Certain Delightful English Towns. William Dean Howells
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,
Learned 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 willful, 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 feel 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.
From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one
"Sole sitting by the shores of old romance"
I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for a thousand years to come. Briton and Phoenician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic willfulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over someone else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self -containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americans achieve when they mean to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.
History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.
If anyone would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the Bath Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title of Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte's. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth-century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that "none but Abigails appeared in white aprons,'' as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who at all periods have invaded England so much less obviously than the