Pleiades
On the
Spending of Holidays
I DEARLY hope that the disquisition which I am beginning will not turn out, when it reaches its end, to have been written by " a superior person." It is the last thing in the world that anybody in his senses would like to be, or even to be thought ; but it is an impression which may very easily be given by one who sits down to reflect, on a quiet misty morning, about the ways and the goings-on of his fellow holiday-makers. The place in which we are staying is one of the Western Isles—mountainous ; indented everywhere by lochs ; looking, on the one side, towards the tumultuous mainland of Scotland, and on the other, across an intervening tract of sea, towards the outer Ilebrides. Our inn, which is full of guests, lies at the head of a little loch, immediately under the shadow of towering black mountains, built of gabbro and basalt (Nature's most formidable and frowning stuff), and rising in a chain to heights of over 3,000 feet. As you stand below, you see a dark knife- edge against the sky ; the edge is jagged and serrated, like a sword-blade that has done long service in hacking casque and harness ; under the edge lie deep black gorges, which the sun seldom visits, and where the snows of yesteryear are still lying in cleft and corrie ; and among the gorges you may generally see the white mists silently swirling in noiseless eddies. Streams tumble down the curries and through the moorland beneath, cutting deep gorges as they flow ; now and again, just beneath a waterfall, you find a pellucid deep pool, shining green over the boulders and pebbles of its bed, with rowans and ferns and foxgloves growing up its precipitous banks. It is all a paradise for the mountain- walker, a paradise in which he may tramp and scramble for hours, until the time comes for the tingling and invigorating bath in the mountain-stream, and after that the comfort of a meal, and after that, again, the fragrant happiness of a pipe and the reminiscent upward glance towards the summits just left behind. It is one of the purest joys in life ; and it is in such places, and among such pursuits, that the rare flower of happiness grows.
* * * * ** To-day there are few walkers among the hills. You may meet a couple of other walkers in the day ; you may spend a whole day and see nobody. It is true that the schools have not yet " scaled," and the young people are still sitting at their desks, following their lessons or (worse still) doing their examination papers. Perhaps the mountains will be more populous in a month's time, when the young have come into their inheritance. But there seems to have been a change of fashion which has affected almost everybody, the young as well as the old and the middle-aged. " Twenty years ago," said a fellow guest the other day, " the inn was the resort of mountain-loving folk, who stayed for a whole fortnight, and tramped all the country round, and drew into their minds the feeling of the island." It seems very different to-day. There are two sorts of persons whom you now find in the inn. One is the fisherman, who haunts the lochs and streams with rod and fly. The fisherman, per se, is nothing new : he is as old as Izaak Walton and John Cotton : indeed, he is as old as the hills and the beginnings of time. But he comes to-day with a large paraphernalia : a majestic car bears him to and from his fishing ; and he seems to have little time for any great communion with nature. The other and typical sort of person is the motorist, who appears in his car, stays a night or two, and then, like the Bedouin, drives away in the early morning to some fresh inn and sonic new pasture. Even the fisherman seems a nomad, moving restlessly to new waters ; and the motorist is a nomad pure and simple. The population of our inn is constantly changing : at the end of ten days we arc the oldest inhabitants, incalculably old ; and we begin to say to ourselves :
Lusisti eatis, edisti satin, atque ; Tempus Ware tibi est.
* * * * * * * There are probably deep delights in fishing. The venerable Paley was a fisherman ; and he spent whole days by Cumber- land streams without ever catching a single fish. His friends said that his fishing was a pretence to cover his thinking ; and
perhaps the quiet of the streams which he fished passed into his writings, and gave to his Natural Theology, and his Prin- ciples of Moral and Political Philosophy, their deep and judicious wisdom. But the fishermen of our days are not fishermen of Paley's stamp. The Industrial Revolution has taken place since Paley sat placidly besides the waters of the Eden or the Wear ; Science has celebrated her tremendous triumphs ; and fishing, even by the waters of moorland lochs and mountain streams, has become an industry and a science. Men seem to fish on statistical principles ; they keep books of records as well as of flies ; it is a question of how many fish a day, and of average size, and, above all, of maximum weight. But perhaps fishermen were always " statisticians " (a good word, which begs all questions) ; and anyhow the writer, even in his palmiest days, was never a fisherman of any skill. He still remembers how he once tried to fish in a Lancashire river, tinder the tuition of a Jesuit father, and only succeeded in losing a cherished Devon minnow (or some such thing) which his tutor had lent him : he still remembers— with less shame, but without an atom of pride—how he once spent a day with two Benedictine monks, by a little tarn in Yorkshire, and netted (or otherwise caught) in the course of the day an innocent and unoffending perch. Surat yuos curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat ; for myself, I am content if a good steam-trawler catches me a breakfast herring, and I am more than content, I am even grateful, if my fellow- guests at the inn where I happen to be staying will catch me a small and succulent trout to give me a change from herrings.
Fishermen are perhaps to be pardoned ; but of the drivers of cars we may wonder, as the Middle Ages wondered about archdeacons (whom they seem to have detested), num motorista salvari poles: ? They are such restless fellows : they are here to-day and have flashed away to-morrow ; their talk is of cars, and their comparative merits—perhaps also of inns, and their comparative merits—at the most, of the " sights " they have seen, and their comparative merits. Was there ever a motorist on holiday who "drew the quiet night," or anything else that was quiet, " into his blood" ? I am inclined to think that every owner of a ear (and, by the way, I should like to make a law that no man should own a car unless he could prove to the satisfaction of a jury of twelve neighbours that he really needed one) should leave his car at home when he went on holiday. He will not tend to be so much of a flitter-mouse ; and he can settle down to the real purpose of a holiday—which is, in brief, to supple your body, by honest walking and climb- ing, so that it will carry you well and gallantly till the next holiday, and again, above and beyond that, to steep your eyes and your thoughts in new scenes and fresh beauties, so that you may enjoy, for months to come, and for your mind's perpetual invigoration, the harvest of a quiet eye " which you have reaped in your walks and your climbs.
*
All this sounds, after all, superior. But perhaps it is only a crying of " sour grapes " to the unattained and unattain- able ; and anyhow there are as many ways of spending holidays as there are persons to spend holidays. Not all of us are born to be tramps ; and men must take their pleasures according to their capacities. Still, one of the deepest of holiday-pleasures is the mere act of seeing, the use of the eyes, the gazing upon beauty until you make it permanent memory as well as immediate vision And there is no way of seeing except the way of walking and watching. Go in a car, and the beauty flashes cinematically past and is gone. Even on a bicycle you may slip too quickly by this or that : only when you are a hundred yards past do you realize what you have missed ; and then it is too late to go back. I wonder if we are all of us possessed by a passion of looking and looking until we can fix the thing seen in the memory—a sort of passion of mental photography. I know that the passion besets me ; and I am always trying to capture for ever what I see—an outline of hills, or a blaze of colour, or whatever it may be. That is why I walk : and that is why I hope the world will always be content to walk—for the sake of the
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