is largely an inconvenience. That is the meaning of an infant’s first
strangling wail. He is protesting against the inconvenience of
breathing. Breathing is an inconvenience; eating is an inconvenience;
sleeping is an inconvenience; praying is an inconvenience; but they
are part and parcel of life, and nothing has been done yet to relieve
the situation, except in the item of prayer. From prayer, and from a
multitude of other inconveniences, not mentioned above, that round out
life (death excepted), we have found ways of escape--by borrowing,
renting, hiring, avoiding, denying, until life, which is the sum of
all inconveniences, has been reduced to its infantile nothingness--the
protest against the personal effort of breathing which is existence.
Not so for the Commuter. He is compelled to live. I have been
reckoning up my inconveniences: the things that I possess; the things
I have that are mine; not rented, borrowed, hired, avoided, but
claimed, performed, made, owned; that I am burdened with, responsible
for; that require my time and my hands. And I find that, for a fairly
full life there are inconveniences enough incidental to commuting.
To begin with, there is the place of the Commuter’s home. Home? Yes,
no doubt, he has a home, but where is it? Can Heaven, besides the
Commuter, find out the way there?
You are standing with your question at the entrance of the great
terminal station as the wintry day and the city are closing, and it is
small wonder that you ask if God knows whither, over the maze of
tracks reaching out into the night, each of this commuting multitude
is going. But follow one, any one of the bundled throng--this one,
this tired, fine-faced Scotchman of fifty years whom we chanced to see
during the day selling silks behind the counter of a department store.
It is a chill November evening, with the meagre twilight already
spent. Our Commuter has boarded a train for a nineteen-mile ride; then
an electric car for five miles more, when he gets off, under a lone
electric light, swinging amid the skeleton limbs of forest trees. We
follow him, now on foot, down a road dark with night and overhanging
pines, on past a light in a barn, and on--when a dog barks, a horse
whinnies, a lantern flares suddenly into the road and comes pattering
down at us, calling, “Father! father!”
We stop at the gate as father and daughter enter the glowing kitchen.
A moment later we hear a cheerful voice greeting the horse, and then,
had we gone closer to the barn, we might have heard the creamy tinkle
of milk, spattering warm into the bottom of the tin pail.
Heaven knew whither, over the reaching rails, this tired seller of
silks was going. Heaven was there awaiting him. The yard-stick was
laid down at half-past five o’clock; at half-past six by the clock the
Commuter was far away, farther than the other side of the world, in
his own small barn where they neither sell silk nor buy it, but where
they have a loft full of fragrant meadow hay, and keep a cow, and eat
their oatmeal porridge with cream.
It is an inconvenient world, this distant, darkened, unmapped country
of the Commuter. Only God and the Commuter know how to get there, and
they alone know why they stay. But there are reasons, good and
sufficient reasons--there are inconveniences, I should say, many and
compelling inconveniences, such as wife and children, miles in, miles
out, the isolation, the chores, the bundles--loads of bundles--that
keep the Commuter commuting. Once a commuter, always a commuter,
because there is no place along the road, either way, where he can put
his bundles down.
Bundles, and miles in, and miles out, and isolation, and children, and
chores? I will count them all.
The bundles I have carried! And the bundles I have yet to carry! to
“tote”! to “tote”! But is it all of life to be free from bundles? How,
indeed, may one so surely know that one has a hold upon life as when
one has it done into a bundle? Life is never so tangible, never so
compact and satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied with a
string. One’s clothes, to take a single example, as one bears them
home in a box, are an anticipation and a pure joy--the very clothes
that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course, or wears with
disconcerting self-consciousness, or wears, it may be, with physical
pain.
Here are the Commuter’s weary miles. Life to everybody is a good deal
of a journey; to nobody so little of a journey, however, as to the
Commuter, for his traveling is always bringing him home.
And as to his isolation and his chores it is just the same, because
they really have no separate existence save in the urban mind, as
hydrogen and oxygen have no separate existence save in the corked
flasks of the laboratory. These gases are found side by side nowhere
in nature. Only water is to be found free in the clouds and springs
and seas--only the union of hydrogen and oxygen, because it is part of
the being of these two elements to combine. So is it the nature of
chores and isolation to combine--into water, like hydrogen and
oxygen, into a well of water, springing up everlastingly to the
health, the contentment, and to the self-sufficiency of the Commuter.
At the end of the Commuter’s evening journey, where he lays his
bundles down, is home, which means a house, not a latch-key and
“rooms”; a house, I say, not a “floor,” but a house that has
foundations and a roof, that has an outside as well as inside, that
has shape, character, personality, for the reason that the Commuter
and not a Community, lives there. Flats, tenements, “chambers,”
“apartments”--what are they but public buildings, just as inns and
hospitals and baths are, where you pay for your room and ice-water, or
for your cot in the ward, as the case may be? And what are they but
unmistakable signs of a reversion to earlier tribal conditions, when
not only the cave was shared in common, but the wives and children and
the day’s kill? The differences between an ancient cliff-house and a
modern flat are mere details of construction; life in the two would
have to be essentially the same, with odds, particularly as to rooms
and prospect, in favor of the cliff-dweller.
The least of the troubles of flatting is the flat; the greatest is
the shaping of life to fit the flat, conforming, and sharing one’s
personality, losing it indeed! I’ll commute first! The only thing I
possess that distinguishes me from a factory shoe-last or an angel of
heaven is my personality. Shoe-lasts are known by sizes and styles,
angels by ranks; but a man is known by what he isn’t, and by what he
hasn’t, in common with anybody else.
One must commute, if one would live in a house, and have a home of
one’s own, and a personality of one’s own, provided, of course, that
one works in New York City or in Boston or Chicago; and provided,
further, that one is as poor as one ought to be. And most city workers
are as poor as they ought to be--as poor, in other words, as I am.
Poor! Where is the man rich enough to buy Central Park or Boston
Common? For that he must needs do who would make a city home with
anything like my dooryard and sky and quiet. A whole house, after all,
is only the beginning of a home; the rest of it is dooryard and
situation. A house is for the body; a home for body and soul; and the
soul needs as much room outside as inside the house,--needs a garden
and some domestic animal and the starry vault of the sky.
It is better to be cramped for room within the house than without. Yet
the yard need not be large, certainly not a farm, nor a gentleman’s
estate, nor fourteen acres of woodchucks, such as my own. Neither can
it be, for the Commuter, something abandoned in the remote foothills,
nor something wanton, like a brazen piece of sea-sand “at the beach.”
The yard may vary in size, but it must be of soil, clothed upon with
grass, with a bush or a tree in it, a garden, and some animal, even if
the tree has to grow in the garden and the animal has to be kept in
the tree, as with one of my neighbors, who is forced to keep his bees
in his single weeping willow, his yard not being large enough for his
house and his hive. A bee needs considerable room.
And the soul of the Commuter needs room,--craves it,--but not mere
acres, nor plentitude of things. I have fourteen acres, and they are
too many. Eight of them are in woods and gypsy moths. Besides, at this
writing, I have one cow, one yearling heifer, one lovely calf, with
nature conspiring to get me a herd of cows; I have also ten colonies
of bees, which are more than any Commuter needs, even if they never
swarmed; nor does he need so many coming cows.
But with only one cow, and only one colony of bees, and only one acre
of yard, still how impossibly inconvenient the life of the Commuter
is! A cow is truly an inconvenience if you care for her yourself--an
inherent, constitutional, unexceptional inconvenience are cows and
wives if you care for them yourself. A hive of bees is an
inconvenience; a house of your own is an inconvenience, and, according
to the figures of many of my business friends, an unwarranted luxury.
It is cheaper to rent, they find. “Why not keep your money in your
business, where you can turn it?” they argue. “Real estate is a poor
investment generally,--so hard to sell, when you want to, without a
sacrifice.”
It is all too true. The house, the cow, the children, are all
inconvenient. I can buy two quarts of blue Holstein milk of a milkman,
typhoid and scarlet-fever germs included, with much less inconvenience
than I can make my yellow-skinned Jersey give down her fourteen
quarts a day. I can live in a rented house with less inconvenience
than in this house of my own. I am always free to go away from a
rented house, and I am always glad to go. The joy of renting is to
move, or sublet; to be rid also of taxes and repairs.
“Let the risers rot! It isn’t my house, and if I break my neck I’ll
sue for damages!”
There is your renter, and the joy he gets in renting.
There are advantages, certainly, in renting; your children, for
instance, can each be born in a different house, if you rent; and if
they chance to come all boys, like my own, they can grow up at the
City Athletic Association--a convenient, and more or less permanent
place, nowadays, which may answer very well their instinctive needs
for a fixed abode, for a home. There are other advantages, no doubt.
But however you reckon them, the rented house is in the end a tragedy,
as the willful renter and his homeless family is a calamity, a
disgrace, a national menace. Drinking and renting are vicious habits.
A house and a bit of land of your own are as necessary to normal
living as fresh air, food, a clear conscience, and work to do.
If so, then the question is, Where shall one make his home? “Where
shall the scholar live?” asks Longfellow; “In solitude or in society?
In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of
Nature beat, or in the dark gray city, where he can feel and hear the
throbbing heart of man? I make answer for him, and say, In the dark,
gray city.”
I should say so, too, and I should say it without so much oracular
solemnity. The city for the scholar. He needs books, and they do not
grow in cornfields. The pale book-worm is a city worm, and feeds on
glue and dust and faded ink. The big green tomato-worm lives in the
country. But this is not a question of where scholars should live; it
is where _men_ should live and their children. Where shall a man’s
home be? Where shall he eat his supper? Where lay him down to sleep
when his day’s work is done? Where find his odd job and spend his
Sunday? Where shall his children keep themselves usefully busy and
find room to play? Let the Commuter, not the scholar, make answer.
The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than
the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or
in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the
throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he
hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of
Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own.
Where, then, should a man live? I will make answer only for myself,
and say, Here in Hingham, right where I am, for here on Mullein Hill
the sky is round and large, the evening and the Sunday silences are
deep, the dooryards are wide, the houses are single, and the
neighborhood ambitions are good kitchen-gardens, good gossip, fancy
chickens, and clean paint.
There are other legitimate ambitions, and the Commuter is not without
them; but these few go far toward making home home, toward giving
point and purpose to life, and a pinch of pride.
The ideal home depends very much, of course, on the home you had as a
child. I can think of nothing so ideally homelike as a farm,--an ideal
farm, ample, bountiful, peaceful, with the smell of apples coming up
from the cellar, and the fragrance of herbs and broom-corn haunting
storeroom and attic.
The day is past when every man’s home can be his farm, dream as every
man may of sometime having such a home; but the day has just arrived
when every man’s home can be his garden and chicken-pen and dooryard,
with room and quiet and a tree.
The day has come, for the means are at hand, when life, despite its
present centralization, can be more as it used to be--spread out,
roomier, simpler, healthier, more nearly normal, because again lived
near to the soil. It is time that every American home was built in the
open country, for there is plenty of land--land in my immediate
neighborhood for a hundred homes where children can romp, and your
neighbor’s hens, too, and the inter-neighborhood peace brood
undisturbed. And such a neighborhood need not be either the howling
wilderness, where the fox still yaps, or the semi-submerged suburban
village, where every house has its Window-in-Thrums. The Commuter
cannot live in the wild country, else he must cease to commute; and as
for small-village life--I suppose it might be worse. It is not true
that man made the city, that God made the country, and that the devil
made the village in between; but it is pretty nearly true, perhaps.
But the Commuter, it must be remembered, is a social creature,
especially the Commuter’s wife, and no near kin to stumps and stars.
They may do to companion the prophetic soul, not, however, the average
Commuter, for he is common and human, and needs his own kind. Any
scheme of life that ignores this human hankering is sure to come to
grief; any benevolent plan for homesteading the city poor that would
transfer them from the garish day of the slums to the sweet solitudes
of unspoiled nature had better provide them with copies of “The
Pleasures of Melancholy” and leave them to bask on their fire-escapes.
Though to my city friends I seem somewhat remote and incontiguous,
still I am not dissevered and dispersed from my kind, for I am only
twenty miles from Boston Common, and as I write I hear the lowing of a
neighbor’s cows, and the voices of his children as they play along the
brook below, and off among the fifteen square miles of treetops that
fill my front yard, I see faint against the horizon two village
spires, two Congregational spires, once one, that divided and fell and
rose again on opposite sides of the village street. I often look away
at the spires. And I as often think of the many sweet trees that wave
between me and those tapering steeples, where they look up to worship
toward the sky, and look down to scowl across the street.
Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel
with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as
wheat-fields and as lovely, too--from twenty miles away, or from
Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the
nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and
directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the
round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is
necessary; but less and less is city living necessary.
It is less and less possible also. New York City--the length and
breadth of Manhattan--and Boston, from the Fenway in three directions
to the water-front, are as unfit for a child to grow up in as the
basement floor of a china store for a calf. There might be hay enough
on such a floor for a calf, as there is doubtless air enough on a New
York City street for a child. It is not the lack of things--not even
of air--in a city that renders life next to impossible there; it is
rather the multitude of things. City life is a three-ringed circus,
with a continuous performance, with interminable side-shows and
peanuts and pink lemonade; it is jarred and jostled and trampled and
crowded and hurried; it is overstimulated, spindling, and
premature--it is too convenient.
You can crowd desks and pews and workbenches without much danger, but
not outlooks and personalities, not beds and doorsteps. Men will work
to advantage under a single roof; they cannot sleep to advantage so. A
man can work under almost any conditions; he can live under very few.
Here in New England--as everywhere--the conditions of labor during the
last quarter-century have vastly changed, while the conditions of
healthful living have remained essentially as they ever were, as they
must continue to remain for the next millennium.
Some years ago I moved into an ancient house in one of the oldest of
New England towns. Over the kitchen I found a room that had to be
entered by ladder from without. That room was full of lasts and
benches--all the kit necessary for shoe-making on a small scale. There
were other houses scattered about with other such rooms--closed as if
by death. Far from it. Yonder in the distance smoked the chimney of a
great factory. All the cobblers of these houses had gathered there to
make shoes by machine. But where did they live? and how? Here in the
old houses where their fathers lived, and as their fathers lived,
riding, however, to and from their work on the electric cars.
I am now living in an adjoining town, where, on my drive to the
station, I pass a small hamlet of five houses grouped about a little
shop, through whose windows I can see benches, lasts, and old
stitching-machines. Shoes were once made here on a larger scale, by
more recent methods. Some one is building a boat inside now. The
shoemakers have gathered at the great factory with the shoemakers of
the neighbor town. But they continue to live in the hamlet, as they
used to, under the open sky, in their small gardens. And they need to.
The conditions of their work have quite changed; the simple, large
needs of their lives remain forever the same.
Let a man work where he will, or must; let him live where only the
whole man can live--in a house of his own, in a yard of his own, with
something green and growing to cultivate, something alive and
responsive to take care of; and let it be out under the sky of his
birthright, in a quiet where he can hear the wind among the leaves,
and the wild geese as they _honk_ high overhead in the night to remind
him that the seasons have changed, that winter is following down their
flying wedge.
As animals (and we are entirely animal)--we are as far under the
dominion of nature as any ragweed or woodchuck. But we are entirely
human too, and have a human need of nature, that is, a spiritual need,
which is no less real than the physical. We die by the million yearly
for lack of sunshine and pure air; and who knows how much of our moral
ill-health might be traced to our lack of contact with the healing,
rectifying soul of the woods and skies?
A man needs to see the stars every night that the sky is clear.
Turning down his own small lamp, he should step out into the night to
see the pole star where he burns or “the Pleiads rising through the
mellow shade.”
One cannot live among the Pleiads; one cannot even see them half of
the time; and one must spend part of one’s time in the mill. Yet never
to look for the Pleiads, or to know which way to look, is to spend,
not part, but all of one’s time in the mill.
The dales for shade,
The hills for breathing space,
and life for something other than mere work!
The Commuter is bound to see the stars nightly, as he goes down to
shut up the hens. He has the whole outdoors in his yard, with the
exception of a good fish-pond; but if he has no pond, he has, and
always will have, to save him from the round of the mill, a little
round of his own--those various endless, small, inconvenient
home-tasks, known as “chores.” To fish is “to be for a space dissolved
in the flux of things, to escape the calculable, drop a line into the
mysterious realms above or below conscious thought”; to “chore” is for
a space to stem the sweeping tides of time, to outride the storms of
fate, to sail serene the sea of life--to escape the mill!
Blessed is the man who has his mill-work to do, perfunctory,
necessitous, machine-work to do; twice blessed the man who has his
mill-work to do and who loves the doing of it; thrice blessed the man
who has it, who loves it, and who, besides, has the varied, absorbing,
self-asserting, self-imposed labors about his own barn to perform!
There are two things in the economy of unperverted nature that it was
never intended, I think, should exist: the childless woman and the
choreless man. For what is a child but a woman with a soul? And what
is a chore? Let me quote the dictionary:--
“_Chore_, _char_, a small job; especially a piece of minor domestic
work, as about a house or barn; ... generally in the plural.”
A small, domestic, plural job! There are men without such a job, but
not by nature’s intention; as there are women without children, and
cows without cream.
What change and relief is this small, domestic, plural job from the
work of the shop! That work is set and goes by the clock. It is nine
hours long, and all in the large or all in the infinitesimally small,
and all alike. It may deal with millions, but seldom pays in more
than ones and twos. And too often it is only for wages; too seldom is
it for love--for one’s self.
Not so this small domestic job. It is plural and personal, to be done
for the joy of doing it. So it ought to be with these Freshmen themes
that I go on, year after year, correcting; so it ought to be with the
men’s shoes that my honest neighbor goes on, year after year, vamping.
But the shoes are never all vamped. Endless vistas of unvamped shoes
stretch away before him down the working days of all his years. He
never has the joy of having finished the shoes, of having a change of
shoes. But recently he reshingled his six by eight hencoop and did a
_finished_ piece of work; he trimmed and cemented up his apple tree
and did a finished piece of work; he built a new step at the kitchen
door and did a finished piece of work. Step and tree and hencoop had
beginnings and ends, little undertakings, that will occur again, but
which, for this once, were started and completed; small, whole,
various domestic jobs, thrice halting for him the endless
procession,--the passing, the coming, the trampling of the shoes.
And here are the teachers, preachers, writers, reformers,
politicians--men who deal, not in shoes, but in theories, ideals,
principalities, and powers, those large, expansive, balloonish
commodities that show the balloon’s propensity to soar and to
explode--do they not need ballast as much as the shoemaker, bags of
plain sand in the shape of the small domestic job?
Daring some months’ stay in the city not long ago, I sent my boys to a
kindergarten. Neither the principal nor the teachers, naturally, had
any children of their own. Teachers of children and mothers’ advisers
seldom have. I was forced to lead my dear lambs prematurely forth from
this Froebel fold, when the principal, looking upon them with tears,
exclaimed, “Yes, your farm is no doubt a _healthful_ place, but they
will be so without guidance! They will have no one out there to show
them how to play!”
That dear woman is ballooning, and without a boy of her own for
ballast. Only successful mothers and doting old grandfathers (who can
still go on all fours) should be allowed to kindergarten. Who was it
but old Priam, to whom Andromache used to lead little Astyanax?