LIV
Modern Hastings, like Brighton, dates its rise from the ultimate quarter of the eighteenth century, and its emergence from the status of a fisher town is due to the same prime cause: the discovery by the medical profession of fresh air and sea-bathing as specifics for that mysterious eighteenth-century malaise, “the vapours,” and all manner of other ailments. No royal favour, however, helped Hastings; only the recommendations of Dr. Baillie in the first instance, and secondly the fine brisk air of the place itself. Indeed, the climate of Hastings is a matter of as great concern to the town as her looks to a woman: it is her chief asset. You may read strange things of the Hastings climate, and indeed of that of any seaside town whose business is to attract visitors; and you will find, as a matter of curiosity, that Hastings claims not one climate, but several, according to height and position. Like the artful sinner who tried to get the best of both this world and the next, Hastings wants it both ways, and would have you believe it has actually got it, too. Thus, with a reminiscent shiver at the thought of the winds we have faced elsewhere, we read appreciatively of how the town is “screened from the biting blasts of the north and east winds,” and open to the “healthful and uncontaminated vapours” from the south and west, is saved from “the unwelcome calms which envelop some holiday resorts.” This, I take it, is one in the eye for Bath, for example, where in summer the visitor is stewed as effectively as any prune, or for Torquay, whose “gridiron” even St. Lawrence might on occasion find uncomfortably warm; while I think, on the other count, the withers of Brighton and of Weymouth—among other places where the east wind is capable of freezing your very marrow—are severely wrung.
In short, Hastings, by her own showing, is one of those favoured (not to say miraculous) places each of which has the better climate than any other, where the sun shines just so long and so brilliantly as you please, where the winds are never rude and the air never stagnant, and there are four hundred fine days (at the very least of it) to the three hundred and sixty-five of every year.
When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence the twin town of St. Leonards as well. Theodore Hook was as it seems to us—strangely enthusiastic on the subject of those never-ending terraces, squares, and streets of stucco, new in his day. Says he: “Under the superintendence of Mr. Burton, a desert has become a thickly peopled town. Buildings of an extensive nature and elegant character rear their heads”—he meant, in plainer English, that they had been built, only perhaps a phrase without those eloquent frills would not have been “literature” as then understood—“where but a few years since the barren cliffs presented their chalky fronts to the storm and wave; and rippling streams and hanging groves adorn the valley which twenty years since was a sterile and shrubless ravine.”
Something is decidedly wrong in that description. The “extensive”—might he not equally well have said the “expensive”(?)—buildings and the “thickly peopled town” we allow, but those “hanging groves” and “rippling streams” are just the delightful objects the coming of the octopus streets abolished, and Hook sacrificed truth to a showy antithetical outburst.
I do not think Hook was sincere. I hope he was not, for surely one would sooner forgive literary insincerity than such a perverse taste. Lamb, who wrote of Hastings in 1823, we know was sincerity itself when he said he loved town or country; “but,” he says, “if this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty, innutritious rocks, which the amateur calls ‘verdure to the edge of the sea.’ I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.”
He, at any rate, saw nothing of Theodore Hook’s “rippling streams and hanging groves.”
“There is,” continues Lamb, “no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the ocean, if it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something—with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something.”
True; but all that is merely a memory. Something of that vanished Hastings may be recalled by those who discover the Brassey Institute in the centre of the town, and climb to where the collection of local prints and paintings is housed; and something more of it may be seen, still in being, by those others who prowl inquisitively in rear of High Street, and there discover the old parish church of St. Clement, fellow to All Saints. It stands in a tightly wedged corner, on rising ground, surrounded by houses and puzzling alleys, and looks very reverend. It is, in fact, over five hundred years old. An ancient cannon-ball wedged into the western face of its tower is a relic of one or other of the several hostile appearances off the town that were not uncommon in the old days; but whether it be the evidence of Dutch good marksmanship in the seventeenth century, or of French gunnery in in the early eighteenth, there is no evidence to show. The corresponding ball on the other side of the belfry window is by no means a miraculous follow-on shot, but is an instance of the eminently British passion for the pendant, for things to match and balance. Just as the average householder must needs have a vase or a statuette on either side of the clock on the dining-room or drawing-room mantelpiece, or else feel uncomfortably one-sided, so the burgesses of Hastings were uneasy until they had duplicated the insult some passing privateer had put upon their town; and so one of these warlike objects is a sham.
ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH.