The Isle of Wight is at first disappointing. 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, is in evident contravention to the
natural style of the place. The place is pure picture or is nothing
at all. It is ornamental only—it exists for exclamation and the
water-colour brush. It is separated by nature from the dense railway
system of the less diminutive island, and is the corner of the world
where a good carriage-road is most in keeping. Never was a clearer
opportunity for sacrificing to prettiness; never was a better chance
for not making a railway. But now there are twenty trains a day, so
that 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
lovely 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 formed and finished watering-place, it
has been reduced to a due degree 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,
is propped up 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. Those which
ornament the successive ledges at Ventnor are for the most part small
semi-detached boxes, predestined, even before they have 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 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 place of recreation is 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 look as if tied
up with ribbon “to match.” 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, so that a wide
natural terrace, all over-tangled with wild shrubs and flowers, hangs
there in mid-air, halfway above salt water. 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
that separate Ventnor from Shanklin. Of a lovely afternoon in April
these four or five miles are an admirable walk.
[Illustration: SHANKLIN]
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.