A SUFFOLK FARMER.
TN the past thore was something dim about life on the land.
Utter dependence upon Nature is a discipline which quenches the vivid elements in character. The latter-day farmer has freed himsglf in a measure. His calculations and manures and machines have won for him a shadow of independence. He is of necessity more a tradesman than he was. He owes allegiance, as other trades owe it, to science. In the old days " the land " was a theoc- racy. The farmer accepted dearth and plenty from the sovereign hand of God. He felt the dignity of his position, and the State, in a measure, acknowledged it. His fate was entirely incalculable, and therefore he was resigned. Storms dashed his hopes to the ground, and the sunshine raised them up. Bemused by fresh air, stunned by Nature's blows, sustained by her magical restoratives, he saw life from his own standpoint. He was a stranger to the uses of anxiety. Nothing that he could do could change the weather. However bad it might be, it must " take up " soon ; it always had done hitherto. Ho accepted his own lot as ho accepted the seasons. The sense of perpetual renewal was always with him. It was the miracle upon which he reposed his faith. Illness was the blight to which human nature is liable ; death as natural, as harsh, as in- evitable as winter, not hopeless, but part of the great secret whose sacred symbol is a grain of corn. Such fatalism means a low standard of happiness and a low level of distress. 'In certain natures it means a great capacity for happiness, in others a great temptation to grimness. The real farmer and the country gentleman had a good deal in common, but yet they were worlds apart. The latter had the social experience which comes of a public education ; a knowledge at first or second hand of foreign countries ; some connexion perhaps with the Government, or at any rate with the governing class. The farmer had none of these things. But in many parts of the country his land was his own just as theirs was their own. He knew ever since ho could remember every inch of his kingdom just as a child knows a garden. He knew the former kings of that sweet patch of earth, and where they lay, and where he himself must expect to lie with them. The church, the sonorous service, the gravestones, and the changing lights over the fields around it were all interwoven in his mind with harvests, and mar- riages, and births, and funerals. The whole outlook was a little dim. Nothing was quite sure but seedtimo and harvest, which proved the Scripture by never failing. It was a world enclosed by a rainbow, and the rainbow was not a scientific phenomenon but a sign.
The present writer is generalizing from a single instance. He knew such a farmer as these conditions only could have produced. He was connected with him during his whole childhood by the closest ties of blood and affection. His farm was just outside a Suffolk village whose wide street seems to flow sluggishly past green inlets of garden up to and around the church which stands towards its end—a splendid church, perfect in line and proportion, bare and sad and colourless as a rock. " The Master " of the farm was considered by his neighbours a grim man. The poor liked him better than his equals did, because, if he " kept his dis- tance," he was open-handed, at least in the matter of gifts. His character for grimness, indeed, came a good deal from his face, which had in repose a look of anger. He was a big man, and had the look of distinction which in East Anglia so often accompanies, in all classes, a tradition perhaps of Huguenot blood. He had always livedwhore he did live, and so had his fathers before him. To London was the longest journey he had ever taken, and in general the length of his tether was the capacity of his cob for endurance. He was educated at a school in the village, and his liveliest recollections of his schooldays were of truancy. He used to tell his grandchildren how on his way to school one morning he met the Hunt and saw the butcher's pony alone outside a door. The temptation was too strong. He got on it and hunted all day. Coming back late in the darkening afternoon, he crept to its stable with the pony and shut it in. As he turned to go out of the yard the butcher struck at him with a whip and took the nail off the third finger of his right hand. He could never settle in his mind if the day had been worth the agony. In early life the world Used him well. He came through a maternal uncle into a small property adjoining his father's upon which there was a better farmhouse than any his forbears had known, and he persuaded a handsome girl a little above him in position to marry him, though at first she was afraid to do so. It turned out a substantially happy marriage, though she never quite lost her fear. She was a timid woman, afraid of thunder and animals and loneliness. She missed the evangelicalism of her home, lamented her husband's seeming indifference to religion, and did not understand his unconscious Nature-worship. It was undoubtedly rather lonely at the farm, though the farmer was hospitable. In imitation of Nature, the great host, he was lavish to strangers, yet he could be close, and he was generous before he was just. His wife did not always know where to turn for a shilling, though no one who passed that way needed to want for bed and board, for wine or a. roaring fire. Not that he ever drank. He would as soon have sworn. He was a Puritan to the backbone from natural taste and conviction, from gravity, and from a certain piety to the soil, in whose service he never made merry. His character was wholly without lightness. His queer scornful pride had something in it more primitive than Christianity, and his lordly refusal of any precaution in business or in any other relation of life struck his timid wife sometimes as almost cruel. His lordli- ness was pagan. Not that he was irreligious. None but a fool, ho would have said, could be that. Could any man, out of a town, doubt the government of God ? Who else could make a field of wheat out of a sack of corn ? He was a Churchman, and proud that he had never entered a chapel, though perhaps the humble edifice which seemed to be trying to hide in the village street was the only building therein that he had never entered. He knew little about " the Compromise," but it suited him. He wanted a service removed from common life and common language, but not too far removed—not removed into the Latin tongue. Religion was for Sundays. The kindly fruits of the earth came in their season; so should the worship of their Giver. He went to church once only in the week. He did not see, hesaid, any reason " to do more than God set you " ; but ho wont in joy or grief, in rain or fine. The evangelical element in his family bored him. It savoured of " Dissent," and " Dissent " of familiarity and comicality and irreverence altogether. When his neighbour began morning prayers with an allusion to " those pigs of my brother James's," he was grimly amused. He did not have family prayers himself. His wife half surreptitiously read a few to her household in a bedroom. When the same neighbour put up a text in his porch, he ceased to visit him. To throw a text at a man's head was, he said, a breach.of hospitality. Quakers, of whom a good many lived near him, he regarded in a slightly different light. They had a good deal of education, and he respected books. He admired too the calm demeanour and sense of their womenkind. " The Quaker women are wonderful good women," he would say ; " but mark me, it's not a religion for men." Much church-going and any tendency to High Church ways he regarded also as " for women." On the other hand, he was not exactly narrow-minded. To the scandal of some of his friends, he subscribed to the Nonconformist charities, and even, on rare occasions, gave money to a priest who lived in a neighbouring town. When one of his daughters—the only person who dared—asked him why he did this, he said : " I serve 'em all alike, my dear. The Bible is true, but many make it out different to what I do." " What is Heaven like :1 " said his little granddaughter to him one day. " I don't know," he replied—then, pointing to a half-reaped hayfield, he said : " I
think they will be making hay when I go to Heaven." To his daughters he showed unswerving tenderness. They " grew up as the young plants," and as the young plants he loved them. They felt safe under the shadow of his wrath as they felt safe by the fireside in a storm—against them it never burst out. One of them used to tell how an angry neighbour had frightened her for entering his field to pick bluebells. Her father's fierce anger dried her tears and filled her with a sense of protection. To his mother he was a devoted son, but his father and his own sons went in awe of him. The old man
was gentle, and was completely ruled by his wife, who, to quote her
son, " wore the breeches." He admired his mother for her ascend- ency as much as he despised• his father for his weakness. He liked women of marked character, and always exalted women's intelli- gence, though his wife had not very much. He spoke of his father rarely, but he used to tell with some sympathy of his devotion to his
garden, and how he had more than once forgotten that it was Sunday
and begun to work in it early in the morning. He died in it in the end ; not suddenly, but insisting on being carried out. The farmer himself would have done nothing so unconventional. Ho approved of his mother's death in her bed in the parlour, whither she had been brought down many months before that she might still direct the household.
In later life, fortune dealt less easily with the farmer. His gene- rosity, his lordliness, his refusal to count his change, ruined him and
the farm was sold. Providence had by this time given him a well- to-do son-in-law—a man who made a largo income in London, not by the sweat of his brow, but by the ink of his pen. This man lent him a little house near London in a grass country and gave him an allowance. To this house the farmer constantly welcomed him and his grandchildren as though it had been his own, and his welcome was like the sun coming from behind a cloud. The air of the theocracy still clung to him. The successful man in his London home who did not know wheat from barley had no part or lot in it, and the grandfather of his children could not forget it. He respected his son-in-law's learning—he could not forgive his ignorance. Tho grandchildren, the " young plants," they were now his inheritance.
For them the fruit was grown and the feast made, and the children thought the modest domain was his because their father never destroyed the illusion—there being quite as much romance and kindness in ink as in corn. After all, " charitable bread is bitter enough even when eaten in secret," he would say, and he avoided making himself at home in his father-in-law's house. Every now
and then—once in spring, once in autumn—the farmer took a very long walk into a corn country, gazed on the wheat, green or golden as might be, and came silently home as a man who has truly wor- shipped. When he could no longer do so, he said he thought " it would soon be time for him to be going." He left, to one of his grand- children only, the call of the blood, the citizenship of the theocracy. None of them ever had any land, but for one
" Bright visions of vapour down Lothbury glide
And a river flows on through the vale of Oheapsille." When he died they were all flourishing, likely young people, still corn in the 'blade as it were, still not sure what they could not do, still dependent on the weather—so in them he was neves disappointed.
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