And sings a melancholy strain:
O listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.
“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said, munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is now a forlorn convention—a mere vestige like the human appendix. For the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles, as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands—that is all there is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the “solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage, and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears—why, then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors. I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s automata are not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.
INTERIORS
Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best—interiors and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth concentre there, and he is unhappy—a figure for Hans Andersen—who has not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing, through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be.
Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one is looking at them—or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying. Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead you through a picture-gallery, so free are the indwellers of their concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children—four little girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy—“forty feeding like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was what the French call cendré, very glossy and smooth, and curling at the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding, no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her eyes. And she had been caught, not by the president, but by her elder sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering. Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You ask—or I did—How come they to leave me outside in the dark? Don’t they know that I am one with them all?