THE QUEST OF THE SIMPLE LIFE
by
W. J. DAWSON
New York E. P. Dutton and Co. 31 West Twenty-Third Street 1907 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim. VIRG., Ecl. viii., l. 72.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
CHAPTER II
GETTING THE BEST OUT OF LIFE
CHAPTER III
GETTING A LIVING, AND LIVING
CHAPTER IV
EARTH-HUNGER
CHAPTER V
HEALTH AND ECONOMICS
CHAPTER VI
IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE
CHAPTER VII
I FIND MY COTTAGE
CHAPTER VIII
BUYING HAPPINESS
CHAPTER IX
HOW WE LIVED
CHAPTER X
NEIGHBOURSHIP
CHAPTER XI
THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND
CHAPTER XII
AM I RIGHT?
CHAPTER XIII
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
For a considerable number of years I had been a resident in London, which city I regarded alternately as my Paradise and my House of Bondage. I am by no means one of those who are always ready to fling opprobrious epithets at London, such as 'a pestilent wen,' a cluster of 'squalid villages,' and the like; on the contrary, I regard London as the most fascinating of all cities, with the one exception of that city of Eternal Memories beside the Tiber. But even Horace loved the olive-groves of Tivoli more than the far-ranged splendours of the Palatine; and I may be pardoned if an occasional vision of green fields often left my eye insensitive to metropolitan attractions.
This is a somewhat sonorous preface to the small matter of my story; but I am anxious to elaborate it a little, lest it should be imagined that I am merely a person of bucolic mind, to whom all cities or large congregations of my fellow-men are in themselves abhorrent. On the contrary I have an inherent love of all cities which are something more than mere centres of manufacturing industry. The truly admirable city secures interest, and even passionate love, not because it is a congeries of thriving factories, but rather by the dignity of its position, the splendour of its architecture, the variety and volume of its life, the imperial, literary, and artistic interests of which it is the centre, and the prolongation of its history through tumultuous periods of time, which fade into the suggestive shadows of antiquity. London answers perfectly to this definition of the truly admirable city. It has been the stage of innumerable historic pageants; it presents an unexampled variety of life; and there is majesty in the mere sense of multitude with which it arrests and often overpowers the mind.
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: The Quest of the Simple Life by William J. Dawson
- 2: So I will now justify myself by Wordsworth
- 3: Oxford Street once more became intolerable to me
- 4: So often pitied for its monotony
- 5: Obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis
- 6: Arrowsmith was as incapable as a kitten
- 7: He was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith
- 8: He had enjoyed no satisfying pleasures
- 9: But that crowd of hungry journalists
- 10: If cheques were prohibited by law
- 11: Although it affects to scorn the phrase
- 12: But suburbanism is a miserable compromise
- 13: A suburb will soon enfeeble her
- 14: Surbiton is to them but a vast caravansary
- 15: Some small industrious faculty which represents them
- 16: Who apologised for being so unconscionably long in dying
- 17: Conscript of the city as I was
- 18: If my earth hunger did not die in London
- 19: A pinewood rose behind the house
- 20: The difference is that all this exertion in the gymnasium
- 21: And instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares
- 22: But a high condition of vitality
- 23: And the expenditure that was evitable
- 24: And the convention cost me a clear 35 pounds per annum
- 25: The omnibus and railway companies
- 26: Show me a fixed income of 100 pounds a year
- 27: That he may discriminate its subtleties
- 28: No one will take him for a drudge
- 29: Fifty acres said the advertisement
- 30: I visited it and found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise
- 31: With Snowdon towering over all like a dome
- 32: When I dropped upon some quaint village that
- 33: I found the village politician quite extinct
- 34: The forest turf came to the very gate
- 35: The warm contiguity of numbers
- 36: I might become despicable to myself by failure in my task
- 37: And not against the partition wall
- 38: Oaken furniture was common in these parts
- 39: It was because I had to deal with honest craftsmen
- 40: But I confess to an old maidish care for cleanliness
- 41: Had acquired the fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender
- 42: Quickened and invigorated by solitude
- 43: ' No doubt if a holiday is devoted to lounging
- 44: There was no jugglery about this
- 45: The immense shoulders of Borrowdale were purple
- 46: We had no trivialities to talk about
- 47: I had to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero
- 48: Incredible masses of water flowed over us
- 49: Had lain prone beneath this violence
- 50: Hence a new kind of neighbourship is possible
- 51: Whose footlights are the changeless planets
- 52: It seemed but the final seal set upon this kinship
- 53: The creature we call dumb is not dumb to its mates
- 54: I can wait and the pastures Of heaven are always green
- 55: You save yourself from the collisions of life
- 56: And pineapples are cheap just now
- 57: You have bought yourself out of the conscription of life
- 58: In less than a century we should be as the Hottentots
- 59: At what point is the ebb checked
- 60: Thoreau did a vast amount of good by showing men
- 61: But also the only available form of philanthropy
- 62: But it is not a vocation for all
- 63: There will be no question of efficient citizenship
- 64: Engaged in patching up the sick anaemic body of society
- 65: But could we live in the country of Millet
- 66: They paid eighty pounds per annum
- 67: Nineveh appears to have been a group of cities
- 68: We cannot do without the capitalist
- 69: The slow and tedious horse tram
- 70: Suppose the capitalised value of such a township