Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a
distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night,
for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long
time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but,
it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly
after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.
In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair
amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get
through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic
relations with people who have no other object every night in the
year.
The month was March, and the weather damp, cloudy, and cold. The sun
not rising before half-past five, the night perspective looked
sufficiently long at half-past twelve: which was about my time for
confronting it.
The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and
tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first
entertainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It
lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the
late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust
the last brawling drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and
stray people were left us, after that. If we were very lucky, a
policeman's rattle sprang and a fray turned up; but, in general,
surprisingly little of this diversion was provided. Except in the
Haymarket, which is the worst kept part of London, and about
Kent-street in the Borough, and along a portion of the line of the Old
Kent-road, the peace was seldom violently broken. But, it was always
the case that London, as if in imitation of individual citizens
belonging to it, had expiring fits and starts of restlessness. After
all seemed quiet, if one cab rattled by, half-a-dozen would surely
follow; and Houselessness even observed that intoxicated people
appeared to be magnetically attracted towards each other: so that we
knew when we saw one drunken object staggering against the shutters of
a shop, that another drunken object would stagger up before five
minutes were out, to fraternise or fight with it. When we made a
divergence from the regular species of drunkard, the thin-armed,
puff-faced, leaden-lipped gin-drinker, and encountered a rarer
specimen of a more decent appearance, fifty to one but that specimen
was dressed in soiled mourning. As the street experience in the night,
so the street experience in the day; the common folk who come
unexpectedly into a little property, come unexpectedly into a deal of
liquor.
At length these flickering sparks would die away, worn out--the last
veritable sparks of waking life trailed from some late pieman or
hot-potato man--and London would sink to rest. And then the yearning
of the houseless mind would be for any sign of company, any lighted
place, any movement, anything suggestive of any one being up--nay,
even so much as awake, for the houseless eye looked out for lights in
windows.
Walking the streets under the pattering rain, Houselessness would walk
and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of
streets, save at a corner, here and there, two policemen in
conversation, or the sergeant or inspector looking after his men. Now
and then in the night--but rarely--Houselessness would become aware of
a furtive head peering out of a doorway a few yards before him, and,
coming up with the head, would find a man standing bolt upright to
keep within the doorway's shadow, and evidently intent upon no
particular service to society. Under a kind of fascination, and in a
ghostly silence suitable to the time, Houselessness and this gentleman
would eye one another from head to foot, and so, without exchange of
speech, part, mutually suspicious. Drip, drip, drip, from ledge and
coping, splash from pipes and water-spouts, and by-and-by the
houseless shadow would fall upon the stones that pave the way to
Waterloo-bridge; it being in the houseless mind to have a halfpenny
worth of excuse for saying "Good night" to the toll-keeper, and
catching a glimpse of his fire. A good fire and a good great-coat and
a good woollen neck-shawl, were comfortable things to see in
conjunction with the toll-keeper; also his brisk wakefulness was
excellent company when he rattled the change of halfpence down upon
that metal table of his, like a man who defied the night, with all its
sorrowful thoughts, and didn't care for the coming of dawn. There was
need of encouragement on the threshold of the bridge, for the bridge
was dreary. The chopped-up murdered man, had not been lowered with a
rope over the parapet when those nights were; he was alive, and slept
then quietly enough most likely, and undisturbed by any dream of where
he was to come. But the river had an awful look, the buildings on the
banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed
to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were
holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds
were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very
shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the
river.
Between the bridge and the two great theatres, there was but the
distance of a few hundred paces, so the theatres came next. Grim and
black within, at night, those great dry Wells, and lonesome to
imagine, with the rows of faces faded out, the lights extinguished,
and the seats all empty. One would think that nothing in them knew
itself at such a time but Yorick's skull. In one of my night walks, as
the church steeples were shaking the March winds and rain with strokes
of Four, I passed the outer boundary of one of these great deserts,
and entered it. With a dim lantern in my hand, I groped my well-known
way to the stage and looked over the orchestra--which was like a great
grave dug for a time of pestilence--into the void beyond. A dismal
cavern of an immense aspect, with the chandelier gone dead like
everything else, and nothing visible through mist and fog and space,
but tiers of winding-sheets. The ground at my feet where, when last
there, I had seen the peasantry of Naples dancing among the vines,
reckless of the burning mountain which threatened to overwhelm them,
was now in possession of a strong serpent of engine-hose, watchfully
lying in wait for the serpent Fire, and ready to fly at it if it
showed its forked tongue. A ghost of a watchman, carrying a faint
corpse candle, haunted the distant upper gallery and flitted away.
Retiring within the proscenium, and holding my light above my head
towards the rolled-up curtain--green no more, but black as ebony--my
sight lost itself in a gloomy vault, showing faint indications in it
of a shipwreck of canvas and cordage. Methought I felt much as a diver
might, at the bottom of the sea.
In those small hours when there was no movement in the streets, it
afforded matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and,
touching its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep,
and then to glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see the
fire and light of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall. Not an
inappropriate time either, to linger by that wicked little Debtors'
Door--shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw--which has
been Death's Door to so many. In the days of the uttering of forged
one-pound notes by people tempted up from the country, how many
hundreds of wretched creatures of both sexes--many quite
innocent--swung out of a pitiless and inconsistent world, with the
tower of yonder Christian church of Saint Sepulchre monstrously before
their eyes! Is there any haunting of the Bank Parlour, by the
remorseful souls of old directors, in the nights of these later days,
I wonder, or is it as quiet as this degenerate Aceldama of an Old
Bailey?
To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the
present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it,
and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to
the treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers passing the
night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate,
in some hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early,
crossed London-bridge and got down by the waterside on the Surrey
shore among the buildings of the great brewery. There was plenty going
on at the brewery; and the reek, and the smell of grains, and the
rattling of the plump dray horses at their mangers, were capital
company. Quite refreshed by having mingled with this good society, I
made a new start with a new heart, setting the old King's Bench prison
before me for my next object, and resolving, when I should come to the
wall, to think of poor Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men.
A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to detect the
beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the wall of the old
King's Bench prison, and it had carried him out with his feet
foremost. He was a likely man to look at, in the prime of life, well
to do, as clever as he needed to be, and popular among many friends.
He was suitably married, and had healthy and pretty children. But,
like some fair-looking houses or fair-looking ships, he took the Dry
Rot. The first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a
tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without
intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many
places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an
intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or
the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the
observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed
or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. He will
scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in his mind and form the
terrible suspicion "Dry Rot," when he will notice a change for the
worse in the patient's appearance: a certain slovenliness and
deterioration, which is not poverty, nor dirt, nor intoxication, nor
ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To this, succeeds a smell as of strong
waters, in the morning; to that, a looseness respecting money; to
that, a stronger smell as of strong waters, at all times; to that, a
looseness respecting everything; to that, a trembling of the limbs,
somnolency, misery, and crumbling to pieces. As it is in wood, so it
is in men. Dry Rot advances at a compound usury quite incalculable. A
plank is found infected with it, and the whole structure is devoted.
Thus it had been with the unhappy Horace Kinch, lately buried by a
small subscription. Those who knew him had not nigh done saying, "So
well off, so comfortably established, with such hope before him--and
yet, it is feared, with a slight touch of Dry Rot!" when lo! the man
was all Dry Rot and dust.
From the dead wall associated on those houseless nights with this too
common story, I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hospital; partly,
because it lay on my road round to Westminster; partly, because I had
a night fancy in my head which could be best pursued within sight of
its walls and dome. And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the
insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us
outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of
those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly
persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with
kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all
sorts? Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and
places, as these do daily? Are we not sometimes troubled by our own
sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for
them or excuse them, just as these do sometimes in respect of their
waking delusions? Said an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a
hospital like this, "Sir, I can frequently fly." I was half ashamed to
reflect that so could I--by night. Said a woman to me on the same
occasion, "Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her
Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and
his Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a
third on horseback in a Field-Marshal's uniform." Could I refrain from
reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal
parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I had
put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting myself on
those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew
everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day's life, did not
call Dreams the insanity of each day's sanity.
By this time I had left the Hospital behind me, and was again setting
towards the river; and in a short breathing space I was on
Westminster-bridge, regaling my houseless eyes with the external walls
of the British Parliament--the perfection of a stupendous institution,
I know, and the admiration of all surrounding nations and succeeding
ages, I do not doubt, but perhaps a little the better now and then for
being pricked up to its work. Turning off into Old Palace-yard, the
Courts of Law kept me company for a quarter of an hour; hinting in low
whispers what numbers of people they were keeping awake, and how
intensely wretched and horrible they were rendering the small hours to
unfortunate suitors. Westminster Abbey was fine gloomy society for
another quarter of an hour; suggesting a wonderful procession of its
dead among the dark arches and pillars, each century more amazed by
the century following it than by all the centuries going before. And
indeed in those houseless night walks--which even included cemeteries
where watchmen went round among the graves at stated times, and moved
the tell-tale handle of an index which recorded that they had touched
it at such an hour--it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts
of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised
while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin's point
in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only
that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys
beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how
far.
When a church clock strikes, on houseless ears in the dead of the
night, it may be at first mistaken for company and hailed as such.
But, as the spreading circles of vibration, which you may perceive at
such a time with great clearness, go opening out, for ever and ever
afterwards widening perhaps (as the philosopher has suggested) in
eternal space, the mistake is rectified and the sense of loneliness is
profounder. Once--it was after leaving the Abbey and turning my face
north--I came to the great steps of St. Martin's church as the clock
was striking Three. Suddenly, a thing that in a moment more I should
have trodden upon without seeing, rose up at my feet with a cry of
loneliness and houselessness, struck out of it by the bell, the like
of which I never heard. We then stood face to face looking at one
another, frightened by one another. The creature was like a
beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose bundle
of rags on, which it held together with one of its hands. It shivered
from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at
me--persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever it thought me--it made with its
whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog.
Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay
it--for it recoiled as it whined and snapped--and laid my hand upon
its shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment, like the young
man in the New Testament, and left me standing alone with its rags in
my hands.
Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful
company. The great waggons of cabbages, with growers' men and boys
lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden
neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party. But
one of the worst night sights I know in London, is to be found in the
children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight
for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their
thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows, dodge the
constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the
pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet. A painful
and unnatural result comes of the comparison one is forced to
institute between the growth of corruption as displayed in the so much
improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the growth of
corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except inasmuch as
ever-hunted) savages.
There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, and that
was more company--warm company, too, which was better. Toast of a very
substantial quality, was likewise procurable: though the
towzled-headed man who made it, in an inner chamber within the
coffee-room, hadn't got his coat on yet, and was so heavy with sleep
that in every interval of toast and coffee he went off anew behind the
partition into complicated cross-roads of choke and snore, and lost
his way directly. Into one of these establishments (among the
earliest) near Bow-street, there came one morning as I sat over my
houseless cup, pondering where to go next, a man in a high and long
snuff-coloured coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my belief, nothing
else but a hat, who took out of his hat a large cold meat pudding; a
meat pudding so large that it was a very tight fit, and brought the
lining of the hat out with it. This mysterious man was known by his
pudding, for on his entering, the man of sleep brought him a pint of
hot tea, a small loaf, and a large knife and fork and plate. Left to
himself in his box, he stood the pudding on the bare table, and,
instead of cutting it, stabbed it, over-hand, with the knife, like a
mortal enemy; then took the knife out, wiped it on his sleeve, tore
the pudding asunder with his fingers, and ate it all up. The
remembrance of this man with the pudding remains with me as the
remembrance of the most spectral person my houselessness encountered.
Twice only was I in that establishment, and twice I saw him stalk in
(as I should say, just out of bed, and presently going back to bed),
take out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his
pudding all up. He was a man whose figure promised cadaverousness, but
who had an excessively red face, though shaped like a horse's. On the
second occasion of my seeing him, he said huskily to the man of sleep,
"Am I red to-night?" "You are," he uncompromisingly answered. "My
mother," said the spectre, "was a red-faced woman that liked drink,
and I looked at her hard when she laid in her coffin, and I took the
complexion." Somehow, the pudding seemed an unwholesome pudding after
that, and I put myself in its way no more.
When there was no market, or when I wanted variety, a railway terminus
with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative company. But like
most of the company to be had in this world, it lasted only a very
short time. The station lamps would burst out ablaze, the porters
would emerge from places of concealment, the cabs and trucks would
rattle to their places (the post-office carts were already in theirs),
and, finally, the bell would strike up, and the train would come
banging in. But there were few passengers and little luggage, and
everything scuttled away with the greatest expedition. The locomotive
post-offices, with their great nets--as if they had been dragging the
country for bodies--would fly open as to their doors, and would
disgorge a smell of lamp, an exhausted clerk, a guard in a red coat,
and their bags of letters; the engine would blow and heave and
perspire, like an engine wiping its forehead and saying what a run it
had had; and within ten minutes the lamps were out, and I was
houseless and alone again.
But now, there were driven cattle on the high road near, wanting (as
cattle always do) to turn into the midst of stone walls, and squeeze
themselves through six inches' width of iron railing, and getting
their heads down (also as cattle always do) for tossing-purchase at
quite imaginary dogs, and giving themselves and every devoted creature
associated with them a most extraordinary amount of unnecessary
trouble. Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow pale with the
knowledge that daylight was coming, and straggling work-people were
already in the streets, and, as waking life had become extinguished
with the last pieman's sparks, so it began to be rekindled with the
fires of the first street-corner breakfast-sellers. And so by faster
and faster degrees, until the last degrees were very fast, the day
came, and I was tired and could sleep. And it is not, as I used to
think, going home at such times, the least wonderful thing in London,
that in the real desert region of the night, the houseless wanderer is
alone there. I knew well enough where to find Vice and Misfortune of
all kinds, if I had chosen; but they were put out of sight, and my
houselessness had many miles upon miles of streets in which it could,
and did, have its own solitary way.
_Dickens._
"A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"
These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile
Drama. That national monument, after having changed its name to
Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has
now become, for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like
Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may be the
Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her
gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the plain
private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have,
at different times, possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind
Boy_, _The Old Oak Chest_, _The Wood Daemon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The
Miller and his Men_, _Der Freischuetz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of
Bondy_, _Robin Hood_, _The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my
Partner Joe_, _The Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered
Jack, the Terror of Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the
illumination of _The Maid of the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In
this roll-call of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy
childhood; and though not half of them are still to be procured of any
living stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive,
kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.
There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the
city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a
party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those
days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of
itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In
the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a
theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few
"robbers carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold
to me! the plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one
upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets.
One figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of
characters, bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the
clothyard arrow; I would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom
Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest!
how--if the name by chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he
figured, and what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange
apparel! And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending
purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and
breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic
combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and
prison vaults--it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt
of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy.
They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a
place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a
double task. They kept us at the stick's end, frowned us down,
snatched each play out of our hand ere we were trusted with another;
and, incredible as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our
entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or with empty hand. Old
Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation, once swept
the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child,
that you are an intending purchaser at all!" These were the dragons of
the garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the
Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another
lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing
in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it
save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain
unwrit stones of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all
vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these
bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and
touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the
deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had
brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy was forth again,
a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue
winter's even, and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or some kindred drama
clutched against his side--on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed
aloud in exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the
years of my life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with
these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the
_Arabian Entertainments_ in the fat, old, double-columned volume with
the prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I
remember, when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty
stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of
ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might!
The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable, as
set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and
characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: "Scene 6. The
Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of
stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting
direction"--such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to
be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not
much appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of _The
Blind Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince and
once, I think, abducted, I know nothing. And _The Old Oak Chest_, what
was it all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number
of banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent
kitchen in the third act (was it in the third?)--they are all fallen
in a deliquium, swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite
forget that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to
"twopence coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of
it--crimson lake!--the horns of elf-land are not richer on the
ear)--with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be
compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The
latter colour with gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite
pigment, supplied a green of such a savoury greenness that to-day my
heart regrets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weakness the very
aspect of the water where I dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure
in the painting. But when all was painted, it is needless to deny it,
all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a scene or two to look at;
but to cut the figures out was simply sacrilege; nor could any child
twice court the tedium, the worry, and the long-drawn disenchantment
of an actual performance. Two days after the purchase the honey had
been sucked. Parents used to complain; they thought I wearied of my
play. It was not so: no more than a person can be said to have wearied
of his dinner when he leaves the bones and dishes; I had got the
marrow of it and said grace.
Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study
that enticing double file of names, where poetry, for the true child
of Skelt, reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much
as I have travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon
that map or abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of
memory, and are still but names. _The Floating Beacon_--why was that
denied me? or _The Wreck Ashore_? _Sixteen-String Jack_ whom I did not
even guess to be a highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my
slumbers; and there is one sequence of three from that enchanted
calender that I still at times recall, like a loved verse of poetry:
_Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_, _Echo of Westminster Bridge_. Names, bare
names, are surely more to children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated
fools remember.
The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the
charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the
attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept
into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we
have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of
Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to
design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It
is even to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of
nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular,
home-bred staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day,
but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama: a
peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a
tone of voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist
upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that
once so thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly
engines and incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the
extreme hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with
pain; the villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the
scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the
efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other
side the impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great
unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead
and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom--or, shall we say, the kingdom of
Transpontus?--had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland
as in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or
Italy with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist
could tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all pervasive, running
wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and
overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus
Skeltica_--brave growths. The caves were all embowelled in the
Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of
T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet another, an oriental string:
he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres,
say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these
blessed visions realised. But on these I will not dwell; they were an
outwork; it was in the occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself.
It had a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of
England and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming. How the
roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates
from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves
uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottage interior, the usual
first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the
gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama
must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with
the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there
again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, which was so dull to
colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills,
glimpses of the navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to
visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for
the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there
the horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the
ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to
load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own
ideal, radiating pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of
Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the
antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank,
had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild. "This is mastering me," as
Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life,
art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped
himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a
poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go
to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little
faded. If I visit a bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been
bolder; there had been certainly a castle on that mountain, and the
hollow tree--that set piece--I seem to miss it in the foreground.
Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and
infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life's
enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about
and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der Freischuetz_ long
ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of
scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain,
I might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts
an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the
bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to Clarke's of Garrick
Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my
ancient aspirations: _Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I
cherish the belief that when these shall see once more the light of
day, B. Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a
dream at times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in
a ghostly street--E. W., I think, the postal district--close below the
fool's-cap of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of
the Abbey bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling
strong of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with
great Skelt himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I buy,
with what a choking heart--I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I
pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
_R. L. Stevenson._