successes of cottage folk-life, where it led up into gracefulness and
serenity, in a coarser fashion the essential spirit of pride in capable
doing was certainly theirs. They could, and did, enjoy the satisfaction
of proficiency, and win respect for it from their neighbours. If they
were not neat, they were very handy; if there was no superlative finish
about their work, there was soundness of quality, which they knew would
be recognized as so much to their credit. Old gossip bears me out.
Conceive the nimble and self-confident temper of those two cottage
women--not in this village, I admit, but in the next one to it, and the
thing was quite possible here--who always planned to do their washing on
the same day, for the pleasure of seeing who had the most "pieces," and
the best, to hang out on the clothes-lines. The story must be seventy
years old, and I don't know who told it me; but it has always seemed to
me very characteristic of the good side of cottage life, whether one
thinks of the eager rivalry itself in the gardens, where the white
clothes flapped, or of the long record implied in it of careful
housewifery and quiet needlework. This spirit of joy in proficiency must
have sweetened many of the cottage duties, and may well have run through
them all. When a woman treated her friends to home-made wine at
Christmas, she was exhibiting to them her own skill; when she cut up the
loaf she had baked, or fried the bacon she had helped to cure, the good
result was personal to herself; the very turf she piled on the fire had
a homely satisfaction for her, because, cut as it was by her husband's
own tools, and smelling of the neighbouring heath as it burnt, it was
suggestive of the time-honoured economies of all the valley. In this way
another comfort was added to that of her own more personal pleasure. For
there was hardly a duty that the old-time village woman did, but was
related closely to what the men were doing out of doors, and harmonized
with the general industry of her people. She may be figured, almost, as
the member of a tribe whose doings explained all her own doings, and to
whose immemorial customs her scrubbing and washing belonged, not
unworthily. Her conscience was in the work. From one thing to another
she went, now busily at a pleasant task, now doggedly at a wearisome
one, and she knew no leisure; but at every point she was supported by
what we may call the traditional feeling of the valley--nay, of the
whole countryside--commending her perhaps; at any rate, fully
understanding her position. To be like her mother and her grandmother;
to practise the time-honoured habits, and to practise them efficiently,
was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadays
with women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager's
wife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman;
she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with a
recognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were her
possession. The arts of her people--the flower-gardening, the songs and
old sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time and
Christmas--were hers as much as anybody's; if the stress of work kept
her from partaking in them, still she was not shut out from them by
reason of any social inferiority. And so we come back to the point at
issue. House-drudgery might fill the peasant woman's days and years, and
yet there was more belonging to it. It was the core of a fruit: the
skeleton of something that was full of warm life. A larger existence
wrapped it in, and on the whole a kindlier one.
In view of all this it is easy to see why the house-duties can no
longer be approached in the old temper, or yield their former
satisfaction while they are being done. The larger existence has been
stripped away from them. They do not lead up to happier, more
interesting, duties; they are not preparatory to pleasantness. The
washing and scrubbing, the very cooking and needlework, are but so much
trouble awaiting a woman when she gets up in the morning and when she
comes home tired at night; they spoil the leisure that wage-earning
should win, and they are undertaken, not with the idea of getting on to
something productive, something that would make the cottage a more
prosperous home, but solely to keep it from degenerating into an
entirely offensive one. There is no hope surrounding these doings.
Nor do they fail only because they have become dissociated from
pleasanter work. Even the best of them are actually less interesting in
themselves. Look, for instance, at cooking. That cheap and coarse food
which women now buy because its coarseness makes it cheap is of a
quality to discourage any cook; it is common to the village--the rough
rations of the poor; and the trumpery crocks and tins, the bad coal, and
worse fireplaces, do nothing to make the preparation of it more
agreeable. With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift has
degraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expend
any art of the needle upon the shabby second-hand garments, or the
shoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer's wife. And if the
family clothes are not good to make or to mend, neither are they good to
wash, or worth displaying on the clothes-lines in the hope of exciting
envy in neighbours.
Not at first, but in due time, inefficiency was added to the other
causes which tended to make housework unpalatable to the women, and of
no use to them as an uplifting experience. The inefficiency could hardly
be avoided. The mothers, employed in the fields, had but little chance
of teaching their daughters; and these daughters, growing up, to marry
and to follow field-work themselves, kept their cottages as best they
could, by the light of nature. In not a few cases all sense of an art of
well-doing in such matters was lost, and the home became a place to
sleep in, to feed in; not a place in which to try to live well. Perhaps
the lowest ebb was reached some fifteen or twenty years ago. By then
that feeling of belonging intimately to the countryside and sharing its
traditions had died out, and nothing had come to replace it. For all
practical purposes there were no traditions, nor were there any true
country-folk living a peculiar and satisfying life of their own. The
women had become merely the "hands" or employees of farmers, struggling
to make up money enough every week for a wretched shopping. With
health, a joking humour, and the inevitable habit of self-reliance, they
preserved a careless good-temper, and they had not much time to realize
their own plight; but it was, for all that, a squalid life that many of
them led, a neglected life. Only in a very few cottages did there linger
any serviceable memory of better things.
Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered a
blowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of
"residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen and
washerwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate a
certain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It is
true I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentary
in the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change her
scrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quite
dubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages is
betrayed naively by the young girls who go from them into domestic
service. "You don't seem to like things sticky," one of these girls
observed to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day and
sticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferies
heard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus as
gets hold o' _you_!" might very well be applied to many and many a
child of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first
"place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do not
affect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an open
question how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called into
play again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due to
experience which the younger women now bring into the valley when they
marry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley.
In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are at
last coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasant
ideas.
May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well;
that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot make
good? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Consider
what it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of a
civilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasant
woman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic method
is all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better than
the old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now in
middle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only--the core
of a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With the
cottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments of
ability and of character as permitted the women to look with
complacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced no
humiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reach
the full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who can
affirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend that
the best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottage
woman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enables
her to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-do
women? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some such
belief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument,
until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to the
inspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and the
kitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of
setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and
body, has side-tracked them--has made of them charwomen and laundresses,
so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured."
Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the only
sources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might be
obtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. At
school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general
information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework
and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish
lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually
most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and
that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of
thought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are not
admitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem of
making both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experience
indeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluable
lessons; yet still the _savoir vivre_ that should make up for the old
peasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is not
attained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pick
up from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything of
the best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learn
it. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be something
further to be said presently; in the meantime I may leave it to the
reader to judge whether the cottage woman's needs, since the peasant
system broke down, are being well met.
But I must not leave it to be inferred that the women, thus stranded
between two civilizations, are therefore degraded or brutalized. From
repeated experience one knows that their sense of courtesy--of good
manners as distinct from merely fashionable or cultured manners--is very
keen: in kindness and good-will they have nothing to learn from
anybody, and most of their "superiors" and would-be teachers might learn
from them. Nor would I disparage their improved housekeeping, as though
it had no significance. It may open no doorway for them into
middle-class civilization, but I think it puts their spirits, as it
were, on the watch for opportunities of personal development. I judge by
their looks. An expression, not too often seen elsewhere, rests in the
eyes of most of the cottage women--an expression neither self-complacent
nor depressed, nor yet exactly docile, though it is near to that. The
interpretation one would put upon it depends on the phrases one is wont
to use. Thus some would say that the women appear to be reaching out
towards "respectability" instead of the blowsy good-temper bred of
field-work; others, more simply, but perhaps more truly, that they are
desirous of being "good." But whatever epithet one gives it, there is
the fine look: a look hardly of expectancy--it is not alert enough for
that--but rather of patient quietness and self-possession, the innermost
spirit being held instinctively unsullied, in that receptive state in
which a religion, a brave ethic, would flourish if the seeds of such a
thing could be sown there. A hopeful, a generous and stimulating
outlook--that is what must be regained before the loss of the peasant
outlook can be made good to them. They are in want of a view of life
that would reinstate them in their own--yes, and in other
people's--estimation; a view of social well-being, not of the village
only, but of all England now, in which they can hold the position proper
to women who are wives and mothers.
And this, vague though it is, shows up some of the more pressing needs
of the moment. Above all things the economic state of the cottage-women
requires improvement. There must be some definite leisure for them, and
they must be freed from the miserable struggle with imminent
destitution, if they are to find the time and the mental tranquillity
for viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, an
education to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; for
nobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classes
certainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at once
that the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women of
the idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit on
those they imitate. In this connection some very curious things--the
product of leisure and no outlook--are to be seen in the village. That
objectionable yet funny cult of "superiority," upon which the "resident"
ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has its
disciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife or
daughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not
"know," or will not "mix with," the wives and daughters of mere
labourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiring
type find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of still
higher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say.
The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion," that new ethic,
which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before the
loss of the peasant system can be made up to the women.
XVIII
THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING
Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an
experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The
absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it.
At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp
outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the
road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing
to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try
to be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of any
passers-by--especially of women--who might be considered safe game: that
was their only way of spending the evenings and at the same time
enjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council had
lately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in the
elementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature,
and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty or
five-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth and
light, though bored by the instruction. They were mischievous and
inattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon as
half-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if the
gloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, less
irksome than the night-school.
There was no recreation whatever for the growing girls, none for the
grown-up women; nothing but the public-house for the men, unless one
excepts the two or three occasions during the winter when the more
well-to-do residents chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom,
and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature
of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies
sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or
a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the
entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months
into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their
winter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages or under the
lamp outside the public-house.
It was in full view of these circumstances that an "Entertainment Club"
was started, with the idea of inducing the cottage people to help
themselves in the matter of recreation instead of waiting until it
should please others to come and amuse them. I am astonished now to
think how democratic the club contrived to be. In the fortnightly
programmes which were arranged the performers were almost exclusively
of the wage-earning sort, and offers of help from "superior people" were
firmly declined. And for at least one, and, I think, two winters, the
experiment was wildly successful--so successful that, to the best of my
recollection, the "gentry" were crowded out, and gave no entertainments
at all. But the enthusiasm could not last. During the third winter decay
set in, and early in the fourth the club, although with funds in hand,
ceased its activities, leaving the field open, as it has since remained,
to the recognized exponents of leisured culture.
The fact is, it died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At the
first nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely or
grotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly on
to a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who could
sing a song or play a musical instrument--it mattered not what--was
welcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people able to do
anything at all were not many, and when their repertory of songs learnt
by ear was exhausted, there was nothing new forthcoming. Gradually,
therefore, the club began to depend on the few members with a smattering
of middle-class attainments; and they, imitating the rich--asking for
piano accompaniments to their singing, and so on--at the same time gave
themselves airs of superiority to the crowd. And that was fatal. The
less cultivated behaved in the manner usual to them where there is any
unwarrantable condescension going--that is to say, they kept out of the
way of it, until, finally, the performers and organizers had the club
almost to themselves. From the outset the strong labouring men had
contemptuously refused to have anything to do with what was often, I
admit, a foolish and "gassy" affair; but their wives and sons and
daughters had been very well pleased, until the taint of superiority
drove them away. The club died when its democratic character was lost.
Yet, though I was glad to have done with it, I have never regretted the
experience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at that
time I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, and
in furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of finding
amongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitive
art. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found.
My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kind
they were dependent on the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table,
or on such cheap refuse as had come into the village from London
music-halls or from the canteens at Aldershot. Street pianos in the
neighbouring town supplied them with popular airs, which they
reproduced--it may be judged with what amazing effect--on flute or
accordion; but the repertory of songs was filled chiefly from the
sources just mentioned. The young men--the shyest creatures in the
country, and the most sensitive to ridicule--found safety in comic songs
which, if produced badly, raised but the greater laugh. Only once or
twice were these songs imprudently chosen; as a rule, they dealt with
somebody's misfortunes or discomforts, in a humorous, practical-joking
spirit, and so came nearer, probably, to the expression of a genuine
village sentiment than anything else that was done. But for all that
they were an imported product. Instead of an indigenous folk-art, with
its roots in the traditional village life, I found nothing but worthless
forms of modern art which left the people's taste quite unfed. Once, it
is true, a hint came that, democratic though the club might be, it was
possibly not democratic enough. A youth mentioned that at home one
evening he and his family had sat round the table singing songs, out of
song-books, I think. It suggested that there might still lurk in the
neglected cottages a form of artistic enjoyment more crude than anything
that had come to light, and perhaps more native to the village. But I
have no belief that it was so. Before I could inquire further, this boy
dropped out of the movement. When asked why he had not come to one
entertainment, he said that he had been sent off late in the afternoon
to take two horses miles away down the country--I forget where--and had
been on the road most of the night. A few weeks afterwards, turning
eighteen, he went to Aldershot and enlisted. So far as I remember, he
was the only boy of the true labouring class who ever took any active
part in the proceedings--he performed once in a farce. The other lads,
although some were sons of labourers and grandsons of peasants, were of
those who had been apprenticed to trades, and therefore knew a little
more than mere labourers, though I do not say that they were more
intelligent by nature.
If, however, they were the pick of the village youth, the fact only
makes the more impressive certain truths which forced themselves upon my
notice at that time with regard to the needs of the village since the
old peasant habits had vanished. There was no mistaking it: intercourse
with these young men showed only too plainly how slow modern
civilization had been to follow modern methods of industry and thrift.
Understand, they were well-intentioned and enterprising fellows. They
had begun to look beyond the bounds of this parish, and to seek for
adaptations to the larger world. Moreover, they were learning
trades--those very trades which have since been introduced into our
elementary schools as a means of quickening the children's intellectual
powers. But these youths somehow had not drawn enlightenment from their
trades, being, in fact, handicapped all the time by the want of quite a
different education. To put it rather brutally, they did not understand
their own language--the standard English language in which modern
thinking has to go on in this country.
For several of the entertainments they came forward to perform farces.
After the first diffidence had worn off, they took a keen delight in the
preparations, working hard and cordially; they were singularly ready to
be shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce--the
counterpart in drama of their comic songs--pleased them best, and they
did well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because they
missed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coach
them in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. They
produced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and were
satisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he
"divested" himself of his clothing, Mr. Box--or was it Cox?--said that
he "invested" himself, and no correction could cure him of saying that.
When one of them came to describing the lady's desperate wooing of him,
"to escape her importunities" is what he should have said; but what he
did say was "to escape our opportunities"--an error which the audience,
fortunately, failed to notice, for it slipped out again at the time of
performance, after having been repeatedly put right at rehearsal. And
this sort of thing happened all through the piece. Almost invariably the
points which depended on a turn of phrase were lost. "I at once give you
warning that I give you warning at once" became, "I at once give you
warning. That is, I give you warning at once." Cox (or Box) reading the
lawyer's letter, never made out the following passage: "I soon
discovered her will, the following extract from which will, I am sure,
give you satisfaction." It was plain that he thought the second word
"will" meant the same as the first.