Читать книгу A Dream of England - Peter Milward - Страница 6

The Englishman is at heart, if not a countryman, at least a lover of the country. The town may be his place of business, a necessary evil, but the country is his place of relaxation and repose. He may slave in the town for six days out of seven – though today it is more likely to be five days out of seven. But for the week-end – if only he is blessed with fair weather – he chooses the country with its peace and freedom.

Thus it is that the country is getting less and less peaceful, at least on sunny week-ends in the warm season of the year. The towns are emptied and the countryside hums with activity, particularly on main roads and around beauty spots. In the past this wasn’t the case. Though the Englishman has always been a lover of the country, it is only in recent times that he has had the leisure (with a longer week-end) and the means (with a family car) to satisfy his love. Now, however, such is the intensity with which he is pursuing his love that he is, as we say, killing the country with too much kindness. The outcome is only to transfer the noise and bustle of the town to the country every week-end, provided the sun is shining, and those who prefer the peace of a country life find it quieter to stay in their town house.

Today one of the worst places in this respect is, sadly enough, the country home of William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. Once upon a time, as we say in fairy stories, this region may well have been granted the title of “the Heart of England”. That was indeed the case in Shakespeare’s time, and Shakespeare himself was a perfect example of the Englishman who goes up to London for business, while leaving his heart behind him in the country. Most of his plays were composed and performed in London, but we never think of Shakespeare as a Londoner, nor has he left behind him any tangible associations in London. His heart was always in Stratford, where he was born and grew up to manhood, and where he spent the last years of his life, before he died and was buried in the parish church there – leaving a curse on anyone who might have the effrontery to disturb his bones.

Not only was the countryside round Stratford “the Heart of England” for Shakespeare. Its scenery is also in many ways typical of the English Midlands. Situated just between the flatlands of the East and the hills of the West, it combines the beauty of both regions, with ups and downs that are neither too up nor too down. Through the midst of this lovely countryside moves the river Avon, flowing spaciously and majestically past Clopton Bridge and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and past the church of the Holy Trinity whose pointed spire rises above the willows behind a bend in the river.

Today this might still be called “the Heart of England”, but its beauty has been irreparably spoilt by the very people who go in search of it with all its literary associations. Today Stratford thrives on what is known as “the Shakespeare industry”, and on hardly anything else, but it has been ruined by this very industry, no less surely than other towns have been ruined by industries of a cruder, more materialistic kind. Stratford, together with the countryside round Stratford, has been ruined by what Virgil calls “the accursed thirst for gold”.

Today, alas, the streets of Stratford are hardly less crowded with buyers and passers-by than Oxford Street in London. The spots sacred to Shakespeare’s memory – his birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the garden of New Place, Hall’s Croft, even the church of the Holy Trinity – are all thronged with inquisitive sight-seers. There is no time to pause and reflect and take in the deep meaning of it all. Nothing there leaves an impression on the mind, except the house of Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden, which is fortunately four miles out of Stratford and overlooked by the majority of day trippers.

Instead of Stratford, therefore, I would award the title of “the Heart of England” to another, less frequented spot further to the East, a spot made famous not by its literary but by its pictorial associations. This is the region by the banks of the river Stour, between the counties of Essex and Suffolk, known as “the Constable country”. Here lived the greatest of English landscape painters, John Constable, and here he painted many of his most famous landscapes. In his paintings he succeeded in bringing out, as no other painter or even poet has done, the heart and essence of England. It is thanks to his memory that this region has remained more or less as he saw it some two centuries ago.

At the heart of this “Constable country” is the village of East Bergholt. From there one takes a country lane leading past fields of wheat and barley down to the river Stour and Flatford Mill, where Constable had his home and studio for many years. Inevitably, the Mill, too, has become the centre of a “Constable industry”, but unlike that of Shakespeare, this industry remains within modest limits. Visitors come here from afar, but not in such great numbers, to pay their respects to the great painter. At the same time, there is here a more noticeable air of domesticity than at Stratford. The river is smaller than the Avon and is inhabited by ducks and moorhens rather than by swans, and children are more in evidence than adults.

In fact, on arriving here one finds more people enjoying themselves feeding the ducks or boating on the river than looking round Flatford Mill – which is just what Constable himself would have preferred. As for myself, I was more interested in a house beyond the Mill called Willie Lot’s Cottage, since this is the house that features in my favourite painting of Constable’s, “The Hay-Wain”. I came upon it standing by the river, quiet in the afternoon sunshine, with its white-washed walls forming a pleasing contrast with the red tiles of the roof and the red bricks of the chimney. I was specially impressed by this chimney, which stood out from the white wall all the way up from the ground to the chimney-pot, giving a peculiar character to the cottage. Not that the cottage is the main feature of the painting. It merely provides a domestic background for the hay-wain or cart loaded with hay and drawn by a pair of horses. For some reason which I can’t fathom, the cart is standing in the river, which at this point seems quite shallow – much shallower than it is today. The farmer sitting in the cart shows no special urge to get out of the river, perhaps because he is waiting till his horses have drunk their fill, more probably because he is sitting for his friend, the painter. I used to imagine he was trying to ford the river, but on visiting the spot I had to change my mind. At this point the river is too deep to ford.

Though the hay-wain is the apparent subject of the painting, it seems to me a mere excuse for Constable to express his vision of the English countryside on either side of the river. The countryside, of course, includes the cottage, the cart and the river, as well as the sheep-dog barking at his master from the safety of the bank. At the same time, it wouldn’t be complete without the rugged clump of elm-trees behind the cottage. To the right, just behind the wain, the trees thin away, leaving a glorious landscape of ripening wheat or barley, with another line of distant trees, presumably more elm-trees, against a cloudy sky.

The painting as a whole epitomizes what most Englishmen think of as natural scenery. Here we admire not the wild beauty of lakes and mountains, such as Wordsworth admired in the Lake District, or Scott in the Highlands, but the tame beauty of meadows and rivers. Here Nature is subject to the needs and uses of Man, not in the violent manner of mines or factories, where Nature is treated as a slave, but in the gentle manner of farming, where she is regarded as a wife. Here all things fit together and harmonize in a peaceful, domestic scene – the cottage, the wain, the river and the fields beyond. All have their appropriate setting amid the elm-trees, and even the dog’s barking chimes in with just the right musical accompaniment.

There is, however, one important detail I find missing in this painting of “The Hay-Wain”. But it may be supplied from almost all Constable’s other paintings of this region. I mean the view of a village church at least in the distance. In fact, the distant view of the church tower at Dedham almost serves as Constable’s signature tune to his paintings of the Stour valley. Wherever he set up his canvas, he seems to have kept his eye on this church tower. There is another famous painting of his called “The Cornfield”, which also seems to lack this characteristic view of Dedham’s church tower. But no! On closer inspection one can make out, on the far side of the field, the shape of a church just visible among the trees. Indeed, all the lines of this painting seem to move in that direction. The sheep-dog is guiding his woolly charges towards the gate of the field, where the shepherd is waiting, and there is a shepherd-boy sprawled by the wayside brook to allay his thirst in the heat of the summer’s day.

The scenery today isn’t so different from what it was in Constable’s time. Walking down the winding lane from East Bergholt to the Mill, and then along the river-path in the direction of Dedham, one finds the countryside for miles around nothing but a delight to the eye and a refreshment to the mind. That day I didn’t see so many sight-seers, nor did “the Constable industry”, or what there is of it, seem to be so very thriving. There was the Mill and the quiet mill-pond, the old lock with its wooden gates, the bridge and the ancient cottage beside the bridge, where one may buy postcards and ice-creams, besides renting boats by the hour. Most enjoyable of all was the path among the willows on the river-bank, with cows peacefully grazing in the meadow to the left and with the inevitable view of Dedham church in the distance.

Now let me put a final word, or rather question, about the church. Why is it that the presence of a church, whether that of Dedham or some other, is so constant a feature of Constable’s paintings? Or rather, why is it that the presence of a church is so constant a feature of the English countryside? Put in this way, the question is almost its own answer. From time immemorial England has been a Christian country – for all the destructive handiwork of Henry VIII – and every village, even villages that now no longer exist, has its charming village church. So the church is now no less part of the English countryside than the cottages and farm-houses which cluster round it as though for protection. Not only the services held within the churches, but their material presence in wood and stone seems to confer a divine blessing on the surrounding countryside and to proclaim the biblical truth that God dwells not in any house made by human hands but, as Wordsworth says, in “the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky, and in the mind of man”. Such was no doubt the instinct which led Constable to sign his paintings with the figure, however distant, of a church tower. And such is still the instinct which remains, if unconsciously, in the heart of the Englishman who looks with nostalgia from the busy town of today to the quiet countryside as his heart and home.