THE TIDINESS OF RURAL ENGLAND.
THE principal impression of rural England derived by an American writer in the Daily Mail is one of tidiness, of absolute finish. He was travelling in Cornwall, and was pre- paring to throw away a brown paper bag which had held some grapes, when his companion seized his arm, saying, "Don't, you'll spoil England." The same impression was made more than sixty years ago on Emerson, who writes in his "English Traits," that the country seems "finished with a pencil." It must be confessed that English manufacturing towns are the most hideous places which the perverted in- genuity of man has ever contrived to rear. They were described by Matthew Arnold as "hell-holes," and the visitor to such places as Sheffield, St. Helens, Widnes, Bacup, Wednesbury, especially if he go on a dank, dreary day in
late autumn, when the rain is falling, and the clouds and the smoke between them have blotted out sun and sky, will scarcely dispute the unpleasant nomenclature. Years ago the present writer paid a visit to Liege, which he had learnt from his early training in geography was the "Birmingham of Belgium:' Birmingham he knew, but what relation had its dark and dreary streets to this charming city with its noble river, its fountains flashing in the sunlight, its charming park, its dignified old houses, and the beautiful antique architecture of its principal square ? As little relation as one of the towns we have named has to the exquisite old villages of rural England. As we pass out of Birmingham, say, to Evesham and the leafy banks of the Severn, as we leave behind us in the gliding train one after another of the suburbs of the great industrial city, and at length come into clear country, into pre-industrial England, we seem to have reached not a different country but a different world, and we wonder how it is that the same people could have built this grey old parish church or that ancient manor-house with its "wet, bird-haunted English lawn," and the huge brick boxes with their smoking chimneys, or the long unlovely streets with not a single object of beauty or grandeur in their interminable miles of dreariness. The wonder is as great as that paradox of creation which seized the mind of William Blake when he saw the tiger,—" Did He who made the lamb make thee ? " How could the same nation have made such, differing human abodes?
The writer in the Daily Mail brackets England with Holland as offering a "monotony of neatness," but the linking of these countries together scarcely conveys an accurate idea. We are by no means insensible of the charm of Holland, which has appealed to so many generations of artists, but it is not the same thing as the charm of rural England. Holland does convey the impression of a "monotony of neat- ness," but England does not. Our scenery is infinitely more varied and animated than that of Holland; indeed, there is no area in the world of equal size where such a variety of scenery presents itself as in England. You may travel in the United States or Canada over hundreds of miles of the same geological formation, presenting the same endless succession of little white houses, wooden fences, and barns (their roofs decorated with advertisements of sarsaparilla in enormous letters), and here and there thicker clusters of the same ingredients with a few church spires and large brick edifices thrown in, denoting a growing town. It seems a healthy, rich, prosperous country, but you tire of it and take refuge in the contents of the newsboys' basket. In England, one never tires of the scenery, one passes from stratum to stratum, from clay to chalk or limestone or gravel, from rich green meadows to picturesque hill-sides or dark woodland or beetling cliff, by lovely little hamlets with towers that were old before the keel of Columbus cut the ocean waves, all varieties of scenery possible in the temperate regions being unveiled as in a panorama before your eyes in a few happy hours. There are only two other countries which, in our experience, offer such swift glimpses of varied beauty as does England—Switzerland and Italy—and the beauty of Switzer- land is largely the beauty of Nature, which has con- centrated more grandeur in that one spot of earth than can be found over millions of square miles. We may say, then, that England and Italy are pre-eminent in revealing varieties of beauty, natural and artistic, within a small com- pass. But how different they are ! It is when we consider them in contrast that this tidiness of England is manifest. It is a tidiness differing from the scrupulous Dutch neatness, for it is compatible with a diversity almost as rich as that of Italy ; it is the tidiness of a rich, well-kept estate whose every detail speaks of a loving human care preserving it through generations from waste and ruin. Man seems to have worked in harmony with Nature. The old church, the timbered cottages, the red-tiled barns stained with the splendid wealth of the lichens, the feudal keep of the castle— all seem to be accepted by Nature as though they were her own products. The English people have for centuries lived close to Nature, and have, perhaps, caught somewhat of the secret of her charm, though they are in danger of losing it through their rush into town life, and the hideous, vulgar advertisements which they permit to disfigure their green fields.
It is when we compare actual English villages that we know with actual villages in foreign lands that we are most impressed by this spirit of beautiful neatness that prevails in England. The present writer has in his mind two villages which he knows well, one in France, the other in Ohio. The French village has made a stir in history, for it was the scene of a fierce battle, and its situation is by no means unpleasant. But what an odour pervades it ; what an air of grimy, out. at-elbows existence it suggests ! In place of the old English inn, with ivy-covered porch, gables, and antique sign, there is a sordid, commonplace "Hotel de l'Univers " (or some such name), looking like a fourth-rate wine-shop in some side street at Montmartre or Batignolles. You cannot take your ease there, the finery is too cheap and nasty. You walk along the village street, and you discover that the odours you had detected proceed from big heaps of manure lying outside the houses festering in the street.. Though France is pre- eminently the land of noble and perfect Gothic art, one walks • to the parish church here and finds a dreary semi-modern structure of no particular style, with cheap new glass and an iron spire. The chateau is fairly imposing, but it seems neglected, you cannot imagine it as a "home." We do not say that all French villages are like this, but that it is a type is quite certain, and it is a type of frowsiness and neglect. Nature has done what she can, but man has not aided her efforts. The Ohio village is different, of course ; growing in size, all staring new, destined, it may be, to attain to beauty some day. But at present, like the Apostle, it has by no means attained, and you can scarcely say that it follows on. You note the planked sidewalk, and it will be well for you to note the holes in it, through which you may inadvertently thrust your foot. You make your way to the inn, and find that a rural inn is not known in America. Three or four men sit round the stove in the bar-room, absolutely silent, chewing tobacco-twist ; and you, forlorn and dreary, take up a two- day-old Cincinnati newspaper, and wade through a venomous attack on the Governor or the Secretary of State until you are summoned to a severe apartment with oilcloth blinds, and dine on a steak which might have been cut with a hatchet from a tree in the forest. Then you begin to sigh for the neatness and charm of an old English inn, for the maid in a spotless apron, for the dark wainscotting and the mullioned windows, for all that rich, humanising experience which adds to the depth and interest of life. The beautiful village church and the thoroughly human old English inn are unique and priceless institutions,—the twin pillars of the rural edifice.
What is the secret of the undoubted charm P—for foreigners admit the charm ; it is no mere boast of a silly chauvinism. 'One reason is to be found, perhaps, in the peaceful continuity of English life, allowing long generations to grow up and live in a sense of security. The wars that have been waged in England since the country was consolidated have only cut skin-deep. The Wars of the Roses were only contests of a iew armed Barons and their retainers, and Mr. Thorold Rogers tells us with truth that even the greater wars of the Common- wealth scarcely touched or interested the mass of English peasant folk. They knew that something was going on, for occasionally a battle took place in the neighbourhood or the defeated troops made their way across the fields to the nearest safe refuge. But English life in its main features was scarcely affected, while in France the Wars of the League carried desolation all over the land, and in Germany the Thirty Years' War made of the country a place of tombs. In new countries, on the other hand, like America and Australia, men build for the hour, and are ready to "pull up stakes" at a minute's notice, and remove to a new home a thousand miles away. In neither case is there the sense of rest, of peace, of permanent possession, and of a serene inheritance from the past which has enabled English rural life to attain its peculiar charm. Nature has done much for England, but human history (arising partly out of conditions given by Nature) has done not a little also. We are "compassed by the inviolate sea," we enjoy varied scenes within a limited and easily manageable area, and we very early established a secure national life. The structure of English society has also helped. In France the grand seigneur thought only of his dignity and feudal privileges, and he never or rarely aided his humble neighbours and dependents. This isolation of classes, with insolent exactions
on the one hand and growing thirst for revenge on the other, made the French Revolution what it was. The mass of the people in rural France were serfs, in feeling if not in actual legal status, and they lived and felt like serfs, with no pride in themselves or their surroundings. In Germany the medizeval Barons so robbed and oppressed that it was impossible to form over large portions of that country "a bold peasantry "who could live in peace. But we contrived to get rid of our lawless barons at an early stage and to leave the field clear, and, with all their faults, our great country magnates never lost the sense of organic relations with the people, unless it were in the highly artificial age of the two first Georges, which was also an age of depression and brutality in country life. And as new facilities open up for village people, as their minds are expanded by education and intercourse, their manners improved, their political power extended, and their economic position slowly bettered, we may look forward with confidence to the future of English rural life. It is the best and sweetest of our national possessions, and we do not wonder that it draws to itself the hearts of our visitors from beyond the seas.
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