COUNTRY HOUSES.
[Illustration]
What a feature in English scenery is the old country house! Compare the
seat that has been occupied for many generations with the new mansion.
The former with its embowering trees, its lawns and ancient oaks, its
avenues of beech, the lofty, flaky Scotch pines in which the rooks
build, and about which they wheel and caw; and the latter with new
plantations, the evidence everywhere present of hedges pulled down,
manifest in the trees propped up on hunches of clay.
There is nothing so striking to the eye on a return to England from
the Continent as the stateliness of our trees. I do not know of any
trees in Europe to compare with ours. It is only with us that they
are allowed to grow to advanced age, and die by inches; only with us
are they given elbow-room to expand into the full plenitude of their
growth. On the Continent every tree is known to the police, when it was
planted, when it attains its maximum of growth; and then, down it comes.
Horace Walpole had no love of the country--indeed, he hated it, and
regarded the months that he spent in Norfolk as intolerable. He laments
in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (Oct. 3rd, 1743), that the country
houses of the nobility and gentry of England are scattered about in the
country, and are not moved up to town, where they would make streets
of palaces, like those of the great people of Florence, and Genoa, and
Bologna. "Think what London would be if the chief houses were in it,
as in the cities of other countries, and not dispersed, like great
rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country."
It is precisely because our most noble mansions are in the country, in
a setting of their own, absolutely incomparable, of park and grove,
that they are unsurpassed for loveliness anywhere. Framed in by pines
and deciduous trees, copper beech and silver poplar, with shrubberies
of azalea in every range of colour, from scarlet, through yellow to
white, and rhododendrons full of bloom from early spring to midsummer,
and double cherry, almond, medlar. Why, the very framing makes an ugly
country house look sweet and homelike.
But beautiful as are the parks and grounds about our gentlemen's
houses, they are but a remnant of what once was. We see in our old
churches, in our mansions, that oak grew in profusion in England at one
time, and reached sizes we cannot equal now. Great havoc was wrought
with the woods and parks in the time of the Commonwealth and at the
Restoration. The finest trees were cut down that ships might be built
of them for the royal navy; the commissioners marked and took what
trees they would. Thus in 1664 Pepys had to select trees in Clarendon
Park, near Salisbury, which the Chancellor had bought of the Duke of
Albemarle. Very angry the Chancellor was at having his park despoiled
of his best timber, and Pepys gives us in his _Diary_ an amusing
account of his trouble thereupon.
But to come to the houses themselves. Is there anything more sweet,
peaceful, comfortable than the aspect of an old country house, of
brick especially, with brown tiled roof and clustering chimneys backed
by woods, with pleasure gardens at its side, and open lawn and park
before it? No, its equal is to be found nowhere. The French château,
the Italian palace, the German schloss are not to be spoken of in the
same breath. Each has its charm, but there is a coldness and stiffness
in the first, a turned-inwardness in the second, and a nakedness in the
last that prevent us from associating with them the ideas of comfort
and peace.
The true English country house is a product of comparatively late
times, that is to say, from the reign of Henry VIII. onwards. Before
that, the great nobles lived in castles, and the smaller gentry in
houses of no great comfort and grandeur.
In the parish of Little Hempston, near Totnes, is a perfect mansion
of the fourteenth century, probably the original manor-house of the
Arundels, but given to the Church, when it became a parsonage. It is
now used as a farm, and a very uncomfortable farm-house it makes. As
one of the best preserved houses of that period I know, it deserves a
few words.
[Illustration: Courtyard: Little Hempston:]
This house consists of three courts; one is a mere garden court,
through which access was had to the main entrance; through this passed
the way into the principal quadrangle. The third court was for stables
and cattle-sheds. Now this house has but a single window in it looking
outwards, and that is the great hall window, all the rest look inwards
into the tiny quadrangle, which is almost like a well, never illumined
by the sun, so small is it.
[Illustration: House at Little Hempston: S: Devon:]
The hall had in it a brazier in the midst, which could never heat it,
though the numbed fingers might be thawed at it. Adjoining the hall
is the ladies' bower, a sitting-room dark as a vault, with indeed a
fireplace in it. These were the sole rooms that were occupied by day,
the hall and the bower.
The Arundels had another place at Ebbfleet, near Stratton, which was no
bigger, and only a little less gloomy; the windows were always made,
for protection, to look into a court. It was not till after the Wars of
the Roses that there was more light allowed into the chambers.
[Illustration: A West Country Manor House:]
I give a sketch and plan of a manor-house still almost unaltered,
called Willsworthy, in the parish of Peter Tavy in Devon. It is built
entirely of granite. It has near it a ruined chapel, but what family
occupied it and when I do not know; it has not certainly been tenanted
by gentlefolks since the reign of Henry VIII.
It was not till the Tudor period that the houses of our forefathers
became comfortable and cheerful.
[Illustration: Plan of an Ancient West-country Manor House]
We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that in the Elizabethan
period the windows were designed so much for looking out at as for
letting the sun look in at. The old idea of a quadrangle was not
discarded, but it was modified. The quadrangle became a pleasant garden
within walls; the destruction of the walls to afford vistas was the
work of a later age.
The normal plan of a house till the reign of Elizabeth was the
quadrangle; but then, in the more modest mansions, the house itself
did not occupy more than a single side of the court, all the rest was
taken up with barns and stables, and the windows of the house looked
into this great stable-yard. On the side of Coxtor, above Tavistock,
stands an interesting old yeoman's house, built of solid granite, which
has remained in the possession of the same worthy family for many
generations, and has remained unaltered. This house, in little, shows
us the disposition of the old squire's mansion, for the yeoman copied
the plan of the house of the lord of the manor. A granite doorway
gives admission to the court, surrounded on all sides but the north
by stabling. On the north side, raised above the yard by a flight of
steps, is a small terrace laid out in flower-beds; into this court all
the windows of the house look. We enter the porch, and find ourselves
in the hall, with its great fireplace, its large south window, where
sits the mistress at her needlework, as of old; and here is the high
table, the wall panelled and carved, where sit the yeoman and his
family at meals, whilst the labourers sit below. This very simple yet
interesting house is quite a fortress; it is walled up against the
stormy gales that sweep the moor. It is a prison too, for it catches
and holds captive the sunbeams that fall into the bright little court.
We are too ready to regard our forefathers as fools, but they knew a
thing or two; they were well aware that in England, if we want flowers
to blow early and freely, they must be sheltered.
It was not till the reign of Charles II. that the fancy came on English
people to do away with nooks and corners, and to build oblong blocks of
houses without projections anywhere.
[Illustration: Kew Palace:]
The new Italian, or French château style, had its advantages, but its
counterbalancing disadvantages. The main advantage was that the rooms
were loftier than before; the walls, white and gold, were more cheerful
at night; there may have been other advantages, but these are the only
two that are conspicuous. The disadvantages were many. In the first
place, no shelter was provided out of doors from the wind; no pleasant
nooks, no sun-traps. The block of building, naked and alone, stood in
the midst of a park, and the wind whistled round it, and the rain
drove against it. When the visitor arrived in bad weather, he was blown
in at the door, and nearly blown through the hall. In our eagerness
to make vistas, obtain extensive landscapes, we have levelled our
enclosing walls. But what could have been a sweeter prospect from a
hall or parlour window, than an enclosed garden full of flowers, with
bees humming, butterflies flitting, and fruit-trees ripening their
burdens against old red brick enclosing walls, tinted gorgeously with
lichens?
There is at present a fashion for being blown about by the wind, so we
unmuffle our mansions of their enclosing walls and hedges. But England
is a land of wind. Nothing strikes an Englishman more, when living
abroad, than the general stillness of the air. Look at the wonderful
bulbous spires and cupolas to towers on the Continent;--marvellously
picturesque they are. If examined, they are found to be very generally
covered with the most delicate slate work, that folds in and out of the
crinks and crannies, like chain mail. Such slating would not endure
three winters in England; it would be torn adrift and scattered like
autumn leaves before an equinoctial gale. We never had these bulbous
spires in England, because the climate would not permit of their
construction. Our forefathers knew that this was a windy world of ours--
"Sing heigh ho for the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day,"
and they built their houses accordingly--to provide the greatest
possible amount of shelter from the cold blasts of March, and from
the driving rains of winter. The house originally consisted on the
ground-floor of hall, parlour, kitchen, and entrance-porch and stairs.
In later times the side wing was carried further back, and a second
parlour was built, and the staircase erected between the parlours.
At Upcott, in Broadwood, in Devon, is a house that belonged to the
Upcotts. The plan is much the same as that of Willsworthy, even ruder,
though the house itself was finer. It had a porch, a hall, and a dairy
and kitchen. The parlour is of Queen Anne's reign, and probably takes
the place of one earlier on the same spot. The plan of Hurlditch is
the same, a mansion of the important family of Speccot. There also the
parlour is comparatively recent.
There was in a house previous to the reign of Henry VII. but one good
room, and that was the hall. It opened to the roof, and must have been
cold enough in winter, and draughty at all times.
At Wortham, the fine mansion of the Dynhams, there was an arrangement,
as far as I know, unique--two halls, one for winter with a fire-place
in it, serving as a sort of lower story to the summer-hall, clear to
the roof--thus one is superposed on the other.
Tonacombe, a mansion of the Leys and Kempthornes in Morwenstowe parish
in Cornwall, is a singularly untouched house of a somewhat similar
construction, but enlarged. Here there was the tiny entrance-court into
which the hall looked; the hall itself being open to the roof, with
its great fire-place, and the parlour panelled with oak. All other
reception-rooms are later additions or alterations of offices into
parlours.
[Illustration: Tonacombe: North Cornwall.]
With the reign of the Tudors a great sense of security and an increase
of wealth must have come to the country gentry, for they everywhere
began to rebuild their houses, to give them more air and light, and
completely shook off that fear which had possessed them previously of
looking out into the world. Then came in an age of great windows. It
would seem as though in the rebound they thought they could not have
light enough. Certainly glass must have been inexpensive in those
days. It was the same in the churches; the huge perpendicular windows
converted the sacred edifices into lanterns. The old halls open to
the roof gave way to ceiled halls, and the newel staircase in the
wall--very inconvenient, impossible for the carrying up or down-stairs
of large furniture--was discarded for the broad and stately staircase
of oak.
It seems to me that the loss of shelter that ensued on the abandonment
of the quadrangle, or of the E-shaped Elizabethan house, is not
counterbalanced by the compactness of the square or the oblong block
of the Queen Anne house. Moreover, the advantages internally were not
so great as might be supposed, for, to light the very lofty room the
windows were made narrow and tall; thus shaped they admitted far less
sun than when they were broad and not tall.
Only one who, like myself, has the happiness to occupy a room with a
six-light window, twelve feet wide and five feet high, through which
the sun pours in and floods the whole room, whilst without the keen
March wind is cutting, cold and cruel, can appreciate the blessedness
of such a window, can tell the exhilarating effect it has on the
spirits, how it lets the sun in, not only through the room, and on to
one's book or paper, but into the very heart and soul as well.
A long upright narrow window does not answer the purpose for which
it was constructed. The light enters the room from the sky, not from
the earth, therefore only through the upper portion of a window. The
wide window gives us the greatest possible amount of light. If we were
but to revert to the Elizabethan window, we would find a singular
improvement in our health and spirits.
Our old country houses were, say modern masons, shockingly badly
built. "Why, sir," said one to me, "do look here at this wall. It is
three foot six thick--what waste of room!--and then only the facing is
with mortar between the stones, all the rest of the stones are set in
clay." I was engaged building my porch when the man said this. So I,
convinced by his superior experience, apologized for my forbears, and
bade him rebuild with mortar throughout. What was the result? That wall
has been to me ever since a worry. The rain beats through it; every
course of mortar serves as an aqueduct, and the driving rain against
that wall traverses it as easily as if it were a sponge. Our old houses
were dry within--dry as snuff. Now we cannot keep the wet out without
cementing them externally. Those fools, our forefathers, by breaking
the connexion prevented the water from penetrating.
Do any of my readers know the cosiness of an oak-panelled or of a
tapestried room? There is nothing comparable to it for warmth. What
the reader certainly does know is, that from a papered wall and from
a plate-glass window there is ever a cold current of air setting
inwards. He supposes that there is a draught creeping round the walls
from the door, or that the window-frame does not fit; and he plugs,
but cannot exclude the cold air. But the origin of the draught is in
the room itself, and it is created by the fire. The wall is cold and
the plate-glass is cold, and the heated atmosphere of the room is
lowered in temperature against these cold surfaces, and returns in the
direction of the fire as a chill draught. But when the room is lined
with oak or with woven woollen tapestry, then the walls are warm, and
they give back none of these chill recoil currents. The fire has not
the double obligation laid on it of heating the air of the apartment
and the walls.
In Germany and Russia during the winter double windows are set up in
every room, and by this means a film of warm air is interposed between
the heated atmosphere of the room and the external cold air. That our
ancestors did not attempt,--plate-glass was not known to them,--but
they did what they could in the right direction. They covered the chill
stone and plaster walls of the rooms with non-conducting materials.
The oak-panelled room was, it can hardly be denied, difficult to light
at night, as the dark walls absorbed the candle rays. But that mattered
little at a time when every one went to bed with the sun. When later
hours were kept, then the oak panels were painted white. But now that
we have mineral oils, not to mention gas and electric lighting, we may
well scrape off the white paint and restore the dark oak. Then, for an
evening, the sombre background has quite a marvellous effect in setting
off the bright ladies' dresses, and showing off fresh pretty faces.
[Illustration: An Oak-panelled Parlour, Lew Trenchard.]
Before the reign of Elizabeth the staircase was not an important
feature in the house. The hall reached to the roof, and the stairs
were winding flights of stone steps in turrets, or in the thickness
of the wall; when the fashion set in to ceil the halls low, then the
staircase became a stately feature of the house. But it was more than
a stately feature, it was the great ventilating shaft of the house;
it was to the house what the tower is to the church, the chimney
by which the stale fumes might pass away. The great staircase window,
made up of thousands of little pieces of glass set in lead, acted
as a colander through which the outer air streamed in and the inner
vitiated air escaped. Where there is a central quadrangle, this was in
many cases glazed in; then a staircase led to a series of galleries
about it, lighted from above, communicating with the several suites of
apartments. Many of our old inns are thus constructed. The reader will
remember the picture of the court of the White Hart in _Pickwick_, with
the first introduction of Sam Weller. The central court serves as a
ventilator to the house, and so does its dwindled representative, the
well-staircase. Those fools, our forefathers, again, if they shut out
the winds and gave shelter to their houses, made ample provision for
internal ventilation.
What a degraded, miserable feature of the house is the staircase
now-a-days, with its steps seven inches instead of four, and the tread
nine and a half inches instead of thirteen. It takes an effort to go
up-stairs now, it is a scramble; it was an easy, a leisurely, and a
dignified ascent formerly. Then again, our staircases are narrow--one
of four feet is of quite a respectable width; but the old Elizabethan
staircase measured from six feet to eight feet wide. That of Blickling
Hall, Norfolk is seven feet eight inches. There the ascent is single
to the first landing; after that the stair branches off, one for the
ascent, the other for the descent. The first ascent is of eight steps;
then after the main landing, on each side eleven steps to the second
landing; then nine more lead to the level of the upper storys and
grand corridor. On such staircases as these furniture can be conveyed
up and down without damage to the walls, or injury to the furniture.
Architects who build modern narrow and steep staircases, forget that
often a coffin has to be conveyed with its tenant down them; and this
can be done neither with convenience nor dignity upon them.
But let us think of the staircase on a brighter occasion than a
funeral. The grand old flight of steps with its landings, and with
sometimes its bay-window with seats in it on one of the landings, how
it lends itself to the exigencies of a sitting-out place at a ball.
The window is filled with azaleas; the walls hung with full-length
family portraits; the broad dark oak stairs are carpeted with crimson;
a chandelier pendant from the moulded Elizabethan ceiling-drop sheds
a soft golden light over the scene; and on the landings, on the
steps themselves, sit the dancers after the exertions of a waltz or a
galop, enjoying the fresher air, and forming a picture of almost ideal
charm. Then also it is that the ventilating advantages of the great
staircase become most manifest. The dancing has been in the hall, which
has become hot; the door on to the stairs is thrown open; there is a
circulation of air at once, and in two minutes the atmosphere of the
ball-room has renewed itself.
In the matter of sleeping arrangements we have certainly made an
advance on those of our ancestors. I have already mentioned Upcott,
which belonged to a family of that name that expired in the reign of
Henry VII. The hall is small, but has a huge fire-place in it. In
the window is a coat of arms, in stained glass, representing Upcott
impaling an unknown coat, party per pale, argent and sable, three
dexter hands couped at the wrist, counterchanged. Now this house has
or had but a _single_ bedroom. There may have been, and there probably
was, a separate apartment for the squire and his wife, over the
parlour, which was rebuilt later; but for all the rest of the household
there existed but one large dormitory over the hall, in which slept
the unmarried ladies of the family, and the maid-servants, and where
was the nursery for the babies. All the men of the family, gentle and
serving, slept in the hall about the fire on the straw, and fern, and
broom that littered the pavement.
That house is a very astonishing one to me, for it reveals a state of
affairs singularly rude--at a comparatively late period. Things were
improved in this particular later; bedrooms many were constructed,
communicating with each other. At the head of the stairs slept the
squire and his wife, and all the rooms tenanted by the rest of the
household were accessible only through that. The females, daughters of
the house and maid-servants, lay in rooms on one side, say the right,
the maids in those most distant, reached through the apartments of the
young ladies; those of the men lay on the left, the sons of the house
nearest the chamber of the squire, the serving-men furthest off.
When the party in the house retired for the night, a file of damsels
marched up-stairs, domestic servants first, passed through the room
of their master and mistress, then through those of the young ladies,
and were shut in at the end; next entered the daughters of the house
to their several chambers, the youngest lying near the room of the
serving-maids, the eldest most outside, near that of her father and
mother. That procession disposed of, a second mounted the stairs,
consisting of the men of the house, the stable-boy first, and the son
and heir last, and were disposed of similarly to the females, but on
the opposite side of the staircase. Then, finally, the squire and his
wife retired to roost in the chamber that commanded those of all the
rest of the household. This arrangement still subsists in our old
fashioned farm-houses.
Now may be understood the odd provision in a will proved in the
Consistory Court of Canterbury in 1652 (Bowyer, f. 57)--"I give to my
son Thomas the sole fee-simple and inheritance of my dwelling-house,
and all my lands and hereditaments thereto belonging, to him and to his
heirs for ever. And my will is, that Joan my daughter shall have free
_ingress_, _egress_, and _regress_ to the bedd in the chambre where she
now lieth, so long as she continueth unmarried."
But to this arrangement followed another, more practical and
convenient, that of having a grand corridor up-stairs, out of which
opened the doors of the bedrooms; or, where there was a glazed-in
quadrangle with staircase and landings around it, there the doors of
the bedrooms opened from these landings. The corridor was used as a
room for dancing, or for music, or for games; it was the recreation
place of the house on a rainy day. Being up-stairs, and away from
library and parlours, the young people might skip, and play blind-man's
buff, dance, and disturb no one; nor was there much furniture in these
corridors to stand in the way and get knocked over.
This corridor is a feature of an old house so very dear to young folks,
and so very advantageous to their health, that it is a pity in our
modern houses we have got rid of it.
A word on the furniture of our old country houses must not be omitted.
Unfortunately there set in at the beginning of this century a most
detestable fashion in furniture, absolutely void of taste; and to make
room for the villainous articles then imported into our old country
houses, much beautiful old work was turned out, very often was given to
servants when they married. The consequence is, that much of it passed
into cottages, where it soon got destroyed. It was not only old carved
oak that was cast forth, for much of that had been got rid of in the
Georgian epoch, but even the beautiful polished wood cabinets, chests
of drawers, and Chippendale chairs of a more recent period.
Of early furniture, I mean mediæval, little remains in our houses, for
one reason, because there was in them very little. The era of furniture
was begun with the Tudor monarchs; it was all of oak, and the carving
was influenced much by Holbein, who inspired artists with admiration
for German Renaissance. Cabinets with architectural façades and heavy
oak furniture continued in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. The
date of a chair can be told approximately by the position of the rail
binding together the legs. The primary object of this brace was, to
hold the legs firmly, but it was also found to possess the not less
important advantage of providing a person sitting in the chair with the
means of keeping his feet from the cold stone-slabbed pavement. When
boarded floors came into fashion, it became no longer necessary to have
the front brace of the chair placed so near the floor, and to give more
freedom to the feet it was gradually heightened. Some time after this
the side braces were raised to the same level as the front brace, and
later still, as the first necessity for their use was gradually lost
sight of, they were dispensed with altogether. This was the first
step towards the bad system of construction now almost universally
practised, of leaving the legs of chairs without any support at their
lower extremities. At the beginning of this century a still further
deviation from right principles ensued. The legs of chairs were
made to curve, and often to curve in such a manner as to make them
unserviceable for supporting the weight reposed upon them.
"Let us examine an old oak chair, and see how it was constructed. In
the first place, we shall find that the whole of the work is executed
in solid oak, the uprights forming the back, and the back legs being
made of one continuous piece; this at once gives strength and backbone
to the whole structure. The framework holding the seat is next securely
tenoned, and pinned with oaken pegs into the four legs, thus binding
the whole of the parts firmly together. Even at this stage we have
a far more strongly constructed piece of work than the modern chair
when quite completed; the old workman, however, not content with this,
next turned his attention to the weakest part of all--the feet of the
chair--and securely fastened them together about three or four inches
from the floor with four strong braces, tenoning each brace at both
ends into the legs of the chair, and securing it, as before, with
oaken pegs. This last addition made the whole a perfectly strong and
almost indestructible piece of framing, and constitutes one of the
most essential differences in the construction of ancient and modern
furniture. The legs of most modern chairs are made to depend entirely
for strength on their hold, _at one end_, to the framing of the seat
of the chair, into which they are generally only glued. The legs of
the ancient chair, on the other hand, are secured at _both ends_; and
the four braces connecting them together act as struts as well as
ties; they form an admirable protection against any blow the chair may
receive at its lower extremities. Many of the old chairs constructed on
these excellent principles are now in good condition, after nearly two
hundred years of daily use."[2]
In mediæval times there were trestles and boards for a dining-table;
but in Chaucer's time fixed tables were coming into use. He tells how
that in the rich and luxurious Franklin's house there were--
"Alle deyntees that men cowde thynke,
* * * * *
His table dormant in his halle alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day."
The "table dormant" was used only by very rich people; it was a new
fashion at the close of the fourteenth century, and was expensive. It
took its name from the fact that it was slept upon at night; it served
as a bed for one of the men who lay in the hall. This table consisted
of a single long trestle with a plank on it. It had but two legs, one
at each end, and a beam between supported by struts. But at the same
time that these tables came into fashion, another variety was in use,
supported by a pair of short trestles at each end. The top of this
table was also formed of planks, but they were hinged together so as to
be easily folded up and removed, when additional space was required. A
table of this kind is referred to by Shakespeare in _Romeo and Juliet_,
when, as Capulet enters the hall with his guests, he exclaims--
"Come, musicians, play.
A hall! a hall! give room, and foot it, girls.
More light, you knaves; and turn the tables up."
A remarkably cleverly constructed table of the reign of Elizabeth
exists at Slade in South Devon. It is based on the plan of the table
dormant, but is convertible into a settle when no longer required as a
table; the planking rests on the settle arms when serving for a board,
and slides back and assumes an erect position when required as a settle
back.
A "drawing-table" was a third variety. It was one that was square
framed, but could be drawn out at both ends, so as to nearly double its
normal length.
In a paper on 'Our Household Furniture,' contributed to the _Art
Journal_ by Mr. G. T. Robinson, an illustration of one of these
tables is given; and in speaking of the ingenuity displayed in the
construction of the sliding leaves, he says, "The whole mechanism is
admirably considered for the purpose it has to fulfil. Indeed its
adaptation for its purpose was so good that the principle was long
retained; and Sheraton, so late as the commencement of the present
century, advocates its use for many writing or other tables, and gives
the rule for finding the exact rake of the slides, and the technical
details of all the other parts."
It is difficult to understand why so admirable and simple an
arrangement was abandoned, for anything more clumsy and unsatisfactory
than the method adopted in our modern dining-room tables for
accomplishing a similar result can hardly be imagined.[3] The only
modern examples I have seen are some manufactured by a firm in Brussels
(Wattier, Steenpoort).
I confess that I look back with regret to the old highly polished
mahogany table for dessert. The modern system of covering the table
with white, and strips of coloured silk, and setting it with sprigs
of ferns and flowers is very pretty, but then for the sake of this
prettiness we are letting the polish of our tables go down. Hardly
anywhere now does the butler care to keep up the polish of the table;
he used to take a pride in it, now he knows that it is never seen.
Yet I know of two or three old country houses into which the Russian
fashion has not penetrated, and where even to this day the mahogany is
shown, and shines like a mirror.
"Hail, good comrades, every one,
Round the polished table;
Pass the bottle with the sun,
Drink, sirs! whilst ye're able.
Life is but a little span,
Full of painful thinking;
Let us live as fits a man,
No good liquors blinking!"
So sang our grandfathers; but the song has gone out with the polished
table, and with the polished table the quiet enjoyable drinking of good
port and sherry after the retirement of the ladies. The cigarette is
lighted--and who can enjoy port with the air full of its perfumes?--and
no sooner is the wine begun to be appreciated, than the tray of coffee
is presented, dug into the side, as a reminder that now-a-days the
pleasant hour with good wine and agreeable male companions is cut
down to a quarter of an hour--has gone out of fashion, along with the
polished table, and we must away into the drawing-room to talk empty
nothingnesses, and listen to bad music.
But we must not spend too much time over tables and chairs. Marquetry
became the fashion under William and Mary, when upright clocks,
bureaux, and chairs were thus decorated. Under Louis XIV. a new style
of decoration was introduced by one André Charles Buhl, who gave his
name to it. He was chief upholsterer to the king, and his rich and
brilliant marquetry of tortoise-shell and brass, so combined as to form
figures and subjects, was extensively used in the furnishing of the new
palace at Versailles.
The fashion extended to England, and where tortoise-shell was not
employed, the ground was gilt, then painted over with black, leaving
a pattern in gold uncovered, and the whole was washed over with a
reddish-brown lacquer, which gave the effect of tortoise-shell. Spaces
thus treated were relieved by raised work in wood carved and gilt in
relief, in representation of Buhl's brass work. We find this chiefly in
mirror and picture-frames.
Then followed the reign of Louis XV., the age of _rococo_, of
shell-shaped curves set against each other back to back. It may
have been barbarous, but it was rich and beautiful. Then walls were
painted white and picked out with gold, the clearest, most brilliant,
turquoise-blues and rose-carmines came in. Painters devoted themselves
to the decoration of panels in the walls of rooms and to ceilings, the
_dessus-de-portes_, over-doors, generally in chiaroscuro, shepherds
and shepherdesses, nymphs, cherubs. There was a certain amount of
sombreness in the old Elizabethan house, in the dark oak panelling, in
the olive-greens of the tapestry, that was distasteful to the merry
men of the epoch from Charles II. to the first Georges, and they set
themselves to make their interiors as sparkling with gold and brilliant
colour as possible on a white instead of a dark ground.
The discovery of Pompeii caused a return to a simpler style of
decoration, to purer forms; and marquetry furniture was manufactured in
exotic woods, enriched with ormolu mountings. Paintings were executed
on copper and let into chimney-pieces, of great delicacy and charm.
Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton are names associated with the
mahogany furniture of the last century, with tables with pierced
galleries, chairs with open strap work backs, cabinets of graceful
curves, all of admirable workmanship. Indeed cabinet-making never
attained a higher degree of delicacy and perfection than at this
period. I would point to some of the bureaux of this date as real
marvels of workmanship. And look at the backs of the chairs--a good
Chippendale chair has the upright curled back at the top, in a manner
remarkable for beauty, and right in principle, for it exposes no sharp
angles to suffer from a blow. The satin-wood furniture, some of it
with medallions painted on it, sideboards, work-tables, chiffoniers,
sometimes only decorated with delicate garlands of laurel or bay
painted or inlaid on the satin-wood, is not to be disregarded. The only
furniture that cannot be loved is that of the first thirty years of
this century, when it violated all true principles of construction,
and manifested neither invention nor taste in design.
Before leaving the consideration of old country houses, one word
must be said about their _setting_. We now-a-days, when we build a
mansion, look out for the top of a hill, a good windy, exposed spot.
It never occurs to us that half the charm of a house consists in the
way in which it is framed. The mediæval Germans lived on the tops
of rocks, but then their houses were castles, partly for defence,
and partly because they knew what was fit to be done. Artistically,
they made these castles eminently picturesque with towers and gables
that cut the sky. We do not now build castles, but--well, the word
is suitable--boxes; and a box looks like a box on the top of a hill
against the sky, and nothing can make it look other. Our English
forefathers, in their sense of security, and in their love of sun and
shelter, sought out a hillside, and built their mansions so as to have
rising ground behind it, to back it, and where they had not a hill,
there they had a wood of tall trees. A house thus set is like a picture
in a frame, a pretty face in a real bonnet. I do not think that ladies
who, in pursuance of a vile fashion, wear hats, can be aware of the
loss of charm to the face. Let them take an ancestral portrait out
of its frame, and hang it thus naked against the wall. They will see
at once that the frame insulates it, draws attention to its beauties
and enhances them. It is the same with a house. It may be good
architecturally, but unless it be backed up by a green hill covered
with wood, tall Scotch pines, the haunt of rooks, umbrageous beech, in
autumn trees of gold, it is nothing but an architectural study. How
naked, how forlorn a dear old house looks that has lost its timber
that surrounded it! I know one or two old mansions that have been
converted into farm-houses, and their rear-guard of timber hewn down
and sold. There is a broken-hearted look about them that reminds one of
a carriage-horse degraded to go in a cart. It feels its degradation,
loses flesh, gloss, and spirit.
I was one day walking with an old friend whom fate doomed to live
abroad all his life, but whose heart was ever in his native land. We
were strolling near an old mansion, in its park, when he stopped,
looked at it, and said, "Ye gentlemen of England, that dwell at home at
ease--and in what ease! in what peace and beauty! Indeed, I think that,
as in all the world there is not a type of man nobler, better, more
complete in every way than the true English gentleman, so do I think
that nowhere--not approachably even, anywhere--is there to be found a
house like the old English country house." And in my heart I responded,
Amen--It is so.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _Examples of Carved Oak Woodwork_, by W. Bliss Sanders. London:
1883.
[3] Mr. Bliss Saunders gives details of one of these in the work above
referred to.