CHESTER

If the Atlantic voyage be counted, as it certainly may, even with the

ocean in a fairly good humour, an emphatic zero in the sum of one’s

better experience, the American traveller arriving at this venerable

town finds himself transported, without a sensible gradation, from

the edge of the new world to the very heart of the old. It is almost

a misfortune perhaps that Chester lies so close to the threshold of

England; for it is so rare and complete a specimen of an antique town

that the later-coming wonders of its sisters in renown,—of Shrewsbury,

Coventry, and York—suffer a trifle by comparison, and the tourist’s

appetite for the picturesque just loses its finer edge. Yet the first

impressions of an observant American in England—of our old friend the

sentimental tourist—stir up within him such a cloud of sensibility

that while the charm is still unbroken he may perhaps as well dispose

mentally of the greater as of the less. I have been playing at first

impressions for the second time, and have won the game against a

cynical adversary. I have been strolling and restrolling along the

ancient wall—so perfect in its antiquity—which locks this dense little

city in its stony circle, with a certain friend who has been treating

me to a bitter lament on the decay of his relish for the picturesque.

“I have turned the corner of youth,” is his ceaseless plaint; “I

suspected it, but now I know it—now that my heart beats but once

where it beat a dozen times before, and that where I found sermons in

stones and pictures in meadows, delicious revelations and intimations

ineffable, I find nothing but the hard, heavy prose of British

civilisation.” But little by little I have grown used to my friend’s

sad monody, and indeed feel half indebted to it as a warning against

cheap infatuations.

I defied him, at any rate, to argue successfully against the effect of

the brave little walls of Chester. There could be no better example

of that phenomenon so delightfully frequent in England—an ancient

property or institution lovingly readopted and consecrated to some

modern amenity. The good Cestrians may boast of their walls without

a shadow of that mental reservation on grounds of modern ease which

is so often the tax paid by the romantic; and I can easily imagine

that, though most modern towns contrive to get on comfortably without

this stony girdle, these people should have come to regard theirs as a

prime necessity. For through it, surely, they may know their city more

intimately than their unbuckled neighbours—survey it, feel it, rejoice

in it as many times a day as they please. The civic consciousness,

sunning itself thus on the city’s rim and glancing at the little

swarming towered and gabled town within, and then at the blue

undulations of the near Welsh border, may easily deepen to delicious

complacency. The wall enfolds the place in a continuous ring, which,

passing through innumerable picturesque vicissitudes, often threatens

to snap, but never fairly breaks the link; so that, starting at any

point, an hour’s easy stroll will bring you back to your station. I

have quite lost my heart to this charming creation, and there are so

many things to be said about it that I hardly know where to begin.

The great fact, I suppose, is that it contains a Roman substructure,

rests for much of its course on foundations laid by that race of

master-builders. But in spite of this sturdy origin, much of which is

buried in the well-trodden soil of the ages, it is the gentlest and

least offensive of ramparts; it completes its long irregular curve

without a frown or menace in all its disembattled stretch. The earthy

deposit of time has indeed in some places climbed so high about its

base that it amounts to no more than a causeway of modest dimensions.

It has everywhere, however, a rugged outer parapet and a broad hollow

flagging, wide enough for two strollers abreast. Thus equipped, it

wanders through its adventurous circuit; now sloping, now bending, now

broadening into a terrace, now narrowing into an alley, now swelling

into an arch, now dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened

garden, and now reminding you that it was once a more serious matter

than all this by the extrusion of a rugged, ivy-smothered tower.

[Illustration: CHESTER HIGH STREET]

Its final hoary humility is enhanced, to your mind, by the freedom

with which you may approach it from any point in the town. Every few

steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward it

through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element

of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American

eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is

the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling

in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness—of those

random corners, projections, and recesses, odd domestic interspaces

charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises

and caprices and fantasies which lead to such refreshing exercise a

vision benumbed by brown-stone fronts. An American is born to the idea

that on his walks abroad it is perpetual level wall ahead of him, and

such a revelation as he finds here of infinite accident and infinite

effect gives a wholly novel zest to the use of his eyes. It produces

too the reflection—a superficial and fallacious one perhaps—that amid

all this cunning chiaroscuro of its _mise en scène_ life must have

more of a certain homely entertainment. It is at least no fallacy

to say that childhood—or the later memory of childhood—must borrow

from such a background a kind of anecdotical wealth. We all know

how in the retrospect of later moods the incidents of early youth

“compose,” visibly, each as an individual picture, with a magic for

which the greatest painters have no corresponding art. There is a

vivid reflection of this magic in some of the early pages of Dickens’s

“Copperfield” and of George Eliot’s “Mill on the Floss,” the writers

having had the happiness of growing up among old, old things. Two or

three of the phases of this rambling wall belong especially to the

class of things fondly remembered. In one place it skirts the edge of

the cathedral graveyard and sweeps beneath the great square tower and

behind the sacred east window of the choir.

Of the cathedral there is more to say; but just the spot I speak

of is the best standpoint for feeling how fine an influence in the

architectural line—where theoretically, at least, influences are

great—is the massive tower of an English abbey, dominating the homes of

men; and for watching the eddying flight of swallows make vaster still

to the eye the high calm fields of stonework. At another point two

battered and crumbling towers, decaying in their winding-sheets of ivy,

make a prodigiously designed diversion. One inserted in the body of

the wall and the other connected with it by a short, crumbling ridge of

masonry, they contribute to a positive jumble of local colour. A shaded

mall wanders at the foot of the rampart; beside this passes a narrow

canal, with locks and barges and burly watermen in smocks and breeches;

while the venerable pair of towers, with their old red sandstone sides

peeping through the gaps in their green mantles, rest on the soft

grass of one of those odd fragments of public garden, a crooked strip

of ground turned to social account, which one meets at every turn,

apparently, in England—a tribute to the needs of the “masses.” _Stat

magni nominis umbra._ The quotation is doubly pertinent here, for this

little garden-strip is adorned with mossy fragments of Roman stonework,

bits of pavement, altars, baths, disinterred in the local soil. England

is the land of small economies, and the present rarely fails to find

good use for the odds and ends of the past. These two hoary shells of

masonry are therefore converted into “museums,” receptacles for the

dustiest and shabbiest of tawdry back-parlour curiosities. Here preside

a couple of those grotesque creatures, _à la_ Dickens, whom one finds

squeezed into every cranny of English civilisation, scraping a thin

subsistence like mites in a mouldy cheese.

Next after its wall—possibly even before it—Chester values its Rows,

an architectural idiosyncrasy which must be seen to be appreciated.

They are a sort of gothic edition of the blessed arcades and porticoes

of Italy, and consist, roughly speaking, of a running public passage

tunnelled through the second story of the houses. The low basement is

thus directly on the drive-way, to which a flight of steps descends,

at frequent intervals, from this superincumbent verandah. The upper

portion of the houses projects to the outer line of the gallery, where

they are propped with pillars and posts and parapets. The shop-fronts

face along the arcade and admit you to little caverns of traffic, more

or less dusky according to their opportunities for illumination in

the rear. If the romantic be measured by its hostility to our modern

notions of convenience, Chester is probably the most romantic city

in the world. This arrangement is endlessly rich in opportunities for

amusing effect, but the full charm of the architecture of which it is

so essential a part must be observed from the street below. Chester

is still an antique town, and mediæval England sits bravely under

her gables. Every third house is a “specimen”—gabled and latticed,

timbered and carved, and wearing its years more or less lightly.

These ancient dwellings present every shade and degree of historical

colour and expression. Some are dark with neglect and deformity, and

the horizontal slit admitting light into the lurking Row seems to

collapse on its dislocated props like a pair of toothless old jaws.

Others stand there square-shouldered and sturdy, with their beams

painted and straightened, their plaster whitewashed, their carvings

polished, and the low casement covering the breadth of the frontage

adorned with curtains and flower-pots. It is noticeable that the

actual townsfolk have bravely accepted the situation bequeathed by

the past, and the large number of rich and intelligent restorations

of the old façades makes an effective jumble of their piety and their

policy. These elaborate and ingenious repairs attest a highly informed

consciousness of the pictorial value of the city. I indeed suspect much

of this revived innocence of having recovered a freshness that never

can have been, of having been restored with usurious interest. About

the genuine antiques there would be properly a great deal to say, for

they are really a theme for the philosopher; but the theme is too heavy

for my pen, and I can give them but the passing tribute of a sigh.

They are cruelly quaint, dreadfully expressive. Fix one of them with

your gaze and it seems fairly to reek with mortality. Every stain and

crevice seems to syllable some human record—a record of lives airless

and unlighted. I have been trying hard to fancy them animated by the

children of “Merry England,” but I am quite unable to think of them

save as peopled by the victims of dismal old-world pains and fears.

Human life, surely, packed away behind those impenetrable lattices

of lead and bottle-glass, just above which the black outer beam marks

the suffocating nearness of the ceiling, can have expanded into scant

freedom and bloomed into small sweetness.

[Illustration: THE ROWS, CHESTER]

Nothing has struck me more in my strolls along the Rows than the fact

that the most zealous observation can keep but uneven pace with the

fine differences in national manners. Some of the most sensible of

these differences are yet so subtle and indefinable that one must give

up the attempt to express them, though the omission leave but a rough

sketch. As you pass with the bustling current from shop to shop you

feel local custom and tradition—another tone of things—pressing on you

from every side. The tone of things is somehow heavier than with us;

manners and modes are more absolute and positive; they seem to swarm

and to thicken the atmosphere about you. Morally and physically it is a

denser air than ours. We seem loosely hung together at home as compared

with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place. It

is not an inferential but a palpable fact that England is a crowded

country. There is stillness and space—grassy, oak-studded space—at

Eaton Hall, where the Marquis of Westminster dwells (or I believe can

afford to humour his notion of not dwelling), but there is a crowd and

a hubbub in Chester. Wherever you go the population has overflowed.

You stroll on the walls at eventide and you hardly find elbow-room. You

haunt the cathedral shades and a dozen sauntering mortals temper your

solitude. You glance up an alley or side street and discover populous

windows and doorsteps. You roll along country roads and find countless

humble pedestrians dotting the green waysides. The English landscape

is always a “landscape with figures.” And everywhere you go you are

accompanied by a vague consciousness of the British child hovering

about your knees and coat-skirts, naked, grimy, and portentous. You

reflect with a sort of physical relief on Australia, Canada, India.

Where there are many men, of course, there are many needs; which

helps to justify to the philosophic stranger the vast number and the

irresistible coquetry of the little shops which adorn these low-browed

Rows. The shop-fronts have always seemed to me the most elegant things

in England; and I waste more time than I should care to confess to in

covetous contemplation of the vast, clear panes behind which the nether

integuments of gentlemen are daintily suspended from glittering brass

rods. The manners of the dealers in these comfortable wares seldom fail

to confirm your agreeable impression. You are thanked with effusion for

expending twopence—a fact of deep significance to the truly analytic

mind, and which always seems to me a vague reverberation from certain

of Miss Edgeworth’s novels, perused in childhood. When you think of the

small profits, the small jealousies, the long waiting and the narrow

margin for evil days implied by this redundancy of shops and shopmen,

you hear afresh the steady rumble of that deep keynote of English

manners, overscored so often, and with such sweet beguilement, by finer

harmonies, but never extinguished—the economic struggle for existence.

[Illustration: CHESTER CATHEDRAL, WEST FRONT]

The Rows are as “scenic” as one could wish, and it is a pity that

before the birth of their modern consciousness there was no English

Balzac to introduce them into a realistic romance with a psychological

commentary. But the cathedral is better still, modestly as it stands

on the roll of English abbeys. It is of moderate dimensions and

rather meagre in form and ornament; but to an American it expresses

and answers for the type, producing thereby the proper vibrations.

Among these is a certain irresistible regret that so much of its

hoary substance should give place to the fine, fresh-coloured masonry

with which Mr. Gilbert Scott, ruthless renovator, is so intelligently

investing it. The red sandstone of the primitive structure, darkened

and devoured by time, survives at many points in frowning mockery of

the imputed need of tinkering. The great tower, however,—completely

restored,—rises high enough to seem to belong, as cathedral towers

should, to the far-off air that vibrates with the chimes and the

swallows, and to square serenely, east and west and south and north,

its embossed and fluted sides. English cathedrals, within, are apt at

first to look pale and naked; but after a while, if the proportions be

fair and the spaces largely distributed, when you perceive the light

beating softly down from the cold clerestory and your eye measures

caressingly the tallness of columns and the hollowness of arches, and

lingers on the old genteel inscriptions of mural marbles and brasses;

and, above all, when you become conscious of that sweet, cool mustiness

in the air which seems to haunt these places as the very climate of

Episcopacy, you may grow to feel that they are less the empty shells

of a departed faith than the abodes of a faith which may still affirm

a presence and awaken echoes. Catholicism has gone, but Anglicanism

has the next best music. So at least it seemed to me, a Sunday or

two since, as I sat in the choir at Chester awaiting a discourse from

Canon Kingsley. The Anglican service had never seemed to my profane

sense so much an affair of magnificent intonations and cadences—of

pompous effects of resonance and melody. The vast oaken architecture

of the stalls among which we nestled—somewhat stiffly and with a due

apprehension of wounded ribs and knees—climbing vainly against the

dizzier reach of the columns; the beautiful English voices of certain

officiating canons, the little rosy “king’s scholars” sitting ranged

beneath the pulpit, in white-winged surplices, which made their heads,

above the pew-edges, look like rows of sleepy cherubs: every element in

the scene gave it a great spectacular beauty. They suggested too what

is suggested in England at every turn, that conservatism here has all

the charm and leaves dissent and democracy and other vulgar variations

nothing but their bald logic. Conservatism has the cathedrals, the

colleges, the castles, the gardens, the traditions, the associations,

the fine names, the better manners, the poetry; Dissent has the dusky

brick chapels in provincial by-streets, the names out of Dickens, the

uncertain tenure of the _h_, and the poor _mens sibi conscia recti_.

Differences which in other countries are slight and varying, almost

metaphysical, as one may say, are marked in England by a gulf. Nowhere

else does the degree of one’s respectability involve such solid

consequences, and I am sure I don’t wonder that the sacramental word

which with us (and, in such correlatives as they possess, more or less

among the continental races) is pronounced lightly and facetiously

and as a quotation from the Philistines, is uttered here with a

perfectly grave face. To have the courage of one’s mere convictions

is in short to have a prodigious deal of courage, and I think one

must need as much to be a Dissenter as one needs patience not to be

a duke. Perhaps the Dissenters (to limit the question to them) manage

to stay out of the church by letting it all hang on the sermon. Canon

Kingsley’s discourse was one more example of the familiar truth—not

without its significance to minds zealous for the good old fashion of

“making an effort,”—that there is an odd link between large forms and

small emanations. The sermon, beneath that triply consecrated vault,

should have had a builded majesty. It had not; and I confess that a

tender memory of ancient obligations to the author of “Westward Ho!”

and “Hypatia” forbids my saying more of it. An American, I think, is

not incapable of taking a secret satisfaction in an incongruity of

this kind. He finds with relief that even mortals reared as in the

ring of a perpetual circus are only mortals. His constant sense of the

beautiful scenic properties of English life is apt to beget a habit of

melancholy reference to the dead-blank wall which forms the background

of our own life-drama; and from doubting in this fantastic humour

whether we have even that modest value in the scale of beauty that he

has sometimes fondly hoped, he lapses into a moody scepticism as to our

place in the scale of “importance,” and finds himself wondering vaguely

whether this be not a richer race as well as a lovelier land. That

of course will never do; so that when after being escorted down the

beautiful choir in what, from the American point of view, is an almost

gorgeous ecclesiastical march, by the Dean in a white robe trimmed

with scarlet and black-robed sacristans carrying silver wands, the

officiating canon mounts into a splendid canopied and pinnacled pulpit

of gothic stonework and proves—not an “acting” Jeremy Taylor, our poor

sentimental tourist begins to hold up his head again and to reflect

that so far as we _have_ opportunities we mostly rise to them. I am

not sure indeed that in the excess of his reaction he is not tempted

to accuse his English neighbours of being impenetrable and uninspired,

to affirm that they do not half discern their good fortune, and that it

takes passionate pilgrims, vague aliens, and other disinherited persons

to appreciate the “points” of this admirable country.

1872.

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