Country Life in War-Time
MRS. CRAN has the gift of the green finger. What she plants, thrives—whether it is a seedling dibbled in in her garden or an idea that she sets on paper. The idea of her new book was to give some further account of gardening at Coggers, the old house in Kent that Mrs. Cran rescued from decay ; it was to be written, as her publisher put it, " with loam dripping from her fingers." And faithfully Mrs. Cran starts with the Ceanothus papillosus that died on her in 1938-39. But soon, though the loam is always there rich and freshly turned over, something else more human begins to occupy the foreground, and, if it did not give the wrong impression, one might say that she ends by writing with her own life-blood dripping from her fingers. The book becomes a tale of exile, of penury and hardship that, for all the happy ending, combine to produce a sense of minor tragedy. The author would not, one fancy, put it so high as that, but the courage and good cheer with which, an elderly, comfortable person, she faces the sudden destruction of her means of livelihood by the out- break of war merits the dignity of the word. And in the course of her experiences she enriches herself, and in turn her readers, because she has the sympathy and unselfishness to learn from those she meets, whether in the hop-gardens or in the dental hospital, her account ..of which is a strong argument for the pro- jected reforms that have lately been announced. Mrs. Cran is not afraid of sentiment, but she never lets it curdle, because she is, above all things, honest and sincere.
Miss Olivier brings far more art, or, at least, a far more obvious artifice, to the making of her beautifully-illustrated mis- cellany. Borrowing from the grammarians, she runs through the moods and tenses of the English countryside from infinitive to conditional. What matters, however, is not the kind of string with which the bundle is tied together, but what the bundle contains. Here there is a little of all sorts—digressions on the sights and sounds of the country, a little about old guide-books we should have liked more extracts from them—a hurried tour of the homes of the poets, something about country customs and village institutes and local " characters." Some good tales well told are worked in, and there are smatterings of useful and interesting information. tut it never cuts very deep and the style is too consciously, literary. Miss Olivier writes of " the busy-ness of bees, buzzing for ever among the blossoms of immemorial lime-trees." And one wonders whether she' is mis- quoting Tennyson or just adapting him to her own use ; and the more one wonders the more one realises how apt is the adjective to ancient elms, and how little the lime, whatever its age, takes on that look of having been there for ever. And bees do " murmur " out of doors at their business ; only when annoyed or frightened do they " buzz." This may seem a small point, but the truthfulness of the images evoked by words is one of the criteria of style and of the writer's command of his own thought. Indicative, too, is Miss Olivier's readiness to write to Fortnum and Mason for some table-delicacy that cannot be made at home or bought in the village-shop. Mrs. Crass, one feels, would never resort to that short cut ; she would concoct some confection of rose-hips or devise a dish of " good King Henry " —and the company would vote it delicious. Miss Sackville-West is an experienced writer with a sense of style that will not tolerate any derangement of epitaphs. Her essay upon the English country-house in the latest addition to the series of monographs called Britain in Pictures, is, within the narrow limits set, wholly admirable. It is a real complement to the pictures, which are enterprisingly chosen and, one or two of the coloured plates excepted, well reproduced. Born in one of the greatest, if not the most resplendent, of these houses, Miss Sack- ville-West knows what she is writing about from the inside. She discusses her subject from an entirely personal angle and not from any architectural standpoint. She has her prejudices and is, confessedly, rather hard upon Vanburgh. Was the architect of King's Weston wholly lacking in grace and charm? With her distaste for the more imposing examples of his work as incon- gruous with the English countryside one may agree. The deterioration of style that set in after the first years of the Gothic revival excuses Miss Sackville-West from pursuing her subject beyond the end of the eighteenth century, and considerations of space forbade more than the passing mention 'of many lovely places. Over the future Miss Sackville-West shakes her head. What is to become of them? Museums? But a house dies, if it is not lived in, is her sad reply.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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