AN ENGLISH WINTER
WATERING-PLACE
1879
I have just been spending a couple of days at a well-known resort upon
the Kentish coast, and though such an exploit is by no means
unprecedented, yet, as to the truly observing mind no opportunity is
altogether void and no impressions are wholly valueless, I have it on my
conscience to make a note of my excursion. Superficially speaking, it
was certainly wanting in originality; but I am afraid that it afforded
me as much entertainment as if the idea of paying a visit to Hastings
had been an invention of my own. This is so far from being the case that
the most striking feature of the town in question is the immense
provision made there for the entertainment of visitors. Hastings and St.
Leonard's, standing side by side, present a united sea-front of more
miles in length than I shall venture to compute. It is sufficient that
in going from one end of the place to the other I had a greater sense of
having taken a long, straight walk, than I had done since I last
measured the remarkable length of Broadway. This is not a strikingly
picturesque image, and it must be confessed that the beauty of Hastings
does not reside in a soft irregularity or a rural exuberance. Like all
the larger English watering-places it is simply a little London _super
mare_. The pictorial is always to be found in England if one will take
the trouble of looking for it; but it must be conceded that at Hastings
this element is less obtrusive than it might be. I had heard it
described as a "dull Brighton," and this description had been intended
to dispose of the place. In fact, however--such is the perversity of the
inquiring mind--it had rather quickened than quenched my interest. It
occurred to me that it might be entertaining to follow out the
variations and modifications of Brighton. Four or five miles of
lodging-houses and hotels staring at the sea across a "parade" adorned
with iron benches, with hand-organs and German bands, with nursemaids
and British babies, with ladies and gentleman of leisure--looking rather
embarrassed with it, and trying, rather unsuccessfully, to get rid of
it--this is the great feature which Brighton and Hastings have in
common. At Brighton there is a certain variety and gaiety of
colour--something suggesting crookedness and yellow paint--which gives
the place a kind of cheerful, easy, more or less vulgar, foreign air.
But Hastings is very gray and sober and English, and, indeed, it is
because it seemed to me so English that I gave my best attention to it.
If one is attempting to gather impressions of a people and to learn to
know them, everything is interesting that is characteristic, quite apart
from its being beautiful. English manners are made up of such a
multitude of small details that the portrait a stranger has privately
sketched in is always liable to receive new touches. And this, indeed,
is the explanation of his noting a great many small points, on the spot,
with a degree of relish and appreciation which must often, to persons
who are not in his position, appear exaggerated. He has formed a mental
picture of the civilisation of the people he lives among, and whom, when
he has a great deal of courage, he makes bold to say he is "studying;"
he has drawn up a kind of tabular view of their manners and customs,
their idiosyncrasies, their social institutions, their general features
and properties; and when once he has suspended this rough cartoon in the
chambers of his imagination, he finds a great deal of occupation in
touching it up and filling it in. Wherever he goes, whatever he sees, he
adds a few strokes. That is how I spent my time at Hastings.
I found it, for instance, a question more interesting than it might
superficially appear, to choose between the inns--between the Royal
Hotel upon the Parade and an ancient hostel--a survival of the
posting-days--in a side-street. A Mend had described the latter
establishment to me as "mellow," and this epithet complicated the
problem. The term mellow, as applied to an inn, is the comparative
degree of a state of things of which (say) "musty" would be the
superlative. If you can seize this tendency in its comparative stage you
may do very well indeed; the trouble is that, like all tendencies, it
contains, even in its earlier phases, the germs of excess. I thought it
very possible that the Swan would be over-ripe; but I thought it equally
probable that the Royal would be crude. I could claim a certain
acquaintance with "royal" hotels--I knew just how they were constituted.
I foresaw the superior young woman sitting at a ledger, in a kind of
glass cage, at the bottom of the stairs, and expressing by refined
intonations her contempt for a gentleman who should decline to "require"
a sitting-room. The functionary whom in America we know and dread as an
hotel-clerk belongs in England to the sex which, when need be, has an
even more perfect command of the supercilious. Large hotels here are
almost always owned and carried on by companies, and the company is
represented by a well-shaped female figure belonging to the class whose
members are more particularly known as "persons." The chambermaid is a
young woman, and the female tourist is a lady; but the occupant of the
glass cage, who hands you your key and assigns you your apartment, is
designated in the manner I have mentioned. The "person" has various
methods of revenging herself for her shadowy position in the social
scale, and I think it was from a vague recollection of having on former
occasions felt the weight of her embittered spirit that I determined to
seek the hospitality of the humbler inn, where it was probable that one
who was himself humble would enjoy a certain consideration. In the
event, I was rather oppressed by the featherbed quality of the welcome
extended to me at the Swan. Once established there, in a sitting-room
(after all), the whole affair was as characteristically English as I
could desire.
I have sometimes had occasion to repine at the meagreness and mustiness
of the old-fashioned English inn, and to feel that in poetry and in
fiction these defects had been culpably glossed over. But I said to
myself the other evening that there is a kind of venerable decency even
in some of its dingiest idiosyncrasies, and that in an age of
vulgarisation one should do justice to an institution which is still
more or less of a stronghold of the ancient amenities. It is a
satisfaction in moving about the world to be treated as a gentleman, and
this gratification appears to be more than, in the light of modern
science, a Company can profitably undertake to bestow. I have an old
friend, a person of admirably conservative instincts, from whom, a short
time since, I borrowed a hint of this kind. This lady had been staying
at a small inn in the country, with her daughter; the daughter, whom we
shall call Mrs. B., had left the house a few days before the mother.
"Did you like the place?" I asked of my friend; "was it comfortable?"
"No, it was not comfortable; but I liked it. It was shabby, and I was
much overcharged; but it pleased me." "What was the mysterious charm?"
"Well, when I was coming away, the landlady--she had cheated me
horribly--came to my carriage, and dropped a curtsey, and said: 'My duty
to Mrs. B., ma'am.' Que voulez-vous? That pleased me." There was an old
waiter at Hastings who would have been capable of that--an old waiter
who had been in the house for forty years, and who was not so much an
individual waiter as the very spirit and genius, the incarnation and
tradition of waiter-hood. He was faded and weary and rheumatic, but he
had a sort of mixture of the paternal and the deferential, the
philosophic and the punctilious, which seemed but grossly requited by a
present of a small coin. I am not fond of jugged hare for dinner, either
as a light _entrée_ or as a _pièce de resistance_; but this
accomplished attendant had the art of presenting you such a dish in a
manner that persuaded you, for the time, that it was worthy of your
serious consideration. The hare, by the way, before being subjected to
the mysterious operation of jugging, might have been seen dangling from
a hook in the bar of the inn, together with a choice collection of other
viands. You might peruse the bill of fare in an elementary form as you
passed in and out of the house, and make up your _menu_ for the day by
poking with your stick at a juicy-looking steak or a promising fowl. The
landlord and his spouse were always on the threshold of the bar,
polishing a brass candlestick and paying you their respects; the place
was pervaded by an aroma of rum-and-water and of commercial travellers'
jokes.
This description, however, is lacking in the element of gentility, and I
will not pursue it farther, for I should give a very false impression of
Hastings if I were to omit so characteristic a feature. It was, I think,
the element of gentility that most impressed me. I know that the word I
have just ventured to use is under the ban of contemporary taste; so I
may as well say outright that I regard it as indispensable in almost any
attempt at portraiture of English manners. It is vain for an observer of
such things to pretend to get on without it. One may talk of foreign
life indefinitely--of the manners and customs of France, Germany, and
Italy--and never feel the need of this suggestive, yet mysteriously
discredited, epithet. One may survey the remarkable face of American
civilisation without finding occasion to strike this particular note.
But in England no circumlocution will serve--the note must be definitely
struck. To attempt to speak of an English watering-place in winter and
yet pass it over in silence, would be to forfeit all claims to analytic
talent. For a stranger, at any rate, the term is invaluable--it is more
convenient than I should find easy to say. It is instantly evoked in my
mind by long rows of smuttily-plastered houses, with a card inscribed
"Apartments" suspended in the window of the ground-floor
sitting-room--that portion of the dwelling which is known in
lodging-house parlance as "the parlours." Everything, indeed, suggests
it--the bath-chairs, drawn up for hire in a melancholy row; the
innumerable and excellent shops, adorned with the latest photographs of
the royal family and of Mrs. Langtry; the little reading-room and
circulating library on the Parade, where the daily papers, neatly
arranged, may be perused for a trifling fee, and the novels of the
season are stacked away like the honeycombs in an apiary; the long pier,
stretching out into the sea, to which you are admitted by the payment of
a penny at a wicket, and where you may enjoy the music of an
indefatigable band, the enticements of several little stalls for the
sale of fancy-work, and the personal presence of good local society. It
is only the winking, twinkling, easily-rippling sea that is not genteel.
But, really, I was disposed to say at Hastings that if the sea were not
genteel, so much the worse for Neptune; for it was the favourable aspect
of the great British proprieties and solemnities that struck me.
Hastings and St. Leonards, with their long, warm seafront, and their
multitude of small, cheap comforts and conveniences, offer a kind of
résumé of middle-class English civilisation and of advantages of which
it would ill become an American to make light. I don't suppose that life
at Hastings is the most exciting or the most gratifying in the world,
but it must certainly have its advantages. If I were a quiet old lady of
modest income and nice habits--or even a quiet old gentleman of the same
pattern--I should certainly go to Hastings. There, amid the little shops
and the little libraries, the bath-chairs and the German bands, the
Parade and the long Pier, with a mild climate, a moderate scale of
prices, and the consciousness of a high civilisation, I should enjoy a
seclusion which would have nothing primitive or crude.