It is characteristic of nature in England that most of the stone with
which the old bridges, churches, and cathedrals are built is so soft
that people carve their initials in it with their jack-knives, as we do
in the bark of a tree or in a piece of pine timber. At Stratford a card
has been posted upon the outside of the old church, imploring visitors
to refrain from this barbarous practice. One sees names and dates there
more than a century old. Often, in leaning over the parapets of the
bridges along the highways, I would find them covered with letters and
figures. Tourists have made such havoc chipping off fragments from the
old Brig o' Doon in Burns's country, that the parapet has had to be
repaired. One could cut out the key of the arch with his pocket-knife.
And yet these old structures outlast empires. A few miles from Glasgow I
saw the remains of an old Roman bridge, the arch apparently as perfect
as when the first Roman chariot passed over it, probably fifteen
centuries ago. No wheels but those of time pass over it in these later
centuries, and these seem to be driven slowly and gently in this land,
with but little wear and tear to the ancient highways.
England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and
clay. The old Plutonic gods do not assert themselves; they are buried
and turned to dust, and the more modern humanistic divinities bear sway.
The land is a green cemetery of extinct rude forces. Where the highway
or the railway gashed the hills deeply, I could seldom tell where the
soil ended and the rock began, as they gradually assimilated, blended,
and became one.
And this is the key to nature in England: 'tis granite grown ripe and
mellow and issuing in grass and verdure; 'tis aboriginal force and
fecundity become docile and equable and mounting toward higher
forms,--the harsh, bitter rind of the earth grown sweet and edible.
There is such body and substance in the color and presence of things
that one thinks the very roots of the grass must go deeper than usual.
The crude, the raw, the discordant, where are they? It seems a
comparatively short and easy step from nature to the canvas or to the
poem in this cozy land. Nothing need be added; the idealization has
already taken place. The Old World is deeply covered with a kind of
human leaf-mould, while the New is for the most part yet raw, undigested
hard-pan. This is why these scenes haunt one like a memory. One seems to
have youthful associations with every field and hilltop he looks upon.
The complete humanization of nature has taken place. The soil has been
mixed with human thought and substance. These fields have been
alternately Celt, Roman, British, Norman, Saxon; they have moved and
walked and talked and loved and suffered; hence one feels kindred to
them and at home among them. The mother-land, indeed. Every foot of its
soil has given birth to a human being and grown tender and conscious
with time.
England is like a seat by the chimney-corner, and is as redolent of
human occupancy and domesticity. It has the island coziness and unity,
and the island simplicity as opposed to the continental diversity of
forms. It is all one neighborhood; a friendly and familiar air is over
all. It satisfies to the full one's utmost craving for the home-like and
for the fruits of affectionate occupation of the soil. It does not
satisfy one's craving for the wild, the savage, the aboriginal, what our
poet describes as his
"Hungering, hungering, hungering for primal energies and Nature's
dauntlessness."
But probably in the matter of natural scenes we hunger most for that
which we most do feed upon. At any rate, I can conceive that one might
be easily contented with what the English landscape affords him.
The whole physiognomy of the land bespeaks the action of slow, uniform,
conservative agencies. There is an elemental composure and moderation in
things that leave their mark everywhere,--a sort of elemental sweetness
and docility that are a surprise and a charm. One does not forget that
the evolution of man probably occurred in this hemisphere, and time
would seem to have proved that there is something here more favorable to
his perpetuity and longevity.
The dominant impression of the English landscape is repose. Never was
such a restful land to the eye, especially to the American eye, sated as
it is very apt to be with the mingled squalor and splendor of its own
landscape, its violent contrasts, and general spirit of unrest. But the
completeness and composure of this outdoor nature is like a dream. It is
like the poise of the tide at its full: every hurt of the world is
healed, every shore covered, every unsightly spot is hidden. The circle
of the horizon is brimming with the green equable flood. (I did not see
the fens of Lincolnshire nor the wolds of York.) This look of repose is
partly the result of the maturity and ripeness brought about by time and
ages of patient and thorough husbandry, and partly the result of the
gentle, continent spirit of Nature herself. She is contented, she is
happily wedded, she is well clothed and fed. Her offspring swarm about
her, her paths have fallen in pleasant places. The foliage of the trees,
how dense and massive! The turf of the fields, how thick and uniform!
The streams and rivers, how placid and full, showing no devastated
margins, no widespread sandy wastes and unsightly heaps of drift
bowlders! To the returned traveler the foliage of the trees and groves
of New England and New York looks thin and disheveled when compared with
the foliage he has just left. This effect is probably owing to our
cruder soil and sharper climate. The aspect of our trees in midsummer is
as if the hair of their heads stood on end; the woods have a wild,
frightened look, or as if they were just recovering from a debauch. In
our intense light and heat, the leaves, instead of spreading themselves
full to the sun and crowding out upon the ends of the branches as they
do in England, retreat, as it were, hide behind each other, stand
edgewise, perpendicular, or at any angle, to avoid the direct rays. In
Britain, from the slow, dripping rains and the excessive moisture, the
leaves of the trees droop more, and the branches are more pendent. The
rays of light are fewer and feebler, and the foliage disposes itself so
as to catch them all, and thus presents a fuller and broader surface to
the eye of the beholder. The leaves are massed upon the outer ends of
the branches, while the interior of the tree is comparatively leafless.
The European plane-tree is like a tent. The foliage is all on the
outside. The bird voices in it reverberate as in a chamber.
"The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores,"
says Tennyson. At a little distance, it has the mass and solidity of a
rock. The same is true of the European maple, and when this tree is
grown on our side of the Atlantic it keeps up its Old World habits. I
have for several years taken note of a few of them growing in a park
near my home. They have less grace and delicacy of outline than our
native maple, but present a darker and more solid mass of foliage. The
leaves are larger and less feathery, and are crowded to the periphery of
the tree. Nearly every summer one of the trees, which is most exposed,
gets the leaves on one side badly scorched. When the foliage begins to
turn in the fall, the trees appear as if they had been lightly and
hastily brushed with gold. The outer edges of the branches become a
light yellow, while, a little deeper, the body of the foliage is still
green. It is this solid and sculpturesque character of the English
foliage that so fills the eye of the artist. The feathery, formless,
indefinite, not to say thin, aspect of our leafage is much less easy to
paint, and much less pleasing when painted.
The same is true of the turf in the fields and upon the hills. The sward
with us, even in the oldest meadows, will wear more or less a ragged,
uneven aspect. The frost heaves it, the sun parches it; it is thin here
and thick there, crabbed in one spot and fine and soft in another. Only
by the frequent use of a heavy roller, copious waterings, and
top-dressings, can we produce sod that approaches in beauty even that of
the elevated sheep ranges in England and Scotland.
The greater activity and abundance of the earthworm, as disclosed by
Darwin, probably has much to do with the smoothness and fatness of those
fields when contrasted with our own. This little yet mighty engine is
much less instrumental in leavening and leveling the soil in New England
than in Old. The greater humidity of the mother country, the deep
clayey soil, its fattening for ages by human occupancy, the abundance of
food, the milder climate, etc., are all favorable to the life and
activity of the earthworm. Indeed, according to Darwin, the gardener
that has made England a garden is none other than this little obscure
creature. It plows, drains, airs, pulverizes, fertilizes, and levels. It
cannot transport rocks and stone, but it can bury them; it cannot remove
the ancient walls and pavements, but it can undermine them and deposit
its rich castings above them. On each acre of land, he says, "in many
parts of England, a weight of more than ten tons of dry earth annually
passes through their bodies and is brought to the surface." "When we
behold a wide, turf-covered expanse," he further observes, "we should
remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is
mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly leveled by worms."
The small part which worms play in this direction in our landscape is, I
am convinced, more than neutralized by our violent or disrupting
climate; but England looks like the product of some such gentle,
tireless, and beneficent agent. I have referred to that effect in the
face of the landscape as if the soil had snowed down; it seems the snow
came from the other direction, namely, from below, but was deposited
with equal gentleness and uniformity.
The repose and equipoise of nature of which I have spoken appears in the
fields of grain no less than in the turf and foliage. One may see vast
stretches of wheat, oats, barley, beans, etc., as uniform as the surface
of a lake, every stalk of grain or bean the size and height of every
other stalk. This, of course, means good husbandry; it means a mild,
even-tempered nature back of it, also. Then the repose of the English
landscape is enhanced, rather than marred, by the part man has played in
it. How those old arched bridges rest above the placid streams; how
easily they conduct the trim, perfect highways over them! Where the foot
finds an easy way, the eye finds the same; where the body finds harmony,
the mind finds harmony. Those ivy-covered walls and ruins, those
finished fields, those rounded hedge-rows, those embowered cottages, and
that gray, massive architecture, all contribute to the harmony and to
the repose of the landscape. Perhaps in no other country are the grazing
herds so much at ease. One's first impression, on seeing British fields
in spring or summer, is that the cattle and sheep have all broken into
the meadow and have not yet been discovered by the farmer; they have
taken their fill, and are now reposing upon the grass or dreaming under
the trees. But you presently perceive that it is all meadow or
meadow-like; that there are no wild, weedy, or barren pastures about
which the herds toil; but that they are in grass up to their eyes
everywhere. Hence their contentment; hence another element of repose in
the landscape.
The softness and humidity of the English climate act in two ways in
promoting that marvelous greenness of the land, namely, by growth and by
decay. As the grass springs quickly, so its matured stalk or dry leaf
decays quickly. No field growths are desiccated and preserved as with
us; there are no dried stubble and seared leaves remaining over the
winter to mar and obscure the verdancy of spring. Every dead thing is
quickly converted back to vegetable mould. In the woods, in May, it is
difficult to find any of the dry leaves of the previous autumn; in the
fields and copses and along the highways, no stalk of weed or grass
remains; while our wild, uplying pastures and mountain-tops always
present a more or less brown and seared appearance from the dried and
bleached stalks of the growth of the previous year, through which the
fresh springing grass is scarcely visible. Where rain falls on nearly
three hundred days in the year, as in the British islands, the
conversion of the mould into grass, and _vice versa_, takes place very
rapidly.