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.