LONDON7 P.M. TO 8 P.M.
7 P.M. TO 8 P.M.
Itwill probably have seemed to many that in London the evening hour between seven and eight o’clock is the most distinctive and significant of the twenty-four, the one that is most expressive of the city’s real life and character. It has something in its mellowness and repose that stimulates in the spectator a subtle receptiveness and quickens a special sensitiveness to the trooping impressions of this manifold, multi-faceted community. One comes nearest then to truly “sensing” colossal, world-weary, indomitable London, as she relaxes a gracious hour to catch breath in the turmoil and struggle that has endured for more than a dozen centuries. For quite the same reason as you would not say that the ocean is most characteristic in either calm or storm, but rather when rolling in long and steady swells, so London is not so much her real self at her most vacant hour of sunrise when the milk carts clatter where the omnibuses usually are and the street lights turn as wan and sickly as the tramps on the benches, nor yet at the height of her turbulence when busy men are dashing hatless about Cheapside and loaded drays are delayed for hoursin traffic blocks, but rather in the agreeable period of early evening “let-up” while truce is effective between the working-hours of day and the playing-hours of night.
Of course, “let-up” is meant in a comparative sense only, for in the bright lexicon of London there is properly no such word; but there comes at seven o’clock at least as much of a lull as is ever to be looked for here. The savage roar of the streets is dulled to a deep growl, the crowds become shuffling and idle and their relative depletion and the proportionate activity and congestion in restaurants,pensions, and hotel dining-rooms are eloquent of the fact that the great city is now engaged in solemn rites before the Roast Beef of Old England. Nor does the altered complexion of things come amiss to the distracted foreign visitors who, though at odds in everything else, are of one opinion in this, that, without reservation on the part of humor, during the greater part of the day they cannot see London for the people. By that they mean that the life of the streets is so intense and so varied that it proves a serious distraction from taking adequate note of the appearance and significance of the city itself. It is, therefore, with profound satisfaction that they welcome an hour in which they may devote a portion of their energy to something more edifying than jostling pedestrians or escaping sudden and sordid destruction by motor-car, hansom, or bus. It is now that the town throws off the yoke of its drivers and the verybuildings become instinct with individuality and character. Every little dim and noiseless square, each broad and lordly park, the massive mansions of the great whose names have been in history for ages, business blocks of Old-World charm to which trade seems the merest incident, blackened pavements and Wren’s slender steeples, every memory-haunted nook and corner, all wrought by smoke and fog to a blood-brotherhood of neutral tones, are joining the song Father Thames is singing of dignity, power, and grandeur,—all breathe the common exultation of being London. It is more than Self-Assertion. It is Apotheosis!
If this may seem an extravagant idea to some, it is certain there can be but one mind as to the relief that comes with the “let-up.” It gives a man a chance to find himself after being lost and daunted and disheartened all day, and to square off and give the giant a good look between the eyes and happily attain to some just impression. “Some just impression” is doubtless within the possibilities, but any complete one is not. London is so vast in territory, interests, activities, and history—such a “monstrous tuberosity of civilized life,” as Carlyle observed—that it effectually defies comprehension. It cannot be taken in. Look south on it from Hornsey or Primrose Hill, or west on it from Blackwell or the Greenwich Observatory, or east from the top of the opera house at Hammersmith, or north from Crystal Palace, and you may see a vast prairie of house-tops and sharp,aspiring steeples and irregular, twisting streets, but you also observe quite the same kind of prairies rolling away under the horizon beyond your ken. If one were to try such an experiment right at the heart of things, futility would still be obvious, for either the Victoria Tower of Parliament or the slightly higher dome of St. Paul’s lifts you only four hundred feet above the pavement to hang like a lookout in midocean. There might be hope of a completer impression if you tried an aëroplane; in which case prostrate London-town would take the seeming of some fabulous “questing beste” of the “Morte d’Arthur,” in format the traditional lion, rotund, monstrous, and oddly marked, half-reclining and gazing fixedly seaward down the Thames. A monster, indeed, fourteen miles by ten, and of a vitality so expansive that his nebulous aura pervades an area of seven hundred square miles! Along his grim, grimy side the Thames draws a crawling blue band with a deepUfor the convenience of his paws as it swings around the Isle of Dogs, the Regent’s Canal marks him lightly up the shoulder and clear across the upper body, and along the profile of the head meanders the marshy River Lea. Odd green patches would stand for the parks—Regent’s on his back, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s on his flank, and on his right ear, Victoria. At the present hour he is speckled with a myriad of lights from the tip of his tail to his chin-whisker, and doubtless in all respects looks wild enough to daunt Sir Launcelot himself.
To the average visitor London is the Strand, Fleet Street, Regent Street, the Embankment, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum, and the Tower. But tastes differ in this as in other things, and Boswell was doubtless justified in amusing himself by noting how different London was to different people. Opinions on the subject have always been very decided but hopelessly conflicting. “Sir,” quoth Dr. Johnson to Boswell at the Mitre Tavern, “the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.” Note Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, observing in his “English Fragments”: “Do not send a philosopher to London, and, for Heaven’s sake, do not send a poet. The grim seriousness of all things; the colossal monotony; the engine-like activity; the moroseness even of pleasure; and the whole of this exaggerated London will break his heart.” There is wisdom, as always, in a happy mean; and one might do worse than to go about his sight-seeing with the whetted curiosity and flaming imagination of those country children once described by Leigh Hunt as fancying they see “the Duke of Wellington standing with his sword drawn in Apsley House, and the Queen, sitting with her crown on, eating barley-sugar in Buckingham Palace.”
To such a mood as this, evening impressions are fresh and vivid, and the goggle-eyed stranger, suddenly set down at seven o’clock before the Shaftesbury Fountain in the centre of Piccadilly Circus,—“feeling inheart and soul the shock of the huge town’s first presence,”—would probably have his own opinion of any intimation that there was really very little doing at that time in view of the hour and the absence of Londoners in the country. He would rather incline to the view of the Chinese prince who took one look at the wave of humanity sweeping across London Bridge and went back to his hotel and wrote home that he had reached the spot where all human life originates. Certainly the stranger at Piccadilly Circus would need but one wild glance at the glare and blaze of lights, the excitement around the “Cri,” the beckoning bill-boards of the Pavilion, the dazzle of shop windows in the sweeping curve of the Regent Street quadrant and the tremendous interweaving of carriages, swift hansoms, delivery bicycles, lumbering busses, “taxis,” “flys,” and “growlers,” to start him shouting to the nearest “Bobby” through the roar of the wild surge for safe passage to the sidewalk—which would be readily and obligingly accomplished by that calmest and most tranquil of officials, the mere lift of whose hand is as miraculously effective as the presence of a regiment at “charge.”
And yet the intimation to the stranger would be entirely within the facts, for a good proportion of Londoners are too far away to hear the seven o’clock bells ring in town. The Briton’s passion for out of doors leads him far afield. Thousands are at this hour in the surf at Brighton or strolling on the terraced streets of the chalkcliffs there; hundreds are at Harrow enjoying the wide prospect beloved by the boy Byron; others in the pleasant villages of Hatfield and St. Albans; some are spying for deer in Epping Forest; and a happy multitude is turning from the “Maze” and Dutch Gardens of Hampton Court to roll homeward by brake and motor-car along the incomparable chestnut avenue of Bushy Park, among the placid deer of Richmond, and the manifold delights of Kew Gardens. For hours the “tubes,” surface cars, and busses have been working to capacity to get business men home, and loaded trains have been groaning out of Charing Cross, Euston, Paddington, St. Pancras, Victoria, and Waterloo. They have all arrived by now at their various destinations—around the picturesque Common of Clapham, the breezy heights of Highgate, the river greens of Hammersmith, the lush meadows of Dulwich, the stuccoed villas of Islington, the quietude of Bethnal Green, or the wooded gardens of Brixton Road. Fancy residential property, in every guise of architectural surprises, is drowsing in the shade of elm and oak and poplar and humming to the contented chatter of reunited families. The fortunate stranger whom Sir Launcelot has “asked down” to “Joyous Garde” is reveling in the generous roast that makes its august appearance between courses of Scotch salmon and Surrey fowl, and presently there will be politics and Havanas after the ladies have left, and later on a general assembling in a serene walled garden withlight laughter and low-voiced talk and mild discussion of water-parties, dinners, and dances.
The London parks are in full revelry now, with bands at play and tens of thousands of loiterers crowding the benches and moving along broad, graveled walks under the deep shadows of old elms and in the fragrance of trim flowerbeds. At Hampstead Heath, for example, not so much as the ghost of a highwayman haunts the bracken-carpeted hills, and East-Enders are out there in force along “Judge’s Walk,” and in the “Vale of Health” that Keats and Leigh Hunt admired, or up at the “Flagstaff” inspecting “Jack Straw’s Castle,” as Dickens so often did, or speculating upon the sources of the ponds with as much aplomb as ever did Mr. Pickwick himself.
Down on rugged and untamed Blackheath the band is playing at “The Point,” and in all that region where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade stirred Kent to rebellion the talk is now of London docks and the latest scores of the golfers.
Up at airy Victoria Park the swans in the ponds and the chaffinches in the hawthorn bushes are performing to enthusiastic audiences, and the Gothic Temple of the Victoria Fountain is rimmed with rough gallants and the “Sallies of their Alleys” who betray no inclination to “attempt from Love’s sickness to fly.”
The cyclists are foregathered at picturesque Battersea Park and chatting with their sweethearts over tea in the refreshment rooms, while hundreds of unemployedwho can afford neither bicycle, sweetheart, nor tea gaze gloomily on the gorgeous blooms of the sub-tropical garden, loll over the balustrade of the long Thames embankment, and end up by sprawling face down on the grass or dozing fitfully on the benches.
Perhaps the largest outpouring of all is at ever popular Regent’s Park, preferred by the substantial middle-class,—long noted, like GeorgeI, for virtues rather than accomplishments. Doubtless they are now rambling through the Zoo, exploring the Botanic Gardens where flowered borders and large stone urns are spilling over with brilliant color, watching the driving in the “Outer Circle,” or swelling the throng on the long Board Walk. Hundreds on these shady acres are taking their ease with all the unction of Arden:—
“Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
“Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
“Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
“Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
In all probability tremendous admiration is being expressed at aristocratic Hyde Park, as usual, for the broad reaches of velvety turf and the venerable oaks and elms. More than one will indulge a pleasant reverie over the dead and gone who have braved it there—Pepys in his new yellow coach, dainty ladies in powder and patches flashing sparkling eyes on the gallants, and the scented, unhappy beaux who have sighed with Shenstone along theseallées:
“When forced from dear Hebe to goWhat anguish I felt at my heart.”
“When forced from dear Hebe to goWhat anguish I felt at my heart.”
“When forced from dear Hebe to goWhat anguish I felt at my heart.”
“When forced from dear Hebe to go
What anguish I felt at my heart.”
Across the Serpentine in the children’s paradise of Kensington Gardens we should find that the Board Walk and the “Round Pond” lose none of their drawing-power with the years and that the fountains and flowers are as beautiful and as highly prized as ever. There is the additional attraction of having a chance, by keeping a sharp eye on the tops of the tall ash-trees, of catching a glimpse of Peter Pan preparing to fly home to his mother’s window.
The exclusive shades of Green Park and St. James’s have a convenient nearness that entices hundreds from the roaring thoroughfares of the neighborhood, and at this hour their old elms and graceful bowers give impartially of their repose and peace to hearts that are heavy and hearts that are gay. It would seem inevitable that thoughts must come of the royal and princely companies that once trod these ways—of CharlesII, at least, strolling in St. James’s surrounded by his dogs, pausing a while to feed his ducks and then tripping gayly up the “Green Walk” for a chat with Nell Gwynn over the garden wall, while scandalized John Evelyn hurries home to make note in his journal of “a very familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nelly.”
The London social season being at its height during May, June, and July, while Parliament is in session, belatedclerks wending homeward between seven and eight o’clock find the great houses occupied and dinner-parties in progress with as much universality as a New York clerk, under like circumstances at home, would expect to see in December. All Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico is indulging in feasting and merriment, and the austere aloofness of their retired squares, with central parks high-fenced in iron from contact with the “ordinary person,” is broken by the whirl of the carriages and motors of arriving guests. The sudden flood of soft lights from the reception hall as Hawkins throws open the door, and the quick and noiseless disappearance of the conveyances, is all of a moment and our clerk finds himself disconsolately gazing at the frowning front of some solid, ivy-grown, and altogether charming old mansion, through whose carefully-drawn window draperies only the slightest of beams dares venture forth to him. Were he to indulge such a passion for walking as characterized Lord Macaulay,—said to have passed through every street of London in his day,—he would find the same thing in progress at this hour in all the exclusive region that lies in the purlieus of Buckingham Palace. Dignity, riches, elegance, and power would be his in hasty, grudging glimpses—and then the dim square again and the high iron fence. The London square, indeed, seems decorative only—trees, turf, flowers, and the fence, and the surrounding houses playing dog-in-the-manager. This is not always without itsbewilderment to foreigners; and so confirmed a traveler as Théophile Gautier puzzled over the matter considerably before he dismissed it with the conclusion that it is probably satisfaction enough to the owners to have kept other people out.
If our clerk were to take the “tube” at Brompton Road and come out at Whitechapel Station in the East End, he would see the other side of the story with a vengeance. To quote Gautier again, “to be poor in London is one of the tortures forgotten by Dante.” Here the air is stifling with dirty dust, and thousands of miserable, unkempt creatures with wan and pasty faces feed, when they can muster a penny, on a choice of “black puddings,” pork-pies, “sheep-trotters,” or the mysterious, smoking “faggots.” In old Ratcliffe Highway, which is now St. George Street, they make out by munching kippers carried in hand as they go their devious ways. An occasional stale fish from Billingsgate is that much better than nothing. Yiddish seems to be the prevailing national tongue east of Aldgate Pump, and if you understand it there will be no trouble over the signs and announcements. With characteristic Hebrew thrift it is always “open season” for buyers. Each product has its special habitat. Toys or other sweatshop articles come from Houndsditch, shoes from Spitalfields, leather goods from Bermondsey, beef remnants from Smithfield, left-over poultry from Leadenhall, vegetable “seconds” from Covent Garden, birdsare to be had in Club Row, meat and clothing in Brick Lane, and a general outfitting in Petticoat Lane which the reformers have rechristened Middlesex Street. As for a “screw o’ baccy” or a “mug o’ bitter,” the “pub” of any corner will answer. The University Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall are doing what men can to better conditions, but so have others tried for ages—yet here is the malodorous East End practically as unwashed and unregenerate as of old. The glimpses one catches of squalor and filth up narrow passages and of the damp and grimy “closes” that remind you of Hogarth’s drawings are apt to content the most curious, unless he be an insatiable investigator, indeed, and is willing to take his chances of being “burked.” Hand on pocket you thread narrow alleys where people are said to have been offered attractive bargains on their own watches when they reached the other end. Here after the day’s work is over and the “moke” and barrow safely stabled for the night, with a “Wot cher, chummy; ’ow yer ’oppin’ up?” our industrious coster friends, ’Arry and ’Arriet, make merry among pals at a “Free and Easy,” or lay out a couple of “thri’-p’ny bits” for seats in a local theatre, whence they emerge between acts for a “’arf-en’-’arf” or a “pot-o’-porter” with instant and painfully frank opinions if “it ’yn’t fustryte.” Dinner at “The Three Nuns,” of course, is only for state occasions. They are the people, just the same, to get most out of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday or a picnic atEpping Forest any time. With them originated in days gone most of the catchy street-cries for which London was long curiously noted. But one hears no more “Bellows to Mend!” or “Three Rows a Penny Pins!” or “Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive oh!” or “Sweet Blooming Lavender, Six Bunches a Penny!” or “One a Penny, two a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!” or the traditional tune of “Buy a Broom!” or the barrow-woman’s “Ripe Cherries!” and “Green Rushes O!” You may, however, have a chance at “’Taters, all ’ot!” or “Three a Penny, Yarmouth Bloaters; ’ere’s yer Bloaters!” After all, it takes a very limited inspection of the East End to wish them all in Hyde Park, as the flag falls at seven-thirty, to join the hundreds of men and boys there who are out of their clothes before the signal is barely given and taking an evening plunge in the Serpentine.
Between the truffles of Mayfair and the “faggots” of Whitechapel lies the region of the menu with which the average Londoner is most familiar and which he is now exploring with profound earnestness according to his lights and shillings. Dining, as every one knows, is an important expression of the British conscience, a solemn rite of well-nigh religious momentousness. The traditional fate of the uninvited guest is his in double measure who ventures to intrude between the Briton and his beef. One might “try it on,” perhaps, on the Surrey Side where they incline to “dining from the joint” around six o’clock—though nothing short of compulsionshould take a sight-seer to South London after nightfall. The shabby Southwark shore of dingy wharves and grimy sheds is half concealed in drifting shadows raised by the uncertain light of flickering gas jets and the net results are not worth the trouble of walking London Bridge, unless we except the picture of quiet dignity and mellow beauty presented by the ancient church of St. Saviour. This rare old survivor finely expresses by night the subtle sense of a long-continued veneration and the finger-touches of the passing years. And to think that St. Saviour’s was doing parish duty and was a delight to look upon long before the Globe Theatre of Shakespearean fame had reared a neighboring head! But the gloom of the Surrey Side is thicker and more discomforting than the fog. Long, monotonous, cheerless streets, poorly lighted and scantily employed after dark, emerge from drab perspectives of gloaming and fade sullenly away into others. The scattered pedestrians one encounters reflect by solemn countenance the prevailing depression and seem able to take but little heart of courage as they go their melancholy ways. The whole region appears given over to breweries, potteries, factories, and hospitals. By night Lambeth Palace itself takes on the universal brewery aspect. You even detect a vatish look to the Greenwich Observatory and mistrust some trace of beer in the famous meridian. And then the tarry hotels of Greenwich must add their quota to the generaldejection by offering everything in the world in the way of fish excepting its celebrated whitebait, which was, of course, the one thing you had come for. The lights of St. George’s Circus—the Leicester Square of South London—may be few in point of fact, but they seem highly exhilarating down there; nor are you to scorn the good cheer of the comfortable old tavern hard by that rejoices in the extraordinary name of “The Elephant and Castle.” There may also be a kindly feeling for the Old Kent Road where Chevalier’s coster “knock’d ’em,” but otherwise the breweries win. There is one on the sacred site of the old Globe Theatre, something like one where stood the Tabard Inn whence Chaucer started his immortal Pilgrims for Canterbury, and you will find a brazen gin palace if you search for “The White Hart Inn,” of “HenryVI” and “Pickwick Papers.” Poor old Southwark! Her glorious days of light have passed!
“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,That it seems as if ‘she’ said,‘They are gone.’”
“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,That it seems as if ‘she’ said,‘They are gone.’”
“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,That it seems as if ‘she’ said,‘They are gone.’”
“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,
That it seems as if ‘she’ said,
‘They are gone.’”
Even Southwark is not much duller at this hour than that ancient nucleus that is still styled the “City.” Where the leading commercial centres and money markets of the world were in frenzied activity, two or three hours ago, a few belated pedestrians now go clattering along echoing and deserted streets with an unhappy air of apology. No section of London undergoes soamazing a transformation each day; nor is any other so drear and cheerless by the suddenness of contrast—attesting the keenness of Lowell’s observation that nothing makes so much for loneliness as the sense of man’s departure. There is little dining now in the region where Falstaff once reveled at “The Boar’s Head” and the Shakespearean coterie at “The Mermaid Tavern.” The low, windowless, stolid Bank of England gropes like a blindman toward Wellington on his horse before the lofty Corinthian portico of the Royal Exchange, and the massive, sombre Mansion House of the Lord Mayor suggests some ruined temple of Paestum. “Gog” and “Magog” slumber in the dusty recesses of the old Guildhall, and the pigeons nest in its blackened eaves unstartled by the impassioned oratory of government ministers at banquets. But it is the time of times to attend the sweet chiming of Bow Bells, under the dragon in the beautiful tower that Wren built for St. Mary’s, and one could almost wish to have been born cockney if only to have heard them ringing from babyhood. The winding and gloomy little streets whose names recall so much in the lives of the Elizabethan literati entice one craftily, like so many Bow runners, into the purlieus of the Tower, within the shadows of whose momentous walls cabmen drowse securely on the boxes of dusty four-wheelers. To the imaginative stranger its bright fascination by day suffers a night-change into something gruesomely repellent,and the “beef-eaters” do not protect the crown jewels half so effectively as do the headless shades of Lady Jane Grey and Henry’s unhappy queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Doubtless there are safer thoroughfares on earth than Lower Thames Street in the early evening, but they would not lead to as diverting a neighborhood. The wharves and storehouses may not be as tumultuous as by day, but the fastidious wayfarer encounters at Billingsgate enough strength of language and odor to satisfy. Tom Bowling is entertaining Black-eyed Susan at some East End “hall,” but the “pubs” are roaring with “the mariners of England that guard our native seas.” Still, cutty-pipes are glowing at Wapping Old Stairs, and the heaving turmoil of the shipping in the “Pool,” with swaying riding-lights dotting the vast tangle of masts and cordage, prepares you for the shock of the amazing human wave that is ever surging with a ceaseless roar across old London Bridge. Caught in the strong current of that billow one washes back to Wellington and his horse and drifts aimlessly along under the raised awnings of the tailor shops of Cheapside, with scarce time for a grateful hand-wave to hushed and shadowed St. Augustine’s for the “Ingoldsby Legends” its former rector gave us, before he finds himself high and dry in Paternoster Row and the bookish churchyard of St. Paul’s. The great cathedral is imposing, without doubt, and no one would think of saying that Wren did not earn the two hundredpounds per annum he received during the thirty-five years it took him to build it;—and yet it can hardly be expected to appear over-cheerful by night, when it is chill and gloomy and repellent by day with the sun powerless to warm the tessellated floor and stiff, gloomy monuments with the brightest colors of its stained-glass windows—futile to rival even the moon in that vision of Keats as she
“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,And on her silver cross soft amethyst,And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”
“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,And on her silver cross soft amethyst,And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”
“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,And on her silver cross soft amethyst,And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”
“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”
The moon, however, will aid us now in quickening into life the rich memories that adhere to the surrounding churchyard and to Paternoster Row, where so many generations of authors and publishers in dingy shops and inns and coffee-houses have debated the launching of immortal books. Every English-published volume must still start its race from neighboring Stationers’ Hall.
The foolish stranger who chooses such an hour for a tramp about the “City” will breathe more freely, after he has exorcised the last whimpering shade of Newgate and “the poor prisoners of the ‘Fleet,’” as he hurries along Ludgate Hill and attains unto his heart’s desire at Fleet Street. Thence on, it is all the primrose way. No matter what the hour or season, he can never be companionless in the “Highway of Letters”for its very excess of material and immaterial presences. In its brief and narrow course of a few hundred yards, the richest in literary associations of any region on earth, the weather-beaten, irregular fronts of its old stone houses look down affectionately, and perhaps pityingly, on hurrying journalists and anxious authors, as they have been doing for ages. The leisurely diner of the old school who clings to the mellow places of inspiring associations is pretty sure to be going along Fleet Street at this time, intent on a chop and kidneys and a mug of stout at “The Cock,” preferred of Tennyson, or a beefsteak-pudding and toby of ale at the sand-floored “Cheshire Cheese” palpitant with memories of autocratic and snuffy Dr. Johnson exploding with “Sirs,” of good-natured Goldsmith, crotchety Reynolds, impassioned Burke, merry Garrick, and all the others of that deathless company. The usual evening idler and aimless stroller always makes Fleet Street a part of his pleasant itinerary, and it matters little to him that the sidewalks are narrow and the crowd uncomfortably large, when he can beguile each yard or two by lingering glances up dim and fascinating little rookery courts full of mysterious corners and deep shadows whose paving-stones have reëchoed the tread of so many sons of fame. The lights may not be as bright nor as numerous as in the Strand, nor the shops as attractive, but they are non-existent to the sentimentalist who is seeing Izaak Walton in his hosiershop at the Coventry Lane corner and Richard Lovelace in dingy quarters up Gunpowder Alley, and is peering wistfully through the arched gateway to the Temple for a glimpse of Lamb’s birthplace or Fielding’s home or Goldsmith’s grave or a sight of those delightful “old benchers,” brusque “Thomas Coventry,” methodical “Peter Pierson,” and gentle “Samuel Salt.” Doubtless he is able even to detect the rich aroma of the chimney-sweeps’ sassafras tea in the neighborhood of “Mr. Read’s shop, on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street.”
The shadows fall away with startling suddenness as Fleet Street becomes the Strand at Temple Bar. The jolliest uproar of all London storms impetuously along that modern Rialto all the way into Trafalgar Square. Brilliant lights, shop displays of every description, theatres, hotels, and restaurants create a profusion of excitement for the gay and jostling crowd that harries you perilously near to the curb and the heavy wheels of the ponderous busses.
And what an amazing institution the London bus is! The Strand might still be the Strand if St. Mary’s and St. Clement Danes were effaced from its roadway, but what if the busses went! Gladstone’s partiality for these archaic contrivances was extreme, which naturally disposed Disraeli to take the other side and champion the fleeting hansom—“the gondola of London,” as he aptly styled it. And, indeed, much may be saidin commendation of the omnipresence, economy, and convenience of the latter, and of its friendly way of flying to one’s aid at the merest raising of the hand to whisk you away at breakneck speed and through a thousand hairbreadth escapes to any possible destination you may indicate. But the majority vote with Gladstone, nevertheless, and take their ease on a bus-top. It is true that in the profusion of advertising signs you may not always be certain whether you are bound for Pear’s Soap or Sanderson’s Mountain Dew, but with blissful indifference you pocket the long ticket, and, ensconced among the glowing pipe-bowls in the dusk of a “garden-seat,” “rumble earthquakingly aloft.” What a delight it is to hear the cockney conductor drawl “Chairin’ Crauss,” “Tot’nh’m Court Rauwd,” “S’n Jimes-iz Pawk,” and the rest of it! From your heaving perch beside the ruddy-faced driver in his white high hat you observe that your ark keeps turning to the left,—the English rule of the road,—and that now you must look down instead of up to find the placards on the trolley posts that mark the stopping-places of the trams. You see belated solicitors and barristers hurrying out of the great gray courts of justice, and above the heads of the pedestrians you may study the gloomy arches of Somerset House or the ornate Lyceum where Sir Henry Irving reigned or the neat little Savoy where Gilbert and Sullivan won spurs and fortune. It is a great satisfaction to look down in comfort on theelbowing throng you have escaped, with its jostling and its stereotyped “I’m sorry,”—the top-hats and the caps, the actors, bohemians, professional men, tourists, tramps, beggars, thieves, Tommy Atkins in “pill-box” and “swagger,” blue-coated and yellow-legged boys of Christ’s Hospital, red-coated bootblacks, barmaids in turndown collars, well-dressed and shabbily-dressed women, as well as that particularly flashy brand to whom you return a “Vade retro, Satanus!” to her “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance.” No wonder when Kipling’s “Private Ortheris” went mad of the heat in India that he babbled of the Adelphi Arches and the Strand!
In the lull before the turning of the evening tide toward the opera and the theatre there is opportunity for each to indulge hispenchant. What the shops of Fleet Street and the Strand show in general, the windows of specialists elsewhere are presenting in particular and with increased elaboration. Regent Street will draw the fanciers of pictures, leather goods, perfumes, and jewelry; Bond Street, rare paintings and choice porcelains; Wardour Street, curios and antiques; Stanway Street, silver and embroidery; Charing Cross Road, old bookstalls; and Hatton Garden, diamonds,—the same Hatton Garden that Queen Elizabeth gave a slice of to a favorite courtier and threatened the Bishop of Ely in a brief but sufficient note to hurry up with the necessary details or “I will unfrock you, by God!” This methodicalfashion of grouping certain interests in definite localities is carried even further; as, for example, should you feel the need of a physician it is not necessary to wade through the thirty-five hundred pages of Kelly’s Post-Office Directory, but take a taxi to Harley Street where any house can supply you. No matter where you ramble, surprises and delights await you. It will be found so to those in particular who stroll down Oxford Street—with thoughts, perhaps, of De Quincey when a starved and homeless little boy groping a timorous and whimpering way down this street as he clutched the hand of his new acquaintance; or of Hazlitt’s dramatic struggle with hunger and poverty—and suddenly, on reaching High Holborn, catch their first glimpse of the picturesque beauty of mediæval Staple Inn. There are few lovelier spots in all London, and the sparrows still chatter there as clamorously every evening as they did when Dr. Johnson frowned up at them from the manuscript of “Rasselas,” or when Dickens lived and worked there, or when Hawthorne visited and revisited it with increasing delight.
The princely spaces in the neighborhood of Buckingham Palace are quite as attractive at this hour as when the afternoon sun is warm along fair Piccadilly—“radiant and immortal street,” said Henley—and the gay coaches clatter back toward Trafalgar Square with blasts of horn and jangling chains. The Mall, the Grand Walk for ages, fairly exhales class and pride in the deepeningdusk of the late English twilight. The clubmen of Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, in their fine, imposing old houses, are taking up the question of the evening’s amusements with as much bored listlessness by the aristocrats at Brooks’s as rakish enthusiasm by the country gentlemen of Boodle’s. Signs of approaching activity are even to be observed in the stately mansions of exclusive Park Lane—a street that half the business men of London hope to be rich enough to live in some day; so effectually has time effaced the memory of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and the rest of the air-dancing specialists who figured here in chains in the days when Tyburn Hill was a name to shudder over.
But the appeal of the “halls,” which began when the curtains of the Alhambra and the Pavilion went up at seven-thirty, grows almost imperative as the hour wears around toward eight. The rank of waiting cabs up the middle of Haymarket is thinned to the merest trickle. “Heavy swells” of clubdom and the West End are strolling in groups across the wide, statue-dotted expanse of Trafalgar Square, stopping to scratch matches on the lions of Nelson’s Column or General Gordon’s granite base. The artists are forsaking the studios of Chelsea, the real bohemians—not the pretenders of the Savage Club and the Vagabond dinners—the cheap restaurants and the performing monkeys of Soho, the students their quiet quarters in Bloomsbury and the forty miles of book-shelves of the British Museum, themusicians their Baker Street lodgings up Madame Tussaud’s way, the literary people their charming Kensington, and even the gay Italians are deserting the organ-grinding on Saffron Hill and the disorder of St. Giles—and all are rapidly moving on Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and the Strand. There they will view the elaborate ballets according to their means; from the “pit” for a shilling, or from a grand circle “stall” for seven shillings sixpence, with another sixpence to the girl usher for a programme loaded with advertisements. It is the hour when Pierce Egan would have summoned “Tom and Jerry” to be in at the inaugural of the night life of the great city, and Colonel Newcome would have marched Clive out of the “Cave of Harmony” to hear less offensive entertainers at the “halls.” It is the time Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights” has invested with the richest potentiality for adventure, and when, in consequence, any polite tobacconist is likely suddenly to disclose himself as a reigning sovereign in disguise. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, you may be sure, are never in their Baker Street lodgings at such a time as this. In the preliminary uproar about the bars of the favorite cafés and in the flashing of electric signs, glare of lights, and rush of hansoms and motors, one may discern the beginnings of “a night of it” for many whom the early sun will surprise with bleared eyes and battered top-hats about the coffee-booths of Covent Garden. And, indeed, unless you have access to a club,night-foraging is a highly difficult undertaking in London. Every restaurant closes down at half an hour after midnight; and thereafter, unless you come across a chance “luncheon-bar” that defies the authorities, or a friendly cabman introduces you to a “shelter,” you may have to content yourself with a hard-boiled egg at a coffee-stall. Many a sturdy Briton trudging along behind his linkman could have found better accommodation two hundred years ago when the watch went by with stave and lantern and cried out that it was two o’clock and a fine morning.
With Big Ben in Parliament Watch Tower throwing his full thirteen tons into an effort to advise as many Londoners as possible that it is eight o’clock at last, and with a band concert in progress in the Villiers Street Garden of the Embankment, as agreeable a lounging-place as one could desire is the beautiful expanse of Waterloo Bridge. Not only is the prospect fair and inspiring, but the great bridge itself is worthy of it. Said Gautier, “It is surely the finest in the world”; said Canova, “It is worthy of the Romans.” Pallid and broad and long, and so level that its double lines of fine lights scarcely rise to the slightest of arcs, it rests with rare grace on its nine sweeping arches and spans the Thames just where the great bend is made to the east. One looks along it northward and sees the lamps of Wellington Street fade into the blurring dazzle of the Strand and Longacre, and southward to find the converginglights of Waterloo Road sending a bright arrow straight to the heart of Southwark. The greensward of the flowered and statued Embankment sweeps across and back on either side of its northern end, and palace hotels, Somerset House and the huge glass roof of Charing Cross Station bulk large at hand. Eastward the Ionic columns of Blackfriars Bridge and the strutting iron arches of Southwark Bridge stalk boldly across the serene river, and southwestward the broad arch of Westminster Bridge offers Parliament cheer to glum Lambeth. It would be the most natural mistake in the world to suppose the trim buildings of St. Thomas Hospital, on the Surrey bank, a favored row of handsome detached summer villas, with owners of strong political influence to be able to build on the fine long curve of the Albert Embankment, having no less a vis-à-vis than the terraces and glorious Gothic pile of Parliament buildings on their thousand feet of “noblest water front in the world.”
Only the mind’s eye may look farther on to Chelsea and take note of the tall plane-trees of Cheyne Walk, and re-people the red brick terraces and homely old houses with Sir Thomas More entertaining Erasmus and Holbein, with Addison and Steele in revelry at Don Saltero’s coffee-house, with Byron at home in the amazing disorder of Leigh Hunt’s cottage, with Tennyson smoking long pipes with Carlyle, with Turner and Whistler bending over their palettes, and with Rossetti,Swinburne, and Meredith courting the Muses under a common roof and in a common brotherhood.
LONDON, ST. PAUL’S FROM UNDER WATERLOO BRIDGE
LONDON, ST. PAUL’S FROM UNDER WATERLOO BRIDGE
To the observer on Waterloo Bridge the deep roar of the city comes out dulled and subdued. Bells chime softly and the whistles of the river-craft sound, from time to time, with sudden and startling shrillness. Long shafts of light shake out from either bank and spots of color from signal lamps dot the nearer rim. All outside is a bright dazzle, with patches of deep shadow and heavy ripples from the brown-sailed lighters and pert steamers that move across the shining reaches. The gloomy Southwark shore is blurred and uncertain in light mists, and the roof masses of the frowning city lift the ghostly fingers of Wren’s slender spires and cower beneath the indistinct and cloudlike silhouette of the dome of St. Paul’s. The prospect is that of a vast, confused expanse of indistinguishable, shadowy blending of buildings and foliage whose remoter verges merge into a soft violet blur, and over all of it rages a wild snowstorm of tiny pin-point lights. Under the arches of the bridge old Father Thames moves serenely seaward, the most ancient and yet ever the youngest member of the community. From his continual renewal of life one could believe that in some long-forgotten time he had won this reward when he, too, had achieved the Holy Grail among the stout knights up Camelot way “in the dayes of Vther pendragon when he was kynge of all Englond and so regned.” With true British reserve hewhispers to a stranger no word of such secrets as once he confided at this bridge to Dickens, of the savagery and cruelty of this London that has driven so many of its desperate children to peace within his sheltering arms,—
“Mad with life’s history,Glad to death’s mysterySwift to be hurled—Anywhere, anywhere,Out of the world.”
“Mad with life’s history,Glad to death’s mysterySwift to be hurled—Anywhere, anywhere,Out of the world.”
“Mad with life’s history,Glad to death’s mysterySwift to be hurled—Anywhere, anywhere,Out of the world.”
“Mad with life’s history,
Glad to death’s mystery
Swift to be hurled—
Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of the world.”
Looking from one of these bridges on the proud, powerful, self-sufficient city, Wordsworth was once moved to exclaim that “earth has not anything to show more fair.” Certainly it has few things to show more stirring and impressive, few to move the heart more profoundly, few that in achievement, resourcefulness, and power embody more completely to men of to-day
“The grandeur that was Rome.”