and found its justification in a philosophy. It grew out of an intense love of life, was actively sustained by an underlying current of literary romanticism throughout the dynasties, and was eventually pronounced right and sensible by a philosophy of life, which we may, in the main, describe as Taoistic.
The romantic cult of the idle life, which we have defined as a product of leisure, was a decidedly not for the wealthy class, as we usually understand it to be. That would be unmitigated error in the approach to the problem. It was a cult for the poor and unsuccessful and humble scholar who either had chosen the idle life or had idleness enforced upon him.
In this sense I regard this romantic cult of the idle life as essentially democratic. On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something that decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament, which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon, spend in a perfectly useless manner.
The Chinese romanticists were gifted with a high sensibility and a vagabond nature, poor in their worldly possessions, but rich in sentiments. They had an intense love of life, which showed itself in their abhorrence of all official life and a stern refusal to make the soul serf of the body. The idle life, so far from being the prerogative of the rich and powerful and successful, was in China an achievment of high-mindedness. A high-mindedness very near to the Western conception of the dignity of the tramp who is too proud to ask favors, to independent to go to work, and too wise to take the world's success too seriously.
This cult of idleness was always bound up with a life of inner calm, a sense of carefree irresponsibility and an intense wholehearted enjoyment of the life of nature.
No, the enjoyment of idle life doesn't cost any money. The capacity for true enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people who have supreme contempt for wealth. It must come from an inner richness of the soul in a man who loves the simple ways of life and who is somewhat impatient with the business of making money. There is always plenty of life to enjoy for a man who is determined to enjoy it. If men fail to enjoy this earthly existence we have, it is because they do not love life sufficiently and allow it to be turned into a humdrum routine existence. Lao Tze has been wrongly accused of being hostile to life; on the other hand, I think he taught the renunciation of the life of the world exactly because he loved life all to tenderly, to allow the art of living to degenerate into a mere business of living.
For where there is love, there is jealously; a man who loves life intensely must be always jealous of the few exquisite moments of leisure that he has. And he must retain the dignity and pride always characteristic of a vagabond. His hours of fishing must be as sacred as his hours of business, erected into a kind of religion as the English have done with sport. He must be as impatient at having people talk to him about the stock market at the golf club, as the scientist is at having anybody disturb him in his laboratory. And he must count the days of departing spring with a sense of sad regret for not having made more trips or excursions, as a businessman feels when he has not sold so many wares in the day.
