7001
The painting-up which the apartments, as they always call themselves, undergo inside and out, in preparation for the season, is a rite to which all London bows during April as far as it can afford it. The lodging-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh green its front door and window-frames, or perhaps reddening its area railing; but private houses pretending to be smart clothe themselves from eave to basement in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints susceptible of the soonest harm from the natural and artificial climates of London. While the paint is fresh, or “wet,” the word by which you are warned from its contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives the gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the boxes of brilliant flowers at every window-sill, promises a gayety which the season realizes in rather unusual measure. It is said that the flowers at the windows must be renewed every month, against the blight of the London smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot be renewed so often, it is of perhaps a little more durable beauty. For a month of preparation, while the house-fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of another London season.
If the American's business or pleasure takes him out of town on the edge of the season and brings him back well over its border, he will have an agreeable effect from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs he left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion will have got in its work, and the streets, the pavements, the parks will have responded with a splendor, a gayety earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the passing feet will be oftener those going to luncheon and afternoon tea, and not so solely those hurrying to or lagging from the toils of the day. Even the morning trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to arrive with multitudes fresher and brighter than those which arrived before the season began. I do not know whether it was in tribute to the joyful time that a housemaid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and whitening up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore a long, black train and a bolero hat and jacket, and I do not say that this is the usual dress of the London housemaid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all the London steps wear in the morning. One might as well pretend that the may is consciously white and red on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom almost as long as its namesake month endures. But that is no great wonder: when a tree has worked as hard as a tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is naturally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on for weeks.
The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their silken fulness; the trees stood densely, softly, darkly rounded in the dim air, and they did not begin to shed their foliage till almost two months later. But I think I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the London trees as one evening in the grounds of a country club not so far out of London as not to have London trees in its grounds. They were mostly oaks, beeches, and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide, slow water, which could not be called a stream, and they hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists. The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I declared which the birds were singing their vespers in. There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I think must have been singing in the heart of the mist, and which probably mistook it for a tree of like substance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; and really the place was enchanting, with its close-cropped, daisy-starred lawns, and the gay figures of polo-players coming home from a distant field in the pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June.
The birds are heard everywhere in London through that glowing month, and their singing would drown the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab-horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens of the houses back together and form innumerable shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the American city-dweller, who never sees anything but clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.
The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really warm days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be making some very gravelly garden-beds along the wall when the hen proclaimed her achievement, and he called his children and their mother to rejoice with him. His oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his lodgers came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am sure the royal princess would have done if she had been taking tea there that afternoon.
He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, and though his aspirates were dislocated, his heart, however he miscalled it, was in the right place. We had many improving conversations, by which I profited more than he; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of every class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively upon the rights of his station. In England you feel that you cannot trespass upon the social demesne of the lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the premises. The social inferiors have a convention of profound respect for the social superiors, but it sometimes seemed provisional only, a mask which they expected one day to drop; yet this may have been one of those errors which foreigners easily make. What is certain is that the superior had better keep to his place, as the inferior keeps to his. Across the barrier the classes can and do exchange much more kindness than we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this is not a good time to say that the English manner to dependants is beyond criticism. The consideration for them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things if they please, and they are invariably and distinctly thanked for the smallest service. There are no doubt exceptions to the kindness which one sees, but I did not see the exceptions. The social machinery has so little play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the grind of class upon class might be intolerable. With us in America there is no love lost between rich and poor; unless the poor are directly and obviously dependent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with one another, as they never seem in England. Very possibly that perfect English manner from superiors is also a convention, like the respect of the inferiors, but it is a becoming one.
This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to say my landlord, who told me that when he first took that house a flock of starlings used to visit him in the spring. He did not tell me that his little house stood in the region of Nell Gwynne's mulberry-gardens; his knowledge was of observation, not of reading; and he was a gossip only about impersonal things. Concerning his lodgers he was as a grave for silence, and I fancy this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak once of a young German lodger whom he had kept from going to a garden-party in full evening-dress, but the incident was of a remoteness which excused its mention. What had impressed him in it was the foreigner's almost tearful gratitude when he came home and acknowledged that he had found everybody in the sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him to wear.
8001
While the may was still hesitating on the hawthorns whether to come out, there were plum and peach trees in the gardens which emulated the earlier daring of the almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the greengages that come there after they have ceased to come from France are as good as our own when the curculio does not get them; but the efflorescence of the peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they never fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances are against them. Perhaps the fruits of the fields and orchards, if not of the streets, would do better in England if the nights were warmer. The days are often quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so decidedly that even in that heated fortnight in July a blanket or two were never too much. In the spring a day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of the afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid.
I had a very good will towards all the historic temples in London, and I hope that this, with the fact that I had seen them before, will pass for my excuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed had some self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul's, of which I said to myself I ought to see it again; there might be an emotion in it. I passed and repassed it, till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of other tardy visitors who had come at the closing hour. After this unavailing visit, the necessity of going again established itself in me, and I went repeatedly, choosing, indeed, rainy days when I could not well go elsewhere, and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy of its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.
Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much mind the heavy presence of the Fames or Britannias of the earlier nineteenth century celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when the national type was least able to inspire grief with an artistic expression. The statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than the Fames or the Britannias.
The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much as at that list of London bishops, which, if you are so lucky as to come on it by chance where it is inscribed beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense of the long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops of the Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly Latin names; bishops of the Saxon and Danish times remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops of the Norman time, with appellations that again flow upon the tongue; bishops of the English time, with designations as familiar as those in the directory: what a record! It moves you more than any of those uniformed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, and it speaks more eloquently of the infrangible continuity, the unbroken greatness of England.
My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other English cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to think, that England was overgothicized, and that I should be glad, or at least relieved, by something classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the English faith, which continues the ancient tradition in terms not ceremonially very distinct from those of Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences which were all in favor of the elder fane. The minster now asserted its superior majesty, and its mere magnitude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty windows, as they held their own in my memory, dwarfed St. Paul's as much physically as spiritually.
A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built after the plans of the most skilful architects of their time and race, and both are monuments to civilizations which had outlived mystery.
I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey than to St. Paul's, but I had from the first so profoundly and thoroughly naturalized myself to the place that it was like going back to a home of my youth. It was, indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; and if I might advise any reader who still has his first visit to Westminster Abbey before him, I would counsel him not to go there much past his twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets' Corner and read the words, “Oh, rare Ben Jonson!” The good Ben was never so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous emotion the tears came.
I am not sensible of having been grouped with others in charge of a verger, but a verger there must have been, and at my next visit there must equally have been one; he only entered, rigid, authoritative, unsparing, into my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that he was going with a flock of other docile tourists. I suppose it would be possible to see Westminster Abbey without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second visits, but that my memory rejected him as unfit for association with fames and names made so much of in death that it seemed better than life in all dignified particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my chances of getting along for a few centuries on earth.
I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next-to-last visit I found him most intelligibly accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty which used to be carried in the funeral processions of the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till he had dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly lifelike in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubtless there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Elizabeth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish that art had so preserved all the great embodiments of history.
I hope it was some better motive than the sightseer's that at least partly caused me to make myself part of the congregation listening to a sermon in the Abbey on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the stir of the place's literary associations began with the sight of Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like him, in the grand simplicity of his looks, as he was when he lived; and then presently the effigies of all the “dear sons of memory” began to reveal themselves, medallion and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory and inscription. We went and sat, for the choral service, under the bust of Macaulay, and, looking down, we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his grave. It might have been the wounded sense of reverence, it might have been the dread of a longer sermon than we had time for, but we left before the sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt little public garden which lies by the Thames in the shadow of the Parliament Houses; and who has said the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand years old, but some day they will be, and then those who cavilled at them when they were only fifty will be sorry. For my part I think them as Gothically noble and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic, too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew from the ground there far into the gray sky to which their architecture is native. It was a pale, resigned afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted heat in it, which a recent rain had slightly abated, and we were glad of a memoriferous property which it seemed to exhale. Suddenly in the midst of that most alien environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom we had last parted twenty years before in the woods beside Lake George, and whose apparition at once implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so sensational is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if it is so, why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and we were in the shadow of the Parliament Houses again, and no longer in that of the forest which did not know it was Gothic.
We were going to hang upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge for the view it offers of the Houses, to which the spacious river makes itself a foreground such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in this cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the pleasure of realizing the statue of Cromwell which has somehow found place where it belongs in those stately precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend of Parliaments than Charles whom he slew, but he was such a massive piece of English history that the void his effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons must have ached for it before.
When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and the children strayed along the streets without playing, or lagged homeward behind their parents. There were no vehicles except those of pleasure or convenience; the omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar; our cab-horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the noisiest thing we heard. The trees in the squares and places hung dull and tired in the coolish, dusty atmosphere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties of experience which, after all, one does not impart. Those who like, as I do, the innocence which companions the sophistication of London will frequent Kensington Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has set the seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then seems peculiarly the playground of little children in the care of their nurses, if they are well-to-do people's children, and in one another's care if they are poor people's. All over England the tenderness of the little children for the less is delightful. I remember to have seen scarcely any squabbling, and I saw abundance of caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies of almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if it were a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This goes on in spite of a reciprocal untidiness which is indescribable; for the English poor children have the very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch have dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering of filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think, perhaps, they wash up a little when they come to play in Kensington Gardens, to sail their ships on its placid waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter the palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as they do in troops, they are commonly in charge of their teachers; and their raptures of loyalty in the presence of those reminders that queens, too, must have once been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are doubtless as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and political associations. Since William III. built the palace and laid out the gardens that he might dwell within easy reach of his capital, but out of its smoke and din, the place has not lost the character which his homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially sweet and commendable because of its relation to the good Victoria's childhood. One does not forget “great Anna's” drinking tea there in the Orangery so nobly designed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is dearest because Victoria spent so many of her early days in it, and received there the awful summons literally to rise from her dreams and come and be queen of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke of poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet provided even for the election of young girls to the presidency; and though we may prefer our prosaical republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of such an incident in the mother monarchy.
The Temple was another of the places that I did not think I should visit again, because I had so pleasant and perfect a memory of it, which I feared to impair. More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in the chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and then went out and wandered about in the wet, for it was raining very diligently. I cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler after our drive from the Thames Embankment and began to walk up towards the Temple Church. I will not ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will merely have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies of the crusaders lying cross-legged in the pavement of the circle to which one enters. According to the strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our party, these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture since she saw them first. It was not merely that they had uncrossed their legs and crossed them another way, or some such small matter; but that now they lay side by side, whereas formerly they had better accommodated themselves to the architectural design, and lain in a ring with their long-pointed toes pointing inward to the centre. Why they should have changed, we could not understand; the verger said they had not; but he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly in a limp sort on keeping the door locked so that people could not get away without his help, and must either fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple Church, indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cunningham says that the two edifices most worth visiting are the church and the Middle Temple Hall, which I now preferred luxuriously to leave in my remembrances of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party, straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the empty courts, and envying, not very actively, the lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking old brick dwellings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this day, but I am told they are practically of both sexes, and that when married they are allowed to domesticate themselves in these buildings in apartments sublet to them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law, but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are subject only to a semicentennial ejection, so that I do not know where a young literary couple could more charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the Temple paths and on the Temple lawns. At one house, a girl was vaguely arriving with a band-box and parcels, and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint, remote date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash of our period came to us through the Strand gate softened to a mellow roar. The noise was not great enough, we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman in court dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the top of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith's grave, and leaning forward with one hand extended as if, in the spirit of the presententente cordiale, he was calling our attention to the fact that the garlands and streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the walls about him were in the mother-clime of a real American redness.
It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must count that last day of our September in London as spent in such sort as to be of unsurpassed if not unrivalled impression, because of the visit which we then so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we had almost not paid it at all.
The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and naval museum; with the swords and saddles and uniforms and other equipments of divers English heroes in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the two most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I was not so vain of my reading about battles as not to be glad of seeing how the men-of-war deployed at Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops were engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of the cannons' mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when Blücher modestly appeared at one corner of the plan in time to save the day. “But we should 'ave 'ad it, without 'im?” a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously inquired of the custodian. “Oh, we should 'ave 'ad the victory, anyway,” the custodian reassured him, and they looked together at some trophies of the Boer war with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I do not know whether they shared my psychological interest in that apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which, in this place, as in several others in England, invests the spiritual squalor of war-memories with the glamour of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities. Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers in their ideals shed such a light upon the sad business of their lives as almost to ennoble it. One feels that with a little more qualification on the creative side they could have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps, but, say, historical novelists.
There is some question among other authorities which window of the Banquetting House the doomed king passed through upon the scaffold to the block; but the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a choice of windows, and as to a space broken through the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so well satisfied with his window as to shrink involuntarily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal substance showed through the shadowy illusion of passing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the street, the king's voice rising above the noises in tender caution to a heedless witness, “Have a care of the axe; have a care,” and then gravely to the headsman: “When I stretch out my hands so, then—” The drums were ordered beaten, so that we could not hear more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs and 'busses to the horse-guards sitting shrunken on their steeds, and passed between them into the park beyond where the beds of flowers spread their soft autumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day.
9001
I liked walking through St. James's and through Green Park, especially in the late afternoon when the tired poor began to droop upon the benches, and, long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face downward, among its odorous roots. There was often the music of military bands to which wide-spreading audiences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St. James's there were seats along the borders of the ponds where, while the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good deal of energetic courting went on. Besides, both were in the immediate neighborhood of certain barracks where there was always a chance of military, and were hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected to find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class, and the women especially make a bolder attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to breathlessness; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emulated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting and flirting at the same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the young fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of the swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled them in their aberrations from formality.
There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the people to sit under, but there was almost a superabundance of flowers in glaring beds, and there were pieces of water, where the amateur boatman could have the admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely encircling the ponds. To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do. We ourselves ordered tea, knowing the quality and quantity of the public English ice, which is so very minute that you think it will not be enough, but which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want. The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and a crowd of envious small boys thronged the railing that parted us from the general public, till the spectacle of their hungry interest became intolerable. We consulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our question as to the moral and social effect of sixpence worth of buns on those boys; he decided that it would at least not form an example ruinous to the peace of his tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag that seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even half a bushel of buns will not go round the boys in Battersea Park, and we had to choose as honest a looking boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and hope, as he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with the whole troop at his heels, that he would be faithful to the trust.
So very mild are the excitements, so slight the incidents, so safe and tame the adventures of modern travel! I am almost ashamed when I think what a swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real imagination would have been having in London when so little was happening to me. There was, indeed, one night after dinner when for a salient moment I had hopes of something different. The maid had whistled for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door where we stood waiting, when out of the shadows across the way two figures sprang, boarded the cab, and bade the cabman drive them away under our very eyes. Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o'clock, promised a series of stirring experiences; and an American lady, long resident in England, encouragingly said, on hearing of the outrage, “Ah, that'sLondon!” as if I might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the sort; but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the security and gentleness with which life is operated in the capital of the world is one of the kind things makes you forget its immensity. Your personal comfort and safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mistake yourself for one of very few people instead of so many.
London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and deliberation, and if it hurried or worried, it would be like the precession of the equinoxes getting a move on, and would shake the earth. The street events are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely spent in the streets, I saw the body of only one accident worse than a cab-horse falling; but that was early in my stay when I expected to see many more. We were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and were walking by the hospital of the same name just as a cab drove up to its gate bearing the body of the accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face hung upon his breast and whose limp arm another young man of the same station in life held round his own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside him. A crowd was already following, and it gathered so quickly at the high iron fence that the most censorious witness could hardly see with what clumsiness the wounded man was half-dragged, half-lifted from the cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the ground till he could be duly carried into the hospital. It may have been a casualty of the many incident to alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single combat, which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediaeval atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic dignity which would have come in the way of a more heroical imagination.
It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however characteristic of the observer, that I made haste to forget it as I entered the church-yard under the Norman arch which has been for some years gradually finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole church, indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it was one of the first effects I saw) of that rescue of the past from the present which is perpetually going on all over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and the crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an ironworker's shop; and modern life still pressed close upon it in the houses looking on the graves of the grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and doing other household offices, the place was like something out of Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he turned monk) who founded the Cistercian monastery there in the twelfth century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to examine the church. He would have had the advantage, which he could not have enjoyed in his life-time, of his own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and he might have been interested to note, as we did, that the painter Hogarth had been baptized in his church six hundred years after his own time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent Norman architecture might have been less; it is possible he would have preferred the Gothic which was coming in when he went out.
The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, dim, twilighted as with the closes of the days of a thousand years; and in the pale ray an artist sat sketching a stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a loss in not having looked to see how he was making out, but the image of the pew-opener remains compensatively with me. She was the first of her sort to confront me in England with the question whether her very intelligent comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. She was a little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca dress, and a world-old black bonnet, who spared us no detail of the church, and took us last into the crypt, not long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now used as a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish, which is still full of the poor. The chapel was equipped with a large bier and tall candles, frankly ready for any of the dead who might drop in. The old countries do not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger countries do.
We came out into the imperfect circle before the gateway of the church, and realized that it was Smithfield, where all those martyrs had perished by fire that the faith of the world might live free. There can be no place where the past is more august, more pathetic, more appealing, and none I suppose, where the activities of the present, in view of it, are more offensive. It is all undermined with the railways that bring the day's meat-provision to London for distribution throughout the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm with butchers' wagons laden with every kind and color of carnage, prevalently the pallor of calves' heads, which seem so to abound in England that it is wonderful any calves have them on still. The wholesale market covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at some central point, you find yourself amid endless prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole carcasses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings, and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, so that you come away wishing to live a vegetarian ever after.
The emotions are not at one's bidding, and if one calls upon them, they are very apt not to come. I promised myself some very signal ones, of a certain type, from going to the Sunday market of the Jews in what was once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning up and clearing out of the slums, has got itself called by some much finer and worthier name. But, really, I had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on our own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I had been led to expect it would. The blazing forenoon of my visit was more than half gone, and yet there was no clothes' auction, which was said to be the great thing to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be everything else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry finery, children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one another indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most monumental features of the scene were the gorgeous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals along the street, and arranged with seats, like swings, for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know their tonnage; apparently they have a passion for knowing it.
The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that he questioned the policemen for some very squalid or depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse but to take me on top of a tram-car and show me how very thoroughly it had been reformed and cleaned up. In a ride the whole length of Whitechapel Road to where the once iniquitous region ceased from troubling and rose in a most respectable resurrection as Stepney, with old-fashioned houses which looked happy, harmless homes, I could only be bidden imagine avenues of iniquity branching off on either hand. But I actually saw nothing slumlike; indeed, with a current of cool east wind in our faces, which the motion of the tram reinforced, the ride was an experience delightful to every sense. It was significant also of the endlessness of London that as far as the tram-car took us we seemed as far as ever from the bounds of the city; whatever point we reached there was still as much or more London beyond.
Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than it used to be in the days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it. At any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less unblushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless days of 1882-3. In those days I remember being taken by a friend, much concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful purlieu where I saw and heard and smelled things quite as bad as any that I did long afterwards in the over-tenanted regions of New York. My memory is still haunted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who fled blinking from one hole in the wall to another, with little or nothing on, and of other creatures much in liquor and loudly scolding and quarrelling, with squalid bits of childhood scattered about underfoot, and vague shapes of sickness and mutilation, and all the time a buying and selling of loathsome second-hand rags.
In the midst of it there stood, like figures of a monument erected to the local genius of misery and disorder, two burly figures of half-drunken men, threatening each other with loud curses and shaken fists under the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the throat-latch of his helmet. When the men should strike, I was aware that it would be his instant duty, as the guardian of the public peace, to seize them both and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ounce of cure.
I would very willingly have seen something of this kind again, but, as I say, I happened not to see it. I think that I did not see or hear even so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more gin-palaces, flaring through their hell-litten windows into the night; but this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and coming out of such places in draggle-tailed processions in those wicked days; but now I only once saw women drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night, when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the thirst of the morrow, for all through the Sunday idleness it cannot be slaked enough. It was a hot night, and the bar-room door stood open, and within, fronted by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men-kind, those poor silly things stood drooping against the wall with their beer-pots dangling limply from their hands, and their mouths fallen open as if to catch the morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the tongues of their admired male companions. They did not look very bad; bad people never do look as bad as they are, and perhaps they are sometimes not so bad as they look. Perhaps these were kind, but not very wise, mothers of families, who were merely relieving in that moment of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's work. I may have passed and repassed in the street some of the families that they were the mothers of; it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose oppressiveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to share with the reader, and the street children seemed to have been roused to uncommon vigilance by it. They played about far into the night, unrebuked by their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little girls were always lugging, shared their untimely wakefulness if not their activity. There was seldom any crying among them then, though by day the voice of grief and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. If their mothers did not call them in-doors, their fathers were still less exacting. After the marketing, which took place in the neighboring avenue, where there began to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, father and mother alike seemed to have renounced their domestic cares and to have liberated their offspring to the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.
As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see much of it, and I heard less, though that might have been because I did not look or listen in the right places. With that, as with everything else in London, I took my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports of a lady in Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of mutual friends from assaulting another lady. She, however, though she excelled in violence, did not equal in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, long hour threatened an invisible bicyclist under our windows in that humbler quarter already described as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had apparently been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, in a moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned that he had not sounded the warning bell. In making this confession he had evidently apologized with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error of his confession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again pardon with warning was given. Even a glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman's voice rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he seemed to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before by the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up at the prospect of his escape. I do not know how the affair ended; perhaps it never ended; but exhausted nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured person was, if not drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when the sensibilities are keenest and self-respect is most alert. An American could not, at least, have been so tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an Englishman could.
It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative drunkenness of the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the hope and example of the human race in so many things, that much if not most of our American drunkenness is alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely native. If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early years of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous, were added to the sum of our home-born intoxication, there could be no doubt which was the greater. As it is, I am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more drunken men in London than in New York; and when I think of the Family Entrance, indicated at the side-door of every one of our thousands of saloons, I am not sure I can plume myself on the superior sobriety of our drinking men's wives. As for poverty—if I am still partially on that subject—as for open misery, the misery that indecently obtrudes itself upon prosperity and begs of it, I am bound to say that I have met more of it in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in London. Such misery may be more rigidly policed in the English capital, more kept out of sight, more quelled from asking mercy, but I am sure that in Fifth Avenue, and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between that avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more deserving or undeserving poverty has made itself seen and heard to my personal knowledge than in Piccadilly, or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane, or the squares and places which are the London analogues of our best residential quarters.
Of course, the statistics will probably be against me—I have often felt an enmity in statistics—and I offer my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September, I used to stroll much among the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more interesting than they probably were, either asleep or awake, and if I could really have got inside their minds I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I had penetrated the consciousness of as many people of fashion in the height of the season. But what I wish to say is that, whether sleeping or waking, they never, any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise intimated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered it myself, it was another thing, and it was not refused to the extent of a shilling by the good fellow whose conversation I bought one afternoon when I found him, sitting up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle and thread. I asked him of the times and their badness, and I hope I left him with the conviction that I believed him an artisan out of work, taking his misfortune bravely. He was certainly cheerful, and we had some agreeable moments, which I could not prolong, because I did not like waking the others, or such of them as might be sleeping.
I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery to be cheerful seemed to be rather trivial, and I was better pleased with the impassioned bearing of a pair who passed me another day as I sat on one of the benches beside the path where the trees were dropping their listless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the best effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, and looked more miserable, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed in a ghastly pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his luck. He owned that he was, and in guarantee of his good faith took the shilling I offered him. If his need had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sovereign; but one must not fly in the face of the Providence, which is probably not ill-advised in choosing certain of us to be reduced to absolute destitution. The man smiled a sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his teeth in a sort of pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife, gloomily unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk back to my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had not embodied, society to her.
I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest that came to my knowledge in London; but I do not insist that it was genuine, and if any more scientific student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my tragedy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize the sentimental American stranger, and do him out of one of his ill-got shillings, I will not gainsay him. I merely maintain, as I have always done, that the conditions are alike in the Old World and the New, and that the only difference is in the circumstances, which may be better now in New York, and now in London, while the conditions are always bad everywhere for the poor. That is a point on which I shall not yield to any more scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time my light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to another pair on the grass of the slope not far off in front of me.
Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair of quite well-dressed young people had thrown themselves, side by side, on the September grass as if it had been the sand at any American seashore, or the embrowned herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps the shelving ground was dryer than the moist levels where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but I do not think it would have mattered to that tender pair if it had been very damp; so warmly were they lapped in love's dream, they could not have taken cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their open-air love-making to that in public places at home, and contrast it with the decorum of Latin countries where nothing of the kind is known. If anything, English lovers of this type are franker than with us, doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the English nature; and they seem to be of a better class. One day when I was sitting in a penny chair in Green Park, the agent of the company came and collected the rent of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely chosen an inconspicuous situation where I should not be found, and it was long past the end of the season, when no company should have had the heart to collect rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmuring, and as the young man who sold me a ticket good for the whole day at a penny, was obviously not pressed with business, I tried to recoup myself by a little conversation.
“I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I don't see many of your chairs occupied.”
“Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a few taken at night, sir—over there in the hollow.” I looked a leading question, and he went on: “Young people come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet place and out of the way.”
“Oh, yes. Where they're not molested by the unemployed?” I cast a generalizing glance over the dead and wounded of the battle of life strewn about the grass of an adjacent space.
“Well, that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do nothing but sleep all day, and then after dark they get up and begin to prowl. They spy, some of 'em, on the young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and blackmail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work if they could get it.”
I perceived that my friend was a capitalist, and I suspected him of being one of the directors of the penny-chair company. But perhaps he thought me a capitalist, too, and fancied that I would like to have him decry the unemployed. Still he may have been right about the blackmailing; one must live, and the innocent courage of open-air courtship in London offers occasions of wilful misconstruction. In a great city, the sense of being probably unnoted and unknown among its myriads must eventuate in much indifference to one's surroundings. How should a young couple on an omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the seat opposite could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which they renewed their love after some previous falling out?
“But I was hurt, Will, dear.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry, dear.”
“I know, Will, dear.”
“But it's all right now, dear?”
“Oh yes, Will, dear.”
Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it down; it ought to be sacred; and nothing but my zeal in these social studies could make me profane it. Who would not have been the careless brute this young man must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweetness of such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on misbehavior. He was a nice-looking young fellow, but she was nicer, and in her tender eyes there seemed more wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to temper justice with mercy.
Sometimes women do not know when to temper mercy with justice. I fancied this the error of the fond nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her perambulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the sidewalk in order to keep up with the tall grenadier who marched with his head in the air, and let her make this show of being in his company, but not once looking at her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls are always with the military, so that it is said to be comparatively easy to keep servants in the neighborhood of the barracks, or even in those streets that the troops habitually pass through, and may be conveniently gloated upon from attic-windows or basement areas. Probably much of the natural supremacy of the male of our species has been lost in all ranks of society through the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men in civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace on their coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely they could still knock women about as they used, and be all the more admired. It is a point worth considering in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.
A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory with those I eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus-top, was a silent pair I noted one day in St. Paul's. They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had apparently lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where every monument is more forbidding than another, and had sunk down on a seat by themselves, and were trying to get back a little courage by furtively holding each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of a human interest larger than any London characteristic. So, in a little different sort, was the rapture of a couple behind a tree on whom a friend of mine came suddenly in St. James's Park at the very moment when the eager he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a 'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had taken next him. The witness was going up to a dentist in that region, and professed that in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the furies of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after all.