LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES
London was a more livable place in the late seventies than it is now,
or so it seems to me, as it seems to many others who knew the town in
that earlier time. There were not so many means for getting everywhere
as there are now, and yet we got everywhere,--everywhere, that is, that
we wished to go. We were not in a hurry then, and there was more
consideration for the old and the lame than there is now. Now there is
none at all in the streets or under them. The electric age was
prophesied, but nothing more. Nobody in England believed in
prophecies. There were arc lights on Holborn Viaduct and the Thames
Embankment, nowhere else, but the incandescent lamp had not appeared.
There was nothing electrical, in our modern sense, except the
telegraph. The telephone was unknown. It is almost unknown to-day, if
London's use of it be compared with New York's. There was no electric
traction, and the petrol age was nearly a quarter of a century distant.
But for all these drawbacks, as I daresay they may be regarded by the
youth of the present hour, London was the most livable place in the
world, if you loved cities; it had a charm, a fascination all its own.
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That charm is not to be described. How can it be described, any more
than the charm of a charming woman? You are conscious of it, you know
that there is nothing like it, you are sorry for those who must live
elsewhere and cannot come under its spell; they have missed that much
out of life. You experience a certain largeness of heart, and would
like to give everybody a June in London, but reluctantly acknowledge
that every one must take the will for the deed.
But if you attempt to analyse London it will baffle your effort. It is
at once so splendid and so mean, so spacious and so meagre, so
beautiful and so ugly, so noisy and so quiet, so restless and restful,
that the farther you go the more puzzled you become, unless having
begun by questioning it you end by accepting. Take it in its own way
and you will see that it is in itself a problem that cannot be solved
by a study of weeks or months; it is a study for a lifetime, for many
lifetimes. For instance: architecturally it is too often saddening and
mean.
Some one will fly into a rage when he reads the preceding sentence. He
will ask resentfully if I think Westminster Abbey, the Parliament
Buildings, St. Paul's Cathedral sad, or mean, or shabby. Of course I
do not. Their nobility and beauty almost redeem the hundreds of square
miles of common-place and melancholy builders' work that encumbers
London. Yet how the mean shops press upon St. Paul's and shut it in!
Could anything be uglier than the National Gallery? Could any
important thoroughfare be more conducive to depression of {11} spirits
than Victoria Street? It's not the old London that is architecturally
ugly and mean; it is the modern London, and usually the more modern the
greater the affliction to the eye. Somebody said, I think it was
Schelling, "Architecture is frozen music." Would not anybody say that
the Methodist mountain in Westminster is frozen pudding?
London in the late seventies was architecturally less saddening than
now, because less that was pretentious and defiant of good taste had
been undertaken. Its public buildings of later date are the worst in
Europe, excepting those that have arisen in Germany. Squat, heavy, out
of proportion, lacking in dignity, in beauty, they seem to have been
erected for the purpose of proving that in architecture the modern
Briton will neither imitate nor aspire. "The finest site in Europe" is
almost the meanest sight. The marvel is that a capital and a country
having so many fine models of earlier date do not repeat them, improve
upon them, or attempt even a finer taste. The opportunities have been
unrivalled, but about the achievements the less said the better. Acres
of slums have been swept away to be superseded by miles of masonry
which serve mainly to prevent an acquaintance with good taste. What
public "improvement" could be shabbier than Shaftsbury Avenue, meaner
than newer Whitehall, or more commonplace than Kingsway and Aldwych?
What department of a Government could have blocked a vista so
remorselessly as the Admiralty has done, or have betrayed a contempt
for beauty more disheartening than the County {12} Council has shown in
its latest horror at Westminster Bridge?
The majestic beauties of London seem to have developed by accident
rather than by design. The view down Waterloo Place to the Abbey and
the Victoria Tower and the view eastward from the Serpentine Bridge in
Hyde Park have certainly done so. The view down the river from
Waterloo Bridge, or Westminster, was never planned; it grew slowly,
being first blessed by every natural advantage that a patient
Providence could bestow. In its buildings of a private character, its
domestic architecture, London still has much to seek; monotony has been
the rule, but the style has not deteriorated. In some respects and
localities it has much improved; there is evidence that imagination has
been allowed to exercise itself, that all house owners do not, in these
times, think alike, and are not content with dwellings which, outwardly
at least, seem, class by class, to have been run from one mould.
Individuality begins to express itself as if, at last, some Londoners
were beginning to lose their fear of becoming conspicuous. An advance
in taste has run concurrently with the decline of the top hat and frock
coat.
But the interiors of English buildings of all kinds, public as well as
private, churches as well as theatres, offices no less than railway
stations, clubs, homes, hotels, all are draughty, as lacking in warmth
as they were when I first knew them. The exceptions are so few that
they are advertised. Central heating is still regarded as a fad,
constant hot water is a {13} novelty; there is a superstitious regard
for cold air as pure air, and a fear of warm air as impure. But the
worst cold is that of dampness, and many houses are never dry. Mildew
is common in their closets, chill in the bedrooms, and their halls are
rheumatic. Rheumatism, and its allies lumbago, influenza, pneumonia,
and consumption are the customary ills. When the Briton is cold
indoors he goes out for a walk and warms his blood. The theory is that
artificial warmth is unhealthful; the truth is that it is an expense to
which the Briton objects, and that he has not learned how to warm his
house. The tough survive. The delicate, the aged, the invalid, or the
sedentary take their chances, and while they live do so with an
unbelievable lack of comfort. Consequently the English complain of
cold when the American would think the temperature moderate; but the
American uses heat to keep his house dry as well as warm. He often
overdoes it; he often goes as far in one direction as the Briton in the
other. But an English house warmed in the American way, not
necessarily to the usual American degree, is always appreciated by the
Briton, although he may be far from understanding the reason of his
content. London had a charm in the late seventies that it lost when
the Twentieth Century was still young,--the charm of leisure. The
internal-combustion engine drove leisure from the land. The old
two-horse 'bus was a leisurely thing. Even the four-horse express
'busses that plied between the Swan at Clapham to Gracechurch Street,
and similar urban and suburban centres, were leisurely enough, {14}
compared with the electric trains and motor 'busses that now rush the
city man to and fro. They were not comfortable, those horse-drawn
caravans with their knifeboard roofs and perilous scaling ladders, that
is, they were not comfortable excepting on the box seats to which every
man's ambition soared. There, sheltered by great leathery aprons, the
lucky passenger braved the weather, beheld the passing world, and
exchanged small talk with the driver who condescended affably to
discourse, with his "regulars", the news of the day. The smart hansom
disappeared long ago. Smart as it was it was leisurely compared with
the flashing taxi and motor which have superseded "London's gondola",
as Disraeli called it. And, Heaven knows, the sulphurous underground
was leisurely beyond words.
Everybody rushes now. London has no more time to spare than New York
has. It seems a dream that, when I first entered an English train, the
custom was for the railway guards to call, "Take your time, take your
time!" But that was their call forty years ago.
Gradually the street cries have lessened in variety, in character, and
in interest. The simple trades that announced their wares by a snatch
of something that passed for song have disappeared one by one. Even
the muffin man is vocal no longer, and his bell is silent. Whatever
may have caused the other merchants of the curb to vanish, the war and
short rations removed the muffin man. He was almost the last, perhaps
actually the last of the creatures who gave to London streets an
old-world sound or savour.
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When the late seventies were still on the calendar, and for long after,
the silk hat was an unrelenting tyrant, and in the City, among
stockbrokers, it bore a special gloss. Every male above the age and
status of an office boy or a labouring man wore a silk hat. Without
that ugly and inconvenient headgear you would not call upon your
solicitor, or appear at your banker's, or negotiate a contract, much
less intrude upon an official person. The silk hat was a sign of
respectability. In the House of Commons it seemed a symbol of the
majesty of the British Constitution. There, to this day, the head must
be covered, as if the members were in a synagogue. In summer time
straw hats were unknown, excepting for the sex that was gentler then,
and invariably the sex wore furs with its straws. A man who ventured
in a straw hat incurred the risk of obloquy. At any rate, he was as
marked and ridiculous an object as Jonas Hanway when, in an earlier
century, he raised an umbrella in Oxford Street.
Temple Bar was standing where Fleet Street joins the Strand; the new
Law Courts which now overlook its site were in process of construction;
the Griffin was undreamed of. Northumberland Avenue had been opened
but was incomplete. The modern hotels had yet to be promoted. The
Grand was the first of these, but its fortunes were thought hazardous.
There was no Metropole, or Victoria, although their walls were going
up. Rimmel's perfumery warehouse stood where the Savoy is now, and
that sordid adventurer Hobbs (or was it Jabez Balfour?) had not
preempted the site of the Cecil which was {16} then covered with
lodging houses, chambers, and private hotels. There was no Carlton, no
Ritz, no Waldorf; even the Great Central was not in being, and the only
restaurants of consequence were the Criterion, St. James', Gatti's old
Adelaide Gallery, half its present size, the Cafe Royal, Very's, and
the stuffy predecessor of the present Holborn.
The first run of "Pinafore" had not ended, the revival of Old Drury's
prosperous days had not begun; "Our Boys" had been running for nearly
five thousand nights at the Vaudeville; Sothern was making his last
appearances in the last season of the unremodelled Haymarket; there was
the Alhambra but no Empire, no Hippodrome, no Coliseum; St. James'
Hall, but no Queen's Hall; the Albert Hall was mostly empty, the
old-style music halls were mostly full; Mr. Pinero was acting small
parts in Irving's company and had not written so much as the scenario
of a one-act play; Henry Arthur Jones had not been heard of; Bernard
Shaw was unknown, Adelaide Neilson was at the height of her brief
career, Forbes Robertson had begun his, and Buckstone's days were
ending. The era of the Kendals and John Hare at the St. James' was yet
to come, but the happy reign of the Bancrofts, at the old Prince of
Wales', behind the Tottenham Court Road, where the Scala now stands,
had yet to close.
George Meredith was not only "caviare to the general" but "the general"
were a little shocked when they learned that he was still a reader for
a publishing house and a writer when he had the time. "The general"
found delight in the fiction of Miss {17} Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood,
and, of course, Ouida, as they would delight now if these ladies were
spinning copy; Kipling was at school, and Barrie dreaming in the north.
We had William Black and Walter Besant and James Rice, but no Society
of Authors, and no literary knights. If the world is small now it was
very large then, but "sausage and mashed" were cheap at the top of
London Bridge, threepence for a pair of hulking sausages and a liberal
plate of mashed potato, a penny more for a great hunk of bread, and
tu'ppence more for half a tankard of beer.
A certain splendid swagger departed from London Streets when the
regiments quartered in town abandoned their gorgeous uniforms and
dressed less like magnificos and more like fighting men. They were
fighting men though, they and their successors who held back the
outnumbering German rush from the Channel ports of France in 1914, as
all the world knows, and none know better than the Huns. But they were
dandies too, those earlier men, and they filled the eye. Their saucy
scarlet, short-waisted jackets, their jaunty fatigue caps, their tight
trousers with broad red stripes, on shapely legs which seemed
tremendous in length, were at once the admiration of nursemaids and the
envy of small boys, lending, as they did, colour and form to these dun
streets. Will the glorious colossi who strode thus habited be seen
again this side of Charon's ferry; or will their successors lead the
simple life in khaki and puttees?
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