After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound
depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading—I have already
used the word too often, but I must use it again—_dingy_ lives. They
seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing
shabby clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses,
going to and fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy,
slippery mud, under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything
for them but dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to
me that my mother’s little savings had been swallowed up and that my
own prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up
myself sooner or later by this dingy London ocean. The London that was
to be an adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had
vanished from my dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park
Lane and showing a frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt:
“I’m to ride in my carriage then. So he old says.”
My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was
intensely sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him—for it seemed
indisputable that as they were living then so they must go on—and at
the same time I was angry with the garrulous vanity and illness that
had elipped all my chance of independent study, and imprisoned her in
those grey apartments. When I got back to Wimblehurst I allowed myself
to write him a boyishly sarcastic and sincerely bitter letter. He never
replied. Then, believing it to be the only way of escape for me, I set
myself far more grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever
done before. After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he
answered me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my mind and
went on working.
Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly depression
of January had an immense effect upon me. It was for me an epoch-making
disappointment. I had thought of London as a large, free, welcoming,
adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly and harsh and irresponsive.
I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind those
grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding façade might
presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to over-estimate
the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement,
the discomfort of London could be due simply to the fact that London
was a witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep
herself clean and maintain a brave face to the word. No! I suffered
from the sort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth
century. I endued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent
quality of intention.
And my uncle’s gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a sort of
fear for him. He seemed to me a lost little creature, too silly to be
silent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was full of pity and a
sort of tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was doomed to follow his
erratic fortunes mocked by his grandiloquent promises.
I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grim
underside of London in my soul during all my last year at Wimblehurst.
BOOK THE SECOND
THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY
I
I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly
twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this book a
little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish speck of
frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the scene broadens out,
becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of the sense of vast
irrelevant movement. I do not remember my second coming to London as I
do my first, for my early impressions, save that an October memory of
softened amber sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on grey
house fronts I know not where. That, and a sense of a large
tranquillity.
I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary account of
how I came to apprehend London, how first in one aspect and then in
another it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions were
added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones;
they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and
accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of
London, complete indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some
way a whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed
and enriched.
London!
At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildings
and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember that I ever
struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a
personal and adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in
me a kind of theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered
structure out of which it has grown, detected a process that is
something more than a confusion of casual accidents though indeed it
may be no more than a process of disease.
I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover the
clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the clue to the
structure of London. There have been no revolutions no deliberate
restatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of
the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover
was built; there have been changes, dissolving forest replacing forest,
if you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system
set firmly. And as I have gone to and fro in London in certain regions
constantly the thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, this
answers to Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone; they have
indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them,
financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is
still Bladesover.
I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions round
about the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each more or less
in relation to a palace or group of great houses. The roads and back
ways of Mayfair and all about St. James’s again, albeit perhaps of a
later growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and
architectural texture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had
the same smells, the space, the large cleanest and always going to and
fro where one met unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable
valets, butlers, footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to
glimpse down areas the white panelling, the very chintz of my mother’s
room again.
I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House
region; passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused and
sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about
Regent’s Park. The Duke of Devonshire’s place in Piccadilly, in all its
insolent ugliness, pleases me particularly; it is the quintessence of
the thing; Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane
has its quite typical mansions, and they run along the border of the
Green Park and St. James’s. And I struck out a truth one day in
Cromwell Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History
Museum “By Jove,” said I “but this is the little assemblage of cases of
stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous,
and yonder as the corresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and
porcelain is the Art Museume and there in the little observatories in
Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert’s Gregorian telescope that I hunted
out in the storeroom and put together.” And diving into the Art Museum
under this inspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I
had inferred, old brown books!
It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did that
day; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over London
between Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and
library movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure
of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first
houses of culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I
became, as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of
letters as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of the Great
House altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.
It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system
of Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the
Estates, that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply
of London, but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence
landed gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown.
The proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent
Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had
been but lightly touched by the American’s profaning hand—and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor’s house of the country village or
country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise
different, and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward
in the abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and
down in Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices
sheltered in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James’s
Park. The Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament
house that was horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into
it a hundred years ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole
system together into a head.
And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastry
model, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not the
same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind
forces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side of
London have been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station
from Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but
from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupid
rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head that came
smashing down in 1905—clean across the river, between Somerset House
and Whitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory
chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly
not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of
all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London
port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly
expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean
clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central
London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the
northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets
of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families,
second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase
do not “exist.” All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times,
do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some
tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines
of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble
comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask
myself will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape
into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and
ultimate diagnosis?...
Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration of
elements that have never understood and never will understand the great
tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the heart of this
yeasty English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward out of
pure curiosity—it must have been in my early student days—and
discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew
placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of
bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish
between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar
with the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found
those crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of
Brompton where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got
my first inkling of the factor of replacement that is so important in
both the English and the American process.
Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewart
was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity was
fairer than its substance; here were actors and actresses, here money
lenders and Jews, here bold financial adventurers, and I thought of my
uncle’s frayed cuff as he pointed out this house in Park Lane and that.
That was so and so’s who made a corner in borax, and that palace
belonged to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used
to be an I.D.B.,—an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of
Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken
and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously
replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and with a
ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of this
daedal earth complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing
insatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the world into
which I had come, into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit
my problem, my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my
moral instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity.
London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather priggish,
rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and with
something—it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I
claim it unblushingly—fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine
responses. I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily or
well; I wanted to serve and do and make—with some nobility. It was in
me. It is in half the youth of the world.