VI
HOME
"Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."
Wordsworth, "To a Sky-lark."
I said good-bye to Oxford on the 17th of June, 1876. What was the next step to be? As so often in my life, the decision came through a doctor's lips. He spoke in a figure, and this is what he said. "When a man has had a severe illness, he has taken a large sum out of his capital. Unless he has the wisdom to replace it, he must be permanently poorer; and, when the original stock was not large, the necessity of economizing becomes more urgent. You are in that case. My advice, therefore, is—Do nothing for the next two or three years. Concentrate all your efforts on getting better. Live as healthy a life as you can, and give mind and body a complete rest. If you will obey this counsel, you will find that you have replaced the capital, or, at any rate, some of it; and you may, in spite of all disabilities, be able to take your part in the life and work of the world." The prescription of total abstinence from effort exactly suited my disposition of the moment. Oxford, one way and another, had taken more out of me than till then I had realized, and I was only too thankful to have an opportunity of making good the loss.
It being, for the time, my prime object to recover some portion of health and strength, I was beyond measure fortunate in the possession of an absolutely ideal home. "'Home! Sweet Home!' Yes. That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their language by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest, British, Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn, with all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were at home in the old familiar places, with father and mother, in the healthy gladness of their childhood."[19] To me home was all this and even more; for not only had it been my earthly Paradise when I was a child, but now, in opening manhood, it was a sanctuary and a resting-place, in which I could prepare myself to face whatever lot the future might have in store for me.
That London as well as country may be, under certain conditions, Home, I am well aware. For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own. And yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home, and as a training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a home in the country and a home in London. All those educating influences which count for so much in the true home are infinitely weaker in the town than in the country. In a London home there is nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the chimney-pots through the back-windows of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt, or a palace of terra-cotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry, in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by name. "The Square" or "The Gardens" are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds, the Common and the Downs. Crossing-sweepers are a deserving folk, but you cannot cultivate those intimate relations with them which bind you to the lodge-keeper at home, or to the old women in the almshouses, or to the septuagenarian waggoner who has driven your father's team ever since he was ten years old. Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, or All Saints, Margaret Street, may be beautifully ornate, and the congregation what Lord Beaconsfield called "sparkling and modish"; but they can never have the romantic charm of the Village Church where you were confirmed side by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the Vicar's daughter when you were wreathing holly round the lectern. There is a magic in the memory of a country home with which no urban associations can compete.
Nowadays the world is perpetually on the move, but in the old days people who possessed a country house passed nine months out of the twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association; with marriage and children, and pure enjoyment and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home, and for those who dwelt in it the interests of life were very much bound up in the Park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomps" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of unwilling exiles, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"