If Each Of These Small Centres Possessed A Scribe Of Genius,
Or At Any Rate One With A Capacity For
Taking pains, who would
collect and print in proper form these remembered events,
every village would in time have its
Own little library of
local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village
Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies",
"Children's Children", and various others whose titles every
reader will be able to supply.
The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten
tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for
on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening
to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that
this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in
everlasting happiness excepting man alone who - mysterious
being! - was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly
upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and
ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a
hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course
in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred
stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore
such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which
stirs our pity and terror - the frustrate life, the glorious
promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken
fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution - all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered
for ever and passed on from generation to generation. But it
would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long
history of the village life with its thousand chapters.
The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition,
we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher
has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that
of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication,
deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to
agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little
- we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the
consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and
wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees
life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away
to an infinite distance before him.
Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us
that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over
the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know
that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.
Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling
very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the
great shout of excited joy of the children just released from
school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the
village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not
more blithe-hearted than they.
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