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

by William Dean Howells

One could easily exaggerate the sense of sunshine at Folkestone, and yet I do not feel that I have got quite enough of it into my picture. It was not much obscured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that came and went—came more than they went. One night there was absolute fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in the electric lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning long the sky was blue, blue, as I had fancied it could be blue only in America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along under the Leas, towards Sandgate, as far as to the Elizabethan castle on the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it was not yet Whitmonday, until which feast of the church it would not be opened. It is only after much trouble with the almanac that the essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church feasts which are confidently given in public announcements in England, as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we should not be there after Whitmonday, and we made what we could of the outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us. Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled along that pleasant-way, with the sea on one side and the sea-side cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England coast they would have frozen up and blown away; but here they stood safe among their laurels, with their little vegetable gardens beside them; and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, probably never left off singing the year round except in some extraordinary stress of weather, or when occupied in plucking up the sprouting peas by the roots and eating the seed-peas. To prevent their ravage, and to restrict them to their business of singing, the rows of young peas were netted with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the mosquitoes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.

I only know that the sun shone impartially on birds and peas, and upon us as well, so that an overcoat became oppressive, and the climb back to the Leas by the steep hill-side paths impossible. If it had not been for the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers reading one another’s thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was we climbed down after climbing half-way up, and retraced our steps towards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone. Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at Shorncliff, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had by me some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and white of print, I might give some notion in color of the way the red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and how the strong purples and greens and yellows and blues of the listeners’ dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them; American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear, colors in their soft atmosphere that would shriek aloud in our clear, pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and each soldier had paired off and strolled away with the maid who had been simple-heartedly waiting for him, it was as gigantic tulips and hollyhocks walking.

The camp at Shorncliff is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe of all arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with streets and lanes of its own; and there many of the officers have their quarters as well as the men. Once these officers’ families lived in Folkestone, and something of its decay is laid to their removal, which was caused by its increasing expensiveness. Probably none of them dwell in the tents, which our drive brought us in sight of beyond the barrack-town, pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying like heaps of snow on the verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a cloud of immemorial associations, rose gray in the background of the picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field a sheep-pasture stretched, full of the bloodless innocence of the young lambs, which after imaginably bounding as to the tabor’s sound from the martial bands, were stretched beside their dams in motionless exhaustion from their play.

It was all very strange, that sunshiny Sunday morning, for the soldiers who lounged near the gate of their camp looked not less kind than the types of harmlessness beyond the hedge, and the emblems of their inherited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous grotesqueness of their trade of murder than these poor souls themselves. It is all a weary and disheartening puzzle, which the world seems as far as ever from guessing out. It may be that the best way is to give it up, but one thinks of it helplessly in the beauty of this gentle, smiling England, whose history has been written in blood from the earliest records of the heathen time to the latest Christian yesterday, when her battle-fields have merely been transferred beyond seas, but are still English battle-fields.

What strikes the American constantly in England is the homogeneousness of the people. We at home have the foreigner so much with us that we miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks in the mall in Central Park I am likely to hear any other tongue oftener than English, to hear Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, or Norwegian, or French, or Italian, or Spanish; but when I take my walks on the Leas at Folkestone, scarcely more than an hour from the polyglot continent of Europe, I hear almost nothing but English. Twice, indeed, I heard a few French people speaking together; once I heard a German Jew telling a story of a dog, which he found so funny that he almost burst with laughter; and once again, in the lower town, there came to me from the open door of an eating-house the sound of Italian. But everywhere else was English, and the signs of Ici on parle Français were almost as infrequent in the shops. As we very well know, if we know English history even so little as I do, it used to be very different. Many of these tongues in their earlier modifications used to be heard in and about Folkestone, if not simultaneously, then successively. The Normans came speaking their French of Stratford-atte-Bow, the Saxons their Low German, the Danes their Scandinavian, and the Italians their vernacular Latin, the supposed sister-tongue and not mother-tongue of their common parlance. It was not the Latin which Cæsar wrote, but it was the Latin which Cæsar heard in his camp on the downs back of Folkestone, if that was really his camp and not some later Roman general’s. The words, if not the accents of these foreigners are still heard in the British speech there; the only words which are almost silent in it are those of the first British, who have given their name to the empire of the English; and that seems very strange, and perhaps a little sad. But it cannot be helped; we ourselves have kept very few Algonquin vocables; we ourselves speak the language of the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman in the mixture imported from England in the seventeenth century, and adapted to our needs by the newspapers in the twentieth. We may get back to a likeness of the Latin to which the hills behind Folkestone echoed two thousand years ago, if the Italians keep coming in at the present rate, but it is not probable; and I thought it advisable, for the sake of a realizing sense of Italian authority in our civilization to pay a visit to Cæsar’s camp one afternoon of the few when the sun shone. This took us up a road so long and steep that it seemed only a due humanity to get out and join our fly driver (again that apparent slang!) in sparing his panting and perspiring horse; but the walk gave us a better chance of enjoying the entrancing perspectives opening seaward from every break in the downs. Valleys green with soft grass and gray with pasturing sheep dipped in soft slopes to the Folkestone levels; and against the horizon shimmered the Channel, flecked with sail of every type, and stained with the smoke of steamers, including the Folkestone boat full of passengers not, let us hope, so sea-sick as usual.

Part of our errand was to see the Holy Well at which the Canterbury Pilgrims used to turn aside and drink, and to feel that we were going a little way with them. But we were so lost in pity for our horse and joy in the landscape, that we forgot to demand these objects and their associations from our driver till we had remounted to our places, and turned aside on the way to Cæsar’s camp. Then he could only point with his whip to a hollow we had passed unconscious, and say the Holy Well was there.

“But where, where,” we cried, “is the pilgrim road to Canterbury?”

Then he faced about and pointed in another direction to a long, white highway curving out of sight, and there it was, just as Chaucer saw it full of pilgrims seven hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw it six hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always preferred Stothard’s notion of these pious folk to Blake’s; but that is a matter of taste. Both versions of them were like, and they both now did their best to repeople the empty white highway for us. I do not say they altogether failed; these things are mostly subjective, and it is hard to tell, especially if you want others to believe your report. We were only subordinately concerned with the Canterbury pilgrims; we were mainly in a high Roman mood, and Cæsar’s camp was our goal.

The antiquity of England is always stunning, and it is with the breath pretty well knocked out of your body that you constantly come upon evidences of the Roman occupation, especially in the old, old churches which abound far beyond the fondest fancy of the home-keeping American mind. You can only stand before these walls built of Roman brick, on these bricked-up Roman arches, and gasp out below the verger’s hearing, “Four hundred years! They held Britain four hundred years! Four times as long as we have lived since we broke with her!” But observe, gentle and trusting reader, that these Roman remains are of the latest years of their domination, and very long after they had converted and enslaved the stubbornest of the Britons, while at Cæsar’s camp, if it was his, we stood before the ghosts of the earliest invaders, of those legionaries who were there before Christ was in the world, and who have left no trace of their presence except this fortress-grave.

Very like a grave it was, with huge, long harrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had stretched himself out on one of them, and as we approached from below was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies, which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter here, and which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover, till I found them out by their having no odor.