The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 2

are infrequent. As a casual resident
in London, a student and spectator, free to leave it when I willed, I
could have been heartily content; but I, in common with some
insignificant millions of my fellow-creatures, was bound to live in
London as a means of living at all. He is no true citizen who merely
comes up to town 'for the season,' alternating the pleasures of town
with those of the country; he alone is the true citizen who must live
amid the roar of the street all the year round, and for years together. If I
could choose for myself I would even now choose the life of pleasant
alternation between town and country, because I am persuaded that the
true piquancy and zest of all pleasures lies in contrast. But fate orders
these things for us, and takes no account of our desires, unless it be to
treat them with habitual irony. At five-and-twenty the plain fact met
me--that I must needs live in London, because my bread could be
earned nowhere else. No choice was permitted me; I must go where
crowds were, because from the favour or necessities of such crowds I
must gather the scanty tithes which put food upon my table and clothes
upon my back. When eminent writers, seated at ample desks, from
which they command fair views of open country, denounce with
prophetic fervour the perils which attend the growth of cities, they
somewhat overlook the fact that the growth of cities is a sequence, alike
ineluctable and pitiless, of the modern struggle for existence. One
cannot be a lawyer, or a banker, a physician or a journalist, without
neighbours. He can scarce be a literary man in perfect sylvan solitude,
unless his work is of such quality--perhaps I should have said such
popularity--that it wins for him immediate payment, or unless his

private fortune be such that he can pursue his aims as a writer with
entire indifference to the half-yearly statements of his publisher. In
respect of the various employments of trade and commerce, the case is
still plainer. Men must needs go where the best wages may be earned;
and under modern conditions of life it is as natural that population
should flow toward cities, as that rivers should seek the sea. These
matters will be more particularly discussed later on; it is enough for me
to explain at present that I was one of those persons for whom life in a
city was an absolute necessity.
It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become apparent. A
street that interests the mind by some charm of populous vivacity when
it is traversed at random and without object, becomes inexpressibly
wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty. My daily duty
took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a street not
altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and dignity. At first I
was ready to concede this claim, and even to endorse it with
enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that Oxford Street
conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a desk in an office,
I began to loathe it. The eye became conscious of a hundred defects and
incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison walls; the resounding
tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of tormented spirits. For
the first time I began to understand why imaginative writers had often
likened London to Inferno.
I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured
to evade these sensations. The most obvious was altogether to avoid
this glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours
through the meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to
exchange one kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for
another kind which had none. Sometimes I endeavoured to contrive a
doubtful exhilaration from the contrast which these meaner streets
afforded; saying to myself, as I pushed my way through the costers'
stalls of Great James Street, 'Now you are exchanging squalor for
magnificence. Be prepared for a surprise.' But the ruse failed utterly,
and my mind laughed aloud at the pitiful imposture. Another device
was to create points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious

road, which should present some aspect of allurement. There was a
book-shop here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of
Napoleon was exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo's 'Flight into
Egypt,' in the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether
they were there to-day. Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium
of empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in which the left hand plays
against the right, so I laid