THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN

A young man with a mind of high degree and an extensive literary style recently shot off this in a magazine article: ‘Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible, namely, God.’ He might have exchanged places with his nouns, written it: ‘People are gossips who have only one relative in common,’ and hit more nails on the head. But at that, he missed by half the number we have in common.

The nearest relative of every mortal man that always survives him is the earth. He is atom and acid kin to it. He springs from it and returns to it, laid back into it, earth to earth and dust to dust, which is closer kin at last than he ever was to his up-and-speaking relatives. He bears but one relation to God, a spiritual resemblance, either real or fancied. Lacking that, he sustains literally no relation to God beyond that of mere material scrapped and to be used again for another form of perishable life, vegetable or flesh. The spirit of him in this case is a disease to be cured by some divine method with which no man is acquainted, whatever the theologians may claim to know about it.

The wisest of us do not actually know much. We can only believe according to the quality of our minds. The favorite notion used to be that such spirits went through a severe smelting process, similar to that of four thousand degrees centigrade by which pure gold is now extracted from quicksilver, but not, I understand, in paying quantities. I am merely suggesting this, not as a doctrine, much less a dogma, but by way of speculating upon the possible method of purification. Personally, I find it disturbing and unprofitable to dwell upon the reclaiming processes of damnation. I have seen too many damned people in this world, and been too frequently damned myself, not to know that we damn ourselves, and that by an act of will and faith we can always escape from this sense of guilt, which settles the whole doctrine of punishment so far as I am concerned.

But the point I wish to make now is that we are all conscious of being kin to the earth, though comparatively few have more than a creed sense of being related to God. It is a thing we are taught, but really learn to feel. The man who begins life next to land never forgets. He may come up in the world and be carried by his illusions of success far from its life and loveliness, but there come wearying days in his countinghouse when his thoughts fly back like homing birds to that quiet place. His own people may be dead and gone, or he may have lost the sense of kinship to them; but he remembers still where the shadows fell upon the grass, as a child far from home remembers his mother’s face. It is the child in him longing for the comfort of that ancient mother of all men.

If he has lost out and gone down in the world with a bad conscience, the same thing happens. There comes a woeful day when his tears rise like a tide and he knows if he could go back, fling himself beneath the shade of a certain tree for a long, long time, the silence and goodness of the earth would cure and restore him. It would not, but this is the way he feels. The sensation proves and defines the sanctity of our relation to the earth.

As to those other people, born in cities as chickens are hatched in an incubator, they have the same instinct changed to silliness. They are like stepchildren who do not know how to love the earth; still, they have their transient cravings for its blessings. But few of them can bear to live with it, because its weather and its silence is terrible to them. They are really inebriates, living by the intoxication of the eye and the ear upon the vast confusion of cities and crowds. They may be strangers there, without home or friends, but they require this frightful motion and noise as an addict must have his drug. They cannot bear the solitude of silent places or the diminishing companionship of their elder brethren, the trees. They are waifs blown like leaves in the wind the world makes in passing. They never had the capacity to live, and so substitute motion and noise for life as a sort of artificial respiration.

I do not know anything more tragic to contemplate than these lost children of the earth. They may be learned men or successful men; they may be dutiful or merely beautiful women; but if you dare to realize how lacking in quality and the original stamina of life they are, thrust them back upon the earth from which they sprung for longer than a vacation period, and watch them go to pieces. They are parasites, consumers. They have lost the valor to produce their own sustenance from the earth. They survive by trade, commerce, inherited wealth, some kind of artificial labor. There is not a drop of honest Adam sweat in them. They are the kind of people who carry an umbrella over their heads through life, whether it is the roof of an office, a factory or a stock exchange. They want money, prestige, power, more rights and privileges than any man can ever earn except at the expense of other men; but they remain unacquainted to the last with real life achieved in the open according to the law which bound the first man to the land for his own good, where there are no fictitious values, but a fair exchange of bread, poverty, and peace promised to those who do keep and dress the garden which the earth is.

One may write very convincingly, however, upon this theme without making much more of a success than Adam did in the beginning when he was ordained to keep and dress that first garden. The Scriptures are not easy to fulfil. I have been tempted to doubt if the very apostles who recorded the Gospels actually lived up to them. I have had a few divine inspirations myself without feeling the least blasphemous; but looking back now, I can see no more than the faintest gleam of them in my deeds. What I mean is that it must be natural, after all, to come short of the glory of God. This world would be a frightfully glaring place if we did not.

The queer thing is that we also miss happiness in the effort. The satisfaction of saints in their piety has always seemed to me despicable. It is a form of deceit never justified by the facts. And the gratified airs they give themselves is not to be confounded with simple honest human happiness. We are entitled to that whether we miss the glory of God or not. Most of the time I am certain this is the supreme gift of His love which still awaits us when we comply sensibly with the conditions; but I have my dark moments when I am tempted to suspect that this instinct for happiness may be a sort of clucking encouragement devised by Providence to keep us up and going, as romantic love is one of Nature’s enchantments to keep up the birth rate.