been insufficient, had it stood alone. But it did not. The misbehaviour
of the boys at the night-school has been mentioned. Being a member of
the school managing committee, I went in to the school occasionally, and
what I saw left me satisfied that a large part of the master's
difficulty arose from the unfamiliarity of the scholars with their own
language. That initial ignorance blocked the road to science even more
completely than, in the Entertainment Club, it did to art. "The Science
of Horticulture" was the subject of the lesson on one dismal evening,
this being the likeliest of some half-dozen "practical sciences"
prescribed for village choice by the educational authority at Whitehall.
About twenty "students," ranging from sixteen to nineteen years old,
were--no, not puzzling over it: they were "putting in time" as
perfunctorily as they dared, making the lesson an excuse for being
present together in a warmed and lighted room. When I went in it was
near the close of the evening; new matter was being entered upon,
apparently as an introduction to the next week's lesson. I stood and
watched. The master called upon first one, then another, to read aloud a
sentence or two out of the textbook with which each was provided; and
one after another the boys stood up, shamefaced or dogged, to stumble
through sentences which seemed to convey absolutely no meaning to them.
If it had been only the hard words that floored them--such as
"cotyledon" and "dicotyledon"--I should not have been surprised; but
they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of
the meaning of punctuation. I admit that probably they were not trying
to do their best; that they might have put on a little intentional
clumsiness, in the instinctive hope of escaping derision by being
thought waggish. But the pity of it was that they should need to protect
themselves so. They had not the rudimentary accomplishment: that was the
plain truth. They could not understand ordinary printed English.
Of science, of course, they were learning nothing. They may have taken
away from those lessons a few elementary scientific terms, and possibly
they got hold of the idea of the existence of some mysterious knowledge
that was not known in the village; but the advantage ended there. I
doubt if a single member of the class had begun to use his brain in a
scientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned
upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be
acquired. They were trying--if they were trying anything at all--to pick
up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing
to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from
watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also
from the following circumstance.
At Christmastime in one of these winters a few of the boys of the
night-school went round the village, mumming. They performed the same
old piece that Mr. Hardy has described in "The Return of the
Native"--the same old piece that, as a little child, I witnessed years
ago in a real village; but it had degenerated lamentably. The boys said
that they had learnt it from an elder brother of one of them, and had
practised it in a shed; and at my request the leader consented to write
out the piece, and in due time he brought me his copy. I have mislaid
the thing, and write from memory; but I recall enough of it to affirm
that he had never understood, or even cared to fix a meaning to, the
words--or sounds, rather--which he and his companions had gabbled
through as they prowled around the kitchen clashing their wooden swords.
That St. George had become King William was natural enough; but what is
to be said of changing the Turkish Knight into the Turkey Snipe? That
was one of the "howlers" this youth perpetrated, amongst many others
less striking, perhaps, but not less instructive. The whole thing
showed plainly where the difficulty lay at the night-school. The
breaking up of the traditional life of the village had failed to supply
the boys either with the language or with the mental habits necessary
for living successfully under the new conditions. Some of these boys
were probably the sons of parents unable to read and write; none of them
came from families where those accomplishments were habitually practised
or much esteemed.
The argument, thus illustrated by the state of the boys, extends in its
application to practically the whole of the village. "Book-learning" had
been very unimportant to the peasant with his traditional lore, but it
would be hard to exaggerate the handicap against which the modern
labourer strives, for want of it. Look once more at his position. In the
new circumstance the man lives in an environment never dreamt of by the
peasant. Economic influences affecting him most closely come, as it
were, vibrating upon him from across the sea. Vast commercial and social
movements, unfelt in the valley under the old system, are altering all
its character; instead of being one of a group of villagers tolerably
independent of the rest of the world, he is entangled in a network of
economic forces as wide as the nation; and yet, to hold his own in this
new environment, he has no new guidance. Parochial customs and the
traditions of the village make up the chief part of his equipment.
But for national intercourse parochial customs and traditions are
almost worse than none at all--like a Babel of Tongues. National
standards have to be set up. We cannot, for instance, deal in Winchester
quarts and Cheshire acres, in long hundreds and baker's dozens; we have
no use for weights and measures that vary from county to county, or for
a token coinage that is only valid in one town or in one trade. But most
of all, for making our modern arrangements a standard English language
is so necessary that those who are unfamiliar with it can neither manage
their own affairs efficiently nor take their proper share in the
national life.
And this is the situation of the labourer to-day. The weakness of it,
moreover, is in almost daily evidence. One would have thought that at
least in a man's own parish and his own private concerns illiteracy
would be no disadvantage; yet, in fact, it hampers him on every side.
Whether he would join a benefit society, or obtain poor-law relief, or
insure the lives of his children, or bury his dead, or take up a small
holding, he finds that he must follow a nationalized or standardized
procedure, set forth in language which his forefathers never heard
spoken and never learned to read. Even in the things that are really of
the village the same conditions prevail. The slate-club is managed upon
lines as businesslike as those of the national benefit society. The
"Institute" has its secretary, and treasurer, and balance-sheet, and
printed rules; the very cricket club is controlled by resolutions
proposed and seconded at formal committee meetings, and duly entered in
minute-books. But all this is a new thing in the village, and no
guidance for it is to be found in the lingering peasant traditions.
To this day, therefore, the majority of my neighbours, whose ability for
the work they have been prepared to do proves them to be no fools, are,
nevertheless, pitiably helpless in the management of their own affairs.
Most disheartening it is, too, for those whose help they seek, to work
with them. In the cricket-club committee, on which I served for a year
or two, it was noticeable that the members, eager for proper
arrangements to be made, often sat tongue-tied and glum, incapable of
urging their views, so that only after the meeting had broken up and
they had begun talking with one another did one learn that the
resolutions which had been passed were not to their mind. Formalities
puzzled them--seemed to strike them as futilities. And so in other
matters besides cricket. A local builder--a man of blameless
integrity--had a curious experience. Somewhat against his wishes, he was
appointed treasurer of the village Lodge of Oddfellows; but when,
inheriting a considerable sum of money, he began to buy land and build
houses, nothing would persuade the illiterate members of the society
that he was not speculating with their funds. Audited accounts had no
meaning for them; possibly the fact that he was doing a service for no
pay struck them as suspicious; at any rate they murmured so openly that
he threw up his office. Whom they have got in his place, and whether
they are suspicious of him too, I do not know. My point is that, while
modern thrift obliges them to enter into these fellowships, they remain,
for mere want of book-learning, unable to help themselves, and dependent
on the aid of friends from the middle or employing classes. In other
words, the greater number of the Englishmen in the village have to stand
aside and see their own affairs controlled for them by outsiders.
This is so wholly the case in some matters that nobody ever dreams of
consulting the people who are chiefly concerned in them. In the
education of their children, for one thing, they have no voice at all.
It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-class
people appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisions
which originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall.
The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty's
inspectors--strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs--issue
fiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile the
parents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done,
but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things must
be arranged over their heads by the classes who have book-learning.
And this customary attitude of waiting for what the "educated" may do
for them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it is
highly important that they should be, reliant upon their own
initiative--I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourers
in the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government.
A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom they
may appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who,
probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quack
doctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote for
him, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look upon
the Government as an instrument at all under the control of people like
themselves; they view it, rather, as a sort of benevolent tyranny, whose
constitution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals or
Tories--what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power,
so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction,
and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do rests
with the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer's to
acquiesce.
Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottage
people suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, that
they are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they say
little about it, I have heard of several men getting their children to
teach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day.
Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now and
then one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence to
understand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing
"Tariff Reform," said: "We sort o' people can't understand it for
ourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us.
And then," she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what they
says." If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers trying
to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his
difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a
paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the
argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may
easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard
of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor,
and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing
circumspection which a parenthesis demands.
XIX
EMOTIONAL STARVATION
Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riot
amongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am a
little unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths,
as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it must
not be quite passed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any more
than all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as at
Oxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to be
insubordinate and to give trouble, while here, just as there, the better
sense of the majority is too feeble to make up a public opinion which
the offenders would be afraid to defy. The disorder of the village lads
was noticeable long ago at the night-school; for example, on an evening
shortly after the "Khaki" election, when Mr. Brodrick (now Lord
Midleton) had been re-elected for this division. On that evening a
lecture on Norway, illustrated by lantern slides, could hardly be got
through owing to the liveliness of a few lads, who amused all their
comrades by letting off volleys of electioneering cries. I have
forgotten who the lecturer was, but I remember well how the shouts of
"Good old Brodrick!" often prevailed, so that one could not hear the
man's voice. Since then there have been more striking examples of the
same sort of vivacity. Not two winters ago the weekly meetings of a
"boys' club," which aimed only to help the village lads pass an evening
sensibly, had to be abandoned, owing to the impossible behaviour of the
members. One week I heard that they had run amok amongst the furniture
of the schoolroom where the meetings were held; on the next, they blew
out the lamps, and locked one of the organizers into the room for an
hour; and a week or two afterwards they piled window-curtains and
door-mats on to the fire, and nearly got the building ablaze. In short,
to judge from what was told me, there seems to have been little to
distinguish them from frolicsome undergraduates, save their
poverty-stricken clothes and their unaspirated speech. It is true they
kept their excesses within doors, but then, they had no influential
relatives to take their part against an interfering police force; and
moreover, most of them came to the meetings a little subdued by ten
hours or so of work at wage-earning. Still, their "high spirits" were in
evidence, uncontrolled--just as elsewhere--by any high sentiment. The
sense of personal responsibility for their actions, the power to
understand that there is such a thing as "playing the game" even towards
people in authority or towards the general public, seemed to be as
foreign to them as if they had never had to soil their hands with hard
work.
Whatever may be the case with others, in the village lads a merely
intellectual unpreparedness is doubtless partly accountable for this
behaviour. The villagers having had no previous experience of action in
groups, unless under compulsion like that of the railway-ganger or of
the schoolmaster with his cane, it is strange now to the boys to find
themselves at a school where there is no compulsion, but all is left to
their voluntary effort. And stranger still is the club. A formal
society, dependent wholly on the loyal co-operation of its members and
yet enforcing no obvious discipline upon them, is a novelty in village
life. The idea of it is an abstraction, and because the old-fashioned
half-peasant people fifty years ago never needed to think about
abstractions at all, it turns out now that no family habit of mind for
grasping such ideas has come down from them to their grandsons.
This mental inefficiency, however, is only a form--a definite form for
once--of a more vague but more prevalent backwardness. The fact is that
the old ideas of conduct in general are altogether too restricted for
the new requirements, so that the village life suffers throughout from a
sort of ethical starvation. I gladly admit that, for the day's work and
its hardships, the surviving sentiments in favour of industry, patience,
good-humour, and so on, still are strong; and I do not forget the
admirable spirit of the cottage women in particular; yet it is true that
for the wider experiences of modern life other sentiments or ideals, in
addition to those of the peasants, need development, and that progress
in them is behindhand in the village. What the misbehaviour of the
village boys illustrates in one direction may be seen in other
directions amongst the men and women and children.
Like other people, the cottagers have their emotional susceptibilities,
which, however, are either more robust than other people's or else more
sluggish. At any rate it takes more than a little to disturb them.
During last winter I heard of a man--certainly he was one of the older
sort, good at many an obsolete rural craft--who had had chilblains burst
on his fingers, and had sewn up the wounds himself with needle and
cotton. There is no suspicion of inhumanity against him, yet it seemed
to me that in fiercer times he would have made a willing torturer; and
other little incidents--all of them recent ones too--came back to my
mind when I heard of him. In one of these a servant-girl from the
village was concerned--a quiet and timid girl she was said to be; yet,
on her own initiative, and without consulting her mistress, she drowned
a stray cat which was trying to get a footing in the household. Again, I
myself heard and wondered at the happy prattle of two little girls--the
children, they, of a most conscientious man and woman--as they told of
the fun they had enjoyed, along with their father and mother, in
watching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that the
faculty for compassion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so that
their susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In their
behaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voices
betoken a great natural aptitude for tenderness. And not to their pets
only. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voice
of an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "_Come_ on, ol'
gal ... _come_ on, ol' gal," he said, over and over again in tireless
repetition, as sympathetically as if he were talking to a child. Where
the people fail in sensitiveness is from a want of imagination, as we
say, though we should say, rather, a want of suppleness in their ideas.
They can sympathize when their own dog or cat is suffering, because use
has wakened up their powers in that direction; but they do not abstract
the idea of suffering life and apply it to the tormented hedgehog,
because their ideas have not been practised upon imagined or
non-existent things in such a way as to become, as it were, a detached
power of understanding, generally applicable.
But is it to be wondered at if some unlovely features appear in the
village character? Or is it not rather a circumstance to give one
pause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglected
people, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with such
solemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, and
sometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are? With like
disadvantages, where are there any other people in the country who would
do so bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their
susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at
it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any
imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional
sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by
frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move
them--some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like that
mentioned earlier in this book, when a man trimming a hedge all but
killed his own child, and a thrill of horror shuddered through the
cottages. Of matters like this the people talk with an excited
fascination, there being so little else to stir them. Instead of the
moving accident by flood or field, they have the squalid or merely
agonizing accident. Sickness amongst friends or neighbours affords
another topic upon which their emotion seeks exercise: they linger over
the discussion of it, talking in moaning tones instinctively intended to
stimulate feeling. Then there are police-court cases. Some man gets
drunk, and is fined; or cannot pay his rent, and is turned out of his
cottage; or misbehaves in such a way that he is sent to gaol. The talk
of it threads its swift way about the village--goes into intimate
details, too, relating how the culprit's wife "took on" when her man was
sentenced; or how his children suffer; or perhaps how the magistrates
bullied him, or how he insulted the prosecuting lawyer.
It is natural that the people should be greedy readers (when they can
read at all) of the sensational matter supplied by newspapers.
Earthquakes, railway disasters, floods, hurricanes, excite them not
really disagreeably. So, too, does it animate them to hear of prodigies
and freaks of Nature, as when, a little while ago, the papers told of a
man whose flesh turned "like marble," so that he could not bend his
limbs for fear lest they should snap. Anything to wonder at will serve;
anything about which they can exclaim. That feeling of the crowd when
fireworks call forth the fervent "_O-oh!_" of admiration, is the village
feeling which delights in portents of whatever kind. But nothing else is
quite so effectual to that end as are crimes of violence, and especially
murder. For, after all, it is the human element that counts; and these
descendants of peasants, having no fictitious means of acquainting
themselves with human passion and sentiment, such as novels and dramas
supply in such abundance to other people, turn with all the more
avidity to the unchosen and unprepared food furnished to their starving
faculties by contemporary crime.
There is, indeed, another side to their sensationalism which should be
noticed. I was a little startled some years ago by a scrap of
conversation between two women. The papers at that time were full of a
murder which had been committed in a village neighbouring this, the
young man accused of it being even then on his trial. It was in the
evidence that he had visited his home quite an hour after the time when
the deed must have been done, and these women were discussing that
point, one of them saying: "I don't believe _my_ boy would ha' come 'ome
that Sunday night if _he'd_ ha' done it." It was surprising to me to
hear a respectable mother speculate as to how her own son would behave
in such a case, or contemplate even the possibility of his being guilty
of murder; and I thought it all too practical a way of considering the
subject. But it revealed how appallingly real such things may be to
people who, as I tried to show farther back, have reason to feel a
little like an alien race under our middle-class law. Very often one may
discern this personal or practical point of view in their
sensationalism: they indulge it chiefly for the sake of excitement, but
with a side glance at the bearing which the issue may have upon their
own affairs. In a foul case which was dealt with under the Criminal Law
Amendment Act, large numbers of our cottage women flocked to the town
to hear the trial, attracted partly by the hope of sensation, of course,
but also very largely actuated by a sentiment of revenge against the
offender; for here the safety of their own young daughters was involved.