we were next going had not always been the same, but its nature and its
spirit had been the same. An enlightened race would naturally favor the
humane side in all times, and the family were Parliamentarian at the
time England shook off the Stuart tyranny, and revolutionist when she
finally ridded herself of her faithless Jameses and Charleses. In the
archives of the house there are records of the hopes vainly cherished by
a son of it who was then in New York, that our own revolt against the
Georgian oppression might be composed to some peaceful solution of the
quarrel. It was not his fault that this hope was from the first moment
too late, but it must be one of his virtues in American eyes that he saw
from the beginning the hopelessness of any accommodation without a full
concession of the principles for which the colonies contended. In the
negotiation of the treaty at Versailles in 1783 he loyally did his
utmost for his country against ours at every point of issue, and
especially where the exiled American royalists were concerned. Our own
commissioners feared while they respected him, and John Adams wrote of
him in his diary, “He pushes and presses every point as far as it can
possibly go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit.”
This was the first baronet of his line, but the real dignity and honor
of the house has been that of a race of scholars and thinkers. Their
public spirit has been of the rarer sort which would find itself most at
home in the literary association of the place, and it has come to
literary expression in a book of singular charm. In the gentle wisdom of
sympathies which can be universal without transcending English
conditions, the _Talk at a Country House_, as the book modestly calls
itself, strays to topics of poetry, and politics, and economics, and
religion, yet keeps its allegiance to the old house we were about to see
as a central _motif_. It was our first English country house, but I do
not think that its claim on our interest was exaggerated by its novelty,
and I would willingly chance finding its charm as potent again, if I
might take my way to it as before. We came from the old church now by
the high-road, now through fringes of woodland, and now over shoulders
of pasturage, where the lesser celandine delicately bloomed, and the
primrose started from the grass, till at last we emerged from under the
sheltering boughs of the tall elms that screened the house from our
approach. There was a brook that fell noisily over our way, and that we
crossed on a rustic bridge, and there must have been a drive to the
house, but I suppose we did not follow it. Our day of March had grown
gray as it had grown old, and we had not the light of a day in June,
such as favored an imaginary visitor in _Talk at a Country House_, but
we saw the place quite so much as he did that his words will be better
than any of my own in picturing it.
“The air was resonant with rooks as they filled the sky with the circles
in which they wheeled to and fro, disappearing in the distance to
appear again, and so gradually reach their roosting trees.... I might
call them a coruscation of rooks.... On my left I saw ... the old
battlemented wall, and a succession of gables on either side ... and one
marked by a cross which I knew must be the chapel.... The old,
battlemented wall had a flora of its own: ferns, crimson valerian,
snap-dragons, and brier-roses ... and an ash and a yew growing on the
battlements where they had been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I
passed through an archway of the road, the whole house came in view. It
was not a castle nor a palace, but it might be called a real though
small record of what men had been doing there from the time of the
Doomsday Book to our own.”
As we grew more acquainted with it, we realized that at the front it was
a building low for its length, rising gray on terraces that dropped from
its level in green, green turf. Some of the long windows opened down to
the grass, with which the ground floor was even. Above rose the
Elizabethan, earlier Tudor, and Plantagenet of the main building, the
wings, and the tower of the keep. The rear of the house was enclosed by
a wall of Edward II.’s time, and beyond this was a wood of elms, tufted
with the nests of that eternal chorus of coruscating rooks. At first we
noticed their multitudinous voices, but in a little while they lost all
severalty of sound, like waves breaking on the shore, and I fancied one
being so lulled by them that one would miss them when out of hearing,
and the sense would ache for them in the less soothing silence.
The family was away from home, and there were no reserves in the house,
left in the charge of the gardener, as there must have been if it were
occupied. But I do not hope to reproduce my impressions of it. I can
only say that a sense of intellectual refinement and of liberal thought
was what qualified for me such state as characterized the place. The
whole structure within as well as without was a record of successive
temperaments as well as successive tunes. Each occupant had built up or
pulled down after his fancy, but the changes had left a certain
physiognomy unchanged, as the mixture of different strains in the blood
still leaves a family look pure. The house, for all its stateliness, was
not too proud for domesticity; its grandeur was never so vast that the
home circle would be lost in it. The portraits on the walls were
sometimes those of people enlarged to history in their lives, but these
seemed to keep with the rest their allegiance to a common life. The
great Bess of Hardwicke, the “building Bess,” whose architectural
impulses effected themselves in so many parts of England, had married
into the line and then married out of it (to become, as Countess of
Shrewsbury, one of the last jailers of Mary Queen of Scots), and she had
left her touch as well as her face on its walls, but she is not a more
strenuous memory in it than a certain unstoried dowager. She, when her
son died, took half the house and left half to her daughter-in-law, whom
she built off from herself by a partition carried straight through the
mansion to the garden wall, with a separate gate for each.
In her portrait she looks all this and more; and a whole pathetic
romance lives in the looks of that lady of the first Charles’s time who
wears a ring pendent from her neck, and a true-lovers’ knot embroidered
on the back over her heart, and who died unwedded. There were other
legends enough; and where the pictures asserted nothing but lineage they
were still very interesting. They were of people who had a life in
common with the house, wives and mothers and daughters, sons and
husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving
from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance
with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their
race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are
each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of
their succession which the generations of such an English house must
feel. It would be easy to overestimate the feeling, but in view of it I
began to understand the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the
children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it
inalienably their common home, though only the first-born son may dwell
in it. If there were no law to transmit it to the eldest brother they
might well in their passion for it be a law unto themselves at any
sacrifice and put it in his hands to have and hold for them all.
In my own country I had known too much graceless private ownership to
care to offer the consecrated tenure of such an ancestral home the
violence of unfriendly opinions of primogeniture. But if I had been
minded to do so, I am not sure that this house and all its dead and
living would not have heard me at least tolerantly. In England, with the
rigid social and civic conformity, there has always been ample play for
personal character; perhaps without this the inflexible conditions would
be insufferable, and all sorts of explosions would occur. With full
liberty to indulge his whim a man does not so much mind being on this
level or that, or which side of the social barrier he finds himself. But
it is not his whim only that he may freely indulge: he may have his way
in saying the thing he thinks, and the more frankly he says it the
better he is liked, even when the thing is disliked. These are the
conditions, implicit in everything, by which the status, elsewhere
apparently so shaky, holds itself so firmly on its legs. They reconcile
to its contradictions those who suffer as well as those who enjoy, and
dimly, dumbly, the dweller in the cottage is aware that his rheumatism
is of one uric acid with the gout of the dweller in the great house.
Every such mansion is the centre of the evenly distributed civilization
which he shares, and makes each part of England as tame, and keeps it as
wild, as any other. He knows that hut and hall must stand or fall
together, for the present, at least; and where is it that there is any
longer a future?
It seems strange to us New-Worldlings, after all the affirmation of
history and fiction, to find certain facts of feudalism (mostly the
kindlier facts) forming part of the status in England as they form no
part of it with us. It was only upon reflection that I perceived how
feudal this great house was in its relation to the lesser homes about it
through many tacit ties of responsibility and allegiance. From eldest
son to eldest son it had been in the family always, but it had descended
with obligations which no eldest son could safely deny any more than he
could refuse the privileges it conferred. To what gentlest effect the
sense of both would come, the reader can best learn from the book which
I have already named. This, when I had read it, had the curious
retroactive power of establishing the author in a hospitable perpetuity
in the place bereft of him, so that it now seems as if he had been chief
of those who took leave of us that pale late afternoon of March, and
warned us of the chill mists which shrouded us back to Bath. As we
drove along between the meadows where the light was failing and the
lambs plaintively called through the gloaming, we said how delightful it
had all been, how perfectly, how satisfyingly, English. We tried again
to realize the sentiment which, as well as the law, keeps such places in
England in the ordered descent, and renders it part of the family faith
and honor that the ancestral house should always be the home of its
head. I think we failed because we conceived of the fact too
objectively, and imagined conscious a thing that tradition has made part
of the English nature, so that the younger brother acquiesces as
subjectively in the elder brother’s primacy as the elder brother
himself, for the family’s sake. We fancied that in their order one class
yielded to another without grudging and without grasping, and that this,
which fills England with picturesqueness and drama, was the secret of
England. In the end we were not so sure. We were not sure even of our
day’s experience; it was like something we had read rather than lived;
and in this final unreality, I prefer to shirk the assertion of a
different ideal, which all the same I devoutly hold.
V
AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL
Even the local guide-book, which is necessarily optimistic, owns that
the railroad service between Bath and Wells leaves something to be
desired. The distance is twenty miles, and you can make it by the Great
Western in something over two hours, but if you are pressed for time,
the Somerset and Dorset line will carry you in two. As we were
nationally in a hurry, though personally we had time to spare, we went
and came by this line, mostly in a sort of vague rain, which favored the
blossoming of the primroses along the railroad bank. Not that any part
of the way needed rain; great stretches of the country lay soaking in
the rainfall of the year before, which had not had sun enough to
diminish its depth or breadth. In fact, on the eve of the sunniest and
loveliest summer which perhaps England ever saw, the whole West looked
in March as if wringing it out and hanging it up to dry in a
steam-laundry could alone get the wet out of it. The water lay in wide
expanses in the meadows, the plethoric streams swam chokeful; in the
ditches men were at work with short scythes cutting the rank weeds out
to give the flood a little course, but where it was to run was a
question which did not answer itself.
We were in a third-class compartment, and we had the advantage of the
simple life getting in and out of a train that seemed to stop oftener
than it started. Our ever-changing fellow-passengers were mostly mothers
of large little families: babies in arms, and babies slightly bigger,
sisters and brothers pendent at arm’s-length from the mother-hands, all
with flaring blue eyes and flaming red cheeks, and flaxen hair and mild,
sweet faces. Everybody was good, and helped these helpless families to
mount and dismount; the kindly porters came and went with their
impracticable bundles, and the passengers handed the brothers and
sisters after the baby-burdened mother, or took them from her so that
she might stumble into the carriage without falling upon her detached
offspring. They were beautifully polite in word and deed, so that it was
a consolation to hear and see them.
Shortly after our journey began, our tram was apparently run down by an
old man and his granddaughter who got in blown and panting from their
chase of half a mile before overtaking us. They were of the thin blond
type of some English country folks, with a milder color in their cheeks
than usual, and between his age and her youth they had about a third of
the natural allowance of teeth. Agriculture is apparently nowhere
favorable to the preservation of teeth; the rustic theory is that when a
tooth offends one should pluck it out; but in England they never expect
to replace it, while with us they pluck out all the others and replace
them with new ones from the dentist’s, so that when you see good teeth
in a country mouth you know where they come from. Their want of teeth
did not prevent the old man and the little girl from beginning to eat as
soon as they could get their breath. They were going on a visit to her
aunt, it seemed, and she was provisioned against the chances of famine
in the hour’s journey by a plentiful supply of oranges and apples and
cakes in a net bag. “Us ’ad a ’ard chase, didn’t us?” the old man asked
her, with a sociable glance round the place. The little girl nodded with
her mouth full, while her fingers explored the bag for more cakes to
fill it when it should be empty, and the old man leaned tenderly towards
her and suggested, “Couldn’t your little ’and find something for me,
too?” She drew forth an orange and a cake and gave them to him. Then
they munched on, he garrulously, she silently; with what teeth they had
between them they must have managed to masticate their food, and there
is every probability that they reached their journey’s end without
famishing.
We had only two changes to make in our twenty miles, and as we were on
the swift train that made the distance in two hours, we did not mind
some delay at each change. It was just lunch-time when we reached Wells,
and had ourselves driven in the hotel omnibus, a tremendously rackety
vehicle, to The Swan. This bird’s plumage was much disarranged by some
sort of Easter preparations, and there were workmen taking down and
hanging up decorations. But there was quiet in the coffee-room, where
over a cold, cold, luncheon we shivered in sympathy with the icy gloom
of the basement entrance of the inn, where an office-lady darkled behind
her office-window, apparently in winter-long question whether she would
be warmer with it shut or open. It was an inn of the old type, now
happily obsolescent, which if it cannot smell directly of a stable-yard,
does what it can by smelling of the stable-boy in its doorway. We had
not, however, come to Wells for the Swan, but for the cathedral, and as
we could look out at its loveliness from the window where we ate lunch,
we had really nothing to complain of. We had indeed something specially
to be glad of, for we could there get our first glimpse of the cathedral
through the Dean’s Eye, or if this is not quite honest, from over the
Dean’s Eyebrow, so to call the top of the fifteenth-century gate, which
commands the finest approach to the cathedral. When you have passed
through the Dean’s Eye it may not be quite as if you had passed through
the Needle’s Eye; but if I were an American millionaire who had my
doubts of the way I was going I might have fancied myself achieving a
feat even more difficult than the camel’s, and to be entering the
Kingdom as I crossed the lawn inside the gate, and moved in my rapture
towards the divine edifice. All the English cathedrals are beautiful,
but among those which are most beautiful the Wells cathedral is next to
the cathedral of Ely, in my memory. I am not speaking of stateliness or
grandeur, but of that more refined and exquisite something which makes a
supreme appeal in, say, the Church of St. Mark’s at Venice. I came away
from the Wells cathedral saying to myself that there was a loveliness in
it for which there was no word but feminine; and if this conveys any
notion to the reader’s mind, I shall be glad to leave him for the rest
to any pictures of it he can find.
Of course we followed the verger through it in the usual way, but I
could not make any one follow me with as much profit. It had its quaint
details, and its grotesque details, from the bursting fun of the ages of
faith, as well as its expressions of simple reverence, all blending to
the sort of tender beauty I have tried to intimate, and it had its great
wonder of an inverted arch, through which one looked at its glories as
with one’s head held upside down. I do not know but the 1325 clock of
Peter Lightfoot, monk of Glastonbury, is as great a wonder as the
inverted arch.
[Illustration: WELLS CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHEAST]
We were so fortunate as to be present when it struck the hour, and so we
saw the four knights on horseback go riding round, and the seated man
kick two small bells with his heels, as he has been doing every fifteen
minutes for nigh six hundred years. For the ordinary lay-mind on its
travels, I suppose, this active personage is one of the great
attractions of the cathedral next after the toothache-man in one of the
capitals who pulls his mouth open to show his aching tooth. He has been
much photographed, of course, but he is to be seen _in situ_ just above
that bishop’s tomb which is sovereign, through the bishop’s merits, for
the toothache. The verger, who told us this, left us to suppose that the
tomb had been too difficult of application to the tooth of the sufferer
above, and that this was why he was still appealing to the public
sympathy.
We offered him a mute condolence after we had sated ourselves with the
beauty of the most beautiful chapter-house in the world, ascending and
descending by the foot-worn wide crossing sweep of the unique stairway,
and then walking through into the Vicar’s Close, and the two rows of
Singers’ Houses, like cottages in a particularly successful stage
perspective. As we passed one of these histrionic habitations, each with
its lifelike dooryard and its practicable gate, three of the clerical
students, who have an immemorial right to lodge with the singers, came
out gayly challenging one another which way they should walk, and
deciding on Tor Hill, wherever that was, and then starting off at a good
round pace in the rain. The doubting day had sorrowed and sowed to that
effect, and when the verger had led us through the cloister aisle into
the gardens of the bishop’s palace the grounds were so much like waters
that there seemed no reason why the ducks should not have been sailing
on the lawn as well as the moat. This, with the embattled wall, is said,
and probably fabled, to have formed the defence of his house for a
certain bishop whose life was threatened by the monks of Bath, who if
they had waited five hundred years in the idea of suddenly descending
upon him by our swift train, would have found him prepared to give them
a warm reception. But the day of our visit there were no belligerent
monks; the place was almost peacefully picturesque, with no protection
needed but an umbrella against the rain heavily dripping from the ivy of
the ruined cloister arches, and goloshes against the water of the
sopping earth.
It was the idea of one of us who had found an ancient almshouse very
amusingly characteristic on a former English journey, that we could not
do better, after the cathedral, than go to one of the several
time-honored charitable foundations in Wells. We had our choice of
several, including one for six poor men, and one for twelve poor men and
two poor women. But we must have selected the largest, where both poor
men and poor women dwell. Such people do not end their days in the
snugness of such places with anything of the disgrace which attaches to
paupers with us. Their lot is rather a coveted honor, and on their level
is felt to add dignity to the decline of life. Each old woman has her
kitchen, and each old man his kitchen garden (always edged with simple
flowers); and they have a stated income, generally six or seven
shillings a week, with which they provision themselves as they please.
We did not find the matron of the place we chose without some
difficulty, or some apologetic delay for her want of preparation. But
she was really well enough, when she came, though it was charing-day,
and the whole house was even better prepared, which was the essential
thing. I cannot say that the inmates seemed especially glad to see their
poor American relations, but there was no active opposition to our
visit, and we did our best to win the favor of three old men shown as
specimens in the large common room where they were smoking by the
chimney, and, if I am any judge of human nature, criticising the
management down to the motives of the original benefactor in the
fourteenth century. We had some brief but not unfriendly parley, and
after offering a modest contribution towards the general tobacco-fund,
we said good-bye to these meritorious old men, who made a show of
standing up, but did not really do so, I think. The matron would have
left the door open, but I bethought me to ask if they would not rather
have it shut, and they said with one voice that they would. I closed it
with the conviction that they would instantly begin talking about us,
and not to our advantage, but I could not blame them. Age is censorious,
poverty is apt to be envious, infirmity is not amiable and we were not
praiseworthy. Upon the whole I hope they gave it us good and strong; for
I am afraid that the next pensioner whom we visited thought better of us
than we deserved. I got the notion that she was in some sort a show
pensioner, and that therefore we had not taken her unawares. Her room
was both parlor and kitchen, and was decorated no less with her cooking
apparatus than the china openly set about the wall on shelves. She was
full of smiles and little polite bobs, and most willing to have her room
admired, even to the bed that crowded her table towards her grate, and
left a very snug fit for her easy-chair. One could see that the matron
prized her, and expected us to do so, and we did so, especially when she
showed us a flower in a pot which her son had given her. Perhaps we
exaggerated the comforts of her room in congratulating her upon it, but
this was an error in the right direction, and we did what we could to
repair it by the offer of a shilling. If it is permitted to the spirits
of benefactors in heaven to take pleasure in their good deeds on earth,
it must have been a source of satisfaction for five hundred years (as
they count time here) to the founder of this charity when he thought of
how many humble fellow-creatures he had helped, and was helping. Perhaps
they do not care, up there; but the chance is worth the attention of
people looking about for a permanent investment. I think every one ought
to earn a living, and when past it ought to be pensioned by the state,
and let live in comfort after his own fancy; but failing this ideal, I
wish the rich with us would multiply foundations after the good old
English fashion, in which the pensioners, though they dwelt much in
common, could keep a semblance of family life and personal independence.
Of course Wells, as its name says, was once a watering-place, though
never of so much resort as Bath; but now its healing springs bubble or
ooze forth in forgottenness, with not a leper or even a rheumatic to
avail of them. It was very, very anciently a mining-town, and long
afterwards a shoe-town, with an interval of being a place of weavers,
but it was never an industrial centre. It has never even been very
historical, though Henry VII. stopped there in his campaign against the
Pretender Perkin Warbeck, and after centuries the followers of another
pretender--the luckless, worthless, but otherwise harmless bastard of
Charles II., the Duke of Monmouth, who was making war against his uncle,
James II.--occupied the city and stripped the lead from the