contemptible. The Puritans were not doing this sort of thing for fun,
though undoubtedly they got fun out of it. They believed truly they were
serving God in the work, and they cannot be left out of any count that
sums up the facts making the English churches so potent upon the
imagination. These churches were of a powerfuler hold upon my age than
those that charmed my youth in Italy, because they bore witness not only
to the great political changes in the life about them, but also to the
succession of religious events. The order of an unbroken Catholicism is
not of so rich a picturesqueness or so vital an importance as the break
from the Roman Church, and then the break from the English Church, the
first protestantism obeying the king’s will and the second the people’s
conscience. Each was effected with ruinous violence, but ruin for ruin,
that wrought by Henry VIII. is of twice the quantity and quality of that
wrought by the zealots of the Commonwealth. When they tell you in these
beautiful old places that Cromwell did so and so to devastate or
desecrate them, you naturally, if you are a true American, and inherit
in spirit the Commonwealth, take shame to yourself for brave Oliver; but
you need not be in such haste. There was a Thomas Cromwell, who failed
to “put away ambition,” when bidden by the dying Wolsey, and who served
his king better than his God; and it was this Cromwell far more than
Oliver Cromwell who spoiled the religious houses and the churches. A
hundred years before the righteous Blue Dick “rattled down proud
Becket’s glassy bones,” there were royal commissioners who rattled out
the same martyr’s real bones, and profaned his tomb in such wise that
one cannot now satisfy the piety which drew the pilgrims in such
multitude to his knee-worn shrine. It is to be said for the first
Cromwell and his instruments, who were not too good to stable their
horses in a church here and there, like the Puritan troopers who hardly
bettered their instruction, that they would forbear their conscientious
violence if the churchmen would pay enough, whereas no bribe could stay
the hands of such followers of the second Cromwell as Blue Dick when
once they lifted their hands against “cathedral saints.”
We revered whatever was venerable in the cathedral, and then came rather
wearily out and sat down to rest on a friendly bench commanding a view
of as much of the edifice as the eye can take in at a glance. That was
much more than the pen could tell in a chapter, and I will only
generalize the effect as such rich repose for soul and body as I should
not know where else to find again. We sat there in a moment of positive
sunshine, which poured itself from certain blue spaces in a firmament of
soft white clouds. The towers and pinnacles of the mighty bulk, which
was yet too beautiful to seem big, soared among the tender forms, the
English sky is so low and the church was so high; and in and out of the
coigns and crevices of its Norman, and early English, and Gothic, the
rooks doing duty as pigeons, disappeared and appeared again. Naturally,
there were workmen doing something to the roofs and towers, but as if
their scaffolding was also Norman, and Gothic, and early English, it did
not hurt the harmony of the architecture. When we could endure no more
of the loveliness, we rose, and went about peering among the noble ruins
of the cathedral cloisters, the work of the first Cromwell who tried to
fear God in honoring the king, not the second Cromwell, who tried to
honor God without fearing the king.
These are somehow more appealing than the ruins of St. Augustine’s
monastery, which is still a school for missionaries in its habitable
parts. He began to build it while King Ethelbert yet mourned, in his
conversion for his Christian Queen Bertha, but it was a thousand years
growing to the grandeur which Henry VIII. spared and appropriated, and
in which it remained to be the sojourn of all the sovereigns visiting
Canterbury from his time till that of Charles II. It is not clear how it
fell into its present dignified dilapidation, through the hands to which
it was granted from age to age; but it could not be a more sightly or
reverently kept monument. The missionary school is like some vigorous
growth clothing with new sap the flank of a mouldering trunk long since
dead. It is interesting, it is most estimable; it tenderly preserves and
uses such portions of the ancient monastery as it may; but the spirit
turns willingly from it, and goes and hangs over some shoulder of
orchard wall, and gloats upon the picturesqueness of broken,
sky-spanning arches, ivied from their pillar bases to the tops of their
mutilated spandrels.
It was here, I think, that we first saw that curious flintwork which so
abounds in the parts of Kent: the cloven pebbles of black-rimmed white
set in walls of such pitiless obduracy that the sense bruises itself
against them, and comes away bleeding. The monks who wove these curtains
of checkered masonry, what an adamantine patience they must have had!
But the labor was the least part of their bleak life, which was well put
an end to, soon after it was corrupted into something tolerable by the
vices attributed to them. Vicious they could not have been in the
measure that the not over-virtuous destroyers of their monasteries
pretended, and I think that amid the ruins of their houses one may
always rather fitly offer their memory the oblation of a pitying tear. I
am not sure whether it was before or after we had visited the still
older scene of St. Augustine’s missionary effort at the church of St.
Martin, that I paid some such tribute to his successors at the
monastery; but the main thing is to have visited St. Martin’s at any
time. It is so old as to have forgotten not only its founders, who are
dimly conjectured to have been some Christian soldiers of the Roman
garrison in about the year 187, but also the name of its first tutelary
saint, for St. Martin was not yet born when St. Martin’s was built. He
died about 395, and his fame crossed over from France with the good
Bertha, when she came to wed the heathen King Ethelbert, of whose
heathenism, with St. Augustine’s help, she made such short and thorough
work that after her death he became a Christian himself, and after his
own death a saint. She dedicated the little Roman church to St. Martin,
and she lies buried in a recess of the wall beside the chancel. The
verger who showed us her stone coffin in its nook said, with a seeking
glance from the corner of his eye: “This is where she is _supposed_ to
be buried. They say she is buried in two other places, but I think, as
there is nothing to prove it, they might as well let her rest here.”
He was probably right, and he was of a subacid saturnine humor which
suited so well with the fabulous atmosphere of the place, or else with
our momentary mood, that we voted him upon the whole the most
sympathetic sexton we had yet known. He made, doubtless not for the
first time, demurely merry with the brass of a gentleman interred
beneath the chancel, who, being the father of three sons and ten
daughters, was recorded to have had “many joys and some cares,” and with
the monumental stone of a patriarch who had died at a hundred and of
whom he conjectured grimly that if he had not so many joys as his
neighbor, he had fewer cares, since he had never married. If these
jokes
[Illustration: ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH, CANTERBURY]
were the standard drolleries purveyed to all travellers, we yet imputed
from them a more habitual humor to the English race than Americans are
willing to give it credit for. I still fancy something national in his
comment on the seven doors, now all but one walled up in the side of the
church: Roman and Saxon and Norman doors, which formed a pretty fair
allowance of exit from a place not much more than thirty feet long, even
if one of the Saxon doors was appropriated to the Evil One for his sole
use in retreating when hard pressed by the sermon within. I believe, or
I wish to believe, that our verger’s caustic wit spared that sad
memorial of past suffering and sorrow which one comes upon again and
again in the old English churches, and which was called the Lepers’
Squint in days when the word had no savor of mocking, and meant merely
the chance of the outcasts to see the worship which their affliction
would not suffer them to share.
It would be a pity to seem in any sort wanting in a sense of the
solemnity of that pathetic temple, so old, so little, so significant of
the history of the faith and race. The tasteful piety which is so
universal in England, and is of such constant effect of godliness in an
age not otherwise much vowed to it, keeps the revered place within and
without in perfect repair; and I hope it is not too fantastic to suppose
it in tacit sympathy with any stranger who lingers in the church-yard,
and stays and stays for the beautiful prospect of Canterbury from its
height. We drove from it through some streets of old houses stooped and
shrunken with age, to that doting monument of the past which calls
itself the Dane John, having forgotten just what its right name is. The
immemorial mound, fifty feet high, which now forms the main feature of a
pretty public garden, is fabled to be the monstrous barrow of those
slain in a battle between the Danes and Saxons, but it need not be just
that to “tease us out of thought” of our times; for wars are still as
rife as in its own century, and dead men’s bones can still be heaped
skyward on the bloody fields. Some sixty or seventy years ago a
public-spirited citizen of Canterbury planned and planted the pleasaunce
one may now enjoy there, if one will leave one’s carriage at the gate
and stroll through it. Half of our little party preferred resting in the
fly, seeing which a public-spirited citizeness came and protested
against the self-denial with much entreaty. This unknown lady,
hospitable and kindly soul, we afterwards fancied tardily fulfilling a
duty to the giver of the garden which other ladies earlier spurned, if
we may trust a local writer to whose monograph I owe more than I should
like to own. “The gentry--for here in Canterbury, as elsewhere, we have
our jarring spheres--consider the place unfashionable, and frequent it
very little, because it is much frequented by the tradespeople, the
industrious classes, and the soldiery; who, one and all, behave with
exemplary propriety.”
Another day of May, not quite so elect as our Canterbury fourth, we went
to the village of Eelham, nearer Folkestone, and there found ourselves
in a most alluring little square with an inn at one corner and divers
shops, and certain casual, wide-windowed, brick cottages enclosing it,
and a windmill topping the low height above it. Windmills are so
characteristic of Eelham Valley that we might not forbear visiting this,
and I found the miller of as friendly and conversible a leisure as I
could ask. Perhaps it was because he had a brother in Manitoba that we
felt our worlds akin; perhaps because the varied experience of my own
youth
[Illustration: THE NORMAN STAIRCASE IN THE CLOSE--CANTERBURY
CATHEDRAL]
had confessedly included a year of milling. He said that he ground all
kinds of grain, except wheat, for which the stones were too coarse, and
he took toll of every third bushel, which did not seem too little. I
should have liked to spend the day in his company, where I perceived I
might be acceptably and comfortably silent when I would.
There must have been a church at Eelham, but there was a more noted
church at Lyminge, two miles away, whither we decided to walk. The main
object of interest at Eelham was an old Tudor manor-house, which we had
not quite the courage, or perhaps the desire, to ask to see except from
the outside. The perspective from the sidewalk through the open doorway
included a lady on a step-ladder papering the entry wall, and presently
another lady, her elder, going in-doors from the garden, who was not
averse to saying that there was plenty of room in the house, but it was
much out of repair. We inferred that we were not conversing with the
manorial family; when we asked how far it was to Lyminge, this old lady
made it a half-mile more than the miller; and probably the disrepair of
the mansion was partly subjective.
The road to Lyminge was longer than it was broad, though its measure was
in keeping with an island where the roads cannot be of our continental
width. It opened to a sky smaller than ours, but from which there fell a
pleasant sunshine with bird-singing in it; and there was room enough on
the borders of the lane for more wild flowers than often grow by our
waysides. When the envious hedges suffered us a glimpse of them we saw
gentle fields on either hand, and men at work in their furrows. From
time to time we met bicyclers of both sexes, and from time to time
people in dogcarts. Once we met a man with a farm-cart, who seemed
willing, though dull, when we asked our way. “Turn to left just inside
the windmill,” he directed us; and by keeping outside of the mill, on a
height beyond, we got to Lyminge.
I am sorry to report of the pastry-shop there that we had with our tea
the only rancid butter offered us in England, and that in a country
where the bread is always heavy and damp, it was here a little heavier
and damper than elsewhere. But we were at Lyminge not for the
pastry-shop, but the church, and that did not disappoint us, even to the
foundation of the Roman edifice which is kept partly exposed beside it.
The actual church is very Norman, and it is of that chilly charm which
all Norman churches are of when the English spring afternoon begins to
wane. From the tower down through the dim air dangled long bell-ropes
bound with red stuff where the ringers seized them, and we heard, or
seem now to have heard, that there had lately been a bell-ringing
contest among them which must have stirred Lyminge to its centre. The
day of our visit was market-day, and there had been cattle sales which
left traces of unwonted excitement in the quiet streets, and almost
thronged the bleak little station with the frequenters of the fair. One
of these was of a type which I imagine is alien to the elder country
life. The young man who embodied it was so full of himself, and of his
day’s affairs, for which he was appropriately costumed in high boots and
riding-breeches, that he overflowed in confidences to the American
stranger. He told what cattle he had bought and what sold, and he
estimated his gains at a figure which I hope was not too handsome. In
return he invited the experience of the stranger whom he brevetted a
cattle-dealer of perhaps a more old-fashioned kind, but whose errand at
Lyminge on market-day was doubtless the same as his own. It was
mortifying not to be able to comply, but my thoughts were still busy
with the somewhat ghostly personage whom we had found deciphering an
inscription on a stone in the church-yard, and whose weirdness was
heightened by an impediment in his speech. He was very kind in helping
us out in our mild curiosity, and I hope he has felt that brace in the
change of air to Lyminge from Folkestone which he offered as a reason
for his being where we met him. But he liked Lyminge, he said, and if
one does not care much for the movements of great cities there may be
worse places than the church-yard of Lyminge, where we left him in the
waning light, gently pushing, not scraping, the moss from
--the lay
Graved on a stone beneath the aged thorn.
If the reader thinks we were too easily satisfied with the events of our
excursion, he can hardly deny that the children and their mothers or
aunts or governesses getting into the trains at the little country
stations, with their hands full of wild flowers, and eyes bluer than
their violets, were more than we had a right to. When at one of these
stations a young man, with county-family writ large upon his face and
person and raiment, escaped from a lady who talked him into the train,
and then almost talked him out of it before it could start, we felt our
cup run over. We instantly dramatized, out of our superabundant English
fiction, the familiar situation of the pushing and the pushed which is
always repeating itself; and in the lady’s fawning persistence, and his
solid, stolid resistance we had a moment of the sort of social comedy
which should provoke tears rather than smiles. But the pushed always
yield to the pusher in the end. This adamantine aristocrat, if such he
was, was ultimately to be as putty between the fingers of the parvenue,
if such she was, and since she was middle-aged enough to be the mother
of a marriageable daughter we foresaw her ultimately giving him her
child with tears of triumph.
Travel is obliged to make up these little romances, or else it is apt to
feel that it has had no genteel experiences, since it necessarily moves
on the surfaces and edges of life. I was glad of any chance of the sort,
and even of the humbler sort of thing which offered itself more
explicitly, such as the acquaintance of a milkman and a retired
exciseman, with whom I found myself walking outside of the pretty town
of Rye on a May morning of sunny rain. At the entrance of a hop-field,
where there was a foot-path inviting our steps across lots, the milkman
eliminated himself with his cans and left us with the fact that
hop-raising was not everything to the farmer that could be wished, and
that if, after all his expenses, he could clear up a pound an acre at
the end of the season, he was lucky. Up to that moment our discourse had
been commonplace and business-like, but now it became sociological, it
became metaphysical, it became spiritual, as befitted the conversation
of a Scotchman and an American. The Englishman had been civil and been
kind; he was intelligent enough in the range of his experiences; but he
was not so vividly all there as the Scotch body, who eagerly inquired of
the state of Presbyterianism among us. He did not push the question as
to my own religious persuasion, but I met nowhere any Briton so
generally interested in us. In the feeling promoted by this interest of
his, we united in a good opinion of his actual sovereign, whom it was
fit, as a pensioner who had been “for-r-ty years in his Majesty’s
sar-r-vice,” he should praise as “a good-natured gentleman.” As for the
late queen he had no terms to measure his affection and reverence for
her. I do not know now by what circuit we had reached these topics from
the Scriptural subjects with which we started, or how it was he came to
express the strong sense he had of the Saviour’s civility to the woman
of Samaria, as something that should be “a lesson to our gentry” in
kindly behavior to the poor.
Wherever he now is, I hope my friendly Scot is well, and I am sure he is
happy. Our weather included, from the time we met till we parted after
crossing the wide salt-marsh stretching between Rye and the sea, every
vicissitude of sun and rain, with once a little hail; but I remember
only an unclouded sky, which I think was his personal firmament. I left
him at the little house of the daughter whom he said he was visiting,
outside the only town-gate that remains to Rye from its mediæval
fortifications. There is a small parade, or promenade, at a certain
point near by, fenced with peaceful guns, from which one may overlook
all that wide level stretching to the sea--with a long gash of
ship-channel and boats tilted by the ebb on its muddy shores--and
carrying the eye to the houses and vessels of the port. Rye itself was
once much more impressively the port, but the sea left it long and long
ago, standing like the bold headland it was, and still must look like
when the fog washes in about its feet. It is an endearing little town,
one of hundreds (I had almost said thousands) in England, with every
comfort in the compass of its cosey streets; with a church, old, old,
but not too dotingly Norman, and a lane opening from it to the door of
a certain house where one might almost live on the entrancing
perspective of its tower and its graveyard trees. A damp blind beggar on
a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass
of rheumatic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many
perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious
about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being
dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely
old towns. It keeps its history to itself, and I would no more invite
the reader to intrude upon its past than I would ask him to join me in
invading the private affairs of any English gentleman. A few people who
know its charm come down from London for the summer months; but there is
a reasonable hope that it will never be newer or other than it is. I
myself would not have it changed in the least particular. I should like
to go there May after May as long as the world stands, and hang upon the
parapet of the small parade and look dreamfully seaward over the
prairie-like level, and presently find myself joined by a weak-eyed,
weak-voiced elder who draws my attention to the blossoming hawthorns
beside us. One is white and one is pink, and between them is a third of
pinkish-white. He wishes to know if it is so because the bees have
inoculated it, and being of the mild make he is, he rather asks than
asserts, “They do inockerlate ’em, sir?”
IX
OXFORD
The friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to
care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began
to express it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our
train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was
going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there
for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been
able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact
that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of
which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of
Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflorescence of the
past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we
had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables
no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of
the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station
where each of our passengers was welcomed by at least three sons or
brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else’s boxes in the confiding
distributions from the luggage-vans. As our passengers were mostly
mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a
nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in
the worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town
is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of
cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers,
but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide
of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in
all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of
the meetings at the station, if I did not say that the meeters were
quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued
together from the place these contributed their advantageous
disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the
proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and
against walls, before their advancing flood.
Our own friend who, lief and dear as any son or brother or nephew or
cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to
greet us at the station, had in a wonderfully little while divined our
baggage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into
the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we
perceived was no petrification, but a living growth from the soul of the
undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there.
We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or
plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortar-boards, and gowns clipped
of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand
anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no
undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets without this
abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full
of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in
the ordinary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened
[Illustration: MAGDALEN TOWER]
suspicion in the authorities. We were, in fact, driving through a
largeish town, peopled beyond its comfortable wont, and noisy with the
rush of feet and wheels far frequenter and swifter than those which set
its characteristic pace.