Every man, though he were born in the very belfry of Bow and spent his
infancy climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a country
house which he has never seen; but which was built for him in the very
shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep in
orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln; and when the man sees
it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I have been
forced to confess this at last, who am a Cockney, if ever there was one,
a Cockney not only on principle, but with savage pride. I have always
maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not in the wind or thunder
of the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street.
I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous
than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be
perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or
cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted
himself to a greengrocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would have
been a better moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead of
worshipping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to
the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is
seldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to
praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the
strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silent
mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call him
a brick.
But, despite all these theories, I have surrendered; I have struck my
colours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I
shall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist or
Simple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character of
the Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have
already learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thus
gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house that
was made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was built of a
good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like the tower of some
Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters,
“1908.” That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian
sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of
ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked me
with some curiosity what I was doing.
“My dear fellow,” I said, with emotion, “I am bidding farewell to
forty-three hansom cabmen.”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose they would think this county rather outside
the radius.”
“Oh, my friend,” I cried brokenly, “how beautiful London is! Why do they
only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into
Cockney.
“'My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,'
“as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the
older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The
Classics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.
“'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'
“or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning
“'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.';
“I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never
realized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why?
It is because I have left it for ever.”
“If you will take my advice,” said my friend, “you will humbly endeavour
not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every
literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and
the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London;
Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite
enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you,
why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed
it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the
streets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some
miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane you
would utter a yell of joy.”
Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible
sternness.
“Why, miserable aesthete,” I said in a voice of thunder, “that is the
true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic
does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real
rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few
moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like
an ancient tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the
real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold;
and I mean to see it before I die.”
The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that
lane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my
Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its
yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: “To cut it short,
then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won't like
it. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?”
“Dig!” I answered, in honourable scorn. “Dig! Do work at my Country
Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for
your other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country,
but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly
suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be
the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I
am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to
London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants
to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am
that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics
love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of The
Golden Treasury)--
“'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves.
I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in a more distant way.
I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet,
Even more than when I lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the London clay
Is lovely yet,'
“because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and
quiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man
that it is.”