It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-cla.s.s people appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisions which originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall.
The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty"s inspectors--strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs--issue fiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile the parents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done, but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things must be arranged over their heads by the cla.s.ses who have book-learning.
And this customary att.i.tude of waiting for what the "educated" may do for them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it is highly important that they should be, reliant upon their own initiative--I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourers in the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government.
A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom they may appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who, probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quack doctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote for him, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look upon the Government as an instrument at all under the control of people like themselves; they view it, rather, as a sort of benevolent tyranny, whose const.i.tution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals or Tories--what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power, so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction, and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do rests with the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer"s to acquiesce.
Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottage people suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, that they are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they say little about it, I have heard of several men getting their children to teach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day.
Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now and then one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence to understand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing "Tariff Reform," said: "We sort o" people can"t understand it for ourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us.
And then," she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what they says." If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers trying to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing circ.u.mspection which a parenthesis demands.
XIX
EMOTIONAL STARVATION
Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riot amongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am a little unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths, as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it must not be quite pa.s.sed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any more than all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as at Oxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to be insubordinate and to give trouble, while here, just as there, the better sense of the majority is too feeble to make up a public opinion which the offenders would be afraid to defy. The disorder of the village lads was noticeable long ago at the night-school; for example, on an evening shortly after the "Khaki" election, when Mr. Brodrick (now Lord Midleton) had been re-elected for this division. On that evening a lecture on Norway, ill.u.s.trated by lantern slides, could hardly be got through owing to the liveliness of a few lads, who amused all their comrades by letting off volleys of electioneering cries. I have forgotten who the lecturer was, but I remember well how the shouts of "Good old Brodrick!" often prevailed, so that one could not hear the man"s voice. Since then there have been more striking examples of the same sort of vivacity. Not two winters ago the weekly meetings of a "boys" club," which aimed only to help the village lads pa.s.s an evening sensibly, had to be abandoned, owing to the impossible behaviour of the members. One week I heard that they had run amok amongst the furniture of the schoolroom where the meetings were held; on the next, they blew out the lamps, and locked one of the organizers into the room for an hour; and a week or two afterwards they piled window-curtains and door-mats on to the fire, and nearly got the building ablaze. In short, to judge from what was told me, there seems to have been little to distinguish them from frolicsome undergraduates, save their poverty-stricken clothes and their unaspirated speech. It is true they kept their excesses within doors, but then, they had no influential relatives to take their part against an interfering police force; and moreover, most of them came to the meetings a little subdued by ten hours or so of work at wage-earning. Still, their "high spirits" were in evidence, uncontrolled--just as elsewhere--by any high sentiment. The sense of personal responsibility for their actions, the power to understand that there is such a thing as "playing the game" even towards people in authority or towards the general public, seemed to be as foreign to them as if they had never had to soil their hands with hard work.
Whatever may be the case with others, in the village lads a merely intellectual unpreparedness is doubtless partly accountable for this behaviour. The villagers having had no previous experience of action in groups, unless under compulsion like that of the railway-ganger or of the schoolmaster with his cane, it is strange now to the boys to find themselves at a school where there is no compulsion, but all is left to their voluntary effort. And stranger still is the club. A formal society, dependent wholly on the loyal co-operation of its members and yet enforcing no obvious discipline upon them, is a novelty in village life. The idea of it is an abstraction, and because the old-fashioned half-peasant people fifty years ago never needed to think about abstractions at all, it turns out now that no family habit of mind for grasping such ideas has come down from them to their grandsons.
This mental inefficiency, however, is only a form--a definite form for once--of a more vague but more prevalent backwardness. The fact is that the old ideas of conduct in general are altogether too restricted for the new requirements, so that the village life suffers throughout from a sort of ethical starvation. I gladly admit that, for the day"s work and its hardships, the surviving sentiments in favour of industry, patience, good-humour, and so on, still are strong; and I do not forget the admirable spirit of the cottage women in particular; yet it is true that for the wider experiences of modern life other sentiments or ideals, in addition to those of the peasants, need development, and that progress in them is behindhand in the village. What the misbehaviour of the village boys ill.u.s.trates in one direction may be seen in other directions amongst the men and women and children.
Like other people, the cottagers have their emotional susceptibilities, which, however, are either more robust than other people"s or else more sluggish. At any rate it takes more than a little to disturb them.
During last winter I heard of a man--certainly he was one of the older sort, good at many an obsolete rural craft--who had had chilblains burst on his fingers, and had sewn up the wounds himself with needle and cotton. There is no suspicion of inhumanity against him, yet it seemed to me that in fiercer times he would have made a willing torturer; and other little incidents--all of them recent ones too--came back to my mind when I heard of him. In one of these a servant-girl from the village was concerned--a quiet and timid girl she was said to be; yet, on her own initiative, and without consulting her mistress, she drowned a stray cat which was trying to get a footing in the household. Again, I myself heard and wondered at the happy prattle of two little girls--the children, they, of a most conscientious man and woman--as they told of the fun they had enjoyed, along with their father and mother, in watching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that the faculty for compa.s.sion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so that their susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In their behaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voices betoken a great natural apt.i.tude for tenderness. And not to their pets only. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voice of an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "_Come_ on, ol"
gal ... _come_ on, ol" gal," he said, over and over again in tireless repet.i.tion, as sympathetically as if he were talking to a child. Where the people fail in sensitiveness is from a want of imagination, as we say, though we should say, rather, a want of suppleness in their ideas.
They can sympathize when their own dog or cat is suffering, because use has wakened up their powers in that direction; but they do not abstract the idea of suffering life and apply it to the tormented hedgehog, because their ideas have not been practised upon imagined or non-existent things in such a way as to become, as it were, a detached power of understanding, generally applicable.
But is it to be wondered at if some unlovely features appear in the village character? Or is it not rather a circ.u.mstance to give one pause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglected people, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with such solemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, and sometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are? With like disadvantages, where are there any other people in the country who would do so bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move them--some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like that mentioned earlier in this book, when a man tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a hedge all but killed his own child, and a thrill of horror shuddered through the cottages. Of matters like this the people talk with an excited fascination, there being so little else to stir them. Instead of the moving accident by flood or field, they have the squalid or merely agonizing accident. Sickness amongst friends or neighbours affords another topic upon which their emotion seeks exercise: they linger over the discussion of it, talking in moaning tones instinctively intended to stimulate feeling. Then there are police-court cases. Some man gets drunk, and is fined; or cannot pay his rent, and is turned out of his cottage; or misbehaves in such a way that he is sent to gaol. The talk of it threads its swift way about the village--goes into intimate details, too, relating how the culprit"s wife "took on" when her man was sentenced; or how his children suffer; or perhaps how the magistrates bullied him, or how he insulted the prosecuting lawyer.
It is natural that the people should be greedy readers (when they can read at all) of the sensational matter supplied by newspapers.
Earthquakes, railway disasters, floods, hurricanes, excite them not really disagreeably. So, too, does it animate them to hear of prodigies and freaks of Nature, as when, a little while ago, the papers told of a man whose flesh turned "like marble," so that he could not bend his limbs for fear lest they should snap. Anything to wonder at will serve; anything about which they can exclaim. That feeling of the crowd when fireworks call forth the fervent "_O-oh!_" of admiration, is the village feeling which delights in portents of whatever kind. But nothing else is quite so effectual to that end as are crimes of violence, and especially murder. For, after all, it is the human element that counts; and these descendants of peasants, having no fict.i.tious means of acquainting themselves with human pa.s.sion and sentiment, such as novels and dramas supply in such abundance to other people, turn with all the more avidity to the unchosen and unprepared food furnished to their starving faculties by contemporary crime.
There is, indeed, another side to their sensationalism which should be noticed. I was a little startled some years ago by a sc.r.a.p of conversation between two women. The papers at that time were full of a murder which had been committed in a village neighbouring this, the young man accused of it being even then on his trial. It was in the evidence that he had visited his home quite an hour after the time when the deed must have been done, and these women were discussing that point, one of them saying: "I don"t believe _my_ boy would ha" come "ome that Sunday night if _he"d_ ha" done it." It was surprising to me to hear a respectable mother speculate as to how her own son would behave in such a case, or contemplate even the possibility of his being guilty of murder; and I thought it all too practical a way of considering the subject. But it revealed how appallingly real such things may be to people who, as I tried to show farther back, have reason to feel a little like an alien race under our middle-cla.s.s law. Very often one may discern this personal or practical point of view in their sensationalism: they indulge it chiefly for the sake of excitement, but with a side glance at the bearing which the issue may have upon their own affairs. In a foul case which was dealt with under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, large numbers of our cottage women flocked to the town to hear the trial, attracted partly by the hope of sensation, of course, but also very largely actuated by a sentiment of revenge against the offender; for here the safety of their own young daughters was involved.
Be this as it may, still it is true that the two sources I have mentioned--namely, the sensational news in the papers and the distresses and misdemeanours in the village itself--supply practically all that the average cottager gets to touch his sentiments and emotions into life; and it is plain enough that from neither of these sources, even when supplemented by a fine traditional family life, can a very desirable spiritual nourishment be obtained. "Real" enough the fare is, in all conscience; but, as usual with realities of that sort, it wants choiceness. It provides plenty of objects for compa.s.sion, for anxiety, for contempt, for ridicule even, but very little for emulation, for reverence. The sentiments of admiration and chivalry, the enthusiastic emotions, are hardly ever aroused in man or woman, boy or girl, in the village. Nothing occurs in the natural course to bring what is called "good form" into notice and make it attractive, and at the same time the means of bringing this about by art demand more money, more leisure and seclusion, more book-learning too, than the average labourer can obtain.
In the middle-cla.s.ses this is not the case. It is true that the middle-cla.s.ses have little to boast of in this respect, but generous ideas of modesty and reverence, and of "playing the game," and of public duty, and of respect for womanhood, have at least a chance of spreading amongst boys and girls, in households where art and books are valued, and where other things are talked of than the sordid scandals of the valley and of the police-courts. The difference that the want of this help may make was brought forcibly home to me one day. I came upon a group of village boys at play in the road, just as one of them--a fellow about thirteen years old--conceived a bright idea for a new game. "Now I"ll be a murderer!" he cried, waving his arms ferociously.
There are other circ.u.mstances that tend to keep the standard of sentiment low. As the boys begin to work for money at so early an age, the money-value of conduct impresses itself strongly upon them, and they soon learn to think more of what they can get than of what they can do or are worth. And while they have lost all the steadying influence that used to flow from the old peasant crafts, they get none of the steadiness which would come from continuity of employment. The work they do as errand-boys calls neither for skill in which they might take pride nor for constancy to any one master; but it encourages them to be mannish and "knowing" long before their time. Of course the more generous sentiments are at a discount under such conditions.
Then, too, there can be little doubt that the "superior" att.i.tude of the employing cla.s.ses has its injurious effect upon the village character. The youth who sees his father and mother and sisters treated as inferiors, and finds that he is treated so too, is led unconsciously to take a low view of what is due either to himself or to his friends.
The sort of view he takes may be seen in his behaviour. The gangs of boys who troop and lounge about the roads on Sundays are generally being merely silly in the endeavour to be witty. They laugh loudly, yet not humorously and kindly (one very rarely hears really jolly laughter in the village), but in derision of one another or of the wayfarers--girls by preference. So far as one can overhear it, their fun is always of that contumacious character, and it must be deadly to any sentiment of modesty, or honour, or reverence.
It requires but little penetration to see how these circ.u.mstances react upon the village girls. The frolicsome and giddy appear to enjoy themselves much as the boys do, but the position must be cruel to those of a serious tendency. To be treated with disrespect and be made the subjects of rough wit as they go about is only the more acute part of their difficulty. One may suppose that at home they find little appreciation of any high sentiments, but are driven, in self-defence, to be rather flippant, rather "worldly." The greater number of house mistresses, meanwhile, if one may judge from their own complacent conversation, behave in a way most unlikely to contribute to their servants" self-respect. It is hard to believe that any really high sentiment is to be learnt from women who, for all the world as if they were village louts, make light of a girl"s feelings, and regard her love-affairs especially as a proper subject for ridicule or for suspicion.
XX
THE CHILDREN"S NEED
As one of the managing committee of the village schools for a good many years, I have had considerable opportunity of watching the children collectively. The circ.u.mstances, perhaps, are not altogether favourable to the formation of trustworthy opinions. Seen in large numbers, and under discipline too, the children look too much alike; one misses the infinite variety of their personalities such as would appear in them at home. On the other hand, characteristics common to them all, which might pa.s.s unnoticed in individuals, become obvious enough when there are many children together.
In the main the "stock" has always seemed to me good, and to some extent my impression is supported by the results of the medical inspection now undertaken at the schools by the County Council. Such defects as the doctor finds are generally of no deep-seated kind: bad teeth, faulty vision (often due, probably, to improper use of the eyes in school), scalp troubles, running ears, adenoids, and so on, are the commonest.
Insufficient nutrition is occasionally reported. In fact the medical evidence tells, in a varied form, much the same tale that school managers have been able to read for themselves in the children"s dilapidated boots and clothes, and their grimy hands and uncared-for hair, for it all indicates poverty at home, want of convenience for decent living, and ignorance as well as carelessness in the parents. All this we have known, but now we learn from the doctor that the evil effects of these causes do not stop at the clothes and skin, but go a little deeper. Yet probably they have not hurt the essential nature of the children. Congenital defects are rare; the doctor discovers even a high average of const.i.tutional fitness, due, it may be, to severe "natural" selection weeding out the more delicate. It is certain that the village produces quite a fair proportion of really handsome children, besides those of several of the old families, who are wont to be of exceptional beauty. Unhappily, before the school-years are over, the fineness usually begins to disappear, being spoilt, I suspect, partly by the privations of the home-life and partly by another cause, of which I will speak by-and-by.
I think, further--but it is only a vague impression, not worth much attention--that as regards physique the girls are as a rule more thriving and comely than the boys. The latter appear very apt to become knottled and hard, and there is a want of generosity in their growth, as though they received less care than the girls, and were more used to going hungry, and being cold and wet. But if my impression is right, there are two points to be noticed in further explanation of it. The first point relates to the early age at which the boys begin to be useful at work. It has been already told how soon they are set to earn a little money out of school-hours; but even before that stage is reached the little boys have to make themselves handy. On the Sat.u.r.day holiday it is no uncommon thing to see a boy of eight or nine pushing up the hill a little truck loaded with coal or c.o.ke, which he has been sent to buy at the railway yard. Smaller ones still are sent to the shops, and not seldom they are really overloaded. Thus at an age when boys in better circ.u.mstances are hardly allowed out alone, these village children practise perforce a considerable self-reliance, and become acquainted with the fatigue of labour. Some little chaps, as they go about their duties--leading lesser brothers by the hand perhaps, or perhaps dealing very sternly with them, and making them "keep up"
without help--have unawares the manner of responsible men.
That is one point which may help to account for the apparent physical disparity between the boys and girls of the village. The other is a subject of remark amongst all who know the school-children. There is no doubt about it; whether the girls are comelier of growth than the boys or not, they are in behaviour so much more civilized that one might almost suppose them to come from different homes. To my mind this might be sufficiently explained by the fact that they are usually spared those burdensome errands and responsibilities which are thrust so soon upon their brothers; but the schoolmaster has another explanation, which probably contains some truth. His view is that at home the girls come chiefly under the influence of their mothers, whose experience of domestic service gives them an idea of manners, while the boys take pattern from their fathers, whose work encourages roughness. Whatever the cause, the fact remains: the boys may be physically as sound as the girls, but they certainly have less charm. It is not often delightful to see them. They do not stand up well; they walk in a slouching and narrow-chested way; and, though they are mischievous enough, there is strangely wanting in them an air of alertness, of vivacity, of delight in life. There is no doubt that their heavily-ironed and ill-fitting boots cause them to walk badly; yet it is only reasonable to suppose that this is but one amongst many difficulties, and that, in general, the conditions in which the boys live are unfavourable to a good physical growth.
As regards intellectual power, in boys and girls too, the evidence--to be quite frank--does not bear out all that I wish to believe; for, in spite of appearances, I am not yet persuaded that these cottage children are by birth more dull of wit than town-bred children and those in better circ.u.mstances. It must be remembered that in this village, so near as it is to a town, there has been little of that migration to towns which is said to have depleted other villages of their cleverer people. A few lads go to sea, more than a few into the army; some of the girls marry outside, and are lost to the parish. But it would be easy to go through the valley and find, in cottage after cottage, the numerous descendants of old families that flourished here, and were certainly not deficient in natural brain-power, two generations ago, although it was not developed in them on modern lines. Nor need one go back two generations. To be acquainted with the fathers and mothers of the school-children is to know people whose minds are good enough by nature, and are only wanting in acquired power; and when, aware of this, one goes into the school and sees the children of these parents, some of them very graceful, with well-shaped heads and eyes that can sparkle and lips that can break into handsome, laughing curves, it is very hard to believe that the breed is dull. The stupidity is more likely due merely to imperfect nurture; at any rate, one should not accept an explanation of it that disparages the village capacity for intelligence until it is made clear that the state of the children cannot be explained in any other way.
Leaving explanations aside, however, there is the fact, not to be gainsaid, that the children in general are slow of wit. One notes it in the infant school first, and especially in the very youngest cla.s.ses.
There, newly come from their mother"s care, the small boys and girls from five to six years old have often a wonderfully vacant expression.
There is little of that speculative dancing of the eyes, that evident appet.i.te for perceptions and ideas, which you will find in well-to-do nurseries and playrooms. And whereas in the latter circ.u.mstances children will take up pencil or paintbrush confidently, as if born to master those tools, the village infant is hesitating, clumsy, feeble.
Upon the removal of a child to the upper or "mixed" school, a certain increase of intelligence often seems to come at a bound. The circ.u.mstance is highly suggestive. The "infant" of seven is suddenly brought into contact with older scholars already familiarized with particular groups of ideas, and those ideas are speedily absorbed by the little ones, while the swifter methods of teaching also have their quickening effect, for a time. But after this jump has been made and lost sight of--that is to say amongst the older scholars, who do not again meet with such a marked change of environment--one is again aware of considerable mental density throughout the school. The children resemble their parents. They are quick enough to observe details, though not always the details with which the teacher is concerned, but they have very little power of dealing with the simplest abstractions. They are clumsy in putting two thoughts together for comparison; clumsy in following reasons, or in discussing underlying principles. In short, "thinking" is an art they hardly begin to practise. They can learn and apply a "rule of thumb," a folk-rule, so to speak--but there is no flow, nor anything truly consecutive, in the movement of their ideas.
Elsewhere one may hear children of six or seven--little well-cared-for people--keep up a continual stream of intelligent and happy talk with their parents or nursemaids; but to the best of my belief this does not happen amongst the village children, at any age.
Observations of them at play, in the cottage gardens or on the road, throw some light on their condition. It would appear that they are extremely ill-supplied with subjects to think about. In the exercise of imagination, other children fall naturally into habits of consecutive thought, or at any rate of consecutive fancy; but these of the labouring cla.s.s have hardly any ideas which their young brains could play with, other than those derived from their own experience of real life in the valley, or those which they hear spoken of at home. Hence in their histrionic games of "pretending" it is but a very limited repertory of parts that they can take. Two or three times I have come upon a little group of them under a hedgerow or sun-warmed bank, playing at school; the teacher being delightfully severe, and the scholars delightfully naughty. And now and again there is a feeble attempt at playing soldiers. Very often, too, one may see boys, in string harness, happy in being very mettlesome horses. In one case a subtle variant of this game inspired two small urchins to what was, perhaps, as good an imaginative effort as I have met with in the village. The horse, instead of being frisky, was being slow, so that the driver had to swear at him. And most vindictive and raucous was the infant voice that I heard saying, "Git up, you blasted lazy cart-"orse!" Other animals are sometimes represented. With a realistic grunt, a little boy, beaming all over his face, said to his companion, "Now I"ll be your pig." Another day it puzzled me to guess what a youngster was doing, as he capered furiously about the road, wearing his cap pushed back and two short sticks protruding from beneath it over his forehead; but presently I perceived that he was a "bullick" being driven to market. Excepting the case already mentioned, of the boy who proposed to "be a murderer," I do not recall witnessing any other forms of the game of "pretending" amongst the village children, unless in the play of little girls with their dolls. There was one very pretty child who used to prattle to me sometimes about her "baby," and how it had been "bad," that is to say, naughty, and put to bed; or had not had its breakfast. This little girl was an orphan who lived with her grandfather and a middle-aged aunt, and was much petted by them. She was almost alone too, amongst the village children of that period, in being the possessor of a doll, for no more than five or six years ago one rarely saw such a thing in the village.
Christmas-trees have since done something to make up the deficiency. A month or two ago I saw a four-year-old girl--a friend of mine from a neighbour"s cottage--solemnly walking down a by-lane alone, carrying a rag-doll half as big as herself. I stopped, and admired; but, in spite of her pride, she took a very matter-of-fact view of her toy. "It"s head keeps comin" off," was all that she could be persuaded to say.
"Matter-of-fact" is what the children are, for the most part. One autumn evening, after dark, t.i.tterings and little squeals of excitement sounded from a neighbour"s garden, where a man, going to draw water from his well, and carrying a lantern, was accompanied by four or five children.
In the security of his presence they were pretending to be afraid of "bogies." "If a bogie was to come," I heard, "I should get up that apple-tree, and then if he come up after me I should get down t"other side." An excited laugh was followed by the man"s contemptuous remonstrance, "_Shut_ up!" which produced silence for a minute or two, until the party were returning to the cottage; when a very endearing voice called softly, "Bo-gie! Bo-gie! Come, bogie!" This instance of fancy in a cottage child stands, however, alone in my experience. I have never heard anything else like it in the village. The children romp and squabble and make much noise; they play, though rarely, at hide-and-seek; or else they gambol about aimlessly, or try to sing together, or troop off to look at the fowls or the rabbits. The bigger children are as a rule extremely kind to the lesser ones. A family of small brothers and sisters who lived near me some time ago were most pleasant to listen to for this reason. The smallest of them, a three-year-old boy commonly called ""Arry," was their pet. "Look, "Arry; here"s a _dear_ little flow-wer! A little "arts-ease--look, "Arry!"
""Ere, "Arry, have a bite o" this nice apple!" They were certainly attractive children, though formidably grubby as to their faces. I heard them with their father, admiring a litter of young rabbits in the hutch.
"O-oh, en"t that a _dear_ little thing!" they exclaimed, again and again. Sunday was especially delightful to them because their father was at home then; and I liked to hear him playing with them. One particularly happy hour they had, in which he feigned to be angry and they to be defiant. They jumped about just out of his reach, jeering at him. "Old Father Smither!" they cried, as often as their peals of laughter would let them cry anything at all. But it struck me as very strange that their sing-song derision was not going to the right tune and rhythm; for there is a genuine folk-tune which I thought indissolubly wedded to this derisive formula. Beginning in a long drawl, it throws all the weight on the first and fourth syllables: "_Old_ Father _Smith_-er." But these children, apparently ignorant of it, had invented a rhythm of their own, in which the first syllable, "Old," was almost elided, and the weight was thrown on the next. I could not help wondering at the breach which this indicated with the ancient folk traditions.
If it were necessary, plentiful other evidence could be produced of the children"s great need for more subjects upon which to exercise their thoughts and fancies. For one example: some years ago a little maidservant from this village was found, when she went to her first "place" in the town, never to have seen a lamb, or a pond of water. This was an extreme case, perhaps; but it suggests how badly the children are handicapped. As recently as last year, when a circus was visiting the town, I asked two village boys on the road if they had seen the procession. They had not; nor had they ever in their lives seen a camel or an elephant; but one of them "thought he should know an elephant, by his trunk." He was probably eight years old; and it is worth noting that he must have owed his enlightenment to books or pictures seen at school; indeed, there is nothing of the sort to be learnt at home, where there are no books, and where the parents, themselves limited to so narrow a range of experience and therefore of ideas, are not apt to encourage inquisitiveness in their children. A man who lived near me a few years ago could often be heard, on Sundays and on summer evenings, chiding his little son for that fault. "Don"t you keep on astin" so many questions," was his formula, which I must have heard dozens of times.
One can sympathize: it would be so much easier to give the child a bun, or the cottage equivalent, and order him to eat it; but that does not satisfy the child"s appet.i.te for information. Probably the great difficulty is that the children"s questions can hardly any longer turn upon those old-fashioned subjects which the parents understand, but upon new-fangled things. And, apart from all this, I suspect that in most of the cottages the old notion prevails that children should be kept in their place, and not encouraged to bother grown-up people with their trumpery affairs.
From the contrast between the talk of the village youngsters and that of children who are better cared for, I inferred just now a want of "flow"
in the thoughts of the former, as though the little sc.r.a.ppy ideas existed in their brains without much relationship to one another. Of course it is possible that the brain activity is far greater than one would surmise, and that it only seems sluggish because of the insufficiency of our village speech as a means of expression, for certainly the people"s vocabulary is extremely limited, while they have no habit of talking in sentences of any complexity. Yet where a language has neither abundant names for ideas, nor flexible forms of construction to exhibit variations of thought, it is hard to believe that the brain-life itself is anything but cramped and stiff.
And if the crude phrasing indicates poverty in the more definite kinds of ideas, I cannot help thinking that another feature of the children"s talk betrays no less a poverty, in respect to those more vague ideas which relate to behaviour and to perception of other people"s position and feelings. It was since beginning this chapter that I happened to be walking for some distance in front of four children--three girls and a boy--from a comfortable middle-cla.s.s home. It was a Sunday morning, and they were chatting very quietly, so that their words did not reach me; but I found it very agreeable to hear the variety of cadence in their voices, with occasionally pauses, and then a resumption of easy talk, as if they had got a subject to consider in serious lights, and recognized each other"s right to be heard and understood. Indeed, it bordered on priggishness, and perhaps over-stepped the border; but nevertheless it made me feel jealous for our village children, for in the conversation of village children one never hears that suggestion of a considerate mental att.i.tude towards one another. The speech is without flexibility or modulation of tone; harsh, exclamatory, and screaming, or guttural and drawling. Rarely, if ever, does one derive from it an impression that the children are growing to regard one another"s feelings, or one another"s thoughts. A further point must be mentioned. I hinted that there might be an additional cause, besides physical privations, for the loss of the children"s attractiveness in many cases even before they leave school. My belief is that, as they approach the age when ideas of a sensitive att.i.tude towards life should begin to sway them, unconsciously moulding the still growing features into fineness, those ideas do not come their way. The boys of eight begin to look, at times, like little men; and the girls of eleven and upwards begin to show signs of acquaintance with struggling domestic economies; but neither boys nor girls discover, in the world into which they are growing up, any truly helpful ideas of what it is comely to be and to think. Lingering peasant notions of personal fitness and of integrity keep them from going viciously wrong, so that when they come to p.u.b.erty their perplexed spirits are not quite without guidance; yet, after all, the peasant conditions are gone, and seeing that the new wage-earning conditions do not, of themselves, suggest worthy ideas of personal bearing, the children"s faculties for that sort of thing soon cease to unfold, and with a gradual slackening of development the attractiveness disappears.
The want is the more to be regretted in that, at a later time of life, when the women have been moulded by motherhood and the men by all the stress and responsibility of their position, such composure and strength often appear in them as to justify a suspicion that these uncared-for people are by nature amongst the very best of the English.
V
THE FORWARD MOVEMENT