1877
It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in England that the beauty
and interest of the country are private property, and that to get access
to them a key is always needed. The key may be large or it may be small,
but it must be something that will turn a lock. Of the things that
contribute to the happiness of an American observer in the country of
parks and castles, I can think of very few that do not come under this
definition of private property. When I have mentioned the hedgerows and
the churches I have almost exhausted the list. You can enjoy a hedgerow
from the public road, and I suppose that even if you are a Dissenter you
may enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If, therefore, one talk of
anything beautiful in England, the presumption will be that it is
private; and indeed such is my admiration of this delightful country
that I feel inclined to say that if one talk of anything private the
presumption will be that it is beautiful. This is something of a
dilemma. If the observer permit himself to commemorate charming
impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world the fruits of
friendship and hospitality. If, on the other hand, he withhold his
impression, he lets something admirable slip away without having marked
its passage, without having done it proper honour. He ends by mingling
discretion with enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not
treating a country ill to talk of its treasures when the mention of each
has tacit reference to an act of private courtesy.
The impressions I have in mind in writing these lines were gathered in a
part of England of which I had not before had even a traveller's
glimpse; but as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite ready
to agree with a friend who lived there, and who knew and loved it well,
when he said very frankly, "I do believe it is the loveliest corner of
the world!" This was not a dictum to quarrel about, and while I was in
the neighbourhood I was quite of his opinion. I felt that it would not
take a great deal to make me care for it very much as he cared for it; I
had a glimpse of the peculiar tenderness with which such a country may
be loved. It is a capital example of the great characteristic of English
scenery--of what I should call density of feature. There are no waste
details; everything in the landscape is something particular--has a
history, has played a part, has a value to the imagination. It is a
region of hills and blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are
high, all of them are interesting--interesting as such things are
interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite modulation,
something suggesting that outline and colouring have been retouched and
refined by the hand of time. Independently of its castles and abbeys,
the definite relics of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has
human relations, and it is intimately conscious of them. That little
speech about the loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his
county, was made to me by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope
of a hill, or "edge," as it is called there, from the crest of which we
seemed in an instant to look away over most of the remainder of England.
Certainly I should have grown affectionate with regard to such a view as
that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding slope on
the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long ridge
for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming prospect
before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next but
one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from
such a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch
across the lighter green, the great estate of one of their lordships?
Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
bosky-looking spot, which constitutes, as you are told, the residential
umbrage of another peer. And to right and left of these, in wooded
expanses, lie other domains of equal consequence. It was therefore not
the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing,
burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we
never see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part
of his county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter
for infinite jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think of saying my
western hand and my eastern," he declared.
I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental
attachment for this delightful region--for its hillside prospect of old
red farmhouses lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and
chimney-tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in
the vague places of the horizon, of far away towns and sites that one
had always heard of--was conditioned upon having "property" in the
neighbourhood, so that the little girls in the town should suddenly drop
curtsies to me in the street; though that too would certainly have been
pleasant. At the same time, having a little property would without doubt
have made the sentiment stronger. People who wander about the world
without money in their pockets indulge in dreams--dreams of the things
they would buy if their pockets were complete. These dreams are very apt
to have relation to a good estate in any neighbourhood in which the
wanderer may happen to find himself. For myself, I have never been in a
country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be
able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New
England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large
mansion with Doric columns and a pediment of white-painted timber; in
Italy I have made imaginary proposals for the yellow-walled villa with
statues on the roof. In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy
myself in treaty for the best house, but, failing this, I have rarely
failed to feel that ideal comfort for the time would be to call one's
self owner of what is denominated here a "good" place. Is it that
English country life seems to possess such irresistible charms? I have
not always thought so; I have sometimes suspected that it is dull; I
have remembered that there is a whole literature devoted to exposing it
(that of the English novel "of manners"); and that its recorded
occupations and conversations occasionally strike one as lacking a
certain indispensable salt. But, for all that, when, in the region to
which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place being likely
sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing could be
more delightful than to see the hammer hanging upon one's own
liberality. And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places
in question would part with them because they could no longer afford to
keep them up. I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was
possible, what sort of income was implied by the possession of
country-seats such as are not in America a concomitant of even the
largest fortunes; and if in these revelations I sometimes heard of a
very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was frequently surprised at the
shortness of purse attributed to people living in the depths of an
oak-studded park. Then, certainly, English country-life seemed to me the
most advantageous thing in the world; on conditions such as these one
would gladly be dull; surrounded by luxury of so moderate a cost one
would joyfully stagnate.
There was one place in particular of which I said to myself that if I
had the money to buy it, I would "move in" on the morrow. I saw this
place, unfortunately, to small advantage; I saw it in the rain. But I am
rather glad that fine weather did not meddle with the affair, for I
think that in this case the irritation of envy might have made me ill.
It was a long, wet Sunday, and the waters were deep. I had been in the
house all day, for the weather can best be described by my saying that
it had been deemed to exonerate me from church-going. But in the
afternoon, the prospective interval between lunch and tea assuming
formidable proportions, my host took me out to walk, and in the course
of our walk he led me into a park which he described as "the paradise of
a small English country-gentleman." It was indeed a modern Eden, and the
trees might have been trees of knowledge. They were of high antiquity
and magnificent girth and stature; they were strewn over the grassy
levels in extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon and down the
slopes in a fashion than which I have seen nothing more charming since I
last looked at the chestnuts on the Lake of Como. It appears that the
place was not very large, but I was unable to perceive its limits.
Shortly before we turned into the park the rain had renewed itself, so
that we were awkwardly wet and muddy; but, being near the house, my
companion proposed to leave his card in a neighbourly way. The house was
most agreeable; it stood on a kind of terrace, in the middle of a lawn
and garden, and the terrace overlooked one of the most copious rivers in
England, and across to those blue undulations of which I have already
spoken. On the terrace also was a piece of ornamental water, and there
was a small iron paling to divide the lawn from the park. All this I
beheld in the rain. My companion gave his card to the butler, with the
remark that we were too much bespattered to come in, and we turned away
to complete our circuit. As we turned away I became acutely conscious of
what I should have been tempted to call the cruelty of this proceeding.
My imagination gauged the whole position. It was a Sunday afternoon, and
it was raining. The house was charming, the terrace delightful, the oaks
magnificent, the view most interesting. But the whole thing was--not to
repeat the invidious epithet of which just now I made too gross a
use--the whole thing was quiet. In the house was a drawing-room, and in
the drawing-room was--by which I meant must be--a lady, a charming
English lady. It seemed to me that there was nothing fatuous in
believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not please her to
be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to her door
only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore, when,
before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us, I
felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been. Of course we went
back, and I carried my muddy boots into the drawing-room--just the
drawing-room I had imagined--where I found--I will not say just the lady
I had imagined, but a lady even more charming. Indeed, there were two
ladies, one of whom was staying in the house. In whatever company you
find yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present
is "staying." I seldom hear this participle nowadays without remembering
an observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of
English manners. "Ah, that dreadful word _staying_! I think we are so
happy in France not to be able to translate it--not to have any word
that answers to it." The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of
looked away over the river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the
rain was drizzling and drifting. It was very quiet, as I say; there was
an air of large leisure. If one wanted to do something here, there was
evidently plenty of time--and indeed of every other appliance--to do it.
The two ladies talked about "town:" that is what people talk about in
the country. If I were disposed I might represent them as talking about
it with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked myself how it
was possible that one should live in this charming place and trouble
one's head about what was going on in London in July. Then we had
excellent tea.
I returned to the habitation of my companion--for I too was guilty of
"staying"--through an old Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly
sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of fancy might see the
ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro.
This aperture admits you to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth
century--a long stone gallery or cloister, repeated in two stories, with
the interstices of its traceries now glazed, but with its long, low,
narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque--with its flags
worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways
opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals.
These rooms are furnished with narrow windows, of almost defensive
aspect, set in embrasures three feet deep, and ornamented with little
grotesque mediæval faces. To see one of the small monkish masks
grinning at you while you dress and undress, or while you look up in the
intervals of inspiration from your letter writing, is a mere detail in
the entertainment of living in a _ci-devant_ priory. This entertainment
is inexhaustible; for every step you take in such a house confronts you
in one way or another with the remote past. You feast upon the
pictorial, you inhale the historic. Adjoining the house is a beautiful
ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the
magnificent church administered by the predecessor of your host, the
abbot. These relics are very desultory, but they are still abundant, and
they testify to the great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You
may lie upon the grass at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the
girth of the great stumps of the central columns, half smothered in soft
creepers, and think how strange it is that in this quiet hollow, in the
midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and elaborate a work of art should
have arisen. It is but an hour's walk to another great ruin, which has
held together more completely. There the central tower stands erect to
half its altitude, and the round arches and massive pillars of the nave
make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf. You get an impression
that when catholic England was in her prime, great abbeys were as thick
as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the region is called
"wild," though to American eyes it seems almost suburban in its
smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway running
through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
abbey-gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with
goodly brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed
cottages, and with little girls, as I have said, bobbing curtsies in the
street. But even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the
railroad, it would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental
cathedral in a spot on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive
then must the beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity,
when the pilgrim came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells
made the stillness sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair;
as my companion said, it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away
from it you think you have got to the end of its geography, but you
encounter it still in the shape of a rugged outhouse enriched with an
early-English arch, or an ancient well, hidden in a kind of sculptured
cavern. It is noticeable that even if you are a traveller from a land
where there are no early-English--and indeed few late-English--arches,
and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest, of fresh-looking
shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this antiquity.
Anything very old seems extremely natural; there is nothing we accept so
implicitly as transmitted associations. It is not too much to say that
after spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years
old, you seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You
seem yourself to have hollowed the flags with your tread, and to have
polished the oak with your touch. You walk along the little stone
gallery where the monks used to pace, looking out of the gothic
window-places at their beautiful church, and you pause at the big round,
rugged doorway that admits you to what is now the drawing-room. The
massive step by which you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked,
as it should be; the lintels are cracked and worn by the myriad-fingered
years. This strikes your casual glance. You look up and down the
miniature cloister before you pass in; it seems wonderfully old and
queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you find modern
conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner. The new
life and the old have melted together; there is no dividing-line. In the
drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
inward, like a small casemate. You ask what it is, but people have
forgotten. It is something of the monks; it is a mere detail. After
dinner you are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is
seen in the dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants
see him; they afterwards go surreptitiously to sleep in the village.
Then, when you take your chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a
short cut through empty rooms, you are conscious of a peculiar sentiment
toward the gray friar which you hardly know whether to interpret as a
hope or a reluctance.
A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to
fail, while I was in the neighbourhood, to go to S---- and two or three
other places. "Edward IV. and Elizabeth," he said, "are still hanging
about there." So admonished, I made a point of going at least to S----,
and I saw quite what my friend meant. Edward IV. and Elizabeth, indeed,
are still to be met almost anywhere in the county; as regards domestic
architecture, few parts of England are still more vividly old-English.
I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the sensation of dropping back
personally into the past in a higher degree than while I lay on the
grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this small castle,
and lazily appreciated the still definite details of mediæval life. The
place is a capital example of what the French call a small
_gentilhommière_ of the thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat,
now filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of a much later
period--the period when the defensive attitude had been well-nigh
abandoned. This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the
habitation, but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams
protruding from surfaces of coarse white plaster, is a very effective
anomaly in regard to the little gray fortress on the other side of the
court. I call this a fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily
have been taken, and it must have assumed its present shape at a time
when people had ceased to peer through narrow slits at possible
besiegers. There are slits in the outer walls for such peering, but they
are noticeably broad and not particularly oblique, and might easily have
been applied to the uses of a peaceful parley. This is part of the charm
of the place; human life there must have lost an earlier grimness; it
was lived in by people who were beginning to believe in good intentions.
They must have lived very much together; that is one of the most obvious
reflections in the court of a mediæval dwelling. The court was not
always grassy and empty, as it is now, with only a couple of gentlemen
in search of impressions lying at their length, one of whom has taken a
wine-flask out of his pocket and has coloured the clear water drawn for
them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a decent, rosy, smiling,
talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the gatehouse, and who
has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about on crutches in
the sun, and making no sign when you ask after his health. This poor man
has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which even a
chance to talk about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the civil
old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of
one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering
repose. The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay,
though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From one of the
windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree, across a meadow, with
her knees up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair
paint-brush; the young lady is sketching. These are the only besiegers
to which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I
doubt whether the young lady's aim is very good. We wandered about the
empty interior, thinking it a pity such things should fall to pieces.
There is a beautiful great hall--great, that is, for a small castle (it
would be extremely handsome in a modern house)--with tall,
ecclesiastical-looking windows, and a long staircase at one end,
climbing against the wall into a spacious bedroom. You may still
apprehend very well the main lines of that simpler life; and it must be
said that, simpler though it was, it was apparently by no means
destitute of many of our own conveniences. The chamber at the top of the
staircase ascending from the hall is charming still, with its irregular
shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in the walls, and its deep
bay window formed of a series of small lattices. You can fancy people
stepping out from it upon the platform of the staircase, whose rugged
wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid, deeply-guttered hand-rail,
still remain. They looked down into the hall, where, I take it, there
was always a congregation of retainers, much lounging and waiting and
passing to and fro, with a door open into the court. The court, as I
said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you may find it
at present of a summer's day; there were beasts tethered in it, and
hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into puddles. But my
lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, commanded the
position and, no doubt, issued their orders accordingly. The sight of
the groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken
tables spread, and the brazier in the middle--all this seemed present
again; and it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through
the rest of the building--through the portion which connected the great
hall with the tower (here the confederate of the sketching young lady
without had set up the peaceful three-legged engine of his craft);
through the dusky, roughly circular rooms of the tower itself, and up
the corkscrew staircase of the same to that most charming part of every
old castle, where visions must leap away off the battlements to elude
you--the bright, dizzy platform at the tower-top, the place where the
castle-standard hung and the vigilant inmates surveyed the approaches.
Here, always, you really overtake the impression of the place--here, in
the sunny stillness, it seems to pause, panting a little, and give
itself up.
It was not only at Stokesay--I have written the name at last, and I will
not efface it--that I lingered a while on the summit of the keep to
enjoy the complete impression so overtaken. I spent such another half
hour at Ludlow, which is a much grander and more famous monument.
Ludlow, however, is a ruin--the most impressive and magnificent of
ruins. The charming old town and the admirable castle form a capital
object of pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent example of a small English
provincial town that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry; it
exhibits no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their attendant
purlieus and slums. The little city is perched upon a hill near which
the goodly Severn wanders, and it has a remarkable air of civic dignity.
Its streets are wide and clean, empty and a little grass-grown, and
bordered with spacious, mildly-ornamental brick houses, which look as if
there had been more going on in them in the first decade of the century
than there is in the present, but which can still, nevertheless, hold up
their heads and keep their window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant
and their door steps whitened. The place seems to say that a hundred
years, and less, ago it was the centre of a large provincial society,
and that this society was very "good" of its kind. It must have
transported itself to Ludlow for the season--in rumbling coaches and
heavy curricles--and there entertained itself in decent emulation of
that metropolis which a choice of railway lines had not as yet placed
within its immediate reach. It had balls at the assembly rooms; it had
Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss Burney's and Miss
Austen's heroines might perfectly well have had their first love-affair
there; a journey to Ludlow would certainly have been a great event to
Fanny Price or Emma Woodhouse, or even to those more exalted young
ladies, Evelina and Cecilia. It is a place on which a provincial
"gentry" has left a sensible stamp. I have seldom seen so good a
collection of houses of the period between the elder picturesqueness and
the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such relics and
intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture
with a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its
characteristics. It is still easier for a stranger who has stayed a
while in England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of
English social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as
all observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that
the mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of
the things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar
"notes" of England infinitely exaggerated--the rigidly aristocratic
constitution of society, for instance; the unæsthetic temper of the
people; the private character of most kinds of comfort and
entertainment. Let an old gentleman of conservative tastes, who can
remember the century's youth, talk to you at a club _temporis
acti_--tell you wherein it is that from his own point of view London, as
a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall off for the last
forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air of decent sympathy,
but privately you will say to yourself how difficult a place of sojourn
London must have been in those days for a stranger--how little
cosmopolitan, how bound in a thousand ways, with narrowness of custom.
What is true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of
the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one I am speaking of
must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even then, however,
the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the castle
to dream himself back into good humour in. They would effectually have
transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.