enclosure, which looked like a neglected nursery, losing itself in a
forest beyond. But we had really chanced upon one of the most
characteristic features of English civilization. This neglected nursery
was in fact a plantation of all woodland growths, for a game-preserve
where later the gentleman who owned it would have the pleasure of
killing the wild things resorting to it. We came to it fresh from our
satisfaction with another characteristic feature: a village of low
houses fronting on a green common, where geese and sheep were grazing,
and poultry were set about in coops in the grass. Children were playing
over it; men were smoking at the doors, and women doubtless were working
within. The evening fire sent up its fumes from the chimneys, and a
savory smell of cooking was in the air. It all looked very sociable, and
if a little squalid, not the less friendly for that reason. It is from
our literary associations with such scenes that we derive our heartaches
when we first leave our humble homes in America, where we have really no
such villages, but only solitary farms, or bustling communities on the
way to be business centres. A village like that could easily become a
“Deserted Village,” and an image of it, reflected in Goldsmith’s dear
and lovely poem, recurred to me from my far youth,
“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along,
And the dread Indian chants his warlike song,”
and mixed with the reality as I drove through it.
The three great summits which are chief of the Malvern Hills are the
Beacons of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire; and
nearest the town they are everywhere traversed by the paths which the
founders of the water-cure taught to stray over their undulations in
the fashion of the German spas, and on which the patients walked
themselves into a wholesome glow after their douches, sprays, and
drenches. They are very noble tops indeed, from which one may everywhere
command a lordly prospect, but the most interesting, and the loftiest,
is the Worcestershire Beacon, a brow of which the Britons fortified
against the Romans. You can drive the greater part of the way to their
earthwork, and if you make the climb to it you will not envy either
enemy its possession. The views from it are enchanting, and the
fortifications, with companies of sheep grazing sidelong on their glacis
and escarpments, can still be easily traced by the eye of military
science; but perhaps their chief attraction to the civilian is that they
seem impregnable to the swarming flies which infest the road almost
throughout its rise, and at the point where you leave your carriage are
a quite indescribable pest. One could imagine the Romans hurrying up the
steep to be rid of them, and beating the Britons out of their stronghold
in order to secure themselves from the insect enemy on the breezy
height. They must have bitten the bare legs of the legionaries fearfully
and really rendered retreat impossible, while the Britons had no choice
but to submit; for if it was at this point that the brave Caractacus
surrendered with his following, rather than be forced down among those
flies, he yielded to a military necessity, and I should be the last to
blame him for it. I wondered how my driver was getting on among them,
till I found that he had taken refuge in the opportune inn from which he
issued, wiping his mouth, on my descent from the embattled height; but
the inn could not have been there in the Roman times.
The best of the excursion was coming home by the Wyche, a tremendous cut
through beetling walls of rock, which are truly, in the old
eighteenth-century literary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before
and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had
supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone.
It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison
with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to
the Grand Cañon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach
the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London.
This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with
the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you
have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of
course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be
happy, if you have an umbrella.
I could not praise too much the meteorological delightfulness of that
fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves,
except for the incursionary trippers, who were, after all, so transient.
What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which
the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and
certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant
municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon
it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England
and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities
look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no
sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private
premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the
succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel
and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted
their doors she could approach their spotless thresholds without
wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to
suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their
prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased
to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.
If ever the tide of sickness sets back there--and somehow I wish it
might--the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful
that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass
the picturesqueness of those up and down hill streets of Malvern, or the
easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down
the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for
much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or
sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water growths which I did
interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked
friendly if not familiar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and
of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a
cultivated sufferer from our Priory Churchless land will have an endless
charm.
At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very
cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various
travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in
Malvern, and spending hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting
graves without, and the vaguely remembering monuments within. But not
among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the
most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early
Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the
Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the
visitor that of
[Illustration: PRIORY CHURCH--SWAN POOL IN FOREGROUND]
the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution
of the monasteries. The good “Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight,”
lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters,
with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father’s head.
Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole
group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but
there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman’s figure,
on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with
“Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in
the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of
Birmingham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which
attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind
that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of
Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a
great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenth-century tiles
which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly
carven stalls with the grotesques of their underseats, and doubtless to
do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost
unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so
many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand
reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after
day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and
piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples
in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness
next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without paying for it,
and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still
so fair and neat, and why if her Hydropathy should fail at last to
attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the
foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the
Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the
home of Langland, the author of “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,” he could
visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any
friend of the poor.
XII
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD
We made Worcester what amends we could for refusing to stop the night in
her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an
afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware
which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was
called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long
before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvíí
dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of “wottle-and-dab,” the dab being
probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more
advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a
mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second
visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant,
could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long,
exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and
ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that
you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity
of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact
that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very
outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows--namely, that
to have a small teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking
bowl of clay, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and
that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with
mathematical precision. With difficulty I then followed our intelligent
guide through every part of the wonderful establishment: from the places
where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being
turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and
decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces
wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the
delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the
pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economical
thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works,
where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual
perfectioning of the product through more than a hundred and fifty
years, and where copies of its _chefs-d’œuvre_ are assembled in dazzling
variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure
than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you
reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the
huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a
tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the
last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.
It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that
we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for
otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it
of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can
scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was
fortunate for us that
[Illustration: WORCESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHWEST]
the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to
the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power,
of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence,
was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each
other, with the eager grudge of travellers; and I suppose we would
rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who
wrote Charles I.’s _Eikon Basilike_, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine
Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubillac, or effigies of King John and
Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by
the angler himself, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the
cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that
Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the
poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. “The organ is
decorated in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty-two stops,” yet we
thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that
we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral. I
remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what
remains to me of the exquisite “Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S.
aisle of the nave”? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see
the marriage contract of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, in the
diocesan registrar’s office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we
so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little
that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting
the cathedral, and is now represented by a remnant of his cuticle in the
chapter-house.
My prevalent impression of the Worcester Cathedral is not so much one of
beauty as one of interest, full, various, and important interest. Of
course in our one poor afternoon we could not give the wonderful place
more than an hour. We had for one thing to go and do some shopping, and
the shops in Worcester are very fairly good. Then we tried for tea, but
there seemed to be men drinking beer in the place; and though the
proprietor hospitably drove them out, in honor of the lady of our party,
yet we thought we would not have tea there, or indeed anywhere. We went
rather for a rainy moment to a pretty public garden beside the Severn,
where from a waterproof spread upon a stone seat we watched the flow of
the river. It seemed a very damp river, but it must be remembered the
weather was wet. For the rest, Worcester proved a city of trams, passing
through rather narrow streets of tall modern houses, intersected by
lanes of lesser and older houses, much more attractive. It was also a
centre of torrential downpours, with refuges in doorways where one of us
could wait while the other umbrellaed a wild way about in search of a
personable public-house, and an eventual chop. Found, the public-house
turned out brand-new, like a hotel in an American railroad centre, where
in an upper chamber, dryer and warmer than the English wont,
travelling-men sat eating, and the strangers were asked by a kind, plain
girl if they would have tea with their chop. Did English people, then,
of the lower middle non-conformist class, have tea with their meats? It
seemed probable, and in compliance we reverted to the American custom of
fifty years ago. If the truth must be told it was not very good,
personal tea, but was of the quick-lunch general brew which one drinks
scalding hot from steaming nickel-plated cylinders in our
country-stations, with the conductor calling “All aboard!” at the door.
[Illustration: WORCESTER, FROM THE RIVER]
It is a shame to be noting these silly exceptions to the grand and
beautiful life which must abound in Worcester, if one only had the key
to it. There looked charming houses here and there in the quiet streets
and places, but the present must keep itself locked against the average
touristry to which the past is open. Afterwards we visited the famous
city again and again in history, where the reader will find our welcome
awaiting him, from Peter de Montford, who pillaged the town in 1263, and
Owen Glendower in 1401; from Henry VII. who beheaded there after the
battle of Bosworth Field many citizens holding for hunchback Richard;
from Queen Elizabeth who came in 1574 and was received at the White
Ladies; from Prince Rupert who captured it and Essex who recaptured and
plundered it and spoiled the cathedral; and from the two wicked Kings
Charles, father and son, who each deserved to lose the battle each lost
at Worcester. If the reader comes and goes by Sidbury Gate, he may
easily make his entrance and exit by that approach, where the first
Charles’s friends upset the wagon-load of hay which kept his pursuers
from overtaking and taking him in his flight from the battle-field above
the city. The storied, or the fabled, hay is always there, if you do not
know the place.
The August day we left Malvern, and stayed for a drive through Hereford
on our way to Shrewsbury, was bright and hot, and Hereford was
responsively sultry and dusty. Except for its beautiful cathedral,
Hereford is not apparently interesting, though it may really be
interesting. It certainly is historically interesting; and if one likes
to find one’s self in a place which was considerable in 584, and sent a
bishop to the synod of St. Augustine seventeen years later, there is
Hereford for the choosing. Otherwise it looks a dull, slovenly large
market-town which has not been swept since the last market-day. It has,
indeed, the merit of a fine old Tudor house between three intersecting
streets and now devoted to a banking business, and I will not pretend
that I did not enjoy, quite as much as I enjoyed the cathedral, the old
almshouse which we visited somewhere on the length of a mighty long
street. A longer, dustier, flatter and hotter street I have not known
outside of Ferrara, where all the streets are like that. It must have
been in default of other attractions that we were so strenuous about
seeing the Coningsby Hospital for old soldiers and servants, but at any
rate I am now glad we went. For one thing we should not have known what
else to do till our train left for Shrewsbury, and for another it was
really very nice to learn what old soldiership or old butlership could
come to late in life in that England of snug retreats for so many sorts
of superannuation. The kindly inmate who showed me about the place was
hurrying himself into a red coat when we stopped at the outer door, and
as he proved an old servant and not an old soldier, I thought he might
have worn something of a cooler color, say Kendall-green, on such a day.
But there was no other fault in him, and if I had been the nobleman who
appointed him to that disoccupation after a life-long menial employment,
I might well have thought twice before choosing some other domestic of
my train. He led me about the thirsty garden, where the vegetables
panted among their droughty flower-borders, and had me view not only the
Norman archway of the old commandery of the Knights Templars, now
spanning a space of pot herbs, but the ruins of the Black Friars’ priory
drooping in the heat. Something incongruous in it all tormented the
spirit, but how to have it otherwise probably the spirit could not have
said. It was better in the cloistered approaches to the pensioners’
quarters, cool and dim under the low ceiling, and I shall always be
sorry that I pretended a hurry, and did not view the rooms of my guide.
I thought I could do that, any time, in the insensate superstition of
the postponing traveller, and now, how far I am from Hereford, recording
these vain regrets in the top of a towering New York hotel, overlooking
the Hudson!
Or is it rather the Wye? The Wye runs, or slowly, slowly creeps through
Hereford, under a most beautiful bridge, which I do not know but you
cross in going to the station. I had, or I ought to have had, long
thoughts in that dreamy old town, where I would now so willingly pass
all the rest of my worst enemy’s life; for it was the market-town of my
ancestors, and thither, I dare say, my Welsh-flannel manufacturing
great-grandfather sent his goods, as to a bustling metropolis where they
would bring the largest price. But at this distance of time, who knows?
I hope at least they went by the river Wye in barges laden at his little
Breconshire town, and floated either up or down the stream; I do not
know which way the Wye runs from The Hay, and in this sort of purely
literary reverie it does not matter. What really matters is to get these
Welsh flannels into the hands of some mercer in Hereford, and then leave
them and go again to the cathedral, which is so beautiful, and so full
of bishops, now no longer living. Your foot knocks against their
monuments at every step; but the great glory of the cathedral is in its
mighty tower, massing itself to heaven from the midst, and looking best,
I fancy, from the outside of the church. Only, there, when you have left
your fly in the shade of the great chestnuts (I hope they are
chestnuts), you will have to run across the blazing pavement if you wish
to reach the cathedral alive in that fierce Hereford sun. Before I
leave it for another flight to our fly, I wish to bear testimony to the
exceptional intelligence of the verger showing us about, in whom I
vainly sought a likeness to the verger who twenty years earlier had
guided my steps among the tombs of those multitudinous bishops. At that
tune I had lately read in an Ecclesiastical Directory of the United
Kingdom that a newer canon of the cathedral was of my own name; and I
asked the verger if he could show me his seat in the choir. He did so at
once, and incidentally noted, “Many’s the ’alf-crown I’ve ’ad from ’im,
sir,” when, such is the honor one bears one’s name, I too gave him a
half-crown at parting. Had I perhaps been meaning to give him sixpence?
We were sheltered from the sun at last when we started for Shrewsbury,
in a train which began almost at once to run between wooded hills under
a sky that constantly cleared, constantly clouded, through a country
that had been expelled from Eden along with Adam and Eve. It was still
very hot, on the outskirts of the afternoon, when we reached Shrewsbury,
and drove to the Raven, which we called a bird of prey because it wanted
certain shillings for two large, cool rooms, though we should be glad
now to pay twice their sum. How haught the spirit grows when once it has
tasted the comparative cheapness of English inns! We alleged Chester, we
alleged Plymouth, we alleged Liverpool, in expostulation, but the Raven
would only offer us two smaller and warmer rooms for fewer shillings,
and so we drove to another hotel. We got two fair chambers there with
loaded casements, for much less money, and we looked from our pretty
windows down upon the green at the foot of St. Mary’s Church, and as far
up its heaven-climbing tower as we could crane our necks to see. I can
give no idea of our content in that proximity; it was as if we had the
lovely and venerable edifice all to ourselves, and as we listened to the
music in which it struck the hour and the next quarter of it, our hearts
sang in unison with a holy and tasteful joy.
But it seemed as if, though a sultry afternoon at Hereford,
“The day increased from heat to heat,”