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Page 3
No more of Signor d'Annunzio here or elsewhere in these pages; but of
ourselves and our needs somewhat. Nobody could have lived through last
year without considering anxiously whither we are tending and with
what pretence. As the occasion moved me I have said my say about those
matters, and here the reader will have as much of it as I am ready
just now to give him. This is perhaps some sort of an apology for
what may be found hereafter of a hortatory kind. I may be charged with
wanting to do people "good." Well, if trying to make them happy is
trying to do them good, then I confess the charge. There is no doubt
whatever that they are not happy now. They hate too many people, they
pant and toil after the wrong things; they serve false gods and forget
the true ones. That is what we think about it in the country; and I am
of the country's opinion.
We need, it seems to me, many things--religion, love, work,
seriousness and so on; but what we need most of all, as I believe, is
to wash our hands. For five years they have been groping and wrenching
in the vitals of other people. They are foul and we are still drunk
with the reek. In God's name, let us wash and then we can begin to
build up the world again. We see the need of that out in the country,
but so far as I can judge by what I read or have seen of London,
there's no notion of it there.
But there's not much about London in this book.
CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY
A book which I shall never willingly be without, one of my minor
classics, is _Idlehurst_. Published in 1898, its author John Halsham,
it has a touch upon country things, the penetrating, pitiful and _tant
soit peu_ condescending touch upon them of one who is both scholar and
recluse, fastidious but discerning. He reads our earth, cloudscape,
landscape, season, foison, man and beast of the field, with the same
wistfulness which women who have known sorrow exhibit for children
who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long
interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found
his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so
degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war
began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or
1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself
of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there
for a while in 1915 and found the village of my choice bare of youth.
But that was West Sussex, and John Halsham lives nearer London, in the
forest region, as I judge, which is a part of the country overflowed
and become suburban. I don't doubt but complete cockneyfication will
be the ultimate fate of that country of deep loam and handsome women
before many years are over. Going down to my village from London,
I could not feel that I was in the country until I had passed
Pulborough; and further east the same would hold good to Lewes.
But when Mr Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has
overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are
cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth.
Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil?
You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of
the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been
no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the
scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people,
their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in
religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident.
We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away
from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any
more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed
what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be
brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion as of every other
human affair. But it was not them we worshipped. Rather it was what
they stood for--which endures.
All this leads me away from John Halsham and _Idlehurst_. A good
antidote to his extreme depression is to be found in another beautiful
book which, if not a classic, will become one. I mean _A Shepherd's
Life_, wherein Mr. Hudson reveals the very heart of pastoral Wilts.
I went right through it only the other day, journeying from Sarum to
Trowbridge on county business--Wishford, Wylye, Codford, Heytesbury,
and so on to Melksham and Westbury--names which to us are symphonies.
No change from the sempiternal round of country labour in those quiet
hollows, though it is true that you saw soldiers in buff unloading
railway trucks, and that the valley was lined with their wooden
hutments. Soldiers, indeed, we have known ever since the Norman
Conquest; but the country is bigger than they are, and they fall
into its ways even as their huts fade into the shadows cast by its
everlasting hills. Mr. Hudson, by the way, does not seem to have
encountered a witch. We had one in this village a few years ago, and
she may be here still, though I haven't come across her. She laid a
malison on my chauffeur's potatoes--I had one once--and (as he told
me) blighted the year's crop. He was digging in his garden when she, a
dark-browed old woman with a beard, leaned over the gate and asked him
for some kindling wood. He, a Swiss, who may not have understood her,
waved her away, saying that he was busy. "You will get no good out of
those taters," said she, and slippered away. That was five years ago.
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