SOCIETY IN COUNTRY HOUSES
A Few Country Houses of Various Types--Castles and Manor Houses
from Cornwall to Sutherland
The pleasantest form of society in country houses--I speak here for
myself--is not to be found on occasions such as that of a great shooting
party or a party for a country ball, but rather in gatherings of a
smaller and more intimate kind.
As an illustration of my own views in this respect, I may mention an
incident which may appeal, perhaps, to the sympathies of others whose
tastes or distastes are like my own. I was asked to stay in Shropshire
with some friends whom I knew so intimately that they did not care how
they treated me; and on this occasion they had treated me very ill. As I
was approaching my destination by way of a little local line, I was
surprised at seeing on the platform of one station after another an
extraordinary amount of luggage, together with a number of footmen and
unmistakable ladies' maids. What could be the meaning of this? At last
the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is
impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise
was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I
would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that.
That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it."
I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There
the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies
went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs
likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat,
lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a
great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door--that of my
hostess--saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must
be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that
I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed
defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the
premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by
the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming
supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.
The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or
less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their
entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the
houses to which I am now alluding--some of them great, others relatively
small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present
owners--have been houses which represented for me that old order of
things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family
traditions and associations--elements rooted in the soil of a national
and immemorial past--such were the factors by which the life of these
houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits--many
of them very bad--on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from
rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths
of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses,
except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same
world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from
which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent,
while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element.
Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had
at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such
country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong
resemblance to Catholic society in London.
But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar
antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a
London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a
fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man,
gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word
with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody
else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an
hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like
chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context.
Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one
moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one
of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of
interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but
there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward.
What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of
Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is
present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at
happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become
new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?
Further, let me observe this--I have here an eye on my own case in
particular--that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life,
the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact--the very
important fact--that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom
as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his
own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work
as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in
hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very
far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a
disturbance.
Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own
acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a
description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as
many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than
a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume
like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order
in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily
recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled
together on account of the positions which they occupy--namely, the
extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme
southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and
St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.
The whole population of the great county of Sutherland is hardly so much
as two-thirds of the population of Wimbledon, and, except for some
minute portions, was, prior to certain recent sales, a single gigantic
property. Dunrobin Castle, with a million silent acres of mountain and
moor behind it, looks down from a cliff over the wastes of the North
Sea, but is on the landward side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot
of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of
the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern
additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate
glass. But through the plate glass on one side is visible a prehistoric
habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now
brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are
visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch
who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and
of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged
terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside the dining
room. So remote is this great house from any center of modern industry
that the carts, dogcarts, and wagonettes used by the estate and the
family were built and repaired by a staff of men on the premises. My
first visit to Dunrobin was in the days of the Duchess Annie. The duke
was away on his yacht, but during my visit he returned, and the duchess
and I went to meet him at the station--a private station in the grounds.
Those were the early days of agrarian agitation in the Highlands--an
agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London.
One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had
been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The
nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently illustrated by
what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were
gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke,
not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from
the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced
him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder,
"you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"
St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern
world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being,
except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit
of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases
of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he
toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred
stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the
dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used
as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large
drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved
out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below
which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose
granite balconies are grazed by the breasts of ascending sea birds.
Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed
in them, the celebrated words of Keats:
Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
are, it is needless to say, exceptions rather than types. Of the others
which I may appropriately mention, a few may be taken as belonging to
an exceptional class also, on account of their unusual size; and these I
may again divide into genuine and ancient castles, as distinct from
modern imitations on the one hand, and what are properly palatial villas
of the classical type on the other; the remainder being smaller, though
often of great magnitude, and commonly known by such names as "halls,"
"parks," or "manors."
Of more or less genuine castles I have known a considerable number, many
of them much smaller than houses less ambitiously named; but, with the
possible exception of Alnwick, the interior of which is undisguisedly
modern, there is one which, in point of magnitude and continuity of
occupation, forms a class by itself. This castle is Raby, which has
never been uninhabited since the days of Stephen, when the first smoke
wreaths rose from its kitchen chimney. The house is a huge block, rising
at intervals into towers, with a small court in the middle of it, across
which carriages drive, having passed through a tunnel of arches, and
deposit their occupants in a hall, from which stairs, at both ends of
it, lead to the various living rooms, among these being an upper hall
more than fifty yards in length. This whole block stands in a walled
area, entered by a castellated gateway and encircled by a moat, a
portion of which still holds water, and in which the towers reflect
themselves. When I stayed there as a guest of the Duke and Duchess of
Cleveland, an atmosphere of the past not only pervaded the castle, but
seemed to extend itself for some miles into the neighborhood. When I and
others who had arrived by the same train issued from the station doors,
the carriages awaiting us in the twilight comprised old yellow chariots,
with postilions, like that of my grandfather in which I had swung myself
when a child. I said to Augustus Hare, who happened to be one of the
party, "One would think that we all of us were going to Gretna Green."
When we approached the castle, whose towers were blots in the November
evening, I felt we were approaching a castle in a child's fairy tale. In
point of magnitude, combined with ancient and absolutely continuous
occupation, there is, so far as my own experience goes, no private
dwelling in the kingdom which excels, or even equals, Raby. The duchess
kept a great album in which each of her guests was asked to inscribe
some record of his or of her visit, which record was to take the form of
answers to certain printed questions, or of a sketch, or some original
verses. I preferred to take refuge in the last, my own metrical record
being this:
Some scoff at what was, and some shrink from what may be
Or is; but they all must be pleased with a place
Where even what was looks enchanting in Raby,
And where even what is is redeemed by Her Grace.
Apart from genuine castles of feudal type and origin, the greatest
houses I have known, if regarded as architectural structures, are
Blenheim, Trentham (the Brentham of Lord Beaconsfield's _Lothair_), and
Cliveden. In this class I should, perhaps, include also Sir Robert
Walpole's Houghton, where I have stayed as the guest of Cora, Lady
Strafford, who occupied it for many years as a tenant, and with singular
taste and knowledge so arranged the interior that every chair,
sideboard, and table then in common use had been Sir Robert Walpole's
own. I wrote my letters one morning in his study, at his own writing
table, and using his own inkstand. The walls were lined with books, most
of them presents from his contemporaries, and some of them extremely
curious. I may mention one in particular. It related to the South Sea
Bubble, and contained what was practically a list of the largest
commercial fortunes existing then in England.
Other houses which in point of magnitude belong to the same group are
Stowe, with its frontage of more than a thousand feet, Hamilton Palace,
Wentworth Wodehouse, and Eaton. By those whose knowledge is greater than
mine, the list, in any case small, might, no doubt, be extended. I speak
here only of those at which I have myself stayed. But, in any case, no
one, however wealthy, would think of building on a similar scale now.
Their magnitude was useful only in days other than ours, when visitors
stayed for a month or six weeks at a time, and brought with them their
own carriages and the necessary grooms and coachmen. It is only on very
rare occasions that such houses could be even half filled to-day; and
they dwarf, rather than subserve, the only possible life that a
reasonable man could live in them. Blenheim impresses a visitor as
though it were built for giants. Alfred Montgomery, when staying for the
first time at Eaton, could not, on coming downstairs, find his way to
the breakfast room till he encountered a friend who guided him. "Good
God!" he exclaimed as he entered the desired apartment, "I don't want to
eat my breakfast in a cathedral." Mere magnitude, indeed, beyond a
certain point is not a luxury, but an oppression. The greatest private
dwelling ever erected in England is said to have been Audley End, when
its original builder completed it. James I said of it, "It is a house
fit only for a king"; and before it could be rendered habitable
three-fourths of it had to be pulled down. Such was the verdict of
experience on overbuilding in the past; and though many conditions have
changed, a similar practical criticism is occasionally being pronounced
to-day. Trentham is practically gone. Hamilton Palace, it is said, will
soon exist no longer.
When, however, we turn to genuine castles, pseudo-castles, or houses
which, large though many of them are, are small as compared with these,
my memory provides me with examples of them which are scattered all over
the kingdom, but of which, since they are types rather than grandiose
exceptions, it will for the moment be enough to describe a few, others
being reserved for mention in connection with particular circumstances.
Of castles other than the greatest, were I asked to name the most
romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable
in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with
Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle
Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales--woods
full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been,
when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle
of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been occupied by Charles I
there was hardly a piece of furniture which was not coeval with himself.
The dining room, as I remember it, had been frescoed by a Dutch artist
in the reign of William and Mary.
In respect of mere romantic situation, the English house which I
remember as coming nearest to Powis is Glenthorne, the seat of the
Hallidays, which not so very long ago was thirty miles from a railway on
one side, and seventeen on another. It fronts the Bristol Channel on the
confines of Devon and Somerset. I have described it accurately in my
novel _The Heart of Life_. In its general aspect it resembles my own
early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of
it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it
precipitous woods rise like a wall to an altitude of more than twelve
hundred feet. The only approach to the house is by a carriage drive
three miles long, which descends to it in zigzags from the upper world
of Exmoor.
Hardly less romantic is Ugbrooke, the seat of the Cliffords, about
twelve miles from Torquay, associated with the name of Dryden, who was a
frequent guest there, and haunted by the Catholicism of a long series of
generations. The chapel is approached through, and transmits its incense
to, a library which hardly contains a book more recent than the days of
the nonjurors, and I have often spent long mornings there examining the
files of journals belonging to the epoch of Queen Anne, of the first two
Georges, and of Pope. I have kindred recollections of Lulworth Castle in
Dorsetshire, where the old religious regime so casts its spell over
everything that I should hardly have been surprised if a keeper,
encountered in the twilight park, had turned out to be carrying, not a
gun, but a crossbow.
Of other houses connected with Catholic memories I may mention two in
Yorkshire--Everingham Park and Houghton, then the respective homes of
the late Lord Herries and his kinsman, Mr. Charles Langdale. Both were
hereditary and absolutely unquestioning Catholics; and, strange to say,
a large part of their tenantry were hereditary Catholics also. Each of
these houses has a great chapel attached to it, and every Sunday
processions of farmers' dogcarts would deposit their occupants at doors
the decorations of which plainly showed that for these stalwart
Englishmen the Protestant Reformation was no more than a dream.
But putting the question of Catholic atmosphere aside, and reverting
once more to castles, I may begin with a mention of Chillingham,
sheltered by the shadowy woods and surrounded by the moors of
Northumberland.
As compared with Alnwick, Chillingham is a small structure. Apart from
some offices added during the nineteenth century, it occupies an area
measuring a hundred and twenty feet by a hundred. The outer walls are of
enormous thickness, with a tower at each corner; and against these outer
walls the rooms which constitute the dwelling, much less massive in
their masonry, are built round a small court. They have hardly been
altered since the days of Inigo Jones. When I stayed there with Sir
Andrew Noble, who for many years was Lord Tankerville's tenant, the
whole of the furniture seemed to have grown old with the house. The most
modern contents of the bookshelves were the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe,
whose faded backs would grow young again in the flickering warmth of
fires. Beneath the external windows were the box borders of a garden,
and visible on distant slopes were the movements of wild cattle.
Another castle with which I was very familiar was Elvaston, near Derby,
where year after year I stayed with the late Lord and Lady Harrington.
Originally a red-brick manor house, it was castellated in the days of
Wyatt; and though architects of to-day would smile at its artificial
Gothic, it may now for this very reason be regarded as a historical
monument. It is a monument of tastes and sentiments which have long
since passed away. It represents not only a vanished taste in
architecture, but sentiments also which are now even more remote. The
Earl of Harrington, under whom the Gothic transfiguration was
accomplished, seems to have regarded himself as a species of
knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is
supported--a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"--were
strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls
which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord
Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he
surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees
having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a
romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park
gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or
contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation
of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his
ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing
at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of
a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent
event, was associated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the
strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field
rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling
passion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical
engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind
of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he
came in contact--even the Derbyshire miners--his friends.
The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle
till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly,
ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed
by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was
ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail
accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have
defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient
castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded
together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator
with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a
certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical
purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there--and this was my
first introduction to Wales--for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year
Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised
only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord
Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank
from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to
a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address,
most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He
and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal
carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of
nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with balls, concerts, or
entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious
than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically
private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a
native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought
with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore
steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard.
These were all arranged on a dais, and sang national melodies; and when
the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented
Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a
Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the
soul is in its strings."
Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting
personage--Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with
Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais
steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest
genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with
him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since.
Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall
which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding
thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcestershire, and to a
fourth--this was in Yorkshire--for the celebration of the New Year.
The Cornish houses of which I speak were Heligan, near Mevagissy, the
home of the John Tremaynes, and Trevarthenick, near Truro, the home of
Sir Louis and Lady Molesworth. Pale externally with the stucco of more
than a hundred and fifty years ago, neither of these substantial houses
has any resemblance to a castle; but the ample rooms and staircases, the
dark mahogany doors and the far-planted woods of each represented in
some subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days
before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of
Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than
villages, which together were represented in those days by four members
of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who
when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked
on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate
before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their
surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist
well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him
at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and
was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He
kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the
principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for
my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste
in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of
chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had
been made and used before the first Reform bill.
The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New
Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and
Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.
Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned,
is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in
England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most
perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of
the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of
Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English
life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and
gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like
the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries
the mind back to the times of John of Padua.
To pass from Hewel to Byram was to pass from one world to another,
though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram,
standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives,
with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended
art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represents as a whole
the dignified utilitarianism of the Yorkshire country gentleman as he
was from a hundred to two hundred years ago. Sir John himself, familiar
with political office, accomplished as a classical scholar, and endowed
with one of the most charming of voices, was of all country gentlemen
the most perfect whom it has ever been my lot to know. He was cradled in
the traditions of Whiggism, and to me one of his most delightful
attributes was inability to assimilate the spirit of modern Liberalism,
whether in the sphere of politics or of social or religious thought.
With Byram my memory associated two neighboring houses--Fryston, then
the home of Lord Houghton, and Kippax, that of the Blands. Fryston was
filled with books, and it was in my early days constantly filled with
celebrities, generally of a miscellaneous, sometimes of an incongruous,
kind. Sir John Ramsden told me that once, when he had been asked to dine
there for the purpose of meeting some bishop whose name he could not
read (for Lord Houghton wrote a very illegible hand), the most reverent
of the assembled guests could hardly forbear from smiling when their
host, having left them for a moment, came back bringing the bishop with
him. The bishop was a negro, with a face as black as his own silk apron.
Kippax, which is close to Fryston, was, in the eighteenth century, a
fairly large, but not notably large, building, but when Lord Rockingham
began the construction of Wentworth the late Mr. Bland's ancestor
declared that, whatever happened, he would not be outbuilt by anybody,
and that Kippax, in spite of Wentworth, should be the longest house in
Yorkshire. He accordingly extended its frontage by the addition of two
wings, which really were for the most part a succession of narrow
outbuildings masked by classical walls of imposing and balanced outline,
the result being that a dwelling which is practically of very moderate
dimensions confronts the world with a facade of more than seven hundred
feet.
A house differing in character from any of those just mentioned is
Stanway, where I have stayed as the guest of the then Lady Elcho. It
variegates with its pointed gables the impending slopes and foliage of
the outlying Cotswold Hills. It is a beautiful building in itself--but
the key to its special charm was for me to be found in certain pictures,
void of all technical merit, and relegated to twilight
passages--pictures representing, with an obvious and minute fidelity,
scenes from the life lived there during the times of the first two
Georges. One of these shows the milkmaids going home from their work
arrayed in striped petticoats, and carrying their milk pails on their
heads. Others show members of the family enjoying themselves in the
garden or setting out for a ride, while the clergyman of the parish, or
the chaplain, is pacing one of the walks in solitary meditation, with a
telescope under his arm.
At Lyme, in Cheshire, the ancient home of the Leghs, which owes its
present magnificence to Leone, the Georgian architect, by whom
Chatsworth was renovated, other pictures of a similar kind abound. In
the days of the first Lord Newton I visited Lyme frequently, and was
often late for breakfast because as I went through the passages I could
not detach myself from a study of these appealing records.
Of houses no less typical of the country life of England I can give a
further example without quitting the Cotswolds. I allude to
Sherborne--the late Lord Sherborne was one of my earliest friends--with
its two principal frontages enriched by Inigo Jones with clusters of
Corinthian columns--a house still happily remote from railways and
towering chimneys. The late Lady Sherborne, like the Duchess of
Cleveland at Raby, kept an album, to which, whenever she could, she
extorted a contribution in verse, or otherwise from her friends. My own
contribution on one occasion was this--it was written at the close of a
visit at Whitsuntide:
When June fevers London with riot,
I regretfully dream of the day
When shadow and sunshine and quiet
Were alive in your woodlands in May.
I remember your oaks and your beeches.
I remember the cuckoo's reply
To the ring dove that moaned where the reaches
Of the Windrush are blue with the sky.
Of country houses which I have known in Scotland I shall speak later, in
connection with extraneous incidents. Of such houses in Ireland, of
which I have known several, it will be enough to mention one. This is
Tullamore in County Down, the home of Strange, Lord Roden and Lady
Roden, to the latter of whom I have referred already. It is from my
visits at Tullamore that most of my knowledge of Ireland, such as it is,
is derived. For many successive years I spent at Tullamore most of the
early autumn. There were a few other old friends whom, in addition to
myself, Lady Roden was accustomed to ask for similar periods, while the
company was constantly augmented by others, mostly Irish, who stayed
there for several days. Among these was Mrs. Ronalds--one of the most
popular of the American ladies of London, who spent most of her autumn
with her daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, at Belfast. More kindly and
accomplished entertainers than Lord and Lady Roden it would not be easy
to imagine. Tullamore stands among great beech woods and gardens on one
side of a valley, at the bottom of which, half hidden by rhododendrons,
an amber-colored stream descends in waterfalls to the sea. The slopes
opposite to the house are thickly fledged with larches up to a certain
height, when they suddenly give place to the wildness of the Mourne
Mountains. The house externally is of more or less modern aspect, but
within, when I knew it, it was full of fine family portraits, books, and
old collections of china, together with certain other objects which
appealed to the sense of history rather than to that of art. The Rodens
having been among the chief of the Orange families of Ireland, a series
of cabinets which stood in a long gallery would be found on examination
to contain a collection of engraved wineglasses, each of which bore the
inscription "God save King William," or else "To Hell with the Pope." I
remember also that a number of fine Dutch mirrors, which were plainly
designed for ladies in the act of doing their hair, had been rendered
useless for this important purpose by the fact that the whole of their
surfaces were covered by delineations of King William on horseback,
gesticulating at the battle of the Boyne.
Such sketches of the country houses that have been known to me might be
very easily multiplied--houses of which, whenever I think of them,
memories come back to me like the voices of evening rooks. But these
will be sufficient, so far as England and Ireland are concerned, to
illustrate certain portions of my life other than that of London, and I
will for the moment turn from those portions to others, which were
spent by me for many years not at home, but abroad.
Not long after my Oxford career was ended, a family with which I was
closely connected was, in consequence of the illness of one of its
members, advised by doctors to pass the winter at Cannes, and, as soon
as my friends were settled there, I was asked to go out and join them. A
diminutive villa next to their own was secured for me. Its windows
opened on an equally diminutive garden, in which orange trees with their
golden globes surrounded a spurting fountain, while, rising from the
depths of a great garden below--a garden pertaining to a villa built
like a Moorish mosque--were the tall spires of cypresses and the yellow
clouds of mimosa trees. In this hermitage, which seemed, under southern
moons, to open on a world like that of _The Arabian Nights_, I remained
for about two months, and wrote there the later portions of my book _Is
Life Worth Living?_ Social life at Cannes had all the charm and none of
the constant unrest of London, and its atmosphere so enchanted me that I
spent for many years the best part of my winters on the Riviera, though
I subsequently varied my program by a month or so at Pau or Biarritz,
and more than once at Florence. On later occasions, of which I shall
speak hereafter, I went farther afield, and saw something of what life
was like in an old Hungarian castle; in the half-Gothic dwellings and
arcaded courts of Cyprus; in the drawing-rooms of Fifth Avenue; and
also on the shores of Lake Michigan, along which the great esplanade of
Chicago now extends itself for more than eleven miles.
Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I
shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of
my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in
London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in
Devonshire, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have
just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and
my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.