Cecil Torr

“ In principle a tax on incomes is quite wrong: it ought to be a tax upon expenditure—not a penalty on amassing wealth, but a penalty on frittering wealth away—and import duties are a tax upon expenditure, as they are finally paid out of prices. Yet smuggling seems to be regarded as a game of skill, a sort of hide-and-seek in passengers’ luggage: the hider need not betray the lair, if the seeker cannot find it. ”

“ If box and yew are clipped into the shape of kerb-stones and stone walls, such trees may just as well be clipped into the shape of domes and pyramids and other architectural things; but not, I think, into the shape of birds and beasts that might fly off or walk away. It is only a bad joke to make a plant look like an animal, and even good jokes pall when they take twenty years to make and go on for a century. ”

“ No doubt, Scripture is taught in every school; but there are many ways of teaching it. Lustleigh has a County Council school, and the Scripture teaching is regulated by a County Council syllabus. The syllabus says what things the children are to read, and what they are to learn by heart; and when people grumble at the Education Rate, I remind them that every well-taught child in Devon can say the names of the Ten Plagues of Egypt as glibly as a parrot. And then, of course, they feel that they are getting value for their money. ”

“ I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,” although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat. ”

“ We have not sun enough in England to justify the use of Classic architecture or Palladian. These styles demand the glare of Greece and Italy; and sometimes that is not enough—in bleak places, such as Phigaleia or Segesta, I have found the old Greek temples too austere without their ancient colouring. ”

“ Young minds understand the butter. Put ‘the force of attraction’ for ‘the thickness of the butter,’ and they will understand the Law of Universal Gravitation, as discovered by Sir Isaac Newton with the assistance of an apple.
Unluckily this easy way of learning things is like all aids to memory: more easily picked up than dropped again, when it has served its purpose. A friend of mine tells me that, out of all his Latin and Greek, the things that he remembers best are silly little rhymes that he was taught at school, “Common are to either sex, Artifex and Opifex,” and other stuff like that. ”

“ If buildings are burnt out or tumble down, there is no remedy but reconstruction. But people are too fond of reconstructing buildings that are still intact, and making them ‘as good as new.’ If they want to know what a building looked like when it was new, they can surely build a copy of it somewhere else, and go and look at that: instead of putting a new front on the north transept of Westminster Abbey, they might have stuck it on a building like Truro Cathedral which is completely new. ”

“ Our present income tax supposes that the net receipts from land will be just double the rent. The owner pays the tax upon the rent, and the occupier pays the tax upon the other half, that is, his supposed profits after paying the rent. He pays no more if his real profits are more than the supposed amount, and pays less if they are less. As the occupier usually rents the land to make a living out of it, he tries to make as large a profit as he can; and large profits may mean reckless farming that impoverishes the land. ”

“ Lower Wreyland is an ordinary bit of cottage architecture; but there was no roof on the north end of it for several weeks in 1901, and then it looked quite grand with a granite gable standing out against the sky, and moonlight streaming through the empty windows. One’s appreciation of a building will always be affected by the atmosphere in which one may have seen it. ”

“ When a building has a character of its own, you ought not merely to abstain from putting in things that are out of character with it: you ought to put in things that will bring its character out. Siena cathedral is a gorgeous building, and it has the finest pavement in the world ”

“ There was a very cultivated man who was often in this neighbourhood some years ago, and he delighted in reading novels about Devon and the West, but was quite unconscious that he was in the midst of the real thing. He was so accustomed to getting his impressions out of books that he had lost the power of getting them in any other way. The children have not come to that, and never may; but they are being overdosed with books. There is a history in use at Lustleigh school that gives three chapters to the times before the Romans came: the Stone and Bronze and Iron Ages. ”

“ Income tax, then known as property tax, was brought in as a temporary measure for the next three years, but was renewed time after time and finally made permanent. My grandfather writes in the third year, 23 February 1845, “The property tax is an inquisitorial and annoying thing: a real-property tax would not be so much amiss, even if it were to be made a permanency: in my opinion they could not levy a better tax.” His opinion was disinterested, as he had real-property enough for such a tax to hit him rather hard. ”

“ The countryside was strewn with granite boulders: when a piece was cleared to make a field, the boulders were broken up and used for walls enclosing it; and the walls were sometimes made immensely large, to use up the material. It is marvellous to see a skilled man building such a wall. The stones are of all shapes and sizes, from half a hundredweight to three or four, just as the rock or boulder happens to split up; and there may be many dozens of them lying about. He glances round and selects a stone, perhaps fifty feet away, and has it brought to him ”

“ From time to time the County Council appoints a ‘rat-week’ for a general attack on rats. Rats have a good deal of sense: they abandon places where they are hunted down, and congregate in places where they are left alone. A rat-week frightens them away from these infested places; and in the following week there are more rats than can be managed in the places that were nearly free of them before. So a rat-week is rather a nuisance to anybody who has always kept rats down. ”

“ Thus, if the Firmament gave forth the sound of f, the Sun gave f an octave higher up and the Moon gave f an octave higher still. Saturn, Venus and the Earth gave g in these three octaves, and Jupiter, Mercury and the Antichthon gave c in these three octaves also, while Mars gave d in the lowest octave by itself. And if that is what these orbs are ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubins,’ I do not much regret ‘this muddy vesture of decay’ that hinders me from hearing it.
If the heavenly bodies went round in circles, their notes would never vary, as the distances would always be the same ”

“ A formal garden may be made to look as ugly as anything in Holland when the tulips are in bloom—five hundred tulips in a bed, all at the same distance from each other, and all of the same colour and size. ”

“ This is a granite country; and if men are to be commemorated here, their names should be inscribed on granite. But cutting names on granite slabs costs more than casting them on metal plates: so an inscription was cast, an ungainly piece of granite was put up, and the metal plate fixed on. That is the War Memorial for which the Market House was swept away. It is like a notice-board. The metal thing at Bovey is like a kitchen-fender. ”

“ In going from Moreton to Hurston, I pass a guide-post with an arm that says, ‘Chagford. 11⁄2 miles.’ Taking that direction, I pass another guide-post (at Stiniel cross) less than a hundred yards away; and this has an arm that says, ‘Chagford. 2 miles.’ A foreigner noticed it and said, “Aha, you advance one hundred metres and you retreat one half-mile? How shall you arrive?” I said, of course, “We muddle through,” and he said “You are a wonderful people”; and he said it as if he meant it as a compliment, but I think he had some reservations in his mind.
There is a new guide-post at Lustleigh. ”

“ These people seemed to think that there would always be a ton an acre, however barren the land—or several tons an acre, if ‘Science’ were invoked. And they also seemed to think that wheat alone is ‘food,’ although our forefathers ate barley, oats and rye. These can be grown on land that is not good enough for wheat; and our island might perhaps grow food enough for the whole population—as these people said it should—but the population would have to be content with something less luxurious than wheaten bread. ”

“ The new-comers at Lustleigh always call the old school-house ‘the old vestry’ for some reason that I cannot comprehend—vestry-meetings were held in one of the rooms there, but the building was always called the school. What they call ‘the new vestry’ is an excrescence from the church: it is in the angle between the chancel and south transept, spoiling the exterior of the church, and making the interior dark by blocking windows up. It contains the organ; and organs are not always worth the space they take and the disfigurement they cause. ”

“ The railway man maintained that he was worse off than his brother; he was paying 7s. a week for cramped accommodation in a town, whereas his brother had a cottage, free, and ground enough for growing vegetables and keeping poultry and a pig. And he went on comparing town and country prices, and town and country needs; and, on the whole, I think he proved his case. But there is an outcry against free cottages now, as a farm hand must vacate his cottage if he ceases working on the farm, the cottage being wanted for the man who takes his place. There is a great deal in a name. ”

“ Whenever I look at bees, I feel misgivings about the future of mankind. Think of the bees that invented the hexagonal cells, and the bees that go on building these cells and yet go buzzing against glass panes in one half of a window when the other half is open. ”

“ You can tell exactly how much the building is indebted to the pavement, as the pavement is covered over with boarding (to protect it) during a great part of the year, and then the building looks comparatively poor. If the Siena pavement could be laid in Lustleigh church, it would not give splendour to the church: it would only make you discontented with the roughness of the pillars and arches and the effigies of the old knights who held the place six centuries ago. The old pavement of rough granite slabs was far more suited to the rugged grandeur of the church. ”

“ When children are learning about England and its place in Europe and the World, they might as well be taught that English is an Aryan language, and that all Aryan languages have grown from the same roots, whereas Semitic languages are of another growth. ”

“ There are plenty of flowers worth growing for their grandeur or their grace; but people fill their gardens up with other sorts, just as they fill their houses with the books ‘without which no gentleman’s library would be complete.’ They merely grow these plants because most people grow them. ”

“ We ought really to be grateful to the browns for killing off the blacks, as the blacks were much worse than the browns for carrying the Plague about. We have not heard much of the Plague in Western Europe since the brown rats arrived—the last great outbreak was in 1720 at Marseilles. The first outbreak in England began with the arrival of some ships at Weymouth in July or August 1348, and it very soon reached Devon and then spread over the whole country, killing more than half the population. So far as we know now, the Plague began in the Crimea. ”

“ He may thereby improve a garden that was naturally wild; but when he plans a ‘landscape’ garden, he usually gives it too much formality for nature and not enough for art.
In looking at landscapes by great painters, such as Claude Lorraine, you sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong, and then it dawns upon you that the hills and dales and rocks and streams defy the laws of Nature. ”

“ One of the worst faults of English architects is that when they have a building of great width, they put a portico or some such ‘feature’ in the centre and another at each end, and thus destroy the broad effect of width without creating an effect of height. ”

“ In a flat country you plant a belt of trees around your house and don’t care what your neighbours do: you are monarch of all you survey. But in a hilly country, such as this, you are at your neighbours’ mercy, unless you have a very large estate. Some neighbour may quite spoil your view by starting building or cutting timber or opening a mine a mile or two away. ”

“ In a fit of temporary insanity a man will take the pledge and let everybody know that he has taken it. After that he cannot decently buy cider or accept it, if it is offered to him; but he cannot do without it, and therefore has to steal. A man of that sort took to preaching in the open air here; and when people interrupted with, “Who stealed that zider?” his language was un-pulpity.{18}
In the War years, when things had to drift, some of my cider turned so sour that I sold it to a firm of vinegar-makers. It really was vinegar already, and needed no more making ”