The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Quest of the Simple Life, by William J.
Dawson
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Title: The Quest of the Simple Life
Author: William J. Dawson
Release Date: December 6, 2005 [eBook #17246]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST OF THE SIMPLE LIFE***
E-text prepared by Al Haines
THE QUEST OF THE SIMPLE LIFE
by
W. J. DAWSON
New York
E. P. Dutton and Co.
31 West Twenty-Third Street
1907
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim.
VIRG., Ecl. viii., l. 72.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
CHAPTER II
GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
CHAPTER III
GETTING A LIVING, AND LIVING
CHAPTER IV
EARTH-HUNGER
CHAPTER V
HEALTH AND ECONOMICS
CHAPTER VI
IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE
CHAPTER VII
I FIND MY COTTAGE
CHAPTER VIII
BUYING HAPPINESS
CHAPTER IX
HOW WE LIVED
CHAPTER X
NEIGHBOURSHIP
CHAPTER XI
THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND
CHAPTER XII
AM I RIGHT?
CHAPTER XIII
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
For a considerable number of years I had been a resident in London,
which city I regarded alternately as my Paradise and my House of
Bondage. I am by no means one of those who are always ready to fling
opprobrious epithets at London, such as 'a pestilent wen,' a cluster of
'squalid villages,' and the like; on the contrary, I regard London as
the most fascinating of all cities, with the one exception of that city
of Eternal Memories beside the Tiber. But even Horace loved the
olive-groves of Tivoli more than the far-ranged splendours of the
Palatine; and I may be pardoned if an occasional vision of green fields
often left my eye insensitive to metropolitan attractions.
This is a somewhat sonorous preface to the small matter of my story;
but I am anxious to elaborate it a little, lest it should be imagined
that I am merely a person of bucolic mind, to whom all cities or large
congregations of my fellow-men are in themselves abhorrent. On the
contrary I have an inherent love of all cities which are something more
than mere centres of manufacturing industry. The truly admirable city
secures interest, and even passionate love, not because it is a
congeries of thriving factories, but rather by the dignity of its
position, the splendour of its architecture, the variety and volume of
its life, the imperial, literary, and artistic interests of which it is
the centre, and the prolongation of its history through tumultuous
periods of time, which fade into the suggestive shadows of antiquity.
London answers perfectly to this definition of the truly admirable
city. It has been the stage of innumerable historic pageants; it
presents an unexampled variety of life; and there is majesty in the
mere sense of multitude with which it arrests and often overpowers the
mind.
As I have already, with an innocent impertinence, justified myself by
Horace, so I will now justify myself by Wordsworth, whose famous sonnet
written on Westminster Bridge is sufficient proof that he could feel
the charm of cities as deeply as the charm of Nature. 'Earth hath not
anything to show more fair,' wrote Wordsworth, and of a truth London
has moods and moments of almost unearthly beauty, perhaps unparalleled
by any vision that inebriates the eye in the most gorgeous dawn that
flushes Alpine snows, or the most solemn sunset that builds a gate of
gold across the profound depth of Borrowdale or Wastwater. He who has
seen the tower of St. Clement Danes swim up, like an insubstantial
fabric, through violet mist above the roaring Strand; or the golden
Cross upon St. Paul's with a flag of tinted cloud flying from it; or
the solemn reaches of the Thames bathed in smoky purple at the slow
close of a summer's day, will know what I mean, and will (it is
possible) have some memory of his own which will endorse the justness
of my praise.
From this exalted prelude I will at once descend to more prosaic
matter, leaving my reader, in his charity, to devise for me an apology
which I have neither the wit nor the desire to invent for myself. With
the best will in the world to speak in praise of cities it must be
owned that the epic and lyric moments of London are infrequent. As a
casual resident in London, a student and spectator, free to leave it
when I willed, I could have been heartily content; but I, in common
with some insignificant millions of my fellow-creatures, was bound to
live in London as a means of living at all. He is no true citizen who
merely comes up to town 'for the season,' alternating the pleasures of
town with those of the country; he alone is the true citizen who _must_
live amid the roar of the street all the year round, and for years
together. If I could choose for myself I would even now choose the
life of pleasant alternation between town and country, because I am
persuaded that the true piquancy and zest of all pleasures lies in
contrast. But fate orders these things for us, and takes no account of
our desires, unless it be to treat them with habitual irony. At
five-and-twenty the plain fact met me--that I must needs live in
London, because my bread could be earned nowhere else. No choice was
permitted me; I must go where crowds were, because from the favour or
necessities of such crowds I must gather the scanty tithes which put
food upon my table and clothes upon my back. When eminent writers,
seated at ample desks, from which they command fair views of open
country, denounce with prophetic fervour the perils which attend the
growth of cities, they somewhat overlook the fact that the growth of
cities is a sequence, alike ineluctable and pitiless, of the modern
struggle for existence. One cannot be a lawyer, or a banker, a
physician or a journalist, without neighbours. He can scarce be a
literary man in perfect sylvan solitude, unless his work is of such
quality--perhaps I should have said such popularity--that it wins for
him immediate payment, or unless his private fortune be such that he
can pursue his aims as a writer with entire indifference to the
half-yearly statements of his publisher. In respect of the various
employments of trade and commerce, the case is still plainer. Men must
needs go where the best wages may be earned; and under modern
conditions of life it is as natural that population should flow toward
cities, as that rivers should seek the sea. These matters will be more
particularly discussed later on; it is enough for me to explain at
present that I was one of those persons for whom life in a city was an
absolute necessity.
It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become
apparent. A street that interests the mind by some charm of populous
vivacity when it is traversed at random and without object, becomes
inexpressibly wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty. My
daily duty took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a
street not altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and
dignity. At first I was ready to concede this claim, and even to
endorse it with enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that
Oxford Street conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a
desk in an office, I began to loathe it. The eye became conscious of a
hundred defects and incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison
walls; the resounding tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of
tormented spirits. For the first time I began to understand why
imaginative writers had often likened London to Inferno.
I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured to
evade these sensations. The most obvious was altogether to avoid this
glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours through the
meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to exchange one
kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for another kind
which had none. Sometimes I endeavoured to contrive a doubtful
exhilaration from the contrast which these meaner streets afforded;
saying to myself, as I pushed my way through the costers' stalls of
Great James Street, 'Now you are exchanging squalor for magnificence.
Be prepared for a surprise.' But the ruse failed utterly, and my mind
laughed aloud at the pitiful imposture. Another device was to create
points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious road,
which should present some aspect of allurement. There was a book-shop
here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of Napoleon was
exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo's 'Flight into Egypt,' in
the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether they were
there to-day. Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium of
empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in which the left hand plays
against the right, so I laid odds for and against myself on such
trifles as these, and even went so far as to keep an account of my
successes and my failures. Thus, for a whole month I was interested in
a person quite unknown to me, who wore an obsolete white beaver hat,
appeared punctually at the corner of Bond Street at half-past five in
the afternoon, and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes
displayed on the street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from
Oxford Circus. His appearances were so planetary in their regularity
that one might have reckoned time by them. Who he was, or what his
objects in life may have been, I never learned. I never saw him walk
but in the one direction; I never saw him buy one of the many books
which he examined: perhaps he also was afflicted with the tedium of
London, and took this singular way of getting through a portion of his
sterile day with a simulated interest. At all events he afforded me an
interest, and when he vanished at the end of the month, Oxford Street
once more became intolerable to me.
These particulars appear so foolish and so trivial that most persons
will find them ridiculous, and even the most sympathetic will perhaps
wonder why they are recorded. They were, however, far from trivial to
me. The marooned seaman saves his sanity by cutting notches in a
stick, the solitary prisoner by friendship with a mouse; and when life
is reduced to the last exiguity of narrowness, the interests of life
will be narrow too. No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever
yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in
having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long
and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight
which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself
resembles those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the
ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and
immobile form. Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice
blessed is he who has both freedom and variety: but the subordinate
toiler in the vast mechanism of a great city has neither. He will sit
at the same desk, gaze upon the same unending rows of figures, do, in
fact, the same things year in and year out till his youth has withered
into age. He himself becomes little better than a mechanism. There is
no form of outdoor employment of which this can be said. The life of
the agricultural labourer, so often pitied for its monotony, is variety
itself compared with the life of the commercial clerk. The labourer's
tasks are at least changed by the seasons; but time brings no such
diversion to the clerk. It is this horrible monotony which so often
makes the clerk a foul-minded creature; driven in upon himself, he has
to create some kind of drama for his instincts and imaginations, and
often from the sorriest material. When I played single-handed cribbage
with the few trivial interests which I knew, I at least took an
innocent diversion; and I may claim that my absurd fancies injured no
one, and were certainly of some service to myself.
The outsider usually imagines that great cities afford unusual
opportunities of social intercourse, and when I first became a citizen
I found this prospect enchanting. I scanned the horizon eagerly for
these troops of friends which a city was supposed to furnish: quested
here and there for a responsive pair of eyes; made timid approaches
which were repulsed; and, finally, after much experiment, had to admit
that the whole idea was a delusion. No doubt it is true enough that,
with a settled and considerable income, and the power of entertaining,
friends are to be found in plenty. But Grosvenor Square and Kentish
Town do not so much as share a common atmosphere. In the one it is a
pleasant tradition that the house door should be set wide to all comers
who can contribute anything to the common social stock; in the other,
the house door is jealously locked and barred. The London clerk does
not care to reveal the shifts and the bareness of his domestic life.
He will reside in one locality for years without so much as seeking to
know his next-door neighbour. He will live on cordial terms with his
comrade in the office, but will never dream of inviting him to his
home. His instinct of privacy is so abnormal that it becomes mere
churlishness. His wife, if he have one, usually fosters this spirit
for reasons of her own. Her interests end with the clothing and
education of her children. She does not wish for friends, does not
cultivate the grace of hospitality, and is indifferent to social
intercourse. In short, the barbaric legend that an Englishman's house
is his castle, is nowhere so much respected as in London.
The exhausting character of life in London, and the mere vastness of
its geographical area, do something to produce this result. Men who
leave home early in the morning, sit for many hours in an office, and
reach home late at night, soon lose both the instinct and desire for
social intercourse. They prefer the comfortable torpor of the
fireside. If some imperative need of new interests torments them, they
seek relaxation in the music-hall or some other place of popular
resort. The art of conversation is almost extinct in a certain type of
Londoner. He knows nothing to converse about outside his business
interests, his family concerns, and perhaps the latest sensation of the
daily newspaper. Those lighter flights of fancy, those delicate
innuendoes and allusions of implied experience or culture--all the
give-and-take of happily contending minds--all, indeed, that makes true
conversation--is a science utterly unknown to him. A certain
superficial nimbleness of mind he does sometimes possess, but for all
that he is a dull creature, made dull by the limitations of his life.
If it should happen, as it often may, that such a man has some genuine
instinct for friendship, and has a friend to whom he can confide his
real thoughts, the chances are that his friend will be separated from
him by the mere vastness of London. To the rural mind the metropolis
appears an entity; in reality it is an empire. A journey from the
extreme north to the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is
less easily accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from
London to Birmingham. There is none of that pleasant 'dropping-in' for
an evening which is possible in country towns of not immoderate radius.
Time-tables have to be consulted, engagement-books scanned, serious
preparations made, with the poor result, perhaps, of two hours' hurried
intercourse. The heartiest friendship does not long survive this
malignity of circumstance. It is something to know that you have a
friend, obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis; but you see
him so rarely, that when you meet, it is like forming a new friendship
rather than pursuing an old one. It is little wonder that, under such
conditions, visits grow more and more infrequent, and at last cease. A
message at Christmas, an intimation of a birth, a funeral card, are the
solitary relics and mementoes of many a city friendship not extinct,
but utterly suspended.
I dwell on these obvious characteristics of London life, because in
course of time they assumed for me almost terrifying dimensions. After
ten years of arduous toil I found myself at thirty-five lonely,
friendless, and imprisoned in a groove of iron, whose long curves swept
on inevitably to that grim terminus where all men arrive at last.
Sometimes I chided myself for my discontent; and certainly there were
many who might have envied me. I occupied a fairly comfortable house
in a decayed terrace where each house was exactly like its neighbour,
and had I told any one that the mere aspect of this grey terrace
oppressed me by its featureless monotony, I should have been laughed at
for my pains. I believe that I was trusted by my employers, and if a
mere automatic diligence can be accounted a virtue, I merited their
trust. In course of time my income would have been increased, though
never to that degree which means competence or freedom. To this common
object of ambition I had indeed long ago become indifferent. What can
a few extra pounds a year bring to a man who finds himself bound to the
same tasks, and those tasks distasteful? I was married and had two
children; and the most distressing thought of all was that I saw my
children predestined to the same fate. I saw them growing up in
complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had made
my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of the
city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and
listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those
must needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in
chance excursions to the country, I compared my children with the
children of cottagers and ploughmen, I felt that I had wronged them, I
saw my children foredoomed, by an inexorable destiny, to a life at all
points similar with my own. In course of time they also would become
recruits in the narrow-chested, black-coated army of those who sit at
desks. They would become slaves without having known the value of
freedom; slaves not by capture but by heritage. More and more the
thought began to gather shape, Was I getting the most, or the best, out
of life? Was there no other kind of life in which toil was redeemed
from baseness by its own inherent interest, no life which offered more
of tranquil satisfaction and available, if humble, happiness? Day by
day this thought sounded through my mind, and each fresh discouragement
and disability of the life I led gave it sharper emphasis. At last the
time came when I found an answer to it, and these chapters tell the
story of my seeking and my finding.
CHAPTER II
GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
The reader will perhaps say that the kind of miseries recounted in the
previous chapter are more imaginary than real. Many thousands of
people subsist in London upon narrow means, and do not find the life
intolerable. They have their interests and pleasures, meagre enough
when judged by a superior standard, but sufficient to maintain in them
some of the vivacity of existence. No doubt this is true. I remember
being struck some years ago by the remark of a person of distinction,
equally acquainted with social life in its highest and its lowest
forms. Mr. H., as I will call this person, said that the dismal
pictures drawn by social novelists of life among the very poor were
true in fact, but wrong in perspective. Novelists described what their
own feelings would be if they were condemned to live the life of the
disinherited city drudge, rather than the actual feelings of the drudge
himself. A man of education, accustomed to easy means, would suffer
tortures unspeakable if he were made to live in a single room of a
populous and squalid tenement, and had to subsist upon a wage at once
niggardly and precarious. He would be tormented with that memory of
happier things, which we are told is a 'sorrow's crown of sorrow.' But
the man who has known no other condition of life is unconscious of its
misery. He has no standard of comparison. An environment which would
drive a man of refinement to thoughts of suicide, does not produce so
much as dissatisfaction in him. Hence there is far more happiness
among the poor than we imagine. They see nothing deplorable in a lot
to which they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents
before their eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to
take a less mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to
whom the refinements of European civilisation are objects of ridicule
rather than envy.
I quote this opinion for what it is worth; but it has little relevance
to my own case. I am the only competent judge of my own feelings. I
know perfectly well that these feelings were not shared by men who
shared the conditions of my own life. There was a clerk in the same
office with me who may be taken as an example of his class. Poor
Arrowsmith--how well I recall him!--was a little pallid man, always
neatly if shabbily dressed, punctual as a clock, and of irreproachable
diligence. He was verging on forty, had a wife and family whom I never
saw, and an aged mother whom he was proud to support. He was of quite
imperturbable cheerfulness, delighted in small jokes, and would chatter
like a daw when occasion served him. He had never read a book in his
life; his mind subsisted wholly upon the halfpenny newspapers. He had
no pleasures, unless one can count as such certain Bank Holiday
excursions to Hampstead Heath, which were performed under a heavy sense
of duty to his family. He had lived in London all his days, but knew
much less of it than the country excursionist. He had never visited
St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; had never travelled so far as Kew or
Greenwich; had never been inside a picture gallery; and had never
attended a concert in his life. The pendulum of his innocuous
existence swung between the office and his home with a uniform
monotony. Yet not only was he contented with his life, but I believe
that he regarded it as entirely successful. He had counted it a great
piece of luck when he had entered the office as a youth of sixteen, and
the glow of his good fortune still lingered in his mind at forty. He
regarded his employers with a species of admiring awe not always
accorded to kings. The most violent social democrat could have made
nothing of Arrowsmith; there was not the least crevice in his heart in
which the seed of discontent could have found a lodgment. As for
making any question of whether he was getting the best or most out of
life, Arrowsmith was as incapable as a kitten.
The virtues of Arrowsmith, which were in their way quietly heroic,
impressed me a good deal; but his abject contentment with the
limitations of his lot appalled me. I felt a dread grow in me lest I
should become subdued to the element in which I worked as he was. I
asked myself whether a life so destitute of real interests and
pleasures was life at all? I made fugitive attempts to allure the
little man into some realms of wider interest, but with the most
discouraging results. I once insisted on taking him with me for a day
in Epping Forest. He came reluctantly, for he did not like leaving his
wife at home, and it seemed that no persuasion could induce her to
undertake so adventurous a jaunt. He was no walker, and half a dozen
miles along the Forest roads tired him out. By the afternoon even his
cheerfulness had vanished; he gazed with blank and gloomy eyes upon the
wide spaces of the woodland scenery. He did not regain his spirits
till we drew near Stratford on the homeward journey. At the first
sight of gas-lit streets he brightened up, and I am persuaded that the
rancid odours of the factories at Bow were sweeter in his nostrils than
all the Forest fragrances. I never asked him again to share a pleasure
for which I now perceived he had no faculty; but I often asked myself
how long it would take for a city life to extirpate in me the taste by
which Nature is appreciated, as it had in Arrowsmith.
I have taken Arrowsmith as an example of the narrowness of interest
created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for
him, which I, for one, would most heartily endorse. The poor fellow
was very much the creature of his circumstances. But this was scarcely
the case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known how
to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many cultivated
tastes. He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same village as
myself. By some curious accident he was flung into the vortex of
London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in a reputable firm of
stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street. He rose rapidly, speculated
largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at
thirty. I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we
had sat upon the same bench at school. I can see him still;
well-fleshed and immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of
gold; a prop of music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants;
flashing from one to the other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a
man envied and admired by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to
whom he appeared a kind of Napoleon of finance. I will confess that I
myself was a little dazzled by his careless opulence. When he took me
to dine with him he thought nothing of giving the head waiter a
sovereign as a guarantee of careful service, or of sending another
sovereign to the master of the orchestra with a request for some
particular piece of music which he fancied. He once confided to me
that he had brought off certain operations which had made him the
possessor of eighty thousand pounds. To me the sum seemed immense, but
he regarded it as a bagatelle. When I suggested certain uses for it,
such as retirement to the country, the building of a country house, the
collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at me. He informed
me that he never spent more than a single day in the country every
year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm. He loathed
the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year an
infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once,
but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his
eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette
table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was
avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not
live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of
Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am
unhappy if I leave it for a day.' So far as knowledge of or interest
in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith.
His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus,
and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.
The man seemed so satisfied with everything about his life that it was
a kind of joy to meet him. The sourness of my own discontent was
dissolved in the alembic of his joviality. Yet it was certain that he
lived a life of the most torturing anxiety. There were recurring
periods when his fortune hung in the balance, and his financial
salvation was achieved as by fire. When he sat silent for a moment,
strange things were written on his face. Haggard lines ran across the
brow; the hollows underneath the eyes grew deep; and one could see that
black care sat upon his shoulders. There was a listening posture of
the head, as of one apprehensive of the footfall of disaster, and
though he was barely forty, his hair was white. What happened to him
finally I do not know. I missed him for a year or two; inquired at the
hotel where he had lived and found him gone; and I thought I read in
the sarcastic smile of the hotel-manager more knowledge than he was
willing to communicate. I imagine that he went down in some financial
storm, like ships at sea that are heard of no more; the Napoleon of
finance had somewhere found his Waterloo. The reflection is
inevitable; what had he got out of life after all? He had won neither
peace nor honour; he had known nothing of the finer joys or tastes; he
had enjoyed no satisfying pleasures; such triumph as he had known had
been the brief triumph of the gambler. Upon the whole I thought the
narrow tedious life of Arrowsmith the worthier.
Reflections of this nature are usually attributed to mere envy or
contempt of wealth, which is a temper not less sordid than a love of
wealth. For my part I can but profess that I feel for wealth neither
envy nor contempt. On the contrary, I love to imagine myself wealthy,
and I flatter myself--as most poor men do--that I am a person
peculiarly fitted by nature to afford a conspicuous example of how
wealth should be employed. I like to dramatise my fancies, and the
more impossible these fancies are, the more convincing is the drama
that can be educed from them. Thus I have several times built palaces
which have rivalled the splendours of the Medici; I have administered
great estates to the entire satisfaction of my tenants; I have
established myself as the Maecenas of art and literature; and were I
ever called to play these parts in reality, I am convinced that my
competence would secure applause. The point at which I stick, however,
is this: rich men rarely do these things. It is the pursuit of wealth,
rather than wealth itself, that is their pleasure. Let us suppose the
case of a man who has toiled with undivided mind for thirty years to
acquire a fortune; will it not be usually found that in the struggle to
be rich he has lost those very qualities which make riches worth
possessing? He buys his estate or builds his house; but there is
little pleasure in the business. He is the mere slave of land-agents,
the puppet of architects and upholsterers. He has no original taste to
guide or interest him: what he once had has perished long ago in the
dreary toil of money-grubbing. The men who build or decorate his house
have a certain pleasure in their work; all that he does is to pay them
for being happy. If he should adopt the rich man's hobby of collecting
pictures or a library, he rarely enjoys a higher pleasure than the mere
lust of possession. He buys what he is told to buy, without
discrimination; he has no knowledge of what constitutes rarity or
value; and most certainly he knows nothing of those excitements of the
quest which make the collection of articles of vertu a pursuit so
fascinating to the man of trained judgment but moderate means. And, as
if to complete the irony of the situation, he is after all but the
infrequent tenant of the treasure-house which he has built; the blinds
are drawn half the year; the splendid rooms are seen by no wiser eyes
than those of his butler and his housekeeper; and his secretary, if he
be a man of taste and education, draws the real dividend of pleasure
from all these rare and costly things which Dives has accumulated.
Dives is in most cases little more than the man who pays the bill for
things which other folk enjoy.
Let Dives be accounted then a public benefactor, we may say; perhaps
so, but the question still remains, does Dives get the most and best
out of life? The obvious answer is that the best things of life are
not to be bought with money; it would be nearer the truth to quote the
prophetic paradox, they are bought 'without money and without price.'
I was present once at a dinner given by a millionaire newspaper
proprietor to a crowd of journalists, on the occasion of the founding
of a new magazine. The millionaire ate little, spoke little, and sat
throughout the feast with an anxious cloud upon his brow. I recognised
the same furtive look of apprehension in his eyes that I had seen in
the eyes of my stock-broking friend long before. As I glanced round
the room I found myself able to pick out all the men of wealth by that
same look. It would seem that the anxieties of getting money only
beget the more torturing anxiety of how to keep it. That, I am
persuaded, was the dominant thought of my millionaire host throughout
the meal; he knew the fear and fever of the gambler risking an enormous
stake, the agitation of the soldier on the eve of a battle, in which
victory is highly problematical. But that crowd of hungry journalists,
how they did eat! What laughter sat on those boyish faces, what zest
of life, what capacity of pleasure! There was not one of them whose
daily bread was not precarious; not one perhaps who had a decent
balance at the bank; yet they were so gay, so resolutely cheerful, so
frankly interested in life and in themselves, that I could fancy those
gloomy eyes at the head of the table watched them with a sort of envy,
I think there must be something fatal to gaiety in the mere
responsibilities of wealth; I am sure that there is something
corrupting in the labours of its acquisition. I think I had rather be
a vagrant, with a crust in my knapsack, a blue sky above me, and the
adventurous road before me, than look upon the world with a pair of
eyes so laughterless as his who was our host that night.
Again I protest that I make no railing accusation against wealth in
itself. I am so far convinced of the truly beneficent utilities of
wealth, that I would quite willingly take the risks of a moderate
competence, should any one be disposed to make experiment with my
virtues. There is some magnanimity in this offer, for I can no more
foretell the effects of the bacillus of wealth upon my moral nature,
than can the physician who offers his body for inoculation with the
germ of some dire disease that science may be served. It argues some
lack of imagination among millionaires that it has occurred to no one
of the tribe to endow a man instead of an institution, if it were only
by way of change. It would at least prove an interesting experiment,
and it would be cheap at the price of the few unmissed thousands which
the millionaire would pay for it. To such an experiment I would be
willing to submit, if it were only to ascertain whether I have been
right or wrong in my supposition that I am better qualified by nature
than my fellows for the right administration of wealth; but there is
one thing I would never do, I would never undertake that laborious
quest of wealth, which robs men of the power to enjoy it when it is
obtained.
It is there that the pinch comes; granted that some degree of
competence is needed for a free and various use of life, is it worth
while to destroy the power of living in attaining the means to live?
What is a man better for his wealth if he does not know how to use it?
A fool may steal a ship, but it takes a wise man to navigate her
towards the islands of the Blest. I am told sometimes that there is a
romance in business; no doubt there is, but it is pretty often the
romance of piracy; and the pleasures of the rich man are very often
nothing better than the pleasures of the pirate: a barbaric wading in
gold, a reckless piling up of treasure, which he has not the sense to
use. As long as there are shouting crews upon the sea and flaming
ships, he is happy; but give him at last the gold which he has striven
to win, and he knows nothing better than to sit like the successful
pirate in a common ale-house, and make his boast to boon companions. I
believe that the dullest men in all the world are very rich men; and I
have sometimes thought that it cannot need a very high order of
intelligence to acquire wealth, since some of the meanest of mankind
appear to prosper at the business. A certain vulpine shrewdness of
intelligence seems the thing most needed, and this may coexist with a
general dulness of mind which would disgrace a savage.
The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in
money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who
can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker,
values nothing that he buys. There is a subtle pleasure in the
extravagance that contests with prudence; in the anxious debates which
we hold with ourselves whether we can or cannot afford a certain thing;
in our attempts to justify our wisdom; in the risk and recklessness of
our operations; in the long deferred and final joy of our possession;
but this is a kind of pleasure which the man of boundless means never
knows. The buying of pictures affords us an excellent illustration on
this point. Men of the type of Balzac's _Cousin Pons_ attain to
rapture in the process because they are poor. They have to walk weary
miles and wait long weeks to get upon the track of their treasure; to
use all their knowledge of art and men to circumvent the malignity of
dealers; to experience the extremes of trepidation and of hope; to deny
themselves comforts, and perhaps food, that they may pay the price
which has at last, after infinite dispute, reached an irreducible
minimum; and the pleasure of their possession is in the ratio of their
pains. But the man who enters a sale-room with the knowledge that he
can have everything he wishes by the signing of a cheque feels none of
these emotions. It seems to me that money has lost more than half its
value since cheques became common. When men kept their gold in iron
coffers, lock-fast cupboards, or a pot buried in an orchard, there was
something tangible in wealth. When it came to counting out gold pieces
in a bag, men remembered by what sweat of mind or body wealth was won,
and they had a sense of parting with something which was really theirs.
But a cheque has never yet impressed me with the least sense of its
intrinsic value. It is a thing so trivial and fragile that the mind
refuses to regard it as the equivalent of lands and houses and solid
bullion. It is a thing incredible to reason that with a stroke of the
pen a man may sign away his thousands. If cheques were prohibited by
law, and all payments made in good coin of the realm, I believe we
should all be much more careful in our expenditure, for we should have
at least some true symbol of what expenditure implies.
In an ideal state all incomes beyond 10,000 pounds per year should be
prohibited. Almost all the real luxuries of life may be enjoyed on
half that sum; and even this is an excessive estimate. Such a
regulation would be of vast advantage to the rich, simply because it
would impose some limit at which economy commenced. They would then
begin to enjoy their wealth. Avarice would decline, for obviously it
would not be worth while to accumulate a larger fortune than the State
permitted. We might also expect some improvement in manners, for there
would be no room for that vulgar ostentation in which excessive wealth
delights. If a man chose to exceed the limit which the law prescribed
he would do so as a public benefactor; for, of course, the excess of
wealth would be applied to the good of the community, in the relief of
taxation, the adornment of cities, or the establishment of libraries
and art-galleries. It would no doubt be objected that the great
historic houses of the aristocracy could not be maintained on such an
income; five thousand pounds a year would hardly pay the servants on a
great estate, and provide the upkeep of a mansion. But in this case
the State would become the custodian of such houses, which would be
treated as national palaces. It is by no means improbable that their
present owners would be glad to be rid of them on generous terms, which
provided for a nominal ownership and an occasional occupation. However
this may be, it is certain that the rich would profit by the change,
for their chance of getting the most and best out of life would be much
increased by the limit put upon cupidity and ostentation.
CHAPTER III
GETTING A LIVING, AND LIVING
Getting the best and most out of life, I take to be the most rational
object of human existence. Even religion, although it affects to scorn
the phrase, admits the fact; for no man would be religious unless he
were convinced that he thereby added something to his store of
happiness. It is a matter of temperament whether a man treats religion
as a panacea for his mortal troubles, or the 'Open Sesame' of brighter
worlds, but it is quite certain that he regards it as a means of
happiness. I cannot doubt that the anchorites, ascetics, and
cloistered nuns of mediaeval times were happy in their own way,
although it was in a fashion that appears to us highly foolish and
absurd. Even a St. Stylites had his consolations; he was kept warm
upon his pillar by the comfortable sense of his superiority to his
wicked fellow-creatures.
To get the best out of life there must be some adequate fulfilment of
one's best self. Man is a bundle of tastes and appetites, some lofty,
and some ignoble, but all crying out for satisfaction. Wisdom lies in
the discernment of essentials; in just discrimination between false and
true tastes. Man has been a long time upon the earth, and he has spent
his time for the most part in one ceaseless experiment, viz., how he
may become a satisfactory creature in his own eyes. All civilisations
converge upon this point; and we maybe sure that, in their lonely hours
of meditation, the fantastic warder on the great wall of China, and the
Roman soldier pacing to and fro in the porticoes of the Palatine, had
much the same thoughts. Whosoever speaks to man on the art of becoming
happy is secure of a hearing; even though he be the vilest of quacks he
will have his following, even though he were the worst of scoundrels
some will take him for a prophet. In short, we are all the dupes of
hope, and it needs some experience to assure us that our only real hope
is in ourselves. In our own hearts lies the Eldorado which we scour
the world to find; could we but fulfil our best selves we should ask no
other happiness.
The question that soon comes to obtrude itself upon the mind of a
thoughtful man in a great city, is this old persistent question of
whether his method of life is such as to answer to the ideal of
fulfilling his best self? It seemed to me that the inhabitants of
cities were too busy getting a living to have time to live.
Let us take the life of the average business man by way of example.
Such a man will rise early, sleep late, and eat the bread of
carefulness, if he means to succeed. He will probably live--or be said
to live--in some suburb more or less remote from the roaring centre of
affairs. The first light of the winter dawn will see him alert;
breakfast is a hurried passover performance; a certain train must be
caught at all hazard to digestion, and the most leisured moments of the
day will be those he passes in the railway carriage. Once arrived at
his office he must plunge into the vortex of business; do battle with a
thousand rivalries and competitions; day after day must labour in the
same wearisome pursuits, content, perhaps, if at the end of the year he
shall have escaped as by a miracle commercial shipwreck. He will come
back to his residence, night after night, a tired man; not pleasantly
wearied with pursuits which have exercised his complete powers, but
tired to the point of dejection by the narrowness and monotony of his
pursuits. I say he returns to his residence; I scorn to say his home,
for the house he rents is merely the barrack where he sleeps. Of the
life that goes on within this house, which is nominally his, he knows
nothing. In its daily ordering, or even in its external features, he
has no part. He has chosen no item of its furniture; he has had no
hand in its decoration; he has but paid the tradesmen's bills. His
children scarcely know him; they are asleep when he goes off in the
morning, and asleep when he returns at night; he is to them the strange
man who sits at the head of the table once a week and carves the Sunday
joint. It is well for them if they have a mother who possesses gifts
of government, sympathy, and patient comprehension, for it is clear
that they have no father. He gets a living, and perhaps in time an
ample living; but does he live?
It may be said that this picture is exaggerated; on the contrary, I
think it is under-estimated. I have myself known men whose average
daily absence from 'home' is twelve hours; they disappear by the eight
o'clock morning train, and in times of special business pressure it is
not far from midnight when they return. The trains, cabs, and public
vehicles of London convey, day by day, one million three hundred
thousand of these homeless men to their employments in the city. Here
and there a wise man may be found who resents this tyranny of
suburbanism. I know a young business man, who also chances to possess
domestic instincts, for whom suburbanism grew so intolerable that he
took a house in the very heart of London, that he might lunch and dine
with his wife at his own table without neglecting his business
interests. He was a wise man, but he is the only one I know. Counting
the time passed at luncheon and dinner, the later departure in the
morning, and the earlier arrival at night, he is the clear gainer, day
by day, of three to four hours of domestic intercourse. At the end of
the week he has thus added to the credit of his family life
four-and-twenty hours; at the end of a year he has enjoyed more than
fifty full days of domestic intercourse which would have been forfeited
had he continued to live at Surbiton. He has also saved money, for
though the rent he pays in Central London is more than the rent he paid
at Surbiton, yet he has saved the expense of his season-ticket,
lunches, and occasional dinners at a club or restaurant, and cabs to
Waterloo when he was pressed for time. But it is quite vain to urge
such considerations on the average man of business. He would tell you
frankly that nothing would induce him to live in a house within a
stone's-throw of Leicester Square, although it is a far better built
and more comfortable house than the gimcrack villa which he rents at
Surbiton. The gain in domestic intercourse would not attract him, for
he has long ago lost taste for it; and the privilege of lunching with
his family would repel him, for he is deeply suspicious of the virtues
of domestic cookery. Nor, I suppose, would it influence him to tell
him that by living in Central London, he could command without
inconvenience the full attractions of the town, such as concerts,
lectures, theatres, or those special assemblies which are
representative of London life; for he desires nothing of the kind.
Considerations of economy might affect him, but with all his skill at
figures he seldom has the sense to see that the moiety of income paid
yearly to the railway, by himself and his family, goes a long way
toward the doubling of his rent. In short, suburbanism is his fetish;
it is the keynote of his poor respectability, and he is not to be
diverted from it by any reasons which a sane man would regard as
considerable, if not imperative.
The most usual excuse of suburbanism is that it is a good thing for the
wife and family of a business man, though it is a bad thing for him.
It is singular that no one seems to recognise the gross selfishness of
this plea. It is like the plea of the vivisectionist, that vivisection
is a bad thing for a rabbit, but a very good thing for humanity, since
humanity profits by the torture of the rabbit. But for my part I doubt
whether there is any real profit to anybody in suburbanism. There is a
town life, and there is a country life, each of which has peculiar
compensations of its own; but suburbanism is a miserable compromise,
which like most compromises combines not the qualities but the defects
of two antagonisms. Its worst effect is that it sets up in one family
two standards of life, which have nothing in common. After a while it
must happen that there is a serious estrangement of taste, and it is
not surprising if this often leads to a much more serious estrangement
of affection. The air of Surbiton may be a little fresher than the air
of Bloomsbury, but what does this count for if the atmosphere of the
hearth be poisoned? Moreover, among the Anglo-Saxon peoples women are
not encouraged to take any vital interest in the pursuits of their
husbands as they are among the Latin races. I should not be surprised
to find that half the women in the London suburbs do not know the
precise nature of their husbands' occupations. A French woman of the
bourgeois class often has a real aptitude for business. She can manage
a shop, keep accounts, take an interest in markets, and in all
questions of commercial enterprise she is the confidante, and often the
adviser, of her husband. Your English woman of the same class prides
herself rather on her total ignorance of business. It is probable that
in twenty years of married life she has not once visited the warehouse
or the office where her husband earns the income which she spends. She
is 'provided for without the sweet sense of providing.' She sees her
husband elated or depressed by things that have happened in the city;
but to her the reasons of his hope or fear are not communicated, nor
would she understand them if they were. His mind speaks a language
foreign to her; his daily operations in the city have for her only the
remote interest of things that have happened in a foreign country,
which appear too unreal to excite any sincere sympathy or apprehension.
Is this divided life good for either party?
Were some curious observer from another planet to arrive in London, I
think few things would appear to him so extraordinary as a London
suburb at noonday. By ten o'clock in the morning at latest he would
see it denuded of all its male inhabitants. Like that fabulous realm
of Tennyson's _Princess_, it is a realm inhabited by women; and the
only male voice left in the land is the voice of the milk-boy on his
rounds, the necessary postman, and the innocuous grocer's tout. There
is something of the 'hushed seraglio' in these miles of trim houses,
from whose doors and windows only female faces look out. An air of
sensible bereavement lies upon the land. Woman, deprived of her lord
and natural complement, cuts but a poor figure anywhere, but nowhere so
poor as in a wide realm populous with grass widows. By what interests
or avocations, or by what delinquency of duty the tedious hours are
cheated, is not revealed to any male philosopher; but he is a poor
observer who does not recognise something unnatural in this one-sided
life. A few miles away the loud Niagara of London runs swift, and the
air vibrates with all the tumult of the strenuous life of man; but here
the air is dead, unwinnowed by any clamorous wind, unshaken by any
planetary motion. I cannot think this narrow separated life good for
woman, and I am surprised that in these days when woman claims equal
privilege with man, she will submit to it. In the act of getting a
living she also suffers, and loses something of the power to live. If
the distraction of the city hurts the man she is not less injured by
the torpor of the suburb. Let a woman be never so intelligent and
keenly wrought, a suburb will soon enfeeble her, and take the fine edge
off her spirit. Left to the sole society of nursemaids and cooks in
her own house for many hours a day; to the companionship of women
outside her house, whose conversation is mainly gossip about household
difficulties; to the tame diversions of shopping at the nearest
emporium; what power of interest in the larger things of life can be
expected of her? The suburb is her cloister, and she the dedicated
bride of littleness.
This seems a hard saying, but it can easily be verified by observation.
I have myself known women, rich enough to keep a carriage, who had
never been so far as Hyde Park, never visited the National Gallery, and
never sought any finer music than could be furnished by a local
concert. For them, London as an entity did not exist. This
parochialism of suburban life is its most surprising feature. There is
after all some excuse for Mr. Grant Allen's description of London as an
aggregation of villages, when we find that so vast a number of
Londoners really live the life of villagers. But it is not patriotism
that binds them to the soil, nor local pride, as is the case with
genuine villagers; it is rather sheer inertia. Such pride, if it
existed, might do much for the regeneration of great cities, by
creating a series of eager and intelligent communities, which would vie
with one another in civic self-improvement; but this is just the kind
of pride which does not exist. No one cares how his suburb is
misgoverned, so long as rates are not too exorbitant. A suburb will
wake into momentary life to curb the liberal programmes of the
school-board, or to vote against the establishment of a free library; a
gross self-interest being thus the only variation of its apathy. It
soon falls asleep again, dulled into torpor by the fumes of its own
intolerant smugness. For much of this the element of family separation
in suburban life is answerable. The men pay their rates and house-rent
at Surbiton, but they live their real lives within hearing of the bell
of St. Paul's; how should they take any interest in Surbiton? After
all, Surbiton is to them but a vast caravansary, where they are lodged
and fed at night; and one does not inquire too closely into the
internal amenities of his hotel so long as the food is tolerable, and
the bed clean.
Suburbanism is, however, but a branch, though an important branch, of
the larger question, whether in cities men do not ultimately sacrifice
the finer qualities and joys of life to the act of getting a living.
It will perhaps be said that the man with a true genius for business
must in any case live in a city; that he is not discontented with the
conditions of his life; that, all things being considered, he is
probably living the kind of life for which he is best fitted. May not
a writer, who is presumably a person of studious and quiet habits,
misinterpret the life of a business man precisely in the same way that
he misinterprets the life of the poor, by applying to it his own
standards instead of measuring it by theirs? Business, for the man of
business genius, is more than an employment; it is his epic, his
romance, his adventurous crusade. He brings to it something of the
statesman's prescience, the diplomatist's sagacity, the great captain's
power of organising victory. His days are battles, his life a long
campaign; and if he does not win the spoil of kingdoms, he does fight
for commercial supremacy, which comes to much the same thing. No doubt
there is much truth in this putting of the case, though it really begs
the main question. But even if we grant that in the larger operations
of commerce a certain type of genius is required, we must remember that
the men of this order are few in number. Every lord of commerce is
attended by a vast retinue of slaves. Very few of these humble
servitors of commerce can ever hope to rise from the ranks into supreme
command. They must labour to create the wealth of the successful
merchant as a private soldier suffers wounds and hardships that fame
may crown his general. Do these men share the higher privileges of
life? Is not life with them the getting of a living rather than
living? Nay, more; is it not the getting of a living for some one else?
The merchant-prince fulfils himself, for his highest powers of
intelligence are daily taxed to the uttermost; but the case is very
different with that vast army of subordinates, whom we see marching
every morning in an infinite procession to the various warehouses and
offices of London. I have often wondered at their cheerfulness when I
have recollected the nature of their life. For they bring to their
daily tasks not the whole of themselves, but a mere segment of
themselves; some small industrious faculty which represents them, or
misrepresents them, at the tribunal of those who ask no better thing of
them. Few of them are doing the best that they can do, and they know
it. They are not doing it because the world does not ask them to do
it; indeed, the world takes care that they shall have no opportunity of
doing it. A certain faculty for arithmetic represents a man who has
many higher faculties; and thus the man is forced to live by one
capacity which is perhaps his least worthy and significant. This is
not the case in what we call the liberal professions and the arts. The
architect, the barrister, the humblest journalist needs his whole mind
for his task, and hence his work is a delight. The artist, if he be a
true artist, does the one thing that he was born to do, and so 'the
hours pass away untold, without chagrin, and without weariness,' nor
would he wish them to pass otherwise. Many times as I took my way to
the dreary labours of my desk I stopped to watch, and sometimes to talk
with, a smiling industrious little Frenchman, who repaired china and
bronzes in a dingy shop in Welbeck Street. He was an expert at his
trade; knew all the distinctive marks of old china, and could assign
with certainty the right date of any piece of bronze he handled; and to
hear him discourse on these things would have been a liberal education
to a budding connoisseur. I never knew a man so indefatigably happy in
his work; his eye lit up at any special glow of colour or delicacy of
design; he used his tools as though he loved them; and if he dreamed at
night, I doubt not that his canopies were coloured with the hues of
Sèvres, and that bronze angels from the hand of Benvenuto stood about
his bed. Plainly the man was happy because his work engaged his whole
attention; and to every cunning rivet that he fashioned he gave the
entire forces of his mind. Here was a man who not merely got a living
but lived; and I, chained to my desk, knew well enough that his life
was much more satisfactory than mine.
Money has little to do with this problem of satisfactory living; I
think that this was the first discovery I made in the direction of a
better mode of life. My French workman earned perhaps two pounds a
week: I earned four or five; but he bought happiness with his work,
whereas I bought discontent and weariness. Money may be bought at too
dear a rate. The average citizen, if he did but know it, is always
buying money too dear. He earns, let us say, four hundred pounds a
year; but the larger proportion of this sum goes in what is called
'keeping up appearances.' He must live in a house at a certain rental;
by the time that his rates and taxes are paid he finds one-eighth of
his income at least has gone to provide a shelter for his head. A
cottage, at ten pounds a year, would have served him better, and would
have been equally commodious. He must needs send his children to some
private 'academy' for education, getting only bad education and high
charges for his pains; a village board-school at twopence a week would
have offered undeniable advantages. He must wear the black coat and
top-hat sacred to the clerking tribe; a tweed suit and cap are more
comfortable, and half the price. At all points he is the slave of
convention, and he pays a price for his convention out of all
proportion to its value. At a moderate estimate half the daily
expenditure of London is a sacrifice to the convention or imposture of
respectability.
Unless a man have, however, a large endowment of that liberal
discontent which makes him perpetually examine and reexamine the
conditions of his life, he will be a long time before he even suspects
that he is the victim of artificial needs. When once the yoke of habit
is imposed, the shoulder soon accustoms itself to the bondage, and the
aches and bruises of initiation are forgotten. There are spasms of
disgust, moments of wise suspicion; but they are transient, and men
soon come to regard a city as the prison from whence there is no
escape. But is no escape possible? That was the question which
pressed more and more upon me as the years went on. I saw that the
crux of the whole problem was economic, I knew that I was not the
gainer by a larger income, if I could buy a more real satisfaction on
less income. I saw that it was the artificial needs of life that made
me a slave; the real needs of life were few. A cottage and a hundred
pounds a year in a village meant happiness and independence; but dared
I sacrifice twice or thrice the income to secure it? The debate went
on for years, and it was ended only when I applied to it one fixed and
reasoned principle. That principle was that my first business as a
rational creature was _not to get a living but to live_; and that I was
a fool to sacrifice the power of living in securing the means of life.
CHAPTER IV
EARTH-HUNGER
Like Charles II., who apologised for being so unconscionably long in
dying, I must apologise for being so long in coming to my point, which
is the possibility of buying happiness at a cheaper rate than London
offers it. As it took me twenty years of experience to make my
discovery, I may claim, however, that three chapters is no immoderate
amount of matter in which to describe it. My chief occupation through
these years was to keep my discontent alive. Satisfaction is the death
of progress, and I knew well that if I once acquiesced entirely in the
conditions of my life, my fate was sealed.
I did not acquiesce, though the temper of my revolt was by no means
steady. There were times when--to reverse an ancient saying--the muddy
Jordan of London life seemed more to me than all the sparkling waters
of Damascus. Humanity seemed indescribably majestic; and there were
moments when I sincerely felt that I would not exchange the trampled
causeways of the London streets for the greenest meadows that bordered
Rotha or Derwentwater. There were days of early summer when London
rose from her morning bath of mist in a splendour truly unapproachable;
when no music heard of man seemed comparable with the long diapason of
the crowded streets; when from morn to eve the hours ran with an
inconceivable gaiety and lightness, and the eye was in turn inebriated
with the hard glare and deep shadows of abundant light, with the
infinite contrasts of the streets, with the far-ranged dignity of domes
and towers swimming in the golden haze of midday, or melting in the
lilac mists of evening. I felt also, in this vast congregation of my
fellow-creatures, the exhilarating sense of my own insignificance. Of
what value were my own opinions, hopes, or programmes in this huge
concourse and confusion of opinion? Who cared what one human brain
chanced to think, where so many million brains were thinking? I was
swept on like a bubble in the stream, and I forgot my own
individuality. And this forgetfulness became a pleasure; the mind,
wearied of its own affairs, found delight in recollecting that the
things that seemed so great to it were after all of infinitesimal
importance in the general sum of things.
Astronomy is often credited with providing this sensation; writers of
fiction especially are fond of explaining how the voyage of the eye
through space humbles the individual pride of man through the
oppression of magnitude and vastness. They might come nearer home, for
terrestrial magnitudes produce the same effect as celestial magnitudes;
the mind loses itself as readily in the abyss of London as in those
gulfs of chaos that open in the Milky Way, confronting the eye with
naked infinitude; and this sense of personal insignificance is at once
a horror and a joy. That humble acquiescence of the Londoner in his
fate which we call his apathy, is the natural consequence of an
overwhelming sense of personal insignificance. The great reformer
should be country-born; in the solitude of nature he may come to think
himself significant, and have faith in those thoughts and intuitions
which no one contradicts. But in London, collective life, by its mere
immensity, overwhelms individual life so completely that no audacity or
arrogance of genius can supply that continuous and firm faith in
himself which the reformer must possess.
If I resisted these debilitating influences, it was through no
particular virtue of my own: it was rather through what I may call a
kind of earth-hunger. I had an obstinate craving for fresh air,
unimpeded movement, outdoor life. I wanted the earth, and I wanted to
live in the close embrace of the earth. Some ancestor of mine must
have been a hermit on a mountain, a gipsy, or a peasant: I know not
which, but something of the temperament of all three had been
bequeathed to me. The smell of fresh-turned earth was a smell that
revived in me a portion of my nature that had seemed dead; a flower set
me dreaming of solitary woods; and I found myself watching clouds and
weather-signs as though my bread depended on their lenience. The first
time I saw a mountain I burst into tears, an act which astonished me no
less than my companions. I could offer no explanation of my conduct,
but I felt as though the mountain called me. I said to myself, 'There
is my home, yonder is the earth of which my corporeal part is
fashioned; it is there that I should live and die.' Even a London park
in the first freshness of a summer morning produced these sensations;
and those rare excursions which I took into the genuine country left me
aching for days afterwards with an exquisite pain. I often imagined
myself living as Wordsworth did in Dove Cottage, as Thoreau did in the
Walden Woods, and the vision was delightful. I took an agricultural
paper, and read it diligently, not because it was of the least
practical utility to me, but because its simple details of country life
seemed to me a kind of poetry. In my rambles I never saw a lovely site
without at once going to work to build an imaginary cottage on it, and
the views I had from the windows of my dream-cottages were more real to
me than the actual prospects on which I looked every day. I have even
gone so far as to seek the offices of land-agents, and haggle over the
price of land which I never meant to buy, for the mere pleasure of
fancying it was mine; and this kind of game was long pursued, for
land-agents are a numerous tribe, and when one discovered my imposture,
there was always another ready to accept me as a capitalist in search
of the picturesque. In short, to possess one small fragment of the
world's surface; to have a hut, a cabin, or a cottage that was verily
my own, to eat the fruits of my own labour on the soil--this seemed to
me the crown and goal of all human felicity. Conscript of the city as
I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic
civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as
rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in
my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams
were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy
loneliness of open spaces under open skies.
This kind of earth-hunger is, I believe, not common among English
people to-day; if it were, the tide of life would not set so steadily
townward as it does. The class in which it existed most strongly was
the yeoman class, and this is a class which has practically
disappeared. In my youth I knew half a dozen persons of this class, to
whom towns were genuinely abhorrent. They would come to London once or
twice in their lives, visit certain market towns in their district at
intervals, and escape back into the country with the joy of wild birds
liberated from a cage. The mere grime and dirt of cities horrified
them; they were suffocated in the close air, and they were driven half
distracted by the clamour of the streets. These men lived, upon the
whole, lives of not immoderate labour: or, as one might say, of sober
ease, They possessed little money, it is true, but the want of it did
not appear to trouble them. Their houses were plain, their method of
life simple, and clearly it had not entered their minds to covet any
more sumptuous modes of life. All this is changed now. The daily
press, which presents a thousand pictures of the bustling life of
cities, goes everywhere, and has communicated a strange restlessness to
the rural mind. Increased means of locomotion have brought London to
the very door of village communities. If men to-day actually possessed
the acres on which they toil they would be in no hurry to leave them;
they would be effectually chained to the soil by the sense of
independence and proprietorship, as is the case among the rural
population of France, who do not rent but own the land. The yeomen did
own the land, and that was the secret of their content. But when the
day of large farms came, the small landowners were crushed out; and as
for the mere peasant, he has no chance at all of ever owning land, and
never has had; so that he has every inducement to crowd into towns
where wages are nominally higher, and he soon outgrows that natural
earth-hunger which modern civilisation affords him no means of
gratifying.
By virtue of the peasant or gipsy blood in me I kept my earth-hunger
through twenty years of London life, but I count my case unique. I
never found any one who shared my feelings; on the contrary, I found
that whatever primitive instincts toward country life my friends may
have had once, London had made an effectual end of them. The country
means for most Londoners, not the blessed solitude of open spaces, but
Margate or Brighton. When the annual summer exodus arrives he does
but exchange one kind of town for another kind. He carries with him
all the aptitudes and artificial instincts of the town; he loves the
bustle of a crowd; he wants boarding-houses full of company, and
streets brilliant with electric light; and he returns to town, after a
vivacious fortnight, without having once looked upon the real country,
unless it be with the distracted eye of a rider on a _char-à-banc_. If
my earth-hunger did not die in London, it was mainly because my
holidays were of a very different description. I never visited but one
watering-place, and that was enough. I never stayed in a
boarding-house in my life, nor would the promise of all my expenses
paid and a handsome bonus into the bargain tempt me to the experiment.
I sought the country absolute; a cottage or a little farm remote from
towns and out of sound of railways; villages so tiny that maps refuse
to name them. I can count half a dozen of these places which haunt my
memory with all the sanctity of some religious dream. They were my
temporary cloisters, where I received the sacrament of silence; the
woodland sanctuaries where my spirit was renewed. When my friends
returned from Margate they were full of chatter about the people that
they had met, and they went about whistling the last song they had
heard upon the beach. I had met no one but a few simple labouring
folk, and the music I remembered was the whistling of blackbirds and
thrushes in the early dawn. I knew that I had purchased much finer
pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month
of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood
me. The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots
on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush.
There is one tiny farm that I love to think of, because its tenants
taught me better than a thousand books could have done how real was the
felicity of simple life. It had six rooms all told, and was little
better than a cottage. Before its door ran a clear river which
connected two lakes; a pinewood rose behind the house, and behind this
again the lower buttresses of the everlasting hills. The nearest town
was seven miles away; you reached it by a lovely road, in part through
pinewoods, in part over open moors, with the silver flashing of a lake
never far away, and the purple mountains always close at hand. The
farm-holding was insignificantly small, as was the case in those parts;
but my host uttered no word of its insufficiency. He grew enough oats
to provide good oatmeal for his family and fodder for his horse; his
potatoes also came from his own soil, and his bacon from his own stye;
his few sheep gave him fresh meat, or brought him a little money in the
market, and from their wool every blanket in the house was spun, and
even his own clothing woven. Two cows provided milk and butter for the
household; his fowls gave him eggs and occasionally a dinner; and thus
with the exception of the yearly grocer's bill he spent next to no
money. I dwelt beneath this humble roof for a month, and I profess
that in all that time I never saw the members of the household engaged
in any labour that was not also a pleasure. There was plenty of work,
of course: cows to be milked, vegetables to be dug and cleansed, meals
to be prepared, the little harvest to be gathered in; but it was work
that one could do with singing. No one hurried over it, for there was
ample time for every duty of the day. No one felt these simple duties
burdensome, because they were so natural and inevitable, It was a rare
day when some member of the household did not find an hour or two for
fishing, and a disappointing breakfast that did not show a lordly dish
of trout.
It may be imagined that in a place so remote culture would be
missing--at least the love and knowledge of books which we call
culture; but when I say the place was Scotch this delusion is disposed
of. The children had had to walk that long seven miles a day and back
again, in all weathers, to obtain an education. They had grown up to
value it, and were the better mentally as well as physically for their
thousands of miles of tramping. There were books in the little
household, and good books too. As often as not when we sat round the
red peats of an evening, we discussed Browning or Herbert Spencer.
That year it happened that a party of students from Edinburgh
University were camping in the neighbourhood, and they often joined us
round the farm fire of an evening. They talked about books and
opinions and men with all the omniscience of youth; but the two girls
of the household held their own with them. Ah, Kate M'Intyre, you did
me much friendly service in tying flies for me that summer, and
teaching me something of the craft of fishing; but you did a far more
enduring service in helping me to see that one does not need towns and
libraries to grow the fine flower of wholesome cultured womanhood.
Here, beside that lake, whose lady has been made immortal by the hand
of Scott, you showed me that God grows ladies still who wear homespun
and live in cottages, and are all the wiser and sweeter for the bright
seclusion of their lives. In a town, you and your family, endowed only
with such means as you found sufficient for existence, would have been
despondent drudges, you yourself perhaps working in a sewing-room in
bad air and for poor pay, but here you were the free-holders of nature.
Never did I see you go about your simple duties--always with a bright
look and a snatch of song--but I said to myself, 'She hath chosen the
better part, which shall not be taken away from her'; and I say it
still, though I am well aware that the smart young women of London
shops and restaurants will not believe me. I dare say they would count
themselves much better off than you in money, in dress, and in
opportunities of pleasure; but I know who was the richer in vitality,
in health, and in the power of happiness.
When I lived among these simple folk I shared not only their roof but
their labours, and it was thus I came to distinguish between the nature
of work in cities and work in the country. To obtain my meal in a city
I had to do things that were distasteful to me; I had to shut myself
away from the fresh air and sunlight in a dingy room and to spend dull
hours in tasks which afforded me no genuine intellectual pleasure.
Here, on the contrary, every duty had a pastime yoked with it. I rose
early, not only that I might learn to milk the cows, but that I might
see the sunrise; if I went into the woods to saw logs that would
presently make a clear flame on the evening fire, my lungs drank health
among the forest fragrances; when I went fishing I did something not
only pleasurable but useful, for I added dainties to my larder. In the
city I lived to work; here I worked to live. I might go further and
say that in the city I lived to work for other people, for my brains
were daily exploited that my master might maintain a house at
Kensington, and when the landlord, the water-lord, the light-lord, and
the rate-collector had all had their dues from me there was little
enough left that I could call my own. Here, on the contrary, all that
I did had an immediate and direct relation to my own well-being. The
amount of work I had to do to live was light, and I bought with it
something that was my own. We are so used to the exactions of a
complicated and artificial life, that it is an amazing discovery to
ascertain how small is the toll of labour which Nature asks of those
who live naturally. You have but to do certain things which in
themselves are pleasures to obtain ample means of life; and as these
things are soon and easily done by a healthy human creature there is an
abundant leisure at his command. To split pine-logs, dig a garden,
pull a heavy boat down the lake after fish, tramp up the hillside to
collect the sheep, are simply so many exercises of the body, the
equivalents of which town youths find in the gymnasium or the football
field; the difference is that all this exertion in the gymnasium, which
the town youth takes to keep up his health, would in the country _keep
him_. The same amount of muscular exertion which a town youth puts
forth to chase a ball round a twenty acre field would, if properly
applied, put a roof over his head and food on his table. The sports of
the civilised man are means of life to the natural man. If a man must
needs sweat, and be bemired, and have an aching back, it is surely
better economy to have a house and a good meal at the end of it all
than merely a good appetite for a meal that he has yet to pay for. I
do not object to buy health in hard physical exercise if I can buy it
in no other way; but I am better satisfied if I can buy health and a
meal at the same time and for the same price. This is practically what
is done every day by men who live in the country. In a town they would
undertake an equal amount of muscular exertion for the sake of health,
and would find that they still had 'to go to business' to live; here
they have done their business in doing their pleasure.
Earth-hunger is without doubt the most wholesome passion men can
entertain, and if Governments were wise they would do all they could to
fortify and gratify it. On the contrary, the settled policy of English
Government is entirely hostile to it. There is no country where it is
so difficult to acquire freehold land in small quantities--a subject on
which I shall have more to say presently. Bad land-laws lie at the
back of what we call the urban tendencies of modern life. If fifty
years ago the Irish peasantry had had the same facilities for acquiring
land that they have to-day, it is safe to say that there would have
been little or no emigration, for never was there race that left the
land of its fathers with such bitter and entire reluctance as the
Irish. The English peasant shares the same reluctance, though his
slower nature is incapable of expressing it with the same volubility of
anguish. Give him enough land to live upon; make him a proprietor
instead of a serf; let him have fair railway rates, so that his produce
can fetch its proper price in the markets, and there were no man so
proud and so content as he. But this is just what the feudal laws of
England will not do for him; and so millions of acres fall out of
cultivation and farms go a-begging because the men who could have kept
them prosperous have been forced to sell their thews and muscles to be
prostituted in the dismal drudgeries of cities.
There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by
Money-hunger. Simple ideas of life must needs perish where the nature
of a nation's life makes them difficult or impossible of attainment. A
country-born youth might keep to the soil, if he saw the slightest hope
that the soil would keep him; when he sees that this is impossible he
files to cities, because he believes that there is more gold to be
picked up in the city mire in a month than can be won from the ploughed
fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown
that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when
the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once
Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome
Earth-hunger--old as the primal Eden, where man's life began--is
stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords
being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for
the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the
wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture
of Nature is cast aside for the blotted pages of the betting-book;
sport becomes not a means of recreation but of gambling; and instead of
sturdy races bred upon the soil, and drawing from the soil solid
qualities of mind and body, you have blighted and anaemic races, bred
amid the populous disease of cities, and incapable of any task that
shall demand steady energy, continuous thought, or sober powers of
reflection or of will.
CHAPTER V
HEALTH AND ECONOMICS
Enough has been said to show that I never heartily settled to a town
life, and that the obstacle to content was my own character. Mere
discontent with one's environment, however useful it may be as an
irritant to prevent stagnation and brutish acquiescence, obviously does
not carry one very far. Men may chafe for years at the conditions of
their lot without in any way attempting to amend them. I soon came to
see that I was in danger of falling into this condition of futility. I
was, therefore, forced to face the question whether my continual inward
protest against the kind of life which I led was founded on anything
more stable than an opinion or a sentiment? No man ever yet took a
positively heroic or original course for the sake of an opinion.
Opinion must become conviction before it has any potency to change the
ordering of life. I saw plainly that I must either bring my thoughts
to the point of conviction or discard them altogether.
There is a good phrase which is sometimes used about men who are
members of a party, without in any way entering into its propagandist
aims--we say that they 'do not play the game.' They may have excellent
philosophic reasons for their aloofness, or even admirable scruples;
but parties do not ask for either. Parties ask for party loyalty, and
to give this loyalty personal scruples must be set aside. I could not
but apply this doctrine to my own state of mind. London asked me to
play the game, and I was not playing it. It was impossible to put
heart into a kind of life which I inwardly detested. I did my day's
work with a mind divided; and, although no one could accuse me of
wilful negligence, yet a child could see that my work missed that
quality of entire efficiency which makes for success. I might count
myself much superior to men like Arrowsmith by the possession of
superior sentiments, yet, in the long run, my sentiment debilitated me,
and his destitution of sentiment was a source of power to him in the
kind of work we both had to do. To the man who detests the nature of
his employment as I detested mine, I would say at once, either conquer
your detestation or change your work. Work that is not genuinely loved
cannot possibly be done well. It is no use chafing and fretting and
wishing that you lived in the country, if you know perfectly well that
you have not the least intention of living anywhere but in the town.
If it is town life you are really bent upon, the sooner rustic
instincts are uprooted the better for you. London can prove herself a
complaisant mistress to those who desire no other, but she will give
nothing to those who flout her in their hearts. In plain words there
is no middle course between accepting the yoke or finally rejecting it;
either course may be justified, but it is the silliest folly to accept
with complacency a yoke which you mean to shake off the moment you have
courage or opportunity to revolt. London marks such dissemblers with
an angry eye, as captains mark reluctant soldiers; and if time holds no
disgrace for them it will certainly bring them no advancement.
Were my fine theories composed of mere fluid sentiment, or had they
some more consistent element in them which was capable of hardening
into invincible conviction? That was my problem. It was debated in
season and out of season. Gradually the two dominant factors in the
problem became evident; they were health and economics.
There could be no question about health. It was true that I had
suffered from no serious illness in my life, but London kept me in a
normal state of low vitality. I had constant headaches, fits of
depression, and minor physical derangements. I rarely knew what it was
to wake in the morning with that clear joyousness of spirit which marks
vigorous vitality. A London winter I dreaded, and I had good reason
for my dread. When the fog lay on the town an unbearable oppression
lay also on my spirits. Imagination had little to do with this
oppression; it was the physical result of lack of oxygen. It was the
same with my children; they grew pinched and bleached in face, and went
about their little tasks with the slowness of old men. It is stated, I
believe, that London is the healthiest city in the world; no doubt it
is true as regards the actual percentage of disease to the immense
population, but statistics take no account of lowered vitality.
Without being actually ill, vitality may be reduced to a point at which
existence becomes a kind of misery. Alcohol dissolves for a time the
cloud on the mind, the incubus upon the energies; and the relief is so
great that men do not think of the price they pay for it. No wonder
public-houses are the landmarks of London locomotion; they are the
Temples of Oblivion, where the devitalised multitudes seek to forget
themselves, that they may regain the courage to live at all.
For myself, I had sense to know that stimulants of this kind were a
remedy much worse than the disease. The only stimulant, at once safe
and effectual, which I needed was fresh air. The moment I found myself
among the hills a miraculous change was wrought in me. I had not
breathed that quick and vital air for an hour before a glow ran through
my veins more delightful, and much more enduring, than the glow of
wine. A single night in some small cottage chamber--where the very bed
had a cool scent of flowers and lawns, where the open window admitted
air fresh from pine forest and mountain streams, where the silence was
so deep that one's pulse seemed to tick aloud like a watch--and I awoke
a man renewed. Six o'clock, or even five, was not too soon for all my
little household to be astir. We were all alike eager for the open
air; for the walk, bare-footed, through the dewy grass to the mountain
pool; for the shock and thrill of that green water into which we
plunged delighted; and in those prolonged and pure ablations I think
our spirits shared. The bells of laughter rang the livelong day. The
cramped mind began to move again, and long abdicated powers of fancy
and of humour were restored. Equanimity of body brought evenness of
temper; it was incredible to recollect how irritable we had been with
one another in those ghastly days of London fog, when the very grating
of a chair along the floor made the nerves jump. Even the mind took
new edge, for though I did not read much upon a holiday, yet I found
that what I did read left a clearness of impression to which I had long
been unaccustomed. And what was the root and cause of all this
miracle? Fresh air, wholesome food, rude health--nothing more! To
feel that it is bliss to be alive, health alone is needed. And by
health I mean not the absence of physical ailment or disease, but a
high condition of vitality. This the country gave me; this the town
denied me. The only question was then, at what rate did I value the
boon?
This brought me immediately to the much more complex problem of
economics. I knew that men could live in the country on small means,
for men did so; but I perceived that the art of living in the country
did not come by nature. Every one supposes that he can drive a horse
or grow potatoes; and, when we recollect how many thousands of men go
to Canada to take up agricultural pursuits without the least knowledge
of the business, it is clear that the belief is general that any man
can farm. I may claim the merit of freedom from this popular delusion.
I not only knew that I could not farm, but I did not wish to be a
farmer. What I wished was to live in the country in some modest way
that answered to my needs; to earn by some form of exertion a small
income; and at the most, to grow my own vegetables, catch my own fish,
and snare my own rabbits.
A legacy of two hundred a year would have served my purpose admirably,
but modesty forbade me laying my case before benevolent millionaires,
and a destitution of maiden aunts put an end to any hopes of a bequest
by natural causes.
What was my precise position then? I had a salary of two hundred and
fifty pounds a year. An investment that had turned out fortunately
gave me about forty pounds a year. I had done from time to time a
little work for the press, which had been worth to me about thirty
pounds a year more. My total budget showed, then, an annual income of
three hundred and twenty pounds, which I found barely sufficient for my
needs as a dweller in towns. If I migrated to a cottage, how would
matters stand with me? I should lose my two hundred and fifty pounds
per annum of course, and this was an alarming prospect. But, on the
other hand, I reminded myself that I had never really possessed it. I
prepared various tables in which I arranged the items of my expenditure
under two heads, viz. the expenditure that was inevitable, and the
expenditure that was evitable, because it was the result of town life.
I shall best explain by giving a sample of these tables:--
TABLE I.
INEVITABLE EXPENDITURE. L. s. d.
Food and general household expenses,
calculated at 30s. per week . . . . . 78 0 0
Books, magazines, and papers . . . . . . 5 0 0
Clothes for two adults and two children . 20 0 0
Insurances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 0 0
Holidays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 0 0
Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 0 0
Sundries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 0
Rent, rates, and taxes . . . . . . . . . 65 0 0
----------
L268 0 0
TABLE II.
EVITABLE EXPENDITURE.
If I adopted a country life. L. s. d.
Holidays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 0 0
By saving on rent, rates, and taxes,
calculating my cottage cost me not
more than L20 per annum . . . . . . . 45 0 0
By saving in food . . . . . . . . . . . 20 0 0
----------
L95 0 0
It will be seen that I allowed no reduction in clothes and books, for I
did not wish my children to be dressed as beggars, or to be ignorant of
current literature.
It does not need the eye of a chartered accountant to perceive that
whatever may be said for Table II., Table I. is not satisfactory. In
it I accounted for only 268 pounds, whereas I have already stated my
total income was 320 pounds. What became of the 52 pounds which found
no record in my ingenuous schedule? I could not tell, but I was pretty
sure that it was absorbed in the petty wastefulness of town life.
Londoners are so accustomed to constant daily expenditure in small
ways, that it occurs to no one to ascertain how considerable an
encroachment this aggregate expenditure is upon the total yearly
income. In all but very fine weather I must needs use some means of
public conveyance every day; there was a daily lunch to be provided;
and when work kept me late at the office there was tea as well. One
can lunch comfortably on a shilling or eighteenpence a day; and I knew
places where I could have lunched for much less, but they were in parts
of the town which I could not reach in the brief time at my disposal.
Moreover, one must needs be the slave of etiquette even though he be a
clerk, and if all the staff of an office frequent a certain restaurant,
one must perforce fall into line with them under penalty of social
ostracism. Thus, whether I liked it or not, for five days in the week
I had to spend eighteenpence a day for lunch, and fourpence for teas;
and if we add those small gratuities which the poorest men take it as a
point of honour to observe, here was an annual expenditure of 25
pounds. Taking one thing with another 5 pounds might be added for 'bus
and railway fares; so that only 22 pounds is left to be accounted for.
And now, if we return to Table II., it is obvious that my income of 320
pounds per annum was only nominal, because a very great part of it was
really spent in keeping up a position which a town life imposed upon
me. Before I touched a single penny of my nominal income of 250 pounds
per annum, I had paid 30 pounds per year in the daily expenses
inevitable to my position, and 65 pounds for rent and taxes, which was
quite 45 pounds more than I ought to pay. Education comes also to be
considered at this point. My two children went to a very respectable
school at the cost of a little more than 15 pounds per annum each. No
doubt I might have sent them to a Board school, where they would have
received a better education; but in the part of London where I lived
there was no Board school within easy reach, and besides this, though I
hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be
considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may
take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but
the London gamin is not a desirable acquaintance. In this, as in other
matters, I paid through the nose for my position; and the convention
cost me a clear 35 pounds per annum. Thus I calculated that out of a
nominal income of 250 pounds per annum 100 pounds was paid as a tax to
convention and respectability.
I have no doubt that a good many flaws may be found in these
calculations; but one point is beyond dispute, viz., that a town income
is always more apparent than real. Money is worth no more than its
purchasing power. The business man who is offered 1000 pounds per
annum in New York against 700 pounds per annum in London, refuses the
offer unless it carries with it great contingent advantages, because he
knows perfectly well that 700 pounds a year in London is worth a good
deal more than 1000 pounds a year in New York. But the same kind of
prudent calculation is seldom applied to the case of town versus
country living at home. It is impossible to persuade the labourer that
a pound a week in London is really less than fifteen shillings a week
in the country. Men are dazzled by mere figures, and there is no
country clerk who would not jump at the idea of a fifty pounds a year
rise in London, though ten minutes spent over a sum in addition and
subtraction would be sufficient to assure him that he would not be
enlarging his income but diminishing it. A man has to live upon a
certain scale suited to his needs and tastes, but the income which
makes this kind of life possible is a variable quantity. It is not by
what men earn in the aggregate that their incomes should be measured,
but by what they have left when the necessary cost of living is
defrayed. If it costs a man fifty pounds a year more to live in London
than in the country, he is obviously no better off by the extra fifty
pounds he earns in London. He is not earning fifty pounds for himself
but fifty pounds for the landlord, the rate-collector, the gas-man, the
restaurant proprietor, the omnibus and railway companies. His gold
never reaches his own pocket; it is filched from him by dexterous
thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the
air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever. Yet
I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would
seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric
lines of _Hudibras_--
Doubtless the pleasure is as great
To cheated be as 'tis to cheat.
In most things I claim to be no wiser than my fellow-men, but in this I
knew myself wiser; I knew where I was cheated. I knew that the
schoolmaster who cost me thirty pounds a year was a licensed footpad;
half the money spent in restaurants and tea-shops was blackmail paid to
respectability; the landlord who took his forty-five pounds a year from
my pocket was a mere robber, who took advantage of the need I had to
live in a certain locality that I might attend to my vocation. Not
only were my brains exploited that my employer might maintain a
sumptuous house at Kensington, but the wage he paid me was exploited by
a host of other people, who had houses of their own to maintain.
Before I could feed my children I must help to pay for and cook the
dinner of the folk who lived on the dividends of railways and omnibus
companies. On the way to my office the tailor took toll of me by
forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear
no other garb. I could not even drink plain water but that some one
was the richer. I was the common gull of the thing called convention.
I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into
leather, some one would have put in a claim to that. Even for my skin,
poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it had ceased to be of
use to me, for London cemeteries declare dividends upon the dead. My
case reminded me of an old gentleman I once knew, who wore so many
coats, waistcoats, and shirts to keep warmth in a body of singular
attenuation, that it was commonly said that by the time James Smith
undressed at night there was very little James Smith that was
discoverable. Certainly by the time London had done wringing gold out
of me there was very little gold left that was my own.
There was, however, one kind of comfort to be deduced from these
reflections; if I was not nearly so well off as I appeared to be, I had
all the less to lose. Rightly considered it would not be 250 pounds
per annum that I should lose by leaving London, for I had never
possessed that sum, I calculated my real loss at something nearer 150
pounds, and this seemed not so terrible a thing. I had my forty pounds
a year for certain. I had the small earnings of my pen, and with
abundant time upon my hands I saw every reason why these should be
increased. Could I face a new kind of life upon an income of seventy
pounds per annum? Ah, how anxiously that problem was debated with my
wife, many a night when the children were abed! The natural
conservatism of woman had a great deal to say in these debates. 'It
was all very well,' said my wife, 'to do these little sums on paper,
but suppose the facts did not correspond? Suppose I found no cottage
at twenty pounds a year, and no decent school at sixpence a week? Then
the world was full of writers for the press.' (I frowned.) 'Not of
course like you, not half so good,' she added with a smile, 'but how do
you know that you will succeed? Show me a fixed income of 100 pounds a
year, and I would chance it, for I can live simply enough,' she would
say, 'and am as fond of liberty as you.'
She might have added what I knew to be true, that the penalties of
London life fell heavier upon her than me. I was not insensible to the
instantaneous lightening of spirits that happened with her when she was
able to forsake the abominable purlieus of the cellar-kitchen where her
life was spent; and although I knew not half her toils, nor half her
dejections and anxieties, which were sedulously kept from me, yet I was
not wholly blind. I had seen her too amid the roses of a cottage
garden flying the colour of long-forgotten roses in her cheeks; in the
hay-field shaking off a dozen years in as many hours; and although she
was always young to me, she never seemed so young and sweet as when we
walked a honeysuckled lane together. Her desire was with me I knew
well; she had no fear of poverty, and would have been content with
plainer fare than I; but her children made her prudent.
At last the one thing happened which made her prudence coincide with
her desires; one of the children sickened with a languor that was the
precursor of disease, and the doctors said that only country air could
bring back strength. And then fate itself took the whole matter out of
my control. Something happened in the city--I know not what--and the
firm I served came near to shipwreck. Business shrank to a diminished
channel, and the staff of clerks must needs be reduced. I have said
some hard words of my employer as the exploiter of my labour; he will
appear no more in this history, and my last word about him shall be
justly kind. He broke the news of his misfortune to me with a delicacy
that made me respect him, and with a hesitating painful shame that made
me pity him. He praised me beyond my merit for my twenty years of
service; he had hoped to keep me with him for another twenty years, and
I believe he spoke the truth when he said it pained him to think that
his misfortunes should be mine. He handed me in silence a cheque for
fifty pounds. He then shook my hand heartily, murmured some vague
words about hoping to reinstate me if things should mend, and hurried
from me; and in his broken look and bowed shoulders I read the prophecy
that his days of fortune and success were gone for ever. The little
tragedy was played out in less than ten minutes. I locked my desk, put
on my hat and coat, and went out into the street; and my heart felt a
pang at leaving the place which I should never have imagined possible.
I had walked fully half a mile before another thought occurred to me.
My blood suddenly sang in my veins, and I remembered that I was an
emancipated slave; at last I was Free!
CHAPTER VI
IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE
I was free, but what was I to do with my freedom? Ingenious apologists
for slavery used to argue that the slave was much happier as a bondman
than a freeman, as long as the conditions of his bondage were not
unendurably harsh: but no one ever knew a slave who held this creed.
There never was a slave who did not prefer his dinner of herbs, earned
by his own labour, to the stalled ox of luxurious captivity. For my
part, I thought the air never tasted so sweet as on that morning of my
liberation. I walked slowly, drawing long breaths, that I might taste
its full relish, as a connoisseur passes an exquisite and rare wine
over his palate, that he may discriminate its subtleties. I became a
lounger, and took the pavement with the air of a gentleman at ease. I
wandered into Hyde Park, paid my penny for a seat, and sat down almost
dizzy with the unaccustomed thought that there was not a human being in
the universe who, at that moment, had the smallest claim to make upon
my time or energy. An hour passed in a kind of ecstatic dream. It
chanced to be a morning when Queen Victoria was driving from Paddington
to Buckingham Palace, and every instant the throng of carriages
increased. Standing on my seat, I saw an immense lane of people,
silent as a wood; a contagious shiver stirred them, like a gust of wind
amongst the leaves; I saw the distant glitter of helmets and cuirasses,
and the pageant swept along with that one tired, kindly, homely face
for its centre of attraction, luring loyalty even from a heart so
republican as mine by its air of patient weariness. I thought, and I
believed the thought sincere, that I would not have exchanged places
with her who was the mistress of so many peoples, the Empress of such
indeterminable Empire. My new-born loyalty was three-parts pity. Had
she, who sat there in such 'lonely splendour,' ever known the day,
since as a young girl the heavy rod of empire was intrusted to her
frail and unaccustomed hands, when she woke to say, 'This day I am
free, I will go where I will, do as I please, and none shall stay me?'
Yet I, a manumitted clerk, had come upon this singular and glad day;
and I had it in my heart to say with Emerson, 'Give me health and a
day, and I will make the pomp of empire ridiculous.'
I turned slowly homeward in this glow of exultation. I should have
run, for the news, either good or evil, called for instant
communication. Let my delay stand excused; I had certain matters to be
settled with myself that morning. My feet had to learn a new kind of
movement, and my thoughts a new sequence; I was as a child learning to
walk and think before I could take my place on equal terms with new
companions. One incident of my walk struck me by way of humour and
discovery. I had often strolled into bookshops toward evening, and had
remarked upon the cold discourtesy with which my presence was regarded.
Now I knew the reason; I had come at the clerk's hour, and the keen
eyes of discriminating shopmen had recognised my low estate. I came
now under altered auspices. To shop at three in the afternoon is to
give proof of leisure; behold, in the eyes of obsequious shopmen I had
at once become a wealthy dilettante, nurturing the growth of an
expensive library, and the rarest books were laid before me with an
ingratiating smile. Let the man who would understand how much the
estimates men take of us are based on wealth, or supposed wealth, make
the brief experiment of shopping at the rich man's hour, instead of at
the poor man's; he will be surprised to note the difference of the
social atmosphere. A man's clothes may be poor enough, and his
appearance contemptible, but if he will shop at the hour when all the
drudges are at work, no one will take him for a drudge. I will confess
it gave me pleasure to note this change of estimate. I seemed to taste
the first privilege of a freeman, when a pursy bookseller took from a
glass case certain expensive books on Art, and drew my attention, with
subtle deference to my judgment, to the merits of the pictures they
contained. I may as well confess at once, that so intoxicated was I
with the new respect that greeted me, that I even bought one of these
volumes, which I did not need, and certainly could not afford. It was
a weakness and a folly, no doubt; but how could I tell my obsequious
friend that I paid my guinea not for anything he sold me, but as a sort
of first footing on my entrance to the realm of freedom? I might have
spent it much worse, for I bought my self-respect with it.
The sight of my doorstep brought me to my bearings, for a man's own
doorstep is a rare corrective of disordered fancies. The fact I had to
communicate was briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum,
against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation. Women, I
have long noticed--or women of the best kind, I ought to add--have much
more genius in finance than men. They have a much keener sense of the
use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate
into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony. They, being primitive and
unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the
cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each
shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get
the most out of it. How would my wife regard the definite
disappearance of five thousand shillings? Not with levity, I knew; and
I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on the _Tombs of
the Etruscans_. The _Tombs of the Etruscans_ would have meant to her
three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine. A
wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man's
pleasure, but his discipline; I believe that he was not far wrong. It
is no use disputing the fact that the married man is always in danger
of the judgment; and it is only by some form of bribery that he can
hope to escape being cast in damages. I resolved on bribery, and made
my cheque the bribe. Here said I, was present wealth, let us be
content. The plea was not received with instant favour, but it was not
wholly ineffectual. By the time we sat down to supper that night we
had all attained to cheerfulness. It was a meal of some tenuity, not
calculated to lie heavy on the stomach; for, said Charlotte, 'If we
have to begin high thinking and plain living, we can't begin too
early.' The only load on my digestion that night was the _Tombs of the
Etruscans_.
It says much for the steadfastness of our convictions, that in this new
crisis of affairs the old resolution to seek a country life passed
unquestioned. What to another had seemed calamity appeared to us
opportunity. When the daily paper came next morning, it was not to the
columns where commerce chronicles its wants that my eye turned, but to
the much more engaging columns where lands and houses were advertised
for sale. This part of the newspaper had long ago attracted me by its
fine air of surreptitious romance. My mind had often been kept aglow
for a whole day by some seductive advertisement of cottages 'situate
amid pine-woods,' or farmhouses, all complete, even to the styes and
kennels, which by all accounts were to be given away. One such
advertisement I particularly remember for a kind of insane generosity
which pervaded it. It described at length a farmhouse, 'stone-built
and covered with ivy' (observe the very definite sense of the
picturesque conveyed in this phrase), containing ten rooms, commanding
pleasant views of a well-wooded country, together with a large orchard,
and one hundred and fifty acres of freehold land, the whole of which
might be purchased for 750 pounds; and, added the advertiser, 'the
furniture at present in the house is included in the price.' I do not
know where this terrestrial Paradise existed; I believe it was in
Essex; but I often regretted that I made no effort to discover it.
However, the morning paper, if it contained no paragraph comparable
with this in point of style and seduction, certainly did appear
singularly rich in Paradises. Philanthropists, disguised as
land-agents, contended eagerly with one another through many columns of
advertisements, offering a reluctant world all the advantages of rural
happiness on what appeared merely nominal terms. It appeared that they
did not even want the money, which they mentioned only in a kind of
gentlemanly whisper; pay them but 100 pounds in sound cash, and the
rest might stand at mortgage upon easy terms for an indefinite period!
One might have imagined that the whole of rural England was
depopulated; that Eden itself had been cut up into building lots; that,
in fact, the land-agent was subsidised by a paternal government to
persuade the townsman to turn landed proprietor on terms which even the
squatter in new lands would regard as generous.
The reality I soon found to be entirely different. The moment I set
about the deliberate business of finding a cottage I made a series of
surprising discoveries which I will now relate.
In the first place, I found that many of these much vaunted farmhouses
were situated in districts utterly destitute of beauty, and even
desolate. One specimen may stand for the whole. I omit the
particulars of the advertisement, which was drawn up in the usual
style; but I must say, in justice to its author, that when I
interviewed him in his city office he did what he could to discourage
too abundant hope. He did not go the length of admitting his
description false, but he told me drily that 'I had better see the
thing for myself.' An hour's journey found me on the Essex flats.
There was a bright sky and a brisk wind, but nothing could disguise the
featureless monotony of the far-stretched landscape. The train put me
down at a roadside station where a dogcart waited my arrival. I drove
through a small village of mean, red-brick houses, and soon found
myself in the open country. My driver made but one remark during the
four-mile journey.
'You be come to see Dawes' farm?' he said.
I admitted the fact.
'There's a-many has come,' he replied. 'You be the twenty-first I have
drove. An' they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
'Why?' I asked.
'You'll soon find out.'
With that he lit his pipe and smoked stolidly. I was not long in
comprehending the reason of his reticence. Dawes' farm may once have
been a comfortable residence, but when I saw it it was a mildewed,
rat-haunted ruin. It stood upon a piece of redeemed marsh-land, and
the salt damp of the marsh had eaten into its very vitals. The
wainscots were discoloured, the walls oozed, and part of the roof was
broken. There had once been a garden; that, like the rest, was a ruin.
The land was there no doubt, fifty acres said the advertisement, but it
was treeless, bleak, flat, covered with coarse grass, and cut up by
muddy watercourses. To have lived in the house at all it must have
been rebuilt, and even then nothing could have made it a cheerful place
of residence. There was no water-supply that I could discover, unless
half a dozen butts that took the drippings of the roof represented it.
The orchard had long ago gone back to barbarism. It appeared that the
place had been deserted for half a dozen years. I did not wonder. The
only wonder was that it had ever been inhabited.
'Ah,' repeated my driver, 'there's a-many as comes an' looks, an' they
all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
I subscribed to the common sentiment. Never did that infinite diapason
which we call the roar of London sound so sweet, never did those long,
lighted, busy streets seem so habitable, as on that night when I
returned from my casual inspection of Dawes' farm.
The memory of Dawes' farm taught me that if I was to live in the
country some charm of outlook was indispensable to my content.
Mountains, a lake, a wood, a running river--some delicate effect of
scenery, some concourse of elements, either in themselves or in their
combination beautiful--these I must have if I would be happy. They
were as necessary to me as my daily bread. But here I made a second
disquieting discovery; there was not a part of England which could be
justly described as beautiful that was not already occupied in the
degree of its accessibility. I thought of Surrey; I visited it and
found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise. Half a dozen men of
genius had in an inadvertent moment advertised the pure air of the
Surrey highlands, and by the time I came upon the scene trim villas had
sprung up by hundreds, and wealth was already in possession. The
merest cottage in this favoured district provoked keen contest in the
auction-room. Indeed, in the true sense, there were no cottages; they
had been transformed, added to, rebuilt, till only a remnant of their
primitive rusticity remained. It was the same everywhere. I was too
late by twenty years in this kind of quest.
I had been led to believe by various social writers that the villages
of England were depopulated. According to these fallacious chroniclers
the country abounded in cottages and even small manor-houses from which
the inhabitants had fled. I can only say I never found it so. A
deserted roadside cottage I often found, but there were obvious reasons
for its desolation. Sometimes it was so far from other houses, or any
centre of congregated life, that it must have been difficult, and
almost impossible, for any one residing in it to obtain the common
necessaries of life. More commonly it was deserted because it was
falling into ruin. But no sooner did I reach a real village than I
found every house in occupation. The usual complaint was lack of
accommodation. Hence rents were by no means low, and the contest for
houses was vehement. If the village had real beauties of its own--a
cluster of thatched and dormer-windowed cottages, properties valuable
to the artist--one was sure to come upon immediate evidence of the
cockney invasion. What I thought a barn would as like as not prove a
studio, and it was no farmer who lived at the pleasant, yellow-washed
farmhouse amid the rose-garden, but 'a gentleman from London.' And we
had but to go a little way down some shady lane to find a glaring board
announcing building land for lease, and from some local agent one
obtained particulars of the exact kind of house which the investor
would be permitted to build upon the site.
It will be said that this was not the country proper, nor was it, for
London has annexed every place within fifty miles of Charing Cross.
But in the country proper a new difficulty met me: not only were there
no empty cottages, but landowners stuck to their acres with such
jealous obstinacy that they refused to sell a rood of land for a
cottage on any terms whatever. I will give one example, which may be
taken as typical. There was a Welsh valley where I had once spent a
summer holiday, exquisitely retired and beautiful--a dozen miles from
the nearest railway. Beyond the green strath, with its few white
cottages and farms, rose on every side the wide hills, with Snowdon
towering over all like a dome. The hillside land had but a prairie
value. It had never been cultivated. A few sheep strayed over it; but
for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its
vociferous cascades. One would have supposed that had any one offered
to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land
would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have
proved remunerative to himself. On the contrary, the two great
landowners of the district stuck to every inch of soil as if it had
been sown with gold. The land was quite useless, as I have said. It
might have been worth three pounds an acre--yet they refused fifty.
They would not even let on lease. Nor could it be pretended that the
scenery would have lost any element of its charm by a cottage that
would have been scarcely observed on those vast slopes of Snowdon.
Jealous obstinacy, the desire to keep intact their own, the desire to
keep out all intruders--this was the temper of the landowners. They
did all they could to harass their existing tenants. A tenant whose
family had increased so that his cottage was as overcrowded as a
tenement in Spitalfields, had to plead long before he was allowed to
add a couple of rooms to his cottage, even when he did so at his own
expense. Often enough he was refused so harshly, that he was
constrained to seek a house in some other district. Yet, in all that
valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two
hundred houses; and there rose around them the unpopulated hillside,
where a host of people might have lived in health, and where, indeed,
men had once lived, as was witnessed by the roofless gables which here
and there rose among the heather.
It seems to me that in this state of things there is a monstrous
injustice. There is no law to compel these gentlemen to sell land, and
there is no public sentiment that can affect them. They are the
complete despots of the countryside. If a man does not like their
domination, he leaves the district; he knows that it is vain to resist
it. In this way many rural districts are depopulated, or kept
under-populated, simply to gratify the selfish temper of a great
proprietor. It is not as though he lived in the district, and wished
to keep its beauties secret to himself; often enough he visits it so
rarely that his face is not known among his tenants. No; but he must
have everything to himself; he must round off his estate; he must look
from his park on nothing which is not his; for your rural Ahab could
not sleep with a Naboth's little vineyard even a mile away. It is
useless to tell him that the land you want is waste natural land, on
which you propose to confer value; he prefers that it shall be
valueless, rather than that it shall be yours. Before population can
be re-distributed to the advantage of town and country alike, this
difficulty must be overcome. It can only be overcome by drastic
legislation. Compulsory purchase, regulated by an equitable land
court, is the only remedy; and it is hard that Irishmen should have,
and grumble over, privileges which their English brethren would receive
with open arms.
Such were some of the discoveries which I made when I came to the real
business of finding a humble country residence. In my ignorance and
inexperience it had seemed the easiest thing in the world. After a
fortnight of experiment I began to think it was the hardest.
CHAPTER VII
I FIND MY COTTAGE
In the meantime a circumstance had occurred which was of great
importance to me. Some enterprising spirits had started a new weekly
local paper, and--_mirabile dictu_--they actually contemplated a
literary page! With a faith in suburban culture, so unprecedented as
to be almost sublime, these daring adventurers proposed giving their
readers reviews of books, literary gossip, and general information
about the doings of eminent writers. They offered the work to me at
the modest honorarium of two pounds a week, and were willing to give me
a three years' agreement. They were frank enough to acknowledge that
their journal was likely to die of 'superiority to its public,' long
before the three years were over; but, barring this disaster, they gave
me assurance of regular employment. This was the very thing for me.
One could write about books anywhere. I thankfully closed with the
offer and began to study the ha'-penny evening papers with assiduity,
in order to learn the craft of manufacturing biographies of living
authors.
The greatest of all questions was thus settled: I should not starve.
But the question of a local habitation remained as difficult as ever.
I went upon wild-goose chases innumerable; was the victim of every kind
of chance hint; gathered fallacious information from garrulous
third-class passengers on many railways; confided my case to carters
and rural postmen, who played upon my innocence with genial malice;
stayed so long at village public-houses without visible motive that I
incurred the suspicion of the local constabulary, and on one memorable
occasion found myself identified with a long watched-for robber of
local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some quaint village that, from a
pictorial point of view, seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my
tale, that I wished to settle in it, universally derided. No one could
conceive any sane person as being desirous of living in a village; the
design seemed wholly unaccountable to people who themselves would have
been only too glad to live in towns.
That I came from London was against me, It seemed to these village
Daniels barely possible that I was honest, and quite certain that I
cloaked some base designs under an innocent inquiry for empty cottages.
The little black bag in which I carried my lunch on these excursions
was the object of extraordinary hypotheses. At one time I was believed
to be selling tracts, at another time, tea; once I was suspected of
being an itinerant anarchist, doing a brisk business in infernal
machines. Landladies, who had lavished smiles upon me when they
supposed me an ordinary pedestrian in search of the picturesque, gave
me the cold shoulder when I began to explain my genuine intentions.
They sometimes treated me with such a mixture of aversion and alarm
that it was plain they doubted not only my sincerity but my sanity.
The travelling artist they knew, the pedlar, the insurance agent, and
the cockney beanfeaster; but the stranger who desired permanent
neighbourship with them they knew not; him they treated as a lunatic at
large. If the papers had chanced to be full at this time of the doings
of some flagrant murderer flying from justice, which fortunately for me
they were not, I have little doubt that these amiable villagers would
have delivered me up to the police without scruple, and have chuckled
over their sagacity.
The thing was amusing enough, and yet it had a certain serious
significance. It was a striking illustration of the way in which the
growth of cities had perverted even the rural mind. I had thoughts of
writing an article on _The Reluctant Villagers_, and a very good
article I could have made of it; for I found hardly any one who was a
villager by choice. A village might appear fair as Paradise to the
casual eye; but closer inspection always revealed the serpent of
discontent among the flowers. Where every outward object breathed of
rest, there was universal restlessness among the people. The common
ambition of all the younger generation was to get to London by almost
any means, and in almost any capacity. There was not a household that
had not children or relatives in London. The young ploughman went to
London as a carter or ostler; the milkmaid as a servant. The village
carpenter was invariably a middle-aged or an old man, secretly despised
by his apprentice, if he had one, for his contentment with his lot.
One saw very few young people in the village street, except mere
children. The universal complaint was that life was dull. There were
no libraries or reading-rooms; no concerts or entertainments; even the
innocuous penny-reading had died out. Nor were there cricket clubs, or
any organised system of sport, except in isolated cases. Here and
there a modern-minded clergyman had recognised the need of recreation
in his parishioners, and had done something to provide for it; but he
was an exception. Hence it happened that the public-house was the
common centre of the village life: it was the poor man's club, and it
was used less for purposes of social intercourse than for the
discussing of racing odds.
Artists have often painted village politicians in earnest confabulation
in an oak-pannelled inn-parlour. I can only say that, so far as my
experience went, I found the village politician quite extinct. The
sort of talk I heard in village bar-rooms was inane and contemptible to
the last degree, and it never once touched on politics. Nor, as a
rule, was there any trace of that leaven of superior intelligence which
comes from a fusion of the classes. All the landlords were practically
non-resident. They knew nothing of their tenants; and that pleasant
intercourse between hall and cottage which poets and novelists depict,
rarely happened. Once a year, perhaps, and for a few weeks only, the
blinds of the Hall windows were drawn up; carriages rolled through the
park gates; young ladies, bright in Bond Street toilets, flashed like
deities upon the village street; my Lady Bountiful left a quarter of a
pound of tea at half a dozen cottages; and then the whole vision faded
like an unsubstantial pageant. The blinds were drawn down again, the
lodge-keeper went to sleep, and the monotonies of life submerged
everything like a wave. The clergyman alone remained as the symbol of
a fuller life, sometimes doing his duty with intelligence, sometimes
not; but the case was rare where any definite attempt was made to
uplift the village community by the infusion of any intellectual
interest, any sense of Art, or any care for honest sport. And here
lies the whole secret of the discontent of villages; their inhabitants
are conscious of unjust deprivations in their lot; and if they remain
villagers, it is rather from lethargy than love.
Were I to describe all the places I visited in search of a habitation,
my list would be interminable. I have given one example in Dawes'
Farm; let me give one other, as illustrating another kind of difficulty
in my quest.
On an exquisite morning in June I found myself climbing the long chalk
hills that lie northward of the Thames valley. At every step the air
became more pure and sparkling; and while in the hazy lowlands not a
leaf stirred, here a brisk and gusty breeze was blowing. The road ran
through high chalk banks, like a railway cutting, and I have since
found that Roman soldiers used it in the days of Caesar. At the height
of three hundred feet authentic forest scenery began. Here the elms
ceased, and enormous woods of beech took their place. The turf was of
the greenest, the solitude intense, the air exhilarating; and never had
I so admired the lace-like delicacy of foliage which distinguishes the
beech, for never had I seen it in such mass or such perfection. The
house I sought stood at fully eight hundred feet above sea-level, on a
carpet of soft turf, round which the forest rose like a wall. Never
did place look so sweetly habitable; it was a kind of green hermitage
in the woods, inimitably quiet, warmed by clearest sunlight, cooled by
freshest winds. Here, said I, at last is my much sought El Dorado; nor
did the cottage, when I came to it, belie my hopes. It was a true
woodland cottage, an intimate part and parcel of the scenery. It had
been recently inhabited by a man of letters, a poet and a dreamer; and
a fitter spot to dream in eye never rested on.
My enthusiasm rose as I drew nearer to it, There was a warm, homely
compactness about it, as of a nest among the trees. The forest turf
came to the very gate; a young orchard of five hundred trees lay to the
southward of the house, a green paddock to the northward; and, as my
advertisement informed me, the entire price of this eligible freehold
property was five hundred pounds! Why, then, was its possessor so
eager to be quit of it? I walked round the house, went through its
rooms, took the view from various windows, already treating it as mine,
and it was long before I came upon the cause. That cause was not its
remoteness or its solitude; it was lack of water. There was no well,
and to have sunk a well would have been costly. The only water-supply
was the rain-water from the roofs. Men can laugh at a good many
deprivations, but deprivation of water is a serious business. I found
upon inquiry that the nearest spring was two miles away. In time of
drought--and in this high district summer drought was normal--it was
this or nothing. Water was then sold by the bucket, nor was it easy to
find any one to fetch and carry for you. I had no mind to condemn
myself to drink the droppings of a roof for life, nor to perform my
ablutions by the aid of a teacup and a saucer. The place, for all its
beauty, was plainly uninhabitable as the Sahara. A camel might have
lived there with content; it was no place for a family used to the
delights of tubbing. I had remarked in the owner of the house a
certain elementary lack of linen; the cause was now explained. I think
his only method of attaining cleanliness must have been by what is
called 'the dry air process.'
This adventure lives in my memory, not only because it had delightful
elements, but because it was the last of a long series, which might
have been called more truthfully misadventures. For an exhilarating
month I scoured the neighbourhood of London, living in a happy fever of
enterprise and hope, but without result. July came, and my problem was
still unsolved. I had already given notice to terminate the tenancy
of my house in London, and there seemed a fair prospect that September
would find me homeless. At my present height of good spirits I cannot
say that even this prospect dismayed me. If the worst came to the
worst I meant to take to the road in one of those convenient vans much
used by travelling hawkers. I had long envied the extraordinary
snugness of those itinerant habitations; to be a Dr. Marigold seemed
the happiest of fates; rent free, and finally delivered from
tax-collectors and their tribe, I might yet roam the world as a
superior kind of vagrant. I knew indeed a young friend of mine who had
adopted this very life. He sold tracts and Bibles upon village greens,
and I promise you no mansion had a warmer glow of comfort than the
interior of his yellow van when the lamp was lit at night for supper.
He has since found his way to a lonely missionary station in Peru; but
he has often told me that he was never happier than when he played the
part of pious gipsy on the village greens of England. At a pinch I
thought that I could do what he had done; it was a romantic trade, and
a new _Lavengro_ might be written on it.
But whatever dreams of permanent and dedicated vagrancy I might
entertain, manifestly my first duty was to find a cottage if I could.
At last, and almost by accident, I came on what I wanted. I had gone
to the Lake District in the month of August, and one day I struck into
a lonely road to the north-west of Buttermere. Half an hour's walk
brought me to a tiny hamlet beside a rushing stream, and here, for the
first time in all my wanderings, I found a genuine deserted cottage.
To speak by the book there were two cottages exactly similar, covered
by a single roof. They stood upon a gentle slope; a group of pines
formed a shelter from the north, the moorland rose behind them, and the
river sang through a contiguous glen. My first glance told me that
they had not long been out of occupation. They showed no marks of
dilapidation, and the little gardens, though weed-grown, gave signs of
recent care. A woman whom I met told me their history. They had long
been inhabited by two families, father and son. A few months
previously these families had sailed for Canada. No one had applied
for the cottages, for in that part work was scarce, and the foundries
and shipyards on the coast drew away the younger population. The
rent--it seemed incredible--was two shillings a week. The woman
yielded to what she thought my idle curiosity, and brought me the keys.
Each cottage contained four rooms, and the two could easily be thrown
into one. They were dry and water-tight, the walls whitewashed and
clean, the woodwork sound and well cared for. I sat down upon the
sun-warmed bank beside the gate and thought. Here was solitude indeed;
a dozen neighbours in all, simple labouring folk:
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Here, too, was beauty in excess; a glen untrodden by the feet of
tourists, moorland and pine-wood, a stream that lifted up a cheerful
voice, hills and mountains of delightful form and colour, and not far
away the silver gleam of lakes. In all external features it was my
dream come true, and the deep-bosomed woman at my side, with her face
of rosy, placid health, was herself the proof of how lightly the wings
of time passed over this haunt of ancient peace.
I suppose that no one ever approaches the realisation of his hopes
without a kind of fear. In those imaginary dramas which we invent and
rehearse perpetually in the silent theatre of our own minds, we always
take care that we get the best of the situation and the dialogue. The
dramas of real life are apt to end differently. The coveted occasion
finds us incapable; a baffling scepticism of our own powers leaves us
impotent; the part that ran so easily, with such unanimous applause,
when we were both the dramatist and the actor, suddenly bristles with a
hundred unsuspected difficulties. For the first time, as I sat on that
sunny bank, I began to ask myself whether I could really play the part
I had so long desired to play. Could I reconcile myself to seclusion
so entire? Would not this weight of utter silence grow heavier than I
could bear? It was not always June, I told myself, and there were days
of lashing rain, grey skies, and 'death-dumb autumn dripping' fog to
think of. The vision of lighted streets and bustling crowds, the warm
contiguity of numbers, the long lines of windows all aglow at evening,
the genial stir and tumult of congregated life, took masterful
possession of my mind. Could I bear to relinquish the familiar scene?
A thousand threads of use and habit bound me to it, each in itself as
light as gossamer, but the whole tough as cords of steel. I foresaw
that I had underestimated the ease of my deliverance. It would
require a strength of consistent resolution of which perhaps I was not
capable. It was but too likely that I should be one of those who put
their hand to the plough and look back, a reluctant recruit of a cause
that won my faith, but could not win my will. This would be not only
fatal to my peace, it would make me despicable in my own eyes, which is
the worst of all calamities that man can suffer.
Such a distress of mind was natural; yet I think that behind it all my
thought was firm and clear. What I had proposed to do for twenty years
I must do, or attempt to do, if I would retain my self-respect. I
might become despicable to myself by failure in my task, but I should
be much more despicable by never trying to accomplish it. In that
half-hour of meditation the die was cast. I had come to my predestined
battlefield. I must here be triumphant or defeated; in any case I must
attempt the conflict.
The decision restored, as by a stroke of magic, all my good spirits. I
examined my two cottages again with an eye less critical, more kindly,
more urbane. I saw with how few touches they could be transformed into
a habitation suited to my needs. With the two main rooms thrown into
one I should have a spacious living-room; the two gardens would compose
an admirable lawn; roses should grow against the walls, warm-hued
creepers frame the upper windows; it should become a lodge in Eden.
Then there was the air, the view, the company of the silent mountains
and the singing stream. Here was my theatre, my orchestra, my
concert-room. The woman who was my guide took me into her own cottage
for a cup of tea, and I was struck with its homely air of comfort. An
oak dresser, covered with blue ware such as is common in these parts,
filled one wall; an oak chest of drawers another; there was a
broad-seated oak settle by the fire; all solid, of a good design, and
polished to a deep brown by use and industry. The floor was red brick;
flowers lined the windows; and everything was clean as hands could make
it. I saw my house furnished on the same plan, and it pleased me. A
recollection crossed my mind, curious and most fantastic at such a
time, of a certain room in one of the show-houses in London, furnished
entirely in the French style. I recalled the console tables of old
gilt, the brocaded couch, and the gilded chairs which no one dared to
sit upon; and I confess that I preferred this habitable cottage-room.
There was something satisfying in its plainness; a sense of something
honest and intimately right; a suggestion of solid worth and homely
ease. My spirits had already been restored by my decision; they were
now invigorated to the point of joy, for I saw the concrete emblems, as
it were, of the beauty which is found in true simplicity.
The next day I returned to the spot accompanied by my wife and my two
boys. We made a new and elaborate inspection of the two cottages. In
the afternoon the landlord, a neighbouring farmer, met us. He was a
dales-man born and bred, shrewd, much given to silence, but with a
plenitude of genial good sense. He began by being somewhat suspicious
of us after the usual country fashion. When he at last understood the
sincerity and novelty of our intentions, he treated us with a kind of
fatherly derision, which had no hint of impoliteness or impertinence in
it. 'It will na do, I'm thinking,' he said, several times. When he
saw us persistent, and that our persistence grew in the ratio of his
dissuasion, he said, just as though he were talking to wayward
children, 'Well, a wilful man maun have his way. As for my bit of
cottages, ye're welcome to them, an' I'll ask no rent till ye've been
in them long enough to know your own minds better. They're of no worth
to me, an' I'll be your debtor for living in them. If ye want to pull
them aboot, ye'll do it at your own expense, I'm willing. Later on, if
ye care to stay, you and me'll fix a rent, an' I gie ye ma word it
shall na be more than ten pund a year. I'll help ye too if ye'll let
me. I can find ye a man as 'll do all the little jobs you want done,
an' glad to do it. As for fishing, the stream's yours, an' I would na
say but what ye might get some shooting too. But ye'll tire of it,
ye'll tire of it,' he concluded, with a grave smile.
With that he handed us the keys. He then shook our hands with the
melancholy air of a man who says farewell to friends embarked upon a
perilous adventure, and strode away across the heather, stopping once
to wave his hand to us as if in wise dissuasion.
So Mahomet might have stood above Damascus when he said, 'My Paradise
is not there,' and yet Damascus was a Paradise all the same.
CHAPTER VIII
BUYING HAPPINESS
We are all children, and in nothing so much perhaps as in the kind of
delight we take in any form of building. The architectural efforts of
a child with a box of bricks or a heap of sand explain the Tower of
Babel, the Pyramids, and the Golden House of Nero. House-building
unites the ideal with the real more thoroughly than any other human
employment. What can there be more delightful than to see that which
you have dreamed grow into tangible and enduring form? No wonder the
rich man builds himself 'a lordly pleasure-house'; it is a kind of
practical poetry which he can understand. Were there only millionaires
enough to go round all architects would be wealthy, for building is a
kind of material art admirably suited to men of material intelligence.
The weeks which followed the acquisition of my two deserted cottages
were the most delightful I have ever spent. First of all, there was
the question of structural alterations to be considered. In my opinion
the living-room of the house is the chief consideration. It should be
a _room to live in_, the focus of the whole life of the household. For
this reason it should be large and airy, covering the whole site of the
house as nearly as possible. One large room is infinitely to be
preferred to two or three small rooms; it is healthier, and much more
cheerful. Space and air are most needed in the room which is most in
use. It is of no consequence that the bedrooms should be small; one's
active hours are not spent in them, and a window left wide open summer
and winter will provide an ample supply of oxygen in the smallest
chamber. What can be more absurd than the arrangement of a modern
London villa? It is usually cut up by partition walls into a number of
small rooms, not more than one of which is in constant use. Pretension
takes the place of comfort. Mrs. Grundy must have a 'drawing-room' or
die! It is a kind of holiest of holies, too beautiful for normal
occupation, full of gimcrack chairs that cannot be sat upon, and
decorative futilities which give it the aspect of a miscellaneous stall
at a 'rummage sale.' Such a room is very well as a _with_drawing-room,
its proper use; but as a room into which no one withdraws it is absurd.
As I expected to keep no company, and needed no room into which to
withdraw, I was able to get rid of this apartment. Moreover, in a very
small house, common sense demanded that every room should be really and
thoroughly used.
Fortunately the fireplaces of my two cottages were against the outer or
gable ends, and not against the partition wall, as is commonly the
case. I had only to remove this partition wall, supporting the ceiling
by a strong beam, and I had a room about twenty-four long by fifteen in
breadth. At the back of this room were two small kitchens, only one of
which was needed. By widening the doorway leading to one of them to
double its breadth, I gained another room about ten feet square. This
made my library, by which I mean not a room in which I ever sat, but a
room entirely devoted to the housing of my books. I had the walls
entirely lined with books, making and staining the bookshelves with my
own hands. Across the widened doorway from which the door had been
removed hung a warm curtain, so that it was to all intents and purposes
a part of my living-room. I took infinite and almost childish delight
in the arrangement of this living-room. I had brought not a single
article of domestic furniture with me from London. Such furniture as I
had--chairs, tables, couch, sideboard, and so forth--would have looked
out of place in the country, and moreover it was better economy to sell
them. I sold them very well in a London auction-room, getting almost
as much as they cost me. With the money thus received in my pocket I
went to a neighbouring market town where there happened to be a shop
that dealt in old furniture. For less than ten pounds I bought an
excellent oaken gate-table, half a dozen serviceable oak chairs, a
couple of fine carved chests, and a corner cupboard. My oak dresser
and settle, each good specimens of serviceable cottage furniture, cost
me thirty-seven shillings at a country auction. I found that even at
these modest prices I had paid too much. Oaken furniture was common in
these parts, and had little value. When a church was restored, or an
old house re-constructed, large quantities of old oak were literally
thrown away. Thus, at a merely nominal expense I acquired enough
carved oak to fit together into a handsome fireplace, and later on the
pews of a church came in for oak panelling.
Let me now picture my living-room as it was about four months after I
took possession. It was entirely oak panelled to a height of nine
feet, above which about a foot of white-washed wall showed, forming a
plain frieze. The fireplace at one end of the room was built in with
carved oak; what had been the corresponding fireplace at the other end
of the room was turned into a cupboard, with plain oak doors. The room
had three old-fashioned leaded windows opening outward. Two were
original, one had been added--the centre window taking the place of the
gap left by the destroyed partition wall. My oak chests, dresser and
cupboard, constituted the furniture of the room. The library,
curtained off with a plain curtain of crimson plush, adjoined; the
kitchen door opened at the east corner of the room. The windows faced
due south. The room therefore was always sunny. The floor-boards were
stained, and covered by two or three cheap rugs. Flowers were at the
windows, a vase of flowers always on the table. The fireplace was
open, for I had removed the ugly modern grate, substituting for it a
low hearth of red brick with iron dogs, on which wood could be burned.
This room, with the adjoining library, was the great feature of my
little house.
The other rooms in the house required no alteration; fresh whitewash
and wall-papers soon transformed them; and although they were small,
they were not devoid of charm. When my scheme of adaptation was
complete I found myself possessed of a house containing one beautiful
living-room, a small library, a kitchen, and four good bedrooms. My
bill for labour, including the mason's work in the removal of the
partition wall, the building of a new window, and the laying of a fresh
hearth; the carpenter's work in fitting my oak, and various minor
repairs, amounted in all to about twelve pounds. The cost of my
furniture, including the oak panelling in the living-room, and all that
was needed for the bedrooms, was about fifty pounds, against which I
had to set thirty-eight pounds, received from the sale of my
superfluous effects in London. If I added to these sums the general
expenses of removal, the carriage and cartage of my goods, and so
forth, which I reckoned at ten pounds, I found that the cost of my
exodus and new tenancy had been as follows:--
L. s. d.
By expenses of removal . . . . . . 10 0 0
By alterations and labour . . . . . 12 0 0
By cost of furniture for living-room
and four bedrooms . . . . . . . . 50 0 0
-----------
L72 0 0
Against which, by sale of goods in
London . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 0 0
-----------
Leaving total outlay of . . . . . . L34 0 0
-----------
I am conscious that to a townsman, accustomed to the wastefulness of
towns, some parts of this account must appear incredible. Take, for
instance, the bill for labour. No one has ever lived in London without
having occasion to complain of the dearness and badness of labour. The
chief object of the town artisan is to do as little work as possible.
He is absolutely without conscience in his work, and all that he does
is slovenly. He surveys a job, and meditates upon it for an hour--at
your expense; begins it, and goes away to fetch a tool that he has
forgotten--the time of his absence being duly charged against you;
procrastinates and dawdles; sits down to read the paper, if no one
watches him; and in one way and another takes quite twice as long over
a job as is needed, and then does it badly. When I first became a
householder in London I naturally sent to some neighbouring employer of
labour for any little jobs of carpentering and plumbing that needed to
be done. I soon had to relinquish the practice. If a new latch were
put upon a window, the screws were driven into the old holes, so that
in a week the latch was off again. If the plumber effected one repair
he invariably left some damage that made it necessary to recall him
before the month was out. There are houses in London which must be as
good as an annuity to local tradesmen; I believe the workmen are
instructed to do their work so badly that it is never really done. I
soon found it wise to learn how to do repairs for myself; and it was by
doing them myself that I discovered how I had been victimised by the
rapacity, dishonesty, and inefficiency of the British workman and his
master.
But in the country things are different. The village workman has
honest pride in his reputation, and in his work. Moreover, he can turn
his hand to anything, he does not grudge his time, and he is not
corrupted by the contiguity of the public-house. The man who did my
masonry work for me was a grey-haired, silent, pertinacious fellow, of
great practical intelligence and efficiency. He did not work rapidly,
but all that he did was thoroughly done. The carpenter was a man of
the same type. He took a genuine delight in fitting my oak to its new
uses, and had ideas of his own, which were often ingenious, and always
practical. He even had a true artistic sense; uncultivated for want of
education, but real. I understood the extraordinary skill of mediaeval
craftsmen through my association with this man. The pieces of
exquisite carved oak which find their way into museums to-day were
wrought by men such as he was; quiet, thoughtful men, residing in
villages, who developed their artistic sense in solitude. I am quite
sure that this man thought a great deal more of his work than of the
money he earned by it. At all events he charged me astonishingly
little. He refused a contract, evidently regarding it as implying
suspicions of his honesty. 'I'll charge ye what's fair,' he said, 'and
you and me'll not quarrel as to the price.' If my bill for labour was
so moderate that it seems absurd to a townsman, it was because I had to
deal with honest craftsmen, who brought not only efficiency and
handiness to their work, but a high sense of honour, and a real
intelligence and interest.
It was in the end of August when I took my house; by the beginning of
December I had completed my work upon it. The gardens in front of the
house had been levelled, and covered with the finest mountain turf.
The walls had been colour-washed a warm yellow, and all the
window-frames painted white. For three months every hour had been
busy, and not the least blessing of my toil was that it had brought me
a degree of physical vigour such as I had never yet enjoyed. How
different were my sensations when I woke in the morning now from those
which I had known in London! In London the hour of rising had
invariably found me languid and reluctant. I woke with the sense of a
load upon me, and I dreaded the long grey day. I see now that these
sensations were not so much mental as physical. I had not mental
buoyancy simply because I was deficient in physical vitality. But at
Thornthwaite I woke eager for the day. The first sounds that greeted
me through the open window were the songs of the birds, the sea-like
diapason of the wind in the elm-trees on the lawn, and the animating
song of the river in the glen. The weather during the whole of that
autumn was extraordinarily fine. After a week of equinoctial storm in
the end of September, the weather settled into exquisite repose. Day
succeeded day, calm, bright, sunny. It was as warm as August, but with
all the tonic freshness of autumn. November, usually a month of misery
in London, was here delightful. The year died slowly, amid the pomp of
crimson leaves and bronzed bracken. For the first time I understood
that it is bliss to be alive. Like the child whom Wordsworth
celebrates, I felt my life in every limb. There was no goading of dull
powers to unwelcome tasks; energy ran free, like the mountain-stream at
my door, and the zest of life was strong in me.
I never came downstairs into my living-room without a sense of new
delight. How beautiful, how sweetly habitable it looked in the morning
sunshine! Any one living in a city, who immediately on rising enters
the room which he has used overnight, has noticed the peculiar
staleness of the atmosphere. It is not exactly a noxious atmosphere;
there is no palpable unpleasant odour in it, but it is used up, it is
stale. He will also notice the dust which rests on everything. In a
city the daily grinding of millions of wheels over thousands of miles
of roads fills the air with an acrid, almost impalpable powder, which
finds its way even through closed windows and settles upon everything.
In my London house I could not take up a book without soiled fingers.
Even books which were protected by glass doors, and papers shut up in
drawers, did not escape this filthy powder, composed of the fine-ground
dust and excrement of the London streets. If I wiped a picture with a
white silk handkerchief, a black stain showed itself upon the
handkerchief, and this in spite of the most careful efforts to keep the
house clean. I suppose Londoners get used to dirt, as eels are said to
get used to skinning. They spend their time in washing their hands,
but with the most transient gain of cleanliness. No one knows how
filthy London is till he begins to notice how much longer
window-curtains, household draperies, and personal linen keep clean in
the country. I should not like to be called an old maid, but I confess
to an old-maidish care for cleanliness. Untidiness in books or papers
would not distress me, but dirt is a real distress; and if it be
old-maidish to fight a continual battle with dirt, to scour and polish
and dust, content with nothing less than immaculate purities of
polished surface, then I suppose I am an old maid, and I count it to
myself for righteousness.
Amid the many miseries of cities, this no doubt is but a minor misery,
but the relief which I experienced in deliverance from it was
disproportionately great. The purity and freshness of the atmosphere,
the corresponding cleanliness of all I touched in the house, were
delightful to me, and added to my self-respect. The clean, aromatic
air passed like a ceaseless lustration through every room of the house.
The very bed-linen, bleached in the open air, had acquired the
fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender. I did not need to climb the
hill to find the pine-woods; they grew round the very table where I
ate. Four walls and a roof gave me shelter, yet I lived in the open
air all the time.
Then there was also the silence, at first so strange as to be almost
oppressive, but later on sweeter than music. It was at early morning
and nightfall that this silence was most intense. On a still night one
could almost hear the earth move, and fancy that the stars diffused a
gentle crackling noise as of rushing flame. The fall of an acorn in a
pine wood startled the ear like an explosion. The river also was
discerned as having a definite rhythm of its own. It ran up and down a
perpetual scale, like a bird singing. What had seemed a heavy confused
sound of falling water resolved itself into regular harmonies, which
could have been written down in musical notation. At times there was
also in the air the sense of breathing. On a dark night, standing at
my door, I had the sense of a great heart that beat in the obscurity,
of a bosom that rose and fell, of a pulse as regular as a clock. I
think that the ear must have recovered a fine sensitiveness, normal to
it under normal conditions, but lost or dulled amid the deafening roar
of towns. It is scarcely an exaggeration when poets speak of hearing
the grass grow; we could hear it, no doubt, if the ear were not stunned
by more violent sounds.
It is probable that mere increase of vitality in itself is sufficient
to account for this new delicacy of the physical senses. The senses
adapt themselves to their environment. An example of this is found in
the absence of what is called long sight among city children. Having
no extensive horizon constantly before the eye, the power of discerning
distant objects gradually decays. On the contrary a child brought up
upon the African veldt, where he is daily confronted with almost
infinite distances, acquires what seems to be an almost preternatural
sharpness of vision. It is the same with hearing. The savage can
distinguish sounds which are entirely inaudible to the civilised man.
The footfall of his enemy, the beat of a horse's hoofs, the movement of
a lion in the jungle, are heard at what appear impossible distances. I
do not seek to offer any absolute explanation of these phenomena as
regards myself, but I state the fact that in returning to a natural
life I found a remarkable quickening of my physical senses. As my eye
became accustomed to the wide moorland prospects I found myself
increasingly able to discriminate distant objects. Flowers that had
seemed to me to smell pretty much alike, now had distinct fragrances.
I knew when I woke in the morning from which direction the wind came,
by its odour; the wind from the moorland brought the scent of heather
and wild thyme, the wind from the glen the scent of water.
It was the same with sound. Properly speaking there is no such thing
as silence in Nature. The silence, or what seems silence, is divisible
into a multitude of minute sounds. Everything in Nature is toiling and
straining at its task, the sap in the tree, the rock balanced on its
bed of clay, the grass-blade pushing and urging its way toward the sun.
And as there is no real silence, so there is no real solitude in a
world where every atom is vigorously at work. Wordsworth's conception
of Nature as a Presence becomes at once intelligible when we live close
to the heart of Nature. Had Wordsworth lived in towns his poetry could
never have been written, nor can its central conception of Nature as a
Presence be understood by the townsman. I had often enough read the
wonderful lines--
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
_A motion and a spirit_, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
But I never really understood them till I lived among scenes similar to
those in which they were composed. And the organ by which they were
interpreted was not the mind so much as the senses, quickened and
invigorated by solitude. I presented a more sensitive surface to
Nature, and the instant result was the perception of Nature as of
something alive. In the silence of the night, as I stood at my door, I
felt the palpitation of a real life around me; the sense, as I have
said, of a breathing movement, of pulsation, of a beating heart, and
then I knew that Wordsworth wrote with strict scientific accuracy, and
not with vague mysticism as is commonly supposed, when he described
Nature as a living Presence.
The sum of these sensations was for me a state of physical beatitude.
I was often reminded of the grim confession of the poor wastrel, who,
when asked where he lived, replied, 'I don't live, I linger.' I had
never really lived; I had lingered. I had trodden the path of the days
and years with reluctant feet. Now every daybreak was a new occasion
of joy to me. I was rejuvenated not only in mind, but in the very core
and marrow of my body. I had put myself in right relation to Nature; I
had established contact, as electricians would say; and as a
consequence all the electric current of Nature flowed through me,
vitalising and quickening me in every nerve. Men who live in cities
are but half alive. They mistake infinite contortion for life. Life
consists in the efficient activity of every part of us, each part
equally efficient, and moving in a perfect rhythm. For the first time,
since I had been conscious of myself, I realised this entire efficiency.
Many times I had coveted what is called 'rude health,' but I had been
led to believe that rude health implies lack of sensitiveness. I now
found the reverse to be the case. Perfect health and perfect
sensitiveness are the same thing. I felt, enjoyed, and received
sensations more acutely simply because my health was perfect. It may
be said that the sensations afforded by such a life as mine were not
upon a grand scale. They were not to be compared with the acute and
poignant sensations afforded--perhaps I should say inflicted--by a
city. I can only say they were enough for me. All pleasures are
relative, and the simplest pleasure is capable of affording as great
delight as the rarest. The sight of a flower can produce as keen a
pleasure as a Coronation pageant, and the song of a bird may become to
the sensitive ear as fine a music as a sonata by Beethoven. May I not
also say that the simplest pleasures are the most enduring, the
commonest delights are the most invigorating, the form of happiness
which is the most easily available is the best? The further we stray
from Nature the harder are we to please, and he knows the truest
pleasure who can find it in the simplest forms.
CHAPTER IX
HOW WE LIVED
The most common objection to country life is what is called its
dulness. When I used to suggest to my town acquaintances the
advantages of a holiday in purely rustic scenes, I was always met by
the remark: 'Oh, there would be nothing to do there!' No doubt if a
holiday is devoted to lounging, it is much more difficult to lounge at
a solitary farm than at some crowded seaside resort. But my holidays
in the country had never been of this description. I am
constitutionally unfitted for a lounger. I like to have my days
planned out, and to live them fully. A country holiday for me had
always meant incessant occupation of one kind or another, fishing,
climbing, boating, long cycling excursions, and an industrious
endeavour to explore all scenes of interest within a reasonable
compass. Now that I had come to live in the country, I felt more than
ever the need of incessant occupation, for I fully realised that the
worst enemy of human happiness is ennui.
During the first three months, while I was busy in getting settled,
there was no danger of ennui. I was constantly interested, and I was
constantly at work. I learned how to do carpentering and joiner's jobs
with a fair proficiency; I dug nearly an acre of land at the back of my
house with my own spade; made paths, and planted fruit trees; all the
turf for my lawn I laid myself, with a few hours' assistance from a
farm-hand; and there was no night when I did not go to bed with aching
muscles and often with bruised hands. If my bill for labour was
absurdly moderate, it was partly because I did so much myself.
For instance, I employed no one to hang papers or to whitewash ceilings
or paint woodwork. With the willing help of my wife and my boys this
was done with complete satisfaction. One result of these labours was
the pride and love for our little homestead which they created. In
modern civilised life we get too many things done for us, and this is
not merely an economical but an ethical mistake. It is difficult to
feel any real pride in a home which is the creation of other people.
In a true state of civilisation no man will pay another to do what he
can do himself. Not only does he preserve his independence by such a
rule, but he creates a hundred new objects of interest for himself.
The paper which I had hung with my own labour gave me a pleasure which
a much finer paper hung by paid labour could not have given me. The
lawn which I had laid with my own hands seemed more intimately mine
than if I had paid some one else to make it. The more I reflect upon
the matter the more am I convinced that one of the great curses of
civilisation is the division of labour which makes us dependent upon
other people to a degree which destroys individual efficiency. Thrown
back upon himself as a dweller in a wilderness, any man of ordinary
capacity soon develops efficiency for kinds of work which he would
never have attempted in a city, simply because a city tempts him at
every point to delegate his own proper toil to others. I can conceive
of few things that would do more to create a genuine pride of home than
to insist that no man should possess a house except by building it for
himself, after the old primitive principle of the earliest social
communities. To build thus is to mix sentiment with the mortar, and
the house thus created is a place to which affections and memories
cling; whereas the mere tenancy of a cube of rotten bricks, thrown
together by the jerry-builder--of which we know no more than the amount
of rent which is charged for it--is incapable of nourishing any
sentiment, and is, in any case, not a home but a lodging.
This idea is no doubt chimerical; for in a vast city, where the great
object is to escape starvation, no one has time to interest himself
deeply in the kind of house he occupies, and still less has he the
opportunity to build a house which is the expression of his own taste
and labour. But in the country the idea is not only practicable, it is
urgent. Independence is made necessary because there are fewer people
on whom we can become dependent. I soon found that if I wanted
potatoes and cabbages, I must grow them; if a pipe burst there was no
plumber to mend it, I must mend it myself; and so through a long range
of occupations, with which I had had no previous acquaintance. The
immortal Captain Davis, of the _Sea Ranger_, remarks to the incompetent
landsman Herrick, whom he has engaged as first mate on the _Farralone_,
'There ain't nothing _to_ sailoring when you come to look it in the
face,' and I am inclined to think that the observation is true of other
things besides navigation. There is nothing in ordinary gardening,
carpentering, or work about a house that any intelligent man cannot
learn in a month by giving his mind to it. Intelligence, industry, and
a deft hand will take any man of capacity through any of the ordinary
employments of life with moderate credit, or at least without disgrace.
When once the right handling of tools is learned, the rest is merely a
matter of intelligence. At all events, I had to learn how to be
proficient in the handling of many strange tools, because there was no
one within reach to handle them for me. The experience was salutary
for me in every way. It taught me to be ashamed of that kind of
inefficiency which in towns is reckoned the hall-mark of gentility. It
taught me the virtue of that independence which makes a man equal to
his own needs. It also saved me from ennui. I found myself living a
much busier life than I had ever lived. I had never worked so hard,
and yet there was not a single part of my work that did not add to my
delight. And I worked for direct results, for things I could see, and
things which I might justly claim as my own, since I had created them.
I shall perhaps fall under the suspicion of morbid sensitiveness when I
confess that I never took my weekly wage in London without a qualm and
a compunction, for I could never make myself believe that I had really
earned it. What had I done? I had simply performed a few arithmetical
processes which any schoolboy might have done as well. My labour, such
as it was, was absorbed instantly in the commercial operations of a
great firm. I could not trace it, and I had no means of estimating its
value. The money I took for it seemed therefore to come to me by a
sort of legerdemain. That some one thought it worth while to pay me
was ostensible proof that my work was really worth something; but so
little able was I to penetrate the processes that resulted in this
judgment, so vivid was the sense of some ingenious jugglery in the
whole business, that I did not know whether I had been cheated or was a
cheat, in living by a kind of labour that cost me so little. How
different was my feeling now! At the end of an hour's spade-work, I
saw something actually done, of which I was the indisputable author.
When I laid down the saw and plane and hammer, and stretched my aching
back, I saw something growing into shape, which I myself had created.
There was no jugglery about this; there was immediate intimate relation
between cause and effect. And thence I found a kind of joy in my work,
which was new and exquisite to me. I stood upon my own feet,
self-possessed, self-respecting, efficient for my own needs, and
conscious of a definite part in the great rhythm of infinite toil which
makes the universe. It is only when a man works for himself that this
kind of joy is felt. So enamoured was I of this new joy, that had it
been possible I would have possessed nothing that was not the direct
result of my own labour. I would have liked to have spun the wool for
my own clothes, and have tanned the leather for my own boots. I would
have liked to grow the corn for my own bread, and have killed my own
meat, as the savage or the primitive settler does. In this respect the
savage or the primitive settler approaches much nearer the true ideal
of human life than the civilised man, for the true ideal is that every
man shall be efficient for his own needs, with as little dependence as
possible on others.
Under natural conditions there is enough faculty in a man's ten fingers
to supply his own needs, and all the avocations needful to life may
meet under one hat. The familiar illustration of the number of men
required to make a pin is typical of that contemptible futility to
which what is called civilisation reduces men by mere dispersal of
labour. Such dispersal develops single faculties, but paralyses men.
It is like developing some single part of the human organism, such as a
finger-tip, to high sensitiveness, by drawing away the sensitiveness
from all the rest. To do this reduces life to barrenness; it makes it
meagre in energy and pleasure; it makes work a disease. But in such a
life as I now lived, it was not a finger-tip that worked but the whole
man. The cabbage I cut for dinner was fashioned from my own substance,
for my sweat had nourished it. The butter I ate was part of my own
energy, spent over the churn, come back to me in the freshness and
firmness of edible gold. My bread was baked in a flame kindled at my
own heart [Transcriber's note: hearth?], and it was the sweeter for it.
When I lay down at night I was quits with Nature. I had paid so much
energy into her bank, and had a right to the dividend of rest she gave
me.
Apart from all other things, the economy of this mode of life will be
at once perceived. My expenses sank steadily month by month. I made a
good many mistakes, of course, for there is more than meets the eye in
remunerative gardening, chicken farming, and bee-keeping, as there is
in most human occupations which appear delusively simple. It took me
some time to rectify these mistakes, but before a year had passed I
found myself raising all my own garden produce, well supplied with eggs
and poultry for my own table, and able to earn a little by the sale of
my superfluous stock. Some articles, such as coal, were excessively
dear; but then, as a set-off, I could have all the wood I required for
next to nothing, and we burned more wood than coal. Groceries I
purchased in wholesale quantities from a Manchester store, so that in
spite of carriage I paid less for them than I had paid in London, and
secured the best quality. My trout rod served my breakfast table, and
my gun brought me many a dinner. In short, I found that small as was
the sum of money which I had earned, yet it was more than enough for my
needs.
Winter is, of course, the trying time for a resident in the country.
About the beginning of December the weather broke, and there was a week
of driving rain. A fortnight of grey weather followed, and then came
three days of heavy snow. From the moment that the snow ceased winter
became delightful. No words of mine can describe the glory of these
winter days. It is only of late years that people have discovered that
Switzerland is infinitely more beautiful in winter than in summer; some
day they will discover the same truth about the Lake District. It
happened one day in midwinter that business took me as far as Keswick,
and I shall never forget the astonishment and delight of that visit.
Skiddaw was a pure snow mountain, a miniature Mont Blanc; Derwentwater
was blue as polished steel, covered with ice so clear that it was
everywhere transparent; the woods were plumed with snow, and over all
shone the sun of June, and the keen air tingled in the veins like wine.
Beside the road the drifts ran high, hollowed by the wind into a
hundred curves and cavities, and in each the reflected light made a
tapestry of delicate violet and rose. Those who imagine that snow is
only white--dead, cold white--have never seen the pure new-fallen snow,
when the stricture of the frost begins to bind it; such snow has every
colour of the rainbow in it, and where it is beaten fine it is like a
dust of diamonds. Under a hard grey sky snow appears dead white; but
under such a sun as this it glowed and sparkled with all the glories of
an ice cave. And then came the sunset, a sunset to be dreamed of.
Skiddaw was a pyramid of rosy flame; great saffron seas of light lay
over the Catbells, the immense shoulders of Borrowdale were purple, and
the lake was truly a sea of glass and fire. Nor was this a singular
and unmatched day. For a whole month the pageant of the snow lasted.
Close to my own door were glories scarcely inferior to those of
Borrowdale and Derwentwater. The glen was rich with all the fantastic
arabesque of the frost, the moor was like a frozen sea, and four miles
away lay Buttermere, ringing from morn to night with the sound of
skates. There is no greater error than to suppose winter a drear and
joyless season in the country. It has delights of its own unimagined
by the townsman, to whom winter means burst pipes and slushy streets,
and snow that is soiled even as it falls. But among mountains winter
has its own incomparable glories, and holds a pageant not inferior to
summer's.
But even in days of rain life had its pleasures. However bad the
weather might be there were few days when we could not be abroad for
some hours, and none when the mountains had not some peculiar beauty to
reveal. At the end of a day of rain there were often splendid
half-hours, just before sunset, when the mountains glowed with richest
colour; when through the rift of thinning clouds some vast peak named
like a torch, and the mist blew out like purple banners, and the
watercourses sparkled like ropes of brilliants hung on the scarred
rocks, and the air was fresh and fragrant with all the perfume of
health. Fog we seldom had, and when it came, it rarely lasted beyond
midday. And then there were the warm delights of winter evenings, when
the wood fire blazed upon the hearth, and the gale roared against the
windows.
I have already remarked that books read in the solitude of the country
always make a deeper impression on my mind than books read in the
uneasy leisure of towns. I found this doubly true when I came to live
in the country. I came to my books with a keener and healthier brain.
The great masters of literature resumed their sway over me; Scott,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, long-neglected, took powerful hold upon my
mind. It is not to dwellers in the town that great writers ever make
their full appeal. They are too occupied with the trivial dramas of
life among a crowd, too disturbed by the eddy and rush of the life
around them. But for the dweller in solitude these great writers erect
a theatre, which is the only theatre he knows. He is able to attend to
the drama presented to him, and to be absorbed by it. He discusses the
actors and their doings as though they were real personages. Effie
Deans and Varley, Ophelia and Don Quixote, were for us creatures whom
we knew. It was the same with later writers. Byron's poetry once more
appealed to me by its revolutionary note, Shelley was interpreted
afresh to me by these mountains which he would have loved. One
incident I recollect which may serve to illustrate this new hold which
imaginative literature took upon me. I opened one evening _Great
Expectations_, and began to read it aloud. The next morning, at five
o'clock, my two boys were contending for the book. For a month Pip sat
beside our hearth, and Joe Gargery winked at us, and 'that ass'
Pumblechook mouthed his solemn platitudes. We were continually
reminding each other never to forget 'them as brought us up by hand.'
Could any book have laid hold of us after this fashion if it had been
read in the hurried leisure of a city life? It was the very absence of
incident in our quiet lives that made these imaginary incidents
delightful. We lingered over the books we read, extracting from them
all their charm, all their wisdom, and there was more good talk, more
discriminating criticism heard in my cottage in a month than would be
heard in a London drawing-room in a year. And the explanation is
simple. We had no trivialities to talk about; none of those odds and
ends of gossip that do duty for conversation in cities; and thus such
talk as we had concerned itself with real thoughts, and the thoughts of
wise men and great writers.
One of the principal occupations of my first winter was the education
of my boys. After the approved modern fashion I had intrusted this
task to others, upon the foolish assumption that what I paid heavily
for must needs be of some value. I discovered my delusion the moment I
came to look into the matter for myself. I found that they knew
nothing perfectly: certain things they had learned by rote, and could
recite with some exactitude, but of the reasons and principles that
underlie all real knowledge they knew nothing. I believe this to be
characteristic of almost all modern education, especially since
competitive examinations have set the pace. The brain is gorged with
crude masses of undigested fact, which it has no power to assimilate.
Fragments of knowledge are lodged in the mind, but the mind is not
taught to co-ordinate its knowledge, or, in other words, to think and
reason. The yearly examination papers of public schools and
universities afford ample and often amusing illustrations of this
condition of things. I remember an Oxford tutor, who set papers for a
certain Theological College, telling me that one year he put this
question: 'Give some account of the life of Mary, the mother of our
Lord.' This was a question which obviously required some power of
synthesis, some exercise of thought and skill in narrative. One bright
youth, after a feeble sentence or two in which the name of Mary was at
least included, went on to say, 'At this point it may not be out of
place to give a list of the kings of Israel.' Here was something he
did know, and it was something not worth knowing. I found that my boys
had been educated on much the same principle. They could do a simple
problem of mathematics after a fashion; that is, they could recite it;
but it had never once been suggested to them as an exercise of reason.
It was the same with history; they could recite dates and facts, but
they had no perception of principles. It may be imagined that I had to
go to school again myself before I could attempt to instruct them. I
had to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero, and work
through many a forgotten passage. At first the task was distasteful
enough, but it soon became fascinating. My love of the classics
revived. I began to read Homer and Thucydides, Tacitus and Lucretius,
for my own pleasure. It was delightful to observe what interest my
boys took in Virgil, as soon as they discovered that Virgil was not a
mere task-book, but poetry of the noblest order. By avoiding all idea
of mere unintelligent task-work, I soon got them to take a real
interest in their work, until at last they came to anticipate the hour
of these common studies. I took care also to never make the burden of
study oppressive. Two hours of real study is as much as a young boy
can bear at a time. He should rise from his task, not with an
exhausted, but with a fresh and quickened, mind. On very fine days it
was understood that no books should be opened. Such days were spent in
fishing, in mountain-climbing, or in long cycling excursions, and the
store of health laid up by these days gave new vigour to the mind when
the work of education was resumed.
When the summer came on, life became a daily lyric of delight. By five
in the morning, sometimes by four, we were out fishing. In the narrow
part of the glen there was a place where the rocks met in a wild
miniature gorge, and through them the water poured into a large
circular rock-basin, about forty feet in diameter. This was our
bathing-pool, and the cool shock and thrill of those exquisitely pure
and flowing waters runs along my nerves still as I write. We often
spent more than an hour there in the early morning, swimming from side
to side of our natural bath, diving off a rock which rose almost in the
centre of the pool, passing to and fro under the cascade, or sitting
out in the sun, till sheer hunger drove us home to breakfast. Writers
who boast a sort of finical superiority will no doubt disdain these
barbarian delights, and wonder that memory should be persistent over
mere physical sensations. But I am not sure that these physical
sensations are not recollected with more acuteness than mental ones,
and there is no just reason why they should be despised. I have
forgotten a good many aesthetic pleasures which at the time gave me
keen delight--some phrase in oratory, some movement in concerted music,
and such like--but I never forget the sensation of wind blowing over my
bare flesh as I coasted down a long mountain road on a broiling day in
August, nor the poignant thrill of that rushing water in my morning
bathes. And mixed with it all is the aromatic scent of the pines
beside the stream, the freshness of the meadows, and the song of
falling water. Sometimes, when the river was in summer flood, there
was just that spice of danger in our bathing which gave it a memorable
piquancy. On such occasions we had to use skill and coolness to avoid
disaster; we were tossed about the boiling water like bubbles;
incredible masses of water flowed over us, warm and strong, in a few
seconds, and we came out of the roaring pool so beaten and thrashed by
the violence of the stream that every nerve quivered. Breakfast was a
great occasion after these adventures. Then came a stroll round our
small estate, and an hour or so over books. Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_
was a favourite poem with us all on these mornings. It breathed the
very spirit of the life we lived, but for its sadness--this we did not
feel. But we did appreciate its wonderfully exact and beautiful
interpretation of Nature, and we had but to look around us to see the
very picture Arnold painted when he wrote:
Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweetwilliam with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow:
Roses that down the alley shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening star.
Such was the life we lived. If we looked back at all to the life we
had left, it was with that sort of sick horror which a prisoner may
feel who has endured and survived a long term of imprisonment. It
seemed to us that we had never really lived before. The past was a
dream, and an evil dream. We had moved in a world of bad enchantment,
like phantoms, barely conscious of ourselves. We had now recovered
proprietorship in our own lives. Work, that had been a curse, was a
blessing. Life, that had gone on maimed feet, was now virile in every
part. This mere fulness of health was in itself ample compensation for
the loss of a hundred artificial pleasures which we had once thought
necessary to existence. We knew that we had found a delight in mere
living which must remain wholly incredible to the tortured hosts that
toil in cities; and we knew also that when at last we came to lie down
with kings and conquerors in the house of sleep, we should carry with
us fairer dreams than they ever knew amid all the tumult of their
triumph.
CHAPTER X
NEIGHBOURSHIP
There is a wonderful passage in _Timon of Athens_ which appears to
express in a few strokes, at once broad and subtle, the picture and the
ideal of a perfect city:
Piety and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws.
The congregated life of man, many-coloured, intricate, composed of
numerous interwoven interests, was never painted with a higher skill.
The word that is most expressive in this description is
'neighbourhood.' It strikes the note of cities. Uttering it, one is
aware of the pleasant music of bustling streets, greetings in the
market-place, whispered converse in the doorways, gay meetings and
laughter, lighted squares and crowds, the touch of kind hands, evening
meals and festivals, and all the reverberation of man's social voice.
A man may grow sick for such scenes as a sailor grows sick with longing
for the sea. There were times when this sickness came on me, this
nostalgia of streets. It was only by degrees I came to see that
neighbourhood has a significance apart from cities.
The first sensation of the man suddenly exiled from cities is a kind of
bewildering homelessness in Nature. He is confronted with a
spaciousness that knows no limit. He treads among voids. He
experiences an almost unendurable sense of infinity. He can put a
bound to nothing that he sees; it is a relief to the eye to come upon a
wall or a hedge, or any kind of object that implies dimension. There
is something awful in the glee or song of birds; it seems irrational
that with wings so slight they should dare heights so profound. All
sense of proportion seems lost. After being accustomed for many years
to think of himself as in some sense a figure of importance in the
universe, a man finds himself unimportant, insignificant, a little
creature scarce perceptible a mile away. I came once upon some human
bones lying exposed on the side of an old earthwork on the summit of a
hill; heavy rains had loosened the soil, and there lay these painful
relics in the cold eye of day. Two thousand years ago, or more, spears
had clashed upon this hillside, living men had gone to final rest amid
their blood; and it came upon me with a sense of insult how little man
and all his battles counted for in the limitless arena of the world.
The brute violence of winds and tempests had swept these hills for
centuries; and he whose lordship of the world is so loudly trumpeted,
had lain prone beneath this violence, unremembered even by his fellows.
I understood in that moment that affecting doctrine of the nothingness
of man, which coloured mediaeval thought so strangely: like the monk of
the cloister I also had before me my _memento mori_. But in truth I
did not need the bones of dead warriors to humble me; the mere space
and stillness of the world sufficed. My ear ached for some sound more
rational than the cry of blind winds, my eye for some narrower stage
than this tremendous theatre, where an army might defile unnoticed. In
such a mood the desire of neighbourship grows keen. One is cheered
even by the comradeship of his own shadow. It becomes necessary to
talk aloud merely to gain assurance that one lives. So ghost-like
appears man's march across the fields of Time, that some active
expression of physical sensation becomes imperative, in order to
recover evidence of one's physical existence; and thrice welcome, like
the violence offered to the half-drowned, is any kind of buffet which
breaks the dream, and sets the nerves tingling in the certainty of
contact with men who breathe and live.
The easy and ostensible remedy for such a state of mind is immediate
retreat to the reassuring hum of cities: the more difficult but real
remedy is the reassurance of one's own identity. Many people take the
first course without admitting it; alleging the lack of intercourse or
convenience in country life, whereas the real truth is that contact
with the steadfast indifference of Nature has proved wounding to their
egoism. A vain man cannot maintain his sense of self-importance in the
centre of a vast moor, or amid the threatening bulk of giant hills. He
looks upon nothing that respects him. He can find nothing subservient
to him. Therefore he flies to the crowded haunts of men, and the
porter touching his hat to him for a prospective twopence at the
railway station, is the welcome confessor of his disallowed divinity.
It is, alas! the most common and humbling feature of human nature that
we all stiffen our backs with pride when the knee of some
fellow-creature is crooked in homage to us, although that homage may be
bought for twopence! No wonder that the man in whose character vanity
is the chief essence cannot long endure contact with Nature; Nature
respects no man, and laughs in the face of the strutting egoist. But
if a man will live long enough with Nature to become reconciled to her
impassivity, he begins to recover self-respect, by recovering the
conviction of his own identity. He has that within himself which
Nature has not, the faculty of consciousness. He is but a trifling
atom in the scheme of things, but he is a thinking atom. He sees also
that all living creatures have an identity of their own. Each goes
about the scheme of life in deliberate wisdom. Why should he complain
of insignificance when the bird, the flower, the horse that drags the
plough, the beaver in the stream, the spider on the wall, make no
complaint; each accomplishing its task as intently as though it were
the one task the world wanted done? In the life of the merest insect
are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic
human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds
of life. The bird building its nest is doing precisely the same thing
as the man who builds his house, and with an equal skill of
architecture. The flower, fighting for its life, is engaged in the
same struggle as man, for whom every breath and pulse-beat is a victory
over forces that threaten his destruction. The world is full of
identities, each unmoved by the tremendous scale of its environment.
Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible, wider and more catholic
than the neighbourship between man and man. Kinship, not in kindred,
but in universal life, becomes possible. There is no sense of
loneliness in a country life after that discovery is made. The
emptiest field is as populous as the thronged city. The Academy of
God's art opens every spring upon the gemmed hillside. The building of
a new metropolis as wonderful as London is going on beneath the thatch
where the bees toil. All that constitutes human magnificence is seen
to be but a part, and not a large part either, of a yet wider
magnificence of effort and achievement; for of the flowers of the field
we can say, 'Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these.'
The fact is that civilised man moves in a much too narrow range of
affinities. He has forgotten the rock from which he was hewn, and the
hole of the pit from which he was dug. He has reduced the keyboard of
his sympathies by whole octaves. The habit of shutting up his body
within walls, has produced the corresponding habit of shutting up his
mind within walls. Hence Nature, which should be an object of delight
to him, becomes a cause of terror or repugnance. Solitude, which is
one of the most agreeable sensations of the natural man, is one of the
most painful and alarming sensations of the civilised man. The
civilised man needs to be born again that he may enter the kingdom of
Nature; for to enter either the kingdom of grace or of Nature the same
process is necessary--we must become as little children. Thoreau has
described this experience in terms which might apply equally to the
religious mystic or the Nature-lover. He tells us that for a brief
period after he came to live in the woods he felt lonesome, and
'doubted if the near neighbourhood of man was not essential to a serene
and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at
the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to
foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while those
thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and
beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and
in every sight and sound about my house, an infinite and unaccountable
friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the
fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have
never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and
swelled with sympathy, and befriended me. I was so distinctly made
aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes that
we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of
blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I
thought no place could ever be strange to me again.' This experience
marked the rebirth of Thoreau, as truly as a new and delightful
sensitiveness to a spiritual world marked the re-birth of Bunyan. The
whole secret of re-birth lies in the recovery of lost affinities.
I do not recollect any particular crisis such as Thoreau describes, but
I can trace the process in myself. I took no pains to cast the slough
of cities; I registered no vows and consulted no teachers; it seemed
that the thing was quietly done for me by the Higher Powers. I had no
part in the matter except to be docile. Nature took me in hand, as
sleep takes in hand the sick child; the only thing asked of me was my
submission. The result soon appeared in the altered scale of my
perceptions. I became indifferent to newspapers, to the doings and
performances of public personages, to the rise and fall of literary
reputations, and to a great many books which once interested me. I saw
that a considerable number of those whom I had counted public teachers
were no better than persons who talked in their sleep. They knew
nothing of the elemental life of man, and were unfitted to pronounce
verdicts upon his destiny. Novelists particularly offended me by their
gross ignorance of life. The pictures of life they drew were as untrue
as a description of a street-fight would be if written by a perfumed
odalisque who had never crossed the threshold of a harem. The ancient
elemental life of man, spent in storm and sunshine, under wide skies,
they had not so much as looked at, and their voluminous chatter about
man and his doings had as little relation to life as the philosophy
that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon
Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout
of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque
at which Nature laughed? And as my sense of the importance of this
kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama
conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are
the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour of
Eternity, through neighbourship with things that are themselves
eternal. I tasted the pleasure of enlarged existence, which had become
possible through enlarged affinities. I had eaten of the Tree of Life,
which grows wherever there is a Garden brought to beauty by the sweat
of man's brow, and I had the knowledge of good and evil.
One form of neighbourship which brought me perpetual delight was--if I
may so describe it--neighbourship with the stars. I had hitherto
scarce given a thought to astronomy, save of the vaguest kind, and all
I knew of it was derived from the recollection of one or two popular
lectures. This was pardonable in a citizen, who is never able to see
any considerable space of firmament. But when a man comes to live in
the country he can scarce remain indifferent to a pageant so sublime as
the midnight heavens. It is always with him; it obtrudes itself upon
him; it becomes in time the scenery of his life. It pleased me on
clear evenings before I slept to go out and take what I called a
star-bath, a term justified by the real sense I had of waves of soft
light and silence flowing over me, submerging and cleansing me, and
setting my soul afloat. But very soon this purely aesthetic pleasure
became also an excitement of the intellect. An immense curiosity
seized me. I desired to penetrate this lighted labyrinth of space, to
climb these shining terraces, to know where these vast roads led, in
whose profound seclusion God Himself seemed to hide. In a very humble
way I began the study of astronomy, and although I never got beyond its
elements yet my whole life was incalculably enriched by what I learned.
I sometimes felt that of all my neighbours the stars were the
friendliest and wisest. That sense of insignificance, begotten by the
pressure of immensity upon the spirit, of which so many men have
written, I never felt; my most constant feeling was a kind of gladness
which had its root in the conviction of some living friendly Power
behind and in the spectacle. The sense of insignificance, if it came
at all, was associated with the vanities of mankind. It did indeed
seem a strange thing that a man whose thoughts could walk among the
stars, should bend those thoughts to a mean eagerness for gold, a pride
in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so
much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill. In a universe, whose
arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as
associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the
biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire of bigness
passes from a man's mind, humility becomes pleasurable, and immensity
is soothing. I forgot to think of the vastness of the stars; they were
for me neighbourly and friendly presences, talking like a wise old
nurse to me of things that happened before my birth, and the ancient
kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, 'My old neighbour--God!'
Neighbourship with the earth also became a vital pleasure and a source
of peace. There was a time when I had a vivid horror of death; and as
I look back, and analyse my sensations, I believe this horror was in
large part the work of cities. It sprang from the constant vision of
deformity, the presence of hospitals, newspaper narratives of tragic
accidents, and the ghastly cheerfulness of metropolitan cemeteries. To
die with a window open to the trampling of a clamorous, unconcerned
street seemed a thing sordid and unendurable. To be whisked away in a
plumed hearse to a grave dug out of the debris of a hundred forgotten
graves was the climax of insult. It happened to me once to see a child
buried in what was called a common grave. It was a grave which
contained already half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin
of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of
religion could give it sanctity. Dissolution met the mind there in
more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of
indecency and wilful outrage. But in the wide wholesome spaces of the
world, and beneath the clean stars, death seems not undesirable. A
country life gives one the pleasant sense of kinship with the earth.
It is no longer an offence to know oneself of the earth earthy. I was
so much engaged in the love and study of things whose life was brief
that the thought of death became natural. I saw constantly in flowers
and birds, and domestic creatures, the little round of life completed
and relinquished without regret. I saw also how the aged peasant
gathered up his feet and died, like a tired child falling asleep at the
close of a long day. Death is in reality no more terrible than birth;
but it is only the natural man who can so conceive it. He who lives in
constant kinship with the earth will go to his rest on the earth's
bosom without repugnance. I knew very well the place where I should be
buried; it was beneath a clean turf kept sweet by mountain winds; and
the place seemed desirable. Having come back by degrees to a life of
entire kinship with the earth, having shared the seasons and the
storms, it seemed but the final seal set upon this kinship, that I
should dissolve quietly into the elements of things, to find perhaps my
resurrection in the eternally renewed life of Nature.
Neighbourship meant also for me kinship, with every kind of life around
me, and some friendly association with my fellow-men. The creatures we
call dumb have a sure way of talking to us, if we will overcome their
shyness and give them a chance. Moreover their habits, their method of
life, their thoughts, are in themselves profoundly interesting. I
seemed to have discovered a new universe when I first took to
bee-culture. The geometry of the heavens is not more astonishing than
the geometry of the beehive, nor is the architecture of the finest city
built by man more intricate and masterly. Here, as in all things, we
are deceived by bulk, counting a thing great merely because it is big;
but if it come to deducing an Invisible Mind in the universe from the
things that are visible, I would as soon base my argument on what goes
on in a bee's brain, as on the harmonies of law manifested in the solar
system. I believe we greatly err in underrating other forms of life
than our own. The Hindu, who acknowledges a mystic sacredness in all
forms of life, comes nearer the truth. Life for life, judged by
proportion, plan, symmetry, delicacy of design and beauty of
adjustment, man is a creature not a whit more wonderful than many forms
of life which he crushes with a careless foot. The creature we call
dumb is not dumb to its mates, and it is very likely our human modes of
communication appear as absurd to the dog or horse as theirs do to us.
We know what we think of the so-called dumb creatures; it might be a
humbling surprise if we could know what the dumb creature thinks of us.
The satire would not be upon one side, be sure of it.
To the townsman the simple dwellers on the soil seem almost as
incapable of intercourse as the creatures of the field and pasture.
Because they do not know the kind of things the townsman knows, they
are supposed to know nothing. I have already said enough to show how
absurd and insolent is this assumption. My neighbours were few, and
simple-minded; but they possessed many kinds of skill necessary to
their life, they had wisdom and virtue, and upon the whole a kind of
fundamental dignity of nature. They were as shy as woodland creatures
to a stranger's voice; they were highly sensitive to the mere shadow of
a slight, and both suspicious and resentful of patronage; but they met
trust with trust, and where they gave their trust they gave their full
loyalty of friendship. In my youth, as I have said elsewhere, I often
passed a whole day in a forest. I would choose some solitary glade,
where my intrusion was audibly resented by the unseen creatures of the
wood, who fled before me; but when an hour had passed, and the signal
had run through the forest that I meant no harm, those scattered and
astonished creatures reassembled. The whole life of the wood then went
on before my eyes; the birds sang their best for me, the squirrel
performed his innocent gymnastics with an eye to my applause, the very
snake moved less shyly through the grass, as though the word had gone
forth that I was a guest, who must be entertained and made to feel at
home. This experience often recurred to me in my early days at
Thornthwaite. It was some time before I was admitted to the
free-masonry of the scanty social life around me; when at last I had
paid my footing I found that here also was a commonwealth; here also
might be found upon a narrow scale, but in authentic forms,
Piety and fear,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws.
CHAPTER XI
THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND
Those who have been friendly enough to follow me so far in my little
story will scarcely push their friendship so far that they will refrain
from criticism upon myself and my doings. On one point, viz. the
social morality of my conduct, I am so sure of criticism that I will
anticipate it with self-criticism. Had I the moral right to desert the
city, and to ignore the social obligations of the city, in order to
find a life that was more pleasurable to myself? A city which presents
a depressing variety of social needs can hardly afford to spare any
good citizen, however humble, who is capable of social service, and for
such a citizen to contract himself out of his obligations is very like
skulking. I confess that this consideration occasioned me some
uneasiness, and the questions which it raised have been treated with
such admirable lucidity by a friend of mine, who still resides in
London, that I will let him put the case against me.
The friend of whom I speak belongs to that class which may be roughly
described as Earnest Good People. With very small means, and not much
spare time at his disposal, he is nevertheless constantly engaged in
what is called the work of Social Amelioration. The problems of city
squalor, vice, and ignorance haunt him like a nightmare. When a very
young man he made a voyage of discovery among the submerged tenth; got
acquainted with tramps, night strollers, and wastrels on the Thames
Embankment; slept in doss-houses and Salvation Army shelters; tried his
hand on experimental philanthropy among the slums; and was driven
half-frantic by what he saw. He has the makings of a saint in him; of
a Francis of Assisi, of a Father Damien. He teaches in night-schools,
conducts Penny Banks, and is grateful to any one who will introduce him
to a desperate social enterprise which no one else will attempt. The
first business of life, he is fond of saying, is not to get good, but
to do good. Of pleasure, in the usual sense of the term, he knows
nothing, and would grudge the expenditure of a sixpence upon himself as
long as he knew a cadger or a decayed washerwoman who seemed to have a
better claim to it. London is for him not a home, but a battlefield,
and his spirit is the spirit of the soldier who dare not forsake his
post.
Many years ago, when I was going for my summer holiday, he wrote me a
reproachful poem, from which I quote a part, because it is the best
index to his own character and the most lucid exposition of his own
attitude to life which I can recall:
The roar of the streets at their loudest
Rises and falls like a tune;
Midday in the heart of London,
Midway in the month of June.
And blue at the end of a valley
I see the ocean gleam,
And a voice like falling water
Speaks to me thro' a dream.
It calls, and it bids me follow;
Ah, how the worn nerves thrill
At the vision of those green pastures
And waters running still!
But I dare not move nor follow,
For out of the quivering heat
Another vision arises
And darkens at my feet--
White faces worn with the fever
That crouches evermore
In the court and alley, and seizes
The poor man at his door,
Float up in my dream and call me,
And cry, If Christ were here
He had not left us to perish
In the fever-heat of the year!
God knows how I yearn for the mountains
And the river that runs between!
Ah, well, I can wait--and the pastures
Of heaven are always green.
No one will question the nobility of sentiment in these simple lines,
and they are the genuine expression of the man. In his case, however
slight may be his claim to be called a poet, that hardest test of the
poet is fulfilled:--
The gods exact for song
To become what we sing.
It will be imagined that a man of this order would view my retreat from
London with disfavour. He thought me guilty of a kind of social
perfidy. No doubt the Earnest Good People, for whom I have the
greatest reverence, will agree in the same verdict. A letter received
during the last few days from my friend puts the case with such force,
and yet with such good-feeling, that I will transcribe a part of it.
'I confess,' he writes, 'that the pleasures of life among the mountains
leaves me cold. It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of
pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of
life. I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving. The
thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti
puts it, "make a goblin of the sun." You used to be very eloquent
against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you
yourself living in the same way? I have heard you declaim against the
gross selfishness of Goethe's aim in life--"to build the pyramid of his
own intellectual culture"; are not you, in your own way, pursuing the
same ideal? I have heard you say that nothing so belittled Goethe in
your judgment as the fact that he was destitute of patriotism; he dwelt
at ease among his books, while his country perished and felt no pang;
and you live your joyous life among the hills, and have forgotten the
Golgothas on which the poor of London endure their unpitied martyrdom.
You are doing good to yourself, no doubt; but is it not a better thing
to be doing good to others? I marvel that you can sleep at peace amid
the wailing of the world. I cannot, and I thank God I cannot.
'What you do not seem to realise is that all our acts must be judged
not only from the personal, but from the collective standpoint.
Suppose all men followed your example, what would happen? Why, cities
would soon become the mere refuse-heaps of the unfit. The drudges
would remain, the captains of industry would be gone. There would be
no leaven of higher intelligence left, no standard of manners, nothing
that could set the rhythm of life. This is too much the case already.
The merchant, the writer, the man of wealth and culture, live as far as
they can from the struggling crowd. You would extend the process, and
make it possible for the clerk as well as the merchant. If your new
gospel of a return to Nature succeeds, we shall soon see the universal
exodus of the best intellectual and physical units of the community.
But you forget that some millions will remain behind, who cannot flee.
Have you no obligations to these?
'Besides this, you do not seem to perceive that the ultimate drift of
the new gospel is toward anarchy. The return to nature is practically
a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they
grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England
return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat
upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content.
There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops
capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself
new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You
save yourself from the collisions of life; but it is in such collisions
that the finest fires are struck out of the heart of humanity. Again,
I say, any course of action must be judged by its collective effect
before it can be rightly understood. It is not the individual that
counts, but the race. A good for the individual is not permissible
unless it is a good also for the race. I do not admit that your new
way of life is an entire good for you, for I believe you must in time
suffer from your isolation; but even if I did admit it, I should deny
your right to it, if in its large effects it means an ill for the race.
Would you venture to say that the race would profit by it if your
example were largely imitated? I think you dare not say so much, for
you must be aware that the general desertion of cities would mean the
decay of commerce and of the arts, the arrest of progress, and national
disintegration. And if your own personal example would bear only evil
fruit were it elevated to a law of life, it stands condemned.
'For my own part, I am where you left me. I am in the same
rooms--dull, stuffy, inconvenient--you know all about them. I breathe
quantities of bad air every day, and see a hundred things that distress
me. I go three nights a week to the room in Lucraft's Row; struggle
with the young barbarians of the slums, and am content if I see but a
few signs of order evolving themselves out of chaos. A week ago I was
knocked down by a ruffian, who came next day to apologise on the
three-fold ground that he was drunk, that he did not know it was me he
struck, and that if he had known he never would have done it. My
ruffian was very penitent. He has since signed the pledge and is my
firm friend. I chased him out of a public-house last night, and made
him come home to my lodgings with me, where I gave him coffee, and sang
songs to him. He followed all my movements with the big wistful eyes
of a dog. There were tears in those eyes when he bade me good-night.
He brushed them away with a dirty hand, and said, "I know I can keep
straight now, sir, because you are my pal, and I ain't a-going against
the wishes of my pal!" This morning he left a pineapple at the door
for me--he is a coster, and pineapples are cheap just now. I felt more
pleasure than I can say; I could have sung over my work all day, so
glad was I. My dear fellow, don't think I speak pharisaically--you
know me too well; but I do believe I got more genuine pleasure out of
my experience with this rough fellow than you will ever get out of your
sunsets. Lucraft's Row is a dull place enough, but when a ray of light
does shine into it, it brings with it more than common joy.
'My objection to your new mode of life is that it is entirely
self-centred. There is no projection of yourself into other lives.
You are contributing nothing to the common stock of moral effort. You
are simply marooned. It alters nothing that you have marooned yourself
under conditions that please and content you. I think that if I were
marooned upon the fairest island of the Southern Seas, where I had but
to bask in the sunshine and stretch out my hand to find delightful
food, there would be still something in my lot which I should find
intolerable. I should spend my days upon the island's loftiest crag,
watching for a sail. The thought of a thousand ships not far away,
rushing round the globe, with throb of piston, crack of cordage, strain
of timber, buffeting of waves, and shouting crews, would drive me
distracted. What to me were blue skies and soft winds when I might be
sharer in this elemental strife? How should I covet, in all this
adorable and detested beauty of my solitary isle, the grey skies that
looked on human effort, the violent wind, the roaring waves, the
muscles cracking at the capstan, the strong exhilaration of peril,
effort, conflict, and the glory of hourly contiguity with death! It
was so Ulysses felt:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.
It was so he resolved
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
* * * * *
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You will not question that the sentiment is manly. Is there not then
something that is unmanly in the opposite sentiment? Or, to be plain,
my friend, is it not lack of courage which has driven you from us, lack
of heroic temper, lack of that divine and primitive instinct which
takes a "frolic welcome" in the "thunder and the sunshine," in the
conflict and the stress of life?
'I believe that we are bound to be the losers by any wilful separation
from our kind. This was the case with the mediaeval monks and
ascetics; they lost far more than they gained from their separation
from the common life of the people. It is the same still with very
rich folk who are able to evade the harsh conscription of life; in
evading the conscription of life they invariably deteriorate in
physical and mental fibre. I can conceive nothing more ruinous to a
young man than that he should have just enough money to make the toil
for bread unnecessary. More lives have been spoiled by competence than
by poverty; indeed, I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all upon
a strong character, except as a stimulus to exertion. Life being what
it is, we should take it as we find it: we gain nothing by going out of
our way to find an easier path. The beaten road is safest. The man
who boldly says, "Let me know the fulness of life; let me taste all
that it has to present of vicissitude, joy, sorrow, labour, struggle;
let me know all that common people endure, and endure with them; let me
be no exception to the common rule, enjoy no special privilege, ask for
no immunity from things harsh and disagreeable"--the man who thinks and
acts thus is the man who gets the best and most out of life. But you,
my friend, have simply copied the old monks in the arrangement of your
life. There is nothing novel in your action, though just now your
egoism is gratified by the sense of novelty and originality. You have
simply gone out of the world to escape the evil of the world. You have
bought yourself out of the conscription of life. You have yet to
answer me one question: are you the better for it? That question
cannot be answered in a day. Ten years hence you will be able to tell
me something about it, and I shall be much surprised if you do not then
report more of loss than gain. No man ever yet held aloof from his
kind without paying the price in narrower sympathies, a narrower brain,
and a narrower heart. The eternal spirit of Progress which works
throughout the universe never fails to punish the deserter, and the
most common punishment is atrophy. Not to submit to the process of
evolution is to fall down the long slope of degeneracy.
'You do not need to be told that the entire history of nations confirms
this rule. The greatest nations are those which have found life most
difficult, and they have thriven on their difficulties. The soft
climate, which reduces toil to a minimum, invariably means the
enervated race. Under the harsh skies of Britain a great race has been
trained to great exploits; but what part have the islands of the South
Pacific ever played in human history? Give man a difficulty to
overcome, and he at once puts forth his strength; difficulty is his
spiritual gymnasium. Impose on him no need of exertion, and he will
rot out, just as the races of the South Pacific are rotting out. I
would measure the future of a man, or of a nation, by this simple test;
do they habitually choose the easier or the harder path for themselves?
The nation that chooses the hard path, that is not afraid of the burden
of empire, that glories in the strife for primacy and is not afraid to
pay the price of primacy in incredible exertion, in blood and
sacrifice, is the nation that shall possess the earth. And is it not
so with men? Here, again, I press home the need for considering one's
actions in their collective aspect. Your course of life is easily
imitable: would you have it imitated? There are thousands of men in
London who could readily retire into a peaceful life to-morrow, on
terms more favourable than yours. Every man possessed of a hundred
pounds a year could do it. Yet there are plenty of old men, with ample
fortunes, who never dream of doing it. They stick to their posts and
they die at them. And it is by such men that the great machinery of
social life, of commerce, of national progress is kept going.
'You would say, perhaps, that they are simply sacrificing the finer
pleasures of life to the fanaticism of work; ah, but they are also
sacrificing them for the good of the community. If the great surgeon
or physician bolted from his duties the moment he had acquired money
enough to buy a cottage, you would say he had no right to rob mankind
of his skill and service to please himself. Have you that right? And
if the whole nation acted in this spirit, how long would the nation
hold its place of power and influence? In less than a century we
should be as the Hottentots. We should be driven out before the
advance of more energetic races, just as the Hottentots; who once
possessed Southern Europe and Egypt, have been forced back into the
African wilderness, where they live a life that is content with the
gratification of the most primitive, the most bestial, wants. It is no
excuse to say that the action of one man can have but little influence
upon the trend of life in a whole nation. The merest unit in the sum,
the cipher even, has power to change the total. The strength of wisdom
in the majority of a nation may be more than sufficient to-day to
counteract the folly of the unit; but there is always the chance that
the folly of the individual may in time prevail against the experience
of the wise, and pervert the nation. At all events, we ought to
consider such possibilities before we hold ourselves free to do as we
please in contempt of general custom.
'Do not be angry with me when I say that to me your flight from London
appears only an illustration of that cowardice about life which is so
common to-day. Men are very much afraid of life to-day; afraid of its
responsibilities and duties; afraid of marriage and the burden of
children; and not alone for the old are there fears in the way, but
even the young men faint and grow weary.
'I can understand Stevenson flying to the South Seas; it was part of
his prolonged duel with death. But his heart was in the Highlands, and
could he have chosen, his feet would have trodden to old age the grey
streets of Edinburgh. Your flight is altogether different. You have
no real excuse in ill-health. You have simply fallen sick with a
distaste for cities. You have had a bad dream, and you are frightened.
I love you still; I count you friend still; but I cannot call you brave.
'O my friend, if I have said anything that sounds unfriendly, do not
believe it of me; do not doubt that I love you. I think I should not
have written thus but that in your last letter you expressed pity for
me, and that stung me, I confess. And so I retort, you see, by pitying
you, which is not admirable in me. Therefore let me say, if you care
still to please me, do not, in any further letters you may write, ever
express the least pity for me. Quite honestly I say I do not need
pity, for I am perfectly happy. In giving all the time and money I can
spare to the poor in Lucraft's Row, I have really renounced nothing;
or, if I have, I am so unconscious of sacrifice that I can only say
with Browning:
Renounce joy for thy fellow's sake?
That's joy beyond joy!
There are half a dozen ragged boys who love me: there are twenty more
who will do so in time; and there is my drunken friend with the dog's
eyes, who looks to me to save him from the pit; what more can I ask?
Fog and mire, grime and drudgery, these never trouble me, because I see
Lucraft's Row, lit with a star, waiting for me at the end of every day.
And the star is growing bigger and brighter, for it shines over a tiny
obscure Bethlehem where the Soul is getting itself born in a few humble
hearts. To be permitted to see this miracle, to assist in this
incarnation of the Soul of the People, is its own exceeding great
reward; and I may be envied, but never pitied.'
So ran the letter of my friend, and as I transcribe it I feel anew that
it is an indictment not to be easily set aside. I must think over what
I can reply to it. It seems as though if he be right in his mode of
life I must be wrong in mine; and yet may we not both be right? Are we
not seeing life from different angles?
Yes, I must have time for thought before I can reply to such a letter.
CHAPTER XII
AM I RIGHT?
I have given myself a week to think over the letter of my friend, and I
am now able to perceive that it is built upon a number of most
ingenious fallacies. The chief fallacy appears to be this--that he
insists that the race must always count for more than the individual,
and that the individual must fall in line and step with the average
conventions of the race at the expense of his own well-being, or be
judged a deserter and a recreant.
It is hardly necessary to point out that no doctrine could be more
hostile to collective progress, because progress is not a collective
movement, but the movement of great individuals who drag the race after
them. I do not recollect a single human reform that has been
spontaneously generated in the heart of society itself; it has always
had its beginnings in the hearts of individuals. Thus the Reformation
is practically Martin Luther, the Evangelical revival is Wesley, the
Oxford Movement is Newman, Free Trade is Cobden, and so on through a
hundred regenerations of thought, morals, and politics. 'The world
being what it is, we must take it as we find it,' is a note of quiet
desperation. It is precisely because the Providence of History has
again and again raised up men who were incapable of taking the world as
they found it, that regenerations and reformations of society have
occurred at all. Society never moves forward except when it is goaded
by the spirit of individual genius. So far as we can trace the history
of civilisation, and thanks to modern research we have about ten
thousand years to go by, civilisation is a succession of waves, each
flowing a little higher than its predecessor, with an ebb between each.
At what point is the ebb checked, at what point does the fuller wave
begin to flow? Always with the advent of individual genius. A great
man rises who founds a dynasty; a great thinker, who publishes new
truths; a great lawgiver or statesman, who establishes a new social
system. New worlds need a Columbus, and the social Columbus is always
a man with sufficient daring to stand by original convictions.
Therefore I say that human progress is only made possible by not taking
the world as we find it; and that he is the best friend of collective
progress who is the most obedient not to collective convention, but to
individual insight.
I observe that my friend does not live in the spirit of his own axiom:
else, why should he trouble himself over the inhabitants of Lucraft's
Row? He is certainly not taking the world as he finds it when he
devotes his hours of leisure to impart the elements of decency to
gutter-snipes, and save drunkards from the pit. He is as much an
individualist as I, only his individualism expresses itself in a
different way; which confirms my original conjecture that we may be
equally right in our own mode of life. Nor, by his own confession,
does he really sacrifice his inclinations in his mode of life; he
gratifies his sense of altruism in Lucraft's Row, and I my love of
Nature in the solitude of lonely hills. The objects which give men
pleasure may be so diverse that what is a source of joy to one man may
be an equal source of misery to another. There can be no doubt that
many of the martyrs and ascetics were honestly enamoured of pain and
whatever credit they deserve for sacrifice, they pleased themselves by
renouncing the world, as others by enjoying it; and all that can be
said on the subject is that each pleased himself in his own way.
Thoreau's defence when he was accused of not doing good was that it did
not agree with his constitution; and although the defence sounds like a
piece of amusing cynicism, it was in reality a plea entirely just. The
common fault of the Good Earnest People, as of most people, is that
they can only conceive of doing good after a pattern which is congenial
to themselves. But their mode of doing good, while it suits themselves
admirably, may not suit every constitution, and people of a quite
different mental constitution may be quite as good as themselves,
although it is after a very different pattern. Thoreau did a vast
amount of good by showing men, in his own example, that the simplest
kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would
he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced
himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum? Are not we so
much the wiser and stronger by the lessons taught in the hut beside
Walden Pond, that it would be the poorest compensation for their loss
to know that Thoreau by dint of effort made himself a fairly efficient
city missionary, or pleased the pundits of a Charity Organisation
Society? Or to take a yet more forcible example of my meaning: Hood
wrote _The Song of the Shirt_, and Wordsworth _The Ode on Intimations
of Immortality_; would either have gained by an exchange of lot? The
one poem could only have been written by a man who knew 'the tragic
heart of towns,' and the other by the man who knew the tranquil heart
of Nature; but Hood, transported to Grasmere, would have written
nothing, and Wordsworth in Fleet Street is unthinkable. As it was,
Destiny took the matter in hand, and having men to work upon whose
first principle of life was to fulfil and not to violate the instincts
of their own nature, succeeded in producing two poets who served
mankind each in a way not possible to the other.
I suspect there is a great deal of cant to be cleared out of the mind
before we can become equitable judges of what doing good really means.
I define doing good as the fulfilment of our best instincts and
faculties for the best use of mankind; but I do not expect that the
Good Earnest People will accept this definition. They would find it
much too catholic, simply because they have learned to attach a
specialised meaning to the phrase 'doing good,' which limits it to some
form of active philanthropy. If they would but allow a wider vision of
life to pass before the eye, they would see that there are many ways of
doing good besides those which satisfy their own ideals. It is a
singular thing that men find it very difficult to live lives of charity
without cherishing uncharitable tempers towards those who do not live
precisely as they themselves do. For instance, the busy
philanthropist, nobly eager to bring a little happiness into the grey
lives of the disinherited, often has the poorest opinion of artists and
novelists, who appear to him to live useless lives. But when Turner
paints a picture like the _Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth_,
which is destined to stir generous thoughts in multitudes of hearts
long after his death: or when Scott writes novels which have increased
the sum of human happiness for a century, is not each doing good of the
rarest, highest, and most enduring kind? The fulfilment of one's best
instincts and faculties, for the best use of mankind, is not only the
completest, but also the only available form of philanthropy. Since
Nature has chosen to endow us with diverse faculties, our service of
mankind must be diverse too. In a word, doing good is a much larger
business than the ordinary philanthropist imagines; it has many
branches and a thousand forms; and they are not always doing the most
who seem the busiest, nor do those accomplish most in the alleviation
of human misery whose contact with it is the closest.
During the last year of my life in London I came into contact with a
brilliant young Oxford man, who had manifest talents for oratory,
leadership, and literature. He was in search of a career, and being a
youth of quick sympathies and very generous instincts, he was soon
caught in the tide of a certain social movement, whose chief aim was to
induce persons of culture to live among the very poorest of the poor.
The leader of this movement was a man of beautifully unselfish temper,
but of no striking intellectual gifts; apart from a certain originality
of character, which was the fruit of this unselfish temper, he was
quite commonplace in mind, and could have aspired to no higher rank in
life than an honourable place among the inferior clergy. He attracted
this brilliant youth, however; a youth who had been president of the
Oxford Union, and had taken a double first in classics, for whom
distinction in life seemed inevitable. The end was that his convert
joined what was really a lay order of social and religious service. He
lived among the slums of Holborn, devoted himself to the instruction of
the children of the gutter, kept the accounts of coal and blanket
clubs, and accepted cheerfully all the drudgery of philanthropy among
the poor. Most people, I am quite aware, will say that this is a very
noble example of renunciation; so it is, and as such I can admire it.
But is there nothing else to be considered? May not the sociologist
ask whether a man is serving society in the best way by refusing to use
his best gifts in the only direction in which they could have full
play? For many years this youth had trained himself for a particular
part in life which few could fill; he might have influenced the
councils of his nation by his powers of debate, the mind of his nation
by his gift of literature; he should have stood before kings and spoken
to scholars; yet all these high utilities were extinguished in order
that he might do something which a man with only a tenth part of his
gifts might have done quite as well. Think of the picture; a scholar
who never opens a book, an orator who addresses only costers and
work-girls, a writer who writes nothing, a leader of men who exerts no
public influence; and what is this wilful destruction of high faculties
but social waste and robbery? No doubt he is doing good; but would not
the good he might have done have been far wider, had he followed the
line of his natural gifts, and occupied the place in life for which
those gifts obviously fitted him?
This story is a pertinent example of the cant of Doing Good. By all
means let those live among the poor and work for their betterment who
have a distinct vocation for the task; but it is not a vocation for
all. I object to the spectacle of a late president of the Oxford Union
giving up his life to the management of coal and blanket clubs, just as
I object to the spectacle of a thorough-bred racehorse harnessed to a
dray. It is a waste of power. But the Good Earnest People never see
this side of things, because they are afflicted with narrowness of
vision. They admit no definition of doing good but their own. They
cannot see that the man who passes from a distinguished University
career to a distinguished public life may do more for the poor by his
pen, by his power of awakening sympathy, by the opportunity that may be
his to obtain the reversal of unjust laws or the establishment of good
laws, than he ever could have done by living in a slum as the friend
and helper of a small group of needy men and women. Decisive victories
are won more often by lateral movements than by frontal attacks. The
wave of force which travels on a circle may arrive with more thrilling
impact on a point of contact than that which travels on a horizontal
line. Society is best served after all by the fullest development of
our best faculties; and whether we check this development from pious or
selfish motives, the result is still the same; we have robbed society
of its profit by us, which is the worst kind of evil which we can
inflict on the community.
If this statement of social obligation is admitted as correct, most of
my friend's strictures on my conduct dissolve into mere harmless
rhetoric. For instance, he says I have 'marooned' myself, and goes on
to draw a fancy picture of a South Sea Islander, content with laziness
and sunshine, intimating that this is the kind of life which I have
chosen. On the contrary my life is what most city men would call a
hard life. I work hard every day, the only difference between my work
and theirs being that my work is natural, wholesome, and pleasant,
while theirs is drudgery. In what am I more selfish than the average
citizen, who after all is doing just what I am doing, viz. working for
his living? My friend would have me believe that the man who toils in
cities does so from exalted motives. He is bearing the weight of
empire, assisting in the growth of British commerce, and generally
serving the cause of national progress, while I sit in ignoble
independence on my own potato patch. I have known a good many men
engaged in the lower ranks of commerce, but I have yet to meet one who
is influenced in the least by these highly-coloured motives and ideals.
They are intent on earning their living, no more. Their interest in
commerce is precisely confined to what they can get out of it. They
bear just as little of the burden of the Empire as the tax-gatherer
will permit them. There is not one of them who would not object with
vigour to take a single shilling less per week for the sake of
progress, or any cause that might arrogate that title. Besides, it is
surely a piece of undiluted Cockney egoism to suppose that the only
persons who do their duty by the Empire are Londoners. We are still an
agricultural country, and there are some millions of people who live
upon the land. They do some kind of work, which one may suppose is of
some utility and value to the nation; why should their kind of work be
despised? They also pay taxes, give an equivalent of labour for their
keep, rear children, educate them, and send them out to be of some
service to the State; what does the dweller in cities do more than
these? If I were disposed to argue the question, I should contend that
the man who gets a bushel of corn or a sack of good potatoes out of the
land has added a more real asset to the wealth of the community, and
therefore deserves more praise from the commonwealth, than all the
tribe of stockbrokers since the world began; for these lords of wealth,
who reign supreme in cities, produce nothing. But since my friend is
fond of quoting Browning, I also will quote him, and let the poet say
in the flash of three lines what the dialectician would need a page to
say:
All service ranks the same with God,--
God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first,
Of course there is no disputing the general truth of the statement that
nations are developed by the call made upon their energies by
difficulty, and their power of response to that call. But why should
such a statement be construed into a reproach on my mode of life? If
my friend, who is probably sitting in a comfortable office at this
moment, adding up figures which he could do almost with his eyes shut,
would condescend to visit my potato patch, he would find call enough
upon his energy. I have almost broken my back, and certainly blistered
my hands, for the last four hours in hoeing my potato trenches into
good level lines, and I have still an hour's work at weeding to do
before I can satisfy myself that I have earned my dinner. I can assure
him that bread-fruit does not grow on my land, nor am I in danger of
being corrupted by a too easy means of subsistence. The worst crime
that can be alleged against me is that I have changed my occupation in
life, but I am very far from being unoccupied. The occupation which I
now follow is the most ancient and most honourable in the world; I
believe that Adam followed it. Is it not a curious irony upon
civilisation, that it has so filled the mind with artificial estimates
of work, that a form of work which is still practised by the great
majority of the world's inhabitants is scarcely regarded as work at all
by the insolent minority of mankind who happen to live in cities? But
I have long observed that there is a universal tendency in men only to
regard as work the peculiar sort of work which they themselves do; and
so the artisan supposes he is the only genuine 'working man,' and the
shopkeeper thinks the life of the professional man a piece of organised
idleness, and the tradition appears ineradicable that all the clergy,
from bishops downwards, never work at all because they do not sit in
offices. It is of a piece with the theory of 'doing good'; for all men
are bigots when they attempt to measure the universal life of men by
their own little egoistic standards.
As to that imposing axiom, that all our actions must be measured by
their collective effects, I heartily agree to it, because it is
precisely here that I think my case is strongest. I do not, of course,
invite all men to follow my example by returning to what my friend
calls 'barbarism,' and there is so little danger of any such
catastrophe that it is not worth while discussing it. But if any
considerable number of men should think my example good, I would not
deter them from following it, because I believe that no greater service
could be done to society than to multiply the number of individuals who
prefer a simple to an artificial existence, who are willing to live
lives of honest labour and entire contentment, who will care not at all
for riches, but will spend their utmost care upon their virtues, who
will count 'self-possession,' the best of all possessions, and the
power of living in God's world in cheerful happiness and modest
usefulness the real programme of life which God has set before all His
children, and which alone is worth our hope and struggle. The basis of
all good citizenship is physical and moral health. Health is really
wholeness, and so we get the word holiness, for all these words are
products of the same idea. What service to the race can be greater,
both in its present value and its ultimate effect, than to produce men
and women both physically and morally whole? It is no doubt a duty to
do all we can to help the unfit, and assist the infirm; but it is
better wisdom and a truer duty to produce the fit and the whole. In
the degree that I am better equipped as a man, I am better equipped as
a member of the commonwealth. All questions of _doing_ good are
secondary to the question of _being_ good; and to be good is but a
synonym of moral wholeness. If a nation can succeed in producing
efficient human creatures, efficient first of all in body, because that
is the basis of all efficiency of mind, and will, and energy, there
will be no question of efficient citizenship. As for me, I have found
the means of a more efficient manhood by a return to a simple and a
natural life; and therefore I am quite willing to submit my action to
the test of collective example, believing that the more widely it is
imitated, the better will it be for the happiness and well-being of my
nation, and of the world.
The best way of doing good that I can devise is to make myself an
efficient member of society; and it is obvious that if every man did
this there would be very little work for the professional
philanthropist. It is not help that men need most, but opportunity.
Philanthropy is, for the most part, engaged in patching up the sick
anaemic body of society; which is equivalent to minimising the distress
of ill-health without producing good health. The wise physician knows
very well that no amount of medicine will do much for the anaemic
child; what the child wants is room to grow. We have social physicians
in plenty, each with his own particular medicine, but all of them
together have said nothing half so wise as these two lines of Walt
Whitman:
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons;
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.
To create the best persons is to accomplish a service for society which
is durable, and therefore is the only real good. I claim that this is
what I have tried to do in my own case, and in no other way could I
discharge my obligation to society so well. Economically considered I
am now a profitable asset to society. I do a man's work every day, and
I earn my keep. When the time comes for my children to go out into
life they will take with them good thews and muscles, sound bodies, and
well-furnished minds. I imagine that this is about as good a
contribution to the cause of Progress, the service of Commerce, and the
maintenance of Empire, as any one man can make.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
After four years' experiment in Quest of the Simple Life I am in a
position to state certain conclusions, which are sufficiently
authoritative with me to suggest that they may have some weight with my
readers. These conclusions I will briefly recapitulate.
The chief discovery which I have made is that man may lead a perfectly
honourable, sufficing, and even joyous existence upon a very small
income. Money plays a part in human existence much less important than
we suppose. The best boon that money can bestow upon us is
independence. How much money do we need to secure independence? That
must depend on the nature of our wants. Becky Sharp thought that
virtue might be possible on 5000 pounds a year; and, apart from the
question of whether money has anything to do with virtue at all, it is
obvious that she put her figure absurdly high. Most of us put the
figure at which independence may be purchased too high. If our idea of
independence is the possession of an income that allows extravagance,
if life would be intolerable to us without the gratification of many
artificial wants, if our notion of a lodge in the wilderness is the
Cottage, with a double coach-house,
The pride that apes humility,
at which Coleridge sneered, then only a very few of us can ever hope
for our emancipation. The first step toward independence is the
limitation of our wants. We must be fed, clothed, and lodged in such a
way that a self-respecting life is possible to us; when we have
ascertained the figure at which this ideal can be realised, we have
ascertained the price of independence.
My experiment I regard as successful, but there are two features in it
which diminish its general application. One is that I took with me
into my solitude certain tastes and aptitudes, which I may claim
without the least egoism to be not altogether common. I had an intense
love of Nature, a delight in physical exertion, and a vital interest in
literature. I was thus provided with resources in myself. It would be
the height of folly for a person wholly destitute of these aptitudes to
venture upon such a life as mine. He would find the country
unutterably wearisome, its pursuits a detestable form of drudgery, and
the unoccupied hours of his life tedious beyond expression.
In reconsidering what I have written I perceive that unconsciously I
have chronicled only the pleasant episodes of my existence. There is
another picture that might be painted of mountains clothed in cloud,
roads deep in mire, work done under drenching rains, early darkness,
lack of neighbourship, isolation and monotony, a life separated by
continents of silence from all the eager movement of the world. There
are two pictures of the country, equally true; the country of Corot,
idyllic, lovely, full of soft light and graceful form; the country of
Millet, austere, harsh, bleak, impressive only by a certain gravity and
grand severity. We all imagine that we could live in, and we all
desire, the country of Corot. But could we live in the country of
Millet? I confess that I could not have done so without resources in
myself. It required a genuine pleasure in hard physical exercise to
get through the duties of the day, and a genuine interest in literature
to supply the place of those artificial forms of pleasure which relieve
the tedium of towns. I do not know what I should have done without
books in the long winter evenings. Nowhere is a 'city of the mind,'
into which one can retire, so necessary as in the country. There is
also needed an enduring and genuine delight in Nature and outdoor
occupations, which creates its own sunshine under dreary skies. The
mere sentiment of rusticity, created in the townsman's mind by pictures
and novels, soon dissolves before the realities of a genuine country
life. It is Millet, not Corot, who is the most frequent comrade of the
man who looks for months together on the same expanse of fields, and
moves upon the same unchanging round of labour. Therefore it is
necessary to insist that no error could be greater than for a man with
no real aptitude for a solitary life, and no resources of intellectual
pleasure in himself, to attempt such an experiment as mine. He would
weary of it in a month, and would flee, like a child afraid of the
darkness, back to gaslit streets again, with reviling on his lips and
bitter anger in his heart.
It must also be remembered that I did not go into the country with the
intention of deriving my livelihood from the soil. My sources of
income were separate from my mode of life; and although my income was
at the best very small, yet it was sufficient to secure me ease of
mind. I did indeed discover that the expenses of a simple life were
slight, and that these expenses might be kept low by a moderate degree
of industry in rural pursuits, but I never imagined that I could live
altogether by the soil. I may frankly confess that while I believe it
to be perfectly possible for a strong and handy man, accustomed to
agricultural pursuits, to earn a living from the soil, my example has
little to teach in this direction. The cry of 'Back to the Land' will
be meaningless until general ownership in the land is made possible.
It is the burden of rent, often a cruel and unjust rent, that has
driven men from the land. Not far from me at Thornthwaite there
resided a man and his wife who were among the most frugal and
industrious persons I have ever met, yet they found it absolutely
impossible to earn a living from the land simply because the conditions
of their tenure were unreasonable. For thirteen acres of land, with a
small farm-house and farm-buildings, they paid eighty pounds per annum,
with an additional charge of thirty shillings a year for the right of a
boat upon the lake. The most that they could do with this small
holding was to graze four cows, and in a good season they got nearly
enough hay to feed their cattle during the winter months; but with all
the pinching in the world they went steadily behind at the rate of
about forty pounds per annum. This is a concrete example of the
difficulties of the small farmer, and it is sufficient to show how vain
is the hope of any return to the land as long as rents are maintained
at their present level. Were it possible for an English government to
offer free grants of land as the Canadian government does, or even to
fix rents and provide for the purchase of land as is the case in
Ireland, multitudes of able-bodied men, wearied with the fierce
struggle for bread in cities, would avail themselves of the
opportunity; but under the present conditions of farm-tenure those who
know the country best, know that, except in a very few districts, it is
next to impossible to live by the land.
In these important respects, I admit that little can be deduced from my
example. All that I can pretend to teach is that any man possessed of
a small but secure income can live with ease and comfort in the
country, where he would be condemned to a bitter struggle in a city;
that a country life presents incomparable advantages of health and
happiness; that it is not dull or monotonous to the man who has a
genuine love of Nature, and some intellectual resources in himself; and
that what are called the privations of such a life are inconsiderable
compared with the real injuries endured by the man of small income, who
earns his difficult bread in the fierce struggle of a city or a
manufacturing town.
This leads me to a final question, viz. can nothing be done to
regenerate our cities? Is it quite impossible that the City of the
Future should be so contrived as to offer the best advantages of
corporate and communal existence without those intolerable
disadvantages which at present make the city a realm of 'dreadful
night' to the poor, the weak, and the sensitive?
I began by saying that I am not a hater of cities. I feel their
fascination, and four years of country life have not destroyed that
fascination. When I had occasion recently to return to London for a
week's visit, I was surprised to find with what eager joy I plunged
into the labyrinth of lighted streets, how the blood began to quicken
with the movement of the ceaseless crowd, how much of grandeur and
beauty assailed the eye in the wide perspective of domes and towers and
spires, how the very voice of London, sonorous and confused, like the
noise of a great battlefield, thrilled the spirit, and I felt again
that old and poignant charm of cities, that quickening of the
imagination which lies in mere multitude, that perpetual seduction of
the senses begotten by the revelation of so much effort and
magnificence. There was an indescribable vivacity in this moving
crowd, a contagious animation in the air; and, if truth be told, I
found the air fresher and the sky less grey than I had fancied, for a
south-west wind, soft as velvet and wet with sea-salt, blew through
street and square, and the sky was full of sunshine and of racing
clouds. I could not wonder at the love of cities; it seemed a passion
inherent in modern man, fed and brought to its maturity by centuries of
communal existence. And so the thought grew, that the temper of
enduring antagonism to cities was a temper more and more impossible to
modern man, who has long since left behind the realities of elemental
life, the rude simplicities of patriarchal modes of existence. The
City is with us, and it has come to stay. London grows vaster year by
year, and there is no sign of arrest in its prodigious life. Is it
then a dream quite impossible and vain, that cities may be so
administered as to develop the best life of men, and not to stint it?
I believe that it is possible, and, most of all, by the expansion of
the city area. There was a reason why men should be closely packed
together in mediaeval times, when cities had their defensive walls
against invaders, but those conditions have long since passed away.
Entire security of life makes for the dispersal of population, and in a
city like London, which has not been exposed to the perils of invasion
for more than two centuries, there is no reason why people should be
confined in narrow areas, From all that we can learn of the most
ancient cities of the world, such as Nineveh and Babylon, we know that
they covered enormous areas, although at no time were they secure from
the capricious tragedies of war. Nineveh appears to have been a group
of cities, united by a common government; cities of gardens and parks,
so that the country flowed into the streets; cities in which the great
temples, and palaces, and public buildings were not confined to any one
quarter, but were scattered through the entire area of the city, giving
an equal dignity to its every part. Let us apply the analogy to
London. Let us suppose a reconstructed London, devised upon the broad
principle of ample space and air according to population; of
congregated and contiguous cities under a common government; of public
buildings of utility and beauty equally distributed; and it is easy to
imagine a London that should combine all the charm of the country with
the advantages of the metropolis. The splendid streets, which are the
main arteries of traffic, would remain, but the squalid tenements and
alleys which are packed away behind them would disappear. A long chain
of parks and gardens would unite the West and East, taking the place of
a host of rotten rabbit-warrens, which are a disgrace to any civilised
community. There would be no quarter of the town relinquished to the
absolutely poor; Poplar would have its palaces of wealthy merchants as
well as Kensington, St. Albans on the north, Reigate on the south,
would mark the limits of the city, and all the intervening space would
be filled with thriving colonies of Londoners, living in well-built
houses with ample gardens. Manufactories would be distributed as well
as mansions. The various trades would not be huddled together in
narrow inconvenient corners of the metropolis; the factory, removed a
dozen miles from Charing Cross, would take its workers with it, and
become the nucleus of a new township. The artisan would thus work
within sight of his house, and that entire dislocation of home-life,
involved by present conditions of labour, would disappear. And each of
these townships would have its baths, libraries, and technical schools,
not dependent on local enterprise or generosity, but administered by a
central body, composed of men of wide views and experience, who should
deserve the great title of the City Fathers; and each would be saved
from the narrow spirit of suburbanism by the proud sense of its
corporate unity with London.
Such a London no doubt bears the aspect of a futile dream; yet it is
worth while pointing out that in a dim and feeble way this has been the
ideal after which London has been groping ever since the day when the
population first overflowed its normal boundaries. The mischief has
been that nothing has been done upon a grand scale and by organised
effort. A bit of open space has been bought for a park here and there,
while a much larger bit has passed into the builder's hands through
local indifference or apathy. New suburbs have arisen in a day, not
because any central power willed it, but simply by the combined greed,
energy, and enterprise of the speculative builder, who invariably
builds rotten houses, which he sells as fast as he can to guileless
people with a passion for owning house-property. The result has been
confusion, waste, and disappointment. The new township rises without
any adequate provision for roads or railway accommodation. It is
filled by a migratory population who do not realise these
inconveniences or ignore them, as long as the novelty of the thing
charms them; presently they move off again, a poorer population takes
their place, rents drop, and another suburb is left to a precarious
existence. I contend that this necessary expansion of the metropolis
should not be left to caprice; it should be designed upon broad lines
of development. The London County Council should buy up every acre of
land that comes into the market within a thirty-five mile radius of
Central London. It should be for the Council to decide whether such
land as they acquired should be retained for parks and gardens, or
utilised for building. It should be in their sole power to decide the
kind of buildings that should be erected, and to bind themselves to
erect buildings of public utility and convenience, such as libraries,
baths, and concert-halls in a settled proportion to the number of
dwelling-houses. At all costs the speculative builder should be
eliminated. He is the worst sort of parasite on the community. His
dishonesty is absolute, and the mischief which he works is little short
of crime. Since the County Council has established its right to build
houses, and has built them well, let it build all our houses, and give
to other classes beside the artisan the advantage of substantial
tenements. Let it borrow as many millions as it pleases; no one will
complain if its administration is efficient; and after all, we may as
well pay a fair rent to a central body, amenable to public opinion, as
to a private individual whose own gain is the chief matter involved, We
cannot do without the capitalist; but a Communal Capitalist is
infinitely preferable to a private capitalist. Municipal Socialism is
the watchword of the future; and instead of being jealous of the
existing powers of the County Council, I would increase those powers
tenfold; for without the widest kind of power, and even of despotic
power, invested in some central authority, the chaotic expansion of
London will go on to the enrichment of the few and the abiding injury
of the many.
One of the greatest difficulties in this expansion of the area is the
means of locomotion. It is at present in the power of a railway
company, which is after all only a private trading concern, to create
or ruin the prosperity of a suburb by the kind of provision which it
makes for it necessities. A good, rapid, cheap, and frequent service
of trains is a matter of the utmost importance to a suburb. But here
again, our method of expansion is left to chance and haphazard. The
speculative builder does not trouble himself about a train-service; he
knows by experience that he can attract a population to any given
locality, and he leaves the new residents to discover the
inconveniences of the locality for themselves. It might be supposed
that the railway company, in its own interest, would be quick to profit
by the new population on its line of route; sometimes it does so, but
in many instances it does not. One would suppose by the grudging way
in which extra trains are put on to meet the needs of an increased
population, that the railway company was a beneficent association,
granting favours, instead of a trading concern in search of new
business. The only real remedy for this kind of evil is that all the
means of locomotion within a twenty-five miles radius of Charing Cross
should be in the hands of one central authority. If a County Council
is capable of superintending a tramway system, it should also be
capable of superintending the suburban railway system for the public
good. And if it be thought much too vast an undertaking for the County
Council to become the proprietor of all the suburban lines, it should
at least be in the power of the Council to exercise effective control
over their working, and to compel the companies to make adequate
provision for the outlying populations.
But it is clear that if factories and businesses were removed into
suburban districts, carrying their armies of workers with them, a good
part of the difficulty of locomotion would soon settle itself. It is
the enormous daily flow of population toward the centre that chokes the
channels of locomotion, and the wisest method of checking this flow is
to make it unnecessary, by establishing manufacturing colonies, on the
pattern of Mr. Ellis Lever's and Mr. Cadbury's colonies at Port
Sunlight and Bourneville. There would still remain the difficulty of
locomotion in the central districts, but with proper enterprise,
organisation, and control, this difficulty is not insuperable. In a
few years we shall look back with wonder and pity to the days when the
infrequent 'bus, the slow and tedious horse-tram, and the exorbitant
cab were the means of locomotion in which a city of six million people
put its trust. The electric tram, clean, frequent, and rapid, will be
everywhere; the electric cab will run at a normal fare of threepence a
mile; perhaps also there will be electric overhead railways,
constructed upon a system which does not interfere with the perspective
of the main thoroughfares, for the overhead electric railway, whatever
may be its defects, is a means of locomotion vastly preferable to the
unventilated tubes on which we now pride ourselves. May we not also
hope that the general application of electric force will do much to
cleanse our atmosphere? With houses lit and warmed by electricity,
factories run by electric force, cooking done in electric ovens, the
vile smoke which darkens and destroys the city would disappear. The
skies of London would be as pure as the sky of the Orkneys, and a
hundred trees and plants, which now perish at the first touch of the
fog-fiend, would grow in our city parks and gardens as freely as they
grow in Epping Forest. With a fleet of electric boats upon the Thames,
running at one minute intervals, the Thames would once more become the
river of pleasure, and a highway of popular traffic. There is no
reason why these things should not be. All that is needed is that
London, through its chosen representatives, should assume the full
control of its own life; working out the scheme of its improvement by
deliberate methods and upon a settled plan; compelling the obedience of
all its citizens to a central authority, and intrusting to that
authority the complete management of its affairs, not as a means of
personal profit, but for the profit and the welfare of the whole
community.
In the meantime much may be done by personal enterprise. Is there any
real reason why groups of persons, whose employment is in the city, but
whose hearts are in the country, should not found small colonies for
themselves on the outskirts of London? Let a thousand householders
combine themselves into a company; let them choose their own site,
build their own houses; let them erect their own Church--one Church
upon the broad basis of charity instead of dogma would suffice--elect
their own managing committee, and set themselves to the creation of a
true community. Let them possess their own electric plant for heating
and lighting; let every house share the common convenience; and since
domestic labour forms one of the chief difficulties to-day, let common
dining-halls be erected for every hundred persons, where good and cheap
meals could be provided, or from which such meals could be supplied to
private houses, at the bare cost of their production. Let it be the
aim of these communities to collect persons of not one trade or
profession only, but persons of varied occupations to compose their
citizenship, so that as many forms of human energy as might be possible
should be represented, each contributing its own element to the common
life. Let all the trades permitted in the little township be conducted
on co-operative principles, and not for private gain. Let due
provision be made for efficient education, for the cultivation of the
arts, and for the proper means of pleasure. Would not such a
combination of men and women represent the best ideal of a human
community? And can we not see that in the mere economy of means and
money the gain by such a system would be immense? Suppose the
capitalised value of such a township, including the purchase of land,
the erection of houses, draining, lighting, and so forth, were put at a
million and a quarter sterling, which is a generous estimate, this
would impose upon the individual house-holders no more than 40 pounds
per annum, calculated at 4 per cent.; and besides this he would share
in the great economy of co-operative trading. If this estimate be
rejected as inadequate, it is easy to compute the cost by adding a
burden of 10 pounds per annum to each house-holder for each quarter of
a million expended; but even if the total charge reached 50 pounds or
60 pounds per annum for each householder, he would gain immensely in
what he could get for his expenditure, compared with what he could get
for the same money in crowded London. Such a scheme is simply the
application of the principle of co-operation to communal life. It is
not chimerical; if it seem so, it is simply because we are so
ill-trained in morals that we are unwilling to act together in
practical brotherhood. It is not impracticable; it might be achieved
to-morrow if we were in earnest over it. There are hundreds of
thoughtful men who have perceived its attractions, outlined its system,
vaguely desired its benefits; are there not a thousand bold adventurers
in London willing to bring their vague ideal to the test, and to make a
practical experiment which, once successful, would alter the whole
science of living, and go far to solve some of the most difficult
problems of our time?
It is for such a movement that I wait. Free and glad as my life among
the mountains has been, yet I am sensible that I am deprived of many
elements of human intercourse, which are efficacious in the growth of
thought and the widening of the mind. I count my deprivation light
compared with the higher gains that are mine in the composure of my
mind, the joy of animal vitality, the tranquil days that leave no
bitterness and bring no discord, each joined to each in 'natural
piety,' each inwoven into the calm rhythm of fulfilled desire and duty.
But my pleasure is too little shared to be entirely satisfactory. I
see that there are terms on which my happiness might be communicated;
that there is a mode of life that should combine all the delight of
human intercourse with the tranquillity of natural existence; that the
choice does not lie, and ought not to lie, between the city and the
desert; that it is only by the folly of man, only by his greed, and
haste, and carelessness, and contempt for the communal principle, that
such a choice is forced upon me. The Regenerated City will come in
time, too late perhaps for me to enjoy it; but the City Colony or
Commune may come at any time; and when it comes I will gladly be its
conscript, I will earnestly labour for its welfare, I will humbly seek
to promote its success, believing that in the degree that society
exchanges individualism for co-operation, personal gain for common
good, man will enter on the widening evolution of a real progress, and
find the path that leads him to a truly Golden Age.
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