The Little Boy That Lived in the Lane

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

AH, ves; the little boy that lived in the lane! Knee-breeches, dusty shoes, sun-burned face, yellow hair, (not golden locks, mind you!) and still, blue eyes. That is he! I have snubbed him since nursery days, yet here he comes from the hinter-lands of the mind, emerging into my consciousness again like some old friend from my native village whom at first I am half-ashamed to meet. He rides atop of the nursery furniture as on a throne, claiming again the kingdom that I had almost stolen from him.

But there is no modern strenuousness about this prince. He is just the little boy that lived in the lane. That is all. That is enough. He is not being trained for a vocation, nor prepared for college. He expects nothing but to go on living in the lane; and to have the good old black sheep bring him all the wool he needs. He has made the descent down the dark chimney, as Mr. Chesterton says, into a fixed abode, and there is his whole field of romance and adventure.

A lane: what a splendid place to live in! With the little boy as Virgil to my Dante, I see again the dark trees, the quiet road damp with dews, the fence blending its color with the grass and the woods; the curving path with a neighbor beyond it; the sunlight that flickers through the leaves, but never scorches here; the birds that come from a great beyond; and the girl that passes on her way from school, whom I may watch until she is out of sight, and still not be rude. These are some of the perquisites of living in the lane. Theirs are the voices that remind us again that life is not all progress, nor moral uplift, nor striving, nor a strained condition of human betterment upheld by nerves, but that most of it is living in a lane.

For, whether city-bred or countrybred, our first years are in the lane and of it. The path is narrow, to teach us not to wander, yet rich in beauty, to tell us that all good lies within our grasp. Blinding, and oppressive sometimes? Yes, and trodden by ‘unwilling steps to school,’yet imprinting on us forever the fact that it is the concentrated gaze, and the repeated path, that really counts. Not only narrow, but short, too. Painfully short? Yes, and no. Yes, in that no boy ever lived who did not think boyhood too long. No, in that no boy ever lived who was not glad that the swimming-pond was just at the end of the lane. Back and forth we went in this lane, until nature had taught us, if she could teach us anything, the meaning of two straight lines, — to hem us in, and yet to give us freedom. In and out of the lane, until it came to pass that even great cities were to be nothing but huge collections of lanes. For civilization is not a scattered tent-ground, but lanes and lanes of houses, methods, and institutions, all sprung from the brains of the little boys that lived in lanes. The races of little boys who have been born and lived in the open, and not in lanes, the Arabs for instance, have produced no great civilization. They have had inspiration enough in the broad expanse of sky and desert, but they have had no pattern to go by. The lane alone furnishes that, for a pattern means limitation, but also power. Anglo-Saxons are lane men, so were the Greeks, and the Romans: verse-makers, mental lanes; road-builders, traffic lanes.

I have often wondered whether the little boy was the son of the master and the dame mentioned in the same breath by the good black sheep. I have come slowly to believe that he belonged to another family in the neighborhood. For this reason: if the master and dame wanted a whole bag of wool apiece they did not deserve to have a little boy. They were selfish people. Somehow I think the bag of wool that went to the little boy was for a mother and father who drew their support from him, and who regarded him as their chief incentive to making a living. Whatever came to their door was marked in his name, not in theirs.

And to this, too, we are all trying to get back. The impress of the lane is awake in us whenever we cry aloud for ownership in life’s true values. We want something with our name on it. We care little what we own, but that we own something is all important. The piercing cry of our hearts is the echo of the dear lane wherein a good black sheep brought us a bag full of wool to be our very own. ‘One for the little boy that lives in the lane.’ That is the sum and substance of our cry for life. Some people are trying to socialize everything, to divide everything up, share and share alike. And which part you get and which I get, to their thinking, makes little difference. But we will not have it. Something in us protests against it as a desecration. When we lived in the lane, something was our own, no matter what. Make us owners! Not of wealth, but of something. Give us back our hearts, our lane, our birthright! Don’t ticket our possessions in card-catalogues! Don’t parcel out God into thin layers, a wafer for every man alike; but give us of His bounty for our very own, as we knew it when we lived in the lane. You need not give us back a selfish heaven. We will not insist on what you despise as personal salvation, but we will insist on having heaven, nevertheless; the ownership of a glittering home beyond our reach, instead of a merely improved world as a substitute. Through the leaves of the bending trees we saw a heaven and we refuse to give it up. The little boy saw truly. The vision is unchangeable. It does not fade for all the new cry about cleaned-up cities and a heaven upon earth. Living in the lane we learned ownership, and we claim it again. Give us back the old sense of private property in the universals, our grip upon the stars, the tentacle-hold of our baby-fingers upon love, and truth, and faith; our own, our very own! Take back your social theories and we’ll lean again upon our gate at eventide and say, ‘All is mine.’ And the next boy to us in the lane may say it, too!

Did the little boy go on living in the lane? I do not know, but I think not. Either the good black sheep died, and the little boy had to seek for wool elsewhere; or, which is more likely, he one day decided that he preferred white wool to black and so started out to find it. In giving us no sequel, the poem (for it is one!) discloses its deepest insight. For it must surely be remarked that if the little boy had gone on living in the lane he would have grown to be a young man, or even an old man; and in that case the poem would have needed reediting. It would not have continued all these years to talk about ’the little boy.’ Plainly the little boy went away, that is the main point; although by inference another came to take his place.

Yes, we leave the lane. It was intended that we should. There are seas to cross, women to see and one to love, men to know and some to hate, and the lane would be disturbed by all this; or we think it would. We must leave it. There are thoughts to think, clues to follow, waves to rise and fall on, experiences to climb or burrow through, desert sands to feel in our throat, and cooling springs to drink from. These all lie outside the lane. New faces alone will let us try our new wings, and who ever saw a new face in our lane? So we leave it. Rightly leave it? Yes, perhaps. Who can say otherwise?

But, look, we are back again! The thousand men you know? See them! They are ranged in order before you. It is in single file they pass! Yours is not a sea of faces; it is a lane of them, one at a time. The women you knew? Yes, but by your side is only one. You are in the lane with her, just as when you were a little boy and lived there. You cannot live on Broadway. You are in the lane again, just wide enough for you and her, as it used to be. The ocean that you crossed? Yes, but the track of your boat was scarce wider than the lane. You only crossed a line, not the ocean. Experiences? Ah, yes, millions of them! But through them there runs no broad highway, but only the print of two feet, toiling one after the other. Just a foot-path, just a lane! And thoughts? Yes, and your brain is weary with them! But across that same brain the tracks of the thoughts are as fine as a hair. There are no expanses, but only little lanes of thought running here and there. Follow the lanes and there is light at the end, as there used to be. Make the spaces too broad, and you will kill the shade trees. Then the sun will madden you. Keep to the lane. That’s the type.

’The little boy that lived in the lane’? Yes, he went away. But he came home again. The old lane was gone. So was the house. But he straightway built another house just like it; and choose as he would, there was no place to build it in but a lane.

And if you look for him you will still find him there.