An invitation to dinner from the Countess gives him at once the entrée to the best society in Lynmere and its neighbourhood. He finds his first English dinner-party a very dull affair; but he was surely peculiarly unfortunate in his company, if we are to take his account of the after-dinner conversation amongst the gentlemen: “At the end of a short time, two of the guests were asleep, and I would willingly have followed their example.” The remarks which follow, however, touch with more truth upon one of the defects in our social intercourse:—
“These dinners of ceremony (and there are scarcely any other kind of entertainments in the country amongst the higher classes) take place between neighbours, usually about twice in the year: scarcely any one except the clergyman enjoys the privilege of being received with less of etiquette. It follows that it is very possible to pass one’s life for ten years in the same spot, without having any really intimate association with any one of one’s neighbours. There are very few English people who do not regret it. Yet such is the despotism of custom, that it is rare to find any family which dreams of freeing itself from the trammels of this etiquette.”
Here and there, of late, the links of this social despotism, under which we have groaned so long, show symptoms of giving way. The advance of fashion has done good service in one respect, that the modern service à la Russe, adopted in all good houses, has struck a decisive blow at the old English heavy dinner; and just as the fashion has long died out of pressing one’s guests to eat more than they wish, so the fashion is coming in of not thinking it necessary to put upon the table three times more than can by any possibility be eaten. When small dinners become “the thing” even amongst the great people, there is hope that their lesser imitators will follow the example. And whenever the mistresses of small families will learn that good and careful cookery is quite as cheap as bad, and much more wholesome, and will condescend to go back not only to their great-grandmothers’ hoops, but to their household receipt-books, they may venture to invite their personal friends without compunction to a pleasant family-dinner, to the great furtherance of real sociability, and get rid for ever of those annual or biennial festivals which are a burden to the weary souls of guests and entertainers.
The foreign visitor becomes, in a very short time, established on a footing of intimacy with the family of Mr Mason, a magistrate and landed proprietor residing in the parish, in whose household Mrs Jones has formerly lived as nurse. The introduction through the Countess on the one part, and on the other the warm eulogies of good Mrs Jones (who is never tired of sounding the praises of her old master and the young ladies whom she has brought up), may serve in some degree to explain the somewhat rapid adoption of “Monsieur” as a family friend into the thrice-guarded circle of an English household. On his part, indeed, we soon discover quite a sufficient attraction. There is a pale pensive sentimental “Miss Mary,” quite the sort of young lady, we should say, to take the fancy of a romantic Frenchman in exile; but as she does not happen to take ours especially, we confess to have found no particular interest in this new version of ‘Love in a Village,’ and shall leave our younger readers to enjoy the romance of the little book for themselves, without forestalling, even by a single hint, its course or its conclusion. So far as relates to Monsieur himself, we repeat, we can quite understand how readily he responded to the warm adoption of his new English friends.
“Mr Mason consulted me about his son’s studies, Mrs Mason confided to me her anxieties as the mother of a family; and Mary—whose ardent and poetic soul felt the need of an intellectual sympathy which failed her in her own family—threw into her conversation with me an openness and vivacity which surprised her relatives.”
Nothing of the sort surprises us. What we were rather surprised at was, that Mr Mason père, a grave county dignitary and practical man of business, should have taken to his bosom, in this ardent and gushing fashion, the most agreeable, most intellectual, and most amiable foreigner that ever lived. At first we thought it a mistake—a patent defect and improbability in an otherwise sensible and natural book. The author’s casual attempt to account for it by the fact that Mr Mason was fond of billiards and of backgammon, and found in his new acquaintance an idle man generally ready to play a game, does not in the least harmonise with the usual character and habits of country gentlemen past sixty, or of Mr Mason in particular. But when we read that this excellent individual, like so many others of his class, has gone largely into turnips—and that his French visitor, wishing to know all about English country life, and knowing that such a life is nothing without turnips, determined, amongst his other travelling studies, to study an English model farm, and, when his host proposed a visit to that beloved establishment, accepted the invitation with “empressement,” and listened for hours to bucolic talk with “un grand interest,”—then we no longer wonder for an instant at the eternal friendship which the English member of the “Royal Agricultural” suddenly and silently vowed to his guest. Long and painful experience of visits paid to these excellent people in the country—reminiscences of the inevitable walk over ploughed fields—the plunging into long dark galleries where unfortunate beasts were immured for life to be turned into beef, a process which should be mercifully hidden from the eyes of every good Christian—the yawns unsuccessfully stifled—the remarks answered at random—the senseless questions desperately volunteered out of politeness on the visitor’s part, betraying the depth of his incapacity and ignorance;—these must rise before many a reader’s mind as well as our own, and make them feel what a treasure the scientific agriculturist had found in the inquiring Frenchman, who walked and talked and listened, not only without a complaint or a yawn, but positively because he liked it. Enterprising foreigners have been said to have tried to make their way into English country society, before now, through the introduction of the hunting-field, not always with success; perhaps they may be inclined to take a hint from this little book, and, in quiet family cases, try the turnips.
The visits to Mr Mason’s farm-cottages give the traveller the opportunity of drawing a contrast between the habits and aspirations of agricultural labourers in the two countries:—
“That passion for becoming proprietors, so widely spread in our own country districts, is unknown, and probably will long continue so, amongst the agricultural classes in England. The example of Ireland [it might have been added, of Wales], where the land has been very much subdivided, and where the population which maintains itself on it has become excessive, has strengthened the opinion amongst large landed proprietors in England as to the evil effects of small holdings. I think I scarcely exaggerate when I say that certainly, in the southern counties of England, a peasant possessing an acre of land would be a rarity. Probably it is to this impossibility of becoming small proprietors that we must attribute the taste which the labouring classes in England show for ornamenting their houses. If a working man has saved any money, he will employ it in buying a set of furniture, and making his cottage look gay; whereas, in France, he would have laid it aside in the hope of acquiring a bit of land; so that nothing can be more different than the wretched cabins of our own rural districts and the cottage of an English labourer, with its many little appliances of comfort and even luxury. In general the English peasant lives much less sparingly, and spends upon his meal twice as much as the French: it is true that the climate requires a more substantial style of diet.”
These observations would have been more strictly true if they had been made a few years ago. Within that time the passion for property has sprung up not only amongst those who call themselves “operatives” (journeymen weavers, shoemakers, &c.), but even, to a certain extent, amongst farm-labourers. Recent alterations in the laws of partnership have encouraged what are called “co-operative societies,” who not only open “stores” for the sale of all the necessaries of life, on the joint-stock principle of division of profits, but build cottages which, by certain arrangements, may become the property of the tenant. A whole village has just been built in Yorkshire, on this principle of the tenants becoming eventually the landlords. Not only this, but the same desire for independence—an excellent feeling in itself—is leading the same class to purchase cottage property whenever it comes into the market. If this ambition to become a purchaser were confined to a desire upon every man’s part to feel himself absolute master of the home he lived in, then, whatever large proprietors or able political economists might have to say, it would be an object which would deserve the very highest respect. But, unfortunately, the feeling is not altogether that of desiring to live in peace under one’s own vine and fig-tree: it is the wish to have a tenement to let out to others. It is comparatively seldom that a small piece of land, suited to the sum at such a purchaser’s command, is thrown into the market. Cottages, on the other hand, are continually advertised for sale; the working-man, eager to secure his bit of real property, gives for them a sum far beyond their value—a sum which the capitalist or large proprietor will not give; and in order to make his purchase pay, he either proceeds at once to divide a comfortable dwelling into two, or raises the rent upon his more needy tenant. The evil consequences are twofold; the neighbouring landowner, who ought to have the cottages for his own labourers, who would keep them in good repair, and let them at moderate rents, has been driven out of the market; and either a lower class of tenant, continually changing and being “sold up,” is introduced; or the honest labourer is compelled to pay to this new landlord of his own class a rent out of all proportion to the accommodation supplied him.
It is to be hoped that this growing evil (for evil it is) may be met by the increased liberality of landed proprietors in building good and sufficient cottages for the labourers on their own estates. In the case of the humbler artisans, in towns especially, one does not see the remedy except in the questionable shape of legislative restrictions.