He is vanishing from the world, and there are few that regret his departure. “Progress” has effected a destruction where penury and starvation had failed. He endured through all the lean years, somehow obtaining nourishment and rearing his children, clinging tenaciously to the earth, within the earth-bound horizon. At length appears the end; a rather squalid and mournful end—to a life which had once stood for the bedrock life of England. The peasant’s resources, the peasant’s vigour and resistance, the peasant’s slow-moving, deliberate mind, had borne the burden of war and change. From his villages came the old folk-songs of the nation; he built the village churches, which are the treasures of rural England, and once took a pride in them. His secret wisdom, his fragments of half-heathen, half-Christian philosophy, his standards of bitterness and enjoyment, once made up the temper and mettle of the common people of England. The period of his greatest degradation coincided with the period of a sudden offer of escape. As the common land passed from his occupation, and he sank steadily to the landless depth of day labour, the cities, with their unlimited demands for the peasant energy and vigour, open to him welcoming arms. The few that remain are coming more and more to present the appearance of a declining race: a race which has lost the secrets of the arts which once flourished in the region in which it dwells. The English countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither energy nor intelligence to regain. “The evidence is abundant and positive,” writes Dr. Jessop, as a result of most careful examination of first-hand authority, “that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, the painting of the lovely figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of those who in the sixteenth century stripped them bare—all this was executed by local artists.” He will not listen to the tradition of indebtedness to monk and squire. “In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” he declares, “there were no squires—that is the naked truth.” The property belonged to the parish: it was always growing. It was of a richness and variety almost incredible to those who to-day see but the last guttering flame of parochial life, the attempt by parish councils, guilds of village players, and all the enterprise of occasional vigorous resistance, to combat the spreading atrophy of decay. Here are “ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners: vestments which were miracles of splendour in their colours and materials and incomparable artistic finish of needlework: not to speak of the fine linen and the veils, the carpets and the hangings.”[16] It is a treasury of wealth, not so much in its direct suggestion of opulence, of services and bequests freely given, as in its indication of a life which can take pride in itself and its labour: a life, however difficult and limited, yet finding occasion for a handicraft in which men and women may delight, and some interests other than that of concentration upon dull and trivial things.
Such were the beginnings of this long sorrowful progress: in villages which could create these things and take a pride in them. The end reveals an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the town, into the heart of a great silence: the silence that broods over a doomed and passing race. There remains at the summit a joyful absorption in physical exercises and pleasures: in the midst of which, almost unnoticed amid the new gaiety, “Bettesworth” is shambling to a pauper grave, and his children vanishing from the life of open sky into the mazes of the lamplit city.
“In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges, and driven along rights of way.” The beauty of continental landscape—of the Touraine and the Midi, the little Norman orchards, the extraordinarily fruitful fields of Southern Germany, the rude plenty of the Balkan principalities—is the beauty of “peasants’ country”: the beauty that is provided by security and close cultivation, excited wherever the peasant is assured that he will reap what he has sown. The beauty of English landscape is the beauty of “landlords’ country”—the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a kind of stately splendour. The typical continental countryside is that of tiny white-washed or wooden broad-eaved cottages, freely scattered over a region of fruit and flowers and close-tilled coveted land, which, in fact, is one large garden. The record of the great landowners of this country is of vast accumulations of acres: aggregations of whole counties, or estates dotted over many counties, each organised on the same plan of inherited feudal tradition. Where the money can still be obtained from external sources—the new wealth of the towns, or tribute from new nations abroad—some semblance of that feudal tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned, there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller, the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties, for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air—even an unashamed Democratic spirit—into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone. The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea. In another period of years, progress may have compelled the breaking up of the big estates; once again, after the population who would avail themselves to-day of such offers, to-morrow will have passed from the scene. In exercise and enjoyment, in parties and pleasant gardens, amid a playing at the ancient rural traditions, and through the newer mechanisms of locomotion, the decay passes almost unnoticed. The few who lift up their voices in warning are openly despised as agitators, or condemned as political pessimists. The rural reformer finds himself not so much opposed as ridiculed. What remains of the system, fortified by the city wealth, is so evidently unassailable by what remains of any resistent forces, that it can afford to contemplate all efforts towards revolt with a good-tempered disdain. Occasionally a village learns of some legislation designed for its benefit, of “Small Holdings” which a benignant Government designs for the advantage of the adventurous, of the apparatus of rural Self-Government, which can give to the poorest some right of control of the village commercial activities. It cautiously or boldly essays the paths of progress. The inhabitants apply for land to the great landowners who constitute the County Council, or organise themselves into a tiny village caucus for the capture of the Parish Meeting. Then, in quiet and effectual action, the movement of revolt is scattered and suppressed. It is explained to the applicants how unsuitable they are for the position of independent agricultural industry: or the leaders of the democratic upheaval are informed that it is not in the least convenient to their owners that they should concern themselves with the intricacies of local self-government. In a few months, or, at most, a few years, order reigns—at Auburn, as at Warsaw. And those who had been galvanised into some semblance of life have, for the most part, disappeared: to London, to the nearest city, to the British dominions beyond the sea. Such pitiful uprising, with its consequent disasters, evokes no resentment against the dominant power. It rather evokes resentment against those who had stirred up the forces of disturbance. In a certain village in Oxfordshire an unwary Liberal member of Parliament recently stimulated resistance to the enclosure by the landlord of a right-of-way. The resistance was sustained, and the village preserved in its ancient privilege. But all six witnesses who had testified to the ancient customs were dismissed from their occupations, and driven from the district. And indignation fell, not on the landlord who thus revealed his power, but on the member of Parliament who revealed his impotence. It was the Liberal, not the Conservative organisation, which henceforth found a united opposition to its energies: as the population, worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885, when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in 1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation.
“The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes lived, and could live, at peace for centuries—that,” says Mr. Ensor, “is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’ we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it, as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within. You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”
Over all which vision of a secular decay Nature still flings the splendour of her dawns and sunsets upon a land of radiant beauty. Here are deep rivers flowing beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing white and clean from the blue surrounding sea. Never, perhaps, in the memorable and spacious story of this island’s history has the land beyond the city offered so fair an inheritance to the children of its people, as to-day, under the visible shadow of the end.
CHAPTER VII
SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
SUCH appear some, at least, of the characteristics of the various classes of Society to-day in England. In general material condition there is little to excite foreboding. A proportion of the population is raised well above the privations of poverty larger than ever before in history. Extravagance and a longing for pleasure and excitement are common to all classes. The aggregation of plenty is such as the Old World has never before seen. The vision, as a whole, is of a laborious energetic race, deserting the countryside for the cities, and there heaping up wealth, which is shared, in some degree, by all but the poorest. If anything is wrong in material conditions it is in the apparatus, not of accumulation, but of distribution. An altogether inadequate proportion of this accumulation is the absolute possession of a tiny class which sits secure upon the summit. In heavy tolls levied upon labour in the form of royalties and the monopoly rents of land, in inherited fortune which reaps its interest from remote regions and foreign kingdoms, in unusual profit of industrial investment through times of trade “boom,” in financial speculation and all the various special advantage of business, commerce, and manufacture in this free market of England, there is being concentrated in few hands vast and ever-increasing fortune. Security accepted as normal, comfort more widely spread than ever before, and a standard of extravagance and display which would have astonished all previous ages, characterise the heart of the Empire at the height of its material greatness. “Situate at the entering of the sea,” with a population exceeding Scotland or Ireland, and the revenues of many European States, the greatest city of that Empire is taking toll from the industry of all the world. In the midst of which outward evidence of attainment sounds almost unnoticed the complaining of a poverty more degraded and intolerable than in many less successful lands: whose misery is intensified by its conjunction in adjacent cities with a people evidently given up to the arts of enjoyment, and finding an ever-increasing plenty inadequate to its ever-increasing demand.
And always the hope is latent that “something will turn up” which will solve all the unfortunate social problems, and make every one happy and content. Sometimes it is to be the advance of mechanical discovery, sometimes a new spirit of kindliness and patience: sometimes fuller conquests of trade or commerce or Imperial dominion; but always the bringing in from outside of a Deus ex machina which will supplement nobody’s loss with everybody’s gain. The advance in acquisition during a century of invention has been so astonishing, the progress of whole classes from a low-grade, comfortless, ignorant life into a highly-paid, skilled, intelligent working people so remarkable, that to many the continuance of such a process seems inevitable. Amelioration is to come as a legitimate child of the forces of change, and without effort or sacrifice is to reveal a continuous process of uplifting. Certainly by all material and tangible tests—income, prices, security, comfort, addition to leisure and wages—the bulk of the people of this country have advanced so incredibly since the “Hungry Forties” that the reality of those days would appear to the present generation but as bad dreams. They cannot believe that these things were actually enacted upon these islands less than eighty years ago. The Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Labour in the Factories,—the most sensational blue book of the century,—for example, would seem rather to refer to the Spaniards in the West Indies or the administration of King Leopold in the Congo than to the solid ground and pleasant airs of England. And in every kind of material test—fall of pauperism, fall of the death-rate, decline of infectious and poverty diseases—or increase of wages, shortening of hours of labour, fall in prices; or, again, spread of education and of means of recreation, improvement in houses and in the sanitation of cities, the offering of opportunities of advancement: in all these the advance has been so amazing that there would seem to be no place for the pessimist who would prophesy coming disaster.
It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still disturbing. Fulness of bread in the past has been accompanied with leanness of soul. And the modern prophet is still undecided whether this enormous increase of life’s comforts and material satisfactions has revealed an equal and parallel advance in courage and compassion and kindly understandings. The nations, equipped with ever more complicated instruments of warfare, face each other as armed camps across frontiers mined and tortured with the apparatus of destruction. A scared wealthy and middle class confronts a cosmopolitan uprising of the “proletariat,” whose discontent it can neither appease nor forget. The industrious populations which have been swept into masses and congestions by the new industry has not yet found an existence serene, and intelligible, and human. No one, to-day, looking out upon a disturbed and sullen Europe, a disturbed and confident America, but is conscious of a world in motion: whither, no man knows. “The people of our Christian world,” so runs the cry of the first of living prophets—“the people of our Christian world live like animals, guided in their lives merely by personal interests and by their struggle with one another: differing from animals only in that the animals, from time immemorial, have kept the same stomachs, claws, and fangs, while people move with ever-increasing rapidity from roads to railroads, from horses to steam, from spoken sermons and letters to printing, to telegraphs and telephones, and from sailing boats to ocean steamers, from swords to gunpowder, cannons, quick-firing guns, bombs, and war aeroplanes. And life, with telegraphs, telephones, electricity, bombs, and aeroplanes, and with hatred of all for all: directed, not by some uniting spiritual principle, but, on the contrary, by animal instincts which divide, and which employ mental powers for their own satisfaction, becomes even more and more insane and wretched.”[18]
What mechanical invention, what mechanical skill, have any promise to offer of immediate and large improvement? Will the cunning ingenuity of men, which embarked on the path of scientific exploration with such large hopes of service to humanity as well as attainment of truth, be able, even at this last, through the multiplication of machinery to eliminate poverty, through the development of the arts of healing to eliminate pain? Or if this be unattainable and delusive, can we find through these and other progressive agencies a permanent healing for the sick soul of humanity? Is the twentieth century to advocate a scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for the apparatus of material pleasure?