‘Between Two Civilizations’ 39
Doings, to which each contributes his tiny part’.^60 Modern society, he believes,
has produced a growth of consciousness, resulting in an ‘increasing conviction
that the Individual Self must be considered ... incompatible with that servitude
to Industry which enthrals the Slingos of the world’.^61 Sturt regarded this as an
irresistible development with uncertain consequences bringing radical change to
traditional industry and society in the name of democracy. Paradoxically, while
he himself was sympathetic to democratic socialism, his discussion of Slingo
reveals contradictory tensions in his thought: on the one hand, he presents the
labourer, like Bettesworth or his wife, as representative of an older, more rooted,
self-suffi cient and satisfi ed way of life; but it is also characterized as an insect-like
existence, intuitive rather than intellectual or spiritual, at or below subsistence
level and largely void of knowledge of or interest in the wider world. If the
modern industrial worker is a ‘wage-slave’, Slingo and the Bettesworths are also
‘enthral[led]’ in their own way. As his journals show, Sturt had no desire to see
the perpetuation of the hardships and limitations of such people’s lives; but nor
could he ever envisage how the transition from a traditional to a modern society
could be eff ected without it becoming wholly fragmented and succumbing to
the infl uences of money and materialism, more especially so because, as he noted
in July 1909, ‘it is the unhappy position of labouring people to be encumbered
with traditions which no longer fi t their circumstances’.^62
At the close of his discussion of Jeff eries, Keith argues that whereas his
earlier work perpetuates the strong sense of relationship to the external world
found in older rural writing, the introspection and self-refl exiveness of Th e
Story of My Heart (1883) and the late essays point to the direction that would
become dominant in Sturt. ‘Here’, he writes, ‘solitary theorizing and intellectual
analysis form the main staple of the work. An almost obsessive introspection
becomes the norm’.^63 Th e truth of this is particularly borne out by the evidence
of the journals, which Sturt told Arnold Bennett was ‘the best book I shall ever
write’.^64 Th ey record the restlessness of his mind in its endless quest not only
to understand and defi ne the physical and social changes he saw taking place
around him, but also to grasp and articulate the elusive nature of the qualita-
tive changes to the culture which, he believed, had been the essence of England
itself for generations. Th e incompleteness of the latter project is unsurprising ,
but it is richly complemented by the remarkable exemplary studies of individual
men and women who were among the last survivors of the earlier part of the
nineteenth century and had become left overs in the modern age. As David Ger-
vais has observed, ‘some of the most moving things in Sturt’s books occur when,
though a looker-on, he is privileged with a sense of whole generations of English
people, emerging through the presence of some humble peasant descendant’.^65
Late in his life Sturt reached even further back, reconstructing and imagining
his own family history before life and work were transformed by modernity. Th e