Читать книгу Shakespeare's England - Winter William West - Страница 13

It is not strange that Englishmen should be—as certainly they are—passionate lovers of their country; for their country is, almost beyond parallel, peaceful, gentle, and beautiful. Even in vast London, where practical life asserts itself with such prodigious force, the stranger is impressed, in every direction, with a sentiment of repose and peace. This sentiment seems to proceed in part from the antiquity of the social system here established, and in part from the affectionate nature of the English people. Here are finished towns, rural regions thoroughly cultivated and exquisitely adorned; ancient architecture, crumbling in slow decay; and a soil so rich and pure that even in its idlest mood it lights itself up with flowers, just as the face of a sleeping child lights itself up with smiles. Here, also, are soft and kindly manners, settled principles, good laws, wise customs—wise, because rooted in the universal attributes of human nature; and, above all, here is the practice of trying to live in a happy condition instead of trying to make a noise about it. Here, accordingly, life is soothed and hallowed with the comfortable, genial, loving spirit of home. It would, doubtless, be easily possible to come into contact here with absurd forms and pernicious abuses, to observe absurd individuals, and to discover veins of sordid selfishness and of evil and sorrow. But the things that first and most deeply impress the observer of England and English society are their potential, manifold, and abundant sources of beauty, refinement, and peace. There are, of course, grumblers. Mention has been made of a person who, even in heaven, would complain that his cloud was damp and his halo a misfit. We cannot have perfection; but the man who could not be happy in England—in so far, at least, as happiness depends upon external objects and influences—could not reasonably expect to be happy anywhere.

Summer heat is perceptible for an hour or two each day, but it causes no discomfort. Fog has refrained; though it is understood to be lurking in the Irish sea and the English channel, and waiting for November, when it will drift into town and grime all the new paint on the London houses. Meantime, the sky is softly blue and full of magnificent bronze clouds; the air is cool, and in the environs of the city is fragrant with the scent of new-mown hay; and the grass and trees in the parks—those copious and splendid lungs of London—are green, dewy, sweet, and beautiful. Persons "to the manner born" were lately calling the season "backward," and they went so far as to grumble at the hawthorne, as being less brilliant than in former seasons. But, in fact, to the unfamiliar sense, this tree of odorous coral has been delicious. We have nothing comparable with it in northern America, unless, perhaps, it be the elder, of our wild woods; and even that, with all its fragrance, lacks equal charm of colour. They use the hawthorne, or some kindred shrub, for hedges in this country, and hence their fields are seldom disfigured with fences. As you ride through the land you see miles and miles of meadow traversed by these green and blooming hedgerows, which give the country a charm quite incommunicable in words. The green of the foliage—enriched by an uncommonly humid air and burnished by the sun—is in perfection, while the flowers bloom in such abundance that the whole realm is one glowing pageant. I saw near Oxford, on the crest of a hill, a single ray of at least a thousand feet of scarlet poppies. Imagine that glorious dash of colour in a green landscape lit by the afternoon sun! Nobody could help loving a land that woos him with such beauty.

English flowers are exceptional for substance and pomp. The roses, in particular—though some of them, it should be said, are of French breeds—surpass all others. It may seem an extravagance to say, but it is certainly true, that these rich, firm, brilliant flowers affect you like creatures of flesh and blood. They are, in this respect, only to be described as like nothing in the world so much as the bright lips and blushing cheeks of the handsome English women who walk among them and vie with them in health and loveliness. It is easy to perceive the source of those elements of warmth and sumptuousness that are so conspicuous in the results of English taste. It is a land of flowers. Even in the busiest parts of London the people decorate their houses with them, and set the sombre, fog-grimed fronts ablaze with scarlet and gold. These are the prevalent colours—radically so, for they have become national—and, when placed against the black tint with which this climate stains the buildings, they have the advantage of a vivid contrast that much augments their splendour. All London wears crape, variegated with a tracery of white, like lace upon a pall. In some instances the effect is splendidly pompous. There cannot be a grander artificial object in the world than the front of St. Paul's cathedral, which is especially notable for this mysterious blending of light and shade. It is to be deplored that a climate which can thus beautify should also destroy; but there can be no doubt that the stones of England are steadily defaced by the action of the damp atmosphere. Already the delicate carvings on the palace of Westminster are beginning to crumble. And yet, if one might judge the climate by this glittering July, England is a land of sunshine as well as of flowers. Light comes before three o'clock in the morning, and it lasts, through a dreamy and lovely gloaming, till nearly ten o'clock at night. The morning sky is usually light blue, dappled with slate-coloured clouds. A few large stars are visible then, lingering to outface the dawn. Cool winds whisper, and presently they rouse the great, sleepy, old elms; and then the rooks—which are the low comedians of the air in this region—begin to grumble; and then the sun leaps above the horizon, and we sweep into a day of golden, breezy cheerfulness and comfort, the like of which is rarely or never known in northern America, between June and October. Sometimes the whole twenty-four hours have drifted past, as if in a dream of light, and fragrance, and music. In a recent moonlight time there was scarce any darkness at all; and more than once I have lain awake all night, within a few miles of Charing Cross, listening to a twitter of birds that is like the lapse and fall of silver water. It used to be difficult to understand why the London season should begin in May and last through most of the summer; it is not difficult to understand the custom now.

The elements of discontent and disturbance which are visible in English society are found, upon close examination, to be merely superficial. Underneath them there abides a sturdy, immutable, inborn love of England. Those croakings, grumblings, and bickerings do but denote the process by which the body politic frees itself from the headaches and fevers that embarrass the national health. The Englishman and his country are one; and when the Englishman complains against his country it is not because he believes that either there is or can be a better country elsewhere, but because his instinct of justice and order makes him crave perfection in his own. Institutions and principles are, with him, by nature, paramount to individuals; and individuals only possess importance—and that conditional on abiding rectitude—who are their representatives. Everything is done in England to promote the permanence and beauty of the home; and the permanence and beauty of the home, by a natural reaction, augment in the English people solidity of character and peace of life. They do not dwell in a perpetual fret and fume as to the acts, thoughts, and words of other nations: for the English there is absolutely no public opinion outside of their own land: they do not live for the sake of working, but they work for the sake of living; and, as the necessary preparations for living have long since been completed, their country is at rest. This is the secret of England's first, and continuous, and last, and all-pervading charm and power for the stranger—the charm and power to soothe.

The efficacy of endeavouring to make a country a united, comfortable, and beautiful home for all its inhabitants,—binding every heart to the land by the same tie that binds every heart to the fireside,—is something well worthy to be considered, equally by the practical statesman and the contemplative observer. That way, assuredly, lie the welfare of the human race and all the tranquillity that human nature—warped as it is by evil—will ever permit to this world. This endeavour has, through long ages, been steadily pursued in England, and one of its results—which is also one of its indications—is the vast accumulation of what may be called home treasures in the city of London. The mere enumeration of them would fill large volumes. The description of them could not be completed in a lifetime. It was this copiousness of historic wealth and poetic association, combined with the flavour of character and the sentiment of monastic repose, that bound Dr. Johnson to Fleet Street and made Charles Lamb such an inveterate lover of the town. Except it be to correct a possible insular narrowness there can be no need that the Londoner should travel. Glorious sights, indeed, await him, if he journeys no further away than Paris; but, aside from ostentation, luxury, gaiety, and excitement, Paris will give him nothing that he may not find at home.

The great cathedral of Notre Dame will awe him; but not more than his own Westminster Abbey. The grandeur and beauty of the Madeleine will enchant him; but not more than the massive solemnity and stupendous magnificence of St. Paul's. The embankments of the Seine will satisfy his taste with their symmetrical solidity; but he will not deem them superior in any respect to the embankments of the Thames. The Pantheon, the Hotel des Invalides, the Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Tribunal of Commerce, the Opera-House,—all these will dazzle and delight his eyes, arousing his remembrances of history and firing his imagination of great events and persons; but all these will fail to displace in his esteem the grand Palace of Westminster, so stately in its simplicity, so strong in its perfect grace! He will ride through the exquisite Park of Monceau,—one of the loveliest spots in Paris,—and onward to the Bois de Boulogne, with its sumptuous pomp of foliage, its romantic green vistas, its many winding avenues, its hillside hermitage, its cascades, and its affluent lakes whereon the white swans beat the water with their joyous wings; but still his soul will turn, with unshaken love and loyal preference to the sweetly sylvan solitude of the gardens of Kensington and Kew. He will marvel in the museums of the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and Cluny; and probably he will concede that of paintings, whether ancient or modern, the French display is larger and finer than the English; but he will vaunt the British Museum as peerless throughout the world, and he will still prize his National Gallery, with its originals of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner, its spirited, tender, and dreamy Murillos, and its dusky glories of Rembrandt. He will admire, at the Théâtre Français, the photographic perfection of French acting; but he will be apt to reflect that English dramatic art, if it sometimes lacks finish, often has the effect of nature; and he will certainly perceive that the playhouse itself is not superior to either Her Majesty's Theatre or Covent Garden. He will luxuriate in the Champs Élysées, in the superb Boulevards, in the glittering pageant of precious jewels that blazes in the Rue de la Paix and the Palais Royal, and in that gorgeous panorama of shop-windows for which the French capital is unrivalled and famous; and he will not deny that, as to brilliancy of aspect, Paris is prodigious and unequalled—the most radiant of cities—the sapphire in the crown of Solomon. But, when all is seen, either that Louis the Fourteenth created or Buonaparte pillaged,—when he has taken his last walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, and mused, at the foot of the statue of Caesar, on that Titanic strife of monarchy and democracy of which France has seemed destined to be the perpetual theatre,—sated with the glitter of showy opulence and tired with the whirl of frivolous life he will gladly and gratefully turn again to his sombre, mysterious, thoughtful, restful old London; and, like the Syrian captain, though in the better spirit of truth and right, declare that Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, are better than all the waters of Israel.