‘Between Two Civilizations’ 27
Th e passage must be understood in the wider context of the combination of
intimate local knowledge and highly specialized skill brought to bear on each
individual task the wheelwrights undertake, which Sturt off ers as the defi ning
characteristic of the work done in the shop. Th e wheelwrights therefore do more
than serve their customers well; they are, as it were, perfectly attuned to the
demands of the local land itself. However, by describing them as ‘unaware’ of
the profundity of this relationship which it takes Sturt himself to articulate, the
writer implicitly claims a level of consciousness he denies to the wheelwrights
and shows self-awareness of his own more detached position.^6 Furthermore, the
metaphors of friendship and private communication he uses to suggest the inti-
macy between the wheelwrights and their raw materials turn description into
an idealized interpretation of the craft smen’s labour. Th e signifi cance of this is
reinforced later, when Sturt records feeling ‘really pained at the sight of an old
farm-waggon’ of the very kind so carefully made in his wheelwright’s shop, laden
with bricks and being towed by a steam tractor:
Too plainly Old England was passing away; villas were coming, the day of farm-wag-
gons was done. Here was this stately implement forced, like the victim of an implacable
conqueror, to carry the materials for its own undoing ... I felt as if I were watching a
slave subjected to insult and humiliation. It was not so much that bricks were out of
place ... But here the shame seemed emphasized by the tractor. Instead of quiet beauti-
ful cart-horses, a little puffi ng steam-engine was hurrying this captive along , faster than
ever farm-waggon was designed to go. Th e shaft s had been removed – as when Samson
was mutilated to serve the ends of his masters – and although I couldn’t see it, I knew
only too well how the timbers would be trembling and the axles fretting at the speed of
this unwonted toil. I felt as if pain was being infl icted; as if some quiet old cottager had
been captured by savages and was being driven to work on the public road.^7Th is is, perhaps, one of the most emblematic moments in Sturt’s writing, reveal-
ing several of his strongest beliefs with particular intensity. Th e vocabulary of
military conquest, slavery, torture, distress and abduction personify the cart as
the victim of change in which one form of civilization, timeless, dignifi ed and
traditional, is superseded by another which is modern, coarse and indiff erent
to the past. Th e capacity for suff ering ascribed to the cart mirrors the empathy
between the wheelwrights and their materials, and its mistreatment and misuse
extend by implication to the men who made it, and beyond that to a careless
rejection of a whole way of life which Sturt equates with ‘Old England’ itself.
Th e rhetorical loading of this series of connections typifi es a repeated strateg y
in Sturt’s construction of the values and character of the past and the impact
of change upon them. It also points to the depth of his personal pain at living
in the midst of ‘the disillusionments of this present time of transition’ in a soci-
ety in which he felt increasingly estranged.^8 Yet despite his animosity towards
change here, Sturt did not always take such a negative view of modernity. He