THE CHANGING COUNTRYSIDE.
IN these records of the countryside a reader often feels a sad sense of the past. It is not the usual sweet melancholy of retrospection. That is personal, and the cause of some of the noblest passages in literature ; it concerns but the writer in the first place, and never anybody else unless his art is good enough to evoke sympathetic emotion. But in these books it is the sense of a common loss, and no great art is needed to express it, for it is no less than the change from one England to another. Even in the book on the Hebrides—and we might have expected those remote rocks to stand eternally—we come upon the story of an exodus to Canada from the Western isles, with a photo. graph of a great liner anchored off an islet to show that this is no minor migration, but that those isles are now essentially different.
Mr. Fortescue writes of his native Devon. We knew that Devon, though, not from his high place in it, of course, and not with his knowledge. The reality of his Devon is now rather like the hut-circles on Dartmoor, those relics which show what once was there. The very atmosphere of Devon has changed, and in but a short time. That corner of the county, fir instance, which includes Hartland, until the coming of the explosive engine was much as it was when Stephen Hawker knew it. It was not easy to reach. A traveller had to make his own way west of Bideford. Try to find that immemorial country this summer, if you can stand the dust of an endless chain of touring eharabancs I Where a few years ago were old inns where leisure could be found,- and Sospitality and- plenty, the cars are parked.
The roads run with grease, the inn orchards are trampled bare, and the folk have no time to attend to anyone except the tourists from the North and the Midlands, who are in a desperate hurry ; and the tourists stand about gossiping in groups, waiting to go on, with their backs turned to Devon, about which they seem to care nothing except that it is a place to be " done." And the local traditions, too, are dispersing on the aromatic wings of petrol. Devon is quickly merging into the rest of England, and soon will be indis tinguishable, except by a gallon or two of spirit, according to distance, from Surrey. We do not complain of all this, but simply point it out in gratitude to the Devon County Council, which proposes to spend several millions on more roads for more cars.
The motor engine has changed even the bearing of the country folk. They have been further afield, and they have found other outlooks on life. It has been the means of altering their dialect till in a few years it will be the same as Cockney. Wonderful stuff, petrol ! There are Devon characters, reported to us by Mr. Fortescue, so rich that their clashes, in the hands of Tchekov, would have made the best of drama. Consider Mr. Fortescue's- story of the " White Witch to Scratton I " All the material is there. But do not look for such people to-day, for the villagers have got to know the cities as well as they know the fields. The dairymaid on a Sunday, in speech and dress, might have just run down to her native village for a week-end rest from her place in the chorus of the Hilarity. If variety is the spice of life, then the spirit of petroleum is resolving us to a nice democratic level with but one taste in common, the same kind of dress, the same speech, and- about as much feeling for locality as could be found in the Hotel Cecil. As for Mr. Fortescue's family butler, who would write to one- of the boys at school as "Honoured Sir," and among whose treasures, when he died, was found a very neat packet containing the letters that the boys wrote to him from school (including the epitaphs on two of his dogs), where to-day should we find so simple-hearted a henchman ?
It is a relief to turn to Mr. Douglas Gordon's red-deer, otters, foxes, owls, and roedeer, perhaps because he so delights in wild life that his quiet enthusiasm is communicated ; for Mr. Gordon is even prepared, when the hounds have lost their quarry, and though he knows where it is, to look on and say nothing. He has a code of his own in such affairs, and it is amusing to watch him working it out in his story when the dogs are pretty close to the roebuck but are at fault. They are not his dogs, you see. The truth is,-his sympathy, except when he himself is hard.on the trail, is with the hunted. When he is not part of the show, but happens to know where the otter is breathing while the hounds are splashing about near we know that the otter has a friend who will not fail. And Mr. Gordon has had some extraordinary hick. On Exmoor, one day, he actually witnessed a battle to the death between two harts. But we think the best chapter is on. the Tawny Owl. We regret that he decided that he could not feed-the young one he captured, for if he had he would have discoVered a good deal more about that highly intelligent-and humorous fowl, and his story would have been longer. He need not have worried, over the problem of feeding it. It can be done with a blow-pipe and milk, and there is no need, of course, to pinion such a sapient bird any more than one need butter a cat's feet.
For Mr. E. L. Grant Watson's rural diary, written in the South of-England, we must confess to less sympathy than for the records of stoats and things. It concerns nature, it is true, but made complex with fond philosophy in an abstract style seldom lighted by an image. Yet to those who care for Richard Jefferies, Mr. Watson's book can be safely commended.
We have a complaint to make over Mr. Seton Gordon's volume, but it does not concern him. It is addressed to his publishers. We assumed, when first handling this book, that from its look it was a prize for good• boys. It is fatted-up as though to make plain the generosity of a kind uncle. Its paper is heavy and hard, its type of the variety associated with prizes, and in fact it seems not what it is. It is a most interesting book, though extended into too many little paragraphs. It is a record by a naturalist of the life of the Hebrides which many, beside good boys, will find attractive
Previous page
