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Page 54
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us
daily:--
Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I
passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads
of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and
planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The
settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left
their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and
killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then
built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a
tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs
and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals
between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the
chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few
utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum
total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say,
under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors
started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the
achievements of the intervening generations.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the
dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and
for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and
one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of
culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries
are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought
to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and
denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people
are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied.
"Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves
under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke
of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and
obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when
_they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
redolent with moral memories and sang a very p�an of duty, struggle, and
success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
* * * * *
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
its form.
"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye
under his top-coat was good enough for us.
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