CORRESPONDENCE.
STOWE--PAST AND FUTURE. Me THE EDITOR Or THE " EPE'CIITOR."1 Still follow sense, of every art the soul, Parts answering parts shall glide into a whole: Spontaneous beauties all around advance, Start even from difficulty, strike front chance, Nature shall join you, time shall make it grow A. work to wonder at—perhaps a Stowe."—Pope.
Sia,—A work to wonder at—yes. But because, despite Pope's eulogy, sense did not surely guide the builders of Stowe, it seems to have lost its soul. If sense meant taste and talent, well and good, the place le a fit memorial to its several architects and their princely patrons. Display is not a vice, architecturally, it can indeed be a shining virtue, but it is now apt to embarrass us a little in a country house, post-war Englishmen rarely having either the means or the assurance to live as cere- moniously as their Augustan predecessors. Domestic pomp and circumstance are just now at something of a discount. Quite apart from the mere enlisting of " Forty maids with forty mops " and the paying of them, most of us would have doubts about the propriety of withdrawing so many from pro- ductive occupations to no other end than the promotion of our ease and elegance. Few of us could, at this day, have the hardihood to spend upon our establishment and our mere living the immense sums to which such a place as Stowe must inevitably commit us.
Our immediate and worst forebodings regarding Stowe have been most happily dispelled by the generous intervention of Mr. Shaw, of Beenham Court, who has not only bought " Lot 1 "—i.e., the house and inner park—and proposed to present his purchase to the nation, but who also hopes to secure an endowment on the property, so that the public funds may be relieved of part at least of the heavy burden of main- tenance. It is a gift that will surely be accepted as generously as it has been made. Stowe is a unique historical document that we cannot afford to lose, and, as such, the nation is its proper protector and custodian. "It is well to preserve England —it is better to have an England worth preserving," and with Stowe dismantled and destroyed England would be appre- ciably the poorer. To the cultivated Stowe has been familiar for two centuries—whether they have actually seen it or not. For generations it has been famous for its art treasures, its architecture, its park and pleasaunces, its avenues, temples, and monuments, and scarcely less so for those who enjoyed them—poets, wits, politicians, and the chief notables of two centuries. The history of the family itself covers half the world and nearly ten centuries of time. There is one of the Saxon progenitors of the Temples, Leofric, Earl of Chester and Mercia (d. 1057), who married Lady Godiva, sister of Thorold, Sheriff of Lincoln. There is the third Duke of Buckingham, Colonel of Yeomanry, Governor of Madras, and Chairman of the London and North-Western Railway. In between and scattered down the centuries are makers of England—for good or ill. There is Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, Field- Marshal, Courtier, and Regent, with the help of Vanburgh and Kent, chief embellisher of Stowe. There is Grenville, Prime Minister to George I.; William Pitt, Lord Chatham. George Temple, Marquis of Buckingham, Secretary of State and Lord- Lieutenant of Ireland; Lord Palmerston, and a whole gallery of minor magnates besides. If a great name is not included in the wide ramifications of the family itself, with its seven or eight hundred quarterings—there is more than a chance that you will find it in the visitors' book. A visit to Stowe was for long a stock item in the English tour of foreign Sovereigns, a distinction which is no doubt largely responsible for its present circumstances.
There were times, it would seem, when the entertainment of royalty and subsequent bankruptcy were regarded as natural cause and effect, and when a sufficiently glittering prelude made ruin, partial or complete, of relatively small account. Stowe has never shirked hospitality; it entertained, indeed, on so lavish a scale that there are few, if any, country houses in England that have as many associations with the great figures of the recent past. Certainly there are few places better worth while preserving or better suited for public delight and educa- tion. Properly arranged and wisely administered Stowe might become a great cultural centre, a place where the arts and the humanities as well as history might have an effective civilizing influence on a democracy that is in danger of missing just those things that made the old aristocracy its superiors.
Lord Lee in giving Chequers to the nation had an eye to its educative effect on future Prime Ministers, who may have been denied the bleseings of a liberal and cultivated environment. Possibly Mr. Shaw's intention is to do the same for our new democracy. It is a great idea, and if he is well advised he may yet invest Stowe with an influence over the destinies of his country to which its old intrigues and cabals will become as nothing. So shall it find its soul again!
"'Tie use alone that sanctifies expense, And splendour borrows all her rays from sense,"
wrote Pope, and failing that:—
"Another age shall see the golden ear Embrown the slope and nod on the parterre, Deep harvests bury all his pride had planned And laughing Cores re-assume the land."
Previous page
