in church well. We are a little bilious sometimes, about these
days of fraternisation, and about nations arriving at a new and
more unprejudiced knowledge of each other (which our Christianity
don't quite approve), but it soon goes off, and then we get on very
well.
There are two dissenting chapels, besides, in our small wateringplace;
being in about the proportion of a hundred and twenty guns
to a yacht. But the dissension that has torn us lately, has not
been a religious one. It has arisen on the novel question of Gas.
Our watering-place has been convulsed by the agitation, Gas or No
Gas. It was never reasoned why No Gas, but there was a great No
Gas party. Broadsides were printed and stuck about - a startling
circumstance in our watering-place. The No Gas party rested
content with chalking 'No Gas!' and 'Down with Gas!' and other such
angry war-whoops, on the few back gates and scraps of wall which
the limits of our watering-place afford; but the Gas party printed
and posted bills, wherein they took the high ground of proclaiming
against the No Gas party, that it was said Let there be light and
there was light; and that not to have light (that is gas-light) in
our watering-place, was to contravene the great decree. Whether by
these thunderbolts or not, the No Gas party were defeated; and in
this present season we have had our handful of shops illuminated
for the first time. Such of the No Gas party, however, as have got
shops, remain in opposition and burn tallow - exhibiting in their
windows the very picture of the sulkiness that punishes itself, and
a new illustration of the old adage about cutting off your nose to
be revenged on your face, in cutting off their gas to be revenged
on their business.
Other population than we have indicated, our watering-place has
none. There are a few old used-up boatmen who creep about in the
sunlight with the help of sticks, and there is a poor imbecile
shoemaker who wanders his lonely life away among the rocks, as if
he were looking for his reason - which he will never find.
Sojourners in neighbouring watering-places come occasionally in
flys to stare at us, and drive away again as if they thought us
very dull; Italian boys come, Punch comes, the Fantoccini come, the
Tumblers come, the Ethiopians come; Glee-singers come at night, and
hum and vibrate (not always melodiously) under our windows. But
they all go soon, and leave us to ourselves again. We once had a
travelling Circus and Wombwell's Menagerie at the same time. They
both know better than ever to try it again; and the Menagerie had
nearly razed us from the face of the earth in getting the elephant
away - his caravan was so large, and the watering-place so small.
We have a fine sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the
body, profitable for the mind. The poet's words are sometimes on
its awful lips:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand.
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
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Yet it is not always so, for the speech of the sea is various, and
wants not abundant resource of cheerfulness, hope, and lusty
encouragement. And since I have been idling at the window here,
the tide has risen. The boats are dancing on the bubbling water;
the colliers are afloat again; the white-bordered waves rush in;
the children
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back;
the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the
far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with
life and beauty, this bright morning.
HAVING earned, by many years of fidelity, the right to be sometimes
inconstant to our English watering-place, we have dallied for two
or three seasons with a French watering-place: once solely known to
us as a town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir
and ending with a steam-boat, which it seemed our fate to behold
only at daybreak on winter mornings, when (in the days before
continental railroads), just sufficiently awake to know that we
were most uncomfortably asleep, it was our destiny always to
clatter through it, in the coupe of the diligence from Paris, with
a sea of mud behind us, and a sea of tumbling waves before. In
relation to which latter monster, our mind's eye now recalls a
worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it,
once our travelling companion in the coupe aforesaid, who, waking
up with a pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the
grim row of breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an
instrument of torture called 'the Bar,' inquired of us whether we
were ever sick at sea? Both to prepare his mind for the abject
creature we were presently to become, and also to afford him
consolation, we replied, 'Sir, your servant is always sick when it
is possible to be so.' He returned, altogether uncheered by the
bright example, 'Ah, Heaven, but I am always sick, even when it is
IMpossible to be so.'
The means of communication between the French capital and our
French watering-place are wholly changed since those days; but, the
Channel remains unbridged as yet, and the old floundering and
knocking about go on there. It must be confessed that saving in
reasonable (and therefore rare) sea-weather, the act of arrival at
our French watering-place from England is difficult to be achieved
with dignity. Several little circumstances combine to render the
visitor an object of humiliation. In the first place, the steamer
no sooner touches the port, than all the passengers fall into
captivity: being boarded by an overpowering force of Custom-house
officers, and marched into a gloomy dungeon. In the second place,
the road to this dungeon is fenced off with ropes breast-high, and
outside those ropes all the English in the place who have lately
been sea-sick and are now well, assemble in their best clothes to
enjoy the degradation of their dilapidated fellow-creatures. 'Oh,
my gracious! how ill this one has been!' 'Here's a damp one coming
next!' 'HERE'S a pale one!' 'Oh! Ain't he green in the face,
this next one!' Even we ourself (not deficient in natural dignity)
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have a lively remembrance of staggering up this detested lane one
September day in a gale of wind, when we were received like an
irresistible comic actor, with a burst of laughter and applause,
occasioned by the extreme imbecility of our legs.
We were coming to the third place. In the third place, the
captives, being shut up in the gloomy dungeon, are strained, two or
three at a time, into an inner cell, to be examined
as to
passports; and across the doorway of communication, stands a
military creature making a bar of his arm. Two ideas are generally
present to the British mind during these ceremonies; first, that it
is necessary to make for the cell with violent struggles, as if it
were a life-boat and the dungeon a ship going down; secondly, that
the military creature's arm is a national affront, which the
government at home ought instantly to 'take up.' The British mind
and body becoming heated by these fantasies, delirious answers are
made to inquiries, and extravagant actions performed. Thus,
Johnson persists in giving Johnson as his baptismal name, and
substituting for his ancestral designation the national 'Dam!'
Neither can he by any means be brought to recognise the distinction
between a portmanteau-key and a passport, but will obstinately
persevere in tendering the one when asked for the other. This
brings him to the fourth place, in a state of mere idiotcy; and
when he is, in the fourth place, cast out at a little door into a
howling wilderness of touters, he becomes a lunatic with wild eyes
and floating hair until rescued and soothed. If friendless and
unrescued, he is generally put into a railway omnibus and taken to
Paris.
But, our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very
enjoyable place. It has a varied and beautiful country around it,
and many characteristic and agreeable things within it. To be
sure, it might have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse, and
it might be better drained, and much cleaner in many parts, and
therefore infinitely more healthy. Still, it is a bright, airy,
pleasant, cheerful town; and if you were to walk down either of its
three well-paved main streets, towards five o'clock in the
afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its
hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses of long tables
set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid of
napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an
uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.
We have an old walled town, rich in cool public wells of water, on
the top of a hill within and above the present business-town; and
if it were some hundreds of miles further from England, instead of
being, on a clear day, within sight of the grass growing in the
crevices of the chalk-cliffs of Dover, you would long ago have been
bored to death about that town. It is more picturesque and quaint
than half the innocent places which tourists, following their
leader like sheep, have made impostors of. To say nothing of its
houses with grave courtyards, its queer by-corners, and its manywindowed
streets white and quiet in the sunlight, there is an
ancient belfry in it that would have been in all the Annuals and
Albums, going and gone, these hundred years if it had but been more
expensive to get at. Happily it has escaped so well, being only in
our French watering-place, that you may like it of your own accord
in a natural manner, without being required to go into convulsions
about it. We regard it as one of the later blessings of our life,
that BILKINS, the only authority on Taste, never took any notice
that we can find out, of our French watering-place. Bilkins never
wrote about it, never pointed out anything to be seen in it, never
measured anything in it, always left it alone. For which relief,
Heaven bless the town and the memory of the immortal Bilkins
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likewise!
There is a charming walk, arched and shaded by trees, on the old
walls that form the four sides of this High Town, whence you get
glimpses of the streets below, and changing views of the other town
and of the river, and of the hills and of the sea. It is made more
agreeable and peculiar by some of the solemn houses that are rooted
in the deep streets below, bursting into a fresher existence a-top,
and having doors and windows, and even gardens, on these ramparts.
A child going in at the courtyard gate of one of these houses,
climbing up the many stairs, and coming out at the fourth-floor
window, might conceive himself another Jack, alighting on enchanted
ground from another bean-stalk. It is a place wonderfully populous
in children; English children, with governesses reading novels as
they walk down the shady lanes of trees, or nursemaids
interchanging gossip on the seats; French children with their
smiling bonnes in snow-white caps, and themselves - if little boys
- in straw head-gear like bee-hives, work-baskets and church
hassocks. Three years ago, there were three weazen old men, one
bearing a frayed red ribbon in his threadbare button-hole, always
to be found walking together among these children, before dinnertime.
If they walked for an appetite, they doubtless lived en
pension - were contracted for - otherwise their poverty would have
made it a rash action. They were stooping, blear-eyed, dull old
men, slip-shod and shabby, in long-skirted short-waisted coats and
meagre trousers, and yet with a ghost of gentility hovering in
their company. They spoke little to each other, and looked as if
they might have been politically discontented if they had had
vitality enough. Once, we overheard red-ribbon feebly complain to
the other two that somebody, or something, was 'a Robber;' and then
they all three set their mouths so that they would have ground
their teeth if they had had any. The ensuing winter gathered redribbon
unto the great company of faded ribbons, and next year the
remaining two were there - getting themselves entangled with hoops
and dolls - familiar mysteries to the children - probably in the
eyes of most of them, harmless creatures who had never been like
children, and whom children could never be like. Another winter
came, and another old man went, and so, this present year, the last
of the triumvirate, left off walking - it was no good, now - and
sat by himself on a little solitary bench, with the hoops and the
dolls as lively as ever all about him.
In the Place d'Armes of this town, a little decayed market is held,
which seems to slip through the old gateway, like water, and go
rippling down the hill, to mingle with the murmuring market in the
lower town, and get lost in its movement and bustle. It is very
agreeable on an idle summer morning to pursue this market-stream
from the hill-top. It begins, dozingly and dully, with a few sacks
of corn; starts into a surprising collection of boots and shoes;
goes brawling down the hill in a diversified channel of old
cordage, old iron, old crockery, old clothes, civil and military,
old rags, new cotton goods, flaming prints of saints, little
looking-glasses, and incalculable lengths of tape; dives into a
backway, keeping out of sight for a little while, as streams will,
or only sparkling for a moment in the shape of a market drinkingshop;
and suddenly reappears behind the great church, shooting
itself into a bright confusion of white-capped women and bluebloused
men, poultry, vegetables, fruits, flowers, pots, pans,
praying-chairs, soldiers, country butter, umbrellas and other sunshades,
girl-porters waiting to be hired with baskets at their
backs, and one weazen little old man in a cocked hat, wearing a
cuirass of drinking-glasses and carrying on his shoulder a crimson
temple fluttering with flags, like a glorified pavior's rammer
without the handle, who rings a little bell in all parts of the
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scene, and cries his cooling drink Hola, Hola, Ho-o-o! in a shrill
cracked voice that somehow makes itself heard, above all the
chaffering and vending hum. Early in the afternoon, the whole
course of the stream is dry. The praying-chairs are put back in
the church, the umbrellas are folded up, the unsold goods are
carried away, the stalls and stands disappear, the square is swept,
the hackney coaches lounge there to be hired, and on all the
country roads (if you walk about, as much as we do) you will see
the peasant women, always neatly and comfortably dressed, riding
home, with the pleasantest saddle-furniture of clean milk-pails,
bright butter-kegs, and the like, on the jolliest little donkeys in
the world.
We have another market in our French watering-place - that is to
say, a few wooden hutches in the open street, down by the Port -
devoted to fish. Our fishing-boats are famous everywhere; and our
fishing people, though they love lively colours, and taste is
neutral (see Bilkins), are among the most picturesque people we
ever encountered. They have not only a quarter of their own in the
town itself, but they occupy whole villages of their own on the
neighbouring cliffs. Their churches and chapels are their own;
they consort with one another, they intermarry among themselves,
their customs are their own, and their costume is their own and
never changes. As soon as one of their boys can walk, he is
provided with a long bright red nightcap; and one of their men
would as soon think of going afloat without his head, as without
that indispensable appendage to it. Then, they wear the noblest
boots, with the hugest tops - flapping and bulging over anyhow;
above which, they encase themselves in such wonderful overalls and