Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
ENTRANCE HALL, HARDWICK HALL
Page [348]
CHAPTER XXIII
MY LADY’S MANSIONS
It is universally conceded by our nation that the French have a sense of the theatre which we shall never possess. The only set-off we can produce is a pre-eminent “sense of the house.” In France this has to a great extent died out. In French and in most continental cities the greater number of people live like pigeons in large cotes. It is the tendency of all towns, though in England the notion takes hold slowly. In the country the sense of the house is as strong as ever, with this change—that it is the day of the little house. Of the great house in its perfect sense as a home there are but few happy instances. It is the day of little things—little books, little songs, little pictures, little buildings, little frequent journeys, little incomes, and little sports. Above all, the little incomes! Little incomes laugh defiance at great houses. For great houses, as aforesaid, are great thieves. Bess and her Lord knew it, in the end, to their sorrow. Slowly English men and women have come to realise this, and not to aspire enviously to great houses. That notion was long a-dying, that obsession of the great house. Its long decline meant assuredly much that was tragic, wounding, self-torturing. Oh! those mistaken, ostentatious shams and pomposities of the early Victorian days when many a kindly, highly cultured, hypersensitive group of persons dwelt the lives of immured cabbages! And all this because of false pride, because of a penury they deliberately huddled round them, like a coward, who flings his cloak over his head so that he may not see even the opportunity for the courage which must go to the changed order of things.
And so the little incomes of to-day—the day of the triumph of the exploitation of limited resources—laugh at the great houses because the first have been forced to learn that trick of defiance side by side with the bitter lesson of monetary limitations which they share with the last. Yet behind their defiance is a great admiration of the big mansions. And behind the admiration, if they but guessed it, a great sense of indebtedness. For it is the little incomes, and not the little houses, which laugh at great mansions. Is it not by virtue of the past life and compassion of the great houses that the little ones achieve their beauty in miniature, and, lastly, their sweet appropriateness to the usages of modern life? The great house begat these little ones of to-day—no hovels, but decent homes—which spring up all over England and Scotland and Ireland—in the hollows or heights of downs, in richly watered places, on ridges, by the fringes of woods, upon the sea flank—creeping up almost impudently to the very skirts of the great “places” which have passed into the traditions of history. Some of these remain to us as dazzling show places, some few are also emphatically homes. Whether applied in the present to this most beautiful and intimate purpose or not, all the great mansions of Elizabeth Lady Shrewsbury were most truly intended for sweet daily uses. Two principal houses had she of her own—Hardwick and Chatsworth. Eight more George Talbot brought her—Wingfield, Sheffield, Rufford, Welbeck, Worksop, Tutbury, Bolsover. One smaller place he cherished for his old age, a little country house at Handsworth in the same county, and one more, as already explained, she in her old age founded—Owlcotes or Oldcotes—besides beginning the rebuilding of Bolsover Castle. Great houses indeed! Four of them, in especial, were widely sung and praised. How runs the curious old rhyme?
“Hardwicke for hugeness, Worsope for height,
Welbecke for use, and Bolser for sighte.
Worsope for walks, Hardwicke for hall,
Welbecke for brewhouse, Bolser for all.
Welbecke a parish, Hardwicke a Court,