RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.
Oh!
friendly to the best pursuits of man, Friendly to thought, to virtue and to peace,
Domestic life in rural pleasures past!
COWPER.
THE stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not confine
his observations to the metropolis.
He must go forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit
castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens; along
hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches; attend wakes and fairs,
and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions, and all their
habits and humors.
In some countries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they
are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the country is inhabited almost
entirely by boorish peasantry.
In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, or general rendezvous,
of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety
and dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of carnival, return again to the apparently
more congenial habits of rural life.
The various orders of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom,
and the more retired neighborhoods afford specimens of the different ranks.
The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling.
They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures
and employments of the country.
This passion seems inherent in them.
Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets,
enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation.
The merchant has his snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays
as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the maturing of
his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his business, and the success of a commercial
enterprise.
Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst
of din and traffic, contrive to have something that shall remind them of the green aspect
of nature.
In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the drawing-room window resembles frequently
a bank of flowers; every spot capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and flower-bed; and every
square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure.
Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an unfavorable opinion of
his social character.
He is either absorbed in business, or distracted by the thousand engagements that dissipate
time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis.
He has, therefore, too commonly, a look of hurry and abstraction.
Wherever he happens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he
is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a friendly visit,
he is calculating how he shall economize time so as to pay the other visits allotted to
the morning.
An immense metropolis, like London, is calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting.
In their casual and transient meetings, they can but deal briefly in commonplaces.
They present but the cold superfices of character—its rich and genial qualities have no time to
be warmed into a flow.
It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to his natural feelings.
He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative civilities of town; throws off
his habits of shy reserve, and becomes joyous and free-hearted.
He manages to collect round him all the conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish
its restraints.
His country-seat abounds with every requisite, either for studious retirement, tasteful gratification,
or rural exercise.
Books, paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds, are at hand.
He puts no constraint, either upon his guests or himself, but, in the true spirit of hospitality,
provides the means of enjoyment, and leaves every one to partake according to his inclination.
The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening,
is unrivalled.
They have studied Nature intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms
and harmonious combinations.
Those charms which, in other countries, she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled
round the haunts of domestic life.
They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about
their rural abodes.
Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park scenery.
Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there clumps of gigantic
trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage.
The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in silent herds across
them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the
wing.
The brook, taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake—the sequestered
pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and
the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while some rustic temple, or sylvan
statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.
These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most delights me, is the
creative talent with which the English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life.
The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of
an Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise.
With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures
in his mind the future landscape.
The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand; and yet the operations of art which
produce the effect are scarcely to be perceived.
The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of others; the nice distribution
of flowers and plants of tender and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope
of velvet turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water;-all
these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet assiduity, like the magic
touchings with which a painter finishes up a favorite picture.
The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has diffused a degree of taste
and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class.
The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their
embellishment.
The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with
snug box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the
lattice; the pot of flowers in the window; the holly, providently planted about the house,
to cheat winter of its dreariness, and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer
the fireside; all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources,
and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind.
If ever Love, as poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English
peasant.
The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has had a great and
salutary effect upon the national character.
I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen.
Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most countries,
they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness of frame and freshness of complexion,
which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing
so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country.
The hardy exercises produce also a healthful tone of mind and spirits, and a manliness
and simplicity of manners, which even the follies and dissipations of the town cannot
easily pervert, and can never entirely destroy.
In the country, too, the different orders of society seem to approach more freely, to
be more disposed to blend and operate favorably upon each other.
The distinctions between them do not appear to be so marked and impassable as in the cities.
The manner in which property has been distributed into small estates and farms has established
a regular gradation from the noblemen, through the classes of gentry, small landed proprietors,
and substantial farmers, down to the laboring peasantry; and while it has thus banded the
extremes of society together, has infused into each intermediate rank a spirit of independence.
This, it must be confessed, is not so universally the case at present as it was formerly; the
larger estates having, in late years of distress, absorbed the smaller, and, in some parts of
the country, almost annihilated the sturdy race of small farmers.
These, however, I believe, are but casual breaks in the general system I have mentioned.
In rural occupation, there is nothing mean and debasing.
It leads a man forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the
workings of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external
influences.
Such a man may be simple and rough, but he cannot be vulgar.
The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing revolting in an intercourse with the lower
orders in rural life, as he does when he casually mingles with the lower orders of cities.
He lays aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to waive the distinctions of rank,
and to enter into the honest, heartfelt enjoyments of common life.
Indeed, the very amusements of the country bring, men more and more together; and the
sound hound and horn blend all feelings into harmony.
I believe this is one great reason why the nobility and gentry are more popular among
the inferior orders in England than they are in any other country; and why the latter have
endured so many excessive pressures and extremities, without repining more generally at the unequal
distribution of fortune and privilege.
To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed the rural feeling
that runs through British literature; the frequent use of illustrations from rural life;
those incomparable descriptions of Nature, that abound in the British poets—that have
continued down from "The Flower and the Leaf," of Chaucer, and have brought into our closets
all the freshness and fragrance of the dewy landscape.
The pastoral writers of other countries appear as if they had paid Nature an occasional visit,
and become acquainted with her general charms; but the British poets have lived and revelled
with her—they have wooed her in her most secret haunts—they have watched her minutest
caprices.
A spray could not tremble in the breeze—a leaf could not rustle to the ground—a diamond
drop could not patter in the stream—a fragrance could not exhale from the humble violet, nor
a daisy unfold its crimson tints to the morning, but it has been noticed by these impassioned
and delicate observers, and wrought up into some beautiful morality.
The effect of this devotion of elegant minds to rural occupations has been wonderful on
the face of the country.
A great part of the island is rather level, and would be monotonous, were it not for the
charms of culture; but it is studded and gemmed, as it were, with castles and palaces, and
embroidered with parks and gardens.
It does not abound in grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural
repose and sheltered quiet.
Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture; and as the roads are continually
winding, and the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a continual
succession of small landscapes of captivating loveliness.
The great charm, however, of English scenery, is the moral feeling that seems to pervade
it.
It is associated in the mind with ideas of order, of quiet, of sober well-established
principles, of hoary usage and reverend custom.
Every thing seems to be the growth of ages of regular and peaceful existence.
The old church of remote architecture, with its low, massive portal; its Gothic tower;
its windows rich with tracery and painted glass, in scrupulous preservation; its stately
monuments of warriors and worthies of the olden time, ancestors of the present lords
of the soil; its tombstones, recording successive generations of sturdy yeomanry, whose progeny
still plough the same fields, and kneel at the same altar;—the parsonage, a quaint
irregular pile, partly antiquated, but repaired and altered in the tastes of various ages
and occupants;—the stile and foot-path leading from the churchyard, across pleasant fields,
and along shady hedgerows, according to an immemorial right of way;—the neighboring
village, with its venerable cottages, its public green sheltered by trees, under which
the forefathers of the present race have sported;—the antique family mansion, standing apart in
some little rural domain, but looking down with a protecting air on the surrounding scene;
all these common features of English landscape evince a calm and settled security, a hereditary
transmission of homebred virtues and local attachments, that speak deeply and touchingly
for the moral character of the nation.
It is a pleasing sight, of a Sunday morning, when the bell is sending its sober melody
across the quiet fields, to behold the peasantry in their best finery, with ruddy faces, and
modest cheerfulness, thronging tranquilly along the green lanes to church; but it is
still more pleasing to see them in the evenings, gathering about their cottage doors, and appearing
to exult in the humble comforts and embellishments which their own hands have spread around them.
It is this sweet home-feeling, this settled repose of affection in the domestic scene,
that is, after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues and purest enjoyments; and I cannot
close these desultory remarks better, than by quoting the words of a modern English poet,
who has depicted it with remarkable felicity:
Through each gradation, from the castled hall, The city dome, the villa crowned with shade,
But chief from modest mansions numberless, In town or hamlet, shelt'ring middle life,
Down to the cottaged vale, and straw-roof'd shed;
This western isle has long been famed for scenes
Where bliss domestic finds a dwelling-place; Domestic bliss, that, like a harmless dove,
(Honor and sweet endearment keeping guard,) Can centre in a little quiet nest
All that desire would fly for through the earth;
That can, the world eluding, be itself A world enjoyed; that wants no witnesses
But its own sharers, and approving Heaven; That, like a flower deep hid in rock cleft,
Smiles, though 't is looking only at the sky.*
* From a poem on the death of the Princess Charlotte, by the
Reverend Rann Kennedy, A.M.