Part 9

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.

When we ask seriously the question which, of any two ways of spending our years, is the most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is not the one which supplies us with the most numerous isolated items of pleasure, but the one of which the whole current tends to maintain in us the _capacity_ for enjoyment at the highest pitch and for as long a time as possible. There is something exceedingly stupid in our common practice of paying superabundant attention to all the external factors of happiness down to the minutest rose-leaf which can be smoothed out for our ease, and all the time forgetting that there must always be an internal factor of _delightability_ to produce the desired result, just as there must be an eye wherewith to see as well as candles to give light. The faculty of _taking_ enjoyment, of _finding_ sweetness in the rose, grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food and rest, interest in books, and happiness in loving and being loved, is—as we must perceive the moment we consider it—indefinitely more precious than any gratification which can be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the affections, just as eyesight is more valuable than the finest landscape, and the power of loving better than the homage of a world. Yet, as Shelley lamented,—

“Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight”;

and we allow it to remain absent from our souls, and grow accustomed to living without it, while all the time we are plodding on, multiplying gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate and evanescent sense they are meant to please is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed, make religio-philosophical remarks on the beautiful patience and cheerfulness of sufferers from agonizing disease, and we smile at the unfailing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys of our acquaintance sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote, with high approval, the poet who sings that

“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.”

Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evident, unmistakable Happiness enjoyed, in despite of circumstances, never seems to teach us how entirely secondary all objective circumstances needs must be to the subjective side of the question, and how much more rational it would be on our part to look first to securing for ourselves the longest and completest tenure of the internal elements of enjoyment before we turn our attention to the attainment of those which are external.