There are as many types of natural scenery in England almost as there are counties. To attempt to describe all in this one volume would be absurd. Yet to generalise on English natural beauty is difficult, because of that great diversity. Who can suggest, for instance, a common denominator to suit the Devonshire Moors, the Norfolk Broads, the Surrey Downs, and the Thames Valley? But since one must generalise, it is safe to give as the predominant feature of England's natural beauty that which strikes most obviously the eye of the stranger used to other countries.

Nine out of ten strangers coming to England for the first time, and asked to speak of its appearance, will say something equivalent to "park-like." England in truth looks like one great well-ordered park, under the charge of a skilful landscape gardener. The trees seem to grow with an eye to effect, the meadows to be designed for vistas, the hedges for reliefs. The land indeed does not seem ever to be doing anything—not at all a correct impression in fact, that, but it is the one conveyed irresistibly.

One soon notices that the tree must in France work for its living. It cannot aspire to the luxurious and beautiful existence of its English brothers, who in their woods and copses have little to do but to "utter green leaves joyously" in the spring, glow with burnished glory in the autumn, and unrobe delicate traceries for admiration in the winter. In France a tree may live on the edge of a road or as one of a cluster sheltering a farmhouse, or keep many other trees company in a State pine forest which will help to make those execrable French matches; but its every twig is utilised, and a hard-working existence takes away much of its beauty. The Æsthetic tree, the tree with nothing to do but just to be a tree and look pretty, is rare in most countries; but in England it is the commonplace. Other countries have useful trees which look pretty, forests which are impressive in spite of man. England seems to share with Japan the amiable thriftlessness of giving up much land to growth which is not intended to serve any base utilitarian purpose at all.

The hedges, which take up a considerable fraction of English arable soil, help to the park-like appearance of the country. They are inexpressibly beautiful when spring wakes them up to pipe their roulades in tender green. In summer they are splendid in blazon of leaf and flower. In autumn they flaunt banners of gold and red and brown. In winter, too, they are still beautiful, especially in the early winter when there still survive a few scarlet berries to glow and crackle and almost burn in the frost. If England, in a mood of thrift, swept away her hedges and put in their places fences (or that nice sense of keeping boundaries which enables the French cultivator to do without either), the saving of land would be enormous. But much of the park-like beauty of the country-side would depart; and with it the predominant note of the English landscape, which is that of the estate of a rich, careful, orderly nobleman.

The change will be slow in coming, if it comes at all; for though he would be the last man, probably, to suspect it, the Englishman is at heart Æsthetic. Yes, in spite of horse-hair furniture, gilt-framed oleographs, wax-flower decorations, and Early Victorian wall-papers, and other sins of which many of him have been, and still are, guilty, the Englishman has planted in him an instinct for art. It shows in his love of nature, of the green of his England. Almost every one aspires to come into touch with a bit of plant life. In the East End of London the aspiration takes the form of a window garden. You may see workingmen's "flats" let at six shillings a week with their window gardens. In the West End, land which must be worth many thousands of pounds per acre is devoted to garden use. For want of better, a terrace of houses will have a little strip of plantation, at back or front, common to all of them. House and "flat" agents tell that tenants almost always demand that there shall be at least sight of a green tree from some window. In the small suburban villas a very considerable tax of money and labour is cheerfully paid in the effort to keep in good order a little pocket-handkerchief of lawn and a few shrubs. This love of the garden is holy and wholesome, and it proves, I think, that the Englishman is at heart a lover of the beautiful, an "Æsthetic," though he is supposed to be such a dull, prosaic, practical person.

Comparing the English with the French on this point, in my opinion it is in the practical application of Æsthetic principles to life rather than in Æsthetic sensibility that the French are superior to the English. What difference there is in Æstheticism favours the English; there are deeper springs of art and poetry in the English people than in the French. But art has been far more carefully cherished and organised in France than in England. There is more general artistic education, if less true artistic feeling.

Approach a typical French village of a modern type. The first impression given by the houses is of a vastly superior artistic consciousness. Both in colour and in form the houses are more beautiful than the same types in England, where domestic architecture of the villa type so often suggests either a penal establishment or the need of a penal establishment for the designer. But look a little closer, and one notices that, as compared with an English town, there is in France a conspicuous absence of gardens. Decorative trees, shrubberies, flowers are rare. Where there is garden space it is, as like as not, devoted to some shocking attempt at grandiose rococo work. The interiors, too, are disappointing. Thrift suggests the hideous closed-in stove as a substitute for open fires; but the garish wall-papers, the coloured prints, the "decorations" of shell-work or china, and so on, are not necessary, and are far more ugly than those of the average poor home in England, even of the "Early Victorian type." I repeat, the natural artistic standard of the French does not seem to be so high as that of the English, but the standard of artistic education is very much higher.

I have noticed among all classes in England the same natural love of beauty. It does not exist only in the rich (but as a class it exists among them to a very marked degree: there is nothing in the world more beautiful than an English manor house, with its park and garden); it permeates the whole people. I recall a farmer to whom I spoke of the waste caused by the gorgeous yellow-blossomed weeds which invaded his wheat. "Yes," he said, half content, half sorry, "but they do look so beautiful." It was not that he was a lazy farmer, but he did actually love the beautiful wild life which came to rob his wheat of its nourishment.

At another time I remember meeting on a country road a draper's porter (one of those poor casual labourers who make an odd penny here and there by carrying parcels for small drapers). He had an enforced holiday and he was tramping out into the country from the town "to see the green fields." He did not say in so many words that he "loved" the green fields. It would not occur to him probably to attempt to phrase his feeling towards them. But it was clear that he did, most fondly; and he was fairly typical of the Englishman of his class.

As an exile the Englishman carries away with him the ideal of the soft green English country-side, and tries to reconstruct England wherever he may settle overseas. English trees, English grass, English flowers he sedulously cultivates in Australia, in Canada, in South Africa, and wins some strange triumphs over Nature in many of his acclimatisations.

Occasionally the transplanting succeeds too well. An Englishman with a touch of nostalgia—not enough of it to send him back to his Home country—introduced rabbits to Australia. It would be home-like, he thought, to see rabbits popping in and out of their burrows. That was the beginning. Now there are places in Australia where you can hardly put your foot down without treading on a rabbit, and sufficient of money to build a large navy has had to be spent in keeping the rabbit-pest in check. Another home-sick colonist, who came possibly, however, from north of the Tweed, introduced Scottish thistles into the same country with disastrous results.

Yet another English acclimatisation was that of the field daisy to Tasmania. It flourished wonderfully in its new surroundings, and had such a bad effect on the pasturage that a war had to be waged against its spread. But, seeing an English meadow decked with daisies, as thick as stars in the Milky Way, one might almost argue that such beauty is good compensation for a little loss of grass, as my farmer thought with his invaded wheat patch. The wide grass walks of Kew Gardens in the daisy time are lovely enough to make one forget all material things. To give a thought to the niceties of a cow's appetite, or to the yield of butter, when remembering such daisies, would not be possible.

All along the English country-side the gardens are delicious, from the winsome cottage plots to the nobly sweeping landscape surrounding a typical manor house, blending a hundred individual beauties of lawn, rosery, herb border, walled garden, wild garden into one enchanting mosaic. But, withal, it is the wonderful variety and perfection of the trees that is most remarkable. The affectionate regard for trees in England is a most pleasing thing to one who in his own country has had often to protest against a sort of rage against trees, as if they were enemies of the human race. (The pioneer who has to clear a forest for the sake of his crop and pasture gets into an unhappy habit afterwards of tree-murder out of sheer wantonness.) At Ampthill Park (an old Henry VIII. hunting seat) I have been shown oaks which in Cromwell's time were recorded as "too old to be cut down for the building of ships." They are still carefully preserved, some of them enjoying old-age pensions in the shape of props to keep up their venerable limbs.

Were I advising a friend abroad who knew nothing of England and wished to make a pilgrimage to its chief shrines of beauty, I think I should urge him to come in the late winter to Plymouth and explore first Cornwall and Devon, seeing, in the first case, how England's "rocky shores beat back the envious siege of watery Neptune." The coming of the waves of an Atlantic storm to Land's End offers a grand spectacle. He should stay in the south-west to see the first breath of spring bring the trees to green, and the earliest of the daffodils to flower. He will very likely encounter some wet weather. The Dartmoor people themselves say:—

But despite showers, spring on Dartmoor is a glowing pageant of green and gold. After feasting upon it a week or so, my imaginary pilgrim would make his way to the Thames valley to welcome yet another spring. The Gulf Stream gives the south-west corner of England a softer climate and an earlier spring than the east enjoys. By the time the daffodils are nodding their golden heads in Cornwall, the crocus will be just showing its flame along the borders of the Thames, and the pilgrim will understand Browning's rapture:—

When once the spring is in full tide towards summer, it is difficult to say where one should search for special beauty in England, for all is so beautiful, from the Yorkshire hills to the Sussex marshes beloved of Coventry Patmore—flat lands whose drowsy beauties glow under the broad sunshine and suggest a tranquil charm of quiet joy tinged with melancholy, too subtle to appeal to the casual "tripper," but of insistent call to all who understood the more intimate charms of Nature. It is spacious is Sussex. It shelters solitudes. Its quiet, slow-voiced people are sympathetic with their surroundings. When storms rage Sussex takes a new aspect. The screaming of the gulls, the sobbing of the sedges in the wind, the wide, flat expanse laid, as it were, bare to the rage of the storm, gives to the wind a sense of poignant desolation.

In Sussex, when Henry VIII. was king, many "great cannones and shotters were caste for His Majestie's service"; and the county was notable for its iron mines and foundries. From Sussex earlier had come all of the 3000 horseshoes on which an English king's army had galloped to ruin at Bannockburn. Owing to the iron in the soil the Sussex streams sometimes run red, so that "at times the grounde weepes bloud." Now there is an end of iron-working there. The foundry at Ashburnham, the last of the Sussex furnaces, was closed down in 1828. One reason given was that the workers were too drunken, helped as they were to unsober habits by the facilities for smuggling in Holland's gin.

But more probably the Sussex ironworks closed down in the main for the same reason that other southern works did. The past two centuries have seen a gradual transference of the great industries and the great centres of population from the south to the north-west and the Midlands. The northern coal mines are the real magnets. So the Sussex iron-workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may not justly be accused of killing an industry with their dissolute love of Holland's gin. Their country is to-day the more picturesque without the iron foundries, though one may give a sigh to Sussex iron, which had the repute of being the toughest in all England.

I have given this little space to Sussex, by way of proof that everywhere in England there is beauty, for Sussex is not a "scenery" county in the general sense. It will, indeed, prove puzzling to my imaginary pilgrim in search of the highest natural beauty of England to find time within one spring and summer to get an idea of its wide variety of charm. Fortunate he if he resists all temptation to rush (by motor car or otherwise) through a "comprehensive tour" mapped out by hours. I remember encountering—with deep pity on my part—a group of delegates to some great Imperial Conference, who were being "shown England" by some misguided and misguiding official. They were at Oxford for lunch, and were due to "do" Oxford and lunch—or rather lunch and Oxford—within three hours. Motoring up they had already "done" a great deal of country in a morning, including a visit to Banbury. After lunch—and Oxford—they were on their way to Worcester and yet farther that day. It was an unhappy experiment in quick-change scenery, proving conclusively the cleverness of motor cars and the stupidity of human beings.

May and June in this fancied Pilgrimage of Beauty should be given up wholly to the Thames valley from Greenwich to Oxford, and past. An intelligent lover of the beautiful in Nature and Art will at least learn in those two months that a life-time is not sufficient for due faithful worship at all the shrines of Beauty he will encounter. My pilgrim has now seen wild coast scenery and river scenery. July should be given to the hills and the lakes, these enchanting lakes which have won new beauties from the poets and wise men who dwelt by them. Then August to the Yorkshire Wolds, with their sweeping outlines, clear in the amber air shining over white roads and blue-green fields.

The attractions of the Yorkshire Wolds are proof against the wet sea-mists, the penetrating winds, and the merciless rain which sometimes sweep over them. The very severity of the weather appeals to nature lovers. The Yorkshire Wolds terminate on the east with the great Flamborough headland, the chalky cliffs of which have remarkable strength to resist ocean erosion. Owing to this fact Flamborough headland has been for centuries becoming more and more the outstanding feature of the east coast of England, because the sea continues to eat into the low shores of Holderness.

With the end of August comes the end of the English summer (though at times it ends at a very much earlier date, and offers with its brief life poor reason for having appeared at all; "seeing that I was so soon to be done for, why ever was I begun for"). It is then time to go to Kent and see the burnishing of the woods by Autumn, the ripening of hop and apple. To the New Forest afterwards, and the sands of the south coast. At the end of the year our pilgrim will know how varied is the beauty of the English landscape, and how faithfully it is loved in its different forms by those who live near to it.