BOOKS OF THE DAY

American Georgics (D. W. Brogan) .. .. 24 The Knowledge of God (Canon J. K. Mozley) . . 25 Poverty and Population (Honor Croome) .. .. 25 Alexander of Jugoslavia (Archibald Lyall) .. 26 Medieval Panorama (C. V. Wedgwood) .. .. 26 Enemies of Promise (Geoffrey Grigson) .. .. 27 Portrait of a Chef (Sylva Norman) ..

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Mr. Heath Robinson and Others (Anthony Powell)

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Champions of the Ring (John Crow) ..

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Whites and Aborigines (A. B. V. Drew)

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Current Literature ..

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The January Magazines , .

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AMERICAN GEORGICS

By D. W. BROGAN

"O fortimatos nimium, sua si bona norint, Agricolas." HITHERTO, the tag has always seemed rather irritating, because of the implication that Virgil and Maecenas and all the other urban preachers of the delights of rural life knew better than the farmers what was good for them. Why shouldn't the farmers know their own business best ? Sua si bona norint indeed ? Yet it has been possible for a holder of these views to read with pleasure and profit a book half of whose theme is the unsuspected joys of farming (unsuspected in many cases by the farmers) and a good deal of the other half is a series of cracks at urban life, politics, manners and ideals. Indeed the modern world has given fresh life to Virgil, for Mr. Smart is a stout anti-fascist and, if not a pacifist, at any rate an anti-militarist ; yet today Hinc mover Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum.

But in Ross County, war in Europe and war in the orient are both far away. The first reason why Mr. Smart's defence of the joys and rewards of farming dogs not arouse the customary irritation is that he is frank about his own limita- tions as a farmer. It is not only that he admits that he knew little four years ago and that he has not learned as much as he should have done if he was to make up for the lost years when he was learning about books and prints and boys instead of about bulls and rams and roosters and their mates. But he knows how far he still is from being what Americans call " a real dirt farmer." The farm that he works doesn't keep him and, even with the resources of his other inherited farm that he lets on a metayer tenancy to that admirable master of the rural arts, Mr. Kincaid, he has to have other resources, in this case the profits of writing. He and his wife are willing to go without many things that they had, including a bathroom ; they miss a lot, including horse- riding, music and the arts in general ; they are willing to work hard at dirty jobs that have to be done every day—and still, like the Jones boys, they can't make the damned thing pay. But they are getting nearer that ideal by the application of the principle—cut down your wants that have to be paid for and use as much of your own products as you can. Don't be a one-crop farmer, don't indeed be a cash farmer. Once you start computing your cash income, whether from eggs or wool, your books are going to look as unhealthy as if you were a big New York house a jump ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. and Mrs. Smart have become better buyers of sheep and sellers of wool and beef, even when they don't rely on knowledgeable and kindly friends to save them from the wiles of dying owners of worthless sheep who recover speedily when the bargain is off, even without the trip to California which its being on might have paid for ! The neighbours and the members of the Farm Bureau are beginning to forget that they are merely city people coming back to land they happened to inherit. Yet it still seems doubtful if the Smart farm is going to pay its way. So Mr. Smart is not giving aid and comfort to the Americans, who believe, as a great Chicago corporation lawyer told this reviewer in 1934, that the only solution of America's troubles is to get millions of people back on the land on " subsistence farms." That, if they only knew it, was what was good for them. Sua si bona norint, in fact, which said, the lawyer was driven off to his Sabine farm in Lake Forest. Farming is a skilled trade and it is more important for America to make the world safe for the people who really know their business on the land, a white Kincaid or a black James, than to make it profitable for retired schoolmasters like Mr. Smart or other modern representatives

The Adventure of an American Farm. By Charles Allen Smart. (Oxford University Press. 8s. 6d.)

of Virgil, Horace, Goldsmith and the Neo-Agrarians. But though it would be wasteful for Mr. Wallace and the Depart- ment of Agriculture to think mainly in terms of the Smarts, it would be a mistake to neglect them altogether. For the Smarts often bring in a little money and a willingness to try new things, both of which the real farmer often lacks. In their own moderately competent way, the bourgeois amateur farmer is useful, as that shrewd peasant, Emile Guillaumin, has admitted. When he has got through with his failures and half-successes, the professionals can use the results. But the Smarts can do more than that. Virgil knew the importance of the cultivation of the rural gods ; some of them (Bacchus and even Pan) are cultivated enough, even in Ohio, but Apollo is neglected. The American countryside is from that point of view rather dull. Mr. Smart shows his good sense in disliking that synthetic legendary figure Paul Bunyan and in thinking kindly of the legendary Johnny Appleseed, who carried apple-seed in his pocket and swept over the West " Planting the trees that would march and train On, in his name to the great Pacific, Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane."

But the " days of President Washington " are long past and the modern Ohio farmer has not that pride in the achievement of his fathers that you find in Minnesota and the Dakotas. There were giants in his earth too, but they have been a long time dead. Mr. Smart laments the decline in cultural independence of the local town, Chillicothe. Its own life is dried up by the increasing urbanisation of the country ; it is near enough Columbus and Cleveland and even New York, and yet not near enough to have acquired urban tolerance. So an amateur performance of scenes from Waiting for Lefty awakens murmurs not only from that tiresome body the American Legion, but from the mysterious " Americaneers." Chillicothe, indeed, seems to be full of the traditional old ladies from Dubuque who perform for America the functions of our Lord Chamberlain's office. Mr. Smart hopes, not unreasonably, that " immigrant " farmers of his type, now members in good standing of the Farm Bureau, may do some good. And in return ? Well you don't find it necessary to get drunk as often as you did before you became a farmer. For, in modem America, if people don't get drunk any oftener than they do here, they are more candid about it. Then you get a sense of doing something useful. Mr. Smart is not stupid enough to think that writing a book isn't work, but he has his doubts about the vast mechan- ism of selling and buying bits of paper that was and is the work of so many intelligent Americans—and may not be, for long, if the machine slows down.

For the British reader it is perhaps a pity that the American title R.F.D. was changed, for it would have suggested some- thing of the novelty of this life. Here we have the federal government, a few years ago so aloof, replacing or improving the sanitary work of the local Lemuel Putt. Here we have described the difficulties of keeping warm and alive at 20 below zero. We can note, too, the absence of 'such, familiar landmarks as the parson and the squire. There is a real social democracy in this society, even though there is considerable economic inequality, and not everybody is really on visiting terms with everybody else, not merely because there are inherited feuds, but because there are barriers of differeni experience. After all Mr. Smart has, in his time, read both Mr. Eliot and the Boston Evening Transcript. R.F.D. does not preach panacea and does not even quite reassure us about the future of Mr. Kincaid, even if the floods don't wash the farm away. But English readers will learn a great deal about a side of American life that is little known here or, for that matter, in America, except of course to the thirty millions who live it.