The Devils Pool | Page 3

and slavery of the many.
The man of leisure seldom loves, for their own sake, the fields and
meadows, the landscape, or the noble animals which are to be
converted into gold for his use. He comes to the country for his health
or for change of air, but goes back to town to spend the fruit of his
vassal's labor.
On the other hand, the peasant is too abject, too wretched, and too
fearful of the future to enjoy the beauty of the country and the charms
of pastoral life. To him, also, the yellow harvest-fields, the rich
meadows, the fine cattle represent bags of gold; but he knows that only
an infinitesimal part of their contents, insufficient for his daily needs,
will ever fall to his share. Yet year by year he must fill those accursed
bags, to please his master and buy the right of living on his land in
sordid wretchedness. Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful, and
generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and all
plants that are allowed free development.
She owns the secret of happiness, of which no one has ever robbed her.
The happiest of men would be he who, knowing the full meaning of his
labor, should, while working with his hands, find his happiness and his
freedom in the exercise of his intelligence, and, having his heart in
unison with his brain, should at once understand his own work and love
that of God, The artist has such delights as these in contemplating and
reproducing the beauties of nature; but if his heart be true and tender,
his pleasure is disturbed when he sees the miseries of the men who
people this paradise of earth. True happiness will be theirs when mind,
heart, and hand shall work in concert in the sight of Heaven, and there
shall be a sacred harmony between God's goodness and the joys of his
creatures. Then, instead of the pitiable and frightful figure of Death
stalking, whip in hand, across the fields, the painter of allegories may
place beside the peasant a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain
broadcast in the smoking furrow. The dream of a serene, free, poetic,
laborious, and simple life for the tiller of the soil is not so impossible
that we should banish it as a chimera. The sweet, sad words of Virgil:
"Oh, happy the peasants of the field, if they knew their own blessings!"

is a regret, but, like all regrets, it is also a prophecy. The day will come
when the laborer too may be an artist, and may at least feel what is
beautiful, if he cannot express it,--a matter of far less importance. Do
not we know that this mysterious poetic intuition is already his, in the
form of instinct and vague reverie? Among those peasants who possess
some of the comforts of life, and whose moral and intellectual
development is not entirely stifled by extreme wretchedness, pure
happiness that can be felt and appreciated exists in the elementary stage;
and, moreover, since poets have already raised their voices out of the
lap of pain and of weariness, why should we say that the labor of the
hands excludes the working of the soul? Without doubt this exclusion
is the common result of excessive toil and of deep misery; but let it not
be said that when men shall work moderately and usefully there will be
nothing but bad workers and bad poets. The man who draws in noble
joy from the poetic feeling is a true poet, though he has never written a
verse all his life.
My thoughts had flown in this direction, without my perceiving that my
confidence in the capacity of man for education was strengthened by
external influences. I was walking along the edge of a field, which
some peasants were preparing to sow. The space was vast as that in
Holbein's picture; the landscape, too, was vast and framed in a great
sweep of green, slightly reddened by the approach of autumn. Here and
there in the great russet field, slender rivulets of water left in the
furrows by the late rains sparkled in the sunlight like silver threads. The
day was clear and mild, and the soil, freshly cleft by the plowshare,
sent up a light steam. At the other extremity of the field, an old man,
whose broad shoulders and stern face recalled Holbein's plowman, but
whose clothes carried no suggestion of poverty, was gravely driving his
plow of antique shape, drawn by two placid oxen, true patriarchs of the
meadow, tall and rather thin, with pale yellow coats and long, drooping
horns. They were those old workers who, through long habit, have
grown to be brothers, as they are called in our country,