Marginal Comments LAMENT FOR HAY
By JAN STRUTHER TO protest against the progress of science is not only a mark .of approaching middle-age but a waste of breath. It will, whatever one says, continue its forward march, and on the whole it does more good than harm : but just occasionally, when one sees its relentless foot about to descend upon some flower a little more lovely than the rest, one May'permit oneself the luxury of a lament.
" Hay-Making," one readS, " is doomed. Chemists have discoVered .that..it is an extremely wasteful method of conserving summer's herbage for winter use. It causes serious loss of protein and a wholesale destruction of vitamines and carotene. It will be supplanted in the future by accurate chemical methods such as silage."
The heart sinks. To those of us, at any-rate, who live in temperate regions, a world without hay is unthinkable, so intimately is the stuff bound up with our li'ves, our language and our literature. In childhood, it is one of the three most treasured substances which nature provides for our delight. Sand is wonderful, but palls ; snow' is superb, but unreliable ; hay is perfect : for it appears without fail every year, yet never lasts long enough for us to exhaust its possibilities as a plaything --thus giving us, in those few ecstatic picnics between cutting and carting; our first lesson in the proper.apprecia- tion of the transient.
'In later life, for the most part,' we are not likely to have so much tactual experience of hay ; but, we lean over gates to look at it, sniff nostalgically, and take a genuine if uninformed interest in whether, this year, it is early or late. Even when out of season it is often in our minds and on our lips. We advise our friends to make it while the sun shines and beseech our children not to make it in the drawing-room ; we talk about looking for a needle in a bundle of it, and then some pedant says it ought to be " bottle," and soon everybody is writing letters about it in The Times.
The poets would be lost without it. Apart from the . fact that it has seventy-six possible rhymes, it is one of the oldest and most powerful emotive symbols. Nothing more easily induces in the reader a mood of gay serenity than the mention of hay, especially if it is new-mown. The .old ballad-writers knew this ; so did Shakespeare, Thomson, Tennyson and a score of others ; even the collaborative turners-out of modern dance-lyrics perform, with an air of discovery; the ancient trick. • But it was Thomas Hood, that profound add flippant' poet, who hit the nail most squarely on the head. When he wrote, in Miss Kilmansegg's Courtship, "Oh, there's nothing in life like making love,
save making hay in fine weather "
he not only used the charm but gave us an inkling of why it works. A world without hay-making would be almost as bad as a world without love-making : and indeed there is more than a verbal resemblance between the two activities. The one is the crown of life as the other is the crown of the year ; each represents a crest, a cream, a pinnacle of almost unbearable loveliness. In each, the making is of more beauty and significance than the thing made ; their ultimate aims—the preservation of thq human race, the winter maintenance of cattle-7-do not vex the minds of lovers and haymakers : the moment's perfection is enough, the sun and the sweetness, the time- honoured and leisurely ritual of their craft. And though science may one day find a means of doing without both of them, it is doubtful whether, in a world of silo-towers and state-controlled ectogenesis, life will be quite so well worth living.
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