Very like a grave it was, with huge, long barrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had stretched himself out on one of them, and as we approached from below was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies, which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter there, and which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover, till I found them out by their having no odor.
The effect was what forts and fields of fight always come to if you give them time enough; though few of the most famous can offer the traveller such a view of Folkestone and the sea as Caesar’s camp. We drove round into the town by a different road from that we came out by, and on the way I noted a small brickmaking industry in the suburb, which could perhaps account both for the prosperity of Folkestone and for the overbuilding. Sadly we saw the great numbers of houses that were to be let or sold, everywhere, and we arrived at our lodgings and the conclusion together that four-fifths of the houses which were not to be let whole, were to be let piecemeal in apartments. The sign of these is up on every hand, and the well-wisher of the sympathetic town must fall back for comfort as to its future on the prevalence of what has been waiting to call itself the instructural industry. Schools for youth of both sexes abound, and we everywhere saw at the proper horns discreetly guarded processions of fresh-looking young English-looking girls, carrying their complexions out into the health-giving air of the seas. As long as we could see them in their wholesome, pinkcheeked, blue-eyed innocence, we could hardly miss the fashion whose absence was a condition of one’s being in Folkestone out of season.
Another compensation for being there untimely, as regarded fashion, was a glimpse of the English political life which I had one night in a “Liberal Demonstration” at the Town Hall. This I found as intellectually bracing as my two nights at the theatre were mentally relaxing. It was all the difference between the beach and the Leas, and nothing but a severe sense of my non-citizenship saved me from partaking the enthusiasm which I perceived all round me. I perceived also the good, honest odor of salt fish, such as was proper to the seafaring constituency whom one of the gentlemen on the platform was willing to represent in Parliament as the Liberal candidate. He was ranked in by rows of his friends of both sexes, and on the floor where I sat, as well as in the galleries there were great numbers of women, whom one seldom sees in political meetings at home, and great numbers of young men whom one sees almost as seldom. One lady on the platform, in evening dress, I fancied the wife of the young gentleman in evening dress who was standing (in England candidates do not run) for a neighboring parliamentary constituency, and who presently made an excellent and telling speech. At times the speakers all aimed some remark, usually semi jocose, at the women, and there was evidence of the domestication, the homely intelligence of all ranks and sexes, in English politics, which is wholly absent from ours. The points made against the Tories were their selfish government of the nation in the interest of themselves and their families; the crushing debts and taxes heaped upon the English people by the mismanagement of the Boer war; the injustice of the proposed school law towards Dissenters; the absurdity and wickedness of the preferential tariff. It was all very personal to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, but impersonally personal and self-respectful. As I came in the Folkestone candidate was speaking very clearly and cogently, but not very vividly, and the real spirit of the demonstration was not roused till a Liberal member of Parliament followed him in a jovial, witty, and forcible talk rather than a speech. He won the heart of the people, and especially the women, who laughed with him, and helped cheer him; there was some give and take between him and the audience, from which he was bantered as well as applauded; but all was well within the bounds of good-humor and good-manners. He genially roughed the working-men, whom he rallied on not getting everything they wanted, now when they had the vote and could vote what they chose. It was like the talk of a man to his family or his familiar friends, and gave the sense of the closely graduated intimacy of politics possible in a homogeneous community.
He was followed by that gentleman in evening dress, who spoke as forcibly, and addressed himself to the working-man, too, whom he invited to realize their power, and to “take their share in the kingship.” The terms of his appeal made me tremble a little, but they were probably quite figurative, and embodied no danger to the monarchy. Still from a man in evening dress, and especially a white waistcoat, they were interesting; and I came away equally divided between my surprise at them, and my American misgiving for the fact that neither the gentleman proposing to represent a Folkestone constituency nor any of his friends was a resident of Folkestone. Such a thing, I reflected, was wholly alien to our law and custom, and could not happen except where some gentleman wished very much to be a Senator from a State of which he was not a citizen, and felt obliged to buy up its legislature.
VIII. KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY
DOVER is a place which looks its history as little as any famous town I know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as commonplace as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting there; but at last, after passing red-coated soldiers stalking upward, and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers, hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through it by a warder of a jocosity which I have not known elsewhere in England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls; for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the unfathomable castle well; for the disparity between our multitude and the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us. At different points he would begin, “I always say, ‘ere,” and then pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a crusader effigy’s tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of calling it “‘is toothpick.”
All would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked, and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has displaced. I knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a dulness, or a heartlessness, I do not know which, such as I have never seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy sixpence into his palm with the bated explanation, “That’s for the jokes,” and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the appreciation and not for the sixpence.
We went o
nce to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe, which was once the home of smuggling, and where there is still a little ale-house that poetically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its sign of “Smuggler’s Retreat.” It is said that there was formerly smuggling pretty much along the whole coast, and there is a heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth-fires of many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn, would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the police-station, in the long, rambling street, had apparently once been an assembly-room, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top of one’s charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.
I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements. Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps, than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in Folkestone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association with Chaucer’s Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas à Becket’s murder. Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more surprise. The manual which one buys in all places is for the retrospective enjoyment and identification of their objects of interest, and my “Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book of the City,” could do no more than agreeably supplement, long afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.
The day which chose us for our run up from Folkestone was a heavenly fourth of May, when the flowers had pretty well all come up to reassure the birds of spring. There were not only cowslips and primroses in their convertible yellow, but violets visible if not recognizable along the railway sides, and the cherry-trees which so abound in Kent were putting on their clouds of bridal white and standing in festive array between the expanses of the hop-fields, in a sort of shining expectation. At first you think there cannot be more of anything than of the cherry-trees in Kent, which last so long in their beauteous bloom, that for week after week you will find them full-flower, with scarcely a fallen petal. But by-and-by you perceive that there are more hop-vines than even cherry-trees in Kent; and that trained first to climb their slender poles, and then to feel their way along the wires crossing everywhere from the tops of these till the whole landscape is netted in, they are there in an insurpassable plenitude. As yet, on our fourth of May, however, the hops, in mere hint of their ultimate prevalence, were just out of the ground, and beginning to curl about their poles, while the cherry-trees were there as if drifted by a blizzard of bloom. Here and there a pear-tree trained against a sunny wall attempted a rivalry self-doomed to failure; but the yellow furze gilded the embankments and the backward-flying plain with its honied flowers, already neighbored by purple expanses of wild hyacinth. What, in the heart of all this blossoming, was the great cathedral itself, when we came in sight of it, but a vast efflorescence of the age of faith, mystically beautiful in form, and gray as some pale exhalation from the mould of the ever-cloistered, the deeply reforested past?
Canterbury Cathedral, however, though it is so distinctive, and is the chief of the sacred edifices which have in all Christian times incomparably enriched the place, might be lost from it and be less missed than from any other town of cathedral dignity. Without it Canterbury would still be worthy of all wonder, but with it, what shall one say? There is St. Martin’s, there is St. Mildred’s, there is St. Alphege’s, there is the Monastery of St. Augustine, there is St. Stephen’s, there is St. John’s Hospital, and I know not what other pious edifices to remember the Roman and Saxon and Norman and English men, who, if they did not build better than they knew, built beautifuler than we can. But of course the cathedral towers above them all in the sky and thought, and I hope no reader of mine will make our mistake of immuring himself in a general omnibus for the rather long drive to the sacred fane from the station. A fly fully open to the sun, and creeping as slowly as a fly can when hired by the hour, is the true means of arrival in the sacred vicinity. In this you may absorb every particular of the picturesque course over the winding road, across the bridge under which the Stour rushes (one marvels whither, in such haste), overhung with the wheels of busy mills and the balconies of idle dwellings, in air reeking of tanneries, and so into the city by streets narrowing and widening at their own caprice, with little regard to the convenience of the shops. These seem rather to thicken about the precincts of the cathedral, where among those just without is a tiny restaurant which thinks itself almost a part of the church, and where some very gentlewomanly young women will serve you an excellent warm lunch in a room of such mediaeval proportion and decoration that you can hardly refuse to believe yourself a pilgrim out of Chaucer. If the main dish of the lunch is lamb from the flocks which you saw trying to whiten the meadows all the way from Folkestone, and destined to greater success as the season advances, the poetic propriety of the feast will be the more perfect. After you have refreshed yourself you may sally out into the Mercery Lane whither the pilgrims used to resort for their occasions of shopping, and where the ruder sort kept up “the noise of their singing, with the sound of their piping, and the jingling of their Canterbury bells,” which they made in all the towns they passed through on their devout errand. They were in Canterbury, according to good William Thorpe, who paid for his opinions by suffering a charge of heresy in 1405, “more for the health of their bodies than their souls.... And if these men and women be a month in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars. They have with them both men and women that sing well wanton songs.” But what of that, the archbishop before whom Thorpe was tried effectively demanded. “When one of them that goeth barefoot striketh his foot against a stone... and maketh him to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow beginneth then a song... for to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow. For with such solace the travel and weariness of pilgrims is lightly and merrily brought forth.”
Nevertheless, in spite of this archiepiscopal reasoning, the pilgrims seem to be largely a godless crew whom, if my reader has come in their company to Canterbury, he will do better to avoid while there, and betake himself at once to the cathedral when he has had his luncheon. It is easily of such interest, historical and architectural, that he may spend in it not only all that is left him of his fourth of May, but many and many days of other months before he has exhausted it. The interest will rather exhaust him if he forms one of that troop of twentieth-century pilgrims who are led sheeplike through the edifice under the rod of the verger. We fell to a somewhat severe verger, though the whole verger tribe is severe, for that matter, and were snubbed if we ventured out of the strict order of our instruction at the shrine where Thomas à Becket, become a saint by his passive participation in the act, was murdered. One lady who trespassed upon the bounds pointed out as worn in the stone by the knees of more pious pilgrims, in former ages, was bidden peremptorily “Step back,” and complied in a confusion that took the mind from the arrogant churchman slain by the knights acting upon their king’s passionate suspiration, “Is there no one to deliver me from this turbulent priest?”
Perhaps it was not the verger alone that at Canterbury caused the vital spirits to sink so low. There was also the sense of
hopelessness with which one recalled a few shadowy details of the mighty story of the church, including, as it does, almost everything of civility and art in the successive centuries which have passed, eight of them, since it began to be the prodigious pile it is. St. Thomas, who, since he was so promptly canonized, must be allowed a saint in everything but meekness, is the prime presence that haunts the thought of the visitor, and yet it is no bad second if the French Protestant refugees, whom Elizabeth allowed to hold their services in the crypt, and who lived where they worshipped in their exile, possess it next; the Black Prince’s armor and effigy are not in it, with these. The crypt is no longer their dwelling-place, but their rites (I suppose Calvinistic) are still solemnized there; and who knows but if the savage Puritans, who imagined they were abolishing episcopacy when they were destroying beauty, had been a little less barbarous they might not now enter third among the associations of the cathedral? We cannot doubt the sincerity of their self-righteousness, and there is a fine thrill in the story of how they demolished “the great idolatrous window standing on the left hand as you go up into the choir,” if you take it in the language of the minister Richard Culmer, luridly known to neighboring men as “Blue Dick.” He himself bore a leading part in the vandalism, being moved by especial zeal to the work, not only because “in that window were seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary, in seven large glorious appearances,” but because “their prime cathedral saint, Archbishop Becket, was most rarely pictured in that window, in full proportion, with cope, rochet, crozier, and his pontificalibus.... A minister,” the godly Blue Dick tells us, modestly forbearing to name himself, “was on top of the city ladder, near sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand, rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones, when others present would not venture so high.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1289