An Apology for the Country

I

IN La Bruyère’s Characters of Theophrastus, there is a sketch of the country gentleman as he appeared to the Athenian civilian of the fourth century B. C. Your countryman, says Theosphrastus, talks in a loud, unrestrained voice, wears heavy shoes, eats not daintily, but voraciously,— he cares not what, — is eccentrically familiar with his servants, and likes to contemplate oxen, — surely a dull occupation. He will carelessly interrupt his dinner to go feed his cattle or to chat with any one who knocks at his door,— surely, to a civilian’s mind, a great disrespect to the function of dining, that gastronomic ceremony, the climax of the day and cynosure of its ordered proprieties. Again, continues Theophrastus, when your countryman comes to town, he is always asking prices and testing the money paid him to see if it is honest weight; he buys a piece of meat, and carries it in his hand about the streets, to the embarrassment of his friends; he sings out loud in the public baths; he lifts his robe most indecorously high, and remarks, apropos of nothing, that it is time for a new moon and that he intends to get shaved.

Theophrastus was a pupil of Aristotle, and though he never so attained the exquisite urbane accent but that the Athenian market women knew him for an alien, still he was an Athenian civilian in point of view. This eccentric countryman of his, is he not like Sir Roger de Coverley ?

Civilian Theophrastus of Athens and Civilian La Bruyère of Paris thought that character absurd whose angles were unground in the social mill. Civilian Addison of London, contemporary of La Bruvère, and fellow observer of human types, thought him odd, but attractive. He smiled, but he liked him; and this liking was the most gracious thing that came out of Addison.

On country matters the civilian has mainly had his say unchallenged and unanswered. He has recorded his opinion and his prejudice even in the language: in “pagan” and “heathen,” country derivatives, “memorials more enduring than brass” of the new faith’s long delay this side of outlying villages and waste places, until “villager ” and “heath man” on urban tongues became reproachful synonyms for the unconverted and those still in the night of their idolatry; in “boor,” who was merely a farmer, a Bauer, a tiller of the soil, until his civilian fellow man decided that his manners were not good. In the meanwhile how does your etymology compliment your cities with “civil,” “civilized,” “urbane,” “polite,” “polished,” and only in “bourgeois” and “policy” venture to hint a criticism! Not that language has shaded its connotations so unkindly to the countryside itself; “natural” is a word of praise, and “rural” a word of good liking; but with the countryman it has been so severe that “country matters” in Hamlet’s usage meant mere coarse obscenity. Only in “citified” and “countrified” do the two seem to have clinched and parted with even honors, leaving the balance of derogation about equal. Mainly language has behaved badly in this matter. Mainly the city has spoken and the country not replied. The satire which jibes at the close-fisted farmer has seldom been answered, though the answer is plain. There is a misleading circumstance in the case. The countryman, in proportion to his income, probably is and always has been more open-handed than the civilian. Between the farmer or planter, and the factory hand or merchant, the farmer or planter is less liberal of his cash, but not of his income, for the reason that, while the whole of the wage earner’s or merchant’s income is in cash, or something readily convertible, only a part of the farmer’s or planter’s is such. The other and larger part goes, with no cash intermediate, directly to his consumption, or in barter at the village store. He does not handle so many dollars to the same income as the wage earner or merchant, and the cash dollar looks greater to his imagination. We associate miserliness with cash, a misleading circumstance. But of his resources at large, his produce, his hospitality, and his time, the countryman is probably more liberal than the civilian, for the balance in tendency to liberal-handedness is in favor of the man whose neighbors are not too close to his elbows. Hospitality varies inversely with the population per square mile.

Some one, in describing his idea of “a gentleman,” speaks of “a certain indifference to small things.” It is to dislike penny wisdom, to be not busy and minute, not careful and troubled about odds and ends, to be able to spoil one’s clothes without regret, to spend one’s money without watching it go, to have no haunting horror of wasting or throwing away. But this is not only a tendency in attitude of your affluent aristocrat , your gentry of birth with whom wealth has passed under the skin and become a characteristic, but it is a tendency in attitude of those who have found a roomy place on the earth, and a wealth of possibilities in wide new lands. The Westerner thinks he detects a certain pettiness in an Easterner of his own class; the American is less saving than the European of similar worldly conditions; the European is this side of the Chinaman. This indifference, this freedom from the petty, might be called the gift of fortune to your aristocrat, and the gift of nature to your frontiersman. The one gains his view and free air by being lifted above, and more or less upon, the shoulders of his neighbors; the other by having his neighbors too few and far to trouble his view and free air. Through lack of space it comes that one’s horizons are narrow, outlets meagre, and choices anxious. The soul is cramped and moulded by the elbows of one’s neighbors. The “bourgeois” attitude is primarily a question of elbows.

Yet out of this close competitive herding it has come in part that we have any souls at all. First civilizations were social growths. Moral standards were tribal rather than private. South European civilization was mainly a city affair, of city states and conversing philosophers. In Northern Europe life was longer uncentralized, and the country spirit moved mightily. The peril of the city is pettiness and conformity. The peril of the country is a certain numbness and vacuity. So witness those literatures where the spirit of ages is “preserved and stored up.” In South European literature there is more liveliness and more conformity, in North European, more dullness and more daring. The Mediterranean poet does not long that “the desert were his dwelling place,” or

or for

and only one companion to sing beside him in the wilderness. He longs for “a day in the city square,”where there is“ something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear at least,” church - bells and news, the Pulcinello, the latest play, the stirring procession: “ Bang - whang - whang, goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle, the fife.” And in higher mood he conceives the reward of the faithful and just, not in a restoration to that lost wild Eden, but as a citizenship in that celestial capital, whose priceless gates, lustrous pavement, and supreme society satisfy better the vision of his inward eye than mountains, moonlit rivers, and the beauty of Eden loneliness. A favorite theme of the Parisian novelist, Amiel observes, is the vie de province, a dreary, narrow, soul-hungry, and unfed existence. But to Amiel, as to Marcus Aurelius before him, it is the same hungry life we all live, dreaming of the city of God and metropolis of the soul.

They are ancient educational rivals, the country and the city. In educational rivalry there is apt to be some ill-feeling. The rivalry was for the charge, discipline, and culture of mankind. The original question was: Are the habits of this promising species to be gregarious or solitary ? Shall it feed and breed in flocks, shoals, and herds, like the crow, the herring, and the deer ? or independently, like the hawk, the trout, and the panther? In more modern form: Is it better for a man to walk like Dr. Johnson by Charing Cross where his fellows throng, or like Isaac Walton by some stream apart, and practice the liberties of angling ? Johnson was a thorough civilian in his likings, but not in his nature, which was angular and individual. His nature tended to solitude, his likings to company, and between the two he was melancholy. He had no love for bucolics. “ ‘Let me smile with the simple and feed with the poor!' What folly is this!” he cried. “No. No. Let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich.” “A fishing rod,” he said, “is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.” Whereas Walton maintained with some force that to go fishing was almost in itself to travel the path of wisdom.

The issue has remained an issue. The educational system adopted has been a conflict and a compromise. Man is both social and solitary. He hungers for fellowship and for independence, for conversation and for peace. He has a destiny both racial and personal. He is of the flood of the generations, and yet feels that he has a private goal which is not with them. He insists that “The proper study of mankind is man,”and then lifts up his eyes unto the hills for help. He is a Charles Lamb in his love for city streets, the “prints, pictures all the glittering and sudden accession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen — bookstalls — busy faces ever passing by;” and he is an Emerson, whose nature feeds on solitude, brooding in his “little sandy village,” which “not the smallest event enlivens,” where “if I look out of the window there is perhaps a cow; if I go into the garden there are cucumbers; if I look into the brook there is a mud turtle. In the sleep of the great heats there is nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the Bible of the tropics, — sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. If I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature makes a Brahmin of me presently — eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence, this is her creed.”

II

There are two cross currents of migration at the present day, the one a stream from the country to the city, swelling the latter to monstrous size and causing some indigestion. The other, from the city to the country, is more like tides, rains, or mists, than like the current of a river: tides with spring floods and autumn ebbs, showers of holidays and vacations, or else a mere moist and drizzling condition, a suburban compromise. Both movements are at the bidding of a common instinct to seek the other half of that race inheritance of a mixed culture, in protestation that man is neither a hawk nor a herring, but a composite in nature.

It was probably a countryman who first discovered that there is a solitude of cities, that it is not the presence of other people which banishes solitude, but the presence of other people with whom we are communicant. A multitude incommunicant emphasizes solitude. Solitude is a condition of the mind. The ticking clock and the wind across the uplands are company enough for conversations— with the clock about its courageous business of measuring the immeasurable, cutting off minute sections of infinite time, and with the wind about its admirable method of traveling. But whatever may be the countryman’s discoveries or gains, his migration is already at flood. It needs no promoter. IBs thirst for the city, his motives for gregarious flocking, have suffered some unjust reproach, but no discouragement. The civilian’s counter migration is smaller, and intermittent in action. A discovery in turn lies before him, so far as he has not made it yet, that there is a society of the woods and fields, that in certain respects, for company, for observation, and for comment, this society is more practicable than civilian society. It is more practicable, for example, in three respects: first, because its social arrangements are more distinct; second, because its dramas, spectacles, panoramas, and contrasts are for that reason more intelligible; and third, because they generally are more convenient and at hand. For this field and forest society is an immense caste system.

It is a drawback in American life for purposes of observation and comment that we are a people indistinguished to the eye, unclassified to the understanding. Your casual stranger may be a bank president or a floor-walker, a bishop or a broker, a Presbyterian or a Christian Scientist, or be by birth of Iowa or Maine, or live in a hall bedroom or a mansion with a park front. He bears few marks of his opinions or beliefs, political or religious. You can make but broad generalizations about him. Moreover his opinions and beliefs are not of a piece. It is likely that he was horn into one set of conditions, passed through others, and has come out a mixture, his make-up composite, his outline indistinct. Our clergy are mainly unfrocked, our officials ununiformed. We have no kings. Our beggars are unsatisfactory. You cannot tell a governor from a congressman. Your collision with a package-carrying youth may be a right contact with a student of the schools, an academic rebuttal, or but “an illiterate encounter” with some mercantile adolescence, some conveyer of parcels. There is nothing absolute about his garb, countenance, or motions. Society moves before us disorderly, and our eyes are bemused with the clutter.

“That nation is happiest whose annals are tiresome.” That nation is most democratic whose society has least structure. Then your happy democracy has its drawbacks for the purposes of observation and comment. Those are not the main purposes of society, but they are the purposes of which we are speaking.

But what even is Hindoo society to the society of the woods and fields ? What is the caste system of Brahmin and Sudra to the caste system of species ? Every bird has its caste marks, its garb, habits and habitat, its song, — save as your catbird or mocking bird, chartered libertines, practice their loose talents of imitation,— its generic manner and motion, its style in respect to eggs. Every creature is a rigid conservative to the caste lines of its species, the law of its kind, the tradition of its race. Cross-breeding and grafting of collaterals are not unknown, but no apple tree shocks creation by bearing a maple leaf. Its sense of propriety is too strong, its pride of species too ingrained, its prejudices too rooted in antiquity. The social system of the woods and fields is older than Egypt. Its customs were venerable when a mummy was an innovation. The bees had their hive cities, their queens and palace tragedies, before ever a human creature wattled a roof.

Kipling’s McIntosh Jellaludin hinted that he could tell a woman’s antecedents of caste and race by the way she rinsed a jug. It were a shrewd inference in humanity, but a commonplace in nature.

The book of humanity is written in obscure language and confused style. The book of nature is perhaps less subtle, but it is more readable. In respect to its contrasts and panoramas, if not more dramatic, they are more convenient. The craft, cruelty, and ceremony of war is a strong effect, but difficult to obtain; but almost any electric spring day one may watch the swallows twittering before the vanguard of the storm, and the black battle climb the sky, with plunge and stab of jagged swords, with power and pomp and hate, with rattling volleys and boom of artillery. Or, on one of those days called of George Herbert “the bridal of the earth and sky,” when the bridegroom world wears his festival garments, green and red and purple and gold, and has riot in his blood, and reverence in his heart for the garmented and veiled bride above him, in blue and white, and pure and soft as the down within a dove’s wing, — on such days peace is overhead, but there is struggle and tumult always in the grass. Whoever lies close with shaded eyes looks into a populous community, a tropical forest, a jungle ruled by jungle laws, the swarming, caste-cleaved India of the grass.

“A child said, ‘What is grass?’ fetching it to me with full hands,” — so Whitman begins one of his singular monologues. “How could I answer the child ? I do not know what it is any more than he.” He goes on to call it the flag of his own disposition, hopeful and green, and like a child among more grown-up vegetations; or, again, it was a uniform hieroglyphic which being interpreted would say something about universal democracy. “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” somehow showing that the dear buried people were not dead, “for the smallest sprout shows that there really is no death.”And so, by taking note of the grass, he becomes sure of his foothold, and leaps suddenly to a “knowledge of the amplitude of time,” meaning that, instead of ars tonga, vita brevis, both art and life are, on the contrary, limitless, that there is no end of time, and an abundance with which to fill it. This seems no very strict deduction from the premise of the grass.

Still, nearlv any form of meditation can start up from the grass and grow greenly. But for myself, I find symbols of such far ideas more in the overbending sky and its population of vapors; and in the grass rather symbols of immediate daily living, its detail and its multitude. To peer closely into the grass is to come down upon a busy subverdant world, a thronged stage, a scene of plots, of comic and tragic event, of fury and of quiet, of more “characters” than there are in La Bruyère’s Theophrastus, and each caste - marked and distinguishable. Here are the sluggard and the parasite, — their primal types; the gauzy frivoler, the sober family drudge; the patient and politic bug who waits in ambush of his cave for his meat to walk into his mouth in due season, and the anxious and troubled bug who is convinced that something is going to prevent his dinner presently. Alas! I am no entomologist. T know not your names, my brethren. But I look down on your labors and ambitions, and find your proceedings not unintelligible. I notice that the gregarious civilian bug seems active but fussy, a something petty, a something bourgeois about him; and about him who feeds and breeds apart from his fellows a certain fixed and vacuous manner, a certain dullness. I hear a council of municipal crows talking business in green chambers of the trees. A hawk rests on his spread wings alone in the sky. There is much to be said for crows; in fact, they say it; they are no hesitant talkers; but by contemplation of the selfcaptained hawk I pass to the opinion that a man is in possession of but half his race inheritance who has no liking for loneliness. It was once somewhere “highly resolved ” for him that his education should be duplex, that he should hunger for his fellows and for himself, and that, as he should find his fellows in company, so he should find himself in solitude. “In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.” The civilian takes the Saturday afternoon train with a happy sigh. Each feels the tug of a faithful instinct, bidding him act after Ins kind and minister to the starved half of his nature.