Not that one looks, perforce, at the opposite side of the compartment for diversion from the disappointments of life, or anxious and schemeful thought, as we are whirled by the green and ochre and umber of the pastures and ploughed lands of the pleasant and undulating country through which the Great Eastern Railway runs. The long-winged windmills, which one cannot see without a smile-begetting recollection of the doughty Don of Cervantes, or the churchyard ghost in “the renowned History of Goody Two Shoes,” the numerous church towers, in Norfolk so often flint-faced and round; the still well farmed fields and the cottage gardens uniformly characterised by an exuberance of vegetables and flowers, furnish a succession of varied objects that gratify and amuse the observing eye and mind.
But for the sake of Cromer, and therefore in the interests of the enterprising company aforesaid, I point out a fault—the only one I may say—in these photographs, although in doing so I feel like a man who knows that he is seen looking a gift-horse in the mouth.
“Landscape,” says Ruskin, “requires figure-incident.” If living, and the chosen photographer of the company that has banished advertisements—at what must be a serious sacrifice of income—from the walls of our temporary prisons, and embellished them with these sun-struck medals of scenic bits to be seen and done by our eyes and limbs, my artist friend would have turned touter with consummate skill. His photographs would have been full of “figure-incidents,”—compositions like his lovely paintings. He would have had his tent-studded foregrounds packed with lithe lasses and be-blazered youth, tennising on the hard, soft sand; and bewitchingly dressed children shovelling and grovelling happily therein, with their parents serenely and approvingly looking on. Many a paterfamilias would come out in clear detail as he lazily enjoys the piping tunes of peace without the rebuke from his beaming better-half, which he would scarcely escape at home at such an hour. Big-booted fishermen would be picturesquely unloading their boats, and actiniæ-hunters prosecuting their absorbing search in the pools of the flinty conglomerate that stretches away to the submerged walls of an older and long-lost Cromer.
My friend would have waited and waited until he could instantaneously catch the very similitude of the beach in such a high-jink and attractive guise as I beheld it on the “glorious 18th of June” last year. Whereas, good undeniably as these sunny shadows in the railway carriages are, they represent an unpeopled and desolate shore. Here, the first or last visitor of the season stands by the jetty, gazing on the sandy and liquid plains before him, as if by very loneliness tempted by the thought that it would be almost preferable to join the majority. I can but believe that the individual is an enemy of the “System;” that he intruded on the photographer’s field, and posed himself thus to spite the company.
Dr. Holmes in Elsie Venner is vexed at the same fellow’s obtrusiveness, I imagine, for, speaking of the Widow Rowen’s centre table, with “the pretty English scenes lying carelessly upon it,” he qualifies his encomium with the words, “Pretty! except for the old fellow with the hanging under-lip, who invests everyone of that interesting series.”
Another view is of the western beach, with just eleven boats drawn up high and dry towards the cliffs in stiff and parallel shipshapedness; but not the shadow of a shade of a living object is to be seen. Better so, than suffer the saturnine visage of the obtrusive stranger to be introduced. But how unfair is this to Cromer! A banquet hall without guests! I longed for my camera and drop-shutter, that I might take and give to the world a few illustrations, real if rough, of “life on the ocean wave,” and by it, too, in its untrammelled enjoyment of such pious orgies and prudent pleasures as may daily be witnessed and shared on the wide-spreading sands of lovely Cromer during the summer season.
I will lean again on the stalwart support of Mr. Ruskin in his Modern Painters while defending my view of views.
“All true landscape depends primarily on connection with humanity, or with spiritual powers. Banish your heroes and nymphs from the classical landscape—its laurel shades will move you no more. Show the dark clefts of the most romantic mountain are uninhabited and untraversed: it will cease to be romantic. Fields without shepherds, and without fairies, will have no gaiety in their green, nor will the noblest masses of ground or colours of clouds arrest or raise your thoughts if the earth has no life to sustain, and the heaven none to refresh.”
But while engaged in this discussion about shadows and similitudes we have reached Cromer, and, on arrival, a visitor’s one thought is, of course, where to bestow his goods.
After a hasty glance at and over the lofty church tower, and the clustered houses at the hillfoot, and the sail-flying sea; while taking a deep refreshing draught of the highly oxygenized—I was almost going to say effervescent—air, let him drive to the Hotel de Paris, or Belle Vue, or the Red Lion, or undertake the more protracted and tiring task of finding lodgings to his mind.