CONTENTS
| I. | The Magical Chance | [1] |
| II. | The Radium of Romance | [39] |
| III. | The Hunt for “Copy” | [69] |
| IV. | The Duty to Dig | [103] |
| V. | The Man and the Book | [131] |
| VI. | A January Summer | [153] |
| VII. | After the Loggers | [173] |
| VIII. | Woodchuck Lodge and Literature | [203] |
THE MAGICAL CHANCE
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CHAPTER I
THE MAGICAL CHANCE
THE MAGICAL CHANCE
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CHAPTER I
THE MAGICAL CHANCE
“What are you going to say to the college girls?” my pretty niece asked, as we motored down the valley. She was being graduated this spring, and the snowy dogwoods and the purple Judas-trees against the tender hillsides were not so fresh, nor half so full of bloom, as she. But they were gayer far than she.
“Don’t tell them, uncle, how wonderful they are! How the world waits for them! Don’t say it, uncle! I have heard that sort of talk for these four years, and here I am with nobody waiting for me; not fitted for anything; nothing to do; and as wonderful—as thirty cents!”
Poor thing!
A few days before, I had seen an interview with the President of Yale, in which the young writer said he had read in a book that all the great devices had been invented; all the new lands explored; all the great deeds done—all the adventure and romance forever gone from life, and that only bread and butter remain with the odds against a young man’s getting much of the butter.
Poor thing!
Have I been living fifty years—in America? or fifty cycles in Cathay? I cannot still be young at fifty! nor can I be so old either as modern two-and-twenty! Youth is a dry tree, these days; a sad state—particularly youth bent with the burden of an A.B. degree. Out of my fifty-odd years of existence I have taught college youth for three-and-twenty, and never in all that time have they looked like plain bread and butter to me. If they are not adventure and romance, not better stories, sweeter songs, mightier deeds than any yet recorded, then I am no judge of story matter and the stuff of epic song.
But my pretty niece declares that she also knows a shoat when she sees one; and she knows it is just pork. As for the college man of the interview: he was not speaking by the book; out, rather, of the depths of his heart.
It is an evil thing to be born young into an old world!
For the world seems very old. Its face is covered with doubt, its heart is only ashes of burned-out fires. The River of Life which John saw has dwindled into Spoon River; and his Book of Life is now a novel, piddling and prurient. But John also saw the Scarlet Woman—and that was long ago! The world was ever much the same; ever in need of an Apocalypse; and never more in need than now. My pretty niece, and the young man of the interview, are the world, and the college world at that, the more’s the pity. They are its skepticism, its materialism, its conventionalism, its fear and failure. They seem afraid to bid on life, for fear it might be knocked off to them at something above par! They do not dare. They won’t take a chance. They would, of course, if there were chances; they would dare, if only one giant were still left stalking through the land. The giants are gone!
The orator was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Richard Henry Dana, the author of “Two Years Before the Mast”:
Life offered him a magical human chance and he took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional life of Boston allowed no place in its scheme. “Two Years Before the Mast” belongs to the Literature of Escape.
Life offered him a magical chance—as if he were a special case! So he was. So is every boy. Who was this boy? and what were the circumstances under which Life offered him this magical chance? He was a Bostonian to begin with, and that is bad enough; he was a Harvard undergraduate also, which still further complicates the situation; and, besides, he was a Dana! Here was a complex which should have staggered Life. Who could escape from all of this? Leave that to Life. Up she comes boldly, just as if she expected the boy to take her offer. And he did take it. He fell ill with some affliction of the eyes; and, going down to the Boston wharfs, shipped as a common sailor before the mast in the little brig Pilgrim for a two years’ trip around the Horn. And out of that escape from Boston and Harvard and the Danas, he brought back one of the three greatest sea stories in literature—a book that all of Boston and Harvard and the Danas combined could never have written except for this escape.
The question is: Does Life come along to-day, as then, and offer us, as it offered Dana, such a magical chance? Is there any escape for us?
We are not all Danas, and so we are certainly not worse off than he was; but our circumstances are distinctly different, and rather disquieting. This chance was given Dana far back in 1834, nearly one hundred years ago, when escape was possible, and when Dana was a boy. It was a young world a hundred years ago, and full of adventure. One could escape then because there was some place to escape into; but to round the Horn to-day is to land, not on wild Point Loma, but at San Diego, with the single exception of Monte Carlo, the most decorous and conventional city on the planet.
Perhaps my niece and the college boy of the interview are right.
About the time that Dana was escaping from Boston, a young man by the name of Henry David Thoreau tried to escape from Concord, of the same State. He had no deep-sea wharf, no brig like the Pilgrim, but, as one must seize such things as are at hand in an escape, Thoreau took a rowboat and the near-by river and started off. He rowed and rowed for a week, and came to Concord, New Hampshire. Here he took to his diary and wrote that there were no frontiers this way any longer. “This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea.”
Born in 1817, more than a hundred years ago, and still born fatally late! How late, then, was I born? and you, my son? and you, my pretty niece?
“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
but you and I have missed the early glory that hath passed forever from the morning earth,” she makes reply.
But I would say to her: It was ten years later, ten whole years after Thoreau’s tame adventure on the Merrimac, that gold was discovered in California. Here was a magical chance as late as the year ’Forty-Nine, and Life offered it to a young man of Providence and Brooklyn by the name of Bret Harte. He took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional round of these cities allowed no place in their scheme. He went into the gold-fields and brought out “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” another piece of the Literature of Escape. Then my students answer: “Yes, but there are no more outcasts in Poker Flat, and whom are we to write about?”
Alas, ’tis true, they’re in their graves, that gentle race of gamblers. With the wind-flower and the violet they perished long ago, as literary material. Eighteen-Forty-Nine will be having its hundredth anniversary soon. But, some fifty years later, gold was struck again—this time on the Yukon. Here was another magical chance. And there was a young fellow walking the streets of Boston along with me, literally begging bread with me from editorial door to editorial door, by the name of Jack London. Life came up to us and offered us this magical chance, and Jack took it, bringing out of the Yukon a story called “Building a Fire” which is surely a part of the immortal Literature of Escape.
“Well, what would he write about now?” they ask. “What has happened since?”
“Peary has found the North Pole,” I reply.
“Yes, and Amundsen, or somebody, has found the South Pole!” they cry. “And what’s the use of living in a world of only two poles, and some one finding both of them before we come along!”
There is something in that. It is a bad sort of world that has only two poles. It should be stuck full of poles, one for each of us. But there are only two, and a flag flies from each of them; as a flag flies over every terrestrial spot in between them: over Mount McKinley now; over the River of Doubt now, so that we are stopped from singing, as once we sang,—
“There’s one more river,
There’s one more river to cross.”
There is no more river to cross. Theodore Roosevelt crossed it. There is nothing to cross; no place to go where, on the surface of things, men have not been there before us. Yes, yes, there is Mount Everest. No one has yet stood on that peak; but there is an expedition climbing it, camping to-day at about twenty-five thousand feet up, with only two or three thousand feet more to go. And here we are in Hingham!
It looks bad. My young niece is possibly right, after all. East, west, north, south, where is a frontier? Where shall I go from here and find an escape?
Not overland any longer, for even Thoreau could find no frontier this way; and not by sea now, for here comes John Masefield, poet and sailor, saying the frontier has disappeared from off the sea; that the clipper ship, the ship of dreams, has foundered and gone down; that you can haunt the wharves these piping times of steam,
“Yet never see those proud ones swaying home,
With mainyards backed and bows acream with foam.
· · · · · · · ·
As once, long since, when all the docks were filled
With that sea beauty man has ceased to build.”
Listen, now, for this is the message of the poem:
“They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such ships again,—”
which makes me thank Heaven for my farm, where the same old romantic hoe remains about what it ever was—the first recorded wedding present.
Mr. Masefield’s observations are dated 1912. Prior to that year real clipper ships rode the deep, and real romance. It was prior to 1839 that there were real frontiers and romance in the land, and a last house (a government lighthouse) still to be set up in the suburbs of Astoria City. Going a little farther back, we find that prior to 1491 (B.C.), about the year 4000 according to the margin of the King James Version, there were giants in the earth, and the stories in the Book of Genesis show that there were romances as well as giants in those days. But, like Thoreau and Masefield, Moses was born fatally late. I feel sorry for Moses and my niece.
Let us pause here for a sad brief moment in order to see just where Moses was when Life sought him out and proffered him a magical chance in the shape of a trip to Egypt. Where was Moses? and what was he doing? To begin with, he was keeping goats, a fairly common occupation in those days, though rather a rare job now. But that was not all: Moses was keeping these goats for Jethro, his father-in-law. Now you begin to get some inkling as to where Moses was. But this is not the worst of it: for Moses was keeping the goats for his father-in-law on “the back side of the desert.” One would certainly say that the front side of any desert would be far enough away, and sterile enough of romance, if one had to keep one’s father-in-law’s goats there; but to keep the goats of your father-in-law on the back side of a desert is to be farther off than Hingham, or any place I know. And here was Moses when Life came upon him offering him an escape into Egypt.
He was born fatally late, Moses was, just like Thoreau and my niece. He might have been one of my own college men, so like a college man’s was his answer!
“No, no!” he complained, “I don’t want to go down to Egypt. There is nothing doing down in Egypt. I’m slow of speech; without imagination; and it’s a hard job, anyway. Let me stay here and be goatherd to Jethro, my father-in-law, and dream of the good old days of the giants, when men began to multiply upon the face of the earth, when the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair. Ah!—there was something doing in those days!”
From Moses to Masefield the times have been fatally late. And so mine are, with the clipper ships, the frontiers, the giants, and the daughters of men that are fair, all gone! But I seem to see them fair. I suppose I ought not, having been born so fatally late. And I wonder if I might not find a giant, too, if I should hunt? and a clipper ship? and a frontier? and even an escape from Hingham!
Lumber is still brought in boats to one of Hingham’s old wharves, but the rest of her wharves are deserted. Her citizens, who used to do business in great waters, stop now in Hingham Harbor to catch smelts. Change and some decay one can see all about Hingham, but little chance of escape.
Down at the foot of Mullein Hill, on which my house stands, there runs a long, long trail awinding into that land of my dreams; but I ask: Where does it cross the frontier? I have traveled it, going south, in my Ford (if you are out for frontiers, take a Ford. We have a saying here in Hingham that a Ford will take a man anywhere—except into good society!)—I say I have gone south over this road which runs at the foot of Mullein Hill as far as Philadelphia, and no frontier!—the next stop was Chester. I have gone east over the same road until I came to within ten miles of Skowhegan, Maine, where I ran into a steam-roller on the road. When you meet a steam-roller on a road in Maine, you are very near the frontier. If there is any adventure for you on the trip, it will be on the détour around that steam-roller. But under the roller ran the road and on into Skowhegan, and on out of Skowhegan into Aroostook County, the richest county in the United States, where they raise “spuds” enough to feed, not only Boston, but the rest of dear old Ireland with her; and all the way from Hingham to Aroostook, except at the steam-roller, there was no chance to get off.
And this road, taking a turn among these glorious potato-fields of Maine, starts over the mountains of New Hampshire, crosses the corn and cattle belt in the central portion of the country, and, running on and on, dips into the Imperial Valley in far-off California, the hottest cultivated spot on earth. And all the way from Hingham, roundabout by Maine, to the Imperial Valley, you may not stop, unless you run out of “gas.” And the oil companies do not intend this magical chance to attend you, for they have planted gasoline tanks under every second telegraph pole all the way.
This road, starting from Mullein Hill, Hingham, and running to Aroostook, Maine, and to the Imperial Valley in California, takes a new turn among the melon-fields there, works its way back along the Gulf States, binding their ragged edge like a selvage, and, bending into Florida, threads its way among the Everglades and out, heading off across the cotton-fields, on across the corn and cattle belt again, climbs Pike’s Peak and down, climbs Mount Hood and down, and, faring on into the State of Washington, climbs the fruited slopes of old Tacoma, “The Mountain that was God.” And all the way from Hingham some one has been there before us, and laid an oiled road for us, and left us no frontier.
Surely we are born late; and my pretty niece fatally late. The frontier is gone. The buffaloes are gone. I saw their ancient trails out of the car windows as my train roared over the Canadian prairie, wavering parallel paths in the virgin sod, a vivider green than the rest of the grass, narrow meandering lines vanishing short of the far-off horizon where hung a cloud not larger than a man’s hand, like the dust of the last disappearing herd.
“Hank” Monk is gone. This king of overland stage-drivers sleeps in Carson City; and beside sleeps his Concord coach of split hickory. Concord has ceased to make such coaches.
They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such coaches again.
From Hell Gate now to Golden Gate there are only miles, and any machine makes a mere holiday of the trip.
A young acquaintance of mine has just made the coast-to-coast run, driving her own car. She said to me on arriving here that “it was an awful monotonous journey.” Didn’t anything happen? I asked with considerable surprise. No, nothing happened. Didn’t she see anything of interest? Wasn’t there any excitement? Didn’t she have any adventures? No, she didn’t see anything; she didn’t get a bit of excitement out of it; there wasn’t any adventure; just one blinkety-blank mile after another!
“Incredible!” I cried.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes brightening, something like a thrill in her voice, “I did have three punctures!”
All the way from Golden Gate to Hell Gate with three punctures to break the cushioned tenor of her way. This is what life has come to.
Then she said: “There were two things on the trip that did greatly interest me. But I don’t exactly know why; and I am afraid to tell you about them for fear you will think me such a big fool.”
“No,” I answered, “I won’t think you any bigger fool than I do now, so what were the two interesting things?”
“Well,” she began (and I wish the reader would note the strictly American touch in this description), “one of them was Luther Burbank’s spineless cactus.” (Notice, I say, the spineless quality of this cactus.)
The girl read my face and exclaimed, much hurt: “There! I knew you would poke fun at me.”
“But tell what the other thing was,” I begged. “Let’s get the sordid story over as fast as we can.”
“I don’t know even yet what it all meant,” she went on, “but, as I was crossing the Arizona desert, I saw a long petition being circulated by the native Arizonians, praying the National Congress to preserve for them and for posterity a portion of their original desert.”
My poor niece! Moses saw the giants pass away; Thoreau saw the frontier pass away; Masefield sees the clipper ship pass away; but it remains for my niece and her day to see the Great American Desert wiped out by the irrigation ditch, and the gila monster with the desert, and the need of a shovel on the trip across the sands! Have we eaten the cassaba melon and gone mad? Is it all of life to make the desert blossom as the rose? To bring forth cassaba melons, and alligator pears, and spineless cacti for cow feed?
Ploughing the desert; turning the giant cactus into ensilage, as if to live were a silo—for fear of this the native Arizonians are asking Congress that a portion of their original desert and of Life’s adventure and romance be saved to them and to their children.
It is sad. But this is not the worst of it: for they have laid an oiled road across that desert, as if it were the whole of life to get through to San Diego on time.
There is no hope for a man who gets through to San Diego on time. He will strike Los Angeles on time, come to San Francisco on time. Portland on time, Winnipeg, Chicago, Boston, and Hingham on time; where he will die on time, be buried on time, rise on time, and keep going on time, with never a chance to get off. But where is the adventure in that? It is not the whole of life to get through to San Diego on time. I had rather leave my bones to bleach beneath a bush than travel on and on by schedule, always making life’s connections, and so missing always life’s magical chances. Don’t you remember your Mother Goose, wise old dear?
“A dillar a dollar,
A ten-o’clock scholar,
Why have you come so soon?
You used to come at ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon.”
And he was the only little duffer in the whole school to get a poem written to him. The other children came on time and passed into oblivion; this boy (he certainly was a boy) came late and has become immortal.
The desert is doomed, no doubt, but we shall always have détours; and if “on the surface of things men have been there before us,” we must go beneath. There are giants still in these days; the daughters of men are still fair; there are frontiers for those who will find them; and, clipper ships or no, I believe in the everlasting adventure of rounding the Horn. I believe in magical chances of escape, born though I was after my parents, which might have been fatally late had I not happily come before my children, each of whom is an adventure and an escape. Wherever I turn, I see a chance to sidestep the decorous, the conventional, the scheduled, to dodge into the bushes and escape. Every day is an adventure.
There are magical human chances to go round; there is adventure and escape for everybody who will seize it. Youth is as young, the world as round, the earth as wild as ever. And, in spite of all those who have grown old, it is still appareled in celestial light—sunlight, starlight, moonlight—or else wrapped in ancient and adventurous dark. The sun still knoweth his going down, thank Heaven! There are some things that do not change nor pass away.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.
Then look out for your men-folks. For this is the end of the decorous and conventional. This is the time wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
We are what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. We have changed the spots of a few leopards, the skins of a few Ethiopians, and shifted the frontier from the dark wild heart of the forest to the wild dark heart of the city; but we have not changed the darkness, or the wildness, or the Ethiopian, or the leopard.
I have seen the evening come over the city, a night deep with darkness and wild with a great storm blowing salty from the sea. I have watched the streets grow empty till the shadow feet of Midnight echoed as they passed, and all the doors were shut. Then I have crept down along the dark wet ways, bleak and steep-cut as cliffs, where I have heard the beating of great wings above the roofs, the call of wild shrill voices along the craggy covings, and the wash and splash of driving rains aslant the walls; I have tasted brine, spume, and spindrift on the level winds, flying through a city’s streets from far at sea—“one-way” streets by day, and so clogged that traffic could barely move in that one way—but here—in the hushed tumult of the storm and night—I could hear the stones crying out of their walls, and the beams out of the timbers answering them; the very cobbles of the pavement having tongues that would speak when the din of the pounding hoofs was past.
Some one complained to Browning that Italy is the only land of romance now left to us. The poet answered promptly, “I should like to include dear old Camberwell.” And I should like to include dear old Haleyville and dear old Hingham. And you would like to include dear old Wig Lane, if you were born there.
But I started out from Hingham, pages back, to find the frontier. Have I found it yet? So Abraham started out from Ur of the Chaldees to find a frontier, which he called a “City without Foundations,” and did he find it? Whether he did or not, he certainly had a plenty of adventure by the way. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born. There is something thrilling about that. Yet, narrow as that chance was, it is nothing when compared with what happened to him next. For, when Abraham was one hundred and forty years old, he married Keturah. Here was a man who would not be put down by a little circumstance like one hundred and forty years. Life comes along at one hundred and forty and offers Abraham Keturah, and he takes her!
I say he may not have found his city. We know that he did find Keturah—which is vastly more of an adventure. We may not have the pleasure of erecting the last house in the suburbs of Astoria City, as Thoreau says; but we might have the wilder adventure of living in it. And as it happens to be a government lighthouse out on Tongue Point, at the mouth of the Columbia; and as it happens to be where the night and the rain and the fog are thickest on the face of the globe, life in that last house is a constant frontier.
One might never leave Ur were he not seeking a city. And one must never find his city else he might cease his seeking. I do not know how old Abraham was when he set out from Ur of the Chaldees. I left Haleyville at the age of eight. I have only lately come to Hingham, having got in on the wrong side of the railroad track some twenty years ago. (If one is really to arrive in Hingham, one must come in with one’s ancestors, and more than twenty years before.) I say, I was eight when I left Haleyville; that I have hardly yet arrived in Hingham; but all the way from Haleyville to Hingham, and all the way from Hingham to—Heaven, dare I say?—there has been, and there shall be, held out, in both of Life’s hands to me, the magical chance of escape.
Did I start out from Hingham to find the frontier? That was wrong. I will start back for Hingham. Hingham is the frontier. So was Haleyville. So will Heaven be. Life with the earth goes round, not forward, except to complete a circuit established when the stars were fixed, an orbit that all the forces of Heaven and human intelligence have been unable to warp. The only variation or shadow of new turning Earth herself can look forward to is from collision with some mad comet, which, if she lasts long enough, may happen possibly within fifteen million years—a square head-on smash it may be, or only a side-swipe with a severe shaking up—and then fifteen million years more of steady turning. Things outside are rather hard and fast despite appearances, and we who are parts of this even scheme, we find that our uprisings and downsittings have never varied much from rule, nor are liable to.
We are, I repeat, what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. So is life what it always was for adventures and frontiers.
The wild frontier, like the hunted fox, has doubled on its trail, that is all. Romance has slipped out of the woods into the deeper places of the city; Adventure has turned commuter; and here are the three to companion life, as they ever have—the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to a bebundled D’Artagnan. And already it is more than “Twenty Years Since.”
Twenty years, or a hundred years—
“The year’s at the spring.”
If you do not find your fill of adventure with Davy Balfour in Appin, come down with him to Dean—to Edinburgh, and you shall see the face of such danger “in the midst of what they call the safety of a town” as may shake you, too, “beyond experience.”
If you don’t find the frontier in the daylight, wait for the dark. Every night is a fresh frontier. There are no landmarks of the day but are blotted out by the dark as the lines are sponged in the wake of a steamer’s keel. On the shortest night of this year wild rabbits were in my garden, fox-hounds were baying beyond the quarries, and through the thin early mist of the dawn we were all at the window watching a wild doe behind the barn. She nipped the clover nervously, twitched her tail, pricked her ears (for the day was approaching), and took the high wire fence at a bound. She was as wild and free as the wind.
A few Sunday nights ago I was at church when the minister announced a series of evening sermons for young people, and, to my utter astonishment, his first talk was to be “Against Sowing Wild Oats.” I was greatly tempted to ask him if he intended to prevent his young people from doing any more farming. If they couldn’t sow wild oats, what kind of oats could they sow? Did he ever see any tame oats? Those preachers imagine a vain thing who think we ever cease to sow wild oats (at least, there is many a late crop, as Thackeray says). The truth is there are no oats but wild ones.
I do not know what seed catalogue you order your garden seeds out of; I get mine out of one marked “Honest Seeds”; it is assuring to have an order-book of this sort plainly stamped “honest” on the cover. In this honest-seed catalogue for the current year the seedsman, on page 56, is describing his oats. Let the preacher on wild oats note with critical care the terms of this description. There is something theological, at least, revivalistic, about them. It is the only oat described in the catalogue; and it would be the only oat to plant in all the world, if it were, as it is described, a “Regenerated Select Swedish Oat.” A “regenerated” (that is Methodist) “select” (that is Presbyterian) oat! But read on through this catalogue, and you will find that every seed and tuber from artichoke to zinnia has been to a revival since last summer and hit the “sawdust trail.” Great revivalists are the seedsmen! Their work, however, is not permanent. For they know, and we all know, that every regenerated select Swedish oat in their bins is a backslider at heart, as wild as the wild ass of the wilderness that scorneth the crying of the driver.
It is true of the seed and true of the soil in which it grows. This spring I brought in from the garden a frozen lump of earth which I had been subduing, after the fashion of Scripture, with my hoe, these twenty years. Nay, that lump of earth had been in process of being subdued for nigh two hundred years, here on this ancient Hingham farm. It was a bit of regenerated, select soil, which I had sweetened with lime, had nourished with nitrogen and potash, and had planted with nothing but regenerated, select seeds out of this honest catalogue. I put this lump of soil in a pot by a south window and tenderly planted more regenerated, select seeds within its breast—tomato seeds, Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best. Then I looked that it should bring forth tomato plants, and it brought forth within the pot, at the end of two weeks, pig-weed, horse-weed, chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed, rag-weed, knot-weed, tumble-weed, milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed, poke-weed; goose-grass, crab-grass, witch-grass, wire-grass, spear-grass; burdock, sourdock, and pusley; to say nothing of the swarm of things from Europe, whose infant cotyledons looked innocent enough, but whose roots were altogether evil.
Life offered that lump of mother earth its magical chance and the lump took it. The innate badness of it, this cared-for, chemically pure, subdued piece of garden soil! Its frozen heart a very furnace of smouldering fires; its breast, that suckled the nursing salsify in the summer, a bed of such wild spores as would sow a world to weeds! Given tomato seeds, regenerated, select tomato seeds, Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best, the lump of earth brings forth its own original pig-weed, horse-weed, chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed, rag-weed, knot-weed, tumble-weed, milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed, poke-weed; goose-grass, crab-grass, witch-grass, wire-grass, spear-grass; burdock, sourdock, and pusley. That is what it brought forth a million years ago. A million years from now, subdued and sweetened and nourished, and planted with regenerated, select tomato seed, Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best, and put in a pot in the sunshine of the south window, that lump of earth will bring forth pig-weed, horse-weed, chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed, rag-weed, knot-weed, tumble-weed, milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed, poke-weed, goose-grass, crab-grass, witch-grass, wire-grass, spear-grass; burdock, sourdock, and pusley.
“The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;”
—vanish, but not change. The heart of man is not less constant than a clod of earth.
“Lord, we are vile, conceived in sin,
And born unholy and unclean;
Sprung from the man, whose guilty fall
Corrupts his race and taints us all,”
—sings Watts with Augustine, with gusto and with more unction and consolation to me than in any other of his hymns. To know that we still inherit a portion of the original Adam, if only the naughty of him, is tremendously heartening. Anything original, if only original sin, in this day of the decorous and the conventional, is stimulating. For, if we do still come by all of Adam’s original badness, do we not, by the same token, come by all of his original goodness, and are we not then wholly original, as the original Adam? We must be; as surely as the clod is; full, like the clod of wild weed-seed, and capable, like the clod, under the proper care, of producing tomato plants: Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best, regenerate and select.
I say the heart of a man is of the same steady stuff as the other clay. What it was, it is, and will be—wild, and ever seeking an escape from the decorous, the conventional, the routine of his subdued and ordered round.
How constant the heart of nature is to itself I saw again the other day at Walden Pond. Almost half a century before I came to this planet, Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond: “But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.” Those many years have long since come and gone. Thoreau is gone; his cabin is gone; and a cairn of stones marks the spot where it stood. Over the stumps he saw, tall stranger trees now stand; and once more there is rambling through their shadowy aisles, and vistas through which you catch glimpses of the beloved face of Walden, calm and pure as when he last looked upon it.
“Why, here is Walden!” I hear him exclaim, “the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lusty as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface as was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, aye”—and it has now been set aside as a reservation that its liquid joy and happiness may be ours forever.
Change is constant, but it is the change of the ever-returning wheel. Thoreau’s cabin is gone, and no other cabin can now be built on the shores of Walden Pond. But the trees have come back to stay, and if, “on the surface of things” Thoreau “has been there before us,” we must go below or above the surface and find our frontier.
“Magical chances?” a young aviator on the Pacific Coast wrote lately. “I thought of them to-day as I flirted with a little bunch of cotton-wool clouds eight thousand five hundred feet above Point Loma. And I wondered what Dana would have thought had one of his shipmates sauntered across the deck of the Pilgrim, and, clapping him on the back, said: ‘I’ll meet you, old man, in fifteen minutes up there in that fleet of little clouds; if they whift and drift into space, wait for me at the five-thousand-foot altitude’?”
So the frontier comes back. Pushed past the suburbs of Astoria City into the Pacific, it is seen crawling out on the sandy shores of Cape Cod with the next great storm. The single line of human footsteps across the polar snows has not left too packed and plain a trail. New snows have covered it, as new trees have shadowed the shores of Walden.
Peary’s footprints, and Dr. Cook’s, too, would be very hard to follow.
It was more than twenty-five years ago that I started from Savannah over the old stage-road to Augusta, finding my way by faint uncertain blazings on the tree-trunks through a hundred and thirty-odd miles of swamp. They were solemn miles. Trees thicker than my body grew in the ruts where wheels had run; more than once the great diamond rattlesnake coiled in my path, chilling the silence of the river bottoms with his shivering whirr. Once I heard the gobble of the wild turkey and the scream of the bobcat; and at night, while sleeping in an old abandoned church on the river bluff, I was awakened by the snuffling of a bear which had thrust its muzzle underneath the church door in the foot-worn hollow of the sill.
It was a lonesome place. A faint road led away from it off through the swamp; but, aside from the gravestones near by, there were no other human signs around. How long since human feet had crossed the threshold, I do not know.
The chintz altar-cloth that I tried to draw over me (the night was chill) crumbled at my touch and drifted off into a million dusty fragments. I had meant no desecration. I was very weary and had crept in through a window from the night and cold. A slow rain had settled down with the dusk, attended by darkness indescribably profound. And beneath the long-draped pines outside slept those whose feet had worn the threshold—slept undisturbed by the soughing of the wind, wrapped in the unutterable loneliness of the coiling river and the silent, somber swamp.
Yet here had passed a highway between two great cities just a few years earlier, before the railroad was built farther out through the State. Already the swamp and the river had taken the highway for their own, and from human feet given it again to adventure, to the gliding form, the swift wing, and the soft padded foot.
The giants of old, the frontiers and clipper ships of old, are gone. They went out with the ebb tide, and here already comes back the flood! And with it the same old human chance, the magical chance of escape. Lay aside the rifle and you pick up the camera—to creep with it into the lion’s den; or to climb with it into the top of a towering oak, on some sheer mountain wall; and, pushing it before you along a horizontal limb, feet dangling in space, a stiff wind blowing, eagles screaming overhead, canyon wall below you, and far, far down the narrow canyon bottom, you hold on, body balancing camera, but nothing over against the swaying brain, and grind out a hundred feet of movie film. This is to shoot a good many lions.
Life offers us all the chance of escape. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us; but beneath the surface we need go no deeper than our own hearts to find a frontier, and that adventurous something for which the decorous and conventional allows no place in its scheme.
CHAPTER II
THE RADIUM OF ROMANCE
CHAPTER II
THE RADIUM OF ROMANCE
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing?”
Because, I suppose, there were once two sides to her bread-board, both of which she used for sketching. She brought the board from the Fine Arts room at college to her new home, carrying it one day to the kitchen to try her hand at modeling—in dough. There are several of her early sketches about the house, of that period prior to the dough, which show real talent. Her bread, however, had about it the touch of genius. The loaves grew larger all the time, the bakings more frequent. The walls of any house are rather quickly covered with pictures, but there is no bottom to the bread-box. There are still two sides to her bread-board, and she uses both sides for dough.
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing?
For the far-off, unattained and dim?”
Because, I suppose, time was when I thought of other things than the price of flour; not because of much money in those times, but because she made angel-cake most of the time then, and what bread we did eat was had of the baker; and because the price of flour was then a matter of course. The price of flour now is a good deal more than a matter of course, and the price of corn-meal even more than the price of flour; so that we must count the slices now, and cut them thin.
We shall have angel-cake again, I promise the children, with the biggest kind of a hole in the middle, giving them a bran muffin to munch meanwhile, and wondering in my heart if this fight for bread will ever end in angel-cake.
One can live on potatoes and bran muffins, although there was never any romance about them, not even during the Great War when Wall Street took them as collateral. We need cake. I don’t remember that I ever lacked potatoes as a child, but, as a child, I do remember dancing while the pickaninnies sang,
“Mammy gwine make some short’nin’, short’nin’,
Mammy gwine make some short’nin’ cake.
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’, short’nin’,
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’ cake,”
in an ecstasy of pure delight, which was not remotely induced by common hunger.
Short’nin’ cake, angel-cake, floating island, coffee jelly—are they not victuals spirituels, drifted deep with frosting, honeyed over with an amber-beaded sweat, with melting sweetness, insubstantial, impalpable, ethereal, that vanish into the brain, that thrill along the nerves, feeding not the body, not the mind, nor yet the spirit, for these are but three of our four elements—we are also the stuff that dreams are made of, and we cannot wholly subsist on more material fare.
What makes pie pie is its four-and-twenty-blackbirds. Singing-blackbird pie is the only pie, whether you make it of apples or rhubarb or custard or squash, with one crust or two. He dreamed a dream who made the original pie. And even now I cannot pass a baker in apron and paper cap without a sense of frostings and méringues—of the white of life separated from the yolk of life and stirred into a dream. I find the same touch of romance on many faces, both young and old, as I find it over the landscape at dusk and dawn, and on certain days even at high noon.
It was so this morning when a flock of migrating bluebirds went over, calling down to me. They came out of the dawn, hovered idly over the barn and the tops of the cedars in the pasture, then faded into the blue about them and beyond them, where a fleet of great white clouds was drifting slowly far off to the south. But their plaintive voices floating down to me I still hear calling, with more yearning than a man, perhaps, should allow himself to know. For at the first sip of such sweet misery some poet chides,
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
For the far-off, unattained and dim,
While the beautiful, all about us lying,
Offers up its low perpetual hymn?”
As if longing were a weakness and not the heart’s hope; and our sighing— Shall I sigh for what I have? Or stop sighing? Some of my possessions I may well sigh over, but there are very few to sigh for, seeing none of them are farther off than the barn or the line fence, except a few books that I have lent my friends, and now and then a few dollars.
And such is the magic in the morning light that I see the beautiful all about me lying—in the bend of the road, on the sweep of the meadow, across the commonplace dooryard asleep in the sun; and such is the sweet silence of the autumn day that I hear the low perpetual hymn—in the lingering notes of the bluebirds, in the strumming of the crickets, in the curving stems of the goldenrods, the loud humming of the aster-dusted bees, even in the wavering red leaves of the maples singing in their fall.
It lacks an hour of mail-time, and the newspaper, and the world. The bluebirds are leaving before the mail-man comes, and everything with wings is flying with them, or is poised for flight as if there were no world, except a world for wings.
The day is warm, with little breezes on the wing, hardly larger than swallows. They stir the grasses of the knoll, and race with them up the slope, to fly on over the wavy crest, following the bluebirds off toward the deep-sea spaces among the drifting clouds. And the curving knoll itself is in motion, a yellow-brown billow heaving against the moving clouds where they ride along the sky. And over the knoll sweep the hawking swallows, white bellies and brown and glinting steel-blue backs aflash in the sun. Winging swallows, winging seeds, winging winds, winging clouds and spheres, and my own soul winging away into the beckoning blue where the bluebirds have gone!
But I shall return—to the mail-box on this rural free delivery route, to the newspaper, to the tariff, to the Turk. The Democratic State Committee is assembled this day in Springfield. I am not there. I also ran. I stumped the State for nomination to the National Senate, and landed here on Mullein Hill, Hingham. Here I set out. Through many years I have developed the safe habit of returning here. It was a magical chance Life offered me; a dream of beating the protective tariff devils. But Mullein Hill is clothed with dreams; and magical chances make this their stopping-place.
It is certainly true to-day. To begin with, I have this day bought the field by the side of my house. For all the twenty years of my living here I have dreamed of this rolling field with its pines and pointed cedars, and rounded knoll against the sky. Not every day in the autumn is like this for dreams; not many of them in all the year. I shall be building fences about the field now for many days; and paying taxes on the field every day from this time on. There are not many autumn days like this for dreams. Yet to know one such day, one touched with this golden melancholy, this sweet unrest and yearning, should it not outlast the noon, is to know,
“And one thing more that may not be,
Old earth were fair enough for me.”
You say that I am still thinking of the United States Senate. Possibly. “One thing more that may not be” I must be thinking on, for we all are. After the nomination comes the election; and what chance has the sworn enemy of a high protective tariff of election in Massachusetts?
Old Earth is fair enough for me ordinarily, and she is passing fair to-day. But even the dog, for all his appetite and growing years, is not always satisfied with bread and play. He clings closer than ever to me, as if sometimes frightened at inner voices calling him, which, like deep waters, seem to widen between us, and which no love, though pure and immeasurable, may be able to cross. He is nothing uncommon as a dog, except in the size of his spirit and the quality of his love. He will tackle anything, from a railroad train to a buzzing bumble-bee, that he imagines has intentions inimical to me; and there is nothing on the move, either coming or going, quite innocent of such intentions. Without fear, or awe, or law, he wears his collar, and his license number, 66, but not as a sign of bondage, for that sign he wears all over his alert and fearless front. He growls in his sleep before the fire at ghosts of things that have designs against the house; he risks his life all day long.
But he reserves a portion of his soul. He will deliberately chew off his leash at night, and, making sure that nothing stirs about the helpless house, will steal away to the woods, where he hears the baying of some spectral pack down the forest’s high-arched halls. I do not know what the little cross-bred terrier is hunting along the frosted paths—fox or rabbit or wild mice; I cannot run the cold trails that are so warm to his nose; but far ahead of his nose lope two panting hearts, his and mine, following the Gleam.
All dogs are dreamers, travelers by twilight, who wander toward a slow deferring dawn. They cannot see in the white fire of noon. A lovelier light, diffused and dim with dusk, is in the eyes of dogs and all dumb creatures, through which they watch a world of shadows moving with them like lantern-lighted shapes at night upon a wall.
“Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight,”
is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs.
There is a deposit, an infinitesimal deposit, it may be, of the radium of romance in the slag of all souls. Call it by other names—optimism, idealism, religion—you still leave it undefined; an inherent, essential element, harder to separate from the spiritual dross of us than radium from its carnotite; a kind of atomic property of the spirit which breaks up its substance; which ionizes, energizes, and illumines it.
There may be souls that never knew its power, but I can hardly think there ever was a soul shut in a cave so darksome, that romance never entered with its touch of radiance, if only as
“A little glooming light, much like a shade.”
This is the light in the eyes of dogs, the light that birds and bees follow, and the jellyfish steering round and round his course. Something like its quivering flame burns down in the green, dismal depths of the sea; down in the black subliminal depths; and on down in the heart of the world. For what other light is it, that guides the herring every spring, in from the ocean up Weymouth Back River? or the salmon in from the Pacific, up, high up the Columbia to the Snake, and higher up the Snake into the deep, dark gorges of the Imnaha?
It is now long past October, and where is the bluebird’s mate of June? She has forgotten him, and is forgotten by him, but he has not forgotten his dream-of-her; for I saw him in the orchard, while southward bound, going in and out of the apple-tree holes, the lover still, the dream-of-her in his heart, holding over from the summer and coming to meet him ahead of her, down the winter, out of the coming spring.
The dog and you and I and even the humble toad are dreamers at heart, all of us, only we are deeper adream than they.
“If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same,”
says Freneau to a flower. Yet the flowers are of the dust that I am made of, and they too are the stuff of dreams. And the toad under the kitchen-steps, what he knows of my heart! As if the unrequited pain of lovers, the sweetest, saddest things of poets, had always been his portion, and their vague melancholy the only measure of his tremulous twilight song. When the soft spring dusk has stolen into the young eyes of the day, as the first shadow of some sweet fear into the startled eyes of a girl, then out of the hush, quavering through the tender gloom,
“A voice, a mystery!”
From his earth-hole under the kitchen-steps I have known the toad, by dint of stretching and hitching up on chance stones, to get nine inches up, nine inches from the surface of the globe, up on the lowest of the steps! Yet it is given him to pipe a serenade in the gloaming that no other lover, bird or poet, ever quite equaled, even when he sang,
“I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night.”
Life is always a romance. There is fire in its heart, even in the three cold chambers of the toad’s heart; and the light of the fire flickers fainter than the guttered candle before it will go out. This may not be “the true light”; yet it lighteth every man that cometh into the world, every man with a pen, and his brother with a hoe, though they comprehend it not. One of our poets has written of “The Man With The Hoe” and left the man out and put only the hoe in the poem. This poet has written more than he has hoed, I am sure; as the painter of “The Man with the Hoe” had painted more than he had hoed, I am sure. Here is a poet who sees no light at all in “The Man with the Hoe,” because that poet has written more than he has hoed, which is to gather where he has not strawed. When a hoe looks as black as this to a pen, you will search the premises of the pen in vain for hoes. I hoe; I know men who hoe; and none of us knows Mr. Markham’s scarecrow for ourself. Here a realist sees what another realist thought he saw; as if you could ever see life!
Life is not what the realist sees, but what the realist is and knows, plus what the man with the hoe is and knows; and he knows that, if chained to a pick instead of a hoe, down in the black pit of some Siberian mine, he could not work life out in the utter dark.
Realism, if not a distortion and a disease, is at best only a half-truth; and the realist, if more than a medical examiner for his district, is but the undertaker besides.
Whoever sings a true song, or pens the humblest plodding prose, whether of Achilles, son of Peleus, or of John Gilley, a milkman down in Maine, or of the toad, or of the bee, has essentially one story to tell, and must be a Homer, truly to tell it.
Here on my desk lies the story of John Gilley, and over in the next farmhouse lingers the unwritten story of another milkman, my neighbor, Joel Moore; and in the other neighbor-houses live like people—humble, humdrum country people, with their stories, which, if lighted with nothing but their own hovering gleam, would glow forever.
The next man I meet would make a book; for either he is, or he knows, a good-enough story, could I but come by the tale.
O. Henry, pacing the streets in an agony of fear at having run out of story-matter, is only a case of nerves. The one inexhaustible supply of matter in the Universe that is of use to man is story-matter; for, as the first human pair have been a perpetual song and story, so the last pair shall be the theme for some recording angel, or else they will leave a diary.
The real ill with literature is writer’s cramp, an inability to seize the story, all of it, its truth as well as its facts—an ill, not of too much observation, but of too little imagination. Art does not watch life and record it. Art loves life and creates it.
“No one knows the stars,” says Stevenson, “who has not slept, as the French happily put it, à la belle étoile. He may know all their names, and distances, and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind, their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.”
Art and literature have turned scientist of late, as if our magnitudes, names, and distances, as if the concern of psychologists, physiologists, ethnologists, criminologists, and pathologists, were the concern of mankind! These things all belong to the specialists.
What does mankind reck of the revolution of the node and apsides? that Neptune’s line of apsides completes its revolution in 540,000 years? Instead of an astronomer, mankind is still the simple shepherd, keeping watch by night, and all he knows of the stars is that they brood above the sleeping hills, and now and then, in some holy hush, they sing together.
Science is concerned with the names, distances, and magnitudes of the stars; and with problems touching the “intestinal parasites of the flea.” Art, literature, and religion are concerned only with mankind; with the elemental, the universal, the eternal; with the dream, the defeat, the romance of life.
I have much to do with writers—with great writers, could they only think of something to write about. “There is nothing left,” they cry, “to write about.” “But here am I. Take me,” I answer. Out come pads and pencils flying. There is hard looking at me for a moment. Then a cynical smile. I won’t do. Becky might have done, but Thackeray got her; just as some one has got everybody! My tribe can never furnish her like again. Yet my tribe is not infertile; it is Thackeray’s, rather, that has run out.
A sweet young thing in one of my extension courses, voicing the literary despair of the class in a poem called “The Fairy Door,” made this end of the whole matter:
“The world seems black and ugly
When I shut the Fairy Door;
I want to go to Fairyland
And live forever more.”
I was reading this effusion on my way in to college. When I reached the climax in the stanza,
“The world seems black and ugly”
I thrust the manuscript back into my bag in disgust and turned for relief to the morning paper. Here—for the young writer was the daughter of a prominent Bostonian—I saw the announcement of her engagement to a Chicago man, and I knew, of course, what ailed the poetry; and I knew the medicine that I should administer.
How far apart literature and life sometimes get! And how much more real and romantic is ordinary life than ordinary literature!
The girl was to meet me that afternoon in the university extension lecture. The amphitheater was full of city folk, and there in the middle of the hall sat the young poet. She was very pretty, one of the daughters of men still fair. Taking her poem, I read it aloud to that last stanza, when, turning sharply, and pointing the manuscript hard at her, I demanded,
“Is this so? Do you want to leave Boston for Fairyland, instead of Chicago? Do you?”
She was staggered by the suddenness and savageness of it all and rose to her feet, adorably pink in her confusion, stammering, “No, no, I beg—of course I—no, I don’t”—by this time so recovered that her eyes flashed wrath as she dropped to her seat amid the gaping and the twittering of the class.
“If you don’t mean it,” I demanded, “why in the sacred name of literature did you write it? Why don’t you ever write what you mean? And you mean that Boston has suddenly become a back number for literature; that the literary center has shifted to Chicago—that’s what you mean. Chicago! the one romantic, fairy-like spot on earth! Isn’t that what you mean? Then don’t you see how fresh, how thrilling a theme you have in your Chicago? No one else, perhaps, ever saw Chicago in quite this rosy, romantic light before.”
Hers is the enduring truth about Chicago; as against that set forth by Mr. Armour in “The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People.” Here she was, herself the very stuff of the eternal in literature, and forced to Fairyland for something to write about! Sheer nonsense. One need not take the wings of the morning to the uttermost sea, or make one’s bed in Hell for “copy.” Chicago will do—or Boston—or even Hingham.
To be, if to be only a stock or a stone, beast or bird or man, is to be a story, while to be any one of my neighbors is to be an epic.
The day we moved out here, before our goods arrived, a strangely youthful pair, far on in the eighties, struggled up the hill from the old farm below to greet us. He was clad in overalls and topcoat, and she in flowers, overflowing from both her arms, and in wild confusion on the gayest Easter bonnet that ever bloomed.
“How do you do, neighbors!” she began, extending her armfuls of glorious mountain laurel; “Mr. White and I bring you the welcome of the Hingham Hills”—Mr. White’s rough old hand grasping mine amid the blossoms.
“Why,” I cried, “I didn’t know the Hingham Hills could hold such a welcome. I have tramped the woods about here, but I never found a bunch of laurel.”
“Ah, you didn’t get into Valley Swamp! Mr. White and I will show you, won’t we, Georgie? We know where odes hang on hawthorns, don’t we? We are busy farmers, and you know what farming is; but we have never ploughed up our poetry-patch, have we, Georgie?”
They never had; nor much of their other ninety-six acres either—the whole farm a joyous riot of free verse: fences without line or meter: cattle running where they liked; the farm kit—a mowing machine, a sulky plough, and a stolid old grindstone—straying romantically about the shy sweet fields.
It was an ode of a carriage that the spoony old couple went to town in, with wheels dactylic on one side and iambic on the other, and so broken a line for a back spring that Mrs. White would slide into Mr. White’s lap without cæsura or even a punctuation mark to hinder.
I was at the village market one muddy March day, when Cupid and the old mare, neither wearing blinders, brought this chariot to the curb. Mr. White, descending to the street, reached up for Mrs. White, who, giving him both her hands, put out a dainty foot to the carriage-step and there poised, dismayed at the March mud. Instantly Mr. White, disengaging one hand, lifted a folded blanket from the seat, shot it grandly out across the mud, and with a bow as gallant as Sir Walter’s own, handed the dear old shoes unblemished to the shop.
Eighteen or eighty, it is just the same. Boston or Chicago or Hingham, it is just the same. White or red or yellow or black, it is just the same. The radium of romance is mixed with the slag of all our souls. Here is my colored neighbor down toward the village.
“Hello!” I called to him over the telephone, “aren’t you going to do that job for me?”
This neighbor is a most useful colored citizen, with a complete line of avocations, cleaning cesspools nocturnally and on Saturday afternoons being one of these sporadic and subsidiary callings.
“Hello!” he answered; “I most assuredly am! And exceedingly sorry I am, too, for this delay.” (He had been coming for one year and six months now.) “But my business grows enormously. It is really more than I can administer. The fact is, professor, I must increase my equipment. I can’t dip any longer. I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.”
“I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” Divine! I like the sound. For it is the true measure of life as set over against that which life may merely appear to be. To trudge along through life beside your humble cart of the long-handled dipper, and to know that your dipper is approaching the proportions of a pump is to know that you are greater than you know.
I saw yesterday in the Sunday newspaper the lovely face of a girl, who, “rumor has it,” ran the legend, “will be the next Queen of England.” She, too, like my colored neighbor, like us all, is approaching the proportions of a pump. We are all the stuff that pumps and dreams are made of, and great art, and great literature.
I spoke of Joel Moore here in the next house to me. For twenty-six years he was chained to a milk-route, covering Lovell’s Corner, East Weymouth, and our back wood-road; but he always drove it in a trotting sulky.
From behind the bushes I have seen him calming the leg-weary team as it labored up the humps in the road, his feet braced, his arms extended to the slack lines, his eyes fixed on the Judge’s Stand ahead, while he maneuvered against Ed Geers and Ben Hur and all the Weymouths for the pole.
He came home in that lumbering, rattling milk-cart as if it wore winged wheels, and were being drawn by the steeds of Aurora around the half-mile track at the great Brockton Fair.
It was sixteen years ago that Joel drove home with Flora IV, a black mare without a leg to stand on, but with a record of 2.12¾ There was large fixing of the little barn for her, and much rubbing-down of withers.
One day Joel was seen wandering over the knoll here near the house, kicking stones around. Something was the matter. I sauntered out toward my barn casually and called to him. Picking up a piece of rock in the pasture, he staggered with it to the fence, and fixing it into the wall, said with labored breath, “Flora IV has a foal!” And, lifting another stone off the wall, for ballast, he strode up the hill and over, and down to his barn, not knowing the “Magnificat,” it may be, but singing it in his heart all the way down.
And this happened on the very hill which this day I bought with the field by the side of the house. Joel owned the field then. But he longed for a fast horse. I never set my heart on a fast horse; but I cannot resist a field. I did not covet this field of Joel’s. I merely dreamed of it as part of my dooryard, and waited—longer than Jacob waited for Rachel. What a dream she must have been!
But let me come back to Joel and Flora and the foal.
My youngest boy was born that same summer—sixteen years ago—the double event in Joel’s mind wearing the mixed complexion of twins. He had had no children till the colt came, and naturally he spoiled her. She was a willful little thing by inheritance, though—arch, skittish, and very pretty; and long before she wore shoes had got the petulant habit of kicking the siding off the barn at any delay of dinner.
She should have been broken by her second birthday, but Joel would take no risks; and in the third summer, though he “had her used to leather,” he needed a steady old horse to hitch her with, and she came up to her fourth birthday untrained. Then, the first time he took her out, she behaved so badly, and cut herself so, forward, that it was necessary to turn her loose for months. Then she was sent away to be broken, but came back a little more willful than ever, and prettier than ever, if possible.
That winter Joel had to give up his milk-route on account of sickness, and with the opening of spring got the blacksmith to take the colt in hand. He took her, and threw her, dislocating her shoulder. Then he pulled off her new shoes, and she was put into the boxstall to get well.
After that, I don’t know just why, but we talked of other things than the colt. She kicked a board off the back of the barn one day, sending a splinter whizzing past my head, but neither of us noticed it. She was seven years old now, a creature shaped for speed, but Joel was not strong enough to manage her, and a horse like this could so easily be harmed. In fact, he never harnessed her again.
I urged him from time to time, with what directness I dared, to let me take him into the hospital. But he had never left the farm and his wife alone overnight in all these years. Then one day he sent for me. He would go, he said, if I could arrange for him.
A March snow lay on the fields the day before he was to go, and all that day, at odd times, I would see him creeping like a shadow about his place: to the hen-coops, up to the line fence, out to the apple tree in the meadow, taking a last look at things. It was quite impossible for me to work that day.
The next morning the four boys, on their way to school, went down ahead of me to say good-bye. They filed in, shook hands bravely, fighting back their tears, and playing fine the game of bluff with him, though the little fellow, born the summer the colt was born, nearly spoiled it all. He is a dear impulsive child and had frankly been Joel’s favorite.
“I’ve taken the eveners off the disk harrow,” he was saying as he came out to the sleigh. “I gave the kittens a bed of fresh rowan. I drove a nail under the shutter of the can-house, where you can hang the key. You had better lock up a little till I get back”—his words half muffled under the big robes of the sleigh.
“I hate to leave home,” he said, as we went along; “but she couldn’t stand it. She’s not well. It isn’t so bad for me with you along.”
Two or three times he was about to say something else, but felt too tired. I had him duly entered; introduced him to his surgeon; helped him to his cot, where a cheery nurse made him easy; then gave him my hand.
“Good-day,” he said; “I’m going to pay you back some time. Only I can’t.” He clung a moment longer to me. “I’ve never had many of the luxuries. I’ve worked hard for all I’ve got—except for the little colt. She was thrown in. I never fed her a quart of grain—the cleanest little eater—as fat as butter—and on nothing but roughage all the time!”
Then, looking me straight in the eye, he said calmly, “You and I know and the doctors know. But I couldn’t tell her. You tell her. You can. And tell her I guess she had better sell the little colt.”
He paused a moment. Something yet he wished to say—the thing he had tried before to say. I hope the Recording Angel took it down, and the way he said it, down. Not quite daring to look into my eyes, he asked, wistfully, “You don’t need a fast horse yourself, of course, having your auto?”
“Yes, I do, Joel,” I answered firmly; “I do need a fast horse. We all do, or something like that.” And I bent over and kissed him, for his wife, and for my little boy at home.
There is balm in Gilead; but are there racetracks in Heaven?—and fast horses there? Perhaps not. But I often wish that I had told Joel I believed there were. Of course there are. There is romance in Heaven, and the magical chance of escape there.
CHAPTER III
THE HUNT FOR “COPY”
CHAPTER III
THE HUNT FOR “COPY”
There never was a bigger, fatter, flabbier woodchuck than old Tubby—among wild animals that I alone have known. Tubby is a fixture of the farm. He was here when we came, or else it was his father or his grandfather. He is fat and flabby and as broad as he is long, and broader when full of beans. He is very much of a tub. When he sits in the garden, he sits like a tub. When he runs, he runs like a tub. And he holds beans like a tub.
It is worth a few beans to see him run—a medley in motions: up and down and round and round, the spinning of a top and the hop of a saucepan on a hot stove with amazing progress forward. He knows which end of him is head and which tail; but from a distance I can see neither head nor tail, only sides, bulging, tubby sides spilling down the garden. One seldom does see the ends of a thing from a distance. Tubby has a head-end; and he has wits in that end. He also has a tail-end; and the disturbing conclusion one reaches with close study is that Tubby has wits also in this end. He is a beautifully capable thing in his way. A cutworm is not more capable—if there is anything so capable as a cutworm! Both are poems; old Tubby an epic poem—were I as capable as Tubby, and a Homer—
A full-sized woodchuck is twenty-two inches long; and I presume that Tubby is not more than twenty-two inches wide, though I have seen him wobbling out of the garden and carrying off as mere ballast a cabbage or two, and a watermelon, and a peck or two of beans, and all of the Swiss chard in the three rows. There are several bushels of chard in three such rows.
The way he can run with his load! His little black heels twinkling through the vines, his shapeless carcass flopping into his hole with me on top of him! Then I will hear a chuckling deep down among the hickory roots, a peculiar vegetarian chuckle quite unlike a carnivorous growl. And then I will sit down on the hole and chuckle, having lost for the moment my carnivorous growl. He is so bold, so impudent, so canny. The old scamp rather likes me. And I am a fairly good gardener, if I do say it myself.
When I place a trap in one entrance to his burrow, he uses the other opening; if I put another trap here, he promptly digs a passage around it; if I block this with chunks of rock, he undermines the stones and patiently moves to a new house farther along the ridge; and, if I set traps for him here, he changes house again. It is a wide wooded ridge around the garden, and honeycombed with woodchuck holes. By and by he is back in his favorite house under the hickory—when the spiders have hung the doors with signs that the traps are gone.
But it happened once that I forgot the traps. Wood-earth and bits of bark and dead leaves washed down till the wicked gins were covered, and Tubby, coming back after weeks off on the ridge, tumbled into one of the traps and got his thick fat fist fast. I heard him making a dreadful racket, and rushed up with a club in my thick fat fist.
Old Tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. I don’t believe that I was ever looked at by a woodchuck before. Stolid, sullen, defiant, there was much more of the puzzled, of the world-old wonder in the eyes gazing steadily into mine, as to what this situation and this moment meant. The snarled body was all fight and fear, but the blinking eyes sought mine for an answer to the riddle that I have asked of God. And all that I could answer was, “You fat-head!” And he said, “Fat-head yourself!” if ever a woodchuck spoke, and spoke the truth. “Fat-head, to set this rotten thing here and forget it!”
It was a rotten thing to do. Somehow he made me feel as if I had trapped one of my neighbors. He saw how I was feeling, and took advantage of me.
“Whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “Whose ancestors were here first, yours or mine? You didn’t even come over in the Mayflower. But I came here in Noah’s Ark.”
“I know it. But keep quiet,” I begged him, “and stop looking at me that way.”
“What way?” he asked.
“Why, so much like my brother!” I exclaimed.
“But I am your brother,” he retorted, “though I am ashamed to say it.”
“Don’t say it, then,” I begged.
But he was wound up.
“Any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother has no soul. And any man who can’t share his beans with his brother doesn’t deserve a soul. If I were as low-down and as lazy as you, I would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, I would.” And all the time I was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him. Suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar, among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which I should have heard, had I been able to understand.
But I have much to learn. And so has Pup, our Scotch-Irish terrier. Time and time again Pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over himself for his hole. Once or twice they have come to blows at the mouth of the burrow, and Pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear, but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. He came off with a deep experience lately, and a greatly enhanced respect for woodchucks. But he is of stubborn stock. So is Tubby of stubborn stock. Pup knows that here is an enemy of the people, and that he must get him. He knows that Tubby is all hair and hide and bowels. He now knows that Tubby is deeper than he is broad, which makes him pretty deep.
The new light began to dawn on Pup when Tubby moved up from the woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. The impudence, the audacity of the thing stood Pup’s hair on end, and he took to the blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would happen.
Tubby’s raiding hour was about five in the afternoon. At that hour the shadows of the ice-house and the barn lay wide across the mowing-field—the proper time and color for things to happen. And there in the close-cut field, as if he had come up out of a burrow, sat old Tubby, looking as big as a bear!
Pup stole softly out to meet him, moving over till he was between the chuck and the ice-house hole. It was a deliberate act and one of complete abandon. Things must this time be finished. And what a perfect bit of strategy it was! Hugging the ground when the chuck rose high on his haunches to reconnoiter, Pup would “freeze” till Tubby dropped down and went to feeding, then, gliding like a snake forward, he would flatten behind a stone or a tuft of grass, and work forward and wait.
The ground rose slightly to Pup’s disadvantage, and he was maneuvering to avoid the uphill rush when Tubby heard something off in the woods and turned with a dash for his hole. It was head-on and terrific! And the utter shock of it, the moral shock, was more terrific! Neither knew for an instant just what had happened; the suddenness, the precision, the amazing boldness and quality of the attack putting Pup almost out of action. But it was precisely the jar old Tubby needed. Every flabby fiber of him was fight. The stub feet snapped into action; the chunk of a body shot forward, ramming Pup amidships, sending him to the bottom of the slope, Tubby slashing like a pirate with his terrible incisors.
But the touch of those long teeth brought Pup short about. He likes the taste of pain. He is a son of battle. And in a moment like this he is possessed of more than common powers of body and soul. The fur flew; the grass flew; but there was scarcely a sound as the two fighters tumbled and tossed a single black-brown body like a ball of pain. They sprang apart and together again, whirled and dived and dodged as they closed, each trying for a hold which neither dared allow. But Pup got plenty of hair, choking, slippery hair, and leathery hide by the mouthful, while the twisting, snapping woodchuck cut holes in Pup’s thin skin with teeth which would punch holes in sheet steel.
And Tubby was fighting with his head as well as with teeth and toes. He was cooler than Pup. He had a single-track mind, and it ran straight to his burrow. The head-work was perfectly clear; the whole powerful play going forward with the nicest calculation, mad as it appeared to be in the wild rough-and-tumble. There was method in Tubby’s madness. He was fighting true to plan. But Pup was fighting to kill, and he lost his head. It was to win his hole, and life, and the pursuit of happiness on these ancestral acres that the woodchuck was fighting; and, as the two laid about them and rolled over and over, they kept rolling nearer and nearer to the ice-house and a burrow under the corner.
Over and over, right and left, they lunged when the woodchuck, sent spinning from Pup’s foreleg, came up with the dog chopping at his stub nose, but, giving him all four of his mailed feet instead, he bounded from the face of the dog, and, with a lightning somersault, landed plop in his burrow, Pup raking the hair from the vanishing haunch.
And now Pup knows that there is no bottom to a woodchuck’s burrow. But do I fully realize that there is no bottom to the woodchuck? I have been almost fatally slow over this lesson. Yet this is the writer’s first and most important lesson, no matter what his theme.
“I have been studying the woodchuck all my life,” said my old friend Burroughs to me, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him!” He made that great discovery early; eighty-four years of study confirmed it; and from early to late Burroughs never lacked for things to write about or failed of his urge to write. There was no bottom to his woodchuck.
Others have made this discovery concerning other things: the philosophers, of truth; the poets, of men and flowers; the prophets, of God. But the writer must find it true of all things, of all his own things, from woodchucks to God. There is nothing new in this discovery. It simply makes all things new to the discoverer. The skeptical, the shallow, the fool who says in his heart there is nothing but bowels to a woodchuck—what would he at four-and-eighty find at Woodchuck Lodge to write about? He might have all knowledge and a pen with which he could remove mountains, but, lacking wonder, that power to invest things with new and infinite significance, he would see no use in removing the mountains and turning them into steppes and pampas and peopled plains.
All creative work, whether by brush or pen or hoe, is somehow making mountains into men, out of the dust an image, in our own likeness created, in the likeness of God. It may be woodchuck dust, or dandelion dust, or the shining dust of stars; touched with a creative, interpreting pen the dust takes human shape and breathes a breath divine. A woodchuck pelt makes an excellent fur for a winter coat; the rest of him makes an excellent roast for a dinner; but it is what still remains, the wonder of him, which makes for sermon and for song.
How hard a lesson that has been for me to learn! And so slow have I been learning it that little time is left for me to preach or sing. If only I had known early that Mullein Hill was as good as Helicon; that the people of Hingham were as interesting as the people of Cranford; that Hingham has a natural history as rich and as varied as Selborne! My very friends have helped to mislead and hinder me: “I don’t see what you find to write about up here!” they exclaim, looking out with commiseration over the landscape, as if Wellfleet or Washington or Wausau were better for books than Hingham! Hanover may be better for ducks than Scituate; but Hingham is as good as Hanover or Heaven for books.
One of my friends started for Hanover once for a day of hunting—but I will let him tell the story:
“We were on our way to Hanover, duck hunting,” he said, “and at Assinippi took the left fork of the road and kept going. But was this left fork the right road? [An ancient doubt which had brought many a traveler before them to confusion and a halt.] It was early morning, raw and dark and damp. No one was stirring in the farmhouses straggling along the road, and we were turning to go back to the forks when the kitchen door of the near-by house opened and a gray-bearded man appeared with a milk-pail on his elbow.
“‘Is this the road to Hanover?’ we called.
“The man backed into the kitchen door, put down his milk-pail, came out again, carefully closing the door behind him, and started down the walk toward the front gate. He opened the gate, turned and latched it behind him as carefully as he had latched the kitchen door, and, stepping out into the road, approached our carryall. Looking up, then down the road intently, he hitched his right foot to the hub of our front wheel, spat precisely into the dust, and, fixing his face steadfastly toward Cape Cod, answered:
“‘Say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the other fork.
“At the turn I looked back. There stood our guide in the road, his right foot still in the air, I think; and there—though it is several years since, he may still be standing—one foot planted on the road to Scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should have been on the road to Hanover.”
The man in the road knew that this road ran to Scituate. He lived on it. Had they asked him: “Master, which is the Great Commandment?” he had answered: “Take this road for Scituate.” For were they not duck hunting in Hanover? Then what profounder error could they have been in than on the road to Scituate!
But most people go that way for Hanover. Every young writer I know hankers to get his Hanover ducks out of Scituate, as if, failing to get ducks, he might get Scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in Scituate when the ducks are in Hanover, making the best sort of “copy.”
Is it some new thing that we should search out, or some deeper, truer thing? Must we travel, or may we stay at home? Locomotion is certainly a curse to literature. No one nowadays stays long enough in his own place to know it and himself in it, which is about all that he can know well enough to express. Let the writer stay at home. Drummers, actors, circus-men, and Satan are free to go up and down the earth. And these seem to be writing most of our books.
For some years, now, I, also, have been going to and fro and up and down in the earth thinking that I might find some better place than Hingham. I have just returned from Wausau, Wisconsin, where they have a very hard red granite, and a deep green granite, both of them the loveliest tombstone stuff that, I think, I ever saw. Certainly they are superior to our seam-face Hingham granite for tombstones. Up to the time of my Wausau visit, I had never given much thought to tombstones; but it shows how one’s thought expands with travel, and how easily Wausau may surpass Hingham, not alone in gravestones, but in other, even in literary, materials.
But Hingham has one thing in the line of gravestones not found at all in Wausau: I mean the boulders, great roundish glacial boulders, gray granite boulders, old and gentle and mossy-grown, which lie strewn over our hilly pastures among the roses and the hardhack and the sweetfern, ready to be rolled to the tomb, and fit for any poet’s tomb. When that shy spirit and bird-lover, Bradford Torrey, native of my neighbor town of Weymouth, died in far-off California, he left but a single simple request: that he be brought back to his birthplace for burial, and that a Weymouth boulder be found and rolled up to mark his grave. Were mine not Hingham boulders I would take one out of my wall, the one which serves as a gatepost, and, with a yoke of Weymouth oxen, would draw it to Bradford Torrey’s tomb, a tribute from Hingham to Weymouth, and a gift out of the heart of one who knows and loves “The Foot-Path Way,” “A Rambler’s Lease,” and “A World of Green Hills.”
Perhaps one must needs go to California in order to come by this deep desire for Weymouth. Then let him go early. For if he is to write “The Natural History of Weymouth,” or of Selborne, he must return early and stay a long time. Thoreau has been criticized for writing of Nature as if she were born and brought up in Concord. So she was. Can one not see all of the world out of the “Window in Thrums”?—that is, all of the world of Thrums, which is all of the world, and just the world, one goes to Thrums to see? “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” says Thoreau.
This brings me back to Hingham. I wish that I could write “The Natural History of Hingham”! A modest desire! There can never be another Gilbert White—but not for lack of birds and beasts in Hingham. Were I a novelist I would write a “Cranford”—and I could! I would call it “Hingham,” not “Main Street,” though that is the name of perhaps the longest street in Hingham. But there are many other streets in Hingham, and all kinds of interesting people.
And here I am on Mullein Hill, Hingham, with all of these streets, and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about—and planning this day a trip to California! I might have been the author of a recent book whose theme and sub-title read: “In the plains and the rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic, but all the peaks are preëmpted.” Come down from Mullein Hill; get out of Hingham; go West, young writer, as far as California; you shall find room to skip and frolic on the plains out there!
It may be true in California, but the opposite of that is true in Hingham. To be sure, I have tried to preëmpt Mullein Hill; I now own the knoll outside my study window, and the seven-acre woodlot beyond; but there are many other peaks here among the hills of Hingham, and scarcely any of them occupied. The people of Hingham all crowd into the plains. So did the people of Israel crowd into the plains—of Moab, leaving Pisgah to Moses, who found it very lonesome. There is no one on Pisgah now, I understand; no one on Ararat; no one on Popocatepetl; no one on the top of Vesuvius, nor on the peak of Everest, peaks as well known as White Plains or the Plains of Abraham, but not anything like so crowded. Moses sleeps on Nebo, yet no man knows where he lies. Have them lay you in Sleepy Hollow if you wish your friends and neighbors to crowd in close and keep you company.
Why has there been no Iliad of Hingham? There are Helens in Hingham, as there were Helens of Troy. Hingham is short of Homers. Mute, inglorious Miltons have we in Hingham. If one of them, however, should take his pen in hand, would he dream, and if he dreamed, would he dare to cry to the Heavenly Muse,
“I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?
Which of our poets thinks any more of an adventurous song? Of attempting any more the unattempted in either prose or rhyme? It is as if everything had been attempted; everything dared; everything accomplished—the peaks all preëmpted. Politics or religion or literature, it matters not: the great days are gone, the great things are done, the great men securely housed in the Hall of Fame. Heaven offers us a League of Nations and we prefer the tried and proved device of war; a famed evangelist comes to town, we build him a vast tabernacle, and twenty thousand gather for the quickening message—“Brighten the corner where you are!” And in the corners, and over the walls of the nation, with poster and placard the “Safety-First” sign warns us not to hold our little rushlight over-high, or flare it over-far, for fear we set our brightened corner of the world on fire. But the whole world is on fire! And wherever an emperor has escaped the devouring flame, he is fiddling, as emperors do; and his poet laureate is writing free verse; and all of his faithful subjects are saying, over and over, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
“We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it,” says Emerson. “Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.” I have not spoken lately with a man who seemed to think he was entitled to the world. That grand old faith has passed away. But I talk with no man lately who does not think he is entitled to an automobile. Great is Tin Lizzie of the Americans! Greater than Diana of the Ephesians. But except for our worship of the Ford we are not over-religious. The Ford is a useful little deity; she meets our needs to the last mile. The individual can skip and frolic with her, for she is distinctly the goddess of the plains and rolling country. Admirable to her winking tail-light, she is one hundred per cent American, the work of one of the supreme inventive geniuses of our time. She is the greatest thing in America, chugging everywhere but up Parnassus. Fool-proof, the universal car, she is the very sign and symbol of our antlike industry, the motor-minded expression of our internal-combustion age.
Even my quiet old friend Burroughs had his Ford. It was her creator himself who gave her to him. The creature would climb around the slopes and over the walls about Woodchuck Lodge like a side-hill gouger, Burroughs in his long white beard driving her, as Father Time might drive a merry-go-round. He nearly lost his life in her, too. But everybody nearly loses his life so nowadays; and nearly everybody had rather lose his life in a Ford than to drag out an endless existence in a buggy or on foot or in a wooden swing at home, watching the Fords go by. What is life, anyway? The Ford is cheap; the service station is everywhere; so, pile into the little old “bug”—on the hood and running-boards! “Let’s go!”
Perhaps our machines are taking us—we wish to believe so—to some new Arden, some far-off Avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds, our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “Safety First” shall give place to “Derring-Do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking Sinai bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of God on new tables of stone.
We are not lacking courage. It is imagination that we lack. We dare. But we do not think it worth while. We are shallow, skeptical, conventional, out of tune with the Infinite, and out of touch with spiritual things. If we do not try the unattempted, it is because we believe it has already been tried. It is because Homer has preëmpted Helicon that we tunnel it. Only Milton, among us moderns (and how ancient Milton seems!), only Milton in his blindness has seen that there is room and verge enough on Helicon, and deeps within the abyss of Hades where Dante would be lost. No, Milton is not the only modern to leave the plains, and, like a star, to dwell apart. Thoreau did it at Walden; Lanier did it on the marshes of Glynn; Burroughs did it at Woodchuck Lodge; and Hudson did it on the plains of Patagonia—proof enough that ponds and plains and the low-lying marsh may be as high as Helicon for poetry, if only the poet have the vision to see that
“Like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.”
But here we fail. We no longer see the greatness of God in things. We have covered God with an atom. We ask for bread, and Science gives us a stone; for God, and Science gives us an electron. It was a super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that all of the other electrons were without form and void. Atomism has taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. Man is only a bunch of willful atoms, or parts of atoms, not any longer the crowning work of Creation, its center and circumference, its dominion and destiny and glory, its divine expression, interpretation, and immortal soul. Are we to be robbed of God? Inhibited forever from faith by the lensed eyes of Science?
“What is man?” I ask, and Science laughs and answers, “Electrons.” That is its latest guess. But does man look like them? Does he feel like them? Does he behave like them? Does he believe like them? In the laboratory he may. But out here in the hills of Hingham, where I am returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, I know that I AM, and that I still hold to all of those first things which Science would shame me out of, offering me electrons instead!
I accept the electrons. Capering little deities, they are the sons of God. But so are you and I the sons of God—and we are electrons, trillions of electrons, if you like.
Gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state of construction, dangerous but passable. The anatomist, laying down his scalpel, cries, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”—his science passing into poetry, and from poetry to religion, but not easily in our present frame and mood.
Science clears the sight and widens its range; but Science can never clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. Only vision can do that, and Science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can see through so much as a single stained cell of him. Science turns aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. It deals with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and art as in life and society. The potent thing among men and nations is love. Love never faileth. Yet never were we so afraid of love as we are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine.
“Go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “I will give you a lesson in skinning and mounting.” I was a young boy. Hurrying out to the woods, I was soon back with a cuckoo. The face of the old scientist darkened. “You should not have killed this bird, it is the friend of man. See when I open this gizzard.” And with a dexterous twist of his fingers turned inside out the gizzard, and showed it, like a piece of plush, its fleshy walls penetrated with millions of caterpillar hairs.
To this day I feel the wonder of that knowledge, and I thrill at the meaning of that bird’s gizzard. Here was science and charity and poetry and religion. What untold good to man! What greater possible good to man? That was before I knew or understood the cuckoo’s song. And neither the old scientist, nor yet his book, “Sixteen Weeks in Zoölogy,” dealt with the song. Science is sure and beautiful with a gizzard. Poetry is sure and beautiful with both gizzard and song. And I wonder if the grinding gizzard or the singing throat is the better part of the cuckoo, even in this world of worms?
“Though babbling only to the vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
“Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
“O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faëry place,
That is fit home for thee!”
I have a great book, published by the Government, devoted entirely to birds’ gizzards, mills of the gods, and their grindings. It is not a dull book, though the mills grind slowly and grind exceeding small. It is a book of bones, of broken beetles, seeds, hairs, feathers, and fragments. It is a great work of science. One might not like to lay it down unfinished; but, having finished it, one could hardly say:
“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
“O blessed Bird! the earth we Pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faëry place,
That is fit home for thee!”
Nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and story. As life is more than meat, so is literature more than life. Nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those who never existed.”
At Good-Will Farm, Maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate. It had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse, skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been uncovered and left as part of the roadbed.
“You ought to blast that thing out,” I said, somewhat testily, to the supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of the trip.
“I’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “I had intended to do it from the first.”
The next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the ledge to take in the wide landscape of the Kennebec below us, I chanced to look down at my feet and saw, cut deep in the smooth surface of the stone, several parallel lines.
“Don’t blast out this rock!” I exclaimed. “Tear down your schoolhouse rather. Build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone. This is part of a great book.”
“I don’t understand,” said the supervisor.
“Here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. These lines were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the Ice Age. Don’t blot it out. Put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it, translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.”
He did. There was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the rock, telling of the Ice Age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out the valley of the Kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and inditing this manuscript for Good-Will Farm School ages later.
So much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone! Now add to your science history. Instead of the scratch of a glacier, let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be—“1620.” Now read—if you can read and understand.
I copy it verbatim from a Freshman college theme:
Plymouth Rock
Plymouth Rock is situated in Plymouth Mass. It is the rock upon which the Mayflower landed in 1620. But it is not now where it was then. It was moved many years ago up to the street. And when they moved it it broke. But they cemented it together. It is four or five feet long; and three or four feet wide; and it is inscribed with the famous figures 1620, to celebrate the landing of the Puritans at that time. It is enclosed within a canopy of stone and an iron fence; but the gate is hardly ever closed. There are a great many famous stones in the world but this is as famous as any.
My mother was visiting me. She is a self-contained old Quaker, and this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had even seen New England! What should we do first? What did she most desire to see? “Take me to see Plymouth Rock first,” she said; and we were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. As we entered Plymouth, however, I noticed that mother had grown silent, and that her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to her moods, was also silent. We descended the hill to the harbor, came on in sight of the canopy over the Rock, and slowed down to stop. But the car had not stopped, when mother, the back door open, her foot on the running-board, was stepping off and through the open gate, where, falling on her knees, with tears running down her face, she kissed the blessed stone, her daughter calling, “O Mother, the germs! the germs!”
When Science and Religion thus clash, Science must give way. Mother knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. She had lived longer than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more—some things more than life itself.
Science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. These are the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through Bacca, make it a well. Knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in its hair.
The other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in Boston on the stars. Wonder and awe held the audience as it traveled the stellar spaces with the help of the astounding pictures on the screen. The emotion was deep; the tension almost painful as the lecturer swept on and on through the unthinkable vast, when, coming to his close, he turned and asked lightly, “Now, what do you think of immortality? Is it anything more than the neurotic hope of a very insignificant mote in this immensity?”
The effect was terrific. The scientific smiled. The simple left the hall dazed and stunned. They lost all sense of time and space, they lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. They had been carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven, then hurled to earth. The lecture failed—not of instruction, not of emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. The lecturer may be right—for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for poetry. He may have uttered the last word—for science; but this end is only the beginning for religion.
How much greater an astronomer this college professor than that shepherd psalmist on the far-off Syrian hills! Ranging the same astral field as our scientist, sweeping the same stellar spaces, with only a shepherd’s knowledge, the psalmist’s thought takes the same turn as the scientist’s, down to man, but on different wings,—the wings of poetry:
“When I consider thy heavens,
The work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars
Which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
Then, swinging upward on those mighty wings, past the reach of science, out of the range of knowledge, up, up to the divinest height ever touched by human thought, the psalmist-astronomer cries impiously, exultantly,
“For thou hast made him but little lower than God,
And crownest him with glory and honor!”
This starts where the astronomer stopped. This is religion and literature. And I have these very stars over my hilltop here in Hingham!
CHAPTER IV
THE DUTY TO DIG