I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps
no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the
supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters
and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than
at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel,
which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even
a ticking, clock in the transom above one’s bedroom door; but the like
type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal
in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it
is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is
more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting
the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to
be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains,
when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and
filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their
stations; but in England they
“Come like shadows, so depart,”
and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
I
These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder
of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and
it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the
beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The
morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague
all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging
monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals;
one could really give one’s self up to serious emotion, and not be
sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester
has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
cathedral was simply T’ Owd Church, and in this character it is still
venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver
Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call
it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least
not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or
despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a
monument there if anywhere.
[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy
is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the
king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr
of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the
still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks
of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was
a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the
Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the
Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town
which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such
a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton
socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer,
but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in
Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of
the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found.
In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be
bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange
madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however,
it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac.
Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the
Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of
August was not the beginning of November.