time, of sentimentality. Was the
social atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams?
Was the village life really idyllic?

Not for a moment can I pretend that it was. Patience and industry
dignified it; a certain rough jollity, a large amount of good temper and
natural kindness, kept it from being foul; but of the namby-pamby or
soft-headed sentiment which many writers have persuaded us to attribute
to old-English cottage life I think I have not in twenty years met with
a single trace. In fact, there are no people so likely to make ridicule
of that sort of thing as my labouring-class neighbours have always been.
They do not, like the middle classes, enjoy it. It is a commodity for
which they have no use, as may appear in the following pages.

To say this, however, is to say too little. I do not mean that the
prevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that,
say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by far
the greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst a
little suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and at
the best generous and happy-go-lucky to a fault. Nevertheless, tales as
repulsive as any that the French writer has told of his country-people
could have been collected here by anyone with a taste for that sort of
thing. Circumstantial narratives have reached me of savage, or, say,
brutish, doings: of sons ill-treating their mothers, and husbands their
wives of fights, and cruelties, and sometimes--not often--of infamous
vice. The likelihood of these tales, which there was no reason to doubt,
was strengthened by what I saw and heard for myself. Drunkenness
corrupted and disgraced the village life, so that good men went wrong
and their families suffered miserably. I have helped more than one
drunkard home at night, and seen a wretched woman or a frightened child
come to the door to receive him. Even in the seclusion of my own garden
I could not escape the evidences of mischief going on. For sounds echo
up and down the valley as clearly as across the water of a lake; and
sometimes a quiet evening would grow suddenly horrid with distracted
noises of family quarrel in some distant cottage, when women shrilled
and clamoured and men cursed, and all the dogs in the parish fell
a-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twice
some wild cry in the night--a woman's scream, a man's volley of
oaths--has