Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth living in:
the former, because there Nature vindicates her rights, and triumphs
over the evils inflicted by the governments; the latter, because art
conquers nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of
comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Under an ash-colored sky, the
fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been
finished with a pencil instead of a plough. The solidity of the
structures that compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. Nothing
is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea itself, feel
the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful and ingenious
race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has found all the
capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the
byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new arts of intercourse
meet you everywhere; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all
that man wants is provided within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted
in every manner, the traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low,
over rivers and towns, through mountains, in tunnels of three or four
miles, at near twice the speed of our trains; and reads quietly the
_Times_ newspaper, which, by its immense correspondence and reporting,
seems to have machinized the rest of the world for his occasion.
The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England is
England. What are the elements of that power which the English hold
over other nations? If there be one test of national genius universally
accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful country in the
universe for the last millennium, that country is England.
A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual
nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw him to
Britain. In all that is done or begun by the Americans towards right
thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and
overpowering. The culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are
English thoughts and aims. A nation considerable for a thousand years
since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and
stamped the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its impress.
Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it less. The Russian in his
snows is aiming to be English. The Turk and Chinese also are making
awkward efforts to be English. The practical common-sense of modern
society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion,
take, is the natural genius of the British mind. The influence of
France is a constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to
the English for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the
continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less
propitious.
See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every biography,
play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners.
So that a sensible Englishman once said to me, "As long as you do not
grant us copyright, we shall have the teaching of you."
But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral estimate of
England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause which
has agitated the whole community, and on which everybody finds himself
an interested party. Officers, jurors, judges, have all taken sides.
England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence,
and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British
element, a serious man must aid himself, by comparing with it the
civilizations of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, the
Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of the
very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in independent
minds.
Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best time, as
some signs portend that it has reached its highest point. It is
observed that the English interest us a little less within a few years;
and hence the impression that the British power has culminated, is in
solstice, or already declining.
As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is no larger than the
State of Georgia,[1] this little land stretches by an illusion to the
dimensions of an empire. The innumerable details, the crowded succession
of towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated estates,
the number and power of the trades and guilds, the military strength and
splendor, the multitudes of rich and of remarkable people, the servants
and equipages,--all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to
pause, hide all boundaries, by the impression of magnificence and
endless wealth.
[1] Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the
area of Scotland.
I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that object
indispensably to be seen,--Yes, to see England well needs a hundred
years; for, what they told me was the merit of Sir John Soane's Museum,
in London,--that it was well packed and well saved,--is the merit of
England;--it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, with towns,
towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity-houses. In
the history of art, it is a long way from a cromlech to York minster;
yet all the intermediate steps may still be traced in this
all-preserving island.
The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer by many
degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there
is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter,
but such days as we have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature
which makes no exhausting demand on human strength, but allows the
attainment of the largest stature. Charles the Second said, "It invited
men abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day than another
country." Then England has all the materials of a working country
except wood. The constant rain--a rain with every tide, in some parts
of the island--keeps its multitude of rivers full, and brings
agricultural production up to the highest point. It has plenty of
water, of stone, of potter's clay, of coal, of salt, and of iron. The
land naturally abounds with game, immense heaths and downs are paved
with quails, grouse, and woodcock, and the shores are animated by
water-birds. The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there
are salmon for the rich, and sprats and herrings for the poor. In the
northern lochs, the herring are in innumerable shoals; at one season,
the country people say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts
fish.
The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its
sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes
to read and to write. Add the coal-smoke. In the manufacturing towns,
the fine soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of
black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many
plants, and corrode the monuments and buildings.
The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes
justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, "in a fine day,
looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one." A gentleman in
Liverpool told me that he found he could do without a fire in his parlor
about one day in the year. It is however pretended, that the enormous
consumption of coal in the island is also felt in modifying the general
climate.
Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship in
its shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have worked
it, or anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. Sir John
Herschel said, "London was the centre of the terrene globs." The
shopkeeping nation, to use a shop word, has a _good stand_. The old
Venetians pleased themselves with the flattery, that Venice was in 45
deg., midway between the poles and the line; as if that were an imperial
centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the navel of the
earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the earth to be an animal. The
Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric
chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same
thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the
cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic
Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the
inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New
Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious
scholars of all those capitals.
But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of
the modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil's famous line,
divided the poor Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring
of marriage with all nations. It is not down in the books,--it is
written only in the geologic strata,--that fortunate day when a wave of
the German Ocean burst the old isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to
France, and gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable sea-wall,
cutting off an island of eight hundred miles in length, with an
irregular breadth reaching to three hundred miles; a territory large
enough for independence enriched with every seed of national power, so
near, that it can see the harvests of the continent; and so far, that
who would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for
tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia lie, these Britons have
precisely the best commercial position in the whole planet, and are sure
of a market for all the goods they can manufacture. And to make these
advantages avail, the river Thames must dig its spacious outlet to the
sea from the heart of the kingdom, giving road and landing to
innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to trade, that a people so
skilful and sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, warehouses,
and lighters required. When James the First declared his purpose of
punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied, "that,
in removing his royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he would
leave them the Thames."
In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, having
plain, forest, marsh, river, sea-shore; mines in Cornwall; caves in
Matlock and Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious
sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales; and, in
Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, in which the lakes
and mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill the eye and touch the
imagination. It is a nation conveniently small. Fontenelle thought,
that nature had sometimes a little affectation; and there is such an
artificial completeness in this nation of artificers, as if there were a
design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature held
counsel with herself, and said, 'My Romans are gone. To build my new
empire, I will choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength.
I will not grudge a competition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore
buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest! For I have work that
requires the best will and sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes
shall blow, to keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin
the people from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall
give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their
feet, by poverty, border-wars, sea-faring, sea-risks, and the stimulus
of gain. An island,--but not so large, the people not so many as to
glut the great markets and depress one another, but proportioned to the
size of Europe and the continents.'
With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence radiate.
It is a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality, the
spiritual centrality, which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people.
"For the English nation, the best of them are in the centre of all
Christians, because they have interior intellectual light. This appears
conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light they derive from the
liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of thinking."