“The CONDITIONAL Mood” is one of which the country is only now slowly learning the existence, for, by its very name, it suggests that conditions can change. Hitherto, in spite of motor buses and wireless sets, life in most country villages has been, outwardly at least, an unconditional denial of this. “ It always ’ as been”, and “ It never ’as been” are unanswerable arguments for and against any new proposal; and the National Anthem of the countryside has ever been—
“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end.’’
But the war is changing the villages; and those which lie farthest from the danger zone were the first to be aware that this was so. At the very outbreak of war, those people who lived in what were known as “ safe” areas learnt that, in the day when an Englishman’s house was first described as his castle, it was a fortress not only for himself, but for anyone else in need of shelter. So in many parts of the country every house is now full of strangers. The sharp thin faces of townswomen and children stand out among natives in the village streets; and every cottage contains an “ uncle” and an “auntie” to one or two evacuated school children. There is something very touching in the sight of these small children (each with a gas-mask slung across its shoulders) marching to school in the morning, hand in hand with their guides, who may be the children of the house in which they are billeted, or the husband on his way to work, or perhaps the mother of the family who has left her “clearing up” to shepherd the little flock to school.
And where there are no evacuated children there are sure to be soldiers, or civil servants, or munition workers, who want lodging.
The age-long peace of the village is now shattered by the roar of aeroplanes passing on their way to bomb the nearest town, and perhaps dropping a few bombs in country meadows to kill one or two cows or rabbits in them. Sometimes the raider even decides to smash the village church or the school, vainly hoping to create a panic among the sturdy country labourers. All the village people have joined war service squads. The men are in the Home Guard. The women have got their First Aid certificates. No more peaceful evenings by the fireside, for it is no longer a case of keeping the home fires burning. The duty in this war is to keep your own fire dark and to help to extinguish your neighbour’s if an incendiary bomb should fall on his house.
And what about “TENSES’’? I only know of three—PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE; and the Present is the only one which is ever actually in existence. It is that point upon the highway from which one looks before and after. The Past is a long road, vanishing into a distance veiled in rose-coloured mists. The Future is a short lane which very soon reaches a turning beyond which one cannot see. So a book written in the Present must draw its material mainly from the Past.
But there are more complex tenses belonging to the more advanced branches of grammar—the Perfect, the Imperfect and the Pluperfect. Some people look on the Past as always an Imperfect tense. They think it consists only of muddy lanes, poverty-stricken hovels and insanitary smells; while in their eyes the Future is a Pluperfect paradise of tarmac roads, council houses and drains. For others, the Past is the Golden Age—all simplicity, picturesqueness and content; and the Future is a hideous prospect from which they can only avert their eyes.
Yet perhaps in the Future we shall find that, as a result of this war, the regrettable gulf between town and country, which opened in the last 150 years, will be closed again, by those piteous ambassadors from the towns, now being made welcome in the country. Friends found in time of adversity will not be lost in happier days. The rural and the urban points of view may find themselves permanently nearer each other.
Village life in itself may become more communal. Neighbours will have formed the habit of working together, and will have found that it makes for happiness and efficiency.
And what will the country of the future look like? When houses, churches and schools have been destroyed, one rather dreads the new buildings; though there is no reason why the loss of the treasures of the past should necessarily destroy that vision which once made it possible to create them.
We cannot foresee the future conditions; what we can do is to keep alive the spirit of Faith. Those who continue to believe in Goodness, Truth and Beauty, will always spread them around, in whatever conditions. The eye of Faith sees farther than the Conditional Mood.
The First Mood
INFINITIVE
1 The Lie of the Land
DR. VAUGHAN CORNISH HAS DESCRIBED HOW, ON HIS FIRST visit to Stonehenge, he found that for a few moments he “forgot the ancient monument”. He had “turned to view the surrounding scene … and was at once impressed by the circularity of the horizon … very rarely do we find ourselves standing thus in the middle of a round world.… Entering within the circle of Stonehenge, I looked through the openings of the colonnade towards the several parts of the panorama, and saw the circularity of the sky-line emphasised by the recurving foreground of the sarsen stones”.
Those who are fortunate enough to have been born near Stonehenge have always been aware of the shape of the universe. It is one of their privileges to realise the full import of the lie of the land. It is an experience which may have a profound effect upon one’s life. That experience led Robert Bridges to begin his Testament of Beauty with the words:
’Twas late in my long journey, when I had clomb to where
The path was narrowing and the company few,
A glow of childlike wonder enthral’ed me, as if my sense
Had come to a new birth purified, my mind enrapt
Re-awakening to a fresh initiation of life;
With like surprise of joy as any man may know
Who rambling wide hath turned, resting on some hill-top
To view the plain he has left, and see’th it now out-spredd
Mapp’d at his feet, a landscape so by beauty estranged
He scarce will ken familiar haunts, nor his own home,
May-be where far it lieth, small as a faded thought.
What is it that attracts one in a panoramic view? It certainly has a very general attraction, for one of the first pleasures offered to a newly arrived guest is to “ walk up the hill and see our view”. What is this irresistible charm? It is partly, I believe, a sense of being let into the secret of a great architect’s conception, as though Christopher Wren had shown us the city he planned, “standing four-square” like the heavenly Jerusalem. The mind cannot but find satisfaction in the vision of a great fulfilled conception.
A sense of the lie of the land on the grand scale must have been a feature of the earliest civilisation which left its mark on this country. It is something which to-day is beyond our range, in spite of the airy way in which we can fly from continent to continent in a few hours. It is only during this century that students are realising again that the men who built Avebury and Stonehenge saw all England as a great topographical unity.
Those who live near these great monuments have always felt a pride in them, but the archæological of the last century had then enough to do burrowing down to the earthworks, as they tried to puzzle out their lost history and to learn something of their builders. Now, like Dr. Vaughan Cornish at Stonehenge, they are turning to scan the horizons in which are set these mysterious temples, camps and barrows. Nothing gives such a sense of the grandeur of Nature and of the human spirit than the realisation that though these earthworks are buildings made of dust, they are not merely emblems of man’s mortality. They speak of his victory over Time, and are set into the great scheme of the Creator by men who had the vision to see that creation as a whole. Avebury, Stonehenge, Old Sarum, Maiden Castle, St. Catherine’s Hill, Glastonbury Tor, and all the other famous ancient sites in southern England, are indeed grand places when simply viewed in themselves; but they uplift the soul when it is grasped that they are parts of a supreme plan. It is like standing upon Mount Pisgah. From that point Moses must have seen the Promised Land more clearly than did the men who blew their trumpets outsid
e the City of Jericho. They brought the walls down, but the Seer looked beyond the wreckage and saw a new world.
There are great panoramas which have a unity apart from that created by pre-historic builders. No one conveys like Hilaire Belloc the inspiration given by the revelation of the Lie of the Land. In the Path to Rome he tells of his pilgrimage from Toul in Lorraine to Rome, and he says, “ When I call up for myself this great march, I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road.… They unroll themselves in all their order till I can see Europe, and Rome shining at the end”.
After that experience, a fine view must ever be something more than a fine view.
Still, many views impress themselves upon the memory simply as, in themselves, things of beauty. I remember the shock of surprise with which I first looked down from that amazing natural rampart formed by the enormous cliff of La Baume as it rises unexpectedly from the Camargue. Below it lay miles of the level land of Provence; and the tideless waters of the Mediterranean seemed to bound an equally tideless marshland.
One comes on another memorable view on the road from London to Ely. I saw it first one evening. We drove out of Stretham, when suddenly, as we went down the hill, the cathedral broke upon our sight. It seemed to be hanging from the sky by a jewelled chain, for curved above it that night was the softly radiant arch of a rainbow. That memory lit the rest of our journey.
There are fewer wide views in the Lake Country than one would expect, because the mountains are so crowded together that you must climb very high before being able to see far. There is a wonderful view from the Striding Edge of Helvellyn, and the country round Derwentwater and Ullswater is open enough to give one the thrill of recognising the general plan of the landscape. But I think that the thing I am describing belongs more to downs than to mountains, and that is why the architects of the earthworks place their triumphs of building in the south country chalklands. The camps and barrows are the natural completion of those great curved contours.
English people are reverting to the spirit of their Neolithic predecessors and are now beginning once more to build their houses on the high ground. Unfortunately they have not yet recovered the genius with which the ancient builders took their natural surroundings into their building and were in turn absorbed by Nature into its primeval pattern. Instead of this, a modern house placed on a skyline is nearly always an eyesore, while it should be the culminating point where the eye finds its resting place. This may be partly because the material of the modern house clashes with green peace of the turf.
Nevertheless, concrete is one of the materials which could be at home beside an earthwork. It, too, can take to itself a curved outline. An enormous concrete viaduct—a line of solemn arches—might without incongruity carry a modern motor road over a valley from one down summit to another, and I look forward to some day seeing one in Wiltshire. And then concrete houses might be placed nearby, but they must be built by architects who look at the lie of the land, and not by those whose happiest memories are of Grosvenor House and the Dorchester Hotel. These new architects must don the mantle of that prehistoric race who were humble enough to see their own works as small parts in Nature’s great design; and who yet were proud enough to set their creations in the key positions of her noble conception.
There is, of course, much beauty in the country, apart from the wonder of the lie of the land. After the days of the Saxons, the high escarpments were left to castles and fortresses, which still proudly occupied the commanding positions from which the garrisons could watch over the peaceable inhabitants pursuing their avocations below. But the villages themselves were built beside the streams. Here were the abbeys and the cathedrals. Here were the manor houses and the country seats. Here were the farms and the cottages. In mediaeval times people avoided wide views. Enclosures were their idea of peace; and for them, beauty was a shut-in thing, delicate and near the eye, like an illumination in a Missal. They bequeathed to us the love of domesticity both in house and garden; and that idea is precious still to English people. The red brick manor house, the walled garden with its roses and paeonies, the little village church, the tiny stone bridge across the stream—these mean for many people the charm of the English country. They are all combined in the word “ homely”. They possess a beauty filled with tenderness, and they carry with them a hundred childish memories. Yet a realisation of the far-flung majesty of the lie of the land embraces all those lesser beauties, and infinitely transcends them.
2 Country Nights
“WHILE THE EARTH REMAINS, SEED TIME AND HARVEST, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” So God said to Noah, as he and his family came out of the ark, and to the modern town-dweller such an idea is indeed archaic. He can’t possibly believe it, and if he could, he doesn’t want to. Our civilisation aims at obliterating the seasons and the time of day, and it has almost succeeded. The prosperous townsman eats peaches in January and strawberries all the year round. Central heating has substituted for that barbarous alternation of cold and heat a mean temperature in his house or hotel of about 70 degrees Fahr. Come summer, come winter, he finds in the cinema always the appropriate setting for the picture he has come to see. Without leaving his seat in the darkened theatre, he passes from the tornado and the earthquake to sea bathing or ice skating, and one flick will carry him from the sand-strewn desert to the flower-filled garden. The unblinking radiance of the street lamps comes between him and the sky; and it required a black-out to bring him the startling revelation of the exotic beauty of the moon.
Life in the cities has, in fact, achieved a polished sameness which has vanquished those old-fashioned seasons with their rough edges and their uncertain frontiers: it has substituted convenience for romance. This is a disaster, because although romance is far more worth-while than convenience, yet it is fatally easy to outgrow, while dependence on convenience is an all but incurable disease.
War-time evacuation has brought this home to us. Townspeople love the thought of the country. They revel in a day there. In theory, the ideal of every Englishman is a country cottage of his own, with a garden from which he will eat his own vegetables, and a pigsty from which his own pig will send him an unbroken string of sausages and unending sides of bacon. Yet, in spite of the fact that the town habit is a new thing in this country, and that hardly one-fifth of our urban population has behind it more than one generation of town dwellers, nearly one-half of the evacuees went home in two months or less. They would rather be bombed than bored.
And in some ways the country is certainly difficult to live in. In wet weather the village streets become quagmires; there is nothing to buy in the one shop, and less than nothing to look at in its window: if you want anything beyond the daily necessities, you must wait till someone goes to “town”. The “privy” in the garden is nothing but revolting after the indoor “ convenience’’; and the dark nights are paralysing to mind and body.
As a matter of fact, however, the black-out is less black in a village than in a town. Rows of houses add their shadows to the darkness of night, while where there are only a few buildings the wide horizon holds and diffuses a feint afterglow of daylight when the sun has long set. For very few hours is the “ traveller in the dark” left without either the “tiny spark” of the distant stars, the silver glory of the moon, the crimson legacy of sunset or the rosy promise of a dawning day.
But in the darkness (and still more in the black-out) townspeople know that houses are “company”, street walls are guides and passers-by are welcomely human. For those who are freshly come from town, country nights are filled only with panic. A young Londoner came to a village a few years ago, as a model for a sculptor friend of mine. He resolutely refused to come to the studio after dark, saying that, if he did, “ something would bogue out at him”.
“There is nothing here that could possibly hurt
you”, we said.
“There might be a wolf”, he answered.
We told him there had been no wolves in England for hundreds of years.
“Well, there are plenty of foxes”, was his last card.
This could not be denied, nor could the unjustifiable panic be ended. Country nights were simply fearsome.
Yet in them is one of the never-failing joys of country life. Throughout the year, “ the Heavens are telling the glory of God”, and, as the fugual impulse of Haydn’s fine chorus suggests, night may uniformly follow night, and yet each will differ in glory from the last, for their length and their brilliance wax and wane with the seasons, except for those who have the misfortune to live either on the Equator or in the Ritz.
It is hard to say in which time of the year country nights are the most magic, though more people know them in summer. Perhaps in those months their chief beauty lies in their long twilight. The sun never goes very far below the horizon. He passes out of sight to make a journey which is really a long, shallow ellipse, leaving our sky free for the planets which then voyage past us “ like a fleet of ships”. Life holds few more exquisite experiences than those hours of on-coming dusk when one gazes into the deepening spaces of the sky to see the stars appear one by one. They say that it brings good fortune to count seven stars on seven consecutive nights, and this is not so easy as one might expect. On some nights clouds come up and spoil the sky for counting and then one has to begin all over again; but to me, it is good fortune even to look for those seven stars. Staring after them into the heavens, one passes into a state of ecstasy in which it seems possible to see any celestial vision. But summer evenings have other pleasures nearer to earth. After sunset, there begin to float about the garden many demurely coloured moths who move soundlessly among the flower beds, but more often about the wood, for they love trees. Bats flit feverishly about, darting erratically hither and thither with their tiny shrill cries, inaudible to anyone over forty years old. Water fowl come home to the stream, taking to the water with a long splash and calling each other in tones of hoarse beauty. Other night birds wake in the meadows. Several warblers have songs which one often mistakes for the nightingale; but when that divine voice does at last break upon the darkness, there is no longer any doubt. No one says, “ Is that the nightingale?” instead, the whisper is “There he is’’; and people always do whisper, lest the magic singer should be frightened away; but this is quite a mistake, as the nightingale loves noise. When we were children, we used to walk out to hear him where he sang in a hawthorn hedge between the high road and the railway. Sometimes he refused to sing, as he often does, being as capricious as other virtuosi; but if the train came puffing and roaring along the line, the nightingale burst at once into his loveliest song. He tried to outsing the engine.
Country Moods and Tenses Page 2