Highways and Byways in London Part 28

"Not with clumsy Jacks or Georges; Unprofaned by grasp of man Maidens speed those simple orgies Betsey Jane with Betsey Ann."

German bands at street corners,--drum-and-fife bands organised by local talent,--all help, at nightfall, to swell the vast volume of the noise of London.

There is one day in the week, however, when silence--a silence that can almost be oppressive--hangs over the entire city, and not even the sound of the organ-grinder varies the dulness of the monotonous streets. This is Sunday, a day which strikes terror to the heart of the uninitiated foreigner. M. Gabriel Mourey thus feelingly describes it:

"That English Sunday, which so exasperates the French, gives them, from mere recollection, an attack of the spleen, a fit of yawning.... Yet to me there is something comforting about it. It is really a day of rest, of compulsory rest, of rest against one's will; a day when it is simply impossible to do otherwise than rest; it is an obligatory imprisonment which at first revolts the prisoner, but which, if he control his feelings, he will, at the end of an hour or so, find not without its charm. To know for certain that no whim, no fancy for outside amus.e.m.e.nt can distract you, no theatrical temptation, no yearning for active life can a.s.sail you, to be a.s.sured that you are protected from the Unforeseen, be it happy or sad, from a letter even--that, in short, it is for the moment impossible to do anything _useful_,--all this gives you a tranquil security, a serene and healthful calm of twenty-four hours, a calm of which we in France, and especially of Paris, do not know the boon.... And if, in the evening, you venture on to the deserted streets, you can pa.s.s freely on your way; no one will interrupt your walk; it is like a dead city; all trace of the life and activity of the six past days has vanished."'

And here is another, and a still more depressing picture, from the same author:

"In this immense and respectable cemetery into which London is metamorphosed on Sundays, some characteristic and amusing beggars patrol the streets. Two old people, a man and his wife, stop at a street corner. The man takes a wretched violin out of an old black cloth bag. The woman sings. What a voice! a hungry voice of chilly misery, which issues, bitter and shrill, from her toothless mouth. Though the weather is warm, she seems to shiver beneath her ragged shawl. The violin grates on obstinately. The man is tall, with a kind of remains of grandeur in his torn coat-tails, and in his face, still haughty, though greasy and bloated.

Some pa.s.sers-by have stopped, and some pence have dropped into the old woman's dirty, wasted hand. The man, still drawing his violin bow, looks round, satisfied, on the treasure.... Six o'clock strikes from a steeple near; they suddenly desist, she from her singing, he from the sc.r.a.ping of his miserable instrument, and they go off to swell the little crowd which awaits, at the public-house doors, the sixth stroke of six,--the re-opening of the house where drunkenness, the cure of hunger-pain, is to be cheaply bought."

Such tragedies, such pitiful sights, wring the heart every day, "whene'er I take my walks abroad" in the streets of London. "How the poor live," indeed! Some of the London waifs would find it hard to tell you how they do live! The day often divided between the street and the public-house; the night, perhaps, spent in the shelter of the "fourpenny doss"; and withal, a delightful uncertainty about the possibilities of dinner and breakfast. Selling penny toys in the street in the winter months must be chilly work; and even in the hot days of August, when the pavements blister in the sun, and American and German tourists throng the streets with their Baedekers, it must have its drawbacks. As to the "fourpenny doss," its discomforts are probably mainly owing to its inmates. The common lodging-houses are often comparatively clean, with a big, central, well-warmed kitchen, presided over by a "deputy." But, of course, where many individuals are herded together in big dormitories, pickpockets will abound; pickpockets, too, abandoned enough to thieve even from other human wastrels. The shelter of the "casual ward" is ever held to be the last resource. A charwoman whom I once knew, a witty and charming lady,--talented, too, in her _metier_, but alas! I fear, of the "Jane Cakebread" type,--often complained to me of the horrors she had endured there. "It's downright crool," she would say with tears in her eyes, "the way them nurses treats yer. Fust, you 'as to be washed; an'

washed you must be; there's no gittin' away from it. An' your' ed, too! It's 'Dip your 'ed in,' and dip it you must, will or no. An' with so much dippin' my 'earin's fair gorn." As for the compulsory oak.u.m picking, the lady minded it not at all. "I didn't never tike much count on it," she said; "but there, my 'ands is 'ardened like."

One word of warning to the wise. Do not, in the mistaken kindness of your heart, take (as Mrs. Carlyle did to her subsequent repentance) to your own home, children that appear to be "lost"; or at least only do so under very exceptional circ.u.mstances. When children tell you that they are lost, they are usually only frightened. "Bless your 'art," a kindly policeman once said to me, "they'll find their way 'ome safe enough, if you only leave 'em where they are." Even if really lost, the best place for the stray child is, after all, the police station, "and" (to quote a Mrs. Gamp-like member of the force), "well they knows it, the little dears--well they knows as the orficer is always their best friend." If you do take the child home, it will prove--as it did to Mrs. Carlyle--as great a riddle as the Sphinx. Once I did this. I took a lost infant home, indulged it in nuts, oranges, buns, and picture books; yet still the wretched child howled, refusing, like Rachel, to be comforted; and I found out to my cost that I had better have left it alone. (Perhaps the too unaccustomed neatness of my room distressed it, or the absence of the friendly and familiar "washing.") But once again was I strongly tempted to play the good Samaritan.

Returning home on a winter's day, I met, in a "mean street," two children--boy and girl, of seven and eight years--crying bitterly. I interrogated them as to the cause of their tears:

"Our school's burnt down," the boy said betwixt his sobs, "and we can't get in there to-day."

A compulsory holiday seemed a feeble reason for howls. "Why don't you go home and say so?" I inquired.

"'Cause--mother--she w--w--won't believe us," the youth sobbed. "She said as she'd rive our livers out, if we ever humbugged her any more, an' stopped away from school--and--and--_it's really burnt down this time_!"

Terrible Nemesis, indeed, and worthy of Miss Jane Taylor's well-known "moral poem,"--this unforeseen result of "giving Mamma false alarms!"

Burglars in London are not uncommon; they seem to know, by mere predatory instinct, the houses where valuables and silver abound. It is best to treat them, when found, gently but firmly. But if we feel that we cannot all attain to the courage of the Gower Street matron who held the thief by the collar till the police came, then we can at least lock up safely and retire to rest, resolute to ignore all suspicious sounds within the house. Casual morning visitors give, on the whole, more trouble to the London householder. Old ladies, for instance, in black silk that has seen better days, who are kindly willing to sell to you, for the nominal sum of one and-six, an ancient recipe for furniture polish, or smart and glib young men who call as though they were old college friends, and who, only after some half-hour's discussion of the state of Europe or the weather, divulge to you the fact that they came as agents for a tea firm. Then there are the itinerant vendors of tortoises, with barrow-loads of the poor distressed creatures. "Wonnerful things for beadles, 'm! eat a beadle as soon as look at 'im"--a thing they seldom, if ever, do. And, on one memorable occasion, a whole hour of my precious morning was taken up by an elderly female who represented herself, I know not on what grounds, as "a relative and scion of the late Sir Humphry Davy"! (I am glad, on the scion's behalf, to be able to add that she did not also appropriate the tea-spoons!)

Yet another factor in city life calls for remark. This is the newsboy of London, a personality into which the street arab not infrequently develops. He is a curious being, gifted with nine lives; I should describe him as "a survival of the fittest." His raucous, indescribably husky voice may be heard at every street corner, crying either "Win-_ner_," or "Extra Spee-shul." Of late, the newsboys have, however, battened on war. "Death o' Kroojer," one of them was bawling one day, before the ex-President's oblivion. "Why are you shouting what's not true?" I inquired kindly of the youthful delinquent, "you've got plenty of lighting." "Shut up, you," the urchin retorted, no whit abashed, "battles is played out!" I once asked a newsboy, just as a matter of curiosity, what piece of news he had found paid him best. "Wy, resignation o' Mr. Gladstone," was the prompt reply, "I got meself a new pair o' boots outer that." The familiar and oft reiterated cry, "'Orrible Murder!" has, especially since "Jack the Ripper" days, been sacred to the calm of Sunday evenings, when men of the roughest cla.s.s take the place of boys, and generally cry bogus news. It is a curious fact, which says much for the weakness of human nature, that the householder can rarely resist the temptation of buying a Sunday evening paper, even though he knows well, from bitter experience, that the news cried is almost invariably false.

The curious indifference to other people's affairs that, as already mentioned, characterises the Londoner,--shows itself also in a certain want of public spirit. There is, naturally, very little of the proud, local, personal feeling that the villager and the small townsman so often feels. The Londoner, on the contrary, is usually self-centred, unsociable, phlegmatic, narrow. This pleasing quality foreigners politely excuse in him by calling it "the spleen," and account it, indeed, a kind of result of the London fog on character. The fog, or "London particular," as that incorrigible c.o.c.kney, Sam Weller, called it, is thus described by a trenchant French satirist, Max O'Rell:

"The London fog, of universal reputation, is of two kinds.

The most curious, and at the same time the less dangerous, is the black species. It is simply darkness complete and intense at mid-day. The gas is immediately lighted everywhere, and when this kind of fog remains in the upper atmospheric regions, it does not greatly affect you. It does not touch the earth, and the gas being lighted, it gives you the impression of being in the street at ten o'clock at night. Traffic is not stopped; the bustle of the city goes on as usual. The most terrible of all is the yellow fog, that the English call pea-soup. This one gets down your throat and seems to choke you. You have to cover your mouth with a respirator, if you do not wish to be choked or seized with an attack of blood-spitting. The gas is useless, you cannot see it even when you are close to the lamp. Traffic is stopped. Sometimes for several hours the town seems dead and buried.... When the sun makes his appearance he is photographed, that folks may not forget what he is like."

Another Frenchman, M. Gabriel Mourey, describes the fog more picturesquely:

"The frenzied, unbridled activity of the City" (he says) "loses half its brutality under the mantle of fog.

Everything seems to be checked, to slacken into a phantom-like motion that has all the vagueness of hallucination. The sounds of the street are m.u.f.fled; the tops of the houses are lost, hardly even guessed; the lower and first floors are, apparently, all that exist: behind the shop-fronts, a light vapour floats, giving to the goods exposed for sale something of age and disuse. Everything shares, in a fashion, in the solidity and heaviness of the atmosphere. The openings of the streets swallow up, like tunnels, a crowd of foot-pa.s.sengers and carriages, which seem, thus, to disappear for ever. The trains that cross Ludgate Hill wander off into emptiness on a cloud. St.

Paul's resembles some monumental ma.s.s of primitive times, at the foot of which the human ant-heap swarms, ridiculous in size, of a mean and pitiable activity. Nevertheless, they are innumerable, a compact army, these miserable little human creatures; the struggle for life animates them; they are all of one uniform blackness in the fog; they go to their daily task, they all use the same gestures, and every step that they take brings them nearer to death. How many millions of men for centuries have followed the same road?

and how many millions will follow it in the future, when these of to-day shall have finished their course? But the clouds settle down; they rain themselves on to the ground in black ma.s.ses; the sky descends among men, and covers them as with an immense funereal pall."

Londoners are always very quick to "catch on" with the latest "craze"; they tire of it, however, also with proportionate rapidity. Thus, the hero of May is often forgotten by November, even if he have not already become a villain by that time. Therefore, with Londoners, it is best to take the ball on the hop, and gather roses, so to speak, while you may. A catch-word is in every one's mouth one winter; it is quite forgotten by next summer. Even a wildly popular new novel has only a "quick sale" of a few short weeks; and may then be altogether ousted in favour of a newer aspirant. The great city is notoriously fickle and wayward in her favours.

Mr. Charles Booth, and his fellow-workers, have, with infinite labour and trouble, sifted and sorted the population of London into varying cla.s.ses of wealth and poverty, of toil, crime, and leisure. The results of this work, which have reduced the heterogeneous elements of London population to order as with a fairy's wand, are very interesting as well as instructive. The results are hardly encouraging to would-be immigrants from the country; and it is, perhaps, fortunate that there are still some rustics who hold the great metropolis in horror, and would not on any account venture near it. This I can endorse from personal experience. For, only last year, I happened to express to a well-educated, intelligent, small farmer of some forty years of age, my surprise that he had never yet thought well to make the short three hours' journey from his native town to London. He seemed, however, quite contented with his ignorance. "No," he remarked, in answer to my wondering question, "I ain't never bin there, nor yet 'as the missus; and, from all I 'ear, we're best away from sich places."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Men in Blue._]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE STONES OF LONDON

"Let others chaunt a country praise, Fair river walks and meadow ways; Dearer to me my sounding days In London town: To me the tumult of the street Is no less music, than the sweet Surge of the wind among the wheat, By dale or down."--_Lionel Johnson._

"I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials, and the things of fame, That do renown this city."--_Shakespeare._

What book has ever been written, nay, has ever attempted to be written, about the general architecture of London? The largest city in the world,--the metropolis of many cities in one city,--the aggregate of a hundred towns, each as big as Oxford, as Cambridge, as Winchester,--why should its stones be thus neglected? And, except for a sprinkling of traditional gibes, an annual dole of scornful references, what attention does the architecture of London receive from its inhabitants? or, indeed, from outsiders? Every one, on the contrary, considers himself at liberty to fling a stone at it. Such t.i.tles as "Ugly London," "The Uglification of London," are "stock"

leaders for paragraphs in daily papers. It is a well-known fact that nothing new can be raised in the city without drawing upon itself the scathing remarks and innuendoes of a too-critical, and generally ignorant, public. Londoners are proverbially ungrateful; they also think it fine, and superior, to cavil at their works of art. Mr.

Gilbert designs a Florentine fountain in Piccadilly Circus; the very 'bus-conductors fling their handful of mud at it as they pa.s.s; the new Gothic Law Courts arise in the Strand, to be freely criticised, and vituperated not only by every budding architect, but also by every "man in the street"; the City Powers erect a Temple Bar Memorial Griffin, and nothing less than their heads, it is felt, should with propriety go to adorn the monument of their cra.s.s Philistinism. A scheme is proposed for an addition to the cloisters of Westminster, and a public-spirited citizen offers to carry it out at his own expense: he is promptly fallen foul of, as a desecrator of the shade of Edward the Confessor, by the united force of the press. It is hard, indeed, in these critical days to be a philanthropist!

And not only are we thus critical to works of our own day, but also to those of the past. Old London, no less than New London, is gibed at and mocked. "A province in brick," "a squalid village," "a large wen"; such are only a few among the epithets that have from time to time been hurled at it by men and women of letters. And yet, looking at the matter calmly and without prejudice,--are London stones, indeed, so unworthy, so poor, so inglorious?

In respect of its architecture, as in nearly every other respect, London suffers, primarily, from its vast size. "One cannot see the forest for the trees." What chance has Italian cupola, Doric portico, Gothic gable, so crowded and overpowered in the busy mart of men and of things? And how many people, in the whirl and rush of London, even _look_ at the surrounding buildings at all? Ask the ordinary person what the dominating architecture of London is; he or she will very probably be unable to make a suggestion on the matter, for the simple reason that the question never occurred to them in all their lives before. And, indeed, it is in any case a difficult question to answer.

In this vast conglomeration of houses, houses built mainly for utility and not for beauty, it is difficult to see at first anything but heterogeneous chaos; all seems "a mighty maze, without a plan"; and the really noteworthy buildings are apt to be missed. The few Norman or Saxon antiquities may well be pa.s.sed over, and even a "gem of purest ray serene" such as Staple Inn, may be overlooked in the general bustle of busy Holborn. To the large body of shoppers from the country and suburbs, "London" is represented satisfactorily, and finally, by the gay thoroughfares of Regent Street and Oxford Street; "the part where the shops are." And the white gleaming river, crossed by its many bridges, encircling the black causeways,--the long line of the Embankment, the Westminster towers at one end of it, the dome of St. Paul's on the other,--are, possibly, all that remains of London in the mind of the average Londoner; his view of it more or less resembling Byron's:

"A mighty ma.s.s of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost among the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"

Why should we, the travellers of the world, who so admire other cities, so persistently pour obloquy on our own? It is true that London, on a day of east wind, when the sky is leaden, when suffering is writ large on the faces of poor humanity, and when dirty tracts of paper, notwithstanding the Borough Councils, blow about in all directions, is hardly inspiring; and on a wet day, or a day of fog, when pedestrians peer vainly through that "light which London takes the day to be," and suffering 'bus and dray horses slide and stagger, in the peculiar glutinous composition termed "London mud," through the murky thoroughfares, it can scarcely be said to be at its best. But then, neither are Paris nor Berlin prepossessing under like circ.u.mstances.... Paradise itself would be at a discount!

But, on fine days of spring or summer, days when the May sun, with "heavenly alchemy," transforms the dust in the atmosphere to gold,--when the slight haze of a London summer but adds to pictorial charm,--does not the great city seem a very Eldorado? Days such as these surely inspired Mr. Henley's _London Voluntaries_; soot, fog, grime are all forgotten; the city sparkles like a many-faceted diamond, and

"Trafalgar Square (The fountains volleying golden glaze) Shines like an angel-market. High aloft Over his couchant lions in a haze Shimmering and bland and soft, A dust of chrysoprase, Our Sailor takes the golden gaze Of the saluting sun...."

Yet it is, on the whole, not so much ourselves, as foreigners and colonials, who are and have been the harshest critics of London stones. The colonists of Melbourne, accustomed to their own straight, wide streets, are shocked at our narrow, tortuous, and inconvenient city thoroughfares; the denizens of New York, fresh from their own system of regular "blocks," their town of parallelograms, are amazed at London's want of "plan." The French, recalling their tall, white palaces of the Place du Louvre and the Rue de Rivoli, are surprised no less at our prevailing soot and grime, than by the lack of continuity in our streets, of conformity in our public buildings. So depressed, indeed, was M. Daudet in our metropolis that he went so far as to call Englishwomen "ugly"; the kindly and accomplished author must really have suffered from "the spleen." So, also, must M. Taine, when he unkindly likened Nelson, on the top of his column, to "a rat impaled on the top of a pole," and added, further, that a swamp like London was "a place of exile for the arts of antiquity." Not one of these critics, be it observed, recognises either the "aesthetic value"

of soot, or the charm of irregularity. And see how, even when we do try after conformity and cla.s.sical regularity, they fall foul of us!

For instance, M. Gabriel Mourey, in his charming book on England, _Pa.s.se le Detroit_, while admiring the beauty of Regent's Park, makes somewhat scornful reference to those too-ambitious stucco terraces, designed by Nash in the Prince Regent's time:

"The turf of Regent's Park" (he says) "under that misty sun of the London summer, that gives both a vagueness to the horizon and an indefinite enlargement to the immense city ... the turf of Regent's Park, with its depths of real country, notwithstanding the 'new Greek' lines of the big houses appearing in the distance--Greek lines that harmonise so badly with that northern sun."

Equally severe is M. Taine, the accomplished and broad-minded critic.

Hear his condemnation of one of our finest palaces:

"A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand, which is called Somerset House. Ma.s.sive and heavy piece of architecture, of which the hollows are inked, the porticoes blackened with soot, where, in the cavity of the empty court, is a sham fountain without water, pools of water on the pavement, long rows of closed windows--what can they possibly do in these catacombs? It seems as if the livid and sooty fog had even befouled the verdure of the parks. But what most offends the eyes are the colonnades, peristyles, Grecian ornaments, mouldings, and wreaths of the houses, all bathed in soot; poor antique architecture--what is it doing in such a climate?"

We give up the whole defence of the Regent's Park houses; yet, surely, poor Somerset House was hardly deserving of all this satire! Somerset House, though its river frontage is inadequate and lacking in dignity, yet testifies to the ability of its eighteenth-century architect, Sir William Chambers. The older palace of Protector Somerset, that English prison where two poor foreign queens, Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza, languished in desolate grandeur, has given place to an imposing structure, a community of Inland Revenue, a Circ.u.mlocution Office on a vast scale. Situated at the Strand end of Waterloo Bridge, its condemned river facade looms, nevertheless, attractively in gleaming whiteness, across the water--a whiteness to which the encroaching soot that the French writers complain of only lends picturesque setting.

M. Taine, however, had evidently no eye for sooty effects. To him, that mystic view from the river bridges, that view that inspired his best sonnet in Wordsworth, a "nocturne" in Mr. Whistler, and immortal art in the boy Turner, has to him merely "the look of a bad drawing in charcoal which some one has rubbed with his sleeve."

While London's natural and primitive instinct is perhaps toward Gothic architecture ("the only style," says M. Taine of Westminster Abbey, "that is at all adapted to her climate,") yet, no doubt, the prevailing note of her architecture is its cosmopolitanism. It is her misfortune, as well as her glory, to show every kind of feverish architectural craze and style in close juxtaposition--Gothic, Renaissance, Norman, Greek, and Early English. Ardent spirits have, at various times, sought to erect in her streets the oriflammes of other nations, quite regardless of suitability or appropriate setting. Italian spires and cupolas that would adorn their native valleys, and shine, gleaming pinnacles of white,--landmarks to the wandering peasant over the intervening black forest of pines,--are here crowded, perhaps, between a fashionable "emporium" and a modern hotel; Doric temples, such as should stand aloof in lonely grandeur each on its tall Acropolis, here are sandwiched, maybe, between a model dairy-shop and a fashionable library; Renaissance palaces that, by the waters of Venice, would reflect their arches and pillars in a sunny, golden glow, here confront blackened statues of square-toed nineteenth-century philanthropists,--or, more prosaic still, a smoke-breathing London terminus!

Yet, while we concede the Gothic style to be more in keeping with London skies and spirits, it is, nevertheless, difficult to say which of her styles is most dominant--for all, truly, have been dominant in their day. For London, in this respect, has been the victim of succeeding fashions; over her resistless and long-suffering ma.s.s have, in every new age and decade,

"Bards made new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, Critics new rules."