Guildford is no more than thirty miles from London, and yet it remains to this day as provincial in appearance as ever it could have been in the olden times of road-travel. Provinciality was the pet bugbear of Matthew Arnold, but he applied it as a scornful term only to literary and critical shortcomings. To him the vapourings of modern poetasters would have been provincialisms, and the narrow-minded criticisms of Mr. George Howells, who can see nothing in Shakespeare, but perceives a wealth of genius in his fellow-novelists of the United States, would have been provincialisms of the worst order.
But the provinciality of places, as distinguished from minds, can be no reproach in these latter days, when all the great towns, with London at their head, have grown so large and congested that a sight of God’s pure country and a breath of healthy air are only to be obtained by most townsfolk with infinite pains and great expenditure of time. It was an evil day when the great cities of England grew so large that one who ascended a church steeple in their midst could discover nothing on the horizon but chimney-pots and bricks-and-mortar; and the best of times were those when weary citizens took their pleasure after the day’s work in the fields and groves that bordered upon the habitations of men. What are Progress and Civilization but will-o’-wisps conjured up by the malignity of the devil to hide the degeneration of the race and the starvation of the soul, when the outcome of the centuries is the shutting out from the face of nature of three-fourths of the population? What else than a sorry jest is the boast of London’s five millions of people, when by far the greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in whose centre you can open your casement of a morning and welcome the sun rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see, though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side?
GUILDHALL, GUILDFORD.
GUILDFORD
Guildford, then, is provincial in the best and healthiest sense; for though your habitat be in the High Street, which here, as in all other properly-constituted towns, is the very nucleus of the borough, you need never be longer than ten minutes in leaving the town behind if you are so minded. Guildford is a town of very individual character. Godalming folks will tell you that Guildford is “cliquey,” by which term I understand exclusiveness to be meant. It may be so, in fact I believe this to be one of Guildford’s most marked social characteristics; but exclusiveness implies local patriotism, which is a refreshing spirit for a Londoner to encounter once in a way. At any rate, he will find no spirit of this description in what Cobbett satirically termed “the Wen.” The patriotism of Peckham has yet to be discovered; the local enthusiasm of Camberwell is as rare as the song of the lark in London streets; and the man who would now praise what was once the country village of “merrie” Islington is not to be found.
It is difficult to pluck even one greatly outstanding incident from Guildford’s history wherewith to enliven these pages, for although Guildford possessed a strong and well-placed castle from Norman times, it cannot be said that the annals of the town are at all distinguished by records of battle, murder, and sudden death, or by military prowess. So much the better for Guildford town, you will say, and the expression may be allowed, for this old borough has ever been eminently peaceful and prosperous in the absence of civil or military commotion. Its very name is earnest of trade and merchandise; and the guilds of Guildford were very powerful bodies of traders who dealt in cloths and wool, at one time the chiefest of local products, or in the minor articles that ministered to the wants of those great staple trades.
Meanwhile the guardians of the old Castle, whose keep still dominates Guildford from most points of view, had little enough to do but to keep the place in order for such occasions when the King came a-hunting in the neighbourhood, or progressed past here to some distant part of the realm. King John seems to have been by far the most frequent royal visitor to Guildford Castle, and almost the last, for the cold comforts of Norman keeps went very early out of fashion with kings and queens, and domestic hearths began to replace dungeon-like apartments in chilly towers as soon as social conditions began to settle down into something remotely resembling tranquillity.