afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so
largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the
possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there
always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be
slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I
can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in
civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit
is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of
fashion and infirmity, of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the
finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The
lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft
afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in
the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with
the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor,
the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have
remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that
the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for
the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the
scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal
sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of
numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and
whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people
who have known the spectres almost from childhood. Some of them have the
habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the
line at Americans.
I forget whether the almond-trees were in bloom or not when we came to
Bath, but I am sure they continued so throughout our stay, and I found
them steadily blossoming away elsewhere for a month afterwards. There is
no reason why they should not, for they have no work to do in the way of
ripening their nuts, and they lead a life as idle and unfinal as the
vines and fig-trees of Great Britain, which also blossom as cheerfully
and set their fruit, and carry it through the seasons in a lasting
immaturity. I never thought the almond in bloom as rare a sight as the
peach, whose pale elder sister it is; but in the absence of the peach, I
was always glad of it, in a dooryard or over a garden wall. Where the
walls were low enough to lean upon, as they sometimes were round the
vegetable gardens, it was pleasant to pause and contemplate the infinite
variety of cabbage held in a green arrest by the mild winter air, but
destined to an ultimation beyond the powers of the almond, the grape and
the fig. There seemed to be a good many of these gardened spaces in the
town, as well as in the outskirts where more new houses were going up,
in something of the long leisure of the vegetation. The famous Bath
building-stone is in fact so much employed elsewhere that there may not
be enough of it for home use, and that may account for the slow growth
of the place; but if I lived there I should not wish it to grow, and if
I were King of Bath, in due succession from Beau Nash, I would not
suffer one Bath-stone to be set upon the other within its limits. The
place is large enough as it is, and I should hate to have it restored to
its former greatness. There was indeed only too little decay in it, but
there was at least one gratifying instance in the stately mansion at the
end of our street,--falling or fallen to ruin, with its Italian style
rapidly antedating the rough classic of the Roman baths, in the effect
of a sorrowful superannuation,--which I could not have rescued from
dilapidation without serious loss. The hollow windows and broken doors
and toppled chimneys, the weather-stained walls and pillars painted
green with mould, were half concealed, half betrayed, by the neglected
growth of trees, and a wilding thicket had sprung up over the lawn,
penetrated by wanton paths in spite of warnings against trespassing by
severely worded sign-boards. Whose the house was, or why it was
abandoned I never learned, and I do not know that I wished to learn; it
was so satisfying as it was and for what it was. It stood on the borders
of Sydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for
our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.
We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that
Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But
it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the
house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it
fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our
souls with so sorrowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there
was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet
gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and
good, and as if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to
look in over the threshold that Jane Austen’s feet had lightly pressed,
but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to
leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have
pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments,
but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note
with a longing, lingering look, that the house was very simple and
plain, like the other houses near.
The literary tradition of the neighborhood is supported in one of these
by the presence of a famous nautical novelist, who has often shipwrecked
and marooned me to my great satisfaction, on reefs and desolate islands,
or water-logged me in lonely seas. He lived even nearer the corner of
Pulteney Street where we were in our hotel, and where we much imagined
taking one of the many lodgings to let there, but never did. We looked
into some, and found them probably not very different from what they
were when the Allens went into theirs with Catherine Morland. We
decided that this was just across the way from our hotel, and that Mrs.
Allen saw us from her window whenever we went or came. We were sure also
that we met Lady Russell and Anne Elliot driving out of _Persuasion_
through Pulteney Street, when Anne noticed Captain Wentworth coming
towards them, and supposed from Lady Russell’s stare, that she was
equally moved by the vision, but found she was “looking after some
window curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland were telling” her
of as “being the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath.”
Our hotel fronted not only on Pulteney Street, but also on Laura Place,
a most genteel locality indeed where we knew as soon as Sir Walter
Elliot that his cousin “Lady Dalrymple had taken a house for three
months and would be living in style.” I do not think we ever made out
the house, and we were more engaged in observing the behavior of the
wicked John Thorpe driving poor Catherine Morland through Laura Place
after he had deceived her into thinking Henry Tilney, whom she had
promised to walk with, had gone out of town, and whom she now saw
passing with his sister. On a happier day, as the reader will remember,
Catherine really went her walk with the Tilneys, and in sympathy and
emulation we too climbed the steep slopes of “Beechen Cliff, that noble
hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking
an object from almost every opening in Bath.” You now cross the railroad
to reach it, and pass through neighborhoods that were probably
pleasanter a hundred years ago; but the view of the town in the bottom
of its bowl must be as fine as ever, though we found no hanging coppice
from which to commend it. Still, as our wont was, we bought several
pieces of property that pleased us, and I still have a few suburban
houses in that quarter which I could offer the reader at a sacrifice.
The truth is that in spite of having the Tilneys and Catherine for
company we did not like the Beechen Cliff as well as its rival
acclivity, Sion Hill, which forms the opposite rim of Bath, and is not
so arduous of approach. A lady who lived not quite at the top, but above
the Bath chair line, declared it the third-best air in England, without
indicating the first or second. The air was at least more active than we
were in our climb, but with a driver who got down and helped his horses
walk up with us, we could enjoy there one of the loveliest prospects in
the world. The fineness of the air was attested probably by the growth
of ivy, which was the richest I saw in England, where the ivy grows so
richly in every place. It not only climbed all the trees on that down,
and clothed their wintry nakedness with a foliage perpetually green, but
it flung its shining mantles over the walls that shut in the mansions on
the varying slopes, and densely aproned the laps of the little hollows
of the lawns and woods. It had the air of feeling its life in every
leaf, and of lustily reaching out for other conquests, like the true
weed it is in Old England, and not the coddled exotic which people make
it believe it is in New England. I do not know that I ever lost the
surprise of it in its real character; I only know that this surprise was
greatest for me on those happy heights.
* * * * *
The modern hand-book which was guiding our steps about Bath advised us
that if we would frequent Milsom Street about four o’clock we should
find the tide of fashion flowing through it; but the torrent must have
been very rapid indeed, for we always missed it, and were obliged to
fill the rather empty channel with the gayety of the past. There are
delightful shops everywhere in Bath, and so many places to buy old
family silver that it seems as if all the old families must have poured
all their old silver into them, till you visit other parts of England,
and find the same superabundance of second-hand plate everywhere. But it
is in Milsom Street that most of the fine shops are, and I do not deny
that you will see some drops of the tide of fashion clustered about
their windows. Other drops have percolated to the tea-rooms, where at
five o’clock there is a scene of dissipation around the innocent cups.
But there was no reason why we should practise the generous self-deceit
of our hand-book regarding the actual Milsom Street, when we had its
former brilliancy to draw upon. Even in the time of Jane Austen’s people
it was no longer “residential,” though it was not so wholly gone to
shops as now. The most eligible lodgings were in it, and here General
Tilney sojourned till he insisted on carrying Catherine off to
Northanger Abbey with his children. “His lodgings were taken the very
day after he left them, Catherine,” said Mrs. Allen, afterwards. “But no
wonder; Milsom Street, you know.” Still, the finest shops prevailed
there, then, and when Isabella Thorpe wished to punish the two young men
who had been so impertinently admiring her, by following them, she
persuaded Catherine that she was taking her to a shop-window in Milsom
Street to see “the prettiest hat you can imagine ... very like yours,
with coquelicot ribbons instead of green.” In Milsom Street, sweet Anne
Elliot first meets Captain Wentworth after he comes to Bath, and he is
much confused. But it is no wonder that so many things happen in or
through Milsom Street in Bath fiction, for it leads directly, or as
directly as a street in Bath can, from the New Assembly to the Old
Assembly which were called, puzzlingly enough for the after-comer, the
Upper Rooms and the Lower Rooms, as if they were on different floors of
the same building, instead of separated a quarter of a mile by a rise of
ground. The street therefore led also to the Pump Room and to the divers
parades and walks and gardens, and was of prime topographical
importance, as well as literary interest.
We could not visit the Lower Rooms because they were burned down a great
while ago, but for the sake of certain famous heroines, and many more
dear girls unknown to fame, we went to the Upper Rooms, and found them
most characteristically getting ready for the Easter Ball which the
County Club was to give, and which promised to relume for one night at
least the vanished splendors of Bath. The Ballroom was really noble, and
there were sympathetic tea-rooms and cloakrooms, and the celebrated
octagonal room in the centre, where workmen were hustling the pretty and
gallant ghosts of former dances with their sawing and hammering, and
painting and puttying, and measuring the walls for decorations. I do not
know that I should have minded all that, though I hate to have the
present disturbing the past so much as it must in England; but something
very tragical happened to me at the Upper Rooms which branded that visit
in my mind. A young fellow civilly detached himself from the other
artisans and showed us through the place, and though we could have
easily found the way ourselves, it seemed fit to return his civility in
silver. Sixpence would have been almost too much, but in my pocket there
was a sole coin that enlarged itself to my dismay to the measure of a
full moon. I appealed to my companion, but when did ever a woman have
money unless she had just got it from a husband or father? The thought
struck me that for once I might behave as shabbily as I should always
like to do; but I had not the courage. Slowly, with inward sighs, I drew
forth my hand and bestowed upon that most superfluous youth, for five
minutes’ disservice, a whole undivided half-crown, received his brief
“Thankyesir,” rendered as if he took half-crowns every day for that sort
of thing, and tottered forth so bewildered that I quite forgot the
emotion proper to the place where Catherine Morland went to her first
ball, and Anne Elliot first met Captain Wentworth after coming to Bath.
It was there that Catherine had to sit the whole evening through without
dancing or speaking with a soul, and was only saved by overhearing two
gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl.” Such words had their due
effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had
found it before, her humble vanity was contented; she ... went to her
chair in good humor with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her
share of public attention.
I should have liked immensely to look on at the County Ball which was to
assemble all the quality of the neighborhood on something like the old
terms, and I heard with joy the story of ten gay youths who returned
from one of the last balls in Bath chairs, drawn through the gray dawn
in Milsom Street by as many mettlesome chairmen. Only when one has
studied the Bath chair on its own ground, and seen the sort of gloomy
veteran who pulls it, commonly with a yet gloomier old lady darkling
under its low buggy-top, can one realize the wild fun of such an
adventure. It might not always be safe, for the chairman sometimes
balks, and in case of sharp acclivities altogether refuses to go on, as
I have already told.
In paying our duty to the literary memories of the town we did not fail
to visit the church of St. Swithin, in the shadow of which Fanny Burney
lies buried with the gentle exile who made her Madame d’Arblay, and a
very happy wife after the glory of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_ began to be
lost a little in the less merited success of _Camilla_ and _The
Wanderer_. The gate was locked and we were obliged to come away without
getting into the church-yard, but we saw “about where” one of the great
mothers of English fiction lay; and the pew-opener, found for us with
some difficulty and delay by an interested neighbor, let us into the
church, and there we revered the tablets of the kindly pair. They were
on the wall of the gallery, and I thought they might have been nearer
together, but hers was very fitly inscribed; and one could stand before
it, and indulge a pensive mood in thoughts of the brilliant girl’s first
novel, which set the London world wild and kept Dr. Johnson up all
night, mixed with fit reflections on her father’s ambition in urging her
into the service of the “sweet Queen” Charlotte, where she was summoned
with a bell like a waiting-maid, and the fire of her young genius was
quenched.
If one would have a merrier memory of literary Bath, let him go visit
the house, if he can find it, of the Reverend Dr. Wilson, in Alfred
Street, where the famous Mrs. Macaulay, the first English historian of
her name, presided as a species of tenth muse, and received the homage
of whatever was academic in the rheumatic culture of Bath. She was
apparently the idol of the heart as well as the head (it was thought to
have been partially turned) of the good man whose permanent guest she
was. He put up a marble statue to her as History in his London parish
church, and had a vault made near it to receive her remains when she
should have done with them. But before this happened, History fell in
love with Romance in the person of a young man many years her junior,
and on their marriage the reverend doctor irately removed her statue
from the chancel of St. Stephen’s, and sold her vault for the use of
some less lively body. Her new husband was the brother of a Dr. Graham
who had formerly travelled with Lord Nelson’s beautiful Lady Hamilton
and exhibited her “reclining on a celestial bed” as the Goddess of
Health and Beauty. On the night of Mrs. Macaulay’s birthday the
physician presented her with an address in which he claimed, by virtue
of his mud baths, “the supreme blessedness of removing under God, the
complicated and obstinate maladies your fair and very delicate frame was
afflicted with.” The company danced, played, and talked, and went out to
a supper of “syllabubs, jellies, creams, ices, wine-cakes, and a variety
of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples.”
The literary celebrities who visited Bath, or sojourned, or lived there
were not to be outnumbered except in London alone, if in fact the
political capital exceeded in them. Mr. Tyte mentions among others De
Foe, who stopped at Bath in collecting materials for his _Tour of Great
Britain_; and who met Alexander Selkirk there, and probably imagined
Robinson Crusoe from him on the spot. Richard Steele came and wrote
about Bath in the _Spectator_. Gay, Pope and Congreve, Lady Mary Wortley
Montague, Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe came and went; and Sheridan dwelt
there in his father’s house, and met the beautiful Miss Linley, woed,
won, went off to Paris with her and wedded her, and returned to fight
two duels in defence of her honor. Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell
resorted to the waters; Lord Chesterfield wrote some of his letters from
a place where worldly politeness might be so well studied; Walpole some
of his where gossip so abounded. De Quincey was a school-boy in Bath;
Southey spent his childhood there, and Coleridge preached there, as he
did in many other Unitarian pulpits in England; Cowper wrote his “Verses
on finding the Heel of a Shoe at Bath” after coming to see his cousin,
Lady Hesketh, there; Burke met his wife there, and so did Beckford, who
wrote _Vathek_, meet his. Christopher Anstey, the author of that
humorous, that scandalous, that amusing satire, the _New Bath Guide_,
lived most of his life in the city he delighted to laugh at.
The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most
attracts, after the names of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, is the name
of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young,
and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wrote _The
Pickwick Papers_ he was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous
drollery was not just the qualification for dealing with the pathetic
absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had
been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a
social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But
the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where
some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick’s money; and he had
already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both
places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the
description of Mr. Pickwick’s introduction to the Master of the
Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq. The exaggerated caricature
preserves some traits of the M.C.’s, his illustrious predecessors; and
perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens could best render the
personal effect of a beau of the period. He “was a charming young man of
not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent
buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly
polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short,
broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left
hand ... and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His
linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiffest; his wig of the
glossiest, blackest and curliest.... His features were contracted into a
perpetual smile. ‘Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition.
Most welcome to Ba-ath.... Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick?... Never
in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good,
good. He! he! he! Re-mark-able!’”
This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened,
and one sighs amid the horse-play for “the touch of a vanished hand,”
like Jane Austen’s, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The
Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just opposite the Pump
Room, but it was while living in “the upper portion of the Royal
Crescent,” that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler,
whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return
from a ball. The elderly reader will probably remember better than the
younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to
let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was
obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the
mockeries of a party coming into the
[Illustration: THE GUINEA-PIG MAN]
Crescent; how he fled to escape her infuriated husband, and in Bristol
found Mr. Dowler, who had also fled from Bath to escape Mr. Winkle and
the consequences of his own violent threats. It was at the house of the
Master of Ceremonies in Queen’s Square that “a select company of Bath
footmen” entertained Sam Weller at a “friendly swarry consisting of a
boiled leg of mutton and the usual trimmings,” but I am unable to give
the number where Sam’s note of invitation instructed him to ring at the
“airy bell.”
In fact, on going back to the Bath episode of the _Pickwick Papers_, one
finds so much make-believe required of him that the remembrance of one’s
earlier delight in it is a burden and a hindrance rather than a help.
You could get on better with it if you were reading it for the first
time, and even then it would not seem very like what he probably saw.
You would be sensible of the elemental facts, but in the picture they
are all jarred out of semblance to life. The effect is quite that of a
Cruikshank illustration, abounding in impossible grotesqueness, yet
related here and there to reality by an action, an expression, a figure.
It is screaming farce, or it is shrieking melodrama; the mirror is held
up to nature, but nature makes a face in it. Nevertheless, on an earlier
visit to England, I had once seen a water-side character getting into a
Thames steam-boat who seemed to me exactly like a character of Dickens;
and in Bath I used often to meet a little, queer plinth of a man, whose
nationality I could not make out, but every inch of whose five feet was
full of the suggestion of Dickens. His face, topped by a frowzy cap, was
twisted in a sort of fixed grin, and his eyes looked different ways,
perhaps to prevent any attempt of mine to escape him. He carried at his
side a small wicker-box which he kept his hand on; and as he drew near
and halted, I heard a series of plaintive squeaks coming from it. “Make
you perform the guinea-pig?” he always asked, and before I could answer,
he dragged a remonstrating guinea-pig from its warm shelter, and
stretched it on the cage, holding it down with both hands. “Johnny die
queek!” he commanded, and lifted his hands for the instant in which
Johnny was motionlessly gathering his forces for resuscitation. Then he
called exultantly, “Bobby’s coming!” and before the police were upon
him, Johnny was hustled back into his cosy box, woefully murmuring to
its comfort of his hardship; and the queer little man smiled his triumph
in every direction. The sight of this brief drama always cost me a
penny; perhaps I could have had it for less; but I did not think a penny
was too much.
IV
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE