The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own.

Where, then, should a man live? I will make answer only for myself, and say, Here in Hingham, right where I am, for here on Mullein Hill the sky is round and large, the evening and the Sunday silences are deep, the dooryards are wide, the houses are single, and the neighborhood ambitions are good kitchen-gardens, good gossip, fancy chickens, and clean paint.

There are other legitimate ambitions, and the Commuter is not without them; but these few go far toward making home home, toward giving point and purpose to life, and a pinch of pride.

The ideal home depends very much, of course, on the home you had as a child. I can think of nothing so ideally homelike as a farm,—an ideal farm, ample, bountiful, peaceful, with the smell of apples coming up from the cellar, and the fragrance of herbs and broom-corn haunting storeroom and attic.

The day is past when every man’s home can be his farm, dream as every man may of sometime having such a home; but the day has just arrived when every man’s home can be his garden and chicken-pen and dooryard, with room and quiet and a tree.

The day has come, for the means are at hand, when life, despite its present centralization, can be more as it used to be—spread out, roomier, simpler, healthier, more nearly normal, because again lived near to the soil. It is time that every American home was built in the open country, for there is plenty of land—land in my immediate neighborhood for a hundred homes where children can romp, and your neighbor’s hens, too, and the inter-neighborhood peace brood undisturbed. And such a neighborhood need not be either the howling wilderness, where the fox still yaps, or the semi-submerged suburban village, where every house has its Window-in-Thrums. The Commuter cannot live in the wild country, else he must cease to commute; and as for small-village life—I suppose it might be worse. It is not true that man made the city, that God made the country, and that the devil made the village in between; but it is pretty nearly true, perhaps.

But the Commuter, it must be remembered, is a social creature, especially the Commuter’s wife, and no near kin to stumps and stars. They may do to companion the prophetic soul, not, however, the average Commuter, for he is common and human, and needs his own kind. Any scheme of life that ignores this human hankering is sure to come to grief; any benevolent plan for homesteading the city poor that would transfer them from the garish day of the slums to the sweet solitudes of unspoiled nature had better provide them with copies of “The Pleasures of Melancholy” and leave them to bask on their fire-escapes.

Though to my city friends I seem somewhat remote and incontiguous, still I am not dissevered and dispersed from my kind, for I am only twenty miles from Boston Common, and as I write I hear the lowing of a neighbor’s cows, and the voices of his children as they play along the brook below, and off among the fifteen square miles of treetops that fill my front yard, I see faint against the horizon two village spires, two Congregational spires, once one, that divided and fell and rose again on opposite sides of the village street. I often look away at the spires. And I as often think of the many sweet trees that wave between me and those tapering steeples, where they look up to worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl across the street.

Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields and as lovely, too—from twenty miles away, or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is necessary; but less and less is city living necessary.

It is less and less possible also. New York City—the length and breadth of Manhattan—and Boston, from the Fenway in three directions to the water-front, are as unfit for a child to grow up in as the basement floor of a china store for a calf. There might be hay enough on such a floor for a calf, as there is doubtless air enough on a New York City street for a child. It is not the lack of things—not even of air—in a city that renders life next to impossible there; it is rather the multitude of things. City life is a three-ringed circus, with a continuous performance, with interminable side-shows and peanuts and pink lemonade; it is jarred and jostled and trampled and crowded and hurried; it is overstimulated, spindling, and premature—it is too convenient.