Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
I like the hunting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days e’er I was born.
For a figure like that—hopelessly conservative, if you will, but conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as we should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really stood for—their virtue along with their stupidity—by one touch of Jane Austen’s wit, shall we say?—Dickens might have made some sort of a fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country, he is a lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it on record) was a scarlet geranium!
Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first—from “Sumer is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”—positively riots in country scenes, sounds, scents, country delights:
—all foison, all abundance,
and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose, until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was The Compleat Angler! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de Coverly papers?—charming; but of the town, surely, and with something of Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in raison d’être? Fielding understood the country better—witness his Squire Allworthy. But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages exhibit—and they do—a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without core or atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance—against the mean streets and the Marshalsea—we must balance (if I may use a paradoxical term) the weight of traditional vacuity.