Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead, and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same farm—it was Sunday—a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us so quietly—a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth. New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it seems that a whole storm, as it were, of innovations has burst upon the fields ever since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the green leaf. The labouring men used to tell me how they went reaping, for although you may see what is called reaping still going on at harvest-time, it is not reaping. True reaping is done with a hook alone and the hand; all the present reaping is 'vagging,' with a hook in one hand and a bent stick in the other, and instead of drawing the hook towards him and cutting it, the reaper chops at the straw as he might at an enemy. Then came the reaping machines, that simply cut the wheat, and left it lying flat on the ground, which were constantly altered and improved. Now there are the wire and string binders, that not only cut the corn, but gather it together and bind it in sheaves—a vast saving in labour. Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms, and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine; the new things come, but the old still remains. In itself the reaping-hook is an enlarged sickle, and the sickle was in use in Roman times, and no man knows how long before that. With it the reaper cut off the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if it had been a pruning-knife. It is the oldest of old implements—very likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of the 'vagging' hook. In the hand of Ceres it was the very symbol of agriculture, and that was a goodly time ago. At this hour they say the sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more to get the straw than the ear.
On the broad page of some ancient illuminated manuscript, centuries old, you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and when the corn laws starved half England—those were the times of the flail. Every barn—and there were then barns on every farm, think of the number—had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.
The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in the wars of old times, i.e. Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam threshes our ricks—in a few days doing what used to take months, and you would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever. Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms—which it is now the cry to multiply—for knocking out little quantities of grain for feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the flail will become as common as ever.
There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels, and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its constitution—still there were waggons in those days, and there are waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry—the slow waggons gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of years since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough, and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields, and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.
If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers. I should like to paint the lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping machine continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed the Greek fret. People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine. Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal, poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature. Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.
All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out—the village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate; the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered, still it is evident to any one of dispassionate thought, while such immense quantities of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case, and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether you farm four acres or four hundred.
New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British bull-dog growled in his countenance—very likely pleasantness itself to those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together,—farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers—and their clothes are different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern country sketch or picture you would not find them, they would be smoothed away—drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people. Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb, with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to mass in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows than they talk hedge and ditch language. They do not talk Pope, or Milton, or Addison; they 'knaaws,' 'they be a-gwoin thur,' it's a 'geat,' and a 'vield,' and a 'vurrow.' These are the old faces you see, the same old powers are at work to fashion them. Heavy, blind blows of the Wind, the Rain, Frost, and Heat, have beaten up their faces in rude repoussé work. They have nails in their boots, but new hats on their heads; he who paints them aright should paint the old nailed boots, but also the new hats and the Waltham watches. Why do they not read? All have been taught, and curious as the inconsistency may seem, they all value the privilege of being able to read and write, and yet they do not exercise it, except in a casual, random way. I for one, when the public schools began all through the rural districts, thought that at last the printing-press was going to reach the country people. In a measure it has done so, but in a flickering, uncertain manner; they read odd bits which come drifting to their homes in irregular ways, just as people on the coast light their fires with fragments of wreck, chance-thrown by the stormy spring-tides on the beach. So the fire of the mind in country places is fed with chips and splinters, and shapeless pieces that do not fit together, and no one sits down to read. I think I see two reasons why country people do not read, the first of which, thanks be to Allah, will endure for ever; the second may perhaps disappear in time, when those who make books come to see what is wanted.
First, nature has given them so much to read out of doors, such a vast and ever-changing picture-book, that white paper stained with black type indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways—there's an illustrated pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only! Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)—here's a Chronicon Nurembergense with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple matter, and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed in watching and living with such things. Add to these the veined elms, whose innumerable branches divide like the veins or the nerves of a physiological diagram, or like sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the incomparable beauty of the mowing grass. Now remember that they live among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and printed in such enormous quantities, do not touch a country mind. They have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey—you may see it, for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books are not natural, and do not care for them; they may be illustrated in gold and colours, sumptuously got up, and yet they are failures. Children do not take these to bed with them. I have seen this myself; I bought so many books to please children, but could never do it till by chance some one sent a little American toy-book, 'The History of the Owl and his Little One, and the Manoeuvres of the Fox.' This had a little of the spirit of the woods in it, and was read and re-read for a year. Only the other day a lady was telling me much the same thing, how she had bought book after book but could never hit on anything to please her little boy, till at last she found an American publication, roughly illustrated, which he always had by him. It is very strange that the art of the old-fashioned book for children has gone over to New York, which seems to us the land of newness.
For grown-up people the modern books which are sent out in such numbers, often very cheap, have likewise an artificial cityfied air so obviously got up and theatrical, such a mark of machinery on them, all stamped and chucked out by the thousand, that they have no attraction for a people who live with nature, and even in old age retain a certain childlike faith in honesty and genuine work. The reprints of good old authors, too, which may be had for a few pennies now, are so edited away that all the golden ring of the metal is clipped out of them. Overlaid with notes, and analyses, and critical exegesis, the original throb of the author's heart has disappeared from these polished bones. Just to suggest the book that would please the country reader, look for a moment at those works which came into existence at the very first dawn of printing—those volumes with strongly drawn and Dürer-like illustrations, very rough, and without perspective, but whose meaning is at once understood, and which somehow convey what I may call a genuine impression. Any countryman would tell you at once that the illustrations of half the books of the present day are mere vamped-up shallowness, drawn from a city man's mind in a city room by gaslight. You must consider that the countryman who lives out of doors, and always with nature, is, as regards his reading, very much in the same mental position as the people who lived four hundred years ago—in the days when costly and rare manuscripts, few and far between, chained to the desk, were just being superseded by printed books at a fifth the price, which could be actually bought and carried home. Till quite lately so few books have circulated in country places that they may be said to have been like these old manuscripts. The early printed books were simply the manuscripts printed, and that is why they remain to this day the finest specimens of typography, quite incomparable and not to be approached by present-day printers. The art of the scribe, elaborated through centuries, had reached a marvellous perfection; the first printer copied them—the magic Fust actually sold his first books as manuscripts. Since printers have only copied printers, books have steadily declined in excellence. I have been obliged to use the outside to suggest the inside—country readers want that which is genuine, honest, and, in a word, really good; you cannot please them with vamped-up book-making. Two books occur to me at this moment which would be greatly appreciated in every country home, from that of the peasant who has just begun to read to the houses of well-educated and well-to-do people, if they only knew of their existence and their contents—of course provided they were cheap enough, for country people have to be careful of their money nowadays. I allude to Darwin's 'Climbing Plants' and to his 'Earthworms;' these are astonishing works of singular patience and careful observation. The first gives most fascinating facts about such a common plant, for example, as the hedge bryony and the circular motion of its tendrils. Any farmer, for instance, will tell you that the hop-bine will insist upon going round the pole in one direction, and you cannot persuade it to go the other. These circular movements seem almost to resemble those of the planets about their centre, all things down to the ether seem to have a rotatory motion; and some foreign plants which he grew send their far-extended tendrils round and round with so patent a movement that you can see it hour by hour like the hand of a clock. Perhaps the little book on earthworms is a yet more wonderful achievement of this great genius, who had not only untiring patience to observe and verify, but also possessed imagination, and could thereby see the motive idea at work behind the facts. At first it has a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy and prejudiced have been our views of the despised worm thrown up by every ploughshare.
I have spoken of the veined elms and their thousand thousand branches that divide like the nerves; from each of these nerves of living wood there has fallen its breathing lungs of leaf. Where are these million leaves? By night the worm has drawn them into his gallery beneath the surface, and they have formed his food to again become the richest guano, to help the succulent growth of green grass and corn. Merely for profit alone, the profit of this digested food for plants, the agriculturist should preserve some trees that their leaves may thus be applied. The despised worm, the lowly worm, is actually so exquisitely organised that the whole of its body is sensitive to light, and is as conscious of the ray as the pupil of your own eye. Here is great and good work like that of those classics, the manuscripts of which were the first to be copied by the early printers, and books like this would be well thumbed of the country reader.