Well, I Had To Sleep Somewhere, I Told Her:
Couldn't She Direct Me To A Cottage Where I Could Get
A bed?
No, she couldn't - it is always so; but after the third time of
asking she unfroze so far
As to say that perhaps they would
take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind
widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She
made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on
the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a
cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and
wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been
tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had
some curious ideas about the land.
That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and
I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to
stay. But how odd that my first thought of the man should
have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself
had sat on many a cold evening! And this was November the
second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his
first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first
date he gives in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted
with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with
the trees in their late autumn colours. Writing on November
2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly called Uphusband,
which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as one
could wish to meet with. However, Uphusband the people will
have it, and Uphusband it shall be for me." That is indeed
how he names it all through his book, after explaining that
"husband" is a corruption of Hurstbourne, and that there are
two Hurstbournes, this being the upper one.
I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at
the "George and Dragon," and was more than satisfied to pass
an evening without a book, sitting there alone listening to an
imaginary conversation between those two curious friends.
"Lord Carnarvon," says Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he
did not like my politics. But what did he mean by my
politics? I have no politics but such as he ought to like.
To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of
distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should
dislike my politics? However, dislike them or like them, to
them, to those very politics, the Lords themselves must come
at last."
Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he
spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being
the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written. And for
this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist,
where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence
than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment,
to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the
implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the
balance of every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole
work - to go from it to the simple vigorous unadorned talk of
Rural Rides. A classic, and as incongruous among classics as
a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would
appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress.
The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of
the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted
at all. Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and
bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have
seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer
friend. Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it: now he
would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he
had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn
colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him
of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that
the increase in food production did not keep pace with
increase of population; then a quieting down, a
breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs
at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until
politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the
glorious demagogue in his tantrums.
At eight o'clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed,
and early next morning write down what he had said to his
friend, or some of it, and send it off to be printed in his
paper. That, I take it, is how Rural Rides was written, and
that is why it seems so fresh to us to this day, and that to
take it up after other books is like going out from a
luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel
the wind and rain on one's face and see the green grass.
But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his
farmer friend. Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a
very fine character to have won the heart and influenced such
a person. Cobbett never loses an opportunity of vilifying the
parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established Church;
and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when
he refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite
capable of seeing the good that is in it.
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