Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/347

Rh effluvium of the city cook-shops; and last — not least — pervading every street and shop and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling and sight. The golden silence, when broken at all, is disturbed only by the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on their return home at evening, or the exquisite "sough" of the night wind, as it passes over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town we have the relentless roar and grind of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally, to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the thin walls of our house as if there were no partition between us and the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the gratifications of the senses in town, surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith it abounds. But beyond these mortifications of the flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place between our feelings and our intellect — a sense, not of being tired and wanting rest, for that is a natural and wholesome alternative of all strong and sustained exercise of our faculties — but of being "like dumb driven cattle," and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air; but our walks through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, — but it does us no good; and sleep, — but we waken up before half the night is past, with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of engagements and duties, that we cannot in honour break loose. We can only break down, and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things has lasted a little too long.

Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why not try the golden mean, the compromise between town and country, to be found in some rus in urbe in Fulham or Hampstead, or a viila a little way further at Richmond or Norwood or Wimbledon? I beg leave humbly to contend that the venerable Aristotelian meson, is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics, and that it will be generally found that people adopting the half-way house system of lodgment will be disposed to repeat the celebrated Scotch ode with slight variations. "Their heart is" in London; "their heart is not," by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. Their days are spent either in waiting at railway-stations to go in or out of town, or in the yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who have promised to "give them a day," and for whom they have provided the modern substitute for the fatted calf, but who, on the particular morning of their engagement, are sure to be swept off their consciences by an unexpected ticket for the opera, which they "could not enjoy if they had gone so far in the morning as dear Mr. A.'s delightful villa." Of course, it is possible to live in the outer circle of real London, and have fresh air and comparative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who goes further afield, the ambitious soul which dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars to a paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion and despair. He tries to "make the best of both worlds," and he gets the worst of the two. The genuine Londoner considers his proffers of hospitality as an imposition, and the genuine country cousin is indignant, on accepting them, to find how far is his residence from the exhibitions and the shops. His trees are black, his roses cankered, and his soul embittered by the defalcations of friends, the blunders and extortions of cabmen, and his own infructuous effort to be always in two places at once.

Nor is the second and, apparently, more facile resource of the tired Londoner — that of quartering himself on his kind country friends for his holidays — very much more successful. The country would indeed be delightful for our Christmas fortnight, or our Easter or 