his own observation--not, of course, intentional observation
scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation,
if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural
English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and
error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing
apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the
potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so
he watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they can
be that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yield
of oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examines
the lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such matters
his talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in his
subject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from him
casually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that he
noticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any new
detail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really his
subject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on the
flimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not now
concerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the point
is that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoy
his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful
if the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even
"educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as
Turner's hours bring to him.
He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley;
but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are not
very unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that the
old cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at least
make the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing to
care about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value them
at all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock.
XVI
THE OBSTACLES
Keeping this old-fashioned kind of life in mind as we turn again to the
modern labourer's existence, we see at once where the change has come
in, and why leisure, from being of small account, has become of so great
importance. It is the amends due for a deprivation that has been
suffered. Unlike the industry of a peasantry, commercial wage-earning
cannot satisfy the cravings of a man's soul at the same time that it
occupies his body, cannot exercise many of his faculties or appeal to
many of his tastes; and therefore, if he would have any profit, any
enjoyment, of his own human nature, he must contrive to get it in his
leisure time.
In illustration of this position, I will take the case--it is fairly
typical--of the coal-carter mentioned in the last chapter. He is about
twenty-five years old now; and his career so far, from the time when he
left school, may be soon outlined. It is true, I cannot say what his
first employment was; but it can be guessed; for there is no doubt that
he began as an errand-boy, and that presently, growing bigger, he took a
turn at driving a gravel-cart to and fro between the gravel-pits and
the railway. Assuming this, I can go on to speak from my own knowledge.
His growth and strength came early; I remember noticing him first as a
powerful fellow, not more than seventeen or eighteen years old, but
already doing a man's work as a gravel-digger. When that work slackened
after two or three years, he got employment--not willingly, but because
times were bad--at night-work with the "ballast-train" on the railway.
Exhausting if not brutalizing labour, that is. At ten or eleven at night
the gangs of men start off, travelling in open trucks to the part of the
line they are to repair, and there they work throughout the night, on
wind-swept embankment or in draughty cutting, taking all the weather
that the nights bring up. This man endured it for some twelve months,
until a neglected chill turned to bronchitis and pleurisy, and nearly
ended his life. After that he had a long spell of unemployment, and was
on the point of going back to the ballast-train as a last resource when,
by good fortune, he got his present job. He has been a coal-carter for
three or four years--a fact which testifies to his efficiency. By
half-past six o'clock in the morning he has to be in the stables; then
comes the day on the road, during which he will lift on his back, into
the van and out of it, and perhaps will carry for long distances, nine
or ten tons of coal--say, twenty hundredweight bags every hour; by
half-past five or six in the evening he has put up his horse for the
night; and so his day's work is over, excepting that he has about a mile
to walk home.
Of this employment, which, if the man is lucky, will continue until he
is old and worn-out, we may admit that it is more useful by far--to the
community--than the old village industries were wont to be. Concentrated
upon one kind of effort, it perhaps doubles the productivity of a day's
work. But just because it is so concentrated it cannot yield to the man
himself any variety of delights such as men occupied in the old way were
wont to enjoy. It demands from him but little skill; it neither requires
him to possess a great fund of local information and useful lore, nor
yet takes him where he could gather such a store for his own pleasure.
The zest and fascination of living, with the senses alert, the tastes
awake, and manifold sights and sounds appealing to his happy
recognition--all these have to be forgotten until he gets home and is
free for a little while. Then he may seek them if he can, using art or
pastimes--what we call "civilization"--for that end. The two hours or so
of leisure are his opportunity.
But after a day like the coal-carter's, where is the man that could even
begin to refresh himself with the arts, or even the games, of
civilization? For all the active use he can make of them those spare
hours of his do not deserve to be called leisure; they are the fagged
end of the day. Slouching home to them, as it were from under ten tons
of coal, he has no energy left for further effort. The community has
had all his energy, all his power to enjoy civilization; and has paid
him three shillings and sixpence for it. It is small wonder that he
seems not to avail himself of the opportunity, prize it though he may.
Yet there is still a possibility to be considered. Albeit any active use
of leisure is out of the question, is he therefore debarred from a more
tranquil enjoyment? He sits gossiping with his family, but why should
the gossip be listless and yawning? Why should not he, to say nothing of
his relations, enjoy the refreshment of talk enlivened by the play of
pleasant and varied thoughts? As everyone knows, the actual topic of
conversation is not what makes the charm; be what it may, it will still
be agreeable, provided that it goes to an accompaniment of ideas too
plentiful and swift to be expressed. Every allusion then extends the
interest of it; reawakened memories add to its pleasure; if the minds
engaged are fairly well furnished with ideas, either by experience or by
education, the intercourse between them goes on in a sort of luminous
medium which fills the whole being with contentment. Supposing, then,
that by education, or previous experience, the coal-carter's mind has
been thus well furnished, his scanty leisure may still compensate him
for the long dull hours of his wage-earning, and the new thrift will
after all have made amends for the deprivation of the old peasant
enjoyments.
But to suppose this is to suppose a most unlikely thing. Previous
experience, at any rate, has done little for the man. The peasants
themselves were better off. Compare his chances, once more, with those
of a man like Turner. From earliest childhood, Turner's days and nights
have been bountiful to him in many-coloured impressions. At the outset
he saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished,
carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount of
traditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for ages
supported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems with
recollections of all this industry. And then to those recollections must
be added memories of the scenes in which the industry went on--the wide
landscapes, the glowing cornfields, the meadows, woods, heaths; and
likewise the details of barn and rick-yard, and stable and cow-stall,
and numberless other corners into which his work has taken him. To
anyone who understands them, those details are themselves like an
interesting book, full of "idea" legible everywhere in the shapes which
country craftsmanship gave to them; and Turner understands them through
and through. Nor is this all. If not actual adventure and romance, still
many of the factors of adventure and romance have accompanied him
through his life; so that it is good even to think of all that he has
seen. He has had experience (travelling down to Sussex) of the dead
silence of country roads at midnight under the stars; has known the
August sunrise, and the afternoon heat, and the chilly moonlight, high
up on the South Downs; and the glint of the sunshine in apple-orchards
at cider-making time; and the grey coming of the rain that urges a man
to hurry with his thatching; and the thickening of the white winter fog
across the heaths towards night-fall, when wayfarers might miss the
track and wander all night unless they knew well what they were about.
Of such stuff as this for the brain-life to feed upon there has been
great abundance in Turner's career, but of such stuff what memories can
the coal-carter have?
Already in his earliest childhood the principal chances were gone. The
common had been enclosed; no little boys were sent out to mind cows
there all day, and incidentally to look for birds'-nests and acquaint
themselves with the ways of the rabbits and hedgehogs and butterflies
and birds of the heath. Fenced-in property, guarded by the Policeman and
the Law, restricted the boy's games to the shabby waste-places of the
valley, and to the footpaths and roads, where there was not much for a
child to do or to see. At home, and in the homes of his companions, the
new thrift was in vogue; he might not watch the homely cottage doings,
and listen to traditional talk about them, and look up admiringly at
able men and women engaged upon them, for the very good reason that no
such things went on. Men slaving at their gardens he might see, and
women weary at their washing and mending, amid scenes of little dignity
and much poverty and makeshift untidiness; but that was all. The
coherent and self-explanatory village life had given place to a half
blind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economic
processes which no child could possibly understand; and it was with the
pitiful stock of ideas to be derived from these conditions that the
coal-carter passed out of childhood, to enter upon the wage-earning
career which I have already outlined.
I need not spend much time in discussing that career as a source of
ideas. From first to last, and with the coal-carting period thrown in,
monotony rather than variety has been the characteristic of it. I do not
say that it has been quite fruitless. There are impressions to be
derived, and intense ones probably, from working all day against the
"face" of a gravel-pit, with the broken edge of the field up above one's
head for horizon; and from the skilled use of pick and shovel; and from
the weight of the wheelbarrow full of gravel as one wheels it along a
sagging plank. That is something to have experienced; as it is to have
sweated at night in a railway-cutting along with other men under the eye
of a ganger, and to have known starlight, or rain, or frost, or fog, or
tempest meanwhile. It is something, even, to see the life of the roads
year after year from the footboard of a coal-van, and to be in charge
of a horse hour after hour; but I am talking now of ideas which might
give buoyancy and zest to the gossip beside a man's fireside in the
evening when he is tired; and I think it unnecessary to argue that, in
regard to providing this kind of mental furniture, the coal-carter's
experience of life cannot have done great things for him. It has been
poverty-stricken just where the peasant life was so rich; it has left a
great deficiency, which could only have been made good by an education
intentionally given for that end.
But it goes almost without saying that the man's "education" did very
little to enrich his mind. The ideas and accomplishments he picked up at
the elementary school between his fourth and fourteenth years were of
course in themselves insufficient for the needs of a grown man, and it
would be unfair to criticize his schooling from that standpoint. Its
defect was that it failed to initiate him into the inner significance of
information in general, and failed wholly to start him on the path of
learning. It was sterile of results. It opened to him no view, no vista;
set up in his brain no stir of activity such as could continue after he
had left school; and this for the reason that those simple items of
knowledge which it conveyed to him were too scrappy and too few to begin
running together into any understanding of the larger aspects of life. A
few rules of arithmetic, a little of the geography of the British
Islands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews;
no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of the
infinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; but
merely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached
observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar
things--"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so
forth--this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind--a
jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And
what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that
civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place?
When the boy left school his "education" had but barely begun.
And hardly anything has happened since then to carry it farther,
although once there seemed just a chance of something better. During two
successive winters the lad, being then from sixteen to seventeen years
old, went to a night-school, which was opened for twenty-six weeks in
each "session," and for four hours in each week. But the hope proved
fallacious. In those hundred and four hours a year--hours which came
after a tiring day's work--his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "the
science of horticulture," the former on the chance that some day he
might want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job of
the sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for a
nursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seeds
begin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two. This gives a
notion of the sort of idea the luckless fellow derived from the
night-school. I do not think that the joinery-classes at present being
held in the night-school had begun in his time; but supposing that he
also learnt joinery, he might, now that he is a man, add thoughts of
mortices and tenons and mitre-joints to his other thoughts about wall
areas and germinating seeds. Of course, all these things--like Jewish
history or English geography--are worth knowing; but again it is true,
of these things no less than of the childish learning acquired at the
day-school, that whatever their worth may be to the people concerned to
know them, they were very unlikely to set up in this young man's brain
any constructive idea-activity, any refreshing form of thought that
would enrich his leisure now, or give zest to his conversation. They
were odds and ends of knowledge; more comparable to the numberless odds
and ends in which peasants were so rich than to the flowing and luminous
idea-life of modern civilization.
Adequate help having thus failed to reach the man from any source at any
time of his life, it cannot be surprising if now the evening's
opportunity finds him unprepared. He is between two civilizations, one
of which has lapsed, while the other has not yet come his way. And what
is true of him is true of the younger labouring men in general. In
bread-and-cheese matters they are perhaps as well off as their
forefathers in the village, but they are at a disadvantage in the matter
of varied and successful vitality. The wage-earning thrift which has
increased their usefulness as drudges has diminished their effectiveness
as human beings; for it has failed to introduce into their homes those
enlivening, those spirit-stirring influences which it denies to them
when they are away from home doing their work. Hence a strange thing.
The unemployed hours of the evening, which should be such a boon, are a
time of blank and disconsolate tediousness, and when the longer days of
the year come round many a man in the valley who ought to be glad of his
spare time dodges the wearisome problem of what to do with it by putting
himself to further work, until he can go to bed without feeling that he
has been wasting his life. Yet that is really no solution of the
problem. It means that the men are trying to be peasants again, because
they can discover no art of living, no civilization, compatible with the
new thrift.
Of course it is true that they are handicapped by the lowness of the
wages they receive. However much time one may have, it would be all but
impossible to follow up modern civilization without any of its
apparatus, in the shape of books and musical instruments, and the
comfort of seclusion in a spare room; and none of these advantages can
be bought out of an income of eighteen shillings a week. That is plainly
the central difficulty--a difficulty which, unless it can be put right,
condemns our commercial economy as wholly inadequate to the needs of
labouring people. Supposing, however, that this defect could be suddenly
remedied; supposing, that is, that by some miracle wages could be so
adjusted as to put the labourer in command of the apparatus of
civilization; still, he could not use the apparatus without a personal
adjustment. He is impoverished, not in money only, but also in
development of his natural faculties, since the old village civilization
has ceased to help him.
XVII
THE WOMEN'S NEED
If, while the common was still open, very few even of the men of the
village troubled about regular employment, we may well believe that
there were still fewer regular wage-earners amongst the women. I do not
mean that wage-earning was a thing they never did. There was not a woman
in the valley, perhaps, but had experience of it at hay-making and
harvesting, while all would have been disappointed to miss the
hop-picking. But these occasional employments had more resemblance to
holidays and outings than they had to constant work for a living.
As the new thrift gradually established itself, the younger women at
least had to alter their ways. For observe what had happened. A number
of men, once half-independent, but now wanting work constantly, had been
forced into a market where extra labour was hardly required; and it
needs no argument to prove that, under such conditions, they were not
only unable to command high wages, but were often unemployed. Of
necessity, therefore, the women were obliged to make up the week's
income by their own earnings. The situation, in fact, was similar to
that which had been produced in earlier times and in other parishes by
the old Poor Law, when parish pay enabled men to work for less than a
living wage; only now the deficiency was made up, not at the expense of
employers and ratepayers, but at the expense of women and girls.
But, though becoming wage-earners, the women missed the first advantage
that wage-earners should enjoy--namely, leisure time. After all, the new
thrift had but partially freed them from their old occupations. They
might buy at a shop many things which their mothers had had to make; but
there was no going to a shop to get the washing and scrubbing done, the
beds made, the food cooked, the clothes mended. All this remained to the
women as before. When they came home from the fields--at first it was
principally by field-work that they earned wages--it was not to be at
leisure, but to fall-to again on these domestic doings, just as if there
had been no change, just as if they were peasant women still.
And yet, though this work had not changed, there was henceforth a vast
difference in its meaning to the women. To approach it in the true
peasant or cottage woman's temper was impossible; nor in doing it might
the labourer's wife enjoy half the satisfaction that had rewarded the
fatigue of her mother and grandmother. Something dropped away from it
that could not be replaced when the old conditions died out.
To discover what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old
conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy,
as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it
was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey,
all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniums
in cottage windows. On the contrary, I believe that very often it grew
intensely ugly, and was as narrowing as it was ugly. The women saw
nothing, and learnt nothing, of the outer world; and, in their own
world, they saw and learnt much that was ill. All the brutalities
connected with getting a living on peasant terms tended to coarsen
them--the cruelties of men to one another, the horrors that had to be
inflicted on animals, the miseries of disease suffered by ignorant human
beings. Their perpetual attention to material cares tended to make them
materialized and sordid; they grew callous; there was no room to
cultivate delicacy of imagination. All this you must admit into the
picture of the peasant woman's life, if you would try to see it fairly
on the bad side as well as on the good side. Still, a good side there
was, and that it was far oftener in evidence than the other I am well
persuaded, when I remember the older village women who are dead now.
They, so masculine in their outlook, yet so true-hearted and, now and
then, so full of womanly tenderness and high feeling, could not have
been the product of conditions that were often evil. And one merit in
particular must be conceded to the old style of life. Say that the
women's work was too incessant, and that some of it was distinctly ill
to do; yet, taken as a whole, it was not uninteresting, and it was just
that wholeness of it that made all the difference. The most tiresome
duties--those domestic cares which were destined to become so irksome to
women of a later day--were less tiresome because they were parts of a
whole. Through them all shone the promise of happier hours to be won by
their performance.