In selecting these idola—The Country House, Coketown, the Megalopolis—I have been forced to gauge their strength and test their quality very largely by their actual results in the workaday world, and it is a little hard to purify them from the various institutions, old and new, in which they are mixt. Yet with all this taint of actuality, these idola are scarcely as credible as the Republic and it will help matters a little to realize that we are still within the province of utopia, and may exercise all the utopian privileges.
II
To understand the utopia of the Country House we must jump back a few centuries in history.
Anyone who has ranged through the European castles that were built before the fourteenth century will realize that they were no more built for comfort than is a modern battleship. They were essentially garrisons of armed men whose main occupation was theft, violence, and murder; and every feature of their environment reflected the necessities of their life. These castles would be found beetling a cliff or a steep hill; their walls and their buttresses would be made of huge, rough hewn stones; their living arrangements would resemble those of a barracks with an almost complete lack of what we now regard as the normal decencies and privacies, except possibly for the lord and his lady; and the life of these feudal bands was necessarily a crude and limited one.
Up to the fourteenth century in Western Europe the little fortified town, or the unfortified town that lay beneath the protection of a garrison on a hill, was the only other social unit that competed with the even more limited horizons of the peasant’s village, or with the spacious claims for the Here and the Hereafter which were put forward by the Roman Church. To dream of huge metropolises and farflung armies and food brought from the ends of the earth would have been wilder in those days than anything More pictured in his Utopia.
During the fifteenth century in England, and in other parts of Europe the same thing seems to have happened sooner or later, this life of agriculture and warfare and petty trade was upset: the feudal power of the reigning nobles was concentrated in the hands of a supreme lord, the King; and the King and his archives and his court settled in the National Capital, instead of moving about from place to place in the troubled realm. The territories of the feudal lords ceased to be dispersed; their possessions were confined more and more within what were called national boundaries; and instead of remaining in their castles the great lords gave up their crude, barbaric ways, and went up to the capital to be civilized. In the course of time money took the place of direct tribute; instead of receiving wheat and eggs and labor, the lord came into possession of a rent which could be figured in pence and pounds; a rent which could be transferred to the new trading cities for the goods which the rest of the world had for sale. There is a fascinating picture of this change in W. J. Ashley’s Economic History; and the old life itself is outlined, with a wealth of significant detail, in J. S. Fletcher’s Memorials of a Yorkshire Parish.
At the same time that this change was taking place in the physical life of Western Europe, a corresponding change was taking place in the domain of culture. Digging about the ruins of Rome and other cities, the men of the late Middle Age discovered the remains of a great and opulent civilization; and exploring the manuscripts and printed books which were getting into general circulation, they found themselves face to face with strange conceptions of life, with habits of refinement, ease, and sensuous luxury which the hard life of the camp and the castle had never really permitted. There followed a reaction against their old life which was little less than a revulsion; and in that reaction two great institutions fell out of fashion. Men ceased to build castles to protect themselves against physical dangers; and they left off entering monasteries in order to fortify their souls for the Hereafter. Both the spiritual and the temporal life began to shift to a new institution, the Country House. The idolum of the Country House drew together and coalesced; and as a familiar symbol of this change the colleges at Oxford which date from the Renaissance can scarcely be distinguished in architectural detail from the palaces which the aristocracy were building in the same period; while our banks and our political edifices to this day bear almost universally the stamp of that Roman and Grecian litter which men discovered on the outskirts of the medieval city.
III
We do not know the Country House until we realize, to begin with, what its physical characteristics are like. There are a great many descriptions which the reader may consult if he does not happen to live in the neighborhood of a great Country House: but perhaps instead of examining the contemporary Country House it will be well to go back to its beginnings, and see how it was pictured in all its encrusted splendor at the first movement of the Renaissance—in the setting which François Rabelais, in one of the few downright serious passages in his great work, Gargantua, sought to provide for the good life.
Gargantua purposes to build a new Abbey which he calls the Abbey of Thélème. This Abbey is to be in every respect what the medieval Abbey was not. Hence to begin with, the Abbey, unlike the castle, is to lie in the midst of the open
