I know a house in Wimpole Street of which every part is as familiar quite as the torn leaves of the old books of childhood, but I have passed it and repassed it for how many years, forbidden an entrance, and finding that ancient and fixed friend in league, so to speak, with strangers. Or, in another manner, which of us does not know a house like any other house, amid the thousand unmarked houses in the better streets of the town, but to us quite individual because there met within it once so many who were for us the history of our time? It was in that room (where are the three windows) that she received her guests, retaining on into the last generations of a worse and degraded time the traditions of a better society. Here came men who could discuss and reveal things that are now distorted legends, and whose revelations were real because they came as witnesses: soldiers of the Crimea, of India, of Italy, and of Algiers, or men who remembered great actions within the State: actions that were significant through conviction, before we became what we are. Here was breeding; here were the just limits of tone and emphasis and change, and here was that type of intercourse which was surely as great and as good a thing as Europe or England has known. Who sees that room to-day? What taste has replaced her taste? What choice of stuff or colour mars the decoration on the walls? What trash or alien thing takes the place of that careful elaborate womanly work in which her travels throughout the world were recorded, and in which the excellent modesty of an art sufficient for her purpose reproduced in line and in colour the ironic nobility of her mind and the wide expanse of her learning? We do not know and we cannot know. The house is neither ours nor hers. To whomever it has passed it has turned traitor to us who knew.
It is better, I think, for those who have such memories when the material things that enshrine them wholly disappear, for then there is no jar, no agony of contrast between that society which once was and this which now is, with its quality of wealth and of the uses to which wealth is put to-day. If we must suffer the intolerable and clumsy presence of accidental power—power got suddenly, got anyhow, got by chance, untrained and unworthy—at least may we suffer such things in their own surroundings, in huge conservatories, with loud music, with an impression of partial drunkenness all around, and a certainty all around of intellectual incompetence and of sprawling bodies and souls. It is better to suffer these new things in such surroundings as may easily let one believe that one is not in London at all, but on the Riviera; and let the heat be excessive, and let there be a complete ignorance of all wine except champagne, and let it be a place where champagne is supposed to be one wine. Then the frame will suit the picture, and there will at least be no desecration of material things by human beings unworthy of the bricks and mortar. I say it is much better when the old houses disappear, at least the old houses in which we knew and loved the better people of a better time:—and yet the youth or childhood in which so many of us saw the last of it is not thirty years, is barely twenty years dead!
On Old Towns
EVERY man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is, born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves, desires to inhabit, and returns to, the Old Towns; but the more one thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this appetite consists.
The love of a village, of a manor, is one thing. You may stand in some place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much of God. True, nearly everything in a good European landscape has been moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by Christian men. It is like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that God gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our villages has surely more in it of God than of man. For one thing there is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of That which made the whole.
But with the Old Towns it is not so. They please us in proportion to their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more can we embed ourselves within them. The more different is every stone from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit of man the more are we pleased. We stand in little lanes where every single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all pictures—something subordinate to man, an ornament.
One could make a list of the Old Towns and go on for ever: the sea-light over the red brick of King’s Lynn from the east, and the other sea-light from the south over that other King’s town, Lyme Regis; the curious bunch of Rye; the hill of Poitiers all massed up with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from the armies of the Gauls to the army that makes a noise about them to-day: the hill of Lincoln, where one looks up from the Roman Gate to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of Cassel and of Montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been, and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely Roman, some certainly so; Chichester, Winchester, Horsham, Oxford, Chester, and a hundred others—England is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going right down into the waters, Albi, Newcastle as it once was; in its own small way Arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, Delft, Antwerp (that part of it which counts), Bruges, Louvain; Ypres also where the cooking is so vile.