The Isle of Wight is disappointing at first. I wondered why it should
be, and then I found the reason in the influence of the detestable
little railway. There can be no doubt that a railway in the Isle of
Wight is a gross impertinence; it is in evident contravention to the
natural style of the place. The place is minutely, delicately
picturesque, or it is nothing at all. It is purely ornamental; it exists
for the entertainment of tourists. It is separated by nature from the
dense railway-system of the less diminutive island, and it is the corner
of the world where a good carriage-road is most in keeping. Never was
there a better place for sacrificing to prettiness; never was there a
better chance for not making, a railway. But now there are twenty trains
a day, and the prettiness is twenty times less. The island is so small
that the hideous embankments and tunnels are obtrusive; the sight of
them is as painful as it would be to see a pedlar's pack on the
shoulders of a pretty woman. This is your first impression as you travel
(naturally by the objectionable conveyance) from Ryde to Ventnor; and
the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly, and stops at half a
dozen little stations, where the groups on the platform enable you to
perceive that the population consists almost exclusively of gentlemen in
costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for attention to cravats and
trousers (an immensely large class in England), of old ladies of the
species denominated in France _rentières_, of young ladies of the
highly-educated and sketching variety, this circumstance fails to
reconcile you to the chartered cicatrix which forms your course. At
Ventnor, however, face to face with the sea, and with the blooming
shoulder of the Undercliff close behind you, you lose sight to a certain
extent of the superfluities of civilisation. Not, indeed, that Ventnor
has not been diligently civilised. It is a well-regulated little
watering-place, and it has been subjected to a due measure of
cockneyfication. But the glittering ocean remains, shimmering at moments
with blue and silver, and the large gorse-covered downs rise superbly
above it. Ventnor hangs upon the side of a steep hill, and here and
there it clings and scrambles, it is propped and terraced, like one of
the bright--faced little towns that look down upon the Mediterranean. To
add to the Italian effect, the houses are all denominated villas, though
it must be added that nothing is less like an Italian villa than an
English one. Those which ornament the successive ledges at Ventnor are
for the most part small semi-detached boxes, predestined, even before
they had fairly come into the world, to the entertainment of lodgers.
They stand in serried rows all over the place, with the finest names in
the British _Peerage_ painted upon their gate-posts. Their severe
similarity of aspect, however, is such that even the difference between
Plantagenet and Percival, between Montgomery and Montmorency, is hardly
sufficient to enlighten the puzzled visitor. An English watering-place
is much more comfortable than an American; in a Plantagenet villa the
art of receiving "summer guests" has usually been brought to a higher
perfection than in an American rural hotel. But what strikes an
American, with regard to even so charmingly-nestled a little town as
Ventnor, is that it is far less natural, less pastoral and bosky, than
his own fond image of a summer-retreat. There is too much brick and
mortar; there are too many smoking chimneys and shops and public-houses;
there are no woods nor brooks, nor lonely headlands; there is none of
the virginal stillness of Nature. Instead of these things, there is an
esplanade, mostly paved with asphalt, bordered with benches and little
shops, and provided with a German band. To be just to Ventnor, however,
I must hasten to add that once you get away from the asphalt there is a
great deal of vegetation. The little village of Bonchurch, which closely
adjoins it, is buried in the most elaborate verdure, muffled in the
smoothest lawns and the densest shrubbery. Bonchurch is simply
delicious, and indeed in a manner quite absurd. It is like a model
village in imitative substances, kept in a big glass case; the turf
might be of green velvet and the foliage of cut paper. The villagers are
all happy gentlefolk, the cottages have plate-glass windows, and the
rose-trees on their walls are tended by an under-gardener. Passing from
Ventnor through the elegant umbrage of Bonchurch, and keeping along the
coast toward Shanklin, you come to the prettiest part of the Undercliff,
or, in other words, to the prettiest place in the world. The immense
grassy cliffs which form the coast of the island make what the French
would call a "false descent" to the sea. At a certain point the descent
is broken, and a wide natural terrace, all overtangled with wild shrubs
and flowers, hangs there in mid-air, half-way above the ocean. It is
impossible to imagine anything more charming than this long, blooming
platform, protected from the north by huge green bluffs and plunging on
the other side into the murmuring tides. This delightful arrangement
constitutes for a distance of some fifteen miles the south shore of the
Isle of Wight; but the best of it, as I have said, is to be found in the
four or five miles that separate Ventnor from Shanklin. Of a lovely
afternoon in April these four or five miles are an enchanting walk.
Of course you must first catch your lovely afternoon. I caught one; in
fact, I caught two. On the second I climbed up the downs, and perceived
that it was possible to put their gorse-covered stretches to still other
than pedestrian uses--to devote them to sedentary pleasures. A long
lounge in the lee of a stone wall, the lingering, fading afternoon
light, the reddening sky, the band of blue sea above the level-topped
bunches of gorse--these things, enjoyed as an undertone to the
conversation of an amiable compatriot, seemed indeed a very sufficient
substitute for that primitive stillness of the absence of which I
ventured just now to complain.