Every man, however unobservant or incapable of correlating experiences,
must learn something in the course of his life. Some little thing.
Circumstances will force it into his intelligence. And a truth that has
just been forced into mine is this--that it is a foolish thing to lend
your sheep-dog to a shepherd, for the simple reason that the shepherd
will at once insidiously and surely make it his own. You may reclaim it
in the evening, fondle it, call it “Good old Bob, then!” receive its
half-hearted caresses, and feed it; but it will be yours no longer.
That is to say, its soul will be yours no longer, however you may
cherish the husk. The cause is twofold--first, that the sheep-dog is a
noble animal, who prefers work to sloth and a master to an owner; and,
secondly, that shepherds are clever men, hiding under a simple exterior
much shrewdness and quite a little guile.
At any rate the shepherd to whom recently I made the mistake of lending
my sheep-dog is a clever man, hiding under a simple exterior much
shrewdness and quite a little guile; and the moment for which he is
living I know perfectly well is the moment when I shall say to him (as
surely I shall), “Well, shepherd, you’d better call Bob yours after
this and keep him altogether.” He knows as well as I do that I shall
say that, although Bob has a pedigree like a duke and the shepherd is
accustomed to very plebeian assistants.
Just for fun I intend to postpone that announcement as long as I can,
because the shepherd and I understand each other and we shall both
subterraneously enjoy the suspense. He knows that he is a bit of a
schemer, and he knows that I know it; I know that I am a bit of an
ass, and I know that he knows it. As to bearing him any grudge for his
act of subtle alienation--that is absurd. I like him too much, and
I recognize too that he is fulfilling Nature’s wish, Nature having
devised Bob to round up sheep, and every minute that he spends in
idleness walking at my heels being a defiance to her.
This shepherd is the true breed. His father was a shepherd on the same
farm; his grandfather was a shepherd on the same farm. His name is
drawn from his calling: not exactly Penfold, but akin. He is sixty-six,
and he has been out in all weathers on the South Downs ever since he
was a child, and he has never had a cold in his life. His crook is
never out of his hand. When it rains he carries also a faded green
umbrella and an ancient military cloak lined with red. He still wears
a smock. He has never been to London, but knows Brighton railway
station. He cannot read or write.
The older I grow the more respect I have for the wise people who cannot
read or write. The shepherd cannot read or write, yet conversation with
him is as natural as if he knew all the jargons. I never find myself
(who have both read and written more than is good for any one) hunting
for words within his vocabulary. He has a sly, glancing humour that
would make the fortune of an author, and observing eyes that would make
the fortune of two. He misses nothing; and, having nothing to confuse
and congest his mind, he has forgotten nothing.
He describes well; but his adjectives are very few: “tidy” and
“middling” for ordinary praise, “out-an’-out” for eulogy. His Bible at
home is “out-an’-out old”; his watch “out-an’-out big.” Where you and
I say we will consider it, he says “insider.” He is that rare thing in
a Southern county, an independent labourer. The vicar met him not long
since, remarking that he had not seen him lately. “No, I beänt much
pestered by parsons,” he replied. I can think of no more disconcerting
reply to a kindly question; but it was not cruelly meant. It merely
comes to this, that his attitude to the world is defensive.
He regrets many things that are no more, not the least being the days
when wheatears were still eaten and the shepherds had in August an easy
way of adding to their very scanty wages by trapping these little plump
birds and selling them to the Brighton poulterers. But that is all done
with, and the only opportunity of earning a little extra money that he
now has is by stopping earths for the hunt just before the meet; which
to me seems to be not quite playing the game.
He looks back, too, to the smuggling days with a certain wistfulness;
not that he did any himself, but he could not help knowing what was
going on, and he remembers more than one exciting arrest; while his
grandmother, over at Lullington, near Alfriston, was always well in
with the smugglers, and once went so far as to conceal some tubs under
her skeps, which the Revenue officer never thought of searching,
partly, no doubt, for fear of the bees. But the shepherd has the same
tale as the fisherman in the Georgian town--the same tale, although
the fisherman represents the sea-smugglers and the shepherd the
land-smugglers. The end of smuggling, they both say, was not so much
the vigilance of the coastguard as the prevalence of the informer.
Small village life in Sussex and along the coast in the early years of
Victoria seems to have been ruined by the presence of informers. A good
field for a novelist here! For the most part those writers who have
dealt with smuggling, from G. P. R. James to Mr. Meade Falkner, have
confined themselves to its perils and triumphs; but the tale-bearer
is perhaps better material--psychologically at any rate. Anyway, it
was the tale-bearer who prevailed, and bit by bit the old, alluring,
dangerous game was dropped. “The man who lived in the cottage next to
you,” says the shepherd, “was a rare smuggler. He did more work at
night than ever he did by day, though he had to show up in the fields
just to keep them from being too suspicious.”
Although the shepherd has never been to London, he has done some
travelling; but that, too, is a thing of the past. Once he used to take
his lambs to the great Sussex “ship fairs” to be sold--to Lindfield and
the “Bat and Ball” at Chiddingly, and so forth. But now that ancient
custom also has gone, so far as he is concerned, for the new farmer
prefers to offer them by auction at the nearest town; and the boy can
drive them there. “A foolish boy,” the shepherd finds him, “always
thinking of something else instead of the ship. Book-learning, I
suppose.”
Mus Penfold, although mostly smiling and detached, has his anxieties
too--and during the lambing season this year (1911) he has been bowed
with care. For the weather’s hand was against him the whole time. I
saw him continually throughout this trying period and for the first
time realized not only how sound a man he is, but how many qualities
the good shepherd needs. For he must be good doctor, good midwife and
good nurse, apart from flock management altogether; and he must be
prepared for little sleep, and the exercise of boundless patience and
resignation. The lambs were born just across the road; and I was on
that side almost as much as this.
“Well, shepherd, how many now?” “’Bout sixty, I reckon.” “How many
twins?” “Eight couple o’ twins. There’s two you could put in your
waistcoat-pocket. I’ll show you.” And I followed him through the
straw of the shed, now divided into little hurdled cubicles, like a
dormitory, with a mother and child in each, to the barn, where he
picked up by the fore-legs two of the forlornest little objects you
ever saw. “Reckon they’ll die,” he said. “I’ve been feeding them, but I
reckon they’ll die. They’re out-an’-out miserable.”
Owing to the cold winds far too many did die; but there was “a big six
hundred,” as the shepherd said, by the time all were in this green
world. When a lamb died Mus Penfold removed its skin and placed it
on the back of another for whom a foster-mother was needed. Then he
put the living one thus clad into the pen with the bereaved mother,
who, smelling its skin and finding it true, adopted the changeling
without a murmur. The skin is fitted on rather ingeniously, with the
living lamb’s legs through holes left for them and the neck tied with
string; but it would take in no one with any intelligence. Either sheep
are very incurious or the maternal instinct makes them careless, for
the deception almost always succeeds. On the other hand, the maternal
instinct can fail utterly; and there were usually one or two sheep
whose heads had to be tied close to the hurdle to prevent them butting
their lambs away.
This lambing season, by the way, was the only time when I ever saw the
shepherd using his crook. As I have said, he carries it with him all
the year--in fact, it is as inseparably his as the emblem of a Saint;
but he never ordinarily uses it except as a staff or a gentle chastener
of his dogs. But lately it was busy. I found him dragging newborn lambs
over the straw with it, from the yard to the maternity ward, while he
carried another by its fore-legs. The act looks, if not exactly cruel,
at any rate thoughtless; but this is not so, for the shepherd is a
tender man.
I never see a crowd of sheep without wanting a picture of them and
thinking of pictures of others, although one can see cattle and horses
and dogs and have no such pictorial wish or association. Why is this?
Is it because sheep are so essentially pictorial--because, in the
artist’s phrase, they always “compose”? I suppose so. However they
stand or lie they make a harmony. That is why one so seldom sees a
picture of sheep that is wholly bad; and similarly it is why every
photograph of sheep is also a picture. An artist who sets out to depict
sheep and makes an outrage must be crude indeed. No artist understood
sheep better than Blake, although his type was, perhaps, a little too
Eastern. But he made sheep lie about and occur exactly as sheep do. He
did not force them into a picture, as Charles Jacque was a little too
much inclined to do, nor pose them like Sidney Cooper. But then I have
never seen sheep in real life like Sidney Cooper’s. My own favourite
painters of sheep are Edward Calvert, Mauve, and J. F. Millet; but I
possess a tiny drawing by Robert Hills, one of the founders of the Old
Water-colour Society, which has as much feeling as any. I saw Millet’s
most beautiful sheep-picture quite recently--his “Bergère gardant ses
Moutons” under a full moon, and it is wonderful. I saw also three or
four Jacques in the same collection--the new Chauchard Collection, just
opened at the Louvre--and he again seemed to me a shade too brilliant
for his subject. Millet came to his sheep as a part of life--the
homely, melancholy, busy life that he knew--and painted them exactly
in their relation to it; Jacque came to them rather as a heaven-sent
subject for his brush. Millet, of course, poetised them, as he was
bound to do, but never to their detriment: they remained sheep, just as
his peasants, though poetised, remained peasants. Mauve saw sheep also
as a part of the universe, but rather as a part of Nature than of life.
Nor had Mauve Millet’s wistful depths. But there is a flock of sheep by
Mauve, passing over the Laren dunes, that reaches, perhaps, the highest
mark of true and beautiful animal-painting. Among the Old Masters I
recall with most pleasure the sheep of the Bassano family, father and
sons. In the gallery at Vienna they have a room to themselves, and a
more attractive collection of warm stables and mangers I never saw. It
is when I think of such pictures as these that my brain swoons at the
idea of what the post-impressionists would make of a scene of sheep.
There were none at the Grafton Galleries recently. May there never be
any!
One pleasant development of sheep-nature that the lambing season brings
about is accessibility. Usually there is no intercourse possible
between man and sheep, except by the hard medium of a crook. Why sheep
are so mistrustful I have never understood; for no one would hurt them,
not even boys on Sunday afternoons. They know too that to man’s care
they owe all their food and comfort, and yet the sight of a strange man
or a child equally fills them with panic. How different a little early
training can make sheep the adorable Billy proves. For Billy is as much
a part of the human family as any child or grandfather ever was.
Billy is a pet lamb in the Midlands--in a river valley far from these
austere hills. He is thick and sturdy, with a black face. He fears no
one and nothing. His favourite resting-place is the very middle of a
frequented path. When tired of repose he saunters about looking for
mischief. If the gate is open he strolls into the street and pursues
and butts the children. No lamb can ever have so entertained and
exhilarated so many grown-up people. The children run and shout, Billy
lowers his head and leaps and dances, the people rush to the doors
to enjoy the fun. When there are no children he chases the hens or
explores the back-gardens. Billy is fed with milk in an old oil can and
at this formidable vessel he plunges several times a day, as though he
had never eaten before, although he has been picking up trifles since
dawn; and even when filled he rarely allows a stranger to pass without
groping at his knees in an effort to derive sustenance from them.
I have never seen any other animal with more character than this three
months old lamb. He is alive with it, as we say. His countenance is
jaunty; his movements are elvish. He is in short an imp, as unlike, on
the one hand, the timid foolish sheep of which our flocks are composed
as, on the other, the sentimental pet lamb of Wordsworth’s poem.
Looking at him one realizes what a waste of good spirits the ordinary
method of sheep-rearing and sheep-tending leads to. If all lambs could
be brought up by hand, one thinks, how merrie would England be!
But I have not put this possibility before Mus Penfold. He would
smell something very treasonable. A humourist he may be, but he is no
Radical.