STONES
A critical foreigner, whose impressions of London I collected, (a
thing one does to foreigners because that at least is common ground),
gave words to the usual complaint of the Continental: London was a
mean-looking city; its bricks were dirty; it used so little stone;
lacked we stone? And the buildings were low. And some stuck out beyond
the common frontage, while some set back. And so on, the whole served
with the usual sauce made up mainly of respect for our practical spirit
and our commercial success, the things we are not proud of because,
indeed, they are ours.
Almost every foreigner has that impression of London, and he mistakes
the spirit of our city so much that, to restore him, one has to show
him typical American architecture such as Selfridge’s, Kingsway,
or older buildings of greater majesty, such as the Quadrant or the
terraces round Regent’s Park. Failing stone, we exhibit stucco, and the
intelligent foreigner discerns no irony in the epigram on Nash:--
‘Augustus, at Rome, was for building renowned,
And of marble he left what of brick he had found;
But is not our Nash, too, a very great master?
He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster.’
Now stucco is an unfairly scorned material; it produces a pleasantly
smooth surface, which weathers to creamy-olive, and, indeed, its only
crime is that it conceals brick. Brick and tile are two of our most
delightful materials; people do wrong to sneer at them just because
poor cottages are so built. Red brick, when not too large, such as the
delightful little Tudor brick, is smiling and domestic. The progress of
building has, in this case, proved a retrogress for art. Nowadays, the
big red bricks are so angular, so perfectly cemented that most blocks
of flats approximate to workhouses, while the yellow brick now current
should be reserved for public buildings of special distinction, such as
national memorials and academies of painting. But the little red brick
that you could hold in your hand, the irregular lines of which bespoke
a temperament, which fitted tenderly into patchy cement, as an almond
of alabaster into the green velvet of its sheath, was quite another
kind of stone. Still, we must take our stones as we find them, and I
do not agree with the intelligent foreigner who thinks London a mean
city. Many of us find the fine Continental cities, such as new Paris,
new Barcelona, and new Frankfurt, as painful to live in as might be the
Agricultural Hall. The houses are too high, their flanks too white,
their alignment dull as a righteous life. When one considers towns like
New York, one wonders how the inhabitant finds his way home. By scent,
I suppose, for little can his eyes help him among those vast buildings,
all alike.
In London, few streets and not many squares are alike. The detestable
institution of the leasehold has had this good result, that few ground
landlords in central London have built the houses they own. They have
merely imposed upon the leaseholder the obligation to build a good
house worth so much. As a result, the leaseholder has built what he
fancied, and, therefore, London is not the result of the schemes of
some horrid central office, but of the oddities and taste of thousands
of men. That is why our sky-line is so broken, why, in Berkeley Square,
we find two charming little, narrow houses close to a tall block of
flats; that is why, in Oxford Street, tottering little shops, built
under William IV., hug the Tube Station and its monster hotel. Variety
is the salt of London life.
[Illustration:
THE TUBE, 9.30 A.M.]
Where London has, to a certain extent, abandoned variety, and that to
good purpose, is in the squares. London, more than any in the world,
is a city of squares; a feudal remnant has there set most of the
important houses, while those of the vassals were placed in the side
streets, and those of the churls in the mews. The squares imply social
classifications, and though many of them, such as Golden Square, Soho
Square, Regent Square, have fallen into the hands of the poor or of
commerce, they all began by being centres of polite society. To this
day there is something in a square that no other thoroughfare has;
a sort of measured enclosedness, a finished privacy. The garden in
the middle that none enter save lovers and cats, a garden sometimes
sooty, sometimes kept trim by a gardener born old, is cut off from
the rough movement of the city. Those who have been interested enough
to penetrate into the green part of Cavendish Square or Craven Hill
Gardens, will know that there one is as truly lost as in any lane
of West Anglia. Those green spots are almost untrodden, and, to all
visitors, are virginal. The impression of privacy extends also to the
houses; though these may differ they do not vastly do so. The contrasts
between them are those which appear among the members of a family. All
are, to a certain extent, traditional, and it is mainly in the squares
that you find remnants of Georgian London.
Most of Georgian London has fallen into the hands of the tenement
maker, because the people of the Georgian period built in districts
now populous, such as Clapham, Highbury, Soho, Chalk Farm, because the
leases were long and the houses good enough to make it unbusinesslike
to pull them down. Still, some Georgian London, and especially some
London of William IV., has preserved its old, flat face, sober and
dignified, yet has been modernised, internally, by anachronistic
organs such as the bathroom, the telephone, electric light. Those
houses are delightful, for the adventure of the present has purged
them of the sins of the past. Such houses as the one now tenanted
by Messrs Thornton Smith, in Soho Square, the small houses with the
Adams doorways that make up the Adelphi, the slim exquisiteness of
Westminster in Barton Street or North Street, all these, by their very
form, suggest that inside all is order and courtesy. Those houses were
built when land was cheap, when we did not need to pile Smith upon
Jones and call the result Cornucopia Court, or what not; in those
days they did not need to store coal in the pantry, and, for historic
reasons, they did not combine the bathroom with the kitchens. Still,
these are only survivals, and though the late William Willett did what
he could near Avenue Road to restore the Georges under an Edward, the
Georgian house is dead. It is too large; it leaves aside the servant
problem; its rooms are too square, difficult to light, difficult to
furnish in a period when furniture is small and tortured in design. It
is almost as dead as the Elizabethan house, which is only a curiosity.
People still talk of Cloth Fair, but if you go to Smithfield you will
find no Cloth Fair now, only a dirty little back street, not at all the
scenery which Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have thought suitable
for the entry of Bolingbroke into London. If you are wise, you will
at once step back farther into the past and enter St Bartholomew’s,
where arches and pillars, broad and solid as those of hell, will
make you understand the Mosaic quality of the Christian faith. In
St Bartholomew’s, that is black and dispassionate, dwells no gentle
Redeemer, but the spirit of the Lord of Hosts.
True, there is Crosby Hall, though it is hard to shake off the
connection between Crosby Hall and chops, for I knew it best in the
days when, there, one ate chops (and sirloin, yes, sirloin). In those
days, in the City, Crosby Hall was really an Elizabethan place, a
mullioned old house, with sunken beams. For most of the day it held
people who ate a great deal, drank a great deal, and bellowed, and
played billiards, and flirted with the waitresses, and made bets, and
told undesirable stories. Yes, it was real Shakespeare, all the time.
But one day they pulled down Crosby Hall and re-erected it in Chelsea,
near the end of Oakley Street; the last time I went in they were
holding an exhibition of arts and crafts, which proved that leather
might be compelled to assume many forms it didn’t like. I never saw
it again. Then there is St Ethelburga, the little wooden church in
Bishopsgate, which takes, I believe, a special interest in seamen. A
pleasant little church, for there is something very human and pre-Fire
in its having let off its frontage to an optician. (I wonder whether
the optician and the incumbent both labour under the motto of Usebius.)
But if Georgian London has left so little, and Elizabethan London
hardly anything, it is not so of the Victorian period, which still
hangs over most of the city like the shadow of a great tree which will
not let the flowers grow. Nearly all the houses in central London are
Victorian; most are early Victorian, because the building rush in the
’eighties and ’nineties affected mainly the suburbs, where a ribald
æstheticism combined with the discovery of the quaint by Charles
Dickens. Now the Victorian period was neither picturesque nor quaint;
it looked upon that sort of thing as indecent. It liked a plain house
for a plain man, and the Victorian man got his house. In another fifty
years or so, when time has done with the houses of the ’sixties, on
their tombstone shall be inscribed: ‘Eight steps and a brass knocker,
such are the wages of virtue.’ Some think that too much evil is spoken
of the Victorian period, and that much that was solid, sound, truly
English came to fruition in those days. For my part, I think that the
Victorian period was nothing but a bad dream, that the English are
essentially the people who drank sack, and danced round the maypole,
just as now they drink beer and go to the cinema. The English are a
pleasure-loving people, an emotional, perhaps a hysterical people;
they are gay, improvident, thriftless, adventurous, reckless people;
there is little to pick between them and the Neapolitans. Yes, there
has been a lot of respectability and talk of carriage folk, and
heavy sideboards, and being shocked, and all that sort of thing; but
I submit that English history extends farther back than 1830, that
there were happy days before the English grew oppressed with their new
respectability, which arose slowly out of the sudden growth of wealth
among numbers of ill-educated people. Before the ’thirties there were
only two kinds of people: those who did what they were told, and those
who did what they liked. The factory had begun to take shape in 1770;
towards 1830 occurred the rise, all over the Midlands and North, of
small workshops that became mills. This turned some members of the
working class into capitalists. As the workshops grew, the working
class population grew round them and formed towns. To serve the needs
of these towns shops arose; these became prosperous, and produced
another fairly rich class, the shopkeeping class. From the ’sixties
onwards, the workshops, warehouses, and shops grew so much that those
who, once upon a time, were scriveners, became managers and agents.
This produced a third class of ill-educated people endowed with some
money.
The result was soon felt: we had created the middle class, and as, in
those days, the middle class was still conscious of the upper class,
realised itself as lowly bred, it concluded that the only way of living
up to its new money was to be more moral and especially more refined
than either the upper class or the lower class. That is the origin of
the red damask curtains, of the English Sunday (which once upon a time
was debauched and delicious), of wax fruit, tall hats, black silk, jet,
and such like horrors.
But is that the end? No. Round about 1890, the middle class having
made still more money, having split itself up into upper middle class
and lower middle class, having sent its sons to the public schools and
universities, its daughters to Brussels or Dresden, began swiftly _to
slough off the old virtues which it no longer needed_. The daughters
went to dances under slender chaperonage; some of them became Fabians;
red paper was scraped off and replaced by brown; Jacobean furniture
came in; respectable people began to dine at hotels and, what was much
more fatal, to lunch at restaurants. Bridge came in ... cigarettes
crept in. I do not say the middle class is dead, but when you are
tempted to think that the Victorian period represented, in English
history, anything but an accident, anything but the formulation of
a class, then consider most of your young acquaintances, and ask
yourself, honestly, whether those very people, fifty years ago, would
not have gone to funerals with weepers tied round their hats. To-day,
there is a continuous impulse in the middle class to grow smart, fast,
intellectual, all that. Call this progress or call it decay, never
mind; I submit that it exhibits Victorian respectability as merely a
stage in the development of English people, and that we are tending
towards a time when the jolly 1780’s will live again with something
hectic and abandoned thrown in. The English people are a light people,
a gay people, and the famous period 1830–1880 was, after all, a short
period in the eight hundred years odd which separate us from the
Conqueror. It was a period of reconstruction, and the English emerged
from it as new English, not very different from the old English. We
have digested our money; of course, England was sleepy while she did
that; those who believe that that sleep was natural to her suffer from
illusion. Now she has begun to spend the resultant energy. Bustles,
daguerreotypes, Sunday rest, and whiskers, Pecksniff will find all that
in another region.
Pecksniff will also, at least I hope so, if he is to be happy, find
the Victorian house. It was not a bad house inside, in spite of its
vast, incoherent basement, the ell at the back of the drawing-room,
and the shameful servants’ bedrooms; it was a roomy house, but there
was too much in it for the cockroach and the mouse. Most of Bayswater,
Paddington, Kensington, and Marylebone, are Victorian; all depend upon
slave labour. Few of those houses can be managed properly on less than
three servants; some are still run by one servant assisted by the young
ladies, who do the dusting, but the importance of the point lies in
this: with one servant they are dirtily run; with two servants they
are barely run. They are full of corners, corridors, cupboards; they
collect dust, and eat up light. In days when flesh and blood was cheap,
when you could easily get young girls to wear the skin off their knees
on the steps, the edifice stood up pretty well. But those days are
gone; the servant problem is partly due to the Victorian house, which
became almost too much to bear when the servants developed enough to
understand that there were things they need not bear. What will replace
it, we do not yet know. It is too early to talk of a revolutionary
change into blocks of flats with common kitchens, common dining-rooms,
and common nurseries; all that will come, has come, is extending, but
it is not yet general. The first step is the break-up of the Victorian
house into maisonettes. You can see this going on all over central
London, where two families now share a house built for one. Others are
being absorbed by the boarding-house. Briefly, we are packing closer
into the old spaciousness, partly because we do not need it for the
purposes of ostentation, partly because we cannot afford it.
Still, there is much left of old, bleak London, Highbury Crescent,
Warwick Street (Pimlico), Mornington Crescent, and many others. There
is, about those places, what there is more proximately about Bayswater,
a sense of past comfort, dating back to the days when comfort meant red
paper in the hall, brown paint, thick stuff curtains, polished boards,
large and straight chairs with hard seats for the young, stuffed seats
for the old. Those houses were comfortable in a frowzy way; they were
houses in which one ate a great deal, slept a great deal, drank a
great deal, and thought within the limits of genteel taste. Little
by little people began to stay up later, so had less time to sleep;
then, their fathers having drunk too much, they found that their
inherited constitutions did not allow of similar excess, while the
intrusive foreigner brought in his curious dishes which taught us to
eat less, if more peculiarly. Picture galleries were opened on Sunday,
concerts were held upon that day; matinees, cinemas, other pleasures,
all these things making a continual call upon time and purse, have
stolen some of its privileges from the old home, until it ceased to be
home in the sacramental sense, a pleasure in itself, and turned into
a dormitory. The bleak old houses of London have responded to this
movement, by breaking up into maisonettes, converting themselves into
boarding-houses and lodgings; there are now few claimants to their
five floors; indeed, the five floors grow more and more disliked.
To-day, when you walk along a street such as Mornington Crescent,
whose gray face wears the inscription: ‘Joy forbidden,’ you are to a
certain extent, labouring under an illusion, for the life behind those
gray fronts is not gray. It is, more and more, the life of people
who have no roots, who have settled for a short time in rooms, whose
employment is precarious, whose fortunes are small, people who live
on small weekly wages, or even on social piracy, whose presence must
cause uneasiness among the portly Victorian ghosts. Inside those houses
live few families, because no families of wealth care to live in such
districts, while poor families cannot afford the servants to keep
such houses clean. So their dwellers are, many of them, adventurers,
semi-respectable people who have something to do with the stage, or who
are in a sort of way in the city. They never want the windows cleaned,
and when they sit down at the Victorian writing-desk with the waggly
legs, they care little if it is not dusted: they blow. That is the end
of those old houses; to-day, most of them are spinning out the last of
their long leases in a truly Victorian way: keeping up appearances, and
pretending to be as respectable as ever.
[Illustration:
AN ABSENT DESERT
THE CROMWELL ROAD]
In South Kensington and Bayswater, the bleakness is less complete,
because those districts are dimly in the West End, with a little too
much End about it. They are ‘possible’ districts, as the phrase goes
among some of us; a ‘possible’ district is one the name of which
can be stamped upon one’s note-paper. The tenants of Bayswater and
South Kensington number many of the old-fashioned people who like
quiet places, comfortable homes, in some cases gardens, but many more
are making of those places a jumping-off ground. They pass through
Bayswater or South Kensington on the way to Mayfair, Belgravia, and
Marylebone; they are already well-to-do, and intend to be better-to-do;
in those places they associate with the people who, once upon a time,
were very well-to-do and are now less so; those districts are social
junctions. But everywhere the boarding-house is gaining ground, and
nowhere does one see this so well as in Cromwell Road. Cromwell Road is
a remarkable street; its length has, on a warm and hazy day, a quality
of eternity. It seems to have no beginning, no end; one might walk
for ever along its broad stretch, between those high walls; a prison
yard must be like that. This does not mean that I dislike Cromwell
Road; far from it; I visit it at least once a week, for purposes of
meditation. One can meditate in Cromwell Road, because nothing ever
seems to have happened there; it certainly looks as if nothing could
happen. It holds no tragedy, no comedy. You pass along the endless
series of houses, all of which have four and a half or five and a half
floors, the half being accounted for by the servants’ rooms, to which
the Victorian builder never accorded a complete floor; they are nearly
all alike, having five to nine steps, a porch on pillars, and a flat
face; the only difference between one house and another is the age of
their lease, the age being revealed by the condition of the paint: some
were repainted three years ago, some two years, some recently. White,
gray, black, such is their symphony. If you look in at the windows
of the dining-room you will generally see a large mahogany table: in
the middle of this stands a heavy brass pot; in the brass pot grows a
big green fern. Behind the green fern, and always facing the window,
stands a colossal sideboard, surmounted by a mirror against which
is outlined a tantalus and sometimes, which is very regrettable, a
cruet. (You do not see a bottle of salad-dressing in Cromwell Road,
but a little farther west you do.) Near the tantalus sometimes dwell a
silver cup or two. On one side of the room you discern a mantelpiece,
decorated with coloured pots, a large, black marble clock, suitably
representing a tomb. There may also be some brass ash-trays and bowls
of obviously Indian pattern. The carpet one cannot see, but I feel
sure that it is generally a red and blue Turkey. That is old Cromwell
Road, grandpapa’s old Cromwell Road, comfortable in its stifled sort
of way. Rail as I may at the Victorian period, I have a vague liking
for those old solidities, that mean pleasant, saddleback chairs, pipes
(not cigarettes), the _Spectator_, port, and evenings devoted to the
reading of travel books and memoirs (not novels). Dull, but solid, and
in Cromwell Road one is aware of a certain merit in solidity because it
finds itself at the point of flux between the old civilisation and the
new.
The new civilisation has already set its teeth into Cromwell Road. The
houses are unchanged, but a great many have been bought up and joined
together, decorated with stained glass, re-named as hotels. These
have fancy pots instead of brass pots, ferns from strange bournes;
curtains of lesser conventionality; looking out from a window you no
longer see Mary Jane in a pink dress, but a sombre face, which may be
that of a musician or a poet; or of a Balkanic waiter stained with
political conspiracy. The inhabitants of those hotels are Americans,
provincials, people who have grown tired of housekeeping and like to
buy it ready-made; they number many widows who behave as if they were
conscious of a transitory condition, actors, unattached people of all
kinds. These are not the old Cromwell Road people; they are a new type,
which you might call the Cromwell light-Roadster, people who drive up
in taxis at all times, and even after eleven o’clock. Kensington means
nothing to them; not one of them will ever be an alderman. They are
breaking up the Cromwell Road, and many of those who read these lines
will see Cromwell Road without a private dwelling-house, except that
here and there a pair of very old maids, accompanied by some very fat
dogs, will stick to the old house. They will groan at the taxis which
stop at the Grand Imperial next door, send out an old retainer to warn
off the street band, and grumble at the electric underground, just as
they grumbled at the smoky steam underground. Then they will die, and
the Grand Imperial will extend its possessions.
The Grand Imperial is extending all over London. Not only have hotels,
undreamt of twenty years ago, sprung up at unexpected corners near
the Strand and over the tube stations, not only have they taken over
anything between two and six private houses at a time, but they are
buying up site after site: a big one in Piccadilly near Down Street,
also the St George’s Hospital site, perhaps. They are extending
everywhere, communising life. It is all very well saying that the hotel
is a sign of the decadent luxury of the day, but that is not true. In
the first place there is in hotels no such thing as decadent luxury;
all that the best offer are things such as plenty of light, air, space
to move in, electric light when you want it, hot water day and night,
a telephone by your bedside, a comfortable common room to write in, a
band to amuse you while you have your meals; such like simple, obvious
things which make up the ordinary comfort of life. The old-fashioned
people look upon this as luxury, but I submit that the facility of
having a hot bath when you want it is a natural thing, and one of the
first things that a developing civilisation should give us all. Some
people seem to think it morally wrong to be comfortable, and it shocks
one to think that so many of our best minds should, for so long, have
been working out ideas for pleasant and harmonious heating, lighting,
cooking, only to be told that they are pampering us. The whole object
of civilisation is to pamper us, to get rid of nature. Nature is all
very well in the summer numbers of the magazines; it looks very pink
and scented with hay, but real nature is rather cold, damp, earwiggy,
dark, always ill-drained, and much less healthy than London. The object
of civilisation is to reduce the struggle for life, and to make the
material side of it pleasant enough to be forgotten. If that is not
true, then let us back to the caveman forthwith.
The truth is that hotels are not luxurious and not dear. It sounds
dear to pay a pound a day for a bedroom and your board, which is what
one paid before the war, but if one reflects that for that pound one
also has the use of excellent common rooms, that one pays nothing
whatever for all sorts of racking things such as gas, electric light,
water rate, borough rate, inhabited house duty, house repairs, that
one owes nothing to the sweep, no tips to tradesmen, it is not dear.
One has the space one needs to live in, and that is the essence of the
old-fashioned opposition to hotel life: it does away with the large
number of rooms that people used to think they needed, rooms in which
they shut themselves up behind closed windows and drawn blinds. The
old-fashioned hate the simplification of life; they do not like to
think that people need no longer tie themselves down, define and label
themselves: hotels are meant for those who do not go to the Zoo.
[Illustration:
BEASTS AT THE ZOO]
Indeed, the Zoo is a tragic hint of the period we have just left
behind. It was founded in 1826, its object being, of course, ‘to
further the study of animal life,’ but it did not very long retain
that character. The only character it retained was a sort of brutal
insensibility, a capacity for not understanding what it means to
animals, accustomed to run forty miles a day, or to fly out of sight,
to find themselves boxed up in small cages. The treatment of animals
in the Victorian period was very like the treatment of children;
people meant well by their children, which did not prevent their
constraining them to immobility on Sundays, forcing them into careers
they disliked, or into marriages with people they detested. They were a
sentimental and brutal generation, mainly because they were stupid. So
the Zoo, which is now a vulgar gapery, remains as one of the ugly blots
inherited by our people; I hope to live long enough to see Parliament
pass an act for its suppression. It seems to me indecent that people
who do not know the difference between a leopard and a yak should, any
afternoon, for sixpence or a shilling, or on Sundays if they are the
friends or the servants of a Fellow, line up in hundreds outside cages
anything between six feet and thirty feet long, to see wretched animals
pace up and down, up and down eternally, or tragic birds hop from an
upper stick to a lower stick and then back again, not one of them with
the space for a full spring or a flight, sentenced to penal servitude
for life, a sentence which we inflict on no man except for murder. I
agree with Mr Galsworthy that the Zoo is one of the saddest and most
disgusting sights in the world. At least, I know that I never leave
the Zoo, which I seldom visit, because it hurts me, without feeling a
partner in a national crime. You can defend vivisection by saying that
it has valuable medical results. I know nothing about that, but you
cannot defend the Zoo by saying that you give some snivelling boy an
opportunity to know what the mandril looks like. What is the use (I put
it on the lowest ground, that of use) of knowing what a mandril looks
like? And if it is of any use, is that use not counterbalanced by the
poison poured into that boy, which is that he shall consent to the
life-long imprisonment of a helpless creature?
This Zoo question was discussed in the _Weekly Dispatch_ some years
ago; I think that one of the points, in defence, was that most of the
animals were born in the Zoo, and, knowing not liberty, could not be
unhappy. That may be, even if nothing in you answers when you look into
the eyes of the animals in those empty cages where there is nothing to
do, when all their nature, thousands of generations of it, is calling
in their blood to hunt and to fly. Is not the test this: would you be
satisfied if at birth your son were placed in a room eight feet by
four, and told to grow up in it? Do you really believe that he would be
content when he reached manhood? even if he had never known freedom.
The truth is represented by opinions such as that of the secretary of
the Zoo, Doctor Chalmers Mitchell, who summed up Mr Galsworthy’s attack
on the Zoo by saying: ‘Mr Galsworthy knows nothing about the subject.
His attack is rubbish, pure rubbish.’ It may be that, on second
thoughts, Doctor Chalmers Mitchell might find one or two more arguments
to put up against Mr Galsworthy, but this one, while not lacking in
force, somehow fails to convince. One is more impressed by the argument
of Mr J. D. Hamlyn, an animal trainer, who said: ‘After the war, the
business of importing animals will go on exactly as it did before. In
the first place, too much capital is at stake, too much money has been
expended to give up the trade altogether.’ The only comment I have to
make on this is that this argument was continually used, first in the
West Indies, and later in the southern states of America, when it was
suggested that we should do away with slavery.
Yes, the Zoo carries on to-day the old tradition of Victorian
brutality. But enough of the Zoo, and of its visitors, so like the
yokels at a fair, that guffaw with their heads through horse collars.
I would rather think that in a few of those Victorian places, sweet
old ladies in mauve silk and lace serve tea in Rockingham cups, which
they dust themselves for fear of Sarah Jane. One such place is Crescent
Grove. That is the sort of place one would like to live in, when one
feels rather older. It is near Clapham Common, and, of course, it
is a blind alley, so that no rude traffic may pass up and down when
the milkman has finished his melodious round. The houses are clean,
stuccoed, comfortable. The knockers are cleaned every day. The glass
is cleaned often, the curtains are changed, and I am sure that when
they go up, a whiff of lavender spreads. Crescent Grove is, perhaps,
a little too clean; in those rooms where everything has its place,
just as in the past every one had his place, there must be so much
order and regularity of life that, as Mirbeau said: ‘On doit rudement
s’embêter là-dedans.’ Still, at the very end of Crescent Grove, there
is one house that should be preserved as a monument of its period. Of
course, it is double-fronted; in front are planted evergreens, and
there is a drive. By the side runs a large garden beyond a wall; on the
other side of the wall one hears children at play. That is the house
to which father came back round about 1860, with his top hat and his
mutton-chop whiskers. If this description does not convince you, let
me give you the clinching fact: it is a private road. Yet Crescent
Grove stands very near to the suburbs. Not far are Streatham, Tooting,
the new streets of Clapham and Brixton. Imbedded among the new streets
are old houses with columns, plaster fronts, stucco mouldings, squares
surrounding a single column that bears a moulting golden eagle, but
the suburbs are overwhelming them. These are not the inner suburbs,
such as Brixton, where the feeling is, on the whole, one of poverty and
dirt. Those inner suburbs have a certain vigour of coarse life; thus,
the Brixton Road is a place of immense activity, notably round the
great, open-air ironmonger, Williamson’s Bonanza; there are shops and
shops, nearly all of the multiple type, Salmon and Gluckstein, Maypole
Dairies, Home and Colonials, the shops that Private Ortheris must
have raved of in his Indian delirium. Likewise, in Kilburn, where the
Kilburn Bon Marché and B. B. Evans struggle in zealous commercialism.
Those inner suburbs are hardly suburbs now, for the trams run through
them and bleed them of their population; tubes tap them; everywhere
the motor-buses stop. The true suburbs lie farther out. You have to
go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marché before you can find such a
place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of
red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete.
Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience
you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the
fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity
upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. It is a
new order, for all those houses are small, manageable, clean, modern,
in every way satisfactory, except that they are all alike, made for
people who may not be all alike, but tend so to become. For if one
buys one’s food, one’s clothes, one’s furniture at the same big, local
store, and if one takes one’s literature from the same bookstall, one
attains to a sort of nationality. But it is not the nationality of the
village, where local effort can develop into art, because it develops
slowly and creeps back upon itself. In the suburbs everything is
supplied on the model of central London, and is turned out in hundreds
of thousands by machines. Perhaps the houses are made by machines.
Maybe, one day the people will be made by machines. Near those streets,
all alike, generally survives an older quarter of poor streets where
live the ‘little women,’ the sweep, the turncock, the dependents of
the semi-poor; there, also, small shopkeepers live by undercutting the
big stores. They do this by selling the vegetables that are too stale
for the stores, by washing the linen which cannot be sent to the steam
laundry because it would fall to pieces, and especially by lowering
their own standard of living to the lowest possible level. They are the
last ramparts of suburban individualism, and they will not last long.
As time goes on, the bigger villa streets, many of whose houses have
pretensions, exemplified by their architecture of concrete and tile, by
their barbarous roofs which make evil, dusty corners in the rooms, by
the select flowers in their front gardens, will turn away from those
little shops and, more and more, deal with Whiteley’s and Harrod’s.
Thus, when one passes through London, from old Victorian street to
inner suburb, then to outer suburb, until one comes to the spreading
country of Tooting Bec Common, when one has seen the homes of the
rich, their marble solemnity, when one has seen those of the poor in
the grimy suburbs that cluster, and emerges at last into those clean
suburban streets, where in almost every window an aspidistra wilts in
its pot, one may grow a little doubtful of the social revolution. We
educate the poor, and sometimes we give them their chance: the next
step is the aspidistra. The aspidistra goes to the grammar school;
clever aspidistra wins a scholarship and goes to Oxford. Then a house
is taken, let us say, in Barkston Gardens; instead of the aspidistra
it is marguerites in the window boxes. The marguerite goes to Oxford as
a matter of course, and may give place to a lily in a green art-pot.
By that time it understands nothing. If it retains its money, the
marguerite goes on having marguerites potted in the window-boxes by the
nurseryman; if it loses its money, it goes back to the aspidistra. Upon
this gloomy botanical note I close this chapter.
IX
CAFÉ ROYAL