Helen Allingham & Steward Dick - On Cottages in General （Abridged）汉译

For it is not the large houses that live in the memory of the visitor. He goes through them as a matter of duty, and forgets about them as a matter of course. The pictures that linger in his mind，called up in a moment by such sensations as the smell of roses or of new-mown hay，are of a simpler nature. A little cottage nestling amidst the wayside trees, the blue smoke curling up against the green, and a bower of roses round the door; or perhaps a village street of which the name has been long forgotten, with its rambling old inn, and, a little distance away, the hoary, grey church-tower in its township of tombstones—these are the pictures of old England that are carried away to other climes. And it is the cottage, more homely than the inn, more sacred than the church, that we remember best.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Such places have no history at all, their life has not been set in the public eye, and they have always been so wrapt up in their own affairs, that they have never noticed how time is passing, and so they have brought down into the life of today the traditions of two or three hundred years ago.

But though they do not pose, those quiet places, yet it is through them that the deep, main current of English life has flowed. For it is a shallow theory that views history as the annals of a court, or the record of the lives of a few famous men. Doubtless such have their significance, but it is easy to overrate their importance, and they afford but little clue to the life of the people, which is the real history of the country. And until recent days it was not through the cities that this main stream flowed, but through innumerable little country towns and villages.

Washington Irving grasped this fact nearly a hundred years ago when he wrote: “The stranger who would form a correct opinion of English character must go forth into the country. He must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farmhouses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens, along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches, attend wakes and fairs and other rural festivals, and cope with the people in all their conditions and all their habits and humors.

And these little villages and hamlets are planted all over England, sometimes close together, sometimes more widely spread, but seldom more than a mile or two apart. Written history may have nothing to say regarding them, but they have helped to make history. They have gathered few legends beyond those which time has written on the walls in weather stains and grey lichen, but the men who were born in those humble cottages have wrought in other lands legends that live today. Their cosy homes were bit newly built when the desperate tides of the civil war surged round them. Half a century later they formed part of the army which “swore terribly in Flanders,” and in fifty years more they were laying the foundations our great Indian empire. Then the arid fields of Spain saw them as they followed the Iron Duke through the dogged years of the Peninsular war, and they took part in his crowning triumph at Waterloo. Later still, India knew them once more, and the snowy trenches of the Crimea, and but yesterday Afghanistan, Egypt, and South Africa called them forth again.

And all the while that those truant birds upheld the name of England abroad, leaving their bones in many lands, their brothers and sisters carried forward the old traditions at home, living their busy, unobtrusive, useful lives, and lying down to rest at last in the old familiar churchyard. And after all, this last is the real life of England, for the sake of which those wars were waged and bloody battles fought. It is the productive life which brings wealth and prosperity and happiness to a nation, and lays the foundation of all that is its honor and its pride.

There is nothing obtrusive about the old cottages. They do not dominate the landscape, but are content to be part of it, and to pass unnoticed unless one looks specially for their homely beauties. The modern house, on the other hand, makes a bid for your notice. It is built on high ground, commands a wide range of country, and is seen from far and wide. But the old cottage prefers to nestle snugly in shady valleys. The trees grow closely about it in an intimate, familiar way, and at a little distance only the wreath of curling smoke tells of its presence.

Indeed the old cottage has always been something so very close and so familiar to us, that its charms have been almost entirely overlooked, and it is only of recent years, when fast falling into decay, that it has formed a theme for pen and pencil. Truth to tell, of late years a change has come over England. The life that the old cottage typifies is now a thing of the past, and is daily fading more and more into the distance. Twentieth-century England, the England of the railway, the telegraph, and the motorcar, is not the England of these old cottages. Our point of view has changed. We no longer see the old homely life from within, but from the outside. But the commonplace of yesterday becomes the poetry of today, such a glamour does the magician. Time cast over things, and the life becomes ever more and more attractive as it slips away from us, and we watch it disappear with regretful and kindly eyes.