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The Quest of the Simple Life

by W. J. Dawson · English · Gutenberg #17246 · 291,607 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Quest of the Simple Life

Author: W. J. Dawson


        
Release date: December 6, 2005 [eBook #17246]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17246

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** 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 

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