AN ENGLISH VILLAGE—IN FRENCH.[[1]]
The old pictures of village life in England will hardly suit for these modern times. The pleasant little social circle which either existed, or more often was imagined to exist, as in Miss Austen’s charming fictions, in the large well-to-do country village, is to be found there no longer. No one condescends in these days to live in the country, unless he can either do so, or affect to do so, more or less en grand seigneur. A change has passed over ‘Our Village,’ even since Mary Russell Mitford so admirably sketched it. The half-pay naval lieutenant or army captain (if any such survive) has retired into the back street of a cheap watering-place, not to the improvement either of his position or his happiness. The village surgeon is no longer an oracle; railways have brought “the first advice” (at any rate, in the county town) within the reach of almost all his patients; and he has either disappeared altogether, or, if he still exists as the “Union Doctor,” badly paid and little respected, he is seldom now a gentleman. Village lawyers—happily or unhappily—are become things unknown: and as for any gentleman’s family of independent but moderate means condescending to that kind of rural seclusion, it is unheard of. If there is any educated resident in any country village not fixed there by some local interest or occupation, he is apt to have something suspicious about his character or antecedents—to be a refugee from his lawful creditors, or his lawful wife, or something of that sort.
So that English village life now resolves itself mainly into that of the parson; for the squire, even if he be resident, scarcely forms part of the same social circle. And as to the rest, between the university graduate, of more or less refinement and education, and the opulent farmer such as he is at present, there lies a gulf which no fancy can exaggerate, and which the best intentions on both sides fail to bridge over. Where village spires stand thick together, where the majority of the rectors or vicars are men of the same way of thinking, and where it is the fashion of the country to be social, there is a good deal of pleasant intercourse, no doubt, between the parsons’ families, and as much “society,” in the real if not in the conventional sense, as is needful to keep the higher elements of humanity from stagnating; but where parishes spread far and wide over a poor or thinly-populated district, or, worse still, where religious sectarianism reckons its clergy into “High” and “Low,” and the Rector of A. shakes his head and lifts his eyebrows when any allusion is made to the Vicar of B.—there, the man whose lot has been cast in a country parsonage had need have abundant resources within himself, and be supremely indifferent to the stir of human interests without. He will, in many cases, have almost as far to ride in search of a congenial neighbour as though he were in the bush of Australia; he will find something like the solitude of the old monastery, without the chance of its peace and quietness.
Not that such a life is dull or uninteresting, by any means, unless in the unfortunate case of the man finding no interest in his duties. One of this world’s many compensations is, that the busy man, be he what else he may, is never dull, and seldom discontented. So it is, almost always, in the country parsonage; without claiming any high standard of zeal or self-devotion for its occupants, there is probably at least as much quiet enjoyment, and as little idle melancholy or fretful discontent, to be found among them, as among any other class of educated men.
Still, it is a life which it would be very difficult for a foreigner to appreciate or understand. The relation of the English country rector to his villagers is totally unlike that of the Lutheran or Roman Catholic priest. Not claiming—or at least not being in a position to maintain—anything like the amount of spiritual authority which is exercised by the pastor under both these other systems, he wields, in point of fact, an amount of influence superior to either. He cannot command the servile and terrified obedience in externals which is often paid by the Irish and Italian peasant to his spiritual guide; but he holds a moral power over his parishioners—even over those who professedly decline his ministrations—of the extent of which neither he nor they are always conscious, but to the reality of which the enemies of the Established Church in England are beginning to awake.
The reading world has perhaps been rather over-supplied, of late years, with novelettes in which the village parson, with some of the very white or very black sheep of his flock, have been made to walk and talk more or less naturally for their amusement and edification; but the sight of a little French book on the subject struck us as something new. It is very desirable that our good friends across the Channel should know something about our ways of going on at home; and that not only in the public life of large towns, or on the highways of travel and commerce, but in our country villages and rural districts. But French attempts at English domestic sketches have not, on the whole, been successful. It is, indeed, most difficult for a foreign visitor to draw pictures of society in any country which would pass muster under the critical examination of a native. We took up this ‘Vie de Village en Angleterre’ with some notion of being amused by so familiar a subject treated by a Frenchman; but we soon found we were in very safe hands. The writer knows us well, and describes us admirably, very much as we are; the foreign element is just strong enough to be occasionally amusing, but never in any way ridiculous; and we should be as much surprised at the correctness of the writer’s observation as charmed with the candour and good taste of the little volume, if we had not heard it credibly whispered that, although written for French readers (and in undeniable French), it may be claimed as the production of an English pen.
Whatever may be the secret of the authorship, the little book will repay the reader of either nation. It is written in the person of a political refugee, who, armed with one or two good introductions, comes to pass a period of exile in England. While previously travelling in Switzerland, he has made acquaintance with a Mr Norris, an energetic country parson of the modern “muscular” type. He it is who persuades the wanderer to study in detail, by personal observation, that “inner life” of England which, he has already learnt to believe, and rightly, forms and shapes, more than anything else, her national and political character. Hitherto, as he confesses to his new acquaintance, the coldness and reserve of such English as he has met with have rather frightened him; yet he has always admired in them that solidarité—which we will not attempt to translate. The hostility between the labouring classes in France and those above them has always appeared to him the great knot of political difficulties in that country—a source of more danger to real liberty and security than any other national evil.
He determines, therefore, to see and study this domestic character of England for himself—“not in her political institutions, which we Frenchmen have been too much accused of wishing to copy, but in that social life which may very possibly explain the secret of her strength and her liberty.”—(P. 22.)
It was not his first visit to London; and, arriving in the month of March, he finds the climate as bad, and the great city as dingy and dirty, as ever. He does not appear to have noticed our painful efforts to consume our own smoke, or our ambitious designs in modern street architecture. On the other hand, he mercifully ignores—if he saw it—our Great Exhibition. The crowded gin-palaces, and the state of the Haymarket by night, disgust him, as well they might; and he escapes from the murky Babylon, as soon as he has taken a few lessons to improve his colloquial English, to pay the promised visit to his friend Mr Norris at his parsonage at Kingsford; stopping on his way to deliver a letter of introduction to an English countess, an old friend of his family, who has a seat close to Lynmere, a sort of pet village, where the ornamented cottages form a portion of the park scenery.
In his walk from the station, he makes the acquaintance of a “Madame Jones,” whose cottage, with its wooden paling and scarlet geraniums, abutting on the pleasant common, has its door invitingly open. He pauses to admire the little English picture as he passes by. Good Mrs Jones observes him, and begs him to walk in; partly, we must hope (and we trust all foreign readers will believe), out of genuine English hospitality—though we doubt if all village dames in Surrey would take kindly to a Frenchman on the tramp—partly, it must be confessed, with the British female’s natural eye to business. “Perhaps Monsieur was looking out for a ‘petit logement?’” For Mrs Jones has two rooms to let; and even a foreigner’s money, paid punctually, is not to be despised. Monsieur was looking out for nothing of the kind, but he takes the rooms forthwith; and indeed any modest-minded gentleman, French or English, who wanted country board and lodging on a breezy common in Surrey, could not have done better. Here is what our traveller gets for twenty-two shillings a-week; we only hope it will stop the mouths of all foreigners who rail at the dearness of English living, when they read here the terms on which a petit logement may be found in a pleasant situation in the home counties—two rooms, “fresh and clean,” comfortably furnished (with a picture of the Queen and a pot of musk into the bargain), and board as follows:—