 | The evening book, or, Fireside talk on morals
and manners |  |
BUSH-LIFE.
`Adieu, thou beautiful land! Canaan of the exile, and Ararat
to many a shattered ark. Fair cradle of a race for whom the
unbounded heritage of a future that no sage can conjecture, no
prophet divine, lies afar in the golden promise-light of Time.....
None can tell how dear the memory of that wild Bush-life becomes
to him who has tried it with a fitting spirit. How often it haunts
him in the commonplace of more civilized scenes! With what an
effort we reconcile ourselves to the trite cares and vexed pleasures,
`the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences,' to which we return!'
So sings, in mellifluous prose, the fastidious author of `Pelham',
in his healthiest work, `The Caxtons,' goodly fruit, it is said, of the
purifying influences of Water! When Wordsworth boasted of being
a water-drinker, Professor Wilson jocosely observed that he could well
believe it, from the lack of spirit in his poems. But Bulwer shows
no diminution of spirit in the new novel; he has only changed
from a wrong spirit to a right one. The book abounds in manly
sentiments, in place of the old, tedious, sentimental dandyism; and
one of the most striking things is the boldness which sends forth its
heroes to brave the hardships and trials of new-country life.
England seems learning, in a new and unexpected way, to sympathize
with the United States. She has looked upon the rapid
settlement of our new, western country, as from a far height of civilization,
holding up dainty hands at the idea of such rudeness of
manners, and considering our whole country tinged—as indeed
it is—by certain results of the growth and activity of the West.
But lately her turn has come. She is now sending not only her
convicts, but her younger sons, her too-active reformers, her scapegraces,
and her youth of more nerve than fortune, to people her
distant islands; to hunt wild asses, and to tame kangaroos. Then,
like a good mother as she is, spreading her wings for the protection
of her brood, she begins to tell us what a fine manly thing emigration
is, how much better it is for young men—and young women,
too—to brave the disagreeables of Bush-life, than to remain idle and
effeminate and unprovided for at home. Two of the most striking
fictions of the day (not to speak of inferior specimens), the one to
which we have alluded, and another—a poem in hexameters—
called `The Bothy of Toper-na-Fuosich,'—send their heroes to Australia,
with a heartiness of approval which makes light of the roughness
of life in the wilderness, and seems for the time to find the
boasted civilization of the mother country rather sickly and feverish
by comparison. This is charming! it foretells some diminution of
national prejudice; for whatever may be the feelings cherished by
London and Liverpool towards New York and Boston, a brotherhood
will surely spring up between Australia and the wide West:
nor will home influence on either side be able to counteract the
sympathy which common toils, privations, customs, hopes, naturally
originate. The Bushman of Australia is essentially the same being
with the western settler. Anglo-Saxons both, and too strongly
characterized by that potent stock to show much subjection to the
of the race into two half-inimical portions in the old and new
worlds, the circumstances of Bush-life will restore the pristine unity,
and awaken a feeling of brotherhood too strong for the pride, prejudice,
and jealousy of either party to resist. Every book, therefore,
that depicts Bush-life, helps on this unity. In discovering how completely
the hopes, occupations, habits, labors, privations, and pleasures
of a new-country life are one and the same, whether the mild
skies of Van Diemen's Land, or the brilliant ones of Wisconsin
bend above the settler, we are brought at once to a mutual recognition
of the natural bonds that bind man to his fellow, and learn to
acknowledge gladly all our human ties, and with an especial warmth
those which unite us to brethren in a common fortune.
It is cheering to find the subjects of an ancient and over-ripe
civilization, which has already produced some ruinous as well as
some splendid fruits, beginning to recognize the dignity of labor—
at least beginning to own that labor and hard living are not necessarily
degrading. A character once familiar to English writers and
readers—that of a younger son, too proud to work, and too self-indulgent
to endure the privations attendant upon small means,
existing as a hanger-on in the family of the heir—will never come
within the cognizance of the next generation. The axiom once
accepted that a man, in whatever station, is exalted and not debased
by work, the class will disappear. Add to this new doctrine a
recognition of the benefits attending self denying and robust personal
habits, and the law of primogeniture will in part become its
own antidote, by supplying the out crops of the great Island with a
class of settlers at once hardy and generous, thrifty and noble-minded.
Leaving field sports to their elder brothers, these more
hopeful sons of Old England will make sport of earnest, and feel
to which they belonged was a necessary of life instead of a luxury.
People who have only heard or read of life in the wilderness
have but crude notions of its actual characteristics. No way of life
more absolutely requires to be tried, in order to be understood.
The accepted idea perhaps includes wolf-hunts, and bear-fights, and
deer-shooting; sleeping in the woods, fording rivers, following
Indian trails, or wading streams in search of fish. This view of
things is a poor preparation for the reality of life in the wilderness.
It makes charming books, as witness the many of which it has
formed the staple; but for the plain truth of the matter, such as
forces itself upon every man's convictions after he has transferred his
domicile and his household gods to the woods, we might as well go
to the melancholy Jacques where he lies
Upon the sobbing deer'—
but, `with a difference.'
Hardships are not always trials. There is a rousing power in
wild adventure, which makes hunger and cold and hard lodging
and press of danger only inspiring. These are not the things that
try the souls of those who exchange a condition of high civilization
for the privations of the woods. Far more wearisome, because
somewhat mortifying, are the petty circumstances attending the
daily cares for mere subsistence which form the staple of sober
existence in a new country; where a man goes not to hunt and fish,
but to repair his fortunes by industry and economy; to `buy and
sell and get gain;' to win the treasures of the soil with hands used
only to the pen; to fell primeval trees with an axe that has never
carry everything with him but the one thing needful,—habits
suited to the exigence. Even a stout frame and a stout heart will
not suffice at first. Time alone can accomplish the assimilating
process, and for time he cannot wait.
Emigrants are apt, at the outset, to feel somewhat of reforming
zeal. They have just left regions where life wears a smooth aspect;
where convention hides much that is coarse and unpleasant; where
the round of human business and duty is comprised in a few convenient
formulas, or seems to be so; and where each man, using, as it
were, the common sense and experience of the whole, naturally
fancies himself wiser than he really is, and where he is indeed practically
wiser than isolated man can easily be. So the emigrant feels
as if he had much to tell; something to teach, as well as something
to learn. If he must depend somewhat on his neighbors for an
insight into the peculiar needs of his new position, he is disposed to
return the favor by correcting, both by precept and example, some
of the awkward habits, the ear-wounding modes of speech, and
unnecessary coarseness which he sees about him. Above all does
he determine that the excellent treatise on farming which he has
studied and brought with him, shall aid him in introducing, before
very long, something like a rational system, instead of the shortsighted,
slovenly, losing, hand-to-mouth practices which are wasting
the riches of the land.
The waking-up is quite amusing. To find that nobody perceives
his own deficiencies, while everybody is taking great pains to make
yours apparent; that your knowledge is considered among your
chief disabilities; that you are, in short, looked upon as a pitiable
ignoramus, stuffed only with useless fancies, offensive pride, silly fastidiousness,
and childish love of trifles; that your grand farming
a sad lack of common sense and good feeling;—the blank
and helpless sense of unfitness that comes over one under such circumstances
is indescribable. This is always supposing that you are
unequal to bodily labor. If you can chop or plough, there is confessed
to be something of you, even though your ideas be silly.
But if, coming from a land where head is all-powerful and hand
only subservient, your muscles are feeble and your brain active, you
must be content with the position of an inferior, and for awhile play
the part of a child in the hands of older and wiser people.
This aspect of Bush-life lacks the pleasant stimulants with which
the imagination is apt to invest it. Where are the hunting and
fishing which were to cheer your leisure hours? You have no
leisure hours; and if you had, to spend them in hunting and fishing
would set you down at once as a `loafer'—the last term of condemnation
where everybody works all the time; lives to work rather
than works to live. Your fine forest dreams give way before the
necessity for `clearing.' If you take a morning walk over the
breezy hills, it will probably be in search of a stray cow; and you
may find it necessary to prolong your stroll indefinitely, returning,
under the blazing sun of noon, to dinner instead of breakfast.
Your delightful, uninterrupted evenings, where so many books were
to be devoured, in order to maintain a counter-influence to the
homely toils of the day, must be sacrificed, perhaps, to sleep, in
order to be ready for an early start in the morning, in search of
additional `hands' at the threshing, or that most valuable and most
slippery of all earthly goods in the new country—a `hired girl.' If
you chance to have an old friend undergoing a similar probation ten
or twenty miles off, and feeling a yearning desire to seek counsel or
sympathy at his hands, be sure that after you have made up your
set you up in courage for a month to come, you will find you `cannot
have the horses,' without such a derangement of the business at
home as would bespeak an insane disregard of your interest, and
lead your whole dependency to look upon you as a fool past praying
for.
Has new-country life, then, no pleasures? Many; but they are
not exactly those we anticipate. To recur to the testimony with
which our musings began. `None can tell how dear the memory
of that wild Bush-life becomes to him who has tried it with a fitting
spirit!' And it could hardly become dear to the cultivated, if it
were that mere dull, mechanical, animal, grubbing existence that
some suppose it to be. Wherein then consists the charm? It is
hard to specify; for, like other charms, it has something of inexplicable
magic in it. We spend our lives here in weaving nets for
ourselves, yet we delight to throw them off; even as the merchant
who prides himself on the well-fitted coat, the neat cravat, the spotless
gloves, the shining boots, in which he proceeds to his counting-house
in the morning, enjoys with all his heart the privilege of
exchanging them for the easy douillette, soft slippers, and general
negligé of a quiet evening at home. Dress, and ceremony, and
formal behavior seem necessary in the city—seem, not are—for
humanity is more truly dignified than convention, and more effective
in every way;—but in the woods we may follow nature—dress to be
warm or to be easy, or to be picturesque, if we like, without shocking
anybody. We have in town perhaps all the essentials of
liberty; we are more alone and independent in a crowd than in a
thinly settled neighborhood; but in the country we have the sense
of liberty; the free breezes suggest it; the wide expanse of prospect;
the unconstrained manners of those about us; the undisguised
kept out of sight in our anxious refinement; all remind us and
seem to us symbolical of an ideal liberty. There are no fixed
`business hours' or `visiting hours;' we may work all day if we
like, or we may make a call at seven in the morning; and although
we shall never care to do these particular things, it is yet pleasant
to think we may do them. It is true, other people's large liberty
sometimes infringes a little on ours; but after all, there is a vast
surplus in our favor, since we have really more of it, with all chance
deductions, than we know what to do with. The idea—the feeling
—is the main thing. This is certainly the chief source of the fascination
of a wild western life.
The inspiring influence of progress is however very potent in its
way. To see everything about you constantly improving, is delightful.
There is an impression of young, joyous life in such a state of
society. As the breath and atmosphere of infancy is said to infuse
new animal spirits into the sluggish veins of age, so the fresh movement
of new-country life stirs the pulses of him who has long made
part of a social system which claims to have discovered everything
and settled everything, and to be resting on the result of past effort.
If it be happiness to have all one's faculties in constant and profitable
use, the dweller in the woods should be happy, for every day
brings new calls upon his powers; upon his ingenuity, his industry
his patience, his energy. Let him be `many-sided' or even `myriad-minded,'
he will find use for all his faculties; it is only one-sided
people—of whom there are, alas! so many—who find Bush-life
intolerable.
This calling out of one's powers certainly gives a new aspect to
many things that would seem intolerable if we were so placed as to
depend on the services of others. There is something in human
We might stand by in irrepressible impatience to see another bungling
at some expedient, which appears very tolerable when it is our
own work, as we have seen a gentleman really vain-glorious of a
garden-gate of his own manufacture, which he would have discharged
a workman for making. We put a portion of our very
selves into these rude specimens of our handiwork, and we love
them with a most paternal affection as long as they last. Is not
some of the ennui of life referable to a disregard of this hint of
nature? Would not something of the vapidity of which the spoiled
children of refinement complain be remedied by the habit of doing
something for ourselves—even if it were imperfectly done—instead
of requiring the incessant intervention of servants and tradespeople?
It would perhaps not be easy to find a rich man who is odd enough
to keep an amateur work-bench, or a lady bold enough to perform
some of the lighter household duties, suffering from that disgust of
life which is the torture of some of the idle. It is at least certain
that dyspepsia is a complaint unknown in the woods!
The enjoyment of health is then another of the pleasant things of
true rustic life. (We talk not of agues! They must be caught and
let go again—endured and forgotten—before one can know how
truly healthy our western country and its out-door habits are.)
After one is acclimated, there is probably no more favorable climate
for health and longevity in the temperate zones. No skies—not the
boasted ones of Italy—are clearer; their transparency is even
remarked, not only by Englishmen, but by our own countrymen
from the Atlantic shores. The stars and the aurora seem brighter
there than elsewhere, and a long succession of brilliantly clear days
is too common an occurrence to be noticed. This naturally contributes
to good health and good spirits; and if people have sense
defy the druggist, and live till they drain existence to the lees, enjoying
the draught more and more as years mellow its flavor.
Do our western population generally make as much of their
health-privilege as they are sure to do of a `water-privilege'?
Alas! where ague kills its units, hot bread, hot meat, pickles,
and strong tea—to say nothing of accursed whiskey—slay their
tens of thousands. No people live so insanely as our western
brethren; in truth, nothing but the kind and genial climate
saves them from the complication of horrid ills which beset the
gourmand in our old cities. Butter is considered rather more a
necessary of life than bread; in fact that which we call bread is
almost unknown in some regions, hot cakes supplying its place at
every meal. The “staff of life,” however, is tea—strong, green tea.
This is usually taken, unless poverty forbid, with breakfast, dinner,
and supper, and without milk or sugar. With this is eaten fried
meat, almost universally (we speak throughout exclusively of country
habits), fried and swimming in fat. Infants partake of all these
things; and if they are teething and fretful, they often have a peeled
cucumber given them to nibble, by way of quietus, which indeed it
may be supposed admirably calculated to become. That many young
children die is therefore less astonishing than that some live. Those
who do survive probably owe their chance of future years' hot
bread to their being allowed to creep about in the open air as soon
as they are old enough to be out of the mother's arms. The fine
climate does all it can for them, and it does everything for those
who will accept its kind ministering.
No inconsiderable variety and amusement are produced by the
unfettered agency of nature and natural objects. Where the earth
is hidden under piles of stone, nothing short of an earthquake can
woods, hardly a day passes without something noticeable in earth,
air, or water, or among their denizens. Tom Stiles, in felling a
huge old oak, brings to light perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds
of honey, which turns the whole neighborhood into a bee-hive for
the nonce. John Nokes, mowing without boots, gets bitten by a
rattlesnake, and a thrill of sympathy runs through the settlement.
The road to his house is thronged with people from far and near,
coming to urge remedies—all infallible—and to offer aid as nurses
or watchers. Perhaps the musk-rats work so stealthily and so well
that the mill-dam will be completely riddled or undermined, and
the whole pond will run away in the night, leaving a huge scoop of
long grass and stumps instead of the fair expanse of water which
the setting sun delighted to dye with crimson and purple. Then
every hand that can be hired is in requisition, and everybody who
is not hirable thinks it necessary to spend nearly the whole time in
looking on, lamenting, suggesting, advising, and prognosticating.
Now the great business of the young men and boys is setting traps
for quails and prairie-hens, and again every fallow is bespread with
nets to catch pigeons; or perhaps Mr. A—, after sitting up all
night to watch for the fox that robs his henroost of late, comes very
near shooting that `loafer,' Sam B—, who, though he will not
work, unreasonably continues to eat, and of the fat of the land too.
Or poor John Smith's stick chimney takes fire and burns his house
and all that is in it, hardly excepting his wife and children. Then
somebody must take wagon and horses and thread the whole region
round about for aid in the shape of clothing, provisions, furniture`
farming utensils and stock, to set him up again; while the neighbors
fall to chopping and notching logs for a new house, and finish by
having a famous raising and installing the sufferers in their rejuvenated
found to consume, and hearts full of gratitude and joy.
Do these things and all that they typify seem trifles? Those
whose hearts quake at the rise and fall of stocks should be ashamed
to call them so. To the dweller in the woods they can never be
trifles. And this brings us to what is perhaps after all the secret
charm of a life far removed from pride and formality—the feeling
of brotherhood. There is in every human heart not totally sophisticated,
a capacity for this; but where men are crowded together in
large cities, or subjected to the friction of keen and pitiless competition,
it is well-nigh obliterated. Where all that each man gains
may be said in some sense to be so much abstracted from the common
stock, and where the brotherly feeling is not kept awake by
any obvious dependence upon others, individualism and selfishness
are too apt to prevail. But when, on the contrary, whatever each
man does for his own profit is sure to turn to the advantage of all
about him; when the means of life and comfort are drawn directly
from the bounteous bosom of earth, not impoverishing, but
enriching the source and fitting it the better to afford wealth
to a coming generation; when the circumstances of life are such
that each man is obliged to be personally indebted to his neighbor
for many of those offices which affect most nearly our business and
bosom, while common toils compel contact and consultation, and the
state of things is adverse to any separation by ceremony—all the
bonds of life are drawn closer; the heart is obliged to act, and the
tone of manners becomes freer and more genial; less polite perhaps,
but more humane; and after some little experience of this, a return
to the cold polish of city intercourse seems indeed a plunging into
frigid impertinences,'—a descent from the free mountain air which
stagnant atmosphere of the plain.
The days of this fresh aspect of things are passing away. The
influence of wealth and of facilitated intercourse will before very
long produce a great equalization of manners. The West has
already tinged not a little, as we said before, the social intercourse
of the East in our country. We adopt her humorous expressions
and even her scorn of the cherished conventions of the Old World.
To be `manly' is more prized among us than to be `elegant,' even
while we are reaching after liveries and other antiquated remnants
of the pride of the dark ages. Our gentlemen print their cards
with names ungraced by even the commonest title, leaving the `Mr.'
which used to be felt essential, to chiropodists and other pretenders.
All this while the West is disposed to take up the politenesses we lay
down, and her ambition is such that it will not be wonderful if she
should in time devise some original ones of her own, so that to our
descendants at no very remote distance, it may perhaps be hardly
credible that the distinction between western manners and those of
the older settled parts of the country was ever as great as it has
really been up to our day.
But it is a state of things worth remembering. In an age and
country where everything is doing, some things run the risk of being
forgotten, for who can afford time for the `slow' business of chronicling,
in the very face of the lightning-flashes which are melting
into one the Present, Past, and Future? With so much to accomplish
for ourselves, can we be expected to think of the coming age,
whose wings already fan our faces? When golden splendors are
dawning, is it worth while to fix on the canvas, the sober hue of
twilight?
For the sake of contrast, at least, let us preserve a clear recollection
æsthetic, not humiliating contrast; as the rough disguise thrown
off by the triumphant hero of the drama imparts new splendor to
the robes he has been only veiling beneath it; or, more nearly, as
the sun, in his might, turns the bars of purple cloud which for awhile
obscured his disk, into a glorious ladder for his ascent to the meridian.
| The evening book, or, Fireside talk on morals
and manners | |