Though the hay-wain is the apparent subject of the painting, it seems to me a mere excuse for Constable to express his vision of the English countryside on either side of the river. The countryside, of course, includes the cottage, the cart and the river, as well as the sheep-dog barking at his master from the safety of the bank. At the same time, it wouldn’t be complete without the rugged clump of elm-trees behind the cottage. To the right, just behind the wain, the trees thin away, leaving a glorious landscape of ripening wheat or barley, with another line of distant trees, presumably more elm-trees, against a cloudy sky.
The painting as a whole epitomizes what most Englishmen think of as natural scenery. Here we admire not the wild beauty of lakes and mountains, such as Wordsworth admired in the Lake District, or Scott in the Highlands, but the tame beauty of meadows and rivers. Here Nature is subject to the needs and uses of Man, not in the violent manner of mines or factories, where Nature is treated as a slave, but in the gentle manner of farming, where she is regarded as a wife. Here all things fit together and harmonize in a peaceful, domestic scene – the cottage, the wain, the river and the fields beyond. All have their appropriate setting amid the elm-trees, and even the dog’s barking chimes in with just the right musical accompaniment.
There is, however, one important detail I find missing in this painting of “The Hay-Wain”. But it may be supplied from almost all Constable’s other paintings of this region. I mean the view of a village church at least in the distance. In fact, the distant view of the church tower at Dedham almost serves as Constable’s signature tune to his paintings of the Stour valley. Wherever he set up his canvas, he seems to have kept his eye on this church tower. There is another famous painting of his called “The Cornfield”, which also seems to lack this characteristic view of Dedham’s church tower. But no! On closer inspection one can make out, on the far side of the field, the shape of a church just visible among the trees. Indeed, all the lines of this painting seem to move in that direction. The sheep-dog is guiding his woolly charges towards the gate of the field, where the shepherd is waiting, and there is a shepherd-boy sprawled by the wayside brook to allay his thirst in the heat of the summer’s day.
The scenery today isn’t so different from what it was in Constable’s time. Walking down the winding lane from East Bergholt to the Mill, and then along the river-path in the direction of Dedham, one finds the countryside for miles around nothing but a delight to the eye and a refreshment to the mind. That day I didn’t see so many sight-seers, nor did “the Constable industry”, or what there is of it, seem to be so very thriving. There was the Mill and the quiet mill-pond, the old lock with its wooden gates, the bridge and the ancient cottage beside the bridge, where one may buy postcards and ice-creams, besides renting boats by the hour. Most enjoyable of all was the path among the willows on the river-bank, with cows peacefully grazing in the meadow to the left and with the inevitable view of Dedham church in the distance.
Now let me put a final word, or rather question, about the church. Why is it that the presence of a church, whether that of Dedham or some other, is so constant a feature of Constable’s paintings? Or rather, why is it that the presence of a church is so constant a feature of the English countryside? Put in this way, the question is almost its own answer. From time immemorial England has been a Christian country – for all the destructive handiwork of Henry VIII – and every village, even villages that now no longer exist, has its charming village church. So the church is now no less part of the English countryside than the cottages and farm-houses which cluster round it as though for protection. Not only the services held within the churches, but their material presence in wood and stone seems to confer a divine blessing on the surrounding countryside and to proclaim the biblical truth that God dwells not in any house made by human hands but, as Wordsworth says, in “the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky, and in the mind of man”. Such was no doubt the instinct which led Constable to sign his paintings with the figure, however distant, of a church tower. And such is still the instinct which remains, if unconsciously, in the heart of the Englishman who looks with nostalgia from the busy town of today to the quiet countryside as his heart and home.
The Country Churchyard
Of all the village churches in England the most famous is surely that of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire. It is, however, famous not for the church itself, however charming it may be. There are hundreds of village churches, no less charming, scattered up and down the country as a precious legacy from the Middle Ages. Rather, what people come here to see is the churchyard – “beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap.” This isn’t just any churchyard, it is the churchyard made forever famous by Gray’s “Elegy”, the poem which expresses more aptly than any other the essence of eighteenth-century England.
On entering the churchyard from a country lane, one is hardly aware of the village to which it is so famously attached. One is more immediately aware of a wooden gate with a tiled roof, known as a “lych-gate”, such as commonly stands at the entrance to churchyards in old England. Only, this gate doesn’t seem particularly old. Inside, too, there are serried ranks of graves, all of them disappointingly new and laid out with no less disappointing regularity. There isn’t a sign of the heaving turf or any mouldering heap mentioned by the poet.
The path from the gate – again a disappointingly straight path – leads on, however, to a second and older lych-gate. Here I felt I could take comfort in the real thing, the old lych-gate, leading to the old English country churchyard. Naturally, the recent dead must have their recent graves laid out in the neat order required by our neat modern age. For them the first churchyard, or rather “cemetery”, must have been added by way of ante-room to the genuine old churchyard beyond. Otherwise the old graves would have been desecrated by the addition of new ones.
So I thought, and so I made my way with confidence through the old lych-gate. There indeed I confronted a charming scene. There facing me was an irregular cluster of stone buildings with pointed Gothic windows and steep red-tiled roofs, all somehow combining to form one village church, as the original building received addition upon addition in different centuries and in different styles of architecture. To the left there was a lower roof projecting from the wall, evidently the porch or entrance to the church, and on the other side was a longer projection extending from the church to the wall of the churchyard, a covered walk for the benefit of the local squire and his family who lived in the mansion beyond. Above this cluster of buildings and roofs dominated what Gray describes as “yonder ivy-mantled tower”, now, alas, no longer mantled with ivy but still charming in its original unclad form with a little, low pyramidal roof of tiles.
What particularly impressed me about the church was its flint structure, like the many churches I had noticed in and around Canterbury. Thousands of small hard black stones, set in mortar round the windows and up to the roofs, gave the appearance of a squat yet cosy solidity and an assurance that the church could easily survive another six or seven centuries. Only the building on the left, presumably added in the Tudor period, was not of stone but brick, with a level, not a pointed, window-frame. It produced in me an oddly discordant impression, yet oddly enough, its discord contributed to the concordant impression of the whole.
In front of the red-brick