In a Green Shade by Maurice Hewlett

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In a Green Shade.

A Country Commentary.

By Maurice Hewlett.

London
G. Bell and Sons
1920

G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, LONDON, W.C. 2.

NOTE

All of these Essays, with two exceptions, have been published
periodically. All, without exception, have been revised and corrected.
My thanks for hospitality afforded to them _en route_ are due to the
_Westminster Gazette_, _Daily News_, and _Daily Chronicle_; to the
_New Statesman_; to the _Cornhill Magazine_, _Fortnightly Review_,
_Anglo-French Review_, and _London Mercury_.

BROADCHALKE, _22 Jan. 1920._

CONTENTS

PAGE
NOTE v
ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE ix
CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY 1
A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT 6
DORIAN MODES 11
CHURCH AND THE MAN 16
BESSY MOORE 20
THE MAIDS 31
POETRY AND THE MODE 35
POLYOLBION 45
THE WELTER 50
CATNACHERY 54
LANDNAMA 60
"WORKS AND DAYS" 64
THE ENGLISH HESIOD 72
FLOWER OF THE FIELD 83
UNDER THE HARVEST MOON 87
_LA PETITE PERSONNE_ 91
A FOOL OF QUALITY 99
SHERIDAN AS MANIAC 105
A FOOTNOTE TO COLERIDGE 119
THE CRYSTAL VASE 132
_NOCTES AMBROSIANAE_ 147
SKELETONS AT A FEAST 151
A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER 156
THE COMMEMORATION 164
THE QUAKER EIRENICON 168

IN A GREEN SHADE

ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE

The title has become equivocal, since there are more green shades in
employment now than were dreamed of by Andrew Marvell. Science is a
great maker of homophones, without respect for the poets. There is,
for instance, the demilune of lined buckram borne by the weak-eyed on
their foreheads, the phylactery of the have-beens--I lay myself open
to be believed a cripple, or to look an old fool. A vivacious reviewer
in _Punch's_ "Booking Office," will have a vision of me as a babbling
elder peering at society from below a green pent. However--I must
risk it. It says exactly what I mean; and what I have written I have
written.

The point is that, having worked hard for a good many years, I can now
consider my latter end under conditions favourable to leisurely and
extended thought, sometimes in a garden made, if rightly made, in my
own image, sometimes in a house which was built aforetime, in a day
when men wrought for posterity as well as for themselves. In such
seed-plots it is impossible that one's thoughts should not take colour
as they rise. Whithersoever I look I see as much permanency as is good
for any sojourner upon earth; I see embodied tradition, respect for
Nature's laws, attention to beauty, subservience to use; all this
within doors. Outside, the trees, the flowers are my calendar;
the birds chime the hours; periodically the church-bell calls the
travellers home. Between all these friendly monitors it is hard if
one cannot keep the mean. If the passing-bell tempts me to moralise
overmuch I may turn to the creatures, and learn to live for the
moment. I should be slow to confess how much worldly wisdom I have
won from what we choose to call the lower orders of creation, because
nobody willingly betrays the whereabouts of his buried treasure, or
the amount of it. Mr. Pepys, I remember, forgot both on a certain
occasion, and had a devil of a time until he recovered his hoard. But
my wealth was not made with hands, or not with my hands.

My house is fortunately placed, too, in the village street, so that I
am in touch with my neighbours and their daily concerns, which I make
mine so far as they are pleased to allow it. I am aware of them all
day long by half a hundred signs; I know the trot of their horses, the
horns of their motor-cars--that shows that there are not too many of
them--the voices of their children, the death-shrieks of their pigs,
the barking of their dogs. Not a day passes but one or other is in,
to have some paper signed, to air a grievance, or to ask advice. The
vicar and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say,
each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can
expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the
pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to
other people. Nor--unless you are a fool--can you be strict with your
categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping
you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance
in this village of five hundred souls. "I have now been in Italy two
days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I know my Italians pretty well!"
When he had been there two years he knew better.

If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly,
leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts
as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to
those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes,
either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I
hope I have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have,
as we say now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None.
I want people to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the
Trade Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me.
I have my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and
England, and am convinced that only through the first will the other
two thrive. I want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want
men to have work and women to have children. Any check on production,
Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me.
As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr.
Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on
war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have
returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical
eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years'
experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget
it. If there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this
tormented earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an
insufficient reason for hating them _in saecula saeculorum_. A German
is a human being, and very likely Mr. Bottomley is one too, and not a
big-head in a pantomime; such also may be Mrs. Partington's nephew and
the editor of the _Morning Post_. There does not seem much difference
between them, and we must be charitable.

The sojourner in the green shade will find himself, as I have found
myself, more interested in people (but not those people) than in
books. We have too many books, as I discovered when I left London for
good. I sold six tons, and again another six, when, after two years in
West Sussex, I came home. Now I have collected about me the things I
can't do without, the things of which I read at least portions every
year, as well as a few which it is good to have handy in case of
accidents. Book-collecting is a foppery, a pastime of youth, when
spending money is as necessary as taking exercise, and you are better
for an object in each case. But I find that I now read with motives
other than those of old. I am now more interested in the author than
in his book. That must mean that I am more interested in life than
in art. I am reading at this moment Professor Child's edition of the
Ballads, and though I am occasionally moved to tears by the beauty
and tragic insight of things like _The Wife of Usher's Well_;
_Clerk Saunders_, or _Lord Thomas and Fair Annie_, I am sure that
considerations altogether unliterary move me more--such, for instance,
as curiosity to know who composed, and for whom they composed, these
lovely tales. I don't suppose that we shall ever know the name, or
anything of the personality of any one poet of them. Those poets were
as anonymous as our church-builders, and if they were content to be so
we should be content to have it so. But one would be happy to know of
what kind they were, and perhaps even happier (certainly I should) to
realise their auditors. Did they write for men or women? That is one
of my consuming quests. The staves of the _Iliad_ were for men: that
seems certain. Those of the _Odyssey_ not so certainly. But take this
from _May Collin_, and consider it.

You know the story, how "She fell in love with a false priest, and
rued it ever mair"? The priest followed her "butt and ben," and gave
her no peace. They took horses and money and rode out together "Until
they came to a rank river, Was raging like the sea." There the priest
declared his purpose:

"Light off, light off now, May Collin,
It's here that you must dee;
Here I have drown'd seven kings' daughters,
The eighth now you must be."

So her torture begins. He bids her cast off "her gown that's of the
green," because it is too good to rot in the sea-stream; next her
"coat that's of the black "; next her "stays that are well-laced";
lastly her "sark that's of the holland"--all for the same reason. Then
the girl speaks:

"Turn you about now, false Mess John,
To the green leaf of the tree;
It does not fit a mansworn man
A naked woman to see."

The point is that he obeys her. She catches him round the body and
flings him into the tide. _Women were listening to that tale_.

If I am to deal with life it must be in my own way, for there's no
escape from one's character. I may be a good poet or a bad one--that's
not for me to say; but I am a poet of sorts. Now a poet does not
observe like a novelist. He does not indeed necessarily observe at
all until he feels the need of observation. Then he observes, and
intensely. He does not analyse, he does not amass his facts; he
concentrates. He wrings out quintessences; and when he has distilled
his drops of pure spirit he brews his potion. Something of the kind
happens to me now, whether verse or prose be the Muse of my devotion.
A stray thought, a chance vision, moves me; presently the flame is
hissing hot. Everything then at any time observed and stored in the
memory which has relation to the fact is fused and in a swimming flux.
Anon, as the Children of Israel said to Moses, "There came forth
this calf." One cannot get any nearer, I believe; and while I do not
pretend that I have said all there is to say about anything here, I
shall maintain that I have said all that need be said about the things
which I touch upon. In an essay, as in a poem, the half is greater
than the whole, if it is the right half. If it is the wrong half, why,
then the shorter it is the better.

As most of these commentaries were written during the year which is
mercifully over, it would not have been possible, even if it had been
sought, to avoid current topics. Why should a writer shrink from being
called a journalist? He need not cease to be writer. But if he wishes
to be true to his original calling, to make his hope and election
sure, he must always be careful to seek the universal in the
particular; and that is where your idealist has such a pull, for he
can see nothing else. And if he does that he need not be afraid that
the conventions of Time and Space will be a hindrance to his book's
path. He will be readable a century hence; he will be readable in the
Antipodes; and that is as near infinity as any of us, short of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, need trouble about. In the country one reads, not
skims, the daily paper; and if one's comments are leisurely, perhaps
they are all the better. At any rate one is not tempted to see the end
of the world in a strike, or a second Bonaparte in Signor d'Annunzio.
To me that poet seems rather a comic-opera brigand. I suspect him of
a green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail. But if you regard him
_sub specie eternitatis_, then I fear we must see in him all Italy
in epitome. That was how Italy went to war--but you must live in the
country to understand things like that, out of range of the tumult and
the shouting.

No more of Signor d'Annunzio here or elsewhere in these pages; but of
ourselves and our needs somewhat. Nobody could have lived through last
year without considering anxiously whither we are tending and with
what pretence. As the occasion moved me I have said my say about those
matters, and here the reader will have as much of it as I am ready
just now to give him. This is perhaps some sort of an apology for
what may be found hereafter of a hortatory kind. I may be charged with
wanting to do people "good." Well, if trying to make them happy is
trying to do them good, then I confess the charge. There is no doubt
whatever that they are not happy now. They hate too many people, they
pant and toil after the wrong things; they serve false gods and forget
the true ones. That is what we think about it in the country; and I am
of the country's opinion.

We need, it seems to me, many things--religion, love, work,
seriousness and so on; but what we need most of all, as I believe, is
to wash our hands. For five years they have been groping and wrenching
in the vitals of other people. They are foul and we are still drunk
with the reek. In God's name, let us wash and then we can begin to
build up the world again. We see the need of that out in the country,
but so far as I can judge by what I read or have seen of London,
there's no notion of it there.

But there's not much about London in this book.

CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY

A book which I shall never willingly be without, one of my minor
classics, is _Idlehurst_. Published in 1898, its author John Halsham,
it has a touch upon country things, the penetrating, pitiful and _tant
soit peu_ condescending touch upon them of one who is both scholar and
recluse, fastidious but discerning. He reads our earth, cloudscape,
landscape, season, foison, man and beast of the field, with the same
wistfulness which women who have known sorrow exhibit for children
who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long
interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found
his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so
degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war
began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or
1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself
of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there
for a while in 1915 and found the village of my choice bare of youth.
But that was West Sussex, and John Halsham lives nearer London, in the
forest region, as I judge, which is a part of the country overflowed
and become suburban. I don't doubt but complete cockneyfication will
be the ultimate fate of that country of deep loam and handsome women
before many years are over. Going down to my village from London,
I could not feel that I was in the country until I had passed
Pulborough; and further east the same would hold good to Lewes.

But when Mr Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has
overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are
cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth.
Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil?
You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of
the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been
no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the
scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people,
their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in
religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident.
We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away
from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any
more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed
what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be
brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion as of every other
human affair. But it was not them we worshipped. Rather it was what
they stood for--which endures.

All this leads me away from John Halsham and _Idlehurst_. A good
antidote to his extreme depression is to be found in another beautiful
book which, if not a classic, will become one. I mean _A Shepherd's
Life_, wherein Mr. Hudson reveals the very heart of pastoral Wilts.
I went right through it only the other day, journeying from Sarum to
Trowbridge on county business--Wishford, Wylye, Codford, Heytesbury,
and so on to Melksham and Westbury--names which to us are symphonies.
No change from the sempiternal round of country labour in those quiet
hollows, though it is true that you saw soldiers in buff unloading
railway trucks, and that the valley was lined with their wooden
hutments. Soldiers, indeed, we have known ever since the Norman
Conquest; but the country is bigger than they are, and they fall
into its ways even as their huts fade into the shadows cast by its
everlasting hills. Mr. Hudson, by the way, does not seem to have
encountered a witch. We had one in this village a few years ago, and
she may be here still, though I haven't come across her. She laid a
malison on my chauffeur's potatoes--I had one once--and (as he told
me) blighted the year's crop. He was digging in his garden when she, a
dark-browed old woman with a beard, leaned over the gate and asked him
for some kindling wood. He, a Swiss, who may not have understood her,
waved her away, saying that he was busy. "You will get no good out of
those taters," said she, and slippered away. That was five years ago.

John Halsham is fond of describing himself as a Tory, and perhaps
really is one of those almost extinct mammalia. I had thought
Professor Saintsbury the only one left. He, I understand, thinks
that the Reform Act of 1832 was a great mistake, and dislikes Horace
Walpole's Letters because their writer was a Whig. Then there is Mrs.
Partington's nephew, who muses perhaps without method, but certainly
not without malice, in _Blackwood_ once a month. He is more Jingo than
Tory. He has to bite somebody. I was amused the other day to consider
his girding at Sir Alfred Mond, chiefly on the score that he had a
German grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that
the same terrific charge could be brought against a much more august
Personage, and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the
purpose that he will have an English grandson, That is the worst of
musing when you neglect method and surrender to malice.

Toryism, which is a parasitic growth of mind, needs a relic to which
it can cling, not a person. In the country the Church will not provide
it, nor any longer the brewing interest. The air has been let into
the one, and the water which they call mineral into the other. There
remain the throne and the squirearchy, and of these the throne is
much the stouter. For the throne is remote enough to be an object of
veneration, separable from its occupant; but when the great house and
the old acres are held, and not filled, by a new man, the villager,
who sees more than he is supposed to see, is by no means concerned to
uphold them. Most of the villages have been Radical; now they are all
going "Labour." The elections, if there are to be some soon, will
be very interesting, and I think surprising to Mr. George and his
assortment of friends.

However--another strike or two like that recent abortion on the
railways will dish the Labour Party and Trade Unionism as well--at
least in the country. Down here we are new to the movement, but have
gone into it keenly, without losing our heads. Indeed, I think we are
finding more in our heads than we suspected. We keep to our code; and
when we find that other men don't, we begin to doubt of Unionism. One
of the very best of our men said in my hearing at the time that if the
railway strike were the kind of thing we were to expect, he, for one,
would have no more to do with the Labourers' Union. As I have said
once before, I think, responsibility (which the Union is giving us)
deepens our men and quickens them too. The time is at hand when they
will begin to feel their power. I have no fears. I have long known
them to be the salt of the earth. If the quotation would not be from
one of my own works, I would quote now.

It is an old discussion, but all my travels have convinced me that a
bad peasantry is the exception. Such exceptions there are, though I
don't mean to give them. If Zola had not made himself ridiculous in
the act, so ridiculous as to show himself negligible, he would stand
as the greatest traducer of his adopted country that France has
ever harboured. But he was a specialist in his particular line of
disgustfulness, and saw in rural France what he took there with him.
They say that the Bulgarian peasant is a savage brute, "they" being
the Greeks, of course. I would not mind betting a crown that he is
nothing of the sort.

In manners, to be sure, peasantries differ remarkably. Here in the
West, from Wilts to Cornwall, our rustics are sweet-mannered. They
are instinctively gentlemen, if gentlehood consist, as I believe, in
having regard for other people's feelings. But in the Danish parts
of England, to be plain, manners are to seek. That means from
Bedfordshire pretty well up to Carlisle. North-east of that again, in
Northumberland, you have delightful manners.

The Northumbrian peasant, like the Scottish, greets you as an equal,
the Wiltshire man as a superior, yet neither loses dignity thereby.
The Lancashire man treats you as his inferior, and is not himself
advantaged, whether it be so or not.

A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT

I hope that I have secured for myself a haven, a yet more impenetrable
shade than this, against the time when, having seen four generations
of men, two behind and two beyond, I may consider in silence what is
likely to be the end of it all. It is true that I am getting old, but
I am not yet prepared for a lodge in the wilderness. My present house
has a wall on the village street. The post-office is a matter of
crossing the road; the church is at the bottom of a meadow. I like all
that, because I like all my neighbours and the sound of their voices.
At eleven o'clock in the morning I can hear the children let out from
school, "as shrill as swifts in upper air." That, too, I like. But the
time will come when silence is best, and, as I say, I believe that I
have found the very place. I have had my eye upon it for years, and
seldom a month passes but I am there. A small black dog and I once saw
Oreads there, or said we did, and in print at that. This very year
the farm to which it belongs came into the market, and was sold; the
purchaser will treat with me. I have described it once, nay twice,
and won't do it again. Enough to say that it is the butt end of a deep
green combe in the Downs, that it is sheltered from every wind, faces
the south, and is below an ancient road, now a grass track, and the
remains of what is called a British village on the ordnance maps, a
great ramparted square with half a dozen gateways and two mist-pools
within its ambit. All about it lie the neolithic dead, of whose race,
as Glaucus told Diomede, "I boast myself to be."

We are all Iberians here, or so I love to believe, grounding
myself upon the learned Dr. Beddoes--a swarthy people, dark-haired,
grey-eyed, rather under than over the mean height. The aboriginal
strain has proved itself stronger than the Frisian, and the Danish
type does not appear at all. There are English names among us, of
course, such as Gurd, which is Gurth as pronounced by a Norman; but it
is understood that we are neolithic chiefly on the distaff side. The
theory that each successive wave of invasion demolished the existing
inhabitants is absurd. Not even the Germans do that; nor have the
Turks succeeded in obliterating the Armenian nation. No--in turn our
oncoming hordes, Celts, Romans, English, Danes, enslaved the men and
married, or at least mated with, the women. And so we are descended,
and (let me at this hour of victory be allowed to say) a marvellous
people we are. For tenacity, patience, and obedience to the law--not
of men, but of nature--I don't suppose there is another such people
in the world. Those characteristics, for which neither Celt nor Roman,
Teuton nor Dane, as we know them now, is remarkable, I set to the
score of the neolithic race, whose physical features are equally
enduring.

When you get what seems like a clear case in either sex, you have a
very handsome person.

The most beautiful woman I ever saw in my days was scrubbing a kitchen
floor on her knees, when I saw her first--not a hundred miles from
here. Pure Iberian, so far as one can judge--olive skin, black hair,
grey-green eyes. Otherwise--colouring apart--the Venus of Milo, no
less. I don't say that she was very intelligent. I wonder if the Venus
was. But she was obedient to the law of her being--that I do know; and
it is a matter of faith with me that Aphrodite can have been no less
so.

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