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When I say inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small American towns Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox, West Newton and he had led exclusively what one may call a village-life.
The starting-point of Crabbe's desire to portray village-life truly was a certain indignation he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of the Pastoral Poets. We have lately watched, in the literature of our own day, a somewhat similar reaction against sentimental pictures of country-life.
It was not good for him to be thus alone. How should he ever live through the long months of November and December? The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get rid of themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of village-life and a few unusual ones.
All she wished was to hold complete sway over the heart of a young man who felt heavily burdened with the fetters of marriage; who, now that the schemes of ambition had failed, reproached his young wife that she was the cause of his misfortune; that for her sake he had exiled himself from home, and sentenced himself to the dulness and loneliness of a village-life in Martinique.
When the palaver ended and the tide served, a fierce tornado broke upon us, and the sky looked grisly in the critical direction, north-east. Having no wish to recross the Gaboon River during a storm blowing a head wind, I resolved to delay my departure till the morrow, and amused myself with drawing from the nude a picture of the village and village-life in Pongo-land.
Among these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute painting of the scenery among which it was led. Cowper had published his first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing.
No thoughtful person can fail to be convinced, after a due consideration of the argument in its favor, that, if the social influences inseparable from village-life could be secured to the American farmer, the greatest drawback of his life would be done away with. It remains, unfortunately, a serious question, how far such a radical change is practicable.
Any one who doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which are the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system, and which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the country to be fitly appreciated.
They lived, too, on friendliest terms with their less-instructed and homelier neighbours, the black alpaca blouse and coloured kerchief, doing duty for bonnet, being conspicuous at their Sunday receptions. Not even a Zola can charge French village-life with the snobbishness so conspicuous in England.
It was not good for him to be thus alone. How should he ever live through the long months of November and December? The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get rid of themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of village-life and a few unusual ones.
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