By virtue of the peasant or gipsy blood in me I kept my earth-hunger through twenty years of London life, but I count my case unique. I never found any one who shared my feelings; on the contrary, I found that whatever primitive instincts toward country life my friends may have had once, London had made an effectual end of them. The country means for most Londoners, not the blessed solitude of open spaces, but Margate or Brighton. When the annual summer exodus arrives he does but exchange one kind of town for another kind. He carries with him all the aptitudes and artificial instincts of the town; he loves the bustle of a crowd; he wants boarding-houses full of company, and streets brilliant with electric light; and he returns to town, after a vivacious fortnight, without having once looked upon the real country, unless it be with the distracted eye of a rider on a char-à-banc. If my earth-hunger did not die in London, it was mainly because my holidays were of a very different description. I never visited but one watering-place, and that was enough. I never stayed in a boarding-house in my life, nor would the promise of all my expenses paid and a handsome bonus into the bargain tempt me to the experiment. I sought the country absolute; a cottage or a little farm remote from towns and out of sound of railways; villages so tiny that maps refuse to name them. I can count half a dozen of these places which haunt my memory with all the sanctity of some religious dream. They were my temporary cloisters, where I received the sacrament of silence; the woodland sanctuaries where my spirit was renewed. When my friends returned from Margate they were full of chatter about the people that they had met, and they went about whistling the last song they had heard upon the beach. I had met no one but a few simple labouring folk, and the music I remembered was the whistling of blackbirds and thrushes in the early dawn. I knew that I had purchased much finer pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood me. The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush.
There is one tiny farm that I love to think of, because its tenants taught me better than a thousand books could have done how real was the felicity of simple life. It had six rooms all told, and was little better than a cottage. Before its door ran a clear river which connected two lakes; a pinewood rose behind the house, and behind this again the lower buttresses of the everlasting hills. The nearest town was seven miles away; you reached it by a lovely road, in part through pinewoods, in part over open moors, with the silver flashing of a lake never far away, and the purple mountains always close at hand. The farm-holding was insignificantly small, as was the case in those parts; but my host uttered no word of its insufficiency. He grew enough oats to provide good oatmeal for his family and fodder for his horse; his potatoes also came from his own soil, and his bacon from his own stye; his few sheep gave him fresh meat, or brought him a little money in the market, and from their wool every blanket in the house was spun, and even his own clothing woven. Two cows provided milk and butter for the household; his fowls gave him eggs and occasionally a dinner; and thus with the exception of the yearly grocer's bill he spent next to no money. I dwelt beneath this humble roof for a month, and I profess that in all that time I never saw the members of the household engaged in any labour that was not also a pleasure. There was plenty of work, of course: cows to be milked, vegetables to be dug and cleansed, meals to be prepared, the little harvest to be gathered in; but it was work that one could do with singing. No one hurried over it, for there was ample time for every duty of the day. No one felt these simple duties burdensome, because they were so natural and inevitable, It was a rare day when some member of the household did not find an hour or two for fishing, and a disappointing breakfast that did not show a lordly dish of trout.
It may be imagined that in a place so remote culture would be missing—at least the love and knowledge of books which we call culture; but when I say the place was Scotch this delusion is disposed of. The children had had to walk that long seven miles a day and back again, in all weathers, to obtain an education. They had grown up to value it, and were the better mentally as well as physically for their thousands of miles of tramping. There were books in the little household, and good books too. As often as not when we sat round the red peats of an evening, we discussed Browning or Herbert Spencer. That year it happened that a party of students from Edinburgh University were camping in the neighbourhood, and they often joined us round the farm fire of an evening. They talked about books and opinions and men with all the omniscience of youth; but the two girls of the household held their own with them. Ah, Kate M'Intyre, you did me much friendly service in tying flies for me that summer, and teaching me something of the craft of fishing; but you did a far more enduring service in helping me to see that one does not need towns and libraries to grow the fine flower of wholesome cultured womanhood. Here, beside that lake, whose lady has been made immortal by the hand of Scott, you showed me that God grows ladies still who wear homespun and live in cottages, and are all the wiser and sweeter for the bright seclusion of their lives. In a town, you and your family, endowed only with such means as you found sufficient for existence, would have been despondent drudges, you yourself perhaps working in a sewing-room in bad air and for poor pay, but here you were the free-holders of nature. Never did I see you go about your simple duties—always with a bright look and a snatch of song—but I said to myself, 'She hath chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her'; and I say it still, though I am well aware that the smart young women of London shops and restaurants will not believe me. I dare say they would count themselves much better off than you in money, in dress, and in opportunities of pleasure; but I know who was the richer in vitality, in health, and in the power of happiness.
When I lived among these simple folk I shared not only their roof but their labours, and it was thus I came to distinguish between the nature of work in cities and work in the country. To obtain my meal in a city I had to do things that were distasteful to me; I had to shut myself away from the fresh air and sunlight in a dingy room and to spend dull hours in tasks which afforded me no genuine intellectual pleasure. Here, on the contrary, every duty had a pastime yoked with it. I rose early, not only that I might learn to milk the cows, but that I might see the sunrise; if I went into the woods to saw logs that would presently make a clear flame on the evening fire, my lungs drank health among the forest fragrances; when I went fishing I did something not only pleasurable but useful, for I added dainties to my larder. In the city I lived to work; here I worked to live. I might go further and say that in the city I lived to work for other people, for my brains were daily exploited that my master might maintain a house at Kensington, and when the landlord, the water-lord, the light-lord, and the rate-collector had all had their dues from me there was little enough left that I could call my own. Here, on the contrary, all that I did had an immediate and direct relation to my own well-being. The amount of work I had to do to live was light, and I bought with it something that was my own. We are so used to the exactions of a complicated and artificial life, that it is an amazing discovery to ascertain how small is the toll of labour which Nature asks of those who live naturally. You have but to do certain things which in themselves are pleasures to obtain ample means of life; and as these things are soon and easily done by a healthy human creature there is an abundant leisure at his command. To split pine-logs, dig a garden, pull a heavy boat down the lake after fish, tramp up the hillside to collect the sheep, are simply so many exercises of the body, the equivalents of which town youths find in the gymnasium or the football field; the difference is that all this exertion in the gymnasium, which the town youth takes to keep up his health, would in the country keep him. The same amount of muscular exertion which a town youth puts forth to chase a ball round a twenty acre field would, if properly applied, put a roof over his head and food on his table. The sports of the civilised man are means of life to the natural man. If a man must needs sweat, and be bemired, and have an aching back, it is surely better economy to have a house and a good meal at the end of it all than merely a good appetite for a meal that he has yet to pay for. I do not object to buy health in hard physical exercise if I can buy it in no other way; but I am better satisfied if I can buy health and a meal at the same time and for the same price. This is practically what is done every day by men who live in the country. In a town they would undertake an equal amount of muscular exertion for the sake of health, and would find that they still had 'to go to business' to live; here they have done their business in doing their pleasure.
Earth-hunger is without doubt the most wholesome passion men can entertain, and if Governments were wise they would do all they could to fortify and gratify it. On the contrary, the settled policy of English Government is entirely hostile to it. There is no country where it is so difficult to acquire freehold land in small quantities—a subject on which I shall have more to say presently. Bad land-laws lie at the back of what we call the urban tendencies of modern life. If fifty years ago the Irish peasantry had had the same facilities for acquiring land that they have to-day, it is safe to say that there would have been little or no emigration, for never was there race that left the land of its fathers with such bitter and entire reluctance as the Irish. The English peasant shares the same reluctance, though his slower nature is incapable of expressing it with the same volubility of anguish. Give him enough land to live upon; make him a proprietor instead of a serf; let him have fair railway rates, so that his produce can fetch its proper price in the markets, and there were no man so proud and so content as he. But this is just what the feudal laws of England will not do for him; and so millions of acres fall out of cultivation and farms go a-begging because the men who could have kept them prosperous have been forced to sell their thews and muscles to be prostituted in the dismal drudgeries of cities.
There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by Money-hunger. Simple ideas of life must needs perish where the nature of a nation's life makes them difficult or impossible of attainment. A country-born youth might keep to the soil, if he saw the slightest hope that the soil would keep him; when he sees that this is impossible he files to cities, because he believes that there is more gold to be picked up in the city mire in a month than can be won from the ploughed fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome Earth-hunger—old as the primal Eden, where man's life began—is stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture of Nature is cast aside for the blotted pages of the betting-book; sport becomes not a means of recreation but of gambling; and instead of sturdy races bred upon the soil, and drawing from the soil solid qualities of mind and body, you have blighted and anaemic races, bred amid the populous disease of cities, and incapable of any task that shall demand steady energy, continuous thought, or sober powers of reflection or of will.
CHAPTER V
HEALTH AND ECONOMICS
Enough has been said to show that I never heartily settled to a town life, and that the obstacle to content was my own character. Mere discontent with one's environment, however useful it may be as an irritant to prevent stagnation and brutish acquiescence, obviously does not carry one very far. Men may chafe for years at the conditions of their lot without in any way attempting to amend them. I soon came to see that I was in danger of falling into this condition of futility. I was, therefore, forced to face the question whether my continual inward protest against the kind of life which I led was founded on anything more stable than an opinion or a sentiment? No man ever yet took a positively heroic or original course for the sake of an opinion. Opinion must become conviction before it has any potency to change the ordering of life. I saw plainly that I must either bring my thoughts to the point of conviction or discard them altogether.
There is a good phrase which is sometimes used about men who are members of a party, without in any way entering into its propagandist aims—we say that they 'do not play the game.' They may have excellent philosophic reasons for their aloofness, or even admirable scruples; but parties do not ask for either. Parties ask for party loyalty, and to give this loyalty personal scruples must be set aside. I could not but apply this doctrine to my own state of mind. London asked me to play the game, and I was not playing it. It was impossible to put heart into a kind of life which I inwardly detested. I did my day's work with a mind divided; and, although no one could accuse me of wilful negligence, yet a child could see that my work missed that quality of entire efficiency which makes for success. I might count myself much superior to men like Arrowsmith by the possession of superior sentiments, yet, in the long run, my sentiment debilitated me, and his destitution of sentiment was a source of power to him in the kind of work we both had to do. To the man who detests the nature of his employment as I detested mine, I would say at once, either conquer your detestation or change your work. Work that is not genuinely loved cannot possibly be done well. It is no use chafing and fretting and wishing that you lived in the country, if you know perfectly well that you have not the least intention of living anywhere but in the town. If it is town life you are really bent upon, the sooner rustic instincts are uprooted the better for you. London can prove herself a complaisant mistress to those who desire no other, but she will give nothing to those who flout her in their hearts. In plain words there is no middle course between accepting the yoke or finally rejecting it; either course may be justified, but it is the silliest folly to accept with complacency a yoke which you mean to shake off the moment you have courage or opportunity to revolt. London marks such dissemblers with an angry eye, as captains mark reluctant soldiers; and if time holds no disgrace for them it will certainly bring them no advancement.