There is no better way to plunge _in medias res_, for the stranger
who wishes to know something of England, than to spend a fortnight in
Warwickshire. It is the core and centre of the English world; midmost
England, unmitigated England. The place has taught me a great many
English secrets; I have been interviewing the genius of pastoral
Britain. From a charming lawn—a lawn delicious to one’s sentient
boot-sole—I looked without obstruction at a sombre, soft, romantic mass
whose outline was blurred by mantling ivy. It made a perfect picture,
and in the foreground the great trees overarched their boughs, from
right and left, so as to give it a majestic frame. This interesting
object was the castle of Kenilworth. It was within distance of an easy
walk, but one hardly thought of walking to it, any more than one would
have thought of walking to a purple-shadowed tower in the background
of a Berghem or a Claude. Here were purple shadows and slowly-shifting
lights, with a soft-hued, bosky country for the middle distance.
Of course, however, I did walk over to the castle; and of course
the walk led me through leafy lanes and beside the hedgerows that
make a tangled screen for large lawn-like meadows. Of course too,
I am bound to add, there was a row of ancient pedlars outside the
castle-wall, hawking twopenny pamphlets and photographs. Of course,
equally, at the foot of the grassy mound on which the ruin stands
were half a dozen public houses and, always of course, half a dozen
beery vagrants sprawling on the grass in the moist sunshine. There
was the usual respectable young woman to open the castle-gate and to
receive the usual sixpenny fee. There were the usual squares of printed
cardboard, suspended upon venerable surfaces, with further enumeration
of twopence, threepence, fourpence. I do not allude to these things
querulously, for Kenilworth is a very tame lion—a lion that, in
former years, I had stroked more than once. I remember perfectly my
first visit to this romantic spot; how I chanced upon a picnic; how I
stumbled over beer-bottles; how the very echoes of the beautiful ruin
seemed to have dropped all their _h_’s. That was a sultry afternoon; I
allowed my spirits to sink and I came away hanging my head. This was a
beautiful fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown philosophic. I
had learned that, with regard to most romantic sites in England, there
is a constant cockneyfication with which you must make your account.
There are always people on the field before you, and there is generally
something being drunk on the premises.
I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now speaking, that the attack
would not be acute, and indeed for the first five minutes I flattered
myself that this was the case. In the beautiful grassy court of the
castle, on my entrance, there were not more than eight or ten fellow
intruders. There were a couple of old ladies on a bench, eating
something out of a newspaper; there was a dissenting minister, also on
a bench, reading the guide-book aloud to his wife and sister-in-law;
there were three or four children pushing each other up and down the
turfy hillocks. This was sweet seclusion indeed; and I got a capital
start with the various noble square-windowed fragments of the stately
pile. They are extremely majestic, with their even, pale-red colour,
their deep-green drapery, their princely vastness of scale. But
presently the tranquil ruin began to swarm like a startled hive. There
were plenty of people, if they chose to show themselves. They emerged
from crumbling doorways and gaping chambers with the best conscience
in the world; but I know not, after all, why I should bear them a
grudge, for they gave me a pretext for wandering about in search of a
quiet point of view. I cannot say that I found my point of view, but
in looking for it I saw the castle, which is certainly an admirable
ruin. And when the respectable young woman had let me out of the gate
again, and I had shaken my head at the civil-spoken pedlars who form
a little avenue for the arriving and departing visitor, I found it in
my good nature to linger a moment on the trodden, grassy slope, and to
think that in spite of the hawkers, the paupers, and the beer-shops,
there was still a good deal of old England in the scene. I say in
spite of these things, but it may have been, in some degree, because
of them. Who shall resolve into its component parts any impression of
this richly complex English world, where the present is always seen,
as it were, in profile, and the past presents a full face? At all
events the solid red castle rose behind me, towering above its small
old ladies and its investigating parsons; before me, across the patch
of common, was a row of ancient cottages, black-timbered, red-gabled,
pictorial, which evidently had a memory of the castle in its better
days. A quaintish village straggled away on the right, and on the left
the dark, fat meadows were lighted up with misty sun-spots and browsing
sheep. I looked about for the village stocks; I was ready to take the
modern vagrants for Shakespearean clowns; and I was on the point of
going into one of the ale-houses to ask Mrs. Quickly for a cup of sack.
I began these remarks, however, with no intention of talking about
the celebrated curiosities in which this region abounds, but with a
design rather of noting a few impressions of some of the shyer and more
elusive ornaments of the show. Stratford of course is a very sacred
place, but I prefer to say a word, for instance, about a charming old
rectory a good many miles distant, and to mention the pleasant picture
it made, of a summer afternoon, during a domestic festival. These are
the happiest of a stranger’s memories of English life, and he feels
that he need make no apology for lifting the corner of the curtain.
I drove through the leafy lanes I spoke of just now, and peeped over
the hedges into fields where the yellow harvest stood waiting. In some
places they were already shorn, and, while the light began to redden
in the west and to make a horizontal glow behind the dense wayside
foliage, the gleaners here and there came brushing through gaps in the
hedges with enormous sheaves upon their shoulders. The rectory was an
ancient, gabled building, of pale red brick with facings of white stone
and creepers that wrapped it up. It dates, I imagine, from the early
Hanoverian time; and as it stood there upon its cushiony lawn and among
its ordered gardens, cheek to cheek with its little Norman church, it
seemed to me the model of a quiet, spacious, easy English home. The
cushiony lawn, as I have called it, stretched away to the edge of a
brook, and afforded to a number of very amiable people an opportunity
of playing lawn-tennis. There were half a dozen games going forward at
once, and at each of them a great many “nice girls,” as they say in
England, were distinguishing themselves. These young ladies kept the
ball going with an agility worthy of the sisters and sweethearts of a
race of cricketers, and gave me a chance to admire their flexibility of
figure and their freedom of action. When they came back to the house,
after the games, flushed a little and a little dishevelled, they might
have passed for the attendant nymphs of Diana flocking in from the
chase. There had, indeed, been a chance for them to wear the quiver,
a target for archery being erected on the lawn. I remembered George
Eliot’s Gwendolen and waited to see her step out of the muslin group;
but she was not forthcoming, and it was plain that if lawn-tennis had
been invented in Gwendolen’s day this young lady would have captivated
Mr. Grandcourt by her exploits with the racket. She certainly would
have been a mistress of the game; and, if the suggestion be not too
gross, the alertness she would have learned from it might have proved
an inducement to her boxing the ears of the insupportable Deronda.
After a while it grew too dark for lawn-tennis; but while the twilight
was still mildly brilliant I wandered away, out of the grounds of
the charming parsonage, and turned into the little churchyard beside
it. The small weather-worn, rust-coloured church had an appearance
of high antiquity; there were some curious Norman windows in the
apse. Unfortunately I could not get inside; I could only glance into
the open door across the interval of an old-timbered, heavy-hooded,
padlocked porch. But the sweetest evening stillness hung over the
place, and the sunset was red behind a dark row of rook-haunted elms.
The stillness seemed the greater because three or four rustic children
were playing, with little soft cries, among the crooked, deep-buried
grave-stones. One poor little girl, who seemed deformed, had climbed
some steps that served as a pedestal for a tall, mediæval-looking
cross. She sat perched there and stared at me through the gloaming.
This was the heart of England, unmistakeably; it might have been the
very pivot of the wheel on which her fortune revolves. One need not be
a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible of the charm of an English
country church—and indeed of some of the features of an English rural
Sunday. In London there is a certain flatness in the observance of this
festival; but in the country some of the ceremonies that accompany
it have an indefinable harmony with an ancient, pastoral landscape.
I made this reflection on an occasion that is still very fresh in my
memory. I said to myself that the walk to church from a beautiful
country-house, of a lovely summer afternoon, may be the prettiest
possible adventure. The house stands perched upon a pedestal of rock
and looks down from its windows and terraces upon a shadier spot
in the wooded meadows, of which the blunted tip of a spire explains
the character. A little company of people, whose costume denotes the
highest pitch of civilisation, winds down through the blooming gardens,
passes out of a couple of small gates, and reaches the footpath in
the fields. This is especially what takes the fancy of the sympathetic
stranger; the level, deep-green meadows, studded here and there with
a sturdy oak; the denser grassiness of the footpath, the lily-sheeted
pool beside which it passes, the rustic stiles, where he stops and
looks back at the great house and its wooded background. It is in the
highest degree probable that he has the privilege of walking with a
pretty girl, and it is morally certain that he thinks a pretty English
girl the very type of the maddening magic of youth. He knows that she
doesn’t know how lovely is this walk of theirs; she has been taking
it—or taking another quite as good—any time these twenty years. But her
want of immediate intelligence only makes her the more a part of his
delicate entertainment. The latter continues unbroken while they reach
the little churchyard and pass up to the ancient porch, round which
the rosy rustics are standing, decently and deferentially, to watch
the arrival of the smarter contingent. This party takes its place in a
great square pew, as large as a small room, and with seats all round,
and while he listens to the respectable intonings the sympathetic
stranger reads over the inscriptions on the mural tablets before
him, all to the honour of the earlier bearers of a name which is, for
himself, a symbol of hospitality.
When I came back to the parsonage the entertainment had been
transferred to the interior, and I had occasion to admire the maidenly
vigour of all the nice girls who, after playing lawn-tennis all the
afternoon, were modestly expecting to dance all the evening. And in
regard to this it is not impertinent to say that from almost any group
of young English creatures of this order—though preferably from such as
have passed their lives in quiet country homes—an American receives a
delightful impression of something that he may describe as an intimate
salubrity. He notices face after face in which this rosy absence of a
morbid strain—this simple, natural, affectionate development—amounts to
positive beauty. If the young lady have no other beauty the air I speak
of is a charm in itself; but when it is united, as it so often is, to
real perfection of feature and colour the result is the most delightful
thing in nature. It makes the highest type of English beauty, and to
my sense there is nothing so satisfyingly high as that. Not long since
I heard a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation with an English
lady,—a very wise and liberal woman,—in a little lightly restrictive
criticism of her countrywomen. “It is possible,” she answered, in
regard to one of his objections; “but such as they are, they are
inexpressibly dear to their husbands.” This is doubtless true of good
wives all over the world; but I felt, as I listened to these words of
my friend, that there is often something in an English girl-face which
gives it an extra touch of _justesse_. Such as the woman is, she has
here, more than elsewhere, the look of being completely and profoundly,
without reservations for other uses, at the service of the man she
loves. This look, after one has been a while in England, comes to seem
so much a proper and indispensable part of a “nice” face, that the
absence of it appears a sign of irritability or of shallowness. Latent
responsiveness to the manly appeal—that is what it means; which one
must take as a very comfortable meaning.
As for the prettiness, I cannot forbear, in the face of a fresh
reminiscence, to give it another word. And yet in regard to prettiness
what do words avail? This was what I asked myself the other day as I
looked at a young girl who stood in an old oaken parlour, the rugged
panels of which made a background for her lovely head, in simple
conversation with a handsome lad. I said to myself that the faces
of the English young have often a perfect charm, but that this same
charm is too soft and shy a thing to talk about. The face of this fair
creature had a pure oval, and her clear brown eyes a quiet warmth.
Her complexion was as bright as a sunbeam after rain, and she smiled
in a way that made any other way of smiling than that seem a shallow
grimace—a mere creaking of the facial muscles. The young man stood
facing her, slowly scratching his thigh and shifting from one foot to
the other. He was tall and straight, and so sun-burned that his fair
hair was lighter than his complexion. He had honest, stupid blue eyes,
and a simple smile that showed handsome teeth. He had the look of a
gentleman. Presently I heard what they were saying. “I suppose it’s
pretty big,” said the beautiful young girl. “Yes; it’s pretty big,”
said the handsome young man. “It’s nicer when they are big,” said
his interlocutress. The young man looked at her, and at everything
in general, with his slowly apprehending blue eye, and for some time
no further remark was made. “It draws ten feet of water,” he at last
went on. “How much water is there?” said the young girl. She spoke
in a charming voice. “There are thirty feet of water,” said the young
man. “Oh, that’s enough,” rejoined the damsel. I had had an idea they
were flirting, and perhaps indeed that is the way it is done. It was
an ancient room and extremely delightful; everything was polished over
with the brownness of centuries. The chimney-piece was carved a foot
thick, and the windows bore, in coloured glass, the quarterings of
ancestral couples. These had stopped two hundred years before; there
was nothing newer than that date. Outside the windows was a deep, broad
moat, which washed the base of grey walls—grey walls spotted over with
the most delicate yellow lichens.
[Illustration: STRATFORD-ON-AVON CHURCH]
In such a region as this mellow conservative Warwickshire an
appreciative American finds the small things quite as suggestive as the
great. Everything indeed is suggestive, and impressions are constantly
melting into each other and doing their work before he has had time to
ask them whence they came. He can scarce go into a cottage muffled in
plants, to see a genial gentlewoman and a “nice girl,” without being
reminded forsooth of the “Small House at Allington.” Why of the “Small
House at Allington?” There is a larger house to which the ladies come
up to dine; but that is surely an insufficient reason. That the ladies
are charming—even that is not reason enough; for there have been other
nice girls in the world than Lily Dale and other mild matrons than
her mamma. Reminded, however, he is—especially when he goes out upon
the lawn. Of course there is lawn-tennis, and it seems all ready for
Mr. Crosbie to come and take a racquet. This is a small example of
the way in which in the presence of English life the imagination must
be constantly at play on the part of members of a race in whom it has
necessarily been trained to do extra service. In driving and walking,
in looking and listening, everything affected one as in some degree
or other characteristic of a rich, powerful, old-fashioned society.
One had no need of being told that this is a conservative county; the
fact seemed written in the hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind
them. Of course the owners of these things were conservative; of course
they were stubbornly unwilling to see the harmonious edifice of their
constituted, convenient world the least bit shaken. I had a feeling,
as I went about, that I should find some very ancient and curious
opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses whose
clustered gables and chimneys appeared here and there, at a distance,
above their ornamental woods. Imperturbable British Toryism, viewed in
this vague and conjectural fashion—across the fields and behind the
oaks and beeches—is by no means a thing the irresponsible stranger
would wish away; it deepens the very colour of the air; it may be
said to be the style of the landscape. I got a sort of constructive
sense of its presence in the picturesque old towns of Coventry and
Warwick, which appear to be filled with those institutions—chiefly of
an eleemosynary order—that make the undoubting more undoubting still.
There are ancient charities in these places—hospitals, almshouses,
asylums, infant-schools—so quaint and venerable that they almost make
the existence of respectful dependence a delectable and satisfying
thought. In Coventry in especial, I believe, these pious foundations
are so numerous as fairly to place a premium upon personal woe.
Invidious reflections apart, however, there are few things that speak
more quaintly and suggestively of the old England that an American
loves than these clumsy little monuments of ancient benevolence. Such
an institution as Leicester’s Hospital at Warwick seems indeed to exist
primarily for the sake of its spectacular effect upon the American
tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old soldiers maintained in
affluence there, constitute its principal _clientèle_.
The American tourist usually comes straight to this quarter of
England—chiefly for the purpose of paying his respects to the
birthplace of Shakespeare. Being here, he comes to Warwick to see
the castle; and being at Warwick, he comes to see the odd little
theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors which lurks in
the shadow of one of the old gate-towers. Every one will remember
Hawthorne’s account of the place, which has left no touch of charming
taste to be added to any reference to it. The hospital struck me
as a little museum kept up for the amusement and confusion of those
enquiring Occidentals who are used to seeing charity more dryly and
practically administered. The old hospitallers—I am not sure, after
all, whether they are necessarily soldiers, but some of them happen
to be—are at once the curiosities and the keepers. They sit on benches
outside of their door, at the receipt of custom, all neatly brushed and
darned and ready to do you the honours. They are only twelve in number,
but their picturesque dwelling, perched upon the old city rampart
and full of dusky little courts, cross-timbered gable-ends and deeply
sunken lattices, seems a wonderfully elaborate piece of machinery for
its humble purpose. Each of the old gentlemen must be provided with a
wife or “housekeeper;” each of them has a dusky parlour of his own, and
they pass their latter days in their scoured and polished little refuge
as softly and honourably as a company of retired lawgivers or pensioned
soothsayers.
At Coventry I went to see a couple of old charities of a similar
pattern—places with black-timbered fronts, little clean-swept courts
and Elizabethan windows. One of them was a romantic residence for a
handful of old women, who sat, each of them, in a cosy little bower,
in a sort of mediæval darkness; the other was a school for little
boys of humble origin, and this last establishment was charming.
I found the little boys playing at “top” in a gravelled court, in
front of the prettiest old building of tender-coloured stucco and
painted timber, ornamented with two delicate little galleries and a
fantastic porch. They were dressed in small blue tunics and odd caps,
like those worn by sailors, but, if I remember rightly, with little
yellow tags affixed. I was able to wander at my pleasure all over the
establishment; there was no sign of pastor or master anywhere; nothing
but the little yellow-headed boys playing before the ancient house and
practising most correctly the Warwickshire accent. I went indoors and
looked at a fine old oaken staircase; I even ascended it and walked
along a gallery and peeped into a dormitory at a row of very short
beds; and then I came down and sat for five minutes on a bench hardly
wider than the top rail of a fence, in a little, cold, dim refectory
where there was not a crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odour of
bygone repasts to be perceived. And yet I wondered how it was that the
sense of many generations of boyish feeders seemed to abide there.
It came, I suppose, from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed
the expression, the clean-licked aspect of the place, which wore the
appearance of the famous platter of Jack Sprat and his wife.
Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has a great deal to
say to himself about this being Shakespeare’s county—about these
densely grassed meadows and parks having been, to his musing eyes, the
normal landscape, the green picture of the world. In Shakespeare’s
day, doubtless, the coat of nature was far from being so prettily
trimmed as it is now; but there is one place, nevertheless, which,
as he passes it in the summer twilight, the traveller does his best
to believe unaltered. I allude of course to Charlecote park, whose
venerable verdure seems a survival from an earlier England and whose
innumerable acres, stretching away, in the early evening, to vaguely
seen Tudor walls, lie there like the backward years receding to the
age of Elizabeth. It was, however, no part of my design in these
remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine as this; and if
I were to allude to Stratford it would not be in connection with the
fact that Shakespeare planted there, to grow for ever, the torment
of his unguessed riddle. It would be rather to speak of a delightful
old house, near the Avon, which struck me as the ideal home for a
Shakespearean scholar, or indeed for any passionate lover of the poet.
Here, with books and memories and the recurring reflection that he
had taken his daily walk across the bridge at which you look from your
windows straight down an avenue of fine old trees, with an ever-closed
gate at the end of them and a carpet of turf stretched over the
decent drive—here, I say, with old brown wainscotted chambers to live
in, old polished doorsteps to lead you from one to the other, deep
window-seats to sit in, with a play in your lap, here a person for whom
the cares of life should have resolved themselves into a care for the
greatest genius who has represented and ornamented life might find a
very congruous asylum. Or, speaking a little wider of the mark, the
charming, rambling, low-gabled, many-staired, much-panelled mansion
would be a very agreeable home for any person of taste who should
prefer an old house to a new. I find I am talking about it quite like
an auctioneer; but what I chiefly had at heart was to commemorate the
fact that I had lunched there and, while I lunched, kept saying to
myself that there is nothing in the world so delightful as the happy
accidents of old English houses.
[Illustration: CHARLECOTE PARK]
And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon, I found it in me to
say that a new house too may be a very charming affair. But I must add
that the new house I speak of had really such exceptional advantages
that it could not fairly be placed in the scale. Besides, was it new
after all? It must have been, and yet one’s impression there was all of
a kind of silvered antiquity. The place stood upon a decent Stratford
road, from which it looked usual enough; but when, after sitting a
while in a charming modern drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly
through an open window upon a verandah, one found that the horizon of
the morning call had been wonderfully widened. I will not pretend to
detail all I saw after I stepped off the verandah; suffice it that the
spire and chancel of the beautiful old church in which Shakespeare is
buried, with the Avon sweeping its base, were one of the elements of
the vision. Then there were the smoothest lawns in the world stretching
down to the edge of this liquid slowness and making, where the water
touched them, a line as even as the rim of a champagne-glass—a verge
near which you inevitably lingered to see the spire and the chancel
(the church was close at hand) among the well-grouped trees, and look
for their reflection in the river. The place was a garden of delight;
it was a stage set for one of Shakespeare’s comedies—for “Twelfth
Night” or “Much Ado.” Just across the river was a level meadow, which
rivalled the lawn on which I stood, and this meadow seemed only the
more essentially a part of the scene by reason of the voluminous sheep
that were grazing on it. These sheep were by no means mere edible
mutton; they were poetic, historic, romantic sheep; they were not there
for their weight or their wool, they were there for their presence and
their compositional value, and they visibly knew it. And yet, knowing
as they were, I doubt whether the wisest old ram of the flock could
have told me how to explain why it was that this happy mixture of lawn
and river and mirrored spire and blooming garden seemed to me for a
quarter of an hour the richest corner of England.
If Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s country, I found myself not dodging
the consciousness that it is also George Eliot’s. The author of “Adam
Bede” and “Middlemarch” has called the rural background of those
admirable fictions by another name, but I believe it long ago ceased
to be a secret that her native Warwickshire had been in her intention.
The stranger who treads its eternal stretched velvet recognises at
every turn the elements of George Eliot’s novels—especially when
he carries himself back in imagination to the Warwickshire of forty
years ago. He says to himself that it would be impossible to conceive
anything—anything equally rural—more sturdily central, more densely
definite. It was in one of the old nestling farmhouses, beyond a
hundred hedgerows, that Hetty Sorrel smiled into her milk-pans as if
she were looking for a reflection of her pretty face; it was at the
end of one of the leafy-pillared avenues that poor Mrs. Casaubon paced
up and down with her many questions. The country suggests in especial
both the social and the natural scenery of “Middlemarch.” There must
be many a genially perverse old Mr. Brooke there yet, and whether
there are many Dorotheas or not, there must be many a well-featured
and well-acred young country gentleman, of the pattern of Sir James
Chettam, who, as he rides along the leafy lanes, softly cudgels his
brain to know why a clever girl shouldn’t wish to marry him. But I
doubt whether there be many Dorotheas, and I suspect that the Sir
James Chettams of the county are not often pushed to that intensity
of meditation. You feel, however, that George Eliot could not have
placed her heroine in a local medium better fitted to throw her fine
impatience into relief—a community more likely to be startled and
perplexed by a questioning attitude on the part of a well-housed and
well-fed young gentlewoman.
Among the edifying days that I spent in these neighbourhoods there
is one in especial of which I should like to give a detailed account.
But I find on consulting my memory that the details have melted away
into the single deep impression of a perfect ripeness of civilisation.
It was a long excursion, by rail and by carriage, for the purpose of
seeing three extremely interesting old country-houses. Our errand
led us, in the first place, into Oxfordshire, through the ancient
market-town of Banbury, where of course we made a point of looking
out for the Cross referred to in the famous nursery-rhyme. It stood
there in the most natural manner—though I am afraid it has been “done
up”—with various antique gables around it, from one of whose exiguous
windows the young person appealed to in the rhyme may have looked
at the old woman as she rode, and heard the music of her bells. The
houses we went to see have not a national reputation; they are simply
interwoven figures in the rich pattern of the Midlands. They have
indeed a local renown, but they are not thought of as unexampled, still
less as abnormal, and the stranger has a feeling that his surprises and
ecstasies are held to betray the existence, on his part, of a blank
background. Such places, to a Warwickshire mind of good habits, must
appear the pillars and props of a heaven-appointed order of things; and
accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles, they are as natural as
the geology of the county or the supply of mutton. But nothing could
well give a stranger a stronger impression of the wealth of England in
such matters—of the interminable list of her territorial homes—than
this fact that the so eminent specimens I speak of should have but a
limited fame, should not be lions of the first magnitude. Of one of
them, the finest in the group, one of my companions, who lived but
twenty miles away, had never even heard. Such a place was not thought
a subject for local swagger. Its peers and mates are scattered all
over the country; half of them are not even mentioned in the county
guidebooks. You stumble upon them in a drive or a walk. You catch a
glimpse of an ivied front at some midmost point of wide acres, and,
taking your way, by leave of a serious old woman at a lodge-gate, along
an overarching avenue, you find yourself introduced to an edifice so
human-looking in its beauty that it seems for the occasion fairly to
reconcile art and morality.
To Broughton Castle, the first seen in this beautiful group, I must do
no more than allude; but this is not because I failed to think it, as
I think every house I see, the most delightful habitation in England.
It lies rather low, and its woods and pastures slope down to it; it
has a deep, clear moat all round it, spanned by a bridge that passes
under a charming old gate-tower, and nothing can be sweeter than to
see its clustered walls of yellow-brown stone so sharply islanded
while its gardens bloom on the other side of the water. Like several
other houses in this part of the country, Broughton Castle played
a part (on the Parliamentary side) in the civil wars, and not the
least interesting features of its beautiful interior are the several
mementoes of Cromwell’s station there. It was within a moderate drive
of this place that in 1642 the battle of Edgehill was fought—the first
great battle of the war—and gained by neither party. We went to see
the battlefield, where an ancient tower and an artificial ruin (of
all things in the world) have been erected for the entertainment of
convivial visitors. These ornaments are perched upon the edge of a
slope which commands a view of the exact scene of the contest, upwards
of a mile away. I looked in the direction indicated and saw misty
meadows a little greener perhaps than usual and colonnades of elms a
trifle denser. After this we paid our respects to another old house
which is full of memories and suggestions of that most dramatic period
of English history. But of Compton Wyniates (the name of this seat
of enchantment) I despair of giving any coherent or adequate account.
It belongs to the Marquis of Northampton, and it stands empty all the
year round. It sits on the grass at the bottom of a wooded hollow, and
the glades of a superb old park go wandering upward away from it. When
I came out in front of the house from a short and steep but stately
avenue I said to myself that here surely we had arrived at the farthest
limits of what ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables,
conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs can accomplish for the
eye. It is impossible to imagine a more finished picture. And its air
of solitude and delicate decay—of having been dropped into its grassy
hollow as an ancient jewel is deposited upon a cushion, and being shut
in from the world and back into the past by its circling woods—all
this drives the impression well home. The house is not large, as great
houses go, and it sits, as I have said, upon the grass, without even a
flagging or a footpath to conduct you from the point where the avenue
stops to the beautiful sculptured doorway which admits you into the
small, quaint inner court. From this court you are at liberty to pass
through the crookedest series of oaken halls and chambers, adorned with
treasures of old wainscotting and elaborate doors and chimney-pieces.
Outside, you may walk all round the house on a grassy bank, which
is raised above the level on which it stands, and find it from every
point of view a more charming composition. I should not omit to mention
that Compton Wyniates is supposed to have been in Scott’s eye when
he described the dwelling of the old royalist knight in “Woodstock.”
In this case he simply transferred the house to the other side of the
county. He has indeed given several of the features of the place, but
he has not given what one may call its colour. I must add that if Sir
Walter could not give the colour of Compton Wyniates, it is useless for
any other writer to try. It is a matter for the brush and not for the
pen.
And what shall I say of the colour of Wroxton Abbey, which we
visited last in order and which in the thickening twilight, as we
approached its great ivy-muffled face, laid on the mind the burden
of its felicity? Wroxton Abbey, as it stands, is a house of about
the same period as Compton Wyniates—the latter years, I suppose, of
the sixteenth century. But it is quite another affair. The place is
inhabited, “kept up,” full of the most interesting and most splendid
detail. Its happy occupants, however, were fortunately not in the
act of staying there (happy occupants, in England, are almost always
absent), and the house was exhibited with a civility worthy of its
merit. Everything that in the material line can render life noble and
charming has been gathered into it with a profusion which makes the
whole place a monument to past opportunity. As I wandered from one rich
room to another and looked at these things, that intimate appeal to
the romantic sense which I just mentioned was mercilessly emphasised.
But who can tell the story of the romantic sense when that adventurer
really rises to the occasion—takes its ease in an old English
country-house while the twilight darkens the corners of expressive
rooms and the victim of the scene, pausing at the window, turns his
glance from the observing portrait of a handsome ancestral face and
sees the great soft billows of the lawn melt away into the park?
1877.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]