Field and Hedgerow Part 4

is an old country proverb; the nearer to wheat the farther from mammon, I may construct as an addendum. Quite lately a gentleman told me that while he grew wheat on his thousand acres he lost just a pound an acre per annum, _i.e._ a thousand a year out of capital, so that if he had not happily given up this amus.e.m.e.nt he would now have been in the workhouse munching the putty there supplied for bread.

The rag and bone men go from door to door filling an old bag with sc.r.a.ps of linen, and so innumerable agents of bankers and financiers, vampires that suck gold, are for ever prowling about collecting every golden coin they can scent out and shipping it over sea. And what does not go abroad is in consequence of this great drain sharply locked up in the London safes as reserves against paper, and cannot be utilised in enterprises or manufacture. Therefore trade stands still, and factories are closed, and ship-yards are idle, and beautiful vessels are stored up doing nothing by hundreds in dock; coal mines left to be filled with water, and furnaces blown out. Therefore there is bitter distress and starvation, and cries for relief works, and one meal a day for Board school children, and the red flag of Socialism is unfurled. All because of these little grains of wheat.

They talked of bringing artillery, with fevered lips, to roar forth shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not Gatling guns? The artillery did not come for very shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to prod folk into moving on. All about these little grains of wheat.

These thoughts came into my mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on my right, the sun going down on the left. The copper did not gleam, it was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces of later date and another shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter, some of these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the reddish brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. The very rooks are black, and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour at a distance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in Russia, and even in France, and why not in our rare sunshine? Once now and then you see a gilded weatherc.o.c.k shine like a day-star as the sun goes down three miles away, over the dark brown field, where the plough has been going to and fro through the slow hours. I can see the plough and the horses very well at three miles, and know what they are doing.

I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and thick enough to hide the steeples and towers which stand up so stiff and stark, and bare and cold, some of them blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to impale, with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards--every one of them out of proportion and jarring to the eye. If by good fortune you can find a spot where you cannot see a steeple or a church tower, where you can see only fields and woods, you will find it so much more beautiful, for nature has made it of its kind perfect. The dim sea is always so beautiful a view because it is not disfigured by these buildings. In the ships men live; in the houses among the trees they live; these steeples and towers are empty, and no spirit can dwell in that which is out of proportion. Scarcely any one can paint a picture of the country without sticking in one of these repellent structures. The oast-houses, whose red cones are so plentiful in Kent and Suss.e.x, have quite a different effect; they have some colour, and by a curious felicity the builders have hit upon a good proportion, so that the shape is pleasant; these, too, have some use in the world.

Westward the sun was going down over the sea, and a wild west wind, which the glow of the sun as it touched the waves seemed to heat into fury, brought up the distant sound of the billows from the beach. A line of dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping, darkest green oaks, shut out the sh.o.r.e. A thousand starlings were flung up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; and every now and then over these hedges there rose up the white forms of sea-gulls drifting to and fro among the elms. White sea-gulls--birds of divination, you might say--a good symbol of the times, for now we plough the ocean. The barren sea! In the Greek poets you may find constant reference to it as that which could not be reaped or sowed. Ulysses, to betoken his madness, took his plough down to the sh.o.r.e and drew furrows in the sand--the sea that even Demeter, great G.o.ddess, could not sow nor bring to any fruition. Yet now the ocean is our wheat-field and ships are our barns. The sea-gull should be painted on the village tavern sign instead of the golden wheatsheaf.

There could be no more flat and uninteresting surface than this field, a damp wet brown, water slowly draining out of the furrows, not a bird that I can see. No hare certainly, or partridge, or even a rabbit--nothing to sit or crouch--on that cold surface, tame and level as the brown cover of a book. They like something more human and comfortable; just as we creep into nooks and corners of rooms and into cosy arm-chairs, so they like tufts or some growth of shelter, or mounds that are dry, between hedges where there is a bite for them. I can trace nothing on this surface, so heavily washed by late rain. Let now the harriers come, and instantly the hounds' second sense of smell picks up the invisible sign of the hare that has crossed it in the night or early dawn, and runs it as swiftly as if he were lifting a clue of thread. The dull surface is all written over with hieroglyphics to the hound, he can read and translate to us in joyous tongue. Or the foxhounds carry a bee-line straight from hedge to hedge, and after them come the hoofs, prospecting deeply into the earth, dashing down fibre and blade, crunching up the tender wheat and battering it to pieces. It will rise again all the fresher and stronger, for there is something human in wheat, and the more it is trampled on the better it grows. Despots grind half the human race, and despots stronger than man--plague, pestilence, and famine--grind the whole; and yet the world increases, and the green wheat of the human heart is not to be trampled out.

The starlings grew busier and busier in the dark green Spanish oaks, thrown up as if a sh.e.l.l had burst among them; suddenly their clucking and whistling ceased, the speeches of contention were over, a vote of confidence had been pa.s.sed in their Government, and the House was silent.

The pheasants in the park shook their wings and crowed 'kuck, kuck--kow,'

and went to roost; the water in the furrows ceased to reflect; the dark earth grew darker and damper; the elms lost their reddish brown; the sky became leaden behind the ridge of the Downs; and the shadow of night fell over the field.

Twenty-five years ago I went into a camera obscura, where you see miniature men and women, coloured photographs alive and moving, trees waving, now and then dogs crossing the bright sun picture. I was only there a few moments, and I have never been in one since, and yet so inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of those years are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet they cannot occupy the s.p.a.ce of a pin's point. They have neither length, breadth, nor thickness, none of the qualifications of mathematical substance, and yet they must in some way be a species of matter. The fact indicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. Now I wish I could put before you a coloured, living, moving picture, like that of the camera obscura, of some other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were painted on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin of green downs. They were large enough to have the charm of vague, indefinite extension, and yet all could be distinctly seen. Large squares of green corn that was absorbing its yellow from the sunlight; chess squares, irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich blood-red trifolium; others of scarlet sainfoin and blue lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies here and there. Not all of these, of course, at once, but they followed so quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one and the same pictures, and had you painted them altogether on the same canvas, together with ripe wheat, they would not have seemed out of place. Never was such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk the colours are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the yellow mustard and charlock a keener yellow; the air, too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks; men and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among clumps of trees, where the chimneys and gables of farmhouses are partly visible; red-tiled barns away yonder; a shepherd moving his hurdles; away again the black funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-wheel above hawthorn bushes--all so distinct and close under that you might almost fear to breathe for fear of dimming the mirror. The few white clouds sailing over seemed to belong to the fields on which their shadows were now foreshortened, now lengthened, as if they were really part of the fields, like the crops, and the azure sky so low down as to be the roof of the house and not at all a separate thing. And the sun a lamp that you might almost have pushed along his course faster with your hand; a loving and interesting sun that wanted the wheat to ripen, and stayed there in the slow-drawn arc of the summer day to lend a hand. Sun and sky and clouds close here and not across any planetary s.p.a.ce, but working with us in the same field, shoulder to shoulder, with man. Then you might see the white doves yonder flutter up suddenly out of the trees by the farm, little flecks of white clouds themselves, and everywhere all throughout the plain an exquisite silence, a delicious repose, not one clang or harshness of sound to shatter the beauty of it. There you might stand on the high down among the thyme and watch it, hour after hour, and still no interruption; nothing to break it up. It was something like the broad folio of an ancient illuminated ma.n.u.script, in gold, gules, blue, green; with foliated scrolls and human figures, somewhat clumsy and thick, but quaintly drawn, and bold in their intense realism.

There was another wheat-field by the side of which I used to walk sometimes in the evenings, as the grains in the cars began to grow firm.

The path ran for a mile beside it--a mile of wheat in one piece--all those million million stalks the same height, all with about the same number of grains in each car, all ripening together. The hue of the surface travelled along as you approached; the tint of yellow shifted farther like the reflection of sunlight on water, but the surface was really much the same colour everywhere. It seemed a triumph of culture over such a s.p.a.ce, such regularity, such perfection of myriads of plants springing in their true lines at the same time, each particular ear perfect, and a mile of it. Perfect work with the plough, the drill, the harrow in every detail, and yet such breadth. Let your hand touch the ears lightly as you walk--drawn through them as if over the side of a boat in water--feeling the golden heads. The sparrows fly out every now and then ahead; some of the birds like their corn as it hardens, and some while it is soft and full of milky sap. There are hares within, and many a brood of partridge chicks that cannot yet use their wings. Thick as the seed itself the feathered creatures have been among the wheat since it was sown. Finches more numerous than the berries on the hedges; sparrows like the finches multiplied by finches, linnets, rooks, like leaves on the trees, wood-pigeons whose crops are like bushel baskets for capacity; and now as it ripens the mult.i.tude will be multiplied by legions, and as it comes to the harvest there is a fresh crop of sparrows from the nests in the barns, you may see a brown cloud of them a hundred yards long.

Besides which there were the rabbits that ate the young green blades, and the mice that will be busy in the sheaves, and the insects from spring-time to granary, a nameless host uncounted. A whole world, as it were, let loose upon the wheat, to eat, consume, and wither it, and yet it conquers the whole world. The great field you see was filled with gold corn four feet deep as a pitcher is filled with water to the brim. Of yore the rich man is said, in the Roman cla.s.sic, to have measured his money, so here you might have measured it by the rood. The sunbeams sank deeper and deeper into the wheatears, layer upon layer of light, and the colour deepened by these daily strokes. There was no bulletin to tell the folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood of the wheat to its hour of overflow. Yet there went through the village a sense of expectation, and men said to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one knew the day--the last day of doom of the golden race; every one knew it was nigh. One evening there was a small square piece cut at one side, a little notch, and two shocks stood there in the twilight. Next day the village sent forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and slay.

It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great farmer gave the signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, or child that did not talk of that. Well-to-do people stopped their vehicles and walked out into the new stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody--all to exchange a word or two with the workers. These were so terribly in earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might come and go as sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more men were put on day by day, and women to bind the sheaves, till the vast field held the village, yet they seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of the golden mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the wheat fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and cradled in a cottage, and pa.s.sed his childhood bareheaded in July heats and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer day is long, and they were there hours before I was up. The edge of the reap-hook had to be driven by force through the stout stalks like a sword, blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; the back stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery rays from a full disc on the head and neck. I think some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled up in their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll of the turban about the head, and perhaps they would have done better if they had adopted the custom of the South and wound a long scarf about the middle of the body, for they were very liable to be struck down with such internal complaints as come from great heat. Their necks grew black, much like black oak in old houses. Their open chests were always bare, and flat, and stark, and never rising with rounded bust-like muscle as the Greek statues of athletes.

The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest-field, and shrunk together--all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle remaining. Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it is not long ago, either--I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was piecework at so much per acre--like solid gold to men and women who had lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the air--the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.

No song, no laugh, no stay--on from morn till night, possessed with a maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum they would receive; and what is man's heart and brain to money? So hard, you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket, and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the furnace of the sun.

Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here was the wheat, the beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of the flowery summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many a low mound in the churchyard--once visible, now level--was the sooner raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life--no rest, no calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly offered by the G.o.ds--the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to a shapeless and hopeless fall.

The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so that a very large quant.i.ty was held tightly in a very small compa.s.s. The gleaner's sheaf looked like the knot of a girl's hair woven in and bound.

It was a tradition of the wheat field handed down from generation to generation, a thing you could not possibly do unless you had been shown the secret--like the knots the sailors tie, a kind of hand art. The wheatstalk being thick at one end makes the sheaf heavier and more solid there, and so in any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are built thick in the middle and lessen gradually toward the top and toward the ground. The warm yellow of the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter's day under a grey sky; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm and comfortable, thrown down thickly in the yards for the roan cattle.

After the village has gone back to its home still the work of the wheat is not over; there is the thatching with straw of last year, which is bleached and contrasts with the yellow of the fresh-gathered crop. Next the threshing; and meantime the ploughs are at work, and very soon there is talk of seed-time.

I used to look with wonder when I was a boy at the endless length of wall and the enormous roof of a great t.i.the barn. The walls of Spanish convents, with little or no window to break the vast monotony, somewhat resemble it: the convent is a building, but does not look like a home; it is too big, too general. So this barn, with its few windows, seemed too immense to belong to any one man. The t.i.the barn has so completely dropped out of modern life that it may be well to briefly mention that its use was to hold the tenth sheaf from every wheat-field in the parish.

The parson's t.i.the was the real actual tenth sheaf bodily taken from every field of corn in the district. A visible tenth, you see; a very solid thing. Imagine the vast heap they would have made, imagine the hundreds and hundreds of sacks of wheat they filled when they were threshed. I have often thought that it would perhaps be a good thing if this contribution of the real tenth could be brought back again for another purpose. If such a barn could be filled now, and its produce applied to the help of the poor and aged and injured of the village, we might get rid of that blot on our civilisation--the workhouse. Mr.

Besant, in his late capital story, 'The Children of Gibeon,' most truly pointed out that it was custom which rendered all men indifferent to the sufferings of their fellow-creatures. In the old Roman days men were crucified so often that it ceased even to be a show; the soldiers played at dice under the miserable wretches: the peasant women stepping by jested and laughed and sang. Almost in our own time dry skeletons creaked on gibbets at every cross-road:--

When for thirty shillings men were hung, And the thirst for blood grew stronger, Men's lives were valued then at a sheep's-- Thank G.o.d that lasts no longer.

So strong is custom and tradition, and the habit of thought it weaves about us, that I have heard ancient and grave farmers, when the fact was mentioned with horror, hum, and ah! and handle their beards, and mutter that 'they didn't know as 'twas altogether such a bad thing as they was hung for sheep-stealing.' There were parsons then, as now, in every rural parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity, and demand its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes and grog very comfortably.

The gallows at the cross-roads is gone, but the workhouse stands, and custom, cruel custom, that tyrant of the mind, has inured us (to use an old word) to its existence in our midst. Apart from any physical suffering, let us only consider the slow agony of the poor old reaper when he feels his l.u.s.ty arm wither, and of the grey bowed wife as they feel themselves drifting like a ship ash.o.r.e to that stony waiting-room.

For it is a waiting-room till the grave receives them. Economically, too, the workhouse is a heavy loss and drag.

Could we, then, see the t.i.the barn filled again with golden wheat for this purpose of help to humanity, it might be a great and wonderful good.

With this tenth to feed the starving and clothe the naked; with the tenth to give the little children a midday meal at the school--that would be natural and true. In the course of time, as the land laws lessen their grip, and the people take possession of the earth on which they stand, it is more than probable that something of this kind will really come about.

It would be only simple justice after so many centuries--it takes so many hundreds of years to get even that.

'Workhouse, indeed!' I have heard the same ancient well-to-do greybeards e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, 'workhouse! they ought to be very thankful they have got such a place to go to!'

All the village has been to the wheat-field with reaping-hooks, and waggons and horses, the whole strength of man has been employed upon it; little brown hands and large brown hands, blue eyes and dark eyes have been there searching about; all the intelligence of human beings has been brought to bear, and yet the stubble is not empty. Down there come again the ever-increasing clouds of sparrows; as a cloud rises here another cloud descends beyond it, a very mist and vapour as it were of wings. It makes one wonder to think where all the nests could have been; there could hardly have been enough caves and barns for all these to have been bred in. Every one of the mult.i.tude has a keen pair of eyes and a hungry beak, and every single individual finds something to eat in the stubble.

Something that was not provided for them, crumbs that have escaped from this broad table, and there they are every day for weeks together, still finding food. If you will consider the incredible number of little mouths, and the busy rate at which they ply them hour by hour, you may imagine what an immense number of grains of wheat must have escaped man's hand, for you must remember that every time they peck they take a whole grain. Down, too, come the grey-blue wood-pigeons and the wild turtle-doves. The singing linnets come in parties, the happy greenfinches, the streaked yellow-hammers, as if any one had delicately painted them in separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the brown buntings, chaffinches--out they come from the hazel copses, where the nuts are dropping, and the hedge berries turning red, and every one finds something to his liking. There are the seeds of the charlock and the thistle, and a hundred other little seeds, insects, and minute atom-like foods it needs a bird's eye to know. They are never still, they sweep up into the hedges and line the boughs, calling and talking, and away again to another rood of stubble without any order or plan of search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown seeds. Up and down the day through with a zest never failing. It is beautiful to listen to them and watch them, if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree boughs, here the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the shade as if the direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly in the shade. The linnets will suddenly sweep up into the boughs and converse sweetly over your head. The sunshine lingers and grows sweeter as the autumn gives tokens of its coming in the buff bryony leaf, and the acorn filling its cup. They are so happy, the birds, yet there are few to listen to them. I have often looked round and wondered that no one else was about hearkening to them. Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives in England than anywhere else. We do not shoot them; the fowlers do mischief, still they make but little impression; there are few birds of prey, and there is not that fearful bloodthirstiness that makes a tropical forest so terrible in fact, under its outward show of glowing colour. There, with cruel hawks and owls, and serpents, and beasts of prey, a bird's life is one long terror. They are ever on the watch here, but they are not so fearfully hara.s.sed, and are not certain as it were beforehand to be torn to pieces. The land is well cultivated, and the more the culture the more the food for them. Frost and snow are their greatest enemies, but even these do not often last a great while. It is a land of woods, and above all of hedges, which are much more favourable to birds than forests, so that they are better off in England than in other countries. From the sowing to the reaping, the wheat-field gives a constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but a free and bountiful largess. Then the stubble must be broken up by the plough, and again there is a fresh helping for them. Brown partridge, and black rook, and yellowhammer, all hues and degrees, come to the wheat-field.

II.

Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead, and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost prehistoric in their ma.s.siveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon up into a battery on the heights. The day before, pa.s.sing the same farm--it was Sunday--a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us so quietly--a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth.

New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it seems that a whole storm, as it were, of innovations has burst upon the fields ever since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the green leaf. The labouring men used to tell me how they went reaping, for although you may see what is called reaping still going on at harvest-time, it is not reaping. True reaping is done with a hook alone and the hand; all the present reaping is 'vagging,' with a hook in one hand and a bent stick in the other, and instead of drawing the hook towards him and cutting it, the reaper chops at the straw as he might at an enemy. Then came the reaping machines, that simply cut the wheat, and left it lying flat on the ground, which were constantly altered and improved. Now there are the wire and string binders, that not only cut the corn, but gather it together and bind it in sheaves--a vast saving in labour. Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms, and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine; the new things come, but the old still remains. In itself the reaping-hook is an enlarged sickle, and the sickle was in use in Roman times, and no man knows how long before that. With it the reaper cut off the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if it had been a pruning-knife. It is the oldest of old implements--very likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of the 'vagging' hook. In the hand of Ceres it was the very symbol of agriculture, and that was a goodly time ago. At this hour they say the sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more to get the straw than the ear.

On the broad page of some ancient illuminated ma.n.u.script, centuries old, you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are all forgotten, G.o.d wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and when the corn laws starved half England--those were the times of the flail. Every barn--and there were then barns on every farm, think of the number--had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.

The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in the wars of old times, _i.e._ Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam threshes our ricks--in a few days doing what used to take months, and you would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.

Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms--which it is now the cry to multiply--for knocking out little quant.i.ties of grain for feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the flail will become as common as ever.

There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels, and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its const.i.tution--still there were waggons in those days, and there are waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry--the slow waggons gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of years since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough, and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields, and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.

If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers. I should like to paint the lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping machine continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed the Greek fret. People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine.

Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal, poetical, and cla.s.sical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature.

Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.

All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out--the village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate; the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered, still it is evident to any one of dispa.s.sionate thought, while such immense quant.i.ties of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case, and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether you farm four acres or four hundred.

New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a stranger, as I pa.s.sed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British bull-dog growled in his countenance--very likely pleasantness itself to those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,--farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers--and their clothes are different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may see in the ancient illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, in the realistic wood engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern country sketch or picture you would _not_ find them, they would be smoothed away--drawing-room faces, made transparent, in att.i.tudes like easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.

Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists honestly drew them; st.u.r.dy and square, bulky and slow, no att.i.tudes, no drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb, with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to ma.s.s in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows than they talk hedge and ditch language. They do not talk Pope, or Milton, or Addison; they 'knaaws,' 'they be a-gwoin thur,' it's a 'geat,'

and a 'vield,' and a 'vurrow.' These are the old faces you see, the same old powers are at work to fashion them. Heavy, blind blows of the Wind, the Rain, Frost, and Heat, have beaten up their faces in rude _repousse_ work. They have nails in their boots, but new hats on their heads; he who paints them aright should paint the old nailed boots, but also the new hats and the Waltham watches. Why do they not read? All have been taught, and curious as the inconsistency may seem, they all value the privilege of being _able_ to read and write, and yet they do not exercise it, except in a casual, random way. I for one, when the public schools began all through the rural districts, thought that at last the printing-press was going to reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, but in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to see what is wanted.

First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery att.i.tudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways--there's an ill.u.s.trated pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only!

Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)--here's a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple matter, and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed in watching and living with such things. Add to these the veined elms, whose innumerable branches divide like the veins or the nerves of a physiological diagram, or like sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the incomparable beauty of the mowing gra.s.s. Now remember that they live among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and printed in such enormous quant.i.ties, do not touch a country mind. They have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey--you may see it, for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books are not natural, and do not care for them; they may be ill.u.s.trated in gold and colours, sumptuously got up, and yet they are failures. Children do not take these to bed with them. I have seen this myself; I bought so many books to please children, but could never do it till by chance some one sent a little American toy-book, 'The History of the Owl and his Little One, and the Manoeuvres of the Fox.' This had a little of the spirit of the woods in it, and was read and re-read for a year. Only the other day a lady was telling me much the same thing, how she had bought book after book but could never hit on anything to please her little boy, till at last she found an American publication, roughly ill.u.s.trated, which he always had by him. It is very strange that the art of the old-fashioned book for children has gone over to New York, which seems to us the land of newness.

For grown-up people the modern books which are sent out in such numbers, often very cheap, have likewise an artificial cityfied air so obviously got up and theatrical, such a mark of machinery on them, all stamped and chucked out by the thousand, that they have no attraction for a people who live with nature, and even in old age retain a certain childlike faith in honesty and genuine work. The reprints of good old authors, too, which may be had for a few pennies now, are so edited away that all the golden ring of the metal is clipped out of them. Overlaid with notes, and a.n.a.lyses, and critical exegesis, the original throb of the author's heart has disappeared from these polished bones. Just to suggest the book that would please the country reader, look for a moment at those works which came into existence at the very first dawn of printing--those volumes with strongly drawn and Durer-like ill.u.s.trations, very rough, and without perspective, but whose meaning is at once understood, and which somehow convey what I may call a genuine impression. Any countryman would tell you at once that the ill.u.s.trations of half the books of the present day are mere vamped-up shallowness, drawn from a city man's mind in a city room by gaslight. You must consider that the countryman who lives out of doors, and always with nature, is, as regards his reading, very much in the same mental position as the people who lived four hundred years ago--in the days when costly and rare ma.n.u.scripts, few and far between, chained to the desk, were just being superseded by printed books at a fifth the price, which could be actually bought and carried home. Till quite lately so few books have circulated in country places that they may be said to have been like these old ma.n.u.scripts. The early printed books were simply the ma.n.u.scripts printed, and that is why they remain to this day the finest specimens of typography, quite incomparable and not to be approached by present-day printers. The art of the scribe, elaborated through centuries, had reached a marvellous perfection; the first printer copied them--the magic Fust actually sold his first books as ma.n.u.scripts.

Since printers have only copied printers, books have steadily declined in excellence. I have been obliged to use the outside to suggest the inside--country readers want that which is genuine, honest, and, in a word, really good; you cannot please them with vamped-up book-making. Two books occur to me at this moment which would be greatly appreciated in every country home, from that of the peasant who has just begun to read to the houses of well-educated and well-to-do people, if they only knew of their existence and their contents--of course provided they were cheap enough, for country people have to be careful of their money nowadays. I allude to Darwin's 'Climbing Plants' and to his 'Earthworms;' these are astonishing works of singular patience and careful observation. The first gives most fascinating facts about such a common plant, for example, as the hedge bryony and the circular motion of its tendrils. Any farmer, for instance, will tell you that the hop-bine will insist upon going round the pole in one direction, and you cannot persuade it to go the other.

These circular movements seem almost to resemble those of the planets about their centre, all things down to the ether seem to have a rotatory motion; and some foreign plants which he grew send their far-extended tendrils round and round with so patent a movement that you can see it hour by hour like the hand of a clock. Perhaps the little book on earthworms is a yet more wonderful achievement of this great genius, who had not only untiring patience to observe and verify, but also possessed imagination, and could thereby see the motive idea at work behind the facts. At first it has a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy and prejudiced have been our views of the despised worm thrown up by every ploughshare.

I have spoken of the veined elms and their thousand thousand branches that divide like the nerves; from each of these nerves of living wood there has fallen its breathing lungs of leaf. Where are these million leaves? By night the worm has drawn them into his gallery beneath the surface, and they have formed his food to again become the richest guano, to help the succulent growth of green gra.s.s and corn. Merely for profit alone, the profit of this digested food for plants, the agriculturist should preserve some trees that their leaves may thus be applied. The despised worm, the lowly worm, is actually so exquisitely organised that the whole of its body is sensitive to light, and is as conscious of the ray as the pupil of your own eye. Here is great and good work like that of those cla.s.sics, the ma.n.u.scripts of which were the first to be copied by the early printers, and books like this would be well thumbed of the country reader.

In a degree the interior of the country bears a certain resemblance to the state of Spain. Of that sunny land, travellers tell us the strangest inconsistencies of the people and natural products. It is an arid land, without verdure, nothing but p.r.i.c.kly aloes and scattered orange groves, mere dots in a sunburnt expanse. Silver and gold abound, and every other metal, yet none of the mines pay except the quicksilver. A rich soil is uncultivated, and every natural advantage thrown away. There are railways, and engines, and telegraphs, and books, but the populace are still Spaniards, conservative in traditions, and wedded to old customs; often nominally Republican, but in fact of the ancient creeds and ways.

Like this in lesser degree, everything among our green leaves and golden wheat is in a confused mixture, at once backwards and forwards, progressive and retrograde. Here is some of the best soil in the world, numerous natural advantages, close proximity to immense markets, such as London. There seem mines of gold and silver in every acre, yet there is a crushing poverty among the farmers, and exacting poverty among their dependants the labourers. Every farm may be said to be within reach of railway communication, yet the producers know nothing of their customers.

The country wishes new land laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudalism, and is beginning to unite against t.i.thes, and in the same breath votes Conservative and places a Conservative Government in office.

It would break down the monopoly of the railways, and at the same time would like a monopoly of protection for itself. It has learned to read and does not buy books. Science has been shouted over the length and breadth of the land, and chemistry, and I know not what, called to the a.s.sistance of the farmer, and every day we are drifting more and more backwards into the rule-of-thumb methods of our forefathers. No anarchy, happily--omitting that there is a strong resemblance to Spain. For an instance, in the daily papers it has become as common as possible to see an advertis.e.m.e.nt of farm-house apartments to let. Numbers of farm people look forward to their letting season in the same way as at the sea-side and in London. This is an immense breach in the ancient isolated manners of country life. The old farmers, and only a very little time ago, would as soon have thought of flying as of opening their doors to strangers, and indeed their rooms were scarcely furnished in a way to receive them.

On the other hand, many farmhouses are empty altogether, and the land is un-tilled, because it cannot be let at any price, and lapsing backwards into barbarism. Everything used to be so fixed: there was a sort of caste of farmers. A man born in a farmhouse never thought of anything else but farming, and waited and waited, perhaps till he was grey, to get a farm; now there are few who have such fixed ideas, they are ready to take a chance at home or abroad. Yet it is the same old country, and with the new ways and science, and learning, and civilisation, it is as with the machinery, they are all sunk and lost in the firm old lines. It is all changed and just the same. What a clamour there used to be about the damage done by the hares and rabbits to the crops! By-and-by Parliament said, 'Shoot the hares and rabbits.' To work they went and demolished them, and now, lo! there is a feeling getting about that we don't want to be rid of all the hares and rabbits. Hares are almost formed on purpose to be good sport, and make a jolly good dish, a pleasant addition to the ceaseless round of mutton and beef to which the dead level of civilisation reduces us. Coursing is capital, the harriers first-rate.

Now every man who walks about the fields is more or less at heart a sportsman, and the farmer having got the right of the gun he is not unlikely to become to some extent a game preserver. When they could not get it they wanted to destroy it, now they have got it they want to keep it. The old feeling coming up again--the land rea.s.serting itself, Spain you see--down with feudalism, but let us have the game. Look down the long list of hounds kept in England, not one of which could get a run were it not for the good-will of the farmers, and indeed of the labourers. Hunting is a mimicry of the mediaeval chase, and this is the nineteenth century of the socialist, yet every man of the fields loves to hear the horn and the burst of the hounds. Never was shooting, for instance, carried to such perfection, perfect guns made with scientific accuracy, plans of campaign among the pheasants set out with diagrams as if there was going to be a battle of Blenheim in the woods. To be a successful sportsman nowadays you must be a well-drilled veteran, never losing presence of mind, keeping your nerve under fire--flashes to the left of you, reports to the right of you, shot whistling from the second line--a hero amid the ceaseless rattle of musketry and the 'dun hot breath of war.' Of old time the knight had to go through a long course of instructions. He had to acquire the _manege_ of his steed, the use of the lance and sword, how to command a troop, and how to besiege a castle.

Till perfect in the arts of war and complete in the minutiae of falconry and all the terms of the chase, he could not take his place in the ranks of men. The English country gentleman who now holds something the same position socially as the knight, is not a sportsman till he can use the breechloader with terrible effect at the pheasant-shoot, till he can wield the salmon-rod, or ride better than any Persian. Never were people--people in the widest sense--fonder of horses and dogs, and every kind of animal, than at the present day. The town has gone out into the country, but the country has also penetrated the mind of the town. No sooner has a man made a little money in the city, than away he rushes to the fields and rivers, and nothing would so deeply hurt the pride of the _nouveaux riches_ as to insinuate that he was not quite fully imbued with the spirit and the knowledge of the country. If you told him he was ignorant of books he might take that as a compliment; if you suggested in a sidelong way that he did not understand horses he would never more be friends with you again.

Nothing has died out, but everything has grown stronger that appertains to the land. Heraldry, for instance, and genealogy, county history--people don't want to be sheriffs now, but they would very much like to be able to say one of their ancestors was sheriff so many centuries ago. The old crests, the old coats of arms, are more thought of than ever; every fragment of antiquity valued. Almost everything old is of the country, either of the mansion or of the cottage; old silver plate, and old china, and works of the old masters in the one, old books, old furniture, old clocks in the other.

The sweet violets bloom afresh every spring on the mounds, the cowslips come, and the happy note of the cuckoo, the wild rose of midsummer, and the golden wheat of August. It is the same beautiful old country always new. Neither the iron engine nor the wooden plough alter it one iota, and the love of it rises as constantly in our hearts as the coming of the leaves. The wheat as it is moved from field to field, like a quarto folded four times, gives us in the mere rotation of crops a fresh garden every year. You have scented the bean-field and seen the slender heads of barley droop. The useful products of the field are themselves beautiful; the sainfoin, the blue lucerne, the blood-red trifolium, the clear yellow of the mustard, give more definite colours, and all these are the merely useful, and, in that sense, the plainest of growths. There are, then, the poppies, whose wild brilliance in July days is not surpa.s.sed by any hue of Spain. Wild charlock--a clear yellow--pink pimpernels, pink-streaked convolvulus, great white convolvulus, double-yellow toadflax, blue borage, broad rays of blue chicory, tall corn-c.o.c.kles, azure corn-flowers, the great mallow, almost a bush, purple knapweed--I will make no further catalogue, but there are pages more of flowers, great and small, that grow at the edge of the plough, from the coltsfoot that starts out of the clumsy clod in spring to the white clematis. Of the broad surface of the golden wheat and its glory I have already spoken, yet these flower-encircled acres, these beautiful fields of peaceful wheat, are the battle-fields of life. For these fertile acres the Romans built their cities and those villas whose mosaics and hypocausts are exposed by the plough, and formed straight roads like the radii of a wheel or the threads of a geometrical spider's web. Thus like the spider the legions from their centre marched direct and quickly conquered. Next the Saxons, next the monk-slaying Danes, next the Normans in chain-mail--one, two, three heavy blows--came to grasp these golden acres. Dearly the Normans loved them; they gripped them firmly and registered them in 'Domesday Book.' They let not a hide escape them; they gripped also the mills that ground the corn. Do you think such blood would have been shed for barren wastes? No, it was to possess these harvest-laden fields. The wheat-fields are the battle-fields of the world. If not so openly invaded as of old time, the struggle between nations is still one for the ownership or for the control of corn. When Italy became a vineyard and could no more feed the armies, slowly power slipped away and the great empire of Rome split into many pieces. It has long been foreseen that if ever England is occupied with a great war the question of our corn supply, so largely derived from abroad, will become a weighty matter. Happy for us that we have wheat-growing colonies! As persons, each of us, in our voluntary or involuntary struggle for money, is really striving for those little grains of wheat that lie so lightly in the palm of the hand. Corn is coin and coin is corn, and whether it be a labourer in the field, who no sooner receives his weekly wage than he exchanges it for bread, or whether it be the financier in Lombard Street who loans millions, the object is really the same--wheat. All ends in the same: iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the desk--no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton--the object is really sacks of wheat. Therefore to the eye of the mind they are not sacks of wheat, but filled to the brim, like those in the magic caves of the 'Arabian Nights,' with gold.