A Maggot - John Fowles Read Free Page A

it was without attraction to an age
whose notion of natural beauty - in those few capable of forming such
notions - was strictly confined to the French or Italianate formal
garden at home and the denuded but ordered (through art) classical
landscapes of southern Europe abroad.
    To the educated English traveller then there was
nothing romantic or picturesque at all in domestic wild landscapes,
and less than nothing in the cramped vernacular buildings of such
townlets as C-. All this was so much desert, beneath the
consideration of anyone who pretended to taste. The period had no
sympathy with unregulated or primordial nature. It was aggressive
wilderness, an ugly and all-invasive reminder of the Fall, of man's
eternal exile from the Garden of Eden; and particularly aggressive,
to a nation of profit-haunted puritans, on the threshold of an age of
commerce, in its flagrant uselessness. The time had equally no sense
(except among a few bookworms and scholars) of the antique outside
the context of Greece and Rome; even its natural sciences, such as
botany, though by now long founded, remained essentially hostile to
wild nature, seeing it only as something to be tamed, classified,
utilized, exploited. The narrow streets and alleys, the Tudor houses
and crammed cottage closes of such towns conveyed nothing but an
antediluvian barbarism, such as we can experience today only in some
primitive foreign land ... in an African village, perhaps, or an Arab
souk.
    A twentieth-century mind, could it have journeyed
back and taken on the sensibilities and eyes of those two
better-class travellers riding that day into the town, must have felt
itself landed, or becalmed, in some strange doldrum of time, place
and spirit; in one of those periods when Clio seems to stop and
scratch her tousled head, and wonder where the devil to go next from
here. This particular last day of April falls in a year very nearly
equidistant from 1689, the culmination of the English Revolution, and
1789, the start of the French; in a sort of dozing solstitial
standstill, a stasis of the kind predicted by those today who see all
evolution as a punctuated equilibrium, between those two zenith dates
and all they stand for; at a time of reaction from the intemperate
extremisms of the previous century, yet already hatching the seeds
(perhaps even in that farthing and careless strew of fallen violets)
of the world-changing upheaval to come. Certainly England as a whole
was indulging in its favourite and sempiternal national hobby:
retreating deep within itself, and united only in a constipated
hatred of change of any kind.
    Yet like so many seemingly inert troughs in history,
it was not altogether a bad time for the six million or so there then
were of the English, however humble. The two begging children by the
road might wear ragged and patched clothes; but at least they were
visibly neither starved nor starving. There were higher real wages
than for centuries past - and for very nearly two centuries to come.
Indeed it was only just becoming anything but a distinctly prosperous
time for this county of Devon. Its ports, its ships, its towns and
villages lived, and largely thrived, as they had for the last
half-millennium, on one great staple: wool. In the abrupt course of
the next seventy years this trade was to be first slowly throttled,
then finally annihilated by a national change of taste, towards
lighter fabrics, and the more enterprising North of England; but
still at this time half Europe, even colonial America and imperial
Russia, bought and made clothes from the Devonshire dozen, its famous
length of serge and perpetuana.
    There was evidence of the cloth trade in nearly every
thatched doorway and open cottage shutter of C ; women spinning, men
spinning, children spinning, their hands so accustomed that eyes and
tongues were entirely free; or if not doing that, then engaged in
cleaning, carding and combing the raw fleece-wool. Here and there in
a dark interior might