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better vocal expression among writers and is more adopted by those whom they lead than what publishers, and occasionally railway companies, call "the cult of the country." But this very enthusiasm wakes in the hearts of its inculcators the most lively distrust. Are we not, they ask themselves, following a literary tradition which is the most faded and the most deceptive in literature? Are we not comparable to the hardly rustic Virgil, whose views on the generation of bees spell bankruptcy to the credulous bee-farmer, and whose poems produce agricultural ruin, wherever they are widely studied? Are we not, in short, the dupes or the exploiters of a convention as unreal in essence as the cult of the 'nineties for the music-hall? Does the country on which we write exist outside our own books?

To all this interrogatory, a strong but usually dumb instinct returns an obstinate reply. And the writers, still questioning, withdraw into the country whenever they have the chance. More persistently than even the tired Titans of commerce, they retreat to green fields, followed by their disciples and ever fleeing them, so that London throws out round her concentric rings of authors, each ring seeking to avoid, as Villiers de l'Isle Adam said of the romantic Red Indian, not the dangers but the banalities of civilization. There must be something in all this. The affected man, with one eye on the drawing-rooms of the rich and the other on his royalty accounts, may wear uncomfortable clothes or inconveniently suppress his natural likings in food or drink; but he will not, if he really like picture-palaces and trams, separate himself from them by a hundred miles of rail and prohibitive fares. And his readers and equally those who do not read him follow him into the country whenever an opportunity offers. The week-end habit is

one of the most remarkable features of modern life. There must be some powerful reason which draws the mammoth stockbroker and the leviathan newspaper owner from the Empire and the Ritz.

It is a platitude, of course, if one says that modern civilization produces nerves. But, like all platitudes on civilization, it gains in force if the attempt be made to apply it to ancient times. Greece and Rome knew nothing about nerves; neither had they the true week-end habit. The Roman senator proceeded periodically with pomp to his country villa; and when he was there he was there for some time. He could no more conceive the hurried bolt of Saturday, the placid sluggishness of Sunday, and the dismal return of Monday than he could imagine an electric tram. This is a serious matter which has escaped the attention of the sociologists who complacently examine and adjudicate upon the fall of Empires. The pace of modern life-the tube, the tram, the lift, the cinema, are factors which materially complicate the problem of civilization. Add to this the incomparable and incurable dirtiness of the air in modern towns, and you have the causes which drive men into the country. Mr. W. H. Davies writes with little elegance but much point: The City has black spit,

The City's breath is stale. And then:

The Country has sweet breath, The Country's spit is white. This is quite true; but how long has it been true? It would have meant little enough to Herrick or Catullus or Aristophanes. They, if they fled at all, fled from the enemy of their mental quiet, from society; but we have a powerful motive to flee a concrete danger to our health. The growth of

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England, none of the parts that are peculiarly England, is not tamed, disciplined and made comely by the work of man. You may walk mile after mile, day after day, without ever being out of sight of his traces. hedge may be untrimmed, but a man drew it in a straight line. The road may be half fallen away and altogether overgrown, but roads do not come of themselves. The bank of the stream may be infinitely lonely at all hours, but men modeled the stream out of a swamp or a torrent. In the loneliest part of the South Downs you are likely at any moment to come across a stone barn or a belled sheep; or, if neither of these, at least an earthwork guarding the straight path just under the crest of the hills. The Mendips have even notice-boards to warn off trespassers on the barren heather.

It is in this humanity of the countryside that nowadays we find its beauty. We have rejected the rather sterile and rather pretentious cult of the late eighteenth century for wild nature. We like fields with hedges, we like tracks and paths, streams with tended banks, well-kept woods with rides cut through them. There is no sight in the world more depressing than a neglected wood. We are not now on the whole a prey to that call

of the wild which still devastates some popular novelists. We have reconIciled the love of Nature with the love of man; and we refuse to believe that, where every prospect pleases man can be wholly vile.

Agriculture, they say, is still numerically the greatest of British industries. Reflection on this gives one a queer feeling of comfort that, in going into the country, one is not altogether a reactionary who has fled from important events. The great industry has made the country (in our special sense) what it is and is constantly maintaining it. The peasant or the farm-laborer is still-in spite of motor-ploughs-a hand-worker, and this gives him his perpetual interest in his work, with its variety of tasks and his genuine though dumb love for it. We seldom hear a townsman speak as proudly of his factory as a farm-laborer of the soil which he tills for a wage. The countryman is engaged in partnership with living things; he finds his land companionable and makes a work of art of it. Hence he has his shrewdness and his kindliness; he feels with the things he handles. There can be few who have not thrilled at Marty South's words in The Woodlanders, when she says of the trees she is helping to plant, that so soon as they are set upright in the earth they begin to whisper with their leaves, as though they knew that their troubles were beginning. Her saying is very like Mr. Hardy, to be sure, but it is not at all unlike a country girl. The countryman's whole world is alive and he feels towards it emotions of living friendliness. Waste is something more to him than an economic fact; it is an insult to Nature. Mr. Joseph Campbell grasped very well the feeling of the peasant when he wrote:

The silence of unlabored fields Lies like a judgment on the air.

These lines reveal the deep force which dwells in the country-a reserve force which manifests itself less often in words than in manual labor.

Manual labor, of course, is prescribed as a cure for nerves. But it is not in this alone that the contentment of the countryman lies, or the fascination of his toil and its results for the mind-driven townsman. There are manual workers enough in factories, handling machines and manufactured articles and depending every day for livelihood on the quickness of hand or wrist. It is the countryman's perpetual manipulation of a living thing so as to make and keep it sweet and docile that attracts us. His work is essentially that of an artist. His hedge is his own creation, and there is no more enjoyable work in the world than that of trimming a hedge. There is also no more beautiful thing in the world than a hedge of some length, which follows the undulations of the ground and which is trimmed well and with proper regard to the different sorts of tree in it. In those parts of the country, such as the Cotswolds, where they prefer stone walls, the landscape has perhaps a bleaker and less amiable appearance; but these walls are extremely beautiful, and it must be a great pleasure either to build or to repair them. A wall of loose stones is by no means the easy matter that it The New Statesman.

looks, and the men whom one sees busy with them at the roadside have an artist's air of absorption and consideration.

There is, again, an immediate connection between even the underpaid agricultural worker and the result of his work. The young men whom one can see incredibly making blouses on sewing-machines in the East End will never wear one of those blouses; it is not likely that they will even walk out with a young woman who does. But the farm laborer

Working stooped amid the golden

ears,

Or taking the sweet apples from the boughs

And laying them by rows in country lofts

-knows that he will presently eat some of what he is handling. His work is real to him in a sense rarely experienced by the factory or the brain worker. This is not to say that these unfortunates should immediately plunge into the country and buy farms; they would find their work then only too cruelly real. But it goes some way towards explaining the spirit that fills the cultivated lands of England, and towards explaining the genuine desire of modern men to look for refreshment, at least for a little while, out of their hurried and grimy towns.

OFF LENS.

The happy woods, fields and meadows roll into one another for miles and miles, stretching their greenness to the blue sky and smiling to the wooing sun; the car seems to be conscious of the universal joy and bounds madly on like a deer intoxicated by the Spring breezes; the sun, the speed, and every now and then the dust raised by a procession of lorries,

are too much for your eyes and thoughts, and you shut your eyes, opening them only when a whiff of bagpipe lyricism searching your innermost being makes you feel that it is all true and that the Highlanders marching past the harsh-eyed German road-menders are not a dream; that the black sphinxes you see squatting on the horizon must be the dross-hills

and ventilating machines of BullyGrenay, and that the grand scene you are seeking cannot be far.

No warning is given you. Suddenly the car is toiling up a solitary road between the comfortable houses of a large village, with a high-shouldered church and a château with indented gables on your right; and in one moment you realize that war has been here, that the château, church and houses may be standing, but the swearing rage of artillery has shattered their windows, roofs and partitions, making life a burden for the inhabitants until nobody has felt like facing the morrow except an old man feeding a few chickens and, at the edge of the wood, an invisible woman who advertises in imperfect English that she takes in washing.

Past the village rises a woody upland showing here and there on its sunny slopes crumbling trenches or rusty wires; there are shell holes, too, in plenty, but the trees have not been hit hard, and Nature is fast making her losses good. The road alone, unhelped by plant or man, is beyond repair; so much so that, at a crossing near the ridgeway, your guide decides that the car had better go down a valley you see to your right, and you proceed on foot.

In a few minutes you are clear of the wood, and you find yourself on the broad green back of a hill with other hills in the hazy distance. "Where are we?" "Why! Notre-Dame de Lorette! the ruins you see over there are those of Mont Saint-Eloy, and the hill in front of us is the Vimy Ridge."

Cannon is booming all round, but the strong breeze brews its sounds, and they melt in a dull, deep swell, so continuous that in a few moments it is not noticed any more, and the great names you have just heard fill your ears to the exclusion of anything else. The calmness of the summer morning

is too complete to admit of any recollections in strong opposition to it: Notre-Dame de Lorette and Vimy are the titles of sanguinary chapters in the history of the War it is true, but just now they are only sacred names bearing their significance in themselves; their solemnity is undisturbed by imaginations of mad scrambling or horrible slaughter. Your guide and yourself are alone on the grassy plateau, and wherever you look not another human being is to be seen; the white road down below meanders in full view for miles, but you see nobody go up or down it; there are no sounds of distant cartings, no ploughman's song rising from a field, but the swallows chase one another in frantic joy and a buffoon of a crow tries his awkward somersault a hundred times over, as if this were a verdant Cornwall district and the booming were only the seas playing along the cliff. The ruins of Ablain-Saint-Nazaire church which you gradually see rising above the lip at your right is so beautiful: the white arches, flamboyant windows, and tall tower recall so much the happy wanderings of other years, that war seems an absurd dream, and the awe you are conscious of has every now and then to be explained to yourself.

Yet there are shell holes every twenty steps, and wires trail among the dandelions, and old trenches zigzag everywhere in indescribable confusion. You come to another trench which evidently is still used, and after following this a few minutes you hear a muffled murmur of conversation somewhere, which as you listen suggests Edinburgh Castle and quaint talks with its custodian; and in fact you soon find yourself in an underground observation post listening to the telephoning of two Scotch artillery men. You look out at the slits on which daisies have decided to bloom, and you see war at last. Between where you

are and the hills where Angres and Liévin display their red brick houses flaming in the light, great chalky slopes curve away from you; and there in rapid succession and at unexpected spots English guns flash, so quickly that the light is more a gleam than a lightning. Just beneath you German shells send up their black cloud, generally at settled intervals, every now and then in batches of five or six, pretending to be very clever and to take everybody by surprise. "He is very angry today, sir," explains one of the Scottish voices, while the officer who accompanies me announces that we shall see shells bursting in that identical spot all day, as "he may be methodical, but he has no imagination."

Methodical or not, imaginative or not, the Boche is nowhere to be seen. The Lens chimneys are smoking, but strain your eyes as you will through the field-glass you see no trace of life in either Angres or Liévin: the scorching sun alone has the range of the red streets and of the gardens outside; nothing stirs along the straight roads which I see on the other side of the Vimy ridge stretching towards once familiar villages; and there are no indications of any sort of activity between the sheets of water beside Swallow's Wood and the houses of Lens. Yet the enemy is there, he must be there; and when you ramble into the open and are told that "he sees you," you entertain no doubt that this is true. But modern warfare is carried on in solitude interrupted only by terrible encounters, and the strange tension of which one is conscious in the air through which shells and aero

The New Witness.

planes and luminous messages and electric waves travel unceasingly is as terrible as anything one ever saw from the towers of a fortress.

Later in the day my guide and I tumbled on a battalion of Canadians snugly accommodated behind a spur where no eye can see, no shell can find them. There, on a narrow space but securely and happily, they lived the busy life which fills the days of soldiers when they are neither watching nor marching.

I was under the spell which one domineering consciousness will frequently lay upon our minds, and enjoying that unique feeling of solitude which I had begun to cherish several hours before; but how grateful I was for meeting those men! how delightedly I exchanged the selfish pleasure I had found in the poetry of solitude and destruction for admiration of the brave souls I was introduced to! As you must seek the monk in his cloister and the artist in his studio, you must seek the soldier where he has just fought and expects soon to fight again. There will you hear simple speeches which can show you life and the world as you used to see them before words, gestures, and the multitudinous deceit of social existence made an accompaniment of falseness to them. There will you realize that it is better to be in danger of losing one's life than of losing one's soul. I have read most of the great books and listened to several men who have left great names. Beautiful thoughts and beautiful words have not left upon me the impression which the ungrammatical English or the quaint French of these soldiers created. Ernest Dimnet.

BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE.

Food is probably the most serious subject that can be considered by an

Englishman, and far be it from us to treat the matter lightly. In the days

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