Highways and Byways in London Part 2

"The Eternal Saki from the Bowl hath poured Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour----"

while this senseless block of stone lives for ever, regardless of the tides of humanity that ebb and flow ceaselessly about its feet. Has it not been a "silent witness" of the pageants of the magnificent Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty? Its hieroglyphics record its erection by Thotmes III., before the Temple of the Sun in _On_ (Heliopolis), where it remained for the first 1600 years of its existence, and (says Mr. Hare) witnessed the slavery and imprisonment of the patriarch Joseph. The obelisk has had a strange and eventful history. Removed to Alexandria shortly before the Christian era, it was never erected there, but lay for years p.r.o.ne in the sand. Then, in 1820, Mahomet Ali presented it to the British nation; with, however, no immediate result. For, the difficulties of removal being great, no advantage was taken of the offer, till, in 1877, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Erasmus Wilson gave the necessary funds, amounting to 10,000. A special cylinder boat was made for the obelisk, but even with its removal its adventures were not ended, for, in the Bay of Biscay, the vessel encountered a terrific storm, and the crew of the ship that towed it, in peril of their lives, cut it adrift. For days it was lost, till a pa.s.sing steamer happened to sight the strange-looking object and picked it up, earning salvage on it.

The granite is said to be slowly disintegrating and the hieroglyphics therefore becoming less deeply scored, by the action of the London smoke and mist--the mist glorified poetically by Mr. Andrew Lang in his "Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle";

"Ye giant shades of Ra and Tum, Ye ghosts of G.o.ds Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument in London mist!

"Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb, That once were read of him that ran When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum, Wild music of the Bull began; When through the chanting priestly clan Walk'd Ramses, and the high sun kiss'd This stone, with blessing scored and ban-- This monument in London mist.

"The stone endures though G.o.ds be numb; Though human effort, plot, and plan Be sifted, drifted, like the sum Of sands in wastes Arabian.

What king may deem him more than man, What priest says Faith can Time resist While _this_ endures to mark their span-- This monument in London mist?"--

It has been objected that Cleopatra's needle ought to have been placed somewhere else; for instance, in the centre of the Tilt Yard, opposite the Horse Guards. But it is, as I said, typical of Londoners to find fault with their monuments; and it is difficult to agree with the writer who described it as in its present position "adorning nothing, emphasising nothing, and by nothing emphasised." M. Gabriel Mourey, for instance, who, though a Frenchman, is also a lover of London, brings it very charmingly into his "impression" of the scene from Charing-Cross Bridge:

"I go every morning to Charing-Cross Bridge, to gaze on the 'magical effects' produced by fog and mist on the Thames.

The buildings on the sh.o.r.es have vanished; there, where recently seethed an enormous conglomeration of roofs, chimneys, the perpetual encroachment of interminable facades, all that insentient life of stones,--heaped to lodge human toil, suffering, happiness,--seems to be now only a desert of far-reaching waters. The river has immeasurably widened, has extended its sh.o.r.es to the infinite. Such immensity is terrible ... the atmosphere is heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight that presses down, penetrates into ears and mouth, seems even to hang about the hair. We might, indeed, be existing in a kind of nothingness, except for the perpetual pa.s.sage of trains--trains that shake the floor of the bridge, and jar our whole being with metallic vibrations.... The wooden sheds of the landing-stage, backed by the stone steps and parapet,--with, further on, the thin spire of Cleopatra's Needle, an unimagined network of lines,--appear suddenly out of nothingness; it might be a fairy city rising all at once; here are revealed the gigantic buildings of the Savoy Hotel, and yonder, farther on, those of Somerset House, as the fog gradually lifts; the whole effect is suggestive of a negative under the chemical action of the developer. There is, however, no distinctness; the negative is a fogged one; outlines are only distinguished with difficulty; and everything, in this strange and sad monochrome, seems to acquire a vast and altogether fantastic size. The sky, however, moves; thick, ragged clouds unravel themselves, in colour a dirty yellow fringed with white; they might well be great folds of torn curtains entangled in each other, curtains of dingy wadding, thickly lined, and edged with faint gold. But the light is too feeble to reflect itself, and the water below continues to flow dully, as though weighed down with the burden of that heavy sky; the pleasure-steamers, indeed, seem to cleave it with painful toil, to force a pathway, soon again closed; a pathway of which scarcely a trace remains, only a slow, sluggish undulation, soon lost in the general distracting cohesion of all and everything."

It may be interesting here to recall Lord Tennyson's sonnet, and the story told of it by his son:

"When Cleopatra's Needle was brought to London, Stanley asked my father to make some lines upon it; to be engraven on the base. These were put together by my father at once, and I made a note of them:

_Cleopatra's Needle._

"Here, I that stood in On beside the flow Of sacred Nile, three thousand years ago!-- A Pharaoh, kingliest of his kingly race, First shaped, and carved, and set me in my place.

A Caesar of a punier dynasty Thence haled me toward the Mediterranean sea, Whence your own citizens, for their own renown, Thro' strange seas drew me to your monster town.

I have seen the four great empires disappear!

I was when London was not! I am here!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The "Top" Season._]

Waterloo Bridge, crossing the Thames at Somerset House, was built by Rennie in 1817. Canova considered it "the n.o.blest bridge in the world, and worth a visit from the remotest corners of the earth." It was at first intended to call it the "Strand" Bridge; but it was eventually named "Waterloo," in honour of the victory just won. Yet Waterloo Bridge is not without its dismal a.s.sociations. So many people, for instance, have committed suicide from it, that it has been called the "English Bridge of Sighs." It suggests Hood's ballad of the "Unfortunate":

"The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver: But not the dark arch Or the black flowing river."

Waterloo Bridge has indeed been the last resource of many an unhappy human moth--attracted by "the cruel lights of London"--to whom

"When life hangs heavy, death remains the door To endless rest beside the Stygian sh.o.r.e."

Dante Rossetti, who painted his terrible picture of the lost girl found by her old lover on a London bridge at dawning, has well realised the ineffable sadness of the wrecks made by this whirlpool of London.

The Victoria Embankment, and indirectly also this splendid Waterloo Bridge, have given cause for one of the most eloquent diatribes of our greatest aesthetic critic. Mr. Ruskin, though he cannot but admire the vast curve of Waterloo Bridge, where the Embankment road pa.s.ses under it, "as vast, it alone, as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions," yet finds, in the wretched attempts at decoration on the Embankment, and in the sad want of "human imagination" of the English architect, windmills apt and ready to his lance. Unlike the Rialto, the "Waterloo arch," he remarks plaintively, "is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite":

"We have lately been busy," he says, "embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of n.o.ble adornment. For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and give l.u.s.tre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, toward the road, we put, for advertis.e.m.e.nt's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury: and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wits' end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or three millions of London street doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry-boxes."

Much, however, may be forgiven to Mr. Ruskin. On the other hand, the view from Waterloo Bridge is thus described by the late Mr. Samuel Butler:

"When ... I think of Waterloo Bridge and the huge wide-opened jaws of those two Behemoths, the Cannon Street and Charing Cross railway stations, I am not sure that the prospect here is not even finer than in Fleet Street. See how they belch forth puffing trains as the breath of their nostrils, gorging and disgorging incessantly those human atoms whose movement is the life of the city. How like it all is to some great bodily mechanism.... And then ... the ineffable St. Paul's. I was once on Waterloo Bridge after a heavy thunderstorm in summer. A thick darkness was upon the river and the buildings upon the north side, but just below, I could see the water hurrying onward as in an abyss, dark, gloomy and mysterious. On a level with the eye there was an absolute blank, but above, the sky was clear, and out of the gloom the dome and towers of St. Paul's rose up sharply, looking higher than they actually were, and as though they rested upon s.p.a.ce."

Mr. Astor's charming estate office, one of the prettiest buildings in London, facing the Embankment, close to the Temple Gardens, is yet another instance of that latter-day change from palace to office, already mentioned. At Blackfriars, the Victoria Embankment ends, and tall, many-storied warehouses crowd down to the water's edge, in picturesque though dingy medley, with, behind them, the blackened dome of St. Paul's, attended by its sentinel spires,--St. Paul's, that has nearly all the way stood out prominently in the distance, making this, by universal consent, the finest view in all London. The n.o.ble effect of Wren's great work is indeed, apparent from all points; but it is the river and the wharves that, no doubt, form its best and most fitting foreground. As we near London Bridge, the dirt of the vast highway gains upon us; but, it must be confessed, its general picturesqueness is thereby immeasurably increased. Dirt, after all, is always so near akin to picturesqueness. The mud-banks and the mud become more constant, the bustle and hum of the great city are everywhere evident. Barges are moored under the tall warehouses; workmen stand in the storing-places above, hauling up the goods from the boats with ropes and pulleys; it is a scene of ceaseless activity, an activity too, which increases as you descend the stream. On the one side, the slums and warehouses of Upper Thames Street; on the other, the yet slummier purlieus of busy, often-burned-down Tooley Street.

Thames Street, like its adjoining Billingsgate, is, I may remark, nearly always muddy, whatever the time of year. On rainy days, it is like a Slough of Despond. If by chance you wish to land at All Hallows or London Bridge Piers, you must first climb endless wooden and slippery steps, then wend your way carefully, past threatening cranes, and along narrow alleys between high houses, alleys blocked by heavy waggons, from which tremendous packages ascend, by rope, to top stories; alleys where there is barely room for a solitary pedestrian to wedge himself past the obstruction. Barrels of the delicious oyster, the obnoxious "c.o.c.kle," the humble "winkle"; loud scents that suggest the immediate neighbourhood of the ubiquitous "kipper"; these, mingled with the shouts of fish-wives and porters, greet you near that Temple of the Fisheries, Billingsgate. The enormous Monument, which stands close by, may be said to be in the dirtiest, dingiest portion of this dingy region. "Fish Street Hill" the locality is called; and it certainly is no misnomer.

London Bridge must have been wonderfully picturesque in old days; it seems to have looked then very much as the Florentine "Ponte Vecchio"

does now, with, outside, its quaint overhanging timbered houses, balconies, roof-gardens, and, inside, its narrow street of shops. The sixth picture in the "Marriage a la Mode" series at the National Gallery gives us an idea of what it was like. The present bridge, opened in 1831, at a cost of two millions, is the last of many on or near this site. For there has been a bridge here of some kind ever since we know anything of London; no other bridge, indeed, existed at all in old days. By old London Bridge Wat Tyler entered with his rebels; by it Jack Cade invaded the city (though his head, for that matter, soon adorned its gate-house), and here London was wont, with pageant and ceremonial, to welcome her kings. The picturesque old stone bridge was demolished in 1832; its narrow arches hindered traffic, and gave undue help, besides, to that total freezing of the river that occasionally happened, as the ancient "Frost Fairs" record, in old days; yet one cannot help regretting the necessity for its removal. The present London Bridge, though said to be "unrivalled in the world in the perfection of proportion and the true greatness of simplicity," is, perhaps, more practical than aesthetically beautiful.

The tide ebbs strongly against its ma.s.sive piers; the last roadway across the river, it is also the boundary line for big ships and sailing boats; below here the river a.s.sumes more and more the look of a sea-port; it becomes "the Pool of London." From this bridge are to be seen some of the finest London views. The lace-like structure of the unique Tower Bridge, the most extraordinary monument of the century, rising, between its huge watch-towers, like a white wraith behind the more prosaic stone of London Bridge, is here very telling.

And, looking towards the City, the brilliant tower of St. Magnus gleams with quite Venetian-like brightness against the blackened medley of its background.

The Tower Bridge, on a first sight, is infinitely more astonishing to the sightseer than any other London monument. It has also a mediaeval look, as of some gigantic fortress of the sixteenth century. With regard to the two great towers, flanked on either side by their graceful suspension chains, "spanned high overhead as with a lintel, and holding apart the great twin bascules, like a portcullis raised to give entry to a castle, there is no denying that all this must loom as an impressive watergate upon ships coming from overseas to the Port of London." M. Gabriel Mourey thus describes it:

"The Tower Bridge, the water-gate of the Capital, is a colossal symbol of the British genius. Like that genius, the Bridge struck me as built on lines of severe simplicity, harmonious, superbly balanced, without exaggeration or emphasis; sober architecture, yet with reasonable audacities, signifying its end with that clearness which is the hall-mark of everything English. It wonderfully completes the seething landscape of quays and docks, and the infernal activity of the greatest port in the world. No waters in the world better reflect without deforming than the muddy waters of the Thames; never blue even under the blue skies of summer. Throw this bridge across the Seine or the Loire, and it would spoil the view, like a false note of colour. But here, on the contrary, its effect is prodigiously imposing. Look at its two towers, how square and solid they are. Their tips are crowned by steeples, the roofs are pointed, the windows straight, with pointed arches. It looks like the gate to some strong tower of the middle ages. The combinations of lines composing the bridge call up the idea of some heroic past time. They lift themselves above the river like some ma.s.sive efflorescence of the past. But look again, and the impression becomes more complex. Light and airy, like clear lace, an iron foot-bridge joins the two towers, across the abyss. Another, lower down, on the level of the banks, lifts up to let big ships pa.s.s as under a triumphal arch. And all the audacity of the modern architects, which is to create the works of the future, here bursts forth, suspended on the heavy foundations of the past; with so much measure and proportion that nothing offends in the medly of archaism and modernity.

There are few countries able to carry off such contrasts.

But this country adjusts itself to them in perfection. It is because no other people know how to unite with the same harmonious force the cult of the past, the religion of tradition, to an unchecked love of progress, and a lively and insatiable pa.s.sion for the future."

The Tower Bridge, as compared with other great engineering works of the kind, labours under the disadvantage of not being seen properly from anywhere as a whole, taking in, that is, both abutment towers with their pendant suspension chains, which add so much to the general effect. Nevertheless, even viewed from close by, it is very telling, and dwarfs immeasurably any other building near it; see, for instance, how the little Tower of London, that ancient and most historic fortress, loses its size from its close juxtaposition to those supporting towers! The "bascules," or drawbridges, are worked by hydraulic power, and it is a curious and interesting sight to see them raised to allow tall vessels to pa.s.s. Below the Tower Bridge, the broad river seems to extend in a sea of masts, the city to become a world of wharves and docks. To quote, once more, an "impression" of M.

Gabriel Mourey:

"Once past the London Tower Bridge, and its two enormous towers, which rise like a triumphal arch with an air of calm victory at the entrance to the great metropolis, the seaport aspect of London becomes very apparent. The immense traffic on the river is evident from the constant pa.s.sage of steamers, no less than by their frequent calls at the wharves whose blackened walls, deep in water, receive the riches of the entire world. A whole people toil at the unloading of the enormous ships; swarming on the barges, dark figures, dimly outlined, moving rhythmically, fill in and give life to the picture. In the far distance, behind the interminable lines of sheds and warehouses, masts bound the horizon, masts like a bare forest in winter, finely branched, exaggerated, aerial trees grown in all the climates of the globe. Steam-tugs whistle, pant, and hurry; ships with great red sails descend the river towards the sea. An enormous steamer advances majestically; she seems as tall as a five-storied house and her masts are lost in the mist. The river suddenly widens, the thick smoke of the atmosphere almost prevents one from seeing the other side; it might almost be an immense lake. Rain, steam, and speed;--Turner's chef d'oeuvre evoked before my eyes. The ever-changing sky is a continual wonder. A while ago the sun, like a disc of melting cream, disappeared in yellowish mists, scattering reflections like dirty snow. Now, through a clearing, he appears like the altar-glory of a Jesuit church; raining waves of golden light; the surrounding cloud-flocks are in a moment tinged with brilliance. And again, he is suddenly eclipsed; all returns to dulness and gloom: it might be the sad dawn of a rainy day."

It is, above all, this vast and eternally busy "Pool of London" that is, and ever has been, the key to her greatness, her wealth, her power. Even the distant church bells of London, clanging fitfully through the "swish" of the wavelets and the eternal m.u.f.fled roar of the City, recall to the true Londoner the commercial spirit of his ancestors. Does not the children's rhyme (there is ever deep reason in childish rhymes) run thus?

"Oranges and Lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's; You owe me ten shillings, Say the bells of St. Helen's; When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey; When I grow rich, Say the bells of Sh.o.r.editch."

The bells, be it observed, are nothing if not business-like, and seem to be more nearly concerned with our temporal than with our spiritual welfare. But here everything tells of work, of traffic, of the endless and indomitable "struggle-for-life" that is so characteristic of the British race. Father Thames, here, may well speak in Kingsley's words:

"Darker and darker the further I go; Baser and baser the richer I grow."

These dingy docks, these blackened wharves, represent, in reality, the world's great treasure-house. For to this vast port of London comes all "the wealth of Ormus and of Ind," all the riches of "a thousand islands rocked in an idle main," all the luxuriant produce of new-world farms, of Colonial ranches, of tropical gardens. Here, if anywhere, may be realised his vision who saw

"The heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."

Jewels such as a Queen of Sheba might have dreamed of, or a Sindbad fabled, from "far Cathay"; ivory and gold from the mysterious East; spices, bark, and coral from many a land of reef and palm; these, with every commercial product of the globe, are daily poured into the ravenous and never-satisfied maw of London. This vast giant, enormous, helpless, is, like the queen termite, all-devouring, and yet would starve of actual food in few days if deprived of her ever-arriving cargoes. For Colonial produce, as every one knows, is, despite the costs of freight, far cheaper than that of our own country. The "Feeding of London," indeed, should prove a very interesting subject to those attracted by statistics.

"There are within the limits of the metropolis at least five million human beings, each of whom has every day to be provided with food. The difference between the plenty of one cla.s.s and the pittance of another is, no doubt, very marked; but taking the rich and the poor together, the quant.i.ty of food required is almost incredible. The necessity for large imports suggests horrid possibilities for some future siege of London! But as the trade and port of London have made its wealth, so they have also helped it to its present enormous dimensions; for though the country, by the railways, brings her share of London's sustenance, yet by far the larger proportion of it comes through the docks. Thus, frozen and living meat comes from the far colony of New Zealand, and also from the United States, Canada, the River Plate, and Australia; potatoes from Malta, Portugal, and Holland; tea from China and India; early vegetables from Madeira and the Canary Islands; spices from Ceylon; wines from France, Portugal, and Spain; oranges from all parts of the tropical globe, far cheaper often than our own home-grown fruits. The import of oranges, indeed, alone reaches a total of 800 or 900 millions yearly; that of raisins and currants some 12,000 tons; while other things are in proportion. The unloading of the ships is done by casual helpers, called "dockers" or "dock-labourers," a rough cla.s.s of workmen living in and around Wapping, Rotherhithe, and Stepney.

Their employment, though now paid at a fair rate for "unskilled" labour, is necessarily heavy while it lasts, and uncertain, causing often a hand-to-mouth existence, and leading to frequent "strikes."--(Darlington's _London and its Environs_.)

The dock warehouses should be visited, if only to gain some idea of the enormous wealth of London.

"These docks," says M. Taine, "are prodigious, overpowering; each of them is a vast port, and accommodates a mult.i.tude of three-masted vessels. There are ships everywhere, ships upon ships in rows ... for the most part they are leviathans, magnificent ... some of them hail from all parts of the world; this is the great trysting-place of the globe."

The sh.o.r.e population, about here, consists mostly of sailors and fishermen; "the Sailors' Town," the region east of the Tower is specially called. The river scenes here are as picturesque in their way as any in the world, a fact of which not only Turner's pictures, but also Mr. Vicat Cole's "Pool of London," now in the Tate Gallery, may well remind us. Why, indeed, should our artists all flock to Venice to paint? Have we not also here golden sunsets, sails of Venetian red, tall masts, dappled skies, all the picturesque litter and crowded life that Turner so loved, suffused in an atmosphere of misty glory?--a glory translated by all the glamour of history and sentiment into

"The light that never was on land or sea, The consecration and the poet's dream."

To the eyes of the boy Turner, the embryo artist, the child of the City, all was beautiful and worthy to be painted--"black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog." To him, even in mature life, "Thames' sh.o.r.e, with its stranded barges, and glidings of red sail, was dearer than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon." Its humanity appealed to him: he, as great a London lover as d.i.c.kens, merely expressed this feeling differently. Thus, Ruskin says of Turner's boyhood:

"That mysterious forest below London Bridge,--better for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. How he must have tormented the watermen, beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get floated down there among the ships, and round and round the ships, and with the ships, and by the ships, and under the ships, staring and clambering;--these the only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky; but these, when the sun is on their sails, filling or falling, endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures--red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the gunwales, true knights, over their castle parapets,--the most angelic beings in the whole compa.s.s of London world."

The Thames and its wonderful glamour, its mingled beauty and squalor--beauty, in the misty distance--squalor, in the more prosaic near view--suggests memories of d.i.c.kens, as it does of Turner.