RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
by Washington Irving
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 Englishcharacter must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He mustgo forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; hemust visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wanderthrough parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he mustloiter about country churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other ruralfestivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions and alltheir habits and humors.
In some countries the large cities absorb the wealth and fashionof the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant andintelligent society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely byboorish peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is amere gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes,where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety anddissipation, and, having indulged this kind of carnival, returnagain to the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. Thevarious orders of society are therefore diffused over the wholesurface of the kingdom, and the most retired neighborhoods affordspecimens 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 keenrelish for the pleasures and employments of the country. Thispassion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, bornand brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter withfacility into rural habits, evince a tact for rural occupation. Themerchant has his snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, wherehe often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of hisflower-garden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in theconduct of his business, and the success of a commercial enterprise.
Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass theirlives in the midst of din and traffic, contrive to have something thatshall remind them of the green aspect of nature. In the most darkand dingy quarters of the city, the drawing-room window resemblesfrequently a bank of flowers; every spot capable of vegetation has itsgrassplot and flower-bed; and every square its mimic park, laid outwith picturesque taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure.
Those who see the Englishman only in town are apt to form anunfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbedin business, or distracted by the thousand engagements thatdissipate time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has,therefore, too commonly a look of hurry and abstraction. Wherever hehappens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at themoment he is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another;and while paying a friendly visit, he is calculating how he shalleconomize time so as to pay the other visits allotted in themorning. An immense metropolis, like London, is calculated to make menselfish and uninteresting. In their casual and transient meetings,they can but deal briefly in commonplaces. They present but the coldsuperficies of character- its rich and genial qualities have no timeto be warmed into a flow.
It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to hisnatural feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities andnegative civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, andbecomes joyous and free-hearted. He manages to collect round him allthe conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish itsrestraints. His country-seat abounds with every requisite, eitherfor studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural exercise.
Books, paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sporting implements ofall kinds, are at hand. He puts no constraint either upon his guestsor himself, but in the true spirit of hospitality provides the meansof enjoyment, and leaves every one to partake according to hisinclination.
The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in whatis called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied natureintently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms andharmonious combinations. Those charms, which in other countries shelavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts ofdomestic 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 parkscenery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, withhere and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles offoliage: the solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with thedeer trooping in silent herds across them; the hare, bounding awayto the covert; or the pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing; thebrook, taught to wind in natural meanderings or expand into a glassylake; the sequestered pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with theyellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlesslyabout its limpid waters; while some rustic temple or sylvan statue,grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to theseclusion.