Chapter V: Part 5

When we ask seriously the question which, of any two ways of spending our years, is the most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is not the one which supplies us with the most numerous isolated items of pleasure, but the one of which the whole current tends to maintain in us the _capacity_ for enjoyment at the highest pitch and for as long a time as possible. There is something exceedingly stupid in our common practice of paying superabundant attention to all the external factors of happiness down to the minutest rose-leaf which can be smoothed out for our ease, and all the time forgetting that there must always be an internal factor of _delightability_ to produce the desired result, just as there must be an eye wherewith to see as well as candles to give light. The faculty of _taking_ enjoyment, of _finding_ sweetness in the rose, grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food and rest, interest in books, and happiness in loving and being loved, is—as we must perceive the moment we consider it—indefinitely more precious than any gratification which can be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the affections, just as eyesight is more valuable than the finest landscape, and the power of loving better than the homage of a world. Yet, as Shelley lamented,—

“Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight”;

and we allow it to remain absent from our souls, and grow accustomed to living without it, while all the time we are plodding on, multiplying gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate and evanescent sense they are meant to please is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed, make religio-philosophical remarks on the beautiful patience and cheerfulness of sufferers from agonizing disease, and we smile at the unfailing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys of our acquaintance sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote, with high approval, the poet who sings that

“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.”

Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evident, unmistakable Happiness enjoyed, in despite of circumstances, never seems to teach us how entirely secondary all objective circumstances needs must be to the subjective side of the question, and how much more rational it would be on our part to look first to securing for ourselves the longest and completest tenure of the internal elements of enjoyment before we turn our attention to the attainment of those which are external.

The bearing of this remark on the present subject is, of course, obvious. Is it Life in Town or Life in the Country wherein the springs of happiness flow with perennial freshness, and wherein the Spirit of Delight will burn brightest and longest? To solve this problem, we must turn over in our minds the various conditions of such a state of mind and spirits, the most generally recognized of which is bodily Health.

There is not the smallest danger in these days that any inquirer, however careless, should overlook the vast importance of physical soundness to every desirable mental result. Indeed, on the contrary, we may rather expect shortly to find our teachers treating Disease as the only real delinquency in the world, and all crimes and vices as mere symptoms of disordered nerves or overloaded stomach,—kleptomania, dipsomania, homicidal mania, or something equally pardonable on the part of automata like ourselves. Seriously speaking, a high state of health, such as the “Original” described himself as having attained, or even something a few degrees less perfect, is, undoubtedly, a potent factor in the sum of happiness, causing every separate sensation—sleeping, waking, eating, drinking, exercise, and rest—to be delightful; and the folly of people who seek for Happiness, and yet barter away Health for Wealth or Fame, or any other element thereof, is like that of a man who should sell gold for dross. Admitting this, it would seem to follow that Life in the Country, generally understood to be the most wholesome, must be the most conducive to the state of enjoyment. But there are two points not quite cleared up on the way to this conclusion. First, bodily health seems to be, to some people, anything but the blessing it ought to be, rendering them merely coarse and callous, untouched by those finer impulses and sentiments which pain has taught their feebler companions, and so shutting them out from many of the purest and most spiritual joys of humanity. Paley questioned whether the sum of happiness would not be increased to most of us by one hour of moderate pain in every twenty-four; and, though few would directly ask for the increment of enjoyment so attained, there are perhaps still fewer who would desire to unlearn all the lessons taught in the school of suffering, or find themselves with the gross, oxlike nature of many a farmer or publican, whose rubicund visage bears testimony to his vigorous appetite and to the small amount of pain, sorrow, or anxiety which his own or anybody else’s troubles have ever caused him. Taking it all in all, it seems doubtful, then, whether the most invariably robust people are really much higher than those with more fluctuating health who have taken from the bitter cup the sweet drop which is always to be found at the bottom by those who seek it. For those, unhappiest of all, whom disease has only rendered more selfish and self-centred and rebellious, there is, of course, no comparison possible.

And, secondly, Is it thoroughly proved that country life is invariably healthier than the life of towns? The maladies arising from bad air, late hours, and that overwork and overstrain which is the modern Black Death, are of course unknown in the calm-flowing existence of a rural squire and his family. But there are other diseases which come of monotonous repose, unvarying meals, and general _tedium vitae_, quite as bad as the scourges of the town. Of all sources of ill health, I am inclined to think lack of interest in life, and the constant society of dull and disheartening people, the very worst and most prolific. Undoubtedly, it is so among the upper class of women; and the warnings of certain American physicians against the adoption by girls of any serious or earnest pursuit seems painfully suggestive of a well-founded alarm lest their own lists of hysterical and dyspeptic patients should show a falling off under the new impetus given to women’s work and study. In London, people have very much less leisure to think about their ailments, or allow the doctor’s visit to become a permanent institution, as is so often the case in country houses. The result is that (whether or not statistics prove the existence of more sickness in town than in the country) at least we do not hear of eternally ailing people in London nearly so often as we do in country neighborhoods, where there are always to be found as stock subjects of local interest and sympathy old Mr. A.’s gout, and Lady B.’s liver complaint; and those sad headaches which yet fortunately enable poor Mrs. C. to spend at least one day in the week in her darkened bedroom out of the reach of her lord’s intolerable temper.[26] Be it also that the maladies which townsfolk mostly escape—namely, dyspepsia, hysteria, and neuralgia—are precisely those which exercise the most direct and fatal influence on human powers of enjoyment, whereas the ills to which flesh is heir in great cities, among the upper and well-fed classes, are generally more remotely connected therewith.

But—_pace_ the doctors and all their materialistic followers—I question very much whether bodily health, the mere absence of physical disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition of happiness as certain peculiarities of the mental and moral constitution. The disposition to Anxiety, for instance, which reduces many lives to a purgatory of incessant care,—about money, about the opinion of society, or about the health and well-being of children,—is certainly a worse drawback to peace and happiness than half the diseases in the Registrar-General’s list. This anxious temperament is commonly supposed to be fostered and excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the peaceful life of the country; and, if it were certainly and invariably so, I think the balance of happiness between the two would well-nigh be settled by that fact alone. But again there is something to be said on the side of the town. An African traveller has described to me how, after months exposed to the interminable perils from man and brute and climate, he felt, after his first night on board a homeward-bound English ship, a reaction from the tension of anxiety which revealed to himself the anguish he had been half-unconsciously enduring for many months. In like manner the city man or the statesman feels, when at last he takes his summer holiday, under what tremendous pressure of care he has been living during the past year, or session, in London; and he compares it, naturally enough, with the comparatively careless life of his friend, the country squire. But every one in London does not run a race for political victory or social success, and there are yet some sober old ways of business—both legal and mercantile—which do not involve the alternative of wealth or ruin every hour. For such people I apprehend London life is actually rather a cure for an anxious temperament than a provocative of care. There is no time for dwelling on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres of possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures, amusements and monetary worries, succeed each other so rapidly that the more serious anxieties receive less and less attention as the plot of London life thickens year by year. One nail drives out another, and we are now and then startled to remember that there has been really for days and months a reasonable fear of disaster hanging over us to which we have somehow scarcely given a thought, while in the country it would have filled our whole horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten it day or night.

And, again, quite as important as bodily health and freedom from anxiety is the possession of a certain childlike freshness of character; a simplicity which enables men and women, even in old age, to enjoy such innocent pleasures as come in their way without finding them pall, or despising them as not worth their acceptance. Great minds and men of genius seem generally specially gifted with this invaluable attribute of perennial youth; while little souls, full of their own petty importance and vanities, lose it before they are well out of the school-room. The late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will be, perhaps, appreciated when all the monstrosities of modern English statuary are consigned to the lime-kiln), used to say in his old age that he wished he could live over again every day and hour of his past life precisely as he had spent it. Let the reader measure what this means in the mouth of a man of transparent veracity, and it will appear that the speaker must needs have carried on through his seventy years the freshness of heart of a boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of the Beautiful, and supported by the consciousness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain. People who are always “looking for the next thing,” taking each pleasure not as pleasure _per se_, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to something else which may possibly be pleasure, or as a subject to be talked of; people who are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the slippery pole of ambition,—cannot possibly know the meaning of such genuine and ever fresh enjoyment.

Is a man likely to grow more or less simple-hearted and single-minded in Town or in the Country? Alas! there can be little or no doubt that London life is a sad trial to all such simplicity; and that nothing is more difficult than to preserve, in its hot, stifling atmosphere, the freshness and coolness of any flower of sentiment, or the glory of any noble, unselfish enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the tone of easy-letting-down commonly adopted by men of the world towards any lofty aspiration, compel those who would fain cherish generous and conscientious motives to cloak them under the guise of a hobby or a whim, and, before many years are over, the glow and bloom of almost every enthusiasm is rubbed off and spoiled.

But it is time to pass from the general subjective conditions of happiness common to us all to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies which are probably more often concerned in the preference of town or country life. We are all of us mingled of pretty nearly the same ingredients of character; but they are mixed in very different proportions in each man’s brewing, and in determining the flavor of the compound everything depends on the element which happens to prevail. By some odd chance, few of us, notwithstanding all our egotism and self-study, really know ourselves well enough to recognize whether we are by nature gregarious or solitary, acted upon most readily by meteorological or by psychological influences, capable of living only on our affections or requiring the exercise of our brains. We are always, for example, talking about the gloom or brightness of the weather, as if we were so many pimpernels, to whom the sun is everything and a cloudy day or a sharp east wind the most pitiable calamity. The real truth is that, to ninety-nine healthy English men and women out of a hundred, atmospheric conditions are insignificant compared to social ones; and the spectacle of a single member of the family in the dumps, or even the suspicion that the servants are quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts more from our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the barometer from Very Dry to Stormy. In the same way we talk about people “loving the country” or “loving the town,” just as if the character which fitted in and found its natural gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy quite equally the other. Obviously, in some of us the passion for Nature and natural beauty is so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by the sight of pictures reminding us of woods and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington House or the Grosvenor Gallery, we miss so much out of life that nothing can make up for it, and no pleasures of the intellect in the company of clever people, or gratification of taste in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to banish the regret. A young branch swaying in the breeze of spring, and the song of the lark rising out of the thyme and the clover, are better than all the pictures, the concerts, the conversation which the town can offer. And just in the opposite way there are others amongst us in whom the æsthetic element is subordinate to the social, and who long to take a part in the world’s work rather than to stand by and watch the grand panorama of summer and winter move before them while they remain passive. Is it not patently absurd to talk as if persons so differently constituted as these could find happiness,—the one where his ingrained passion for Nature is permanently denied its innocent and easy gratification, the other where his no less deeply rooted interest in the concerns of his kind is narrowed within the petty sphere of rural social life?

But let us now pass on, hoping that we have found the round man for the round hole, and the square man for the square one. What are the more hidden and recondite charms of the two modes of life, of which the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse have rehearsed the superficial characters? What is the meaning in the first place of that taste for “Life at High Pressure,” against which W. R. Greg cautioned us, and Matthew Arnold inveighed? How was it that the sage Dr. Johnson felt undoubtedly a twinge of the same unholy passion when he remarked to the faithful Boswell how delightful it was to drive fast in a post-chaise,—in _such_ a post-chaise, and over such roads as existed in his time? I apprehend that the love for rapid movement comes from the fact that it always conveys to us a sense of vivid volition, and effectually stirs both our pulses and our brains, causing us not only to seem to ourselves, but actually to become, more intelligent. At first the bustle and hurry of London life bewilder the visitor; and, finding it impossible to think, move, and speak as fast as is needful, he feels as a feeble old lady might do arm-in-arm with Jack in his Seven-league boots. But after a little while he learns to step out mentally as rapidly as his neighbors, and thereby acquires the double satisfaction of the intrinsic pleasure of thinking quickly and not dwelling on ideas till they become tedious, and the further sense of gratified vanity in being as clever as other people. This last is again a curious source of metropolitan satisfaction. It is all very well to boast of having “also dwelt in Arcadia.” Such pastoral pride is humility beside the conceit of being a thorough-bred Londoner. There may live many men with souls so dead as never to themselves to have said—anything signifying peculiar appropriation of the soil of Scotland, or of any other “native land.” But who has ever yet met a Cockney who was not from the bottom to the top of his soul proud of being a Londoner, and deeply convinced that he and his fellows can alone be counted as standing “in the foremost files of time”? Of course, whilst he is actually in London, he has no provocation to betray his self-satisfaction among people who can all make the same boast. But watch him the moment he passes into the country. Observe the pains he takes that the natives shall fully understand what manner of man, even a Londoner, they have the privilege of entertaining, and no doubt will remain as to how immensely superior he feels himself to those who habitually dwell “far from the madding crowd.” If he wander into the remoter provinces, say of Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, there is always in his recognition of the hospitality shown to him a tone like that of the shipwrecked apostle in Malta: “The Barbarous people there showed us no small kindness.” He manages to convey by looks, words, and manners his astonishment at any vestiges of civilization which he may meet on those distant shores, and exhibits graceful forbearance in putting up with the delicious fresh fruit, cream, vegetables, and home-fed beef and mutton of his entertainers in lieu of the stale produce of the London shops. One such stranded Cockney I have known to remark that he “observed” that the eggs at N——, and at another country house where he occasionally visited, had in them a “peculiar milky substance,” about whose merits he seemed doubtful; and another I have heard, after landing at Holyhead on his return from Ireland, complacently comparing his watch (which had, like himself, faithfully kept London time during all his tour) with the clock in the station, and observing to his fellow-passengers “that there was not a single clock right in Dublin,—they were all twenty minutes too slow,—and, when he went to Galway, he found them still worse.”

Even if a man sincerely prefer country life, and transfer his abode from London to the rural districts, he still retains a latent satisfaction at having lived once in the very centre of human interests, close to the throbbing heart of the world. The old squire, who has been too gouty and too indolent to run up to town for twenty years, will still brighten up at the names of the familiar streets and play-houses, and will tell anecdotes, the chief interest of which seems to lie in the fact that he formerly lodged in Jermyn Street, or bought his seals at the corner of Waterloo Place, or had his hair cut in Bond Street, preparatory to going to the play in Drury Lane.

As volunteers enjoy a field day with the manœuvres and marches, so a Londoner experiences a dim sense of pleasure in forming part of the huge army of four millions of human beings who are for ever moving hither and thither, and yet strangely bringing about, not confusion, but order. The Greek philosophers and statesmen, who thought such a little tiny “Polis” as Athens or Sparta (not an eighth part of one postal district of London) almost a miracle of divine order, would have fallen down and worshipped at the shrine of Gog and Magog for having provided that a whole nation should be fed, housed, clothed, washed, lighted, warmed, taught, and amused for years and generations in a single city eight miles long. It is impossible not to feel an ever fresh interest and even surprise in the solution of so marvellous a problem as this human ant-hill presents, and Londoners themselves, perhaps even more than their visitors, are wont to watch with pleasant wonder each occurrence which brings its magnitude to mind: the long quadruple train of splendid equipages filing through Hyde Park of a summer afternoon; the scene presented by the river at the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race; or the overwhelming spectacle of such crowds as greeted the Queen on her Jubilee.

The facility wherewith a busy-minded person, possessed of moderate pecuniary resources, can carry out almost any project in London, is another great source of the pleasure of town life. At every corner a cab, a hansom, an omnibus, an underground station, or a penny steamboat, is ready to convey him rapidly and securely to any part of the vast area; and a post-pillar or post-office or telegraph office, to forward his letter or card or telegram. He has acquired the privilege of Briareus for doing the work of a hundred hands, while the scores of penny and half-penny newspapers give him the benefit of the hundred eyes of Argus to see how to do it.

Not many people seem to notice wherein the last and greatest of London pleasures, that of London society, has its special attraction. It is contrasted with the very best society which the Country can ever afford, by offering the charm of the _imprévu_. There are always indefinite possibilities of the most delightful and interesting new acquaintances or of the renewal of old friendships in London: whereas even in the most brilliant circles in the country we are aware, before we enter a house, that our host’s choice of our fellow-guests must have lain within a very narrow and restricted circle, and that, if a stranger should happily have fallen from the skies into the neighborhood, his advent would have been proclaimed in our note of invitation. Now it is much more piquant to meet an agreeable person unexpectedly than by formal rendezvous; and, for that large proportion of mankind who are not particularly agreeable, it is still more essential that they should be presented freshly to our acquaintance. Other things being equal, a Stranger Bore is never half so great a bore as a Familiar Bore, of whose boredom we have already had intimate and painful experience. There yet hangs about the Stranger Bore somewhat of the mists of early day, and we are a little while in piercing them and thoroughly deciding that he _is_ a bore and nothing better. Often, indeed, for the first hour or two of acquaintanceship, he fails to reveal himself in his true colors, and makes remarks and tells anecdotes the dulness of which we shall only thoroughly recognize when we have heard them repeated on twenty other occasions. With our own Familiar Bore no illusion is possible. The moment we see him enter the room, we know everything that is going to be said for the rest of the evening, and Hope itself escapes out of Pandora’s box. Thus, even if there were proportionately as many bores in London as in the provinces, we should still, in town, enjoy a constant change of them, which would considerably lighten the burden. This, however, is very far from being the case; and the stupid wives of clever men and the dull husbands of clever wives, who alone smuggle into the inner coteries (few people having the effrontery to omit them in their invitations), are so far rubbed up and instructed in the best means of concealing their ignorance, silliness, or stupidity, that they are often quite harmless and inoffensive, and even qualified to shine with a mild reflected lustre in rural society in the autumn. Certain immutable laws made and provided by society against bores are brought sooner or later to their knowledge. They do not tell stories more than five minutes long in the narration, nor rehearse jokes till they fancy they can recall the point, nor entertain their friends by an abridgment of their own pedigree, or by a catalogue of the ages, names, heights, and attainments in the Latin grammar of their hopeful offspring. To all this sort of thing the miserable visitor in the country is liable to be subjected in every house the threshold of which he may venture to cross; for, even if his host and hostess be the most delightful people, they generally have some old uncle or aunt, or privileged and pompous neighbor, with whom nobody has ever dared to interfere in his ruthless exercise of the power to bore, and who will fasten on a new-comer just as mosquitoes do on fresh arrivals at a seaport after having tormented all the old inhabitants.

And if London Bores are as lions with drawn teeth and clipped claws, London pleasant people on the other hand are beyond any doubt the pleasantest in the world; more true and kind and less eaten up by vanity and egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile-minded as the very cleverest German.

Again, a great charm of London is that wealth is of so much less social weight there than anywhere else. It is singular what misapprehensions are current on this subject, and how apt are country people to say that money is everything in town, whereas the exact converse of the proposition is nearer the truth. In a country neighborhood, the man who lives in the largest house, drives the handsomest horses, and gives the most luxurious entertainments is allowed with little question to assume a prominent position, be he never so dull and never so vulgar; and, though respect will still be paid to well-born and well-bred people of diminished or narrow fortune, their position as regards their _nouveau riche_ neighbors is every year less dignified or agreeable. Quite on the contrary in town: with no income beyond what is needful to subscribe to a club and wear a good coat, a man may take his place (hundreds _do_ so take a place) in the most delightful circles, welcomed by all for his own worth or agreeability, for the very simple and sufficient reason that people like his society and want nothing more from him. In a city where there are ten thousand people ready to give expensive dinners, it is not the possession of money enough to entertain guests which can by itself make the owner an important personage, or cause the world to overlook the fact that he is a snob; nor will the lack of wealth prevent those thousands who are on the look-out only for a pleasant and brilliant companion from cultivating one, be he never so poor. The distinction between the rural and the urban way of viewing a new acquaintance as regards both birth and fortune is very curiously betrayed by the habit of townsfolk to ask simply “_what_ a man may be” (meaning, “Is he a lawyer, a _littérateur_, a politician, a clergyman,—above all, is he a pleasant fellow?”) and that of country gentry invariably to inquire, “_Who_ is he?” (meaning, Has he an estate, and is he related to the So-and-so’s of such a place?) It is not a little amusing sometimes to witness the discomfiture of both parties when a bland old gentleman is introduced in London to some man of world-wide celebrity, whose antecedents none of the company ever dreamed of investigating, and the squire courteously intimates, as the pleasantest thing he can think of to say, that he “used to meet often in the hunting field a gentleman of that name who had a fine place in Cheshire,” or that “he remembers a man who must surely have been his father—a gentleman-commoner of Christchurch.”

For those men and women—numerous enough in these days—who hold rather pronounced opinions of the sort not relished in country circles, who are heretics regarding the religious or political creed of their relatives and neighbors, London offers the real Broad Sanctuary, where they may rest in peace, and be no more looked upon as black sheep, suspicious and uncomfortable characters, the “gentleman who voted for Topsy Turvey at the last election,” or “the lady who doesn’t go to church on Sundays.” In town, not only will their errors be overlooked, but they will find scores of pleasant and reputable persons who share the worst of them and go a great deal further, and in whose society they will soon begin to feel themselves by comparison quite orthodox, and perhaps rather conservative characters.

And lastly, besides all the other advantages of London which I have recapitulated, there is one of which very little note is ever taken. If many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost by living there, many sharp and weary pains also therein find a strange anodyne. There is no time to be very unhappy in London. Past griefs are buried away under the surface, since we may not show them to the unsympathizing eyes around; and present cares and sorrows are driven into dark corners of the mind by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts which inevitably take their place. A man may feel the heart-ache in the country, and wander mourning by the solitary shore or amid the silent winter woods. But let him go, after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into the busy London streets, and be obliged to pick his way amid the crowd; to pass by a score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over by an omnibus, give a penny to a streetsweeper, push through the children looking at Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail a hansom and drive to his office or his chambers,—and at the end of the hour how many thoughts will he have given to his sorrow?

Before it has had time to sink into his mind, many days of similar fuss and business will have intervened; and by that time the edge of the grief will be dulled, and he will never experience it in its sharpness. Of the influence of this process, continually repeated, on the character, a good deal might be said; and there may be certainly room to doubt whether thus perpetually shirking all the more serious and solemn passages of life is conducive to the higher welfare. After we have suffered a good deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter every new experience and drink every cup to the dregs has been exchanged for the dread of strong emotions and the weariness of grief which belong to later years, there is an immense temptation to spare our own hearts as much as we can; and London offers the very easiest way, without any failure of kindness, duty, or decorum, to effect such an end. Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy and unselfish sorrow are not things to be lightly tampered with; and it is to be feared that the consequences of any conscious evasion of their claims must always be followed by that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our hearts and the disbelief in the sympathy of our neighbors. We have made love and friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes impossible to continue to believe they are real to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter be not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it merely come in the natural course of things that the business and variety of town life prevent us from dwelling on sorrows which cannot be lightened by our care, it seems a better alternative than the almost infinite durability and emphasis given to grief in the monotonous life of the country.

If these be the advantages of Town life, however, there are to be set against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse justly urges, half those quickly following sensations and ideas which constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights, forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there is no particularly fine scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the _country_ at all) the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, out of the same number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher’s shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer’s dray, a score of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in agony from their tight bearing-reins while the coachman flicks them with his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odors the great majority will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden with bones and offal, the insufferable effluvium of the city cook-shops; and last—not least—pervading every street and shop and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling and sight. The golden silence when broken at all is disturbed only by the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on the return home at evening, or the exquisite “sough” of the night wind as it passes over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town, we have the relentless roar and rattle of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally, to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the thin walls of our house, as if there were no partitions between us and the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the sufferings of the senses in London,—surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications of the flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place between our feelings and our intellect,—a sense, not of being tired and wanting rest, for that is the natural and wholesome alternative of all strong and sustained exercise of our faculties, but of being “like dumb driven cattle,” and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air, but our walks through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, but it does us little good; and sleep, but we waken up before half the night is past with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of engagements and duties that we cannot break loose. We can only break _down_; and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things has lasted a little too long.

Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why not try the golden mean, the compromise between town and country, to be found in some _rus in urbe_ in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa a little way further, at Richmond or Norwood or Wimbledon? I beg leave humbly to contend that the venerable Aristotelian “Meson” is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics, and that it will be generally found that people adopting the Half-way House system of lodgement will be disposed to repeat the celebrated Scotch ode with slight variations. “Their heart is”—in London; “their heart is not,”—by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. Their days are spent either in waiting at railway stations to go in or out of town, or in the yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who have promised to “give them a day,” and for whom they have provided the modern substitute for the fatted calf, but who, on the particular morning of their engagement, are sure to be swept off their consciences by an unexpected ticket for the opera, which they “could not enjoy if they had gone so far in the morning as dear Mr. A.’s delightful villa.” Of course, it is possible to live in the outer circle of real London, and have fresh air and comparative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who goes further afield, the ambitious soul who dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars to a paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion and despair. He tries to “make the best of both worlds,” and he gets the worst of both. The genuine Londoner considers his proffers of hospitality as an imposition; and the genuine country cousin is indignant, on accepting them, to find how far is his residence from the exhibitions and the shops. His trees are black, his roses cankered, and his soul imbittered by the defalcations of friends, the blunders and extortions of cabmen, and his own infructuous effort to be always in two places at once.

Nor is the second and, apparently, more facile resource of the tired Londoner—that of quartering himself on his kind country friends for his holidays—very much more successful. The country would indeed be delightful for our Christmas fortnight or our Easter or Whitsuntide week, if we were permitted to enjoy in it that repose we so urgently need and so fondly seek. We are quite enamoured, when we first turn our steps from the smoky city, with the trees and fields; and we enjoy indescribably our rides and drives and walks, the varied aspects of nature, and the beasts and birds wherewith we are surrounded. But one thing we have not bargained for, and that is—country Society. Of course we love our friends and relations in whose homes we are received with kindness and affection, whom we know to be the salt of the earth for goodness, and who love us enough to feel an interest even in our towniest gossip. But _their_ country friends, the neighboring gentlefolk, the clergyman’s wife, the family doctor, the people who are invariably invited to meet us at the long formal country dinner! This is the trial beneath which our new-found love of rural life is apt to succumb. Sir Cornewall Lewis’s too famous _dictum_ returns, slightly modified, to our memories—As “life would be tolerable but for its pleasures,” so the country would be enchanting, were it not for its society. Could we be allowed to live in the country, and see only our hosts, we should be as happy as kings and queens. But to fly, for the sake of rest and quiet, from the tables where we might have met some of the most brilliant men and women of the day, and then to find that we shall incur the disgrace of being unsociable curmudgeons if we object to spend the afternoon in playing tennis with the rector’s stupid daughters, and to dine afterwards at the house of a particularly dull and vulgar neighbor with whom we would fain avoid such acquaintance as may justify him in visiting us in town, this is surely an evil destiny! When, alas! will all the good and kind people who invite town friends to come and rest with them in the country forbear to make their acceptance the occasion for a round of rural dissipation, and believe that their weary brother would be only too glad, did civility permit, to inscribe on the door of his bedroom during his sojourn the affecting Italian epitaph, _Implora pace!_

The Country Mouse has naturally said as little as possible of the drawbacks of his favorite mode of existence,—metaphorically speaking, the dampness of his “Hollow Tree,” and its liability to be infested by Owls. It may be well to jot off a few of the less recognized offsets to the pleasures of rural life before listening to any eulogies thereof.

The real evil of country life I apprehend is this: the whole happiness or misery of it is so terribly dependent on the character of those with whom we live that, if we are not so fortunate as to have for our companions the best and dearest, wisest and pleasantest, of men and women (in which case we may be far happier than in any other life in the world), we are infinitely worse off than we can ever be in town. One, two, or perhaps three relatives and friends, who form our permanent housemates, make or mar all our days by their good or evil tempers, their agreeability or stupidity, their affection and confidence, or their dislike and jealousy. _Être avec les gens qu’on aime, cela suffit_, says Rousseau; and he speaks truth. But _être avec les gens qu’on n’aime pas_, and buried in a dull country house with them, without any prospect of change, is as bad as having a millstone tied round our necks and being drowned in the depth of the sea. In a town house, if the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, scold and wrangle, if the husband be a bear or the wife a shrew, there is always the refuge of the outer circle of acquaintances wherein cheer and comfort, or, at least, variety and relief, may be found. Reversing the pious Dr. Watts’s maxim, we cry,—

“Whatever brawls disturb the home,
Let peace be in the street.”

The Club is the shelter of henpecked man; a friend’s house, or Marshall and Snellgrove’s, the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the stormiest domestic debate, the advent of a visitor intervenes, throwing temporary oil on the waters, and compelling the belligerents to put off their quarrels and put on their smiles; and, when the unconscious peacemaker has departed, it is often found difficult, if not impossible, to take up the squabble just where it was left off. But there is no such luck for cross-grained people in country houses. Humboldt’s “Cosmos” contains several references to certain observations made by two gentlemen who passed a winter together on the inhospitable northern shores of Asia, and one of whom bore the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult to imagine any trial more severe than that of spending the six dark months of the year with Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea. But this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hundreds of unlucky English men and women spend their winters every year in country houses, limited, practically, to the society of a Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a burden by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, suspicion, jar, and jolt. As regards children or dependent people or the wives of despotic husbands, the case is often worse than this. By a terrible law of our nature, an unkindness, harshness, or injustice done once to any one has a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the victim (I have elsewhere called the passion _heteropathy_) and a restlessness to heap wrong on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to justify the first fault. Woe to the hapless stepchild or orphan nephew or penniless cousin, or helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under this terrible destiny in a country house where there are few eyes to witness the cruelty and no tongue bold enough to denounce it! The misery endured by such beings, the poor young souls which wither under the blight of the perpetual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers mortified and humiliated in their age, must be quite indescribable. Perhaps by no human act can truer charity be done than by resolutely affording moral support, if we can do no more, to such butts and victims; and, if it be possible, to take them altogether away out of their ill-omened conditions, and “deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary.” It is astonishing how much may be done by very humble spectators to put a check to evils like these, even by merely showing their own surprise and distress in witnessing them; and, on the contrary, how deplorably ready are nine people out of ten to fall in with the established prejudices and unkindnesses of every house they enter.

Very little of this kind of thing goes on in towns. People are too busy about their own affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all kinds are too much diffused among the innumerable men and women with whom they come in contact, to permit of concentrated dislike settling down on any inmate of their homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the country.

Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret of the difference of Town and Country life. All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are more are less dissipated in town, and concentrated and deepened in the country. Even a very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of hours of meals too late or too early for our health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a door below stairs perpetually banged, assumes a degree of importance when multiplied by the infinite number of times we expect to endure it in the limitless monotony of country life. Our nerves become in advance irritated by all we expect to go through in the future, and the consequence is that a degree of heat enters into family disputes about such matters which greatly amazes the parties concerned to remember when the wear and tear of travel or of town life have made the whole mode of existence in a country home seem a placid stream, with scarcely a pebble to stir a ripple.

And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees and with the work-day world far enough away behind the park palings so that the sound of wheels is never heard save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is the key-note of the life led by the men and women who have grown from childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in the green churchyard close by, where they shall “sleep with their fathers”? That “note” seems to me to be a peculiar sense—exceeding that of mere calmness—of _stability_, of a repose of which neither beginning nor end is in sight. Instead of a “changeful world,” this is to them a world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father’s marriage; another, tradition tells us, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls—no one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on the churchyard stones. The garden, with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers and clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with twice the perfume of other flowers; and, as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the twilight, the odors of the well-remembered bushes of lavender and jessamine and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were born) fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune. The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in to milking and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not of restlessness and turmoil like the noises of the town, but of calm and repose and the unchanging order of an “abode of ancient Peace.”

Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhyme. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long day, when the early laborer’s bell, and the gong at nine o’clock, and one o’clock, and seven o’clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals. And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the psalm of life. And yet again there are the half-yearly summer strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the family life oscillates like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which brings the return into the warm, oak-panelled library. To violate or alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life from the very beginning set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way; and he learns to think that “Order is Heaven’s first law,” and that change will never come over the placid tenor of existence. The difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels—thinking perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat—that Shelley’s dreamy philosophy must be true

“That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all bright shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”