The human way

Front matter

RnnI, ■ VI n A-

Copyright IN" .

COPW?rGHT DEPOSre

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

Introduction — The Decoration of Life ... i

I. The Service of Books 19

II Out-of-doors

THE world is large in proportion as we enter it with a capacity for emotion. Few kinds of feeling return so rich a reward as a highly cultivated love of appearances. The first impulse of civilisation is to beautify. When primitive man established himself in a cave and finished making stone knives and hatchets for self-protection, the first-fruits of his leisure were the drawings on the walls of the cave. He demanded beauty in his surroundings. It is to-day the mark of progress from the pure savage that a man becomes attentive to the decorations of his life, and a keen perception and a skilled practice in this matter of seeing is one of the most powerful means to the extension of the personality. Desire limits — it is a process of dragging what one wants into one's self ; but love and perception extend — these push out the barriers of the self and endow with elasticity and power of wide reach.

THE WORLD OF PERCEPTION

Touch and taste unaided by the imagination remain imprisoned in the sphere of the body. Smell, despite its priority in associational value and its stimulative effect upon the imagination, has a limited reach, but vision and hearing extend indefinitely beyond the body. The joys of seeing and hearing — these lift us out of ourselves and intensify our relation to the visible universe in all its vast extension and its unplummetted depths. To stretch the realms in which we see and hear is no childish impulse; indeed, the love of the beauty in the world, the power of seeing it, the impersonal joy it gives, is apt to come to a man when the life of desire is failing. The personal life of need and greed blinds; it limits the vision to the thing we hope to get ; but let a man grow beyond his wants and a new and wonderful universe is spread out before him.

Since beauty is the sensation in us of a pure and disinterested delight regarded as the quality of an external object, the more we dwell in such sensations, the more will they grow in keenness, quickness, and intensity ; the eye will perceive more and more of delicate shades of beauty, become more and more alert to line and colour, and the ear will awake to the vaguer waverings and vibrations in the air. And even as morality the sense of power 4 49 in obedience is a contribution to the worth of life, so the cultivated perceptions make their own valuable contribution to the charm and dignity of existence.

It is a strange sensation to cross the sand-dunes at night with an average workman and realise that his entire self is concentrated on bad walking, the approaching fall of night, and the desire for comfortable shelter, while to the observer these are all the merest side-issues, hardly apparent, and every sense is aroused to delight. Nature is calling into play the whole being at once. We feel the great wash of the scented air, blown clean across sea spaces, slapping against our skin; we taste the salt in our pores, and we smell, rising up with the dark from the pale stretch of dune or purple patches of furze, the odour of the earth; the silence, punctuated by distant sounds, delicate and faint, claims the ear; through its pulsing we catch the mournful lapping of the sea, the faint whispering of the evening breeze preparing to blow, the far-away chorus of the frogs. An inlet of the ocean spreads to one side a little space of water, very still, yet glistening somewhat in the dusk. The sky, deep and dark and infinitely far overhead, blends toward the horizon with a glow of pale primrose, shot up on the trail of a setting

SO

ACROSS THE SAND-DUNES

sun, and against this splash of pallor the deep green pines toss their tufted tops. The planet Venus appears on the edge between the light of the western slope and the depth of the central cone, and mirrors herself brokenly in the rippled waters, and the trunks of a few scattered pines along the farther beach draw black lines somewhat uncertain in the mirror. Just to be alive for such a moment is a joy beyond speech. It bears no relation to any gratified desire whatsoever. It is the straining of the self beyond its limits, and we cease to want, to demand, to suffer; we know an absolutely impersonal joy, unruffled and unalloyed as the existence of tree, rock or mountain or freshly blossoming flower, and yet more full of content because more deeply alive, more keenly aware. The boy who stood in the copse each spring morning at the break of dawn to hear a mocking-bird trill, as it fluttered up from its bush and down again, was laying aside a capacity for joy in living which no sorrow could quench, no deprivation deaden. The perception of beauty is a spiritual and a creative act, and who translates such perception into the medium of the spoken or the written word puts his shoulder against the world's burden and helps to shove it aside and widen the area of gladness.

The Poet, more than all others, has demanded entrance to the Temple of Beauty — has claimed the right to dwell there. Indeed, it is difficult sometimes to know whether we love scenery because it reminds us of poetry, or poetry because it reminds us of scenery. It is certain that one of the chief charms of literature is its power of evoking memories of landscape. The poets, gathering up the dust of fleeting impressions, re-create the earth and cover it with a vivifying garment of thought, putting order and exactitude into our vague and chaotic impressions, and enhancing beauty by fitting it to noble sounds. They give us:

**A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky."

No detail is too trivial for them to note and deck with beauty; the thick-leaved oak, the tender dove in firry woodlands, the ragged rims of thunder brooding low with shadow-streaks of rain, the long and pleasant grass, the tufted plover piping along the fallow lea, are a part of the zest in living.

Their feeling for beauty carries with it not only spiritual promise and meaning, but purification,

HEALTH AND PURIFICATION

as does any form of extension of the self. All reverence and admiration have in them the reactive blessedness of formal worship, and are, in themselves and in their power of exaltation and lifting above the level of sin and death, of the essence of true religion. In the wonderful death scene of Socrates, when his disciples turned to him and asked him what they could do to serve him, he replied: '* Take care of yourselves; by so doing ye shall best serve me and mine.*' Perhaps the truth is too easily lost sight of that by keeping our finer pleasures alive and alert we best serve the world.

To see a countenance lit by innocent delight and lively health is a joy and benefit, and few things so conduce to these spiritual expressions as the simple habit of living close to the forces of which we are a product. There is a part of each year when we should all go out and camp. He knows this of a certainty who, year by year, has tried it and found it good. But experience makes perfect; and after several trials a man knows that camping with a party is a futile and stupid experience, and not unlike camping in evening clothes or near a town. If, for any frailty, physical, mental or moral, one cannot camp alone — '' mutter seelen allein^'' as the Gennans emphati-

S3 cally and quaintly phrase it — ^then one should take a boy and a dog along; for they have a way of absenting themselves — tramping, exploring, swimming, fishing, or hunting — all day, and only turn up hungry and sleepy after sunset. Also, it is futile to camp if one is dependent upon three meals a day. Air and water are excellent nourishment, and a meal after tidying up camp in the middle of the morning and another after sunset with the dog and boy are all-sufficient to a hardy camper. Real camping requires at least five miles of surrounding silence and loneliness and a good spring of water, and then one's shelter matters little. A tent or a deserted log-cabin and a little help in the beginning at installing the woodpile and building a fireplace, suffice for all the needs of a man through August. To have a tent near that last forlorn refuge of the dull and the vacant, the summer hotel, is no camping at all, for the whole object of the expedition is to be thrown back once more upon one's own resources, and find out what civilisation and education and comforts have done for one. One has then a fair chance of measuring how much company one's thoughts and perceptions unaided can furnish.

Perhaps the ideal camping lodge is an old deserted cabin with a rustic bench on either side the

CAMPING door and a flowing stream with a good stonelined pool not too far distant. To sit on one's front settle and look out upon miles of stretching meadow, hill and wood, gives one a lord-of-themanor sensation which the most complex of mansions with its serving-folk and difficult organisation cannot bestow. Here is our leisure to enjoy and contemplate unbroken and unimpaired.

"We plough the very skies, as well

As earth; the spacious seas Are ours; the stars all gems excel.

The air was made to please The souls of men; devouring fire Doth feed and quicken man's desire. The sun itself doth in its glory shine

And gold and silver out of very mire, And pearls and rubies out of earth refine;

While herbs and flowers aspire To touch and make our feet divine. How glorious is man's fate!

The laws of God, the works He did create, His ancient ways, are His and my estate."

One's bedroom should be all out-of-doors,- — be chosen not too far from the woodshed to pull one's cot or mattress in and out. For a bed is an ungainly piece of furniture in the daytime and should be hustled out of sight, and yet at night perfect contemplation requires springs and sheets.

Complete repose steals over him, however, who, lying in comfort a cot's height above the creeping ants and lizards, sees a wavering carpet about him of tall, gray grasses, thickly studded with daisies and harebells. The hillsides and overtopping mountains that form the distant circular walls blend in colour with the inwrought harebells, and shade from azure into misty purple, and all night the ceiling shifts. The clouds are wavering draperies fanned across the stars. Charles's Wain and Cassiopeia chassee around Polaris ; Vega, blue and steely, dominates at first the highest arch of the sky; and if over the eastern hills one notes a strange and splendid white glow, it means that in the course of an hour the broad face of the moon will peep over, laughing at the joke. He is a lucky camper who can keep awake, watching the scenery all night. Somehow, even with the best intents to see it all, the hours slip out of sight, the keen air blows us over into unconsciousness, and the glow of dawning awakens us.

Straightway the path of the sun points out the swimming-pool, and then one begins to fetch water, to inspect the woodpile, to turn over one's stores. One whistles with the boy and scampers with the dog, and sweeps and orders and sets the day along to motion,

THE DAY LONG

When the sun has ridden past the meridian, however, it is quite as natural to lie on one's back and inspect the depth of azure above and the sailing of those heaped-up, cotton-wool clouds that litter the blue floor of the sky with shreds and patches. The young camper may want to do things all day, but the beauty of many camping days is that one has learned to lie still on one's back all the long, lazy, declining afternoon, just staring at the shadows as they begin to slant, and the colours as they brighten along the horizon line. Nor must one ever regret the slow, still hours of a day when a uniform gray stretches from curve to curve of the horizon, and the rain falls steadily, unaggressively, unbrokenly through lagging time. One can heap the cushions on the settle, under the slanting roof of the doorway, and, with a raincoat thrown over one, keep still. The stiller one is, the more passive and patient one becomes, the better ; and only a stupid man would look about distrustfully for useful thoughts. The thoughts that chance along the way, bowing themselves courteously through the consciousness, are much more like to be worth our hospitality than those we have chased and harried till they are worn out. And then, when one is very, very still, one begins to hear the steady swish of the rain as it falls through the air and its gentle tapping on the sodden ground. In a stillness such as this all kinds of sounds become perceptible. Far off in the woods one hears the intermittent, subdued chatter of the birds. They do not sing, but occasionally they exchange a few remarks about the prospects of the weather. Now and then a bird's shrill cry breaks forth, intense and scolding — doubtless some mother -bird telling her restless young not to rtm out in the wet and get their feathers damp. Occasionally, too, the quiet, steady sounds are interrupted by some insect's shrilling. What about? Who knows? In such a lazy mood one can speculate for hours what the insect wanted, why it burst suddenly into audible eloquence and as suddenly stopped. Was the outburst effective? Was it indignation — a call upon the gods to right an evil world, or just a glorifying hymn of praise? And such long day, drawn to its close, need waken no reproachful thoughts of idleness. What better thing can we do for our Creator than stop to love and admire His handiwork?

Perhaps the finest days are those when the air is heavy and inert, after the rain is over, and clouds are gray and hang hardly an arm's-length over the hilltops. Such a day presses all the colotir out of the earth; the brown and olive tones stand out

THE WORLD A-FOOT in the woods, and below the yellow grasses one sees an inch or two of vivid, sodden green, and the stems of the white birches stand out and flaunt themselves before the eyes like ladies at a gardenparty. The stones are a wet, slippery gray, and one gets the odd sensation of light coming forth from the earth and rising toward the sky, the exactly contrary experience of watching, as evening falls, the darkness rising from the clefts in the furrows of the earth, slowly spreading and enwrapping the woods and invading the sky.

It is never worth while to waste our years without a few glad weeks of camping. For neither wealth, nor love, nor fame, nor achievement can repay us for the loss of those lazy hours when we might have lain prone beneath a beneficent heaven, staring at the clouds, peering through long grasses, watching the checkered sunlight break into the woods, or reviewing at night the marshalling of the heavenly forces.

Rightly to know the by-paths as well as the dusty highroads, to count the wild flowers and listen to the birds' notes, to remember just what kinds of pine and birch grow, and where to expect the maple, oak, and elm, the choke-cherry and the rowan-tree, one must travel through the country afoot. To peep through the window at a gurgling brook is one thing, but to follow it along until the feet ache and burn, and then to sit and dabble them in it until one starts up renewed and refreshed for the home run, is another and a far more memorable experience. There is an tmforgettable intimacy established with such a brook and its song; its stones, its miniature falls, and soft, grassy places are a part of our mental life in seasons of dryness and under wintry skies. To travel afoot is to know the abundant joy of racing blood setting the body all a-tingle, and to get acquainted with the folk in the villages and along the highway. To know men, met at haphazard down the road, lifts the mind from narrow provincialism of class and sectional distinctions. Perhaps we have been inclined to pity the poor and to be morbidly anxious to relieve them from a situation so devoid of accessories. To walk the road and ask the hospitality of the chance comer is a lesson in the equalisation of happiness.

A hale old man of sixty, travelling with an equally hale old woman in a wagon containing their whole cooking apparatus and a tent for the night lodging, gladly shared a meal of corn-bread, buttermilk, and Irish potatoes roasted in the ashes of a little bonfire, while they expatiated on the delights of a nomadic life in terms fit for Juggling

JUGGLING JERRY

Jerry. A blacksmith by trade, he said he was, but he handed over the business to apprentices while all the summer long he and his wife drove through the land, pitching their tent by night and sleeping on balsam boughs with the flaps of the tent thrown open to the stars. It took no longer than ten minutes to picket the horses and pitch the tent when they foimd a grassy spot and a spring tow^- ard evening. It was a cheap way of living, for it cost every bit of thirty dollars a month to run their establishment at home, whereas, living in the open, they reduced the sum to eighteen or twenty a month without any privations. Moreover, he looked for horse-trades along the way and often turned a pretty penny, and he lent out his cow to his poorer neighbours while he was gone; and charity like that counted to one's credit side in the Beyond. Then the Beyond, once mentioned, loomed bigger, and he continued: ''There is folks as don't believe in enjoyin' yer life while yer got it. But I do. Why, what did our Saviour say on earth? He said: *You eat, drink, and be merry; to-morrow you may die.''' He was an asttite citizen, that blacksmith, and he felt the seal of approval upon his whole career.

But there are other than human intimacies to be cultivated by the wayfarer. Who that travels in train or conveyances knows the birds' nests, or sees young thrushes getting the first lessons in flying, as does he who falls asleep by a mossy stone and slowly opens his eyes to hear the scolding of a mother thrush, and to see four small, downy babies, gaping perilously on a twig and listening to counsels of perfection for birds. It is the foottraveller only who counts sixty different kinds of wild flowers in as many miles' stretch, and who hears the vesper sparrow sing at sunset. There is, too, all the glory of independence to be counted in. To feel one's own completeness one need only travel fifteen to twenty miles a day for a week and find out how difficult it is to get rid of five dollars in that time, to know the insistent camaraderie and good-fellowship of the road to those on foot. Whether it's the real glory of being mistaken for a veritable tramp or whether

"The market girls and fishermen The soldiers and the sailors too,"

simply like to flaunt the light-hearted gayety of their lives in the faces of those habitually deprived, it would be difficult to decide, but nowhere else in the world is there such hospitality and kindness, such trustful cordiality and con-

NATURE^S LIMITATIONS

fidence, as greets the footsore and weary when he unbuckles his pack and makes a halt in his tramp. There is, of course, a limit to this complete understanding of nature, and our at-one-ment with all created earth may easily be snapped. It requires only one good day's march from home or from any shelter, a sudden darkening of the sky, and the fond Mother Nature, so infinitely and variously beautiful, is converted into a hostile force — alien, harsh, destructive. One realises then that if a man has carried civilisation too far and has swamped himself in his belongings, he has at least done so in a natural self-defence. If one is inclined to feel rather contemptuous of the big athlete who confessed that it took just half a man's waking hours to keep his body in order, one is yet brought to feel that there is a happy medium between savagery and the Waldorf. To wander forth in the gray of dawn, to go on and on until eighteen miles from home — one's own or any one else's — to sit down at the end of a mountain gorge with sheer gray cliffs rising steep on either side and a wide, frothing stream gushing in between, with an imperfectly blazed trail behind as the only guide to a distant shelter, and to watch a storm break, awakens the conviction that the world is not really so much one's own as one had dreamed in the sunlit morning. The breeze which fanned us then freezes us now; the heavens blacken and glower malignantly; a deep, prolonged grumbling as of wild beasts after prey begins in the distance; sudden flashes of light throw out the cliffs and forests in lurid grotesque wise; and all these are far from native and home-like phenomena; man becomes conscious that creation exists for some more unfathomable purpose than to add to his joy in living. How innocent and round and shiny the moon looks, peeping over the eastern tips of the mountains when the earth has laid ^side her evil mood. It is not so easy for a chance wayfarer, wrapped in borrowed blankets with wet and steaming clothes pressed close to his burning skin, to forget. He is apt to drive homeward a chastened and a saddened spirit. Yes, Nature can deceive. Wilful, feminine, and capricious, she smiles to trap him into a presumptuous fondness, the better to flout him. The wayfarer remembers a certain friend who, taken suddenly ill at a far-away mountain house, exclaimed, weakly: ''I don't mind dying, but I want to die where I can buy cologne and have the frills on my night -shirt fluted!'' The wayfarer who once felt only scorn for such yearnings is apt to be converted. His heart will ever after fail him when he threatens to elope with a blanket

SUPERFLUITIES and a book to a mountain-top and live alone till the winter snows drive him down. He realises that civilised man has given his heart and his peace to tubs of hot water, laundered clothes, scented soaps, bath - towels, cooked food, open fires, and softly-tinted walls.

A lady, who was also a philanthropist, crossed the Russian frontiers to visit Tolstoi and, ushered into the presence of the great saint, she uttered the usual conventional greetings and exclamations, while the sage eyed her abstractedly and silently. "As if," she said— ''as if he were quietly turning back the top of my head and looking at the thoughts inside.'' When she ceased speaking, he touched her large and, at the time, fashionable sleeve, and said, sweetly: ''Why do you wrap so much cloth on your arms? If you ripped it off it would make a nice frock for a little girl.'' The great difficulty, then, is to draw the line at sufficiency. Man thrown loose upon the caprices of nature is not man at his best; man spending half his waking hours upon the care of his body, is not man at his best. Wherever protection and necessary care are converted into luxury and superfluity, he is weakened. But doubtless time will renew the bond between man and Nature, drawing him ever closer to her, teaching him to extract

5 65 health and peace and patience from her and to thwart her caprices by his ingenuity. To live confined by artificial limits the year round, is to let civilisation wreak great vengeance upon us, dulling our senses, weakening our bodies. There is a constant need to renew the bond to nature, to come again into our natural heritage of the earth, so that the whole girth of the world may be our playground and the material of our joy.

As for the real sensation of deserving the chaplet of the sage, the average mortal is most like to win it when he spends long, idle, rambling days in the spring woods; for, just at this time of the year, they are wrought with miracles of delicacy and intricacy and beauty beyond speech.

Every place in the world has its own time for perfection. One can never echo quite whole-heartedly Browning's —

"Oh, to be in England Now that April's there!"

Not that England has not perennial charm; but why not be there in Jtme, while one 's about it, when, the cold and the drizzling grayness are once and for all folded up and laid on the shelf, and when the larks wheel, circling, singing over every field, dropping their ''silver chain of sound'*; when all the wild flowers of Milton's Lycidas and

THE SPRING WOODS

Arnold's Thyrsis and Shelley's Question are trailing and blooming and bedecking the whole face of the earth, and when every wind that blows is faint with the fumes of sunlight and of earth? Every one who is attentive to the real business of life, the catching at all the stray ends of beauty and heaping them in a treasure-trove of memory, knows that the proper time to see Normandy, Brittany, and the New England hills is September, when a little forecasting tinge of frost is in the air, glinting white over the meadows in the early morning, just by way of adding glitter to the flashing pageant of the auttimn leaves. But if one owned the magic carpet, as truly all human beings should, one would sit down upon it just about the tenth of April every year, and give the order, "To the Southern woods/' Probably it would be better to leave the carpet by the roadside, near some old historic town, and walk — for it would be a pity to miss the mile-long hedges of golden broom flinging their wild arms over the straggling white road that runs

** Like a lane out of heaven that leads through a dream,**

a sight equal in its glory to Wordsworth's ''host of golden daffodils." How the words bring the picture to the mind! He must have made a sudden turning and come upon them quite by surprise — a whole field of molten gold, ten thousand daffodils waving in the wind. What wonder that Shelley, falling upon a like experience, should have swooned away with sheer delight of the vision, since he was so slightly bound down to earth that emotion invariably loosened the frail tie. Whoever has driven up a certain bare rise of land and overlooked a tiny, worn-old, but once historic-proud village in Virginia has seen a sight not less overwhelming in its glory — miles upon miles of the golden broom hedges.

And then one penetrates from the roadside into the softened and checkered light of the woods. The trees at this time of the year combine the beauties of both winter and summer; they are still partially bare to the blue sky, letting through wonderful lace-like traceries, and yet the tender green bespeaks the fuller shade that shall come when the sun has worked himself up to his full midsummer fervour. The long-needled pines hung with brown cones overtop the other trees, their great straight, aspiring stems drawing lines in the wilderness, and below them the low-growing, wide-spreading dogwood raises its layers of pure white blossoms, like an unexpected shower of baby moons caught on the

NOONTIDE AND SUNSET

branches and held ; and in between, for sheer luxuriance and supererogation, the red-bud and the Judas-tree add their flash of colours. Lower still there are wild knotted tangles of coral honeysuckle and yellow jasmine clinging to the holly- trees, and still lower the wild azalea blooms, pink and white in her glossy leaves. Just peeping above the dead leaves rise the pink lady's-slipper, green jacks-in-the-pulpit, serious, straight, and comical withal, and everywhere sweet-scented bracken. As one nears the edge of the wood, what more natural than a wide stretch of the red columbines, hanging jewel -like above their large and tender trefoils?

The noon hour should be spent deep in the woods and among the tree -tops. One need not climb, but, lying flat on one's back, one sees all the affairs half-way between earth and heaven. A bald-headed mother eagle may be scolding her three awkward young ones in the nest and spurring them on to make an effort to fly. There is much encouragement to be derived from seeing an eaglet wavering on the branch, flapping his wings and afraid to trust himself in the air, and then, finally, soaring off so easily and comfortably. And there, in the noonday stillness, with the sun throwing fantastic shapes of light upon the ground, out of the quiet and the silence the little furtive woodnoises penetrate — the tapping of the woodpecker, the squirrel's chirp, the whiz of wing as the humming-birds fly past, and the drone and buzz of insects. No birds sing just at this hour; but blue and scarlet and cardinal colour, olive and gray and brown, the little specks of melodious life flit past us, bent, doubtless, too, upon the hoarding of beauty after their kind.