In the course of several visits and stays of considerable length we
acquired a homelike feeling towards Leamington, and came back thither
again and again, chiefly because we had been there before. Wandering and
wayside people, such as we had long since become, retain a few of the
instincts that belong to a more settled way of life, and often prefer
familiar and commonplace objects (for the very reason that they are so)
to the dreary strangeness of scenes that might be thought much better
worth the seeing. There is a small nest of a place in Leamington--at No.
16, Lansdowne Circus--upon which, to this day, my reminiscences are apt
to settle as one of the coziest nooks in England, or in the world; not
that it had any special charm of its own, but only that we stayed long
enough to know it well, and even to grow a little tired of it. In my
opinion, the very tediousness of home and friends makes a part of what
we love them for; if it be not mixed in sufficiently with the other
elements of life, there may be mad enjoyment, but no happiness.
The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one of a circular range
of pretty, moderate-sized, two-story houses, all built on nearly the
same plan, and each provided with its little grass-plot, its flowers,
its tufts of box trimmed into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its
verdant hedges shutting the house in from the common drive and dividing
it from its equally cozy neighbors. Coming out of the door, and taking a
turn round the circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your
way back by any distinguishing individuality of your own habitation. In
the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in with iron railing, a small
play-place and sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct,
permeated by brief paths through the fresh English grass, and shadowed
by various shrubbery; amid which, if you like, you may fancy yourself in
a deep seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from the windows
of all the surrounding houses. But, in truth, with regard to the rest of
the town and the world at large, an abode here is a genuine seclusion;
for the ordinary stream of life does not run through this little, quiet
pool, and few or none of the inhabitants seem to be troubled with any
business or outside activities. I used to set them down as half-pay
officers, dowagers of narrow income, elderly maiden ladies, and other
people of respectability, but small account, such as hang on the world's
skirts rather than actually belong to it. The quiet of the place was
seldom disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive
orders, or the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the
ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired
captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated
postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in
the evening, ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In
merely mentioning these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness,
I seem to myself to disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that
brooded over the spot; whereas its impression upon me was, that the
world had never found the way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the
fortunate inhabitants were the only ones who possessed the spell-word of
admittance. Nothing could have suited me better, at the time; for I had
been holding a position of public servitude, which imposed upon me
(among a great many lighter duties) the ponderous necessity of being
universally civil and sociable.
Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of society, he might find
it more readily in Leamington than in most other English towns. It is a
permanent watering-place, a sort of institution to which I do not know
any close parallel in American life: for such places as Saratoga bloom
only for the summer season, and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even
then; while Leamington seems to be always in flower, and serves as a
home to the homeless all the year round. Its original nucleus, the
plausible excuse for the town's coming into prosperous existence, lies
in the fiction of a chalybeate well, which, indeed, is so far a reality
that out of its magical depths have gushed streets, groves, gardens,
mansions, shops, and churches, and spread themselves along the banks of
the little river Leam. This miracle accomplished, the beneficent
fountain has retired beneath a pump-room, and appears to have given up
all pretensions to the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. I
know not whether its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not the less
does Leamington--in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of
England, in a good hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats
and castles--continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more
permanent abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not
very wealthy people, such as are hardly known among ourselves. Persons
who have no country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a
London expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country
life in one.
In its present aspect, the town is of no great age. In contrast with the
antiquity of many places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face,
and seems almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn.
Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, if we reckon up
that sleepy lapse of time during which it existed as a small village of
thatched houses, clustered round a priory; and it would still have been
precisely such a rural village, but for a certain Doctor Jephson, who
lived within the memory of man, and who found out the magic well, and
foresaw what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it. A public garden
has been laid out along the margin of the Leam, and called the Jephson
Garden, in honor of him who created the prosperity of his native spot. A
little way within the garden-gate there is a circular temple of Grecian
architecture, beneath the dome of which stands a marble statue of the
good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of
fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored
him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably,
to blight his whole neighborhood by some disastrous speculation.
The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most other English
pleasure-grounds; for, aided by their moist climate and not too fervid
sun, the landscape-gardeners excel in converting flat or tame surfaces
into attractive scenery, chiefly through the skilful arrangement of
trees and shrubbery. An Englishman aims at this effect even in the
little patches under the windows of a suburban villa, and achieves it on
a larger scale in a tract of many acres. The Garden is shadowed with
trees of a fine growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense
entanglements, pervaded by woodland paths; and emerging from these
pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth of sunshine, where the green
sward--so vividly green that it has a kind of lustre in it--is spotted
with beds of gemlike flowers. Rustic chairs and benches are scattered
about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of the stumps of
obtruncated trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining
branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron. In a
central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens
practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by
the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young
man's heart. There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an
artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both
lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement in
the water are most beautiful and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and
decrepit, when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk
upon dry land. In the latter case, they look like a breed of uncommonly
ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the
moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person
or thing, unless we behold it in the sphere and circumstances to which
it is specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a
labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks,
involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably
within a circuit of only a few yards,--a sad emblem, it seemed to me, of
the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty
in scope, yet large enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with
a weary movement, but no genuine progress.
The Leam, after drowsing across the principal street of the town beneath
a handsome bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without any
perceptible flow. Heretofore I had fancied the Concord the laziest river
in the world, but now assign that amiable distinction to the little
English stream. Its water is by no means transparent, but has a
greenish, goose-puddly hue, which, however, accords well with the other
coloring and characteristics of the scene, and is disagreeable neither
to sight nor smell. Certainly, this river is a perfect feature of that
gentle picturesqueness in which England is so rich, sleeping, as it
does, beneath a margin of willows that droop into its bosom, and other
trees, of deeper verdure than our own country can boast, inclining
lovingly over it. On the Garden-side it is bordered by a shadowy,
secluded grove, with winding paths among its boskiness, affording many a
peep at the river's imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam; and on the
opposite shore stands the priory-church, with its church-yard full of
shrubbery and tombstones.
The business-portion of the town clusters about the banks of the Leam,
and is naturally densest around the well to which the modern settlement
owes its existence. Here are the commercial inns, the post-office, the
furniture-dealers, the ironmongers, and all the heavy and homely
establishments that connect themselves even with the airiest modes of
human life; while upward from the river, by a long and gentle ascent,
rises the principal street, which is very bright and cheerful in its
physiognomy, and adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as those of
London, though on a diminutive scale. There are likewise side-streets
and cross-streets, many of which are bordered with the beautiful
Warwickshire elm, a most unusual kind of adornment for an English town;
and spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room for stately groves,
with foot-paths running beneath the lofty shade, and rooks cawing and
chattering so high In the tree-tops that their voices get musical before
reaching the earth. The houses are mostly built in blocks and ranges, in
which every separate tenement is a repetition of its fellow, though the
architecture of the different ranges is sufficiently various. Some of
them are almost palatial in size and sumptuousness of arrangement. Then,
on the outskirts of the town, there are detached villas, inclosed within
that separate domain of high stone fence and embowered shrubbery which
an Englishman so loves to build and plant around his abode, presenting
to the public only an iron gate, with a gravelled carriage-drive winding
away towards the half-hidden mansion. Whether in street or suburb,
Leamington may fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points,
magnificent; but by-and-by you become doubtfully suspicious of a
somewhat unreal finery: it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it
has been built, with malice aforethought, as a place of gentility and
enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as
they often are, there is a nameless something about them, betokening
that they have not grown out of human hearts, but are the creations of a
skilfully applied human intellect: no man has reared any one of them,
whether stately or humble, to be his life-long residence, wherein to
bring up his children, who are to inherit it as a home. They are nicely
contrived lodging-houses, one and all,--the best as well as the
shabbiest of them,--and therefore inevitably lack some nameless property
that a home should have. This was the case with our own little snuggery
in Lansdowne Circus, as with all the rest: it had not grown out of
anybody's individual need, but was built to let or sell, and was
therefore like a ready-made garment,--a tolerable fit, but only
tolerable.
All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas are adorned with the
finest and most aristocratic names that I have found anywhere in
England, except, perhaps, in Bath, which is the great metropolis of that
second-class gentility with which watering-places are chiefly populated.
Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne Circus, Lansdowne Terrace, Regent Street,
Warwick Street, Clarendon Street, the Upper and Lower Parade: such are a
few of the designations. Parade, indeed, is a well-chosen name for the
principal street, along which the population of the idle town draws
itself out for daily review and display. I only wish that my descriptive
powers would enable me to throw off a picture of the scene at a sunny
noontide, individualizing each character with a touch: the great people
alighting from their carriages at the principal shop-doors; the elderly
ladies and infirm Indian officers drawn along in Bath-chairs; the
comely, rather than pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy
bloom, which an American taste is apt to deem fitter for a milkmaid than
for a lady; the moustached gentlemen with frogged surtouts and a
military air; the nursemaids and chubby children, but no chubbier than
our own, and scampering on slenderer legs; the sturdy figure of John
Bull in all varieties and of all ages, but ever with the stamp of
authenticity somewhere about him.
To say the truth, I have been holding the pen over my paper, purposing
to write a descriptive paragraph or two about the throng on the
principal Parade of Leamington, so arranging it as to present a sketch
of the British out-of-door aspect on a morning walk of gentility; but I
find no personages quite sufficiently distinct and individual in my
memory to supply the materials of such a panorama. Oddly enough, the
only figure that comes fairly forth to my mind's eye is that of a
dowager, one of hundreds whom I used to marvel at, all over England, but
who have scarcely a representative among our own ladies of autumnal
life, so thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually makes the latter. I
have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain
their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that
an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate
the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English
lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so
far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people class
under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not
pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive
with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully
against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and
sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits
down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she
looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by
the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably
credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can
fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, not always
positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth
and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much
well-founded self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils,
troubles, and dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a
foe. Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or,
indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a
seventy-four gun-ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself
that there is no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous
would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort
to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a
hundredfold--better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed
and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the
English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, and
strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher
physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in
society, and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found
powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy
outside of the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.
You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the
recollection. But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny
arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding
development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle
to howl at in such an overblown cabbage-rose as this.
Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest,
slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has
unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very
seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender
womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other,
our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable
moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an
outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder
whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married
to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride,
since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he
ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the
matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three-fourths of the wife
that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter
of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to
insist upon the celebration of a Silver Wedding at the end of
twenty-five years, in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that
corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into
possession since they were pronounced one flesh?
The chief enjoyment of my several visits to Leamington lay in rural
walks about the neighborhood, and in jaunts to places of note and
interest, which are particularly abundant in that region. The high-roads
are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often
afford him the hospitality of a wayside-bench beneath a comfortable
shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go
wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad
fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of
thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills,
streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet
strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in
his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very
heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of
intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for,
with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the
public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their
antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the
aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the natural flow of
intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever
since. An American fanner would plough across any such path, and
obliterate it with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is
protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably
springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined footprints of
centuries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English
nostrils: we pull them up as weeds.
I remember such a path, the access to which is from Lovers' Grove, a
range of tall old oaks and elms on a high hill-top, whence there is a
view of Warwick Castle, and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful,
though bedimmed with English mist. This particular foot-path, however,
is not a remarkably good specimen of its kind, since it leads into no
hollows and seclusions, and soon terminates in a high-road. It connects
Leamington by a short cut with the small neighboring village of
Lillington, a place which impresses an American observer with its many
points of contrast to the rural aspects of his own country. The village
consists chiefly of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated only by
party-walls, but ill-matched among themselves, being of different
heights, and apparently of various ages, though all are of an antiquity
which we should call venerable. Some of the windows are leaden-framed
lattices, opening on hinges. These houses are mostly built of gray
stone; but others, in the same range, are of brick, and one or two are
in a very old fashion,--Elizabethan, or still older,--having a ponderous
framework of oak, painted black, and filled in with plastered stone or
bricks. Judging by the patches of repair, the oak seems to be the more
durable part of the structure. Some of the roofs are covered with
earthen tiles; others (more decayed and poverty-stricken) with thatch,
out of which sprouts a luxurious vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and
yellow flowers. What especially strikes an American is the lack of that
insulated space, the intervening gardens, grass-plots, orchards,
broad-spreading shade-trees, which occur between our own village-houses.
These English dwellings have no such separate surroundings; they all
grow together, like the cells of a honey-comb.
Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it by a turn of the
road, there was another row (or block, as we should call it) of small,
old cottages, stuck one against another, with their thatched roofs
forming a single contiguity. These, I presume, were the habitations of
the poorest order of rustic laborers; and the narrow precincts of each
cottage, as well as the close neighborhood of the whole, gave the
impression of a stifled, unhealthy atmosphere among the occupants. It
seemed impossible that there should be a cleanly reserve, a proper
self-respect among individuals, or a wholesome unfamiliarity between
families, where human life was crowded and massed into such intimate
communities as these. Nevertheless, not to look beyond the outside, I
never saw a prettier rural scene than was presented by this range of
contiguous huts; for in front of the whole row was a luxuriant and
well-trimmed hawthorn hedge, and belonging to each cottage was a little
square of garden-ground, separated from its neighbors by a line of the
same verdant fence. The gardens were chock-full, not of esculent
vegetables, but of flowers, familiar ones, but very bright-colored, and
shrubs of box, some of which were trimmed into artistic shapes; and I
remember, before one door, a representation of Warwick Castle, made of
oyster-shells. The cottagers evidently loved the little nests in which
they dwelt, and did their best to make them beautiful, and succeeded
more than tolerably well,--so kindly did Nature help their humble
efforts with its verdure, flowers, moss, lichens, and the green things
that grew out of the thatch. Through some of the open door-ways we saw
plump children rolling about on the stone floors, and their mothers, by
no means very pretty, but as happy-looking as mothers generally are; and
while we gazed at these domestic matters, an old woman rushed wildly out
of one of the gates, upholding a shovel, on which she clanged and
clattered with a key. At first we fancied that she intended an onslaught
against ourselves, but soon discovered that a more dangerous enemy was
abroad; for the old lady's bees had swarmed, and the air was full of
them, whizzing by our heads like bullets.
Not far from these two rows of houses and cottages, a green lane,
overshadowed with trees, turned aside from the main road, and tended
towards a square, gray tower, the battlements of which were just high
enough to be visible above the foliage. Wending our way thitherward, we
found the very picture and ideal of a country-church and church-yard.
The tower seemed to be of Norman architecture, low, massive, and crowned
with battlements. The body of the church was of very modest dimensions,
and the eaves so low that I could touch them with my walking-stick. We
looked into the windows, and beheld the dim and quiet interior, a narrow
space, but venerable with the consecration of many centuries, and
keeping its sanctity as entire and inviolate as that of a vast
cathedral. The nave was divided from the side aisles of the church by
pointed arches resting on very sturdy pillars: it was good to see how
solemnly they held themselves to their age-long task of supporting that
lowly roof. There was a small organ, suited in size to the vaulted
hollow, which it weekly filled with religious sound. On the opposite
wall of the church, between two windows, was a mural tablet of white
marble, with an inscription in black letters,--the only such memorial
that I could discern, although many dead people doubtless lay beneath
the floor, and had paved it with their ancient tombstones, as is
customary in old English churches. There were no modern painted windows,
flaring with raw colors, nor other gorgeous adornments, such as the
present taste for medieval restoration often patches upon the decorous
simplicity of the gray village-church. It is probably the
worshipping-place of no more distinguished a congregation than the
farmers and peasantry who inhabit the houses and cottages which I have
just described. Had the lord of the manor been one of the parishioners,
there would have been an eminent pew near the chancel, walled high
about, curtained, and softly cushioned, warmed by a fireplace of its
own, and distinguished by hereditary tablets and escutcheons on the
inclosed stone pillar.
A well-trodden path led across the church-yard, and the gate being on
the latch, we entered, and walked round among the graves and monuments.
The latter were chiefly head-stones, none of which were very old, so far
as was discoverable by the dates; some, indeed, in so ancient a
cemetery, were disagreeably new, with inscriptions glittering like
sunshine, in gold letters. The ground must have been dug over and over
again, innumerable times, until the soil is made up of what was once
human clay, out of which have sprung successive crops of gravestones,
that flourish their allotted time, and disappear, like the weeds and
flowers in their briefer period. The English climate is very unfavorable
to the endurance of memorials in the open air. Twenty years of it
suffice to give as much antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone or
edifice, as a hundred years of our own drier atmosphere,--so soon do the
drizzly rains and constant moisture corrode the surface of marble or
freestone. Sculptured edges lose their sharpness in a year or two;
yellow lichens overspread a beloved name, and obliterate it while it is
yet fresh upon some survivor's heart. Time gnaws an English gravestone
with wonderful appetite; and when the inscription is quite illegible,
the sexton takes the useless slab away, and perhaps makes a hearthstone
of it, and digs up the unripe bones which it ineffectually tried to
memorialize, and gives the bed to another sleeper. In the Charter-Street
burial-ground at Salem, and in the old graveyard on the hill at Ipswich,
I have seen more ancient gravestones, with legible inscriptions on them,
than in any English church-yard.
And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile as it generally is to the
long remembrance of departed people, has sometimes a lovely way of
dealing with the records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in
the open air. The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and
has scarcely time to be dried away before another shower sprinkles the
flat stone again, and replenishes those little reservoirs. The unseen,
mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into the lettered furrows, and
are made to germinate by the continual moisture and watery sunshine of
the English sky; and by-and-by, in a year, or two years, or many years,
behold the complete inscription--HERE LIETH THE BODY, and all the rest
of the tender falsehood--beautifully embossed in raised letters of
living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab! It becomes
more legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has forgotten
the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's hands. It
outlives the grief of friends. I first saw an example of this in
Bebbington church-yard, in Cheshire, and thought that Nature must needs
have had a special tenderness for the person (no noted man, however, in
the world's history) so long ago laid beneath that stone, since she took
such wonderful pains to "keep his memory green." Perhaps the proverbial
phrase just quoted may have had its origin in the natural phenomenon
here described.
While we rested ourselves on a horizontal monument, which was elevated
just high enough to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of the
gravestones lay very close to the church,--so close that the droppings
of the eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that
grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. On closer inspection,
we found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty
made out this forlorn verse:--
"Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried."
It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life,
death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least,
we found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced
letters. The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise
towards it, the head-stone being within about three feet of the
foundation-wall; so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have
been doubled up to fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that
his epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well
as I could make it out, was Treeo,--John Treeo, I think,--and he died in
1810, at the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with
grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and crumbly with
time and foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever
be at the trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad
kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do
it) the probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a
little sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him
better and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in
Lillington church-yard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast
of them all.
You find similar old churches and villages in all the neighboring
country, at the distance of every two or three miles; and I describe
them, not as being rare, but because they are so common and
characteristic. The village of Whitnash, within twenty minutes' walk of
Leamington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed by the
fashions of to-day, as if Doctor Jephson had never developed all those
Parades and Crescents out of his magic well. I used to wonder whether
the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate
of progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. As you
approach the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall,
overshadowing canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate
to follow the public road, on account of the remoteness that seems to
exist between the precincts of this old-world community and the thronged
modern street out of which you have so recently emerged. Venturing
onward, however, you soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and
see an irregular ring of ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the
village-green, on one side of which stands the church, with its square
Norman tower and battlements, while close adjoining is the vicarage,
made picturesque by peaks and gables. At first glimpse, none of the
houses appear to be less than two or three centuries old, and they are
of the ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with thatched roofs, which give
them the air of birds' nests, thereby assimilating them closely to the
simplicity of Nature.
The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time; it has narrow
loop-holes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over
the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and
irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight.
Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the
projections of the architecture. The church-yard is very small, and is
encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church
itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of
incalculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty
head of foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which
perhaps was in its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash.
A thousand years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew.
We were pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of
more youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for
the faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk,
which had become hollow with long decay. On one side of the yew stood a
framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks: a public
institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church-yard. It is not to be
supposed, however, that this old-fashioned mode of punishment is still
in vogue among the good people of Whitnash. The vicar of the parish has
antiquarian propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks out of
some dusty hiding-place, and set them up on their former site as a
curiosity.
I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to hit upon some
characteristic feature, or assemblage of features, that shall convey to
the reader the influence of hoar antiquity lingering into the present
daylight, as I so often felt it in these old English scenes. It is only
an American who can feel it; and even he begins to find himself growing
insensible to its effect, after a long residence in England. But while
you are still new in the old country, it thrills you with strange
emotion to think that this little church of Whitnash, humble as it
seems, stood for ages under the Catholic faith, and has not materially
changed since Wickcliffe's days, and that it looked as gray as now in
Bloody Mary's time, and that Cromwell's troopers broke off the stone
noses of those same gargoyles that are now grinning in your face. So,
too, with the immemorial yew-tree: you see its great roots grasping hold
of the earth like gigantic claws, clinging so sturdily that no effort of
time can wrench them away; and there being life in the old tree, you
feel all the more as if a contemporary witness were telling you of the
things that have been. It has lived among men, and been a familiar
object to them, and seen them brought to be christened and married and
buried in the neighboring church and church-yard, through so many
centuries, that it knows all about our race, so far as fifty generations
of the Whitnash people can supply such knowledge. And, after all, what a
weary life it must have been for the old tree! Tedious beyond
imagination! Such, I think, is the final impression on the mind of an
American visitor, when his delight at finding something permanent begins
to yield to his Western love of change, and he becomes sensible of the
heavy air of a spot where the forefathers and foremothers have grown up
together, intermarried, and died, through a long succession of lives,
without any intermixture of new elements, till family features and
character are all run in the same inevitable mould. Life is there
fossilized in its greenest leaf. The man who died yesterday or ever so
long ago walks the village-street to-day, and chooses the same wife that
he married a hundred years since, and must be buried again to-morrow
under the same kindred dust that has already covered him half a score of
times. The stone threshold of his cottage is worn away with his
hob-nailed footsteps, scuffling over it from the reign of the first
Plantagenet to that of Victoria. Better than this is the lot of our
restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards
"fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish
ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields,
listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray
Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,--change of
place, social customs, political institutions, modes of
worship,--trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will
but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe
his life in them, and to fling them off in turn.
Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts growth and change as
the law of his own national and private existence, he has a singular
tenderness for the stone-incrusted institutions of the mother-country.
The reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous explanation)
that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her
joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of improvement. I
hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in
England. Yet change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash. At a
subsequent visit, looking more critically at the irregular circle of
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the church, I
perceived that some of the houses must have been built within no long
time, although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old oaken
framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole
assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair and restoration,
which is but another name for change. Masons were making patchwork on
the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up
bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or enlarge the ancient edifice by an
additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the
church-yard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two-thirds of which
profundity were discolored by human decay and mixed up with crumbly
bones. What this excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine,
unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury
its Dead," and Whitnash, of all places in the world, were going to avail
itself of our poet's suggestion. If so, it must needs be confessed that
many picturesque and delightful things would be thrown into the hole,
and covered out of sight forever.
The article which I am writing has taken its own course, and occupied
itself almost wholly with country churches; whereas I had purposed to
attempt a description of some of the many old towns--Warwick, Coventry,
Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon--which lie within an easy scope of
Leamington. And still another church presents itself to my remembrance.
It is that of Hatton, on which I stumbled in the course of a forenoon's
ramble, and paused a little while to look at it for the sake of old
Doctor Parr, who was once its vicar. Hatton, so far as I could discover,
has no public-house, no shop, no contiguity of roofs, (as in most
English villages, however small,) but is merely an ancient neighborhood
of farm-houses, spacious, and standing wide apart, each within its own
precincts, and offering a most comfortable aspect of orchards,
harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of rural plenty. It seemed
to be a community of old settlers, among whom everything had been going
on prosperously since an epoch beyond the memory of man; and they kept a
certain privacy among themselves, and dwelt on a cross-road at the
entrance of which was a barred gate, hospitably open, but still
impressing me with a sense of scarcely warrantable intrusion. After all,
in some shady nook of those gentle Warwickshire slopes there may have
been a denser and more populous settlement, styled Hatton, which I never
reached.
Emerging from the by-road, and entering upon one that crossed it at
right angles and led to Warwick, I espied the church of Doctor Parr.
Like the others which I have described, it had a low stone tower,
square, and battlemented at its summit: for all these little churches
seem to have been built on the same model, and nearly at the same
measurement, and have even a greater family-likeness than the
cathedrals. As I approached, the bell of the tower (a remarkably
deep-toned bell, considering how small it was) flung its voice abroad,
and told me that it was noon. The church stands among its graves, a
little removed from the wayside, quite apart from any collection of
houses, and with no signs of a vicarage; it is a good deal shadowed by
trees, and not wholly destitute of ivy. The body of the edifice,
unfortunately, (and it is an outrage which the English churchwardens are
fond of perpetrating,) has been newly covered with a yellowish plaster
or wash, so as quite to destroy the aspect of antiquity, except upon the
tower, which wears the dark gray hue of many centuries. The
chancel-window is painted with a representation of Christ upon the
Cross, and all the other windows are full of painted or stained glass,
but none of it ancient, nor (if it be fair to judge from without of what
ought to be seen within) possessing any of the tender glory that should
be the inheritance of this branch of Art, revived from mediaeval times.
I stepped over the graves, and peeped in at two or three of the windows,
and saw the snug interior of the church glimmering through the
many-colored panes, like a show of commonplace objects under the
fantastic influence of a dream: for the floor was covered with modern
pews, very like what we may see in a New-England meeting-house, though,
I think, a little more favorable than those would be to the quiet
slumbers of the Hatton farmers and their families. Those who slept under
Doctor Parr's preaching now prolong their nap, I suppose, in the
church-yard round about, and can scarcely have drawn much spiritual
benefit from any truths that he contrived to tell them in their
lifetime. It struck me as a rare example (even where examples are
numerous) of a man utterly misplaced, that this enormous scholar, great
in the classic tongues, and inevitably converting his own simplest
vernacular into a learned language, should have been set up in this
homely pulpit, and ordained to preach salvation to a rustic audience, to
whom it is difficult to imagine how he could ever have spoken one
available word.
Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I have been attempting to
describe, I had a singular sense of having been there before. The
ivy-grown English churches (even that of Bebbington, the first that I
beheld) were quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old
wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the
frozen purgatory of my childhood. This was a bewildering, yet very
delightful emotion, fluttering about me like a faint summer-wind, and
filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, which looked
as vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I
attempted to grasp and define them. Of course, the explanation of the
mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the
talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the
common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by
a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among the images of
things actually seen. Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of
innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents,
to my own. I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person,
returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years,
and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly
changed during his long absence,--the same shady by-paths and
hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and
fields,--while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by
disuse, were reviving at every step.
An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on
whatever length of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could
give it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a curious
and inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up
what they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America. They
will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them
as their bitter ale. Therefore--and possibly, too, from a similar
narrowness in his own character--an American seldom feels quite as if he
were at home among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased to be
an American. But it requires no long residence to make him love their
island, and appreciate it as thoroughly as they themselves do. For my
part, I used to wish that we could annex it, transferring their thirty
millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in the great West,
and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places.
The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry
atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated,
unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the
other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted,
material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries
he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw. Heretofore
Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien
races with the old English stock; so that each successive conquest of
England has proved a victory, by the revivification and improvement of
its native manhood. Cannot America and England hit upon some scheme to
secure even greater advantages to both nations?