IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE
I was free, but what was I to do with my freedom? Ingenious apologists
for slavery used to argue that the slave was much happier as a bondman
than a freeman, as long as the conditions of his bondage were not
unendurably harsh: but no one ever knew a slave who held this creed.
There never was a slave who did not prefer his dinner of herbs, earned
by his own labour, to the stalled ox of luxurious captivity. For my
part, I thought the air never tasted so sweet as on that morning of my
liberation. I walked slowly, drawing long breaths, that I might taste
its full relish, as a connoisseur passes an exquisite and rare wine
over his palate, that he may discriminate its subtleties. I became a
lounger, and took the pavement with the air of a gentleman at ease. I
wandered into Hyde Park, paid my penny for a seat, and sat down almost
dizzy with the unaccustomed thought that there was not a human being in
the universe who, at that moment, had the smallest claim to make upon
my time or energy. An hour passed in a kind of ecstatic dream. It
chanced to be a morning when Queen Victoria was driving from Paddington
to Buckingham Palace, and every instant the throng of carriages
increased. Standing on my seat, I saw an immense lane of people,
silent as a wood; a contagious shiver stirred them, like a gust of wind
amongst the leaves; I saw the distant glitter of helmets and cuirasses,
and the pageant swept along with that one tired, kindly, homely face
for its centre of attraction, luring loyalty even from a heart so
republican as mine by its air of patient weariness. I thought, and I
believed the thought sincere, that I would not have exchanged places
with her who was the mistress of so many peoples, the Empress of such
indeterminable Empire. My new-born loyalty was three-parts pity. Had
she, who sat there in such 'lonely splendour,' ever known the day,
since as a young girl the heavy rod of empire was intrusted to her
frail and unaccustomed hands, when she woke to say, 'This day I am
free, I will go where I will, do as I please, and none shall stay me?'
Yet I, a manumitted clerk, had come upon this singular and glad day;
and I had it in my heart to say with Emerson, 'Give me health and a
day, and I will make the pomp of empire ridiculous.'
I turned slowly homeward in this glow of exultation. I should have
run, for the news, either good or evil, called for instant
communication. Let my delay stand excused; I had certain matters to be
settled with myself that morning. My feet had to learn a new kind of
movement, and my thoughts a new sequence; I was as a child learning to
walk and think before I could take my place on equal terms with new
companions. One incident of my walk struck me by way of humour and
discovery. I had often strolled into bookshops toward evening, and had
remarked upon the cold discourtesy with which my presence was regarded.
Now I knew the reason; I had come at the clerk's hour, and the keen
eyes of discriminating shopmen had recognised my low estate. I came
now under altered auspices. To shop at three in the afternoon is to
give proof of leisure; behold, in the eyes of obsequious shopmen I had
at once become a wealthy dilettante, nurturing the growth of an
expensive library, and the rarest books were laid before me with an
ingratiating smile. Let the man who would understand how much the
estimates men take of us are based on wealth, or supposed wealth, make
the brief experiment of shopping at the rich man's hour, instead of at
the poor man's; he will be surprised to note the difference of the
social atmosphere. A man's clothes may be poor enough, and his
appearance contemptible, but if he will shop at the hour when all the
drudges are at work, no one will take him for a drudge. I will confess
it gave me pleasure to note this change of estimate. I seemed to taste
the first privilege of a freeman, when a pursy bookseller took from a
glass case certain expensive books on Art, and drew my attention, with
subtle deference to my judgment, to the merits of the pictures they
contained. I may as well confess at once, that so intoxicated was I
with the new respect that greeted me, that I even bought one of these
volumes, which I did not need, and certainly could not afford. It was
a weakness and a folly, no doubt; but how could I tell my obsequious
friend that I paid my guinea not for anything he sold me, but as a sort
of first footing on my entrance to the realm of freedom? I might have
spent it much worse, for I bought my self-respect with it.
The sight of my doorstep brought me to my bearings, for a man's own
doorstep is a rare corrective of disordered fancies. The fact I had to
communicate was briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum,
against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation. Women, I
have long noticed--or women of the best kind, I ought to add--have much
more genius in finance than men. They have a much keener sense of the
use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate
into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony. They, being primitive and
unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the
cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each
shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get
the most out of it. How would my wife regard the definite
disappearance of five thousand shillings? Not with levity, I knew; and
I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on the _Tombs of
the Etruscans_. The _Tombs of the Etruscans_ would have meant to her
three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine. A
wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man's
pleasure, but his discipline; I believe that he was not far wrong. It
is no use disputing the fact that the married man is always in danger
of the judgment; and it is only by some form of bribery that he can
hope to escape being cast in damages. I resolved on bribery, and made
my cheque the bribe. Here said I, was present wealth, let us be
content. The plea was not received with instant favour, but it was not
wholly ineffectual. By the time we sat down to supper that night we
had all attained to cheerfulness. It was a meal of some tenuity, not
calculated to lie heavy on the stomach; for, said Charlotte, 'If we
have to begin high thinking and plain living, we can't begin too
early.' The only load on my digestion that night was the _Tombs of the
Etruscans_.
It says much for the steadfastness of our convictions, that in this new
crisis of affairs the old resolution to seek a country life passed
unquestioned. What to another had seemed calamity appeared to us
opportunity. When the daily paper came next morning, it was not to the
columns where commerce chronicles its wants that my eye turned, but to
the much more engaging columns where lands and houses were advertised
for sale. This part of the newspaper had long ago attracted me by its
fine air of surreptitious romance. My mind had often been kept aglow
for a whole day by some seductive advertisement of cottages 'situate
amid pine-woods,' or farmhouses, all complete, even to the styes and
kennels, which by all accounts were to be given away. One such
advertisement I particularly remember for a kind of insane generosity
which pervaded it. It described at length a farmhouse, 'stone-built
and covered with ivy' (observe the very definite sense of the
picturesque conveyed in this phrase), containing ten rooms, commanding
pleasant views of a well-wooded country, together with a large orchard,
and one hundred and fifty acres of freehold land, the whole of which
might be purchased for 750 pounds; and, added the advertiser, 'the
furniture at present in the house is included in the price.' I do not
know where this terrestrial Paradise existed; I believe it was in
Essex; but I often regretted that I made no effort to discover it.
However, the morning paper, if it contained no paragraph comparable
with this in point of style and seduction, certainly did appear
singularly rich in Paradises. Philanthropists, disguised as
land-agents, contended eagerly with one another through many columns of
advertisements, offering a reluctant world all the advantages of rural
happiness on what appeared merely nominal terms. It appeared that they
did not even want the money, which they mentioned only in a kind of
gentlemanly whisper; pay them but 100 pounds in sound cash, and the
rest might stand at mortgage upon easy terms for an indefinite period!
One might have imagined that the whole of rural England was
depopulated; that Eden itself had been cut up into building lots; that,
in fact, the land-agent was subsidised by a paternal government to
persuade the townsman to turn landed proprietor on terms which even the
squatter in new lands would regard as generous.
The reality I soon found to be entirely different. The moment I set
about the deliberate business of finding a cottage I made a series of
surprising discoveries which I will now relate.
In the first place, I found that many of these much vaunted farmhouses
were situated in districts utterly destitute of beauty, and even
desolate. One specimen may stand for the whole. I omit the
particulars of the advertisement, which was drawn up in the usual
style; but I must say, in justice to its author, that when I
interviewed him in his city office he did what he could to discourage
too abundant hope. He did not go the length of admitting his
description false, but he told me drily that 'I had better see the
thing for myself.' An hour's journey found me on the Essex flats.
There was a bright sky and a brisk wind, but nothing could disguise the
featureless monotony of the far-stretched landscape. The train put me
down at a roadside station where a dogcart waited my arrival. I drove
through a small village of mean, red-brick houses, and soon found
myself in the open country. My driver made but one remark during the
four-mile journey.
'You be come to see Dawes' farm?' he said.
I admitted the fact.
'There's a-many has come,' he replied. 'You be the twenty-first I have
drove. An' they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
'Why?' I asked.
'You'll soon find out.'
With that he lit his pipe and smoked stolidly. I was not long in
comprehending the reason of his reticence. Dawes' farm may once have
been a comfortable residence, but when I saw it it was a mildewed,
rat-haunted ruin. It stood upon a piece of redeemed marsh-land, and
the salt damp of the marsh had eaten into its very vitals. The
wainscots were discoloured, the walls oozed, and part of the roof was
broken. There had once been a garden; that, like the rest, was a ruin.
The land was there no doubt, fifty acres said the advertisement, but it
was treeless, bleak, flat, covered with coarse grass, and cut up by
muddy watercourses. To have lived in the house at all it must have
been rebuilt, and even then nothing could have made it a cheerful place
of residence. There was no water-supply that I could discover, unless
half a dozen butts that took the drippings of the roof represented it.
The orchard had long ago gone back to barbarism. It appeared that the
place had been deserted for half a dozen years. I did not wonder. The
only wonder was that it had ever been inhabited.
'Ah,' repeated my driver, 'there's a-many as comes an' looks, an' they
all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
I subscribed to the common sentiment. Never did that infinite diapason
which we call the roar of London sound so sweet, never did those long,
lighted, busy streets seem so habitable, as on that night when I
returned from my casual inspection of Dawes' farm.
The memory of Dawes' farm taught me that if I was to live in the
country some charm of outlook was indispensable to my content.
Mountains, a lake, a wood, a running river--some delicate effect of
scenery, some concourse of elements, either in themselves or in their
combination beautiful--these I must have if I would be happy. They
were as necessary to me as my daily bread. But here I made a second
disquieting discovery; there was not a part of England which could be
justly described as beautiful that was not already occupied in the
degree of its accessibility. I thought of Surrey; I visited it and
found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise. Half a dozen men of
genius had in an inadvertent moment advertised the pure air of the
Surrey highlands, and by the time I came upon the scene trim villas had
sprung up by hundreds, and wealth was already in possession. The
merest cottage in this favoured district provoked keen contest in the
auction-room. Indeed, in the true sense, there were no cottages; they
had been transformed, added to, rebuilt, till only a remnant of their
primitive rusticity remained. It was the same everywhere. I was too
late by twenty years in this kind of quest.
I had been led to believe by various social writers that the villages
of England were depopulated. According to these fallacious chroniclers
the country abounded in cottages and even small manor-houses from which
the inhabitants had fled. I can only say I never found it so. A
deserted roadside cottage I often found, but there were obvious reasons
for its desolation. Sometimes it was so far from other houses, or any
centre of congregated life, that it must have been difficult, and
almost impossible, for any one residing in it to obtain the common
necessaries of life. More commonly it was deserted because it was
falling into ruin. But no sooner did I reach a real village than I
found every house in occupation. The usual complaint was lack of
accommodation. Hence rents were by no means low, and the contest for
houses was vehement. If the village had real beauties of its own--a
cluster of thatched and dormer-windowed cottages, properties valuable
to the artist--one was sure to come upon immediate evidence of the
cockney invasion. What I thought a barn would as like as not prove a
studio, and it was no farmer who lived at the pleasant, yellow-washed
farmhouse amid the rose-garden, but 'a gentleman from London.' And we
had but to go a little way down some shady lane to find a glaring board
announcing building land for lease, and from some local agent one
obtained particulars of the exact kind of house which the investor
would be permitted to build upon the site.
It will be said that this was not the country proper, nor was it, for
London has annexed every place within fifty miles of Charing Cross.
But in the country proper a new difficulty met me: not only were there
no empty cottages, but landowners stuck to their acres with such
jealous obstinacy that they refused to sell a rood of land for a
cottage on any terms whatever. I will give one example, which may be
taken as typical. There was a Welsh valley where I had once spent a
summer holiday, exquisitely retired and beautiful--a dozen miles from
the nearest railway. Beyond the green strath, with its few white
cottages and farms, rose on every side the wide hills, with Snowdon
towering over all like a dome. The hillside land had but a prairie
value. It had never been cultivated. A few sheep strayed over it; but
for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its
vociferous cascades. One would have supposed that had any one offered
to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land
would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have
proved remunerative to himself. On the contrary, the two great
landowners of the district stuck to every inch of soil as if it had
been sown with gold. The land was quite useless, as I have said. It
might have been worth three pounds an acre--yet they refused fifty.
They would not even let on lease. Nor could it be pretended that the
scenery would have lost any element of its charm by a cottage that
would have been scarcely observed on those vast slopes of Snowdon.
Jealous obstinacy, the desire to keep intact their own, the desire to
keep out all intruders--this was the temper of the landowners. They
did all they could to harass their existing tenants. A tenant whose
family had increased so that his cottage was as overcrowded as a
tenement in Spitalfields, had to plead long before he was allowed to
add a couple of rooms to his cottage, even when he did so at his own
expense. Often enough he was refused so harshly, that he was
constrained to seek a house in some other district. Yet, in all that
valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two
hundred houses; and there rose around them the unpopulated hillside,
where a host of people might have lived in health, and where, indeed,
men had once lived, as was witnessed by the roofless gables which here
and there rose among the heather.
It seems to me that in this state of things there is a monstrous
injustice. There is no law to compel these gentlemen to sell land, and
there is no public sentiment that can affect them. They are the
complete despots of the countryside. If a man does not like their
domination, he leaves the district; he knows that it is vain to resist
it. In this way many rural districts are depopulated, or kept
under-populated, simply to gratify the selfish temper of a great
proprietor. It is not as though he lived in the district, and wished
to keep its beauties secret to himself; often enough he visits it so
rarely that his face is not known among his tenants. No; but he must
have everything to himself; he must round off his estate; he must look
from his park on nothing which is not his; for your rural Ahab could
not sleep with a Naboth's little vineyard even a mile away. It is
useless to tell him that the land you want is waste natural land, on
which you propose to confer value; he prefers that it shall be
valueless, rather than that it shall be yours. Before population can
be re-distributed to the advantage of town and country alike, this
difficulty must be overcome. It can only be overcome by drastic
legislation. Compulsory purchase, regulated by an equitable land
court, is the only remedy; and it is hard that Irishmen should have,
and grumble over, privileges which their English brethren would receive
with open arms.
Such were some of the discoveries which I made when I came to the real
business of finding a humble country residence. In my ignorance and
inexperience it had seemed the easiest thing in the world. After a
fortnight of experiment I began to think it was the hardest.