England and the Countryman

Extract

It is now some time since Mr. Massingham began to educate and delight us with his studies of the English rural tradition, but the present book may be considered his most mature achievement. In it he takes the types which he regards as most representative of the English countryman and examines in turn the origins, status, character and history of each. The history indeed is of rather a melancholy kind, since in each case rise and development is followed by a decline and fall, the fortunes of the countryside being bound up with those of England and its culture at large, and the movement towards modern times being a retreat rather than an advance. The replacement of sacred by secular, of spiritual by material, of the functional and the reasonable by the functionless and irrational, of many-sided wisdom by the smartness of business men and the research of undisciplined scientists—these are the characteristic note's of modernity, and it is natural that they should appear with particular vividness in the history of so central and primary a thing as agriculture. Nevertheless, the diagnosis is not a hopeless one, and its partial acceptance now, with the chance of wider acceptance soon, offers some possibility of a return to the norm we have forsaken.