________________________________________________
_
Washington Irving's short story: 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.
Washington Irving's short story: Rural Life in England
_
Read next: The Broken Heart
Read previous: English Writers on America
Table of content of Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your reviewYour review will be placed after the table of content of this book
