if one begins to long for its excavation one must be willing to involve
so much mediæval and modern superstructure in a common ruin that one’s
wisdom must be doubted. So far as the Roman remains showed themselves to
a pretty ignorant observer they did not seem worth digging out in their
entirety; here and there an example seems to serve; they are the
unpolished monuments of life in a remote and partially settled province,
not to be compared, except at Bath and York, with those of Pompeii or
Herculaneum. To be sure, if one knew they underlay New York, one would
gladly level all the sky-scrapers in the town, that they might be given
to the light. But in Chester it is another matter. There is already an
interesting if not satisfactory collection of antiquities in Chester;
and if it came to question of demolishing the delightful old wall, or
the Rows, with God’s Providence House, and Bishop Lloyd’s House, or even
the cathedral, though it is, to my knowledge, the least sympathetic of
English cathedrals, one would wish to think twice. At the wall,
especially, one would like to hesitate, walking perhaps all the way
round the city on it, and pausing at discreet intervals to repose and
ponder. It does not convince everywhere of an equal antiquity; there are
parts that are evidently restorations and parts that are reproductions,
and the gates frankly own themselves modern. But there are towers that
moulder and bastions that have plainly borne the brunt of time. In the
circuit of the wall you may look down on the roofs of old Chester
within, and that much larger and busier new Chester without, which
stretches with its shops and mills and suburban cottages and villas into
the pretty country, as far as you like. But our affair was never with
that Chester; except where the country began under the walls, and
widened away beyond the river Dee, with bridges and tramways presently
lost to the eye in the shadow of pleasant groves, we cared for nothing
beyond the walls. There were places where these dropped sheer to the
waters of the Dee, which obliged us at one point of its flow with a
vivid rapid, or (I will not be sure) the swift slope of a dam, where a
man stood midway casting his line into the ripple. He could by some
stretch of the imagination have been a Jolly Miller who lived on the
river Dee, though I remember no mills in sight; and by an equal stroke
of fancy, he could have been casting his line for the salmon with which
the sands of Dee are also associated in song. I do not insist that the
reader shall hazard either conjecture with me; but what I say is that
all England is so closely netted over and embroidered with literary
reminiscence, with race-memories, from the earliest hours of personal
consciousness, that wherever the American goes his mind catches in some
rhyme, some phrase, some story of fact or fable that makes the place
more home to him than the house where he was born. That is the
sweetness, the kindness of travel in England, and that is the enchanting
strangeness. To other lands we relate ourselves by an effort, but there
the charm lies waiting for us, to seize us and hold us fast with ties
running to the inmost and furthermost of our earthly being.
At one point in our first ramble on the wall at Chester we came to a
house built close upon it, of such quaintness and demureness that it
needed no second glance, in the long June twilight, to convince us that
one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines lived there; or if it did, no possible
doubt of the fact could be left when we encountered at the descent to
the next city gate the smartest of red-coated sergeants mounting the
wall to go and pay court to her. Afterwards we found many houses level
with the top of the wall, with little gardened door-yards or leafy
spaces beside them. I do not say they all had Hardy heroines in them;
there were not sergeants enough for that; but the dwellings were all of
an insurpassable quaintness and demureness, or only less quaint and less
demure than the first. One of the most winning traits of the past
wherever you find it is its apparent willingness to be friends with the
present, to make room for it when it can, and to respond as far as
possible to its commonplace and even sordid occasions. Like old walls
that I had known in Italy, the old wall at Chester lent itself not only
to the domestic but the commercial demands of to-day, and if the shops
which it allowed to front upon its promenade were preferably those of
dealers in bric-à-brac and second-hand books, still the principle is the
same. In one of these shops was an old (it looked old) sundial which
tempted and tempted the poor American, who knew very well he could not
get it home without intolerable inconvenience and expense; and who tore
himself from it at last with the hope of returning another day and
carrying it all the way, if need be, to New York in his arms. As is the
custom of sundials it professed to number only the sunny hours; but he
had (or is this his subsequent invention?) the belief that somewhere on
its round was indelibly if invisibly marked that gloomy moment of the
September afternoon when King Charles looked from the Phœnix Tower hard
by the shop where the dial lurked, and saw his army routed by the
Parliamentarians on Rowton Moor. To be sure the moment was bright for
the Parliamentarians; there is the consolation in every defeat that it
is the victory of at least one side, and in this instance it was the
right side which won.
You are advised that if you would see Chester Cathedral aright you had
best look at it across the grassy space which lies between it and the
wall near Phœnix Tower. It is indeed finest there, for it is a fane that
asks distance, and if you go visit it by the pale twilight
[Illustration: KING CHARLES’S TOWER]
at nine o’clock of the long June day, the brown stone it is built of
will remind you less than it might at noon-day of the brown-stone fronts
of the old New York streets. But who am I that I should criticise even
the material body of any English cathedral? If we had this one of
Chester in the finest American city, in Boston itself, we should throng
to it with our guide-books if not our prayer-books, and would not allow
that any ecclesiastical structure in the country compared with it. All
that I say to my compatriots of either sex, who come to its
Perpendicular Gothic fresh from the Oblique Doric of their Cunarders or
White Stars at Liverpool, is: “Wait! Do not lavish your precipitate
raptures all upon this good but plain edifice. Keep some of them rather
for the gentler and lovelier dreams of architecture at Wells, at Ely, at
Exeter, and supremely the minster at York, to which you should not come
impoverished of the emotions you have been storing up from the beginning
of your æsthetic consciousness. Yet, stay! Forbear to turn slightingly
from your first cathedral because some one tells you it is not the best.
It will have more to say to that precious newness of yours (you cannot
yet realize how precious your newness is) than fairer temples shall to
your more shop-worn sensibility.” It is always well in travel to cherish
the first moments of it, for these are richer in potentialities of joy
than any that can follow; and it is doubtless in the wise order of
Providence that such a city as Chester should lie so near the great port
of entry for three hundred thousand Americans that they may have
something worthy of their emotions while they have still their sea-legs
on, and may reel under the stroke without causing suspicion.
I have said how constantly one met them, how inevitably; and if they
were wondering, willingly or unwillingly, what Chester could be bought
for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour
from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should
blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the
place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded
millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and
offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be
raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but
the walls and gates must be included.
Why should such a thing be impossible? Such a thing on a smaller scale,
different in quantity but not in quality, had been dreamt of by a boldly
imaginative Chicagoan, if we could believe the good woman in charge of
the Derby House, up the little court out of Nicholas Street, where all
that is left of the old town mansion of the noble Stanleys remains. This
magnanimous dreamer had the vision of the Stanleys’ town-house
transplanted to the shores of Lake Michigan, and erected as a prime
feature of the great Columbian Fair. He offered to buy it in fulfilment
of his vision, so ran the tale, of whoever then could sell it; but when
the head of the family to which it once belonged heard of the offer, he
bought it himself in a quiver of indignation conceivably lasting yet,
and dedicated it to the public curiosity forever, on the spot where its
timbered and carven gables have looked into a dingy little court ever
since the earliest days of Tudor architecture. If we could trust the
witness of the cards which strewed the good woman’s table, it was
American curiosity which mainly wreaked itself on the beautiful but
rather uninhabitable old house our Chicagoan failed to buy. By hungry
hundreds they throng to the place, and begin to satisfy their life-long
famine for historic scenes in the mansion where Charles the First
sojourned while in Chester, and whence the head of the house was taken
out to die by the axe for his part in the royalist rising of 1657. So,
in my rashness, I should have believed, but for the correction of Mr.
Havell Crickmore, who says, in his pleasantly written and pleasantly
pictured book about “Old Chester,” that the Earl was “beheaded during
the great Rebellion,” which would shorten his life by some ten years,
and make his death date 1647, not 1657. It does not greatly matter now;
he would still be dead, at either date, and at either a touch of heroic
humor would survive him in the story Mr. Crickmore repeats. Colonel
Duckenfield of the Cromwellian forces asked him if he had no friend who
would do the last office for him. “Do you mean, to cut my head off? Nay,
if those men who would have my head off cannot find one to cut it off,
let it stand where it is.”
I have always liked to believe everything I read in guide-books, or hear
from sacristans or custodians. In Chester you can believe not only the
bleak Baedeker, with its stern adherence to fact, but anything that
anybody tells you; and in my turn I ask the unquestioning faith of the
reader when I assure him that he will find nothing so mediæval-looking
out of Nuremberg as that street--I think it is called Eastgate
Street--with its Rows, or two-story sidewalks, and its timber-gabled
shops with their double chance of putting up the rates on the fresh
American. Let him pay the price, and gladly, for there is no perspective
worthier his money. I am not in the pay of a certain pastry-cook of the
Rows, who makes the wedding-cakes for all the royal marriage feasts; but
I say he will serve you a toasted tea-cake with the afternoon oolong he
will try to put off on an American, such as you cannot buy elsewhere in
England; only, you must be sure to eat the bottom half of the tea-cake,
because most of the rich, sweet Cheshire butter will have melted
tenderly into that. Go then, if you will, to the cathedral which I have
been vainly seeking to decry, and study its histories, beginning with
the remnants of the original Norman church of the Conqueror’s lieutenant
and nephew Hugh Lupus, and ending with a distinctly modern restoration
of the mediæval carvings in the eastern transept, wherein Disraeli and
Gladstone are made grotesquely to figure, the one in building up the
Indian Empire and the other in disestablishing the Irish Church.
Somewhere in the historical middle distance are certain faded flags
taken from the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, which we should
always have won if our powder had not given out, and let the enemy
capture these banners. The beauty of the Chapter House will subdue you,
if you rebel against the sight of them, and I can certify to the
solemnity of the Cloister, which I visited with due impression; but with
what success a young girl was sketching a perspective of the cathedral I
did not look over her shoulder to see.
How perverse is memory! I cannot recall distinctly the prospect across
the Dee from the Watergate to which the Dee use to float its ships and
from which it now shrinks far beyond the green flats. But I remember
that in returning through a humble street from the Watergate, the
children on the door-steps were eating the largest and thickest slices
of bread and butter I saw in all England, where the children in humble
streets are always eating large, thick slices of bread and butter. For
the pleasure of riding on the municipal trams, and of realizing how much
softer and slower they run than our monopolistic trolleys, we made,
whenever we had nothing else to do, an excursion “across the sands of
Dee” by the bridge which spans its valley, with always fragments of
Kingsley’s tender old song singing themselves in the brain, and with the
visionary Mary going to call the cattle home, and the cruel, crawling
foam from which never home came she.
Oh, is it fish, or weed, or floating hair,
in the tide that no longer laps the green floor that once was sand? Ask
the young girls of fifty years ago, who could make people cry with the
words! It was enough for me that I was actually in the scene of the
tragedy, and more than all the British, Roman, Saxon, or Norseman
antiquity of Chester. At the suburban extremity of the tram-line, or
somewhere a little short of it, we were offered by sign-board a bargain
in house-lots so phrased that it added thirty generations to the age of
a region already old enough in all conscience. We were not invited to
buy the land brutally in fee-simple, outright; but it was intimated that
the noble or gentle family to which it belonged would part with it
temporarily on a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years. I hope we
fully felt the delicacy, the pathos in that reservation of the
thousandth year, which was the more appealing because it was tacit.
These lots were no part of the vast estate of the great noble whose seat
lies farther yet out of Chester in much the same direction. It was one
of the many aristocratic houses which I meant to visit in England, but
as I really visited no other, I am glad that I gave way in the matter of
a shilling to the driver of the fly who held that the drive to the place
was worth that much more than I did. I tried hard for the odd shilling,
as an affair of conscience and of public spirit; but the morning was of
a cool-edged warmth, and of a sky that neither rained nor shone, and the
driver of the fly was an elderly man who looked as if he would not lie
about the regular price, though I pretended so strenuously it should be
six and not seven shillings for the drive, and I yielded. After all (I
excused my weakness to myself), it would have been seven dollars at
home; and presently we were in the leafy damp, the leafy dark of the
parkway within the gates of the great nobleman’s estate beyond the Dee.
Eight thousand acres large it stretches all about, and is visibly
bounded only by the beautiful Welsh hills to the westward, and four
miles we drove through the woodsy quiet of the park, which was so much
like the woodsy quiet of forest-ways not so accessible at home. Birds
were singing in the trees, and on the hawthorns a little may hung yet,
though it was well into June. Rabbits--or if they were hares I mean no
offence to the hares--limped leisurely away from the road-side. Coops of
young pheasants, carefully bringing up to be shot in the season for the
pleasure of noble or even royal guns, were scattered about in the
borders of the shade; and grown cock and hen pheasants showed their
elect forms through the undergrowth in the conscious pride of a species
dedicated to such splendid self-sacrifice. In the open spaces the brown
deer by scores lay lazily feeding, their antlers shining, or their ears
pricking through the thin tall stems of the grass. Otherwhere in paddock
or pasture, were two-year-olds or three-year-olds, of the blooded
hunters or racers to whose breeding that great nobleman is said to be
mostly affectioned, though for all I personally know he may be more
impassioned of the fine arts, or have his whole
[Illustration: CHESTER CASTLE]
heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do personally know is
that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his
cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless
fly, and escaped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own
responsive nerves vibrating.
From time to time notices to the public “earnestly requested” the
visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him
with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England,
and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more
generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will
learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the
privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit
themselves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circumstance proper
to a great English nobleman’s place, no one can say; and if I mention
that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful
houses appropriated to the immediate dependants of this nobleman, it is
less with the purpose of instructing some future oil-king or beef-baron
in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we
drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.
As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace,
it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it
with vague preconceptions of another sort of majesty. I myself was
disappointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect
to be Norman, “or at least Early English,” but which one finds a low
two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground,
with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance
disguised as a small classic temple. But the castle is in the definite
taste of a self-justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated
Georgian--the Fourth Georgian--surviving into our own century not so
very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle
in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years
later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any
other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses
its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satisfaction in the silvery
sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the
nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname
as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror appointed to hold Chester
for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the
wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.
I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the
formalities of cropt lawns and clipt trees, and I would fain have the
reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which
gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the
interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully
rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be
inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the
photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and
sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that
magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any
land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the
help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of
an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its belongings, so that
in passing a certain bust with the familiar broken nose of the master he
respectfully murmured, “Sir Michael Hangelo.”
“_Who?_” the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of
the precious fact; and the good soul repeated,
“Sir Michael _Hangelo_, sir.”
Of course it was Sir Michelangelo, Bart.; nothing so low as the effigy
of a knight could be admitted to that august gallery.
Am I being a little too scornful in all this? I hope not, though I own
that in the mansions of the great it is difficult not to try despising
them. The easy theory about a man whom you find magnificently housed in
the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of
his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it.
In your generous indignation you wish to have him out, and his
pleasure-grounds divided up into small farms. But this is a kind of
equity which may be as justly applied to any one who owns more of the
earth than he knows how to use. Who are they that fence large parts of
Long Island, and much of the Hudson River scenery, which they have
studded with villas never open to the public like that great house near
Chester? I know a man who has two acres and a half on the Maine shore of
the Piscataqua, and tills not a tenth of it; but I should be sorry to
have him expropriated from the rest. We all, who have the least bit more
than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one
another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already
struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another
matter. They are the immense majority and they may vote anything they
choose, even a cruel injustice.
The American, newly arrived in Chester after his new arrival in
Liverpool, will be confronted with a stronghold of the past which he
will not be able to overthrow perhaps during his whole stay in England,
though he should spend the summer. Immemorial custom is intrenched there
not only in the picturesqueness, the beauty, the charm, but the silent
inexpugnable possession which time from the beginning has been
fortifying. The outside has been made as goodly as possible, but within
is the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and
toil. Yet let him not rashly fling himself against its impregnable
defences. It is not primarily his affair. Let him go quietly about with
his Baedeker, and see and enjoy all he can of that ancient novelty, so
dear to us new folk, and then when he is worn out with his pleasure, and
sits down to his toasted tea-cake in that restaurant of the Rows where
they will serve him a cup of our national oolong, let him ask himself
how far the beloved land he has left has been true to its proclamations
in favor of a fresh and finally just _Theilung der Erde_.
Having answered this question to his satisfaction, let him by no means
hurry away from Chester that night or the next morning in the vain
belief that greater historic riches await him in cities, farther away
from his port of entry, in the heart of the land. Scarcely any shall
surpass it, for if not a Roman capital like York or London, it was long
a Roman camp, and a temple of Apollo replaced a Druid temple on the site
of the present cathedral. The Britons were never pushed farther off than
the violet hills where they still dwell, strong in their unintelligible
tongue, with a taste for music and mysticism which seems never to have
failed them. From those adjacent heights they harried in frequent foray
their Roman and Saxon and Norman invaders, and only left off attacking
Chester when the Early English had become the Later.
Chester was not only one of the stubbornest of the English cities in its
resistance of William the Conqueror, but it held out still longer
against Oliver the Conqueror in the war of the King and the Parliament.
What part, if any, it had in the Wars of the Roses, I excuse myself for
not knowing. The strong Henry Fourth led the weak Richard Second a
captive through it, and there is record that the weaker Henry Sixth
tried in vain to recruit his forces in it for his futile struggle with
fate. The lucky Henry Seventh who had newly married royalty, and was no
more king by right than the pretender who afterwards threatened his
throne, sent a Stanley to the block for having spoken tolerantly of
Perkyn Warbeck. But if there was any party in Chester for that
pretender, there was none for the Stuart calling himself Charles III.,
for when he sent from Scotland an entreaty to the citizens for help,
they took it as a warning to fortify their town against him. After that
they had peace, and now the place is the great market for Cheshire
cheese which is made in the fertile country round about, and vies with
the New Jersey imitation in the favor of our own country.
The American who means to stop in Chester for the day, which may so
profitably and pleasantly extend itself to a week, cannot do better than
instruct himself more particularly in the history which I still find
myself so ignorant, for all my show of learning. I would have him
distrust this at every point, and correct it from better authorities.
Especially I would have him mistrust a story told in Chester of the
American who discovered a national origin in the guide-book’s mention of
one of the Mercian kings who extended his rule so far from the midland
counties. The traveller read the word American, and pronounced it as the
English believe we all do. “My dear,” he said to his wife, “this town
was settled by the ’Murricans.”
XI
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
From the 10th to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the
nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our
heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fortnight, with a
peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was
why we left London, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.