A Cotswold Miscellany
Wold Without End. By H. J. Massingham. (Cobden.
Sanderson. 10s. 6d.)
Ma. MASSINGHAM'S new book fits into no'ready-made category: It is not topography, nature study, archaeology, science, belles-leUrea, or autobiography, but a blend of all these things: There are suggestions in it, as there are scattered personal memories, of W. H. Hudson ; and we are reminded most of all, perhaps, of Richard Jeffcries' The Story of My Heart. But even such comparisons do injustice to Mr. Massingham, who.4e range or interest and knowledge is singularly varied, and whose temperament is so individual and so informs every line which he writes that his objective treatment of a theme is almost as selfrevealing as the many actual intimacies which besprinkle his pages. Here is a brave, sensitive, passionately sincere huntan document—a type of book too rare in these days when most authors write with an eye on some definite literary market rather than to satisfy their own inmost needs.
"All the best things in life come by not looking for them," and Mr. Massingham discovered the Cotswold country by accident. He found in its continuity of landscape and history the .ideal balm not only for a sick body, but for a mind dis- traught by personal anxieties and poignantly conscious of its alicuage in our modern world, with its almost complete divorce between man and Nature. Mr. Massingham settled in Cotswold for a year. He came to know with loving familiarity its trees and birds, its churches, barns and barrows, and its incom- parable limestone villages, of which he places Campden at the head of the list, and Broadway, where " a sophisticated anti- quity is side by side with a shoddy modernism," at the bottom. Ile is persuaded that the ultimate secret of Cotswold, " and the bond of union between all its differences of natural and man- made particularities, emanates from the limestone itself, the bones of the land." It is unlike any other limestone in colour, texture, and plasticity, and in its responsiveness to light. Mr. Massingham found himself equally in love with the Cotswold natives, to whose fellowship in inn parlours he was, after pre- liminary suspicion, cordially admitted. Some breezy stories in dialect enliven his twelve chapters, each devoted to a month of the year ; and he has much to say about the Cotswold language—" the only one known to me which preserves in a living matrix what is left of our Renaissance heritage and ' the tongue that Shakespeare spake."l From description Mr. Massingham passes by easy transitions to reflection, front reflection to aneedotage, and from anec- dotage to those deep wells of tradition in which alone he sees any hope for the future. Though seldom the deliberate moralist in this book, with its fine imaginative prose, be makes many sly assaults upon the biological fallacies of the nineteenth century, with its insistence on man's separateness front Nature and the inevitable law of competition. His whole volume is an implicit challenge to the idea that a year spent in Cotswold is an escape from modern problems. Man has flouted Nature, to whom he belongs ; and Nature, which always has the last word, will compel him to return. " Euro- pean civilization trembles on the edge of self-destruction ; our economic and industrial system approaches its collapse. But while shove ha'penny goes on in the pubs of Cotswold, there seems to be a nodal point of stability in human affairs." '
GILBERT THOMAS.
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