MAY.

I was travelling some weeks ago by a railway line alongside of which ran a quickset hedge. It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to the base of embankments, looped itself around stations, flickered on the skyline above us, raced us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again on their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, ran round and waited for us as we emerged. Its importunity drove me to the other side of the carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving similarly. Now I can understand that a railway company has excellent reasons for planting quickset hedges alongside its permanent way. But their unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do we neglect the real parks of England?—parks enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here and there and in the most timid fashion. And how better could our millionaires use their wealth (since they are always confiding to us their difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?—for, as Victor Hugo said, the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library has been sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. So, you may say again, have free public gardens and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit that a fair percentage of the public avails itself of these libraries and parks; still the mass does not, and they were intended for the mass. Their attractiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The stream of public appreciation which pours through them is not fathomless; beyond a certain point it does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking slowness; and candid librarians and curators can sound its shallows accurately enough. What we want is not a garden into which folk will find their way if they have nothing better to do and can spare the time with an effort. Or, to be accurate, we do want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment; but what we want more is to catch our busy man and build a garden about him in the brief leisure which, without seeking it, he is forced to take.

Where are these gardens? Why, beside and along our railway lines. These are the great public parks of England; and through them travels daily a vast population held in enforced idleness, seeking distraction in its morning paper. Have you ever observed how a whole carriageful of travellers on the Great Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? A garish appeal, no doubt: a few raying spokes of colour, and the vision has gone. And I forestall the question, "Is that the sort of thing you wish to see extended?—a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or of scarlet lobelias, or of bright-blue larkspurs, all the way from London to Liverpool?" I suggest nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, when they follow the valleys—as railway lines must in hilly districts—are extraordinarily beautiful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye Valley or in the Derbyshire Peak country, and even the rich levels of Somerset have a beauty of their own (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets of buttercups) which artificial planting would spoil. But—cant about Nature apart—every line has its dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need not labour this: here and there by a casual bunch of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing is proved, and has been proved again and again to me by the comments of fellow-passengers.

Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of mine, and must pause to dwell on some of its beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise it in the most modest fashion and test the appreciation of the public as we go along. Our flowers would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for the most part, native British plants, costing, say, from thirty shillings to three pounds the hundred. A few roods would do to begin with, if the spot were well chosen; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to begin modestly, for though England possesses several great artists in landscape gardening, their art has never to my knowledge been seriously applied to railway gardening, and the speed of the spectators introduces a new and highly-amusing condition, and one so singular and so important as to make this almost a separate art. At any rate, our gardeners would have to learn as they go, and if any man can be called enviable it is an artist learning to express art's eternal principles in a new medium, under new conditions.

Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not despond over ways and means. The beauty-spots of Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry of advertisement. Why should not this rivalry be pressed into the service of beautifying the railway lines along which the tourist must travel to reach them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to speak) of our temples? Would not the tourist arrive in a better temper if met on his way with silent evidence of our desire to please? And, again, is the advertising tradesman quite wise in offending so many eyes with his succession of ugly hoardings standing impertinently in green fields? Can it be that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the liver which he promises to cure? And if not, might he not call attention to his wares at least as effectively, if more summarily, by making them the excuse for a vision of delight which passengers would drop their newspapers to gaze upon? Lastly, the railway companies themselves have discovered the commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and long before their discovery (and as if by a kind of instinct they were blundering towards it) they began to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens—with what happy result all who have travelled in South Wales will remember. They should find it easy to learn that the 'development' of watering-places and holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by spending care upon their approaches.

But I come back to my imaginary millionaire—the benevolent man who only wants to be instructed how to spend his money—the 'magnificent man' of Aristotle's Ethics, nonplussed for the moment, and in despair of discovering an original way of scattering largesse for the public good. For, while anxious to further my scheme by conciliating the commercial instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in the conception of our railways as vast public parks only hindered by our sad lack of inventiveness from ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The millionaire I want is one who can rise to this conception of it, and say with Blake—

"I will not cease from mental fight,"

(Nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter)

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions. The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have more money than they know how to use.

The railway—not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor—took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking— especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays—of a passage in Izaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton:—

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time—which I therefore thought slow-paced—had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me—a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.