THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE1

L. H. BAILEY

Not long ago, I sat at the window of a hotel chamber, looking down a thoroughfare of a great city. I saw thousands of human beings pouring in and out, up and down, as if moved by some relentless machinery. Most of them were silent and serious and went quickly on. Some sauntered, and returned again and again as if looking for something that they did not expect to find. Carriages went up and down in endless pageant. Trolley-cars rushed by, clanging and grinding as they headlonged into the side streets. Meretricious automobiles with gorgon-eyed drivers whirred into the crowds, scattering the street crossers. Men passed with banners and advertising placards. Women paraded with streaming headgear and tempestuous gowns. A resplendent trumpeter rolled by in a tallyho. A hundred other devices to attract the eye and distract the ear came out and vanished; and yet no one stopped and no one seemed to care. Now and then I saw a knot of men form, as some one fell or as wagons collided; but the knots as quickly dissolved, and I saw that they were made up of the idle who were amused for the moment and then floated on hoping for fresh entertainment. A hurdygurdy attracted only a bevy of scurrying children. A little girl with an armful of newspapers moved in and out unnoticed.

Suddenly a dog leaped down a flight of steps and was followed by two little children laughing and screaming. The dog felt his freedom and the children were in pursuit. The

1 Copyright. Reprinted from The Outlook to Nature, by permission of the Macmillan Company.

crowd stopped; the stern-faced men with high hats stopped; the well-dressed women stopped. Even a cabby pulled up his horse as the children dashed on the pavement after the escaping dog. Back and forth the children ran. On the far side of the street the people halted and took their hands out of their pockets. The children caught the dog and bundled it lovingly into the house; the crowd applauded, and dispersed. Every person seemed to be surprised that he had stopped. From my height I thought I could discern the reason for this curious phenomenon: in all the blare and blazonry of that tumultuous thoroughfare, this was the only episode of real spontaneous and unaffected human nature. All else was a kind of acting, and every person unconsciously recognized that it was so. I thought how rare must common naturalness

be and how much has it been driven from our lives!

If a person has given any serious thought to public questions, he has his own contribution to make as to the causes of present conditions and the means of bettering them; so I make mine: what is now much needed in the public temper is such a change of attitude as will make us to see and appreciate the commonplace and the spontaneous, and to have the desire to maintain and express our youthful and native enthusiasms. And it is my special part to try, so far as possible, to open the eyes and the heart to nature and the common-day environment. My point of view is, of course, that of the countryman, and no doubt it has the countryman's bias.

So great has been the extension of knowledge, and so many the physical appliances that multiply our capabilities, that we are verily burdened with riches. We are so eager to enter all the strange and ambitious avenues that open before us that we overlook the soil at our feet. We live in an age of superlatives, I had almost said of super-superlatives, so much so that even the superlatives now begin to pall. The reach for something new has become so much a part of our lives that we cease to recognize the fact and accept novelty

as a matter of course. If we shall fail to satisfy ourselves with the new, the strange, and the eccentric, perhaps we shall find ourselves returning to the old commonplace and the familiar, and perhaps we shall be able to extract new delights from them because of the flights we have taken. Perhaps in their turn the commonplaces will be again the superlatives, and we shall be content with the things that come naturally and in due order. Certain it is that every sensitive soul feels this longing for something simple and elemental in the midst of the voluminous and intricate, something free and natural that shall lie close to the heart and really satisfy our best desires.

It is not likely that we shall greatly simplify our outward physical and business affairs. Probably it is not desirable that we should do so, for we must maintain our executive efficiency. We have seen a marvelous development of affairs, expressed in the renovation of a hundred old occupations and the creation of a thousand new ones. Most of these occupations and businesses are clear gain to the world, and we may expect them to endure. This rise of affairs has emphasized the contrasts of business and of home. Machinery and complexity belong to affairs; but a simpler and directer mental attitude should belong to our personal and private hours. Perhaps our greatest specific need is a wholesome return to nature in our moments of leisure, all the more important now that the moments of leisure are so few. This return to nature is by no means a cure-all for the ills of civilization, but it is one of the means of restoring the proper balance and proportion in our lives. It stands for the antithesis of acting and imitation, for a certain pause and repose, for a kind of spiritual temper, for the development of the inner life as contrasted with the externals.

The outlook to nature is, of course, the outlook to optimism, for nature is our governing condition and is beyond the power of man to modify or to correct. We look upward and outward

to nature. Some persons have supposed, however, that the contentment" preached by the nature-lover implies unvexed indifference to the human affairs of the time, and that therefore it makes for a kind of serene and weak utopianism; but, to my mind, the outlook to nature makes for just the reverse of all this. If nature is the norm, then the necessity for correcting and amending the abuses that accompany civilization becomes baldly apparent by very contrast. The repose of the nature-lover and the assiduous exertion of the man of affairs are complementary, not antithetical, states of mind. The return to nature affords the very means of acquiring the incentive and energy for ambitious and constructive work of a high order; it enforces the great truth that, in the affairs of men, continued progress is conditioned upon a generous discontent and diligent unrest.

the snow

By nature, I mean the natural out-of-doors, and the rain, the sky, the plants, the animals, the running brooks, and every landscape that is easy of access and undefiled. Every person desires these things in greater or lesser degree: this is indicated by the rapidly spreading suburban movement, by the astonishing multiplication of books about nature. Yet there are comparatively very few who have any intimate contact with nature, or any concrete enjoyment from it, because they lack information that enables them to understand the objects and phenomena.

The currents of civilization tend always to take us out of our environment rather than to fit us into it. We must recast our habits of thought so as to set our faces nature-ward. This is far more important than any effort at mere simplicity or toward lopping off the redundancies: it is fundamental direction and point of view.

The outlook to nature is the outlook to what is real, and hearty, and spontaneous. Our eager civilization prematurely makes us mentally old. It may be true that the span of man's life is increasing, but at twenty we have the knowledge

and the perplexities that our grandfathers had only at forty. Our children may now be older when they are graduated from school, but the high school course of to-day is more complex than was the college course of fifty years ago. All this has a tendency to lessen the years of free and joyous youth. You have only to see the faces of boys and girls on your city streets, to discover how old the young have grown to be. In home and school our methods have been largely those of repression: this is why the natural buoyant outburst that I saw on the city thoroughfare challenged such instant attention and surprise. We need to emphasize the youthful life.

Therefore, I preach the things that we ourselves did not make; for we are all idolaters, the things of our hands we worship. I preach the near-at-hand, however plain and ordinary, -the sky in rain and sun; the bird on its nest and the nest on its bough; the rough bark of trees; the frost on bare thin twigs; the mouse skittering to its burrow; the insect seeking its crevice; the smell of the ground; the sweet wind; the leaf that clings to its twig or that falls when its work is done. Wisdom flows from these as it can never flow from libraries and laboratories.

"There be four things," say the Proverbs, "which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:

"The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the

summer:

"The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks;

"The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; “The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces."

Some of us do not enjoy nature because there is not enough sheer excitement in it. It has not enough dash and go for this uneasy age; and this is the very reason why we need the solace and resource of nature so much. On looking over the lists of Christmas books I was surprised to find how often the word "sensation" occurs. In the announcement of the