the hostelry—the tavern—bah! it isn’t a hostelry—it isn’t a tavern; it
is an unadulterated gin and beer palace—whither takes place the rush at
half-price for malt refreshment. I have kept you lingering at the door
a long time; I have digressed, parried, evaded the question; discoursed
upon the transpontine drama, and the moot question of its morality; I
have wandered about the New Cut, and have even gone back to the last
century, and evoked the ghost of Doctor Johnson; I have been discursive,
evasive, tedious very probably, but purposely so. I was bound to show
you the place, but it is better that the pen should leave the fulness of
representation to the pencil in this instance. It is humorous enough,
brilliant enough, full of varied life and bustle enough. I could make you
very merry with accounts of the mock Ethiopian serenaders at the door,
with facetious remarks on the gentleman in the sou’-wester, knee-shorts,
anklejacks, and gaiters, who is instructing the lady in the mob-cap in
the mysteries of the celebrated dance known as the “Roberto Polveroso,”
or “Dusty Bob and Black Sal.” I might be eloquent upon the subject of
the sturdy sailor who is hobnobbing with the negro, the Life Guardsman
treating the ladies, like a gallant fellow as he is, and the stream
of honest, hardworking mechanics, their wives, and families, who have
surged in from the “Vic.” to have their “drop of beer.” But the picture
would still be incomplete. In graver pages—in tedious, solemn journals
only—could be told (and I have told, in my time) the truth about a
gin-shop in the New Cut. I will not descant upon the crime and shame,
the age made hardened, the very babies weaned on gin. Let us take the
better part, and throw a veil over this ugly position of the night side
of London.
[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK P.M.: HOUSE OF CALL FOR THE VICTORIA
AUDIENCE.]
* * * * *
Do you ever read the supplement of the “Times” newspaper? Of course you
do; at least, you must diurnally peruse one column at least of that
succursal to the monster journal, specially interesting to yourself.
Almost every one who can read is anxious to consult the “Times” every
morning for one purpose or other. Either he requires information about a
ship that is going out, or a ship that should be come home; about a purse
he has lost, or a bank-note he has found; about a situation he wants,
or a clerkship he has advertised for competition; about the wife he has
run away from, or the son who has run away from him; about the horse he
wishes to sell, or about the Newfoundland pup he wants to buy; about his
debtor’s bankruptcy, or his own insolvency; about the infallible remedy
for all diseases, for which he has promised to send a recipe on the
receipt of twelve postage-stamps; or the best curative pills advertised
for hypochondriasis and dyspepsia; about the cheapest sherries, and the
best second-hand broughams; about pianofortes for the million, sales by
auction, money to be lent, or money wanted to borrow; and, chiefest of
all, about the “births, deaths, and marriages,” which announcements are
the prime and favourite reading of the female sex. Indeed, I know one
lady—young, comely, accomplished, good-natured, and married—who never
even condescends to glance at a line of the colossal “Times” newspaper,
beyond the “Births, Marriages, and Deaths;” and very good reading she
declares them to be.
There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I know
not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), having
reference to dancing. I don’t allude to the casinos, or masquerades,
or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge about, stare
at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without ever shaking
a leg; but to the advertisements of the professors of dancing and
“drawing-room deportment,” who really mean business, and give instruction
in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their academies daily and
nightly all over London, from the farthest East to the extremest West.
Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a boy, in the grim Parisian
_pension_, or school boarding-house attached to the College where I
had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a certain obese professor,
to whom my parents and guardians paid a certain quarterly sum for my
instruction in the poetry of motion. I remember him well, for whenever
we took our walks abroad in Paris, we could scarcely pass a dead wall
without seeing it placarded, or a _porte cochère_ without seeing it
hung, with a little yellow black framed bill, screened with a wire
trellis-work, proclaiming “Boizot” and his “_cours de danse_.” This was
in ’39; yet last winter in Paris the same walls and _portes cochères_
still sounded the praises of Boizot. He appears to be immortal, like
Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye-snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby
of the sauce. The square _toqued_ and black-gowned professors of the
College Bourbon—now Lycée Bonaparte—could by dint of locking me up in
cellars, making me kneel across sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with
ferulas (for corporal punishment never—oh! never—enters into the scheme
of French education), impel me to construe Cæsar indifferently well; but
Boizot, in all his _cours de danse_, failed in teaching me the difference
between _cavalier seul_ and _en avant deux_—between the _pastorale_ and
the _chaine des dames_. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your
humble servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct
me in the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most
lamentable _fiasco_, although he resorted to his famous specific of
stamping on the pupil’s toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the
right steps to the right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing
all my waltzing on _his_ toes; and he flung me away from him at last,
denouncing me as a hopeless _butor_, _ganache_, _cretin_, and _cancre_—a
Vandal, a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth—the three first being
terms perfectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which
it is difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that
Boizot left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most
sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released
from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on
good authority that I once danced a hornpipe at the wedding-breakfast of
a maritime relation of mine; but the exploit, if ever accomplished, was
due more, I opine, to the salmon and cucumber of the nuptial feast than
to the _certaminis gaudia_ of dancing. I essayed seriously once more to
waltz at a Kursaal ball at a German watering-place. How I tore a lady’s
dress, how I tripped myself up, how I was covered with shame, and had the
finger of scorn pointed at me, are yet matters of history at Bubbelbingen
Schlaggasenberg. Thither I will return no more. Again, when I visited
Russia, the first letter of introduction I presented on my arrival at St.
Petersburg brought me an invitation to a grand ball. It was—Oh, horror! a
diplomatic ball; there were not half a dozen persons in plain clothes in
the ball-room; and I stood lonely and forlorn among a crowd of brilliant
guardsmen, be-starred and be-ribboned ministers, plenipotentiaries, and
embroidered _attachés_, who are proverbially the best dancers in Europe.
I had not even the miserable safety-valve of crossing over and talking
to the non-dancing dowagers, for, according to Russian custom—one which
would delight the irreverent Mr. Spurgeon—the ladies remain at one end of
the _salon_, and the gentlemen at the other—a relic of Orientalism—and
in strict isolation, during the intervals between the dances. I was in
despair, and about either to rush out or to recite “My name is Norval,”
with a view towards exciting curiosity and inspiring terror, when the
gracious lady who did the honours for the ball-giving minister, who was a
bachelor, asked me if I didn’t dance? I didn’t say that I had a sprained
ankle, that I was hot, or tired, but I told the truth for once, and
said honestly that I couldn’t. “Don’t you smoke, then?” she continued,
glancing at me with a sort of pitying expression, as though she were
thinking, “I wonder what this gawky Englishman _can_ do?” I replied that
I could smoke a little; whereupon, with her own fair hands, she opened
a door and inducted me to an apartment, where a score of Boyards and
secretaries of legation were smoking Havannahs, playing _préférence_,
and sipping whisky-punch, and where I stopped till two o’clock in the
morning, became very popular, and positively sang a comic song. At
evening parties in England, alas! they seldom have a smoking-room, and so
I don’t go to them. A non-dancing man becomes speedily known in society,
and the women shun him.
I can’t help thinking (of course, on the fox and sour grapes principle),
whenever I see a very accomplished male dancer, as when I look upon a
first-rate amateur billiard-player, on the immense amount of time the man
must have wasted to acquire a useless and frivolous art. Yet I remember
the fox and the grapes, and suppress my rising sneer. Dancing to those
who like it, and can dance gracefully, is an innocent and cheerful
recreation. It does my heart good sometimes to see the little tiny
children in our crowded London courts and alleys waltzing and polkaing to
the Italian organ-grinder’s music; and I shall be sorry for the day when
some new Oliver Cromwell or Puritan government—we may have another in
time—may denounce and put down “public dancing and dancing academies.”
But why should the dancing academy column in the “Times” advertisements
possess more than general attractions for me? Is it that I have a
sneaking inclination to visit one of these establishments as a pupil;
take six private lessons from Miss Leonora Geary, or Mrs. Nicholas
Henderson—I could never dare to face Madame Mélanie Duval, or the
Semiramis of dancing mistresses, Madame Michau Adelaïde—study the
fashionable steps in secret, and then burst upon the world as an adept
in the _Schottische_, the _Cellarius_, and the _Deux Temps_? Alas! I do
not even know the names of the fashionable dances of the day, and very
probably those to which I have alluded are by this time old fashioned,
out of date, rococo, and pigtaily. But I have a theory that every man
must dance before he dies, and that of the choreographic art we may say
as of love—
“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see,
Who is, or was, or is to be.”
And I shall dance, I suppose, some of these days, although my nerves be
shrunk, my blood be cold, and hair white, and Death scrape away on the
fiddle, as in Hans Holbein’s shudder-giving panorama.
Mr. William M’Connell, however, the young gentleman who is my artistic
_fides achates_ in this horological undertaking, is, I am given to
understand, a complete master of this desirable accomplishment, and a
finished adept in its various mysteries. In this case, therefore, the
leader has become the led, and I am grateful to him for his service as
cicerone in introducing me to the domains of Terpsichore.
Assume, O reader and spectator—to violate no academical privacy—that we
are in the _salle de danse_ conducted for so many years, and with so much
success, by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague, late of the Royal Operas. Throughout
each day, from morn till dewy eve, does Mrs. Fanteague—a little woman,
who, at no remote period of time, has been pretty—assisted by her
husband, Mr. Hercules Fanteague, a diminutive gentleman, with tight
pantaloons and a “kit,” and a numerous family of sons and daughters,
who all appear to have been born dancing-masters and mistresses, give
private instruction to ladies and gentlemen, who are as yet novices in
the art, or who are too shame-faced to venture upon the ordeal of public
instruction. But, at nine o’clock in the evening, commences the public
academy—the “hop,” as some persons, innocent of the bump of veneration,
call it. There, in the tastefully yet cheaply decorated saloon, with
its boarded floor and flying cupids and sylphides on the panels—there,
where the gas shines, and the enlivening strains of a band, composed
of a harp, piano, and violin, are heard—there, in a remote section
of the apartment—the _pons asinorum_ of the dancing-school—the adult
gentlemen, who are as yet in the accidence or rudiments of dancing, are
instructed in the mysteries of the “positions” and preliminary steps by
Mrs. Hercules Fanteague. The dancing-mistress is obliged to be very firm
and decided, not to say severe, with her awkward pupils; for some are
inclined to blush, and some to laugh and whisper disparaging jokes to one
another, and some to tie their legs into knots and imitate the action
of the old shutter telegraphs with their arms, and some to sink into
a state of stony immobility and semi-unconsciousness, from which they
can only be rescued by sharp words and pushes. When these hopeful ones
are sufficiently advanced in the elements, they are handed over to lady
partners, who, to the sound of the aforesaid harp, piano, and violin,
twirl them about the room till they are pronounced fit to figure in the
_soirées_ of society, and in the Arabian Night-like scenes of Cremorne
and Highbury Barn.
[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK P.M.: A DANCING ACADEMY.]
I once heard a man of the world tell a lady, in gay reproach, that
there were three things impossible of accomplishment to her sex. “Women
can’t throw,” he said, “they can’t jump, and they can’t slide.” The
lady stoutly denied the third postulate, and adduced in proof her own
sliding performances in winter time in the day-room at boarding school.
The first assertion she settled by throwing the peeling of an apple at
him, which fell deftly over his left shoulder, and formed on the carpet,
I am told, the initials of her Christian name. However this may be with
other ladies—for she was fair, and good, and wise, as “Sydney’s sister,
Pembroke’s mother,” though Time has not thrown a dart at her yet, I
know there is one thing a man cannot do. He cannot dance. He may take
lessons of Mrs. Hercules Fanteague till his hair grows out of his hat,
and his nails grow out of his pumps; he may dance the Crystal Platform
at Cremorne to sawdust, but he will never succeed in making himself more
than a capering elephant, or an ambling hippopotamus, with the facial
expression of an undertaker’s man on duty for the funeral of a very
rich “party,” where extra woe is laid on by Mr. Tressels, regardless of
expense.
Of course I except professional dancers, and I bow reverentially before
the bust of Vestris, “_Diou de la Danse_” and of the late Mr. Baron
Nathan. I do not remember the first. He died years before I was born,
yet I see him in my mind’s eye on the stage of the Grand Opera in
Paris, swelling with peacock-pride and conscious merit—in dancing—in
full court-dress, his sword by his side, his laced and plumed _chapeau
bras_ beneath his arm, his diamond _solitaire_ in his laced shirt-frill,
leading his son to the footlights, on the night of the first appearance
of the youth, and saying, “_Allez_, my son, the Muses will protect you,
and your father beholds you.” Was it this son, or a grandson I—tell
me “Notes and Queries”—that was the Armand Vestris, whom our Eliza
Bartolozzi (the famous Madame Vestris) married, and who was hurried
at that dreadful hole at Naples? I see the _Diou de la Danse_ on a
subsequent occasion at rehearsal, when the same son, being committed
to the prison as Fort l’Evêque by the lieutenant of police (the whole
operatic _troupe_, led by Mademoiselle Guimard, were in a state of
chronic revolt) dismissed him with these magnanimous words: “_Allez_, my
beloved one. This is the proudest day of your life. Demand the apartments
of my friend the King of Poland. Take my carriage. Your father pays for
all!” But the poor baron, with his corkscrew ringlets, turn-down collar,
and limber legs, I can and do remember. I have seen him dance that
undying _pas_, blindfold, among the eggs and tea-things, in the Gothic
Hall at Rosherville. But five Sundays since I was at Gravesend, and over
my shilling tea in the Gothic Hall, I sighed when I thought of Baron
Nathan and of happier days. “Where art thou, my Belinda? There is no one
to pull off my shrimp-heads now.”
Lo, as I pen these reminiscences of nine o’clock in the evening—pen them
in the “quiet street,” where I am again for a season—though my boat is
on the shore, and my bark is on the sea, and ere you hear from me again
there will be a considerable variation of clocks between London and
Jericho—a fife and tabour announce the advent of a little dancing boy
and girl, with a careworn mother, in the street below. I look from my
window, and see the little painted people capering in their spangles and
fleshings and short calico drawers. It is against conviction, and against
my own written words, and against political economy, and ex-Lord Mayor
Carden; but I think on Mr. Carrick’s picture of “Weary Life,” and must
needs take some pence from the clock-case, and throw them out to these
tiny mummers. Life is _so_ hard, my brother!
TEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT
EXETER HALL.
Exists there, in the whole world, civilised or uncivilised, a nation
of such inveterate grumblers as the English? We grumble at everything.
We are five-and-twenty millions of bears afflicted with perpetually
sore heads. Are we charged sixpence extra for a bed? is the tail of
our mutton-chop underdone? does our mockturtle soup disagree with us?
is a railway train late? or the requisite amount of hop deficient in
our pale ale? does an Italian itinerant split our ears while we are
endeavouring to solve the Seventh Problem in the First Book of Euclid?
does the editor or manager refuse to return the manuscript of our poems
or our farces? do we buy a silk dress that turns out to be nine-tenths
cotton? are we surcharged by the commissioners of income-tax, (_they_
say I make a thousand a year, I say I don’t _make_ a hundred and
fifty; but may difference of opinion never, et cetera)? forthwith we
call for pen, ink, and paper, and indite a letter to the “Times,” that
providential safety-valve for the great legion of grumblers. What are our
public meetings but organised arenas of grumbling? what the “leaders”
in our Sunday newspapers but extra facilities for grumbling after we
have been grumbling all the week? I think it was Mr. Horace Mayhew, in
his “Model Men and Women,” who told the story of a waiter at a city
tavern, who took but one holiday in the course of the year, and then
enjoyed himself by paying a visit to another waiter at another tavern,
and assisting him in laying the knives and forks. In like manner the
ordinarily-understood holiday for the gentlemen of the daily press—there
being no diurnals published on Sunday—is Saturday; whereupon, after
lying in bed somewhat longer than usual on the sixth day’s morning, they
indulge in the _dulce desipere in loco_, by writing stinging leading
articles in the journals which publish editions on the Sabbath. This is
due to their inveterate propensity for grumbling. And, mark me, this
licensed and acknowledged grumbling is the surest safeguard of our
liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our snug
roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and smile
at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained in
the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching
into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter
democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few
months’, and sometimes a few years’ grumbling, we find that the wrong
exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have had no
barricades _ad interim_, no fusillades, no bombardment of private houses,
no declarations of the “solidarity” of anybody, no confiscations, no
deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by experience
of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the people were
very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into the limbo
of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions upon
grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily receives
deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures he won’t
guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no sooner does
our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the speech
that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write a
much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin to
grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the address
which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the session,
parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and witnesses are
grumbling at the committee; and in outlying boroughs vicious electors are
grumbling at the members of the Commons’ House of Parliament. The country
newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. The barristers grumble at
the judge, and the judge at the jury. The public grumbles at the way
soldiers are treated by the officers, and the soldiers (who are about
the only citizens who are not addicted to grumbling) go out and fight
and win battles, at which we at home grumble, because so many lives have
been lost. And I daresay the Prime Minister grumbles because he has the
gout, and the Queen on her throne grumbles because “Punch” caricatures
the Prince Consort, and “Punch” grumbles because the Prince Consort does
not often enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being
obliged to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not
half amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the
price of the marriage license, at the doctor’s bill for our first child’s
measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his
money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the physician
tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into our purer,
better Fielding’s aphorism in “Vanity Fair”—“Ah! _vanitas vanitatum_? Who
of us has not his hobby, or, having it, is satisfied?” Yet there is much
virtue in having at least liberty to grumble.
These thoughts come over me as I wend my way at Ten o’Clock at night
along the New Road—what do they call it now? Euston Road, Pancras
Road, Paddington Road—_que scais-je_—towards the suburban district of
Pentonville. It won’t be suburban much longer; for Clerkenwell and
Islington, Somers Town and Finsbury, are hemming it in so closely that it
will be engulphed some of these days by a brick-and-mortar torrent, like
the first Eddystone Lighthouse. A pleasant spot once was Pentonville,
haunted by cheery memories of Sir Hugh Myddleton, the New River Head,
Sadlers’ Wells Theatre, and the “Angel” at Islington—which isn’t (at
least now-a-days, and I doubt if it ever was) at Islington at all. They
began to spoil Pentonville when they pulled down that outrageously
comic statue of George IV., at Battle Bridge. Then they built the Great
Northern Railway Terminus—clincher number one; then an advertising
tailor built a parody of the Crystal Palace for a shop—clincher number
two (I am using a Swivellerism). The pre-ordinate clincher had been the
erection of the hideously lugubrious penitentiary. However, I suppose it
is all for the best. The next step will be to brick up the reservoir, and
take down that mysterious tuning-fork looking erection, which no doubt
has something to do with the water supply of London, and the New River
Head; then they had better turn the Angel into a select vestry-room or
a meeting-house for the Board of Works; and then, after that, I should
advise them to demolish the “Belvidere.”
Whose connection with grumbling you shall very speedily understand. At
this famous and commodious old tavern, one of the few in London that
yet preserve, not only a local but a metropolitan reputation, there
is held every Saturday evening—ten o’clock being about the time for
the commencement of the mimic Wittenagemotte—one of those meetings for
political discussion, and the “ventilation” of political questions, whose
uninterfered with occurrence, not only here, but in Fleet Street, in
Bride Lane, and in Leicester Square, so much did rouse the ire of the
_sbirri_, and _mouchards_, and unutterable villany of Rue de Jérusalem
spydom, in the employ of his Imperial Majesty, Napoleon III.