Part 4 (1/2)
Only very rarely does it occur to him that when he goes to the shop he, too, makes work. In bad times, perhaps, he gets an inkling of it; and then, when wages are scarce, and the public-house landlord grumbles, old-fas.h.i.+oned villagers will say, ”Ah, they misses the poor man, ye see!” But the idea is too abstract to be followed to its logical conclusion. The people do not see the mult.i.tudes at work for them in other counties, making their boots and ready-made clothes, getting their coal, importing their cheap provisions; but they do see, and know by name, the well-to-do of the neighbourhood, who have new houses built and new gardens laid out; and they naturally enough infer that labour would perish if there were no well-to-do people to be supplied.
Against the rich man, therefore, the labourers have no sort of animosity. If he will spend money freely, the richer he is the better.
Throughout the south of England this is the common att.i.tude. I remember, not long ago, on a holiday, coming to a village which looked rarely prosperous for its county, owing, I was told, to the fact that the county lunatic asylum near by caused money to be spent there. In the next village, which was in a deplorable state, and had no asylum, the people were looking enviously towards this one, and wis.h.i.+ng that at least their absentee landlords would come and hunt the neighbourhood, though it appeared that one of these gentlemen was a Bishop. But the labouring folk were not exacting as to the sort of person--lunatics, fox-hunters, Bishops--anybody would be welcome who would spend riches in a way to ”make work.” And so here. This village looks up to those who control wealth as if they were the sources of it; and if there is a little dislike of some of them personally, there has so far appeared but little bitterness of feeling against them as a cla.s.s.
I do not say that there has never been any grumbling. One day, years ago, an old friend of mine broke out, in his most contemptuous manner, ”What d'ye think Master Dash Blank bin up to now?” He named the owner of a large estate near the town. ”Bin an' promised all his men a blanket an' a quarter of a ton o' coal at Christmas. A _blanket_, and a _quarter of a ton o' coal_! Pity as somebody hadn't shoved a brick down his throat, when he _had_ got 'n open, so's to _keep_ 'n open!” The sentiment sounds envious, but in fact it was scornful. It was directed, not against the great man's riches, but against the well-known meanness he displayed anew in his contemptible gifts.
A faint trace of traditional cla.s.s animosity sounds in one or two customary phrases of the village, for instance in the saying that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Yet this has become such a by-word as to be usually stated with a smile; for is it not an old acquaintance amongst opinions? The older people even have a humorous development of it. According to their improved version, there are not two only, but three kinds of law: one kind for the rich, one for the poor, and one ”the law that n.o.body can't make.” What is this last? Why, the law ”to make a feller pay what en't got nothink.” By such witticisms the edge of bitterness is turned; the sting is taken out of that sense of inequality which, as the labourer probably knows, would poison his present comfort and lead him into dangerous courses if he let it rankle.
With one exception, the angriest recognition of cla.s.s differences which I have come across amongst the villagers was when I pa.s.sed two women on their way home from the town, where, I surmised, they, or some friend of theirs, had just been fined at the County Court or the Petty Sessions.
”Ah!” one was saying, with spiteful emphasis, ”_there'll_ come a great day for they to have _their_ Judge, same as we _poor_ people.” Yet even there, if the emotion was newly-kindled, the sentiment was too antiquated to mean much. For it is a very ancient idea--that of getting even with one's enemies in the next world instead of in this. So long as the poor can console themselves by leaving it to Providence to avenge them at the Day of Judgment, it cannot be said that there is any virulent cla.s.s-feeling amongst them. The most that you can make of it is that they occasionally feel spiteful. It happened, in this case, to be against rich people that those two women felt their momentary grudge; but it was hardly felt against the rich as a cla.s.s; and if the same kind of offence had come from some neighbour, they would have said much the same kind of thing. In the family disputes which occur now and then over the inheritance of a few pounds' worth of property, the losers put on a very disinterested and superior look, and say piously of the gainers: ”Ah, they'll never prosper! They _can't_ prosper!”
The exceptional case alluded to above was certainly startling. I was talking to an old man whom I had long known: a little wrinkled old man, deservedly esteemed for his integrity and industry, full of experience as well as of old-world notions sometimes a little ”grumpy,” a little caustic in his manner of talking, but on the whole quite kindly and tolerant in his disposition. You could often watch in his face the habitual practice of patience, as, with a wry smile and a contemptuous remark, he dismissed some disagreeable topic or other from his thoughts.
He had come down in the world. His father's cottage, already mortgaged when he inherited it, had been sold over his head after the death of the mortgagee, so that thenceforth he was on no better footing than any other of the labourers. Gradually, as the demand failed for his old-fas.h.i.+oned forms of skill--thatching, mowing, and so on--his position became more and more precarious; yet he remained good-tempered, in his queer acid way, until he was past seventy years old. That evening, when he startled me, he had been telling of his day's work as a road-mender, and he was mightily philosophical over the prospect of having to give up even that last form of regular employment, because of the exposure and the miles of walking which it entailed. n.o.body could have thought him a vindictive or even a discontented man so far. By chance, however, something was said about the uncultivated land in the neighbourhood, covered as it is with fir-woods now; and at that he suddenly fired up.
Pointing to the woods, which could be seen beyond the valley, he said spitefully, while his eyes blazed: ”I can remember when all that was open common, and you could go where you mind to. Now 'tis all fenced in, and if you looks over the fence they'll lock ye up. And they en't got no more _right_ to it, Mr. Bourne, than you and me have! I should _like_ to see they woods all go up in flames!”
That was years ago. The woods are flouris.h.i.+ng; the old man is past doing any mischief; but I remember his indignation. And it was the sole case I have met with in the parish, of animosity harboured not so much against persons as against the existing position of things. This one man was alive to the injustice of a social arrangement; and in that respect he differed from the rest of my neighbours, unless I am much deceived in them. Of course there may be more of envious feeling abroad in the village than I know about. It is the sort of thing that would keep itself secret; and perhaps this old man's contemporaries, who shared his recollections, silently shared his bitterness too. But if so, I do not believe that they have pa.s.sed the feeling on to their children. The impression is strong in me that the people have never learnt to look upon the distribution of property, which has left them so impoverished, as anything other than an inevitable dispensation of Providence. If they thought otherwise, at any rate if the contrary view were at all prevalent amongst them, they must be most gifted hypocrites, to go about with the good temper in their eyes and the cheerfulness in their voices that I have been describing.
To what should it be attributed--this power of facing poverty with contentment? To some extent doubtless it rests on Christian teaching, although perhaps not much on the Christian teaching of the present day.
Present-day religion, indeed, must often seem to the cottagers a tiresome hobby reserved to the well-to-do; but from distant generations there seems to have come down, in many a cottage family, a rather lofty religious sentiment which fosters honesty, patience, resignation, courage. Much of the gravity, much of the tranquillity of soul of the more sedate villagers must be ascribed to this traditional influence, whose effects are attractive enough, in the character and outlook of many an old cottage man and woman.
Yet there is much more in the village temper than can be accounted for by this cause alone. In most of the people the cheerfulness does not suggest pious resignation, in the hope of the next world; it looks like a grim and l.u.s.ty determination to make the best of this world. It is contemptuous, or laughing. As I have shown, it has a tendency to be beery. It occasionally breaks out into disorder. In fact, if the folk were not habitually overworked they would be boisterous, jolly. Of course it may all proceed from the strong English nature in them; and in that case we need seek no other explanation of it. Yet if one influence, namely, a traditional Christianity, is to be credited--as it certainly should be--with an effect upon the village character in one direction, then probably, behind this other effect in another direction, some other influence is at work. And for my part I make no doubt of it. The cheerfulness of the cottagers rests largely upon a survival of the outlook and habits of the peasant days before the common was enclosed.
It is not a negative quality. My neighbours are not merely patient and loftily resigned to distress; they are still groping, dimly, for an enjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable.
They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they are intentionally old-fas.h.i.+oned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They make no aesthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral customs it would be ”nice” for them to follow; but, other things being equal, they incline to go on in the way that has been usual in their families. It is a tendency that sways them, not a thought-out scheme of the way to live. Now and again, perhaps, some memory may strengthen the tendency, as they are reminded of this or that fine old personality worthy of imitation, or as some circ.u.mstance of childhood is recalled, which it would be pleasant to restore; but in the main the force which bears them on is a traditional outlook, fifty times more potent than definite but transient memories. This it is that has to be recognized in my neighbours. Down in their valley, until the ”residents” began to flock in, the old style of thinking lingered on; in the little cottages the people, from earliest infancy, were accustomed to hear all things--persons and manners, houses and gardens, and the day's work--appraised by an ancient standard of the countryside; and consequently it happens that this evening while I am writing, out there on the slopes of the valley the men and women, and the very children whose voices I can just hear, are living by an outlook in which the values are different from those of easy-going people, and in which, especially, hards.h.i.+ps have never been met by peevishness, but have been beaten by good-humour.
III
THE ALTERED CIRc.u.mSTANCES
VIII
THE PEASANT SYSTEM
The persistence into the twentieth century--the scarcely realized persistence--not so much of any definite ideas, as of a general temper more proper to the eighteenth century, accounts for all sorts of anomalies in the village, and explains not only why other people do not understand the position of its inhabitants to-day, but why they themselves largely fail to understand it. They are not fully aware of being behind the times, and probably in many respects they no longer are so; only there is that queer mental att.i.tude giving its bias to their view of life. Although very feebly now, still the momentum derived from a forgotten cult carries them on.
But, having noticed the persistence of the peasant traditions, we have next to notice how inadequate they are to present needs. Our subject swings round here. Inasmuch as the peasant outlook lingers on in the valley, it explains many of those peculiarities I have described in earlier chapters; but, inasmuch as it is a decayed and all but useless outlook, we shall see in its decay the significance of those changes in the village which have now to be traced out. The little that is left from the old days has an antiquarian or a gossipy sort of interest; but the lack of the great deal that has gone gives rise to some most serious problems.
For, as I hinted at the outset, the ”peasant” tradition in its vigour amounted to nothing less than a form of civilization--the home-made civilization of the rural English. To the exigent problems of life it furnished solutions of its own--different solutions, certainly, from those which modern civilization gives, but yet serviceable enough.
People could find in it not only a method of getting a living, but also an encouragement and a help to live well. Besides employment there was an intense interest for them in the country customs. There was scope for modest ambition too. Best of all, those customs provided a rough guidance as to conduct--an unwritten code to which, though we forget it, England owes much. It seems singular to think of now; but the very labourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nor trouble about ”raising” himself into some other cla.s.s, so long as he could live on peasant lines. And it is in the virtual disappearance of this civilization that the main change in the village consists. Other changes are comparatively immaterial. The valley might have been invaded by the leisured cla.s.ses; its old appearance might have been altered; all sorts of new-fangled things might have been introduced into it; and still under the surface it would have retained the essential village characteristics, had but the peasant tradition been preserved in its integrity amongst the lowlier people; but with that dying, the village, too, dies where it stands. And that is what has been happening here. A faint influence from out of the past still has its feeble effect; but, in this corner of England at least, what we used to think of as the rural English are, as it were, vanis.h.i.+ng away--vanis.h.i.+ng as in a slow transformation, not by death or emigration, not even by essential change of personnel, but by becoming somehow different in their outlook and habits. The old families continue in their old home; but they begin to be a new people.
It was of the essence of the old system that those living under it subsisted in the main upon what their own industry could produce out of the soil and materials of their own countryside. A few things, certainly, they might get from other neighbourhoods, such as iron for making their tools, and salt for curing their bacon; and some small interchange of commodities there was, accordingly, say between the various districts that yielded cheese, and wool, and hops, and charcoal; but as a general thing the parish where the peasant people lived was the source of the materials they used, and their well-being depended on their knowledge of its resources. Amongst themselves they would number a few special craftsmen--a smith, a carpenter or wheelwright, a shoemaker, a pair of sawyers, and so on; yet the trades of these specialists were only ancillary to the general handiness of the people, who with their own hands raised and harvested their crops, made their clothes, did much of the building of their homes, attended to their cattle, thatched their ricks, cut their firing, made their bread and wine or cider, pruned their fruit-trees and vines, looked after their bees, all for themselves. And some at least, and perhaps the most, of these economies were open to the poorest labourer. Though he owned no land, yet as the tenant, and probably the permanent tenant, of a cottage and garden he had the chance to occupy himself in many a craft that tended to his own comfort. A careful man and wife needed not to despair of becoming rich in the possession of a cow or a pig or two, and of good clothes and household utensils; and they might well expect to see their children grow up strong and prosperous in the peasant way.
Thus the claim that I have made for the peasant tradition--namely, that it permitted a man to hope for well-being without seeking to escape from his own cla.s.s into some other--is justified, partially at least. I admit that the ambition was a modest one, but there were circ.u.mstances attending it to make it a truly comforting one too. Look once more at the conditions. The small owners of the parish might occupy more land than the labourers, and have the command of horses and waggons, and ploughs and barns, and so on; but they ate the same sort of food and wore the same sort of clothes as the poorer folk, and they thought the same thoughts too, and talked in the same dialect, so that the labourer working for them was not oppressed by any sense of personal inferiority.
He might even excel in some directions, and be valued for his excellence. Hence, if his ambition was small, the need for it was not very great.
And then, this life of manifold industry was interesting to live. It is impossible to doubt it. Not one of the pursuits I have mentioned failed to make its pleasant demand on the labourer for skill and knowledge; so that after his day's wage-earning he turned to his wine-making or the management of his pigs with the zest that men put into their hobbies.