TRAVEL AT HOME AND ABROAD.
THE season for travel has begun, would indeed, but for the protracted sitting of Parliament, be somewhat far advanced, and the papers are treating us all to their annual high-flown essays on the beauties of England and Wales. Why do we not all stay at home, they say, especially the professionals, to whom money is valuable, and travel within the four seas? We do not know Eng- land, we are told, and it is full of beautiful things. There is no such coast scenery in the world, no such lake scenery, no such views of the sea. If we love woods, where are there trees to com- pare with the oaks and beeches of Great Britain? if hills and valleys, what is there like Wales? if cultivated country, what can equal the undulating orchards of Kent, or the smiling cornfields of the Midland Counties? We are told of " bosky dells," and " green lanes," and foaming waves, and pleasant plains, till we begin to feel that it is almost unpatriotic to quit Great Britain; and then these assertions having made their due impression, the argument is clinched. It is much cheaper and more moral to travel in Britain. One does not waste pounds on foreign hotels, or crowns on couriers, or half-sovereigns on laquaii: de place. The traveller knows the language, and is, therefore, not robbed ; he is not liable to be spied upon through trams Judas, and his daughters are not exposed to the allurements of foreign Counts, who are all, be it remembered, couriers in disguise. Why, then, abandon Devonshire for Nor- mandy, Wales for Switzerland, Kent for the Bordelais, Scotland for the Carpathians? why quit a country which wants our money for one which may want it equally, but is, at all events, not our own ? why study foreigners, when we do not yet know our own master—the British Householder? So sings in chorus every journal to which innkeepers are valuable constituents, or which knows that to the British Philistine nothing is so pleasant as praise of the'qualities England does not possess. Exalt the climate of Great Britain, the hospitality of her people, the civilization of her labourers, and you win the hearts of Englishmen.
It is all nonsense together. Of all countries in the world, the very worst for the English professional man to traverse in search of relaxation is Great Britain. In the first place, such travel gives him no relaxation, no real holiday for the mind ; and it is that which above all he is seeking, at so much cost of cash, comfort, and ease. It is only by a violent break with his daily life that he can obtain a mental holiday, and no such break is obtainable in England. Let him go to the stupidest corner of the Continent—to Bruges for instance, or the Hague—and still his routine is broken ; he is surrounded by men of a different lan- guage and different habits, who eat at different hours widely different things, and whose notions of propriety and rightfulness, though equally Philistine, are not absolutely identical with his own. The gutters are in a different place, the shop windows are differently filled, the dinner is not absolutely the same, the common people do not belong entirely to the same class. He hears sounds which, familiar or unfamiliar, are at all events new, sees sights which, pleasant or unpleasant, are not seen in the Strand. These things in themselves relieve his mind, even if he gets no positive benefit from them ; if he is incapable of under- standing the grand truth that " humanity " is a word not limited to a thinly spread upper crust or deposit of persons upon the social surface of two or three clans settled in a corner of the smallest continent, and gifted for some mysterious end of Providence with a knowledge of mechanics and a power of organi- zation which enable them to apply physical force to the rest of mankind. Even if he does not learn this cardinal truth—and he never does—the English professional still benefits by the mental change, by the violent displacement of his thoughts, and ways, and smaller idiosyncrasies. He may travel in England to places he knows not, and he will still find them all the same, ride in railways organized or not organized like his own, live in hotels which are trying to be London hotels, see scenes which have, as a rule, for their first and last merit that they are English. The Times is still his gospel, respectability still his religion, " position" still his main care and end in life. If he lives at a hotel, his host talks to him as a Londoner, feeds him as a Londoner, charges him as a Londoner. If he takes lodgings, he is robbed in the English way by a landlady who surrounds him with stuffy English comforts, demands that he keep English hours, and quarrels subserviently with his wife after the English fashion. If he sets up a house, he might, but for the prospect, almost as well be in London, for he is just as immovable, and just as mach fettered in the chains of English routine, keeping English hours, eating English dishes, and worrying himself with those implacable foes of comfort and independence, English servants. The charm of work is unbroken, he is harassed with a sensation as if he were wasting time, and might, for all the comfort he enjoys, as well be at home, where be would be earning money. If his taste is for cities, it remains ungratified simply. Nobody yet has had the impudence to affirm that English cities are entertaining, that any Londoner's mind was ever relieved by going to Leeds, or Liverpool, or Bristol, or Bath, or any other city—except, indeed Edinburgh —within the four seas. Nobody advises a tour to them, nor would anybody take such advice if it were ever offered. About fifty thousand families are supposed to " travel" every year, but no one of them ever thinks, or is ever likely to think, of making a round of English towns, to live in smoke of different densities, or to observe architecture of different degrees of grey or red uniformity of badness. Brick boxes tire one, even if they vary in cost from 1,0001. to 10,0001., and are blackened in somewhat different degrees. Then, as to the beauties of Nature, they exist doubtless in England in profusion, perhaps in greater profusion than in any -other country ; but then they exist for the advantage of the thirty thousand families who own England, and for them alone. England is an "enclosed land," a land where " property" is fenced, where underwood has value, where a brook will let, where a view raises the price of every house within its range. There are " noble woods " without end, but you require a letter of in- troduction to see them, and in Baden Baden you do not. There are moors in plenty, and very beautiful, but beware, lest in your -admiration of Nature you disturb the birds. There are " glades" in profusion, but the traveller who enters them is liable, like those poor Cornwall people, to twenty-one days' imprisonment, without -option of fine. The wildest hills in Scotland are private property, and the tourist is gravely warned, in solemn placards, that he must " keep to the paths," which, of course, wind round the least picturesque, and, therefore, least difficult faces of the hilk 'There are no meadows like the English, but the gates are not yours ; no such rivers, but they are all let ; no such copses, but who gives you a written right to enjoy them ? The green lanes, we admit, are rarely beautiful ; but walking for a month with bitter rain for half the time between hedges, even when filled with -wild flowers and blackberries, is not to a cultivated mind a per- manently interesting occupation. In most counties of England a traveller might, for all the liberty le has, as well be in a city, and in the remainder he is only allowed his full range with a guide, who knows nothing except the most scientifically -stupid method of extortion. One advantage England has, we admit,—a glorious sea. To those to whom the sea is a delight, or to whom it is the best health-bringer, we, like the Telegraph, can :say stop at home, for there is nothing on the Continent within the compass of an autumn tour in the least like England, or nothing save Norway and one or two places on the Baltic, —no place where the visitor may enjoy the waves and their melodious monotony in such perfection and peace. But even then he must carefully choose his place, for to the South, which he would choose, every- thing is enclosed—in the Isle of Wight every pleasant bit is private property—and to the East he gets out of railway communication, and to the North he comes full in front of that diabolical north- east wind, and a temperature which, if he is longing, as at heart -every Englishman longs, for an annual bath of sunlight, is -altogether detestable. There remains, it is true, the West, but the Welsh coast is as far off, and in most respects as foreign, as any -corner of the Continent. The sea, however, we have in places like Whitby, but this is the one single advantage of a home tour, and -consequently the one which the London papers never press on anybody's attention. To those who do not care for the sea .except as a convenient road for ships, who hate spray and are bored with shingle, what has England to offer ? Bright cities, wild mountains, exquisitely ordered nature ? Yes, in the columns of penny papers ; but in reality the cities are dull congeries of brick boxes, inhabited by men who look on a stranger as an enemy, and would think it madness to breakfast in the street ; the wild mountains are all property as carefully fenced as London squares ; the ordered agriculture means a dreary succession of fields, which in September have just lost their charm for anybody with eyes, gain- ing one, no doubt, for the sportsman who has a licence, and a right of shooting, and dogs, and a habit of enjoying his annual holiday gregariously. We are, however, wasting words. Who is there -except a journalist who compares Bristol with Florence, or an Alp with a Scottish enclosed hill, or who does not thirst, when he has once known it, for a little of the full life or the free nature
which he can find in Paris or in Switzerland, and can never find at home ?
But then the money ? It is a pure delusion. Of course it is infinitely cheaper for a familrto stay at home than to go wander. ing about, and if a father with his wife and two daughters goes for a month to Whitby, or Llandudno, or Dartmouth, it will cost less than if they travelled an average fifty miles a day over Con- tinental railways. But movement for movment, England is dearer than the Continent, and movement, locomotion, change from day to day, is the very essence of the question. If you do not want that, locality makes no difference, life in the Black Forest costing very much the same as life in an English watering-place, or, comfort for comfort, rather less ; but if you do, just let any professional with a slate and the capacity to use it try a tour in England. He will find that if he avoids wine, and does not mind being considered mean, and thinks of every accidental sixpence, and does not bribe porters, and never takes a carriage, and forbids his daughters to do anything they particularly want to do, he will live his holiday on mutton chops in stuffy rooms and under unpleasant landlords for about the sum per diem which on the Continent would enable him to wander at will, live as he pleases, and dine every second day among a totally different set of persons. Of course he can waste more there if he likes. A Welsh village does not offer many temp- tations to money wasting, but then he can avoid wasting also, and much more easily when he has not " position" to keep up than when he has. If he will live like an Englishman, that is, like a mis- anthrope, feed in his own rooms, and insist that a light, pleasant drawing room is improper because in one corner of it there is a bed, why he must pay, and the more he pays the more he will learn ; but to the Englishman who lives on the Continent like a rational being, leaves England behind him when he travels, and prefers good claret to brandied Lunel called sherry, the Continent is the cheaper place for a holiday of the two. Even if he is robbed he is not robbed surlily, and buys with his money a right, unknown at home, to qo where he likes, do as he likes, and live without fear of Mrs. Grundy perpetually before his eyes.
There is, we admit, one exception to this view, which ought to be recorded. To a man strong enough and unembarrassed enough to enjoy a walking tour England offers much, both in means of pleasure and opportunities of study. There can be no pleasanter land, or one more full of variety and interest, of rare bits of scenery, and quaint bits of architecture, and eccentric bits of humanity ; and the same may be said to the man content to drive under an English sky from village to village, church to church, hostelry to hostelry. It is possible to such men to shake off the burden of daily life, the routine of cities, to forget their work and themselves as completely as if they were in the desert, to obtain every minute new impres- sions, to live every hour among people they scarcely know, to learn every day some new thing. But then the mass of travellers are not men of this kind, but men approaching or past forty, with wives and daughters, whose feeling for the minutely picturesque is languid, who are genuinely interested only in mountains or great cities, who want to see things not visible at home, and see them without too much exertion or discomfort. Talk as we will of Wales, it is not in Wales that a man can sit in a chair as a friend writes us this week, and look full-eyed into a green glacier ; not in Devonshire that one can gaze at the same moment on olive groves, vineyards, audgperpetual snow ; not in Leeds or Bristol that one can linger unchallenged for hours through miles of galleries so covered with beauty that the eye at last gets drunk and refuses to transmit its impressions to the brain. Quiet beauty is all very well, and England is full, no doubt, of quiet beauty— with rents levied therefrom—but to the man of cities unquiet beauty is the real temptation ; the scene in which there is grandeur, rather than the scene in which is: prettiness. One place in Great Britain there is, we admit, wilder than almost any on the Con- tinent, but a journey through Skye is as costly and as wearying as a journey through Switzerland, and, after all, only deepens the melancholy which weary men are trying in autumn to escape.
Previous page
