More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday, a
friend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded with
half-packed luggage.
“You seem to be off on your travels,” he said. “Where are you going?”
With a strap between my teeth I replied, “To Battersea.”
“The wit of your remark,” he said, “wholly escapes me.”
“I am going to Battersea,” I repeated, “to Battersea viâ Paris, Belfort,
Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It contained
simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once
more I find Battersea. Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise,
somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little
island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and great
white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotch
travellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumour
that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called
Battersea.”
“I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you,” said my friend, with an air
of intellectual comparison, “that this is Battersea?”
“It is quite unnecessary,” I said, “and it is spiritually untrue. I
cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I
cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep
and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is
to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real
pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see
France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany?
I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am
seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on
foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a
foreign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and
heavy, and that if you utter that word ‘paradox’ I shall hurl it at your
head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is
not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to
go away from it.”
But when, after only a month’s travelling, I did come back to England, I
was startled to find that I had told the exact truth. England did break
on me at once beautifully new and beautifully old. To land at Dover is
the right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed are
right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which
are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the
rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with
whom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though for
another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm in that
simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans, who are the most
idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the
idealist can easily become the idolator. And the American has become
so idealistic that he even idealises money. But (to quote a very able
writer of American short stories) that is another story.
“I have never been in England before,” said the American lady, “yet
it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it for a long
time.”
“So you have,” I said; “you have been away for three hundred years.”
“What a lot of ivy you have,” she said. “It covers the churches and
it buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it grow like
that.”
“I am interested to hear it,” I replied, “for I am making a little list
of all the things that are really better in England. Even a month on
the Continent, combined with intelligence, will teach you that there are
many things that are better abroad. All the things that the DAILY MAIL
calls English are better abroad. But there are things entirely English
and entirely good. Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front
gardens, and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom
cabs, and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a
German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts
upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and
the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital
letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did write
Shakespeare.”
“I cannot look at anything but the ivy,” she said, “it looks so
comfortable.”
While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many weeks
an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour in which
he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because it
represented something in the nature of permanent public opinion of
England, above the ebb and flow of the parties. Now Mr. Balfour is a
perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his own point of view, thinks
long and seriously about the public needs, and he is, moreover, a man
of entirely exceptionable intellectual power. But alas, in spite of
all this, when I had read that speech I thought with a heavy heart that
there was one more thing that I had to add to the list of the specially
English things, such as kippers and cricket; I had to add the specially
English kind of humbug. In France things are attacked and defended for
what they are. The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic,
and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended because
it is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican. But here is the
ablest of English politicians consoling everybody by telling them that
the House of Lords is not really the House of Lords, but something quite
different, that the foolish accidental peers whom he meets every night
are in some mysterious way experts upon the psychology of the democracy;
that if you want to know what the very poor want you must ask the very
rich, and that if you want the truth about Hoxton, you must ask for it
at Hatfield. If the Conservative defender of the House of Lords were
a logical French politician he would simply be a liar. But being an
English politician he is simply a poet. The English love of believing
that all is as it should be, the English optimism combined with the
strong English imagination, is too much even for the obvious facts. In a
cold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly all the
Lords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery. He knows, and
(as Mr. Belloc excellently said) everybody in Parliament knows the very
names of the peers who have purchased their peerages. But the glamour
of comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself and reassuring others, is
too strong for this original knowledge; at last it fades from him,
and he sincerely and earnestly calls on Englishmen to join with him in
admiring an august and public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgotten
that the Senate really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised;
and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled.
“Your ivy is so beautifully soft and thick,” said the American lady, “it
seems to cover almost everything. It must be the most poetical thing in
England.”
“It is very beautiful,” I said, “and, as you say, it is very English.
Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England, wrote one of
his rare poems about the beauty of ivy. Yes, by all means let us admire
the ivy, so deep, so warm, so full of a genial gloom and a grotesque
tenderness. Let us admire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercy
that it may not kill the tree.”