KNOLE, FROM THE ROAD.
Knole is a “show place.” You may roam where you please in the park, and on most days, within easily ascertainable hours, you can be shown over the vast place on payment of two shillings. You would not be permitted so much in the millionaires’ palaces of democratic America.
In this gigantic place Lord Sackville and his family occupy a small suite of rooms furnished in modern style, and, if you consider it closely, are practically the caretakers of a vast museum of antiquities maintained at their own expense. The place is so extensive, and the maintenance and repairs so costly, that it would require the revenue of one of the great landlords of London to keep it up, and, in addition, to live in fitting state, and the Sackville-Wests have not those resources.
Some day a paternal Government will come to the rescue of owners of historic houses of public interest. There is a widely prevalent idea that all governments are paternal to one class, and act in a dominie and minatory manner to the others. Conservatives, in this belief, play the beneficent father to the aristocracy and their fringe, and waggle weapons of punishment at the lower classes; while the Liberals (in the accepted idea) pat the middle classes and the working men on the head and give them something to go away and play with; and then, turning up their sleeves and selecting a fine birch-rod, bid dukes and earls to come here this instant moment and take their trousers down. It is not really precisely like that, but Sir William Harcourt did something of the kind with his Death Duties. At any rate, those are the respective aspirations of free and enlightened voters on either side.
A fatherly Conservative Government may, therefore, some day be expected to come handsomely to the rescue of the owners of historic mansions: owners with acres of reception-rooms, picture-galleries, and baronial halls; owners with long pedigrees but slim purses, who can scarcely afford even to keep their many windows cleaned, let alone maintain floors and roofs and keep the moth out of priceless ancient tapestries and silken hangings. Such a Government will allocate grants annually to those proprietors who habitually admit sightseers, and who make application for aid; and surely the principle would be just, for it certainly is scarcely fair to the proprietors of such places as Knole, if witness to their good nature, that they should expend their substance chiefly for the delight of the tourist and sightseer.
The next step would be a competitive measure introduced by the inevitable Liberal Government ordained by the well-known fickleness of the electorate, by which all historic mansions would be scheduled and administered as to their “show” parts by a Department responsible for the safe and careful keeping of artistic and historic treasures, endangered by the carelessness, the poverty, or even the uninstructed enthusiasm of their owners. It will all some day come to pass.
It is obvious that a great range of buildings like Knole, covering nearly four acres, dating back, in part, four hundred years, and filled to overcrowding with things precious intrinsically and by association, must involve the existence of a large staff; and it must be at least equally obvious that no lord of Knole could without great physical effort use even a respectable proportion of his three hundred and sixty-five rooms, traverse his fifty-two staircases, or look forth daily from more than ten per cent. of his five hundred and forty windows.
The house stands in what is probably the least attractive portion of the park, where the grass is tough and wiry, and like that of some untended prairie. The long, dark-grey, stone front, pierced with mullioned windows, is like that of an ancient Oxford college. You are personally struck with the resemblance, and, reading the impressions of bygone visitors, you find they have all been impressed in the same way. Every gable is surmounted by the leopard “sejant affronté” of the Sackville coat of arms, looking like so many tomcats obeying the instruction of some unseen drill-master: “Eyes right.”
THE GATEWAY, KNOLE.