K NOLE
By V. SACKVILLE-WEST
IN times when the esteem of beauty and the humanities hides like an unhonoured nymph from the eyes of men ; times when expediency, convenience, and economy demand and hold our entire and sole consideration ; times when pressure compels us to forget that " Beauty, being the best of all we know, Sums up the unsearch- able and secret aims " ; times when beauty and all that stands for culture make no more impact on men's ears than the unreality of a dead language,—in such times it comes as a plumb luxury to indulge even for a moment in the contemplation of something se very different, something so unnecessary, so inordinate, prodigal, extravagant, and traditional, as the great houses of the past. Of the past they are indeed, not only in century but in spirit ; anachronisms both in time and in tenor. Yet in their growth they were organic, and in their creation they involved the com- pletion of many a human life, the life of the craftsman who laboured, the stone-mason, the carver, the carpenter, the builder of chimneys, and the life also of those who ordered and enjoyed, the obscure " Richards, Johns, Armes, Elizabeths, not one of whom has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have left this."
Thus wrote Virginia Woolf of those who had made Knole, and it seems to me, whose hothe it was and who am too greatly moved by the merest thought of it to write or think of it with sufficient objectivity, that she has put her fingers on the still living truth of this massive anachronism. They have left this. They, a living stream of men and women who laboured, suffered, loved, were ordinary, and cared for beauty and the gracious way. What, then, is this house which rose so gradually stone by stone quarried from its native county, and what is its significance either in the past or in the future? Is an agglomeration of stones a soul-less thing? Does it breathe, does it live, does it hold a spirit of its own even as every ship has her own temper? Bacon made the subtle and profound remark that there was " no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion," but this is not true of Knole, which in every sobriety of proportion proclaims that
straightforwardness of design and colour may also compose into a perfection, homogeneous though diversified, without oddity, as continuous as history itself. History indeed is implicit here, for behind the roughest earliest portion which served as a tithe-barn in the days of Magna Carta has grown up the vast structure which, after soaring to its peak of pomp as a palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a palac of the Crown, then became for many generations the home of an English family, and now in the days of democracy is about to pass into the possession of the nation for the enjoyment of the people.
There it lies, grey, silent and inscrutable. Few of its many chimney-stacks now send up their thread of smoke, for its popula- tion is diminished and this blue symbolic breath of its life has faded down with the death of the different mode of existence that went to its makbig. Great state was observed here once, when well over a hundred servants sat down daily to eat at long tables in the Great Hall ; the very list of their employments suggests the sound and activity which stirred within the walls of this self- contained encampment, this private burg: the armourer, the falconer, the slaughterman, the brewer, the baker, the. barber, the huntsman, the yeoman of the granary, the farrier, the grooms of the great horse and the stranger's horse, the men to carry wood, Solomon the bird-catcher, and many others besides, all came in from their bothies and outhouses to share in the communal meal with their master, his lady, their children, their guests, and the mob of indoor servants whose avocations ranged from His Lord- ship's Favourite through innumerable pages, attendants, grooms and yeomen of various chambers, scriveners, pantrymen, maids, clerks of the kitchen and the buttery, down to the humble Grace Robinson and John Morockoe, both blackamoors. Some of their names, I think, would have pleased Thomas Hardy: Penelope Tutty, Faith Husband, and Widow Ben among the women ; and among the men Paschal Beard, Moses Shonk, Diggory Dyer and Marfidy Snipt.
Guests came and went ; standing out as more illustrious above this contributory rabble, John Donne, who preached sermons in Archbishop Cranmer's chapel ; John Dryden, who profited feoni the munificence of the master of Knole, himself a poet ; Matthew Prior, who owed his education to that same master ; meeting together and talking and drinking in a room described by Horace Walpole as " a chamber of parts and players, which is proper enough in that house." Guests came and went ; and now they have for ever gone. They will come no more, neither they nor their present counterparts, and that which was a living thing with its granaries, its chapel, its larders and stillrooms, its ruffle and talk, the hooves ringing on the stable-yard, the rhymesters cadging in the Poets' Parlour, the long garden-paths made for twilight pacing and deliberation, will change over into some new transforma- tion of itself, but what this transmigration of soul will bring about we cannot tell. It remains to be seen. As birth is a process of pain, so must rebirth be a process of pain also ; one is prepared to accept the pain, in the hope that the travail will suscitate some Phoenix of future value.
Poets will no longer have to depend for their education and opportunity on the whim of a patron, nor will the privilege of beauty be reserved for the few who can afford to indulge it But what of those to whom these things belong by birthright, and who belonged to the service of these things by tradition? Shall they weep over the passing, or shall they cultivaw the philosophy that the old world must with cheerfulness relinquish its heritage into the hands of the new? Do they not deserve a word, if only a word of valediction? It is a small thing, perhaps ; only a single feather observed falling from the too gorgeous plumage of the discarded past ; but to them it is the sacrifice, the symbol, "of some- thing perhaps too profoundly dear. For their comfort, let us suggest that some of the grace of another age may seep into the consciousness of the million wandering freely among these ancient courts, -and that the new young Richards, Johns, Alines, and Elizabeths (who also are a part of continuous history) may find enrichment in the gift of something so old, so courteous, and so lovely.
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