The New Village

Introduction

Though he spent much of his adult life in London, which worked a profound mesmerism on the writer, Arthur Machen was raised in the quiet countryside of Wales, and never lost his love for rural places. As an actor, he toured and performed in many small English villages and later, as a reporter, he traveled to similar locales on assignment. The following article illustrates his interest in traditional rurality and beautiful architecture, and dislike for any innovation that could threaten this character.

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The New Village:
How Make It Delightful
by
Arthur Machen
June 4, 1919

No Two Cottages Alike: A 16^th Century Lesson

Some time ago, Mr. Arnold Bennett, writing on the housing question, dismissed with contempt one great objection to the poorer quarters of our modern towns; the objection founded on the deadly monotony of the streets, the interminable rows of houses in which each house is an exact replica of every other house. Mr. Bennett said, if I remember, that what was good enough for Eaton-square ought to be good enough for dwellers in humbler quarters, and that the instinct for living in a home exactly like everybody else’s house was a thoroughly sane and human instinct.

I noted this deliverance at the time with great interest, since it struck me as, on the whole, perhaps, the falsest thing that has ever been uttered. The chief delight of life is, no doubt, to be found in the noting of the infinite differences and irregularities of the universe, both spiritual and corporeal. Nay; it is possible that this desire of finding differences—or originalities, if you please—which is at the heart of every rational human being, with the constant satisfaction of this desire both in nature and in art, is rather the very root of all delight than a particular kind of delight.

All this came to my mind the other day when I read Sir Martin Conway’s plea in parliament for houses that should not only be healthy, but also pleasant to use. Sir Martin wishes the old cottages, which are as delightful to the eye as a tree or fern-covered wall or a flower in the hedge, to be restored; that is, made weatherproof and healthy and habitable. He pleaded also that the new cottages which are so urgently required be built as far as possible on the old lines.

Both his wishes, I hope, may be granted; but what I want to say is this: that the radical difference between the beauty of a country village in Warwickshire and the horror and despair of an industrial village in Durham or Glamorganshire or Lancashire is not chiefly to be sought in the fact that the figure of an old cottage is usually pleasant, while the figure of new cottage is usually detestable, both in form and in colour. There is this distinction, but there is the greater one. In Stratford-on-Avon, for example, there are many houses of the sixteenth century; and no two of them are exactly alike.

Here is the true horror; the denial in brick and slate, in door and window, in street after street, of that thirst for difference or originality which, as I have said, is the source and root of all human delight.

To realise the truth of this, it is only necessary to think of the picture that you consider the most beautiful in the world, and then imagine yourself entering the National Gallery and finding every room filled with minutely exact copies of this one picture. This would be a nightmare; and this being so when the object reproduced is beautiful, what is it when the object is a brick wall pierced with a door and three windows?

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The Weekly Machen

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