Chance recently made me for a while the tenant of a windmill. Not
to live in, and unhappily not to grind corn in, but to visit as the
mood arose, and see the ships in the harbour from the topmost window,
and look down on the sheep and the green world all around. For this
mill stands high and white--so white, indeed, that when there is a
thunder-cloud behind it, it seems a thing of polished aluminium.
From its windows you can see four other mills, all, like itself, idle,
and one merely a ruin and one with only two sweeps left. But just over
the next range of hills, out of sight, to the north-east, is a windmill
that still merrily goes, and about five miles away to the north-west is
another also active; so that things are not quite so bad hereabouts as
in many parts of the country, where the good breezes blow altogether
in vain. And recently as all the world knows there has been a boom in
whole-meal bread which was to set many a pair of derelict mill-stones
in action again.
Thinking over the losses which England has had forced upon her by
steam and the ingenuity of the engineer, one is disposed to count the
decay of the windmill among the first. Perhaps in the matter of pure
picturesqueness the most serious thing that ever happened to England
was the discovery of galvanized iron roofing; but, after all, there
was never anything but quiet and rich and comfortable beauty about red
roofs, whereas the living windmill is not only beautiful but romantic
too: a willing, man-serving creature, yoked to the elements, a whirling
monster, often a thing of terror. No one can stand very near the
crashing sweeps of a windmill in half a gale without a tightening of
the heart--a feeling comparable to that which comes from watching the
waves break over a wall in a storm. And to be within the mill at such
a time is to know something of sound’s very sources; it is the cave
of noise itself. No doubt there are dens of hammering energy which
are more shattering, but the noise of a windmill is largely natural,
the product of wood striving with the good sou’-wester; it fills the
ears rather than assaults them. The effect, moreover, is by no means
lessened by the absence of the wind itself and the silent nonchalance
of the miller and his man, who move about in the midst of this
appalling racket with the quiet efficiency of vergers.
In my mill, of course, there is no such uproar; nothing but the
occasional shaking of the cross-pieces of the idle sails. Everything
is still, and the pity of it is that everything is in almost perfect
order for the day’s work. The mill one day--some score years ago--was
full of life; the next, and ever after, mute and lifeless, like a
stream frozen in a night or the palace in Tennyson’s ballad of the
“Sleeping Beauty.” There is no decay--merely inanition. One or two of
the apple-wood cogs have been broken from the great wheel; a few floor
planks have been rotted; but that is all. A week’s overhauling would
put everything right. But it will never come, and the cheerful winds
that once were to drive a thousand English mills so happily now bustle
over the Channel in vain.
Not the least attractive thing about my mill is its profound
woodenness. There is not enough iron in it to fill a wheelbarrow. The
walls are wood, the sweeps, the brake, the wheels, the cogs (apple as
I have said: how long were they discovering that apple was best, I
wonder). Those fishing-smacks which from the topmost window we see on
the grey waters do not owe more to the friendly forest.
I know a man who takes the loss of the windmill so much to heart that
he is making a windmill map. He is beginning with Sussex only and
marking with a cross every place--so far as he can now ascertain--where
a windmill once stood. “That will show them what they have lost!” he
says bitterly. “That will teach them to prefer steam!” The crosses
will crowd like lovers’ kisses in some parts, for Sussex was a county
of millers, and all over the Downs now one comes upon shallow pits
from which ancient mills have been dug and dispersed. Imaginative
archæologists find a thousand fantastic explanations of these hollows,
and one even has been claimed for a prehistoric observatory; but all
the time they are merely the foundations of windmills: nothing more
romantic than that, and nothing less romantic.
To me, at any rate, this map will be a melancholy document. How much
more so would it be to that greatest of mill-lovers and mill-painters
and himself a miller and miller’s son, John Constable, could he see it!
The Sussex mill-map alone would cause him to weep tears, for, though
an alien, he knew our mills well, and painted many of them. Even at
Brighton (such is the incorruptible beauty of these structures) he
found mills to paint. One or two, indeed, still remain, but they are
blackened stumps merely--only the ruins of the radiant aerial creatures
of their prime, when the master sat before them with those paints and
brushes whose magic secret it was to preserve and glorify English
weather for all time. You will find some of these sketches in South
Kensington Museum, particularly that masterpiece of wind and joyousness
called “Spring,” which depicts the very mill in which the youthful
artist, when milling was still his destiny, worked; and a favourite of
mine is the “Mill Near Brighton,” seen over the shoulder of a poppied
field, that hangs in the Salting collection at the National Gallery.
Mr. Salting showed it to me soon after he bought it, and I longed for
enough moral courage to snatch it from his hand and run. But one’s
ordinary invertebrate easy rectitude prevailed, and I lost it.
Constable’s grief, I say, would be deep as he scanned this Sussex map
for his lost darlings. How much more so when the Suffolk mill-map was
laid before him! He used to say that a miller has a better chance to
study the sky than any man: that is, on land. Certainly if he had never
been a miller his own skies would not have the living truth that is
theirs.
As to the loss of the miller, that is a matter that does not bear
thinking about. That the elimination of this character, historically
so shrewd and so genial, from the countryside should be borne with
such equanimity proves the carelessness and apathy of England more
almost than the rise of the dust-evolving, road-devouring car. And what
chance has the English ballad poetry of the future with no millers
to celebrate? But perhaps the bread boom will really bring him back.
Devoutly do I hope so, for the only thing more beautiful in a landscape
than a mill that is still is a mill that is active.