When I lived among these simple folk I shared not only their roof but their labours, and it was thus I came to distinguish between the nature of work in cities and work in the country. To obtain my meal in a city I had to do things that were distasteful to me; I had to shut myself away from the fresh air and sunlight in a dingy room and to spend dull hours in tasks which afforded me no genuine intellectual pleasure. Here, on the contrary, every duty had a pastime yoked with it. I rose early, not only that I might learn to milk the cows, but that I might see the sunrise; if I went into the woods to saw logs that would presently make a clear flame on the evening fire, my lungs drank health among the forest fragrances; when I went fishing I did something not only pleasurable but useful, for I added dainties to my larder. In the city I lived to work; here I worked to live. I might go further and say that in the city I lived to work for other people, for my brains were daily exploited that my master might maintain a house at Kensington, and when the landlord, the water-lord, the light-lord, and the rate-collector had all had their dues from me there was little enough left that I could call my own. Here, on the contrary, all that I did had an immediate and direct relation to my own well-being. The amount of work I had to do to live was light, and I bought with it something that was my own. We are so used to the exactions of a complicated and artificial life, that it is an amazing discovery to ascertain how small is the toll of labour which Nature asks of those who live naturally. You have but to do certain things which in themselves are pleasures to obtain ample means of life; and as these things are soon and easily done by a healthy human creature there is an abundant leisure at his command. To split pine-logs, dig a garden, pull a heavy boat down the lake after fish, tramp up the hillside to collect the sheep, are simply so many exercises of the body, the equivalents of which town youths find in the gymnasium or the football field; the difference is that all this exertion in the gymnasium, which the town youth takes to keep up his health, would in the countrykeep him. The same amount of muscular exertion which a town youth puts forth to chase a ball round a twenty acre field would, if properly applied, put a roof over his head and food on his table. The sports of the civilised man are means of life to the natural man. If a man must needs sweat, and be bemired, and have an aching back, it is surely better economy to have a house and a good meal at the end of it all than merely a good appetite for a meal that he has yet to pay for. I do not object to buy health in hard physical exercise if I can buy it in no other way; but I am better satisfied if I can buy health and a meal at the same time and for the same price. This is practically what is done every day by men who live in the country. In a town they would undertake an equal amount of muscular exertion for the sake of health, and would find that they still had 'to go to business' to live; here they have done their business in doing their pleasure.
Earth-hunger is without doubt the most wholesome passion men can entertain, and if Governments were wise they would do all they could to fortify and gratify it. On the contrary, the settled policy of English Government is entirely hostile to it. There is no country where it is so difficult to acquire freehold land in small quantities—a subject on which I shall have more to say presently. Bad land-laws lie at the back of what we call the urban tendencies of modern life. If fifty years ago the Irish peasantry had had the same facilities for acquiring land that they have to-day, it is safe to say that there would have been little or no emigration, for never was there race that left the land of its fathers with such bitter and entire reluctance as the Irish. The English peasant shares the same reluctance, though his slower nature is incapable of expressing it with the same volubility of anguish. Give him enough land to live upon; make him a proprietor instead of a serf; let him have fair railway rates, so that his produce can fetch its proper price in the markets, and there were no man so proud and so content as he. But this is just what the feudal laws of England will not do for him; and so millions of acres fall out of cultivation and farms go a-begging because the men who could have kept them prosperous have been forced to sell their thews and muscles to be prostituted in the dismal drudgeries of cities.
There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by Money-hunger. Simple ideas of life must needs perish where the nature of a nation's life makes them difficult or impossible of attainment. A country-born youth might keep to the soil, if he saw the slightest hope that the soil would keep him; when he sees that this is impossible he files to cities, because he believes that there is more gold to be picked up in the city mire in a month than can be won from the ploughed fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome Earth-hunger—old as the primal Eden, where man's life began—is stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture of Nature is cast aside for the blotted pages of the betting-book; sport becomes not a means of recreation but of gambling; and instead of sturdy races bred upon the soil, and drawing from the soil solid qualities of mind and body, you have blighted and anaemic races, bred amid the populous disease of cities, and incapable of any task that shall demand steady energy, continuous thought, or sober powers of reflection or of will.
Enough has been said to show that I never heartily settled to a town life, and that the obstacle to content was my own character. Mere discontent with one's environment, however useful it may be as an irritant to prevent stagnation and brutish acquiescence, obviously does not carry one very far. Men may chafe for years at the conditions of their lot without in any way attempting to amend them. I soon came to see that I was in danger of falling into this condition of futility. I was, therefore, forced to face the question whether my continual inward protest against the kind of life which I led was founded on anything more stable than an opinion or a sentiment? No man ever yet took a positively heroic or original course for the sake of an opinion. Opinion must become conviction before it has any potency to change the ordering of life. I saw plainly that I must either bring my thoughts to the point of conviction or discard them altogether.
There is a good phrase which is sometimes used about men who are members of a party, without in any way entering into its propagandist aims—we say that they 'do not play the game.' They may have excellent philosophic reasons for their aloofness, or even admirable scruples; but parties do not ask for either. Parties ask for party loyalty, and to give this loyalty personal scruples must be set aside. I could not but apply this doctrine to my own state of mind. London asked me to play the game, and I was not playing it. It was impossible to put heart into a kind of life which I inwardly detested. I did my day's work with a mind divided; and, although no one could accuse me of wilful negligence, yet a child could see that my work missed that quality of entire efficiency which makes for success. I might count myself much superior to men like Arrowsmith by the possession of superior sentiments, yet, in the long run, my sentiment debilitated me, and his destitution of sentiment was a source of power to him in the kind of work we both had to do. To the man who detests the nature of his employment as I detested mine, I would say at once, either conquer your detestation or change your work. Work that is not genuinely loved cannot possibly be done well. It is no use chafing and fretting and wishing that you lived in the country, if you know perfectly well that you have not the least intention of living anywhere but in the town. If it is town life you are really bent upon, the sooner rustic instincts are uprooted the better for you. London can prove herself a complaisant mistress to those who desire no other, but she will give nothing to those who flout her in their hearts. In plain words there is no middle course between accepting the yoke or finally rejecting it; either course may be justified, but it is the silliest folly to accept with complacency a yoke which you mean to shake off the moment you have courage or opportunity to revolt. London marks such dissemblers with an angry eye, as captains mark reluctant soldiers; and if time holds no disgrace for them it will certainly bring them no advancement.
Were my fine theories composed of mere fluid sentiment, or had they some more consistent element in them which was capable of hardening into invincible conviction? That was my problem. It was debated in season and out of season. Gradually the two dominant factors in the problem became evident; they were health and economics.
There could be no question about health. It was true that I had suffered from no serious illness in my life, but London kept me in a normal state of low vitality. I had constant headaches, fits of depression, and minor physical derangements. I rarely knew what it was to wake in the morning with that clear joyousness of spirit which marks vigorous vitality. A London winter I dreaded, and I had good reason for my dread. When the fog lay on the town an unbearable oppression lay also on my spirits. Imagination had little to do with this oppression; it was the physical result of lack of oxygen. It was the same with my children; they grew pinched and bleached in face, and went about their little tasks with the slowness of old men. It is stated, I believe, that London is the healthiest city in the world; no doubt it is true as regards the actual percentage of disease to the immense population, but statistics take no account of lowered vitality. Without being actually ill, vitality may be reduced to a point at which existence becomes a kind of misery. Alcohol dissolves for a time the cloud on the mind, the incubus upon the energies; and the relief is so great that men do not think of the price they pay for it. No wonder public-houses are the landmarks of London locomotion; they are the Temples of Oblivion, where the devitalised multitudes seek to forget themselves, that they may regain the courage to live at all.
For myself, I had sense to know that stimulants of this kind were a remedy much worse than the disease. The only stimulant, at once safe and effectual, which I needed was fresh air. The moment I found myself among the hills a miraculous change was wrought in me. I had not breathed that quick and vital air for an hour before a glow ran through my veins more delightful, and much more enduring, than the glow of wine. A single night in some small cottage chamber—where the very bed had a cool scent of flowers and lawns, where the open window admitted air fresh from pine forest and mountain streams, where the silence was so deep that one's pulse seemed to tick aloud like a watch—and I awoke a man renewed. Six o'clock, or even five, was not too soon for all my little household to be astir. We were all alike eager for the open air; for the walk, bare-footed, through the dewy grass to the mountain pool; for the shock and thrill of that green water into which we plunged delighted; and in those prolonged and pure ablations I think our spirits shared. The bells of laughter rang the livelong day. The cramped mind began to move again, and long abdicated powers of fancy and of humour were restored. Equanimity of body brought evenness of temper; it was incredible to recollect how irritable we had been with one another in those ghastly days of London fog, when the very grating of a chair along the floor made the nerves jump. Even the mind took new edge, for though I did not read much upon a holiday, yet I found that what I did read left a clearness of impression to which I had long been unaccustomed. And what was the root and cause of all this miracle? Fresh air, wholesome food, rude health—nothing more! To feel that it is bliss to be alive, health alone is needed. And by health I mean not the absence of physical ailment or disease, but a high condition of vitality. This the country gave me; this the town denied me. The only question was then, at what rate did I value the boon?
This brought me immediately to the much more complex problem of economics. I knew that men could live in the country on small means, for men did so; but I perceived that the art of living in the country did not come by nature. Every one supposes that he can drive a horse or grow potatoes; and, when we recollect how many thousands of men go to Canada to take up agricultural pursuits without the least knowledge of the business, it is clear that the belief is general that any man can farm. I may claim the merit of freedom from this popular delusion. I not only knew that I could not farm, but I did not wish to be a farmer. What I wished was to live in the country in some modest way that answered to my needs; to earn by some form of exertion a small income; and at the most, to grow my own vegetables, catch my own fish, and snare my own rabbits.
A legacy of two hundred a year would have served my purpose admirably, but modesty forbade me laying my case before benevolent millionaires, and a destitution of maiden aunts put an end to any hopes of a bequest by natural causes.
What was my precise position then? I had a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. An investment that had turned out fortunately gave me about forty pounds a year. I had done from time to time a little work for the press, which had been worth to me about thirty pounds a year more. My total budget showed, then, an annual income of three hundred and twenty pounds, which I found barely sufficient for my needs as a dweller in towns. If I migrated to a cottage, how would matters stand with me? I should lose my two hundred and fifty pounds per annum of course, and this was an alarming prospect. But, on the other hand, I reminded myself that I had never really possessed it. I prepared various tables in which I arranged the items of my expenditure under two heads, viz. the expenditure that was inevitable, and the expenditure that was evitable, because it was the result of town life. I shall best explain by giving a sample of these tables:—
INEVITABLE EXPENDITURE. L. s. d.
Food and general household expenses,calculated at 30s. per week . . . . . 78 0 0Books, magazines, and papers . . . . . . 5 0 0Clothes for two adults and two children . 20 0 0Insurances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 0 0Holidays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 0 0Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 0 0Sundries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 0Rent, rates, and taxes . . . . . . . . . 65 0 0—————L268 0 0
If I adopted a country life. L. s. d.
Holidays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 0 0By saving on rent, rates, and taxes,calculating my cottage cost me notmore than L20 per annum . . . . . . . 45 0 0By saving in food . . . . . . . . . . . 20 0 0—————L95 0 0
It will be seen that I allowed no reduction in clothes and books, for I did not wish my children to be dressed as beggars, or to be ignorant of current literature.
It does not need the eye of a chartered accountant to perceive that whatever may be said for Table II., Table I. is not satisfactory. In it I accounted for only 268 pounds, whereas I have already stated my total income was 320 pounds. What became of the 52 pounds which found no record in my ingenuous schedule? I could not tell, but I was pretty sure that it was absorbed in the petty wastefulness of town life. Londoners are so accustomed to constant daily expenditure in small ways, that it occurs to no one to ascertain how considerable an encroachment this aggregate expenditure is upon the total yearly income. In all but very fine weather I must needs use some means of public conveyance every day; there was a daily lunch to be provided; and when work kept me late at the office there was tea as well. One can lunch comfortably on a shilling or eighteenpence a day; and I knew places where I could have lunched for much less, but they were in parts of the town which I could not reach in the brief time at my disposal. Moreover, one must needs be the slave of etiquette even though he be a clerk, and if all the staff of an office frequent a certain restaurant, one must perforce fall into line with them under penalty of social ostracism. Thus, whether I liked it or not, for five days in the week I had to spend eighteenpence a day for lunch, and fourpence for teas; and if we add those small gratuities which the poorest men take it as a point of honour to observe, here was an annual expenditure of 25 pounds. Taking one thing with another 5 pounds might be added for 'bus and railway fares; so that only 22 pounds is left to be accounted for. And now, if we return to Table II., it is obvious that my income of 320 pounds per annum was only nominal, because a very great part of it was really spent in keeping up a position which a town life imposed upon me. Before I touched a single penny of my nominal income of 250 pounds per annum, I had paid 30 pounds per year in the daily expenses inevitable to my position, and 65 pounds for rent and taxes, which was quite 45 pounds more than I ought to pay. Education comes also to be considered at this point. My two children went to a very respectable school at the cost of a little more than 15 pounds per annum each. No doubt I might have sent them to a Board school, where they would have received a better education; but in the part of London where I lived there was no Board school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London gamin is not a desirable acquaintance. In this, as in other matters, I paid through the nose for my position; and the convention cost me a clear 35 pounds per annum. Thus I calculated that out of a nominal income of 250 pounds per annum 100 pounds was paid as a tax to convention and respectability.
I have no doubt that a good many flaws may be found in these calculations; but one point is beyond dispute, viz., that a town income is always more apparent than real. Money is worth no more than its purchasing power. The business man who is offered 1000 pounds per annum in New York against 700 pounds per annum in London, refuses the offer unless it carries with it great contingent advantages, because he knows perfectly well that 700 pounds a year in London is worth a good deal more than 1000 pounds a year in New York. But the same kind of prudent calculation is seldom applied to the case of town versus country living at home. It is impossible to persuade the labourer that a pound a week in London is really less than fifteen shillings a week in the country. Men are dazzled by mere figures, and there is no country clerk who would not jump at the idea of a fifty pounds a year rise in London, though ten minutes spent over a sum in addition and subtraction would be sufficient to assure him that he would not be enlarging his income but diminishing it. A man has to live upon a certain scale suited to his needs and tastes, but the income which makes this kind of life possible is a variable quantity. It is not by what men earn in the aggregate that their incomes should be measured, but by what they have left when the necessary cost of living is defrayed. If it costs a man fifty pounds a year more to live in London than in the country, he is obviously no better off by the extra fifty pounds he earns in London. He is not earning fifty pounds for himself but fifty pounds for the landlord, the rate-collector, the gas-man, the restaurant proprietor, the omnibus and railway companies. His gold never reaches his own pocket; it is filched from him by dexterous thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever. Yet I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric lines ofHudibras—
Doubtless the pleasure is as greatTo cheated be as 'tis to cheat.
In most things I claim to be no wiser than my fellow-men, but in this I knew myself wiser; I knew where I was cheated. I knew that the schoolmaster who cost me thirty pounds a year was a licensed footpad; half the money spent in restaurants and tea-shops was blackmail paid to respectability; the landlord who took his forty-five pounds a year from my pocket was a mere robber, who took advantage of the need I had to live in a certain locality that I might attend to my vocation. Not only were my brains exploited that my employer might maintain a sumptuous house at Kensington, but the wage he paid me was exploited by a host of other people, who had houses of their own to maintain. Before I could feed my children I must help to pay for and cook the dinner of the folk who lived on the dividends of railways and omnibus companies. On the way to my office the tailor took toll of me by forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear no other garb. I could not even drink plain water but that some one was the richer. I was the common gull of the thing called convention. I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into leather, some one would have put in a claim to that. Even for my skin, poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it had ceased to be of use to me, for London cemeteries declare dividends upon the dead. My case reminded me of an old gentleman I once knew, who wore so many coats, waistcoats, and shirts to keep warmth in a body of singular attenuation, that it was commonly said that by the time James Smith undressed at night there was very little James Smith that was discoverable. Certainly by the time London had done wringing gold out of me there was very little gold left that was my own.
There was, however, one kind of comfort to be deduced from these reflections; if I was not nearly so well off as I appeared to be, I had all the less to lose. Rightly considered it would not be 250 pounds per annum that I should lose by leaving London, for I had never possessed that sum, I calculated my real loss at something nearer 150 pounds, and this seemed not so terrible a thing. I had my forty pounds a year for certain. I had the small earnings of my pen, and with abundant time upon my hands I saw every reason why these should be increased. Could I face a new kind of life upon an income of seventy pounds per annum? Ah, how anxiously that problem was debated with my wife, many a night when the children were abed! The natural conservatism of woman had a great deal to say in these debates. 'It was all very well,' said my wife, 'to do these little sums on paper, but suppose the facts did not correspond? Suppose I found no cottage at twenty pounds a year, and no decent school at sixpence a week? Then the world was full of writers for the press.' (I frowned.) 'Not of course like you, not half so good,' she added with a smile, 'but how do you know that you will succeed? Show me a fixed income of 100 pounds a year, and I would chance it, for I can live simply enough,' she would say, 'and am as fond of liberty as you.'
She might have added what I knew to be true, that the penalties of London life fell heavier upon her than me. I was not insensible to the instantaneous lightening of spirits that happened with her when she was able to forsake the abominable purlieus of the cellar-kitchen where her life was spent; and although I knew not half her toils, nor half her dejections and anxieties, which were sedulously kept from me, yet I was not wholly blind. I had seen her too amid the roses of a cottage garden flying the colour of long-forgotten roses in her cheeks; in the hay-field shaking off a dozen years in as many hours; and although she was always young to me, she never seemed so young and sweet as when we walked a honeysuckled lane together. Her desire was with me I knew well; she had no fear of poverty, and would have been content with plainer fare than I; but her children made her prudent.
At last the one thing happened which made her prudence coincide with her desires; one of the children sickened with a languor that was the precursor of disease, and the doctors said that only country air could bring back strength. And then fate itself took the whole matter out of my control. Something happened in the city—I know not what—and the firm I served came near to shipwreck. Business shrank to a diminished channel, and the staff of clerks must needs be reduced. I have said some hard words of my employer as the exploiter of my labour; he will appear no more in this history, and my last word about him shall be justly kind. He broke the news of his misfortune to me with a delicacy that made me respect him, and with a hesitating painful shame that made me pity him. He praised me beyond my merit for my twenty years of service; he had hoped to keep me with him for another twenty years, and I believe he spoke the truth when he said it pained him to think that his misfortunes should be mine. He handed me in silence a cheque for fifty pounds. He then shook my hand heartily, murmured some vague words about hoping to reinstate me if things should mend, and hurried from me; and in his broken look and bowed shoulders I read the prophecy that his days of fortune and success were gone for ever. The little tragedy was played out in less than ten minutes. I locked my desk, put on my hat and coat, and went out into the street; and my heart felt a pang at leaving the place which I should never have imagined possible. I had walked fully half a mile before another thought occurred to me. My blood suddenly sang in my veins, and I remembered that I was an emancipated slave; at last I was Free!
I was free, but what was I to do with my freedom? Ingenious apologists for slavery used to argue that the slave was much happier as a bondman than a freeman, as long as the conditions of his bondage were not unendurably harsh: but no one ever knew a slave who held this creed. There never was a slave who did not prefer his dinner of herbs, earned by his own labour, to the stalled ox of luxurious captivity. For my part, I thought the air never tasted so sweet as on that morning of my liberation. I walked slowly, drawing long breaths, that I might taste its full relish, as a connoisseur passes an exquisite and rare wine over his palate, that he may discriminate its subtleties. I became a lounger, and took the pavement with the air of a gentleman at ease. I wandered into Hyde Park, paid my penny for a seat, and sat down almost dizzy with the unaccustomed thought that there was not a human being in the universe who, at that moment, had the smallest claim to make upon my time or energy. An hour passed in a kind of ecstatic dream. It chanced to be a morning when Queen Victoria was driving from Paddington to Buckingham Palace, and every instant the throng of carriages increased. Standing on my seat, I saw an immense lane of people, silent as a wood; a contagious shiver stirred them, like a gust of wind amongst the leaves; I saw the distant glitter of helmets and cuirasses, and the pageant swept along with that one tired, kindly, homely face for its centre of attraction, luring loyalty even from a heart so republican as mine by its air of patient weariness. I thought, and I believed the thought sincere, that I would not have exchanged places with her who was the mistress of so many peoples, the Empress of such indeterminable Empire. My new-born loyalty was three-parts pity. Had she, who sat there in such 'lonely splendour,' ever known the day, since as a young girl the heavy rod of empire was intrusted to her frail and unaccustomed hands, when she woke to say, 'This day I am free, I will go where I will, do as I please, and none shall stay me?' Yet I, a manumitted clerk, had come upon this singular and glad day; and I had it in my heart to say with Emerson, 'Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of empire ridiculous.'
I turned slowly homeward in this glow of exultation. I should have run, for the news, either good or evil, called for instant communication. Let my delay stand excused; I had certain matters to be settled with myself that morning. My feet had to learn a new kind of movement, and my thoughts a new sequence; I was as a child learning to walk and think before I could take my place on equal terms with new companions. One incident of my walk struck me by way of humour and discovery. I had often strolled into bookshops toward evening, and had remarked upon the cold discourtesy with which my presence was regarded. Now I knew the reason; I had come at the clerk's hour, and the keen eyes of discriminating shopmen had recognised my low estate. I came now under altered auspices. To shop at three in the afternoon is to give proof of leisure; behold, in the eyes of obsequious shopmen I had at once become a wealthy dilettante, nurturing the growth of an expensive library, and the rarest books were laid before me with an ingratiating smile. Let the man who would understand how much the estimates men take of us are based on wealth, or supposed wealth, make the brief experiment of shopping at the rich man's hour, instead of at the poor man's; he will be surprised to note the difference of the social atmosphere. A man's clothes may be poor enough, and his appearance contemptible, but if he will shop at the hour when all the drudges are at work, no one will take him for a drudge. I will confess it gave me pleasure to note this change of estimate. I seemed to taste the first privilege of a freeman, when a pursy bookseller took from a glass case certain expensive books on Art, and drew my attention, with subtle deference to my judgment, to the merits of the pictures they contained. I may as well confess at once, that so intoxicated was I with the new respect that greeted me, that I even bought one of these volumes, which I did not need, and certainly could not afford. It was a weakness and a folly, no doubt; but how could I tell my obsequious friend that I paid my guinea not for anything he sold me, but as a sort of first footing on my entrance to the realm of freedom? I might have spent it much worse, for I bought my self-respect with it.
The sight of my doorstep brought me to my bearings, for a man's own doorstep is a rare corrective of disordered fancies. The fact I had to communicate was briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum, against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation. Women, I have long noticed—or women of the best kind, I ought to add—have much more genius in finance than men. They have a much keener sense of the use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony. They, being primitive and unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get the most out of it. How would my wife regard the definite disappearance of five thousand shillings? Not with levity, I knew; and I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on theTombs of the Etruscans. TheTombs of the Etruscanswould have meant to her three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine. A wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man's pleasure, but his discipline; I believe that he was not far wrong. It is no use disputing the fact that the married man is always in danger of the judgment; and it is only by some form of bribery that he can hope to escape being cast in damages. I resolved on bribery, and made my cheque the bribe. Here said I, was present wealth, let us be content. The plea was not received with instant favour, but it was not wholly ineffectual. By the time we sat down to supper that night we had all attained to cheerfulness. It was a meal of some tenuity, not calculated to lie heavy on the stomach; for, said Charlotte, 'If we have to begin high thinking and plain living, we can't begin too early.' The only load on my digestion that night was theTombs of the Etruscans.
It says much for the steadfastness of our convictions, that in this new crisis of affairs the old resolution to seek a country life passed unquestioned. What to another had seemed calamity appeared to us opportunity. When the daily paper came next morning, it was not to the columns where commerce chronicles its wants that my eye turned, but to the much more engaging columns where lands and houses were advertised for sale. This part of the newspaper had long ago attracted me by its fine air of surreptitious romance. My mind had often been kept aglow for a whole day by some seductive advertisement of cottages 'situate amid pine-woods,' or farmhouses, all complete, even to the styes and kennels, which by all accounts were to be given away. One such advertisement I particularly remember for a kind of insane generosity which pervaded it. It described at length a farmhouse, 'stone-built and covered with ivy' (observe the very definite sense of the picturesque conveyed in this phrase), containing ten rooms, commanding pleasant views of a well-wooded country, together with a large orchard, and one hundred and fifty acres of freehold land, the whole of which might be purchased for 750 pounds; and, added the advertiser, 'the furniture at present in the house is included in the price.' I do not know where this terrestrial Paradise existed; I believe it was in Essex; but I often regretted that I made no effort to discover it.
However, the morning paper, if it contained no paragraph comparable with this in point of style and seduction, certainly did appear singularly rich in Paradises. Philanthropists, disguised as land-agents, contended eagerly with one another through many columns of advertisements, offering a reluctant world all the advantages of rural happiness on what appeared merely nominal terms. It appeared that they did not even want the money, which they mentioned only in a kind of gentlemanly whisper; pay them but 100 pounds in sound cash, and the rest might stand at mortgage upon easy terms for an indefinite period! One might have imagined that the whole of rural England was depopulated; that Eden itself had been cut up into building lots; that, in fact, the land-agent was subsidised by a paternal government to persuade the townsman to turn landed proprietor on terms which even the squatter in new lands would regard as generous.
The reality I soon found to be entirely different. The moment I set about the deliberate business of finding a cottage I made a series of surprising discoveries which I will now relate.
In the first place, I found that many of these much vaunted farmhouses were situated in districts utterly destitute of beauty, and even desolate. One specimen may stand for the whole. I omit the particulars of the advertisement, which was drawn up in the usual style; but I must say, in justice to its author, that when I interviewed him in his city office he did what he could to discourage too abundant hope. He did not go the length of admitting his description false, but he told me drily that 'I had better see the thing for myself.' An hour's journey found me on the Essex flats. There was a bright sky and a brisk wind, but nothing could disguise the featureless monotony of the far-stretched landscape. The train put me down at a roadside station where a dogcart waited my arrival. I drove through a small village of mean, red-brick houses, and soon found myself in the open country. My driver made but one remark during the four-mile journey.
'You be come to see Dawes' farm?' he said.
I admitted the fact.
'There's a-many has come,' he replied. 'You be the twenty-first I have drove. An' they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
'Why?' I asked.
'You'll soon find out.'
With that he lit his pipe and smoked stolidly. I was not long in comprehending the reason of his reticence. Dawes' farm may once have been a comfortable residence, but when I saw it it was a mildewed, rat-haunted ruin. It stood upon a piece of redeemed marsh-land, and the salt damp of the marsh had eaten into its very vitals. The wainscots were discoloured, the walls oozed, and part of the roof was broken. There had once been a garden; that, like the rest, was a ruin. The land was there no doubt, fifty acres said the advertisement, but it was treeless, bleak, flat, covered with coarse grass, and cut up by muddy watercourses. To have lived in the house at all it must have been rebuilt, and even then nothing could have made it a cheerful place of residence. There was no water-supply that I could discover, unless half a dozen butts that took the drippings of the roof represented it. The orchard had long ago gone back to barbarism. It appeared that the place had been deserted for half a dozen years. I did not wonder. The only wonder was that it had ever been inhabited.
'Ah,' repeated my driver, 'there's a-many as comes an' looks, an' they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.'
I subscribed to the common sentiment. Never did that infinite diapason which we call the roar of London sound so sweet, never did those long, lighted, busy streets seem so habitable, as on that night when I returned from my casual inspection of Dawes' farm.
The memory of Dawes' farm taught me that if I was to live in the country some charm of outlook was indispensable to my content. Mountains, a lake, a wood, a running river—some delicate effect of scenery, some concourse of elements, either in themselves or in their combination beautiful—these I must have if I would be happy. They were as necessary to me as my daily bread. But here I made a second disquieting discovery; there was not a part of England which could be justly described as beautiful that was not already occupied in the degree of its accessibility. I thought of Surrey; I visited it and found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise. Half a dozen men of genius had in an inadvertent moment advertised the pure air of the Surrey highlands, and by the time I came upon the scene trim villas had sprung up by hundreds, and wealth was already in possession. The merest cottage in this favoured district provoked keen contest in the auction-room. Indeed, in the true sense, there were no cottages; they had been transformed, added to, rebuilt, till only a remnant of their primitive rusticity remained. It was the same everywhere. I was too late by twenty years in this kind of quest.
I had been led to believe by various social writers that the villages of England were depopulated. According to these fallacious chroniclers the country abounded in cottages and even small manor-houses from which the inhabitants had fled. I can only say I never found it so. A deserted roadside cottage I often found, but there were obvious reasons for its desolation. Sometimes it was so far from other houses, or any centre of congregated life, that it must have been difficult, and almost impossible, for any one residing in it to obtain the common necessaries of life. More commonly it was deserted because it was falling into ruin. But no sooner did I reach a real village than I found every house in occupation. The usual complaint was lack of accommodation. Hence rents were by no means low, and the contest for houses was vehement. If the village had real beauties of its own—a cluster of thatched and dormer-windowed cottages, properties valuable to the artist—one was sure to come upon immediate evidence of the cockney invasion. What I thought a barn would as like as not prove a studio, and it was no farmer who lived at the pleasant, yellow-washed farmhouse amid the rose-garden, but 'a gentleman from London.' And we had but to go a little way down some shady lane to find a glaring board announcing building land for lease, and from some local agent one obtained particulars of the exact kind of house which the investor would be permitted to build upon the site.
It will be said that this was not the country proper, nor was it, for London has annexed every place within fifty miles of Charing Cross. But in the country proper a new difficulty met me: not only were there no empty cottages, but landowners stuck to their acres with such jealous obstinacy that they refused to sell a rood of land for a cottage on any terms whatever. I will give one example, which may be taken as typical. There was a Welsh valley where I had once spent a summer holiday, exquisitely retired and beautiful—a dozen miles from the nearest railway. Beyond the green strath, with its few white cottages and farms, rose on every side the wide hills, with Snowdon towering over all like a dome. The hillside land had but a prairie value. It had never been cultivated. A few sheep strayed over it; but for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its vociferous cascades. One would have supposed that had any one offered to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have proved remunerative to himself. On the contrary, the two great landowners of the district stuck to every inch of soil as if it had been sown with gold. The land was quite useless, as I have said. It might have been worth three pounds an acre—yet they refused fifty. They would not even let on lease. Nor could it be pretended that the scenery would have lost any element of its charm by a cottage that would have been scarcely observed on those vast slopes of Snowdon. Jealous obstinacy, the desire to keep intact their own, the desire to keep out all intruders—this was the temper of the landowners. They did all they could to harass their existing tenants. A tenant whose family had increased so that his cottage was as overcrowded as a tenement in Spitalfields, had to plead long before he was allowed to add a couple of rooms to his cottage, even when he did so at his own expense. Often enough he was refused so harshly, that he was constrained to seek a house in some other district. Yet, in all that valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two hundred houses; and there rose around them the unpopulated hillside, where a host of people might have lived in health, and where, indeed, men had once lived, as was witnessed by the roofless gables which here and there rose among the heather.
It seems to me that in this state of things there is a monstrous injustice. There is no law to compel these gentlemen to sell land, and there is no public sentiment that can affect them. They are the complete despots of the countryside. If a man does not like their domination, he leaves the district; he knows that it is vain to resist it. In this way many rural districts are depopulated, or kept under-populated, simply to gratify the selfish temper of a great proprietor. It is not as though he lived in the district, and wished to keep its beauties secret to himself; often enough he visits it so rarely that his face is not known among his tenants. No; but he must have everything to himself; he must round off his estate; he must look from his park on nothing which is not his; for your rural Ahab could not sleep with a Naboth's little vineyard even a mile away. It is useless to tell him that the land you want is waste natural land, on which you propose to confer value; he prefers that it shall be valueless, rather than that it shall be yours. Before population can be re-distributed to the advantage of town and country alike, this difficulty must be overcome. It can only be overcome by drastic legislation. Compulsory purchase, regulated by an equitable land court, is the only remedy; and it is hard that Irishmen should have, and grumble over, privileges which their English brethren would receive with open arms.
Such were some of the discoveries which I made when I came to the real business of finding a humble country residence. In my ignorance and inexperience it had seemed the easiest thing in the world. After a fortnight of experiment I began to think it was the hardest.
In the meantime a circumstance had occurred which was of great importance to me. Some enterprising spirits had started a new weekly local paper, and—mirabile dictu—they actually contemplated a literary page! With a faith in suburban culture, so unprecedented as to be almost sublime, these daring adventurers proposed giving their readers reviews of books, literary gossip, and general information about the doings of eminent writers. They offered the work to me at the modest honorarium of two pounds a week, and were willing to give me a three years' agreement. They were frank enough to acknowledge that their journal was likely to die of 'superiority to its public,' long before the three years were over; but, barring this disaster, they gave me assurance of regular employment. This was the very thing for me. One could write about books anywhere. I thankfully closed with the offer and began to study the ha'-penny evening papers with assiduity, in order to learn the craft of manufacturing biographies of living authors.
The greatest of all questions was thus settled: I should not starve. But the question of a local habitation remained as difficult as ever. I went upon wild-goose chases innumerable; was the victim of every kind of chance hint; gathered fallacious information from garrulous third-class passengers on many railways; confided my case to carters and rural postmen, who played upon my innocence with genial malice; stayed so long at village public-houses without visible motive that I incurred the suspicion of the local constabulary, and on one memorable occasion found myself identified with a long watched-for robber of local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some quaint village that, from a pictorial point of view, seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my tale, that I wished to settle in it, universally derided. No one could conceive any sane person as being desirous of living in a village; the design seemed wholly unaccountable to people who themselves would have been only too glad to live in towns.
That I came from London was against me, It seemed to these village Daniels barely possible that I was honest, and quite certain that I cloaked some base designs under an innocent inquiry for empty cottages. The little black bag in which I carried my lunch on these excursions was the object of extraordinary hypotheses. At one time I was believed to be selling tracts, at another time, tea; once I was suspected of being an itinerant anarchist, doing a brisk business in infernal machines. Landladies, who had lavished smiles upon me when they supposed me an ordinary pedestrian in search of the picturesque, gave me the cold shoulder when I began to explain my genuine intentions. They sometimes treated me with such a mixture of aversion and alarm that it was plain they doubted not only my sincerity but my sanity. The travelling artist they knew, the pedlar, the insurance agent, and the cockney beanfeaster; but the stranger who desired permanent neighbourship with them they knew not; him they treated as a lunatic at large. If the papers had chanced to be full at this time of the doings of some flagrant murderer flying from justice, which fortunately for me they were not, I have little doubt that these amiable villagers would have delivered me up to the police without scruple, and have chuckled over their sagacity.
The thing was amusing enough, and yet it had a certain serious significance. It was a striking illustration of the way in which the growth of cities had perverted even the rural mind. I had thoughts of writing an article onThe Reluctant Villagers, and a very good article I could have made of it; for I found hardly any one who was a villager by choice. A village might appear fair as Paradise to the casual eye; but closer inspection always revealed the serpent of discontent among the flowers. Where every outward object breathed of rest, there was universal restlessness among the people. The common ambition of all the younger generation was to get to London by almost any means, and in almost any capacity. There was not a household that had not children or relatives in London. The young ploughman went to London as a carter or ostler; the milkmaid as a servant. The village carpenter was invariably a middle-aged or an old man, secretly despised by his apprentice, if he had one, for his contentment with his lot. One saw very few young people in the village street, except mere children. The universal complaint was that life was dull. There were no libraries or reading-rooms; no concerts or entertainments; even the innocuous penny-reading had died out. Nor were there cricket clubs, or any organised system of sport, except in isolated cases. Here and there a modern-minded clergyman had recognised the need of recreation in his parishioners, and had done something to provide for it; but he was an exception. Hence it happened that the public-house was the common centre of the village life: it was the poor man's club, and it was used less for purposes of social intercourse than for the discussing of racing odds.
Artists have often painted village politicians in earnest confabulation in an oak-pannelled inn-parlour. I can only say that, so far as my experience went, I found the village politician quite extinct. The sort of talk I heard in village bar-rooms was inane and contemptible to the last degree, and it never once touched on politics. Nor, as a rule, was there any trace of that leaven of superior intelligence which comes from a fusion of the classes. All the landlords were practically non-resident. They knew nothing of their tenants; and that pleasant intercourse between hall and cottage which poets and novelists depict, rarely happened. Once a year, perhaps, and for a few weeks only, the blinds of the Hall windows were drawn up; carriages rolled through the park gates; young ladies, bright in Bond Street toilets, flashed like deities upon the village street; my Lady Bountiful left a quarter of a pound of tea at half a dozen cottages; and then the whole vision faded like an unsubstantial pageant. The blinds were drawn down again, the lodge-keeper went to sleep, and the monotonies of life submerged everything like a wave. The clergyman alone remained as the symbol of a fuller life, sometimes doing his duty with intelligence, sometimes not; but the case was rare where any definite attempt was made to uplift the village community by the infusion of any intellectual interest, any sense of Art, or any care for honest sport. And here lies the whole secret of the discontent of villages; their inhabitants are conscious of unjust deprivations in their lot; and if they remain villagers, it is rather from lethargy than love.
Were I to describe all the places I visited in search of a habitation, my list would be interminable. I have given one example in Dawes' Farm; let me give one other, as illustrating another kind of difficulty in my quest.
On an exquisite morning in June I found myself climbing the long chalk hills that lie northward of the Thames valley. At every step the air became more pure and sparkling; and while in the hazy lowlands not a leaf stirred, here a brisk and gusty breeze was blowing. The road ran through high chalk banks, like a railway cutting, and I have since found that Roman soldiers used it in the days of Caesar. At the height of three hundred feet authentic forest scenery began. Here the elms ceased, and enormous woods of beech took their place. The turf was of the greenest, the solitude intense, the air exhilarating; and never had I so admired the lace-like delicacy of foliage which distinguishes the beech, for never had I seen it in such mass or such perfection. The house I sought stood at fully eight hundred feet above sea-level, on a carpet of soft turf, round which the forest rose like a wall. Never did place look so sweetly habitable; it was a kind of green hermitage in the woods, inimitably quiet, warmed by clearest sunlight, cooled by freshest winds. Here, said I, at last is my much sought El Dorado; nor did the cottage, when I came to it, belie my hopes. It was a true woodland cottage, an intimate part and parcel of the scenery. It had been recently inhabited by a man of letters, a poet and a dreamer; and a fitter spot to dream in eye never rested on.
My enthusiasm rose as I drew nearer to it, There was a warm, homely compactness about it, as of a nest among the trees. The forest turf came to the very gate; a young orchard of five hundred trees lay to the southward of the house, a green paddock to the northward; and, as my advertisement informed me, the entire price of this eligible freehold property was five hundred pounds! Why, then, was its possessor so eager to be quit of it? I walked round the house, went through its rooms, took the view from various windows, already treating it as mine, and it was long before I came upon the cause. That cause was not its remoteness or its solitude; it was lack of water. There was no well, and to have sunk a well would have been costly. The only water-supply was the rain-water from the roofs. Men can laugh at a good many deprivations, but deprivation of water is a serious business. I found upon inquiry that the nearest spring was two miles away. In time of drought—and in this high district summer drought was normal—it was this or nothing. Water was then sold by the bucket, nor was it easy to find any one to fetch and carry for you. I had no mind to condemn myself to drink the droppings of a roof for life, nor to perform my ablutions by the aid of a teacup and a saucer. The place, for all its beauty, was plainly uninhabitable as the Sahara. A camel might have lived there with content; it was no place for a family used to the delights of tubbing. I had remarked in the owner of the house a certain elementary lack of linen; the cause was now explained. I think his only method of attaining cleanliness must have been by what is called 'the dry air process.'
This adventure lives in my memory, not only because it had delightful elements, but because it was the last of a long series, which might have been called more truthfully misadventures. For an exhilarating month I scoured the neighbourhood of London, living in a happy fever of enterprise and hope, but without result. July came, and my problem was still unsolved. I had already given notice to terminate the tenancy of my house in London, and there seemed a fair prospect that September would find me homeless. At my present height of good spirits I cannot say that even this prospect dismayed me. If the worst came to the worst I meant to take to the road in one of those convenient vans much used by travelling hawkers. I had long envied the extraordinary snugness of those itinerant habitations; to be a Dr. Marigold seemed the happiest of fates; rent free, and finally delivered from tax-collectors and their tribe, I might yet roam the world as a superior kind of vagrant. I knew indeed a young friend of mine who had adopted this very life. He sold tracts and Bibles upon village greens, and I promise you no mansion had a warmer glow of comfort than the interior of his yellow van when the lamp was lit at night for supper. He has since found his way to a lonely missionary station in Peru; but he has often told me that he was never happier than when he played the part of pious gipsy on the village greens of England. At a pinch I thought that I could do what he had done; it was a romantic trade, and a newLavengromight be written on it.
But whatever dreams of permanent and dedicated vagrancy I might entertain, manifestly my first duty was to find a cottage if I could. At last, and almost by accident, I came on what I wanted. I had gone to the Lake District in the month of August, and one day I struck into a lonely road to the north-west of Buttermere. Half an hour's walk brought me to a tiny hamlet beside a rushing stream, and here, for the first time in all my wanderings, I found a genuine deserted cottage. To speak by the book there were two cottages exactly similar, covered by a single roof. They stood upon a gentle slope; a group of pines formed a shelter from the north, the moorland rose behind them, and the river sang through a contiguous glen. My first glance told me that they had not long been out of occupation. They showed no marks of dilapidation, and the little gardens, though weed-grown, gave signs of recent care. A woman whom I met told me their history. They had long been inhabited by two families, father and son. A few months previously these families had sailed for Canada. No one had applied for the cottages, for in that part work was scarce, and the foundries and shipyards on the coast drew away the younger population. The rent—it seemed incredible—was two shillings a week. The woman yielded to what she thought my idle curiosity, and brought me the keys. Each cottage contained four rooms, and the two could easily be thrown into one. They were dry and water-tight, the walls whitewashed and clean, the woodwork sound and well cared for. I sat down upon the sun-warmed bank beside the gate and thought. Here was solitude indeed; a dozen neighbours in all, simple labouring folk:
The silence that is in the starry sky,The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Here, too, was beauty in excess; a glen untrodden by the feet of tourists, moorland and pine-wood, a stream that lifted up a cheerful voice, hills and mountains of delightful form and colour, and not far away the silver gleam of lakes. In all external features it was my dream come true, and the deep-bosomed woman at my side, with her face of rosy, placid health, was herself the proof of how lightly the wings of time passed over this haunt of ancient peace.
I suppose that no one ever approaches the realisation of his hopes without a kind of fear. In those imaginary dramas which we invent and rehearse perpetually in the silent theatre of our own minds, we always take care that we get the best of the situation and the dialogue. The dramas of real life are apt to end differently. The coveted occasion finds us incapable; a baffling scepticism of our own powers leaves us impotent; the part that ran so easily, with such unanimous applause, when we were both the dramatist and the actor, suddenly bristles with a hundred unsuspected difficulties. For the first time, as I sat on that sunny bank, I began to ask myself whether I could really play the part I had so long desired to play. Could I reconcile myself to seclusion so entire? Would not this weight of utter silence grow heavier than I could bear? It was not always June, I told myself, and there were days of lashing rain, grey skies, and 'death-dumb autumn dripping' fog to think of. The vision of lighted streets and bustling crowds, the warm contiguity of numbers, the long lines of windows all aglow at evening, the genial stir and tumult of congregated life, took masterful possession of my mind. Could I bear to relinquish the familiar scene? A thousand threads of use and habit bound me to it, each in itself as light as gossamer, but the whole tough as cords of steel. I foresaw that I had underestimated the ease of my deliverance. It would require a strength of consistent resolution of which perhaps I was not capable. It was but too likely that I should be one of those who put their hand to the plough and look back, a reluctant recruit of a cause that won my faith, but could not win my will. This would be not only fatal to my peace, it would make me despicable in my own eyes, which is the worst of all calamities that man can suffer.
Such a distress of mind was natural; yet I think that behind it all my thought was firm and clear. What I had proposed to do for twenty years I must do, or attempt to do, if I would retain my self-respect. I might become despicable to myself by failure in my task, but I should be much more despicable by never trying to accomplish it. In that half-hour of meditation the die was cast. I had come to my predestined battlefield. I must here be triumphant or defeated; in any case I must attempt the conflict.
The decision restored, as by a stroke of magic, all my good spirits. I examined my two cottages again with an eye less critical, more kindly, more urbane. I saw with how few touches they could be transformed into a habitation suited to my needs. With the two main rooms thrown into one I should have a spacious living-room; the two gardens would compose an admirable lawn; roses should grow against the walls, warm-hued creepers frame the upper windows; it should become a lodge in Eden. Then there was the air, the view, the company of the silent mountains and the singing stream. Here was my theatre, my orchestra, my concert-room. The woman who was my guide took me into her own cottage for a cup of tea, and I was struck with its homely air of comfort. An oak dresser, covered with blue ware such as is common in these parts, filled one wall; an oak chest of drawers another; there was a broad-seated oak settle by the fire; all solid, of a good design, and polished to a deep brown by use and industry. The floor was red brick; flowers lined the windows; and everything was clean as hands could make it. I saw my house furnished on the same plan, and it pleased me. A recollection crossed my mind, curious and most fantastic at such a time, of a certain room in one of the show-houses in London, furnished entirely in the French style. I recalled the console tables of old gilt, the brocaded couch, and the gilded chairs which no one dared to sit upon; and I confess that I preferred this habitable cottage-room. There was something satisfying in its plainness; a sense of something honest and intimately right; a suggestion of solid worth and homely ease. My spirits had already been restored by my decision; they were now invigorated to the point of joy, for I saw the concrete emblems, as it were, of the beauty which is found in true simplicity.
The next day I returned to the spot accompanied by my wife and my two boys. We made a new and elaborate inspection of the two cottages. In the afternoon the landlord, a neighbouring farmer, met us. He was a dales-man born and bred, shrewd, much given to silence, but with a plenitude of genial good sense. He began by being somewhat suspicious of us after the usual country fashion. When he at last understood the sincerity and novelty of our intentions, he treated us with a kind of fatherly derision, which had no hint of impoliteness or impertinence in it. 'It will na do, I'm thinking,' he said, several times. When he saw us persistent, and that our persistence grew in the ratio of his dissuasion, he said, just as though he were talking to wayward children, 'Well, a wilful man maun have his way. As for my bit of cottages, ye're welcome to them, an' I'll ask no rent till ye've been in them long enough to know your own minds better. They're of no worth to me, an' I'll be your debtor for living in them. If ye want to pull them aboot, ye'll do it at your own expense, I'm willing. Later on, if ye care to stay, you and me'll fix a rent, an' I gie ye ma word it shall na be more than ten pund a year. I'll help ye too if ye'll let me. I can find ye a man as 'll do all the little jobs you want done, an' glad to do it. As for fishing, the stream's yours, an' I would na say but what ye might get some shooting too. But ye'll tire of it, ye'll tire of it,' he concluded, with a grave smile.
With that he handed us the keys. He then shook our hands with the melancholy air of a man who says farewell to friends embarked upon a perilous adventure, and strode away across the heather, stopping once to wave his hand to us as if in wise dissuasion.
So Mahomet might have stood above Damascus when he said, 'My Paradise is not there,' and yet Damascus was a Paradise all the same.
We are all children, and in nothing so much perhaps as in the kind of delight we take in any form of building. The architectural efforts of a child with a box of bricks or a heap of sand explain the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, and the Golden House of Nero. House-building unites the ideal with the real more thoroughly than any other human employment. What can there be more delightful than to see that which you have dreamed grow into tangible and enduring form? No wonder the rich man builds himself 'a lordly pleasure-house'; it is a kind of practical poetry which he can understand. Were there only millionaires enough to go round all architects would be wealthy, for building is a kind of material art admirably suited to men of material intelligence.
The weeks which followed the acquisition of my two deserted cottages were the most delightful I have ever spent. First of all, there was the question of structural alterations to be considered. In my opinion the living-room of the house is the chief consideration. It should be aroom to live in, the focus of the whole life of the household. For this reason it should be large and airy, covering the whole site of the house as nearly as possible. One large room is infinitely to be preferred to two or three small rooms; it is healthier, and much more cheerful. Space and air are most needed in the room which is most in use. It is of no consequence that the bedrooms should be small; one's active hours are not spent in them, and a window left wide open summer and winter will provide an ample supply of oxygen in the smallest chamber. What can be more absurd than the arrangement of a modern London villa? It is usually cut up by partition walls into a number of small rooms, not more than one of which is in constant use. Pretension takes the place of comfort. Mrs. Grundy must have a 'drawing-room' or die! It is a kind of holiest of holies, too beautiful for normal occupation, full of gimcrack chairs that cannot be sat upon, and decorative futilities which give it the aspect of a miscellaneous stall at a 'rummage sale.' Such a room is very well as a _with_drawing-room, its proper use; but as a room into which no one withdraws it is absurd. As I expected to keep no company, and needed no room into which to withdraw, I was able to get rid of this apartment. Moreover, in a very small house, common sense demanded that every room should be really and thoroughly used.
Fortunately the fireplaces of my two cottages were against the outer or gable ends, and not against the partition wall, as is commonly the case. I had only to remove this partition wall, supporting the ceiling by a strong beam, and I had a room about twenty-four long by fifteen in breadth. At the back of this room were two small kitchens, only one of which was needed. By widening the doorway leading to one of them to double its breadth, I gained another room about ten feet square. This made my library, by which I mean not a room in which I ever sat, but a room entirely devoted to the housing of my books. I had the walls entirely lined with books, making and staining the bookshelves with my own hands. Across the widened doorway from which the door had been removed hung a warm curtain, so that it was to all intents and purposes a part of my living-room. I took infinite and almost childish delight in the arrangement of this living-room. I had brought not a single article of domestic furniture with me from London. Such furniture as I had—chairs, tables, couch, sideboard, and so forth—would have looked out of place in the country, and moreover it was better economy to sell them. I sold them very well in a London auction-room, getting almost as much as they cost me. With the money thus received in my pocket I went to a neighbouring market town where there happened to be a shop that dealt in old furniture. For less than ten pounds I bought an excellent oaken gate-table, half a dozen serviceable oak chairs, a couple of fine carved chests, and a corner cupboard. My oak dresser and settle, each good specimens of serviceable cottage furniture, cost me thirty-seven shillings at a country auction. I found that even at these modest prices I had paid too much. Oaken furniture was common in these parts, and had little value. When a church was restored, or an old house re-constructed, large quantities of old oak were literally thrown away. Thus, at a merely nominal expense I acquired enough carved oak to fit together into a handsome fireplace, and later on the pews of a church came in for oak panelling.
Let me now picture my living-room as it was about four months after I took possession. It was entirely oak panelled to a height of nine feet, above which about a foot of white-washed wall showed, forming a plain frieze. The fireplace at one end of the room was built in with carved oak; what had been the corresponding fireplace at the other end of the room was turned into a cupboard, with plain oak doors. The room had three old-fashioned leaded windows opening outward. Two were original, one had been added—the centre window taking the place of the gap left by the destroyed partition wall. My oak chests, dresser and cupboard, constituted the furniture of the room. The library, curtained off with a plain curtain of crimson plush, adjoined; the kitchen door opened at the east corner of the room. The windows faced due south. The room therefore was always sunny. The floor-boards were stained, and covered by two or three cheap rugs. Flowers were at the windows, a vase of flowers always on the table. The fireplace was open, for I had removed the ugly modern grate, substituting for it a low hearth of red brick with iron dogs, on which wood could be burned. This room, with the adjoining library, was the great feature of my little house.
The other rooms in the house required no alteration; fresh whitewash and wall-papers soon transformed them; and although they were small, they were not devoid of charm. When my scheme of adaptation was complete I found myself possessed of a house containing one beautiful living-room, a small library, a kitchen, and four good bedrooms. My bill for labour, including the mason's work in the removal of the partition wall, the building of a new window, and the laying of a fresh hearth; the carpenter's work in fitting my oak, and various minor repairs, amounted in all to about twelve pounds. The cost of my furniture, including the oak panelling in the living-room, and all that was needed for the bedrooms, was about fifty pounds, against which I had to set thirty-eight pounds, received from the sale of my superfluous effects in London. If I added to these sums the general expenses of removal, the carriage and cartage of my goods, and so forth, which I reckoned at ten pounds, I found that the cost of my exodus and new tenancy had been as follows:—
L. s. d.By expenses of removal . . . . . . 10 0 0By alterations and labour . . . . . 12 0 0By cost of furniture for living-roomand four bedrooms . . . . . . . . 50 0 0—————-L72 0 0Against which, by sale of goods inLondon . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 0 0—————-Leaving total outlay of . . . . . . L34 0 0—————-
I am conscious that to a townsman, accustomed to the wastefulness of towns, some parts of this account must appear incredible. Take, for instance, the bill for labour. No one has ever lived in London without having occasion to complain of the dearness and badness of labour. The chief object of the town artisan is to do as little work as possible. He is absolutely without conscience in his work, and all that he does is slovenly. He surveys a job, and meditates upon it for an hour—at your expense; begins it, and goes away to fetch a tool that he has forgotten—the time of his absence being duly charged against you; procrastinates and dawdles; sits down to read the paper, if no one watches him; and in one way and another takes quite twice as long over a job as is needed, and then does it badly. When I first became a householder in London I naturally sent to some neighbouring employer of labour for any little jobs of carpentering and plumbing that needed to be done. I soon had to relinquish the practice. If a new latch were put upon a window, the screws were driven into the old holes, so that in a week the latch was off again. If the plumber effected one repair he invariably left some damage that made it necessary to recall him before the month was out. There are houses in London which must be as good as an annuity to local tradesmen; I believe the workmen are instructed to do their work so badly that it is never really done. I soon found it wise to learn how to do repairs for myself; and it was by doing them myself that I discovered how I had been victimised by the rapacity, dishonesty, and inefficiency of the British workman and his master.
But in the country things are different. The village workman has honest pride in his reputation, and in his work. Moreover, he can turn his hand to anything, he does not grudge his time, and he is not corrupted by the contiguity of the public-house. The man who did my masonry work for me was a grey-haired, silent, pertinacious fellow, of great practical intelligence and efficiency. He did not work rapidly, but all that he did was thoroughly done. The carpenter was a man of the same type. He took a genuine delight in fitting my oak to its new uses, and had ideas of his own, which were often ingenious, and always practical. He even had a true artistic sense; uncultivated for want of education, but real. I understood the extraordinary skill of mediaeval craftsmen through my association with this man. The pieces of exquisite carved oak which find their way into museums to-day were wrought by men such as he was; quiet, thoughtful men, residing in villages, who developed their artistic sense in solitude. I am quite sure that this man thought a great deal more of his work than of the money he earned by it. At all events he charged me astonishingly little. He refused a contract, evidently regarding it as implying suspicions of his honesty. 'I'll charge ye what's fair,' he said, 'and you and me'll not quarrel as to the price.' If my bill for labour was so moderate that it seems absurd to a townsman, it was because I had to deal with honest craftsmen, who brought not only efficiency and handiness to their work, but a high sense of honour, and a real intelligence and interest.