Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 2

It is odd, when one is safely anch.o.r.ed in a winter refuge to look back at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pa.s.s in this sharp, abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark olive woods, the ma.s.ses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has a.s.sociated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seash.o.r.e in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The "lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.

Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the _habitue_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.

England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine to-morrow.

But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them "good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.

The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft, conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.

No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father, against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home, fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no "evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.

The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat, a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.

It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives, donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa at 150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.

But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives, and parades stretch along the sh.o.r.e. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients with his nod.

SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.

V.

SAN REMO.

San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable superiority on a rival almost dest.i.tute of promenades, and whose munic.i.p.ality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles the oddest of Italian towns, a strange ma.s.s of arches and churches and steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, a.s.sumes any but picturesque forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick ma.s.ses of the olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of San Remo.

What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white gleaming ma.s.s of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the s.p.a.ce is, it is varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west of the town, the grey ma.s.s of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep, the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.

What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.

But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the l.u.s.trous foliage of its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.

The dark green ma.s.ses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean, rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand colours even in the gloomiest weather.

The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular contraction of its full ecclesiastical t.i.tle, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."

It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of his see. Two centuries pa.s.sed quietly over the little town ere the sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it munic.i.p.al liberty. The civil authority of the bishops pa.s.sed to the communal Parliament, the free a.s.sembly of the citizens in the church of San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war, or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.

This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal n.o.blesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.

The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.

Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in 1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as ill.u.s.trating the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation, rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound to administer the laws pa.s.sed or adopted by the commune. The red cross of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.

The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The "Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution found the city ruined and enslaved, and the grat.i.tude of the citizens for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for the construction of vessels for the French navy.

Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.

But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archaeological interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a sketch-book may pa.s.s his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.

The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will surpa.s.s the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes the charm of San Remo.

THE POETRY OF WEALTH.

There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny beauty of Ma.r.s.eilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into oblivion, the sight of Chateau d'If as it rises glowing from the blue waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst upon it of the acc.u.mulated riches of the older world kindled in senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-h.o.a.rded treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of wealth.

It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans, and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow acc.u.mulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its enormous ma.s.s, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.

There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after generation which require nothing for their realization but the appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us remember what a wonderful amount of hope and antic.i.p.ation has been thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.

Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could turn the wildest fancies of Dr. c.u.mming into sober earnest with very little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of Judaea could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the sh.o.r.es of Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a pa.s.sion for nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the peace for a midland county.

But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those, we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's position, and those which arise from the terrible serf.a.ge of the rural labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.

Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of international politics. Already those who come in contact with the big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a few people quietly b.u.t.toning their breeches-pockets, and the march of "armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."

Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has. .h.i.t on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief, and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in the mud of November before the loss was replaced.

It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers the a.s.sistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an important factor in political questions.

Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English n.o.bles, and contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the n.o.bles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the service of the State. But from any const.i.tutional point of view there is perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England the political power which such a national employment of their wealth would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given her a power over the imagination of vast ma.s.ses of the London poor which no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions, and the very quietness and un.o.btrusiveness of her work gives it an air of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.

It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political n.o.bles has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring ma.s.ses by "panem et Circenses." But a n.o.bler ambition might find its field in a large employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost, and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest music might be brought to bear without cost on the coa.r.s.eness and vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For n.o.bler outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.

LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.

A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge ma.s.s of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward along the river to the gate.

The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.

What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.

Nothing ill.u.s.trates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like aelfred or aethelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of the People.

Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Const.i.tutional Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the traditional const.i.tution of the realm. It was his to call on the people to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over Thames.

From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over against each other on either side the water.

With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar att.i.tude of the Archbishops pa.s.sed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the ma.s.s of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Pa.s.sing over its trim gra.s.s-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which somewhat mythical tradition a.s.serts Lollards to have been tied when they were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the Church that finds its centre there.

And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.

Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance.