1877
I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess
that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore,
taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this
dishonourable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of
it. I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected
necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it--that I
had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you
don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you
have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or,
gazing along the empty vista of the Drive, in Hyde Park, have beheld,
for almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But
little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that
I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis--either on the
first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with
the members of Parliament, or on the twelfth when the grouse-shooting
began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these
were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the
departure of everything genteel, and the three millions of persons who
remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.
I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having lingered in town, I
have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I
have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and
steal abroad only under cover of the darkness--a line of conduct imposed
by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly
papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow
themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed
always had a theory that few things are pleasanter than during the hot
weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to
one's self.
These majestic conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan
sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be
rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of
powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely
hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The
present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year
is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the
people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best
(or the worst) even the highest flights of the thermometer in the
British Islands betray a broken wing. People live with closed windows in
August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no
appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in
England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable
tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a
more obvious ornament of the market at midsummer than at Christmas. This
matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best
examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners
finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost
ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the
country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as
"English comfort"--is a limited and restricted, an essentially private,
affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English
fruit as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well
what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone
of contemptuous generalisation by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen.
They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their
hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the
stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose
grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and, after
a long delay reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable
gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon
investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only things of
succulence that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it
seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was
as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my
anecdote seemed disposed to generalise: this was sufficiently the case,
I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that on a thousand
charming estates the most beautiful peaches and melons were at that
moment ripening under glass. My auditors tossed their heads, of course,
at the beautiful estates and the glass; and indeed at their ascetic
hostelry close to Buckingham Palace such a piece of knowledge was but
scantily consoling.
It is to a more public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger
in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I
have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an
appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at
this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But
one's liking for London--a stranger's liking at least--is at the best an
anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly less
difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I
am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis
a thousand sources of interest, entertainment, and delight: what I mean
is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the
place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusky,
fierce and unmerciful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at
last with an active satisfaction, and finds something warm and
comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its
tremendous pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that
every one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing.
If it has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign
cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent
diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the
absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now
made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open
air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither
the seat, the ice, nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to
your profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of
these delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes
of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is
idle--every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be
accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces
a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic
constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of
English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a
stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear
in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a
good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as
we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a
pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are
too refined, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to
add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing,
quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own; they have
those special resources to which I alluded a moment since. They are
people of fortune, and are naturally independent of communistic
pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have
your _café noir_ handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder
and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house.
In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will
sally forth and encamp for the evening, under a row of coloured lamps,
upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess
live on a single floor, up several pair of stairs. They are, however, I
think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently
in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door
would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger
of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social
inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight
into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how
serious a danger it appears, and how good--given the texture of English
life--are some of his reasons for wishing not to expose himself.
The consideration of these reasons, however, would lead us very far from
the potential little tables for ices in--where shall I say?--in Oxford
Street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should
hover about these articles of furniture. I am afraid they would not
strike us as happily situated. In such matters everything hangs
together, and I am certain that the customs of the Boulevard des
Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonise with the scenery of
the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a
detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle--these, I
confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair.
Yet at the season of which I write, one's social studies must at the
least be studies of low life, for wherever one may go for a stroll or to
spend the summer afternoon, the unfashionable side of things is
uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who
are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are
always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently
pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your
wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of the
recumbent British tramp. You perceive among them some rich
possibilities. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their
purple necks and ear-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats,
make them look like stage-villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do
them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of
penal servitude--that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some
weaker human head with those huge square heels that are turned up to the
summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are
sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it
is their look of having walked over half England, and of being
confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic
attractiveness. These six square feet of brown grass are their present
sufficiency; but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next,
and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they
might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.
The month of August is so uncountenanced in London that going a few days
since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but
half a dinner. The celebrated hotel had put out its stoves and locked up
its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little
expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London
August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban
dining-places. I know not how it may be at this time with Richmond, but
the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to the
element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English
pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the
Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All well-bred
people leave London after the first week in August, _ergo_ those who
remain behind are not well-bred, and cannot therefore rise to the
conception of a "fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready?
I had other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I
hasten to declare that during the period of good-breeding the dinner at
Greenwich is the most amusing of all dinners. It begins with fish and it
continues with fish: what it ends with--except songs and speeches and
affectionate partings--I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid
reversed; for I do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature
is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly
indiscreet, I should risk an allusion to the particular banquet which
was the occasion of my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich cuisine.
I would affirm that it is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever
and distinguished men, before the large windows that look out upon the
broad brown Thames. The ships swim by confidently, as if they were part
of the entertainment and put down in the bill; the light of the
afternoon fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash
them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. We
partake of any number of those sauces with which, according to the
French adage, one could swallow one's grandmother with a good
conscience. To speak of the particular merits of my companions would
indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a
high appreciation of the frankness and robustness of English
conviviality. The stranger--the American at least--who finds himself in
the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose
becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something
which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness
of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in
the magnificent temperament of the people. This seems to him one of the
finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge
from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention.
It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old
society--a society in which every one that a newly-arrived observer
meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic
identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard
of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it.
There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose
songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to
the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must
needs be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the
gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming
voice and the most finished art.
I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old
park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous
observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take
passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the
Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a
stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an
irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a
loss how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to
Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being
afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the
fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the
crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European
cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has
expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and
miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they
are the sooty fronts: in buildings so very expressionless it is
impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of
the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to
reflect the dismal image. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the
universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black
barges; above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks
and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing
steamer is dingy and gritty--it belches a sable cloud that keeps you
company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who
belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an
harmonious grayness; and the whole picture, glazed over with the
glutinous London mist, becomes a masterly composition. But it is very
impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and though
it is ugly it is not insignificant. Like so many of the aspects of
English civilisation that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the
merit of expressing something very serious. Viewed in this intellectual
light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced
warehouses, the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly
suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid
detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the
British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical magnificence
hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I
don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look
off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark,
hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions
are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous
piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British
empire aforesaid.
It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive and unprofitable
reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the
Greenwich observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The
sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at
first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it
as a child, in woodcuts, in school-geographies, and in the corners of
large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended
in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung
so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these
corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house, standing
among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most
engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an immense
pleasure to hurl one's self down this curving precipice. Close at hand
was usually something printed about something being at such and such a
number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague
wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a
mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the
difficult and fascinating parts of geography--the countries of
unintentional outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet
there it stood the other day, the precise point from which the great
globe is measured; there was the plain little façade, with the
old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so
delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old
to find that I was not even tempted to begin. There are indeed a great
many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the
most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and
footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all
its own. It is filled with magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which I
know nothing but that they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts,
planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth
and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty
of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the
tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and
the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the water-side, and the
great pompous buildings, designed by Inigo Jones, of the old Hospital,
which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into
a kind of naval academy.
Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of
the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door
open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath
Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was--a great
green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing
cricket I always admire an English common; it may be curtailed and
cockneyfied, as this one was--which had lamp-posts stuck about on its
turf and a fresh-painted banister all around--but it is sure to be one
of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if
the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English
greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way
the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down
their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the
British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap
upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane
in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him
where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich,
and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again
by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent
my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a
nursery of British valour. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon
another common, where local colour was still more intense. The scene was
very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and, the evening
being beautiful, it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk.
There were half a dozen cricket matches, both civil and military. At one
end of this peaceful _campus martius_, which stretches over a hill-top,
rises an interminable façade--one of the fronts of the artillery
barracks. It has a very honourable air, and more windows and doors, I
imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade
before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept
places of ingress to officers' quarters. Everything it looks out upon is
military--the distinguished college (where the poor young man whom it
would perhaps be premature to call the last of the Bonapartes lately
studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp--a collection
of the tidiest plank huts--on the other; a hospital, on a
well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in the town below
there are a great many more military matters--barracks on an immense
scale; a dock-yard that presents an interminable dead wall to the street;
an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be
"five miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame
the most craven spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way
to the railway station at the bottom of the hill; but before departing
I had spent half an hour in strolling about the common in vague
consciousness of certain emotions that are called into play (I speak but
for myself) by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of this
great country. The glimpse may be of the slightest; it stirs a peculiar
sentiment. I know not what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an
admiration for the greatness of England. The greatness of England; that
is a very off-hand phrase, and of course I don't pretend to use it
analytically. I use it sentimentally--as it sounds in the ears of any
American who finds in English history the sacred source of his own
national affection. I think of the great part that England has played in
human affairs, the great space she has occupied, her tremendous might,
her far-stretching sway. That these clumsily-general ideas should be
suggested by the sight of some infinitesimal fraction of the English
administrative system may seem to indicate a cast of fancy too
hysterical; but if so, I must plead guilty to the weakness. Why should a
sentry-box more or less set one thinking of the glory of this little
island, which has found in her bosom the means of so vast a dominion?
This is more than I can say; and all I shall attempt to say is, that in
the difficult days that are now elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds
his meditations singularly quickened. It is the dramatic element in
English history that he has chiefly cared for, sand he finds himself
wondering whether the dramatic epoch is completely closed. It is a
moment when all the nations of Europe seem to be doing something, and he
waits to see what England, who has done so much, will do. He has been
meeting of late a good many of his country-people--Americans who live on
the Continent and pretend to speak with assurance of continental ways of
feeling. These people have been passing through London, and many of them
are in that irritated condition of mind which appears to be the portion
of the American sojourner in the British metropolis when he is not given
up to the delights of the historic sentiment. They have affirmed with
emphasis that the continental nations have ceased to care a straw for
what England thinks, that her traditional prestige is completely
extinct, and that the affairs of Europe will be settled quite
independently of the power whose capital is on the Thames. England will
do nothing, will risk nothing; there is no cause bad enough for her not
to find a selfish interest in it--there is no cause good enough for her
to fight about it. Poor old England is exploded; it is about time she
should haul in her nets. To all this the sympathetic stranger replies
that, in the first place, he doesn't believe a word of it; and, in the
second place, he doesn't care a fig for it--care, that is, what the
continental nations think. If the greatness of England were really
waning, it would be to him as a personal grief; and as he strolls about
the breezy common of Woolwich, with all those mementoes of British
dominion around him, he is quite too keenly exhilarated to be distracted
by such vapours.
He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that England would do
something--something striking and powerful, which should be at once
characteristic and unexpected. He asks himself what she can do, and he
remembers that this greatness of England which he so much admires was
formerly much exemplified in her "taking" something. Can't she "take"
something now? There is the _Spectator_, who wants her to occupy Egypt:
can't she occupy Egypt? The _Spectator_ considers this her moral
duty--inquires even whether she has a right not to bestow the blessings
of her beneficent rule upon the down-trodden Fellaheen, I found myself
in company with an acute young Frenchman a day or two after this
eloquent plea for a partial annexation of the Nile had appeared in the
most ingenious of journals. Some allusion was made to it, and my
companion proceeded to pronounce it a finished example of British
hypocrisy. I don't know how powerful a defence I made of it, but while I
read it I certainly had been carried away by it. I recalled it while I
pursued my contemplations, but I recalled at the same time that sadly
prosaic speech of Mr. Gladstone's to which it had been a reply. Mr.
Gladstone had said that England had much more urgent duties than the
occupation of Egypt: she had to attend to the great questions of----What
were the great questions? Those of local taxation and the liquor-laws!
Local taxation and the liquor-laws! The phrase, to my ears, just then
made a painful discord. These were not the things I had been thinking
of; it was not as she should bend anxiously over these doubtless
interesting subjects that the sympathetic stranger would seem to see
England in his favourite posture--that, as Macaulay says, of hurling
defiance at her foes. Of course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but
Mr. Gladstone was not a sympathetic stranger.