the village temper than can be accounted for
by this cause alone. In most of the people the cheerfulness does not
suggest pious resignation, in the hope of the next world; it looks like
a grim and lusty determination to make the best of this world. It is
contemptuous, or laughing. As I have shown, it has a tendency to be
beery. It occasionally breaks out into disorder. In fact, if the folk
were not habitually overworked they would be boisterous, jolly. Of
course it may all proceed from the strong English nature in them; and in
that case we need seek no other explanation of it. Yet if one influence,
namely, a traditional Christianity, is to be credited--as it certainly
should be--with an effect upon the village character in one direction,
then probably, behind this other effect in another direction, some other
influence is at work. And for my part I make no doubt of it. The
cheerfulness of the cottagers rests largely upon a survival of the
outlook and habits of the peasant days before the common was enclosed.
It is not a negative quality. My neighbours are not merely patient and
loftily resigned to distress; they are still groping, dimly, for an
enjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable.
They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they
are intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic
at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now
being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They
make no aesthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral
customs it would be "nice" for them to follow; but, other things being
equal, they incline to go on in the way that has been usual in their
families. It is a tendency that sways them, not a thought-out scheme of
the way to live. Now and again, perhaps, some memory may strengthen the
tendency, as they are reminded of this or that fine old personality
worthy of imitation, or as some circumstance of childhood is recalled,
which it would be pleasant to restore; but in the main the force which
bears them on is a traditional outlook, fifty times more potent than
definite but transient memories. This it is that has to be recognized in
my neighbours. Down in their valley, until the "residents" began to
flock in, the old style of thinking lingered on; in the little cottages
the people, from earliest infancy, were accustomed to hear all
things--persons and manners, hous