God Speed the Plough
This passage in Fletcher's book caught my eye:
"In England part of the price of progress has been the spoiling of the countryside and the almost total disappearance of rural life and traditional art. There is, you see, a point at which innovation is a distinct advantage: the trouble arises from the fact that men seem unable to see the point at which development must cease. The history of the motor-car is a characteristic example: originally an advantage, it has been allowed to make town life intolerable and the countryside in many cases into a mere seedy appendage to the nearest big town. Now that we have become a nation of stockbroker farmers, now that we buy our natty country clothes at expensive shops in Bond Street in order to play at living in the country at weekends, it is all but impossible to visualize what English rural life was up to fifty years or so ago, before so much of the old traditional art of country areas had been driven into museums -- a sure indication of its decline. Many of the kinds of popular art we shall be discussing in this chapter [Popular Art in the Country] will, therefore, be bygones."
"In England part of the price of progress has been the spoiling of the countryside and the almost total disappearance of rural life and traditional art. There is, you see, a point at which innovation is a distinct advantage: the trouble arises from the fact that men seem unable to see the point at which development must cease. The history of the motor-car is a characteristic example: originally an advantage, it has been allowed to make town life intolerable and the countryside in many cases into a mere seedy appendage to the nearest big town. Now that we have become a nation of stockbroker farmers, now that we buy our natty country clothes at expensive shops in Bond Street in order to play at living in the country at weekends, it is all but impossible to visualize what English rural life was up to fifty years or so ago, before so much of the old traditional art of country areas had been driven into museums -- a sure indication of its decline. Many of the kinds of popular art we shall be discussing in this chapter [Popular Art in the Country] will, therefore, be bygones."
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