THE MAGICAL CHANCE
“What are you going to say to the college girls?” my pretty niece
asked, as we motored down the valley. She was being graduated this
spring, and the snowy dogwoods and the purple Judas-trees against the
tender hillsides were not so fresh, nor half so full of bloom, as she.
But they were gayer far than she.
“Don’t tell them, uncle, how wonderful they are! How the world waits
for them! Don’t say it, uncle! I have heard that sort of talk for these
four years, and here I am with nobody waiting for me; not fitted for
anything; nothing to do; and as wonderful--as thirty cents!”
Poor thing!
A few days before, I had seen an interview with the President of Yale,
in which the young writer said he had read in a book that all the
great devices had been invented; all the new lands explored; all the
great deeds done--all the adventure and romance forever gone from life,
and that only bread and butter remain with the odds against a young
man’s getting much of the butter.
Poor thing!
Have I been living fifty years--in America? or fifty cycles in
Cathay? I cannot still be young at fifty! nor can I be so old either
as modern two-and-twenty! Youth is a dry tree, these days; a sad
state--particularly youth bent with the burden of an A.B. degree. Out
of my fifty-odd years of existence I have taught college youth for
three-and-twenty, and never in all that time have they looked like
plain bread and butter to me. If they are not adventure and romance,
not better stories, sweeter songs, mightier deeds than any yet
recorded, then I am no judge of story matter and the stuff of epic song.
But my pretty niece declares that she also knows a shoat when she sees
one; and she knows it is just pork. As for the college man of the
interview: he was not speaking by the book; out, rather, of the depths
of his heart.
It is an evil thing to be born young into an old world!
For the world seems very old. Its face is covered with doubt, its heart
is only ashes of burned-out fires. The River of Life which John saw
has dwindled into Spoon River; and his Book of Life is now a novel,
piddling and prurient. But John also saw the Scarlet Woman--and that
was long ago! The world was ever much the same; ever in need of an
Apocalypse; and never more in need than now. My pretty niece, and the
young man of the interview, are the world, and the college world at
that, the more’s the pity. They are its skepticism, its materialism,
its conventionalism, its fear and failure. They seem afraid to bid on
life, for fear it might be knocked off to them at something above par!
They do not dare. They won’t take a chance. They would, of course, if
there _were_ chances; they would dare, if only one giant were still
left stalking through the land. The giants are gone!
The orator was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Richard Henry
Dana, the author of “Two Years Before the Mast”:
Life offered him a magical human chance and he took it. There was
something in him for which the decorous and conventional life of
Boston allowed no place in its scheme. “Two Years Before the Mast”
belongs to the Literature of Escape.
Life offered him a magical chance--as if he were a special case! So he
was. So is every boy. Who was this boy? and what were the circumstances
under which Life offered him this magical chance? He was a Bostonian
to begin with, and that is bad enough; he was a Harvard undergraduate
also, which still further complicates the situation; and, besides, he
was a Dana! Here was a complex which should have staggered Life. Who
could escape from all of this? Leave that to Life. Up she comes boldly,
just as if she expected the boy to take her offer. And he did take it.
He fell ill with some affliction of the eyes; and, going down to the
Boston wharfs, shipped as a common sailor before the mast in the little
brig Pilgrim for a two years’ trip around the Horn. And out of that
escape from Boston and Harvard and the Danas, he brought back one of
the three greatest sea stories in literature--a book that all of Boston
and Harvard and the Danas combined could never have written except for
this escape.
The question is: Does Life come along to-day, as then, and offer us, as
it offered Dana, such a magical chance? Is there any escape for us?
We are not all Danas, and so we are certainly not worse off than
he was; but our circumstances are distinctly different, and rather
disquieting. This chance was given Dana far back in 1834, nearly one
hundred years ago, when escape was possible, and when Dana was a boy.
It was a young world a hundred years ago, and full of adventure. One
could escape then because there was some place to escape into; but to
round the Horn to-day is to land, not on wild Point Loma, but at San
Diego, with the single exception of Monte Carlo, the most decorous and
conventional city on the planet.
Perhaps my niece and the college boy of the interview are right.
About the time that Dana was escaping from Boston, a young man by the
name of Henry David Thoreau tried to escape from Concord, of the same
State. He had no deep-sea wharf, no brig like the Pilgrim, but, as
one must seize such things as are at hand in an escape, Thoreau took
a rowboat and the near-by river and started off. He rowed and rowed
for a week, and came to Concord, New Hampshire. Here he took to his
diary and wrote that there were no frontiers this way any longer. “This
generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises.
Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before
us. We cannot have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was
long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have
literally been run to the South Sea.”
Born in 1817, more than a hundred years ago, and still born fatally
late! How late, then, was I born? and you, my son? and you, my pretty
niece?
“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
but you and I have missed the early glory that hath passed forever from
the morning earth,” she makes reply.
But I would say to her: It was ten years later, ten whole years after
Thoreau’s tame adventure on the Merrimac, that gold was discovered in
California. Here was a magical chance as late as the year ’Forty-Nine,
and Life offered it to a young man of Providence and Brooklyn by the
name of Bret Harte. He took it. There was something in him for which
the decorous and conventional round of these cities allowed no place in
their scheme. He went into the gold-fields and brought out “The Luck
of Roaring Camp,” another piece of the Literature of Escape. Then my
students answer: “Yes, but there are no more outcasts in Poker Flat,
and whom are we to write about?”
Alas, ’tis true, they’re in their graves, that gentle race of gamblers.
With the wind-flower and the violet they perished long ago, as literary
material. Eighteen-Forty-Nine will be having its hundredth anniversary
soon. But, some fifty years later, gold was struck again--this time
on the Yukon. Here was another magical chance. And there was a young
fellow walking the streets of Boston along with me, literally begging
bread with me from editorial door to editorial door, by the name of
Jack London. Life came up to us and offered us this magical chance,
and Jack took it, bringing out of the Yukon a story called “Building a
Fire” which is surely a part of the immortal Literature of Escape.
“Well, what would he write about now?” they ask. “What has happened
since?”
“Peary has found the North Pole,” I reply.
“Yes, and Amundsen, or somebody, has found the South Pole!” they cry.
“And what’s the use of living in a world of only two poles, and some
one finding both of them before we come along!”
There is something in that. It is a bad sort of world that has only two
poles. It should be stuck full of poles, one for each of us. But there
are only two, and a flag flies from each of them; as a flag flies over
every terrestrial spot in between them: over Mount McKinley now; over
the River of Doubt now, so that we are stopped from singing, as once we
sang,--
“There’s one more river,
There’s one more river to cross.”
There is no more river to cross. Theodore Roosevelt crossed it. There
is nothing to cross; no place to go where, on the surface of things,
men have not been there before us. Yes, yes, there is Mount Everest. No
one has yet stood on that peak; but there is an expedition climbing it,
camping to-day at about twenty-five thousand feet up, with only two or
three thousand feet more to go. And here we are in Hingham!
It looks bad. My young niece is possibly right, after all. East, west,
north, south, where is a frontier? Where shall I go from here and find
an escape?
Not overland any longer, for even Thoreau could find no frontier this
way; and not by sea now, for here comes John Masefield, poet and
sailor, saying the frontier has disappeared from off the sea; that the
clipper ship, the ship of dreams, has foundered and gone down; that you
can haunt the wharves these piping times of steam,
“Yet never see those proud ones swaying home,
With mainyards backed and bows acream with foam.
* * * * *
As once, long since, when all the docks were filled
With that sea beauty man has ceased to build.”
Listen, now, for this is the message of the poem:
“They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such ships again,--”
which makes me thank Heaven for my farm, where the same old romantic
hoe remains about what it ever was--the first recorded wedding present.
Mr. Masefield’s observations are dated 1912. Prior to that year real
clipper ships rode the deep, and real romance. It was prior to 1839
that there were real frontiers and romance in the land, and a last
house (a government lighthouse) still to be set up in the suburbs of
Astoria City. Going a little farther back, we find that prior to 1491
(B.C.), about the year 4000 according to the margin of the King James
Version, there were giants in the earth, and the stories in the Book of
Genesis show that there were romances as well as giants in those days.
But, like Thoreau and Masefield, Moses was born fatally late. I feel
sorry for Moses and my niece.
Let us pause here for a sad brief moment in order to see just where
Moses was when Life sought him out and proffered him a magical chance
in the shape of a trip to Egypt. Where was Moses? and what was he
doing? To begin with, he was keeping goats, a fairly common occupation
in those days, though rather a rare job now. But that was not all:
Moses was keeping these goats for Jethro, his father-in-law. Now you
begin to get some inkling as to where Moses was. But this is not the
worst of it: for Moses was keeping the goats for his father-in-law
on “the _back_ side of the desert.” One would certainly say that the
_front_ side of any desert would be far enough away, and sterile enough
of romance, if one had to keep one’s father-in-law’s goats there; but
to keep the goats of your father-in-law on the _back_ side of a desert
is to be farther off than Hingham, or any place I know. And here was
Moses when Life came upon him offering him an escape into Egypt.
He was born fatally late, Moses was, just like Thoreau and my niece. He
might have been one of my own college men, so like a college man’s was
his answer!
“No, no!” he complained, “I don’t want to go down to Egypt. There is
nothing doing down in Egypt. I’m slow of speech; without imagination;
and it’s a hard job, anyway. Let me stay here and be goatherd to
Jethro, my father-in-law, and dream of the good old days of the giants,
when men began to multiply upon the face of the earth, when the sons
of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair. Ah!--there was
something doing in those days!”
From Moses to Masefield the times have been fatally late. And so
mine are, with the clipper ships, the frontiers, the giants, and the
daughters of men that are fair, all gone! But I seem to see them fair.
I suppose I ought not, having been born so fatally late. And I wonder
if I might not find a giant, too, if I should hunt? and a clipper ship?
and a frontier? and even an escape from Hingham!
Lumber is still brought in boats to one of Hingham’s old wharves, but
the rest of her wharves are deserted. Her citizens, who used to do
business in great waters, stop now in Hingham Harbor to catch smelts.
Change and some decay one can see all about Hingham, but little chance
of escape.
Down at the foot of Mullein Hill, on which my house stands, there runs
a long, long trail awinding into that land of my dreams; but I ask:
Where does it cross the frontier? I have traveled it, going south, in
my Ford (if you are out for frontiers, take a Ford. We have a saying
here in Hingham that a Ford will take a man anywhere--except into good
society!)--I say I have gone south over this road which runs at the
foot of Mullein Hill as far as Philadelphia, and no frontier!--the next
stop was Chester. I have gone east over the same road until I came to
within ten miles of Skowhegan, Maine, where I ran into a steam-roller
on the road. When you meet a steam-roller on a road in Maine, you
are very near the frontier. If there is any adventure for you on the
trip, it will be on the détour around that steam-roller. But under the
roller ran the road and on into Skowhegan, and on out of Skowhegan into
Aroostook County, the richest county in the United States, where they
raise “spuds” enough to feed, not only Boston, but the rest of dear old
Ireland with her; and all the way from Hingham to Aroostook, except at
the steam-roller, there was no chance to get off.
And this road, taking a turn among these glorious potato-fields of
Maine, starts over the mountains of New Hampshire, crosses the corn and
cattle belt in the central portion of the country, and, running on and
on, dips into the Imperial Valley in far-off California, the hottest
cultivated spot on earth. And all the way from Hingham, roundabout by
Maine, to the Imperial Valley, you may not stop, unless you run out
of “gas.” And the oil companies do not intend this magical chance to
attend you, for they have planted gasoline tanks under every second
telegraph pole all the way.
This road, starting from Mullein Hill, Hingham, and running to
Aroostook, Maine, and to the Imperial Valley in California, takes a
new turn among the melon-fields there, works its way back along the
Gulf States, binding their ragged edge like a selvage, and, bending
into Florida, threads its way among the Everglades and out, heading off
across the cotton-fields, on across the corn and cattle belt again,
climbs Pike’s Peak and down, climbs Mount Hood and down, and, faring on
into the State of Washington, climbs the fruited slopes of old Tacoma,
“The Mountain that was God.” And all the way from Hingham some one has
been there before us, and laid an oiled road for us, and left us no
frontier.
Surely we are born late; and my pretty niece fatally late. The frontier
is gone. The buffaloes are gone. I saw their ancient trails out of the
car windows as my train roared over the Canadian prairie, wavering
parallel paths in the virgin sod, a vivider green than the rest of the
grass, narrow meandering lines vanishing short of the far-off horizon
where hung a cloud not larger than a man’s hand, like the dust of the
last disappearing herd.
“Hank” Monk is gone. This king of overland stage-drivers sleeps in
Carson City; and beside sleeps his Concord coach of split hickory.
Concord has ceased to make such coaches.
They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such coaches again.
From Hell Gate now to Golden Gate there are only miles, and any machine
makes a mere holiday of the trip.
A young acquaintance of mine has just made the coast-to-coast run,
driving her own car. She said to me on arriving here that “it was
an awful monotonous journey.” Didn’t anything happen? I asked
with considerable surprise. No, nothing happened. Didn’t she see
anything of interest? Wasn’t there any excitement? Didn’t she
have any adventures? No, she didn’t see anything; she didn’t get a
bit of excitement out of it; there wasn’t any adventure; just one
blinkety-blank mile after another!
“Incredible!” I cried.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes brightening, something like a thrill in
her voice, “I did have three punctures!”
All the way from Golden Gate to Hell Gate with three punctures to break
the cushioned tenor of her way. This is what life has come to.
Then she said: “There were two things on the trip that did greatly
interest me. But I don’t exactly know why; and I am afraid to tell you
about them for fear you will think me such a big fool.”
“No,” I answered, “I won’t think you any bigger fool than I do now, so
what were the two interesting things?”
“Well,” she began (and I wish the reader would note the strictly
American touch in this description), “one of them was Luther Burbank’s
spineless cactus.” (Notice, I say, the spineless quality of this
cactus.)
The girl read my face and exclaimed, much hurt: “There! I knew you
would poke fun at me.”
“But tell what the other thing was,” I begged. “Let’s get the sordid
story over as fast as we can.”
“I don’t know even yet what it all meant,” she went on, “but, as I was
crossing the Arizona desert, I saw a long petition being circulated by
the native Arizonians, praying the National Congress to preserve for
them and for posterity a portion of their original desert.”
My poor niece! Moses saw the giants pass away; Thoreau saw the frontier
pass away; Masefield sees the clipper ship pass away; but it remains
for my niece and her day to see the Great American Desert wiped out
by the irrigation ditch, and the gila monster with the desert, and
the need of a shovel on the trip across the sands! Have we eaten the
cassaba melon and gone mad? Is it all of life to make the desert
blossom as the rose? To bring forth cassaba melons, and alligator
pears, and spineless cacti for cow feed?
Ploughing the desert; turning the giant cactus into ensilage, as
if to live were a silo--for fear of this the native Arizonians are
asking Congress that a portion of their original desert and of Life’s
adventure and romance be saved to them and to their children.
It is sad. But this is not the worst of it: for they have laid an oiled
road across that desert, as if it were the whole of life to get through
to San Diego on time.
There is no hope for a man who gets through to San Diego on time.
He will strike Los Angeles on time, come to San Francisco on time.
Portland on time, Winnipeg, Chicago, Boston, and Hingham on time; where
he will die on time, be buried on time, rise on time, and keep going
on time, with never a chance to get off. But where is the adventure in
that? It is not the whole of life to get through to San Diego on time.
I had rather leave my bones to bleach beneath a bush than travel on and
on by schedule, always making life’s connections, and so missing always
life’s magical chances. Don’t you remember your Mother Goose, wise old
dear?
“A dillar a dollar,
A ten-o’clock scholar,
Why have you come so soon?
You used to come at ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon.”
And he was the only little duffer in the whole school to get a poem
written to him. The other children came on time and passed into
oblivion; this boy (he certainly was a boy) came late and has become
immortal.
The desert is doomed, no doubt, but we shall always have détours; and
if “on the surface of things men have been there before us,” we must
go beneath. There are giants still in these days; the daughters of
men are still fair; there are frontiers for those who will find them;
and, clipper ships or no, I believe in the everlasting adventure of
rounding the Horn. I believe in magical chances of escape, born though
I was after my parents, which might have been fatally late had I not
happily come before my children, each of whom is an adventure and an
escape. Wherever I turn, I see a chance to sidestep the decorous, the
conventional, the scheduled, to dodge into the bushes and escape. Every
day is an adventure.
There are magical human chances to go round; there is adventure and
escape for everybody who will seize it. Youth is as young, the world
as round, the earth as wild as ever. And, in spite of all those who
have grown old, it is still appareled in celestial light--sunlight,
starlight, moonlight--or else wrapped in ancient and adventurous dark.
The sun still knoweth his going down, thank Heaven! There are some
things that do not change nor pass away.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the
forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down
in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.
Then look out for your men-folks. For this is the end of the decorous
and conventional. This is the time wherein all the beasts of the forest
do creep forth.
We are what we always were, and so are things what they always were,
though they look different. We have changed the spots of a few
leopards, the skins of a few Ethiopians, and shifted the frontier
from the dark wild heart of the forest to the wild dark heart of the
city; but we have not changed the darkness, or the wildness, or the
Ethiopian, or the leopard.
I have seen the evening come over the city, a night deep with darkness
and wild with a great storm blowing salty from the sea. I have watched
the streets grow empty till the shadow feet of Midnight echoed as they
passed, and all the doors were shut. Then I have crept down along the
dark wet ways, bleak and steep-cut as cliffs, where I have heard the
beating of great wings above the roofs, the call of wild shrill voices
along the craggy covings, and the wash and splash of driving rains
aslant the walls; I have tasted brine, spume, and spindrift on the
level winds, flying through a city’s streets from far at sea--“one-way”
streets by day, and so clogged that traffic could barely move in that
one way--but here--in the hushed tumult of the storm and night--I could
hear the stones crying out of their walls, and the beams out of the
timbers answering them; the very cobbles of the pavement having tongues
that would speak when the din of the pounding hoofs was past.
Some one complained to Browning that Italy is the only land of romance
now left to us. The poet answered promptly, “I should like to include
dear old Camberwell.” And I should like to include dear old Haleyville
and dear old Hingham. And you would like to include dear old Wig Lane,
if you were born there.
But I started out from Hingham, pages back, to find the frontier. Have
I found it yet? So Abraham started out from Ur of the Chaldees to find
a frontier, which he called a “City without Foundations,” and did he
find it? Whether he did or not, he certainly had a plenty of adventure
by the way. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born. There
is something thrilling about that. Yet, narrow as that chance was, it
is nothing when compared with what happened to him next. For, when
Abraham was one hundred and _forty_ years old, he married Keturah. Here
was a man who would not be put down by a little circumstance like one
hundred and forty years. Life comes along at one hundred and forty and
offers Abraham Keturah, and he takes her!
I say he may not have found his city. We know that he did find
Keturah--which is vastly more of an adventure. We may not have the
pleasure of erecting the last house in the suburbs of Astoria City, as
Thoreau says; but we might have the wilder adventure of living in it.
And as it happens to be a government lighthouse out on Tongue Point,
at the mouth of the Columbia; and as it happens to be where the night
and the rain and the fog are thickest on the face of the globe, life in
that last house is a constant frontier.
One might never leave Ur were he not seeking a city. And one must never
find his city else he might cease his seeking. I do not know how old
Abraham was when he set out from Ur of the Chaldees. I left Haleyville
at the age of eight. I have only lately come to Hingham, having got in
on the wrong side of the railroad track some twenty years ago. (If one
is really to arrive in Hingham, one must come in with one’s ancestors,
and more than twenty years before.) I say, I was eight when I left
Haleyville; that I have hardly yet arrived in Hingham; but all the way
from Haleyville to Hingham, and all the way from Hingham to--Heaven,
dare I say?--there has been, and there shall be, held out, in both of
Life’s hands to me, the magical chance of escape.
Did I start out from Hingham to find the frontier? That was wrong.
I will start back for Hingham. Hingham _is_ the frontier. So was
Haleyville. So will Heaven be. Life with the earth goes round, not
forward, except to complete a circuit established when the stars were
fixed, an orbit that all the forces of Heaven and human intelligence
have been unable to warp. The only variation or shadow of new turning
Earth herself can look forward to is from collision with some mad
comet, which, if she lasts long enough, may happen possibly within
fifteen million years--a square head-on smash it may be, or only a
side-swipe with a severe shaking up--and then fifteen million years
more of steady turning. Things outside are rather hard and fast despite
appearances, and we who are parts of this even scheme, we find that our
uprisings and downsittings have never varied much from rule, nor are
liable to.
We are, I repeat, what we always were, and so are things what they
always were, though they look different. So is life what it always was
for adventures and frontiers.
The wild frontier, like the hunted fox, has doubled on its trail, that
is all. Romance has slipped out of the woods into the deeper places
of the city; Adventure has turned commuter; and here are the three to
companion life, as they ever have--the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to a
bebundled D’Artagnan. And already it is more than “Twenty Years Since.”
Twenty years, or a hundred years--
“The year’s at the spring.”
If you do not find your fill of adventure with Davy Balfour in Appin,
come down with him to Dean--to Edinburgh, and you shall see the face of
such danger “in the midst of what they call the safety of a town” as
may shake you, too, “beyond experience.”
If you don’t find the frontier in the daylight, wait for the dark.
Every night is a fresh frontier. There are no landmarks of the day but
are blotted out by the dark as the lines are sponged in the wake of a
steamer’s keel. On the shortest night of this year wild rabbits were
in my garden, fox-hounds were baying beyond the quarries, and through
the thin early mist of the dawn we were all at the window watching a
wild doe behind the barn. She nipped the clover nervously, twitched her
tail, pricked her ears (for the day was approaching), and took the high
wire fence at a bound. She was as wild and free as the wind.
A few Sunday nights ago I was at church when the minister announced
a series of evening sermons for young people, and, to my utter
astonishment, his first talk was to be “Against Sowing Wild Oats.” I
was greatly tempted to ask him if he intended to prevent his young
people from doing any more farming. If they couldn’t sow wild oats,
what kind of oats could they sow? Did he ever see any tame oats? Those
preachers imagine a vain thing who think we ever cease to sow wild oats
(at least, there is many a late crop, as Thackeray says). The truth is
there are no oats but wild ones.
I do not know what seed catalogue you order your garden seeds out of;
I get mine out of one marked “Honest Seeds”; it is assuring to have an
order-book of this sort plainly stamped “honest” on the cover. In this
honest-seed catalogue for the current year the seedsman, on page 56, is
describing his oats. Let the preacher on wild oats note with critical
care the terms of this description. There is something theological,
at least, revivalistic, about them. It is the only oat described in
the catalogue; and it would be the only oat to plant in all the world,
if it were, as it is described, a “Regenerated Select Swedish Oat.” A
“regenerated” (that is Methodist) “select” (that is Presbyterian) oat!
But read on through this catalogue, and you will find that every seed
and tuber from artichoke to zinnia has been to a revival since last
summer and hit the “sawdust trail.” Great revivalists are the seedsmen!
Their work, however, is not permanent. For they know, and we all know,
that every regenerated select Swedish oat in their bins is a backslider
at heart, as wild as the wild ass of the wilderness that scorneth the
crying of the driver.
It is true of the seed and true of the soil in which it grows. This
spring I brought in from the garden a frozen lump of earth which I
had been subduing, after the fashion of Scripture, with my hoe, these
twenty years. Nay, that lump of earth had been in process of being
subdued for nigh two hundred years, here on this ancient Hingham farm.
It was a bit of regenerated, select soil, which I had sweetened with
lime, had nourished with nitrogen and potash, and had planted with
nothing but regenerated, select seeds out of this honest catalogue. I
put this lump of soil in a pot by a south window and tenderly planted
more regenerated, select seeds within its breast--tomato seeds, Jewel,
Earliana, and Bonny Best. Then I looked that it should bring forth
tomato plants, and it brought forth within the pot, at the end of
two weeks, pig-weed, horse-weed, chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed,
rag-weed, knot-weed, tumble-weed, milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed,
poke-weed; goose-grass, crab-grass, witch-grass, wire-grass,
spear-grass; burdock, sourdock, and _pusley_; to say nothing of the
swarm of things from Europe, whose infant cotyledons looked innocent
enough, but whose roots were altogether evil.
Life offered that lump of mother earth its magical chance and the
lump took it. The innate badness of it, this cared-for, chemically
pure, subdued piece of garden soil! Its frozen heart a very furnace
of smouldering fires; its breast, that suckled the nursing salsify in
the summer, a bed of such wild spores as would sow a world to weeds!
Given tomato seeds, regenerated, select tomato seeds, Jewel, Earliana,
and Bonny Best, the lump of earth brings forth its own original
pig-weed, horse-weed, chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed, rag-weed,
knot-weed, tumble-weed, milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed, poke-weed;
goose-grass, crab-grass, witch-grass, wire-grass, spear-grass; burdock,
sourdock, and pusley. That is what it brought forth a million years
ago. A million years from now, subdued and sweetened and nourished,
and planted with regenerated, select tomato seed, Jewel, Earliana,
and Bonny Best, and put in a pot in the sunshine of the south
window, that lump of earth will bring forth pig-weed, horse-weed,
chick-weed, smart-weed, white-weed, rag-weed, knot-weed, tumble-weed,
milk-weed, silk-weed, sneeze-weed, poke-weed, goose-grass, crab-grass,
witch-grass, wire-grass, spear-grass; burdock, sourdock, and pusley.
“The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;”
--vanish, but not change. The heart of man is not less constant than a
clod of earth.
“Lord, we are vile, conceived in sin,
And born unholy and unclean;
Sprung from the man, whose guilty fall
Corrupts his race and taints us all,”
--sings Watts with Augustine, with gusto and with more unction and
consolation to me than in any other of his hymns. To know that we still
inherit a portion of the original Adam, if only the naughty of him, is
tremendously heartening. Anything original, if only original sin, in
this day of the decorous and the conventional, is stimulating. For,
if we do still come by all of Adam’s original badness, do we not, by
the same token, come by all of his original goodness, and are we not
then wholly original, as the original Adam? We must be; as surely as
the clod is; full, like the clod of wild weed-seed, and capable, like
the clod, under the proper care, of producing tomato plants: Jewel,
Earliana, and Bonny Best, regenerate and select.
I say the heart of a man is of the same steady stuff as the other clay.
What it was, it is, and will be--wild, and ever seeking an escape from
the decorous, the conventional, the routine of his subdued and ordered
round.
How constant the heart of nature is to itself I saw again the other day
at Walden Pond. Almost half a century before I came to this planet,
Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond: “But since I left those shores the
woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a
year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood,
with occasional vistas through which you see the water.” Those many
years have long since come and gone. Thoreau is gone; his cabin is
gone; and a cairn of stones marks the spot where it stood. Over the
stumps he saw, tall stranger trees now stand; and once more there is
rambling through their shadowy aisles, and vistas through which you
catch glimpses of the beloved face of Walden, calm and pure as when he
last looked upon it.
“Why, here is Walden!” I hear him exclaim, “the same woodland lake
that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last
winter another is springing up by its shore as lusty as ever; the same
thought is welling up to its surface as was then; it is the same liquid
joy and happiness to itself and its maker, aye”--and it has now been
set aside as a reservation that its liquid joy and happiness may be
ours forever.
Change is constant, but it is the change of the ever-returning wheel.
Thoreau’s cabin is gone, and no other cabin can now be built on the
shores of Walden Pond. But the trees have come back to stay, and if,
“on the surface of things” Thoreau “has been there before us,” we must
go below or above the surface and find our frontier.
“Magical chances?” a young aviator on the Pacific Coast wrote lately.
“I thought of them to-day as I flirted with a little bunch of
cotton-wool clouds eight thousand five hundred feet above Point Loma.
And I wondered what Dana would have thought had one of his shipmates
sauntered across the deck of the Pilgrim, and, clapping him on the
back, said: ‘I’ll meet you, old man, in fifteen minutes up there in
that fleet of little clouds; if they whift and drift into space, wait
for me at the five-thousand-foot altitude’?”
So the frontier comes back. Pushed past the suburbs of Astoria City
into the Pacific, it is seen crawling out on the sandy shores of Cape
Cod with the next great storm. The single line of human footsteps
across the polar snows has not left too packed and plain a trail. New
snows have covered it, as new trees have shadowed the shores of Walden.
Peary’s footprints, and Dr. Cook’s, too, would be very hard to follow.
It was more than twenty-five years ago that I started from Savannah
over the old stage-road to Augusta, finding my way by faint uncertain
blazings on the tree-trunks through a hundred and thirty-odd miles of
swamp. They were solemn miles. Trees thicker than my body grew in the
ruts where wheels had run; more than once the great diamond rattlesnake
coiled in my path, chilling the silence of the river bottoms with his
shivering whirr. Once I heard the gobble of the wild turkey and the
scream of the bobcat; and at night, while sleeping in an old abandoned
church on the river bluff, I was awakened by the snuffling of a bear
which had thrust its muzzle underneath the church door in the foot-worn
hollow of the sill.
It was a lonesome place. A faint road led away from it off through
the swamp; but, aside from the gravestones near by, there were no
other human signs around. How long since human feet had crossed the
threshold, I do not know.
The chintz altar-cloth that I tried to draw over me (the night was
chill) crumbled at my touch and drifted off into a million dusty
fragments. I had meant no desecration. I was very weary and had crept
in through a window from the night and cold. A slow rain had settled
down with the dusk, attended by darkness indescribably profound. And
beneath the long-draped pines outside slept those whose feet had worn
the threshold--slept undisturbed by the soughing of the wind, wrapped
in the unutterable loneliness of the coiling river and the silent,
somber swamp.
Yet here had passed a highway between two great cities just a few years
earlier, before the railroad was built farther out through the State.
Already the swamp and the river had taken the highway for their own,
and from human feet given it again to adventure, to the gliding form,
the swift wing, and the soft padded foot.
The giants of old, the frontiers and clipper ships of old, are gone.
They went out with the ebb tide, and here already comes back the flood!
And with it the same old human chance, the magical chance of escape.
Lay aside the rifle and you pick up the camera--to creep with it into
the lion’s den; or to climb with it into the top of a towering oak, on
some sheer mountain wall; and, pushing it before you along a horizontal
limb, feet dangling in space, a stiff wind blowing, eagles screaming
overhead, canyon wall below you, and far, far down the narrow canyon
bottom, you hold on, body balancing camera, but nothing over against
the swaying brain, and grind out a hundred feet of movie film. This is
to shoot a good many lions.
Life offers us all the chance of escape. Go where we will on the
surface of things, men have been there before us; but beneath the
surface we need go no deeper than our own hearts to find a frontier,
and that adventurous something for which the decorous and conventional
allows no place in its scheme.