Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/336

324 Madame?" is the type of them all. Of course, country life taken thus as a temporary and rather disgraceful banishment can never display its true features, or produce its proper quantum of enjoyment.

And again, among English forms of country life, it is life in bonâ fide rural districts which we must take for our type. All round London there now exists a sort of intellectual cordon, extending from twenty to thirty miles into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles into Herts and Essex. Professor Nichols might have mapped it as he did our starry cluster, by jotting down every house on the boundary inhabited by politicians, literary men, and artists, and then running a line all round from one to another. Within this circumference (of course, extending year by year) the ideas, habits, and conversation of the inhabitants are purely Londonesque. The habitué of London dinner-parties finds himself perfectly at home at every table where he sits down, and may take it for granted that his hosts and their guests will all know the same familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions; and much more than all this, will possess the indescribable easy London mnanermanner [sic] of lightly tripping over commonplace subjects, and seriously discussing only really interesting ones, which is the art of conversational perspective. Beyond the invisible mental London Wall which we have described, the wanderer seems suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. As the author of the "Night Thoughts" describes a rather more startling experience, he stands on the last battlement, which

at the end of all things wherewith he is familiar. He has, in short, penetrated into the rural districts of the mind, where men's ideas have hedges and ditches as well as their fields.

And once again we must take English country life in its most elevated and perfect form — that of the hereditary landed gentry — to contrast it most advantageously with the life of towns. To understand and enjoy country life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not only live in one of those "stately homes of England," of which Mrs. Hemans was so enamoured, but be born and have spent his youth in such a house built by his fathers in long-past generations. A wealthy merchant or a great lawyer who buys in his declining years the country-seat of some fallen family, to enjoy therein the honourable fruits of his labours, may probably be a much more intelligent person than the neighbouring squire, whose acres have descended to him depuis que le monde est rnonde. But he can no more make himself into a country gentleman, and acquire the tastes and ideas of one, or learn to understand from the inside the loves and hates, pleasures and prejudices of squiredom, than he can acquire the dolce favella Toscana by buying himself a Florentine barony.

And, lastly, our typical country life must neither be that of people so great and wealthy as to be called frequently by political interests up to Parliament, and who possess two or more great estates (a man can no more have two homes than he can have two heads), nor yet that of people in embarrassed and narrow circumstances. The genuine squire is never rich in the sense in which great merchants and manufacturers are rich, for, however many acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain that the claims on them will be quite in proportion to their extent. There is, in fact, a kind of money which never comes out of land; a certain breadth of margin and freedom in the disposal of large sums quite unknown among the landed gentry. But if not possessed of a heavy balance at their bankers, the country family must at least have the wherewithal for the young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and for the girls to ride or amuse themselves with garden and pleasure-grounds according to taste. All these things being elements of the typical English country life must be assumed as at least attainable at will by our "Country Mouse" if he is not to be put altogether out of countenance by his brother of the town.