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Page 4
John Halsham is fond of describing himself as a Tory, and perhaps
really is one of those almost extinct mammalia. I had thought
Professor Saintsbury the only one left. He, I understand, thinks
that the Reform Act of 1832 was a great mistake, and dislikes Horace
Walpole's Letters because their writer was a Whig. Then there is Mrs.
Partington's nephew, who muses perhaps without method, but certainly
not without malice, in _Blackwood_ once a month. He is more Jingo than
Tory. He has to bite somebody. I was amused the other day to consider
his girding at Sir Alfred Mond, chiefly on the score that he had a
German grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that
the same terrific charge could be brought against a much more august
Personage, and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the
purpose that he will have an English grandson, That is the worst of
musing when you neglect method and surrender to malice.
Toryism, which is a parasitic growth of mind, needs a relic to which
it can cling, not a person. In the country the Church will not provide
it, nor any longer the brewing interest. The air has been let into
the one, and the water which they call mineral into the other. There
remain the throne and the squirearchy, and of these the throne is
much the stouter. For the throne is remote enough to be an object of
veneration, separable from its occupant; but when the great house and
the old acres are held, and not filled, by a new man, the villager,
who sees more than he is supposed to see, is by no means concerned to
uphold them. Most of the villages have been Radical; now they are all
going "Labour." The elections, if there are to be some soon, will
be very interesting, and I think surprising to Mr. George and his
assortment of friends.
However--another strike or two like that recent abortion on the
railways will dish the Labour Party and Trade Unionism as well--at
least in the country. Down here we are new to the movement, but have
gone into it keenly, without losing our heads. Indeed, I think we are
finding more in our heads than we suspected. We keep to our code; and
when we find that other men don't, we begin to doubt of Unionism. One
of the very best of our men said in my hearing at the time that if the
railway strike were the kind of thing we were to expect, he, for one,
would have no more to do with the Labourers' Union. As I have said
once before, I think, responsibility (which the Union is giving us)
deepens our men and quickens them too. The time is at hand when they
will begin to feel their power. I have no fears. I have long known
them to be the salt of the earth. If the quotation would not be from
one of my own works, I would quote now.
It is an old discussion, but all my travels have convinced me that a
bad peasantry is the exception. Such exceptions there are, though I
don't mean to give them. If Zola had not made himself ridiculous in
the act, so ridiculous as to show himself negligible, he would stand
as the greatest traducer of his adopted country that France has
ever harboured. But he was a specialist in his particular line of
disgustfulness, and saw in rural France what he took there with him.
They say that the Bulgarian peasant is a savage brute, "they" being
the Greeks, of course. I would not mind betting a crown that he is
nothing of the sort.
In manners, to be sure, peasantries differ remarkably. Here in the
West, from Wilts to Cornwall, our rustics are sweet-mannered. They
are instinctively gentlemen, if gentlehood consist, as I believe, in
having regard for other people's feelings. But in the Danish parts
of England, to be plain, manners are to seek. That means from
Bedfordshire pretty well up to Carlisle. North-east of that again, in
Northumberland, you have delightful manners.
The Northumbrian peasant, like the Scottish, greets you as an equal,
the Wiltshire man as a superior, yet neither loses dignity thereby.
The Lancashire man treats you as his inferior, and is not himself
advantaged, whether it be so or not.
A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT
I hope that I have secured for myself a haven, a yet more impenetrable
shade than this, against the time when, having seen four generations
of men, two behind and two beyond, I may consider in silence what is
likely to be the end of it all. It is true that I am getting old, but
I am not yet prepared for a lodge in the wilderness. My present house
has a wall on the village street. The post-office is a matter of
crossing the road; the church is at the bottom of a meadow. I like all
that, because I like all my neighbours and the sound of their voices.
At eleven o'clock in the morning I can hear the children let out from
school, "as shrill as swifts in upper air." That, too, I like. But the
time will come when silence is best, and, as I say, I believe that I
have found the very place. I have had my eye upon it for years, and
seldom a month passes but I am there. A small black dog and I once saw
Oreads there, or said we did, and in print at that. This very year
the farm to which it belongs came into the market, and was sold; the
purchaser will treat with me. I have described it once, nay twice,
and won't do it again. Enough to say that it is the butt end of a deep
green combe in the Downs, that it is sheltered from every wind, faces
the south, and is below an ancient road, now a grass track, and the
remains of what is called a British village on the ordnance maps, a
great ramparted square with half a dozen gateways and two mist-pools
within its ambit. All about it lie the neolithic dead, of whose race,
as Glaucus told Diomede, "I boast myself to be."
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