June 12, 1915 
LAND AND WATER 
AN ISLAND UTOPIA 
By K. RICHMOND 
IT would be interesting to know how the England of to-day 
would strike an observer who could come amongst us 
ignorant of all that has happened in the last ten months. 
National change has to proceed by steps, though the 
steps be of the swiftest ; it has to be, in 'the strict sense 
of the word, gradual. Even a revolution of thought, a complete 
volte face of public opinion, has always been prepared by a 
long series of small and often unperceived changes, slowly 
accumulating until the balance tips over. And revolutions 
of thought are essentially foreign to the English genius. 
We take things as they come, and adjust them as they come 
— a practice which has long made us the despair of the would- 
be-picturesque demagogue, who lives for, and by, the moment 
of crisis. And for that reason we are perhaps the slowest 
people in Europe (with the possible exception of the Russians) 
to realise exactly where we are at any given moment. It is 
always open to our public men, as in these days, to hold and 
to utter diametrically opposite views upon the state of mind 
of the nation ; and we are so used to the absurdity that it 
seldom raises a smile. 
It might be an advantage to us to employ a public 
servant whose duty it would be to live out of England, 
returning periodically to receive his impressions and to 
record them for the general benefit. This function has 
at times been admirably performed by Irishmen ; but 
some Irish critics suffer the disability of being too clear- 
sighted. When a man's mind is so luminous that all the 
facts are transparent to him, it is only a step further to 
forget that the facts are there at all — to " see through " them 
with that piercing insight which discovers precisely what the 
critic expects and wishes to see. The candidate for our 
imagined office of National Critic would have to be of pure 
English blood, a student of history, and a man who had been, 
in his time, familiar with every rank in the social scale. 
He should belong to no party, and should have no particular 
financial or class interests. And most certainly he ought not 
to be too clever ; he should be " able " — a word which has 
come to characterise a typically English form of mental 
competence. Even in war time such a man might be 
spared from other forms of national service ; indeed, in war 
time his function would have a doubled and redoubled value. 
It is another question where, in war time, he could go for 
that complete dissociation from daily detail which would be 
part of his duty ; he needs entire freedom for thought and 
reflection, as well as unsophisticated surroundings. 
There is a Uttle island in the Atlantic, set, as though by 
an inversion of the jeweller's art, like a spot of gold in a sheet 
of sapphire ; it is unknown to the tourist, and its name is kept 
secret by the few who know and love its unspoiled beauties. 
Here we will send our seeker for the unsophisticated. After 
a night's voyage, from the liner's port of call, in a tiny steamer 
that appears to be made of japanned tin, from whose deck 
he has watched the leaping phosphorescence fly past like 
wreaths and coils of luminous smoke, he is carried through 
the surf and to the shore by an islander ; an islander dark- 
skinned but grey-eyed, of surprising lankiness and still more 
surprising strength. He is assured that mules shall be duly 
saddled and laden for his journey to the hills by the time his 
simple breakfast is eaten ; but the heat has grown to its 
sweltering climax of noon and begun to decline again before 
the cavalcade is on the move. Later, he will learn that 
the Island is blissfully devoid of the time sense ; its " now " 
means, usually, to-morrow ; its " to-morrow " means never. 
But long before completing this discovery he will himself 
be under the spell, and the rich days will be flowing past 
unpartitioned and unnumbered. He first touches upon the 
bedrock of old human wisdom in the laconic talk of the 
grey-haired muleteer who trudges by his side ; and upon the 
bedrock of natural wisdom in the behaviour of his invincibly 
opinionated mule. " You would now both be dead, if he 
had obeyed you," is the muleteer's quiet comment on one 
occasion when the mule, open-mouthed but imperturbable, 
has disregarded the dragging rein ; and our traveller views 
the chasm with a shudder, and the mule with a new respect. 
The crest of the pass attained, the western sky beyond is 
aflame with that afterglow peculiar to the horizon of the 
sub-tropical Atlantic ; gilded crags sweep down three thousand 
feet to a shelving plam which is a sea of almond blossom ; 
twenty miles further, and six thousand feet below, the veritable 
ocean basks and gleams. The descent into fairyland, through 
gradually enshrouding night, becomes mysterious, and the 
sure-footed mule a magician disguised. Carrier women, 
basket on head, come swinging, bare-footed, down the pre- 
carious path ; at a word from the muleteer they light small 
torches made from resinous pine-splinters, wrapped round 
with leaves that burning may be slow. Thus revealed, 
they stand out against the darkness as glowing portraits of 
womanhood, broad of brow and hip, and deep of bosom, 
erect and quiet-eyed. At the foot of the crags they take a 
side-path for their own village, calling out good-nights. 
By midnight our traveller is on the path that leads to his 
minute inn, inhaling deeply a faint breeze that comes, now 
fresh and cool as spring water, now warmly laden with per- 
fume from the orange trees on either side ; and soon the 
awakened host and hostess, welcoming but drowsy, have 
fed him with omelette and light wine, and he is asleep-— 
and as far from the fret of civilisation, in body and in spirit, 
as we could wish. 
His sojourn in the Island will not rub off the bloom of the 
first impression. It is a place whose natural beauties do not 
cloy, but quietly sink deeper and ever more memorably into 
the consciousness. And it is the home of an extraordinary and 
an abounding human simplicity. He will discover that there 
are no rich in the Island ; and no poor. From time to time 
he wiU meet with men and women, old and outworn, who 
have no younger relations to support them in their decline ; 
these are the newsbearers of the community, and they totter 
from village to village with tidings of birth and death, pros- 
perity and vicissitude, always finding a hospitable roof and 
a welcome for their wise garruhty. He will find no traces 
of government that anyone need bother about ; ,no crime, 
and no police. In the course of long and rambling discussions 
with the innkeeper he wiU begin to realise a philosophy 
that concerns itself but little with any but the essentials 
of hfe, and will find as much difficulty in explaining or justi- 
fying to him many of the preoccupations of Europe as did 
Gulliver in parrying the questions and criticisms of the horse- 
King. He wiU discover a courtesy that knows neither sub- 
servience nor condescension, and an openness of speech that 
is wholly unconscious of its apparent daring. He will redis- 
cover the essential human subsoil — and that discovery is 
the main purpose of his exile. It is needless to labour the 
fact that in the process he will also rediscover himself, an 
achievement which will not be without effect upon his sub- 
sequent usefulness. 
Then he will return, his mind untrammelled and impression- 
able, all equipped to diagnose and interpret the national 
symptoms of his own people. ... All this is no more than 
an airy speculation ; for the business of our imagined official 
is everybody's business, and it is no good giving everybody's 
job to one man. All can in some degree, if it be only in 
thought and imagination, escape the trammels of the crowded 
hour, when their duty is not calling them to sterner tasks. 
Beneath all the anxieties and urgencies of the day there flows 
the quiet, purposeful current of Enghsh life ; and in the English 
countryside there is peace and beauty and the magic of human 
tradition to be realised, no less than among sub-tropical 
hiUs. Some are ashamed of being normal in war time, 
and would have us aU in hysterics if they could have their 
way. " Be different, somehow," they seem to say, " even 
if you cannot be useful." Meanwhile, it is the men who think 
less of their emotions than of their heritage who are doing 
our country's share in the winning of the war, and the 
nation is realising its purpose and its selfhood through those 
to whom the meadows and moors, the homesteads and 
hamlets of England, are full of a still and an eternal 
meaning. 
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