We have little belief in the days of merry England, or in the “good old times,” that illusory paradise of dullards and sluggards, who would rather mourn over a lost Eden than find one in the present, or look for it in a future; but we do remember when the land had more mirth in it than now, when it was more romantic and picturesque. We remember it ere the utilitarian spirit had laid its iron grasp on the hearts of our people, and spread its iron network over our fields and valleys. We remember it less wealthy, less prosperous, less cultivated, and we remember it also as more genial, more joyous, and more beautiful. A change—a great change, almost a revolution—in our social feelings, thoughts and habits,—in our aims and pursuits—in the character of the people and the features of the country—has taken place even in our memory. Has this change wrought most of good or evil? We admit that it had become a necessity of progress that men should be shaken out of their domesticity, their local isolation be more centralised, and become more cosmopolitan—that their intercommunications should be more rapid, their diffusion more general: we admit that the increase of population and labour-power demanded that wealth should no longer be hoarded or land be wasted, and that every penny, every acre, should be made productive—that some such changes as have come upon us must needs have come: but have we not bought them at a price, have we not paid for them at the cost of many manly attributes—many social virtues—by the loss of much rural beauty, and many characteristics of our pastoral life? We quarrel not with steam, the great wonder of the Age—the great means to the mighty end of utilitarianism. We know all that it has done for us—all it has brought us. We know that it has accelerated intercourse, impelled industry, expanded our resources, extended knowledge, equalised consumption and production, given facilities to enterprise, and opportunities to labour. Much has it done for our material prosperity; and we should hail it as an altogether beneficent agent, did we not think—God knows whether rightly or not—that this shuffling together of people, this eager competition, this hot-bed production which it has fostered, was rapidly effacing individuality and simplicity of character—had overstrode that honest persevering industry which toils on slowly and patiently to its end, which is content to labour and to wait—had raised an unrest, a rapid craving for quick results, a discontent with appointed spheres of action, a restless movement of classes to tread on each other’s heels, and had decreased their mutual trust and despondency—did we not know that it had invaded the seclusion of our valleys, smoked and scorched our woods and copses, tunnelled our rocks, cut up our meadows, and overlaid the poesy of nature by the materialism of traffic.
Commerce and manufacture! shall we raise our voices against them? God forbid! Have they not been the great agents in our prosperity? Have they not created our wealth, begotten our merchant princes, raised our shipping, filled our island with products, and circulated our own to the ends of the earth? Have they not promoted science, encouraged enterprise? Have they not nourished our colonies, given employment to our growing millions, made this little spot to swarm like a busy hive, and placed it as the centre of a wide-spreading civilisation—the heart of a mighty organisation? Should they, however, beget a thirst for gold—a mad pursuit for wealth, which will engross and absorb our thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of generous impulses and noble principles, hitherto main elements in the happiness and greatness of nations—will they be all gain? Will not there be a balance then—moral loss against material gain? Answer for thyself, O wondrous Age!
Neither will we quarrel with model farming. The competition of production, the opening of markets, the pressure of other classes and interests, have forced agriculture, for the sake of its very life and being, to adopt utilitarianism—have compelled it to turn every inch of ground to account. Utility demanded that hedgerows should be levelled, the waste patches, knolls, and nooks ploughed up, old pollards and groups of trees uprooted, and that sheep and oxen, instead of cropping the pleasant herbage in pleasant sunny meadows, should be cooped and stalled in narrow spaces, fed by rule and measure, and left to fatten in darkness; that machinery should supersede the reaper’s and thresher’s work, and that crops should be stacked and garnered as a matter of business, and not borne home, as heretofore, with festive rejoicings and thanksgivings. And if the increasing number of mouths required so many more bushels of corn, so many more pounds of meat, and they can be obtained only by such means, then must the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful be sacrificed instantly and ruthlessly, that man may eat and live. Yes! uproot, overturn, change, overlay them all, if thus, and thus only, the people may be fed, the poor have bread. The beautiful has ever yielded to the inroads of necessity or utility, which is a sort of modified and modernised necessity. Yet may we not mourn over the things which are gone or going, the things belonging to the outer world of the poetic, the romantic, and the picturesque? They are associated with sunny holidays, with the memories of boyhood, and the feelings of youth; and we must mourn them, though their extirpation be the doom of an imperious and beneficent necessity. We must fain mourn over those hedgerows, as we remember them, with their soft, grassy banks—the nursery of early violets and gregarious primroses—the parterre of more gaudy daffodils, and the nestling-place of hundreds of tiny flowerets, whose names we knew not, but whose faces we loved, with their tops crowned by rich-scented hawthorn, budding hazel, and dark-leaved sloe—with their bases bordered by luxuriant brambles and flowering gorse. They were favourite haunts of ours, those hedgerows: there we sought the early nosegay, there we clutched at the ripe brown clusters of nuts,—the slip shellers, the Spolia prima of the season—our hoards were gathered elsewhere: there we stripped the sloe-bushes of their fruit, under the delusion that, by a long process of hoarding in bran, they would become luxuries, and would not set the teeth on edge; there, with net and ferret, or with dog and gun, we commenced our initiation as sportsmen; there, as Dandie Dinmont would say, we were entered on the rabbit.
We must mourn, too, for these groves and thickets, which lay in the intervals of cultivation like the remnants of a conquered race amid the conquerors. Much, very much, did we love to thread these coverts, in the schoolboy pursuits of nutting or bird-nesting, or to roam in mere wantonness through the thick underwood, gathering an immature poetry from the massed foliage of holly, mountain-ash, alder, and willow—from the tangled shades of briar, woodbine, convolvulus, and the other creepers which wreathed their wild luxuriance round stem and boughs, or trailed it in a rich undergrowth along the ground—from the lights, which fell soft and mellow through the openings and through the leaves on the long-tufted grass below, rich with blue-bells, harebells, wild anemone, and many another wildling;—from the fluttering of wings, the twitterings and the cooings of birds—from the sweet-scented breaths—from the solitude, and from the many gentle influences through which nature inspires the beautiful. These places have glad memories—the gladdest of all—the memories of the full heart, the free fresh impulses, and of growing thought. On some such spot, too, we took our first stand as a sportsman. We see it even now—an opening glade, a plash overhung with the boughs of a holly bush—behind a knot of alders and some tangled brushwood. Even now we feel our heart fluttering, and our cheek flushing, as Flush—the best of cockers—after wagging and bustling about in a most excited manner, gave one sharp bark, one spring, and, something rising before us, we fired, and a bird fell. We had killed our first woodcock. Utilitarianism has waged the war of extermination most ruthlessly against these spots, and the gorse brakes which shone in golden patches betwixt the fallow and grass lands. There are few left now. The fields are spread before us, smooth and bare, and the corn waves on the ground, erewhile cumbered by old trees and brushwood, which were of no use, save to grow berries, give a covert to birds, rabbits, and vermin, and to offer the eye a pleasant spot to rest upon in the landscape. Away with such uselessness! The world is not large enough for such waste.
Those old pollards, too—those venerable solitary trees which, with their grey scarred trunks, and the green twigs shooting from their tops, evidences of the life still within,—seemed to us always the very symbols of a hale, vigorous old age, furrowed perchance, or shrunken by time, but crowned and flowering still with the presence of youth. Is there not room for them? and wilt thou, oh man! regret also that utilitarianism has wrought such a similitude betwixt agriculture and manufacture,—has so imbued both with the self-same economy of space and material, that the buildings and structures of the one are as stiff, formal, and red-bricked as the other? Yea, O Age! even so far will our perverseness carry us. Those old farmhouses, with their low thatched roofs covered with grass and lichens, their stacks of chimney, the old tree at the gable-end, the trim little garden and the bee-hives in front, those old straggling farmyards with their ivy-covered out-houses and linheys, their pools and scattered groups of trees, were doubtless incommodious and wasteful, but they had a picturesqueness in our eyes never to be claimed by their successors. Utility seeks not such effects.
Those brooks which used to meander through pleasant meadows and shady copses, or ripple gently over rocks and yellow pebbles, and whose waters are now diverted into straight channels and narrow cuts to irrigate land or turn wheels, are not they a lost beauty? But there is a gain in water-power, a saving in labour.
Harvest-homes—merry-makings—rural feasts! The Age repudiates and ignores them utterly. The land is too poor, life too short, for such follies. Yet do we look back lovingly on the days when the loud shout of the reapers announced far and wide the cutting of the first sheaf—when the last load was carried home, attended by a long procession of men, women, and boys, all rejoicing with shouts, song, and laughter, in the plenty which had been gathered in; and when the event was celebrated ever with feasts and mirth, with open-doored hospitality, and open-handed charity. Nor has there ever yet been a time in the age of the world when the fruitfulness of the earth has not been hailed by man with joy and triumph, or the completion of its riches been calendared by festivity and thankfulness. Now the goodly sheaves are carted and thrown out before their garners as so much manure or so many cotton bales. “So much the better,” says utilitarianism; “there is so much time, so much money saved.”
And are men’s stomachs, men’s pockets, to be the all in all of consideration? Are their hearts and fancies not to be fed or cultured? Is man’s labour to find the dead level of toil, ungladdened by the sound of rejoicing, unbrightened by hours of mirth? Is he to see no other end and aim in such toil than the receipt of a few shillings at the week’s end—the fair day’s wage for the fair day’s work? Is this to be the sole tie betwixt him and the soil—betwixt him and his labour? Is life to be stripped of all its poetic and noble inspirations, and be reduced to a dead materialism? Is man’s soul to become merely the motive power in a mechanism of profit and loss, utility and production? Is thy civilisation to take this form, O wondrous Age! If so, the experiment may be a grand one, a successful one; but the experiences of the past, and the instincts and sentiments of mankind, are against it. For what do men most love to look into the past? To seek the useful, or the heroic and the beautiful? Do they pore over musty tomes, and delve into buried cities, that they may discover the secret of Tyrian dye and Etruscan pottery, the system of Phœnician commerce and the sources of Egyptian wealth; or that their hearts may burn with the heroism of Marathon or swell with the glories of Alexander, and that the thrilling words of Pindar, the noble thoughts of Sophocles, the beautiful legends of Grecian mythology, the grand truths of Grecian history, may be their own? Do they investigate the records of the middle ages to understand the monetary schemes of Lombardy and Venice, or that they may read how men fought, how women loved, and minstrels sang—that they may dwell on knightly courtesy and knightly chivalry? Utility has, I fear, little of the study. This may be a human error, but it is a deep-seated and long-standing one. What a Jeremiad to sing over a fine old hedgerow, rotten stumps, and barbarous customs! Not so, O Age! It is not things themselves we mourn, but the feelings, the principles they nurtured or represented.
Agriculture followed of necessity in the march of utilitarianism. It was challenged to fight for its own footing—to struggle and compete with its rivals in the quickness and quantity of production. In this struggle it gained, maybe, much strength from its alliance with science, and added to its resources by the applications of art; but it lost much of the Arcadian character, the pastoral beauty, the simplicity of pleasure and simplicity of toil, the simple honesty and the generous manliness, which placed in point of attraction the rural life next to the heroic in men’s minds, which invested the vocation of the husbandman with the graces and dignity of a higher order of labour, and wreathed the bare facts of his toil with the garlands of poesy and sentiment. It was forced to strip for the race, to throw away all its adornments, its poetry and sentiments, and descend to the bare remunerative materialism of husbandry. It can no longer afford
“Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,