Passing Away
The English Countryside. By nine contributors. With an
Life. los. 6d.) THE English countryside is still beautiful, still a breeding- ground of strong and cunning-handed workers, still a palimp- sest of immemorial history, still an inspiration to artists and poets. And yet having read these books, each displaying an intimate understanding and love of their subject, one feels that the operative word is " stilL" Flints are knapped in Suffolk today as they were in the Neolithic age ; but today's lcnappers have no apprentices. The timber planted a cen- tury ago stands today in its full glory ; but no one plants now for a century ahead. The hedgerow pattern which, as Mr. Bates justifiably claims in The English Countryside, provides the fundamental theme of the English landscape, is as lovely as ever—provided one does not look onwards to the vanish- ing of the hedgers and the barbed-wire that will follow. The pattern may last our time, one cannot confidently say more ; and so it is throughout. That beauty which is not already a.'-stroyed seems either doomed or on sufferance. For the peculiar characteristics of the English landscape, as all our authors variously make clear, is that its loveliness springs from the marriage ot ni.er. and Nature's work in the bonds not of deliberate art but•of agrarian economics. The England we know is based, as Mr. Massingham says, on axe, crook, plough, scythe, chisel and billhook. These things are going ; the countryside they framed remains—but for how long?
The English Countryside and Men and the Fields both sound this disconsolate note more or less strongly and ex- plicitly. The first should find a place among the luggage of any visiting foreigner or town-dweller bent on exploration. It is not itself a guide-book, but with its fine team of con- tributors and its superb photographs it gives that sense and spirit of the land which is lost among a guide-book's utilities. The second, rambling and discursive but never aimless, delightfully illustrated with line drawings and lithographs by John Nash, is a perfect bedside book. So, in its different way, is Suffolk Scene, with its portraits of landscapes and towns, Suffolk Punches and wildfowl, dogs, and men living and dead, famous or obscure. It is a happier book, for Suffolk is still unmistakably Suffolk; the marshes which to the author are its characteristic glory defy man-made change. Mr. Tennyson's own appreciative relish communicates itself as he tells of poaching expeditions, of well-earned duckings from dinghies, or of the aged roadman who could tell the legend of King Edmund in masterly fashion when he chose, but when questioned by an uncongenial tourist affected to con- fuse the martyr with King Edward VIII. "That whully set her liver a bilin that did."
But perhaps it is the late Mr. James Cornish's Reminiscences which leaves the deepest and most convinc- ing impression of the realities of country life. A country parson's son and a country parson himself, Mr. Cornish was born in the golden days of the 'sixties; and he does not regret them. He saw the countryside for which he had a deep and abiding love, in terms not of aesthetics but of drains and schools, wages and water-supplies. He judged the old ways of life according to their success in providing human health, happiness and goodness. He has accounts of ancient customs which link Devonshire with the Golden Bough and the nine- teenth century with Good Queen Bess; but his heart is less in these things than in the water-supply which, with endless trouble, he succeeded in bringing to his Devon village. This, too, is a delightful bedside book. Mr. Cornish offers none of Mr. Tennyson's gift in the evocative use of language, none of Mr. Adrian Bell's summary dexterity of phrase; but from his pages there sounds the voice—quiet and gently remi- niscent—of one who helped to build the countryside which is the stuff of their art.
Many queries arise as one looks back over these four books and out over a country landscape. Continuity (which is not the same thing as stagnation) is a good thing in itself, but it cannot generally be demanded on a market basis by those who feel the need for it. Our sixpences can buy sixpence
worth of acceleration; they cannot buy the quality of smooth evolution. The conviction needs no strengthening that humanity needs every sixpenceworth of material progress that it can buy; but how can that conviction be squared with the other, no less deep, that the community to. which Harvest Home means nothing has gone fatally astray? Perhaps one day agriculture of the traditional kind will be not a branch of economic activity but overtly and wholly, as once it was partly, an aspect of religion. One could weave a pleasant fantasy on the thought. But meanwhile, what of the thistle. grown pastures and the starved soil, and the underpaid and ill-housed labourer looking hungrily to a new Council house and a factory job? What about the Milk and Potato and Pig Boards, the wheat quota, and malnutrition? Perhaps, aftzr all, these are not wholly to be recommended as bedside books.
HONOR CROOME.
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