1877
I
They differed greatly from each other, but each had an interest of its
own. There seemed (as regards the first) a general consensus of opinion
as to its being a great pity that a stranger in England should miss the
Derby day. Every one assured me that this was the great festival of the
English people, and the most characteristic of national holidays. So
much, since it had to do with horse-flesh, I could readily believe. Had
not the newspapers been filled for weeks with recurrent dissertations
upon the animals concerned in the ceremony? and was not the event, to
the nation at large, only imperceptibly less momentous than the other
great question of the day--the fate of empires and the reapportionment
of the East? The space allotted to sporting intelligence in a compact,
eclectic, "intellectual" journal like the _Pall Mall Gazette_, had
seemed to me for some time past a measure of the hold of such questions
upon the British mind. These things, however, are very natural in a
country in which in "society" you are liable to make the acquaintance of
some such syllogism as the following. You are seated at dinner next a
foreign lady, who has on her other hand a native gentleman, by whom she
is being instructed in the art of getting the light point-of-view for
looking at English life. I profit by their conversation, and I learn
that this point-of-view is apparently the saddle. "You see, English
life," says the gentleman, "is really English country life. It's the
country that is the basis of English society. And you see, country life
is--well, it's the _hunting_. It's the hunting that is at the bottom of
it all." In other words, "the hunting" is the basis of English society.
Duly initiated into this interpretation of things, the American observer
is prepared for the colossal proportions of the annual pilgrimage to
Epsom. This pilgrimage, however, I was assured, though still well worth
taking part in, is by no means so characteristic as in former days. It
is now performed in a large measure by rail, and the spectacle on the
road has lost its ancient brilliancy. The road has been given up more
and more to the populace and the strangers, and has ceased to be graced
by the presence of ladies. Nevertheless, as a man and a stranger, I was
strongly recommended to take it; for the return from the Derby is still,
with all its abatements, a classic spectacle.
I mounted upon a four-horse coach, a charming coach, with a yellow body,
and handsome, clean-flanked leaders; placing myself beside the coachman,
as I had been told this was the point of vantage. The coach was one of
the vehicles of the new fashion--the fashion of public conveyances
driven, for the entertainment of themselves and of the public, by
gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby day all the coaches that start from
the classic headquarters--the "White Horse," in Piccadilly--and stretch
away from London toward a dozen different and well-selected goals, had
been dedicated to the Epsom road. The body of the vehicle is empty, as
no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thirteen places on the
top. On the Derby day, however, a properly laden coach carries a company
of hampers and champagne-baskets in its inside places. I must add that
on this occasion my companion was by exception a professional whip, who
proved an entertaining cicerone. Other companions there were, perched in
the twelve places behind me, whose social quality I made less of a point
of testing--though in the course of the expedition their various
characteristics, under the influence of champagne, expanded so freely as
greatly to facilitate the operation. We were a society of
exotics--Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans. There were only two Britons, and
these, according to my theory, were Australians--an antipodal bride and
groom, on a centripetal wedding-tour.
The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of London, is sufficiently
pretty; but the part of it which most took my fancy was a suburban
district--the classic neighbourhood of Clapham. The vision of Clapham
had been a part of the furniture of my imagination--the vision of its
respectable common, its evangelical society, and its goodly brick
mansions of the Georgian era. I now beheld these objects for the first
time, and I thought them very charming. This epithet, indeed, scarcely
applies to the evangelical society, which naturally, on the morning of
the Derby day, and during the desecrating progress of the Epsom
revellers, was not much in the foreground. But all around the verdant,
if cockneyfied common, are ranged commodious houses of a sober red
complexion, from under whose neoclassic pediments you expect to see a
mild-faced lady emerge--a lady in a cottage-bonnet and mittens,
distributing tracts from a little satchel. It would take an energetic
piety, however, to stem the current of heterogeneous vehicles which at
about this point takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears them in
its rumbling, rattling tide. The concourse of wheeled conveyances of
every possible order here becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top
of the coach proportionately absorbing. You begin to perceive that the
brilliancy of the road has in truth departed, and that well-appointed
elegance is not the prevailing characteristic. But when once you have
grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous. You perceive that
you are "in," as the phrase is, for something vulgar, something
colossally, unimaginably, heroically vulgar; all that is necessary is to
accept this situation and look out for illustrations. Beside you, before
you, behind you, is the mighty London populace, taking its _ébats_. You
get for the first time a notion of the London population at large. It
has piled itself into carts, into omnibuses, into every possible and
impossible species of "trap." A large proportion of it is of course on
foot, trudging along the perilous margin of the middle way, in such
comfort as may be gathered from fifteen miles' dodging of broken shins.
The smaller the vehicle, the more rat-like the animal that drags it, the
more numerous and ponderous its human freight; and as every one is
nursing in his lap a parcel of provender as big as himself, wrapped in
ragged newspapers, it is not surprising that roadside halts are
frequent, and that the taverns all the way to Epsom (it is wonderful how
many there are) are encompassed by dense groups of dusty pilgrims,
indulging liberally in refreshment for man and beast. And when I say man
I must by no means be understood to exclude woman. The female contingent
on the Derby day is not the least remarkable part of the London
multitude. Every one is prepared for an "outing," but the women are even
more brilliantly and resolutely prepared than the men; it is the best
possible chance to observe the various types of the British female of
the lower orders. The lady in question is usually not ornamental. She is
useful, robust, prolific, excellently fitted to play the somewhat
arduous part allotted to her in the great scheme of English
civilisation. But she has not those graces which enable her to become
easily and harmoniously festal. On smaller holidays--or on simple
working-days--in London crowds, I have often thought her handsome;
thought, that is, that she has handsome points, and that it was not
impossible to see how it is that she helps to make the English race, on
the whole, the comeliest in the world. But at Epsom she is too stout,
too hot, too red, too thirsty, too boisterous, too strangely accoutred.
And yet I wish to do her justice; so I must add that if there is
something to which an American cannot refuse a tribute of admiration in
the gross plebeian jollity of the Derby day, it is not evident why these
lusty she-revellers should not get part of the credit of it. The
striking thing, the interesting thing, both on the outward drive and on
the return, was that the holiday was so frankly, heartily,
good-humouredly taken. The people that of all peoples is habitually the
most governed by decencies, proprieties, rigidities of conduct, was, for
one happy day, unbuttoning its respectable straight-jacket and letting
its powerful, carnal, healthy temperament take the air. In such a
spectacle there was inevitably much that was unlucky and unprofitable;
these things came uppermost chiefly on the return, when demoralisation
was supreme, when the temperament in question had quite taken what the
French call the key of the fields, and seemed in no mood to come back
and give an account of itself. For the rest, to be dressed with a kind
of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and violently flushed, to laugh
perpetually at everything and at nothing, thoroughly to enjoy, in short,
a momentous occasion--all this is not, in simple persons of the more
susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime.
The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and disposed by nature
herself in sympathetic prevision of the sporting passion. It is
something like the crater of a volcano, without the mountain. The outer
rim is the course proper; the space within it is a vast, shallow, grassy
concavity in which vehicles are drawn up and beasts tethered, and in
which the greater part of the multitude--the mountebanks, the
betting-men, and the myriad hangers-on of the scene--are congregated.
The outer margin of the uplifted rim in question is occupied by the
grand stand, the small stands, the paddock. The day was exceptionally
beautiful; the charming sky was spotted over with little idle-looking,
loafing, irresponsible clouds; the Epsom Downs went swelling away as
greenly as in a coloured sporting-print, and the wooded uplands, in the
middle distance, looked as innocent and pastoral as if they had never
seen a policeman or a rowdy. The crowd that spread itself over this
immense expanse was the richest representation of human life that I have
ever looked upon. One's first fate after arriving, if one is perched
upon a coach, is to see the coach guided, by means best known to the
coachman himself, through the tremendous press of vehicles and
pedestrians, introduced into a precinct roped off and guarded from
intrusion save under payment of a fee, and then drawn up alongside of
the course, as nearly as possible opposite the grand stand and the
winning post. Here you have only to stand up in your place--on tiptoe,
it is true, and with a good deal of stretching--to see the race fairly
well. But I hasten to add that seeing the race is indifferent
entertainment. If I might be Irish on the occasion of a frolic, I would
say that in the first place you do not see it at all, and in the second
place you perceive it to be not much worth the seeing. It may be very
fine in quality, but in quantity it is inappreciable. The horses and
their jockeys first go dandling and cantering along the course to the
starting-point, looking as insubstantial as sifted sunbeams. Then there
is a long wait, during which, of the sixty thousand people present (my
figures are imaginary) thirty thousand affirm positively that they have
started, and thirty thousand as positively deny it. Then the whole sixty
thousand are suddenly resolved into unanimity by the sight of a dozen
small jockey-heads whizzing along a very distant sky-line. In a shorter
space of time than it takes me to write it, the whole thing is before
you, and for the instant it is anything but beautiful. A dozen furiously
revolving arms--pink, green, orange, scarlet, white--whacking the flanks
of as many straining steeds; a glimpse of this, and the spectacle is
over. The spectacle, however, is of course an infinitesimally small part
of the purpose of Epsom and the interest of the Derby. The interest is
in having money in the affair, and doubtless those most interested do
not trouble themselves particularly to watch the race. They learn soon
enough whether they are, in the English phrase, to the good or to the
bad.
When the Derby stakes had been carried off by a horse of which I confess
I am barbarous enough to have forgotten the name, I turned my back to
the running, for all the world as if I too were largely "interested,"
and sought entertainment in looking at the crowd. The crowd was very
animated; that is the most succinct description I can give of it. The
horses of course had been removed from the vehicles, so that the
pedestrians were free to surge against the wheels and even to a certain
extent to scale and overrun the carriages. This tendency became most
pronounced when, as the mid-period of the day was reached, the process
of lunching began to unfold itself and every coach-top to become the
scene of a picnic. From this moment, at the Derby, demoralisation
begins. I was in a position to observe it, all around me, in the most
characteristic forms. The whole affair, as regards the conventional
rigidities I spoke of a while since, becomes a real _dégringolade_. The
shabbier pedestrians bustle about the vehicles, staring up at the lucky
mortals who are perched in a kind of tormentingly near empyrean--a
region in which dishes of lobster-salad are passed about and
champagne-corks cleave the air like celestial meteors. There are
nigger-minstrels and beggars and mountebanks and spangled persons on
stilts, and gipsy matrons, as genuine as possible, with glowing Oriental
eyes and dropping their _h_'s; these last offer you for sixpence the
promise of everything genteel in life except the aspirate. On a coach
drawn up beside the one on which I had a place, a party of opulent young
men were passing from one stage of exhilaration to another with a
punctuality which excited my admiration. They were accompanied by two or
three young ladies of the kind that usually shares the choicest
pleasures of youthful British opulence--young ladies in whom nothing has
been neglected that can make a complexion Titianesque. The whole party
had been drinking deep, and one of the young men, a pretty lad of
twenty, had in an indiscreet moment staggered down as best he could to
the ground. Here his cups proved too many for him, and he collapsed and
rolled over. In plain English, he was beastly drunk. It was the scene
that followed that arrested my observation. His companions on the top of
the coach called down to the people herding under the wheels to pick him
up and put him away inside. These people were the grimiest of the
rabble, and a couple of men who looked like coal-heavers out of work
undertook to handle this hapless youth. But their task was difficult; it
was impossible to imagine a young man more drunk. He was a mere bag of
liquor--at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted. He lay in a
helpless heap under the feet of the crowd--the best intoxicated young
man in England. His extemporised chamberlains took him first in one way
and then in another; but he was like water in a sieve. The crowd hustled
over him; every one wanted to see; he was pulled and shoved and fumbled.
The spectacle had a grotesque side, and this it was that seemed to
strike the fancy of the young man's comrades. They had not done
lunching, so they were unable to bestow upon the incident the whole of
that consideration which its high comicality deserved. But they did what
they could. They looked down very often, glass in hand, during the
half-hour that it went on, and they stinted neither their generous,
joyous laughter, nor their appreciative comments. Women are said to have
no sense of humour; but the Titianesque young ladies did liberal justice
to the pleasantry of the scene. Toward the last, indeed, their attention
rather flagged; for even the best joke suffers by reiteration, and when
you have seen a stupefied young man, infinitely bedusted, slip out of
the embrace of a couple of clumsy paupers for the twentieth time, you
may very properly suppose that you have arrived at the farthest limits
of the ludicrous.
After the great race had been run I quitted my perch and spent the rest
of the afternoon in wandering about that grassy concave I have
mentioned. It was amusing and picturesque; it was like a huge Bohemian
encampment. Here also a great number of carriages were stationed,
freighted in like manner with free-handed youths and young ladies with
gilded tresses. These young ladies were almost the only representatives
of their sex with pretensions to elegance; they were often pretty and
always exhilarated. Gentlemen in pairs, mounted on stools, habited in
fantastic sporting garments, and offering bets to whomsoever listed,
were a conspicuous feature of the scene. It was equally striking that
they were not preaching in the desert and that they found plenty of
patrons among the baser sort. I returned to my place in time to assist
at the rather complicated operation of starting for the drive back to
London. Putting in horses and getting vehicles into line seemed in the
midst of the general crush and entanglement a process not to be
facilitated even by the most liberal swearing on the part of those
engaged in it. But little by little we came to the end of it; and as by
this time a kind of mellow cheerfulness pervaded the upper
atmosphere--the region of the perpendicular whip--even those
interruptions most trying to patience were somehow made to minister to
jollity. It was for people below to not get trampled to death or
crunched between opposing wheel-hubs, if they could manage it. Above,
the carnival of "chaff" had set in, and it deepened as the lock of
vehicles grew denser. As they were all locked together (with a
comfortable padding of pedestrians at points of acutest contact), they
contrived somehow to move together; so that we gradually got away and
into the road. The four or five hours consumed on the road were simply
as I say, a carnival of "chaff," the profusely good-humoured savour of
which, on the whole, was certainly striking. The chaff was not brilliant
nor subtle nor especially graceful; and here and there it was quite too
tipsy to be even articulate. But as an expression of that unbuttoning of
the popular straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile since, it had its
wholesome and even innocent side. It took, indeed, frequently an
importunate physical form; it sought emphasis in the use of pea-shooters
and water-squirts. At its best, too, it was extremely low and rowdyish.
But a stranger even of the most refined tastes might be glad to have a
glimpse of this popular revel, for it would make him feel that he was
learning something more about the English people. It would give a
meaning to the old words "merry England." It would remind him that the
natives of that country are subject to some of the most frolicsome of
the human passions, and that the decent, dusky vistas of the London
residential streets--those discreet creations of which Thackeray's
"Baker Street" is the type--are not a complete symbol of the complicated
race that erected them.