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.