On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (7 page)

Railways have changed the arrangement and distribution of crowds and
solitude, but have done nothing to disturb the essential contrast
between them.

The more behindhand of my friends, among whom I count the weary men
of the towns, are ceaselessly bewailing the effect of railways and
the spoiling of the country; nor do I fail, when I hear such
complaints, to point out their error, courteously to hint at their
sheep-like qualities, and with all the delicacy imaginable to let
them understand they are no better than machines repeating worn-out
formulae through the nose. The railways and those slow lumbering
things the steamboats have not spoilt our solitudes, on the contrary
they have intensified the quiet of the older haunts, they have
created new sanctuaries, and (crowning blessing) they make it easy
for us to reach our refuges.

For in the first place you will notice that new lines of travel are
like canals cut through the stagnant marsh of an old civilisation,
draining it of populace and worry, and concentrating upon themselves
the odious pressure of humanity.

You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I
belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the
wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater
pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to
find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But
the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems
of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and
drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives
for themselves.

Now take the true modern citizen, the usurer. How does the usurer
suck the extremest pleasure out of his holiday? He takes the train
preferably at a very central station near the Strand, and (if he can
choose his time) on a foggy and dirty day; he picks out an express
that will take him with the greatest speed through the Garden of Eden,
nor does he begin to feel the full savour of relaxation till a row of
abominable villas' appears on the southern slope of what were once the
downs; these villas stand like the skirmishers of a foul army deployed:
he is immediately whirled into Brighton and is at peace. There he has
his wish for three days; there he can never see anything but houses,
or, if he has to walk along the sea, he can rest his eye on herds of
unhappy people and huge advertisements, and he can hear the newspaper
boys telling lies (perhaps special lies he has paid for) at the top of
their voices; he can note as evening draws on the pleasant glare of gas
upon the street mud and there pass him the familiar surroundings of
servility, abject poverty, drunkenness, misery, and vice. He has his
music-hall on the Saturday evening with the sharp, peculiar finish of
the London accent in the patriotic song, he has the London paper on
Sunday to tell him that his nastiest little Colonial War was a crusade,
and on Monday morning he has the familiar feeling that follows his
excesses of the previous day…. Are you not glad that such men and
their lower-fellows swarm by hundreds of thousands into the "resorts"?
Do you not bless the railways that take them so quickly from one Hell
to another.

Never let me hear you say that the railways spoil a countryside;
they do, it is true, spoil this or that particular place—as, for
example, Crewe, Brighton, Stratford-on-Avon—but for this
disadvantage they give us I know not how many delights. What is more
English than the country railway station? I defy the eighteenth
century to produce anything more English, more full of home and rest
and the nature of the country, than my junction. Twenty-seven trains
a day stop at it or start from it; it serves even the expresses.
Smith's monopoly has a bookstall there; you can get cheap Kipling
and Harmsworth to any extent, and yet it is a theme for English
idylls. The one-eyed porter whom I have known from childhood; the
station-master who ranges us all in ranks, beginning with the Duke
and ending with a sad, frayed and literary man; the little chaise in
which the two old ladies from Barlton drive up to get their paper of
an evening, the servant from the inn, the newsboy whose mother keeps
a sweetshop—they are all my village friends. The glorious Sussex
accent, whose only vowel is the broad "a", grows but more rich and
emphatic from the necessity of impressing itself upon foreign
intruders. The smoke also of the train as it skirts the Downs is
part and parcel of what has become (thanks to the trains) our
encloistered country life; the smoke of the trains is a little
smudge of human activity which permits us to match our incomparable
seclusion with the hurly-burly from which we have fled. Upon my
soul, when I climb up the Beacon to read my book on the warm turf,
the sight of an engine coming through the cutting is an emphasis of
my selfish enjoyment. I say "There goes the Brighton train", but the
image of Brighton, with its Anglo-Saxons and its Vision of Empire,
does not oppress me; it is a far-off thing; its life ebbs and flows
along that belt of iron to distances that do not regard me.

Consider this also with regard to my railway: it brings me what I
want in order to be perfect in my isolation. Those books discussing
Problems: whether or not there is such an idea as right; the
inconvenience of being married; the worry of being Atheist and yet
living upon a clerical endowment,—these fine discussions come from
a library in a box by train and I can torture myself for a shilling,
whereas, before the railways, I should have had to fall back on the
Gentleman's Magazine
and the County History. In the way of
newspapers it provides me with just the companionship necessary to a
hermitage. Often and often, after getting through one paper, I
stroll down to the junction and buy fifteen others, and so enjoy the
fruits of many minds.

Thanks to my railway I can sit in the garden of an evening and read
my paper as I smoke my pipe, and say, "Ah! That's Buggin's work. I
remember him well; he worked for Rhodes…. Hullo! Here's Simpson at
it again; since when did they buy
him
?…" And so forth. I lead
my pastoral life, happy in the general world about me, and I serve,
as sauce to such healthy meat, the piquant wickedness of the town;
nor do I ever note a cowardice, a lie, a bribery, or a breach of
trust, a surrender in the field, or a new Peerage, but I remember
that my newspaper could not add these refining influences to my life
but for the
railway
which I set out to praise at the beginning of
this and intend to praise manfully to the end.

Yet another good we owe to railways occurs to me. They keep the
small towns going.

Don't pester me with "economics" on that point; I know more
economics than you, and I say that but for the railways the small
towns would have gone to pieces. There never yet was a civilisation
growing richer and improving its high roads in which the small towns
did not dwindle. The village supplied the local market with bodily
necessaries; the intellectual life, the civic necessities had to go
into the large towns. It happened in the second and third centuries
in Italy; it happened in France between Henri IV and the Revolution;
it was happening here before 1830.

Take those little paradises Ludlow and Leominster; consider Arundel,
and please your memory with the admirable slopes of Whitchurch; grow
contented in a vision of Ledbury, of Rye, or of Abingdon, or of
Beccles with its big church over the river, or of Newport in the
Isle of Wight, or of King's Lynn, or of Lymington—you would not
have any of these but for the railway, and there are 1800 such in
England—one for every tolerable man.

Valognes in the Cotentin, Bourg-d'Oysan down in the Dauphiné in its
vast theatre of upright hills, St. Julien in the Limousin,
Aubusson-in-the-hole, Puy (who does not connect beauty with the
word?), Mansle in the Charente country—they had all been half dead
for over a century when the railway came to them and made them
jolly, little, trim, decent, self-contained, worthy, satisfactory,
genial, comforting and human [Greek: politeiae], with clergy, upper
class, middle class, poor, soldiers, yesterday's news, a college,
anti-Congo men, fools, strong riders, old maids, and all that makes
a state. In England the railway brought in that beneficent class,
the gentlemen; in France, that still more beneficent class, the
Haute Bourgeoisie.

I know what you are going to say; you are going to say that there
were squires before the railways in England. Pray have you
considered how many squires there were to go round? About half a
dozen squires to every town, that is (say) four gentlemen, and of
those four gentlemen let us say two took some interest in the place.
It wasn't good enough … and heaven help the country towns now if
they had to depend on the great houses! There would be a smart dog-cart
once a day with a small (vicious and servile) groom in it, an actor, a
foreign money-lender, a popular novelist, or a newspaper owner jumping
out to make his purchases and driving back again to his host's within
the hour. No, no; what makes the country town is the Army, the Navy,
the Church, and the Law—especially the retired ones.

Then think of the way in which the railways keep a good man's
influence in a place and a bad man's out of it. Your good man loves
a country town, but he must think, and read, and meet people, so in
the last century he regretfully took a town house and had his little
house in the country as well. Now he lives in the country and runs
up to town when he likes.

He is always a permanent influence in the little city—especially if
he has but £400 a year, which is the normal income of a retired
gentleman (yes, it is so, and if you think it is too small an
estimate, come with me some day and make an inquisitorial tour of my
town). As for the vulgar and cowardly man, he hates small towns
(fancy a South African financier in a small town!), well, the
railway takes him away. Of old he might have had to stay there or
starve, now he goes to London and runs a rag, or goes into
Parliament, or goes to dances dressed up in imitation of a soldier;
or he goes to Texas and gets hanged—it's all one to me. He's out of
my town.

And as the railways have increased the local refinement and virtue,
so they have ennobled and given body to the local dignitary. What
would the Bishop of Caen (he calls himself Bishop of Lisieux and
Bayeux, but that is archaeological pedantry); what, I say, would the
Bishop of Caen be without his railway? A Phantom or a Paris magnate.
What the Mayor of High Wycombe? Ah! what indeed! But I cannot waste
any more of this time of mine in discussing one aspect of the
railway; what further I have to say on the subject shall be
presented in due course in my book on
The Small Town of
Christendom
[Footnote:
The Small Town of Christendom: an
Analytical Study
. With an Introduction by Joseph Reinach. Ulmo
et Cie. £25 nett.] I will close this series of observations with a
little list of benefits the railway gives you, many of which would
not have occurred to you but for my ingenuity, some of which you may
have thought of at some moment or other, and yet would never have
retained but for my patient labour in this.

The railway gives you seclusion. If you are in an express alone you
are in the only spot in Western Europe where you can be certain of
two or three hours to yourself. At home in the dead of night you may
be wakened by a policeman or a sleep-walker or a dog. The heaths are
populous. You cannot climb to the very top of Helvellyn to read your
own poetry to yourself without the fear of a tourist. But in the
corner of a third-class going north or west you can be sure of your
own company; the best, the most sympathetic, the most brilliant in
the world.

The railway gives you sharp change. And what we need in change is
surely keenness. For instance, if one wanted to go sailing in the
old days, one left London, had a bleak drive in the country, got
nearer and nearer the sea, felt the cold and wet and discomfort
growing on one, and after half a day or a day's gradual introduction
to the thing, one would at last have got on deck, wet and wretched,
and half the fun over. Nowadays what happens? Why, the other day, a
rich man was sitting in London with a poor friend; they were
discussing what to do in three spare days they had. They said "let
us sail." They left London in a nice warm, comfortable, rich-padded,
swelly carriage at four, and before dark they were letting
everything go, putting on the oilies, driving through the open in
front of it under a treble-reefed storm jib, praying hard for their
lives in last Monday's gale, and wishing to God they had stayed at
home—all in the four hours. That is what you may call piquant, it
braces and refreshes a man.

For the rest I cannot detail the innumerable minor advantages of
railways; the mild excitement which is an antidote to gambling; the
shaking which (in moderation) is good for livers; the meeting
familiarly with every kind of man and talking politics to him; the
delight in rapid motion; the luncheon-baskets; the porters; the
solid guard; the strenuous engine-driver (note this next time you
travel—it is an accurate observation). And of what other kind of
modern thing can it be said that more than half pay dividends?
Thinking of these things, what sane and humorous man would ever
suggest that a part of life, so fertile in manifold and human
pleasure, should ever be bought by the dull clique who call
themselves "the State", and should yield under such a scheme yet
more
, yet
larger
, yet
securer
salaries to the younger sons.

I might have added in this list I have just made of the advantages
of Railways, that Railways let one mix with one's fellow-men and
hear their continual conversation. Now if you will think of it,
Railways are the only institutions that give us that advantage. In
other places we avoid all save those who resemble us, and many men
become in middle age like cabinet ministers, quite ignorant of their
fellow-citizens. But in Trains, if one travels much, one hears every
kind of man talking to every other and one perceives all England.