In The Hand Of Ceres It Was The Very Symbol Of
Agriculture, And That Was A Goodly Time Ago.
At this hour they say the
sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more
to get the straw than the ear.
On the broad page of some ancient illuminated manuscript, centuries old,
you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at
the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on
through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are
all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old
days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets
printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and
when the corn laws starved half England - those were the times of the
flail. Every barn - and there were then barns on every farm, think of the
number - had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all
the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their
most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours
of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging
that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and
drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.
The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They
had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, - i.e. - Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks - in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms - which it is now
the cry to multiply - for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their
collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern
ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the
flail will become as common as ever.
There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London
said to be two hundred years old; probably it had had so many new wheels,
and shafts, and sides, as to have physiologically changed its
constitution - still there were waggons in those days, and there are
waggons now. Express trains go by in a great hurry - the slow waggons
gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of
years since. The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the
old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph
wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a
thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough,
and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing
machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields,
and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.
If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to
paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep
of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into
the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's
volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets
in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think
that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more
lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she
returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers. I should
like to paint the lessening square of the wheat-field, the reaping
machine continually cutting the square smaller, as if it traversed the
Greek fret. People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the
half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine.
Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old
wooden plough and the oxen. To be true, pictures of our fields should
have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually
omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the
first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal,
poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a
modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour
rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give
him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense
of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs
no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature.
Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.
All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out - the
village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not
altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and
as work decreases, so men decrease. Some go the cities, some emigrate;
the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there
used to be.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 45 of 104
Words from 45037 to 46051
of 105669
