Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most attracts, after the names of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, is the name of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young, and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wrote The Pickwick Papers he was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous drollery was not just the qualification for dealing with the pathetic absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick’s money; and he had already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the description of Mr. Pickwick’s introduction to the Master of the Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq. The exaggerated caricature preserves some traits of the M.C.’s, his illustrious predecessors; and perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens’s could best render the personal effect of a beau of the period. He “was a charming young man of not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short, broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand... and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiff est; his wig of the glossiest, blackest and curliest.... His features were contracted into a perpetual smile. ‘Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to Ba-ath.... Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick?... Never in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-markable!’”

  This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened, and one sighs amid the horse-play for “the touch of a vanished hand,” like Jane Austen’s, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just opposite the Pump Room, but it was while living in “the upper portion of the Royal Crescent,” that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler, whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return from a ball. The elderly reader will probably remember better than the younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the mockeries of a party coming into the Hosted by Crescent; how he fled to escape her infuriated husband, and in Bristol found Mr. Dowler, who had also fled from Bath to escape Mr. Winkle and the consequences of his own violent threats. It was at the house of the Master of Ceremonies in Queen’s Square that “a select company of Bath footmen” entertained Sam Weller at a “friendly swarry consisting of a boiled leg of mutton and the usual trimmings,” but I am unable to give the number where Sam’s note of invitation instructed him to ring at the “airy bell.”

  In fact, on going back to the Bath episode of the Pickwick Papers, one finds so much make-believe required of him that the remembrance of one’s earlier delight in it is a burden and a hindrance rather than a help. You could get on better with it if you were reading it for the first time, and even then it would not seem very like what one probably saw. You would be sensible of the elemental facts, but in the picture they are all jarred out of semblance to life. The effect is quite that of a Cruikshank illustration, abounding in impossible grotesqueness, yet related here and there to reality by an action, an expression, a figure. It is screaming farce, or it is shrieking melodrama; the mirror is held up to nature, but nature makes a face in it. Nevertheless, on an earlier visit to England, I had once seen a water-side character getting into a Thames steamboat who seemed to me exactly like a character of Dickens; and in Bath I used often to meet a little, queer block of a man, whose nationality I could not make out, but every inch of whose five feet was full of the suggestion of Dickens. His face, topped by a frowzy cap, was twisted in a sort of fixed grin, and his eyes looked different ways, perhaps to prevent any attempt of mine to escape him. He carried at his side a small wicker-box which he kept his hand on; and as he drew near and halted, I heard a series of plaintive squeaks coming from it. “Make you perform the guinea-pig?” he always asked, and before I could answer, he dragged a remonstrating guinea-pig from its warm shelter, and stretched it on the cage, holding it down with both hands. “Johnny die queek!” he commanded, and lifted his hands for the instant in which Johnny was motionlessly gathering his forces for resuscitation. Then he called exultantly, “Bobby’s coming!” and before the police were upon him, Johnny was hustled back into his cosy box, woefully murmuring of his hardship to its comfort; and the queer little man smiled his triumph in every direction. The sight of this brief drama always cost me a penny; perhaps I could have had it for less; but I did not think a penny was too much.

  IV. A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE

  THERE were so many pleasing places within easy reach of Bath that it was hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to break the charm, to Bradford-on-Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathedral, and felt that the chapel had a prior claim. Possibly, spoiled as we were by the accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there is really a good deal of.

  The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the fellow-subjects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle’s battle with the Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very small and very rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by the lapse of centuries. Without, the grass grew close to its foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after entering, one must wait a moment before attempting to move about in the cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English continuity on which political and religious changes vainly break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was i
n like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must be the lot of youth in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it sometimes seemed, the plainest prose ever devised by a Yankee carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such dwellings.

  But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times, when, as I have noted, the English seemed to build with an instinct for comfort earlier unknown and later lost; otherwise Bradford was of stone, stony. It Studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there were moments when it might have looked Italian.

  Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guardhouse which had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweetness in a minister of the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke?

  The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that character, but when he put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman’s boots in honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us out on the other side.

  His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered’ houses which were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their horror in delicate French and become abattoirs; but as that street in Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we could have wished for the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within, but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort of others. The house was that Kingston House, world-famous for having been reproduced in papier-maché at the last Universal Exposition in Paris, which a wealthy cloth - manufacturer had had built for himself about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was touched with Italian feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England), faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur of a mill somewhere beyond the Avon.

  There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy fanner, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee-deep in the manure, with the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get milk from in America, but if we could have that old cow-barn, without the cows, at home, I think we might gainfully exchange our neatest and wholesomest dairy for it. The rich superabundance of the past in England is what always strikes one, and the piety with which the past is preserved and restored promises more and more of antiquity. I am sure the Barton Bam at Bradford is only waiting for some public-spirited magnate who will yet drive the untidy kine from its shelter, clean up, and sod and plant its yard, and with the help of some reverent architect renew it in the image of its prime, and stock it as a museum with the various kinds of tithes which in the ages of faith the neighboring churls used to pay into it for the comfort of the clergy here, and the good of their own souls hereafter.

  When we got well away from the tithe-barn we felt the need of tea, and we walked back from the station where our large boy, or little man, had put us down, to the shop of a green-grocer, which is probably the most twentieth-century building in Bradford. It is altogether of wood, and behind the shop, where the vegetables vaunted themselves in all the variety of cabbage, there is a clean little room, with the walls and roof sheathed in matched and painted pine. In this cheerful place, two rustics, a man and a boy, were drinking tea at the only table, but at our coming they politely choked down all the tea that was in their cups, and in spite of our entreaties hurried out with their cheeks bulged by what was left of their bread and butter. It was too bad, we murmured, but our hostess maintained that her late guests had really done, and she welcomed us with a hospitality rendered precious by her dusting off the chairs for us with her apron: I do not know that I had ever had that done for me before, and it seemed very romantic, and very English. The tea and butter were English too, and excellent, as they almost unfailingly are in England, no matter how po
or the place where they are supplied, and the bread was no worse than usual. In a morsel of garden under the window some gillyflowers were in bloom, and when we expressed our surprise, the kind woman went out and gathered some for us: they bloomed there pretty well all the winter, she said; but let not this give the fond reader too glowing an idea of the winter’s warmth in the West of England. It only proves how sturdy the English flowers are, and how much raw cold they can stand without turning a petal.