THE MONOTONY OF LIFE.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 4983, 13 March 1877, Page 3

THE MONOTONY OF LIFE.

(From th a Saturday Review.) V V Monotony and dulness are frequently taken as convertible terms, and complaints are'common enough among educated people of average mental resources that they are bored to death with the unchanging dulness, by which they mean the monotony of their existence. They would probably be much perplexed if they were told that life even to, them would be insupportable if it. tvere not so' monotonous. They would deny the statement offhand in the evening; and would : come, downstairs; the next morning out of temper: for the day because their hot water was brought ten minutes, too late, and was only tepid then. The breakfast-table in the countryhouse where jou are visiting may be usually bright and pleasant, your host genial and attentive. But a morning comes when you find him fidgetty and ill at ease, unable either to take his own coffee in peace or to bestow, any attention on his guests. The post-bag has not arrived ; that is all; it ought to have been on his study-table at half-past 8. The consequence is that the horses require rest, .the weather was threatening, and the roads abom-, inable; all the plans for the day must be given up, and the hostess would be in despair, only that she is accustomed to the phenomenon. The ordinary course of life is expected to run smoothly in its appointed groove; one day must repeat another—either the day before, or the day corresponding to it in the accustomed debit ; and the man who' grumbles the most oreply at being condemned to an existence like that of a horse in a mill would be the most disturbed and querulous if ■ he found his vocation changed to that of a horse in. a Hansom. The mouotoqy of which wa complain is in reality an order which we prize. But society, in all its various grades and sections, has chosen to condemn ■ the idea of routine as antiquated,’unfashionable, and slow. Conventional effort, sustained or spasmodic, must be made to escape from it, or rather from the imputation of it, and our, houses must be turned upside down, our purses inside out, .and our habits and customs out-of-doors, in order that we may conform to law’s against which we inwardly protest, and pretend to enjoy an excitement and variety which in the bottom of our hearts we regard as a social purgatory.

And, after all, the result is only the old monotony in a new form Still, there is a real charm, and that a charm now much more widely extended than formerly, about Christmas gatherings and other like anniversaries. And the secret of this charm is not so truly represented by the gaudy coloring of the railway bookstall as by the methodical labor of the railway porter as lie plies his pitchfork into the mistletoe-van uuder the shadow of the Malvern hills. The charm of the anniversary lies in the monotony of its repetition. The children like to have exactly the same things done at exactly the same time in exactly the same manner year after year. It is not in variety, but in uniformity, not iu change, but in changelessness, that their idea of enjoyment is realised ; and if a few years later they pass through a parenthetical stage of contempt for the old ways, they probably get over it, as they have got over the preceding period of other diseases of early life, and return with renewed devotion to the old faith in monotony. If dulness and enjoyment arc to be accepted as contradictories, then monotony and dulness cannot in any sense be allowed to be convertible terms. We are using, of course, the .term “ monotonous ” iu a sense somewhat wider than its strictly technical definition would allow ; a sense in which it would be admissible as applied to the recurring repetition of one tune, or even of a succession of tunes, in a musical box. And in this sense the idea of variety is not in any way excluded. On the contrary, the capacity for appreciating variety would seem to depend for its free development on a condition of existence kept steady by a substratum of the monotonous. To recur for a moment to an illustration already used ; the interests of life are checked, and a man is thrown so much out of the current of his time, be it only for a few minutes, if the local letter-carrier fails in his mechanical regularity. The power to concentrate one’s thought on external matters, to devote the mind to literary or political or any otherqnestions,or to join in the world’s progress at all, depends in a much larger measure than people are apt to imagine, on the possession of a fixed and steady footing in the details of personal life. Nor dues any grade or position in working or social life set its occupant free from those trammels of routine against which it is tbe fashion to rebel It is only in the exceptional circumstances or the catastrophes of life that the estimate of each day’s proceedings cannot be approximately made beforehand. Travellers iu unexplored regions, sailors in a shipwreck, and people literally or figuratively “up in a balloon,” merely illustrate the very occasional dapartures from an established general rule. AndAhe general law, that whatever belongs necessarily to the conditions of existence becomes in itself agreeable, holds good in this routine. We accept the monotony, and, being habituated to it, we like it. The weaker classical sense in which agapdn represents a contented acquiescence, develops Into the later and stronger idea of love "hich the word now conveys. We may profess ourselves dissatisfied with the dulness of our lot in life, as people did in Horace’s time ; and the “Atqui licet esse beatis” would, on the whole, be as little attractive now as then. A great deal of well-meant sympathy is thus very needlessly wasted, through a failure to recognise the general application of this principle.