approach, but now we felt that the time spent before studying it would
be time lost and we made haste to the great west front. To the first
glance it is all a soft gray blur of age-worn carving, in which no point
or angle seems to have failed of the touch which has blent all the
archaic sanctities and royalties of the glorious screen in a dim
sumptuous harmony of figures and faces. Whatever I had sceptically
read,
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF ROUGEMONT]
and yet more impatiently heard, of the beauty of English cathedrals was
attested and approved far beyond cavil, and after that first glance I
asked nothing but submissively to see more and more of their gracious
splendor. No wise reader will expect me to say what were the sculptured
facts before me or to make the hopeless endeavor to impart a sense of
the whole structure in descriptions or admeasurements. Let him take any
picture of it, and then imagine something of that form vastly old and
dark, richly wrought over in the stone to the last effects of tender
delicacy by the miracles of Gothic art. So let him suppose the edifice
set among leafless elms, in which the tattered rooks’-nests swing
blackening, on a spread of close greensward, under a low welkin, where
thin clouds break and close in a pallid blue, and he will have as much
of Exeter Cathedral as he can hope to have without going there to see
for himself; it can never otherwise be brought to him in words of mine.
Neither, without standing in that presence or another of its kind, can
he realize what the ages of faith were. Till then the phrase will remain
a bit of decorative rhetoric, but then he will live a meaning out of it
which will die only with him. He will feel, as well as know, how men
built such temples in an absolute trust and hope now extinct, but
without which they could never have been built, and how they continued
to grow, like living things, from the hearts rather than the hands of
strongly believing men. So that of Exeter grew, while all through the
tenth and eleventh centuries the monks of its immemorial beginning were
flying from the heathen invasions, but still returning, till the Normans
gave their monastery fixity in the twelfth century, and the long English
succession of bishops maintained the cathedral in ever-increasing
majesty till the rude touch of the Tudor stayed the work that had
prospered under the Norman and Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings. If the
age of faith shall extend itself to his perception, as he listens to the
afternoon service in the taper-starred twilight, far back into the times
before Christ, he may hear in the chanting and intoning the voice of the
first articulate religions of the world. The sound of that imploring and
beseeching, that wailing and sighing, which drifts out to him through
the screen of the choir will come heavy with the pathos of the human
abasing itself before the divine in whatever form men may have imagined
God, and seeking the pity and the mercy of which Christianity was not
the first to feel the need. Then, if he has a sense of the unbroken
continuity of ceremonial, the essential unity of form, from Pagan to
Roman and from Roman to Anglican, perhaps he will have more patience
than he otherwise might with the fierce zeal of the fanatics who would
at last away with all ceremonial and all form, and would stand in their
naked souls before the eternal justice and make their appeal direct, and
if need be, through their noses, to Him who desireth not the death of a
sinner.
Unless the visitor to Exeter Cathedral can come into something of this
patience, he will hardly tolerate the thought of the Commonwealth’s-men
who deemed that they were doing God’s will when they built a brick wall
through it, and listened on one side to an Independent chaplain, and on
the other to a Presbyterian minister. It is said that they “had great
quiet and comfort” in their worship on each side of their wall, which
was of course taken down directly after the Restoration. For this no one
can reasonably grieve; and one may of course rejoice that Cromwell’s
troopers did not stable
[Illustration: “THE CATHEDRAL ... A SOFT GRAY BLUR OF AGE-WORN
CARVING”]
their horses in Exeter Cathedral. They forbore to do so in few other old
churches in England, but we did not know how to value fully its
exemption from this profanation in our first cathedral. We took the fact
with an ignorant thanklessness from our guide-book, and we acquiesced,
with some surprise, in the lack of any such official as a verger to
instruct us in the unharmed monuments. The printed instructions which we
received from the placard overhanging a box at the gate to the choir did
not go beyond the elementary precept that we were each to put sixpence
in it; after that we were left free to look about for ourselves, and we
made the round of the tombs and altars unattended.
The disappointment which awaits one in English churches, if one’s
earlier experience of churches has been in Latin countries, is of course
from the want of pictures. Color there is and enough in the stained
windows which Cromwell’s men sometimes spared, but the stained windows
in Exeter are said to be indifferent good. In compensation for this,
there are traces of the frescoing which once covered the walls, and
which Cromwell’s men neglected to whitewash. They also heedlessly left
unspoiled that wonderful Minstrel’s Gallery stretching across the front
of the choir, with its fourteen tuneful angels playing forever on as
many sculptured instruments of stone. For the rest the monuments are of
the funereal cast to which the devout fancy is pretty much confined in
all sacred edifices. There is abundance of bishops lying on their tombs,
with their features worn away in the exposure from which those of many
crusaders have been kept by their stone visors. But what was most
expressive of the past, which both bishops and crusaders reported so
imperfectly, was the later portrait statuary, oftenest of Elizabethan
ladies and their lords, painted in the colors of life and fashion, with
their ruffs and farthingales worn as they were when they put them off,
to rest in the tombs on which their effigies lie. It is not easy to
render the sense of a certain consciousness which seemed to deepen in
these, as the twilight of the closing day deepened round them in the
windows and arches. If they were waiting to hold converse after the
night had fallen, one would hardly have cared to stay for a share in
their sixteenth-century gossip, and I could understand the feeling of
the two dear old ladies who made anxiously up to us at one point of our
common progress, and asked us if we thought there was any danger of
being locked in. I did my poor best to reassure them, and they took
heart, and were delightfully grateful. When we had presently missed them
we found them waiting at the door, to thank us again, as if we had saved
them from a dreadful fate, and to shake hands and say good-bye.
If it were for them alone, I should feel sensibly richer for my
afternoon in our first cathedral. But I think my satisfaction was
heightened just before we left, by meeting a man with a wheelbarrow full
of coal which he was trundling through “the long-drawn aisle and fretted
vault” to the great iron stoves placed on either side of the nave to
warm the cathedral, and contribute in their humble way to that perfect
balance of parts which is the most admired effect of its architectural
symmetry. As he stopped before each stove and noisily stoked it from a
clangorous shovel, the simple sincerity of this bit of necessary
house-keeping in the ancient fane seemed to strike a note characteristic
of the English civilization, and to suggest the plain outrightness by
which it has been able to save itself sound through every age and
fortune. The English have reared a civic edifice more majestic than any
the world has yet seen, but in the temple of their liberty and their
loyalty a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal has always been frankly
invited to appear when needed. It is this mingling of the poetical ideal
and the practical real which has preserved them at every emergency, and
but for his timely ministrations church and state would alike have fared
ill in the past. He has kept both habitable, and to any one who visits
cathedrals with a luminous mind the man with the wheelbarrow of coal
will remain as distinctly a part of the impression as the processioning
and recessioning celebrants coming and going in their white surplices,
with their red and black bands; or even the singing of the angel-voiced
choir-boys, who as they hurry away at the end of the service do not all
look as seraphic as they have sounded. There is often indeed something
in the passing regard of choir-boys less suggestive of the final state
of young-eyed cherubim than of evil provisionally repressed.
I do not say that I thought all this before leaving the cathedral in
Exeter, or till long afterwards. I was at the time rather bent upon
seeing more of the town, in which I felt a quality different from that
of Plymouth though it pleased me no better. The manageress of the Butt
of Malmsey had boasted already of the numbers of nobility and gentry
living in the neighborhood of the little city, where, she promised, we
should see ten private carriages for every one in Plymouth. I did not
keep count, but I dare say she was right. What was more to my crude
pleasure was the sight of the many Tudor, and earlier than Tudor, houses
in the High Street and the other streets of Exeter, with their second
stories overhanging their first, to that effect of baffle in the leaded
casements of their gables which we fancy in the eyes of stout gentlemen
who try to catch sight of their feet over the intervening bulge of their
waistcoats. They are incomparably picturesque, those Tudor houses, and
as I had afterwards occasion to note from some of their interiors, they
mark a beginning of domestic comfort, which, if not modern on the
American terms, is quite so on the English.
To the last, I had always to make my criticisms of the provision for the
inner house in England, but my conviction that the English had little to
learn of us in providing for the inner man began quite as early as in my
first walks about Exeter, where the most perverse American could not
have helped noting the abundance and variety of the fruits and
vegetables at the green-grocers’. Southern Europe had supplied these
better than Florida and California supply them with us at the same
season in towns the size of Exeter, or indeed in any less luxurious than
our great seaboard cities. Counting in the apples and oranges from South
Africa and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, we are far out of it
as to cheapness and quality. Then, no place in England is so remote from
one sea or another as not always to have the best and freshest fish,
which as the dealers arrange them with an artistic eye for form and
color, make, it must be owned, a more appetizing show than the thronging
shapes of carnage which start from the butchers’ doors and windows, and
bleed upon the sidewalk, and gather microbes from every passing gust.
There is something peculiarly loathsome in these displays of fresh meat
carcases all over England, which does not affect the spectator from the
corded and mounded ham and bacon in the grocers’ shops, though when one
thinks of the myriads of eggs needed to accompany these at the forty
million robust English breakfasts every morning, it is with doubt and
despair for the hens. They seem equal to the demand upon them, however,
like every one and everything else English, and they always lay eggs
enough, as if every hen knew that England expected her to do her duty.
We sauntered through Exeter without a plan, and took it as it came in a
joy which I wish I could believe was reciprocal, and which was at no
moment higher than when we found at the corner of the most impressive
old place in Exeter the office of a certain New York insurance company.
As smiling fate would have it, this was the very company in which I was
myself insured, and I paused before it with effusion, and shook hands
with the actuary in the spirit. In the flesh, if he was an Englishman,
he might not have known what to do with my emotion, but with Englishmen
in the spirit the wandering American always finds himself cordially at
home. One must not say that the longer they have been in the spirit the
better; some of them who are actually still in the flesh are also in the
spirit; but a certain historical remove is apt to relieve friends of
that sort of stiffness which keeps them at arm’s-length when they meet
as contemporaries. At the other end of Bedford Circus, where I had my
glad moment with the insurance actuary, I found myself in the presence
of that daughter of Charles I., the Princess Henrietta, who was born
there near three hundred years ago, and whose life I had lately followed
with pathos for her young exile from England, through her girlhood in
France, and through her unhappy marriage with the King’s brother
Monsieur, to the afternoon of her last day when she lay so long dying in
the presence of the court, as some thought, of poison. I could not feel
myself an intrusive witness at that strange scene, which now
represented itself in Bedford Circus, with the courtiers coming and
going, and the doctors joining their medical endeavors with the
spiritual ministrations of the prelates, and the poor princess herself
taking part in the speculations and discussions, and presently in the
midst of all incontinently making her end.
I suppose it would not be good taste to boast of the intimacy I enjoyed
with the clergy in the neighborhood of the cathedral, by favor of their
translation into a region much remoter than the past. Without having the
shadow of acquaintance with them and without removing them for an
instant from their pleasant houses and gardens in the close at Exeter, I
put them back a generation, and met them with familiar ease in the
friendly circumstance of Trollope’s many stories of cathedral towns. I
am not sure they would have liked that if they had known it, and
certainly I should not have done it if they had known it; but as it was
I could do it without offence. When we could rend ourselves from the
delightful company of those deans, and canons, and minor canons, and
prebendaries, with whom we really did not pass a word, we went a long
idle walk to an old-fashioned part of the town overlooking the Exe from
the crest of a hill, where certain large out-dated mansions formed
themselves in a crescent. We instantly bought property there in
preference to any more modern neighborhood, and there our subliminal
selves remain, and stroll out into the pretty park and sit on the
benches, and superintend the lading and unlading of the small craft from
foreign ports in the old ship-canal below: the oldest ship-canal in the
world, indeed, whose beginnings Shakespeare was born too late to see. We
do not find the shipping is any the less picturesque for being much
entangled in the net-work of railroad lines (for Exeter is a large
junction), or feel the sticks and spars more discordant with the smoke
and steam of the locomotives through which they pierce, than with the
fine tracery of the trees farther away.
I was never an enemy of the confusion of the old and new in Europe when
Italy was all Europe for me, and now in England it was distinctly a
pleasure. It is something we must accept, whether we like it or not, and
we had better like it. The pride of the old custodian of the Exeter
Guildhall in the coil of hot-water pipes heating the ancient edifice was
quite as acceptable as his pride in the thirteenth-century carvings of
the oaken door and the oak-panelled walls, the portraits of the Princess
Henrietta and General Monk, and the swords bestowed upon the faithful
city by Edward IV. and Henry VII. I warmed my chilly hands at the
familiar radiator while I thawed my fancy out to play about the medieval
facts, and even fly to that uttermost antiquity when the Roman
Præetorium stood where the Guildhall stands now. Still, I was not so
warm all over but that I was glad to shun the in-doors inclemency to
which we must have returned in the hotel, and to prolong our stay in the
milder air outside by going a drive beyond the city into the charming
country. I do not say that the country was more charming than about
Plymouth, but it had its pleasant difference, which was hardly a
difference in the subtropical types of trees and shrubs. There were the
same evergreens hedging and shading, too deeply shading, the stone
cottages of the suburbs as we had seen nearer the sea; but when we were
well out of the town, we had climbed to high, rolling fields, which
looked warm even when the sun did not shine upon them; there were brown
bare woods cresting the hills, and the hedge-rows ran bare and brown
between the ploughed fields and the verdure of the pastures and the
wheat. Behind and below us lay the town, clustering about the cathedral
which dwarfed its varying tops to the illusion of one level.
We had driven out by a handsome avenue called, for reasons I did not
penetrate, Pennsylvania Road. Stately houses lined the way, and the
wealth and consequence of the town had imaginably transferred themselves
to Pennsylvania Road from the fine old crescent where we had perhaps
rashly invested; though I shall never regret it. But we came back
another way, winding round by the first English lane I had ever driven
through. It was all, and more, than I could have asked of it in that
quality, for it was so narrow between the tall hedges, which shut
everything else from sight, that if we had met another vehicle, I do not
know what would have happened. There was a breathless moment when I
thought we were going to meet a market-cart, but luckily it turned into
an open gateway before the actual encounter. There must be tacit
provision for such a chance in the British Constitution, but it is not
for a semi-alien like an American to say what it is.
We were apparently the first of our nation to reach Exeter that spring,
for as we came in to lunch we heard an elderly cleric, who had the air
of lunching every day at the Butt of Malmsey, say to his waiter, “The
Americans are coming early this year.” We had reasons of our own for
thinking we had come too early; probably in midsummer the
old-established cold of the venerable hostelry is quite tolerable. If I
had been absolutely new to the past, I could not have complained, even
in March, of its reeling floors and staggering stairways and dim
passages; these were as they should be, and I am not saying anything
against the table. That again was better than it would have been at a
hotel in an American town of the size of Exeter, and it had a personal
application at breakfast and luncheon that pleased and comforted; the
table d’hôte dinner was, as in other English inns, far preferable to the
indiscriminate and wasteful superabundance for which we pay too much at
our own. It is of the grates in the Butt of Malmsey that I complain, and
I do not know that I should have cause to complain of these if I had not
rashly ordered fire in mine. To give the grate time to become glowing,
as grates always should be in old inns, I passed an hour or two in the
reading-room talking with an elderly Irish gentleman who had come to
that part of England with his wife to buy a place and settle down for
the remnant of his days, after having spent the greater part of his life
in South Africa. He could not praise South Africa enough. Everything
flourished there and every one prospered; his family had grown up and he
had left seven children settled there; it was the most wonderful country
under the sun; but the two years he had now passed in England were worth
the whole thirty-five years that he had passed in South Africa. I agreed
with him in extolling the English country and climate, while I accepted
all that he said of South Africa as true, and then I went up to my room.
With the aid of the two candles which I lighted I discovered the grate
in the wall near the head of the bed, and on examining it closely I
perceived that there was a fire in it. The grate would have held quite a
double-handful of coal if carefully put on; the fire which seemed to be
flickering so feebly had yet had the energy to draw all the warmth of
the chamber up the chimney, and I stood shivering in the temperature of
a subterranean dungeon. The place instantly gave evidence of being
haunted, and the testimony of my nerves on this point was corroborated
by the spectral play of the firelight on the ceiling, when I blew out my
candles. In the middle of the night I woke to the sense of something
creeping with a rustling noise over the floor. I rejected the hypothesis
of my bed-curtain falling into place, though I remembered putting it
back that I might have light to read myself drowsy. I knew at once that
it was a ghost walking the night there, and walking hard. Suddenly it
ceased, and I knew why: it had been frozen out.
III
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
The American who goes to England as part of the invasion which we have
lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans
have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the
Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phœnicians,
and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there
from the beginning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering
races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the
Romans always cropping up and displacing the others. He likes well
enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy,
in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Britain forms too
great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a
long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his
own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him
little hope of doing anything very surprising in a stay of four months.
He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in
Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the
remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable
mediævalism before pushing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of
London, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their vestiges are less
intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the
sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a
sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on
with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they
frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his
resentment.