"Oh, Universe, what thou wishest, I wish."
--_Marcus Aurelius_
I come to the end of these Adventures with a regret I can scarcely
express. I, at least, have enjoyed them. I began setting them down with
no thought of publication, but for my own enjoyment; the possibility of
a book did not suggest itself until afterwards. I have tried to relate
the experiences of that secret, elusive, invisible life which in every
man is so far more real, so far more important than his visible
activities--the real expression of a life much occupied in other
employment.
When I first came to this farm, I came empty-handed. I was the veritable
pattern of the city-made failure. I believed that life had nothing more
in store for me. I was worn out physically, mentally and, indeed,
morally. I had diligently planned for Success; and I had reaped defeat.
I came here without plans. I plowed and harrowed and planted, expecting
nothing. In due time I began to reap. And it has been a growing marvel
to me, the diverse and unexpected crops that I have produced within
these uneven acres of earth. With sweat I planted corn, and I have here
a crop not only of corn but of happiness and hope. My tilled fields have
miraculously sprung up to friends!
This book is one of the unexpected products of my farm. It is this way
with the farmer. After the work of planting and cultivating, after the
rain has fallen in his fields, after the sun has warmed them, after the
new green leaves have broken the earth--one day he stands looking out
with a certain new joy across his acres (the wind bends and half turns
the long blades of the corn) and there springs up within him a song of
the fields. No matter how little poetic, how little articulate he is,
the song rises irrepressibly in his heart, and he turns aside from his
task with a new glow of fulfillment and contentment. At harvest time in
our country I hear, or I imagine I hear, a sort of chorus rising over
all the hills, and I meet no man who is not, deep down within him, a
singer! So song follows work: so art grows out of life!
And the friends I have made! They have come to me naturally, as the corn
grows in my fields or the wind blows in my trees. Some strange potency
abides within the soil of this earth! When two men stoop (there must be
stooping) and touch it together, a magnetic current is set up between
them: a flow of common understanding and confidence. I would call the
attention of all great Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians to this
phenomenon: it will repay investigation. It is at once the rarest and
the commonest thing I know. It shows that down deep within us, where we
really live, we are all a good deal alike. We have much the same
instincts, hopes, joys, sorrows. If only it were not for the outward
things that we commonly look upon as important (which are in reality not
at all important) we might come together without fear, vanity, envy, or
prejudice and be friends. And what a world it would be! If civilisation
means anything at all it means the increasing ability of men to look
through material possessions, through clothing, through differences of
speech and colour of skin, and to see the genuine man that abides within
each of us. It means an escape from symbols!
I tell this merely to show what surprising and unexpected things have
grown out of my farm. All along I have had more than I bargained for.
From now on I shall marvel at nothing! When I ordered my own life I
failed; now that I work from day to day, doing that which I can do best
and which most delights me, I am rewarded in ways that I could not have
imagined. Why, it would not surprise me if heaven were at the end of all
this!
Now, I am not so foolish as to imagine that a farm is a perfect place.
In these Adventures I have emphasised perhaps too forcibly the joyful
and pleasant features of my life. In what I have written I have
naturally chosen only those things which were most interesting and
charming. My life has not been without discouragement and loss and
loneliness (loneliness most of all). I have enjoyed the hard work; the
little troubles have troubled me more than the big ones. I detest
unharnessing a muddy horse in the rain! I don't like chickens in the
barn. And somehow Harriet uses an inordinate amount of kindling wood.
But once in the habit, unpleasant things have a way of fading quickly
and quietly from the memory.
And you see after living so many years in the city the worst experience
on the farm is a sort of joy!
In most men as I come to know them--I mean men who dare to look
themselves in the eye--I find a deep desire for more naturalness, more
directness. How weary we all grow of this fabric of deception which is
called modern life. How passionately we desire to escape but cannot see
the way! How our hearts beat with sympathy when we find a man who has
turned his back upon it all and who says "I will live it no longer." How
we flounder in possessions as in a dark and suffocating bog, wasting
our energies not upon life but upon _things_. Instead of employing our
houses, our cities, our gold, our clothing, we let these inanimate
things possess and employ us--to what utter weariness. "Blessed be
nothing," sighs a dear old lady of my knowledge.
Of all ways of escape I know, the best, though it is far from
perfection, is the farm. There a man may yield himself most nearly to
the quiet and orderly processes of nature. He may attain most nearly to
that equilibrium between the material and spiritual, with time for the
exactions of the first, and leisure for the growth of the second, which
is the ideal of life.
In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered the
disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one
another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them
intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families
were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life:
neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the
rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly
changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of
mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane
at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country trolleys, more
schools and churches, and cheaper railroad rates, have all helped to
bring the farmer's life well within the stimulating currents of world
thought without robbing it of its ancient advantages. And those
advantages are incalculable: Time first for thought and reflection
(narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom of
action--which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who has
his feet firmly planted upon his own land.
A city hammers and polishes its denizens into a defined model: it
worships standardisation; but the country encourages differentiation, it
loves new types. Thus it is that so many great and original men have
lived their youth upon the land. It would be impossible to imagine
Abraham Lincoln brought up in a street of tenements. Family life on the
farm is highly educative; there is more discipline for a boy in the
continuous care of a cow or a horse than in many a term of school.
Industry, patience, perseverance are qualities inherent in the very
atmosphere of country life. The so-called manual training of city
schools is only a poor makeshift for developing in the city boy those
habits which the country boy acquires naturally in his daily life. An
honest, hard-working country training is the best inheritance a father
can leave his son.
And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a tool. A cornfield, a plow, a
woodpile, an oak tree, will cure no man unless he have it in himself to
be cured. The truth is that no life, and least of all a farmer's life,
is simple--unless it is simple. I know a man and his wife who came out
here to the country with the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith,
simple. They were unable to keep the chickens out of their summer
kitchen. They discovered microbes in the well, and mosquitoes in the
cistern, and wasps in the garret. Owing to the resemblance of the seeds,
their radishes turned out to be turnips! The last I heard of them they
were living snugly in a flat in Sixteenth Street--all their troubles
solved by a dumb-waiter.
The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a man
is in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place of
all places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where he
can _grow_. The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it often
destroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces,
the desire for the higher life which animates every good man.
While on the subject of simplicity it may be well to observe that
simplicity does not necessarily, as some of those who escape from the
city seem to think, consist in doing without things, but rather in the
proper use of things. One cannot return, unless with affectation, to the
crudities of a former existence. We do not believe in Diogenes and his
tub. Do you not think the good Lord has given us the telephone (that we
may better reach that elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the highest of
human ideals) and the railroad (that we may widen our human knowledge
and sympathy)--and even the motor-car? (though, indeed, I have sometimes
imagined that the motor-cars passing this way had a different origin!).
He may have given these things to us too fast, faster than we can bear;
but is that any reason why we should denounce them all and return to
the old, crude, time-consuming ways of our ancestors? I am no
reactionary. I do not go back. I neglect no tool of progress. I am too
eager to know every wonder in this universe. The motor-car, if I had
one, could not carry me fast enough! I must yet fly!
After my experience in the country, if I were to be cross-examined as to
the requisites of a farm, I should say that the chief thing to be
desired in any sort of agriculture, is good health in the farmer. What,
after all, can touch that! How many of our joys that we think
intellectual are purely physical! This joy of the morning that the poet
carols about so cheerfully, is often nothing more than the exuberance
produced by a good hot breakfast. Going out of my kitchen door some
mornings and standing for a moment, while I survey the green and
spreading fields of my farm, it seems to me truly as if all nature were
making a bow to me. It seems to me that there never was a better cow
than mine, never a more really perfect horse, and as for pigs, could any
in this world herald my approach with more cheerful gruntings and
squealings!
But there are other requisites for a farm. It must not be too large,
else it will keep you away from your friends. Provide a town not too far
off (and yet not too near) where you can buy your flour and sell your
grain. If there is a railroad convenient (though not so near that the
whistling of the engines reaches you), that is an added advantage.
Demand a few good old oak trees, or walnuts, or even elms will do. No
well-regulated farm should be without trees; and having secured the
oaks--buy your fuel of your neighbours. Thus you will be blessed with
beauty both summer and winter.
As for neighbours, accept those nearest at hand; you will find them
surprisingly human, like yourself. If you like them you will be
surprised to find how much they all like you (and will upon occasion
lend you a spring-tooth harrow or a butter tub, or help you with your
plowing); but if you hate them they will return your hatred with
interest. I have discovered that those who travel in pursuit of better
neighbours never find them.
Somewhere on every farm, along with the other implements, there should
be a row of good books, which should not be allowed to rust with
disuse: a book, like a hoe, grows brighter with employment. And no farm,
even in this country where we enjoy the even balance of the seasons,
rain and shine, shine and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation from
the currents of the world's thought which is so essential to the
complete life. From the papers which the postman puts in the box flow
the true waters of civilisation. You will find within their columns how
to be good or how to make pies: you will get out of them what you look
for! And finally, down the road from your farm, so that you can hear the
bell on Sunday mornings, there should be a little church. It will do you
good even though, like me, you do not often attend. It's a sort of Ark
of the Covenant; and when you get to it, you will find therein the True
Spirit--if you take it with you when you leave home. Of course you will
look for good land and comfortable buildings when you buy your farm:
they are, indeed, prime requisites. I have put them last for the reason
that they are so often first. I have observed, however, that the joy of
the farmer is by no means in proportion to the area of his arable land.
It is often a nice matter to decide between acres and contentment: men
perish from too much as well as from too little. And if it be possible
there should be a long table in the dining-room and little chairs around
it, and small beds upstairs, and young voices calling at their play in
the fields--if it be possible.
Sometimes I say to myself: I have grasped happiness! Here it is; I have
it. And yet, it always seems at that moment of complete fulfillment as
though my hand trembled, that I might not take it!
I wonder if you recall the story of Christian and Hopeful, how, standing
on the hill Clear (as we do sometimes--at our best) they looked for the
gates of the Celestial City (as we look--how fondly!):
"Then they essayed to look, but the remembrance
of that last thing that the shepherds had showed them
made their hands shake, by means of which impediment
they could not look steadily through the glass:
yet they thought they saw something like the gate, and
also some of the glory of the place."
How often I have thought that I saw some of the glory of the place
(looking from the hill Clear) and how often, lifting the glass, my hand
has trembled!