14 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



Meredith's firmament there was little room for the cottager. 

 We get a glimpse of a senile rustic like Master Gammon, 

 or an Andrew Hedger, who " could eat a hog a solid hower." 

 As characters the labourers are clowns, though Meredith 

 knew full well the part they played in English rural life 

 was something greater, for into the mouth of Matey Wey- 

 burn he puts these words : 



" Here in England, and particularly on a fortnight's run in the 

 Lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my lady, come now 

 and then across people we call common, men and women, old 

 wayside men especially ; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp 

 of facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, 

 though going a roundabout way to express them. They were 

 at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads a delicate 

 sense of justice, upon which wisdom is founded. That is what 

 their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad 

 like a common air there's no peace, and no steady advance. 

 But these humble people had it. They reasoned from it, and 

 came to sound conclusions. I felt them to be my superiors. 

 On the other hand I have not felt the same, with ' our senators, 

 rulers, and lawgivers.' They are for the most part deficient in 

 the liberal mind." * 



Even Thomas Hardy, who by birth and early training 

 had perhaps more opportunities of studying the hired farm 

 servant than either George. Eliot or George Meredith, 

 rarely took the trouble to make him the protagonist in his 

 novels. Gabriel Oak, the shepherd in Far from the Madding 

 Crowd, was an exception, it is true, but Hardy was always 

 too interested in the labourer's daughter to give her father 

 a prominent place in the social setting. Nevertheless in 

 The Woodlanders and Under the Greenwood Tree he presents 

 us with wonderful backgrounds to peasant life in Dorset, 

 and Hardy's perspective ranges from the 'forties to the 

 'eighties of Jude the Obscure. 



If we place by the side of these novels such books as The 

 Revolt of the Field, by Arthur Clayden ; Mr. W. H. Hudson's 

 A Shepherd's Life ; English Farming Past and Present, by 

 R. E. Prothero ; Joseph Arch's Autobiography ; The 

 Agricultural Lockout, 1874, by Frederick Clifford, The Times 



1 Lord Ormont and His Aminta. By George Meredith. 



