1851.
First visit to London in 1851.--My first impression of the place.--
Nostalgia of the country.--Westminster.--The Royal Academy.--Resolution
never to go to London again.--Reason why this resolution was afterwards
broken.
In the year 1851 I went to London for the first time, to see the Great
Exhibition. Our little party consisted only of my guardian, my aunt, and
myself.
My first impression of London was exactly what it has ever since
remained. It seemed to me the most disagreeable place I had ever seen,
and I wondered how anybody could live there who was not absolutely
compelled to do so. At that time I did not understand the only valid
reason for living in London, which is the satisfaction of meeting with
intelligent people who know something about what interests you, and do
not consider you eccentric because you take an interest in something
that is not precisely and exclusively money-making.
My aunts knew nobody in London except one or two ladies of rank superior
to their own, on whom we made formal calls, which was a sort of human
intercourse that I heartily detested, as I detest it to this day.
Our lodgings were in Baker Street, which, after our pure air, open
scenery, and complete liberty at Hollins, seemed to me like a prison.
The lodgings were not particularly clean--the carpets, especially,
seemed as if they had never been taken up. The air was heavy, the water
was bad (our water at Hollins was clearer than glass, and if you poured
a goblet of it beady bubbles clung to the sides), there was no view
except up street and down street, and the noise was perpetual. A
Londoner would take these inconveniences as a matter of course and be
insensible to them, but to me they were so unpleasant that I suffered
from nostalgia of the country all the time.
The reader may advantageously be spared my boyish impressions of the
Great Exhibition and the other sights of London. Of course we fatigued
our brains, as country people always do, by seeing too many things in a
limited time; and as we had no special purpose in view, we got, I fear,
very little instruction from our wanderings amidst the bewildering
products of human industry. I remember being profoundly impressed by
Westminster Abbey, though I would gladly have seen all the modern
monuments calcined in a lime-kiln; and Westminster Hall affected me even
more, possibly because one of our ancestors, Sir Stephen Hamerton, had
been condemned to death there for high treason in the time of Henry
VIII. I was also deeply impressed by the grim, old Tower of London, and
only regretted that I did not know which cell the unlucky Sir Stephen
had occupied during his hopeless imprisonment there.
The rooms of the Royal Academy left a more durable recollection than the
contents of the great building in Hyde Park. Those are quite old times
for us now in the history of English art. Sir Frederick Leighton was a
young student who had not yet begun to exhibit; I think he was working
in Frankfort then. Millais was already known as the painter of strange
and vivid pictures of small size, which attracted attention, and put the
public into a state of much embarrassment. There were three of these
strange pictures that year,--an illustration of Tennyson, "She only
said, 'My life is dreary,'" the "Return of the Dove to the Ark," and the
"Woodman's Daughter." I distinctly remember the exact sensation with
which my young eyes saw these works; so distinctly that I now positively
feel those early sensations over again in thinking about them. All was
so fresh, so new! This modern art was such a novelty to one who had not
seen many modern pictures, and my own powers of enjoying art were so
entirely unspoiled by the effect of habit that I was like a young bird
in its first spring-time in the woods. I much preferred the beautiful
bright pictures in the Academy, with their greens and blues like Nature,
to the snuffy old canvases (as they seemed to me) in the National
Gallery.
The oddest result for a boy's first visit to London was a quiet mental
resolution of which I said nothing to anybody. What I thought and
resolved inwardly may be accurately expressed in these words: "Every
Englishman who can afford it ought to see London _once_, as a patriotic
duty, and I am not sorry to have been there to have got the duty
performed; but no power on earth shall ever induce me to go to that
supremely disagreeable place again!"
Of course the intelligent reader considers this boyish resolution
impossible and absurd, as it is entirely contrary to prevalent ideas;
but a man may lead a very complete life in Lancashire, and even in
counties less rich in various interest, without ever going to London at
all. A man's own fields may afford him as good exercise as Hyde Park,
and his well-chosen little library as good reading as the British
Museum. It was the Fine Arts that brought me to London afterwards; the
worst of the Fine Arts being that they concentrate themselves so much in
great capitals.