Feet make the game. Clay courts and hard courts are safer roads. The footing is more sure there. The beauty of the grass is that it breathes. It is English.
Hard courts are more like American highways, omnipresent, imposing, yet often cracking.
We seem to like our climaxes straight, fast, and requiring little care or doubt. The surface in France is red like the earth itself in Roussillon. The French like longer battles and slower climaxes - and they get them on the clay. The Australians, great sportsmen and sportswoman, competitive and somewhat cost-effective by nature, broke fully with their English past in the real estate upmarket of the 1980s, building a beautiful modern stadium in Melbourne and rubberizing their court surfaces. The English have never poured cement or rubber over their lawns.