The values of rural community in the great houses were doomed in the later years of the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding, the country house continued to provide something of a nostalgia for a number of writers- Galsworthy, Waugh, among others and even Wells.
Certainly, this kind of idealization of rural values is important because many writers have accepted its essential truth and have involved it, if only as a regret in their work.. The pervasive feeling was that material gain must be balanced against a perceptible spiritual loss, and it was the spiritual loss which received the literary attention.
And, for James- the country house, ‘the happy rural seat’, continued to embody certain important values even if he also glimpsed its less attractive side.
In James’s play, The High Bid, Mrs Gracedew pleads for the values of ‘the old human home’ of Covering End, the country house location of the play: ‘What...................is more precious than what Ages have slowly wrought?’. While Captain Yule, ‘the rabid Reformer’, proclaims ‘something else................... than vanity of old show-houses’. Thousands of people in England had no houses at all. There was an arising awareness of the ‘under privilege’. Symptomatically, the fashionable audience applauded the sentiments of Yule, and greeted those of Mrs Gracedew with silence.
Of the forty-five million inhabitants of the United Kingdom in 1911, nearly 80 per cent lived in England and Wales; and, of these, the majority came to live in urban districts.
The altered social emphases following on urbanization extended the encroachment of a changed pattern in social relations.
Furthermore, the development of American wheat prairies and the importation of refrigerated meat from Argentina meant that four millions of arable acres, seventeen million pounds of landed rents, and 150,000 agricultural labourers disappeared during a period of forty years.
Also, free trade, and the increasing urbanization it provoked, gorged the banks but left the rickyards bare.
‘Agriculture’, as Trevelyan has said, ‘is not one industry among many, but is a way of life, unique and irreplaceable in its human and spiritual values’.
The decline of the rural way of life has certainly been reflected in the tenuousness of this century in the veering of interest towards urban and cosmopolitan themes.