I have noticed among all classes in England the same natural love of beauty. It does not exist only in the rich (but as a class it exists among them to a very marked degree: there is nothing in the world more beautiful than an English manor house, with its park and garden); it permeates the whole people. I recall a farmer to whom I spoke of the waste caused by the gorgeous yellow-blossomed weeds which invaded his wheat. "Yes," he said, half content, half sorry, "but they do look so beautiful." It was not that he was a lazy farmer, but he did actually love the beautiful wild life which came to rob his wheat of its nourishment.
At another time I remember meeting on a country road a draper's porter (one of those poor casual labourers who make an odd penny here and there by carrying parcels for small drapers). He had an enforced holiday and he was tramping out into the country from the town "to see the green fields." He did not say in so many words that he "loved" the green fields. It would not occur to him probably to attempt to phrase his feeling towards them. But it was clear that he did, most fondly; and he was fairly typical of the Englishman of his class.
As an exile the Englishman carries away with him the ideal of the soft green English country-side, and tries to reconstruct England wherever he may settle overseas. English trees, English grass, English flowers he sedulously cultivates in Australia, in Canada, in South Africa, and wins some strange triumphs over Nature in many of his acclimatisations.
Occasionally the transplanting succeeds too well. An Englishman with a touch of nostalgia—not enough of it to send him back to his Home country—introduced rabbits to Australia. It would be home-like, he thought, to see rabbits popping in and out of their burrows. That was the beginning. Now there are places in Australia where you can hardly put your foot down without treading on a rabbit, and sufficient of money to build a large navy has had to be spent in keeping the rabbit-pest in check. Another home-sick colonist, who came possibly, however, from north of the Tweed, introduced Scottish thistles into the same country with disastrous results.
Yet another English acclimatisation was that of the field daisy to Tasmania. It flourished wonderfully in its new surroundings, and had such a bad effect on the pasturage that a war had to be waged against its spread. But, seeing an English meadow decked with daisies, as thick as stars in the Milky Way, one might almost argue that such beauty is good compensation for a little loss of grass, as my farmer thought with his invaded wheat patch. The wide grass walks of Kew Gardens in the daisy time are lovely enough to make one forget all material things. To give a thought to the niceties of a cow's appetite, or to the yield of butter, when remembering such daisies, would not be possible.
All along the English country-side the gardens are delicious, from the winsome cottage plots to the nobly sweeping landscape surrounding a typical manor house, blending a hundred individual beauties of lawn, rosery, herb border, walled garden, wild garden into one enchanting mosaic. But, withal, it is the wonderful variety and perfection of the trees that is most remarkable. The affectionate regard for trees in England is a most pleasing thing to one who in his own country has had often to protest against a sort of rage against trees, as if they were enemies of the human race. (The pioneer who has to clear a forest for the sake of his crop and pasture gets into an unhappy habit afterwards of tree-murder out of sheer wantonness.) At Ampthill Park (an old Henry VIII. hunting seat) I have been shown oaks which in Cromwell's time were recorded as "too old to be cut down for the building of ships." They are still carefully preserved, some of them enjoying old-age pensions in the shape of props to keep up their venerable limbs.
Were I advising a friend abroad who knew nothing of England and wished to make a pilgrimage to its chief shrines of beauty, I think I should urge him to come in the late winter to Plymouth and explore first Cornwall and Devon, seeing, in the first case, how England's "rocky shores beat back the envious siege of watery Neptune." The coming of the waves of an Atlantic storm to Land's End offers a grand spectacle. He should stay in the south-west to see the first breath of spring bring the trees to green, and the earliest of the daffodils to flower. He will very likely encounter some wet weather. The Dartmoor people themselves say:—
The south wind blows and brings wet weather,
The north gives wet and cold together,
The west wind comes brimful of rain,
The east wind drives it back again.
Then if the sun in red should set,
We know the morrow must be wet;
And if the eve is clad in grey
The next is sure a rainy day.
But despite showers, spring on Dartmoor is a glowing pageant of green and gold. After feasting upon it a week or so, my imaginary pilgrim would make his way to the Thames valley to welcome yet another spring. The Gulf Stream gives the south-west corner of England a softer climate and an earlier spring than the east enjoys. By the time the daffodils are nodding their golden heads in Cornwall, the crocus will be just showing its flame along the borders of the Thames, and the pilgrim will understand Browning's rapture:—
Oh to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm tree hole are in tiny leaf;
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!