southward, it would be milder than Bath, where the spring was from time
to time so inclement, but finding it rather colder and bleaker, we
experimented a little farther to the southward, a day or two after our
arrival, and went to the Isle of Wight. The sail across the Solent, or
whatever water is was we crossed, was beautiful, but it was not balmy,
and when we reached Cowes, after that dinner aboard which you always get
so much better in England than in like conditions with us, we found it
looking not so tropical as we could have liked, but doubtless as
tropical as it really was. The pretty town curved round its famous yacht
harborage in ranks of summer hotel-like houses, with green lattices and
a convention of out-door life in their architecture, such as befitted a
mild climate; but we were keeping on to the station where you take train
for Ventnor, on the southern shore of the island, which has to support
the reputation of being the English Riviera. We did not know then how
bad the Italian Riviera could be, and doubtless we blamed the English
one more than we ought. We ought, indeed, to have been warmed for it by
the sort of horseback exercise we had on the roughest stretch of railway
I can remember, in cars whose springs had been broken in earlier service
on some mainland line of the monopoly now employing them on the Isle of
Wight, and defying the public to do anything about it, as successfully
as any railroad of our own republic. We had a hope and an intention of
seeing flowers, which we fulfilled as we could with the unprofitable
gayety of the blossomed furze by the waysides; and more and more we
fancied a forwardness in the spring which was doubtless mainly of our
invention. From our steamer we had a glimpse of Osborne Castle, the
favorite seat of the good queen who is gone, and we wafted our thoughts
afar to Carisbrooke, where the hapless Charles I. was for a time
captive, playing fast and loose, in feeble bad faith, with the
victorious Parliament, when it would have been willing to treat with
him. But you cannot go everywhere in England, especially in one day,
though home-keeping Americans think it is so small, and we had to leave
Newport and its Carisbrooke castle aside in our going and coming between
Ryde and Ventnor.
It was well into the afternoon when we reached Ventnor, and took a fly
for the time left us, which was largely tea-time, by the reckoning of
the girl in the nice pastry-shop where we stopped for refreshment. She
said that the season in Ventnor was July and August, but the bathing was
good into October, and we could believe the pleasant Irishman in our
return train who told us that it was terribly hot in the summer at
Ventnor. The lovely little town, which is like an English water-color,
for the rich, soft blur of its grays, and blues and greens, has a sea at
its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a milky
horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats, drowning in it,
like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in
amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to have
the liveliness of watering-place
[Illustration: THE SOUTH SHORE, SOUTHAMPTON]
shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer
boarding-houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly
and oleander and laurel; some of the better-looking houses were
thatched, perhaps to satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer
boarder or tenant. The intelligent hunchback who drove our fly, and
instructed us in things of local interest far beyond our capacity, named
prices at these houses which might, if I repeated them, tempt an
invasion from our own resorts, if people did not mind suffering in July
and August for the sake of the fine weather in November. Doubtless there
are some who would not mind being shut southward by the steep and lofty
downs which prevent the movement of air as much in summer as in winter
at Ventnor. The acclivities are covered with a short, wiry grass, and on
the day of our visit the boys of Ventnor were coasting down them on a
kind of toboggans. Besides this peculiar advantage, Ventnor has the
attraction, common to so many English towns and villages, of a Norman
church, and of those seats and parks of the nobility and gentry which
one cannot long miss in whatever direction one goes, in a land where the
nobility and gentry are so much cherished.
The day had been hesitating between rain and sun as usual, but it had
decided for rain when we left Ventnor, where we had already found it
very cold in-doors, over the tea and bread and butter, which they gave
us so good. By the time we had got back to Ryde, the frigidity of the
railway waiting-room, all the colder for the fire that had died earlier
in the day, was such that it seemed better to go out and walk up and
down the platform, in the drive of the rain, as hard and fast as one
could, than to stay within. In these conditions the boat appeared to be
longer in coming than it really was, and when it came it was almost too
well laden with the Bank-holiday folk whom we had been instructed to
dread. At Cowes, more young men and young girls of a like sort came on
board, but beyond favoring us with their loud confidences they did us no
harm, and it was quite practicable to get supper. They were of the
chorus-girl level of life, apparently, and there was much that suggested
the stage in their looks and behavior, but they could not all have been
of the theatre, and they were better company than the two German
governesses who had travelled towards Ventnor with us, and filled the
compartment with the harsh clashing of their native consonants. The
worst that you could say of the trippers was that they were always
leaving the saloon door open, and letting in the damp wind, which had
now become very bitter, but English people of every degree are always
leaving the door open, and these poor trippers were only like the rest
of their nation in that. One young lady lay with her feet conspicuously
up on the lounge which she occupied to the exclusion of four or five
other persons, but by-and-by she took her feet down, and the most
critical traveller could not have affirmed that it was characteristic of
Easter Bank-holiday ladies to stretch themselves out with their feet
permanently up on the cushions. When we landed at Southampton, and drove
away in a cab, we had an experience which was then novel, but ceased to
be less and less so. It seemed that the pier was a private enterprise,
and you must pay toll for its use, or else not arrive or depart on that
boat.
So many of our fellow-countrymen come ashore from their Atlantic liners
at Southampton, and rush up to London in two hours by their steamer
trains, without
[Illustration: “THE PIER WAS A PRIVATE ENTERPRISE”]
any other sense of the place than as a port of entry, that I feel as if
I were making an undue claim upon their credulity in proposing it as a
city having a varied literary and historical interest. Yet Southampton
is a city of no mean memories, with a history going back into the dark
of the first invasions, and culminating early in the fable of King
Canute’s failure to browbeat the Atlantic. The men who won Cressy,
Poictiers and Agincourt set sail from it, and fifty ships and more made
ready there for the Armada. In turn it was much harried by the French,
but the Dutch, whom Alva drove into exile, settled in the town and
helped prosper it with their industries, till the Great Plague brought
it such adversity that the grass, which has served the turn of so much
desolation, grew in its streets. With the continuous wars of England and
France it rose again, and now it is what every American traveller fails
to see as he hurries through it. I have not thought it needful to
mention that in the ages when giants abounded in Britain, Southampton
had one of the worst of that caitiff race, who was baptized against his
will, but afterwards eloping with his liege lady, was finally slain.
The place was so attractive socially, a hundred-odd years ago, that Jane
Austen’s family, when they came away from Bath, could think of no
pleasanter sojourn. She wrote some of her most delightful letters from
Southampton, and of course we went and looked up the neighborhood where
she had lived. No trace of that precious occupancy is now left beside
the stretch of the ancient city wall from which the Austens’ garden
overlooked a beautiful expanse of the Solent, but we made out the place,
and for the rest we gave ourselves to the pleasure of following the
course of the old city wall, which, with its ivied arches, its towers
and battlements all agreeably mouldering and ruinous, is better, as far
as it goes, than the walls of either Chester or York, conscious of their
entirety, and of their claim upon the interest of travel. Southampton is
so very modern in the prosperity which has made it the rival of
Liverpool as the chief port of entry from our country, that we ought
rather to have devoted ourselves to its docks than its walls, and we did
honestly try for them. But there is always something very disappointing
about docks, and though I went more than once for a due impression of
them at Southampton, I constantly failed of it. I tried coming upon them
casually at first; at last I drove expressly to them, and when I
dismounted from my cab, and cast about me for the sensation they should
have imparted, and demanded of my cabman, “Where are the docks?” and he
said, “Here they are, sir,” I could not make them out, and was forced to
conclude that they had been taken in for the time.
I had no such difficulty with the prison into which Dr. Isaac Watts’s
father was put for some of those opinions which in former times were
always costing people their personal liberty. In my mind’s eye I could
almost see his poor wife bringing their babe and suckling the infant
hymnologist under the father’s prison window; and I was in such rich
doubt of Dr. Watts’s birthplace in French Street, that with two houses
to choose from, I ended by uncovering to both. I think it was not too
much honor to that kind, brave soul, who got no little poetry into his
piety, and was neither very severe about theology on earth, nor exigent
of psalm-singing in heaven, where he imagined a pleasing conformity in
the conditions to the tastes and habits of the several saints in this
life. If the reader thinks that I overdid my reverence in the case of
this poet, let him set against it my total failure to visit either the
birthplace or the baptismal church of another Southampton poet, that
Charles Dibdin, namely, whose songs were much on British tongues when
Britain was making herself mistress of the seas, and which possibly
breathe still from the lips of
“The sweet little cherub who sits up aloft,
Keeping watch o’er the life of poor Jack.”
Early in my English travels I found it well to leave something to the
curiosity of after-seekers, and there is so much to see in every English
city, town, village, country neighborhood, road, and lane that I could
always leave unseen far more than I saw. I suppose it was largely
accidental that I gave so much of my time to the traces of the Watts
family, but perhaps it was also because both the prison and the house
(in which, whichever it was, the mother kept a boarding-house while she
nurtured her nine children, and the good doctor began his Greek and
Latin at five years of age), were in the region of the old church of St.
Michael’s which will form another compensation at Southampton for the
American who misses the docks. Its architecture was amongst my earliest
Norman, and was of the earliest Norman of any, for the church was built
in 1100 by monks who came over from Normandy. It was duly burned by the
French two centuries later in one of their pretty constant incursions;
they burned only the nave of the church, but they left the baptismal
font rather badly cracked, and with only the staple of the lock which
used to fasten the lid to keep the water from being stolen. I do not
know why the baptismal water should have been stolen, but perhaps in
those ages of faith it was a specific against some popular malady,
leprosy or the black death, or the like. The sacristan who showed me the
font, showed me also the tomb of a bad baronet of the past, a very great
miscreant, whose name he could not remember, but who had done something
awful to his wives; and no doubt he could easily have told me why people
stole the water. He was himself an excellent family man, or at least
highly domesticated, if one might judge from his manner with his own
wife, who came in demanding a certain key of him. Husband-like, he
denied having it; then he remembered, and said, “Oh, I left it in the
pocket of my black coat.” He was not at all vexed at being interrupted
in telling me about the bad baronet, whose tomb, he made me observe, had
not a leaf or blossom on it, though it was Easter Sunday, and the old
church, which was beautifully rough and simple within, was decked with
flowers for the festival.
Outside, the prevalence of Easter was so great that we had failed of a
street cab, and had been obliged to send to the mews (so much better
than a livery-stable, though probably not provided now with falcons) for
a fly, and we felt by no means sure that we should be admitted to the
beautiful old Tudor house, facing the church of St. Michael’s, which
goes by the name of King Henry VIII.’s Palace. They are much stricter in
England concerning the holy days of the church than the non-conforming
American imagines. On Good Friday there were neither cabs nor trams at
Southampton in the morning, and only Sunday trains were run on the Great
Southwestern to London; though on the other hand the shops were open,
and mechanics were working; perhaps they closed and stopped in the
afternoon. But we summoned an unchurchly courage for the Tudor house,
and when we rang at the postern-gate--it ought to have been a
postern-gate, and at any rate I will call it so--it was opened to us by
a very sprightly little old lady, with one tooth standing boldly up in
the centre of her lower jaw, unafraid amid the surrounding desolation.
She smiled at us so kindly that we apologized for our coming, and said
that we did not suppose we could see the palace, and then she looked
grave, and answered, “Yes, but you’ll have to pay a fee, sir,” I
undertook that the fee should be paid, and then she smiled again, and
led the way from her nook in it, through one of the most livable houses
I was in anywhere in England. I will use the privilege of the
superficial and cursory observation of the hurried tourist, to which we
are so well accustomed in English travellers among ourselves, and say
that the English did not know what domestic comfort was till the times
of the Tudors, and were apparently forgetful of it afterwards. This
palace of Henry VIII., which is rather simple for a palace, but may very
well have been the sojourn of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen
Elizabeth in their visits to Southampton, was divided above and below
into large rooms, wainscotted in oak, of a noble shapeliness, and from
cellar to attic was full of good air, without the draughts which the
earlier and later English have found advantageous in perpetuating the
racial catarrh and rheumatism. The apartments were of varying dignity
from the ground floor up, and the basement was so wholesome, that before
the time of the present owner, who had restored it to its former state,
a family with eleven children lived there in the greatest health as long
as they were allowed to stay. Even in the attic, the rooms, though
rough, were pleasant, and there were so many that one of them had got
lost and could never be found, though the window of it still shows
plainly from the outside. This and much more the friendly dame recounted
to us in our passage through a mansion, which we found so attractive
that we of course tacitly proposed to buy it and live in it always. Then
she led us out into her kitchen-garden, running to the top of the
ancient city wall, and undermined, as she told us, by submarine
passages.
But we could only find a flight of stone steps descending to the street
level below, where, if the reader is of a mind to follow, he will find
the wall falling wholly away at times, and at times merging itself in
the modern or moderner buildings, and then reappearing in arches, topped
with quaint roofs and chimneys, and here and there turned to practical
uses in little workshops, much as old walls are in the dear Italian
towns which we Americans know rather better than the English, though the
English ruins are befriended by a softer summer, prolonging itself with
its mosses and its ivy never sere deep into winters almost as mild as
Italy’s. In an avenue reluctantly leaving the ancient wall and winding
deviously into the High Street, are the traces, in humbler masonry, of
the jambs and spandrels of far older arches in the façade of an edifice
presently a cow stable, but famed to have been the palace of that King
Canute who was mortified to find his power inferior to the sea’s, and
sharply rebuked his courtiers when they had induced him to set his chair
in reach of the tides which would not ebb at his bidding. The tides have
now permanently ebbed from the scene of the king’s discomfiture, and as
this royal Dane was otherwise so able and shrewd a prince as to have
made himself master of England if not of her seas, we may believe as
little as we like of the story. For my part, I choose to believe it
every word, as I always have believed it, and I think it should still be
a lesson to royalty, which is altogether too credulous of its relative
importance to the rest of the universe.
In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which
remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its
archway the High Street hard by where Porter’s Lane creeps into it from
Canute’s cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to
take a seat even farther back than Canute’s, under an overruling
providence. In this effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a
Roman warrior, but perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed
more aptly symbolizes the extremely friable nature of human empire. One
never can look at any presentment of the poor, good, mistaken man
without the softness of regret for his long sufferings, or without
gratitude for what he involuntarily did for us as a people in forcing us
to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet with our national
prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find him taken
seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between us and
the remoter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an unbroken
allegiance. When I looked on the mediæval work of the Bargate, I easily
felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of
Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had
to draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than
either of the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in
war than George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against
as the allies of the French.
We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey,
which is such a little way off from Southampton across the river
Itchen, that I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all
fellow-countrymen arriving on whatever line, to keep half a day from
London, and give it to that most beautiful and pathetic place. It was
our first ruin in England, but though we saw ruins afterwards of great
merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and none remains so sweet and
pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern city you reach this dim,
mediæval shadow by way of what they poetically call at Southampton the
Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it, we fancied some form
of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of ferry-boat common in
earlier times on American rivers East and West, forced by the tide on
supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our landing on the
farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly refused to
abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the borders of the Itchen
in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been so
bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of
the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that
yielded perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute,
that not the sunniest day known to the English climate could have added
sensibly to it. I do not believe that we could have been happier in it
even if we had known all the little why and how together with the great
when of its suppression by Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the
conjecture of the moment by anything especially dramatic from history.
Netley Abbey, like the rest of the religious houses which Henry hammered
down, was suppressed in the general hope of pillage, defeated by the
fact that its income was rather less than a hundred and fifty pounds a
year, which even in the money of the
[Illustration: THE OLD TOWER WALL]
time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian
monks in their life as their income, except perhaps their virtues, which
he would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told
us, they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were
given them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor
cheese, but only a spare porridge--twice a day, and in Lent once. They
never spoke except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and
on a journey they could only ask questions, which they must ask if
possible by signs. They that transgressed the rules were whipped, or
stretched upon the stone floor during mass. For their greater
humiliation the heads of the order were entirely shaven, which if the
wind blew from the sea in their day, as piercingly as it blew in ours,
was not so comfortable as it was picturesque for the monks going about
bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their hospitality was great and
constant, and their guest-hall was so often full that Horace Walpole, in
his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could speak with
insinuation of their “purpled abbots,” as if these perhaps led a life of
luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey is
so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the
best thing that could be said of it: “How shall I describe Netley to
you? I can only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and
Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful
fretted roofs, pendent in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns
of windows topped round and round with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up
among the walls, and only want to be increased by cypresses. A hill
rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood. The fort in which we would
build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This
little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on
the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the
Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In
short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the
purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is
so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have
retired into the world.”