The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 5

without having known the value of
freedom; slaves not by capture but by heritage. More and more the

thought began to gather shape, Was I getting the most, or the best, out
of life? Was there no other kind of life in which toil was redeemed
from baseness by its own inherent interest, no life which offered more
of tranquil satisfaction and available, if humble, happiness? Day by day
this thought sounded through my mind, and each fresh discouragement
and disability of the life I led gave it sharper emphasis. At last the time
came when I found an answer to it, and these chapters tell the story of
my seeking and my finding.
CHAPTER II
GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
The reader will perhaps say that the kind of miseries recounted in the
previous chapter are more imaginary than real. Many thousands of
people subsist in London upon narrow means, and do not find the life
intolerable. They have their interests and pleasures, meagre enough
when judged by a superior standard, but sufficient to maintain in them
some of the vivacity of existence. No doubt this is true. I remember
being struck some years ago by the remark of a person of distinction,
equally acquainted with social life in its highest and its lowest forms.
Mr. H., as I will call this person, said that the dismal pictures drawn by
social novelists of life among the very poor were true in fact, but wrong
in perspective. Novelists described what their own feelings would be if
they were condemned to live the life of the disinherited city drudge,
rather than the actual feelings of the drudge himself. A man of
education, accustomed to easy means, would suffer tortures
unspeakable if he were made to live in a single room of a populous and
squalid tenement, and had to subsist upon a wage at once niggardly and
precarious. He would be tormented with that memory of happier things,
which we are told is a 'sorrow's crown of sorrow.' But the man who has
known no other condition of life is unconscious of its misery. He has
no standard of comparison. An environment which would drive a man
of refinement to thoughts of suicide, does not produce so much as
dissatisfaction in him. Hence there is far more happiness among the
poor than we imagine. They see nothing deplorable in a lot to which
they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents before their

eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to take a less
mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to whom the
refinements of European civilisation are objects of ridicule rather than
envy.
I quote this opinion for what it is worth; but it has little relevance to my
own case. I am the only competent judge of my own feelings. I know
perfectly well that these feelings were not shared by men who shared
the conditions of my own life. There was a clerk in the same office with
me who may be taken as an example of his class. Poor
Arrowsmith--how well I recall him!--was a little pallid man, always
neatly if shabbily dressed, punctual as a clock, and of irreproachable
diligence. He was verging on forty, had a wife and family whom I
never saw, and an aged mother whom he was proud to support. He was
of quite imperturbable cheerfulness, delighted in small jokes, and
would chatter like a daw when occasion served him. He had never read
a book in his life; his mind subsisted wholly upon the halfpenny
newspapers. He had no pleasures, unless one can count as such certain
Bank Holiday excursions to Hampstead Heath, which were performed
under a heavy sense of duty to his family. He had lived in London all
his days, but knew much less of it than the country excursionist. He had
never visited St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; had never travelled so
far as Kew or Greenwich; had never been inside a picture gallery; and
had never attended a concert in his life. The pendulum of his innocuous
existence swung between the office and his home with a uniform
monotony. Yet not only was he contented with his life, but I believe
that he regarded it as entirely successful. He had counted it a great
piece of luck when he had entered the office as a youth of sixteen, and
the glow of his good fortune still lingered in his mind at forty. He
regarded his employers with a species of admiring awe not always
accorded to kings. The most violent social democrat could have made
nothing of Arrowsmith; there was not the least crevice in his heart in
which the seed of discontent could have found a lodgment. As