not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as
the putative prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal
advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few
persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are
constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who
went forth from his father’s house a leper, and who observed the swine
under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from
his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived
to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring
Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to
impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there
until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the
Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the
site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort
of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal
springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its
vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so
abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneum or Pompeii, you can still
have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the
stone platforms, steps, and seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the
furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for conveying
it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material,
attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of
the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall
and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach
those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before
him.
If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morning we arrived, he
might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his
approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains
to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like getting
into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several
steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into
my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English
stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by
your hand-baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class
whom Lord Chesterfield nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in
England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their
own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of
their service. I have seen people give them twopence, for some slight
office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something;
but I never saw an English porter’s face clouded by the angry resentment
which instantly darkens the French porter’s brow if he thinks himself
underpaid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to
the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a
third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from
the hope of gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being
with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first-class for short
hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh,
you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no
great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.
We had come third-class from Plymouth to Exeter in a superstition
preached us before leaving home, that everybody now went third-class in
England, that to go first-class was sinfully extravagant, and that to go
second-class was to chance travelling with valets and lady’s-maids. But
in coming on from Exeter we thought we would risk this contamination,
and, not realizing that the first-class rate was no greater than ours
with the cost of a Pullman ticket added, I boldly “booked” second-class.
But so far from finding ourselves in a compartment with valets and
lady’s-maids, in whose company I hope we should have avouched our
quality by promptly perishing, we were quite alone, except for the
presence of a lady who sat by the window knitting, knitting, knitting.
She did not look up, but from time to time she looked out, till our
interchanges of joy in the landscape seemed to win upon her, and then
she looked round. Her glance at the member of our party whose sex seemed
to warrant her in the overture was apparently reassuring. She asked if
we would like the window closed, and we pretended that we would not, but
she closed it, and then she arranged her needles in her knitting, and
folded her knitting up, and put it firmly away in her bag, and began to
talk. Evidently she liked talking, but evidently she liked listening,
too, and she let us do our share of both in confirming the tacit treaty
of amity between our nations. She spoke
[Illustration: GREAT PULTENEY STREET]
of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I
began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English,
and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they
were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world,
and we tried hard for some mutual acquaintance. Our failure did not
matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we
came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run
away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from
the window of her parting train.
It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be
like that! I do not say that they actually were, and I do not say they
were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that
charming incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again
and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year
before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour
when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with
everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the
fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should
be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read afterwards
that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone,
the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry
should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our
pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was
in Pulteney Street, where the Allens of “Northanger Abbey” had their
apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with
the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest corner of which the
dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen herself had lived for two years
in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the
neighborhood.
Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach itself
from the rank of these handsome dwellings; and everything in our happy
circumstance began at once to breathe that air of gentle association
which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a
belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early
consultation with possibly the most lenient of the medical authorities
of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous
martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath,
his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in
the mean time he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of
the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little
careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at
Carlsbad that everything which was not allowed was forbidden! But he
found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom
he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating
and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their
mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the
sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their
doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud’s day
few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough
in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had
come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running,
or limping, with his fellow-invalids.
He had apparently not even brought an American accent with his malady,
and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who
constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be
begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the
only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless
dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in
British company, and that when his party went to their rooms they talked
violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight
compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the
Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his
disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he
forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.
He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the
pleasant people at that hotel, who seemed to regard their being thrown
together as a circumstance that justified their speaking to one another
much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more
conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked
to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been
nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially
hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type
there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the
lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table
covered with the day’s papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the
most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people
drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as
they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in
our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept at a distance in which
they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the
house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He
came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire
would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically
affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire
would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less
excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the
course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly
and intelligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather,
there was plenty of weather to talk about.
There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage
at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the
imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable
fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its
simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower,
brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for
there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a
dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like
celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had
admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers’, and we eagerly
helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could
answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of
the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately
cabbage.
Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and
well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at
every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was
vitiated by an attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it
arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that
pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the
“sweets” included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a
dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze,
but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course,
a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that
passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine
length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a
thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us,
tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the
English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the
color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he
is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away
bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of
an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good
and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am
about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to
the observer’s comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader
can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly
larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those
at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if
they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the
corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly
warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the
elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of
the staircase. It was a formidable matter to get the head porter, in
full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key,
but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from
their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.
When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have
been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on
Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed
to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at
the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses
backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs
which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When
there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of
the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the
kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our
eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs,
bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of
the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her
faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they
carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken
here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no
Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair
to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one
resigns one’s self with difficulty in the country where they abound)
rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb
their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads,
except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a
[Illustration: THE RED-TILED HOUSE-ROOFS AND CHURCH SPIRES OF BATH]
fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of
the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and
at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring
their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament.
When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we
found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have
compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed
large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is
put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it
was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no
more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has
one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant,
and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in
the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one’s self
one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in
a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some
high-set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that
noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system--I do not say
universe--The King’s Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood,
famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty,
and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment,
that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every
night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the
dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade
back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which
overhangs The King’s Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he
is, as a double star is one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the
ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son
realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the
beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the
effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the
unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory,
without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.
In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such
greatness as the Woods’ has always bowed, every person of fashion
thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a
greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a
house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and
Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James’s Square or Queen’s Square, or in
Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition
of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus.
As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past
than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found
the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars
of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied
dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant
at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one’s self
without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably
back to dinner at one’s hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist
moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the
houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my
quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where
[Illustration: CIRCUS FROM BENNET STREET]
the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American
as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil
would never had laid down his arms--never, never, never! The eloquent
words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought
itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the
American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted
colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid
the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously
memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it
in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora
Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there;
and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and
Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord
Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those
simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now
recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic
Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in
Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence,
Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen,
Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole
nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more
celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.
Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off
into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear
that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a
lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to make oath to at
least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent,
where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its
high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal
Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park
and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old
between fields and pastures in a landscape of insurpassable loveliness.
But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the
temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in
itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is
an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and
the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when
they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a
very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of
fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition
of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediæval abbey for her
principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and
purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than
some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose
more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it
is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely
proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of
their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as
if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The
abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through
a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached
to the bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory
from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream
angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of
God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let
an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by
this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered
from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it
was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s
failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others
suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached
and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses
were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street
for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and
restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop
who had not been authorized in a dream.
The failure of Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is
another of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I
was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously
despoiled by Henry VIII. But among the most interesting monuments of the
interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general,
Sir William Waller which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan
soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I
will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guide-book, though
I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.
“Sole issue of a matchless paire,
Both of their state and virtues heyre;
In graces great, in stature small,
As full of spirit as voyd of gall;
Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,
Holy without vain-glorious showes;
Happy, and yet from envy free,
Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,
Reader, this riddle read with mee,
Here the good Lady Waller lies.”