Adventures In Contentment - David Grayson
"What have you?" we are ever asking of those we meet. "Information,
learning, money?"
We take it cruelly and pass onward, for such is the law of material
possessions.
"What have you?" we ask. "Charm, personality, character, the great gift
of unexpectedness?"
How we draw you to us! We take you in. Poor or ignorant though you may
be, we link arms and loiter; we love you not for what you have or what
you give us, but for what you are.
I have several good friends (excellent people) who act always as I
expect them to act. There is no flight! More than once I have listened
to the edifying conversation of a certain sturdy old gentleman whom I
know, and I am ashamed to say that I have thought:
"Lord! if he would jump up now and turn an intellectual handspring, or
slap me on the back (figuratively, of course: the other would be
unthinkable), or--yes, swear! I--think I could love him."
But he never does--and I'm afraid he never will!
When I speak then of my books you will know what I mean. The chief charm
of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise,
unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairly
hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the
centuries. How we love 'em! They laughed for themselves, not for us!
Yes, there must be surprise in the books that I keep in the worn case at
my elbow, the surprise of a new personality perceiving for the first
time the beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of
truth. It doesn't matter at all whether the writer is a poet, a
scientist, a traveller, an essayist or a mere daily space-maker, if he
have the God-given grace of wonder.
"What on _earth_ are you laughing about?" cries Harriet from the
sitting-room.
When I have caught my breath, I say, holding up my book:
"This absurd man here is telling of the adventures of a certain
chivalrous Knight."
"But I can't see how you can laugh out like that, sitting all alone
there. Why, it's uncanny."
"You don't know the Knight, Harriet, nor his squire Sancho."
"You talk of them just as though they were real persons."
"Real!" I exclaim, "real! Why they are much more real than most of the
people we know. Horace is a mere wraith compared with Sancho."
And then I rush out.
"Let me read you this," I say, and I read that matchless chapter wherein
the Knight, having clapped on his head the helmet which Sancho has
inadvertently used as a receptacle for a dinner of curds and, sweating
whey profusely, goes forth to fight two fierce lions. As I proceed with
that prodigious story, I can see Harriet gradually forgetting her
sewing, and I read on the more furiously until, coming to the point of
the conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, having yawned, "threw
out some half yard of tongue wherewith he licked and washed his face,"
Harriet begins to laugh.
"There!" I say triumphantly.
Harriet looks at me accusingly.
"Such foolishness!" she says. "Why should any man in his senses try to
fight caged lions!"
"Harriet," I say, "you are incorrigible."
She does not deign to reply, so I return with meekness to my room.
* * * * *
The most distressing thing about the ordinary fact writer is his
cock-sureness. Why, here is a man (I have not yet dropped him out of
the window) who has written a large and sober book explaining life. And
do you know when he gets through he is apparently much discouraged about
this universe. This is the veritable moment when I am in love with my
occupation as a despot! At this moment I will exercise the prerogative
of tyranny:
"Off with his head!"
I do not believe this person though he have ever so many titles to
jingle after his name, nor in the colleges which gave them, if they
stand sponsor for that which he writes, I do not believe he has
compassed this universe. I believe him to be an inconsequent being like
myself--oh, much more learned, of course--and yet only upon the
threshold of these wonders. It goes too deep--life--to be solved by
fifty years of living. There is far too much in the blue firmament, too
many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain. We
are not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the
"scheme of things entire." This is no place for weak pessimism--this
universe. This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fine
adventure! What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, are
insignificant compared with that which may be known.
What this person explains is not, after all, the Universe--but himself,
his own limited, faithless personality. I shall not accept his
explanation. I escape him utterly!
Not long ago, coming in from my fields, I fell to thinking of the
supreme wonder of a tree; and as I walked I met the Professor.
"How," I asked, "does the sap get up to the top of these great maples
and elms? What power is there that should draw it upward against the
force of gravity?"
He looked at me a moment with his peculiar slow smile.
"I don't know," he said.
"What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to tell me that science has not solved
this simplest of natural phenomena?"
"We do not know," he said. "We explain, but we do not know."
No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not know--we do not know the why of the
flowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not even know why, in our own
hearts, we should be asking this curious question--and other deeper
questions.
* * * * *
No man becomes a great writer unless he possesses a highly developed
sense of Mystery, of wonder. A great writer is never _blase_; everything
to him happened not longer ago than this forenoon.
The other night the Professor and the Scotch Preacher happened in here
together and we fell to discussing, I hardly know how, for we usually
talk the neighbourhood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace and of
Charles Baxter, we fell to discussing old Izaak Walton--and the nonsense
(as a scientific age knows it to be) which he sometimes talked with such
delightful sobriety.
"How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment and
progress of his age," said the Professor, "when he reads Izaak's
extraordinary natural history."
"Does it make you feel that way?" asked the Scotch Preacher. "It makes
me want to go fishing."
And he took the old book and turned the leaves until he came to page
54.
"Let me read you," he said, "what the old fellow says about the
'fearfulest of fishes.'"
"'... Get secretly behind a tree, and stand as
free from motion as possible; then put a grasshopper
on your hook, and let your hook hang a quarter of
a yard short of the water, to which end you must rest
your rod on some bough of a tree; but it is likely
that the Chubs will sink down towards the bottom
of the water at the first shadow of your rod, for a
Chub is the fearfulest of fishes, and will do so if but
a bird flies over him and makes the least shadow
on the water; but they will presently rise up to the
top again, and there lie soaring until some shadow
affrights them again; I say, when they lie upon the
top of the water, look at the best Chub, which you,
getting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see,
and move your rod as slowly as a snail moves, to
that Chub you intend to catch, let your bait fall
gently upon the water three or four inches before
him, and he will infallibly take the bait, and you
will be as sure to catch him.... Go your way
presently, take my rod, and do as I bid you, and I
will sit down and mend my tackling till you return
back----'"
"Now I say," said the Scotch Preacher, "that it makes me want to go
fishing."
"That," I said, "is true of every great book: it either makes us want
to do things, to go fishing, or fight harder or endure more
patiently--or it takes us out of ourselves and beguiles us for a time
with the friendship of completer lives than our own."
The great books indeed have in them the burning fire of life;
.... "nay, they do preserve, as in a violl,
the purest efficacie and extraction of that living
intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous
Dragon's teeth; which being sown up and down, may
chance to spring up armed men."
How soon we come to distinguish the books of the mere writers from the
books of real men! For true literature, like happiness, is ever a
by-product; it is the half-conscious expression of a man greatly engaged
in some other undertaking; it is the song of one working. There is
something inevitable, unrestrainable about the great books; they seemed
to come despite the author. "I could not sleep," says the poet Horace,
"for the pressure of unwritten poetry." Dante said of his books that
they "made him lean for many days." I have heard people say of a writer
in explanation of his success:
"Oh, well, he has the literary knack."
It is not so! Nothing is further from the truth. He writes well not
chiefly because he is interested in writing, or because he possesses any
especial knack, but because he is more profoundly, vividly interested in
the activities of life and he tells about them--over his shoulder. For
writing, like farming, is ever a tool, not an end.
How the great one-book men remain with us! I can see Marcus Aurelius
sitting in his camps among the far barbarians writing out the
reflections of a busy life. I see William Penn engaged in great
undertakings, setting down "Some of the Fruits of Solitude," and Abraham
Lincoln striking, in the hasty paragraphs written for his speeches, one
of the highest notes in our American literature.
* * * * *
"David?"
"Yes, Harriet."
"I am going up now; it is very late."
"Yes."
"You will bank the fire and see that the doors are locked?"
"Yes."
After a pause: "And, David, I didn't mean--about the story you read. Did
the Knight finally kill the lions?"
"No," I said with sobriety, "it was not finally necessary."
"But I thought he set out to kill them."
"He did; but he proved his valour without doing it."
Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, but did not do so.
"Valour"--I began in my hortatory tone, seeing a fair opening, but at
the look in her eye I immediately desisted.
"You won't stay up late?" she warned.
"N-o," I said.
Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man who forgot himself into
immortality. How seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, now happily
forgotten! But it was not until he was shut up in jail (some writers I
know might profit by his example) that he "put aside," as he said, "a
more serious and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's Progress." It is
the strangest thing in the world--the judgment of men as to what is
important and serious! Bunyan says in his rhymed introduction:
"I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I:
I did it my own self to gratify."
Another man I love to have at hand is he who writes of Blazing Bosville,
the Flaming Tinman, and of The Hairy Ones.
How Borrow escapes through his books! His object was not to produce
literature but to display his erudition as a master of language and of
outlandish custom, and he went about the task in all seriousness of
demolishing the Roman Catholic Church. We are not now so impressed with
his erudition that we do not smile at his vanity and we are quite
contented, even after reading his books, to let the church survive; but
how shall we spare our friend with his inextinguishable love of life,
his pugilists, his gypsies, his horse traders? We are even willing to
plow through arid deserts of dissertation in order that we may enjoy the
perfect oases in which the man forgets himself!
Reading such books as these and a hundred others, the books of the worn
case at my elbow.
"The bulged and the bruised octavos,
The dear and the dumpy twelves----"
I become like those initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries who, as
Cicero tells us, have attained "the art of living joyfully and of dying
with a fairer hope."
* * * * *
It is late, and the house is still. A few bright embers glow in the
fireplace. You look up and around you, as though coming back to the
world from some far-off place. The clock in the dining-room ticks with
solemn precision; you did not recall that it had so loud a tone. It has
been a great evening, in this quiet room on your farm, you have been
able to entertain the worthies of all the past!
You walk out, resoundingly, to the kitchen and open the door. You look
across the still white fields. Your barn looms black in the near
distance, the white mound close at hand is your wood-pile, the great
trees stand like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has drifted upon the
doorstep and lies there untracked. It is, indeed, a dim and untracked
world: coldly beautiful but silent--and of a strange unreality! You
close the door with half a shiver and take the real world with you up to
bed. For it is past one o'clock.
[Illustration: "The beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the
greatness of truth"]
XIII
THE POLITICIAN
In the city, as I now recall it (having escaped), it seemed to be the
instinctive purpose of every citizen I knew not to get into politics but
to keep out. We sedulously avoided caucuses and school-meetings, our
time was far too precious to be squandered in jury service, we forgot to
register for elections, we neglected to vote. We observed a sort of
aristocratic contempt for political activity and then fretted and fumed
over the low estate to which our government had fallen--and never saw
the humour of it all.
At one time I experienced a sort of political awakening: a "boss" we
had was more than ordinarily piratical. I think he had a scheme to steal
the city hall and sell the monuments in the park (something of that
sort), and I, for one, was disturbed. For a time I really wanted to bear
a man's part in helping to correct the abuses, only I did not know how
and could not find out.
In the city, when one would learn anything about public matters, he
turns, not to life, but to books or newspapers. What we get in the city
is not life, but what someone else tells us about life. So I acquired a
really formidable row of works on Political Economy and Government (I
admire the word "works" in that application) where I found Society laid
out for me in the most perfect order--with pennies on its eyes. How
often, looking back, I see myself as in those days, read my learned
books with a sort of fury of interest!--
From the reading of books I acquired a sham comfort. Dwelling upon the
excellent theory of our institutions, I was content to disregard the
realities of daily practice. I acquired a mock assurance under which I
proceeded complacently to the polls, and cast my vote without knowing a
single man on the ticket, what he stood for, or what he really intended
to do. The ceremony of the ballot bears to politics much the
relationship that the sacrament bears to religion: how often, observing
the formality, we yet depart wholly from the spirit of the institution.
It was good to escape that place of hurrying strangers. It was good to
get one's feet down into the soil. It was good to be in a place where
things _are_ because they _grow_, and politics, not less than corn! Oh,
my friend, say what you please, argue how you like, this crowding
together of men and women in unnatural surroundings, this haste to be
rich in material things, this attempt to enjoy without production, this
removal from first-hand life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin.
If our cities were not recruited constantly with the fresh, clean blood
of the country, with boys who still retain some of the power and the
vision drawn from the soil, where would they be!
"We're a great people," says Charles Baxter, "but we don't always work
at it."
"But we talk about it," says the Scotch Preacher.
"By the way," says Charles Baxter, "have you seen George Warren? He's up
for supervisor."
"I haven't yet."
"Well, go around and see him. We must find out exactly what he intends
to do with the Summit Hill road. If he is weak on that we'd better look
to Matt Devine. At least Matt is safe."
The Scotch Preacher looked at Charles Baxter and said to me with a note
of admiration in his voice:
"Isn't this man Baxter getting to be intolerable as a political boss!"
* * * * *
Baxter's shop! Baxter's shop stands close to the road and just in the
edge of a grassy old apple orchard. It is a low, unpainted building,
with generous double doors in front, standing irresistibly open as you
go by. Even as a stranger coming here first from the city I felt the
call of Baxter's shop. Shall I ever forget! It was a still morning--one
of those days of warm sunshine--and perfect quiet in the country--and
birds in the branches--and apple trees all in bloom. Baxter whistling
at his work in the sunlit doorway of his shop, in his long, faded apron,
much worn at the knees. He was bending to the rhythmic movement of his
plane, and all around him as he worked rose billows of shavings. And oh,
the odours of that shop! the fragrant, resinous odour of new-cut pine,
the pungent smell of black walnut, the dull odour of oak wood--how they
stole out in the sunshine, waylaying you as you came far up the road,
beguiling you as you passed the shop, and stealing reproachfully after
you as you went onward down the road.
Never shall I forget that grateful moment when I first passed Baxter's
shop--a failure from the city--and Baxter looking out at me from his
deep, quiet, gray eyes--eyes that were almost a caress!
My wayward feet soon took me, unintroduced, within the doors of that
shop, the first of many visits. And I can say no more in appreciation of
my ventures there than that I came out always with more than I had when
I went in.
The wonders there! The long bench with its huge-jawed wooden vises, and
the little dusty windows above looking out into the orchard, and the
brown planes and the row of shiny saws, and the most wonderful pattern
squares and triangles and curves, each hanging on its own peg; and
above, in the rafters, every sort and size of curious wood. And oh! the
old bureaus and whatnots and high-boys in the corners waiting their turn
to be mended; and the sticky glue-pot waiting, too, on the end of the
sawhorse. There is family history here in this shop--no end of it--the
small and yet great (because intensely human) tragedies and humours of
the long, quiet years among these sunny hills. That whatnot there, the
one of black walnut with the top knocked off, that belonged in the old
days to----
"Charles Baxter," calls my friend Patterson from the roadway, "can you
fix my cupboard?"
"Bring it in," says Charles Baxter, hospitably, and Patterson brings it
in, and stops to talk--and stops--and stops--There is great talk in
Baxter's shop--the slow-gathered wisdom of the country, the lore of
crops and calves and cabinets. In Baxter's shop we choose the next
President of these United States!
You laugh! But we do--exactly that. It is in the Baxters' shops (not in
Broadway, not in State Street) where the presidents are decided upon. In
the little grocery stores you and I know, in the blacksmithies, in the
schoolhouses back in the country!
* * * * *
Forgive me! I did not intend to wander away. I meant to keep to my
subject--but the moment I began to talk of politics in the country I was
beset by a compelling vision of Charles Baxter coming out of his shop in
the dusk of the evening, carrying his curious old reflector lamp and
leading the way down the road to the schoolhouse. And thinking of the
lamp brought a vision of the joys of Baxter's shop, and thinking of the
shop brought me naturally around to politics and presidents; and here I
am again where I started!
Baxter's lamp is, somehow, inextricably associated in my mind with
politics. Being busy farmers, we hold our caucuses and other meetings in
the evening and usually in the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is
conveniently near to Baxter's shop, so we gather at Baxter's shop.
Baxter takes his lamp down from the bracket above his bench, reflector
and all, and you will see us, a row of dusky figures, Baxter in the
lead, proceeding down the roadway to the schoolhouse. Having arrived,
some one scratches a match, shields it with his hand (I see yet the
sudden fitful illumination of the brown-bearded, watchful faces of my
neighbours!) and Baxter guides us into the schoolhouse--with its shut-in
dusty odours of chalk and varnished desks and--yes, leftover lunches!
Baxter's lamp stands on the table, casting a vast shadow of the chairman
on the wall.
"Come to order," says the chairman, and we have here at this moment in
operation the greatest institution in this round world: the institution
of free self-government. Great in its simplicity, great in its
unselfishness! And Baxter's old lamp with its smoky tin reflector, is
not that the veritable torch of our liberties?
This, I forgot to say, though it makes no special difference--a caucus
would be the same--is a school meeting.
You see, ours is a prolific community. When a young man and a young
woman are married they think about babies; they want babies, and what
is more, they have them! and love them afterward! It is a part of the
complete life. And having babies, there must be a place to teach them to
live.
Without more explanation you will understand that we needed an addition
to our schoolhouse. A committee reported that the amount required would
be $800. We talked it over. The Scotch Preacher was there with a plan
which he tacked up on the blackboard and explained to us. He told us of
seeing the stone-mason and the carpenter, he told us what the seats
would cost, and the door knobs and the hooks in the closet. We are a
careful people; we want to know where every penny goes!
"If we put it all in the budget this year what will that make the rate?"
inquires a voice from the end of the room.
We don't look around; we know the voice. And when the secretary has
computed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz of
multiplications and additions which is going on in each man's head as he
calculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes on
his farm, his daughter's piano his wife's top-buggy.
And many a man is saying to himself:
"If we build this addition to the schoolhouse, I shall have to give up
the new overcoat I have counted upon, or Amanda won't be able to get the
new cooking-range."
That's _real_ politics: the voluntary surrender of some private good for
the upbuilding of some community good. It is in such exercises that the
fibre of democracy grows sound and strong. There is, after all, in this
world no real good for which we do not have to surrender something. In
the city the average voter is never conscious of any surrender. He never
realises that he is giving anything himself for good schools or good
streets. Under such conditions how can you expect self-government? No
service, no reward!
The first meeting that I sat through watching those bronzed farmers at
work gave me such a conception of the true meaning of self-government as
I never hoped to have.
"This is the place where I belong," I said to myself.
It was wonderful in that school meeting to see how every essential
element of our government was brought into play. Finance? We discussed
whether we should put the entire $800 into the next year's budget or
divide it paying part in cash and bonding the district for the
remainder. The question of credit, of interest, of the obligations of
this generation and the next, were all discussed. At one time long ago I
was amazed when I heard my neighbours arguing in Baxter's shop about the
issuance of certain bonds by the United States government: how
completely they understood it! I know now where they got that
understanding. Right in the school meetings and town caucuses where they
raise money yearly for the expenses of our small government! There is
nothing like it in the city.
The progress of a people can best be judged by those things which they
accept as matters-of-fact. It was amazing to me, coming from the city,
and before I understood, to see how ingrained had become some of the
principles which only a few years ago were fiercely-mooted problems. It
gave me a new pride in my country, a new appreciation of the steps in
civilisation which we have already permanently gained. Not a question
have I ever heard in any school meeting of the necessity of educating
every American child--at any cost. Think of it! Think how far we have
come in that respect, in seventy--yes, fifty--years. Universal education
has become a settled axiom of our life.
And there was another point--so common now that we do not appreciate the
significance of it. I refer to majority rule. In our school meeting we
were voting money out of men's pockets--money that we all needed for
private expenses--and yet the moment the minority, after full and honest
discussion, failed to maintain its contention in opposition to the new
building, it yielded with perfect good humour and went on with the
discussion of other questions. When you come to think of it, in the
light of history, is not that a wonderful thing?