Afoot in England

W >> W.H. Hudson >> Afoot in England

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

The village is not picturesque. Its one perennial charm is
the swift river that flows through it, making music on its
wide sandy and pebbly floor. Hither and thither flit the
wagtails, finding little half-uncovered stones in the current
to perch upon. Both the pied and grey species are there; and,
seeing them together, one naturally wishes to resettle for
himself the old question as to which is the prettiest and most
graceful. Now this one looks best and now that; but the
delicately coloured grey and yellow bird has the longest tail
and can use it more prettily. Her tail is as much to her,
both as ornament and to express emotions, as a fan to any
flirtatious Spanish senora. One always thinks of these dainty
feathered creatures as females. It would seem quite natural
to call the wagtail "lady-bird," if that name had not been
registered by a diminutive podgy tortoise-shaped black and red
beetle.

So shallow is the wide stream in the village that a little
girl of about seven came down from a cottage, and to cool her
feet waded out into the middle, and there she stood for some
minutes on a low flat stone, looking down on her own wavering
image broken by a hundred hurrying wavelets and ripples. This
small maidie, holding up her short, shabby frock with her
wee hands, her bright brown hair falling over her face as she
bent her head down and laughed to see her bare little legs and
their flickering reflection beneath, made a pretty picture.
Like the wagtails, she looked in harmony with her
surroundings.

So many are the villages, towns, and places of interest seen,
so many the adventures met with in this walk, starting with
the baby streamlet beyond Simonsbath, and following it down to
Exeter and Exmouth, that it would take half a volume to
describe them, however briefly. Yet at the end I found that
Exford had left the most vivid and lasting impression, and was
remembered with most pleasure. It was more to me than
Winsford, that fragrant, cool, grey and green village, the
home of immemorial peace, second to no English village in
beauty; with its hoary church tower, its great trees, its old
stone, thatched cottages draped in ivy and vine, its soothing
sound of running waters. Exeter itself did not impress me so
strongly, in spite of its cathedral. The village of Exford
printed itself thus sharply on my mind because I had there
been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of a face
exceeding in loveliness all the faces seen in that West
Country--a rarest human gem, which had the power of imparting
to its setting something of its own wonderful lustre. The
type was a common Somerset one, but with marked differences in
some respects, else it could not have been so perfect.

The type I speak of is a very distinct one: in a crowd in a
London street you can easily spot a Somerset man who has this
mark on his countenance, but it shows more clearly in the
woman. There are more types than one, but the variety is less
than in other places; the women are more like each other, and
differ more from those that are outside their borders than is
the case in other English counties. A woman of this prevalent
type, to be met with anywhere from Bath and Bedminster to the
wilds of Exmoor, is of a good height, and has a pleasant,
often a pretty face; regular features, the nose straight,
rather long, with thin nostrils; eyes grey-blue; hair brown,
neither dark nor light, in many cases with a sandy or sunburnt
tint. Black, golden, reds, chestnuts are rarely seen. There
is always colour in the skin, but not deep; as a rule it is a
light tender brown with a rosy or reddish tinge. Altogether
it is a winning face, with smiling eyes; there is more in it
of that something we can call "refinement" than is seen in
women of the same class in other counties. The expression is
somewhat infantile; a young woman, even a middle-aged woman,
will frequently remind you of a little girl of seven or eight
summers. The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly
childlike. This peculiarity is the more striking when we
consider the figure. This is not fully developed according to
the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too
narrow and flat, the arms too thin. True or false, the idea
is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but
lacking in passion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than
a wife. Something in us--instinct or tradition--will have it
that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly
qualities--the wifely and maternal feelings. The luxuriant
types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.

It will be understood that the women described are those that
live in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the
social scale--further from the soil as it were--the type
becomes less and less distinct. Those of the "higher class,"
or "better class," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston

I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from
towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for
the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good
memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of
the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names
of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple
of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a
branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the
birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet"
in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was
living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many
years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other
side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature
and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out
later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little
village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a
person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield,
found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing
success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in
readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's
memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for
the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling
about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the
selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his
day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other
names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one
of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be
a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging
me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn
me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was
exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty
editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of
its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half
a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it
alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now?
Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his
popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it;
Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the
Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look
at it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless,
I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker
who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a
case out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to
extenuate my folly--to say, in the end, that this appears to
be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of
his poems, the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of
literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some
extent, a matter of association,--and as the story of how this
comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief
delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find
something about nature in it, especially some expression of
the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case,
inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most
important thing in life. For who could look on earth, water,
sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without
experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In
due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed
books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen
lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me
more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such
subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not
obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas.
There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves
--theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels,
essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was
there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume.
This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana
tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews
her eye to think yon playful kid must die. To my uncultivated
mind--for I had never been at school, and lived in the open
air with the birds and beasts--this seemed intolerably
artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but
kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until
he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite.
Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or
even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a
slight return of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone
alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless
have been outlived early in life; but there were many
passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on
the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive. There was
Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate
his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in
my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from
Akenside, who was not "rural." But there were other books in
which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages
which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of
rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I
discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town,
a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled
German in a long shabby black coat. I remember him well
because he was a very important person to me. It was the
first shop of the kind I had seen--I doubt if there was
another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour
among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped
on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience. The
books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there
were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's
Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I
snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding.
It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this
day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is
often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard
to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away
and take it home. If shillings had not been wanted for bread
and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return
to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow
the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when
I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that
Thomson is no longer read--that he is unreadable.

After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow
in that delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by
the discovery of yet another poem of rural England--the
Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to like it, for although I did
not know anything about the author's early life, the few
passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's and
other old natural history compilations had given me a strong
desire to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it--this
quiet description in verse of a green spot in England, my
spiritual country which so far as I knew I was never destined
to see; and that I continue to like it is, as I have said, the
reason of my being in this place.

While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances
of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made
it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in
England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am
at the same time convinced that this is not the sole reason
for my regard.

I take it that the Farmer's Boy is poetry, not merely
slightly poetized prose in the form of verse, although it is
undoubtedly poetry of a very humble order.

Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher
qualities of the poet--imagination and passion. The lower
kind of inspiration is, in fact, often better suited to such
themes and shows nature by the common light of day, as it
were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of lightning
flashes. Even among those who confine themselves to this
lower plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is
constantly sinking and flickering out. But at intervals it
burns up again and redeems the work from being wholly
commonplace and trivial. He is, in fact, no better than many
another small poet who has been devoured by Time since his
day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back.
It is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose
fame was brief would in their day have deeply resented being
placed on a level with the Suffolk peasant-poet. In spite of
all this, and of the impossibility of saving most of the verse
which is only passably good from oblivion, I still think the
Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one, but
chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.

There is no lack of rural poetry--the Seasons to begin with
and much Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a
general way; then we have innumerable detached descriptions of
actual scenes, such as we find scattered throughout Cowper's
Task, and numberless other works. Besides all this there are
the countless shorter poems, each conveying an impression of
some particular scene or aspect of nature; the poet of the
open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out
for picturesque "bits" and atmospheric effects as a subject.
In Bloomfield we get something altogether different--a simple,
consistent, and fairly complete account of the country
people's toilsome life in a remote agricultural district in
England--a small rustic village set amid green and arable
fields, woods and common lands. We have it from the inside by
one who had part in it, born and bred to the humble life he
described; and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day
record--photographed as we may say--with all the minute
unessential details and repetitions, but as it appeared when
looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in memory, the
sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's
mind standing vividly out. Of this lowly poem it may be truly
said that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use
the phrase invented by Wordsworth when he attempted a
definition of poetry generally and signally failed, as
Coleridge demonstrated.

It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life--that he
was a farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows,
feed the pigs, and forty things besides, and that later, when
learning the shoemaker's trade in a London garret, he put
these memories together and made them into a poem--are wholly
beside the question when we come to judge the work as
literature. A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his
own day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in
the end his work must be tried by the same standards applied
in other and in all cases.

There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to
endeavour to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is
not altogether bad, but contains many lines that glow with
beautiful poetic feeling, and many descriptive passages which
are admirable. Furthermore, I will venture to say that
despite the feebleness of a large part of the work (as poetry)
it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its
unique character. It may be that I am the only person in
England able to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in
which it first came to my notice, and the critical reader can,
if he thinks proper, discount what I am now saying as mere
personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in a distant
region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I
could find relating to country scenes and life in England
--the land of my desire--I was never able to get an extended
and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in
human and animal life in its relation to nature. It was all
broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes,
vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but
unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural
subjects hanging on the walls of a room. Even the Seasons
failed to supply this want, since Thomson in his great work is
of no place and abides nowhere, but ranges on eagle's wings
over the entire land, and, for the matter of that, over the
whole globe. But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy. I
visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was
with him from morn till eve always in that same green country
with the same sky, cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic
village, at the small church with a thatched roof where the
daws nested in the belfry, and the children played and shouted
among the gravestones in the churchyard; in woods and green
and ploughed fields and the deep lanes--with him and his
fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding
their life and actions from day to day through all the
vicissitudes of the year.

The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic
literature, or to fill a gap; at all events from the point of
view of those who, born and living in distant parts of the
earth, still dream of the Old Home. This perhaps accounts for
the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of the
pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.

Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem
into the four seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an
invitation to the Muse:--

O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art,
Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.

But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction
of the Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I
imagine, Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble
mind and knew his limitations, and though he adopted the
artificial form of verse which prevailed down to his time he
was still able to be simple and natural.

"Spring" does not contain much of the best of his work, but
the opening is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos
in his apologetic description of himself, as Giles, the
farmer's boy.

Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes
Nor Science led me . . .
From meaner objects far my raptures flow . . .
Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew,
Delight from trifles, trifles ever new.
'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor,
Labour his portion . . .
His life was cheerful, constant servitude . . .
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, Nature was his book.

The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable
master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small
flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are
described, and the result left to the powers above:

Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
His tufted barley yellow with the sun.

While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to
do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows;
one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that
have been shot, for although--

Their danger well the wary plunderers know
And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
Will scatter death among them as they rise.

'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about
the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded
than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their
hands. It was for him to shift the dead from place to place,
to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings.
Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be
guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round
to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach
of hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning,
he would take his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks
to "fields remote from home" to redistribute his dead birds,
then to fetch the cows, and here we have an example of his
close naturalist-like observation in his account of the
leading cow, the one who coming and going on all occasions is
allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by many a
broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its
work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and
luxury of the over-populous capital which drains the whole
country-side of all produce, which makes the Suffolk
dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving nothing but the
"three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local
consumption. What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a
post, which turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in
despair into the hog-trough, where

It rests in perfect spite,
Too big to swallow and too hard to bite!

We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and
here there is more evidence of his observant eye when he
describes the character of the animals, also in what follows
about the young lambs, which forms the best passage in this
part. I remember that, when first reading it, being then
little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid
beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging
each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a
mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort
of goatlike joyous madness. For how often in those days I
used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand
sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch
the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight! I
cannot but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such
pictures as these does or should count for something in
considering his work. He concludes:-

Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb,
Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme,
Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain;
A bird, a leaf, will set them off again;
Or if a gale with strength unusual blow,
Scattering the wild-briar roses into snow,
Their little limbs increasing efforts try,
Like a torn rose the fair assemblage fly.

This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds
him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives--his
white-fleeced little fellow-mortals. He sees the murdering
butcher coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock;
he cannot suppress a cry of grief and indignation--he can only
strive to shut out the shocking image from his soul!

"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a
prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a
rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view
than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when
he attempts wide prospects and large effects. He is at his
best only when describing scenes and incidents at the farm in
which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when, after
the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the
small birds from the ripening corn:

There thousands in a flock, for ever gay,
Loud chirping sparrows welcome on the day,
And from the mazes of the leafy thorn
Drop one by one upon the bending corn.

Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with
his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he
takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in
shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life
that swarms about him:

The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain
O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a spacious plain!
Then higher still by countless steps conveyed,
He gains the summit of a shivering blade,
And flirts his filmy wings and looks around,
Exulting in his distance from the ground.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18