Afoot in England: Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Bath and Wells Revisited

'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping
into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a
stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at
myself in having allowed five full years to pass since my
previous visit. The question was much in my mind as I
strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and
squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed on
one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old
impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered.
The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their
dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace;
mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues
and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump
of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the
classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green
hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be
equalled by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention
exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks,
trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes
with man's works. To sit on some high hill and look down on
Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden
Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the
water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or,
better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this
was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I
found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to
be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved
it. The impression it had made on me during my former visits
had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not
seen it in the right emotional mood. Now I began to think it
the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the
equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind. How rich
the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender
gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high
roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture!
What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass! I certainly
gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion,
as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and
not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually
awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of
the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every
imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls. So numerous
are they and so closely placed that you could not find space
anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are accustomed
to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical
buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names
and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in
no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the
dead as in this place. The inscription-covered walls were
like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins.
Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath
celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau
Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably
Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found
that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging
to Bath or even Somerset. These monuments were erected to
persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all
the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous. Nor
were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here you
find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or
Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or
Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many
retired captains, majors, and colonels. There were hundreds
more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated.
There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies--widows and
spinsters. They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to
die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or
their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the
abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His
early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety,
inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them
many bright prospects of excellence and happiness. These
prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in
very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath?
He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in
Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health,
"caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"!
If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey
authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe;
if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to
suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities,
which ought never to have been placed there, should now be
removed and placed in some vault where the relations or
descendants of the persons described could find, and if they
wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair
number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I
admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the
most appropriate epitaph ever written. No, one, however
familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting
them here:

That tongue which set the table on a roar
And charmed the public ear is heard no more.
Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.
Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
At friendship's call to succor modest worth.
Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought,
In Nature's happiest mood however cast,
To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of
Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more
beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of
about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription
except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but
instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to
admire it at that distance. The tablet was of white marble,
and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly
head and classic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose
mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other
hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in
the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and
the artist had been singularly successful in producing the
idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of
some absorbing object in his mind. The figure was undoubtedly
symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its
meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had
been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no
great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced
first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes
met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had
found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make
out its meaning. You see the man is a traveller and is
stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand. It
strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a
person who introduced some valuable plant into England."

"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"

"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name
was Sibthorpe."

"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very
memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had
pretty well given up all hopes of finding it." With that he
went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in
Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist,
author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.

"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained,
"and have been familiar with his name and work all my life.
Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense
that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a little local botanist, quite
unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great
lover of botany."

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great
man's life, and found some very curious things in it. He was
a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who
succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor
of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six
years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which
was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with his
mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on
leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies.
Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to
identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set
about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it
travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to
leave his work undone. When nearing his end he came to Bath,
like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was
very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an
estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the
completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes,
with one hundred plates in each. This was done and the work
finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies
were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and
forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set
down at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to
find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to
die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange
bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the
size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own
memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to
knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as I
have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the
stone-built town of old memories and associations--so long as
I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places
and in the Pump Room and the abbey. The bitter came in only
when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the
friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar faces
seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in
some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who
had blossomed into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at
that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or
past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at
the difference. "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to
the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does
not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no
compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not
hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs--their own
and yours. "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face,
no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's! This is no light
thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such
matters, see not only the change in you, but what is
infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your
eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot
hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is
filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater
if her life has glided smoothly--if she cannot appeal to your
compassion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:--

O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!

For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any
misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time
alone she hates and fears--insidious Time who has lulled her
mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly
taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour,
the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.

Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not
exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady
of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale
and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her
expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old
daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show
her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest
portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she
was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him
through all his long life--he died recently at a very advanced
age--he at once put his work away and took her round his
studio to show her everything he thought would interest her.
But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving
the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture.
Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her
standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring
fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain,
"was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears. She
had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had
come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years,
and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great
artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at
length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist
put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face
expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the
artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the
uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?"
and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long
as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an
insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer
her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the
portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he
would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for
the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he
never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud
beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait,
scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was
in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and
had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of
surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to
speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have
more balm than bitterness in it. "Grieve not, dear friend of
old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all
--the idea that those we have not looked on this long time
--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were
while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in
that path in which our feet are set. No one, however hardened
he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now
the illusion I cherished has gone--now I have seen with my
physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has
taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have
it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that
wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my
sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we
cannot find a permanent resting-place."

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if
she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these
inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were
born into this mutable world. After all, it is because of the
losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet
to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where
I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to
have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories,
I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet. A small, squalid
town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it. Well,
yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings
together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses
included. To get some food I went to the only eating-house
in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and
high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good
humour and goodness of every description in her comely
countenance. She promised to have a chop ready by the time I
had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it
with a small Guinness. She could not provide that, the house,
she said, was strictly temperance. "My doctor has ordered me
to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that
St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a
heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name,
"but we go on a different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses,
called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse,
or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot
remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie--a
tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the
muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a
glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by
a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine
yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the
Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest.
This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or
village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and,
incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I
am to be sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once
with a cup of coffee with my lunch? I should have saved a
shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some
poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some
interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman.
What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his
words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear
brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of
the small town and the neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the
water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with
hills on either side. It is a five-mile road through a
beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation,
and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and
here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone
cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble,
produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a
state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost
experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley
was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January
as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a
kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel
with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not
see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who
belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned
quickly, with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a
long neck, but its colour was not blue--oh, no! I suggested
that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet
high, of no particular colour. No, it was not a heron; and
after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."

Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches
into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill,
and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the
noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the
right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the
cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond. O joy to
look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to
the number I had long treasured! For the others were not
exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the
same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the
green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter
sky beyond.

Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green
before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite
of the strange defeatures Time has written on it. I watched
the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now
springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries,
only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on
their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues
in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the
palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green
woodpecker. The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps
by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten
years ago! "You will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.

But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three
following days I will say very little. That laugh of the
woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no
change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running
waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I
looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp
again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very
handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying
on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously,
pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow
eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit
changed, and that he was delighted to see me.

On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was
cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and
shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric
tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea
that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army
theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not
heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused
myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train
after train came in late in the day discharging loads of
humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding
country coming in for an evening's amusement, I noticed again
the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant--the
shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the
expression.

Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove
that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It
appeared to me that any person, unbiassed by theories on such
a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the
conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we
are, in fact, "somebody else."

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