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 fibre, 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 sea-kale 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 whi
ch 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 his soil would never had laid down his arms — never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.
Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to make oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of unsurpassed loveliness.
But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediaeval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to the bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.
The failure of Oliver Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is one of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously despoiled by Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller, which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guidebook, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.
“Sole issue of a matchless paire,
Both of their state and virtues heyre;
In graces great, in stature small,
As full of spirit as voyd of gall;
Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,
Holy without vain-glorious showes;
Happy, and yet from envy free,
Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,
Reader, this riddle read with mee,
Here the good Lady Waller lies.”
There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash — namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command; and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much less spiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between
a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with entire acceptance.
From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one
“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”
I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for a thousand years to come. Briton and Phoenician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wilfulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americans achieve when they mean to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1278