Post-Prandial Philosophy: 21. Why England is Beautiful

21. 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.

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