Books: Lessons in Life
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Timothy Titcomb >> Lessons in Life
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The logical sequence of disbelief in what Mr. Emerson calls a
"pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism.
There is certainly nothing ridiculous in the faith that the Being
who contrived and arranged, and adjusted the infinite littlenesses
of creation, and ordained their laws, and who continues their
existence, maintains an intimate interest in the only intelligent
creatures he has placed in this world. The little bird that sings
to me, the bee that bears me honey, the blossom that brings me
perfume, all testify to me that He who created them will not
neglect nor forget His own child. If I look up into the firmament,
and send my imagination into its deep abysses, and think that
further than even dreams can go, those abysses are strewn with
stars; if I think of comets coming and going with the rush of
lightning, and yet occupying whole centuries in their journey; or
if I only sit down by the sea, and think of the waves that kiss
other shores thousands of miles away, I am oppressed by a sense of
my own littleness. I ask the question whether the God who has such
large things in His care, can think of me--a speck on an infinite
aggregate of surface--a mote uneasily shifting in the boundless
space. I get no hope in this direction; but I look down, and find
that the shoulders of all inferior creation are under me, lifting
me into the very presence of God. I find that God has been at work
below me, in a mass of minute and munificent detail, by the side
of which my life is great and simple, and satisfyingly significant.
So, if I may not believe in a "pistareen Providence," I must make
a God of the universe itself, or pass into the hands of many Gods
the world's creation and governance. If the God that made the bee,
and the ant, and the daisy, made me, then He is not above taking
care of me, and of maintaining an interest in the smallest affairs
of my life. The faith that lives in reason is never stronger than
when it stands on flowers. There is not a fly that floats, nor a
fish that swims, nor an animalcule that navigates its little drop
of sea-spray, but bears a burden of hope to despairing humanity.
"If God so clothe the grass which to-day is, and tomorrow is cast
into the oven," then what, Mr. Emerson?
This subject is a very large one, and I can present only one more
phase of it. A great multitude--the larger part, in fact--of the
human race are engaged in doing small work. It may be a comfort
for them to know that the Almighty Maker of all things has done a
great deal of the same kind of work, and has not found it unworthy
or unprofitable employment. Let them remember that it is just as
hard to do a small thing well as a large thing, and that the
difficulty of a deed is the gauge of the power required for its
doing. Let them remember that when they go down, they are going
just as directly toward infinity as when they go up, and that
every man who works Godward, works in honor.
It was a very forcible reflection to which a visitor at Niagara
Falls gave utterance, when he said that, considering the relative
power of their authors, he did not regard the cataract as so
remarkable a piece of work as the Suspension Bridge; and it may be
said with truth that there is no work within the power of man--so
small that God has not been below it in a work smaller and
possibly humbler still,--certainly humbler when we consider the
infinite majesty and the ineffable dignity of His character. My
maid is too proud to go into the street for a pail of milk; my God
smiles upon me in flowers from the very gutter. My neighbor thinks
it beneath him to till the soil, working with his hands, but the
Being who made him, breathes upon that soil, and works in it, that
it may bear food to keep human dignity from starving. There are
men who set themselves above driving a horse, no part of which the
King of the universe was above making. Ah! human pride! Alas!
human dignity! I do not know what to make of you.
LESSON XII.
RURAL LIFE.
"Going into a village at night, with the lights gleaming on each
side of the street, in some houses they will be in the basement
and nowhere else."--BEECHER.
"The little God o' the world jogs on the same old way,
And is as singular as on the world's first day.
A pity 'tis thou shouldst have given
The fool, to make him worse, a gleam of light from heaven;
He calls it reason, using it
To be more beast than ever beast was yet.
He seems to me, (your grace the words will pardon,)
Like a long-legged grasshopper, in the garden,
Forever on the wing, and hops and sings
The same old song, as in the grass he springs."
GOETHE'S FAUST.
It is a common remark that a railroad car is an excellent place in
which to study human nature; but the particular phase of human
nature which is usually presented there is not, I think,
sufficiently attractive to engage a man who desires to maintain a
good opinion of his race. I would as soon think of studying human
nature in a pig-pen as in a railroad car. I do not like to study
even my own nature there, for I find that the more I ride, the
more selfish I become, and the more desirable it seems to me that
I should occupy the space usually assigned to four men, viz,: two
seats for my feet, and two for such other portions of my person as
are not required for spanning the space between the sofas. It must
be a matter of regret to most persons, I am sure, that they are
not large enough to cover twice as many seats as they do, and thus
drive those who travel with them into more close and inconvenient
quarters. Whenever I witness an instance of genuine, self-sacrificing
politeness in a railroad car, I become aware that there is at least one
man on the train who has travelled very little. No; when I travel I turn
my observation upon things outside--upon the farms and streams, and
mountains and forests, and towns and villages through which the
train bears me. I am particularly interested in the faces of those
who gather at the smaller stations to gaze at the passengers, get
the papers, and feel the rush, for a single moment, of the world's
great life. I love to listen to the smart remarks of some rustic wit in
shirt-sleeves, who, if the train should happen to be behind time,
intimates to the brakeman that the old horse didn't have his
allowance of oats that morning, or commiserates the loneliness of
the conductor of a train not crowded with passengers, all of which
is intended for the ears of a village girl who stands in the door
of the "Ladies' Room," with the tip of a parasol in her teeth, and
a hat on her head that was jaunty last year.
Riding into the country recently, I saw at one of these little
stations a pair of young men, leaning against the station-house.
They had evidently been waiting for the approach of the train, but
they did not stir from their positions. They were young men whose
life had been spent in severe and unremitting toil. Their hands
were large, and coarse, and brown; their faces and necks were
bronzed; their clothing was of the commonest material and pattern,
and was old and patched besides; and they had a hard look
generally. There was the usual bustle about them, but they did not
seem to mind it. At last, they started, and these are the words
that one of them spoke: "Come, Bob, let's go over and see if we
can't tuck away some of that grub." So both turned their backs
upon the train, and upon me; and as they went over to see if they
couldn't "tuck away some of that grub," I got a view of their
heavy shoulders, and their shambling, awkward gait. A pair of old
draft horses, going out in the morning to take their places in
front of their truck, would not move more stiffly than those
fellows moved.
Now these young men taught me nothing, for I had seen many such
before; but through them I took a fresh and a very impressive
glimpse into a style of life that abounds among the rural
population of America, and shows but feeble signs of improvement.
These men, who, when they eat, only "tuck away grub," of course
"go to roost" when they sleep. They call the sun "Old Yaller,"
naming him in honor of a favorite ox. When they undress themselves
"they peel off," as if they were onions or potatoes; and when they
put themselves into their Sunday clothing, they "surprise their
backs with a clean shirt." When they marry, they "hitch on," as if
matrimony were a sled, and a wife were a saw-log. Every thing in
their life is brought down to the animal basis, and why should it
not be? They labor as severely as any animal they own; they are
proud of their animal strength and endurance; they eat, and work,
and sleep, like animals, and they do nothing like men. Their
frames are shaped by labor; and they are only the best animals,
and the ruling animals, on their farms. As between the wives and
children who live in their houses, and the horses and cattle that
live in their barns, the latter have the easier time of it.
Having brought every thing down to the animal basis in their homes
and in their lives, their intercourse with other men will
naturally betray the ideas upon which they live. They are usually
very blunt men, who "never go round" to say any thing, but who
blurt out what they have to say in a manner entirely regardless
of the feelings of others. They enter each other's houses with
their hats on, and "help themselves" when they sit at each other's
tables, and affect great contempt for the courtesies and forms of
polite life. They are exceedingly afraid of being looked upon as
"stuck up;" and if they can get the reputation of being able to
mow more grass, or pitch more hay, or chop and pile more wood, or
cradle more grain, than any of their neighbors, their ambition is
satisfied. There is no dignity of life in their homes. They cook
and eat and live in the same room, and sometimes sleep there, if
there should be room enough for a bed. There is no family life
that is not associated with work, and no thought of any life that
is not connected with bodily labor; and if they sit down five
minutes, either at home or at church, they go to sleep. Their
highest intellectual exercise is that which is called out by the
process of swapping horses, and the selling of their weekly
product of eggs and butter at the highest market price. They
invariably call their wives--"the old woman," or "she;" and if
they should stumble into saying, "my dear," in the presence of a
neighbor, they would blush at being self-convicted of unjustifiable
politeness and unpardonable weakness.
These men have learned to read, but they rarely read any thing,
except the weekly newspaper, taken exclusively for the probate
notices. The only books in their houses are the Bible and two
or three volumes forced upon them at unguarded moments by
book-agents, who made the most of internal wood-cuts, and external
Dutch metal to place them in possession of the "History of the
World," or the "Lives of the Presidents," or some other production
equally extensive and comprehensive. There is no exhibition of
taste about their dwellings. Every thing is brought down to the
hard standard of use. If their wives should desire a border for
flowers, they regard them as very silly, and look upon their
attempts to "fix up things" as a great waste of labor. They never
go out with their wives to mingle in the social life of their
neighborhood; and if the wives of their neighbors come to spend an
afternoon, they harness their horses, and drive off to attend to
some distant business that will detain them until the women get
away. It is useless to say to me that this is an extreme picture,
for I know what I am writing about, and know that I am painting
from the life. I know that there are hundreds of thousands of
American farmers whose life and whose ideas of life are cast upon
these models. Some of these are as coarse and hard as I paint
them, and others are only a little better. Such a farmer's boy is
brought up to the idea that work is the grand thing in life. Work,
indeed, is supposed by him to be pretty much all of life. It is
supposed to spoil farmers to get any thing but work into their
heads; and scientific agriculturists will bear witness that they
have been obliged to fight the popular prejudices against "book
farming" at every step of their progress. They will also testify
that the improvements made in farming and in the implements of
agriculture have not been made by farmers themselves, but by
outsiders--mechanics, and men of science--who have marvelled at
the brainless stupidity which toiled on in its old track of
unreasoning routine, and looked with suspicion and discouragement
upon innovations. The reason why the farmer has not been foremost
in improving the instruments and methods of his own business, is,
that his mind has been unfitted for improvement by the excessive
labors of his body. A man whose whole vital energy is directed to
the support of muscle has, of course, none to direct to the
support of thought. A man whose strength is habitually exhausted
by bodily labor becomes, at length, incapable of mental exertion;
and I cannot help feeling that half of the farmers of the country
establish insuperable obstacles to their own improvement by their
excessive toil. They are nothing more than the living machines of
a calling which so far exhausts their vitality that they have
neither the disposition nor the power to improve either their
calling or themselves.
To a student or a literary man, it is easy to explain the
necessity of the proper division of the nervous energies between
the mind and the body. Any student or literary man who has a daily
mental task to do, will do it before he exercises his body to any
great extent. If I wished to unfit my mind for a day of literary
labor, I would use the hoe in my garden for an early hour in the
morning. If I wished utterly to unfit a pupil for his daily task
of study, I would put him through an exhausting walk before
breakfast. The direction of all the nervous energies to the
support of the muscular system, and the necessary draft upon the
digestive and nutritive functions to supply the muscular waste,
leave the mind temporarily a bankrupt. I have never seen a man who
was really remarkable for acquired muscular power, and, at the
same time, remarkable for mental power. A man may be born into the
world with a fine muscular system and a fine brain, and in early
life his muscular system may have a fine development. Such a man
may subsequently have a remarkable mental development, but this
development will never be accompanied by large and regular
expenditures of muscular power. If I wished to repress the mental
growth and manifestation of a man, I would undertake to educate
him up to the point of lifting eight or ten kegs of nails. There
is danger at first of overdoing our "muscular Christianity"--
danger of getting more muscle than Christianity; and there is a
good deal more danger of overdoing our muscular intellectuality.
The difference between the kind and amount of exercise necessary
to produce a healthy machine and the kind and amount necessary to
produce a powerful one, is very great. We are never to look for
great intellectuality in a professor of gymnastics, nor to expect
that the time will come when a man will not only walk a thousand
miles in a thousand hours, but compose a poem of a thousand lines
at the same time.
If the temporary diversion of the nervous energy from the brain
have this effect, what must a permanent diversion accomplish? It
will accomplish precisely what is indicated by the look and
language of our two young friends at the station-house. It will
develop muscle for the uses of a special calling, and make ugly
and clumsy men of those who should be symmetrical; and at the same
time it will repress mental development, and permanently limit
mental growth--at least, so long as the mind shall be associated
with the body. I suppose that every fecundated germ of human being
is endowed with a certain possibility of development--a
complement of vital energy which will be expended in various
directions, according to the circumstances which may surround it
and the will of its possessor. If it shall be mainly expended upon
the growth and sustentation of muscle, it will not be expended
upon the growth and sustentation of mind; and I have no hesitation
in saying that it is an absolute impossibility for a man who
engages in hard bodily labor every day to be brilliant in
intellectual manifestation. The tide of such a man's life does not
set in that direction. An hourglass has in it a definite quantity
of sand; and when I turn it over, that sand falls from the upper
apartment into the lower; and while it occupies that position it
will continue to fall until the former is exhausted and the latter
is filled. Moreover, it will never take its place at the other end
of the instrument, until it is turned back. It is precisely thus
with a human constitution. The grand vital current moves only in
one direction, and when it is moving toward muscle it is not
moving toward mind, and when it is moving toward mind it is not
moving toward muscle. This fact is illustrated sufficiently by the
phenomena of digestion. After a man has eaten a hearty dinner, he
becomes dull, even to drowsiness or perfect sleep. Why? Simply
because the tide of nervous energy sets towards digestion, and
there is not enough left to carry on mental or voluntary muscular
operations.
A resident of a city riding into the country, especially if he be
an intellectual man, and engaged in intellectual pursuits, will be
thrilled by what he sees around him. The life of the farmer, planted
in the midst of so much that is beautiful, having to do with nature's
marvellous miracles of germination and growth, moving under the
open heaven with its glory of sky and meteoric change, and
accompanied by the songs of birds and all characteristic rural sights
and sounds, will seem to him the sweetest and the most enviable
that falls to human lot. But the hard-working farmer sees nothing
of this. What cares he for birds, unless they pull up his corn?
What cares he for skies, unless he can make use of them for drying
his hay, or wetting down his potatoes? The beautiful changes of
nature do not touch him. His sensibilities are deadened by hard
work. His nervous system is all imbedded in muscle, and does not lie
near enough to the surface to be reached by the beauty and music
around him. All he knows about a daisy is that it does not make
good hay; and he draws no appreciable amount of the pleasure
of his life from those surroundings which charm the sensibilities of
others.
We are in the habit of regarding the farming population of the
country as the most moral and religious of any, yet if we look at
them critically, we shall find that their piety is of a negative,
rather than a positive character. They are men in the first place
who have very few temptations, either from without or from within.
There are no professional tempters around them to lure them into
the more seductive paths of sin. The woman whose steps take hold
on hell does not pass their doors; the gambler spreads no snares
for them; no gilded palace invites them to music and intoxicating
draughts; they are not maddened by ambition; and they have no
vanity that leads them to degrading and ruinous display. If they
are little assailed from without, they are not more moved toward
vice from within. The fact that their vital energies are all
expended upon labor relieves them from the motives of temptation.
Men whose muscles are overworked have no vitality to expend upon
vices. The devil cannot make much out of a man who is both tired
and sleepy. If we inquire of the ministers who have charge of
rural parishes, they will usually tell us that an audience of
mechanics is better than an audience of farmers, and that the
miscellaneous audience of a city is better than either. It is
impossible for men who have devoted every bodily energy they
possess to hard labor during the waking hours of six days, to go
to church and keep brightly awake on the seventh. Country
ministers will also admit that they have in their parishes less
help in social and conference meetings than the pastors of city
parishes, and that no great movements of benevolence ever
originate in, or are carried on by, rural churches.
As a matter of course, life cannot have much dignity or much that
is characteristically human in it unless it be based upon active
intellectuality, genuine sensibility, a development of the finer
affections, and positive Christian virtue. When a man is a man, he
never "tucks in grub." When a man lies down for rest and sleep he
does not "go to roost." To a man, marriage is something more than
"hitching on," and a dirty shirt is a good deal more of a
"surprise" to a man's back than a clean one. There is no doubt
about the fact that a life whose whole energies are expended in
hard bodily labor is such a life as God never intended man should
live. I do not wonder that men fly from this life and gather into
the larger villages and cities, to get some employment which will
leave them leisure for living. Life was intended to be so adjusted
that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always
subordinate to the soul. It was never meant by the Creator that
the soul should always be subordinate to the body, or sacrificed
to the body.
I am perfectly aware that I am not revealing pleasant truths. We
are very much in the habit of glorifying rural life, and praising
the intelligence and virtue of rural populations; and if they
believe us, they cannot receive what I write upon this subject
with pleasure. But the question which interests these people most
is not whether my statements are pleasant but whether they are
true. Is the philosophy sound? Are the facts as they are
represented to be? Does a severe and constant tax upon the
muscular system repress mental development, and tend to make life
hard and homely and unattractive? Is this the kind of life
generally which the American farmer leads? Is not the American
farmer, generally, a man who has sacrificed a free and full mental
development, and all his finer sensibilities and affections, and a
generous and genial family and social life, and the dignities and
tasteful proprieties of a well-appointed home, to the support of
his muscles? I am aware that there are instances of a better life
than this among the farmers, and I should not have written this
article if those instances had not taught me that this everlasting
devotion to labor is unnecessary. There are farmers who prosper in
their calling, and do not become stolid. There are farmers who are
gentlemen--men of intelligence--whose homes are the abodes of
refinement, whose watchward is improvement, and whose aim it is to
elevate their calling. If there be a man on the earth whom I
honestly honor it is a farmer who has broken away from his slavery
to labor, and applied his mind to his soil.
Mind must be the emancipator of the farmer. Science, intelligence,
machinery--these must liberate the white bondman of the soil from
his long slavery. When I look back and see what has been done for
the farmer within my brief memory, I am full of hope for the
future. The plough, under the hand of science, is become a new
instrument. The horse now hoes the corn, digs the potatoes, mows
the grass, rakes the hay, reaps the wheat, and threshes and
winnows it; and every day adds new machinery to the farmer's
stock, to supersede the clumsy implements which once bound him to
his hard and never-ending toil. When a farmer begins to use
machinery and to study the processes of other men, and to apply
his mind to farming so far as he can make it take the place of
muscle, then he illuminates his calling with a new light, and
lifts himself into the dignity of a man. If mind once gets the
upper hand, it will serve itself and see that the body is properly
cared for. Intelligent farming is dignified living. For a farmer
who reads and thinks, and studies and applies, nature will open
the storehouse of her secrets, and point the way to a life full of
dignity and beauty, and grateful and improvable leisure.
LESSON XIII.
REPOSE.
"Peace, greatness best becomes; calm power doth guide
With a far more imperious stateliness
Than all the swords of violence can do,
And easier gains those ends she tends unto." DANIEL.
"When headstrong passion gets the reins of reason,
The force of nature, like too strong a gale,
For want of ballast oversets the vessel." HIGGONS.
"Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts,
As I do thee." SHAKSPEARE.
Mrs. Flutter Budget was at church last Sunday, She always is at
church; and she never forgets her fan. I have known her for many
years, and have never known her to be in church without a fan in
her hand, and some article upon her person that rustled
constantly. Her black silk dress is death to devotion over the
space of twenty feet on all sides of her. She fixes the wires in
the bonnets of her little girls, then takes their hats off
entirely, then wipes their noses, then shakes her head at them,
then makes them exchange seats with each other, then finds the
text and the hymns for them, then fusses with the cricket, and
then fans herself unremittingly until she can see something else
to do. During all this time, and throughout all these exercises,
the one article of dress upon her fidgety person that has rustle
in it, rustles. It chafes against the walls of silence as a caged
bear chafes, with feverish restlessness, against the walls of his
cell; and as if the annoyance of one sense were not sufficient,
she seems to have adopted a bob-and-sinker style of trimming, for
hat and dress, and hair and cloak, and every thing that goes to
make up her externals. Little pendants are everywhere--little
tassels, and little balls, and little tufts--at the end of little
cords; and these are all the time bobbing up and down, and
trembling, and threatening to bob up and down, like--
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