HAPPINESS IN THE VILLAGE
Not far from me there lives a man with wife and child in a tenement not much better than a cowshed. It is exactly two rooms of a wooden building, with no other conveniences of any kind, not so much as a copper for the washing. It is built into a ledge cut out of the southern slope of the valley, consequently never looks the sun in the face. I know that the rain falls through into the bedroom. If one dared one would have the place condemned, if to do that would not condemn to the workhouse those who shelter there. Yet I have known those poor things envied. At a certain hour of the afternoon the wife comes to her open door, the child in her arms. After five minutes’ watching, she sets the little creature down to totter up the road, down which comes a man, homing from his work. He too is on the look-out, and stands to admire. Then, when they meet, he picks up the baby, sets it on his shoulder, and back they go together to mother at the door. I have known that envied, I say, by the childless, by the unhappily mated, and by those whose days for children are over and done. Life has that in store for some of us, and I don’t know that it has anything better. An allegory, that, in its way.
Four years ago, when Agriculture had a Wages Board, and hopes were high that a carminis aetas was opening for our oldest industry, a club was formed among the members of the Board for the ventilation of ideas. It was a gallant adventure, maintained with spirit so long as the parent Board was suffered to endure. Political exigencies, however, determined its existence, and with it perished the Agricultural Club. Now its president and virtual founder, Sir Henry Rew, has published its remains in “The Story of the Agricultural Club” (P. S. King and Son), and we are able to judge of the remedies proposed for a sick profession. It may shortly be said of the club, as of the deceased board, that its very existence did more service to agriculture than any of its recommendations, if only because it was solid in Pall Mall while its remedies were, and largely remain, in the air. In that fine room of Schomberg House, which happens to have been Gainsborough’s studio, there met on the eve of every Board-meeting representatives of the landed interests from all England, squires, tenant-farmers and farm labourers, on terms of that complete equality which only clubmanship can guarantee. How extraordinary that was is illustrated by Sir Henry Rew as follows:
“A year ago I had occasion to attend a meeting in the market town of a typical agricultural district. It purported to be a conference between the representatives of farmers and of farm-workers with regard to a dispute then in progress. I was shown into the conference room, where I found the farmers assembled in force round a large table, and I was honoured with a seat at the head of the table by the side of the chairman. After some discussion among themselves, the chairman announced that they were ready to receive the representations of the workers. About half a dozen of them entered, and were ranged on a form against the wall at the lower end of the room. The Chairman addressed them civilly enough, but with much the same air of condescension as a magistrate assumes in speaking from the Bench. I am sure that no offence was intended or taken. The position seemed perfectly natural to both parties. It was the normal and habitual relation of master and man in discussion.”
It is fair to conclude, with Sir Henry, that the Wages Board and its club were “the expression of a new relationship,” not that of “master and man,” but rather of “man and man”; and it is not difficult to say what that may imply in latter-day village life. I am prepared by observation to say that at least it implies a definite heightening of status for the farm-labourer, of which he is very well aware. But whether it will work out for village prosperity and (a very different thing) village happiness, is still a matter of various opinion—opinion which is reflected in the papers read before the assembled club, and in the ensuing discussions.
These papers, as one might expect, are mainly practical in purpose. They deal with education, principally technical; they deal with cottage-building, not very fruitfully; they offer proposals for the formation of village-clubs; they touch, but gingerly, upon the ownership of land. The avowed ends of every proposition are two: how to keep the labourer in the village, and how to make him happy when he is there. It seems to me that readers and debaters alike fell into the common error of confusing prosperity with happiness, and happiness with pleasure. The mistake is fundamental. If all men of pleasure were happy men, legislation might accomplish what philosophers have failed to do. If excitement had no reactions, then let village clubs abound and young ploughmen dance all night! Bread and circuses are within the discretion of Parliament, but not prosperity, and not happiness. A man must work for his happiness “as some men toil after virtue”; and the education which he must receive in order to attain it is in another technic than that which has been in the mind of the Club. The young villager must acquire mental alacrity, he must learn to be temperate, and he must get charity. Having those, he may pick up happiness like gold off from Tom Tiddler’s ground, for the world is full of it. All the specifics of the Agricultural Club are palliatives of his lot, “consolatories writ.” The elementals remain—to be sought elsewhere.
The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow, and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming, is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens, nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others abide our question, but not those.