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Certain delightful
English Towns
W. D. Howells
[Illustration: WESTGATE, SOUTHAMPTON]
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL
ENGLISH TOWNS
WITH GLIMPSES OF THE PLEASANT
COUNTRY BETWEEN
W. D. HOWELLS
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1906
Copyright, 1906, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published October, 1906.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH 1
II. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER 22
III. A FORTNIGHT IN BATH 39
IV. A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE 83
V. AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL 103
VI. BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON 122
VII. IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON 143
VIII. KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY 173
IX. OXFORD 193
X. THE CHARM OF CHESTER 219
XI. MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS 237
XII. SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD 257
XIII. NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY 275
ILLUSTRATIONS
WESTGATE, SOUTHAMPTON _Frontispiece_
“THE PROMENADE ... A PROMONTORY PUSHED WELL
OUT INTO THE SOUND” _Facing p._ 4
LOOKING DOWN FROM THE HOE " 8
A GROUP OF PUBLIC EDIFICES, MODERN PLYMOUTH " 10
OLD HOUSES ALOOF FROM THE WATER " 16
A BIT OF COUNTRY BETWEEN PLYMOUTH AND EXETER " 22
“IN EXETER OUR FIRST CATHEDRAL WAS WAITING US” " 24
THE CASTLE OF ROUGEMONT " 26
“THE CATHEDRAL ... A SOFT GRAY BLUR OF AGE-WORN CARVING” " 28
GREAT PULTENEY STREET " 42
THE RED-TILED HOUSE-ROOFS AND CHURCH SPIRES OF BATH " 48
CIRCUS FROM BENNET STREET " 50
THE GUINEA-PIG MAN " 80
SAXON CHAPEL AT BRADFORD " 84
KINGSTON HOUSE, BRADFORD " 88
SUTTON COURT, ONE OF ENGLAND’S HISTORIC HOUSES " 94
WELLS CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHEAST " 106
MARKET-PLACE, WELLS " 110
BRISTOL HARBOR AND DRAWBRIDGE " 112
CLIFTON, FROM ASHTON MEADOWS " 116
GORGE OF THE AVON, WITH ST. VINCENT’S ROCKS " 120
THE SOUTH SHORE, SOUTHAMPTON " 126
“THE PIER WAS A PRIVATE ENTERPRISE " 128
THE OLD TOWER WALL
“THE TRAM’S COURSE WAS LARGELY THROUGH UMBRAGEOUS AVENUES” " 140
THE BEACH, FOLKESTONE " 144
THE PIER WITH ITS PAVILION " 146
THE SHELTER UNDER THE LEAS " 148
THE FISH-MARKET AT FOLKESTONE " 150
THE ANCIENT CHURCH AT HYTHE " 156
ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH, CANTERBURY " 184
THE NORMAN STAIRCASE IN THE CLOSE--CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL " 186
MAGDALEN TOWER " 194
“A BUMP” " 200
OXFORD--LOOKING UP THE ISIS " 216
WATER-TOWER AND ROMAN REMAINS " 220
KING CHARLES’S TOWER " 224
CHESTER CASTLE " 230
MALVERN--THE TOWN " 240
THE PRIORY CHURCH--NORTH VIEW " 242
BRITISH CAMP, SHOWING ROMAN INTRENCHMENTS " 250
PRIORY CHURCH--SWAN POOL IN FOREGROUND " 254
WORCESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHWEST " 258
WORCESTER FROM THE RIVER " 260
THE ENGLISH BRIDGE " 272
THE WASHINGTON HOUSE AT LITTLE BRINGTON " 278
THE BUSINESS CENTRE OF NORTHAMPTON " 280
THE CHURCH AT GREAT BRINGTON " 286
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
I
THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
No American, complexly speaking, finds himself in England for the first
time, unless he is one of those many Americans who are not of English
extraction. It is probable, rather, that on his arrival, if he has not
yet visited the country, he has that sense of having been there before
which a simpler psychology than ours used to make much of without making
anything of. His English ancestors who really were once there stir
within him, and his American forefathers, who were nourished on the
history and literature of England, and were therefore intellectually
English, join forces in creating an English consciousness in him.
Together, they make it very difficult for him to continue a new-comer,
and it may be that only on the fourth or fifth coming shall the illusion
wear away and he find himself a stranger in a strange land. But by that
time custom may have done its misleading work, and he may be as much as
ever the prey of his first impressions. I am sure that some such result
in me will evince itself to the reader in what I shall have to say of my
brief stay with the English foster-mother of our American Plymouth; and
I hope he will not think it altogether to be regretted.
* * * * *
My first impressions of England, after a fourth or fifth visit, began
even before I landed in Plymouth, for I decided that there was something
very national in the behavior of a young Englishman who, as we neared
his native shores, varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour, in
his doubt whether a cap or a derby hat was the right wear for a
passenger about landing. He seemed also perplexed whether he should or
should not speak to some of his fellow-passengers in the safety of
parting, but having ventured, seemed to like it. On the tender which
took us from the steamer to the dock I fancied another type in the
Englishman whom I asked which was the best hotel in Plymouth. At first
he would not commit himself; then his humanity began to work in him, and
he expressed a preference, and abruptly left me. He returned directly to
give the reasons for his preference, and to excuse them, and again he
left me. A second time he came back, with his conscience fully roused,
and conjured me not to think of going elsewhere.
I thought that charming, and I afterwards found the hotel excellent, as
I found nearly all the hotels in England. I found everything delightful
on the way to it, inclusive of the cabman’s overcharge, which brought
the extortion to a full third of the just fare of a New York cabman. I
do not include the weather, which was hesitating a bitter little rain,
but I do include the behavior of the customs officer, who would do not
more than touch, with averted eyes, the contents of the single piece of
baggage which he had me open. When it came to paying the two hand-cart
men three shillings for bringing up the trunks, which it would have
cost me three dollars to transport from the steamer to a hotel at home,
I did not see why I should not save money for the rest of my life by
becoming naturalized in England, and making it my home, unless it was
because it takes so long to become naturalized there that I might not
live to economize much.
It was with a pleasure much more distinct than any subliminal intimation
that I saw again the office-ladies in our hotel. Personally, they were
young strangers, but officially they were old friends, and quite as I
had seen them first forty years ago, or last a brief seven; only once
they wore bangs or fringes over their bright, unintelligent eyes, and
now they wore Mamie loops. But they were, as always, very neatly and
prettily dressed, and they had the well-remembered difficulty of
functionally differencing themselves to the traveller’s needs, so that
which he should ask for a room and which for letters and which for a
candle and which for his bill, remains a doubt to the end. From time to
time with an exchange of puzzled glances, they unite in begging him to
ask the head porter, please, for whatever it is he wants to know. They
all seem of equal authority, but suddenly and quite casually the real
superior appears among them. She is the manageress, and I never saw a
manager at an English hotel except once, and that was in Wales. But the
English theory of hotel-keeping seems to be house-keeping enlarged; a
manageress is therefore more logical than a manager, and practically the
excellence of English hotels attests that a manager could not be more
efficient.
One of the young office-ladies, you never can know which it will be,
gives you a little disk of pasteboard with the number and sometimes the
price of your room on it, but the key is an after-thought of your own.
You apply for it on going down to dinner, but in nearly all provincial
hotels it is safe to leave your door unlocked. At any rate I did so with
impunity. This was all new to me, but a greater novelty which greeted us
was the table d’hôte, which has nearly everywhere in England replaced
the old-time dinner off the joint. You may still have that if you will,
but not quite on the old imperative terms. The joint is now the roast
from the table d’hôte, and you can take it with soup and vegetables and
a sweet. But if you have become wonted to the superabundance of a German
steamer you will not find all the courses too many for you, and you will
find them very good. At least you will at first: what is it that does
not pall at last? Let it be magnanimously owned at the outset then,
while one has the heart, that the cooking of any English hotel is better
than that of any American hotel of the same grade. At Plymouth, that
first night, everything in meats and sweets, though simple, was
excellent; in vegetables there were green things with no hint of the can
in them, but fresh from the southerner parts of neighboring France. As
yet the protean forms of the cabbage family were not so insistent as
afterwards.
Though we dined in an air so cold that we vainly tried to warm our
fingers on the bottoms of our plates, we saw, between intervening heads
and shoulders, a fire burning blithely in a grate at the farther side of
the room. It was cold there in the dining-room, but after we got into
the reading-room, we thought of it as having been warm, and we hurried
out for a walk under the English moon which we found diffusing a
mildness over the promenade on the Hoe, in which the statue of Sir
Francis Drake fairly basked on its pedestal. The old
[Illustration: “THE PROMENADE ... A PROMONTORY PUSHED WELL OUT INTO
THE SOUND”]
sea-dog had the air of having lifted himself from the game of bowls in
which the approach of the Spanish Armada had surprised him, and he must
have already arrived at that philosophy which we reached so much later.
In England it is chiefly inclement in-doors, but even out-doors it is
well to temper the air with as vigorous exercise as time and occasion
will allow you to take. Another monument, less personally a record of
the Armada, balanced that of Drake at the farther end of the Hoe, and on
top of this we saw Britannia leading out her lion for a walk: lions
become so dyspeptic if kept housed, and not allowed to stretch their
legs in the open air. We had no lion to lead out; and there was no
chance for us at bowls on the Hoe that night, but we walked swiftly to
and fro on the promenade and began at once to choose among the mansions
looking seawards over it such as we meant to buy and live in always.
They were all very handsome, in a reserved, quiet sort; but we had no
hesitation in fixing on one with a balcony glassed in, so that we could
see the sea and shore in all weathers; and I hope we shall not incommode
the actual occupants.
The truth is we were flown with the beauty of the scene, which we
afterwards found as great by day as by night. The promenade, which may
have other reasons for calling itself as it does besides being shaped
like the blade of a hoe, is a promontory pushed well out into the sound,
with many islands and peninsulas clustered before it, or jutting towards
it and forming a safe roadstead for shipping of all types. Plymouth is
not a chief naval station of Great Britain without the presence of
war-ships in its harbor; and among the peaceful craft at anchor with
their riding-lights showing in the deeps of the sea and air one could
distinguish the huge kraken shapes of modern cruisers and destroyers,
and what not. But like the embattled figures of the marine and
land-going soldiery, flirting on the benches of the promenade with
females as fearless as themselves, or jauntily strolling up and down
under the moon, the ships tended to an effect of subjective
peacefulness, as if invented merely for the pleasure of the appreciative
stranger. We were, at any rate, very glad of them, and appreciated the
municipal efforts in our behalf as gratefully as the imperial
fortifications of the harbor. It must be confessed at once, if I am ever
to claim any American superiority in these “trivial, fond records,”
which I shall never be able to help making comparative, that in what is
done by the public for the public, we are hardly in the same running
with England. It is only when we reflect upon our greater municipal
virtue, and consider how the economies of our civic servants in the
matter of beauty enable them to spend the more in good works, that we
can lift up our heads and look down on what England has everywhere
wrought for the people in such unspiritual things as parks and gardens,
and terraces and promenades and statues. I could have wished that first
evening, before I committed myself to any wrong impression or
association, that I had known something more, or even anything at all,
of the history of Plymouth. But I did not even know that from the Hoe,
and possibly the very spot where I stood, the brave Trojan Cirenæus
hurled the giant Goemagot into the sea. I was quite as far from
remembering any facts of the British civilization which has always
flourished so splendidly in the fancy of the native bards, and which has
mingled its relics with those of the Roman, not only in the neighborhood
of Plymouth, but all over England. As for the facts that Plymouth had
been harried throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the
incursions of the French; that it was the foremost English port in the
time of Elizabeth; that Drake sailed from it in 1585 to bring back the
remnant of Raleigh’s colony from Virginia; that one hundred and
twenty-seven English ships waited in its waters to meet the Spanish
Armada; that it stood alone in the West of England for the Parliament in
the Civil War; that Charles II. had signified his displeasure with it
for this by building to overawe it the entirely useless fortress in the
harbor; and that it was the first town to declare for William of Orange
when he landed to urge the flight of the last Stuart: I do not suppose
there is any half-educated school-boy but has the facts more about him
than I had that first night in Plymouth when I might have found them so
serviceable. I could only have matched him in my certainty that this was
the Plymouth from which the _Mayflower_ sailed to find, or to found,
another Plymouth in the New World; but he could easily have alleged more
proofs of our common conviction than I.
At sunset, which they have in Plymouth appropriately late for the spring
season and the high latitude, there had been a splotch of red about six
feet square in the watery west, promising the fine weather which the
morning brought. It also brought more red coats and swagger-sticks in
company with the large hats and glaring costumes which had not had so
good a chance the night before, whether we saw them in our walk on the
Hoe, or met them in the ramble through the town into which we prolonged
it. Through the still Sunday morning air there came a drumming and
bugling of religious note from the neighboring fortifications, and while
we listened, a general officer, or perhaps only a colonel, very tight in
the gold and scarlet of his uniform, passed across the Hoe, like a
pillar of flame, on his way to church. But I do not know that he was a
finer bit of color, after all, than the jet-black cat with a vivid red
ribbon at her neck, which had chosen to crouch on the ivied stone-wall
across the way from our hotel, in just the spot where the sun fell
earliest and would lie longest. There was more ivy than sun in Plymouth,
that is the truth, and this cat probably knew what she was about. There
was ivy, ivy everywhere, and there were subtropical growths of laurel
and oleander and the like, which made a pleasant confusion of earlier
Italy and later Bermuda in the brain, and yet was so characteristic of
that constantly self-contradictory England.
Many things of it that I had known in flying and poising visits during
fifty years of the past began to steal back into my consciousness. The
nine-o’clock breakfast, of sole and eggs and bacon, and heavy bread and
washy coffee, was of the same moral texture as the sabbatical silence in
the pale sunny air, which now I remembered so well, with some weird
question whether I was not all the while in Quebec, instead of Plymouth,
and the strong conviction at the same time that this was the absurdest
of obsessions. The Hoe was not Durham Terrace, but it looked down on a
sort of Lower Town from a height almost as great, and the spread of the
harbor, with a little help, recalled the confluence of the St. Lawrence
and the St. Charles. But the rows of small houses that sent up the smoke
of their chimney-pots were of yellow brick, not of wood or gray stone,
and their red roofs were tiled in dull weather-worn tints, and not
brilliantly tinned.
Why, I wonder, do we feel such a pleasure in finding different things
alike? It is rather stupid, but we are always trying to do it and
fatiguing ourselves with the
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN FROM THE HOE]
sterile effect. At Plymouth there was so much to remind me of so much
else that it was a relief to be pretty promptly confronted on the Hoe
with something so positive, so absolute as a Bath chair, which at the
worst could only remind me of something in literature. A stubby old man
was tugging it over the ground slowly, as if through a chapter of
Dickens; and a wrathful-looking invalid lady sat within, just as if she
had got into it from a book. There was little to recall anything else in
the men strolling about in caps and knickerbockers, with short pipes in
their mouths, or, equally with short pipes, wheeling back and forth on
bicycles. There were a few people in top-hats, who had unmistakably the
air of having got them out for Sunday; though why every one did not wear
them every day in the week was the question when we presently saw a
shop-window full of them at three and sixpence apiece.
This was when we had gone down into the town from the Hoe, and found its
quiet streets of an exquisite Sunday neatness. They were quite empty,
except for very washed-up-looking worshippers going to church, among
whom a file of extremely little boys and girls, kept in line and kept
moving by a black-gowned church-sister, gave us, with their tender pink
cheeks and their tender blue eyes, our first delight in the wonderful
West-of-England complexion. The trams do not begin running in any
provincial town till afternoon on Sundays, and the loud-rattling
milk-carts, bearing bright brass-topped cans as big as the ponies that
drew them, seemed the only vehicles abroad. The only shops open were
those for the sale of butter and eggs and fruit and flowers; but these
necessaries and luxuries abounded in many windows and doorways,
especially the flowers, which had already begun to arrive everywhere by
tons from the Channel Islands, though it was then so early in March. It
is not the least of the advantages which England enjoys that she has her
Florida at her door; she has but to put out her hand and it is heaped
with flowers and fruits from the Scilly Isles, while the spring is
coming slowly up our way at home by fast-freight, through Georgia and
the Carolinas and Virginia.
So many things were strange to me that I might have thought I had never
been in Plymouth before, and so many things familiar that I might have
fancied I had always been there. The long unimpressive stretches of
little shops might have been in any second-class American city, which
would likewise have shown the same exceptional number of large
department stores. What it could not have shown were the well-kept
streets, the reverently guarded heritage from the past in here and there
a bit of antique architecture amid the prosperous newness; the presence
of lingering state in the mansions peering over their high garden wall,
or standing withdrawn from the thoroughfares in the quiet of wooded
crescents or circles.
I doubt if any American city, great or small, has the same number of
birds, dear to poetry, singing in early March, as Plymouth has. That
morning as we walked in the town, and that afternoon as we rode on our
tram-top into the country, they started from a thousand lovely lines of
verse, finches and real larks, and real robins, and many a golden-billed
blackbird, and piped us on our way. Overhead, in the veiled sun, circled
and swam the ever-cawing rooks, as they jarred in the anxieties of the
nesting then urgent with them. They were no better than our birds; I
will never own such a recreant thing. If I do not quite prefer a crow to
a rook, I am free to say that one oriole or redbird or
[Illustration: A GROUP OF PUBLIC EDIFICES, MODERN PLYMOUTH]
hermit-thrush is worth all the English birds that ever sang. Only, the
English birds sing with greater authority, and find an echo in the
mysterious depths of our ancestral past where they and we were
compatriots.
Viewed from the far vantage of some rising ground the three towns of
Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport, which have grown together to form
one Plymouth, stretch away from the sea in huge long ridges thickly
serried with the gables, and bristling with the chimney-pots of their
lines of houses. They probably look denselier built than they are
through the exaggerative dimness of the air which lends bulk to the
features of every distant prospect in England; but for my pleasure I
would not have had the houses set any closer than they were on the
winding, sloping line of the tram we had taken after luncheon. It was
bearing us with a leisurely gait, inconceivable of an American trolley,
but quite swiftly enough, towards any point in the country it chose; and
after it had carried us through rows and rows of small, low, gray stone
cottages, each with its pretty bit of garden at its feet, it bore us on
where their strict contiguity ceased in detached villas, and let us have
time to look into the depths of their encompassing evergreenery, their
ivy, their laurel, their hedges of holly, all shining with a pleasant
lustre. So we came out into the familiar provisionality of half-built
house-lots, and at last into the open country quite beyond the town,
with green market-gardens, and brown ploughed fields, patching the sides
of the gentle knolls, laced with white winding roads, that lost their
heads in the haze of the horizon, and with woodlands calling themselves
“Private,” and hiding the way to stately mansions withdrawn from the
commonness of our course.
When the tram stopped we got down, with the other civilian persons of
our tram-top company, and with the soldiers and the girls who formed
their escort, and hurried beyond hearing of the loud-cackling,
hard-mouthed, red-cheeked, black-eyed young woman, whom one sees
everywhere in some form, and in whose English version I saw so many an
American original that I was humbled with the doubt whether she might
not have come out on the _Mayflower_. There were many other people more
inoffensive coming and going, or stretching themselves on the damp new
grass in a defiance of the national rheumatism which does not save them
from it. At that time, though, I did not know but it might, and I
enjoyed the picturesqueness of their temerity with an untroubled mind. I
noted merely the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the
commoner sort, and I thought the men better and the women worse dressed
than Americans of the same order. Then, after I had realized the
prevalence of much the same farming tradition as our own, in the
spreading fields, and holloed my fancy up and away over the narrow lines
climbing between them to the sky, there was nothing left to do but to go
to town by a different tram-line from that which brought us. The man I
asked for help in this bold enterprise had a face above the ordinary in
a sort of quickness, and he seemed to find something unusual in my
speech. He answered civilly and fully, as all the English do when you
ask them a civil question, without the friendly irony with which
Americans often like to visit the inquiring stranger. Then he stopped
short, checking the little boy he was leading by the hand, and said,
abruptly, “You’re not English!”
“No,” I said, “we’re Americans,” and I added, “From New York.”
“Ah, from New York!” he said, with a visible rush of interest in the
fact that it never afterwards brought to another English face, so far as
I could see. “From New York! Americans!” and he stood clutching the hand
of the little boy, while I felt myself in the presence of a tacit drama,
which I have not yet been able to render explicit. Sometimes I have
thought it not well to try. It might have been the memory of sad
experiences which had left a rancor for our country in his heart, and
held him in doubt whether he might not fitly wreak it upon the first
chance American he met. Again I fancied it might have been the stirring
of some long-deferred hope, some defeated ambition, or the rapture of
some ideal of us which had never had the opportunity to disappoint
itself. I only know that he looked like a man above his class: an
unhappy man anywhere, and probably in England most unhappy. I stupidly
hurried on, and after some movement to follow me he let me leave him
behind. Whoever he was or whatever his emotion, I hope he was worthy of
the sympathy which here offers itself too late. If I could I would
perhaps go back to him, and tell him that if he sailed for New York he
might never find the America of his vision, but only a hard workaday
world like the one he was leaving, where he might be differently
circumstanced, but not differently conditioned. I dare say he would not
believe me; I am not sure that I should believe myself, though I might
well be speaking the truth.
The next day being Monday, it was quite fit that we should go to work
with the rest of the world in Plymouth, and we set diligently about the
business of looking up such traces of the Pilgrim Fathers as still exist
in the town which was so kind to them in their great need of kindness. I
will not pretend that the pathetic story recurred to me in full
circumstance during our search for the exact place from which the
_Mayflower_ last sailed, when after she had come with her sister ship,
the _Speedwell_, from Holland to Southampton, and then started on the
voyage to America, she had been forced by the unseaworthiness of the
_Speedwell_ to put back as far as Plymouth. Mr. W. E. Griffin, in his
very agreeable and careful little book, _The Pilgrims in their Three
Homes_, is able only to define the period of their stay there as “some
time,” but he tells us that the disappointed voyagers “were treated very
kindly by the people of the Free Church, forming what is now the Grange
Street Chapel, the _Mayflower_ meanwhile lying off the Barbican.” The
weather was good while the two ships stayed, but when they sailed again
the _Speedwell_ returned to London with some twenty of the homesick or
heart-sick, while all her other people stowed themselves with their
belongings in the little _Mayflower_ as best they could, and she once
more put out to sea: a prison where the brutal shipmen were their
jailers; a lazar where the seeds of death were planted in many that were
soon to fill the graves secreted under the snow of the savage shore they
were seeking.
I believe it was the visiting association of American librarians who
caused, a few years ago, a flag-stone in the pavement of the quay where
the _Mayflower_ lay to be inscribed with her name and the date 1620, as
well as a more explicit tablet to be let into the adjacent parapet.
Perhaps our driver could have found these records for us, or we could
have found them for ourselves, but I am all the same grateful for the
good offices of several unoccupied spectators, especially a friendly
matron who had disposed of her morning’s stock of fish, and had now the
leisure for indulging an interest in our search. She constituted herself
the tutelary spirit of the neighborhood, which smelt of immemorial
catches of fish, both from the adjacent market and from the lumpish,
quaintly rigged craft crowding one another in the docks and composing in
an insurpassable picturesqueness; and she directed us wherever we wanted
to go.
The barbican of the citadel from which the _Mayflower_ sailed, before
there was either citadel or barbican, is no great remove from the Hoe,
which may justly enough boast itself “the first promenade in England,”
but it is quite in another world: a seventeenth-century world of narrow
streets crooking up hill and down, and overhung by the little bulging
houses which the pilgrims must have seen as they came and went on their
affairs with the ship, scarcely bigger than the fishing-boats now nosing
at the quay where she then lay. Whatever it was in the _Mayflower’s_
time, it is not a proud neighborhood in ours, nor has it any reason to
be proud; for it is apparently what is indefinitely called a purlieu. At
one point where I climbed a steep thoroughfare to look at what no doubt
unwarrantably professed to be a remnant of “Cromwell’s castle,” I met an
elderly man, who was apparently looking up truant school-children, and
who said, quite without prompting, “This used to be ’ell upon earth,”
with something in his tone implying that it might still be a little like
it. We could not get into the ruin, the solitary who tenanted its one
habitable room being away on a visit, as a neighbor put her head out of
a window opposite to tell us.
Probably the traveller who wishes for a just impression of the Plymouth
of 1620 will get it more reliably somewhat away from the immediate scene
of the _Mayflower’s_ departure. There are old houses abundantly
overhanging their first stories, after the seventeenth-century fashion,
in the pleasanter streets which keep aloof from the water. If he is
more bent upon a sense of modern Plymouth he will do best to visit her
group of public edifices, the Guild Hall, the Law Courts, the Library,
and see all that I did not see of the vast shipping which constitutes
her one of the greatest English ports, and the government works which
magnify her importance among the naval stations of the world.
It is always best to leave something for a later comer, and I may seem
almost to have left too much by any one whom I shall have inspired to
linger in Plymouth long enough after landing to get his sea-legs off.
But really I was continually finding the most charming things. The very
business aspects of Plymouth had their charm. I saw a great prosperity
around me, but there was no sense of the hustle which is supposed alone
to create prosperity with us. I dare say that below the unruffled
surface of life there is sordid turmoil enough, but I did not perceive
it, and I prefer still to think of Plymouth as the first of the many
places in England where the home-wearied American might spend his last
days in the repose of a peaceful exile, with all the comforts, which
only much money can buy with us, cheaply about him. He could live like a
gentleman in Plymouth for about half what the same state would cost him
in his own air, unless he went as far inland as the inexpensive Middle
West, and then it would be dearer in as large a town. He could keep his
republican self-respect in his agreeable banishment by remembering how
Plymouth had held for the Commonwealth in Cromwell’s time, and the very
name of the place would bring him near to the heroic Plymouth on the
other shore of the Atlantic. I speak from experience, for even in my two
days’ stay with the mother Plymouth I had now and then a vision of the
daughter Plymouth, on the elm-shaded slopes of
[Illustration: OLD HOUSES ALOOF FROM THE WATER]
her landlocked bay, filially the subordinate in numbers and riches with
which she began her alien life. Still of wood, as the English Plymouth
is still of stone, and newer by a thousand years, she has an antiquity
of her own precious to Americans, and a gentle picturesqueness which I
found endearing when I first saw her in the later eighteen-sixties, and
which I now recalled as worthy of her lineage. Perhaps it was because I
had always thought the younger Plymouth would be a kind dwelling-place
that I fancied a potential hospitality in the elder. At any rate I
thought it well, while I was on the ground, to choose a good many
eligible residences, not only among the proud mansions overlooking the
Hoe, but in some of the streets whose gentility had decayed, but which
were still keeping up appearances in their fine roomy old houses, or
again in the newer and simpler suburban avenues, where I thought I could
be content in one of the pretty stone cottages costing me forty pounds a
year, with my holly hedge before me belting in a little garden of all
but perennial bloom.
We had chanced upon weather that we might easily have mistaken for
climate. There was the lustre of soft sunshine in it, and there was the
song of birds in the wooded and gardened pleasaunces which opened in
several directions about the Hoe, and seemed to follow the vagarious
lines of ancient fortifications. Whether weather or climate, it could
not have been more suitable for the excursion we planned our last
afternoon across that stretch of water which separates Plymouth from the
seat of the lords who have their title from the great estate. The
mansion is not one of the noble houses which are open to the public in
England, and even to get into the grounds you must have leave from the
manor-house. This will not quite answer the raw American’s expectation
of a manor-house; it looks more like a kind of office in a Plymouth
street; but if you get from it as guide a veteran of the navy with an
agreeable cast in his eye, and an effect of involuntary humor in his
rusty voice, you have not really so much to complain of. In our own case
the veteran’s intelligence seemed limited to delivering us over at gates
to gardeners and the like, who gave us back to his keeping after the
just recognition of their vested interests, and then left him to walk us
unsparingly over the whole place, which had grown as large at least as
some of our smaller States, say Connecticut or New Jersey, by the time
we had compassed it. We imagined afterwards that he might have led us a
long way about, not from stupidity, but from a sardonic amusement in our
protests; and we were sure he knew that the bird he called a nightingale
was no nightingale. It was as if he had said to himself, on our asking
if there were none there, “Well, if they want a nightingale, let ’em
have it,” and had chosen the first songster we heard. There were already
songsters enough in the trees about to choose any sort from, for we were
now in Cornwall, and the spring is very early in Cornwall. There were
primroses growing at the roots of the trees in the park; in the garden
closes were bamboos and palms, and rhododendrons in bloom, with
cork-trees and ilexes, springing from the soaked earth which the sun
damply shining from the spongy heavens could never have dried. The
confusion of the tropical and temperate zones in this air, which was
that of neither or both, was somewhat heightened by the first we saw of
those cedars of Lebanon which so abound in England that you can hardly
imagine any left on Lebanon. It was a dark, spreading tree, with a
biblical seriousness and an oriental poetry of aspect, under whose low
shelving branches one might think to find the scripturalized childhood
of our race. The gardens, whether English or French or Italian, appealed
to a more sophisticated consciousness; but it had all a dim, blurred
fascination which words refuse to impart, and the rooks, wheeling in
their aërial orbits overhead, seemed to deepen the spell with the
monotony of their mystical incantations. There were woodland spaces
which had the democratic friendliness of American woods, as if not
knowing themselves part of a nobleman’s estate, and which gave the foot
a home welcome with the bedding of their fallen leaves. But the rabbits
which had everywhere broken the close mossy turf with their burrowing
and thrown out the red soil over the grass, must have been consciously a
part of the English order. As for the deer, lying in herds, or posing
statuesquely against the sky on some stretch of summit, they were as
absolutely a part of it as if they had been in the peerage. A flag
floated over the Elizabethan mansion of gray stone (rained a fine
greenish in the long succession of springs and falls), to intimate that
the family was at home, and invite the public to respect its privacy by
keeping away from the grounds next about it; and in the impersonal touch
of exclusion which could be so impersonally accepted, the sense of
certain English things was perfected. You read of them all your life,
till you imagine them things of actual experience, but when you come
face to face with them you perceive that till then they have been as
unreal as anything else in the romances where you frequented them, and
that you have not known their true quality and significance. In fiction
they stood for a state as gracious as it was splendid, and welcomed the
reader to an equal share in it; but in fact they imply the robust
survival, in commercial and industrial times, of a feudal condition so
wholly obsolete in its alien admirer’s experience that none of the
imitations of it which he has seen at home suggest it more than by a
picturesqueness almost as provisional as that of the theatre.
What the alien has to confess in its presence is that it is an essential
part of a system which seems to work, and in the simpler terms, to work
admirably; so that if he has a heart to which the ideal of human
equality is dear, it must shrink with certain withering doubts as he
looks on the lovely landscapes everywhere in which those who till the
fields and keep the woods have no ownership, in severalty or in common.
He must remember how persistently and recurrently this has been the
history of mankind, how, while democracies and republics have come and
gone, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, have remained, or
have returned after they had passed. If he is a pilgrim reverting from
the new world to which the outgoing pilgrims sailed, there to open from
the primeval woods a new heaven and a new earth, his dismay will not
justly be for the persistence of the old forms which they left behind,
but for the question whether these forms have not somehow fixed
themselves as firmly and lastingly in his native as in his ancestral
country. I do not say that any such anxieties spoiled the pleasure of my
afternoon. I was perhaps expecting to see much more perfect instances of
the kind, and I was probably postponing the psychological effect to
these. It is a fault of travel that you are always looking forward to
something more typical, and you neglect immediate examples because they
offer themselves at the outset, or you reject them as only approximately
representative to find that they are never afterwards surpassed. That
was the case with our hotel, which was quite perfect in its way: a way
rather new to England, I believe, and quite new to my knowledge of
England.
It is a sort of hotel where you can live for as short or as long a time
as you will at an inclusive rate for the day or week, and always in
greater comfort for less money than you can at home, except in the mere
matter of warmth. Warm you cannot be in-doors, and why should not you go
out-doors for warmth, when the subtropical growths in the well-kept
garden, which never fails to enclose that kind of hotel, are flourishing
in a temperature distinctly above freezing? They always had the long
windows, that opened into the garden, ajar when we came into the
reading-room after dinner, and the modest little fire in the grate
veiled itself under a covering of cinders or coal-siftings, so that it
was not certain that the first-comer who got the chair next to it was
luckiest. Yet around this cold hearth the social ice was easily broken,
and there bubbled up a better sort of friendly talk than always follows
our diffidence in public places at home. Without knowing it, or being
able to realize it at that moment, we were confronted with a social
condition which is becoming more and more general in England, where in
winter even more than in summer people have the habit of leaving town
for a longer or a shorter time, which they spend in a hotel like ours at
Plymouth. There they meet in apparent fearlessness of the consequences
of being more or less agreeable to one another, and then part as
informally as they meet. But as yet we did not know that there was that
sort of hotel or that we were in it, and we lost the earliest occasion
of realizing a typical phase of recent English civilization.
II
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
The weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and
fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by
cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun
shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have
been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in
many trains, still embodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun
shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than
our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English
country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves,
as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as an American
train would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of
the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet,
with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but
there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which?) in bloom along
the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders
nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether
it was in mere surfeit, or in an invincible distaste for turnips, or an
instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the
sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure
[Illustration: A BIT OF COUNTRY BETWEEN PLYMOUTH AND EXETER]
as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray
stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with
tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and
then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.
As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that
is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it
become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older
country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours,
where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you
pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation,
but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a
vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of
your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not
cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over
the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry
nakedness; the hedge-rows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone,
change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train
passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams
loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all
these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to
transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition
from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and
back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then
suddenly skirts some nobleman’s park where the herds of fallow deer lie
motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion,
is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and
twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I
seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at
other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was
following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in
either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had
been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been
back in England.
The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that
short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have
been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by
hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly
in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in
England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we
could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting
station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter’s claims upon us. There
our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words
which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find “a typical
English city ... alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great
prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ,
but where Christ never gave way to Wodin.... None other can trace up a
life so unbroken to so remote a past.” Whether, when we found it, we
found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape
saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any
expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral.
A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it
cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter’s.
[Illustration: “IN EXETER OUR FIRST CATHEDRAL WAS WAITING US”]
Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do
as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if
even New York would be equal to it.
I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history
before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to
the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of
Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases,
and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the
chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman
station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the
central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the
better-informed reader will recall without an effort that the place was
never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest.
The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and
beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered
Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality.
Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and
they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror
after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to
hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a
substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travellers as do
not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the
wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was
for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York
disputed its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the
time of Henry VIII.’s high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and
Cornish men fought for the ancient faith within its walls against his
forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I always
think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged
it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and
Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles’s hapless
daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and
in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts
back after Cromwell’s death.
The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the
cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral’s
sake we fell a willing prey to the fanciful statement. There is of
course no hotel in the cathedral close, but the Butt of Malmsey is so
close to the cathedral that it may have unintentionally confused the
words. At any rate, it stood facing the side of the beautiful pile and
getting its noble Norman towers against a sky, which we would not have
had other than a broken gray, above the tops of trees where one nesting
rook the less would have been an incalculable loss. One of the rooms
which the managers could give us looked on this lovely sight, and if the
other looked into a dim court, why, all the rooms in a cathedral close,
or close to a cathedral, cannot command views of it.