appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals.
These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful,
and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal
monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash--namely, who
ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway
at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in
England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very
good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as
his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to
the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the
abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for
the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command;
and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt
to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the
lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had
then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do
it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part
of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has
never been anywhere else on earth, much less spiritually between the
human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of
the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there
delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the
preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any
decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation
through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his
children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King
wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health
for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s
body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it
is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard
the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or
the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher
in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will
welcome it with entire acceptance.
From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the
meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came
upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at
dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose
in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from
the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one
“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”
I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their
ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them
substantially the same for a thousand years to come. Briton and
Phœnician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result
so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my
pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American
consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely
provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely
from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them,
talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the
theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold
generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid
climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable
them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the
future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wilfulness, their
sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first
people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies
they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the
world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always
to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all,
testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally
accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served,
and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal
unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the
passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy
level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the
continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had
already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment;
but the result was not the gloom which Americans achieve when they mean
to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin
gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in
spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of
tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these
psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been
coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures
in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from
the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what
they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not
essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect;
the effect was not the logic of the causes.
History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs,
and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute
monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern
town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth
the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those
days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral
tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of
their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the
offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of
both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their
earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the
humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as
the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well
into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even
then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public
frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally
abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.
If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no
manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one
to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the _Bath Chronicle_,
by William Tyte, with the title of _Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its
Progress and Life described_. It is only honest (but one is honest with
so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most
amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal
of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to
Mr. Tyte’s. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good
though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler,
and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing
others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that
he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he deals with; we
have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who
reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in
the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon
which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of
virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how
close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He
could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the
clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the
Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that “none but Abigails appeared in
white aprons,” as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who
wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could
forbid ladies coming in riding-hoods; he could abolish the wearing of
swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a
challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not
try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government[A] of
Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on
occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who, at all periods have
invaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so
largely into control of the Sassenach, while seeming to merge and lose
themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he
was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through
disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as
that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But
though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the
rebellious material to a form of propriety if not of beauty. When he
passed to his account, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed
again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental
condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old
and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans
of two rival candidates for the mastership met in force, a free fight
followed the attempt of a clergyman’s wife to take precedence of a
peer’s daughter; “the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming,
tore each other’s garments and headgear; the floor was strewn with
fragments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The
non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the
walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each
other.” Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and
read the Riot Act three times.
Of course matters could not go on so. Both the contestants for the
Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office
though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled
as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich),
was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the
Abbey. This to be sure was after his death, but the place was always of
such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, “who had highly distinguished
himself in the British army during the American war,” by no means
disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our
annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to
our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane
Austen’s most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but
though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland,
his courage was apparently not equal to upholding his general authority
with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down
the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King “humbly
requested,” though in the matter of wearing hats “at the cotillions or
concerts or dress balls,” our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit
to warn any lady who should “through inattention or any other motive
infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should
be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly.”
From Nash’s time onward several Masters of Ceremonies were scandalized
by people’s giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics,
and one of them took public notice of the evil. “Servants,
hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of
the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to
keep away, and to spare themselves the mortification of being desired to
withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they continue
to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their
entrance.”
Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies,
society in Bath was not only very fast, which society never minds
being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it
was at the same time always very gay. When at last the respective nights
of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained,
the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms;
it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on
Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms; on Thursday with a
Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on
Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Saturday with Public Tea
and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking,
alternately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these
pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might
be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for
the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the
fun was over by eleven o’clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last
step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who
loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with
far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but
might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modern party is
beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea
for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls.
Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence
admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.
It will be seen that with that “large acquaintance” which Mrs. Allen so
handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first
ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very good
time at Bath for a very little money, and every one apparently who had
the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens,
where all sorts of people went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and
for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and-six. Jane
Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the
concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could
best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens,
the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to
because they were so convenient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if
not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon
babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a
busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time
picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous
bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The
river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it
through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless
grace which leaves nothing to be asked.
The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the
Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and
partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer
young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fishing,
riding, and beer. “Her favorite haunt,” says Mr. Tyte, “was a
summer-house by the riverside in Harrison’s Walk, where she often was
seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied
under her chin.” But she also liked to wear when on horseback “a
hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat,” which must have set off her red
face and portly bulk to peculiar advantage. Her particular friend was a
milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the
princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with
people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy
balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and
whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the
customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors
of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to
the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include
any comer from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for,
as the supposed writer in the _New Bath Guide_ records. But the custom
has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need
fear being honored and plundered through it.
It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and
duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to
Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the
other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists,
and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin
yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the
divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or
character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in
them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being
helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped
my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of
encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive
phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much
frequented. I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the
characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland
first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to
meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every
creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different
periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment
passing in and out, up the steps and down.”
I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than
Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day
there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately
hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy
and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in
which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their
glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that
they no longer cared to look at the glass cases full of Roman and Saxon
coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent
people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used
to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk;
and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in
the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest
fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a
grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it
one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s
privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths
with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the
goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a
guide who started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.
I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription
did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the
sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion
you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of
the _New Bath Guide_, when--
“’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex
All wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”
The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now
put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent
to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of
rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting
the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or
gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated
conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident,
many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we
saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the
beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly
creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet
which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems,
and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that
wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing
to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.
I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the
truth rather than bound in a slavish fidelity to the fact. The fact is
that in the succession of days that were all and more than here
suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could
walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird-song and
bee-murmur, with the color of bloom in one’s eyes and the odor of
flowers in one’s nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought
property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath
the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always.
The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I
repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the
rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not
live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and
their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a
proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards
employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses
stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay
the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the
social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler
dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price,
and in the article of butcher’s meat of a far more glaring and offensive
abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun
which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in
unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every
third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way
entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little
to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England
complexions, the wonder what became of that bilious superfluity of
pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.
But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I
know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were
uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided,
and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more
easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost
indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact
large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that
self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain
give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal
spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their
consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which
concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling
has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a
garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers
distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic
situation.