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

by William Dean Howells

In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its archway the High Street hard by where Porter’s Lane creeps into it from Canute’s cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to take a seat even farther back than Canute’s, under an overruling providence. In this effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a Roman warrior, but perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed more aptly symbolizes the extremely friable nature of human empire. One never can look at any presentment of the poor, good, mistaken man without the softness of regret for his long sufferings, or without gratitude for what he involuntarily did for us as a people in forcing us to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet with our national prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find him taken seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between us and the remoter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an unbroken allegiance. When I looked on the mediæval work of the Bargate, I easily felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had to draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than either of the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in war than George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against as the allies of the French.

We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey, which is such a little way off from Southampton across the river Itchen, that I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all fellow-countrymen arriving on whatever line, to keep half a day from London, and give it to that most beautiful and pathetic place. It was our first ruin in England, but though we saw ruins afterwards of great merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and none remains so sweet and pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern city you reach this dim, mediæval shadow by way of what they poetically call at Southampton the Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it, we fancied some form of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of ferry-boat common in earlier times on American rivers East and West, forced by the tide on supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our landing on the farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly refused to abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the borders of the Itchen in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been so bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that yielded perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute, that not the sunniest day known to the English climate could have added sensibly to it. I do not believe that we could have been happier in it even if we had known all the little why and how together with the great when of its suppression by Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the conjecture of the moment by anything especially dramatic from history. Netley Abbey, like the rest of the religious houses which Henry hammered down, was suppressed in the general hope of pillage, defeated by the fact that its income was rather less than a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which even in the money of the

THE OLD TOWER WALL

time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian monks in their life as their income, except perhaps their virtues, which he would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told us, they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were given them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor cheese, but only a spare porridge—twice a day, and in Lent once. They never spoke except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and on a journey they could only ask questions, which they must ask if possible by signs. They that transgressed the rules were whipped, or stretched upon the stone floor during mass. For their greater humiliation the heads of the order were entirely shaven, which if the wind blew from the sea in their day, as piercingly as it blew in ours, was not so comfortable as it was picturesque for the monks going about bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their hospitality was great and constant, and their guest-hall was so often full that Horace Walpole, in his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could speak with insinuation of their “purpled abbots,” as if these perhaps led a life of luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey is so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the best thing that could be said of it: “How shall I describe Netley to you? I can only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs, pendent in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns of windows topped round and round with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up among the walls, and only want to be increased by cypresses. A hill rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood. The fort in which we would build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the world.”

What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little parley at the porter’s lodge where they charge admittance and sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction, though not without the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed, that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Everything in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it: a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleasant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The machine-threshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.

When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick houses, each with its little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hartford. The tram’s course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holiday-makers strolled up and down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in ever-increasing multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modern advance of Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses, standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease and splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a setting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.