Various
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439
SUMMER LODGINGS
In the dominions of the Czar, the backs of the serfs suffer a weekly titillation as insufferable, although not so deadly, as the less frequent knout. When it comes to Wednesday, they begin to imagine that they are not exactly comfortable; on Thursday, the natural moisture of their skin seems fast drying up, and they are in an incipient fit of the fidgets; on Friday, the epidermis cracks all over, or makes-believe to do so; and on Saturday, the whole population, with a shout of impatient joy, rush to the bath-house of the village, like a herd of bullocks in the dog-days to the river, and boil themselves in steam. When thoroughly done, they come out, beautifully plumped, as the cooks say, and feeling fresh and vigorous, and as fit as ever they were in their lives to encounter a new week of serfdom.
An annual process analogous to this takes place in our own country. In spring, we begin to look wistfully at the garden, to watch the opening of the lettuces, and count the colours of the pansies. As the season advances, we wander into the fields, examine curiously the thin grass, and turn an admiring eye towards the green hills in the distance. As May breaks upon us in sunlight, though the east wind is still chill, we half persuade ourselves that this really is the season of love and sentiment; and when the month ripens into June, when the grass beneath our feet actually deserves the name of a carpet, when the trees are rich and umbrageous, when the birds are in full song, and the roses in full blow—then the hitherto indefinite longing of our heart acquires strength and purpose. The dry streets look unnatural; the formal lines of houses offend the taste; the air is close and hot; the younger children look pale, and their elder sisters languish. The month is at length out, and we wonder how we have survived it. The thing can no longer be borne: the town looks and breathes like a pest-house; while hill-sides glimmer in our waking dreams, broad seas stretch away till they are lost in the golden light—
'And dying winds and waters near
Make music to the lonely ear:'
still worse—everybody that is anybody is off to the country and the sea, and we rush madly after.
But the country? Where is the country? That is the puzzle. In our youth, we knew many a quiet village, many a fine beach, many a sheltered bay, where one might wander, or swim, or muse, or rusticate in any way he chose. The village has grown into a town; the beach is lined with villas; the bay swarms with vessels, and its shores with population. Every eligible spot on the coast becomes the resort of country-goers, till it is no longer the country. All local advantages are taken advantage of, till they disappear. The citizen, charmed with the countryness of the spot, builds his box by the water-side; the speculator runs up lines of houses; a handsome inn rises in the midst; and benevolent individuals hasten to the new centre of attraction, loaded with every kind of commodity men stand in need of, and are likely to buy. Here, in Scotland, on the Clyde, which is the grand sanatorium of the east as well as the west country, this process of change is remarkable. The once wildly beautiful shores, wherever there is not a town or a village, are dotted with trim white villas, glimmering here and there among the trees. The angles of the lochs, where these diverge from the parent stream, are covered with houses. The Gair Loch, which we remember as one of the sweetest mysteries of a mountain lake whose banks ever echoed to the songs of poetry and love, is a snug suburban retreat. The entrance of the Holy Loch, and of the dark and awful Loch Long, are fortified against the spirit of nature by groups of streets. At the heretofore quiet village of Dunoon, slumbering at the foot of its almost obliterated castle, you might lose yourself in the wilderness of new habitations. Gourock, on the opposite side, where in our boyhood the fairies disported round the Kempuck Stane, is a bustling town, with a suburb stretching along the Clyde, nearly as long as the long town of Kirkaldy, on the Forth; and at Largs, the barrows of the ancient Danes have become the cellars of the sons of little men, who confine spirits in them, as the prophet Solomon used to do, with a sealed cork. The once solitary island of Cumbrae is the town of Milport; the hoary ruins of Rothsay Castle are almost buried in a congeries of seaport streets and lanes; and, smoking, sputtering, and flapping their water-wings, scores of steamers ply in endless succession among these and a multitude of other places of renown.
All this, we may be told, is as it should be; a house is better than a hut, and the conveniences of civilised life better than roughing it in the desert: but we will not be comforted. Roughing it! that is just what the smoke-dried citizen wants occasionally, to prevent his blood from stagnating, and keep his faculties in working order. Physically, at least, we are not half the men we were when we used to rumble, and sometimes tumble, in stage-coaches, exposed to all the excitement and adventures of a journey; or to get as sick as forty dogs, tossing about whole days and nights in a sailing vessel. Then, when we landed, how delightful were the miseries of a cottage; the makeshifts, the squeezing, the dirt, the hunger—that veal-pie was always left behind!—the hunting of the neighbourhood for eggs for the children, the compulsory abstinence for three days out of four from butcher-meat, and the helpless dependence upon the chapter of accidents for everything else!
Now, we get into a railway carriage, or the cabin of a steamer, and after taking a book or a nap for an hour or two, raise our heads, and find ourselves, somehow or other, fifty miles off—in the country. The country is a genteel house in a genteel street, or a nice villa in a row of nice villas, where we are surrounded with all the conveniences we enjoy at home. The very society is the same; for our friends, Thomson and Smith, and the whole of that set, have brought their families to the same place for summer lodgings—it is so agreeable to be among one's acquaintances. Then we begin to enjoy ourselves: we have conversation-parties, and dancing-parties, and balls, all the same as at home. We enjoy our newspaper, as usual, in our comfortable reading-room. In the morning, we take a stroll or a dip, or drink water at the Wells, which, although undoubtedly nasty, is undeniably wholesome. Then there is a steamer in sight, and we all hasten to the pier, to ascertain if we know anybody on board. Then we dine early, for one must dine early in the country. Then we take a nap; then another stroll; then there is another steamer to watch; then we drink tea; then to the pier again. This time, the vessel's head is pointed homewards; and as she breaks away from the land, we follow her with our eyes till she is swallowed up in the distance. Then we turn away with a sigh; go back to our lodgings; lounge into bed; and fall asleep in the midst of the delightful sensation of having nothing to do, and being in the country.
All this is delightful, no doubt; every bit as good as being at home. Our aim, in fact, is to carry home with us—to feel as if we had never left No. 24. The closer the resemblance between our country lodgings and our town-house, the better we are off; for we then get what we have come for—change of air—without any sacrifice of comfort.
But we doubt whether 'change of air' has so limited a meaning. Hygienically speaking, it includes, we suspect, change of habits, change of diet, change of company, change of thought. The miseries of the old country lodgings were better for the health than the comforts of the new. The very grumbling they gave rise to was a wholesome exercise. The short allowance was worth a whole pharmacopœia. The ravenous appetite that fastened upon things common and unclean was a glorious symptom. We came back strengthened in mind as well as body. Our country sojourn had the effect of foreign travel in opening the heart and expanding the intellect; it smoothed away prejudices and upset conventionalities; and the ruddy glow of our sunburnt cheeks was the external token of the healthy natural tone of the feelings within. No; this passion for comfort and gentility in the wilderness, is a bad sign of the generation: it bespeaks effeminacy of character, and a vanity which, however graceful it may be thought in the town, shews mean and ridiculous among the hills, and woods, and waters of the country.
Among our neighbours on the continent, the summer move is not so universal as with us. In Paris, for instance, everything is considered the country that is outside the barriers; and in the fine season, every bourgeois family is outside the barriers at least once a week—eating, drinking, dancing, and singing. Then there are the walks in the Bois de Boulogne, and the picnics at St Cloud, and the excursions to Versailles: wherever there is green turf and shady trees, you hear the sounds of mirth and music rising in the clearest, brightest atmosphere in the world. Thus a sojourn out of town is not a necessity. They take change of air by instalments, and pass the summer in a state of chronic excitement.
In other parts of the world, the move is as entire as with us; and in at least one instance, all classes of the population desert the cities at the same time, and flock to the same sea-side. To be sure, this sea-side is somewhat extensive, and there need be no more crowding than is social and comfortable. An amusing account of the migration, and of the summer lodgings of Central America is given in Mr Squier's Nicaragua, recently published. The state of Nicaragua occupies that part of the Isthmus lying between the lake of the same name and the Pacific, the distance between being in some places only about fifteen miles. In this narrow tract there are several large towns, such as Grenada and Leon, which, in spite of the breath of the two oceans, get smoke-dried by the time the dry season advances into March. Then comes on the 'Paseo al mar,' or bathing-season, when a great portion of the population, taken not merely from the upper classes, but from the bourgeoisie and Indian peasantry, rush down to the shores of the Pacific. 'At that time,' says Mr Squier, 'a general movement of carts and servants takes place in the direction of the sea, and the government despatches an officer and a guard, to superintend the pitching of the annual camp upon the beach, or rather upon the forest-covered sand-ridge which fringes the shore. Each family builds a temporary cane-hut, lightly thatched with palm-leaves, and floored with petates or mats. The whole is wickered together with vines, or woven together basketwise, and partitioned in the same way, by means of coloured curtains of cotton cloth. This constitutes the penetralia, and is sacred to the bello sexo and the babies. The more luxurious ladies bring down their neatly-curtained beds, and make no mean show of elegance in the interior arrangements of their impromptu dwellings. Outside, and something after the fashion of their permanent residences, is a kind of broad and open shed, which bears a very distant relation to the corridor. Here hammocks are swung, the families dine, the ladies receive visitors, and the men sleep.... The establishments here described pertain only to the wealthier visitors, the representatives of the upper classes. There is every intermediate variety, down to those of the mozo and his wife, who spread their blankets at the foot of a tree, and weave a little bower of branches above them—an affair of ten or a dozen minutes. And there are yet others who disdain even this exertion, and nestle in the dry sand.'
This kind of gipsying expedition to the sea in summer would hardly suit the form of European, or at least British civilisation; but we do not see why, in the one continent more than in the other, one's country lodgings should be required to resemble a town-house. In the Clyde, which we have mentioned as a resort for summer loiterers, there is one exceptional place—the island of Arran. Here the Marquis of Douglas has determined, with much good taste, that his property shall not be vulgarised by the new style of country lodgings, and so far from feuing the ground, he will not permit even a pier to be built for the accommodation of visitors. The village, accordingly, is simply a line of thatched cottages, which, in the fine season, are filled to overflowing. A few houses of more pretension stand on the other side of the bay; but, in general, no one sets his foot in Brodick who has not made up his mind to rough it pretty much in the fashion of the last generation. Sometimes, on the occasion of a holiday in Glasgow, which is six hours' steaming distant, the village is flooded with a moving population that can neither find house-room on the island nor means of quitting it the same day. Then comes a scene of something more than Mexican roughness. Shawls, cloaks, plaids, are the only substitute for tents, and a bush or a tree the only shelter from the summer wind. Such wandering companies are rarely short of provisions, for they have a wholesome dread of Highland hunger; and hearty is the feast and loud the merriment, as they sit thus, houseless and homeless outcasts of the Clyde. The night comes on, neither dark nor unpleasantly cold, and the trooping stars assemble in the heavens, and look down on the slumbrous waters, as bright and new as they were seen of old from the hill-tops of Chaldea. Higher swell the hearts of the spectators for a time, till, yielding to the influence of the hour, lower and lower sink their pulses of emotion, like the tide of the lately panting deep. Their voices fall; their words are few and whispered, then heard no more; the lights of the village disappear one by one; the last door is heard to shut; there is silence on the earth.
We never heard of anybody being the worse of this adventure, although it is a kind of roughing we would not positively recommend to Miss Laura Matilda, or any of her fair sisters. We would give them a thatched roof over their heads, a weather-tight room for their slumbers, and a substantial wall between them and the couple of cows that yield their warm milk in the morning. We would afford them a homely sitting-room, with no temptation to keep them within doors for a single moment, except during their brief and humble meals. We would plant their tabernacle in some lonely place on a hillside, or on the shores of a romantic loch, an hour's smart walk from any society they are accustomed to at home. We would have them make acquaintances of the said two cows; of both the dogs, even the surly one, which cannot for some time understand who or what they are, or what business they have there; of the hens, that present them with newly-laid eggs to breakfast; of the five or six sheep, to whom they are evidently objects of curiosity and admiration; of that sociable goat, which accompanies the sheep to the hill like one of themselves; and more especially of the little boy, who is proud of being called the herd; and of the cotter and his old mother, and his wife and two young daughters. We would insist upon their feeling a kindly interest in these new friends, one and all; on their taking leave of them individually when coming away; and on their carrying home with them an impression which would sometimes, in the crowded street, or the hot room, well suddenly up in their hearts like a fresh stream, or pass across their cheeks like a breath of mountain air.
Depend upon it, we lose much humanising feeling, much true refinement, much of the poetry of life, in parting with the roughness of our Summer Lodgings.