Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  The glories of Chatsworth, which lies but a few miles from Haddon, serve as a fine repoussoir to its more delicate merits, just as they are supposed to gain, I believe, in the tourist’s eyes, by contrast with its charming, its almost Italian shabbiness. But the glories of Chatsworth, incontestable as they are, were so effectually eclipsed to my mind, a couple of days later, that in future, when I think of an English mansion, I shall think only of Warwick, and when I think of an English park, only of Blenheim. Your run by train through the gentle Warwickshire landscape does much to prepare you for the great spectacle of the castle, which seems hardly more than a sort of massive symbol and synthesis of the broad prosperity and peace and leisure diffused over this great pastoral expanse. The Warwickshire meadows are to common English scenery what this is to that of the rest of the world. For mile upon mile you can see nothing but broad sloping pastures of velvet turf, overbrowsed by sheep of the most fantastic shagging, and ornamented with hedges out of the trailing luxury of whose verdure, great ivy-tangled oaks and elms arise with a kind of architectural regularity. The landscape, indeed, sins by excess of nutritive suggestion; it savors of the larder; it is too ovine, too bovine, too succulent, and if you were to believe what you see before you, this rugged globe would be a sort of boneless ball, neatly covered with some such plush-like integument as might be figured by the down on the cheek of a peach. But a great thought keeps you company as you go and gives character to the scenery. Warwickshire was Shakespeare’s country. Those who think that a great genius is something supremely ripe and healthy, and human, may find comfort in the fact. It helps materially to complete my own vague conception of Shakespeare’s temperament, with which I find it no great shock to be obliged to associate ideas of mutton and beef. There is something as final, as disillusioned of the romantic horrors of rock and forest, as deeply attuned to human needs, in the Warwickshire pastures, as there is in the underlying morality of the poet.

  With human needs in general, Warwick Castle may be in no great accord, but few places are more gratifying to the sentimental tourist. It is the only great residence that I ever coveted as a home. The fire that we heard so much of last winter in America appears to have consumed but an inconsiderable and easily-spared portion of the house, and the great towers rise over the great trees and the town with the same grand air as before. Picturesquely, Warwick gains from not being sequestered, after the common fashion, in acres of park. The village-street winds about the garden walls, though its hum expires before it has had time to scale them. There can be no better example of the way in which stone-walls, if they do not of necessity make a prison, may on occasions make a palace, than the tremendous privacy maintained thus about a mansion whose windows and towers form the main feature of a bustling town. At Warwick the past joins hands so stoutly with the present that you can hardly say where one begins and the other ends, and you rather miss the various crannies and gaps of what I just now called the Italian shabbiness of Haddon. There is a Caesar’s tower and a Guy’s tower and half a dozen more, but they are so well-conditioned in their ponderous antiquity that you are at loss whether to consider them parts of an old house revived or of a new house picturesquely superannuated. Such as they are, however, plunging into the grassed and gravelled courts from which their battlements look really feudal, and into gardens large enough for all delight and too small, as they should be, to be amazing; and with ranges between them of great apartments at whose hugely recessed windows you may turn from Van Dyke and Rembrandt, to glance down the cliff-like pile into the Avon, washing the base like a lordly moat, with its bridge, and its trees, and its memories—they mark the very model of a great hereditary dwelling—one which amply satisfies the imagination without irritating the conscience. The pictures at Warwick reminded me afresh of an old conclusion on this matter, that the best fortune for good pictures is not to be crowded into public collections—not even into the relative privacy of Salons carrés and Tribunes, but to hang in largely-spaced half-dozens on the walls of fine houses. Here the historical atmosphere, as one may call it, is almost a compensation for the often imperfect light. If this is true of most pictures, it is especially so of the works of Van Dyke, whom you think of, wherever you may find him, as having, with that immense good-breeding which is the stamp of his manner, taken account in his painting of the local conditions, and predestined his picture to just the spot where it hangs. This is, in fact, an illusion as regards the Van Dykes at Warwick, for none of them represent members of the house. The very finest, perhaps, after the great melancholy, picturesque Charles I.—death, or at least the presentiment of death on the pale horse—is a portrait from the Brignole palace at Genoa, a beautiful noble matron in black, with her little son and heir. The last Van Dykes I had seen were the noble company this lady had left behind her in the Genoese palace, and as I looked at her, I thought of her mighty change of circumstance. Here she sits in the mild light of Midmost England; there you could almost fancy her blinking in the great glare sent up from the Mediterranean. Picturesque for picturesque, I should hardly know which to choose.

  A EUROPEAN SUMMER: NORTH DEVON

  July 1872

  Illsborough, Ilfracombe, England, ca. 1890.

  FOR THOSE FANCIFUL OBSERVERS TO WHOM BROAD ENGLAND means chiefly the perfection of the rural picturesque, Devonshire means the perfection of England. I, at least, had so complacently taken it for granted that all the characteristic graces of English scenery are here to be found in especial exuberance that before we fairly crossed the borders I had begun to look impatiently from the carriage window for the veritable landscape in watercolors. Devonshire meets you promptly in all its purity. In the course of ten minutes you have been able to glance down the green vista of a dozen Devonshire lanes. On huge embankments of moss and turf, smothered in wild-flowers and embroidered with the finest lace-work of trailing ground-ivy, rise solid walls of flowering thorn and glistening holly and golden broom, and more strong, homely shrubs than I can name, and toss their blooming tangle to a sky which seems to look down between them in places from but a dozen inches of blue. They are over-strewn with lovely little flowers with names as delicate as their petals of gold and silver and azure—bird’s-eye and ring’s-finger and wandering-sailor—and their soil, a superb dark red, turns in spots so nearly to crimson that you almost fancy it some fantastic compound purchased at the chemist’s and scattered there for ornament. The mingled reflection of this rich-hued earth and the dim green light which filters through the hedge, forms an effect to challenge the skill of the most accomplished watercolorist. A Devonshire cottage is no less striking a local “institution.” Crushed beneath its burden of thatch, coated with a rough white stucco, of a tone to delight a painter, nestling in deep foliage, and garnished at doorstep and wayside with various forms of chubby infancy, it seems to have been stationed there for no more obvious purpose than to keep a promise to your fancy, though it covers, I suppose, not a little of the sordid misery which the fancy loves to forget. I rolled past lanes and cottages to Exeter, where I found a cathedral. When one has fairly tasted of the pleasure of cathedral-hunting, the approach to each new shrine gives a peculiarly agreeable zest to one’s curiosity. You are making a collection of great impressions, and I think the process is in no case so delightful as applied to cathedrals. Going from one fine picture to another is certainly good, but the fine pictures of the world are terribly numerous, and they have a troublesome way of crowding and jostling each other in the memory. The number of cathedrals is small, and the mass and presence of each specimen is great, so that, as they rise in the mind in individual majesty, they dwarf all common impressions. They form, indeed, but a gallery of vaster pictures; for, when time has dulled the recollection of details, you retain a single broad image of the vast gray edifice, with its towers, its tone of color, and its still, green precinct. All this is especially true, perhaps, of one’s memory of English cathedrals, which are almost alone in possessing, as pictures, the setting of a spacious and harmonious Close.
The Cathedral stands supreme, but the Close makes the scene. Exeter is not one of the grandest, but, in common with great and small, it has certain points on which local learning expatiates with peculiar pride. Exeter, indeed, does itself injustice by a low, dark front, which not only diminishes the apparent altitude of the nave, but conceals, as you look eastward, two noble Norman towers. The front, however, which has a gloomy picturesqueness, is redeemed by two fine features: a magnificent rose-window, whose vast stone ribs (enclosing some very pallid last-century glass) are disposed with the most charming intricacy; and a long sculptured screen—a sort of stony band of images—which traverses the façade from side to side. The little broken-visaged effigies of saints and kings and bishops niched in tiers along this hoary wall are prodigiously black and quaint and primitive in expression, and as you look at them with whatever contemplative tenderness your trade of hard-working tourist may have left at your disposal, you fancy that somehow they are consciously historical—sensitive victims of time; that they feel the loss of their noses, their toes, and their crowns; and that, when the long June twilight turns at last to a deeper gray, and the quiet of the Close to a deeper stillness, they begin to peer sidewise out of their narrow recesses, and to converse in some strange form of early English, as rigid, yet as candid, as their features and postures, moaning, like a company of ancient paupers round a hospital fire, over their aches and infirmities and losses, and the sadness of being so terribly old. The vast square transeptal towers of the church seem to me to have the same sort of personal melancholy. Nothing in all architecture expresses better, to my imagination, the sadness of survival, the resignation of dogged material continuance, than a broad expanse of Norman stonework, roughly adorned with its low relief of short columns, and round arches, and almost barbarous hatchet-work, and lifted high into that mild English light which accords so well with its dull-gray surface. The especial secret of the impressiveness of such a Norman tower I cannot pretend to have discovered; it lies largely in the look of having been proudly and sturdily built—as if the masons had been urged by a trumpet-blast, and the stones squared by a battle-axe—contrasted with this mere idleness of antiquity and passive lapse into quaintness. A Greek temple preserves a kind of fresh immortality in its concentrated refinement, and a Gothic cathedral in its adventurous exuberance; but a Norman tower stands up like some simple strong man in his might, bending a melancholy brow upon an age which demands that strength shall be cunning.

  The North Devon coast, whither it was my design on coming to Exeter to proceed, has the primary merit of being, as yet, virgin soil as to railways. I went accordingly from Barnstaple to Ilfracombe on the top of a coach, in the fashion of elder days; and, thanks to my position, I managed to enjoy the landscape in spite of the two worthy Englishmen before me who were reading aloud together, with a natural glee which might have passed for fiendish malice, the Daily Telegraph’s painfully vivid account of the defeat of the Atalanta crew. It seemed to me, I remember, a sort of pledge and token of the invincibility of English muscle that a newspaper record of its prowess should have power to divert my companions’ eyes from the bosky flanks of Devonshire combes. The little watering-place of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge of one of the seaward-plunging valleys, between a couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the Bristol Channel. It is a very finished little specimen of its genus, and I think that during my short stay there, I expended as much attention on its manners and customs and its social physiognomy as on its cliffs and beach and great coast-view. My chief conclusion, perhaps, from all these things, was that the terrible summer question which works annual anguish in so many American households would be vastly simplified if we had a few Ilfracombes scattered along our Atlantic coast; and furthermore, that the English are masters of the art of uniting the picturesque with the comfortable—in such proportions, at least, as may claim the applause of a race whose success has as yet been confined to an ingenious combination of their opposites. It is just possible that at Ilfracombe the comfortable weighs down the scale; so very substantial is it, so very officious and business-like. On the left of the town (to give an example), one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks, and presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all veiled in tufts of golden brown and mighty fern. You have not walked fifty yards away from the hotel before you encounter half a dozen little signboards, directing your steps to a path up the cliff. You follow their indications, and you arrive at a little gate-house, with photographs and various local gimcracks exposed for sale. A most respectable person appears, demands a penny, and, on receiving it, admits you with great civility to commune with nature. You detect, however, various little influences hostile to perfect communion. You are greeted by another signboard threatening legal pursuit if you attempt to evade the payment of the sacramental penny. The path, winding in a hundred ramifications over the cliff, is fastidiously solid and neat, and furnished at intervals of a dozen yards with excellent benches, inscribed by knife and pencil with the names of such visitors as do not happen to have been the elderly maiden ladies who now chiefly occupy them. All this is prosaic, and you have to subtract it in a lump from the total impression before the sense of pure nature becomes distinct. Your subtraction made, a great deal assuredly remains; quite enough, I found, to give me an ample day’s entertainment, for English scenery, like everything else that England produces, is of a quality that wears well. The cliffs are superb, the play of light and shade upon them a perpetual study, and the air a delicious mixture of the mountain-breeze and the sea-breeze. I was very glad at the end of my climb to have a good bench to sit upon—as one must think twice in England before measuring one’s length on the grassy earth; and to be able, thanks to the smooth footpath, to get back to the hotel in a quarter of an hour. But it occurred to me that if I were an Englishman of the period, and, after ten months of a busy London life, my fancy were turning to a holiday, to rest, and change, and oblivion of the ponderous social burden, it might find rather less inspiration than needful in a vision of the little paths of Ilfracombe, of the signboards and the penny-fee and the solitude tempered by old ladies and sheep. I wondered whether change perfect enough to be salutary does not imply something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from that deep-bosomed Nature to which the overwrought mind reverts with passionate longing; something in short which is attainable at a moderate distance from New York and Boston. I must add that I cannot find in my heart to object, even on grounds the most aesthetic, to the very beautiful and excellent hotel at Ilfracombe, where such of my readers as are perchance actually wrestling with the summer question may be interested to learn that one may live en pension, very well indeed, at a cost of ten shillings a day. I have paid very much more at some of our more modest summer resorts for very much less. I made the acquaintance at this establishment of that somewhat anomalous institution, the British table d’hôte, but I confess that, faithful to the duty of a sentimental tourist, I have retained a more vivid impression of the talk and the faces than of our entrées and relevés. I noticed here what I have often noticed before (the fact perhaps has never been duly recognized), that no people profit so eagerly as the English by the suspension of a common social law. A table d’hôte, being something abnormal and experimental, as it were, it produced, apparently, a complete reversal of the national characteristics. Conversation was universal—uproarious, almost; and I have met no vivacious Latin more confidential than a certain neighbor of mine; no speculative Yankee more inquisitive.