A JACOBEAN DOORWAY.
But I have strayed from the road. It was a quiet land we were in, one out of the way of much traffic, for the lanes seemed to lead nowhere in particular, and only to exist for local convenience, but they take you into the heart of the real country: a land as hushed as ever it was in the distant days of "Queen Bess," for there has nothing arisen since to disturb its foretime tranquillity—unless, perhaps, the rare and temporary intrusion of a motor-car whose driver has lost his way. It is for such unpretentious, peaceful scenery that the Englishman yearns at times when in foreign lands far away. Just a yearning for the sight of England's green fields, green hedges, leafy elms, and old homes, nothing more. Even Byron, that wanderer, sings:
A green field is a sight which makes us pardon
The absence of that more sublime construction
Which mixes up vines, olives, precipices,
Glaciers, volcanoes, oranges, and ices.
Also did not Keats, when in Italy, once tell Severn that he lay awake one night just thinking all the while of England's green fields and her flowers?
I have often wondered how so simple a thing as a purely English pastoral landscape can so greatly please; wherein exactly lies its strong power to charm? I once took an American friend for a long drive through a beautiful corner of England. I selected it specially, wishing to give my visitor a pleasant impression of the old country. There were hills and fair woods on the way, winding streams with ancient stone bridges across them, a lovely ruined priory in a lonely glen, old homes, many gabled and ivy-clad, picturesque cottages, and a quaint, old-world village or two. These were some of the good things we saw. When the journey was ended—we took it by motor-car, so we went far—I asked my friend what pleased him the most. "Well, I think," said he, "it's the mellow, domesticated look of the country, as though man and nature had long been on familiar terms there; but what really appeals to me most are just your green meadows studded with daisies, and your beautiful hedges." It was actually the simple sight of the daisied meadows and the green hedges that pleased him more than all the other good things, and the other things were very good indeed. It is sometimes enlightening to see our land as others see it. Listen to what Mark Twain says in his More Tramps Abroad:—
After all, in the matter of certain physical patent rights there is only one England. Now that I have sampled the globe I am not in doubt. There is the beauty of Switzerland, and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the earth; there is the beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New Zealand and Alaska; there is the beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in ten thousand islands of the Southern Seas; there is a beauty of the prairie and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth; each of these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of its beauty; but that beauty which is England, is alone; it has no duplicate. It is made up of very simple details—just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin, and over all a mellow dreamland of history. But its beauty is incomparable, and all its own.
There must surely be some special charm in a country, unassuming though it may be, to cause such praise of it to be written. Does not even cosmopolitan Kipling pronounce his preference for "Sussex by the sea" over all the world?
We were in Sussex again, but, in spite of Kipling, I love Sussex inland, sequestered Sussex of woodlands, sleepy villages, ancient farmsteads and cottages, and genuine ruralness, infinitely more than "Sussex by the sea," with its fringe of more or less fashionable watering-places. Inland Sussex, on the whole, is the Sussex and the England of the long past, delightful to see, but much of seaside Sussex is the England of to-day, and is rather depressing to me. The real charm of Sussex lies in its ancientness and in its simple, good-humoured country folk, not in its modernness. People who rush from London by rail or by motor on the main highways to Brighton, or other of its seaside towns, know little of rural Sussex or the rare charms of its silvan scenes.