CARRINGTON MEWS,
_13th November._
Dear Agatha,--I quite agree with you that it isn't altogether a kind
thing to drag these poor old ghosts out of their hiding-places and talk
scandal about them. One pictures them blinking their dust-dimmed eyes in
the strong light of to-day and resenting the conduct of Paul Prys like
myself. But one must take the bad with the good, and if with stories of
heroism, human kindness, and tenderness one unearths a good deal that is
unworthy, one cannot do better than adopt Mrs. Darling's attitude. _She_
is neither depressed nor demoralised by learning of the frailties and
passions of those who have had their little day, and, going out into the
great unknown, become creatures of Romance and Mystery. That may be
because death has not invested them, for _her_, with any dignity which
can suffer from these familiarities, and her charity, always large for
the living, is just as large, and no larger, for the dead. Mrs. Darling
is a philosopher, and finds in the human comedy her entertainment. She
is also, by the way, an optimist of the first water. "Never say die till
yer shin-bone cuts the blanket," is her advice when there's a yellow fog
and one has a cold in one's head.
This afternoon the old lady and I have been playing a sort of game of
hide and seek in the courts and alleys on the northern side of Fleet
Street. Our ambition was to find Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square,
always an elusive object, I had been told by those who had been there,
and I, unfortunately, was born without the bump of locality. This
afternoon the strange fact that man, left to himself, travels in a
circle, found startling corroboration. For one solid half-hour the pair
of us revolved round the Doctor's abode, sometimes within a few yards of
it, without finding it. As you may remember, I would always rather lose
a train than question a porter, and I have the same dislike for
confessing the ignorance of my whereabouts to strangers. Besides, I want
to cure myself of this ridiculous habit of rotating. Mrs. Darling, to
whom I explained the situation, had solutions to offer. Was it, she
said, that man was _not meant_ to extend his travels, or was it because
the world was round? Meanwhile it certainly seemed that Providence
didn't intend us to find No. 17 Gough Square. I blush to tell you,
Agatha, that I stared into its side windows without recognising it, and
that I passed entrances to Gough Square from three points of the compass
without being aware of them, but that may have been because I was
mentally employed in sorting out suitable anecdotes about the Doctor for
Mrs. Darling's entertainment when once we reached our goal.
A little public-house called "The Red Lion," squeezed into a corner of
Red Lion Court (a most unsuitable spot, one would have thought, for a
"pub"), exercised an unholy attraction for us. Three times did we make
it our starting point, and three times did we come back to it with
feelings of surprise at finding an old friend from whom we thought we
had parted for good. I hope it isn't necessary to add _that we hadn't
been inside_. Getting clear of "The Red Lion" at last, we got entangled
with Bolt Court, Hind Court, and Wine-office Court on the other side,
only escaping their labyrinthine twists and turns to get mixed up in
Shoe Lane, East Harding Street, and Goldsmith's Street. At last we
emerged into Fleet Street once more to take breath and Mrs. Darling
triumphantly pointed to "Johnson's Court," which, by the way, has no
connection with the Doctor. I had no faith in the promise held out by
the august name, but in desperation I turned into it. This time,
however, it was impossible to go astray, because once inside
Johnson's Court we had no choice but to follow our noses. Up the court,
across a paved square, through a narrow passage, along by the backs of
some houses, round an abrupt turn to the left, and behold one was in
Gough Square, and the object of one's pilgrimage come into being, as it
were, by magic. In fact, so suddenly and unexpectedly did it break on us
that the wonder is we didn't pass it unnoticed and forge straight ahead
again for "The Red Lion".
[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE.]
Mrs. Darling claimed acquaintance with the Doctor by virtue of an old
copy of the Dictionary which she told me she found lying on the kerb
near a bookstall in Farringdon Road. I suggested that she should have
made enquiries of the owner of the stall as to whether the book was his.
But she said that seeing she had at different times lost a watch which
didn't go, a purse containing two and sevenpence three farthings, a flat
iron, and a set of artificial teeth belonging to an old friend who died,
she thought it was time she _found_ something.
There was a poetic sort of justice about this reasoning which I was loth
to question, and I evaded the issue by directing the old lady's
attention to the tablet on the wall of the house, which informs
passers-by that Dr. Johnson lived there from 1748 to 1758.
She answered, "Well, I never," and in her turn drew my attention to the
fact that someone had opened the door and was waiting for us to enter.
Mrs. Darling followed at my heels with an apologetic clearing of her
throat. I think she anticipated being introduced to some alarming social
function. This was not a museum nor a church. This was a house with
curtains at the windows, pictures on the walls, and even flowers in
vases, and Mrs. Darling had never heard of the idea of turning a house
into a shrine. I pointed out to her the portrait of the author of the
Dictionary, and she gave it as her opinion that he was trustworthy but
of a bilious disposition.
There were no other visitors, at the moment, and we wandered unmolested
from room to room, finding everywhere a strange silence set in the
monotonous hum and clack of the printing presses outside--a sound which
fills the neighbouring courts and alleys with a ceaseless thump, thump,
as of the labouring heart of this backwater of Fleet Street.
Mrs. Darling stared out of the windows and took an occasional rest in
one of the stiff rush-bottomed chairs, whilst I peered into the glass
cases containing yellow letters inscribed with faded brown characters,
thinking how surprised the writers would have been could they have
foreseen this day, nearly two hundred years ahead, when some chance
note, scribbled on the spur of the moment, was read by the curious eyes
of strangers, eager to put an eye to any hole in the curtain of the
past.
The portraits, too, were eloquent. Boswell of the long ears, who did for
Johnson what Pepys did for himself. "Bozzy," who saw with the terrible
eyes of a child, and who, without any apparent realisation that each
word was a stroke of the chisel, patiently hewed his living portrait of
Dr. Johnson for posterity. I do not agree with the implications of
toadyism against "Bozzy". There was real humility in his attitude
towards the great man, and real love for the object of his hero worship.
To myself, the history of "Bozzy's" patience under rebuff, his elation
at small victories, his hopes and fears, and the minuteness with which
he chronicles every detail of his intercourse with the object of his
adoration, is more thrilling than many a romance of the love of man for
woman.
There was Garrick, too, of whom Goldsmith wrote, "He cast off his
friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleased he could
whistle them back". Johnson, speaking of the actor's great wealth and
popularity, said, "If all this had happened to me I should have had a
couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down
everybody that stood in the way.... Yet Garrick speaks to _us_.... A
liberal man. He has given away more money than any man in England." To
which Boswell replies, "Yet Foote used to say of him that he walked out
with an intention to do a generous action, but, turning the corner of a
street, he met the ghost of a halfpenny, which frightened him". I've
been reading "Bozzy," you will see, and having my faith in the colossal
inconsistency of human nature strongly confirmed.
The vivacious Mrs. Thrale, whom Macaulay describes as "one of those
clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who are
perpetually saying or doing something that is not exactly right; but
who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable," wears a hat which
lends her an appearance of false solemnity. She has, though, an air of
elegance which makes it easy to believe that she was the lady "for whom"
the Doctor "bought silver buckles and new wigs, and by associating with
whom, his external appearance was much improved".
There also was Goldsmith, with his ugly, bulging forehead, his
protruding, obstinate mouth and apprehensive eyes, the eyes of a man who
anticipates adverse criticism. To _him_ the Doctor accorded a protective
tenderness the more notable that, whilst recognising the genius of his
protege, Johnson could have but ill understood poor Goldy's
self-consciousness and foolish little weaknesses.
The poet himself had a lively appreciation of this trait of chivalry in
the Doctor. Witness his words when speaking of a ne'er-do-well of his
acquaintance: "He is now become miserable," says Goldsmith, "and that
insures the protection of Johnson".
Mrs. Darling was curious to know whether the Doctor had a wife, and I
told her the strange story of his wooing and winning a lady twice his
age--not a beauty, according to Garrick, who described her as "very fat,
with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of
a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal
use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both
in her speech and her general behaviour". Boswell's remark apropos of
the situation is very naive. Says "Bozzy" in his most pompous style,
referring to the Doctor and his wife, "He had a high opinion of her
understanding, and the impressions which her beauty, real or imaginary,
had originally made upon his fancy, being continued by habit, had not
been effaced, though she herself was doubtless much altered for the
worse". What a touching view this gives of the learned Doctor's
simplicity of heart! Mrs. Darling, on whom even such an ancient piece of
gossip as this had a cheering effect, remarked that the Doctor wasn't
everybody's money. For her part she wouldn't have taken him "if 'is 'air
'ad 'ung with dimonds". Not that she doubted the excellence of his
character, but, well--and really, Agatha, you must forgive me if I
appear vain in repeating the incident. "Give me a man," said Mrs.
Darling solemnly, with an unmistakable glance of admiration in _my_
direction--"Give me a man that keeps 'imself _clean_ and 'olds 'imself
stright, even if 'e does put a bit of glass in 'is eye and pretend 'e
can see through it." Mrs. Darling, by the way, never misses an occasion
for airing her disapproval of my monocle.
We climbed the winding staircase and stood in the garret where the
dictionary had been written, a long, low-ceiled room with small
curtained windows, one end of which was chill with the approach of dusk,
whilst the other was warmed by slant beams of a red sun shining amongst
the crowding chimney-pots and telephone wires. I pictured on some such
afternoon Johnson's six amanuenses busy at their part in the great work,
and wondered whether they knocked off at dusk.
The Doctor, in his rusty brown suit and his "little old shrivelled
unpowdered wig, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up and his
unbuckled shoes," would probably be busy with them. Perhaps he would be,
as Boswell once found him, "covered with dust and buffeting his books,"
whilst Mrs. Hannah Williams in the room downstairs waited at the tea
table. Presently the Doctor would go down and they would drink tea by
the light of the fire. What would they talk about? Boswell describes the
blind lady as "a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature,"
and the two might have discussed some contribution Johnson had in his
mind for "The Literary Magazine"--"A Free Inquiry into the Nature and
Origin of Evil," perhaps, or his "Essay on Tea".
"I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that
fragrant leaf than Johnson," says Boswell, and as Mrs. Darling shares
with myself the Doctor's weakness, I proposed an adjournment to Temple
Tea Rooms--if we could extricate ourselves from the maze surrounding
Gough Square.
And so we left the tall, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century house as the
lights were coming out in the offices all round. At the printers'
windows compositors were busy setting up type, and the printing machines
had no peace from their treadmill labour. But no sound issued from
Number 17, and no face appeared at any one of the long narrow windows.
"Even if you 'adn't told me, sir, I should 'ave known that wos a empty
house," announced Mrs. Darling, as she stared meditatively at the Queen
Anne front, and the roof line against the reddening sky.
"Why?" I enquired.
"Oh, I dunno 'ow I know, but I _do_ know." Mrs. Darling begins, you will
see, to display signs of imagination. It would not surprise me to learn
that she belongs to the class of "mute inglorious" Miltons. Hers may
be:--
"Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre."
I shared her feeling about the place, and as we stood taking a final
look it occurred to me that such houses are pathetic attempts to assuage
a wistful craving for things that have passed. Perhaps, though, it is in
their very failure that they score. If one could put back the centuries
and meet the real selves of all those people about whom one had been
dreaming one might lose something for which nothing gained could
compensate.
No. 17 Gough Square, however, isn't _always_ forlorn. There are
afternoons when merry tea parties of twentieth-century men and women
gather in the garret, or in the "Pink" room sacred to those long ago
tea parties when Hannah Williams entertained the Doctor's friends. There
are, too, evenings when members of the Johnsonian Club, literary folk,
or societies given over to the study of London lore, meet for discussion
or conviviality. I hope the Doctor doesn't resent the intrusion: I don't
think he does, for hospitality was one of his distinguishing traits.
Mrs. Darling suggested we should go back by the way we came. She feared
the magnetic power of The Red Lion, coupled with my propensity for
rotating. And so we turned to the right and followed our noses until
they brought us out into the bustle of Fleet Street and the sight of the
dark archway leading to Middle Temple Lane under the jutting windows of
Prince Henry's room.
At the risk of inducing in Mrs. Darling a mood which she describes as
the "bloomin' 'ump," I suggested over the tea-cups that, being on the
spot, it would only be seemly to visit poor "Goldy's" grave in the
Temple.
She said she was in "good sperets" this afternoon and thought she could
bear it. Poor Goldy! it seems from the accounts one reads of his end
that it was his humble friends who grieved most for him. Neither Johnson
nor Reynolds nor Burke nor Garrick followed him to the grave, and
Boswell, writing to Johnson on June 24th (Goldsmith died on April 4th),
says, "You have said nothing to me about poor Goldsmith," to which
Johnson replied, "Of poor dear Dr. Goldsmith there is little to be told,
more than the papers have made public. He died of a fever, made, I am
afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy,
and all his resources were exhausted."
Darkness had fallen when we left the tearooms, and people were hurrying
through the Temple on their way home from work. The gas lamps shone on
the windows of the circular end of the Temple Church, giving them a
frosty sort of glitter, and no one but ourselves heeded the turning
which leads to the poet's tomb. The little corner where he lies was
deserted and silent, and the inscription on the tombstone could be
deciphered easily by the light of the gas lamp near. There is so little
of it to read:--
"Here lies Oliver Goldsmith. Born November 10th, 1728, died April
4th, 1774."
As I read it I thought of his own words: "Innocently to amuse the
imagination in this dream of life is wisdom."
"This dream of life." Is he _awake_ now? An idea occurs to me, Agatha:
the idea that these ghosts enjoy a visit to their old haunts in the
same fashion that we enjoy trying to reconstruct their past, but they
are only allowed to return during those moments when someone in this
life thinks of them. If this is so, _I_ must be much sought after on the
other side, and my obsession with the past is accounted for.
I showed Mrs. Darling the chambers in Brick Court where Goldsmith died,
and we looked in through the open door at the crooked, narrow staircase
where those poor creatures he had befriended wept for his loss on the
morning after his death. No doubt he had given them sympathy as well as
alms. _He_ knew the meaning of poverty from the day when, as a humble
physician, he hid the holes in the front of his coat with his hat when
paying visits, to the hour when, dying a debtor to the extent of two
thousand pounds, he earned Johnson's exclamation, "Was ever poet so
trusted before!"
Returning to Temple Bar, we exchanged confidences about our early
recollections of the old gate, and I wondered at the barbarity of those
times, not much more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when the heads
of traitors were spiked over the gate and allowed to rot under the eyes
of those who passed to and fro beneath. There's a lot of "frightfulness"
in old London. It reads at times very much like a penny dreadful. The
kings and queens, saints and warriors, the men of letters and gentle
poets are limned against a tenebrous background of narrow ill-lit
streets, of plague and fire, persecution and deeds of violence. There is
something of the crudeness of cheap melodrama about it all, but at the
same time a virility which satisfies.
But it grows late as I write this, and to quote Goldsmith once more,
"Let me no longer waste the night over the page of antiquity ... the
dying lamp emits a yellow gleam; no sound is heard but of the chiming
clock...."
Meanwhile, dear Agatha,
I am, yours as ever,
GEORGE.