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THE Perer sheaves with them; QUENT BY yet which sheaf will te uitimate market of posterity. I ET VR s ight his own battle; for he 221 snes his day the novel has

Te met perhaps, is one that his Ze virs of the good sort of realism ciralism. When people have

emier the conditions of art, as in her son want it without those conditions, I LAGE of science there is inevitably 8 C&I ke province of science and that of Jeze By forget that art is the child of and that, as Mr Hardy has told us, & magination is truer than any literally Eat to forget that is to accept the subIs for truth. The conversations in many ves are as stupidly true as if they had been The LW by a reporter in a boarding house. The arms of kings in such a book as 'The Card' are as mmmersing as the photographs in the shop-windows, Is it as they are, and as empty and superficial however fatal for the moment to such TR as Thackeray's, can have no permanent ine bere it is not art at all, but a bastard kind of scrtice it trading into the world of art.

Thackeray has, however, suffered from the arising of riner needs which neither he nor Dickens could satisfy. As the novel increased in importance and became the pomaza vecice of literary expression, people naturally Demanded that it should express their attitude towards the gras problems of life and destiny. In a word, they Demanded from it something like a philosophy of the meaning of things. And so, many people turned from Thackeray to such writers as George Eliot and George Meredith, who were felt to make an attempt to explain, if no longer perhaps to justify, the ways of God to man. And finally those who thought as well as read were certain not to rest content for ever with the ruthlessly

prosaic note of Thackeray or the sentimentalism which was almost his solitary escape from it. If the novel was to absorb the work of all other forms of literature, it must needs satisfy the eternal demand for poetry. And so those to whom Thackeray seemed to be immeshed in this visible world as we know it drew away from him to one who appeared to give so much more-the invisible, intangible essence of life, its spirit, in a word its poetry-and transferred their allegiance to Mr Hardy. The love of nature too, the sense of a Presence about us which the forms of nature somehow reveal has been growing ever since Wordsworth's day; and the novel could not do without it for ever, as Thackeray did; so that for this reason again people turned from him to the Brontës, to George Eliot, to George Meredith, and above all again to Mr Hardy.

All these things are against Thackeray, yet so much is for him that he triumphantly survives them. 'Non omnes omnia.' He cannot give us what others give, but he gives us of his own no mean or ordinary gift. After all the great fact remains. 'Vanity Fair' was written in 1847; and it is still doubtful whether, in spite of all its limitations, it is not on the whole the greatest novel in the language. A writer who is still talked of for the first prize in the race which he began to run longer ago than the historic Sixty Years Since can have no complaint to make of his treatment at the hands of Fame.

JOHN BAILEY.

(442

Art. 7.-AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS AND LAND

LORDS.

1. The Village Labourer 1760-1832. By J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond. London: Longmans, 1911. 2. British Rural Life and Labour. By Francis George Heath. London: King and Son, 1911.

THE two books which head this article differ widely in scope and character. Together they present a continuous history of the conditions of agricultural labour from 1760 to the present day. Though Mr Heath is mainly occupied with the present and the future of the 'peasant,' his retrospect bridges the gap between 1832 and 1911. It may be read with interest and profit. This is true also of Mr Hammond's book. But from the first page to the last it must be read with caution. It is social history written for political purposes. The volume contains much truth, worth telling, and admirably told. But the story is very far from being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Mr Hammond, who loves literary allusions, introduces us to many of the local tyrants whom Fielding and Richardson depict among the rural squirearchy. He never mentions Squire Allworthy. Yet a Justice Frolic was drawn from the novelist's imagination, while Squire Allworthy is understood to have been a portrait from real life.

Mr Hammond devotes his first chapter to a contrast between the history of the French and English peasantry. He conveys the impression that the surrender of their seignorial dues by the French nobility in 1789 created the five million peasant proprietors who already existed in France, and suggests that, if the English aristocracy had acted in the same way in 1660, their action would have produced the same result. The suggestion is scarcely justified by facts. If English landlords in 1660 had sacrificed their seignorial dues, the customary freeholders of the North might have become absolute owners. But beyond this very limited class, no occupier would have been transformed into the owner of the soil which he cultivated. In support of his theory, however, Mr Hammond calls two witnesses. In the first place, he misquotes from Roger North's 'Lives of the Norths' the

description which the first Lord Guildford (1637-1685) gives of his experiences as steward of manorial courts. 'He used' (says Mr Hammond) 'to describe the copyhold exactions, and to say that in many cases that came under his notice small tenements and pieces of land which had been in a poor family for generations were swallowed up in the monstrous fines imposed on copyholders.'

Lord Guildford's statement really is as follows:

'And in very good earnest, it is a miserable thing to observe how sharpers that now are commonly court-keepers pinch the poor copyholders in their fees. Small tenements and pieces of land that have been man's inheritances for divers generations, to say nothing of the fines, are devoured by fees.' Mr Hammond may possibly have confused fines for renewal paid to the land-owner with the court fees paid to the steward. The second witness is Sir Henry Maine, from whom is quoted the statement that the seignorial dues, against which the French peasant revolted, resembled the dues which in this country were extinguished by the peaceful process of copyhold enfranchisement. Presumably the reference is to 'The Early History of Institutions' (Lecture V). If so, Mr Hammond might have quoted with advantage an earlier passage in the same Lecture. Maine says that, in France, the sense of property in the soil was not in the lord but in the peasant, because feudal dues and petty monopolies, not rents, formed the land revenues of the bulk of the French nobility. But, continues Maine,

'a certain number of noblemen, besides their feudal rights, had their terres, or domain, belonging to them in absolute property, and sometimes of enormous extent; and the wealthiest members of this limited class . . . formed the counterpart, from the legal point of view, of the English landed proprietary.'

Mr Hammond's introductory chapter cannot be regarded entirely as a rhetorical flourish. The theory which it expounds pervades the whole volume. But his main purpose is to discuss the changes which were produced in English village life between 1760 and 1832, and to attribute them, not to economic causes or national necessities, but to the grasping tyranny of an omnipotent landed aristocracy.

'At the time of the great Whig Revolution' (he writes, p. 'England was in the main a country of commons and of con mon-fields; at the time of the Reform Bill, England was i the main a country of individualist agriculture and of larg enclosed farms.'

The change which took place in these 140 years is «< remarkable, and on social grounds so deplorable, that ne exaggeration is needed. But when Mr Hammond speaks in the first half of the above-quoted sentence, of England in the main' he, of course, really means less than's quarter of England.' He says,

'Gregory King and Davenant estimated that the whole of the cultivated land in England in 1685 did not amount to much more than half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common-field system.'

The sentence is ambiguous in more ways than one. Neither King nor Davenant would have included in the 'cultivated' area any land except that under plough The figures are King's; and the addition of Davenant's name lends no greater authority to the guess. But King nowhere attempted to calculate the amount of land cultivated on the common-field system. For that part of the guess Mr Hammond is alone responsible. King did estimate the total area of England and Wales at 39,000,000 acres, a figure which exceeds the real area by over 1,600,000 acres. He then calculated the meadows and pastures at 10,000,000 acres, the forests, parks, and commons at 3,000,00 acres, and the arable area at 11,000,000 acres. Reducing the arable area to the proper scale, it amounts to 10,500,000 acres. Lawrence in his System of Agriculture' (1727) estimated the proportion of this tillage land still under the open-field system at a third of the whole; Mr Hammond nearly doubles this contemporary calculation. and claims three-fifths. Possibly Lawrence under estimated the quantity, which may be taken at half the tillage land of the country; 5,250,000 acres were therefore cultivated by open-field farmers. One of the admitted defects of the system was the excess of arable land. It would therefore be a most lavish allowance to assign one acre of grass to every three acres of tillage. Yet, even with this generous treatment, the total area under the