THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE

By HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE

Daughter of Julian Hawthorne, and grand-daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She writes with rare charm and literary power, and contributes regularly to many periodicals. Among her books are: A Country Interlude; The Lure of the Garden; Old Seaport Towns of New England; Girls in Bookland.

The article that follows is much like an oration or an editorial article in that it is directed to “you” rather than expressive of “I”. The true essay is not concerned with “you”: it is concerned only with “I”.Both the oration and the editorial article have much in common with the essay type; for both turn aside frequently into the happy fields of meditation.The first three paragraphs ofThe Spirit of Adventureare purely personal in nature and therefore wholly in keeping with the spirit of the essay form. Furthermore, those paragraphs—so reminiscent of the fancy of the writer's famous grandfather, Nathaniel Hawthorne,—represent poetic prose. Throughout the article the personal note mingles with the directing voice of the editorial article. Indeed, it would be easy to drop fromThe Spirit of Adventureeverything that is not personal, and thereby to leave pure essay.As it stands,The Spirit of Adventureis a didactic essay, brave and strong in its thought, and poetic in its style.

Both the oration and the editorial article have much in common with the essay type; for both turn aside frequently into the happy fields of meditation.

The first three paragraphs ofThe Spirit of Adventureare purely personal in nature and therefore wholly in keeping with the spirit of the essay form. Furthermore, those paragraphs—so reminiscent of the fancy of the writer's famous grandfather, Nathaniel Hawthorne,—represent poetic prose. Throughout the article the personal note mingles with the directing voice of the editorial article. Indeed, it would be easy to drop fromThe Spirit of Adventureeverything that is not personal, and thereby to leave pure essay.

As it stands,The Spirit of Adventureis a didactic essay, brave and strong in its thought, and poetic in its style.

Wind has always seemed wonderful and beautiful to me.

Invisible as it is, it pervades the whole world. It has the very quality of life. Without wind, how dead and still the world would be! In the autumn, wind shakes the leaves free and sends them flying, gold and red. It takes the seeds of many plants and sows them over the land. It blows away mists and sets clouds to voyaging, brings rain and fair weather the year round, builds up snow in fantastic palaces, rolls the waves high, murmurs a fairy music in the pines and shouts aloud in storms. Wind is the great adventurer of nature. Sometimes it is so fierce and terrible that nothing can stand before it—houses are torn to shreds, trees arefelled, ruin follows where it goes. At other times, it comes marching wet and salt from the sea, or dry and keen from the mountains on hot summer days, bringing ease and rest and health. Keen as a knife, it whips over the frozen ground in winter and screams wildly round the farm-house, taps the panes with ghost fingers, and whistles like a sprite in the chimney. It brings sails from land to land, turns windmills in quaint foreign places, and sets the flags of all the countries of the world fluttering on their high staffs.

Wind is nature's spirit of adventure, keeping her world vigorous, clean, and alive.

For us, too, the spirit of adventure is the fine wind of life, and if we have it not, or lose it, either as individual or nation, then we begin to die, our force and freshness depart, we stop in our tracks, and joy vanishes. For joy is a thing of movement and energy, of striving forward, a thing of hope as well as fruition. You must be thoroughly alive to be truly joyful, and all the great things accomplished by men and nations have been accomplished by vigorous and active souls, not content to sit still and hold the past, but eager to press on and to try undiscovered futures.

If ever a nation was founded on, and built up by, the spirit of adventure, that nation is our own. The very finding of it was the result of a splendid upspring of that spirit. From then on through centuries it was only men in whom the spirit of adventure was strong as life itself who reached our shores. Great adventurers, on they came, borne as they should be, by wind itself! Gallant figures, grim figures, moved by all sorts of lures and impulses, yet one and all stirred and led by the call of adventure, that cares nothing for ease of body or safety, for old, tried rules and set ways and trodden paths, but passionately for freedom and effort, for what is strange and dangerous and thrilling, for tasks that call on brain and body for quick, new decisions and acts.

The spirit of adventure did not die with the settling of our shores. Following the sea adventures came those ofthe land, the pioneers, who went forward undismayed by the perils and obstacles that appeared quite as insurmountable as did the uncharted seas to Columbus's men. Think of the days, when next you ride across our great continent in the comfort of a Pullman, when it took five months and more to make the same journey with ox-teams. Think how day followed day for those travelers across the Great Plains in a sort of changeless spell, where they topped long slow rise after long slow rise only to see the seemingly endless panorama stretch on before them. Think how they passed the ghastly signs of murdered convoys gone before, and yet pressed on. Think how they settled here and there in new strange places where never the foot of men like themselves had been set before, and proceeded to build homes and till the land, rifle in hand; think how their wives reared their children and kept their homes where never a white child or a Christian home had been before.

Where should we be to-day but for such men and women—if this wind of the spirit had never blown through men's hearts and fired them on to follow its call, as the wind blows a flame?

Wherever you look here in America you can see the signs and traces of this wonderful spirit. In old towns, like Provincetown or Gloucester,[59]you still hear tales of the whale-fisheries, and still see boats fare out to catch cod and mackerel on the wild and dangerous Banks. But in the past, the fishers sailed away for a year or two, round the globe itself, after their game! You see the spirit's tracks along the barren banks of the Sacramento,[60]where the gold-seekers fronted the wilderness after treasure, and in Alaska it walks incarnate. It is hewing its way in forests and digging it in mines; it is building bridges and plants in the deserts and the mountains. Out it goes to the islands of the Pacific, and in Africa it finds a land after its heart.

How much of this spirit lives in you?

I tell you, when I hear a girl or a boy say: “This place is good enough for me. I can get a good job round the corner! I know all the folks in town; and I don't see any reason for bothering about how they live in other places or what they do away from here”; when I hear that sort of talk from young people, my heart sinks a bit.

For such boys and girls there is no golden call of adventure, no lure of wonder by day and night, no desire to measure their strength against the world, no hope of something finer and more beautiful than what they have as yet known or seen.

I like the boy or girl who sighs after a quest more difficult than the trodden trail, who wants more of life than the assurance of a good job. I know very well that the home-keeping lad has a stout task to perform and a good life to live. But I know, too, that if the youth of a nation loses its love of adventure, if that wild and moving spirit passes from it, then the nation is close to losing its soul. It has about reached the limit of its power and growth.

So much in our daily existence works against this noble spirit, disapproves it, fears it. People are always ready to prove that there is neither sense nor profit in it. Why should you sail with Drake[61]and Frobisher,[62]or march with Fremont[63]or track the forest with Boone,[64]when it is so much easier and safer and pays better to stay at home? Why shouldn't you be content to do exactly like the people about you, and live the life that is already marked out for you to live?

That is what most of us will do. But that is no reason why the glorious spirit of adventure should be denied and reviled. It is the great spirit of creation in our race. If it stirs in you, listen to it, be glad of it.

A mere restless impulse to move about, the necessity to change your environment or else be bored, the dissatisfaction with your condition that leads to nothing but ill temper or melancholy, these are not part of the spirit of which I am speaking. You may develop the spirit of adventure without stirring from home, for it is not ruled by the body and its movements. Great and high adventure may be yours in the home where you now live, if you realize that home as a part of the great world, as a link of the vast chain of life. Two boys can sit side by side on the same hearth-stone, and in one the spirit of adventure is living and calling, in the other it is dead. To the first, life will be an opportunity and a beckoning. He will be ready to give himself for the better future; he will be ready to strike hands with the fine thought and generous endeavor of the whole world, bringing to his own community the fruit of great things, caring little for the ease and comfort of his body, but much for the possibilities of a finer, truer realization of man's eternal struggle toward a purer liberty and a nobler life. The spirit of adventure is a generous spirit, kindling to great appeals. Of the two boys, sitting there together, the second may perhaps go round the world, but to him there will be no song and no wonder. He will not find adventure, because he has it not. The old phrase, “adventures to the adventurous,” is a true saying. The selfish and the small of soul know no adventures.

As I think of America to-day, I say the spirit that found and built her must maintain her. There are great things to be done for America in the coming years, in your years. Her boundaries are fixed, but within those boundaries marvelous development is possible. Her government has found its form, but there is work for the true adventurer in seeing that the spirit of that government, in all its endless ramifications and expressions, fulfils the intention of human libertyand well-being that lie within that form. Her relations with the world outside of herself are forming anew, and here too there is labor of the noblest. The lad who cares only for his own small job and his own small comforts, who dreads the rough contacts of life and the dangers of pioneering will not help America much.

In the older days the Pilgrim Fathers cast aside every comfort of life to follow the call of liberty, coming to a wilderness so remote, that for us a voyage to some star would scarcely seem more distant or strange. None of us will be called upon to do so tremendous a thing as that act of theirs, so far as the conditions of existence go, since the telegraph and the aëroplane and turbine knit us close. But there are adventures quite as magnificent to be achieved.

The spirit of adventure loves the unknown. And in the unknown we shall find all the wonders that are waiting for us. Our whole life is lived on the very border of unknown things, but only the adventurous spirit reaches out to these and makes them known, and widens the horizons for humanity. The very essence of the spirit of adventure is in doing something no one has done before. Every high-road was once a trail, every trail had its trail-breaker, setting his foot where no man's foot had gone before through what new forests and over what far plains.

It is good to ride at ease on the broad highway, with every turning marked and the rules all kept. But it is not the whole of life. The savor of lonely dawns, the call of an unknown voice, the need to establish new frontiers of spirit and action beyond any man has yet set, these are also part of life. Do not forego them. You are young and the world is before you. Be among those who perceive all its variety, its potentialities, who can see good in the new and unknown, and find joy in hazard and strength in effort. Do not be afraid of strange manners and customs, nor think a thing is wrong because it is different.

Throw wide the great gates of adventure in your soul, young America!

1. Love of Truth11. The Snow2. The Spirit of Fair Play12. Falling Leaves3. The Sense of Honor13. The Ocean4. Stick-to-it-iveness14. The Storm5. Faithfulness15. Moonlight6. School Spirit16. The Voice of Thunder7. Loyalty17. Flowers8. The Scientific Spirit18. The Friendly Trees9. Work19. Country Brooks10. The Spirit of Helpfulness20. Gentle Rain

If you wish to write two or three paragraphs of poetic prose in imitation of the first three paragraphs ofThe Spirit of Adventurechoose one of the topics in the second column. Write, first of all, a sentence that will summarize your principal thought, a sentence that will correspond with the sentence that forms the third paragraph of Miss Hawthorne's essay. Then lead up to this sentence by writing a series of sentences full of fancy. Use figures of speechfreely. Arrange your words, phrases or clauses so that you will produce both striking effects and also rhythm.

If you wish to write in imitation of the entire essay choose one of the topics in the first column. Begin your work by writing a series of poetic paragraphs that will present the spirit of your essay. Continue to write in a somewhat poetic style, but make many definite allusions to history, literature or the facts of life.

Throughout your work express your own personality as much as you can. End your essay by making some personal appeal but do not make your work too didactic.

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