27th June.
Ose of the idle st, kindest, and best of British poets will stand on the muster roll of England's glorious sons as the author of the Deserted Village. Had Goldsmith written nothing else, this one poem would have given him his place on the roll of the immortals. Only the disappearance of British fields under piles of stone and brick, and, with that, the disappearance of the capacity to understand village life and its presentment, can prevent: this {wonderful poem from holding the place it has ever held in England's estimation.
Goldsmith knew the country and loved it. With flute in hand he had wandered through most of the lands of Western Europe. Village life to him had many charms. He shared its sorrows and its joys: the hopes and fears of its simple folk were his, his their aspirations and desires, and to all of -them, his sympathy went forth in copious streams.
We want a Goldsmith now for hamlets of another sort. Our vil-Jages are not deserted. Far from it. Rather are they engulfed, surrounded, and overwhelmed. They are falling a prey to the insatiable maw of a growing city, just as Westminster, Chelsea, Battersea, Hammer smith, and a hundred other villages have been swallowed up in mighty London, Shanghai is growing, expanding, developing, enlarging her borders in every direction. Here villa, there a street; here a mansion, there a cottage; everywhere the city grasp is clutching at the land that lies around. Perhaps the growth over the Defence Creek, between the Race-course and Sinza, and westward to the Carter Road is best known, but that on the northern borders of the Settlement is more marked. Here what is really a new town has grown up within recent years.
Tt is interesting to note the different characteristics in such a neighbourhood. Many of the alleyways are as straight from end to end as if they had been ruled by a straightedge, while the similarity in their structure is such as to suggest the employment of some giant house-constructing machine incapable of variation. But here and there the arrow-like directness gives place, as in the native part of the Peking Road, to tortuous winding, Such thoroughfares are the result of pre-existing conditions, possibly of creeks, probably of country paths and native country dwellings. How these persist in some quarters of the Settlement would be a surprise to many residents. In the comparatively long established road above mentioned, there are still a number of country houses left as they stood when in front and around them were open fields, gardens, and groves of trees. In parts of near Hongkew there are others. In the newer districts at least a dozen of these strangled villages may be found. Little by little their denizens have watched the stealthy approach of the Jand-grabbing city. Then has come the tempter with offers of foreign coins in greater number per mow than ever they had dreamt of before. There is a struggle in the mind. Shall Naboth part with his vineyard? In some cases the answer is promptly in the affirmative, in many there is a long period of shillyshaily, not altogether for the hope of higher prices, but from a very natural reluctance to part with ancestral acres. Even when the chink of the Mexican has successfully charmed the ear, and treland has been conveyed to some speculator, "his heirs, executors, administrators, or assigns," the family mansion is still held sacred. Its windowless walls, its earthen floor, its single storey, its poverty, and the fact that it is now shut in, strangled, make no difference. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." The scent of the fields in spring and harvest has gone for ever. The bamboo grove which kept off the cold north wind in times gone by has disappeared. Luckily it is not wanted, a row of the usual two-storied tenement houses having taken its place. Everything that suggests country life has been swept away. The Municipal authorities have come along with their new-fangled ideas about drainage and other sanitary matters. Every house is closely enveloped in a tight-fitting bamboo fence, as though its occupants would willingly shut out the hateful sight of surrounding civilisation. They do not like the interference of salaried officials. Sometimes the salaried officials do not like them. Their old-world customs do not harmonise with the progressive desires of western life. Choy are in the way: their houses cumber the ground: it is impossible to carry out the system of drainage, or the line of road that suggests itself to the authority, and now and then there is friction. It is regrettable that it should be so, but we must confess to some sympathy with the strangled villagers. Memory takes us back to similar scenes in the old land, where old-fashioned people are quite as pig-headed in their opposition to modern, improvements as ever the Chinese can be.
There is one captured village in the Hongkew district which presents a picture of almost hopeless despair. Five years ago it was surrounded with fields and gardens. It had its little creek flowing past its front, its clump of trees as usual guarding its northern side, and it was to all intents and purposes a typical hamlet of the smaller kind. It is now surrounded. As though loath to give up every ancient claim to country life, there are still some three or four square yards of untilled land, richin wild balsams, in front of one of the houses. Another has actually a heap of straw under the shelter of its eaves, a sorry reminder of possibly happier times, A little further on there stands as a solitary relic of the woodland life that flourished years ago, the stump of a dead tree with two or three sadly battered branches stretched forth to Heaven as though in mute appeal against such degradation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.