MR. R. KIPLING ON VILLAGE LIFE IN AMERICA.

IN the wonderful dullness to which the literary world has been reduced, a dullness almost inexplicable even by the dearth of news which has now for some months prevailed, a letter like Mr. Rudyard Kipling's to the Times, reporting on the things he saw in a Vermont village, is a literary luxury. It is given to few to include in a narrative of less than two columns, an ineffaceable description of an entire society, yet say nothing which would not appear most natural and simple in the letter of a travelling acquaintance ; but his acCount has a value far beyond that of any purely literary enjoyment it may yield. It is a report by one of the most keen-sighted of mankind—a man who has really understood the East as well as the West,.A.sia as well as Europe, Indian soldiers as much as London roughs—upon a subject which, to all who care about the future of rural humanity, is of surpassing interest. No account of the villagers of North America, however long-drawn, ever wearies men who care for their kind, if only it be truthful, for in every such account they catch glimpses of the future which is in store for European democracies. The great experiment of demo-

cracy rooted in the soil has been tried in New England under the most favourable circumstances, such as may be reproduced elsewhere but can hardly be exceeded. The race which has been its subject is the English one, the most hopeful, upon the whole, that the world has produced; and it has lived under the condition which best develops its virtues, the training of a century and a half in Puritan opinions. The people throughout that period have been cultivated as well as it is at all probable that modern democracy will be; they have been as free and as self-governed as it is possible for institutions to make them ; and though their soil is not kindly, they have enjoyed more opportunity

of comfort than the mass of the population of Europe, who are set so thick upon the ground, can ever hope to obtain. There may be many more gracious climates, but it is simply impossible for the agricultural popula- tion of Europe, as a huge corporation, to be better off, more intelligent, or better trained in the manlier virtues than the population of New England; and what is the total result ? By the consent of a hundred observers, many of them, like Bayard Taylor, possessed of rare powers of sympathy, and others, like Miss Wilkins, with microscopic eyes, it is a singu- larly disappointing one. The New England freeholder is

described by all with one consent as a man with some strong beliefs and some sterling virtues, full of industry, patience, and endurance, thrifty as a Scotchman, self-helpful as any of Mr. Smiles's subjects, and with a deep, unshakeable regard for wife and child, and home and all the domesticities. And yet withal he is a mean man, full of haxdnesses, immersed in sordid cares, inquisitive to a positive vice, censorious to a degree, narrow beyond conception, and as a rule non-receptive, so far as quickness is concerned, and unintelligent. He is, moreover,

on the whole, unhappy, worn with care to a degree unknown in Europe, where his rival is often below care, being too little

conscious of his position, and—a most curious point, which we have never seen explained, but which is never omitted in any careful description of him—a victim to those depressing forms of ill-health, an incurable dyspepsia being the most prominent of them, which on this side of the water we asso- ciate with over-refinement in living. His women are better, because more intellectual, and gentler in the way of compas- sion and sympathy for suffering ; but even more inquisitive, even more censorious, and overloaded with still heavier cares, and with work so unceasing and so heavy that the constitution breaks under it, and the happy girl of nineteen is at forty- five thin, acidulated, bent, and in all but years an aged woman, whose very religion is to her a tribulation, and her virtues burdens to be borne because they are acceptable to God. That is the universal and most melancholy picture penetrating a whole literature; and we regret to find that Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a new observer who has seen the miseries of so many and such various peoples, and retained his own cheerfulness through all, confirms the accuracy of the portrait.

The families of rural Vermont, most New English of all States, dwell in little wooden houses, painted white, whence they emerge to perform never-ending tasks, and to find their sole interest in incessant watching of their neighbours :—

"Winter life on a farm does not mean the comparative idleness *hat is so much written of. Each hour seems to have its sixty minutes of work ; for the cattle are housed, and eat eternally ; the colts must be turned out for their drink, and the ice broken for them if necessary; then ice must be stored for summer use ; and then the real work of hauling logs for firewood begins. New England depends for its fuel on the woods. The trees are 'blazed' in the autumn just before the fall of the leaf, felled later, cut into four-foot lengths, and, as soon as the friendly snow makes sledging possible, drawn down to the woodhouse. Afterwards the needs of the farm can be attended to, and a farm, like an arch, is never at rest."

Sometimes in such villages there is a scarcity of men :—

" The men have gone away—the young me n are fighting for fortune further West, and the women remain—remain for ever, as women must. On the farms, when the children depart, the old man and the old woman strive to hold things together without help, and the woman's portion is work and monotony. Sometimes she goes mad to an extent which appreciably affects statistics and is put down in census reports. More often, let us hope, she only dies. In the villages where the necessity for heavy work is not so urgent, the women find consolation in the formation of literary clubs and circles, and so gather to themselves a great deal of wisdom in their own way. That way is not altogether lovely. They desire facts, and the knowledge that they are at a certain page in a German or Italian book before a certain time, or that they have read the proper books in a proper way. At any rate, they have something to do that seems OA if they were doing some-

thing. It has been said that the New England stories are cramped and narrow. Even a far-off view of the iron-bound life whence they are drawn justifies the author. You can carve a nut in a thousand different ways, by reason of the hardness of the shell."

The "talk of the men is of their farms, purchase, mort- gage, and sale, recorded rights, batmdary.lines, and the road-tax ; " and the conversation of both sexes, of their neighbours, especially those who are a little better off.

"With strangers, more particularly if they do not buy their groceries in the street,' which means, and is, the town, the town has little to do ; but it knows everything, and much more also, that goes on among them. Their dresses, their cattle, their views, the manners of their children, their manner towards their servants, and every other conceivable thing, is reported, digested, discussed, and rediscussed up and down Main Street." There is no real prosperity for the farmers, no sense of ease or repose, only a bare maintenance for most, extracted by toil out of the land, and sometimes not even that ; for Mr. Kipling found on the other side of the Green Mountains "some finished chapters of pitiful stories,—a few score abandoned farms, started in a lean land, held fiercely so long as there was any one to work them, and then left on the hill-sides." There are no landlords here, it will be remem- bered; no taxes, save what the people themselves impose ; no class-privileges, no inequalities, save those, such as the inequali- ties of health and intelligence, which are established by a power beyond man's control. And the life in this Vermont village is the life of the twenty million freeholders of America, the last product of the freest civilisation, planted on unrented laud; for the Western village differs only from the Eastern one in this, that the land is not so exhausted by perpetual culture, and yields a more generous return. There is, too, from other climatic conditions, in places better health; but the toil is everywhere, the anxiety everywhere, so that it has modified the national face, and everywhere, too, is that interest in each other's affairs which is the sure mark of the absence of intel- lectual distractions. It seems to us, with all its equality and independence and citizenship, a sordid, unlovely life; yet it is born among a great race out of conditions in most respects favourable, which tend, with our modern "progress," to re- produce themselves all over Europe. Much of it, too, seems to us inevitably born. Granted a Teuton people which does not drink wine; which has to maintain itself on patches of land, and is therefore overworked; which has nothing interest- ing around it except its neighbours ; and which cannot, from racial qualities, free itself either of censorious intolerance or of an uneasy sense of responsibility; which has no true leisure, no ease, and no indifference; which requires of all women all indoor work, and leaves to them exclusively the rearing and early training of the race,—and there can be but the people whom Mr. Rudyard Kipling in his artistic hintings depicts. Are they so much better off than the Europeans, with their infinite varieties of condition, their long ladders of grades, their habits of easy, and in some countries thriftless, carelessneess of the morrow ? It is doubt- ful at least, and yet Americans have reached the level to which European toilers look up as to the land of Beulah.

It will be said that the cure must be sought in more leisure and deeper intellectual interests, and wider farms to possess ; but whence are these pleasant things to be obtained ? The artisan may work shorter hours ; but the freeholder, if he uses that privilege, will have a shorter crop ; and, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling puts it, a farm even in winter, like an arch, is never at rest; there is always a thrust from one side or the other, and if there is no yielding, the structure breaks. In no country of the world, not even where the soil, as in California, "if you tickle it with a hoe, laughs

with a harvest," is there ever leisure for the agriculturist who has to live upon its produce. It is work for him every day and always, till he dies. No law can alter the laws of Nature, or compel the earth unploughed to yield a profitable crop. As for intellectual interests, they attract but a per- centage of mankind, and that per-centage is least among the tillers of the ground, whose frames, exhausted with the day's

labour, cease in the immense majority of cases to provide stimulus for the brain. The experience of Cornell University showed clearly that, except among an exceptional few, real labour with the hands and real culture are incompatible.

There will be hundreds of Hugh Millers in all countries ; but millions, no. Nor will the patches to be cultivated be greatly enlarged, for human strength is not to be increased

any more than human stature, and a man can only pace over, let alone cultivate, a sadly limited number of acres, hardly more than sufficient to give him bread. Assistance he must not hire, for if he does, there at once reappear the relations of master and servant, the strongest forma of inequality. The freeholding agriculturist must remain lonely save for family help,—a feature, we may add, in rural American life which, as regards all men over twenty-five, has struck all acute observers. The middle-aged men live alone save for their families, work alone, see no society, and meet, in truth, only outside the church-door. But there is combination, that most blessed of all weapons P Yes, there is combination—that principle so gracious, and so fearfully exacting of inequality—in all other trades ; but has it never struck you as strange that if com- bination could be applied to agriculture,—combination we mean among equals,—it never has been; that for four thousand years the human race has elected in all countries, places, and circumstances, to prefer lonely labour on the soil ; that in this very America, with its wise people, heirs of all the ages, and its unrented soil, each freeholder works an independent unit by himself, and has for his first desire rigid avoidance of combined action P The means of , combination do, it is true, exist in one place in perfection; but the Russian " Mir " is agriculturally an utter failure, and the peasant who is subject to it works for himself and by himself as completely as if he were a Vermont farmer or a Suffolk holder of an allotment. Human nature is so consti- tuted, that the freeholder will hardly combine with others even for irrigation or drainage, and whenever combination is indispensable, he places himself always, on some pretext or another, under some sort of overlord. The peasant-life is the life to which all modern changes tend, and what that life is we may see in all the literature of New England, which Mr. Rudyard Kipling now endorses as accurately descriptive. It may be a noble life, for what we know, and certainly it should produce manliness; but gladness and leisure, and freedom from care, and exemption from interest in gossip, are as absent from it as they are from life in the most feudal English or Austrian village. Man is, in fact, pursuing an ideal against which Nature has pronounced her eternal " No !" He wants to eat without toiling over-hard; and Earth, though she smiles on him, has ridicule latent beneath the sweetness of her smile. She knows, though he does not, how irresistible the orders are.