T HE letter from Miss Octavia Hill printed elsewhere in this
issue of the Spectator will appeal directly to a very large number of readers who have never seen Ullswater. The opportunity of purchasing and saving to the country for ever a part of the wall of mountain and fell surrounding this lovely lake, with a mile of the shore of the lake itself, and one of the finest waterfalls in the district, is not likely to recur ; while what is almost certain. to happen if it is not taken advantage of is that the land will be first cut up into building lots, and that ultimately the public will lose, section by section, such privileges as they now enjoy of access to the shores and of roaming over the hills that look down upon them. On the other hand, the purchase would secure not only a beautiful park, already adorned with trees and stocked with deer, but would form a nucleus to which other tracts of wild and beautiful land adjacent would almost certainly be added as time goes on. Epping Forest, to cite a very tame example in comparison with the Lakes, but one the proximity of which to London enhances its value ten times, is an instance ready to hand. The preservation of the Londoners' forest has led to the acquisition of two adjacent tracts, first Wanstead Park, and, later, Hainault Forest. In this country we are almost blind to the need for securing examples of fine natural scenery, and are not yet inspired by the acute and practical foresight of America, where millions of acres are preserved in the State of New York alone, and where the United States have even stretched a hand across to Canada, and made a joint purchase, not of a few hundred acres on the lakeside, but of all the archipelago of islands of the St. Lawrence.
Premising that subscriptions to aid this last proposal of the National Trust should be sent either to Miss Octavia Hill, 190 Marylebone Road, London, or to Canon Rawnsley, Crosthwaite Vicarage, Keswick, it is perhaps not amiss to say a word or two as to the way in which acquisitions of this kind benefit personally every one who pays a visit to a country neighbourhood in which such " beauty spots " are to be found. The public generally are not awake to hard facts as to what land they are free to enter, and what they may not; and if the facilities for cheap locomotion, and the taste of the masses for country excursions, are going to increase, as there is every reason to hope that they will, it will very soon be found that the ground which the nation at large is free to walk upon is very limited. Visitors of whatever class to country places have a comfortable theory that so long as they do not enter enclosures they can go where they like, especially by river- sides and on pastures, moors, and rough country,—in fact, all that is most charming and most beautiful. To this the regular urban tripper of the poorer class adds a settled con- viction, if he comes from London, that the whole of the country is one vast Battersea Park wherein to go where he pleases; and if he comes from a North Country industrial city he takes the same view, except that for Battersea Park he substitutes mentally the town moor or recreation ground.
So long as no harm was done, and the visitors were in- frequent, this view was good-naturedly acquiesced in by loca: owners, farmers, and cottagers. But lately the visitors haw increased from individuals to hundreds, not always too dis- creet in their behaviour, and there is a very general tendency to assert the rights of property in places deserving the name of "natural pictures " and elsewhere. As the law happens tc be the exact opposite of what the public take it to be, and public "rights " are usually non-existent, there is every proba- bility that the amount of beautiful ground where the public can legally walk and take its enjoyment of scenery will before long be enormously curtailed, unless indeed the education of the "tripper," using the word in no unkind sense, can be begun and completed very speedily. Brought down to " bed- rock," public rights will very often be found to be limited, in theory at least, to that of walking along the high roads, or keeping to strictly guarded footpaths of the width of the statu- tory number of feet ; while in practice elbow-room of all kinds will be greatly curtailed and confined as visitors become more numerous and residents also increase. No one going down to a fresh neighbourhood anywhere within reach of the great cities—and the Lakes are now well within reach of the whole cotton, coal, and iron districts of Lancashire, as well as of the coal towns of Cumberland—can fail to notice the importance of preserving open ground where the public have been allowed to roam in the past, though the concession was only per- missive. What is needed is that the beginning made by the National Trust shall become a part of the national conscience. It would in many cases be a greater boon for a testator to leave a hillside or a mountain or a park to hia countrymen, than to endow a College or found a library or a museum or a picture gallery.
The aesthetic value of these scenes as natural pictures of the highest merit is now keenly appreciated. Yet perhaps their comparative value, in proportion to the artistic pro- ducts of the hand and brain, are not yet fully understood, reckoned out in terms of value. There is a special and obvious reason why an effort should be made at once to preserve them when possible as part of the country's available assets of beauty. These natural pictures are highly perishable, far more so than those on canvas. If there is one fact better established than another about the beauties created by the artist's mind, and put into being by his brush or by his chisel, it is the practical indestructibility of masterpieces of art. There is a kind of semi-divinity which hedges them at almost all times and in all seasons, a senti- ment and a tradition as to their value which is almost universally known and respected, though this insensible education of centuries, so beneficent to the works of men's hands, has not yet had time to create a similar feeling in regard to the preservation of natural beauty. Through sacks and sieges, wars and conflagrations, pictures and statues as a rule survive, providing that they are among the great triumphs of the painter or the sculptor. They are taken captive, and sometimes restored to their homes. If not, they are magnificently housed and carefully protected. They may be stolen, but the thief never destroys them, and they once more make their appearance on the scene. Did a Roman Proconsul steal them, and the ship sink on her voyage, carrying the ill-gotten bronzes to the bottom, the place was marked and the knowledge of it handed down through the ages, and perhaps fifteen centuries later the objects are recovered. The care of pictures in galleries and palaces has been in the hands of capable experts ever since the Renais- sance, and these pictures are rarely injured. Their value grows with time, and with it the solicitude bestowed upon the maintenance of the colours and their fabric. It is a pretty safe prophecy that five centuries hence the paint of the Ansidei Madonna will be as fresh as it is to-day, and that the eyes of the children of Greuze will be as blue as when they first smiled upon the painter in his studio.
But time and man both set their hand against the natural pictures. The rate of their destruction or decay increases with every year ; but the acceleration of the danger during the last ten years, and the menace for the future, have increased the risk so greatly that no time ought to be wasted in setting out clearly what the next generation must expect to deplore. The " filling up " of England is not pro- ceeding from one centre alone,—i.e., Lyndon. It is going on from fifty industrial centres besides. The " overspill " tends
to destroy first the surroundings of any natural picture, and then the picture itself. You cannot build a ten-foot wall round the centre of the view from Richmond Hill, and request people not to mind any disfigurements outside it; and you cannot monopolise a length of a Scotch river with whisky distilleries and workmen's cottages without injuring the beauty of the woods and rocks of the mountains above. In other words, what is happening almost everywhere in the case of our natural pictures is that first the " gallery'.' .in which they are preserved is destroyed, and then the contents. To allow the latter to be injured or to perish is to take a great liberty with the next generation, if not with the present one. The assumption that popular feeling among the latter does not value natural beauty remains to be proved. It would probably be found that there is a very strong sentiment indeed in favour of taking measures for their protection, and that this • feeling is quite as strong among the poorer classes as it is among the richer. It is not the working men who are the vandals. In nearly every instance the damage done to natural pictures is by the pro- pertied class, acting from commercial reasons. "Indus- trialism," or building speculations, or the construction of " tripper " railways or hideous bridges, or similar enterprises which will before long be scheduled as among the standing enemies of Nature's masterpieces, are not promoted by work- men. On the contrary, it is the masses who suffer most by such destruction of scenery, and of the galleries of natural ornament, small and great, where they could wander and admire, without money and-without price, and enjoy the un- bought heritage that such beauty gives to all who have eyes to see and an understanding to appeal to.
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