Hillsboro People | Page 4

up and down our village street, called by strangers, "so quaint
and sleepy-looking." What does the author of a novel do for you, after
all, even the best author? He presents to you people not nearly so
interesting as your next-door neighbors, makes them do things not
nearly so exciting as what happened to your grandfather, and doles out
to you in meager paragraphs snatches of that comprehending and
consolatory philosophy of life, which long ago you should have learned
to manufacture for yourself out of every incident in your daily routine.
Of course, if you don't know your next-door neighbors, and have never
had time to listen to what happened to your grandfather and are too
busy catching trains to philosophize on those subjects if you did know
them, no more remains to be said. By all means patronize the next shop
you see which displays in its show windows canned romances,
adventures, tragedies, farces, and the like line of goods. Live
vicariously, if you can't at first hand; but don't be annoyed at our pity
for your method of passing blindfold through life.

And don't expect to find such a shop in our village. To open one there
would be like trying to crowd out the great trees on Hemlock Mountain
by planting a Noah's Ark garden among them. Romances, adventures,
tragedies, and farces ... why, we are the characters of those plots. Every
child who runs past the house starts a new story, every old man whom
we leave sleeping in the burying-ground by the Necronsett River is the
ending of another ... or perhaps the beginning of a sequel. Do you say
that in the city a hundred more children run past the windows of your
apartment than along our solitary street, and that funeral processions
cross your every walk abroad? True, but they are stories written in a
tongue incomprehensible to you. You look at the covers you may even
flutter the leaves and look at the pictures but you cannot tell what they
are all about. You are like people bored and yawning at a performance
of a tragedy by Sophocles, because the actors speak in Greek. So
dreadful and moving a thing as a man's sudden death may happen
before your eyes, but you do not know enough of what it means to be
moved by it. For you it is not really a man who dies. It is the abstract
idea of a man, leaving behind him abstract possibilities of a wife and
children. You knew nothing of him, you know nothing of them, you
shudder, look the other way, and hurry along, your heart a little more
blunted to the sorrows of others, a little more remote from your fellows
even than before.
All Hillsboro is more stirred than that, both to sympathy and active
help, by the news that Mrs. Brownell has broken her leg. It means
something unescapably definite to us, about which we not only can, but
must take action. It means that her sickly oldest daughter will not get
the care she needs if somebody doesn't go to help out; it means that if
we do not do something that bright boy of hers will have to leave
school, just when he is in the way of winning a scholarship in college;
it means, in short, a crisis in several human lives, which by the mere
fact of being known calls forth sympathy as irresistibly as sunshine in
May opens the leaf buds.
Just as it is only one lover in a million who can continue to love his
mistress during a lifetime of absolute separation from her, so it is one
man in a million who can continue his sympathy and interest in his

fellow-men without continual close contact with them. The divine
feeling of responsibility for the well-being of others is diluted and
washed away in great cities by the overwhelming impersonal flood of
vast numbers; in villages it is strengthened by the sight, apparent to the
dullest eyes, of immediate personal and visible application. In other
words, we are not only the characters of our unwritten stories, but also
part authors. Something of the final outcome depends upon us,
something of the creative instinct of the artist is stirred to life within
every one of us ... however unconscious of it in our countrified
simplicity we may be. The sympathy we feel for a distressed neighbor
has none of the impotent sterility of a reader's sympathy for a distressed
character in a book. There is always a chance to try to help, and if that
fail, to try again and yet again. Death writes the only Finis to our
stories, and since a chance to start over again has been so unfailingly
granted us here, we