On the Return to the Land

their vision, from an imaginative point o£ view, but it did turn the minds of nineteenth-century men (or at least of nineteenth-century poets) too exclusively in the direction of deserts. The great romantics said many sad and splendid and profound things about the sands that run through the glass of time, or spread themselves before the path of pilgrims; they gave many great landscapes in a flash or the stroke of a brush, like that of Swinburne, "In a land of sand and ruin and gold." Unfortunately, at this moment, we have gone off the gold, we find an inadequate substitute in the sand, and we are uncomfortably near to the ruin.

In a word, what was recently called "the love of nature" had become, for the moderns, very much too exclusively the love of nature sterile; of nature standing still; in short, the very opposite of the medieval mystical truth of Natura Naturans. The romantic poets were real poets. We do not mean to sneer at them, when we say that they were persons of peculiar sensibility. But it is profoundly true that they wefe often content to gaze across a desert; and "weep like anything to see such quantities of sand." Now there was in old times, and there ought to be in all times, a perfectly natural and spontaneous and spirited reply to this. There ought to be, at any given moment, a large number of poets and philosophers "who laughed like anything to see such quantities of land." There ought to be a normal exaltation at the hospitality and opportunity of the earth; there has been in almost all other ages and societies such joy expressed in a hundred poetical forms, from ale-house songs about wagoning and harvesting to long didactic poems about milking cows or keeping bees. The peculiar trouble of these times, as distinct from almost all other times, is that the mere sight of these agricultural opportunities does not lift the heart; and men do not laugh like anything to see such quantities of land. There was a time when they could excuse themselves, by saying that there was not enough land to see. But so much of England has now simply gone out of cultivation that it might almost as well be a new country as one of the oldest countries, with one of the oldest cultures, in the great Roman scheme of the West. It is not now the new countries, but rather the old countries, that cry out for the plough.

In fact, the present condition of our fields is such that a man might very well imitate the Walrus, and weep to see such quantities of land; of land about as barren as sand. And if we ask what is the cause of this strange and startling desolation in the most highly civilized States of the modern world, we shall of course find ourselves entangled in any number of political quarrels, which are often little better than the quarrels of politicians. But, behind all this, there remains the real historical fact; that the culture of the country has been artificially changed; and not for the better. I shall probably be misunderstood if I say that the culture was agriculture. It; will be supposed to signify that the most cultured people were clowns and bumpkins. But it was not so. Whatever were the faults of the aristocratic England of the last three centuries, it was agricultural, even when it was aristocratic. The gentlemen read the Georgics of Virgil, while the yokel carried them out. It was an unfair division of the fruits of the earth; but both the gentleman and the yokel were interested in the fruits of the earth. And there did in fact grow up, even under a rule of squires, which I shall always think more ignoble than a commonwealth of peasants, a perfectly real and practical art and science of the earth. The crafts of the countryside were practised by the common country people. They were arts as well as crafts. They were arts by this acid and actual test of all arts; that some men could do them very well and some men could not. Things like thatching or broadcast sowing were arts by which 'a man won local fame; as he might win it by weaving carpets or carving statuettes. In a word, the Craftsman was forgotten, in the country as well as the town. There is another allegory in that old nonsense poem of our nursery about the incongruous creatures who wept to see a quantity of sand. The Victorians, caring only for their vision of nonsense, really thought only of the Walrus. They managed to forget the Carpenter.

That is the basic tragedy of our time, which can only be cured by a return to practical crafts like carpentry and thatching and ploughing and getting a living on the land. But I took a text from Mr. Heseltine's excellent little pamphlet, because he addresses himself directly to the question of how so difficult a thing may be done. Indeed, his own title of Town to Country really expresses the whole difficulty, as it confronts many people even in the country, and practically all people in the town. I will not attempt here to deal with the details of his very sensible advice; I will only mention one general doubt or difficulty, which I believe to have a huge effect on human hopes in this department.

To put it shortly, the objection almost always raised is, "How can the sort of people brought up in the town ever grow accustomed to the country?" Nobody seems to ask the very simple historical question, "How did the sort of people brought up in the country ever grow accustomed to the town?" If human nature has been hopelessly changed and fixed by less than a hundred years of industrial life, why was it not already hopelessly fixed by hundreds and thousands of years of rural life? If it only took one or two generations to lift a man from the low and degraded estate of an honest ploughman into the lofty and superior estate of a shoddy stockbroker, why is it psychologically impossible for the son of the shoddy stockbroker to have the sense to see that it would be better fun to be an honest ploughman — especially when there is obviously no more money in stockbroking? Why, to put it with a pathetic simplicity, if men came up to the town in millions to find more money, should they not have enough of the light of reason to leave the town, when it has no more money? I cannot see on what possible theory of human nature the one social transformation is any more impossible than the other. I know all about the minor arguments about the urban amusements, and Mr. Heseltine deals very soundly with that rather ominous parallel, not to say portent, of the necessity of bread and circuses. But I do not profess to deal here with any such special debates; I merely point out the elementary fact that the rush to the towns was presumably impelled by some sort of human hunger; and it is a human hunger which the towns can no longer feed. As a simple fact, there is only one way in which human hunger can ever be fed. Even in the triumph of towns and trade, it consisted only of securing in towns the tokens by which it was possible to live on the country. But nobody ever did live, or ever will live, on anything except the country. It seems tenable that we shall now find it better to do so in a straight rather than a crooked manner.

-C73*

XII On Dialect and Decency

THERE are some who actually like the Country dialects which State education is systematically destroying. There are some who actually prefer them to the Cockney dialect which State education is systematically spreading. For that is perhaps the most practical and successful effect o£ our present scheme of public instruction: that the village children no longer talk like ignorant inhabitants of Sussex or Suffolk; they now talk like enlightened inhabitants of Hoxton or Hounds-ditch. Among the eccentric reactionaries who have actually observed this change with regret, a further and more curious fact has also been remarked more than once. An Anglican country parson, a friend of mine, once told me that it was not only a loss of pronunciation, but also of perception, "They not only can't say the word; but they can't hear it"; was the way he put it. Supposing that the virtuous vicar in question had been so ill-advised as to teach his infant school to recite, let us say, the "Dolores" of Swinburne — which I admit is not extremely probable — their intonation would be different; but without any intention to differ. The vicar