The Quest of the Simple Life

The gods exact for songTo become what we sing.

It will be imagined that a man of this order would view my retreat from London with disfavour. He thought me guilty of a kind of social perfidy. No doubt the Earnest Good People, for whom I have the greatest reverence, will agree in the same verdict. A letter received during the last few days from my friend puts the case with such force, and yet with such good-feeling, that I will transcribe a part of it.

'I confess,' he writes, 'that the pleasures of life among the mountains leaves me cold. It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of life. I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving. The thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti puts it, "make a goblin of the sun." You used to be very eloquent against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you yourself living in the same way? I have heard you declaim against the gross selfishness of Goethe's aim in life—"to build the pyramid of his own intellectual culture"; are not you, in your own way, pursuing the same ideal? I have heard you say that nothing so belittled Goethe in your judgment as the fact that he was destitute of patriotism; he dwelt at ease among his books, while his country perished and felt no pang; and you live your joyous life among the hills, and have forgotten the Golgothas on which the poor of London endure their unpitied martyrdom. You are doing good to yourself, no doubt; but is it not a better thing to be doing good to others? I marvel that you can sleep at peace amid the wailing of the world. I cannot, and I thank God I cannot.

'What you do not seem to realise is that all our acts must be judged not only from the personal, but from the collective standpoint. Suppose all men followed your example, what would happen? Why, cities would soon become the mere refuse-heaps of the unfit. The drudges would remain, the captains of industry would be gone. There would be no leaven of higher intelligence left, no standard of manners, nothing that could set the rhythm of life. This is too much the case already. The merchant, the writer, the man of wealth and culture, live as far as they can from the struggling crowd. You would extend the process, and make it possible for the clerk as well as the merchant. If your new gospel of a return to Nature succeeds, we shall soon see the universal exodus of the best intellectual and physical units of the community. But you forget that some millions will remain behind, who cannot flee. Have you no obligations to these?

'Besides this, you do not seem to perceive that the ultimate drift of the new gospel is toward anarchy. The return to nature is practically a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content. There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You save yourself from the collisions of life; but it is in such collisions that the finest fires are struck out of the heart of humanity. Again, I say, any course of action must be judged by its collective effect before it can be rightly understood. It is not the individual that counts, but the race. A good for the individual is not permissible unless it is a good also for the race. I do not admit that your new way of life is an entire good for you, for I believe you must in time suffer from your isolation; but even if I did admit it, I should deny your right to it, if in its large effects it means an ill for the race. Would you venture to say that the race would profit by it if your example were largely imitated? I think you dare not say so much, for you must be aware that the general desertion of cities would mean the decay of commerce and of the arts, the arrest of progress, and national disintegration. And if your own personal example would bear only evil fruit were it elevated to a law of life, it stands condemned.

'For my own part, I am where you left me. I am in the same rooms—dull, stuffy, inconvenient—you know all about them. I breathe quantities of bad air every day, and see a hundred things that distress me. I go three nights a week to the room in Lucraft's Row; struggle with the young barbarians of the slums, and am content if I see but a few signs of order evolving themselves out of chaos. A week ago I was knocked down by a ruffian, who came next day to apologise on the three-fold ground that he was drunk, that he did not know it was me he struck, and that if he had known he never would have done it. My ruffian was very penitent. He has since signed the pledge and is my firm friend. I chased him out of a public-house last night, and made him come home to my lodgings with me, where I gave him coffee, and sang songs to him. He followed all my movements with the big wistful eyes of a dog. There were tears in those eyes when he bade me good-night. He brushed them away with a dirty hand, and said, "I know I can keep straight now, sir, because you are my pal, and I ain't a-going against the wishes of my pal!" This morning he left a pineapple at the door for me—he is a coster, and pineapples are cheap just now. I felt more pleasure than I can say; I could have sung over my work all day, so glad was I. My dear fellow, don't think I speak pharisaically—you know me too well; but I do believe I got more genuine pleasure out of my experience with this rough fellow than you will ever get out of your sunsets. Lucraft's Row is a dull place enough, but when a ray of light does shine into it, it brings with it more than common joy.

'My objection to your new mode of life is that it is entirely self-centred. There is no projection of yourself into other lives. You are contributing nothing to the common stock of moral effort. You are simply marooned. It alters nothing that you have marooned yourself under conditions that please and content you. I think that if I were marooned upon the fairest island of the Southern Seas, where I had but to bask in the sunshine and stretch out my hand to find delightful food, there would be still something in my lot which I should find intolerable. I should spend my days upon the island's loftiest crag, watching for a sail. The thought of a thousand ships not far away, rushing round the globe, with throb of piston, crack of cordage, strain of timber, buffeting of waves, and shouting crews, would drive me distracted. What to me were blue skies and soft winds when I might be sharer in this elemental strife? How should I covet, in all this adorable and detested beauty of my solitary isle, the grey skies that looked on human effort, the violent wind, the roaring waves, the muscles cracking at the capstan, the strong exhilaration of peril, effort, conflict, and the glory of hourly contiguity with death! It was so Ulysses felt:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.

It was so he resolved

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,* * * * *To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

You will not question that the sentiment is manly. Is there not then something that is unmanly in the opposite sentiment? Or, to be plain, my friend, is it not lack of courage which has driven you from us, lack of heroic temper, lack of that divine and primitive instinct which takes a "frolic welcome" in the "thunder and the sunshine," in the conflict and the stress of life?

'I believe that we are bound to be the losers by any wilful separation from our kind. This was the case with the mediaeval monks and ascetics; they lost far more than they gained from their separation from the common life of the people. It is the same still with very rich folk who are able to evade the harsh conscription of life; in evading the conscription of life they invariably deteriorate in physical and mental fibre. I can conceive nothing more ruinous to a young man than that he should have just enough money to make the toil for bread unnecessary. More lives have been spoiled by competence than by poverty; indeed, I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all upon a strong character, except as a stimulus to exertion. Life being what it is, we should take it as we find it: we gain nothing by going out of our way to find an easier path. The beaten road is safest. The man who boldly says, "Let me know the fulness of life; let me taste all that it has to present of vicissitude, joy, sorrow, labour, struggle; let me know all that common people endure, and endure with them; let me be no exception to the common rule, enjoy no special privilege, ask for no immunity from things harsh and disagreeable"—the man who thinks and acts thus is the man who gets the best and most out of life. But you, my friend, have simply copied the old monks in the arrangement of your life. There is nothing novel in your action, though just now your egoism is gratified by the sense of novelty and originality. You have simply gone out of the world to escape the evil of the world. You have bought yourself out of the conscription of life. You have yet to answer me one question: are you the better for it? That question cannot be answered in a day. Ten years hence you will be able to tell me something about it, and I shall be much surprised if you do not then report more of loss than gain. No man ever yet held aloof from his kind without paying the price in narrower sympathies, a narrower brain, and a narrower heart. The eternal spirit of Progress which works throughout the universe never fails to punish the deserter, and the most common punishment is atrophy. Not to submit to the process of evolution is to fall down the long slope of degeneracy.

'You do not need to be told that the entire history of nations confirms this rule. The greatest nations are those which have found life most difficult, and they have thriven on their difficulties. The soft climate, which reduces toil to a minimum, invariably means the enervated race. Under the harsh skies of Britain a great race has been trained to great exploits; but what part have the islands of the South Pacific ever played in human history? Give man a difficulty to overcome, and he at once puts forth his strength; difficulty is his spiritual gymnasium. Impose on him no need of exertion, and he will rot out, just as the races of the South Pacific are rotting out. I would measure the future of a man, or of a nation, by this simple test; do they habitually choose the easier or the harder path for themselves? The nation that chooses the hard path, that is not afraid of the burden of empire, that glories in the strife for primacy and is not afraid to pay the price of primacy in incredible exertion, in blood and sacrifice, is the nation that shall possess the earth. And is it not so with men? Here, again, I press home the need for considering one's actions in their collective aspect. Your course of life is easily imitable: would you have it imitated? There are thousands of men in London who could readily retire into a peaceful life to-morrow, on terms more favourable than yours. Every man possessed of a hundred pounds a year could do it. Yet there are plenty of old men, with ample fortunes, who never dream of doing it. They stick to their posts and they die at them. And it is by such men that the great machinery of social life, of commerce, of national progress is kept going.

'You would say, perhaps, that they are simply sacrificing the finer pleasures of life to the fanaticism of work; ah, but they are also sacrificing them for the good of the community. If the great surgeon or physician bolted from his duties the moment he had acquired money enough to buy a cottage, you would say he had no right to rob mankind of his skill and service to please himself. Have you that right? And if the whole nation acted in this spirit, how long would the nation hold its place of power and influence? In less than a century we should be as the Hottentots. We should be driven out before the advance of more energetic races, just as the Hottentots; who once possessed Southern Europe and Egypt, have been forced back into the African wilderness, where they live a life that is content with the gratification of the most primitive, the most bestial, wants. It is no excuse to say that the action of one man can have but little influence upon the trend of life in a whole nation. The merest unit in the sum, the cipher even, has power to change the total. The strength of wisdom in the majority of a nation may be more than sufficient to-day to counteract the folly of the unit; but there is always the chance that the folly of the individual may in time prevail against the experience of the wise, and pervert the nation. At all events, we ought to consider such possibilities before we hold ourselves free to do as we please in contempt of general custom.

'Do not be angry with me when I say that to me your flight from London appears only an illustration of that cowardice about life which is so common to-day. Men are very much afraid of life to-day; afraid of its responsibilities and duties; afraid of marriage and the burden of children; and not alone for the old are there fears in the way, but even the young men faint and grow weary.

'I can understand Stevenson flying to the South Seas; it was part of his prolonged duel with death. But his heart was in the Highlands, and could he have chosen, his feet would have trodden to old age the grey streets of Edinburgh. Your flight is altogether different. You have no real excuse in ill-health. You have simply fallen sick with a distaste for cities. You have had a bad dream, and you are frightened. I love you still; I count you friend still; but I cannot call you brave.

'O my friend, if I have said anything that sounds unfriendly, do not believe it of me; do not doubt that I love you. I think I should not have written thus but that in your last letter you expressed pity for me, and that stung me, I confess. And so I retort, you see, by pitying you, which is not admirable in me. Therefore let me say, if you care still to please me, do not, in any further letters you may write, ever express the least pity for me. Quite honestly I say I do not need pity, for I am perfectly happy. In giving all the time and money I can spare to the poor in Lucraft's Row, I have really renounced nothing; or, if I have, I am so unconscious of sacrifice that I can only say with Browning:

Renounce joy for thy fellow's sake?That's joy beyond joy!

There are half a dozen ragged boys who love me: there are twenty more who will do so in time; and there is my drunken friend with the dog's eyes, who looks to me to save him from the pit; what more can I ask? Fog and mire, grime and drudgery, these never trouble me, because I see Lucraft's Row, lit with a star, waiting for me at the end of every day. And the star is growing bigger and brighter, for it shines over a tiny obscure Bethlehem where the Soul is getting itself born in a few humble hearts. To be permitted to see this miracle, to assist in this incarnation of the Soul of the People, is its own exceeding great reward; and I may be envied, but never pitied.'

So ran the letter of my friend, and as I transcribe it I feel anew that it is an indictment not to be easily set aside. I must think over what I can reply to it. It seems as though if he be right in his mode of life I must be wrong in mine; and yet may we not both be right? Are we not seeing life from different angles?

Yes, I must have time for thought before I can reply to such a letter.

CHAPTER XII

AM I RIGHT?

I have given myself a week to think over the letter of my friend, and I am now able to perceive that it is built upon a number of most ingenious fallacies. The chief fallacy appears to be this—that he insists that the race must always count for more than the individual, and that the individual must fall in line and step with the average conventions of the race at the expense of his own well-being, or be judged a deserter and a recreant.

It is hardly necessary to point out that no doctrine could be more hostile to collective progress, because progress is not a collective movement, but the movement of great individuals who drag the race after them. I do not recollect a single human reform that has been spontaneously generated in the heart of society itself; it has always had its beginnings in the hearts of individuals. Thus the Reformation is practically Martin Luther, the Evangelical revival is Wesley, the Oxford Movement is Newman, Free Trade is Cobden, and so on through a hundred regenerations of thought, morals, and politics. 'The world being what it is, we must take it as we find it,' is a note of quiet desperation. It is precisely because the Providence of History has again and again raised up men who were incapable of taking the world as they found it, that regenerations and reformations of society have occurred at all. Society never moves forward except when it is goaded by the spirit of individual genius. So far as we can trace the history of civilisation, and thanks to modern research we have about ten thousand years to go by, civilisation is a succession of waves, each flowing a little higher than its predecessor, with an ebb between each. At what point is the ebb checked, at what point does the fuller wave begin to flow? Always with the advent of individual genius. A great man rises who founds a dynasty; a great thinker, who publishes new truths; a great lawgiver or statesman, who establishes a new social system. New worlds need a Columbus, and the social Columbus is always a man with sufficient daring to stand by original convictions. Therefore I say that human progress is only made possible by not taking the world as we find it; and that he is the best friend of collective progress who is the most obedient not to collective convention, but to individual insight.

I observe that my friend does not live in the spirit of his own axiom: else, why should he trouble himself over the inhabitants of Lucraft's Row? He is certainly not taking the world as he finds it when he devotes his hours of leisure to impart the elements of decency to gutter-snipes, and save drunkards from the pit. He is as much an individualist as I, only his individualism expresses itself in a different way; which confirms my original conjecture that we may be equally right in our own mode of life. Nor, by his own confession, does he really sacrifice his inclinations in his mode of life; he gratifies his sense of altruism in Lucraft's Row, and I my love of Nature in the solitude of lonely hills. The objects which give men pleasure may be so diverse that what is a source of joy to one man may be an equal source of misery to another. There can be no doubt that many of the martyrs and ascetics were honestly enamoured of pain and whatever credit they deserve for sacrifice, they pleased themselves by renouncing the world, as others by enjoying it; and all that can be said on the subject is that each pleased himself in his own way.

Thoreau's defence when he was accused of not doing good was that it did not agree with his constitution; and although the defence sounds like a piece of amusing cynicism, it was in reality a plea entirely just. The common fault of the Good Earnest People, as of most people, is that they can only conceive of doing good after a pattern which is congenial to themselves. But their mode of doing good, while it suits themselves admirably, may not suit every constitution, and people of a quite different mental constitution may be quite as good as themselves, although it is after a very different pattern. Thoreau did a vast amount of good by showing men, in his own example, that the simplest kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum? Are not we so much the wiser and stronger by the lessons taught in the hut beside Walden Pond, that it would be the poorest compensation for their loss to know that Thoreau by dint of effort made himself a fairly efficient city missionary, or pleased the pundits of a Charity Organisation Society? Or to take a yet more forcible example of my meaning: Hood wrote The Song of the Shirt, and Wordsworth The Ode on Intimations of Immortality; would either have gained by an exchange of lot? The one poem could only have been written by a man who knew 'the tragic heart of towns,' and the other by the man who knew the tranquil heart of Nature; but Hood, transported to Grasmere, would have written nothing, and Wordsworth in Fleet Street is unthinkable. As it was, Destiny took the matter in hand, and having men to work upon whose first principle of life was to fulfil and not to violate the instincts of their own nature, succeeded in producing two poets who served mankind each in a way not possible to the other.

I suspect there is a great deal of cant to be cleared out of the mind before we can become equitable judges of what doing good really means. I define doing good as the fulfilment of our best instincts and faculties for the best use of mankind; but I do not expect that the Good Earnest People will accept this definition. They would find it much too catholic, simply because they have learned to attach a specialised meaning to the phrase 'doing good,' which limits it to some form of active philanthropy. If they would but allow a wider vision of life to pass before the eye, they would see that there are many ways of doing good besides those which satisfy their own ideals. It is a singular thing that men find it very difficult to live lives of charity without cherishing uncharitable tempers towards those who do not live precisely as they themselves do. For instance, the busy philanthropist, nobly eager to bring a little happiness into the grey lives of the disinherited, often has the poorest opinion of artists and novelists, who appear to him to live useless lives. But when Turner paints a picture like the Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth, which is destined to stir generous thoughts in multitudes of hearts long after his death: or when Scott writes novels which have increased the sum of human happiness for a century, is not each doing good of the rarest, highest, and most enduring kind? The fulfilment of one's best instincts and faculties, for the best use of mankind, is not only the completest, but also the only available form of philanthropy. Since Nature has chosen to endow us with diverse faculties, our service of mankind must be diverse too. In a word, doing good is a much larger business than the ordinary philanthropist imagines; it has many branches and a thousand forms; and they are not always doing the most who seem the busiest, nor do those accomplish most in the alleviation of human misery whose contact with it is the closest.

During the last year of my life in London I came into contact with a brilliant young Oxford man, who had manifest talents for oratory, leadership, and literature. He was in search of a career, and being a youth of quick sympathies and very generous instincts, he was soon caught in the tide of a certain social movement, whose chief aim was to induce persons of culture to live among the very poorest of the poor. The leader of this movement was a man of beautifully unselfish temper, but of no striking intellectual gifts; apart from a certain originality of character, which was the fruit of this unselfish temper, he was quite commonplace in mind, and could have aspired to no higher rank in life than an honourable place among the inferior clergy. He attracted this brilliant youth, however; a youth who had been president of the Oxford Union, and had taken a double first in classics, for whom distinction in life seemed inevitable. The end was that his convert joined what was really a lay order of social and religious service. He lived among the slums of Holborn, devoted himself to the instruction of the children of the gutter, kept the accounts of coal and blanket clubs, and accepted cheerfully all the drudgery of philanthropy among the poor. Most people, I am quite aware, will say that this is a very noble example of renunciation; so it is, and as such I can admire it. But is there nothing else to be considered? May not the sociologist ask whether a man is serving society in the best way by refusing to use his best gifts in the only direction in which they could have full play? For many years this youth had trained himself for a particular part in life which few could fill; he might have influenced the councils of his nation by his powers of debate, the mind of his nation by his gift of literature; he should have stood before kings and spoken to scholars; yet all these high utilities were extinguished in order that he might do something which a man with only a tenth part of his gifts might have done quite as well. Think of the picture; a scholar who never opens a book, an orator who addresses only costers and work-girls, a writer who writes nothing, a leader of men who exerts no public influence; and what is this wilful destruction of high faculties but social waste and robbery? No doubt he is doing good; but would not the good he might have done have been far wider, had he followed the line of his natural gifts, and occupied the place in life for which those gifts obviously fitted him?