EARTH-HUNGER
Like Charles II., who apologised for being so unconscionably long in
dying, I must apologise for being so long in coming to my point, which
is the possibility of buying happiness at a cheaper rate than London
offers it. As it took me twenty years of experience to make my
discovery, I may claim, however, that three chapters is no immoderate
amount of matter in which to describe it. My chief occupation through
these years was to keep my discontent alive. Satisfaction is the death
of progress, and I knew well that if I once acquiesced entirely in the
conditions of my life, my fate was sealed.
I did not acquiesce, though the temper of my revolt was by no means
steady. There were times when--to reverse an ancient saying--the muddy
Jordan of London life seemed more to me than all the sparkling waters
of Damascus. Humanity seemed indescribably majestic; and there were
moments when I sincerely felt that I would not exchange the trampled
causeways of the London streets for the greenest meadows that bordered
Rotha or Derwentwater. There were days of early summer when London
rose from her morning bath of mist in a splendour truly unapproachable;
when no music heard of man seemed comparable with the long diapason of
the crowded streets; when from morn to eve the hours ran with an
inconceivable gaiety and lightness, and the eye was in turn inebriated
with the hard glare and deep shadows of abundant light, with the
infinite contrasts of the streets, with the far-ranged dignity of domes
and towers swimming in the golden haze of midday, or melting in the
lilac mists of evening. I felt also, in this vast congregation of my
fellow-creatures, the exhilarating sense of my own insignificance. Of
what value were my own opinions, hopes, or programmes in this huge
concourse and confusion of opinion? Who cared what one human brain
chanced to think, where so many million brains were thinking? I was
swept on like a bubble in the stream, and I forgot my own
individuality. And this forgetfulness became a pleasure; the mind,
wearied of its own affairs, found delight in recollecting that the
things that seemed so great to it were after all of infinitesimal
importance in the general sum of things.
Astronomy is often credited with providing this sensation; writers of
fiction especially are fond of explaining how the voyage of the eye
through space humbles the individual pride of man through the
oppression of magnitude and vastness. They might come nearer home, for
terrestrial magnitudes produce the same effect as celestial magnitudes;
the mind loses itself as readily in the abyss of London as in those
gulfs of chaos that open in the Milky Way, confronting the eye with
naked infinitude; and this sense of personal insignificance is at once
a horror and a joy. That humble acquiescence of the Londoner in his
fate which we call his apathy, is the natural consequence of an
overwhelming sense of personal insignificance. The great reformer
should be country-born; in the solitude of nature he may come to think
himself significant, and have faith in those thoughts and intuitions
which no one contradicts. But in London, collective life, by its mere
immensity, overwhelms individual life so completely that no audacity or
arrogance of genius can supply that continuous and firm faith in
himself which the reformer must possess.
If I resisted these debilitating influences, it was through no
particular virtue of my own: it was rather through what I may call a
kind of earth-hunger. I had an obstinate craving for fresh air,
unimpeded movement, outdoor life. I wanted the earth, and I wanted to
live in the close embrace of the earth. Some ancestor of mine must
have been a hermit on a mountain, a gipsy, or a peasant: I know not
which, but something of the temperament of all three had been
bequeathed to me. The smell of fresh-turned earth was a smell that
revived in me a portion of my nature that had seemed dead; a flower set
me dreaming of solitary woods; and I found myself watching clouds and
weather-signs as though my bread depended on their lenience. The first
time I saw a mountain I burst into tears, an act which astonished me no
less than my companions. I could offer no explanation of my conduct,
but I felt as though the mountain called me. I said to myself, 'There
is my home, yonder is the earth of which my corporeal part is
fashioned; it is there that I should live and die.' Even a London park
in the first freshness of a summer morning produced these sensations;
and those rare excursions which I took into the genuine country left me
aching for days afterwards with an exquisite pain. I often imagined
myself living as Wordsworth did in Dove Cottage, as Thoreau did in the
Walden Woods, and the vision was delightful. I took an agricultural
paper, and read it diligently, not because it was of the least
practical utility to me, but because its simple details of country life
seemed to me a kind of poetry. In my rambles I never saw a lovely site
without at once going to work to build an imaginary cottage on it, and
the views I had from the windows of my dream-cottages were more real to
me than the actual prospects on which I looked every day. I have even
gone so far as to seek the offices of land-agents, and haggle over the
price of land which I never meant to buy, for the mere pleasure of
fancying it was mine; and this kind of game was long pursued, for
land-agents are a numerous tribe, and when one discovered my imposture,
there was always another ready to accept me as a capitalist in search
of the picturesque. In short, to possess one small fragment of the
world's surface; to have a hut, a cabin, or a cottage that was verily
my own, to eat the fruits of my own labour on the soil--this seemed to
me the crown and goal of all human felicity. Conscript of the city as
I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic
civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as
rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in
my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams
were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy
loneliness of open spaces under open skies.
This kind of earth-hunger is, I believe, not common among English
people to-day; if it were, the tide of life would not set so steadily
townward as it does. The class in which it existed most strongly was
the yeoman class, and this is a class which has practically
disappeared. In my youth I knew half a dozen persons of this class, to
whom towns were genuinely abhorrent. They would come to London once or
twice in their lives, visit certain market towns in their district at
intervals, and escape back into the country with the joy of wild birds
liberated from a cage. The mere grime and dirt of cities horrified
them; they were suffocated in the close air, and they were driven half
distracted by the clamour of the streets. These men lived, upon the
whole, lives of not immoderate labour: or, as one might say, of sober
ease, They possessed little money, it is true, but the want of it did
not appear to trouble them. Their houses were plain, their method of
life simple, and clearly it had not entered their minds to covet any
more sumptuous modes of life. All this is changed now. The daily
press, which presents a thousand pictures of the bustling life of
cities, goes everywhere, and has communicated a strange restlessness to
the rural mind. Increased means of locomotion have brought London to
the very door of village communities. If men to-day actually possessed
the acres on which they toil they would be in no hurry to leave them;
they would be effectually chained to the soil by the sense of
independence and proprietorship, as is the case among the rural
population of France, who do not rent but own the land. The yeomen did
own the land, and that was the secret of their content. But when the
day of large farms came, the small landowners were crushed out; and as
for the mere peasant, he has no chance at all of ever owning land, and
never has had; so that he has every inducement to crowd into towns
where wages are nominally higher, and he soon outgrows that natural
earth-hunger which modern civilisation affords him no means of
gratifying.
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.