A generation corresponding to this ideal would yet need one or two reforms in the law of the land before the French peasant could reach his perfect development. First of all, let us admit that the nation has outgrown the Code Napoléon, which is a system of excessive centralization. As usual, the people are in advance of the law of the land; here as elsewhere, a fossilized system cramps and hinders the expansion of life. Even at some sacrifice of order, France would be more fortunate if she were decentralized, with more importance accorded to the country towns and rural districts. Have we not seen how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this same vice of over-centralization was fatal to the country-sides of France, even as, in the closing years of the Roman Empire, it was fatal to the country-sides of Gaul? In this lovely land of France, over-centralization is a sort of endemic disease which we may combat, but scarcely, perhaps, eradicate. Let us do our best. It were well should the law, even if it continue the principle of equal inheritance, at least permit some laxity in practice (as an insertion of the thin edge of the wedge), allowing the estate, for instance, to remain intact in the hands of the son who farms it, though a proportion of the revenue be divided yearly among his brothers and sisters. Let us take from the Old Order what was best in it. Nothing was more frequent under the ancien régime than for a family to enjoy in common their paternal acres. To take a case in point:—when the great-grandfather of Ernest Renan died in 1732, his sons continued to dwell together in their old grey farm by the estuary of Ledano, without separating their shares of the estate. Gilles farmed the land; Alain, François, and Olivier manned the joint fishing-smack and salted their pilchards in common. This system of joint possession was usual in France, and suits the sociable French character. Even to-day, in some such way, the extremest results of the sub-division of property might be avoided. Thirdly, we would have every schoolmaster in France teach his children, instead of the names of the Merovingian kings, such elementary notions of physics and chemistry as explain or at least suggest the life of natural things: why the sea is salt; how the dew condenses; how the seed germinates in the earth; why such and such a soil best serves to produce such and such a crop, etc. When we see with what extraordinary swiftness the rural population of France has adopted the theories of Pasteur and their consequences, we feel that in this direction, at any rate, the rustic is not stupid. Let the peasants learn the meaning of the world in which they live; they will find it more interesting. A child who has learned to observe and reflect has the beginnings of a liberal education, and one that will not necessarily draw him from the land.
And, again, we would teach our peasants the benefits of union. There is a great future for agricultural syndicates, buying and selling on co-operative terms, and distributing among their members the proper complement of agricultural machines; by their aid the small landowner of a few acres may be enabled to sustain the competition of the large model-farms; and perhaps, under new conditions, the agriculture of the rural districts may revive, surpassing those golden years between 1830 and 1880. But the season of adversity has not been barren. Even the farmer cannot live by bread alone; and the lean years that end the nineteenth century have witnessed the moral and mental regeneration of the French peasant. Whatever be his destiny, he is now that “man of independent mind” whom Burns proclaimed the equal of any man in any class.
THE FORESTS OF THE OISE THE FORESTS OF THE OISE
Part I
1893
I
“THE prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost.” So runs an old French proverb, which is not always true. At least, in that bygone year of 1893 by the end of April the heat was as parched as at midsummer; roses and strawberries were hawked through the streets of Paris; the dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh for the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand years! ’Tis something to feel one’s self in a Gaulish forest—though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But, in the forests of the Oise, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors who may have shadowed Pharamond.
At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training-stables, and parched, oblong racecourse. Chantilly is a true French village, with its one endless winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. From almost any point of it you see, beyond the houses, a glint of waters and hear a rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy lightness about the place, about the fresh fine air, the loose sand of the soil, the thin green boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, the smooth-trunked beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into great forest trees. It was with an effort of the imagination that we realized the ancient stock of this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared.
II
In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of a hunter-prince, and everything about it was ordered for the chase. Those wide-open grassy glades, studded with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer; and in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does prepared their nurseries. Great, floundering, russet pheasants came flying by; at every step a hare or a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far at the further end of the forest there were deep, unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place, for the wild boar delights in them. As we walked or drove down the neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appeared impassable to the traveller, and we wondered at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman.