HOME SCENERY.
THE Bishop of London's advice to those about to travel is to begin their travels at home. He half suggests that we look on expenditure as part of the pleasure of change, and have a positive liking for taking long and costly journeys when there is better scenery, more interesting ancient archi- tecture, and incomparable outdoor beauty quite near our doors. We have, in fact, every variety of scenery without crossing the sea, except perhaps the sublime, to which some of the great precipices of the South and Western Coasts very nearly approach. English landscape produced the English land- scape painters, as surely as Nile scenery begot Egyptian architecture. If our landscape school is without a rival, to the subjects painted must be accorded a due share in the result. Though the charm of domestic scenery of the land- scapes of Constable and )Borland is still felt, there is a growing taste and admiration for those parts of our country which are really wild. This is not a craving for being among " wild scenery " in the sense in which the word is used of mountain landscape, but for the simplicity and unrestraint of scenery free from all traces of cultivation,—landscape which owes everything to Nature and nothing to man. This senti. ment is by no means confined to dwellers in towns. People who spend their lives among fields have as intense a longing to get away into the wilderness as those who live in the towns have to be in the fields. The desire is quite logical. It is only in the wilderness that the eye and mind find com- plete relief from the "squeeze" of competition, and the silent but visible evidences that thirty millions of people seeking a living on one small island in the East Atlantic scarcely leave each other elbow-room. The Act of Parlia- ment which decreed that the New Forest should remain for ever " open and wild" secured to the nation the most perfect example in this country of the kind of scenery most desired by modern feeling. Its seventy thousand acres give every variety of wild and natural woods, of thickets, of swamps and brooks, of heather moors, without the loneliness of the great moorlands of the North, of "mosses" and bogs, of tidal estuaries, of the inland Solent Sea. There, too, that human interest removed from human cares which the Bishop finds expressed in ancient architecture set in fine landscape is seen in perfection in the precincts of Beaulieu Abbey, and the storehouses, the wine-presses, the quays, and salterns of the great Cistercian brotherhood. The New Forest is, in fact, the embodiment of what we now hold to be the best of all forms of English scenery. But tracts anciently wild are also rare, and should be preserved with ever-increasing vigilance. They are found scattered in the home and southern counties in bits and patches, the remnants of forests and chases, mainly saved by old Crown rights, and always in danger until a special Act has been passed for their protection. We find it in Woolmer Forest, in corners of Epping Forest, in the little known Ashdown Forest, on parts only of Exmoor, in Sherwood Forest—" fruitful grounds and fertile," yielding trees and vegetation rich and various, not waste places of the earth " which no man may abide in" like the barren moorlands or the mountain sides. No one can make such places as the New Forest or its satellites. Not an acre of them should be given up by the nation. You cannot reconstruct this scenery, or renew within the limits of three generations the uncovenanted grace of the English wilderness.
But in our rich variety of landscape the sense of freedom given by the wild forests is repeated in a fainter echo in forms of scenery which must owe their attraction mainly to the same feeling, that they are what they are without the meddling of man. Such of the charm of the chalk downs which is not due to the sense of space and height must come from the knowledge that the turf is as old as the hills them- selves, and that the soil of which it is the covering never knew another. The lines of the scenery are soft and tame,— spacious, but void of form, a mere playground for cloud- shadows. It is this sense of freedom which induces among coast-dwelling people such an intense affection for their salt-marshes, their man-am-covered sandhills, and the cockle strands which fringe their tidal streams. The Kentish marsh- men think the world can scarcely show a finer landscape than the levels of Romney Marsh. You can scarcely keep a Norfolk coastman for three days at a time from visiting the meal-marshes ; he feels he must go there, if only for an hour, and if he is not in the marshes he will be roaming among the sandhills away from every token that can remind him of work and other people. Gilpin has written of sunrise in the forest, but it is equalled by the sunset over the marshlands and the sands, when the evening glow is shot from beneath the cloud- piles on sea and half-formed land, and the dividing barrier of wind-piled hills. On the cultivated flats of the Fens, men, by a curious inversion, praise their landscape "because they can always see the clouds." In exchange for the featureless land they have the panorama of the sky.
Our scenery abounds in rivers, and in rivers of very different character. Yet all our river-scenery is good, for none are too wide. You cannot have a stream too small for beauty, but it may be too large. The opposite bank must be well in sight and objects clearly seen upon it, otherwise the water is less of an ornament than a barrier, It becomes a great gulf fixed; a breach in the continuity of the landscape. But we have rivers to suit every mood, from the tranquil Thames to the galloping Spey. An " average " Southern river, the Arun, the Rother, the Bedfordshire Ouse, the Stratford Avon, or the minor Thames tributaries close to London, as the Lea, the Mole, the Colne, and the Wandle, "fits" into its rich valley landscape with a grace of con- gruity to which imagination could not add a new feature. Take, for example, the junction of the Orwell and the Stour above Harwich Haven. There is nothing "grand" in this typical piece of English river - scenery, only the wide running water, low, richly wooded hills, good old houses, ma1tings and mills, and the brown river-craft. But it is entirely pleasing, and is only one of a hundred such scenes which the painters learnt to appreciate first, and the people later. Then, for change, the Dart, the Wye, the Hampshire Test and Itchen, and the Derbyshire Dove and Derwent. As an example of the juxtaposition of different forms of English landscape the latter is perhaps the most striking. The change from the level meads by the full- flowing Trent to the vales and hills of the Peak is like a transformation scene. We have lost much of the charm of English travel by exchanging the coach for the rail. The railways so hug the flats that few of our main lines show the quick natural succession of different landscape. But there are exceptions. The journey from Victoria to Portsmouth by Dorking and Chichester is perhaps the best example. The line of the North Downs, steep and richly wooded, covered with parks and studded with mansions, is succeeded by the typical clay landscape, cornfields, and oak plantations of the Weald. Then at Pulborough the rivers sweep sharply round the base of the higher ground. The downs once more appear on either side, and for miles the richest flats in England stretch down to the foot of Arundel Castle, whose walls recall that human interest of seven hundred years in which Bishop Creighton, and those whose minds, like his, are equipped with the story of England's fortunes, find such an added charm to scenery. The contrast between the Mendips and the lower vale of Glastonbury, the Bridgwater flats and the Taunton hills, is equally striking, though more distant on the western line. These are the larger " aspects of Nature" in England. But the variety is greater the more closely it is scanned. The Bishop of London, in his advice to Londoners, would have them seek near at home for that variety of scenes they crave. Surely they can find it within an hour of London town. There are the numberless commons, woodlands, pools, and heaths of Surrey, the beauties of a single county which no one has exhausted yet. Northward there are More Park and 'Cassiobury, Cheynies and Northwood, and the lovely valley of the Colne. A little further afield the Buckinghamshire Chalfonts. North-east the remnant of Waltham Chase, and so round to Epping Forest. There is nothing in England finer of its kind than the Thames from Sion House to Hampton Court ; yet how few who visit Hampton Court ever explore the lower river, or remember that at Greenwich is a rival palace, and that Tilbury Fort and Pirbright are as picturesque and enriched by as great historical associations as is the park round Wolsey's Palace ?
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