The Middlesex magistrates have shut up the Argyle Rooms. Mr. Bignell,
who has found it worth his while to invest £80,000 in the place, it is to
be presumed, is much annoyed, and has, in some respects, reason to be so.
Year after year noble lords and Middlesex magistrates have visited the
place, and have licensed it. Indeed, it had become one of the
institutions of the country—one of the places which Bob Logic and
Corinthian Tom (for such men still exist, though they go by other names)
would be sure to visit, and such as they and the women who were
_habitués_ will have to go elsewhere. It is said a great public scandal
is removed, but the real scandal yet remains. It is a scandal that such
a place ever flourished in the great metropolis of a land which professes
Christianity—which pays clergymen and deans, and bishops and archbishops
princely sums to extirpate that lust of the flesh and lust of the eye and
pride of life, which found their lowest form of development in the Argyle
Rooms. It was a scandal that men of position, who have been born in
English homes and nursed by English mothers, and been consecrated
Christians in baptism, and have been trained at English public schools
and universities, and worshipped in English churches and cathedrals,
should have helped to make the Argyle a flourishing institution. Mr.
Bignell created no vice—he merely pandered to what was in existence. It
was men of wealth and fashion who made the Argyle what it was. The
Argyle closed, the vice remains the same, and it will avail little to
make clean the outside of the whited sepulchre if within there be
rottenness and dead men’s bones. Be that as it may, there are few people
who will regret the defeat of Mr. Bignell and the closing of the Argyle.
It was not an improving spectacle in an age that has sacrificed
everything to worldly show, and that has come to regard brougham as the
one thing needful—as the outward and visible sign of an inward and
invisible grace—as a charter of respectability to everyone who rides in
it, whether purchased by the chastity of woman or the honour of man—to
see painted and bedizened females, most of them
Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred,
driving up in broughams from St. John’s Wood or Chelsea or Belgravia,
with their gallants, or “protectors,” to the well-known rendezvous, at a
late hour, to leave a little later for the various oyster-rooms in the
district, through a dense crowd of lookers-on, drunk or sober, poor or
rich, old or young, as the case might be. In no other capital in Europe
was such a sight to be seen. The lesson taught by such a spectacle was
neither moral nor improving at first sight, and it was not well that a
young, giddy girl, with good looks, and wishing, above all things, for
fine dresses and gay society—sick at heart of her lowly home and the
dreary drudgery of daily poverty—should there practically have learnt
that if she could but make up her mind to give her virtue to the winds,
there awaited her the companionship of men of birth and breeding and
wealth, and the gaudy, if short-lived, pomps and splendours of successful
vice. It is true that in the outside crowd there were, in rags and
tatters, in degradation and filth, shivering with cold, pale with want,
hideous with intemperance and disease, homeless and friendless and
destitute, withered hags old before their time, whom the policeman shrank
from touching as he bade them move on, who once were the admired of the
Argyle, and the pets and _protégées_ of England’s gilded youth; and here
and there in the crowd, with boots in holes and broken hat, and needy
coat buttoned as far as possible to the chin to conceal the absence of a
shirt, with hands thrust in empty pockets, sodden in face and feeble of
limb, were men who had been hauled from the Argyle to Bow Street and the
gaol. It is true thus side by side were the bane and the antidote; but
when did youth, flushed with wine and pleasure, pause on the road to
ruin? Young says:
All men think all men mortal but themselves,
and in like manner each man or woman in the glow of youth feels confident
that he or she can never fall, and thus rushes madly on, ignoring the
eternal truth that there is a Nemesis ever tracking the steps of the
wrongdoer, one from whose grasp we can never escape, that the pleasures
of sin are but for a season, and that the wages of sin are death. By the
beery dissipated crowd outside, I say, this obvious fact had been lost
sight of. What they wanted to see was the women and the men as they
turned out into the streets or drove away. Well, that sight exists no
longer, and to a certain extent it is a gain. The Haymarket in these
latter days was very different and a much more sober place than it was
when the Marquis of Waterford played his drunken pranks at Bob Croft’s,
or when the simple Windham was in the habit of spending his time and
wasting his money and degrading an honoured name at such a place as
Barns’s or The Blue Posts. Men not far advanced in life can remember the
Piccadilly Saloon, with its flashy women and medical students and
barristers from the Temple, and men about town and greenhorns from the
country—who in the small hours turned out into the streets, shouting
stentoriously, “We won’t go home till morning,” and putting their
decision into execution by repairing to the wine and coffee rooms which
lined both sides of the Haymarket and existed in all the adjacent
streets. In some there was a piano, at which a shabby performer was
hired to keep up the harmony of the evening and to give an appearance of
hilarity to what was after all a very slow affair. In others the company
were left to their own resources. At a certain hour the police
inspector, with a couple of constables, would look in, and it was comic
to see how unconscious he was apparently that every trace of intoxicating
drink had been removed, as nothing remained on the tables but a few
harmless cups of coffee. It was not till the industrious world had risen
to the performance of its daily task that the rag-tag and bob-tail of the
Haymarket retired to roost; and by the time that earls and holy bishops
and godly clergy were ready to drive down the Haymarket to take part in
meetings at Exeter Hall to send the Gospel to the heathen abroad, not a
trace was left of the outrageous display the night before of the more
fearful and sadder forms of heathenism at home. Undoubtedly the
Haymarket thirty or forty years ago was an awful place; undoubtedly it
will be a little quieter now that the Argyle Rooms are closed, and as the
glory of Windmill-street has fled. Undoubtedly we have gained a great
deal externally by magisterial action. Yet it is evident we need
something more than magisterial sanction for the interference of the
police. I am not partial to the men in blue. I doubt their efficacy as
agents for moral reform or the introduction of the millennium. They can
remove the symptoms, but they cannot touch the disease. It seems to me
that they often interfere—especially in the case of poor women—when there
is no occasion to do so; and no one, when it is requisite, can be more
stolidly blind and deaf and dumb than your ordinary policeman. Police
surveillance must mean more or less police bribery. It was once my fate
to live in a country town and to belong to a library, which was also
supported by the superintendent of police. On one occasion I had a book
which had previously been in that gentleman’s hands. In opening it a
letter fell out addressed to him. I did what I ought not to have done,
but as it was wide open, I read it, as anyone would. It was from a
publican in the town, begging the superintendent’s acceptance of a cask
of cider. Of course, on the next licensing-day no complaint would be
heard as to the character of that house. A journeyman engineer, in his
“Habits and Customs of the Working Classes,” gives us similar testimony
as he describes a drinking party during prohibited hours disturbed by the
appearance of a policeman, but reassured when told by the landlord that
he is one of “the right sort;” which means, continues the author, that
“he is one of that tolerably numerous sort who, provided a publican
‘tips’ them a ‘bob’ occasionally, and is liberal in the matter of drops
of something short when they are on night duty, will not see any
night-drinking that may be carried on in his establishment as long as it
is done with a show of decency.” I need say no more on that head; human
nature is the same all the world over. Out of the heart are the issues
of life, and no policeman or magistrate can make a drunken people sober,
or a low, sordid, and sensual race of men and women noble and pure in
thought and beautiful in life. For that we look to the Christian Church
in all its branches. To its ministers especially we appeal. Let them
leave theological wrangling, and the cloister where no living voice is
heard, and the well-lined study in which human nature, when it puts in an
appearance, has learned to assume a decent and decorous mask, and see
what are the amusements of the people, not so much on the Sabbath-day,
but on the week-night. The Argyle was but one place out of many. In our
great cities there are tens of thousands who live only for amusement,
whether they be the working classes or in the higher walks of life. A
glance at some of these places of resort may help us to understand what
are the amusements of the people, and whether the Church does well and
wisely in stamping them with her approval, or regarding them with her
frown. It is how a man spends his money, and not how he makes it, that
is the true index to his character. It is really impossible to imagine
amusements more foolish or more indicative of a low tone of mind morally
and intellectually than those which are most patronised at the present
day. What pleasure can there be in watching a man walking for a bet, or
in a woman risking her neck on a trapeze? Yet thousands go to see such a
sight. Even the theatres delight in displays equally revolting, perhaps
more so from a moral point of view.
When General Grant was in Moscow lately, an acrobat placed four bottles
on a high table, and on top of these a chair, which he balanced sideways
while he stood on his head on one corner of it. He kept repeating this,
adding one chair at a time, until he got five on top of each other, and
still showed no signs of stopping; but General Grant got up and walked
away, saying he would rather read the death in the papers than witness
it. Our music-hall audiences are far more appreciative of the amusements
provided for them.
The stage, I have said, may not escape censure. It has its illustrious
exceptions, but, as Mr. Chatterton has shown us, Shakespeare means
bankruptcy, and the majority of adaptations from the French are, it is
admitted on all hands, not of an improving character. The way also in
which the powers of the licenser are administered is, to say the least,
puzzling. It is impossible to represent some subjects on the stage
without injury to the morals and the manners of the spectators. In Mr.
Arthur Matthison’s adaptation of “Les Lionnes Pauvres,” the sin of
adultery was, it is true, held up to execration; but the license was
withheld because it was deemed undesirable to turn the English theatre
into a spectacular divorce court. Another prohibited play was founded on
“La Petite Marquise,” in which faithlessness to the marriage vow becomes
a fine art, and virtue and honour and purity in woman is held up to
ridicule. A lady who has married a man very much her senior, is
represented as encouraging the advances of a seducer, who, when she
throws herself in his arms, to avoid the expense of having to keep her,
sends her back to her husband; and yet the man who forces this filth on
the stage complains that he is badly treated, and questions whether the
world has ever given birth, or ever will give birth, to any conception as
obscene as that of the old man in “The Pink Dominoes”—a play which, it
must be remembered, has had a most successful run upon the stage. At the
theatre, the same writer observes, “I have beheld a young man hidden in a
chest spring out upon a woman half dressed, while from her lips broke
words I shudder to repeat. In peril I have watched with bated breath an
attempt to commit a rape elaborately represented before the public. In
‘Madame! attend Monsieur,’ I have seen a woman take a shirt in one hand,
and a shift in the other, and, standing in the very centre of the stage,
walk up to the float, deliberately put the two together, then with a wild
shriek, etc.;” and here the writer stops short. No one, of course,
expects people will stop away from the theatre; but why cannot the tone
of the place be a little higher, and the whole style of the amusement
more worthy of a civilised community? Why cannot we have a less liberal
display of legs and bosoms, and more generally in the matter of wit?
There have always been admirers of good acting. Why should they be
ignored, and the stage lowered to the level of the country bumpkin, the
imbecile youth of the day, and his female friends?