THE BANK HOLIDAY SPECTACLE AT KEW.
IN an inner room of the "North Gallery" at Kew, there has been on view, for some two years past, a collection of studies in oil and water-colour by Monsieur and Madame de l'Aubiniere, of some of the most delightful spots and aspects of Kew Gardens ; and last year a portfolio of repro- ductions of some of these pictures was published and cir- culated under the title of "The Poetry of Kew Gardens." But not many weeks ago the present writer happened to see a drawing by Madame de l'Aubiniere of a subject which suggests at the first blush everything that is most opposed to poetry, to wit, "Bank Holiday on Kew Green ; " and, in spite of prejudice, it was impossible to deny that the artist had succeeded in making a charming picture of the scene. The question remained, however, "Had truth been sacrificed in achieving the effect? Was there really so much good colour to be got out of the holiday costume of an English mob ? Was it possible that groups of Cockneys—courting, romping, smoking, and eating under the ancient chestnut-trees, where the shadow of royalty still lingers—could really add beauty to a scene of which the seduction at ordinary times lies in a certain air of quiet retirement and old-world dignity sharply contrasting with the cheaper effects of the mushroom suburb of modern villas that has sprung up around Kew Gardens Station ? And the resolve was formed to look once more at the familiar spectacle when the August Bank Holiday should come round again, and see whether, after all, the artist had approached the matter in the truer spirit, and Bank Holiday might not also deserve to be included among the manifestations of life that poetry can treat. Thanks, no doubt, in part to the glorious sunshine and clear atmosphere that made Monday a
day of beauty and delight in any circumstances, but probably in part also to the new bias given to the observer's mind by the unconscious hypnotism of the artist, the observations made on the Green and in the Gardens at Kew on this week's Bank Holiday seemed to go far to justify Madame de l'Aubiniere's poetic treatment.
Though the number of visitors to Kew Gardens on a Bank Holiday has before now passed a hundred thousand —it reached the goodly figure of 74,620 last Monday—yet very little of a special kind is done for their entertainment. Compared with the elaborate shows advertised by so many suburban resorts, the doings at Kew are marked by an almost primitive simplicity. No steam roundabouts or switchback railways may take their stand upon the Green. Even Punch and Judy and the black-faced minstrels, without whose presence no English holiday could be celebrated satis- factorily, must keep to the skirting roads, and the result is that hardly anything in the way of organised play or show is attempted in Kew. Those who want a fete with a programme can get it in the Richmond Deer Park, a mile away. The people who stay in Kew must content themselves with the simple pleasure of a picnic in the open air, a survey of the Gardens, a row on the river, and—in the evening, when the sun has set and the gates of the Gardens are closed—a game of kiss-in-the-ring on the Green. Kew attracts those London visitors who have quiet and more or less educated tastes, and also those whose purses are lightest. Lovers of flowers and students of botany find much to please and instruct them in the gardens and hot-houses, while the poorest families from Whitechapel, having once defrayed the cost of their return railway tickets, may spend the whole day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., in beautiful surroundings, without being tempted to make any further disbursements except, perhaps, of the very few coppers necessary to secure posses- sion of the simple toys hawked upon the Green, and recom- mended in turn as "the fun of the fair." These toys, however, are indispensable. No human being under six can be long content without a gay plume of coloured paper, fashioned like the tail of a cart - horse and fastened whip-like to a handle, with which to fan the air and swish at flies and fellow-mortals. Beings of more advanced years require zinc squeeze-tubes, full of clean water, with which to squirt one another as they fly over the grass ; and there is no age, from infancy to absolute old-fogeydom, at which it is possible to be happy without a paper bag full of tiny wafers of every colour under the sun, which look like the minute sugar-plums called "hundreds and thousands," and probably get their otherwise inappropriate name of confetti from some dimly-felt association with these sweetmeats of the carnival. But a paper horse-tail, a squeezing tube, and a bag of confetti may be bought for a penny each, and the holiday-maker, who has frugally brought his dinner and tea in a basket—having these things—needs nothing more to make him happy, comfortable, and fashionable till he returns home at night. Kew Gardens, on ordinary days so precise and so fastidious, relaxes its discipline on Bank Holiday, and allows people to picnic on the grass, only begging humbly by the mouthpiece of capacious and conveniently disposed baskets that they will put their paper and orange-peel into these receptacles instead of scattering them over the lawns. We are sorry to have to record that we saw very few paper wrappers in the baskets, and a great many littering the grass.
But to return to the Green and the horse-tails and confetti. The uses of the horse-tails are obvious,—they satisfy the need of every child to hit at something with something else, and they contribute to the scene those splendid red and orange effects that filled us with incredulity when we saw them depicted in Madame de l'Aubiniere's picture. Confetti explain their mission very quickly to the instincts of purchasers. Children fling them at their elders, and then scamper away from the chase they have provoked. Boys, come to courting age, throw them like dust in the eyes of the girls, while they snatch the kisses they have run for. There is something touching about the simplicity of these amusements and the constancy with which they are provided and appreciated.
All through the burning afternoon of Monday the shadeless spaces in the middle of the Green were practically deserted, except during a short interval, when a game of cricket was played—the visitors keeping as much as possible under the shadow of the trees, when they were not hanging about the
carts of the cAstermongers arranged in line beyond the railing on the river side of the Green. And though it would be straining a good many points to assert that there were many among these loafers who, taken individually, could be said to satisfy by their appearance any moderately exacting standard of taste : yet it must be conceded that, considered en masse, the crowd looked gay and pic- turesque enough as it congregated round the costers' carts and trucks. While, as for the costermongers' carts, they looked so well, both in the mass and in detail, that one was tempted to the conclusion that either costermongers enjoy a monopoly of taste among the lower classes, or that taste is after all a matter of instinct in the uneducated Englishman, excepting only where the selection of clothing for his own wear is in question. In old days the costers used to muster round the Green on the night before a holiday. But their activity and volubility during the small hours disturbed the inhabitants of the overlooking houses, and it has therefore been ruled by the Town Council of Richmond that they may not pass the bridge till 8 o'clock in the morning. Accordingly, they now gather during the night upon Kew Bridge, and wait there till 8 o'clock strikes, and the police- man gives the signal to move on. Then the carts rattle down the slope of the bridge, in detachments of five or six at a time (taking precedence according to the position they have occupied during the night), and are allotted their places by the policemen on duty. Next begins the work of unpacking carts and building up and decorating stalls. The simpler carts come empty, their owners' object in watching on the bridge all night being merely to secure a good place at 8 o'clock ; the wares may be left to; follow later and so escape the dangers of uncertain weather. The more complicated carts bring their goods packed within, and also the framework of a booth, the setting up of which is as amusing to watch as the putting together of a puzzle. Taste and ingenuity are nowhere so effectively displayed as in the arrangement of the fruit-stalls and the booths where cooling drinks are mixed and sold. Greengages, apples, and tomatoes make a pretty show. But nothing looks so superb in the sunshine as the gigantic bowls of golden lemon-squash surmounted by glass dishes full of the unpeeled fruit. From a decorative point of view this is a feature that could not be improved upon, while its obvious serviceableness to the needs of a thirsty summer day, adds to the effect of beauty the justification of fitness without which the philosophers tell us that beauty is not real. But not only is the coster- mongers' row pleasant to the eye. It is good for the soul of the student of popular manners to observe the alacrity and good temper that animate all these humble victuallers, and to note the excellent understanding that exists between them and the marshalling police who assign to each his place.
To many of us the interruptions of the business of life made by the frequent recurrences of Bank Holiday seem a solid evil ; to others the annoyance of seeing favourite haunts overrun by the vulgar is a grievance admitting of no com- pensation. And again, to others who combine a fastidious taste with popular sympathies, it is a distressing incident, inasmuch as it suggests the irreconcilability of the one set of feelings with the other. But perhaps after all the right way of looking at these recurring festivals of the masses is to regard them as part of the education of the people in manners and taste. Great days like that of the Queen's Jubilee and Diamond Jubilee have taught us how, in the course of one genera- tion's growth from childhood to manhood, the compulsory Education Act has eliminated the element of savagery from the temper of the English mob ; and we had learned before how fifty years of organised police supervision had taught it law-abidingness. Perhaps in another fifty years our grand- children will be remarking that the habit of taking their pleasure collectively in public places has taught the people how to dress their persons so that they shall not be blots upon the landscape they have come out to enjoy; and how to behave in minor matters so that they shall not leave the scene of their holiday less beautiful than they found it. How these things are to be taught is one of the mysteries upon which only fools and msthetes dare to dogmatise. Bat, dimly and 'vaguely, all of us feel that the sense of the beautiful comes through beautiful associations, as gentle manners are learned by intercourse with the gentle. The costume of the people leaves such to be desired, and though both on Kew Green and among the brilliant parterres of Kew Gardens the holiday crowd looked well from a distance, the same could not be said of the groups of twos and threes seen strolling among the trees of the pleasure-grounds. The white or light-coloured blouse that almost every woman or girl wears at the present day (regard- less of the fact that only good shoulders, a trim waist; and a certain natural grace of carriage can make it a tolerable garment from the point of view of beauty) robs the figure of the one grace of slim height that distance otherwise lends to every woman seen as a far-off objects and reduces people who, clad in continuous garments of one colour or mixture of colours, might have looked a little way off like the sylphs and wood-nymphs appropriate to the place, into shapeless patches upon the landscape. But perhaps the thing to be done before the task of reforming the people's dress is undertaken, is to help the people themselves to become, if not beautiful, at. least comely. And in this direction good work is already being done by the increase of public baths and the popularisation of cricket, football, and gymnastic exercises. The freer gait and easier manner that come with better physical development are- already noticeable among the working lads of the generation that is growing up, and as there are many who hold that in the- matter of beauty it is the male sex that shows the way, we may be nearer than some of us think to the day when Bank Holidays will be spectacles altogether agreeable to behold; when 'Arry and 'Arriet will do their courting gracefully ; when the commonest young man will have too much respect for the green sward on which he disports himself to cover it with broken ginger-beer bottles; and lowly-born girls—realising the gospel Mr. Ruskin has preached to them, that they are all princesses became they are, by right of their sex, washer- women and housemaids, whose prerogative it is to "set dis- ordered things in orderly array "—will royally gather up fragments of paper and orange-peel, and scrupulously bestow them in baskets, rather than outrage the poetry of Kew Gardens. And then doubtless the ideal costume for men and women will develop itself and surprise us all by its simplicity even more than by its beauty. But in the meantime it must be granted that when the sun shines as it shone last Monday,. there is already a fair amount of beauty to be seen, by those who have eyes to see it, in the actual holiday-making of the ill-dressed artisans of our own imperfect day.
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