Yet games necessitate having someone to play with, and there are many times in our lives when we cannot have anyone else to take a part. That is the great advantage of hobbies, they can be enjoyed in solitude.
Not that we have any wish to drive people to solitude, for there is nothing worse than being alone too much. Solitary people are very apt to become too introspective, and that is always a bad thing for their nervous systems. If people avoid the society of their fellow-men they acquire an undue sense of their own importance, and their own affairs loom too largely in their thoughts. Furthermore, they are liable to become depressed, and to develop that mixture of conceit and diffidence which is of all things most objectionable.
It is because solitude is inevitable that we are anxious to lay stress on those things which will effectually prevent that morbid introspection and make life brighter and happier. And hobbies fulfil both these requirements. There are thousands of people who are doomed to live in lodgings. They have no one at hand to join them in a game, and unless they have some congenial occupation wherewith to occupy their minds, life becomes a poor, dull affair.
It often happens, too, that those who have the privileges of family life have to depend on themselves for their own amusement at times. The other people in the house may be busy or disinclined to take part in any game. Besides that, games are apt to pall in time; you cannot carry them on indefinitely. Then it is that a hobby becomes a priceless boon. It does more than enliven solitude, it makes all the difference to home-life also.
A man returned home after a hard day at business, and after he had had his meal sat down and spent the evening gazing with a bored, tired countenance into the fire, a cheerful spectacle for his poor wife, who had also had a worrying day, and would have been glad of a little brightness. The boys and girls had even to be sent out of the room, as their talking made father’s head ache.
As he sat there his one thought was of his work. It was all he had to think about, for he had never cultivated any pursuits or broadened his interests in any way. And running the mind in one groove is, like singing on one note, a tiring occupation. That man was always tired, body and soul. Of late, too, he had had another worry, for he had found himself becoming more nervous and irritable, and with less confidence in his own powers. The dread had come upon him that he was going to break down. And as he thought of his wife and family, who would be left insufficiently provided for, it nearly broke his heart.