The Quest of the Simple Life eBook

William Johnson Dawson
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 172 pages of information about The Quest of the Simple Life.

The Quest of the Simple Life eBook

William Johnson Dawson
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 172 pages of information about The Quest of the Simple Life.

This seems a hard saying, but it can easily be verified by observation.  I have myself known women, rich enough to keep a carriage, who had never been so far as Hyde Park, never visited the National Gallery, and never sought any finer music than could be furnished by a local concert.  For them, London as an entity did not exist.  This parochialism of suburban life is its most surprising feature.  There is after all some excuse for Mr. Grant Allen’s description of London as an aggregation of villages, when we find that so vast a number of Londoners really live the life of villagers.  But it is not patriotism that binds them to the soil, nor local pride, as is the case with genuine villagers; it is rather sheer inertia.  Such pride, if it existed, might do much for the regeneration of great cities, by creating a series of eager and intelligent communities, which would vie with one another in civic self-improvement; but this is just the kind of pride which does not exist.  No one cares how his suburb is misgoverned, so long as rates are not too exorbitant.  A suburb will wake into momentary life to curb the liberal programmes of the school-board, or to vote against the establishment of a free library; a gross self-interest being thus the only variation of its apathy.  It soon falls asleep again, dulled into torpor by the fumes of its own intolerant smugness.  For much of this the element of family separation in suburban life is answerable.  The men pay their rates and house-rent at Surbiton, but they live their real lives within hearing of the bell of St. Paul’s; how should they take any interest in Surbiton?  After all, Surbiton is to them but a vast caravansary, where they are lodged and fed at night; and one does not inquire too closely into the internal amenities of his hotel so long as the food is tolerable, and the bed clean.

Suburbanism is, however, but a branch, though an important branch, of the larger question, whether in cities men do not ultimately sacrifice the finer qualities and joys of life to the act of getting a living.  It will perhaps be said that the man with a true genius for business must in any case live in a city; that he is not discontented with the conditions of his life; that, all things being considered, he is probably living the kind of life for which he is best fitted.  May not a writer, who is presumably a person of studious and quiet habits, misinterpret the life of a business man precisely in the same way that he misinterprets the life of the poor, by applying to it his own standards instead of measuring it by theirs?  Business, for the man of business genius, is more than an employment; it is his epic, his romance, his adventurous crusade.  He brings to it something of the statesman’s prescience, the diplomatist’s sagacity, the great captain’s power of organising victory.  His days are battles, his life a long campaign; and if he does not win the spoil of kingdoms, he does fight for commercial supremacy, which comes to much the same

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The Quest of the Simple Life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.