Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

The Windmill

Chance recently made me for a while the tenant of a windmill. Not to live in, and unhappily not to grind corn in, but to visit as the mood arose, and see the ships in the harbour from the topmost window, and look down on the sheep and the green world all around. For this mill stands high and white—so white, indeed, that when there is a thunder-cloud behind it, it seems a thing of polished aluminium.

From its windows you can see four other mills, all, like itself, idle, and one merely a ruin and one with only two sweeps left. But just over the next range of hills, out of sight, to the north-east, is a windmill that still merrily goes, and about five miles away to the north-west is another also active; so that things are not quite so bad hereabouts as in many parts of the country, where the good breezes blow altogether in vain. And recently as all the world knows there has been a boom in whole-meal bread which was to set many a pair of derelict mill-stones in action again.

Thinking over the losses which England has had forced upon her by steam and the ingenuity of the engineer, one is disposed to count the decay of the windmill among the first. Perhaps in the matter of pure picturesqueness the most serious thing that ever happened to England was the discovery of galvanized iron roofing; but, after all, there was never anything but quiet and rich and comfortable beauty about red roofs, whereas the living windmill is not only beautiful but romantic too: a willing, man-serving creature, yoked to the elements, a whirling monster, often a thing of terror. No one can stand very near the crashing sweeps of a windmill in half a gale without a tightening of the heart—a feeling comparable to that which comes from watching the waves break over a wall in a storm. And to be within the mill at such a time is to know something of sound’s very sources; it is the cave of noise itself. No doubt there are dens of hammering energy which are more shattering, but the noise of a windmill is largely natural, the product of wood striving with the good sou’-wester; it fills the ears rather than assaults them. The effect, moreover, is by no means lessened by the absence of the wind itself and the silent nonchalance of the miller and his man, who move about in the midst of this appalling racket with the quiet efficiency of vergers.

In my mill, of course, there is no such uproar; nothing but the occasional shaking of the cross-pieces of the idle sails. Everything is still, and the pity of it is that everything is in almost perfect order for the day’s work. The mill one day—some score years ago—was full of life; the next, and ever after, mute and lifeless, like a stream frozen in a night or the palace in Tennyson’s ballad of the “Sleeping Beauty.” There is no decay—merely inanition. One or two of the apple-wood cogs have been broken from the great wheel; a few floor planks have been rotted; but that is all. A week’s overhauling would put everything right. But it will never come, and the cheerful winds that once were to drive a thousand English mills so happily now bustle over the Channel in vain.

Not the least attractive thing about my mill is its profound woodenness. There is not enough iron in it to fill a wheelbarrow. The walls are wood, the sweeps, the brake, the wheels, the cogs (apple as I have said: how long were they discovering that apple was best, I wonder). Those fishing-smacks which from the topmost window we see on the grey waters do not owe more to the friendly forest.

I know a man who takes the loss of the windmill so much to heart that he is making a windmill map. He is beginning with Sussex only and marking with a cross every place—so far as he can now ascertain—where a windmill once stood. “That will show them what they have lost!” he says bitterly. “That will teach them to prefer steam!” The crosses will crowd like lovers’ kisses in some parts, for Sussex was a county of millers, and all over the Downs now one comes upon shallow pits from which ancient mills have been dug and dispersed. Imaginative archæologists find a thousand fantastic explanations of these hollows, and one even has been claimed for a prehistoric observatory; but all the time they are merely the foundations of windmills: nothing more romantic than that, and nothing less romantic.

To me, at any rate, this map will be a melancholy document. How much more so would it be to that greatest of mill-lovers and mill-painters and himself a miller and miller’s son, John Constable, could he see it! The Sussex mill-map alone would cause him to weep tears, for, though an alien, he knew our mills well, and painted many of them. Even at Brighton (such is the incorruptible beauty of these structures) he found mills to paint. One or two, indeed, still remain, but they are blackened stumps merely—only the ruins of the radiant aerial creatures of their prime, when the master sat before them with those paints and brushes whose magic secret it was to preserve and glorify English weather for all time. You will find some of these sketches in South Kensington Museum, particularly that masterpiece of wind and joyousness called “Spring,” which depicts the very mill in which the youthful artist, when milling was still his destiny, worked; and a favourite of mine is the “Mill Near Brighton,” seen over the shoulder of a poppied field, that hangs in the Salting collection at the National Gallery. Mr. Salting showed it to me soon after he bought it, and I longed for enough moral courage to snatch it from his hand and run. But one’s ordinary invertebrate easy rectitude prevailed, and I lost it.

Constable’s grief, I say, would be deep as he scanned this Sussex map for his lost darlings. How much more so when the Suffolk mill-map was laid before him! He used to say that a miller has a better chance to study the sky than any man: that is, on land. Certainly if he had never been a miller his own skies would not have the living truth that is theirs.