E-text prepared by Al Haines
THE QUEST OF THE SIMPLE LIFE
by
W. J. DAWSON
New York
E. P. Dutton and Co.
31 West Twenty-Third Street
1907
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim.
VIRG., Ecl. viii., l. 72.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
CHAPTER II
GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
CHAPTER III
GETTING A LIVING, AND LIVING
CHAPTER IV
EARTH-HUNGER
CHAPTER V
HEALTH AND ECONOMICS
CHAPTER VI
IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE
CHAPTER VII
I FIND MY COTTAGE
CHAPTER VIII
BUYING HAPPINESS
CHAPTER IX
HOW WE LIVED
CHAPTER X
NEIGHBOURSHIP
CHAPTER XI
THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND
CHAPTER XII
AM I RIGHT?
CHAPTER XIII
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
For a considerable number of years I had been a resident in London,
which city I regarded alternately as my Paradise and my House of
Bondage. I am by no means one of those who are always ready to fling
opprobrious epithets at London, such as 'a pestilent wen,' a cluster of
'squalid villages,' and the like; on the contrary, I regard London as
the most fascinating of all cities, with the one exception of that city
of Eternal Memories beside the Tiber. But even Horace loved the
olive-groves of Tivoli more than the far-ranged splendours of the
Palatine; and I may be pardoned if an occasional vision of green fields
often left my eye insensitive to metropolitan attractions.
This is a somewhat sonorous preface to the small matter of my story;
but I am anxious to elaborate it a little, lest it should be imagined
that I am merely a person of bucolic mind, to whom all cities or large
congregations of my fellow-men are in themselves abhorrent. On the
contrary I have an inherent love of all cities which are something more
than mere centres of manufacturing industry. The truly admirable city
secures interest, and even passionate love, not because it is a
congeries of thriving factories, but rather by the dignity of its
position, the splendour of its architecture, the variety and volume of
its life, the imperial, literary, and artistic interests of which it is
the centre, and the prolongation of its history through tumultuous
periods of time, which fade into the suggestive shadows of antiquity.
London answers perfectly to this definition of the truly admirable
city. It has been the stage of innumerable historic pageants; it
presents an unexampled variety of life; and there is majesty in the
mere sense of multitude with which it arrests and often overpowers the
mind.
As I have already, with an innocent impertinence, justified myself by
Horace, so I will now justify myself by Wordsworth, whose famous sonnet
written on Westminster Bridge is sufficient proof that he could feel
the charm of cities as deeply as the charm of Nature. 'Earth hath not
anything to show more fair,' wrote Wordsworth, and of a truth London
has moods and moments of almost unearthly beauty, perhaps unparalleled
by any vision that inebriates the eye in the most gorgeous dawn that
flushes Alpine snows, or the most solemn sunset that builds a gate of
gold across the profound depth of Borrowdale or Wastwater. He who has
seen the tower of St. Clement Danes swim up, like an insubstantial
fabric, through violet mist above the roaring Strand; or the golden
Cross upon St. Paul's with a flag of tinted cloud flying from it; or
the solemn reaches of the Thames bathed in smoky purple at the slow
close of a summer's day, will know what I mean, and will (it is
possible) have some memory of his own which will endorse the justness
of my praise.
From this exalted prelude I will at once descend to more prosaic
matter, leaving my reader, in his charity, to devise for me an apology
which I have neither the wit nor the desire to invent for myself. With
the best will in the world to speak in praise of cities it must be
owned that the epic and lyric moments of London are infrequent. As a
casual resident in London, a student and spectator, free to leave it
when I willed, I could have been heartily content; but I, in common
with some insignificant millions of my fellow-creatures, was bound to
live in London as a means of living at all. He is no true citizen who
merely comes up to town 'for the season,' alternating the pleasures of
town with those of the country; he alone is the true citizen who _must_
live amid the roar of the street all the year round, and for years
together. If I could choose for myself I would even now choose the
life of pleasant alternation between town and country, because I am
persuaded that the true piquancy and zest of all pleasures lies in
contrast. But fate orders these things for us, and takes no account of
our desires, unless it be to treat them with habitual irony. At
five-and-twenty the plain fact met me--that I must needs live in
London, because my bread could be earned nowhere else. No choice was
permitted me; I must go where crowds were, because from the favour or
necessities of such crowds I must gather the scanty tithes which put
food upon my table and clothes upon my back. When eminent writers,
seated at ample desks, from which they command fair views of open
country, denounce with prophetic fervour the perils which attend the
growth of cities, they somewhat overlook the fact that the growth of
cities is a sequence, alike ineluctable and pitiless, of the modern
struggle for existence. One cannot be a lawyer, or a banker, a
physician or a journalist, without neighbours. He can scarce be a
literary man in perfect sylvan solitude, unless his work is of such
quality--perhaps I should have said such popularity--that it wins for
him immediate payment, or unless his private fortune be such that he
can pursue his aims as a writer with entire indifference to the
half-yearly statements of his publisher. In respect of the various
employments of trade and commerce, the case is still plainer. Men must
needs go where the best wages may be earned; and under modern
conditions of life it is as natural that population should flow toward
cities, as that rivers should seek the sea. These matters will be more
particularly discussed later on; it is enough for me to explain at
present that I was one of those persons for whom life in a city was an
absolute necessity.
It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become
apparent. A street that interests the mind by some charm of populous
vivacity when it is traversed at random and without object, becomes
inexpressibly wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty. My
daily duty took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a
street not altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and
dignity. At first I was ready to concede this claim, and even to
endorse it with enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that
Oxford Street conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a
desk in an office, I began to loathe it. The eye became conscious of a
hundred defects and incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison
walls; the resounding tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of
tormented spirits. For the first time I began to understand why
imaginative writers had often likened London to Inferno.
I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured to
evade these sensations. The most obvious was altogether to avoid this
glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours through the
meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to exchange one
kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for another kind
which had none. Sometimes I endeavoured to contrive a doubtful
exhilaration from the contrast which these meaner streets afforded;
saying to myself, as I pushed my way through the costers' stalls of
Great James Street, 'Now you are exchanging squalor for magnificence.
Be prepared for a surprise.' But the ruse failed utterly, and my mind
laughed aloud at the pitiful imposture. Another device was to create
points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious road,
which should present some aspect of allurement. There was a book-shop
here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of Napoleon was
exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo's 'Flight into Egypt,' in
the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether they were
there to-day. Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium of
empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in which the left hand plays
against the right, so I laid odds for and against myself on such
trifles as these, and even went so far as to keep an account of my
successes and my failures. Thus, for a whole month I was interested in
a person quite unknown to me, who wore an obsolete white beaver hat,
appeared punctually at the corner of Bond Street at half-past five in
the afternoon, and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes
displayed on the street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from
Oxford Circus. His appearances were so planetary in their regularity
that one might have reckoned time by them. Who he was, or what his
objects in life may have been, I never learned. I never saw him walk
but in the one direction; I never saw him buy one of the many books
which he examined: perhaps he also was afflicted with the tedium of
London, and took this singular way of getting through a portion of his
sterile day with a simulated interest. At all events he afforded me an
interest, and when he vanished at the end of the month, Oxford Street
once more became intolerable to me.
These particulars appear so foolish and so trivial that most persons
will find them ridiculous, and even the most sympathetic will perhaps
wonder why they are recorded. They were, however, far from trivial to
me. The marooned seaman saves his sanity by cutting notches in a
stick, the solitary prisoner by friendship with a mouse; and when life
is reduced to the last exiguity of narrowness, the interests of life
will be narrow too. No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever
yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in
having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long
and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight
which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself
resembles those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the
ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and
immobile form. Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice
blessed is he who has both freedom and variety: but the subordinate
toiler in the vast mechanism of a great city has neither. He will sit
at the same desk, gaze upon the same unending rows of figures, do, in
fact, the same things year in and year out till his youth has withered
into age. He himself becomes little better than a mechanism. There is
no form of outdoor employment of which this can be said. The life of
the agricultural labourer, so often pitied for its monotony, is variety
itself compared with the life of the commercial clerk. The labourer's
tasks are at least changed by the seasons; but time brings no such
diversion to the clerk. It is this horrible monotony which so often
makes the clerk a foul-minded creature; driven in upon himself, he has
to create some kind of drama for his instincts and imaginations, and
often from the sorriest material. When I played single-handed cribbage
with the few trivial interests which I knew, I at least took an
innocent diversion; and I may claim that my absurd fancies injured no
one, and were certainly of some service to myself.
The outsider usually imagines that great cities afford unusual
opportunities of social intercourse, and when I first became a citizen
I found this prospect enchanting. I scanned the horizon eagerly for
these troops of friends which a city was supposed to furnish: quested
here and there for a responsive pair of eyes; made timid approaches
which were repulsed; and, finally, after much experiment, had to admit
that the whole idea was a delusion. No doubt it is true enough that,
with a settled and considerable income, and the power of entertaining,
friends are to be found in plenty. But Grosvenor Square and Kentish
Town do not so much as share a common atmosphere. In the one it is a
pleasant tradition that the house door should be set wide to all comers
who can contribute anything to the common social stock; in the other,
the house door is jealously locked and barred. The London clerk does
not care to reveal the shifts and the bareness of his domestic life.
He will reside in one locality for years without so much as seeking to
know his next-door neighbour. He will live on cordial terms with his
comrade in the office, but will never dream of inviting him to his
home. His instinct of privacy is so abnormal that it becomes mere
churlishness. His wife, if he have one, usually fosters this spirit
for reasons of her own. Her interests end with the clothing and
education of her children. She does not wish for friends, does not
cultivate the grace of hospitality, and is indifferent to social
intercourse. In short, the barbaric legend that an Englishman's house
is his castle, is nowhere so much respected as in London.
The exhausting character of life in London, and the mere vastness of
its geographical area, do something to produce this result. Men who
leave home early in the morning, sit for many hours in an office, and
reach home late at night, soon lose both the instinct and desire for
social intercourse. They prefer the comfortable torpor of the
fireside. If some imperative need of new interests torments them, they
seek relaxation in the music-hall or some other place of popular
resort. The art of conversation is almost extinct in a certain type of
Londoner. He knows nothing to converse about outside his business
interests, his family concerns, and perhaps the latest sensation of the
daily newspaper. Those lighter flights of fancy, those delicate
innuendoes and allusions of implied experience or culture--all the
give-and-take of happily contending minds--all, indeed, that makes true
conversation--is a science utterly unknown to him. A certain
superficial nimbleness of mind he does sometimes possess, but for all
that he is a dull creature, made dull by the limitations of his life.
If it should happen, as it often may, that such a man has some genuine
instinct for friendship, and has a friend to whom he can confide his
real thoughts, the chances are that his friend will be separated from
him by the mere vastness of London. To the rural mind the metropolis
appears an entity; in reality it is an empire. A journey from the
extreme north to the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is
less easily accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from
London to Birmingham. There is none of that pleasant 'dropping-in' for
an evening which is possible in country towns of not immoderate radius.
Time-tables have to be consulted, engagement-books scanned, serious
preparations made, with the poor result, perhaps, of two hours' hurried
intercourse. The heartiest friendship does not long survive this
malignity of circumstance. It is something to know that you have a
friend, obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis; but you see
him so rarely, that when you meet, it is like forming a new friendship
rather than pursuing an old one. It is little wonder that, under such
conditions, visits grow more and more infrequent, and at last cease. A
message at Christmas, an intimation of a birth, a funeral card, are the
solitary relics and mementoes of many a city friendship not extinct,
but utterly suspended.
I dwell on these obvious characteristics of London life, because in
course of time they assumed for me almost terrifying dimensions. After
ten years of arduous toil I found myself at thirty-five lonely,
friendless, and imprisoned in a groove of iron, whose long curves swept
on inevitably to that grim terminus where all men arrive at last.
Sometimes I chided myself for my discontent; and certainly there were
many who might have envied me. I occupied a fairly comfortable house
in a decayed terrace where each house was exactly like its neighbour,
and had I told any one that the mere aspect of this grey terrace
oppressed me by its featureless monotony, I should have been laughed at
for my pains. I believe that I was trusted by my employers, and if a
mere automatic diligence can be accounted a virtue, I merited their
trust. In course of time my income would have been increased, though
never to that degree which means competence or freedom. To this common
object of ambition I had indeed long ago become indifferent. What can
a few extra pounds a year bring to a man who finds himself bound to the
same tasks, and those tasks distasteful? I was married and had two
children; and the most distressing thought of all was that I saw my
children predestined to the same fate. I saw them growing up in
complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had made
my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of the
city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and
listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those
must needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in
chance excursions to the country, I compared my children with the
children of cottagers and ploughmen, I felt that I had wronged them, I
saw my children foredoomed, by an inexorable destiny, to a life at all
points similar with my own. In course of time they also would become
recruits in the narrow-chested, black-coated army of those who sit at
desks. They would become slaves without having known the value of
freedom; slaves not by capture but by heritage. More and more the
thought began to gather shape, Was I getting the most, or the best, out
of life? Was there no other kind of life in which toil was redeemed
from baseness by its own inherent interest, no life which offered more
of tranquil satisfaction and available, if humble, happiness? Day by
day this thought sounded through my mind, and each fresh discouragement
and disability of the life I led gave it sharper emphasis. At last the
time came when I found an answer to it, and these chapters tell the
story of my seeking and my finding.