THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND
It is not strange that Englishmen should be--as certainly they
are--passionate lovers of their country; for their country is, almost
beyond parallel, peaceful, gentle, and beautiful. Even in vast London,
where practical life asserts itself with such prodigious force, the
stranger is impressed, in every direction, with a sentiment of repose
and peace. This sentiment seems to proceed in part from the antiquity of
the social system here established, and in part from the affectionate
nature of the English people. Here are finished towns, rural regions
thoroughly cultivated and exquisitely adorned; ancient architecture,
crumbling in slow decay; and a soil so rich and pure that even in its
idlest mood it lights itself up with flowers, just as the face of a
sleeping child lights itself up with smiles. Here, also, are soft and
kindly manners, settled principles, good laws, wise customs--wise,
because rooted in the universal attributes of human nature; and, above
all, here is the practice of trying to live in a happy condition instead
of trying to make a noise about it. Here, accordingly, life is soothed
and hallowed with the comfortable, genial, loving spirit of home. It
would, doubtless, be easily possible to come into contact here with
absurd forms and pernicious abuses, to observe absurd individuals, and
to discover veins of sordid selfishness and of evil and sorrow. But the
things that first and most deeply impress the observer of England and
English society are their potential, manifold, and abundant sources of
beauty, refinement, and peace. There are, of course, grumblers. Mention
has been made of a person who, even in heaven, would complain that his
cloud was damp and his halo a misfit. We cannot have perfection; but the
man who could not be happy in England--in so far, at least, as happiness
depends upon external objects and influences--could not reasonably
expect to be happy anywhere.
Summer heat is perceptible for an hour or two each day, but it causes no
discomfort. Fog has refrained; though it is understood to be lurking in
the Irish sea and the English channel, and waiting for November, when it
will drift into town and grime all the new paint on the London houses.
Meantime, the sky is softly blue and full of magnificent bronze clouds;
the air is cool, and in the environs of the city is fragrant with the
scent of new-mown hay; and the grass and trees in the parks--those
copious and splendid lungs of London--are green, dewy, sweet, and
beautiful. Persons "to the manner born" were lately calling the season
"backward," and they went so far as to grumble at the hawthorne, as
being less brilliant than in former seasons. But, in fact, to the
unfamiliar sense, this tree of odorous coral has been delicious. We have
nothing comparable with it in northern America, unless, perhaps, it be
the elder, of our wild woods; and even that, with all its fragrance,
lacks equal charm of colour. They use the hawthorne, or some kindred
shrub, for hedges in this country, and hence their fields are seldom
disfigured with fences. As you ride through the land you see miles and
miles of meadow traversed by these green and blooming hedgerows, which
give the country a charm quite incommunicable in words. The green of the
foliage--enriched by an uncommonly humid air and burnished by the
sun--is in perfection, while the flowers bloom in such abundance that
the whole realm is one glowing pageant. I saw near Oxford, on the crest
of a hill, a single ray of at least a thousand feet of scarlet poppies.
Imagine that glorious dash of colour in a green landscape lit by the
afternoon sun! Nobody could help loving a land that woos him with such
beauty.
English flowers are exceptional for substance and pomp. The roses, in
particular--though some of them, it should be said, are of French
breeds--surpass all others. It may seem an extravagance to say, but it
is certainly true, that these rich, firm, brilliant flowers affect you
like creatures of flesh and blood. They are, in this respect, only to be
described as like nothing in the world so much as the bright lips and
blushing cheeks of the handsome English women who walk among them and
vie with them in health and loveliness. It is easy to perceive the
source of those elements of warmth and sumptuousness that are so
conspicuous in the results of English taste. It is a land of flowers.
Even in the busiest parts of London the people decorate their houses
with them, and set the sombre, fog-grimed fronts ablaze with scarlet and
gold. These are the prevalent colours--radically so, for they have
become national--and, when placed against the black tint with which this
climate stains the buildings, they have the advantage of a vivid
contrast that much augments their splendour. All London wears crape,
variegated with a tracery of white, like lace upon a pall. In some
instances the effect is splendidly pompous. There cannot be a grander
artificial object in the world than the front of St. Paul's cathedral,
which is especially notable for this mysterious blending of light and
shade. It is to be deplored that a climate which can thus beautify
should also destroy; but there can be no doubt that the stones of
England are steadily defaced by the action of the damp atmosphere.
Already the delicate carvings on the palace of Westminster are beginning
to crumble. And yet, if one might judge the climate by this glittering
July, England is a land of sunshine as well as of flowers. Light comes
before three o'clock in the morning, and it lasts, through a dreamy and
lovely gloaming, till nearly ten o'clock at night. The morning sky is
usually light blue, dappled with slate-coloured clouds. A few large
stars are visible then, lingering to outface the dawn. Cool winds
whisper, and presently they rouse the great, sleepy, old elms; and then
the rooks--which are the low comedians of the air in this region--begin
to grumble; and then the sun leaps above the horizon, and we sweep into
a day of golden, breezy cheerfulness and comfort, the like of which is
rarely or never known in northern America, between June and October.
Sometimes the whole twenty-four hours have drifted past, as if in a
dream of light, and fragrance, and music. In a recent moonlight time
there was scarce any darkness at all; and more than once I have lain
awake all night, within a few miles of Charing Cross, listening to a
twitter of birds that is like the lapse and fall of silver water. It
used to be difficult to understand why the London season should begin in
May and last through most of the summer; it is not difficult to
understand the custom now.
The elements of discontent and disturbance which are visible in English
society are found, upon close examination, to be merely superficial.
Underneath them there abides a sturdy, immutable, inborn love of
England. Those croakings, grumblings, and bickerings do but denote the
process by which the body politic frees itself from the headaches and
fevers that embarrass the national health. The Englishman and his
country are one; and when the Englishman complains against his country
it is not because he believes that either there is or can be a better
country elsewhere, but because his instinct of justice and order makes
him crave perfection in his own. Institutions and principles are, with
him, by nature, paramount to individuals; and individuals only possess
importance--and that conditional on abiding rectitude--who are their
representatives. Everything is done in England to promote the permanence
and beauty of the home; and the permanence and beauty of the home, by a
natural reaction, augment in the English people solidity of character
and peace of life. They do not dwell in a perpetual fret and fume as to
the acts, thoughts, and words of other nations: for the English there is
absolutely no public opinion outside of their own land: they do not live
for the sake of working, but they work for the sake of living; and, as
the necessary preparations for living have long since been completed,
their country is at rest. This is the secret of England's first, and
continuous, and last, and all-pervading charm and power for the
stranger--the charm and power to soothe.
The efficacy of endeavouring to make a country a united, comfortable,
and beautiful home for all its inhabitants,--binding every heart to the
land by the same tie that binds every heart to the fireside,--is
something well worthy to be considered, equally by the practical
statesman and the contemplative observer. That way, assuredly, lie the
welfare of the human race and all the tranquillity that human
nature--warped as it is by evil--will ever permit to this world. This
endeavour has, through long ages, been steadily pursued in England, and
one of its results--which is also one of its indications--is the vast
accumulation of what may be called home treasures in the city of London.
The mere enumeration of them would fill large volumes. The description
of them could not be completed in a lifetime. It was this copiousness of
historic wealth and poetic association, combined with the flavour of
character and the sentiment of monastic repose, that bound Dr. Johnson
to Fleet Street and made Charles Lamb such an inveterate lover of the
town. Except it be to correct a possible insular narrowness there can be
no need that the Londoner should travel. Glorious sights, indeed, await
him, if he journeys no further away than Paris; but, aside from
ostentation, luxury, gaiety, and excitement, Paris will give him nothing
that he may not find at home.
The great cathedral of Notre Dame will awe him; but not more than his
own Westminster Abbey. The grandeur and beauty of the Madeleine will
enchant him; but not more than the massive solemnity and stupendous
magnificence of St. Paul's. The embankments of the Seine will satisfy
his taste with their symmetrical solidity; but he will not deem them
superior in any respect to the embankments of the Thames. The Pantheon,
the Hotel des Invalides, the Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Tribunal of
Commerce, the Opera-House,--all these will dazzle and delight his eyes,
arousing his remembrances of history and firing his imagination of great
events and persons; but all these will fail to displace in his esteem
the grand Palace of Westminster, so stately in its simplicity, so strong
in its perfect grace! He will ride through the exquisite Park of
Monceau,--one of the loveliest spots in Paris,--and onward to the Bois
de Boulogne, with its sumptuous pomp of foliage, its romantic green
vistas, its many winding avenues, its hillside hermitage, its cascades,
and its affluent lakes whereon the white swans beat the water with their
joyous wings; but still his soul will turn, with unshaken love and loyal
preference to the sweetly sylvan solitude of the gardens of Kensington
and Kew. He will marvel in the museums of the Louvre, the Luxembourg,
and Cluny; and probably he will concede that of paintings, whether
ancient or modern, the French display is larger and finer than the
English; but he will vaunt the British Museum as peerless throughout the
world, and he will still prize his National Gallery, with its originals
of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner, its spirited, tender,
and dreamy Murillos, and its dusky glories of Rembrandt. He will admire,
at the Theatre Francais, the photographic perfection of French acting;
but he will be apt to reflect that English dramatic art, if it sometimes
lacks finish, often has the effect of nature; and he will certainly
perceive that the playhouse itself is not superior to either Her
Majesty's Theatre or Covent Garden. He will luxuriate in the Champs
Elysees, in the superb Boulevards, in the glittering pageant of precious
jewels that blazes in the Rue de la Paix and the Palais Royal, and in
that gorgeous panorama of shop-windows for which the French capital is
unrivalled and famous; and he will not deny that, as to brilliancy of
aspect, Paris is prodigious and unequalled--the most radiant of
cities--the sapphire in the crown of Solomon. But, when all is seen,
either that Louis the Fourteenth created or Buonaparte pillaged,--when
he has taken his last walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, and mused,
at the foot of the statue of Caesar, on that Titanic strife of monarchy
and democracy of which France has seemed destined to be the perpetual
theatre,--sated with the glitter of showy opulence and tired with the
whirl of frivolous life he will gladly and gratefully turn again to his
sombre, mysterious, thoughtful, restful old London; and, like the Syrian
captain, though in the better spirit of truth and right, declare that
Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, are better than all the waters of
Israel.