A popular notion akin to this, that the world would have any room for
the departed if they should now and then return, is the constant
regret that people will not learn by the experience of others, that
one generation learns little from the preceding, and that youth never
will adopt the experience of age. But if experience went for
anything, we should all come to a standstill; for there is nothing so
discouraging to effort. Disbelief in Ecclesiastes is the mainspring
of action. In that lies the freshness and the interest of life, and
it is the source of every endeavor.
If the boy believed that the accumulation of wealth and the
acquisition of power were what the old man says they are, the world
would very soon be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of
obtaining either were as poor as the majority of men find them to be,
ambition would die within him. It is because he rejects the
experience of those who have preceded him, that the world is kept in
the topsy-turvy condition which we all rejoice in, and which we call
progress.
And yet I confess I have a soft place in my heart for that rare
character in our New England life who is content with the world as he
finds it, and who does not attempt to appropriate any more of it to
himself than he absolutely needs from day to day. He knows from the
beginning that the world could get on without him, and he has never
had any anxiety to leave any result behind him, any legacy for the
world to quarrel over.
He is really an exotic in our New England climate and society, and
his life is perpetually misunderstood by his neighbors, because he
shares none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even
called lazy, good-for-nothing, and "shiftless,"--the final stigma
that we put upon a person who has learned to wait without the
exhausting process of laboring.
I made his acquaintance last summer in the country, and I have not in
a long time been so well pleased with any of our species. He was a
man past middle life, with a large family. He had always been from
boyhood of a contented and placid mind, slow in his movements, slow
in his speech. I think he never cherished a hard feeling toward
anybody, nor envied any one, least of all the rich and prosperous
about whom he liked to talk. Indeed, his talk was a good deal about
wealth, especially about his cousin who had been down South and "got
fore-handed" within a few years. He was genuinely pleased at his
relation's good luck, and pointed him out to me with some pride. But
he had no envy of him, and he evinced no desire to imitate him. I
inferred from all his conversation about "piling it up" (of which he
spoke with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eye), that there were moments
when he would like to be rich himself; but it was evident that he
would never make the least effort to be so, and I doubt if he could
even overcome that delicious inertia of mind and body called
laziness, sufficiently to inherit.
Wealth seemed to have a far and peculiar fascination for him, and I
suspect he was a visionary in the midst of his poverty. Yet I
suppose he had--hardly the personal property which the law exempts
from execution. He had lived in a great many towns, moving from one
to another with his growing family, by easy stages, and was always
the poorest man in the town, and lived on the most niggardly of its
rocky and bramble-grown farms, the productiveness of which he reduced
to zero in a couple of seasons by his careful neglect of culture.
The fences of his hired domain always fell into ruins under him,
perhaps because he sat on them so much, and the hovels he occupied
rotted down during his placid residence in them. He moved from
desolation to desolation, but carried always with him the equal mind
of a philosopher. Not even the occasional tart remarks of his wife,
about their nomadic life and his serenity in the midst of discomfort,
could ruffle his smooth spirit.
He was, in every respect, a most worthy man, truthful, honest,
temperate, and, I need not say, frugal; and he had no bad habits,--
perhaps he never had energy enough to acquire any. Nor did he lack
the knack of the Yankee race. He could make a shoe, or build a
house, or doctor a cow; but it never seemed to him, in this brief
existence, worth while to do any of these things. He was an
excellent angler, but he rarely fished; partly because of the
shortness of days, partly on account of the uncertainty of bites, but
principally because the trout brooks were all arranged lengthwise and
ran over so much ground. But no man liked to look at a string of
trout better than he did, and he was willing to sit down in a sunny
place and talk about trout-fishing half a day at a time, and he would
talk pleasantly and well too, though his wife might be continually
interrupting him by a call for firewood.
I should not do justice to his own idea of himself if I did not add
that he was most respectably connected, and that he had a justifiable
though feeble pride in his family. It helped his self-respect, which
no ignoble circumstances could destroy. He was, as must appear by
this time, a most intelligent man, and he was a well-informed man;
that is to say, he read the weekly newspapers when he could get them,
and he had the average country information about Beecher and Greeley
and the Prussian war (" Napoleon is gettin' on't, ain't he?"), and
the general prospect of the election campaigns. Indeed, he was
warmly, or rather luke-warmly, interested in politics. He liked to
talk about the inflated currency, and it seemed plain to him that his
condition would somehow be improved if we could get to a specie
basis. He was, in fact, a little troubled by the national debt; it
seemed to press on him somehow, while his own never did. He
exhibited more animation over the affairs of the government than he
did over his own,--an evidence at once of his disinterestedness and
his patriotism. He had been an old abolitionist, and was strong on
the rights of free labor, though he did not care to exercise his
privilege much. Of course he had the proper contempt for the poor
whites down South. I never saw a person with more correct notions on
such a variety of subjects. He was perfectly willing that churches
(being himself a member), and Sunday-schools, and missionary
enterprises should go on; in fact, I do not believe he ever opposed
anything in his life. No one was more willing to vote town taxes and
road-repairs and schoolhouses than he. If you could call him
spirited at all, he was public-spirited.
And with all this he was never very well; he had, from boyhood,
"enjoyed poor health." You would say he was not a man who would ever
catch anything, not even an epidemic; but he was a person whom
diseases would be likely to overtake, even the slowest of slow
fevers. And he was n't a man to shake off anything. And yet
sickness seemed to trouble him no more than poverty. He was not
discontented; he never grumbled. I am not sure but he relished a
"spell of sickness" in haying-time.
An admirably balanced man, who accepts the world as it is, and
evidently lives on the experience of others. I have never seen a man
with less envy, or more cheerfulness, or so contented with as little
reason for being so. The only drawback to his future is that rest
beyond the grave will not be much change for him, and he has no works
to follow him.