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