of the people. We at home have the foreigner so much with us that we
miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks in the mall in
Central Park I am likely to hear any other tongue oftener than English,
to hear Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, or Norwegian, or French, or
Italian, or Spanish; but when I take my walks on the Leas at Folkestone,
scarcely more than an hour from the polyglot continent of Europe, I hear
almost nothing but English. Twice, indeed, I heard a few French people
speaking together; once I heard a German Jew telling a story of a dog,
which he found so funny that he almost burst with laughter; and once
again, in the lower town, there came to me from the open door of an
eating-house the sound of Italian. But everywhere else was English, and
the signs of _Ici on parle Français_ were almost as infrequent in the
shops. As we very well know, if we know English history even so little
as I do, it used to be very different. Many of these tongues in their
earlier modifications used to be heard in and about Folkestone, if not
simultaneously, then successively. The Normans came speaking their
French of Stratford-atte-Bow, the Saxons their Low German, the Danes
their Scandinavian, and the Italians their vernacular Latin, the
supposed sister-tongue and not mother-tongue of their common parlance.
It was not the Latin which Cæsar wrote, but it was the Latin which Cæsar
heard in his camp on the downs back of Folkestone, if that was really
his camp and not some later Roman general’s. The words, if not the
accents of these foreigners are still heard in the British speech
there; the only words which are almost silent in it are those of the
first British, who have given their name to the empire of the English;
and that seems very strange, and perhaps a little sad. But it cannot be
helped; we ourselves have kept very few Algonquin vocables; we ourselves
speak the language of the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman in the
mixture imported from England in the seventeenth century, and adapted to
our needs by the newspapers in the twentieth. We may get back to a
likeness of the Latin to which the hills behind Folkestone echoed two
thousand years ago, if the Italians keep coming in at the present rate,
but it is not probable; and I thought it advisable, for the sake of a
realizing sense of Italian authority in our civilization to pay a visit
to Cæsar’s camp one afternoon of the few when the sun shone. This took
us up a road so long and steep that it seemed only a due humanity to get
out and join our fly driver (again that apparent slang!) in sparing his
panting and perspiring horse; but the walk gave us a better chance of
enjoying the entrancing perspectives opening seaward from every break in
the downs. Valleys green with soft grass and gray with pasturing sheep
dipped in soft slopes to the Folkestone levels; and against the horizon
shimmered the Channel, flecked with sail of every type, and stained with
the smoke of steamers, including the Folkestone boat full of passengers
not, let us hope, so sea-sick as usual.
Part of our errand was to see the Holy Well at which the Canterbury
Pilgrims used to turn aside and drink, and to feel that we were going a
little way with them. But we were so lost in pity for our horse and joy
in the landscape, that we forgot to demand these objects and their
associations from our driver till we had remounted to our places, and
turned aside on the way to Cæsar’s camp. Then he could only point with
his whip to a hollow we had passed unconscious, and say the Holy Well
was there.
“But where, where,” we cried, “is the pilgrim road to Canterbury?”
Then he faced about and pointed in another direction to a long, white
highway curving out of sight, and there it was, just as Chaucer saw it
full of pilgrims seven hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw
it six hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always preferred Stothard’s
notion of these pious folk to Blake’s; but that is a matter of taste.
Both versions of them were like, and they both now did their best to
repeople the empty white highway for us. I do not say they altogether
failed; these things are mostly subjective, and it is hard to tell,
especially if you want others to believe your report. We were only
subordinately concerned with the Canterbury pilgrims; we were mainly in
a high Roman mood, and Cæsar’s camp was our goal.
The antiquity of England is always stunning, and it is with the breath
pretty well knocked out of your body that you constantly come upon
evidences of the Roman occupation, especially in the old, old churches
which abound far beyond the fondest fancy of the home-keeping American
mind. You can only stand before these walls built of Roman brick, on
these bricked-up Roman arches, and gasp out below the verger’s hearing,
“Four hundred years! They held Britain four hundred years! Four times as
long as we have lived since we broke with her!” But observe, gentle and
trusting reader, that these Roman remains are of the latest years of
their domination, and very long after they had converted and enslaved
the stubbornest of the Britons, while at Cæsar’s camp, if it was his, we
stood before the ghosts of the earliest invaders, of those legionaries
who were there before Christ was in the world, and who have left no
trace of their presence except this fortress-grave.
Very like a grave it was, with huge, long harrows of heavily sodded
earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some
imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward
side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their
defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for
the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have
had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with
their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had
stretched himself out on one of them, and as we approached from below
was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two
thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in
the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft
of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies,
which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter here, and
which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover,
till I found them out by their having no odor.
The effect was what forts and fields of fight always come to if you give
them time enough; though few of the most famous can offer the traveller
such a view of Folkestone and the sea as Cæsar’s camp. We drove round
into the town by a different road from that we came out by, and on the
way I noted a small brick-making industry in the suburb, which could
perhaps account both for the prosperity of Folkestone and for the
overbuilding. Sadly we saw the great numbers of houses that were to be
let or sold, everywhere, and we arrived at our lodgings and the
conclusion together that four-fifths of the houses which were not to be
let whole, were to be let piecemeal in apartments. The sign of these is
up on every hand, and the well-wisher of the sympathetic town must fall
back for comfort as to its future on the prevalence of what has been
waiting to call itself the instructural industry. Schools for youth of
both sexes abound, and we everywhere saw at the proper hours discreetly
guarded processions of fresh-looking young English-looking girls,
carrying their complexions out into the health-giving air of the seas.
As long as we could see them in their wholesome, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed
innocence, we could hardly miss the fashion whose absence was a
condition of one’s being in Folkestone out of season.
Another compensation for being there untimely, as regarded fashion, was
a glimpse of the English political life which I had one night in a
“Liberal Demonstration” at the Town Hall. This I found as intellectually
bracing as my two nights at the theatre were mentally relaxing. It was
all the difference between the beach and the Leas, and nothing but a
severe sense of my non-citizenship saved me from partaking the
enthusiasm which I perceived all round me. I perceived also the good,
honest odor of salt fish, such as was proper to the seafaring
constituency whom one of the gentlemen on the platform was willing to
represent in Parliament as the Liberal candidate. He was ranked in by
rows of his friends of both sexes, and on the floor where I sat, as well
as in the galleries there were great numbers of women, whom one seldom
sees in political meetings at home, and great numbers of young men whom
one sees almost as seldom. One lady on the platform, in evening dress, I
fancied the wife of the young gentleman in evening dress who was
standing (in England candidates do not _run_) for a neighboring
parliamentary constituency, and who presently made an excellent and
telling speech. At times the speakers all aimed some remark, usually
semijocose, at the women, and there was evidence of the domestication,
the homely intelligence of all ranks and sexes, in English politics,
which is wholly absent from ours. The points made against the Tories
were their selfish government of the nation in the interest of
themselves and their families; the crushing debts and taxes heaped upon
the English people by the mismanagement of the Boer war; the injustice
of the proposed school law towards Dissenters; the absurdity and
wickedness of the preferential tariff. It was all very personal to Mr.
Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, but impersonally personal and
self-respectful. As I came in the Folkestone candidate was speaking very
clearly and cogently, but not very vividly, and the real spirit of the
demonstration was not roused till a Liberal member of Parliament
followed him in a jovial, witty, and forcible talk rather than a speech.
He won the heart of the people, and especially the women, who laughed
with him, and helped cheer him; there was some give and take between him
and the audience, from which he was bantered as well as applauded; but
all was well within the bounds of good-humor and good-manners. He
genially roughed the working-men, whom he rallied on not getting
everything they wanted, now when they had the vote and could vote what
they chose. It was like the talk of a man to his family or his familiar
friends, and gave the sense of the closely graduated intimacy of
politics possible in a homogeneous community.
He was followed by that gentleman in evening dress, who spoke as
forcibly, and addressed himself to the working-man, too, whom he invited
to realize their power, and to “take their share in the kingship.” The
terms of his appeal made me tremble a little, but they were probably
quite figurative, and embodied no danger to the monarchy. Still from a
man in evening dress, and especially a white waistcoat, they were
interesting; and I came away equally divided between my surprise at
them, and my American misgiving for the fact that neither the gentleman
proposing to represent a Folkestone constituency nor any of his friends
was a resident of Folkestone. Such a thing, I reflected, was wholly
alien to our law and custom, and could not happen except where some
gentleman wished very much to be a Senator from a State of which he was
not a citizen, and felt obliged to buy up its legislature.
VIII
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY
Dover is a place which looks its history as little as any famous town I
know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as
commonplace as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like
effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference
in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are
upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of
one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few
people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think
of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting
there; but at last, after passing red-coated soldiers stalking upward,
and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers,
hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress
and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through
it by a warder of a jocosity which I have not known elsewhere in
England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be
constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls;
for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the
unfathomable castle well; for the disparity between our multitude and
the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us.
At different points he would begin, “I always say, ’ere,” and then
pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a crusader
effigy’s tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of
calling it “‘is toothpick.”
All would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from
laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the
bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he
showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked,
and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say
that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make
merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which
renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning
family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has
displaced. I knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that
alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained
respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a
dulness, or a heartlessness, I do not know which, such as I have never
seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy
sixpence into his palm with the bated explanation, “That’s for the
jokes,” and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the
appreciation and not for the sixpence.
We went once to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe,
which was once the home of smuggling, and where there is still a little
ale-house that poetically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its
sign of “Smuggler’s Retreat.” It is said that there was formerly
smuggling pretty much along the whole coast, and there is a
heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house
chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth-fires of
many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still
to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn,
would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in
the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the
police-station, in the long, rambling street, had apparently once been
an assembly-room, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top
of one’s charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit
the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.
I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in
Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements.
Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and
yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps,
than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in
Folkestone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly
and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose
origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was
undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in
which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association
with Chaucer’s Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the
primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending
itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas à Becket’s murder.
Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers
have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more
surprise. The manual which one buys in all places is for the
retrospective enjoyment and identification of their objects of interest,
and my “Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book
of the City,” could do no more than agreeably supplement, long
afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.
The day which chose us for our run up from Folkestone was a heavenly
fourth of May, when the flowers had pretty well all come up to reassure
the birds of spring. There were not only cowslips and primroses in their
convertible yellow, but violets visible if not recognizable along the
railway sides, and the cherry-trees which so abound in Kent were putting
on their clouds of bridal white and standing in festive array between
the expanses of the hop-fields, in a sort of shining expectation. At
first you think there cannot be more of anything than of the
cherry-trees in Kent, which last so long in their beauteous bloom, that
for week after week you will find them full-flower, with scarcely a
fallen petal. But by-and-by you perceive that there are more hop-vines
than even cherry-trees in Kent; and that trained first to climb their
slender poles, and then to feel their way along the wires crossing
everywhere from the tops of these till the whole landscape is netted in,
they are there in an insurpassable plenitude. As yet, on our fourth of
May, however, the hops, in mere hint of their ultimate prevalence, were
just out of the ground, and beginning to curl about their poles, while
the cherry-trees were there as if drifted by a blizzard of bloom. Here
and there a pear-tree trained against a sunny wall attempted a rivalry
self-doomed to failure; but the yellow furze gilded the embankments and
the backward-flying plain with its honied flowers, already neighbored by
purple expanses of wild hyacinth. What, in the heart of all this
blossoming, was the great cathedral itself, when we came in sight of it,
but a vast efflorescence of the age of faith, mystically beautiful in
form, and gray as some pale exhalation from the mould of the
ever-cloistered, the deeply reforested past?
Canterbury Cathedral, however, though it is so distinctive, and is the
chief of the sacred edifices which have in all Christian times
incomparably enriched the place, might be lost from it and be less
missed than from any other town of cathedral dignity. Without it
Canterbury would still be worthy of all wonder, but with it, what shall
one say? There is St. Martin’s, there is St. Mildred’s, there is St.
Alphege’s, there is the Monastery of St. Augustine, there is St.
Stephen’s, there is St. John’s Hospital, and I know not what other pious
edifices to remember the Roman and Saxon and Norman and English men,
who, if they did not build better than they knew, built beautifuler than
we can. But of course the cathedral towers above them all in the sky and
thought, and I hope no reader of mine will make our mistake of immuring
himself in a general omnibus for the rather long drive to the sacred
fane from the station. A fly fully open to the sun, and creeping as
slowly as a fly can when hired by the hour, is the true means of arrival
in the sacred vicinity. In this you may absorb every particular of the
picturesque course over the winding road, across the bridge under which
the Stour rushes (one marvels whither, in such haste), overhung with the
wheels of busy mills and the balconies of idle dwellings, in air reeking
of tanneries, and so into the city by streets narrowing and widening at
their own caprice, with little regard to the convenience of the shops.
These seem rather to thicken about the precincts of the cathedral,
where among those just without is a tiny restaurant which thinks itself
almost a part of the church, and where some very gentlewomanly young
women will serve you an excellent warm lunch in a room of such mediæval
proportion and decoration that you can hardly refuse to believe yourself
a pilgrim out of Chaucer. If the main dish of the lunch is lamb from the
flocks which you saw trying to whiten the meadows all the way from
Folkestone, and destined to greater success as the season advances, the
poetic propriety of the feast will be the more perfect. After you have
refreshed yourself you may sally out into the Mercery Lane whither the
pilgrims used to resort for their occasions of shopping, and where the
ruder sort kept up “the noise of their singing, with the sound of their
piping, and the jingling of their Canterbury bells,” which they made in
all the towns they passed through on their devout errand. They were in
Canterbury, according to good William Thorpe, who paid for his opinions
by suffering a charge of heresy in 1405, “more for the health of their
bodies than their souls.... And if these men and women be a month in
their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after great
janglers, tale-tellers, and liars. They have with them both men and
women that sing well wanton songs.” But what of that, the archbishop
before whom Thorpe was tried effectively demanded. “When one of them
that goeth barefoot striketh his foot against a stone ... and maketh him
to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow beginneth then a song
... for to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow. For with
such solace the travel and weariness of pilgrims is lightly and merrily
brought forth.”
Nevertheless, in spite of this archiepiscopal reasoning, the pilgrims
seem to be largely a godless crew whom, if my reader has come in their
company to Canterbury, he will do better to avoid while there, and
betake himself at once to the cathedral when he has had his luncheon. It
is easily of such interest, historical and architectural, that he may
spend in it not only all that is left him of his fourth of May, but many
and many days of other months before he has exhausted it. The interest
will rather exhaust him if he forms one of that troop of
twentieth-century pilgrims who are led sheeplike through the edifice
under the rod of the verger. We fell to a somewhat severe verger, though
the whole verger tribe is severe, for that matter, and were snubbed if
we ventured out of the strict order of our instruction at the shrine
where Thomas à Becket, become a saint by his passive participation in
the act, was murdered. One lady who trespassed upon the bounds pointed
out as worn in the stone by the knees of more pious pilgrims, in former
ages, was bidden peremptorily “Step back,” and complied in a confusion
that took the mind from the arrogant churchman slain by the knights
acting upon their king’s passionate suspiration, “Is there no one to
deliver me from this turbulent priest?”
Perhaps it was not the verger alone that at Canterbury caused the vital
spirits to sink so low. There was also the sense of hopelessness with
which one recalled a few shadowy details of the mighty story of the
church, including, as it does, almost everything of civility and art in
the successive centuries which have passed, eight of them, since it
began to be the prodigious pile it is. St. Thomas, who, since he was so
promptly canonized, must be allowed a saint in everything but meekness,
is the prime presence that haunts the thought of the visitor, and yet
it is no bad second if the French Protestant refugees, whom Elizabeth
allowed to hold their services in the crypt, and who lived where they
worshipped in their exile, possess it next; the Black Prince’s armor and
effigy are not in it, with these. The crypt is no longer their
dwelling-place, but their rites (I suppose Calvinistic) are still
solemnized there; and who knows but if the savage Puritans, who imagined
they were abolishing episcopacy when they were destroying beauty, had
been a little less barbarous they might not now enter third among the
associations of the cathedral? We cannot doubt the sincerity of their
self-righteousness, and there is a fine thrill in the story of how they
demolished “the great idolatrous window standing on the left hand as you
go up into the choir,” if you take it in the language of the minister
Richard Culmer, luridly known to neighboring men as “Blue Dick.” He
himself bore a leading part in the vandalism, being moved by especial
zeal to the work, not only because “in that window were seven large
pictures of the Virgin Mary, in seven large glorious appearances,” but
because “their prime cathedral saint, Archbishop Becket, was most rarely
pictured in that window, in full proportion, with cope, rochet, crozier,
and his pontificalibus.... A minister,” the godly Blue Dick tells us,
modestly forbearing to name himself, “was on top of the city ladder,
near sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand, rattling down
proud Becket’s glassy bones, when others present would not venture so
high.”