Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered a blowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of "residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen and washerwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate a certain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It is true I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentary in the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change her scrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quite dubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages is betrayed naïvely by the young girls who go from them into domestic service. "You don't seem to like things sticky," one of these girls observed to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day and sticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferies heard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus as gets hold o' you!" might very well be applied to many and many a child of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first "place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do not affect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an open question how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called into play again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due to experience which the younger women now bring into the valley when they marry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley. In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are at last coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasant ideas.
May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well; that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot make good? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Consider what it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of a civilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasant woman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic method is all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better than the old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now in middle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only—the core of a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With the cottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments of ability and of character as permitted the women to look with complacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced no humiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reach the full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who can affirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend that the best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottage woman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enables her to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-do women? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some such belief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument, until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to the inspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and the kitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and body, has side-tracked them—has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured."
Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the only sources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might be obtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. At school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of thought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are not admitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem of making both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experience indeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluable lessons; yet still the savoir vivre that should make up for the old peasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is not attained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pick up from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything of the best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learn it. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be something further to be said presently; in the meantime I may leave it to the reader to judge whether the cottage woman's needs, since the peasant system broke down, are being well met.
But I must not leave it to be inferred that the women, thus stranded between two civilizations, are therefore degraded or brutalized. From repeated experience one knows that their sense of courtesy—of good manners as distinct from merely fashionable or cultured manners—is very keen: in kindness and good-will they have nothing to learn from anybody, and most of their "superiors" and would-be teachers might learn from them. Nor would I disparage their improved housekeeping, as though it had no significance. It may open no doorway for them into middle-class civilization, but I think it puts their spirits, as it were, on the watch for opportunities of personal development. I judge by their looks. An expression, not too often seen elsewhere, rests in the eyes of most of the cottage women—an expression neither self-complacent nor depressed, nor yet exactly docile, though it is near to that. The interpretation one would put upon it depends on the phrases one is wont to use. Thus some would say that the women appear to be reaching out towards "respectability" instead of the blowsy good-temper bred of field-work; others, more simply, but perhaps more truly, that they are desirous of being "good." But whatever epithet one gives it, there is the fine look: a look hardly of expectancy—it is not alert enough for that—but rather of patient quietness and self-possession, the innermost spirit being held instinctively unsullied, in that receptive state in which a religion, a brave ethic, would flourish if the seeds of such a thing could be sown there. A hopeful, a generous and stimulating outlook—that is what must be regained before the loss of the peasant outlook can be made good to them. They are in want of a view of life that would reinstate them in their own—yes, and in other people's—estimation; a view of social well-being, not of the village only, but of all England now, in which they can hold the position proper to women who are wives and mothers.
And this, vague though it is, shows up some of the more pressing needs of the moment. Above all things the economic state of the cottage-women requires improvement. There must be some definite leisure for them, and they must be freed from the miserable struggle with imminent destitution, if they are to find the time and the mental tranquillity for viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, an education to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; for nobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classes certainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at once that the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women of the idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit on those they imitate. In this connection some very curious things—the product of leisure and no outlook—are to be seen in the village. That objectionable yet funny cult of "superiority," upon which the "resident" ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has its disciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife or daughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not "know," or will not "mix with," the wives and daughters of mere labourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiring type find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of still higher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say. The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion," that new ethic, which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before the loss of the peasant system can be made up to the women.
XVIII
THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING
Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it. At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try to be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of any passers-by—especially of women—who might be considered safe game: that was their only way of spending the evenings and at the same time enjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council had lately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in the elementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature, and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty or five-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth and light, though bored by the instruction. They were mischievous and inattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon as half-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if the gloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, less irksome than the night-school.