from the ideas suggested by that life, the peasant folk had few ideas.
Their minds lacked freedom; there was no escape from the actual
environment into a world either of imagination or of more scientific
understanding. Nor did this matter a great deal, so long as the
environment remained intact. In the absence of what we call
"views"--those generalizations about destiny or goodness, or pleasure,
or what not, by which we others grope our way through life--the steady
peasant environment, so well known and containing so few surprises, was
itself helpful, precisely because it was so well known. If a man would
but give shrewd attention to his practical affairs, it was enough; a
substitute for philosophy was already made for him, to save him the
trouble of thinking things out for himself. His whole mental activity
proceeded, unawares, upon a substratum of customary understanding, which
belonged to the village in general, and did not require to be
formulated, but was accepted as axiomatic by all. "Understanding" is the
best word I can find for it. It differed from a philosophy or a belief,
because it contained no abstract ideas; thinking or theorizing had no
part in it; it was a sheer perception and recognition of the
circumstances as they were. The people might dispute about details; but
the general object to be striven for in life admitted of no
disagreement. Without giving it a thought, they knew it. There lay the
valley before them, with their little homesteads, their cattle, their
gardens, the common; and connected with all these things a certain
old-established series of industries was recognized, leading up to a
well-known prosperity. That perception was their philosophy. The
environment was understood through and through. And this common
knowledge, existing apart from any individual in particular, served
every individual instead of a set of private opinions of his own. To get
away from it was impossible, for it was real knowledge; a man's
practical thoughts had to harmonize with it; supported by it, he was
saved the trouble of thinking things out in "systems"; and in fact it
was a better guide to him than thought-out systems could have been,
because generations of experience had fitted it so perfectly to the
narrow environment of the valley. So long, therefore, as the environment
remained unaltered, the truth that the people's minds held few ideas
upon other subjects, and had developed no method of systematic thinking,
was veiled.
But it has become plain enough now that the old environment is gone. The
new thrift has laid bare the nakedness of the land. It has found the
villagers unequipped with any efficient mental habits appropriate to
the altered conditions, and shown them to be at a loss for interesting
ideas in other directions. They cannot see their way any longer. They
have no aims; at any rate, no man is sure what his own aims ought to be,
or has any confidence that his neighbours could enlighten him. Life has
grown meaningless, stupid; an apathy reigns in the village--a dull
waiting, with nothing in particular for which to wait.
XV
THE OPPORTUNITY
Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it has
brought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us the
means of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life has
become. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is so
obscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productive
work in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kind
actually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however,
with a more business-like interest in the matter than mine, have
recognized that a new thing has come into the country labourer's life,
although they do not speak of it as "leisure." Mere wasted time is what
it looks like to them. Thus, not long ago, an acquaintance who by no
means shares my views of these matters was deploring to me the
degenerate state, as he conceived it, of the labourers on certain farms
in which he is interested, a few miles away from this valley. The men,
he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employment
on the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottage
gardens--were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests of
the estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon my
asking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourers
in this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens,
but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately:
"I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the men
can buy all they want without working for it; and the result is that
they waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin."
With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothing
to do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelong
experience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at their
disposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; the
cheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men to
live without occupying every available hour in productive work, and in
this one respect they do profit a little by those innovations--the use
of machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation of
foreign goods--which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It is
not necessary nowadays--not absolutely necessary--for the labourer, when
his day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening in
order to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so he
is the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While he
has been earning money away from home during the day, other men he has
never met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for him
the things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these things
have not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him in
shops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned.
Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill and
industry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificial
light provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized by
Gilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, but
cheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winter
evenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day's
work a cottage family may prolong their winter day as far into the night
as they please; and that, without feeling that they are wasting their
store of light, and without being under necessity of spending the
rescued hours at any of those thrifty tasks which alone would have
justified peasant folk in sitting up late. They have the evening to use
at their pleasure.
If it is said, as my friend interested in land seemed to suggest, that
they do not know how to use it, I am not concerned to disagree. In fact,
that is my own text. On an evening last winter, having occasion to ask a
neighbour to do me a service, I knocked at his cottage door, and was
invited in. The unshaded lamp on the table cast a hard, strong light on
the appointments of the room, and in its glare the family--namely, the
man, with his wife, his mother, and his sister--were sitting round the
fire. On the table, which had no cloth, the remains of his hot
tea-supper were not cleared away--the crust of a loaf, a piece of
bacon-rind on a plate, and a teacup showed what it had been. But now he
had finished, and was resting in his shirt-sleeves, nursing his baby. In
fact, the evening's occupation had begun. The family, that is to say,
had two or three hours to spend--for it was but little past seven
o'clock--and nothing to do but to sit there and gossip. An innocent
pastime that; I have no fault to find with it, excepting that it had the
appearance of being very dull. The people looked comfortable, but there
was no liveliness in them. No trace of vivacity in their faces gave the
smallest reason to suppose that my coming had interrupted any enjoyment
of the evening. A listless contentment in being at home together, with
the day's work done and a fire to sit by, was what was suggested by the
whole bearing of the family. Their leisure was of no use to them for
recreation--for "making themselves anew," that is--or for giving play to
faculties which had lain quiet during the day's work. At the time,
however, I saw nothing significant in all this. It was just what other
cottage interiors had revealed to me on other winter evenings. The
surprising, the unexpected thing would have been to find the little
spell of leisure being joyfully used.
Shall we leave the matter there then? If we do, we shall overlook the
one feature in the situation that most particularly deserves attention.
For suppose that the cottagers in general do not know what to do with
their leisure, yet we must not argue that therefore they do not prize
it. Dull though they may seem in it, tedious though I believe they often
find it, nevertheless there proceeds from it a subtle satisfaction, as
at something gained, in the liberty to behave as they like, in the vague
sense that for an hour or two no further effort is demanded of them.
Yawning for bed, half sick of the evening, somewhere in the back of
their consciousness they feel that this respite from labour, which they
have won by the day's work, is a privilege not to be thrown away. It is
more to them than a mere cessation from toil, a mere interval between
more important hours; it is itself the most important part of the
day--the part to which all the rest has led up.
Nothing of the sort, I believe, was experienced in the village in
earlier times. Leisure, and the problem of using it, are new things
there. I do not mean that the older inhabitants of the valley never had
any spare time. There were, doubtless, many hours when they "eased off,"
to smoke their pipes and drink their beer and be jolly; only, such hours
were, so to speak, a by-product of living, not the usual and expected
consummation of every day. Accepting them by no means unwillingly when
they occurred, the folk still were wont normally to reduce them to a
minimum, or at least to see that they did not occur too often; as if
spare time, after all, was only a time of waiting until work could be
conveniently resumed. So lightly was it valued that most villagers cut
it short by the simple expedient of going to bed at six or seven
o'clock. But then, in their peasant way, they enjoyed interesting days.
The work they did, although it left their reasoning and imaginative
powers undeveloped, called into play enough subtle knowledge and skill
to make their whole day's industry gratifying. What should they want of
leisure? They wanted rest, in which to recover strength for taking up
again the interesting business of living; but they approached their
daily life--their pig-keeping and bread-making, their mowing and
thatching and turf-cutting and gardening, and the whole round of country
tasks--almost in a welcoming spirit, matching themselves against its
demands and proving their manhood by their success. But the modern
labourer's employment, reduced as it is to so much greater monotony, and
carried on for a master instead of for the man himself, is seldom to be
approached in that spirit. The money-valuation of it is the prime
consideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office
has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to
work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition
of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being
earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn;
and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a
man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living.
Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new one
in the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone over
them, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers must
make up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturally
enough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. But
self-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be to
shirk the problem, not to solve it.
So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be
well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the
new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted
with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley
still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the
earlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving an
account of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter the
different position of the present-day labourers may be more exactly
understood.
The man I have in mind--I will rename him Turner--belongs to one of the
old families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage and
an acre or so of ground--probably mortgaged--together with a horse and
cart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usual
rustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited no
traditions--there were none in his family--to teach him how to use these
possessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in the
old way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddled
away his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property left
that was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too late
to have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weekly
tenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and a
few rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used to
be in prosperity--thriftless from our point of view, but from the
peasant point of view thrifty enough, good-tempered too, generous to a
fault, indifferent to discomforts, as a rule very hard-working, yet
apparently quite unacquainted with fatigue.
He gets his living now as a labourer; but, unlike his neighbours, he
seems by no means careful to secure constant employment. The regularity
of it would hardly suit his temper; he is too keenly desirous of being
his own master. And his own master he manages to be, in a certain
degree. From those who employ him he obtains some latitude of choice,
not alone as to the hours of the day when he shall serve them, but even
as to the days of the week. I have heard him protest: "Monday you says
for me to come. Well, I dunno about _Monday_--if Tuesday'd suit ye as
well? I wants to do so-and-so o' Monday, if 'tis fine. You see, there's
Mr. S---- I bin so busy I en't bin anear him this week for fear _he_
should want me up _there_. I _knows_ his grass wants cuttin'. But I
'xpects I shall ha' to satisfy 'n Monday, or else p'raps he won't like
it." Sometimes he takes a day for his own affairs, carting home hop-bine
in his donkey-cart, or getting heath for some thatching job that has
been offered to him. On these terms, while he finds plenty to do in
working intermittently for four or five people in the parish, he
preserves a freedom of action which probably no other labourer in the
village enjoys. Few others could command it. But Turner's manner is so
ingratiating that people have a personal liking for him, and it is
certain that his strength and all-round handiness make of him an
extremely useful man. Especially does his versatility commend him.
Others in the village are as strong as he and as active and willing, but
there are not now many others who can do such a number of different
kinds of work as he can, with so much experienced readiness.
Among his clients (for that is a more fitting word for them than
"employers") there are two or three residents with villa gardens, and
also two of those "small-holders" who, more fortunate than himself
(though not more happy, I fancy), have managed to cling to the little
properties which their fathers owned. Turner, therefore, comes in for a
number of jobs extraordinarily diverse. Thus, during last summer I knew
him to be tending two gardens, where his work ranged from lawn-cutting
(sometimes with a scythe) to sowing seeds, taking care of the vegetable
crops, and trimming hedges. But this occupied him only from seven in the
morning until five in the afternoon. In the margin outside these
hours--starting at five or earlier and keeping on until dark--he was
helping the two small-holders, one after the other, to make their hay
and get the ricks built. Then the ricks required thatching, and Turner
thatched them. In the meantime he was getting together a little rick of
his own for his donkey's use, carrying home in bags the longer grass
which he had mowed in the rough places of people's gardens or had
chopped off in hedgerows near his home. A month later he was harvesting
for the small-holders, and again there was rick-thatching for him to do.
"That's seven I've done," he remarked to me, on the day when he finished
the last one. "But didn't the rain stop you this morning?" I asked, for
rain had begun heavily about nine o'clock. He laughed. "No.... We got'n
covered in somehow. Had to sramble about, but he was thatched afore the
rain come."
Later still he was threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of
it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to
it when I was seventeen, so I _had_ to learn." He seemed to think little
of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a
thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom I
mentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across any knights
in armour lately.
One autumn, when he was doing some work for myself, he begged for a day
or two away in order to take a job at turf-cutting. When he returned on
the third or fourth day, he said: "Me and my nipper" (a lad of about
sixteen years old) "cut sixteen hundred this time." Now, lawn-turfs are
cut to a standard size, three feet by one, wherefore I remarked: "Why,
that's nearly a mile you have cut." "Oh, is it?" he said. "But it didn't
take long. Ye see, I had the nipper to go along with the edgin' tool in
front of me, and 'twan't much trouble to get 'em up."
He could not keep on for me regularly. The thought of Mr. S----'s work
waiting to be done fidgeted him. "When I was up there last he was
talkin' about fresh gravellin' all his paths. I said to'n, 'If I was you
I should wait anyhow till the leaves is down--they'll make the new
gravel so ontidy else.' So they would, sure. I keeps puttin' it off. But
I shall ha' to go. I sold'n a little donkey in the summer, and he's
hoofs'll want parin' again. I done 'em not so long ago...."
So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down
the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober
interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his
forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after
their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful
enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him.
Furthermore, things on either side of it--things he learnt to understand
long ago--make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although
his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer--he had
come to mow a little grass plot for me--I found him full of a boyish
delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had
arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from
the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their
starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said
Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest
somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass
somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered
speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they
builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll
find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be
bound to find where he is afore I done with it."
The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew
him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a
nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next
moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in
that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's
it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before
I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged
and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest.
As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and
especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its
population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and
the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded--hedgehogs which his father used
to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that
each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to
this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what was
shepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge." At eight years old
he was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought big
enough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds;
and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father and
others for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wet
August, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living on
bread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories of
that annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciative
reminiscence--"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetite
there! I could eat anything.... You could go to the top of a hill and
look down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (houses
or farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er a
one at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas." On this
farm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't _pay_
very high--you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well.
Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, and
bread-an'-cheese.... Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says
'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I _knows_ 'twas as many as seven, the
farmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, be
how 'twill. In a great yaller basin...." Turner held out his arms to
illustrate a large circumference.
In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his own
horse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experience
in that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of the
slanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse--the ground was too
steep for that--but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough which
he kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put him
out," hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with country
industry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however,
before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; but
that is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved him
inefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is to
realize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work,
even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake to
count in how many such things he is proficient.
One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from an
old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning
fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple--the first one to be picked from a
young tree--and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange,"
recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and,
finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while
his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have
known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time.
Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do
that. He was laid up one time--'twas when I was eighteen year old--and
he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of
course he showed me _how_. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My
father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was
mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of
course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and
a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he
never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best
training.
From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge
for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift
connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after
the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed
his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here.
Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the
second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into
a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose--a kind of
chaff-cutting box--was described to me. The same man had a horse, which
also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own
beer-brewing.