Country Mouse.
“There is some sense in these boasts of my illustrious friend and guest, but against them I think I can produce equivalent reasons for preferring the country. In the first place, if he lives faster, I live longer; and I have better health than he all the time. My lungs are not clogged with smoke, my brain not addled by eternal hurry and interruption, my eyes not dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature blindness. While his limbs are stiffening year by year till he can only pace along his monotonous pavement, I retain till the verge of old age much of the agility and vigor wherewith I walked the moors and climbed the mountains in my youth. He is pleased at having twenty times as many sensations in a day as I; but, if nineteen out of the twenty be jarring noises, noxious smells, plague, worry, and annoyance, I am quite content with my humbler share of experience. Even if his thick-coming sensations and ideas be all pleasant, I doubt if he ever have the leisure necessary to enjoy them. Very little would be gained by the most exquisite dinner ever cooked, and the finest wines ever bottled, if a man should be obliged to gobble them standing up, while his train, just ready to start, is whistling behind him. Londoners gulp their pleasures, we country folk sip such as come in our way; think of them a long time in advance with pleasant anticipation, and ruminate on them and talk them over for months afterwards. I submit that even a few choice gratifications thus carefully prized add to a man’s sense of happiness as much as double the number which are received when he is too weary to enjoy or too hurried to recall them.
“Again, the permanent and indefeasible delights of the country seem somehow to be more indispensable to human beings than the high-strung gratifications of the town. The proof of this fact is that, while we can live at home all the year round, Town Mice, after eight or nine months’ residence at longest, begin to hate their beloved city, and pine for the country. Even when they are in the full fling of the London season, it is instructive to notice the enthusiasm and sparkle wherewith they discuss their projected tours a few weeks later among Swiss mountains or up Norwegian fiords. Also it may be observed how of all the entertainments of the year the most popular are the Flower-shows, and the afternoon Garden-parties in certain private grounds. Even the wretched, unmanly sport of Hurlingham has become fashionable, chiefly because it has brought men and women out of London for a day into the semblance of a country place. Had the gentlemen shot the poor pigeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields or Bloomsbury, the admiring spectators of their prowess would have been exceedingly few. Nay, it is enough to watch in any London drawing-room wherein may stand on one table a bouquet of the costliest hot-house flowers, and on the other a bowl of primroses in March, of hawthorn in May, and of purple heather in July, and see how every guest will sooner or later pay some little affectionate attention to the vase which brings the reminiscence of the fields, woods, and mountains, taking no notice at all of the gorgeous azaleas and pelargoniums, gardenias, and camellias, in the rival nosegay. It is very well to boast of the ‘perfection’ and ‘finish’ of London life, but the ‘perfection’ fails to supply the first want of nature,—fresh air; and the ‘finish’ yet waits for a commencement in cheerful sunlight unobscured by smoke and fog, and a silence which shall not be marred all day and night by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds. What man is there who would prefer to live in one of the Venetian palace chambers, gorgeously decorated and adorned with frescos and marbles, and gilding and mirrors, but with a huge high wall, black, damp, and slimy, within two feet of the windows, shutting out the light of day and the air of heaven, rather than in a homely English drawing-room, furnished with nothing better than a few passable water-color sketches and some chintz-covered chairs and sofas, but opening down wide on a sunny garden, with an acacia waving its blossoms over the emerald sward, and the children weaving daisy chains round the neck of the old collie who lies beside them, panting with the warmth of the weather and his own benevolence?
“Then as to the dulness of our country conversation, wherewith my distinguished friend the Town Mouse has rather impolitely taunted us. Is it because we take no particular interest in his gossip of the clubs that he thinks himself justified in pronouncing us stupid? Perhaps we also think him a trifle local (if we may not say provincial) in his choice of topics, and are of opinion that the harvest prospects of our country, and the relations of agricultural labor to capital, are subjects quite as worthy of attention as his petty and transitory cancans about articles in reviews, quarrels, scandals, and jests. East Indians returning to Europe after long absence are often amazed that nobody at home cares much to hear why Colonel Chutnee was sent from Curriepoor to Liverabad, or how it happened that Mrs. Cayenne broke off her engagement with old General Temperatesty. And in like manner perhaps a Londoner may be surprised without much reason that his intensely interesting ‘latest intelligence’ is rather thrown away upon us down in the shires.”
These, as we premised, are the obvious and salient advantages and disadvantages of Town and Country life respectively observed and recognized by everybody who thinks on the subject. It is the purport of the present paper to pass beyond them to some of the more subtle and less noticed features of either mode of existence, and to attempt to strike some kind of balance of the results as regards individuals of different character and the same individual in youth and old age.
When we ask seriously the question which, of any two ways of spending our years, is the most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is not the one which supplies us with the most numerous isolated items of pleasure, but the one of which the whole current tends to maintain in us the capacity for enjoyment at the highest pitch and for as long a time as possible. There is something exceedingly stupid in our common practice of paying superabundant attention to all the external factors of happiness down to the minutest rose-leaf which can be smoothed out for our ease, and all the time forgetting that there must always be an internal factor of delightability to produce the desired result, just as there must be an eye wherewith to see as well as candles to give light. The faculty of taking enjoyment, of finding sweetness in the rose, grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food and rest, interest in books, and happiness in loving and being loved, is—as we must perceive the moment we consider it—indefinitely more precious than any gratification which can be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the affections, just as eyesight is more valuable than the finest landscape, and the power of loving better than the homage of a world. Yet, as Shelley lamented,—
“Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight”;
and we allow it to remain absent from our souls, and grow accustomed to living without it, while all the time we are plodding on, multiplying gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate and evanescent sense they are meant to please is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed, make religio-philosophical remarks on the beautiful patience and cheerfulness of sufferers from agonizing disease, and we smile at the unfailing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys of our acquaintance sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote, with high approval, the poet who sings that
“Stone walls do not a prison make,