This unfortunate system of neglect never prevailed in England to the same extent as it did in France, though, during the brilliant reign of Charles II., some poison of this kind began to creep into the habits of the landed gentry. Upon the whole, the English lords of the soil have justly and generously lived for as well as upon their possessions, and, if we have not had a “Reign of Terror,” this is one of the chief reasons. The great land-owners of a county (we speak specifically of the midland counties) divide among them the municipal and political offices; the Lord-Lieutenant, the High Sheriff, the M. P., the local magistrates, are all gentlemen and property-holders, and personally interested in the individual progress of the county. Each manor-house is a petty court of justice, and offenders of a minor sort, such as poachers, window-breakers, and the like, are tried and sentenced with exemplary despatch as well as impartiality by the squires of the neighborhood. There is generally a yearly agricultural show, and as almost all the gentlemen are cattle-breeders, or keep studs for hunting or racing purposes, and all the ladies are more or less poultry-fanciers, the whole community meets with equally eager pleasure upon common ground. The yeomanry and militia, which answer to the rural national guard in other European countries, are formed of well-to-do young farmers whose pride in their accoutrements or horses is a healthy token of sound national feeling; the officers are the gentlemen of the county, the same who sit upon the bench, and who entertain their military tenants at the annual rent-dinner. As for this gathering, it has no ominous meaning for the thriving men who attend it; the meeting is signalized by an unlimited flow of good spirits, of kindly feeling, and, occasionally, of local and rural wit. True, the speechifying is at times prolix, and the number of toasts alarmingly great; the smoke of the farmers’ pipes becomes sometimes rather dense, and the wit turns to pleasantry which has a slightly “heady” flavor like the wine, no doubt; but, for all that, there is nothing more reassuring in a political point of view than such a gathering, and nothing more charming to an imaginative mind than this unfeigned hospitality and baronial good-fellowship.
It might be said, speaking broadly, that, “next to a gentleman, there is nothing like a farmer.”
The farmer has his pride of caste and descent as eminently as any child of Saxon earls or of Norman barons; his family have often lived on the same land, under the same roof, and owned the same allegiance to a long uninterrupted line of noble landlords for centuries back. Of nothing is he prouder than of this, and when, as is often the case, he entertains the family of his lord, nothing can be simpler, grander, and more utterly gentleman-like than his conduct. No straining after effect, but homely and lavish abundance; no attempt at fine speeches, but cordial and undisguised rejoicing; respect that is not the contrary to independence, but the very assertion and expression of it. In one estate, it happened, perhaps about a hundred or more years ago, that an Earl of G—— wooed and married the pretty daughter of one of his chief tenants; both families are living now on the same lands, and, when the farmer looks towards the chancel of the parish church from his capacious pew in the nave, he sees the marble monument of his beautiful ancestress, who was twice the wife of a man distinguished by noble birth, and generally beloved for his goodness. (After the death of her first husband, she married his Cousin Tom, the great local sportsman of his times.) Her portrait, in her countess’ robes and ermine-lined coronet, hangs conspicuously in the dining-room of the family mansion, while her two successive husbands are represented not far from her, the one in the gorgeous court dress of a peer, the other in the familiar green velvet hunting-coat, with a fox-hound by his side.
The farmers of the midland counties are often land-owners on their own account, and, far from being indifferent or adverse to sport, they are its chief encouragers. Fox-hunting is an instinct with them—another likeness they bear to their landlords. You never hear a complaint of fields ridden over, or crops injured; the owner will gallop over his own furrows, or break through his own fences, utterly reckless of anything but the pursuit of the fox. Meanness is a thing unknown to them, and yet you will hardly meet many who are extravagant. There is a broadness of character, an incapacity for doing or thinking anything petty, a love of Old-World customs and hereditary modes of thought, that seem to keep them out of the selfish narrowness born of modern commerce, and, while it makes them less sharp, less peculating, makes them also incomparably more lovable.
Surrounded by such people, of whom they are the pets and the pride, the children of the landlords cannot fail to grow up healthy in mind and body, full of fun and frankness, loving country sports and pastimes, learning early how to manage land and crops, entering heartily into the feelings and wishes of those they will one day be called upon to rule, noting the idiosyncrasies and carefully handling the prejudices of their early comrades and future co-laborers. A bond of union, friendship, and help is thus formed which grows stronger every year, and stronger still with each succeeding generation. The old men and women, whose place is by the capacious hearth, seem to live just long enough to tell their master’s grandchildren how they danced at his “coming of age” fifty years ago, while their own little grandchildren laugh as they think that, in a few years more, there will be another “coming of age,” and that they, too, will dance at the old hall, and taste the wonderful ale their father told them of when they passed the ghostly stairs leading down to the great cellar.
Then come the weddings of the daughters of the house, and, as they have been familiarly known in the village nearest their home by all the poorer cottage tenants and the Sunday-school children, the young brides find the whole population personally enthusiastic over each detail of the ceremony. Young men and girls have seen the ladies of the “house” bringing cordials and delicacies to their poor dying parents, and strewing costly flowers over their plain coffins in the churchyard; and they remember this as the same fair girl whom they saw minister to them in their sorrow, takes upon herself another and a lifelong ministry with the hopeful trust of youth and the holy certainty of love. Again, as the bride comes forth, the children remember the feasts in the grounds, the armful of buns and cakes thrown into their pinafores at leaving, the delightful romps on the lawn, the adventurous row round the pond which their imagination magnified into a stormy sea—all the pleasures, out-doors and indoors, which were associated with the sight and presence of that slender, white-robed, and white-crowned figure. Thus, while there are class distinctions in rural England, there are no class divisions, and servants and masters, landlords and tenants, form, as it were, one clan with common interests and reciprocal sympathies.
Then, life in the country is so much more individual than in town. All tastes are there easily gratified; books and magazines are constantly pouring down from London; guests, not compulsory, as is the genus “morning caller” in town, who lounges in utterly exhausted, and asks languidly whether “Lady So-and-so’s ball last night was not perfectly delightful?” while his general air of boredom proclaims that he is surfeited with all mundane delights—guests not such as this inane specimen of humanity, but chosen friends, gay, witty, brilliant, are at hand at the shortest notice for those whose life is cut out for society; morning rambles for the solitary; moonlight effects for the romantic; hours of leisure for the studious; a wide field of usefulness for the charitable; a matchless opportunity for indulging in the woman-gossip, without which that essentially English institution, five o’clock tea, would be “flat, stale, and unprofitable”; and last, not least, the best chances for marriage that any sort of social intercourse can afford.
The only drawback to this state of things is that it sometimes becomes a little too artificial. Even rusticity may be aped, and, indeed, this is the tendency of the day, as it was the tendency in former days also, when shepherdesses were represented by ladies of fashion in silk skirts, beribboned crooks, and high-heeled shoes. But this pseudo-rusticity spoils the real, tangible pleasures of life in the country. Studied simplicity is worse than studied art. Young ladies “got up” like Dresden china are not peasants, and have neither the charms nor the merits of peasants. They are probably blasées, and so miss the freshness symbolized by their costume; and they are incapable of work, and so miss the usefulness also distantly suggested by their dress. In one expressive word, they are a sham.
There are many houses, however, where healthful pleasure is dominant, and no fine-ladyism finds favor—houses where the chapel is not far from the drawing-room, and where masters and servants, guests and hosts, meet silently to greet their Maker before they enjoy his gifts for the day. Then comes the ten o’clock gathering round the breakfast table—a picture in itself, with bright flame-colored flowers amid the delicate white glass and china, and pretty faces joyously eager for the day’s programme of amusements. Perhaps there are ruins to be seen—a great resource in country visiting—at all events, there is a church. The churches are certainly one of the proudest inheritances of the old land, and the way in which they have been preserved speaks well for the naturally reverential turn of the Saxon mind. In every county, some distinctive feature is visible; in Kent, hardly anything is used in churches but flint, and the bells are generally hung in a square massive tower instead of a steeple. In the midland counties, on the contrary, steeples are a great feature; there is one at a little village called Ketton, which is peculiarly fine, though it certainly looks too heavy for the church it crowns. Wicliffe’s church, at Lutterworth, is a standard sight for the guests of a large old family mansion near by; you are shown the pulpit said to be Wicliffe’s own, and, in one of the aisles, his tomb, with a long Latin epitaph sufficiently bombastic and untruthful, as it states that, despite of monks and bishops, he instructed the populace in plain Gospel truth, and was the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular! But Lutterworth church has for us of the old faith a more interesting memorial of the “good old days.” This consists in a very primitive fresco representing the resurrection of the dead. The colors are not much varied, and the draperies are quaintly angular; yet this early effort of art is far more simply and honestly Christian than many of those skilful productions of later periods, when the painter thought more of the fame his execution of a subject might bring him than of the solemn truth contained in the subject itself. Here we see Our Lord seated on some very solid-looking clouds, while below, on the right side, the angels are helping the good out of their sepulchres, and, on the left, the devils doing the same service to the wicked. Some of the tombs are open, as if burst asunder by an explosion, and the skeletons stand bolt upright; some are half closed, and their occupants creeping quietly out; while in others the disjointed bones are seen, not yet rebuilt into human shape, or a skeleton is detected half clothed with flesh, and some bones still protruding in their original bareness. Much the same scene is portrayed on the left side, but the expressions even in the skeletons are very different; the attitudes are distorted, and the impish figures of the demons prominently drawn. If there is a lack of harmony and beauty in the whole composition, it is quite compensated for by the evident earnestness of the artist, the gravity of the angels’ demeanor, and the reverent intention which animates the grotesque ensemble. As an archæological memorial, it is invaluable, as very few such specimens of Catholic art of so early a date (certainly no later than the XIIIth century) are in existence in England.
Some of the country churches are beautifully restored according to old Catholic models, and, with the restoration of the ancient worship, might again become what they were at the time they were christened by those suggestive names, All Hallows’, S. Mary’s, S. Chad’s. Others, however are terribly neglected, though this is a fault fast disappearing, together with the fox-hunting, easy-going parsons of the Georgian era, and all other laxities of an unusually stagnant age. The music in these country churches is not always equal to the imposing exterior, a harmonium in the choir being sometimes all there is wherewith to guide and sustain the voices. Still, this is a step in the right direction, as formerly the utmost a village church could boast of was an orchestra composed of the local shoemaker with a dilapidated fiddle and the smith with a bass-viol out of tune. Any self-elected, occasional amateur with a strong or a thrilling voice would be, of course, a welcome addition, but the instrumental groundwork might be always depended upon. Most churches near family seats have remarkable monuments, some of the ancient Elizabethan style, with rows of decorous sons and daughters praying in bas-relief at the feet of their dead parents, their quaint costume, heavy-folded robes, and immense ruffles seeming marvellously to suit the immobility of the material in which they are sculptured; some, again, dating back to the times of the Crusaders, but many, unfortunately, of the pseudo-Grecian Renaissance, which to a Catholic mind seem both irreverent and absurd. Fancy a Cupid with eyes bandaged and torch inverted as an emblem of that sacred grief for the dead which is inseparably mingled with the steadfast hope of the Christian for the day of resurrection! Or again, as we once heard a sarcastic friend aptly express it, a woman crying over a tea-urn! Really, some of these monuments are no better than that, and deserve no other description. How much more dignified are those ancient Gothic tombs where the quiet, stately figures of a knight and his wife, a bishop, a magistrate, lie as on a bed, in the sleep of expectation, not in a ridiculous simulation of life, nor symbolized by some vulgar heathen myth.