TRAVELLERS' JOY
Tax Englishman knows more than anyone else in Europe about the pleasure of travel. Not very many English- men spend a holiday in their own homes for choice. One might almost say that none dO7-unless they have two homes. They always want to " book through " to somewhere, far or near, according to their means.- All the facilities for travel are on sale in London, all risks and difficulties and uncertainties have been minimized. You still pay for what you get in time and money, but the prise has been lowered—at any rate, where time is concerned. Pe-op-le who can afford but a short holiday can get a long way, and still they crave to get further and further. To-day, while all classes make sacrifices for leisure, rest is a commodity. biCh has gone down in value. Up till late middle age people are " not taking any." Even the old are affected by the new fashion, and Christmas no less than the first of August finds the well-off world upon the move. Those who can afford it travel alone, with their families or with a chosen companion. Privacy in pleasure is, however, a luxury, and humbler,PeOple go in little bands accompanied by paid officials, who point out the wonders of the country as upon a blackbOard and lead their scholars to the cheapest hotels. The better to do laugh at such inexperienced holiday- makers, but their merriment is a mere outcome of pride. These eager novices are more akin to the romantic adven- turers of the past thin are the bulk of those who know their way well along the beaten tracks of Europe ; to whom Paris and the Riviera seem no further than Brighton or Penzance ; for whom Contineatal winter sports offer nothing more new and strange than London balls, who, indeed, are at home everywhere where modern comfort and English-speaking com- pany are to be found. The conducted bands, on the other hand, go full of curiosity to see a new world. That the advan- tages at their command give them but a peep-show view is not their fault.
But, after all, we are not bound to take our pleasures educa- tionally. Why should we travel to learn ? We do not think it necessary to pretend that we knock off work as early as we can on Saturdays in order to improve our minds or that we never read for sheer pastime. Most people " go away " in order to " get away," to leave their cares behind them and so into fresh playgrounds, there to enjoy themselves according to their bent.
There is perhaps something a little sad in the fact that we tend nowadays to seek distraction so deliberately, and that there is so much less visiting and staying with friends and relations than there used to be. Years ago London children and even their grown-up brothers and sisters looked forward to a few weeks of life with grandparents in the country as in itself and apart from any " set pieces " of entertainment a delight. Older men and women kept their friendships in repair by " autumn visits," when walking and talking counted much higher among the good things of life than they do now. Many reasons coincided to bring about a change. Country homes small and great are being given up. Their owners can no longer afford to live in them, much less entertain in them. Motor-cars have reduced distance and made it easy for friends to meet without staying for more at most than a night or two. The habit of sitting still at home was killed by the War, and though. most_ of us have a smaller income than in the past, very many of us have more ready money at our disposal—a compul- sory shrinkage in regular expenditure very drastically carried Out has left us with a considerable margin. Our children demand variety, and we who cannot give them what we had at their ages arc glad to give them what we can. Again, the anxieties of the marriage market are ever before the parent of girls, and these are five times greater than they were. English fathers and mothers have always considered that the proper way to promote matrimony was by organized amuse- ments, dancing and games, whether at home or abroad. Only lately have they begun to wonder whether the money would not be better spent upon marriage portions; and so far they have wondered to no purpose. Winter sports offer health and happiness and a gay irresponsible sense of being " on the wing " as well as pleasant opportunities for the meeting of the sexes whose similar education fits them better and better for playing together. In these merry " resorts " amusements of a rather less violent character are offered also to older people who are, so to speak, younger than they used to be and less content to look on. Even the men and women, young and old, whom their friends call thinking people " and their enemies." high brows " now travel for pure pleasure and not for " improvement." Extremes meet. The great scientific travellers and the men and women who scrape together £10 to cross France in a crowd are the only people who now do that. The Victorian longing to study " conditions and compare the amenities and miseries of life at home and abroad is becoming uncommon. Philanthropy in some form or other coloured the whole of life, but since pity has entered into polities the philanthropic passion and its pale reflections in the fashion arc things of the past. If we go to Sweden, as an increasing. number of people do, we go rather to see how the architectural taste of the Sweden of to-day, and a wonder- fully high power of municipal " planning," more and more inform the civic life of that progressive land, or to compare the lightheartedness of the Swede with the pensive sedateness of his Norwegian neighbour and to wonder why long contact between the two has caused so small an interchange of moods. We want only to see as children want to see, when they ask to be held up to look over a wall. Some children look for the familiar, recognize it, and arc satisfied ; others look for something to play with ; others fix grave and fascinated eyes upon the far distance. In the same way grown-up travellers travelling for mere recreation resolve themselves into three classes. The thoughtful belong to the third, and they strain their eyes to see into the past or the future. The past lies the nearest, a little off the beaten track and we are there in Spain or Central Europe ; a three weeks' holiday will take us into another period and give us not only a change of air, but a change of time. If they are willing for a little discomfort and a very little risk they can see the people whose hearts Cervantes has shown them. All thinking sightseers have already been to Spain in their dreams—have perhaps even gone through the length and breadth of the land, realized the " colour question " of the past, seen as in a mirror Algiers, that " ship in full sail " where Cervantes was so long imprisoned, and realized why this stupendously great man of letters, yet " rather versed in sorrow than in poetry," was always more than half a soldier, always, as he said of himself on his death-bed,with " one foot in the stirrup." But three weeks is a short time in which to catch even a glimpse of what is gone. The traveller should spend it in real contemplation of the past, not standing in the present and throwing stones at the memory of inquisitors or enjoying the sickening thrills of a bull fight. In Central Europe getting away from to-day is perhaps easier. The constant sense of insecurity, the light- hearted acceptance of death and of the excitements of its proximity as essential parts of the drama of life, without which it would be less worth living, force the traveller to visualize an earlier civilization.
But for many minds the future means far more than the past. How many of us to-day hear Canada or South Africa calling and half hope, half fear, that our children as they grow up will answer and go to her. South Africa has perhaps the most health-giving climate in the world, but Canada more than any other of the Dominions is like the wise man of-scripture bringing out of her treasure things old and-new. In Canada, too, we see what we can recognize, and feel as in no other strange place that we are not altogether away from home.
Home ! When all temptations to go elsewhere have been offered many people will be unable to leave England. There is much to he said 'for such resorts a:s' Bath and Torquay. When one stands in h modern Renaissance loggia round the ancient Roman bath and glances up at the Gothic towers and pinnacles of Bath Abbey church, one seems to be in an architectural fantasy where all the styles meet and blend. It is one of the many singular and agreeable experiences that confront the leisured visitor to Bath. We think of Bath as of the eighteenth century, the age of Queen Anne and Pope, of Chatham and Goldsmith, of Gainsborough and Burke. The city is theirs in its stately crescents and squares and pi:Lille gardens, over which presides the benevolent shade of Beau Nash. But Bath is something more than a Georgian city. Pepys knew it before the Beau was born ; he found the con- versation good, and the music " extraordinary good," as it still is, and he stayed more than two hours in the hot water. And more than a thousand years before Pepys, Roman settlers and Roman Britons were flocking to take the waters at Aquae Solis, whose forum stood where is now the Abbey Churchyard. Nor did Bath cease to adorn herself in new modes for new generations when the nineteenth century came in. Miss Austen's Bath, in the Napoleonic period, and Dickens's Bath of the Reform Bill period, so humorously sketched in the Pickwick Papers, were both thriving and progressive, and the old city can boast of attractive modem buildings of more recent date, with all the conveniences of the twentieth century. That is one reason why Bath is now more popular than ever as a winter resort. She not only enshrines the memories of the past, but also offers the comforts and gaieties of the present. Seen as a whole from Beechen Cliff, with the Abbey standing out clear against the Downs beyond, Bath is assuredly one of our forest cities ; to study her in detail is a long and fascinating task. Landor, who was no mean judge, thought the Circus the most perfect thing he had seen, and the late W. D. Howells echoed his praises of the Woods, father and son, who built it. But it seems unfair to mention the Circus and not to name the Crescent and Pulteney Bridge and other familiar and stately features of Bath. Her true lovers never particularize.
It is pleasant in these grey winter days to come upon Macaulay's description of Torquay. It is, he says in his History, " a great watering place, to which strangers are attracted from the most remote parts of our island by the Italian softness of the air ; for in that climate the myrtle flourishes unsheltered ; and even the winter is milder than the Northumbrian April." The passage occurs in the account of the landing of Dutch William in Torbay, as if to accentuate the author's regret that his hero did not see this winter resort ! For Torquay is a modern creation ! Neolithic man Imew the natural charms of the site ; he left his flint weapons, and the bones of the deer that he brought down, in Kent's Cavern, on the way to Babbacombe, and Torquay now exhibits these, relies of her earliest visitors. But ages elapsed ere an ex- governor of Madras, who had shaken the pagoda-tree " to some purpose, bought the land, built himself a house and laid out a new town so that others might share the charms of wintering in this sheltered bay. Sir Robert Palk and his son Sir Lawrence Palk, who founded Torquay in the reign of George the Third, deserve to be remembered for their good taste in town-planning Even the casual visitor must be im- pressed with the public gardens, full of flowering shrubs, that line the shore beside the harbour. And the white streets, rising terrace above terrace, the gay villas peeping -from the midst of shrubberies of flower-beds, which were new in Macaulay's day, are now weathered so that they accord with the cliffs on and amid which they are set. Torquay, seen from the sea or from the pier-head, is exquisite and memorable. The builder for once at least has not defaced nature but. lent it variety and human interest. To stroll along the Rock Walk, or in the gardens contents many an invalid. But it should be added that Torquay, unlike many other winter resorts, is most fortunate in its surroundings. The most energetic of visitors will not easily exhaust the many walks in this delightful corner of Devon, with its old castles and manor. houses and fishing towns, and Dartmoor at no ureat distancel
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