§ 68
But is it not a selfish pleasure, this that is to be gained by rural peregrination, I shall be asked. Bluntly I answer, No. A country walk makes one blithesome; and than blithesomeness there is no greater foe to selfishness. Had Bacon not declared that gardening was the purest of human pleasures, I should be inclined to give the palm to walking.
We are too gregarious. We live too much in herds, and we consider too much what the herd will think of our petty individual ways. Civilisation is not an unmixed boon, and artificial combinations of men taint the natural simplicity of the race. In combining together for mutual protection against a common foe we forget that sometimes a man's foes are those of his own household. Each feels that the eyes of the world are upon him, and always he is subconsciously occupied in conforming himself to the world. A political community not only curtails the individual's freedom of action for the good of the whole, it curtails also his freedom of thought and manner. What is the result? The result is that "self-consciousness" has taken on a new and sinister meaning. Instead of denoting the especial and distinguishing characteristic of emancipated reason, self-consciousness has come to denote a painful cognisance of the fetters that our fellow-reasoners have put upon reason. We are the slaves of ourselves. Only the child and the savage are free to "live deliberately," to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." Long before the child has developed into the grown, and the savage into the civilised, man, that silent and unseen but tireless architect, Convention, builds about him an invisible but infrangible wall of reserve: his spontaneous emotions, his natural affections, his aspirations and ambitions, must filter through crevices and peepholes instead of exhaling from him as a rich and original aura.
Already the taint is perceptible in our literature. The centripetal tendency is not a purely economic one. Commerce and industry draw the crowds to the cities, and immediately there arises a set of writers who write only of the city. How large a proportion of our fiction portrays only the wretched drawing-room intrigue, the wretched rivalries of wretched citizens. The Epic was buried three hundred years ago. The Ode is dead. The Lyric is dying. Now we have the Novel and the Problem Play, the sensational Newspaper and the Picture Magazine. In time, I suppose, we shall come to the Snapshot and the Paperette. Already we are almost there.—Was it for this that the mighty Areopagitical pleader for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing strove?
I wish that whole populations of crowded cities could be turned out hebdomadally to take long week-end walks in the country, there to mew its mighty youth and kindle its undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; there to slough off the skin of daily toil, cleanse itself from the dross of money-getting, and learn that there is something in life more worth living for than the weekly wage, and other joys than those of panem et circenses.—But this is a wild dream. As well try to rehabilitate the Bacchic dance and Chian wine in place of Football and beer or Baseball and peanuts.—Yet methinks I have heard of wilder. What did Jean-Jacques and his school really mean by "back to nature"?
To me, I confess, this polipetal or city-seeking tendency in modern life (if I may so call it) wears a most serious, a most sinister aspect. So, I am inclined to think, it did to Ruskin. "I had once purposed," wrote John Ruskin half-a-century ago, "to show what kind of evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend about, political or social, and might care to follow it out with me earnestly. The day will assuredly come when men will see that it is a grave question."[59]
If we read history aright, always the bloated city succumbs to the pagan horde. It is in the crowded city that all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,[60] have most free play. And it is in the city, where division of labour is daily carried to greater extremes, that men's activities as a whole have least free play. The result is twofold: the nobler emotions are stunted; the baser passions are stimulated. Socialism (whatever the precise prescription so labelled may be) is no remedy for this. Perhaps Rousseau reasoned better than he knew.
In a sense, however—thanks to whatever gods may be!—as a matter of fact there is quietly going on a constant recurrence to Nature. The United States of America, Canada, Australia, South Africa—what but wholesale emigration from over-populous or over-pragmatical centres is the source and origin of these? Colonisation is the protest against the social, political, economical, or religious constrictions of the crowd.—It is precisely these constrictions, my practical quærist, that I am tempting thee now and again to flee. De te fabula narratur.