An English Writer's Notes on England

I.

BACK again in England. Early morning : the sea and downs in gray, misty sunlight; everything inexpressibly clean, refined, pure, and in a way (how express it otherwise ?) general. This country in Fine weather, like its inhabitants when in happy circumstance, has a singular look of newness and good breeding.

This impression grows on me during these few. days in Sussex and Kent. Everything is swept and garnished, like the interior of a daintily kept house. The hop-poles make a pale green pattern on the violet ploughed ground. In the streams, the long willow-like weeds are combed out and starred with jasminelooking blossoms. Fish dart like ghosts in the sunlit, bright golden water. And then the gardens of the old cottages, — cottages, some of them, of the time of Elizabeth, nay, almost of the Black Prince, with scalloped weather-tiles of delicate peach-bloom color, and brilliant whitewashed walls, against which stand out geraniums, and pink and white mallows, and even an exquisite Japanese lily. What dainty prosperity ! And, characteristically English, through the midst of it runs the past, in the shape of an old Roman highway. You can still see slabs of it, along the downs, among immense nut-laden beeches, past duckponds and haystacks. What a strange mixture of a very present present with a past which seems scarcely past at all!

Strolling yesterday through the little Kentish village of Charing, which lies along the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury, and seems barely altered since their days, I realize why England is England ; or rather, why the English country is what it is. The explanation is virtually given, though not explicitly, in Thorold Rogers’s book on the Economic Interpretation of History : England is the only country which was not merely prosperous, but on the whole peaceful, during the Middle Ages. Hence its sort of bourgeois-bucolic (not Theocritan idyllic) character even nowadays. Note the fact that the Elizabethan playwrights had to fetch their tragic subjects (save Arden of Feversham) from abroad, — their Othellos, Measure for Measures, Duchesses of Malfy, and Giovanni and Annabellas. England inspires As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comus, L’Allegro, and Spenser’s Epithalamium. There is no trace of bloodshed and tragedy in this English past, as everywhere on the Continent; ’t is the past of yeomen and burgesses and cottagers and quiet country squires, not of kings and princes. There are no scars of fire on blackened stones in this country. Compare the past of places like Perugia, Volterra, Verona ! The prosperity of mediæval Italy was passionate and terrible; that of mediæval England, peaceful and idyllic, of a land of shepherds providing the foreign looms with wool.

Such is the impression made by the past; that of the present, for one just come from the Continent, is as special in its way. In years spent abroad I had almost forgotten what it was like, and it came on me all of a sudden, yesterday evening, with the sight of the daisy heads and red sorrel stalks standing out in the low sunlight, with the note of the unseen lark over the bracken, the scent of universal green; the conversation, also, of the daughters of the house and their friends. For it is an impression of moral characteristics even more than of physical, or of such physical characteristics as suggest moral ones: the well-ordered large house, neither raised to higher importance nor convulsed by any individual spirit, but produced, so to speak, by a whole family, you might say almost a whole nation (at least a whole class thereof), acting harmoniously, if a trifle dully, together. This landscape, pale grass rounded by dark green trees till it merges into folds and folds of blue; all sloping up to the very doorstep, gently, not aggressively or theatrically, opposite the low, wide windows; this house, with its comfort and prosperity subdued into delicacy and almost simplicity (nothing showy in these pale wall papers and chintzes so immaculately fresh, in this well-polished furniture), — this landscape, this house, seem to carry the same meaning as these young women : we are pure, good, high-bred ; we are carefully selected away from vulgarity and evil. But when you think of the towns — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, especially London — at whose expense all this exists, you feel what I fancy underlies not a few of the secret feelings of these young women : the world to which all this good belongs is, in itself, most strangely full of evil.

II.

For England, alas, is not all country, is not all old world, is not altogether composed of well-appointed houses and wellbred persons. I am in the train again, going Londowards. The line passes through the same delicate, intimate landscape of green cliffs just scarred with chalk ; of green fields of short grass, dotted with sheep and cricketers : all wrapped in a tender mist, such as Carrière envelops his personages in, which makes one understand, as it were, the tender dewy freshness of the scene. This country seems as new as when the Romans landed : oak woods barely in leaf, meadows reddened with sorrel, great tufts of daisies, white, pure, even among the cinders of the railway embankment; neat flowery stations and comfortablelooking flowery cottages. Who would guess that London, of all places on earth, is at the end of the line ? The horror of Bermondsey and the like, with its millions of squalid houses the train looks down upon, and its sickly smell of kiln and beer; the Thames, with its great barges and shipping, which, from the railway bridge, is so evidently a magnificent gigantic drain.

III.

In London. Across the Park, where there are beds of the most lovely flowers (things worthy of a show) along the path ; close to that beautiful house which has, inside, the brass staircase and marble incrusted walls, and many fine pictures, I notice two persons on a bench, asleep, — black, draggled, and in heavy sleep: the man thrown back, the woman forward, her head low over her knees ; the one in a high hat, the other in a bonnet ! My friend, to whom I point them out, says they are probably asleep because they are drunk, and drunk because drink is the cheapest thing to buy. Everywhere here is Nemesis, saying “ Enjoy not ” at the elbow of those who enjoy.

Great cities are places where mankind live upon pleasures and excitements which are compensations for the loss of what nature is prevented from giving them. Yet even in London nature does take the trouble to provide a performance once in a way. This morning, though only the 5th of August, there was a fog. The air outside gradually became a positive, real thing, thickening, growing gray and at the same time luminous ; the room became dusky, all tilings in it shadowy ; but on these shadowy, vaguely looming things the fog-enwrapped sun dabbed broad high lights, brilliant and blinding in this penumbra, a strange Rembrandt etching. Outside, also, a Rembrandt effect, but this time in color. The visible atmosphere now changed into a wonderful tawny luminousness ; a mist of palest orange, bright, dazzling, in which all nearer objects start into violent relief, blaze out, green, orange, scarlet, like lacquer ; while all the further things stand flat like theatre scenes, separate, layer by layer, against the smokelike layers of air. And over it all, the magnificence and mystery of a luminous, veined, and suffused smokedamber sky.

Little by little the strange high lights disappear from the furniture, leaving an unnatural twilight. The air outside thickens ; the sky descends ; the suffused gold dies away into solid lead. The intervening distances are effaced, the further objects disappear entirely; only treetops, rows of chimney-stacks (fantastic like castle battlements), loom unsubstantial against the gray substantial sky, and every now and then a preternatural dash of yellow or green or scarlet across the grayness, — a passing omnibus, or a fireescape being wheeled along the street. Certainly, nature’s chief performance in London is impressive and not without beauty. But it leaves one with aching eyes and head, and an intolerable sense of dreariness and degradation.

IV.

Just returned from two days’ stay at a Settlement in the extreme east of London, the home of the dock laborers. The walk we took the first evening made me understand Miss Beatrice Potter’s words about the attractions, the æsthetic and imaginative attractions, which a great city has for the poor. Within doors, I am told, blackness and inexpressible squalor; within the houses, and also within the district, the immense blocks of brick and mortar and human life hidden away by their own compassionate darkness and by the brilliant light of the thoroughfares which inclose them. For it is brilliant, in the one or two wide streets, crowded with people buying at the open stalls and barrows, and strolling about in the mild evening, children dancing and turning somersaults to the barrel-organ music, venders vociferating, sounds of harp and banjo from behind the white ground-glass effulgence of the publics ; gas everywhere, in great sheets and in little flamelets, among the cheap highcolored clothes of the shops, the tinware, the stacked-up fruit and spread-out fish, the great staring pink carcasses at the butchers’. Bright signal lights, also, red and green against the blue starlit sky, and every minute or two a long train, like a snake filled with fire, flashing and rattling along the side of the road. Undoubtedly a spectacle, a performance, every part of it, for these poor squalid, often hungry people ; no mere place for use, like our shop streets, but a place also for imaginative pleasure, a Crystal Palace, Kursaal, St. Mark’s Square.

The day impression is very different. Yet despite the sadness of bands of able-bodied loiterers (ninety men of a hundred only can get a job) at the dock gates, where a horrible shanty eatinghouse, against the background of green marsh and distant factory obelisks and bulbs, calls itself grimly Peace and Plenty,— despite all this, the impression of the dockers’ district is that of life, of sound, of participation in the great movement of the world, rather than of anything we can regret. A stranger and finer impression than any to be got in well-to-do, philistine western London. There is something of the universal and eternal in it, of the great give-and-take which constitutes life. The immense ships, on either side of the big basin, sunk to the wharf edge with their freight still in them; or riding high up, waiting for cargo to ballast them ; or stranded, being painted scarlet or black in the dry dock ; an interminable line, with the corresponding line of wooden sheds, cases and bales and boxes in front, and inside, black sticky baskets of raw sugar, painted boxes of tea, piles and piles of sweetsmelling Japanese matting. Strong men wheeling and carrying the wares about among the railway lines; cranes rising and falling, with clank of chain and whir of engine; coal-heavers, black to their hair, in the flat-bottomed coalboats ; and all about the place, groups of red-turbaned Lascars sweeping the wooden wharf, and single Lascars walking barefoot like statues,—bringing in a note, as it were, from antiquity as well as from the East; the immensely distant, the past and present, seeming to work together under the fresh sea breeze.

All this, seen superficially and with the fancy, is a piece of life as it should be, — of the life of body and of soul, of near and distant, of complexity and simplicity, in which we would all of us fain participate, — and therefore, as much as anything in field or mountain, church or study, a piece of the ideal. But the ideal a little, I fear, as a delusion ; the ideal in the same sense, for instance, as Tangier : horror behind it, quite as much as good ; a bit, in short, of that barbarism which our one-sided progress has isolated and accentuated, — barbarism which contains so much we would gladly have for ourselves, and so much which we shrink from perceiving.

V.

Westminster Abbey, about five P. m. A fine grayish-blue sky outside, and enormous rumble of traffic. The first impression is of the extremely narrow vaulting, and of the lovely meeting of the sheaves of pillars of the aisle with those of the main vault; tapering boles, springing higher, higher, and spreading like palm trees into the roof spandrils. One’s attention is caught at first, owing to the incongruity, by the tombs of the barelegged, tunicked heroes in full-bottomed wigs, often opposite painted robed Shakespearean worthies kneeling among delicate colored Renaissance moulding; here and there a Gothic knight or lady ; and, specially colossal and dramatic, Charles James Fox collapsing between a negro and a goddess. One likes, however, the rough-and-ready liberalism of it all : Wesley commemorated in this Anglican abbey, although the founder of a sect, and Garrick in most unecclesiastic way disporting himself between Comedy and Tragedy. Near him also is “ G. Handel Esqre,” with his wig off and dressing-gown on, posing among musical instruments, with a green laurel crown. The strangest is Poets’ Corner ; the most conspicuous, the poets that are forgotten. Prior, for instance, standing grandly like a general, with a bandanna round his head ; and Phillips (yes, I remember a Life of Ambrose Phillips in Johnson’s Lives), more forgotten still. There is a lovely tender piece of Gothic lace carving with effaced inscription and a loose label inscribed “ Poet Chaucer ; ” but Mr. Somebody (with wigged bust and 1780 fireplace sculpture), “ Secretary to Lord Pelham, minister of King George III " has been triumphantly built into Chaucer’s resting-place. A bust of Milton is here ; and a modest inscription, “ the Poet Spenser,” and a monument with the one line, “ O rare Ben Jonson.” One no longer smiles, but feels something like what one felt a minute ago while following that highest shaft to its palm branchings, or as one would feel if suddenly the organ played. What thoughts and images and melodies in those names,—Milton, Handel, " Poet Chaucer,” Spenser, Ben Jonson ! What names to conjure with ! And meanwhile, outside, where once (as the Morte d’Arthur tells us) the green fields and hawthorn hedges were, the ’buses cross and recross ; and the Aquarium, with its Diving Man and Boxing Kangaroo, offers “ the greatest variety of entertainment in London.”

The Abbey again : this time the apse. Beautiful effect (in Henry VII.’s Chapel especially), of much glass and little masonry and groined ceiling in imitation of woodwork, what masonry there is reduced to sculpture. The stone saints have remained, and, in the vaults, numbers of those very English, Burne-Jonesian angels with Tudor roses and portcullis. Everything black, tarnished ; everything seeming endlessly old, even the banneret helmets, which are really modern, hanging over the stalls, converted to thorough antiquity. Through the open chapel doors one sees, a fantastic vista, the spring of the arches in the main church, beyond the Confessor’s tomb. This whole apse, with its innumerable tucked-away chapels, and tombs of all times crammed in every corner, is singularly touching in its neglected, yet inhabited, its “old-house” character. Into this lumber-room — one feels it almost more here than in Poets’ Corner — is crowded all England’s greatest past; all that England was before the advent of machinery and commercialism. Here lie the great soldiers, from Henry V.’s knights of Agincourt to the great navigators and buccaneers ; and Shakespeare’s kings and queens and dukes and regents, stone or bronze, all equally blackened, equally exiled from this life, under the bower of stonework, the chipped, smoked sculpture, the torn banners, colorless like black cobwebs, hanging from the roof ; and round these is a spiritual atmosphere, a silent afflatus, in which one feels one’s soid quiver. This world of glory and pathos and poetry (poor brass Richard II., and the Confessor under his chipped halfByzantine canopy, and the urn of the little Princes murdered in the Tower), all thrust out of sight, with the old Shakespearean England, with the old mediæval religion, into that blackened lumberroom at the back, by the smug modern Protestant England, which bids the pilgrim “ use both the scraper and mat ” before entering, and then “ keep with the guide ” when going round. It is strange that the most conservative and, on the whole, most poetical of nations should endure to see the tombs of its kings and great men in company with vergers bellowing dates of birth and death ; should feel, apparently, so little inclination, or have so little time, to muse thereon.

VI.

And this is what, for the imagination and emotion, at present replaces it: I am speaking of the Crystal Palace, where we had supper yesterday. All the centuries have been called upon, here also, to bring their gifts ; and there they are, higgledy-piggledy : casts of antiques and Michelangelos ; Innsbruck bronze knights ; switchback railways and aerial flights ; a colossal organ with the list of all Handel’s oratorios round it; moreover, on this occasion, the Dahomey warriors parading and dancing in the midst of it all. People meanwhile eating cold pie and ham on bare tables, sitting on nailed - together stools, and drinking American drinks ; umbrellas and hats stowed away on fire-engines and pails, and on the base of Parthenon statues ; family parties with babies held on high to see the savages dance, and parties of numerous ’Arriets entertained by less numerous ’Arries. Here a space is cleared, and the Dahomey warriors dance, — magnificent, like bronze athletes, with kilts of tiger skins, — and play with knives, and work themselves up into a rhythmic fury which anywhere else means killing. A tremendous impression of the splendor and terror of savagery. Then, when they have disappeared, the crowd streams down the gigantic flights of steps into the gardens. In the blue darkness stands out the great ribbed huge hall-ofEblis palace, made of beams of moonlight, one would say, lilac, dim, with absurd mediæval towers; in front great descents and pits and open spaces pricked out in colored lights, mysterious, scarce visible, among which the crowd circulates silently, to vague strains of music. Later fireworks, the gold dust of rockets in the deep blue sky ! The smoke (with stifling smell of powder) making a gray, lurid background for exquisite showers of silver sparks and trails of orange and grass-green filaments of fire. Then the return home. The immense train, darkness, other trains racing by one’s side, full of uproarious cads, — a ribbon of light; rushing through stations with their tin advertisement plates flashing in the haze and beams of electric light. And suddenly a few moments’ stoppage by the dimly lit up Thames. Altogether a confused impression of soiled, hustled, joyless beauty and wonder.

VII.

One of the most curious things, surely, about England, is its amount of wild country, and of wild country in close proximity to London. In a way it is London which is responsible for its existence, or the spirit which London typifies. For it is the industrialism, the race for wealth, of England which sucks the inhabitants out of the rural districts to the great towns ; and which, at the same time, leaves miles and miles of land uncultivated that would be made to produce poor crops in a country where the demand for labor and the supply of riches were less. Be it as it may, the fact is a very curious one. Take, for instance, the district near Hindhead, not fifty miles from London. There are ridges and ridges of magenta heather, slopes on slopes of high green bracken, great vague valleys, marked with dark green woods and light green meadows, a distance of pale blue mist, out of which sometimes rises a white glint of far-off chalk cliff, so welcome with its suggestion of something which is not mere vegetation. The roads among the heather a violent chrome yellow, sandy, desolate.

This landscape has immense charm, far more than itself can account for : the charm of the smell of wild greenness, of the abundance and bracingness of the air (unbreathed air, suggestive of much greater heights than we are really on) ; and above all, charm of the vast extent and great movement of clouds.

The moral aspect is equally wild. In one of the roads is a stone with an inscription “ in detestation of a barbarous murder committed on an unknown sailor " by three men, who were taken and hanged on that spot, in chains, in 1787. (The chains, by the way, I am almost sure, I have seen hanging up in Lady D—’s drawing-room, among other old iron.) To this is added a bloodthirsty text, “ He who spilleth blood,” etc., and very elaborately, on both sides of the stone, the name and address of the pious person who put it up. Evidently in these desolate places, and in the year 1787, a gallows hung with tarred malefactors was considered a sane and pleasant subject of contemplation, and the person who perpetuated the memory of those hanged men, after the birds and storms had worked them toward oblivion, thought of himself much as if he had erected a drinking-fountain in a more prosaic time and spot. Indeed, had he not furnished the world with a salutary draught of decocted vengeance ? Such places explain Hardy’s tales and some of Stevenson’s, and explain why we English, even if we live in Bloomsbury or Kensington, feel that they express our country.

But there are nobler impressions of wildness than this. Oddly enough, one of the strongest I have got even nearer London, on the Chiltern downs, near Aylesbury, — long, low ridges above the fields and beech woods, here and there seamed with chalk pits and scars; tall, steep hillsides, dotted only with stunted junipers ; and on the top a flat strip of grass opposite the moving inky storm sky, only a hawk or two in it. These little ridges of solitariness, narrow domains of clouds and winds, utterly aloof from man, explain much that is finest and most delicate in the English soul, a certain primeval quality, the power of being moved and chastened by the free contact of the elements, a possibility of dispensing with vain talk and worthless properties, of finding companionship in silence.

Vernon Lee.