James doesn’t only write, in the essays in English Hours, about the physicalities of a place: he’s also writing about culture and history, about the American temperament and the English temperament (or at least, about an American’s impression of them), about the majesty of Anglican services and American twinges of jealousy at all the richness of England’s past. But I have to say, it’s the concrete that I like best, the descriptions of buildings and landscapes.
Before reading this essay, I could not have told you where in England Chester might be or what it might look like, but now I’ve got a hundred-and-thirty-eight-year-old vision of it in my head. James, writing in 1872, says that it is “so rare and complete a specimen of an antique town” that Coventry and York are a bit of a let-down for the traveler who’s gone to Chester first (18). I have no idea if this is still the case—somehow I doubt it—but James sure does make it sound appealing, though even in 1872 he fears that some of it’s turning into a tourist trap: “I indeed suspect much of this revived innocence of having recovered a freshness that never can have been, of having been restored with usurious interest,” he writes (39).
Chester is a walled city, a city grown from the remains of a Roman fort, and James describes walking on the wall around the whole town, the path “now sloping, now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now narrowing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened garden, and now reminding you that it was once a more serious matter than all this by the extrusion of a rugged, ivy-covered tower” (36). It’s great: the image of a wall around a city could so easily be the image of something static, stony, unmoving and unmovable, but here the wall seems charming, almost coquettish, changing its appearance at every turn. The wall, and even the whole town, as James describes it, is full of twisty-turny charm:
Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward [the wall] through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness—of those random corners, projections and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises and caprices and fantasies which lead to such refreshing exercise a vision benumbed by brownstone fronts. (36-37)
Side-note: James also talks, in this essay, about hearing a sermon by Charles Kingsley, who I only knew as the author of The Water Babies. Apparently the sermon wasn’t that great, but James mostly manages to keep from snarking about it, though he does get a little smug, talking about how an American in England may despair at his own country not being so grand and historic, but ah well, here in this great cathedral there’s this not-so-interesting sermon: at least Americans, he says, usually manage to rise to the occasion when there is one. Ouch!
Leave a Reply