We are continually labouring to improve society—to diffuse education—to confer higher and ampler religious knowledge; but these people know little of all this—experience little of its effect; for their abodes, and natural paradises, lie far from the great tracks of travel and commerce; far from our great roads; in the most out-of-the-world places—the very nooks of the world.
If you come by chance upon them, you are struck with their admirable beauty, their solemn repose, their fresh and basking solitude. You cannot help exclaiming, What happy people must these be! But, when you come to look closer into them, the delusion vanishes. They do not, in fact, see any beauty that you see. Their minds have never been stirred from the sluggish routine of their daily life; their mental eye has never been unsealed, and directed to survey the advantages of their situation. They have been occupied with other things. Like the farmer’s lad mentioned by Wordsworth, their souls have become encrusted in their own torpor.
A sample should I give
Of what this stock produces, to enrich
The tender age of life, ye would exclaim,
“Is this the whistling plough-boy whose shrill notes
Impart new gladness to the morning air?”
Forgive me, if I venture to suspect
That many, sweet to hear of in soft verse,
Are of no finer frame;—his joints are stiff;
Beneath a cumbrous frock that to the knees
Invests the thriving churl, his legs appear,
Fellows to those that lustily upheld
The wooden-stools, for everlasting use,
Whereon our fathers sate. And mark his brow!
Under whose shaggy canopy are set
Two eyes, not dim, but of a healthy stare;
Wide, sluggish, blank, and ignorant and strange;
Proclaiming boldly that they never drew
A look or motion of intelligence,
From infant conning of the Christ-cross-row,
Or puzzling through a Primer, line by line,
Till perfect mastery crown the pains at last.
The Excursion, B. 8.
This, however, is one of the worst specimens of the most stupified class—farm-servants. Wordsworth himself makes his good and wise Wanderer, a shepherd in his youth, and describes him, when a lad, as impressed with the deepest sense of nature’s majesty. He represents him, in one of the noblest passages of the language, as witnessing the sun rise from some bold headland, and
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.
And, indeed, the mountaineer must be generally excepted from that torpor of mind I have alluded to. The forms of nature that perpetually surround him, are so bold and sublime, that they almost irresistibly impress, excite, and colour his spirit within him; and those legends and stirring histories which generally abound in them, co-operate with these natural influences. This unawakened intellect dwells more generally amid the humbler and quieter forms of natural beauty; in the “sleepy hollows” of more champaign regions.
It might be supposed that these nooks of the world would, in their seclusion, possess very much one moral character; but nothing can be more untrue. Universally, they may seem old-fashioned, and full of a sweet tranquillity; but their inhabitants differ widely in character in different parts of the country—widely often in a short space, and in a manner that can only be accounted for by their less or greater communion with towns, less or greater degree of education extended to them—and the kind extended. Where they are far from towns, and hold little intercourse with them, and have no manufactory in them, they may be dull, but they are seldom very vicious. If they have had little education, they lead a very mechanical sort of life; are often very boorish, and have very confined notions and contracted wishes; are rude in manner, but not bad in heart. I have been in places—ay, in this newspaper-reading age, where a newspaper never comes; where they have no public-house, no school, no church, and no doctor; and yet the district has been populous. But, in similarly situated places, where yet they had a simple, pious pastor—some primitive patriarch, like the venerable Robert Walker, of whom so admirable an account is given by Wordsworth; where they have been blest with such a man amongst them, and where they have had a school; where they knew little of what was going on in the world, and where yet you were sure to find, in some crypt-like hole in the wall, or in a little fireside window, about half a dozen books—the Bible, “Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs,” “Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” “Romaine’s Life of Faith,” or his “Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ,” “Macgowan’s Life of Christ,” or “Drelincourt on Death,” and such like volumes; or “Robinson Crusoe,” “Philip Quarle,” “The History of Henry the Earl of Moreland,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” or “Pamela;”—have you found a simplicity of heart and manner, a quiet prosperity, a nearer approach to the Arcadian idea of rural life, than anywhere else in this country. There are yet such places to be found in our island, notwithstanding the awful truth of what was said by Coleridge, that “Care, like a foul hag, sits on us all; one class presses with iron foot upon the wounded heads beneath, and all struggle for a worthless supremacy, and all, to rise to it, move shackled by their expenses.”
But these are now few and far between; and they are certainly “nooks of the world,” far from manufacturing towns; for my experience coincides with that of Captain Lloyd, as given in his “Field Sports of the North:”—“Manufactures, of whatever nature they may be, may certainly tend to enrich individuals, but, to my mind, they add little to the happiness of the community at large. In what parts of any country in the world, are such scenes of vice and squalid misery to be witnessed, as in manufacturing districts?” What he adds is very true—that, though it may appear singular, yet it is a fact, that the farther we retreat from great towns and manufactories, a greater degree of comfort is generally to be observed amongst the peasantry. It is, indeed, a strange relief to the spirit of one who has known something of the eager striving of the world, to come upon a spot where the inhabitants are passing through life, as it were, in a dreamlike pilgrimage, half unconscious of its trials and evils—an existence which, if it have not the merit of great and triumphant virtue, has that absence of selfish cunning, pride, sorrow, and degradation, which one would seek for in vain amid more bustling scenes. To find the young, soberly and cheerfully fulfilling their daily duties—nowhere affluence, but everywhere plenty and comfort observable—and the old, in their last tranquil days, seated in their easy chairs, or on the stone bench at their doors, glad to chat with you on all they have known on earth and hoped for in heaven—why, it would be more easy to scathe such a place with the evil spirit of the town, than to raise it in the scale of moral life. The experiment of improvement there, you feel, would be a hazardous one. It were easy and desirable to give more knowledge: but not easy to give it unaccompanied by those blighting contaminations that at present cling to it.
It is in those rural districts into which manufactories have spread—that are partly manufacturing and partly agricultural—that the population assumes its worst shape. The state of morals and manners amongst the working population of our great towns is terrible—far more so than casual observers are aware of. After all that has been done to reform and educate the working class, the torrent of corruption rolls on. The most active friends of education, the most active labourers in it, are ready to despair, and sometimes exclaim,—“What have we done, after all!” There, the spirit of man is aroused to a marvellous activity; but it is an unhealthful activity, and overpowers, in its extravagance, all attempts to direct it aright. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” faster than good communications can counteract them; and where the rural population, in its simplicity, comes in contact with this spirit, it receives the contagion in its most exaggerated form—a desolating moral pestilence; and suffers in person and in mind. There, spread all the vice and baseness of the lowest grade of the town, made hideous by still greater vulgarity and ignorance, and unawed by the higher authorities, unchecked by the better influences which there prevail, in the example and exertions of a higher caste of society.