Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to
me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small
neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and
cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of mine calls
such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are
as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our
own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a
hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship;
where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every
one, and authorised to hope that every one feels an interest in us. How
pleasant it is to slide into these true-hearted feelings from the kindly
and unconscious influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the
people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know
and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons
that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality, and so
do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as
to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of a hero, to go
to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a
weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to
sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen's delicious novels,
quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and
every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White* over his own
parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices,
as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them; or to
sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his
goats and his man Friday;--how much we dread any new comers, any fresh
importation of savage or sailor! we never sympathise for a moment in our
hero's want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away;--or to
be shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island--the island
of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else,
none of Dryden's exotic inventions:--that is best of all. And a small
neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose;
a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write,
a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence,
with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen, and
carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from B---- to S----,
which passed through about ten days ago, and will I suppose return some
time or other. There are coaches of all varieties nowadays; perhaps this
may be intended for a monthly diligence, or a fortnight fly. Will you
walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The journey is not
long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up the hill.
*White's 'Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne;' one of the most
fascinating books ever written. I wonder that no naturalist has adopted
the same plan.
The tidy, square, red cottage on the right hand, with the long
well-stocked garden by the side of the road, belongs to a retired
publican from a neighbouring town; a substantial person with a comely
wife; one who piques himself on independence and idleness, talks
politics, reads newspapers, hates the minister, and cries out for
reform. He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious
innovation of an illumination on the Queen's acquittal. Remonstrance and
persuasion were in vain; he talked of liberty and broken windows--so we
all lighted up. Oh! how he shone that night with candles, and laurel,
and white bows, and gold paper, and a transparency (originally designed
for a pocket-handkerchief) with a flaming portrait of her Majesty,
hatted and feathered, in red ochre. He had no rival in the village, that
we all acknowledged; the very bonfire was less splendid; the little boys
reserved their best crackers to be expended in his honour, and he gave
them full sixpence more than any one else. He would like an illumination
once a month; for it must not be concealed that, in spite of gardening,
of newspaper reading, of jaunting about in his little cart, and
frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to feel
the weariness of idleness. He hangs over his gate, and tries to entice
passengers to stop and chat; he volunteers little jobs all round,
smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows up all the
wasps'-nests in the parish. I have seen a great many wasps in our garden
to-day, and shall enchant him with the intelligence. He even assists his
wife in her sweepings and dustings. Poor man! he is a very respectable
person, and would be a very happy one, if he would add a little
employment to his dignity. It would be the salt of life to him.
Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a
yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale,
sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry.
There he sits in his little shop from early morning till late at night.
An earthquake would hardly stir him: the illumination did not. He stuck
immovably to his last, from the first lighting up, through the long
blaze and the slow decay, till his large solitary candle was the only
light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect than the
contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have
felt for each other on that evening. There was at least as much vanity
in the sturdy industry as in the strenuous idleness, for our shoemaker
is a man of substance; he employs three journeymen, two lame, and one
a dwarf, so that his shop looks like an hospital; he has purchased the
lease of his commodious dwelling, some even say that he has bought it
out and out; and he has only one pretty daughter, a light, delicate,
fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress, and playfellow
of every brat under three years old, whom she jumps, dances, dandles,
and feeds all day long. A very attractive person is that child-loving
girl. I have never seen any one in her station who possessed so
thoroughly that undefinable charm, the lady-look. See her on a Sunday
in her simplicity and her white frock, and she might pass for an earl's
daughter. She likes flowers too, and has a profusion of white stocks
under her window, as pure and delicate as herself.
The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith's;
a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine; dark and smoky
within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high officer in
our little state, nothing less than a constable; but, alas! alas! when
tumults arise, and the constable is called for, he will commonly be
found in the thickest of the fray. Lucky would it be for his wife
and her eight children if there were no public-house in the land:
an inveterate inclination to enter those bewitching doors is Mr.
Constable's only fault.
Next to this official dwelling is a spruce brick tenement, red, high,
and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows, the only
sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on
the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender mansion has a fine,
genteel look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth's old maid and
her stunted footboy; for tea and card parties,--it would just hold one
table; for the rustle of faded silks, and the splendour of old china;
for the delight of four by honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal
between the deals; for affected gentility and real starvation. This
should have been its destiny; but fate has been unpropitious: it belongs
to a plump, merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children,
the very essence of vulgarity and plenty.
Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as
a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, and
bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which
you happen to want at the moment, and will be sure not to find. The
people are civil and thriving, and frugal withal; they have let the
upper part of their house to two young women (one of them is a pretty
blue-eyed girl) who teach little children their A B C, and make caps and
gowns for their mammas,--parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker.
I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than
adorning the mind.
Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the shoemaker's,
is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage--no--a
miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places,
pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness;
a little bricked court before one half, and a little flower-yard before
the other; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks,
roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree; the casements full of
geraniums (ah! there is our superb white cat peeping out from among
them); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms)
full of contrivances and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind
full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and
carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one
lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all
gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an
exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there
no longer.
The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn: a white-washed
building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a
little bow-window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our
stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort
of carts, waggons, and return chaises. There are two carts there now,
and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat. He
is a thriving man and a portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been
twice let out within this twelvemonth. Our landlord has a stirring wife,
a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty
as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten times
as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in
the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers, and
more lovers than curls. Miss Phoebe is fitter for town than country; and
to do her justice, she has a consciousness of that fitness, and turns
her steps townward as often as she can. She is gone to B---- to-day with
her last and principal lover, a recruiting sergeant--a man as tall as
Sergeant Kite, and as impudent. Some day or other he will carry off Miss
Phoebe.
In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall, belonging to a
house under repair:--the white house opposite the collar-maker's shop,
with four lime-trees before it, and a waggon-load of bricks at the door.
That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person
who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and,
being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with
altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing
here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have
been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and
wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June
was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the
limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in
the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every
tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas
under the glowing midsummer sun. Nature revenged herself, in her own
sweet and gracious manner; fresh leaves sprang out, and at nearly
Christmas the foliage was as brilliant as when the outrage was
committed.
Next door lives a carpenter, 'famed ten miles round, and worthy all his
fame,'--few cabinet-makers surpass him, with his excellent wife, and
their little daughter Lizzy, the plaything and queen of the village,
a child three years old according to the register, but six in size and
strength and intellect, in power and in self-will. She manages everybody
in the place, her schoolmistress included; turns the wheeler's children
out of their own little cart, and makes them draw her; seduces cakes
and lollypops from the very shop window; makes the lazy carry her, the
silent talk to her, the grave romp with her; does anything she pleases;
is absolutely irresistible. Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding
power of loving, and her firm reliance on the love and indulgence of
others. How impossible it would be to disappoint the dear little girl
when she runs to meet you, slides her pretty hand into yours, looks up
gladly in your face, and says 'Come!' You must go: you cannot help it.
Another part of her charm is her singular beauty. Together with a good
deal of the character of Napoleon, she has something of his square,
sturdy, upright form, with the finest limbs in the world, a complexion
purely English, a round laughing face, sunburnt and rosy, large merry
blue eyes, curling brown hair, and a wonderful play of countenance. She
has the imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand with her hands behind
her, or folded over her bosom; and sometimes, when she has a little
touch of shyness, she clasps them together on the top of her head,
pressing down her shining curls, and looking so exquisitely pretty! Yes,
Lizzy is queen of the village! She has but one rival in her dominions, a
certain white greyhound called Mayflower, much her friend, who resembles
her in beauty and strength, in playfulness, and almost in sagacity, and
reigns over the animal world as she over the human. They are both coming
with me, Lizzy and Lizzy's 'pretty May.' We are now at the end of the
street; a cross-lane, a rope-walk shaded with limes and oaks, and a cool
clear pond overhung with elms, lead us to the bottom of the hill. There
is still one house round the corner, ending in a picturesque wheeler's
shop. The dwelling-house is more ambitious. Look at the fine flowered
window-blinds, the green door with the brass knocker, and the somewhat
prim but very civil person, who is sending off a labouring man with sirs
and curtsies enough for a prince of the blood. Those are the curate's
lodgings--apartments his landlady would call them; he lives with his
own family four miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat
little parlour to write sermons, to marry, or to bury, as the case may
require. Never were better or kinder people than his host and hostess;
and there is a reflection of clerical importance about them since
their connection with the Church, which is quite edifying--a decorum,
a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see the worthy wheeler carry the
gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned up in his wife's best
handkerchief!--or to hear him rebuke a squalling child or a squabbling
woman! The curate is nothing to him. He is fit to be perpetual
churchwarden.
We must now cross the lane into the shady rope-walk. That pretty white
cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the village in
a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the shortest of men,
and his handsome, tall wife: he, a dwarf, with the voice of a giant; one
starts when he begins to talk as if he were shouting through a speaking
trumpet; she, the sister, daughter, and grand-daughter, of a long line
of gardeners, and no contemptible one herself. It is very magnanimous in
me not to hate her; for she beats me in my own way, in chrysanthemums,
and dahlias, and the like gauds. Her plants are sure to live; mine have
a sad trick of dying, perhaps because I love them, 'not wisely, but too
well,' and kill them with over-kindness. Half-way up the hill is another
detached cottage, the residence of an officer, and his beautiful family.
That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate, and looking with such
intense childish admiration at my Lizzy, might be a model for a Cupid.
How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad green borders
and hedgerows so thickly timbered! How finely the evening sun falls on
that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on the top of the
eminence! and how clearly defined and relieved is the figure of the
man who is just coming down! It is poor John Evans, the gardener--an
excellent gardener till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife, and
became insane. He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but
his power was gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden,
nor submit to the restraint, nor encounter the fatigue of regular
employment: so he retreated to the workhouse, the pensioner and factotum
of the village, amongst whom he divides his services. His mind often
wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan, and lost to
present objects; but he is perfectly harmless, and full of a childlike
simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching gratitude. Every
one is kind to John Evans, for there is that about him which must be
loved; and his unprotectedness, his utter defencelessness, have an
irresistible claim on every better feeling. I know nobody who inspires
so deep and tender a pity; he improves all around him. He is useful,
too, to the extent of his little power; will do anything, but loves
gardening best, and still piques himself on his old arts of pruning
fruit-trees, and raising cucumbers. He is the happiest of men just now,
for he has the management of a melon bed--a melon bed!--fie! What a
grand pompous name was that for three melon plants under a hand-light!
John Evans is sure that they will succeed. We shall see: as the
chancellor said, 'I doubt.'
We are now on the very brow of the eminence, close to the Hill-house and
its beautiful garden. On the outer edge of the paling, hanging over
the bank that skirts the road, is an old thorn--such a thorn! The
long sprays covered with snowy blossoms, so graceful, so elegant, so
lightsome, and yet so rich! There only wants a pool under the thorn to
give a still lovelier reflection, quivering and trembling, like a tuft
of feathers, whiter and greener than the life, and more prettily mixed
with the bright blue sky. There should indeed be a pool; but on the dark
grass-plat, under the high bank, which is crowned by that magnificent
plume, there is something that does almost as well,--Lizzy and Mayflower
in the midst of a game at romps, 'making a sunshine in the shady place;'
Lizzy rolling, laughing, clapping her hands, and glowing like a rose;
Mayflower playing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes
with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks, and her
escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same momentary
touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has exactly the same
power of flight, the same matchless ease and strength and grace. What a
pretty picture they would make; what a pretty foreground they do make to
the real landscape! The road winding down the hill with a slight bend,
like that in the High Street at Oxford; a waggon slowly ascending, and a
horseman passing it at a full trot--(ah! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly
desert you to have a gambol with that blood-horse!) half-way down, just
at the turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the
very image of comfort and content; farther down, on the opposite side,
the small white dwelling of the little mason; then the limes and the
rope-walk; then the village street, peeping through the trees, whose
clustering tops hide all but the chimneys, and various roofs of the
houses, and here and there some angle of a wall; farther on, the elegant
town of B----, with its fine old church-towers and spires; the whole
view shut in by a range of chalky hills and over every part of the
picture, trees so profusely scattered, that it appears like a woodland
scene, with glades and villages intermixed. The trees are of all kinds
and all hues, chiefly the finely-shaped elm, of so bright and deep a
green, the tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp
and garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just
now so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves.
Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm of
English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right side
fringed by hedgerows and trees, with cottages and farmhouses irregularly
placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks; the left,
prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and islands of
cottages and cottage-gardens, and sinking gradually down to cornfields
and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs and clustered
chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody
hills. The common is itself the prettiest part of the prospect; half
covered with low furze, whose golden blossoms reflect so intensely the
last beams of the setting sun, and alive with cows and sheep, and two
sets of cricketers; one of young men, surrounded by spectators, some
standing, some sitting, some stretched on the grass, all taking a
delighted interest in the game; the other, a merry group of little boys,
at a humble distance, for whom even cricket is scarcely lively enough,
shouting, leaping, and enjoying themselves to their hearts' content. But
cricketers and country boys are too important persons in our village
to be talked of merely as figures in the landscape. They deserve an
individual introduction--an essay to themselves--and they shall have it.
No fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks
every day.