That a labourer in the fields should stand very much on the level of the
beast that toils with him, can be neither desirable nor necessary. He
does so, as a matter of fact, and one hears that only the dullest-witted
peasant will nowadays consent to the peasant life; his children, taught
to read the newspaper, make what haste they can to the land of
promise--where newspapers are printed. That here is something altogether
wrong it needs no evangelist to tell us; the remedy no prophet has as yet
even indicated. Husbandry has in our time been glorified in eloquence
which for the most part is vain, endeavouring, as it does, to prove a
falsity--that the agricultural life is, in itself, favourable to gentle
emotions, to sweet thoughtfulness, and to all the human virtues.
Agriculture is one of the most exhausting forms of toil, and, in itself,
by no means conducive to spiritual development; that it played a
civilizing part in the history of the world is merely due to the fact
that, by creating wealth, it freed a portion of mankind from the labour
of the plough. Enthusiasts have tried the experiment of turning
husbandman; one of them writes of his experience in notable phrase.
"Oh, labour is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it
without becoming proportionately brutified. Is it a praiseworthy matter
that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and
horses? It is not so."
Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne, at Brook Farm. In the bitterness of his
disillusion he went too far. Labour may be, and very often is, an
accursed and a brutalizing thing, but assuredly, it is not the curse of
the world; nay, it is the world's supreme blessing. Hawthorne had
committed a folly, and he paid for it in loss of mental balance. For
him, plainly, it was no suitable task to feed cows and horses; yet many a
man would perceive the nobler side of such occupation, for it signifies,
of course, providing food for mankind. The interest of this quotation
lies in the fact that, all unconsciously, so intelligent a man as
Hawthorne had been reduced to the mental state of our agricultural
labourers in revolt against the country life. Not only is his intellect
in abeyance, but his emotions have ceased to be a true guide. The worst
feature of the rustic mind in our day, is not its ignorance or grossness,
but its rebellious discontent. Like all other evils, this is seen to be
an inevitable outcome of the condition of things; one understands it only
too well. The bucolic wants to "better" himself. He is sick of feeding
cows and horses; he imagines that, on the pavement of London, he would
walk with a manlier tread.
There is no help in visions of Arcadia; yet it is plain fact that in days
gone by the peasantry found life more than endurable, and yet were more
intelligent than our clod-hoppers who still hold by the plough. They had
their folk-songs, now utterly forgotten. They had romances and fairy
lore, which their descendants could no more appreciate than an idyll of
Theocritus. Ah, but let it be remembered that they had also a _home_,
and this is the illumining word. If your peasant love the fields which
give him bread, he will not think it hard to labour in them; his toil
will no longer be as that of the beast, but upward-looking and touched
with a light from other than the visible heavens. No use to blink the
hard and dull features of rustic existence; let them rather be insisted
upon, that those who own and derive profit from the land may be constant
in human care for the lives which make it fruitful. Such care may
perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency of
the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to wish to
wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel. Well-meaning folk
talk about reawakening love of the country by means of deliberate
instruction. Lies any hope that way? Does it seem to promise a return
of the time when the old English names of all our flowers were common on
rustic lips--by which, indeed, they were first uttered? The fact that
flowers and birds are well-nigh forgotten, together with the songs and
the elves, shows how advanced is the process of rural degeneration. Most
likely it is foolishness to hope for the revival of any bygone social
virtue. The husbandman of the future will be, I daresay, a well-paid
mechanic, of the engine-driver species; as he goes about his work he will
sing the last refrain of the music-hall, and his oft-recurring holidays
will be spent in the nearest great town. For him, I fancy, there will be
little attraction in ever such melodious talk about "common objects of
the country." Flowers, perhaps, at all events those of tilth and
pasture, will have been all but improved away. And, as likely as not,
the word Home will have only a special significance, indicating the
common abode of retired labourers who are drawing old-age pensions.