ENGLAND of my HEART

SPRING

BY EDWARD HUTTON

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS BY GORDON HOME

MCMXIV


TO MY FRIEND O.K.

INTRODUCTION

England of my heart is a great country of hill and valley, moorland and marsh, full of woodlands, meadows, and all manner of flowers, and everywhere set with steadings and dear homesteads, old farms and old churches of grey stone or flint, and peopled by the kindest and quietest people in the world. To the south, the east, and the west it lies in the arms of its own seas, and to the north it is held too by water, the waters, fresh and clear, of the two rivers as famous as lovely, Thames and Severn, of which poets are most wont to sing, as Spenser when he invokes the first:

or Dryden when he tells us of the second:

Within England of my heart, in the whole breadth of her delight, there is no industrial city such as infests, ruins, and spoils other lands, and in this she resembles her great and dear mother Italy. Like her, too, she is full of very famous towns scarcely to be matched for beauty and ancientness in the rest of the world, and their names which are like the words of a great poet, and which it is a pleasure to me to recite, are Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, Exeter, and her ports, whose names are as household words, even in Barbary, are Dover, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Bristol. All these she may well boast of, for what other land can match them quite?

But there is a certain virtue of hers of which she is perhaps unaware, that is nevertheless among her greatest delights: I mean her infinite variety. Thus she is a true country, not a province; indeed, she is made up of many counties and provinces, and each is utterly different from other, and their different genius may be caught by the attentive in their names, which are Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire. Her variety thus lies in them and their dear, and let us hope, immortal differences and characteristics, their genius that is, which is as various as their scenery. For England of my heart not only differs fundamentally from every other country of the known world, but from itself in its different parts, and that radically. Thus in one part you have ranges of chalk-hills, such as no other land knows, so regular, continuous, and tremendous withal, that you might think some army of archangels—and such might well abide there—had thrown them up as their vast and beautiful fortifications, being good Romans and believing in the value of such things, and not as the heathen despising them. These chalk downs are covered, as indeed becomes things so old, with turf, the smoothest, softest, and sweetest under the sun.

There are other hills also that catch the breath, and these be those of the west. They all bear the beautiful names of home, as Mendip, Quantock, Brendon, and Cotswold. And as there are hills, so there are plains, plains uplifted, such as that great silent grassland above Salisbury, plains lonely, such as the Weald and the mysterious marsh of Romney in the east by which all good things go out of England, as the legions went, and, as, alas, the Faith went too, another Roman thing many hundred years ago. There is also that great marsh in the west by the lean and desolate sea, more mysterious by far, whence a man may see far off the great and solemn mountains of another land. By that marsh the Faith came into England of my heart, and there lies in ruin the greatest of its shrines in loving but alien hands, and desolate.

I have said nothing of the valleys: they are too many and too fair, from the fairest of all through which Thames flows seaward, to those innumerable and more beloved where are for sure our homes. I say nothing of the rivers, for who could number them? Yet I will tell you of some if only for the beauty of their names, passing the names of all women but ours, as Thames itself, and Medway, Stour, and Ouse and Arun and Rother; Itchen and Test, Hampshire streams; and those five which are like the fingers of an outstretched hand about Salisbury in the meads, Bourne and Avon and Wylye and Nadder and Ebble; and those of the West, Brue, which is holiest of all, though all be holy, Exe and Barle, Dart and Taw, Fal under the sloping woods, Tamar, which is an eastern girdle to a duchy, and Camel, which kissed the feet of Iseult, and is lost ere it finds the sea.

Of the uplifted moorlands which are a part of the mystery of the west, of the forests, of the greenwood, of the meads, of the laughing coast, white as with dawn in the east, darkling in the west, I know not how to speak, for in England of my heart we take them for granted and are satisfied. They fill all that quiet and fruitful land with their own joy and beneficence, and are a part of God's pleasure. Because of them the name of England of my heart might be but Happiness, or—as for ages we have named that far-off dusky Arabia,—Anglia Felix.

And yet, perhaps, the chief thing that remains with the mere sojourner in this country of mine, the true Old England, is that in the whole breadth of it, it is one vast graveyard. Do you not know those long barrows that cast their shadows at evening upon the lonely downs, those round tumuli that are dark even in the sun, where lie the men of the old time before us, our forefathers? Do you not know the grave of the Roman, the mystery that seems to lurk outside the western gate of the forgotten city that was once named in the Roman itinerary and now is nothing? Do you not know many an isolated hill often dark with pines, but, more often still, lonely and naked where they lie of whom we are come, with their enemies, and they call the place Battlebury or Danesbury, or for ever deserted like all battlefields it is nameless? If you know not these you know not England of my heart, though you know those populous graveyards about the village churches where the grass is so lush and green and the dead are more than the living; though you know that marvellous tomb, the loveliest thing in all my country, where the first Earl of Salisbury lies in the nave of the great church he helped to build; though you know that wonder by the roadside where Somerset and Wiltshire meet; though you know the beauty that is fading and crumbling in the little church under the dark woods where the dawn first strikes the roots of the Quantock Hills.

There is so much to know, and all must be got by heart, for all is a part of us and of that mighty fruitful and abiding past out of which we are come, which alone we may really love, and which holds for ever safe for us our origins.

After all, we live a very little time, the future is not ours, we hold the present but by a brittle thread; it is the past that is in our hearts. And so it is that to go afoot through Southern England is not less than to appeal to something greater and wiser than ourselves, out of which we are come, to return to our origins, to appeal to history, to the divine history of the soul of a people.

There is a genius loci. To look on the landscapes we have always known, to tread in the