Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very mediaeval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any corner in his misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun, with groups of people seriously, if somewhat awe-strickenly, enjoying themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude towards their superiors which must long delay a real classification of society with us. When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I came to pay the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then added, “And two shillings for me,” I did not like it as well as my theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much, and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible law.

  It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them. There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday afternoon, for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery door-yards and making believe to read.

  The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it ran by a vast enclosure, which looked like a neglected nursery, losing itself in a forest beyond. But we had really chanced upon one of the most characteristic features of English civilization. This neglected nursery was in fact a plantation of all woodland growths, for a game-preserve where later the gentleman who owned it would have the pleasure of killing the wild things resorting to it. We came to it fresh from our satisfaction with another characteristic feature: a village of low houses fronting on a green common, where geese and sheep were grazing, and poultry were set about in coops in the grass. Children were playing over it; men were smoking at the doors, and women doubtless were working within. The evening fire sent up its fumes from the chimneys, and a savory smell of cooking was in the air. It all looked very sociable, and if a little squalid, not the less friendly for that reason. It is from our literary associations with such scenes that we derive our heartaches when we first leave our humble homes in America, where we have really no such villages, but only solitary farms, or bustling communities on the way to be business centres. A village like that could easily become a “Deserted Village,” and an image of it, reflected in Goldsmith’s dear and lovely poem, recurred to me from my far youth,

  “On Eric’s banks, where tigers steal along,

  And the dread Indian chants his warlike song,”

  and mixed with the reality as I drove through it.

  The three great summits which are chief of the Malvern Hills are the Beacons of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire; and nearest the town they are everywhere traversed by the paths which the founders of the water-cure taught to stray over their undulations in the fashion of the German spas, and on which the patients walked themselves into a wholesome glow after their douches, sprays, and drenches. They are very noble tops indeed, from which one may everywhere command a lordly prospect, but the most interesting, and the loftiest, is the Worcestershire Beacon, a brow of which the Britons fortified against the Romans. You can drive the greater part of the way to their earthwork, and if you make the climb to it you will not envy either enemy its possession. The views from it are enchanting, and the fortifications, with companies of sheep grazing sidelong on their glacis and escarpments, can still be easily traced by the eye of military science; but perhaps their chief attraction to the civilian is that they seem impregnable to the swarming flies which infest the road almost throughout its rise, and at the point where you leave your carriage are a quite indescribable pest. One could imagine the Romans hurrying up the steep to be rid of them, and beating the Britons out of their stronghold in order to secure themselves from the insect enemy on the breezy height. They must have bitten the bare legs of the legionaries fearfully and really rendered retreat impossible, while the Britons had no choice but to submit; for if it was at this point that the brave Caractacus surrendered with his following, rather than be forced down among those flies, he yielded to a military necessity, and I should be the last to blame him for it. I wondered how my driver was getting on among them, till I found that he had taken refuge in the opportune inn from which he issued, wiping his mouth, on my descent from the embattled height; but the inn could not have been there in the Roman times.

  The best of the excursion was coming home by the Wyche, a tremendous cut through beetling walls of rock, which are truly, in the old eighteenth-century literary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone. It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to the Grand Canon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London. This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be happy, if you have an umbrella.

  I could not praise too much the meteorological delightfulness of that fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves, except for the incursionary trippers, who were, after all, so transient. What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted their doors she could approach their spotless thresholds without wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.

  If ever the tide of sickness sets back there — and somehow I wish it might — the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass the picturesqueness of those up and down hill streets of Malvern, or the easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water
growths which I did interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked friendly if not familiar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a cultivated sufferer from our Priory Churchless land will have an endless charm.

  At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in Malvern, and spending hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting graves without, and the vaguely remembering monuments within. But not among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the visitor that of the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution of the monasteries. The good “Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight,” lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters, with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father’s head. Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman’s figure, on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of Birmingham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenth-century tiles which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly carven stalls with the grotesques of their underseats, and doubtless to do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without paying for it, and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still so fair and neat, and why if her Hydropathy should fail at last to attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the home of Langland, the author of “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,” he could visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any friend of the poor.

  XII. SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD

  WE made Worcester what amends we could for refusing to stop the night in her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvlf dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of “wottle-and-dab,” the dab being probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows — namely, that to have a small teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking bowl of day, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with mathematical precision. With difficulty I then followed our intelligent guide through every part of the Wonderful establishment: from the places where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economical thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works, where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual perfectioning of the product through more than a hundred and fifty years, and where copies of its chefs-d’œuvre are assembled in dazzling variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.

  It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was fortunate for us that the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power, of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence, was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each other, with the eager grudge of travellers; and I suppose we would rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who wrote Charles I.’s Eikon Basilike, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubiliac, or effigies of King John and Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by the angler himself, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. “The organ is decorated, in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty-two stops,” yet we thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral. I remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what remains to me of the exquisite “Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S. aisle of the nave”? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see the marriage contract of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, in the diocesan registrar’s office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting the cathedral, and is now represented by a remnant of his cuticle in the chapter-house.

  My prevalent impression of the Worcester Cathedral is not so much one of beauty as one of interest, full, various, and important interest. Of course in our one poor afternoon we could not give the wonderful place more than an hour. We had for one thing to go and do some shopping, and the shops in Worcester are very fairly good. Then we tried for tea, but there seemed to be men drinking beer in the place; and though the proprietor hospitably drove them out, in honor of the lady of our party, yet we thought we would not have tea there, or indeed anywhere. We went rather for a rainy moment to a pretty public garden beside the Severn, where from a waterproof spread upon a stone seat we watched the flow of the river. It seemed a very damp river, but it must be remembered the weather was wet. For the rest, Wor
cester proved a city of trams, passing through rather narrow streets of tall modern houses, intersected by lanes of lesser and older houses, much more attractive. It was also a centre of torrential downpours, with refuges in doorways where one of us could wait while the other umbrellaed a wild way about in search of a personable public-house, and an eventual chop. Found, the public-house turned out brand-new, like a hotel in an American railroad centre, where in an upper chamber, dryer and warmer than the English wont, travelling-men sat eating, and the strangers were asked by a kind, plain girl if they would have tea with their chop. Did English people, then, of the lower middle non-conformist class, have tea with their meat? It seemed probable, and in compliance we reverted to the American custom of fifty years ago. If the truth must be told it was not very good, personal tea, but was of the quick-lunch general brew which one drinks scalding hot from steaming nickel-plated cylinders in our country-stations, with the conductor calling “All aboard!” at the door.