Country Moods and Tenses

by Edith Olivier

  When a London visitor arrives in a country garden, the first thing he says is nearly always, “How quiet it is”. Yet it is only in the depths of winter that there is ever complete silence in the country. And then only for short intervals. A concert is always in progress, and Pan is an inexorable conductor. His music is so continuous that to an ear accustomed to the unco-ordinated clashes and bangs of the mechanised world of towns, this eternal succession of melting sounds is so peaceful that it seems to be no sound at all.

  Some notes detach themselves from the perpetual flow. The bold song of a robin cuts clear against the white stillness of the snow. A startled pheasant crows harshly in the night, or a cow moans for a calf which was taken to market on the previous day. But except for these episodic notes, the visitor from the great world revels in the quiet of the country, and he only gradually learns that this precious silence is composed of living sounds.

  The main reason why country noises combine to create the country quiet is that the whole of nature responds unfailingly to the conductor’s baton. The music of the year follows a preordained programme, and it is a lovely thing to listen for this, as one by one the separate items follow each other in a perfectly planned sequence.

  The first thrushes sing while the robin is still master of the music. Their strong clear notes begin before the new year, and then slowly the chorus gathers. The birds conscientiously keep St. Valentine’s Day, and after their mating, their nuptial songs gradually mount up to the full symphonies of late spring. There is nothing in Nature to equal the joyousness which fills the hours between three and five on a May morning, and these harmonies seem to be quite fortuitous. Birds are the most independent of beings. Each goes his own way, apparently with no attempt at composing a harmony. That is Pan’s part. The singers merely obey the baton. And they appear with complete punctuality to throw their separate motifs into the orchestra. The migrants arrive in the New Forest with a regularity rivalling the Atlantic Clipper. Punctual as a roundabout, the Wiltshire cuckoo arrives at Downton Fair, to support the local superstition that he has been asleep under the hurdle stacks all the winter and was released by the men when they prepared for the Fair. The nightingale arrives in my part of the world in the last days of April, though Cowper declares he once heard one on New Year’s Day. Sometimes the weather checks his song on his first few nights in this country, but whenever he begins to sing, he flies away at his appointed time, abandoning the evenings to the corncrake and the nightjar. And so the birds’ chorus closes down, and what is called the midsummer silence falls upon the country. But this is no silence at all. As the birds end their songs, the insects begin. Already there has been a night in May when a sudden rush of clumsy and sticky cockchafers has bumped through the night colliding with everything in their path. Now the bees fill the lime avenues with their long sustained chord, and the air is full of the hum of nameless insects. Mosquitoes tune their shrill little violins. Wasps moan on their violas, to the pizzicato accompaniment of thousands of grasshoppers. In the late summer the ring doves never cease to coo, and as the autumn grows, the water birds cry and the foxes bark, while from the kennels comes the musical response of the hounds.

  This harmonious unity which completes itself in the circle of the year, comes from Nature’s obedience to those laws which she cannot know, but instinctively obeys. Wild birds and animals appear to be completely free. Hares play in circles and hold their boxing matches in the spring. Squirrels run along the boughs of the trees to peep saucily round the trunks, just as the whim takes them. Swallows dart along the stream, swooping down upon the invisible insects which are playing spontaneous and erratic games just above the water level. Flights of swans swing over the wide spaces of sky, filling the air with the heavy rhythmic thud of their wings. Ducks and drakes swoop down on to the river in a swift and shallow glide which leaves a long, gleaming wash behind them. All of these seem to be gaily wilful, and yet the longer one watches the birds and beasts and insects, the more one understands that theirs is the Imperative Mood. As Robert Bridges wrote:

  Ther is a young black ousel, now building her nest

  Under the rosemary on the wall …

  Could we discourse together, and were I to ask

  for-why

  She is making such pother with thatt rubbishy straw,

  Her answer would be surely: “I know not, but I

  MUST”.

  The Imperative is then the natural mood of the animal world; and the reason why one’s friends’ pet animals are often such unmitigated bores is that they have been taken out of this mood to which they belong. Animals prefer the Imperative, and owners of pets should understand this. It is a mistake to imagine that all country dwellers must possess a dog or two. Many country houses are too small to contain them, or to give the animals the illusion that they can roam about freely as if in the open air. The little villas with garden gates opening upon the main road merely give the unfortunate animals a false appearance of liberty which is only too likely to end under the wheels of a lorry. There is a widespread superstition that all Englishmen and women naturally understand dogs, but this is quite a fallacy. The gift for dog-management is a rare one, handed down for generations in some families, and never learnt at all in others. No one without it should think of owning a dog.

  Keepers possess this gift, and shepherds. But then their dogs are given genuine canine careers. They have their responsible positions in the world. They carry out their duties under a discipline which they understand, and which they in turn know how to exercise. This is a fine life; and no one can say that of the life of a dog which lives in its basket, is exercised on a chain, and runs into the garden for ten minutes every evening before its owner goes to bed.

  Of recent years the trend of English life (and, indeed, life in most countries) seems to be moving away from the world in which dogs can find a natural place. When I was a child I never saw a dog being taken for a walk on a chain. Now you seldom see a dog off one. No wonder they often bark and yap. Foxes bark at night, and that sound is full of the romance of a witch-haunted world, but a captive dog has no beauty in his voice: he has lost his inheritance.

  Blake, whose love for animals was profoundly imaginative, knew that prison is the one curse from which they should be saved.

  A robin redbreast in a cage

  Puts all Heaven in a rage.

  A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons

  Shudders hell through all its regions.

  A dog starved at his master’s gate

  Predicts the ruin of the State.

  A horse misused upon the road

  Calls to Heaven for human blood.

  Each outcry of the hunted hare

  A fibre from the brain does tear.

  A skylark wounded in the wing

  A cherubim does cease to sing.

  The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight

  Does the rising sun affright.

  Every wolf’s and lion’s howl

  Raises from hell a human soul.

  The wild deer, wandering here and there,

  Keeps the human soul from care.

  The bleat, the bark, bellow and roar

  Are waves that beat on Heaven’s shore.

  The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile

  Make lame philosophy to smile.

  If I was not afraid of being accused of impiety, I should like to add to these another couplet. This may be considered to be what Chaucer called “ Rym dogerel”, but it will he none the less appropriate for that. Here it is:

  A puppy dog upon a chain

  Fills all the Angel Host with pain.

  The farmers’ flocks and herds appear to fit into Nature’s plan in spite of their captive condition. This is because, although removed from the laws of their wild state, they have submitted to a new Imperative. Their lives are adapted to another freedom, within bounds so wide that they are not observed.

  There is complete peace in living on a dairy farm, and watching the cows move a
cross the fields in the morning after milking. They seem to be unaware of the meadow palings, which nevertheless confine them. They stroll; they graze; they lie down; they chew the cud; they act as if they know they are part of the plan of the Universe.

  It is the same with a flock of sheep. Sometimes, when sitting in a quiet country spot, the stillness of the day becomes remotely vocal. For a while the sounds—if sounds they be—are so distant that they cannot be picked out from the silence around. Slowly they come nearer. They form themselves into a wide, confused indefinite murmur which gradually becomes the bleating of a flock of sheep upon the road. They approach in a mounting crescendo; and as they get near it is revealed that the musicians are playing a concerto with the sheep-dog in the solo part, for now his anthoritative bark asserts itself, dominating the chorus. The flock has arrived. The sheep’s voices rise as near to fortissimo as is possible while they pass: then they move away—diminuendo—into the distance, there slowly to die altogether.

  THE THIRD MOOD

  INDICATIVE

  1 Road-Books and Milestones

  THE INDICATIVE IS AN ESSENTIAL MOOD IN THE COUNTRY, where travellers are for ever asking the way. It is, however, a Mood possessing distinct tenses, and its Past, Present and Future are very different. Until about 1850, the main indicators were road-books and milestones. Then came a period of signposts, signal boxes, and again road-books. And the Present holds no road indicators at all. This matters less than might be expected, for people are travelling less, and as so few contemporary journeys are being made, this study of the Indicative Mood in the country shall begin in the Past.

  In the Middle Ages, the traveller in Europe (or even in England if he went beyond his own county) had to be an adventurous fellow indeed. Morrison, who published one of the earliest roadbooks, tells his readers that they should certainly make their wills before leaving home; and one of his first bits of practical advice is an instruction on the different technique of duelling in each European country. He tells the traveller that he will meet with more thieves in England than anywhere else; but he adds this encouraging postscript: “Having taken purses by the Highway, they seldom or never kill those they rob. All private men pursue them from village to village with hue and cry”.

  Before the days of the Tudors there was no organised public travel in this country. Men going from one part of England to another had to rely on their own feet or on those of their beasts; and they must find their own way. Journeys were purely utilitarian, undertaken either for purposes of trade, or on pilgrimage, or on family business. The early road-books traced the course of long roads traversing the country from end to end. They indicated the whereabouts of good inns, noticed the dates of fairs and market days; and, for the benefit of those who were visiting friends in distant counties, they also gave the names of the owners of country seats on either side of the road. This last has given an unexpected value to these early road-books. As they went through many editions, and were published and republished over periods which included some centuries, they are often the only means of tracing the successive owners of the smaller country houses in many a county.

  Leland’s, first published in 1535, is the earliest extant road-book. The writer had travelled personally on every road he described and his book is full of vivid individual touches. Riding out of Banbury he remembers that, as he passed the Castle, he saw “In the Utter, a terrible prison for Convict men’’; while two centuries before the Woods replanned the city, Bath must have been romantic rather than classical. Leland specially remembers the church built by the physician John of Tours. “He was buried in the Presbyterie thereof, whose image I saw lying there, at which time all the church he made lay to waste, and weeds grew about this John of Tours’ Sepulchre.’’

  It was the later Tudors who instituted the system of posts—an organised service of King’s Messengers riding swiftly about the country, bearing Royal Proclamations and other official documents. At distances which varied from 10 to 20 miles, there was a post office, where the messenger left his mount and acquired a fresh one. This secured a speed which 300 years ago was considered magic. After a time the posts were used for the passage of other than official letters and soon the whole service was thrown open to private travellers. They left home on their own horses and exchanged them at the first post for those provided. A century later there was a fresh advance in the organisation. Post-chaises and mail coaches appeared, and these made it possible for family parties to travel together. From that time onwards there appeared a succession of guide books, written for the benefit of people who now began to travel for pleasure—to enjoy the beauties of the country, and to visit its great houses or its provincial centres.

  These guides are, of course, now useless for their original purpose; but they still make the most lively and reliable guides for anyone who wishes to make a journey into the manners and customs of those remote, urbane and deliberate days. Their heyday was between 1750 and 1830, for by then enough people were travelling to create a demand; and yet travel was not so general as to make a class of cosmopolitan travellers who had been about so much that they knew what to expect, and who were too blasé to be surprised by the manners of other men. Nor had enough people begun to travel to impose upon society everywhere a general standard of social etiquette. So though these guides began by showing the way to reach a place, their most important vocation was to instruct the visitor as to his behaviour after his arrival. This is what makes them so amusing to-day.

  I have a small collection of these old guides, the earliest of which is Les Délices de la Grande Bretagne, published in 1707 for the benefit of travellers from France. It is in seven small and portable leather-bound volumes, and is illustrated by charming steel engravings—buildings, garden plans, academic dresses and so on. It is dedicated to Queen Anne; “as to whom could be offered more fitly the delights of Great Britain and Ireland than to your Majesty, herself the first and chief of the delights of this flourishing kingdom”. Among the other and lesser delights are Oxford and Cambridge Dons, and all the members of both Houses of Parliament.

  We all know the look of a modern station bookstall with its motley collection of coloured paper-bound books and magazines, to while away the tedium of a railway journey in these days of universal education. In the Guide des etrangers en faisant le tour des villes de Londres et de Westminster, published in 1763, a page of advertisements tells us what was considered likely to be the popular reading for the travellers of the day.

  These are some of the books which absorbed the attention of ladies and gentlemen in the early years of George the Second’s reign, as they drove about the country in their post-chaises:

  The Matrimonial Preceptor.

  The Whole Duty of Prayer (necessary for all Families).

  The Complete Tything Table (proper for all Vestries,

  Clergymen and Gentlemen’s Halls).

  A Vindication of Providence, in which the Passions are

  considered in a new light.

  The Court and City Register, containing Lists of both Houses

  of Parl’t, Royal Households, Foreign Kings and Princes, Army

  and Navy Lists, Lord Mayor, Alderman, and Common Council.

  2/9 with Almanack, 2/- without. Moral Tales, or Dreams of

  Men Awake, 5/-.

  The Genuine Trial at Bar between James Angelsey, Esq.,

  Plaintiff, and the Rt. Hon’ble Richard Earl of Angelsey, for

  that title and estate. 5/-.

  Travels through England, giving an account of all the Curiosities in a concise manner. By Mr. Thomas Thumb. 1/6.

  History of England with prints of the Kings in Armour. 2/6.

  Milton’s Essay on Education. 6d.

  Acalou and Zirphile, an entertaining French Novel. 1/-.

  Thoughts on Dreaming. 1/6.

  The Vindication of Providence sounds rather an arid topic to occupy the hours of a long journey; but it is given piquancy by the new light which it promises to throw on the pas
sions; and the case between Lord Angelsey and his kinsman must have had a more topical interest for the English aristocrat than the most entertaining French novel. The Matrimonial Preceptor and the Moral Tales could either be taken seriously or with a tongue in the cheek; and the Court and City Register would find its place as a bedside book when the journey was over. The prices are surprisingly low for a time when all the printing was hand printing, and when the editions could not have been large.

  Travelling in the eighteenth century was not really expensive. A post-horse cost 3d. a mile, but the traveller was obliged to hire two, one for the man who came in charge, and this man expected a tip at the end of his stage, which might be anything from ten to twenty miles. A post-chaise cost 9d. a mile, and a coach could be hired at the surprisingly low rate, of ten shillings a day, or 1/6 for the first hour and a shilling afterwards. If hired by distance the charge was 1 1/2 miles for a shilling. Turnpike fees were 1d. per horseman, and 6d. for a coach and six. “The prices are for going and coming back the same day, a ticket being given for that purpose, which you must never fail of taking.” If a London coachman, chairman or waterman was found overcharging he was fined 40/-, half of which went to the poor-box and half to the informer—an incentive for blackmail.

  Towards the end of the century it became fashionable to make day tours in various parts of the country. Travellers might drive in a day through the Lake Country or the Isle of Thanet, and guides were provided for these journeys. Passengers who toured round the Isle of Wight learnt many little details about the owners of the houses which they passed on the way. There was “Fairy Hill”, for instance, “ the delightful abode of Mrs. Glyn, sister of Sir William Oglander’’; and another quiet residence was the “ Priory”, the property of Mr. Answell, “ who married the daughter of a late proprietor”. After these demure county homes, “ Sundown Cottage” came as a shock. This was said to be “the villakyn of the late Mr. Wilkes”, an eccentric figure who antagonised his country neighbours by wearing his London clothes in the Island. “ The bag, the blue and gold, or the full dress of scarlet were his constant and unalterable drapery.” Though his hospitality and benevolence were admitted, the obliquity of his politics, the licentiousness of his private life and the abominable profligacy of his publications were the very opposite of chaste simplicity. Everything was overdone and gawdy: “but this licentious creature, by the end of his life, considered himself a volcano burnt out”, so that he became a warning, rather than a danger to the young people on the Island.