| <Saturday Review 2 September 1871, 302-3>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <ARCADIA.>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible to adult life
| is to be found in the first weeks of the summer's holiday, when the
| hard-worked man of business leaves his office and all its anxieties
| behind him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a couple of
| months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh to him, it is like the
| renewal of his boyhood; and if he happens to have chosen a picturesque
| place, where the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of
| landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders how it is that people
| who can stay here ever leave, or tire of the beauties that are so
| delightful to him. Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its
| park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an occupant; he is told
| of that fairyland cottage, embowered in roses and jessamine, with a
| garden gay and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song; and
| he finds to his surprise that the owners of these choice corners of
| Arcadia are only anxious to escape from what he would, if he could, be
| only anxious to retain.
| In his first days this restlessness, this discontent, is simply
| inconceivable. What more do they want than what they have? Why, that
| field lying there in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured cows
| which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening red, and backed by rock
| and tree and tumbling cascade, would be enough to make him happy. He
| could never weary of such a lovely bit of home scenery; and if to this
| he adds a view of the sea, or the crags and purple shadows of a
| mountain, he has wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of
| his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London and the sulphur of
| the Metropolitan still cling about his throat, and the roar of the
| streets has not quite died out of his ears.
| The woods are full of flowers and the rarer kind of insects, and he is
| never sated with the sea. There is the trout stream as clear as
| crystal, where he is sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the
| moors, where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot at, are
| handy; and there is no end to the picturesque bits just made for his
| sketch-book. Whatever his tastes may make him ~~ naturalist, sailor,
| sportsman, artist ~~ he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten or
| eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now that his playtime
| has come round again. At every turn he falls upon little scenes which
| give him an odd pleasure, as if they belonged to another life ~~ things
| he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint books, long ago.
| Here go by two countrywomen, whose red and purple dresses are touched
| by the sun with startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside
| road; there clatters past on horseback a group of market-girls with
| flapping straw hats, and carrying their baskets on their arms as if
| they were a set of Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn
| their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London man with frank
| curiosity as they canter on and smother him with dust. Now he passes
| through the midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a
| barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where, standing under an
| ivied porch, a pretty young woman unconsciously makes a picture as she
| bends down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with sweets and
| cakes. The idyl here is so complete that the contemplation of pence
| given for the accommodation of the barn, or the calculation of
| shillings to be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the
| little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist for the good
| things its small soul coveted, does not enter his mind.
| The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent would be a kind
| of high treason to the poetic instinct; so the London man
| instinctively feels, glad to recognize the ideal he is mainly
| responsible for making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is fishing in
| the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows skim the ground or dart
| slanting above his head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a
| dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young birds rustle in
| and out of the foliage; distant cattle low; cottage children laugh;
| everywhere he finds quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence
| of disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all who live here
| must feel the same delightful influences as those which he is feeling
| now, and be as innocent and virtuous as the place is beautiful and
| quiet.
| But the charm does not last. Very few of us retain to the end of our
| holidays the same enthusiastic delight in our Arcadia that we had in
| the beginning. Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the illusion
| better; and with it the excitement; but a long spell in one place,
| however beautiful ~~ unless indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes
| personally fond of the place and interested in the people ~~ is almost
| sure to end in weariness. At first the modern pilgrim is savagely
| disinclined to society and his kind. All the signs and circumstances
| of the life he has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to watch
| the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers which put into his
| little harbour, and the excursionists who come by them he accounts as
| heathens and accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate
| generation and made only for evildoers. He has no reverence for the
| post, and his soul is not rejoiced at the sight of letters. Even his
| daily paper is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts as
| equal in importance with the picturesque bits he wishes to sketch, or
| the rare ferns and beetles to be found by long rambles and much
| diligence. By degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearns after
| the life he has left, and he begins to look for the signs thereof with
| interest, not to say pleasure. He watches the arrival of the boat, or
| he strolls up to the railway station and speculates on the new comers
| with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance, he hails him with
| enthusiastic cordiality; and in his extremity is reduced to fraternize
| with men <p> 'not in his way.'</p> He becomes peevish 
| at the lateness of the
| mail, and he reads his <hi> Times </hi> from beginning to end, 
| taking in even the agony column and the advertisements. 
| He finds his idyllic pictures
| to be pictures, and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better than
| their neighbours; and, as for the absence of human passions ~~ they are
| merely dwarfed to the dimensions of the life, and are as relatively
| strong here as elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages
| quarrel among each other for trifles which he would have thought only
| children could have noticed; and they gossip to an extent of which he
| in his larger metropolitan life has no experience.
| If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom of visitors, he is
| as much an object of curiosity and surmise as if he were a man of
| another hemisphere; and he may think himself fortunate if vague
| reports do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality, or his
| sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage at home, he is nobody
| here. He may be sure that, however great his name in art and
| literature, it will not be accounted to him for honour ~~ it will only
| place him next to a well-conditioned mountebank; political fame,
| patent to all the world, rank which 
| <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> can mistake, and money 
| which all may handle, alone going down in remote country places 
| and carrying esteem along with them. If a wise man, he will 
| forgive the uncharitable surmises and the contempt of 
| which he is the object,
| knowing the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless vacuity from
| which they spring; but they are not the less unpleasant, and to
| understand a cause is not therefore to rejoice in the effect.
| As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of circumstance gradually
| becoming unbearable. He misses the familiar conveniences and orderly
| arrangements of his London life. He has a raging tooth, and there is
| no dentist for miles round; he falls sick, or sprains his ankle, and
| the only doctor at hand is a half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman
| skilled in herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His
| letters go astray among the various hands to which they are entrusted;
| his paper is irregular; <hi> Punch </hi> and his illustrated 
| weeklies come a day late, with torn covers and greasy 
| thumbmarks testifying to the
| love of pictorial art which encountered them by the way. He finds that
| he wants the excitement of professional life and the changeful action
| of current history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in a
| corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious; but he misses
| the centralized interest of metropolitan life, and catches himself
| hankering after the old intellectual fleshpots with the fervour of an
| exile, counting the days of his further stay.
| And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony,
| and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few
| ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of
| moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at
| Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of
| moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after
| all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to
| understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others,
| which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic
| youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept
| from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no
| opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty
| agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty
| market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve
| elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of
| natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more
| easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in
| essentials here as in London ~~ Arcadia being the poorer of the two,
| inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of
| bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of
| classes.
| By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his
| work invigorated in body, but quite sufficiently sated in mind to
| return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office
| decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly
| glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on
| his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy
| office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots.
| Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr.
| So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is
| more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing
| discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question
| whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors
| whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his
| delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the
| Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles
| ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it
| to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun
| eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.
| The peace to which we are all looking is not to be had in a Highland
| glen nor a Devonshire lane; and beautiful as are the retreats
| and show-places to which men of business rush for rest and
| refreshment ~~ peaceful as they are to look at, 
| and happy as it seems to
| us their inhabitants must be ~~ it is all only a 
| matter of the eye. They
| are Arcadias, if one likes to call them so; but while a man's powers
| remain to him they are halting-places only, not homes; and he who
| would make them his home before his legitimate time, would come to a
| weariness which should cause him to regret bitterly and often the
| collar which had once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of
| which he had so often growled.