The South Country

by Edward Thomas

Almost to such a time as that does the old man carry back the thoughts. His old master was the fifth in the direct line to work one farm in the vale; he left money in his will to pay for new smocks, all of the best linen, to be worn by the labourers who should carry him to the grave.

The old man has three companions under that roof. The hand that lit the lamp is his daughter’s, the youngest by the second wife, whom he married when he was fifty. The other two are her children, and she is unmarried. She earns no money except by keeping a few fowls and bees. When the younger child was born—the old man having to go six miles out at midnight for the parish doctor—the married women commented: “There’s forgiveness for the first, but not for the second; no”: for the first showed indiscretion, carelessness, youth; the second, helplessness. The old man can hardly leave the children, and though he is deaf he will, when he is told that the baby is crying, go to the room and listen carefully for the pleasure of the infant voice. That voice means colder winter nights for him and less cheer of meat and ale. But for all young life he has a passion equal to a mother’s, so he laces up his boots and does not grieve. See him in the dim outlying barn with the sick heifer which is sure to die. The wet killed several in the open field; this one is to die on dry hay. She lies with stiff, high-ridged back, patient and motionless, except that her ears move now and then like birds—they alone seem alive. There is a deep blue gleam in her eyes. Her head is stretched forward upon the ground. She is alone. Through the open door the sunlight falls, and the swallows fly in and out or hang twittering at the dark beams over her head. Twice a day the cowman comes to the door and salutes her with deep, slow voice, hearty and blithe: “Hoho! Cowslip; how’s Cowslip?” He pulls away the foul hay from under her and puts in fresh, talking now in a high falsetto voice as to a child; he raises her head that she may lap the bucket of gruel, still talking unintelligible baby talk interlarded with her pretty name. She holds up her head for a minute or two, heartened by her moist lips and full stomach and that friend’s voice. He stands in the doorway watching and silent now, as her head slowly sinks down, and she sighs while her limbs find their position of least pain. “She’s going to die,” he mutters in the deep voice as he goes.

A very different earth child, an artist, used to live in a cottage at the foot of the opposite Downs. The village itself, whether you saw it from its own street or from the higher land, was wrought into such a rightness of form as few other artists than Time ever achieve; it made a music to which the hands unconsciously beat time. But though apparently complete in itself, it was as part of a huge and gentle harmony of sky, down and forest that the village was most fascinating. Like all beautiful things in their great moments the whole scene was symbolic, not only in the larger sense by expressing in an outward and visible way an inward grace, but in the sense that it gathered up into itself the meanings which many other scenes only partly and in a scattered way expressed.

Two roads of a serpentining form that was perpetually alluring from afar climbed the Down from the village and, skirting the forest, ended in the white mountains of the moon. At the tail of one of these roads the artist lived. His work still further enlarged the harmony of sky and down and village. For a short time I used to wonder why it was that when I entered his studio the harmony was prolonged into something even more huge and gentle than seemed to have been designed. How came it that he could safely hang his pictures on the wall of the Down, as practically they were hung?

It is not enough to say merely that it was because they did not, as some landscapes seem to do, enter into competition with Nature. The spirit that raised and sculptured the Downs, that entered the beech and made a melody of its silent towering and branching, that kept the sky above alive and beautiful with the massiveness of mountains and the evanescence of foam, was also in this man’s fingers. He was a great lover of these things, and in his love for them combined the ecstasy of courtship with the understanding of marriage. But he loved them too well to draw and paint them. He was not of those who tear themselves from a mistress to write a sonnet on her face. No. He painted the images which they implanted—such was their love of him and his of them—in his brain. There many a metamorphosis as wonderful as Ovid’s was made. The beech-trees mingled with the fantasies of the brain and brought forth holes that are almost human forms, branches that are thoughts and roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless pleasure in the thymy winds, in the drama of light and shade on the woods and hills, in the sound of leaves and birds and water. Within him these things lived a new life until they reached forms as different from their beginnings as we are from Palæolithic man. They attained to that beauty of which, as I have said, Nature was so little jealous, by this evolution. Some of his pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work of beeches always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic but has a real significance.

And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, as might have been expected, decorations that have lost all smell of earth and light of sun and breath of breeze. Decorative they certainly are, and I know few pictures which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending beyond the limits of the frame. But such is the personality of the artist that all this refinement only made more powerful than ever the spirit of the motionless things, the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds. Frankly, there is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the moment only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he could not thus have reinforced or intensified the inhumanity of Nature. Consider, for example, his “Song of the Nightingale.” Those woods are untrodden woods as lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s song to rule in solitude under the crescent moon. No lovers walk there. Mortal who enters there must either a poet or a madman be.

Look again at his “Castle in Spain,” how it is perched up above that might of forest, like a child that has climbed whence it can never descend. And the little house at the edge of the high, dark wood—in “The Farm under the Hill”—is as frail and timid as if it heard the roaring of wild beasts, and the little white road winds into the darkness as to death. So, too, with the children who make a pretence of playing hoops at the edge of just such another wood, though mortal has never come out of it since the beginning of the world. The ship in the “Fall of the Leaf” is subdued to the spirit of autumn as is the poet subdued to the immense scenes of “Alastor.” To introduce an elvish figure, as he has done, in “Will o’ the Wisp” was an unnecessary aid to the elvishness of the scene itself. Indeed, his human or fantastic figures seem to be sometimes as much out of place as a Yankee at the court of King Arthur, though there are two notable exceptions—“The Sower” and “The Weed Burner”—both figures towards which idolatry might be excusable, so nobly do they represent labour in the field. And even in “The Weed Burner” the boy seems bemused by the motion and savour of the smoke that curdles up through the autumn air. The picture of a forest pool is magical, but it repudiates the fairy altogether. Nothing would be more out of place here than the kind of sucking harlequin or columbine which is commonly foisted upon us as a fairy; for here is something more desirable, the very forces which begot the fairies upon a different age from ours. Even when he draws a house it is, I think, for the house’s sake, for the sake of whatever soul it has acquired, which men cannot take away. Was there ever such an inn as “The Wispers”? The landlord is dead, the casks are dry, a rat has littered on the top stair of the cellar, and the landlord says—

“’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire:

Sit close, and draw the table nigher;

Be merry, and drink wine that’s old,