CIRCUS FROM BENNET STREET
the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil would never had laid down his arms—never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.
Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to make oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of insurpassable loveliness.
But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediæval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to the bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.
The failure of Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is another of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously despoiled by Henry VIII. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guide-book, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.
“Sole issue of a matchless paire,
Both of their state and virtues heyre;
In graces great, in stature small,
As full of spirit as voyd of gall;
Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,
Holy without vain-glorious showes;
Happy, and yet from envy free,
Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,
Reader, this riddle read with mee,
Here the good Lady Waller lies.”
There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash—namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command; and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much less spiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with entire acceptance.