UTILITY AND NATURAL BEAUTY.
IT is asserted that early application will be made to the proper authorities for power to construct a light railway across Exmoor. The alleged reason for so utterly unreasonable a proposal is that the growing populations of the South Wales industrial district may enjoy easy facilities for a day's cheap trip, and may see some of the most interesting country scenes in rural England. This, of course, can be the sole ground for advocating such a project, for Exmoor contains no mineral or other products for which the light railway would provide a cheap and rapid means of transit. There is no commercial ground for the project, although, generally speaking, the one ground for the making of light railways is a commercial or economic ground, viz., the better provision of a market for farmers. The numerous light railways of Germany, Italy, and Belgium are mainly, if not entirely, industrial railways ; that is to say, they feed districts in which an ordinary railway would not pay expenses, and, being connected with some important railway junction, they enable the peasantry to emerge rapidly from their ancient seclusion into the great highways of travel. For the light railway of this character, which is usually constructed along the side of a country road, and on which there are but two or three trains a day each way, there is much to be said. Indeed, it is almost an economic and social necessity of modern times. But the projected Exmoor line stands in a quite different category, and we venture to say it ought to be vigorously opposed by all who have at heart the preservation of a wild and charming piece of almost unique scenery in these crowded islands.
Those who undertake to repel the invasion of fine natural scenery by railways have always to meet a plausible but super- ficial argument. They are charged with two vices,—selfishness and sentimentalism. They are told that it is all very well for gentlemen of leisure who can travel where they like and take their own time over it, to oppose railways which convey poorer people to beautiful or interesting scenery. Such action, they say, argues selfishness on the part of the leisured class, who want to keep for their own exclusive enjoyment all the fine bits of scenery, while the masses are driven to crowded seaside places, where the din of minstrels and cabdrivers and other enemies of quiet prevents anything like an enjoyment of Nature. Quiet spots of rare beauty for the rich and educated, crowded beaches for the poor,—such, it is alleged, is the inevitable outcome of the selfish conduct of those who oppose the perpetual intrusion of railways into wild spots like Exmoor, or scenes where natural beauty blends with historic or spiritual associations, as the Lake District. The charge of sentimentalism is also brought. It is denied that a passing train is a blot on the landscape, it is alleged that the attempt to keep a spot free from the too frequent beat of the human footstep is but a silly manifestation of an affected Eestheticism. The writer was, not long ago, pleading for the preservation of the Jungfran from the mountain rail- way which is to climb round its sides to the summit, when he was told that his attitude was thoroughly immoral, that others had as good a claim to see all that was to be seen on or from the Jungfran as he had, and that the more mountain railri-ays were built, the more chance there
would be for the people everywhere to have their minds elevated by the sublimest natural beauty. It need scarcely be said that this same argument was urged some years ago in the House of Commons when it was proposed to build a railway from Windermere to Keswick which would have enabled trippers to leave their empty bottles and greasy newspapers within a few yards of the grave of Wordsworth.
If we look into the question, however, we shall find that the selfishness and sentimentalism are altogether on the other side. We do not wish to be mistaken, and therefore we say at once that we are in favour of the most complete facilities being given to all to approach to the borders of any scene of rare beauty. Railways skirt the glorious lakes of Lucerne and Geneva, Como and Lugano, they convey rich and poor alike to Windermere and Pooley's Bridge, they take one to the edges of the Black Forest and the Vosges. We would have them stop just there, and we can show that this limit is not arbitrary, and that it is devised for the good of all. For the manifest question arises, what is it that prompts one to visit Exmoor, or the remote Highlands, or the Jung- frau, or the Norwegian fords? And the obvious answer is that the motive is to escape from the vulgar, commonplace, tedious routine of daily life into a different world, the world of purely natural forces, of rarer animal and plant life, the world of wildness, of torrents and avalanches, of unsullied snow, of glowing sunsets, of primmval forests, of the hush and mystic loveliness of Nature. We do not want to carry the Strand with us to Grasmere, we want rather to forget for the time that such a thoroughfare exists. Is this sentimentalism ? Rather is it an irresistible prompting of the nature within us to escape from a deadly thraldom which, if unrelieved, vulgarises and oppresses the mind. In all great civilisations this feeling has existed. Horace left the scorching and crowded streets of ancient Rome for his farm in the Sabine Mountains, and he and other Roman writers have drawn for us vivid pictures of the summer life of the Roman people on mountain or by seashore. But of what use is it to travel to either sea or mountain, meadows or woodland scenes, if when we arrive there we find the same conditions of life which we left behind P It is not enough that we shall escape at intervals from the streets into Nature ; but it must be genuine Nature, it must yield us that peculiar satisfaction which we cannot derive from places that have been plentifully sprinkled over with cafes and tea-gardens. Now, so far from occupying a selfish position, we claim this right to be in touch with the restorative power of natural beauty for all who can appreciate it, whether rich or poor, and we feel morally certain that the poor man who is haunted, as was Words- worth, by the mountain torrent, or who lives to study the habits and varied plumage of moths on a wild moorland, will respond to our demand that such scenes shall not be invaded by the "resources of civilisation" to any greater degree than is necessary for the comfort and safety of the traveller. It is those who would convert every wild spot in Great Britain into a sort of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday who are rightly to be charged with selfishness. They would grasp at a temporary pleasure and yield up a permanent good. We, on the contrary, regard the duty of the present genera- tion in this matter as that of a trustee of a great estate, the finest features in which he is to preserve intact for the pleasure and wellbeing of future generations.
Whatever may be said of the relative merits and demerits of town and country life, it is certain that continuous life in large towns produces two very evil results : it tends to vulgarise the mass of people, and it tends to divorce them from Nature. The dweller in the large town is sharp and often cunning, quick of speech and quick of thought within a narrow range, and he looks down on the slow-moving and slow-speaking countryman who spends his life in the fields. But there is, as the Lake poets have shown us, a dignity of character in the country worker but rarely found in the quick, busy denizen of streets, and it is on character that a nation must ultimately depend. If one steps into a a group of labourers in a village inn, one finds often amazing ignorance, but it is very rarely that one finds the peculiar quality which we call vulgarity. On the other hand, vulgarity is the leading note of an analogous throng in a London public-house. So, again, while the Londoner will, as Johnson said of Gold- smith, hardly know a goose from a swan, the most
ignorant country lout will possess a store of natural knowledge, and a rapport with varied forms of life of no little value. The modern world is spacious, and all kinds of human activity are needed in it. But assuredly, if we have to choose, it is far better that a growing youth should be versed in woodland lore, that he should be familiar with wild birds, than that he should merely be able to mechanically wait on an automatic machine which turns out with grinding monotony the heads of pins. There is not only more charac- ter, there is really more intellect involved in the pursuit of the former than in that of the latter, and there is a breezy healthfulness the loss of which to a nation can scarcely be compensated for.
We may have wandered apparently from the subject of the Exmoor light railway, but our object has been to concentrate attention on the absolute need for intercourse with wild Nature as a corrective to our crowded civilised life. This corrective is needful for all classes, and our wish is that it should be available for all, and that the cheap trip for multi- tudes packed in a train should not be taken for that which it is not and never can be,—an introduction to natural beauty of the less ordinary character. The rich man to-day can go where he will; if Exmoor is destroyed for him as a scene of wild life, he can easily betake himself to the Rockies, or to Norway, or the Caucasus, or the Himalayas. But the poor man can rarely travel beyond the seas which sweep his island shores. The more need is there that every scene of remark- able beauty or unique interest within this island should be preserved in as wild a state as may be. We shall have made a poor bargain if we gain half the world and lose our own country and our own souls; for the soul that is vulgarised, that is dead to the solemn beauty of the forest, or the purple solitudes of the moorland, or the thunder of the breakers on the lonely surf, is in a fair way to be lost. As to how far it may be needful to prevent by law natural beauty from being ruined it is difficult to say. It may not be needful to create State preserves, but it will, it seems to us, be necessary to earmark certain districts, and to say to industrialism and to railway promoters, "Thus far, but no further." With such State action, if it be necessary, all right-minded landowners will co-operate ; and we believe and hope that a growing section of the public will see that no more short-sighted policy could be permitted than to allow a few present gains to shut our eyes to large, permanent, and irremediable losses.
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