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Title: The Haunts of Old Cockaigne
Author: Alex Thompson
Release Date: January 23, 2015 [EBook #48055]
Language: English
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THE HAUNTS OF
OLD COCKAIGNE
[Illustration: BANKSIDE IN 1648 (_FLAG FLYING OVER GLOBE THEATRE_).]
THE HAUNTS OF
OLD COCKAIGNE
BY
ALEX. M. THOMPSON
(DANGLE)
1898 . LONDON . THE CLARION OFFICE
72 FLEET STREET, E.C. . WALTER SCOTT
LTD., PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.
AN EPISTLE DEDICATORY
MY DEAR WILL RANSTEAD,--
When, in our too infrequent talks, I have confessed my growing
fondness for life in London, your kindly countenance has assumed
an expression so piteous that my Conscience has turned upon what I
am pleased to call my Mind, to demand explanation of a feeling so
distressing to so excellent a friend.
My Mind, at first, was disposed to apologise. It pleaded its
notoriously easy-going character: it had never met man or woman that
it had not more or less admired, nor remained long anywhere without
coming to strike kinship with the people and to develop pride in
their activities.
In its infancy it had been as Badisch as the Grossherzog of Baden,
and had deemed lilac-scented Carlsruhe the grandest town in the
world.
In blue-and-white Lutetia, it had grown as Parisian as an English
dramatist.
When the fickle Fates moved it on to Manchester, it had learned in a
little while to ogle Gaythorn and Oldham Road as enchanted Titania
ogled her gentle joy, the loathly Bottom. It had looked with scorn
on the returned prodigals who had been to London--"to tahn," they
called it--and who came back to their more or less marble halls in
Salford with trousers turned up round the hems, shepherds' crooks
to support their elegantly languid totter, and words of withering
scorn for the streets of Peter and Oxford, which my Mind had learned
to regard as boulevards of dazzling light.
Mine had always been a pliant and affable mind. Perhaps if it lived
in Widnes it might prefer it to Heaven.
But the longer I remained in London the more convinced I became
that never again should I like Widnes, or Manchester, or Paris, or
Carlsruhe, as well as this tantalising, fascinating, baffling city
of misty light--this stately, monstrous, grey, grimy, magnificent
London.
Then I sought reason for my state, and the following papers--one or
two contributed to the _Liverpool Post_, one to the _Clarion_, and
the most part printed now for the first time--are the result of my
inquiries.
One day I found cause for liking London, another day the reverse.
As the reasons came to me I wrote them down, and with all their
inconsistencies upon their heads, you have them here collected.
I have addressed the papers to you, because:--
As you had inspired the book, it was only fair you should share the
blame.
By answering you publicly, I saved myself the trouble of separately
answering many other country friends who likewise looked upon my
love of London as a deplorable falling from grace.
Thirdly, by this means, I save postages, and may actually induce a
few adventurous moneyed persons to pay me for the work.
Lastly, and most seriously, I lay hold on this occasion to publish
the respect and gratitude I owe to you, and which I repay to the
best of my ability by this small token of my friendship.--Sincerely
yours,
ALEX. M. THOMPSON.
_P.S._--You will naturally wonder after reading the book--should you
be spared so long--why I call it _Haunts of Old Cockaigne_.
I may say at once that you are fully entitled to wonder.
It is included in the price.
INDEX
PAGE
AN EPISTLE DEDICATORY 7
LONDON'S ENCHANTMENT 15
LONDON CHARLIE 35
LONDON GHOSTS 57
THE MERMAID TAVERN 78
WAS SHAKESPEARE A SCOTSMAN? 87
FLEET STREET 116
LONDON'S GROWTH 135
A TRUCE FROM BOOKS AND MEN 152
A RUDE AWAKENING 161
LONDON PRIDE AND COCKNEY CLAY 188
MY INTRODUCTION TO RESPECTABILITY 202
PARIS REVISITED 215
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
BANKSIDE IN 1648 _Frontispiece_
STRAND CROSS, 1547 61
COURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN 81
A BARBER'S SHOP IN 1492 119
WHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES I. 137
OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHWARK 141
THE STRAND, 1660 143, 144
WHITEFIELD'S TABERNACLE, 1736 147
GORLESTON PIER 155
THE LIFEBOAT 177
THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES 219
LONDON'S ENCHANTMENT
I want the hum of my working brothers--
London bustle and London strife.
H. S. LEIGH.
Let them that desire "solitary to wander o'er the russet mead" put
on their clump boots and wander.
I prefer the Strand.
The Poet's customary meadow with its munching sheep and æsthetic
cow, his pleasing daisies and sublimated dandelions, his ecstatic
duck and blooming plum tree, are all very well in their way; but
there is more human interest in Seven Dials.
The virtuous man who on the sunless side
Of a romantic mountain, forest crowned,
Sits coolly calm; while all the world without,
Unsatisfied, and sick, tosses at noon--
may have a very good time if his self-satisfaction suffice to
shelter him from Boredom; but of what use is he to the world or to
his fellow-creatures?
I have no patience with the long-haired persons whose scorn of the
common people's drudgery finds vent in lofty exhortations to "fly
the rank city, shun the turbid air, breathe not the chaos of eternal
smoke, and volatile corruption."
By turning his back to "the tumult of a guilty world," and "through
the verdant maze of sweetbriar hedges, pursue his devious walk,"
the Poet provides no remedy for the sin and suffering of human
cities--especially if the Poet finds it inconvenient to his soulful
rapture to attend to his own washing.
It offends me to the soul to hear robustious, bladder-pated,
tortured Bunthornes crying out for "boundless contiguity of shade"
where they can hear themselves think, when they might be digging the
soil or fixing gaspipes.
I would have such fellows banished to remote solitudes, where they
should prove their disdain of the grovelling herd by learning to
do without them. I would have them fed, clothed, nursed, caressed,
and entertained solely by their own sufficiency. Let them enjoy
_themselves_.
Erycina's doves, they sing, and ancient stream of Simois!
I sing the common people, and the vulgar London streets--streams
of life, action, and passion, whose every drop is a human soul,
each drop distinct and different, each coloured by his or her own
wonderful personality.
I never grow tired of seeing them, admiring them, wondering about
them.
Beneath this turban what anxieties? Beneath yon burnoose what
heartaches and desires? Under all this sartorial medley of
frock-coats, jackets, mantles, capes, cloth, silk, satins, rags,
what truth? what meaning? what purport? How to get at the hearts
of them? how to evolve the best of them? how to blot out their
passions, spites, and rancours, and get at their human kinship and
brotherhood?
All day long these streets are crowded with the great, the rich,
the gay, and the fair--and if one looks one may also see here the
poorest, the most abject, the most pitiful, and most awful of the
creatures that God permits to live. There is more wealth and
splendour than in all the _Arabian Nights_, and more misery than in
Dante's _Inferno_.
Such a bustling, jostling, twisting, wriggling wonder! "An
intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of
colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the
horses' teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of
dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast flowing water."
There is everything here, and plenty of it. As Malaprop Jenkins
wrote to her "O Molly Jones," "All the towns that ever I beheld in
my born days are no more than Welsh barrows and crumlecks to this
wonderful sitty! Even Bath itself is but a fillitch; in the naam of
God, one would think there's no end of the streets, but the Land's
End. Then there's such a power of people going hurry-scurry! Such a
racket of coxes! Such a noise and halibaloo! So many strange sites
to be seen! O gracious! I have seen the Park, and the Paleass of St.
Gimeses, and the Queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young
princes and the hillyfents, and pybald ass, and all the rest of the
Royal Family."
In two minutes from Piccadilly Circus I can be at will in France, in
Germany, in Italy, or in Jerusalem. Even at the loneliest hour of
the night I can have company to walk with; for in Bond Street I meet
Colonel Newcome's stately figure, in Pall Mall I encounter Peregrine
Pickle's new chariot and horses, by the Thames I find the skulking
figures of Quilp and Rogue Riderhood, in Southwark I am with Mr.
Pickwick and Sam Weller, in Eastcheap with immortal Jack Falstaff,
sententious Nym, blustering Pistol, and glow-nosed Bardolph.
With such companions at my side,
I float on London's human tide;
An atom on its billows thrown,
But lonely never, nor alone.
In a hundred yards I may jostle an Archbishop of the Established
Church, a Prostitute, a Poet, a victorious General, the Hero of the
last football match, a Millionaire, a "wanted" Murderer, a bevy
of famous Actresses, a Socialist Refugee from Spain or Italy, a
tattooed South Sea Islander, a loose-breeched Man-o'-War's man from
Japan, Armenians, Cretans, Greeks, Jews, Turks, and Clarionettes
from Pudsey.
The mere picturesque externals suffice to entrance me; but the spell
grips like a vice when I look closer and discriminate between the
types.
Such a commodity of warm slaves has civilisation gathered here!
Such a fascinating rabble of addle-pated toadies, muddy-souled
bullies of the bagnio, trade-fallen prize-fighters, aristocratic
and other drabs, card and billiard sharpers, discarded unjust
serving-men, revolted tapsters, touting tipsters, police-court
habitués, cut-purses, area sneaks, and general slum-scum; pimpled
bookmakers, millionaire sweaters and their dissipated sons;
jerry-builders, members of Parliament, phosy-jaw and lead poisoners;
African diamond smugglers, peers on the make, long-nosed company
promoters, and old clo' men; Stock Exchange tricksters, fraudulent
patriotic contractors, earthworms and graspers; fog-brained and
parchment-hearted crawlers, pigeons, rooks, hawks, vultures, and
carrion crows; the cankers of a base city and a sordid age; the
flunkeys, pimps, and panders of society; the pride and chivalry of
Piccadilly; the carrion, maggots, and reptiles of an empire upon
whose infamies the sun never wholly succeeds in hiding its blushing
countenance.
There is no fear of my forgetting the misery and crime underlying
London's splendour. I never invite Mrs. Dangle's admiration to
the flashing lights of Piccadilly but she sharply reminds me of
the pitiful sights which they illuminate. The ever-fresh and
ever-wonderful magic of the Embankment's circle as seen by night
from Adelphi Terrace does not efface the remembrance of Hood's
"Bridge of Sighs," nor of Charles Mackay's "Waterloo Bridge."
In she plunged boldly, no matter how coldly the rough river ran:--
Over the brink of it, picture it, think of it, dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it, then, if you can!
I have seen our painted sisters standing for hire under the flaring
gas-lamps. I have seen ghastly wrecks of humankind slinking by the
blazing shop fronts as if ashamed of their hungry faces; and others,
bloated out of womanly grace, tottering from gin-palace doors into
side-dens that make one pale and sick to glance into.
And the interminable battalions of foolish-faced men in foolish
frock-coats and foolish tall hats, who suck their foolish sticks as
they foolishly amble by!
What tragic and comic contrasts! What variety!
Faces black and copper faces; yellow faces, rosy faces, and
martyrs' faces ghastly white; cruel crafty faces, false and leering
faces--faces cynical, callous, and confident; faces crushed, abject,
bloodless, and woebegone; satyrs' faces, gross, pampered, impudent,
and sensual; sneering, arrogant, devilish faces; and shrinking
faces full of prayer and meek entreaty; vulture faces--eager,
greedy, ravenous; penguin faces--fat, smug, and foolish; faces of
whipped curs, fawning spaniels, and treacherous hounds; wolves'
faces and foxes' faces, and many hapless heads of puzzled sheep
floating helpless down the current; faces of all tints and forms and
characters; and not a few, thank Heaven! of faces strong and calm,
of faces kind, modest, and intrepid! of faces blooming, healthy,
pretty, and beautiful!
Gold and grime, purple and shame, squalor and splendour, contrasts
and wonders without end. And all of it--all the flotsam and jetsam
of these tumultuous streets--gallant hearts, heroes, criminals,
millionaires, pretty girls, and wrecks--they are all charged, and
overbrimming with interest, for, as Longfellow says, "these are the
great themes of human thought; not green grass, and flowers, and
moonshine."
Yet flowers too can London show.
In the densest quarters of Whitechapel I have seen grass and trees
as green as the best that can be seen in the choicest districts of
Oldham or Bolton.
As for the West End, no richer, riper scenes of urban beauty are to
be found in Europe than the stretch of park and garden spread out
between the Horse Guards and Kensington Palace.
Stand on the steps of the Albert Memorial and feast your gaze on the
woody vistas of Kensington Gardens; or, from the suspension bridge
of fair St. James's Park, look over the water to the up-piled,
towering white palaces of Whitehall; or, without exertion at all,
lie down amongst the sheep in the wide green fields of Hyde Park,
and listen to the hum of the traffic.
Hyde Park's verdurous carpet is shot in its season with the
golden lustre of the buttercup, dotted with the peeping white of
the timorous daisy, and spangled with the flaunting, extravagant
dandelion. Every tree is in spring a gorgeous picture, and every
thorn bush a bouquet of fragrant flower.
As for London's outside suburbs, no English town can show such
charming variety of wood and meadow, of hill and plain.
Smiling uplands and blooming slopes; bushy lanes, flowered hedges,
and crystal streams; cottages overgrown, according to the season,
with honeysuckle, roses, and creeping plants of gorgeous varying
hues; smooth green lawns bedecked with flowers; bracken and
woods upon the hills; scampering rabbits, scattered meditative
cattle, placid sheep, singing birds, swifts and swallows, rooks
high sailing o'er tufted elms; and, above all, the sweet, blue,
cloudless, southern sky;--all these may be found on a fine summer's
day within an easy cycle-ride in any direction from London.
Where shall we find nobler views than those exposed from Muswell's
woody slopes, or Sydenham's stately terraces; from happy Hampstead,
or haughty Highgate; from rare Richmond, or, best of all, from
glorious Leith?
Where are sweeter woods than those of Epping or Hadley? Where such
glades as at Bushey or Windsor? Where so sweet a garden, or so
gracious a stream to water it, as lies open to the excursionist in
the valley of the Thames between Maidenhead and beautiful Oxford?
To hear the lark's song gushing forth to the sun on Hampstead's
golden heath, to see the bluebells making soft haze in the Hadley
woods, to watch the children returning through Highgate to their
feculent rookeries laden with the fair bloom of hawthorn hedges,
to lie on Hyde Park's soft green velvet, is to bring home the
knowledge to our tarnished hearts that even this city of fretful
stir, weariness, and leaden-eyed despair, might be sweet and of
goodly flavour--that even London's cruel face might be made to beam
upon all her children like a maternal benediction, if they were wise
enough to deserve and demand it!
But--
Mammon is their chief and lord,
Monarch slavishly adored;
Mammon sitting side by side
With Pomp and Luxury and Pride,
Who call his large dominion theirs,
Nor dream a portion is Despair's.
The wealth and the poverty! the grandeur and the wretchedness!
Sir Howard Vincent, a Conservative M.P., lately told his Sheffield
constituents, after a round of visits paid to "almost every state in
Europe," that--
He had no hesitation in saying that in a walk of a mile in
London, and in the West End too, they saw more miserable
people than he met with in all the countries enumerated--more
bedraggled, unhappy, unfortunate out-of-works, seeking alms and
bread, and strong men earning a few pence loitering along with
immoral advertisements on their shoulders. He granted that there
were more people in London with palatial mansions, luxurious
carriages, and high-stepping horses, but there was much greater
poverty and dire distress among the aged.
As regards the luxury, this is true enough. As regards poverty,
London's state is bad--God knows!--infinitely worse than that of
Paris, which I know intimately; but not so bad, according to my
more travelled friends, as that of Russian, Italian, or even Saxon
industrial regions. London's destitution at its worst is perhaps
more brutal, and more repellent, but not more hopeless than the more
picturesque poverty of sunnier climes.
Poplar, Stepney, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, and Whitechapel are as
hideous tumours upon a fair woman's face.
They are vile labyrinths of styes, where pallid men and women, and
skeleton children,--guileless little things, fresh from the hands of
God,--wallow like swine.
Yet, except for vastness, London slums are not more shameful than
the slums Sir Howard Vincent may find, if he will look in the town
which he has the dishonour of representing in Parliament.
I saw the slum-scum sweltering in their close-packed, foetid East
End courts during the great water famine last summer (miles of
luxuriously appointed palaces in the gorgeous West standing the
while deserted), but even then I found them cleaner, fresher, and
sweeter than the slums of Manchester, Liverpool, Dublin, Dundee,
Glasgow, Birmingham, or Darkest Sheffield.
For over all these London possesses one precious, inestimable
advantage--the wide estuary and great air avenue of the Thames,
through which refreshing winds are borne into the turbid crannies,
bringing precious seeds of health and sweeping out the stagnant
poisons.
* * * * *
I have beheld the great city in many aspects, fair and foul. I have
seen St. Paul's pierce with ghostly whiteness through a mist that
swathed and wholly hid its lower parts, the great dome rising like
a phantom balloon from out a phantom city. I have seen a blue-grey
"London particular" transform a dingy, narrow street into a portal
of mystery, romance, and enchantment. I have loitered on Waterloo
Bridge to gaze on the magic of the river and listen to the eerie
music of Time's roaring loom. I have heard the babel of Petticoat
Lane on Sunday morning. I have surveyed the huge wen and contrasted
it with the pleasant Kentish weald from Leith Hill's summit. And I
would not go back from London to any place that I have lived in. I
like London. I am bitten as I have seen all bitten that came under
its spell--bitten as I vowed I never could be.
London's air is in my lungs and nostrils, its glamour in my eyes,
its roar and moan and music in my ears, its fever in my blood, its
quintessence in my heart.
I came to scoff and I pray to remain.
LONDON CHARLIE
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.
MOORE.
The celebrated novelist Ouida has made a general indictment against
the "_cruel ugliness and dulness_" of the streets of London.
The greatest city in the world, according to Mdlle. de la Ramé, has
"a curiously provincial appearance, and in many ways the aspect of a
third-rate town."
Even the aristocratic quarters are "absolutely and terribly
depressing and tedious"; and as for _decorative beauty_, this is
all she can find of it in London:--
An ugly cucumber frame like Battersea Park Hall, gaudily
coloured; a waggon drawn by poor, suffering horses, and laden
with shrieking children, going to Epping Forest; open-air
preachers ranting hideously of hell and the devil; gin-palaces,
music-halls, and the flaring gas-jets on barrows full of rotting
fruit, are all that London provides in the way of enjoyment or
decoration for its multitudes!
Instead of which, I am free to maintain that no town of my
acquaintance has such diversity of entertainment.
Paris has the bulge in the trifling, foolish matter of theatrical
plays and players. But London has more and finer playhouses; as good
opportunities of hearing great music; and infinitely larger and
better-appointed music-halls.
London has now the finest libraries, museums, and
picture-galleries; and as for out-door entertainment, no town
possesses such remarkable variety as is offered at the Imperial
Institute, the Crystal and Alexandra Palaces, Olympia, and Earl's
Court. Thereby hangs a tale.
It must be that the provincial friends who visit me are not as other
men. I hear of people receiving guests from the country and taking
them out for nice walks to the National Gallery, South Kensington
Museum, the Tower, and other places of cultured dissipation
provided by the generous rate-payer to discourage and kill off the
cheap-tripper; but I have no such luck.
To my ardent, blushing commendation of national eleemosynary
entertainments, the rude provincials who assail my hospitality reply
with a rude provincial wink.
Frequent failure has, I fear, stripped my plausibility of its
pristine bloom. Time was when I could boldly recommend Covent Garden
Market at four o'clock in the morning as a first-rate attraction to
the provincial pilgrim of pleasure, but your stammering tongue and
quailing eye are plaguy mockers of your useful villainy.
Mrs. Dangle herself begins to look doubtfully when, on our
periodical little pleasure trips, I repeat the customary: "Tower!
eh? It will be _such_ a treat!"
Ah me! Confidence was a beautiful thing. The world grows too
cynical. Earl's Court is the thin end of the wedge by which the
hydra-headed serpent of unbelief is bred to fly roughshod over the
thin ice of irresolute dissimulation, to nip the mask of pretence
in the bud, and with its cold, uncharitable eye to suck the very
life-blood of that confidence which is the corner-stone and
sheet-anchor of friendly trust 'twixt man and man.
Be that as it may, my praise of County Council Parks and County
Council Bands, of Tower history and Kensington culture, is as
ineffectual as a Swedish match in a gale.
My visitors, as with one accord, reply, "That is neither here nor
there. We are going to Earl's Court."
Thus, Captandem had come to town, and said "he wanted to see things."
I tempted him with the usual programme.
"I am told," I insinuated, "that the Ethnographical Section of the
British Museum 'silently but surely teaches many beautiful lessons.'"
"I daresay," he sneered.
"The educational facilities furnished by South Kensington Museum"--
"Educational fiddlesticks," interrupted he.
"The Tower," I went on, "is improving to the mind."
"I have had some."
"The National Gallery"--
"Be hanged!" he snorted. "Do you take me for an Archæological
Conference? or a British Association picnic?"
"Well," I began, in my most winning Board-meeting manner, "if you
don't like my suggestions, you can go to"--
"Earl's Court," he opportunely snapped.
* * * * *
He then explained that he had been reading in _The Savoy_, a poem by
Sarojini Chattopâdhyây on "Eastern Dancers," commencing thus:--
Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what passionate
spirits aflaming with fire
Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens that glimmer around
them in fountains of light?
O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music that cleaveth the
stars like a wail of desire,
And beautiful dancers with houri-like faces bewitch the voluptuous
watches of night.
The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter and die in the maze
of their gem-tangled hair,
And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies of lips
that are opiate-sweet,
Their glittering garments of purple are burning like tremulous
dawns in the quivering air,
And exquisite, subtle, and slow are the tinkle and tread of their
rhythmical slumber-soft feet.
Now silent, now singing and swaying and swinging, like blossoms
that bend to the breezes or showers,
Now wantonly winding, they flash, now they falter, and lingering
languish in radiant choir,
Their jewel-bright arms and warm, wavering, lily-long fingers
enchant thro' the summer-swift hours,
Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, their passionate
spirits aflaming with fire.
When I had finished reading this too-too all but morsel of
exquisiteness, the Boy said he'd be punctured if he could exactly
catch the hang of the thing (the Philistine!), but he thought
he would like some of those (the heathen!), and having seen an
announcement that a troupe of Eastern Dancers were then appearing
at Earl's Court, he had determined to let his passionate, with
fire-aflaming spirit "drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth
heavens."
* * * * *
On the way to Earl's Court, I filled up the Boy with such general
information about Nautch Girls, as I had gathered in my studies.
I informed him that nothing could exceed the transcendent beauty,
both in form and lineament, of these admirable creatures; that their
dancing was the most elegant and gently graceful ever seen, for that
it comprised no prodigious springs, no vehement pirouettes, no
painful tension of the muscles, or extravagant contortions of the
limbs; no violent sawing of the arms; no unnatural curving of the
limbs, no bringing of the legs at right angles with the trunk; no
violent hops or jerks, or dizzy jumps.
The Nautch Girl's arms, I assured him, move in unison with her
tiny, naked feet, which fall on earth as mute as snow. She
occasionally turns quickly round, expanding the loose folds of her
thin petticoat, when the heavy silk border with which it is trimmed
opens into a circle round her, showing for an instant the beautiful
outline of her form, draped with the most becoming and judicious
taste.
She wears, I continued, scarlet or purple celestial pants, and veils
of beautiful gauze with tassels of silver and gold. The graceful
management of the veil by archly peeping under it, then radiantly
beaming over it, was in itself enough, I assured him, to make one's
eyes celestially pant, but--
"Dis way for Indu juggler, Indu tumbler, Nautch Dance," at this
moment cried a shrill voice at my side; and I perceived that we were
actually standing outside the Temple where the passionate spirits in
celestial pants drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens!
* * * * *
The performance had begun. An able-bodied, well-footed Christy
Minstrel was doing a sort of shuffling walk-round, droning out
the while a monotonous wail in a voice that might have been more
profitably employed to kill cats.
"Lor'," the Boy complained, "will that suffering nigger last long?
Couldn't they get him to reserve his funeral service for his own
graveyard? Ask them how soon they mean to trot out the exquisite,
subtle Tremulous Dawns,--the swaying and swinging Sandalwood
Slumber-soft Flutter in celestial pants,--the wantonly winding
Lingering Languishers?"
I approached one of the artistes--a lean and dejected Fakir,
picturesquely attired in a suit of patched atmosphere.
"That's very nice," I said conciliatorily, "very nice indeed, in
its way. But we don't much care for Wagner's music, nor Christy
Minstrels. We would prefer to take a walk until your cornerman is
through: at what time will the Nautch Girls appear?"
"Yes, yes," the heathen Hindu replied, with a knowing leer, "Nautch
Girl ver' good, ver' good; Lonndonn Charlee, he likee Nautch Girl,
ver' good."
"Yes," I said. "What time do they kick off?"
"Yes, yes, ver' good, ver' good, Nautch Girl," the mysterious
Oriental replied; "she Nautch Girl bimeby done now; me go do conjur,
ver' good, ver' good."
"Nautch Girl nearly done?" I cried. "Why, where _is_ the Nautch
Girl!"
"That Nautch Girl is dance now, ver' good, ver' good. Lonndonn
Charlee, he likee Nautch Girl, ver' good."
At last the horrible truth dawned on me!
The person we had taken for a Christy Minstrel was the wantonly
winding, lingeringly languishing Nautch Girl!!!
* * * * *
After that we visited other "side shows," and saw more dejected
Hindoos perform marvellous feats of jugglery and conjuring, with the
aid of trained mongooses, monkeys, and goats. Also an extraordinary
game of football by Burmese players, who catch a glass ball on their
necks and ankles as dexterously as Ranjitsinhji catches a cricket
ball with his hands. Also we saw the acrobats who balance themselves
on a bamboo pole by gripping it with their stomachs--a trick which I
have since practised with but incomplete success.
We also saw the juggling of an Indian humorist with two attendants,
who, if they did not realise all the wonders we have read about
Indian conjurers, did at least perform miracles with the English
language and the linked sweetness of music too long drawn out.
The attendants sat on the ground and beat monotonous drums, what
time the conjurer walked to and fro and played a peculiarly baneful
type of Indian bagpipe.
"Ram, ram, ram, ram, kurte heren ugh!" sang the conjurer.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh! ugh!" sang the chorus, rolling their eyes and
swaying their shoulders.
"Baen, deina, juldee, chup, chup!" droned the conjurer.
"Chup, chup, chup, chup," wailed the chorus.
"Hum mugurer hue! hum padre hue! hum booker se mur jata hue!" cried
the conjurer.
"Hue! hue! hue! hue!" replied the chorus.
Then, "one, two, three, four, five, nine, sumting, fifteen, twenty,"
cried the conjurer, fumbling with his conjuring gear; "see dere,
dere de egg; Lonndonn chicken egg, chicken egg, chicken egg."
"Chicken egg, chicken egg," repeated the chorus in triumphant
tones; and banged the mournful drums.
By weird Hindu enchantment, they beguiled Captandem to the platform
to assist, and having got him there, proceeded to make him wish he
wasn't.
"Lonndonn Charlee," cried the conjurer, triumphantly
introducing him; "Lonndonn Charlee, Lonndonn Charlee, say now
uchmeechulouchuadmee," and grinned like a heathen.
"Uchmeechulouchuadmee," wailed the chorus.
"Uchmee--uchmee--oh! I can't say it," cried poor London Charlie,
and the chorus, showing all its flashing teeth, victoriously droned
a mocking "Bu-u-uh!" which obviously completed London Charlie's
discomfiture and distress.
"Lennee me Lonndonn sixpence, Lonndonn Charlee," cried the
conjurer; and the youthful Captandem, after much inward searching,
produced the coin demanded.
The conjurer took it in his hand, placed it under a flower-pot, and
said: "Ulla ulla juldeechupalee"; and the chorus shouted, "Chupalee."
Then followed two or three more experiments and practical jokes on
London Charlie's confiding innocence, till at last London Charlie,
unwilling to bear any more ridicule, leaped from the platform and
desperately fled the scene--looking as unlike the cocksure London
Charlie that went up, as doth the tin-kettled feline maniac which
has fallen amongst felonious boys, to the smug and purring pet of
the ancient spinster's fireside.
Poor little London Charlie.
It was not till long afterwards that he remembered his sixpence.
Poor Captandem!
* * * * *
Still he enjoyed himself, and, if the truth must be told, there are
moments when even I am less amused by the mummies and fossils of
the museums than by the lights, the fountains, the colour, and the
movement of Earl's Court.
I wonder why it never occurs to the philanthropists and
municipalities which provide picture-galleries, libraries, and
other elevating institutions for the people, to try the effect upon
Whitechapel or Ancoats of a genuine place of _amusement_.
The class from which our philanthropists chiefly spring, regard
with suspicion nearly everything in which the common people find
spontaneous pleasure; and, instead of helping the development and
improvement of such natural sources of delight, they only aim to
"elevate" the masses by mortifying their flesh and wearying their
souls.
To "elevate" them, the philanthropists close their eyes to all that
delights the common people, and thrust upon them, willy-nilly,
something which interests them not at all, something which they
cannot understand, something which nips and chills and infinitely
bores them.
The philanthropists, when they give of their benefactions to the
people, cannot, or will not, see that to teach a mouse to fly, it is
needful for the teacher to begin by stepping down to the earth. They
insist, as a condition of their generosity, that the people shall be
thereby flabbergasticated, petriflummoxed, and aggrawetblankalysed
with everlasting doldrums.
Show me, anywhere, 'twixt Widnes and Heaven--which is as wide a
stretch as imagination may compass--any public institution founded
by private munificence for the people's delectation, to which the
people flock with cheerful alacrity, or wherein the people bear
themselves with anything like holiday jauntiness.
The public museums and picture-galleries are very fine institutions,
but how much do they affect or brighten the lives of the mass? How
do they touch the common people? How many of the Slum-scum come? and
how often? Do they enjoy the painted and sculptured masterpieces
presented to their admiration? Is it possible that, without guidance
or explanation, they can understand the beauty of these, their
treasures?
Behold the stragglers that come--how puzzled, awestruck, furtive,
and ill-at-ease they are! There is fear of the Superior Person
in their face, and of the policeman in their tread. They stare
at the frames, at the skylights, at the polished floors, at the
attendants, and at the modified Minervas in No. 9 _pince-nez_ who
are the most regular frequenters of such places; but they scarcely
see the pictures. They walk on their toes to prevent noise, cough
apologetically, shrivel under the withering glances of the modified
Minervas, and look ostentatiously unhappy.
The modified Minervas walk round with the air of exclusive
proprietorship. They are at home. They pervade the place. The
young ones stare with mild amazement or languid curiosity at the
unaccustomed, aberrant hewer of wood or drawer of water, as if
speculating as to which of the more remote planets he sprang from;
the elder ones glare at him through their eyeglasses with such
scathing disdain as to confirm him in his opinion that his entrance
there was an unpardonable liberty.
The public museums and picture-galleries are made, not for the
common people of the seething slums, but for the modified Minervas
of the genteel suburbs. These are the legatees of the public
philanthropists. That which is given for the "elevation of the
masses" tends in practice to elevate nothing except the already
tilted tips of their particularly cultured noses. The benevolent
Croesus produces no happiness by his benefaction, except that which
these ladies derive from the admiring contemplation of their refined
superiority.
What the common people want is the glitter of spectacle, the
intoxication of beauty and grace, of music and dance; the sensation
of light and brightness and stirring movement.
The wisest thing to do with appetites so old-established and
deep-rooted is, not to suppress, but to guide them.
Obstruct them, and they will run into dark and dirty channels out of
sight; recognise and cultivate them in the clear light of day, and
they may produce in every town even better sources of amusement than
Earl's Court.
LONDON GHOSTS
I pass the populous houses
In terrace or street or square,
I hear the rattle of chariots
And the sound of life on the air;
And up at the curtained windows,
Where the flaming gaslights glow,
I see 'mid the flitting shadows
Of the guests that come and go,
The paler and dimmer shadows
Of the ghosts of the Long Ago.
CHARLES MACKAY.
Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain
covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had
been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman.
The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal
in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there
came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the
Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the
stones, transformed them again into animated creatures of flesh and
blood--"a great company of youths and maidens who followed her down
the mountain."
As I take my walks in London-town, I think of that story and long
for a pitcher of the magic Water of Life.
For if imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till
he find it stopping a bung-hole, and if, as biologists tell us,
the whole of our mortal tissue is unceasingly being shed and
renewed, every brick and stone in London pavement, church, inn, and
dwelling-house must have in it some part of human greatness; for
the flower of Britain's brain and valour, the heroes of her most
glorious service and achievement--poets, philosophers, prelates,
princes, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, explorers--the greatest
of those who have "toiled and studied for mankind," have lived in
London.
Milton used to thank God that he had been born in London.
Shakespeare acted in Blackfriars and near London Bridge; his wit
flashed nightly at the Mermaid; in the shadow of Whitehall, he broke
his heart for Mary Fitton; and here he wove the magic of his plays.
That is the consideration which makes London's enchantment so
irresistible. Here is the actual, visible scene of the most
momentous deeds of our history, of the most memorable episodes in
our country's fiction, and of the workaday, toiling, rejoicing, and
sorrowing of the greatest of our English brothers and sisters.
At Charing Cross the statue of Charles I. on his Rabelais horse
faces the site of the scaffold "in the open street," on to which
the king stepped one morning through a window of his palace of
Whitehall. Pepys saw General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered
at Charing Cross, he (Harrison) "looking as cheerful as any man
could in that condition." And he gravely adds that Sir Harry
Vane, about to be beheaded on Tower Hill, urgently requested the
executioner to take off his head so as not to hurt a pimple on his
neck.
[Illustration: STRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN, &c. ANNO 1647.]
Trooper Lockyer, a brave young soldier of seven years' service,
though only twenty-three years old, having helped to seize General
Cromwell's colours at the Bull in Bishopsgate, was shot in Paul's
Churchyard by grim Oliver's orders. His crime was that he was a
Leveller or early Socialist, "with hot notions as to human freedom,
and the rate at which millenniums are obtainable. He falls shot in
Paul's Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women," says
Carlyle, Paul's Cathedral being then a horse-guard, with horses
stamping in the canons' stalls, and its leaden roof melted into
bullets. On the following Monday the corpse having been "watched
and wept over" meantime "in the eastern regions of the City," brave
Lockyer was buried "at the new churchyard in Westminster":--
The corpse was adorned with bundles of Rosemary, one half
stained with blood. . . . Some thousands followed in rank and
file: all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and
to their breasts; and the women brought up the rear.
How actual and visible and present they are, as one stands on the
spots where these great events were transacted! And such histories
has nearly every street and every ancient building. London is not
paved with gold. It is paved with the glory of England's mighty dead.
* * * * *
The name is Legion of the eminences whose last cumbrous clog of clay
is buried here.
In Westminster's venerable and beautiful Abbey, where I saw
Gladstone buried last June, I can look on the bury-hole of Edward
the Confessor, King of our remote Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and one
of the prime founders of English liberties; I see the tomb of
that butcher Edward who subdued Wales and overthrew Scotland's
Wallace; here, too, is the grave of the third Edward, who, by his
raiding and stealing, laid the foundations of England's glorious
commerce. Here, under his Agincourt helmet, lies the valiant dust of
Falstaff's Prince Hal, and of three other Royal Henrys. Bloody Mary
rests from her fiery rage; Mary Queen of Scots is united in death to
her terrible foe, Elizabeth of England; and two Stuart Kings repose
uncomplainingly by the side of William of Orange.
Here mighty troublers of the earth,
Who swam to sov'reign rule through seas of blood;
The oppressive, sturdy, man-destroying villains,
Who ravag'd kingdoms, and laid empires waste,
And in a cruel wantonness of power
Thinn'd states of half their people, and gave up
To want the rest; now, like a storm that's spent,
Lie hushed.
From these crumbled majesties I turn with reverence to aisles
hallowed by the mould of Darwin, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning,
Macaulay, Livingstone, Garrick, and Handel.
Beneath St. Paul's great dome my gratitude can tender homage to the
names of Titanic Turner, Reynolds, Landseer, Napier, Cornwallis,
Wellington, and Nelson.
Think what a procession if all these could be sprinkled with the
Water of Life! If to each fragment of noble dust in this huge,
unshapely, and overgrown wilderness of masonry, one could call back
the soul that sometime quickened it, what a great city, in Walt
Whitman's sense, would London be!
Every town cherishes the sacred memory of its own particular great
man, but London bears in its bosom intimate and familiar tokens of
them all. The city and its neighbourhood for miles round are marked
with historic and literary associations. The place is all composed
of great men's fame and chapters of world-history. London Clay is
made of London's Pride, and London Pride grows in the London Clay.
Not a quarter, not a suburb is free of hallowed associations.
Within half an hour's stroll from my home at Highgate I can visit
the pleasaunce of which Andrew Marvell wrote--
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown,
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness.
I cross the threshold of the adjoining house, and stand within the
actual domicile of staid Andrew's improper neighbour, Mistress Nell
Gwynne. It was from a window of this house she threatened to drop
her baby, unless her Merry Monarch would there and then confer name
and title on him; and thus came England into the honour and glory
of a ducal race of St. Albans.
When Nell Gwynne looked up from that signally successful jest, she
may have seen, across the street, the two houses wherein, a few
years before, had dwelt the stern Protector of the Commonwealth and
the husband of his daughter, Ireton. I wonder what she thought of
old Noll!
The houses stand there yet, substantial, square, their red brick
"mellowed but not impaired by time."
The "restored" Charles had had the corpses of over a hundred
Puritans, including Admiral Blake's, and that of Cromwell's old
mother, dug up from their graves and flung in a heap in St.
Margaret's Churchyard; he had hung in chains on Tyburn gallows
the disinterred clay of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. I wonder
he was not prompted to pull down these dwellings of his father's
"murderers." He must have seen them often. Their windows overlooked
the garden of his light-o'-love.
Did _she_ intercede to have them preserved? As I linger there, I
like to think so.
* * * * *
Still within a half-mile circle of my home, on the same Highgate
Hill whereon stand the houses of Nell Gwynne and Ireton, I can show
my children the "werry, indentical" milestone from which--_ita
legenda scripta_--Dick Whittington was recalled by the sound of Bow
Bells.
At the top of Highgate Hill, and on the slope of another hill where
a man (since dead in the workhouse) saved Queen Victoria's life,
stands the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. Here, and,
it is said, in a little inn near by, he entertained such company as
Shelley, Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and--surely not in the little
inn?--Carlyle.
Coleridge lies buried in the churchyard hard by, and in Highgate
Cemetery I find the graves of George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Charles
Dickens' daughter Dora, Tom Sayers the prize-fighter, and Lillywhite
the cricketer.
* * * * *
Harry Lowerison has a way of teaching children by taking them to
see the streets and monuments of London; and I can think of no more
interesting or promising mode of instruction.
For in these scenes English history is indelibly and picturesquely
written, back to the date of our earliest records.
I stood one day in Cannon Street, when a passing omnibus-horse
chanced to slip. The vehicle swerved across the asphalt, and, to
complete the catastrophe, the horse fell.
Then, hey, presto! in the twinkling of an eye, the street was
blocked with a compact mass of "blue carts and yellow omnibuses,
varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and brown cabs,
pale loads of yellow straw, rusty red iron clanking on paintless
carts, high white wool packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams;
sunlight sparkling on the brass harness, gleaming from the carriage
panels; jingle, jingle, jingle."
A bustling, shuffling, pushing, wriggling, twisting wonder! One
moment's damming of the stream had caused such a gathering as
Imperial Cæsar never dreamt of.
I was pushed back against the wall, and then observed that I stood
by the London Stone--a stone which "'midst the tangling horrors
of the wood" by Thames side, may have been drenched with the human
gore of druidical sacrifices. Captives bound in wicker rods may have
burned upon its venerable surface to glut the fury of savage gods.
That stone stood here when Constantine built the London Wall around
the "citty."
It was here when, upon an island formed by a river which crept
sullenly through "a fearful and terrible plain," which none might
approach after nightfall without grievous danger, King Sebert of the
East Saxons built to the glory of St. Peter the Apostle that church
which is known to our generation as Westminster Abbey.
The London Stone stood when Sebert built a church on the ruins of
Diana's Temple, where now stands St. Paul's Cathedral. London was
built before Rome, before the fall of the Assyrian monarchs, over a
thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Who knows? Where I stood, old Chaucer may have stood to see his
Canterbury Pilgrims pass. Falstaff, reeling home from Dame Quickly's
Tavern with his load of sherris-sack, may have sat here to ponder on
his honour. Shakespeare may have leaned on the old milestone as he
watched the Virgin Queen's pageant to Tilbury Fort in Armada times.
Through James Ball's and Jack Cade's uprising, through the Wars of
the Roses, the Fire of London, the Plague, the Stuart upheaval, and
Cromwell's stirring times--through all these the London Stone stood,
"fixed in the ground very deep," says Stowe, "that if carts do runne
against it through negligence the wheels be broken, and the stone
itself unshaken." And now it links the bustle and roar of modern
London with the strife out of which London grew, and keeps our
conceits reminded of the forefathers who lived and fought in Britain
here to make the way more smooth for us.
Ere cabs or omnibuses were; ere telephones, telegraphs, or railways;
ere Magna Charta; before William the Conqueror brought our ancient
nobility's ancestors over from Normandy--London knew this stone.
It has endured longer than any king, it has survived generations and
dynasties of monarchs. "Walls have ears," they say, and Shakespeare
"finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, and sermons in
stones."
What a tale would he tell that could find the tongue of the London
Stone!
Think of all the men and women who have passed it, seen it with
their eyes, felt it with their hands; the millions of simple,
faithful, anonymous people who have cheerfully slaved, and bled,
and died, to help--as each according to his lights conceived--the
honour, safety, and well-being of his country.
We have paid homage to the celebrated dead: what about those that
have done their duty and have received neither fame nor monument?
Their blood, too, cries out to me from the paving-stones of London.
Alas for men! that they should be so blind,
And laud as gods the scourges of their kind!
Call each man glorious who has led a host,
And him most glorious who has murdered most!
Alas! that men should lavish upon these
The most obsequious homage of their knees--
That those who labour in the arts of peace,
Making the nations prosper and increase,
Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave,
Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save--
But that the Leaders who despoil the earth,
Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth,
Should with their statues block the public way,
And stand adored as demi-gods for aye.
But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter
Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these
unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life.
During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or
galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes
painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's
great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared
in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first
frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the
valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her
three young charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in
the flames.
When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des
Fédérés in the Père-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the
Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse.
My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the
Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my
homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer.
THE MERMAID TAVERN
There hath been great sale and utterance of wine,
Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine,
In every country, region, and nation,
But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation;
And the Bore's Head, near London Stone,
The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known;
The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head,
And many like places that make noses red;
Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry,
And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree;
The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange,
King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range;
The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,
Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.
(_Newes From Bartholomew Fayre_; an undated, anonymous black-letter
poem.)
"Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century,
"was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns."
The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and
dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum,
sometimes too the Theatre.
The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and,
strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An
old song of the period describes a feast of this sort, and tells
how each woman carried with her some goose, or pork, the wing of
a capon, or a pigeon pie. Arrived at the tavern, they ordered the
best wine. They praised the liquor, and, under its inspiriting
influence, discussed their husbands, with whom they were naturally
dissatisfied; and then went home by different streets, perfidiously
assuring their lawful masters that they had been to church.
This evidence is useful and seemly to be here set down, as
indicating the true origin of habits for which much undeserved
censure has been in these later days inflicted upon mere imitators.
The men, whose chiefest fault has ever been their too great
readiness to follow the women, fell insensibly into the habit, and
have been there ever since.
[Illustration: COURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN.]
And what a glorious time they have had of it! To recall only
Fuller's description of the "wit combates" between Shakespeare's
"quickness of wit and invention" against Ben Jonson's "far higher
learning," and "solid, but slow performances," at the historic
Mermaid; and Beaumont's rapturous praise in his epistle to Jonson
of the banquet of wit and admirable conversation which they had
enjoyed at the same place!
Oh to have been at the Mermaid on the night when Jonson had been
burnt out at the Bankside Globe! or on the night of Shakespeare's
first performance before Elizabeth--when he had first, perhaps, set
eyes on Mary Fitton!
All the wits of that age of giants were wont to assemble, after
the theatre, at the Mermaid, the Devil, and the Boar. Exuberant
Fletcher and graver Beaumont would "wentle" in from their lodging
on Bankside, wearing each other's clothes, and wrangling perhaps
about their plots--a habit which on one occasion caused them to be
arrested, a fussy listener having heard them disputing in a tavern
as to whether they should or should not assassinate the king. Poor,
drunken, profligate Greene, and his debauched companions, Marlowe
and George Peele,--all of whom ended their riotous courses with
painful and shameful deaths,--are sure to have lurched in on many
a razzling night. Regular visitors, too, were "Crispinus" Dekker,
and his friend Wilson the actor, whom Beaumont mentions as a
boon-companion over the Mermaid wine:--
Filled with such moisture, in most grievous qualms
Did Robert Wilson write his singing psalms.
From Whitehall, with "their port so proud, their buskin, and their
plume," would swagger in Raleigh, Surrey, Spenser, and others of the
wits from Elizabeth's ruffling Court. Drummond of Hawthornden came
here at least once on a visit to Ben Jonson; but this must have been
after Shakespeare had deserted the festive board for the crested
pomp of a gentlemanly life at Stratford, "coming up every term to
take tobacco and see new motions."
Sombre John Webster would be here sometimes, sometimes Massinger,
Thomas Middleton, Lilly, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, Day,
Wilkins, Ford, Camden, Ned Drayton, Fulke Greville, Harrington,
Edmund Waller, Martin, Morley, Selden, the future Bishop of
Winchester, _et cetera, et cetera, et cetera_!
What a galaxy! what a feast!
It is well for your peace of mind, my good wife, that the Mermaid
and its company have vanished into the dark immensity. How long
would I wait, and cheerfully, for so much as a peep through the
window at that glorious company!
* * * * *
Dryden claims that the Mermaid did not receive such pleasant and
such witty fellows in the reigns of Bess and James as did the Royal
Oak, the Mitre, and the Roebuck after the Restoration; but to me
the haunts of Wycherley, Otway, Villiers of Buckingham, Wilmot of
Rochester, and the periwigged bucks and bloods and maccaronies in
velvets and lace of Charles the Second's dissolute Court, are, as
compared with the Falstaffian Taverns of the Shakespeareans, but
dull and dry dens.
So, if you will, of your grace, excuse the pun and the hasty skip,
we will give these pretty gentlemen a miss, and jump at once into a
fresh chapter and an account of a curious experience that once upon
a time came in a tavern to me.
WAS SHAKESPEARE A SCOTSMAN?
O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child.
SCOTT.
At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more;
his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had
indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for
the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze.
Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us--Bacon's _Essays_ and
Donnelly's _Cryptogram_!--in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was
mine host, then, of a literary turn? Ay, I had noted his gushing
praise of Burns and Walter Scott; and, by the way, what was it he
said about Shakespeare's visit to Edinburgh? He had shown me a
letter in a book: I had been too intensely bored by his trowelled
praise of Scottish lochs, Scottish mountains, haggis, parritch,
usquebaugh, and Scottish poetry, to pay much heed--but yes, this
must be it. Drummond's _Sonnets_, and here evidently was the letter,
signed by Ben Jonson, indorsed "to my very good friend, the lairde
of Hawthornden":--
Master vill,
quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised
yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my
Lord Sempill his interlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill
Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit
the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits
your answer:
So give him the play,
And lette him awaye
To your assured friend
and loving servand,
BEN JONSON.
From my lodging in the canongait,
Mrch the twelft, 1619.
So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to
Edinburgh too?
I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I
almost cease to notice them.
Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before--though I have taken
keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in--well,
the land where they do raise Bacon--and found Shakespeare out.
Could it indeed be true that Shakespeare was an ignorant impostor,
whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the
stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the
Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the
same with intent to deceive?
To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.
Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't
know.
I saw Shakespeare's _Works_ on the bookshelf, and reached the volume
down. It opened at the _Sonnets_.
Ah! what exquisite music! But--what was this?
_Your_ name, from hence, immortal life shall have,
Though _I_, once gone, to all the world must die.
Again in Sonnet XXXVIII.--
If my slight muse do please these curious days,
The pain be _mine_, but _thine_ shall be the praise.
And in the next:--
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is't but mine own when I praise _thee_?
Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?
And again:--
_My life hath in this line some interest._
What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely
emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to
solve the mystery?
By Jove! here _was_ a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as
it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell
the words
"MISTRESS MARY FITTON";
and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady
of the _Sonnets_, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot,
and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover,
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover
whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death--Sir William
Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!
Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been
established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of
_Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton_. The perfect
anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly
accentuated line in the whole of the _Sonnets_, was therefore
something more than curious.
I next took the entire passage:--
But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
_My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with me shall stay._
After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming
these four lines, these words:--
"Learn ye that have a little wit y^t FRANCIS BACON THESE
LINES TO MISTRESS MARY FITTON, ELIZABETH'S MAID OF HONOUR at
Whitehalle, hath writt."
But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words
of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram.
It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it
were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling
alphabetic signs.
Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect
the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more
bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became. My blood was a-fire, my
head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels
and consonants.
The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to
brain fever or madness.
I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless,
sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window.
It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of
"fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets
girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs
of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam
of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff,
stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and
bartisans.
Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's
feathers, glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night.
The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock,
looked like a match held up to show the darkness.
The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and
rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious
to the scene.
The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain
I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal
pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped
off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug
at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep.
Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some
impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditative
pose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I
beheld an Apparition.
A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered
(no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his
movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads,
shone horridly.
My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze
fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking
like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair
standing up round his neck like a frill.
He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror,
issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his
vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the
sofa.
For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely
excited. I felt that something was about to be revealed to me; this
was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare,
Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the
floor.
I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.
The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and
flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to
endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct
told me we should do business.
He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped
eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness;
his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs
straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps
and flings and prancings.
So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to
catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was
a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a
variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet
was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of
oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest
rye dangled proudly by his side.
"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed
ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till
your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are
Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson,
Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and
Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord
Brougham; and Chalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone,
and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and
Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to
suppose that the author of Shakespeare's _Plays_ was an exception?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said, "but--er--have I had the pleasure of
meeting you before?"
"Bah!" said he, hastily dancing a strathspey, "ma fute is on ma
native dew, ma name is Roderick; I am," he continued, drawing
himself up to the full height of his figure, which was about six
inches, "I am the Speerit o' Scottish Literature."
"Oh, I know you now," I said, "you're the spirit men call the Small
Scotch."
"Where will ye find the Small Scotch that's fu' sax inches in
height?" answered Roderick, with asperity.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said. "But I didn't ring for you, did I?"
"I'm no slave o' the ring," proudly answered Roderick, as he broke
into the opening steps of a complicated sword-dance. "I came of my
ain sweet will, just to improve your mind."
"That's very kind," said I; "will you take a chair, or a tumbler?"
The Spirit hissed angrily, as if a small soda had been poured over
him, and I prudently abstained from further interruptions.
As some of my readers are perhaps less fluently acquainted with the
Scotch than myself, I take the liberty of translating into English
the conversation which ensued.
The Spirit began by asking whether I regarded Shakespeare as the
greatest poet that ever lived, or as the meanest sweater that ever
exploited the gifts of the helpless poor--meaning in this case
Francis Bacon.
I responded that I did _not_ think Bacon a man of that sort.
"Well," continued the Spirit, "do you think that a man who could
scarcely write his own name could write _Hamlet_?"
"It is a nice point," I said.
"Very well," said the Spirit, dancing a series of fantastic Highland
flings in the unsubstantial air, and turning a double somersault at
the finish; "if, as everybody admits, Bacon was one of the blackest
scoundrels that ever lived, his mind could not have conceived the
noble philosophy to which his name is attached. And if Shakespeare,
as the signature to his will shows, could scarcely write his own
name, he could not have written his own _Plays_."
"Same again," said I.
"Besides which," continued the Spirit, "neither Shakespeare nor
Bacon was a Scotsman."
"That settles 'em," quoth I.
"Now, look at here," continued the Spirit, aggressively shaking his
forefinger under my nose; "whoever wrote Shakespeare's _Plays_ must
have written Shakespeare's _Sonnets_."
"Undoubtedly," said I.
"And the _Sonnets_ were dedicated by the publisher to 'W. H.,' who
is styled 'the onlie begetter of these ensuing _Sonnets_.'"
"Well?"
"The publisher must have known who the author was."
"Very likely."
"And in referring to the '_onlie_ begetter,' he clearly implies that
the authorship was claimed by many, and in furnishing no more than
the initials of 'the onlie begetter,' he indicates that the real
author had reasons for concealing the authorship."
"That may be so."
"Well, why should a man desire to conceal his authorship of such
exquisite sonnets--sonnets of whose surpassing excellence he himself
is so convinced that he writes--
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this,
--unless the _Sonnets_ contained matter likely to bring him into
trouble? For instance, if a man had, in the fervour of his youth,
poured out such warm expression of his love as the _Sonnets_
contain, and very earnestly desired, later on in life, to marry
another lady, he might be anxious then that the authorship of the
_Sonnets_ should be temporarily forgotten. But Bacon never did
marry. And Shakespeare married young, and deserted his wife; and she
survived his death. Therefore, no such motive for secrecy could
have affected Bacon or Shakespeare."
At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for
effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in the
_Strand Magazine_.
"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the
detective."
At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself
right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went
on as if nothing had happened:--
"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his
own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."
"What! The lot?"
"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon's _Essays_ and
Shakespeare's _Plays_ prove that they were written by the same man.
That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in
the _Plays_ and the _Essays_, must have studied the law. But if he
wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had
time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts
a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the
human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare's _Plays_."
"There's something in that," said I.
"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even
as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the
ceiling, "we have now established these facts:--
"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called
Shakespeare's _Plays_ are 'W. H.'
"Secondly, that he had an intensely painful love affair in his
youth, and married another woman in his later years.
"Thirdly, that he was a lawyer by education but not by practice.
"Now, who was he? We have yet more evidence to aid us in identifying
him. There's Spenser's plaint that 'our pleasant Willy,' 'the man
whom Nature's self had made to mock herself and truth to imitate,'
had been 'dead of late,' and 'with him all joy and merriment.' We
have also the lines in the _Sonnets_:--
Make but my name thy love and love that still;
And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will.
The first name of 'W. H.,' therefore, is Will. And this Will had
great trouble at one period of his life, which silenced all his joy
and merriment. Again I ask you, Who was the man?"
And the Spirit, bubbling and shaking with eagerness, peered
anxiously into my face.
"What great Scotsman of that great period," he continued, screaming
rather than speaking, "was brought up to the law and abandoned it
for the pursuit of literature and poetry? was driven nearly to
distraction by the loss of a mistress whom he loved more dearly
than life? went abroad to seek solace, and, returning after many
years, married another lady? wrote and left extant in his own name,
sonnets which are acknowledged to be perfect models of sweetness and
delicacy, sonnets which have never been eclipsed since his death?
who was the Scottish poet, friend of the London actors; friend of
Ben Jonson; the man who has left on record in British literature the
report of his conversations with Jonson; the man who, as you have
to-night seen by your landlord's letter, knew Shakespeare and lent
him plays which are not known now by the names they then bore--come,
come, man, who is this W. H.? Cannot you guess it even now?"
"William of Hawthornden?"
"Of course, of course," the Spirit cried. "Look you, now, how
plain it is. William Drummond of Hawthornden was tinged with the
conceits and romances of the Italian school, as was the author of
_Romeo and Juliet_. He wrote histories, as did the author of _The
History of Henry VII._, attributed to Bacon; as did the author of
the historical plays, attributed to Shakespeare. He wrote many
reflections on Death, as did the author of the _Sonnets_ and the
_Plays_. And who but a Scotsman, I would like you to tell me, could
have furnished the local colour and the Scottish character to the
tragedy of _Macbeth_?"
"Why, man, it's as plain as a pikestaff. The greatest Englishman
that ever lived was naturally a Scotsman. The greatest genius of any
clime or time was William Drummond of Hawthornden."
And, in the frenzy of his exultation, Roderick leaped high again
into the air, turned seventeen somersaults in succession, and,
alighting upon my nose, danced a wild Highland fling of triumph and
defiance.
It was certainly very plausible--as plausible, at least, as any
argument that I had heard in support of the theory that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare's _Plays_. I was almost persuaded: then a difficulty
occurred to me.
"But," I said, "Drummond of Hawthornden was not born till 1585, and
some of Shakespeare's _Plays_ appear to have been produced before
1593."
"Well," answered the Spirit, carelessly sticking his sword into
my nose and sitting on it, "what has age to do with genius? Has
not another poet said, 'He was not of an age, but for all time'?
Besides, the Scottish are a precocious people and byordinar'. And
furthermore, who told you that Drummond was born in '85?"
"English history says so."
"English history!" answered the Spirit, with a sneer; "try Scotch."
"But," I still objected, "if Shakespeare wrote nothing, why did
Ben Jonson, who knew him well, praise his wit and his 'gentle
expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it
was necessary he should be stopped'?"
"Well," said Roderick, "and who said that Shakespeare wrote
nothing? I only said he did not write Shakespeare's _Works_. But he
wrote other poetry--poetry which everybody knows--poetry as familiar
in every child's mouth as butterscotch. There is nothing finer of
its kind."
"It is strange," I muttered, "that I have never heard of it."
"What?" cried the Spirit, "never heard of 'Little Jack Horner'?
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie;
He pulled out a plum with his finger and thumb,
And said "What a good boy am I!"
"And is that Shakespeare's?" I exclaimed.
"And what for no'? It is a perfect specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon
English, without corrupt admixture of Norman or Roman words. It is
terse and dramatic. The very first line, in its revelation of the
hero's remote and solitary state, presents a powerful suggestion
of a contemplative character. His voracity, tempered by intense
conscientiousness, is indicated in a few clear, pertinent touches
that unmistakably betoken the master-hand. Yet the author's name
is lost in the dust of the centuries; it has eluded the vigilance
of antiquarian research. Only I am acquainted with the secret. If
you doubt it, turn the poem into an anagram, and the truth shall be
clear even to you."
"But," I began, "if"--
"Bah! Look at here!" cried Roderick, jumping to his feet and
brandishing his sword, "I came here to improve your mind; but if you
are not amenable to reason, it's no use talking. So get out of it,
ye puir, daft, gawkie Southron loon!"
And so saying, he struck me so terrible a blow across the nose with
his sword that I sneezed, and lo, behold! he was gone, and in the
place where he had been, was nothing but a great, busy, buzzing
moth, that hovered round my nose as though it had been a joy-beacon.
* * * * *
It was a strange experience. I don't know what to make of it. But
I don't think that Shakespeare was Bacon. And, as I hadn't the
slightest trace of headache when I awoke, I think that, after all,
the Scottish Spirit was right. Bacon hasn't a ham to stand on. Bacon
is smoked. To honest nostrils Bacon hereafter is rancid.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt henceforth as to the
authorship of "Little Jack Horner." Following Roderick's
instructions, I have taken the letters of the lines of that poem,
and have constructed with them an anagram which establishes beyond
possibility of dispute that Shakespeare wrote them.
I am prepared to prove it to the British Association, and defy
_The Daily Chronicle_. It is true the spelling is rather bad, but
Shakespeare's was notoriously beastly, so that is another proof in
my favour.
It is moreover a perfect anagram, in which each letter is used,
and used once only. The letters are L i t t l e j a c k
h o r n e r s a t i n a c o r n e r e a t i n g a
c h r i s t m a s p i e h e p u l l e d o u t a p l u m
w i t h h i s f i n g e r a n d t h u m b a n d s a i d
w h a t a g o o d b o y a m i.
Now, mark, hey presto! there's no deception; mix these letters and
form them into new combinations, and you evolve this remarkable,
startling, conclusive, and scientifically historical revelation:--
_=Mistir Shakesper aloan was the Lyturery
gent wich rote this Bootiful Pome in Elizabuth Raign, and Jaimce
had Damn Good Lauph.=_
Could anything be clearer?
FLEET STREET
When I go up that quiet cloistered court, running up like a
little secure haven from the stormy ocean of Fleet Street, and
see the doctor's gnarled bust on the bracket above his old hat,
I sometimes think the very wainscot must still be impregnated
with the fumes of his seething punch-bowl.
WASHINGTON IRVING.
My Bosom's Lord declares that it is more of a smell than a street;
but there is not a journalist of any literary pretension in Britain
who does not regard Fleet Street as the Mecca of his craft, and
instinctively turn his face towards it when he has occasion to say
his prayers.
It is the focus, the magnetic centre, and very heart of London's
Fairyland--the Capital of the Territory of Brick and Mortar Romance.
Its enchanted courts are the inner sanctuary of Haunted London. It
is the most astonishing sensation to step out of the hum and moan
and fret of the rushing and turbulent City's most bustling and
roaring street, into the absolute, cloistered stillness of, for
instance, the Temple; where, within fifty yards of Fleet Street, you
may stand by Oliver Goldsmith's grave and hear no sound save the
cooing of pigeons and the splashing of a fountain.
Fleet Street's air is the quintessence of English History. From the
Plague and the Fire to the Jubilee Procession, everything has passed
here. All the literary eminence of the day comes to do business
here. These paving-stones have felt the weight of George R. Sims,
Clement Scott, Bernard Shaw, and the Poet Craig. It is the world's
main artery, the centre of the Empire's nervous system, the brain
and soul of England.
Be that as it may, I am conscious of an increase in my stature since
I became a part of Fleet Street--a stretching of my boots since I
began to walk in the footsteps of Swift, Steele, Pope, Goldsmith,
Johnson, and all the other giants whose seething punch-bowls have
impregnated the wainscot of the neighbouring taverns.
[Illustration: A BARBER'S SHOP IN 1492.]
The chief of the ghosts, of course, is the burly lexicographer--the
man with the inky ruffles, the dirty large hands, the shabby brown
coat, and shrivelled wig. Methinks I see him now, clinging to his
door in dingy Bolt Court, and waking the midnight echoes with his
Cyclopean laughter, as he listens to a parting from fluent Burke or
snuffy Gibbon.
There were no footpaths in Fleet Street in those days; spouts
projected the rain-water in streams from the house-tops, and there
were no umbrellas. The swinging of broad signs in high winds would
sometimes bring down a wall--an accident which killed, on one
occasion, in Fleet Street, "two young ladies, a cobbler, and the
king's jeweller."
And yet the daintiest and prettiest of women came tripping down
Fleet Street, and up the narrow court, to see the blustering,
pompous Lichfield bear; unless, indeed, Miss Burney, witty Mrs.
Montague, charming Miss Reynolds, and shrewd Miss Piozzi only called
to caress Hodge, the doctor's cat.
(Happy thought! who knows? MEM.: _We_ must get a cat.)
* * * * *
It was Dr. Johnson who set the excellent Fleet Street fashion of
tempering the fierce delights of literary achievement with staid and
lingering meditation in the pleasant taverns.
In fact, the Fleet Street taverns are visited by reverend pilgrims
to this day as monuments consecrate to the great lexicographer; and
at all times of the day one may find faithful congregations of Fleet
Street men of letters devoutly lingering there to pour out libations
to his glory.
It was at the Cheshire Cheese, whilst the chops hissed on the grid,
that Dr. Johnson was wont to snub Boswell, quiz Goldsmith, and
brutally beat down his opponents with his "Why, sir," "What, sir?"
and "What then, sir?"
"Here, sir," he himself admitted, "I dogmatise and am contradicted,
and I love this conflict of intellect and opinion." It was in
another tavern, up another narrow court, that the pompous author
of _Rasselas_ said to his delighted biographer, "Sir, give me your
hand; I have taken a liking to you." And it was under the influence
of this place that Boswell wrote:--
The orthodox High Church sound of the Mitre, the figure and
manner of the celebrated Dr. Johnson, the extraordinary power
and precision of his conversation, and the pride arising from
finding myself admitted as his companion, produced a variety of
sensations and a pleasing elevation of mind beyond what I had
ever before experienced.
Dear, garrulous, faithful old Bozzy! I have myself seen literary men
mentally elevated in the same hallowed atmosphere, but never have I
met any who expressed his emotions with nicer precision.
But the first and foremost to me of all Fleet Street's illustrious
ghosts--as actual and inevitable a feature of the famous
thoroughfare as the taverns, the restaurants, the overhanging signs,
the newspaper offices, the Griffin, and the Law Courts--is our old
friend and colleague the Bounder.
I cannot walk from Ludgate Circus to the Griffin without meeting
him. I see him stalking into Edwards', with solemn visage and
weighty stride, for the momentous function of dinner. I see him
with beaming countenance and abdominal "Haw, haw!" of full content,
nimbly stepping out of Bower's, his "percentage restored" and
his soul "satisfied in Nature." I see him striding gloomily with
downcast eyes, hands in fob, and bludgeon under his arm, oblivious
of the traffic and the world, wrestling in desperate conflict with
the reluctant Muses, for a happy phrase or eccentric rhyme.
His Gargantuan figure is never absent from _my_ Fleet Street. Were
he to slap me on the back, I should say "Hello, Ned," as naturally
as if he had never left us.
Ah me! how we get carried away from those by whose side we would
have chosen to fight!
Happily, there is no settled sadness in the Bounder's ghost.
One of the earliest recollections I have of him is connected with a
_tête-à-tête_ dinner (the tater-tart came many years after) in one
of the Fleet Street taverns.
We had finished our ample meal, when in came my old friend Tom
Sutton, of the _Athletic News_, and seeing nothing but empty plates
before us, cheerily invited us to dine.
I was about to explain the situation, when the Bounder, to warn me
off, winking sideways, affably answered, "All right, old chap. I'll
have a steak and a tankard of stout."
This he consumed, together with several accessories and supplements
pressed upon his easy acquiescence by our genial host.
At last came the solemn moment
When the banquet's o'er,
The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.
Tom Sutton looked, and looked again, pulled his moustache, and
called the waiter.
"I say," he protested, "there's a mistake here. We haven't had all
this."
"Mistake, sir?" said the waiter. "No, dere vas no mistake, sir;
I haf charge for dat gentleman all his two dinner. Dat gentleman
always have two dinner sometimes. No mistake."
"Two dinners? Why"--
But at that moment Tom looked across the table, saw the Bounder's
huge frame shaking with inward chuckles, which rose to a roar as
their eyes met, and then he paid and said no more.
The Bounder was of course the Mentor who introduced me to Bower's.
I was "up" for a day, and of course we "signified the same in the
usual manner."
"Albert," said the Bounder, "bring me a glass of _my_ port--from
behind the glue-pot."
I said I would take the same, and put down half a crown.
Albert brought tenpence change.
As I counted it, I began, "I say, is this change"--
The Bounder, who had been watching, at once interrupted me. "Don't
expose your untutored provincial ignorance," he said; "tenpence a
time. Always have it with provincials. Tenpence left? Order another."
* * * * *
It was soon after the _Clarion_ removed its headquarters to London,
that I paid my first visit to the Cheshire Cheese, the primitive
tavern, with "nicely sanded floor," which, in a dingy Fleet Street
court, still rears its antique head in proud and successful defiance
of the gimcrack modern amply-mirrored restaurant.
It was a damp, cold, miserable November night, and I had been
tramping with the partner of my joys all day through slush and mire
in search of houses.
Looking in for letters at the _Clarion's_ gloomy little office in
Bouverie Street, I found Fay crouching disconsolately over a handful
of expiring embers in the grate.
He had been ill for many weeks, and had been reduced to a painful
diet of buns and milk, but yet, if he might not feast, he could
still take an interest in other people's feasting. Doctors could not
rob him of that comfort.
So he inquired with touching interest where we proposed to dine.
My Bosom's Lord, with native Cornish trend, asked where was food the
cheapest.
"Tut tut," said the Bounder. "Are you blessed with an appetite, yet
grudge its entertainment? Is dinner-time a time to think of thrift?
Go to, woman. Do you never give thanks? It is Saturday night. The
Cheshire Cheese pudding is now on. Take this poor victim of your
avarice to the Cheshire Cheese, and let him for once be decently
fed."
"All right," answered my frugal spouse; "if it's the Board's
orders, and the Board pays, I don't object," and with a laughing
"Good-night," she prepared to depart.
But as we were crossing the threshold the Bounder stopped me. "Are
you going to the Cheese?" he asked.
"I expect so."
"Hum! and I'm doomed to the bun-and-milk shop." His voice quivered
as he spoke. Then suddenly--"No, hang it! I'll come with you. That
doctor of mine is an ass. I'll try the pudding."
And he did--several times; though I, in robust health, could stomach
no more than one helping of the rich and bilious compound.
As we came out he walked on his heels and slapped his chest. "Haw!
haw!" he said, "I never felt better in my life. That doctor is an
ass. Bread and milk? Bah!" And he swaggered all the way down Fleet
Street.
On the next evening I found him crouching again over the little fire
in Bouverie Street. I could feel his "hump" as soon as I opened the
door. He was very bad.
"What's the matter, old chap? Don't you feel well?"
"No," he said, very ruefully; "I'm very bad. You know, I begin
to think my doctor is a fool. I've been trying this perishing
bread-and-milk diet for nearly two months, and, upon my word, I
never felt worse. Really, I've given this doctor a fair trial, but,
hang it all, the fellow does not understand me at all!"
* * * * *
Oh the gaps left by the passing years in a man's little circle of
friends!
Time was when the cordial hand-grip of friends met me in Manchester
at every corner, and almost every face in the streets was familiar.
I was there last Christmas, and I walked for half a day without a
welcoming voice or smiling countenance to greet me. I thought of
them that I had known, and walked with, and drank and eaten with
there, and desolation fell upon me. To stroll through the crowded,
bustling thoroughfare was like walking through a graveyard at
midnight. The buildings loomed upon my gaze like monuments of the
departed; and the only inhabitants I saw were spectres of the dead.
It was holiday time, and the passers-by were many. Their laughter
sounded in my ears like the sobbing of wind through willows.
Then I fell into a cluster of survivors from the fray, a band of
staunch and hearty friends of old, who took me by the hand and
"trated me dacent."
"Well, I am glad to see you," said one; then another, then another,
and all together in lusty chorus.
That was good.
Then they began to talk. "Do you remember being here with Tom Sutton
on such a night? Ah, poor old Tom! His death was an awful shock!"
And, "You heard how Jones's two boys went down in the pleasure
yacht? Jones has been out of his wits ever since."
And so on, and so on, till I rejoiced to hear the signal of parting.
We'll have no more of these reminiscences of graves and worms and
epitaphs. "Some grief shows much of love; but much of grief shows
still some want of wit."
LONDON'S GROWTH
Why, how nowe, Babell, whither wilt thou build?
I see old Holbourne, Charing Cross, the Strand,
Are going to St. Giles' in the Field.
St. Katerne, she takes Wapping by the hand,
And Hogsdon will to Hygate ere't be long.
London has got a great way from the streame.
I think she means to go to Islington,
To eat a dish of strawberries and creame.
THOMAS FREEMAN (1614).
"Hogsdon" has come to Hygate long since, as our friend Cartmel,
wearily pedalling his bicycle through the up-piled accumulation of
dingy streets that divide his slum from my elevated fastness, can
sadly testify.
Where will "she" be a hundred years hence?
Where when "she" is finished?
I wonder.
James I. predicted that London would shortly be England and England
would be London. Yet London in his time was literally the village
that modern facetiousness calls it.
Little more than fifty years ago a magazine writer, bewailing
London's vastness, declared that it must on no account be permitted
to grow larger. The population was then less than a million and a
half.
[Illustration: WHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES I.]
The monstrous growth which has taken place since then and the
stupendous rate of present increase fill the thoughtful observer
with dread. The problems of communication and distribution grow year
by year more complicated and difficult. The congestion of clever
men attracted from all parts of the country by the glitter of the
capital, impoverishes the provinces, and fills London with starving
unemployed talent, much of which gradually degenerates into hopeless
drunkenness, or still more degraded flunkeyism. The surplus artists,
sculptors, writers, and actors stagnating and rotting in London
would, and should, set up throughout the counties living, healthy,
beneficial schools of art, culture, and general enlightenment.
The only comfort visible in the actual distortion is, that by its
wholesale exaggeration of the evils afflicting the whole country,
it will the more speedily bring a breakdown of the whole system,
and so precipitate its own cure. Through the growth of population
between 1866 and 1891 the "value" of land in London increased by
£110,000,000. Ground in the City is sold at the rate of ten guineas
per superficial foot. £16,000,000 a year is drawn as rent of land
whose agricultural value is about £16,000 a year. That is to say,
the people of London have to pay £50 every year for what would have
cost, but for their own industry, only one shilling.
But these are matters for discussion in weightier works than mine.
Here I merely skim the surface, and catch the superficial fact.
For instance, I observe that London's growth is steadily destroying
London's picturesqueness. The embowered palaces of dukes and earls
are giving place, more or less, to workmen's model dwellings; and
the spots, such as Charing Cross and Tower Hill, where kings and
princes were formerly decapitated in a gentlemanly way, never rise
nowadays beyond the breaking of the crowns of rude and clamorous
agitators.
Nowhere, in short, is Democracy advancing so visibly as in London;
nowhere is it so manifestly pushing back, and crawling over, and
supplanting Aristocracy.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHWARK.]
Southwark's palaces have been famous for hundreds of years. St.
Saviour's Church, where the bones of Fletcher and Massinger and
Edmond Shakespeare are laid, was built on the site of a church built
before the Norman Conquest, from the profits of a ferry across
the Thames. Anne Boleyn had an abode here, and hither rode the
enterprising Royal Henry to walk and talk with her. Elizabeth came
by water with the French Ambassador to see the bull-baiting in the
building near the Globe Theatre.
A famous old London tavern, the Tabard, from which Chaucer's
nine-and-twenty pilgrims started on their journey, stood near London
Bridge within living memory. In Southwark too, until our time, stood
the galleried inn where Mr. Pickwick discovered Sam Weller. In fact,
Southwark was, until our time, full of historical associations, and
once ranked amongst London's most fashionable suburbs. Now it is a
labyrinth of slums, and Barclay & Perkins' brewery occupies the
site of the Bankside Globe Theatre.
[Illustration: THE STRAND, 1660.]
The narrow thoroughfares between the Strand and the river, where
modern provincial visitors have their caravanserais, rustled
once with fashionable satins and groaned under the weight of
gilded coaches. Here dwelt dukes and earls and the pick of our
nobility. Mark Twain, in _The Prince and the Pauper_, has
pictured for us a Royal river pageant, such as many bright and
flashing eyes must have beheld from the windows and steps of the
palaces that lined the Strand or Middlesex bank of the Thames
between London and Westminster, for the king's town residence
stood hard by in Whitehall; and thence to his country palace at
Greenwich--Elizabeth's favourite "Manner of Pleasaunce"--the richly
caparisoned and silk-canopied State barges fluttered splendidly.
[Illustration: THE STRAND, 1660.]
Now the stateliest craft that ride the Cockney surge are the rackety
penny packet and dingily plebeian coal barge.
Soho, the dingy resort of foreign refugees, was formerly a district
of great mansions, glimpses of whose former grandeur can still be
distinguished beneath their present grime.
James the First's unlucky son, Henry, Raleigh's friend and the
people's favourite, built himself a mansion in Gerrard Street,
behind the site of the present Shaftesbury Theatre. Dryden lived in
the same street, and here stood Dr. Johnson's favourite club, the
Turk's Head.
Charles the Second's "natural" son, the Duke of Monmouth, the
ill-starred, ambitious soldier who figures as the hero of Dryden's
"Absalom," and who was beheaded, at the third stroke of the axe,
on Tower Hill, had a palace in Soho Square where now stand gloomy
warehouses; and in the same square, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Gilbert
Burnet, and George Colman the Elder, formerly made history and
literature where Crosse & Blackwell now make pickles.
The whole district is, as Bottom might have said with more than
usual accuracy, "translated." It is become the stronghold and
fastness of the foreigner and of his cheap and excellent restaurants.
Nowhere in the world are cheaper or more varied dinners to be had.
The odours of the fried fish of Jerusalem here mingle with the
perfume of the sauerkraut of Germany, and the cheeses of France
and Italy; and over all, blending them into one harmonious whole,
serenely soars the powerful aroma of triumphant garlic.
This is but one of the phases of an amazing latter-day development
of the Restaurant in London.
[Illustration: WHITEFIELD'S TABERNACLE: TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD IN
1736.]
Shall I ever forget the horror of the first dinner I ever had in
England? The Gargantuan slabs of semi-raw beef, and the bitter,
black, treacly "porter," seemed to my mind certain signs that I had
fallen among a race of savages and cannibals. But now, instead
of the mean, dingy, dirty, fly-blown chop-houses that formerly
mocked and balked London's appetite, we have a collection of marble
palaces, in which daintily prepared repasts are retailed at lower
prices than were formerly charged for the chop-houses' superannuated
chunks of brutal flesh.
The Adelaide Gallery, one of the largest of these restaurants, has
taken the place of a most respectable Gallery of Practical Science,
and the Oxford Street store of the most democratic of wine-importers
grows its cobwebs in what, fifty years ago, was accounted one of
the most fashionable resorts in Europe. "Two thousand persons of
rank and fashion," as I read in an old magazine, "assembled in
the splendid structure" at its opening. And it _was_ a splendid
structure then, for the architect had introduced niches containing
statues of "the heathen deities," with "Britannia, George III., and
Queen Charlotte" thrown in! And now, I presume, they are thrown
out--or rounded off into a perfectly harmonious circle perhaps, by a
supplemental and complementary statue of Ally Sloper.
These tokens of Democracy's advance are not unpleasing; the growth
of the restaurant tendency affords one particular pleasure, as
suggesting that the English are losing some of their dominant
insular fault of sullen individualism, and are becoming more
healthily disposed to the communal life.
Much less hopeful is the swelling grandeur of the London
gin-palace--the modern substitute for the pleasant tavern.
In mediæval times, if the earle saw a stately edifice with
stained-glass windows, statuary, and everything gorgeous, he
would enter with reverence to stoop his head; now, he goes in with
fourpence to soak it.
In mediæval times he would be seen crossing himself with the holy
water as he emerged; now, as he comes out, he wipes it off on his
coat tail.
In mediæval times, for their sins and sorrows and the glory of
God, the nobles built cathedrals. In this more vulgar age, for the
people's griefs and the lords' profit, England's nobility build
glorified pot-houses.
In mediæval times, our chivalry won their knighthood and titles by
spoiling the heathen at the sword's point; now, they secure peerages
by spoiling English men and women with adulterated and brutalising
liquors.
This is what we call the progress of civilisation--
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
But that is neither here nor there.
A TRUCE FROM BOOKS AND MEN
Dreaming, dozing,
Fallow, fallow, and reposing.
DR. MACKAY.
There is an old Dutch pier at Gorleston separating the open sea from
the mouth of the river that leads to Yarmouth. It is not ornamental;
it has no pavilion, no railings, no band, but only capstans, tarry
ropes, a small white-washed observatory, and--the most surprising
jumble of odd, cosy, sheltered nooks overhanging the blue water,
where one may sprawl all day in any garb and any posture, and,
soothed by the sea's lullaby, blink at the sun, or, with the aid of
our country's literature, go to sleep.
There is nothing to pay to go on, and our pier is therefore
frequented by no objectionable persons. It is true there are a few
mistaken damsels who sketch or paint the endless succession of
spectacular marvels laid on by tide and clouds; but I think they
mean no harm.
As for the apathetic individuals who come with bits of string and
worms, pretending to catch fish, everybody knows that they never
do; indeed, after observing them through several waking intervals,
I have come to the conclusion that their only object is to politely
aid our slumbers by the sight of their languidly deliberate
preparations, and calm, leisurely hours of uninterrupted waiting.
As for the rest of us, we are frankly, honestly, disreputably lazy,
and dowdily, drowsily sprawl and dawdle the daily clock-round.
If the wind be southerly, we take our nap on the river side of the
pier, and open our eyes at intervals to scan the fishing-boats with
flapping sails, as they depart to or return from their two months'
strife with wind and wave to reap for us the harvest of the sea.
Every vessel in Yarmouth's swarming fleet must round this pier's
windy point at coming in or going out, and cross the stream that
swiftly flows and whirls beneath our feet. All through the day, in
and out they pass, to and from their perilous work; late at night
we hail and greet them as they glide with majestic sail through the
reflected moonbeams, and disappear like huge, towering phantoms into
the darkness and mystery beyond.
[Illustration: GORLESTON PIER.]
These, with a few timber-laden steamers from Norway--their shifted
cargoes, sloping decks, and fearfully-listed hulls attesting often
to the fury of the Baltic gales--are the only link connecting us
with the far distant world of commerce to which we once belonged.
These, and--I must not forget the great morning and evening events
of our drowsy days--the two big passenger steamers that set out
before breakfast for Clacton and London, and the two that heavily
swing into the narrow channel at dusk, with ever fresh wonder to our
awakened and densely assembled holiday population.
When the wind is northerly we shift over to the south side
of our pier and face the Gorleston bay and beach. Lo, what a
transformation! No trace of the workaday world remains. A scene of
pure enchantment, of sunny brightness and rest.
A semicircle of crumbling sandcliffs forms the background of the
bay; and from the verge of a narrow streak of yellow sand, without
a pebble, stretches the green, the blue, the yellow sea--nestling
in its intimate nooks, splashing against the wooden promenade,
or dashing with imposing affectation of fierceness over our
promiscuously scattered breakwaters of granite.
We have one hotel, incongruously conspicuous on the neck of ground
dividing sea from river at the pier's base; but we have no theatres,
no music-halls, no punch-and-judy show, no niggers, no "amusements"
(!!!) of any sort. We have a few bathing-machines upon the beach,
and a vast picturesque camp of bathing-tents, but not any other sign
of commercial enterprise. There is no esplanade to swagger on; no
electric lights to set off our beauties by night; no illumination
over all the "promenade" and mignonette gardens and pier after
sunset, except the light of the moon and stars.
We _can_ see the garish lights of Yahoo Yarmouth, flaunting through
the night, two miles away; but, if we can help it, we don't.
* * * * *
The only thing we do with assiduity is bathing, unless we belong to
the army of bare-legged water-babies who unceasingly "paddle" and
build castles on the beach.
Sometimes we carry our day-dreams in small boats across the
glistering sea, and lazily drift or tack before the languid breeze.
It has even occurred that foolish relapses into energy have borne
us upon bicycles through leafy lanes to lazier Suffolk Broads; but
these excesses are rare and brief. No man could face these sleepy
inland waters and preserve an active spirit; the apathetic willows
on the banks dreamily curtsey as if too tired to hold up their heads.
But let Dr. Mackay, who opened this chapter, also speak the last
word--
There's a humming of bees beneath the lime,
And the deep blue heaven of a southern clime
Is not more beautifully bright
Than this English sky with its islets white,
And its Alp-like clouds, so snowy fair!--
The birch leaves dangle in balmy air.
A RUDE AWAKENING
Men must work and women must weep;
There's little to earn and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
What is this Life at all, and what its purport? Is Good its aim or
evil? If roses be fair, what need of thorns? God sends youth and
health and beauty; what devil brings sickness, grief, and decay?
When I wrote the irrelevant, drowsy chapter preceding this, the sun
shone so kindly, and so benignly Nature beamed, that Care was as a
dream of what never could have been.
To live was to be blessed; to think was to enjoy. Nature was a
doting mother that fed us with bounty and kissed us fondly to rest;
the earth a sunny garden; heaven a waste of luxurious fancy.
How blind I must have been! What a glorious blindness it would be,
if----
Ah! "If"!
* * * * *
My drop from the rosy clouds began pleasantly enough. I was nooning
by the river-side, when an ancient, second-hand Danish pirate, with
improbable pantomime whiskers, like tangled seaweed, fixedly looking
at the lower part of my waistcoat, casually remarked, "Seems to me
you're pining away down there."
"Yes," I answered briskly, "I'm not the man I was."
"No," said he meditatively, "we're none of us as young as we was;
but, come, you can't be more than forty-three."
"I am," I answered indignantly, "no more than thirty-six."
"Well," said he, with what may have been a consolatory intent, "we
can't help our looks, none of us. I'm judging you'll not be for the
lifeboat when you're my age."
I had decided to speak to him no more, but an undefined hope to get
the better of his sauciness prompted me to ask, "What age may that
be?"
"Fifty-five," he answered.
"You look," said I vindictively, "a great deal older."
Scarce had the words left my mouth than I was ashamed of them. I
saw for the first time now that he was crippled, and walked with a
stick. Rough weather and a hard life had left on him a low-water
mark of rust and wear and decay. But he answered, gently enough,
"It's like enough I may. I've been very bad this three week. Got
tangled in a rope and fell overboard, and was dragged ashore through
the water from the pierhead to the harbour. My uncle and two other
young fellows was in the boat, but"--
The "two other young fellows" was tempting, but I did not smile.
"They couldn't get me in," he continued unconsciously, "and I got
knocked about a bit. My shoulder was main bad. I'm crawling about
again, but it's hard work doing nothing."
I repeated the words to myself as I walked away, "hard work doing
nothing"--especially when "doing nothing" means a bare cupboard and
hungry children, eh?
Gorleston is perhaps not altogether so cheerful as I thought.
Unsneck the door to Care and you might as well take it off its
hinges.
Late the same night, I was talking to the watchman at the end of the
pier. A Yarmouth fishing-smack sailed out into the gloom.
"Rough night," the watchman cried to the skipper.
"Ay, ay," replied a gruff voice from below; and a moment later the
smack was gone.
"Better here than on that boat to-night," I observed, as the black
sail faded and merged in the black cloud.
"Ay," the watchman answered; "but they'll see worse before they see
home again. There's queer weather to be found on the Dogger Bank
in an eight weeks' trawling. I mind me of three hundred and sixty
drowned in one March gale, and upwards of two hundred lost two or
three years ago one Christmas night. Then there's always the risk of
collisions in the fog, men washed overboard in a gale, or crippled
in the small boat when they put out, as they must whatever the
weather, when the Billingsgate steamer comes round in the night for
the fish."
"H'm! And what pay sends willing men to face these risks?"
"Penny an hour, from time they start till they get back. That's
fourteen shilling a week."
"And when they come home?"
"Pay stops."
"God! how can their women and children live?"
"Nay, now you're asking something. But they're better off than them
as waits ashore all winter, and can't get a job."
"Fourteen shillings! Why do they stand it?"
"Because they can't help theirsels. There's too many waiting to take
t' place o' them as has a job."
"Have they no trade union?"
"They've trouble enough to keep theirsels in work; who'd keep them
if they went on strike?"
"Fourteen shillings a week! It's shameful."
"Happen it is, and happen the shame is not so much the men's as
yours."
"Mine? How?"
"I suppose you buy and eat fish?"
"Yes, and pay the price I'm asked; if I paid twice as much, would
the fishermen get the money?"
"Nay, I don't know. We look to you clever folk in London to settle
these things."
They are not awe-struck by the superiority of the "clever folk from
London," these outspoken men of the sea. From the taciturn solitary
policeman, who looks on us with undisguised contempt, to the ancient
mariners by the river-side, who gaze on us with the puzzled stare
that a Viking might have cast on a French dancing-master, the
natives give one the painful impression that they regard us as
prodigies of ignorance and uselessness.
But--we have money. People who don't seem to know anything or to
do anything always have. And they that have to wrest sustenance
from the churlish sea at Gorleston, are disposed to do much for
money--even to tolerate inquisitive, pompously patronising,
incessantly cackling Cockneys.
I went down to the sea thinking to mend my tired body with the blow
of the lusty spray, but I am judging 'twas perhaps my mind most
needed change of air.
They are not so much our lungs that get stifled in the cities as our
brains and hearts. We are so hemmed in with glittering shams and
lies that we forget Truth's features.
What do we know of work and trade, we that scramble for gold dust
in London? What do we know of Life, we that seek it in the perfumed
mire and corruption of the West End? They are not the usurers and
money-changers that make the wealth of nations, nor the painted
splendours of Babylon that ripen our harvests, nor the swinish
orgies of Sodom and Gomorrah that make the pulses beat with healthy
joy of life.
One stews in London's vitiated atmosphere, and one forgets. One's
perceptions grow numb, and dull and blunted; one's knowledge
twisted, warped, awry. We are made dizzy by the rush and whirl, and
cheated by specious shows and make-believes. Our days and nights
are passed in fever, our thoughts are as the babbling of a grim
delirium, and there is no health in us.
Contango? The odds for the Leger? The new ballet?
"We went out twice that night," said the lifeboatman; "one of our
men broke his arm th' first trip, and he wur main wild when he
couldn't go th' second time."
"And did you save them all?"
"Ay, we got 'em all off--both lots; though they'd give up hope. They
couldn't see us till we came close up to them, for it was a dirty
night, and the sea was running high, but they heard the cheers we
give them when we got within calling distance, poor things."
That makes a better picture than the Stock Exchange or Piccadilly
Circus. The thought of the ships that sink, of the men and women and
children that go down into the cold depths, "their eyes and mouths
to be filled with the brown sea sand"--that is not good to think of.
But the picture of the rescue, is not that glorious?
The sound of the human cheer across the roar of Nature's
battle--think of it in the ears of the crew that had "given up
hope"! The thrill, the gladness, the doubt, the eager lookout.
The cheer again, clearer, huskier, certain now, and full of brave
comfort. A chance then for life? A chance for the wailing women and
the weeping bairns? Then a glimpse, deep down in the great trough
of the sea, of a boat staggering and rolling amidst the waves,
manfully propelled, perceptibly approaching, despite wind and sleet
and drenching wave, with rough men's voices giving promise of life
through the darkness of the storm!
Ah! gentlemen of the Spiers & Pond and money-making world, isn't
it a brave picture to think of? The cooling dash of ocean spray is
delightfully refreshing. To think that our race can still breed
heroes; that even we, if we could or would but shake off the Old
Man of the Earth that sits upon our shoulders, might perhaps be
heroes too; that we too might risk our lives to snatch storm-tossed
unfortunates from the clutch of death--is it not a blessed thought?
It is the custom of our age to boast of its civilisation. When
we stand erect we fear to hurtle the stars with our foreheads as
we pass under. We smile upon our accumulations of wealth and the
monuments of our commerce, and esteem ourselves the crowning
triumphs of evolution, the ultimate perfection, Nature's finished
masterpieces. But how small, how mean, and how insignificant we
Londoners look by the side of these stalwart and fearless fishermen
of Suffolk and Norfolk.
They know nothing of Westralians, S. P. prices, futures, or the
Sisters Bobalink's new dance; but what a lot they have to teach us!
* * * * *
The weather changes swiftly at Gorleston, and when the white
foam-horses ride over the hidden sand-banks, even a Cockney-tripper
may feel the sense of peril.
Ever since we came we have seen the gaunt masts of one wreck
spectrally haunting our feast from behind the lightship in the east.
Now there is another on a sand-bank close to shore, a little to the
north of the river's mouth.
It had been a glorious day, but towards evening the storm-clouds
gathered and the wind rose in fitful gusts. A Baltic steamer,
clearing out of the harbour at dusk, blocked up the mouth of the
river for some hours owing to a fouled anchor, till at last, her
cable being cut, she succeeded in getting to sea.
Meantime, a Yarmouth trawler, returning to port with a week's catch
of fish, was misled by the lights of the disabled vessel, and,
manoeuvring to get clear, backed on to the dangerous North Sand,
whose floor is thickly strewed with remains of former wrecks.
From the pier, through the blackening night, we watched the crew's
futile efforts to get off again. It was very like a fly's efforts to
escape from a spider's web, and evidently as profitless. The more
they struggled, the deeper in the sand they sank.
Now, boom! through the night came the bang of a great gun. The
Admiralty men in charge of the Board of Trade life-saving apparatus
were about to begin operations. We saw lights flickering to and fro
on the Denes--the low bank of land between the river and the sea.
Presently, with a prodigious whiz, up to the black sky and across
the ship shot the rocket, bearing the lifeline that would bring
the shipwrecked mariners to land! Before this, however, one of the
five lifeboats maintained on this dangerous coast had been safely
launched through the surf, and reached the wreck almost as soon as
the line.
But neither line nor boat would the captain of the smack accept: to
leave his ship meant loss of property, and property in England is
of all things the most sacred.
The night by this time had become wild and fearful. The wind
shrieked viciously; the waves broke ashore with a hungry roar; and
from the swart clouds came down squalls of rain, merging land and
lights and sea and sky in one blur of desolation.
There was no more to be seen. The crew of the stranded trawler
deemed it safe to remain where they were. So we curious Cockneys,
perceiving no hope of further fresh sensations, hastened us home to
cosy beds and warmth.
* * * * *
I had just gone to sleep when a boom that shook the bed roused me
with a start.
I jumped up and went to the window.
A signal-rocket had been fired from the coastguard station opposite
our lodging.
[Illustration: THE LIFEBOAT.]
I slipped on some clothes and went out. The night was wilder than
ever, the driving rain heavier, the wind louder, the sea rougher. I
saw the coastguard-men bury themselves in oilskins, and sally out
with lanterns to their station on the Denes. When they took boat to
cross the river, I had perforce to leave, and so, wet through, went
back to my bedroom window.
For hours I watched the fitful lights on the Denes, and the wavering
light on the mast of the ship beyond. Once, in the staring light
of a "flare," I saw her plainly--her stark, white, sloping deck
looming ghostly through the darkness; then, another rocket-line went
flashing across the black waste, and I hoped the crew were safe.
* * * * *
Next morning I learned from our landlady's son that he had been
all night in the lifeboat; that despite the smack-skipper's first
refusal to leave his ship the lifeboat had stood by him for hours,
the waves washing over the stranded vessel the while; that, at
last, finding the skipper obstinate, the lifeboatmen had returned
to shore, but had scarcely landed when the new view which isolation
lent to his perilous position, caused the skipper to signal for
their return. They went back accordingly, and at three in the
morning safely landed the shipwrecked crew in Gorleston.
All through the next day, without rest or respite, the hardy young
boatman unceasingly engaged on salvage duty. I accidentally heard,
by the way, that on the previous day he had plunged twice into the
sea from the breakwater to save two children who had fallen in--for
which service he was munificently rewarded with five shillings.
At night, in answer to a question, he told me, "Sometimes in winter
we've been out as much as three times in one night, and been at it
again the night after. You soon get used to it, you know."
H'm! I _don't_ know: I only know that after that night I was laid
up with a chill, whilst he made no more of his labours, his perils
and exposure than if they had been part of a picnic; and I also know
that when, in inquiring about my health, he wistfully struggled to
tune his storm-tanned hardy face to a note of decent sympathy, he
made me feel ashamed of my lubberly fragility.
Yet--tut, tut! Can I not win more pay for a nice little cackling
article about his work, than this dreadnought will get for saving
six men's and two children's lives?
Since everything is justly ordained in our best of all possible
societies, my greater gain must prove, despite appearances, that I
am this man's superior.
Besides, he speaks to me with manifest respect, and calls me "Sir."
A few nights later, there was another gale; a trawler was driven
ashore, and her crew saved by the rocket apparatus.
Two or three nights later a Lowestoft smack was run down by a
Norwegian barque, and the skipper and mate were drowned; one left a
wife and four children, the other a wife and nine!
These casualties are happening constantly--they are so common they
are scarcely reported, even in local papers; but what becomes of the
widows and orphans?
A man's wages on the trawlers are 14s. a week, _when his boat is at
sea_.
"They ought to be included in the Compensation Act," I suggested to
a boatman.
"Who is to pay the compensation?" he asked.
I suggested the smack owners.
"Oh, they couldn't afford it"; they couldn't afford more wages;
couldn't afford anything. They also were to be numbered amongst
those deserving unfortunate classes of disinterested British
capitalists who are living on their losses. Yet one doesn't hear
of _their_ starving in the winter, of _their_ being drowned in
quest of a precarious livelihood, of _their_ widows and orphans
being gathered into the workhouse. Nor the boatbuilders, nor the
sailmakers, nor the Billingsgate "wholesalers," nor any of the men
connected with the trade, except those who do the actual work of
catching the fish.
Their poverty is apparent to all the world; the difficulty of
getting even a bare living by the fisheries is bringing competition
for employment even into the lifeboat. Lifeboatmen may earn 30s. in
a winter's night by going out to a wreck, and may get as much as £10
per man in one haul if they recover salvage. That is "big money" to
fishermen; so it comes to pass that even that business is tarnished
with a sordid taint.
"The coastguard had no business to fire their rocket-line," said a
fisherman to me, speaking of the wreck above described; "we was in
the water first and was entitled to the pay. Besides," he continued,
following up a train of thought which is horrible to pursue, "they
needn't be in such a hurry to take the bread from us lifeboatmen:
_it's only half a crown each they'd get for firing the rocket_."
I heard ugly hints of vessels purposely cast away to recover
insurance; and I heard a well-dressed townsman, who spoke with
considerable warmth, and evidently with knowledge, utter bitter
sneers at the rapacity of certain boatmen who had "made salvage a
business," and who "always won their actions-at-law against the
owners because counsel artfully worked on the jurymen's feelings by
glowing accounts of the men's pluck and perils."
"And do you deny the peril of the work?" I asked.
"No," he admitted, "it's risky enough, but it pays better than
fishing, and that's about as risky."
"You would not care to do it yourself, I presume?"
"Not me!" he answered, with a chuckle; "I should hope I'd got a
better mark on. But to make a ten-pound note, those beggars, why,
they'd face hell!"
* * * * *
If there be a devil his name is Money.
Fresh from the hands of the gods, we are the exquisite instruments
upon which they play divine music. But comes Money to play upon
us, and the strings become jangled, harsh, and out of tune. If
there were no money--if none were tempted for lack of it to sell
themselves, if none were driven by excess of it to wallow in porcine
gutters--how brave, noble, and lovable were Man!
The stock question that Yorkshire weavers ask of one another on
meeting, is one we might fitly ask of our Civilisation, "What soorts
are yo' makin' now?"
The nearer the knuckle of civilisation we seek, the less shall we
find of the cool, fearless, manly air of my Gorleston lifeboatman.
Civilisation is not making those "soorts," Nature preserves the
monopoly of manufacture; civilisation succeeds only in spoiling
them.
LONDON PRIDE AND COCKNEY CLAY
From drinking fiery poison in a den
Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,
Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:
I wake from day dreams to this real night.
JAMES THOMSON.
Since I met the Lancashire excursionist at Lowestoft I have
been wondering what is the essential distinction between the
Cockney-tripper and the holiday-maker one meets at New Brighton,
Douglas, or Blackpool.
We were tightly packed in the shelter on the promenade waiting the
end of the thunderstorm. There were two native boys singing a
temperance song to the tune of "There's nae luck aboot the hoose,"
translated to a dirge with a drawling refrain of "No d-r-r-rink! no
d-r-r-rink for me!"
This they would whisperingly sing, with stealthy inquiring glances
at the people who pressed about them, and then hysterically giggle.
But the stolid, respectable crowd of "visitors" from London, stiff
with the recent dignity of seeing their names printed in the
visitors' list (with "Esquire" at the end!) would not stoop to
notice these frivolous ebullitions. They stolidly glowered with
heavy impassive glare, oblivious, it seemed, not only of the boys,
but also of each other.
Now this starchiness would not have been remarkable in Southport or
Folkestone, where one meets so many pompous, old, superior persons,
puffed up with the importance of their little pension, annuity, or
snug, retiring hoard; nor in Scarborough, where many visitors are
genuine "toffs," and naturally privileged to look down upon the
common herd.
But this crowd at Lowestoft consisted unmistakably of the genteel
working class--the clerks at £150 to £300 a year, the small
shopkeepers, the--in short, the genteel working class.
In Lancashire this class, though disposed to a sort of blunt
arrogance at home, become humanised when holiday-making. They will
condescend to fuse with their "inferiors," and when united, as in
this case, by common misfortune, they will even condescend to be
affable.
Not so the genteel workman of Cockaigne.
That he is a workman he never remembers; that he is genteel he never
forgets.
Even when he has divested himself of his customary frock-coat
and tall silk hat, he remains still clothed with his cumbrous and
sombre gentility. It is to him as valour was to his forebears. It
serves him in lieu of honour or religion. His gentility is of his
possessions the most sacred: rather than that, he would lose his
honesty, his manliness, and his humanity.
The silence was broken by the irruption of a bustling newcomer, who,
as he shook his dripping cap, cheerily cried, "Good Laur! it does
come down!"
He looked round for acknowledgment, but the genteel gentlemen from
London stonily stared into vacancy.
Undiscouraged, the newcomer took off his mackintosh, offered a jest
about the weather, beamed cordially upon the crowd, and playfully
cuffed the ears of the boy who demanded, "No d-r-r-rink, no
d-r-r-rink for me."
"All right," he said, "if you don't want any drink, you needn't cry
about it. I'll take your share when the whisky comes."
Again he glanced round with an inviting smile, but the petrified
images looked remote, unfriendly, melancholy, slow.
But this chilliness troubled him no more than a frosty morning
troubles the jovial sun. He beamed and glowed and laughed and
talked, and, despite themselves, the genteel glaciers thawed.
"That man," I said to myself, "comes from the North."
His next speech told of storms he had seen--at Blackpool! of seas
washing over the promenade wetting him "three streets back."
One of the gentlemen from London cast a look of curiosity.
The man from the North went on to tell how he had taken a day's
sail from Blackpool, and, being unable to land there at night, had
been carried to Fleetwood, and thence back by rail after midnight.
"How was that?" asked the gentleman who had looked interested;
"haven't they a pier at Blackpool?"
Fancy that to a Blackpoolite! It was as if one had asked a sailor
whether he had ever seen the sea, a Scotch reporter whether he
had tasted whisky, a French soldier whether he had ever heard the
"Marseillaise," or a Southport man whether he knew what sand was.
It did my heart good in that strange land upon that cheerless day
to hear the man from the North pour out his volcanic eloquence in
Blackpool's praise.
I grieve to be compelled to admit that some of his statements
struck me as inaccurate. For instance, I thought he was wrong in
describing the promenade as ten miles long, and I think he was not
justified in stretching the Tower to double the height of the Eiffel
Tower in Paris.
I cast a glance of mild rebuke upon him when he added that the
Winter Gardens were "something like the Crystal Palace, and Earl's
Court put together," and I gasped when he represented Uncle Tom's
Cabin as "a sort of shandygaff of Buckingham Palace and Olympia!".
I felt that if I didn't check him the man would rupture himself.
I touched him on the shoulder. "I have lived at Blackpool myself," I
said.
"There you are," he continued, without turning a hair; "this
gentleman will confirm what I'm telling you. Aren't all these South
of England watering-places slow as compared with Blackpool?"
"Well," I said, "none of them have such variety of amusements."
"If you want amusement," said the Cockney gentleman who had offered
the cue about the pier, "if you want amusement, you should try
Yarmouth."
"Yarmouth!" cried the North of England man, with an expression of
superb disdain. "Bah! Yarmouth is vulgar!"
* * * * *
It was lovely! After his praise of Blackpool it was sublime. I
saluted him respectfully and departed with a soul full of awe.
For I had not then seen Yarmouth. On the next day I did.
Then my wonder vanished.
I had seen something of the Yarmouth yahoos at Gorleston.
For the democratic price of twopence, steamers bring them up the
river, past the teeming wharves and shipbuilding yards of the Yare,
and belch them forth to stare upon Gorleston's "slowness."
Our placid Gorleston sun smiled on their hurry and pain with its
customary calm complacency. Our lazy Gorleston sea rocked itself
benignly with its usual hushing swish. Our deliberate Gorleston
sea-gulls indolently flapped their wings.
And the Yarmouth yahoos yawned and hastened away in disgust.
* * * * *
But at Yarmouth, their feet are, as it were, upon their own wicket;
their deportment was to the manner born.
See them shying at skittles or cocoanuts, gorging on stout and
shellfish, bustling, breathless but roaring, from "entertainment"
to "entertainment." How hot they look! how they perspire! and how
they shout! Do they really amuse themselves? I wonder.
They all seek happiness, these good brothers and sisters of ours;
but surely they run away from it that so distress themselves in its
pursuit. To "get on," to "do" the utmost possible in the shortest
possible time, to eclipse their fellows, to make haste and yet more
haste, and ever more haste--that, in pleasure as in toil, is ever
their aim.
For a right-down, regular, blaring, flaring, glaring, tearing,
staring, devil-may-caring hullabaloo, Blackpool on August Bank
Holiday is peculiar.
But between the Lancashire and the Cockney-tripper there is an
essential difference which is not in the Southerner's favour.
The Northern tripper may be rowdy, but there is a redeeming quality
of broad joviality, good-tempered companionship in his razzling,
that mellows and softens its asperity. But the Cockney-tripper,
from his exasperating accent to his infuriating concertina, is
aggressively, blatantly, harshly coarse. There is a self-sufficient
"cockiness" about him that soars above all compromise and defers to
nothing and to nobody. His profanity is more raucous and vicious
than the Northerner's, his ebriety more ribald, brutal, and swinish.
Armed with his customary concertina, or his still more harrowing
occasional cornet, 'Arry is a terror to shudder at.
His 'Arriet, too, is infinitely coarser than the worst specimen of
the Lancashire mill-girl.
The shrieking sisterhood of the flaunting feathers and marvellously
beaded and bugled tippets, swagger along in serried bands, five and
six feet deep. Arm in arm they come, lifting their skirts high in
impudent dance as they lurch to and fro, giggling hysterically, and
shouting vocal inanities with shrill and piercing insistence.
There is nothing more distressing in all England than the spectacle
of these unfortunate persons in their hours of mirth. In all England
there is no poverty more pitiful than the conspicuous poverty of
their resources of pleasure.
To raise as much noise as they can, to make themselves as offensive
as possible to the quietly disposed, to spoil natural beauties and
break things,--these seem to be the aims of their enjoyment.
If they find a pleasant stretch of clean sand, where barefooted
children happily disport themselves, they will fill the place
with lurid profanity, and departing leave behind them a Tom
Tiddler's heap of broken bottles, threatening the security and
comfort of every playing baby in the neighbourhood. If they find a
pretty flower-garden, where they are politely requested to "keep
off the grass," they will deliberately and purposely trample on
the sequestered patch, to prove their insolent superiority over
regulations framed for their and the general public's profit and
advantage.
Oh, but it is sad to see! There is nothing more depressing, more
crushing to one's aspirations for the people's greater and truer
liberty.
The usurer's greed, the tyranny of upstart wealth, labour's
subjection and dependence, poverty's hunger--all these may be cured;
but what shall be done with yahoos whose chief delight lies in
spoiling the enjoyment of others?
Ah, me! I wish I had not been to Yarmouth.
MY INTRODUCTION TO RESPECTABILITY
It was a Sunday in London--gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat,
cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar
echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of
soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to
look to them out of windows in dire despondency. In every
thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every
turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling,
as if the plague were in the city, and the dead-carts were
going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by
possibility furnish relief to an overworked people.
CHARLES DICKENS.
When, as a boy of ten (driven from Paris by General Trochu's
proclamation before the siege as a _bouche inutile_), I first
set my eyes on the world's metropolis, my impressions were not
favourable. Ugh! that first Sunday in London! It was like a day of
death, a day among the tombs.
What a change from the Paris of the Third Empire!
I had been suddenly translated from an airy, flower-festooned
apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, to a dirty brick
lodging-house in the Pentonville Road, with a soot-garden in front
and a dingy penitentiary across the way.
Never before had I seen a brick house, soot-garden, or penitentiary;
and novelty for once failed to lure my youthful eye.
It was then that the purple-faced landlady in the rusty black gown
assured my father that the place was "exceedingly respectable."
"What is that?" asked my elder brother John in French--"_c'est tres
quoi?_"
"Respectable," repeated my father.
"Respectable," quoth John. "What we call _triste, hein_?"
And my father, who was ever grave as a tetrarch, smiled.
I knew only two or three English phrases then, such as "I am pretty
and vell; how vos you?" "If you please," "menny of zem," etc. etc.
Never till then had I heard the British national word; and when
my father explained that "respectability" meant "_une nature
honorable_," we boys looked out at the soot-garden and penitentiary,
and marvelled why honour in London looked so dirty.
The next day was Sunday, and our landlady furnished us with the name
of a "most respectable" church near Clerkenwell Prison.
But John expressed a suspiciously fervent and pious desire to attend
service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and when my mother looked hard at
him he blushed. That settled it. I was ordered to put on my new
Sunday boots, and go with him.
When we got outside, John took the precaution, by way of a start, to
box my ears for being an artful little _mouchard_, and then set off
as fast as he could go, with a view to leaving me behind.
His legs were long, mine were short, and I wore my Sunday boots.
Besides, I was hindered by rude insular boys, who stood in my way
pointing to my Parisian headgear, and shouting barbarian phrases
which I have since recognised as "Who's your 'atter?"
We ran, as I have since ascertained, through Euston Square,
Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury Square, Bedford Square, twice round
Russell Square, and then somehow got back to Euston. Then John
stopped. The fact was he was lost. But he put a bold front on the
matter, and said we would go and dance with the London 'prentice
lads and fair-haired Saxon maids, first at Westminster and then at
Tower Green. He told me he had seen pictures in which the youth
of Britain, in gaily-coloured attire, were shown dancing round
garlanded and festooned poles. He fancied the sports were held at
Westminster. But was sure some were held on Tower Hill. Was I brave
enough to join the venture and risk the after-part?
I was a nice, well-meaning boy, but before his dazzling array of
temptations I fell at once.
John knew a little English--learnt at the Lycée St. Louis--but,
as he confided to me after several interviews with the ignorant
Londoners, these persons did not understand their own tongue; and it
seemed to take a long time to teach it them.
So we trudged again through the dreadful, dreary, desolate squares,
with their carefully railed regulation patches of soot-gardens, and
indefinable, uniform air of hypochondriacal blight.
I believe we should have walked round and round those grim and
forbidding dwelling-boxes all day, had we not, after many attempts,
discovered a man who knew a little French, and who offered to take
us down to Westminster.
John asked him about the Squares. "Are they barracks?" he said, "or
workmen's dwellings?"
"_Mais, non_," answered our guide, looking shocked, "they are the
dwellings of the most respectable people."
Again that mystic word "respectable." Again the atmosphere of
dignified dumps and dingy sulkiness. And father had told us that
"respectability" was "an honourable nature." London honour seemed a
sad thing.
The story of that day's spree ought to be published as a
Sunday-school tract. It was the most chastening experience I ever
underwent.
A few months later we were in the midst of barricades and street
massacres in Paris; but even that weird experience has left no such
impression of blank and heavy gloom upon my memory as the dismal
reconnaissance into the London Sabbath and British respectability
whereof this is the true account.
Those miles of deserted and colourless streets under the narrow
glimpses of leaden sky, with the solitary heavy figure of the large
British policeman everlastingly in the foreground--_mon Dieu!_ in
what clammy, icy bands of unrelieved wretchedness they strangled the
exuberance of our boyish hearts upon that dull September Sunday!
Besides, I wore my Sunday boots.
The man who spoke French, or who, at least, understood some of
John's English, left us at Charing Cross, and we went on alone to
the joyous dance and revels of Westminster.
John had mentioned them to the man, so far as his resources would
allow; but the man only shook his head and muttered something about
Cremorne, which John explained to me, must be the name of the queen
of the revels.
And when we got there--oh dear! oh dear!--frosty-faced,
dun-coloured, British matrons and virgins with ivory-backed
prayer-books were streaming out of the Abbey, and a drizzling
chilly rain and mist had begun to fall over the scene, when John,
distracted and discomfited, stumbled over the boots of the customary
policeman.
"_Milles pardons!_" said John, lifting his hat, "but ve seek vere ze
girls and boys dance ze Sunday."
"Daunce!" replied the heavy policeman, "daunce a' Sundays? Nice,
respectable little boys you must be, I down't think!"
We didn't understand all he said, but we heard the chilly word
"respectable," and didn't get warm again till we had run to the City.
To tell all the adventures of that terrible day would be to repeat,
with variations, the tale I've told so far. The City finished our
spirits. Even liquorice-water would not raise one's courage in these
"catacombs with the roof off," as John aptly described the tomb-like
streets.
And the Tower, which John had represented to me as a sort of
Versailles or Fontainebleau, with fountains, flower-beds, and
avenues on the exterior, and British lions, crowns, and a plentiful
supply of beheaded traitors constantly on view inside, was the last
straw.
It was, as the usual policeman told John, "closed on Sundays."
Then I fell upon a seat, repentant, and vowed I'd tell my mother.
Finally, we compromised, on my brother's promising to pay the
omnibus fare home, for the which I was to declare that we had lost
our way, and to deny that we had been upon the spree.
I felt that I could do this without injury to my conscience, and
when we returned to the soot-garden I did it.
John got a hiding all the same, and I didn't offer myself as a
substitute; for my feet were very sore, and I felt that he was a
wicked boy who deserved all the chastisement he could get.
In the days which followed, my understanding of "respectability" was
much ripened.
There was another family in the house.
Its head was a fat old lady with corkscrew ringlets (I'd never seen
corkscrew ringlets before), who sat everlastingly in front of the
fire, like Patience in a hair-seated rocking-chair (I'd never seen
a hair-seated chair before), toasting endless slices of bread (I'd
never seen toast before). There were her two thin, middle-aged,
maiden daughters, who were perfect types of the British old maid
(and I'd never seen an old maid before). There was also a son, who
washed up the pots, and occasionally went out into the garden to
feed the hens, dressed in a pair of shabby gaiters, a rusty tall
hat, and a cane.
The landlady informed us that they were a family of the highest
respectability. They never paid any rent, and owed money to all the
tradesmen in the neighbourhood; but they always went to church on
Sundays and were most respectable people.
My mother asked why the son didn't go to work.
"Work?" said the landlady, with a pitying smile. "None of the Ropers
were ever known to work. The family is too respectable."
There was another thing I saw for the first time in that house, and
that was a drunken woman.
The landlady, robbed of rent and food by the Ropers, who were too
respectable to be turned out, had grown poor and dismal, and had
taken to pawn her belongings for gin. I had never heard of gin
before, nor ever seen a gin-palace. It was our landlady who bribed
me for the first time to enter a London public-house--a flaring,
reeking, typical London gin-palace. The sight and smell of the place
filled me with a loathing which I have never forgotten.
But "here's a penny for yourself," said she, "and it's a most
respectable house."
And that was my first introduction to English respectability.
No wonder that I preferred Parisian wickedness!
PARIS REVISITED
Other days come back on me
With recollected music, though the tone
Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan
Of dying thunder on the distant wind.
BYRON.
The stock-in-trade of the ten-a-penny poets includes a serviceable
allusion to the pleasure derivable from a re-visit, after a
prolonged absence to a familiar scene of earlier years.
The wanderer, returning in a snowstorm, sees the dear old gables
from afar, bathed in tender memories and moonshine. The snow lies
in crystal heaps on the well-remembered window-sill; and the
apple-trees in the backyard are loaded with frequent blossom. The
boats are darting o'er the curly bay, the nightingales are singing
blythe and free, the little lambs on the icy peaks skip up and down
the flowering willow, and the wanderer's aged parents are standing
on their heads under the ancestral fig-tree.
And as the ten-a-penny poet gazes, enraptured, upon this pleasing
spectacle from a conveniently adjacent mountain summit, his bosom
heaves with many a joy, he flings his pack upon the grassy sward,
and he too dances a festal hornpipe upon his head.
If admirers of ten-a-penny poetry had anything to think with, they
would resent this crude and humiliating imposition.
I protest that the scenes of earlier joys are always, and in the
nature of things, a delusion and a snare. That vast and luscious
orchard, so long and so fondly remembered, turns out to be no more
than a scrubby clump of woebegone bearers of tasteless, sapless
pears and wooden apples. The main street that we thought so wide
and grand and gay, is a narrow, dirty, straggling collection of
dingy, fly-blown marine stores and reach-me-down contraptions.
The toffee-shop--the Star of the East, that glorious palace of
delight--is a ramshackle, tumbledown hovel, with a stock of
sloppy, sticky, sickly brandy-balls, and soiled peppermints. The
confectioner's--ah, woe is me!
When I lived in Paris, as a boy, what a mad, merry, reckless place
it was! How admirably Offenbach set it to music in the rippling airs
of _La Grande Duchesse_, which _tout Paris_ then whistled and sang!
I think the sun in those days shone all the time, and Paris, newly
rebuilt by Baron Haussman, glittered in bran new white and gold
under a canopy of silky blue.
Offenbach translated it all--sunshine, staring new white stone,
gilt railings and eagles, joyous crowds, laughing women, madly
merry mirlitons, dazzling uniforms, splendid horses and carriages,
imperial tinsel, bright silk skies, universal carelessness,
recklessness, and intoxication. It is all in the music of _The Grand
Duchess of Gerolstein_.
Then the Sunday picnics in the woods of Vincennes and St. Cloud!
the _al fresco_ dinner-parties at the suburban cafés! the jousting
games upon the river, where we knocked each other into the Seine,
to the joy of ourselves and all beholders! and the old dances--ah!
who could forget the dances of the fête at St. Cloud? Men in
shirt-sleeves, girls without hats, spinning like coupled
tornadoes, heedless of time, heedless of all measure, heedless of
conventions. If they desired to dance the waltz, and the band chose
to play the polka, _eh bien_, "_Zut_," to the band.
[Illustration: THE CHAMPS ÉLYSÉES.]
And the band! If the dancers didn't care, it was _bien égal_ to the
band? _Parbleu._ Every blower blew his hardest, and arranged his
time to his heart's content; every scraper scraped for novelty of
effect, letting harmony take care of itself; and the drummer in his
shirt-sleeves, contemptuous of all besides, spanked the sounding
drum with a rollicking energy that put all other effects in the
shade. How he did drum, that drummer! and smile, and cock his hat!
Then the great Exhibition of 1867, and my childish wonder and
delight in its cosmopolitan crowds and dazzling prodigality of
uniforms! By the same token I remember that my first literary
attempt was a composition written at M. Duvernoy's Protestant
School, in the Rue Madame, setting forth my impressions of a grand
review upon a brilliant Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, where
three emperors and the Sultan of Turkey watched the manoeuvres of
what was then believed to be the finest army in the world; and I
remember--these little things cling to one's memory sometimes to the
exclusion of important events--how the Prince Imperial, Napoleon's
ill-starred son, riding past our landau at the head of his
glittering regiment in the Avenue de l'Impératrice, paused to smile
at me, a boy little younger than himself, as my hat's protecting
elastic hindered my salute.
Yet another radiant Sunday I remember, and a splendid cavalcade
escorting Napoleon III, and the Sultan from the Palais de
l'Industrie back through the Champs-Élysées through the then spick
and span, and glitteringly white Rue de Rivoli, to the luxurious
Palais des Tuileries; and I remember how amongst the hurrahs and
waving of hats, there burst out one loud "_A bas l'Empereur_," which
caused the conqueror of Solferino to look furtively sideways under
his heavy eyebrows, whilst his ubiquitous _mouchards_ pounced upon
the bold republican with their loaded sticks and dragged him off to
jail.
* * * * *
But now when I visit Paris I see no more the pomp and glitter of
unsurpassed opulence, nor splendour of architecture, nor infectious
gaiety.
Scowling St. Antoine I see all the time--in the bullet marks left on
the buildings from the Commune massacre, and in the faces and gait
of the tired and melancholy Parisians.
The glitter of Haussman's buildings is faded, their whiteness
tarnished, the whole place is like the scene of an orgie as seen by
the revellers on the dismal morrow.
The books and pictures in the shop windows are infamous; the plays
in theatres and music-halls are unspeakable; and the smells--ah,
_mon Dieu?_ the smells!
Looked Paris so in '70? and smelt so? Pah!
My acquaintance with atmospheres is extensive and peculiar. I have
essayed Widnes on a summer's afternoon; I have sniffed the fiery
soot, smithy cleek, and wheel swarf of Sheffield in August; I have
dwelt upon the fragrant banks of Irwell and within scent of Barking
Creek; but--a sultry day in Paris, ugh!
The narrow streets near the Halles may not smell as strong as St.
Helen's, nor as loud as Widnes, but their perfume is more subtle,
and like the famous patent pill of England it goes further.
When the hot season begins, people who regularly live thereabouts
need no nutriment.
They live on the atmosphere--or die on it. And the state of the
latter is the more happy.
* * * * *
Then the drapers' shops.
How is it that in the years that were earlier, I saw only fêtes
and picnics? whilst now, when I accompany my Bosom's Lord on her
periodical invasions of France--
Ah! yes, perhaps that accounts for it.
I accompany Madame to the Printemps, the Belle Jardinière, the
Louvre, and the Bon Marché, to interpret her commands, and I climb
everlasting staircases like a little white mouse in a wheel.
How I perspire--_dame!_ how I perspire!
One day in a great magazine of Paris a small grease spot will be
found upon the carpet, and someone will approach and say, "_Tiens
donc_, this grease spot; what is it?"
And they will call Mr. Stirlock Roames, the detective, and he will
say, "Ah, it is the remains of a great dramatic critic. By my
process of induction I perceive that he was a remarkable genius, and
owned a yellow dog with a gift for solo leapfrog. He had one fault:
he was too good. If you bring me a small piece of blotting-paper and
a flat iron I will pick him up."
And the grease spot will be removed to Westminster Abbey, and the
readers of the _Clarion_ will wear sackcloth and ashes ever after.
* * * * *
Ah! _mon Dieu!_ These shops!
"Ask the man," says She who must be obeyed, "to show me an
accordeon-pleated plain bell-skirt with a deep hem and shallow
basque of glycine velvet, shirred with a shallow round yoke of fine
guise guipure, and broadly turned back lapels of material to match,
and ample Marie Stuart sleeves of white satin mounted on lace,
braceleted with a band of silver and pearl-embroidered satin slashed
to the elbow."
A college of professors of languages, armed with a library of
technical dictionaries would be compelled to give it up.
But I dare not.
If I confessed myself unable to translate this wholesale order
offhand into current Parisian, Madame would denounce me as an
impostor on the spot.
Therefore I translate it for her, but I work it on a system. Thus--
I turn nonchalantly to the shopman, and observe briskly in French,
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, it might
have been."
Madame, who doesn't understand a word, nods her head in
corroboration like a Chinese figure in a tea-shop window, and
repeats "Wee-wee," which, as regards French, represents the whole of
her little lot.
Whatever the topic, whatever the emergency, she always says
"Wee-wee." One would think that sometimes when she had laid it out
in one speculation unsuccessfully, she would feel discouraged and
deterred.
But lor! nothing discourages that diminutive but remarkable woman.
I have tried, and I know.
So whenever, in Paris, opportunity occurs to put in a word, Madame
sails in hopefully and spreads out her "Wee-wee" as confidently as
if it were the ace of trumps.
Whereupon the shopman looks perplexed. "_Mais, M'sieur_," says he,
shrugging his shoulders in pretty apology, "_je ne comprends pas_."
It is a shame to abuse his gentle, smiling good-nature and
affability, but, what the good year! self-preservation is the
first law of Nature. My business at this crisis is not to bandy
compliments with a polite shopman, but to snatch my acquisitive
Bosom's Lord as swiftly as it may be from bankruptcy.
When the shopman says he does not understand me, I pepper him at
once with another staggerer. "_Milles bombes!_" I cry, "what have
you done with M. Zola?"
"M. Zola!" he exclaims, looking pathetically bewildered; "_Vraiment,
M'sieur_, I do not know."
"You're quite right," I answer meditatively. Then, turning to
Madame, I explain: "Sold out. Empress of China sent for the last
this morning. Fresh cargo expected from Patagonia in the spring";
and hastily grabbing her umbrella I snatch her out of the shop
before she can say "Wee-wee."
* * * * *
It worked very well at first. Then she got in the way of grabbing
her umbrella in her own hand at the critical moment, and when I
turned to go she would say, "Yes, I know what you are going to say,
my dear; they're sold out again. It must be, as you suggest, the
curious custom of the country. But do not be discouraged; ask him
whether they have any alpaca skirts with dotted foulards in two-inch
wristbands of shot moiré gussets and squashed strawberry ruchings
to the sleeve, rosettes of guipure and bronze-powdered swordgrass
flounces with Imogen ruffles round the waist."
Then the situation complicates itself; it becomes needful to prepare
the _grand coup_.
I approach the shopman with a determined air, and with faltering
speech, and eyes that wildly glare; I give it him in French, as
thus--"Look at here, young fellow, unaccustomed as I am to public
speaking, I say that drink is a curse."
He looks surprised, and shrugs his shoulders again as if once more
to apologise.
"Then bandy words no more with me," I cry; "for slaves cannot
breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they
are free; they touch our country and their shackles fall."
"_Mais, M'sieur_," he begins, but ere he can think of his little
piece, I pour into him another broadside--"O native isle," I cry,
adopting now a friendly, engaging, and rhapsodical air, "fair
freedom's happiest seat! at thought of thee, my bounding pulses
beat! For what country has such work-houses, such gin-palaces, such
company promoters, such Sunday clothes, and such respectability?"
He shakes his head, a little impatiently perhaps, and again begins,
"_Mais, M'sieur_"--
"Yes, I know what you would plead," I interrupt, "but _milles
tonnerres!_ is not your proprietor a lanthern-jawed, spider-legged,
hump-backed, knock-kneed, flat-footed, swivel-eyed, chowder-headed
old Paty du Clam?"
Then his politeness gives way and the poison begins to work on him.
He foams at the mouth and jerks out little broken bits of hissing
and gurgling words.
"Come, come," I continue in a placid and wheedling tone, "you must
admit his eyebrows are like birds' nests, his teeth like tombstones,
and his hair like whiskers on broomstick. Now, even at his time of
life, why should he not try to wash himself?"
That lets my poor friend out. He rolls his eyes, claws the air, and
spits fire, till at last my Bosom's Lord, who has been unconsciously
smiling and dropping bland "Wee-wee's" at ill-sorted intervals
throughout the conversation, imperiously demands to know what is the
matter.
"Oh, nothing!" I explain; "only the gentleman wants to know whether
you are a Kaffir collector of curiosities or a Hottentot marine
store-dealer, that you should ask for a thing so many years behind
the fashion. He says you've no more notion of style, my Queen, than
a superannuated Dutch scarecrow with cheap false teeth and a father
who worked for his living. He says"--
But that lets _her_ out. She turns upon the gasping foreigner as
if with a view to fell him, but realising at last the pathetic
inadequacy of "Wee-wee" as a conversational medium, she speechlessly
grabs her umbrella, and with eyes flashing lightning, rustles out.
As she is too excited to notice me, I seize the opportunity to
apologise to the shopman.
I explain to him that we are English.
"Ah!" he says, shrugging his shoulders. No further explanation is
required.
I have said.
* * * * *
It seems mean, but no other means may serve. Once let a woman get a
footing in a Paris draper's shop, and all is lost.
_Par example_--to show you the system. A woman enters one of these
vast magazines where the insidious, perfidious, meretricious
merchandise of Paris is displayed on countless counters, in storey
after storey.
Suppose, after sampling all the stock, she asks for a ha'pennyworth
of pins:--
"Ha'porth o' pins? Oui, madame," says the shopman. "Would madame
deign to give the address to which I must send them? No, madame, it
is not worth the trouble to pay now. If you desire to pay, why not
pay when the goods are delivered, madame?"
And, bowing madame out of the shop, he politely sweeps the floor
with his hair.
* * * * *
On the next day the pins are delivered at Madame's address in the
suburbs, by two handsome men in uniform who drive out in a handsome
van. Madame uses the pins for a few days, and decides that she can
do without them.
Next time she passes that way she calls in the shop, visits the
refreshment department, where refreshments are dispensed free of
charge, lolls awhile on a sofa in the reading-room, where the
newspapers are kept for the use of customers, retires to the
writing-room, conducts her day's correspondence on stationery
provided by the establishment, and finally, as she is passing out,
informs the cashier that she has bought something which she desires
to return.
"Oui, madame," says he, "what address?"
She gives her address, and the shop-walker, as he bows her out,
sweeps the floor with his nose.
Next day come the two handsome men in uniform with the handsome
carriage, to fetch the pins; on the day following they come once
more to return the money, and when the lady has pocketed her
halfpenny again, they politely raise their caps and say, "_Merci
bien, Madame._"
* * * * *
What is the natural result of these things? When a Parisian wife
is not foraging in the shops, she is in her bedroom trying on the
plunder. She has all the new fashions sent home to her, tries them
on, and sends half of them back. The other half, which she never
would have seen but for this tempting convenience, are kept and
have to be paid for.
It is thus that Parisian husbands are reminded of their wives'
existence. If it were not for the bills, I think some of them might
sometimes forget that they were married.
* * * * *
It occurred the other day, that my interpretation of the French
failed of its accustomed success.
At Madame's request, I had asked a shopwoman at the Samaritaine, the
price of a pennyworth of ribbon; but, after I had spoken, Madame
demanded to know what I had said.
"I asked her, my Queen, what was the price?"
"Price of what? Price of a kiss?"
"No, my Sultana; price of the ribbon."
"What was it you said about a kiss?"
"I didn't mention a kiss, my Empress."
"Yes, you did; I heard you."
"No, my Juno, I said, _Qu'est ce que c'est?_"
"Ah? 'Kiss Kissay.' That was what I heard. How do you spell it?"
She produces a pocket dictionary, with whose aid she designs during
the next few days to learn the French language, and I am obliged to
spell out my remark while she dubiously translates it word for word.
The literal translation comes out thus--
FRENCH--_Qu'est ce que c'est?_
ENGLISH--_What is this, what this is?_
"'What is this, what this is'?" Madame solemnly repeats; "is that
all you said to the girl?"
"Yes, my dear, it is a 'French idiom.'"
"I am glad," says she, "that it is no worse. It is a mercy I did not
let you come to this place by yourself.
"Let us get home to London."
And I am thankful to be able to add that we get.
EDINBURGH:
PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed.
The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up
paragraphs, thus the page number of the illustration might not match
the page number in the List of Illustrations.
Page 98: "Burrrns", in "Burrrns was Scottish", was printed that way.
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