equanimity. Nevertheless it drives them in upon themselves. Observing
the conditions, and yielding to them as to something inherent in the
nature of things, they strive to keep out of the way of the superior
classes. They are an aloof population, though not as their ancestors
were. They are fenced out from the country; they cannot with security go
into enclosed wood or coppice; they must keep to the public way, and
there they must behave so as not to disturb the employing classes.
Accordingly, all up and down the valley they restrict themselves more
and more soberly to their gardens and cottages, dreading few things so
much as a collision with those impersonal forces which seem always to
side with property and against people like them.
XIII
NOTICE TO QUIT
It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people would
be untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the new
civilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but the
more searching for being impersonal.
It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds
proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that
the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is
gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; for
where, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were but
emphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a more
brilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the sky
has a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its town
side. As for the daytime, the labourer can hardly look from his door
without seeing up or down the valley some sign or other telling of the
invasion of a new people, unsympathetic to his order. He sees, and hears
too. As he sweats at his gardening, the sounds of piano-playing come to
him, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying of
a motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on the
road. And though the man should go into his cottage and shut the door,
these things must often have for him a sinister meaning which he cannot
so easily shut out. There is a vague menace in them. They betoken to all
the labouring people that their old home is no longer quite at their own
disposal, but is at the mercy of a new class who would willingly see
their departure.
Perhaps the majority do not feel themselves personally threatened;
nevertheless, the situation is disquieting for all. Before the
property-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, a
sort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one's
consciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths a
laborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their home
and supplied their own wants. Not one of them probably thought of the
significance of it all, or understood how the village traditions were
his inheritance; not one considered what it meant to him to belong to
the little group of folk and be independent of the whims of strangers.
Yet, for all that, there was comfort in the situation. To be so familiar
as the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciate
the usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, to
comprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to have
fellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was to
be at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of the
past. To-day, when the labourer looks around, much of what he sees in
the new houses, roads, fences, and so on, has, indeed, been produced by
his own handiwork, but it is a product in the enjoyment of which he has
no share. It has nothing to do with him and his people; on the contrary,
it announces the break-up of the traditional industries by which he
lived, and the disintegration of the society of which he was a member.
It follows that a certain suggestiveness which used to dignify the home
pursuits of the village is wanting to them now. Instead of being a part
of the general thrift of the valley--a not unworthy contribution to that
which, in the sum, was all important to the village life--those little
jobs which the labourer does at home, including his garden-work, have no
relation now to anything save his private necessities, because now the
dominant interests of the valley are those of a different sort of people
who care nothing for such homely things. I shall be told that, after
all, this is mere sentiment. But, then, half the comfort of life
proceeds from those large vague sentiments which lift a man's private
doings up from meanness into worthiness. No such enrichment, however--no
dim sense of sharing in a prosperous and approved existence--can reward
the labourer's industry in this place at the present time. The clever
work which, in the village of his equals, would have made him
conspicuous and respected, now stamps him as belonging to the least
important and least considered section of the population.
Still, I will waive this point. Assuming--though it is much to
assume--that the cottagers have no sentiment in the matter, there are
other circumstances in the change which cannot fail to disquiet them. I
hinted just now that the "residential" people would not grieve if the
labouring folk took their departure. Now, this is no figure of speech.
Although it is likely that not one cottager in twenty has any real cause
to fear removal, there has been enough disturbance of the old families
to prove that nobody is quite safe. Thus, about two years ago, when some
cottage property near to a new "residence" was bought up by the owner of
the residence, it was commonly said that he had bought it in order to
get rid of some of the tenants, whom he disliked for neighbours. Whether
or not that was the real reason I do not know; but certain it is that
two of the tenants were forthwith turned out--one of them after
twenty-five years of occupancy. It was not the first case of the kind in
the village, nor yet the last. At the present moment I know of three
families who are likely ere long to have to quit. They live in a block
of cottages just beyond the hedge of a substantial house--a block which,
it must be owned, is rather an eyesore from there, but which might
easily be turned into a decent villa, and is actually up for sale for
that purpose. And the dwellers in the substantial house are fervently
hoping that a buyer of the cottages will soon come forward. They have
told me so themselves. "Of course," they say, "we shall be sorry for the
poor people to be turned out, but we should like to have nicer
neighbours, of our own sort." So in their own valley these English
people are not safe from molestation. With scarce more care for them
than would be shown by a foreign invader, gentility pursues its ungentle
aims. No cottager can feel quite secure. A dim uncertainty haunts the
village, with noticeable effect upon everybody's activities. For a sort
of calculating prudence is begotten of it, which yet is not thrift. It
dissuades the people from working for a distant future. It cuts off
hope, benumbs the tastes, paralyzes the aspiration to beautify the home
which may any day have to be abandoned.
And in the long run this effect, from which all the people suffer more
or less unconsciously, is more injurious than the actual misfortune of
having to move, which, after all, falls upon the few only. Not that I
would make light of that calamity. Men under its shadow lie awake o'
nights, worrying about it. While I am writing here, in a cottage near at
hand there is a man under notice to quit, who is going through all the
pitiful experiences--wondering where in the world he shall take his wife
and children, fearing lest it should have to be into some backyard in
the town, dreading that in that case he will be too far away from his
day's work and have to give it up, and scheming to save enough, from the
cost of bread and boots, to pay for a van to move his furniture. It is
not for any fault that he is to go. And indeed he is being well treated;
for the owner, who wants to occupy the cottage himself, has waited
months because the man cannot find another place. Nevertheless he will
have to go. As a rule, a man under notice to quit is in the position of
standing by and seeing his home, and his living, and the well-being of
his family sacrificed to the whim of a superior whom he dares not
oppose; and I do not dream of arguing that that is a tolerable position
for any Englishman to be in. None the less, it is true that these acute
troubles, which fall upon a few people here and there, and presently are
left behind and forgotten, are of less serious import than the injury to
the village at large, caused by the general sense of insecurity.
The people's tastes are benumbed, I said: their aspirations to beautify
their homes are paralyzed by the want of permanence in their condition.
To make this quite plain, it would be only needful to look at the few
cottages in the valley still inhabited by their owners, and to compare
them with those let to weekly tenants. It seems to be no question of
income that makes the difference between the two. In several cottages
very well known to me, the owners are not earning more than fifteen
shillings a week--or, including the value of the cottage, twenty
shillings; yet the places, in their varied ways, all look comfortable
and comely. Fruit-trees, or grape-vines, or roses, are trained to the
walls. The boundary hedges are kept well trimmed; here and there
survives a box border--product of many years of clipping--or even a
yew-tree or two fancifully shaped out. Here and there, too, leading to
the cottage door, is carefully preserved an example of those neat
pavements of local stone once so characteristic of this countryside; and
in all these things one sees what the average cottager would do if it
were worth while--if he had the heart. Since none of these things,
however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without
skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things
decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week
look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected,
broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not
for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often
suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized,
materialized, so sordid and ugly are their homes.
Yet it is not for want of taste that they endure these conditions.
Amidst the pitiful shabbiness which prevails may be found many little
signs that the delight in comely things would go far if it dared. There
is hardly a garden in the village, I think, which does not contain a
corner or a strip given over unthriftily, not to useful vegetables, but
to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent
and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and
mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes
farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his
doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing
nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or
he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve
instead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his flowers. One of those
families whose removal was mentioned above--turned out in the summertime
they were, with loss of garden crops--found refuge in a hovel which
stood right against a public pathway. And, although it was an
encroachment, within a week a twelve-inch strip of the pathway was dug
up under the cottage eaves, and fenced in with a low fencing of sticks
roughly nailed together. Within this narrow space were planted
chrysanthemums rescued from the previous home; and when the fence gave
way--as it did before the chrysanthemums flowered--big stones and
brickbats were laid in its place. Considered as decoration, the result
was a failure; it was the product of an hour's work in which despair and
bitterness had all but killed the people's hope; but that it was done at
all is almost enough to prove my point. For further illustration I may
refer again to that other man mentioned above, who is now under notice
to leave his cottage. Last year he was happy in tending four or five
rose-trees which he had been allowed to bring home from the rubbish-heap
of his employer's garden. I remember that when he showed them to me,
gloating over them, he tried to excuse himself to me for neglecting his
potatoes in their favour, and I did my best to encourage him and puff
him up with pride. But it was of no use. This summer he is neglecting
his roses, and is wondering if his potatoes will be ripe enough for
digging before he is obliged to move.
With such things going on, it is not wonderful that the people live
shabbily, meanly, out at elbows. Tastes so handicapped as theirs make no
headway, and, though not dying, sink into disuse. The average cottager
learns to despise pleasantness and to concentrate upon usefulness. His
chief pride now is in his food-crops, which, if not eaten, can be turned
into money. Of course, these have their beauty--not undiscerned by the
labourer--but they are not grown for that end, and the thriftier the
man, the less time to the consideration of beauty will he give. It is,
besides, an imprudence to make a cottage look comely, now that covetous
eyes are upon the valley and the people's position there has grown
insecure.
Does it seem a slight thing? Whatever the practical importance of it,
the extent of change involved in this hopeless attitude of the
villagers towards their home-places must not be under-rated; for if it
could be viewed in sharp perspective it would appear considerable
enough. Let us note the transitions. First the straying squatters
settled here, to cultivate chosen spots of the valley and reduce them to
order. They were not wedded to the place; only if it gave them a chance
of getting food and shelter were they likely to remain. Soon, however,
that first uncertainty was forgotten. Their peasant customs fitted the
environment; there was no danger of molestation; already to their
children the valley began to feel like a permanent home. As years went
on that feeling deepened, wrapped the people round in an unthought-of
security, and permitted them, here and there, to go beyond the necessary
peasant crafts and think of what was pleasant as well as necessary.
Gardens were trimmed into beauty, grape-vines were grown for the sake of
wine-making, and bees were kept for the sake of honey and mead. In the
cottages decent furniture and implements began to accumulate; the women
decorated their men's blouses with pretty smocking; the children were
taught old-fashioned lore because it was old-fashioned and their
inheritance; time-honoured customs of May-day and of Christmas were not
ignored. So during a few generations the old country thrift and its
simple civilization were kept alive, until the loss of the common made
the old thrift no longer possible and introduced the new. Lastly, and
within recent years, a new population has come, taking possession, with
a new civilization which is by no means simple; and now once more a
sense of unsettledness is upon the cottagers, although for the most part
they remain here. It is, however, an unsettledness very unlike that of
the earlier time. Instead of hope in it there is anxiety; instead of
striking deeper root in the valley, the people's hold grows shallower.
The agreeable peasant arts have faded out accordingly. The whole peasant
mode of life is all but forgotten. To-day we have here not a distinct
group of people living by customs which their singular circumstances
justify, but numerous impoverished families living provisionally from
hand to mouth, because of the possibility of further changes to be
thrust upon them. While they wait they still work, yet without
pleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby
and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little
remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from
being quite joyless.
IV
THE RESULTING NEEDS
XIV
THE INITIAL DEFECT
Keeping pace with the alterations in their circumstances, a great mental
and spiritual destitution has made its appearance amongst the labouring
people. I say "has made its appearance" because it cannot be wholly
attributed to the changes we have been discussing. Those changes have
done their part, certainly. Obliterating the country crafts and cults,
breaking down the old neighbourly feelings, turning what was an
interesting economy into an anxious calculation of shillings and pence,
and reducing a whole village of people from independence to a position
bordering on servility, the introduction of a new system of thrift must
bear the greater share of the blame for the present plight of the
labourers. Nevertheless, their destitution--their mental and spiritual
destitution--has its roots deeper down, and springs from a grave defect
which was inherent in the peasant system. It is time to recognize that
fact. In many ways the folk-civilization had served the cottagers
excellently. They had grown up hardy and self-reliant under its
influence; clever with their hands, shrewd with their heads, kindly and
cheerful in their temper. But one can see now that all this had been
bought very dear. To set against the good qualities that came to light
there was a stifling of other qualities which were equally good, but had
no chance of development at all under the peasant thrift.
Especially on the side of mental activity was the people's natural power
cramped. I do not mean that they were stupid; it would be an error of
the first magnitude to suppose anything of the sort. But the
concentration of their faculties on their rural doings left them
childish and inefficient in the use of their brains for other purposes.
Mention has been made of the "fatalism" which still prevails in the
village outlook; but fatalism is too respectable a name for that mere
absence of speculative thought which was characteristic of the peasant
kind of people I have known. The interest of their daily pursuits kept
their minds busy upon matters obvious to the senses, while attention to
opinions and ideas was discouraged. For this reason the older men and
women had seldom if ever indulged in fancies or day-dreams, or troubled
about theories or first principles; and until lately I might have said
the same of the younger ones too. As for watching themselves--watching
and checking off the actions of their own intelligence--it was what they
never did. A sentiment might arise in them and mellow all their temper,
and they would not notice it. The inner meaning of things concerned them
very little. Their conception of cause and effect, or of the constancy
of nature, was rudimentary. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred," said
an old bricklayer of the village, baffled by some error in his
work--"ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll come right same as you
sets it out, but not always." Puzzles were allowed to be puzzling, and
left so; or the first explanation was accepted as final. The "mistis in
March" sufficiently accounted for the "frostis in May." Mushrooms would
only grow when the moon was "growing." Even with regard to personal
troubles the people were still as unspeculative as ever. Were they poor,
or ill? It merely happened so, and that settled it. Or were they in
cheerful spirits? Why, so they were; and what more could be said?
It was largely this simplicity of their mental processes that made the
older people so companionable. They were unaccustomed to using certain
powers of the brain which modern people use; nay, they were so unaware
of that use as to be utterly unsuspicious of such a thing. To be as
little psychological as possible, we may say that a modern man's thought
goes on habitually at two main levels. On the surface are the subjects
of the moment--that endless procession of things seen or heard or spoken
of which make up the outer world; and here is where intercourse with the
old type of villager was easy and agreeable. But below that surface the
modern mind has a habit of interpreting these phenomena by general
ideas or abstract principles, or referring them to imaginations all out
of sight and unmentioned; and into this region of thought the peasant's
attention hardly penetrated at all. Given a knowledge of the
neighbourhood, therefore, it was easy to keep conversation going with a
man of this kind. If you could find out the set of superficial or
practical subjects in which he was interested, and chatter solely on
that plane, all went well. But if you dipped underneath it amongst
fancies or generalizations, difficulties arose. The old people had no
experience there, and were out of their depth in a moment. And yet--I
must repeat it--we should be entirely wrong to infer that they were
naturally stupid, unless a man is to be called stupid because he does
not cultivate every one of his inborn faculties. In that sense we all
have our portion in stupidity, and the peasant was no worse than the
rest of us. His particular deficiency was as I have described it, and
may be fully explained by his mode of life. For in cow-stall or garden
or cottage, or in the fields or on the heaths, the claim of the moment
was all-absorbing; and as he hurried to thatch his rick before the rain
came, or to get his turfs home by nightfall, the ideas which thronged
about his doings crowded out ideas of any other sort. Or if, not
hurrying, his mind went dreamy, it was still of peasant things that he
dreamed. Of what he had been told when he was a child, or what he had
seen for himself in after-life, his memory was full; and every stroke
of reap-hook or thrust of spade had power to entice his intellect along
the familiar grooves of thought--grooves which lie on the surface and
are unconnected with any systematized channels of idea-work underneath.