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Page 55
Well may we feel the perplexity and sickness of heart, which some
day the whole world shall feel to find its hopes disappointed, if we
do not look to it; for this is not what civilisation looked for: a
new house added to the old village, where is the harm of that?
Should it not have been a gain and not a loss; a sign of growth and
prosperity which should have rejoiced the eye of an old friend? a
new family come in health and hope to share the modest pleasures and
labours of the place we loved; that should have been no grief, but a
fresh pleasure to us.
Yes, and time was that it would have been so; the new house indeed
would have taken away a little piece of the flowery green sward, a
few yards of the teeming hedge-row; but a new order, a new beauty
would have taken the place of the old: the very flowers of the
field would have but given place to flowers fashioned by man's hand
and mind: the hedge-row oak would have blossomed into fresh beauty
in roof-tree and lintel and door-post: and though the new house
would have looked young and trim beside the older houses and the
ancient church; ancient even in those days; yet it would have a
piece of history for the time to come, and its dear and dainty
cream-white walls would have been a genuine link among the
numberless links of that long chain, whose beginnings we know not
of, but on whose mighty length even the many-pillared garth of
Pallas, and the stately dome of the Eternal Wisdom, are but single
links, wondrous and resplendent though they be.
Such I say can a new house be, such it has been: for 'tis no ideal
house I am thinking of: no rare marvel of art, of which but few can
ever be vouchsafed to the best times and countries; no palace
either, not even a manor-house, but a yeoman's steading at grandest,
or even his shepherd's cottage: there they stand at this day,
dozens of them yet, in some parts of England: such an one, and of
the smallest, is before my eyes as I speak to you, standing by the
roadside on one of the western slopes of the Cotswolds: the tops of
the great trees near it can see a long way off the mountains of the
Welsh border, and between a great county of hill, and waving
woodland, and meadow and plain where lies hidden many a famous
battlefield of our stout forefathers: there to the right a wavering
patch of blue is the smoke of Worcester town, but Evesham smoke,
though near, is unseen, so small it is: then a long line of haze
just traceable shows where the Avon wends its way thence towards
Severn, till Bredon Hill hides the sight both of it and Tewkesbury
smoke: just below on either side the Broadway lie the grey houses
of the village street ending with a lovely house of the fourteenth
century; above the road winds serpentine up the steep hill-side,
whose crest looking westward sees the glorious map I have been
telling of spread before it, but eastward strains to look on
Oxfordshire, and thence all waters run towards Thames: all about
lie the sunny slopes, lovely of outline, flowery and sweetly
grassed, dotted with the best-grown and most graceful of trees:
'tis a beautiful countryside indeed, not undignified, not
unromantic, but most familiar.
And there stands the little house that was new once, a labourer's
cottage built of the Cotswold limestone, and grown now, walls and
roof, a lovely warm grey, though it was creamy white in its earliest
day; no line of it could ever have marred the Cotswold beauty;
everything about it is solid and well wrought: it is skilfully
planned and well proportioned: there is a little sharp and delicate
carving about its arched doorway, and every part of it is well cared
for: 'tis in fact beautiful, a work of art and a piece of nature--
no less: there is no man who could have done it better considering
its use and its place.
Who built it then? No strange race of men, but just the mason of
Broadway village: even such a man as is now running up down yonder
three or four cottages of the wretched type we know too well: nor
did he get an architect from London, or even Worcester, to design
it: I believe 'tis but two hundred years old, and at that time,
though beauty still lingered among the peasants' houses, your
learned architects were building houses for the high gentry that
were ugly enough, though solid and well built; nor are its materials
far-fetched; from the neighbouring field came its walling stones;
and at the top of the hill they are quarrying now as good freestone
as ever.
No, there was no effort or wonder about it when it was built, though
its beauty makes it strange now.
And are you contented that we should lose all this; this simple,
harmless beauty that was no hindrance or trouble to any man, and
that added to the natural beauty of the earth instead of marring it?
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