talk; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim acquaintance.
I have been one of the Alumni of “Cogers” or “Codger’s” Hall, Bride
Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was addressed as “My
Noble Grand” by the speaker. I have attended a meeting at the Forum,
held at the Green Dragon,[11] Fleet Street, where visitors are invited
to join in the discussion; and where, one evening, joining in the
discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my political views, and
a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out of the window; from
which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by the advent of a friendly
Templar, who had dropped in from chambers to the Forum to oil his rusty
eloquence in time for the coming Western Circuit. I have dropped in, too,
occasionally, at Mr. Wyld’s Reading-Room, in Leicester Square, and have
listened to much drouthy eloquence on subjects home and foreign. But
nowhere have I seen such tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris
have depicted, in the gloomiest of colours, as images of the political
discussion meetings of _perfide Albion_. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of
blood on the table, the chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder—to
be subsequently used for the conflagration of the Thames—the orator
addressing his hearers from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges
erected on a coffin; or dissentient members launching _abuses_, charged
with fulminating mercury, at an unpopular speaker’s head. Dark and
dangerous meetings, of dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place
in London. Oppressed, despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles,
do meet in holes and corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech,
denunciation and sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet
Street, to Bride Lane, to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to
Pentonville, to find them. The doors of those mysterious meeting-places
are “tiled” as securely as Freemasons’ lodges. Now and then a traitor,
by lies and hypocrisy, gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be
discovered in his treason. He dies within the year.
[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE.”]
The “Belvidere” is distinguished above its kindred discussion halls,
by its eminently respectable aspect. The subjects broached are bold
enough, and are as boldly treated; but you are puzzled to reconcile
the full-blown democracy of some of the speakers, with their mild,
bank-account-possessing, rate-and-tax-paying, housekeeping appearance.
They bark but do not bite. The usages and prestige of the place, too,
demand a certain amenity in discussion and forbearance in reply, which
throws an extra tinge of respectability over the whole. Looking at
this spacious, handsome room, panelled and pillared, comfortably and
brilliantly lit, with its doubled rows of mahogany tables covered with
bottles and glasses full of steaming compounds that do comfort the
flesh outwardly and rejoice the spirit inwardly—in strict moderation,
mind; looking at this burly, substantial auditory, ensconced in their
cosy chairs, smoking their cigars, and listening with attentive ears
to the orator; looking at the thoughtful waiter slipping from table to
table, administering refreshment and receiving orders with a subtle
swiftness, yet taking, I will be bound, an ardent mental interest
in the discussion; looking at the grave chairman in his comfortable
high-raised _fauteuil_—you might fancy this to be one of the parochial
“representative councils,” as vestries are now queerly christened,
or a freemasons’ lodge, when, “labour” being over, “refreshment”
commences, or an ordinary club of middle-class men accustomed to meet
one another, and talk upon the topics of the day over a social glass.
And, in truth, were you to suppose this, you would not be so very far
out in your calculation. These are, indeed, vestrymen—or representative
councillors—freemasons, benefit-club, middle-class men. But the topic
of the night is invested with authority, and its discussion is subject
to rules; and the highest compliment I can pay to the “Belvidere” is
that, if in that other Discussion Hall, held between the months of March
and August, in a green-leather and oak-carving furnished chamber, nigh
unto the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, as much sobriety,
decorum, and persistence in adhering to the matter in hand were shown, as
in this convivial parliament, the business of the nation would progress
much better, and we should have much less cause to grumble at most things.
See a speaker on his legs—a fluent speaker, somewhat of a florid speaker,
occasionally somewhat of a violent speaker, though his violence is
strictly confined to words and gesticulations. What withering sarcasms he
hurls at kings and ministers! How eloquently he tells those tyrannical
puppets that, when they are forgotten, when the force and direction of
personal satire is no longer understood, and measures are felt only in
their remotest consequences, his words shall still be found to contain
principles worthy of being transmitted to posterity! How sneeringly
he assures our rulers that they have but a copyhold interest in the
state, that they cannot waste, that they cannot alienate, and that
the fee-simple is in us! How menacingly he assures the monarchs of the
earth that the crowns which were gained by one revolution may be lost
by another! and how much, listening to his impassioned exordium, to
his whirlwind argument, to his scathing peroration, I become impressed
with a notion that the orator has a capital memory, and has been an
assiduous student of certain letters, which were addressed, in our
great-grandmothers’ time, to Mr. Woodfall, the printer of the “Public
Advertiser,” by a mysterious correspondent—a correspondent whose motto
was, “_Stat nominis umbra_” and who chose to assume the pseudonym of
“JUNIUS.”
In these orations you are sure to hear a good deal about Catholic
Emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, the Spa Fields Riots,
the Peterloo Massacre, the “Piccadilly Butchers,” the “Dorsetshire
Labourers,” Queen Caroline’s Trial, Richmond the Spy, and similar topics.
They are not very amusing, perhaps, but they are of infinite service in
keeping juvenile politicians _au fait_ with the political _memorabilia_
of thirty or forty years since. I have even heard an ardent reformer,
with scarcely so much as a tuft on his chin, declaim in burning accents
upon the great case of Horne Tooke _versus_ the House of Commons—“Once
a priest forever a priest”—on Jack Wilkes, Number Forty-five, and the
question of general warrants, on the cruelty of Lord Ellenborough to
William Hone, the trial of Colonel Despard, and the eventualities which
might have followed the successful assassination of Lord Sidmouth by
Arthur Thistlewood.
A staid, middle-aged gentleman follows the reformer, and proceeds,
genteelly, to demolish him. He is a staunch upholder of our ancient
institutions, and sneers at the presumptuous and levelling tendencies of
the age. He has some neat things to say about the “Pig and Whistle” style
of oratory, at which the ardent reformer winces, chews the end of his
cigar, and empties his glass indignantly; and he concludes with a glowing
eulogium on church and state, our glorious constitution, and our noble
aristocracy.
Ere I leave these placid tribunes of Pentonville Hill, discharging their
harmless philippics at men high in place and power, I muse a little
over the tavern itself, and call to mind a certain story I once heard
respecting it, possessing what foundation of truth I know not, but which,
if not true, is assuredly _ben trovato_. Thus runs the dubious legend:
You remember the fair young daughter of England, the good princess, the
virtuous daughter of a wicked father, and in whom, from her cradle to
her marriage, the hope and love of this stolid but strong-feeling nation
were centred. You remember her husband: he is a king at Brussels now. You
remember how, when she died, all England burst into a passionate lament;
how thousands went into voluntary mourning; how clergymen wept in the
pulpit, when they discoursed on her virtues; how an awful darkness and
despair seemed to overshadow the ill-governed land when the news came
that the Princess Charlotte was dead. There is little need to say that
her husband (who, I am glad to believe, loved her very truly and fondly)
was at first inconsolable for her loss, and grieved long and bitterly
for her. But time was good to him, and heaven merciful, and by degrees
his sorrow wore away. Still he was melancholy, pre-occupied, and loved
nothing so much as to be left alone. It was about this time that the
then landlord of the Belvidere began to notice that about eleven o’clock
almost every forenoon during the week a gentleman in deep mourning, and
on horseback, would stop at the door of the tavern, leave his horse in
charge of his groom, enter the large room, call for a pipe and a pint
of ale, and quietly enjoy those refreshments for about the space of one
hour. The room would be at that early hour of the day almost deserted.
The one or two tradesmen who would occasionally drop in for a crust of
bread and cheese, and a peep at the “Times,” would be bidden a civil
“good morning”—in a slightly foreign accent—by the stranger; but he
never entered into conversation; he never read the newspaper; he “kep
hisself to hisself,” the waiter said. But he was so punctual and so
regular in his attendance, that the people of the house came to look out
for his daily visit in his suit of sables, and a special pipe was laid,
a special dish of tobacco prepared, and a special chair and spittoon
arranged, every day for his use. So things went on for many weeks; till
one luckless morning, just after the departure of the black horseman, a
customer of the house—I believe he was a commercial traveller, who had
just returned from a journey in the west of England, and who had been
enjoying his pipe and pint in the society of the taciturn stranger—called
the landlord on one side.
“Do you know who that chap is?” he asked.
“Not a bit,” answered the host. “Comes here every morning regular. Pint
of mild sixpenny; bird’s-eye; gives the waiter twopence, and goes away.
Groom has a glass of ale sitting on his horse. Pays his way like a
gentleman.”
“He’s somebody,” said the commercial traveller, significantly.
“So I should think,” returned the landlord, quietly.
“He’s a high fellow,” added the bagman, mysteriously.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord, tranquilly.
“Why, bless your heart, man alive!” broke out, impatiently, his
interlocutor, “can’t you guess who he is? He’s Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg. I have seen his Royal Highness a hundred times, and know him
by sight as well as I do you.”
The next forenoon, when the sable horseman arrived, he found a roll of
crimson baize laid down from the pales before the tavern to the doorway,
which was lined by American aloes in tubs. The staircase was freshly
carpeted; in the stranger’s customary place was a table covered with a
crimson cloth, backed by a crimson chair with gilt legs. The landlady,
her daughter, and the barmaid, were all in holiday attire, and when the
unknown rang the bell, the landlord himself, in a blue coat and brass
buttons, and his hair newly powdered, brought him the beer in a silver
tankard, and a wax candle at which to light his pipe. The black horseman
said nothing, drank his ale, and smoked his tobacco, paid his reckoning,
made his way downstairs amidst a profusion of bows and curtsies, mounted
his horse, and—never came again. So runs the legend. The commercial
traveller may have been wrong in his assertion, or may have been hoaxing
the landlord; but I incline to the belief that this was really Prince
Leopold. Why not? The incident is trifling enough; yet there is something
touching in the picture of the good-natured young German brooding over
his bereavement, yet consoling himself in the simple German fashion, over
his pipe and beer.
* * * * *
Friend of mine, if you have the slightest hope or thought that whither
I am now taking thee is one of the gay and merry scenes of London
night-life, prithee dismiss the thought, for thou art in error. Prithee
pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as
possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thine eyes,
and assume a decorum, if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall.
Don’t be alarmed: this is not the month of May or the season for meetings
in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or the Oolalooloo
cannibals. We are not going to hear John B. Gough lecture on temperance.
We are going to hear an oratorio, conducted by Mr. Costa—an oratorio in
which Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. Weiss, Miss Dolby, and Madame Clara Novello,
are to sing—and to listen to a band and chorus brought to a degree of
perfection which only the genius of such a conductor could insure, or the
gigantic resources of the Sacred Harmonic Society command.
There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to
the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling
hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music,
have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English
people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately
enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. The
French can no more understand oratorios than they can understand blank
verse. I remember going to see Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” once in Paris. It
was winter time, and the performances took place in Franconi’s great,
windy, for-summer-built horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysées. The
band and chorus shivered as they scraped and sang; the _prima donna’s_
nose and lips were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand; the
_contralto_ looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a
page’s dress and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat
muffled up in shawls and furs—it was a morning performance—and whispered
among themselves; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled their
moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, _Quelle drôle de
musique_! They didn’t repeat that oratorio, and I don’t wonder at it.
To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither ecclesiastical nor
secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the chanting priests,
the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the red-cassocked altar
boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered canopies, and the swelling
pæans of the concealed choristers. If the last, let us have a drinking
chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger chorus, a _prima donna_ to make
her entrance on horseback, a _contralto_ in tights, a ballet in the
second act, and some red fire at the end. But this is neither mass nor
opera.
They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined middle
classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you
to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class
men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and citizens of the
world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of acquaintances
as cosmopolitan as ourselves; it is all very well for us, who see “no
harm” in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, while our wives
go to church; who support Sunday bands, Sunday steamboats, and Sunday
excursion trains, and are agitating now for the opening of museums,
and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath; who talk lightly on serious
topics, and call clergymen parsons; it is all very well, I say, for
us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the
“serious” world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness,
and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner
on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on
the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands—how many
millions—of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are
honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider
harmless recreations! who would shrink back in horror, if they heard
a tithe of the conversations that go on every night in hundreds of
well-conducted London drawing-rooms! who look upon dancing as an
irreligious and Babylonish pastime! whose only light reading consists
of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers,
and the beatified daughters of dairymen! I declare that I never see a
theatre in a country town—where, at least, two-thirds of the population
consist of such as I have described—without wondering at the lunacy of
the person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh
speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise the
Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the “Record”
or the “Wesleyan;” but it is folly to ignore the vast numerical strength
of these same Puritans. They purchase such books as “Memorials of Captain
Headly Vicars” by thousands; they subscribe thousands of pounds yearly
in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better
faith; they give away millions of tracts; they flood the platform and the
auditory of every public meeting. It won’t do to ignore them. Cromwell’s
Ironsides and Sir Harry Vane’s Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a
mark upon the people of England to be lightly passed over.
But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on
neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin
in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight
to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. “When
shall their glory fade” asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at
Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay?
Never—I hope.
A resident at Bethlehem Hospital—he wasn’t either a doctor or a
keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths
very frequently, and kept his head close shaved—once divided the world
into two classes: people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I,
too—but out of Bedlam, thank heaven!—have made a somewhat analogous
classification. I divide the world into people who have and have not
seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually seeing
ghosts. I shake hands in the street with friends who have been dead
these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night when
I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coming home
so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his head off,
who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his knees, sat
continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an unworthy
hallucination, and not a genuine ghost. I meet a good many ghosts
now—friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts—but chiefly do they favour me with
their company at places of public entertainment. It may be that I am a
bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that I am absent in mind,
and _distrait_; but so surely as I go to a theatre or concert, so surely
do I fall a conjuring up mind-pictures, till the theatre or the hall, and
its occupants, quite fade away, and I find myself in entirely different
company, talking to people who are mouldering in their graves, or who are
thousands of miles away.
And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and
decorous attention to the music, and bearing themselves far more like
a congregation than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the
magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast
mass of them join in the choruses; and when, at the first bar of the
sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hearers all _stand up_, the singers
in the orchestra seem to me like priests. In truth, I think that to
hear an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away
from those grand performances wiser and better men. There is a natural
disinclination to return—at least, immediately—to frivolous and trivial
pursuits, after listening to those solemn and ennobling strains. I know
that some exist upon whom music has no effect whatsoever; but I believe
that the vast majority of mankind are influenced for good or evil by
the sound of music. The most heartless woman in the world whom I know,
cries when she hears “Kathleen ma vourneen.” Napoleon could never listen
to “_Lascio ch’io piango la cruda sorte_,” without crossing himself.
How grandly does John Dryden set forth this theory in his immortal St.
Cecilian Ode! with what exquisite art has he shown us Alexander moved to
alternate joy, pride, shame, weeping, frenzy, as old Timotheus sweeps the
lyre in varied strains!
[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL.]
Now, in sober broughams and in hack-cabs—driven, I hope, by regenerated
cabmen, who give tickets before they are asked for them, and never charge
more than thirty per cent. above the legal fare—or haply, if the night be
fine, on foot, the serious audience, well cloaked and bonneted, leave the
hall. For half an hour afterwards, the Exeter Hall side of the Strand,
both east and west, is dotted with serious groups in search of the last
omnibus, or, perchance, boldly walking home. I wonder how many of the
serious ones know anything of the thoroughfare. They may traverse it at
noonday, or pass down it every morning for twenty years in omnibuses on
their way to the city; but do they know anything of the night aspect of
that most mysterious of London thoroughfares? It is better, perhaps, that
they should not.
Minute by minute they grow scarcer, and by ten minutes to eleven there
are no serious groups in the Strand. They are all gone home to supper—hot
ones, very probably, for the serious world is not at all unaddicted
to good living—and sober. I, too, have liberty to go and sup, if I so
choose; but not, alas! to bed. Still have I work to do, and for some
hours.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY.
It is Eleven o’Clock post meridian, and I am once more thrown, with my
clock on my hands, on the great world of London. The insatiable, restless
metropolis is as busy in the night as in the day season; there is no
respite, no cessation, in its feverish activity. One set or class of
mortals may, quite worn and worried out, cast themselves on beds more or
less hard, and sleep; but, forthwith, another section of the population
arise like giants refreshed—the last hour of the night to some is the
commencement, the opening day, to others; and an innumerable army of
conscripts are ready to relieve one another in mounting the guard of
London Life.
Eleven o’clock, and thousands are yet in the streets, tens of thousands
still in the pursuit of the avocations by which they earn their daily
(or nightly) bread, hundreds of thousands awake, busy, and stirring. The
children of the aristocracy and some sections of the middle classes are
gone to bed—save those who have been so good that their fond parents have
taken them to the play, which entertainment they are now enjoying, with
delightful prospects superadded of “sitting up” to supper, perchance of
oysters, afterwards. But the children of the poor do not dream of bed.
They are toddling in and out of chandlers’ shops in quest of ounces of
ham and fragments of Dutch cheese for father’s supper; they are carrying
the basket of linen—mother takes in washing—to the residences of clients;
they are eliminating the most savoury-looking bits of plaice or flounders
from the oleaginous pile in the fried-fish shop; they are fetching the
beer and the “clean pipe” from the public-house; nay—not unfrequently,
alas! assisted by a lean baby in arms—they are fetching father himself
home from the too-seductive establishment of the licensed victualler.
Eleven o’clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes;
then, by the steady and industrious mechanic, the final calumet is
smoked, the borrowed newspaper read, the topics of the day, the prospects
of the coming week, discussed with the cheery and hard-working helpmate
who sits by the side of her horny-handed lord, fills his pipe, pours out
his beer, and darns the little children’s hose.