Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.

  If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title of Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte’s. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he’ deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that “none but Abigails appeared in white aprons,” as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding-hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government* of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who at all periods have

  *BATH.

  Rules laid down by Richard Nash, Esq., M.C., put up by Authority in the Pump Room and observed at Bath Assemblies during his reign.

  I.

  “That a visit of ceremony at coming to Bath, and another going away, is all that is expected or desired by Ladies of Quality and Fashion — except Impertinents.

  II.

  “That Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmens coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Inconveniences to Themselves and Others.

  III.

  “That Gentlemen of Fashion never appearing in a Morning before the Ladies in Gowns and Caps shew Breeding and Respect.

  IV.

  “That no Person take it ill that any one goes to another’s Play or breakfast and not to theirs; — except Captious by Nature.

  V.

  “That no Gentleman give his Tickets for the Balls to any but Gentlewomen; — N. B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.

  VI.

  “That Gentlemen crowding before the Ladies at the Ball, shew ill Manners; and that none do so for the Future; — except such as respect nobody but themselves.

  VII.

  “That no Gentleman or Lady take it ill that another Dances before them; — except such as have no Pretence to dance at all.

  VIII.

  “That the Elder Ladies and Children be contented with a Second Bench at the Ball, as being past, or not come to Perfection.

  IX.

  “That the younger Ladies take notice how many Eyes observe them; — This don’t extend to the Have-at-all’s.

  X.

  “That all whisperers of Lies and Scandal be taken for their Authors.

  XI.

  “That all Repeaters of such Lies and Scandal be shun’d by all Company; — except such as have been guilty of the same Crime.

  “V. B. — Several Men of no Character, Old Women and Young Ones of Questioned Refutation, are great Authors of Lies in this place, being of the sect of LEVELLERS.”

  Date 1707. invaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so largely into control of the Saeseneg, while seeming to merge and lose themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the rebellious material to a form of propriety if not of beauty. When he passed to his account, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans of two rival candidates for the mastership met in force, a free fight followed the attempt of a clergyman’s wife to take precedence of a peer’s daughter; “the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming, tore each other’s garments and headgear; the floor was strewn with fragments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each other.” Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and read the Riot Act three times.

  Of course matters could not go on so. Both the contestants for the Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich), was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the Abbey. This to be sure was after his death, but the place was always of such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, “who had highly distinguished himself in the British army during the American war,” by no means disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane Austen’s most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, his courage was apparently not equal to upholding his general authority with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King “humbly requested,” though in the matter of wearing hats “at the cotillions or concerts or dress balls,” our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit to warn any lady who should “through inattention or any other motive infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly.”

  From Nash’s time onward several Masters of Ceremonies were scandalized by people’s giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics, and one of them took public notice of the evil. “Servants, hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to keep away, and to spare themselves the mortification of being desi
red to withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they continue to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their entrance.”

  Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies, society in Bath was not only very fast, which society never minds being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it was at the same time always very gay. When at last the respective nights of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained, the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms; it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms; on Thursday with a Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Saturday with Public Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking, alternately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the fun was over by eleven o’clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modem party is beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls. Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.

  It will be seen that with that “large acquaintance” which Mrs. Allen so handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very good time at Bath for a very little money, and every one apparently who had the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens, where all sorts of people went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and-six. Jane Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens, the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to because they were so convenient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless grace which leaves nothing to be asked.

  The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fishing, riding, and beer. “Her favorite haunt,” says Mr. Tyte, “was a summer-house by the riverside in Harrison’s Walk, where she often was seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied under her chin.” But she also liked to wear when on horseback “a hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat,” which must have set off her red face and portly bulk to peculiar advantage. Her particular friend was a milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include any corner from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for, as the supposed writer in the New Bath Guide records. But the custom has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need fear being honored and plundered through it.

  It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much frequented, I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down.”

  I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the, glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide who started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.

  I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of the New Bath Guide, when —

  “’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex

  All wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”

  The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March
weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.