I last posted nine breathless and breathtaking days ago, but I now find
myself briefly domiciled in Cambridge at the home of my wonderful niece
Elisabeth and her wonderful family.
And when I say wonderful, I mean wonderful. There is no greater act of ceremonial
hospitality known to the annals of anthropology than the loan of an iMac, which
I find at my disposal for the duration of a stint of child-minding. This is particularly light duty since
the children involved are for the moment all at their schools.
Only those who have travelled in Britain can fully appreciate how much
rural beauty has been preserved on a small, highly populated island. The protection of the environment has
been a feature of British customary law since times immemorial, certainly since
long before the concept of the “environment” even existed. One wise historian defined patriotism
and “the love of locality”; and Britain is a land of thousands of beloved
geographical nooks and crannies.
Despite its dramatic urbanization, Britain is still a land a
villages. The village, as it developed in medieval Britain, has practically no
American counterpart, even in New England, built by transplanted English
villagers. For the truth is that
you can scarcely build a village in less than a quarter of a millennium. American villages had hardly got
started when they were overwhelmed by the architectural chaos demanded by the
internal combustion engine.
Most of what I have been doing since my last post is visiting old
friends. Two of those visits—one
to Mayfield in Sussex, the other to Cardiff in Wales—I shall perhaps write about
on later occasions. They were
particularly intimate in character, and not the easy fare of a public
travelogue. But there has been
some upscale tourism as well. A week
ago today my friend John Smith drove me to Barnes station (beyond the river
from Hammersmith) whence I travelled quickly back to Waterloo Station in
London, changed trains after a brief wait, and an hour later found myself in
Peterfield, Hants., in serious Anglo-Saxon territory. Here I was met by my old friend John Filer who transported
me by Jaguar to his (relatively) new abode in West Meon. You have perhaps not heard of West
Meon? Well, it’s slightly to the
west of East Meon—the Meon being a sort of meandering creek that in those parts
passes for a river. It would be
rash to hazard a definite opinion as to which is the more gorgeous of the two
villages.
Chawton
But for us West Meon was mainly a base camp from which to set out on a
day’s culture-crawl, a visit to two famous literary abodes. The first of these was Chawton), the lovely old house in which Jane Austen
spent the final years of her miraculous writing career. The house is now a well-kept museum,
and it is possible to visit every room in it, many of them filled with
authentic relics of one of the
greatest novelists the world has ever known. In a small frame on one wall, in her own clear hand, was one
of several beautiful prayers she composed: Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to
deserve to be heard, to address thee with our Hearts, as with our lips. Thou
art every where present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of
this, teach us to fix our Thoughts on Thee, with Reverence and Devotion that we
pray not in vain.
Historians have
often taken a rather dim view of the state of English religion in the
eighteenth century. William Edward
Hartpole Lecky, one of the great historians of Britain in the eighteenth
century, opines that most Tories of the period probably “regarded the Church as
an admirable extension of the police force.” So it’s good to recall Jane Austen and some others like
her. One of these lived just down the
road a piece, at Selborne. The
Rev. Gilbert White was a somewhat eccentric country parson. When his early
academic ambitions foundered on the shoals of the eccentricity just alluded to,
White went to ground in the village of Selborne where he spent the rest of his
life in preaching, in pastoral work, and (above all) in recording his minute
observations of the natural world around him that later became famous as The Natural History of Selborne—the pioneering eco-classic, and still
the unsurpassed example of English language “nature writing”. His house, too, along with its splendid
gardens, has been successfully turned into a public museum. In it I spent two inspiring hours. Austen and White: an impressive cultural
double-header!
Gilbert White's house from the back lawn
Here are three
more photographs of beautiful things I saw during the week: (1) Saint Dunstan’s
Church, Mayfield, Sussex, where I worshipped last Sunday; (2) Daniel Gabriel
Rossetti’s triptych The Seed of David
in Llandaff Cathedral; (3) Renoir’s La
Parisienne, one of the most famous paintings in the National Museum of
Wales in Cardiff.
