Certain delightful English towns, with glimpses of the pleasant country between

by William Dean Howells

It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much frequented. I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down.”

I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide who started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.

I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of the New Bath Guide, when—

“’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex
All wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”

The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.

I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavish fidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird-song and bee-murmur, with the color of bloom in one’s eyes and the odor of flowers in one’s nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher’s meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of that bilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.

But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.

The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of fashion and infirmity, of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people who have known the spectres almost from childhood. Some of them have the habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the line at Americans.

I forget whether the almond-trees were in bloom or not when we came to Bath, but I am sure they continued so throughout our stay, and I found them steadily blossoming away elsewhere for a month afterwards. There is no reason why they should not, for they have no work to do in the way of ripening their nuts, and they lead a life as idle and unfinal as the vines and fig-trees of Great Britain, which also blossom as cheerfully and set their fruit, and carry it through the seasons in a lasting immaturity. I never thought the almond in bloom as rare a sight as the peach, whose pale elder sister it is; but in the absence of the peach, I was always glad of it, in a dooryard or over a garden wall. Where the walls were low enough to lean upon, as they sometimes were round the vegetable gardens, it was pleasant to pause and contemplate the infinite variety of cabbage held in a green arrest by the mild winter air, but destined to an ultimation beyond the powers of the almond, the grape and the fig. There seemed to be a good many of these gardened spaces in the town, as well as in the outskirts where more new houses were going up, in something of the long leisure of the vegetation. The famous Bath building-stone is in fact so much employed elsewhere that there may not be enough of it for home use, and that may account for the slow growth of the place; but if I lived there I should not wish it to grow, and if I were King of Bath, in due succession from Beau Nash, I would not suffer one Bath-stone to be set upon the other within its limits. The place is large enough as it is, and I should hate to have it restored to its former greatness. There was indeed only too little decay in it, but there was at least one gratifying instance in the stately mansion at the end of our street,—falling or fallen to ruin, with its Italian style rapidly antedating the rough classic of the Roman baths, in the effect of a sorrowful superannuation,—which I could not have rescued from dilapidation without serious loss. The hollow windows and broken doors and toppled chimneys, the weather-stained walls and pillars painted green with mould, were half concealed, half betrayed, by the neglected growth of trees, and a wilding thicket had sprung up over the lawn, penetrated by wanton paths in spite of warnings against trespassing by severely worded sign-boards. Whose the house was, or why it was abandoned I never learned, and I do not know that I wished to learn; it was so satisfying as it was and for what it was. It stood on the borders of Sydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.

We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our souls with so sorrowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and good, and as if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to look in over the threshold that Jane Austen’s feet had lightly pressed, but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments, but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note with a longing, lingering look, that the house was very simple and plain, like the other houses near.