The English Peasant.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 49, 10 May 1884, Page 5

The English Peasant.

The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the iufluence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and townbred rather than tho truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploujrhmon are jocund when they drive their toam afield ; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes ; idyllic villagers danco in the chequered shado and rcfro&h themselves, not immoderately, with spicy, nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund ; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze — in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles— the slow utterance, and the heavy, slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the camel, than of the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat,_ and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance, tossing up tho forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the waggon creeps slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene ''smiling," and you think these companions in labour must be as bright and cheerful as tho picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking time is a timo for joking, especially if there are women among the labourers ; but the course laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possiblo from your conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious ellervcsccnce of the mind uhich we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry ; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart pot. Tho conventional countryman of the stage, -who picks up pocketbooks and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents tho still lingering mistake that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheat ing, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into filling his small beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by tho sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in tho least established by that classic rurul occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. — " Essays and Leaves from a Note Book." By Ueorge Eliot.