News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest<br />Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance by William Morris (english novels to improve english .txt) 📖

a quiet pony and ride about there on a sunny afternoon of autumn, and look over the river and the craft passing up and down, and on to Shooters’ Hill and the Kentish uplands, and then turn round to the wide green sea of the Essex marsh-land, with the great domed line of the sky, and the sun shining down in one flood of peaceful light over the long distance.  There is a place called Canning’s Town, and further out, Silvertown, where the pleasant meadows are at their pleasantest: doubtless they were once slums, and wretched enough.”

The names grated on my ear, but I could not explain why to him.  So I said: “And south of the river, what is it like?”

He said: “You would find it much the same as the land about Hammersmith.  North, again, the land runs up high, and there is an agreeable and well-built town called Hampstead, which fitly ends London on that side.  It looks down on the north-western end of the forest you passed through.”

I smiled.  “So much for what was once London,” said I.  “Now tell me about the other towns of the country.”

He said: “As to the big murky places which were once, as we know, the centres of manufacture, they have, like the brick and mortar desert of London, disappeared; only, since they were centres of nothing but ‘manufacture,’ and served no purpose but that of the gambling market, they have left less signs of their existence than London.  Of course, the great change in the use of mechanical force made this an easy matter, and some approach to their break-up as centres would probably have taken place, even if we had not changed our habits so much: but they being such as they were, no sacrifice would have seemed too great a price to pay for getting rid of the ‘manufacturing districts,’ as they used to be called.  For the rest, whatever coal or mineral we need is brought to grass and sent whither it is needed with as little as possible of dirt, confusion, and the distressing of quiet people’s lives.  One is tempted to believe from what one has read of the condition of those districts in the nineteenth century, that those who had them under their power worried, befouled, and degraded men out of malice prepense: but it was not so; like the mis-education of which we were talking just now, it came of their dreadful poverty.  They were obliged to put up with everything, and even pretend that they liked it; whereas we can now deal with things reasonably, and refuse to be saddled with what we do not want.”

I confess I was not sorry to cut short with a question his glorifications of the age he lived in.  Said I: “How about the smaller towns?  I suppose you have swept those away entirely?”

“No, no,” said he, “it hasn’t gone that way.  On the contrary, there has been but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns.  Their suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the general country, and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres: but there are the towns still with their streets and squares and market-places; so that it is by means of these smaller towns that we of to-day can get some kind of idea of what the towns of the older world were like;—I mean to say at their best.”

“Take Oxford, for instance,” said I.

“Yes,” said he, “I suppose Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth century.  At present it has the great interest of still preserving a great mass of pre-commercial building, and is a very beautiful place, yet there are many towns which have become scarcely less beautiful.”

Said I: “In passing, may I ask if it is still a place of learning?”

“Still?” said he, smiling.  “Well, it has reverted to some of its best traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its nineteenth-century position.  It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past.  Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial.  They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise.  The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a mediæval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, the bores of society.  They were laughed at, despised—and paid.  Which last was what they aimed at.”

Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgments.  Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that.  But I must admit that they were mostly prigs, and that they were commercial.  I said aloud, though more to myself than to Hammond, “Well, how could they be better than the age that made them?”

“True,” he said, “but their pretensions were higher.”

“Were they?” said I, smiling.

“You drive me from corner to corner,” said he, smiling in turn.  “Let me say at least that they were a poor sequence to the aspirations of Oxford of ‘the barbarous Middle Ages.’”

“Yes, that will do,” said I.

“Also,” said Hammond, “what I have been saying of them is true in the main.  But ask on!”

I said: “We have heard about London and the manufacturing districts and the ordinary towns: how about the villages?”

Said Hammond: “You must know that toward the end of the nineteenth century the villages were almost destroyed, unless where they became mere adjuncts to the manufacturing districts, or formed a sort of minor manufacturing districts themselves.  Houses were allowed to fall into decay and actual ruin; trees were cut down for the sake of the few shillings which the poor sticks would fetch; the building became inexpressibly mean and hideous.  Labour was scarce; but wages fell nevertheless.  All the small country arts of life which once added to the little pleasures of country people were lost.  The country produce which passed through the hands of the husbandmen never got so far as their mouths.  Incredible shabbiness and niggardly pinching reigned over the fields and acres which, in spite of the rude and careless husbandry of the times, were so kind and bountiful.  Had you any inkling of all this?”

“I have heard that it was so,” said I “but what followed?”

“The change,” said Hammond, “which in these matters took place very early in our epoch, was most strangely rapid.  People flocked into the country villages, and, so to say, flung themselves upon the freed land like a wild beast upon his prey; and in a very little time the villages of England were more populous than they had been since the fourteenth century, and were still growing fast.  Of course, this invasion of the country was awkward to deal with, and would have created much misery, if the folk had still been under the bondage of class monopoly.  But as it was, things soon righted themselves.  People found out what they were fit for, and gave up attempting to push themselves into occupations in which they must needs fail.  The town invaded the country; but the invaders, like the warlike invaders of early days, yielded to the influence of their surroundings, and became country people; and in their turn, as they became more numerous than the townsmen, influenced them also; so that the difference between town and country grew less and less; and it was indeed this world of the country vivified by the thought and briskness of town-bred folk which has produced that happy and leisurely but eager life of which you have had a first taste.  Again I say, many blunders were made, but we have had time to set them right.  Much was left for the men of my earlier life to deal with.  The crude ideas of the first half of the twentieth century, when men were still oppressed by the fear of poverty, and did not look enough to the present pleasure of ordinary daily life, spoilt a great deal of what the commercial age had left us of external beauty: and I admit that it was but slowly that men recovered from the injuries that they inflicted on themselves even after they became free.  But slowly as the recovery came, it did come; and the more you see of us, the clearer it will be to you that we are happy.  That we live amidst beauty without any fear of becoming effeminate; that we have plenty to do, and on the whole enjoy doing it.  What more can we ask of life?”

He paused, as if he were seeking for words with which to express his thought.  Then he said:

“This is how we stand.  England was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes, with a few towns interspersed, which were fortresses for the feudal army, markets for the folk, gathering places for the craftsmen.  It then became a country of huge and foul workshops and fouler gambling-dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops.  It is now a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty.  For, indeed, we should be too much ashamed of ourselves if we allowed the making of goods, even on a large scale, to carry with it the appearance, even, of desolation and misery.  Why, my friend, those housewives we were talking of just now would teach us better than that.”

Said I: “This side of your change is certainly for the better.  But though I shall soon see some of these villages, tell me in a word or two what they are like, just to prepare me.”

“Perhaps,” said he, “you have seen a tolerable picture of these villages as they were before the end of the nineteenth century.  Such things exist.”

“I have seen several of such pictures,” said I.

“Well,” said Hammond, “our villages are something like the best of such places, with the church or mote-house of the neighbours for their chief building.  Only note that there are no tokens of poverty about them: no tumble-down picturesque; which, to tell you the truth, the artist usually availed himself of to veil his incapacity for drawing architecture.  Such things do not please us, even when they indicate no misery.  Like the mediævals, we like everything trim and clean, and orderly and bright; as people always do when they have any sense of architectural power; because then they know that they can have what they want, and they won’t stand any nonsense from Nature in their dealings with her.”

“Besides the villages, are there any scattered country houses?” said I.

“Yes, plenty,” said Hammond; “in fact, except in the wastes and forests and amongst the sand-hills (like Hindhead in Surrey), it is not easy to be out of sight of a house; and where the houses are thinly scattered they run large, and are more like the old colleges than ordinary houses as they used to be.  That is done for the sake of society, for a good many people can dwell in such houses, as the country dwellers are not necessarily husbandmen; though they almost all help in such work at times.  The life that goes on in these big dwellings in the country is very pleasant, especially as some of the most studious men of our time live in them, and altogether there is a great variety of mind and mood to be found in them which brightens and quickens the society there.”

“I am rather surprised,” said I, “by all this, for it seems to me that after all the country must be tolerably populous.”

“Certainly,” said he; “the population is pretty much the same as it was at the end of the nineteenth century; we have spread it, that is all.  Of course, also, we have helped to populate other countries—where we were wanted and were called for.”

Said I: “One thing, it seems to me, does not go with your word of ‘garden’ for the country.  You have spoken of wastes and forests, and I myself have seen the beginning of your Middlesex and Essex forest.  Why do you keep such things in a garden? and isn’t it very wasteful to do so?”

“My friend,” he said, “we like these pieces of wild nature, and can afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to the forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and sons’ sons will do the like.  As to the land being a garden, I have heard that they used to have shrubberies and rockeries in gardens once; and though I might not like the artificial ones, I