How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 29

The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown
in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford
Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under the cellars
and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd's Bush! And you
say that isn't picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the
property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening.
Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life?

You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to
tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest straight
street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the longest
absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will
admit that in an estate agent's clerk I have not chosen an example that
specially favours my theories.

You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance
(disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street"?
Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for ninety
minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to
you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.

You are "penned in town," but you love excursions to the country and
the observation of wild life-certainly a heart-enlarging diversion. Why
don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the nearest
gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild life of
common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate the
knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at last
get to know something about something?

You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to live fully.

The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that curiosity
which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an understanding heart.

I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature, and
I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person, happily very