Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

Talking with him, I was not surprised to find him a discontented man. He did not want to live in a town—he seemed not to know just what he wanted, or having but few words he did not know how to say it; but his mind was in a state of turmoil and revolt, and he could only curse the head shepherd, the bailiff, the farmer, and, to finish up, the lord of the manor. Probably he soon cast away his crook, and went off in search of some distant place, where he would be permitted to discharge the energy that seethed and bubbled in him—perhaps to bite the dust on the African veldt.

This, then, is one of the main facts to be noted in the blonde Hampshire peasant—the great contrast between the small minority of persons of the Anglo-Saxon and of the prevalent type. It was long ago shown by Huxley that the English people generally are not Saxons in the shape of the head, and in all Saxon England the divergence has perhaps been greatest in this southern county. The oval-faced type, as I have said, is less pronounced as we approach the borders of Berkshire, and although the difference is not very great, it is quite perceptible; the Berkshire people are rather nearer to the common modified Saxon type of Oxfordshire and the Midlands generally.

Dark Hampshire people

In the southern half of Hampshire the dark-eyed, black-haired people are almost as common as the blonde, and in some localities they are actually in a majority. Visitors to the New Forest district often express astonishment at the darkness and "foreign" appearance of the people, and they sometimes form the mistaken idea that it is due to a strong element of gipsy blood. The darkest Hampshire peasant is always in shape of head and face the farthest removed from the gipsy type.

Among the dark people there are two distinct types, as there are two in the blonde, and it will be understood that I only mean two that are, in a measure, fixed and easily recognised types; for it must always be borne in mind that, outside of these distinctive forms, there is a heterogeneous crowd of persons of all shades and shapes of face and of great variety in features. These two dark types are: First, the small, narrow-headed person of brown skin, crow-black hair, and black eyes; of this rarest and most interesting type I shall speak last. Second, the person of average height, slightly oval face, and dark eyes and hair. The accompanying portrait of a young woman in a village on the Test is a good specimen of this type. Now we find that this dark-haired, dark-eyed, and often dark-skinned people are in stature, figure, shape of head, and features exactly like the oval-faced blonde people already described. They are, light and dark, an intermediate type, and we can only say that they are one and the same people, the outcome of a long-mixed race which has crystallised in this form unlike any of its originals; that the difference in colour is due to the fact that blue and black in the iris and black and brown in the hair very seldom mix, these colours being, as has been said, "mutually exclusive." They persist when everything else, down to the bony framework, has been modified and the original racial characters obliterated. Nevertheless, we see that these mutually exclusive colours do mix in some individuals both in the eyes and hair. In the grey-blue iris it appears as a very slight pigmentation, in most cases round the pupil, but in the hair it is more marked. Many, perhaps a majority, of the dark-eyed people we are now considering have some warm brown colour in their black hair; in members of the same family you will often find raven-black hair and brownish-black hair; and sometimes in three brothers or sisters you will find the two original colours, black and brown, and the intermediate very dark or brownish-black hair.

A HAMPSHIRE GIRL

The brunette of this oval-faced type is also, as we have seen, deficient in colour, but, as a rule, she is more attractive than her light-eyed sister. This may be due to the appearance of a greater intensity of life in the dark eye; but it is also probable that there is almost always some difference in disposition, that black or dark pigment is correlated with a warmer, quicker, more sympathetic nature. The anthropologists tell us that very slight differences in intensity of pigmentation may correspond to relatively very great constitutional differences. One fact in reference to dark- and light-coloured people which I came upon in Hampshire, struck me as exceedingly curious, and has suggested the question: Is there in us, or in some of us, very deep down, and buried out of sight, but still occasionally coming to life and to the surface, an ancient feeling of repulsion or racial antipathy between black and blonde? Are there mental characteristics, too, that are "mutually exclusive"? Dark and light are mixed in very many of us, but, as Huxley has said, the constituents do not always rightly mix: as a rule, one side is strongest. With the dark side strongest in me, I search myself, and the only evidence I find of such a feeling is an ineradicable dislike of the shallow frosty blue eye: it makes me shiver, and seems to indicate a cold, petty, spiteful, and false nature. This may be merely a fancy or association, the colour resembling that of the frosty sky in winter. In many others the feeling appears to be more definite. I know blue-eyed persons of culture, liberal-minded, religious, charitable, lovers of all men, who declare that they cannot regard dark-eyed persons as being on the same level, morally, with the blue-eyed, and that they cannot dissociate black eyes from wickedness. This, too, may be fancy or association. But here in Hampshire I have been startled at some things I have heard spoken by dark-eyed people about blondes. Not of the mitigated Hampshire blonde, with that dimness in the colour of his skin, and eyes, and hair, but of the more vivid type with brighter blue eyes, and brighter or more fiery hair, and the light skin to match. What I have heard was to this effect:

"Perhaps it will be all right in the end—we hope it will: he says he will marry her and give her a home. But you never know where you are with a man of that colour—I'll believe it when I see it."