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Title: In a Green Shade A Country Commentary

Author: Maurice Hewlett

Release Date: March 29, 2005 [EBook #15495]

Language: English

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In a Green Shade.

A Country Commentary.

By Maurice Hewlett.

         London
    G. Bell and Sons
         1920

G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, LONDON, W.C. 2.

NOTE

All of these Essays, with two exceptions, have been published periodically. All, without exception, have been revised and corrected. My thanks for hospitality afforded to them en route are due to the Westminster Gazette, Daily News, and Daily Chronicle; to the New Statesman; to the Cornhill Magazine, Fortnightly Review, Anglo-French Review, and London Mercury.

BROADCHALKE, 22 Jan. 1920.

CONTENTS

                               PAGE
  NOTE v
  ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE ix
  CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY 1
  A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT 6
  DORIAN MODES 11
  CHURCH AND THE MAN 16
  BESSY MOORE 20
  THE MAIDS 31
  POETRY AND THE MODE 35
  POLYOLBION 45
  THE WELTER 50
  CATNACHERY 54
  LANDNAMA 60
  "WORKS AND DAYS" 64
  THE ENGLISH HESIOD 72
  FLOWER OF THE FIELD 83
  UNDER THE HARVEST MOON 87
  LA PETITE PERSONNE 91
  A FOOL OF QUALITY 99
  SHERIDAN AS MANIAC 105
  A FOOTNOTE TO COLERIDGE 119
  THE CRYSTAL VASE 132
  NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ 147
  SKELETONS AT A FEAST 151
  A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER 156
  THE COMMEMORATION 164
  THE QUAKER EIRENICON 168

IN A GREEN SHADE

ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE

The title has become equivocal, since there are more green shades in employment now than were dreamed of by Andrew Marvell. Science is a great maker of homophones, without respect for the poets. There is, for instance, the demilune of lined buckram borne by the weak-eyed on their foreheads, the phylactery of the have-beens—I lay myself open to be believed a cripple, or to look an old fool. A vivacious reviewer in Punch's "Booking Office," will have a vision of me as a babbling elder peering at society from below a green pent. However—I must risk it. It says exactly what I mean; and what I have written I have written.

The point is that, having worked hard for a good many years, I can now consider my latter end under conditions favourable to leisurely and extended thought, sometimes in a garden made, if rightly made, in my own image, sometimes in a house which was built aforetime, in a day when men wrought for posterity as well as for themselves. In such seed-plots it is impossible that one's thoughts should not take colour as they rise. Whithersoever I look I see as much permanency as is good for any sojourner upon earth; I see embodied tradition, respect for Nature's laws, attention to beauty, subservience to use; all this within doors. Outside, the trees, the flowers are my calendar; the birds chime the hours; periodically the church-bell calls the travellers home. Between all these friendly monitors it is hard if one cannot keep the mean. If the passing-bell tempts me to moralise overmuch I may turn to the creatures, and learn to live for the moment. I should be slow to confess how much worldly wisdom I have won from what we choose to call the lower orders of creation, because nobody willingly betrays the whereabouts of his buried treasure, or the amount of it. Mr. Pepys, I remember, forgot both on a certain occasion, and had a devil of a time until he recovered his hoard. But my wealth was not made with hands, or not with my hands.

My house is fortunately placed, too, in the village street, so that I am in touch with my neighbours and their daily concerns, which I make mine so far as they are pleased to allow it. I am aware of them all day long by half a hundred signs; I know the trot of their horses, the horns of their motor-cars—that shows that there are not too many of them—the voices of their children, the death-shrieks of their pigs, the barking of their dogs. Not a day passes but one or other is in, to have some paper signed, to air a grievance, or to ask advice. The vicar and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say, each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to other people. Nor—unless you are a fool—can you be strict with your categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance in this village of five hundred souls. "I have now been in Italy two days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I know my Italians pretty well!" When he had been there two years he knew better.

If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly, leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes, either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I hope I have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have, as we say now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None. I want people to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the Trade Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me. I have my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and England, and am convinced that only through the first will the other two thrive. I want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want men to have work and women to have children. Any check on production, Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me. As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr. Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years' experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget it. If there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this tormented earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an insufficient reason for hating them in sæcula