“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.