THE COUNTRYSIDE
Outside this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and
with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural
England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and
apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of
the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there
who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with
energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life
of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe
in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or
tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless
toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered
feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity
masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population
in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are
absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no
new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy
with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a
particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force
in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are
left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and
intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations--hedging and
ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things--are
becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a
feverish prosperity and adventure--motors along all the main roads,
golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants,
excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties--we
can discern the passing of a race of men.
From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There
is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village
which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig
its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own
dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It
is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being
adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on
now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few
shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will
sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and
binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace,
discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries,
and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13]
In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast
wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the
houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down
like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled;
they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient,
the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly
going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural
returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,”
he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and
thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their
anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and
lost their own land.”[14]
And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants
of the labourer still unsatisfied--Hope and a Home. He laments the
passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and
channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for
them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class
beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call
his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He
exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the
sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work,
and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour
of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him
of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the
workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere
material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in
which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling
walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life
and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole
presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live
in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any
stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of
the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was
life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as
a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in
the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever
more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village
meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed.
It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as
‘_le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et
orgueilleux_.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]
This writer does not despair of revival as a result of large and
drastic changes. “The monopoly of great farmers must be broken up,” he
boldly declares, “before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English
peasant.” He has discovered deep in the heart of the country labourer
that “Love of the Land” which has survived through all the generations
of hopeless drudgery. He recognises it as “a survival from the days
when an able-bodied Englishman, bred on and to the land, might cherish
the hope of one day calling a corner of it his own, at least as the
tenant of a landlord without personal interest in the degradation of
his dependants.” Here is the sole asset we possess in the work of
rural revival. Parliament has been attempting by legislation to give
to some select persons in the villages direct access to the land. The
labourer to-day is slowly and doubtfully realising that a law has been
passed which is designed to work for his benefit. The whole conception
is new to him. “Law” he has hitherto regarded as something remote or
inimical, symbolised by the village policeman, or the magistrates
who penalise poaching and petty larceny. Those who made themselves
missionaries of the new Act in the villages found everywhere this first
incredulity. They announced the decree of Government that henceforth
the first charge on the land should be the allotment or small holding;
that nothing was to stand in the way of the provision of such holding
when it was desired; that, if necessary by compulsion, the claims
of sport, the claims of pleasure, the ambitions of the large farmer
adding field to field, the prejudice or caprice of those who dislike
the creation of these small plots and gardens, were to be made to
yield to the primary necessity of finding land for the landless. The
labourer was silent, astonished, doubtful, wondering if this was a new
trick designed for his disadvantage. There were meetings at night, to
which men came furtively; suggestions that one is a “spy,” and dogged
silence until he has departed; doubt as to what Mr. A. (the landlord)
would think of it, or whether Mr. B. (the farmer) would dispossess all
those who apply for land, or if Mr. C. (the vicar) would be inclined
to look favourably on the affair. The stirring and the movement for
a time seemed real; far more real than many had ventured to hope for
when the Act was passing through Parliament. But the rather cumbrous
machinery is difficult to put into operation, and the future is still
uncertain. If the Parish Councils and County Councils and Central
Commissioners prove adequate to the situation, they may yet reveal life
where there now is little but death, and a transformation of England’s
deserted countryside. If the difficulties are insuperable or action
too long delayed, with Councils embarking upon one experiment chosen
from ten applications, postponing for months or years any energetic
action; there will be no vocal protest, and few who cannot look beneath
the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural
England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will
continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open
riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the
cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been
flung into the flames.
What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its
weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years
have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the
farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual
conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer.
They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited
vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of
another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in
moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing
enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain
sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness,
by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially
unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath
it all.
In his _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Mr. “George Bourne” has
presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for
the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the
sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s
decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange
superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the
hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily
intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once
fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent
impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which
influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down
into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the
South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election
scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of
more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest,
dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of
advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is
here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists
the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which
the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their
foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing
his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as
the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his
mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan
remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian
tradition. There is scepticism concerning “these here places nobody
ever bin to an’ come back again to tell we.” “Nobody don’t know nothin’
about it. ’Tain’t as if they come back to tell ye. There’s my father
what bin dead this forty year, what a crool man he must be not to’ve
come back in all that time, if he was able, an’ tell me about it.
That’s what I said to Colonel Sadler. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you had better
talk to the Vicar.’ ‘Vicar?’ I says; ‘he won’t talk to me. Besides,
what do he know about it more’n anybody else?’”
He is seen moving into his squalid cottage, and refusing to be
dislodged from his lair: resisting, to the death, the services of the
efficient poor law infirmary or the suggestion of Hospital kindliness.
He had a theory that “bread never ought to be no less than a shillin’
a gallon” if farmers were to prosper: but on hearing of the new
“fiscal reform,” “Oh dear!” is his comment, “we don’t want no taxes
on food.” In war-time he is on the side of “our country,” and has
a subtle explanation of the report of “missing” in the newspapers.
“Prisoners--or else burnt.” “They burns ’em, some says.” He enjoys
his life to the end; despising, so long as is possible, the forces of
ill-health, advancing old age, weariness; exhibiting in circumstances
of bereavement and squalid misery the astonishing endurance and
clinging to life which is found amongst the rural poor of England.
“During the last year or two of his life he was seldom without pain.
He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his
landlord. A neighbour looking in upon him, and seeing his serious
condition, said genially, ‘You ben’t goin’ to die, be ye, Freddy?’
And he answered, ‘I dunno. Shouldn’t care if I do. ’Tis a poor feller
as can’t make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three
times, then there might be something to fret about.’” Later, he adds
more seriously, “But nobody dunno _when_, that’s the best of it.”
The author recounts, with a poignant simplicity, the incidents of the
old man’s death: in hot July weather, with the year at the summit of
riotous life, and every element in nature taunting the impotence of
humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction. “He is dying,”
was the thought at the end, “without any suspicion that any one could
think of him with admiration and reverence.” His race is perishing in
similar ignorance, unhonoured and unsung: without a suspicion that “any
one could think of it with admiration and reverence.” The agricultural
labourer survived the intolerable conditions of the early century when
his life was one impossible struggle against penury and starvation.
He stands to-day for a moment, an old man in a crumbling home, the
last of a long line of high tradition and heritage. He stands to-day
without successors: occupying the region of his ancestors, which they
had peopled since England first was: which they had maintained, with no
ignoble life, through the transitory centuries.
He is vanishing from the world, and there are few that regret his
departure. “Progress” has effected a destruction where penury and
starvation had failed. He endured through all the lean years, somehow
obtaining nourishment and rearing his children, clinging tenaciously to
the earth, within the earth-bound horizon. At length appears the end;
a rather squalid and mournful end--to a life which had once stood for
the bedrock life of England. The peasant’s resources, the peasant’s
vigour and resistance, the peasant’s slow-moving, deliberate mind, had
borne the burden of war and change. From his villages came the old
folk-songs of the nation; he built the village churches, which are the
treasures of rural England, and once took a pride in them. His secret
wisdom, his fragments of half-heathen, half-Christian philosophy, his
standards of bitterness and enjoyment, once made up the temper and
mettle of the common people of England. The period of his greatest
degradation coincided with the period of a sudden offer of escape. As
the common land passed from his occupation, and he sank steadily to
the landless depth of day labour, the cities, with their unlimited
demands for the peasant energy and vigour, open to him welcoming arms.
The few that remain are coming more and more to present the appearance
of a declining race: a race which has lost the secrets of the arts
which once flourished in the region in which it dwells. The English
countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages
and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a
picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink
and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by
their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither
energy nor intelligence to regain. “The evidence is abundant and
positive,” writes Dr. Jessop, as a result of most careful examination
of first-hand authority, “that the work done upon the fabrics of our
churches and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of
our churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, the painting of
the lovely figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of
the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving
of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all
that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense
profusion in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of
those who in the sixteenth century stripped them bare--all this was
executed by local artists.” He will not listen to the tradition of
indebtedness to monk and squire. “In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries,” he declares, “there were no squires--that is the naked
truth.” The property belonged to the parish: it was always growing. It
was of a richness and variety almost incredible to those who to-day
see but the last guttering flame of parochial life, the attempt by
parish councils, guilds of village players, and all the enterprise
of occasional vigorous resistance, to combat the spreading atrophy
of decay. Here are “ornaments and church furniture, bells and
candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners: vestments
which were miracles of splendour in their colours and materials and
incomparable artistic finish of needlework: not to speak of the fine
linen and the veils, the carpets and the hangings.”[16] It is a
treasury of wealth, not so much in its direct suggestion of opulence,
of services and bequests freely given, as in its indication of a
life which can take pride in itself and its labour: a life, however
difficult and limited, yet finding occasion for a handicraft in which
men and women may delight, and some interests other than that of
concentration upon dull and trivial things.
Such were the beginnings of this long sorrowful progress: in villages
which could create these things and take a pride in them. The end
reveals an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer
wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the
town, into the heart of a great silence: the silence that broods
over a doomed and passing race. There remains at the summit a joyful
absorption in physical exercises and pleasures: in the midst of which,
almost unnoticed amid the new gaiety, “Bettesworth” is shambling to a
pauper grave, and his children vanishing from the life of open sky into
the mazes of the lamplit city.
“In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are
imprisoned between hedges, and driven along rights of way.” The beauty
of continental landscape--of the Touraine and the Midi, the little
Norman orchards, the extraordinarily fruitful fields of Southern
Germany, the rude plenty of the Balkan principalities--is the beauty
of “peasants’ country”: the beauty that is provided by security and
close cultivation, excited wherever the peasant is assured that he
will reap what he has sown. The beauty of English landscape is the
beauty of “landlords’ country”--the open woods, the large grass fields
and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given
up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is
a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of
men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading
to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private
land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a
kind of stately splendour. The typical continental countryside is that
of tiny white-washed or wooden broad-eaved cottages, freely scattered
over a region of fruit and flowers and close-tilled coveted land,
which, in fact, is one large garden. The record of the great landowners
of this country is of vast accumulations of acres: aggregations of
whole counties, or estates dotted over many counties, each organised
on the same plan of inherited feudal tradition. Where the money can
still be obtained from external sources--the new wealth of the towns,
or tribute from new nations abroad--some semblance of that feudal
tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market
prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned,
there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a
deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the
model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great
house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns
reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from
some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The
smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural
depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a
growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the
estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of
comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There
is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the
case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller,
the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in
trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down
into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties,
for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands
of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its
consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many
of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what
remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in
the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample
bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities
which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There
are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air--even an unashamed
Democratic spirit--into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter
regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a
toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would
purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert
the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier
air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the
heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms
they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to
arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something
after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone.
The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the
great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time
when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits
of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to
the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that
offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea. In
another period of years, progress may have compelled the breaking
up of the big estates; once again, after the population who would
avail themselves to-day of such offers, to-morrow will have passed
from the scene. In exercise and enjoyment, in parties and pleasant
gardens, amid a playing at the ancient rural traditions, and through
the newer mechanisms of locomotion, the decay passes almost unnoticed.
The few who lift up their voices in warning are openly despised as
agitators, or condemned as political pessimists. The rural reformer
finds himself not so much opposed as ridiculed. What remains of the
system, fortified by the city wealth, is so evidently unassailable by
what remains of any resistent forces, that it can afford to contemplate
all efforts towards revolt with a good-tempered disdain. Occasionally a
village learns of some legislation designed for its benefit, of “Small
Holdings” which a benignant Government designs for the advantage of
the adventurous, of the apparatus of rural Self-Government, which can
give to the poorest some right of control of the village commercial
activities. It cautiously or boldly essays the paths of progress. The
inhabitants apply for land to the great landowners who constitute the
County Council, or organise themselves into a tiny village caucus
for the capture of the Parish Meeting. Then, in quiet and effectual
action, the movement of revolt is scattered and suppressed. It is
explained to the applicants how unsuitable they are for the position
of independent agricultural industry: or the leaders of the democratic
upheaval are informed that it is not in the least convenient to their
owners that they should concern themselves with the intricacies of
local self-government. In a few months, or, at most, a few years, order
reigns--at Auburn, as at Warsaw. And those who had been galvanised into
some semblance of life have, for the most part, disappeared: to London,
to the nearest city, to the British dominions beyond the sea. Such
pitiful uprising, with its consequent disasters, evokes no resentment
against the dominant power. It rather evokes resentment against those
who had stirred up the forces of disturbance. In a certain village in
Oxfordshire an unwary Liberal member of Parliament recently stimulated
resistance to the enclosure by the landlord of a right-of-way. The
resistance was sustained, and the village preserved in its ancient
privilege. But all six witnesses who had testified to the ancient
customs were dismissed from their occupations, and driven from the
district. And indignation fell, not on the landlord who thus revealed
his power, but on the member of Parliament who revealed his impotence.
It was the Liberal, not the Conservative organisation, which henceforth
found a united opposition to its energies: as the population,
worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported
over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public
right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885,
when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise
of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in
1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax
their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In
the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural
England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation.
“The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes
lived, and could live, at peace for centuries--that,” says Mr. Ensor,
“is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other
greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’
we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate
fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A
few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify
in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the
manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the
democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the
older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a
combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an
overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish
themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it,
as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into
another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate
of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You
can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside
the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.
You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of
the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green;
in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those
villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but
the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular
songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by
their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences
can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than
to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll
tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”
Over all which vision of a secular decay Nature still flings the
splendour of her dawns and sunsets upon a land of radiant beauty. Here
are deep rivers flowing beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed
red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of
cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down
valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing
white and clean from the blue surrounding sea. Never, perhaps, in the
memorable and spacious story of this island’s history has the land
beyond the city offered so fair an inheritance to the children of its
people, as to-day, under the visible shadow of the end.