OUTSIDE this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations—hedging and ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things—are becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure—motors along all the main roads, golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties—we can discern the passing of a race of men.

From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace, discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13]

In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled; they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient, the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,” he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and lost their own land.”[14]

And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants of the labourer still unsatisfied—Hope and a Home. He laments the passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work, and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed. It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as ‘le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et orgueilleux.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]

This writer does not despair of revival as a result of large and drastic changes. “The monopoly of great farmers must be broken up,” he boldly declares, “before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English peasant.” He has discovered deep in the heart of the country labourer that “Love of the Land” which has survived through all the generations of hopeless drudgery. He recognises it as “a survival from the days when an able-bodied Englishman, bred on and to the land, might cherish the hope of one day calling a corner of it his own, at least as the tenant of a landlord without personal interest in the degradation of his dependants.” Here is the sole asset we possess in the work of rural revival. Parliament has been attempting by legislation to give to some select persons in the villages direct access to the land. The labourer to-day is slowly and doubtfully realising that a law has been passed which is designed to work for his benefit. The whole conception is new to him. “Law” he has hitherto regarded as something remote or inimical, symbolised by the village policeman, or the magistrates who penalise poaching and petty larceny. Those who made themselves missionaries of the new Act in the villages found everywhere this first incredulity. They announced the decree of Government that henceforth the first charge on the land should be the allotment or small holding; that nothing was to stand in the way of the provision of such holding when it was desired; that, if necessary by compulsion, the claims of sport, the claims of pleasure, the ambitions of the large farmer adding field to field, the prejudice or caprice of those who dislike the creation of these small plots and gardens, were to be made to yield to the primary necessity of finding land for the landless. The labourer was silent, astonished, doubtful, wondering if this was a new trick designed for his disadvantage. There were meetings at night, to which men came furtively; suggestions that one is a “spy,” and dogged silence until he has departed; doubt as to what Mr. A. (the landlord) would think of it, or whether Mr. B. (the farmer) would dispossess all those who apply for land, or if Mr. C. (the vicar) would be inclined to look favourably on the affair. The stirring and the movement for a time seemed real; far more real than many had ventured to hope for when the Act was passing through Parliament. But the rather cumbrous machinery is difficult to put into operation, and the future is still uncertain. If the Parish Councils and County Councils and Central Commissioners prove adequate to the situation, they may yet reveal life where there now is little but death, and a transformation of England’s deserted countryside. If the difficulties are insuperable or action too long delayed, with Councils embarking upon one experiment chosen from ten applications, postponing for months or years any energetic action; there will be no vocal protest, and few who cannot look beneath the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been flung into the flames.

What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer. They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness, by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath it all.

In his Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, Mr. “George Bourne” has presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest, dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian tradition. There is scepticism concerning “these here places nobody ever bin to an’ come back again to tell we.” “Nobody don’t know nothin’ about it. ’Tain’t as if they come back to tell ye. There’s my father what bin dead this forty year, what a crool man he must be not to’ve come back in all that time, if he was able, an’ tell me about it. That’s what I said to Colonel Sadler. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you had better talk to the Vicar.’ ‘Vicar?’ I says; ‘he won’t talk to me. Besides, what do he know about it more’n anybody else?’”

He is seen moving into his squalid cottage, and refusing to be dislodged from his lair: resisting, to the death, the services of the efficient poor law infirmary or the suggestion of Hospital kindliness. He had a theory that “bread never ought to be no less than a shillin’ a gallon” if farmers were to prosper: but on hearing of the new “fiscal reform,” “Oh dear!” is his comment, “we don’t want no taxes on food.” In war-time he is on the side of “our country,” and has a subtle explanation of the report of “missing” in the newspapers. “Prisoners—or else burnt.” “They burns ’em, some says.” He enjoys his life to the end; despising, so long as is possible, the forces of ill-health, advancing old age, weariness; exhibiting in circumstances of bereavement and squalid misery the astonishing endurance and clinging to life which is found amongst the rural poor of England. “During the last year or two of his life he was seldom without pain. He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his landlord. A neighbour looking in upon him, and seeing his serious condition, said genially, ‘You ben’t goin’ to die, be ye, Freddy?’ And he answered, ‘I dunno. Shouldn’t care if I do. ’Tis a poor feller as can’t make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three times, then there might be something to fret about.’” Later, he adds more seriously, “But nobody dunno when, that’s the best of it.”

The author recounts, with a poignant simplicity, the incidents of the old man’s death: in hot July weather, with the year at the summit of riotous life, and every element in nature taunting the impotence of humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction. “He is dying,” was the thought at the end, “without any suspicion that any one could think of him with admiration and reverence.” His race is perishing in similar ignorance, unhonoured and unsung: without a suspicion that “any one could think of it with admiration and reverence.” The agricultural labourer survived the intolerable conditions of the early century when his life was one impossible struggle against penury and starvation. He stands to-day for a moment, an old man in a crumbling home, the last of a long line of high tradition and heritage. He stands to-day without successors: occupying the region of his ancestors, which they had peopled since England first was: which they had maintained, with no ignoble life, through the transitory centuries.

He is vanishing from the world, and there are few that regret his departure. “Progress” has effected a destruction where penury and starvation had failed. He endured through all the lean years, somehow obtaining nourishment and rearing his children, clinging tenaciously to the earth, within the earth-bound horizon. At length appears the end; a rather squalid and mournful end—to a life which had once stood for the bedrock life of England. The peasant’s resources, the peasant’s vigour and resistance, the peasant’s slow-moving, deliberate mind, had borne the burden of war and change. From his villages came the old folk-songs of the nation; he built the village churches, which are the treasures of rural England, and once took a pride in them. His secret wisdom, his fragments of half-heathen, half-Christian philosophy, his standards of bitterness and enjoyment, once made up the temper and mettle of the common people of England. The period of his greatest degradation coincided with the period of a sudden offer of escape. As the common land passed from his occupation, and he sank steadily to the landless depth of day labour, the cities, with their unlimited demands for the peasant energy and vigour, open to him welcoming arms. The few that remain are coming more and more to present the appearance of a declining race: a race which has lost the secrets of the arts which once flourished in the region in which it dwells. The English countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither energy nor intelligence to regain. “The evidence is abundant and positive,” writes Dr. Jessop, as a result of most careful examination of first-hand authority, “that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, the painting of the lovely figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of those who in the sixteenth century stripped them bare—all this was executed by local artists.” He will not listen to the tradition of indebtedness to monk and squire. “In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” he declares, “there were no squires—that is the naked truth.” The property belonged to the parish: it was always growing. It was of a richness and variety almost incredible to those who to-day see but the last guttering flame of parochial life, the attempt by parish councils, guilds of village players, and all the enterprise of occasional vigorous resistance, to combat the spreading atrophy of decay. Here are “ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners: vestments which were miracles of splendour in their colours and materials and incomparable artistic finish of needlework: not to speak of the fine linen and the veils, the carpets and the hangings.”[16] It is a treasury of wealth, not so much in its direct suggestion of opulence, of services and bequests freely given, as in its indication of a life which can take pride in itself and its labour: a life, however difficult and limited, yet finding occasion for a handicraft in which men and women may delight, and some interests other than that of concentration upon dull and trivial things.

Such were the beginnings of this long sorrowful progress: in villages which could create these things and take a pride in them. The end reveals an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the town, into the heart of a great silence: the silence that broods over a doomed and passing race. There remains at the summit a joyful absorption in physical exercises and pleasures: in the midst of which, almost unnoticed amid the new gaiety, “Bettesworth” is shambling to a pauper grave, and his children vanishing from the life of open sky into the mazes of the lamplit city.

“In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges, and driven along rights of way.” The beauty of continental landscape—of the Touraine and the Midi, the little Norman orchards, the extraordinarily fruitful fields of Southern Germany, the rude plenty of the Balkan principalities—is the beauty of “peasants’ country”: the beauty that is provided by security and close cultivation, excited wherever the peasant is assured that he will reap what he has sown. The beauty of English landscape is the beauty of “landlords’ country”—the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a kind of stately splendour. The typical continental countryside is that of tiny white-washed or wooden broad-eaved cottages, freely scattered over a region of fruit and flowers and close-tilled coveted land, which, in fact, is one large garden. The record of the great landowners of this country is of vast accumulations of acres: aggregations of whole counties, or estates dotted over many counties, each organised on the same plan of inherited feudal tradition. Where the money can still be obtained from external sources—the new wealth of the towns, or tribute from new nations abroad—some semblance of that feudal tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned, there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller, the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties, for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air—even an unashamed Democratic spirit—into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone. The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea. In another period of years, progress may have compelled the breaking up of the big estates; once again, after the population who would avail themselves to-day of such offers, to-morrow will have passed from the scene. In exercise and enjoyment, in parties and pleasant gardens, amid a playing at the ancient rural traditions, and through the newer mechanisms of locomotion, the decay passes almost unnoticed. The few who lift up their voices in warning are openly despised as agitators, or condemned as political pessimists. The rural reformer finds himself not so much opposed as ridiculed. What remains of the system, fortified by the city wealth, is so evidently unassailable by what remains of any resistent forces, that it can afford to contemplate all efforts towards revolt with a good-tempered disdain. Occasionally a village learns of some legislation designed for its benefit, of “Small Holdings” which a benignant Government designs for the advantage of the adventurous, of the apparatus of rural Self-Government, which can give to the poorest some right of control of the village commercial activities. It cautiously or boldly essays the paths of progress. The inhabitants apply for land to the great landowners who constitute the County Council, or organise themselves into a tiny village caucus for the capture of the Parish Meeting. Then, in quiet and effectual action, the movement of revolt is scattered and suppressed. It is explained to the applicants how unsuitable they are for the position of independent agricultural industry: or the leaders of the democratic upheaval are informed that it is not in the least convenient to their owners that they should concern themselves with the intricacies of local self-government. In a few months, or, at most, a few years, order reigns—at Auburn, as at Warsaw. And those who had been galvanised into some semblance of life have, for the most part, disappeared: to London, to the nearest city, to the British dominions beyond the sea. Such pitiful uprising, with its consequent disasters, evokes no resentment against the dominant power. It rather evokes resentment against those who had stirred up the forces of disturbance. In a certain village in Oxfordshire an unwary Liberal member of Parliament recently stimulated resistance to the enclosure by the landlord of a right-of-way. The resistance was sustained, and the village preserved in its ancient privilege. But all six witnesses who had testified to the ancient customs were dismissed from their occupations, and driven from the district. And indignation fell, not on the landlord who thus revealed his power, but on the member of Parliament who revealed his impotence. It was the Liberal, not the Conservative organisation, which henceforth found a united opposition to its energies: as the population, worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885, when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in 1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation.

“The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes lived, and could live, at peace for centuries—that,” says Mr. Ensor, “is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’ we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it, as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within. You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”

Over all which vision of a secular decay Nature still flings the splendour of her dawns and sunsets upon a land of radiant beauty. Here are deep rivers flowing beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing white and clean from the blue surrounding sea. Never, perhaps, in the memorable and spacious story of this island’s history has the land beyond the city offered so fair an inheritance to the children of its people, as to-day, under the visible shadow of the end.