with the same
wistfulness which women who have known sorrow exhibit for children
who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long
interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found
his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so
degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war
began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or
1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself
of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there
for a while in 1915 and found the village of my choice bare of youth.
But that was West Sussex, and John Halsham lives nearer London, in the
forest region, as I judge, which is a part of the country overflowed
and become suburban. I don't doubt but complete cockneyfication will
be the ultimate fate of that country of deep loam and handsome women
before many years are over. Going down to my village from London,
I could not feel that I was in the country until I had passed
Pulborough; and further east the same would hold good to Lewes.

But when Mr Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has
overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are
cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth.
Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil?
You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of
the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been
no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the
scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people,
their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in
religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident.
We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away
from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any
more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed
what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be
brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion as of every other
human affair. But it was not them we worshipped. Rather it was what
they stood for--which endures.

All this leads me away from John Halsham and _Idlehurst_. A good
antidote to his extreme depression is to be found in another beautiful
book which, if not a classic, will become one. I mean _A Shepherd's
Life_, wherein Mr. Hudson reveals the ver