same God no man can escape. And heaven deliver me from living in a
country where there are no capitalists! My idea would be to live in
one where everybody would be in neighborly reach of one. But at that I
am this close kin to the bishop in the perversity of my mind; I should
like to see all communists and radicals banished from this country
before they pollute the minds of the ignorant, irresponsible, and
unwary, who are the real poor we have always with us, even if some of
them are learned and rich.
My tides are falling. I have no longer the mortal power to believe
everything and hope everything. I must leave hopes now for those who
need them more than I do.
When you are passing into the afternoon of your years it is wise to
break the habit you used to have of planning for the future, because
your future is behind you, as some Smart Aleck has said. It is
sensible to economize in hopes, because they are depleting when you
no longer have the power to achieve them. I have planted all my trees
years ago. Presently I shall be obliged to sit beneath their shade and
fold my hands. Even then I know I shall not be contented with just
peace. I shall be looking and wishing for a little happiness.
When you are about to matriculate into old age you speculate a good
deal about how you will feel then. I am thinking it would be a grand
thing to live long enough to grow simple and full of faith and the
artless happiness I had as a child. Old people do sometimes; they come
again into that eager, snooping curiosity the very young have. They
go about wondering and getting themselves happily deceived as we keep
terrors and anxieties from little children. It is a sweet and blessed
state.
Heaven preserve me from becoming a grand old woman and being obliged to
keep my dignity and mind sitting up overwhelming others to the last!
I should hate to pass out as one of my grandfathers did. He was very
old, but he retained to the end an outrageously overbearing use of
his faculties. All of us who were his meeker posterity had gathered
respectfully about his bedside, not tearful, because he was intolerant
of tears and we dared not weep. Presently he swept the whole bowed
company with one glittering gray glance and commanded us to leave him
alone.
‘I will not be stared out of countenance at the very last!’ he gasped.
So he died with all of us hidden behind the bed peeping at him.
I want some one to hold my hand then, and to hear many kind voices
soothing me and praising me as if I had been a dear good old child for
a long time. I want to be reduced to that innocency of the ‘such as’
when I go hence, and maybe trailing some fragment of the same cloud of
glory with which I came from God who was my home.
XXXVI
WHY WORSHIP EUROPE?
We never can be sure what it was that gave us a bad cold, and for some
reason we invariably speculate about that as if it made a difference.
So it is with getting to be an old person when we have always felt
young. I suppose we do grow old, but we do not know it until suddenly
the fact comes upon us. The curtain drops behind us, all those years
when we were young pass into memory, and we see the whole of life from
a soberer, wiser, different point of view. Our very self-consciousness
gets a stoop in the shoulders, and though we may go on for a time with
a square-shouldered air we are not the same.
About this time that change took place in me. I shall never know
whether it was the death of my husband, ill-health, or that six months
spent in Europe, but some vivacity of the spirit was gone when I came
home. Life had been bent somewhere within. I felt the weariness of
wisdom, such as one gets from the world. And I never had it until this
time--a curious depression about the mortal fate of man. I was so
outrageously tamed that I lost the habit of making dogmatic statements,
which had always been a refreshing insolence of the mind with me, as
bearing arms must be with a soldier of fortune. It seemed to me that I
had been demoted and suddenly civilized.
Whatever may have been the cause I do not know, but in my opinion it
was Europe, that aged me. It is an old book of history, illustrated
with the scenes and architecture of former, younger, more spirited
races of men. The countries I saw could never have been produced by
the people who are now living in them, with the possible exception of
England. I do not like Britishers, but involuntary respect compels me
to hand it to Englishmen wherever I see them. They have the weakest
chins in the Old World and the strongest wills still to survive and
achieve.
I cannot understand Americans who worship the life, culture, and
mental attitude of these failing civilizations. But they do. Nothing,
not even the Great War and our experiences then with their rapacity
and their resentment of our qualities can cure us of this obsession.
If the League of Nations had been called the League of Arts, nothing
could have kept us out of it. We spend more every year staring at their
scenery, buying their pictures, statues, tapestries, and the very
stones of their ancient castles than would be required to open every
door in the world to our commerce, our inventions, our morals, and our
institutions, all of which are more vigorous and vastly superior to
anything along the same lines in Europe.
But we seem determined to degrade our own powers to achieve better
things by this idealism of old things abroad. We note disparagingly
the imitative characteristics of the negro race in their relation to
the white races, which has in fact delayed the development of their
peculiar genius in many ways; but we show the same tendencies toward
European culture with less excuse. I suppose we buy their old things
because we feel the lack of the tone of time in our civilization and
collect this stuff to produce that effect.
As a matter of fact, there is no virtue in the tone of time. Virtue
comes alone from our own achievements. We cannot mellow what we are by
what we hang on our walls. This is cheating, in my opinion, such as we
do when we chase our ancestors back until we derive a coat of arms from
some old swashbuckling knight of the fourteenth century. Very few of
them would be acceptable now in decent society. It seems to me safer
and more respectable not to admit descending from any further back
than our original pioneer American blacksmith ancestors. This is good
stock, cleaned and charged with the noblest virtues by the courage with
which they endured hardships and built a great civilization. Benjamin
Franklin’s sister made soap and sold it to her patrons in Philadelphia
for a livelihood. It seems to me a more honorable record to hand down
to posterity than that of a seventeenth lady whose only distinction was
that she had a title inherited, not earned, and that she sat to a great
artist for her portrait.
Europe is childish, overbearing, grasping, like an old man. We ought to
contribute liberally to its support on that account, as we do to aged
parents; but we ought not to ape the senility of old age. We do now
limit the quota of immigrants from these countries, but it seems to me
even more important to limit the number of American tourists who go
abroad to the aged and mature. The youth of this country should be kept
at home until their characters and ideals have been firmly established.
I was forty years old before I went over there, confirmed and certified
in my convictions as an American citizen, but it was a long time before
I recovered my own spirit and wiped the shadows of a weaker world from
my mind. Even now I cannot be sure. It seems to me that I detect a
foreign substance at times in my thoughts, not so firm or sound as real
living makes thinking. And I have known a great many people who never
do repent of Europe after they have indulged in it. They get an air of
aloofness and superiority. They are sick and disgusted with our honest
sins. They have acquired a decadent taste for vice as if vice were one
of the arts of Europe, as indeed it is. Now it does seem to me that
if we must be wicked we ought to be normally and healthily wicked and
call our sins by their right names. It is a sign of degeneracy to be so
virtuously sensitive and proud of your vices as so many men and women
of older nations have grown to be.
XXXVII
THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN
A young man with a mind of high degree and an extensive literary style
recently shot off this in a magazine article: ‘Gossips are people
who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest
possible, namely, God.’ He might have exchanged places with his nouns,
written it: ‘People are gossips who have only one relative in common,’
and hit more nails on the head. But at that, he missed by half the
number we have in common.
The nearest relative of every mortal man that always survives him
is the earth. He is atom and acid kin to it. He springs from it and
returns to it, laid back into it, earth to earth and dust to dust,
which is closer kin at last than he ever was to his up-and-speaking
relatives. He bears but one relation to God, a spiritual resemblance,
either real or fancied. Lacking that, he sustains literally no relation
to God beyond that of mere material scrapped and to be used again for
another form of perishable life, vegetable or flesh. The spirit of him
in this case is a disease to be cured by some divine method with which
no man is acquainted, whatever the theologians may claim to know about
it.
The wisest of us do not actually know much. We can only believe
according to the quality of our minds. The favorite notion used to be
that such spirits went through a severe smelting process, similar
to that of four thousand degrees centigrade by which pure gold is
now extracted from quicksilver, but not, I understand, in paying
quantities. I am merely suggesting this, not as a doctrine, much
less a dogma, but by way of speculating upon the possible method of
purification. Personally, I find it disturbing and unprofitable to
dwell upon the reclaiming processes of damnation. I have seen too many
damned people in this world, and been too frequently damned myself, not
to know that we damn ourselves, and that by an act of will and faith
we can always escape from this sense of guilt, which settles the whole
doctrine of punishment so far as I am concerned.
But the point I wish to make now is that we are all conscious of being
kin to the earth, though comparatively few have more than a creed
sense of being related to God. It is a thing we are taught, but really
learn to feel. The man who begins life next to land never forgets. He
may come up in the world and be carried by his illusions of success
far from its life and loveliness, but there come wearying days in his
countinghouse when his thoughts fly back like homing birds to that
quiet place. His own people may be dead and gone, or he may have lost
the sense of kinship to them; but he remembers still where the shadows
fell upon the grass, as a child far from home remembers his mother’s
face. It is the child in him longing for the comfort of that ancient
mother of all men.
If he has lost out and gone down in the world with a bad conscience,
the same thing happens. There comes a woeful day when his tears rise
like a tide and he knows if he could go back, fling himself beneath the
shade of a certain tree for a long, long time, the silence and goodness
of the earth would cure and restore him. It would not, but this is the
way he feels. The sensation proves and defines the sanctity of our
relation to the earth.
As to those other people, born in cities as chickens are hatched in an
incubator, they have the same instinct changed to silliness. They are
like stepchildren who do not know how to love the earth; still, they
have their transient cravings for its blessings. But few of them can
bear to live with it, because its weather and its silence is terrible
to them. They are really inebriates, living by the intoxication of the
eye and the ear upon the vast confusion of cities and crowds. They may
be strangers there, without home or friends, but they require this
frightful motion and noise as an addict must have his drug. They cannot
bear the solitude of silent places or the diminishing companionship
of their elder brethren, the trees. They are waifs blown like leaves
in the wind the world makes in passing. They never had the capacity
to live, and so substitute motion and noise for life as a sort of
artificial respiration.
I do not know anything more tragic to contemplate than these lost
children of the earth. They may be learned men or successful men; they
may be dutiful or merely beautiful women; but if you dare to realize
how lacking in quality and the original stamina of life they are,
thrust them back upon the earth from which they sprung for longer than
a vacation period, and watch them go to pieces. They are parasites,
consumers. They have lost the valor to produce their own sustenance
from the earth. They survive by trade, commerce, inherited wealth, some
kind of artificial labor. There is not a drop of honest Adam sweat in
them. They are the kind of people who carry an umbrella over their
heads through life, whether it is the roof of an office, a factory or
a stock exchange. They want money, prestige, power, more rights and
privileges than any man can ever earn except at the expense of other
men; but they remain unacquainted to the last with real life achieved
in the open according to the law which bound the first man to the land
for his own good, where there are no fictitious values, but a fair
exchange of bread, poverty, and peace promised to those who do keep and
dress the garden which the earth is.
One may write very convincingly, however, upon this theme without
making much more of a success than Adam did in the beginning when he
was ordained to keep and dress that first garden. The Scriptures are
not easy to fulfil. I have been tempted to doubt if the very apostles
who recorded the Gospels actually lived up to them. I have had a few
divine inspirations myself without feeling the least blasphemous; but
looking back now, I can see no more than the faintest gleam of them in
my deeds. What I mean is that it must be natural, after all, to come
short of the glory of God. This world would be a frightfully glaring
place if we did not.
The queer thing is that we also miss happiness in the effort. The
satisfaction of saints in their piety has always seemed to me
despicable. It is a form of deceit never justified by the facts. And
the gratified airs they give themselves is not to be confounded with
simple honest human happiness. We are entitled to that whether we miss
the glory of God or not. Most of the time I am certain this is the
supreme gift of His love which still awaits us when we comply sensibly
with the conditions; but I have my dark moments when I am tempted to
suspect that this instinct for happiness may be a sort of clucking
encouragement devised by Providence to keep us up and going, as
romantic love is one of Nature’s enchantments to keep up the birth rate.
XXXVIII
GARDEN HAPPINESS
Certainly the exercise of our virtues does not insure happiness.
My experience is according to the Scriptures at this point--your
virtues invite hardship and persecution. I have observed the very good
carefully. They are noble souls, totally defeated in this present world
by their conscience and their sacrifices. It takes a spunky spirit
to escape the Job Scriptures. This is my objection to the intimate
companionship of saints. The last one of them has a martyr tune in him
somewhere, and if you encourage him with either sympathy or admiration,
he will let go and sing it to you in sobbing praise of himself. I
am a trifle that way. More than once I have known myself to keen my
spiritual nose to a kind friend and chant the tale of some injustice
suffered in the exercise of my nobler qualities. It is puerile. No
matter how virtuous you are, virtue goes out of you then.
I take involuntarily a sort of ignoble consolation in the fact that
the very bad are farther from happiness than the very good, because
they have destroyed the foundation upon which happiness must rest. It
is written that if we repent of our sins the Lord remembereth them no
more forever, which is something that cannot be said of any mortal man.
Even if he repents of his transgressions, the memory of them hangs like
a shadow in the light of his spirit forever. I have seen these swords
suspended over the head of a saint until finally he was slain by them.
As for me, I have never been able to keep a record of my virtues,
though I have tried hard enough; but I have never been able to
forget one sin. Just let me get in a weaving way with so much as one
beam of holiness to light my dark places, and some niggardly little
transgression I committed years ago, or yesterday, lifts its head and
licks out a forked tongue in hissing comment. I defy anyone, however
worthy, to risk himself in the glow of holiness without having a
similar experience.
This, I believe, is what is meant by the omniscience of the Almighty.
It is in us, a fearful faculty for seeing ourselves which we cannot
escape. And it reveals each man to himself as a spiritual bungler every
time he frisks within range of his own inner vision. The effect is
salutary, but very depressing. I am never peaceful, much less happy
afterwards.
It all comes to this: We get wisdom of one sort and another with fatal
facility, because the world is full of it, a brilliant or dull sort of
ignorance deduced from observation, study, experience, and the prideful
exercise of our rational faculties; but we are perpetually short on
understanding until after it is too late.
When I came back to these hills to dress my garden in the year 1913,
I know now that I missed happiness by the narrowest margin. I was on
the right track. I was at home again upon the earth. I felt that peace
and steadiness of mind we all feel in familiar surroundings among
companions who never change or move away. The same grass and the same
green boughs overhead, the same flowers I had known in earliest infancy
blooming like tiny remembered faces in every meadow and on the banks
of every stream. The same little footpaths of peace across every hill,
winding according to the minds of those happy travelers who made them.
But the most enterprising business man was never more quickly involved
than I was in plans and preparations for happiness. The old cabin to be
restored and furnished, all about to be cleared and trimmed. I saw the
frost crystals blooming in the gray dawn of every morning that first
winter. The longest day was too short to accomplish what must be done
before the next day. I was in the woods choosing timber for more rooms
to be added to the cabin. I was something of a nautilus in those days,
without the sublime indifference of that little sailing mollusk to the
passage of time. I was in a hurry to finish my house.
But, like the nautilus, I have gone on adding to it year by year
according to the widening chambers of my mind. There will be a wall,
a pillar unfinished somewhere when my own end comes. I shall probably
defer death by an effort of mortal will if I am having another window
cut in order to get one more entrancing view of this valley at the very
last. I do not know whether this is foolishness or not, but I have left
much copy of my mind and spirit written in stones that will last longer
than the monument Horace raised to himself, ‘more enduring than brass.’
I made a garden and planted it. I was in the fields from dawn until
dusk that first spring, watching the plows sink deep in the loam of the
land. To me, there is no fragrance comparable in sweetness to the scent
of freshly turned earth. Later I walked like an impudent little god of
a woman down the rows of young corn. I remember praying for the corn
that year during a long drought, not that I needed bread so fiercely
earned, but because to see it living and growing was like feeling the
green blades of my own vanity spreading and rustling in the sun.
Somewhere in this house there is a snapshot made of me that summer
standing up on a load of wheat sheaves. I am wearing a stiff white
frock. I am bareheaded and the wind is blowing. I do seem to have a
high happy look. There streams across my face something of the light of
youth, keen and strong. Love alone can so transfigure us. I am in love,
you understand. My heart is embracing this sky, this meadow, these
overshadowing hills. I am feeling the wreaths of little blue flowers
that bloom beside the streams upon my brow. I am strong and well again,
cured of so many sorrows. My heel has touched the earth again. Auteas
was right about that--if you believe in your heel and the life of the
earth you can recover strength as he did for the next struggle.
I was that child I used to be, let loose like a joyful energy. So this
is something I have discovered about happiness: It is not a product
of energy, but of chance, a free mind and deliverance from that
parsimonious sense of time which no child ever feels. This marked the
difference now between the woman I was and the child I had been. I took
every chance then with a free mind and no sense at all of time. I was
too young to make plans. I met the future as a lark meets the sky upon
the wings of a singing heart. I was nearer kin to God then and had a
wiser sense of life than I shall ever know again.
The simpler creatures manage life more gracefully than we do. I have
often envied the birds, not because they can sing, but because they
can fly. They own everything from the tallest tree top to the farthest
meadow’s rim; but they have no sense of possession, no baggage to
carry. They endure more hardships than we do and have a better time.
The difference between them and, say, the communists, is that they are
not acquisitive. They do not want to own everything in common. They
are honest about that, and no man is. He must be either predatory or
competitive. He has an instinct for ownership which he is determined to
satisfy.
This earth would be settled by squatters if a comparatively few people
did not hold titles to most of it. The latter are safer neighbors
than the migratory class to which the communists really belong. They
are a kind of human locust swarming over the earth now, never to be
confounded with the earlier pioneers. I suppose in time we shall get
rid of them. If we do not, they will destroy us. Then they will turn
upon themselves. They are by purpose destructive, according to some
rascally notion of gain. Their piety is a sort of missionary malice
couched in the noblest deceit of language.
But with all the virtues and aspirations the best of us claim, it does
seem strange that we make such an awkward art of living. We are more
successful at increasing our capital and decorating ourselves with
worldly distinctions than we are at increasing our income in happiness.
This is essential. I have no patience with the piety of defeat which
yields the point and declares that happiness was never meant for us
in this present world, but reserved for us in paradise--a damnable
doctrine which reflects upon the goodness of God as they do who lay
their misfortunes to Providence when they alone are responsible for
them.
It is we who miss our cue. We suffer from some blindness of the mind
which leads us to mistake the circumstances that produce happiness.
Nothing will satisfy us but riches, when we know that relative poverty
insures more peace and fewer responsibilities. We have built a social,
industrial and commercial civilization, so expensive that it cannot
be financed. And the more wealth we get the less capable we are of
achieving our own lives.
It is the laborers, servants, and professional people whom we employ
that determine the conditions under which we exist, which is a form of
frightful tyranny. We get the idea or the ideal, then pay some one else
to achieve it. An architect draws the plans of our house. Carpenters
build it. A decorator chooses the furnishings, and servants keep it. A
landscape artist lays off the grounds and we employ someone to dress
the garden, because we lack the will and skill to do any of these
things.