The pleasantest form of society in country houses—I speak here for myself—is not to be found on occasions such as that of a great shooting party or a party for a country ball, but rather in gatherings of a smaller and more intimate kind.
As an illustration of my own views in this respect, I may mention an incident which may appeal, perhaps, to the sympathies of others whose tastes or distastes are like my own. I was asked to stay in Shropshire with some friends whom I knew so intimately that they did not care how they treated me; and on this occasion they had treated me very ill. As I was approaching my destination by way of a little local line, I was surprised at seeing on the platform of one station after another an extraordinary amount of luggage, together with a number of footmen and unmistakable ladies' maids. What could be the meaning of this? At last the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that. That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it." I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat, lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door—that of my hostess—saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.
The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding—some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present owners—have been houses which represented for me that old order of things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family traditions and associations—elements rooted in the soil of a national and immemorial past—such were the factors by which the life of these houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits—many of them very bad—on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses, except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent, while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element. Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong resemblance to Catholic society in London.
But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward. What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?
Further, let me observe this—I have here an eye on my own case in particular—that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life, the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact—the very important fact—that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a disturbance.
Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled together on account of the positions which they occupy—namely, the extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.
The whole population of the great county of Sutherland is hardly so much as two-thirds of the population of Wimbledon, and, except for some minute portions, was, prior to certain recent sales, a single gigantic property. Dunrobin Castle, with a million silent acres of mountain and moor behind it, looks down from a cliff over the wastes of the North Sea, but is on the landward side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate glass. But through the plate glass on one side is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside the dining room. So remote is this great house from any center of modern industry that the carts, dogcarts, and wagonettes used by the estate and the family were built and repaired by a staff of men on the premises. My first visit to Dunrobin was in the days of the Duchess Annie. The duke was away on his yacht, but during my visit he returned, and the duchess and I went to meet him at the station—a private station in the grounds. Those were the early days of agrarian agitation in the Highlands—an agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London. One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently illustrated by what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke, not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, "you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"
St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being, except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose granite balconies are grazed by the breasts of ascending sea birds.
Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed in them, the celebrated words of Keats:
Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,