THE CHESHAM COACH, 1796. From the painting by Cordery.
But Marian Evans had, you see, her limitations as a diviner of things to be. Electricity was not within her ken; she did not suspect the steam-carriages of her youth would be reincarnated as modern motor-cars. Yet, all the time, they were simply laid by, and Gurney, Hancock, and their fellows are justified in this our day. Everything recurs, essentially the same as before, with a complete revolution of the wheel of time, and thus the Road has become itself again.
Will a time come when the day of the motor-car will be looked back upon with that air of regretful sentiment with which the vanished Coaching Age is regarded? The rhythmic footfall of the horses and the rattle of the bars, the tootling of the “yard of tin” and the cheerful circumstance that attends the progress of a well-appointed coach, are things which have been, and may still be, experienced in our time by those who journey down the roads affected by the summer coaches, to Brighton, St. Albans, and Virginia Water; but as the Coaching Age itself has passed away, these are only sentimental revivals. The horseless carriages are upon us, and “going strong,” alike in speed and scent. The odour of the imperfectly-combusted petrol desecrates the airs of the country-side. Already the length and breadth of the land have been explored by them, on roads good, bad and indifferent, hilly or flat; and the characteristic rattle of their machinery and the hoarse trumpeting of their cyclorns are becoming familiar even to the rustics of Devon and Somerset.
Let it not be supposed, however, that skill in driving is not so necessary now as in the days of the spanking teams of coach-horses. The careful coachman of old saved his horses over the road for the long climbs and rugged places; he “sprung” them perhaps on the level, and gave them a “towelling” as a persuader to greater efforts through snow-drifts, winds or floods; and the driver of a motor-car does many of these things to his machinery, not indeed with the aid of a whip, but through the agency of levers, taps and brakes. You can overdrive and exhaust a motor just as easily as you can a horse, while it wants feeding just as well. “A just man is merciful to his beast,” and a cautious man is careful of his car, not only because if he was not he would perhaps be left with half a ton of inert machinery upon the road, but because he is just as fond of his automobile as many another of his steeds of flesh and blood.
But to most people who have only seen motor-cars, and have neither driven them nor ridden in one, this will not readily be understood; while the veteran who remembers the sights and sounds of the coaching days does not hear the clatter of the new occupants of the road with pleasurable feelings. To him there is no music in the “Gurr-r-r-umph! bang, gr-rrr!” of a Daimler, changing speeds in going uphill, nor any charm in the rattle of a Benz; the “ft-ft-ft” of a motor-tricycle, or the banshee-like minor-key wail, “wow-wow-wow,” of an electric cab on wood pavement. How very odd if there were!
THE LAST OF THE “MANCHESTER DEFIANCE.” From a lithograph.
Does it never occur to thinking men that the “blessings” of invention and the age of mechanical and other improvements have been too loudly and consistently praised? We need not be thought fanatically opposed to change if we deny the reality of some of those blessings. Let it be granted that they are ultimately in favour of the community and for the eventual improvement of the race; but if you view him unconventionally, does not the inventor, with his ingenious devices to overturn the practice and habits of generations past, seem sometimes rather a curse than a benefactor to mankind? While with one hand he simplifies and cheapens something (whether it be in travel or in anything else does not particularly matter for argument’s sake), with the other he sets a more strenuous pace to life. In the long ago he invented printing; and the Devil, seeing prophetically ahead, looked on with approval, because he foresaw the halfpenny evening papers. He introduced gas, replaced horses by steam-engines, and away went the leisured pace of that generation; and then, when a newer one was born to take steam as a matter of course, brought electricity to bear upon lighting and tractive problems. Always he sets you a quicker pace when you would be going quietly or resting by the way. One generation of him takes away the traffic of the roads; another filches that of the railways and puts the traffic on the road again in an altered form. There is no finality about the inventor, who ought, for the peace of the age, first to be gently dissuaded, then admonished, and, in the last resort, severely dealt with. Our ancestors had a “quick way” with such, and discouraged invention by putting inventors to death as wizards. A drastic method, but they saved themselves much worry and trouble thereby. The inventor is not usually entitled to any consideration on the score of working for the benefit of humanity. So little does he do so that he takes infinite care to patent and to provisionally protect even his immature devices. He works, in short, to build his own fortune.
Apply these feelings to the case of the coachmen who were born in an age that knew nothing of steam. Every stand-by was rooted up in the coming of railways, and the steam-engine was just as strange a monster to them as the electric dynamo is to many of ourselves. Often they could not transfer their allegiance to the railway, even though they starved. It was not always stubbornness or pride that held them aloof, but a certain and easily-understood lack of adaptability that forbade one who had held the reins to handle the starting-lever of the locomotive. More guards than coachmen transferred themselves from the road to the rail, because the duties were not so diverse; but, although there were coachmen who took positions on railways, no one has ever heard of one who became an engine-driver.
But coachmen and guards and the passengers they drove are all passed away, and the world rolls on as though they had never existed. The coaches, like the old Manchester “Defiance,” shown in the picture, rotting away in the deserted inn-yard, were left to decay in unconsidered places or were reduced to firewood; unlike many of the old “Bull and Mouth” mails, which, after lying there for some time idle, were bought and shipped to Spain, running for many years on Peninsula roads, from Malaga in the south to Vittoria and Salamanca in the north, and by a singular fate visiting in their old age those blood-red fields of victory whose fame they had once spread from London all over triumphant England.