Not to affront the reader’s intelligence, but to note my own ignorance, until an unusually excellent local guide-book partially dispersed it, will I remind him that all this region was once a royal chase. Half a dozen forests, of which Malvern Forest was chief, spread “a boundless contiguity of shade” over the hills and plains in which the cruel kings, from Canute down to Charles I., hunted the deer consecrated to their bows and spears, and took the lives or put out the eyes of any other man that slew them without leave. But in virtue of the unwritten law by which the people’s own reverts to them through the very pride of their expropriators, the dwellers in and about Malvern Chase had insensibly grown to have such rights and privileges in the wilderness that when Charles proposed to sell the woods they made a tumultuous protest; they rose in riot against the king’s will, and he had to give them two-thirds of the Chase for commons, before he could turn the remaining third into the money he needed so much.
THE PRIORY CHURCH—NORTH VIEW
In the very earliest times Malvern seems to have been a British stronghold against the Romans, and perhaps, again, the Saxons; but otherwise its peaceful history is resumed in that of its beautiful Priory church, an edifice which is fabled to have begun its religious life as a Druid temple. On one of the three Beacons, as the chief of the Malvern Hills are called, after the three counties of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford in which they rise,
“Twelve fair counties saw the blaze”
which signaled the approach of the Spanish Armada. But the local history is not of that dense succession of events, against whose serried points the visitor so often dashes himself in vain elsewhere in England. He can let his fancy roam up and down the vague past, with nothing, except the possible surrender of Caractacus to the Romans, very definitely important to hinder it, from the dawn of time to the year 1842, when the Priessnitz system of water-cure chose Malvern the capital of English hydropathy. The Wells of Malvern had always been famous for their healing properties, and now modern faith added itself to ancient superstition, and from the centre of belief thus established, a hydropathic religion spread throughout England. Its monuments still confront one everywhere in the minor hotels or major boarding-houses which briefly call themselves Hydros, but probably do not attempt working the old miracles. There is still a commodious shrine for the performance of these in the heart of Malvern; but the place was plainly no longer the Mecca of the pilgrims of thirty or fifty years ago. The air of its hills indeed invites the ailing, who so abound in England, but the waters have found the level which even medicinal waters seek, and flow away in the obscurity attending the decline of so many once thronged and honored Spas.
I do not know that I particularly like ruinous ruins, but a decay that is still in tolerable repair is greatly to my mind. The better the repair, the greater my pleasure in it, and when we were once posited in our lodgings, I began to take comfort in the perfect neatness, the unfailing taste, the pious care with which the spirit of that dead Malvern guarded its sepulchre. There was all the apparatus of a social gayety beneficial to invalids, but not, so far as I could note, an invalid to profit by it, if it had been running. In a certain public garden, indeed, in the centre of the town, there was a sound of revelry emitted by a hidden band, in the afternoon and evening, but I had never the heart to penetrate its secret; within, the garden might not have looked so gay as it sounded. There were excellent large and little shops, including a book and periodical store, where you could get almost anything you wanted, or did not want, at watering-place prices. There was an Assembly building, always locked fast, and a very good public library where I resorted for books of reference, and for a word of intellectual converse with the kind assistant librarian who formed my social circle in Malvern. From somewhere in the dim valley at night there came bursts of fragmentary minstrelsy, which we were told by the maid was the professional rejoicing of Pierrots, a gleeful tribe summer England has borrowed from the French tradition almost as lavishly as the crude creations of our own burnt-cork opera. Wherever you go, among her thronged and thronging watering-places, these strongly contrasted figures meet and cheer you; even in Malvern there were strains of rag-time, mingling with the music of the Pierrots, which gave assurance of these duskier presences somewhere in the dark.
One afternoon we went to a politer entertainment in a lower room of the Assembly building, given by a company which had so vividly plastered the dead walls (if this is specific) of Malvern with the announcements of their coming, that we hastened to be among the earliest at the box-office lest we should not get seats. To make sure of seeing and hearing we took two-shilling seats, which were at the front, and it was well we did so, for before the curtain rose, a multitude of fourteen people thronged to the one-shilling benches behind us. This number I knew from deliberate count, for the curtain, as if in a sad prescience of adversity, was long in rising. I do not think that company of artists would have been very cheerful under the best conditions; as it was they afforded us the very sorrowfulest amusement I have ever enjoyed. In that pathetic retrospect it seems to me that one man and woman of them sang at different times comic duets with tears in their voices. There were also from time to time joyless glees, and there was an interlude of dancing, so very, very blameless that it was all but actively virtuous in its modesty. A sense of something perpetually provincial, something irretrievably amateurish in the performers, penetrated the American spectators; and it is from a heart still full of pity that I recall how plain they were, poor girls, how floor-walkerish they were, poor fellows. They were as one family in their mutual disability and forbearance; if perhaps they each knew how badly the others were doing, they did nothing to show it; and in their joint weakness they were unable to spare us a single act of their programme. I have seldom left a hall of mirth in so haggard a frame, but perhaps if I had been more inured to Malvern I could have borne my pleasure better.