of laboring folk, that too might be inferred from their occasional talk; but after all, opportunities of hearing such things are not many, for the men are commonly too modest about their work, and too unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical skill exercised in country labors may be surely deduced from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country tools.

The beauty of tools is not accidental but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adzehead or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (within the limits of its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for different soils; it is widened out or narrowed; it is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar example for beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which however is so variable (the statement is made on the authority of an old coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch of shore may be dangerous if not entirely useless at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a wagon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools, none of course is more exquisite than a fid

dle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees, is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and convexity in the beerbarrel; and that, exerting itself with matchless precision through the trained senses of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles of their scythes and the shafts of their Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper handling of it technique is present.

axes.

Coming, then, from the tools in general to those more strictly associated with rural work, we find as it were midway between general and special use one which, connected as it with a perfectly well recognized form of skill, affords a convenient standard for estimating the degree of skill incidental to the use of other tools. The axe, as Walt Whitman says, has been the servant "of all great works on land and all great works on the sea"; and in our country-places it still serves, amongst others, woodmen in the forest, sawyers in the timber-yard, wheelwrights in their village workshops. For though

elsewhere axe-work may be giving place to machine-sawing and apprentices grow up unskilful in it, in villages far from machinery your wheelwright is helpless without his axe, and preserves faithfully the traditional technique of its use. Perhaps also he cherishes the traditional belief (which may be recommended to the attention of technical educators) that a wheelwright must first chop his knee at least five or six times before he can hope to become a master of his craft.

Be that as it may, in the manipulation of an axe-whether it is the mighty two-handed weapon of woodmen and sawyers or the lighter one of wheelwrights-there is one circumstance which makes the tool a pre-eminent example of the law by which beauty waits on technique. In the case of most other tools, from fiddlebow to dung-prong, the part to be handled is adapted for a stationary grip, but the handle of an axe is required for a grip that may loosen for the swinging gesture, and sliding back swiftly down the shaft, tighten suddenly at the moment of impact into a clutch that is at once firm to check rebound and yet elastic to disperse the jar of the concussion. Consequently there is no part of an axe-shaft, from the wide end where it is wedged into the head to the other end which swells to prevent slipping, but has its necessary contour; and the whole handle, thus fitted so to speak to the clever motion of a man's trained hands, has taken the mould of that motion and exhibits it to our sight. In earlier days, not so long ago but that they can be remembered, but before commerce had dispensed so much as now with the technique of chopping, every worker in hard wood was wont to fit his own shaft into his own axe.

The village

wheelwright still does So, because there is no other than himself who knows so accurately what his individECLECTIC VOL. LXXIX. 556

ual needs are. And seeing that his needs are roughly those of all other men, the established type of the tool is never departed from. It is as indispensable as the sole to a shoe, or as the teeth to a comb. It began to acquire organic shape in the hands of the first primeval savage who lashed a stick to his chipped flint; and through all the thousands of years since then the skill of all woodmen has been moulding the form of the tool until it is impossible to conceive any real alteration in it. But the type is as plastic as it is immutable. The present writer once knew an old wheelwright who, being left-handed, gave such a "set" to his axe-shafts that no other skilled workman could work with them; yet their refinement on the type was so nice that apprentice boys never perceived anything unusual in the tools, until the peculiarity of them was pointed out.

In singular contrast with the axe, which ever suggests the cunning of the individual workman, as the scythe, in whose comely lines the cleverness of the whole race of mowers, rather than supreme individual skill, is recorded. The reader is not to imagine here that there is no technique in mowing, or that a scythe would be a safe plaything for students in night-schools; but only that the scythe, before it began to be discarded, had reached such perfection as to minimize the extent of skill demanded for its proper use. It had almost ceased to be a tool pure and simple; it had all but become an "implement," fit to produce its results even in the hands of men who scarce understood it. True it is that farmers nowadays, when occasionally they want mowers to make up for the deficiencies of machines, have some difficulty in finding men who can handle a scythe. Yet, while this proves that there is a technique to be acquired, on the other hand it must be remembered that no individ

ual mower can ever have spent more than a few weeks in each year at work with a scythe, and that a few weeks in a year are not enough to allow of the acquisition of any elaborate technique. Consequently in the mower's action, which, so far as appears, is but one action repeated interminably, we must not expect to find all the technique for which the scythe has attained its wonderful shape. There is the undeniable beauty, but the explanation of it refers only a little to the men of our own time: it belongs much more to their unknown ancestors, far back through the generations. To understand the fitness of the tool one has first to realize the intention of ithow its curved shaft is a sort of hypotenuse to the right-angle formed by man and meadow, and then one must imagine (unless antiquaries can restore for us) the slow evolution of it from the first blade (of bronze it may have been) fastened to the end of a pole, up through all the improved forms to its perfected form, which was just reached when the mowing-machine arrived, and the experience of the centuries could be discarded. Realizing SO the difficulties of mowing, and imagining so how they were gradually overcome, one pictures no individual, but generation after generation supplementing the imperfections of a tool by dogged traditional dexterity; and one sees how the task may have grown simpler to individual men, as the improved implement compensated for the shortness of time available for practicing the use of it. A very slight examination of a modern scythe is enough to convince one that much history is crystallized in its rare beauty. The original handle is no longer a handle; the handles now are two turned pegs, set in iron ring-sockets which are themselves suggestive of long evolution. Moreover, the sinuous shaft is not now what it was fifty years ago—

the nearest pole that the copse-cutter could find for the purpose a sort of makeshift, in fact; it is now a shaft rounded and smoothed in a machine lathe, and bent by steam and pressure in a factory to the ideal curve desired by mowers for ages. Perfect scythehandles might be had now by the thousand, for the type is found, and manufacturers could reproduce it for ever: but at this stage even the easier technique that would suffice for working the perfected tool seems likely to be quite superseded by machinery. Thus the scythe is less the minister to a modern technique than the embodied evidence of a technique soon to be forgotten. Before it is too late specimens should be collected for preservation in museums, where future generations, technically educated, might go on bank holidays and wonder why men ever de vised such awkward looking tools.

The axe and the scythe tell their story of technique too plainly to be disbelieved; but evidence of practiced skill in the efficient handling of spades, and shovels, and hoes is not so easily to be deduced from the shape of those tools. They do not take the eye. Compared with the others they seem a despised race, as it were the ill-conditioned jackasses among tools, meriting and receiving scant consideration. Any treatment seems good enough for them: with sufficient stubbornness and brute force anybody might expect to make them go. No fascinating and romantic association of woodland or of meadow attracts affection to them: one looks upon them without sentiment; calls a spade a spade-if an epithet is added it is no endearing one-and discovers in them at best some rough fitness, but little or no beauty.

There may none the less be a beauty in these things that the book-learned have not learnt to see. A laborer, an old and experienced man, might be named here, who still treasures up a

hoe, long since worn out, because in its time it was "such a nice little hoe." The same man speaks with affectionate regret of a shovel he once owned: "The purtiest little shovel I ever had. Wore so nice and thin he was. I wouldn't have lost 'n for a crown. Many's wanted me to lend 'n to 'm, but I never would; but one day my brotherin-law got hold of 'n, and chinked out the edge of 'n, usin' him in some big stones." From this it would appear that an amateur's failure to discern beauty in such tools may prove little more than his own lack of discernment. Because its fitness is not truly understood, the shape of a spade or of a shovel goes unappreciated. In the action of a man digging-when he is following up his trench, and making of thrust and heave and renewed thrust one superb circulatory gesture, still progressing the fine accomplishment is lost upon the onlooker. Given equal muscular strength, the onlooker does not see why he should be unable to do equally well. But there is more in it than a mere exertion of muscle: more than may be learnt from books or acquired by theorizing. The greatest intellect can furnish no substitute for the practised skill, the "knack," required even in an art so humble as that of digging. It is somewhere related of Emerson that, working in his garden, he was SO clumsy that his son called out in dismay, "Take care, papa, you'll dig your foot!" One seems to see the awkward, all but impossible, frontal attack the philosopher must have been making on his soil. Another amateur-not to be named after Emerson, but very intimately known to the present writerlong harbored a delusion that he knew all about digging. His experience had been gained upon narrow garden borders. When he tried his hand upon a straightforward piece of a few rods, trenching deep and burying manure as

he went, the very soil proclaimed his incompetence. Here a ridge showed where he had worked too deeply; there a hollow bore witness to the opposite fault; for, from first to last his unpracticed senses had not perfectly apprehended either the length of his spade, or the resistance of the earth, or the weight of the successive spadefuls of it as he heaved them over. Worse still, there was something wrong --something elusive and incomprehensible in the texture of the ground as he left it. It did not lie loose and friable as an expert would have made it do, inviting the chemistry of the air: it had a niggling look, and, in short, it explained with undisguised candor to this amateur that there were mysteries in the craft of digging only to be fathomed after much longer training than his had been. His acquaintance with books had not availed to supplement his ignorance of other things; for his senses had never been vitalized to that higher power whose action is called technique.

To the laborer already mentionedthat connoisseur of tools to whom spadefuls of earth are as words to the author, though unlike the author he never counts them-we are indebted for further exidence of the nice perceptive powers that a man must acquire for effective digging. The evidence, too, brings us a little nearer to the "points" in which the fitness, and perhaps the beauty, of spades and shovels should be looked for. The old man was talking of a spade that had been provided for him in somebody's garden: "'Tis a spade!" he jeered. "I expect they just sent to a shop for 'a spade,' and they got one! no mistake. Long, and straight, and heavy. . . . Now this little spade here," and he lifted the nearly new one he was using, "it's a very nice little spade. I chose 'n myself, out o' twenty or more they showed me at the shop. But he's

too thick. He wants usin' in sharp sand for a week or two, to make 'n thinner; and that 'd wear off his sharp corners, too, so's he'd enter the ground better. A spade's never no good till his corners is wore off. Same with a shovel. These navvies, when they buys a new shovel, very often they'll take 'n to the blacksmith's straight away, to have the corners chipped off. A blacksmith 'll do that for ye for nothin'-well, with his hard chisels it don't take 'n no time. And then just rub the corners smooth with a file..."

A more mysterious defect in this otherwise "nice little spade" seemed to be beyond correction, as it was also beyond the power of an inexperienced eye to discern. "It hadn't got quite a nice lift to it." Observing how the tree or handle, where it curved down taperingly into the iron socket, was much straighter than that of a shovel which stood near, the amateur supposed that it was there that the fault lay. But he was quite wrong. In that respect the tool was all that a spade should be. ""Tis here in the blade. "Ten't quite hollow enough for liftin' the earth. Still, 'tis a purty little spade."

66

Groping thus to the truth of the matter, we may get further light on it by another consideration. We have seen how a scythe is fashioned to facilitate one definite movement, always in the same direction from right to left. (The work of a gang of mowers is like drill, every man's part fitting in with his neighbor's, so that it would be impossible for any one of them to be lefthanded.) And we have seen that an axe, by slightest alteration of the shaft, may be fitted to either hand, but once fitted to that, cannot be changed to the other. And now in spades and shovels we reach the other extreme: from the symmetry of these tools the possibility is manifest of shifting them

It

from hand to hand, indifferently. is a possibility which suggests that "right-handedness," dexterity, may be dispensed with, or that the untrained gaucherie of an amateur may suffice. Instead of the strict handling that has shaped the scythe, we have with tools of this family a semblance of freedom, too haphazard to have warped their balance into a specialized beauty.

Fortunately, there are other symmetrical tools, more familiar to the booklearned, to warn us against a false conclusion here. The skill necessary for using a steel pen or a dinner-knife with one hand is commonly too exigent to allow of its being acquired by the other, and the same truth holds good of shovels and spades and "spuds." If strength were all there is in it, one hand should be as ready for digging as the other; but the much-quoted laborer confesses, "With a shovel I can only use it one way-with my left hand down towards the ground. But that's the left-handed way. If you puts me on to t' t'other way, all I can do is to move a little sand or anything like that, what's on the level. I en't no good that way." "No good," because in this man's estimation the little he can do does not amount to shoveling. To see what shovelling may be, one should watch navvies excavating for a sewer. As the narrow trench deepens, you lose sight of the men, but the shovelfuls of earth come flying up orderly as ever on to the growing heaps at the side, two feet, three, four, five feet above the men's heads, never missing, never falling back nor thrown too far. This is the sort of shovelling that the old laboring man means he can only do in "the left-handed way."

Put side by side, a spade and a shovel exhibit differences as significant as is their family likeness. They are as cousins. Sprung obviously from the same ancestry, each has diverged from the original in its own way, and with