The placement of the Peasant Arts Society in Haslemere reflects the country life beliefs of the movement. They believed that industrialized society in the towns and cities was to the detriment of individual happiness.
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| from Blount, Godfrey, Arbor Vitae, 1899 |
Members of the movement wrote on this subject. Godfrey Blount was interested in the relationship between handicraft and the simplicity of country life. In ‘Town or country, from the rustic renaissance’, The Craftsmen, March 1906 he stated that “A return to the country must imply the decay of the town. If it does not imply this it can be no true return. A return to the country with the corresponding decline of the town, must also mean a return to simplicity and handicraft, because, when the town ceases to be a burden on the countryman’s back, he will have to make what he wants by hand in the country instead of having them made by machinery in town. But, above all, a return to the country means the determination to be thorough-bred peasants and not mongrel ones.”
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| from Blount, Godfrey, Arbor Vitae, 1899 |
Maude Egerton King valued the positive effect of country life upon the human soul. In ‘An Appreciation’, 1912 (The Forest Farm, Peter Rosegger) she stated that “The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs, traditions, lore and art – everything except religion in its Church sense – which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole world, they certainly lose their own soul – the soul special to Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world’s imaginative life.”
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| from Blount, Godfrey, Arbor Vitae, 1899 |
Greville MacDonald recounts Maude Egerton King saying “By the time the demon has discovered the millennium he wants, I am sure machinery will dispense with Man altogether …If any men are left they will be too fat to work; or starving; but with still enough brains to serve the machines as the Luddites did.” (MacDonald, 1932, Reminiscences of a Specialist, London, George Allen and Unwin).
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| from Blount, Godfrey, Arbor Vitae, 1899 |
Ethel Blount writes in The Story of the Homespun Web (1910) “I will show, bit by bit, how we, disinherited of tradition, can again learn to make a bit of cloth from the wool straight from the sheep’s back to the web of good stuff ready for wear. And while helping my readers to the material part of the mater I hope to aid them to recover the greater, immaterial part, of the joy, namely, that has belonged to it ever since the day that Eve first spun her spindle- while her Adam delved near by….If but few can be found to try such a mode of life, let women take heart, and begin it by twos and threes, for more will assuredly follow in their footsteps. What might not England be in even ten years’ time if women would turn their splendid energies and devotion to this re-conquest? England, after centuries of mechanical degradation and lost imagination, would arise like the prodigal, and weeping out its repentance at is Father’s feet, would be restored to its ancient dignities, with the fairest garment, the garment of the forgiven wanderer, on its shoulders…I want every English home to have a loom or a spinning-wheel.”
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| from Blount, Godfrey, Arbor Vitae, 1899 |
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