Villages

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Title:     Villages
Author: Arthur C. Benson [More Titles by Benson]

I wonder if any human being has ever expended as much sincere and unrequited love upon the little pastoral villages about Cambridge as I have. No one ever seems to me to take the smallest interest in them or to know them apart or to remember where they are. It is true that it takes a very faithful lover to distinguish instantly and impeccably between Histon, Hinxton, Hauxton, Harston, and Harlton; but to me they have all of them a perfectly distinct quality, and make a series of charming little pastoral pictures in the mind. Who shall justly and perfectly assess the beautiful claims of Great and Little Eversden? I doubt if any inhabitant of Cambridge but myself and one friend of mine, a good man and true, could do it. Yet it is as pleasant to have a connoisseurship in villages as to have a connoisseurship in wines or cigars, though it is not so regarded.

What is the charm of them? That I cannot say. It is a mystery, like the charm of all sweet things; and further, what is the meaning of love for an inanimate thing, with no individuality, no personality, no power of returning love? The charm of love is that one discerns some spirit making signals back. "I like you to be here, I trust you, I am glad to be with you, I wish to give you something, to increase your joy, as mine is increased." That, or something like that, is what one reads in the eyes and faces and gestures of those whom one dares to love. One would otherwise be sadly and mournfully alone if one could not come across the traces of something, some one whose heart leaps up and whose pulse quickens at the proximity of comrade and friend and lover. But even so there is always the thought of the parting ahead, when, after the sharing of joy, each has to go on his way alone.

Then, one may love animals; but that is a very strange love, for the man and the animal cannot understand each other. The dog may be a true and faithful comrade, and there really is nothing in the world more wonderful than the trustful love of a dog for a man. One may love a horse, I suppose, though the horse is a foolish creature at best; one may have a sober friendship with a cat, though a cat does little more than tolerate one; and a bird can be a merry little playfellow: but the terror of wild animals for men has something rather dreadful about it, because it stands for many centuries of cruel wrong-doing.

And one may love, too, with a wistful sort of love the works of men, pictures, music, statues; but that, I think, is because one discerns a human figure at the end of a vista--a figure hurrying away through the ages, but whom one feels one could have loved had time and place only allowed.

But when it comes to loving trees and flowers, streams and hills, buildings and fields, what is it that happens? I have a perfectly distinct feeling about these little villages hereabouts. Some are to me like courteous strangers, some like dull and indifferent people, some like pleasant, genial folk whom I am mildly pleased to see; but with some I have a real and devoted friendship. I like visiting them, and if I cannot visit them, I think of them; when I am far away the thought of them comes across me, and I am glad to think of them waiting there for me, nestling under their hill, the smoke going up above the apple-orchards.

One or two of them are particularly beloved because I visited them first thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, and the thought of the old days and the old friendships springs up again like a sweet and far-off fragrance when I enter them. Yet I do not know any of the people who live in these villages, though by dint of going there often there are a few people by whom I am recognised and saluted.

But let me take one village in particular, and I will not name it, because one ought not to publish the names of those whom one loves. What does it consist of? It straggles along a rough and ill-laid lane, under a little wold, once a sheep-walk, now long ploughed up. The soil of the wold is pale, so that in the new-ploughed fields there rest soft, creamlike shadows when the evening sun falls aslant. There are two or three substantial farmhouses of red brick, comfortable old places, with sheds and ricks and cattle-byres and barns close about them. And I think it is strange that the scent of a cattle-byre, with its rich manure and its oozing pools, is not ungrateful to the human sense. It ought to be, but it is not. It gives one, by long inheritance, no doubt, a homelike feeling.

Then there are many plastered, white-walled, irregular cottages, very quaint and pretty, perhaps a couple of centuries old, very ill built, no doubt, but enchanting to look at; there is a new schoolhouse, very ugly at present, with its smart red brick and its stone facings--ugly because it does not seem to have grown up out of the place, but to have been brought there by rail; and there are a few new yellow-brick cottages, probably much pleasanter to live in than the old ones, but with no sort of interest or charm. The whole is surrounded by little fields, orchards, closes, paddocks, and a good many great elms stand up above the house-roofs. There is one quaint old farm, with a moat and a dove-cote and a fine, old mellow brick wall surrounded by little pollarded elms, very quiet and characteristic; and then there is a big, ancient church, by whom built one cannot divine, because there is no squire in the village, and the farmers and labourers could no more build such a church now than they could build a stellar observatory. It would cost nowadays not less than ten thousand pounds, and there is no record of who gave the money or who the architect was. It has a fine tower and a couple of solid bells; it has a few bits of good brass-work, a chandelier and some candlesticks, and it has a fine eighteenth-century tomb in a corner, with a huge slab of black basalt on the top, and a heraldic shield and a very obsequious inscription, which might apply to anyone, and yet could be true of nobody. Why the particular old gentleman should want to sleep there, or who was willing to spend so much on his lying in state, no one knows, and I fear that no one cares except myself.

There are a few little bits of old glass in the church, in the traceries of the windows, just enough to show that some one liked making pretty things, and that some one else cared enough to pay for them. And then there is a solid rectory by the church, inhabited for centuries by fellows of a certain Cambridge college. I do not expect that they lived there very much. Probably they rode over on Sundays, read two services, and had a cold luncheon in between; perhaps they visited a sick parishioner, and even came over on a week-day for a marriage or a funeral; and I daresay that in the summer, when the college was deserted, they came and lived there for a few weeks, rather bored, and longing for the warm combination room and the college port and the gossip and stir of the place.

That is really all, I think. And what is there to love in all that?

Well, it is a little space of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years. The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man. Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better. Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest-- that has been the village for a thousand years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at the end of all!

Well, I think all that pathetic and mysterious, and beautiful with the beauty that reality has. I want to know who all the folks were, what they looked like, what they cared about or thought about, how they made terms with pain and death, what they hoped, expected, feared, and what has become of them. Everyone as urgently and vehemently and interestedly alive as I myself, and yet none of them with the slightest idea of how they got there or whither they were going--the great, helpless, good-natured, passive army of men and women, pouring like a stream through the world, and borne away on the wings of the wind. They were glad to be alive, no doubt, when the sun fell on the apple-orchard, and the scent of the fruit was in the air, and the bees hummed round the blossoms, when people smile at each other and say kind and meaningless things; they were afraid, no doubt, as they lay in pain in the stuffy attics, with the night wind blustering round the chimney-stack, and hoped to be well again. Then there were occasions and treats, the Sunday dinner, the wedding, the ride in the farm-cart to Cambridge, the visit of the married sister from her home close by. I do not suppose they knew or cared what was happening in the world. War and politics made little difference to them. They knew about the weather, they cared perhaps about their work, they liked the Sunday holiday--all very dim and simple, thoughts not expressed, feelings not uttered, experience summed up in little bits of phrases. Yet I like to think that they were pleased with the look of the place without knowing why. I don't deceive myself about all this, or make it out as idyllic. I don't exactly wish to have lived thus, and I expect it was coarse, greedy, dull, ugly, a great deal of it; but though I can think fine thoughts about it, and put my thoughts into musical words, I do not honestly believe that my life, my hopes, my feelings differ very much from the experience of these old people.

Of course I have books and pictures and intellectual fancies and ideas; but that is only an elaborate game that I play, the things I notice and recognise: but I expect the old hearts and minds were at work, too, noticing and observing and recording; and all my flourish of talk and thought is only a superficial affair.

And what consecrates and lights up the little place for me, touches it with golden hues, makes it moving, touching, beautiful, is the thought of all that strange, unconscious life, the love and hate, the fear and the content, the joy and sorrow, that has surged to and fro among the thatched roofs and apple-orchards so many centuries before I came into being, and will continue when I am trodden into the dust.

When I came here first thirty years ago, exploring with a friend long dead the country-side, it was, I am sure, the same thought that made the place beautiful. I could not then put it into words; I have learned to do that since, and word-painting is a very pleasant pastime. It was a hot, bright summer day--I recall the scent of the clover in the air--and there came on me that curious uplifting of the heart, that wonder as to what all the warmth and scent, the green-piled tree, the grazing cows, the children trotting to and fro, could possibly mean, or why it was all so utterly delightful. It was not a religious feeling, but there was a sense of a great, good-natured, beauty-loving mind behind it all--a mind very like our own, and yet even then with a shadow striking across it--the shadow of pain and grief and hollow farewells.

I was not a very contented boy in those days, in some bewilderment of both mind and heart, having had my first experience that life could be hard and intricate. The world was sweeter to me, though not so interesting as it now is; but I had just the same deep desire as I have now, though it has not been satisfied, to find something strong and secure and permanent, some heart to trust utterly and entirely, something that could understand and comfort and explain and reassure, a power which one could clasp hands with, as a child lays its delicate finger in a strong, enfolding palm, and never be in any doubt again. It is one's weakness which is so tiring, so disappointing; and yet I do not want a careless, indifferent, brutal, healthy strength at all. It is the strength of love and peace that I want, not to be afraid, not to be troubled. It is all somewhere, I do not doubt:

Yet, oh, the place could I but find!

I have been through my village this very day. The sun was just beginning to slope to the west; the sun poured out his rays of gold from underneath the shadow of a great, dark, up-piled cloud--the long rays which my nurse used to tell me were sucking up water, but which I believed to be the eye of God. The trees were bare, but the elm-buds were red, and the willow-rods were crimson with spring; the little stream bubbled clearly off the hill; and the cottage gardens were full of up-thrusting blades; while the mezereons were all aflame with bloom. Life moving, pausing, rushing past! I wonder. When I pass the gate, if I see the dawn of that other morning, I cannot help feeling that I shall want to see my little village again, to loiter down the lane among the white-gabled houses. Shall I be much wiser then than I am now? Shall I have seen or heard something which will set my anxious mind at rest? Who can tell me? And yet the old, gnarled apple-boughs, with the blue sky behind them, and the new-springing grass all seem to hold the secret, which I want as much to interpret and make my own as when I wandered through the hamlet under the wold more than thirty years ago.

[The end]
Arthur C. Benson's essay: Villages

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