had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, _i.e._ Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks--in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms--which it is now
the cry to multiply--for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their
collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern
ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the
flail will become as common as ever.
There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London
said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels,
and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its
constitution--still there were waggons in those days, and there are
waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry--the slow waggons
gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of
years since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the
old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph
wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a
thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough,
and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing
machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields,
and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.
If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to
paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep
of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into
the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's
volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets
in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think
that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more
lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she
returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers. I should
like to paint the lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping
machine continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed the
Greek fret. People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the
half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine.
Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old
wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should
have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually
omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the
first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal,
poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a
modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour
rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give
him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense
of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs
no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature.
Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.
All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out--the
village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not
altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and
as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate;
the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there
used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the
laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered,
still it is evident to any one of dispassionate thought, while such
immense quantities of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made
in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case,
and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether
you farm four acres or four hundred.
New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at
the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body
was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great
checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a
stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every
line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have
been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British
bull-dog growled in his countenance--very likely pleasantness itself to
those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the
barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of
the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the
winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his
great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he
would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and
the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap
tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,--farmers, and
bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers--and their clothes are
different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that
you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood
engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the
same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern
country sketch or picture you would _not_ find them, they would be
smoothed away--drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like
easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.
Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no
drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb,
with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In
the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their
mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not
know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy
day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing
all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort
of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the
wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming
along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round
bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to mass
in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the
rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches
till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every
hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go
to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to
read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows
than they talk hedge and ditch language. They do not talk Pope, or
Milton, or Addison; they 'knaaws,' 'they be a-gwoin thur,' it's a 'geat,'
and a 'vield,' and a 'vurrow.' These are the old faces you see, the same
old powers are at work to fashion them. Heavy, blind blows of the Wind,
the Rain, Frost, and Heat, have beaten up their faces in rude _repousse_
work. They have nails in their boots, but new hats on their heads; he who
paints them aright should paint the old nailed boots, but also the new
hats and the Waltham watches. Why do they not read? All have been taught,
and curious as the inconsistency may seem, they all value the privilege
of being _able_ to read and write, and yet they do not exercise it,
except in a casual, random way. I for one, when the public schools began
all through the rural districts, thought that at last the printing-press
was going to reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, but
in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting
to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their
fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides
on the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips
and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one
sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not
read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the
second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to
see what is wanted.
First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast
and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type
indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his
family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red
comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery
attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways--there's an illustrated
pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only!
Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the
feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red
wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)--here's a Chronicon Nurembergense
with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple
matter, and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed in
watching and living with such things. Add to these the veined elms, whose
innumerable branches divide like the veins or the nerves of a
physiological diagram, or like sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning
from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to
these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity
of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the
incomparable beauty of the mowing grass. Now remember that they live
among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes
wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat
surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and
printed in such enormous quantities, do not touch a country mind. They
have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely
well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey--you may see it,
for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which
fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among
stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist
who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their
inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among
the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the
birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books
are not natural, and do not care for them; they may be illustrated in
gold and colours, sumptuously got up, and yet they are failures. Children
do not take these to bed with them. I have seen this myself; I bought so
many books to please children, but could never do it till by chance some
one sent a little American toy-book, 'The History of the Owl and his
Little One, and the Manoeuvres of the Fox.' This had a little of the
spirit of the woods in it, and was read and re-read for a year. Only the
other day a lady was telling me much the same thing, how she had bought
book after book but could never hit on anything to please her little boy,
till at last she found an American publication, roughly illustrated,
which he always had by him. It is very strange that the art of the
old-fashioned book for children has gone over to New York, which seems to
us the land of newness.
For grown-up people the modern books which are sent out in such numbers,
often very cheap, have likewise an artificial cityfied air so obviously
got up and theatrical, such a mark of machinery on them, all stamped and
chucked out by the thousand, that they have no attraction for a people
who live with nature, and even in old age retain a certain childlike
faith in honesty and genuine work. The reprints of good old authors, too,
which may be had for a few pennies now, are so edited away that all the
golden ring of the metal is clipped out of them. Overlaid with notes, and
analyses, and critical exegesis, the original throb of the author's heart
has disappeared from these polished bones. Just to suggest the book that
would please the country reader, look for a moment at those works which
came into existence at the very first dawn of printing--those volumes
with strongly drawn and Durer-like illustrations, very rough, and without
perspective, but whose meaning is at once understood, and which somehow
convey what I may call a genuine impression. Any countryman would tell
you at once that the illustrations of half the books of the present day
are mere vamped-up shallowness, drawn from a city man's mind in a city
room by gaslight. You must consider that the countryman who lives out of
doors, and always with nature, is, as regards his reading, very much in
the same mental position as the people who lived four hundred years
ago--in the days when costly and rare manuscripts, few and far between,
chained to the desk, were just being superseded by printed books at a
fifth the price, which could be actually bought and carried home. Till
quite lately so few books have circulated in country places that they may
be said to have been like these old manuscripts. The early printed books
were simply the manuscripts printed, and that is why they remain to this
day the finest specimens of typography, quite incomparable and not to be
approached by present-day printers. The art of the scribe, elaborated
through centuries, had reached a marvellous perfection; the first printer
copied them--the magic Fust actually sold his first books as manuscripts.
Since printers have only copied printers, books have steadily declined in
excellence. I have been obliged to use the outside to suggest the
inside--country readers want that which is genuine, honest, and, in a
word, really good; you cannot please them with vamped-up book-making. Two
books occur to me at this moment which would be greatly appreciated in
every country home, from that of the peasant who has just begun to read
to the houses of well-educated and well-to-do people, if they only knew
of their existence and their contents--of course provided they were cheap
enough, for country people have to be careful of their money nowadays. I
allude to Darwin's 'Climbing Plants' and to his 'Earthworms;' these are
astonishing works of singular patience and careful observation. The first
gives most fascinating facts about such a common plant, for example, as
the hedge bryony and the circular motion of its tendrils. Any farmer, for
instance, will tell you that the hop-bine will insist upon going round
the pole in one direction, and you cannot persuade it to go the other.
These circular movements seem almost to resemble those of the planets
about their centre, all things down to the ether seem to have a rotatory
motion; and some foreign plants which he grew send their far-extended
tendrils round and round with so patent a movement that you can see it
hour by hour like the hand of a clock. Perhaps the little book on
earthworms is a yet more wonderful achievement of this great genius, who
had not only untiring patience to observe and verify, but also possessed
imagination, and could thereby see the motive idea at work behind the
facts. At first it has a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy
and prejudiced have been our views of the despised worm thrown up by
every ploughshare.
I have spoken of the veined elms and their thousand thousand branches
that divide like the nerves; from each of these nerves of living wood
there has fallen its breathing lungs of leaf. Where are these million
leaves? By night the worm has drawn them into his gallery beneath the
surface, and they have formed his food to again become the richest guano,
to help the succulent growth of green grass and corn. Merely for profit
alone, the profit of this digested food for plants, the agriculturist
should preserve some trees that their leaves may thus be applied. The
despised worm, the lowly worm, is actually so exquisitely organised that
the whole of its body is sensitive to light, and is as conscious of the
ray as the pupil of your own eye. Here is great and good work like that
of those classics, the manuscripts of which were the first to be copied
by the early printers, and books like this would be well thumbed of the
country reader.
In a degree the interior of the country bears a certain resemblance to
the state of Spain. Of that sunny land, travellers tell us the strangest
inconsistencies of the people and natural products. It is an arid land,
without verdure, nothing but prickly aloes and scattered orange groves,
mere dots in a sunburnt expanse. Silver and gold abound, and every other
metal, yet none of the mines pay except the quicksilver. A rich soil is
uncultivated, and every natural advantage thrown away. There are
railways, and engines, and telegraphs, and books, but the populace are
still Spaniards, conservative in traditions, and wedded to old customs;
often nominally Republican, but in fact of the ancient creeds and ways.
Like this in lesser degree, everything among our green leaves and golden
wheat is in a confused mixture, at once backwards and forwards,
progressive and retrograde. Here is some of the best soil in the world,
numerous natural advantages, close proximity to immense markets, such as
London. There seem mines of gold and silver in every acre, yet there is a
crushing poverty among the farmers, and exacting poverty among their
dependants the labourers. Every farm may be said to be within reach of
railway communication, yet the producers know nothing of their customers.
The country wishes new land laws to abolish the last vestiges of
feudalism, and is beginning to unite against tithes, and in the same
breath votes Conservative and places a Conservative Government in office.
It would break down the monopoly of the railways, and at the same time
would like a monopoly of protection for itself. It has learned to read
and does not buy books. Science has been shouted over the length and
breadth of the land, and chemistry, and I know not what, called to the
assistance of the farmer, and every day we are drifting more and more
backwards into the rule-of-thumb methods of our forefathers. No anarchy,
happily--omitting that there is a strong resemblance to Spain. For an
instance, in the daily papers it has become as common as possible to see
an advertisement of farm-house apartments to let. Numbers of farm people
look forward to their letting season in the same way as at the sea-side
and in London. This is an immense breach in the ancient isolated manners
of country life. The old farmers, and only a very little time ago, would
as soon have thought of flying as of opening their doors to strangers,
and indeed their rooms were scarcely furnished in a way to receive them.
On the other hand, many farmhouses are empty altogether, and the land is
un-tilled, because it cannot be let at any price, and lapsing backwards
into barbarism. Everything used to be so fixed: there was a sort of caste
of farmers. A man born in a farmhouse never thought of anything else but
farming, and waited and waited, perhaps till he was grey, to get a farm;
now there are few who have such fixed ideas, they are ready to take a
chance at home or abroad. Yet it is the same old country, and with the
new ways and science, and learning, and civilisation, it is as with the
machinery, they are all sunk and lost in the firm old lines. It is all
changed and just the same. What a clamour there used to be about the
damage done by the hares and rabbits to the crops! By-and-by Parliament
said, 'Shoot the hares and rabbits.' To work they went and demolished
them, and now, lo! there is a feeling getting about that we don't want to
be rid of all the hares and rabbits. Hares are almost formed on purpose
to be good sport, and make a jolly good dish, a pleasant addition to the
ceaseless round of mutton and beef to which the dead level of
civilisation reduces us. Coursing is capital, the harriers first-rate.
Now every man who walks about the fields is more or less at heart a
sportsman, and the farmer having got the right of the gun he is not
unlikely to become to some extent a game preserver. When they could not
get it they wanted to destroy it, now they have got it they want to keep
it. The old feeling coming up again--the land reasserting itself, Spain
you see--down with feudalism, but let us have the game. Look down the
long list of hounds kept in England, not one of which could get a run
were it not for the good-will of the farmers, and indeed of the
labourers. Hunting is a mimicry of the mediaeval chase, and this is the
nineteenth century of the socialist, yet every man of the fields loves to
hear the horn and the burst of the hounds. Never was shooting, for
instance, carried to such perfection, perfect guns made with scientific
accuracy, plans of campaign among the pheasants set out with diagrams as
if there was going to be a battle of Blenheim in the woods. To be a
successful sportsman nowadays you must be a well-drilled veteran, never
losing presence of mind, keeping your nerve under fire--flashes to the
left of you, reports to the right of you, shot whistling from the second
line--a hero amid the ceaseless rattle of musketry and the 'dun hot
breath of war.' Of old time the knight had to go through a long course of
instructions. He had to acquire the _manege_ of his steed, the use of the
lance and sword, how to command a troop, and how to besiege a castle.
Till perfect in the arts of war and complete in the minutiae of falconry
and all the terms of the chase, he could not take his place in the ranks
of men. The English country gentleman who now holds something the same
position socially as the knight, is not a sportsman till he can use the
breechloader with terrible effect at the pheasant-shoot, till he can
wield the salmon-rod, or ride better than any Persian. Never were
people--people in the widest sense--fonder of horses and dogs, and every
kind of animal, than at the present day. The town has gone out into the
country, but the country has also penetrated the mind of the town. No
sooner has a man made a little money in the city, than away he rushes to
the fields and rivers, and nothing would so deeply hurt the pride of the
_nouveaux riches_ as to insinuate that he was not quite fully imbued with
the spirit and the knowledge of the country. If you told him he was
ignorant of books he might take that as a compliment; if you suggested in
a sidelong way that he did not understand horses he would never more be
friends with you again.
Nothing has died out, but everything has grown stronger that appertains
to the land. Heraldry, for instance, and genealogy, county
history--people don't want to be sheriffs now, but they would very much
like to be able to say one of their ancestors was sheriff so many
centuries ago. The old crests, the old coats of arms, are more thought of
than ever; every fragment of antiquity valued. Almost everything old is
of the country, either of the mansion or of the cottage; old silver
plate, and old china, and works of the old masters in the one, old books,
old furniture, old clocks in the other.