miniature men and women, coloured photographs alive and moving, trees
waving, now and then dogs crossing the bright sun picture. I was only
there a few moments, and I have never been in one since, and yet so
inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as
if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come
and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an
instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions
of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of
those years are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet
they cannot occupy the space of a pin's point. They have neither length,
breadth, nor thickness, none of the qualifications of mathematical
substance, and yet they must in some way be a species of matter. The fact
indicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. Now I wish I
could put before you a coloured, living, moving picture, like that of the
camera obscura, of some other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were
painted on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin of green
downs. They were large enough to have the charm of vague, indefinite
extension, and yet all could be distinctly seen. Large squares of green
corn that was absorbing its yellow from the sunlight; chess squares,
irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich blood-red trifolium;
others of scarlet sainfoin and blue lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies
here and there. Not all of these, of course, at once, but they followed
so quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one and the same
pictures, and had you painted them altogether on the same canvas,
together with ripe wheat, they would not have seemed out of place. Never
was such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk the colours
are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the yellow mustard and charlock a
keener yellow; the air, too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks;
men and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among clumps of trees,
where the chimneys and gables of farmhouses are partly visible; red-tiled
barns away yonder; a shepherd moving his hurdles; away again the black
funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-wheel above hawthorn bushes--all so
distinct and close under that you might almost fear to breathe for fear
of dimming the mirror. The few white clouds sailing over seemed to belong
to the fields on which their shadows were now foreshortened, now
lengthened, as if they were really part of the fields, like the crops,
and the azure sky so low down as to be the roof of the house and not at
all a separate thing. And the sun a lamp that you might almost have
pushed along his course faster with your hand; a loving and interesting
sun that wanted the wheat to ripen, and stayed there in the slow-drawn
arc of the summer day to lend a hand. Sun and sky and clouds close here
and not across any planetary space, but working with us in the same
field, shoulder to shoulder, with man. Then you might see the white doves
yonder flutter up suddenly out of the trees by the farm, little flecks of
white clouds themselves, and everywhere all throughout the plain an
exquisite silence, a delicious repose, not one clang or harshness of
sound to shatter the beauty of it. There you might stand on the high down
among the thyme and watch it, hour after hour, and still no interruption;
nothing to break it up. It was something like the broad folio of an
ancient illuminated manuscript, in gold, gules, blue, green; with
foliated scrolls and human figures, somewhat clumsy and thick, but
quaintly drawn, and bold in their intense realism.
There was another wheat-field by the side of which I used to walk
sometimes in the evenings, as the grains in the cars began to grow firm.
The path ran for a mile beside it--a mile of wheat in one piece--all
those million million stalks the same height, all with about the same
number of grains in each car, all ripening together. The hue of the
surface travelled along as you approached; the tint of yellow shifted
farther like the reflection of sunlight on water, but the surface was
really much the same colour everywhere. It seemed a triumph of culture
over such a space, such regularity, such perfection of myriads of plants
springing in their true lines at the same time, each particular ear
perfect, and a mile of it. Perfect work with the plough, the drill, the
harrow in every detail, and yet such breadth. Let your hand touch the
ears lightly as you walk--drawn through them as if over the side of a
boat in water--feeling the golden heads. The sparrows fly out every now
and then ahead; some of the birds like their corn as it hardens, and some
while it is soft and full of milky sap. There are hares within, and many
a brood of partridge chicks that cannot yet use their wings. Thick as the
seed itself the feathered creatures have been among the wheat since it
was sown. Finches more numerous than the berries on the hedges; sparrows
like the finches multiplied by finches, linnets, rooks, like leaves on
the trees, wood-pigeons whose crops are like bushel baskets for capacity;
and now as it ripens the multitude will be multiplied by legions, and as
it comes to the harvest there is a fresh crop of sparrows from the nests
in the barns, you may see a brown cloud of them a hundred yards long.
Besides which there were the rabbits that ate the young green blades, and
the mice that will be busy in the sheaves, and the insects from
spring-time to granary, a nameless host uncounted. A whole world, as it
were, let loose upon the wheat, to eat, consume, and wither it, and yet
it conquers the whole world. The great field you see was filled with gold
corn four feet deep as a pitcher is filled with water to the brim. Of
yore the rich man is said, in the Roman classic, to have measured his
money, so here you might have measured it by the rood. The sunbeams sank
deeper and deeper into the wheatears, layer upon layer of light, and the
colour deepened by these daily strokes. There was no bulletin to tell the
folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood of the wheat
to its hour of overflow. Yet there went through the village a sense of
expectation, and men said to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one
knew the day--the last day of doom of the golden race; every one knew it
was nigh. One evening there was a small square piece cut at one side, a
little notch, and two shocks stood there in the twilight. Next day the
village sent forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and slay.
It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great farmer gave the
signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, or child that did not talk of
that. Well-to-do people stopped their vehicles and walked out into the
new stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody--all to
exchange a word or two with the workers. These were so terribly in
earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so
intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might
come and go as sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more men were
put on day by day, and women to bind the sheaves, till the vast field
held the village, yet they seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of
the golden mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the wheat
fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine
could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and
sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No
one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and
cradled in a cottage, and passed his childhood bareheaded in July heats
and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to
wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer day is
long, and they were there hours before I was up. The edge of the
reap-hook had to be driven by force through the stout stalks like a
sword, blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; the back
stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery rays from a full disc on
the head and neck. I think some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled
up in their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll of the
turban about the head, and perhaps they would have done better if they
had adopted the custom of the South and wound a long scarf about the
middle of the body, for they were very liable to be struck down with such
internal complaints as come from great heat. Their necks grew black, much
like black oak in old houses. Their open chests were always bare, and
flat, and stark, and never rising with rounded bust-like muscle as the
Greek statues of athletes.
The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed
cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest-field, and
shrunk together--all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle
remaining. Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it
is not long ago, either--I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was
piecework at so much per acre--like solid gold to men and women who had
lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and
slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the
heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the
air--the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.
No song, no laugh, no stay--on from morn till night, possessed with a
maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum
they would receive; and what is man's heart and brain to money? So hard,
you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have
prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket,
and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the
furnace of the sun.
Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here was the wheat, the
beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of the flowery
summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give
life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that
of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many
a low mound in the churchyard--once visible, now level--was the sooner
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few
weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life--no rest, no
calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly
offered by the gods--the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to
a shapeless and hopeless fall.
The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the
most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains
its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and
the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was
something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the
Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The
gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so
that a very large quantity was held tightly in a very small compass. The
gleaner's sheaf looked like the knot of a girl's hair woven in and bound.
It was a tradition of the wheat field handed down from generation to
generation, a thing you could not possibly do unless you had been shown
the secret--like the knots the sailors tie, a kind of hand art. The
wheatstalk being thick at one end makes the sheaf heavier and more solid
there, and so in any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a
rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are built thick in the
middle and lessen gradually toward the top and toward the ground. The
warm yellow of the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter's day
under a grey sky; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm and comfortable,
thrown down thickly in the yards for the roan cattle.
After the village has gone back to its home still the work of the wheat
is not over; there is the thatching with straw of last year, which is
bleached and contrasts with the yellow of the fresh-gathered crop. Next
the threshing; and meantime the ploughs are at work, and very soon there
is talk of seed-time.
I used to look with wonder when I was a boy at the endless length of wall
and the enormous roof of a great tithe barn. The walls of Spanish
convents, with little or no window to break the vast monotony, somewhat
resemble it: the convent is a building, but does not look like a home; it
is too big, too general. So this barn, with its few windows, seemed too
immense to belong to any one man. The tithe barn has so completely
dropped out of modern life that it may be well to briefly mention that
its use was to hold the tenth sheaf from every wheat-field in the parish.
The parson's tithe was the real actual tenth sheaf bodily taken from
every field of corn in the district. A visible tenth, you see; a very
solid thing. Imagine the vast heap they would have made, imagine the
hundreds and hundreds of sacks of wheat they filled when they were
threshed. I have often thought that it would perhaps be a good thing if
this contribution of the real tenth could be brought back again for
another purpose. If such a barn could be filled now, and its produce
applied to the help of the poor and aged and injured of the village, we
might get rid of that blot on our civilisation--the workhouse. Mr.
Besant, in his late capital story, 'The Children of Gibeon,' most truly
pointed out that it was custom which rendered all men indifferent to the
sufferings of their fellow-creatures. In the old Roman days men were
crucified so often that it ceased even to be a show; the soldiers played
at dice under the miserable wretches: the peasant women stepping by
jested and laughed and sang. Almost in our own time dry skeletons creaked
on gibbets at every cross-road:--
When for thirty shillings men were hung,
And the thirst for blood grew stronger,
Men's lives were valued then at a sheep's--
Thank God that lasts no longer.
So strong is custom and tradition, and the habit of thought it weaves
about us, that I have heard ancient and grave farmers, when the fact was
mentioned with horror, hum, and ah! and handle their beards, and mutter
that 'they didn't know as 'twas altogether such a bad thing as they was
hung for sheep-stealing.' There were parsons then, as now, in every rural
parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did
they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity, and demand
its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes and
grog very comfortably.
The gallows at the cross-roads is gone, but the workhouse stands, and
custom, cruel custom, that tyrant of the mind, has inured us (to use an
old word) to its existence in our midst. Apart from any physical
suffering, let us only consider the slow agony of the poor old reaper
when he feels his lusty arm wither, and of the grey bowed wife as they
feel themselves drifting like a ship ashore to that stony waiting-room.
For it is a waiting-room till the grave receives them. Economically, too,
the workhouse is a heavy loss and drag.
Could we, then, see the tithe barn filled again with golden wheat for
this purpose of help to humanity, it might be a great and wonderful good.
With this tenth to feed the starving and clothe the naked; with the tenth
to give the little children a midday meal at the school--that would be
natural and true. In the course of time, as the land laws lessen their
grip, and the people take possession of the earth on which they stand, it
is more than probable that something of this kind will really come about.
It would be only simple justice after so many centuries--it takes so many
hundreds of years to get even that.
'Workhouse, indeed!' I have heard the same ancient well-to-do greybeards
ejaculate, 'workhouse! they ought to be very thankful they have got such
a place to go to!'
All the village has been to the wheat-field with reaping-hooks, and
waggons and horses, the whole strength of man has been employed upon it;
little brown hands and large brown hands, blue eyes and dark eyes have
been there searching about; all the intelligence of human beings has been
brought to bear, and yet the stubble is not empty. Down there come again
the ever-increasing clouds of sparrows; as a cloud rises here another
cloud descends beyond it, a very mist and vapour as it were of wings. It
makes one wonder to think where all the nests could have been; there
could hardly have been enough caves and barns for all these to have been
bred in. Every one of the multitude has a keen pair of eyes and a hungry
beak, and every single individual finds something to eat in the stubble.
Something that was not provided for them, crumbs that have escaped from
this broad table, and there they are every day for weeks together, still
finding food. If you will consider the incredible number of little
mouths, and the busy rate at which they ply them hour by hour, you may
imagine what an immense number of grains of wheat must have escaped man's
hand, for you must remember that every time they peck they take a whole
grain. Down, too, come the grey-blue wood-pigeons and the wild
turtle-doves. The singing linnets come in parties, the happy
greenfinches, the streaked yellow-hammers, as if any one had delicately
painted them in separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the
brown buntings, chaffinches--out they come from the hazel copses, where
the nuts are dropping, and the hedge berries turning red, and every one
finds something to his liking. There are the seeds of the charlock and
the thistle, and a hundred other little seeds, insects, and minute
atom-like foods it needs a bird's eye to know. They are never still, they
sweep up into the hedges and line the boughs, calling and talking, and
away again to another rood of stubble without any order or plan of
search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown seeds. Up and down
the day through with a zest never failing. It is beautiful to listen to
them and watch them, if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree
boughs, here the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the shade as if the
direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly
in the shade. The linnets will suddenly sweep up into the boughs and
converse sweetly over your head. The sunshine lingers and grows sweeter
as the autumn gives tokens of its coming in the buff bryony leaf, and the
acorn filling its cup. They are so happy, the birds, yet there are few to
listen to them. I have often looked round and wondered that no one else
was about hearkening to them. Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives
in England than anywhere else. We do not shoot them; the fowlers do
mischief, still they make but little impression; there are few birds of
prey, and there is not that fearful bloodthirstiness that makes a
tropical forest so terrible in fact, under its outward show of glowing
colour. There, with cruel hawks and owls, and serpents, and beasts of
prey, a bird's life is one long terror. They are ever on the watch here,
but they are not so fearfully harassed, and are not certain as it were
beforehand to be torn to pieces. The land is well cultivated, and the
more the culture the more the food for them. Frost and snow are their
greatest enemies, but even these do not often last a great while. It is a
land of woods, and above all of hedges, which are much more favourable to
birds than forests, so that they are better off in England than in other
countries. From the sowing to the reaping, the wheat-field gives a
constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but
a free and bountiful largess. Then the stubble must be broken up by the
plough, and again there is a fresh helping for them. Brown partridge, and
black rook, and yellowhammer, all hues and degrees, come to the
wheat-field.
II.
Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old
things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the
farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead,
and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all
other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses
at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to
harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were
dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above
the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost
prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon
up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same
farm--it was Sunday--a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in
a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun
shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long
black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us
so quietly--a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine
has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have
been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel
of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth.
New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's
day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it
seems that a whole storm, as it were, of innovations has burst upon the
fields ever since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the
green leaf. The labouring men used to tell me how they went reaping, for
although you may see what is called reaping still going on at
harvest-time, it is not reaping. True reaping is done with a hook alone
and the hand; all the present reaping is 'vagging,' with a hook in one
hand and a bent stick in the other, and instead of drawing the hook
towards him and cutting it, the reaper chops at the straw as he might at
an enemy. Then came the reaping machines, that simply cut the wheat, and
left it lying flat on the ground, which were constantly altered and
improved. Now there are the wire and string binders, that not only cut
the corn, but gather it together and bind it in sheaves--a vast saving in
labour. Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms,
and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine;
the new things come, but the old still remains. In itself the
reaping-hook is an enlarged sickle, and the sickle was in use in Roman
times, and no man knows how long before that. With it the reaper cut off
the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if
it had been a pruning-knife. It is the oldest of old implements--very
likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and
then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of
the 'vagging' hook. In the hand of Ceres it was the very symbol of
agriculture, and that was a goodly time ago. At this hour they say the
sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more
to get the straw than the ear.
On the broad page of some ancient illuminated manuscript, centuries old,
you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at
the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on
through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are
all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old
days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets
printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and
when the corn laws starved half England--those were the times of the
flail. Every barn--and there were then barns on every farm, think of the
number--had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all
the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their
most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours
of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging
that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and
drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.