Certain Delightful English Towns. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
to see much more perfect instances of the kind, and I was probably postponing the psychological effect to these. It is a fault of travel that you are always looking forward to something more typical, and you neglect immediate examples because they offer themselves at the outset, or you reject them as only approximately representative to find that they are never afterwards surpassed. That was the case with our hotel, which was quite perfect in its way: a way rather new to England, I believe, and quite new to my knowledge of England.
It is a sort of hotel where you can live for as short or as long a time as you will at an inclusive rate for the day or week, and always in greater comfort for less money than you can at home, except in the mere matter of warmth. Warm you cannot be in-doors, and why should not you go out-doors for warmth, when the subtropical growths in the well-kept garden, which never fails to enclose that kind of hotel, are flourishing in a temperature distinctly above freezing? They always had the long windows, that opened into the garden, ajar when we came into the reading-room after dinner, and the modest little fire in the grate veiled itself under a covering of cinders or coal-siftings, so that it was not certain that the first-comer who got the chair next to it was luckiest. Yet around this cold hearth the social ice was easily broken, and there bubbled up a better sort of friendly talk than always follows our diffidence in public places at home. Without knowing it, or being able to realize it at that moment, we were confronted with a social condition which is becoming more and more general in England, where in winter even more than in summer people have the habit of leaving town for a longer or a shorter time, which they spend in a hotel like ours at Plymouth. There they meet in apparent fearlessness of the consequences of being more or less agreeable to one another, and then part as informally as they meet. But as yet we did not know that there was that sort of hotel or that we were in it, and we lost the earliest occasion of realizing a typical phase of recent English civilization.
II. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
THE weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in many trains, still embodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves, as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as some American trains would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet, with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which?) in bloom along the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether it was in mere surfeit, or in an invincible distaste for turnips, or an instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.
As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedgerows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back a' park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in England.
The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was, we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter's claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find " a typical English city . . . alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin. . . . None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past.'' Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter's. Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if even New York would be equal to it.
I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases, and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the better-informed reader will recall without an effort that the place was never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest. The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality. Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travelers as do not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York disputed its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the time of Henry VIII's high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and Cornish men fought for the ancient faith within its walls against his forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I always think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles's hapless daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts back after Cromwell's death.
The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral's sake, we fell a willing