Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedgerows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then suddenly skirts some nobleman’s park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in England.

  The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter’s claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find “a typical English city... alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin.... None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past.” Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter’s. Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if even New York would be equal to it.

  I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases, and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the better-informed reader will recall without an effort that the place was never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest. The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality. Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travellers as do not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York disputed its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the time of Henry VIII.’s high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and Cornish men fought for the ancient faith within its walls against his forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I always think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles’s hapless daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts back after Cromwell’s death.

  The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral’s sake we fell a willing prey to the fanciful statement. There is of course no hotel in the cathedral close, but the Butt of Malmsey is so close to the cathedral that it may have unintentionally confused the words. At any rate, it stood facing the side of the beautiful pile and getting its noble Norman towers against a sky, which we would not have had other than a broken gray, above the tops of trees where one nesting rook the less would have been an incalculable loss. One of the rooms which the managers could give us looked on this lovely sight, and if the other looked into a dim court, why, all the rooms in a cathedral close, or close to a cathedral, cannot command views of it.

  We had of course seen the cathedral almost before we saw the city in our approach, but now we felt that the time spent before studying it would be time lost and we made haste to the great west front. To the first glance it is all a soft gray blur of age-worn carving, in which no point or angle seems to have failed of the touch which has blent all the archaic sanctities and royalties of the glorious screen in a dim sumptuous harmony of figures and faces. Whatever I had sceptically read, and yet more impatiently heard, of the beauty of English cathedrals was attested and approved far beyond cavil, and after that first glance I asked nothing but submissively to see more and more of their gracious splendor. No wise reader will expect me to say what were the sculptured facts before me or to make the hopeless endeavor to impart a sense of the whole structure in descriptions or admeasurements. Let him take any picture of it, and then imagine something of that form vastly old and dark, richly wrought over in the stone to the last effects of tender delicacy by the miracles of Gothic art. So let him suppose the edifice set among leafless elms, in which the tattered rooks-nests swing blackening, on a spread of close greensward, under a low welkin, where thin clouds break and close in a pallid blue, and he will have as much of Exeter Cathedral as he can hope to have without going there to see for himself; it can never otherwise be brought to him in words of mine.

  Neither, without standing in that presence or another of its kind, can he realize what the ages of faith were. Till then the phrase will remain a bit of decorative rhetoric, but then he will live a meaning out of it which will die only with him. He will feel, as well as know, how men built such temples in an absolute trust and hope now extinct, but without which they could never have been built, and how they continued to grow, like living things, from the hearts rather than the hands of strongly believing men. So that of Exeter grew, while all through the tenth and eleventh centuries, the monks of its immemorial beginning were flying from the heathen invasions, but still returning, till the Normans gave their monastery fixity in the twelfth century, and the long English succession of bishops maintained the cathedral in ever-increasing majesty till the rude touch of the Tudor st
ayed the work that had prospered under the Norman and Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings. If the age of faith shall extend itself to his perception, as he listens to the afternoon service in the taper-starred twilight, far back into the times before Christ, he may hear in the chanting and intoning the voice of the first articulate religions of the world. The sound of that imploring and beseeching, that wailing and sighing, which drifts out to him through the screen of the choir will come heavy with the pathos of the human abasing itself before the divine in whatever form men may have imagined God, and seeking the pity and the mercy of which Christianity was not the first to feel the need. Then, if he has a sense of the unbroken continuity of ceremonial, the essential unity of form, from Pagan to Roman and from Roman to Anglican, perhaps he will have more patience than he otherwise might with the fierce zeal of the fanatics who would at last away with all ceremonial and all form, and would stand in their naked souls before the eternal justice and make their appeal direct, and if need be, through their noses, to Him who desireth not the death of a sinner.

  Unless the visitor to Exeter Cathedral can come into something of this patience, he will hardly tolerate the thought of the Commonwealth’s-men who deemed that they were doing God’s will when they built a brick wall through it, and listened on one side to an Independent chaplain, and on the other to a Presbyterian minister. It is said that they “had great quiet and comfort” in their worship on each side of their wall, which was of course taken down directly after the Restoration. For this no one can reasonably grieve; and one may of course rejoice that Cromwell’s troopers did not stable their horses in Exeter Cathedral. They forbore to do so in few other old churches in England, but we did not know how to value fully its exemption from this profanation in our first cathedral. We took the fact with an ignorant thanklessness from our guide-book, and we acquiesced, with some surprise, in the lack of any such official as a verger to instruct us in the unharmed monuments. The printed instructions which we received from the placard overhanging a box at the gate to the choir did not go beyond the elementary precept that we were each to put sixpence in it; after that we were left free to look about for ourselves, and we made the round of the tombs and altars unattended.

  The disappointment which awaits one in English churches, if one’s earlier experience of churches has been in Latin countries, is of course from the want of pictures. Color there is and enough in the stained windows which Cromwell’s men sometimes spared, but the stained windows in Exeter are said to be indifferent good. In compensation for this, there are traces of the frescoing which once covered the walls, and which Cromwell’s men neglected to whitewash. They also heedlessly left unspoiled that wonderful Minstrel’s Gallery stretching across the front of the choir, with its fourteen tuneful angels playing forever on as many sculptured instruments of stone. For the rest the monuments are of the funereal cast to which the devout fancy is pretty much confined in all sacred edifices. There is abundance of bishops lying on their tombs, with their features worn away in the exposure from which those of many crusaders have been kept by their stone visors. But what was most expressive of the past, which both bishops and crusaders reported so imperfectly, was the later portrait statuary, oftenest of Elizabethan ladies and their lords, painted in the colors of life and fashion, with their ruffs and farthingales worn as they were when they put them off, to rest in the tombs on which their effigies lie. It is not easy to render the sense of a certain consciousness which seemed to deepen in these, as the twilight of the closing day deepened round them in the windows and arches. If they were waiting to hold converse after the night had fallen, one would hardly have cared to stay for a share in their sixteenth-century gossip, and I could understand the feeling of the two dear old ladies who made anxiously up to us at one point of our common progress, and asked us if we thought there was any danger of being locked in. I did my poor best to reassure them, and they took heart, and were delightfully grateful. When we had presently missed them we found them waiting at the door, to thank us again, as if we had saved them from a dreadful fate, and to shake hands and say good-bye.

  If it were for them alone, I should feel sensibly richer for my afternoon in our first cathedral. But I think my satisfaction was heightened just before we left, by meeting a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal which he was trundling through “the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault” to the great iron stoves placed on either side of the nave to warm the cathedral, and contribute in their humble way to that perfect balance of parts which is the most admired effect of its architectural symmetry. As he stopped before each stove and noisily stoked it from a clangorous shovel, the simple sincerity of this bit of necessary house-keeping in the ancient fane seemed to strike a note characteristic of the English civilization, and to suggest the plain outrightness by which it has been able to save itself sound through every age and fortune. The English have reared a civic edifice more majestic than any the world has yet seen, but in the temple of their liberty and their loyalty a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal has always been frankly invited to appear when needed. It is this mingling of the poetical ideal and the practical real which has preserved them at every emergency, and but for the man’s timely ministrations church and state would alike have fared ill in the past. He has kept both habitable, and to any one who visits cathedrals with a luminous mind the man with the wheelbarrow of coal will remain as distinctly a part of the impression as the processioning and recessioning celebrants coming and going in their white surplices, with their red and black bands; or even the singing of the angel-voiced choir-boys, who as they hurry away at the end of the service do not all look as seraphic as they have sounded. There is often indeed something in the passing regard of choir-boys less suggestive of the final state of young-eyed cherubim than of evil provisionally repressed.

  I do not say that I thought all this before leaving the cathedral in Exeter, or till long afterwards. I was at the time rather bent upon seeing more of the town, in which I felt a quality different from that of Plymouth though it pleased me no better. The manageress of the Butt of Malmsey had boasted already of the numbers of nobility and gentry living in the neighborhood of the little city, where, she promised, we should see ten private carriages for every one in Plymouth. I did not keep count, but I dare say she was right. What was more to my crude pleasure was the sight of the many Tudor, and earlier than Tudor, houses in the High Street and the other streets of Exeter, with their second stories overhanging their first, to that effect of baffle in the leaded casements of their gables which we fancy in the eyes of stout gentlemen who try to catch sight of their feet over the intervening bulge of their waistcoats. They are incomparably picturesque, those Tudor houses, and as I had afterwards occasion to note from some of their interiors, they mark a beginning of domestic comfort, which, if not modern on the American terms, is quite so on the English.

  To the last, I had always to make my criticisms of the provision for the inner house in England, but my conviction that the English had little to learn of us in providing for the inner man began quite as early as in my first walks about Exeter, where the most perverse American could not have helped noting the abundance and variety of the fruits and vegetables at the green-grocers’. Southern Europe had supplied these better than Florida and California supply them with us at the same season in towns the size of Exeter, or indeed in any less luxurious than our great seaboard cities. Counting in the apples and oranges from South Africa and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, we are far out of it as to cheapness and quality. Then, no place in England is so remote from one sea or another as not always to have the best and freshest fish, which as the dealers arrange them with an artistic eye for form and color, make, it must be owned, a more appetizing show than the thronging shapes of carnage which start from the butchers’ doors and windows, and bleed upon the sidewalk, and gather microbes from every passing gust. There is something peculiarly loathsome in these displays of fresh meat carcases all over England, which does not affect the spectator
from the corded and mounded ham and bacon in the grocers’ shops, though when one thinks of the myriads of eggs needed to accompany these at the forty million robust English breakfasts every morning, it is with doubt and despair for the hens. They seem equal to the demand upon them, however, like every one and everything else English, and they always lay eggs enough, as if every hen knew that England expected her to do her duty.

  We sauntered through Exeter without a plan, and took it as it came in a joy which I wish I could believe was reciprocal, and which was at no moment higher than when we found at the corner of the most impressive old place in Exeter the office of a certain New York insurance company. As smiling fate would have it, this was the very company in which I was myself insured, and I paused before it with effusion, and shook hands with the actuary in the spirit. In the flesh, if he was an Englishman, he might not have known what to do with my emotion, but with Englishmen in the spirit the wandering American always finds himself cordially at home. One must not say that the longer they have been in the spirit the better; some of them who are actually still in the flesh are also in the spirit; but a certain historical remove is apt to relieve friends of that sort of stiffness which keeps them at arm’s-length when they meet as contemporaries. At the other end of Bedford Circus, where I had my glad moment with the insurance actuary, I found myself in the presence of that daughter of Charles I., the Princess Henrietta, who was born there near three hundred years ago, and whose life I had lately followed with pathos for her young exile from England, through her girlhood in France, and through her unhappy marriage with the King’s brother Monsieur, to the afternoon of her last day when she lay so long dying in the presence of the court, as some thought, of poison. I could not feel myself an intrusive witness at that strange scene, which now represented itself in Bedford Circus, with the courtiers coming and going, and the doctors joining their medical endeavors with the spiritual ministrations of the prelates, and the poor princess herself taking part in the speculations and discussions, and presently in the midst of all incontinently making her end.