Title: Portraits of places
Author: James, Henry
Language: English
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                              HENRY JAMES



                           PORTRAITS OF PLACES



                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK

                       HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

                       The Riverside Press, Cambridge



NOTE
 
The following papers originally appeared in the _Century_, the _Atlantic 
Monthly_, the _Galaxy_ Magazine, in that of Lippincott, and in the _New 
York Tribune_ and _The Nation_. The four last chapters in the book, 
which were the earliest published, can now have (in some slight degree) 
only the value of history. The lapse of thirteen years will have brought 
many changes to Saratoga, Newport, Quebec, and Niagara. 



CONTENTS

I. Venice

II. Italy Revisited

III. Occasional Paris

IV. Rheims and Laon: A Little Tour

V. Chartres

VI. Rouen

VII. Etretat

VIII. From Normandy to the Pyrenees

IX. An English Easter

X. London at Midsummer

XI. Two Excursions

XII. In Warwickshire

XIII. Abbeys and Castles

XIV. English Vignettes

XV. An English New Year

XVI. An English Winter Watering-Place

XVII. Saratoga

XVIII. Newport

XIX. Quebec

XX. Niagara



I

VENICE

1882


It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not
a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been
painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of
the world it is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first
book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first
picture-dealer's and you will find three or four high-coloured "views"
of it. There is nothing more to be said about it. Every one has been
there, and every one has brought back a collection of photographs. There
is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our local
thoroughfare; and the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the postman's
ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar things, and I
believe that, for the true Venice-lover, Venice is always in order.
There is nothing new to be said about it certainly, but the old is
better than any novelty. It would be a sad day, indeed, when there
should be something new to say. I write these lines with the full
consciousness of having no information whatever to offer. I do not
pretend to enlighten the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his
memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in
love with his topic.



I


Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but it is only after
extracting half a life-time of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of
fame from it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn,
which it probably will not cease to do for many a year to come.
Meantime, it is Mr. Ruskin who, beyond any one, helps us to enjoy. He
has, indeed, lately produced several aids to depression in the shape of
certain little humorous--ill-humorous--pamphlets (the series of _St.
Mark's Rest_), which embody his latest reflections on the subject of
Venice and describe the latest atrocities that have been perpetrated
there. These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit
that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be
spoiled--an admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty.
Fortunately, one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of
the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose. This queer,
late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed
issue of the _Stones of Venice_, only one little volume of which has
appeared or, perhaps, will ever appear) is all to be read, though much
of it seems to be addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in
the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry
governess. It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is
delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though
the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form, and
scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with
the love of his subject--a love disconcerted and abjured, but which has
still some of the force of inspiration. Among the many strange things
that have befallen Venice, she has had the good fortune to become the
object of a passion to a man of splendid genius, who has made her his
own, and, in doing so, has made her the world's. There is no better
reading at Venice, therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true
Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow
theological spirit, the moralism _à tout propos_, the queer
provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of
flowers. One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at
all--without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought.
It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous
thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as much
happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all the world
to see; it is part of the spectacle--a thorough-going devotee of local
colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The Venetian
people have little to call their own--little more than the bare
privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their
habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their
opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life
presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this
meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it
than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the
sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into
attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal _conversazione_. It
is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it
certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed.
The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat
is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally
perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's
allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and
conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its
sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American; but to
make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The
Italian people have, at once, the good and evil fortune to be conscious
of few wants; so that if the civilisation of a society is measured by
the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is
to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor
figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, doubtless, but
the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental
tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by
the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to follow the
example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. Almost
all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be maintained even
under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure
than looking at a fine Titian--unless it be looking at a fine Tintoret,
or strolling into St. Mark's--it is abominable, the way one falls into
the habit--and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the windowless
gloom; or than floating in a gondola, or hanging over a balcony, or
taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of these superficial pastimes
that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in
the emotions to which they minister. These, fortunately, are of the
finest; otherwise, Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is
good; reading the old records is, perhaps, better; but the best thing of
all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she
deserves it, is to give her a chance to touch you often--to linger and
remain and return.



II


The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which the
author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike
Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent
manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who
are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others
were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist's only quarrel with his
Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone;
to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making
discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little
wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you
march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is
nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is
completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn
your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of delicacy.
But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the
world. The fault of Venice is that, though it is easy to admire it, it
is not so easy to live in it. After you have been there a week, and the
bloom of novelty has rubbed off, you wonder whether you can accommodate
yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits become
impracticable, and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an
undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your gondola
(or you think you are), and you have seen all the principal pictures and
heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your
gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an
English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked
several hundred times round the Piazza, and bought several bushels of
photographs. You have visited the antiquity-mongers whose horrible
sign-boards dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand
Canal; you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have
bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a
shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and the
Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and
encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual
exercise. You try to take a walk, and you fail, and meantime, as I say,
you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's
cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are
sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across
the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his
turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke.
The canals have, a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you
have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found
them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead-bracelets and
"panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same
tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at
the same empty tables, in front of the same _caffès_--the Piazza, as I
say, has resolved itself into a sort of magnificent tread-mill. This is
the state of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very
well for a week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure,
you act with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is
not--with all deference to your personal attractions--that of your
companions who remain behind; for though there are some disagreeable
things in Venice, there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The
conditions are peculiar, but your intolerance of them evaporates before
it has had time to become a prejudice. When you have called for the bill
to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are
deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that
you feel the fulness of its charm; that you invite its exquisite
influence to sink into your spirit. The place is as changeable as a
nervous woman, and you know it only when you know all the aspects of its
beauty. It has high spirits or low, it is pale or red, gray or pink,
cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour. It is
always interesting and almost always sad; but it has a thousand
occasional graces and is always liable to happy accidents. You become
extraordinarily fond of these things; you count upon them; they make
part of your life. Tenderly fond you become; there is something
indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that gradually
establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to become
human and sentient, and conscious of your affection. You desire to
embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally, a soft sense of
possession grows up, and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It
is very true that if you go there, like the author of these lines, about
the middle of March, a certain amount of disappointment is possible. He
had not been there for several years, and in the interval the beautiful
and helpless city had suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are
in full possession, and you tremble for what they may do. You are
reminded, from the moment of your arrival, that Venice scarcely exists
any more as a city at all; that it exists only as a battered peep-show
and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza,
and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. The
English and Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with
a great many French, who were discreet enough to make very long repasts
at the Caffè Quadri, during which they were out of the way. The months
of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a
favourable season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The
valet-de-place had marked them for his own, and held triumphant
possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy
voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, whatever language he
be speaking, the accent of some other idiom. During all the spring
months in Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead
their helpless captives through churches and galleries in dense
irresponsible groups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the
Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the _caffès_. In
saying just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind
the impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St.
Mark's. The condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great
scandal The pedlars and commissioners ply their trade--often a very
unclean one--at the very door of the temple; they follow you across the
threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into
your ear, scuffling with each other for customers. There is a great deal
of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has
become a great bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.



III


It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not, somehow, a
great spirit of solemnity within it, the traveller would soon have
little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration
of the outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended,
is certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert
is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a
necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more
distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign
themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all
semblance of beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that
the external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impressive
only than that of the still comparatively uninjured interior. I know not
what is the measure of necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed
to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that admirable
harmony of faded mosaic and marble, which, to the eye of the traveller
emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the
farther end of it with a sort of dazzling, silvery presence--to-day this
lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and, indeed,
well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--the work
of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea--is giving way
to large crude patches of new material, which have the effect of a
monstrous malady rather than of a restoration to health. They look like
blotches of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the
cheeks of a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial
the newest-looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots, or
as the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a
scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our complaint is a
purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must
doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe
that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply
interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations.
For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases of the
process are more visible than the result, to arrive at which it seems
necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful,
she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is, doubtless,
too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to
forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside, as well, there
has been a considerable attempt to make the place more tidy; but the
general effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly
remember is the straightening out of that dark and rugged old
pavement--those deep undulations of primitive mosaic, in which the
wondering tourist was thought to perceive an intended resemblance to the
waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not, the analogy was an image
the more in a treasure-house of images; but from a considerable portion
of the church it has now disappeared. Throughout the greater part,
indeed, the pavement remains as recent generations have known it--dark,
rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened
malachite, and polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers; but in
other large sections the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the
ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have taken, the floor of a
London clubhouse or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian and
scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and when, a year
ago, people in England were writing to the _Times_ about the whole
business, and holding meetings to protest against it, the dear children
of the lagoon (so far as they heard, or heeded, the rumour) thought them
partly busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were,
but they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to
the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the
Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in
which personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for
grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, however, speak
of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it,
or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served
already. It is surely the best-described building in the world. Open the
_Stones of Venice_, open Théophile Gautier's _Italia_, and you will
see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there
is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that
offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the
light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured
porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness, and a desire for
something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when the church
is comparatively quiet and empty, when you may sit there with an easy
consciousness of its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go
into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look
at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just
spoke of; you treat the place like an orifice in the peep-show. Still,
it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the worst, an amorous one--to
feed one's eyes on the moulten colour that drops from the hollow vaults
and thickens the air with its richness. It is all so quiet and sad and
faded; and yet it is all so brilliant and living. The strange figures in
the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare
down through the glowing dimness; and the burnished gold that stands
behind them catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's
owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or
perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there are
no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches
indeed; but it arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone,
of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean
against--it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the
place is incredibly rich, and you may go there every day and find afresh
some lurking pictorial nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters
say; and there are usually three or four painters, with their easels set
up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy to
catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at
portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But, if you cannot
paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and
jasper, the crucifixes, of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the
vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark
Byzantine image, spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot paint
these things you can, at least, grow fond of them. You grow fond even of
the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many
generations, and attached to the base of those wide pilasters, of which
the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a faint
gray bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age.



IV


Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges having
been reduced to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its
keenness, there was a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging
on the Riva degli Schiavoni and looking out at the far-shimmering
lagoon. There was entertainment indeed in simply getting into the place
and observing the queer incidents of a Venetian installation. A great
many persons contribute indirectly to this undertaking, and it is
surprising how they spring out at you during your novitiate to remind
you that they are bound up in some mysterious manner with the
constitution of your little establishment. It was an interesting
problem, for instance, to trace the subtle connection existing between
the niece of the landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor.
Superficially, it was not easily visible, as the young lady in question
was a dancer at the Fenice theatre--or, when that was closed, at the
Rossini--and might have been supposed to be absorbed by her professional
duties. It proved to be necessary, however, that she should hover about
the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid gloves, with one
little white button; as also, that she should apply a thick coating of
powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a sweet, weak
expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens, who, as a general
thing (it was not a peculiarity of the landlady's niece), are fond of
besmearing themselves with flour. It soon became plain that it is not
only the many-twinkling lagoon that you behold from a habitation on the
Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian. Straight across, before
my windows, rose the great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which, for
an ugly Palladian church, has a success beyond all reason. It is a
success of position, of colour, of the immense detached Campanile,
tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because San
Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, and because it has a great deal of
worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has
a kind of suffusion of rosiness. If we were asked what is the leading
colour at Venice we should say pink, and yet, after all, we cannot
remember that this elegant tint occurs very often. It is a faint,
shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with
it, and the pale whitish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There
is, indeed, in Venice a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is
never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always
exquisitely mild. There are certain little mental pictures that rise
before the sentimental tourist at the simple mention, written or spoken,
of the places he has loved. When I hear, when I see, the magical name I
have written above these pages, it is not of the great Square that I
think, with its strange basilica and its high arcades, nor of the wide
mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the well-poised
dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the sweet
Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark's. I simply see a narrow
canal in the heart of the city--a patch of green water and a surface of
pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it gives a great, smooth swerve,
passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's cry, carried over the quiet
water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl is passing over
the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel's back, with an old
shawl on her head, which makes her look charming; you see her against
the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the
whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a
garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose--the roses of
Venice are splendid--has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On
the other side of this small water-way is a great shabby façade of
Gothic windows and balconies--balconies on which dirty clothes are hung
and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of
slimy water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer
smell, and the whole place is enchanting. It is poor work, however,
talking about the colour of things in Venice. The sentimental tourist is
perpetually looking at it from his window, when he is not floating about
with that delightful sense of being for the moment a part of it, which
any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain. Venetian windows and
balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest your elbows on these
cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But, in truth, Venice is
not, in fair weather, a place for concentration of mind. The effort
required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the
brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your _milieu_.
All nature beckons you forth, and murmurs to you sophistically that such
hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterward, in ugly
places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions into
prose. Fortunately for the present proser, the weather was not always
fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to look at
the lagoon from an open casement than to respond to the advances of
persuasive gondoliers. Even then, however, there was a constant
entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-gray
floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there
were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the
anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva,
seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm--warm
to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole
place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were
only infinite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of
began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard
of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub, of
sky above a _calle_, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters
say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which
played across it like huge, smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied
and spotted it all over; every gondola and every gondolier looking, at a
distance, precisely like every other. There is something strange and
fascinating in this mysterious impersonality of the gondola. It has an
identity when you are in it, but, thanks to their all being of the same
size, shape, and colour, and of the same deportment and gait, it has
none, or as little as possible, as you see it pass before you. From my
windows on the Riva there was always the same silhouette--the long,
black, slender skiff, lifting its head and throwing it back a little,
moving yet seeming not to move, with the grotesquely-graceful figure on
the poop. This figure inclines, as may be, more to the graceful or to
the grotesque--standing in the "second position" of the dancing-master,
but indulging, from the waist upward, in a freedom of movement which
that functionary would deprecate. One may say, as a general thing, that
there is something rather awkward in the movement of even the most
graceful gondolier, and something graceful in the movement of the most
awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace predominates, and
nothing can be finer than the large firm way in which, from their point
of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous oar. It has the
boldness of a plunging bird, and the regularity of a pendulum.
Sometimes, as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola that passes
you--see, as you recline on your own low cushions, the arching body of
the gondolier lifted up against the sky--it has a kind of nobleness
which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. The gondolier at Venice is
your very good friend--if you choose him happily--and on the quality of
the personage depends a good deal that of your impressions. He is a part
of your daily life, your double, your shadow, your complement. Most
people, I think, either like their gondolier or hate him; and if they
like him, like him very much. In this case they take an interest in him
after his departure; wish him to be sure of employment, speak of him as
the gem of gondoliers, and tell their friends to be certain to "secure"
him. There is usually no difficulty in securing him; there is nothing
elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. They are, for the most part,
excellent fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a
kindness for them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they
are the children of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy,
with its essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. When I say they
are associated with its silence, I should immediately add that they are
associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are an
extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the _traghetti_,
where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl
across the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy
each other from afar. If you happen to have a _traghetto_ under your
window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even
farther than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier
is, in fact, the sound of Venice. There is scarcely any other, and that,
indeed, is part of the interest of the place. There is no noise there
save distinctly human noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of
wheels and hoofs. It is all articulate, personal sound. One may say,
indeed, that Venice is, emphatically, the city of conversation; people
talk all over the place, because there is nothing to interfere with
their being heard. Among the populace it is a kind of family party. The
still water carries the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences
at a distance of half a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they
don't like trouble. Their delightful garrulous language helps them to
make Venetian life a long _conversazione_. This language, with its soft
elisions, its odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and
other disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and
accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit, he would have the
merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit, even--some
people perhaps would say especially--when you don't understand what he
says. But he adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature
in your life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and
he has a happy art of being obsequious, without being, or, at least,
without seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an
almost lyrical gratitude. In short, he has delightfully good manners, a
merit which he shares, for the most part, with Venetians at large. One
grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's fondness is the
frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian people, in
general, has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian manner there is
something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that
it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it has not
been blessed by fortune, it has at least been polished by time. It has
not a genius for morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that
direction. It scruples not to represent the false as the true, and is
liable to confusion in the attribution of property. It is peculiarly
susceptible to the tender sentiment, which it cultivates with a graceful
disregard of the more rigid formalities. I am not sure that it is very
brave, and was not struck with its being very industrious. But it has an
unfailing sense of the amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a
natural man of the world. He is better company than persons of his class
are apt to be among the nations of industry and virtue--where people are
also, sometimes, perceived to lie and steal. He has a great desire to
please and to be pleased.



V


In this latter point the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to imitate
him; he begins to lead a life that is, before all things, good-humoured:
unless, indeed, he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of his
good-humour by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the
pictures are his best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed of myself to
have written so much of common things when I might have been making
festoons of the names of the masters. But, when we have covered our page
with such festoons, what more is left to say? When one has said
Carpaccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a
note that must be left to resound at will. Everything has been said
about the mighty painters, and it is of little importance to record that
one traveller the more has found them to his taste. "Went this morning
to the Academy; was very much pleased with Titian's 'Assumption.'" That
honest phrase has doubtless been written in many a traveller's diary,
and was not indiscreet on the part of its author. But it appeals little
to the general reader, and we must, moreover, not expose our deepest
feelings. Since I have mentioned Titian's "Assumption," I must say that
there are some people who have been less pleased with it than the
gentleman we have just imagined. It is one of the possible
disappointments of Venice, and you may, if you like, take advantage of
your privilege of not caring for it. It imparts a look of great richness
to the side of the beautiful room of the Academy on which it hangs; but
the same room contains two or three works less known to fame which are
equally capable of inspiring a passion. "The 'Annunciation' struck me as
coarse and superficial": that was once written in a simple-minded
traveller's note-book. At Venice, strange to say, Titian is altogether a
disappointment; the city of his adoption is far from containing the best
of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, Munich--these are the
homes of his greatness. There are other painters who have but a single
home, and the greatest of these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit
Carpaccio and Bellini, who make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The
Veronese may be seen and measured in other places; he is most splendid
in Venice, but he shines in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of
the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the
chambers of the National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and
pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful
young Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into
the cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour, and dream
you are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain
old beggar, with one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to
a hundred painters for Doges, and for personages more sacred--has a
prescriptive right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to
hold out a greasy, immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice, in fact,
to see the other masters, who form part of your life while you are
there, and illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to
express one's relation to them; for the whole Venetian art-world is so
near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the actual world,
that it seems almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than
to another. Nowhere (not even in Holland, where the correspondence
between the real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant
and so exquisite) do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so
consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian
air and the Venetian history, are on the walls and ceilings of the
palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions
they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance
upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you
live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go
into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; you
go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the
things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, and
life was so pictorial that art could not help becoming so. With all
diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an
extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great Venetian works.
You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and
you enjoy them because they are so social and so actual. Perhaps, of all
works of art that are equally great, they demand least reflection on the
part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed.
Reflection only confirms your admiration, but it is almost ashamed to
show its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the
sense that we feel there is reason as well in such an address. But it is
hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well to
attempt it--painful, because in the memory of vanished hours so filled
with beauty the sense of present loss is overwhelming. Exquisite hours,
enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have
always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May
and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice is not
smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome;
but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola
waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your
place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion, in Venice,
should, of course, be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An
intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it
makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be aware that she cannot help
looking graceful as she glides over the waves. The handsome Pasquale,
with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way, from
observation of your habits, that your intention is to go to see a
picture or two. It perhaps does not immensely matter what picture you
choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander
through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual
architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming to
disembark at the polished steps of a little empty _campo_--a sunny,
shabby square, with an old well in the middle, an old church on one
side, and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are
tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown is leaning vaguely
on the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for coppers;
there are always three or four small boys dodging possible
umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to
the door of the church.



VI


The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece
lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many
a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a
scantily-visited altar; some of them, indeed, are hidden behind the
altar, in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered
you for approaching the picture, in such cases, are a kind of mockery of
your irritated desire. You stand on tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you
climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the
_custode_. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to
perceive that it is beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of
a fig-tree against a mellow sky; but the rest is impenetrable mystery.
You renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima
da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the
immaculate purity that dwells in the works of this master, you renounce
it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high altar, in that church, there
hangs a Baptism of Christ, by Cima, which, I believe, has been more or
less repainted. You can make the thing out in spots; you can see that it
has a fulness of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff
neck, and promise yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna
dell' Orto, where two noble pictures, by the same hand--pictures as
clear as a summer twilight--present themselves in better circumstances.
It may be said, as a general thing, that you never see the Tintoret. You
admire him, you adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, but,
in the great majority of cases, you don't see him. This is partly his
own fault; so many of his works have turned to blackness and are
positively rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where
there are acres of the Tintoret, there is scarcely anything at all
adequately visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It
is true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many
pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures, but a wealth of
episodes; and you pass from one of these to the other as if you were
"doing" a gallery. Surely, no single picture in the world contains more
of human life; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite
beauty. It is one of the greatest things of art; it is always
interesting. There are pictures by the Tintoret which contain touches
more exquisite, revelations of beauty more radiant, but there is no
other vision of so intense a reality and execution so splendid. The
interest, the impressiveness, of that whole corner of Venice, however
melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a
strange importance to a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers
go to see appears to suffer less from the incursions of travellers. It
is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, and the author of these
lines has always had the good fortune, which he wishes to every other
traveller, of having it to himself. I think most visitors find the place
rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the
fitful figures that gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as
it were) with which the painter has hung all the walls, and then,
depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity of these objects,
by strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely
footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure, and
find themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, and of the
_genius loci_ having been a sort of mad white-washer, who worked with a
bad mixture, in the bright light of the _campo_, among the beggars, the
orange-vendors, and the passing gondolas. Solemn, indeed, is the place,
solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall
scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area an
equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it, and dense and
difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as
it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we
breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality.
Fortunately, however, we have the Ducal Palace, where everything is so
brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite
of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is, of
course, the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a
wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment
of Venice is a question of dodging--and go at about one o'clock, when
the tourists have gone to lunch and the echoes of the charming chambers
have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no brighter place in
Venice; by which I mean that, on the whole, there is none half so
bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from
the glittering lagoon, and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and
ceilings. All the history of Venice, all its splendid, stately past,
glows around you in a strong sea-light. Every one here is magnificent,
but the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before
you in a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue
sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white
colonnades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen
and ladies in the world both render homage and receive it. Their
glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea, and their sun-lighted
faces are the very complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety,
of politics and religion, of art and patriotism, gives a magnificent
dignity to every scene. Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did
an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of
breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of perpetual success.
He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, with the fluttering
movement of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the blue. He
was the happiest of painters, and he produced the happiest picture in
the world. The "Rape of Europa" surely deserves this title; it is
impossible to look at it without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art
is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity
combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and
brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth,
health, movement, desire--all this is the brightest vision that ever
descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could
entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the
"Rape of Europa" is painted. The Tintoret's visions were not so bright
as that; but he had several that were radiant enough. In the room that
contains the "Rape of Europa" are several smaller canvases by the
greatly more complex genius of the Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost
simple in their loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity. They have
kept their brightness through the centuries, and they shine with their
neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a piece of painting in one of
them which is one of the sweetest things in Venice, and which reminds
one afresh of those wild flowers of execution that bloom so profusely
and so unheeded in the dark corners of all of the Tintoret's work.
"Pallas chasing away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to the
picture; and it represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance
administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as if to tell
him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push that I
speak, the charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a single
bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, with its rosy fingers parted,
upon his dark breastplate. She bends her enchanting head with the
effort--a head which has all the strange fairness that the Tintoret
always sees in women--and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these
members, over which the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as
pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the
Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great "Paradise," which unfolds
its somewhat smoky splendour, and the wonder of its multitudinous
circles, in one of the other chambers? If it were not one of the first
pictures in the world, it would be about the biggest, and it must be
confessed that at first the spectator gets from it chiefly an impression
of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the
dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of
the details of this composition are supremely beautiful. It is
impossible, however, in a retrospect of Venice, to specify one's
happiest hours, though, as one looks backward, certain ineffaceable
moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to
forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they
may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the
treasure of that apartment?



VII


Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no work of
art more complete. The picture is in three compartments: the Virgin sits
in the central division with her child; two venerable saints, standing
close together, occupy each of the others. It is impossible to imagine
anything more finished or more ripe. It is one of those things that sum
up the genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of a
school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been
clarified by time, and it is as solemn as it is gorgeous, and as simple
as it is deep. John Bellini is, more or less, everywhere in Venice, and
wherever he is, he is almost certain to be first--first, I mean, in his
own line; he paints little else than the Madonna and the saints; he has
not Carpaccio's care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's, nor
that of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, however, where
several figures are clustered together, have a richness of sanctity that
is almost profane. There is one of them on the dark side of the room at
the Academy, containing Titian's "Assumption," which, if we could only
see it--its position is an inconceivable scandal--would evidently be one
of the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So, too, is the Madonna
of San Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much too
high, but so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and accompanied,
that the proper attitude for even the most critical amateur, as he looks
at it, seems to be the bended knee. There is another noble John Bellini,
one of the very few in which there is no Virgin, at San Giovanni
Crisostomo--a St Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks,
with a landscape of extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of the
peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the
works of the painter, and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it
has brilliant beauty, and the St. Jerome is a delightful old personage.
The same church contains another great picture, for which he must find a
shrine apart in his memory; one of the most interesting things he will
have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing appeals more to him than
three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy the foreground of a
smallish canvas of Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the high altar of
San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian by birth, but few of
his productions are to be seen in his native place; few, indeed, are to
be seen anywhere. The picture represents the patron-saint of the church,
accompanied by other saints, and by the worldly votaries I have
mentioned. These ladies stand together on the left, holding in their
hands little white caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost
turns her face to the spectator. This face and figure are almost unique
among the beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the susceptible
observer with the impression of having made, or rather having missed, a
strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. The lady, who
is superbly handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century,
and she remains in the mind as the perfect flower of that society. Never
was there a greater air of breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil
superiority. She walks like a goddess--as if she trod, without sinking,
the waves of the Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect
expression of the aristocratic spirit, either in its pride or in its
benignity. This magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is
gentle, and so quiet that, in comparison, all minor assumptions of
calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm. But for all this, there are depths
of possible disorder in her light-coloured eye. I had meant, however, to
say nothing about her, for it is not right to speak of Sebastian when
one has not found room for Carpaccio. These visions come to one, and one
can neither hold them nor brush them aside. Memories of Carpaccio, the
magnificent, the delightful--it is not for want of such visitations, but
only for want of space, that I have not said of him what I would. There
is little enough need of it for Carpaccio's sake, his fame being
brighter to-day--thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Ruskin has held up to
it--than it has ever been. Yet there is something ridiculous in talking
of Venice without making him, almost, the refrain. He and the Tintoret
are the two great realists, and it is hard to say which is the more
human, the more various. The Tintoret had the mightier temperament, but
Carpaccio, who had the advantage of more newness and more
responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and there he quite
touches it, as in the enchanting picture, at the Academy, of St. Ursula
asleep in her little white bed, in her high, clean room, where the angel
visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his study, at S.
Giorgio degli Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, and I
may add, without being fantastic, a ruby of colour. It unites the most
masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling, and he
who has it well in his memory will never hear the name of Carpaccio
without a throb of almost personal affection. This, indeed, is the
feeling that descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of St.
George of the Slaves, where this most personal and sociable of artists
has expressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The place is small
and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the
custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the
shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has written a
pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I cannot but
think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling,
would have suffered at hearing his eulogist declare that one of his
other productions--in the Museo Civico in Palazzo Correr, a delightful
portrait of two Venetian ladies, with pet animals--is the "finest
picture in the world." It has no need of that to be thought admirable;
and what more can a painter desire?



VIII


May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the
days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than
the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, and more
golden than ever as the day descends. It seems to expand and evaporate,
to multiply all its reflections and iridescences. Then the life of its
people and the strangeness of its constitution become a perpetual
comedy, or, at least, a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole
habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido,
though the Lido has been spoiled. When I was first in Venice, in 1869,
it was a very natural place, and there was only a rough lane across the
little island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a
bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, but
where, in the warm evenings, your dinner did not much matter as you sat
letting it cool upon the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea.
To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy, and has been made the victim
of villainous improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on
its rural bosom, and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta
to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walls and gas-lamps, lodging-houses,
shops, and a _teatro diurno_. The bathing-establishment is bigger than
before, and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation, perhaps,
that the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you will not
scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy platform under which
bathers dart and splash, and which looks out to where the fishing-boats,
with sails of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening horizon.
The beach at the Lido is still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily
walk away from the cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset
is classical and indispensable, and those who, at that glowing hour,
have floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon, will not
easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger
excursions--you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia.
Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply interesting
little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there on the edge of
the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its grassy threshold and its
primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed
ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made cheerful, and the
charm of the place, its strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh
departed. It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on
the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the
wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am sorry to
say--can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of
its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a fact that though
some of the ladies are rather bold about it, every one of them shows you
a handsome face. The children assail you for coppers, and, in their
desire to be satisfied, pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a
larger Burano, and you carry away from either place a half-sad,
half-cynical, but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of
bright-coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls
with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with
splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow
shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes that
click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges; of
brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive
throats encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own with a
certain traditional defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice
are almost as handsome as the women; I have never seen so many
good-looking fellows. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their
nets, or lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always
high-pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they
decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and throats as
richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--their sea-faded
tatters which are always a "costume"--their soft Venetian jargon, and
the gallantry with which they wear their hats--an article that nowhere
sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy, you
will find yourself, after a June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on a
balcony that overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad
ledge, a cigarette in your teeth, and a little good company beside you.
The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there from
their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously
in the darkness. There are some evenings in June when there are too many
gondolas, too many lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels.
The serenading (in particular) is overdone; but on such a balcony as I
speak of you needn't suffer from it, for in the apartment behind you--an
accessible refuge--there is more good company, there are more
cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there presently.



II

ITALY REVISITED

1877

I


I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they
took place on the 14th of October); for only after one had learned that
the celebrated attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive
the French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with
the white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not
achieved the success which the energy of the process might have
promised--only then was it possible to draw a long breath and deprive
the republican party of such support as might have been conveyed in
one's sympathetic presence. Seriously speaking, too, the weather had
been enchanting, and there were Italian sensations to be encountered
without leaving the banks of the Seine. Day after day the air was filled
with golden light, and even those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux
quartiers_ assumed the iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn-weather in
Europe is often such a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American
will have it on his conscience to call attention to a rainless and
radiant October.

The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after
starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin, which, as you leave
Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is
a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming,
however, I think, prevails; for the dark half of the journey is, in
fact, the least interesting. The morning light ushers you into the
romantic gorges of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _café au lait_ at
Culoz you may compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your
spectacle. The day before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had
just returned from a visit to a Tuscan country-seat, where he had been
watching the vintage. "Italy," he said, "is more lovely than words can
tell, and France, steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better
than a bear-garden." That part of the bear-garden through which you
travel as you approach the Mont-Cenis seemed to me that day very
beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence of rain, had been
vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands between the
mulberries, in the neighbourhood of Chambéry, looked like long festoons
of coral and amber. The frontier station of Modane, on the farther side
of the Mont-Cenis tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even the
most irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be
disposed to consider it good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling
and scrambling, and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory
process of ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian
custom-house are much scantier than should be; but, for myself, there is
something that deprecates irritation in the shabby green and gray
uniforms of all the Italian officials who stand loafing about and
watching the northern invaders scramble back into marching order.
Wearing an administrative uniform does not necessarily spoil a man's
temper, as in France one is sometimes led to believe; for these
excellent under-paid Italians carry theirs as lightly as possible, and
their answers to your inquiries do not in the least bristle with
rapiers, buttons, and cockades. After leaving Modane you slide straight
downhill into the Italy of your desire; and there is something very
impressive in the way the road edges along those great precipices which
stand shoulder to shoulder, in a long perpendicular file, until they
finally admit you to a distant glimpse of the ancient capital of
Piedmont.

Turin is not a city to make, in vulgar parlance, a fuss about, and I pay
an extravagant tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as
ancient. But if the place is not so peninsular as Florence and Rome, at
least it is more so than New York and Paris; and while the traveller
walks about the great arcades and looks at the fourth-rate shop windows,
he does not scruple to cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively
speaking, Turin is diverting; but there is, after all, no reason in a
large collection of shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly
rectangular manner, for passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only
reason, I am afraid, is the old superstition of Italy--that property in
the very look of the written word, the evocation of a myriad images,
that makes any lover of the arts take Italian satisfactions upon easier
terms than any other. Italy is an idea to conjure with, and we play
tricks upon our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is
offered to our hand at Turin. I walked about all the morning under the
tall porticoes, thinking it sufficient entertainment to take note of the
soft, warm air, of that colouring of things in Italy that is at once
broken and harmonious, and of the comings and goings, the physiognomy
and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I had opened the old book again;
the old charm was in the style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw
nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious; but the appreciative
traveller finds a vividness in nameless details. And I must add that on
the threshold of Italy he tastes of one solid and perfectly definable
pleasure, in finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in
architecture. It must be said that we have still to come to Italy to see
great houses. (I am speaking more particularly of town-architecture.) In
northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious
houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming
bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, and a profusion of
delicate ornament; but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a
nobleness that is all its own. We laugh at Italian "palaces," at their
peeling paint, their nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great
palatial quality--elevation and extent. They make smaller houses seem
beggarly; they round their great arches and interspace their huge
windows with a noble indifference to the cost of materials. These grand
proportions--the colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for
cathedrals, the far-away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and
_bourgeois_ expression to those less exalted dwellings in which the air
of grandeur depends largely upon the help of the upholsterer. At Turin
my first feeling was really one of shame for the architectural manners
of our northern lands. I have heard people who know the Italians well
say that at bottom they despise all the rest of mankind and regard them
as barbarians. I doubt of it, for the Italians strike me as having less
national vanity than any other people in Europe; but if the charge had
its truth there would be some ground for the feeling in the fact that
they live in palaces.

An impression which, on coming back to Italy, I find even stronger than
when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity
of the great artistic period and the vulgarity of the Italian genius of
to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to
renew it, and the phenomenon that I allude to is surely one of the most
singular in human history. That the people who but three hundred years
ago had the best taste in the world should now have the worst; that
having produced the noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now
be given up to the manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that
the race of which Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were
characteristic should have no other title to distinction than third-rate
_genre_ pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent
perplexity to the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of art in
these latter years has ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but
nowhere does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the
immortal embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or
a gallery and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite
piece of sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you
to the beautiful past you are confronted with something that has all the
effect of a very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging (the carpets, the
curtains, the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent
colouring and their vulgar material), the third-rate look of the shops,
the extreme bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and
baseness of every attempt at decoration in the cafés and railway
stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that pretends to be a
work of art--all this modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the
great period.

We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all
that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law which is not
on the whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know
things better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at
the same time, that a traveller who has worked off the primal
fermentation of his relish for this inexhaustibly interesting country
has by no means entirely drained the cup. After thinking of Italy as
historical and artistic, it will do him no great harm to think of her,
for a while, as modern, an idea supposed (as a general thing correctly)
to be fatally at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic,
poetic, æsthetic manner of considering this fascinating peninsula. He
may grant--I don't say it is absolutely necessary--that modern Italy is
ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album;
it is nevertheless true that, at the point things have come to, modern
Italy in a manner imposes herself! I had not been many hours in the
country before I became conscious of this circumstance; and I may add
that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it. And
if we think of it, nothing is more easy to understand than a certain
displeasure on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at
by all the world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied
with its economical and political future, must be heartily tired of
being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray's
novels there is mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy
a picture representing "A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the
door of a Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude
and with these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen
fit to represent young Italy, and I do not wonder that, if the youth has
any spirit, he should at last begin to resent our insufferable æsthetic
patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from the
Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these
democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course
down the vista of the future. I will not pretend to rejoice with him any
more than I really do; I will not pretend, as the sentimental tourists
say about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border
of a Roman scarf, to "like" it. Like it or not, as we may, it is
evidently destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many
important respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising
sections of our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San
Francisco will have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will
dance at the doors of _locande_. However this may be, a vivid impression
of an accomplished schism between the old Italy and the new is, as the
French say, _le plus clair_ of a new visit to this ever-suggestive part
of the world. The old Italy has become more and more of a museum,
preserved and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any
further relation to it--it must be admitted, indeed, that such a
relation is considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the
shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands
before his booth. More than once, as we move about nowadays in the
Italian cities, there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the
coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and
prosperous, but altogether commercial. The Italy, indeed, that we
sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country;
though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and
altar-pieces more. Scattered through this brilliantly economical
community--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of
beautiful buildings, in which an endless series of dusky pictures are
darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. At the doors
of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles, at which there sit a
great many men in uniform, to whom the visitor pays a ten-penny fee.
Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies
buried, as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is
constantly copied; sometimes it is "restored"--as in the case of that
beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto, at Florence, which may be seen
at the gallery of the Uffizi, with its honourable duskiness quite peeled
off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening
lately, in Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among those
encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled with the
vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a wayside
shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a
little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, the
lovely evening, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the
observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an
assassin, or from some other peril, and had set up a little grateful
altar in consequence, in the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled
_podere_; all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an
emotional step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became
conscious of an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air
was charged with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar,
had not hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside
altars. I gently interrogated the atmosphere, and the operation left me
no doubts. The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was
nourished with the national fluid of Pennsylvania. I confess that I
burst out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his homeward
way in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an iconoclast. If he noticed
the petroleum, it was only, I imagine, to sniff it gratefully; but to me
the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future. There is a
horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan
shrines are fed with kerosene.



II


If it is very well to come to Turin first, it is still better to go to
Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the queerest place in the world, and even a
second visit helps you little to straighten it out. In the wonderful
crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese alleys the
traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian sketchability.
Genoa is, I believe, a port of great capacity, and the bequest of the
late Duke of Galliera, who left four millions of dollars for the purpose
of improving and enlarging it, will doubtless do much toward converting
it into one of the great commercial stations of Europe. But as, after
leaving my hotel the afternoon I arrived, I wandered for a long time at
hazard through the tortuous byways of the city, I said to myself, not
without an accent of private triumph, that here was something it would
be almost impossible to modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first
place, extremely entertaining--the Croce di Malta, as it was called,
established in a gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not
over-clean harbour. It was the biggest house I had ever entered, and the
basement alone would have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I
met an American gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a
perfect right to be) was annoyed by its troublesome dimensions--one was
a quarter of an hour ascending out of the basement--and desired to know
whether it was a "fair sample" of the Genoese inns. It appeared to be an
excellent specimen of Genoese architecture generally; so far as I
observed, there were few houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic
tavern. I lunched in a dusky ballroom, whose ceiling was vaulted,
frescoed and gilded with the fatal facility of a couple of centuries
ago, and which looked out upon another ancient house-front, equally huge
and equally battered, from which it was separated only by a little wedge
of dusky space (one of the principal streets, I believe, of Genoa), out
of the bottom of which the Genoese populace sent up to the windows--I
had to crane out very far to see it--a perpetual clattering, shuffling,
chaffering sound. Issuing forth, presently, into this crevice of a
street, I found an abundance of that soft local colour for the love of
which one revisits Italy. It offered itself, indeed, in a variety of
tints, some of which were not remarkable for their freshness or purity.
But their combined effect was highly pictorial, and the picture was a
very rich and various representation of southern low-life. Genoa is the
crookedest and most incoherent of cities; tossed about on the sides and
crests of a dozen hills, it is seamed with gullies and ravines that
bristle with those innumerable palaces for which we have heard from our
earliest years that the place is celebrated. These great edifices, with
their mottled and faded complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices
to a tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain indescribably
forlorn and desolate fashion, over-topping each other, they seem to
reflect the twinkle and glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down about
the basements, in the little dim, close alleys, the people are for ever
moving to and fro, or standing in their cavernous doorways and their
dusky, crowded shops, calling, chattering, laughing, scrambling, living
their lives in the conversational Italian fashion. For a long time I had
not received such an impression of the human agglomeration. I had not
for a long time seen people elbowing each other so closely, or swarming
so thickly out of populous hives. A traveller is very often disposed to
ask himself whether it has been worth while to leave his home--whatever
his home may have been--only to see new forms of human suffering, only
to be reminded that toil and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid
effort, are the portion of the great majority of his fellow-men. To
travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle; and
there is something heartless in stepping forth into the streets of a
foreign town to feast upon novelty when the novelty consists simply of
the slightly different costume in which hunger and labour present
themselves. These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled about in
those crepuscular, stale-smelling alleys of Genoa; but after a time they
ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I think, is because (at
least to foreign eyes) the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less
than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should thank
you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence is a
proof, certainly, of an extreme and constant destitution; but (keeping
in mind the sweetness) it is also a proof of an enviable ability not to
be depressed by circumstances. I know that this may possibly be great
nonsense; that half the time that we are admiring the brightness of the
Italian smile the romantic natives may be, in reality, in a sullen
frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation in any foreign land is
extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the
inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence
of the fancy-picture. The other day I visited a very picturesque old
city upon a mountain-top, where, in the course of my wanderings, I
arrived at an old disused gate in the ancient town-wall. The gate had
not been absolutely forfeited; but the recent completion of a modern
road down the mountain led most vehicles away to another egress. The
grass-grown pavement, which wound into the plain by a hundred graceful
twists and plunges, was now given up to ragged contadini and their
donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were not alarmed at the disrepair into
which it had fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall old gateway
admiring the scene, looking to right and left at the wonderful walls of
the little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy precipice; at the
circling mountains over against them; at the road dipping downward among
the chestnuts and olives. There was no one within sight but a young man,
who was slowly trudging upward, with his coat slung over his shoulder
and his hat upon his ear, like a cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic
performer, too, he was singing as he came; the spectacle, generally, was
operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself
that in Italy accident was always picturesque, and that such a figure
had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. It suggested
in a high degree that knowledge of life for which I just now commended
the Italians. I was turning back, under the old gateway, into the town,
when the young man overtook me, and, suspending his song, asked me if I
could favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant of a cigar.
This request led, as I walked back to the inn, to my having some
conversation with him. He was a native of the ancient city, and answered
freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs and the state of
public opinion there. But the point of my anecdote is that he presently
proved to be a brooding young radical and communist, filled with hatred
of the present Italian government, raging with discontent and crude
political passion, professing a ridiculous hope that Italy would soon
have, as France had had, her "'89," and declaring that he, for his part,
would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads of the king and the
royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who
took a hard, grim view of everything, and was operatic only quite in
spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked at him
simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little
figure in the middle distance. "Damn the prospect, damn the middle
distance!" would have been all his philosophy. Yet, but for the accident
of my having a little talk with him, I should have made him do service,
in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism!

I am bound to say, however, that I believe that a great deal of the
sensuous optimism that I noticed in the Genoese alleys and beneath the
low, crowded arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was
magnificently sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types,
mahogany-coloured, bare-chested mariners, with earrings and crimson
girdles, that make a southern seaport entertaining. But it is not fair
to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, for
the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the world.
Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest and
most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple of very
proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a coach-and-four to
approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways are open, revealing
great marble staircases, with couchant lions for balustrades, and
ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened yellow. One of
the palaces is coloured a goodly red, and contains, in particular, the
grand people I just now spoke of. They live, indeed, in the third story;
but here they have suites of wonderful painted and gilded chambers, in
which there are many foreshortened frescoes in the vaulted ceilings, and
the walls are embossed with the most florid mouldings. These
distinguished tenants bear the name of Vandyke, though they are members
of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children (the Duchess
of Galliera) has lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the
gallery of the Red Palace to the city of Genoa.



III


On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of
accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I, in fact, achieved, in
the most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the
headquarters of the Italian fleet, and there were several big
iron-plated frigates riding at anchor in front of the town. The streets
were filled with lads in blue flannel, who were receiving instruction at
a school-ship in the harbour, and in the evening--there was a brilliant
moon--the little breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean
offered a promenade to the naval functionaries. But this fact is, from
the tourist's point of view, of little account, for since it has become
prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with long, dull
stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial land. It
wears that look of monstrous, of more than Occidental, newness which
distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian state. Nor did I
find any great compensation in an immense new inn, which has lately been
deposited by the edge of the sea, in anticipation of a _passeggiata_
which is to come that way some five years hence, the region being in the
meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn was filled with grave
English people, who looked respectable and bored, and there was of
course a Church of England service in the gaudily-frescoed parlour.
Neither was it the drive to Porto Venere that chiefly pleased me--a
drive among vines and olives--over the hills and beside the sea, to a
queer little crumbling village on a headland, as sweetly desolate and
superannuated as the name it bears. There is a ruined church near the
village, which occupies the site (according to tradition) of an ancient
temple of Venus; and if Venus ever revisits her desecrated shrines she
must sometimes pause a moment in that sunny stillness, and listen to the
murmur of the tideless sea at the base of the narrow promontory. If
Venus sometimes comes there, Apollo surely does as much; for close to
the temple is a gateway, surmounted by an inscription in Italian and
English, which admits you to a curious (and it must be confessed rather
cockneyfied) cave among the rocks. It was here, says the inscription,
that the great Byron, swimmer and poet, "defied the waves of the
Ligurian sea." The fact is interesting, though not supremely so; for
Byron was always defying something, and if a slab had been put up
whenever this performance came off, these commemorative tablets would
be, in many parts of Europe, as thick as milestones. No; the great merit
of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there of a lovely October
afternoon, and had myself rowed across the gulf--it took about an hour
and a half--to the little bay of Lerici, which opens out of it. This bay
of Lerici is charming; the bosky gray-green hills close it in, and on
either side of the entrance, perched upon a bold headland, a wonderful
old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The place is classic for
all English travellers, for in the middle of the curving shore is the
now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent the last months of his
short life. He was living at Lerici when he started on that short
southern cruise from which he never returned. The house he occupied is
strangely shabby, and as sad as you may choose to find it. It stands
directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered walls, and a loggia
of several arches opening upon a little terrace with a rugged parapet,
which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with the salt spray. The
place is very lonely--all overwearied with sun and breeze and
brine--very close to nature, as it was Shelley's passion to be. I can
fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace, of a warm evening, far
from England, in the early years of the century. In that place, and with
his genius, he would, as a matter of course, have heard in the voice of
nature a sweetness which only the lyric movement could translate. It is
a place where an English-speaking traveller may very honestly be
sentimental and feel moved, himself, to lyric utterance. But I must
content myself with saying in halting prose that I remember few episodes
of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have it here, than that
perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on the little battered
terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly picturesque old castle
that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, on
the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the sunset and the
darkening mountains, and, far below, upon the quiet sea, beyond which
the pale-faced villa stared up at the brightening moon.



IV


I had never known Florence more charming than I found her for a week in
that brilliant October. She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river
like the little treasure-city that she has always seemed, without
commerce, without other industry than the manufacture of mosaic
paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without actuality, or energy, or
earnestness, or any of those rugged virtues which in most cases are
deemed indispensable for civic robustness; with nothing but the little
unaugmented stock of her mediæval memories, her tender-coloured
mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. There were
very few strangers; one's detested fellow sight-seer was infrequent; the
native population itself seemed scanty; the sound of wheels in the
streets was but occasional; by eight o'clock at night, apparently, every
one had gone to bed, and the wandering tourist, still wandering, had the
place to himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and
the shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the
empty bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness
broken only by a homeward step, accompanied by a snatch of song from a
warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river, and was
flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured paper
on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed
beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of
extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over
the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their
shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river,
while the fronts stood for ever in the deep, damp shadow of a narrow
mediæval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual
delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which
Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the
river, from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave brilliancy--a
harmony of high tints--which I know not how to describe. There are
yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, and intervals of brilliant
brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture is not spotty nor gaudy,
thanks to the colours being distributed in large and comfortable masses,
and to its being washed over, as it were, by some happy softness of
sunshine. The river-front of Florence is, in short, a delightful
composition. Part of its charm comes, of course, from the generous
aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of
acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified
dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving up
the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and
staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but a
massive pedestal for the real habitation, and people were not properly
housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above the
pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals,
horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the
height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung
forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing the
narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls--these
definite elements are put together with admirable art.

Take one of these noble structures out of its oblique situation in the
town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down upon a
terrace, on one of the hills that encircle Florence, with a row of
high-waisted cypresses beside it, a grassy courtyard, and a view of the
Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it
perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and
brilliantly warm, when I arrived in Florence; and after I had looked
from my windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have
spoken of, I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one
of the gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate, in which the space from
the top of the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a
cornice, it is all a plain, massive piece of wall) is as great (or seems
to be) as that from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a
steep and winding way--much of it a little dull, if one likes, being
bounded by mottled, mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where
I found various things that touched me with almost too fine a point.
Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I
never quite learned not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part
of them was somehow to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil,
contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty as a part of its daily
texture!--the sunny terrace, with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the
bright gray olives against the bright blue sky; the long, serene,
horizontal lines of other villas, flanked by their upward cypresses,
disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little city in the
world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's feet, and beyond it the most
appealing of views, the most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within the
villa was a great love of art and a painting-room full of successful
work, so that if human life there seemed very tranquil, the tranquillity
meant simply contentment and devoted occupation. A beautiful occupation
in that beautiful position, what could possibly be better? That is what
I spoke just now of envying--a way of life that is not afraid of a
little isolation and tolerably quiet days. When such a life presents
itself in a dull or an ugly place, we esteem it, we admire it, but we do
not feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. When, however, the people
who lead it move as figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their
walks and contemplations are like a turning of the leaves of history, we
seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning
here by virtue, contentment and concentration, the love of privacy and
study. One need not be exacting if one lives among local conditions that
are of themselves constantly suggestive. It is true, indeed, that I
might, after a certain time, grow weary of a regular afternoon stroll
among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low parapets, in intervals of
flower-topped wall, and looking across at Fiesole, or down the rich-hued
valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open gates of villas and wondering
at the height of cypresses and the depth of loggias; of walking home in
the fading light and noting on a dozen westward-looking surfaces the
glow of the opposite sunset. But for a week or so all this was
delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if one is a stranger half
the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that one has another;
they all look as if they had stories. Most of them are offered to rent
(many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower
and a garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five
hundred dollars a year. In imagination, you hire three or four; you take
possession, and settle, and live there. About the finest there is
something very grave and stately; about two or three of the best there
is something even solemn and tragic. From what does this latter
impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the early dusk,
looking at the long, pale-brown façade, the enormous windows, the iron
cages fastened upon the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression of
these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay,
from their look of having outlived their original use. Their
extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire upon their present
fate. They were not built with such a thickness of wall and depth of
embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply
to afford an economical winter residence to English and American
families. I know not whether it was the appearance of these stony old
villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that
threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is
that, having always found this plaintive note in the view of Florence,
it seemed to me now particularly distinct. "Lovely, lovely, but it makes
me blue," the fanciful stranger could not but murmur to himself as, in
the late afternoon, he looked at the landscape from over one of the low
parapets, and then, with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors
to candles and dinner.



V


Below, in the city, in wandering about in the streets and churches and
museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same feeling;
but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from a sense
of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of the
Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the
actual life and manners, the native ideal I have already spoken of the
way in which the great aggregation of beautiful works of art in the
Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays (so far as present Italy is
concerned) as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty
people. It is this metaphysical desertedness and loneliness of the great
works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon
the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the
pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one thing and
resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a shop-window, the series
of _Mornings in Florence_, published a few years since by Mr. Ruskin, I
made haste to enter and purchase these amusing little books, some
passages of which I remembered formerly to have read. I could not turn
over many pages without observing that the "separateness" of the new and
old which I just mentioned had produced in their author the liveliest
irritation. With the more acute phases of this sentiment it was
difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it seems to me, that it
savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as a right of one's own,
that they shall be artistic. "Be artistic yourselves!" is the very
natural reply that young Italy has at hand for English critics and
censors. When a people produces beautiful statues and pictures it gives
us something more than is set down in the bond, and we must thank it for
its generosity; and when it stops producing them or caring for them we
may cease thanking, but we hardly have a right to begin and abuse it.
The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, "is now too ghastly and
heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old;" and
these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the little square
in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, with the grand
Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of a number of
hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lamentable, and it
would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among people who have
been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime
campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even from the
danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and
Giotto's Tower should have nothing in common with such conveniences. But
there is more than one way of taking such things, and a quiet traveller,
who has been walking about for a week with his mind full of the
sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine places, may feel at
last, in looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, discord for
discord, there is not much to choose between the importunity of the
author's personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails and
bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan of
the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own part,
I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian spirit
is not capable of, and not many, indeed, that we are not destined to
see. Pictures and buildings will not be completely destroyed, because in
that case foreigners with full pockets would cease to visit the country,
and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with
the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite
rusty, and creak with disuse. But it is safe to say that the new Italy,
growing into an old Italy again, will continue to take her elbow-room
wherever she finds it.

I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin's little books. I
put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There
I sat down, and after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful
church, I drew them forth one by one, and read the greater part of them.
Occupying one's self with light literature in a great religious edifice
is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings
which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most
of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was to
go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the
church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr.
Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _littérateur_, because in these
little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. I
remembered, of course, where I was; and, in spite of my latent hilarity,
I felt that I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying
the good old city of Florence; but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that
this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an
imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I
had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio, in the
choir of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books
that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce, and
I had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most
positive assurance I knew nothing about it. After a while, if it was
only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the
Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr.
Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, and not the stupid Brunelleschi
and the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed, I lost patience altogether, and
asked myself by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run
riot through a quiet traveller's relish for the noblest of
pleasures--his wholesome enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The
little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I
remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I
checked myself in repenting of having done so. Then, at last, my friend
arrived, and we passed together out of the church, and through the first
cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure, where we stood a while to
look at the tomb of the Marchesa Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great
Giotto has painted four superb little pictures. It was easy to see the
pictures were superb; but I drew forth one of my little books again, for
I had observed that Mr. Ruskin spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my
tolerance; for what could be better in this case, I asked myself, than
Mr. Ruskin's remarks? They are, in fact, excellent and charming, and
full of appreciation of the deep and simple beauty of the great
painter's work. I read them aloud to my companion; but my companion was
rather, as the phrase is, "put off" by them. One of the frescoes (it is
a picture of the birth of the Virgin) contains a figure coming through a
door. "Of ornament," I quote, "there is only the entirely simple outline
of the vase which the servant carries; of colour two or three masses of
sober red and pure white, with brown and gray. That is all," Mr. Ruskin
continues. "And if you are pleased with this you can see Florence. But
if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as
long as you like; you can never see it." _You can never see it_. This
seemed to my friend insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book
again, so that we might look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality
it deserves. We agreed afterwards, when in a more convenient place I
read aloud a good many more passages from Mr. Ruskin's tracts, that
there are a great many ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing
most beautiful and interesting things, and that it is very dry and
pedantic to say that the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes
with a certain particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and
whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more
pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I agreed
also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on
account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental
criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being
extremely amusing. Nothing, in fact, is more comical than the familiar
asperity of the author's style and the pedagogic fashion in which he
pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward
this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners,
and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the
felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin's writings, that
are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as I
have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will
never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so
long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible.
If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine works
which do still, in a way, force themselves into notice through the
vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that
Mr. Ruskin's little books are pitched in the strangest falsetto key.
"One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing," said my friend,
"without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say
nothing worse about it than that." And that is very true. Art is the one
corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our
presence there the only thing that is demanded of us is that we shall
have a passion for representation. In other places our passions are
conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are
consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and
well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and
regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her brilliant
standard floats the need for apologies and exonerations is over; there
it is enough simply that we please or that we are pleased. There the
tree is judged only by its fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to
pluck them.

One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of
this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art,
after all, is made for us, and not we for art. This idea of the value of
a work of art being the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by
its absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin's world of art being a place where we
may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any
such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of
assize-court, in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human
responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed
by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities, indeed, are
tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for ever yawning
at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are advertised,
in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and the poor
wanderer soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the lost
paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in dealing
with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than to be
perpetually talking about "error." A truce to all rigidities is the law
of the place; the only thing that is absolute there is sensible charm.
The grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels that this
is not her province. Differences here are not iniquity and
righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament and of point of
view. We are not under theological government.



VI


It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one
corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered
masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no
tricks, and that the beautiful things of an earlier year were as
beautiful as ever. To enumerate these beautiful things would take a
great deal of space; for I never had been more struck with the mere
quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and
Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the
Florentine treasures is almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries
of the Uffizi had never seemed to me more delectable; sometimes there
were not more than two or three figures standing there, Baedeker in
hand, to break the charming perspective. One side of this
upstairs-portico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of glass;
a continuity of old-fashioned windows, draped with white curtains of
rather primitive fashion, which hang there till they acquire a
perceptible "tone." The light, passing through them, is softly filtered
and diffused; it rests mildly upon the old marbles--chiefly antique
Roman busts--which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It is
projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite wall, and
that are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great
collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old ornamental
arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it makes a great soft
shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you
see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists almost reflected.
I don't know why I should find all this very pleasant, but, in fact, I
have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the length of this
third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) third-rate
pictures and the faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we see a
charm in things in regard to which in other countries we always take
vulgarity for granted? If in the city of New York a great museum of the
arts were to be provided, by way of decoration, with a species of
verandah inclosed on one side by a series of small-paned windows, draped
in dirty linen, and furnished on the other with an array of pictorial
feebleness, the place being surmounted by a thinly-painted wooden roof,
strongly suggestive of summer heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage,
those amateurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel would be at
small pains to conceal their contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to
the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into
twenty chambers where I found as great a number of ancient favourites. I
do not know that I had a warmer greeting for any old friend than for
Andrea del Sarto, that most touching of painters who is not one of the
first. But it was on the other side of the Arno that I found him in
force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace, to which you
take your way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses
of Florence, and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the
Ponte Vecchio. In the rich, insufficient light of these beautiful rooms,
where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your
elbows on tables of malachite, Andrea del Sarto becomes peculiarly
effective. Before long you feel a real affection for him. But the great
pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those
specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big, plain
walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and
Lorenzo di Credi are the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for
an hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I
have mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of
brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good ones--it seemed
to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one could not do
better than choose here. You may sit very quietly and comfortably at the
Academy, in this big first room--at the upper end, especially, on the
left--because more than many other places it savours of old Florence.
More for instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello
makes great pretensions. Beautiful and picturesque as the Bargello is,
it smells too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still
lurks in its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more
distinctly of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has (as unavoidably as
you please) lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the
convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan
painters are exquisite, I can think of no praise generous enough for the
sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo
Civitale and Mino da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them,
seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of
purity of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of
early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from
suppressed convents; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal, he is
uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by which it has
been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number of
disagreeable things she has had to do.

The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the
better and for the worse; for the better, in that it has been shortened
by a couple of hours; for the worse, inasmuch as, when about half the
distance has been traversed, the train deflects to the west, and leaves
the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of
old, it was possible to visit these places, in a manner, from the window
of the train; even if you did not stop, as you probably could not, every
time you passed, the picturesque fashion in which, like a loosened belt
on an aged and shrunken person, their old red walls held them easily
together was something well worth noting. Now, however, by way of
compensation, the express-train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in
consequence... In consequence what? What is the consequence of an
express train stopping at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I
suddenly paused, with a sense of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an
express train would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from
the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering
front of its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer
of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to
stop there, this is a fact over which, as he records it, a sentimental
chronicler may well make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does
stop at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you
out. The same phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having
visited the city, you get in again. I availed myself of both of these
occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to Orvieto in a
post-chaise. And really, the railway-station being in the plain, and the
town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget all
about the triumphs of steam, while you wind upwards to the city-gate.
The position of Orvieto is superb; it is worthy of the "middle distance"
of a last-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the beautiful
cathedral is the proper attraction of the place, which, indeed, save for
this fine monument, and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a
meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive
little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there, and I looked at the
charming church. I looked at it a great deal--a great deal considering
that on the whole I found it inferior to its fame. Intensely brilliant,
however, is the densely carved front; densely covered with the
freshest-looking mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured
portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the large, exceedingly
bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled in the splendid weather.
Very beautiful and interesting are the theological frescoes of Luca
Signorelli, though I have seen pictures that struck me as more
attaching. Very enchanting, finally, are the clear-faced saints and
seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon
the ceiling of the great chapel, along with a noble sitting figure--more
expressive of movement than most of the creations of this pictorial
peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. But the interest of the cathedral of
Orvieto is mainly not the visible result, but the historical process
that lies behind it; those three hundred years of devoted popular labour
of which an American scholar has written an admirable account.[1]


[Footnote 1: Charles Eliot Norton: _Study and Travel in Italy._]



III

OCCASIONAL PARIS

1877


It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with
another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of
neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the
world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the
case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the
cosmopolite--that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and
feeling at home in none. To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal;
the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is
an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about,
as the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the
sanctity of the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made you so
happy in the midst of them. You have seen that there are a great many
_patriæ_ in the world, and that each of these is filled with excellent
people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the only thing that is not
rather barbarous. There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever
it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another;
and then I suppose it may be said of you that you have become a
cosmopolite. You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking for
points of difference and of resemblance, for present and absent
advantages, for the virtues that go with certain defects, and the
defects that go with certain virtues. If this is poor work compared with
the active practice, in the sphere to which a discriminating Providence
has assigned you, of the duties of a tax-payer, an elector, a juryman or
a diner-out, there is nevertheless something to be said for it. It is
good to think well of mankind, and this, on the whole, a cosmopolite
does. If you limit your generalisations to the sphere I mentioned just
now, there is a danger that your occasional fits of pessimism may be too
sweeping. When you are out of humour the whole country suffers, because
at such moments one is never discriminating, and it costs you very
little bad logic to lump your fellow-citizens together. But if you are
living about, as I say, certain differences impose themselves. The worst
you can say of the human race is, for instance, that the Germans are a
detestable people. They do not represent the human race for you, as in
your native town your fellow-citizens do, and your unflattering judgment
has a flattering reverse. If the Germans are detestable, you are
mentally saying, there are those admirable French, or those charming
Americans, or those interesting English. (Of course it is simply by
accident that I couple the German name here with the unfavourable
adjective. The epithets may be transposed at will.) Nothing can well be
more different from anything else than the English from the French, so
that, if you are acquainted with both nations, it may be said that on
any special point your agreeable impression of the one implies a
censorious attitude toward the other, and _vice versa_. This has rather
a shocking sound; it makes the cosmopolite appear invidious and
narrow-minded. But I hasten to add that there seems no real reason why
even the most delicate conscience should take alarm. The consequence of
the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate you into the merits of all
peoples; to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they
may be very different, and to make downright preference really very
hard. I have, for instance, every disposition to think better of the
English race than of any other except my own. There are things which
make it natural I should; there are inducements, provocations,
temptations, almost bribes. There have been moments when I have almost
burned my ships behind me, and declared that, as it simplified matters
greatly to pin one's faith to a chosen people, I would henceforth cease
to trouble my head about the lights and shades of the foreign character.
I am convinced that if I had taken this reckless engagement, I should
greatly have regretted it. You may find a room very comfortable to sit
in with the window open, and not like it at all when the window has been
shut. If one were, to give up the privilege of comparing the English
with other people, one would very soon, in a moment of reaction, make
once for all (and most unjustly) such a comparison as would leave the
English nowhere. Compare then, I say, as often as the occasion presents
itself. The result as regards any particular people, and as regards the
human race at large, may be pronounced agreeable, and the process is
both instructive and entertaining.

So the author of these observations finds it on returning to Paris after
living for upwards of a year in London. He finds himself comparing, and
the results of comparison are several disjointed reflections, of which
it may be profitable to make a note. Certainly Paris is a very old
story, and London is a still older one; and there is no great reason why
a journey across the channel and back should quicken one's perspicacity
to an unprecedented degree. I therefore will not pretend to have been
looking at Paris with new eyes, or to have gathered on the banks of the
Seine a harvest of extraordinary impressions. I will only pretend that a
good many old impressions have recovered their freshness, and that there
is a sort of renovated entertainment in looking at the most brilliant
city in the world with eyes attuned to a different pitch. Never, in
fact, have those qualities of brightness and gaiety that are half the
stock-in-trade of the city by the Seine seemed to me more uncontestable.
The autumn is but half over, and Paris is, in common parlance, empty.
The private houses are closed, the lions have returned to the jungle,
the Champs Elysées are not at all "mondains." But I have never seen
Paris more Parisian, in the pleasantest sense of the word; better
humoured, more open-windowed, more naturally entertaining. A radiant
September helps the case; but doubtless the matter is, as I hinted
above, in a large degree "subjective." For when one comes to the point
there is nothing very particular just now for Paris to rub her hands
about. The Exhibition of 1878 is looming up as large as a mighty mass of
buildings on the Trocadéro can make it. These buildings are very
magnificent and fantastical; they hang over the Seine, in their sudden
immensity and glittering newness, like a palace in a fairy-tale. But the
trouble is that most people appear to regard the Exhibition as in fact a
fairy-tale. They speak of the wonderful structures on the Champ de Mars
and the Trocadéro as a predestined monument to the folly of a group of
gentlemen destitute of a sense of the opportune. The moment certainly
does not seem very well chosen for inviting the world to come to Paris
to amuse itself. The world is too much occupied with graver cares--with
reciprocal cannonading and chopping, with cutting of throats and burning
of homes, with murder of infants and mutilation of mothers, with warding
off famine and civil war, with lamenting the failure of its resources,
the dulness of trade, the emptiness of its pockets. Rome is burning
altogether too fast for even its most irresponsible spirits to find any
great satisfaction in fiddling. But even if there is (as there very well
may be) a certain scepticism at headquarters as to the accomplishment of
this graceful design, there is no apparent hesitation, and everything is
going forward as rapidly as if mankind were breathless with expectation.
That familiar figure, the Parisian _ouvrier_, with his white, chalky
blouse, his attenuated person, his clever face, is more familiar than
ever, and I suppose, finding plenty of work to his hand, is for the time
in a comparatively rational state of mind. He swarms in thousands, not
only in the region of the Exhibition, but along the great
thoroughfare--the Avenue de l'Opéra--which has just been opened in the
interior of Paris.

This is an extremely Parisian creation, and as it is really a great
convenience--it will save a great many steps and twists and turns--I
suppose it should be spoken of with gratitude and admiration. But I
confess that to my sense it belongs primarily to that order of benefits
which during the twenty years of the Empire gradually deprived the
streets of Paris of nine-tenths of their ancient individuality. The
deadly monotony of the Paris that M. Haussmann called into being--its
huge, blank, pompous, featureless sameness--sometimes comes over the
wandering stranger with a force that leads him to devote the author of
these miles of architectural commonplace to execration. The new street
is quite on the imperial system; it must make the late Napoleon III.
smile with beatific satisfaction as he looks down upon it from the
Bonapartist corner of Paradise. It stretches straight away from the
pompous façade of the Opera to the doors of the Théâtre Français,
and it must be admitted that there is something fine in the vista that
is closed at one end by the great sculptured and gilded mass of the
former building. But it smells of the modern asphalt; it is lined with
great white houses that are adorned with machine-made arabesques, and
each of which is so exact a copy of all the rest that even the little
white porcelain number on a blue ground, which looks exactly like all
the other numbers, hardly constitutes an identity. Presently there will
be a long succession of milliners' and chocolate-makers' shops in the
basement of this homogeneous row, and the pretty bonnets and
bonbonnières in the shining windows will have their ribbons knotted
with a _chic_ that you must come to Paris to see. Then there will be
little glazed sentry-boxes at regular intervals along the curbstone, in
which churlish old women will sit selling half a dozen copies of each of
the newspapers; and over the hardened bitumen the young Parisian of our
day will constantly circulate, looking rather pallid and wearing very
large shirt-cuffs. And the new avenue will be a great success, for it
will place in symmetrical communication two of the most important
establishments in France--the temple of French music and the temple of
French comedy.

I said just now that no two things could well be more unlike than
England and France; and though the remark is not original, I uttered it
with the spontaneity that it must have on the lips of a traveller who,
having left either country, has just disembarked in the other. It is of
course by this time a very trite observation, but it will continue to be
made so long as Boulogne remains the same lively antithesis of
Folkestone. An American, conscious of the family-likeness diffused over
his own huge continent, never quite unlearns his surprise at finding
that so little of either of these two almost contiguous towns has rubbed
off upon the other. He is surprised at certain English people feeling so
far away from France, and at all French people feeling so far away from
England. I travelled from Boulogne the other day in the same
railway-carriage with a couple of amiable and ingenuous young Britons,
who had come over to spend ten days in Paris. It was their first landing
in France; they had never yet quitted their native island; and in the
course of a little conversation that I had with them I was struck with
the scantiness of their information in regard to French manners and
customs. They were very intelligent lads; they were apparently fresh
from a university; but in respect to the interesting country they were
about to enter, their minds were almost a blank. If the conductor,
appearing at the carriage door to ask for our tickets, had had the leg
of a frog sticking out of his pocket, I think their only very definite
preconception would have been confirmed. I parted with them at the Paris
station, and I have no doubt that they very soon began to make precious
discoveries; and I have alluded to them not in the least to throw
ridicule upon their "insularity"--which indeed, being accompanied with
great modesty, I thought a very pretty spectacle--but because having
become, since my last visit to France, a little insular myself, I was
more conscious of the emotions that attend on an arrival.

The brightness always seems to begin while you are still out in the
channel, when you fairly begin to see the French coast. You pass into a
region of intenser light--a zone of clearness and colour. These
properties brighten and deepen as you approach the land, and when you
fairly stand upon that good Boulognese quay, among the blue and red
douaniers and soldiers, the small ugly men in cerulean blouses, the
charming fishwives, with their folded kerchiefs and their crisp
cap-frills, their short striped petticoats, their tightly-drawn
stockings, and their little clicking sabots--when you look about you at
the smokeless air, at the pink and yellow houses, at the white-fronted
café, close at hand, with its bright blue letters, its mirrors and
marble-topped tables, its white-aproned, alert, undignified waiter,
grasping a huge coffee-pot by a long handle--when you perceive all these
things you feel the additional savour that foreignness gives to the
picturesque; or feel rather, I should say, that simple foreignness may
itself make the picturesque; for certainly the elements in the picture I
have just sketched are not especially exquisite. No matter; you are
amused, and your amusement continues--being sensibly stimulated by a
visit to the buffet at the railway station, which is better than the
refreshment-room at Folkestone. It is a pleasure to have people offering
you soup again, of their own movement; it is a pleasure to find a little
pint of Bordeaux standing naturally before your plate; it is a pleasure
to have a napkin; it is a pleasure, above all, to take up one of the
good long sticks of French bread--as bread is called the staff of life,
the French bake it literally in the shape of staves--and break off a
loose, crisp, crusty morsel.

There are impressions, certainly, that imperil your good-humour. No
honest Anglo-Saxon can like a French railway-station; and I was on the
point of adding that no honest Anglo-Saxon can like a French
railway-official. But I will not go so far as that; for after all I
cannot remember any great harm that such a functionary has ever done
me--except in locking me up as a malefactor. It is necessary to say,
however, that the honest Anglo-Saxon, in a French railway-station, is in
a state of chronic irritation--an irritation arising from his sense of
the injurious effect upon the genial French nature of the possession of
an administrative uniform. I believe that the consciousness of brass
buttons on his coat and stripes on his trousers has spoiled many a
modest and amiable Frenchman, and the sight of these aggressive insignia
always stirs within me a moral protest. I repeat that my aversion to
them is partly theoretic, for I have found, as a general thing, that an
inquiry civilly made extracts a civil answer from even the most
official-looking personage. But I have also found that such a
personage's measure of the civility due to him is inordinately large; if
he places himself in any degree at your service, it is apparently from
the sense that true greatness can afford to unbend. You are constantly
reminded that you must not presume. In England these intimations never
proceed from one's "inferiors." In France the "administration" is the
first thing that touches you; in a little while you get used to it, but
you feel somehow that, in the process, you have lost the flower of your
self-respect. Of course you are under some obligation to it. It has
taken you off the steamer at Folkestone; made you tell your name to a
gentleman with a sword, stationed at the farther end of the plank--not a
drawn sword, it is true, but still, at the best, a very nasty weapon;
marshalled you into the railway-station; assigned you to a carriage--I
was going to say to a seat; transported you to Paris, marshalled you
again out of the train, and under a sort of military surveillance, into
an enclosure containing a number of human sheep-pens, in one of which it
has imprisoned you for some half-hour. I am always on the point, in
these places, of asking one of my gaolers if I may not be allowed to
walk about on parole. The administration at any rate has finally taken
you out of your pen, and, through the medium of a functionary who
"inscribes" you in a little book, transferred you to a cab selected by a
logic of its own. In doing all this it has certainly done a great deal
for you; but somehow its good offices have made you feel sombre and
resentful. The other day, on arriving from London, while I was waiting
for my luggage, I saw several of the porters who convey travellers'
impedimenta to the cab come up and deliver over the coin they had just
received for this service to a functionary posted _ad hoc_ in a corner,
and armed with a little book in which he noted down these remittances.
The _pour-boires_ are apparently thrown into a common fund and divided
among the guild of porters. The system is doubtless an excellent one,
excellently carried out; but the sight of the poor round-shouldered man
of burdens dropping his coin into the hand of the official arithmetician
was to my fancy but another reminder that the individual, as an
individual, loses by all that the administration assumes.

After living a while in England you observe the individual in Paris with
quickened attention; and I think it must be said that at first he makes
an indifferent figure. You are struck with the race being physically and
personally a poorer one than that great family of largely-modelled,
fresh-coloured people you have left upon the other side of the channel.
I remember that in going to England a year ago and disembarking of a
dismal, sleety Sunday evening at Folkestone, the first thing that struck
me was the good looks of the railway porters--their broad shoulders,
their big brown beards, their well-cut features. In like manner, landing
lately at Boulogne of a brilliant Sunday morning, it was impossible not
to think the little men in numbered caps who were gesticulating and
chattering in one's path, rather ugly fellows. In arriving from other
countries one is struck with a certain want of dignity in the French
face. I do not know, however, whether this is anything worse than the
fact that the French face is expressive; for it may be said that, in a
certain sense, to express anything is to compromise with one's dignity,
which likes to be understood without taking trouble. As regards the
lower classes, at any rate, the impression I speak of always passes
away; you perceive that the good looks of the French working-people are
to be found in their look of intelligence. These people, in Paris,
strike me afresh as the cleverest, the most perceptive, and,
intellectually speaking, the most human of their kind. The Paris
_ouvrier_, with his democratic blouse, his expressive, demonstrative,
agreeable eye, his meagre limbs, his irregular, pointed features, his
sallow complexion, his face at once fatigued and animated, his light,
nervous organisation, is a figure that I always encounter again with
pleasure. In some cases he looks depraved and perverted, but at his
worst he looks refined; he is full of vivacity of perception, of
something that one can appeal to.

It takes some courage to say this, perhaps, after reading _L'Assommoir_;
but in M. Emile Zola's extraordinary novel one must make the part, as
the French say, of the horrible uncleanness of the author's imagination.
_L'Assommoir_, I have been told, has had great success in the lower
walks of Parisian life; and if this fact is not creditable to the
delicacy of M. Zola's humble readers, it proves a good deal in favour of
their intelligence. With all its grossness the book in question is
essentially a literary performance; you must be tolerably clever to
appreciate it. It is highly appreciated, I believe, by the young ladies
who live in the region of the Latin Quarter--those young ladies who
thirty years ago were called grisettes, and now are called I don't know
what. They know long passages by heart; they repeat them with infinite
gusto. "Ce louchon d'Augustine"--the horrible little girl with a squint,
who is always playing nasty tricks and dodging slaps and projectiles in
Gervaise's shop, is their particular favourite; and it must be admitted
that "ce louchon d'Augustine" is, as regards reality, a wonderful
creation.

If Parisians, both small and great, have more of the intellectual stamp
than the people one sees in London, it is striking, on the other hand,
that the people of the better sort in Paris look very much less
"respectable." I did not know till I came back to Paris how used I had
grown to the English _cachet_; but I immediately found myself missing
it. You miss it in the men much more than in the women; for the
well-to-do Frenchwoman of the lower orders, as one sees her in public,
in the streets and in shops, is always a delightfully comfortable and
creditable person. I must confess to the highest admiration for her, an
admiration that increases with acquaintance. She, at least, is
essentially respectable; the neatness, compactness, and sobriety of her
dress, the decision of her movement and accent suggest the civic and
domestic virtues--order, thrift, frugality, the moral necessity of
making a good appearance. It is, I think, an old story that to the
stranger in France the women seem greatly superior to the men. Their
superiority, in fact, appears to be conceded; for wherever you turn you
meet them in the forefront of action. You meet them, indeed, too often;
you pronounce them at times obtrusive. It is annoying when you go to
order your boots or your shirts, to have to make known your desires to
even the most neat-waisted female attendant; for the limitations to the
feminine intellect are, though few in number, distinct, and women are
not able to understand certain masculine needs. Mr. Worth makes ladies'
dresses; but I am sure there will never be a fashionable tailoress.
There are, however, points at which, from the commercial point of view,
feminine assistance is invaluable. For insisting upon the merits of an
article that has failed to satisfy you, talking you over, and making you
take it; for defending a disputed bill, for paying the necessary
compliments or supplying the necessary impertinence--for all these
things the neat-waisted sex has peculiar and precious faculties. In the
commercial class in Paris the man always appeals to the woman; the woman
always steps forward. The woman always proposes the conditions of a
bargain. Go about and look for furnished rooms, you always encounter a
concierge and his wife. When you ask the price of the rooms, the woman
takes the words out of her husband's mouth, if indeed he have not first
turned to her with a questioning look. She takes you in hand; she
proposes conditions; she thinks of things he would not have thought of.

What I meant just now by my allusion to the absence of the "respectable"
in the appearance of the Parisian population was that the men do not
look like gentlemen, as so many Englishmen do. The average Frenchman
that one encounters in public is of so different a type from the average
Englishman that you can easily believe that to the end of time the two
will not understand each other. The Frenchman has always, comparatively
speaking a Bohemian, empirical look; the expression of his face, its
colouring, its movement, have not been toned down to the neutral
complexion of that breeding for which in English speech we reserve the
epithet of "good." He is at once more artificial and more natural; the
former where the Englishman is positive, the latter where the Englishman
is negative. He takes off his hat with a flourish to a friend, but the
Englishman never bows. He ties a knot in the end of a napkin and thrusts
it into his shirt-collar, so that, as he sits at breakfast, the napkin
may serve the office of a pinafore. Such an operation as that seems to
the Englishman as _naïf_ as the flourishing of one's hat is
pretentious.

I sometimes go to breakfast at a café on the Boulevard, which I
formerly used to frequent with considerable regularity. Coming back
there the other day, I found exactly the same group of habitués at
their little tables, and I mentally exclaimed as I looked at them over
my newspaper, upon their unlikeness to the gentlemen who confront you in
the same attitude at a London club. Who are they? what are they? On
these points I have no information; but the stranger's imagination does
not seem to see a majestic social order massing itself behind them as it
usually does in London. He goes so far as to suspect that what is behind
them is not adapted for exhibition; whereas your Englishmen, whatever
may be the defects of their personal character, or the irregularities of
their conduct, are pressed upon from the rear by an immense body of
private proprieties and comforts, of domestic conventions and
theological observances. But it is agreeable all the same to come back
to a café of which you have formerly been an habitué. Adolphe or
Edouard, in his long white apron and his large patent-leather slippers,
has a perfect recollection of "les habitudes de Monsieur." He remembers
the table you preferred, the wine you drank, the newspaper you read. He
greets you with the friendliest of smiles, and remarks that it is a long
time since he has had the pleasure of seeing Monsieur. There is
something in this simple remark very touching to a heart that has
suffered from that incorruptible dumbness of the British domestic. But
in Paris such a heart finds consolation at every step; it is reminded of
that most classic quality of the French nature--its sociability; a
sociability which operates here as it never does in England, from below
upward. Your waiter utters a greeting because, after all, something
human within him prompts him; his instinct bids him say something, and
his taste recommends that it be agreeable. The obvious reflection is
that a waiter must not say too much, even for the sake of being human.
But in France the people always like to make the little extra remark, to
throw in something above the simply necessary. I stop before a little
man who is selling newspapers at a street-corner, and ask him for the
_Journal des Débats_. His answer deserves to be literally given: "Je ne
l'ai plus, Monsieur; mais je pourrai vous donner quelque chose à peu
près dans le même genre--_la République Française_." Even a person
of his humble condition must have had a lurking sense of the comicality
of offering anything as an equivalent for the "genre" of the venerable,
classic, academic _Débats_. But my friend could not bear to give me a
naked, monosyllabic refusal.

There are two things that the returning observer is likely to do with as
little delay as possible. One is to dine at some _cabaret_ of which he
retains a friendly memory; another is to betake himself to the Théâtre
Français. It is early in the season; there are no new pieces; but I
have taken great pleasure in seeing some of the old ones. I lost no time
in going to see Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt in _Andromaque_.
_Andromaque_ is not a novelty, but Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt has a
perennial freshness. The play has been revived, to enable her to
represent not the great part, the injured and passionate Hermione, but
that of the doleful, funereal widow of Hector. This part is a poor one;
it is narrow and monotonous, and offers few brilliant opportunities. But
the actress knows how to make opportunities, and she has here a very
sufficient one for crossing her thin white arms over her nebulous black
robes, and sighing forth in silver accents her dolorous rhymes. Her
rendering of the part is one more proof of her singular intelligence--of
the fineness of her artistic nature. As there is not a great deal to be
done with it in the way of declamation, she has made the most of its
plastic side. She understands the art of motion and attitude as no one
else does, and her extraordinary personal grace never fails her. Her
Andromaque has postures of the most poetic picturesqueness--something
that suggests the broken stem and drooping head of a flower that had
been rudely plucked. She bends over her classic confidant like the
figure of Bereavement on a bas-relief, and she has a marvellous manner
of lifting and throwing back her delicate arms, locking them together,
and passing them behind her hanging head.

The _Demi-Monde_ of M. Dumas _fils_ is not a novelty either; but I quite
agree with M. Francisque Sarcey that it is on the whole, in form, the
first comedy of our day. I have seen it several times, but I never see
it without being forcibly struck with its merits. For the drama of our
time it must always remain the model. The interest of the story, the
quiet art with which it is unfolded, the naturalness and soberness of
the means that are used, and by which great effects are produced, the
brilliancy and richness of the dialogue--all these things make it a
singularly perfect and interesting work. Of course it is admirably well
played at the Théâtre Français. Madame d'Ange was originally a part
of too great amplitude for Mademoiselle Croizette; but she is gradually
filling it out and taking possession of it; she begins to give a sense
of the "calme infernal," which George Sand somewhere mentions as the
leading attribute of the character. As for Delaunay, he does nothing
better, more vividly and gallantly, than Olivier de Jalin. When I say
gallantry I say it with qualification; for what a very queer fellow is
this same M. de Jalin! In seeing the _Demi-Monde_ again I was more than
ever struck with the oddity of its morality and with the way that the
ideal of fine conduct differs in different nations. The _Demi-Monde_ is
the history of the eager, the almost heroic, effort of a clever and
superior woman, who has been guilty of what the French call "faults," to
pass from the irregular and equivocal circle to which these faults have
consigned her into what is distinctively termed "good society." The only
way in which the passage can be effected is by her marrying an
honourable man; and to induce an honourable man to marry her, she must
suppress the more discreditable facts of her career. Taking her for an
honest woman, Raymond de Nanjac falls in love with her, and honestly
proposes to make her his wife. But Raymond de Nanjac has contracted an
intimate friendship with Olivier de Jalin, and the action of the play is
more especially De Jalin's attempt--a successful one--to rescue his
friend from the ignominy of a union with Suzanne d'Ange. Jalin knows a
great deal about her, for the simple reason that he has been her lover.
Their relations have been most harmonious, but from the moment that
Suzanne sets her cap at Nanjac, Olivier declares war. Suzanne struggles
hard to keep possession of her suitor, who is very much in love with
her, and Olivier spares no pains to detach him. It is the means that
Olivier uses that excite the wonderment of the Anglo-Saxon spectator. He
takes the ground that in such a cause all means are fair, and when, at
the climax of the play, he tells a thumping lie in order to make Madame
d'Ange compromise herself, expose herself, he is pronounced by the
author "le plus honnête homme que je connaisse." Madame d'Ange, as I
have said, is a superior woman; the interest of the play is in her being
a superior woman. Olivier has been her lover; he himself is one of the
reasons why she may not marry Nanjac; he has given her a push along the
downward path. But it is curious how little this is held by the author
to disqualify him from fighting the battle in which she is so much the
weaker combatant. An English-speaking audience is more "moral" than a
French, more easily scandalised; and yet it is a singular fact that if
the _Demi-Monde_ were represented before an English-speaking audience,
its sympathies would certainly not go with M. de Jalin. It would
pronounce him rather a coward. Is it because such an audience, although
it has not nearly such a pretty collection of pedestals to place under
the feet of the charming sex, has, after all, in default of this degree
of gallantry, a tenderness more fundamental? Madame d'Ange has stained
herself, and it is doubtless not at all proper that such ladies should
be led to the altar by honourable young men. The point is not that the
English-speaking audience would be disposed to condone Madame d'Ange's
irregularities, but that it would remain perfectly cold before the
spectacle of her ex-lover's masterly campaign against her, and quite
fail to think it positively admirable, or to regard the fib by which he
finally clenches his victory as a proof of exceptional honesty. The
ideal of our own audience would be expressed in some such words as, "I
say, that's not fair game. Can't you let the poor woman alone?"



IV

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR

1877


It was a very little tour, but the charm of the three or four old towns
and monuments that it embraced, the beauty of the brilliant October, the
pleasure of reminding one's self how much of the interest, strength and
dignity of France is to be found outside of that huge pretentious
caravansary called Paris (a reminder often needed), these things deserve
to be noted. I went down to Rheims to see the famous cathedral, and to
reach Rheims I travelled through the early morning hours along the
charming valley of the Marne. The Marne is a pretty little green river,
the vegetation upon whose banks, otherwise unadorned, had begun to blush
with the early frosts in a manner that suggested the autumnal tints of
American scenery. The trees and bushes were scarlet and orange; the
light was splendid and a trifle harsh; I could have fancied myself
immersed in an American "fall," if at intervals some gray old
large-towered church had not lifted a sculptured front above a
railway-station, to dispel the fond illusion. One of these church-fronts
(I saw it only from the train) is particularly impressive; the little
cathedral of Meaux, of which the great Bossuet was bishop, and along
whose frigid nave he set his eloquence rolling with an impetus which it
has not wholly lost to this day. It was entertaining, moreover, to enter
the country of champagne; for Rheims is in the ancient province whose
later fame is syllabled the world over in popping corks. A land of
vineyards is not usually accounted sketchable; but the country about
Epernay seemed to me to have a charm of its own. It stretched away in
soft undulations that were pricked all over with little stakes muffled
in leaves. The effect at a distance was that of vast surfaces, long,
subdued billows, of pincushion; and yet it was very pretty. The deep
blue sky was over the scene; the undulations were half in sun and half
in shade; and here and there, among their myriad bristles, were groups
of vintagers, who, though they are in reality, doubtless, a prosaic and
mercenary body of labourers, yet assumed, to a fancy that glanced at
them in the cursory manner permitted by the passage of the train, the
appearance of joyous and disinterested votaries of Bacchus. The blouses
of the men, the white caps of the women, were gleaming in the sunshine;
they moved about crookedly among the tiny vine-poles. I thought them
full of a charming suggestiveness. Of all the delightful gifts of France
to the world, this was one of the most agreeable--the keen, living
liquid in which the finest flower of sociability is usually dipped. It
came from these sunny places; this little maze of curling-sticks
supplied the world with half the world's gaiety. I call it little only
in relation to the immense number of bottles with gilded necks in which
this gaiety is annually stored up. The acreage of the champagne seemed
to me, in fact, large; the bristling slopes went rolling away to new
horizons in a manner that was positively reassuring. Making the
handsomest allowance for the wine manufactured from baser elements, it
was apparent that this big corner of a province represents a very large
number of bottles.

As you draw near to Rheims the vineyards become sparser, and finally
disappear, a fact not to be regretted, for there is something
incongruous in the juxtaposition of champagne and gothic architecture.
It may be said, too, that for the proper appreciation of a structure
like the cathedral of Rheims you have need of all your head. As, after
my arrival, I sat in my window at the inn, gazing up at the great
façade, I found something dizzying in the mere climbing and soaring of
one's astonished vision; and later, when I came to wander about in the
upper regions of the church, and to peep down through the rugged
lacework of the towers at the little streets and the small spots of
public places, I found myself musing upon the beauty of soberness. My
window at the Lion d'Or was like a proscenium-box at the play; to admire
the cathedral at my leisure I had only to perch myself in the casement
with a good opera-glass. I sat there for a long time watching the great
architectural drama. A drama I may call it, for no church-front that I
have seen is more animated, more richly figured. The density of the
sculptures, the immense scale of the images, detract, perhaps, at first,
in a certain sense, from the impressiveness of the cathedral of Rheims;
the absence of large surfaces, of ascending lines, deceives you as to
the elevation of the front, and the dimensions of some of the upper
statues bring them unduly near the eye. But little by little you
perceive that this great figured and storied screen has a mass
proportionate to its detail, and that it is the grandest part of a
structure which, as a whole, is one of the noblest works of man's hands.
Most people remember to have seen some print or some photograph of this
heavily-charged façade of Rheims, which is usually put forward as the
great example of the union of the purity and the possible richness of
gothic. I must first have seen some such print in my earliest years, for
I have always thought of Rheims as the typical gothic cathedral I had
vague associations with it; it seemed to me that I had already stood
there in the little overwhelmed _place_. One's literary associations
with Rheims are indeed very vivid and impressive; they begin with the
picture of the steel-clad Maid passing under the deeply-sculptured
portal, with a banner in her hand which she has no need to lower, and
while she stands amid the incense and the chants, the glitter of arms
and the glow of coloured lights, asking leave of the young king whom she
has crowned to turn away and tend her flocks. And after that there is
the sense of all the kings of France having travelled down to Rheims in
their splendour to be consecrated; the great groups on the front of the
church must have looked down on groups almost as stately--groups full of
colour and movement--assembled in the square. (The square of Rheims, it
must be confessed, is rather shabby. It is singular that the august
ceremony of the _sacre_ should not have left its mark upon the
disposition of the houses, should not have kept them at a respectful
distance. Louis XIV., smoothing his plumage before he entered the
church, can hardly have had space to swing the train of his
coronation-robe.) But when in driving into the town I reached the small
precinct, such as it is, and saw the cathedral lift its spireless towers
above the long rows of its carven saints, the huge wheel of its window,
the three great caverns of its portals, with the high acute pediments
above each arch, and the sides abutting outward like the beginning of a
pyramid; when I looked at all this I felt that I had carried it in my
mind from my earliest years, and that the stately vision had been
implanted there by some forgotten glimpse of an old-fashioned
water-colour sketch, in which the sky was washed in with expressive
splashes, the remoter parts of the church tinted with a fascinating
blueness, and the foundations represented as encumbered with little
gabled and cross-timbered houses, inhabited by women in red petticoats
and curious caps.

I shall not attempt any regular enumeration of the great details of the
façade of Rheims; I cannot profess even to have fully apprehended them.
They are a glorious company, and here and there, on its high-hung
pedestal, one of the figures detaches itself with peculiar
effectiveness. Over the central portal sits the Virgin Mary, meekly
submitting her head to the ponderous crown which her Son prepares to
place upon it; the attitude and movement of Christ are full of a kind of
splendid politeness. The three great doorways are in themselves a museum
of imagery, disposed in each case in five close tiers, the statues in
each of the tiers packed perpendicularly against their comrades. The
effect of these great hollowed and chiselled recesses is extremely
striking; they are a proper vestibule to the dusky richness of the
interior. The cathedral of Rheims, more fortunate than many of its
companions, appears not to have suffered from the iconoclasts of the
Revolution; I noticed no absent heads nor broken noses. It is very true
that these members may have had adventures to which they do not, as it
were, allude. But, like many of its companions, it is so pressed upon by
neighbouring houses that it is not easy to get a general view of the
sides and the rear. You may walk round it, and note your walk as a long
one; you may observe that the choir of the church travels back almost
into another quarter of the city; you may see the far-spreading mass lose
itself for a while in parasitic obstructions, and then emerge again with
all its buttresses flying; but you miss that wide margin of space and
light which should enable it to present itself as a consistent picture.
Pictures have their frames, and poems have their margins; a great work
of art, such as a gothic cathedral, should at least have elbow-room. You
may, however, stroll beneath the walls of Rheims, along a narrow, dark
street, and look up at the mighty structure and see its higher parts
foreshortened into all kinds of delusive proportions. There is a grand
entertainment in the view of the church which you obtain from the
farthermost point to which you may recede from it in the rear, keeping
it still within sight I have never seen a cathedral so magnificently
buttressed. The buttresses of Rheims are all double; they have a
tremendous spring, and are supported upon pedestals surmounted by
immense crocketed canopies containing statues of wide-winged angels. A
great balustrade of gothic arches connects these canopies one with
another, and along this balustrade are perched strange figures of
sitting beasts, unicorns and mermaids, griffins and monstrous owls.
Huge, terrible gargoyles hang far over into the street, and doubtless
some of them have a detail which I afterwards noticed at Laon. The
gargoyle represents a grotesque beast--a creature partaking at once of
the shape of a bird, a fish, and a quadruped. At Laon, on either side of
the main entrance, a long-bellied monster cranes forth into the air with
the head of a hippopotamus; and under its belly crouches a little man,
hardly less grotesque, making up a rueful grimace and playing some
ineffectual trick upon his terrible companion. One of these little
figures has plunged a sword, up to the hilt, into the belly of the
monster above him, so that when he draws it forth there will be a leak
in the great stone gutter; another has suspended himself to a rope that
is knotted round the neck of the gargoyle, and is trying in the same
manner to interrupt its functions by pulling the cord as tight as
possible. There was sure to be a spirit of life in an architectural
conception that could range from the combination of clustering towers
and opposing fronts to this infinitely minute play of humour.

There is no great play of humour in the interior of Rheims, but there is
a great deal of beauty and solemnity. This interior is a spectacle that
excites the sensibility, as our forefathers used to say; but it is not
an easy matter to describe. It is no description of it to say that it is
four hundred and sixty-six feet in length, and that the roof is one
hundred and twenty-four feet above the pavement; nor is there any very
vivid portraiture in the statement that if there is no coloured glass in
the lower windows, there is, _per contra_, a great deal of the most
gorgeous and most ancient in the upper ones. The long sweep of the nave,
from the threshold to the point where the coloured light-shafts of the
choir lose themselves in the gray distance, is a triumph of
perpendicular perspective. The white light in the lower part of Rheims
really contributes to the picturesqueness of the interior. It makes the
gloom above look richer still, and throws that part of the roof which
rests upon the gigantic piers of the transepts into mysterious
remoteness. I wandered about for a long time; I sat first in one place
and then in another; I attached myself to that most fascinating part of
every great church, the angle at which the nave and transept divide. It
was the better to observe this interesting point, I think, that I passed
into the side gate of the choir--the gate that stood ajar in the tall
gilded railing. I sat down on a stool near the threshold; I leaned back
against the side of one of the stalls; the church was empty, and I lost
myself in the large perfection of the place. I lost myself, but the
beadle found me; he stood before me, and with a silent, imperious
gesture, motioned me to depart. I risked an argumentative glance,
whereupon he signified his displeasure, repeated his gesture, and
pointed to an old gentleman with a red cape, who had come into the choir
softly, without my seeing him, and had seated himself in one of the
stalls. This old gentleman seemed plunged in pious thoughts; I was not,
after all, very near him, and he did not look as if I disturbed him. A
canon is at any time, I imagine, a more merciful man than a beadle. But
of course I obeyed the beadle, and eliminated myself from this
peculiarly sacred precinct. I found another chair, and I fell to
admiring the cathedral again. But this time I think it was with a
difference--a difference which may serve as an excuse for the triviality
of my anecdote. Sundry other old gentlemen in red capes emerged from the
sacristy and went into the choir; presently, when there were half a
dozen, they began to chant, and I perceived that the impending vespers
had been the reason of my expulsion. This was highly proper, and I
forgave the beadle; but I was not so happy as before, for my thoughts
had passed out of the architectural channel into--what shall I
say?--into the political. Here they found nothing so sweet to feed upon.
It was the 5th of October; ten days later the elections for the new
Chamber were to take place--the Chamber which was to replace the
Assembly dissolved on the 16th of May by Marshal MacMahon, on a charge
of "latent" radicalism. Stranger though one was, it was impossible not
to be much interested in the triumph of the republican cause; it was
impossible not to sympathise with this supreme effort of a brilliant and
generous people to learn the lesson of national self-control and
self-government. It was impossible by the same token, not to have noted
and detested the alacrity with which the Catholic party had rallied to
the reactionary cause, and the unction with which the clergy had
converted itself into the go-betweens of Bonapartism. The clergy was
giving daily evidence of its devotion to arbitrary rule and to every
iniquity that shelters itself behind the mask of "authority." These had
been frequent and irritating reflections; they lurked in the folds of
one's morning paper. They came back to me in the midst of that tranquil
grandeur of Rheims, as I listened to the droning of the old gentlemen in
the red capes. Some of the canons, it was painful to observe, had not
been punctual; they came hurrying gut of the sacristy after the service
had, begun. They looked like amiable and venerable men; their chanting
and droning, as it spread itself under the great arches, was not
disagreeable to listen to; I could certainly bear them no grudge. But
their presence there was distracting and vexatious; it had spoiled my
enjoyment of their church, in which I doubtless had no business. It had
set me thinking of the activity and vivacity of the great organisation
to which they belonged, and of all the odious things it would have done
before the 15th of October. To what base uses do we come at last! It was
this same organisation that had erected the magnificent structure around
and above me, and which had then seemed an image of generosity and
benignant power. Such an edifice might at times make one feel tenderly
sentimental toward the Catholic church--make one remember how many of
the great achievements of the past we owe to her. To lapse gently into
this state of mind seems indeed always, while one strolls about a great
cathedral, a proper recognition of its hospitality; but now I had lapsed
gently out of it, and it was one of the exasperating elements of the
situation that I felt, in a manner, called upon to decide how far such a
lapse was unbecoming. I found myself even extending the question a
little, and picturing to myself that conflict which must often occur at
such a moment as the present--which is actually going on, doubtless, in
many thousands of minds--between the actively; practically liberal
instinct and what one may call the historic, æsthetic sense, the sense
upon which old cathedrals lay a certain palpable obligation. How far
should a lover of old cathedrals let his hands be tied by the sanctity
of their traditions? How far should he let his imagination bribe him, as
it were, from action? This of course is a question for each man to
answer for himself; but as I sat listening to the drowsy old canons of
Rheims, I was visited, I scarcely know why, by a kind of revelation of
the anti-catholic passion, as it must bum to-day in the breasts of
certain radicals. I felt that such persons must be intent upon war to
the death; how that must seem the most sacred of all duties. Can
anything, in the line of action, for a votary of the radical creed, be
more sacred? I asked myself; and can any instruments be too trenchant? I
raised my eyes again to the dusky splendour of the upper aisles and
measured their enchanting perspective, and it was with a sense of doing
them full justice that I gave my fictive liberal my good wishes.

This little operation restored my equanimity, so that I climbed several
hundred steps and wandered lightly over the roof of the cathedral.
Climbing into cathedral-towers and gaping at the size of the statues
that look small from the street has always seemed to me a rather brutal
pastime; it is not the proper way to treat a beautiful building; it is
like holding one's nose so close to a picture that one sees only the
grain of the canvas. But when once I had emerged into the upper
wilderness of Rheims the discourse of a very urbane and appreciative old
bell-ringer, whom I found lurking behind some gigantic excrescence, gave
an aesthetic complexion to what would otherwise have been a rather
vulgar feat of gymnastics. It was very well to see what a great
cathedral is made of, and in these high places of the immensity of
Rheims I found the matter very impressively illustrated. I wandered for
half an hour over endless expanses of roof, along the edge of sculptured
abysses, through hugely-timbered attics and chambers that were in
themselves as high as churches. I stood knee-high to strange images, of
unsuspected proportions, and I followed the topmost staircase of one of
the towers, which curls upward like the groove of a corkscrew, and gives
you at the summit a hint of how a sailor feels at the masthead. The
ascent was worth making to learn the fulness of beauty of the church,
the solidity and perfection, the mightiness of arch and buttress, the
latent ingenuity of detail. At the angles of the balustrade which
ornaments the roof of the choir are perched a series of huge sitting
eagles, which from below, as you look up at them, produce a great
effect. They are immense, grim-looking birds, and the sculptor has given
to each of them a pair of very neatly carved human legs, terminating in
talons. Why did he give them human legs? Why did he indulge in this
ridiculous conceit? I am unable to say, but the conceit afforded me
pleasure. It seemed to tell of an imagination always at play, fond of
the unexpected and delighting in its labour.

Apart from its cathedral Rheims is not an interesting city. It has a
prosperous, modern, mercantile air. The streets look as if at one time
M. Haussmann, in person, may have taken a good deal of exercise in them;
they prove, however, that a French provincial town may be a wonderfully
fresh, clean, comfortable-looking place. Very different is the aspect of
the ancient city of Laon, to which you may, by the assistance of the
railway, transfer yourself from Rheims in a little more than an hour.
Laon is full of history, and the place, as you approach it, reminds you
of a quaint-woodcut in the text of an ancient folio. Out of the midst of
a smiling plain rises a goodly mountain, and on the top of the mountain
is perched the old feudal _commune_, from the centre of which springs,
with infinite majesty, the many-towered cathedral. At Laon you are in
the midst of old France; it is one of the most interesting chapters of
the past. Ever since reading in the pages of M. Thierry the story of the
fierce straggle for municipal independence waged by this ardent little
city against its feudal and ecclesiastical lords, I had had the
conviction that Laon was worthy of a visit. All the more so that her two
hundred years of civic fermentation had been vainly spent, and that in
the early part of the fourteenth century she had been disfranchised
without appeal. M. Thierry's readers will remember the really thrilling
interest of the story which he has selected as the most complete and
typical among those of which the records of the mediæval communities
are full; the complications and fluctuations of the action, its
brilliant episodes, its sombre, tragic _dénoûment_, I did not visit
Laon with the _Lettres sur l'Histoire de France_ in my pocket, nor had I
any other historic texts for reference; but a vague notion of the
vigorous manner in which for a couple of centuries the stubborn little
town had attested its individuality supplied my observations with an
harmonious background. Nothing can well be more picturesque than the
position of this interesting city. The tourist who has learned his trade
can tell a "good" place at a glance. The moment Laon became visible from
the window of the train I perceived that Laon was good. And then I had
the word for it of an extremely intelligent young officer of artillery,
who shared my railway-carriage in coming from Rheims, and who spoke with
an authority borrowed from three years of garrison-life on that windy
hill-top. He affirmed that the only recreation it afforded was a walk
round the ramparts which encircle the town; people went down the hill as
little as possible--it was such a dreadful bore to come up again. But he
declared, nevertheless, that, as an intelligent traveller, I should be
enchanted with the place; that the cathedral was magnificent, the view
of the surrounding country a perpetual entertainment, and the little
town full of originality. After I had spent a day there I thought of
this pleasant young officer and his familiar walk upon the city-wall; he
gave a point to my inevitable reflections upon the degree to which at
the present hour, in France, the front of the stage is occupied by the
army. Inevitable reflections, I say, because the net result of any
little tour that one may make just now is a vivid sense of red trousers
and cropped heads. Wherever you go you come upon a military quarter, you
stumble upon a group of young citizens in uniform. It is always a pretty
spectacle; they enliven the scene; they touch it here and there with an
effusion of colour. But this is not the whole of the matter, and when
you have admitted that it is pictorial to be always _sous les armes_,
you fall to wondering whether it is not very expensive. A million of
defenders take up a good deal of room, even for defenders. It must be
very uncomfortable to be always defending. How do the young men bear it;
how does France bear it; how long will she be able to keep it up? Every
young Frenchman, on reaching maturity, has to give up five years of his
life to this bristling Minotaur of military service. It is hard for a
nation of shameless civilians to understand how life is arranged among
people who come into the world with this heavy mortgage upon the
freshest years of their strength; it seems like drinking the wine of
life from a vessel with a great leak in the bottom. Is such a _régime_
inspiring, or is it demoralising? Is the effect of it to quicken the
sentiment of patriotism, the sense of the daggers to which one's country
is exposed and of what one owes to the common cause, or to take the edge
from all ambition that is not purely military, to force young men to say
that there is no use trying, that nothing is worth beginning, and that a
young fellow condemned to pay such a tax as that has a right to refund
himself in any way that is open to him? Reminded as one is at every step
of the immensity of the military burden of France, the most interesting
point seems to me not its economical but its moral bearing. Its effect
upon the finances of the country may be accurately computed; its effect
upon the character of the young generation is more of a mystery. As the
analytic tourist wanders of an autumn afternoon upon the planted rampart
of an ancient town and meets young soldiers strolling in couples or
leaning against the parapet and looking off at the quiet country, he is
apt to take the more genial view of the dreadful trade of arms. He is
disposed to say that it teaches its votaries something that is worth
knowing and yet is not learned in several other trades--the hardware,
say, or the dry-goods business. Five years is a good deal to ask of a
young life as a sacrifice; but the sacrifice is in some ways a gain.
Certainly, apart from the question of material defence, it may be said
that no European nation, at present, can afford, morally, not to pass
her young men, the hope of the country, through the military mill. It
does for them something indispensable; it toughens, hardens, solidifies
them; gives them an ideal of honour, of some other possibility in life
than making a fortune. A country in which the other trades I spoke of
have it all their own way appears, in comparison, less educated.

So I mused, as I strolled in the afternoon along the charming old
city-wall at Laon; and if my meditations seem pretentious or fallacious,
I must say in justice that I had been a good while coming to them. I had
done a great many things first. I had climbed up the long straight
staircase which has been dropped like a scaling-ladder from one of the
town-gates to the bottom of the hill. Laon still has her gates as she
still has her wall, and one of these, the old Porte d'Ardon, is a really
precious relic of mediæval architecture. I had repaired to the sign of
the _Hure_--a portrait of this inhospitable beast is swung from the
front of the inn--and bespoken a lodging; I had spent a long time in
the cathedral, in it and before it, beside it, behind it; I had walked
all over the town, from the citadel, at one end of the lofty plateau on
which it stands, to the artillery-barracks and the charming old church
of St. Martin at the other. The cathedral of Laon has not the elaborate
grandeur of that of Rheims; but it is a very noble and beautiful church.
Nothing can be finer than its position; it would set off any church to
stand on such a hill-crest. Laon has also a façade of many sculptures,
which, however, has suffered greater violence than that of Rheims, and
is now being carefully and delicately restored. Whole figures and
bas-reliefs have lately been replaced by exact imitations in that fresh
white French stone which looks at first like a superior sort of plaster.
They were far gone, and I suppose the restorer's hand was imperiously
called for. I do not know that it has been too freely used. But half the
charm of Laon is the magnificent colouring of brownish, weather-battered
gray which it owes to the great exposure of its position, and it will be
many a year before the chalky scars and patches will be wrought into
dusky harmony with the rest of the edifice. Fortunately, however, they
promise not to be very numerous; the principal restorations have taken
place inside. I know not what all this labour costs; but I was
interested in learning from the old bell-ringer at Rheims that the sum
voted by the Chamber for furbishing up his own church was two millions
of francs, to be expended during ten years. That is what it is to have
"national monuments" to keep up. One is apt to think of the fourteenth
century as a rather ill-appointed and comfortless period; but the fact
that at the present time the mere repair of one of its buildings costs
forty thousand dollars a year would indicate that the original builders
had a great deal of money to spend. The cathedral of Laon was intended
to be a wonderful cluster of towers, but only two of these
ornaments--the couple above the west front--have been carried to a great
altitude; the pedestals of the rest, however, detach themselves with
much vigour, and contribute to the complicated and somewhat fantastic
look which the church wears at a distance, and which makes its great
effectiveness. The finished towers are admirably light and graceful;
with the sky shining through their large interstices they suggest an
imitation of timber in masonry. They have one very quaint feature. From
their topmost portions, at each angle, certain carven heads of oxen peep
forward with a startling naturalness--a tribute to the patient, powerful
beasts who dragged the material of the building up the long zig-zags of
the mountain. We perhaps treat our dumb creatures better to-day than was
done five hundred years ago; but I doubt whether a modern architect, in
settling his accounts, would have "remembered," as they say, the oxen.

The whole precinct of the cathedral of Laon is picturesque. There is a
charming Palais de Justice beside it, separated from it by a pleasant,
homely garden, in which, as you walk about, you have an excellent view
of the towering back and sides of the great church. The Palais de
Justice, which is an ancient building, has a fine old gothic arcade, and
on the other side, directly upon the city-wall, a picturesque, irregular
rear, with a row of painted windows, through which, from the _salle
d'audience_, the judge on the bench and the prisoner in the dock may
enjoy a prospect, admonitory, inspiring, or depressing, as the case may
be, of the expanded country. This great sea-like plain that lies beneath
the town on all sides constitutes, for Laon, a striking resemblance to
those Italian cities--Siena, Volterra, Perugia--which the traveller
remembers so fondly as a dark silhouette lifted high against a glowing
sunset. There is something Italian, too, in the mingling of rock and
rampart in the old foundations of the town, and in the generous verdure
in which these are muffled. At one end of the hill-top the plateau
becomes a narrow ridge; the slope makes a deep indentation, which
contributes to the effect of a thoroughly Italian picture. A line of
crooked little red-roofed houses stands on the edge of this indentation,
with their feet in the tangled verdure that blooms in it; and above them
rises a large, florid, deserted-looking church, which you may be sure
has a little empty, grass-grown, out-of-the-way _place_ before it.
Almost opposite, on another spur of the hill, the gray walls of a
suppressed convent peep from among the trees. I might have been at
Perugia.

There came in the evening to the inn of the Hure a very worthy man who
had vehicles to hire. The Hure was decidedly a provincial hostelry, and
I compared it mentally with certain English establishments of a like
degree, of which I had lately had observation. In England I should have
had a waiter in an old evening-suit and a white cravat, who would have
treated me to cold meat and bread and cheese. There would have been a
musty little inn-parlour and probably a very good fire in the grate, and
the festally-attired waiter would have been my sole entertainer. At Laon
I was in perpetual intercourse with the landlord and his wife, and a
large body of easy-going, confidential domestics. Our intercourse was
carried on in an old darksome stone kitchen, with shining copper vessels
hanging all over the walls, in which I was free to wander about and take
down my key in one place and rummage out my candlestick in another,
while the domestics sat at table eating _pot-au-feu_. The landlord
cooked the dinner; he wore a white cap and apron; he brought in the
first dish at the table d'hôte. Of course there was a table d'hôte,
with several lamps and a long array of little dessert-dishes, for the
benefit of two commercial travellers, who tucked their napkins into
their necks, and the writer of these lines. Every country has its
manners. In England the benefits--whatever they are--represented by the
evening dress of the waiter would have been most apparent; in France one
was more sensible of the blessings of which the white cap and apron of
the host were a symbol. In England, certainly, one is treated more as a
gentleman. It is too often forgotten, however, that even a gentleman
partakes of nourishment. But I am forgetting my dispenser of vehicles,
concerning whom, however, and whose large red cheeks and crimson cravat,
I have left myself room to say no more than that they were witnesses of
a bargain that I should be driven early on the morrow morning, in an
"Américaine," to the Château de Coucy. The Américaine proved to be a
vehicle of which I should not have been eager to claim the credit for my
native land; but with the aid of a ragged but resolute little horse, and
a driver so susceptible as regards his beast's appearance that,
referring to the exclamation of dismay with which I had greeted it, he
turned to me at the end of each successive kilometre with a rancorous
"_Now_, do you say he can't go?"--with these accessories, I say, it
conveyed me more than twenty miles. It was entertaining to wind down the
hillside from Laon in the early morning of a splendid autumn day; to dip
into the glistening plain, all void of hedges and fences, and sprinkled
with light and dew; to jog along the straight white roads, between the
tall, thin poplars; to rattle through the half-waked villages and past
the orchards heavy with sour-looking crimson apples. The Château de
Coucy is a well-known monument; it is one of the most considerable ruins
in France, and it is in some respects the most extraordinary. As you
come from Laon a turn in the road suddenly, at last, reveals it to you.
It is still at a distance; you will not reach it for half an hour; but
its huge white donjon stands up like some gigantic lighthouse at sea.
Coucy is altogether on a grand scale, but this colossal, shining
cylinder is a wonder of bigness. As M. Viollet-le-Duc says, it seems to
have been built by giants for a race of giants. The very quaint little
town of Coucy-le-Château nestles at the foot of this strange,
half-substantial, half-spectral structure; it was, together with a
goodly part of the neighbouring country, the feudal appanage of those
terrible lords who erected the present indestructible edifice, and whose
"boastful motto" (I quote from Murray) was


    "Roi je ne suis,
    Prince ni comte aussi;
    Je suis le Sire de Coucy."


Coucy is a sleepy little borough, still girdled with its ancient wall,
entered by its old gateways, and supported on the verdurous flanks of a
hill-top. I interviewed the host of the Golden Apple in his kitchen; I
breakfasted--_ma foi, fort bien_, as they would say in the indigenous
tongue--in his parlour; and then I visited the château, which is at
five minutes' walk. This very interesting ruin is the property of the
state, and the state is represented by a very civil and intelligent
woman, who divests the trade of custodian of almost all its grossness.
Any feudal ruin is a charming affair, and Coucy has much of the sweet
melancholy of its class. There are four great towers, connected by a
massive curtain and enclosing the tremendous donjon of which I just now
spoke. All this is very crumbling and silvery; the enclosure is a tangle
of wild verdure, and the pigeons perch upon the inaccessible battlements
exactly where the sketcher would wish them. But the place lacked, to my
sense, the peculiar softness and venerableness, the ivied mellowness, of
a great English ruin. At Coucy there is no ivy to speak of; the climate
has not caressed and embroidered the rugged masses of stone. This is
what I meant by speaking of the famous donjon as spectral; the term is
an odd one to apply to an edifice whose walls are thirty-four feet
thick. Its vast, pale surface has not a speck nor a stain, not a
clinging weed nor a creeping plant. It looks like a tower of ivory.

I took my way from Coucy to the ancient town of Soissons, where I found
another cathedral, from which, I think, I extracted all the
entertainment it could legitimately yield. There is little other to be
had at Soissons, in spite of the suggestiveness of its name, which is
redolent of history and local colour. The truth is, I suppose, that
Soissons looks so new, precisely because she is so old. She is in her
second youth; she has renewed herself. The old city was worn out; it
could no longer serve; it has been succeeded by another. The new one is
a quiet, rather aristocratic-looking little _ville de province_--a
collection of well-conditioned, sober-faced abodes of gentility, with
high-walled gardens behind them and very carefully closed
portes-cochère in front. Occasionally a porte-cochère opens; an
elderly lady in black emerges and paces discreetly away. An old
gentleman has come to the door with her. He is comfortably corpulent; he
wears gold spectacles and embroidered slippers. He looks up and down the
dull street, and sees nothing at all; then he retires, closing the
porte-cochère very softly and firmly. But he has stood there long
enough to give an observant stranger the impression of a cautious
provincial bourgeoisie that has a solid fortune well invested, and that
marries its daughters only _à bon escient_. This latter ceremony,
however, whenever it occurs, probably takes place in the cathedral, and
though resting on a prosaic foundation must borrow a certain grace from
that charming building. The cathedral of Soissons has a statueless front
and only a single tower; but it is full of a certain natural elegance.



V

CHARTRES

1876


The spring, in Paris, since it has fairly begun, has been enchanting.
The sun and the moon have been blazing in emulation, and the difference
between the blue sky of day and of night has been as slight as possible.
There are no clouds in the sky, but there are little thin green clouds,
little puffs of raw, tender verdure, entangled among the branches of the
trees. All the world is in the streets; the chairs and tables which have
stood empty all winter before the doors of the cafés are at a premium;
the theatres have become intolerably close; the puppet-shows in the
Champs Elysées are the only form of dramatic entertainment which seems
consistent with the season. By way of doing honour, at a small cost, to
this ethereal mildness, I went out the other day to the ancient town of
Chartres, where I spent several hours, which I cannot consent to pass
over as if nothing had happened. It is the experience of the writer of
these lines, who likes nothing so much as moving about to see the world,
that if one has been for a longer time than usual resident and
stationary, there is a kind of overgrown entertainment in taking the
train, even for a suburban goal; and that if one takes it on a charming
April day, when there is a sense, almost an odour, of change in the air,
the innocent pleasure is as nearly as possible complete. My
accessibility to emotions of this kind amounts to an infirmity, and the
effect of it was to send me down to Chartres in a shamelessly optimistic
state of mind. I was so prepared to be entertained and pleased with
everything that it is only a mercy that the cathedral happens really to
be a fine building. If it had not been, I should still have admired it
inordinately, at the risk of falling into heaven knows what æsthetic
heresy. But I am almost ashamed to say how soon my entertainment began.
It began, I think with my hailing a little open carriage on the
Boulevard and causing myself to be driven to the Gare de l'Ouest--far
away across the river, up the Rue Bonaparte, of art-student memories,
and along the big, straight Rue de Rennes to the Boulevard Montparnasse.
Of course, at this rate, by the time I reached Chartres--the journey is
of a couple of hours--I had almost drained the cup of pleasure. But it
was replenished at the station, at the buffet, from the pungent bottle
of wine I drank with my breakfast. Here, by the way, is another
excellent excuse for being delighted with any day's excursion in
France--that wherever you are, you may breakfast to your taste. There
may, indeed, if the station is very small, be no buffet; but if there is
a buffet, you may be sure that civilisation--in the persons of a
sympathetic young woman in a well-made black dress, and a rapid,
zealous, grateful waiter--presides at it. It was quite the least, as the
French say, that after my breakfast I should have thought the cathedral,
as I saw it from the top of the steep hill on which the town stands,
rising high above the clustered houses and seeming to make of their
red-roofed agglomeration a mere pedestal for its immense beauty,
promised remarkably well. You see it so as you emerge from the station,
and then, as you climb slowly into town, you lose sight of it. You
perceive Chartres to be a rather shabby little _ville de province_, with
a few sunny, empty open places, and crooked shady streets, in which two
or three times you lose your way, until at last, after more than once
catching a glimpse, high above some slit between the houses, of the
clear gray towers shining against the blue sky, you push forward again,
risk another short cut, turn another interposing corner, and stand
before the goal of your pilgrimage.

I spent a long time looking at this monument. I revolved around it, like
a moth around a candle; I went away and I came back; I chose twenty
different standpoints; I observed it during the different hours of the
day, and saw it in the moonlight as well as the sunshine. I gained, in a
word, a certain sense of familiarity with it; and yet I despair of
giving any coherent account of it. Like most French cathedrals, it rises
straight out of the street, and is destitute of that setting of turf and
trees and deaneries and canonries which contribute so largely to the
impressiveness of the great English churches. Thirty years ago a row of
old houses was glued to its base and made their back walls of its
sculptured sides. These have been plucked away, and, relatively
speaking, the church is fairly isolated. But the little square that
surrounds it is deplorably narrow, and you flatten your back against the
opposite houses in the vain attempt to stand off and survey the towers.
The proper way to look at them would be to go up in a balloon and hang
poised, face to face with them, in the blue air. There is, however,
perhaps an advantage in being forced to stand so directly under them,
for this position gives you an overwhelming impression of their height.
I have seen, I suppose, churches as beautiful as this one, but I do not
remember ever to have been so fascinated by superpositions and vertical
effects. The endless upward reach of the great west front, the clear,
silvery tone of its surface, the way three or four magnificent features
are made to occupy its serene expanse, its simplicity, majesty, and
dignity--these things crowd upon one's sense with a force that makes the
act of vision seem for the moment almost all of life. The impressions
produced by architecture lend themselves as little to interpretation by
another medium as those produced by music. Certainly there is an
inexpressible harmony in the façade of Chartres.

The doors are rather low, as those of the English cathedrals are apt to
be, but (standing three together) are set in a deep framework of
sculpture--rows of arching grooves, filled with admirable little images,
standing with their heels on each other's heads. The church, as it now
exists, except the northern tower, dates from the middle of the
thirteenth century, and these closely-packed figures are full of the
grotesqueness of the period. Above the triple portals is a vast
round-topped window, in three divisions, of the grandest dimensions and
the stateliest effect. Above this window is a circular aperture, of huge
circumference, with a double row of sculptured spokes radiating from its
centre and looking on its lofty field of stone, as expansive and
symbolic as if it were the wheel of Time itself. Higher still is a
little gallery with a delicate balustrade, supported on a beautiful
cornice and stretching across the front from tower to tower; and above
this is a range of niched statues of kings--fifteen, I believe, in
number. Above the statues is a gable, with an image of the Virgin and
Child on its front, and another of Christ on its apex. In the relation
of all these parts there is such a high felicity that while on the one
side the eye rests on a great many large blanks there is no approach on
the other to poverty. The little gallery that I have spoken of, beneath
the statues of the kings, had for me a peculiar charm. Useless, at its
tremendous altitude, for other purposes, it seemed intended for the
little images to step down and walk about upon. When the great façade
begins to glow in the late afternoon light, you can imagine them
strolling up and down their long balcony in couples, pausing with their
elbows on the balustrade, resting their stony chins in their hands, and
looking out, with their little blank eyes, on the great view of the old
French monarchy they once ruled, and which now has passed away. The two
great towers of the cathedral are among the noblest of their kind. They
rise in solid simplicity to a height as great as the eye often troubles
itself to travel, and then suddenly they begin to execute a magnificent
series of feats in architectural gymnastics. This is especially true of
the northern spire, which is a late creation, dating from the sixteenth
century. The other is relatively quiet; but its companion is a sort of
tapering bouquet of sculptured stone. Statues and buttresses, gargoyles,
arabesques and crockets pile themselves in successive stages, until the
eye loses the sense of everything but a sort of architectural lacework.
The pride of Chartres, after its front, is the two portals of its
transepts--great dusky porches, in three divisions, covered with more
images than I have time to talk about. Wherever you look, along the
sides of the church, a time-worn image is niched or perched. The face of
each flying buttress is garnished with one, with the features quite
melted away.

The inside of the cathedral corresponds in vastness and grandeur to the
outside--it is the perfection of gothic in its prime. But I looked at it
rapidly, the place was so intolerably cold. It seemed to answer one's
query of what becomes of the winter when the spring chases it away. The
winter hereabouts has sought an asylum in Chartres cathedral, where it
has found plenty of room and may reside in a state of excellent
preservation until it can safely venture abroad again. I supposed I had
been in cold churches before, but the delusion had been an injustice to
the temperature of Chartres. The nave was full of the little padded
chairs of the local bourgeoisie, whose faith, I hope for their comfort,
is of the good old red-hot complexion. In a higher temperature I should
have done more justice to the magnificent old glass of the
windows--which glowed through the icy dusk like the purple and orange of
a winter sunset--and to the immense sculptured external casing of the
choir. This latter is an extraordinary piece of work. It is a high
gothic screen, shutting in the choir, and covered with elaborate
bas-reliefs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, representing
scenes from the life of Christ and of the Virgin. Some of the figures
are admirable, and the effect of the whole great semicircular wall,
chiselled like a silver bowl, is superb. There is also a crypt of high
antiquity and, I believe, great interest, to be seen; but my teeth
chattered a respectful negative to the sacristan who offered to guide me
to it It was so agreeable to stand in the warm outer air again, that I
spent the rest of the day in it.

Although, besides its cathedral, Chartres has no very rare architectural
treasures, the place is pictorial, in a shabby, third-rate,
poverty-stricken degree, and my observations were not unremunerative.
There is a little church of Saint-Aignan, of the sixteenth century, with
an elegant, decayed façade, and a small tower beside it, lower than its
own roof, to which it is joined, in unequal twinship, by a single long
buttress. Standing there with its crumbling Renaissance doorway, in a
kind of grass-grown alcove, it reminded me of certain monuments that the
tourist encounters in small Italian towns. Most of the streets of
Chartres are crooked lanes, winding over the face of the steep hill, the
summit of the hill being occupied by half a dozen little open squares,
which seem like reservoirs of the dulness and stillness that flow
through the place. In the midst of one of them rises an old dirty brick
obelisk, commemorating the glories of the young General Marceau, of the
first Republic--"Soldier at 16, general at 23, he died at 27." Such
memorials, when one comes upon them unexpectedly, produce in the mind a
series of circular waves of feeling, like a splash in a quiet pond.
Chartres gives us an impression of extreme antiquity, but it is an
antiquity that has gone down in the world. I saw very few of those
stately little hôtels, with pilastered fronts, which look so well in
the silent streets of provincial towns. The houses are mostly low,
small, and of sordid aspect, and though many of them have overhanging
upper stories, and steep, battered gables, they are rather wanting in
character. I was struck, as an American always is in small French and
English towns, with the immense number of shops, and their brilliant
appearance, which seems so out of proportion to any visible body of
consumers. At Chartres the shopkeepers must all feed upon each other,
for, whoever buys, the whole population sells. This population appeared
to consist mainly of several hundred brown old peasant women, in the
seventies and eighties, with their faces cross-hatched with wrinkles and
their quaint white coifs drawn tightly over their weather-blasted
eye-brows. Labour-stricken grandams, all the world over, are the
opposite of lovely, for the toil that wrestles for its daily bread,
morsel by morsel, is not beautifying; but I thought I had never seen the
possibilities of female ugliness so variously embodied as in the crones
of Chartres. Some of them were leading small children by the
hand--little red-cheeked girls, in the close black caps and black
pinafores of humble French infancy--a costume which makes French
children always look like orphans. Others were guiding along the flinty
lanes the steps of small donkeys, some of them fastened into little
carts, some with well-laden backs. These were the only quadrupeds I
perceived at Chartres. Neither horse nor carriage did I behold, save at
the station the omnibuses of the rival inns--the "Grand Monarque" and
the "Duc de Chartres"--which glare at each other across the Grande
Place. A friend of mine told me that a few years ago, passing through
Chartres, he went by night to call upon a gentleman who lived there.
During his visit it came on to rain violently, and when the hour for his
departure arrived the rain had made the streets impassable. There was no
vehicle to be had, and my friend was resigning himself to a soaking.
"You can be taken of course in the sedan-chair," said his host with
dignity. The sedan-chair was produced, a couple of serving-men grasped
the handles, my friend stepped into it, and went swinging back--through
the last century--to the "Grand Monarque." This little anecdote, I
imagine, still paints Chartres socially.

Before dinner I took a walk on the planted promenade which encircles the
town--the Tour-de-ville it is called--much of which is extremely
picturesque. Chartres has lost her walls as a whole, but here and there
they survive, and play a desultory part in holding the town together. In
one place the rampart is really magnificent--smooth, strong and lofty,
curtained with ivy, and supporting on its summit an old convent and its
garden. Only one of the city-gates remains--a narrow arch of the
fourteenth century, flanked by two admirable round towers, and preceded
by a fosse. If you stoop a little, as you stand outside, the arch of
this hoary old gate makes a capital setting for the picture of the
interior of the town, and, on the inner hill-top, against the sky, the
large gray mass of the cathedral. The ditch is full, and to right and to
left it flows along the base of the mouldering wall, through which the
shabby backs of houses extrude, and which is garnished with little
wooden galleries, lavatories of the town's soiled linen. These little
galleries are filled with washerwomen, who crane over and dip their
many-coloured rags into the yellow stream. The old patched and
interrupted wall, the ditch with its weedy edges, the spots of colour,
the white-capped laundresses in their little wooden cages--one lingers
to look at it all.



VI

ROUEN

1876


It is quite in the nature of things that a Parisian correspondence
should have flagged during the last few weeks; for even the most
brilliant of capitals, when the summer has fairly begun to be summer,
affords few topics to the chronicler. To a chronicle of small beer such
a correspondence almost literally finds itself reduced. The
correspondent consumes a goodly number of those magnified thimblefuls of
this fluid, known in Paris as "bocks," and from the shadiest corner of
the coolest café he can discover watches the softened bitumen grow more
largely interspaced. There is little to do or to see, and therefore
little to write about. There is in fact only one thing to do, namely, to
get out of Paris. The lively imagination of the correspondent
anticipates his departure and takes flight to one of the innumerable
watering-places whose charms at this season are set forth in large
yellow and pink placards on all the empty walls. They order this matter,
like so many others, much better in France. Here you have not, as in
America, to hunt up the "summer retreat" about which you desire
information in a dense alphabetical list in the columns of a newspaper;
you are familiar with its merits for weeks before you start--you have
seen them half a dozen times a day emblazoned on the line of your
customary walk, over the hand and seal of the company that runs, as we
should say in America, the Casino. If you are detained in Paris,
however, after luckier mortals have departed--your reflections upon the
fate of the luckless mortals who do not depart at all are quite another
question, demanding another chapter--it does not perhaps make you much
happier to peruse these lyrical advertisements, which seem to flutter
with the breezes of Houlgate and Etretat. You must take your consolation
where you can find it, and it must be added that of all great cities
Paris is the most tolerable in hot weather. It is true that the asphalt
liquifies, and it is true that the brilliant limestone of which the city
is built reflects the sun with uncomfortable fierceness. It is also true
that of a summer evening you pay a penalty for living in the
best-lighted capital in the world. The inordinate amount of gas in the
streets makes the atmosphere hot and thick, so that even under the dim
constellations you feel of a July night as if you were in a big
music-hall If you look down at such a time upon the central portions of
Paris from a high window in a remoter quarter, you see them wrapped in a
lurid haze, of the devil's own brewing. But, on the other hand, there
are a hundred facilities for remaining out of doors. You are not obliged
to sit on a "stoop" or on a curbstone, as in New-York. The Boulevards
are a long chain of cafés, each one with its little promontory of
chairs and tables projecting into the sea of asphalt. These promontories
are doubtless not exactly islands of the blessed, peopled though some of
them may be with sirens addicted to beer, but they may help you to pass
a hot evening. Then you may dine in the Champs Elysées, at a table
spread under the trees, beside an ivied wall, and almost believe you are
in the country. This illusion, imperfect as it is, is a luxury, and must
be paid for accordingly; the dinner is not so good as at a restaurant on
the Boulevard, and is considerably dearer, and there is after all not
much difference in sitting with one's feet in dusty gravel or on a
sanded floor. But the whole situation is more idyllic. I indulged in a
cheap idyl the other day by taking the penny steamer down the Seine to
Auteuil (a very short sail), and dining at what is called in Parisian
parlance a _guingette_ on the bank of the stream. It was a very humble
style of entertainment, but the most ambitious pursuit of pleasure can
do no more than succeed, and this was a success. The Seine at Auteuil is
wide, and is spanned by a stately viaduct of two tiers of arches, which
stands up against the sky in a picturesque and monumental manner. Your
table is spread under a trellis which scratches your head--spread
chiefly with fried fish--and an old man who looks like a political exile
comes and stands before it and sings a doleful ditty on the respect due
to white hairs. You testify by the bestowal of copper coin the esteem
with which his own inspire you, and he is speedily replaced by a lad
with one arm, who treats you to something livelier:


     "A la bonne heure; parlez-moi de ça!"


You eventually return to Paris on the top of a tramcar. It is a very
different affair to go out and dine at the Bois de Boulogne, at the
charming restaurant which is near the cascade and the Longchamp
racecourse. Here are no ballad-singers, but stately trees majestically
grouped and making long evening shadows on a lawn, and irreproachable
tables, and carriages rolling up behind high-stepping horses and
depositing all sorts of ladies. The drive back through the wood at night
is most charming, and the coolness of the air extreme, however hot you
may still be certain to find the city.

The best thing, therefore, is not to go back. I write these lines at an
inn at Havre, before a window which frames the picture of the seaward
path of the transatlantic steamers. One of the great black ships is at
this moment painted on the canvas, very near, and beginning its outward
journey. I watch it to the right-hand ledge of the window, which is as
far as so poor a sailor need be expected to follow it. The hotel at
Havre is called, for mysterious reasons, "Frascati"--reasons which I
give up the attempt to fathom, so undiscoverable are its points of
analogy with the lovely village of the same name which nestles among the
olives of the Roman hills. The locality has its charms, however. It is
very agreeable, for instance, at the end of a hot journey, to sit down
to dinner in a great open cage, hung over the Atlantic, and, while the
sea-breeze cools your wine, watch the swiftly-moving ships pass before
you like the figures on the field of a magic lantern. It is pleasant
also to open your eyes in the early dawn, before the light is intense,
and without moving your head on the pillow, enjoy the same clear vision
of the ocean highway. In the vague dusk, with their rapid gliding, the
passing vessels look like the ghosts of wrecked ships. Most seaports are
picturesque, and Havre is not the least so; but my enjoyment has been
not of my goal, but of my journey.

My head is full of the twenty-four hours I have just passed at Rouen,
and of the charming sail down the Seine to Honfleur. Rouen is a city of
very ancient renown, and yet I confess I was not prepared to find a
little town of so much expression. The traveller who treads the Rouen
streets at the present day sees but the shadow of their former
characteristics; for the besom of M. Haussmann has swept through the
city, and a train of "embellishments" has followed in its track. The
streets have been widened and straightened, and the old houses--gems of
mediæval domestic architecture--which formed the peculiar treasure of
the place, have been more than decimated. A great deal remains, however,
and American eyes are quick to make discoveries. The cathedral, the
churches, the Palais de Justice, are alone a splendid group of
monuments, and a stroll through the streets reveals a collection of
brown and sculptured façades, of quaintly-timbered gables, of curious
turrets and casements, of doorways which still may be called rich. Every
now and then a considerable stretch of duskiness and crookedness
delights the sentimental tourist who is to pass but a couple of nights
at Rouen, and who does not care if his favourite adjective happen to
imply another element which also is spelled with a _p_. It is nothing to
him that the picturesque is pestiferous. It is everything to him that
the great front of the cathedral is magnificently battered, heavy,
impressive. It has been defaced immensely, and is now hardly more than a
collection of empty niches. I do not mean, of course, that the wanton
tourist rejoices in the absence of the statues which once filled them,
but up to the present moment, at least, he is not sorry that the façade
has not been restored. It consists of a sort of screen, pierced in the
centre with a huge wheel-window, crowned with a pyramid of chiselled
needles and spires, flanked with two turrets capped with tall empty
canopies, and covered, generally, with sculptures--friezes, statues,
excrescences. On each side of it rises a great tower; one a rugged mass
of early Norman work, with little ornament save its hatcheted closed
arches, and its great naked base, as huge and white as the bottom of a
chalk-cliff; the other a specimen of sixteenth century gothic, extremely
flamboyant and confounding to the eye. The sides of the cathedral are as
yet more or less imbedded in certain black and dwarfish old houses, but
if you pass around them by a long détour, you arrive at two superb
lateral porches. The so-called Portail des Libraires, in especial, on
the northern side, is a magnificent affair, sculptured from summit to
base (it is now restored), and preceded by a long forecourt, in which
the guild of booksellers used to hold its musty traffic. From here you
see the immense central tower, perched above the junction of the
transepts and the nave, and crowned with a gigantic iron spire, lately
erected to replace one which was destroyed by lightning in the early
part of the century. This gaunt pyramid has the drawback, to American
eyes, of resembling too much the tall fire-towers which are seen in
transatlantic cities, and its dimensions are such that, viewed from a
distance, it fairly makes little Rouen look top-heavy. Behind the choir,
within, is a beautiful lady-chapel, and in this chapel are two
enchanting works of art. The larger and more striking of these is the
tomb of the two Cardinals d'Amboise, uncle and nephew--the elder, if I
mistake not, minister of Louis XII. It consists of a shallow, oblong
recess in the wall, lined with gilded and fretted marble, and corniced
with delicate little statues. Within the recess the figures of the two
cardinals are kneeling, with folded hands and ruggedly earnest faces,
their long robes spread out behind them with magnificent amplitude. They
are full of life, dignity, and piety; they look like portraits of
Holbein transferred into marble. The base of the monument is composed of
a series of admirable little images representing the cardinal and other
virtues, and the effect of the whole work is wonderfully grave and rich.
The discreet traveller will never miss an opportunity to come into a
great church at eventide--the hour when his fellow-travellers, less
discreet, are lingering over the table d'hôte, when the painted windows
glow with a deeper splendour, when the long wand of the beadle, slowly
tapping the pavement, or the shuffle of the old sacristan, has a ghostly
resonance along the empty nave, and three or four work-weary women,
before a dusky chapel, are mumbling for the remission of unimaginable
sins. At this hour, at Rouen, the tomb of the Duke of Brézé, husband
of Diana of Poitiers, placed opposite to the monument I have just
described, seemed to me the most beautiful thing in the world. It is
presumably the work of the delightful Jean Goujon, and it bears the
stamp of his graceful and inventive talent. The deceased is lying on his
back, almost naked, with a part of his shroud bound in a knot about his
head--a realistic but not a repulsive image of death. At his head kneels
the amiable Diana, in sober garments, all decency and devotion; at his
feet stands the Virgin, a charming young woman with a charming child.
Above, on another tier, the subject of the monument is represented in
the fulness of life, dressed as for a tournament, bestriding a
high-stepping war-horse, riding forth like a Roland or a Galahad. The
architecture of the tomb is exceedingly graceful and the subordinate
figures admirable, but the image of the dead Duke is altogether a
masterpiece. The other evening, in the solemn stillness and the fading
light of the great cathedral, it seemed irresistibly human and touching.
The spectator felt a sort of impulse to smooth out the shroud and
straighten the helpless hands.

The second church of Rouen, Saint-Ouen, the beautiful and harmonious,
has no monuments of this value, but it offers within a higher interest
than the Cathedral. Without, it looks like an English abbey, scraped and
restored, disencumbered of huddling neighbours and surrounded on three
sides by a beautiful garden. Seen to this excellent advantage it is one
of the noblest of churches; but within, it is one of the most
fascinating. My taste in architecture greatly resembles my opinions in
fruit; the particular melon or pear or peach that I am eating appears to
me to place either peaches, pears, or melons, beyond all other succulent
things. In the same way, in a fine building the present impression is
the one that convinces me most. This is deplorable levity; yet I risk
the affirmation _à propos_ of Saint-Ouen. I can imagine no happier
combination of lightness and majesty. Its proportions bring tears to the
eyes. I have left myself space only to recommend the sail down the Seine
from Rouen to the mouth of the stream; but I recommend it in the highest
terms. The heat was extreme and the little steamer most primitive, but
the river is as entertaining as one could wish. It makes an infinite
number of bends and corners and angles, rounded off by a charming
vegetation. Abrupt and rocky hills go with it all the way--hills with
cornfields lying in their hollows and deep woods crowning their tops.
Out of the woodland peep old manors, and beneath, between the hills and
the stream, are high-thatched farmsteads, lying deep in their meadows
and orchards, cottages pallisaded with hollyhocks, gray old Norman
churches and villas flanked with big horse-chestnuts. It is a land of
peace and plenty, and remarkable to Anglo-Saxon eyes for the
English-looking details of its scenery. I noticed a hundred places where
one might have been in Kent as well as in Normandy. In fact it is almost
better than Kent, for Kent has no Seine. At the last the river becomes
unmistakably an arm of the sea, and as a river, therefore, less
interesting. But crooked little Honfleur, with its miniature port,
clinging to the side of a cliff as luxuriant as one of the headlands of
the Mediterranean, gratifies in a high degree the tourist with a
propensity for sketching.



VII

ETRETAT

1876


The coast of Normandy and Picardy, from Trouville to Boulogne, is a
chain of _stations balnéaires_, each with its particular claim to
patronage. The grounds of the claim are in some cases not especially
obvious; but they are generally found to reside in the fact that if
one's spirits, on arriving, are low, so also are the prices. There are
the places that are dear and brilliant, like Trouville and Dieppe, and
places that are cheap and dreary, like Fécamp and Cabourg. Then there
are the places that are both cheap and pleasant. This delightful
combination of qualities may be found at the modest _plage_ from which I
write these lines. At Etretat you may enjoy some of the finest
cliff-scenery it has been my fortune to behold, and you may breakfast
and dine at the principal hotel for the sum of five and a half francs a
day. You may engage a room in the town over the butcher's, the baker's,
the cobbler's, at a rate that will depend upon your talent for driving a
bargain, but that in no case will be exorbitant. Add to this that there
are no other opportunities at Etretat to spend money. You wear old
clothes, you walk about in canvas shoes, you deck your head with a
fisherman's cap (when made of white flannel these articles may be
extolled for their coolness, convenience, and picturesqueness), you lie
on the pebbly strand most of the day, watching the cliffs, the waves,
and the bathers; in the evening you converse with your acquaintance on
the terrace of the Casino, and you keep monkish hours. Though Etretat
enjoys great and deserved popularity, I see no symptoms of the decline
of these simple fashions--no menace of the invasion of luxury. A little
more luxury, indeed, might be imported without doing any harm; though
after all we soon learn that it is an idle enough prejudice that has
hitherto prevented us from keeping our soap in a sugar-dish and
regarding a small rock, placed against a door, as an efficient
substitute for a key. From a Parisian point of view, Etretat is
certainly primitive, but it would be affectation on the part of an
American to pretend that he was not agreeably surprised to find a
"summer resort," in which he had been warned that he would have to rough
it, so elaborately appointed and organised. Etretat may be primitive,
but Etretat is French, and therefore Etretat is "administered."

Like most of the French watering-places, the place has a limited past.
Twenty years ago it was but a cluster of fishing-huts. A group of
artists and literary people were its first colonists, and Alphonse Karr
became the mouthpiece of their enthusiasm. In vulgar phrase, he wrote up
Etretat, and he lives in legend, at the present hour, as the _genius
loci_. The main street is named after him; the gable of the chief
inn--the classic Hôtel Blanquet--is adorned with a coloured medallion
representing his cropped head and long beard; the shops are stocked with
his photographs and with pictures of his villa. Like the magician who
has evoked the spirit, he has made his how and retired; but the artistic
fraternity, his disciples, still haunt the place, and it enjoys also the
favour of theatrical people, three or four of whom, having retired upon
their laurels, possess villas here. From my open window, as I write
these lines, I look out beyond a little cluster of clean housetops at
the long green flank of the down, as it slopes to the village from the
summit of the cliff. To the right is the top of an old storm-twisted
grove of oaks, in the heart of which stands a brown old farmhouse; then
comes the sharp, even outline of the down, with its side spotted with
little flat bushes and wrinkled with winding paths, along which here and
there I see a bright figure moving; on the left, above the edge of the
cliff, stands a bleak little chapel, dedicated to our Lady of the
fishing-folk. Just here a provoking chimney starts up and cuts off my
view of the downward plunge of the cliff, showing me, with a bar of blue
ocean beyond, but a glimpse of its white cheek--its fantastic profile is
to the left. But there is not far to go to see without impediments.
Three minutes' walk along the Rue Alphonse Karr, where every house is a
shop, and every shop has lodgers above it, who scramble bedward by a
ladder and trap-door, brings you to the little pebbly bay where the
cliffs are perpendicular and the foreign life of Etretat goes forward.
At one end are the small fishing-smacks, with their green sides and
their black sails, resting crookedly upon the stones; at the other is
the Casino, and the two or three tiers of bathing-houses on the slope of
the beach in front of it. This beach may be said to be Etretat. It is so
steep and stony as to make circulation impossible; one's only course is
to plant a camp-chair among the stones or to look for a soft spot in the
pebbles, and to abide in the position so chosen. And yet it is the spot
in Etretat most sacred to tranquil pleasure.

The French do not treat their beaches as we do ours--as places for a
glance, a dip, or a trot, places animated simply during the balneary
hours, and wrapped in natural desolation for the rest of the
twenty-four. They love them, they adore them, they take possession of
them, they live upon them. The people here sit upon the beach from
morning to night; whole families come early and establish themselves,
with umbrellas and rugs, books and work. The ladies get sunburnt and
don't mind it; the gentlemen smoke interminably; the children roll over
on the pointed pebbles and stare at the sun like young eagles. (The
children's lot I rather commiserate; they have no wooden spades and
pails; they have no sand to delve and grub in; they can dig no trenches
and canals, nor see the creeping tide flood them.) The great occupation
and amusement is the bathing, which has many entertaining features (I
allude to it as a spectacle), especially for strangers who keep an eye
upon national idiosyncrasies. The French take their bathing very
seriously; supplemented by opéra-bouffe in the evening at the Casino,
it is their most preferred form of communion with nature. The spectators
and the bathers commingle in graceful promiscuity; it is the freedom of
the golden age. The whole beach becomes a large family party, in which
the sweetest familiarities prevail. There is more or less costume, but
the minimum rather than the maximum is found the more comfortable.
Bathers come out of their dressing-houses wrapped in short white sheets,
which they deposit on the stones, taking an air-bath for some minutes
before entering the water. Like everything in France, the bathing is
excellently managed, and you feel the firm hand of a paternal and
overlooking government the moment you issue from your hut. The
Government will on no consideration consent to your being rash. There
are six or eight worthy old sons of Neptune on the beach--perfect
amphibious creatures--who, if you are a new-comer, immediately accost
you and demand pledges that you know how to swim. If you do not, they
give you much excellent advice, and keep an eye on you while you are in
the water. They are moreover obliged to render you any service you may
demand--to pour buckets of water over your head, to fetch your
bathing-sheet and your slippers, to carry your wife and children into
the sea, to dip them, cheer them, sustain them, to teach them how to
swim and how to dive, to hover about, in short, like ministering and
trickling angels. At a short distance from the shore are two boats,
freighted with sundry other marine divinities, who remain there
perpetually, taking it as a personal offence if you venture out too far.

The French themselves have every pretext for venturing, being in general
excellent swimmers. Every one swims, and swims indefatigably--men,
women, and children. I have been especially struck with the prowess of
the ladies, who take the neatest possible headers from the two long
plunging-boards which are rigged in the water upon high wheels. As you
recline upon the beach you may observe Mademoiselle X. issue from her
cabin--Mademoiselle X., the actress of the Palais Royal Theatre, whom
you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a
bathing-dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called
the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying
her liberated limbs. "_C'est convenable, j'espère, hein_?" says
Mademoiselle, and trots up the spring-board which projects over the
waves with one end uppermost, like a great see-saw. She balances a
moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the
most graceful of somersaults. This performance the star of the Palais
Royal repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and
leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to consider
the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put
herself into a single scant clinging garment and take a straight leap,
head downward, before three hundred spectators, without violation of
propriety--and why impropriety should begin only when she turns over in
the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upwards. The
logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a
hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and
vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant,
however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and
such a sea, might be diluted into innocence. The sea is as blue as
melted sapphires, and the rugged white faces of the bordering cliffs
make a silver frame for the picture. Every one is idle, amused,
good-natured; the bathers take to the water as easily as mermen and
mermaids. The bathing-men in the two _bateaux de surveillance_ have in
their charge a freight of rosy children, more or less chubbily naked,
and they have nailed a gay streamer and a rude nosegay to their low
mastheads. The swimmers dip and rise, circling round the boats and
playing with the children. Every now and then they grasp the sides of
the boats and cling to them in a dozen harmonious attitudes, making one
fancy that Eugène Delacroix's great picture of Dante and Virgil on the
Styx, with the damned trying to scramble into Charon's bark, has been
repainted as a scene on one of the streams of Paradise. The swimmers are
not the damned, but the blessed, and the demonstrative French babies are
the cherubs.

The Casino at Etretat is a modest but respectable establishment, with a
sufficiently capacious terrace, directly upon the beach, a café, a
billiard-room, a ballroom--which may also be used as a theatre, a
reading-room, and a _salon de conversation_. It is in very good taste,
without any attempt at gilding or mirrors; the ballroom, in fact, is
quite a masterpiece, with its charm of effect produced simply by
unpainted woods and happy proportions. Three evenings in the week a
blond young man in a white necktie plays waltzes on a grand piano; but
the effect is not that of an American "hop," owing to the young ladies
of France not being permitted to dance in public places. They may only
sit wistfully beside their mammas. Imagine a "hop" at which sweet
seventeen is condemned to immobility. The burden of the gaiety is
sustained by three or four rosy English maidens and as many of their
American sisters. On the other evenings a weak little operatic troupe
gives light specimens of the lyric drama, the privilege of enjoying
which is covered by your subscription to the Casino. The French hurry in
joyously (four times a week in July and August!) at the sound of the
bell, but I can give no report of the performances. Sometimes I look
through the lighted windows and see, on the diminutive stage, a
short-skirted young woman with one hand on her heart and the other
persuasively extended. Through the hot unpleasant air comes a little
ghost of a roulade. I turn away and walk on the terrace and listen to
the ocean vocalising to the stars.

But there are (by daylight) other walks at Etretat than the terrace, and
no account of the place is complete without some commemoration of the
admirable cliffs. They are the finest I have seen; their fantastic
needles and buttresses, at either end of the little bay, give to
careless Etretat an extreme distinction. In spite of there being no
sands, a persistent admirer of nature will walk a long distance upon the
tiresome sea-margin of pebbles for the sake of being under them and
visiting some of their quiet caves and embrowned recesses, varnished by
the ocean into splendid tones. Seen in this way from directly below,
they look stupendous; they hold up their heads with attitudes quite
Alpine. They are marvellously white and straight and smooth; they have
the tint and something of the surface of time-yellowed marble, and here
and there, at their summits, they break into quaint little pinnacles and
turrets. But to be on the top of them is even better; here you may walk
over miles of grassy, breezy down, with the woods, contorted and
sea-stunted, of old farmsteads on your land-side (the farmhouses here
have all a charming way of being buried in a wood, like the castle of
the Sleeping Beauty), coming every little while upon a weather-blackened
old shepherd and his flock (their conversation--the shepherds'--is
delightful), or on some little seaward-plunging valley, holding in its
green hollow a diminutive agricultural village, curtained round from the
sea-winds by a dense stockade of trees. So you may go southward or
northward, without impediment, to Havre or to Dieppe.



VIII

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES

1876


The other day, before the first fire of winter, when the deepening dusk
had compelled me to close my book and wheel my chair closer, I indulged
in a retrospect. The objects of it were not far distant, and yet they
were already interfused with the mellow tints of the past. In the
crackling flame the last remnant of the summer appeared to shrink up and
vanish. But the flicker of its destruction made a sort of fantastic
imagery, and in the midst of the winter fire the summer sunshine seemed
to glow. It lit up a series of visible memories.



I


One of the first was that of a perfect day on the coast of Normandy--a
warm, still Sunday in the early part of August. From my pillow, on
waking, I could look at a strip of blue sea and a great cube of white
cliff. I observed that the sea had never been so brilliant, and that the
cliff was shining as if it had been painted in the night. I rose and
came forth with the sense that it was the finest day of summer, and that
one ought to do something uncommon by way of keeping it. At Etretat it
was uncommon to take a walk; the custom of the country is to lie all day
upon the pebbly strand, watching, as we should say in America, one's
fellow-boarders. Your leisurely stroll, in a scanty sheet, from your
bathing-cabin into the water, and your trickling progress from the water
back into your cabin, form, as a general thing, the sum total of your
pedestrianism. For the rest you remain horizontal, contemplating the
horizon. To mark the day with a white stone, therefore, it was quite
sufficient to stretch my legs. So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which
shuts in the little bay on the right (as you lie on the beach, head
upward), and gained the bleak white chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde,
which a lady told me she was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's
"little gray church on the windy shore." This is very likely; but the
little church to-day was not gray, neither was the shore windy.

I had occasion, by the time I reached the summit, to wish it had been.
Deep, silent sunshine filled the air, and the long grass of the downs
stood up in the light without a tremor. The downs at Etretat are
magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward Dieppe, with their
shining levels and their faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an
irresistible invitation. On the land-side they have been somewhat
narrowed by cultivation; the woods, and farms, and grain-fields here and
there creep close enough to the edge of the cliff almost to see the
shifting of the tides at its base. But cultivation in Normandy is itself
picturesque, and the pedestrian rarely needs resent its encroachments.
Neither walls nor hedges nor fences are anywhere visible; the whole land
lies open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. This universal
absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that
really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of
being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so
incongruously with defensive palings and dykes. Norman farmhouses, too,
with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of
triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful
things. Hereabouts they have always a dark little wood dose beside them;
often a _chênaie_, as the term is--a fantastic little grove of
tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, some night, when the
sea-blasts were howling their loudest and their boughs were tossing most
wildly, the tumult had suddenly been stilled and they had stopped short,
each in the attitude into which the storm was twisting it. The only
thing the storm can do with them now is to blow them straight. The long,
indented coast-line had never seemed to me so charming. It stretched
away into the light haze of the horizon, with such lovely violet spots
in its caves and hollows, and such soft white gleams on its short
headlands--such exquisite gradations of distance and such capricious
interruptions of perspective--that one could only say that the land was
really trying to smile as intensely as the sea. The smile of the sea was
a positive simper. Such a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and
blueness, such tiny little pin-points of foam, and such delicate little
wrinkles of waves--all this made the ocean look like a flattered
portrait.

The day I speak of was a Sunday, and there were to be races at Fécamp,
ten miles away. The agreeable thing was, of course, to walk to Fécamp
over the grassy downs. I walked and walked, over the levels and the
dells, having land and ocean quite to myself. Here and there I met a
shepherd lying flat on his stomach in the sun, while his sheep, in
extreme dishabille (shearing-time being recent), went huddling in front
of me as I approached. Far below, on the blue ocean, like a fly on a
table of lapis, crawled a little steamer, carrying people from Etretat
to the races. I seemed to go much faster, yet the steamer got to Fécamp
before me. But I stopped to gossip with a shepherd on a grassy hillside,
and to admire certain little villages which are niched in small,
transverse, seaward-sloping valleys. The shepherd told me that he had
been farm-servant to the same master for five-and-thirty years--ever
since the age of ten; and that for thirty-five summers he had fed his
flock upon those downs. I don't know whether his sheep were tired of
their diet, but he professed himself very tired of his life. I remarked
that in fine weather it must be charming, and he observed, with humility,
that to thirty-five summers there went a certain number of rainy days.

The walk to Fécamp would be quite satisfactory if it were not for the
_fonds_. The _fonds_ are the transverse valleys just mentioned--the
channels, for the most part, of small water-courses which discharge
themselves into the sea. The downs subside, precipitately, to the level
of the beach, and then slowly lift their grassy shoulders on the other
side of the gully. As the cliffs are of immense height, these
indentations are profound, and drain off a little of the exhilaration of
the too elastic pedestrian. The first _fond_ strikes him as delightfully
picturesque, and he is down the long slope on one side and up the
gigantic hump on the other before he has time to feel hot. But the
second is greeted with that tempered _empressement_ with which you bow
in the street to an acquaintance whom you have met half an hour before;
the third is a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too many,
and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. The _fonds_, in a word, are very
tiresome. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom of the last and
widest of the series that I discovered the little town of Yport. Every
little fishing-village on the Norman coast has, within the last ten
years, set up in business as a watering-place; and, though one might
fancy that nature had condemned Yport to modest obscurity, it is plain
she has no idea of being out of the fashion. But she is a miniature
imitation of her rivals. She has a meagre little wood behind her and an
evil-smelling beach, on which bathing is possible only at the highest
tide. At the scorching midday hour at which I inspected her she seemed
absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed,
looked very far away. She has everything that a properly appointed
_station de bains_ should have, but everything is on a Lilliputian
scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nüremburg toy. There is a
diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head-waiter should be a pigmy
and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a Casino on the
smallest possible scale. Everything about the Casino is so consistently
microscopic, that it seems a matter of course that the newspapers in the
reading-room should be printed in the very finest type. Of course there
is a reading-room, and a dancing-room, and a café, and a billiard-room,
with a bagatelle-board instead of a table, and a little terrace on which
you may walk up and down with very short steps. I hope the prices are as
tiny as everything else, and I suspect, indeed, that Yport honestly
claims, not that she is attractive, but that she is cheap.

I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took my way over the
grass, for another hour, to Fécamp, where I found the peculiarities of
Yport directly reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated
along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course, with the classic
Casino and the row of hotels. But all this is on a very brave scale,
though it is not manifest that the bravery at Fécamp has won a victory;
and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A
pebbly beach of immense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy
embankment; a Casino of a bald and unsociable aspect; a principal inn,
with an interminable brown façade, suggestive somehow of an asylum or
an almshouse--such are the most striking features of this particular
watering-place. There are magnificent cliffs on each side of the bay,
but, as the French say, without impropriety, it is the devil to get to
them. There was no one in the hotel, in the Casino, or on the beach; the
whole town being in the act of climbing the farther cliff, to reach the
downs on which the races were to be held. The green hillside was black
with trudging spectators and the long sky-line was fretted with them.
When I say there was no one at the inn, I forget the gentleman at the
door, who informed me positively that he would give me no breakfast; he
seemed to have stayed at home from the races expressly to give himself
this pleasure. But I went farther and fared better, obtaining a meal of
homely succulence in an unfashionable tavern, in a back street, where
the wine was sound, the cutlets were tender, and the serving-maid was
rosy. Then I walked along--for a mile, it seemed--through a dreary, gray
_grand'-rue_, where the sunshine was hot, the odours were portentous,
and the doorsteps garnished with aged fishwives, retired from business,
whose plaited linen coifs gave a value, as the painters say, to the
brown umber of their cheeks. I inspected the harbour and its goodly
basin--with nothing in it--and certain pink and blue houses which
surround it, and then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered up the
side of the cliff to the downs.

The races had already begun, and the ring of spectators was dense. I
picked out some of the smallest people, looked over their heads, and saw
several young farmers, in parti-coloured jackets and very red in the
face, bouncing up and down on handsome cart-horses. Satiated at last
with this diversion, I turned away and wandered down the hill again; and
after strolling through the streets of Fécamp, and gathering not a
little of the wayside entertainment that a seaport and fishing-town
always yields, I repaired to the Abbey-church, a monument of some
importance, and almost as great an object of pride in the town as the
Casino. The Abbey of Fécamp was once a very rich and powerful
establishment, but nothing remains of it now save its church and its
_trappistine_. The church, which is for the most part early gothic, is
very stately and interesting, and the _trappistine_, a distilled liquor
of the Chartreuse family, is much prized by people who take a little
glass after their coffee. By the time I had done with the Abbey the
townsfolk had slid _en masse_ down the cliff again, the yellow afternoon
had come, and the holiday-takers, before the wine-shops, made long and
lively shadows. I hired a sort of two-wheeled gig, without a hood, and
drove back to Etretat in the rosy stage of evening. The gig dandled me
up and down in a fashion of which I had been unconscious since I left
off baby-clothes; but the drive, through the charming Norman country,
over roads which lay among the peaceful meadows like paths across a
park, was altogether delightful. The sunset gave a deeper mellowness to
the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of the wayside villages
the young men and maidens were dancing like the figures in
vignette-illustrations of classic poets.



II


It was another picked day--you see how freely I pick them--when I went
to breakfast at Saint-Jouin, chez la belle Ernestine. The beautiful
Ernestine is as hospitable as she is fair, and to contemplate her charms
you have only to order breakfast. They shine forth the more brilliantly
in proportion as your order is liberal, and Ernestine is beautiful
according as your bill is large. In this case she comes and smiles,
really very handsomely, round your table, and you feel some hesitation
in accusing so well-favoured a person of extortion. She keeps an inn at
the end of a lane which diverges from the high road between Etretat and
Havre, and it is an indispensable feature of your "station" at the
former place that you choose some fine morning and seek her hospitality.
She has been a celebrity these twenty years, and is no longer a simple
maiden in her flower; but twenty years, if they have diminished her
early bloom, have richly augmented her _musée_. This is a collection of
all the verses and sketches, the autographs, photographs, monographs,
trinkets, presented to the amiable hostess by admiring tourists. It
covers the walls of her sitting-room and fills half a dozen big albums
which you look at while breakfast is being prepared, just as if you were
awaiting dinner in genteel society. Most Frenchmen of the day whom one
has heard of appear to have called at Saint-Jouin, and to have left
their _homages_. Each of them has turned a compliment with pen or
pencil, and you may see in a glass case on the parlour wall what
Alexandre Dumas _fils_ thought of the landlady's nose, and how several
painters measured her ankles.

Of course you must make this excursion in good company, and I affirm
that I was in the very best. The company prefers, equally of course, to
have its breakfast in the orchard in front of the house; which, if the
repast is good, will make it seem better still, and if it is poor, will
carry off its poorness. Clever innkeepers should always make their
victims (in tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I forget whether
Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically good or bad, but I distinctly
remember enjoying it, and making everything welcome. Everything, that
is, save the party at the other table--the Paris actresses and the
American gentlemen. The combination of these two classes of persons,
individually so delightful, results in certain phenomena which seem less
in harmony with appleboughs and summer breezes than with the gas-lamps
and thick perfumes of a _cabinet particulier_; and yet it was
characteristic of this odd mixture of things that Mademoiselle
Ernestine, coming to chat with her customers, should bear a beautiful
infant on her arm, and smile with artless pride on being assured of its
filial resemblance to herself. She looked handsomer than ever as she
caressed this startling attribute of presumptive spinsterhood.

Saint-Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest cliffs in the world.
One of my companions, who had laden the carriage with the implements of
a painter, went off into a sunny meadow to take the portrait of a
windmill, and I, choosing the better portion, wandered through a little
green valley with the other. Ten minutes brought us to the edge of the
cliffs, which at this point of the coast are simply sublime. I had
supposed the white sea-walls of Etretat the finest thing possible in
this way, but the huge red porphyritic-looking masses of Saint-Jouin
have an even grander character. I have rarely seen a landscape more
"plastic." They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country,
and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even
an African prospect. Certain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish sierras
must have very much the same warmth of tone and desolation of attitude.
The great distinction of the cliffs of Saint-Jouin is their
extraordinary doubleness. Falling to an immense depth, they encounter a
certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they pause and play a dozen
fantastic tricks, such as piling up rocks into the likeness of needles
and watch-towers; then they plunge again, and in another splendid sweep
descend to the beach. There was something very impressive in the way
their evil brows, looking as if they were stained with blood and rust,
were bent upon the indifferent--the sleeping--sea.



III


In a month of beautiful weather at Etretat, every day was not an
excursion, but every day seemed indeed a picked day. For that matter, as
I lay on the beach watching the procession of the easy-going hours, I
took a good many mental excursions. The one, perhaps, on which I
oftenest embarked, was a comparison between French manners, French,
habits, French types, and those of my native land. These comparisons are
not invidious; I do not conclude against one party and in favour of the
other; as the French say, _je constate_ simply. The French people about
me were "spending the summer," just as I had so often seen my
fellow-countrymen spend it, and it seemed to me, as it had seemed to me
at home, that this operation places men and women under a sort of
monstrous magnifying-glass. The human figure has a higher relief in the
country than in town, and I know of no place where psychological studies
prosper so much as at the seaside. I shall not pretend to relate my
observations in the order in which they occurred to me (or indeed to
relate them in full at all); but I may say that one of the foremost was
to this effect--that the summer-question, for every one, had been more
easily settled than it usually is in America. The solution of the
problem of where to go had not been a thin-petalled rose, plucked from
among particularly sharp-pointed thorns. People presented themselves
with a calmness and freshness very different from the haggardness of
aspect which announces that the American citizen and his family have
"secured accommodations." This impression, with me, rests perhaps on the
fact that most Frenchwomen turned of thirty--the average wives and
mothers--are so comfortably endowed with flesh. I have never seen such
richness of contour as among the mature _baigneuses_ of Etretat. The
lean and desiccated person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often
converts the blooming American girl is not emulated in France. A
majestic plumpness flourished all around me--the plumpness of triple
chins and deeply dimpled hands. I mused upon it, and I discovered that
it was the result of the best breakfasts and dinners in the world. It
was the corpulence of ladies who are thoroughly well fed, and who never
walk a step that they can spare. The assiduity with which the women of
America measure the length of our democratic pavements is doubtless a
factor in their frequent absence of redundancy of outline. As a "regular
boarder" at the Hôtel Blanquet--pronounced by Anglo-Saxon visitors
Blanket--I found myself initiated into the mysteries of the French
dietary system. I assent to the common tradition that the French are a
temperate people, so long as it is understood in this sense--that they
eat no more than they want to. But their wants are very comprehensive.
Their capacity strikes me as enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less
regulated, are certainly much more slender consumers.

The American breakfast has, I believe, long been a subject of irony to
the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal
compared with the French _déjeûner-à-la-fourchette_. The latter,
indeed, is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither generically
nor specifically from the evening-repast. If it excludes soup, it
includes eggs, prepared in a hundred forms; and if it proscribes
champagne, it admits beer in foaming pitchers, so that the balance is
fairly preserved. I think that an American will often suffer vicariously
from the reflection that a French family which sits down at half-past
eleven to fish and entries and roasts, to asparagus and beans, to salad
and dessert, and cheese and coffee, proposes to do exactly the same
thing at half-past six. But we may be sure at any rate that the dinner
will be as good as the breakfast, and that the breakfast has nothing to
fear from prospective comparison with the dinner; and we may further
reflect that in a country where the pleasures of the table are
thoroughly organised, it is natural that they should be prolonged and
reiterated. Nothing is more noticeable among the French than their
superior intelligence in dietary matters; every one seems naturally a
judge, a dilettante. They have analysed tastes and savours to a finer
point than we; they are aware of differences and relations of which we
take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age and of any condition (I
have been quite as much struck with it in the very young men as in the
old), as he orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian restaurant,
and you will perceive that the operation is much more solemn than it is
apt to be in New York or in London. Monsieur has, in a word, a certain
ideal for a particular repast, and it will make a difference in his
happiness whether the kidneys, for instance, of a certain style, are
chopped to the ultimate or only to the penultimate smallness. His
directions and admonitions to the waiter are therefore minute and
exquisite, and eloquently accentuated by the pressure of thumb and
forefinger; and it must be added that the imagination of the waiter is
usually quite worthy of the refined communion opened to it.

This subtler sense of quality is observable even among those classes in
which in other countries it is generally forestalled by a depressing
consciousness on the subject of quantity. Observe your concierge and his
wife at their mid-day meal, as you pass up and down stairs. They are not
satisfying nature upon green tea and potatoes; they are seated before a
repast which has been reasoned out, which, on its modest scale, is
served in courses, and has a beginning, a middle, an end. I will not say
that the French sense of comfort is confined to the philosophy of
nutrition, but it is certainly here that it is most highly evolved.
French people must have a good dinner and a good bed; but they are
willing that the bed should be stationed and the dinner be eaten in the
most insufferable corners. Your porter and his wife dine with a certain
distinction, and sleep soft in their lodge; but their lodge is in all
probability a fetid black hole, five feet square, in which, in England
or in America, people of their talents would never consent to live. The
French are willing to abide in the dark, to huddle together, to forego
privacy, to let bad smells grow great among them. They have an accursed
passion for coquettish furniture; for cold, brittle chairs, for tables
with scalloped edges, for ottomans without backs, for fireplaces muffled
in plush and fringe. A French bedroom is a bitter mockery--a ghastly
attempt to serve two masters which succeeds in being agreeable to
neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions, constructed on the
assumption that it is inelegant to be known to wash or to sleep, and yet
pervaded with suggestions of uncleanness compared with which the
matutinal "tub," well _en évidence_, is a delightful symbol of purity.
This comes of course from that supreme French quality, the source of
half the charm of the French mind as well as of all its dryness, the
genius for economy. It is wasting a room to let it be a bedroom alone;
so it must be tricked out ingeniously as a sitting-room, and ends by
being (in many cases) insufferable both by night and by day. But
allowing all weight to these latter reflections, it is still very
possible that the French have the better part. If you are well fed, you
can perhaps afford to be ill lodged; whereas enjoyment of the most
commodious apartments is incompatible with inanition and dyspepsia.

If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by these possibly milder
generalisations, I should have touched lightly upon some of the social
phenomena of which the little beach at Etretat was the scene. I should
have narrated that the French, at the seaside, are not "sociable" as
Americans affect to be in a similar situation, and I should subjoin that
at Etretat it was very well on the whole that they should not have been.
The immeasurably greater simplicity of composition of American society
makes sociability with us a comparatively untaxed virtue; but anything
like an equal exercise of it in France would be attended with alarming
drawbacks. Sociability (in the American sense of the word) in any
aristocratic country would indeed be very much like an attempt to
establish visiting relations between birds and fishes. At Etretat no
making of acquaintance was to be perceived; people went about in
compact, cohesive groups, of natural formation, governed doubtless,
internally, by humane regulations, but presenting to the world an
impenetrable defensive front. The groups usually formed a solid phalanx
around two or three young girls, compressed into the centre, the
preservation of whose innocence was their chief solicitude. These groups
were doubtless wisely constituted, for with half a dozen _cocottes_, in
scarlet petticoats, scattered over the sunny, harmless-looking beach,
what were mammas and duennas to do? I used to pity the young ladies at
first, for this perpetual application of the leading-string; but a
little reflection showed me that the French have ordered this as well as
they have ordered everything else. The case is not nearly so hard as it
would be with us, for there is this immense difference between the lot
of the _jeune fille_ and her American sister, that the former may as a
general thing be said to be certain to marry. "Alas, to marry badly,"
the Anglo-Saxon objector may reply. But the objection is precipitate;
for if French marriages are almost always arranged, it must be added
that they are in the majority of cases arranged successfully. Therefore,
if a _jeune fille_ is for three or four years tied with a very short
rope and compelled to browse exclusively upon the meagre herbage which
sprouts in the maternal shadow, she has at least the comfort of
reflecting that, according to the native phrase, _on s'occupe de la
marier_--that measures are being carefully taken to promote her to a
condition of unbounded liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, marriage
may fail to mean, it at least means freedom and consideration. It does
not mean, as it so often means in America, being socially shelved--and
it is not too much to say, in certain circles, degraded; it means being
socially launched and consecrated. It means becoming that exalted
personage, a _mère de famille_. To be a _mère de famille_ is to occupy
not simply (as is mostly the case with us) a sentimental, but really an
official position. The consideration, the authority, the domestic pomp
and circumstance allotted to a French mamma are in striking contrast
with the amiable tolerance which in our own social order is so often the
most liberal measure that the female parent may venture to expect at her
children's hands, and which, on the part of the young lady of eighteen
who represents the family in society, is not unfrequently tempered by a
conscientious severity. All this is worth waiting for, especially if you
have not to wait very long. Mademoiselle is married certainly, and
married early, and she is sufficiently well informed to know, and to be
sustained by the knowledge, that the sentimental expansion which may not
take place at present will have an open field after her marriage. That
it should precede her marriage seems to her as unnatural as that she
should put on her shoes before her stockings. And besides all this, to
browse in the maternal shadow is not considered in the least a hardship.
A young French girl who is _bien-élevée_--an expression which means so
much--will be sure to consider her mother's company the most delightful
in the world, and to think that the herbage which sprouts about this
lady's petticoats is peculiarly tender and succulent. It may be
fanciful, but it often seems to me that the tone with which such a young
girl says _Ma mère_ has a peculiar intensity of meaning. I am at least
not wrong in affirming that in the accent with which the
mamma--especially if she be of the well-rounded order alluded to
above--speaks of _Ma fille_ there is a kind of sacerdotal dignity.



IV


After this came two or three pictures of quite another
complexion--pictures of which a long green valley, almost in the centre
of France, makes the general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms
one delightful picture, although the country which surrounds it is by no
means one of the regions that place themselves on exhibition. It is the
old territory of the Gâtinais, which has much history, but no renown of
beauty. It is very quiet, deliciously rural, immitigably French; the
typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art--of
art, of landscape-art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look I seem to
see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall--a Lambinet, a
Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority;
the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and
vivid greens. The history of this part of France is the history of the
monarchy, and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic
tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local patois. The peasants
deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but their French is as
consecutive as that of Ollendorf.

Each side of the long valley is a continuous ridge, which offers it a
high, wooded horizon, and through the middle of it there flows a
charming stream, wandering, winding and doubling, smothered here and
there in rushes, and spreading into lily-coated reaches, beneath the
clear shadow of tall, straight, light-leaved trees. On each side of the
stream the meadows stretch away flat, clean, magnificent, lozenged
across with rows of lateral foliage, under which a cow-maiden sits on
the grass, hooting now and then, nasally, to the large-uddered browsers
in front of her. There are no hedges nor palings nor walls; it is all a
single estate. Occasionally in the meadows there rises a cluster of
red-roofed hovels--each a diminutive village. At other points, at about
half an hour's walk apart, are three charming old houses. The châteaux
are extremely different, but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each
has its points. They are very intimate with each other, so that these
points may be amicably discussed. The points in one case, however, are
remarkably strong. The little old _castel_ I mention stands directly in
the attenuated river, on an island just great enough to hold it, and the
garden-flowers grow upon the farther bank. This, of course, is a most
delightful affair. But I found something very agreeable in the aspect of
one of the others, when I made it the goal of certain of those walks
before breakfast, which of cool mornings, in the late summer, do not
fall into the category of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if one
did not do a great many things before breakfast, the work of life would
be but meagrely performed.)

The dwelling in question stands on the top of the long ridge which
encloses the comfortable valley to the south, being by its position
quite in the midst of its appurtenant acres. It is not particularly
"kept up," but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only help it to be
familiar. A grassy plateau approaches it from the edge of the hill,
bordered on one side by a short avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the
other by a dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the steep-roofed,
yellow-walled farm-buildings, and under cover of the wood a stretch of
beaten turf, where, on Sundays and holidays, the farm-servants play at
bowls. Directly before the house is a little square garden, enclosed by
a low parapet, which is interrupted by a high gateway of mossy pillars
and iron arabesques, the whole of it muffled in creeping plants. The
house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial;
it is a very proper _gentilhommière_. In a corner of the garden, at the
angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, the
_pigeonnier_, the old stone dovecot. It is a great round tower, as broad
of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extinguisher, and
a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a dove is always
fluttering.

You see all this from the windows of the drawing-room. Be sure that the
drawing-room is panelled in white and gray, with old rococo mouldings
over the doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway of the garden, with
its tangled creepers, makes a frame for the picture that lies beyond the
grassy esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to grow round a
disused stone well, placed in odd remoteness from the house (if, indeed,
it be not a relic of an earlier habitation): a picture of a wide green
country, rising beyond the unseen valley and stretching away to a far
horizon in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other windows, you
look out on the gardens proper. There are places that take one's fancy
by some accident of expression, some mystery of accident. This one is
high and breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet picturesque,
extremely cheerful and a little melancholy. It has what in the arts is
called "style," and so I have attempted to commemorate it.

Going to call on the peasants was as charming an affair as a chapter in
one of George Sand's rural tales. I went one Sunday morning with my
hostess, who knew them well and enjoyed their most garrulous confidence.
I don't mean that they told her all their secrets, but they told her a
good many; if the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd
simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morning in August, when he is
stopping at home from work and has put on his best jacket and trousers,
and is loafing at the door of his neighbour's cabin, he is a very
charming person. The peasantry in the region I speak of had admirably
good manners. The curé gave me a low account of their morals, by which
he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they were moderate church-goers.
But they have the instinct of civility and a talent for conversation;
they know how to play the host and the entertainer. By "he," just now, I
meant she quite as much; it is rare that, in speaking superlatively of
the French, in any connection, one does not think of the women even more
than of the men. They constantly strike the foreigner as a stronger
expression of the qualities of the race. On the occasion I speak of the
first room in the very humble cabins I successively visited--in some
cases, evidently, it was the only room--had been set into irreproachable
order for the day. It had usually a fine brownness of tone, generated by
the high chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the important bed, in
its dusky niche, with its flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware
in the cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet
light of the small, deeply-set window, the mixture, on all things, of
smoke-stain and the polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this "la
Rabillon" or "la mère Léger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to
be seated, and, seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles expressively
and answers abundantly every inquiry about her cow, her husband, her
bees, her eggs, her baby. The men linger half outside and half in, with
their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles with
that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much
more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they
receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with
proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them
dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the
bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their
occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance
which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or
forty thousand francs carefully put away.

And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he
knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in
scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he
deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than
one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest
of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been
accused, I believe, of pretensions to _illuminisme_; but even in his most
illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been
chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet
to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to
Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that
briefest of village-names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may
be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very
specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains--Gy of the Little Nuns. I went
with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself
opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross
perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty _calotte_, stood there a moment
in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than his words.

A rural _presbytère_ is not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le
Curé's little drawing-room reminded me of a Yankee parlour (_minus_ the
subscription-books from Hartford on the centre-table) in some
out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very
diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have
flourished in the shadow of a Yankee parlour--a rude stone image of the
Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which
he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on
slowly, for he must take the labour as he could get it; but he appealed
to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that
his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told
him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round the
statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and
expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days
afterward he came to breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his new
cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and down
alone and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality, the
personage and the occupation, made me smile; and I smiled again when,
after breakfast, I found him strolling about the garden, puffing a
cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is
something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French
parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant--a fact
which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he has
usually--or in many cases--been brought up to that life. But his
fellow-peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze down the
savoury vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute
pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of
course it is by no means every day, or every week even, that M. le Curé
breakfasts at the château; but there must nevertheless be a certain
uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a labourer, yet
he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him
sometimes to have rather a point of irony. But to the ideal curé, of
course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad
breakfasts nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent
man I speak of is the ideal curé, but I suspect he is an approach to
it; he has a grain of the epicurean to an ounce of stoicism. In the
garden-path, beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me
how he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to
believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons.
According to this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but very
distinctly, to the group of officers who had made themselves at home in
his dwelling--had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he
was obliged to meet them standing there in his _soutane_, and not out in
the fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at
his side. The scene must have been dramatic. The first of the officers
got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M.
le Curé," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractère."

Six miles away--or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal--was
an ancient town with a legend--a legend which, as a child, I read in my
lesson-book at school, marvelling at the woodcut above it, in which a
ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and
his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it
chiefly in order to mention the name of one of its promenades, which is
the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the world; the name, I mean,
not the street. The latter is called the Promenade des Belles Manières.
Could anything be finer than that? With what a sweep gentlemen must once
have taken off their hats there; how ladies must once have curtsied,
regardless of gutters, and how people must have turned out their toes as
they walked!



V


My next impressions were gathered on the margin of a southern sea--if
the Bay of Biscay indeed deserve so sympathetic a name. We generally
have a mental image beforehand of a place on which we may intend to
project ourself, and I supposed I had a tolerably vivid prevision of
Biarritz. I don't know why, but I had a singular sense of having been
there; the name always seemed to me expressive. I saw the way it lay
along its gleaming beach; I had taken in imagination long walks toward
Spain over the low cliffs, with the blue sea always to my right and the
blue Pyrenees always before me. My only fear was that my mental picture
had not been brilliant enough; but this could easily be touched up on
the spot. In truth, however, on the spot I was exclusively occupied in
toning it down. Biarritz seemed to be decidedly below its reputation; I
am at a loss to see how its reputation was made. There is a partial
explanation that is obvious enough. There is a low, square, bare brick
mansion seated on the sands, under shelter of a cliff; it is one of the
first objects to attract the attention of an arriving stranger. It is
not picturesque, it is not romantic, and even in the days of its
prosperity it never can have been impressive. It is called the Villa
Eugénie, and it explains in a great measure, as I say, the Biarritz
which the arriving stranger, with some dismay, perceives about him. It
has the aspect of one of the "cottages" of Newport during the winter
season, but is surrounded by a vegetation much less dense than the
prodigies of arborescence now so frequent at Newport. It was what the
newspapers call the "favourite resort" of the ex-Empress of the French,
who might have been seen at her imperial avocations with a good glass,
at any time, from the Casino. The Casino, I hasten to add, has quite the
air of an establishment frequented by gentlemen who look at ladies'
windows with telescopes. There are Casinos and Casinos, and that of
Biarritz is, in the summary French phrase, "impossible." Except for its
view, it is moreover very unattractive. Perched on the top of a cliff
which has just space enough to hold its immense brick foundations, it
has no garden, no promenade, no shade, no place of out-of-door
reunion--the most indispensable feature of a Casino. It turns its back
to the Pyrenees and to Spain, and looks out prettily enough over a blue
ocean to an arm of the low French coast.

Biarritz, for the rest, scrambles over two or three steep hills,
directly above the sea, in a promiscuous, many-coloured, noisy fashion.
It is a watering-place pure and simple; every house has an expensive
little shop in the basement and a still more expensive set of rooms to
let above stairs. The houses are blue and pink and green; they stick to
the hillsides as they can, and being near Spain, you try to fancy they
look Spanish. You succeed, perhaps, even a little, and are rewarded for
your zeal by finding, when you cross the border a few days afterward,
that the houses at San Sebastian look strikingly French. Biarritz is
bright, crowded, irregular, filled with many sounds, and not without a
certain second-rate pictorial quality; but it struck me as common and
cockneyfied, and my vision travelled back to modest little Etretat, by
its northern sea, as to a very much more downy couch. The south-western
coast of France has little of the exquisite charm of the Mediterranean
shore. It has of course a southern expression which in itself is always
delightful. You see a brilliant, yellow sun, with a pink-faced,
red-tiled house staring up at it. You can see here and there a trellis
and an orange-tree, a peasant-woman in a gold necklace, driving a
donkey, a lame beggar adorned with earrings, a glimpse of blue sea
between white garden-walls. But the superabundant detail of the French
Riviera is wanting; the softness, luxuriousness, enchantment.

The most pictorial thing at Biarritz is the Basque population, which
overflows from the adjacent Spanish provinces and swarms in the crooked
streets. It lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon the
curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and vociferates
continually a shrill, strange tongue, which has no discoverable affinity
with any other. The Basques look like hardier and thriftier Neapolitan
lazzaroni; if the superficial resemblance is striking, the difference is
very much in their favour. Although those specimens which I observed at
Biarritz appeared to enjoy an excess of leisure, they had nothing of a
shiftless or beggarly air, and seemed as little disposed to ask favours
as to confer them. The roads leading into Spain were dotted with them,
and here they were coming and going as if on important business--the
business of the abominable Don Carlos himself. They struck me as a very
handsome race. The men are invariably clean-shaven; smooth chins seem a
positively religious observance. They wear little round maroon-coloured
caps, like those of sailor-boys, dark stuff shirts, and curious white
shoes, made of strips of rope laid together--an article of toilet which
makes them look like honorary members of base-ball clubs. They sling
their jackets cavalier-fashion, over one shoulder, hold their heads very
high, swing their arms very bravely, step out very lightly, and, when
you meet them in the country at eventide, charging down a hillside in
companies of half a dozen, make altogether a most impressive appearance.
With their smooth chins and childish caps, they may be taken, in the
distance, for a lot of very naughty little boys; for they have always a
cigarette in their teeth.

The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into
Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm
in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind a
coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet
and silver and a pair of yellow breeches and jack-boots. If it has been
the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land
of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursion from
Biarritz is a matter to encourage visions. Everything helping--the
admirable scenery, the charming day, the operatic coachman, the
smooth-rolling carriage--I am afraid I became more visionary than it is
decent to tell of. You move toward the magnificent undulations of the
Pyrenees, as if you were going to plunge straight into them; but in
reality you travel beneath them and beside them, pass between their
expiring spurs and the sea. It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian
that you seriously attack them. But they are already extremely
vivid--none the less so that in this region they abound in suggestions
of the recent Carlist war. Their far-away peaks and ridges are crowned
with lonely Spanish watch-towers, and their lower slopes are dotted with
demolished dwellings. It was hereabouts that the fighting was most
constant. But the healing powers of nature are as remarkable as the
destructive powers of man, and the rich September landscape appeared
already to have forgotten the injuries of yesterday. Everything seemed
to me a small foretaste of Spain; I discovered an unreasonable amount of
local colour. I discovered it at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the last French
town, in a great brown church, filled with galleries and boxes, like a
playhouse--the altar and choir, indeed, looked very much like a
proscenium; at Bohébie, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream which
divides France from Spain, and which at this point offers to view the
celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned with
a decayed commemorative monument, on which, in the seventeenth century,
the affairs of Louis XIV. and the Iberian monarch were discussed in
ornamental conference; at Fuentarabia (glorious name), a mouldering
relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hendaye, at Irun, at Benteria, and
finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show
marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be
riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old
escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half
the house. It struck me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the
poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this
noble advertisement. But it represented knightly prowess, and pitiless
time had taken up the challenge. I found it a luxury to ramble through
the narrow single street of Irun and Benteria, between the
strange-coloured houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies
and the heraldic doorways.

San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set down in the
guide-books as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain. It has of course a
new quarter in the provincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafés,
barber-shops, and apartments to let), looking out upon a planted
promenade and a charming bay, locked in fortified heights, with a narrow
portal to the ocean. I walked about for two or three hours and devoted
most of my attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a
great frowning gate upon the harbour, through which you look along a
vista of gaudy house-fronts, balconies, awnings, surmounted by a narrow
strip of sky. Here the local colour was richer, the manners more naïf.
Here too was a church with a flamboyant Jesuit façade and an interior
redolent of Spanish Catholicism. There was a life-sized effigy of the
Virgin perched upon a table beside the great altar (she appeared to have
been walking abroad in a procession), which I looked at with extreme
interest. She seemed to me a heroine, a solid Spanish person, as perfect
a reality as Don Quixote or Saint Theresa. She was dressed in an
extraordinary splendour of laces, brocades and jewels, her coiffure and
complexion were of the finest, and she evidently would answer to her
name if you should speak to her. Mustering up the stateliest title I
could think of, I addressed her as Dona Maria of the Holy Office;
whereupon she looked round the great dusky, perfumed church, to see
whether we were alone, and then she dropped her fringed eyelids and held
out her hand to be kissed. She was the sentiment of Spanish Catholicism;
gloomy, yet bedizened, emotional as a woman and mechanical as a doll.
After a moment I grew afraid of her, and went slinking away. After this
I didn't really recover my spirits until I had the satisfaction of
hearing myself addressed as "Caballero." I was hailed with this epithet
by a ragged infant, with sickly eyes and a cigarette in his lips, who
invited me to cast a copper into the sea, that he might dive for it; and
even with these limitations, the sensation seemed worth the cost of my
excursion. It appeared kinder, to my gratitude, to make the infant dive
upon the pavement.

A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, to be present at a
bull-fight; but I suppose my right to descant upon this entertainment
should be measured less by the gratification it afforded me than by the
question whether there is room in literature for another chapter on this
subject. I incline to think there is not; the national pastime of Spain
is the best-described thing in the world. Besides, there are other
reasons for not describing it. It is extremely disgusting, and one
should not describe disgusting things--except (according to the new
school) in novels, where they have not really occurred, and are invented
on purpose. Description apart, one has taken a certain sort of pleasure
in the bull-fight, and yet how is one to state gracefully that one has
taken pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record
your pleasure, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your
delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel as if
you were wanting in suppleness. Thus much I can say, at any rate, that
as there had been no bull-fights in that part of the country during the
Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman, and child of
them comes under this denomination) returned to their precious pastime
with peculiar zest. The spectacle, therefore, had an unusual splendour.
Under these circumstances it is highly effective. The weather was
beautiful; the near mountains peeped over the top of the vast open
arena, as if they too were curious; weary of disembowelled horses and
posturing _espadas_, the spectator (in the boxes) might turn away and
look through an unglazed window at the empty town and the cloud-shadowed
sea. But few of the native spectators availed themselves of this
privilege. Beside me sat a blooming matron, in a white lace mantilla,
with three very juvenile daughters; and if these ladies sometimes yawned
they never shuddered. For myself, I confess that if I sometimes
shuddered I never yawned. A long list of bulls was sacrificed, each of
whom had pretensions to originality. The _banderillos_, in their silk
stockings and embroidered satin costumes, skipped about with a great
deal of attitude; the _espada_ folded his arms within six inches of the
bull's nose and stared him out of countenance; yet I thought the bull,
in any case, a finer fellow than any of his tormentors, and I thought
his tormentors finer fellows than the spectators. In truth, we were all,
for the time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull-fight will, to a
certain extent, bear looking at, but it will not bear thinking of. There
was a more innocent effect in what I saw afterward, when we all came
away, in the late afternoon, as the shadows were at their longest: the
bright-coloured southern crowd, spreading itself over the grass, and the
women, with mantillas and fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling up
and down before the mountains and the sea.



IX

AN ENGLISH EASTER

1877

I


It may be said of the English, as is said of the council of war in
Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the
rehearsal, that when they do agree, their unanimity is wonderful. They
differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of
Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the merits of the Reverend Arthur
Tooth, the genius of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters;
but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to
those social observances on which respectability has set her seal
England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with
her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual
character is very positive, very independent, very much made up
according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling
eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this
peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other
country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing,
in the same way, at the same time--using the same slang, wearing the
same hats and neckties, collecting the same china-plates, playing the
same game of lawn-tennis or of polo, admiring the same professional
beauty. The monotony of such a spectacle would soon become oppressive if
the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the
performers for great freedom of action; he finds a good deal of
entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity
of the individual with this perpetual tribute to usage. Of course, in
all civilised societies, the tribute to usage is constantly paid; if it
is less apparent in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think,
because individual independence is greater, but because usage is more
sparsely established. Where custom can be ascertained people certainly
follow it; but for one definite precedent in American life there are
fifty in English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I
have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal
force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by
social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the
manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting
idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking
example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is, of
course, the universal church-going. In the sight of the English people
getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its
hat, and drawing on its gloves, and taking its wife on its arm, and
making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's,
respectability's, propriety's sake, taking its way to a place of worship
appointed by the State, in which it repeats the formulas of a creed to
which it attaches no positive sense, and listens to a sermon over the
length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles--in this exhibition
there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he
hardly knows whether to regard as a great force or as a great infirmity.
He inclines, on the whole, to pronounce the spectacle sublime, because
it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a
people trained in these manœuvres to move all together under a common
direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous weight and
cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian
military system in consolidating the German people and making them
available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful
to say that the military punctuality which characterises the English
observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A
nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been
stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really
the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his
_entourage_ I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young
unmarried men go to church, the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members
of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance.
No one in England is literally irresponsible, that perhaps is the
shortest way of describing the nation. Every one is free and every one
is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course
a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to
propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English
conscience, which is, after all, such a powerful factor. With us there
is infinitely less responsibility; but there is also, I think, less
freedom.)

The way in which the example of the more luxurious classes imposes
itself upon the less luxurious may of course be noticed in smaller
matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem
trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation, nothing, however,
is trivial. So I may cite the practice of banishing the servants from
the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and accordingly, through the
length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest
pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is
blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those
at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of
waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in
English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary.
But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into
each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it
for gentility's sake. My instance may seem feeble, and I speak honestly
when I say I might give others, forming part of an immense body of
prescriptive usage, to which a society possessing in the largest manner,
both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights
and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do
not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and
arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that
sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the
rigidity of a tradition which has struck one at first as mechanical, a
reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The
sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that
even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English
society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of
which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines.
The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes
out of town, and that if he have no mind to be left as lonely as Marius
on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a
temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of
unexpectedness in this prompt re-emigration of a body of people who, but
a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for
the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country,
where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time,
it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life.
Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as
if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close,
and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own
affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that
city, I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of
my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of
snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an
uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant, one's
habitual stall at the Théâtre Français, one's usual fiacre on the
cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that
the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions; and you
may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without
invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh
primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom
of the bare tree-masses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In
England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse,
and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of
what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull,
moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not
without reason, though at the moment I speak of, their dulness must have
been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and
liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes
Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity--the moment
at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the
game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary,
as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept
lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an
American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in
which occasions for "a little change" are made use of. All this speaks
to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted
in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more
money, and they have a much higher relish for active leisure. Leisure,
fortune, and the love of sport--these things are implied in English
society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter
that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the
luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence
we shall be having the Whitsuntide holidays, which I am told are even
more of a season of revelry than Easter, and from this point to
midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The men of
business and the professional men partake in equal measure of these
agreeable diversions, and I was interested in hearing a lady whose
husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving
town with her for ten days, and though Easter was a very nice "little
break," they really amused themselves more during the later festival,
which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly
probable, and admired so dramatic an interfusion of work and play. If my
phrase has a slightly ironical sound, this is purely accidental. A large
appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know
what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and
judged by this measure we Americans are rather incompetent. Such
holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is
sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy on our hands.
Acknowledgement made of English industry, however (our own stands in no
need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes
I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons
obtainable for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is
infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the
arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their
superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of
civilisation. The young men who are preparing for the stem realities of
life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their
terms but half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and
Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number
of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens,
lawns, and parks.



II


Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is
really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is
suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge
dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a sort of hush
steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is
not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about
Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row--a
spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a
"bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a
Christmas-day, and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude.
I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character,
for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it
would not come round again for another year. This information was given
me on the occasion of that surprising interruption of one's relations
with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I
was told that all the washerwomen were intoxicated, and that, as it
would take them some time to revive, I must not count upon a relay of
"fresh things." I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this
statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning
back. One of the incidental _agréments_ of life in the latter city had
been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman
with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her
head a frilled and fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible
advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_ was
not in liquor is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always
grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her
talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp,
dense hair, and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I
talked with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved
about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her
light step carried her off again, talking, to the door, and with a
brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her,
leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a
washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog,
and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a
horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky!
She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost
frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my
fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not
strictly accurate, and that at the end of three months I had another
array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing
occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched,
though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the
lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were
very much _en évidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for getting
an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the
background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets
were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the
"masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I
strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most
unfavourable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left
for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the
shifting gloom of the sky, the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of
weatherproof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway
stations overflowed, and the Thames embankment was covered. The
"masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when
observed through the distorting medium of London bad weather. There are
indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London
holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at
superficially, the British capital is one of the most interesting of
cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most
felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than
any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on
festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large
numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human
life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic want of charm. A
Christmas-day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you
walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you
look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog,
pierced with their straight stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of
a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curbstone.
There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the
narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me
rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker
Street--a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity
of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying
monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no
claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London,
however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of
a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details.
London is pictorial in spite of details--from its dark-green, misty
parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its
cloud-ceiling, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put
on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is
there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke,
such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such
contemplations this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only part
of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the
feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated
immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners
you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain
interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so
much human life gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon you
with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far
from it. But they are of every possible kind, and that is the interest
of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter
season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even
with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from
Piccadilly across the Green Park and through that of St. James. The
parks were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling
about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over
the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of
people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and
succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to
advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the
church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact, and
beneath the gothic arches the odour was not that of incense. I slowly
eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that
one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent
disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly
speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are
too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation. Go to the
theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find
that, before you arrive, there are people enough in the field. You are a
tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too many
companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of
thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were,
swallows up quality, and perpetual association is rather irritating.
This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a
"park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a
few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the
breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which
circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the
profane pleasure-grounds of London, in the midst of "superfluous herds,"
and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great
English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest
people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe
that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without
feeling this impression confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have
sometimes felt it to be rather shaken in the presence of a limited
group. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger
percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to
the upper class I suppose this is generally granted; but I should extend
it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the
observer by their good looks, they must be very good-looking indeed.
They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their
garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common
with some of the more romantic forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of
misery--an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is
especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the
women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed
boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not
too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses,"
bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The
proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very
striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact
that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A
very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the
distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes
from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted,
misbegotten, and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in
every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest
an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the
observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-moulded
faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and
handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised
heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as
absolutely unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious
class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the
people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are
strikingly numerous--especially among the younger ones. Here the same
distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than
the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are
physically very well turned out. Their features are finished, composed,
as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and
remoter neighbours, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and
compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and
inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of
hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it
may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of
the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West End
pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm,
fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among
the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have, it at heart
to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also
very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are
uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent
types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilisations.
American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness;
English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few
grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them have a high
pictorial value.



III


The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most
striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since
I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr.
George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter
period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical
agitator of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse
desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful
profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens
but to the refined. But he was a useful and honourable man, and his own
people gave him an honourable burial I emerged accidentally into
Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one
I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed
to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up
beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play.
Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy;
but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be
magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand
by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had
the character of a great popular "manifestation" The hearse was followed
by very few carriages, but the _cortège_, of pedestrians stretched away
in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly, on a
scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was broken by
a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant Germans
that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the rest it
was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the
population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and
women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had
scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and
were making a sort of solemn "lark" of it. Very solemn it all
was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an
interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom
I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the
wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures
which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of
strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly
sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found
the whole affair rather suggestive. My impression rose not simply from
the radical, or, as I may say for the sake of colour, the revolutionary,
emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but
from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day
the Queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking
straight down into Westminster and over the royal procession, were
gathered a group of banners and festoons inscribed in big staring
letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police department
might easily have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the
Tichborne claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily
demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several
sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country.
These impertinent standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as
if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental
Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the
police-department is more sensitive, and where revolutionary placards
are not observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la
Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both of the occasions I
speak of with the admirable English practice of letting people
alone--with the good sense and the good humour and even the good taste
of it. It was this that I found impressive, as I watched the
"manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans--the fact that the
mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the excellent
quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear
and comfortable.

When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's
friends--three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was
hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was
not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the
rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one
plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of
enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the
unanimity I began by talking about), and to restrict as much as possible
the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so
much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the
limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might have projected
in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due cogitation I
paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Rochester by the
way, and it was of this momentous journey that I proposed, in beginning
these remarks, to give an account. But I have dallied so much by the way
that I have come almost to my rope's end without reaching my first
stage. I should have begun, artistically, by relating that I put myself
in the humour for remote adventure by going down the Thames on a penny
steamboat to--the Tower. This was on the Saturday before Easter, and the
City was as silent as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my childhood,
and having a theory that from such memories the dust of the ages had
better not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable
walls. But the Tower is very good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed
it would seem to my maturer vision; very gray and historical, with the
look that vivifies--rather lividly indeed--the past I could not get into
it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was consequently
relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers
in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through
the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers
of the garrison, who seemed to connect the place with important events.



IV


At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I espied from
the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway.
There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and
one has read about it in Dickens, whose house of Gadshill was a couple
of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and
Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent,
for our own time, the spirit of the land. I found this to be quite the
case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a
talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her
counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the
house often made his appearance in the town "Oh, bless you, sir," she
said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop
on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on
the Friday." (I should remark that I probably do not repeat the days of
the week as she gave them.) "He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it
always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I _do_ think
Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he
couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop
on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of
little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and
the river toward neighbouring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses,
of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull
quaintness of gable or window. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old
lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed
slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the
great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard
Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor
travellers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and
entertainment gratis, and fourpence in the morning to go on their way
withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately
been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted
to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither
a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveller who avails himself of the
testamentary fourpence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham
without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy
Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover to
join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which
forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, lighted up in the dusk, as I
measured it up and down, with the red coats of the vespertinal soldier
quartered at the various barracks of Chatham.

The cathedral of Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an
awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and
effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But
within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the
vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and
breaks the sacred perspective of the aisle. Here, as at Canterbury, you
ascend a high range of steps, to pass through the small door in this
wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester
cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so
happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go
barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of
Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory
gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I
remember a kind of haunted-looking deanery, if that be the technical
name, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that
took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come
circling and clamouring around it. Better than these things, however, I
remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a very noble and imposing
ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public
garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the
place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is
agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the
destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I
sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what
was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great
many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction
or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached
expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of
softness and grimness, have an undefinable fascination for the eye.
English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fail.
Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the
twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral I have seen many a
mouldering castle, but I remember in no single mass of ruin more of the
helpless, amputated look.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral
stands amid grass and trees, with a cultivated margin all round it, and
is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gatehouse,
you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and
magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more
beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk, beneath
the walls, from the gateway of the close to the farther end of the last
chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I
can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general
impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of
Canterbury has a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more
perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman
arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view
superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine
agglomeration of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches
had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other
its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the
roof, between them, sits a huge gothic tower, which is one of the latest
portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so
crumbled and blunted and suffused is it by time and weather, like the
rest of the structure it has a magnificent colour--a sort of rich dull
yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly
appreciable from the cloisters on the farther side of the church--the
side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of;
the side that looks toward a damp old clerical house, lurking behind a
brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats
playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is
somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle--a quadrangle serving as a
playground to a King's School, and adorned externally with a very
precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This
cloisters is not "kept up;" is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated,
and of course very sketchable. The old black arches and capitals are
various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of
crooked grave-stones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass.
Out of the cloisters opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up
either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble,
lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a
tunnel, without columns or brackets. The place is now given up to dust
and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room
of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two
or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up
and make out the faint ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon
the brown ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an
idea." From one of the angles of the cloisters you are recommended by
the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches
itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as
broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away
to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they drop
from the topmost shelf. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of
course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place
is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down
at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit
of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late
in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a
service in the choir, but that was well over, and I had the place to
myself. The verger, who had some pushing-about of benches to attend to,
turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the
side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I
had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I
shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was
stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood;
his hands were crossed upon his breast, and his pointed toes rested upon
a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image
of a gallant knight His name was Edward Plantagenet, and his sobriquet
was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the
beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I
too, as I stood there, lost the sense of death in a momentary impression
of personal nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from
other famous knights. In this same chapel for many a year stood the
shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent
in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but
Henry VIII. swept away everything else in his famous short cut to
reform. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his
ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that
his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was
transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a
priceless relic, and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims.
It was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade
came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which is a
magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till
I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled the
inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of further
desecration. While I stood there a violent thunderstorm broke over the
cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through
the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the darkness which
seemed to deepen and flash in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell,
made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of history. I
emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the evening,
and I splashed back to my inn and sat in an uncomfortable chair by the
coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable _Memorials of
Canterbury_, and wondering over the musty appointments and meagre
resources of English hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in
compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose) the "Fleur-de-lis" The name
was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to let it attract me to the
inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered.



X

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER

1877


I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess
that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore,
taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this
dishonourable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of
it. I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected
necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it--that I
had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you
don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you
have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or,
gazing along the empty vista of the Drive, in Hyde Park, have beheld,
for almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But
little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that
I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis--either on the
first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with
the members of Parliament, or on the twelfth when the grouse-shooting
began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these
were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the
departure of everything genteel, and the three millions of persons who
remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having lingered in town, I
have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I
have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and
steal abroad only under cover of the darkness--a line of conduct imposed
by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly
papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow
themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed
always had a theory that few things are pleasanter than during the hot
weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to
one's self.

These majestic conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan
sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be
rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of
powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely
hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The
present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year
is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the
people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best
(or the worst) even the highest flights of the thermometer in the
British Islands betray a broken wing. People live with closed windows in
August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no
appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in
England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable
tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a
more obvious ornament of the market at midsummer than at Christmas. This
matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best
examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners
finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost
ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the
country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as
"English comfort"--is a limited and restricted, an essentially private,
affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English
fruit as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well
what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone
of contemptuous generalisation by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen.
They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their
hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the
stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose
grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and, after
a long delay reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable
gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon
investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only things of
succulence that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it
seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was
as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my
anecdote seemed disposed to generalise: this was sufficiently the case,
I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that on a thousand
charming estates the most beautiful peaches and melons were at that
moment ripening under glass. My auditors tossed their heads, of course,
at the beautiful estates and the glass; and indeed at their ascetic
hostelry close to Buckingham Palace such a piece of knowledge was but
scantily consoling.

It is to a more public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger
in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I
have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an
appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at
this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But
one's liking for London--a stranger's liking at least--is at the best an
anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly less
difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I
am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis
a thousand sources of interest, entertainment, and delight: what I mean
is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the
place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusky,
fierce and unmerciful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at
last with an active satisfaction, and finds something warm and
comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its
tremendous pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that
every one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing.
If it has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign
cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent
diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the
absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now
made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open
air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither
the seat, the ice, nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to
your profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of
these delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes
of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is
idle--every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be
accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces
a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic
constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of
English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a
stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear
in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a
good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as
we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a
pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are
too refined, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to
add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing,
quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own; they have
those special resources to which I alluded a moment since. They are
people of fortune, and are naturally independent of communistic
pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have
your _café noir_ handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder
and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house.
In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will
sally forth and encamp for the evening, under a row of coloured lamps,
upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess
live on a single floor, up several pair of stairs. They are, however, I
think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently
in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door
would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger
of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social
inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight
into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how
serious a danger it appears, and how good--given the texture of English
life--are some of his reasons for wishing not to expose himself.

The consideration of these reasons, however, would lead us very far from
the potential little tables for ices in--where shall I say?--in Oxford
Street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should
hover about these articles of furniture. I am afraid they would not
strike us as happily situated. In such matters everything hangs
together, and I am certain that the customs of the Boulevard des
Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonise with the scenery of
the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a
detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle--these, I
confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair.
Yet at the season of which I write, one's social studies must at the
least be studies of low life, for wherever one may go for a stroll or to
spend the summer afternoon, the unfashionable side of things is
uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who
are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are
always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently
pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your
wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of the
recumbent British tramp. You perceive among them some rich
possibilities. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their
purple necks and ear-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats,
make them look like stage-villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do
them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of
penal servitude--that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some
weaker human head with those huge square heels that are turned up to the
summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are
sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it
is their look of having walked over half England, and of being
confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic
attractiveness. These six square feet of brown grass are their present
sufficiency; but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next,
and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they
might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.

The month of August is so uncountenanced in London that going a few days
since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but
half a dinner. The celebrated hotel had put out its stoves and locked up
its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little
expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London
August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban
dining-places. I know not how it may be at this time with Richmond, but
the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to the
element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English
pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the
Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All well-bred
people leave London after the first week in August, _ergo_ those who
remain behind are not well-bred, and cannot therefore rise to the
conception of a "fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready?
I had other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I
hasten to declare that during the period of good-breeding the dinner at
Greenwich is the most amusing of all dinners. It begins with fish and it
continues with fish: what it ends with--except songs and speeches and
affectionate partings--I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid
reversed; for I do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature
is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly
indiscreet, I should risk an allusion to the particular banquet which
was the occasion of my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich cuisine.
I would affirm that it is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever
and distinguished men, before the large windows that look out upon the
broad brown Thames. The ships swim by confidently, as if they were part
of the entertainment and put down in the bill; the light of the
afternoon fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash
them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. We
partake of any number of those sauces with which, according to the
French adage, one could swallow one's grandmother with a good
conscience. To speak of the particular merits of my companions would
indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a
high appreciation of the frankness and robustness of English
conviviality. The stranger--the American at least--who finds himself in
the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose
becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something
which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness
of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in
the magnificent temperament of the people. This seems to him one of the
finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge
from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention.
It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old
society--a society in which every one that a newly-arrived observer
meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic
identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard
of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it.
There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose
songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to
the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must
needs be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the
gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming
voice and the most finished art.

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old
park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous
observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take
passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the
Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a
stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an
irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a
loss how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to
Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being
afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the
fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the
crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European
cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has
expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and
miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they
are the sooty fronts: in buildings so very expressionless it is
impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of
the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to
reflect the dismal image. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the
universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black
barges; above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks
and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing
steamer is dingy and gritty--it belches a sable cloud that keeps you
company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who
belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an
harmonious grayness; and the whole picture, glazed over with the
glutinous London mist, becomes a masterly composition. But it is very
impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and though
it is ugly it is not insignificant. Like so many of the aspects of
English civilisation that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the
merit of expressing something very serious. Viewed in this intellectual
light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced
warehouses, the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly
suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid
detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the
British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical magnificence
hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I
don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look
off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark,
hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions
are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous
piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British
empire aforesaid.

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive and unprofitable
reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the
Greenwich observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The
sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at
first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it
as a child, in woodcuts, in school-geographies, and in the corners of
large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended
in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung
so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these
corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house, standing
among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most
engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an immense
pleasure to hurl one's self down this curving precipice. Close at hand
was usually something printed about something being at such and such a
number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague
wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a
mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the
difficult and fascinating parts of geography--the countries of
unintentional outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet
there it stood the other day, the precise point from which the great
globe is measured; there was the plain little façade, with the
old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so
delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old
to find that I was not even tempted to begin. There are indeed a great
many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the
most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and
footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all
its own. It is filled with magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which I
know nothing but that they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts,
planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth
and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty
of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the
tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and
the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the water-side, and the
great pompous buildings, designed by Inigo Jones, of the old Hospital,
which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into
a kind of naval academy.

Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of
the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door
open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath
Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was--a great
green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing
cricket I always admire an English common; it may be curtailed and
cockneyfied, as this one was--which had lamp-posts stuck about on its
turf and a fresh-painted banister all around--but it is sure to be one
of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if
the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English
greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way
the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down
their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the
British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap
upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane
in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him
where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich,
and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again
by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent
my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a
nursery of British valour. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon
another common, where local colour was still more intense. The scene was
very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and, the evening
being beautiful, it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk.
There were half a dozen cricket matches, both civil and military. At one
end of this peaceful _campus martius_, which stretches over a hill-top,
rises an interminable façade--one of the fronts of the artillery
barracks. It has a very honourable air, and more windows and doors, I
imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade
before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept
places of ingress to officers' quarters. Everything it looks out upon is
military--the distinguished college (where the poor young man whom it
would perhaps be premature to call the last of the Bonapartes lately
studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp--a collection
of the tidiest plank huts--on the other; a hospital, on a
well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in the town below
there are a great many more military matters--barracks on an immense
scale; a dock-yard that presents an interminable dead wall to the street;
an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be
"five miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame
the most craven spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way
to the railway station at the bottom of the hill; but before departing
I had spent half an hour in strolling about the common in vague
consciousness of certain emotions that are called into play (I speak but
for myself) by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of this
great country. The glimpse may be of the slightest; it stirs a peculiar
sentiment. I know not what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an
admiration for the greatness of England. The greatness of England; that
is a very off-hand phrase, and of course I don't pretend to use it
analytically. I use it sentimentally--as it sounds in the ears of any
American who finds in English history the sacred source of his own
national affection. I think of the great part that England has played in
human affairs, the great space she has occupied, her tremendous might,
her far-stretching sway. That these clumsily-general ideas should be
suggested by the sight of some infinitesimal fraction of the English
administrative system may seem to indicate a cast of fancy too
hysterical; but if so, I must plead guilty to the weakness. Why should a
sentry-box more or less set one thinking of the glory of this little
island, which has found in her bosom the means of so vast a dominion?
This is more than I can say; and all I shall attempt to say is, that in
the difficult days that are now elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds
his meditations singularly quickened. It is the dramatic element in
English history that he has chiefly cared for, sand he finds himself
wondering whether the dramatic epoch is completely closed. It is a
moment when all the nations of Europe seem to be doing something, and he
waits to see what England, who has done so much, will do. He has been
meeting of late a good many of his country-people--Americans who live on
the Continent and pretend to speak with assurance of continental ways of
feeling. These people have been passing through London, and many of them
are in that irritated condition of mind which appears to be the portion
of the American sojourner in the British metropolis when he is not given
up to the delights of the historic sentiment. They have affirmed with
emphasis that the continental nations have ceased to care a straw for
what England thinks, that her traditional prestige is completely
extinct, and that the affairs of Europe will be settled quite
independently of the power whose capital is on the Thames. England will
do nothing, will risk nothing; there is no cause bad enough for her not
to find a selfish interest in it--there is no cause good enough for her
to fight about it. Poor old England is exploded; it is about time she
should haul in her nets. To all this the sympathetic stranger replies
that, in the first place, he doesn't believe a word of it; and, in the
second place, he doesn't care a fig for it--care, that is, what the
continental nations think. If the greatness of England were really
waning, it would be to him as a personal grief; and as he strolls about
the breezy common of Woolwich, with all those mementoes of British
dominion around him, he is quite too keenly exhilarated to be distracted
by such vapours.

He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that England would do
something--something striking and powerful, which should be at once
characteristic and unexpected. He asks himself what she can do, and he
remembers that this greatness of England which he so much admires was
formerly much exemplified in her "taking" something. Can't she "take"
something now? There is the _Spectator_, who wants her to occupy Egypt:
can't she occupy Egypt? The _Spectator_ considers this her moral
duty--inquires even whether she has a right not to bestow the blessings
of her beneficent rule upon the down-trodden Fellaheen, I found myself
in company with an acute young Frenchman a day or two after this
eloquent plea for a partial annexation of the Nile had appeared in the
most ingenious of journals. Some allusion was made to it, and my
companion proceeded to pronounce it a finished example of British
hypocrisy. I don't know how powerful a defence I made of it, but while I
read it I certainly had been carried away by it. I recalled it while I
pursued my contemplations, but I recalled at the same time that sadly
prosaic speech of Mr. Gladstone's to which it had been a reply. Mr.
Gladstone had said that England had much more urgent duties than the
occupation of Egypt: she had to attend to the great questions of----What
were the great questions? Those of local taxation and the liquor-laws!
Local taxation and the liquor-laws! The phrase, to my ears, just then
made a painful discord. These were not the things I had been thinking
of; it was not as she should bend anxiously over these doubtless
interesting subjects that the sympathetic stranger would seem to see
England in his favourite posture--that, as Macaulay says, of hurling
defiance at her foes. Of course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but
Mr. Gladstone was not a sympathetic stranger.



XI

TWO EXCURSIONS

1877

I


They differed greatly from each other, but each had an interest of its
own. There seemed (as regards the first) a general consensus of opinion
as to its being a great pity that a stranger in England should miss the
Derby day. Every one assured me that this was the great festival of the
English people, and the most characteristic of national holidays. So
much, since it had to do with horse-flesh, I could readily believe. Had
not the newspapers been filled for weeks with recurrent dissertations
upon the animals concerned in the ceremony? and was not the event, to
the nation at large, only imperceptibly less momentous than the other
great question of the day--the fate of empires and the reapportionment
of the East? The space allotted to sporting intelligence in a compact,
eclectic, "intellectual" journal like the _Pall Mall Gazette_, had
seemed to me for some time past a measure of the hold of such questions
upon the British mind. These things, however, are very natural in a
country in which in "society" you are liable to make the acquaintance of
some such syllogism as the following. You are seated at dinner next a
foreign lady, who has on her other hand a native gentleman, by whom she
is being instructed in the art of getting the light point-of-view for
looking at English life. I profit by their conversation, and I learn
that this point-of-view is apparently the saddle. "You see, English
life," says the gentleman, "is really English country life. It's the
country that is the basis of English society. And you see, country life
is--well, it's the _hunting_. It's the hunting that is at the bottom of
it all." In other words, "the hunting" is the basis of English society.
Duly initiated into this interpretation of things, the American observer
is prepared for the colossal proportions of the annual pilgrimage to
Epsom. This pilgrimage, however, I was assured, though still well worth
taking part in, is by no means so characteristic as in former days. It
is now performed in a large measure by rail, and the spectacle on the
road has lost its ancient brilliancy. The road has been given up more
and more to the populace and the strangers, and has ceased to be graced
by the presence of ladies. Nevertheless, as a man and a stranger, I was
strongly recommended to take it; for the return from the Derby is still,
with all its abatements, a classic spectacle.

I mounted upon a four-horse coach, a charming coach, with a yellow body,
and handsome, clean-flanked leaders; placing myself beside the coachman,
as I had been told this was the point of vantage. The coach was one of
the vehicles of the new fashion--the fashion of public conveyances
driven, for the entertainment of themselves and of the public, by
gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby day all the coaches that start from
the classic headquarters--the "White Horse," in Piccadilly--and stretch
away from London toward a dozen different and well-selected goals, had
been dedicated to the Epsom road. The body of the vehicle is empty, as
no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thirteen places on the
top. On the Derby day, however, a properly laden coach carries a company
of hampers and champagne-baskets in its inside places. I must add that
on this occasion my companion was by exception a professional whip, who
proved an entertaining cicerone. Other companions there were, perched in
the twelve places behind me, whose social quality I made less of a point
of testing--though in the course of the expedition their various
characteristics, under the influence of champagne, expanded so freely as
greatly to facilitate the operation. We were a society of
exotics--Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans. There were only two Britons, and
these, according to my theory, were Australians--an antipodal bride and
groom, on a centripetal wedding-tour.

The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of London, is sufficiently
pretty; but the part of it which most took my fancy was a suburban
district--the classic neighbourhood of Clapham. The vision of Clapham
had been a part of the furniture of my imagination--the vision of its
respectable common, its evangelical society, and its goodly brick
mansions of the Georgian era. I now beheld these objects for the first
time, and I thought them very charming. This epithet, indeed, scarcely
applies to the evangelical society, which naturally, on the morning of
the Derby day, and during the desecrating progress of the Epsom
revellers, was not much in the foreground. But all around the verdant,
if cockneyfied common, are ranged commodious houses of a sober red
complexion, from under whose neoclassic pediments you expect to see a
mild-faced lady emerge--a lady in a cottage-bonnet and mittens,
distributing tracts from a little satchel. It would take an energetic
piety, however, to stem the current of heterogeneous vehicles which at
about this point takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears them in
its rumbling, rattling tide. The concourse of wheeled conveyances of
every possible order here becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top
of the coach proportionately absorbing. You begin to perceive that the
brilliancy of the road has in truth departed, and that well-appointed
elegance is not the prevailing characteristic. But when once you have
grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous. You perceive that
you are "in," as the phrase is, for something vulgar, something
colossally, unimaginably, heroically vulgar; all that is necessary is to
accept this situation and look out for illustrations. Beside you, before
you, behind you, is the mighty London populace, taking its _ébats_. You
get for the first time a notion of the London population at large. It
has piled itself into carts, into omnibuses, into every possible and
impossible species of "trap." A large proportion of it is of course on
foot, trudging along the perilous margin of the middle way, in such
comfort as may be gathered from fifteen miles' dodging of broken shins.
The smaller the vehicle, the more rat-like the animal that drags it, the
more numerous and ponderous its human freight; and as every one is
nursing in his lap a parcel of provender as big as himself, wrapped in
ragged newspapers, it is not surprising that roadside halts are
frequent, and that the taverns all the way to Epsom (it is wonderful how
many there are) are encompassed by dense groups of dusty pilgrims,
indulging liberally in refreshment for man and beast. And when I say man
I must by no means be understood to exclude woman. The female contingent
on the Derby day is not the least remarkable part of the London
multitude. Every one is prepared for an "outing," but the women are even
more brilliantly and resolutely prepared than the men; it is the best
possible chance to observe the various types of the British female of
the lower orders. The lady in question is usually not ornamental. She is
useful, robust, prolific, excellently fitted to play the somewhat
arduous part allotted to her in the great scheme of English
civilisation. But she has not those graces which enable her to become
easily and harmoniously festal. On smaller holidays--or on simple
working-days--in London crowds, I have often thought her handsome;
thought, that is, that she has handsome points, and that it was not
impossible to see how it is that she helps to make the English race, on
the whole, the comeliest in the world. But at Epsom she is too stout,
too hot, too red, too thirsty, too boisterous, too strangely accoutred.
And yet I wish to do her justice; so I must add that if there is
something to which an American cannot refuse a tribute of admiration in
the gross plebeian jollity of the Derby day, it is not evident why these
lusty she-revellers should not get part of the credit of it. The
striking thing, the interesting thing, both on the outward drive and on
the return, was that the holiday was so frankly, heartily,
good-humouredly taken. The people that of all peoples is habitually the
most governed by decencies, proprieties, rigidities of conduct, was, for
one happy day, unbuttoning its respectable straight-jacket and letting
its powerful, carnal, healthy temperament take the air. In such a
spectacle there was inevitably much that was unlucky and unprofitable;
these things came uppermost chiefly on the return, when demoralisation
was supreme, when the temperament in question had quite taken what the
French call the key of the fields, and seemed in no mood to come back
and give an account of itself. For the rest, to be dressed with a kind
of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and violently flushed, to laugh
perpetually at everything and at nothing, thoroughly to enjoy, in short,
a momentous occasion--all this is not, in simple persons of the more
susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime.

The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and disposed by nature
herself in sympathetic prevision of the sporting passion. It is
something like the crater of a volcano, without the mountain. The outer
rim is the course proper; the space within it is a vast, shallow, grassy
concavity in which vehicles are drawn up and beasts tethered, and in
which the greater part of the multitude--the mountebanks, the
betting-men, and the myriad hangers-on of the scene--are congregated.
The outer margin of the uplifted rim in question is occupied by the
grand stand, the small stands, the paddock. The day was exceptionally
beautiful; the charming sky was spotted over with little idle-looking,
loafing, irresponsible clouds; the Epsom Downs went swelling away as
greenly as in a coloured sporting-print, and the wooded uplands, in the
middle distance, looked as innocent and pastoral as if they had never
seen a policeman or a rowdy. The crowd that spread itself over this
immense expanse was the richest representation of human life that I have
ever looked upon. One's first fate after arriving, if one is perched
upon a coach, is to see the coach guided, by means best known to the
coachman himself, through the tremendous press of vehicles and
pedestrians, introduced into a precinct roped off and guarded from
intrusion save under payment of a fee, and then drawn up alongside of
the course, as nearly as possible opposite the grand stand and the
winning post. Here you have only to stand up in your place--on tiptoe,
it is true, and with a good deal of stretching--to see the race fairly
well. But I hasten to add that seeing the race is indifferent
entertainment. If I might be Irish on the occasion of a frolic, I would
say that in the first place you do not see it at all, and in the second
place you perceive it to be not much worth the seeing. It may be very
fine in quality, but in quantity it is inappreciable. The horses and
their jockeys first go dandling and cantering along the course to the
starting-point, looking as insubstantial as sifted sunbeams. Then there
is a long wait, during which, of the sixty thousand people present (my
figures are imaginary) thirty thousand affirm positively that they have
started, and thirty thousand as positively deny it. Then the whole sixty
thousand are suddenly resolved into unanimity by the sight of a dozen
small jockey-heads whizzing along a very distant sky-line. In a shorter
space of time than it takes me to write it, the whole thing is before
you, and for the instant it is anything but beautiful. A dozen furiously
revolving arms--pink, green, orange, scarlet, white--whacking the flanks
of as many straining steeds; a glimpse of this, and the spectacle is
over. The spectacle, however, is of course an infinitesimally small part
of the purpose of Epsom and the interest of the Derby. The interest is
in having money in the affair, and doubtless those most interested do
not trouble themselves particularly to watch the race. They learn soon
enough whether they are, in the English phrase, to the good or to the
bad.

When the Derby stakes had been carried off by a horse of which I confess
I am barbarous enough to have forgotten the name, I turned my back to
the running, for all the world as if I too were largely "interested,"
and sought entertainment in looking at the crowd. The crowd was very
animated; that is the most succinct description I can give of it. The
horses of course had been removed from the vehicles, so that the
pedestrians were free to surge against the wheels and even to a certain
extent to scale and overrun the carriages. This tendency became most
pronounced when, as the mid-period of the day was reached, the process
of lunching began to unfold itself and every coach-top to become the
scene of a picnic. From this moment, at the Derby, demoralisation
begins. I was in a position to observe it, all around me, in the most
characteristic forms. The whole affair, as regards the conventional
rigidities I spoke of a while since, becomes a real _dégringolade_. The
shabbier pedestrians bustle about the vehicles, staring up at the lucky
mortals who are perched in a kind of tormentingly near empyrean--a
region in which dishes of lobster-salad are passed about and
champagne-corks cleave the air like celestial meteors. There are
nigger-minstrels and beggars and mountebanks and spangled persons on
stilts, and gipsy matrons, as genuine as possible, with glowing Oriental
eyes and dropping their _h_'s; these last offer you for sixpence the
promise of everything genteel in life except the aspirate. On a coach
drawn up beside the one on which I had a place, a party of opulent young
men were passing from one stage of exhilaration to another with a
punctuality which excited my admiration. They were accompanied by two or
three young ladies of the kind that usually shares the choicest
pleasures of youthful British opulence--young ladies in whom nothing has
been neglected that can make a complexion Titianesque. The whole party
had been drinking deep, and one of the young men, a pretty lad of
twenty, had in an indiscreet moment staggered down as best he could to
the ground. Here his cups proved too many for him, and he collapsed and
rolled over. In plain English, he was beastly drunk. It was the scene
that followed that arrested my observation. His companions on the top of
the coach called down to the people herding under the wheels to pick him
up and put him away inside. These people were the grimiest of the
rabble, and a couple of men who looked like coal-heavers out of work
undertook to handle this hapless youth. But their task was difficult; it
was impossible to imagine a young man more drunk. He was a mere bag of
liquor--at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted. He lay in a
helpless heap under the feet of the crowd--the best intoxicated young
man in England. His extemporised chamberlains took him first in one way
and then in another; but he was like water in a sieve. The crowd hustled
over him; every one wanted to see; he was pulled and shoved and fumbled.
The spectacle had a grotesque side, and this it was that seemed to
strike the fancy of the young man's comrades. They had not done
lunching, so they were unable to bestow upon the incident the whole of
that consideration which its high comicality deserved. But they did what
they could. They looked down very often, glass in hand, during the
half-hour that it went on, and they stinted neither their generous,
joyous laughter, nor their appreciative comments. Women are said to have
no sense of humour; but the Titianesque young ladies did liberal justice
to the pleasantry of the scene. Toward the last, indeed, their attention
rather flagged; for even the best joke suffers by reiteration, and when
you have seen a stupefied young man, infinitely bedusted, slip out of
the embrace of a couple of clumsy paupers for the twentieth time, you
may very properly suppose that you have arrived at the farthest limits
of the ludicrous.

After the great race had been run I quitted my perch and spent the rest
of the afternoon in wandering about that grassy concave I have
mentioned. It was amusing and picturesque; it was like a huge Bohemian
encampment. Here also a great number of carriages were stationed,
freighted in like manner with free-handed youths and young ladies with
gilded tresses. These young ladies were almost the only representatives
of their sex with pretensions to elegance; they were often pretty and
always exhilarated. Gentlemen in pairs, mounted on stools, habited in
fantastic sporting garments, and offering bets to whomsoever listed,
were a conspicuous feature of the scene. It was equally striking that
they were not preaching in the desert and that they found plenty of
patrons among the baser sort. I returned to my place in time to assist
at the rather complicated operation of starting for the drive back to
London. Putting in horses and getting vehicles into line seemed in the
midst of the general crush and entanglement a process not to be
facilitated even by the most liberal swearing on the part of those
engaged in it. But little by little we came to the end of it; and as by
this time a kind of mellow cheerfulness pervaded the upper
atmosphere--the region of the perpendicular whip--even those
interruptions most trying to patience were somehow made to minister to
jollity. It was for people below to not get trampled to death or
crunched between opposing wheel-hubs, if they could manage it. Above,
the carnival of "chaff" had set in, and it deepened as the lock of
vehicles grew denser. As they were all locked together (with a
comfortable padding of pedestrians at points of acutest contact), they
contrived somehow to move together; so that we gradually got away and
into the road. The four or five hours consumed on the road were simply
as I say, a carnival of "chaff," the profusely good-humoured savour of
which, on the whole, was certainly striking. The chaff was not brilliant
nor subtle nor especially graceful; and here and there it was quite too
tipsy to be even articulate. But as an expression of that unbuttoning of
the popular straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile since, it had its
wholesome and even innocent side. It took, indeed, frequently an
importunate physical form; it sought emphasis in the use of pea-shooters
and water-squirts. At its best, too, it was extremely low and rowdyish.
But a stranger even of the most refined tastes might be glad to have a
glimpse of this popular revel, for it would make him feel that he was
learning something more about the English people. It would give a
meaning to the old words "merry England." It would remind him that the
natives of that country are subject to some of the most frolicsome of
the human passions, and that the decent, dusky vistas of the London
residential streets--those discreet creations of which Thackeray's
"Baker Street" is the type--are not a complete symbol of the complicated
race that erected them.



II


It seemed to me such a piece of good fortune to have been asked down to
Oxford at Commemoration by a gentleman implicated in the remarkable
ceremony which goes on under that name, who kindly offered me the
hospitality of his college, that I scarcely waited even to thank him, I
simply took the first train. I had had a glimpse of Oxford in former
years, but I had never slept in a low-browed room looking out on a
grassy quadrangle, opposite a mediæval clock-tower. This satisfaction
was vouchsafed me on the night of my arrival; I was inducted into the
rooms of an absent undergraduate. I sat in his deep arm-chairs; I burned
his candles and read his books. I hereby thank him as tenderly as
possible. Before going to bed I took a turn through the streets and
renewed in the silent darkness that impression of the charm imparted to
them by the quiet college-fronts, which I had gathered in former years.
The college-fronts were now quieter than ever, the streets were empty,
and the old scholastic city was sleeping in the warm starlight. The
undergraduates had retired in large numbers, encouraged in this impulse
by the collegiate authorities, who deprecate their presence at
Commemoration. However many young gownsmen may be sent away, there
always remain enough to make a noise. There can be no better indication
of the resources of Oxford in a spectacular way than this fact that the
first step toward preparing an impressive ceremony is to get rid of the
undergraduates.

In the morning I breakfasted with a young American who, in common with a
number of his countrymen, had come hither to seek stimulus for a finer
quality of study. I know not whether he would have reckoned as such
stimulus the conversation of a couple of those ingenuous youths of
Britain whose society I always find charming; but it added, from my own
point of view, to the local colour of the entertainment. After this was
over I repaired, in company with a crowd of ladies and elderly people,
interspersed with gownsmen, to the hoary rotunda of the Sheldonian
theatre, which every visitor to Oxford will remember, with its curious
cincture of clumsily-carven heads of warriors and sages perched upon
stone posts. The interior of this edifice is the scene of the classic
hooting, stamping, and cat-calling by which the undergraduates confer
the last consecration upon the distinguished gentlemen who come up for
the honorary degree of D.C.L. It is with the design of attenuating as
much as possible this incongruous chorus, that the heads of colleges, on
the close of the term, a few days before Commemoration, speed their too
demonstrative disciples upon the homeward way. As I have already hinted,
however, the contingent of irreverent lads was on this occasion quite
large enough to produce a very handsome specimen of the traditional
rumpus. This made the scene a very singular one. An American of course,
with his fondness for antiquity, his relish for picturesqueness, his
"emotional" attitude at historic shrines, takes Oxford much more
seriously than its customary denizens can be expected to do. These
people are not always upon the high horse; they are not always in an
acutely sentient condition. Nevertheless, there is a certain maximum of
disaccord with their beautiful circumstances which the ecstatic
Occidental vaguely expects them not to transcend. No effort of the
intellect beforehand would enable him to imagine one of those
silver-gray temples of learning converted into a semblance of the Bowery
Theatre when the Bowery Theatre is being trifled with.

The Sheldonian edifice, like everything at Oxford, is more or less
monumental. There is a double tier of galleries, with sculptured pulpits
protruding from them; there are full-length portraits of kings and
worthies; there is a general air of antiquity and dignity, which, on the
occasion of which I speak, was enhanced by the presence of certain
ancient scholars, seated in crimson robes in high-backed chairs.
Formerly, I believe, the undergraduates were placed apart--packed
together in a corner of one of the galleries. But now they are scattered
among the general spectators, a large number of whom are ladies. They
muster in especial force, however, on the floor of the theatre, which
has been cleared of its benches. Here the dense mass is at last severed
in twain by the entrance of the prospective D.C.L.'s walking in single
file, clad in crimson gowns, preceded by mace-bearers and accompanied by
the Regius professor of Civil Law, who presents them individually to the
Vice-Chancellor of the university, in a Latin speech which is of course
a glowing eulogy. The five gentlemen to whom this distinction had been
offered in 1877 were not among those whom fame has trumpeted most
loudly; but there was something very pretty in their standing in their
honourable robes, with heads modestly bent, while the orator, equally
brilliant in aspect, recited their titles sonorously to the venerable
dignitary in the high-backed chair. Each of them, when the little speech
is ended, ascends the steps leading to the chair; the Vice-Chancellor
bends forward and shakes his hand, and the new D.C.L. goes and sits in
the blushing row of his fellow-doctors. The impressiveness of all this
is much diminished by the boisterous conduct of the collegians, who
superabound in extravagant applause, in impertinent interrogation, and
in lively disparagement of the orator's Latinity. Of the scene that
precedes the episode I have just described I have given no account;
vivid portrayal of it is not easy. Like the return from the Derby, it is
a carnival of "chaff"; and it is a singular fact that the scholastic
festival should have forcibly reminded me of the great popular "lark."
In each case it is the same race enjoying a certain definitely chartered
license; in the young votaries of a liberal education and the London
rabble on the Epsom road it is the same perfect good-humour, the same
muscular jocosity.

After the presentation of the doctors came a series of those collegiate
exercises which have a generic resemblance all the world over: a reading
of Latin verses and English essays, a spouting of prize poems and Greek
paraphrases. The prize poem alone was somewhat attentively listened to;
the other things were received with an infinite variety of critical
ejaculation. But after all, I reflected, as the ceremony drew to a dose,
this discordant racket is more characteristic than it seems; it is at
bottom only another expression of the venerable and historic side of
Oxford. It is tolerated because it is traditional; it is possible
because it is classical. Looking at it in this light, one might manage
at last to find it impressive and romantic.

I was not obliged to find ingenious pretexts for thinking well of
another ceremony of which I was witness after we adjourned from the
Sheldonian theatre. This was a lunch-party at the particular college in
which I should find it the highest privilege to reside. I may not
further specify it. Perhaps, indeed, I may go so far as to say that the
reason for my dreaming of this privilege is that it is deemed by persons
of a reforming turn the best-appointed abuse in a nest of abuses. A
commission for the expurgation of the universities has lately been
appointed by Parliament to look into it--a commission armed with a
gigantic broom, which is to sweep away all the fine old ivied and
cobwebbed improprieties. Pending these righteous changes, one would like
while one is about it--about, that is, this business of admiring
Oxford--to attach one's self to the abuse, to bury one's nostrils in the
rose before it is plucked. At the college in question there are no
undergraduates. I found it agreeable to reflect that those gray-green
cloisters had sent no delegates to the slangy congregation I had just
quitted. This delightful spot exists for the satisfaction of a small
society of Fellows who, having no dreary instruction to administer, no
noisy hobbledehoys to govern, no obligations but toward their own
culture, no care save for learning as learning and truth as truth, are
presumably the happiest and most charming people in the world. The party
invited to lunch assembled first in the library of the college, a cool,
gray hall, of very great length and height, with vast wall-spaces of
rich-looking book-titles and statues of noble scholars set in the midst.
Had the charming Fellows ever anything more disagreeable to do than to
finger these precious volumes and then to stroll about together in the
grassy courts, in learned comradeship, discussing their precious
contents? Nothing, apparently, unless it were to give a lunch at
Commemoration in the dining-hall of the college. When lunch was ready
there was a very pretty procession to go to it. Learned gentlemen in
crimson gowns, ladies in brilliant toilets, paired slowly off and
marched in a stately diagonal across the fine, smooth lawn of the
quadrangle, in a corner of which they passed through a hospitable door.
But here we cross the threshold of privacy; I remained on the farther
side of it during the rest of the day. But I brought back with me
certain memories of which, if I were not at the end of my space, I
should attempt a discreet adumbration: memories of a fête champêtre in
the beautiful gardens of one of the other colleges--charming lawns and
spreading trees, music of Grenadier Guards, ices in striped marquees,
mild flirtation of youthful gownsmen and bemuslined maidens; memories,
too, of quiet dinner in common-room, a decorous, excellent repast; old
portraits on the walls and great windows open upon the ancient court,
where the afternoon light was fading in the stillness; superior talk
upon current topics, and over all the peculiar air of Oxford--the air of
liberty to care for intellectual things, assured and secured by
machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.



XII

IN WARWICKSHIRE

1877


There is no better way for the stranger who wishes to know something of
England, to plunge in _medias res_, than to spend a fortnight in
Warwickshire. It is the core and centre of the English world; midmost
England, unmitigated England. The place has taught me a great many
English secrets; I have interviewed the genius of pastoral Britain. From
a charming lawn--a lawn delicious to one's sentient boot-sole--I looked
without obstruction at a sombre, soft, romantic mass, whose outline was
blurred by mantling ivy. It made a perfect picture; and in the
foreground the great trees overarched their boughs from right and left,
so as to give it a majestic frame. This interesting object was the
castle of Kenilworth. It was within distance of an easy walk, but one
hardly thought of walking to it, any more than one would have thought of
walking to a purple-shadowed tower in the background of a Berghem or a
Claude. Here there were purple shadows, and slowly-shifting lights, and
a soft-hued, bosky country in the middle distance.

Of course, however, I did walk over to the castle; and of course the
walk led me through leafy lanes, and beside the hedgerows that make a
tangled screen for lawn-like meadows. Of course too, I am bound to add,
there was a row of ancient pedlars outside the castle-wall, hawking
twopenny pamphlets and photographs. Of course, equally, at the foot of
the grassy mound on which the ruin stands, there were half a dozen
public houses; and, always of course, there were half a dozen beery
vagrants sprawling on the grass in the moist sunshine. There was the
usual respectable young woman to open the castle-gate and to receive the
usual sixpenny fee. And there were the usual squares of printed
cardboard, suspended upon venerable surfaces, with further enumeration
of twopence, threepence, fourpence. I do not allude to these things
querulously, for Kenilworth is a very tame lion--a lion that, in former
years, I had stroked more than once. I remember perfectly my first visit
to this romantic spot; how I chanced upon a picnic; how I stumbled over
beer-bottles; how the very echoes of the beautiful ruin seemed to have
dropped all their _h_'s. That was a sultry afternoon; I allowed my
spirits to sink, and I came away hanging my head. This was a beautiful
fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown philosophic. I had
learned that, with regard to most romantic sites in England, there is a
sort of average cockneyfication with which you must make your account.
There are always people on the field before you, and there is generally
something being drunk on the premises.

I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now speaking, that the average
would be low; and indeed, for the first five minutes I flattered myself
that this was the case. In the beautiful grassy court of the castle, on
my entrance, there were not more than eight or ten fellow-intruders.
There were a couple of old ladies on a bench, eating something out of a
newspaper; there was a dissenting minister, also on a bench, reading the
guide-book aloud to his wife and sister-in-law; there were three or four
children pushing each other up and down the turfy hillocks. This was
sweet seclusion indeed; and I got a capital start with the various noble
square-windowed fragments of the stately pile. They are extremely
majestic, with their even, pale-red colour, their deep-green drapery,
their princely vastness of scale. But presently the tranquil ruin began
to swarm like a startled hive. There were plenty of people, if they
chose to show themselves. They emerged from crumbling doorways and
gaping chambers, with the best conscience in the world; but I know not,
after all, why I should bear them a grudge, for they gave me a pretext
for wandering about in search of a quiet point of view. I cannot say
that I found my point of view, but in looking for it I saw the castle,
which is certainly an admirable ruin. And when the respectable young
woman had let me out of the gate again, and I had shaken my head at the
civil-spoken pedlars who form a little avenue for the arriving and
departing visitor, I found it in my good-nature to linger a moment on
the trodden, grassy slope, and to think that in spite of the hawkers,
the paupers, and the beer-shops, there was still a good deal of old
England in the scene. I say in spite of these things, but it may have
been, in some degree, because of them. Who shall resolve into its
component parts any impression of this richly complex English world,
where the present is always seen, as it were, in profile, and the past
presents a full face? At all events the solid red castle rose behind me,
towering above its small old ladies and its investigating parsons;
before me, across the patch of common, was a row of ancient cottages,
black-timbered, red-gabled, pictorial, which evidently had a memory of
the castle in its better days. A quaintish village straggled away on the
right, and on the left the dark, fat meadows were lighted up with misty
sun-spots and browsing sheep. I looked about for the village stocks; I
was ready to take the modern vagrants for Shakespearean clowns; and I
was on the point of going into one of the ale-houses to ask Mrs. Quickly
for a cup of sack.

I began these remarks, however, with no intention of talking about the
celebrated curiosities in which this region abounds, but with a design,
rather, of noting a few impressions of some of the shyer and more
elusive ornaments of the show. Stratford, of course, is a very sacred
place, but I prefer to say a word, for instance, about a charming old
rectory, a good many miles distant, and to mention the pleasant picture
it made of a summer afternoon, during a domestic festival. These are the
happiest of a stranger's memories of English life, and he feels that he
need make no apology for lifting the corner of the curtain. I drove
through the leafy lanes I spoke of just now, and peeped over the hedges
into fields where the yellow harvest stood waiting. In some places they
were already shorn, and while the light began to redden in the west and
to make a horizontal glow behind the dense wayside foliage, the
gleaners, here and there, came brushing through gaps in the hedges with
enormous sheaves upon their shoulders. The rectory was an ancient,
gabled building, of pale red brick, with facings of white stone and
creepers that wrapped it up. It dates, I imagine, from the early
Hanoverian time; and as it stood there upon its cushiony lawn, among its
ordered gardens, cheek to cheek with its little Norman church, it seemed
to me the model of a quiet, spacious, easy English home. The cushiony
lawn, as I have called it, stretched away to the edge of a brook, and
afforded to a number of very amiable people an opportunity of playing
lawn-tennis. There were half a dozen games going forward at once, and at
each of them a great many "nice girls," as they say in England, were
distinguishing themselves. These young ladies kept the ball going with
an agility worthy of the sisters and sweethearts of a race of
cricketers, and gave me a chance to admire their flexibility of figure
and their freedom of action. When they came back to the house, after the
games, flushed a little and a little dishevelled, they might have passed
for the attendant nymphs of Diana, flocking in from the chase. There
had, indeed, been a chance for them to wear the quiver, a target for
archery being erected on the lawn. I remembered George Eliot's
Gwendolen, and waited to see her step out of the muslin groups; but she
was not forthcoming, and it was plain that if lawn-tennis had been
invented in Gwendolen's day, this young lady would have captivated Mr.
Grandcourt by her exploits with the racket. She certainly would have
been a mistress of the game; and, if the suggestion is not too gross,
the alertness that she would have learned from it might have proved an
inducement to her boxing the ears of the insupportable Deronda.

After a while it grew too dark for lawn-tennis; but while the twilight
was still mildly brilliant I wandered away, out of the grounds of the
charming parsonage, and turned into the little churchyard beside it. The
small weather-worn, rust-coloured church had an appearance of high
antiquity; there were some curious Norman windows in the apse.
Unfortunately I could not get inside; I could only glance into the open
door across the interval of an old-timbered, heavy-hooded, padlocked
porch. But the sweetest evening stillness hung over the place, and the
sunset was red behind a dark row of rook-haunted elms. The stillness
seemed the greater because three or four rustic children were playing,
with little soft cries, among the crooked, deep-buried grave-stones. One
poor little girl, who seemed deformed, had climbed some steps that
served as a pedestal for a tall, mediæval-looking cross. She sat
perched there, staring at me through the gloaming. This was the heart of
England, unmistakably; it might have been the very pivot of the wheel on
which her fortune revolves. One need not be a rabid Anglican to be
extremely sensible of the charm of an English country church--and indeed
of some of the features of an English rural Sunday. In London there is a
certain flatness in the observance of this festival; but in the country
some of the ceremonies that accompany it have an indefinable harmony
with an ancient, pastoral landscape. I made this reflection on an
occasion that is still very fresh in my memory. I said to myself that
the walk to church from a beautiful country-house, of a lovely summer
afternoon, may be the prettiest possible adventure. The house stands
perched upon a pedestal of rock, and looks down from its windows and
terraces upon a shadier spot in the wooded meadows, of which the blunted
tip of a spire explains the character. A little company of people, whose
costume denotes the highest pitch of civilisation, winds down through
the blooming gardens, passes out of a couple of small gates, and reaches
the footpath in the fields. This is especially what takes the fancy of
the sympathetic stranger; the level, deep-green meadows, studded here
and there with a sturdy oak; the denser grassiness of the footpath, the
lily-sheeted pool beside which it passes, the rustic stiles, where he
stops and looks back at the great house and its wooded background. It is
in the highest degree probable that he has the privilege of walking with
a very pretty girl, and it is morally certain that he thinks a pretty
English girl the prettiest creature in the world. He knows that she
doesn't know how lovely is this walk of theirs; she has been taking
it--or taking another quite as good--any time these twenty years. But
her quiet-eyed unsuspectingness only makes her the more a part of his
delicate entertainment. The latter continues unbroken while they reach
the little churchyard, and pass up to the ancient porch, round which the
rosy rustics are standing decently and deferentially, to watch the
arrival of the smarter contingent. This party takes its place in a great
square pew, as large as a small room, and with seats all round, and
while he listens to the respectable intonings the sympathetic stranger
reads over the inscriptions on the mural tablets before him, all to the
honour of the earlier bearers of a name which is, for himself, a symbol
of hospitality.

When I came back to the parsonage the entertainment had been transferred
to the interior, and I had occasion to admire the maidenly vigour of
those charming young girls who, after playing lawn-tennis all the
afternoon, were modestly expecting to dance all the evening. And in
regard to this it is not impertinent to say that from almost any group
of English maidens--though preferably from such as have passed their
lives in quiet country homes--an American observer receives a delightful
impression of something that he can best describe as an intimate
salubrity. He notices face after face in which this rosy absence of a
morbid strain--this simple, natural, affectionate development--amounts
to positive beauty. If the young lady have no other beauty, the look I
speak of is a sufficient charm; but when it is united, as it so often
is, to real perfection of feature and colour, the result is the most
delightful thing in nature. It makes the highest type of English beauty,
and to my sense there is nothing so high as that. Not long since I heard
a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation with an English lady--a very
wise and liberal woman--in a little lightly restrictive criticism of her
countrywomen. "It is possible," she answered, in regard to one of his
objections; "but such as they are, they are inexpressibly dear to their
husbands." This is doubtless true of good wives all over the world; but
I felt, as I listened to these words of my friend, that there is often
something in an English girl-face which gives it an extra touch of
_justesse_. Such as the woman is, she has here, more than elsewhere, the
look of being completely and profoundly at the service of the man she
loves. This look, after one has been a while in England, comes to seem
so much a proper and indispensable part of a "nice" face, that the
absence of it appears a sign of irritability or of shallowness. Depth of
tenderness as regards a masculine counterpart--that is what it means;
and I confess that seems to me a very agreeable meaning.

As for the prettiness, I cannot forbear, in the face of a fresh
reminiscence, to give it another word. And yet in regard to prettiness,
what do words avail? This was what I asked myself the other day as I
looked at a young girl who stood in an old oaken parlour, the rugged
panels of which made a background for her lovely head, in simple
conversation with a handsome lad. I said to myself that the faces of
English young people had often a singular charm, but that this same
charm is too soft and shy a thing to talk about. The face of this fair
creature had a pure oval, and her clear brown eyes a quiet warmth. Her
complexion was as bright as a sunbeam after rain, and she smiled in a
way that made any other way of smiling than that seem a shallow
grimace--a mere creaking of the facial muscles. The young man stood
facing her, slowly scratching his thigh and shifting from one foot to
the other. He was tall and very well made, and so sun-burned that his
fair hair was lighter than his complexion. He had honest, stupid blue
eyes, and a simple smile that showed his handsome teeth. He was very
well dressed. Presently I heard what they were saying. "I suppose it's
pretty big," said the beautiful young girl. "Yes; it's pretty big," said
the handsome young man. "It's nicer when they are big," said his
interlocutress. The young man looked at her, and at everything in
general, with his slowly-apprehending blue eye, and for some time no
further remark was made. "It draws ten feet of water," he at last went
on. "How much water is there?" said the young girl. She spoke in a
charming voice. "There are thirty feet of water," said the young man.
"Oh, that's enough," rejoined the damsel. I had had an idea they were
flirting, and perhaps indeed that is the way it is done. It was an
ancient room and extremely delightful; everything was polished over with
the brownness of centuries. The chimney-piece was carved a foot thick,
and the windows bore, in coloured glass, the quarterings of ancestral
couples. These had stopped two hundred years before; there was nothing
newer than that date. Outside the windows was a deep, broad moat, which
washed the base of gray walls--gray walls spotted over with the most
delicate yellow lichens.

In such a region as this mellow, conservative Warwickshire an
appreciative American finds the small things quite as suggestive as the
great. Everything, indeed, is suggestive, and impressions are constantly
melting into each other and doing their work before he has had time to
ask them whence they came. He cannot go into a cottage muffled in
plants, to see a genial gentlewoman and a "nice girl," without being
reminded forsooth of "The Small House at Arlington" Why of "The Small
House at Arlington?" There is a larger house at which the ladies come up
to dine; but that is surely an insufficient reason. That the ladies are
charming--even that is not reason enough; for there have been other nice
girls in the world than lily Dale, and other mellow matrons than her
mamma. Reminded, however, he is--especially when he goes out upon the
lawn. Of course there is lawn-tennis, and it seems all ready for Mr.
Crosbie to come and play. This is a small example of the way in which in
the presence of English life the imagination must be constantly at play,
on the part of members of a race in whom it has necessarily been trained
to do extra service. In driving and walking, in looking and listening,
everything seemed to me in some degree or other characteristic of a
rich, powerful, old-fashioned society. One had no need of being told
that this is a conservative county; the fact seemed written in the
hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind them. Of course the owners of
these things were conservative; of course they were stubbornly unwilling
to see the harmonious edifice of Church and State the least bit shaken.
I had a feeling, as I went about, that I should find some very ancient
and curious opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses
whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared here and there, at a
distance, above their ornamental woods. Self-complacent British Toryism,
viewed in this vague and conjectural fashion--across the fields and
behind the oaks and beeches--is by no means a thing the irresponsible
stranger would wish away; it deepens the local colour; it may be said to
enhance the landscape. I got a sort of constructive sense of its
presence in the picturesque old towns of Coventry and Warwick, which
appear to be filled with those institutions--chiefly of an eleemosynary
order--that Toryism takes a genial comfort in. There are ancient
charities in these places--hospitals, almshouses, asylums,
infant-schools--so quaint and venerable that they almost make the
existence of poverty a delectable and satisfying thought. In Coventry in
especial, I believe, these pious foundations are so numerous as almost
to place a premium upon misery. Invidious reflections apart, however,
there are few things that speak more quaintly and suggestively of the
old England that an American loves than these clumsy little monuments of
ancient benevolence. Such an institution as Leicester's Hospital at
Warwick seems indeed to exist primarily for the sake of its spectacular
effect upon the American tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old
soldiers maintained in affluence there, constitute its principal
_clientèle_.

The American tourist usually comes straight to this quarter of
England--chiefly for the purpose of paying his respects to the
birthplace of Shakespeare. Being here, he comes to Warwick to see the
castle; and being at Warwick, he comes to see the odd little
theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors which lurks in the
shadow of one of the old gate-towers. Every one will remember
Hawthorne's account of the place, which has left no touch of charming
taste to be added to any reference to it. The hospital struck me as a
little museum kept up for the amusement and confusion of those inquiring
Occidentals who are used to seeing charity more dryly and practically
administered. The old hospitallers--I am not sure, after all, whether
they are necessarily soldiers, but some of them happen to be--are at
once the curiosities and the keepers. They sit on benches outside of
their door, at the receipt of custom, all neatly brushed and darned, and
ready, like Mr. Cook, to conduct you personally. They are only twelve in
number, but their picturesque dwelling, perched upon the old city
rampart, and full of dusky little courts, cross-timbered gable-ends and
deeply sunken lattices, seems a wonderfully elaborate piece of machinery
for its humble purpose. Each of the old gentlemen must be provided with
a wife or "housekeeper;" each of them has a dusky parlour of his own;
and they pass their latter days in their scoured and polished little
refuge as softly and honourably as a company of retired lawgivers or
pensioned soothsayers.

At Coventry I went to see a couple of old charities of a similar
pattern--places with black-timbered fronts, little clean-swept courts
and Elizabethan windows. One of them was a romantic residence for a
handful of old women, who sat, each of them, in a cosy little bower, in
a sort of mediæval darkness; the other was a school for little boys of
humble origin, and this last establishment was charming. I found the
little boys playing at "top" in a gravelled court, in front of the
prettiest old building of tender-coloured stucco and painted timber,
ornamented with two delicate little galleries and a fantastic porch.
They were dressed in small blue tunics and odd caps, like those worn by
sailors, but, if I remember rightly, with little yellow tags affixed to
them. I was free, apparently, to wander all over the establishment;
there was no sign of pastor or master anywhere; nothing but the little
yellow-headed boys playing before the ancient house, and practising most
correctly the Warwickshire accent. I went indoors and looked at a fine
old oaken staircase; I even ascended it, and walked along a gallery and
peeped into a dormitory at a row of very short beds; and then I came
down and sat for five minutes on a bench hardly wider than the top rail
of a fence, in a little, cold, dim refectory, where there was not a
crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odour of bygone repasts to be
perceived. And yet I wondered how it was that the sense of many
generations of boyish feeders seemed to abide there. It came, I suppose,
from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed the expression, the
clean-licked aspect of the place, which wore the appearance of the
famous platter of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has a great deal to say
to himself about this being Shakespeare's county--about these densely
verdant meadows and parks having been, to his musing eyes, the normal
landscape. In Shakespeare's day, doubtless, the coat of nature was far
from being so prettily trimmed as it is now; but there is one place,
nevertheless, which, as he passes it in the summer twilight, the
traveller does his best to believe unaltered. I allude, of course, to
Charlecote park, whose venerable verdure seems a survival from an
earlier England, and whose innumerable acres, stretching away, in the
early evening, to vaguely seen Tudor walls, lie there like the backward
years receding to the age of Elizabeth. It was, however, no part of my
design in these remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine as
this; and if I were to allude to Stratford, it would not be in
connection with the fact that Shakespeare came into the world there. It
would be rather to speak of a delightful old house near the Avon which
struck me as the ideal home for a Shakespearean scholar, or indeed for
any passionate lover of the poet. Here, with books, and memories, and
the recurring reflection that he had taken his daily walk across the
bridge, at which you look from your windows straight down an avenue of
fine old trees, with an ever-closed gate at the end of them and a carpet
of turf stretched over the decent drive--here, I say, with old brown
wainscotted chambers to live in, old polished doorsteps to lead you from
one to the other, deep window-seats to sit in, with a play in your
lap--here a person for whom the cares of life should have resolved
themselves into a care for the greatest genius who has represented and
ornamented life, might find a very congruous asylum. Or, speaking a
little wider of the mark, the charming, rambling, low-gabled,
many-staired, much-panelled mansion would be a very agreeable home for
any person of taste who should prefer an old house to a new. I find I am
talking about it quite like an auctioneer; but what I chiefly had at
heart was to commemorate the fact that I had lunched there, and while I
lunched kept saying to myself that there is nothing in the world so
delightful as the happy accidents of old English houses.

And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon, I found it in me to say
that a new house too may be a very charming affair. But I must add that
the new house I speak of had really such exceptional advantages that it
could not fairly be placed in the scale. Besides, was it new after all?
I suppose that it was, and yet one's impression there was all of a kind
of silvery antiquity. The place stood upon a decent Stratford street,
from which it looked usual enough; but when, after sitting a while in a
charming modern drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly through an open
window upon a verandah, one found that the horizon of the morning-call
had been wonderfully widened. I will not pretend to relate all that I
saw after I stepped off the verandah; suffice it that the spire and
chancel of the beautiful old church in which Shakespeare is buried, with
the Avon sweeping its base, were one of the elements of the vision. Then
there were the smoothest lawns in the world stretching down to the edge
of this lovely stream, and making, where the water touched them, a line
as even as the rim of a champagne-glass--a verge near which you
inevitably lingered to see the spire and the chancel--the church was
close at hand--among the well-grouped trees, and look for their
reflection in the river. The place was a garden of delight; it was a
stage set for one of Shakespeare's comedies--for _Twelfth Night_ or
_Much Ado_. Just across the river was a level meadow, which rivalled the
lawn on which I stood, and this meadow seemed only the more essentially
a part of the scene by reason of the voluminous sheep that were grazing
on it. These sheep were by no means mere edible mutton; they were
poetic, historic, romantic sheep; they were there to be picturesque, and
they knew it. And yet, knowing as they were, I doubt whether the wisest
old ram of the flock could have told me how to explain why it was that
this happy mixture of lawn and river and mirrored spire and blooming
garden seemed to me for a quarter of an hour the prettiest corner of
England.

If Warwickshire is Shakespeare's country, I found myself remembering
that it is also George Eliot's. The author of _Adam Bede_ and
_Middlemarch_ has called the rural background of those admirable
fictions by another name, but I believe it long ago ceased to be a
secret that her native Warwickshire had been in her intention. The
stranger who wanders over its velvety surface recognises at every turn
the elements of George Eliot's novels--especially when he carries
himself back in imagination to the Warwickshire of forty years ago. He
says to himself that it would be impossible to conceive anything more
conservatively bucolic, more respectably pastoral. It was in one of the
old nestling farmhouses, beyond a hundred hedgerows, that Hetty Sorrel
smiled into her milk-pans, as if she were looking for a reflection of
her pretty face; it was at the end of one of the leafy-pillared avenues
that poor Mrs. Casaubon paced up and down in fervid disappointment. The
country suggests, in especial, both the social and the natural scenery
of _Middlemarch_. There must be many a genially perverse old Mr. Brooke
there yet, and whether there are many Dorotheas or not, there must be
many a well-featured and well-acred young country gentleman, of the
pattern of Sir James Chettam, who, as he rides along the leafy lanes,
softly cudgels his brain to know why a clever girl shouldn't wish to
marry him. But I doubt whether there are many Dorotheas, and I suspect
that the Sir James Chettams of the county are not often pushed to that
intensity of meditation. You feel, however, that George Eliot could not
have placed her heroine in a local medium better fitted to throw her
fine impatience into relief--a community more likely to be startled and
perplexed by a questioning attitude on the part of a well-housed and
well-fed young gentlewoman.

Among the edifying days that I spent in these neighbourhoods there is
one in especial of which I should like to give a detailed account. But I
find on consulting my memory that the details have melted away into the
single deep impression of a perfect ripeness of civilisation. It was a
long excursion, by rail and by carriage, for the purpose of seeing three
extremely interesting old country-houses. Our errand led us, in the
first place, into Oxfordshire, through the ancient market-town of
Banbury, where of course we made a point of looking out for the Cross
referred to in the famous nursery-rhyme. It stood there in the most
natural manner--though I am afraid it has been "done up"--with various
antique gables around it, from one of whose exiguous windows the young
person appealed to in the rhyme may have looked at the old woman as she
rode and heard the music of her bells. The houses we went to see have
not a national reputation; they are simply interwoven figures in the
rich pattern of the Midlands. They have, indeed, a local renown, but
they are not thought to be very exceptionally curious or beautiful, and
the stranger has a feeling that his surprises and ecstasies are held to
betray a meagre bringing-up. Such places, to a Warwickshire mind of good
habits, must appear to be the pillars and props of a heaven-appointed
order of things; and accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles, they
are as natural as the geology of the county or the supply of mutton. But
nothing could well give a stranger a stronger impression of the wealth
of England in such matters--of the interminable list of her territorial
homes--than this fact that the enchanting old mansions I speak of should
have but a limited fame--should not be lions of the first magnitude. Of
one of them, the finest in the group, one of my companions, who lived
but twenty miles away, had never even heard. Such a place was not
thought a matter to boast about. Its peers and its mates are scattered
all over the country; half of them are not even mentioned in the county
guide-books. You stumble upon them in a drive or a walk. You catch a
glimpse of an ivied front at the midmost point of a great estate, and
taking your way, by leave of a serious old woman at a lodge-gate, along
an overarching avenue, you find yourself introduced to an edifice so
human-looking in its beauty, that it seems for the occasion to reconcile
art and morality.

To Broughton Castle, the first seen in this beautiful group, I must do
no more than allude; but this is not because I failed to think it, as I
think every house I see, the most delightful residence in England. It
lies rather low, and its woods and pastures slope down to it; it has a
deep, clear moat all around it, spanned by a bridge that passes under a
charming old gate-tower, and nothing can be prettier than to see its
clustered walls of yellow-brown stone so sharply islanded, while its
gardens bloom on the other side of the water. Like several other houses
in this part of the country, Broughton Castle played a part (on the
Parliamentary side) in the civil wars, and not the least interesting
features of its beautiful interior are the several mementoes of
Cromwell's station there. It was within a moderate drive of this place
that in 1642 the battle of Edgehill was fought--the first great battle
of the war--and gained by neither party. We went to see the battlefield,
where an ancient tower and an artificial ruin (of all things in the
world) have been erected for the entertainment of convivial visitors.
These ornaments are perched upon the edge of a slope which commands a
view of the exact scene of the contest, upwards of a mile away. I looked
in the direction indicated, and saw misty meadows, a little greener
perhaps than usual, and colonnades of elms, a trifle denser. After this
we paid our respects to another old house which is full of memories and
suggestions of that most dramatic period of English history. But of
Compton Wyniates (the name of this enchanting domicile), I despair of
giving any coherent or adequate account. It belongs to the Marquis of
Northampton, and it stands empty all the year round. It sits on the
grass at the bottom of a wooded hollow, and the glades of a superb old
park go wandering upward, away from it. When I came out in front of the
house from a short and steep but stately avenue, I said to myself that
here surely we had arrived at the farthest limits of what ivy-smothered
brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and
clustered mossy roofs, can accomplish for the eye. It is impossible to
imagine a more perfect picture. And its air of solitude and delicate
decay--of having been dropped into its grassy hollow as an ancient jewel
is deposited upon a cushion, and being shut in from the world and back
into the past by its circling woods--all this highly increased its
impressiveness. The house is not large, as great houses go, and it sits,
as I have said, upon the grass, without even a flagging or a footpath to
conduct you from the point where the avenue stops to the beautiful
sculptured doorway which admits you into the small, quaint, inner court.
From this court you are at liberty to pass through the crookedest series
of oaken halls and chambers, adorned with treasures of old wainscotting
and elaborate doors and chimney-pieces. Outside, you may walk all round
the house on a grassy bank, which is raised above the level on which it
stands, and find it from every point of view a more charming
composition. I should not omit to mention that Compton Wyniates is
supposed to have been in Scott's eye when he described the dwelling of
the old royalist knight in Woodstock. In this case he simply transferred
the house to the other side of the county. He has indeed given several
of the features of the place, but he has not given what one may call its
colour. I must add that if Sir Walter could not give the colour of
Compton Wyniates, it is useless for any other writer to attempt it It is
a matter for the brush and not for the pen.

And what shall I say of the colour of Wroxton Abbey, which we visited
last in order, and which in the thickening twilight, as we approached
its great ivy-muffled face, made an ineffaceable impression on my fancy?
Wroxton Abbey, as it stands, is a house of about the same period as
Compton Wyniates--the latter years, I suppose, of the sixteenth century.
But it is quite another affair. The place is inhabited, "kept up," and
full of the most interesting and most splendid detail. Its happy
occupants, however, were fortunately not actually staying there (happy
occupants, in England, are almost always absent), and the house was
exhibited with a civility worthy of its merit. Everything that in the
material line can render life noble and charming has been gathered into
it with a profusion which makes the whole place a monument to past
opportunity. As I wandered from one rich room to another, looking at
these things, that ineffaceable impression upon my fancy which I just
mentioned was delightfully deepened. But who can tell the pleasures of
fancy when fancy takes her ease in an old English country-house, while
the twilight darkens the corners of expressive rooms, and the
appreciative intruder, pausing at the window, turns his glance from the
observing portrait of a handsome ancestral face and sees the great soft
billows of the lawn melt away into the park?



XIII

ABBEYS AND CASTLES

1877


It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in England that the beauty
and interest of the country are private property, and that to get access
to them a key is always needed. The key may be large or it may be small,
but it must be something that will turn a lock. Of the things that
contribute to the happiness of an American observer in the country of
parks and castles, I can think of very few that do not come under this
definition of private property. When I have mentioned the hedgerows and
the churches I have almost exhausted the list. You can enjoy a hedgerow
from the public road, and I suppose that even if you are a Dissenter you
may enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If, therefore, one talk of
anything beautiful in England, the presumption will be that it is
private; and indeed such is my admiration of this delightful country
that I feel inclined to say that if one talk of anything private the
presumption will be that it is beautiful. This is something of a
dilemma. If the observer permit himself to commemorate charming
impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world the fruits of
friendship and hospitality. If, on the other hand, he withhold his
impression, he lets something admirable slip away without having marked
its passage, without having done it proper honour. He ends by mingling
discretion with enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not
treating a country ill to talk of its treasures when the mention of each
has tacit reference to an act of private courtesy.

The impressions I have in mind in writing these lines were gathered in a
part of England of which I had not before had even a traveller's
glimpse; but as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite ready
to agree with a friend who lived there, and who knew and loved it well,
when he said very frankly, "I do believe it is the loveliest corner of
the world!" This was not a dictum to quarrel about, and while I was in
the neighbourhood I was quite of his opinion. I felt that it would not
take a great deal to make me care for it very much as he cared for it; I
had a glimpse of the peculiar tenderness with which such a country may
be loved. It is a capital example of the great characteristic of English
scenery--of what I should call density of feature. There are no waste
details; everything in the landscape is something particular--has a
history, has played a part, has a value to the imagination. It is a
region of hills and blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are
high, all of them are interesting--interesting as such things are
interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite modulation,
something suggesting that outline and colouring have been retouched and
refined by the hand of time. Independently of its castles and abbeys,
the definite relics of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has
human relations, and it is intimately conscious of them. That little
speech about the loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his
county, was made to me by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope
of a hill, or "edge," as it is called there, from the crest of which we
seemed in an instant to look away over most of the remainder of England.
Certainly I should have grown affectionate with regard to such a view as
that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding slope on
the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long ridge
for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming prospect
before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next but
one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from
such a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch
across the lighter green, the great estate of one of their lordships?
Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
bosky-looking spot, which constitutes, as you are told, the residential
umbrage of another peer. And to right and left of these, in wooded
expanses, lie other domains of equal consequence. It was therefore not
the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing,
burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we
never see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part
of his county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter
for infinite jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think of saying my
western hand and my eastern," he declared.

I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental
attachment for this delightful region--for its hillside prospect of old
red farmhouses lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and
chimney-tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in
the vague places of the horizon, of far away towns and sites that one
had always heard of--was conditioned upon having "property" in the
neighbourhood, so that the little girls in the town should suddenly drop
curtsies to me in the street; though that too would certainly have been
pleasant. At the same time, having a little property would without doubt
have made the sentiment stronger. People who wander about the world
without money in their pockets indulge in dreams--dreams of the things
they would buy if their pockets were complete. These dreams are very apt
to have relation to a good estate in any neighbourhood in which the
wanderer may happen to find himself. For myself, I have never been in a
country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be
able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New
England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large
mansion with Doric columns and a pediment of white-painted timber; in
Italy I have made imaginary proposals for the yellow-walled villa with
statues on the roof. In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy
myself in treaty for the best house, but, failing this, I have rarely
failed to feel that ideal comfort for the time would be to call one's
self owner of what is denominated here a "good" place. Is it that
English country life seems to possess such irresistible charms? I have
not always thought so; I have sometimes suspected that it is dull; I
have remembered that there is a whole literature devoted to exposing it
(that of the English novel "of manners"); and that its recorded
occupations and conversations occasionally strike one as lacking a
certain indispensable salt. But, for all that, when, in the region to
which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place being likely
sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing could be
more delightful than to see the hammer hanging upon one's own
liberality. And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places
in question would part with them because they could no longer afford to
keep them up. I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was
possible, what sort of income was implied by the possession of
country-seats such as are not in America a concomitant of even the
largest fortunes; and if in these revelations I sometimes heard of a
very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was frequently surprised at the
shortness of purse attributed to people living in the depths of an
oak-studded park. Then, certainly, English country-life seemed to me the
most advantageous thing in the world; on conditions such as these one
would gladly be dull; surrounded by luxury of so moderate a cost one
would joyfully stagnate.

There was one place in particular of which I said to myself that if I
had the money to buy it, I would "move in" on the morrow. I saw this
place, unfortunately, to small advantage; I saw it in the rain. But I am
rather glad that fine weather did not meddle with the affair, for I
think that in this case the irritation of envy might have made me ill.
It was a long, wet Sunday, and the waters were deep. I had been in the
house all day, for the weather can best be described by my saying that
it had been deemed to exonerate me from church-going. But in the
afternoon, the prospective interval between lunch and tea assuming
formidable proportions, my host took me out to walk, and in the course
of our walk he led me into a park which he described as "the paradise of
a small English country-gentleman." It was indeed a modern Eden, and the
trees might have been trees of knowledge. They were of high antiquity
and magnificent girth and stature; they were strewn over the grassy
levels in extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon and down the
slopes in a fashion than which I have seen nothing more charming since I
last looked at the chestnuts on the Lake of Como. It appears that the
place was not very large, but I was unable to perceive its limits.
Shortly before we turned into the park the rain had renewed itself, so
that we were awkwardly wet and muddy; but, being near the house, my
companion proposed to leave his card in a neighbourly way. The house was
most agreeable; it stood on a kind of terrace, in the middle of a lawn
and garden, and the terrace overlooked one of the most copious rivers in
England, and across to those blue undulations of which I have already
spoken. On the terrace also was a piece of ornamental water, and there
was a small iron paling to divide the lawn from the park. All this I
beheld in the rain. My companion gave his card to the butler, with the
remark that we were too much bespattered to come in, and we turned away
to complete our circuit. As we turned away I became acutely conscious of
what I should have been tempted to call the cruelty of this proceeding.
My imagination gauged the whole position. It was a Sunday afternoon, and
it was raining. The house was charming, the terrace delightful, the oaks
magnificent, the view most interesting. But the whole thing was--not to
repeat the invidious epithet of which just now I made too gross a
use--the whole thing was quiet. In the house was a drawing-room, and in
the drawing-room was--by which I meant must be--a lady, a charming
English lady. It seemed to me that there was nothing fatuous in
believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not please her to
be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to her door
only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore, when,
before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us, I
felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been. Of course we went
back, and I carried my muddy boots into the drawing-room--just the
drawing-room I had imagined--where I found--I will not say just the lady
I had imagined, but a lady even more charming. Indeed, there were two
ladies, one of whom was staying in the house. In whatever company you
find yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present
is "staying." I seldom hear this participle nowadays without remembering
an observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of
English manners. "Ah, that dreadful word _staying_! I think we are so
happy in France not to be able to translate it--not to have any word
that answers to it." The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of
looked away over the river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the
rain was drizzling and drifting. It was very quiet, as I say; there was
an air of large leisure. If one wanted to do something here, there was
evidently plenty of time--and indeed of every other appliance--to do it.
The two ladies talked about "town:" that is what people talk about in
the country. If I were disposed I might represent them as talking about
it with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked myself how it
was possible that one should live in this charming place and trouble
one's head about what was going on in London in July. Then we had
excellent tea.

I returned to the habitation of my companion--for I too was guilty of
"staying"--through an old Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly
sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of fancy might see the
ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro.
This aperture admits you to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth
century--a long stone gallery or cloister, repeated in two stories, with
the interstices of its traceries now glazed, but with its long, low,
narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque--with its flags
worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways
opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals.
These rooms are furnished with narrow windows, of almost defensive
aspect, set in embrasures three feet deep, and ornamented with little
grotesque mediæval faces. To see one of the small monkish masks
grinning at you while you dress and undress, or while you look up in the
intervals of inspiration from your letter writing, is a mere detail in
the entertainment of living in a _ci-devant_ priory. This entertainment
is inexhaustible; for every step you take in such a house confronts you
in one way or another with the remote past. You feast upon the
pictorial, you inhale the historic. Adjoining the house is a beautiful
ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the
magnificent church administered by the predecessor of your host, the
abbot. These relics are very desultory, but they are still abundant, and
they testify to the great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You
may lie upon the grass at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the
girth of the great stumps of the central columns, half smothered in soft
creepers, and think how strange it is that in this quiet hollow, in the
midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and elaborate a work of art should
have arisen. It is but an hour's walk to another great ruin, which has
held together more completely. There the central tower stands erect to
half its altitude, and the round arches and massive pillars of the nave
make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf. You get an impression
that when catholic England was in her prime, great abbeys were as thick
as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the region is called
"wild," though to American eyes it seems almost suburban in its
smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway running
through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
abbey-gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with
goodly brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed
cottages, and with little girls, as I have said, bobbing curtsies in the
street. But even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the
railroad, it would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental
cathedral in a spot on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive
then must the beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity,
when the pilgrim came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells
made the stillness sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair;
as my companion said, it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away
from it you think you have got to the end of its geography, but you
encounter it still in the shape of a rugged outhouse enriched with an
early-English arch, or an ancient well, hidden in a kind of sculptured
cavern. It is noticeable that even if you are a traveller from a land
where there are no early-English--and indeed few late-English--arches,
and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest, of fresh-looking
shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this antiquity.
Anything very old seems extremely natural; there is nothing we accept so
implicitly as transmitted associations. It is not too much to say that
after spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years
old, you seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You
seem yourself to have hollowed the flags with your tread, and to have
polished the oak with your touch. You walk along the little stone
gallery where the monks used to pace, looking out of the gothic
window-places at their beautiful church, and you pause at the big round,
rugged doorway that admits you to what is now the drawing-room. The
massive step by which you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked,
as it should be; the lintels are cracked and worn by the myriad-fingered
years. This strikes your casual glance. You look up and down the
miniature cloister before you pass in; it seems wonderfully old and
queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you find modern
conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner. The new
life and the old have melted together; there is no dividing-line. In the
drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
inward, like a small casemate. You ask what it is, but people have
forgotten. It is something of the monks; it is a mere detail. After
dinner you are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is
seen in the dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants
see him; they afterwards go surreptitiously to sleep in the village.
Then, when you take your chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a
short cut through empty rooms, you are conscious of a peculiar sentiment
toward the gray friar which you hardly know whether to interpret as a
hope or a reluctance.

A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to
fail, while I was in the neighbourhood, to go to S---- and two or three
other places. "Edward IV. and Elizabeth," he said, "are still hanging
about there." So admonished, I made a point of going at least to S----,
and I saw quite what my friend meant. Edward IV. and Elizabeth, indeed,
are still to be met almost anywhere in the county; as regards domestic
architecture, few parts of England are still more vividly old-English.
I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the sensation of dropping back
personally into the past in a higher degree than while I lay on the
grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this small castle,
and lazily appreciated the still definite details of mediæval life. The
place is a capital example of what the French call a small
_gentilhommière_ of the thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat,
now filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of a much later
period--the period when the defensive attitude had been well-nigh
abandoned. This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the
habitation, but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams
protruding from surfaces of coarse white plaster, is a very effective
anomaly in regard to the little gray fortress on the other side of the
court. I call this a fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily
have been taken, and it must have assumed its present shape at a time
when people had ceased to peer through narrow slits at possible
besiegers. There are slits in the outer walls for such peering, but they
are noticeably broad and not particularly oblique, and might easily have
been applied to the uses of a peaceful parley. This is part of the charm
of the place; human life there must have lost an earlier grimness; it
was lived in by people who were beginning to believe in good intentions.
They must have lived very much together; that is one of the most obvious
reflections in the court of a mediæval dwelling. The court was not
always grassy and empty, as it is now, with only a couple of gentlemen
in search of impressions lying at their length, one of whom has taken a
wine-flask out of his pocket and has coloured the clear water drawn for
them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a decent, rosy, smiling,
talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the gatehouse, and who
has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about on crutches in
the sun, and making no sign when you ask after his health. This poor man
has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which even a
chance to talk about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the civil
old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of
one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering
repose. The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay,
though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From one of the
windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree, across a meadow, with
her knees up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair
paint-brush; the young lady is sketching. These are the only besiegers
to which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I
doubt whether the young lady's aim is very good. We wandered about the
empty interior, thinking it a pity such things should fall to pieces.
There is a beautiful great hall--great, that is, for a small castle (it
would be extremely handsome in a modern house)--with tall,
ecclesiastical-looking windows, and a long staircase at one end,
climbing against the wall into a spacious bedroom. You may still
apprehend very well the main lines of that simpler life; and it must be
said that, simpler though it was, it was apparently by no means
destitute of many of our own conveniences. The chamber at the top of the
staircase ascending from the hall is charming still, with its irregular
shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in the walls, and its deep
bay window formed of a series of small lattices. You can fancy people
stepping out from it upon the platform of the staircase, whose rugged
wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid, deeply-guttered hand-rail,
still remain. They looked down into the hall, where, I take it, there
was always a congregation of retainers, much lounging and waiting and
passing to and fro, with a door open into the court. The court, as I
said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you may find it
at present of a summer's day; there were beasts tethered in it, and
hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into puddles. But my
lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, commanded the
position and, no doubt, issued their orders accordingly. The sight of
the groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken
tables spread, and the brazier in the middle--all this seemed present
again; and it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through
the rest of the building--through the portion which connected the great
hall with the tower (here the confederate of the sketching young lady
without had set up the peaceful three-legged engine of his craft);
through the dusky, roughly circular rooms of the tower itself, and up
the corkscrew staircase of the same to that most charming part of every
old castle, where visions must leap away off the battlements to elude
you--the bright, dizzy platform at the tower-top, the place where the
castle-standard hung and the vigilant inmates surveyed the approaches.
Here, always, you really overtake the impression of the place--here, in
the sunny stillness, it seems to pause, panting a little, and give
itself up.

It was not only at Stokesay--I have written the name at last, and I will
not efface it--that I lingered a while on the summit of the keep to
enjoy the complete impression so overtaken. I spent such another half
hour at Ludlow, which is a much grander and more famous monument.
Ludlow, however, is a ruin--the most impressive and magnificent of
ruins. The charming old town and the admirable castle form a capital
object of pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent example of a small English
provincial town that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry; it
exhibits no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their attendant
purlieus and slums. The little city is perched upon a hill near which
the goodly Severn wanders, and it has a remarkable air of civic dignity.
Its streets are wide and clean, empty and a little grass-grown, and
bordered with spacious, mildly-ornamental brick houses, which look as if
there had been more going on in them in the first decade of the century
than there is in the present, but which can still, nevertheless, hold up
their heads and keep their window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant
and their door steps whitened. The place seems to say that a hundred
years, and less, ago it was the centre of a large provincial society,
and that this society was very "good" of its kind. It must have
transported itself to Ludlow for the season--in rumbling coaches and
heavy curricles--and there entertained itself in decent emulation of
that metropolis which a choice of railway lines had not as yet placed
within its immediate reach. It had balls at the assembly rooms; it had
Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss Burney's and Miss
Austen's heroines might perfectly well have had their first love-affair
there; a journey to Ludlow would certainly have been a great event to
Fanny Price or Emma Woodhouse, or even to those more exalted young
ladies, Evelina and Cecilia. It is a place on which a provincial
"gentry" has left a sensible stamp. I have seldom seen so good a
collection of houses of the period between the elder picturesqueness and
the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such relics and
intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture
with a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its
characteristics. It is still easier for a stranger who has stayed a
while in England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of
English social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as
all observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that
the mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of
the things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar
"notes" of England infinitely exaggerated--the rigidly aristocratic
constitution of society, for instance; the unæsthetic temper of the
people; the private character of most kinds of comfort and
entertainment. Let an old gentleman of conservative tastes, who can
remember the century's youth, talk to you at a club _temporis
acti_--tell you wherein it is that from his own point of view London, as
a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall off for the last
forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air of decent sympathy,
but privately you will say to yourself how difficult a place of sojourn
London must have been in those days for a stranger--how little
cosmopolitan, how bound in a thousand ways, with narrowness of custom.
What is true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of
the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one I am speaking of
must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even then, however,
the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the castle
to dream himself back into good humour in. They would effectually have
transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.



XIV

ENGLISH VIGNETTES

1879

I


Toward the last of April, in Monmouthshire, the primroses were as big as
your fist. I say "in Monmouthshire," because I believe that a certain
grassy mountain which I gave myself the pleasure of climbing, and to
which I took my way across the charming country, through lanes where the
hedges were perched upon blooming banks, lay within the borders of this
ancient province. It was the festive Eastertide, and a pretext for
leaving London had not been wanting. Of course it rained,--it rained a
good deal,--for man and the weather are usually at cross-purposes. But
there were intervals of light and warmth, and in England a couple of
hours of fine weather, islanded in moisture, assert their independence
and leave an uncompromised memory. These bright episodes were even of
longer duration; that whole morning, for instance, on which, with a
companion, I scrambled up the little Skirrid. One had a feeling that one
was very far from London; as, in fact, one was, after six or seven hours
in a smooth, swift English train. In England this is a great remoteness;
it seemed to justify the half-reluctant confession which I heard
constantly made, that the country was extremely "wild." There is
wildness and wildness, I thought; and though I had not been a great
explorer, I compared this rough district with several neighbourhoods in
another part of the world that passed for tame. I went even so far as to
wish that some of its ruder features might be transplanted to that
relatively unregulated landscape and commingled with its suburban
savagery. I went over the elements of this English prospect and of human
life in the midst of it, and wondered whether, if I were to enumerate
them and leave them to be added up by the dwellers beyond the sea, the
total would be set down as a wilderness. We were close to the Welsh
border, and a dozen little mountains in the distance were peeping over
each other's shoulders. But nature was open to the charge of no worse
disorder than this. The Skirrid (I like to repeat the name) wore, it is
true, at a distance, the aspect of a magnified extinguisher; but when,
after a bright, breezy walk through lane and meadow, we had scrambled
over the last of the thickly-flowering hedges which lay around its
shoulders like loosened strings of coral and began to ascend the grassy
cone (very much in the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar), it proved as
smooth-faced as a garden-mound. Hard by, on the flanks of other hills,
were troops of browsing sheep, and the only thing in which there was any
harshness of suggestion was the strong, damp wind. But even this had a
good deal of softness in it, and ministered to my sense of the agreeable
in scenery by the way it blew about the pearly morning mists that were
airing themselves upon neighbouring ridges, and kept shaking the
vaporous veil that fluttered down in the valley over the picturesque
little town of Abergavenny. A breezy, grassy English hill-top, looking
down on a country full of suggestive names and ancient memories, belongs
(especially if you are exhilarated by a beautiful walk, and you have a
flask in your pocket) decidedly to the category of smooth scenery. And
so with all the rest of it.

On Sunday I stayed away from church, because I learned that the sacred
edifice had a mediæval chill, and that if I should sit there for a
couple of hours I might inherit a lumbago three hundred years old. The
fact was formidable, but the idea was, in a certain way, attractive;
there was nothing crude in a rheumatism which descended from the Norman
times. Practical considerations, however, determined me not to expose
myself to this venerable pain; so in the still hours, when the roads and
lanes were empty, I simply walked to the churchyard and sat upon one of
the sun-warmed grave-stones. I say the roads were empty, but they were
peopled with the big primroses I just now spoke of--primroses of the
size of ripe apples, and yet, in spite of their rank growth, of as pale
and tender a yellow as if their gold had been diluted with silver. It
was indeed a mixture of gold and silver, for there was a wealth of the
white wood-anemone as well, and these delicate flowers, each of so
perfect a coinage, were tumbled along the green wayside as if a prince
had been scattering largesse. The outside of an old English
country-church in service-time is a very pleasant place; and this is as
near as I often care to approach to the celebration of the Anglican
mysteries. A just sufficient sense of their august character may be
gathered from that vague sound of village-music which makes its way out
into the stillness, and from the perusal of those portions of the
Prayer-Book which are inscribed upon mouldering slabs and dislocated
headstones. The church I speak of was a beautiful specimen of its
kind--intensely aged, variously patched, but still solid and useful, and
with no touch of restoration. It was very big and massive, and, hidden
away in the fields, it had a kind of lonely grandeur; there was nothing
in particular near it but its out-of-the-world little parsonage. It was
only one of ten thousand; I had seen a hundred such before. But I
watched the watery sunshine upon the rugosities of its ancient masonry;
I stood a while in the shade of two or three spreading yews which
stretched their black arms over graves decorated for Easter, according
to the custom of that country, with garlands of primrose and dog-violet;
and I reflected that in a wild region it was a blessing to have so quiet
a place of refuge as that.

Later, I chanced upon a couple of other asylums which were more spacious
and no less tranquil Both of them were old country-houses, and each in
its way was charming. One was a half-modernised feudal dwelling, lying
in a wooded hollow--a large concavity filled with a delightful old park.
The house had a long gray façade and half a dozen towers, and the usual
supply of ivy and of clustered chimneys relieved against a background of
rook-haunted elms. But the windows were all closed and the avenue was
untrodden; the house was the property of a lady who could not afford to
live in it in becoming state, and who had let it, famished, to a rich
young man "for the shooting." The rich young man occupied it but for
three weeks in the year, and for the rest of the time left it a prey to
the hungry gaze of the passing stranger, the would-be redresser of
æsthetic wrongs. It seemed a great æsthetic wrong that so charming a
place should not be a conscious, sentient home. But in England all this
is very common. It takes a great many plain people to keep a gentleman
going; it takes a great deal of wasted sweetness to make up a property.
It is true that, in the other case I speak of, the sweetness, which here
was even greater, was less sensibly squandered. If there was no one else
in the house, at least there were ghosts. It had a dark red front and
grim-looking gables; it was perched upon a sort of terrace, quite high
in the air, which was reached by steep, crooked, mossy steps. Beneath
these steps was an ancient bit of garden, and from the hither side of
the garden stretched a great expanse of turf. Out of the midst of the
turf sprang a magnificent avenue of Scotch firs--a perfect imitation of
the Italian stone-pine. It looked like the Villa Borghese transplanted
to the Welsh hills. The huge, smooth stems, in their double row, were
crowned with dark parasols. In the Scotch fir or the Italian pine there
is always an element of grotesqueness; the open umbrella in a rainy
country is not a poetical analogy, and the case is not better if you
compare the tree to a colossal mushroom. But, without analogies, there
was something very striking in the effect of this enormous, rigid vista,
and in the grassy carpet of the avenue, with the dusky, lonely,
high-featured house looking down upon it. There was something solemn and
tragical; the place was made to the hand of a romancer, and he might
have found his characters within; the leaden lattices were open.



II


The Isle of Wight is disappointing at first. I wondered why it should
be, and then I found the reason in the influence of the detestable
little railway. There can be no doubt that a railway in the Isle of
Wight is a gross impertinence; it is in evident contravention to the
natural style of the place. The place is minutely, delicately
picturesque, or it is nothing at all. It is purely ornamental; it exists
for the entertainment of tourists. It is separated by nature from the
dense railway-system of the less diminutive island, and it is the corner
of the world where a good carriage-road is most in keeping. Never was
there a better place for sacrificing to prettiness; never was there a
better chance for not making, a railway. But now there are twenty trains
a day, and the prettiness is twenty times less. The island is so small
that the hideous embankments and tunnels are obtrusive; the sight of
them is as painful as it would be to see a pedlar's pack on the
shoulders of a pretty woman. This is your first impression as you travel
(naturally by the objectionable conveyance) from Ryde to Ventnor; and
the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly, and stops at half a
dozen little stations, where the groups on the platform enable you to
perceive that the population consists almost exclusively of gentlemen in
costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for attention to cravats and
trousers (an immensely large class in England), of old ladies of the
species denominated in France _rentières_, of young ladies of the
highly-educated and sketching variety, this circumstance fails to
reconcile you to the chartered cicatrix which forms your course. At
Ventnor, however, face to face with the sea, and with the blooming
shoulder of the Undercliff close behind you, you lose sight to a certain
extent of the superfluities of civilisation. Not, indeed, that Ventnor
has not been diligently civilised. It is a well-regulated little
watering-place, and it has been subjected to a due measure of
cockneyfication. But the glittering ocean remains, shimmering at moments
with blue and silver, and the large gorse-covered downs rise superbly
above it. Ventnor hangs upon the side of a steep hill, and here and
there it clings and scrambles, it is propped and terraced, like one of
the bright--faced little towns that look down upon the Mediterranean. To
add to the Italian effect, the houses are all denominated villas, though
it must be added that nothing is less like an Italian villa than an
English one. Those which ornament the successive ledges at Ventnor are
for the most part small semi-detached boxes, predestined, even before
they had fairly come into the world, to the entertainment of lodgers.
They stand in serried rows all over the place, with the finest names in
the British _Peerage_ painted upon their gate-posts. Their severe
similarity of aspect, however, is such that even the difference between
Plantagenet and Percival, between Montgomery and Montmorency, is hardly
sufficient to enlighten the puzzled visitor. An English watering-place
is much more comfortable than an American; in a Plantagenet villa the
art of receiving "summer guests" has usually been brought to a higher
perfection than in an American rural hotel. But what strikes an
American, with regard to even so charmingly-nestled a little town as
Ventnor, is that it is far less natural, less pastoral and bosky, than
his own fond image of a summer-retreat. There is too much brick and
mortar; there are too many smoking chimneys and shops and public-houses;
there are no woods nor brooks, nor lonely headlands; there is none of
the virginal stillness of Nature. Instead of these things, there is an
esplanade, mostly paved with asphalt, bordered with benches and little
shops, and provided with a German band. To be just to Ventnor, however,
I must hasten to add that once you get away from the asphalt there is a
great deal of vegetation. The little village of Bonchurch, which closely
adjoins it, is buried in the most elaborate verdure, muffled in the
smoothest lawns and the densest shrubbery. Bonchurch is simply
delicious, and indeed in a manner quite absurd. It is like a model
village in imitative substances, kept in a big glass case; the turf
might be of green velvet and the foliage of cut paper. The villagers are
all happy gentlefolk, the cottages have plate-glass windows, and the
rose-trees on their walls are tended by an under-gardener. Passing from
Ventnor through the elegant umbrage of Bonchurch, and keeping along the
coast toward Shanklin, you come to the prettiest part of the Undercliff,
or, in other words, to the prettiest place in the world. The immense
grassy cliffs which form the coast of the island make what the French
would call a "false descent" to the sea. At a certain point the descent
is broken, and a wide natural terrace, all overtangled with wild shrubs
and flowers, hangs there in mid-air, half-way above the ocean. It is
impossible to imagine anything more charming than this long, blooming
platform, protected from the north by huge green bluffs and plunging on
the other side into the murmuring tides. This delightful arrangement
constitutes for a distance of some fifteen miles the south shore of the
Isle of Wight; but the best of it, as I have said, is to be found in the
four or five miles that separate Ventnor from Shanklin. Of a lovely
afternoon in April these four or five miles are an enchanting walk.

Of course you must first catch your lovely afternoon. I caught one; in
fact, I caught two. On the second I climbed up the downs, and perceived
that it was possible to put their gorse-covered stretches to still other
than pedestrian uses--to devote them to sedentary pleasures. A long
lounge in the lee of a stone wall, the lingering, fading afternoon
light, the reddening sky, the band of blue sea above the level-topped
bunches of gorse--these things, enjoyed as an undertone to the
conversation of an amiable compatriot, seemed indeed a very sufficient
substitute for that primitive stillness of the absence of which I
ventured just now to complain.



III


It was probably a mistake to stop at Portsmouth. I had done so, however,
in obedience to a familiar theory that seaport-towns abound in local
colour, in curious types, in the quaint and the strange. But these
charms, it must be confessed, were signally wanting to Portsmouth, along
whose sordid streets I strolled for an hour, vainly glancing about me
for an overhanging façade or a group of Maltese sailors. I was
distressed to perceive that a famous seaport could be at once untidy and
prosaic. Portsmouth is dirty, but it is also dull. It may be roughly
divided into the dock-yard and the public-houses. The dock-yard, into
which I was unable to penetrate, is a colossal enclosure, signalised
externally by a grim brick wall, as featureless as an empty blackboard.
The dock-yard eats up the town, as it were, and there is nothing left
over but the gin-shops, which the town drinks up. There is not even a
crooked old quay of any consequence, with brightly patched houses
looking out upon a forest of masts. To begin with, there are no masts;
and then there are no polyglot sign-boards, no overhanging upper
stories, no outlandish parrots and macaws perched in open lattices. I
had another hour or so before my train departed, and it would have gone
hard with me if I had not bethought myself of hiring a boat and being
pulled about in the harbour. Here a certain amount of entertainment was
to be found. There were great iron-clads, and white troopships that
looked vague and spectral, like the floating home of the Flying
Dutchman, and small, devilish vessels whose mission was to project the
infernal torpedo. I coasted about these metallic islets; and then, to
eke out my entertainment, I boarded the _Victory_. The _Victory_ is an
ancient frigate of enormous size, which in the days of her glory carried
I know not how many hundred guns, but whose only function now is to
stand year after year in Portsmouth waters and exhibit herself to the
festive cockney. Bank-holiday is now her great date; once upon a time it
was Trafalgar. The _Victory_, in short, was Nelson's ship; it was on her
huge deck that he was struck and in her deep bowels he breathed his
last. The venerable vessel is provided with a company of ushers, like
the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey, and it is hardly less solid
and spacious than either of those edifices. A good man in uniform did me
the honours of the ship with a terrible displacement of _h_'s, and there
seemed something strange in the way it had lapsed from its heroic part.
It had carried two hundred guns and a mighty warrior, and boomed against
the enemies of England; it had been the scene of one of the most
thrilling and touching events in English history. Now, it was hardly
more than a mere source of income to the Portsmouth watermen--an
objective point for Whitsuntide excursionists--a thing that a foreign
observer must allude to very casually, for fear of seeming vulgar, or
even serious.



IV


But I recouped myself, as they say in England, by stopping afterwards at
Chichester. In this dense and various old England two places may be very
near together and yet strike a very different note. I knew in a general
way that there was a cathedral at Chichester; indeed, I had seen its
beautiful spire from the window of the train. I had always regarded an
afternoon in a little cathedral-town as a high order of entertainment,
and a morning at Portsmouth had left me in the mood for not missing such
an exhibition. The spire of Chichester at a little distance greatly
resembles that of Salisbury. It is on a smaller scale, but it tapers
upward with a delicate slimness which, like that of its famous rival,
makes a picture of the level landscape in which it stands. Unlike the
spire of Salisbury, however, it has not at present the charm of
antiquity. A few years ago the old steeple collapsed and tumbled into
the church, and the present structure is but a modern facsimile. The
cathedral is not of the highest interest; it is rather plain and bare,
and, except a curious old detached bell-tower which stands beside it,
has no particular element of unexpectedness. But an English cathedral of
restricted grandeur may yet be a very charming affair; and I spent an
hour or so lounging around this highly respectable edifice, without the
spell of contemplation being broken by satiety. I approached it, from
the station, by the usual quiet red-brick street of the usual cathedral
town--a street of small, excellent shops, before which, here and there,
one of the vehicles of the neighbouring gentry was drawn up beside the
curbstone, while the grocer or the bookseller, who had hurried out
obsequiously, was waiting upon the comfortable occupant. I went into a
bookseller's to buy a Chichester guide, which I perceived in the window;
I found the shopkeeper talking to a young curate in a soft hat. The
guide seemed very desirable, though it appeared to have been but
scantily desired; it had been published in the year 1841, and a very
large remnant of the edition, with a muslin back and a little white
label and paper-covered boards, was piled up on the counter. It was
dedicated, with terrible humility, to the Duke of Richmond, and
ornamented with primitive woodcuts and steel plates; the ink had turned
brown and the page musty; and the style itself--that of a provincial
antiquary of upwards of forty years ago penetrated with the grandeur of
the aristocracy--had grown rather sallow and stale. Nothing could have
been more mellifluous and urbane than the young curate: he was arranging
to have the _Times_ newspaper sent him every morning for perusal. "So it
will be a penny if it is fetched away at noon?" he said, smiling very
sweetly and with the most gentlemanly voice possible; "and it will be
three halfpence if it is fetched away at four o'clock?" At the top of
the street, into which, with my guide-book, I relapsed, was an old
market-cross, of the fifteenth century--a florid, romantic little
structure. It consists of a stone pavilion, with open sides and a number
of pinnacles and crockets and buttresses, besides a goodly medallion of
the high-nosed visage of Charles I., which was placed above one of the
arches, at the Restoration, in compensation for the violent havoc
wrought upon the little town by the Parliamentary soldiers, who had
wrested the place from the Royalists, and who amused themselves, in
their grim fashion, with infinite hacking and hewing in the cathedral.
Here, to the left, the cathedral discloses itself, lifting its smart
gray steeple out of a pleasant garden. Opposite to the garden was the
Dolphin or the Dragon--in fine, the most eligible inn. I must confess
that for a time it divided my attention with the cathedral, in virtue of
an ancient, musty parlour on the second floor, with hunting-pictures
hung above haircloth sofas; of a red-faced waiter, in evening dress; of
a big round of cold beef and a tankard of ale. The prettiest thing at
Chichester is a charming little three-sided cloister, attached to the
cathedral, where, as is usual in such places, you may sit upon a
gravestone amid the deep grass in the middle, and measure the great
central mass of the church--the large gray sides, the high foundations
of the spire, the parting of the nave and transept. From this point the
greatness of a cathedral seems more complex and impressive. You watch
the big shadows slowly change their relations; you listen to the cawing
of rooks and the twittering of swallows; you hear a slow footstep
echoing in the cloisters.



V


If Oxford were not the finest thing in England, Cambridge would
certainly be. Cambridge was so, for that matter, to my imagination, for
thirty-six hours. To the barbaric mind, ambitious of culture, Oxford is
the usual image of the happy reconciliation between research and
acceptance. It typifies, to an American, the union of science and
sense--of aspiration and ease. A German university gives a greater
impression of science, and an English country-house or an Italian villa
a greater impression of idle enjoyment; but in these cases, on one side,
knowledge is too rugged, and, on the other, satisfaction is too trivial.
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure. When I say
Oxford, I mean Cambridge, for a barbarian is not in the least obliged to
know the difference, and it suddenly strikes me as being both very
pedantic and very good-natured in him to pretend to know it. What
institution is more majestic than Trinity College? what can be more
touching to an American than the hospitality of such an institution? The
first quadrangle is of immense extent, and the buildings that surround
it, with their long, rich fronts of time-deepened gray, are the
stateliest in the world. In the centre of the court are two or three
acres of close-shaven lawn, in the midst of which rises a splendid
gothic fountain, where the serving-men fill up their buckets. There are
towers and battlements and statues, and besides these things there are
cloisters and gardens and bridges. There are charming rooms in a kind of
stately gate-tower, and the rooms, occupying the thickness of the
building, have windows looking out on one side over the magnificent
quadrangle, with half a mile or so of Decorated architecture, and on the
other into deep-bosomed trees. And in the rooms is the best company
conceivable--distinguished men who are remarkably good fellows. I spent
a beautiful Sunday morning walking about Cambridge, with one of these
gentlemen, and attempting, as the French say, to _débrouiller_ its
charms. These are a very complicated affair, and I do not pretend, in
memory, to keep the colleges apart. There are, however, half a dozen
points that make ineffaceable pictures. Six or eight of the colleges
stand in a row, turning their backs to the river; and hereupon ensues
the loveliest confusion of gothic windows and ancient trees, of grassy
banks and mossy balustrades, of sun-chequered avenues and groves, of
lawns and gardens and terraces, of single-arched bridges spanning the
little stream, which is small and shallow, and looks as if it had been
"turned on" for ornamental purposes. The scantily-flowing Cam appears to
exist simply as an occasion for these enchanting little bridges--the
beautiful covered gallery of John's or the slightly-collapsing arch of
Clare. In the way of college-courts and quiet scholastic porticoes, of
gray-walled gardens and ivied nooks of study, in all the pictorial
accidents of a great English university, Cambridge is delightfully and
inexhaustibly rich. I looked at these one by one, and said to myself
always that the last was the best. If I were called upon, however, to
mention the prettiest corner of the world, I should heave a tender sigh
and point the way to the garden of Trinity Hall. My companion, who was
very competent to judge (but who spoke, indeed, with the partiality of a
son of the house), declared, as he ushered me into it, that it was, to
his mind, the most beautiful _small_ garden in Europe. I freely
accepted, and I promptly repeat, an affirmation so ingeniously
conditioned. The little garden at Trinity Hall is narrow and crooked; it
leans upon the river, from which a low parapet, all muffled in ivy,
divides it; it has an ancient wall, adorned with a thousand matted
creepers on one side, and on the other a group of extraordinary
horse-chestnuts. These trees are of prodigious size; they occupy half
the garden, and they are remarkable for the fact that their giant limbs
strike down into the earth, take root again, and emulate, as they rise,
the majesty of the parent tree. The manner in which this magnificent
group of horse-chestnuts sprawls about over the grass, out into the
middle of the lawn, is one of the most picturesque features of the
garden of Trinity Hall. Of course the single object at Cambridge that
makes the most abiding impression is the famous chapel of King's
College--the most beautiful chapel in England. The effect it attempts to
produce within belongs to the order of sublimity. The attempt succeeds,
and the success is attained by means so light and elegant that at first
it almost defeats itself. The sublime usually has more of a frown and
straddle, and it is not until after you have looked about you for ten
minutes that you perceive that the chapel is saved from being the
prettiest church in England by the accident of its being one of the
noblest. It is a cathedral without aisles or columns or transepts, but
(as a compensation) with such a beautiful slimness of clustered tracery
soaring along the walls, and spreading, bending and commingling in the
roof, that its simplicity seems only a richness the more. I stood there
for a quarter of an hour on a Sunday morning; there was no service, but
in the choir behind the great screen which divides the chapel in half,
the young choristers were rehearsing for the afternoon. The beautiful
boy-voices rose together and touched the splendid vault; they hung
there, expanding and resounding, and then, like a rocket that spends
itself, they faded and melted toward the end of the building. The sound
was angelic.



VI


Cambridgeshire is one of the so-called ugly counties; which means that
it is observably flat. It is for this reason that Newmarket is, in its
own peculiar fashion, so thriving a locality. The country is like a
board of green cloth; the turf presents itself as a friendly provision
of nature. Nature offers her gentle bosom as a gaming-table;
card-tables, billiard-tables are but a humble imitation of Newmarket
Heath. It was odd to think that amid this gentle, pastoral scenery,
there is more betting than anywhere else in the world. The large, neat
English meadows roll away to a humid-looking sky, the young partridges
jump about in the hedges, and nature does not look in the least as if
she were offering you odds. The gentlemen do, though--the gentlemen whom
you meet on the roads and in the railway carriage; they have that
indefinable look--it pervades a man from the cut of his whisker to the
shape of his boot-toe--which denotes a familiarity with the turf. It is
brought home to you that to an immense number of people in England the
events in the _Racing Calendar_ constitute the most important portion of
contemporary history. The very air about Newmarket appears to contain a
vague echo of stable-talk, and you perceive that this is the landscape
depicted in those large coloured prints of the "sporting" genus which
you have admired in inn-parlours.

The destruction of partridges is, if an equally classical, a less
licentious pursuit, for which, I believe, Cambridgeshire offers peculiar
facilities. Among these is a certain shooting-box, which is a triumph of
accidental picturesqueness (the highest order) and a temple of delicate
hospitality. The shooting belongs to the autumn, not to this vernal
period; but as I have spoken of echoes, I suppose that if I had listened
attentively I might have heard the ghostly crack of some of the famous
shots that have been discharged there. The air, I believe, had vibrated
to several august rifles, but all that I happened to hear by listening
was some excellent talk.

In England, I said just now, a couple of places may be very near
together, and yet have what the philosophers call a connotation
strangely different. Only a few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St.
Edmunds, a town whose tranquil antiquity makes horse-racing, and even
partridge-shooting, appear a restless and fidgety mode of passing the
time. I confess that I went to Bury St. Edmunds simply on the strength
of its name, which I had often encountered, and which had always seemed
to me to have a high value for the tourist I knew that St. Edmund had
been an Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my conviction that the little town that
bore his name would afford entertainment between trains had nothing
definite to rest upon. The event, however, rewarded my faith--rewarded
it with the sight of a magnificent old gatehouse of the thirteenth
century, the most substantial of many relics of the great abbey which
once flourished there. There are many others; they are scattered about
the old precinct of the abbey, a large portion of which has been
converted into a rambling botanic garden, the resort at Whitsuntide of a
thousand very modern merrymakers. The monument I speak of has the
proportions of a triumphal arch; it is at once a gateway and a fortress;
it is covered with beautiful ornament, and is altogether the lion of
Bury.



XV

AN ENGLISH NEW YEAR

1879


It will hardly be pretended this year that the English Christmas has
been a merry one, or that the New Year has the promise of being
particularly happy. The winter is proving very cold and vicious--as if
nature herself were loath to be left out of the general conspiracy
against the comfort and self-complacency of man. The country at large
has a sense of embarrassment and depression, which is brought home more
or less to every class in the closely-graduated social hierarchy, and
the light of Christmas firesides has by no means dispelled the gloom.
Not that I mean to overstate the gloom. It is difficult to imagine any
combination of adverse circumstances powerful enough to infringe very
sensibly upon the appearance of activity and prosperity, social
stability and luxury, which English life must always present to a
stranger. Nevertheless, the times are distinctly hard--there is plenty
of evidence of it--and the spirits of the public are not high. The
depression of business is extreme and universal; I am ignorant whether
it has reached so calamitous a point as that almost hopeless prostration
of every industry which you have lately witnessed in America, and I
believe things are by no means so bad as they have been on two or three
occasions within the present century. The possibility of distress among
the lower classes has been minimised by the gigantic poor-relief system,
which is so characteristic a feature of English civilisation, and which
on particular occasions is supplemented (as is the case at present) by
private charity proportionately huge. I notice, too, that in some parts
of the country discriminating groups of work-people have selected these
dismal days as a happy time for striking. When the labouring classes are
able to indulge in the luxury of a strike I suppose the situation may be
said to have its cheerful side. There is, however, great distress in the
North, and there is a general feeling of impecuniosity throughout the
country. The _Daily News_ has sent a correspondent to the great
industrial regions, and almost every morning for the last three weeks a
very cleverly-executed picture of the misery of certain parts of
Yorkshire and Lancashire has been served up with the matutinal tea and
toast. The work is a good one and, I take it, eminently worth doing, as
it appears to have had a visible effect upon the purse-strings of the
well-to-do. There is nothing more striking in England than the success
with which an "appeal" is always made. Whatever the season or whatever
the cause, there always appears to be enough money and enough
benevolence in the country to respond to it in sufficient measure--a
remarkable fact when one remembers that there is never a moment of the
year when the custom of "appealing" intermits. Equally striking,
perhaps, is the perfection to which the science of distributing charity
has been raised--the way it has been analysed and explored and made one
of the exact sciences. One perceives that it has occupied for a long
time a foremost place among administrative questions, and has received
all the light that experience and practice can throw upon it. The
journal I quoted just now may perhaps, without reproach, be credited
with a political _arrière-pensée_. It would obviously like its readers
to supply in this matter of the stagnation of trade the missing link
between effect and cause--or the link which, if not absolutely missing,
is at any rate difficult to lay one's hand upon. The majority in
Parliament were not apparently of the opinion that the disorganisation
of business is the fault of Lord Beaconsfield; but there is no doubt
that it is a misfortune for the Conservative party that this bad state
of things coincides very much with its tenure of office. When an
Administration may be invidiously described as "restless," "reckless,"
and "adventurous," and when at the same time business is very bad and
distress increasing, it requires no great ingenuity to represent the
former fact as responsible for the latter.

I have spoken of the rigour of the time in the lower walks of English
life; and it is not out of place to say that among those happier people
who stand above the reach of material incommodity, the Christmas season
has been overshadowed sentimentally--or at least conventionally--by the
death of Princess Alice. If I had written to you at the moment this
event occurred I should have been tempted to make some general
reflections upon it, and it is even now perhaps not too late to say that
there was, to an observer, something very interesting and characteristic
in the manner in which the news was received. Broadly speaking, it
produced much more commotion than I should have expected; the papers
overflowed with articles on the subject, the virtues of the deceased
lady and the grief of the Queen were elaborately commemorated; many
shops, on the day of the Princess's funeral, were partially closed, and
the whole nation, it may be said--or the whole of what professes, in any
degree whatever, to be "society"--went into mourning. There was enough
in all this to make a stranger consider and interrogate; and the result
of his reflections would, I think, have been that, after all abatements
are made, the monarchy has still a great hold upon the affections of the
people. The people takes great comfort in its royal family. The love of
social greatness is extraordinarily strong in England, and the royal
family appeals very conveniently to this sentiment. People in the
immense obscurity of that middle class which constitutes the bulk of the
English world like to feel that they are related in some degree to
something that is socially great. They cannot pretend that they are
related to dukes and earls and people of that sort; but they are able to
cultivate a certain sense of being related to the royal family. They may
talk of "our" princes and princesses--and the most exalted members of
the peerage may do no more than that; they may possess photographs of
the Queen's children, and read of their daily comings and goings with an
agreeable sense of property, and without incurring that reproach of
snobbishness which sometimes attaches to too eager an interest in the
doings of the great nobility. There is no reason to suppose that the
Queen takes the humorous view of this situation; her Majesty is indeed
credited with a comfortable, motherly confidence in the salutary effect
of the court-circle upon the mind of the middle class; and there is a
kind of general feeling that, socially speaking, the Queen and the
middle class understand each other. There was something natural,
therefore, in the great impression made by the death of a princess who
was personally known but to an incalculably small proportion of the
people who mourned for her, and on whose behalf propriety would have
resented the idea that she could personally be missed. It is
nevertheless true that Lord Beaconsfield is felt rather to have overdone
his part in announcing the event to the House of Lords in language in
which he might have proclaimed some great national catastrophe. I was
told by a person who was present that the House felt itself to be at the
mercy of his bad taste--that men looked at each other with a blush and a
kind of shudder, and asked each other what was coming next. He remarked,
among other things, that the manner in which the Princess Alice had
contracted her fatal illness (her tender imprudence in kissing her sick
children) was an act worthy to be commemorated in art--"in painting, in
sculpture, and in gems." I have heard these last two words wittily
quoted in illustration of his Semitic origin. An ordinarily florid
speaker would have contented himself with saying "in painting and in
sculpture." The addition "in gems" betrays the genius of the race which
supplies the world with pawnbrokers.

I left town a short time before Christmas and went to spend the festive
season in the North, in a part of the country with which I was
unacquainted. It was quite possible to absent one's self from London
without a sense of sacrifice, for the charms of the metropolis during
the last several weeks have been obscured by peculiarly atrocious
weather. It is, of course, a very old story that London is foggy, and
this simple statement is not of necessity alarming. But there are fogs
and fogs, and these murky visitations, during the present winter, have
been of the least tolerable sort. The fog that draws down and absorbs
the smoke of the housetops, causes it to hang about the streets in
impenetrable density, forces it into one's eyes and down one's throat,
so that one is half-blinded and quite sickened--this atmospheric
abomination has been much more frequent than usual. Just before
Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and even a tolerably light
fall of snow has London quite at its mercy. The emblem of purity is
almost immediately converted into a sticky, lead-coloured mush, the cabs
skulk out of sight or take up their stations before the lurid windows of
a public-house, which glares through the sleety darkness at the
desperate wayfarer with an air of vulgar bravado. This state of things
in the London streets made a rather sorry Christmas, though I believe
the Christmas hearth is supposed to burn the more brightly in proportion
as the outer world is less attractive. The wonderful London shops were,
of course, duly transfigured, but they seemed to me, for the most part,
to have an aspect of vain expectation, and I hear that their proprietors
give a melancholy account of the profits of the season. It was only at a
certain charming little French establishment in Bond Street that I
observed any great activity--a little chocolate-shop where
light-fingered young women from Paris dispense the most wonderful
bonbonnières.

To keep one's self in good humour with English civilisation, however,
one must do what I alluded to just now--one must go into the country;
one must limit one's horizon, for the time, to the spacious walls of one
of those admirable homes which at this season overflow with hospitality
and good cheer. By this means the result is triumphantly attained--these
are conditions that you cordially appreciate. Of all the great things
that the English have invented and made a part of the glory of the
national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the one
they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has
become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their
manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled
country-house. The grateful stranger makes these reflections--and others
besides--as he wanders about in the beautiful library of such a
dwelling of an inclement winter afternoon just at the hour when six
o'clock tea is impending. Such a place and such a time abound in
agreeable episodes; but I suspect that the episode from which, a
fortnight ago, I received the most ineffaceable impression was but
indirectly connected with the charms of a luxurious fireside. The
country I speak of was a populous manufacturing region, full of tall
chimneys and of an air that is gray and gritty. A lady had made a
present of a Christmas-tree to the children of a workhouse, and she
invited me to go with her and assist at the distribution of the toys.
There was a drive through the early dusk of a very cold Christmas eve,
followed by the drawing-up of a lamp-lit brougham in the snowy
quadrangle of a grim-looking charitable institution. I had never been in
an English workhouse before, and this one transported me, with the aid
of memory, to the early pages of _Oliver Twist_. We passed through
certain cold, bleak passages, to which an odour of suet-pudding, the
aroma of Christmas cheer, failed to impart an air of hospitality; and
then, after waiting a while in a little parlour appertaining to the
superintendent, where the remainder of a dinner of by no means
eleemosynary simplicity and the attitude of a gentleman asleep with a
flushed face on the sofa seemed to effect a tacit exchange of
references, we were ushered into a large frigid refectory, chiefly
illumined by the twinkling tapers of the Christmas-tree. Here entered to
us some hundred and fifty little children of charity, who had been
making a copious dinner, and who brought with them an atmosphere of
hunger memorably satisfied--together with other traces of the occasion
upon their pinafores and their small red faces. I have said that the
place reminded me of _Oliver Twist_, and I glanced through this little
herd for an infant figure that should look as if it were cut out for
romantic adventures. But they were all very prosaic little mortals. They
were made of very common clay indeed, and a certain number of them were
idiotic. They filed up and received their little offerings, and then
they compressed themselves into a tight infantine bunch, and lifting up
their small hoarse voices, directed a melancholy hymn toward their
benefactress. The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its
curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose--the dying wintry light in
the big, bare, stale room; the beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing in the
twinkling glory of the Christmas-tree; the little multitude of staring
and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, faces.



XVI

AN ENGLISH WINTER
WATERING-PLACE

1879


I have just been spending a couple of days at a well-known resort upon
the Kentish coast, and though such an exploit is by no means
unprecedented, yet, as to the truly observing mind no opportunity is
altogether void and no impressions are wholly valueless, I have it on my
conscience to make a note of my excursion. Superficially speaking, it
was certainly wanting in originality; but I am afraid that it afforded
me as much entertainment as if the idea of paying a visit to Hastings
had been an invention of my own. This is so far from being the case that
the most striking feature of the town in question is the immense
provision made there for the entertainment of visitors. Hastings and St.
Leonard's, standing side by side, present a united sea-front of more
miles in length than I shall venture to compute. It is sufficient that
in going from one end of the place to the other I had a greater sense of
having taken a long, straight walk, than I had done since I last
measured the remarkable length of Broadway. This is not a strikingly
picturesque image, and it must be confessed that the beauty of Hastings
does not reside in a soft irregularity or a rural exuberance. Like all
the larger English watering-places it is simply a little London _super
mare_. The pictorial is always to be found in England if one will take
the trouble of looking for it; but it must be conceded that at Hastings
this element is less obtrusive than it might be. I had heard it
described as a "dull Brighton," and this description had been intended
to dispose of the place. In fact, however--such is the perversity of the
inquiring mind--it had rather quickened than quenched my interest. It
occurred to me that it might be entertaining to follow out the
variations and modifications of Brighton. Four or five miles of
lodging-houses and hotels staring at the sea across a "parade" adorned
with iron benches, with hand-organs and German bands, with nursemaids
and British babies, with ladies and gentleman of leisure--looking rather
embarrassed with it, and trying, rather unsuccessfully, to get rid of
it--this is the great feature which Brighton and Hastings have in
common. At Brighton there is a certain variety and gaiety of
colour--something suggesting crookedness and yellow paint--which gives
the place a kind of cheerful, easy, more or less vulgar, foreign air.
But Hastings is very gray and sober and English, and, indeed, it is
because it seemed to me so English that I gave my best attention to it.
If one is attempting to gather impressions of a people and to learn to
know them, everything is interesting that is characteristic, quite apart
from its being beautiful. English manners are made up of such a
multitude of small details that the portrait a stranger has privately
sketched in is always liable to receive new touches. And this, indeed,
is the explanation of his noting a great many small points, on the spot,
with a degree of relish and appreciation which must often, to persons
who are not in his position, appear exaggerated. He has formed a mental
picture of the civilisation of the people he lives among, and whom, when
he has a great deal of courage, he makes bold to say he is "studying;"
he has drawn up a kind of tabular view of their manners and customs,
their idiosyncrasies, their social institutions, their general features
and properties; and when once he has suspended this rough cartoon in the
chambers of his imagination, he finds a great deal of occupation in
touching it up and filling it in. Wherever he goes, whatever he sees, he
adds a few strokes. That is how I spent my time at Hastings.

I found it, for instance, a question more interesting than it might
superficially appear, to choose between the inns--between the Royal
Hotel upon the Parade and an ancient hostel--a survival of the
posting-days--in a side-street. A Mend had described the latter
establishment to me as "mellow," and this epithet complicated the
problem. The term mellow, as applied to an inn, is the comparative
degree of a state of things of which (say) "musty" would be the
superlative. If you can seize this tendency in its comparative stage you
may do very well indeed; the trouble is that, like all tendencies, it
contains, even in its earlier phases, the germs of excess. I thought it
very possible that the Swan would be over-ripe; but I thought it equally
probable that the Royal would be crude. I could claim a certain
acquaintance with "royal" hotels--I knew just how they were constituted.
I foresaw the superior young woman sitting at a ledger, in a kind of
glass cage, at the bottom of the stairs, and expressing by refined
intonations her contempt for a gentleman who should decline to "require"
a sitting-room. The functionary whom in America we know and dread as an
hotel-clerk belongs in England to the sex which, when need be, has an
even more perfect command of the supercilious. Large hotels here are
almost always owned and carried on by companies, and the company is
represented by a well-shaped female figure belonging to the class whose
members are more particularly known as "persons." The chambermaid is a
young woman, and the female tourist is a lady; but the occupant of the
glass cage, who hands you your key and assigns you your apartment, is
designated in the manner I have mentioned. The "person" has various
methods of revenging herself for her shadowy position in the social
scale, and I think it was from a vague recollection of having on former
occasions felt the weight of her embittered spirit that I determined to
seek the hospitality of the humbler inn, where it was probable that one
who was himself humble would enjoy a certain consideration. In the
event, I was rather oppressed by the featherbed quality of the welcome
extended to me at the Swan. Once established there, in a sitting-room
(after all), the whole affair was as characteristically English as I
could desire.

I have sometimes had occasion to repine at the meagreness and mustiness
of the old-fashioned English inn, and to feel that in poetry and in
fiction these defects had been culpably glossed over. But I said to
myself the other evening that there is a kind of venerable decency even
in some of its dingiest idiosyncrasies, and that in an age of
vulgarisation one should do justice to an institution which is still
more or less of a stronghold of the ancient amenities. It is a
satisfaction in moving about the world to be treated as a gentleman, and
this gratification appears to be more than, in the light of modern
science, a Company can profitably undertake to bestow. I have an old
friend, a person of admirably conservative instincts, from whom, a short
time since, I borrowed a hint of this kind. This lady had been staying
at a small inn in the country, with her daughter; the daughter, whom we
shall call Mrs. B., had left the house a few days before the mother.
"Did you like the place?" I asked of my friend; "was it comfortable?"
"No, it was not comfortable; but I liked it. It was shabby, and I was
much overcharged; but it pleased me." "What was the mysterious charm?"
"Well, when I was coming away, the landlady--she had cheated me
horribly--came to my carriage, and dropped a curtsey, and said: 'My duty
to Mrs. B., ma'am.' Que voulez-vous? That pleased me." There was an old
waiter at Hastings who would have been capable of that--an old waiter
who had been in the house for forty years, and who was not so much an
individual waiter as the very spirit and genius, the incarnation and
tradition of waiter-hood. He was faded and weary and rheumatic, but he
had a sort of mixture of the paternal and the deferential, the
philosophic and the punctilious, which seemed but grossly requited by a
present of a small coin. I am not fond of jugged hare for dinner, either
as a light _entrée_ or as a _pièce de resistance_; but this
accomplished attendant had the art of presenting you such a dish in a
manner that persuaded you, for the time, that it was worthy of your
serious consideration. The hare, by the way, before being subjected to
the mysterious operation of jugging, might have been seen dangling from
a hook in the bar of the inn, together with a choice collection of other
viands. You might peruse the bill of fare in an elementary form as you
passed in and out of the house, and make up your _menu_ for the day by
poking with your stick at a juicy-looking steak or a promising fowl. The
landlord and his spouse were always on the threshold of the bar,
polishing a brass candlestick and paying you their respects; the place
was pervaded by an aroma of rum-and-water and of commercial travellers'
jokes.

This description, however, is lacking in the element of gentility, and I
will not pursue it farther, for I should give a very false impression of
Hastings if I were to omit so characteristic a feature. It was, I think,
the element of gentility that most impressed me. I know that the word I
have just ventured to use is under the ban of contemporary taste; so I
may as well say outright that I regard it as indispensable in almost any
attempt at portraiture of English manners. It is vain for an observer of
such things to pretend to get on without it. One may talk of foreign
life indefinitely--of the manners and customs of France, Germany, and
Italy--and never feel the need of this suggestive, yet mysteriously
discredited, epithet. One may survey the remarkable face of American
civilisation without finding occasion to strike this particular note.
But in England no circumlocution will serve--the note must be definitely
struck. To attempt to speak of an English watering-place in winter and
yet pass it over in silence, would be to forfeit all claims to analytic
talent. For a stranger, at any rate, the term is invaluable--it is more
convenient than I should find easy to say. It is instantly evoked in my
mind by long rows of smuttily-plastered houses, with a card inscribed
"Apartments" suspended in the window of the ground-floor
sitting-room--that portion of the dwelling which is known in
lodging-house parlance as "the parlours." Everything, indeed, suggests
it--the bath-chairs, drawn up for hire in a melancholy row; the
innumerable and excellent shops, adorned with the latest photographs of
the royal family and of Mrs. Langtry; the little reading-room and
circulating library on the Parade, where the daily papers, neatly
arranged, may be perused for a trifling fee, and the novels of the
season are stacked away like the honeycombs in an apiary; the long pier,
stretching out into the sea, to which you are admitted by the payment of
a penny at a wicket, and where you may enjoy the music of an
indefatigable band, the enticements of several little stalls for the
sale of fancy-work, and the personal presence of good local society. It
is only the winking, twinkling, easily-rippling sea that is not genteel.
But, really, I was disposed to say at Hastings that if the sea were not
genteel, so much the worse for Neptune; for it was the favourable aspect
of the great British proprieties and solemnities that struck me.
Hastings and St. Leonards, with their long, warm seafront, and their
multitude of small, cheap comforts and conveniences, offer a kind of
résumé of middle-class English civilisation and of advantages of which
it would ill become an American to make light. I don't suppose that life
at Hastings is the most exciting or the most gratifying in the world,
but it must certainly have its advantages. If I were a quiet old lady of
modest income and nice habits--or even a quiet old gentleman of the same
pattern--I should certainly go to Hastings. There, amid the little shops
and the little libraries, the bath-chairs and the German bands, the
Parade and the long Pier, with a mild climate, a moderate scale of
prices, and the consciousness of a high civilisation, I should enjoy a
seclusion which would have nothing primitive or crude.



XVII

SARATOGA

1870


The sentimental tourist makes images in advance; they grow up in his
mind by a logic of their own. He finds himself thinking of an unknown,
unseen place, as having such and such a shape and figure rather than
such another. It assumes in his mind a certain complexion, a certain
colour which frequently turns out to be singularly at variance with
reality. For some reason or other, I had supposed Saratoga to be buried
in a sort of elegant wilderness. I imagined a region of shady forest
drives, with a bright, broad-terraced hotel gleaming here and there
against a background of mysterious groves and glades. I had made a
cruelly small allowance for the stem vulgarities of life--for the shops
and sidewalks and loafers, the complex machinery of a city of pleasure.
The fault was so wholly my own that it is quite without bitterness that
I proceed to affirm that the Saratoga of experience is sadly different
from this. I confess, however, that it has always seemed to me that
one's visions, on the whole, gain more than they lose by being
transmuted into fact. There is an essential indignity in indefiniteness;
you cannot allow for accidents and details until you have seen them.
They give more to the imagination than they receive from it I frankly
admit, therefore, that the Saratoga of reality is a much more
satisfactory place than the all-too-primitive Elysium I had constructed.
It is indeed, as I say, immensely different. There is a vast number of
brick--nay, of asphalt--sidewalks, a great many shops, and a magnificent
array of loafers. But what indeed are you to do at Saratoga--the morning
draught having been achieved--unless you loaf? "Que faire en un gîte à
moins que l'on ne songe?" Loafers being assumed, of course shops and
sidewalks follow. The main avenue of Saratoga does not scruple to call
itself Broadway. The untravelled reader may form a very accurate idea of
it by recalling as distinctly as possible, not indeed the splendours of
that famous thoroughfare, but the secondary charms of the Sixth Avenue.
The place has what the French would call the "accent" of the Sixth
Avenue. Its two main features are the two monster hotels which stand
facing each other along a goodly portion of its course. One, I believe,
is considered much better than the other,--less of a monster and more of
a refuge,--but in appearance there is little choice between them. Both
are immense brick structures, directly on the crowded, noisy street,
with vast covered piazzas running along the façade, supported by great
iron posts. The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly
informed, is the largest "in the world." There are a number of objects
in Saratoga, by the way, which in their respective kinds are the finest
in the world. One of these is Mr. John Morrissey's casino. I bowed my
head submissively to this statement, but privately I thought of the blue
Mediterranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, and the
silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view across the outer sea toward
the bosky cliffs of Italy. The Congress waters, too, it is well known,
are excellent in the superlative degree; this I am perfectly willing to
maintain.

The piazzas of these great hotels may very well be the biggest of all
piazzas. They have not architectural beauty; but they doubtless serve
their purpose--that of affording sitting-space in the open air to an
immense number of persons. They are, of course, quite the best places to
observe the Saratoga world. In the evening, when the "boarders" have all
come forth and seated themselves in groups, or have begun to stroll in
(not always, I regret to say; to the sad detriment of the dramatic
interest, bisexual) couples, the big heterogeneous scene affords a great
deal of entertainment. Seeing it for the first time, the observer is
likely to assure himself that he has neglected an important item in the
sum of American manners. The rough brick wall of the house, illumined by
a line of flaring gas-lights, forms a natural background to the crude,
impermanent, discordant tone of the assembly. In the larger of the two
hotels, a series of long windows open into an immense parlour--the
largest, I suppose, in the world, and the most scantily furnished in
proportion to its size. A few dozen rocking-chairs, an equal number of
small tables, tripods to the eternal ice-pitcher, serve chiefly to
emphasise the vacuous grandeur of the spot. On the piazza, in the outer
multitude, ladies largely prevail, both by numbers and (you are not slow
to perceive) by distinction of appearance. The good old times of
Saratoga, I believe, as of the world in general, are rapidly passing
away. The time was when it was the chosen resort of none but "nice
people." At the present day, I hear it constantly affirmed, "the company
is dreadfully mixed." What society may have been at Saratoga when its
elements were thus simple and severe, I can only vaguely and mournfully
conjecture. I confine myself to the dense, democratic, vulgar Saratoga
of the current year. You are struck, to begin with, at the hotels, by
the numerical superiority of the women; then, I think, by their personal
superiority. It is incontestably the case that in appearance, in manner,
in grace and completeness of aspect, American women surpass their
husbands and brothers; the relation being reversed among some of the
nations of Europe. Attached to the main entrance of the Union Hotel, and
adjoining the ascent from the street to the piazza, is a "stoop" of
mighty area, which, at most hours of the day and evening, is a favoured
lounging-place of men. I should add, after the remark I have just made,
that even in the appearance of the usual American male there seems to me
to be a certain plastic intention. It is true that the lean, sallow,
angular Yankee of tradition is dignified mainly by a look of decision, a
hint of unimpassioned volition, the air of "smartness." This in some
degree redeems him, but it fails to make him handsome. But in the
average American of the present time, the typical leanness and
sallowness are less than in his fathers, and the individual acuteness is
at once equally marked and more frequently united with merit of form.
Casting your eye over a group of your fellow-citizens in the portico of
the Union Hotel, you will be inclined to admit that, taking the good
with the bad, they are worthy sons of the great Republic. I have found,
at any rate, a great deal of entertainment in watching them. They
suggest to my fancy the swarming vastness--the multifarious
possibilities and activities--of our young civilisation. They come from
the uttermost ends of the Union--from San Francisco, from New Orleans,
from Alaska. As they sit with their white hats tilted forward, and their
chairs tilted back, and their feet tilted up, and their cigars and
toothpicks forming various angles with these various lines, I seem to
see in their faces a tacit reference to the affairs of a continent They
are obviously persons of experience--of a somewhat narrow and monotonous
experience certainly; an experience of which the diamonds and laces
which their wives are exhibiting hard by are, perhaps, the most
substantial and beautiful result; but, at any rate, they have _lived_,
in every fibre of the will. For the time, they are lounging with the
negro waiters, and the boot-blacks, and the news-vendors; but it was not
in lounging that they gained their hard wrinkles and the level impartial
regard which they direct from beneath their hat-rims. They are not the
mellow fruit of a society which has walked hand-in-hand with tradition
and culture; they are hard nuts, which have grown and ripened as they
could. When they talk among themselves, I seem to hear the cracking of
the shells.

If the men are remarkable, the ladies are wonderful Saratoga is famous,
I believe, as the place of all places in America where women adorn
themselves most, or as the place, at least, where the greatest amount of
dressing may be seen by the greatest number of people. Tour first
impression is therefore of the--what shall I call it?--of the abundance
of petticoats. Every woman you meet, young or old, is attired with a
certain amount of richness, and with whatever good taste may be
compatible with such a mode of life. You behold an interesting, indeed a
quite momentous spectacle; the democratisation of elegance. If I am to
believe what I hear--in fact, I may say what I overhear--many of these
sumptuous persons have enjoyed neither the advantages of a careful
education nor the privileges of an introduction to society. She walks
more or less of a queen, however, each uninitiated nobody. She often
has, in dress, an admirable instinct of elegance and even of what the
French call "chic." This instinct occasionally amounts to a sort of
passion; the result then is wonderful. You look at the coarse brick
walls, the rusty iron posts of the piazza, at the shuffling negro
waiters, the great tawdry steamboat-cabin of a drawing-room--you see the
tilted ill-dressed loungers on the steps--and you finally regret that a
figure so exquisite should have so vulgar a setting. Your resentment,
however, is speedily tempered by reflection. You feel the impertinence
of your old reminiscences of English and French novels, and of the
dreary social order in which privacy was the presiding genius and women
arrayed themselves for the appreciation of the few. The crowd, the
tavern-loungers, the surrounding ugliness and tumult and license,
constitute the social medium of the young lady you are so inconsistent
as to admire; she is dressed for publicity. The thought fills you with a
kind of awe. The social order of tradition is far away indeed, and as
for the transatlantic novels, you begin to doubt whether she is so
amiably curious as to read even the silliest of them. To be dressed up
to the eyes is obviously to give pledges to idleness. I have been
forcibly struck with the apparent absence of any warmth and richness of
detail in the lives of these wonderful ladies of the piazzas. We are
freely accused of being an eminently wasteful people; and I know of few
things which so largely warrant the accusation as the fact that these
conspicuous _élégantes_ adorn themselves, socially speaking, to so
little purpose. To dress for every one is, practically, to dress for no
one. There are few prettier sights than a charmingly-dressed woman,
gracefully established in some shady spot, with a piece of needlework or
embroidery, or a book. Nothing very serious is accomplished, probably,
but an æsthetic principle is recognised. The embroidery and the book
are a tribute to culture, and I suppose they really figure somewhere out
of the opening scenes of French comedies. But here at Saratoga, at any
hour of morning or evening, you may see a hundred rustling beauties
whose rustle is their sole occupation. One lady in particular there is,
with whom it appears to be an inexorable fate that she shall be nothing
more than dressed. Her apparel is tremendously modern, and my remarks
would be much illumined if I had the learning necessary for describing
it I can only say that every evening for a fortnight she has revealed
herself as a fresh creation. But she especially, as I say, has struck me
as a person dressed beyond her life and her opportunities. I resent on
her behalf--or on behalf at least of her finery--the extreme severity
of her circumstances. What is she, after all, but a "regular boarder"?
She ought to sit on the terrace of a stately castle, with a great
baronial park shutting out the undressed world, and bandy quiet
small-talk with an ambassador or a duke. My imagination is shocked when
I behold her seated in gorgeous relief against the dusty clapboards of
the hotel, with her beautiful hands folded in her silken lap, her head
drooping slightly beneath the weight of her _chignon_, her lips parted
in a vague contemplative gaze at Mr. Helmbold's well-known advertisement
on the opposite fence, her husband beside her reading the New York
_Herald_.

I have indeed observed cases of a sort of splendid social isolation
here, which are not without a certain amount of pathos--people who know
no one, who have money and finery and possessions, only no friends. Such
at least is my inference, from the lonely grandeur with which I see them
invested. Women, of course, are the most helpless victims of this cruel
situation, although it must be said that they befriend each other with a
generosity for which we hardly give them credit I have seen women, for
instance, at various "hops," approach their lonely sisters and invite
them to waltz, and I have seen the fair invited surrender themselves
eagerly to this humiliating embrace. Gentlemen at Saratoga are at a much
higher premium than at European watering-places. It is an old story that
in this country we have no "leisure-class"--the class from which the
Saratogas of Europe recruit a large number of their male frequenters. A
few months ago, I paid a visit to an English "bath," commemorated in
various works of fiction, where, among many visible points of difference
from American resorts, the most striking was the multitude of young men
who had the whole day on their hands. While their sweethearts and
sisters are waltzing together, our own young men are rolling up
greenbacks in counting-houses and stores. I was recently reminded in
another way, one evening, of the unlikeness of Saratoga to Cheltenham.
Behind the biggest of the big hotels is a large planted yard, which it
is the fashion at Saratoga to talk of as a "park," and which is perhaps
believed to be the biggest in the world. At one end of it stands a great
ballroom, approached by a range of wooden steps. It was late in the
evening; the room, in spite of the intense heat, was blazing with light
and the orchestra thundering a mighty waltz. A group of loungers,
including myself, were hanging about to watch the ingress of the
festally-minded. In the basement of the edifice, sunk beneath the
ground, a noisy auctioneer, in his shirt and trousers, black in the face
with heat and vociferation, was selling "pools" of the races to a dense
group of frowsy betting-men. At the foot of the steps was stationed a
man in a linen coat and straw hat, without waistcoat or necktie, to take
the tickets of the ball-goers. As the latter failed to arrive in
sufficient numbers, a musician came forth to the top of the steps and
blew a loud summons on a horn. After this they began to straggle along.
On this occasion, certainly, the company promised to be decidedly
"mixed." The women, as usual, were much bedizened, though without any
constant adhesion to the technicalities of full-dress. The men adhered
to it neither in the letter nor the spirit. The possessor of a pair of
satin-shod feet, twinkling beneath an uplifted volume of gauze and lace
and flowers, tripped up the steps with her gloved hand on the sleeve of
a railway "duster." Now and then two ladies arrived alone; generally a
group of them approached under convoy of a single man. Children were
freely scattered among their elders, and frequently a small boy would
deliver his ticket and enter the glittering portal, beautifully
unembarrassed. Of the children of Saratoga there would be wondrous
things to relate. I believe that, in spite of their valuable aid, the
festival of which I speak was rated rather a "fizzle." I see it
advertised that they are soon to have, for their own peculiar benefit, a
"Masquerade and Promenade Concert, beginning at 9 P.M." I observe that
they usually open the "hops," and that it is only after their elders
have borrowed confidence from the sight of their unfaltering paces that
the latter dare to dance. You meet them far into the evening, roaming
over the piazzas and corridors of the hotels--the little girls
especially--lean, pale, formidable. Occasionally childhood confesses
itself, even when maternity resists, and you see at eleven o'clock at
night some poor little bedizened precocity collapsed in slumber in a
lonely wayside chair. The part played by children in society here is
only an additional instance of the wholesale equalisation of the various
social atoms which is the distinctive feature of collective Saratoga. A
man in a "duster" at a ball is as good as a man in regulation-garments;
a young woman dancing with another young woman is as good as a young
woman dancing with a young man; a child of ten is as good as a woman of
thirty; a double negative in conversation is rather better than a
single.

An important feature in many a watering-place is the facility for
leaving it a little behind you and tasting of the unmitigated country.
You may wander to some shady hillside and sentimentalise upon the vanity
of a high civilisation. But at Saratoga civilisation holds you fast. The
most important feature of the place, perhaps, is the impossibility of
carrying out any such pastoral dream. The surrounding country is a
charming wilderness, but the roads are so abominably bad that walking
and driving are alike unprofitable. Of course, however, if you are bent
upon a walk, you will take a walk. There is a striking contrast between
the concentrated prodigality of life in the immediate neighbourhood of
the hotels and the pastoral solitudes into which a walk of half an hour
may lead you. You have left the American citizen and his wife, the
orchestras, the pools, the precocious infants, the cocktails, the
importations from Worth, but a mile or two behind, but already the
forest is primeval and the landscape is without figures. Nothing could
be less manipulated than the country about Saratoga. The heavy roads are
little more than sandy wheel-tracks; by the tangled wayside the
blackberries wither unpicked. The horizon undulates with an air of
having it all its own way. There are no white villages gleaming in the
distance, no spires of churches, no salient details. It is all green,
lonely, and vacant. If you wish to enjoy a detail, you must stop beneath
a cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly-troubled air,
or follow upward the scaly straightness of their trunks to where the
afternoon light gives it a colour. Here and there on a slope by the
roadside stands a rough unpainted farmhouse, looking as if its dreary
blackness were the result of its standing dark and lonely amid so many
months--and such a wide expanse--of winter snow. It has turned black by
contrast. The principal feature of the grassy unfurnished yard is the
great wood-pile, telling grimly of the long reversion of the summer. For
the time, however, it looks down contentedly enough over a goodly
appanage of grain-fields and orchards, and I can fancy that it may be
amusing to be a boy there. But to be a man, it must be quite what the
lean, brown, serious farmers physiognomically hint it to be. You have,
however, at the present season, for your additional beguilement, on the
eastern horizon, the vision of the long bold chain of the Green
Mountains, clad in that single coat of simple, candid blue which is the
favourite garment of our American hills. As a visitor, too, you have for
an afternoon's excursion your choice between a couple of lakes. Saratoga
Lake, the larger and more distant of the two, is the goal of the regular
afternoon drive. Above the shore is a well-appointed tavern--"Moon's" it
is called by the voice of fame--where you may sit upon a broad piazza
and partake of fried potatoes and "drinks;" the latter, if you happen to
have come from poor dislicensed Boston, a peculiarly gratifying
privilege. You enjoy the felicity sighed for by that wanton Italian lady
of the anecdote, when, one summer evening, to the sound of music, she
wished that to eat an ice were a sin. The other lake is small, and its
shores are unadorned by any edifice but a boat-house, where you may hire
a skiff and pull yourself out into the minnow-tickled, wood-circled
oval. Here, floating in its darkened half, while you watch on the
opposite shore the tree-stems, white and sharp in the declining sunlight,
and their foliage whitening and whispering in the breeze, and you feel
that this little solitude is part of a greater and more portentous
solitude, you may recall certain passages of Ruskin, in which he dwells
upon the needfulness of some human association, however remote, to make
natural scenery fully impressive. You may recall that magnificent page
in which he relates having tried with such fatal effect, in a
battle-haunted valley of the Jura, to fancy himself in a nameless
solitude of our own continent. You feel around you, with irresistible
force, the eloquent silence of undedicated nature--the absence of
serious associations, the nearness, indeed, of the vulgar and trivial
associations of the least complete of all the cities of pleasure--you
feel this, and you wonder what it is you so deeply and calmly enjoy. You
make up your mind, possibly, that it is a great advantage to be able at
once to enjoy Mr. Ruskin and to enjoy Mr. Ruskin's alarms. And hereupon
you return to your hotel and read the New York papers on the plan of the
French campaign and the Nathan murder.



XVIII

NEWPORT

1870


The season at Newport has an obstinate life. September has fairly begun,
but as yet there is small visible diminution in the steady stream--the
splendid, stupid stream--of carriages which rolls in the afternoon along
the Avenue. There is, I think, a far more intimate fondness between
Newport and its frequenters than that which in most American
watering-places consecrates the somewhat mechanical relation between the
visitors and the visited. This relation here is for the most part
slightly sentimental. I am very far from professing a cynical contempt
for the gaieties and vanities of Newport life: they are, as a spectacle,
extremely amusing; they are full of a certain warmth of social colour
which charms alike the eye and the fancy; they are worth observing, if
only to conclude against them; they possess at least the dignity of all
extreme and emphatic expressions of a social tendency; but they are not
so untouched with Philistinism that I do not seem to overhear at times
the still, small voice of this tender sense of the sweet, superior
beauty of the natural things that surround them, pleading gently in
their favour to the fastidious critic. I feel almost warranted in saying
that here the background of life has sunk less in relative value and
suffered less from the encroachments of pleasure-seeking man than the
scenic dispositions of any other watering-place. For this, perhaps, we
may thank rather the modest, incorruptible integrity of the Newport
landscape than any very intelligent forbearance on the part of the
summer colony. The beauty of this landscape is so subtle, so essential,
so humble, so much a thing of character and expression, so little a
thing of feature and pretension, that it cunningly eludes the grasp of
the destroyer or the reformer, and triumphs in impalpable purity even
when it seems to make concessions. I have sometimes wondered, in
rational moods, why it is that Newport is so much appreciated by the
votaries of idleness and pleasure. Its resources are few in number. It
is extremely circumscribed. It has few drives, few walks, little variety
of scenery. Its charms and its interest are confined to a narrow circle.
It has of course the unlimited ocean, but seafaring idlers are not true
Newporters, for any other sea would suit them as well. Last evening, it
seemed to me, as I drove along the Avenue, that I guessed the answer to
the riddle. The atmospheric tone, the careful selection of ingredients,
your pleasant sense of a certain climatic ripeness--these are the real
charm of Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You are affected by
the admirable art of the landscape, by seeing so much that is lovely and
impressive achieved with such a frugality of means--with so little
parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, with so narrow a range of
colour and form. I could not help thinking, as I turned from the
harmonies and purities which lay deepening on the breast of nature, with
the various shades of twilight, to the heterogeneous procession in the
Avenue, that, quite in their own line of effect, the usual performers in
this exhibition might learn a few good lessons from the daily prospect
of the great western expanse of rock and ocean in its relations with the
declining sun. But this is asking too much. Many persons of course come
to Newport simply because others come, and in this way the present
brilliant colony has grown up. Let me not be suspected, when I speak of
Newport, of the untasteful heresy of meaning primarily rocks and waves
rather than ladies and gentlemen.

The ladies and gentlemen are in great force--the ladies, of course,
especially. It is true everywhere, I suppose, that women are the
animating element of "society;" but you feel this to be especially true
as you pass along Bellevue Avenue. I doubt whether anywhere else so many
women have a "good time" with so small a sacrifice of the luxury of
self-respect. I heard a lady yesterday tell another, with a quiet
ecstasy of tone, that she had been having a "most perfect time." This is
the very poetry of pleasure. It is a part of our complacent tradition
that in those foreign lands where women are supposed to be socially
supreme, they maintain their empire by various clandestine and
reprehensible arts. With us--we say it at Newport without bravado--they
are both conspicuous and unsophisticated. You feel this most gratefully
as you receive a confident bow from a pretty girl in her basket-phaeton.
She is very young and very pretty, but she has a certain habitual
assurance which is only a grace the more. She combines, you reflect with
respectful tenderness, all that is possible in the way of modesty with
all that is delightful in the way of facility. Shyness is certainly very
pretty--when it is not very ugly; but shyness may often darken the bloom
of genuine modesty, and a certain frankness and confidence may often
incline it toward the light. Let us assume, then, that all the young
ladies whom you may meet here are of the highest modern type. In the
course of time they ripen into the delightful matrons who divide your
admiration. It is easy to see that Newport must be a most agreeable
sojourn for the male sex. The gentlemen, indeed, look wonderfully
prosperous and well-conditioned. They gallop on shining horses or
recline in a sort of coaxing Herculean submission beside the lovely
mistress of a curricle. Young men--and young old men--I have occasion to
observe, are far more numerous than at Saratoga, and of vastly superior
quality. There is, indeed, in all things a striking difference in tone
and aspect between these two great centres of pleasure. After Saratoga,
Newport seems really substantial and civilised. Æsthetically speaking,
you may remain at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at Saratoga you
linger under passionate protest. At Newport life is public, if you will;
at Saratoga it is absolutely common. The difference, in a word, is the
difference between a group of undiscriminating hotels and a series of
organised homes. Saratoga perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being
characteristically democratic and American; let us, then, make Saratoga
the heaven of our aspiration, but let us yet a while content ourselves
with Newport as the lowly earth of our residence.

The villas and "cottages," the beautiful idle women, the beautiful idle
men, the brilliant pleasure-fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps,
to Newport life a faintly European expression, in so far as they suggest
the somewhat alien presence of leisure--"fine old Leisure," as George
Eliot calls it. Nothing, it seems to me, however, can take place in
America without straightway seeming very American; and, after a week at
Newport, you begin to fancy that to live for amusement simply, beyond
the noise of commerce or of care, is a distinctively national trait.
Nowhere else in this country--nowhere, of course, within the range of
our better civilisation--does business seem so remote, so vague, and
unreal. It is the only place in America in which enjoyment is organised.
If there be any poetry in the ignorance of trade and turmoil and the
hard processes of fortune, Newport may claim her share of it. She
knows--or at least appears to know--for the most part nothing but
results. Individuals here, of course, have private cares and burdens to
preserve the balance and the dignity of life; but collective society
conspires to forget everything that worries. It is a singular fact that
a society that does nothing is decidedly more pictorial, more
interesting to the eye of contemplation, than a society which is hard at
work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more fertile in combinations
than Saratoga. There you feel that idleness is occasional, empirical.
Most of the people you see are asking themselves, you imagine, whether
the game is worth the candle and work is not better than such difficult
play. But here, obviously, the habit of pleasure is formed, and (within
the limits of a severe morality) many of the secrets of pleasure are
known. Do what we will, on certain lines Europe is in advance of us yet.
Newport lags altogether behind Trouville and Brighton in her exhibition
of the unmentionable. All this is markedly absent from the picture,
which is therefore signally destitute of the enhancing tints produced by
the mysteries and fascinations of vice. But idleness per se is vicious,
and of course you may imagine what you please. For my own part, I prefer
to imagine nothing but the graceful and the pure; and with the help of
such imaginings you may construct a very pretty sentimental undercurrent
to the superficial movement of society. This I lately found very
difficult to do at Saratoga. Sentiment there is pitifully shy and
elusive. Here, the multiplied relations of men and women, under the
permanent pressure of luxury and idleness, give it a very fair chance.
Sentiment, indeed, of masterly force and interest, springs up in every
soil, with a sovereign disregard of occasion. People love and hate and
aspire with the greatest intensity when they have to make their time and
opportunity. I should hardly come to Newport for the materials of a
tragedy. Even in their own kind, the social elements are as yet too
light and thin. But I can fancy finding here the motive of a drama which
should depend more on smiles than tears. I can almost imagine, indeed, a
transient observer of the Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a
great American novel, in which the heroine might be infinitely realistic
and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast. I say intentionally the
"transient" observer, because it is probable that here the suspicion
only is friendly to dramatic point; the knowledge is hostile. The
observer would discover, on a nearer view, I rather fear, that his
possible heroines have too perfect a time.

This will remind the reader of what he must already have heard affirmed,
that to speak of a place with abundance you must know it, but not too
well. I suffer from knowing the natural elements of Newport too well to
attempt to describe them. I have known them so long that I hardly know
what I think of them. I have little more than a simple consciousness of
enjoying them very much. Even this consciousness at times lies dumb and
inert. I wonder at such times whether, to appeal fairly to the general
human sense, the horizon has not too much of that mocking straightness
which is such a misrepresentation of the real character of the sea--as
if, forsooth, it were level. Life seems too short, space too narrow, to
warrant you in giving in an unqualified adhesion to a pay sage which is
two-thirds ocean. For the most part, however, I am willing to take the
landscape as it stands, and to think that, without the water to make it
precious, the land would be much less lovable. It is, in fact, a land
exquisitely modified by marine influences. Indeed, in spite of all the
evil it has done me, I could almost speak well of the ocean when I
remember the charming tricks it plays with the Newport promontories.

The place consists, as the reader will know, of an ancient and
honourable town, a goodly harbour, and a long, broad neck of land,
stretching southward into the sea and forming the chief habitation of
the summer colony. Along the greater part of its eastward length, this
projecting coast is bordered with cliffs of no great height, and dotted
with seaward-gazing villas. At the head of the promontory the villas
enjoy a magnificent reach of prospect. The pure Atlantic--the old world
westward tides--expire directly at their feet. Behind the line of villas
runs the Avenue, with more villas yet--of which there is nothing at all
to say but that those built recently are a hundred times prettier than
those built fifteen years ago, and give one some hope of a revival of
the architectural art. Some years ago, when I first knew Newport, the
town proper was considered remarkably quaint. If an antique shabbiness
that amounts almost to squalor is a pertinent element, as I believe it
is, of this celebrated quality, the little main street at least--Thames
Street by name--still deserves the praise. Here, in their crooked and
dwarfish wooden mansions, are the shops that minister to the daily needs
of the expanded city; and here of a summer morning, jolting over the
cobble stones of the narrow roadway, you may see a hundred superfine
ladies seeking with languid eagerness what they may buy--to "buy
something," I believe, being a diurnal necessity of the conscientious
American woman. This busy region gradually melts away into the
grass-grown stillness of the Point, in the eyes of many persons the
pleasantest quarter of Newport. It has superficially the advantage of
being as yet uninvaded by fashion. When I first knew it, however, its
peculiar charm was even more undisturbed than at present. The Point may
be called the old residential, as distinguished from the commercial,
town. It is meagre, shallow and scanty--a mere pinch of antiquity--but,
so far as it goes, it retains an exquisite tone. It leaves the shops and
the little wharves, and wanders close to the harbour, where the
breeze-borne rattle of shifted sails and spars alone intrudes upon its
stillness, till its mouldy-timbered quiet subsides into the low, tame
rocks and beaches which edge the bay. Several matter-of-course modern
houses have recently been erected on the water-side, absorbing the
sober, primitive tenements which used to maintain the picturesque
character of the place. They improve it, of course, as a residence, but
they injure it as an unexpected corner. Enough of early architecture
still remains, however, to suggest a multitude of thoughts as to the
severe simplicity of the generation which produced it. The plain gray
nudity of these little warped and shingled boxes seems to make it a
hopeless task on their part to present any positive appearance at all.
But here, as elsewhere, the magical Newport atmosphere wins half the
battle. It aims at no mystery--it simply makes them scintillate in their
bareness. Their homely notches and splinters twinkle till the mere
friendliness of the thing makes a surface. Their steep gray roofs,
barnacled with lichens, remind you of old barges, overturned on the
beach to dry.

One of the more recent monuments of fashion is the long drive which
follows the shore. The Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has
been made to extend itself to the west, and to wander for a couple of
miles over a lovely region of beach and lowly down and sandy meadow and
salt brown sheep-grass. This region was formerly the most beautiful part
of Newport--the least frequented and the most untamed by fashion. I by
no means regret the creation of the new road, however. A walker may very
soon isolate himself, and the occupants of carriages axe exposed to a
benefit quite superior to their power of injury. The peculiar charm of
this great westward expanse is very difficult to define. It is in an
especial degree the charm of Newport in general--the combined lowness of
tone, as painters call it, in all the elements of _terra firma_, and the
extraordinary elevation of tone in the air. For miles and miles you see
at your feet, in mingled shades of yellow and gray, a desolate waste of
mossclad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left is nothing but the
shine and surge of the ocean, and over your head that wonderful sky of
Newport, which has such an unexpected resemblance to the sky of Venice.
In spite of the bare simplicity of this prospect, its beauty is far more
a beauty of detail than that of the average American landscape. Descend
into a hollow of the rocks, into one of the little warm climates, five
feet square, which you may find there, beside the grateful ocean glare,
and you will be struck quite as much by their fineness as by their
roughness. From time to time, as you wander, you will meet a lonely,
stunted tree, which is sure to be a charming piece of the individual
grotesque. The region of which I speak is perhaps best seen in the late
afternoon, from the high seat of a carriage on the Avenue. You seem to
stand just outside the threshold of the west. At its opposite extremity
sinks the sun, with such a splendour, perhaps, as I lately saw--a
splendour of the deepest blue, more luminous and fiery than the usual
redness of evening, and all streaked and barred with blown and drifted
gold. The whole large interval, with its rocks and marshes and ponds,
seems bedimmed with a kind of purple glaze. The near Atlantic fades and
turns cold with that desolate look of the ocean when the day ceases to
care for it. In the foreground, a short distance from the road, an old
orchard uplifts its tangled stems and branches against the violet mists
of the west. It seems strangely grotesque and enchanted. No ancient
olive-grove of Italy or Provence was ever more hoarily romantic. This is
what people commonly behold on the last homeward bend of the drive. For
such of them as are happy enough to occupy one of the villas on the
cliffs, the beauty of the day has even yet not expired. The present
summer has been emphatically the summer of moonlights. Not the nights,
however, but the long days, in these agreeable homes, are what
especially appeal to my fancy. Here you find a solution of the insoluble
problem--to combine an abundance of society with an abundance of
solitude. In their charming broad-windowed drawing-rooms, on their great
seaward piazzas, within sight of the serious Atlantic horizon, which is
so familiar to the eye and so mysterious to the heart, caressed by the
gentle breeze which makes all but simple, social, delightful now and
here seem unreal and untasteful--the sweet fruit of the lotus grows more
than ever succulent and magical. How sensible they ought to be, the
denizens of these pleasant places, of their peculiar felicity and
distinction! How it should purify their temper and refine their tastes!
How delicate, how wise, how discriminating they should become! What
excellent manners--what enlightened opinions--their situation should
produce! How it should purge them of vulgarity! Happy _villeggianti_ of
Newport!



XIX

QUEBEC

1871

I


A traveller who combines a taste for old towns with a love of letters
ought not, I suppose, to pass through "the most picturesque city in
America" without making an attempt to commemorate his impressions. His
first impression will certainly have been that not America, but Europe,
should have the credit of Quebec. I came, some days since, by a dreary
night-journey, to Point Levi, opposite the town, and as we rattled
toward our goal in the faint raw dawn, and, already attentive to
"effects," I began to consult the misty window-panes and descried
through the moving glass little but crude, monotonous woods, suggestive
of nothing that I had ever heard of in song or story, I felt that the
land would have much to do to give itself a romantic air. And, in fact,
the feat is achieved with almost magical suddenness. The old world rises
in the midst of the new in the manner of a change of scene on the stage.
The St. Lawrence shines at your left, large as a harbour-mouth, gray
with smoke and masts, and edged on its hither verge by a bustling
water-side _faubourg_ which looks French or English, or anything not
local that you please; and beyond it, over against you, on its rocky
promontory, sits the ancient town, belted with its hoary wall and
crowned with its granite citadel. Now that I have been here a while I
find myself wondering how the city would strike one if the imagination
had not been bribed beforehand. The place, after all, is of the soil on
which it stands; yet it appeals to you so cunningly with its little
stock of transatlantic wares that you overlook its flaws and lapses, and
swallow it whole. Fancy lent a willing hand the morning I arrived, and
zealously retouched the picture. The very sky seemed to have been
brushed in like the sky in an English water-colour, the light to filter
down through an atmosphere more dense and more conscious. You cross a
ferry, disembark at the foot of the rock on unmistakably foreign soil,
and then begin to climb into the city proper--the city _intra muros_.
These walls, to the American vision, are of course the sovereign fact of
Quebec; you take off your hat to them as you clatter through the gate.
They are neither very high nor, after all, very hoary. Our clear
American air is hostile to those mellow deposits and incrustations which
enrich the venerable surfaces of Europe. Still, they are walls; till but
a short time ago they quite encircled the town; they are garnished with
little slits for musketry and big embrasures for cannon; they offer here
and there to the strolling bourgeoisie a stretch of grassy rampart; and
they make the whole place definite and personal.

Before you reach the gates, however, you will have been reminded at a
dozen points that you have come abroad. What is the essential difference
of tone between street-life in an old civilisation and in a new? It
seems something subtler and deeper than mere external accidents--than
foreign architecture, than foreign pinks, greens, and yellows plastering
the house-fronts, than the names of the saints on the corners, than all
the pleasant crookedness, narrowness and duskiness, the quaint
economised spaces, the multifarious detail, the brown French faces, the
ruddy English ones. It seems to be the general fact of detail
itself--the hint in the air of a slow, accidental accretion, in
obedience to needs more timidly considered and more sparingly gratified
than the pressing necessities of American progress. But apart from the
metaphysics of the question, Quebec has a great many pleasant little
ripe spots and amenities. You note the small, box-like houses in rugged
stone or in stucco, each painted with uncompromising _naïveté_ in some
bright hue of the owner's fond choice; you note with joy, with envy,
with momentary self-effacement, as a New Yorker, as a Bostonian, the
innumerable calashes and cabs which contend for your selection; and you
observe when you arrive at the hotel, that this is a blank and gloomy
inn, of true provincial aspect, with slender promise of the "American
plan." Perhaps, even the clerk at the office will have the courtesy of
the ages of leisure. I confess that, in my case, he was terribly modern,
so that I was compelled to resort for a lodging to a private house near
by, where I enjoy a transitory glimpse of the _vie intime_ of Quebec. I
fancied, when I came in, that it would be a compensation for worse
quarters to possess the little Canadian vignette I enjoy from my
windows. Certain shabby Yankee sheds, indeed, encumber the foreground,
but they are so near that I can overlook them. Beyond is a piece of
garden, attached to nothing less than a convent of the cloistered nuns
of St. Ursula. The convent chapel rises inside it, crowned with what
seemed to me, in view of the circumstances, a real little _clocher de
France_. The "circumstances," I confess, are simply a couple of stout
French poplars. I call them French because they are alive and happy;
whereas, if they had been American they would have died of a want of
appreciation, like their brothers in the "States." I do not say that the
little convent-belfry, roofed and coated as it is with quaint scales of
tin, would, by itself, produce any very deep illusion; or that the
whispering poplars, _per se_, would transport me to the Gallic
mother-land; but poplars and belfry together constitute an
"effect"--strike a musical note in the scale of association. I look
fondly even at the little casements which command this prospect, for
they too are an old-world heritage. They open sidewise, in two wings,
and are screwed together by that bother--some little iron handle over
which we have fumbled so often in European inns.

If the windows tell of French dominion, of course larger matters testify
with greater eloquence. In a place so small as Quebec, the bloom of
novelty of course rubs off; but when first I walked abroad I fancied
myself again in a French seaside town where I once spent a year, in
common with a large number of economically disposed English. The French
element offers the groundwork, and the English colony wears, for the
most part, that half-genteel and migratory air which stamps the exiled
and provincial British. They look as if they were still _en
voyage_--still in search of low prices--the men in woollen shirts and
Scotch bonnets; the ladies with a certain look of being equipped for
dangers and difficulties. Your very first steps will be likely to lead
you to the market-place, which is a genuine bit of Europeanism. One side
of it is occupied by a huge edifice of yellow plaster, with stone
facings painted in blue, and a manner of _porte-cochère_, leading into
a veritable court--originally, I believe, a college of the early
Jesuits, now a place of military stores. On the other stands the French
cathedral, with an ample stone façade, a bulky stone tower, and a
high-piled, tin-scaled belfry; not architectural, of course, nor
imposing, but with a certain gray maturity, and, as regards the belfry,
a quite adequate quaintness. Bound about are shops and houses, touching
which, I think, it is no mere fancy that they might, as they stand, look
down into some dull and rather dirty place in France. The stalls and
booths in the centre--tended by genuine peasants of tradition,
brown-faced old Frenchwomen, with hard wrinkles and short petticoats,
and white caps beneath their broad-brimmed hats, and more than one
price, as I think you'll find--these, and the stationed calèches and
cabriolets complete a passably fashionable French picture. It is a proof
of how nearly the old market-women resemble their originals across the
sea that you rather resentfully miss one or two of the proper features
of the type--the sabots for the feet and the donkey for the load. Of
course you go into the cathedral, and how forcibly that swing of the
door, as you doff your hat in the cooler air, recalls the old tourist
strayings and pryings beneath other skies! You find a big garish church,
with a cold high light, a promiscuity of stucco and gilding, and a mild
odour of the seventeenth century. It is, perhaps, a shade or so more
sensibly Catholic than it would be with ourselves; but, in fine, it has
pews and a boarded floor, and the few paintings are rather pale in their
badness, and you are forced to admit that the old-world tone which
sustains itself so comfortably elsewhere falters most where most is
asked of it.

Among the other lions of Quebec--notably in the Citadel--you find
Protestant England supreme. A robust trooper of her Majesty, with a pair
of very tight trousers and a very small cap, takes charge of you at the
entrance of the fortifications, and conducts you through all kinds of
incomprehensible defences. I cannot speak of the place as an engineer,
but only as a tourist, and the tourist is chiefly concerned with the
view. This is altogether superb, and if Quebec is not the most
picturesque city in America, this is no fault of its incomparable site.
Perched on its mountain of rock, washed by a river as free and ample as
an ocean-gulf, sweeping from its embattled crest, the villages, the
forests, the blue undulations of the imperial province of which it is
warden--as it has managed from our scanty annals to squeeze out a past,
you pray in the name of all that's majestic that it may have a future. I
may add that, to the mind of the reflective visitor, these idle ramparts
and silent courts present other visions than that of the mighty course
of the river and its anchorage for navies. They evoke a shadowy image of
that great English power, the arches of whose empire were once built
strong on foreign soil; and as you stand where they are highest and look
abroad upon a land of alien speech, you seem to hear the echoed names of
other strongholds and provinces--Gibraltar, Malta, India. Whether these
arches are crumbling now, I do not pretend to say; but the last regular
troops (in number lately much diminished) are just about to be withdrawn
from Quebec, and in the private circles to which I have been admitted I
hear sad forebodings of what society will lose by the departure of the
"military." This single word is eloquent; it reveals a social order
distinctly affiliated, in spite of remoteness, to the society reproduced
for the pacific American in novels in which the hero is a captain of the
army or navy, and of which the scene is therefore necessarily laid in
countries provided with these branches of the public service. Another
opportunity for some such reflections, worthy of a historian or an
essayist, as those I have hinted at, is afforded you on the Plains of
Abraham, to which you probably adjourn directly from the
Citadel--another, but I am bound to say, in my opinion, a less inspiring
one. A battlefield remains a battlefield, whatever may be done to it;
but the scene of Wolfe's victory has been profaned by the erection of a
vulgar prison, and this memento of human infirmities does much to efface
the meagre column which, with its neat inscription, "Here died Wolfe,
victorious," stands there as a symbol of exceptional virtue.



II


To express the historical interest of the place completely, I should
dwell on the light provincial--French provincial--aspect of some of the
little residential streets. Some of the houses have the staleness of
complexion which Balzac loved to describe. They are chiefly built of
stone or brick, with a stoutness and separateness of structure which
stands in some degree in stead of architecture. I know not that,
externally, they have any greater charm than that they belong to that
category of dwellings which in our own cities were long since pulled
down to make room for brown-stone fronts. I know not, indeed, that I can
express better the picturesque merit of Quebec than by saying that it
has no fronts of this luxurious and horrible substance. The greater
number of houses are built of rough-hewn squares of some more vulgar
mineral, painted with frank chocolate or buff, and adorned with blinds
of a cruder green than we admire. As you pass the low windows of these
abodes, you perceive the walls to be of extraordinary thickness; the
embrasure is of great depth; Quebec was built for winter. Door-plates
are frequent, and you observe that the tenants are of the Gallic
persuasion. Here and there, before a door, stands a comely private
equipage--a fact agreeably suggestive of a low scale of prices; for
evidently in Quebec one need not be a millionaire to keep a carriage,
and one may make a figure on moderate means. The great number of private
carriages visible in the streets is another item, by the way, among the
Europeanisms of the place; and not, as I may say, as regards the simple
fact that they exist, but as regards the fact that they are considered
needful for women, for young persons, for gentility. What does it do
with itself, this gentility, keeping a gig or not, you wonder, as you
stroll past its little multicoloured mansions. You strive almost vainly
to picture the life of this French society, locked up in its small dead
capital, isolated on a heedless continent, and gradually consuming its
principal, as one may say--its vital stock of memories, traditions,
superstitions. Its evenings must be as dull as the evenings described by
Balzac in his _Vie de Province_; but has it the same ways and means of
dulness? Does it play loto and "boston" in the long winter nights, and
arrange marriages between its sons and daughters, whose education it has
confided to abbés and abbesses? I have met in the streets here little
old Frenchmen who look as if they had stepped out of Balzac--bristling
with the habits of a class, wrinkled with old-world expressions.
Something assures one that Quebec must be a city of gossip; for
evidently it is not a city of culture. A glance at the few booksellers'
windows gives evidence of this. A few Catholic statuettes and prints,
two or three Catholic publications, a festoon or so of rosaries, a
volume of Lamartine, a supply of ink and matches, form the principal
stock.

In the lower class of the French population there is a much livelier
vitality. They are a genuine peasantry; you very soon observe it, as you
drive along the pleasant country-roads. Just what it is that makes a
peasantry, it is, perhaps, not easy to determine; but whatever it is,
these good people have it--in their simple, unsharpened faces, in their
narrow patois, in their ignorance and naïveté, and their evident good
terms with the tin-spired parish church, standing there as bright and
clean with ungrudged paint and varnish as a Nürnberg toy. One of them
spoke to me with righteous contempt of the French of France--"They are
worth nothing; they are bad Catholics." These are good Catholics, and I
doubt whether anywhere Catholicism wears a brighter face and maintains
more docility at the cost of less misery. It is, perhaps, not
Longfellow's Evangeline for chapter and verse, but it is a tolerable
prose transcript. There is no visible squalor, there are no rags and no
curses, but there is a most agreeable tinge of gentleness, thrift, and
piety. I am assured that the country-people are in the last degree mild
and peaceable; surely, such neatness and thrift, without the
irritability of the French genius--it is true the genius too is
absent--is a very pleasant type of character. Without being ready to
proclaim, with an enthusiastic friend, that the roadside scenery is more
French than France, I may say that, in its way, it is quite as
picturesque as anything within the city. There is an air of completeness
and maturity in the landscape which suggests an old country. The roads,
to begin with, are decidedly better than our own, and the cottages and
farmhouses would need only a bit of thatch and a few red tiles here and
there to enable them to figure creditably by the waysides of Normandy or
Brittany. The road to Montmorency, on which tourists most congregate, is
also, I think, the prettiest. The rows of poplars, the heavy stone
cottages, seamed and cracked with time, in many cases, and daubed in
coarse, bright hues, the little bourgeois villas, rising middle-aged at
the end of short vistas, the sunburnt women in the fields, the old men
in woollen stockings and red nightcaps, the long-kirtled curé nodding
to doffed hats, the more or less bovine stare which greets you from
cottage-doors, are all so many touches of a local colour reflected from
over the sea. What especially strikes one, however, is the peculiar tone
of the light and the atmospheric effects--the chilly whites and grays,
the steely reflections, the melancholy brightness of a frigid zone.
Winter here gives a stamp to the year, and seems to leave even through
spring and summer a kind of scintillating trail of his presence. To me,
I confess it is terrible, and I fancy I see constantly in the brilliant
sky the hoary genius of the climate brooding grimly over his dominion.

The falls of Montmorency, which you reach by the pleasant avenue I speak
of, are great, I believe, among the falls of the earth. They are
certainly very fine, even in the attenuated shape to which they are
reduced at the present season. I doubt whether you obtain anywhere in
simpler and more powerful form the very essence of a cataract--the wild,
fierce, suicidal plunge of a living, sounding flood. A little platform,
lodged in the cliff, enables you to contemplate it with almost shameful
convenience; here you may stand at your leisure and spin analogies, more
or less striking, on the very edge of the white abyss. The leap of the
water begins directly at your feet, and your eye trifles dizzily with
the long, perpendicular shaft of foam, and tries, in the eternal crash,
to effect some vague notation of its successive stages of sound and
fury; but the vaporous sheet, for ever dropping, lapses from beneath the
eye, and leaves the vision distracted in mid-space; and the vision, in
search of a resting-place, sinks in a flurry to the infamous saw-mill
which defaces the very base of the torrent. The falls of Montmorency are
obviously one of the greatest of the beauties of nature; but I hope it
is not beside the mark to say that of all the beauties of nature,
"falls" are to me the least satisfying. A mountain, a precipice, a
river, a forest, a plain, I can enjoy at my ease; they are natural,
normal, self-assured; they make no appeal; they imply no human
admiration, no petty human cranings and shrinkings, head-swimmings and
similes. A cataract, of course, is essentially violent. You are certain,
moreover, to have to approach it through a turnstile, and to enjoy it
from some terribly cockneyfied little booth. The spectacle at
Montmorency appears to be the private property of a negro innkeeper, who
"runs" it evidently with great pecuniary profit. A day or two since I
went so far as to be glad to leave it behind, and drive some five miles
farther along the road, to a village rejoicing in the pretty name of
Château-Richer. The village is so pretty that you count on finding
there the elderly manor which might have baptized it. But, of course, in
such pictorial efforts as this Quebec breaks down; one must not ask too
much of it. You enjoy from here, however, a revelation of the noble
position of the city. The river, finding room in mid-stream for the long
island of Orleans, opens out below you with a peculiar freedom and
serenity, and leads the eye far down to where an azure mountain gazes up
the channel and responds to the dark headland of Quebec. I noted, here
and there, as I went, an extremely sketchable effect. Between the road
and the river stand a succession of ancient peasant-dwellings, with
their back-windows looking toward the stream. Glancing, as I passed,
into the apertures that face the road, I saw, as through a
picture-frame, their dark, rich-toned interiors, played into by the late
river light and making an admirable series of mellow _tableaux de
genre_. The little curtained alcoves, the big household beds, and
presses, and dressers, the black-mouthed chimney-pieces, the crucifixes,
the old women at their spinning-wheels, the little heads at the
supper-table, around the big French loaf, outlined with a rim of light,
were all as warmly, as richly composed, as French, as Dutch, as worthy
of the brush, as anything in the countries to which artists resort for
subjects.

I suppose no patriotic American can look at all these things, however
idly, without reflecting on the ultimate possibility of their becoming
absorbed into his own huge state. Whenever, sooner or later, the change
is wrought, the sentimental tourist will keenly feel that a long stride
has been taken, roughshod, from the past to the present. The largest
appetite in modern civilisation will have swallowed the largest morsel.
What the change may bring of comfort or of grief to the Canadians
themselves, will be for them to say; but, in the breast of this
sentimental tourist of ours, it will produce little but regret. The
foreign elements of eastern Canada, at least, are extremely interesting;
and it is of good profit to us Americans to have near us, and of easy
access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves. Here we
find a hundred mementoes of an older civilisation than our own, of
different manners, of social forces once mighty, and still glowing with
a sort of autumnal warmth. The old-world needs which created the
dark-walled cities of France and Italy seem to reverberate faintly in
the steep and narrow and Catholic streets of Quebec. The little houses
speak to the fancy by rather inexpensive arts; the ramparts are endued
with a sort of silvery innocence; but the historic sense, conscious of a
general solidarity in the picturesque, ekes out the romance and deepens
the colouring.



XX

NIAGARA

1871


My journey hitherward by a morning's sail from Toronto across Lake
Ontario, seemed to me, as regards a certain dull vacuity in this episode
of travel, a kind of calculated preparation for the uproar of Niagara--a
pause or hush on the threshold of a great impression; and this, too, in
spite of the reverent attention I was mindful to bestow on the first
seen, in my experience, of the great lakes. It has the merit, from the
shore, of producing a slight ambiguity of vision. It is the sea, and yet
just not the sea. The huge expanse, the landless line of the horizon,
suggest the ocean; while an indefinable shortness of pulse, a kind of
fresh-water gentleness of tone, seem to contradict the idea. What meets
the eye is on the scale of the ocean, but you feel somehow that the lake
is a thing of smaller spirit. Lake-navigation, therefore, seems to me
not especially entertaining. The scene tends to offer, as one may say, a
sort of marine-effect missed. It has the blankness and vacancy of the
sea, without that vast essential swell which, amid the belting brine, so
often saves the situation to the eye. I was occupied, as we crossed, in
wondering whether this dull reduction of the main contained that which
could properly be termed "scenery." At the mouth of the Niagara River,
however, after a sail of three hours, scenery really begins, and very
soon crowds upon you in force. The steamer puts into the narrow channel
of the stream, and heads upward between high embankments. From this
point, I think, you really enter into relations with Niagara. Little by
little the elements become a picture, rich with the shadow of coming
events. You have a foretaste of the great spectacle of colour which you
enjoy at the Falls. The even cliffs of red-brown earth are crusted and
spotted with autumnal orange and crimson, and, laden with this gorgeous
decay, they plunge sheer into the deep-dyed green of the river. As you
proceed, the river begins to tell its tale--at first in broken syllables
of foam and flurry, and then, as it were, in rushing, flashing sentences
and passionate ejaculations. Onwards from Lewiston, where you are
transferred from the boat to the train, you see it from the edge of the
American cliff, far beneath you, now superbly unnavigable. You have a
lively sense of something happening ahead; the river, as a man near me
said, has evidently been in a row. The cliffs here are immense; they
form a vomitorium worthy of the living floods whose exit they protect.
This is the first act of the drama of Niagara; for it is, I believe, one
of the commonplaces of description that you instinctively convert it
into a series of "situations." At the station pertaining to the railway
suspension-bridge, you see in mid-air, beyond an interval of murky
confusion produced at once by the farther bridge, the smoke of the
trains, and the thickened atmosphere of the peopled bank, a huge
far-flashing sheet which glares through the distance as a monstrous
absorbent and irradiant of light. And here, in the interest of the
picturesque, let me note that this obstructive bridge tends in a way to
enhance the first glimpse of the cataract. Its long black span, falling
dead along the shining brow of the Falls, seems shivered and smitten by
their fierce effulgence, and trembles across the field of vision like
some enormous mote in a light too brilliant. A moment later, as the
train proceeds, you plunge into the village, and the cataract, save as a
vague ground-tone to this trivial interlude, is, like so many other
goals of æsthetic pilgrimage, temporarily postponed to the hotel.

With this postponement comes, I think, an immediate decline of
expectation; for there is every appearance that the spectacle you have
come so far to see is to be choked in the horribly vulgar shops and
booths and catchpenny artifices which have pushed and elbowed to within
the very spray of the Falls, and ply their importunities in shrill
competition with its thunder. You see a multitude of hotels and taverns
and stores, glaring with white paint; bedizened with placards and
advertisements, and decorated by groups of those gentlemen who flourish
most rankly on the soil of New York and in the vicinage of hotels; who
carry their hands in their pockets, wear their hats always and every
way, and, although of a stationary habit, yet spurn the earth with their
heels. A side-glimpse of the Falls, however, calls out your philosophy;
you reflect that this may be regarded as one of those sordid foregrounds
which Turner liked to use, and which may be effective as a foil; you
hurry to where the roar grows louder, and, I was going to say, you
escape from the village. In fact, however, you don't escape from it; it
is constantly at your elbow, just to the right or the left of the line
of contemplation. It would be paying Niagara a poor compliment to say
that, practically, she does not hurl away this chaffering by-play from
her edge; but as you value the integrity of your impression, you are
bound to affirm that it suffers appreciable abatement from such sources.
You wonder, as you stroll about, whether it is altogether an unrighteous
dream that with the slow progress of taste and the possible or
impossible growth of some larger comprehension of beauty and fitness,
the public conscience may not tend to confer upon such sovereign phases
of nature something of the inviolability and privacy which we are slow
to bestow, indeed, upon fame, but which we do not grudge at least to
art. We place a great picture, a great statue, in a museum: we erect a
great monument in the centre of our largest square, and if we can
suppose ourselves nowadays to build a cathedral, we should certainly
isolate it as much as possible and expose it to no ignoble contact. We
cannot enclose Niagara with walls and a roof, nor girdle it with a
palisade; but the sentimental tourist may muse upon the contingency of
its being guarded by the negative homage of empty spaces and absent
barracks and decent forbearance. The actual abuse of the scene belongs
evidently to that immense class of iniquities which are destined to grow
very much worse in order to grow a very little better. The good humour
engendered by the main spectacle bids you suffer it to run its course.

Though hereabouts so much is great, distances are small, and a ramble of
two or three hours enables you to gaze hither and thither from a dozen
standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first is that on the
Canada cliff, a little way above the suspension-bridge. The great fall
faces you, enshrined in its own surging incense. The common feeling just
here, I believe, is one of disappointment at its want of height; the
whole thing appears to many people somewhat smaller than its fame. My
own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from the first; and,
indeed, I was not struck with anything being tall or short, but with
everything being perfect. You are, moreover, at some distance, and you
feel that with the lessening interval you will not be cheated of your
chance to be dizzied with mere dimensions. Already you see the
world-famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets, shining on the
lip of the precipice; the more so, of course, for the clouds of silver
and snow into which it speedily resolves itself. The whole picture
before you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe glares and boils and
smokes from the centre to the right, drumming itself into powder and
thunder; in the centre the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the
double flood; to the left booms in vaporous dimness the minor battery of
the American Fall; while on a level with the eye, above the still crest
of either cataract, appear the white faces of the hithermost rapids. The
circle of weltering froth at the base of the Horseshoe, emerging from
the dead white vapours--absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute
black--which muffle impenetrably the crash of the river upon the lower
bed, melts slowly into the darker shades of green. It seems in itself a
drama of thrilling interest, this blanched survival and recovery of the
stream. It stretches away like a tired swimmer, struggling from the
snowy scum and the silver drift, and passing slowly from an eddying
foam-sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold, verd-antique, streaked
and marbled with trails and wild arabesques of foam. This is the
beginning of that air of recent distress which marks the river as you
meet it at the lake. It shifts along, tremendously conscious, relieved,
disengaged, knowing the worst is over, with its dignity injured but its
volume undiminished, the most stately, the least turbid of torrents. Its
movement, its sweep and stride, are as admirable as its colour, but as
little as its colour to be made a matter of words. These things are but
part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. As you draw nearer
and nearer, on the Canada cliff, to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the
mass begins in all conscience to be large enough. You are able at last
to stand on the very verge of the shelf from which the leap is taken,
bathing your boot-toes, if you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy
curve. I may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one suffers
here, amid the central din of the cataract, from hackmen and
photographers and vendors of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous.
The road is lined with little drinking-shops and warehouses, and from
these retreats their occupants dart forth upon the hapless traveller
with their competitive attractions. You purchase release at last by the
fury of your indifference, and stand there gazing your fill at the most
beautiful object in the world.

The perfect taste of it is the great characteristic. It is not in the
least monstrous; it is thoroughly artistic and, as the phrase is,
thought out. In the matter of line it beats Michael Angelo. One may seem
at first to say the least, but the careful observer will admit that one
says the most, in saying that it pleases--pleases even a spectator who
was not ashamed to write the other day that he didn't care for
cataracts. There are, however, so many more things to say about it--its
multitudinous features crowd so upon the vision as one looks--that it
seems absurd to begin to analyse. The main feature, perhaps, is the
incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the shelf and its lateral
abutments. It neither falters, nor breaks nor stiffens, but maintains
from wing to wing the lightness of its semicircle. This perfect curve
melts into the sheet that seems at once to drop from it and sustain it.
The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A
green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to
the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to
artificial dyes, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as
that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of colour to
all the verdant water-caves and all the dear, sub-fluvial haunts and
bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams of the earth. The lower
half of the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boiling gulf--a
veil never rent nor lifted. At its heart this eternal cloud seems fixed
and still with excess of motion--still and intensely white; but, as it
rolls and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and
fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which betray the convulsions we never
behold. In the middle of the curve, the depth of the recess, the
converging walls are ground into a dust of foam, which rises in a tall
column, and fills the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far
overtops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the
rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some
far-flowing signal of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal hint
may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest charm of all--the
clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and figure of the leap, the
rounded passage of the horizontal to the perpendicular? To say it is
simple is to make a phrase about it. Nothing was ever more successfully
executed. It is carved as sharp as an emerald, as one must say and say
again. It arrives, it pauses, it plunges; it comes and goes for ever; it
melts and shifts and changes, all with the sound as of millions of
bass-voices; and yet its outline never varies, never moves with a
different pulse. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a
flagon--of melody from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside
the American Fall you catch this extraordinary profile better than you
are able to do at the Horseshoe. If the line of beauty had vanished from
the earth elsewhere, it would survive on the brow of Niagara. It is
impossible to insist too strongly on the grace of the thing, as seen
from the Canada cliff. The genius who invented it was certainly the
first author of the idea that order, proportion and symmetry are the
conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among the watching
and listening forests, long before the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the
measurements of the Parthenon. Even the roll of the white batteries at
the base seems fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle
zone of difference between the flood as it falls and the mist as it
rises you imagine a mystical meaning--the passage of body to soul, of
matter to spirit, of human to divine.

Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the menagerie of lions,
and the spot where your single stone--or, in plain prose, your
half-dollar--kills most birds. This broad insular strip, which performs
the excellent office of withholding the American shore from immediate
contact with the flood, has been left very much to itself, and here you
may ramble, for the most part, in undiverted contemplation. The island
is owned, I believe, by a family of co-heirs, who have the good taste to
keep it quiet. More than once, however, as I have been told, they have
been offered a "big price" for the privilege of building an hotel upon
this sacred soil. They have been wise, but, after all, they are human,
and the offer may be made once too often. Before this fatal day dawns,
why should not the State buy up the precious acres, as California has
done the Yo-Semite? It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist that no
price would be too great to pay. Otherwise, the only hope for their
integrity is in the possibility of a shrewd provision on the part of the
gentlemen who know how to keep hotels that the music of the dinner-band
would be injured by the roar of the cataract. You approach from Goat
Island the left abutment of the Horseshoe. The little tower which, with
the classic rainbow, figures in all "views" of the scene, is planted at
a dozen feet from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the Fall. This
little tower, I think, deserves a compliment. One might have said
beforehand that it would never do, but, as it stands, it makes rather a
good point. It serves as a unit of appreciation of the scale of things,
and from its spray-blackened summit it admits you to an almost downward
peep into the green gulf. More here, even, than on the Canada shore, you
perceive the unlimited _wateriness_ of the whole spectacle. Its liquid
masses take on at moments the likeness of walls and pillars and columns,
and, to present any vivid picture of them, we are compelled to talk
freely of emerald and crystal, of silver and marble. But really, all the
simplicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside in their
unmitigated fluidity, which excludes all rocky staging and earthy
commixture. It is water piled on water, pinned on water, hinging and
hanging on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in shocks altogether
watery. And yet for all this no solid was ever so solid as that
sculptured shoulder of the Horseshoe. From this little tower, or, better
still, from various points farther along the island-shore, even to look
is to be immersed. Before you stretches the huge expanse of the upper
river, with its belittled cliffs, now mere black lines of forest, dull
as with the sadness of gazing at perpetual trouble, eternal danger.
Anything more horribly desolate than this boundless livid welter of the
rapids it is impossible to conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it
the tribute of your own suddenly-assumed suspense, in the impulse to
people it with human forms. On this theme you can work out endless
analogies. Yes, they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and eddy of
them--alive and frenzied with the sense of their doom. They see below
them that nameless pause of the arrested current, and the high-tossed
drift of sound and spray which rises up lamenting, like the ghosts of
their brothers who have been dashed to pieces. They shriek, they sob,
they clasp their white hands and toss their long hair; they cling and
clutch and wrestle, and, above all, they appear to _bite_. Especially
tragical is the air they have of being forced backward, with averted
faces, to their fate. Every pulse of the flood is like the grim stride
of a giant, wading huge-kneed to his purpose, with the white teeth of a
victim fastened in his neck. The outermost of three small islands,
interconnected by short bridges, at the extremity of this shore, places
one in singularly intimate relation with this portentous flurry. To say
that hereabouts the water leaps and plunges and rears and dives, that
its uproar makes even one's own ideas about it inaudible, and its
current sweeps those ideas to perdition, is to give a very pale account
of the universal agitation.

The great spectacle may be called complete only when you have gone down
the river some four miles, on the American side, to the so-called rapids
of the Whirlpool. Here the unhappy stream tremendously renews its
anguish. Two approaches have been contrived on the cliff--one to the
rapids proper, the other, farther below, to the scene of the sudden
bend. The first consists of a little wooden cage, of the "elevator"
pattern, which slides up and down a gigantic perpendicular shaft of
horrible flimsiness. But a couple of the usual little brides, staggering
beneath the weight of gorgeous cashmeres, entered the conveyance with
their respective consorts at the same time with myself; and, as it thus
carried Hymen and his fortunes, we survived the adventure. You obtain
from below--that is, on the shore of the river--a specimen of the
noblest cliff-scenery. The green embankment at the base of the sheer red
wall is by itself a very fair example of what they call in the Rocky
Mountains a foot-hill; and from this continuous pedestal erects itself a
bristling palisade of earth. As it stands, Gustave Doré might have
drawn it. He would have sketched with especial ardour certain
parasitical shrubs and boskages--lone and dizzy witnesses of autumn;
certain outward-peering wens and warts and other perpendicular
excrescences of rock; and, above all, near the summit, the fantastic
figures of sundry audacious minor cliffs, grafted upon the greater by a
mere lateral attachment and based in the empty air, with great slim
trees rooted on their verges, like the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at
Florence. The actual whirlpool is a third of a mile farther down the
river, and is best seen from the cliff above. From this point of view,
it seems to me by all odds the finest of the secondary episodes of the
drama of Niagara, and one on which a scribbling tourist, ineffectively
playing at showman, may be content to ring down his curtain. The channel
at this point turns away to the right, at a clean right-angle, and the
river, arriving from the rapids just above with stupendous velocity,
meets the hollow elbow of the Canada shore. The movement with which it
betrays its surprise and bewilderment--the sudden issueless maze of
waters--is, I think, after the Horseshoe Fall, the very finest thing in
its progress. It breaks into no small rage; the offending cliffs receive
no drop of spray; for the flood moves in a body and wastes no vulgar
side-spurts; but you see it shaken to its innermost bowels and panting
hugely, as if smothered in its excessive volume. Pressed back upon its
centre, the current creates a sort of pivot, from which it eddies,
groping for exit in vast slow circles, delicately and irregularly
outlined in foam. The Canada shore, shaggy and gaudy with late September
foliage, closes about it like the rising shelves of an amphitheatre, and
deepens by contrast the strong blue-green of the stream. This
slow-revolving surface--it seems in places perfectly still--resembles
nothing so much as some ancient palace-pavement, cracked and scratched
by the butts of legionary spears and the gold-stiffened hem of the
garments of kings.



THE END



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