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Chapter III - LandChapter III - Land
Chapter III - Land
Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth living in; the
former, because there nature vindicates her rights, and triumphs over the
evils inflicted by the governments; the latter, because art conquers nature,
and transforms a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and plenty.
England is a garden. Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed
and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a
plough. The solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the
industry of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the
sea itself feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful and
ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has found all
the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the
byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new arts of intercourse meet
you everywhere; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all that man
wants is provided within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every
manner, the traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers
and towns, through mountains, in tunnels of three or four miles, at near twice
the speed of our trains; and reads quietly the Times newspaper, which, by its
immense correspondence and reporting, seems to have machinized the rest of the
world for his occasion.
The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England is
England? What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other
nations? If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is
success; and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last
millennium, that country is England.
A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual
nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw him to Britain.
In all that is done or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or
practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering. The
culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and
aims. A nation considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the
last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity,
and power of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or
obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English. The Turk and
Chinese also are making awkward efforts to be English. The practical common -
sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion,
religion take, is the natural genius of the British mind. The influence of
France is a constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the
English for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the continuation
of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.
See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every biography,
play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners. So that
a sensible Englishman once said to me, "As long as you do not grant us
copyright, we shall have the teaching of you."
But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral estimate of
England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause which has
agitated the whole community, and on which everybody finds himself an
interested party. Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. England has
inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence, and tastes; and,
to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British element, a serious man
must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east
and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if
only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in
independent minds.
Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best time, as
some signs portend that it has reached its highest point. It is observed that
the English interest us a little less within a few years; and hence the
impression that the British power has culminated, is in solstice, or already
declining.
As soon as you enter England, which with Wales, is no larger than the
State of Georgia,^1 this little land stretches by an illusion to the
dimensions of an empire. The innumerable details, the crowded succession of
towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated estates, the
number and power of the trades and guilds, the military strength and splendor,
the multitudes of rich and remarkable people, the servants and equipages, -
all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to pause, hide all
boundaries by the impression of magnificence and endless wealth.
[Footnote 1: Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the
area of Scotland.]
I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that object
indispensably to be seen, - Yes, to see England well needs a hundred years;
for, what they told me was the merit of Sir John Soane`s Museum, in London, -
that it was well packed and well saved, - is the merit of England; - it is
stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, with towns, towers, churches,
villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity-houses. In the history of art it is
a long way from a cromlech to York minster; yet all the intermediate steps may
still be traced in this all-preserving island.
The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer by many
degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no
hour in the whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter, but such days
as we have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature which makes no
exhausting demand on human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest
stature. Charles the Second said, "it invited men abroad more days in the year
and more hours in the day than another country." Then England has all the
materials of a working country except wood. The constant rain, - a rain with
every tide in some parts of the island, - keeps its multitude of rivers full,
and brings agricultural production up to the highest point. It has plenty of
water, of stone, of potter`s clay, of coal, of salt, and of iron. The land
naturally abounds with game; immense heaths and downs are paved with quails,
grouse, and woodcock, and the shores are animated by water birds. The rivers
and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the rich, and
sprats and herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs the herring are in
innumerable shoals; at one season, the country people say, the lakes contain
one part water and two parts fish.
The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its
sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes to read
and to write. Add the coal smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or
blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of black sheep, discolor the
human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants, and corrode the
monuments and buildings.
The London fog aggregates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes
justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, "in a fine day,
looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one." A gentleman in
Liverpool told me that he found he could do without a fire in his parlor about
one day in the year. It is, however, pretended that the enormous consumption
of coal in the island is also felt in modifying the general climate.
Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship in its
shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have worked it, or
anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herschel said,
"London was the centre of the terrene globe." The shopkeeping nation, to use a
shop word, has a good stand. The old Venetians pleased themselves with the
flattery that Venice was in 45 degrees, midway between the poles and the line;
as if that were an imperial centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi
the navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the earth to be an
animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a
kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the
same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the
cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian,
and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of
Chestnut Street. But when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to
Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those
capitals.
But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of
the modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil`s famous line, divided
the poor Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring of marriage
with all nations. It is not down in the books, - it is written only in the
geologic strata, - that fortunate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst
the old isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and gave to this
fragment of Europe its impregnable sea wall, cutting off an island of eight
hundred miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to three hundred
miles; a territory large enough for independence enriched with every seed of
national power, so near, that it can see the harvests of the continent; and so
far, that who would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for
tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely the
best commercial position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all
the goods they can manufacture. And to make these advantages avail, the river
Thames must dig its spacious outlet to the sea from the heart of the kingdom,
giving road and landing to innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to
trade, that a people so skilful and sufficient in economizing water-front by
docks, warehouses, and lighters required. When James the First declared his
purpose of punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied,
"that, in removing his royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he would
leave them the Thames."
In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, having
plain, forest, marsh, river, seashore; mines in Cornwall; caves in Matlock and
Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor Bay,
Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales; and, in Westmoreland and Cumberland,
a pocket Switzerland, in which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient
scale to fill the eye and tough the imagination. It is a nation conveniently
small. Fontenelle thought that nature had sometimes a little affectation; and
there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers, as if
there were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham.
Nature held counsel with herself, and said, "My Romans are gone. To build my
new empire, I will choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. I
will not grudge a competition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore buffalo
and the pasture to the strongest! For I have work that requires the best will
and sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to keep that will
alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others, and knit them
to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I
will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea -
risks, and the stimulus of gain. An island, - but not so large, the people not
so many, as to glut the great markets and depress one another, but
proportioned to the size of Europe and the continents."
With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence radiate.
It is a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality, the spiritual
centrality, which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people. "For the English
nation, the best of them are in the centre of all Christians, because they
have interior intellectual light. This appears conspicuously in the spiritual
world. This light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, and
thereby of thinking."
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