been communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it over
absolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and the
coal-owners. "'Tis impossible," they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn't
be workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A single
landlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke of
Westminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion;
he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up their
residence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them from
following their own trades or professions; he might even descend to such
petty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And what
would you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland,
again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tracts
into grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists from
walking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to
_that_. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish might
turn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection of
chapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed,
there would be nothing to prevent an American alien from buying up
square miles of purple heather in Scotland, and shutting the inhabitants
of these British Isles out of their own inheritance. Sites might be
refused for needful public purposes; fancy prices might be asked for
pure cupidity. Speculators would job land for the sake of unearned
increment; towns would have to grow as landlords willed, irrespective of
the wants or convenience of the community. Theoretically, I don't even
see that Lord Rothschild mightn't buy up the whole area of Middlesex,
and turn London into a Golden House of Nero. Your scheme can't be
worked. The anomalies are too obvious."
They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite have
foreseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. But
they urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; and
they urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existing
system exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks.
The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine how
its far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are not
the least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminster
or the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister power
of a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with the
horrors of a fuel famine. But they _are_ staggered by their bogey that
State ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobbery
and corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that the
dukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State should
get most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptly
embezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want of
imagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All your
income shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not to
yourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, are
afraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of it
be stolen from you or badly invested." How transparently absurd! We want
our income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losing
one per cent. of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up by
the dukes and the landlords.
It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate
the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't
picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men
with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very
advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_
see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty
of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and
practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from
selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves
that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really
menaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier even
they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community.
Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered
that life comes as a constant æsthetic delight to everybody. They know
that that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others could
picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that
it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow
evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right
action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic
conception of the feelings of others.
XX.
_ABOUT ABROAD._
The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in as
England. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They are
in every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen.
These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in their
tail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out now
with a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes are
much less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating.
Not that I am sanguine enough to expect I shall irritate Englishmen.
Your Englishman is far too cock-sure of the natural superiority of
Britons to Foreigners, the natural superiority of England to Abroad,
ever to be irritated by even the gentlest criticism. He accepts it all
with lordly indifference. He brushes it aside as the elephant might
brush aside the ineffective gadfly. No proboscis can pierce that
pachydermatous hide of his. If you praise him to his face, he accepts
your praise as his obvious due, with perfect composure and without the
slightest elation. If you blame him in aught, he sets it down to your
ignorance and mental inferiority. You say to him, "Oh, Englishman, you
are great; you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble;
you are generous; you are the prince among nations." He smiles a calm
smile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord,
if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I make
bold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligent
countenance." He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. He
responds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on my
immaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The sky is as clear there in
November as in August. All is pure and serene and beautiful." You
answer, "Oh, my lord, I admit the force of your profound reasoning. You
light the gas at ten in the morning only to show all the world you can
afford to burn it." At that, he gropes his way along Pall Mall to his
club, and tells the men he meets there how completely he silenced you.
And yet, My Lord Elephant, there is use in mosquitoes. Mr. Mattieu
Williams once discovered the final cause of fleas. Certain people, said
he, cannot be induced to employ the harmless necessary tub. For them,
Providence designed the lively flea. He compels them to scratch
themselves. By so doing they rouse the skin to action and get rid of
impurities. Now, this British use of the word Abroad is a smudge on the
face of the otherwise perfect Englishman. Perchance a mosquito-bite may
induce him to remove it with a little warm water and a cambric
pocket-handkerchief.
To most Englishmen, the world divides itself naturally into two unequal
and non-equivalent portions--Abroad and England. Of these two, Abroad is
much the larger country; but England, though smaller, is vastly more
important. Abroad is inhabited by Frenchmen and Germans, who speak their
own foolish and chattering languages. Part of it is likewise pervaded by
Chinamen, who wear pigtails; and the outlying districts belong to the
poor heathen, chiefly interesting as a field of missionary enterprise,
and a possible market for Manchester piece-goods. We sometimes invest
our money abroad, but then we are likely to get it swallowed up in
Mexicans or Egyptian Unified. If you ask most people what has become of
Tom, they will answer at once with the specific information, "Oh, Tom
has gone Abroad." I have one stereotyped rejoinder to an answer like
that. "What part of Abroad, please?" That usually stumps them. Abroad is
Abroad; and like the gentleman who was asked in examination to "name the
minor prophets," they decline to make invidious distinctions. It is
nothing to them whether he is tea-planting in the Himalayas, or
sheep-farming in Australia, or orange-growing in Florida, or ranching in
Colorado. If he is not in England, why then he is elsewhere; and
elsewhere is Abroad, one and indivisible.
In short, Abroad answers in space to that well-known and definite date,
the Olden Time, in chronology.
People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that";
"Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee for
breakfast." "Indeed," I love to answer; "I've never observed it myself
in Central Asia." 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. Nine
English people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they call
the Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France,
Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited by
Englishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday.
"I don't like Abroad," a lady once said to me on her return from Calais.
Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians.
In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the parts
nearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important are
those who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below the
horizon are hardly worth noticing.
Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? Would it
surprise you to learn that most people are poor benighted heathen, and
that, of the remainder, most people are Mahommedans, and that of the
Christians, who come next, most people are Roman Catholics, and that, of
the other Christian sects, most people belong to the Greek Church, and
that, last of all, we get Protestants, more particularly Anglicans,
Wesleyans, Baptists? Have you ever really realised the startling fact
that England is an island off the coast of Europe? that Europe is a
peninsula at the end of Asia? that France, Germany, Italy, are the
fringe of Russia? Have you ever really realised that the
English-speaking race lives mostly in America? that the country is
vastly more populous than London? that our class is the froth and the
scum of society? Think these things out, and try to measure them on the
globe. And when you speak of Abroad, do please specify what part of it.
Abroad is not all alike. There are differences between Poland, Peru, and
Palestine. What is true of France is not true of Fiji. Distinguish
carefully between Timbuctoo, Tobolsk, and Toledo.
It is not our insularity that makes us so insular. 'Tis a gift of the
gods, peculiar to Englishmen. The other inhabitants of these Isles of
Britain are comparatively cosmopolitan. The Scotchman goes everywhere;
the world is his oyster. Ireland is an island still more remote than
Great Britain; but the Irishman has never been so insular as the
English. I put that down in part to his Catholicism: his priests have
been wheels in a world-wide system; his relations have been with Douai,
St. Omer, and Rome; his bishops have gone pilgrimages and sat on Vatican
Councils; his kinsmen are the MacMahons in France, the O'Donnels in
Spain, the Taafes in Austria. Even in the days of the Regency this was
so: look at Lever and his heroes! When England drank port, County Clare
drank claret. But ever since the famine, Ireland has expanded. Every
Irishman has cousins in Canada, in Australia, in New York, in San
Francisco. The Empire is Irish, with the exception of India; and India,
of course, is a Scotch dependency. Irishmen and Scotchmen have no such
feelings about Abroad and its Foreigners as Londoners entertain. But
Englishmen never quite get over the sense that everybody must needs
divide the world into England and Elsewhere. To the end no Englishman
really grasps the fact that to Frenchmen and Germans he himself is a
foreigner. I have met John Bulls who had passed years in Italy, but who
spoke of the countrymen of Cæsar and Dante and Leonardo and Garibaldi
with the contemptuous toleration one might feel towards a child or an
Andaman Islander. These Italians could build Giotto's campanile; could
paint the Transfiguration; could carve the living marble on the tombs of
the Medici; could produce the Vita Nuova; could beget Galileo, Galvani,
Beccaria; but still--they were Foreigners. Providence in its wisdom has
decreed that they must live Abroad--just as it has decreed that a
comprehension of the decimal system and its own place in the world
should be limitations eternally imposed upon the English intellect.
XXI.
_WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL._
As I strolled across the moor this afternoon towards Waverley, I saw
Jones was planting out that bare hillside of his with Douglas pines and
Scotch firs and new strains of silver birches. They will improve the
landscape. And I thought as I scanned them, "How curious that most
people entirely overlook this constant betterment and beautifying of
England! You hear them talk much of the way bricks and mortar are
invading the country; you never hear anything of this slow and silent
process of planting and developing which has made England into the
prettiest and one of the most beautiful countries in Europe."
What's that you say? "Astonished to find I have a good word of any sort
to put in for England!" Why, dear me, how irrational you are! I just
_love_ England. Can any man with eyes in his head and a soul for beauty
do otherwise? England and Italy--there you have the two great glories of
Europe. Italy for towns, for art, for man's handicraft; England for
country, for nature, for green lanes and lush copses. Was it not one
that loved Italy well who sighed in Italy--
"Oh, to be in England now that April's there?"
And who that loves Italy, and knows England, too, does not echo
Browning's wish when April comes round again on dusty Tuscan hilltops?
At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned
for the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed!
Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, the
dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love every
flower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down,
rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one's
heartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can love England as those
love her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea to her
ivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, the
berries on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound
up in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth?
do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever
set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first
foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run
obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries,
for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and every
petal. You think because I dislike one squalid village--"The Wen," stout
English William Cobbett delighted to call it--I don't love England. You
think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I
don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English
tongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud
of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that
gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford,
Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we
hewn out of granite, to be cold before England?
Upon my soul, your unseasonable interruption has almost made me forget
what I was going to say; it has made me grow warm, and drop into poetry.
England, I take it, is certainly the prettiest country in Europe. It is
almost the most beautiful. I say "almost," because I bethink me of
Norway and Switzerland. I say "country," because I bethink me of Rome,
Venice, Florence. But, taking it as country, and as country alone,
nothing else approaches it. Have you ever thought why? Man made the
town, says the proverb, and God made the country. Not so in England.
There, man made the country, and beautified it exceedingly. In itself,
the land of south-eastern England is absolutely the same as the land of
Northern France--that hideous tract about Boulogne and Amiens which we
traverse in silence every time we run across by Calais to Paris. Chalk
and clay and sandstone stretch continuously under sea from Kent and
Sussex to Flanders and Picardy. The Channel burst through, and made the
Straits of Dover; but the land on either side was and still is
geologically and physically identical. What has made the difference?
Man, the planter and gardener. England is beautiful by copse and
hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows
interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep,
deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral
beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual
contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of
northern France--though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it.
Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery,
have made England what she is--the garden of Europe.
Of course there are parts of the country which owed, and still owe,
their beauty to their wildness--Dartmoor, Exmoor, the West Riding of
Yorkshire, the Surrey hills, the Peak in Derbyshire. Yet even these
depend more than you would believe, when you take them in detail, on the
art of the forester. The view from Leith Hill embraces John Evelyn's
woods at Wotton: the larches that cover one Jura-like gorge were set
there well within your and my memory. But elsewhere in England the hand
of man has done absolutely everything. The American, when he first
visits England, is charmed on his way up from Liverpool to London by the
exquisite air of antique cultivation and soft rural beauty. The very
sward is moss-like. Thoroughly wild country, indeed, unless bold and
mountainous, does not often please one. It is apt to be bare,
unattractive, and desolate. Witness the Veldt, the Steppes, the
prairies. You may go through miles and miles of the States and Canada,
where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. I
do not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like a
rose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with
wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even
our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game
preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our
moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way
is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassy
lawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare the
blank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France with
our Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of the
vast, the unspeakable difference.
And man has done it all. Alone he did it. Often as I take my walks
abroad--and when I say abroad I mean in England--I see men at work
dotting about exotics of variegated foliage on some barren hillside, and
I say to myself, "There, before my eyes, goes on the beautifying of
England." Thirty years ago, the North Downs near Dorking were one bare
stretch of white chalky sheep-walk; half of them still remain so; the
other half has been planted irregularly with copses and spinneys, which
serve to throw up and enhance the beauty of the unaltered intervals.
Beech and larch in autumn tints set off smooth patches of grass and
juniper. Within the last few years, the downs about Leatherhead have
been similarly diversified. Much of the loveliness of rural England is
due, one must frankly confess, to the big landlords. Though the great
houses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses have
cared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in the
meadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, their
foxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm is
due to individual small owners or occupiers. 'Tis they who have planted
the grounds about villa or cottage; they who have stocked the sweet old
gardens of yew and box, of hollyhock and peony; they who have given us
the careless rustic grace of the English village. Still, one way or
another, man has done it all, whether in grange or in manor-house, in
palatial estate or in labourer's holding. Look at the French or Belgian
hamlet by the side of the English one; look at the French or Belgian
farm by the side of our English wealth in wooded glen or sheltered
homestead. Bricks and mortar are _not_ covering the whole of England.
That is only true of the squalid purlieus and outliers of London,
whither Londoners gravitate by mutual attraction. If you _will_ go and
live in a dingy suburb, you can't reasonably complain that all the
world's suburban. Being the most cheerful of pessimists, a dweller in
the country all the days of my life, I have no hesitation in expressing
my profound conviction that within my memory more has been done to
beautify than to uglify England. Only, the beautification has been quiet
and unobtrusive, while the uglification has been obvious and
concentrated. It takes half a year to jerry-build a dingy street, but it
takes a decade for newly-planted trees to give the woodland air by
imperceptible stages to a stretch of country.
XXII.
_ANENT ART PRODUCTION._
Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town to
Sasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses that
top the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages,
it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evil
smells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church--a picturesquely
ugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church was
decorated by inglorious hands with very naïve and rudimentary frescoes.
The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the Four
Greater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing in
most wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa in
gorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all--just the common
everyday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out to
pattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as I
sat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into the
Borghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima,
it set me thinking. 'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothing
better to turn one's mind to.
We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything
on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive,
what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del
Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish
level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who
rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy
was capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, just
because in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-day
artisans in form and colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubs
as those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop.
We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We think
of it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariably
begins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief,
were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of church
decorators in infantile fresco.