Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/342

330 which do not involve the alternative of wealth or ruin every hour. For such people I apprehend London life is actually rather a cure for an anxious temperament than a provocative of care. There is no time for dwelling on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres of possible evils ahead. Labours and pleasures, amusements and momentary worries, succeed each other so rapidly that the more serious anxieties receive less and less attention as the plot of London life thickens year by year. One nail drives out another, and we are now and then startled to remember that there has been really for days and months a reasonable fear of disaster hanging over us, to which we have somehow scarcely given a thought, while in the country it would have filled our whole horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten it day or night.

And again, quite as important as bodily health and freedom from anxiety, is the possession of a certain child-like freshness of character; a simplicity which enables men and women, even in old age, to enjoy such innocent pleasures as come in their way without finding them pall, or despising them as not worth their acceptance. Great minds and men of genius seem generally specially gifted with this invaluable attribute of perennial youth; while little souls, full of their own petty importance and vanities, lose it before they are well out of the schoolroom. The late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will be, perhaps, appreciated when all the monstrosities of modern English statuary are consigned to the lime-kiln), used to say in his old age that he wished he could live over again every day and hour of his past life precisely as he had spent it. Let the reader measure what this means in the mouth of a man of transparent veracity, and it will appear that the speaker must needs have carried on through his seventy years the freshness of heart of a boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of the beautiful, and supported by the consciousness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain. People who are always "looking for the next thing," taking each pleasure not as a pleasure in itself, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to something else, or as a subject to be talked of; people who are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the slippery pole of ambition, cannot possibly know the meaning of such genuine and ever fresh enjoyment.

Is a man likely to grow more or less simple-hearted and single-minded in town or in the country? Alas! there can be little or no doubt that London life is a sad trial to all such simplicity; and that nothing is more difficult than to preserve, in its hot stifling atmosphere, the freshness and coolness of any flower of sentiment, or the glory of any noble unselfish enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the tone of easy-letting-down commonly adopted by men of the world towards any lofty aspiration, compels those who would fain cherish generous and conscientious motives to cloak them under the guise of a hobby or a whim, and before many years are over, the glow and bloom of almost every enthusiasm is rubbed off and spoiled. "The trail of ——," a certain weekly review, "is over them all."

But it is time to pass from the general subjective conditions of happiness common to us all, to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies which are probably more often concerned in the preference of town or country life. We are all of us mingled of pretty nearly the same ingredients of character, but they are mixed in very different proportions in each man's brewing, and in determining the flavour of the compound everything depends on the element which happens to prevail. By some odd chance few of us, notwithstanding all our egotism and self-study, really know ourselves well enough to consciously recognize whether we are by nature gregarious or solitary, acted upon most readily by meteorological or by psychological influences; capable of living only on our affections, or requiring the exercise of our brains. We are always, for example, talking about the gloom or brightness of the weather, as if we were so many pimpernels, to whom the sun is everything, and a cloudy day or a sharp east wind the most pitiable calamity. The real truth is, that to ninety-nine rational English men and women out of a hundred, atmospheric conditions are altogether insignificant compared to social ones, and the spectacle of a single member of our family in the dumps, or even the suspicion that the servants are quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts more from our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the barometer from very dry to stormy. In the same way we talk about people "loving the country" or "loving the town," just as if the character which fitted in and found its natural gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy quite equally the other.

