The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 4

of her children.

She does not wish for friends, does not cultivate the grace of hospitality,
and is indifferent to social intercourse. In short, the barbaric legend that
an Englishman's house is his castle, is nowhere so much respected as in
London.
The exhausting character of life in London, and the mere vastness of its
geographical area, do something to produce this result. Men who leave
home early in the morning, sit for many hours in an office, and reach
home late at night, soon lose both the instinct and desire for social
intercourse. They prefer the comfortable torpor of the fireside. If some
imperative need of new interests torments them, they seek relaxation in
the music-hall or some other place of popular resort. The art of
conversation is almost extinct in a certain type of Londoner. He knows
nothing to converse about outside his business interests, his family
concerns, and perhaps the latest sensation of the daily newspaper.
Those lighter flights of fancy, those delicate innuendoes and allusions
of implied experience or culture--all the give-and-take of happily
contending minds--all, indeed, that makes true conversation--is a
science utterly unknown to him. A certain superficial nimbleness of
mind he does sometimes possess, but for all that he is a dull creature,
made dull by the limitations of his life.
If it should happen, as it often may, that such a man has some genuine
instinct for friendship, and has a friend to whom he can confide his real
thoughts, the chances are that his friend will be separated from him by
the mere vastness of London. To the rural mind the metropolis appears
an entity; in reality it is an empire. A journey from the extreme north to
the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is less easily
accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from London to
Birmingham. There is none of that pleasant 'dropping-in' for an evening
which is possible in country towns of not immoderate radius.
Time-tables have to be consulted, engagement-books scanned, serious
preparations made, with the poor result, perhaps, of two hours' hurried
intercourse. The heartiest friendship does not long survive this
malignity of circumstance. It is something to know that you have a
friend, obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis; but you see
him so rarely, that when you meet, it is like forming a new friendship

rather than pursuing an old one. It is little wonder that, under such
conditions, visits grow more and more infrequent, and at last cease. A
message at Christmas, an intimation of a birth, a funeral card, are the
solitary relics and mementoes of many a city friendship not extinct, but
utterly suspended.
I dwell on these obvious characteristics of London life, because in
course of time they assumed for me almost terrifying dimensions. After
ten years of arduous toil I found myself at thirty-five lonely, friendless,
and imprisoned in a groove of iron, whose long curves swept on
inevitably to that grim terminus where all men arrive at last. Sometimes
I chided myself for my discontent; and certainly there were many who
might have envied me. I occupied a fairly comfortable house in a
decayed terrace where each house was exactly like its neighbour, and
had I told any one that the mere aspect of this grey terrace oppressed
me by its featureless monotony, I should have been laughed at for my
pains. I believe that I was trusted by my employers, and if a mere
automatic diligence can be accounted a virtue, I merited their trust. In
course of time my income would have been increased, though never to
that degree which means competence or freedom. To this common
object of ambition I had indeed long ago become indifferent. What can
a few extra pounds a year bring to a man who finds himself bound to
the same tasks, and those tasks distasteful? I was married and had two
children; and the most distressing thought of all was that I saw my
children predestined to the same fate. I saw them growing up in
complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had
made my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of
the city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and
listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those must
needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in chance
excursions to the country, I compared my children with the children of
cottagers and ploughmen, I felt that I had wronged them, I saw my
children foredoomed, by an inexorable destiny, to a life at all points
similar with my own. In course of time they also would become
recruits in the narrow-chested, black-coated army of those who sit at
desks. They would become slaves