NEIGHBOURSHIP
There is a wonderful passage in _Timon of Athens_ which appears to
express in a few strokes, at once broad and subtle, the picture and the
ideal of a perfect city:
Piety and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws.
The congregated life of man, many-coloured, intricate, composed of
numerous interwoven interests, was never painted with a higher skill.
The word that is most expressive in this description is
'neighbourhood.' It strikes the note of cities. Uttering it, one is
aware of the pleasant music of bustling streets, greetings in the
market-place, whispered converse in the doorways, gay meetings and
laughter, lighted squares and crowds, the touch of kind hands, evening
meals and festivals, and all the reverberation of man's social voice.
A man may grow sick for such scenes as a sailor grows sick with longing
for the sea. There were times when this sickness came on me, this
nostalgia of streets. It was only by degrees I came to see that
neighbourhood has a significance apart from cities.
The first sensation of the man suddenly exiled from cities is a kind of
bewildering homelessness in Nature. He is confronted with a
spaciousness that knows no limit. He treads among voids. He
experiences an almost unendurable sense of infinity. He can put a
bound to nothing that he sees; it is a relief to the eye to come upon a
wall or a hedge, or any kind of object that implies dimension. There
is something awful in the glee or song of birds; it seems irrational
that with wings so slight they should dare heights so profound. All
sense of proportion seems lost. After being accustomed for many years
to think of himself as in some sense a figure of importance in the
universe, a man finds himself unimportant, insignificant, a little
creature scarce perceptible a mile away. I came once upon some human
bones lying exposed on the side of an old earthwork on the summit of a
hill; heavy rains had loosened the soil, and there lay these painful
relics in the cold eye of day. Two thousand years ago, or more, spears
had clashed upon this hillside, living men had gone to final rest amid
their blood; and it came upon me with a sense of insult how little man
and all his battles counted for in the limitless arena of the world.
The brute violence of winds and tempests had swept these hills for
centuries; and he whose lordship of the world is so loudly trumpeted,
had lain prone beneath this violence, unremembered even by his fellows.
I understood in that moment that affecting doctrine of the nothingness
of man, which coloured mediaeval thought so strangely: like the monk of
the cloister I also had before me my _memento mori_. But in truth I
did not need the bones of dead warriors to humble me; the mere space
and stillness of the world sufficed. My ear ached for some sound more
rational than the cry of blind winds, my eye for some narrower stage
than this tremendous theatre, where an army might defile unnoticed. In
such a mood the desire of neighbourship grows keen. One is cheered
even by the comradeship of his own shadow. It becomes necessary to
talk aloud merely to gain assurance that one lives. So ghost-like
appears man's march across the fields of Time, that some active
expression of physical sensation becomes imperative, in order to
recover evidence of one's physical existence; and thrice welcome, like
the violence offered to the half-drowned, is any kind of buffet which
breaks the dream, and sets the nerves tingling in the certainty of
contact with men who breathe and live.
The easy and ostensible remedy for such a state of mind is immediate
retreat to the reassuring hum of cities: the more difficult but real
remedy is the reassurance of one's own identity. Many people take the
first course without admitting it; alleging the lack of intercourse or
convenience in country life, whereas the real truth is that contact
with the steadfast indifference of Nature has proved wounding to their
egoism. A vain man cannot maintain his sense of self-importance in the
centre of a vast moor, or amid the threatening bulk of giant hills. He
looks upon nothing that respects him. He can find nothing subservient
to him. Therefore he flies to the crowded haunts of men, and the
porter touching his hat to him for a prospective twopence at the
railway station, is the welcome confessor of his disallowed divinity.
It is, alas! the most common and humbling feature of human nature that
we all stiffen our backs with pride when the knee of some
fellow-creature is crooked in homage to us, although that homage may be
bought for twopence! No wonder that the man in whose character vanity
is the chief essence cannot long endure contact with Nature; Nature
respects no man, and laughs in the face of the strutting egoist. But
if a man will live long enough with Nature to become reconciled to her
impassivity, he begins to recover self-respect, by recovering the
conviction of his own identity. He has that within himself which
Nature has not, the faculty of consciousness. He is but a trifling
atom in the scheme of things, but he is a thinking atom. He sees also
that all living creatures have an identity of their own. Each goes
about the scheme of life in deliberate wisdom. Why should he complain
of insignificance when the bird, the flower, the horse that drags the
plough, the beaver in the stream, the spider on the wall, make no
complaint; each accomplishing its task as intently as though it were
the one task the world wanted done? In the life of the merest insect
are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic
human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds
of life. The bird building its nest is doing precisely the same thing
as the man who builds his house, and with an equal skill of
architecture. The flower, fighting for its life, is engaged in the
same struggle as man, for whom every breath and pulse-beat is a victory
over forces that threaten his destruction. The world is full of
identities, each unmoved by the tremendous scale of its environment.
Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible, wider and more catholic
than the neighbourship between man and man. Kinship, not in kindred,
but in universal life, becomes possible. There is no sense of
loneliness in a country life after that discovery is made. The
emptiest field is as populous as the thronged city. The Academy of
God's art opens every spring upon the gemmed hillside. The building of
a new metropolis as wonderful as London is going on beneath the thatch
where the bees toil. All that constitutes human magnificence is seen
to be but a part, and not a large part either, of a yet wider
magnificence of effort and achievement; for of the flowers of the field
we can say, 'Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these.'
The fact is that civilised man moves in a much too narrow range of
affinities. He has forgotten the rock from which he was hewn, and the
hole of the pit from which he was dug. He has reduced the keyboard of
his sympathies by whole octaves. The habit of shutting up his body
within walls, has produced the corresponding habit of shutting up his
mind within walls. Hence Nature, which should be an object of delight
to him, becomes a cause of terror or repugnance. Solitude, which is
one of the most agreeable sensations of the natural man, is one of the
most painful and alarming sensations of the civilised man. The
civilised man needs to be born again that he may enter the kingdom of
Nature; for to enter either the kingdom of grace or of Nature the same
process is necessary--we must become as little children. Thoreau has
described this experience in terms which might apply equally to the
religious mystic or the Nature-lover. He tells us that for a brief
period after he came to live in the woods he felt lonesome, and
'doubted if the near neighbourhood of man was not essential to a serene
and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at
the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to
foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while those
thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and
beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and
in every sight and sound about my house, an infinite and unaccountable
friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the
fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have
never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and
swelled with sympathy, and befriended me. I was so distinctly made
aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes that
we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of
blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I
thought no place could ever be strange to me again.' This experience
marked the rebirth of Thoreau, as truly as a new and delightful
sensitiveness to a spiritual world marked the re-birth of Bunyan. The
whole secret of re-birth lies in the recovery of lost affinities.
I do not recollect any particular crisis such as Thoreau describes, but
I can trace the process in myself. I took no pains to cast the slough
of cities; I registered no vows and consulted no teachers; it seemed
that the thing was quietly done for me by the Higher Powers. I had no
part in the matter except to be docile. Nature took me in hand, as
sleep takes in hand the sick child; the only thing asked of me was my
submission. The result soon appeared in the altered scale of my
perceptions. I became indifferent to newspapers, to the doings and
performances of public personages, to the rise and fall of literary
reputations, and to a great many books which once interested me. I saw
that a considerable number of those whom I had counted public teachers
were no better than persons who talked in their sleep. They knew
nothing of the elemental life of man, and were unfitted to pronounce
verdicts upon his destiny. Novelists particularly offended me by their
gross ignorance of life. The pictures of life they drew were as untrue
as a description of a street-fight would be if written by a perfumed
odalisque who had never crossed the threshold of a harem. The ancient
elemental life of man, spent in storm and sunshine, under wide skies,
they had not so much as looked at, and their voluminous chatter about
man and his doings had as little relation to life as the philosophy
that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon
Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout
of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque
at which Nature laughed? And as my sense of the importance of this
kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama
conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are
the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour of
Eternity, through neighbourship with things that are themselves
eternal. I tasted the pleasure of enlarged existence, which had become
possible through enlarged affinities. I had eaten of the Tree of Life,
which grows wherever there is a Garden brought to beauty by the sweat
of man's brow, and I had the knowledge of good and evil.
One form of neighbourship which brought me perpetual delight was--if I
may so describe it--neighbourship with the stars. I had hitherto
scarce given a thought to astronomy, save of the vaguest kind, and all
I knew of it was derived from the recollection of one or two popular
lectures. This was pardonable in a citizen, who is never able to see
any considerable space of firmament. But when a man comes to live in
the country he can scarce remain indifferent to a pageant so sublime as
the midnight heavens. It is always with him; it obtrudes itself upon
him; it becomes in time the scenery of his life. It pleased me on
clear evenings before I slept to go out and take what I called a
star-bath, a term justified by the real sense I had of waves of soft
light and silence flowing over me, submerging and cleansing me, and
setting my soul afloat. But very soon this purely aesthetic pleasure
became also an excitement of the intellect. An immense curiosity
seized me. I desired to penetrate this lighted labyrinth of space, to
climb these shining terraces, to know where these vast roads led, in
whose profound seclusion God Himself seemed to hide. In a very humble
way I began the study of astronomy, and although I never got beyond its
elements yet my whole life was incalculably enriched by what I learned.
I sometimes felt that of all my neighbours the stars were the
friendliest and wisest. That sense of insignificance, begotten by the
pressure of immensity upon the spirit, of which so many men have
written, I never felt; my most constant feeling was a kind of gladness
which had its root in the conviction of some living friendly Power
behind and in the spectacle. The sense of insignificance, if it came
at all, was associated with the vanities of mankind. It did indeed
seem a strange thing that a man whose thoughts could walk among the
stars, should bend those thoughts to a mean eagerness for gold, a pride
in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so
much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill. In a universe, whose
arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as
associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the
biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire of bigness
passes from a man's mind, humility becomes pleasurable, and immensity
is soothing. I forgot to think of the vastness of the stars; they were
for me neighbourly and friendly presences, talking like a wise old
nurse to me of things that happened before my birth, and the ancient
kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, 'My old neighbour--God!'
Neighbourship with the earth also became a vital pleasure and a source
of peace. There was a time when I had a vivid horror of death; and as
I look back, and analyse my sensations, I believe this horror was in
large part the work of cities. It sprang from the constant vision of
deformity, the presence of hospitals, newspaper narratives of tragic
accidents, and the ghastly cheerfulness of metropolitan cemeteries. To
die with a window open to the trampling of a clamorous, unconcerned
street seemed a thing sordid and unendurable. To be whisked away in a
plumed hearse to a grave dug out of the debris of a hundred forgotten
graves was the climax of insult. It happened to me once to see a child
buried in what was called a common grave. It was a grave which
contained already half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin
of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of
religion could give it sanctity. Dissolution met the mind there in
more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of
indecency and wilful outrage. But in the wide wholesome spaces of the
world, and beneath the clean stars, death seems not undesirable. A
country life gives one the pleasant sense of kinship with the earth.
It is no longer an offence to know oneself of the earth earthy. I was
so much engaged in the love and study of things whose life was brief
that the thought of death became natural. I saw constantly in flowers
and birds, and domestic creatures, the little round of life completed
and relinquished without regret. I saw also how the aged peasant
gathered up his feet and died, like a tired child falling asleep at the
close of a long day. Death is in reality no more terrible than birth;
but it is only the natural man who can so conceive it. He who lives in
constant kinship with the earth will go to his rest on the earth's
bosom without repugnance. I knew very well the place where I should be
buried; it was beneath a clean turf kept sweet by mountain winds; and
the place seemed desirable. Having come back by degrees to a life of
entire kinship with the earth, having shared the seasons and the
storms, it seemed but the final seal set upon this kinship, that I
should dissolve quietly into the elements of things, to find perhaps my
resurrection in the eternally renewed life of Nature.
Neighbourship meant also for me kinship, with every kind of life around
me, and some friendly association with my fellow-men. The creatures we
call dumb have a sure way of talking to us, if we will overcome their
shyness and give them a chance. Moreover their habits, their method of
life, their thoughts, are in themselves profoundly interesting. I
seemed to have discovered a new universe when I first took to
bee-culture. The geometry of the heavens is not more astonishing than
the geometry of the beehive, nor is the architecture of the finest city
built by man more intricate and masterly. Here, as in all things, we
are deceived by bulk, counting a thing great merely because it is big;
but if it come to deducing an Invisible Mind in the universe from the
things that are visible, I would as soon base my argument on what goes
on in a bee's brain, as on the harmonies of law manifested in the solar
system. I believe we greatly err in underrating other forms of life
than our own. The Hindu, who acknowledges a mystic sacredness in all
forms of life, comes nearer the truth. Life for life, judged by
proportion, plan, symmetry, delicacy of design and beauty of
adjustment, man is a creature not a whit more wonderful than many forms
of life which he crushes with a careless foot. The creature we call
dumb is not dumb to its mates, and it is very likely our human modes of
communication appear as absurd to the dog or horse as theirs do to us.
We know what we think of the so-called dumb creatures; it might be a
humbling surprise if we could know what the dumb creature thinks of us.
The satire would not be upon one side, be sure of it.
To the townsman the simple dwellers on the soil seem almost as
incapable of intercourse as the creatures of the field and pasture.
Because they do not know the kind of things the townsman knows, they
are supposed to know nothing. I have already said enough to show how
absurd and insolent is this assumption. My neighbours were few, and
simple-minded; but they possessed many kinds of skill necessary to
their life, they had wisdom and virtue, and upon the whole a kind of
fundamental dignity of nature. They were as shy as woodland creatures
to a stranger's voice; they were highly sensitive to the mere shadow of
a slight, and both suspicious and resentful of patronage; but they met
trust with trust, and where they gave their trust they gave their full
loyalty of friendship. In my youth, as I have said elsewhere, I often
passed a whole day in a forest. I would choose some solitary glade,
where my intrusion was audibly resented by the unseen creatures of the
wood, who fled before me; but when an hour had passed, and the signal
had run through the forest that I meant no harm, those scattered and
astonished creatures reassembled. The whole life of the wood then went
on before my eyes; the birds sang their best for me, the squirrel
performed his innocent gymnastics with an eye to my applause, the very
snake moved less shyly through the grass, as though the word had gone
forth that I was a guest, who must be entertained and made to feel at
home. This experience often recurred to me in my early days at
Thornthwaite. It was some time before I was admitted to the
free-masonry of the scanty social life around me; when at last I had
paid my footing I found that here also was a commonwealth; here also
might be found upon a narrow scale, but in authentic forms,
Piety and fear,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws.