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 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. Leonards, 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 through
street scenery than I had done since I last measured the populated
length of Broadway. This is not an image that evokes any one of the
graces, 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 graceful, or at least 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 enquiring mind, it had rather
quickened than quenched my interest. It occurred to me that it might
be as entertaining to follow out the variations of Brighton, the
possible embroideries of the theme, as it is often found to listen
to those with which some expressed musical idea is overscored by
another composer. 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 gentlemen 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 scene a kind
of cheerful, easy, more or less vulgar, foreign air. But Hastings is
very grey 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, if not absurd. 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.
[Illustration: THE FRONT, BRIGHTON]
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 friend 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, at need, is able to look over your head
to a still further point. 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 feather-bed quality of the welcome extended to
me at the Swan. Once established there, in a sitting-room (after all),
the whole affair had all the local colour 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 consistencies, and that in an age in which
the conception of good manners is losing most of its ancient firmness
one should do justice to an institution that is still more or less of
a stronghold of the faded 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 curtsy, 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 waiterhood. 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 résistance_; 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 the analytic spirit. 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 was 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 sea-front 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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]