There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers’, and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately cabbage.
Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by an attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the “sweets” included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer’s comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was a formidable matter to get the head porter, in full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.
When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one’s self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a
THE RED-TILED HOUSE-ROOFS AND CHURCH SPIRES OF BATH
fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament.
When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one’s self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high-set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system—I do not say universe—The King’s Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King’s Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star is one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.
In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods’ has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James’s Square or Queen’s Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one’s self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably back to dinner at one’s hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where