MODEST ESSEX

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 8

MODEST ESSEX

CINDERELLA OF THE COUNTIES.

Essex is the Cinderella of the Home Counties —the world takes it for grant.ed that her prankt-up sisters must needs be the B elles'of the Ball (writes A. D. Gristwood in the London '“Sunday Times”). But that’s only half the story. Cinderella boasts a quiet and peaceful beauty of her own, which, to any man not irretrievably blinded by prejudice, is as much a part of the spell of old England as the lordliest (and best advertised) nook among the Chilterns and the Downs. She can show, indeed, little of the grandeur that rivals further afield find so lucrative, and for the most part her clay lands yield a landscape so placid and gentle that at first sight it seems commonplace; but her tranqiul, easy-going rivers hold the secret of an illusive sleepy charm that finds perfect expression in the canvases of Constable and Gainsbdrough. Gainsborough, indeed, was born at Sudbury, across the border in Suffolk, but his landscapes of the Stour Valley bear the mingled fragrance of the two countries. His successor, Constable, was eloquent in his praise. “The landscape of Gainsborough is soothing, tender,- and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of the morning are all to be found on his canvases. On looking at them we find tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them. The lonely haunt of the solitary shepherd, the return of the rustic with his bill and bundle of wood, the darksome lane or dell, the Sweet little cottage girl at the spring with her pitcher, were the things he delighted to paint, and which he painted with exquisite refinement, yet not a refinement beyond nature.” As for Constable himself, also a Suffolk man, the lower reaches of the Stour are so closely connected with his work that even in his lifetime they had come to be known as “Constable’s Country.” It has been well said that “the grander forms of nature did not appeal to his imagination, roused rather by the incidents of cultivated country, and fondly resting on the quiet landscapes of his native valley.” He himself declared of his birthplace at East Bergholt that he loved every stile and stump, and every lane in the village. Essex may at least claim the famous Dedham Mill, long since, alas, destroyed by fire, as hei’ very own, and it is surely not for nothing that the fathers of English landscape-painting found in Essex scenery a fit medium for their genius.

NEGLECTFUL LITERATURE.

Literature, however, has taken little interest in the county. Wessex and the Five Towns and lonely Exmoor find immortality in the familiar pages of Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and R. D. Blackmore, but Essex for the most part remains unhonoured and unsung. Dickens indeed celebrates in “Barnaby Rudge,” the fame of the “King’s Head,” at Chigwell, dwelling lovingly on the “overhanging storeys, drowsy little panes of glass and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway,” and the Chester Room at the inn proves the power of the novelist’s magic. Six’ Walter Besant in “All in a Garden Fair,” and unlucky George Gissing in “The Nether World,” painted truthful and vivid Essex landscapes. Wiliam Morris found his “Earthly Paradise” not far from Epping. Coventry Patmore was an Essex man. But the hero who shal redeem Cinderella, from ’ her servitude has yet to enter the lists, and in the meantime she must endure an undeserved neglect and honourable obscurity. Mr Britling, in his rural retreat at Dunmow, has worthily celebrated this survival of old ways and old customs. “Essex is so much more genuinely old England than Surrey, say, or Kent, In Essex we’re as lax as the eighteenth century. We hunt in any old clothes . . All our finger-psts’ have been twisted round by facetious men years ago ’ . . . Our roses and oaks are wonderful, that alone shows that this is the real England. If I wanted to play golf—which I don’t, being a decent Essex man —I should have to motor ten miles into Hertfordshire. And for rheumatics and longevity Surrey can’t touch us.”

Mr Britling perhaps exaggerates, and his panegyric was written a dozen years ago, but beyond the morass of bricks and mortar that girdles London on the Essex side as elsewhere, the flavour of old times still lingers obstinately, and seed-time and harvest are more important than politics and tho loud-speaker. Sun-bleached stile and fragrant hayrick; meadow and copse and barn; ragged lanes leading to forgotten villages where the yokels stil argue on the benches outside the inn; broad acres of cornlands, and plebeian helds of swedes and turnips; the red-tiled roofs of farms spotted with green and golden moss —these things are commonplace enough, but an abiding joy to eyes unspoiled by overmuch sight-seeing. And Cinderella is as rich in such treasures as any of her sisters.