Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 15

One experience of my own recurs to my memory poignantly here, and I think I cannot do better than set it forth. I had pa.s.sed an unforgettable night all alone in a meadow, detained by the evening almost insensibly into 'solemn midnight's tingling silences,' and thence into the austere dawn. It was an episode such as should have sealed my lips forever; but I profanely spoke of it, and at once the contagion of interest spread through the little village.

'What fun! Did you have your rubbers on? Did you sit in a chair? I should think you would have sat in a chair--so much more comfortable!

Well, I tell you what, let's do it together,--a lot of us, so we won't be afraid,--and let's climb a mountain. The sunset and dawn will be beautiful from a mountain.'

We did it; I blush to confess that some twenty-five of us did it. It was an excursion planned and discussed for a matter of two weeks (a full moon being part of the programme), and there was no accident unforeseen, no event unprovided for. The procession that wended its way, toiling and puffing, up the ascent of Haystack,--the favored mountain selected for the high pedestal of our rapture,--on the auspicious night, was about as sad, and withal as funny, an affront as the secrecy of beauty ever received. Blankets, steamer-rugs, pillows, shawls, hammocks, whiskey-flasks--how we groaned beneath the burden of all these things.

We lost the way, of course, and had to beat the woods in every direction; we were tired and hot and--cross? Perhaps. But we knew what our role was, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we all of us stood very solemnly in a row and said, 'How beautiful!'

It was beautiful; that was just the fineness of the night's triumph over us--over me at least; I cannot speak for the other twenty-four. To this day, be it said in parentheses, whenever we mention that night on Haystack we lift our eyes in ecstasy, and no one of us has ever confessed any sense of lack. But honestly, honestly at the last (dear stalwart relief of honesty!), that experiment was a failure--so beautiful that the spirit should have been lifted out of the body, and would have been, had it stood alone, had it not already exhausted itself in plans and expectations. Beneath us, a far-spreading sea of misty, rolling hills, all vague and blended in the light of the soaring moon; above us, such a sweep of sky as only mountain-tops command; around us, silence, silence. Yet the unstrenuous orchard at home, with its tranquil acceptance of such degree of sunset light as was granted to it, and of the moon's presence when she rose above the apple trees, would have conveyed the night's message a thousand times more clearly.

It is seldom worth while to describe any failure of the spirit very minutely, and tragedy is not the tone this paper would a.s.sume; but one slight episode of the dawn following that fatal night must be related.

We were gathered on the eastern edge of our mountain top, a tousled, gray, disheveled lot, heavy-eyed and weary. Does the reader understand the significance of the term 'to prevent the dawn'? He does if he has stood and waited for the sun to rise--or the moon or any of the constellations, for that matter. All heavenly bodies r.e.t.a.r.d their progress through the influence of being waited for. 'Surely now!' a dozen times we warned one another there, with our faces toward the quickening east; yet no glittering, lambent rim slid up to greet our eyes.

At last a decent comely cloud came to the rescue of the sun, halting and embarra.s.sed, and settled snugly all about the mountain of the day-spring. Into this the sun was born, so obscurely that it rode high above the mountain's edge, shorn and dull, a rubber ball, before we discovered it. 'Why--why--' some one began, stammering; and then there was a dramatic pause. Brave and determined though we were in our pursuit of ecstasy, we could not burst forth into song like Memnon statues at the sight of that belated orange, 'Lo, the Lord Sun!' Not at all. It was the merest varlet. In this dilemma of our hearts, a funny little wailing cry came from the cliff's edge: 'I want my money back! I want my money back!' It was a perfect commentary on the whole situation, as fine and humorous and true an utterance as could be asked on the foiled occasion.

We laughed at it, and all the air was straightway clearer for us. Then down the mountain-side we trooped, and went home to bed.

Of course I am not unaware of the impatience of some readers, if they have taken pains to scan so far this earnest exposition. The outdoor movement is not one primarily of sentiment, but of health and happiness; and the story just related is aside from the point. That may be true. I certainly stand in respect of the great claims of the physical side of the subject, and would not deal with them. By all means, let all people be as well as possible. But it is still the other side, the side of sentiment and rapture, which is most pleadingly often brought home to me.

It is pitiful how helpless we are against the invasions of a new enthusiasm like this--we sober, conservative folk. I still sleep in my bed, in my room, but the satisfaction I used to take in the innocent practice is broken of late by haunting fears that I may not be able to keep it up. My friends will not let me alone.

'Of all things! why don't you sleep out here, on this little upper piazza? Precisely the place! I can't understand how you can ignore such an opportunity.'

'Well, you see,'--my answer was glib at first,--'the piazza overhangs the road, and the milk-wagons go by very early. I don't want to get up at four o'clock every morning.'

'They couldn't see much of you, I should think,'--with a thoughtful measuring glance,--'not more than your toes and the tip of your nose.'

'Oh, thank you, that's quite enough!'

'Well, you might saw off the legs of a cot, to bring it below the railing. Or just a mattress spread on the floor would do very well.'

Just a mattress spread on the floor! That closes the argument. I have no spirit left to prefer any other objections to these dauntless souls, such as the rain (the piazza has no roof). But what would a cold bath be if not distinctly so much to the good in view of the toilet operations of the following morning? There is no course left me but that final one,--which should in honesty have come first,--of d.a.m.ning myself by the hopeless a.s.sertion, 'I don't want to sleep out of doors.' This locks the argument, and the barrier stands complete, shutting me off in a world by myself, interrupting the genial flow of sympathetic friends.h.i.+p. But I love my friends. Therefore it follows that I tremble for my further repose in my bed. I fear I shall yet utter midnight sighs on that piazza floor.

Indoors, dear indoors! I would I might plead its cause a little here.

Does no one ever pause to reflect that there was never any outdoors at all until indoors was created? The two had a simultaneous birth, but it was an appurtenance of the latter that marked the distinction and gave the names. A little humiliating that might have seemed to any creatures less generous than woods and mountains--to have been here really from the beginning, ages and ages in glorious life, and then to take their first generic name, find their first cla.s.sification, all of them in a lump together (what a lump!) as the other side of a fragile barrier to a mushroom construction. One wonders that those who exalt the outdoors as everything nowadays, do not find some better t.i.tle for it than its dooryard term. But those who love the indoors too, though they may smile at the calm presumption of its dubbing the universe, accept the conclusion without any question. Man is after all the creature of creatures, and his life is of first importance. We do not hear that the woodchuck speaks of _out-hole_, or the bird of _out-tree_.

Such life of man is an inner thing, intensely inner; its essence lies in its inwardness. It can hardly know itself 'all abroad'; it must needs have devised for itself a shelter as soon as it came to self-consciousness, a refuge, not only from storm and cold but from the distracting variety of the extensive world. Indoors is really an august symbol, a very grave and reverend thing, if we apprehend it rightly. It stands for the separate life of man, apart from (though still a part of, too) the rest of the universe. Take any one room inhabited daily by a person of strong individuality,--how alive it is! How brisk and alert in the very att.i.tudes of the chairs and the pictures on the walls! Or, more happily, how serene and reposeful! Or how matter-of-fact! Morbid and pa.s.sionate, flippant, austere, boisterous, decorous,--anything, everything a room may be which a human creature may be; and that range, as most of us know, is almost unlimited.

It is hard to understand how any person can fail to respond to the warm appeal of his own abode. Say one has been abroad all day (another term that a.s.sumes the house as a starting-point), climbing the mountains, exploring the woods, ravis.h.i.+ng eyes and heart with the beauty of the excellent world. Night comes at last, and weariness droops upon the flesh. Enough! Even the spirit's cry finds a pause. Enough, enough! The wide world suddenly spreads so vast that it overwhelms and frightens; there is something pitiless in the reach of the unbounded sky. Then, as fast as they can, the lagging feet make for a point on the hillside where the eyes can command the valley, and swiftly, eagerly flies the glance to one dear accustomed goal. A white house nestled among the trees,--that is all, yet it thrills the heart with a potent summons which mountain-peaks and sunsets do not know. Home! Ah, hurry, then!

Down the hill, across the pasture, in at the white gate, and up the two marble steps. The front door stands open unconcernedly. The house makes no stir at receiving its inmate back,--its inmate whose life it has held and brooded during his absence, waiting to reinvest him with it when he wants it again,--but there is a quiet sense of welcome, a content of returning, which is among the sweetest and most establis.h.i.+ng of human experiences. The clock ticks steadily in the hall, its hands approaching the genial hour of supper-time. Within the open library door, the books dream on the shelves. Little sounds of a tranquil preparation come from the dining-room; the tea-kettle sings, the black kitten purrs. Blessed indoors! It draws a veil gently over the tired head, bewildered with much marveling, lays a cool hand over the eyes, says, 'Now rest, rest.'

Indoors is like the Guardian Angel in Browning's poem.

After supper, one sits by the lamp and reads peacefully. Aunt Susan reads, too, on the other side of the big table, and Cousin Jane sews.

The books and the pictures look on benignly, and even the furniture is instinct with a mute eloquence of companions.h.i.+p. The song of the night insects throbs without, and millers hurl themselves with soft thuds against the windows; an owl mutters to himself in the maple tree. But not for anything would one go out, not for anything would one leave this glowing, brooding, protecting indoors which one has regained. After a while, one goes upstairs and lays one's self in the safe white bed in one's own room. The windows are open to the night, but solid walls are all round about; and, before the sleepily closing eyes, gleam one's own peculiar cherished belongings in the creeping moonlight. Into the very heart of one's life one has returned at the close of the day, and there one goes to sleep. 'In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.'

And we will not? Is the discouraged clause, promptly succeeding to that most beautiful verse of Isaiah, true, then, of us? Are we going to despoil ourselves of all the poetry, the intimate meaning of our indoor life?

'A place in which to dress and undress--that is all I want of a house,'

an energetic young woman said.

A bath-house would suit her perfectly. Perhaps that is what we are coming to--rows of bath-houses, with sleeping-bags stored up in them against the night. Alas for the pictures! Alas for the music! Alas for the books!

The books! There is a happy suggestion. I believe the books will save us. There is certainty nothing that objects with greater decision and emphasis to sleeping out of doors than a book--yes, even a volume of Walt Whitman. Books are obstinate in their way; they know their own minds, and there are some things which they will not do. The effect of leaving one in the orchard inadvertently over night has a final melancholy about it which most book-lovers understand poignantly. Could books be printed on india rubber and bound in water-proof cloth?

Perhaps; but the method does not sound attractive enough to be feasible even in these practical days. No, I believe the books will save us. They are a great army and they have power; a steady conservative hold is theirs on their restless owners. Other threatening situations, they have saved and are constantly saving.

'I sometimes think I'd give up housekeeping, and not have a home any more,' one woman said, 'if it weren't for my books. But I can't part with them, nor yet can I get them all into one room; so here I stay.'

'Buy books?' exclaimed a New York man. 'No; it hurts them too much to move them.'

Which innocent implication has caused me many a thoughtful smile.

Essentially human,--with the humanity of the ages, not of a few decades,--books understand what man really wants, and what he must have, better than he does himself. In the serene and gracious indoors, they took up their places long ago, and there they remain, and there they will always make s.h.i.+ft to abide. Perhaps, if we sit down close at their feet, we, too, may abide.

The Contented Heart

By Lucy Elliot Keeler

_Cur Content, grand Talent_, runs the motto of one of my friends; which early led me to dub her, Contented Heart. Is it not human nature, such easy a.s.sumption of an interesting aspiration as a fact to be posted? As logical as to expect Mr. Short to check his stature at five feet two; as humanly contrary as for the Blacks to name their girls Lily, Blanche, and Pearl. They usually do. I remember a Bermudian rector, leaning down to inquire the name of the black baby to be christened, suddenly quickened into audibility by the mother's reply: 'Keren-Happuck, sir, yes, sir, one of the Miss Jobs, sir.' Now Job's daughters were fairest among the daughters of men.

Contented Heart has obsessed my mind of late. I like to take the other side: everybody does. Does like to and does; and because the air to-day is redolent of unrest and discontent, I put in the a.s.sertion that, nevertheless, the great majority of my acquaintances possess that great talent,--translate it knack, or translate it acquirement,--a contented heart. I seldom talk intimately with anybody but I hear something like this:--

'I have been visiting at the X's. What a superb place! but I do not envy them. Think of the care and expense and the servant question. Simple as my cot is, I honestly prefer it.' Or, 'What a fortune the H's appear to have. It would be comfortable to get what one wants and go where one wishes; not to worry at tax-paying time and new-suit time. Still I doubt if they get half the enjoyment from their acquisitions that we do who have to save and plan for ours.' Or, 'You do not use eye-gla.s.ses? How fortunate! they are such a nuisance. But hush--such a boon. I should be helpless without them. I am not sure but it is even a good thing to be born with them on, so to speak. My contemporaries who are beginning to use them are most unhappy, while gla.s.ses are just a part of my face.'

Or, 'It is a great affliction to be deaf in even one ear. The person on that one side of you thinks you prefer the conversation of the person on the other side. Yet, as my brother said when he saw me struggling to make out a dull speaker's words, "Why abuse your natural advantage?"

How do people with two good ears sleep? They cannot bury them both in the pillow. Suppose our ears were so sensitive that we noticed every footstep on the street! Being deaf is merely to enjoy some of the advantages that the society to prevent unnecessary noises seeks to confer on a normal public. We admire a beautiful face and then add, 'But how she must hate to grow old; a tragedy of the mirror that we homely souls are spared.' All my life I envied persons with straight noses till I began to observe that with age the straight nose droops into a beak, whereas the youthful tip-tilt and concavity kind straightens its end to a fair cla.s.sicism. Thus others than the Vicar of Wakefield draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune.

Of course content is dilemma enough to have its two horns: the double peaks of taking life too easily, and of taking it too hard. In his statue of Christ, Thorvaldsen expressed his conviction that he had reached his culminating point,--since he had never been so satisfied with any work before,--and was 'alarmed that I _am_ satisfied.' That 'the people ask nothing better' is the slogan of the grafter. No reform comes without its preceding period of discontent; dissatisfaction is the price to be paid for better things; a revolutionary att.i.tude must be maintained. Stevenson knew a Welsh blacksmith who at twenty-five could neither read nor write, at which time he heard a chapter of _Robinson Crusoe_ read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance; but he left the kitchen another man.

There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.

Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy, only one in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length with entire delight read _Robinson_.

As there is a n.o.ble way of being discontented, so there is an ign.o.ble content. The Contented Heart is not a phrase to soothe us, but a power to work results. It must constantly emerge upon a higher plane, or it will fall. Few of us would be willing to retain just the personal habits that we have now. Sir Gilbert Elliot drove his sister out of her literary inertia when he bet gloves to ribbons that she could not write a modern ballad on the _Flowers of the Forest_. The result is one of the most popular songs of Scotland. There is also a sham content whose pract.i.tioners often get their 'c.u.muppances' as effectively as did Thomas Raikes. The d.u.c.h.ess of York led him about her garden, where was a menagerie crowded with eagles and some favorite macaws. A herd of kangaroos and ostriches appeared and a troop of monkeys. Next morning a kangaroo and a macaw strolled into Raikes's bedroom. He was too much of a courtier to tell his terror. At breakfast he said, 'If I like one creature more than another it is a kangaroo, while there is nothing so good for a bedroom sentinel as a strong-legged macaw.' The good d.u.c.h.ess smiled pleasantly and put Raikes down in her will for two macaws.

A certain kind of content enlivens us with the bliss of others'

ignorance. Tacitus was one of the first historians in our modern sense, yet he described a motionless frozen sea in the north from which a hiss is heard as the sun plunges down into it at night; and Pliny noted that the reflection of mirrors is due to the percussion of the air thrown back upon the eyes. Kipling laughed slyly at the traveler in India who spent his time gazing at the names of the railway stations in Baedeker.

When the train rushed through a station he would draw a line through the name and say, 'I've done that.' Satisfaction with our learning is confined to no age or nation. Two Frenchmen in a restaurant showing off their English opined, 'It deed rain to-morrow.' 'Yes, it was.'

Satisfaction with virtue was rebuked by Francis de Sales when he told the nuns, who asked to go barefoot, to keep their shoes and change their brains. Satisfaction with our importance recalls Harlequin, who when asked what he was doing on his paper throne replied that he was reigning. Satisfaction with our future is the satisfaction of the eighth square of the chessboard where we shall all be queens together, and it's all feasting and fun.

I would not, as advocate of the Contented Heart, go so far as Walt Whitman when he said that whoever was without his volume of poems should be a.s.sa.s.sinated; but his remark suggests that extreme measures are frequently curative. Stanislaus of Poland did not hesitate to recall to his daughter the bad days they had undergone. 'See, Marie, how Providence cares for good people: you had not even a chemise in 1725, and now you are Queen of France.' To take up Dante and read about devils boiled in pitch must by comparison cheer morbid humans. The spectacle of tragedy in the lives of kings and favorites of the G.o.ds such as the Greek stage presented was believed to be wholesome because beholders thereby faced a scale of misfortune so much exceeding anything in their own lives that their mishaps appeared of slight importance in comparison. I know that after seeing _dipus Rex_ given by the three Salvinis and others in the old amphitheatre in Fiesole, I went off murmuring, 'What does it matter if my trunk is lost!' a state of mind to which no slighter argument had sufficed to bring me. Surely life is too interesting to spend it all knocking off its pretty scallops by aimless exaggeration of small troubles, or hanging out our large ones to flap the pa.s.ser-by. Besides which, we get no more sympathy from the pa.s.ser-by than did Giant Despair who sometimes, in suns.h.i.+ny weather, fell into fits.

Captivating as a 'born,' a fortuitous, untrained content may be, trained content is of a finer type. One is quant.i.ty content, the other quality content. Not to smash things up and make them over just as we want them, which we should like to do but cannot; not to waste our time fighting against conditions, but to take up those conditions, that environment, and out of them forge the _s triplex_ of a contented heart--that, I take it, is to be an adept in the fine art of living, and I for one am votary.

That the most restless heart can train itself to find content in simple, commonplace things, like work, nature, health, books, meditation, and friends,--ill.u.s.trations are bewilderingly abundant. Burne-Jones said he would like to stay right in his own house for numberless years, the hope of getting on with his painting was happiness enough. Macaulay would 'rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading'; and King James said that if he were not a king he would be a university man, and if it were so that he must be a prisoner he would desire no other durance than to be chained in the Bodleian Library with so many n.o.ble authors. Carlyle's chief luxury was 'to think and smoke tobacco, with a new clay pipe every day, put on the doorstep at night for any poor brother-smoker or souvenir-hunter to carry away.'

All Diogenes wanted was that Alexander and his men should stand from between him and the sun. Goethe found content in Nature and earnest activity; and the happy Turk told Candide that he had twenty acres of land which he cultivated with his children, work which put them far from great evils: ennui, vice, and need,--'Il faut cultiver notre jardin.'

Diocletian, one of the cleverest of the Roman emperors, reigned twenty-two years and then retired to private life in Dalmatia, building, planting, and gardening. Solicited by Maximian to resume the imperial purple, he replied that if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands he would no longer be urged to relinquish his enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power. f.a.n.n.y Kemble lived all summer in the Alps, the guides describing her exquisitely as the lady who goes singing over the mountains. Pedaretus, being left out of the election of the three hundred, went home merry, saying that it did him good to find there were three hundred better than himself in the city. St. Augustine on his thirty-third birthday gave his friends a moderate feast followed by a three days' discussion of the Happy Life.

Bunyan wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_ not to please his neighbors, but his own self to satisfy; in prison, too.