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.

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