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.”