English country house

“ We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded{142} depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. ”

“ That American house-building of the last fifty years is out of joint, requires no better proof than that the 21 main improvements which have been applied to our rural architecture, are in the English style of farm and country houses of two or three centuries ago; so, in that particular, we acknowledge the better taste and judgment of our ancestors. True, modern luxury, and in some particulars, modern improvement has made obsolete, if not absurd, many things considered indispensable in a ruder age. ”

“ From the edges of the cañon, purple heather and ling stretch away on either side to the most distant horizons, and one can walk for miles in almost any direction without encountering a human being and rarely a house of any description. The few cottages that now stand in lonely isolation in different parts of the moors have only made their appearance since the Enclosures Act, so that before that time these moors must have been one of the most extensive stretches of uninhabited country in England. ”

“ As pointed out in the last issue in speaking of the country houses of France, the impulse to associate in communities has been a stronger power in moulding the domestic architecture of France than the desire to have an independent home. In England the isolated house is the type. The social unit is the family, and consequently the architectural unit is the “home.” The English character has given to the family an independence and privacy, a permanence and sacredness which are all reflected in the English houses, and it is this which makes them homes. ”

“ The habitations of the Americans who have settled in the British colonies are generally better constructed than those of any other settlers who have not had the advantage of many years’ residence in the country. But though the house of the English emigrant, from his imperfect knowledge of the use of edge tools, is usually a very clumsy affair, the peculiar neatness and comfort which prevails within doors more than compensates for the want of mechanical skill displayed without. ”

“ There is not a more beautiful sight in the world than that of our English cottages, in those parts of the country where the violent changes of the times have not been so sensibly felt. Where manufactures have not introduced their red, staring, bald brick-houses, and what is worse, their beershops and demoralization: where, in fact, a more primitive simplicity remains. ”

“ The grounds of the Dingle embrace three cottages; those of the two Messrs. Cropper, and that of a son, who is married to a daughter of Dr. Arnold. I rather think this way of relatives living together is more common here in England than it is in America; and there is more idea of home permanence connected with the family dwelling-place than with us, where the country is so wide, and causes of change and removal so frequent. A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. ”

“ They are the towns which they admire: to them the country is merely useful. But in England everybody loves the country; even those who cultivate it. The most humble cottage is a proof of it. The taste which rarely distinguishes the architecture of the English towns, is reserved, I think, for the country houses. ”

“ The whole group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were spread landscapes of the finished and serene character peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after a thunder storm in America. ”

“ Another noticeable contrast to England is the wooden houses, that look so temporary as compared with the brick and stone of the old country. The absence of the trim gardens of English rural districts also strikes a stranger, as do the curious and ragged fences that take the place of the English hedge-rows. ”

“ There are, I imagine, few places in England where the humble homes of the people have so great a charm. Undoubtedly they are darker inside, and not so convenient to live in as the modern box-shaped, red-brick, slate-roofed cottages, which have spread a wave of ugliness over the country ”

“ For the average American the best types of country house to choose from are the smaller Tudor manor-houses, Italian villas, Georgian architecture in England, and our own Colonial style which of course was founded on the Georgian. ”

“ The beauty of English landscape is the beauty of “landlords’ country”—the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a kind of stately splendour. ”

“ The road wound always to new beauties. The way led by old houses and picturesque barns, shaded by lofty trees, past fertile farms and modern dwellings, bristling with gables and rising [140] among green, smooth-shaven lawns. A season earlier I had spent in England; and when Weston was reached, with its quaint stone church, the thought arose of those village churches of Old England with their ivy-covered towers, and, all about, God’s acre.
But here no manor-house rose proudly above the trees, no coat-of-arms was sculptured over the cottage doors. ”

“ And oddly enough, rather perhaps as we should expect it, in not one, but in every respect, this French village is the exact opposite of its English counterpart. In England every tenant of a cottage pays rent, there, not an inhabitant, however poor, but sits under his own vine and his own fig-tree. In England the farm-house faces the road and the premises lie behind. Here manure-heap, granary and pig styes open on the highway, the dwellings being at the back. In England a man’s home, called his castle, is no more defended than the Bedouin’s tent. ”

“ There are thousands of them inhabited by woodmen, labourers, or keepers, that are fit dwellings for the truest poet that ever lived; and it is the ideal of these picturesque and peace-breathing English cottages that has given origin to some of the sweetest paradises in the world—the cottages of the wealthy and the tasteful. What most lovely creations of this description now abound in the finest parts of England, with their delicious shrubberies, velvet lawns, hidden walks, and rustic garden-huts; their little paddocks lying amid woods, and skirted with waters ”

“ There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers ”

“ Leaving with regret the veranda which commanded so enchanting a foreground of flowers, rare shrubbery, and bearded live oaks, with each graceful sylvan outline distinctly penciled upon the waters of the river, we enter the house, and are reminded by its low-browed, old-fashioned rooms, of the country houses yet to be found in parts of Ireland or the Scottish border, with additions made by the luxury and love of foreign travel of more than one generation of educated Southern planters. ”

“ As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. ”

“ Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. ”

“ All books of travels on English ground are full of them. Snugly sheltered in its bower of apple trees, or more stately group of walnuts, approachable only by its rustic stairs, or dotted at neighborly distances along the straggling village, with its trim garden of lavender and wall flowers, seen through the wicket gate or over the privet hedge, the English cottage, above or below, near or in the distance, was alike the delight and envy of the traveler, the theme of the journalist and the poet. ”

“ Neither in England nor anywhere else in western Europe have I ever met with a village of the New England type. In English villages one finds small houses closely crowded together, sometimes in blocks of ten or a dozen, and inhabited by people belonging to the lower orders of society; while the fine houses of gentlemen stand quite apart in the country, perhaps out of sight of one another, and surrounded by very extensive grounds. The origin of the village, in a mere aggregation of tenants of the lord of the manor, is thus vividly suggested. ”

“ The poorest houses are never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch Highlands. The picturesque and cosy cottage at Shottery, where Shakespeare used to do his courting, will serve very well as a sample of the humblest sort of old-fashioned New England farm-house. But most of the dwellings in the village come between these extremes. They are plain neat wooden houses, in capaciousness more like villas than cottages. A New England village street, laid out in this way, is usually very picturesque and beautiful, and it is highly characteristic. ”

“ Still more peculiar is the rural scenery of England, in the various and beautiful landscape it affords—in the undulating surface—the greenness of the enclosures—the hamlets and country churches—and the farm houses and cottages dispersed over the face of the country, instead of being congregated into villages, as in France and Italy. ”

“ England is distinctively a country of homes, pretty, little, humble homes as well as stately palaces and castles, homes well made of stone or brick for the most part, and clad with ivy and roses. Who would not be proud to have had such a home as Ann Hathaway's humble cottage or one of the little huts in the Lake District? The homes of America are often more palatial, especially in small cities, but the use of wood in America makes them less substantial than the slate-and-brick houses of England. ”

“ The walls were raised, and an upper room was formed under the roof for sleeping accommodation. There are many old farmhouses throughout the country, once manor-houses, which retain in spite of subsequent alterations the distinguishing features of this mediaeval style of architecture.
The nobles built their castles as late as the fourteenth century; but under the Tudor monarchs, when the government of the country was strong and more settled, fortified dwellings were deemed no longer necessary, and the great landowners built splendid country houses. ”

“ Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right side fringed by hedgerows and trees, with cottages and farmhouses irregularly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks; the left, prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and islands of cottages and cottage-gardens, and sinking gradually down to cornfields and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills. ”

“ The French cottage, therefore, is just such as we should have expected from the disposition of its inhabitants: its massive windows, its broken ornaments, its whole air and appearance, all tell the same tale of venerable age, respected and preserved, till at last its dilapidation wears an appearance of neglect. Again, the Englishman will sacrifice everything to comfort, and will not only take great pains to secure it, but he has generally also the power of doing so; for the English peasant is, on the average, wealthier than the French. ”

“ With their gable roofs of cosy thatch or of red tiles bright with moss and lichen, with their ornamented chimneys and walls of plaster laced and interlaced with heavy beams, the Cottage Homes of England, peeping out from the green lanes of Kent, or fringing the Surrey commons, or nestling in the wooded vales of Sussex, are always picturesque. They are, moreover, the one form of human habitation always in harmony with the scenery around them. ”