But how many have there been who never found a real home, though they sought it painfully and with tears! Byron, the predestinate wanderer, and Rousseau, who never found rest, who complained that his birth was but the beginning of his misfortunes, le premier de mes malheurs—these are types of the less fortunate class. But we need not multiply examples; it is the old story of wandering and homelessness. How often is the homing effort made in vain! One would fancy the air filled with piloting spirits that endeavor to find ways of escape for the languishing body, spirits constantly coming and going between the rock of exile and the far distant home. Sometimes the effort succeeds, as we have seen; and sometimes it fails; the spirit wastes itself in vain endeavor, passes away like the unnoticed melting of a cloud. To spirits thus aspiring, thus failing, life is indeed what old Desportes calls it, a bitter and thorny blossom, une fleur espineuse et poignante. For what is the loss of opportunity but the loss of the soul? and the conscious loss of opportunity may go on for a lifetime, a protracted martyrdom. Take the case of any intelligent exile, some wanderer in the Macerian desert, some refined person unluckily born in Patagonia, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, who no longer craves the most succulent of limpets gathered at the lowest tide: in our own comfort and satisfaction cannot we extend a little compassion to him? Not that I have the least prejudice against Patagonia; but we need some name for the better concentration of our sympathy. The intelligent but discontented Patagonian, then, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of Patagonia, whose ways are not Patagonian ways, he to whom even the most successful popular career in Patagonia would seem a humiliation, because it would associate him with the Patagonian character, and so compromise him before the extra-Patagonian world—his, I say, is not a happy case. His exile must end like other banishments for life—either in escape or in death. For while he lives he must do without spiritual light and heat, without the intellectual climate that he needs.
Do you call this a morbid state of mind in the Patagonian? Well, it may be that he should imitate the repose, the serenity of the limpet; it may be his duty to rest contented with the beach at low tide, with the estate to which he was born; and yet I say that his feeling is not devoid of a certain distinction; it may be, indeed, very blamable, but it is a feeling that is no trait of ignoble natures.
And there is, too, a sanative quality in that feeling. His critical attitude may help the exile to keep before him higher standards, whether in thought or in conduct, whether in his "Hellenizing" or his "Hebraizing" tendencies, as Mr. Arnold calls them, than he might entertain were he living comfortably at the very centre. His privations may thus be more effective than the maceration of the recluse in keeping him in sympathy with culture, with the best things of the mind; and surely that is some compensation for living in Patagonia! There is still another: there is a fortunate exemption for such exiles—fortunate we may safely call it, though it is but a negative beatitude—the exemption from envy. That is worth not a little. In Paris, in London, in Pekin, how many provocatives to envy beset even the philosopher! For in those cities he must see many undeniably superior persons about him—persons superior to himself not only in fortune, but in ability! There, in attainment of all sorts, he meets his rivals; and if he is a real philosopher, he will remember Creon's caution—"not to get the idea fixed in your head that what you say and nothing else is right."[5 ] Still, philosopher or not, he will be likely to envy some of the desirable things that he sees; and the fault is perhaps excusable: at any rate an occasional touch of the claw, an effleurement now and then of the passion, need not surprise us, even when we do not excuse it, in London or Pekin. But in the Patagonian civilization, however important it may be to the progress of the world, what does such a man find to envy? Surely the higher provocatives to that weakness are not abundant. Hereditary wealth, ancient family dignities, culture, scholarship, imposing genius—these do not surround him, these do not confront him with his inferiority as they do, let us say, in this country. It is we, then, who are the unhappy ones in this respect; but we can understand, at least, the weakness of brethren who may be a little shaken by the contemplation of all the desirable things in which the richer civilizations abound.
Yes, the careers which we may observe from day to day may certainly prove stumbling blocks to some of us. The thriving politician or contractor, for instance, Dives in his barouche, the blooming members of literary cliques, the fashionable clergymen and poets, chorusing gently to feminine audiences, who listen intent, perhaps even "weeping in a rapturous sense of art," as Heine tells us the women of his day wept when they heard the sweet voices of the evirates singing of passion, of
Liebes fehnen,
Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss—
how admirable are all these characters! These, indeed, are careers to move any but the steadfast mind.
And yet, even in Philistia, it is not every one that will yearn after successes like these. In Philistia, far from the promised land, the exile may yet contemplate without desire all these desirable things, envying neither them nor their possessors. He may even indulge in a saving scorn of them, a scorn of the main achievements, the popular men of the Philistine community; bathing himself in irony as a tonic against the spiritual malaria. Such a man I once knew, a man of Askelon. He lived in that rich city as a recluse, and according to any standard recognized in Askelon, he was not rich. On this text he would sometimes quote delightful old Rutebeuf:
Je ne sai par ou je coumance,
Tant ai de matyère abondance