II

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is

really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is

suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge

dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a sort of hush

steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is

not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about

Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row--a

spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a

"bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a

Christmas-day, and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude.

I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character,

for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it

would not come round again for another year. This information was given

me on the occasion of that surprising interruption of one's relations

with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I

was told that all the washerwomen were intoxicated, and that, as it

would take them some time to revive, I must not count upon a relay of

"fresh things." I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this

statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning

back. One of the incidental _agréments_ of life in the latter city had

been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman

with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her

head a frilled and fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible

advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_ was

not in liquor is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always

grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her

talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp,

dense hair, and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I

talked with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved

about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her

light step carried her off again, talking, to the door, and with a

brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her,

leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a

washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog,

and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a

horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky!

She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost

frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my

fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not

strictly accurate, and that at the end of three months I had another

array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing

occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched,

though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the

lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were

very much _en évidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for getting

an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the

background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets

were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the

"masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I

strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most

unfavourable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left

for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the

shifting gloom of the sky, the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of

weatherproof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway

stations overflowed, and the Thames embankment was covered. The

"masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when

observed through the distorting medium of London bad weather. There are

indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London

holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at

superficially, the British capital is one of the most interesting of

cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most

felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than

any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on

festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large

numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human

life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic want of charm. A

Christmas-day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you

walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you

look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog,

pierced with their straight stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of

a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curbstone.

There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the

narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me

rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker

Street--a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity

of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying

monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no

claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London,

however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of

a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details.

London is pictorial in spite of details--from its dark-green, misty

parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its

cloud-ceiling, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put

on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is

there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke,

such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such

contemplations this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only part

of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the

feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated

immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners

you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain

interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so

much human life gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon you

with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far

from it. But they are of every possible kind, and that is the interest

of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter

season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even

with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from

Piccadilly across the Green Park and through that of St. James. The

parks were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling

about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over

the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of

people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and

succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to

advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the

church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact, and

beneath the gothic arches the odour was not that of incense. I slowly

eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that

one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent

disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly

speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are

too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation. Go to the

theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find

that, before you arrive, there are people enough in the field. You are a

tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too many

companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of

thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were,

swallows up quality, and perpetual association is rather irritating.

This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a

"park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a

few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the

breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which

circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the

profane pleasure-grounds of London, in the midst of "superfluous herds,"

and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great

English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest

people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe

that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without

feeling this impression confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have

sometimes felt it to be rather shaken in the presence of a limited

group. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger

percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to

the upper class I suppose this is generally granted; but I should extend

it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the

observer by their good looks, they must be very good-looking indeed.

They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their

garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common

with some of the more romantic forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of

misery--an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is

especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the

women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed

boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not

too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses,"

bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The

proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very

striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact

that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A

very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the

distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes

from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted,

misbegotten, and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in

every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest

an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the

observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-moulded

faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and

handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised

heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as

absolutely unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious

class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the

people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are

strikingly numerous--especially among the younger ones. Here the same

distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than

the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are

physically very well turned out. Their features are finished, composed,

as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and

remoter neighbours, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and

compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and

inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of

hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it

may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of

the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West End

pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm,

fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among

the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have, it at heart

to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also

very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are

uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent

types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilisations.

American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness;

English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few

grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them have a high

pictorial value.