necessarily, my patient friend and companion, exist at every auction,
though it must be admitted, to the credit of Messrs. Debenham and
Storr, that their proceedings are always marked by as much regularity
and decorum as the nature of their transactions will admit of. For
auctioneering is the Bohemianism of commerce; and whether it be the
purser of a man-of-war selling the effects of a deceased Jack Tar before
the mainmast; an impromptu George Robins, with a very large beard,
knocking down red flannel shirts, jack-boots, and gold rocking-cradles at
the Ballarat diggings; my former friends, the fish salesmen, brandishing
their account-books over their piscine merchandise in Billingsgate; or
the courtly Robins, _in propriâ personâ_, eloquently bepuffing the Right
Hon. the Earl of Cockletops’s broad acres, which he has been honoured
with instructions to sell, in consequence of the insolvency of his
Lordship, there always enters into the deed of selling something wild,
something picturesque, and something exciting. It is strange, too, how
soon the virtues of auctioneering are apt to degenerate into vices; and
how thin a barrier exists between its legitimate commercial business and
an imbroglio of roguish chaffering.
So is it on the turf. There, on the velvet verdant lawn before the Grand
Stand at Epsom, sits, or stands, or reclines, my Lord the immaculate
owner of Podasokus or Cynosure. Betting-book in hand, he condescends to
take the odds from Mr. Jones, who may have been a journeyman carpenter
ten years since, but whose bare word is good now for a hundred thousand
pounds. The peer and the plebeian bet together amicably; they respect
their parole agreements; they would disdain to admit the suspicion of a
fraud in their transactions; they are honourable men both, though they
might, I acknowledge, do something better for a livelihood than gamble
on the speed of a racehorse; yet, all honourable men as they are on the
turf, within two feet of them, _outside_ the Grand Stand railing, are
some hundreds of turfites depending for their existence upon exactly
the same means—betting, but who cheat, and lie, and cozen, and defraud,
and swagger about in an impudent boastfulness of roguery, till the most
liberal-minded member of the non-cheating community must regret, almost,
that the old despotic punishments are gone out of vogue, and that a few
of these rogues’ ears cannot be nailed to the winning post, a few of them
tied up to the railings of the Grand Stand and soundly swinged, and a
few more placed in neat pillories, or commodious pairs of stocks beneath
the judge’s chair. Like the honourable betters inside, and the thievish
touts outside, electioneering is apt to suffer by the same disreputable
companionships; and within a few stones’ throw of Garraway’s, there
may be pullulating an infamous little watch-box of dishonesty, where a
thick-lipped, sham Caucasian auctioneer, is endeavouring, with the aid
of confederates as knavish as he, to palm off worthless lamps, lacquered
tea-trays, teapots of tin sophisticated to the semblance of silver, and
rubbishing dressing-cases, upon unwary country visitors, or even upon
Cockneys, who, were they to live to the age of Methuselah, would never be
thoroughly initiated into the ways of the town.
And now stand on one side: the auction company—it is nearly four
o’clock—stream forth from Debenham’s. I spoke of the amateurs of
auctions—the people who persist in attending them, but who rarely
appear to become purchasers of anything. There is not much difficulty,
however, in discerning who the people are who are really bidding and
really buying. Here they come, bagged and bundled, and gesticulating and
jabbering. They are Jews, my dear. They are the hook-nosed, ripe-lipped,
bright-eyed, cork-screw ringleted, and generally oleaginous-looking
children of Israel. They cluster, while in the sale-room, round the
auctioneer and his clerk, who (the last) seems to have an intimate
acquaintance with them all. They nod and chuckle, and utter Hebrew
ejaculations, and seem, all the while that the sale is proceeding, to
be in an overboiling state of tremour and nervous excitement. A sale
by auction is to them as good—better—than a play; so is everything on
this earth, in, about, or in the remotest connection with which, there
is something that can be bought, or something that can be sold, or
something that can be higgled for. If ever you attend auctions, my friend
and reader, I should advise you not to bid against the Jews. If it seem
to you that any one of the Caucasian Arabs has set his mind upon the
acquisition of an article, let him bid for it and buy it, a’goodness
name; for if you meddle with the matter, even by the augmentation of a
sixpence, he will so bid and bid against you, that he will bid you, at
last, out of your hat, and out of your coat, and out of your skin, and
out of your bones; even as the cunning man of Pyquag, that Diedrich
Knickerbocker tells of, questioned Anthony van Corlear, the trumpeter,
out of his fast-trotting nag, and sent him home mounted on a vile calico
mare.
There are some here, who are dissatisfied with the bargains they have
made, and are squabbling in a lively manner on the foot pavement. Mark,
I entreat you, among them, those dusky-faced females, mostly given to
the loose and flabby order of corpulency, who are shabbily dressed,
yet with a certain tendency to the wearing of lace bonnets, and faded
cashmeres, and who have moreover a decided penchant for golden bangles
and earrings, and rings with large stones that do not shine. You cannot
make up your mind at once that they are Jewesses, because they have a
conflicting facial resemblance to Gipsies. During the sale they have been
reclining, not to say squatting, on the broad goods counter in shabby
state, like second-hand sultanas, making bids in deep contralto voices,
or mysteriously transmitting them through the intermediary of glib Jew
boys with curly heads. These commercial females must be reckoned among
the million and one mysteries of London. I imagine them to be the ladies
dwelling in remote suburbs or genteel neighbourhoods gone to decay, who,
in the columns of the “Times,” are always expressing a desire to purchase
second-hand wearing apparel, lace, jewellery, and books, for the purpose
of exportation to Australia, and for which they are always willing to
pay ready money, even to the extent of remitting post-office orders in
immediate return for parcels from the country. They, too, I think, must
keep the mysterious “ladies’ wardrobe shops” known to the Abigails in
aristocratic families, and which are, a little bird has told me, not
altogether unknown to the patrician occupants of the noblest mansions
of the realm. Thus, there seems to be a perpetual round of mutation and
transmutation going on among clothes. The natural theory of reproduction
here seems carried to its most elaborate condition of practice; and,
bidding adieu to Debenham and Storr’s, the chaffering Jews, and the
dusky ladies’ wardrobe women, my mind wanders to Rag Fair, thence to
the emporium of Messrs. Moses and Son, and thence, again, to Stultze,
Nugee, and Buckmaster, and I end in a maze of cogitation upon the “Sartor
Resartus” of Thomas Carlyle.
Come, let us struggle into the open, and inhale the flower-laden breeze
that is wafted from Covent Garden market. There, we are in King Street;
and, I declare, there is my aunt Sophy’s brougham, with my identical aunt
and my cousin Polly in the interior of the vehicle. They are bound, I
will go bail, either to the Soho Bazaar or to the Pantheon, in Oxford
Street. Jump up behind; fear no warning cry of “whip behind” addressed to
the coachman by malevolent street boy, disappointed in his expectations
of an eleemosynary ride. Remember, we are invisible; and as for the
dignity of the thing, the starched, buckramed, and watchspringed-hooped
skirts of my female relatives take up at least three and a half out of
the four seats in the brougham: the remaining moiety of a place being
occupied, as of right, by my aunt’s terrier, Jip, who threatens vengeance
with all his teeth on any one who should venture to dispossess him.
I told you so. They have passed Charles Street, Soho, whisked by the
Princess’s Theatre, and alighted beneath the portico of the Pantheon.
The affable beadle (whose whiskers, gold-laced hat-band, livery buttons,
and general deportment, are as superior to those the property of the
beadle of the Burlington Arcade, as General Washington to General Walker)
receives the ladies with a bow. He is equalled, not surpassed, in
polished courtesy, by his brother beadle at the conservatory entrance in
Great Marlborough Street, who bows ladies out with a dignified politeness
worthy of the best days of Richelieu and Lauzun.
So into the Pantheon, turning and turning about in that
Hampton-Court-like maze of stalls, laden with pretty gimcracks, toys,
and _papier maché_ trifles for the table, dolls and children’s dresses,
wax flowers and Berlin and crotchet work, prints, and polkas, and
women’s ware of all sorts. Up into the gallery, where you may look down
upon a perfect little ant-hill of lively industry. And, if you choose,
into that queer picture-gallery, where works by twentieth-rate masters
have been quietly accumulating smoke and dust for some score years, and
where the only conspicuous work is poor shiftless Haydon’s big nightmare
picture of “Lazarus.” They have lately added, I believe, a photographic
establishment to the picture-gallery of the Pantheon; but I am doubtful
as to its success. It requires a considerable amount of moral courage to
ascend the stairs, or to enter the picture department at all. The place
seems haunted by the ghosts of bygone pictorial mediocrities. It is the
lazar-house of painting—an hospital of incurables in art.
[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.]
I am not aware whether any of my present generation of readers—people
are born, and live and die, so fast now-a-days—remember a friend of
mine who dwelt in an out-of-the-way place called Tatty-boy’s Rents, and
whom I introduced to the public by the name of Fripanelli. He was a
music-master—very old, and poor, and ugly; almost a dwarf in stature,
wrinkled, decrepit; he wore a short cloak, and the boys called him
“Jocko;” indeed, he was not at all unlike a baboon in general appearance.
But Fripanelli in his time—a very long time ago—though now brought
to living in a back slum, and teaching the daughters of chandlers’
shopkeepers, had been a famous professor of the tuneful art. He knew old
Gaddi—Queen Caroline’s Gaddi—well: he had been judged worthy to preside
at the pianoforte at Velluti’s musical classes; and he had even written
the music to a ballet, which was performed with great _éclat_ at the
King’s Theatre, and in which the celebrated Gambalonga had danced. To
me, Frip. had an additional claim to be regarded with something like
curiosity mingled with reverence; for he had positively been, in the
halcyon days of youth, the manager of an Italian opera company, the place
of whose performance was—wherever do you think?—the Pantheon, in Oxford
Street. Now, as I stand in the lively bazaar, with the prattling little
children, and the fine flounced ladies, I try to conjure back the days
when Fripanelli was young, and when the Pantheon was a theatre. From here
in the vestibule—where the ornamented flower-pots, and the garden-chairs
of complicated construction, and the busts with smoky cheeks and noses,
and marvellously clubbed heads of hair, have their _locus standi_—from
here sprang the grand staircase. There was no Haydon’s picture of Lazarus
for our grandfathers and grandmothers in hoops and powder—you must
remember that Fripanelli looks at least two hundred and fifty years of
age, and is currently reported to be ninety—to stare at as they trotted
up the degrees. Yonder, in the haven of bygone mediocrities in the
picture-gallery, may have been the crush-room; the rotunda at the back
of the bazaar, where now the vases of wax-flowers glimmer in a perpetual
twilight, must have been the green-room; the conservatories were
dressing-rooms, and the stage door was undoubtedly in Great Marlborough
Street. How I should have liked to witness the old pigtail operas and
ballets performed at the Pantheon, when Fripanelli and the century were
young. “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” “Orestes and Pylades,”
“Daphnis and Chloë,” “Bellerophon,” “Eurydice,” the “Clemency of Titus,”
the “Misfortunes of Darius,” and the “Cruelty of Nero”—these were the
lively subjects which our grandfathers and grandmothers delighted to have
set to Italian music. Plenty of good heavy choruses, tinkle-tankling
instrumental music, plaintive ditties, with accompaniments on the fife
and the fiddle, and lengthy screeds of droning recitatives, like the
Latin accidence arranged for the bagpipes. Those were the days of the
unhappy beings of whom Velluti and Ambrogetti were among the last whom
a refined barbarity converted into _soprani_. The Italians have not
many things to thank the first Napoleon for; yet to his sway in Italy
humanity owes the abolition of _that_ atrocity. They dig up some of the
worthy old pigtail operas now, and perform them on our modern lyric
stage. A select audience of fogies, whose sympathies are all with the
past, comes to listen, and goes to sleep; and “Iphigenia in Aulis,” or
“Ariadne in Naxos,” is consigned to a Capuletian tomb of limbo. Days of
good taste are these, my masters, when aristocratic ears are tickled by
the melodious naughtinesses of the great Casino-and-Codliver-oil opera,
the “Traviata;” by the Coburg melodrama, mingled with Mrs. Ratcliffe’s
novel, and finished with extracts from Guicciardini’s “Annals”—called
the “Trovatore,” [who was it fried that child, or broiled him, or ate
him: Azucena, Leonora, the Conde di Luna, Mrs. Harris, all or any of
them?] or by the sparkling improbabilities of “Rigoletto,” with its
charming Greenacre episode of the murdered lady in the sack. We manage
those things so much better now-a-days. And the ballets, too; do you
know positively that in the pig-tail opera times, the lady dancers wore
skirts of decent length? do you know that Guimard danced in a hoop
that reached nearly to her ankles, and that Noblet wore a corsage that
ended just below her armpits, and a skirt that descended far below her
knees? Do you know, even, that Taglioni, and Ellsler, and Duvernay,
the great terpsichorean marvels of twenty years since, disdained the
meretricious allurements of this refined and polished age, that calls
garters “elastic bands,” and winces at a grant of twenty pounds a year
for providing living models for the students of the Dublin Academy?—that
strains at these gnats, and swallows the camel of a ballet at the opera!
Oh, stupid old pig-tail days, when we could take our wives and sisters
to hear operas and see ballets, without burning with shame to think that
we should take, or they suffer themselves to be taken, to witness a
shameless exhibition, fit only for the _blasé_ patricians of the Lower
Empire!
In the memoirs of old Nollekens, the sculptor, you will find that he
was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera at the Pantheon, to
which he had a life admission—it did not last _his_ life though, I am
afraid—and that he sat in the pit with his sword by his side, and a
worsted comforter round his neck. This must surely, however, have been
before the days of Fripanelli’s management. It is hard to say, indeed,
for the Pantheon has been so many things by turns and nothing long.
Once, if I mistake not, there was wont to be an exhibition of wax-work
here; once, too, it was famous as a place for masquerades of the most
fashionable, or, at least, of the costliest description. Here Charles Fox
and Lord Maldon, with dominoes thrown over their laced clothes, and masks
pressed upon their powdered perukes, reeled in from the chocolate houses
and the E. O. tables; here, so the legends say, the bad young prince, who
afterwards became a worse old king, the worthless and witless wearer of
the Prince of Wales’s three ostrich plumes—here George III.’s eldest born
met the beautiful Perdita. He ill-treated her, of course, afterwards,
as he ill-treated his wives (I say wives, in the plural number, do you
understand?) and his mistresses, his father, his friends, and the people
he was called upon to govern. He lied to, and betrayed, them all; and he
was _Dei gratiâ_, and died in the odour of civil list sanctity, and they
have erected a statue to his disreputable memory in Trafalgar Square.
Soft, whisper low, tread softly: the Pantheon was once a church! Yes,
there were pews in the area of the pit, and free-sittings in the
galleries. There is a singing, buffooning place in Paradise Street,
Liverpool, where they dance the Lancashire clog-hornpipe, yell comic
songs on donkeys’ backs, perform acrobatic feats, juggle, strum the
banjo, clank the bones, belabour the tambourine, stand on their heads,
and walk on the ceiling. This place is called the Colosseum, _but it was
once a chapel_. The pews, with very slight alteration, yet exist, and on
the ledges where the hymn-books were wont to lie, stand now the bottles
of Dublin stout and ginger-pop. I do not like these violent revolutions,
these galvanic contrasts. They are hideous, they are unnatural, they are
appalling. To return to the Pantheon—I still follow the legends—after it
had been a masquerading temple and a wax-work show, and then a church,
it was changed once more into a theatre; but _mark what followed_. One
Saturday night the company were playing “Don Giovanni,” and midnight had
struck before the awful tramp of the Commendatore was heard re-echoing
through the marble corridors of the libertine’s palace, and the last
tube of maccaroni stuck in Leporello’s throat; but when, the finale
being at its approach, and to cap the climax of the catastrophe, twelve
demons in flame-coloured garments, and bearing torches flaming with
resin, rose from trap-doors to seize the guilty Don, the manager, who
had been watching the scene from the wing, rushed on the stage with
a screech of horror, crying out, “_There are thirteen! There are
thirteen!_” And so there were! A solitary demon, with flaming eyes, a
tail of incredible length, and bearing _two_ torches, appeared, no man
knew whence—_he_ hadn’t come up a trap to the foot-lights (the audience
screaming and fainting by scores), danced a ghastly _pas seul_, cut six,
and disappeared in a blaze of livid-coloured fire, which had _not_ been
provided in the usual iron pans by the property man.[6] Whether he took
Don Giovanni or the manager away with him the legend does not state; but
it is certain that the latter went bankrupt a month afterwards, of course
as a punishment for his sins; whereupon the lease of the Pantheon was
purchased by a sober-minded speculator, who forthwith converted it into a
bazaar, as which it has greatly thriven ever since.
I am very fond of buying toys for children; but I don’t take them to
the Pantheon for that purpose. I fear the price of the merchandise
which the pretty and well-conducted female assistants at the stalls
have to sell. I have been given to understand that incredible prices
are charged for India-rubber balls, and that the quotations for drums,
hares-and-tabors, and Noah’s arks, are ruinously high. I have yet
another reason for not patronising the Pantheon as a toy mart. It
frequently happens that I feel slightly misanthropic and vicious in my
toy-dealing excursions, and that my juvenile friends have sudden fits
of naughtiness, and turn out to be anything but agreeable companions.
Woe betide the ill-conditioned youngsters who cause me to assume the
function of a vicarious “Bogey!” But I serve them out, I promise you.
To use a transpontine colloquialism, ungenteel but expressive, I “warm
them.” Not by blows or pinches—I disdain that; not by taking them into
shops where they sell unwholesome pastry or deleterious sweetstuff—I
have no wish to impair their infantile powers of digestion; though both
processes, I have been given to understand, are sometimes resorted to
by child-quellers; but I “warm” them by taking them into toy shops and
buying them _ugly toys_. Aha! my young friends! who bought you the old
gentleman impaled on the area railing while in the act of knocking at his
own street door, and who emitted a dismal groan when the pedestal on
which he stood was compressed? Who purchased the monkey with the horrible
visage, that ran up the stick? who the dreadful crawling serpent, made
of the sluggishly elastic substance—a compound of glue and treacle, I
believe—of which printers’ rollers are made, and that unwound himself
in a shudderingly, reptile, life-like manner on the parlour carpet? Who
brought you the cold, flabby toad, and the centipede at the end of the
India-rubber string, with his heavy chalk body and quivering limbs, the
great-grandfather of all the irreverent daddy-long-legs who wouldn’t
say their prayers, and were taken, in consequence, by those elongated
appendages, and thrown, with more or less violence, downstairs? This is
about the best method I know for punishing a refractory child. There is
another, an almost infallible and Rarey-like process of taming juvenile
termagants in the absence of their parents; but it entails a slight
modicum of physical cruelty. Say that you are left alone with a child,
too young to reason with, and who _won’t_ behave himself. Don’t slap
him: it is brutal and cowardly on your part; besides, it _leaves marks_,
and you don’t want to make an enemy of his mother. Don’t make faces at
him: it may spoil the beauty of your own countenance, and may frighten
him out of his little wits. _Shake him._ Shake him till he becomes an
animated whirligig. He isn’t appalled; he is only bewildered. He doesn’t
know what on earth the unaccustomed motion means: then wink at him, and
tell him that you will do it again if he doesn’t behave himself; and it
is perfectly wonderful to see to what complete submission you can reduce
him. It is true that a grown person must be a callous brute to try such
measures with a defenceless infant; but let that pass—we can’t get on in
the world without a little ruffianism. I have heard, even, that in the
matrimonial state a good shaking will from time to time—but soft!
The young ladies who serve behind the counters at the Pantheon, are much
given to working the spiky cobweb collars in which our present belles
delight, and which are worked in guipure, or crotchet, or application, or
by some other process with an astounding name of which I am profoundly
ignorant. To their lady customers they behave with great affability.
The gentlemen, I am pleased, though mortified to say, they treat with
condescension mingled with a reserved dignity that awes the boldest
spirit. It is somewhat irritating, too, to know that they can be as merry
as grigs among themselves when they so choose; and it is a bending of the
brows, a clinching of the fists, and a biting of the lips matter, to see
them flitting from stall to stall, romping with one another in a pastoral
manner, and retailing merry anecdotes, which may possibly be remarks on
your personal appearance. Yet I have known a man with large whiskers
(he went to the bad, and to Australia, and is now either high in the
government or in the police over there) to whom a young lady assistant in
the Pantheon, on a very wet day, once lent a silk umbrella. But he was
always a bold man, and had a winning way with the sex.