Chapter IV: Part 4

Alone among Thoughts of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, stands the grim, soul-chilling thought of Death. It is a strange fact that, face it and attempt to familiarize ourselves with it as we may, this one thought ever presents itself as something fresh, something we had never really thought before,—“_I shall die!_” There is a shock in the simple words ever repeated each time we speak them in the depths of our souls.

There are few instances of the great change which has passed over the spirit of the modern world more striking than the revolution which has taken place in our judgment respecting the moral expediency of perpetually thinking about Death. Was it that the whole Classic world was so intensely entrancing and delightful that, to wean themselves from its fascinations and reduce their minds to composure, the Saints found it beneficial to live continually with a skull at their side? For something like sixteen centuries Christian teachers seem all to have taken it for granted that merely to write up “Memento mori” was to give to mankind the most salutary and edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in the same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint Francis or Saint Theresa who keeps his or her pet skull alongside of his Bible and Prayerbook?

A parallel might also be drawn between the medical and spiritual treatment in vogue in former times and in our own. Up to our generation, when a man was ill, the first idea of the physician was to bleed him and reduce him in every way by “dephlogistic” treatment, after which it was supposed the disease was “drawn off”; and, if the patient expired, the survivors were consoled by the reflection that Dr. Sangrado had done all which science and skill could effect to preserve so valuable a life. In the memory of some now living, the presence of a medical man with a lancet in his pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a fall from horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epilepsy, or intoxication), was felt by alarmed relations to be quite providential. Only somewhere about the period of the first visitation of cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing dropped out of fashion; and, when the doctors had pretty nearly abandoned it, a theory was broached that it was the human constitution, not medical science, which had undergone a change, and that men and women were so much weaker than heretofore that, even in fever, they now needed to be supported by stimulants. Very much in the same way it would appear that in former days our spiritual advisers imagined they could cure moral disease by reducing the vital action of all the faculties and passions, and bringing a man to feel himself a “dying creature” by way of training him to live. Nowadays our divines endeavor to fill us with warmer feelings and more vigorous will, and tell us that

“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”

Is it possible that human nature is really a little less vigorous and passionate than it was when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the earth, or when the genius of Shakspere made them live on the stage?

ESSAY V.
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.

The father of Grecian philosophy held that “Man was created to know and to contemplate.” The father of Hebrew philosophy—whose “Song,” if not his “Wisdom,” is canonical, and whose judgment, if not his life, is supposed to have been divinely guided—taught the somewhat different lesson: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

We have been more or less steadily trying the validity of Solomon’s dictum for about three thousand years. Would it be premature to take stock of the results, and weigh whether it be really for human well-being or the reverse that Knowledge is “increasing,” not only at the inevitable rate of the accumulating experience of generations, but also at the highly accelerated pace attained by our educational machinery? It is at least slightly paradoxical that the same State should call on its clergy to teach as an infallible truth that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and at the same time decree for all its subjects, as if it were a highly benevolent measure, universal compulsory education.

I fear that the prejudice in favor of Knowledge is so potent that no reader will give me credit for entering on this inquiry in any other spirit than one of banter. Nevertheless, I propose in the present paper to examine, to the best of my ability, the general bearings of book-knowledge upon human happiness and virtue, and so attain to some conclusion on the matter, and decide whether Solomon did or did not give proof of profound sagacity in originating the axiom that “Ignorance is bliss” in the usual negative form of Hebrew verities; and also in foretelling (nearly thirty centuries before the present London publishing season) that “of the making of books there is no end.” Knowledge, like other evils, it seems, is infinitely reproductive.

The larger and simpler objections to book-lore lie on the surface of the case. First. Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength are almost inevitably exchanged in a certain measure for learning. Ardent students are rarely vigorous or agile; and, in the humbler ranks, the loss of ruddy cheeks and stalwart limbs among the children of the peasantry, after schools have been established in a village, has been constantly observed. The close and heated class-rooms in which the poor urchins sit (often in winter with clothes and shoes drenched through with rain or snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical point of view, for the scamper across the common, and the herding of sheep on the mountain. Let us put the case at its lowest. Suppose that, out of three persons who receive an ordinary book-education, one always loses a certain share of health; that he is never so vigorous as he would have been, and is more liable to consumption, dyspepsia, and other woes incident to sedentary humanity, of which again he bequeaths a tendency to his offspring. Here is surely some deduction from the supposed sum of happiness derivable from knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric of all the poets make atonement for the loss of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the cool brain of perfect health?

Secondly. It is not only the health of life’s noon and evening which is more or less compromised by study, but the morning hours of life’s glorious prime, hours such as never can come again on this side heaven, which are given to dull, dog’s-eared books and dreary “copies,” and sordid slates, instead of to cowslips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field, and the flying of the white kite, which soars up into the deep dark blue and carries the young eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing and the child-angels are playing among the rolling clouds of summer. There was once a child called from such dreams to her lesson,—the dreary lesson of learning to spell possibly those very words which her pen is now tracing on this page. The little girl looked at her peacock, sitting in his glory on the balustrade of the old granite steps, with nothing earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat nice brown bread and call “Pea-ho!” every morning, and the poor child burst into a storm of weeping, and sobbed, “I wish I were a peacock! I wish I were a peacock!” Truly Learning ought to have something to show to compensate for the thousand tears shed in similar anguish! School-rooms are usually the ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms in the houses where they exist; and yet in these dens we ruthlessly imprison children day after day, year after year, till childhood itself is over, never, never to return. And _then_ the young man or woman may go forth freely among the fields and woods, and find them fair and sweet, but never so fair or so sweet as they were in the wasted years of infancy. Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say that a cowslip or a daffodil smells now as it used to smell when it was so very much easier to pluck it, quite on our own level? Do strawberries taste as they did, and is there the same drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the red clover? Are modern kittens and puppies half so soft and so funny as they were in former days when we were young? No one will dare affirm any of these things who has reached years of discretion. Is it not then a most short-sighted policy—giving away of a bird in hand for a bird in the bush—to sacrifice the joyous hours of young existence for the value of advantages (if advantages indeed they be) to be reaped in later and duller years? Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have forgotten your own feelings. Let it be Coleridge’s

“Little singing, dancing elf,
Singing, dancing by itself.”

Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into yours, and hear the laugh which only means the best of all possible jokes, “I _am_ so happy!” Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate algebraically what amount of classics and mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of young existence, wherein

“Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live,
Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give.”

The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for the virtuous dead, and called it “Innis-na-n’Oge,” the “Island of the Young.” We all live there the first dozen years of mortality; and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear it may be long before we arrive at a better place.

But hitherto we have taken for granted that the little prisoners of the school-room are all sure to live and come into their fortunes of erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is far from being the true state of the case. The poor little child, whose happiness—innocent, certain, and immediate happiness—is bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and contingent benefit of his later years, may very probably never see those years at all; nay, in a fixed average number of cases, it is absolutely certain that he will not grow into a man. Can anything be much more sad than such an abortive sacrifice? Who does not remember Walter Scott’s “Pet Marjory,” with her infantine delight in her visits to the country, and the calves and the geese, and the “bubbly-jocks”; and how she wrote down in her private journal that she was learning the multiplication table, and that seven times seven was a “divlish thing,” and quite impossible to acquire; and how, when somehow at last even the still more dreadful “eight times eight” had been lodged in her poor little brains, there came a day when she cried suddenly to her mother, “Oh, my head! my head!” and then in a few brief hours there was an end of lessons and their advantages for Marjory forever?

And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against hope, and then—death!

Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in education. It is understood, when we see a young man with the “light of the body” dimmed behind glass spectacles, that he has hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, a sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-five or thirty, is a rare thing to see. It is the scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the penalty of seeing God’s beautiful world evermore through those abominable bits of glass. And for what mighty advantage? Again I say, it ought to be something excessively valuable for which a man will exchange the apple of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a blind gentleman a fee of a thousand pounds to give him his sight as he has given it to more than one born blind. The blind man, if he possessed the money, would doubtless pour it out like water to obtain the priceless boon of vision. And _this_ is the gift which our boys exchange for a moderate acquaintance with the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few years after they leave school!

Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the universe from behind spectacles; owing, no doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education, aided by their truculent black types. And we open-eyed Britons are exhorted, forsooth, to admire and follow in the steps of those barnacled Prussians!

Such are three of the most obvious losses to be placed in the scale against the gains of Knowledge,—the loss to many of bodily health; to all of the unshackled freedom of childhood; and to not a few of perfect eyesight.

But we cannot suppose it was to any of these things Solomon alluded when he linked Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is not likely that those studies of his, about the hyssop and the cedar, injured his health; nor that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory throne to receive the Queen of Sheba in a pair of spectacles. As to the loss of the pleasures of childhood, his well-known opinion of the value of the Rod (to the wisdom of which the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam afforded an illustration) makes it probable that he would have approved of the torture of infants through the instrumentality of lessons. Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some other connection in his mind; and that connection we have still to mark.

It is a paradox only too readily verified that the mind as well as the body suffers in more ways than one from the acquirement of book knowledge. In the first place, the Memory, laden with an enormous mass of facts, and accustomed to shift the burden of carrying them to written notes and similar devices, loses much of its natural tenacity. The ignorant clodhopper always remembers the parish chronicles better than the scholarly parson. The old family servant, who is strongly suspected of not knowing how to write and whose spectacles are never forthcoming when there is any necessity to read, is the living annalist of the house, and was never yet known to forget an order, except now and then on purpose. Not only are the interests, and consequently the attention and retentive powers, of illiterate persons monopolized by the practical concerns of life and the tales of the past which may have reached their ears, but they have actually clearer heads, less encumbered by a multitude of irrelevant ideas, and can recall whatever they need, at a moment’s notice, without tumbling over a whole lumber-room full of rubbish to get at it. The old Rabbinical system of schooling, which mainly consisted in the committal to memory of innumerable aphorisms and dicta of sages and prophets, possessed this enormous advantage over modern instruction,—that whatever a man had so learned he possessed at his fingers’ ends, ready for instant use in every argument. But, as half the value of knowledge in practical life depends on the rapidity with which it can be brought to bear at a given moment on the point of issue, and as a ready-witted man will not merely outshine in discussion his slow-brained antagonist, but forestall and outrun him in every way, save in the labors of the library, it follows that to sacrifice the ready money of the mind for paper hard to negotiate is extremely bad economy. Mere book-learning, instead of rendering the memory more strong and agile, accustoms it to hobble on crutches.

Other mental powers suffer even more than the memory by the introduction of books. That method which we familiarly call the “Rule of Thumb”—that is, the method of the Artist—is soon lost when there come to be treatises and tables of calculation to form, instead, the Method of the Mechanic. The boats of Greece are to this day _sculptured_ rather than wrought by the shipwrights, even as the old architects cut their marble architraves by the eye of genius trained to beauty and symmetry, not by the foot-rule of precedent and book-lore. The wondrous richness and harmony of coloring of Chinese and Indian and Turkish stuffs and carpets and porcelain are similarly the result, not of any rules to be reduced to formulæ, but of taste unfettered by pattern-books, unwarped by Schools of Art Manufacture, bequeathed through long generations, each acquainted intimately with the aforesaid “rule of thumb.”

For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in the scale of human faculties, it may be fairly doubted whether the modern increase of Knowledge has done much to strengthen them, when we find ourselves still unprotected by common sense against such absurdities as those which find currency amongst us. Men are treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the crop with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion of them is impaired.

As to the Imagination, books are like the stepping-stones whereon fancy trips across an otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on the further bank. But it may be questioned whether the reading eye ever really does the same work as the hearing ear. The voice of tradition bears, as no book can do, the burden of the feelings of generations. A ballad learned orally from our mother’s lips seems to have far other meaning when we recall it, perchance long years after that sweet voice has been silent, than the stanzas we perused yesterday through our spectacles in a volume freshly reviewed in the _Times_.

Such are the somewhat dubious results of book-lore on the faculties exercised in its acquisition. It is almost needless to remark that there are also certain positive vices frequently engendered by the same pursuit. Bacon’s noble apophthegm, that “a little knowledge leads to atheism, but a great deal brings us back to God,” needs for commentary that “a little” must be taken to signify what many people think “much.” Read in such a sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but to faith in everything, and most particularly to faith in Knowledge itself. Nobody despises books so much as those who have read many of them, except those still more hopeless infidels who have written them. Watch the very treatment given to his library by a bookworm. Note how the volumes are knocked about, and left on chairs, and scribbled over with ill-penned notes, and ruthlessly dog’s-eared and turned down on their faces on inky tables, and sat upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast this behavior towards them with the respectful demeanor of unlettered mortals, who range the precious and well-dusted tomes like soldiers on drill on their spruce shelves; nobody pushed back out of the line, nobody tumbling sideways against his neighbor, nobody standing on his head! History is not jumbled ignominiously with romance; moral treatises are not made sandwiches of (as we have beheld) between the yellow covers of Zola; and “Sunday books” have a prominent pew all to themselves, where they are not rubbed against by either profane wit or worldly wisdom. Such is the different appreciation of literature by those to whom it is very familiar and by those to whom it preserves still a little of the proverbial magnificence of all unknown things.

We used to hear, some years ago, so much about the Pride of Learning that it would be a commonplace to allude to that fault among the contingent disadvantages of study. One of the Fathers describes how he was flogged by an angel for his predilection for Cicero,—an anecdote which must have made many a school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel that life was only a dilemma between the rods of terrestrial and celestial pedagogues. But it is obvious that the saint had in his mind a sense that the reading of “Tusculan Disputations” had set him up—saint though he was—above the proper spirit of implicit docility and unqualified admiration for more sacred instructions. The critical spirit, which is the inevitable accompaniment of high erudition, is obviously a good way off from that ovine frame of mind which divines, in all ages, have extolled as the proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in a truer and better sense than that of the open-mouthed credulity so idly inculcated, it must be owned that, short of that really great knowledge of which Bacon spoke and which allies itself with the infinite wisdom of love and faith, there are few things more hurtful to a man than to be aware that he knows a great deal more than those about him. The main difference between what are called self-made men and those who have been educated in the upper grades is that the former, from their isolation, have a constant sense of their own knowledge, as if it were a Sunday coat, while the others wear it easily as their natural attire. The best thing which could happen to a village Crichton would be to be mercilessly snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when women were “Précieuses” and “Blue Stockings” were those in which it was a species of miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they were lifted into the heaven of Latin Grammar.

But, passing over the injury to healthy eyesight and mental vigor contingent on learning, and the moral faults sometimes engendered thereby, I proceed to ask another question. What is the ethical value of the Knowledge bought at such a price, and heaped together by mankind during the thirty centuries since Solomon uttered his warning? How has it contributed to their moral welfare?

Surely it is true that even as Art too often gilds sensuality, and renders it attractive to souls otherwise above its influence, so Knowledge must open new roads to temptation, and take off from sin that strangeness and horror which is one of the best safeguards of the soul. The old jest of the confessor, who asked the penitent whether he did such and such dishonest tricks, and received the reply, “No, Father; but I will do them next time,” was only a fable of one form of the mischief of knowledge; and that not the most fatal form either. To know how to do wrong is one small step towards doing it. To know that scores and hundreds and thousands of people, in all lands and ages, have done the same wrong, is a far larger encouragement to the timidity of guilt. Not only is it dangerous to know that there is a descent to Avernus, but specially dangerous to know that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray to children that the way to perdition is a

“Broad road, where thousands go,”

which, moreover,

“Lies near, and opens fair.”

Better let people suppose that it has become quite grass-grown and impassable.

Many offences, such as drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, adulteration, and false weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if not solely, like small-pox by direct infection conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C, and D do the same things. David was not so far wrong to be angry; and divines need not be so anxious to excuse him for being so, when he saw the “wicked” flourishing “like green bay-trees.” Such sights are, to the last degree, trying and demoralizing.

In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowledge of the evil of the world, of the baseness, pollution, cruelty, which have stained the earth from the earliest age till this hour, is truly a knowledge fraught with dread and woe. He who can walk over the carnage field of history and behold the agonies of the wounded and the fallen, the mutilations and hideous ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful humanity,—he who can see all this, ay, or but a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet retain his unwavering faith in the final issue of the strife, and his satisfaction that it has been permitted to human free will, must be a man of far other strength than he who judges of the universe from the peaceful prosperity of his parish, and believes that the worst of ills is symbolized by the stones under which “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” Almost every form of knowledge is some such trial of faith. Look at zoölogy and palæontology. What revelations of pain and death in each hideous artifice of jagged tooth, and ravening beak, and cruel claw! What mysterious laws of insect and fungus life developed within higher organisms, to whom their presence is torture! What savage scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast struggle for existence of every beast and bird, every fish and reptile! Turn to ethnology, and gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian tribes of Africa and Polynesia; of the countless myriads of their progenitors; and of those who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone æons of prehistoric time. Is not the story of these squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full of woe? Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise and of a primeval couple dwelling there in perfect peace and innocence. We have at last so eaten of the Tree of Knowledge that we have been driven out of even the ideal Eden; and instead thereof we behold the earliest parents of our race, dwarf and hirsute, shivering and famished, contending with mammoths in a desert world, and stung and goaded by want and pain along every step in the first advance from the bestiality of the baboon into the civilization of a man.

Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and sick, into the abysses of time and space opened beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plummet can sound, and all our toylike measures of thousands of ages and millions of miles drop useless from our hands. Can any thought be more tremendous than the question, What are _we_ in this immensity? We had fondly fancied we were Creation’s last and greatest work, the crown and glory of the universe, and that our world was the central stage for the drama of God. Where are we now? When the “stars fall from heaven,” will they “fall on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs”? Nay, rather will one of the heavenly host so much as notice when our little world, charged with all the hopes of man, bursts like a bubble, and falls in the foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a single night some planet calmly rolling on its way?

Let us pass from the outer into the inner realm, and glance at the developments of human thought. The knowledge of Philosophy, properly so called, from Pythagoras and Plato to Kant and Spencer,—is it a Knowledge the increase of which is wholly without “sorrow”? Not the most pathetic poem in literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes’s History of Philosophy. Those endless wanderings amid the labyrinths of Being and Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nominalism and Realism, which, to most men, seem like a troubled “dream within a dream,” to him who has taken the pains to understand them rather appear like the wanderings of the wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams hither and thither, and feels feebly along the walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding himself in a passage which has no outlet, and turns back to seek another way of escape, and grasps at something he deems may contain a clew to the far distant daylight, and, lo! it is but an urn filled with dust and dead men’s bones.

Faust is the true type of the student of metaphysics when he marks the skull’s “spectral smile”:—

“Saith it not that thy brain, like mine,
Still loved and sought the beautiful,
Loved truth for its own sake, and sought,
Regardless of aught else the while,
Like mine the light of cloudless day,
And in unsatisfying thought
By twilight glimmers led astray,
Like mine, at length, sank overwrought?”

There _may_ be truth within our reach. Some of us deem we have found it in youth, and, passing out of the metaphysic stage of thought, use our philosophy as a scaffolding wherewith to build the solid edifice of life, gradually heeding less and less how that scaffolding may prove rotten or ill-jointed. But, even in such a case, the knowledge of all that _has_ been, and _is_ not, in the world of man’s highest thought is a sorrowful one. As we wander on from one system to another, we feel as if we were but numbering the gallant ships with keels intended to cut such deep waters, and topmasts made to bear flags so brave, which lie wrecked and broken into drift-wood along the shore of the enchanted Loadstone Isle.

What is, then, the conclusion of our long pleading? Knowledge is acquired at the cost of a certain measure of health, and eyesight, and youthful joy. Knowledge involves the deterioration of some faculties as well as the strengthening of others. Knowledge engenders sundry moral faults. In the realms of history, of physical and of mental science, the survey of things obtained through knowledge is full of sadness and solemnity. The telescope which has revealed to us a thousand galaxies of suns has failed to show us the Heaven which we once believed was close overhead.

Is then the pursuit of Knowledge, after all, truly a delusion, the worst and weariest of human mistakes, a thing to which we are driven by our necessities on one hand and lured by our thirst for it on the other, but which, nevertheless, like the martyrs’ cup of salt water, only burns our lips with its bitter brine?

Not so! a thousand times, no! Knowledge, like Virtue, is not good because it is useful, but useful because it is good. It is useful contingently, and good essentially. The joy of it is simple, and not only needs not to be supplemented by accessory advantages, but is well worth the forfeit of many advantages to obtain. The most miserable wretch we can imagine is the ignorant convict locked up in a solitary cell, with nothing to employ his thoughts but unattainable vice and frustrated crime, whereon his stupid judges leave him to ruminate as if such poison were moral medicine to heal the diseases of his soul. And, on the other hand, one of the happiest beings we can imagine is the man at the opposite end of the intellectual scale, who lives in the free acquirement of noble knowledge. What is any “increase of sorrow” incurred thereby, compared to the joy of it? To build Memory like a gallery hung round with all the loveliest scenes of nature and all the masterpieces of art; to make the divine chorus of the poets sing for us their choicest strains whenever we beckon them from their cells; to talk familiarly, as if they were our living friends, with the best and wisest men who have ever lived on earth, and link our arms in theirs in the never-withering groves of an eternal Academe,—this is to burst the bounds of space and bring the ages together, and lift ourselves out of the sordid dust to sit at the banquet of heroes and of gods.

ESSAY VI.
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE.

Whether it is best to live rapidly or slowly; whether the “twenty years of Europe” be preferable to the “cycle of Cathay”; and what is to be said on behalf of each of the two modes of existence,—supposing that we have the choice between them,—seem to be questions not unworthy of a little consideration. It is quite possible that the common impulse to be “in among the throngs of men,” and to cram a month’s ideas and sensations into a day, may be the truest guide to happiness; indeed, it is rather sorrowful to doubt that it should be so, considering how every successive census shows the growth of the urban over the rural populations, and how strongly the magnets of the great cities seem destined in future years to draw into them all the loose attractable human matter in each country. Nevertheless, it must be admitted to be also possible that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or opium, the taste for town life may be an appetite the indulgence of which is deleterious, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby obtained may be practically outbalanced by the loss of pleasures which slip away meanwhile unperceived. It would be satisfactory, once for all, to feel assured that in choosing either town or country life (when we have the choice), we not only follow immediate inclination, but make deliberate selection of that which must necessarily be the higher and happier kind of life, on which, when the time comes for saying good-night, we shall look back without the miserable regret that we have permitted the nobler duties and the sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent our years in grasping at shadows and vanities. The dog with the bone in his mouth, who drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a terrible warning to all mankind. But which is the real bone, and which is only the reflection? The question is not easily answered.

Let us premise that it is of English country life and town life alone I mean to speak. Foreigners—Frenchmen, for example—who live in the country seem always to do so under protest, and to wish to convey to the traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only strangers and sojourners in the rural districts, seeking a better country, even a Parisian. Molière’s Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, who has been six weeks in the capital once in her life, and who indignantly asks her visitor, “_Me prenez-vous pour une provinciale, Madame?_” is the type of them all. Of course, country life taken thus as a temporary and rather disgraceful banishment can never display its true features or produce its proper quantum of enjoyment.

And again, among English forms of country life, it is life in _bona fide_ rural districts which we must take for our type. All round London there now exists a sort of intellectual cordon, extending from twenty to thirty miles into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles into Herts and Essex. Professor Nichols might have mapped it as he did our starry cluster, by jotting down every house on the boundary inhabited by politicians, literary men, and artists, and then running a line all round from one to another. Within this circumference (of course, extending year by year), the ideas, habits, and conversation of the inhabitants are purely Londonesque. The _habitué_ of London dinner-parties finds himself perfectly at home at every table where he sits down, and may take it for granted that his hosts and their guests will all know the same familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions; and, much more than all this, will possess the indescribable easy London manner of lightly tripping over commonplace subjects, and seriously discussing only really interesting ones, which is the art of conversational perspective. Beyond the invisible mental London Wall which we have described, the wanderer seems suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. As the author of the “Night Thoughts” describes a rather more startling experience, he stands on the last battlement, which

“Looks o’er the vale of non-existence,”—

at the end of all things wherewith he is familiar. He has, in short, penetrated into the Rural Districts of the Mind, where men’s ideas have hedges and ditches no less than their fields.

And once again we must take English country life in its most elevated and perfect form,—that of the hereditary landed gentry,—to contrast it most advantageously with the life of towns. To understand and enjoy country life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not only live in one of those “Stately Homes of England,” of which Mrs. Hemans was so enamoured, but be born and have spent his youth in such a house, built by his fathers in long past generations. A wealthy merchant or a great lawyer who buys in his declining years the country seat of some fallen family, to enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors may probably be a much more intelligent person than the neighboring squire, whose acres have descended to him _depuis que le monde est monde_. But he can no more make himself into a country gentleman, and acquire the tastes and ideas of one, or learn to understand _from the inside_ the loves and hates, pleasures and prejudices of squiredom, than he can acquire the _dolce favella Toscana_ by buying himself a Florentine barony.

And, lastly, our typical country life must neither be that of people so great and wealthy as to be called frequently by political interests up to Parliament, and who possess two or more great estates (a man can no more have two _homes_ than he can have two heads), nor yet that of people in embarrassed and narrow circumstances. The genuine squire is never rich in the sense in which great merchants and manufacturers are rich; for, however many acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain that the claims on them will be quite in proportion to their extent. There is, in fact, a _kind of money_ which never comes out of land; a certain freedom in the disposal of large sums quite unknown among the landed gentry, at least in these days. But, if not possessed of a heavy balance at their bankers, the country family must have the wherewithal for the young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and for the girls to ride or amuse themselves with garden and pleasure-grounds according to taste. All these things, being elements of the typical English country life, must be assumed as at least attainable at will by our “Country Mouse” if he is not to be put altogether out of countenance by his brother of the town.

As for the Town Mouse, he need not be rich, nor is it more than a trifling advantage to him (felt chiefly at the outset of his career) that his father or grandfather should have occupied the same social position as himself. All that is needed is that, in the case of a man, he should belong to a good club, and go out often to dinner; and, in the case of a lady, that she should have from one hundred to five hundred people on her visiting list. Either of these fortunate persons may, without let or hindrance, experience pretty nearly all the intellectual and moral advantages and disadvantages of living in a town, provided their place of abode be London. Over every other city in the empire there steals some breath of country air, if it be small; or, if it be large, its social character is so far modified by special commercial, industrial, or ecclesiastical conditions that its influence cannot be held to be merely that of a town _pur et simple_; nor are the people who come out of it properly typically towny, but rather commercial-towny, manufacturing-towny, or cathedral-towny, as the case may be.

Turn we now from these preliminaries to the characteristics of the Town life and the Country life, each in its own most perfect English form. Let us see first what is to be said for each, and then strike our balance. Very briefly we may dismiss the commonly recognized external features of both, and pass as rapidly as possible to the more subtle ones, which have scarcely perhaps been noted as carefully as their importance as items in the sum of happiness will warrant.

TOWN MOUSE _loquitur_.

“I confess I love London. It _is_ a confession, of course, for everybody who lives in the country seems to think there is a particular virtue in doing so, resembling the cognate merit of early rising. Even that charming town poet, Mr. Locker, practically admits the same when he says,—

‘I hope I’m fond of much that’s good,
As well as much that’s gay;
I’d like the country _if I could_,
I like the Park in May.’

“The truth is that one wants _to live_, not to vegetate; to do as much good, either to ourselves or other people, as time permits; to receive and give impressions; to feel, to act, to _be_ as much as possible in the few brief years of mortal existence; and this concentrated Life can be lived in London as nowhere else. If a man have any ambition, here it may best be pursued. If he desire to contend for any truth or any justice, here is his proper battle-field. If he love pleasure, here are fifty enjoyments at his disposal for one which he can obtain in the country. The mere sense of forming part of this grand and complicated machine, whereof four millions of men and women work the wheels, makes my pulse beat faster, and gives me a sense as if I were marching to the sound of trumpets. Then the finish and completeness of London life is delightful to the thoroughly civilized mind. It is only the half-reclaimed savage who is content with unpaved and unlighted roads, ill-trained servants, slovenly equipages, and badly cooked, badly attended dinners. Like my little nibbling prototype who served his feast ‘_sur un tapis de Turquie_,’ I like everything, down to the little card on which my _menu_ is written, to be perfect about me. The less I am reminded by disagreeable sensations of my animal part, the more room is left for the exercise of my higher intellectual functions. The ascetic who lives on locusts and wild honey, and _catches the locusts_, has far less leisure to think about better things than the alderman who sits down every day to ten courses, served by a well-trained staff of London servants. The sense of order, of ease, of dignity and courtesy, is continually fostered and flattered in the great Imperial City, which, notwithstanding its petty faults of local government, is still the freest and noblest town the globe has ever borne. People talk of the ‘freedom’ of the country, and my quondam host, the Country Mouse, is perpetually boasting of his ‘crust of bread and liberty.’ But, except the not very valuable license to wear shabby old clothes, I am at a loss to discover wherein the special freedom of rural life consists. You are certainly watched, and your actions, looks, and behavior commented on fifty times more by your idle neighbors in the country, gasping for gossip, than by your busy neighbors in town, who never trouble themselves to turn their heads when you pass them in the street, or even to find out your name if you live next door. In the country, you have generally the option of going on either of three or four roads. In London, you have the choice of as many thousand streets. In the country, you may ‘kill something’ whenever you take your walks abroad, if that special privilege of the British gentleman be dear to your soul, and you care to shoot, hunt, or fish. Or, if you belong to the softer sex or sort, you may amuse yourself in your garden or shrubbery, play tennis, teach in the village school, or pay a visit to some country neighbor who will bore you to extinction. In London, you have ten times as large a choice of occupations, and five hundred times as pleasant people to visit; seeing that in the country even clever men and women grow dull, and in town the most stupid get _frotté_ with other people’s ideas and humor.

“Again,—and this is a most important consideration in favor of London,—when a man has no particular bodily pain or mental affliction, and is not in want of money, the worst evil which he has to dread is _ennui_. To be bored is the ‘one great grief of life’ to people who have no other grief. But can there be any question whether _ennui_ is better avoided in London or in the country? Even in the month of August, as somebody has remarked, ‘when London is “empty,” there are always more people in it than anywhere else’; and where there are people there must be the endless play of human interests and sympathies. Nay, for my part, I find a special gratification in the cordiality wherewith my acquaintances, left stranded like myself by chance in the dead season, hail me when we meet in Pall Mall like shipwrecked mariners on a rock; and in the respectful enthusiasm wherewith I am greeted in the half-deserted shops, where in July I made my modest purchases, unnoticed and unknown. In the country, on the contrary, _Ennui_ stalks abroad all the year round; and the puerile ceremonies wherewith the ignorant natives strive to conjure away the demon—the dismal tea and tennis parties, the deplorable archery meetings, and, above all, the really frightful antediluvian institution, called ‘Spending a Day’—only place us more helplessly at his mercy. We conjugate the reflective verb ‘to be Bored,’ in all moods and tenses; not in the light and airy way of townsfolk, when they trivially observe they were ‘bored at such a party last night,’ or decline to be ‘bored by going to hear such a preacher on Sunday morning,’ but sadly and in sober earnest, as men who recognize that boredom is a chronic disease from which they have no hope of permanent relief. There is, in short, the same difference between _ennui_ in the country and _ennui_ in town as between thirst in the midst of Sahara and thirst in one’s home, where one may ring the bell at any moment and call for soda water.”

So speaks the modern Town Mouse, describing the more superficial and obvious advantages of his abode over those of his friend in the country. And (equally on the surface of things) straightway replies—

COUNTRY MOUSE.

“There is some sense in these boasts of my illustrious friend and guest, but against them I think I can produce equivalent reasons for preferring the country. In the first place, if he lives _faster_, I live _longer_; and I have better health than he all the time. My lungs are not clogged with smoke, my brain not addled by eternal hurry and interruption, my eyes not dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature blindness. While his limbs are stiffening year by year till he can only pace along his monotonous pavement, I retain till the verge of old age much of the agility and vigor wherewith I walked the moors and climbed the mountains in my youth. He is pleased at having twenty times as many sensations in a day as I; but, if nineteen out of the twenty be jarring noises, noxious smells, plague, worry, and annoyance, I am quite content with my humbler share of experience. Even if his thick-coming sensations and ideas be all pleasant, I doubt if he ever have the leisure necessary to enjoy them. Very little would be gained by the most exquisite dinner ever cooked, and the finest wines ever bottled, if a man should be obliged to gobble them standing up, while his train, just ready to start, is whistling behind him. Londoners _gulp_ their pleasures, we country folk _sip_ such as come in our way; think of them a long time in advance with pleasant anticipation, and ruminate on them and talk them over for months afterwards. I submit that even a few choice gratifications thus carefully prized add to a man’s sense of happiness as much as double the number which are received when he is too weary to enjoy or too hurried to recall them.

“Again, the permanent and indefeasible delights of the country seem somehow to be more indispensable to human beings than the high-strung gratifications of the town. The proof of this fact is that, while _we_ can live at home all the year round, Town Mice, after eight or nine months’ residence at longest, begin to hate their beloved city, and pine for the country. Even when they are in the full fling of the London season, it is instructive to notice the enthusiasm and sparkle wherewith they discuss their projected tours a few weeks later among Swiss mountains or up Norwegian fiords. Also it may be observed how of all the entertainments of the year the most popular are the Flower-shows, and the afternoon Garden-parties in certain private grounds. Even the wretched, unmanly sport of Hurlingham has become fashionable, chiefly because it has brought men and women out of London for a day into the semblance of a country place. Had the gentlemen shot the poor pigeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields or Bloomsbury, the admiring spectators of their prowess would have been exceedingly few. Nay, it is enough to watch in any London drawing-room wherein may stand on one table a bouquet of the costliest hot-house flowers, and on the other a bowl of primroses in March, of hawthorn in May, and of purple heather in July, and see how every guest will sooner or later pay some little affectionate attention to the vase which brings the reminiscence of the fields, woods, and mountains, taking no notice at all of the gorgeous azaleas and pelargoniums, gardenias, and camellias, in the rival nosegay. It is very well to boast of the ‘perfection’ and ‘finish’ of London life, but the ‘perfection’ fails to supply the first want of nature,—fresh air; and the ‘finish’ yet waits for a commencement in cheerful sunlight unobscured by smoke and fog, and a silence which shall not be marred all day and night by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds. What man is there who would prefer to live in one of the Venetian palace chambers, gorgeously decorated and adorned with frescos and marbles, and gilding and mirrors, but with a huge high wall, black, damp, and slimy, within two feet of the windows, shutting out the light of day and the air of heaven, rather than in a homely English drawing-room, furnished with nothing better than a few passable water-color sketches and some chintz-covered chairs and sofas, but opening down wide on a sunny garden, with an acacia waving its blossoms over the emerald sward, and the children weaving daisy chains round the neck of the old collie who lies beside them, panting with the warmth of the weather and his own benevolence?

“Then as to the dulness of our country conversation, wherewith my distinguished friend the Town Mouse has rather impolitely taunted us. Is it because we take no particular interest in his gossip of the clubs that he thinks himself justified in pronouncing us stupid? Perhaps we also think him a trifle local (if we may not say provincial) in his choice of topics, and are of opinion that the harvest prospects of our country, and the relations of agricultural labor to capital, are subjects quite as worthy of attention as his petty and transitory _cancans_ about articles in reviews, quarrels, scandals, and jests. East Indians returning to Europe after long absence are often amazed that nobody at home cares much to hear why Colonel Chutnee was sent from Curriepoor to Liverabad, or how it happened that Mrs. Cayenne broke off her engagement with old General Temperatesty. And in like manner perhaps a Londoner may be surprised without much reason that his intensely interesting ‘latest intelligence’ is rather thrown away upon us down in the shires.”

These, as we premised, are the obvious and salient advantages and disadvantages of Town and Country life respectively observed and recognized by everybody who thinks on the subject. It is the purport of the present paper to pass beyond them to some of the more subtle and less noticed features of either mode of existence, and to attempt to strike some kind of balance of the results as regards individuals of different character and the same individual in youth and old age.