A Month in Yorkshire

by Walter White

The overhanging trees multiply, and the green shade deepens, as you ascend. At last I came to the waterfall—the loneliest nook of all, in which the Rhymer had mused and listened to the brook, as he says:

“Here, where first murmuring from thine urn,
Thy voice deep joy expresses;
And down the rock, like music, flows
The wildness of thy tresses.”

It was just the place for a day-dream. I sat for nearly an hour, nothing disturbing my enjoyment but now and then the intrusive thought that my holiday was soon to end. However, there is good promise of summers yet to come. I climbed the hill in the rear of the fall, where, knee-deep in heath and fern, I looked down on the top of the oaken canopy and a broad reach of the valley; and intended to return to the town by another road. But the attractions of the glen drew me back; so I scrambled down it by the way I came, and retraced my outward route.

The one particular in which the glen differs from Elliott’s description is, that an opening has been made for, as it appeared to me, a quarry or gravel-pit, from which a loose slope of refuse extends down to the brook, and encroaches on its bed, creating a deformity that shocks the feelings by what seems a desecration. I thought that Ribbledin, at least, might have been saved from spade and mattock; and the more so as Sheffield, poisoned by smoke, can ill afford to lose any place of recreative resort in the neighbourhood. It may be that I felt vexed; for after my return to London, I addressed a letter on the subject to the editor of the Sheffield Independent, in the hope that by calling public attention thereto, the hand of the spoiler might be stayed.

As I walked down to the railway-station the next morning in time for the first train, many of the chimneys had just began to vent their murky clouds, and the smoke falling into the streets darkened the early sunlight; and Labour, preparing to “bend o’er thousand anvils,” went with unsmiling face to his daily task.

Away sped the train for Manchester; and just as the Art Treasures Exhibition was opening for the day, I alighted at the door.

Less than half an hour spent in the building sufficed to show that it was a work of the north, not of the south. There was a manifest want of attention to the fitness of things, naturally to be looked for in a county where the bulk of the population have yet so much to learn; where manufacturers, with a yearly income numbered by thousands, can find no better evening resort than the public-house; where so much of the thinking is done by machinery, and where steam-engines are built with an excellence of workmanship and splendour of finish well-nigh incredible.

For seven hours did I saunter up and down and linger here and there, as my heart inclined—longest before the old engravings. And while my eye roved from one beautiful object to another, I wondered more and more that the Times and some other newspapers had often expressed surprise that so few comparatively of the working-classes visited the Manchester Exhibition. Those best acquainted with the working-classes, as a mass, know full well how little such an exhibition as that appeals to their taste and feelings. To appreciate even slightly such paintings and curiosities of art as were there displayed, requires an amount of previous cultivation rare in any class, and especially so in the working-classes. For the cream of Manchester society, the Exhibition was a fashionable exchange, where they came to parade from three to five in the afternoon—the ladies exhibiting a circumference of crinoline far more ample than I have ever seen elsewhere; and of them and their compeers it would be safe to argue that those attracted by real love of art were but tens among the thousands who went for pastime and fashion.

To me it seems, that of late, we have had rather too much talk about art; by far too much flattery of the artist and artificer, whereby the one with genius and the one with handicraft feel themselves alike ill-used if they are not always before the eyes of the world held up to admiration. And so, instead of a heart working inspired by love, we have a hand working inspired by hopes of praise. The masons who carved those quaint carvings at Patrington worked out the thought that was in them lovingly, because they had the thought, and not the mere ambitious shadow of a thought. And their work remains admirable for all time, for their hearts were engaged therein as well as heads and hands. But now education and division of labour are to do everything; that is, if flattery fail not; and in wood-engraving we have come to the pass that one man cuts the clouds, another the trees, another the buildings, and another the animal figures; while on steel plates the clouds are “executed” by machinery. For my part, I would be willing to barter a good deal of modern art for the conscience and common honesty which it has helped to obscure.

We are too apt to forget certain conclusions which ought to be remembered; and these are, according to Mr. Penrose, that “No government, however imperial, can create true taste, or combine excellence with precipitation; that money is lavished in vain where good sense guides neither the design nor the execution; and that art with freedom, of which she is one manifestation, will not condescend to visit the land where she is not invited by the spontaneous instincts, and sustained by the unfettered efforts of the people.”