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ST. PAUL'S FROM THE RIVER THAMES
ENGLAND
BY
FRANK FOX
AUTHOR OF "RAMPARTS OF EMPIRE" "PEEPS AT THE BRITISH EMPIRE," "AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA"
WITH 32 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1914
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
To bring within the limits of one volume any detailed description of England—her history, people, landscapes, cities—would be impossible. I have sought in this book to give an impression of some of the most "English" features of the land, devoting a little space first to an attempt to explain the origins of the English people. Thus the English fields and flowers and trees, the English homes and schools are given far more attention than English cities, English manufactures; for they are more peculiar to the land and the people. More markedly than in any superiority of her material greatness England stands apart from the rest of the world as the land of green trees and meadows, the land of noble schools and of sweet homes:
Green fields of England! wheresoe'er
Across this watery waste we fare,
One image at our hearts we bear,
Green fields of England, everywhere.
Sweet eyes in England, I must flee
Past where the waves' last confines be,
Ere your loved smile I cease to see,
Sweet eyes in England, dear to me!
Dear home in England, safe and fast,
If but in thee my lot lie cast,
The past shall seem a nothing past
To thee, dear home, if won at last;
Dear Home in England, won at last.
That is the cry of an Englishman (Arthur Hugh Clough). On the same note—the green fields, the dear homes—a sympathetic visitor to England would shape his impressions on going away.
If, by chance, the reading of this book should whet the appetite for more about England, or some particular part of the kingdom, there are available in the same series very many volumes on different counties and different features of England. To these I would refer the lover or student of England wishing for closer details. My impression is necessarily a general one; and it is that of a visitor from one of the overseas Dominions—not the less interesting, I hope, certainly not the less sympathetic for that reason.
FRANK FOX.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Making of England—The Britons and the Romans [1]
CHAPTER II
The Making of England—The Anglo-saxons and the Normans [16]
CHAPTER III
The English Landscape and the English Love of it [28]
CHAPTER IV
The Training of Young England [43]
CHAPTER V
England at Work [64]
CHAPTER VI
England at Play [81]
CHAPTER VII
The Cities of England [101]
CHAPTER VIII
The Rivers of England [114]
CHAPTER IX
England's Shrines [125]
CHAPTER X
The Poorer Population [137]
CHAPTER XI
The Arts in England [155]
CHAPTER XII
Political Life in England [171]
CHAPTER XIII
The Defence of England [187]
INDEX [203]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. St. Paul's from the River Thames [Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
2. The Chalk Cliffs of England [1]
3. North Side, Canterbury Cathedral [8]
4. Richmond, Yorkshire [17]
5. Norman Staircase, King's School, Canterbury [24]
6. A Kent Manor-House and Garden [33]
7. A Sussex Village [40]
8. The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge [49]
9. St. Magdalen Tower and College, Oxford [56]
10. Broad Street, Oxford, looking West [59]
11. Eton Upper School [62]
12. Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, London [65]
13. Harvesting in Herefordshire [72]
14. Football at Rugby School [81]
15. Cricket at "Lord's" [88]
16. Trout-fishing on the Itchen, Hampshire [97]
17. Dean's Yard, Westminster [104]
18. Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, Hyde Park, London [107]
19. Watergate Street, Chester [110]
20. The River Rother, Sussex [115]
21. Thames at Richmond, Surrey [118]
22. Spring by the Thames [121]
23. Windsor Castle from Fellows' Eyot: Early Spring [124]
24. Glastonbury Abbey, Somersetshire [128]
25. Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford-on-Avon [137]
26. Gipsies on a Gloucestershire Common [144]
27. The Tower from the Tower Bridge, looking West [153]
28. Westminster Abbey from the end of the Embankment [160]
29. Westminster and the Houses of Parliament [169]
30. Hyde Park, London [176]
31. Battleships Manœuvring [193]
32. Changing the Guard [200]
THE CHALK CLIFFS OF ENGLAND—THE NEEDLES, ISLE OF WIGHT
ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND—THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS
When Europe, as it shows on the map to-day, was in the making, some great force of Nature cut the British Islands off from the mainland. Perhaps it was the result of a convulsive spasm as Mother Earth took a new wrinkle on her face. Perhaps it was the steady biting of the Gulf Stream eating away at chalk cliffs and shingle beds. Whatever the cause, as far back as man knows the English Channel ran between the mainland of Europe and "a group of islands off the coast of France"; and the chalk cliffs of the greatest of these islands faced the newcomer to suggest to the Romans the name of Terra Alba: perhaps to prompt in some admirer of Horace among them a prophetic fancy that this white land was to make a "white mark" in the Calendar of History.
Considered geographically, the British Islands, taking the sum of the whole five thousand or so of them (counting islets), are of slight importance. Yet a map of the world showing the possessions of Great Britain—the area over which the people of these islands have spread their sway—shows a whole continent, large areas of three other continents, and numberless islands to be British. And when the astonishing disproportion between the British Islands and the British Empire has been grasped, it can be made the more astonishing by reducing the British Islands down to England as the actual centre from which all this greatness has radiated. It is true that the British Empire is the work of the British people: as the Roman Empire was of the Italian people and not of Rome alone. But it was in England that it had its foundation; and the English people made a start with the British Empire by subduing or coaxing to their domain the Welsh, the Scottish, and the Irish. Not to England all the glory: but certainly to England the first glory.
There is at this day a justified resentment shown by Scots and Irish, not to speak of Welshmen, when "England" is used as a term to embrace the whole of the British Isles. (Similarly Canadians resent the term "America" being arrogated by the United States.) A French wit has put very neatly the case for that resentment by stating that ordinarily an inhabitant of the British Isles is a British citizen until he does something disgraceful, when he is identified in the English newspapers as a "Scottish murderer" or an "Irish thief": but if he does something fine then he is "a gallant Englishman." That is neat satire, founded on a slight foundation of truth. Very often "England" is confounded with "Great Britain" when there is discussion of Imperial greatness. I do not want to come under suspicion of inexactness, which that confusion of terms shows. But writing of England, and England alone, it is just to claim at the outset that the actual first beginning of that great British power which has eclipsed all records of the world was in England: and it is worth the while to inquire into the causes which made for the growth of that power. It is necessary, indeed, to make that inquiry and get to know something of English history before attempting to look with an understanding eye upon English landscapes, English cities, and the English people of to-day. The classic painters of the greatest age of Art used landscape only as the background for portraiture. The human interest to them was always paramount. And, whether one may or may not go the whole way with these painters in the appraisement of the relative value of the human or the natural, clear it is that a human interest heightens the value of every scene; and there can be no full appreciation of a country without a knowledge of its history.
"When a noble act is done—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty: when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and the moon come each and look upon them once in the steep defile of Thermopylæ: when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" Assuredly "yes" to that question from Emerson, and assuredly, too, they pay back every day what they have borrowed, giving to a noble landscape the added charm of its human association with a noble deed. The white cliffs of England are beautiful and impressive as they show like gleaming ramparts defending green fields and fruitful valleys. But they become more beautiful and more impressive as one thinks of them confronting the Romans stepping from Gaul to a wider conquest; or facing William of Normandy as he set out to enforce a weak claim with a strong sword; or set like white defiant teeth at the great ships of the Spanish Armada as they passed up the English Channel with Drake in pursuit, the unwieldy Spanish galleons showing like bulls pursued by gadflies.
Let us then look for a moment at England in the making before considering the England of to-day.
When the British Isles were cut off from the mainland, England was, without doubt, inhabited by people akin to the Gauls. The people of the French province of Brittany are to-day very clearly cousins of the people of those districts of England, such as Cornwall, which preserve most of the old Briton blood. Separation from the mainland does not seem to have effected very much change in the national type by the time that history came on the scene to make her records. Cæsar found the Britons very like the Gauls. They had not developed into a maritime people. Fisheries they had, for food and for pearls; but they had none of the piratical adventurousness of the Norsemen. That they were naked, woad-painted savages, those Britons of Cæsar's time, has been held long as a popular belief. But that is hardly tenable in the light of the knowledge which recent archæological investigation has given, though, likely enough, they painted for battle, as soldiers of a later time used to wear plumes and glittering uniforms to impress and frighten the enemy.
Excavations in more than one district of late have shown that the early Britons possessed a good share of civilisation before ever the Romans came to their land. Thus near Northampton there is a place which used to be a camp of the Britons prior to the Roman occupation. The camp has an area of about four acres, and was defended by a ditch fifteen feet deep, and about thirty feet wide, with a rampart on either side of the fosse.
Here were discovered the bases of what are considered to have been the remains of the hut-dwellings of the occupiers of the camp. Of these some three hundred were found filled with black earth and mould, and from them many most interesting articles were obtained. There were many iron relics, such as swords, daggers, spear heads, knives, saws, sickles, adzes, an axe, plough-shares, nails, chisels, gouges, bridles (one with a bronze centre-bit), and a well-formed pot-hook made of twisted iron. In bronze there were remains of two sword scabbards, four brooches, some fragments belonging to horse harness, pins and rings, and a small spoon. There were also glass beads and rings, a fragment of jet, a number of spindle whorls for spinning, bone combs used in weaving, and about twenty triangular-shaped bricks pierced through each corner, considered to be loom weights to keep the warp taut; more than a hundred querns or millstones, some of the corn which was ground in them (this fortunately happened to be charred and so preserved), and remains of about four hundred pots, nearly all used for domestic purposes. One of the bronze scabbards bears on the top an engraved pattern of the decorative art of the period, showing the Triskele, a sun symbol often found on remains of the Bronze Age in Denmark as well as elsewhere.
Similar pre-Roman relics have been obtained from the Marsh Village near Glastonbury, from Mount Coburn near Lewes, and from near Canterbury. The unmistakable evidence of these relics is that the pre-Roman Briton could spin and weave, knew how to plough and when to sow, was an excellent carpenter, and was an expert in metal work, both in iron and bronze, and possessed a decorative art. He was therefore not a "savage" as savages were understood in those days.
We must consider the Britons, then, of Cæsar's time as possessed of some degree of civilisation. They understood fabrics, pottery, metals, architecture. They had come into contact with the civilisation of the Mediterranean Sea long before his day. The Scilly Islands off the coast of Cornwall can reasonably be identified as the Casserterrides of the Phœnicians, where the merchants of Tyre and Sidon bought tin, giving cloth in exchange. It is said, indeed, that an ingot of tin with a Phœnician mark upon it was dredged up once from Falmouth Harbour. Probably the very earliest mention of Britain is by Hecatæus (b.c. 500, about the time when Marathon was fought). He described Britain then as an isle of the Hyperboreans, and alleged that the inhabitants "raised two crops in the year and worshipped the sun."
NORTH SIDE, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL
That may be the first original sneer at the British climate, the sneer which now takes the form that whenever the sun appears in England it is photographed, lest the inhabitants of the island should forget what it is like. (There is an Australian "drought" story of the same order of humorous exaggeration, that in a certain district the rain from heaven had been withheld so long, and grass had so long disappeared, that when at last relief came and the grass grew the sheep would not eat it, as they did not recognise what it was!) But perhaps Hecatæus was serious. It is not at all unlikely that the gossip Hecatæus had of the Isle of the Hyperboreans came from Phœnician sources, and referred to that south-westerly extremity of Cornwall which gets the full benefit of the warm Gulf Stream, and has in consequence an astonishingly mild climate for its latitude, a climate quite capable of producing sometimes two crops a year.
As for sun worship, there are many indications of the practice of its rites in prehistoric Britain. The "Round Towers" which are sprinkled over Ireland can best be explained by a theory of sun worship. Stonehenge, in the south of England, which dates back to about 1500 years b.c., was probably a temple of sun worship. There are the ruins of a temple, possibly of the sun, at Avebury (Wilts.) of even older date.
It would be impossible to attempt even to hint at all the evidence in the matter. But what may be accepted quite safely as a fact is, that in prehistoric times the Briton was no laggard in the path of civilisation: that indeed he was among the early pilgrims on that path. Even as far north as the Yorkshire Wolds—it is clear from recent excavations—there was a thick local population of men in the Neolithic Age. The burial mounds of these Neolithic tribes have lately been excavated, and have given much valuable evidence as to the history of Man. The "Ipswich Man," too—the indubitable remains of a man who walked upright and who had skull accommodation for a human brain, discovered in strata of a most remote age of the earth—proves that in the little corner of the world which was to have such a wonderful history in the far future, there were early indications of promise.
It is worth while to clear our British ancestors of the reproach of being woad-painted savages at a time of the world's history when every European, almost, had learned at least the use of skins. For those Britons were responsible for that "Celtic fringe" which to-day shows so largely in our poetry and our politics, and in other walks of life. The ancient Briton enters into the making of modern England through the strong traces of his ancestry left in Cornwall, Devon, the Marches of Wales, and elsewhere.
But respectably clothed, arm-bearing, house-building personage as he was, the ancient Briton would never have made a very great mark in the world if he had been left to himself. He would never have overflowed to send out tidal waves of conquest like the Norsemen or the Goths. Possibly even in those early days he had his Celtic qualities of poetry and imagination and argumentativeness, and spent much of his energy in dreaming things instead of doing things. It was when the Romans came that England began to shape towards a big place in the world.
The Romans do not seem to have had a very bloody campaign in subduing that part of Britain which is now England. The people were rather softer than the Gauls of the mainland. Their country was penetrated by several rivers such as the Thames, which gave easy highways to the Roman galleys. The gentle contours of the country made easy the building of the Roman roads, which were the chief agents of Roman civilisation. But the Roman dominion in the British Islands stopped with England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland remained unsubdued. That fact was to have an important bearing on the future of England. Step by step, Fate was working for the making of the people who were to cover the whole earth with their dominions.
We have seen that in the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate singularly mild and promotive of fertility. When the separation from the mainland came because of the cutting of the English Channel, the Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their soft environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.
With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards, though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)
But side by side with the growth of a gracious civilisation in England, there was constant warfare on the borders. The wilder natives of the British islands refused the Roman sway, and threatened by their forays the security of the new cities. This made necessary a great military organisation, which has left its mark on the England of to-day in the Roman roads and the sites of Roman military camps dotted all over the country from the Thames to the Tweed. The remains of these camps are quite distinguishable in many places; and generally they are known as "Cæsar's camps," whether Julius Cæsar ever saw their neighbourhood or not. Probably Carausius was the "Cæsar" of many of these camps.
Despite the border wars the Romanised Britons got on fairly comfortably until the failing power of the Roman Empire made it necessary for the Roman legions to withdraw to Italy. This left Romanised Britain to be attacked by the wilder Britons of the north and the west. That these attacks should have been as successful as they were, hints that the south Briton of England was rather a soft fellow. Since, as we will find later, the Anglo-Saxon—once comfortably settled in England—showed a tendency also to become a soft fellow, and had to be pricked to greatness by the Dane and the Norman, it would almost seem that this gentle, green, cloudy England has ultimately a softening effect on its inhabitants. But fresh blood pours in to bring vigour. England invites adventurers by her beauty and then tames them. Because of her perpetual invitation the British nation has been made of a brew of Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman bloods, and all these people have left their mark on the landscape of the country.
CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND—THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS
How the Romanised Briton of England would have fared ultimately in his contest with the more savage Britons of the north and the west, who came to rob him down to his toga, if they had been left to fight it out, it is hard to say. Probably the course of events would have been that the English natives would first have yielded to the northern invaders, and afterwards absorbed them and made them partakers in their civilisation.
RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE A town of considerable importance at the time of the Norman Conquest
But the issue was never fought out. There had begun the most momentous swarming of a human race that history records. Along the Scandinavian and the Danish peninsulas, and the northern coast of Germany, there had been swelling up a vast population of fierce, strong, courageous and hungry men; Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen—they were all very much akin: big blue-eyed men of mighty daring mated with fair, chaste, fruitful women; and they swarmed out of their warrens to over-run the greater part of Europe. You may trace them to the interior of Russia, to Iceland, to Constantinople, some think to North America. But, whatever their path, the British Islands were athwart the track they took, and the British Islands received the most complete flood of Anglo-Saxon blood. Again it was England that made way most easily to the invader. The Anglo-Saxons came and cleared out the Romanised and Christian civilisation from Yorkshire to Kent. But the fiercer British natives who had held back the Romans, held back also these new invaders, helped thereto by the fact that their lands seemed to be hungry, and to offer but little booty. England, fat, fertile, like a beautiful park with its forests and meadows and rivers, was at once a richer and an easier prize.
The Anglo-Saxon probably made his conquest more easy by treachery and by fomenting discord among the Britons. There is a ballad by Thomas Love Peacock, which treats of such an Anglo-Saxon victory—with at least a shadow of a shade of historical warrant:—
"Come to the feast of wine and meat,"
Spake the dark dweller of the sea.
"There shall the hours in mirth proceed;
There neither sword nor shield shall be."
None but the noblest of the land,
The flower of Britain's chiefs were there;
Unarmed, amid the Saxon band
They sate, the fatal feast to share.
Three hundred chiefs, three score and three
Went, where the festal torches burned
Before the dweller of the sea;
They went, and three alone returned.
Till dawn the pale sweet mead they quaffed,
The ocean chief unclosed his vest,
His hand was on his dagger's haft,
And daggers glared at every breast.
Still it was an easy victory, that of Anglo-Saxon over Briton. But just as we must, in the light of recent knowledge, give up the idea that the Briton whom Julius Cæsar encountered was a woad-painted savage, so we must refuse to accept the impression (which is implied more often than directly stated) that the Romanised Briton, after the departure of the Roman legions, was quite helpless. Between the Roman departure from Britain and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms there, room must be found, somehow, for whatever of historical truth there is as a foundation for the Arthurian legends. On that point let old Caxton speak:—
Now it is notoriously known through the universal world that there be nine worthy and the best that ever were. That is to wit three paynims, three Jews, and three Christian men. As for the paynims they were tofore the Incarnation of Christ, which were named, the first Hector of Troy, of whom the history is come both in ballad and in prose; the second Alexander the Great; and the third Julius Cæsar, Emperor of Rome, of whom the histories be well-known and had.
And as for the three Jews which also were tofore the Incarnation of our Lord, of whom the first was Duke Joshua which brought the children of Israel into the land of behest; the second David, King of Jerusalem; and the third Judas Maccabæus; of these three the Bible rehearseth all their noble histories and acts.
And sith the said Incarnation have been three noble Christian men stalled and admitted through the universal world into the number of the nine best and worthy, of whom was first the noble Arthur, whose noble acts I purpose to write in this present book here following. The second was Charlemagne or Charles the Great, of whom the history is had in many places both in French and English; and the third and last was Godfrey of Bouillon, of whose acts and life I made a book unto the excellent prince and king of noble memory, King Edward the Fourth. The said noble gentleman instantly required me to imprint the history of the said noble king and conqueror, King Arthur, and of his knights, with the history of the Sangreal, and of the death and ending of the said Arthur; affirming that I ought rather to imprint his acts and noble feats, than of Godfrey of Bouillon, or any of the other eight, considering that he was a man born within this realm, and king and emperor of the same; and that there be in French divers and many noble volumes of his acts, and also of his knights.
To whom I answered, that divers men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but feigned and fables, by cause that some chronicles make of him no mention nor remember him no thing, nor of his knights. Whereunto they answered, and one in special said, that in him that should say or think that there was never such a king called Arthur, might well be credited great folly and blindness; for he said that there were many evidences of the contrary: first ye may see his sepulture in the Monastery of Glastonbury. And also in Polichronicon, in the fifth book of the sixth chapter, and in the seventh book and the twenty-third chapter, where his body was buried and after found and translated into the said monastery. Ye shall see also in the history of Bochas, in his book De Casu Principum, part of his noble acts, and also of his fall.
Also Galfridus in his British book recounteth his life; and in divers places of England many remembrances be yet of him and shall remain perpetually, and also of his knights. First in the Abbey of Westminster, at Saint Edward's shrine, remaineth the print of his seal in red wax closed in beryl, in which is written Patricius Arthurus, Britannæ, Gallie, Germanie, Dacie, Imperator. Item in the castle of Dover ye may see Gawaine's skull and Craddock's mantle, at Winchester the Round Table, in other places Launcelot's sword and many other things. Then all these things considered, there can no man reasonably gainsay but there was a king of this land named Arthur. For in all places, Christian and heathen, he is reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the first of the three Christian men. And also he is more spoken of beyond the sea, more books made of his noble acts than there be in England, as well in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, as in French. And yet of record remain in witness of him in Wales, in the town of Camelot, the great stones and marvellous works of iron, lying under the ground, and royal vaults, which divers now living hath seen.
I fear one cannot take Caxton's endorsement of Sir Thomas Malory as final evidence, and accept as historic a King Arthur who on one occasion invaded the European Continent and defeated in battle the troops of the Roman Emperor. But there were men to fight in England after the Romans left; and those beaten in the fight fell back on Scotland, on Wales, on Cornwall, and some of them wandered farther afield and colonised Brittany in France, a province which to-day reminds of Cornwall at a thousand points.
The Anglo-Saxons, like other nations, found the air of England civilising. They aspired to settle down in quiet comfort when there came from the east a fresh cloud of freebooters, the Danes, to claim a share in this delectable island. Dane and Saxon fought it out—the Briton from "the Celtic fringe" occasionally interfering—with all the hearty ill-will of blood relations, and as they fought shaped out a very good people, partly English, partly Saxon, partly Danish, and in the mountains partly British.
If you look over England with a seeing eye, you can notice the traces of each element in the nation's blood; and the landscape will partly explain why in one place there is a Celtic predominance, in another a Danish. Each national type sought and held the districts most suitable to its character.
After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the British race was the Norman. The Normans were not so much aliens as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while merged amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the present British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman—a hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous type, which in its making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take.
The Normans brought to England a higher knowledge of the arts than the Anglo-Saxons had. The Roman culture of Britain had been just as high as the Roman culture of Gaul. But in Britain its tradition had been lost to a great extent in the onrush of the rude, unlettered Anglo-Saxons. In Gaul the Norsemen had won only a district, not the whole country, and they had been surrounded by civilising influences and had reacted to them wonderfully. Practically all the fine buildings of England date from after the Norman Epoch. But it is a fact which will strike at once the student of those buildings, who afterwards compares them with contemporary Norman buildings in France, that Norman architecture was not transplanted to England. Whilst at Rouen, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, you see the churches usually in Flamboyant or Ogival Gothic; in England the churches of about the same date are in a more severe and straight-laced style. It is well worth the trouble to study somewhat closely the churches built by the Normans in France and by the Norman-English in England during the century after the Conquest. A clear indication will be found from the study that the Normans did not over-run and beat down the Anglo-Saxons; but that the Anglo-Saxon was the "predominant partner" almost from the first in the domestic economy of the nation, however badly he fared in the tented field against the Normans.
The antiquities of England, the edifices of England, the very fields of England will be understood better if they are looked at in the light of English history—not that bare-bones caricature of history which is a mere record of battles and kings, but the living history which traces to their sources the streams of our race. The England of to-day is beginning to know the wisdom of a close sympathetic study of the past. One of the signs of this awakening of the historical sense is the popularity of the open-air pageant reviving scenes of old. I shall always remember, among many of those pageants, a particularly fine one at Chester, a city of great historic importance.
NORMAN STAIRCASE, KING'S SCHOOL, CANTERBURY
Such brilliant sunshine as rarely glows over "green and cloudy England" greeted this Chester Pageant; and, with it, just enough of a gentle breeze as to set all the leaves to a morris dance and to give to banner and mantle a flowing line. The scene for the play was set by Nature, or by good gardeners of long ago working in close sympathy with her model for an English pleasaunce. It was a very dainty sward, perhaps of five acres in all, ringed around with trees and bushes in their native wildness, which invaded here and there the grass with an out-thrown clump or extended arm. On such a spot fairies would pitch for their revels, noticing how the curtains of the shrubberies would mask their troopings, and the extending wings of boscage give surprise to their exits and entrances. With perfect weather and a perfect stage, the Chester Pageant needed to claim a large excellence to prove itself worthy of its opportunity; and did make and fully establish the claim.
It was bright, graced with fine music and much dainty dancing, engrossing in its story, and amusing in the little character sketches of life with which it embroidered history. Also it taught patriotism by impressing proud facts of history. Where, to serve the purpose of the picturesque, the probable rather than the certain was followed, due warning was given; and the wise plan was adopted of interspersing with the great incidents pages from the familiar life of the people. The Crusade was preached from Chester Cross; side by side with it was shown an excerpt from cottage life in the story of Dickon, an archer, and his betrothed, Alison, whom he would leave, and yet not leave, to take the badge of the Crusade. History was, in fact, made homely, as history should be if it is to claim interest outside the philosopher's study.
Chester is very proud of its history and jealously preserves its antiquities. A city which was a great camp for the Romans, a naval headquarters for the Saxons, a centre for the fierce contests between Normans and Welsh, a much-disputed prize in the Civil War, has certainly much history to cherish, and Chester nobly indulges the pride. No other city of England, not even excepting London, shows so much reverence for a glorious past.
But all through England there is an awakening of historical interest; and it marches on the right lines to make history not so much a record of dead people as an explanation of living people.
After this short glance at the past let us look to the England of to-day.
CHAPTER III
THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE AND THE ENGLISH LOVE OF IT
There are as many types of natural scenery in England almost as there are counties. To attempt to describe all in this one volume would be absurd. Yet to generalise on English natural beauty is difficult, because of that great diversity. Who can suggest, for instance, a common denominator to suit the Devonshire Moors, the Norfolk Broads, the Surrey Downs, and the Thames Valley? But since one must generalise, it is safe to give as the predominant feature of England's natural beauty that which strikes most obviously the eye of the stranger used to other countries.
Nine out of ten strangers coming to England for the first time, and asked to speak of its appearance, will say something equivalent to "park-like." England in truth looks like one great well-ordered park, under the charge of a skilful landscape gardener. The trees seem to grow with an eye to effect, the meadows to be designed for vistas, the hedges for reliefs. The land indeed does not seem ever to be doing anything—not at all a correct impression in fact, that, but it is the one conveyed irresistibly.
One soon notices that the tree must in France work for its living. It cannot aspire to the luxurious and beautiful existence of its English brothers, who in their woods and copses have little to do but to "utter green leaves joyously" in the spring, glow with burnished glory in the autumn, and unrobe delicate traceries for admiration in the winter. In France a tree may live on the edge of a road or as one of a cluster sheltering a farmhouse, or keep many other trees company in a State pine forest which will help to make those execrable French matches; but its every twig is utilised, and a hard-working existence takes away much of its beauty. The æsthetic tree, the tree with nothing to do but just to be a tree and look pretty, is rare in most countries; but in England it is the commonplace. Other countries have useful trees which look pretty, forests which are impressive in spite of man. England seems to share with Japan the amiable thriftlessness of giving up much land to growth which is not intended to serve any base utilitarian purpose at all.
The hedges, which take up a considerable fraction of English arable soil, help to the park-like appearance of the country. They are inexpressibly beautiful when spring wakes them up to pipe their roulades in tender green. In summer they are splendid in blazon of leaf and flower. In autumn they flaunt banners of gold and red and brown. In winter, too, they are still beautiful, especially in the early winter when there still survive a few scarlet berries to glow and crackle and almost burn in the frost. If England, in a mood of thrift, swept away her hedges and put in their places fences (or that nice sense of keeping boundaries which enables the French cultivator to do without either), the saving of land would be enormous. But much of the park-like beauty of the country-side would depart; and with it the predominant note of the English landscape, which is that of the estate of a rich, careful, orderly nobleman.
The change will be slow in coming, if it comes at all; for though he would be the last man, probably, to suspect it, the Englishman is at heart æsthetic. Yes, in spite of horse-hair furniture, gilt-framed oleographs, wax-flower decorations, and Early Victorian wall-papers, and other sins of which many of him have been, and still are, guilty, the Englishman has planted in him an instinct for art. It shows in his love of nature, of the green of his England. Almost every one aspires to come into touch with a bit of plant life. In the East End of London the aspiration takes the form of a window garden. You may see workingmen's "flats" let at six shillings a week with their window gardens. In the West End, land which must be worth many thousands of pounds per acre is devoted to garden use. For want of better, a terrace of houses will have a little strip of plantation, at back or front, common to all of them. House and "flat" agents tell that tenants almost always demand that there shall be at least sight of a green tree from some window. In the small suburban villas a very considerable tax of money and labour is cheerfully paid in the effort to keep in good order a little pocket-handkerchief of lawn and a few shrubs. This love of the garden is holy and wholesome, and it proves, I think, that the Englishman is at heart a lover of the beautiful, an "æsthetic," though he is supposed to be such a dull, prosaic, practical person.
Comparing the English with the French on this point, in my opinion it is in the practical application of æsthetic principles to life rather than in æsthetic sensibility that the French are superior to the English. What difference there is in æstheticism favours the English; there are deeper springs of art and poetry in the English people than in the French. But art has been far more carefully cherished and organised in France than in England. There is more general artistic education, if less true artistic feeling.
Approach a typical French village of a modern type. The first impression given by the houses is of a vastly superior artistic consciousness. Both in colour and in form the houses are more beautiful than the same types in England, where domestic architecture of the villa type so often suggests either a penal establishment or the need of a penal establishment for the designer. But look a little closer, and one notices that, as compared with an English town, there is in France a conspicuous absence of gardens. Decorative trees, shrubberies, flowers are rare. Where there is garden space it is, as like as not, devoted to some shocking attempt at grandiose rococo work. The interiors, too, are disappointing. Thrift suggests the hideous closed-in stove as a substitute for open fires; but the garish wall-papers, the coloured prints, the "decorations" of shell-work or china, and so on, are not necessary, and are far more ugly than those of the average poor home in England, even of the "Early Victorian type." I repeat, the natural artistic standard of the French does not seem to be so high as that of the English, but the standard of artistic education is very much higher.
A KENT MANOR-HOUSE AND GARDEN
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!
When once the spring is in full tide towards summer, it is difficult to say where one should search for special beauty in England, for all is so beautiful, from the Yorkshire hills to the Sussex marshes beloved of Coventry Patmore—flat lands whose drowsy beauties glow under the broad sunshine and suggest a tranquil charm of quiet joy tinged with melancholy, too subtle to appeal to the casual "tripper," but of insistent call to all who understood the more intimate charms of Nature. It is spacious is Sussex. It shelters solitudes. Its quiet, slow-voiced people are sympathetic with their surroundings. When storms rage Sussex takes a new aspect. The screaming of the gulls, the sobbing of the sedges in the wind, the wide, flat expanse laid, as it were, bare to the rage of the storm, gives to the wind a sense of poignant desolation.
In Sussex, when Henry VIII. was king, many "great cannones and shotters were caste for His Majestie's service"; and the county was notable for its iron mines and foundries. From Sussex earlier had come all of the 3000 horseshoes on which an English king's army had galloped to ruin at Bannockburn. Owing to the iron in the soil the Sussex streams sometimes run red, so that "at times the grounde weepes bloud." Now there is an end of iron-working there. The foundry at Ashburnham, the last of the Sussex furnaces, was closed down in 1828. One reason given was that the workers were too drunken, helped as they were to unsober habits by the facilities for smuggling in Holland's gin.
But more probably the Sussex ironworks closed down in the main for the same reason that other southern works did. The past two centuries have seen a gradual transference of the great industries and the great centres of population from the south to the north-west and the Midlands. The northern coal mines are the real magnets. So the Sussex iron-workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may not justly be accused of killing an industry with their dissolute love of Holland's gin. Their country is to-day the more picturesque without the iron foundries, though one may give a sigh to Sussex iron, which had the repute of being the toughest in all England.
I have given this little space to Sussex, by way of proof that everywhere in England there is beauty, for Sussex is not a "scenery" county in the general sense. It will, indeed, prove puzzling to my imaginary pilgrim in search of the highest natural beauty of England to find time within one spring and summer to get an idea of its wide variety of charm. Fortunate he if he resists all temptation to rush (by motor car or otherwise) through a "comprehensive tour" mapped out by hours. I remember encountering—with deep pity on my part—a group of delegates to some great Imperial Conference, who were being "shown England" by some misguided and misguiding official. They were at Oxford for lunch, and were due to "do" Oxford and lunch—or rather lunch and Oxford—within three hours. Motoring up they had already "done" a great deal of country in a morning, including a visit to Banbury. After lunch—and Oxford—they were on their way to Worcester and yet farther that day. It was an unhappy experiment in quick-change scenery, proving conclusively the cleverness of motor cars and the stupidity of human beings.
A SUSSEX VILLAGE
May and June in this fancied Pilgrimage of Beauty should be given up wholly to the Thames valley from Greenwich to Oxford, and past. An intelligent lover of the beautiful in Nature and Art will at least learn in those two months that a life-time is not sufficient for due faithful worship at all the shrines of Beauty he will encounter. My pilgrim has now seen wild coast scenery and river scenery. July should be given to the hills and the lakes, these enchanting lakes which have won new beauties from the poets and wise men who dwelt by them. Then August to the Yorkshire Wolds, with their sweeping outlines, clear in the amber air shining over white roads and blue-green fields.
The attractions of the Yorkshire Wolds are proof against the wet sea-mists, the penetrating winds, and the merciless rain which sometimes sweep over them. The very severity of the weather appeals to nature lovers. The Yorkshire Wolds terminate on the east with the great Flamborough headland, the chalky cliffs of which have remarkable strength to resist ocean erosion. Owing to this fact Flamborough headland has been for centuries becoming more and more the outstanding feature of the east coast of England, because the sea continues to eat into the low shores of Holderness.
With the end of August comes the end of the English summer (though at times it ends at a very much earlier date, and offers with its brief life poor reason for having appeared at all; "seeing that I was so soon to be done for, why ever was I begun for"). It is then time to go to Kent and see the burnishing of the woods by Autumn, the ripening of hop and apple. To the New Forest afterwards, and the sands of the south coast. At the end of the year our pilgrim will know how varied is the beauty of the English landscape, and how faithfully it is loved in its different forms by those who live near to it.
CHAPTER IV
THE TRAINING OF YOUNG ENGLAND
All the world and his wife seem to be agreed that there is something in the English system of education which can work miracles. Boys from all over the world come to England, to school and university, to be trained. And further, the English tutor and the English governess are to be found sprinkled over the globe, teaching some of the young of all nations. There is a recent fashion for German training, "because it is so thorough," and the English system of training (which can certainly fail in a very large proportion of cases to show creditable results when tested by examination paper) comes in for some merciless criticism in its own home country. Nevertheless, it still holds its reputation as the best of systems to make "character."
What exactly character signifies in this connection it would be hard to define in a phrase. But it is that something which makes the young pink English boy fresh from home step, as if by nature born to the job, into the work of administering things, governing inferiors amiably, obeying superiors cheerfully, and keeping up a high tradition of fair play and tolerance. It is that something which made a cute American, after planning out, in theory, the administrative staff of a gigantic enterprise, with experts of all nations in this and that department, to add, "Then I would have an Englishman to run the whole lot of them."
It is an education which trains the character and exercises the mind rather than one which informs—the typical English education. It can turn out, and does turn out, shoals of careless youngsters who know little or nothing of science, mathematics, philosophy, of "the humanities" even, but who give always the impression of having been "well brought up," who have a wise way of doing practical things, and who somehow or other manage to play no mean part in the governance of the world. Observing them, many a foreign parent resolves that his children shall be trained in the same way. But often he is disappointed. The system is English, and it suits the English mind. Not always is it successful with the foreigner.
All over England are spread the institutions—preparatory schools, public schools, and universities—which are given over to the making of character, and incidentally to the teaching of a few facts. In the ordinary course a boy goes to a preparatory school with a career already mapped out for him, the Navy, the Army, or the Church, or one of the learned professions. If he is destined for the Navy he has to specialise at a very early age; if for the Army, he betakes himself to a military college at a later time; if for the Church or the Bar, or the public service, he passes through the full course of preparatory school, public school, and university.
A great educational institution in England will be found, almost invariably, built in a valley or on a marsh. Perhaps this sort of low living is thought to be conducive to high thinking. A more likely explanation is that most of the great educational institutions are ancient, and in the time of their building any great concourse of people had to settle close to the banks of a stream. The situation of the schools and universities has had its influence on the course of English education. Oxford and Cambridge, brooding in their low basins, alternately chill and steamy, are ideal places to dream in, and much more suitable for the encouragement of ethical arguments than of the inclination to "hustle." What will happen to the English character when a university comes to be founded on top of a Yorkshire hill I refuse to speculate; the prospect is too remote. But there are indications of the possible course of events in the results of the Scottish universities.
The various schools and universities of England contribute largely to its list of historic and beautiful buildings. The first great educational centre was York. In Roman times York was a fine city. With the coming of the Saxons it reasserted its importance, and became the chief collegiate town of the kingdom. In the seventh and eighth centuries the chief of England's learned men hailed from Northumbria. It was in 657 a.d. that the School of York was founded by Cædmon, first of English poets, and with the York of the early days are linked the names of the venerable Bede, "father of English learning," John of Beverley, and Wilfrid of York; also of Alcuin, a great doctor of theology, who was one of the first to hold that "chair" at Cambridge. But York suffered many vicissitudes. Wars interfered with the pursuits of the scholars. At the dawn of the twelfth century Henry I. endeavoured to restore the prosperity of the city and its colleges, with some success.
Meanwhile to the south-east, among the marshes and fens of East Anglia, scholarship had found a fitting place to dream and study. Great monastic houses at Ely and Peterborough—some of the most important in England—were the forerunners of Cambridge University. The earliest community at Cambridge was founded by Dame Hugolina in 1092, in gratitude for her recovery from a serious sickness. Cambridge has never forgotten that feminine foundation, and whilst Oxford was cold to the higher education of women movement, the other university gave the girl graduate a welcome, and pupils of two great Cambridge colleges, the "Girton Girl" and the "Newnham Girl," carried Cambridge culture wherever the English tongue was spoken.
Dame Hugolina's little foundation of six canons soon extended, until the house held thirty. In 1135 another canons' house was established, which served not only as a retreat for scholars, but as a hospital and travellers' hospice. The third foundation came in the next century, and now Cambridge University began to take definite shape. A church of the Franciscan Friars was used first for university purposes. The older and more learned friars were the professors, the novices and younger friars the undergraduates. Later, the Franciscans were succeeded by the Dominicans, and still later by the Austin Friars in the control of the nascent University. Then there began a movement to make the University independent of any monastic order, and during the fourteenth century the contest was as bitter as one could wish for. Early in the fifteenth century the University had won ground to the extent that it could act in defiance of the Bishop of Ely, and could, moreover, secure a Papal Bull in its favour.
THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
Simultaneously with this movement of the University towards independence of the monks, there had been the inevitable contests of all university towns between "gown's-men" and "town's-men." Cambridge had never been a city of any great commercial importance. But it had its "unlearned population" engaged in connection with the fisheries, farming, and the pastoral industry. Near by, the great Stourbridge Fair—one of the most important in England—brought every year a great concourse of people with little sympathy to spare for the University students, who, in turn, despised them (or affected to) right heartily, though probably among the younger students there was a lurking sympathy for the jollity of the fairs, a good impression of which one may get from a quaint old ballad of 1762:—
While gentlefolks strut in their silver and sattins,
We poor folks are tramping in straw hats and pattens;
Yet as merrily old English ballads can sing-o,
As they at their opperores outlandish ling-o;
Calling out, bravo, ankcoro, and caro,
Tho'f I will sing nothing but Bartlemew fair-o.
Here was, first of all, crowds against other crowds driving,
Like wind and tide meeting, each contrary striving;
Shrill fiddling, sharp fighting, and shouting and shrieking,
Fifes, trumpets, drums, bagpipes, and barrow girls squeaking,
Come my rare round and sound, here's choice of fine ware-o,
Though all was not sound sold at Bartlemew fair-o.
There was drolls, hornpipe dancing, and showing of postures,
With frying black-puddings; and op'ning of oysters;
With salt-boxes solos, and gallery folks squalling;
The tap-house guests roaring, and mouth-pieces bawling,
Pimps, pawn-brokers, strollers, fat landladies, sailors,
Bawds, bailiffs, jilts, jockies, thieves, tumblers, and taylors.
Here's Punch's whole play of the gun-powder plot, Sir,
With beasts all alive, and pease-porridge all hot, Sir;
Fine sausages fry'd, and the black on the wire,
The whole court of France, and nice pig at the fire.
Here's the up-and-downs; who'll take a seat in the chair-o?
Tho' there's more ups-and-downs than at Bartlemew fair-o.
Here's Whittington's cat, and the tall dromedary,
The chaise without horses, and queen of Hungary;
Here's the merry-go-rounds, come, who rides, come, who rides, Sir?
Wine, beer, ale, and cakes, fine eating besides, Sir;
The fam'd learned dog that can tell all his letters,
And some men, as scholars, are not much his betters.
This world's a wide fair, where we ramble 'mong gay things;
Our passions, like children, are tempted by play-things;
By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery,
The fal-lals of fashion and Frenchify'd frumpery.
What is life but a droll, rather wretched than rare-o?
And thus ends the ballad of Bartlemew fair-o.
It is on record that Edward I. in 1254 (whilst still Prince of Wales) visited the town of Cambridge, and acted as arbitrator in quarrels between the townsmen and the students. He decided that thirteen scholars and thirteen burgesses of the town should be chosen to represent both interests on a Board of Control. His son, Edward II., continued his father's interest in Cambridge, and maintained, at his own expense, a group of scholars there. In 1257 Hugh de Balsham, the tenth bishop of the diocese, placed and endowed at St. John's Hospital a group of secular students known as "Ely students." At this time also Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, assigned his manor of Malden, Surrey, as endowment for "poor scholars in the schools of Cambridge, who were to live according to his directions." In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in this as at other universities, scholars lived each at his own charge. Sometimes three or four clubbed together, but each had his own "founder and benefactor." Some scholars elected their own principal, and paid a fixed rate for board and lodging, and this hostel system developed into the collegiate system which distinguishes English universities from all others. Now Cambridge has seventeen of these colleges.
Among the architectural features of special interest at Cambridge is a chapel built by Matthew Wren, the uncle of Sir Christopher Wren. It is a fine specimen of seventeenth-century work. The various college buildings date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The dates are: Michaelhouse 1324, Clare 1338, Peterhouse 1284, King's Hall 1337, Pembroke 1347, Gonville Hall 1348, Trinity Hall 1356, Corpus Christi 1382, King's College 1441, Queens' 1448, St. Catharine's 1473, Jesus 1495, Christ's 1505, St. John's 1509, Magdalene 1542, Trinity 1546, Caius 1557, Emmanuel 1584, Sidney Sussex 1595. Modern colleges are Downing College, Girton College, and Newnham College. Girton College occupies Girton Manor on the Huntingdon Road, an eleventh-century house built by Picot the Norman Sheriff of Cambridge. Earlier it had been the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial-ground. The college was founded by Madame Bodichon and Miss Emily Davies. Newnham College began in a hired house with five students in 1871. Miss Anne J. Clough was the founder. The present Newnham Hall is composed of several buildings acquired since.
For the historical student a brief roll of some of Cambridge's great men would include: Green, Lyly, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Nash, Fletcher, Sterne, Thackeray, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Cranmer, the two great Cecils, Walsingham, Cromwell, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Wilberforce, Castlereagh, Palmerston, Herrick, Hutchinson, Marvell, Jeremy Taylor, Ascham, Erasmus, Spenser, Wren, Hook, Evelyn, More, Newton, and Darwin.
Meanwhile Oxford waits us, with no impatience, secure in her calm sense of dignity. There is a story of an Irishman with a great idea of his own dignity. But he was careless, he professed, as to the place at table assigned to him. "Wherever I am seated," he said, "that is the head of the table." Oxford is sometimes credited with having a feeling of rivalry for Cambridge. A mimic war of wits has been waged over the fancied rivalry, of which one epigram that sticks in my memory is, that "Cambridge breeds philosophers and Oxford burns them" (I have not the exact words, perhaps, but that is the sentiment). In truth, though, Oxford has no sense of rivalry. She knows herself to be peerless, incomparable, the centre of the educational aspiration, not only of England but of the world. In her atmosphere of drowsy ritual she broods serene as Buddha. And she does not burn philosophers nowadays, however heretical may seem to be their ideas. Indeed the Oxford of to-day shelters beneath its imperturbable calm, behind its moss-grown walls, all the "latest fashions" in beliefs.
As to the first beginnings of Oxford—the town not the University has just been celebrating its millenary—Anthony à Wood records this tale of its first origin: "When Fredeswyde had bin soe long absent from hence, she came to Binsey (triumphing with her virginity) into the city mounted on a milk-white ox betokening Innocency, and as she rode along the streets she would forsooth be still speaking to her ox, 'Ox, forth'—or (as it is related) 'bos perge,' that is 'Ox, goe on,' or 'Ox, go forth'—and hence they indiscreetly say that our city was from thence called Oxforth or Oxford." It is fairly certain that Didau and the daughter Fredeswide established a nunnery and built a church there in the eighth century. The town was rebuilt by Ethelred in the eleventh century.
Before the Norman Conquest Oxford was a notable city, often visited by the reigning kings, sometimes the meeting-place of Parliaments. This prominence brought with it many troubles. It was often sacked and in part burned. These incidents despite, it grew to be a prosperous medieval walled city. A Benedictine scholastic house on the site of Worcester College was the beginning of the University.
Early in the thirteenth century William of Durham, with a company of others, shook from off their English shoes the dust of Paris University after a "town and gown row" there, and settled at Oxford, and then the University began to take shape. He gave money to the University to found a "Hall" for students. Many other halls were founded (half of the Oxford Inns are, or were, perversion of old "Halls"). William of Wykeham gave a code of rubrics which became a legacy to the whole University. He built a college for the exclusive use of scholars of the foundation. He built also bell-tower, cloisters, kitchen, brewery, and bakehouse for "New" College. New College was the first home for scholars at Oxford. Lincoln College was next founded, after that All Souls, then Magdalen. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester gave the nucleus of the famous Bodleian library to the Benedictine monks. Christ Church was built with the revenues of a suppressed monastery.
So every step in English history for ten centuries can be remembered by the stones of Oxford. That fine library building of All Souls, which holds as one of its treasures Wren's original plans for St. Paul's Cathedral, was built out of sugar money from the West Indies, being the gift of a great sugar planter in the early days of the making of the Empire.
During the wars of Cavaliers and Roundheads Oxford suffered some shrewd blows. It was for the King always, and after the Restoration the Court recognised its loyalty. Charles II. with his Queen—and eke another lady or so as a rule—was often a visitor, and spent a great part of the Plague Year there, though "the Merry Monarch" showed no want of pluck or loyalty to his sore-stricken people during that time, and did not abandon London altogether. But all who could got out of London for a while to escape the horrors of which Pepys has given so clear a record in his diary and letters, as in the following to Lady Carteret:—
ST. MAGDALEN, TOWER AND COLLEGE, OXFORD
The absence of the Court and emptiness of the city takes away all occasion of news, save only such melancholy stories as would rather sadden than find your Ladyship any divertisement in the hearing; I have stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-street, and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not 50 upon the Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr. Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own house being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service: lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer's house shut up, and my baker, with his whole family, dead of the plague.
Greenwich begins apace to be sickly; but we are, by the command of the King, taking all the care we can to prevent its growth; and meeting to that purpose yesterday, after sermon, with the town officers, many doleful informations were brought us, and, among others, this, which I shall trouble your Ladyship with the telling:—Complaint was brought us against one in the town for receiving into his house a child newly brought from an infected house in London. Upon inquiry, we found that it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, who, having lost already all the rest of his children, and himself and wife being shut up and in despair of escaping, implored only the liberty of using the means for the saving of this only babe, which with difficulty was allowed, and they suffered to deliver it, stripped naked out at a window into the arms of a friend, who, shifting into fresh clothes, conveyed it thus to Greenwich, where, upon this information from Alderman Hooker, we suffer it to remain. This I tell your Ladyship as one instance of the miserable straits our poor neighbours are reduced to.
Pepys himself had taken refuge then at Greenwich. All had left who could, even to dour old John Milton, whose plague retreat at Chalfont St. Giles (Bucks) is now preserved as an historical relic, and usually holds the attention of the rushing tourist, who is "doing" England within a month, for quite seven minutes. That is really space for a matured consideration to the tourist mind.
"The motor has slowed down from seventy miles an hour to fifty miles an hour. We are passing a point of great historic interest." That is sight-seeing in Europe for the American tourist according to one of their own humorists. I have had many opportunities to observe the truth on which that sarcasm is based. Take Milton's Cottage for an instance. I had walked there from Chorley Wood one spring afternoon, and was enjoying idly the blooms in the little garden, when a motor rushed up, disgorged a party of hurried tourists, of which the man member had a guide-book. "Is this Milton's Cottage?" It was: so they entered. "Is this really Milton's chair? Sure?" It was. So they all sat on it solemnly in turn. Within five minutes their chariot of petrol had wrapped them up again, and they were rushing over the face of England to see some shrine of the Pilgrim Fathers.
BROAD STREET, OXFORD, LOOKING WEST
But we have rambled from Oxford, which is, by the way, much cursed of the rushing tourist, who has a plan for "doing" it in an hour, and gallops from the Bodleian to Shelley's Tomb, and Addison's Walk, the Old Wall, the Tower of St. Michael's, and is away in a cloud of dust, without having gained the barest hint of the subtle persuasive charm of Oxford; without a thought of seeing St. Mary's Tower afloat in the moonlight; of hearing the choir of Magdalen; of drowsing an afternoon under the elms; or of seeking, with all due reverence and modesty, to gain an entrance to some of those august companies of Oxford—of undergraduates dreaming their exalted young dreams, of dons musing their deep thoughts.
I own to it that I feel it difficult to write of Oxford, though, alas! I am able to write with facility of many places visited and things experienced. There is something of rebuke towards quick generalisations and easy judgments in the atmosphere of the place. I have been to Oxford many times. My very first dinner in England was with the Fellows of All Souls, a feast of solemn yet cheerful splendour in four rooms, one for the dinner itself, yet another for dessert, another for coffee, and finally, another for tobacco. Another time I was at Oxford to lecture to a gathering of dons and undergraduates on social problems in Australia; yet another time to prove that the young athletes of the University were conquerable at epée fencing. But never have I got over a first awe of the place. To attempt to probe to its soul seems an impertinence. Oxford has an atmosphere of the Round Table.
Rather than attempt to give my own impressions, I prefer to quote others, and to state facts. That Herodotus of social life, Pepys, found Oxford "a very sweet place," spent two shillings and sixpence on a barber in its honour, and gave ten shillings "to him that showed us All Souls College and Chickley's picture." He concludes, "Oxford a mighty fine place.... Cheap entertainment." Pepys was not troubled evidently by any awe of the place. There is, by the way, astonishingly little in the poetic literature of England about Oxford, seeing that so many poets have lived and studied there.
The University of Oxford, for all its devotion to the King, would not follow James II. on the path towards Rome. When on his accession he was welcomed to Oxford, "the fountains ran claret for the vulgar." But when he tried to force his Roman Catholic nominee into the presidentship of Magdalen, he could not even get a blacksmith to force a door for him. Oxford was for the Church and the Throne, but for the Church first. Nowadays Oxford is very much interested in social problems. It is Conservative still, but many of its young men have a flavour of socialism, generally of a "non-revolutionary" and Christian type.
Material life at Oxford is exceedingly pleasant, not to say luxurious. The undergraduates "do themselves" very well. Kitchen and buttery maintain agreeably historic reputations, and the old college buildings have been modernised to the extent of admitting electric light and sanitary plumbing. But bath-rooms are rare: the good old English "tub" which a servant makes ready in the morning with a ewer of water is still a feature of the college bedroom.
It is the social life and the college system, with its fine mixture of independence and wardship, which make Oxford sought for as a school for "character." But one may also gain much learning there if one wishes. Still it is hardly essential. You may emerge from Oxford with a degree, but with astonishingly little knowledge. To the "Babu" type of mind in particular—that easily memorising, non-comprehending type of mind—a degree at Oxford is particularly easy of attainment. (The University, by the way, attracts very many coloured students, from India, from Africa, and from other parts of the world.) The man, too, of real intelligence who is willing to seek a degree in the manner of the Babu can easily fritter away the most of his student hours at Oxford, and win through his examinations by cramming at the last moment.
Since Oxford is so typical of the best of English life, it is fitting that it should be a place of very sweet and dignified gardens. There is the grandeur of elegant simplicity about Oxford gardens; and the Oxford trees—beeches, elms, limes, oaks—are surely the finest in all the world. Oxford history is curiously linked with trees. William of Waynflete commanded that Magdalen be built against an oak that fell a hundred years before, aged six hundred years. Sir Thomas Whiteway "learned in a dream" to build a college where there was a "triple elm tree," and that fixed the site of St. Thomas. To-day the green of the Spring in the precincts of Trinity and Magdalen is a green which speaks of all peace and wise comprehension.
ETON UPPER SCHOOL AND LONG WALK, FROM COMMON LANE HOUSE
So much space has been given to Oxford and Cambridge, where young England receives the crowning garlands of the academies, that I can do no more than briefly mention the great public schools: Eton, under the shadow of the King's castle at Windsor; Harrow, on a hill a little apart from London; Winchester, nestling in the valley where, if tradition can be trusted, King Arthur once held a court; Rugby, in the Midlands, enjoying a sturdier climate and giving to the world that very manly exercise, Rugby football. These and others might each have a book to themselves with justice. But in this volume we must move on to see something of adult England.
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND AT WORK
A good proportion of young English manhood after having passed through their course of education at home are claimed away from their country. The Indian Civil Service, the Services of the Crown Colonies, the Navy, the Army garrisons abroad, the immigration demand of the Overseas' Dominions—all these make a tax on the numbers of adult England; and unfortunately the tax is much more heavy upon the numbers of males than of females. Thus there is a great disproportion of sexes in England. The females far outnumber the males, especially in the cities. But after all the demands have been met, there are still some millions of Englishmen left. Let us see the work they do, the home life they lead.
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT AND WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, LONDON
First of all, if a young Englishman is of the well-to-do order, and is ambitious, he will strive to take some part in politics. He may not be born to be a member of the House of Lords: and only six hundred or so of him can hope to become members of the House of Commons. But there are numerous other avenues of political activity, such as County Councils and Committees of all kinds. It is a wholesome aspiration of the best type of Englishmen to take some part, not necessarily a paid part, in the government and administration of their country. The supreme ambition, then, of the young Englishman may be said to be to work in the House of Commons; and that keeps "the Mother of Parliaments," in spite of all that pessimists may say, the leading legislative body of the world.
In its vast membership the House of Commons includes experts on every subject under the sun. There is no topic of debate imaginable on which some member cannot speak as a past-master. And the House insists that if you wish to engage its attention you must have something to say. You may halt or stumble in your speech, but you must have something to say or you will fail to get a hearing, no matter how charmingly you may talk. That helps the debate to a high level, discouraging talk for mere talk's sake.
"Mr. Speaker," who presides over the House of Commons, seems to be always a genius in the art of managing a deliberative assembly. At any rate, one never hears of a weak "Mr. Speaker." The present one takes it to be his duty to suppress all irrelevance and all tediousness in debate. He insists that a member shall say his say without circumlocution or repetition. With the vigilance of a ratting terrier he watches for discursiveness, and pounces upon the offender at once. I recollect a debate on the Indian question, arising out of the House of Lords' amendments in an Indian governing Councils Bill. All the speakers in the debate were experts with an inside knowledge of Indian affairs. They all spoke with terseness and directness. But there were, nevertheless, four interruptions from Mr. Speaker, that "the hon. member was not sticking to the point at issue." In each case you recognised that Mr. Speaker was right. In one case, and one case only, did the rebuked member attempt to argue the point. "I was only going to point out, Mr. Speaker," he started. The whole House rose against him. "'Vide, 'Vide," they called from front and cross and back benches. He attempted again, and again the cries of "'Vide" drowned his voice; and he had to submit without argument. The House clearly believed in its tyrant. It requires a curious sort of genius to be so able to "proof-read" a current debate and hit at once on the first divergence into redundancy.
If a "Mr. Speaker" is to become a tradition as one of the greatest of the many great Mr. Speakers, then he must have a sense of humour as well as a gift of prompt decision. The present Mr. Speaker has that qualification. He does not say "funny" things. But in almost every ruling and reproof there is a slight flavour of fun. A rule of the House was made after the "Suffragettes" made trouble once or twice in the chamber, that the Women's Gallery, a curious gilded bird-cage perched up in the roof of the House, should be open only to "relatives of members." Mr. Speaker was asked to define what closeness of relation justified admission. "That," said Mr. Speaker, "I must leave to the individual consciences of hon. members." The House chuckled and understood that any respectable person could be counted as a feminine relative for purposes of admission to the gallery.
For the student of the origins of the English-race it is interesting—and quite easy of accomplishment if you have an acquaintance who is a member of Parliament—to see the quaint ceremony in the Lords of the Royal Assent being given to Bills. On the occasion on which I attended, the Chancellor and two Peers, acting as Commissioners for the King, sat in solemn state, the Chancellor finding obvious difficulty in accommodating both a huge wig and a cocked hat on his head. To them entered as far as the Bar of the House, on summons, some of the Commons, heralded by Black Rod and led by the Speaker. The titles of the Bills were recited by a clerk, and, with much ritual of bowing, the Royal Assent was granted in Norman French: "Le Roy le veult." It was rather a pity that the Bills were painfully prosaic ones, dealing with tramways and the like. The elaborate medieval ceremony would have been more fitting to some great measure of statecraft. Still it did not seem incongruous. That is a characteristic of London. It is a medieval city modernised, but without the flavour of the medievalism being spoiled.
Of course it is well known that the present are not the original Houses of Parliament; it may not be so familiar a fact that Westminster Hall covers the old site, and that tablets, let into its walls, mark the limits, curiously small, of the old House of Commons. The King is supposed by tradition to open Parliament in the Hall of Westminster on the old site of the Commons. But to do so he would have to stand exactly on the spot where King Charles I. rose to receive a death sentence from his revolted Commons; and I think that lately our monarchs have shown sentimental objections to this and have let tradition in the matter go.
The House of Lords and the House of Commons are built in the one straight line, with the lobbies intervening. The King, when seated on the throne, can see right through (all the doors being open) to the Speaker on his chair some four hundred yards away. The Lords have the finer debating hall; but the Commons, it is complained, monopolise all the comfortable smoking and lounge rooms. Evidently they think that the noble lords have enough comfort in their own homes.
Lately a committee of the Houses of Parliament have been discussing the question of redecorating the buildings, and have come practically to the conclusion to do nothing. In some of the halls mural paintings of a rather astonishing kind, betraying a time when artistic standards were a little lower than now, cover the panels. To fill the gaps with paintings of this epoch would make for incongruity. To imitate the old-fashioned and rather bad-fashioned existing panels does not seem advisable. So probably the difficulty will be solved by doing nothing, unless a daring wight suggests the painting out of some old work to make room for a complete set of modern frescoes. Probably, if there were just now an unquestionably pre-eminent British artist offering for the work, that would be done. As it is, the Mother of Parliaments remains with some of her halls a little patchy in decoration; some of them, indeed, a good deal ugly.
But, of course, governing the country is the business of the few. Tempting though it is to linger on at Westminster, let us see other classes of England at work. The historic industry of England is agriculture, and it is to this day one of the most important, though a dwindling one lately. Still, however, the English are an agricultural people; though it is around the agriculture of a century ago that their affections are entwined. Modern agriculture, nevertheless, hardly exists in England, neither in the production of grain nor of fruit. The average orchard seems better designed to be an insectarium for the cultivation of pests than for the growth of good fruit. Straggling unkempt trees, growing for the most part their own wild way, naturally do not produce like the well-disciplined trees of the modern orchardist. But the soil is wondrous kind. That anything at all should come of such culture, or neglect of culture, is to be explained by a great graciousness of Nature.
Fruit is the text I take, because fruit is at once the worst example, and the most obvious one. But in no branch of agriculture is there anything approaching to modern scientific farming. Wheat-farming represents the crown of agricultural achievement in England, and very good yields per acre are garnered, because the tillage is careful, the manuring generous, the climate favourable. But what gross waste of labour is involved in the cultivation of these tiny fields, laboriously ploughed, in many instances with a single furrow plough; sown by hand and often reaped, yes reaped, with scythe-men and picturesque but unthrifty gathering of haymakers!
But there is this to be said for the old-fashioned English agriculture, that it is very, very picturesque. The tiny hedge-divided fields, the orchards in which the trees grow to forest dimensions, are far more pleasing to the eye than the great, bare, wire-fence-divided wheat-fields of Canada and Australia; or their orchards with close-clipped trees kept working with all their might for a living and not allowed the luxury of a single vagrant branch or the sight of any green carpet of grass beneath. And, withal, in England, farming is not a commercial speculation altogether. If it relied upon its commercial success, it would die out almost completely. But the old landholders love their estates: the newly rich, if they are of the English spirit, aspire to become landholders. Both are usually content if from their agricultural estates they are able to make the products pay a slight profit only.
HARVESTING IN HEREFORDSHIRE
The area under tillage shows, therefore, a tendency to dwindle, though already it is very small, considering the thick population of the country. Love of sport and love of seeing the woods in their wild state have always set apart a great area of England for forest and for game preserve. Nowadays we do not make a deer forest as roughly as did William the Conqueror the New Forest for the sake of the deer "whom he loved as if he had been their father." But somehow land passes out of cultivation to become moorland or forest. These "waste lands" are far from being useless, however. They graze ponies and cows; they are deer forests, grouse moors, pheasant preserves, golf links. Land is more valuable for sport than for agriculture, and therefore it drifts to the use of sport, and peasants make way for pheasants.
A fine track of oak forest has been left at the Forest of Dean near the borders of Wales—the finest forest tract probably in England. It is a wild tract of steep hills covered with oaks, used for the building of the Navy in the days before the wooden walls had given way to steel ramparts.
The fen areas alone are in course of reclamation from the wild to the cultivated state. The work of bringing them back to usefulness was begun under Charles I. by Dutch engineers. Now a great part of the old fen lands are good productive meadows bounded by a network of dykes and drains, from which the surplus of water is pumped into the channels of the Ouse and other rivers, and so finds its way to the North Sea. Like the similar land of Holland, these reclaimed fens are excellent for the culture of bulbs, and Lincolnshire has made quite an industry of sending narcissi to the London market.
Considering the Englishman at his work in other capacities, he is iron-founder, pottery-maker, textile-weaver, miner, and of course sailor and merchant. His work is characterised by a great solidness and honesty. There is not much "gimcrack" work turned out in England. The spirit of her workshops is to make things that will last, not short-life tools and machines, such as some other peoples love. Indeed they do say that the idols made at Birmingham—a large proportion of the idols for the heathens of the world are made at Birmingham—are made so solidly as to suggest that the manufacturers have grave doubts about Paganism being supplanted among their customers for some generations.
Occasionally, indeed, one is tempted to believe that the Englishman loves work for work's own sake. I concluded this on first landing at Liverpool, when it took an hour's effort, on an average, for each passenger from the mail steamer to sort out his luggage. At Euston at least another half-hour was wasted in the same way. All that might have been avoided by a luggage check system such as prevails in Australia, America, and other countries. But evidently the English character for steady energy and stolid good humour is built up partly by following the sport of luggage-hunting.
The English public and semi-public service, which gives to the visitor the first view of the Englishman at work, is simply beyond praise. In the railway service, the civility of the guards and porters, the neatness, the quiet energy of the drivers and firemen, are notable. In most countries railway engines seem always dirty and ill-kept. In England they are bright and clean. That shows a workman's pride in his work and its instruments. It is the man with the clean engines who is going to win through in the end.
I have a means of comparison of the public service in the United States and in England. In New York a letter addressed to me at a newspaper office went astray through a clerk refusing to take it in. I inquired for it at the New York Central Post Office: was—not very civilly—referred to the particular district post office which had attempted to deliver the letter. A clerk there could not see that anything could be done—"the letter would be opened, probably, and returned to the writer.... Perhaps if I applied at the Washington Dead Letter Office it would do some good." I applied by letter (unanswered), then personally, and was told in a tired way that the matter would be looked into and I should be communicated with in London. That is the last I ever heard of the matter.
Now in London one morning I left a small despatch case in a motor omnibus. Reporting to Scotland Yard, I stated that the papers in the portfolio were important and their recovery urgent. The police officer at once volunteered to wire round to every police station in the metropolitan district (200 of them), reporting the loss and asking that word should be at once sent if the article were handed in. Before eleven that night a police officer called at my house with a despatch from Scotland Yard that the case had been found.
"The public good" depends largely on the efficiency of the public service. It can never be real when the Government and the instruments of the Government are careless of the people's convenience. The efficiency of the Post Office, the police, and the park servants in England is great proof of a sound national spirit.
When the Englishman is through with his work—whether it be the large and dignified work of administering his Empire, or the smaller task of driving a tram—he goes home; and he is not a really happy Englishman, whatever his class, if his home has not at least the sight of a green tree. He is willing, even if he is poor and condemned to work long hours, to travel long distances each day so that he may have at the end of his work a home to come to which will please his love of green England.
Having noted that the Englishman's home is, whenever possible, adorned with a little bit of green garden, step over its threshold and consider its domestic economy; that is to say, see the Englishwoman at her special work. This must be done by classes.
In the wealthiest class the house is perfectly managed. It seems to run like the fabled machine of perpetual motion. There is no sign of the driving-power, no racket, no effort. Breakfast is a meal of charming informality, which, I think, illustrates best the domestic ideals of the Englishman. Self-help from amply furnished sideboards and from tea and coffee urns is the rule. There is no fixed moment for coming to breakfast, and, since you help yourself, no servants need to be in attendance. How pleasantly thought-out is this idea! You have not the urging to an inconvenient punctuality of the thought that you are keeping servants waiting. Dinner is a ceremony of ritual. It is the social crown of the day. You are expected to treat it with the considerateness due to its importance. To be asked to dinner is the sign of the Englishman's complete acceptance of you as a desirable person. (He may ask you to lunch without admitting quite as much.) To be asked, casually, "to eat with us" at dinner time shows a degree of friendliness which is willing to allow some familiarity.
It is because the luxury of upper-class life in England is so suave and so refined that it does not challenge antagonism as does the arrogant wealth of other lands. An English manor house, such as Stoke Court—once upon a time the house of the poet Grey—is, from its beautiful surroundings to the last detail of a curtain, as fine a product as civilisation can show. And the Englishman's home is for himself, his friends, and, in so far as it can claim to be of any public interest, for the enjoyment also of the mass of his fellow-countrymen.
The casual traveller through London may, on several days of the year, see a great crowd of omnibuses and drags outside Buckingham Palace, and learn that the grounds of the King's palace had been that day thrown open to the public. To a large extent the royal palaces thus welcome the people as guests; and the great houses of the nobility, which have fine collections of paintings, are in very many cases treated as semi-public institutions. This shows a fine public spirit and feeling of common patriotism between classes.
The middle class fashions itself, as closely as it can, on the upper class. Its home is often as admirably managed, though on a smaller scale. Its observance of etiquette is more rigid, especially in the "lower middle class." Smooth home-management is the Englishman's (or the Englishwoman's) gift. The domestic economy of the country cottager seems generally good, but the city worker often makes the mistake of trying to ape the standards of richer people, sacrificing a good deal of material comfort to have, for instance, his "drawing-room" or parlour.
But on the whole the Englishman's home proves as high a standard of taste and good feeling as the twentieth century can offer. It is a fine reward for the work-doer, a fine fortress from which to issue forth to work. Let us now see England at play.
FOOTBALL AT RUGBY SCHOOL
CHAPTER VI
ENGLAND AT PLAY
"These English take their pleasures sadly," said a French wit. It was a misunderstanding of the national expression. The Englishman takes his pleasures not sadly but resolutely. It is a holiday. He is out to enjoy himself. He will enjoy himself whatever the obstacles. There is a grim resolve in his mind. But he is not sad: he is resolutely merry. That look on his face is not agony; it is stern determination.
I have seen Hampstead Heath on the midsummer Bank Holiday. A frowning sky, a bleak wind, and occasional gusty showers of rain declared the day to be not of midsummer and not suitable to open-air holiday. But the East End was not to be deterred from merriment. "London's playground" was like a huge ant-hill with swarming holiday-makers, and all had made up their dogged English minds to rejoice and be merry. That was apparent from the first.
In the "Tube" railways girls of from sixteen to sixty—all girly—giggled hilariously at everything and anything and nothing. "It's from the other side" announced one on the train platform; and this fact about the train's going was greeted with shouting laughter, and the "joke" went round a widening circle of rippling merriment. On the road, the coster's cart, loaded with Mr. and Mrs. Coster and a group of Costerlings—the numerousness of which said "no race suicide here"—scattered abroad song, vociferous if not tuneful. When a shower came the song grew louder, as though to smother the weather.
Commerce helped the people's resolve to be gay. You could buy a bag of confetti for a halfpenny; for the same sum a stick adorned with bright paper streamers, or a tuft of gorgeously-dyed flax. A penny provided a tartan cap in paper, wearing which one might be quite ridiculously gay. The oceans had been dredged and the earth rifled for the people's holiday. Shellfish of all sorts, bananas from the West Indies, plums from Spain, roses from Kent and Surrey, pine-apple tinned at Singapore, bright nacre shells from Australian beaches, little love-birds from Papua trained as "fortune-tellers" to pick out a paper telling you of the happiness in store for you—all these were at your service; and the standard price was one penny. A few coppers opened up for the holiday Englishman the resources of a whole Empire.
Over all lowered a grey sky. But what mattered that! The factory girls danced on the gravel paths to the music of barrel organs (sometimes, indeed, of the humble mouth organ), danced often with verve, and always with hilarity. The Australian larrikin and his "donah" dance at "down the harbor" picnics with a fixed solemnity of face, as if performing some weird corybantic rite. The London coster and his girl are determinedly merry. The merriment may be in some cases forced, but it is forced with grit. A dance on the road is broken up to allow a cart to slowly creep past. It is resumed with perfect good humour, and with the same gay whoops.
Yet there is nothing orgiastic in the merriment. Among the many many thousands you may notice here and there a man and—far worse sight—occasionally a girl the worse for drink, prompting the thought that if public opinion won't keep women out of the bars the licensing law should; but the great mass of the crowd is quite sober: the merriment is not vinous.
If dancing, shouting, or "spooning"—discouraged neither by the gaze of the public nor the dampness of the weather—did not amuse, there were more intellectual amusements. You might have your head read for a penny, your character diagnosed by your eye for the same sum; or you might see an old man making a fairly good pretence of hanging himself, and he left it to your honesty to subscribe the penny.
The Englishman take his pleasures sadly? Not a bit of it. That roar from the Old Bull and Bush, the crackling laughter around all the booths and from all the crowded paths, tell that the Englishman can become very gay on quite slight encouragement.
A day at Southend, another great "popular place of amusement," gives the same impression of resolute gaiety. A good-humoured crowd packs the cheap-trip trains. There are more passengers than seats; and young fellows take it amiably in turn to stand, leaving the elders and the womenfolk to sit throughout. At Southend there is no beach, as one understands the term elsewhere—a scimitar curve of gleaming sand on which blue waves break, showing their white teeth in smiles. The "beach" is just a flat, which at high tide the sea covers, to leave it at low tide a wide muddy expanse of marshy soil. But the seaside trippers make the best of it. The cliffs are thronged with happy picnickers. The beach is dotted with waders, who go out many hundreds of yards along the wet flat, and in some mysterious way enjoy themselves. Where at last the water starts there are bathers disporting from boats. A pier which stretches out its long straightness and suggests a task rather than a pleasure, is filled with happy promenaders, who sniff up the smell of the seaweed and recognise it as ozone. They mostly wear yachting caps, or some other costume sign of the seaside, and an air of nautical adventure.
Yes, the Englishman has a great faculty of enjoying himself. I am indeed struck, in many aspects of life, at the Englishman's faculty of being cheerful under what one would consider depressing conditions. The Englishman does not hesitate to take his girl to the cemetery to court her. A London friend asked me, with real enthusiasm, to look at the "fine view" from his flat, and it looked out on an old Plague Cemetery, where the victims of the London plague nourish the green of the trees. The Englishman take his pleasures sadly? Rather he takes his sadnesses pleasurably.
It is the Englishman of the industrial classes I have pictured amusing himself. As to the richer folk, is there anything fresh to be said? Does not every one at least think that he knows? Have not "society" novelists innumerable, from "Ouida" downwards, given us studies of English "society" people at play, making the home life of the duke open for inspection by the meanest intelligence? Are there not numberless penny and halfpenny papers carrying on the good work to this day?
If one can contrive to put out of one's mind all that nonsense and observe with intelligence, one will find that the middle-class Englishman and the rich Englishman amuse themselves after very much the same manner as do the people of the poorer classes. They refine on the methods, but the spirit is the same. At heart, the Englishman of all classes loves feasting and boisterous jollity. Education and breeding may modify his tastes, but they are still there. Au fond, the typical Englishman likes best a joke that has a savour of the "practical" in it. Give him his natural rein, and duke's son, cook's son—if there are any English cooks left to have sons—will lightly incline his thoughts to horseplay when he wishes to be genuinely amused.
Yet perhaps this, too, passes. I remember thinking so, Lord Mayor's Day 1909, when the procession through the city proved to be not a "show," but a display of the defence guards of the nation. Perhaps this may be taken as a hint of a growing earnestness in English life, of a recognition of stern struggles to come and only to be met with resolved and steady vigour. It had, of a surety, some significance—the sudden casting off on the city's great festival day of an old habit of childish play and the putting in its place of a display of soldiers and sailors, and boys who will one day be soldiers and sailors. Of some significance, too, was the ready, popular acquiescence in the change. Crowds that had been for years regaled on such occasions with broad pantomime, all fun and levity, were faced of a sudden with serious drama—soldiers in glittering mail, still more impressive soldiers in uniforms of the colour of earth; Boy Scouts playing at being soldiers and enjoying the most wholesome game; war paraphernalia of wagons and field telegraphs and field hospitals, and guns of all kinds, from the great mastiff siege-guns drawn by eight horses, which the Navy taught the Army to make mobile, down to the vicious little terrier pom-poms. And the people cheered the change. There was no hint at a protest against the departure from the stage of the old vanities. After a quieter method than that which came of Savonarola's teaching, but none the less surely, they had gone to destruction, and in their place was a dutiful parade of citizens armed for the defence of their homes: and the people approved. The Balaclava veterans and the Boy Scouts shared the honours of the day. Gog and Magog were not; but the crowd would have its symbolism, and cheered the ideal of tried valour, the ideal of aspiring youth, as they saw them seriously personified.
CRICKET AT LORD'S
In 1910 and 1911 there was the same "sober-minded" Lord Mayor's Day; and the old pantomime procession clearly will never be revived. Perhaps now the English nation is at last "growing up" to be too old for such elemental humours. If so, does the fact speak for good augury or evil augury? I wonder. A well-known Scottish artist of the day, who lives in Paris "because it is the place for all rebels and all ideas," and sells his pictures in London and America, told me once very solemnly, "When the English people get artistic and witty they are going to go down. It is the Philistinism of England that proves her national strength and sanity." I reassured him by telling him that most of the statues erected in England nowadays were those of men in trousers, and we were comforted to think that there was still enough of Philistinism in England to keep her safe and sound. But it does look as though the Englishman were losing his enjoyment of primitive humour when he vetoes Gog and Magog on Lord Mayor's Day. Also he begins to live in hotels and to dine at restaurants when he is not travelling. Yes, on the surface all peoples grow sadly alike, and that charm of travel which comes from the stimulating contact of the mind with the more obvious differences between lands and peoples threatens to vanish in a generation or two, through the fashion of admiring all countries but one's own spreading, and through each country learning to imitate some other. Still, the threat has been often made before without justifying itself. In Shakespeare's time it was Italy
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.
But we did not in the end become Italians. In spite of surface imitations the deeper differences which come from the tap-roots of nations remain.
The Lord Mayor's Day of the old style of buffoonery is dead. But there is, on the other hand, a movement in England nowadays—a happy and wholesome movement—to revive the festivities of May Day, which once was the great festival of the country-side. The old chronicles in their descriptions of May Day rejoicings provide a very delectable picture. This from Bourne:—
On the calends or first of May, commonly called May Day, the Juvenile part of both sexes were wont to rise a little after midnight and walk to some neighbouring wood accompanied with music and blowing of horns, where they break down branches of trees and adorn them with nosegays and crowns of flowers; when this is done they return homewards about the rising of the sun and make their doors and windows to triumph with their flowery spoils and the after part of the day is chiefly spent in dancing round a tall pole, called a May-pole and being placed in a convenient part of the village stands there, as it were consecrated to the Goddess of Flowers without the least violation being offered to it in the whole circle of the year.
Stubbes, writing in 1595, describes closely the bringing home of the May-pole:—
Against May Day ... every parish, towne or village assemble themselves, both men, women and children and either all together or dividing themselves into companies, they goe some to the woods and groves some to the hills and mountains where they spend all the night in pleasant pastime and in the morning return bringing with them birch boughs and branches of trees to deck their assemblies withal. But their chiefest jewel they bring thence is the Maie pole which they bring home with great veneration as thus—they have twentie to fortie yoake of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nosegaie of flowers tied to the top of his horns, and these oxen draw home the Maypoale which they covered all over with flowers and herbes bound round with strings from the top to the bottome and sometimes it was painted with colours, having two or three hundred men, women and children following in great devotion.... Then fall they to banquetting and feasting, to leaping and dancing about it, as heathen people did at the dedication of their idols.
Hall, in his Chronicle of the time of Henry VIII., tells how the feast of May Day was sometimes accompanied by a kind of historical pageant. This is from his description of a May Day in the seventh year of the reign of Henry VIII.:—
The King and Queen accompanied with many lordes and ladies rode in the high ground of Shooter's Hill to take the open air and as they passed by the way they espied a company of tall yeomen clothed all in green with green whodes and bows and arrowes to the number of two hundred. Then one of them which called himself Robin Hood came to the King, desiring him to see his men shoot, and the King was content. Then he whistled and all the two hundred archers shot and losed at once and then he whistled again and they likewise shot again, their arrows whistled by craft of the head, so that the noise was strange and great and much pleased the company. All these archers were of the King's guard and had thus apparelled themselves to make solace to the King. Then Robin Hood desired the King and Queen to come into the green wood and to see how the outlaws live. The King demanded of the Queen and her ladies if they durst venture to go into the wood with so many outlawes. Then the Queen said that if it pleased him she was content, then the horns blew till they came to the wood under Shooter's Hill, and there was an arbour made of bows with a hall and a great chamber and an inner chamber very well made and covered with flowers and herbes which the King much praised. Then said Robin Hood, Sir, outlaw's breakfast is venison and therefore you must be content with such fare as we use. Then the King and Queen sat down and were served with venison and wine by Robin Hood and his men. Then the King departed and his company and Robin Hood and his men them conducted.
I have spoken, so far, of "amusement" only. There are other forms of play. There is "sport." Now sport must not be considered an amusement merely in England. It is a vital absorbing affair of life, a "bemusement" rather. Some serious-minded folk in London still tell, with deprecation, of incidents of the time of the South African War, when the evening newspaper contents bills showed that there was a keener attraction for coppers in news of the cricket matches than in news of the campaign. But even these serious-minded people themselves probably have often bought a paper which recorded a century in a Test Match in preference to one which gave some news of national importance; and have murmured to themselves in excuse something that the dour old Duke of Wellington probably never said, about the Battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton.
"Sport," indeed, is so much a part of English life that it could never be uprooted without making some vital change in the national character—and, perhaps, not a change for the better.
One thing the passion for sport does give to the Englishman, and that is a passion for fair play. There is not in any other nation of the world such a nice sense of manly honour. "Give him a sporting chance" means that you must take no unfair advantage of an enemy. "Take it like a sport" means that you must not be merely a cheerful winner, but must be ready to face losses and set-backs with equanimity.
When the small English boy goes to school the question is solemnly asked as to what sports he will take up. This is of at least equal importance with the other question as to what professional or business career he will follow in the future. Often it is counted of greater moment. Will the youngster be good at cricket, or football, or rowing? On that hinges the degree of his greatness in his world's estimation for quite a number of years. Cricket is, on the whole, the most important. To be a classic bat, to be a deadly slow bowler, or a still more deadly fast bowler—that is greatness for the young man. The cricket matches between the great public schools, the universities, the counties, are the chief pre-occupation of a large proportion of England during the summer months. Football grips more among the industrial classes, cricket more among the professional and administrative classes. Between them they keep a great part of England excited from one year's end to the other.
There are, of course, other sports of the schools—running, jumping, lawn tennis, hockey and the like. But they usually are just allowed to fill in gaps between cricket and football. Manhood, however, adds to the list of sports largely. There is golf. "If you find that golf interferes with your business, give up your business," runs a popular gibe. It accentuates, without misrepresenting acutely, the attitude taken up by very many Englishmen and Englishwomen on the subject of golf. They live in a district because of its golf facilities, shape their holiday resorts by the golf they offer, reckon their days by the chances they offer for golf.
Horse-racing is another great English sport, in which few take an active part, but in which a vast multitude has a share of interest either as spectators or as speculators. It claims such a huge share of English attention that one definition of the English is, "a horse-racing nation"; and wherever an English town is built in any part of the world it will have a race-course almost as soon as it has a church and a school. The various race-meetings throughout the year in England vary in their social character. The Derby is a great popular event, to see which the East End of London pours itself out on the Surrey roads. Goodwood, on the other hand, is very much a "society" meeting.
The tale is not yet complete. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Englishmen find it necessary to life to disport on water during the summer—yachting, skiff-rowing, punting, or canoeing. Hunting is mostly the sport of the well-to-do, though an otter-hunt calls a whole country-side to its excitement, demanding of no one either that he should be mounted or that he should be rich.
Fox-hunting is of the very marrow of the English character. "The unspeakable pursuing the uneatable," said Wilde savagely of the English squire pursuing the fox; and thereby proved his utter un-Englishness. To sneer at fox-hunting! It is a step towards atheism. Once upon a time I remember going out into the yard of a little village public-house on the Monaro (Australia) and seeing chained up in the yard a fox. I stopped to ask why, and the groom told me of an English tourist who had also inquired as to the fox, and who had learned incidentally that poison was laid for foxes on the Monaro because they had become a pest; and, so learning, had set his face at once away from a land where such barbarities were possible. He did not reckon his own life safe, I suppose, in a country where foxes were poisoned.
TROUT-FISHING ON THE ITCHEN, HAMPSHIRE
The pheasant battues, which are one of the autumn games of the rich in England, I would hardly dignify as "sport." They are the growth of the recent times of great fortunes, and scarcely a wholesome sign, I think. Grouse-shooting en battue is more tolerable as a sport, for at least the birds are wild-bred.
But one may not even catalogue all the sports of England in a chapter. I find that fishing—in all its phases: salmon, trout, deep-sea, and the rest—asks attention, and may not have it. One final note: the Englishman, for all his present sports, is hospitable to welcome others, and often takes them up to excel in them. In flying, for instance, the Englishman is beginning now to take a place after the French. And I can recollect, as late as the end of 1909, a Flying Meeting at Doncaster at which not a single Englishman took the air. Within a little more than two years what a change!
That Doncaster Flying Meeting was the first ever held in England, and I was one of those who travelled up to see the strange fowl in the air, birds of the growth of the fabled roc winging steady flights around the field once sacred to the horse. Badly treated by the weather, the "First Flying Meeting in England" faced an outlook which was not too cheerful. Over a sodden ground a grey sky lowered threateningly, and gusty winds, blowing hither and thither, threatened storms. The great "birds" nestled within their sheds, and a nervous committee went round lifting questioning hands to the sky. If this day were a fiasco the meeting was ruined, and the horses of Doncaster would have the laugh over their strange rivals.
Then the sun came out. The wind dropped to a zephyr's lightness. There seemed no reason why the men should not fly, and they could fly. Whispers went round hinting at delays which were condemnable because avoidable if they were real. An official suggested that aviators had all the tricks and uncertainties of the indispensable prima donna assoluta; that they had to be humoured to take the stage when the call-bell rang. Devout prayers were muttered for the day when aviation would be as common in England as trick-cycling and stout, bejewelled promoters of flying meetings would lounge haughtily in front of a long queue of humble applicants for a chance to appear, and country hotel-keepers would, with most particular care, exact payment in advance from poor "artists" in flying who, in the event of a bad season, had such inconvenient facilities for escaping without footing the score. That time has almost come in England to-day. But then in 1909 public and managers had to wait patiently on the gentlemen who had improved on Prometheus and, harnessing the fire that he stole from above, dared the assault of the very heavens.
Finally the flying did begin. But it was all by Frenchmen on French machines. There was the Blériot, aptly to be compared in shape to a dragon-fly; the Farman, a long box trailing a baby box in its wake. The Blériot suggests a successful wooing, the Farman a scientific conquest, of the air. The one soars and swoops and skims actually like a bird, the other progresses with scientific and mathematical precision. One might imagine a respectable barn-door fowl brood-mother, resting a while after the arduous labours of the pheasant season, speculating dismally on the prospects of being called upon to hatch out a brood of aeroplanes, and resolving to accept with resignation a clutch of Blériots but to draw the line firmly at Farmans. No respectable fowl could give even the kinship of adoption to a flying contrivance that suggests so strongly a collection of egg-boxes.
Since then Englishmen have learned to fly, and aeroplaning is becoming one of the national sports. Also I see in some of the papers that because at the last Olympic Games England got more of the dust than of the laurels, the Englishman must set to work to learn to throw the javelin and the discus farther than any one else; and I believe that a section of him will accept the direction to do this and do it quite earnestly. So the Englishman who practises at football, cricket, hunting, sailing, rowing, fishing, running, walking, flying, shooting, must also learn to throw strange things great distances. Withal he has his work to do, and some time to give to the enjoyment of the beauty of his most beautiful England. A wonderful people of a wonderful country!
CHAPTER VII
THE CITIES OF ENGLAND
There are so many great cities and historic towns in England that a mere guide-book enumeration of the chief of them would fill many pages—in rather a dull fashion. I shall not attempt that, but will take the reader for a brief glance at some of the more notable centres of population.
In the beginning there is, of course, London—the capital of the world, the centre from which has sprung most of the great movements of the Christian era for the betterment of humanity, the magnet which draws to-day the best of the world's thought and energy. To have the best introduction to London I should like to think of the visitor coming upon it, as I did for the first time, in the "small hours" of a clear May morning. A drive through its streets then was a sheer delight. Hushed they were and solemn, the torrents of trade stilled for a few hours. But the soul of London was awake, though its busy material life for a brief time was asleep. The great grey old city was peopled with ghosts. Through the empty streets paced London's great men since Cæsar, some native and to the land born, others foreign, finding in England hospitality whether they came as poor refugees or as noble visitors. From the houses walked out memories and traditions in spectral hordes. The buildings themselves, mostly of the white freestone of Bath, which with London smoke becomes a dull black, and then with London showers learns to show here and there a patch of ghostly white, lent themselves to the fancy of a city of dreams. The architecture was disembodied, and floated in the air; the shadows of venerable churches and institutions were a background to shadows of great men and noble women.
In time I came in front of the Houses of Parliament, the shrine of representative government. Yonder, looming high in the pale early morning light, was the Nelson Monument, and stretching from it the Strand, leading to Fleet Street, whence issued the first newspapers of European civilisation. Near by Westminster Abbey lifted its grey fane in praise and prayer. This indeed seemed the very centre and capital of the world.
If you cannot so enter London for the first time, when its busy traffic is hushed, and the first pale glow of a spring dawn is in the sky, be heedful that some night you will give up thoughts of your couch to taste that joy. Wander then down Pall Mall, home of magnificent clubs, after the last late reveller has been taken to his cab, past the National Gallery, the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (a wondrous beautiful church by moonlight or first-dawn light), through Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand to Wellington Street. Cross the Thames by Waterloo Bridge, turning a blind eye to the electric signs that are now allowed to disfigure the south river front, and see the great sweep, right and left, of the Thames Embankment, and then look up in the sky to see the dome of St. Paul's afloat there. Recrossing the bridge, go to the left until Westminster Bridge is reached, and look there for the Houses of Parliament and, a little away from the river, the Abbey of Westminster. Then turn into Bird-Cage Walk by the side of St. James's Park and cross that park by the only path open at night, which will take you across the lake by a little footbridge. From the middle of that footbridge, looking towards the Horse Guards, there is, by night, a view as poetic as any that Venice can show: of the still lake fringed with woods, and—apparently rising up from its very marge—the Horse Guards, and the palaces which shelter the officials of the great public departments.
DEAN'S YARD, WESTMINSTER
Most of London is beautiful at any hour. All of it, even to the most sordid parts, is beautiful at the fall of evening or the first glance of the morning. And there is always intruding into the commonplace of the twentieth century some touch of ancientry, some hint of romance. I can recall once finding a note of beauty in that least likely of all places, London Dock. It was an autumn dawn so grey and chill that the pungent smell of a cargo of pepper from one of the wharves brought a welcome sense of warmth. I was wandering about aimlessly when, in a dirty little basin of muddy water in the Wapping corner of the docks, I suddenly came upon a white swan swimming with placid disregard of its utter incongruousness there. In the grey morning, in that grey water, surrounded by the murk of industrialism at its ugliest, the white swan was as startling as a ghost. When, as I looked upon it, the air was suddenly pierced by the crisp, urgent note of a bugle calling the réveillé, I felt sure for a moment that this was an uneasy dream bringing into the sordid grey of life a thread of white and silver from the days of jousts and pageantry. But no, the swan was real enough; the mystery of the bugle-call was that the docks were under the shadow of the Tower of London, which relieves with its splendidly preserved Norman keep a busy quarter of London from architectural dullness.
But the chief charm of London is, without a doubt, its parks and open places, of which there are some three hundred. Indeed, of the total area of London a full tenth is park land, and the civic authorities are adding to the park area, not lessening it.
Nothing that one could say would exaggerate the beauty of these parks in spring and summer. The grass lawns—delicately smooth, of a glowing green that seems to be suffused with light and starred with little white daisies, suggest a bright firmament, the emerald sky of a fairy tale with daisies to make its Milky Way. The trees are full of their own rustling song and of the clear soprano notes of crowding birds. The flower-beds flaunt a constantly changing bravery of colour. All the plants are bedded out in full bloom. The cost must be enormous, but the Londoner pays it cheerfully, and these city parks provide the people with gayer gardens than have any of the great nobles.
For the gardens are the people's. On the dainty grass the children of the poor sprawl and play contentedly. In the ponds and streamlets, beside which, in the old days, kings sauntered, the youngsters of the slums fish with bent pins or scoop with small nets for small fish. The rangers are the friends of the people, and will help a little kiddie to a patch where daisies may be picked for daisy-chains. The trees are all a-twitter with songsters. In the ponds and streams a gorgeous variety of water-fowl display themselves—giant white pelicans, filled with a smug and hypocritical satisfaction at the mistaken reputation they have won for benevolence; black swans from Australia and white swans of this country; all manner of ducks and geese and teal. Children bring crumbs and feed these birds, and also the pigeons, which in consequence reach a bloated size and can hardly waddle out of the way of the horsemen who canter along the soft tracks laid out for cavaliers in Hyde Park.
SAILING BOATS ON THE SERPENTINE, HYDE PARK, LONDON
The aloofness from the city's turmoil of the London parks is wonderful. Matthew Arnold noted it in Kensington Gardens:—
In this lone, open glade I lie,
Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye,
Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!
Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!
Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.
The art of designing city parks of this kind seems to be exclusively English. In other parts of the world there are magnificent parks, but nowhere the little bit of woodland planted in the heart of a city.
Though London is the greatest industrial city of the world, it does not succeed in being sordid-looking or mean. But the Midlands—where are the new great manufacturing cities—are frankly horrible, grimy city following grimy city, the pavements seeming never to end, the suburbs of one town stretching out lank arms to greet those of another.
When rain sets in, the sordidness of these towns is complete. Thickly growing chimneys take the place of trees, and from the tops of their great harsh trunks float thin wisps of black foliage. The streets are of a miserable muddiness which bemires without softening the hardness of the pavements. Through the smoky, dirty, wet air pallid faces loom. The very meat in the shops has no red wholesomeness, but looks pallid and anæmic; that, I suppose, is really due to the fact that the Midlands so largely eat pork, but it pleases me to imagine that the inanimate stuff also feels the depression of this smoke-palled district and knows not the red of life.
But much of the evil is curable. Sheffield is a brighter, more sunny town than most in the Midlands because its authorities insist on something being done to mitigate the smoke nuisance. In most of the other towns factory and workshop can pour out unchecked their defiling streams, poisoning the air and darkening the sky so that the birds leave the district in despair, and no green thing flourishes and men grow pale and unwholesome. Now that is being changed, and the Midland cities are beginning to claim their share of the heritage of English beauty.
Away from the actual new manufacturing towns there are none without some beauty. Durham in the north perches grandly on its river, and the river-front shows off well the impressive Cathedral. York, with its famous Minster, has been already noted in another chapter. To Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, all visitors to England go, but some English people are beginning to resent the commercial spirit which makes it purely a "show" town, with fees payable for this and that at every turn.
A town not too "hackneyed" but full of historical interest is St. Albans, the Verulam of the Romans, with its fine Abbey Church overlooking hill and field. The path past that church was a wide-paved Roman road once, and by the vicarage foundations of Roman chambers and mosaics are found. Some two thousand years ago St. Albans was a stronghold of the Britons, protected naturally on two sides by marsh and river; adding to those natural defences an artificial ditch, earthworks, and a palisade. It had to stand an onslaught of the Roman invaders, and, of course, fell. Before that Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, had laid the town waste—Boadicea of whom Cowper sang:—
When the British warrior Queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods,
Sought, with an indignant mien,
Counsel of her country's gods.