Certain Delightful English Towns

William Dean Howells

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849657802
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Viaggi

A companion volume to 'London Films', in which Mr. Howells writes of Bath, Oxford, Canterbury and other delightful English towns, with glimpses of the country in between. The author catches the true spirit and dominant tone of each locality, and he regales the reader with various little adventures along the road. Mr. Howells is especially alert for details that link English history with our own, and have a special interest for the American traveler.

III. A FORTNIGHT IN BATH

THE American who goes to England as part of the invasion which we have lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phoenicians, and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there from the beginning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the Romans always cropping up and displacing the others. He likes well enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy, in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Britain forms too great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him little hope of doing anything very surprising in a stay of four months. He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable medievalism before pushing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of London, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their vestiges are less intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his resentment.

The very beginnings of Bath were Roman, for I suppose Prince Bladud is not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as the prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who went forth from his father's house a leper, and who observed the swine under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneum or Pompeii, you can still have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the stone platforms, steps, and seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for conveying it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material, attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before him.

If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morning we arrived, he might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like getting into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by your hand baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class whom Lord Chesterfield nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of their service. I have seen people give them two-pence, for some slight office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something; but I never saw an English porter's face clouded by the angry resentment which instantly darkens the French porter's brow if he thinks himself underpaid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from the hope of gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first-class for short hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh, you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.

We had come third-class from Plymouth to Exeter in a superstition preached us before leaving home, that everybody now went third-class in England, that to go first-class was sinfully extravagant, and that to go second-class was to chance travelling with valets and lady's maids. But in coming on from Exeter we thought we would risk this contamination, and, not realizing that the first-class rate was no greater than ours with the cost of a Pullman ticket added, I boldly "booked" second-class. But so far from finding ourselves in a compartment with valets and lady's-maids, in whose company I hope we should have avouched our quality by promptly perishing, we were quite alone, except for the presence of a lady who sat by the window knitting, knitting, knitting. She did not look up, but from time to time she looked out, till our interchanges of joy in the landscape seemed to win upon her, and then she looked round. Her glance at the member of our party whose sex seemed to warrant her in the overture was apparently reassuring. She asked if we would like the window closed, and we pretended that we would not, but she closed it, and then she arranged her needles in her knitting, and folded her knitting up, and put it firmly away in her bag, and began to talk. Evidently, she liked talking, but evidently she liked listening, too, and she let us do our share of both in confirming the tacit treaty of amity between our nations. She spoke of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English, and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world, and we tried hard for some mutual acquaintance. Our failure did not matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from the window of her parting train.

It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be like that! I do not say that they actually were, and I do not say they were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that charming incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read afterwards that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone, the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was in Pulteney Street, where the Aliens of "Northanger Abbey" had their apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest corner of which the dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen herself had lived for two years in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the neighborhood.

Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach, itself from the rank of these handsome dwellings; and everything in our happy circumstance began at once to breathe that air of gentle association which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early consultation with possibly the most lenient of the medical authorities of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath, his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in the meantime he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at Carlsbad that everything which was not allowed was forbidden! But he found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud's day few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running, or limping, with his fellow-invalids.

He had apparently not even brought an American accent with his malady, and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in British company, and that when his party went to their rooms, they talked violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.

He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the pleasant people at that hotel, who seemed to regard their being thrown together as a circumstance that justified their speaking to one another much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table covered with the day's papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept at a distance in which they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly and intelligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather, there was plenty of weather to talk about.

There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fiber, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers', and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was seakale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately cabbage.

Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by an attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the "sweets" included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer's comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended, I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was a formidable matter to get the head porter, in full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.

When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one's self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament. When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one's self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system — I do not say universe — The King's Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King's Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star is one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.

In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods' has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James's Square or Queen's Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one's self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably back to dinner at one's hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on...