Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines? If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for the Italian destitute.
Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection with the cottage silkworm industry. The cavalleri (as the peasants call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family working for them from morning till night.
Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one such household:
"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."
As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst of Nature's graciousness and beauty Among Italian Peasants is not without value.
SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker, M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5s.
The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time, and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down those trees. Taken at some length—indeed, taken in series—he becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called Kitty Fairhall, which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas himself is likely to apprehend.
Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles, the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr. Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about him—Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking—flicker like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago, one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language, I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand—give us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted sights" do but sting the mind.
Of course he tells us—he can't help it—some interesting things. One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That must have been in the Weald—but we did not know that feature of Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again, he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ... to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand." Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr. Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.