The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldries which thronged the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses of which I have just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not visually, the same. They all looked out, as though it were the unquestioned order of things, on wooded seclusions pricked by manorial chimneys or on lodges and gray park walls, while somewhere beyond these last lurked the thatch of contented cottages, at the doors of which, when a member of "the family" passed, women and children would curtsy and men touch their forelocks.
Here some persons may be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory. They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery to which history shows few parallels. Such an objection, even if correct, would, however, be here irrelevant; for I am dealing now not with things as they actually were, but merely with the impressions produced by them on childish minds, and more particularly on my own. Nevertheless, the objection in itself is of quite sufficient importance to call, even here, for some incidental attention; and how far, in this respect, our impressions were true or false will appear in the following chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE TWO NATIONS
The Rural Poor of Devonshire—The Old Landed Families—An Ecclesiastical Magnate
Our impressions of the cottagers, to which I have just alluded—and for us the cottagers represented the people of England generally—were not, it is true, derived from our own scientific investigations; they were derived from the conversation of our elders. But the knowledge which these elders possessed as to the ways, the temper, and the conditions of the rural poor was intimate, and was constantly illustrated by anecdotes, to which we as children were never weary of listening. The descriptions so often given of the misery of the agricultural laborers and the oppression of the ruling class from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the abolition of the Corn Laws may be correct as applied to certain parts of the kingdom; but, in the case of Devonshire at all events, they are, it would appear, very far from the truth. The period more particularly in question, including the decade known as "the hungry 'forties," is precisely the period with which these elders of ours were most closely acquainted; and, though we occasionally heard of disturbances called "bread riots" as having occurred in Exeter and Plymouth, no hint reached us of such outbreaks having ever taken place in the country, or of any distress or temper which was calculated to provoke protests of any sort or kind against the established order. On the contrary, between the rural poor and the old-fashioned landed aristocracy, lay and clerical alike, the relations were not only amicable, but very often confidential also.
This fact may be illustrated by the case of old Miss Froude, the "Lady Bountiful" of her immediate neighborhood, who was constantly appealed to by its inhabitants, not only for material aid, but for religious guidance as well, and appreciation of their religious experiences. Thus on one occasion an old woman was ushered into Miss Froude's presence who had evidently some fact of great importance to communicate. The fact turned out to be this: that she had spent the whole of the previous night in a trance, during which she had ascended to heaven, and been let in by "a angel." "Well," said Miss Froude, "and did they ask you your name?" "No, ma'am, not my name," was the answer; "they only asked me my parish." "And do you," Miss Froude continued, "remember what the angel's name was?" The old woman seemed doubtful. "Do you think," said Miss Froude, "it was Gabriel?" "Iss, fay (yes, i' faith)," said the old woman. "Sure enough 'twas Gaburl." "And did you," said Miss Froude, finally, "see anybody in heaven whom you knew?" The old woman hesitated, but caught herself up in time, and solemnly said, "I seed you, ma'am."
Had all Miss Froude's dependents been of an equally communicative disposition, there would indeed in the confessions of two of them have been matter of a less peaceful character. It had for some time been whispered among her indoor servants—this is before I can remember—that horses, after days of idleness so far as carriage work was concerned, would on certain mornings be found covered with sweat, and other signs of mysteriously hard usage. It was ultimately found out that an enterprising coachman and groom had been riding them periodically to Teignmouth, and playing a nocturnal part in the landing of smuggled cargoes, these being stowed in the cellars of a decaying villa, which for years had remained tenantless owing to persistent rumors that it was haunted by a regiment of exceedingly savage ghosts. The only other approach to anything like rural violence which reached our ears through the channel of oral tradition was an event which must have occurred about the year 1830, and was reported to the Archdeacon by George Diggins, his old factotum. This was the plunder of a vessel which had been wrecked the night before somewhere between Plymouth and Salcombe. The Archdeacon asked if no authorities had interfered. "I heard, sir," said George Diggins, "that a revenue officer did what he could to stop 'un, but they hadn't a sarved he very genteel." This statement meant that they had pushed him over the cliffs.
Otherwise the stories of rural life that reached me, though relating to times which have in popular oratory been associated with the rick-burnings and kindred outrages "by which the wronged peasant righted himself," were pictures of a general content, broken only by individual vicissitudes, which were accepted and bewailed as part of the common order of nature. Of such individual afflictions the larger part were medical. The women, even the most robust, would rarely confess to the enjoyment of anything so uninteresting as a condition of rude health. The usual reply made by them to the inquiries of any lady visitant was, "Thankee, ma'am, I be torrable" (tolerable); but, if conscious of any definite malady, their diagnosis of their own cases would, though simple, be more precise. One of them told my mother that for days she'd been terrible bad. "My inside," she said, "be always a-coming up, though I've swallowed a pint of shot by this time merely to keep my liver down."
In cottage households, though occasionally there might be some shortage of food, there were no indications of anything like general or chronic want. Indeed, if delicacies which the inmates had never seen before were brought them as a present from this or from that "great house," they would often eye them askance, and make a favor of taking them. That the ordinary diet of the Devonshire cottagers of those days contented them is shown by the dinner prepared for a man who worked at a limekiln by his wife, which she complacently exhibited to my mother as at once appetizing and nutritious. It was a species of dumpling with an onion, instead of an apple, in the middle of it, the place of the customary crust being taken by home-baked bread.