Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as
English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair
so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought
the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a
gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The
prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly
understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of
them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.
Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were
not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not
devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them
from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with
them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say,
“No, not in the same battle-field.”
Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery
youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each
other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near
Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them
into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.
On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and
two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to
remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer
settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed
to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.
There is much the same confusion now on every farm that has adopted
Summer Time. Farm work must be regulated by the sun--some things cannot
be done until the dew is off the ground, others cannot be done until the
noon-tide heat has passed, and so on with other things all through the
day; and the times for doing them have been fixed accordingly. It would
be disastrous to do the things an hour earlier: so the times for doing
them are all moved on. The clock says five instead of four, but what was
timed for five is timed for six.
For many years past the Board of Agriculture has called for a return on
4 June in every year with the acreage of the crops and the quantity of
live-stock on each farm, including horses but not including asses. In
1920 the War Office called for a return of horses and asses on 4 June.
So (I suppose) asses must be useless in agriculture, but of some use in
war. Just at that time the War Office was suspected of planning an
expedition into southern Russia; and I wondered if a man of genius had
been reading in Herodotos how a Persian army made an expedition there,
and frightened the enemy clean away by the braying of the asses in its
train.
Although the War Office and the Board of Agriculture were calling for
returns on the same day, 4 June, the War Office did not apply for them
direct, or through the Board of Agriculture, but through the Board of
Trade. And these authorities differed over mules. The War Office had
asked for a return of horses and asses, and said that ‘horse’ included
‘mule’; but the Board of Trade changed this into a return of horses,
mules and asses. Seeing that the Board of Trade was acting under an Army
Council Regulation made under section 114 of the Army Act, I doubted its
having any right whatever to distinguish horse and mule.
In this part of Devon we all received a notice in the autumn of 1917,
headed “Increased Food Production for 1918,” and informing us--“The area
of corn and potatoes allotted to the Southern Division of Devon for 1918
is 86,000 acres. In order to get this quantity it is necessary for all
farms to have 30 per cent. of their total acreage into corn and
potatoes. This percentage has been adopted by the Executive Committee
for the Division, who have power to enforce it. You are expected to have
[number inserted] acres into corn and potatoes in 1918.” I suppose the
fools imagined that an average of 30 per cent. on all the farms together
was the same thing as 30 per cent. on every single farm. But they had
the power, and they used it with disastrous results. They ploughed their
30 per cent. on dairy farms, destroying pasture that will not mature
again for years; and on other farms with 60 per cent. quite fit for
ploughing, they ploughed no more than 30. On some moorland farms they
only got their 30 by ploughing such sterile ground that the crop was of
less value than the seed that was put in.
There was a story of a successful advocate who was troubled on his
death-bed by the thought of having got innocent men convicted, but at
last found comfort in the thought of having also got guilty men
acquitted, so that, upon the whole, he had got justice done. And this
Committee will perhaps find comfort in the thought of having got the
specified amount of ploughing done.
In some flat parts of England people might believe that all land was
alike and one acre as good as another; but I cannot understand how
anyone could think so here, in a district that runs up from sea-level to
about 2000 feet above, with all sorts of soils and climates. The fools
may say they had no time to make a survey of each farm; but that is no
excuse. They had the figures at hand, and did not use them.
Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 a map was made of every parish
in England, and every field was numbered on the map; and the
corresponding number on the Tithe Apportionment gave the acreage of the
field and its state of cultivation. It is waste of seed and labour to
put corn or potatoes into fields that were not arable then, for they
were grown wherever it was possible to grow them, as they were paying
crops--Potato Disease did not appear till 1845, and the Corn Laws were
not repealed till 1846. The fools could easily have seen what fields
were arable then, and based their regulations upon that. They had the
figures in every parish, at Exeter for the whole of Devon, and in London
for the whole of England, for the apportionments and maps were made in
triplicate--one for the parson of the parish, one for the bishop of the
diocese, and one for the Tithe Commissioners themselves, which last is
at the office of the Board of Agriculture.
In the autumn of 1918 we had a notice that 35 per cent. of every holding
must be ploughed, and “substitution of quota (from one holding to
another) will not be allowed under any circumstances.” Suppose
arrangements had been made for ploughing an acre of productive land on
one holding instead of an acre of unproductive land upon another. It was
forbidden by these fools, in the name of Food Production.
Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all
they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they
have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to
blunder as prescribed.
As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to
think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law
assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and
might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage
agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. Such things have
been done before. Thus, the London County Council wanted an excuse for
running steamers on the Thames, and therefore made it impossible for the
steamboat companies to carry on. It then ran steamers at a loss, using
money from the rates, and finally came to grief with them.
These public bodies come to grief in the most foolish ways. I am one of
the trustees of a property in London, and the County Council scheduled
part of it for “betterment.” We could not comprehend how houses in one
street would be bettered by the Council’s widening another street that
ran parallel with it some hundred yards away. But the Council then
decided on making a new street at right angles to the street that it had
widened, and demolished these houses to make way for the new street. It
wanted now to buy them at their market value, but we made it buy them at
their “bettered” value--we could not, as trustees, sell property to the
Council for less than the Council’s own valuation of it. So the Council
paid us (with the ratepayers’ money) for a “betterment” that never
existed except in some cranks’ brains.
Lawyers abbreviate trustees into trēēs, and a careless copyist will
sometimes write trustees for trees, if the crossing of the _t_ is rather
long. On looking into a deed, I found a power to cut down and sell
trustees by public auction or by private treaty, etc., etc., and I was
one of the trustees there. In another trust there were two sums of
Consols in the joint names of myself and co-trustee. They were entered
in the usual way as A and B accounts, and it happened that our B account
went on long after our A account was closed. My co-trustee was a knight,
belonging to various orders, and ‘B act.’ came next the groups of
letters following his name. After a time this was altered into
‘Bart.’--an excusable mistake, as there was no ‘A act.’ and he was
‘Sir.’ Having thus become a baronet here, he was entered as ‘Bart.’ in
other stocks standing in his name.
A friend of mine was being shown into a stockbroker’s room just as a
shabby old man was coming out; and the old man turned back and said
something which showed that he was speculating heavily. My friend
remonstrated with the stockbroker for letting the man risk money that he
manifestly could not afford to lose. But the answer was--“Don’t make
yourself uneasy over him. He’s very fond of speculating, but he always
keeps a hundred thousand in Consols, so that he may never be reduced to
actual want.”
I doubt if many people understand the happiness of misers. It must be
like the happiness of feeling thoroughly fit. There is a joy in knowing
you can jump clean over any gate you see; and I think the miser has this
joy in knowing he can pay for anything he likes. But he does not go
buying things, any more than you go jumping over gates.
The air is often very buoyant here, especially upon the hill tops; and
one morning on the top of Easton Down a friend of mine turned round to
me and said--“Well, you know, I don’t think the Ascension was very much
of a miracle after all.” And certainly one felt there was no saying
where one wouldn’t go to, if one just gave a jump.
A man here said to me, “Her went up ’xactly like an angel,” as if he
often saw them go, and thought I must have seen them too. (He was
speaking of the finish of a play he saw in town.) Another person here
was very certain of what angels did or did not do. A stranger came to
the back-door one Sunday morning, and asked for a drink of cider to help
him on his way. He was denied it by the maid who was in charge there,
and thereupon he said to her--“You know not what you do. You might be
entertaining angels unawares.” To which she answered--“Get thee’ long.
Angels don’t go drinkin’ cider church-times.”
People sometimes ask me for advice on matters of which I am no judge,
and a girl once asked me this:--She had been engaged to a young man for
several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to
suffer dreadfully from toothache; and in the early days of his affection
he sent her to the dentist, and paid for putting in a plate of teeth.
Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or
wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.
When teeth are drawn, young people here think nothing of the pain, but
often speak with pride of the resistance of their teeth--“he scarce
could stir’n,” or “he had a proper job to get’n.” In a letter to my
father, 20 January 1860, my grandfather says--“I saw a man spitting out
blood, and asked him the matter, when he said he had had a tooth drawn,
and the doctor had torn the jaw.... I gave him brandy on lint, which
soon stopped the flow of blood.... The old dentists or tooth-drawers
used to apply salt and water, which was not bad, though a little brandy
would have been better: but the fact is their charge was only sixpence,
so they could not afford the brandy. But now, I hear, those new
fashioned ones charge as much as five shillings: therefore there is no
excuse.”
A man here who was born in 1852, tells me that he had whooping-cough
when he was four years old, and that he was treated for it (if not cured
of it) by being laid on a sheep’s forme. A forme is the imprint that a
sheep makes on the grass by lying in one place all night; and when the
sheep gets up in the morning, a sort of vapour rises from the warm
ground underneath into the cold morning air. He was taken out into a
meadow in the early morning, and was told to lie face-downwards on a
forme and breathe this vapour in, not merely through the nostrils but
with open mouth. He breathed it in until the ground was cold and there
was no more vapour to be breathed (a matter of about five minutes) and
then he was taken home to bed.
People now-a-days laugh at cures like that, but they laughed at Jenner
when he first said that there was something about a cow that kept
small-pox away. There may be something about a sheep that cures the
whooping-cough; but there may be people who would rather have the
whooping-cough than cure it in this way. I remember about fifty years
ago a claret was being advertised as an antidote to gout; and the old
three-bottle men who tried it, all said that they would rather have the
gout.
I started drinking port when I was less than two years old. An
injudicious friend remonstrated with my mother--if I had port when I was
well, what could I take if I were ill and needed strengthening? She
answered that it would prevent my ever being ill. I never was ill enough
to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five, and might never have been
ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I
degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles,
as I should. There is an entry in Dyott’s Diary, 10 November
1787--“There were just twenty dined, and we drank sixty-three bottles of
wine.” I heard of a man going to a physician because he could not drink
three bottles, as his father did before him. The physician said,
“Perhaps it _was_ port that your father drank.” Even in my time it has
become a different wine. If I can trust my tongue, the vintages of 1900
and 1904 are quite unlike the vintages of 1847 and 1858 at similar ages.
Phylloxera attacked the Douro vineyards after 1878, and most of them
have been replanted with a stronger sort of vine.
My grandfather was a little disturbed about my starting port so early in
my life. He writes to my father on 22 November 1858, “My views are
different from yours respecting the treatment of young children:
however, I hope all will go right with him,” and again on 30 January
1859, “I hope he gets on well--but not too much port wine, mind.” All
went right with me, and I got on as he hoped; and he writes on 25
December 1859 that a neighbour said I had “limbs strong enough for a
wrestler.”
Wrestling was formerly as great a sport in Devon as in Cornwall; but it
died out in this district about fifty years ago. My brother writes to my
father, 2 August 1866--“I went to see the wrestling, but it was a rough
and clumsy business.” This was at a festival at Lustleigh in honour of
the opening of the railway. My grandfather writes to my father, 28 May
1858--“There was a grand wrestling match at Moreton on Saturday, set on
foot by Mr *****, who said he would see one match more before he left
the world.” A few years earlier there was wrestling at Moreton every
summer. My grandfather notes, 22 June 1841, “Moreton Wrestling today,”
14 June 1842, “Wrestling at Moreton today and tomorrow,” and so on, and
usually with a further note that so-and-so or so-and-so had gone off
there instead of sticking to work.
Writing to my father on 10 November 1861, my grandfather says, “Football
was a game much played in my youth, but cricket was my favourite game.”
He was born in 1789; and the cricket and football of a century ago were
very different from cricket and football now.
The chimney-pot hat used to be worn in playing cricket; and I have seen
it worn in matches on village-greens and even at Lord’s. The distinction
between Gentlemen and Players was much sharper then than now; and the
Gentlemen wore chimney-pots, while the Players wore caps. Policemen also
wore chimney-pots, a London fashion adopted in Milan and retained by
policemen there. And the Channel Pilots wore chimney-pots. I remember
them on liners starting from the Thames. The pilots were dropped off
Dover or the Isle of Wight, and kept their hats on even when going down
the ship’s side to the pilot cutter, and came on board in the same style
on voyages home.
My father told me how he once got a lesson in the Continental way of
taking off your hat to anyone. He met Louis Philippe strolling in the
Tuileries gardens, and raised his hat to him as he would have raised it
to Prince Albert or anyone like that in England. And in reply the King
not merely raised his hat, but swung it right down to the level of his
knees and up again.
He notes in his diary on 17 September 1840 that he was at Versailles
that afternoon, and “there were no cheers or any sign of respect” when
Louis Philippe drove out from the Trianon. He also notes on 15 September
that “the Palais de Justice is strongly guarded, as young Bonaparte is
imprisoned there.” Some years afterwards he saw ‘young Bonaparte’ in the
Tuileries gardens and Louis Philippe at Kew.--Napoleon the Third had
landed in France on 6 August 1840, and was sentenced on 6 October to
imprisonment for life, not escaping until 1846.
After a visit to the Palais de Justice, 16 October 1839, he notes down
in his diary--“An advocate on the right bench was addressing the judges
as I entered. He used an immense deal of action and gesture, quite
unknown at the English bar. Then the advocate on the other side replied.
His action was much more violent, even when reading from documents.” He
liked things quietly done. In his diary, 24 March 1838, he speaks of
Lord Denman as “a judge more to my liking than any one I ever saw: quite
a contrast to some of them, especially in his exclusive attention to the
case in hand, instead of officiously meddling with every thing and body
in the court.”
Some twenty years ago a very astute old man in Paris got into litigation
in the English courts about a group of companies that he controlled; and
he asked me confidentially how much I thought he ought to give the judge
in order to secure the right decision. I felt it would be waste of time
to tell him that we did not do this here: so I told him what huge
salaries our judges got, and what big fortunes most of them had made
while they were at the Bar. He saw their price would be prohibitive, and
gave the notion up. He really had a very strong case that was bound to
win upon its merits; but from what he said, I gathered that merits were
not always the decisive point in France in litigation or in anything
else.
I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been
at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never
made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be
carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless
he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum
than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good
information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the
various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not
only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate
that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court--they were all inside a
great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo--and I have
never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the
members of that syndicate.
There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was
hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom
that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily,
and the brigands kept their word and gave him half.
I was at Taormina in 1883--it was a quiet place then with only two small
inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now--and I was reading in Goethe’s
diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the
sea and planned _Nausikaa_, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more
than sixty lines. I am only a _Wahrheit_ man myself, and have no
_Dichtung_ in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at
the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in
Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him
at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek
colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this
portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only
talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not
picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the
Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will
model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as
entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the
Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left
broken-hearted at each place where he stayed.
A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day
Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and
he walked into a brook he did not see: hence _Del mar Tirreno_. And one
day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence _Rock
of Ages_. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for
he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.
Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play
seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were
convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about
Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous
luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely
Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who
adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that
is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off.
Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his
maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation
late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the
_Odyssey_, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of
Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji
Baba was to Morier--a character of whom he could narrate all manner of
tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and
Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they
first thought of planting colonies there.
For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.--as
Herodotos avers, ii. 53--and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of
all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties
of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where
the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see
anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached
a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with
advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s
treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the
Pope.
There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the
best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called
the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic _maklûbah_, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so
that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is
about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas
and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you
stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots
out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is
scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then,
and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.