When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that
passed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under
the old city gateway and out through the mean city "lanes." The other
branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and
night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the
day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the
thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it
filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The
steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they passed over the uneven
road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute
pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings
underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the
colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver's seat, a battered
silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at
dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the
market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or
the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady,
homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find
it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die.
The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer
evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble
of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its
passengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like
the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the
town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I
hate bells--the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church
bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or
the dinner bell.
I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of
Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is
the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on
the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a
happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the
same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of
Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or
thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern shore of Long Island, who
has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as
apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that
Atlantic is drenching.
The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate
the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured
walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a
lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are
barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A
little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak
cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out
on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at
nightfall has the same, or even a more aetherial, radiance. From the
hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor.
This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who
is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.
Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom
cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily
wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected
branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already
rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow
or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to
find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to
sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life
that trails so impudently across the path, the life that spawns in the
forgotten pond--this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners.
Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the
only living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of
sunning himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily
paddled through waters laced down with scum. It was pleasant to see him,
a not too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family
had been home the gardener would have scoured him.
Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire--which I thank heaven I
am not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one--I should take pleasure in
the silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible
hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up
everything, even the Sunday newspapers--those I should enjoy. I should
enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of
the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no
laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent
and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire;
I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets.
The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude that life is in the
striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial
offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their
victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that
brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child
out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It
is pleasant to think of one's first delicious surrender to fatigue after
a long day's haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one's joints,
with all one's driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed
himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it
away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees--but I wish to
think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this
golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It
is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even
golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen
possess and understand.
These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet.
They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine,
is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild
pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly
lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether
he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to
keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons
of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity,
admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But they fill the mind
with _-ations_. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free
swing of pleasant things.