The Romance of the Commonplace

by Gelett Burgess

Let us grant that, in the gross, every new community must be crude--it takes time to grow ivy over the walls, to soften the primary colours into harmonious tones, to smooth off the rough edges,--but let us also grant that, at all the back doorways of empire, in far-away corners of the earth, are assembled little coteries of men and women who, by reason of their very isolation, rather than despite it, have made themselves cosmopolitan, catholic, eclectic, and stand ever ready to welcome, each in his own polite dialect and idiom, the astonished traveller who thinks he has left all that is great and good behind.

This compensation is, indeed, a natural law. If we cut back half the shoots of a shrub, the surviving sprouts will be more vigorous. The deprivation of one sense renders the others more acute. Make it hard for an ambitious lad to obtain an education, and, working alone by candle-light, he will outstrip the student with greater advantages. So it is with the colonial who realizes his poverty of artistic and intellectual resources. He must, in self-defense and to compensate for his isolation, make friends with the world at large, and his mental vision, accustomed to long ranges of sight, becomes sharp and subtile. To avoid the reproach of provincialism he studies the great centers of thought and watches eagerly for the first signs of new growths in fads, fashions, art and politics. It is for this reason that the British colonial is more British than the Englishman at home.

Plunged in the midst of the turmoil of every-day excitements, the dwellers in great cities lose much of the true and fine significance of things. A thousand enterprises are beginning, and amidst a myriad essays the headway of yesterday's novelty is lost in the struggle of today's agonists. The little, temporary, local success seems big with import, and the slower development of more serious and permanent virtues is ignored. Things are seen so closely that they are out of true proportion, and they are seen through media of personality that diffract and magnify.

But the provincial, far from this complicated aspect of intellectual life, gains greatly in perspective. Separated by great space, he is, in a way, separated by time also, and he sees what another generation will perhaps see in the history of today. For he watches not only literary London, that tiniest and most garrulous of gossiping villages, but a dozen other hives of thought as well, and from his very distance can the more easily discern the first signs of pre-eminence. His ears are not ringing with a myriad petty clamours, but he can hear, rising above the multitudinous hum, the voice of those who sing clearest. The connoisseur in art views a painting from across the hall--the lover of music does not sit too close to the orchestra--and so the intelligent looker-on at life does not come too often in familiar touch with the aspirants for fame. Living, as one might say, upon a hill, the stranger thus gets the range, volume and trend of human activities, and sees their movements, like those of armies marching below him, though they seem as ants, so far away. He can trace the direction of waves of emotion that follow round the earth like tides of the sea.

In every community, however small or remote, there are a few who delight in this comprehensive view of things, who keep up with the times, and, so far as their immediate neighbours are concerned, are ahead of the prevailing mode. As the meteorologist, studying the reports from North, South, East and West, can trace the progress of storm and wind, so these intelligent observers can predict what will be talked about next, and how soon the first murmurs will reach their shores. Their cosmic laboratory is the club library table, with its journals and periodicals from all over the world.

The first hint of a new success in literature comes from the London weeklies, and then, if the British opinion is corroborated by American favour, the New York papers take up the note of praise, and one may follow the progress of a novel's triumph across three thousand five hundred miles of continent, or see the word pass from colony to colony, over the whole empire. The Londoner sees but the bubbles at the spring--the pioneer by the Pacific watches the course of a mighty stream increasing in depth and width. Tomorrow, or in three months, the vogue will reach his own town, and he will smile to see all tongues wag of the latest literary success.

So it is with art, so it is with fashions, with the drama and with every fad and foible, from golf and Babism to the last song and catchword of the music halls. The colonial is behind the times? What does it matter! Are we not all behind the times of tomorrow? So long as we cannot travel faster than the news, it makes little difference; and it is wise, when we are in San Francisco, to do as the Franciscans do. It is as bad to be ahead of the times as to be behind, and it is best to follow the style of one's own locality, with a shrewd eye to one's purchases for the future, buying what we can see must come into popular favour.

But does your metropolitan enjoy this complexity, this living in the future? Not he! He cares nothing for the vieux jeu. For him, ping-pong is dead or dying--he neither knows nor cares that it still lives in the Occident, marching in glory ever towards the West, along the old trail to fame. Of the last six successful books discussed over his muffins, does he know which have been virile enough to survive transplanting to other shores--which have emigrated and become naturalized in the colonies? No! He is for the next little victory at the tea tables of the elect!

And yet, this afterglow, this subsequent invasion of new territory is what brings enduring fame. Before the city election is substantiated, the country must be heard from. The urban hears the solo voices of adulation, the worship of those near and dear to celebrity, but the great chorus that sweeps the hero up to Parnassus comes from a wider stage. The army of invasion never comes home again to be hailed as victor until it has encircled the globe. But it is the greater conquest that the dweller at the outpost sees, at first like a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, and it is his game to watch and await it. It is better so. Waste no pity upon him at the edge of the world. For the big game needs big men, and it is the boldest and most strenuous spirits who push to Ultima Thule. The anæmic and neurotic do not emigrate; the reddest blood has flowed in the veins of the pioneer ever since the first migration. He does things, rather than talks of things others have done--he knows life, even if he knows not Ibsen. Meet him in his far-away home, and he holds your interest with an unlooked-for charm; take him to the Elgin marbles and he will have and hold his own idea of art unborrowed from text-books. He knows more of your city's history than you do yourself; panic or the furor of a fashion cannot hypnotize him. The importance of a celebrated name cannot embarrass him, for he has met men unknown to fame who have lived as uncrowned kings. He has seen cities rise from the plain. He has made the wilderness to blossom like the rose; he has lived, not written epics.

And in addition to gaining all this experience that trained the pioneers of old, he has, while living at the confines of civilization, kept in touch with the world, and has tasted the exhilarating flavour of the old and new in one mouthful. For, in this century, distance is swept away and no land is really isolate. The pioneer lives like a god above distinctions of time, at once in the past, the present and the future.