GARDEN HAPPINESS

Certainly the exercise of our virtues does not insure happiness. My experience is according to the Scriptures at this point--your virtues invite hardship and persecution. I have observed the very good carefully. They are noble souls, totally defeated in this present world by their conscience and their sacrifices. It takes a spunky spirit to escape the Job Scriptures. This is my objection to the intimate companionship of saints. The last one of them has a martyr tune in him somewhere, and if you encourage him with either sympathy or admiration, he will let go and sing it to you in sobbing praise of himself. I am a trifle that way. More than once I have known myself to keen my spiritual nose to a kind friend and chant the tale of some injustice suffered in the exercise of my nobler qualities. It is puerile. No matter how virtuous you are, virtue goes out of you then.

I take involuntarily a sort of ignoble consolation in the fact that the very bad are farther from happiness than the very good, because they have destroyed the foundation upon which happiness must rest. It is written that if we repent of our sins the Lord remembereth them no more forever, which is something that cannot be said of any mortal man. Even if he repents of his transgressions, the memory of them hangs like a shadow in the light of his spirit forever. I have seen these swords suspended over the head of a saint until finally he was slain by them.

As for me, I have never been able to keep a record of my virtues, though I have tried hard enough; but I have never been able to forget one sin. Just let me get in a weaving way with so much as one beam of holiness to light my dark places, and some niggardly little transgression I committed years ago, or yesterday, lifts its head and licks out a forked tongue in hissing comment. I defy anyone, however worthy, to risk himself in the glow of holiness without having a similar experience.

This, I believe, is what is meant by the omniscience of the Almighty. It is in us, a fearful faculty for seeing ourselves which we cannot escape. And it reveals each man to himself as a spiritual bungler every time he frisks within range of his own inner vision. The effect is salutary, but very depressing. I am never peaceful, much less happy afterwards.

It all comes to this: We get wisdom of one sort and another with fatal facility, because the world is full of it, a brilliant or dull sort of ignorance deduced from observation, study, experience, and the prideful exercise of our rational faculties; but we are perpetually short on understanding until after it is too late.

When I came back to these hills to dress my garden in the year 1913, I know now that I missed happiness by the narrowest margin. I was on the right track. I was at home again upon the earth. I felt that peace and steadiness of mind we all feel in familiar surroundings among companions who never change or move away. The same grass and the same green boughs overhead, the same flowers I had known in earliest infancy blooming like tiny remembered faces in every meadow and on the banks of every stream. The same little footpaths of peace across every hill, winding according to the minds of those happy travelers who made them.

But the most enterprising business man was never more quickly involved than I was in plans and preparations for happiness. The old cabin to be restored and furnished, all about to be cleared and trimmed. I saw the frost crystals blooming in the gray dawn of every morning that first winter. The longest day was too short to accomplish what must be done before the next day. I was in the woods choosing timber for more rooms to be added to the cabin. I was something of a nautilus in those days, without the sublime indifference of that little sailing mollusk to the passage of time. I was in a hurry to finish my house.

But, like the nautilus, I have gone on adding to it year by year according to the widening chambers of my mind. There will be a wall, a pillar unfinished somewhere when my own end comes. I shall probably defer death by an effort of mortal will if I am having another window cut in order to get one more entrancing view of this valley at the very last. I do not know whether this is foolishness or not, but I have left much copy of my mind and spirit written in stones that will last longer than the monument Horace raised to himself, ‘more enduring than brass.’

I made a garden and planted it. I was in the fields from dawn until dusk that first spring, watching the plows sink deep in the loam of the land. To me, there is no fragrance comparable in sweetness to the scent of freshly turned earth. Later I walked like an impudent little god of a woman down the rows of young corn. I remember praying for the corn that year during a long drought, not that I needed bread so fiercely earned, but because to see it living and growing was like feeling the green blades of my own vanity spreading and rustling in the sun.

Somewhere in this house there is a snapshot made of me that summer standing up on a load of wheat sheaves. I am wearing a stiff white frock. I am bareheaded and the wind is blowing. I do seem to have a high happy look. There streams across my face something of the light of youth, keen and strong. Love alone can so transfigure us. I am in love, you understand. My heart is embracing this sky, this meadow, these overshadowing hills. I am feeling the wreaths of little blue flowers that bloom beside the streams upon my brow. I am strong and well again, cured of so many sorrows. My heel has touched the earth again. Auteas was right about that--if you believe in your heel and the life of the earth you can recover strength as he did for the next struggle.

I was that child I used to be, let loose like a joyful energy. So this is something I have discovered about happiness: It is not a product of energy, but of chance, a free mind and deliverance from that parsimonious sense of time which no child ever feels. This marked the difference now between the woman I was and the child I had been. I took every chance then with a free mind and no sense at all of time. I was too young to make plans. I met the future as a lark meets the sky upon the wings of a singing heart. I was nearer kin to God then and had a wiser sense of life than I shall ever know again.

The simpler creatures manage life more gracefully than we do. I have often envied the birds, not because they can sing, but because they can fly. They own everything from the tallest tree top to the farthest meadow’s rim; but they have no sense of possession, no baggage to carry. They endure more hardships than we do and have a better time. The difference between them and, say, the communists, is that they are not acquisitive. They do not want to own everything in common. They are honest about that, and no man is. He must be either predatory or competitive. He has an instinct for ownership which he is determined to satisfy.

This earth would be settled by squatters if a comparatively few people did not hold titles to most of it. The latter are safer neighbors than the migratory class to which the communists really belong. They are a kind of human locust swarming over the earth now, never to be confounded with the earlier pioneers. I suppose in time we shall get rid of them. If we do not, they will destroy us. Then they will turn upon themselves. They are by purpose destructive, according to some rascally notion of gain. Their piety is a sort of missionary malice couched in the noblest deceit of language.

But with all the virtues and aspirations the best of us claim, it does seem strange that we make such an awkward art of living. We are more successful at increasing our capital and decorating ourselves with worldly distinctions than we are at increasing our income in happiness. This is essential. I have no patience with the piety of defeat which yields the point and declares that happiness was never meant for us in this present world, but reserved for us in paradise--a damnable doctrine which reflects upon the goodness of God as they do who lay their misfortunes to Providence when they alone are responsible for them.

It is we who miss our cue. We suffer from some blindness of the mind which leads us to mistake the circumstances that produce happiness. Nothing will satisfy us but riches, when we know that relative poverty insures more peace and fewer responsibilities. We have built a social, industrial and commercial civilization, so expensive that it cannot be financed. And the more wealth we get the less capable we are of achieving our own lives.

It is the laborers, servants, and professional people whom we employ that determine the conditions under which we exist, which is a form of frightful tyranny. We get the idea or the ideal, then pay some one else to achieve it. An architect draws the plans of our house. Carpenters build it. A decorator chooses the furnishings, and servants keep it. A landscape artist lays off the grounds and we employ someone to dress the garden, because we lack the will and skill to do any of these things.

I do not think we should give ourselves such airs about art and culture as we do, seeing that we buy most of the mere effects of these things and that they are really produced by a class of people with whom we do not associate. No man is really learned who speaks his wisdom instead of practicing it. No woman is really cultured because she is up on art and music and literature, or because she wears beautiful clothes designed by a modiste, or because she lives in a splendid house, or because she is surrounded by people who think and speak well about what they know and see and exquisitely feel. She is merely the living portrait of many arts accomplished by other people. I should call her the decadent mollusk of refinement, never to be confounded with that woman depicted a while ago in these pages as the more endearing type of Southern woman. They have their occupations. They are amazingly executive when it comes to ordering others to do it. They have taste and piety and know how to exercise these virtues.

The effects of the theories about the art of living which I have been recording in these pages are plainly visible in this valley. The gaping logs of the one-room cabin left by the Cherokee Indians have been restored, and so many rooms added that it stretches a distance of one hundred and thirty feet--pieced together with open entries, winged with a long vine-covered court on one side and a living porch on the other side. So you may see through this house to the valley below or the hills beyond, as one should see through a good man’s heart to the scenes and Scriptures which account for his existence. I doubt if an architect could have drawn plans of a house so satisfying to the spirit.

There is no color scheme inside. To my mind, a house furnished in a strictly harmonious manner seems to be designed for publication and read by guests, but not to be lived in at ease in your own private everyday moods lest you break a note by moving something of a blue shade to that place which calls for orange-yellow, or by dropping your old green coat upon the divan covered with iridescent tapestry. Even the company bedrooms in this house are so plain and comfortable that a guest might feel at home in them, clean and fragrant, but faded; little messy conveniences in every one of them to delude the occupant into thinking he or she is not a transient there, but may stay a long time. And the living-room is such a humanly gifted place that I may leave my walking shoes on the hearth upon a winter evening and they will add a note of peace to the firelit scene, as if they were warming and drying and resting after a hard day’s walking out of doors in bad weather.

Not one thing in this house is to be admired, but is to be appropriated and used for your ease. You are to shine and talk, hold a book in your hand to taste now and then, as in the old days a gentleman sipped his wine. I have seen very dull people exhilarated before my fire on a winter evening; I have also seen very bright ones let go their weary wits and nod. These are triumphs which color-scheming hostesses rarely enjoy, because you feel that you must sit up with their harmonies and take note or be damned.

Besides, these women are never contented for long with their furniture or draperies. They must tear them up, send for the decorator and try some other effect. I do not change my furniture or move it about. Let the scenes of the world and all fashions change. I have laid my inside scenes like one of those prayers for peace and honor to be found in the Episcopal prayer book written and finished. All you have to do is recite it. God has been familiar with it for a long time, and would probably be astonished to hear a new word or phrase in it.

There is an old-man chair here which, by all the canons of art, should never be found in a cabin; mahogany, with hideously carved legs, toe nails sticking out, the arms finished with two human heads, females, but not goddesses--houris, I should say. The springs in the seat have weakened in precisely the right place to make sitting in it more restful. About as often as an old man is barbered, this chair is rubbed up and the faces of the ladies polished; but it is never moved from the corner beside the fireplace. I have observed that the elderly men who come here invariably choose it as their resting place. There is a huge couch beneath a long row of casement windows on the living porch which has enticed some of the stiffest, most elegant people known to modern society in this section to relax upon it and fall asleep, when by all the rules of polite conversation they should have been erect and vocative.

This is boasting--I admit it--but not of my possessions. I am simply showing the kind of mind I have toward a house, to fill it with snares of peace and good will whatever happens to art. It is not a bad idea. You excite less criticism and confer more happiness. It cannot be done by an interior decorator. He has an expensive eye and a furniture collector’s intellect.

By the same token, I have declined the services of a landscape gardener. My idea of a landscape is a good deal of it, preferably green, and merely frilled with flowers, with the trees of an original forest surrounding the whole thing. I planted my flowers years ago, perennials, with much the same mind the Lord had when he said to the original creatures and little leaves, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ They do. Poppies, peonies, gladioli, zinnias, marigolds, phlox, dianthus, snapdragons, like good hardy people of the soil in bloom, making a thousand wreaths of loveliness around this green hill in their seasons. No wet-nursing to keep them alive during a drought, no coddling to preserve them through the winter. They die down as we do, and come again, as we shall do.

During these first years here I was near the verge of happiness, at least by anticipation. If my mind could have rested I might have made it; but what with writing a book or two every year, conducting the farm and building everything from barns to stone walls that popped into my head, I lacked the leisure to be glad.

It seems to me now that I indulged in too much self-expression without looking for the reward of gratified vanity such persons usually crave. Comparatively few people have ever seen this valley or know what has been accomplished here. I have occupied it much as I shall presently occupy my grave, alone, but doubtless with a great deal more activity than the narrow confines of a grave with a tombstone over you can possibly afford.

I cannot think what made me so furiously industrious laying scenes so rarely to be praised. As to that, we must always wonder why the Lord required such limitless spaces for His creation and made so many unintelligible stars. Fewer would have been rarer and shown to a better advantage. And what measly sight-seers of the heavens we make, always snooping and squinting at His handiwork without being able to find out anything about it, with no mind to comprehend the glory of these populous heavens.

There must be another audience somewhere. Surely the Almighty has had more encouragement than we could give Him, more inspiration than our pathetically inadequate existence affords Him. I am so religious at times that I can conceive of a great council chamber of creators located upon one of the grander stars between burning suns. Not that I crave more than one Lord to serve. When we consider the Ten Commandments and the rules laid down for our obedience in the Scriptures of our Jehovah, it is apparent that no man could serve more than one God; but in certain moods one likes to speculate in gods by way of the most gallant and adventurous spiritual exercise.

The thing that confounds and depresses me is, Why are so many of us born? Why is there so much of everything anyhow, when we can understand and use so little of anything? And what strange madness is this in us which perpetually compels us to add to the sum total of everything? I have had fearful thoughts along this line--the dreadful fate we are under to keep on thinking and doing, because if we stop something happens to us, a slow and monstrous decay. And at the end of it all, poor old Solomon--after he had been King of Jerusalem and ruled a long time, after he had built his golden temple and won his reputation for being the wisest man--sitting in his royal robes, tired of his crown, tired of his wisdom, calling to us down the ages, ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.’

He gives this conclusion a note of authority by signing it, ‘Thus saith the Preacher.’ But I have always felt that if Solomon had been a better man he might have been a better preacher. Like father, like son. David was a fine, true singer of the hearts of men; but I cannot think he set a good example for Solomon in his youth, which accounts for the depressing wisdom he acquired by living.

I never take one of these headers in spiritual speculations, however, without falling to pieces afterwards. I seem to suffer from some kind of nervous prostration of the soul. In these ailing moods no wise man or great divine could comfort me. I am longing to hear the Word preached by a simple man who has lived a good little life and who can pray like a child. It is like taking the shortest, narrowest path back home by faith.

I never have believed it is a far journey to the real kingdom of Heaven. If you start off with great preparations for a long pilgrimage, you may be sure you have missed your way. There is in the heart of every man a fair and lovely land, never betrayed by his transgressions, never sold to the world and never darkened by mortal wisdom. I have been there sometimes, an ineffable place. As a child I lived there.

These little old preachers mentioned a while ago are the only pastors of the children we have been left among us. They do not know us now, they are not acquainted with the world in which we have learned so much; but they know where every man’s land of Canaan lies, and they have only one Rock of Ages tune that leads to it.

Looking back, we can see how smart we were when at the time we simply followed some instinct in the right direction.

For years I went on trying to create my own little kingdom of Heaven here behind these hills. A place visible to the naked eye, very deceptive in its loveliness and silence. I had sense enough to keep the world out, which was not difficult, since I have never been one of those popular writers whose doorsill the people seek. And I was rarely tempted out into the world.