benevolent Bore. There was a very good and worthy old gentleman who used
to pay me frequent visits, the reason of which I did not discover till
many years later; on several occasions he brought with him a written
list of questions to be put to me, twelve or more perhaps in number, the
only one of which I still remember was the not very thrilling inquiry:
“Now, Sir, do you read the _Echo_?” In particular he pressed on my
attention, as demanding most earnest study, a book called _The Alpha_,
written by a friend of his, and differing, as he explained to me, from
all other printed works in this--that whereas _they_ expressed merely
the opinions of their respective writers, _The Alpha_ conveyed the
actual and absolute truth. In my liking and respect for a sincere friend
of our cause, I not only replied as well as I could to his string of
questions, but even made an attempt to read _The Alpha_ itself: here,
however (as with _The Works of Henry Heavisides_ mentioned in a previous
chapter), I failed so utterly that all I could do was to agree with the
donor of the book that it was certainly unique. This was too ambiguous
to satisfy him; he was disappointed in me, and from that time his visits
were fewer, till they altogether ceased: thus _The Alpha_ became in a
manner the Omega or the end of our intercourse. After his death I learnt
that he had left money to found a Society; and then only did I
comprehend why he had “sampled” the Humanitarian League with such
assiduous care. Without knowing it, we had been weighed in the balance
and found wanting: we were not capable of so great and sacred a trust.
Sometimes the visitation came from oversea; in one case we unwittingly
brought it on ourselves, by sending to the Madrid papers an account of a
scandalous scene that had taken place with the Royal Buckhounds, our
object being to show that British deer-hunting and Spanish bull-baiting
came of the same stock. We did not know with what zest the Spanish
papers had taken to the subject, till one day there arrived in Chancery
Lane an infuriated American, who told us that his work in the Canary
Islands had been blasted and ruined by our action. For years, he said,
he had preached kindness to animals, making England his exemplar, and
now at one fell swoop all his labours had been demolished, for the story
of the British stag-bait had gone like wild-fire through the Spanish
papers, and thence to the Canaries. We expressed our sincere regret to
him for this mishap, but tried to make him see that it was no fault of
ours if he had based his propaganda on a false principle, viz. the
superiority of Anglo-Saxon ethics, instead of on the universal
obligation of humaneness. It was useless. He consumed much time in
excited talk, and went away unappeased. This incident should be classed,
I feel, not with our diversions, but with our tribulations; but having
no chapter on the latter theme, I must let it remain where it stands.
But here some of my readers may be wondering why the office of the
Humanitarian League should have been so open to attack: they imagine it
perhaps as a luxurious suite of apartments, one within the other, with a
hall-porter in the outer premises, skilled in the art of the sending the
undesirable visitor into space. In reality, the circumstances of the
League were very humble, and its housing was in accord with its income;
some of our friends, in fact, used to be pleased to chaff us by quoting
that well-known verse in Lowell’s stanzas to Lloyd Garrison:
In a small chamber, friendless and unseen,
Toiled o’er his types one poor unlearn’d young man;
The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean;
Yet there the freedom of a race began.
Thus it was that, with an ante-room of very diminutive size, we were
almost at the mercy of any one who opened the outer door; for though the
secretary of the League, Miss Whitaker, would rush forward most
devotedly to bear the brunt of the charge, not a few of our assailants
were through the front lines, and well in our midst, before we were
aware of it. To this I owe my not inconsiderable knowledge of the
time-devouring Bore.
Among the ex-prisoners who visited us were occasionally some very good
fellows, with a real wish to do something to improve the penal system,
which they all described as thoroughly bad; but as a rule they lacked
the power of expressing what they knew, or were hampered by some
personal ailment. There was one, a quiet civil man, who was anxious to
give a lecture before the League, and assured us that, though he was
prone to drink, he would take care that none of his lapses should
coincide with the date of his appearance on our platform. That was a
risk which we were not disposed to take; but strange to say, the very
disaster which we shunned in this case actually befell us, a year or two
afterwards, at a most respectable meeting which we organized jointly
with another Society. On the very stroke of the clock, when the audience
was all seated in expectation, and the chairman was ready to ascend the
platform, supported by the members of our Committee, the news reached us
that the lecturer himself could not be present: it was _he_ in fact, who
was having to be “supported,” in another and more literal sense.
Ex-warders did not often favour us with a visit; but one there was who
had been employed in Reading Gaol at the time when Oscar Wilde was
imprisoned there: such was his story, and I had no reason to disbelieve
it. He told me several edifying anecdotes, among them the following: It
used to be a great hardship to Wilde that the glazed window of his cell
allowed him no skyward view (one recalls his allusion, in _The Ballad
of Reading Gaol_, to “that little tent of blue, which prisoners call the
sky”); and once, when the prison chaplain was visiting him, he spoke
sorrowfully of this grievance. But the chaplain only offered him
spiritual comfort, and urged him to lift up his thoughts “to Him who is
above the sky”; whereat Wilde, suddenly losing his patience, exclaimed,
“Get out, you d----d fool!” and pushed him to the door. For this he was
reported to the Governor.
The League had not often the honour of finding itself in agreement with
the Prison Commissioners; but we did think that they were wise to
decline the too generous offer of a body calling itself the Poetry
Recital Society to read poetry to prisoners. The words, “I was in
prison, and ye came unto me,” would receive a new and fearful
significance, if a number of versifiers and reciters were to be let
loose on the helpless inmates of our gaols. It seemed barbarous on the
part of these minstrels to try to secure an audience which had no choice
in the matter, and which had not got even an open window to jump through
if the strain should have become too acute.
Of beggars and swindlers we had no lack in Chancery Lane; it suited
their purpose to regard a Humanitarian League as primarily designed for
the relief of the impecunious; its very name, they felt, could imply
nothing less. They were mostly young men who seemed to act in concert;
for they usually came, as if on circuit, at certain times of the year.
Their mentality was of a low order (or they thought that ours was), for
though they showed a certain ingenuity in collecting previous
information about the parties on whom they tried to impose, they often
presented their case so badly as to make it palpably absurd. Sometimes,
however, a really clever and humorous rogue would make his appearance.
There was one such who began a wordy statement that if I would but
grant him twenty minutes, he could convince me that he was deserving of
half a crown; but when I hinted that if the interview was going to cost
me half a crown, I would rather be spared the twenty minutes, his
solemnity fell from him like a cloud, and with a twinkling eye he said
that he would be only too pleased to cut his story as short as I liked.
When I was a master at Eton I used to subscribe to the Charity
Organization Society, and I was presented by that austere body with a
number of tickets, one of which was to be given to every beggar who
called; but the trouble was that the tramps declined to regard the
“scrap of paper” seriously, and informed us, in effect, that when they
asked for bread we were offering them a stone. It certainly did not seem
quite a human way of treating a fellow-being; unless one could hold the
comfortable belief, confidently expressed to me by one of my Eton
colleagues, a very religious man, that every mendicant one meets has had
a good chance in life, and has deliberately thrown it away. The logic of
that view was to say “no” to everybody.
I once had an opportunity of seeing the exactly opposite theory put into
practice. When I was living in Surrey, I had a visit from Prince
Kropotkin, who was looking for a house in the district, and we spent a
day in walking about on that quest. We met a troop of beggars whose
appearance was decidedly professional; and I noticed that Kropotkin at
once responded to their appeal. Later in the day we fell in with the
same party, and again, when they told their tale of woe, Kropotkin put
his hand in his pocket. At this I ventured to ask him whether he had
observed that they were the same lot; to which he replied: “Oh, yes. I
know they are probably impostors and will drink the money at the public
house; but _we_ are going back to our comfortable tea, and I cannot run
the risk of refusing help where it may possibly be needed.” If in this
matter one sympathizes with Kropotkin rather than with the Charity
Organization folk, I suppose it is on Shelley’s principle--that he would
“rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than be saved with Paley and
Malthus.”
I will conclude this chapter on our diversions with a rather diverting
passage from Mr. George Moore’s _Confessions_:
“Self, and after self, a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and
be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously
egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in
humanitarianism.... Humanitarianism is a pigsty where liars,
hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so
since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end.
Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening
clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says: ‘I don’t care how the
poor live; my only regret is that they live at all’; and he gives
the beggar a shilling.”
Many years ago, at a meeting of the Shelley Society, I had the pleasure
of a talk with Mr. George Moore; and I remember that when he asked me
what work I was doing, and I said it was mostly humanitarian, there came
over his expressive face a look of half-incredulous surprise and
disgust--the sort of look a bishop might give to one who coolly remarked
that he had just committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. I was rather
puzzled at the moment; and it was not till long after, when I read Mr.
Moore’s _Confessions_, that I realized of what crimes I had convicted
myself in his eyes by my too careless avowal. But as for “the blithe
modern pagan,” I suspect he would be a little less blithe if his wish
were fulfilled, and the poor did not live at all; for how then would he
obtain his evening clothes and his white tie? He would have to live
entirely, one fears, upon his “facile philosophy,” as snails were once
reputed to subsist on their own succulence.
XIII
HOOF-MARKS OF THE VANDAL
The barbarian gives to the earth he lives on an aspect of rough
brutality.--ELISÉE RECLUS.
Humanitarianism is not merely an expression of sympathy with pain: it is
a protest against all tyranny and desecration, whether such wrong be
done by the infliction of suffering on sentient beings, or by the
Vandalism which can ruthlessly destroy the natural grace of the earth.
It is in man’s dealings with the mountains, where, owing to the
untameable wildness of the scenery, any injury is certain to be
irreparable, that the marks of the modern Vandal are most clearly seen.
It so happens that as I have known the mountains of Carnarvonshire and
Cumberland rather intimately for many years, the process of spoliation
which, as Elisée Reclus has remarked, is a characteristic of barbarism,
has been there forced on my attention. It is close on half a century
since I was introduced to some of the wildest mountains of North Wales
by that muscular bishop, Dr. G. A. Selwyn, of whom I have spoken in an
earlier chapter, when, as tutor to his nephew, I was one of an episcopal
party that went on a summer holiday from Lichfield to Penmaenmawr. There
the bishop relaxed very genially from the austere dignities of his
Palace: and having procured an Ordnance map, was not only taken with a
desire to find his way across the heights to Llyn-an-Afon, a tarn which
nestles under the front of the great range of Carnedd Llewelyn, but
insisted on being accompanied by his nephew and his nephew’s tutor.
Mountaineering, as I afterwards saw, could not have been one of Dr.
Selwyn’s many accomplishments; for we had to make more than one
expedition before we set eyes on the lake, and in the course of our
first walk he slipped on a steep ridge and put his thumb out of joint,
to the secret amusement, I had reason to fear, of my pupil, who, greatly
disliking these forced marches into the wilderness, regarded the
accident as a nemesis on an uncle’s despotism. But to me the experience
of those bleak uplands was invaluable, for it was the beginning of a
love of mountains, both Cambrian and Cumbrian, which led me to return to
them again and again, until I had paid over a hundred visits to their
chief summits. Thus I could not fail to note, now in the one district,
now in the other, how the hand of the desecrator had been busy.
Recent discussions in the press on the subject of the proposed Sty Head
motor-road have been useful in two ways: first, they called forth so
strong and general an expression of opinion against that ill-advised
project, as to render its realization extremely unlikely for a long time
to come; and secondly, they drew attention to the wider and deeper
under-lying question of the preservation of British mountain scenery
against Vandalism of various kinds. The attempt on the Sty Head was in
itself a significant object-lesson in the dangers by which our mountain
“sanctuaries” are beset. A hundred and fifty years ago the poet Gray
could write thus of the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the famous Pass has
its entrance on the Borrowdale side:
“All further access is here barred to prying mortals, only there is
a little path winding over the fells, and for some weeks in the
year passable to the dalesmen; but the mountains know well that
these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their
ancient kingdom.”
If the mountains held that belief, it was _they_, not the dalesmen, who
were the innocents, for the little path has been found passable at every
season of the year; and Mr. G. D. Abraham, himself a distinguished
climber, and a native of the district, was so willing to reveal the
mountain mysteries as to plead in his book on _Motor Ways in Lakeland_
for the construction of a highroad from the very point where all farther
access used to be barred. “The quaint little old-world hamlet,” he said,
“will doubtless recover its glory of former days when the highway over
Sty Head Pass becomes an accomplished fact.”
The love of mountains, itself a growth of modern times, has in fact
brought with it a peril which did not exist before; it has opened the
gateway and pointed the path to the shrine; but where the worshipper
enters, what if the destroyer enters too? What if the pilgrim is close
followed by the prospector?
Some years ago Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., introduced an “Access to
Mountains Bill,” which while safeguarding the interests of land-owners,
would have permitted pedestrians to indulge their love of highland
scenery by making their way to the summits of uncultivated mountain or
moorland. All nature-lovers must desire that such a measure may become
law; and it might be hoped that landlords themselves would not persist
in opposing it, for consideration should show them that it is impossible
permanently to exclude the people from the hilltops of their native
land. Even now, since it is the difficult and the forbidden which
attract, there is a certain relish in the attempted ascent of those
heights which in the landlord’s sense (not the climber’s) are still
“inaccessible”--just as the cragsmen find a pleasure in striving to
surmount the obstacles of rock-face or gully. Who has not longed to
cross the lofty frontier into some deer-stalking or grouse-shooting
Thibet, where, beyond the familiar lying sign-post stating that
“trespassers will be prosecuted,” all is vagueness and mystery? What
mountain-lover has not at times sought to snatch an “access to
mountains” where access was denied?
I still recall the zest of a raid, albeit unsuccessful, on one of the
summits of the Grampians, when our small party of climbers, starting
from Aviemore, and passing the heathery shores of Loch-an-Eilan, fell in
near “the Argyle Stone” with a number of deer-stalkers, who groaned
aloud in their fury when they heard by what route we had ascended, and
insisted on our going down to Kincraig. We had spoiled their day’s
sport, they told us; and we, while regretting to have done so, could not
refrain from saying that they had equally spoiled ours. We were
consoled, however, in some measure, during that inglorious descent, by
the sight of an osprey, or fishing-eagle, hovering over the river Spey:
doubtless the bird was one of a pair that for years haunted
Loch-an-Eilan, until the cursed cupidity of egg-collectors drove them
from almost their last breeding-place.
One of the most inaccessible heights in England at the present day is
Kinderscout, the “Peak” of Derbyshire, a triangular plateau of heathery
moorland, with rocky “edges” broken into fantastic turrets and
“castles.” Here only do the Derbyshire hills show some true mountain
characteristics; and the central position of the “Peak,” which is about
twenty miles equidistant from Sheffield, Manchester, and Huddersfield,
would seem to mark it as a unique playground for the dwellers in our
great manufacturing towns. In reality, it is a _terra incognita_ to all
but a very few, a place not for workers to find health in, but for
sportsmen to shoot grouse; and there is no spot in England which is
guarded against intruders with more jealous care. I speak advisedly, for
I once tried, with some friends, to “rush” the summit-ridge from the
public path which crosses its western shoulders, only to be overtaken
and turned back by some skilfully posted gamekeeper.[36] The loss to the
public of a right of way over these moors, as over many similar places,
is deplorable; and here, as elsewhere, the compromise that has been
arrived at has been greatly to the landlord’s advantage, for while the
grouse-shooter excludes the public from a vast area of moorland, the
wayfarer finds himself limited to the narrowest of roundabout routes,
and is insulted, as at Ashop Head, by a perfect plague of notice-boards
threatening all the imaginary pains and penalties of the law for any
divergence on to the hillside. Certainly an Access to Mountains Bill is
urgently required.
But there is one thing which is even worse than too little access to
mountains, and that is the concession of too much. It were heartily to
be wished that such districts as those of the Lakes, Snowdonia, and
others which might be named, had long ago been made inaccessible, in
this sense, to the railway-lord, the company-promoter, and all the other
Vandals who for commercial purposes would destroy the sanctitude of the
hills. We have, in fact, to consider what _sort_ of access we propose,
for just as there is all the difference in the world between the
admission of the public to see a grand piece of statuary, and the
admission of the man who has a design to chip the statue’s nose, so we
have to distinguish between those who come to the mountains to speculate
on the beauties of Nature and those who come there to speculate in a
baser sense. Access to mountains is in itself most desirable, but what
if we end by having no mountains to approach? In this respect the Bill
might be strengthened, by making it withhold from the Vandal the access
which it would bestow on the mountaineer.
Already much that was of inestimable value has been lost. The Lake
District has in this respect been more fortunate than some other
localities, because, owing to the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake
poets, there is a considerable public opinion opposed to any act of
desecration. For this we have to thank, in the first place, the great
name of Wordsworth, and, next, the faithful band of defenders which has
stood between the enterprising contractor and his prey, as in the case
of the once threatened railway to Ambleside and Grasmere. But even in
Lakeland no little damage has been done, as by the mining which has
ruined the scenery of Coniston, and by the permission granted to
Manchester to turn the once sylvan and secluded Thirlmere into a
suburban tank--Thirlmere first, and now the ruin of Haweswater is to
follow.
Mention has been made in an earlier part of this book of a visit which I
paid to Coniston in the winter of 1878-79. It so happened that a spell
of severe frost and cloudless skies had then turned the Lakeland
mountains into a strange realm of enchantment, the rocks being
fantastically coated with fronds and feathers of snow, and the streams
and waterfalls frozen into glittering masses of ice. I was the only
visitor in the place (it was before Mr. Harrison Riley’s arrival), and
for several days I had been scrambling over the range of the Old Man
mountain without meeting a human being, when one afternoon, on the shore
of Levers Water, a solitary figure came suddenly round a buttress of the
hill and stalked silently past me as if wrapped in thought. I knew at
once that it was Ruskin, for what other inhabitant of Coniston would be
on the fells at such a season?
A few days later, when I went to Brantwood with Harrison Riley, as I
have described, Ruskin talked a good deal of his favourite mountain
haunts, as he showed us his wild strawberry beds, and terraces on the
hillside made like Swiss roads; also a small beck running through his
grounds to the lake, which he said was never dry, and was as precious to
him as a stream of pure gold. The Lake scenery, he said, almost
compensated him for the loss of Switzerland, which he could not hope to
see again; his feeling for it was one less of affection than of
“veneration.” But the sunsets had been a disappointment to him, for the
sky above the Old Man was often sullen and overclouded, and this he
attributed to the poisonous influence of the copper mines.
At present the chief danger to the quietude and beauty of the Lake
district seems to be the motor-craze, especially that form of it which
has been called “the fascinating sport of hill-hunting,” a game which
has turned the Kirkstone Pass into a place of terror, where noisy
machines pant and snort up one side and scorch furiously down the other,
and which is now craving new heights to conquer. If not on the Sty Head,
why not make a motor-way of the old track from Langdale to Eskdale over
the passes of Wrynose and Hardknott? Such was the “compromise” which
some mountain-lovers unwisely suggested, forgetting, first, that even
this surrender, though less deadly than that of the Sty Head, would
involve the destruction of a wild and primitive tract, and secondly
that, as there is no finality in such dealings, it would only whet the
motorists’ appetite for more. It is generally overlooked, too, though
the point is a very important one, that the invaders have already got
much more than their due share of the district; for the making of many
of the roads now in existence would have been strongly opposed years
ago, if it had been possible to foresee the riotous use to which they
would be put.
But it is when we turn to the mountains of Snowdonia that we see what
inexcusable injury has been done by the rapacity of private enterprise,
connived at by the indifference of the public. It is a somewhat strange
fact that, while there is an English branch of the League for the
Preservation of Swiss Scenery, no organized attempt is made to preserve
our own mountain scenery, not from desecration merely, but from
destruction.[37]
Take, for example, the case of the River Glaslyn, which flows from the
heart of Snowdon through Cwm Dyli and Nant Gwynant, till it finds its
way by the Pass of Aberglaslyn to the sea. Visitors are often invited to
admire the “power works,” erected some years ago at the head of Nant
Gwynant, and other signs of enterprise; but from the nature-lover’s
point of view there is a different tale to tell. The once shapely peak
of Snowdon has been blunted into a formless cone by the Summit Hotel,
which has since added to its premises a battlemented wall built of red
brick; both Glaslyn and Llyn Llydaw, two tarns of flawless natural
beauty, have long been befouled with copper mines; and more recently the
glorious waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm
Dyli to Nant Gwynant, has been replaced by a line of hideous metal
pipes, by which the whole hillside is scarred. As for the far-famed Pass
of Aberglaslyn, defaced as it is by railway works and tunnellings,
remorselessly begun and then temporarily abandoned, its state can only
be described as one of stagnant devastation.