E. L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to
indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that
remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake"
style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
prepossessions rather than of direct observation. 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 influence of idyllic literature,
which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and
town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are
jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful
love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the checkered
shade and refresh 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 humor
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 the forkfuls of hay in the golden
light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden 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 labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to
which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find
that haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are women
among the laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and