textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/IRVING/irving-rural-584.txt

                                    1819-20

                                THE SKETCH BOOK

                             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 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 most 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, 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
grassplot 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 in 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
superficies 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 discover 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 grassplot 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.
These 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 nobleman, 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 of 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
footpath leading from the church-yard, across pleasant fields, and
along shady hedge-rows, 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, and 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 crown'd 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 hath 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 enjoy'd; that wants no witnesses

         But its own sharers, and approving heaven;

         That, like a flower deep hid in rocky cleft,

         Smiles, though 'tis looking only at the sky.*

  * From a Poem on the death of the Princess Charlotte, by the
Reverend Rann Kennedy, A.M.

                        THE END
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