TEE NEW AND THE OLD VIEW OF RURAL LIFE.
IT is a striking thought, and curiously suggestive of the un- suspected possibilities of human development, to remember that all those pathetic and picturesque associations which to a modern eye encircle the life of rural toil, as the clematis or fioneysuckle clings to the cottage wall, are exclusively modern. To the Greek, the life of leisure was the only life ; he had but one word for labour and sorrow. To work was the hard necessity of the slave; the freeman, unless he were an artist, undertook willingly only the labours that looked for their goal in the circus at Olympia, or else those that were to equip him for battle. War and the Games,—these were the only objects worth exertion to a citizen of Athens or Sparta. Rome took a step forward ; we owe to the Latin tongue the word "in- dustry," translatable into Greek only by cumbrous and little- used paraphrases (" love-of-work " the writer who wants it has to say, which is exactly what it is not). And a Greek treatise .on country work familiar only to scholars, when imitated by a Latin, appears as a poem full of grace and beauty that should be familiar to all readers. But a comparison of the first Georgic with any modern poem, while it shows, indeed, how full was Virgil's mind of sympathy with the coming age, as well as of reverence for the past, shows us also how curiously little that human interest which for us clings so closely to all farm-life, was present to the poet who has set farm-life to music. The only human interest is found in glimpses of work that might go on just as well at Rome as at Mantua; we catch snatches of song from the farmer's wife as she plys the 4‘
noisy" shuttle; we see the weary girls stop in their lamp-lit work to note the thief in the wick, and remark to each other on very weak evidence, we should say) that there will be rain to-morrow. But the labours of the farm itself bring in nothing of all the imagery that rises to the eye of the modern whenever he sees a plough or a wheatsheaf. Virgil looks at the plough, and notes with satisfaction that the share will soon be polished in the furrows, and that is all he has to say about it. The Georgics were written to win interest from the sword to the plough; they gather up, we must presume, all the associations that it brought to a poet finely fashioned both by Nature and experience to enter into the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, of the peasant ; full of sympathy for the pious, simple life "of patient-working, little- craving men." And yet, as he looks at the plough, he sees only the thing. The personal element is uninteresting to him, and if to him, how much more to an average Roman ! Turn now to an anonymous modern poem, written apparently to vindicate even for the weaker sex the strengthening and exhilarating influence of outdoor work, and look at this charming sketch :—
" Well can our Dorothy plough—as a girl, she learnt it and loved it; Leading the teams, at first, follow'd by master himself; Then, when she grew to the height and the strength of a mus- cular woman, Grasping the stilts in her pride, driving the mighty machine. Ah, what a joy for her, at early morn, in the springtime,
Driving from hedge to hedge furrows as straight is a line ! Seeing the crisp brown earth, like waves at the bow of a vessel, Rise, curl over, and fall, under the thrust of the share; Orderly falling and still, its edges all creamy and crumbling, But, on the sloping side, polish'd and purple as steel ; Till all the field, she thought, looked bright as the bars of that gridiron In the great window at church, over the gentlefolks' pew : And evermore, as she strode, she has cheerful companions behind her; Rooks and smaller birds, following after her plough ;
And, ere the ridges were done, there was gossamer woven above them, Gossamer dewy and white, shining like foam on the sea."* There we have, in one line from Virgil, and sixteen from a writer who would probably be much surprised at finding him- self in company with Virgil, but who on this particular point seems to us to excel him as much in quality as quantity, the comparative interest of ancient and modern thought, in the oldest and the most necessary form of the labour by which • Dorothy: a Country Story, in Elegiac Verse. London : Sega* Pad and Co. 1880. men earn their daily bread. Classic life affords no tradition of interest in the work of the plough ; mythology, indeed, is busy with it; but all daily associations with manual labour call up the hateful life of servitude, and allusions to it are marked by a certain dullness of perception even when they would fain be persuasive and sympathetic. The modern, on the other hand, sees these manual labours through the eyes of many a painter and many a poet, and when he would describe them, images of picturesque beauty rise to his eyes unbidden.
It is almost impossible to believe that the human race can ever again make such a step into realms unknown before, as that which revealed to humanity the value of work. The full revelation is of yesterday. Chivalric knows almost as little as does classic life of any industrial interest ; media-val civilisa- tion is nearer to Homer than it is to our own time. We may say of the whole period which began with the establishment of Christianity and ended with the French Revolution, that the most salient differences dividing mankind were those which could be expressed in rival creeds. Men felt, in those ages, that the most important thing was to believe, and all action, in com- parison, was thrown into the shade. To make the world accept or refuse doctrines, was a motive that stirred the mightiest wars the world has known ; and although the civilisation which had adjusted itself to this assumption was gradually undermined, yet when that Revolution broke oat which was finally to shatter it, it had still strength to make a vigorous resistance. It was the workers of the world who uprose against the dominion of the older spirit, and the triumph of the newer has been marked by an increasing deference for work that at the hour we write pervades all literature and all thought, and much talk which cannot be reckoned with either. Many causes have co-operated with this result. The French Revolution marks the birth of steam and the transformation of industry. Land and sea alike bear the impress of our industrial achieve- ment ; we dart above tall masts, through granite Alps ; and if our civilisation should perish, the record of these achieve- ments would in part remain to tell travellers from new seats of civilisation what had been achieved by the race that had lost the world's primacy. Our own generation is in no danger of undervaluing the claims and the interests of a life of toil. We are in more danger of forgetting the prejudices generated and the truths hidden by the experience of such a life. It is not faith, but industry in partnership with science which in our day has said to the mountains, "Be ye removed, and cast into the sea," and which has been obeyed by them. So impressive is the triumph of work in the material world, so feeble in comparison the effect of belief, even when most sincere and even profound, that it is not felt extravagant to make activity take the place of con- viction; and the latest expression of our new democracy is a proposal to supersede all creeds by a practical programme, and to convert the Christian Church into "an unsectarian association for doing good." What is doing good, and what harm ? seems a question of insignificant detail, in face of the impatient eagerness of the new spirit to be doing something.
The Gospel of Work has had its prophet. A thinker not long gone from us gathers up and expresses in vivid and picturesque words this distinctive doctrine of the modern world ; he preaches with burning eloquence the dignity of that vocation which Plato despised. Carlyle remembered with pride his father's thorough and honest masonry ; he would teach the child upon his knee to hear with interest how the shoemaker's toil had been put in requisition to cover the little feet, and the narrative in later years was remembered like a fairy-tale. If we remove this faith in work, it is hard to say what message inspires the fervour which thrilled and awed his audience only a generation ago. He was the only great man that ever lived, pro- bably, who, in the neighbourhood of the greatest issues that can divide mankind in matters of belief, left no sign of adherence either way, and took up a position of neutrality that in former days was possible only to the indifferent or superficial. He was born amid all the stir of the Revolution which will always be associated with his name, however completely his stormy sketch of it may be set aside as a mere history : he lived to see the principles of that Revolution develop into directions where his sympathies deserted them, or rather, where they appeared in an inverted form as the strongest antipathies. But throughout all his long life, his reverence for industry appears as a golden thread, binding in one continuous whole the varied and not always consistent aspirations of a rich,
ragged nature, bringing many of the peasant's prejudices to match the peasant's sturdy independence, and showing some of the lacunes found in the richest culture when nothing in it is hereditary except industry and earnestness. If sometimes his reverence for work passed into a mere admiration of power, perhaps the most dangerous of all forms of admiration, it never wholly lost sight of his original demand that all efficiency shall be constructive,—that the mere energy of de- struction, so much the most apparent and obvious as it is, shall go for nothing. "Do the duty that lieth nearest to thee," trite maxim as it seems on our page, was on his an inspiring and awakening message, chronicled in many a heart as the herald of new hopes and fertile aspirations. Would that his spirit might return to earth, to preach his lesson anew to men who seem to have forgotten all in it that is stern and bracing, who remember only his concessions to the law-breaker, and forget his reverence for the law that binds Nature and Man in one harmonious whole, setting labour as the price of achievement, and endurance as the root of that fortitude without which every other virtue is fugitive and vain !
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