against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse
justly urges, half those quickly following sensations and ideas which
constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially
disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much
greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights,
forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there
is no particularly fine scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads,
cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad
expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and
moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which
everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the _country_ at
all) the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, out of the same
number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a
score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher’s
shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer’s dray, a
score of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from dinner, and a
handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in
agony from their tight bearing-reins while the coachman flicks them with
his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odors the great majority
will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly
ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure
the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden
with bones and offal, the insufferable effluvium of the city cook-shops;
and last—not least—pervading every street and shop and park, puffed
eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country,
our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling
and sight. The golden silence when broken at all is disturbed only by
the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes
and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on the return home at
evening, or the exquisite “sough” of the night wind as it passes over
the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town, we have the relentless
roar and rattle of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the
perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and
ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally,
to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the
thin walls of our house, as if there were no partitions between us and
the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for
six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the sufferings of the senses
in London,—surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to
command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich
nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly
noises wherewith it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications of the
flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier
punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London
there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to
have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place
between our feelings and our intellect,—a sense, not of being tired and
wanting rest, for that is the natural and wholesome alternative of all
strong and sustained exercise of our faculties, but of being “like dumb
driven cattle,” and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We
seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and
forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air, but our walks
through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and
weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, but it does us
little good; and sleep, but we waken up before half the night is past
with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are
conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which
makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of
engagements and duties that we cannot break loose. We can only break
_down_; and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things
has lasted a little too long.
Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why not try the golden mean, the
compromise between town and country, to be found in some _rus in urbe_
in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa a little way further, at Richmond or
Norwood or Wimbledon? I beg leave humbly to contend that the venerable
Aristotelian “Meson” is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics,
and that it will be generally found that people adopting the Half-way
House system of lodgement will be disposed to repeat the celebrated
Scotch ode with slight variations. “Their heart is”—in London; “their
heart is not,”—by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. Their days are
spent either in waiting at railway stations to go in or out of town, or
in the yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who have promised to
“give them a day,” and for whom they have provided the modern substitute
for the fatted calf, but who, on the particular morning of their
engagement, are sure to be swept off their consciences by an unexpected
ticket for the opera, which they “could not enjoy if they had gone so
far in the morning as dear Mr. A.’s delightful villa.” Of course, it is
possible to live in the outer circle of real London, and have fresh air
and comparative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who goes further
afield, the ambitious soul who dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars
to a paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion and despair. He tries
to “make the best of both worlds,” and he gets the worst of both. The
genuine Londoner considers his proffers of hospitality as an imposition;
and the genuine country cousin is indignant, on accepting them, to find
how far is his residence from the exhibitions and the shops. His trees
are black, his roses cankered, and his soul imbittered by the
defalcations of friends, the blunders and extortions of cabmen, and his
own infructuous effort to be always in two places at once.
Nor is the second and, apparently, more facile resource of the tired
Londoner—that of quartering himself on his kind country friends for his
holidays—very much more successful. The country would indeed be
delightful for our Christmas fortnight or our Easter or Whitsuntide
week, if we were permitted to enjoy in it that repose we so urgently
need and so fondly seek. We are quite enamoured, when we first turn our
steps from the smoky city, with the trees and fields; and we enjoy
indescribably our rides and drives and walks, the varied aspects of
nature, and the beasts and birds wherewith we are surrounded. But one
thing we have not bargained for, and that is—country Society. Of course
we love our friends and relations in whose homes we are received with
kindness and affection, whom we know to be the salt of the earth for
goodness, and who love us enough to feel an interest even in our
towniest gossip. But _their_ country friends, the neighboring
gentlefolk, the clergyman’s wife, the family doctor, the people who are
invariably invited to meet us at the long formal country dinner! This is
the trial beneath which our new-found love of rural life is apt to
succumb. Sir Cornewall Lewis’s too famous _dictum_ returns, slightly
modified, to our memories—As “life would be tolerable but for its
pleasures,” so the country would be enchanting, were it not for its
society. Could we be allowed to live in the country, and see only our
hosts, we should be as happy as kings and queens. But to fly, for the
sake of rest and quiet, from the tables where we might have met some of
the most brilliant men and women of the day, and then to find that we
shall incur the disgrace of being unsociable curmudgeons if we object to
spend the afternoon in playing tennis with the rector’s stupid
daughters, and to dine afterwards at the house of a particularly dull
and vulgar neighbor with whom we would fain avoid such acquaintance as
may justify him in visiting us in town, this is surely an evil destiny!
When, alas! will all the good and kind people who invite town friends to
come and rest with them in the country forbear to make their acceptance
the occasion for a round of rural dissipation, and believe that their
weary brother would be only too glad, did civility permit, to inscribe
on the door of his bedroom during his sojourn the affecting Italian
epitaph, _Implora pace!_
The Country Mouse has naturally said as little as possible of the
drawbacks of his favorite mode of existence,—metaphorically speaking,
the dampness of his “Hollow Tree,” and its liability to be infested by
Owls. It may be well to jot off a few of the less recognized offsets to
the pleasures of rural life before listening to any eulogies thereof.
The real evil of country life I apprehend is this: the whole happiness
or misery of it is so terribly dependent on the character of those with
whom we live that, if we are not so fortunate as to have for our
companions the best and dearest, wisest and pleasantest, of men and
women (in which case we may be far happier than in any other life in the
world), we are infinitely worse off than we can ever be in town. One,
two, or perhaps three relatives and friends, who form our permanent
housemates, make or mar all our days by their good or evil tempers,
their agreeability or stupidity, their affection and confidence, or
their dislike and jealousy. _Être avec les gens qu’on aime, cela
suffit_, says Rousseau; and he speaks truth. But _être avec les gens
qu’on n’aime pas_, and buried in a dull country house with them, without
any prospect of change, is as bad as having a millstone tied round our
necks and being drowned in the depth of the sea. In a town house, if the
fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, scold and wrangle, if the
husband be a bear or the wife a shrew, there is always the refuge of the
outer circle of acquaintances wherein cheer and comfort, or, at least,
variety and relief, may be found. Reversing the pious Dr. Watts’s maxim,
we cry,—
“Whatever brawls disturb the home,
Let peace be in the street.”
The Club is the shelter of henpecked man; a friend’s house, or Marshall
and Snellgrove’s, the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the stormiest
domestic debate, the advent of a visitor intervenes, throwing temporary
oil on the waters, and compelling the belligerents to put off their
quarrels and put on their smiles; and, when the unconscious peacemaker
has departed, it is often found difficult, if not impossible, to take up
the squabble just where it was left off. But there is no such luck for
cross-grained people in country houses. Humboldt’s “Cosmos” contains
several references to certain observations made by two gentlemen who
passed a winter together on the inhospitable northern shores of Asia,
and one of whom bore the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult to
imagine any trial more severe than that of spending the six dark months
of the year with Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea. But
this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hundreds of unlucky English men and
women spend their winters every year in country houses, limited,
practically, to the society of a Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a
burden by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, suspicion, jar,
and jolt. As regards children or dependent people or the wives of
despotic husbands, the case is often worse than this. By a terrible law
of our nature, an unkindness, harshness, or injustice done once to any
one has a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the victim (I have
elsewhere called the passion _heteropathy_) and a restlessness to heap
wrong on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to justify the first
fault. Woe to the hapless stepchild or orphan nephew or penniless
cousin, or helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under this
terrible destiny in a country house where there are few eyes to witness
the cruelty and no tongue bold enough to denounce it! The misery endured
by such beings, the poor young souls which wither under the blight of
the perpetual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers mortified and
humiliated in their age, must be quite indescribable. Perhaps by no
human act can truer charity be done than by resolutely affording moral
support, if we can do no more, to such butts and victims; and, if it be
possible, to take them altogether away out of their ill-omened
conditions, and “deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the
adversary.” It is astonishing how much may be done by very humble
spectators to put a check to evils like these, even by merely showing
their own surprise and distress in witnessing them; and, on the
contrary, how deplorably ready are nine people out of ten to fall in
with the established prejudices and unkindnesses of every house they
enter.
Very little of this kind of thing goes on in towns. People are too busy
about their own affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all kinds
are too much diffused among the innumerable men and women with whom they
come in contact, to permit of concentrated dislike settling down on any
inmate of their homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the country.
Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret of the difference of Town and
Country life. All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are more are less
dissipated in town, and concentrated and deepened in the country. Even a
very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of hours of meals too late or
too early for our health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a door below
stairs perpetually banged, assumes a degree of importance when
multiplied by the infinite number of times we expect to endure it in the
limitless monotony of country life. Our nerves become in advance
irritated by all we expect to go through in the future, and the
consequence is that a degree of heat enters into family disputes about
such matters which greatly amazes the parties concerned to remember when
the wear and tear of travel or of town life have made the whole mode of
existence in a country home seem a placid stream, with scarcely a pebble
to stir a ripple.
And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden
delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten
all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain
gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes,
bosomed in its ancestral trees and with the work-day world far enough
away behind the park palings so that the sound of wheels is never heard
save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is
the key-note of the life led by the men and women who have grown from
childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly
down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in
the green churchyard close by, where they shall “sleep with their
fathers”? That “note” seems to me to be a peculiar sense—exceeding that
of mere calmness—of _stability_, of a repose of which neither beginning
nor end is in sight. Instead of a “changeful world,” this is to them a
world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible.
Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already
old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present
occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations
since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of
time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father’s marriage;
another, tradition tells us, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls—no
one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles
the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on
the churchyard stones. The garden, with its luxuriant old-fashioned
flowers and clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden
so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with twice the perfume of
other flowers; and, as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the
twilight, the odors of the well-remembered bushes of lavender and
jessamine and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were
born) fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune.
The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among
their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in
to milking and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not
of restlessness and turmoil like the noises of the town, but of calm and
repose and the unchanging order of an “abode of ancient Peace.”
Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a
sort of rhyme. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long
day, when the early laborer’s bell, and the gong at nine o’clock, and
one o’clock, and seven o’clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals.
And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain
of the psalm of life. And yet again there are the half-yearly summer
strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and
laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the family life oscillates
like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus
into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which
brings the return into the warm, oak-panelled library. To violate or
alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into
the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves
the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as
if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life from the very
beginning set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its
way; and he learns to think that “Order is Heaven’s first law,” and that
change will never come over the placid tenor of existence. The
difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes
have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or
that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels—thinking
perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat—that Shelley’s dreamy
philosophy must be true
“That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all bright shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”
The anticipation of perpetual variety and change which is the lesson
commonly taught to children by town life,—the Micawber-like expectation
of “something turning up,” to amuse or distract them, and for which they
are constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is precisely reversed for the
little scion of the old country family. For him nothing is ever likely
to turn up beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of fair weather and foul,
the sickness of his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival of his
new gun. All that is to be made out of life he invents for himself in
his sports and in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is sent to
school. And when the epochs of school and college are over, when he
returns as heir or master, life lays all spread out before him in a
long, straight, honorable road, all his duties and his pleasures lying
by the wayside, ready for his acceptance. For the girl there is often
even longer and more unbroken monotony, lasting (unless she marry) into
early womanhood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the _eventlessness_ of
many a young lady’s life in such a home. Her walks to her village
school, or to visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and
disasters; her rides and drives along the familiar roads which she has
ridden and driven over five hundred times already; the arrival of a new
book, or of some old friend (more often her parent’s contemporary than
her own),—make up the sum of her excitements, or even expectations of
excitement, perhaps, through all the years when youth is most eager for
novelty, and the outer world seems an enchanted place. The effects on
the character of this extreme regularity and monotony, this life at Low
Pressure, vary, of course, in different individuals. Upon a dull mind
without _motu proprio_ or spring of original ideas, it is, naturally,
depressing enough; but it is far from equally injurious to those
possessed of some force of character, provided they meet the affection
and reasonable indulgence of liberty without which the heart and
intellect can no more develop healthfully than a baby can thrive without
milk, or a child’s limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes. The young mind
slowly working out its problems for itself, unwarped by the influence
(so enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions, and devouring the
great books of the world, ferreted out of a miscellaneous library by its
own eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps ripening in a
healthier way than the best taught town child, with endless “classes”
and masters for every accomplishment under the sun. Even the imagination
is better cultivated in loneliness, when the child, through its solitary
rambles by wood and shore, spins its gossamer webs of fancy, and invents
tales of heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or pantomime ever yet
brought to the town child’s exhausted brain. Then the affections of the
country child are concentrated on their few objects with a passionate
warmth of which the feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst scores
of friends and admirers, affords no measure whatever. The admiration
amounting to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to some older
woman who represents to her all of grace and goodness she has yet
dreamed, and who descends every now and then from some far-off Elysium
to be a guest in her home, is one of the least read and yet surely one
of the prettiest chapters of innocent human sentiment. As to the graver
and more durable affections nourished in the old home,—the fond
attachment of brothers and sisters, the reverence for the father, the
love, purest and deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child and
child for mother,—there can be little doubt that their growth in the
calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can
well be elsewhere.
And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful and solitary youth soon
enters the deeper waters of the moral and spiritual life, and breathes
religious aspirations which have in them, in those early years, the
freshness and the holiness of the morning. Happy and good must, indeed,
be that later life from the heights of which any man or woman can dare
to look back on one of these lonely childhoods without a covering of the
face. Talk of hermitages or monasteries! The real nursery of religion is
one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy,
beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven
with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other;
and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the
thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all
the ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy child dwelling in such
a home, with a father and mother who speak to it sometimes of God and
the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude into that Holy of
Holies, a young soul’s love and penitence and resolution, is the place
on earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame of religion. Of the
cruelty and wickedness and meanness of the world the child hears only as
of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who may roam or crawl in
African deserts. They are too far off to force themselves on the
attention as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved on pain of
moral death. Even sickness, poverty, and death appear oftenest as
occasions for the kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and guides.
To turn to lighter matters. Of course among the first recognized
pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather
_bathing in_, Nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air,
grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object or another which
attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, without being
interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us _en
masse_. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own
lullaby. Probably, on the whole, country folks admire each separate view
and scrap of landscape less than their visitors from the town, and
criticise it as little as school-boys do their mother’s dress. But they
love Nature as a whole, and her real influence appears in their genial
characters, their healthy nervous systems, and their optimistic
opinions. Nor is it by any means only inanimate nature wherewith they
are concerned. Not to speak of their poorer neighbors (of whom they know
much more, and with whom they usually live in far more kindly relations
than townsfolk with theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes and
birds. How much, to some of us, the leisurely watching of stately
cattle, gentle sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driving of
generous, kindly-natured horses and the companionship of loving dogs,
add to the sum of the day’s pleasures and tune the mind to its happiest
key-note, it would be difficult to define. For my own part, I have never
ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture Heaven
and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not
to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have
desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their
boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on and not a single
animal to caress,—even those which Mahomet promised his followers,—his
own camel, Balaam’s ass, and Tobit’s dog,—would, I think, be a very
incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!