IN PRAISE OF THE PROVINCIAL SUBURB.
BY this time it is an accepted dogma that if God made the country and man made the town, it must have been the Devil that made the suburb. One of the most hideous circles in the Ruskinian Inferno is that described by the ten- mile radius,—a district covered with " packing-cases " for the temporary storage of a population of " monkeys that have lost the use of their legs," and that are more passive and infinitely less witty than the baboons in Regent's Park. No type of the modern Englishman is more discredited than the suburban, except possibly the provincial. How lost beyond redemption, then, must be those who unite two heinous offences by dwelling in a provincial suburb! At present I am of their number, and so far from appearing in a white sheet, I am brazen enough to extol my own choice as an example to others.
No doubt, for those who can afford it, the ideal scheme of existence is to divide one's time between a house in London and a cottage in the country. Six months in solitude and sir months in the stream of life should develop an admirable combination of character and talent. But my personal concern is for the man whose decision is affected by the cost of rent, furniture, and travelling, and who has to spend eleven months of the twelve in steady work, with his own apparatus of books and papers close at hand. As the unexpected result of a wide experience in many environments, I have formulated the heresy that for such a man there is no all-the-year-round habitation so desirable as one on the outskirts of a large provincial city.
My postal address excites the pity of all friends of mine who have not yet paid me a visit. The last word of it suggests to them a place of purgatorial function for one whose daily occupation it is to study and write,—the perpetual din of mills and factories in one's ears, and other by-products of our commercial prosperity in one's eyes. When they defy
their prejudices, and make the bold venture of seeing for themselves, they declare that a week at my house is as :good as. a week at the seaside. The air we breathe is fresh and tonic, and with a few exceptions we can keep our windows open day or night throughout the year without disagreeable results. We do not wholly escape fog, but the atmosphere up here is often quite clear when the lamps have to be lit down in:the city streets. Both in front of the house and behind it there is a prospect of fields and woods. The westward view is.especially calm and restful, and gives us the refreshment of glorious sunsets over the opposite bill. From our back-door we can start without more ado on a moorland or woodland ramble : there is no waste of time in first getting clear of the houses. We are five minutes' walk from the main road, from which no sign of even the motor-car traffic reaches us except an agreeable hum. All the morning, as I have been writing near the window, there has been no irritating disturbance from outside. Three or four tradesmen's messengers have called for orders, but otherwise the stillness has been unbroken. At might our quiet is absolute. Midnight roisterers never come this way, and the first morning call is the knock of . the milkman's boy at seven o'clock. In fact, we are so ,closely in touch with the countryside that no sub- stantial advantage of rural life is lacking to us. In a situation more remote from the town the change of the seasons would reveal itself in a larger variety of floral growth ; but what I most seek and prize in rural conditions is not so much a wealth of botanical detail as a general atmosphere of rest- fulness and leisure, and where I am now the opportunities of uninterrupted contemplation are all that the most meditative temperament could wish.
And these boons have been gained without payment of the great price that life in the country ordinarily demands. We are not isolated. I have known city men whose exhilaration at their escape from " streaming London's central roar " has been froaen into repugnance by the dreariness of their first country. winter. The dark and lonely roads have chilled their spirits as the frost has chilled their bones. To have only one postal delivery in the day, and to be five miles from the nearest telegraph-office, may sound attractive to those who are -*eery with much hustling, but it is soon discovered that in matters of communication defect is quite as irritating as excess. Even in household affairs the combination of town and country offers a distinct advantage. While our milk and eggs come fresh from a neighbouring farmhouse, we have also within reach a large market and the city shops, and if some domestic article should chance to have been forgotten, there is noneed to wait until the next visit of the carrier, for a short tram journey will supply the deficiency. In more serious coneenas our proximity to a great city ensures us against exile. It supplies the intellectual stimulus for lack Of which rustication has so often proved equivalent to rusting.
As to my opportunities of being in touch with " the move- ment," I should scarcely be better off if I lived in London.
digest every morning with my coffee and rolls a provincial paper of the first class—of. the first class of papers, I mean, not of provincial papers only—which goes to press later than the London journals, and thus gives me even later news than my London friends are reading at the same moment. In the town itself I have the use of two large and well- administered libraries. I can reach them quickly and cheaply, and I can find in them practically any book I want. What could the British Museum give me more ? I have not the choice in any one night among several good plays or several good concerts, but the visits of singers and performers of the front rank are so frequent that they would fill up more leisure than I have to spare for either music or the drama. And what of the society of the place ? It is usual, I know, to speak as though only in a capital could a thinker or artist or man of letters find congenial companionship. Now I freely admit that if I were a member, say, of the Athenaeum Club my chances of frequent intercourse with eminent persons on easy terms would be much greater than they are at present. But a consciousness of personal limitations compels me to recognise that even residence in London would not secure my admission to that distinguished :fraternity. In reality, the Londoner who is neither wealthy nor famous is, socially, not as happily placed as those of .us who live in the chief ,provincial towns. Through the very size of his own city, his associa-
tions are likely to be in the Main with men of his own profession or of his own sect in art or letters. The great compactness of my own town makes . possible the existence of a general cultivated group which is not the union of a number of cliques. For this result we have largely to thank the local University. No matter on what topic you
may need expert assistance, there is some one on its staff who
can solve your problem for you, and when these diversities of skill and acquirement are pooled the combination is singularly attractive. No one type is strong enough to suppreas or dominate the rest. In cities which are the limes of modern Universities or University Colleges the academic element is neither paramount, as at Oxford and Cambridge, nor over- whelmed, as in London. It could not afford; if it wished. to do so, to hold itself aloof from the main interests of the city, and it is a sufficiently important section of the community for its co-operation to be welcomed and recognised in every- thing that makes for intellectual and social progress. Contact with the vigorous activities of an industrial town is a whole7 some corrective to the dilettantism so prevalent where art and letters are cultivated apart from the common affairs Of men. Provincialism was once defended by James Macdonell as " the nursing mother of character, morality, intellect, philosophy, and religion." This judgment is illustrated ,not only by the enlightened zeal with which the great provincial towns address themselves to their own municipal probleme, but by their infusion of the same spirit into national concerns. It is not in them that "politics" comes to mean the pettiness, of backstairs gossip.. The provincialism of a city of this type is entirely different from that of a small country town, where "the rustic cackle of the bourg " is mistaken for "the murmur of the world." It is in the small town that local prejudices of caste or religion present to the independent thinker the alternative of fitting himself into a narrow groeie or living apart from his fellows. In the provincial city- the is a "public opinion" more sharply defined than in London, but sufficiently liberal to look without disfavour upOn temperaments and pursuits alien to the traditional notions of "gentility."
Let me now sum up my argument for establishing one's dwelling-place in the suburb of a large provincial city: ]ts advantage over residence in the heart of. London is not merely the much greater house-room that can be obtained for the same money, but the quiet, the fresh air, and the immediate access to fields and woods. Matthew Arnold, it is true, could discover "amid the city's jar" a refuge for his soul in a "lone
open glade screened by deep boughs on either hamd"; but to how few Londoners, after all, is it given to spend their days in the midst of Kensington Gardens ! My surroundings offer nearly the same contrast with the London suburbs as with the City itself. Within Greater London the rows of villa terraces are occasionally relieved by a public park, or by two or three fields not yet invaded by the speculative builder ; but I doubt whether there can be found anywhere within that area a house of moderate rental with such a rural outlook as mine, and with such direct access to the refreshment of country rambles. Suburban London is still London. In comparisonwith the country—even with the country just beyond the suburbs, as in the villages of Kent or the hills of Surrey—our gain is twofold. We are free from the sense of isolation, and we enjoy quick, easy, and inexpensive contact with the city when needed. No extensions of the London tram system, or improvements of the London train service, will ever alter the fact that in the provinces a much shorter distance separates the real country
from the heart of the town. A quarter of an hour's walk— not in crowded streets, yet along well-paved and well-lighted roads—and ten minutes in the tram will bring me to the doors of my reference library. The cars run at intervals, of three minutes, and the fare for the double journey amounts .to.four- pence. How much better off am I in time and money, to say nothing of " wear and tear," than if I had to start from a Surrey cottage on a serious expedition, carefully adjusted to the railway time-table, whenever I needed a few quotations ,Or figures to complete an article. 0 fortunatos nimium,-Lnot,in these days of agricultural depression, who attempt in vain to meet American competition in wheat-growing, or Danish, in butter-making, but who capture the sweets of countrY and city life together by fixing their tent in a provincial suburb.
Rue JIIXTA
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