FIRST COUNTRY BOOKS 131 



As in * Greene Feme Farm,' belonging to the same 

 year, he is interested in the country crafts — in the mill- 

 wright, the rope-walker, the bell-founder, the basket- 

 maker and mop-maker — and in distinguishing local 

 usages ; he regrets their decay, because of their goodness 

 as much as of their age. He makes another revelation of 

 his view of art ; for he likes ' the poetry of life ' under 

 the harshness of an old hunting picture, the horses from 

 life, the men portraits, the hounds labelled with names ; 

 but he has not seen really truthful hunting scenes on 

 canvas : the best are conventional, and have too much 

 colour. He shows how it might be done : ^ 



' A thick mist clings in the hollow there by the osier-bed, 

 where the pack have overtaken the fox, so that you can- 

 not see the dogs. Beyond, the contour of the hill is lost 

 in the cloud trailing over it ; the foreground towards us 

 shows a sloping ploughed field, a damp brown, with a 

 thin mist creeping along the cold furrows. Yonder, 

 three vague and shadowy figures are pushing laboriously 

 forward beside the leafless hedge ; while the dirt-be- 

 spattered bays hardly show against its black background 

 and through the mist. Some way behind, a weary grey 

 — the only spot of colour, and that dimmed — is gamely 

 struggling — it is not leaping — through a gap beside a 

 gaunt oak-tree, whose dark buff leaves yet linger. But 

 out of these surely an artist who dared to face Nature as 

 she is might work a picture.'* 



All through the book he sees things like this, as they 

 are, without a tinge of pastoral or other sentiment ; and 

 it is worth noticing that in the eleventh chapter he 

 mentions his dreaming in summer or standing to muse 

 in an early spring night, under the great oak that looked 

 over a great field to the Downs — perhaps the very oak 

 where he used to go to dream the dreams of ' The Story 

 of My Heart ' — but he mentions it with no dimmest hint 

 as yet of what those dreams are to bring forth, and he 

 is silent as to what he dreamed or mused. The import- 



* Wild Life in a Southau County. 



9—2 



