On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
_Answer._ It is more than accessible already; the public are pitched
into it head-foremost, and necessarily miss two-thirds of it. The Lake
scenery really begins, on the south, at Lancaster, where the Cumberland
hills are seen over Morecambe Bay; on the north, at Carlisle, where the
moors of Skiddaw are seen over the rich plains between them and the
Solway. No one who loves mountains would lose a step of the approach,
from these distances, on either side. But the stupid herds of modern
tourists let themselves be emptied, like coals from a sack, at
Windermere and Keswick. Having got there, what the new railway has to do
is to shovel those who have come to Keswick to Windermere, and to shovel
those who have come to Windermere to Keswick. And what then?
3. "But cheap and swift transit is necessary for the working population,
who otherwise could not see the scenery at all."
_Answer._ After all your shrieking about what the operatives spend in
drink, can't you teach them to save enough out of their year's wages to
pay for a chaise and pony for a day, to drive Missis and the Baby that
pleasant twenty miles, stopping when they like, to unpack the basket on
a mossy bank? If they can't enjoy the scenery that way, they can't any
way; and all that your railroad company can do for them is only to open
taverns and skittle grounds round Grasmere, which will soon, then, be
nothing but a pool of drainage, with a beach of broken gingerbeer
bottles; and their minds will be no more improved by contemplating the
scenery of such a lake than of Blackpool.
4. What else is to be said? I protest I can find nothing, unless that
engineers and contractors must live. Let them live, but in a more useful
and honorable way than by keeping Old Bartholomew Fair under Helvellyn,
and making a steam merry-go-round of the lake country.
There are roads to be mended, where the parish will not mend them,
harbors of refuge needed, where our deck-loaded ships are in helpless
danger; get your commissions and dividends where you know that work is
needed, not where the best you can do is to persuade pleasure-seekers
into giddier idleness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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