Anthologies with a similar title to this are far from
uncom- mon, but Mr. 'Adrian Bell's The Open Air (Faber and Faber, 7s. ad.), sub-titled An Anthology of English Country Life, is in a class by itself. As readers of Corduroy and Cherry Tree know, Mr. Bell is a true countryman, and in choosing his authors he has wisely ignored the tra-la-la school of ruralists. He leads us up the country lane, not the garden path. His method is original. Instead of making a random collection of extracts, he has carefully arranged his material in chapters to be read consecutively, his aim being " to catch some glint of the genius of the country in an oblique, perhaps the only way." The authors' names do not appear in the text, but only in the index. They include writers of all periods and countries. D. H. Lawrence follows Wordsworth (strange but fitting con- trast), Shakespeare (not Under the Greenwood Tree but Henry VI) lies on the same page as C. E. Montague ; Ruskin accompanies Sir William Beach Thomas, a passage from Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbondrye is near one from Chardonne, and Tolstoy rounds the book off. Skilfully weaving these diverse threads together, Mr. Bell produces the pattern of the countryman's life, a pattern which is slowly but surely fading. At the centre he has rightly placed the country labourer, who seems, as Mr. Bell remarks in his introduction, "the embodi- ment of the constant fatalistic thread of our history . . . ", whose " power of quietness . . . was born of the earliest arts of life, of the inherited intuitive knowledge of the best way to live within the framework of natural law." Every aspect of his life is pictured and interpreted in this excellent book.
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