Yet it is not for want of taste that they endure these conditions. Amidst the pitiful shabbiness which prevails may be found many little signs that the delight in comely things would go far if it dared. There is hardly a garden in the village, I think, which does not contain a corner or a strip given over unthriftily, not to useful vegetables, but to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve instead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his flowers. One of those families whose removal was mentioned above—turned out in the summertime they were, with loss of garden crops—found refuge in a hovel which stood right against a public pathway. And, although it was an encroachment, within a week a twelve-inch strip of the pathway was dug up under the cottage eaves, and fenced in with a low fencing of sticks roughly nailed together. Within this narrow space were planted chrysanthemums rescued from the previous home; and when the fence gave way—as it did before the chrysanthemums flowered—big stones and brickbats were laid in its place. Considered as decoration, the result was a failure; it was the product of an hour's work in which despair and bitterness had all but killed the people's hope; but that it was done at all is almost enough to prove my point. For further illustration I may refer again to that other man mentioned above, who is now under notice to leave his cottage. Last year he was happy in tending four or five rose-trees which he had been allowed to bring home from the rubbish-heap of his employer's garden. I remember that when he showed them to me, gloating over them, he tried to excuse himself to me for neglecting his potatoes in their favour, and I did my best to encourage him and puff him up with pride. But it was of no use. This summer he is neglecting his roses, and is wondering if his potatoes will be ripe enough for digging before he is obliged to move.

With such things going on, it is not wonderful that the people live shabbily, meanly, out at elbows. Tastes so handicapped as theirs make no headway, and, though not dying, sink into disuse. The average cottager learns to despise pleasantness and to concentrate upon usefulness. His chief pride now is in his food-crops, which, if not eaten, can be turned into money. Of course, these have their beauty—not undiscerned by the labourer—but they are not grown for that end, and the thriftier the man, the less time to the consideration of beauty will he give. It is, besides, an imprudence to make a cottage look comely, now that covetous eyes are upon the valley and the people's position there has grown insecure.

Does it seem a slight thing? Whatever the practical importance of it, the extent of change involved in this hopeless attitude of the villagers towards their home-places must not be under-rated; for if it could be viewed in sharp perspective it would appear considerable enough. Let us note the transitions. First the straying squatters settled here, to cultivate chosen spots of the valley and reduce them to order. They were not wedded to the place; only if it gave them a chance of getting food and shelter were they likely to remain. Soon, however, that first uncertainty was forgotten. Their peasant customs fitted the environment; there was no danger of molestation; already to their children the valley began to feel like a permanent home. As years went on that feeling deepened, wrapped the people round in an unthought-of security, and permitted them, here and there, to go beyond the necessary peasant crafts and think of what was pleasant as well as necessary. Gardens were trimmed into beauty, grape-vines were grown for the sake of wine-making, and bees were kept for the sake of honey and mead. In the cottages decent furniture and implements began to accumulate; the women decorated their men's blouses with pretty smocking; the children were taught old-fashioned lore because it was old-fashioned and their inheritance; time-honoured customs of May-day and of Christmas were not ignored. So during a few generations the old country thrift and its simple civilization were kept alive, until the loss of the common made the old thrift no longer possible and introduced the new. Lastly, and within recent years, a new population has come, taking possession, with a new civilization which is by no means simple; and now once more a sense of unsettledness is upon the cottagers, although for the most part they remain here. It is, however, an unsettledness very unlike that of the earlier time. Instead of hope in it there is anxiety; instead of striking deeper root in the valley, the people's hold grows shallower. The agreeable peasant arts have faded out accordingly. The whole peasant mode of life is all but forgotten. To-day we have here not a distinct group of people living by customs which their singular circumstances justify, but numerous impoverished families living provisionally from hand to mouth, because of the possibility of further changes to be thrust upon them. While they wait they still work, yet without pleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless.



IV

THE RESULTING NEEDS



XIV

THE INITIAL DEFECT

Keeping pace with the alterations in their circumstances, a great mental and spiritual destitution has made its appearance amongst the labouring people. I say "has made its appearance" because it cannot be wholly attributed to the changes we have been discussing. Those changes have done their part, certainly. Obliterating the country crafts and cults, breaking down the old neighbourly feelings, turning what was an interesting economy into an anxious calculation of shillings and pence, and reducing a whole village of people from independence to a position bordering on servility, the introduction of a new system of thrift must bear the greater share of the blame for the present plight of the labourers. Nevertheless, their destitution—their mental and spiritual destitution—has its roots deeper down, and springs from a grave defect which was inherent in the peasant system. It is time to recognize that fact. In many ways the folk-civilization had served the cottagers excellently. They had grown up hardy and self-reliant under its influence; clever with their hands, shrewd with their heads, kindly and cheerful in their temper. But one can see now that all this had been bought very dear. To set against the good qualities that came to light there was a stifling of other qualities which were equally good, but had no chance of development at all under the peasant thrift.

Especially on the side of mental activity was the people's natural power cramped. I do not mean that they were stupid; it would be an error of the first magnitude to suppose anything of the sort. But the concentration of their faculties on their rural doings left them childish and inefficient in the use of their brains for other purposes. Mention has been made of the "fatalism" which still prevails in the village outlook; but fatalism is too respectable a name for that mere absence of speculative thought which was characteristic of the peasant kind of people I have known. The interest of their daily pursuits kept their minds busy upon matters obvious to the senses, while attention to opinions and ideas was discouraged. For this reason the older men and women had seldom if ever indulged in fancies or day-dreams, or troubled about theories or first principles; and until lately I might have said the same of the younger ones too. As for watching themselves—watching and checking off the actions of their own intelligence—it was what they never did. A sentiment might arise in them and mellow all their temper, and they would not notice it. The inner meaning of things concerned them very little. Their conception of cause and effect, or of the constancy of nature, was rudimentary. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred," said an old bricklayer of the village, baffled by some error in his work—"ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll come right same as you sets it out, but not always." Puzzles were allowed to be puzzling, and left so; or the first explanation was accepted as final. The "mistis in March" sufficiently accounted for the "frostis in May." Mushrooms would only grow when the moon was "growing." Even with regard to personal troubles the people were still as unspeculative as ever. Were they poor, or ill? It merely happened so, and that settled it. Or were they in cheerful spirits? Why, so they were; and what more could be said?

It was largely this simplicity of their mental processes that made the older people so companionable. They were unaccustomed to using certain powers of the brain which modern people use; nay, they were so unaware of that use as to be utterly unsuspicious of such a thing. To be as little psychological as possible, we may say that a modern man's thought goes on habitually at two main levels. On the surface are the subjects of the moment—that endless procession of things seen or heard or spoken of which make up the outer world; and here is where intercourse with the old type of villager was easy and agreeable. But below that surface the modern mind has a habit of interpreting these phenomena by general ideas or abstract principles, or referring them to imaginations all out of sight and unmentioned; and into this region of thought the peasant's attention hardly penetrated at all. Given a knowledge of the neighbourhood, therefore, it was easy to keep conversation going with a man of this kind. If you could find out the set of superficial or practical subjects in which he was interested, and chatter solely on that plane, all went well. But if you dipped underneath it amongst fancies or generalizations, difficulties arose. The old people had no experience there, and were out of their depth in a moment. And yet—I must repeat it—we should be entirely wrong to infer that they were naturally stupid, unless a man is to be called stupid because he does not cultivate every one of his inborn faculties. In that sense we all have our portion in stupidity, and the peasant was no worse than the rest of us. His particular deficiency was as I have described it, and may be fully explained by his mode of life. For in cow-stall or garden or cottage, or in the fields or on the heaths, the claim of the moment was all-absorbing; and as he hurried to thatch his rick before the rain came, or to get his turfs home by nightfall, the ideas which thronged about his doings crowded out ideas of any other sort. Or if, not hurrying, his mind went dreamy, it was still of peasant things that he dreamed. Of what he had been told when he was a child, or what he had seen for himself in after-life, his memory was full; and every stroke of reap-hook or thrust of spade had power to entice his intellect along the familiar grooves of thought—grooves which lie on the surface and are unconnected with any systematized channels of idea-work underneath.

So the strong country life tyrannized over country brains, and, apart from the ideas suggested by that life, the peasant folk had few ideas. Their minds lacked freedom; there was no escape from the actual environment into a world either of imagination or of more scientific understanding. Nor did this matter a great deal, so long as the environment remained intact. In the absence of what we call "views"—those generalizations about destiny or goodness, or pleasure, or what not, by which we others grope our way through life—the steady peasant environment, so well known and containing so few surprises, was itself helpful, precisely because it was so well known. If a man would but give shrewd attention to his practical affairs, it was enough; a substitute for philosophy was already made for him, to save him the trouble of thinking things out for himself. His whole mental activity proceeded, unawares, upon a substratum of customary understanding, which belonged to the village in general, and did not require to be formulated, but was accepted as axiomatic by all. "Understanding" is the best word I can find for it. It differed from a philosophy or a belief, because it contained no abstract ideas; thinking or theorizing had no part in it; it was a sheer perception and recognition of the circumstances as they were. The people might dispute about details; but the general object to be striven for in life admitted of no disagreement. Without giving it a thought, they knew it. There lay the valley before them, with their little homesteads, their cattle, their gardens, the common; and connected with all these things a certain old-established series of industries was recognized, leading up to a well-known prosperity. That perception was their philosophy. The environment was understood through and through. And this common knowledge, existing apart from any individual in particular, served every individual instead of a set of private opinions of his own. To get away from it was impossible, for it was real knowledge; a man's practical thoughts had to harmonize with it; supported by it, he was saved the trouble of thinking things out in "systems"; and in fact it was a better guide to him than thought-out systems could have been, because generations of experience had fitted it so perfectly to the narrow environment of the valley. So long, therefore, as the environment remained unaltered, the truth that the people's minds held few ideas upon other subjects, and had developed no method of systematic thinking, was veiled.

But it has become plain enough now that the old environment is gone. The new thrift has laid bare the nakedness of the land. It has found the villagers unequipped with any efficient mental habits appropriate to the altered conditions, and shown them to be at a loss for interesting ideas in other directions. They cannot see their way any longer. They have no aims; at any rate, no man is sure what his own aims ought to be, or has any confidence that his neighbours could enlighten him. Life has grown meaningless, stupid; an apathy reigns in the village—a dull waiting, with nothing in particular for which to wait.



XV

THE OPPORTUNITY

Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it has brought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us the means of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life has become. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is so obscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productive work in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kind actually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however, with a more business-like interest in the matter than mine, have recognized that a new thing has come into the country labourer's life, although they do not speak of it as "leisure." Mere wasted time is what it looks like to them. Thus, not long ago, an acquaintance who by no means shares my views of these matters was deploring to me the degenerate state, as he conceived it, of the labourers on certain farms in which he is interested, a few miles away from this valley. The men, he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employment on the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottage gardens—were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests of the estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon my asking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourers in this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens, but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately: "I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the men can buy all they want without working for it; and the result is that they waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin."

With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothing to do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelong experience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at their disposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; the cheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men to live without occupying every available hour in productive work, and in this one respect they do profit a little by those innovations—the use of machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation of foreign goods—which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It is not necessary nowadays—not absolutely necessary—for the labourer, when his day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening in order to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so he is the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While he has been earning money away from home during the day, other men he has never met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for him the things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these things have not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him in shops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned. Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill and industry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificial light provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized by Gilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, but cheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winter evenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day's work a cottage family may prolong their winter day as far into the night as they please; and that, without feeling that they are wasting their store of light, and without being under necessity of spending the rescued hours at any of those thrifty tasks which alone would have justified peasant folk in sitting up late. They have the evening to use at their pleasure.

If it is said, as my friend interested in land seemed to suggest, that they do not know how to use it, I am not concerned to disagree. In fact, that is my own text. On an evening last winter, having occasion to ask a neighbour to do me a service, I knocked at his cottage door, and was invited in. The unshaded lamp on the table cast a hard, strong light on the appointments of the room, and in its glare the family—namely, the man, with his wife, his mother, and his sister—were sitting round the fire. On the table, which had no cloth, the remains of his hot tea-supper were not cleared away—the crust of a loaf, a piece of bacon-rind on a plate, and a teacup showed what it had been. But now he had finished, and was resting in his shirt-sleeves, nursing his baby. In fact, the evening's occupation had begun. The family, that is to say, had two or three hours to spend—for it was but little past seven o'clock—and nothing to do but to sit there and gossip. An innocent pastime that; I have no fault to find with it, excepting that it had the appearance of being very dull. The people looked comfortable, but there was no liveliness in them. No trace of vivacity in their faces gave the smallest reason to suppose that my coming had interrupted any enjoyment of the evening. A listless contentment in being at home together, with the day's work done and a fire to sit by, was what was suggested by the whole bearing of the family. Their leisure was of no use to them for recreation—for "making themselves anew," that is—or for giving play to faculties which had lain quiet during the day's work. At the time, however, I saw nothing significant in all this. It was just what other cottage interiors had revealed to me on other winter evenings. The surprising, the unexpected thing would have been to find the little spell of leisure being joyfully used.

Shall we leave the matter there then? If we do, we shall overlook the one feature in the situation that most particularly deserves attention. For suppose that the cottagers in general do not know what to do with their leisure, yet we must not argue that therefore they do not prize it. Dull though they may seem in it, tedious though I believe they often find it, nevertheless there proceeds from it a subtle satisfaction, as at something gained, in the liberty to behave as they like, in the vague sense that for an hour or two no further effort is demanded of them. Yawning for bed, half sick of the evening, somewhere in the back of their consciousness they feel that this respite from labour, which they have won by the day's work, is a privilege not to be thrown away. It is more to them than a mere cessation from toil, a mere interval between more important hours; it is itself the most important part of the day—the part to which all the rest has led up.

Nothing of the sort, I believe, was experienced in the village in earlier times. Leisure, and the problem of using it, are new things there. I do not mean that the older inhabitants of the valley never had any spare time. There were, doubtless, many hours when they "eased off," to smoke their pipes and drink their beer and be jolly; only, such hours were, so to speak, a by-product of living, not the usual and expected consummation of every day. Accepting them by no means unwillingly when they occurred, the folk still were wont normally to reduce them to a minimum, or at least to see that they did not occur too often; as if spare time, after all, was only a time of waiting until work could be conveniently resumed. So lightly was it valued that most villagers cut it short by the simple expedient of going to bed at six or seven o'clock. But then, in their peasant way, they enjoyed interesting days. The work they did, although it left their reasoning and imaginative powers undeveloped, called into play enough subtle knowledge and skill to make their whole day's industry gratifying. What should they want of leisure? They wanted rest, in which to recover strength for taking up again the interesting business of living; but they approached their daily life—their pig-keeping and bread-making, their mowing and thatching and turf-cutting and gardening, and the whole round of country tasks—almost in a welcoming spirit, matching themselves against its demands and proving their manhood by their success. But the modern labourer's employment, reduced as it is to so much greater monotony, and carried on for a master instead of for the man himself, is seldom to be approached in that spirit. The money-valuation of it is the prime consideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn; and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living. Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new one in the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone over them, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers must make up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturally enough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. But self-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be to shirk the problem, not to solve it.

So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the earlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving an account of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter the different position of the present-day labourers may be more exactly understood.

The man I have in mind—I will rename him Turner—belongs to one of the old families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage and an acre or so of ground—probably mortgaged—together with a horse and cart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usual rustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited no traditions—there were none in his family—to teach him how to use these possessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in the old way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddled away his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property left that was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too late to have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weekly tenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and a few rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used to be in prosperity—thriftless from our point of view, but from the peasant point of view thrifty enough, good-tempered too, generous to a fault, indifferent to discomforts, as a rule very hard-working, yet apparently quite unacquainted with fatigue.

He gets his living now as a labourer; but, unlike his neighbours, he seems by no means careful to secure constant employment. The regularity of it would hardly suit his temper; he is too keenly desirous of being his own master. And his own master he manages to be, in a certain degree. From those who employ him he obtains some latitude of choice, not alone as to the hours of the day when he shall serve them, but even as to the days of the week. I have heard him protest: "Monday you says for me to come. Well, I dunno about Monday—if Tuesday'd suit ye as well? I wants to do so-and-so o' Monday, if 'tis fine. You see, there's Mr. S—— I bin so busy I en't bin anear him this week for fear he should want me up there. I knows his grass wants cuttin'. But I 'xpects I shall ha' to satisfy 'n Monday, or else p'raps he won't like it." Sometimes he takes a day for his own affairs, carting home hop-bine in his donkey-cart, or getting heath for some thatching job that has been offered to him. On these terms, while he finds plenty to do in working intermittently for four or five people in the parish, he preserves a freedom of action which probably no other labourer in the village enjoys. Few others could command it. But Turner's manner is so ingratiating that people have a personal liking for him, and it is certain that his strength and all-round handiness make of him an extremely useful man. Especially does his versatility commend him. Others in the village are as strong as he and as active and willing, but there are not now many others who can do such a number of different kinds of work as he can, with so much experienced readiness.

Among his clients (for that is a more fitting word for them than "employers") there are two or three residents with villa gardens, and also two of those "small-holders" who, more fortunate than himself (though not more happy, I fancy), have managed to cling to the little properties which their fathers owned. Turner, therefore, comes in for a number of jobs extraordinarily diverse. Thus, during last summer I knew him to be tending two gardens, where his work ranged from lawn-cutting (sometimes with a scythe) to sowing seeds, taking care of the vegetable crops, and trimming hedges. But this occupied him only from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. In the margin outside these hours—starting at five or earlier and keeping on until dark—he was helping the two small-holders, one after the other, to make their hay and get the ricks built. Then the ricks required thatching, and Turner thatched them. In the meantime he was getting together a little rick of his own for his donkey's use, carrying home in bags the longer grass which he had mowed in the rough places of people's gardens or had chopped off in hedgerows near his home. A month later he was harvesting for the small-holders, and again there was rick-thatching for him to do. "That's seven I've done," he remarked to me, on the day when he finished the last one. "But didn't the rain stop you this morning?" I asked, for rain had begun heavily about nine o'clock. He laughed. "No.... We got'n covered in somehow. Had to sramble about, but he was thatched afore the rain come."

Later still he was threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I had to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom I mentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across any knights in armour lately.

One autumn, when he was doing some work for myself, he begged for a day or two away in order to take a job at turf-cutting. When he returned on the third or fourth day, he said: "Me and my nipper" (a lad of about sixteen years old) "cut sixteen hundred this time." Now, lawn-turfs are cut to a standard size, three feet by one, wherefore I remarked: "Why, that's nearly a mile you have cut." "Oh, is it?" he said. "But it didn't take long. Ye see, I had the nipper to go along with the edgin' tool in front of me, and 'twan't much trouble to get 'em up."

He could not keep on for me regularly. The thought of Mr. S——'s work waiting to be done fidgeted him. "When I was up there last he was talkin' about fresh gravellin' all his paths. I said to'n, 'If I was you I should wait anyhow till the leaves is down—they'll make the new gravel so ontidy else.' So they would, sure. I keeps puttin' it off. But I shall ha' to go. I sold'n a little donkey in the summer, and he's hoofs'll want parin' again. I done 'em not so long ago...."

So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him. Furthermore, things on either side of it—things he learnt to understand long ago—make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer—he had come to mow a little grass plot for me—I found him full of a boyish delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be bound to find where he is afore I done with it."

The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest.

As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded—hedgehogs which his father used to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what was shepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge." At eight years old he was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought big enough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds; and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father and others for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wet August, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living on bread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories of that annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciative reminiscence—"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetite there! I could eat anything.... You could go to the top of a hill and look down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (houses or farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er a one at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas." On this farm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't pay very high—you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well. Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, and bread-an'-cheese.... Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says 'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I knows 'twas as many as seven, the farmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, be how 'twill. In a great yaller basin...." Turner held out his arms to illustrate a large circumference.

In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his own horse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experience in that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of the slanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse—the ground was too steep for that—but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough which he kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put him out," hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with country industry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however, before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; but that is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved him inefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is to realize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work, even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake to count in how many such things he is proficient.

One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from an old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple—the first one to be picked from a young tree—and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange," recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and, finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time. Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do that. He was laid up one time—'twas when I was eighteen year old—and he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of course he showed me how. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best training.

From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose—a kind of chaff-cutting box—was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own beer-brewing.

To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much by his own observation—not, of course, intentional observation scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation, if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so he watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they can be that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yield of oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examines the lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such matters his talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in his subject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from him casually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that he noticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any new detail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really his subject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on the flimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not now concerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the point is that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoy his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful if the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even "educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as Turner's hours bring to him.

He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley; but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are not very unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that the old cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at least make the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing to care about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value them at all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock.



XVI

THE OBSTACLES

Keeping this old-fashioned kind of life in mind as we turn again to the modern labourer's existence, we see at once where the change has come in, and why leisure, from being of small account, has become of so great importance. It is the amends due for a deprivation that has been suffered. Unlike the industry of a peasantry, commercial wage-earning cannot satisfy the cravings of a man's soul at the same time that it occupies his body, cannot exercise many of his faculties or appeal to many of his tastes; and therefore, if he would have any profit, any enjoyment, of his own human nature, he must contrive to get it in his leisure time.

In illustration of this position, I will take the case—it is fairly typical—of the coal-carter mentioned in the last chapter. He is about twenty-five years old now; and his career so far, from the time when he left school, may be soon outlined. It is true, I cannot say what his first employment was; but it can be guessed; for there is no doubt that he began as an errand-boy, and that presently, growing bigger, he took a turn at driving a gravel-cart to and fro between the gravel-pits and the railway. Assuming this, I can go on to speak from my own knowledge. His growth and strength came early; I remember noticing him first as a powerful fellow, not more than seventeen or eighteen years old, but already doing a man's work as a gravel-digger. When that work slackened after two or three years, he got employment—not willingly, but because times were bad—at night-work with the "ballast-train" on the railway. Exhausting if not brutalizing labour, that is. At ten or eleven at night the gangs of men start off, travelling in open trucks to the part of the line they are to repair, and there they work throughout the night, on wind-swept embankment or in draughty cutting, taking all the weather that the nights bring up. This man endured it for some twelve months, until a neglected chill turned to bronchitis and pleurisy, and nearly ended his life. After that he had a long spell of unemployment, and was on the point of going back to the ballast-train as a last resource when, by good fortune, he got his present job. He has been a coal-carter for three or four years—a fact which testifies to his efficiency. By half-past six o'clock in the morning he has to be in the stables; then comes the day on the road, during which he will lift on his back, into the van and out of it, and perhaps will carry for long distances, nine or ten tons of coal—say, twenty hundredweight bags every hour; by half-past five or six in the evening he has put up his horse for the night; and so his day's work is over, excepting that he has about a mile to walk home.

Of this employment, which, if the man is lucky, will continue until he is old and worn-out, we may admit that it is more useful by far—to the community—than the old village industries were wont to be. Concentrated upon one kind of effort, it perhaps doubles the productivity of a day's work. But just because it is so concentrated it cannot yield to the man himself any variety of delights such as men occupied in the old way were wont to enjoy. It demands from him but little skill; it neither requires him to possess a great fund of local information and useful lore, nor yet takes him where he could gather such a store for his own pleasure. The zest and fascination of living, with the senses alert, the tastes awake, and manifold sights and sounds appealing to his happy recognition—all these have to be forgotten until he gets home and is free for a little while. Then he may seek them if he can, using art or pastimes—what we call "civilization"—for that end. The two hours or so of leisure are his opportunity.

But after a day like the coal-carter's, where is the man that could even begin to refresh himself with the arts, or even the games, of civilization? For all the active use he can make of them those spare hours of his do not deserve to be called leisure; they are the fagged end of the day. Slouching home to them, as it were from under ten tons of coal, he has no energy left for further effort. The community has had all his energy, all his power to enjoy civilization; and has paid him three shillings and sixpence for it. It is small wonder that he seems not to avail himself of the opportunity, prize it though he may.

Yet there is still a possibility to be considered. Albeit any active use of leisure is out of the question, is he therefore debarred from a more tranquil enjoyment? He sits gossiping with his family, but why should the gossip be listless and yawning? Why should not he, to say nothing of his relations, enjoy the refreshment of talk enlivened by the play of pleasant and varied thoughts? As everyone knows, the actual topic of conversation is not what makes the charm; be what it may, it will still be agreeable, provided that it goes to an accompaniment of ideas too plentiful and swift to be expressed. Every allusion then extends the interest of it; reawakened memories add to its pleasure; if the minds engaged are fairly well furnished with ideas, either by experience or by education, the intercourse between them goes on in a sort of luminous medium which fills the whole being with contentment. Supposing, then, that by education, or previous experience, the coal-carter's mind has been thus well furnished, his scanty leisure may still compensate him for the long dull hours of his wage-earning, and the new thrift will after all have made amends for the deprivation of the old peasant enjoyments.

But to suppose this is to suppose a most unlikely thing. Previous experience, at any rate, has done little for the man. The peasants themselves were better off. Compare his chances, once more, with those of a man like Turner. From earliest childhood, Turner's days and nights have been bountiful to him in many-coloured impressions. At the outset he saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished, carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount of traditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for ages supported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems with recollections of all this industry. And then to those recollections must be added memories of the scenes in which the industry went on—the wide landscapes, the glowing cornfields, the meadows, woods, heaths; and likewise the details of barn and rick-yard, and stable and cow-stall, and numberless other corners into which his work has taken him. To anyone who understands them, those details are themselves like an interesting book, full of "idea" legible everywhere in the shapes which country craftsmanship gave to them; and Turner understands them through and through. Nor is this all. If not actual adventure and romance, still many of the factors of adventure and romance have accompanied him through his life; so that it is good even to think of all that he has seen. He has had experience (travelling down to Sussex) of the dead silence of country roads at midnight under the stars; has known the August sunrise, and the afternoon heat, and the chilly moonlight, high up on the South Downs; and the glint of the sunshine in apple-orchards at cider-making time; and the grey coming of the rain that urges a man to hurry with his thatching; and the thickening of the white winter fog across the heaths towards night-fall, when wayfarers might miss the track and wander all night unless they knew well what they were about. Of such stuff as this for the brain-life to feed upon there has been great abundance in Turner's career, but of such stuff what memories can the coal-carter have?

Already in his earliest childhood the principal chances were gone. The common had been enclosed; no little boys were sent out to mind cows there all day, and incidentally to look for birds'-nests and acquaint themselves with the ways of the rabbits and hedgehogs and butterflies and birds of the heath. Fenced-in property, guarded by the Policeman and the Law, restricted the boy's games to the shabby waste-places of the valley, and to the footpaths and roads, where there was not much for a child to do or to see. At home, and in the homes of his companions, the new thrift was in vogue; he might not watch the homely cottage doings, and listen to traditional talk about them, and look up admiringly at able men and women engaged upon them, for the very good reason that no such things went on. Men slaving at their gardens he might see, and women weary at their washing and mending, amid scenes of little dignity and much poverty and makeshift untidiness; but that was all. The coherent and self-explanatory village life had given place to a half blind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economic processes which no child could possibly understand; and it was with the pitiful stock of ideas to be derived from these conditions that the coal-carter passed out of childhood, to enter upon the wage-earning career which I have already outlined.

I need not spend much time in discussing that career as a source of ideas. From first to last, and with the coal-carting period thrown in, monotony rather than variety has been the characteristic of it. I do not say that it has been quite fruitless. There are impressions to be derived, and intense ones probably, from working all day against the "face" of a gravel-pit, with the broken edge of the field up above one's head for horizon; and from the skilled use of pick and shovel; and from the weight of the wheelbarrow full of gravel as one wheels it along a sagging plank. That is something to have experienced; as it is to have sweated at night in a railway-cutting along with other men under the eye of a ganger, and to have known starlight, or rain, or frost, or fog, or tempest meanwhile. It is something, even, to see the life of the roads year after year from the footboard of a coal-van, and to be in charge of a horse hour after hour; but I am talking now of ideas which might give buoyancy and zest to the gossip beside a man's fireside in the evening when he is tired; and I think it unnecessary to argue that, in regard to providing this kind of mental furniture, the coal-carter's experience of life cannot have done great things for him. It has been poverty-stricken just where the peasant life was so rich; it has left a great deficiency, which could only have been made good by an education intentionally given for that end.

But it goes almost without saying that the man's "education" did very little to enrich his mind. The ideas and accomplishments he picked up at the elementary school between his fourth and fourteenth years were of course in themselves insufficient for the needs of a grown man, and it would be unfair to criticize his schooling from that standpoint. Its defect was that it failed to initiate him into the inner significance of information in general, and failed wholly to start him on the path of learning. It was sterile of results. It opened to him no view, no vista; set up in his brain no stir of activity such as could continue after he had left school; and this for the reason that those simple items of knowledge which it conveyed to him were too scrappy and too few to begin running together into any understanding of the larger aspects of life. A few rules of arithmetic, a little of the geography of the British Islands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews; no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of the infinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; but merely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things—"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth—this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind—a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place? When the boy left school his "education" had but barely begun.

And hardly anything has happened since then to carry it farther, although once there seemed just a chance of something better. During two successive winters the lad, being then from sixteen to seventeen years old, went to a night-school, which was opened for twenty-six weeks in each "session," and for four hours in each week. But the hope proved fallacious. In those hundred and four hours a year—hours which came after a tiring day's work—his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "the science of horticulture," the former on the chance that some day he might want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job of the sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for a nursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seeds begin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two. This gives a notion of the sort of idea the luckless fellow derived from the night-school. I do not think that the joinery-classes at present being held in the night-school had begun in his time; but supposing that he also learnt joinery, he might, now that he is a man, add thoughts of mortices and tenons and mitre-joints to his other thoughts about wall areas and germinating seeds. Of course, all these things—like Jewish history or English geography—are worth knowing; but again it is true, of these things no less than of the childish learning acquired at the day-school, that whatever their worth may be to the people concerned to know them, they were very unlikely to set up in this young man's brain any constructive idea-activity, any refreshing form of thought that would enrich his leisure now, or give zest to his conversation. They were odds and ends of knowledge; more comparable to the numberless odds and ends in which peasants were so rich than to the flowing and luminous idea-life of modern civilization.

Adequate help having thus failed to reach the man from any source at any time of his life, it cannot be surprising if now the evening's opportunity finds him unprepared. He is between two civilizations, one of which has lapsed, while the other has not yet come his way. And what is true of him is true of the younger labouring men in general. In bread-and-cheese matters they are perhaps as well off as their forefathers in the village, but they are at a disadvantage in the matter of varied and successful vitality. The wage-earning thrift which has increased their usefulness as drudges has diminished their effectiveness as human beings; for it has failed to introduce into their homes those enlivening, those spirit-stirring influences which it denies to them when they are away from home doing their work. Hence a strange thing. The unemployed hours of the evening, which should be such a boon, are a time of blank and disconsolate tediousness, and when the longer days of the year come round many a man in the valley who ought to be glad of his spare time dodges the wearisome problem of what to do with it by putting himself to further work, until he can go to bed without feeling that he has been wasting his life. Yet that is really no solution of the problem. It means that the men are trying to be peasants again, because they can discover no art of living, no civilization, compatible with the new thrift.

Of course it is true that they are handicapped by the lowness of the wages they receive. However much time one may have, it would be all but impossible to follow up modern civilization without any of its apparatus, in the shape of books and musical instruments, and the comfort of seclusion in a spare room; and none of these advantages can be bought out of an income of eighteen shillings a week. That is plainly the central difficulty—a difficulty which, unless it can be put right, condemns our commercial economy as wholly inadequate to the needs of labouring people. Supposing, however, that this defect could be suddenly remedied; supposing, that is, that by some miracle wages could be so adjusted as to put the labourer in command of the apparatus of civilization; still, he could not use the apparatus without a personal adjustment. He is impoverished, not in money only, but also in development of his natural faculties, since the old village civilization has ceased to help him.



XVII

THE WOMEN'S NEED

If, while the common was still open, very few even of the men of the village troubled about regular employment, we may well believe that there were still fewer regular wage-earners amongst the women. I do not mean that wage-earning was a thing they never did. There was not a woman in the valley, perhaps, but had experience of it at hay-making and harvesting, while all would have been disappointed to miss the hop-picking. But these occasional employments had more resemblance to holidays and outings than they had to constant work for a living.

As the new thrift gradually established itself, the younger women at least had to alter their ways. For observe what had happened. A number of men, once half-independent, but now wanting work constantly, had been forced into a market where extra labour was hardly required; and it needs no argument to prove that, under such conditions, they were not only unable to command high wages, but were often unemployed. Of necessity, therefore, the women were obliged to make up the week's income by their own earnings. The situation, in fact, was similar to that which had been produced in earlier times and in other parishes by the old Poor Law, when parish pay enabled men to work for less than a living wage; only now the deficiency was made up, not at the expense of employers and ratepayers, but at the expense of women and girls.

But, though becoming wage-earners, the women missed the first advantage that wage-earners should enjoy—namely, leisure time. After all, the new thrift had but partially freed them from their old occupations. They might buy at a shop many things which their mothers had had to make; but there was no going to a shop to get the washing and scrubbing done, the beds made, the food cooked, the clothes mended. All this remained to the women as before. When they came home from the fields—at first it was principally by field-work that they earned wages—it was not to be at leisure, but to fall-to again on these domestic doings, just as if there had been no change, just as if they were peasant women still.

And yet, though this work had not changed, there was henceforth a vast difference in its meaning to the women. To approach it in the true peasant or cottage woman's temper was impossible; nor in doing it might the labourer's wife enjoy half the satisfaction that had rewarded the fatigue of her mother and grandmother. Something dropped away from it that could not be replaced when the old conditions died out.

To discover what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy, as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey, all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniums in cottage windows. On the contrary, I believe that very often it grew intensely ugly, and was as narrowing as it was ugly. The women saw nothing, and learnt nothing, of the outer world; and, in their own world, they saw and learnt much that was ill. All the brutalities connected with getting a living on peasant terms tended to coarsen them—the cruelties of men to one another, the horrors that had to be inflicted on animals, the miseries of disease suffered by ignorant human beings. Their perpetual attention to material cares tended to make them materialized and sordid; they grew callous; there was no room to cultivate delicacy of imagination. All this you must admit into the picture of the peasant woman's life, if you would try to see it fairly on the bad side as well as on the good side. Still, a good side there was, and that it was far oftener in evidence than the other I am well persuaded, when I remember the older village women who are dead now. They, so masculine in their outlook, yet so true-hearted and, now and then, so full of womanly tenderness and high feeling, could not have been the product of conditions that were often evil. And one merit in particular must be conceded to the old style of life. Say that the women's work was too incessant, and that some of it was distinctly ill to do; yet, taken as a whole, it was not uninteresting, and it was just that wholeness of it that made all the difference. The most tiresome duties—those domestic cares which were destined to become so irksome to women of a later day—were less tiresome because they were parts of a whole. Through them all shone the promise of happier hours to be won by their performance.

For although in this rough valley women might not achieve the finer successes of cottage folk-life, where it led up into gracefulness and serenity, in a coarser fashion the essential spirit of pride in capable doing was certainly theirs. They could, and did, enjoy the satisfaction of proficiency, and win respect for it from their neighbours. If they were not neat, they were very handy; if there was no superlative finish about their work, there was soundness of quality, which they knew would be recognized as so much to their credit. Old gossip bears me out. Conceive the nimble and self-confident temper of those two cottage women—not in this village, I admit, but in the next one to it, and the thing was quite possible here—who always planned to do their washing on the same day, for the pleasure of seeing who had the most "pieces," and the best, to hang out on the clothes-lines. The story must be seventy years old, and I don't know who told it me; but it has always seemed to me very characteristic of the good side of cottage life, whether one thinks of the eager rivalry itself in the gardens, where the white clothes flapped, or of the long record implied in it of careful housewifery and quiet needlework. This spirit of joy in proficiency must have sweetened many of the cottage duties, and may well have run through them all. When a woman treated her friends to home-made wine at Christmas, she was exhibiting to them her own skill; when she cut up the loaf she had baked, or fried the bacon she had helped to cure, the good result was personal to herself; the very turf she piled on the fire had a homely satisfaction for her, because, cut as it was by her husband's own tools, and smelling of the neighbouring heath as it burnt, it was suggestive of the time-honoured economies of all the valley. In this way another comfort was added to that of her own more personal pleasure. For there was hardly a duty that the old-time village woman did, but was related closely to what the men were doing out of doors, and harmonized with the general industry of her people. She may be figured, almost, as the member of a tribe whose doings explained all her own doings, and to whose immemorial customs her scrubbing and washing belonged, not unworthily. Her conscience was in the work. From one thing to another she went, now busily at a pleasant task, now doggedly at a wearisome one, and she knew no leisure; but at every point she was supported by what we may call the traditional feeling of the valley—nay, of the whole countryside—commending her perhaps; at any rate, fully understanding her position. To be like her mother and her grandmother; to practise the time-honoured habits, and to practise them efficiently, was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadays with women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager's wife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman; she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with a recognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were her possession. The arts of her people—the flower-gardening, the songs and old sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time and Christmas—were hers as much as anybody's; if the stress of work kept her from partaking in them, still she was not shut out from them by reason of any social inferiority. And so we come back to the point at issue. House-drudgery might fill the peasant woman's days and years, and yet there was more belonging to it. It was the core of a fruit: the skeleton of something that was full of warm life. A larger existence wrapped it in, and on the whole a kindlier one.

In view of all this it is easy to see why the house-duties can no longer be approached in the old temper, or yield their former satisfaction while they are being done. The larger existence has been stripped away from them. They do not lead up to happier, more interesting, duties; they are not preparatory to pleasantness. The washing and scrubbing, the very cooking and needlework, are but so much trouble awaiting a woman when she gets up in the morning and when she comes home tired at night; they spoil the leisure that wage-earning should win, and they are undertaken, not with the idea of getting on to something productive, something that would make the cottage a more prosperous home, but solely to keep it from degenerating into an entirely offensive one. There is no hope surrounding these doings.

Nor do they fail only because they have become dissociated from pleasanter work. Even the best of them are actually less interesting in themselves. Look, for instance, at cooking. That cheap and coarse food which women now buy because its coarseness makes it cheap is of a quality to discourage any cook; it is common to the village—the rough rations of the poor; and the trumpery crocks and tins, the bad coal, and worse fireplaces, do nothing to make the preparation of it more agreeable. With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift has degraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expend any art of the needle upon the shabby second-hand garments, or the shoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer's wife. And if the family clothes are not good to make or to mend, neither are they good to wash, or worth displaying on the clothes-lines in the hope of exciting envy in neighbours.

Not at first, but in due time, inefficiency was added to the other causes which tended to make housework unpalatable to the women, and of no use to them as an uplifting experience. The inefficiency could hardly be avoided. The mothers, employed in the fields, had but little chance of teaching their daughters; and these daughters, growing up, to marry and to follow field-work themselves, kept their cottages as best they could, by the light of nature. In not a few cases all sense of an art of well-doing in such matters was lost, and the home became a place to sleep in, to feed in; not a place in which to try to live well. Perhaps the lowest ebb was reached some fifteen or twenty years ago. By then that feeling of belonging intimately to the countryside and sharing its traditions had died out, and nothing had come to replace it. For all practical purposes there were no traditions, nor were there any true country-folk living a peculiar and satisfying life of their own. The women had become merely the "hands" or employees of farmers, struggling to make up money enough every week for a wretched shopping. With health, a joking humour, and the inevitable habit of self-reliance, they preserved a careless good-temper, and they had not much time to realize their own plight; but it was, for all that, a squalid life that many of them led, a neglected life. Only in a very few cottages did there linger any serviceable memory of better things.

Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered a blowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of "residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen and washerwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate a certain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It is true I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentary in the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change her scrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quite dubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages is betrayed naively by the young girls who go from them into domestic service. "You don't seem to like things sticky," one of these girls observed to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day and sticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferies heard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus as gets hold o' you!" might very well be applied to many and many a child of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first "place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do not affect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an open question how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called into play again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due to experience which the younger women now bring into the valley when they marry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley. In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are at last coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasant ideas.

May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well; that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot make good? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Consider what it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of a civilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasant woman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic method is all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better than the old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now in middle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only—the core of a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With the cottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments of ability and of character as permitted the women to look with complacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced no humiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reach the full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who can affirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend that the best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottage woman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enables her to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-do women? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some such belief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument, until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to the inspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and the kitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and body, has side-tracked them—has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured."

Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the only sources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might be obtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. At school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of thought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are not admitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem of making both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experience indeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluable lessons; yet still the savoir vivre that should make up for the old peasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is not attained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pick up from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything of the best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learn it. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be something further to be said presently; in the meantime I may leave it to the reader to judge whether the cottage woman's needs, since the peasant system broke down, are being well met.

But I must not leave it to be inferred that the women, thus stranded between two civilizations, are therefore degraded or brutalized. From repeated experience one knows that their sense of courtesy—of good manners as distinct from merely fashionable or cultured manners—is very keen: in kindness and good-will they have nothing to learn from anybody, and most of their "superiors" and would-be teachers might learn from them. Nor would I disparage their improved housekeeping, as though it had no significance. It may open no doorway for them into middle-class civilization, but I think it puts their spirits, as it were, on the watch for opportunities of personal development. I judge by their looks. An expression, not too often seen elsewhere, rests in the eyes of most of the cottage women—an expression neither self-complacent nor depressed, nor yet exactly docile, though it is near to that. The interpretation one would put upon it depends on the phrases one is wont to use. Thus some would say that the women appear to be reaching out towards "respectability" instead of the blowsy good-temper bred of field-work; others, more simply, but perhaps more truly, that they are desirous of being "good." But whatever epithet one gives it, there is the fine look: a look hardly of expectancy—it is not alert enough for that—but rather of patient quietness and self-possession, the innermost spirit being held instinctively unsullied, in that receptive state in which a religion, a brave ethic, would flourish if the seeds of such a thing could be sown there. A hopeful, a generous and stimulating outlook—that is what must be regained before the loss of the peasant outlook can be made good to them. They are in want of a view of life that would reinstate them in their own—yes, and in other people's—estimation; a view of social well-being, not of the village only, but of all England now, in which they can hold the position proper to women who are wives and mothers.

And this, vague though it is, shows up some of the more pressing needs of the moment. Above all things the economic state of the cottage-women requires improvement. There must be some definite leisure for them, and they must be freed from the miserable struggle with imminent destitution, if they are to find the time and the mental tranquillity for viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, an education to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; for nobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classes certainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at once that the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women of the idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit on those they imitate. In this connection some very curious things—the product of leisure and no outlook—are to be seen in the village. That objectionable yet funny cult of "superiority," upon which the "resident" ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has its disciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife or daughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not "know," or will not "mix with," the wives and daughters of mere labourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiring type find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of still higher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say. The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion," that new ethic, which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before the loss of the peasant system can be made up to the women.



XVIII

THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING

Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it. At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try to be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of any passers-by—especially of women—who might be considered safe game: that was their only way of spending the evenings and at the same time enjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council had lately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in the elementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature, and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty or five-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth and light, though bored by the instruction. They were mischievous and inattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon as half-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if the gloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, less irksome than the night-school.

There was no recreation whatever for the growing girls, none for the grown-up women; nothing but the public-house for the men, unless one excepts the two or three occasions during the winter when the more well-to-do residents chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom, and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their winter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages or under the lamp outside the public-house.

It was in full view of these circumstances that an "Entertainment Club" was started, with the idea of inducing the cottage people to help themselves in the matter of recreation instead of waiting until it should please others to come and amuse them. I am astonished now to think how democratic the club contrived to be. In the fortnightly programmes which were arranged the performers were almost exclusively of the wage-earning sort, and offers of help from "superior people" were firmly declined. And for at least one, and, I think, two winters, the experiment was wildly successful—so successful that, to the best of my recollection, the "gentry" were crowded out, and gave no entertainments at all. But the enthusiasm could not last. During the third winter decay set in, and early in the fourth the club, although with funds in hand, ceased its activities, leaving the field open, as it has since remained, to the recognized exponents of leisured culture.

The fact is, it died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At the first nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely or grotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly on to a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who could sing a song or play a musical instrument—it mattered not what—was welcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people able to do anything at all were not many, and when their repertory of songs learnt by ear was exhausted, there was nothing new forthcoming. Gradually, therefore, the club began to depend on the few members with a smattering of middle-class attainments; and they, imitating the rich—asking for piano accompaniments to their singing, and so on—at the same time gave themselves airs of superiority to the crowd. And that was fatal. The less cultivated behaved in the manner usual to them where there is any unwarrantable condescension going—that is to say, they kept out of the way of it, until, finally, the performers and organizers had the club almost to themselves. From the outset the strong labouring men had contemptuously refused to have anything to do with what was often, I admit, a foolish and "gassy" affair; but their wives and sons and daughters had been very well pleased, until the taint of superiority drove them away. The club died when its democratic character was lost.

Yet, though I was glad to have done with it, I have never regretted the experience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at that time I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, and in furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of finding amongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitive art. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found. My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kind they were dependent on the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table, or on such cheap refuse as had come into the village from London music-halls or from the canteens at Aldershot. Street pianos in the neighbouring town supplied them with popular airs, which they reproduced—it may be judged with what amazing effect—on flute or accordion; but the repertory of songs was filled chiefly from the sources just mentioned. The young men—the shyest creatures in the country, and the most sensitive to ridicule—found safety in comic songs which, if produced badly, raised but the greater laugh. Only once or twice were these songs imprudently chosen; as a rule, they dealt with somebody's misfortunes or discomforts, in a humorous, practical-joking spirit, and so came nearer, probably, to the expression of a genuine village sentiment than anything else that was done. But for all that they were an imported product. Instead of an indigenous folk-art, with its roots in the traditional village life, I found nothing but worthless forms of modern art which left the people's taste quite unfed. Once, it is true, a hint came that, democratic though the club might be, it was possibly not democratic enough. A youth mentioned that at home one evening he and his family had sat round the table singing songs, out of song-books, I think. It suggested that there might still lurk in the neglected cottages a form of artistic enjoyment more crude than anything that had come to light, and perhaps more native to the village. But I have no belief that it was so. Before I could inquire further, this boy dropped out of the movement. When asked why he had not come to one entertainment, he said that he had been sent off late in the afternoon to take two horses miles away down the country—I forget where—and had been on the road most of the night. A few weeks afterwards, turning eighteen, he went to Aldershot and enlisted. So far as I remember, he was the only boy of the true labouring class who ever took any active part in the proceedings—he performed once in a farce. The other lads, although some were sons of labourers and grandsons of peasants, were of those who had been apprenticed to trades, and therefore knew a little more than mere labourers, though I do not say that they were more intelligent by nature.

If, however, they were the pick of the village youth, the fact only makes the more impressive certain truths which forced themselves upon my notice at that time with regard to the needs of the village since the old peasant habits had vanished. There was no mistaking it: intercourse with these young men showed only too plainly how slow modern civilization had been to follow modern methods of industry and thrift. Understand, they were well-intentioned and enterprising fellows. They had begun to look beyond the bounds of this parish, and to seek for adaptations to the larger world. Moreover, they were learning trades—those very trades which have since been introduced into our elementary schools as a means of quickening the children's intellectual powers. But these youths somehow had not drawn enlightenment from their trades, being, in fact, handicapped all the time by the want of quite a different education. To put it rather brutally, they did not understand their own language—the standard English language in which modern thinking has to go on in this country.

For several of the entertainments they came forward to perform farces. After the first diffidence had worn off, they took a keen delight in the preparations, working hard and cordially; they were singularly ready to be shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce—the counterpart in drama of their comic songs—pleased them best, and they did well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because they missed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coach them in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. They produced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and were satisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he "divested" himself of his clothing, Mr. Box—or was it Cox?—said that he "invested" himself, and no correction could cure him of saying that. When one of them came to describing the lady's desperate wooing of him, "to escape her importunities" is what he should have said; but what he did say was "to escape our opportunities"—an error which the audience, fortunately, failed to notice, for it slipped out again at the time of performance, after having been repeatedly put right at rehearsal. And this sort of thing happened all through the piece. Almost invariably the points which depended on a turn of phrase were lost. "I at once give you warning that I give you warning at once" became, "I at once give you warning. That is, I give you warning at once." Cox (or Box) reading the lawyer's letter, never made out the following passage: "I soon discovered her will, the following extract from which will, I am sure, give you satisfaction." It was plain that he thought the second word "will" meant the same as the first.

As evidence of a lack of "book-learning" in the village, this might have been insufficient, had it stood alone. But it did not. The misbehaviour of the boys at the night-school has been mentioned. Being a member of the school managing committee, I went in to the school occasionally, and what I saw left me satisfied that a large part of the master's difficulty arose from the unfamiliarity of the scholars with their own language. That initial ignorance blocked the road to science even more completely than, in the Entertainment Club, it did to art. "The Science of Horticulture" was the subject of the lesson on one dismal evening, this being the likeliest of some half-dozen "practical sciences" prescribed for village choice by the educational authority at Whitehall. About twenty "students," ranging from sixteen to nineteen years old, were—no, not puzzling over it: they were "putting in time" as perfunctorily as they dared, making the lesson an excuse for being present together in a warmed and lighted room. When I went in it was near the close of the evening; new matter was being entered upon, apparently as an introduction to the next week's lesson. I stood and watched. The master called upon first one, then another, to read aloud a sentence or two out of the textbook with which each was provided; and one after another the boys stood up, shamefaced or dogged, to stumble through sentences which seemed to convey absolutely no meaning to them. If it had been only the hard words that floored them—such as "cotyledon" and "dicotyledon"—I should not have been surprised; but they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of the meaning of punctuation. I admit that probably they were not trying to do their best; that they might have put on a little intentional clumsiness, in the instinctive hope of escaping derision by being thought waggish. But the pity of it was that they should need to protect themselves so. They had not the rudimentary accomplishment: that was the plain truth. They could not understand ordinary printed English.

Of science, of course, they were learning nothing. They may have taken away from those lessons a few elementary scientific terms, and possibly they got hold of the idea of the existence of some mysterious knowledge that was not known in the village; but the advantage ended there. I doubt if a single member of the class had begun to use his brain in a scientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be acquired. They were trying—if they were trying anything at all—to pick up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also from the following circumstance.

At Christmastime in one of these winters a few of the boys of the night-school went round the village, mumming. They performed the same old piece that Mr. Hardy has described in "The Return of the Native"—the same old piece that, as a little child, I witnessed years ago in a real village; but it had degenerated lamentably. The boys said that they had learnt it from an elder brother of one of them, and had practised it in a shed; and at my request the leader consented to write out the piece, and in due time he brought me his copy. I have mislaid the thing, and write from memory; but I recall enough of it to affirm that he had never understood, or even cared to fix a meaning to, the words—or sounds, rather—which he and his companions had gabbled through as they prowled around the kitchen clashing their wooden swords. That St. George had become King William was natural enough; but what is to be said of changing the Turkish Knight into the Turkey Snipe? That was one of the "howlers" this youth perpetrated, amongst many others less striking, perhaps, but not less instructive. The whole thing showed plainly where the difficulty lay at the night-school. The breaking up of the traditional life of the village had failed to supply the boys either with the language or with the mental habits necessary for living successfully under the new conditions. Some of these boys were probably the sons of parents unable to read and write; none of them came from families where those accomplishments were habitually practised or much esteemed.

The argument, thus illustrated by the state of the boys, extends in its application to practically the whole of the village. "Book-learning" had been very unimportant to the peasant with his traditional lore, but it would be hard to exaggerate the handicap against which the modern labourer strives, for want of it. Look once more at his position. In the new circumstance the man lives in an environment never dreamt of by the peasant. Economic influences affecting him most closely come, as it were, vibrating upon him from across the sea. Vast commercial and social movements, unfelt in the valley under the old system, are altering all its character; instead of being one of a group of villagers tolerably independent of the rest of the world, he is entangled in a network of economic forces as wide as the nation; and yet, to hold his own in this new environment, he has no new guidance. Parochial customs and the traditions of the village make up the chief part of his equipment.