IV

At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I espied

from the railway train as it perched on a grassy bank beside the

widening Medway. There were other beguilements as well; the place has

a small cathedral, and, leaving the creators of Falstaff and of the

tale-telling Pilgrims out of the question, one had read about it in

Dickens, whose house of Gadshill was a couple of miles from the town.

All this Kentish country, between London and Dover, figures indeed

repeatedly in Dickens; he expresses to a certain extent, for our later

age, the spirit of the land. I found this to be quite the case at

Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a talkative

old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her counter. This

led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the house had

often, to her old-time vision, made his appearance in the town. “Oh,

bless you, sir,” she said, “we every one of us knew him to speak to. He

was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners—as he

was dead in his bed on the Friday.” (I should remark that I probably

do not repeat the days of the week as she gave them.) “He ’ad on his

black velvet suit, and it always made him look so ’andsome. I said

to my ’usband, ‘I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that

black velvet suit.’ But he said he couldn’t see as he looked any way

particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of

foreigners.” Rochester consists of little more than one long street,

stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighbouring

Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial

aspect, most of which have some small, dull smugness or quaintness of

gable or window. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the

snubby husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into

its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master

of the comic. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts

here established a charity which should furnish “six poor travellers,

not rogues or proctors,” one night’s lodging and entertainment gratis,

and fourpence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in

memory of his “munificence” the stone has lately been renewed. The

inn at Rochester had small hospitality, and I felt strongly tempted to

knock at the door of Mr. Watts’s asylum, under plea of being neither

a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveller who avails himself of the

testamentary fourpence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham

without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy

Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover to

join his aunt Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which

forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, lighted up in the dusk,

as I measured it up and down, with the red coats of the vespertinal

soldier quartered at the various barracks of Chatham.

[Illustration: ROCHESTER CASTLE]

The cathedral of Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an

awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed

and effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle.

But within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall,

the vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir

and breaks the sacred perspective of the aisle. Here, as at Canterbury,

you ascend a high range of steps, to pass through the small door in the

wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester

cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were

so happy as to have this secondary pile within reach in America we

should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow

of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old

priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street;

I remember a kind of haunted-looking deanery, if that be the technical

name, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower

that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come

circling and clamouring around it. Better still than these things, I

remember the ivy-muffled squareness of the castle, a very noble and

imposing ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little

public garden, with flowers and benches and a pavilion for a band,

and the place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The

result is agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving

the destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the

ruin. I lingered there for a long time, looking in the fading light at

what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a

great many solid things have departed; it mocks, ever so monotonously,

at destruction, at decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their

great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses,

their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an undefinable

fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when

the day begins to fail. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn

even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I

have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember in no single mass of

ruin more of the helpless, bereaved, amputated look.

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL CLOSE, CANTERBURY]

[Illustration: THE NAVE, CANTERBURY]

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral

stands amid grass and trees, with a cultivated margin all round it, and

is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house

you appreciate immediately its grand feature—its extraordinary and

magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems to sit more

gravely apart, to desire more to be shut up to itself. It is a long

walk, beneath the walls, from the gateway of the close to the farther

end of the last chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this

upward-gazing stroll I can give no detailed account; I can, in my fear

to pretend to dabble in the esoteric constructional question—often

so combined with an absence of other felt relations—speak only of

the picture, the mere builded _scène_. This is altogether delightful.

None of the rivals of Canterbury has a more complicated and elaborate

architecture, a more perplexing intermixture of periods, a more

charming jumble of Norman arches and English points and perpendiculars.

What makes the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts,

which produce the finest agglomeration of gables and buttresses. It

is as if two great churches had joined forces toward the middle—one

giving its nave and the other its choir, and each keeping its own

great cross-aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge

gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the building,

though it looks like one of the earliest, so tempered and tinted,

so thumb-marked and rubbed smooth is it, by the handling of the ages

and the breath of the elements. Like the rest of the structure it has

a magnificent colour—a sort of rich dull yellow, a sort of personal

accent of tone that is neither brown nor grey. This is particularly

appreciable from the cloisters on the further side of the church—the

side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of;

the side that looks toward a damp old clerical house, lurking behind a

brown archway through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats

playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that

is somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle—a quadrangle serving

as a playground to a King’s School and adorned externally with a

very precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This

cloister is not “kept up;” it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated,

and of course very sketchable. The old black arches and capitals are

various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of

crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass.

Out of the cloister opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up

either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble,

lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that

of a tunnel, without columns or brackets. The place is now given up

to dust and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a

council-room of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which,

raised on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls,

you may gaze up and make out the faint ghostly traces of decorative

paint and gold upon the brown ceiling. A little patch of this has been

restored “to give an idea.” From one of the angles of the cloister you

are recommended by the verger to take a view of the great tower, which

indeed detaches itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself

upon the roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and

then pile itself away to a height which seems to make the very swallows

dizzy as they drop from the topmost shelf. Within the cathedral you

hear a great deal, of course, about poor great Thomas A’Becket, and

the special sensation of the place is to stand on the spot where he

was murdered and look down at a small fragmentary slab which the verger

points out to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-drops

of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon when I first entered the

church; there had been a service in the choir, but that was well over,

and I had the place to myself. The verger, who had some pushing-about

of benches to attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left me to

wander through the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel

beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it would be more decent

to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman.

This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint

old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast, and his

pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very

handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward

Plantagenet, and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. “_De la mort ne

pensai-je mye_,” he says in the beautiful inscription embossed upon the

bronze base of his image; and I too, as I stood there, lost the sense

of death in a momentary impression of personal nearness to him. One had

been further off, after all, from other famous knights. In this same

chapel, for many a year, stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury,

one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which

lay before it has kept its place, but Henry VIII swept away everything

else in his famous short cut to reform. Becket was originally buried

in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for fifty years, and

it was only little by little that his martyrdom was made a “draw.”

Then he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust

became a priceless relic, and the pavement was hallowed by the knees of

pilgrims. It was on this errand of course that Chaucer’s story-telling

cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which

is a magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about

till I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled

the inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of

further desecration. While I stood there a violent thunderstorm broke

over the cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping

through the open sides of the crypt and, mingling with the darkness

which seemed to deepen and flash in corners and with the potent mouldy

smell, made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of

history. I emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the

evening, and I splashed back to my inn and sat, in an uncomfortable

chair by the coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley’s agreeable

“Memorials of Canterbury” and wondering over the musty appointments

and meagre resources of so many English hostels. This establishment

had entitled itself (in compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose) the

“Fleur-de-Lis.” The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to

let it attract me to the inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered.

1877.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]