WALK TO OAKHAM--THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPRING--THE ENGLISH GENTRY-
-A SPECIMEN OF THE CLASS--MELTON MOWBRAY AND ITS SPECIALITIES--
BELVOIR VALE AND ITS BEAUTY--THOUGHTS ON THE BLIND PAINTER.
From Stamford to Oakham was an afternoon walk which I greatly
enjoyed. This was the first week of harvest, and the first of
August. How wonderfully the seasons are localised and subdivided.
How diversified is the economy of light and heat! That field of
wheat, thick, tall and ripe for the sickle, was green and apparently
growing through all the months of last winter. What a phenomenon it
would have been, on the first of February last, to a New England
farmer, suddenly transported from his snow-buried hills to the view
of this landscape the same day! Not a spire of grass or grain was
alive when he left his own homestead. All was cold and dead. The
very earth was frozen to the solidity and sound of granite. It was
a relief to his eye to see the snow fall upon the scene and hide it
two feet deep for months. He looks upon this, then upon the one he
left behind. This looks full of luxuriant life, as green as his in
May. It has three months' start of his dead and buried crop. He
walks across it; his shoes sink almost to the instep in the soft
soil. He sees birds hopping about in it without overcoats. Surely,
he says to himself, this is a favored land. Here it lies on the
latitudes of Labrador, and yet its midwinter fields are as green as
ours in the last month of Spring. At this rate the farmers here
must harvest their wheat before the ears of mine are formed. But he
counts without Nature. The American sun overtakes and distances the
English by a full month. Here is the compensation for six
consecutive months in which the New England farmer must house his
plough and not turn a furrow.
Doubtless, as much light and heat brighten and warm one country as
the other in the aggregate of a year. But there is a great
difference in the economy of distribution. In England, the sun
spreads its warmth more evenly over the four seasons of the year.
What it withholds from Summer it gives to Winter, and makes it wear
the face of Spring through its shortest and coldest days. But then
Spring loses a little from this equalising dispensation. It is not
the resurrection from death and the grave as it is in America.
Children are not waiting here at the sepulchre of the season, as
with us, watching and listening for its little Bluebird angel to
warble from the first budding tree top, "_It is risen_!" They do
not come running home with happy eyes, dancing for joy, and shouting
through the half open door, "O, mother, Spring has come! We've
heard the Bluebird! Hurrah! Spring has come. We saw the Phebee on
the top of the saw-mill!" Here Spring makes no sensation; takes no
sudden leap into the seat of Winter, but comes in gently, like the
law of primogeniture or the British Constitution. It is slow and
decorous in its movements. It is conservative, treats its
predecessor with much deference, and makes no sudden and radical
changes in the face of things. It comes in with no Lord Mayor's
Day, and blows no trumpets, and bends no triumphal arches to grace
its entree. Few new voices in the tree-tops hail its advent. No
choirs of tree-toads fiddle in the fens. No congregation of frogs
at twilight gather to the green edges of the unfettered pond to sing
their Old Hundred, led by venerable Signor Cronker, in his bright,
buskin doublet, mounted on a floating stump, and beating time with a
bulrush. No Shad-spirits with invisible wings, perform their
undulating vespers in the heavens, to let the fishermen know that it
is time to look to their nets. Even the hens of the farm-yard
cackle with no new tone of hope and animation at the birth of the
English Spring. The fact is, it is a baby three months old when it
is baptised. It is really born at Christmas instead of Easter, and
makes no more stir in the family circle of the seasons than any
familiar face would at a farmer's table.
In a utilitarian point of view, it is certainly an immense advantage
to all classes in this country, that Nature has tempered her
climates to it in this kindly way. I will not run off upon that
line of reflection here, but will make it the subject of a few
thoughts somewhere this side of John O'Groat's. But what England
gains over us in the practical, she loses in the poetical, in this
economy of the seasons. Her Spring does not thrill like a sudden
revelation, as with us. It does not come out like the new moon,
hanging its delicate silver crescent in the western pathway of the
setting sun, which everybody tries to see first over the right
shoulder, for the very luck of the coincidence. Still, both
countries should be contented and happy under this dispensation of
Nature. The balance is very satisfactory, and well suited to the
character and habits of the two peoples. The Americans are more
radical and sensational than the English; more given to sudden
changes and stirring events. Sterne generally gets the credit of
saying that pretty thought first, "Providence tempers the wind to
the shorn lamb." A French writer puts it the other way, and more
practically: "Providence tempers the wool of the lamb to the wind."
This is far better and more natural. But it may be truly said that
Providence tempers the seasons to the temperaments and customs of
the two nations.
Just before reaching Oakham, I passed a grand mansion, standing far
back from the turnpike road, on a commanding eminence, flanked with
extensive plantations. The wide avenue leading to it looked a full
mile in length. Lawns and lakes, which mirrored the trees with
equal distinctness, suffused the landscape of the park like evening
smiles of Nature. It was indeed a goodly heritage for one man; and
he only mounted a plain _Mr_. to his name, although I learned that
he could count his farms by the dozen. I was told that the annual
dinner given to his tenant farmers came off the previous day at the
inn where I lodged. A sumptuous banquet was provided for them,
presided over by the steward of the estate; as the great _Mr_. did
not honor the plebeian company with his presence. This is a feature
of the structure of English society which the best read American
would not be likely to recognise without travelling somewhat
extensively in the country. The British Nobility, the great, world-
renowned Middle Class, and the poor laboring population, constitute
the three great divisions of the people and include them all in his
mind. He is apt to leave out of count the Gentry, the great
untitled MISTERS, who come in between the nobility and middle-men,
and constitute the connecting link between them. "The fine old
English gentleman, all of the olden time," is supposed to belong to
this class. They make up most of "the old county families," of
which you hear more than you read. They are generally large
landholders, owning from twenty to one hundred farms. They live in
grand old mansions, surrounded with liveried servants, and inspire a
mild awe and respectful admiration, not only in the common country
people, but in the minds of persons in whom an American would not
look for such homage to untitled rank. They hunt with horses and
dogs over the grounds of their tenant farmers, and the latter often
act as game-beaters for them at their "shootings." When one of them
owns a whole village, church and all, he is generally called "the
Squire," but most of them are squired without the definite article.
They still boast of as good specimens of "the fine old English
gentleman" as the country can show; and I am inclined to think it is
not an unfounded pretension, although I have not yet come in contact
with many of the class.
One of this county squirocracy I know personally and well,--and
other Americans know him as well as myself,--who, though living in a
palace of his own, once occupied by an exiled French sovereign, is
just as simple and honest as a child in every feature of his
disposition and deportment. Every year he has a Festival in his
park, lasting two or three days. It is a kind of out-door
Parliament and a Greenwich Fair combined, as it would seem at first
sight to an incidental spectator. I do not believe anything in the
rest of the wide world could equal this gathering, for many peculiar
features of enjoyment. It is made up of both sexes and all ages and
conditions; especially of the laboring classes. They come out
strong on these occasions. The round and red faced boys and girls
of villages and hamlets for a great distance around look forward to
this annual frolic with exhilarating expectation. Never was romping
and racing and the amorous forfeit plays of the ring got up under
more favorable auspices, or with more pleasant surroundings. It
would do any man's heart good, who was ever a genuine boy, to see
the venerable squire and his lady presiding over a race between
competing couples of ploughmens' boys, from ten to fifteen years of
age, running their rounds in the park, bare-footed, bare-headed,
with faces as round and red as a ripe pumpkin, and hair of the same
color whipping the air as they neck-and-neck it in the middle of the
heat. When the winners of the prizes receive their rewards at his
hands, his kind words and the radiant benevolence of his face they
value more than the conquest and the coins they win.
Then there are intellectual entertainments and deliberative
proceedings of grave moment arranged for the elder portion of the
great congregation. While groups of blushing lads and lasses are
hunting the handkerchief in the hustle and tussle of the ring under
the great, solemn elms, a scene may be witnessed on the lawn nearer
the mansion that ought to have been painted long ago. Two or three
double-horse wagons are ranged end to end in the shade, and planks
are placed along from one end to the other, making a continuous seat
for a score or two of orators. In front of this dozen-wheeled
tribune rows of seats, capable of holding several hundred persons,
are arranged within hearing distance. When these are filled and
surrounded by a standing wall of men and women, three or four deep,
and when the orators of the day ascend over the wheels to the long
wagon-seat, you have a scene and an assembly the like of which you
find nowhere else in Christendom. No Saxon parliament of the
Heptarchy could "hold a candle to it." Never, in any age or country
of free speech, did individual ideas, idiosyncrasies, and liberty of
conscience have freer scope and play. Never did all the isms of
philanthropy, politics, or of social and moral reform generally have
such a harmonious trysting time of it. Never was there a platform
erected for discussing things local and general so catholic as the
one now resting upon the wheels of those farm wagons. Every year
the bland and venerable host succeeds in widening the area of
debate. I was invited to be present at the Festival this year, but
was too far on the road to John O'Groat's to participate in a
pleasure I have often enjoyed. But I read his resume of the year's
doings, aspects and prospects from Japan to Hudson's Bay with lively
interest and valuable instruction. He seldom presides himself as
chairman, but leaves that post of honor to be filled, if possible,
by the citizen of some foreign country, if he can speak English
tolerably. This gives a more cosmopolitan aspect to the assembly.
But he himself always makes what in Parliament would be called "a
financial statement," without the reference to money matters. He
sums up the significance of all the great events of the year,
bearing upon human progress in general, and upon each specific
enterprise in particular. With palatial mansions, parks, and farms
great and small, scattered through several counties, he is the
greatest radical in England. He distances the Chartists altogether
in his programme, and adds several new points to their political
creed. He not only advocates manhood suffrage, but womanhood
suffrage, and woman-seats in Parliament. Then he is a great friend
of a reform which the Chartists grievously overlook, and which would
make thousands of them voters if they would adopt it. That is,
Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well as from Ardent Spirits.
Thus, no report of modern times equals the good Squire's summing-up,
which he gives on these occasions, from the great farm-wagon
tribune, to the multitudinous and motley congregation assembled
under his park trees. This year it was unusually rich and piquant,
from the expanded area of events and aspects. In presenting these,
as bearing upon the causes of Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti-
Slavery, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Capital Punishment, Anti-Church-Rates,
Free Trade, Woman's Rights, Parliamentary Reform, Social Reform,
Scientific Progress, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, and other
important movements, he was necessarily obliged to be somewhat
discursive. But he generalised with much ease and perspicuity, and
conducted the thread of his discourse, like a rivulet of light,
through the histories of the year; transporting the mind of his
audience from doings in Japan to those in America, from Poland to
Mexico, and through stirring regions of Geography, Politics,
Philanthropy, Social Science and Economy, by gentle and interesting
transitions. This annual statement is very valuable and
instructive, and should have a wider publicity than it usually
obtains.
When "the fine old English gentleman all of the olden time" has
concluded his resume of the year's progress, and the prospects it
leaves to the one incoming, the orators of the different causes
which he has thus reported, arise one after the other, and the
bright air and the green foliage of the over-spreading trees, as
well as the listening multitude below are stirred with fervid
speeches, sometimes interspersed with "music from the band." The
Festival is wound up by a banquet in the hall, given by the
munificent host to a large number of guests, representing the
various good movements advocated from the platform described. Many
Americans have spoken from that rostrum, and sat at that banquet
table in years gone by, and they will attest to the correctness of
these slight delineations of the character of the host and of the
annual festival that will perpetuate his name in long and pleasant
remembrance.
Oakham is a goodly and pleasant town, the chief and capital of
Rutlandshire. It has the ruins of an old castle in its midst, and
several interesting antiquities and customs. It, too, has its
unique speciality or prerogative. I was told that every person of
title driving through the town, or coming to reside within the
jurisdiction of its bye-laws, must leave his card to the authorities
in the shape of a veritable horse-shoe. It is said that the walls
of the old town hall are hung with these iron souvenirs of
distinguished visits; thus constituting a museum that would be
instructive to a farrier or blacksmith, as well as to the
antiquarian.
From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town
in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye. One cannot say
exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to
the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave
it in twenty-four hours. "I only require fifteen minutes," said
cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate.
This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode
Island is to the American family of States--the smallest, but not
least, in several happy characteristics.
I spent a quiet Sabbath in Melton Mowbray; attended divine service
in the old parish church and listened to two extemporaneous sermons
full of simple and earnest teaching, and delivered in a
conversational tone of voice. Here, too, the parish church was
seated in the midst of the great congregation which had long ceased
to listen to the call of its Sabbath bells. It was a beautiful and
touching arrangement of the olden time to erect the House of Prayer
in the centre of "God's Acre," that the shadow of its belfry and the
Sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for centuries over
the family circles lying side by side in their long homes around the
sanctuary. There was a good and tender thought in making up this
sabbath society of the living and the dead; in planting the narrow
pathway between the two Sions with the white milestones of
generations that had travelled it in ages gone, leaving here and
there words of faith, hope and admonition to those following in
their footsteps. It is one of the contingencies of "higher
civilization" that this social economy of the churchyard, that
linked present and past generations in such touching and instructive
companionship, has been suspended and annulled.
Melton Mowbray has also a very respectable individuality. It is a
great centre for the scarlet-coated Nimrods who scale hedges and
ditches, in well-mounted squadrons, after a fox _preserved_ at great
expense and care to become the victim of their valor. But this is a
small and frivolous distinction compared with its celebrated
manufacture of _pork-pies_. It bids fair to become as famous for
them as Banbury is for buns. I visited the principal establishment
for providing the travelling and picnicking world with these very
substantial and palatable portables. I went under the impulse of
that uneasy, suspicious curiosity to peer into the forbidden
mysteries of the kitchen which generally brings no satisfaction when
gratified, and which often admonishes a man not only to eat what is
set before him without any questions for conscience sake, but also
for the sake of the more delicate and exacting sensibilities of the
stomach. I must confess my first visit to this, the greatest pork-
pie factory in the world, savored a little of the anxiety to know
the worst, instead of the best, in regard to the solid materials and
lighter ingredients which entered into the composition of these
suspiciously cheap luxuries. There were points also connected with
the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable
uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations.
I was determined to settle these moot points once for all. So I
entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an
exciseman's searching a building for illicit distillery, and I came
out of it a more charitable and contented man. All was above board,
fair and clean. The meat was fresh and good. The flour was fine
and sweet; the butter and lard would grace the neatest housewife's
larder; the forms on which the pies were moulded were as pure as
spotless marble. The men and boys looked healthy and bright; their
hands were smooth and clean, and their aprons white as snow. Not
one of them smoked or took snuff at his work. I saw every process
and implement employed in the construction of these pies for the
market; the great tubs of pepper and spice, the huge ovens, the
cooling racks, the packing room; in a word, every department and
feature of the establishment. And the best thing that I can say of
it is this: that I shall eat with better satisfaction and relish
hereafter the pies bearing the brand of Evans, of Melton Mowbray,
than I ever did before. The famous Stilton cheese is another
speciality of this quiet and interesting town, or of its immediate
neighborhood. So, putting the two articles of luxury and
consumption together, it is rather ahead of Banbury with its cakes.
On Monday, August 11th, I resumed my walk northward, and passed
through a very highly cultivated and interesting section. About the
middle of the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked off
upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape I have yet seen in
England. It was the Belvoir Vale; and it would be worth a hundred
miles' walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it. It lay
in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring apparently about
twenty miles in length. As I sat upon the high wall of this valley,
that overlooks it on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the
most highly-finished piece of pre-Raphaelite artistry that could be
found in the world,--the artistry of the plough, glorious and
beautiful with the unconscious and involuntary pictures which
patient human labor paints upon the canvas of Nature. Never did I
see the like before. If Turner had the shaping of the ground
entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not have been more
happily formed for a display of agricultural pictures. What might
be called the _physical_ vista made the most perfect hemiorama I
ever looked upon. The long, high, wooded ridge, including Broughton
Hill, _eclipsed_, as it were, just half the disk of a circle twenty
miles in diameter, leaving the other half in all the glow and glory
that Nature and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry,
could give to it. The valley with its foot against this mountainous
ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded to its bosom a little,
beautiful world of its own of about fifty miles girth. In this
embrace were included hundreds of softly-rounded hills, with their
intervening valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers,
plantations, groves, copses and hedge-row trees, grouped by sheer
accident as picturesquely as Turner himself could have arranged
them. The elevation of the ridge on which I sat softened down all
these distant hills, so that they looked only like little undulating
risings by which the valley gently ascended to the blue rim of the
horizon on the north.
It was an excellent standpoint on which to balance Nature and Human
Industry; to estimate their separate and joint work upon that vast
landscape. A few centuries ago, perhaps about the time that the
Mayflower sighted Plymouth Rock, this valley, now so indescribably
beautiful, was almost in the state of nature. Wolves and wild boars
may have been prowling about in the woods and tangled thickets that
covered this ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and
briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this
valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees,
all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the
northward horizon. This declining sun, and the moon and stars that
will soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, like a liveried
cortege, shone upon that scene with all the light they will give
this day and night. The rain and dew, and all the genial ministries
of the seasons, did their unaided best to make it lovely and
beautiful. The sweetest singing-birds of England came and tried to
cheer its solitude with their happy voices. The summer breezes came
with their softest breath, whispering through brake, bush and brier
the little speeches of Nature's life. The summer bees came and
filled all those heather-purpled acres with their industrial lays,
and sang a merry song in the door of every wild-flower that gave
them the petalled honey of its heart. All the trained and
travelling industrials and all the sweet influences of Nature came
and did all they could without man's help to make this great valley
most delightful to the eye. But the wolves still prowled and
howled; the briers grew rough and rank; the grass, coarse and thin;
the heathered hills were oozy and cold in their watery beds; the
clumpy, shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss; and no
feature of the scene mended for the better from year to year.
Then came the great Blind Painter, with his rude, iron pencils, to
the help of Nature. He came with the Axe, Plough and Spade, her
mightiest allies. With these he had driven wild Druidic Paganism
back mile by mile from England's centre; back into her dark
fastnesses. With the Axe, Spade and Plough he chased the foul
beasts and barbarisms from the island. Two centuries long was he in
painting this Beautiful Valley. Nature ground and mixed the colors
for him all the while, for he was blind. He was poor; often cold
and hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale, silent
eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he could not give. He
lived in a low cottage, small, damp and dark, and laid him down at
night upon a bed of straw. He could not read; and his thoughts of
human life and its hereafter were few and small. He had no taste
for music, and seldom whistled at his work. He wore a coarse
garment, of ghostly pattern, called a smock-frock. His hat just
rounded his head to a more globular and mindless form. His shoes
were as heavy as a horse's with iron nails. He had no eye nor taste
for colors. If all the trees, if all the crops of grain, grass and
roots on which he wrought his life long, had come out in brickdust
and oil, it would have been all the same to him, if they had sold as
high in the market, and beer and bread had been as cheap for the
uniformity. And yet he was the Turner of this great painting. He
is the artist that has made England a gallery of the finest
agricultural pictures in the world. And in no country in
Christendom is High Art so appreciated to such pecuniary patronage
and valuation as here. In none is the genius of the Pencil so
treasured, so paid, and almost worshipped as here. The public and
private galleries of Britain hold pictures that would buy every acre
of the island at the price current of it when Elizabeth was queen.
One of Turner's landscapes would pay for a whole Highland county at
its valuation when Mary held her first court at Holyrood.
I sit here and look off upon this largest, loveliest picture the
Blind Painter has given to England. I note his grouping of the ivy-
framed fields, of every size and form, panelling the gently-rounded
hills, and all the soft slopes down to the foot of the valley; the
silvery, ripe barley against the dark-green beans; the rich gold of
the wheat against the smooth, blue-dashed leaves of the mangel
wurzel or rutabaga; the ripening oats overlooking a foreground of
vividly green turnips, with alternations of pasture and meadow land,
hedges running in every direction, plantations, groves, copses
sprinkled over the whole vista, as if the whole little world, clear
up to the soft, blue fringe of the horizon, were the design and work
of a single artist. And this, and ten thousand pictures of the same
genius, were the work of the Briarean-handed BLIND PAINTER, who
still wears a smock-frock and hob-nailed shoes, and lives in a low,
damp cottage, and dines on bread and cheese among the golden sheaves
of harvest!
O, Mother England! thou that knightest the artists while living, and
buildest their sepulchres when dead; thou that honorest to such
stature of praise the plagiarists upon Nature, and clothest the
copyists of patient Labor's pictures in such purple and fine linen;
thou whose heart is softening to the sweet benevolences of Christian
charity in so many directions,--wilt thou not think, with a new
sentiment of kindness and sympathy, on this Blind Painter, who has
tapestried the hills and valleys of thy island with an artistry that
angels might look upon with admiration and wonder!
Wilt thou not build him a better cottage to live in?
Wilt thou not give him something better than dry bread and cold
bacon for dinner in harvest?
Wilt thou not teach all his children to read the alphabet and the
blessed syllables of the Great Revelation of God's Love to man?
Wilt thou not make a morning-ward door in his dwelling and show him
a future with a sun in it, in _this_ world, as well as the world to
come?
Wilt thou not open up a pathway through the valley of his
humiliation by which his children may ascend to the better
conditions of society?