The Simple Life
'Tis an old question, revived by a letter that wondered why anybody could be content to stay in Charlotte or smaller places when New York, Boston and other larger cities offer so much more broadening influences and so much greater facilities for ambition. The letter came from a man who has lived in New York only a year or so and talks glibly about the various streets, Weber & Fields', and a few well-known cafés. Men who know New York thoroughly and are known in that city do not usually advise other people to go there to live. The metropolitan enthusiast is the new resident, who will never know one-tenth as many people as he knew in his native village. He becomes dazed by the glare and glitter, the big sounds and the mad tumult, and calls all this a part of seeing and learning and living and broadening.
But is the city life more broadening than the life down here? Does it give a man a more comprehensive view of life? This question does not consider the genuine cosmopolitan type--the man of the world who may live in New York or anywhere, and who is broad because he has found how utterly small he is and simple because he has learned that any manner other than simplicity is absurd. But does the man who leaves this section of country, for instance, and goes to New York to live--does he enter a broader or a narrower life? Has he a right to pity those that are left behind?
What does the city give the rank outsider? What profit does New York offer the man from our midst who goes there to live? He is swallowed up, lost from view immediately, for--saving a brilliant few--who ever heard of a man who lived in New York? He is a tiny thing who rubs elbows with strangers. He sees millions of people every day, and is lucky if he gets an opportunity to study and know half a dozen. He has no neighbors. In the quick rush there is scant time for sympathy, and his eyes, seeing no further than camera lens, can take no intimate account of the undercurrent --the pulsing human nature that is about. He is on the outside of everything--a little, worrying atom that must fight fiercely for space. He may make a lot of money and spend it extravagantly, but who cares or who notices? He may do a very fine thing, but the man who lives next door to him will never hear of it.
The note of his suffering or his happiness is not heard above the ceaseless din, and his death will be no more than the passing of a dray horse. He may successfully pander to fastidious appetites, but does he learn anything that is worth while or do anything that is endurable? He is hurried in a rut, goaded too fast for reflection, keyed up to a point where he confuses personal values. He is a drop of oil in a mammoth machine, or--to change the figure--he reminds one of a bit of scurrying chaff in a maelstrom. Aye, who ever heard of a man in a city? And you, and you, know that the narrowest man who walks these streets is not the denizen of Paw Creek, but the man who has left Paw Creek and smirks complacently when he returns, after having served prenticeship as galley slave to metropolitan drudgery.
The man who is pitied--how does he fare? He stays down here and lives what the world terms a small life, but is his living as narrowed as the city man thinks? His amusements are limited; he is apt to do the same things day after day, and he is not apt to make a great deal of money, but he learns to know a great many people, and to love and be loved by a few. He gets close to a scattered multitude that finds time to be quiet occasionally, and he sees people, not as they seem to be, but as they are. If he is happy there are those who will rejoice with him. If he suffers, men reach out their hands and touch him understandingly. Be he ever so small a figure, his movements are not unheeded; and his virtues, as well as his sins, are a matter of public knowledge. If he does anything that is good and praiseworthy his community knows it and applauds, and he climbs not very high on the ladder of fame before his State sees him and nods approval. Old men and old women stop him and bless him in memory of his father and mother; he knows a countless number of babies; and his neighbors' dogs come out and recognize him as a beloved friend. The joy of his acquaintances is so near to him, so undisguised, that he is gladdened with its radiance, and his eyes are wet in thought of their sorrows. He has time for reflection, and he learns to know his fellow man--know his strength and his weaknesses; learns to commend the one and condone the other. On week days he speaks to hundreds of people who call him by his first name; on Sundays he worships with a congregation that has known him since he was a babe in arms. When he grows old he is not in the way, and when he dies men bring sympathy to his children and declare a common loss. Maybe he, too, has lived in a rut, but he has lived with his heart-side throbbing; he has been an integral part of the life that was builded around him; and the best of him is proclaimed while he lives and lives after he dies.
Both types are exaggerated, but which of the two really lives the broader life?
And the delocalized Southern woman is a pitiable, abortive creature. Mrs. Pembroke Jones, from this State, and some other women from Baltimore, Richmond, and New Orleans, are occasionally heard of in the metropolis, but nine times out of ten the Southern woman in New York has much less social pleasure than she found at home, and she has no tale of triumph to carry back to the South. She gains, however, if she absorbs the best of life about her without losing her own individuality. But she is lost if she becomes an imitative onlooker. Too often she does this. This type you also know and you don't like it--as a type. It is tailor-made, spick-and-span, and conscious to a wonderful degree. It wears three dresses a day down here and talks New York incessantly--tells you about the life there with the same gusto that one would exhibit in describing the habits of a newly discovered tribe in the South Sea Islands. "We do this in New York," or "We do that in New York"--we, the lessees or proprietors. You know the patronizing language. And then the change in the manner and in the voice--that is simply horrible. The best voice that the Lord ever put into a woman's head is the soft Southern accent--the velvety voice, as Miss Mary Johnston terms it. And this is sacrificed by a delocalized feminine product that hasn't even intelligence enough to know that it has cast away its best possession. "She has been to the Big Place and she has come home to see her folks," and doesn't she usually worry you to death? In all these fine clothes you see unnaturalness. The Southern woman is gone, and in her stead you see a person who wraps her clothes around her to show curves, prates unmusical, borrowed speech, and looks above the people who, being merely natural, could reach a social status that she, an anomaly, can now never hope to attain here, there, or anywhere.
All this is a tribute to the folk who have seen, but not enough; who have traveled, but too little--a tribute to fledgelings who return with a strange, harsh crow.
Oh, these people who come down here and talk about the big people they know somewhere else! Why? Why? You meet a decent sort of chap, and just when you are beginning to like him he clears his throat and says, "That reminds me of something Senator Blank said to me once." And you want to take a club and kill him. When a man goes to a strange place he commits a fatal mistake by pretending to know anybody worth while who lives elsewhere. He may be telling the truth in his boast, but nobody believes him. This particular kind of an ass is getting to be so common around here. He makes one weary, sick. A stranger has no business with either people or mighty friends. He is sized up like any other animal, and if he is considered a thoroughbred it will not be because he named his sire. Mankind has a varied creed, but all men, from the beginning of time, have had a quiet contempt for any man who bragged about birth or discussed his nearness to the Distinguished.
You know the class. They return overly dressed and they don't know what to do with themselves. They work hard to kill time in the village; they yawn a good deal; they bore others and are bored. At one time they went barefooted in the town or walked behind a mule in a furrow, but they can't understand now why every resident doesn't sell out bag and baggage and move to New York. They derive their only pleasure while here from meeting some other person who can talk New York with them, and, for the edification of the rural population, they eagerly exchange inane reminiscences of Weber & Fields, or of some restaurant where one can get a tip-top supper after the theatre. They have gone from this place and have been jammed into some little niche in the metropolis, and they wander back, conscious of a superiority that impresses no one else. In the big city they spend most of their life in offices, and in leisure moments they move among vast hordes of strange people. They call this living and learning; and they go back to their birthplaces to pity--but, above all, to be pitied.
Northern men have voluntarily come here to live and have lived here contentedly without making unfair comparisons. They have been glad to get the freer life that allows time for reflection and for the cultivation of one's fellow man. And on the other hand, the best men in the city are the big-lunged active fellows from the country--men who absorb ideas with wide-open eyes and without being deceived. But the most patent type of ass that one meets down here is the country boy who has moved into the hurly-burly, and, fascinated and bewildered by the din about his ears, loses the proper reckoning of the bigger social values. In other words, a native New Yorker or a Boston man is not apt to bore anybody, and, moreover, he is apt to be at home everywhere; but half of the Southern boys who have barely tasted New York and return home for the holidays ought to be slain for sheer idiocy and conceit.
"The natives who go abroad, spend three months traveling in Europe, and then return to tell you about the well-dressed women in Paris, the height of the tower in London, the pigeons in Venice, or of the nobility in Rome, are of great educational benefit to the provincial State," remarked the observant man. "One may have read much about the interesting sights on the Continent, but it is very gratifying to run across a friend who has seen the things with his own eyes.
I have noticed in recent times that foreign travel doesn't seem to make as much impression upon North Carolinians as it did in former years. A quarter of a century ago you could count upon the fingers of one hand the natives who had crossed the Atlantic. These were mighty men after they returned, and were the central figures wherever they went. 'Why, he's been to Europe!' would be the awe-stricken whisper; and then everybody would hang on the words of the fortunate traveler. Folks knew London through Dickens, and Egypt by the geographies, and personal testimony of the existence of both places was a passport into any and all grades of society.
And foreign travel affected North Carolinians more in the old days than it does now. Why, there was a Mecklenburg man who spent three weeks in Paris, and when he came home he couldn't call an apple by anything but a French name. Another county man who stayed a year in Germany returned speaking broken English. He would say: 'Big gates! Pass me--oh, donder and blitzen, what shall I say? Oh, I remember; pass me dot--what you call heem?--dot bread?' And that fellow had walked behind a mule in this county and in Cabarrus until he was over twenty years old. He was wonderfully proficient with his German, however, and could spot out line after line, from his Ollendorf, about the red dog and the blue cat.
This pice first appeared in the Charlotte Observer newspaper, and can also be found in Isaac Erwin Avery’s “Idle Comments”.