Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 3

OUR yard is only an epitome of and substitute for the real thing, which is the country. I do not live in town because I want to, but because I must. The trade I learned can be practised only in town; its pay is apt to be so restricted that retirement on one’s savings from the practice of it is practically unheard of; and I want to educate the children, There are no groves of Academus, or I would pack them off forthwith, and perhaps occupy some adjacent cabin, and devote myself to raising potatoes and Cain for their Saturday holiday. In the nearly hopeless hope of some day having a home in the village of my fathers, there being free to deal saucily with mankind and take walks, I find few sympathizers; for is not art more than ​nature? man more than mountains? much acquaintance more than few? No,—to each of these propositions. A mob is physically and mentally repellent to me, and its clothes and its behavior have little to do with this repugnance. Nature means liberty, and liberty means life.

Mr. Bellamy’s hopeful but fanciful economy has not considered one of the origins for the evils that threaten us: crowding. Americans are growing afraid of that wholesome rural life that gave force and composure to their fathers, and that is reflected so sweetly by the English and New England writers. They are falling into the town habit, which, like most habits, grows by what it feeds on, and is commonly acquired by crediting the fallacy that life, society, gaiety, art, letters, learning, and all forms of progress come of physical aggregation.

What force is in numbers, except brute force? Because we do justice, keep order, and claim privileges for each other, does it follow that we must associate with all men, including dirty men, mean men, ​drunken men? Our very admiration for the best human qualities makes the lower of them more offensive. Cream comes to the top of big pans, but you get as much of it from half the quantity of milk if the quality is twice as good. Cities cast their best people to the top, perhaps; but how many sordid folks a single wise man stands for; how much poverty is required to make a rich man; how few are good and gentle, compared with the rough and vulgar; and how little the goodness of the few benefits the many! Yet the plague of it is that a company of quiet and congenial people is not allowed to settle by itself, Directly it has done so, those round about cry, “Hello! here’s a chance to get into a jam!” and they edge their way in until the original settlers are fain to make their way out.

Aggregation presupposes weakness in the individual. The farmer not only sows, reaps, hoes, and gathers, but he drives nails, saws wood, keeps accounts, cuts ice, kills pigs, is trustee of the village library, and deacon in the church, He is the best ​type of man we have, because he is a man whose expediences are so many that he suffices to himself. He lives his own life, and leaves strong sons to man the cities. If he were in town he would stick at some one trade, or some department of a trade, and hire his nailing, sawing, accounting, and killing; for in the specialization of business, begotten of large manufactures, the city man’s limitations of industry are narrowing every year. When one has not self-poise to stand by himself, or to do his work without company, he topples into a town, and the neighbors help him as he helps the neighbors: they wedge together, so that none may tip over.

The coarseness of city life is usually sorest to those who are best able to keep aloof. It is courted by those who would be better away from it: the tenement population. The drinking, the fighting, the yelling, the sickness, closeness, vice, ignorance, and slum politics disgust the visitor; but the resident glories in them, for to him they express society.

Wretched is that man who has no re​sources within himself, who accepts any company rather than no company, who is afraid to be alone, who sits by the hour on the door-step of a seething barrack, surveying a landscape of rookeries, pavements, telegraph-poles, and ash-barrels, breathing stenches, thinking leanly and meanly, hearing the din made by harsh and dirty thousands, because that is society. Wretched is that man who must ride only on drags or in dog-carts, in certain avenues; who must dress three times a day, wear a monocle, carry his cane head down, call only on certain people, always be dancing, talking, driving—who, in short, must live for show; for that, too, is supposed to be necessary to society.

The desertion of the country, with its health, its beauty, its freedom, its practical charms of cheapness and room, must change the character of the people. It may not be true that the rapid life and the wear of incessant noise in town are shortening our years and enfeebling our nerves; but it is certain that the American of to-day has not the content and calm that belonged to ​his ancestors; that he is not a fruitful parent; that his pleasures, being artificial, are taken in hot, crowded rooms; and that jealousy and rivalry are more common than they were.

If crowding has the merits that are claimed for it, we ought to see its result. A certain glib smartness is more common than it used to be, but illiteracy is not decreasing, and as to the great results of scientific investigation and artistic aspiration, how many in the crowd are touched by them? How many of New York’s east-side million know about, or are advantaged by, the work of the painters, statuaries, architects, poets, dramatists? How many of them ever heard of Huxley, Darwin, Emerson, Edison, Pasteur, Röntgen, the men who move the world; and how many of the world-movers could think or act in the throng? Fancy Emerson meditating in the clatter of a hotel, Edison perfecting his inventions in a city office, Darwin making scientific investigations in a “flat” or a boarding-house! Even the actor, by nature and calling the most social of the ar​tists, has to gain seclusion to think out his part, invent action, and memorize text.

To leave that abode of greed, envy, anxiety, and excess, the modern town, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, for an hour of country life—life with trees, rocks, streams, and tuneful, uncomplaining things—is paradise. One gets back the health of a tired mind, and more minds are tired now than in our fathers’ day. If it wearies a man to be with gentler, wilder organisms than men, the reason is that he is incomplete and does not think, read, study, observe, eat, sleep, walk, or work as a healthy man should. He flings himself before society, and demands to he amused.

What is the cure, or is there none? Persuasion accomplishes nothing. In hard times, when thousands are asking food, clothing, and coal from the thrifty, and tramping the roads declaring their distress, the farmers cannot get help, and families in the country cannot procure service. No offer of work is considered unless it is accompanied by a promise of society. ​The villages themselves do not ask for population. They lack the local patriotism that might put them into competition with the town. They are slow to increase or improve the benefits of corporate life: good roads, trees, parks, schools, libraries, sanitary appliances, and access to the arts.

The establishment of an exile for the useless would be a blessing not to the towns alone. The crowding of the West and the filling up of trades and professions will do something to bring farming into vogue again. But perhaps increased intelligence and increased rent promise best for the restoration of rural life. It is growing more difficult every year for people of moderate incomes to remain in town under conditions that enable them to retain health and self-respect. Taxes do not increase in rate, but rents do; and the tenant who pays both gets less and less for his money as the streets fill up and his air and light are taken away.

The saddest part of the town habit is the injury it entails on children. Young folks want earth to sport on and oxygen to ​breathe, as plants do; and they get a few feet of pavement where they play ball when the police are not looking. The poor creatures become like animals in cages, and their delight in grass, trees, hills, and running waters, when they reach them, is pathetic. Their parents cheat them of their birthright.

Pessimism, which we find in all forms of art,—even in the drama, which has brought an Ibsen, a Zola, a Sudermann, and a Maeterlinck to its service,—is a philosophy of exhaustion. It is as foreign to the natural man as it would be to brutes. That it is not accepted by the masses is hopeful; that many are acquiring country places and prolonging their vacations, is hopeful; that a new interest has been aroused in science—nature—is hopeful; that fresh-air funds have been started in every city, is most hopeful, Out of the great hives of brick and mortar another generation may send away many to live in health, to think their own thought, to become the staminates of a mushy and ineffectual society. In that generation the delights ​of independent living will be appreciated once more.

Meeting some country people, and noting how little they seem to care for nature, how concerned they are with small things, how their ambitions turn toward the city, one feels that he must look for a human balance, like that of the rotation of crops, the town folk returning to the country to restore their exhausted energies, say every fifty years, and the rustics going to town, in exchange, with their high vitality and their practical ways and sense, to run the affairs of society. Yet we mistake when we charge invariable discontent against the farmer. He may have a silly notion, like others of us, that he would like to he President; but he does not consent to stand behind a counter or scribble at a desk in order to do it. Sometimes he really enjoys the health and liberty and landscape to which he is heir, and envies the citizen not a whit. One of the unlikeliest converts to rural life that I have met is a peddler, fifty-eight years old, who, having lost an arm in a railroad accident, gains a pre​carious livelihood by selling brushes and pills through New Jersey, lower New York, and eastern Pennsylvania.

I quickly found that condolences were thrown away on him. He prided himself on the extent of his acquaintance, and the fact that many of the farmers cheerfully gave him a meal and lodging when he appeared. He was particular about his lodging. Beds he did not countenance; but a blanket on the porch or in the haymow suited him exactly, He believed in the virtues of air, and when storm-bound in the mountains made no bones of lying under a rock or fallen tree,—however much his bones may have made of him,—with a burning log at his feet. He had not been ill for an hour since he began his wandering life. The tramps never worried him, and he was able to sell enough to keep out of the poorhouse. In winter he lived on a farm with a man who drove a butcher’s wagon, and had no legs.

This little old man, with his butternut clothes, had no book education; but there was a marked sympathy with nature in ​him. While we talked together, he strolled to and fro. Noticing the stars,—it was after nine o’clock at night,—he said that he often did his tramping after sunset in summer, “because it was n’t so hot then”; and in spite of his years, his short legs, his basket, and his calls, he occasionally made twenty miles in a day, Of all men, to his mind, the farmers were the best off, because, while the rich might lose everything in a bad season, the farmer had his roof, his fire-wood, and his food. With these he could defy the fates. He wanted little of cities, He had seen a building thirteen stories high, and “they wanted $8 a month on the top floor, while out in Jersey you can buy a house, sheds, well, patch of ground, and orchard for $600.” He reported some adventures with dogs, but few of them exciting. One night, while sleeping in an arbor, he was awakened by the arrival of another man, who passed a few words with him, and likewise lay down to sleep on a plank. In the morning he discovered that his quondam neighbor was richly dressed, and sported ​a gold watch and chain. “He was sensible, that man was: he liked air.” And, after all, thousands of New Yorkers sleep, or try to, in the streets on broiling, sultry August nights. Only, they don’t wear gold watches.

The merit of such a life, and of all rural life, is its individualism and independence, its modesty, bravery, and self-sufficingness. Men are a part of nature, and cannot help it; yet the world is full of vain striving to get away from this fixity and fate. The men wear starched collars, narrow shoes, and hard hats, and the women wear tight foot-covering and corsets—the aim in each case being to be as little like men and women as they can. They do not care to be reminded of nature. Better the farmer, the hunter, the wood-chopper, who eats with his knife, and is at home in the woods and at one with them, than the affected, lisping, dawdling fop of the town. The clearest, if not the deepest, minds ought to be found in the country, and frankness is apt to be a rural trait. Bacon objects to a naked mind. I wonder if our ​commonplaces struck him as nudities, and if he approved our social fibs as coverings. We wear only our hands and faces visible new; but commonly, when we expose the mind, there are no reservations. And of what avail are these things we say to each other or assent to about weather and politics? One look at the hills is worth the talk of a multitude as to what the weather is, because the weather is there, without comment, and all weathers have their welcomes and their uses. Woods, plains, seas, vary every hour: but how few of us know it; for, alas! we have become afraid of nature. The woods are full of bogies, the sea of krakens, the fields of malaria. Shut the windows, bar the doors, converse on politics, and keep nature out.

Content in the city is difficult. In youth it is not commendable. But when the objects of life are gained, either in money or place or occupation, when middle age fixes us in our ways, comfort of mind is to be desired. And what a rare thing is content—satisfaction with the present! We live in the past or future, memory or hope, ​or in the imagination of impossibilities. Our touch with passing facts is as light as we might think our hold was on the future. Seldom in our lives do we cry, as Faust, “Stay, flying moment: thou art fair.” But if the hour strikes when we may, we hear it in the country.