The uninformed traveller, whose principle it is never to look at a guide-book, is surprised to find that the small village of Exford contains no fewer than half a dozen inns. He asks how they are kept going; and the natives, astonished at his ignorance, proceed to enlighten him. Exford is the headquarters of the stag-hunt: thither the hunters flock in August, and spend so much money during thir brief season that the innkeepers grow rich and fat, and for the rest of the year can afford to doze peacefully behind their bars. Here are the kennels, and when I visited them they contained forty or fifty couples of stag-hounds. These are gigantic foxhounds, selected for their great size from packs all over the country. When out exercising these big vari-coloured dogs make a fine show. It is curious to find that, although these individual variations are continually appearing—very large dogs born of dogs of medium size—others cannot be bred from them; the variety cannot be fixed.

The village is not picturesque. Its one perennial charm is the swift river that flows through it, making music on its wide sandy and pebbly floor. Hither and thither flit the wagtails, finding little half-uncovered stones in the current to perch upon. Both the pied and grey species are there; and, seeing them together, one naturally wishes to resettle for himself the old question as to which is the prettiest and most graceful. Now this one looks best and now that; but the delicately coloured grey and yellow bird has the longest tail and can use it more prettily. Her tail is as much to her, both as ornament and to express emotions, as a fan to any flirtatious Spanish senora. One always thinks of these dainty feathered creatures as females. It would seem quite natural to call the wagtail "lady-bird," if that name had not been registered by a diminutive podgy tortoise-shaped black and red beetle.

So shallow is the wide stream in the village that a little girl of about seven came down from a cottage, and to cool her feet waded out into the middle, and there she stood for some minutes on a low flat stone, looking down on her own wavering image broken by a hundred hurrying wavelets and ripples. This small maidie, holding up her short, shabby frock with her wee hands, her bright brown hair falling over her face as she bent her head down and laughed to see her bare little legs and their flickering reflection beneath, made a pretty picture. Like the wagtails, she looked in harmony with her surroundings.

So many are the villages, towns, and places of interest seen, so many the adventures met with in this walk, starting with the baby streamlet beyond Simonsbath, and following it down to Exeter and Exmouth, that it would take half a volume to describe them, however briefly. Yet at the end I found that Exford had left the most vivid and lasting impression, and was remembered with most pleasure. It was more to me than Winsford, that fragrant, cool, grey and green village, the home of immemorial peace, second to no English village in beauty; with its hoary church tower, its great trees, its old stone, thatched cottages draped in ivy and vine, its soothing sound of running waters. Exeter itself did not impress me so strongly, in spite of its cathedral. The village of Exford printed itself thus sharply on my mind because I had there been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of a face exceeding in loveliness all the faces seen in that West Country—a rarest human gem, which had the power of imparting to its setting something of its own wonderful lustre. The type was a common Somerset one, but with marked differences in some respects, else it could not have been so perfect.

The type I speak of is a very distinct one: in a crowd in a London street you can easily spot a Somerset man who has this mark on his countenance, but it shows more clearly in the woman. There are more types than one, but the variety is less than in other places; the women are more like each other, and differ more from those that are outside their borders than is the case in other English counties. A woman of this prevalent type, to be met with anywhere from Bath and Bedminster to the wilds of Exmoor, is of a good height, and has a pleasant, often a pretty face; regular features, the nose straight, rather long, with thin nostrils; eyes grey-blue; hair brown, neither dark nor light, in many cases with a sandy or sunburnt tint. Black, golden, reds, chestnuts are rarely seen. There is always colour in the skin, but not deep; as a rule it is a light tender brown with a rosy or reddish tinge. Altogether it is a winning face, with smiling eyes; there is more in it of that something we can call "refinement" than is seen in women of the same class in other counties. The expression is somewhat infantile; a young woman, even a middle-aged woman, will frequently remind you of a little girl of seven or eight summers. The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly childlike. This peculiarity is the more striking when we consider the figure. This is not fully developed according to the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too narrow and flat, the arms too thin. True or false, the idea is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but lacking in passion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than a wife. Something in us—instinct or tradition—will have it that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly qualities—the wifely and maternal feelings. The luxuriant types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.

It will be understood that the women described are those that live in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the social scale—further from the soil as it were—the type becomes less and less distinct. Those of the "higher class," or "better class," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.



Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston

I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look at it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to extenuate my folly—to say, in the end, that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of his poems, the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some extent, a matter of association,—and as the story of how this comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find something about nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most important thing in life. For who could look on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas. There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves—theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume. This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews her eye to think yon playful kid must die. To my uncultivated mind—for I had never been at school, and lived in the open air with the birds and beasts—this seemed intolerably artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite. Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a slight return of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless have been outlived early in life; but there were many passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive. There was Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from Akenside, who was not "rural." But there were other books in which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town, a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled German in a long shabby black coat. I remember him well because he was a very important person to me. It was the first shop of the kind I had seen—I doubt if there was another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience. The books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding. It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away and take it home. If shillings had not been wanted for bread and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read—that he is unreadable.

After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow in that delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by the discovery of yet another poem of rural England—the Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to like it, for although I did not know anything about the author's early life, the few passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's and other old natural history compilations had given me a strong desire to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it—this quiet description in verse of a green spot in England, my spiritual country which so far as I knew I was never destined to see; and that I continue to like it is, as I have said, the reason of my being in this place.

While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am at the same time convinced that this is not the sole reason for my regard.

I take it that the Farmer's Boy is poetry, not merely slightly poetized prose in the form of verse, although it is undoubtedly poetry of a very humble order.

Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher qualities of the poet—imagination and passion. The lower kind of inspiration is, in fact, often better suited to such themes and shows nature by the common light of day, as it were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of lightning flashes. Even among those who confine themselves to this lower plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is constantly sinking and flickering out. But at intervals it burns up again and redeems the work from being wholly commonplace and trivial. He is, in fact, no better than many another small poet who has been devoured by Time since his day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back. It is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose fame was brief would in their day have deeply resented being placed on a level with the Suffolk peasant-poet. In spite of all this, and of the impossibility of saving most of the verse which is only passably good from oblivion, I still think the Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one, but chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.

There is no lack of rural poetry—the Seasons to begin with and much Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a general way; then we have innumerable detached descriptions of actual scenes, such as we find scattered throughout Cowper's Task, and numberless other works. Besides all this there are the countless shorter poems, each conveying an impression of some particular scene or aspect of nature; the poet of the open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out for picturesque "bits" and atmospheric effects as a subject. In Bloomfield we get something altogether different—a simple, consistent, and fairly complete account of the country people's toilsome life in a remote agricultural district in England—a small rustic village set amid green and arable fields, woods and common lands. We have it from the inside by one who had part in it, born and bred to the humble life he described; and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day record—photographed as we may say—with all the minute unessential details and repetitions, but as it appeared when looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in memory, the sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's mind standing vividly out. Of this lowly poem it may be truly said that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use the phrase invented by Wordsworth when he attempted a definition of poetry generally and signally failed, as Coleridge demonstrated.

It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life—that he was a farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows, feed the pigs, and forty things besides, and that later, when learning the shoemaker's trade in a London garret, he put these memories together and made them into a poem—are wholly beside the question when we come to judge the work as literature. A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his own day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in the end his work must be tried by the same standards applied in other and in all cases.

There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to endeavour to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is not altogether bad, but contains many lines that glow with beautiful poetic feeling, and many descriptive passages which are admirable. Furthermore, I will venture to say that despite the feebleness of a large part of the work (as poetry) it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its unique character. It may be that I am the only person in England able to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in which it first came to my notice, and the critical reader can, if he thinks proper, discount what I am now saying as mere personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in a distant region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I could find relating to country scenes and life in England—the land of my desire—I was never able to get an extended and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in human and animal life in its relation to nature. It was all broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes, vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural subjects hanging on the walls of a room. Even the Seasons failed to supply this want, since Thomson in his great work is of no place and abides nowhere, but ranges on eagle's wings over the entire land, and, for the matter of that, over the whole globe. But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy. I visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was with him from morn till eve always in that same green country with the same sky, cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic village, at the small church with a thatched roof where the daws nested in the belfry, and the children played and shouted among the gravestones in the churchyard; in woods and green and ploughed fields and the deep lanes—with him and his fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding their life and actions from day to day through all the vicissitudes of the year.

The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic literature, or to fill a gap; at all events from the point of view of those who, born and living in distant parts of the earth, still dream of the Old Home. This perhaps accounts for the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of the pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.

Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem into the four seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an invitation to the Muse:—

O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art, Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.

But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction of the Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I imagine, Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble mind and knew his limitations, and though he adopted the artificial form of verse which prevailed down to his time he was still able to be simple and natural.

"Spring" does not contain much of the best of his work, but the opening is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos in his apologetic description of himself, as Giles, the farmer's boy.

Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes Nor Science led me... From meaner objects far my raptures flow... Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew, Delight from trifles, trifles ever new. 'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor, Labour his portion... His life was cheerful, constant servitude... Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look, The fields his study, Nature was his book.

The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are described, and the result left to the powers above:

Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around, And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground; In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun, His tufted barley yellow with the sun.

While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows; one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that have been shot, for although—

Their danger well the wary plunderers know And place a watch on some conspicuous bough, Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise Will scatter death among them as they rise.

'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their hands. It was for him to shift the dead from place to place, to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings. Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach of hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning, he would take his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks to "fields remote from home" to redistribute his dead birds, then to fetch the cows, and here we have an example of his close naturalist-like observation in his account of the leading cow, the one who coming and going on all occasions is allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by many a broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and luxury of the over-populous capital which drains the whole country-side of all produce, which makes the Suffolk dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving nothing but the "three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local consumption. What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a post, which turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in despair into the hog-trough, where

It rests in perfect spite, Too big to swallow and too hard to bite!

We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and here there is more evidence of his observant eye when he describes the character of the animals, also in what follows about the young lambs, which forms the best passage in this part. I remember that, when first reading it, being then little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight! I cannot but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such pictures as these does or should count for something in considering his work. He concludes:—

Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb, Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme, Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain; A bird, a leaf, will set them off again; Or if a gale with strength unusual blow, Scattering the wild-briar roses into snow, Their little limbs increasing efforts try, Like a torn rose the fair assemblage fly.

This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives—his white-fleeced little fellow-mortals. He sees the murdering butcher coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock; he cannot suppress a cry of grief and indignation—he can only strive to shut out the shocking image from his soul!

"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when he attempts wide prospects and large effects. He is at his best only when describing scenes and incidents at the farm in which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when, after the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the small birds from the ripening corn:

There thousands in a flock, for ever gay, Loud chirping sparrows welcome on the day, And from the mazes of the leafy thorn Drop one by one upon the bending corn.

Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life that swarms about him:

The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a spacious plain! Then higher still by countless steps conveyed, He gains the summit of a shivering blade, And flirts his filmy wings and looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground.

It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his vision is called to the springing lark:

Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings, And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings; Still louder breathes, and in the face of day Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way. Close to his eye his hat he instant bends And forms a friendly telescope that lends Just aid enough to dull the glaring light And place the wandering bird before his sight, That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along; Lost for a while yet pours a varied song; The eye still follows and the cloud moves by, Again he stretches up the clear blue sky, His form, his motions, undistinguished quite, Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.

In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his poles and starts again brushing round.

Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit

Confess the presence of a pretty face.

She is very rustic herself in her appearance:—

Her hat awry, divested of her gown, Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown: Invidious barrier! why art thou so high, When the slight covering of her neck slips by, Then half revealing to the eager sight Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?

The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land; not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails, against which he protests in this place when describing the summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

"Autumn" opens bravely:

Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods, The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods Invite my song.

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a delightful picture which must be given in full:—

No more the fields with scattered grain supply The restless tenants of the sty; From oak to oak they run with eager haste, And wrangling share the first delicious taste Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground. It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave: Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave; The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young, Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among, Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round, Where last year's mould'ring leaves bestrew the ground, And o'er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls, Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls; Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool, The wild duck's lonely haunt, whose jealous eye Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly, On the calm bosom of her little lake, Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake; And as the bold intruders press around, At once she starts and rises with a bound; With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear, And ludicrously wild and winged with fear, The herd decamp with more than swinish speed, And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed; Through tangled thickets headlong on they go, Then stop and listen for their fancied foe; The hindmost still the growing panic spreads, Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds, Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap; Yet glorying in their fortunate escape, Their groundless terrors by degrees soon cease, And Night's dark reign restores their peace. For now the gale subsides, and from each bough The roosting pheasant's short but frequent crow Invites to rest, and huddling side by side The herd in closest ambush seek to hide; Seek some warm slope with shagged moss o'erspread, Dried leaves their copious covering and their bed. In vain may Giles, through gathering glooms that fall, And solemn silence, urge his piercing call; Whole days and nights they tarry 'midst their store, Nor quit the woods till oaks can yield no more.

It is a delightful passage to one that knows a pig—the animal we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for example its liability to lose its head. Thousands of years of comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran. Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be thrown off his balance.

Passing over other scenes, about one hundred and fifty lines, we come to the second notable passage, when after the sowing of the winter wheat, poor Giles once more takes up his old occupation of rook-scaring. It is now as in spring and summer—

Keen blows the blast and ceaseless rain descends; The half-stripped hedge a sorry shelter lends,

and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its construction.

In some sequestered nook, embanked around, Sods for its walls and straw in burdens bound; Dried fuel hoarded is his richest store, And circling smoke obscures his little door; Whence creeping forth to duty's call he yields, And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields. On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose, A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows; Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise, He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize; And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests, Placing green sods to seat the coming guests; His guests by promise; playmates young and gay; But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away! He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain, Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain His fairy revels are exchanged for rage, His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage, The field becomes his prison, till on high Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trivial restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an infinitely greater one. Look, he says—

From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes

to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons, deprived of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose minds perpetually travel back to happy scenes,

Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way,

whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no familiar friendly face.

"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the idea that the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring" onwards, that by the time he got to the last part the writer had acquired a greater ease and assurance. At all events it is less patchy and more equal. It is also more sober in tone, as befits the subject, and opens with an account of the domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on man and the compassionate feelings they evoke in us. He is, we feel, dealing with realities, always from the point of view of a boy of sensitive mina and tender heart—one taken in boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in him. For in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart; and as he hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked and cried to him to be fed. He describes it well, the frost and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the fields, the load of turnips thrown out on the hard frozen ground; but the turnips too are frozen hard and they cannot eat them until Giles, following with his beetle, splits them up with vigorous blows, and the cows gather close round him, sending out a cloud of steam from their nostrils.

The dim short winter day soon ends, but the sound of the flails continues in the barns till long after dark before the weary labourers end their task and trudge home. Giles, too, is busy at this time taking hay to the housed cattle, many a sweet mouthful being snatched from the load as he staggers beneath it on his way to the racks. Then follow the well-earned hours of "warmth and rest" by the fire in the big old kitchen which he describes:—

For the rude architect, unknown to fame, (Nor symmetry nor elegance his aim), Who spread his floors of solid oak on high, On beams rough-hewn from age to age that lie, Bade his wide fabric unimpaired sustain The orchard's store, and cheese, and golden grain; Bade from its central base, capacious laid, The well-wrought chimney rear its lofty head Where since hath many a savoury ham been stored, And tempests howled and Christmas gambols roared.

The tired ploughman, steeped in luxurious heat, by and by falls asleep and dreams sweetly until his chilblains or the snapping fire awakes him, and he pulls himself up and goes forth yawning to give his team their last feed, his lantern throwing a feeble gleam on the snow as he makes his way to the stable. Having completed his task, he pats the sides of those he loves best by way of good-night, and leaves them to their fragrant meal. And this kindly action on his part suggests one of the best passages of the poem. Even old well-fed Dobbin occasionally rebels against his slavery, and released from his chains will lift his clumsy hoofs and kick, "disdainful of the dirty wheel." Short-sighted Dobbin!

Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose, Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes; Show thee his bleeding shoulders, and unfold The dreadful anguish he endures for gold; Hired at each call of business, lust, or rage, That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage. Still on his strength depends their boasted speed; For them his limbs grow weak, his bare ribs bleed; And though he groaning quickens at command, Their extra shilling in the rider's hand Becomes his bitter scourge....

The description, too long to quote, which follows of the tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things would not be tolerated now. But we must get over the ground somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and, "trembling under complicated pains," when "every nerve a separate anguish knows," he is finally unharnessed and led to the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before he is called for again.

Though limping, maimed and sore; He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door... The collar tightens and again he feels His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels With tiresome sameness in his ears resound O'er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in the land. Its end has invariably been brought about by legislation through the devotion of men who were the "cranks," the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who were jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally getting their law.

Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness, and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest singers. As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found its highest expression in his own great contemporaries, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In virtue of this feeling he was of their illustrious brotherhood.

In conclusion, I will quote one more passage. From the subject of horses he passes to that of dogs and their occasional reversion to wildness, when the mastiff or cur, the "faithful" house-dog by day, takes to sheep-killing by night. As a rule he is exceedingly cunning, committing his depredations at a distance frown home, and after getting his fill of slaughter he sneaks home in the early hours to spend the day in his kennel "licking his guilty paws." This is an anxious time for shepherds and farmers, and poor Giles is compelled to pay late evening visits to his small flock of heavy-sided ewes penned in their distant fold. It is a comfort to him to have a full moon on these lonely expeditions, and despite his tremors he is able to appreciate the beauty of the scene.

With saunt'ring steps he climbs the distant stile, Whilst all around him wears a placid smile; There views the white-robed clouds in clusters driven And all the glorious pageantry of heaven. Low on the utmost bound'ry of the sight The rising vapours catch the silver light; Thence fancy measures as they parting fly Which first will throw its shadow on the eye, Passing the source of light; and thence away Succeeded quick by brighter still than they. For yet above the wafted clouds are seen (In a remoter sky still more serene) Others detached in ranges through the air, Spotless as snow and countless as they're fair; Scattered immensely wide from east to west The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest.

This is almost the only passage in the poem in which something of the vastness of visible nature is conveyed. He saw the vastness only in the sky on nights with a full moon or when he made a telescope of his hat to watch the flight of the lark. It was not a hilly country about his native place, and his horizon was a very limited one, usually bounded by the hedgerow timber at the end of the level field. The things he depicts were seen at short range, and the poetry, we see, was of a very modest kind. It was a "humble note" which pleased me in the days of long ago when I was young and very ignorant, and as it pleases me still it may be supposed that mentally I have not progressed with the years. Nevertheless, I am not incapable of appreciating the greater music; all that is said in its praise, even to the extremest expressions of admiration of those who are moved to a sense of wonder by it, find an echo in me. But it is not only a delight to me to listen to the lark singing at heaven's gate and to the vesper nightingale in the oak copse—the singer of a golden throat and wondrous artistry; I also love the smaller vocalists—the modest shufewing and the lesser whitethroat and the yellowhammer with his simple chant. These are very dear to me: their strains do not strike me as trivial; they have a lesser distinction of their own and I would not miss them from the choir. The literary man will smile at this and say that my paper is naught but an idle exercise, but I fancy I shall sleep the better tonight for having discharged this ancient debt which has been long on my conscience.



Chapter Twenty-Five: My Friend Jack

My friend rack is a retriever—very black, very curly, perfect in shape, but just a retriever; and he is really not my friend, only he thinks he is, which comes to the same thing. So convinced is he that I am his guide, protector, and true master, that if I were to give him a downright scolding or even a thrashing he would think it was all right and go on just the same. His way of going on is to make a companion of me whether I want him or not. I do not want him, but his idea is that I want him very much. I bitterly blame myself for having made the first advances, although nothing came of it except that he growled. I met him in a Cornish village in a house where I stayed. There was a nice kennel there, painted green, with a bed of clean straw and an empty plate which had contained his dinner, but on peeping in I saw no dog. Next day it was the same, and the next, and the day after that; then I inquired about it—Was there a dog in that house or not? Oh, yes, certainly there was: Jack, but a very independent sort of dog. On most days he looked in, ate his dinner and had a nap on his straw, but he was not what you would call a home-keeping dog.

One day I found him in, and after we had looked for about a minute at each other, I squatting before the kennel, he with chin on paws pretending to be looking through me at something beyond, I addressed a few kind words to him, which he received with the before-mentioned growl. I pronounced him a surly brute and went away. It was growl for growl. Nevertheless I was well pleased at having escaped the consequences in speaking kindly to him. I am not a "doggy" person nor even a canophilist. The purely parasitic or degenerate pet dog moves me to compassion, but the natural vigorous outdoor dog I fear and avoid because we are not in harmony; consequently I suffer and am a loser when he forces his company on me. The outdoor world I live in is not the one to which a man goes for a constitutional, with a dog to save him from feeling lonely, or, if he has a gun, with a dog to help him kill something. It is a world which has sound in it, distant cries and penetrative calls, and low mysterious notes, as of insects and corncrakes, and frogs chirping and of grasshopper warblers—sounds like wind in the dry sedges. And there are also sweet and beautiful songs; but it is very quiet world where creatures move about subtly, on wings, on polished scales, on softly padded feet—rabbits, foxes, stoats, weasels, and voles and birds and lizards and adders and slow-worms, also beetles and dragon-flies. Many are at enmity with each other, but on account of their quietude there is no disturbance, no outcry and rushing into hiding. And having acquired this habit from them I am able to see and be with them. The sitting bird, the frolicking rabbit, the basking adder—they are as little disturbed at my presence as the butterfly that drops down close to my feet to sun his wings on a leaf or frond and makes me hold my breath at the sight of his divine colour, as if he had just fluttered down from some brighter realm in the sky. Think of a dog in this world, intoxicated with the odours of so many wild creatures, dashing and splashing through bogs and bushes! It is ten times worse than a bull in a china-shop. The bull can but smash a lot of objects made of baked clay; the dog introduces a mad panic in a world of living intelligent beings, a fairy realm of exquisite beauty. They scuttle away and vanish into hiding as if a deadly wind had blown over the earth and swept them out of existence. Only the birds remain—they can fly and do not fear for their own lives, but are in a state of intense anxiety about their eggs and young among the bushes which he is dashing through or exploring.

I had good reason, then, to congratulate myself on Jack's surly behaviour on our first meeting. Then, a few days later, a curious thing happened. Jack was discovered one morning in his kennel, and when spoken to came or rather dragged himself out, a most pitiable object. He was horribly bruised and sore all over; his bones appeared to be all broken; he was limp and could hardly get on his feet, and in that miserable condition he continued for some three days.

At first we thought he had been in a big fight—he was inclined that way, his master said—but we could discover no tooth marks or lacerations, nothing but bruises. Perhaps, we said, he had fallen into the hands of some cruel person in one of the distant moorland farms, who had tied him up, then thrashed him with a big stick, and finally turned him loose to die on the moor or crawl home if he could. His master looked so black at this that we said no more about it. But Jack was a wonderfully tough dog, all gristle I think, and after three days of lying there like a dead dog he quickly recovered, though I'm quite sure that if his injuries had been distributed among any half-dozen pampered or pet dogs it would have killed them all. A morning came when the kennel was empty: Jack was not dead—he was well again, and, as usual, out.

Just then I was absent for a week or ten days then, back again, I went out one fine morning for a long day's ramble along the coast. A mile or so from home, happening to glance back I caught sight of a black dog's face among the bushes thirty or forty yards away gazing earnestly at me. It was Jack, of course, nothing but his head visible in an opening among the bushes—a black head which looked as if carved in ebony, in a wonderful setting of shining yellow furze blossoms. The beauty and singularity of the sight made it impossible for me to be angry with him, though there's nothing a man more resents than being shadowed, or secretly followed and spied upon, even by a dog, so, without considering what I was letting myself in for, I cried out "Jack" and instantly he bounded out and came to my side, then flew on ahead, well pleased to lead the way.

"I must suffer him this time," I said resignedly, and went on, he always ahead acting as my scout and hunter—self-appointed, of course, but as I had not ordered him back in trumpet tones and hurled a rock at him to enforce the command, he took it that he was appointed by me. He certainly made the most of his position; no one could say that he was lacking in zeal. He scoured the country to the right and left and far in advance of me, crashing through furze thickets and splashing across bogs and streams, spreading terror where he went and leaving nothing for me to look at. So it went on until after one o'clock when, tired and hungry, I was glad to go down into a small fishing cove to get some dinner in a cottage I knew. Jack threw himself down on the floor and shared my meal, then made friends with the fisherman's wife and got a second meal of saffron cake which, being a Cornish dog, he thoroughly enjoyed.

The second half of the day was very much like the first, altogether a blank day for me, although a very full one for Jack, who had filled a vast number of wild creatures with terror, furiously hunted a hundred or more, and succeeded in killing two or three.

Jack was impossible, and would never be allowed to follow me again. So I sternly said and so thought, but when the time came and I found him waiting for me his brown eyes bright with joyful anticipation, I could not scowl at him and thunder out No! I could not help putting myself in his place. For here he was, a dog of boundless energy who must exercise his powers or be miserable, with nothing in the village for him except to witness the not very exciting activities of others; and that, I discovered, had been his life. He was mad to do something, and because there was nothing for him to do his time was mostly spent in going about the village to keep an eye on the movements of the people, especially of those who did the work, always with the hope that his services might be required in some way by some one. He was grateful for the smallest crumbs, so to speak. House-work and work about the house—milking, feeding the pigs and so on—did not interest him, nor would he attend the labourers in the fields. Harvest time would make a difference; now it was ploughing, sowing, and hoeing, with nothing for Jack. But he was always down at the fishing cove to see the boats go out or come in and join in the excitement when there was a good catch. It was still better when the boat went with provisions to the lighthouse, or to relieve the keeper, for then Jack would go too and if they would not have him he would plunge into the waves and swim after it until the sails were hoisted and it flew like a great gull from him and he was compelled to swim back to land. If there was nothing else to do he would go to the stone quarry and keep the quarrymen company, sharing their dinner and hunting away the cows and donkeys that came too near. Then at six o'clock he would turn up at the cricket-field, where a few young enthusiasts would always attend to practise after working hours.

Living this way Jack was, of course, known to everybody—as well known as the burly parson, the tall policeman, and the lazy girl who acted as postman and strolled about the parish once a day delivering the letters. When Jack trotted down the village street he received as many greetings as any human inhabitant—"Hullo, Jack!" or "Morning, Jack," or "Where be going, Jack?"

But all this variety, and all he could do to fit himself into and be a part of the village life and fill up his time, did not satisfy him. Happiness for Jack was out on the moor—its lonely wet thorny places, pregnant with fascinating scents, not of flowers and odorous herbs, but of alert, warm-blooded, and swift-footed creatures. And I was going there—would I, could I, be so heartless as to refuse to take him?

You see that Jack, being a dog, could not go there alone. He was a social being by instinct as well as training, dependent on others, or on the one who was his head and master. His human master, or the man who took him out and spoke to him in a tone of authority, represented the head of the pack—the leading dog for the time being, albeit a dog that walked on his hind legs and spoke a bow-wow dialect of his own.

I thought of all this and of many things besides. The dog, I remembered, was taken by man out of his own world and thrust into one where he can never adapt himself perfectly to the conditions, and it was consequently nothing more than simple justice on my part to do what I could to satisfy his desire even at some cost to myself. But while I was revolving the matter in my mind, feeling rather unhappy about it, Jack was quite happy, since he had nothing to revolve. For him it was all settled and done with. Having taken him out once, I must go on taking him out always. Our two lives, hitherto running apart—his in the village, where he occupied himself with uncongenial affairs, mine on the moor where, having but two legs to run on, I could catch no rabbits—were now united in one current to our mutual advantage. His habits were altered to suit the new life. He stayed in now so as not to lose me when I went for a walk, and when returning, instead of going back to his kennel, he followed me in and threw himself down, all wet, on the rug before the fire. His master and mistress came in and stared in astonishment. It was against the rules of the house! They ordered him out and he looked at them without moving. Then they spoke again very sharply indeed, and he growled a low buzzing growl without lifting his chin from his paws, and they had to leave him! He had transferred his allegiance to a new master and head of the pack. He was under my protection and felt quite safe: if I had taken any part in that scene it would have been to order those two persons who had once lorded it over him out of the room!

I didn't really mind his throwing over his master and taking possession of the rug in my sitting-room, but I certainly did very keenly resent his behaviour towards the birds every morning at breakfast-time. It was my chief pleasure to feed them during the bad weather, and it was often a difficult task even before Jack came on the scene to mix himself in my affairs. The Land's End is, I believe, the windiest place in the world, and when I opened the window and threw the scraps out the wind would catch and whirl them away like so many feathers over the garden wall, and I could not see what became of them. It was necessary to go out by the kitchen door at the back (the front door facing the sea being impossible) and scatter the food on the lawn, and then go into watch the result from behind the window. The blackbirds and thrushes would wait for a lull to fly in over the wall, while the daws would hover overhead and sometimes succeed in dropping down and seizing a crust, but often enough when descending they would be caught and whirled away by the blast. The poor magpies found their long tails very much against them in the scramble, and it was even worse with the pied wagtail. He would go straight for the bread and get whirled and tossed about the smooth lawn like a toy bird made of feathers, his tail blown over his head. It was bad enough, and then Jack, curious about these visits to the lawn, came to investigate and finding the scraps, proceeded to eat them all up. I tried to make him understand better by feeding him before I fed the birds; then by scolding and even hitting him, but he would not see it; he knew better than I did; he wasn't hungry and he didn't want bread, but he would eat it all the same, every scrap of it, just to prevent it from being wasted. Jack was doubtless both vexed and amused at my simplicity in thinking that all this food which I put on the lawn would remain there undevoured by those useless creatures the birds until it was wanted.

Even this I forgave him, for I saw that he had not, that with his dog mind he could not, understand me. I also remembered the words of a wise old Cornish writer with regard to the mind of the lower animals: "But their faculties of mind are no less proportioned to their state of subjection than the shape and properties of their bodies. They have knowledge peculiar to their several spheres and sufficient for the under-part they have to act."

Let me be free from the delusion that it is possible to raise them above this level, or in other words to add an inch to their mental stature. I have nothing to forgive Jack after all. And so in spite of everything Jack was suffered at home and accompanied me again and again in my walks abroad; and there were more blank days, or if not altogether blank, seeing that there was Jack himself to be observed and thought about, they were not the kind of days I had counted on having. My only consolation was that Jack failed to capture more than one out of every hundred, or perhaps five hundred, of the creatures he hunted, and that I was even able to save a few of these. But I could not help admiring his tremendous energy and courage, especially in cliff-climbing when we visited the headlands—those stupendous masses and lofty piles of granite which rise like castles built by giants of old. He would almost make me tremble for his life when, after climbing on to some projecting rock, he would go to the extreme end and look down over it as if it pleased him to watch the big waves break in foam on the black rocks a couple of hundred feet below. But it was not the big green waves or any sight in nature that drew him—he sniffed and sniffed and wriggled and twisted his black nose, and raised and depressed his ears as he sniffed, and was excited solely because the upward currents of air brought him tidings of living creatures that lurked in the rocks below—badger and fox and rabbit. One day when quitting one of these places, on looking up I spied Jack standing on the summit of a precipice about seventy-five feet high. Jack saw me and waved his tail, and then started to come straight down to me! From the top a faint rabbit track was, visible winding downwards to within twenty-four feet of the ground; the rest was a sheer wall of rock. Down he dashed, faster and faster as he got to where the track ended, and then losing his footing he fell swiftly to the earth, but luckily dropped on a deep spongy turf and was not hurt. After witnessing this reckless act I knew how he had come by those frightful bruises on a former occasion. He had doubtless fallen a long way down a cliff and had been almost crushed on the stones. But the lesson was lost on Jack; he would have it that where rabbits and foxes went he could go!

After all, the chief pleasure those blank bad days had for me was the thought that Jack was as happy as he could well be. But it was not enough to satisfy me, and by and by it came into my mind that I had been long enough at that place. It was hard to leave Jack, who had put himself so entirely in my hands, and trusted me so implicitly. But—the weather was keeping very bad: was there ever known such a June as this of 1907? So wet and windy and cold! Then, too, the bloom had gone from the furze. It was, I remembered, to witness this chief loveliness that I came. Looking on the wide moor and far-off boulder-strewn hills and seeing how rusty the bushes were, I quoted—

The bloom has gone, and with the bloom go I,

and early in the morning, with all my belongings on my back, I stole softly forth, glancing apprehensively in the direction of the kennel, and out on to the windy road. It was painful to me to have to decamp in this way; it made me think meanly of myself; but if Jack could read this and could speak his mind I think he would acknowledge that my way of bringing the connection to an end was best for both of us. I was not the person, or dog on two legs, he had taken me for, one with a proper desire to kill things: I only acted according to my poor lights. Nothing, then, remains to be said except that one word which it was not convenient to speak on the windy morning of my departure—Good-bye Jack.

THE END