piece is “on.” Convivial clubs are in full action, and the waiters at the
supper-rooms, very tumbled and drowsy during the day, put on their most
highly-starched neckcloths, and begin to rub their eyes, in preparation
for the labours of the night. The linen-drapers’ shopmen, who have
been strolling about Regent Street and Oxford Street since the shops
closed at nine, and who “live on the premises,” begin to turn in; the
proprietors tolerate no gadding about after eleven, and persistence in
keeping bad hours to the extent of hearing the chimes at midnight, out of
doors, would entail reprimand, and perhaps expulsion, on the offender.
At eleven o’clock close the majority of the coffee, chop houses, and
reading-rooms. There are some that will remain open all night; but they
are not of the most reputable description. At eleven the cheap grocer,
the cheesemonger, and the linen-draper, in low-priced neighbourhoods,
begin to think of putting up the shutters; and, by half-past eleven, the
only symposia of merchandise open will be the taverns and cigar-shops,
the supper-rooms and shell-fish warehouses, the night coffee-houses, and
the chemists—which last shops, indeed, never seem to be quite open, or
quite closed, at all, and may be said to sleep with one eye open.
Eleven o’clock at the West-end is, morally speaking, broad day-light.
Midnight will be high noon. Fashionable life’s current riots through the
veins of West-end streets; mirth, and gaiety, and intrigue, are heard on
staircases and at street corners. And pre-eminently wide awake, busy,
active, and restless just now is the great and mysterious country of
Bohemia, both Upper and Lower. You are beginning to hear of Bohemia, oh,
reflective reader! and of its shady denizens. Recondite, half-reluctant
allusions are made to it in solemn reviews and portentous magazines. An
arch-Bohemian proposed the other day to write a novel concerning the
present condition of his country. The book actually appeared, but its
author stumbled on the threshold of his own subject. Either he dared not
say that which he knew, or he had over-estimated his knowledge of things
Bohemian: and he drew, not the real country, but an impalpable region
full of monsters. But his was no easy task. After all, who shall say, who
can tell, where Bohemia really is, and who really are Bohemians? They
are secretly affiliated, and to each other known, like freemasons, like
the Illuminati and Brethren of the Rosy Cross of the last century, like
Balzac’s “Treize;” but the outside world knows them not, and oft-times
mistakes for a Bohemian a vile Illyrian, a contemptible Styrian, a
worthless Croat, or a base Bezonian. Is there a king of Bohemia? or is
it an oligarchy, a theocracy, or a red republic? How does a man become
a Bohemian, and can he ever renounce his allegiance to the “friends of
Bohemia,” and become an ordinary citizen of the world? Yet Bohemianism is
ubiquitous. The initiated ones are everywhere. In the House of Commons,
at this very moment, a free and accepted Bohemian is pounding away at
the ministry, and a past grand-master of Bohemianism is descending the
steps of the Carlton. A Bohemian is dancing the Schottische in Westbourne
Terrace, and his brother is passing underneath Temple Bar, in a cab and
in custody, on his way to Mr. Slowman’s caravanserai in Cursitor Street.
There is a Bohemian, in white kid gloves and a white cravat, sitting
in his opera-stall, and he whispers to his companion to order a Welsh
rabbit and a pint of half-and-half for him at the Club. Some Bohemians
are drinking claret at the Wellington, and others are sleeping among
the vegetable baskets under the tarpaulins in Covent Garden Market.
Bohemian No. one has just won a hundred pounds at _écarté_. Bohemian
No. two has just pawned his great-coat. A Bohemian has just gone home
to read Plato, and take a basin of arrow-root for supper. Another has
let himself out with his latch-key, and is on his way to the Haymarket.
Oh, marvellous land! Oh, people yet more marvellous! Despised, derided,
abused by men, ye are yet a power in the state. Bootmakers combine
against ye; but you can turn out governments. Clerks of county courts
issue judgment summonses against ye; but you dine at princes’ tables.
Lands you have not, nor jewels, nor raiment, nor fine linen, nor pieces
of gold, nor pieces of silver; still do ye travel first-class express;
still do you clamour for green fat at mighty banquets, and turn up your
Bohemian noses if the venison be not hung to your liking; still do you
pride yourselves upon being good judges of Rhine wine and Habana cigars.
A peculiar race! And the most astonishing thing about the Bohemian is
this: that he does not—as the non-Bohemian charitably supposes and
reports—die in an hospital, to be saved from dissection, and humbly
buried, only by a subscription among his Bohemian associates. If he be an
ass and a profligate, he goes to the bad, and serve him right; but the
Bohemian, dying, frequently leaves a great deal more money behind him
than yonder starched man of business, who professed to regard him, during
his lifetime, with a shuddering, pitying horror. The Bohemian, brought,
as it would seem, to the lowest and forlornest state of impecuniosity
and discredit, suddenly starts up as Attorney-General of Yellow-Jack
Island with twelve hundred a year, as Judge-Advocate of the Meridional
Quashiboos, or Consul-General to the Tontine Republic.
While thus discoursing to you on things in general, I have been keeping a
sharp look-out for the most notable things that are to be seen in London
at eleven p.m. But as we shall have to sit up very late to-night—or
rather early to-morrow morning—I think it right that we should pass
the time till midnight in a quiet and decorous manner. Not but that we
have been exceedingly well-behaved ever since the commencement of our
peripatetics; but life is life, and one can scarcely go twice round the
clock in London without some moral and physical wear and tear. Suppose we
drop in at a Conversazione.
This (more or less) social _réunion_ is an institution of purely modern
invention. It is the latest device of the fantastically despotic
organisation we call “society,” with the exception of _the dansante_,
or dancing tea. It might be alleged, but the allegation would be open
to the imputation of hypercriticism, that the first conversazione on
English record was the meeting of the Royal Society at which King Charles
II. propounded the famous problem of the live fish in the pail of water:
and another semblance of a conversazione might be found in the assemblage
of antiquaries at the christening of Martinus Scriblerus. But the real
conversazione is quite another affair, and wholly modern. It is not much
more than twenty years old, its establishment following close on the
heels of the fashionable “rout,” which again succeeded the “assemblies”
of our grandmothers and the “drums” of our great-grandmothers. The
modern conversazione means a room or a suite of rooms thrown open for
the reception of a miscellaneous mob of fashionables or of celebrities,
foreign and native, political, literary, scientific, or artistic. It
is a vast menagerie, a “happy family” on a monster scale, a Noah’s ark
upon dry ground, and the birds, beasts, and fishes crowd and elbow
each other, and roar, or yell, or howl, or bark, or low, or grunt,
or squeak, or crow, or whistle, or scream, or pipe, to the infinite
delectation of the host and hostess. The only sounds proper to the
animal or ornithological kingdom are those which might be supposed to
be produced by billing and cooing; for the guests are not—or do not in
general look—very good-tempered, and a favourite manner of passing the
time at a conversazione is to scowl at your neighbour, and wonder who
the deuce he is. But one of the chief advantages connected with these
bringings-together of celebrities, lies in the moderate sum for which the
thing can be done. The conversazione is eminently cheap. They don’t give
these lions any shinbones of beef; tea, coffee, macaroons, and, at very
hospitable houses, sandwiches and wishy-washy negus, are all that you can
reckon upon in the way of refreshment at a conversazione.
Of late days, conversaziones, which were ordinarily given by private
persons—the Mrs. Leo Hunters of the _beau monde_—have been held by
societies literary and learned, nay, even by commercial and financial
companies. I remember myself receiving on one occasion an invite
to a “conversazione” at which the novel principles of a new life
assurance company, and the immense advantages offered to shareholders,
assurers, and annuitants, were to be fully developed and explained. The
conversazione was held at the bran-new offices of the company, smelling
very strongly of recent varnish, putty, and French polish, and of calf
ledgers and day-books yet innocent of entries. There were plenty of
ladies in evening dress, and plenty of gentlemen in white waistcoats,
and flirtation and gallantry were oddly mixed up with the Northampton
Tables and the Institute of Actuaries. We had a neat lecture by a stout
gentleman, in a blue coat buttoned up to the chin, upon the inestimable
blessings of life assurance. Tea and coffee were handed round in the
intervals of his discourse upon bonuses, paid-up capital, and the
purchase of reversions; and an immense sensation was created at the
termination of the lecture by the recitation, on the part of the orator,
of a neat little copy of verses, of which the commencing stanzas, so far
as my recollection will serve me, ran somewhat thus:—
“When dear papa went up to heaven,
What grief mamma endured!
And yet that grief was softened, for
Papa he was assured.
“He never lodged his policy,
He left it to mamma;
The office paid most cheerfully,
How happy now we are!”
This touching effusion was received with great waving of handkerchiefs,
and some sobs, indeed, on the part of the ladies, and I have no doubt
that many of those fair ones on returning home did that night incite,
command, and compel their liege lords and masters forthwith to assure
their lives in the “Amiable and General Fire and Life Assurance Company”
(with which are incorporated the “Good-natured and Law Life,” the
“Equitable and Jocular Fire,” and the “Compassionate and Confidential
Deposit and Loan Association”). The friendly meeting of the “Amiable
and General” was distinguished above other conversaziones by the fact,
that when the ladies had taken their departure, a capital cold supper,
and abundant libations of champagne, were provided for the directors
and their friends, at which repast, which lasted to a very advanced
hour, everybody drank everybody else’s health with all the honours, and
everybody was made a preferential shareholder. I know that I was; though
I am not quite aware at the present moment of the exact locality of the
“Amiable and General’s” offices, or, indeed, whether that most promising
company is still in existence.
The strange conversaziones a man may from time to time visit! I have
been to one at the Hanover Square Rooms given by the confraternity of
dentists. Slim gentlemen of Carker-like dental developement held forth
on the transcendant merit of the art of pulling out people’s teeth, and
fiercely denounced the quacks and impostors who ignorantly tampered with
the jaws of her Majesty’s subjects; the room itself was hung round with
the most hideous coloured cartoons, representative of diverse phases of
dental surgery, and I came away haunted by visions of pink beeswax, thin
gold plates, morocco easy chairs, springs, _dents osanores_, artificial
gums, and those dreadfully clean hands, the wrists garnished by
wristbands as clean, which seem to be the exclusive property of dentists.
I congratulated myself, too, on my departure, on the fact that no visitor
to the conversazione had, for the pure love of art, pulled out one of
my few remaining teeth, just as, after dining with a schoolmaster, I
felicitate myself for having escaped a caning. There is something in the
whiteness of a dentist’s hand, and in the twinkling of a schoolmaster’s
gray eye, that would make me tremble were I Lord Chancellor of Great
Britain.
But the oddest conversazione I ever attended was not in this country,
but in a foreign land. It was in Paris—and I am speaking seriously—a
conversazione of _coiffeurs_, of barbers, hair-dressers, and wig-makers.
I declare that I have seldom passed a more agreeable evening in my
life. Everything was conducted on the most intensely genteel footing,
and everybody was ceremoniously polite; although I must be candid
in admitting that a decided odour of pomatum and freshly-frizzled
curls pervaded the _salon_, which was, indeed, the upstairs room of a
_restaurant_ at Montmartre. There were ladies present, too; and after
some pleasant little discourse, all tending to the glorification of
hair-dressing, an eminent professor of the philocomal art there present
proceeded to a series of practical and illustrative experiments on
the heads of some of the young ladies, in order to show the different
styles of dressing and arranging the head which had prevailed from
the time of François, _premier jusqu’ à nos jours_, to our own days.
The ladies submitted with charming equanimity to the operation, and
the experimentalist was enabled to submit to public inspection and
admiration a full-blown Ninon d’Enclos, a Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
a Duchesse de Longueville, a Madame de Maintenon, together with several
Du Barris, De la Vallières, Pompadours, Madame Talliens, Mademoiselle
Mars, Charlotte Cordays, and Théroigne de Méricourts. At the conclusion
of the experiments, there was a grand procession of the ladies variously
_coiffées_ round the room, followed by the triumphant hair-dressers,
waving their tongs and combs, and redolent of puff-powder; then we had
_orgeat_ and _anisette_; and then I went and supped in the _restaurant_
downstairs with one of the hair-dressers, who went me halves in a bottle
of Beaune, and swore eternal friendship to me over a _Mayonnaise de
homard_.
But to return to the conversazione world of London. Suppose we take
a literary one to begin with: say one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s Thursdays.
Mrs. Van Umbug lives at that classically severe mansion, the “Arena.
Gladiator’s Crescent, Nero Square.” Mr. Van Umbug is a member of
Parliament, and sits on the Liberal side of the House, but nobody takes
much notice of him, and he is usually alluded to as Mrs. Van Umbug’s
husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent mews whose horses are
those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, he will probably answer,
“Mrs. Van Umbug’s.” The servants in the house in Gladiator Street, talk
continually of “Missus” (who makes her presence not only seen but felt),
but scarcely ever mention “Master.” The tradespeople usually send in
their bills to Mrs. Van Umbug; and it is certain that it is that lady
who issues the invitations and receives the company at her Thursday
conversaziones. Mr. Van Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those
gatherings, and when he is, rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and
subdued manner. He sneaks in and out as if the house didn’t belong to
him (which, indeed, it does not), and appears desperately afraid of the
portly man in black with the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea
and coffee.
Mrs. Van Umbug’s mansion is supposed to be furnished in the highest style
of taste and virtu. Hers is quoted as an abode of all that is elegant,
_recherché_, and _distingué_. What are taste and virtu, I wonder?
what makes things elegant, _distingué_, and _recherché_? Do chairs
that you can’t sit down upon, and spindled-shanked tables, tottering
beneath the weight of gaudily-bound books, containing specimens of
chromo-lithography? do a sham pre-Raphaelite picture or two, in which a
long-legged swain is courting a lady with yellow hair and a striped dress
falling in unnatural folds, under the lee of a marvellously-executed
waterbutt—a curiously-manipulated mangold-wurzel, and a minutely
finished frying-pan occupying the foreground? do scraps of armour and
oak-carvings, supposed to be ancient, but in reality manufactured the
week before last in Wardour Street? do odds and ends, and Chinese
monsters in porcelain, and a Louis Quinze clock, and the model of a Swiss
châlet in box-wood, and an imitation grotto and aquarium in an ante-room?
I suppose these things do.
This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug’s is a great literary one.
The lions of literature are present in the flesh. Here is the
distinguished Snortup, author of “The Common Objects of the Back-yard,”
“Geology in Joke,” “Trigonometry Judged by Taxation,” “The Extinct
Animals of Eel-pie Island,” and other erudite and ponderous scientific
works. Snortup, who is a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of
Schinckelbrauen, is a heavy man, with a black wig and a huge black satin
stock, in which gleams a cameo bearing a curious resemblance to an
oyster. He snuffs a great deal, and when he speaks he does not belie his
name, but literally snorts. Near him is young Twiddles, with his auburn
hair, his turn-down collar, and Byron tie, his speckled silk stockings
and low shoes, his baby face and falsetto voice. Twiddles, who writes
under the pseudonym of Swedenborg Scanderberg, has just published a
volume of poems of the ultra-spasmodic order. In passages replete with
burning eloquence, he has spoken of the “moonbeam’s frosty rime, that
hoars the head of nature, and makes last summer’s sapling patriarchal
white.” His grand passage in “Ladye Babbynetta,” in which he alludes to
“the hot and rabid ice, that burns and sears by force of congelation,”
has been enthusiastically spoken of by Sidney Muffins, editor of the
“Tomfool” (with which is incorporated the “Pinchbeck News”) weekly
journal. Muffins is not a poet yet, but he hopes to be one when his
whiskers grow and he has read “Cassel’s Popular Educator.” Meanwhile, he
swears by Twiddles, and fiercely abuses, in print and in person, those
who can’t avoid the conviction that Twiddles is a donkey.
Do you see that man with the enormous red beard, the black velvet cuffs,
collars, and facings to his coat, and the fez cap? That is O’Roarer.
O’Roarer is a special correspondent to the “Howl” daily newspaper.
O’Roarer went to the Crimea for the “Howl,” during the war; he quarrelled
with a major in a marching regiment, and challenged him to mortal
combat. The general commanding the division was compelled to request
O’Roarer to select some other locality for his hut, and terrific were
the criticisms upon that divisional general’s military conduct, which
subsequently appeared in the “Howl.” Little Eggles, who was a clerk in
the Commissariat Department, who hates O’Roarer, declares that he was
found in Balaclava once returning from a carouse on board ship, and
_Bacchi plenus_, that he was taken to the main-guard, and in the morning,
notwithstanding his protestations that it was “all a mistake,” and his
assertions of his “responsible position,” he received the customary
hospitality of the main-guard, namely, two dozen lashes. Eggles adds,
with a knowing wink, that the provost-marshal was not General ——’s nephew
for nothing.
Besides Mr. O’Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the
Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental
traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simperkin
fearfully, is Leathers, the author of “A Jaunt to Jericho” and “Seven
Years in a Penal Settlement.” Leathers wears a huge cut-velvet waistcoat,
that looks like a fragment from some tapestried window-curtain. He is
not at all clever, is Leathers—has no humour, observation, or power of
description; but he has got a name among the book-selling trade, somehow,
as a “good travelling hand”—a safe man for two volumes royal octavo
with plates and a map—and so soon does any foreign country, from Canton
to British Columbia, begin, from political or other causes, to attract
public attention, so soon is Leathers commissioned to write his two
bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill-natured people say that he keeps
particulars relative to geography pigeon-holed in his library, and that
he never went further than Boulogne, in the days of the five-shilling
fares; but Leathers gets his price, and can afford to laugh at the
evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, of Bumpus Street, will have
Leathers’s portrait in the next edition of “Rambles in the Island of
Perim.”
I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent
regarding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with
their presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over
the charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of “Crackings of
the Heartstrings,” “Shudderings of the Soul,” “Crinklings of the
Spirit-skin,” “Eyeball Darts,” and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Withers
once kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She
attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the
downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, and
is the writer of “Lives of the Wet Nurses of the Princesses of England,”
“Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women,” and “The Silversticks in
Waiting before the Conquest”—all works replete with critical acumen,
and brimful of historical lore, though following a little too closely
in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and genuine
History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, however, has
done very well for her publishers and for herself. She is one of those
authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a line they had
written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a happy mental
cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine-tenths of their
works should never have been written at all. You may see Miss Withers
any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigorously compiling away
at the desk marked “for ladies only.” She has piles of books around
her; she makes the attendants’ lives a torment to them with the flying
squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar; she walks about
the india-rubber flooring with one pen behind her ear and another in
her mouth. She, being tall, bony, severe of aspect, and much given to
snuff-taking, is generally feared by the Museum frequenters. She wrenches
volumes of the catalogue from mild young clergymen in spectacles and
M. B. waistcoats. She follows line after line of the printed page with
her heavy inkstained forefinger. Once Dedman the pedigree-hunter, who
was filling up his ticket opposite Miss Withers, was venturous enough
to ask her the day of the month. She called him, in a hollow voice,
“fellow,” on the spot, snuffed indignantly, and afterwards spoke of him
to the attendant with the red moustache as an “impertinent jackanapes.”
The only person with whom she condescends to be conversational in the
reading-room, is Eglintoun Beaverup, the famous novelist, satirist, poet,
traveller, Quarterly Reviewer, essayist, epigrammatist and politician,
who stood for the Macbeth district of burghs last general election, and
proved in an article in the “Rampant Magazine,” that the present Duke of
Sennacherib’s grandfather was a pork butcher in Liquorpond Street, and
that Sir Ranulph De Brie’s papa (who was a pawnbroker) owed his baronetcy
to a loan of ten thousand pounds, advanced by him to the Prince Regent
on the security of a pinchbeck watch, which that improvident scion of
royalty, having no other available pawnable property, had borrowed for
the nonce from one of the helpers in his stable. Beaverup is himself
descended from Brian de Bois Guilbert on the father’s side, and from the
original Thane of Cawdor, who slew Duncan, on that of the mother. Miss
Withers will sometimes exchange deadly whispers with him relative to the
mushroom characteristics of our modern peerage, and the departed glories
of soccage and villeinage, infang theof and outfang theof.