Just below me on the hillside is a forty-acre field that slopes
gently down to the valley. Last year it was ploughed by a
motor-tractor: this year I rejoice to say it is being ploughed in the
old way, as it has been ploughed for a thousand years. I suppose we
ought to be grateful for the motor-tractor and the steam-digger that
in cheapening production cheapen our food, but I am glad that the
farmer below me has returned to the ancient way. When the machine
comes in, the poetry goes out, and though poetry has no place in the
farmer's ledger it is pleasant to find that he has sound reasons for
reverting to the primitive plough. All the operations of the fields
are beautiful to see. They are beautiful in themselves and beautiful
in their suggestions of the permanence of things in the midst of
which we come and go like the guests of a day. Who can see the
gleaners in the field, or the haymakers piling the hay on the
hay-wain, or the mower bending over the scythe without the stirring
of the feelings which the mere beauty of the scene or of the motion
does not explain? Indeed the sense of beauty itself is probably only
the emanation of the thoughts subtly awakened by the action. It is
so with pictures. I do not know any painting that lives in my mind
with a more abiding beauty than one of Millet's. It is just a
solitary upland field, with a flight of birds and an untended plough
lying in the foreground. The barrenness and austerity of the scene
are almost forbidding at the first glance, but as the mind dwells on
it, it becomes instinct with meaning and emotion. Evening has come
and darkness is falling over the land. The labourer has left the
field and the rooks are going home. In the midst of the ancient
solitude and silence that have taken possession of the earth, the old
plough has the passion of personality. It embodies the epic of man's
labour with the intensity that direct statement could not convey but
only the power of suggestion can give.
And so it is with the scene before me. As I watch the ploughman
drawing that straight, undulating line in the yellow stubble of the
field, he seems to be not so much a mortal as a part of the
landscape, that comes and goes as the seasons come and go, or as the
sun comes and goes. His father, it may be, ploughed this field
before him, and his father before him, and so on back through the
centuries to the days when the monks still drank their sack and ate
their venison in the monastery below, which is now only a mound of
stones. And over the new-ploughed soil the rooks, who have as
ancient an ancestry as himself, descend in clouds to forage as they
have descended in these late October days for a thousand years. And
after the rooks, the starlings. They have gathered in hosts after
the pleasant domestic intimacies of summer for their winter
campaigning, and stream across the sky in those miraculous mass
manœuvres that affect one like winged and noiseless music. When
they swoop down on the upturned soil the farmer blesses them.
He forgets the devastations of the summer in the presence of the
ruthless war which the mail-clad host is making on the
leather-jackets and other pestilent broods that lurk in the soil.
They, too, have their part in the eternal economy of the fields.
They are notes in that rhythm of things which touches our
transitoriness with the hint of immemorial ancestry. The ploughman
has reached the far end of his furrow and rests his horses while he
takes his lunch by the hedgerow. That is aflame once more with the
returning splendours of these October days. The green of summer has
turned to a passion of gold and scarlet and yellow and purple, and
all over the landscape the foliage is drunk with colour. The elms
that have stood so long garbed in sober green are showing wonderful
tufts and curls of bright yellow at the top, like old gentlemen who
are growing old gaily. It is as though they have suddenly become
vocal and hilarious and are breaking into song. A few days hence
they will be a glory of bright yellow. But that last note of triumph
does not belong to October. It is in the first days of November that
the elm is at its crowning hour. But the beech is at its best now,
and the woodlands that spread up the hillside glow, underfoot and
overhead, with the fires of fairyland.
In the bright warm sunshine there is a faint echo of the songs of
spring. There are chirrups and chatterings from voices that have
been silent for long. There is the "spink, spink" of the chaffinch,
and from the meadowland at the back there comes at intervals the song
of a lark, not the full song of summer, but no mean imitation of it.
It is the robin, however, who is now chorister-in-chief. His voice
was lost or unnoticed when the great soloists were abroad, but now he
is left to sing the requiem of the year alone--unless we include the
owl who comes punctually every evening as the dusk falls to my
garden, and utters a few owlish incantations.
I can see the ploughman nearing the top end of the field, and can
hear the jangle of the harness and his comments to the horses and
almost the soft fall of the soil as the furrow is turned over. I
think I will bid him adieu, for these October days provide tasks for
me as well as for the ploughman. There are still some apples to
pick, there is an amazing bed of carrots to be got up, there are
laurels to be cut down, there are--oh, joy!--bonfires to be lighted,
and there are young fir-trees to be transplanted. I think I will
start with the bonfires.