Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I have said how constantly one met them, how inevitably; and if they were wondering, willingly or unwillingly, what Chester could be bought for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but the walls and gates must be included.

  Why should such a thing be impossible? Such a thing on a smaller scale, different in quantity but not in quality, had been dreamt of by a boldly imaginative Chicagoan, if we could believe the good woman in charge of the Derby House, up the little court out of Nicholas Street, where all that is left of the old town mansion of the noble Stanleys remains. This magnanimous dreamer had the vision of the Stanleys’ town-house transplanted to the shores of Lake Michigan, and erected as a prime feature of the great Columbian Fair. He offered to buy it in fulfilment of his vision, so ran the tale, of whoever then could sell it; but when the head of the family to which it once belonged heard of the offer, he bought it himself in a quiver of indignation conceivably lasting yet, and dedicated it to the public curiosity forever, on the spot where its timbered and carven gables have looked into a dingy little court ever since the earliest days of Tudor architecture. If we could trust the witness of the cards which strewed the good woman’s table, it was American curiosity which mainly wreaked itself on the beautiful but rather uninhabitable old house our Chicagoan failed to buy. By hungry hundreds they throng to the place, and begin to satisfy their life-long famine for historic scenes in the mansion where Charles the First sojourned while in Chester, and whence the head of the house was taken out to die by the axe for his part in the royalist rising of 1657. So, in my rashness, I should have believed, but for the correction of Mr. Havell Crickmore, who says, in his pleasantly written and pleasantly pictured book about “Old Chester,” that the Earl was “beheaded during the great Rebellion,” which would shorten his life by some ten years, and make his death date 1647, not 1657. It does not greatly matter now; he would still be dead, at either date, and at either a touch of heroic humor would survive him in the story Mr. Crickmore repeats. Colonel Duckenfield of the Cromwellian forces asked him if he had no friend who would do the last office for him. “Do you mean, to cut my head off? Nay, if those men who would have my head off cannot find one to cut it off, let it stand where it is.”

  I have always liked to believe everything I read in guide-books, or hear from sacristans or custodians. In Chester you can believe not only the blunt Baedeker, with its stern adherence to fact, but anything that anybody tells you; and in my turn I ask the unquestioning faith of the reader when I assure him that he will find nothing so mediæval-looking out of Nuremberg as that street — I think it is called Eastgate Street — with its Rows, or two-story sidewalks, and its timber-gabled shops with their double chance of putting up the rates on the fresh American. Let him pay the price, and gladly, for there is no perspective worthier his money. I am not in the pay of a certain pastry-cook of the Rows, who makes the wedding-cakes for all the royal marriage feasts; but I say he will serve you a toasted tea-cake with the afternoon oolong he will try to put off on an American, such as you cannot buy elsewhere in England; only, you must be sure to eat the bottom half of the tea-cake, because most of the rich, sweet Cheshire butter will have melted tenderly into that. Go then, if you will, to the cathedral which I have been vainly seeking to decry, and study its histories, beginning with the remnants of the original Norman church of the Conqueror’s lieutenant and nephew Hugh Lupus, and ending with a distinctly modern restoration of the mediaeval carvings in the eastern transept, wherein Disraeli and Gladstone are made grotesquely to figure, the one in building up the Indian Empire and the other in disestablishing the Irish Church. Somewhere in the historical middle distance are certain faded flags taken from the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, which we should always have won if our powder had not given out, and let the enemy capture these banners. The beauty of the Chapter House will subdue you, if you rebel against the sight of them, and I can certify to the solemnity of the Cloister, which I visited with due impression; but with what success a young girl was sketching a perspective of the cathedral I did not look over her shoulder to see.

  How perverse is memory! I cannot recall distinctly the prospect across the Dee from the Watergate to which the Dee use to float its ships and from which it now shrinks far beyond the green flats. But I remember that in returning through a humble street from the Watergate, the children on the door-steps were eating the largest and thickest slices of bread and butter I saw in all England, where the children in humble streets are always eating large, thick slices of bread and butter. For the pleasure of riding on the municipal trams, and of realizing how much softer and slower they run than our monopolistic trolleys, we made, whenever we had nothing else to do, an excursion “across the sands of Dee” by the bridge which spans its valley, with always fragments of Kingsley’s tender old song singing themselves in the brain, and with the visionary Mary going to call the cattle home, and the cruel, crawling foam from which never home came she.

  Oh, is it fish, or weed, or floating hair, in the tide that no longer laps the green floor that once was sand? Ask the young girls of fifty years ago, who could make people cry with the words! It was enough for me that I was actually in the scene of the tragedy, and more than all the British, Roman, Saxon, or Norseman antiquity of Chester. At the suburban extremity of the tram-line, or somewhere a little short of it, we were offered by sign-board a bargain in house-lots so phrased that it added thirty generations to the age of a region already old enough in all conscience. We were not invited to buy the land brutally in fee-simple, outright; but it was intimated that the noble or gentle family to which it belonged would part with it temporarily on a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years. I hope we fully felt the delicacy, the pathos in that reservation of the thousandth year, which was the more appealing because it was tacit.

  These lots were no part of the vast estate of the great noble whose seat lies farther yet out of Chester in much the same direction. It was one of the many aristocratic houses which I meant to visit in England, but as I really visited no other, I am glad that I gave way in the matter of a shilling to the driver of the fly who held that the drive to the place was worth that much more than I did. I tried hard for the odd shilling, as an affair of conscience and of public spirit; but the morning was of a cool-edged warmth, and of a sky that neither rained nor shone, and the driver of the fly was an elderly man who looked as if he would not lie about the regular price, though I pretended so strenuously it should be six and not seven shillings for the drive, and I yielded. After all (I excused my weakness to myself), it would have been seven dollars at home; and presently we were in the leafy damp, the leafy dark of the parkway within the gates of the great nobleman’s estate beyond the Dee. Eight thousand acres large it stretches all about, and is visibly bounded only by the beautiful Welsh hills to the westward, and four miles we drove through the woodsy quiet of the park, which was so much like the woodsy quiet of forest-ways not so accessible at home. Birds were singing in the trees, and on the hawthorns a little may hung yet, though it was well into June. Rabbits — or if they were hares I mean no offence to the hares — limped leisurely away from the road-side. Coops of young pheasants, carefully bringing up to be shot in the season for the pleasure of noble or even royal guns, were scattered about in the borders of the shade; and grown cock and hen pheasants showed their elect forms through the undergrowth in the conscious pride of a species dedicated to such splendid self-sacrifice. In the open spaces the brown deer by scores lay lazily feeding, their antlers shining, or their ears pricking through the thin tall stems of the grass. Otherwhere in paddock or pasture, were tw
o-year-olds or three-year-olds, of the blooded hunters or racers to whose breeding that great nobleman is said to be mostly affectioned, though for all I personally know he may be more impassioned of the fine arts, or have his whole heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do personally know is that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless fly, and escaped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own responsive nerves vibrating.

  From time to time notices to the public “earnestly requested” the visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England, and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit themselves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circumstance proper to a great English nobleman’s place, no one can say; and if I mention that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful houses appropriated to the immediate dependants of this nobleman, it is less with the purpose of instructing some future oil-king or beef-baron in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.

  As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace, it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it with vague preconceptions of another sort of majesty. I myself was disappointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect to be Norman, “or at least Early English,” but which one finds a low two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground, with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance disguised as a small classic temple. But the castle is in the definite taste of a self-justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated Georgian — the Fourth Georgian — surviving into our own century not so very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satisfaction in the silvery sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror appointed to hold Chester for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.

  I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the formalities of cropt lawns and dipt trees, and I would fain have the reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its belongings, so that in passing a certain bust with the familiar broken nose of the master he respectfully murmured, “Sir Michael Hangelo.”

  “Who?” the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of the precious fact; and the good soul repeated, “Sir Michael Hangelo, sir.”

  Of course it was Sir Michelangelo, Bart.; nothing so low as the effigy of a knight could be admitted to that august gallery.

  Am I being a little too scornful in all this? I hope not, though I own that in the mansions of the great it is difficult not to try despising them. The easy theory about a man whom you find magnificently housed in the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it. In your generous indignation you wish to have him out, and his pleasure-grounds divided up into small farms. But this is a kind of equity which may be as justly applied to any one who owns more of the earth than he knows how to use. Who are they that fence large parts of Long Island, and much of the Hudson River scenery, which they have studded with villas never open to the public like that great house near Chester? I know a man who has two acres and a half on the Maine shore of the Piscataqua, and tills not a tenth of it; but I should be sorry to have him expropriated from the rest. We all, who have the least bit more than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another matter. They are the immense majority and they may vote anything they choose, even a cruel injustice.

  The American, newly arrived in Chester after his new arrival in Liverpool, will be confronted with a stronghold of the past which he will not be able to overthrow perhaps during his whole stay in England, though he should spend the summer. Immemorial custom is intrenched there not only in the picturesqueness, the beauty, the charm, but the silent inexpugnable possession which time from the beginning has been fortifying. The outside has been made as goodly as possible, but within is the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and toil. Yet let him not rashly fling himself against its impregnable defences. It is not primarily his affair. Let him go quietly about with his Baedeker, and see and enjoy all he can of that ancient novelty, so dear to us new folk, and then when he is worn out with his pleasure, and sits down to his toasted tea-cake in that restaurant of the Rows where they will serve him a cup of our national oolong, let him ask himself how far the beloved land he has left has been true to its proclamations in favor of a fresh and finally just — Theilung der Erde.

  Having answered this question to his satisfaction, let him by no means hurry away from Chester that night or the next morning in the vain belief that greater historic riches await him in cities, farther away from his port of entry, in the heart of the land. Scarcely any shall surpass it, for if not a Roman capital like York or London, it was long a Roman camp, and a temple of Apollo replaced a Druid temple on the site of the present cathedral. The Britons were never pushed farther off than the violet hills where they still dwell, strong in their unintelligible tongue, with a taste for music and mysticism which seems never to have failed them. From those adjacent heights they harried in frequent foray their Roman and Saxon and Norman invaders, and only left off attacking Chester when the Early English had become the Later!

  Chester was not only one of the stubbornest of the English cities in its resistance of William the Conqueror, but it held out still longer against Oliver the Conqueror in the war of the King and the Parliament. What part, if any, it had in the Wars of the Roses, I excuse myself for not knowing. The strong Henry Fourth led the weak Richard Second a captive through it, and there is record that the weaker Henry Sixth tried in vain to recruit his forces in it for his futile struggle with fate. The lucky Henry Seventh who had newly married royalty, and was no more king by right than the pretender who afterwards threatened his throne, sent a Stanley to the block for having spoken tolerantly of Perkyn Warbeck. But if there was any party in Chester for that pretender, there was none for the Stuart calling himself Charles III., for when he sent from Scotland an entreaty to the citizens for help, they took it as a warning to fortify their town against him. After that they had peace, and now the place is the great market for Cheshire cheese which is made in the fertile country round about, and vies with the New Jersey imitation in the favor of our own country.

  The American who means to stop in Chester for the day, which may so profitably and pleasantly extend itself to a week, cannot do better than instruct himself more particularly in the history which I st
ill find myself so ignorant, for all my show of learning. I would have him distrust this at every point, and correct it from better authorities. Especially I would have him mistrust a story told in Chester of the American who discovered a national origin in the guide-book’s mention of one of the Mercian kings who extended his rule so far from the midland counties. The traveller read the word American, and pronounced if as the English believe we all do. “My dear,” he said to his wife, “this town was settled by the’Murricans.”

  XI. MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS

  FROM the loth to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fortnight, with a peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was why we left London, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.