[From _Old London Town, and Other Travel Sketches_ (Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, 1910)]
London, less than any of the great capitals of the world--even less than
Berlin--has changed its aspects in the last four decades of alteration
and development. During the Second Empire, and under the wizard hand of
Baron Hauseman, a new Paris sprang into existence. We know what has
happened in New York and Chicago. But London, except the Thames
Embankment and the opening of a street here and there betwixt the City
and the West End--the mid-London of Soho and the Strand--is very much
the London I became acquainted with nearly forty years ago. To be sure
many of the ancient landmarks, such as Temple Bar, the Cock and the
Cheshire Cheese, have gone to the ash heap of the forgotten, whilst some
imposing hostelries have risen in the region about Trafalgar Square;
but, in the main, the biggest village of Christendom has lost none of
its familiar earmarks, so that the exile set down anywhere from Charing
Cross and Picadilly Circus to the bustling region of the Old Lady of
Threadneedle Street, blindfold, would, the instant the bandage were
removed from his eyes, exclaim, "It is London!"
Yes, it is London; the same old London; the same old cries in the
street; the same old whitey-brown atmosphere; even the same old Italian
organ-grinders, the tunes merely a trifle varied. Nor yet without its
charm, albeit to me of a rather ghostly, reminiscental sort. I came here
in 1866, with a young wife and a roll of ambitious manuscript, found
work to do and a publisher, lived for a time in the clouds of two
worlds, that of Bohemia, of which the Savage Club was headquarters, and
that of the New Apocalypse of Science which eddied about the School of
Mines in Jermyn Street and the _Fortnightly Review_, then presided over
by George Henry Lewes, my nearest friend and sponsor the late Professor
Huxley. I alternated my days and nights between a somewhat familiar
intimacy with Spencer and Tyndall and a wholly familiar intimacy with
Tom Robertson and Andrew Halliday. Artemus Ward was in London and it was
to him that I owed these later associations. Sir Henry Irving had not
made his mark. Sir Charles Wyndham was still in America. There were
Keenes and Kembles yet upon the stage. Charles Matthews ruled the roost
of Comedy. George Eliot was in the glory of her powers and her
popularity. Thackeray was gone, but Charles Dickens lived and wrote.
Bulwer-Lytton lived and wrote. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade vied
with one another for current favor. Modern Frenchification had invaded
neither the restaurants nor the music halls. Evans's Coffee House
(Pendennis core of Harmony) prevailed after midnight in Covent Garden
Market. In short, the solidarities of Old England, along with its roast,
succulent, abundant and intact.
* * * * *
To me London was Mecca. The look of it, the very smell of it, was
inspiration. Incidentally--I don't mind saying--there were some cakes
and ale. The nights were jolly enough down in the Adelphi, where the
barbarians of the Savage Club held high revel, and George Augustus
Sala was Primate, and Edmund Yates and Tom Robertson were High
Priests. Temple Bar blocked the passage from Belgravia to the Bank of
England, and there was no Holborn Viaduct nor Victorian Embankment.
Aye, long ago! How far away it seems, and how queer! To me it was the
London of story-books; of Whittington and his cat and Goody Two-Shoes
and the Canterbury Shades; of Otway and Marlowe and Chatterton; of
Nell Gwynne and Dick Steele and poor Goldsmith; of all that was
bizarre and fanciful in history, that was strange and romantic in
legend; and not the London of the Tower, the Museum and Westminster
Abbey; not the London of Cremorne Gardens, newly opened, nor the
Argyle Rooms, which should have been burned to the ground before they
were opened at all.
Since then I have been in and out of London many times. I have been
amused here and bored here; but give me back my old fool's paradise
and I shall care for naught else.
One may doubt which holds him closest, the London of History or the
London of Fiction, or that London which is a mingling of both, and may
be called simply the London of Literature, in which Oliver Goldsmith
carouses with Tom Jones, and Harry Fielding discusses philosophy with
the Vicar of Wakefield, where Nicholas Nickleby makes so bold as to
present himself to Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and to ask his
intercession in favor of a poor artist, the son of a hairdresser of
the name of Turner in Maiden Lane, and even where "Boz," as he passes
through Longacre, is tripped up by the Artful Dodger, and would
perchance fall upon the siding if not caught in the friendly arms of
Sir Richard Steele on his way to pay a call upon the once famous
beauty, the Lady Beatrix Esmond.
But yesterday I strolled into Mitre Court, and threading my way
through the labyrinth of those dingy old law chambers known as the
Middle and Inner Temple, found myself in the little graveyard of the
Temple Church and by the side of the grave of Oliver Goldsmith. Though
less than a stone's throw from Fleet Street and the Strand, the place
is quiet enough, only a faint hum of wheels penetrating the cool
precincts and gloomy walls. There, beneath three oblong slabs, put
together like an outer stone coffin, lies the most richly endowed of
all the vagabonds, with the simple but sufficient legend:
"Here lies Oliver Goldsmith,
"Born Nov. 10th, 1728. Died April 4th, 1774."
to tell a story which for all its vagrancy and folly, is somewhat dear
to loving hearts. He died leaving many debts and a few friends. He
lived a lucky-go-devil, who could squander in a night of debauch more
than he could earn in a month of labor. Yet he gave us the good
Primrose and _The Deserted Village_ and _The Traveler_, and many a
care-dispelling screed beside.
The Frenchman would say "his destiny." The less fanciful Briton, "his
temperament." Poor Noll! He seemed to know himself fairly well in
spite of his dissipations and his vanity, and he sleeps sound enough
now, perhaps as soundly as the rest of those who in life held him in a
rather equivocal admiration and affectionate contempt. There are a few
other tombs--an effigy or two--round about, the weird old Chapel of
the Templars, shut in by great walls from the streets beyond, to keep
them solemn company. For Goldsmith, at least, there seems a fitness;
for his life, and such labor as he did, eddied round these sad
precincts. Nigh at hand was the Mitre tavern, across the way the
Cock, and down the street the Cheshire Cheese. Without the Vandal has
been busy enough, within all remains as it was the day they buried
him. Perhaps he was not a desirable visiting acquaintance. I dare say
he was rather a trying familiar friend. Pen-craft and purse-making are
often wide apart. The charm of authorship ends in most cases upon the
printed page. The man carries his sentiment in a globule of ink and it
evaporates by exposure to the atmosphere of the world of action. The
song of Dickens died by its own fireside. Kipling, for all his
word-painting, is hardly a miracle of grace. Why should one wish to
have known Goldsmith, or grudge him his place by the side of the great
old Doctor, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Garrick? He lived his own
life, and, though it was not very clean and wholly unprosperous,
perhaps he enjoyed it. He left us some rich fruitage dangling over a
wall, which may well conceal all else. Of the dead, no ill! Their
faults to the past. The rest to Eternity!
Gradually, but surely, a new London is showing itself above the debris
of the old. Miles of roundabout are reduced by short cuts. Thoroughfares
are ruthlessly cut through sacred precincts and landmarks obliterated to
make room for imposing edifices and widened streets. In the end, London
will be rebuilt to rival Paris in the splendor, without the uniformity
of its architecture. The grime will, of course, attach itself in time to
the modern city as it did in the ancient, so that the London that is to
be will grow old to the coming generations as the London that was grew
old to the generations that went before.
"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps on this petty pace from day to day,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death."
Ever and ever the old times, the dear old times! Were they really any
better than these? I don't think so--we only fancy them so. They had
their displacements. It was then, as now, "eat, drink, and be merry,
for to-morrow ye die," life the same old walking shadow, the same old
play, or, lagging superfluous, or laughing his hour upon the stage
and seen no more, the same old
"... tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Somehow, London has a tendency to call up such reflections; sombre,
serious itself, to provoke moralizing, albeit a turmoil, with incessant
flashes of light and shade, the contrasts the vividest and most
precipitate on earth, deep and penetrating, even from Hyde Park corner
to St. Martins-in-the-Field, and on eastward beyond the Tower and into
the purlieus of Whitechapel and the solitudes of Bethnal Green.