Oh! friendly to the best pursuits of man,
Friendly to thought, to virtue and to peace,
Domestic life in rural pleasures past!
COWPER.
THE stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character,
must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He must go forth
into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit
castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks
and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country
churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope
with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and
humors.
In some countries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of
the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent
society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish
peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere
gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes, where
they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety and
dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of carnival, return again to
the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. The various orders
of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom,
and the more retired neighborhoods afford specimens of the different
ranks.
The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They
possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish
for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems
inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up
among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural
habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. The merchant has his
snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays
as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the
maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his business,
and the success of a commercial enterprise. Even those less fortunate
individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and
traffic, contrive to have something that shall remind them of the green
aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the
drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of flowers; every spot
capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and flower-bed; and every
square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming
with refreshing verdure.
Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an
unfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in
business, or distracted by the thousand engagements that dissipate time,
thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has, therefore, too
commonly, a look of hurry and abstraction. Wherever he happens to be, he
is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking
on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a
friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall economize time so as to
pay the other visits allotted to the morning. An immense metropolis,
like London, is calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting.
In their casual and transient meetings, they can but deal briefly in
commonplaces. They present but the cold superfices of character--its
rich and genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a flow.
It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to his natural
feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative
civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and becomes
joyous and free-hearted. He manages to collect round him all the
conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish its
restraints. His country-seat abounds with every requisite, either for
studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural exercise. Books,
paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds,
are at hand. He puts no constraint, either upon his guests or himself,
but, in the true spirit of hospitality, provides the means of enjoyment,
and leaves every one to partake according to his inclination.
The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is
called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied Nature
intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and
harmonious combinations. Those charms which, in other countries, she
lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of
domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and
spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.
Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park
scenery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here
and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage.
The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in
silent herds across them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the
pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook, taught to wind in
natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake--the sequestered pool,
reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its
bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while
some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age,
gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.
These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most
delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the
unostentatious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most
unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of
taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye,
he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the
future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand;
and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to
be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious
pruning of others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender
and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf;
the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of
water;-all these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet
assiduity, like the magic touchings with which a painter finishes up a
favorite picture.
The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has
diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends
to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and
narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. The trim hedge,
the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug
box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms
about the lattice; the pot of flowers in the window; the holly,
providently planted about the house, to cheat winter of its dreariness,
and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside; all
these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources,
and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as
poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an
English peasant.
The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has
had a great and salutary effect upon the national character. I do not
know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the
softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most
countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness
of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute
to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the
invigorating recreations of the country. The hardy exercises produce
also a healthful tone of mind and spirits, and a manliness and
simplicity of manners, which even the follies and dissipations of the
town cannot easily pervert, and can never entirely destroy. In the
country, too, the different orders of society seem to approach more
freely, to be more disposed to blend and operate favorably upon each
other. The distinctions between them do not appear to be so marked
and impassable as in the cities. The manner in which property has been
distributed into small estates and farms has established a regular
gradation from the noblemen, through the classes of gentry, small landed
proprietors, and substantial farmers, down to the laboring peasantry;
and while it has thus banded the extremes of society together, has
infused into each intermediate rank a spirit of independence. This, it
must be confessed, is not so universally the case at present as it was
formerly; the larger estates having, in late years of distress, absorbed
the smaller, and, in some parts of the country, almost annihilated the
sturdy race of small farmers. These, however, I believe, are but casual
breaks in the general system I have mentioned.
In rural occupation, there is nothing mean and debasing. It leads a man
forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the
workings of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating
of external influences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he
cannot be vulgar. The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing
revolting in an intercourse with the lower orders in rural life, as he
does when he casually mingles with the lower orders of cities. He lays
aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to waive the distinctions of
rank, and to enter into the honest, heartfelt enjoyments of common life.
Indeed, the very amusements of the country bring, men more and more
together; and the sound hound and horn blend all feelings into harmony.
I believe this is one great reason why the nobility and gentry are more
popular among the inferior orders in England than they are in any other
country; and why the latter have endured so many excessive pressures and
extremities, without repining more generally at the unequal distribution
of fortune and privilege.
To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed
the rural feeling that runs through British literature; the frequent
use of illustrations from rural life; those incomparable descriptions of
Nature, that abound in the British poets--that have continued down from
“The Flower and the Leaf,” of Chaucer, and have brought into our closets
all the freshness and fragrance of the dewy landscape. The pastoral
writers of other countries appear as if they had paid Nature an
occasional visit, and become acquainted with her general charms; but the
British poets have lived and revelled with her--they have wooed her in
her most secret haunts--they have watched her minutest caprices. A
spray could not tremble in the breeze--a leaf could not rustle to the
ground--a diamond drop could not patter in the stream--a fragrance could
not exhale from the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson
tints to the morning, but it has been noticed by these impassioned and
delicate observers, and wrought up into some beautiful morality.
The effect of this devotion of elegant minds to rural occupations has
been wonderful on the face of the country. A great part of the island
is rather level, and would be monotonous, were it not for the charms
of culture; but it is studded and gemmed, as it were, with castles and
palaces, and embroidered with parks and gardens. It does not abound in
grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural
repose and sheltered quiet. Every antique farm-house and moss-grown
cottage is a picture; and as the roads are continually winding, and
the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a
continual succession of small landscapes of captivating loveliness.
The great charm, however, of English scenery, is the moral feeling that
seems to pervade it. It is associated in the mind with ideas of order,
of quiet, of sober well-established principles, of hoary usage and
reverend custom. Every thing seems to be the growth of ages of regular
and peaceful existence. The old church of remote architecture, with its
low, massive portal; its Gothic tower; its windows rich with tracery
and painted glass, in scrupulous preservation; its stately monuments of
warriors and worthies of the olden time, ancestors of the present lords
of the soil; its tombstones, recording successive generations of sturdy
yeomanry, whose progeny still plough the same fields, and kneel at the
same altar;--the parsonage, a quaint irregular pile, partly
antiquated, but repaired and altered in the tastes of various ages and
occupants;--the stile and foot-path leading from the churchyard, across
pleasant fields, and along shady hedgerows, according to an immemorial
right of way;--the neighboring village, with its venerable cottages,
its public green sheltered by trees, under which the forefathers of the
present race have sported;--the antique family mansion, standing apart
in some little rural domain, but looking down with a protecting air on
the surrounding scene; all these common features of English landscape
evince a calm and settled security, a hereditary transmission of
homebred virtues and local attachments, that speak deeply and touchingly
for the moral character of the nation.
It is a pleasing sight, of a Sunday morning, when the bell is sending
its sober melody across the quiet fields, to behold the peasantry in
their best finery, with ruddy faces, and modest cheerfulness, thronging
tranquilly along the green lanes to church; but it is still more
pleasing to see them in the evenings, gathering about their cottage
doors, and appearing to exult in the humble comforts and embellishments
which their own hands have spread around them.
It is this sweet home-feeling, this settled repose of affection in the
domestic scene, that is, after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues
and purest enjoyments; and I cannot close these desultory remarks
better, than by quoting the words of a modern English poet, who has
depicted it with remarkable felicity:
Through each gradation, from the castled hall,
The city dome, the villa crowned with shade,
But chief from modest mansions numberless,
In town or hamlet, shelt’ring middle life,
Down to the cottaged vale, and straw-roof’d shed;
This western isle has long been famed for scenes
Where bliss domestic finds a dwelling-place;
Domestic bliss, that, like a harmless dove,
(Honor and sweet endearment keeping guard,)
Can centre in a little quiet nest
All that desire would fly for through the earth;
That can, the world eluding, be itself
A world enjoyed; that wants no witnesses
But its own sharers, and approving Heaven;
That, like a flower deep hid in rock cleft,
Smiles, though ‘t is looking only at the sky.*
* From a poem on the death of the Princess Charlotte, by the
Reverend Rann Kennedy, A.M.