The Heart of England — Context and Discussion

most strange the unobserved, innumerable things prepared for the eyes of men on the coming day--glittering windows of cutlery, food, drugs, sadlery--the high walls with coloured advertisements of beer, medicine, food, actors, newspapers, corsets, concerts, pickles. The dark windows, the windows lit to serve some purpose unknown, seemed to make it necessary to cry out, to raise an alarm, to make sure that the darkness or light meant only the usual things. Now and then several streets ran towards one another and left a square or irregular space at their meeting, surrounded by an inn with a sign, a stone trough, an old eighteenth-century house, its windows emphasised by white paint, a row of pollarded limes, a scrap of orchard--once perhaps the heart of a village. Or for almost a mile the streets ran straight, with branches at right angles, and suddenly a large house stood back and its garden of limes and lawn broke the monotone. The names of the streets were an epitome of the world and time, commemorating famous and unknown men, battles, conspiracies, far-off cities and rivers, little villages known to me, streams and hills now buried by houses; the names of the inns were as rich as the titles of books in an old library, suggested many an inn by wood and mill and meadow and village square, but all confused as if in a marine store. And as I walked through old and new villages, rents, courts, alleys, lanes, rises, streets, buildings, roads, avenues, I seemed to be travelling through the Inferno and Purgatorio, but before the first man had entered them and without a guide. It was immense, sublime, but its purposes dark and not to be explained by the policemen here and there in charge. Nor, passing through Battersea, did I meet the famous man who has threaded this mystery. He, at least, would have taken me to a housetop and have unravelled space; but I expected him at street corners and on commons in vain. But presently I reached a sign-post that stood boldly up with undoubted inscriptions, one of them to London, and away from that I set my face, though I saw market-carts going the way I had come, with drowsy carters, one lamp, and horses whose shadowy muscles quivered in the electric light. That sign-post seemed to make all things clear. Like a prophet it rose up, who after an age of darkness says that the path of life and goodness is plain, that he knows it, and that all who follow him will be saved. Not for him hesitation and qualification; but to all men perplexed by definitions, testimonies, other prophets and their own thoughts, he cries: “This is the way.”

“The world may find the Spring by following her.”

I followed and needed only a good marching song. By chance I lighted on one which was first sung by countrymen. It is not triumphant--the mind wearies of a triumphant song in solitude and at night--but it persists and acknowledges no end. It was made by feeble, mighty-limbed men who knew what it is to go on and on for ends which they do not entirely apprehend. It matches the hurrying feet of the lover or the limp of the hungry man at dawn. It begins--

“With one man, with two men, We mow the hay together; With three men, with four men, We mow the hay together: With four, with three, with two, with one, no more, We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”

“With five men, with six men, We mow the hay together; With seven men, with eight men, We mow the hay together; With eight, with seven, with six, with five, with four, with three, with two, with one, no more, We mow the hay and rake the hay and take it away together.”

It goes on until a hundred is reached, proceeding after twenty by tens. And so, gradually, as the song went on, the houses opened apart, and the road ahead was a simple white line. On either hand thousands of lights showed valleys and hills; but ahead there was a promising darkness, and out of it came the Watercress Man with a basket of wild flowers on his back.

“Sir,” said he, setting down his flowers slowly, “the price of a pint of ale won’t hurt you, I suppose? I have drunk nothing since yesterday morning.”

“But have you eaten anything?” I asked, ready to admire him for asking first for drink.

“No,” said he, “I have neither eaten nor drunken. I drink four ale.”

“Thank you,” he said, when I had given him twopence for drink and twopence for food. “We are all sons of one mother. You can’t get away from that.”

“Then we are brothers,” said I.

“Certainly, if you will.”

“I should like to know you.”

“With pleasure, if you can.”

“What are you by profession?”

“A hard question. I profess nothing. By conviction I am an ill-used man, and for the moment I am a seller of flowers.”

He showed me his flowers--kingcups, cuckoo flowers, primroses from the moist woods.

“I will buy your flowers,” I said.

“No! I think I shall keep those,” and he put them in a horse trough close by. I asked him if he would return into the country with me.

“No,” he replied, “it would be sunrise before we got into the country, and I never spend the daytime in the country if I can avoid it.”

“As we are brothers,” he said, “I will tell you that I paint landscapes. I like nothing on earth so well as the country. I was dragged up in the Borough. The country for me! But the lover of Nature and the gamekeeper and the farmer and the landowner spoil it by day. The people are stupid, brutal. The women are not at all beautiful. Their cowsheds are the only things they have not spoilt: they are still sweet. As a lad I read the pastoral poets, and I know that these things were once far different. So I live in London and paint landscapes at sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning, so that I live well. I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpennyworth. I am sixty-eight; my son will succeed me, but badly--badly.”

“Because he says that he paints Nature as she is, which is impossible. I make no such mistake, as you shall see----I aim for suggestion. Here,” he said, producing one from his pocket (a brown field sloping up to a ridge of trees, painted black, against a silvery sky, and in that a few rooks). “Do you not hear there the wild, angry charm of hundreds of blackbirds and thrushes and larks? They sometimes make me lie down and cry before the sun rises, because I am not worthy; I do not own a little farm and drive my own plough and cause the envy of kings at my happiness.”

“Is that clump of trees right?” I asked (in need of something to say).

“Right? But the feeling is there. Is it not cold and pure and wild? I felt great as I did that. But see here again!”

Here he brought out another, also in three colours, of a landscape at dawn. Three black firs stood at the top of a steep down, and from them went a pair of dark birds out along a silver sky.

“I never put figures in my landscapes,” he explained, “but is not the spirit of a small sweet Amaryllis in it? _Ah! lovely as thou art to look upon, ah, heart of stone, ah, dark-browed maiden!_ Does she not hide somewhere out of the picture; and does not a shepherd, seated perhaps under those fir trees, look for her coming? Is not the Golden Age in that sky?”

“I am glad,” said I, “that you believe in a Golden Age. Literature and art are continually recreating it for us.”

“Modern literature,” he said scornfully, “is by those who have not seen for those who do not care. What answer has literature to this?” Here he showed a third sketch.

“I know nothing of literature,” I said; “I am a journalist.”

He sighed with relief, and pointed to a yellow thatched house with windows open on to the sea, and behind the house the usual dark trees and silver sky.

“There,” he exclaimed, “literature does not believe in or understand the honest life, bound up with the seasons and beauty which is expressed by that simple scene. See, there, equal laws, harmony, aims unspotted by the world, not fearing nor loving kings. Any thoughtful man living in a scene like that would be wiser, and it would be impossible for him to err. I myself would venture to be a Daphnis or Menalcas again there. I can hear the one living pastoral poet saying in that cottage by the sea--

“Come, pretty Phyllis, you are late! The cows are crowding round the gate. An hour or more, the sun has set; The stars are out; the grass is wet; The glow-worms shine; the beetles hum; The moon is near--come, Phyllis, come!

The black cow thrusts her brass-tipped horns Among the quick and bramble thorns; The red cow jerks the padlock chain; The dun cow shakes her bell again, And round and round the chestnut tree, The white cow bellows lustily.” ...

He knew all four verses by heart.

“Your aims are wonderful,” I stammered. “If I could only see you at work, if you would only show me the scenes which inspire such antique and lofty emotions....”

“See! this is London--nothing but trees--I have seen it so as I came home. But I cannot go with you. I return to think about the Golden Age.”

He tied the flowers round the pole of a signboard that stood on a harsh courtyard of gravel strewn with dirty paper, and pursued his homeward road, eager for “The Old Angel” or “The Chequers” where he could vivify his vision of the Golden Age.

In the sky, the distant dawn sent up to the clouds a faint dream of light that made their shapes just visible. A hedge-sparrow awoke in the furze beside the road, twittered clearly and became silent again; on the other side, in some invisible trees high up, a few rooks began to talk. Then, for a little while as I went on, the darkness was complete, and the silence also, except that the telegraph wires forced a faint complaint out of the light wind.

As the clouds filled with that dream of light and the road began visibly to lengthen out, I left London behind or recognised it only in the blue bowls and copper-ware gleaming through the windows of new houses round about. Beyond them rolled a ploughed country of such abounding and processional curves that it seemed almost to move and certainly to rejoice; here and there the curves dimpled suddenly and made a hollow, where elm or beech sprang up in the midst of the ploughland, in a small consistory, grave, shining, fair. To right and left, where the curves of the land rose to the sky, the white foam of orchards half buried rosy farmhouses and their own dark boughs. The dense thorn hedges gleamed all wet, compelling the wind to dip deep into them and taste their fragrance, coolness, moistness, softness all together, envying not the earnest bee, or the dallying butterfly, or even the insect that was drowning in a dewy flower. How the dew washed away the night! I thought that the old man had spoken truly when he said that the Golden Age comes again with every dawn. The dew gave the eyes a kind of fitness and worthiness to behold the white fruit blossom and the sudden hills of horse-chestnut green. It washed out London as the old man’s brush had done. See! the world is but a brown and fragrant cloud decorated with dark boles, green foliage, white bloom, and here and there a soul akin to them; it turns the wilful mind into a garden neat and fine, of red and white, with green lawns between, which the bee Fancy sucks at and combines. For a minute only, in one shadowed wood that faced the departing night, all the birds sang together stormily and hardly moving from the sprays on which they slept, with something of night in their voices. But as I entered the wood, already the most of them had gone hither and thither, and only on high twigs one or two blackbirds and thrushes sang, and hidden wood pigeons cooed. The young hazel boughs bent at the top with fresh leaves that were so beautiful and frail that they seemed but just to have been persuaded to stay and give up a winged life. The low wych elm twigs had been dipped in leaves. Wild cherry leaves and flowers mingled like lovers so young that the boy rivals the girl in tenderness. There was no path, and pushing through hazel and cornel and thorn, I saw the eyes of sitting birds gleam with a little anger through the lustrous green. Presently the stems were less dense; a little river ran through freshly cut underwood of hazel and ash and oak, their wounds still flashing. There pale primroses and the last celandines ran in sharp gulfs into the heart of bluebell and orchis and cuckoo-flower, and the orange-tipped butterfly tripped over them. The mosses on the ash and hazel roots gleamed darkly gold and green. In the rivulet itself broad kingcups swayed and their leaves sank into darkness and rose into light as the ripples fluctuated. The blackbird, fed on golden hours, sang carelessly, time after time, the two opening phrases of an old Highland melody. Close by, in the cool, sombre, liquid air between the new-leaved boughs of beech sang a cuckoo, and his notes seemed not to die but to nestle and grow quiet among the leaves overhead and the flowers underfoot, and some of them even to find their embalming in the little round hawthorn clouds that sailed high above in a deep stream of blue.

Suddenly my mind went back to the high dark cliffs of Westminster Abbey, the blank doors and windows of endless streets, the devouring river, the cold gloom before dawn, and then with a shudder forgot them and saw the flowers and heard the birds with such a joy as when the ships from Tarshish, after three blank years, again unloaded apes and peacocks and ivory, and men upon the quay looked on; or as, when a man has mined in the dead desert for many days, he suddenly enters an old tomb, and making a light, sees before him vases of alabaster, furniture adorned with gold and blue enamel and the figures of gods, a chariot of gold, and a silence perfected through many ages in the company of death and of the desire of immortality.

How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause and go out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb--mighty, splendid and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes.

The ship, the chariot, the plough, these three are, I suppose, the most sovereign beautiful things which man has made in his time, and such that were his race to pass away from the earth, would bring him most worship among his successors.

All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair, heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a pæan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the plough is the same--in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted and muzzle bowed to the scent.

Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil, and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight, small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices, flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch, but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passer-by feeling stupid because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing, with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard, and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in another man’s mouth, they convey little but the apparent _ennui_ of all those long hours walking to this oak or that hawthorn spray.