" In Easy Reach of Town "
Chiltern Country. By H. J. Massingham. (Batsford. 8s. 6d.)
MR. MASSINGHAK if his practice were as good as his theory, would represent an admirable change in guide-book fashions. "Much more attention, quite rightly I think, is now given to the geology, topography, agriculture, ecology, crafts,' vegetation, village architecture, landscape, flora and ornithology. Landscape: perhaps the cloven hoof is there, for Mr. Massingham, who can write plainly and agreeably about village crafts, becomes unbearably literary in his descriptions, and no book of his has suffered more from descriptions than this one. Metaphors crowd one " another confusedly; roads which are " worms " at the beginning of a sentence " sidle " before the end. Nothing is ever • itself (if only Mr. Massingham had learnt to write at Cobbett's feet): scarps are engraved title-pages, hills are lighthouses, flowers are illuminated borders : everything is decorative, everything is exaggerated (" these Chiltern yews are impenetrable to rabbits, more so than any primeval jungle "—when did a rabbit try to penetrate a jungle?), everything is touched with an absurd and personal lyricism (" To walk along the ravine beside the upper branches of these imperial trees is to be shot through with a flash of the squirrel's happiness "), above all no landscape will keep still. The landscape round Tring—in Mr. Massingham's wordy periods —makes you giddy. First " the Roman-arterial road goose-steps, while the Way side-slips ": then, as we follow the Way, we find it " shaking off a strait-waistcoat " among the " skipping little hills "; later roads " bound," woods and arable " change over like partners in a dance," trees " leap out," and we are not sur- prised to read that " if a great painter had witnessed such a scene, he would have despaired "—what with " the blaze of supernatural intensity " it would need a technicolor film to do Mr.. Massingham's restless landscapes credit.
Mr. Massingham, in some of his more reasoned pages, dwells on the social changes in the Chilterns—the arrival of Metroland; he takes a rofnantic view of the Puritan revolution and a yet more romantic view of his own qualifications : " I propose to take the issue a little further than Tawney has done." But there is such a false aesthetic attitude behind all his arguments that one is driven to defend the bungalows, the little villas called Mon Repos, the chicken coops and the dog kennels strewn untidily across the hills between Dunstable and Ivinghoe. In the heavy winter mists, among the half-abandoned fields, on the clay and chalk of the downs, the dog's bark and the stained glass door and the wireless aerial have some of the dignity of a losing fight : human beings live in those bungalows, human beings tied to a dying system, and there are moments when, pottering home in the small car to the dog's greeting and the artistic gas-fire, they seem to have more dignity than Mr. Massingham's squirrel happiness. Nature after all will always win in the end. The photographs, as in all the Batsford books, are excellent. The West Wycombe direction pillar should not, however, have been carefully photographed to exclude the petrol-filling station beside it There is a hideous jacket by Mr. Brian Cook which comes off
Previous page
