sausages of life, as well as for its nicer cates and dainties, I enjoyed
the scene, and was amused at the sight of a gruff old Greenwich
pensioner, who, forgetful of the sailor-frolics of his young days, stood
looking with grim disapproval at all these vanities. Thus we squeezed
our way through the mob-jammed town, and emerged into the Park, where,
likewise, we met a great many merry-makers, but with freer space for
their gambols than in the streets. We soon found ourselves the targets
for a cannonade with oranges (most of them in a decayed condition),
which went humming past our ears from the vantage-ground of neighboring
hillocks, sometimes hitting our sacred persons with an inelastic thump.
This was one of the privileged freedoms of the time, and was nowise to
be resented, except by returning the salute. Many persons were running
races, hand in hand, down the declivities, especially that steepest one
on the summit of which stands the world-central Observatory, and (as in
the race of life) the partners were usually male and female, and often
caught a tumble together before reaching the bottom of the hill.
Hereabouts we were pestered and haunted by two young girls, the elder
not more than thirteen, teasing us to buy matches; and finding no market
for their commodity, the taller one suddenly turned a somerset before
our faces, and rolled heels over head from top to bottom of the hill on
which we stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, the topsy-turvy
trollop offered us her matches again, as demurely as if she had never
flung aside her equilibrium; so that, dreading a repetition of the feat,
we gave her sixpence and an admonition, and enjoined her never to do so
any more.
The most curious amusement that we witnessed here--or anywhere else,
indeed--was an ancient and hereditary pastime called "Kissing in the
Ring." I shall describe the sport exactly as I saw it, although an
English friend assures me that there are certain ceremonies with a
handkerchief, which make it much more decorous and graceful. A
handkerchief, indeed! There was no such thing in the crowd, except it
were the one which they had just filched out of my pocket. It is one of
the simplest kinds of games, needing little or no practice to make the
player altogether perfect; and the manner of it is this: A ring is
formed (in the present case, it was of large circumference and thickly
gemmed around with faces, mostly on the broad grin), into the centre of
which steps an adventurous youth, and, looking round the circle, selects
whatever maiden may most delight his eye. He presents his hand (which
she is bound to accept), leads her into the centre, salutes her on the
lips, and retires, taking his stand in the expectant circle. The girl,
in her turn, throws a favorable regard on some fortunate young man,
offers her hand to lead him forth, makes him happy with a maidenly kiss,
and withdraws to hide her blushes, if any there be, among the simpering
faces in the ring; while the favored swain loses no time in transferring
her salute to the prettiest and plumpest among the many mouths that are
primming themselves in anticipation. And thus the thing goes on, till
all the festive throng are inwreathed and intertwined into an endless
and inextricable chain of kisses; though, indeed, it smote me with
compassion to reflect that some forlorn pair of lips might be left out,
and never know the triumph of a salute, after throwing aside so many
delicate reserves for the sake of winning it. If the young men had any
chivalry, there was a fair chance to display it by kissing the homeliest
damsel in the circle.
To be frank, however, at the first glance, and to my American eye, they
looked all homely alike, and the chivalry that I suggest is more than I
could have been capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to be
country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarse-grained,
cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing to suppose, a stout texture of
moral principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough usage without
suffering much detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of my
native land! I desire above all things to be courteous; but, since the
plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England produce
feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit; and though
admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house
ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the
coarseness of the original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are
not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the
male. To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few,
and their behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; and yet it was
impossible not to feel a degree of faith in their innocent intentions,
with such a half-bashful zest and entire simplicity did they keep up
their part of the game. It put the spectator in good-humor to look at
them, because there was still something of the old Arcadian life, the
secure freedom of the antique age, in their way of surrendering their
lips to strangers, as if there were no evil or impurity in the world. As
for the young men, they were chiefly specimens of the vulgar sediment of
London life, often shabbily genteel, rowdyish, pale, wearing the
unbrushed coat, unshifted linen, and unwashed faces of yesterday, as
well as the haggardness of last night's jollity in a gin-shop. Gathering
their character from these tokens, I wondered whether there were any
reasonable prospect of their fair partners returning to their rustic
homes with as much innocence (whatever were its amount or quality) as
they brought to Greenwich Fair, in spite of the perilous familiarity
established by Kissing in the Ring.
The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, at which a vast city was
brought into intimate relations with a comparatively rural district,
have at length led to its suppression; this was the very last
celebration of it, and brought to a close the broad-mouthed merriment of
many hundred years. Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors are, may
acquire some little value in the reader's eyes from the consideration
that no observer of the coming time will ever have an opportunity to
give a better. I should find it difficult to believe, however, that the
queer pastime just described, or any moral mischief to which that and
other customs might pave the way, can have led to the overthrow of
Greenwich Fair; for it has often seemed to me that Englishmen of station
and respectability, unless of a peculiarly philanthropic turn, have
neither any faith in the feminine purity of the lower orders of their
countrywomen, nor the slightest value for it, allowing its possible
existence. The distinction of ranks is so marked, that the English
cottage damsel holds a position somewhat analogous to that of the negro
girl in our Southern States. Hence comes inevitable detriment to the
moral condition of those men themselves, who forget that the humblest
woman has a right and a duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as the
highest. The subject cannot well be discussed in these pages; but I
offer it as a serious conviction, from what I have been able to observe,
that the England of to-day is the unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones
and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our
refined era, just the same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this
singular people has a certain contempt for any fine-strained purity, any
special squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous
youth. They appear to look upon it as a suspicious phenomenon in the
masculine character.
Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm that English
morality, as regards the phase here alluded to, is really at a lower
point than our own. Assuredly, I hope so, because, making a higher
pretension, or, at all events, more carefully hiding whatever may be
amiss, we are either better than they, or necessarily a great deal
worse. It impressed me that their open avowal and recognition of
immoralities served to throw the disease to the surface, where it might
be more effectually dealt with, and leave a sacred interior not utterly
profaned, instead of turning its poison back among the inner vitalities
of the character, at the imminent risk of corrupting them all. Be that
as it may, these Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler people
than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but if we can take it as
compensatory on our part (which I leave to be considered) that they owe
those noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in their nature, and
that, with a finer one in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble
polish of which they are unsusceptible, I believe that this may be the
truth.
X.
UP THE THAMES
The upper portion of Greenwich (where my last article left me loitering)
is a cheerful, comely, old-fashioned town, the peculiarities of which,
if there be any, have passed out of my remembrance. As you descend
towards the Thames the streets get meaner, and the shabby and sunken
houses, elbowing one another for frontage, bear the signboards of
beer-shops and eating-rooms, with especial promises of white-bait and
other delicacies in the fishing line. You observe, also, a frequent
announcement of "Tea Gardens" in the rear; although, estimating the
capacity of the premises by their external compass, the entire sylvan
charm and shadowy seclusion of such blissful resorts must be limited
within a small back-yard. These places of cheap sustenance and
recreation depend for support upon the innumerable pleasure-parties who
come from London Bridge by steamer, at a fare of a few pence, and who
get as enjoyable a meal for a shilling a head as the Ship Hotel would
afford a gentleman for a guinea.
The steamers, which are constantly smoking their pipes up and down the
Thames, offer much the most agreeable mode of getting to London. At
least, it might be exceedingly agreeable, except for the myriad floating
particles of soot from the stove-pipe, and the heavy heat of midsummer
sunshine on the unsheltered deck, or the chill, misty air-draught of a
cloudy day, and the spiteful little showers of rain that may spatter
down upon you at any moment, whatever the promise of the sky; besides
which there is some slight inconvenience from the inexhaustible throng
of passengers, who scarcely allow you standing-room, nor so much as a
breath of unappropriated air, and never a chance to sit down. If these
difficulties, added to the possibility of getting your pocket picked,
weigh little with you, the panorama along the shores of the memorable
river, and the incidents and shows of passing life upon its bosom,
render the trip far preferable to the brief yet tiresome shoot along the
railway track. On one such voyage, a regatta of wherries raced past us,
and at once involved every soul on board our steamer in the
tremendous excitement of the struggle. The spectacle was but a moment
within our view, and presented nothing more than a few light skiffs, in
each of which sat a single rower, bare-armed, and with little apparel,
save a shirt and drawers, pale, anxious, with every muscle on the
stretch, and plying his oars in such fashion that the boat skimmed along
with the aerial celerity of a swallow. I wondered at myself for so
immediately catching an interest in the affair, which seemed to contain
no very exalted rivalship of manhood; but, whatever the kind of battle
or the prize of victory, it stirs one's sympathy immensely, and is even
awful, to behold the rare sight of a man thoroughly in earnest, doing
his best, putting forth all there is in him, and staking his very soul
(as these rowers appeared willing to do) on the issue of the contest. It
was the seventy-fourth annual regatta of the Free Watermen of Greenwich,
and announced itself as under the patronage of the Lord Mayor and other
distinguished individuals, at whose expense, I suppose, a prize-boat was
offered to the conqueror, and some small amounts of money to the
inferior competitors.
[Illustration: _London Bridge._]
The aspect of London along the Thames, below Bridge, as it is called, is
by no means so impressive as it ought to be, considering what peculiar
advantages are offered for the display of grand and stately architecture
by the passage of a river through the midst of a great city. It seems,
indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft open for the mere
purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore
is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be
imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look
ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's
metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the
downfall which I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict
for it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting
nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast,--a
sort of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of
sin that constantly flow into it,--is just the dismal stream to glide by
such a city. The surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity,
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steamers and covered with a
good deal of shipping, but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been
accustomed to see in the Mersey: a fact which I complacently attributed
to the smaller number of American clippers in the Thames, and the less
prevalent influence of American example in refining away the
broad-bottomed capacity of the old Dutch or English models.
About midway between Greenwich and London Bridge, at a rude
landing-place on the left bank of the river, the steamer rings its bell
and makes a momentary pause in front of a large circular structure,
where it may be worth our while to scramble ashore. It indicates the
locality of one of those prodigious practical blunders that would supply
John Bull with a topic of inexhaustible ridicule if his cousin Jonathan
had committed them, but of which he himself perpetrates ten to our one
in the mere wantonness of wealth that lacks better employment. The
circular building covers the entrance to the Thames Tunnel, and is
surmounted by a dome of glass, so as to throw daylight down into the
great depth at which the passage of the river commences. Descending a
wearisome succession of staircases, we at last find ourselves, still in
the broad noon, standing before a closed door, on opening which we
behold the vista of an arched corridor that extends into everlasting
midnight. In these days, when glass has been applied to so many new
purposes, it is a pity that the architect had not thought of arching
portions of his abortive tunnel with immense blocks of the lucid
substance, over which the dusky Thames would have flowed like a cloud,
making the sub-fluvial avenue only a little gloomier than a street of
upper London. At present, it is illuminated at regular intervals by jets
of gas, not very brilliantly, yet with lustre enough to show the damp
plaster of the ceiling and walls, and the massive stone pavement, the
crevices of which are oozy with moisture, not from the incumbent river,
but from hidden springs in the earth's deeper heart. There are two
parallel corridors, with a wall between, for the separate accommodation
of the double throng of foot-passengers, equestrians, and vehicles of
all kinds, which was expected to roll and reverberate continually
through the tunnel. Only one of them has ever been opened, and its
echoes are but feebly awakened by infrequent footfalls.
Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives here, and who
probably blink like owls, when, once or twice a year, perhaps, they
happen to climb into the sunshine. All along the corridor, which I
believe to be a mile in extent, we see stalls or shops in little
alcoves, kept principally by women; they were of a ripe age, I was glad
to observe, and certainly robbed England of none of its very moderate
supply of feminine loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like interment.
As you approach (and they are so accustomed to the dusky gaslight that
they read all your characteristics afar off), they assail you with
hungry entreaties to buy some of their merchandise, holding forth views
of the tunnel put up in cases of Derbyshire spar, with a magnifying
glass at one end to make the vista more effective. They offer you,
besides, cheap jewelry, sunny topazes, and resplendent emeralds for
sixpence, and diamonds as big as the Kohinoor at a not much heavier
cost, together with a multifarious trumpery which has died out of the
upper world to reappear in this Tartarean bazaar. That you may fancy
yourself still in the realms of the living, they urge you to partake of
cakes, candy, ginger-beer, and such small refreshment, more suitable,
however, for the shadowy appetite of ghosts than for the sturdy
stomachs of Englishmen. The most capacious of the shops contains a
dioramic exhibition of cities and scenes in the daylight world, with a
dreary glimmer of gas among them all; so that they serve well enough to
represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that dead people might be
supposed to retain from their past lives, mixing them up with the
ghastliness of their unsubstantial state. I dwell the more upon these
trifles, and do my best to give them a mockery of importance, because,
if these are nothing, then all this elaborate contrivance and mighty
piece of work has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has burrowed
under the bed of his great river, and set ships of two or three thousand
tons a-rolling over his head, only to provide new sites for a few old
women to sell cakes and ginger-beer!
Yet the conception was a grand one; and though it has proved an absolute
failure, swallowing an immensity of toil and money, with annual returns
hardly sufficient to keep the pavement free from the ooze of
subterranean springs, yet it needs, I presume, only an expenditure three
or four (or, for aught I know, twenty) times as large, to make the
enterprise brilliantly successful. The descent is so great from the bank
of the river to its surface, and the tunnel dips so profoundly under the
river's bed, that the approaches on either side must commence a long way
off, in order to render the entrance accessible to horsemen or vehicles;
so that the larger part of the cost of the whole affair should have been
expended on its margins. It has turned out a sublime piece of folly; and
when the New-Zealander of distant ages shall have moralized sufficiently
among the ruins of London Bridge, he will bethink himself that somewhere
thereabout was the marvelous Tunnel, the very existence of which will
seem to him as incredible as that of the hanging gardens of Babylon. But
the Thames will long ago have broken through the massive arch, and
choked up the corridors with mud and sand and with the large stones of
the structure itself, intermixed with skeletons of drowned people, the
rusty ironwork of sunken vessels, and the great many such precious and
curious things as a river always contrives to hide in its bosom; the
entrance will have been obliterated, and its very site forgotten beyond
the memory of twenty generations of men, and the whole neighborhood be
held a dangerous spot on account of the malaria; insomuch that the
traveler will make but a brief and careless inquisition for the traces
of the old wonder, and will stake his credit before the public, in some
Pacific Monthly of that day, that the story of it is but a myth, though
enriched with a spiritual profundity which he will proceed to unfold.
Yet it is impossible (for a Yankee, at least) to see so much magnificent
ingenuity thrown away, without trying to endow the unfortunate result
with some kind of usefulness, though perhaps widely different from the
purpose of its original conception. In former ages, the mile-long
corridors, with their numerous alcoves, might have been utilized as a
series of dungeons, the fittest of all possible receptacles for
prisoners of state. Dethroned monarchs and fallen statesmen would not
have needed to remonstrate against a domicile so spacious, so deeply
secluded from the world's scorn, and so admirably in accordance with
their thenceforward sunless fortunes. An alcove here might have suited
Sir Walter Raleigh better than that darksome hiding-place communicating
with the great chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end of which he
meditated upon his "History of the World." His track would here have
been straight and narrow, indeed, and would therefore have lacked
somewhat of the freedom that his intellect demanded; and yet the length
to which his footsteps might have traveled forth and retraced themselves
would partly have harmonized his physical movement with the grand curves
and planetary returns of his thought, through cycles of majestic
periods. Having it in his mind to compose the world's history, methinks
he could have asked no better retirement than such a cloister as this,
insulated from all the seductions of mankind and womankind, deep beneath
their mysteries and motives, down into the heart of things, full of
personal reminiscences in order to the comprehensive measurement and
verification of historic records, seeing into the secrets of human
nature,--secrets that daylight never yet revealed to mortal,--but
detecting their whole scope and purport with the infallible eyes of
unbroken solitude and night. And then the shades of the old mighty men
might have risen from their still profounder abodes and joined him in
the dim corridor, treading beside him with an antique stateliness of
mien, telling him in melancholy tones, grand, but always melancholy, of
the greater ideas and purposes which their most renowned performances so
imperfectly carried out; that, magnificent successes in the view of all
posterity, they were but failures to those who planned them. As Raleigh
was a navigator, Noah would have explained to him the peculiarities of
construction that made the ark so seaworthy; as Raleigh was a statesman,
Moses would have discussed with him the principles of laws and
government; as Raleigh was a soldier, Caesar and Hannibal would have held
debate in his presence, with this martial student for their umpire; as
Raleigh was a poet, David, or whatever most illustrious bard he might
call up, would have touched his harp, and made manifest all the true
significance of the past by means of song and the subtle intelligences
of music.
Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew
nothing of gaslight, and that it would require a prodigious and wasteful
expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the tunnel sufficiently to
discern even a ghost. On this account, however, it would be all the
more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to keep him from
bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; and, being shut off
from external converse, the dark corridor would help him to make rich
discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious by-paths of the
intellect, which he had so long accustomed himself to explore. But how
would every successive age rejoice in so secure a habitation for its
reformers, and especially for each best and wisest man that happened to
be then alive! He seeks to burn up our whole system of society, under
pretense of purifying it from its abuses! Away with him into the tunnel,
and let him begin by setting the Thames on fire, if he is able!
If not precisely these, yet akin to these were some of the fantasies
that haunted me as I passed under the river: for the place is suggestive
of such idle and irresponsible stuff by its own abortive character, its
lack of whereabout on upper earth, or any solid foundation of realities.
Could I have looked forward a few years, I might have regretted that
American enterprise had not provided a similar tunnel, under the Hudson
or the Potomac, for the convenience of our National Government in times
hardly yet gone by. It would be delightful to clap up all the enemies of
our peace and Union in the dark together, and there let them abide,
listening to the monotonous roll of the river above their heads, or
perhaps in a state of miraculously suspended animation, until,--be it
after months, years, or centuries,--when the turmoil shall be all over,
the Wrong washed away in blood (since that must needs be the cleansing
fluid), and the Right firmly rooted in the soil which that blood will
have enriched, they might crawl forth again and catch a single glimpse
at their redeemed country, and feel it to be a better land than they
deserve, and die!