Folkway

“ The railways do no more than run their fine lines through the rural landscape, making sunny banks for the flowers and shrubs most loved by the English people. Though places which have a name in history are undoubtedly visited by a larger number of strangers than formerly, I am inclined to think there are many nooks and corners of rural England which are more secluded from the world now than when the world's travellers had to journey by the common road. ”

“ He knew all the old people in the village, if not all the young ones: he would sit chatting in their cottages on a wet day, and on a fine one he would stroll around with some old fellow past his work, and glean old words and sayings, and pick up odds and ends of treasure for the history of the parish which he was going to write some day. ”

“ Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the roofs of its houses. On the slopes there lies the world in which the fringes of life are embroidered—a world where men and women talk of books, pictures and plays. It is a world of hyphenated names. But in all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name. It is a refuse-heap of humanity. ”

“ They all want to be able to get out at a moment's notice, to get away—quick, quick. A village which is two miles off the high-road, even if it is perched like a hawk's nest on a peak, still chafes and chafes for the great road [Pg 214] to come to it, chafes and chafes for the daily motor-bus connection with the railway. There is no placidity, no rest in the heart of the land. There is a fever of restless irritation all the time. ”

“ Now from the country around, from the farms and neighboring hamlets,
Came in their holiday dresses the blithe Acadian peasants.
Many a glad good-morrow and jocund laugh from the young folk
Made the bright air brighter, as up from the numerous meadows,
Where no path could be seen but the track of wheels in the greensward,
Group after group appeared, and joined, or passed on the highway.
Long ere noon, in the village all sounds of labor were silenced.
Thronged were the streets with people; and noisy groups at the house-doors
Sat in the cheerful sun, and rejoiced and gossiped together. ”

“ The high-roads lie as a rule along the backs of the uplands, and the villages stand on the windy heights. The lines of railway which run along the valley tend to create a new species of valley village, but the old hamlets, with their grey-stone high-backed churches, with slender shingled spires, stand aloft, the pure air racing over them. The ancient manors and granges are as a rule built in the more sheltered and sequestered valleys, approached from the high-road by winding wood-lanes of exquisite beauty. ”

“ Little villages, out of shell fire, some miles from the lines, were then of more use to us than Albert. Long after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tourists, wandering in Picardy, will see names scratched in a barn, some mark or notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear, on the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long before in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All the villages behind our front were thronged with our people. ”

“ Every sort of pleasure here is improvised, and as you pass through a village the first thing you know the young girls and young men start up in a sort of girandole, and linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure along through the street and out over the highway to the next village, and the next and the next. The work has all been done in the forenoon, and every one who chooses is at liberty to join in the fun. ”

“ The metropolis of the northern valley in those days was a sleepy little adobe town of a few hundred people, reclining about its dusty plaza near the river. The railroad, scorning to notice it, passed a mile away. Forthwith a new town began growing up between, the old one and the railroad. And this new town was such a town [pg 21] as had never before been seen in all the Southwest. It was built of wood and only half painted. It was ugly, noisy and raw. It was populated largely by real estate agents, lawyers, politicians and barkeepers. It cared little for joy, leisure, beauty or tradition. ”

“ When the people of our village are in the mood to reflect upon antiquity, when they feel as if they would like to meditate upon the heroic deeds that have been achieved in this kindly old place by the mighty men of valor who swaggered and swore and fought here a hundred years before the war of the Revolution was dreamed of, they turn from the street down the gentle slope of the highway which runs by the river; and when they have wandered on a brief distance beyond the present confines of the town, they reach old Fort Lane. ”

“ The morrow would be a fête-day, and the town was stirred from the gray torpor and stillness of its extreme old age, and was alive and gay with country-people and its own small population, all afoot and thronging the wooden stalls of the fair, and the crooked steep alleys that crossed and recrossed each other up the slope of the place. ”

“ I used to wonder whether the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. As you approach the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall, overshadowing canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the public road, on account of the remoteness that seems to exist between the precincts of this old-world community and the thronged modern street out of which you have so recently emerged. ”

“ This, as the white settler drifted in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy, expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from progress. ”

“ The highways begin to swarm with people that press and pour in from the hundred little yards and colonnades and alleys of which the old city has so many; they are men and women of the peasantry from without the walls, of the smaller tradesmen, from within—the people who, in all nations, would rather stand breathless for hours in a throng than miss the exultation of giving the first shout for the first rumour of a pageant’s approach. ”

“ The chance wayfarers who looked in upon the village from the old turnpike road were more numerous than the "pilgrims of nature" in the great stream of life ever rushing past, who find occasion to diverge from their course between the great centres of life and trade. ”

“ And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!) , or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt ”

“ At the corner as one could say, of one of these little streets or roads where it joined the Great Road, one spring day of the sixteenth century, we might see a group of some of the villagers, young people principally, and it is plain some event of unusual interest has called them together; they are laughing and waving to a young man who rides away from them down the road, a friend who has been one of them from childhood and popular as evidenced by the number who have been wishing him a safe journey and all the usual farewells of any time and place. ”

“ It is not likely that there has been much change or influx of population in these districts for centuries. The alertness and intelligence of the natives must be to some extent an inheritance from the generations of strenuous clansmen whose blood flows in their veins. Life in a historical district is bound to have an ennobling effect on a man, especially if he feels knit to the past by lineal descent from the historical actors. A glamour of romance clings to hill and glen. The dalesman you meet on the highway can tell you all the lore of his parish, giving dates and citing illustrative lays. ”

“ But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited. ”

“ Except on Sundays and holidays, when the station is to the village what the fashionable promenade is to the town, the people who loaf on the platform are by no means the pick of the population, being merely those who have nothing else to do. ”

“ We are looking then at a road--a road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness, that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny tears. ”

“ Here and there, in those sluggish times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. So it was in the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end, the invention of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and complex agricultural machinery, had changed all these things: changed them beyond all hope of return. ”

“ The village of Florac is high up among the hills, built along certain ledges of rock overlooking the valley, and going south in the train one catches sight of many towns, like it built among mountain declivities, hanging out like nests over the edge of precipices, showing against a red background, crowning the rocky hill. ”

“ The town itself is simply a mean and straggling street, lined on either side by whitewashed, red-roofed, green-shuttered houses which become less and less pretentious and more and more scattered as you make your way up the ever narrowing valley until it loses itself in the hills. ”

“ For instance, you may find a town which, by the incidence of the railroad and the springing up of great industries, has shot far ahead of the other sleepy little places; its population may treble itself, its trade be ten times as large, its attractions one would imagine incalculably greater. Nothing of the kind: its annual fair is not nearly so important an event to the village mind as that of an old-world slumberous place removed from the current of civilisation. ”

“ The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. ”

“ Those writers who have imagined a reign of peace and happiness on earth, have generally described a rural country, where each small township was directed by the elders and wise men. This was the key of my design. Each village, however small, usually contains a leader, one among themselves whom they venerate, whose advice they seek in difficulty, and whose good opinion they chiefly value. ”

“ The country generally is poorly supplied with highways, and I sometimes found myself wandering from house to house and from village to village, through bye roads and footpaths, crossing sluiceways on a plank or pole, and at wet seasons, when the country was nearly half covered with water, obliged to wade through mud and water, or take a serpentine route through fields.
The country people, generally, live in small villages, miserable houses, with thatched roofs and clay floors, and are generally filthy and uncouth in their habits. ”

“ Only for a moment, though; for when we drop our eyes to the street below us, those are our own townsfolk, well-remembered faces, that throng every doorstep and fill the overflowing pavements and swarming roadway. Yes, they are our own townsfolk, and they are taking care to let us know it—such a welcome they have made ready for us. ”

“ And so the last hand-clasp of civilization is extended to you from the little Aromatic Shop.
Occasionally, however, though very rarely, you step to the Long Trail from the streets of a raw modern town. The chance presence of some local industry demanding a large population of workmen, combined with first-class railroad transportation, may plant an electric-lighted, saloon-lined, brick-hoteled city in the middle of the wilderness. ”

“ His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. It is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or the High Street of the country town to see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children of the soil. ”