The history of the horn-blower and his old wife, and their still living aged children, serves to remind me that this book, which contains so much about all sorts of creatures and forms of life, from spiders and flies to birds and beasts, and from red alga on gravestones to oaks and yews, has so far had almost nothing to say about our own species—of that variety which inhabits Hampshire.
Racial differences
If the critical reader asks what is here meant by "variety," what should I answer him? On going directly from any other district in southern England to the central parts of Hampshire one is sensible of a difference in the people. One is still in southern England, and the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the quiet but verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other neighbouring counties—Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire, Wilts, and Dorset. In general appearance, at all events, the people are much the same; and the dialect, where any survives, and even the quality of the voices, closely resemble those in adjoining counties. Nevertheless there is a difference; even the hasty seers who are almost without the faculty of observation are vaguely cognisant of it, though they would not be able to say what it consisted in. Probably it would puzzle anyone to say wherein Hampshire differed from all the counties named, since each has something individual; therefore it would be better to compare Hampshire with some one county near it, or with a group of neighbouring counties in which some family resemblance is traceable. Somerset, Devon, Wilts, and Dorset—these answer the description, and I leave out Cornwall only because its people are unknown to me. The four named have seemed to me the most interesting counties in southern England; but if I were to make them five by adding Hampshire, the verdict of nine persons out of ten, all equally well acquainted with the five, would probably be that it was the least interesting. They would probably say that the people of Hampshire were less good-looking, that they had less red colour in their skins, less pure colour in their eyes; that they had less energy, if not less intelligence, or at all events were less lively, and had less humour.
These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of soil, climate, food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of man may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in the Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less Anglo-Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the South Hampshire people, of the New Forest district especially, have not yet been worked out. Not being an anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for what they are worth.
Gentry and peasantry
There is little profit in looking at the townspeople. The big coast towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as that of the metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural inland town, like Winchester, one would be puzzled to say what the chief characteristics of the people were. You may feel in a vague way that they are unlike the people of, say, Guildford, or Canterbury, or Reading, or Dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too great to allow of any definite idea. The only time when the people even in a town can be studied to advantage in places like Winchester, Andover, etc., is on a market day, or on a Saturday afternoon, when the villagers come in to do their marketing. I have said, in writing of Somerset and its people, that the gentry, the landowners, and the wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense foreigners. The man may bear a name which has been for many generations in a county, but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as John Bright once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the nation. His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. It is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or the High Street of the country town to see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children of the soil.
Even so there will be variety enough—a little more perhaps than is wanted by the methodic mind anxious to classify these "insect tribes." But after a time—a few months or a few years, let us say—the observer will perceive that the majority of the people are divisible into four fairly distinct types, the minority being composed of intermediate forms and of nondescripts. There is an enormous disproportion in the actual numbers of the people of these distinct types, and it varies greatly in different parts of the county. Of the Hampshire people it may be said generally, as we say of the whole nation, that there are two types—the blonde and the dark; but in this part of England there are districts where a larger proportion of dark blood than is common in England generally has produced a well-marked intermediate type; and this is one of my four distinct Hampshire types. I should place it second in importance, although it comes a very long way after the first type, which is distinctly blonde.
Common blonde type
This first most prevalent type, which greatly outnumbers all the others put together, and probably includes more than half of the entire population, is strongest in the north, and extends across the county from Sussex to Wiltshire. The Hampshire people in that district are hardly to be distinguished from those of Berkshire. One can see this best by looking at the school-children in a number of North Hampshire and Berkshire villages. In sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty children in a village school you will seldom find as many as a dozen with dark eyes.
As was said in a former chapter, there is very little beauty or good looks in this people; on the other hand, there is just as little downright ugliness; they are mostly on a rather monotonous level, just passable in form and features, but with an almost entire absence of any brightness, physical or mental. Take the best-looking woman of this most common type—the description will fit a dozen in any village. She is of medium height, and has a slightly oval face (which, being Anglo-Saxon, she ought not to have), with fairly good features; a nose fairly straight, or slightly aquiline, and not small; mouth well moulded, but the lips too thin; chin frequently pointed. Her hair is invariably brown, without any red or chestnut colour in it, generally of a dull or dusty hue; and the eyes are a pale greyish-blue, with small pupils, and in very many cases a dark mark round the iris. The deep blue, any pure blue, in fact, from forget-me-not to ultramarine, is as rare in this commonest type as warm or bright hair—chestnut, red, or gold; or as a brilliant skin. The skin is pallid, or dusky, or dirty-looking. Even healthy girls in their teens seldom have any colour, and the exquisite roseate and carmine reds of other counties are rare indeed. The best-looking girls at the time of life when they come nearest to being pretty, when they are just growing into womanhood, have an unfinished look which is almost pathetic. One gets the fancy that Nature had meant to make them nice-looking, and finally becoming dissatisfied with her work, left them to grow to maturity anyhow. It is pathetic, because there was little more to be done—a rosier blush on the cheek, a touch of scarlet on the lips, a little brightness and elasticity in the hair, a pencil of sunlight to make the eyes sparkle.