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 the analytic spirit. 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 was 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 sea-front 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.
WINCHELSEA, RYE, AND “DENIS DUVAL”
I
I have recently had a literary adventure which, though not followed by the prostration that sometimes ensues on adventures, has nevertheless induced meditation. The adventure itself indeed was not astounding, and I mention it, to be frank, only in the interest of its sequel. It consisted merely, on taking up an old book again for the sake of a certain desired and particular light, of my having found that the light was in fact not there to shine, but was, on the contrary, directly projected upon the book from the very subject itself as to which I had invoked assistance. The case, in short, to put it simply, was that Thackeray’s charming fragment of “Denis Duval” proved to have much less than I had supposed to say about the two little old towns with which the few chapters left to us are mainly concerned, but that the two little old towns, on the other hand, unexpectedly quickened reflection on “Denis Duval.” Reading over Thackeray to help me further to Winchelsea, I became conscious, of a sudden, that Winchelsea—which I already in a manner knew—was only helping me further to Thackeray. Reinforced, in this service, by its little sister-city of Rye, it caused a whole question to open, and the question, in turn, added a savour to a sense already, by good fortune, sharp. Winchelsea and Rye form together a very curious small corner, and the measure, candidly undertaken, of what the unfinished book had done with them, brought me to a nearer view of them—perhaps even to a more jealous one; as well as to some consideration of what books in general, even when finished, may do with curious small corners.
I daresay I speak of “Denis Duval” as “old” mainly to make an impression on readers whose age is less. I remember, after all, perfectly, the poetry of its original appearance—there was such a thrill, in those days, even after “Lovel the Widower” and “Philip,” at any new Thackeray—in the cherished “Cornhill” of the early time, with a drawing of Frederick Walker to its every number and a possibility of its being like “Esmond” in its embroidered breast. If, moreover, it after a few months broke short off, that really gave it something as well as took something away. It might have been as true of works of art as of men and women, that if the gods loved them they died young. “Denis Duval” was at any rate beautiful, and was beautiful again on reperusal at a later time. It is all beautiful once more to a final reading, only it is remarkably different: and this is precisely where my story lies. The beauty is particularly the beauty of its being its author’s—which is very much, with book after book, what we find ourselves coming to in general, I think, at fifty years. Our appreciation changes—how in the world, with experience always battering away, shouldn’t it?—but our feeling, more happily, doesn’t. There are books, of course, that criticism, when we are fit for it, only consecrates, and then, with association fiddling for the dance, we are in possession of a literary pleasure that is the highest of raptures. But in many a case we drag along a fond indifference, an element of condonation, which is by no means of necessity without its strain of esteem, but which, obviously, is not founded on one of our deeper satisfactions. Each can but speak, at all events, on such a matter, for himself. It is a matter also, doubtless, that belongs to the age of the loss—so far as they quite depart—of illusions at large. The reason for liking a particular book becomes thus a better, or at least a more generous, one than the particular book seems in a position itself at last to supply. Woe to the mere official critic, the critic who has never felt the man. You go on liking “The Antiquary” because it is Scott. You go on liking “David Copperfield”—I don’t say you go on reading it, which is a very different matter—because it is Dickens. So you go on liking “Denis Duval” because it is Thackeray—which, in this last case, is the logic of the charm I alluded to.