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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.