purveyed by St. Ursula's and Hyde Park. I said at the outset that the
Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother have their own methods
and places of devotion--their Mecca is St. Paul's Cathedral. One of
the pleasantest ways of spending a Sunday evening in London is to join
the pilgrim-throng. The great west doors of the Cathedral are flung
wide open, as if to welcome the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord
Mayor, and all at once we find ourselves, hushed and awestruck, in
the illimitable perspective. Even the staunchest believer in Gothic
as the only religious architecture may admit, with disloyalty to
his faith, that every year St. Paul's becomes more like a place of
Christian worship and less like a glorified Council-hall or an Imperial
Senate-house. And it is seen at its best in twilight. The shadows
temper the garish splendour of mosaic and gold and electricity, and
enhance the dominant sense of vastness and grandeur. And prayer ascends
on the wings of music and sweet boy-voices ring, and the distant
altar, with its gleaming lights, focuses the meaning and purpose of
the whole. And then the great "Communion of Hymns" unites us all,
American and English, Londoner and countryman, as citizens of a city
not built with hands, patriots of a country which is not marked on the
terrestrial globe. Bernard of Cluny and William Cowper and John Keble
all contribute of their best. "Brief life is here our portion" seems to
utter the real heart's desire of a tired-looking mechanic who stands by
my side. "Hark, my soul!" seems to communicate its own intensity to the
very tone and look of the people who are singing it. "Sun of my soul"
is an evening prayer which sounds just as natural and as fitting in the
inmost heart of London's crowd and grind and pressure as in the sweet
solitude of the Hursley fields. In the pulpit a pale preacher, himself
half worn-out before his prime by ten years' battle in a slum, is
extolling the Cross as the test and strength and glory of human life--
"While at his feet the human ocean lay,
And wave on wave rolled into space away."
A human stream indeed, of all sorts and conditions--old men and
maidens, young men and children, rich and poor, English and foreigners,
sightseers and citizens, dapper clerks and toil-stained citizens
and red-coated soldiers--all interested, and all at ease, and all
at home at what Bishop Lightfoot called "the centre of the world's
concourse"--under the cross-crowned Dome of St. Paul's.
XIX
A SUBURBAN SUNDAY
"It seems to the writer of this history that the inhabitants of London
are scarcely sufficiently sensible of the beauty of its environs....
With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world
that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself,
though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this
respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he
does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of
Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of
Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air of graceful
Richmond. In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to
free himself from all the tumult of the world and find himself in a
sublime sylvan solitude superior to the Cedars of Lebanon and inferior
only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia."
The judicious critic will have little difficulty in assigning this
vivid passage to the too-graphic pen of Lord Beaconsfield; but he
will also recognize the fact that a description written in 1837
needs some modification when applied to 1906. The central solitude of
London--Kensington Gardens--is still very much as it was. Just now, its
dark foliage and dusky glades suggest all the romantic associations
of Gustave Doré's forests, with a tall trooper of the Life Guards
and a bashful nursery-maid, for a Red Cross Knight and an Enchanted
Princess. If we go further afield and climb the uplands of Highgate
and Hampstead, we look down upon a boundless and beautiful city dimly
visible through a golden haze. But the difference between the environs
of London now and the same environs when Lord Beaconsfield described
them is that they are now united to the centre by an unbroken network
of gaslit streets. The enormous increase in the population of London,
which every year brings with it, fills up the gaps and spaces, and
the metropolis is now a solid whole, with its circumference extending
further and further every day into what a year ago was country. In
other words, the suburbs are getting further off, and what are suburbs
to-day will be town to-morrow; but still there are suburbs, and a
Sunday spent in them is an interesting experience.
Yesterday the well-known stuffiness of St. Ursula's, combined with the
kind hospitality of some suburban friends, drove me to spend my Sunday
about ten miles from Stucco Square. It is a characteristic of people
who live in suburbs to believe that their lot is cast in a primæval
solitude, and that, though the Dome of St. Paul's is plainly visible
from their back gardens, the traveller who ventures to approach them
needs explicit and intricate directions about routes and trains and
changes and stations. The station for my friend's place was called by
a name intensely suggestive of rurality--not exactly "Rosebank," but
Rosebank will serve. Readers of Archbishop Temple's Life will remember
that a clergyman, excusing himself for living a long way from his
church, urged that it was only three miles as the crow flies, thereby
drawing down on himself the implacable reply, "But you ain't a crow."
In the same way I found that, though Rosebank is only ten miles from
Stucco Square "as the crow flies," a human being seeking to approach it
must first make a considerable journey to a central terminus, must then
embark in a train which a tortoise might outstrip, must change twice,
and must burrow through a sulphurous tunnel; and must even then run a
considerable risk of being carried through Rosebank Station, which all
self-respecting trains seem to ignore.
Faced by these difficulties, I again took counsel with Lord
Beaconsfield. "''Tis the gondola of London,' exclaimed Lothair,
as he leapt into a hansom, which he had previously observed to be
well-horsed." My Gondolier was ready with his terms--a very liberal
payment, several hours' rest, his dinner and tea, and something extra
for putting up his horse. Granted these preliminaries, he would "do
the job on 'is 'ead." It would "be a little 'oliday to 'im." I in vain
suggested that the opportunity of attending Divine Service twice at
Rosebank Church might be regarded as part payment of his charge; he
replied, with startling emphasis, that he didn't go into the country
to go to church--not if he knew it; that, if I wanted him, I must take
him on the terms proposed; and, further, that I mustn't mind starting
early, for he wanted to get his horse down cool.
The Gondolier had his own way; and, while the sparrows were still
twittering and the housemaids were taking in the milk and the Sunday
paper, I was well on my road to Rosebank. This much I will concede
to the curiosity of readers--that my road led me out of London in a
south-easterly direction, by the Horseferry, where James II. dropped
the Great Seal into the Thames, along the Old Kent Road, of which a
modern minstrel sang; past Kennington Common, now a "Park," where the
gallant Jacobites of '45 underwent the hideous doom of Treason, where
the iron-shuttered windows still commemorate the Chartist rising of
'48, and where Sackville Maine took his Sunday walk with Mrs. Sackville
and old Mrs. Chuff. On past the "Hamlet of Dulwich," where Mr. Pickwick
spent the last years of his honoured life, to Chislehurst, where
Napoleon III. hid his exiled head, and North Cray, where the tragedy
of Lord Londonderry's death is not yet forgotten, and Shooters' Hill,
where Jerry Cruncher stopped the coach with the terrifying message
of "Recalled to Life." Now, as readers are sometimes unduly literal,
and as I would not willingly involve any one in an hour's fruitless
puzzling over a map, let me say that this itinerary is rather general
than particular, and that, although the Gondolier pursued an extremely
devious course and murmured when I suggested straighter paths, we
did not touch all the above-mentioned places in our morning's drive.
But evermore we tended south-eastwards, and evermore the houses grew
imperceptibly less dignified. Stone and stucco we had left behind us on
the northern side of the river, and now it was a boundless contiguity
of brick--yellow brick, rather grimy,--small houses with porticos,
slips of dusty garden between the front door and the road, and here
and there a row of wayside trees. But everywhere gas, and everywhere
_omnibi_ (as the classical lady said,) and everywhere electric trams.
Churches of every confession and every architecture lined the way,
varied with Public-houses of many signs, Municipal Buildings of
startling splendour (for Borough Councils have a flamboyant taste),
and Swimming Baths and Public Libraries, and here and there a private
Lunatic Asylum frowning behind suggestively solemn gates.
Now we are in a long and featureless street, with semi-detached houses
on either hand, and a malodorous cab-stand and a four-faced clock.
"Which way for Rosebank?" shouts the Gondolier. "The first to your left
and then turn sharp to the right," bellows a responsive policeman. We
follow the direction given, and suddenly we are there--not at Rosebank,
but quite out of even Greater London. The street ends abruptly. Trams
and trains and gas and shops are left behind, and all at once we are in
the country. The road is lined with hedgerows, dusty indeed, but still
alive. Elms of respectable dimensions look down upon big fields, with
here and there an oak, and cows resting under it. At one turn of the
road there is a recognizable odour of late-cut hay, and in the middle
distance I distinctly perceive a turnip-field, out of which a covey of
partridges might rise without surprising any one. We pull up and gaze
around. Look where I will, I cannot see a house, nor even a cottage.
Surely my friends have not played a practical joke on me and asked me
to spend a day in an imaginary Paradise. The Gondolier looks at his
perspiring horse, and mops his own brow, and gazes contemptuously on
the landscape. "I should call this the world's end if I was arst," he
says. "Blow'd if they've even got a Public 'Ouse." Suddenly the sound
of a shrill bell bursts on the ear. The Gondolier, who is a humorist,
says "Muffins."
I jump out of the gondola, and pursue the welcome tinkle round a sharp
angle in the road. There I see, perched on the brow of a sandy knoll,
a small tin building, which a belfry and a cross proclaim to be a
church. Inside I discover the Oldest Inhabitant pulling the muffin-bell
with cheerful assiduity. He is more than ready to talk, and his whole
discourse is as countrified as if he lived a hundred miles from Charing
Cross. "Yes, this is a main lonely place. There ain't many people lives
about 'ere. Why, ten years ago it was all fields. Now there are some
houses--not many. He lives in one himself. How far off? Well, a matter
of a mile or so. He was born on the Squire's land; his father worked
on the farm. Yes, he's lived here all his life. Remembers it before
there was a Crystal Palace, and when there was no railways or nothing.
He hasn't often been in the train, and has only been up to London two
or three times. Who goes to the church? Well--not many, except the
Squire's family and the school-children. Why was it built? Oh, the
Squire wants to get some rich folks to live round about. He's ready
to part with his land for building; and there's going to be a row of
houses built just in front of the church. He reckons the people will be
more likely to come now that there's a church for them to go to." And
now the "ten-minutes" bell begins with livelier measure; the Oldest
Inhabitant shows me to a seat; and, on the stroke of eleven, a shrill
"Amen" is heard in the vestry, and there enters a modest procession of
surpliced schoolboys and a clergyman in a green stole. His sons and
daughters, the wife of the Oldest Inhabitant, and the sisters of the
choristers, from the congregation, eked out by myself and my friends
from Rosebank, who arrive a little flushed and complain that they have
been waiting for me. The "service is fully choral," as they say in
accounts of fashionable weddings; the clergyman preaches against the
Education Bill, and a collection (of copper) is made to defray the
expenses of a meeting at the Albert Hall. It is pleasant to see that,
even in these secluded districts, the watch-dogs of the Church are on
the alert.
XX
WINE AND WATER
The second and third words are added to the title in deference to the
weather. One must be a hardened toper if, with the thermometer at 93
in the shade, one can find comfort in the thought of undiluted wine.
Rather I would take pattern from Thackeray's friend the Bishop, with
his "rounded episcopal apron." "He put water into his wine. Let us
respect the moderation of the Established Church." But water is an
after-thought, incidental and ephemeral. It was on wine that I was
meditating when the mercury rushed up and put more temperate thoughts
into my head, and it was Sir Victor Horsley who set me on thinking
about wine. Sir Victor has been discoursing at Ontario about the
mischiefs of Alcohol, and the perennial controversy has revived in all
its accustomed vigour. Once every five years some leading light of
the medical profession declares with much solemnity that Alcohol is
a poison, that Wine is the foundation of death, and that Gingerbeer
or Toast-and-Water or Zoedone or Kopps or some kindred potion is the
true and the sole elixir of life. Sir Oracle always chooses August or
September for the delivery of his dogma, and immediately there ensues
a correspondence which suitably replaces "Ought Women to Propose?" "Do
We Believe?" and "What is Wrong?" Enthusiastic teetotallers fill the
columns of the press with letters which in their dimensions rival the
Enormous Gooseberry and in their demands on our credulity exceed the
Sea Serpent. To these reply the advocates of Alcohol, with statistical
accounts of patriarchs who always breakfasted on half-and-half, and
near and dear relations who were rescued from the jaws of death by a
timely exhibition of gin and bitters. And so the game goes merrily on
till October recalls us to common sense.
Thus far, the gem of this autumn's correspondence is, I think, the
following instance contributed by an opponent of Sir Victor Horsley:--
"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera.
His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done
for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him
to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including
his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by
assuming a cheerful demeanour, remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must
go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get
you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop
of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.'
With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story."
Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing
quite so rich as that--unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal
rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871,
it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of
typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons,
reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed
ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that
the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops,
I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some
of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was
reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water
if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold
weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by
hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It
was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet
turned eighty, at any rate we were not cut off untimely nor hurried
into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system
produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that
"our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops
under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret,
according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of
port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the
last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table
meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of
it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was
made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not
suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew
Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted,
for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a
black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank
port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who,
as his kinsfolk said, got up to par--or, in other words, completed
his hundred years,--had drunk a bottle of port every day since he
came to man's estate. Dr. Charles Sumner, the last Prince-Bishop of
Winchester, so comely and benign that he was called "The Beauty of
Holiness," lent ecclesiastical sanction to the same tradition by not
only drinking port himself but distributing it with gracious generosity
to impoverished clergy. But, if I were to sing all the praises of port,
I should have no room for other wines.
Sherry--but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to
talk about sherry;[7] so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that
particular wine, but gaze and pass on--only remarking, as I pass,
that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that
this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the
professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the
sweet poison of misusèd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore
the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong
convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate
listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath,
and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that
good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many
who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they
would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at
dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little
wine I drink I drink at dinner,--but the great deal of wine I drink I
drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King
killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for
some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it
at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened
with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late
Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the
chair at public dinners that his friends called him Pére La Chaise)
once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was
always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it
was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines
of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the
conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical
Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those
rather dispiriting vintages.
[7] A correspondence on Sherry had just been running in the daily press.
But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say
Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in
champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well
remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious
than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through
dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in
colour a sort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone
foaming or sparkling.
"How sad, and bad, and mad it was,--
And oh! how it was sweet!"
Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown
in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so
copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in
the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in
"Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome
in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he
always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as
that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.
_Wine and Water._ I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the
innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of
Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but
songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time,
when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano,
Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song,
ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A
kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to
hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcome till some quite recent
singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortal
_Ariston men hudor_:--
"Pure water is the best of gifts
That man to man can bring;
But what am I, that I should have
The best of anything?
"Let Princes revel at the Pump,
Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8]
But whisky, beer, or even wine
Is good enough for me."
[8] Some commentators read--"Peers with the pond make free."
XXI
DINNER
"We may live without poetry, music, and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without Cooks.
"He may live without lore--what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope--what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love--what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?"
The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed,
and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he
it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said:
"It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still
greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who,
having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without
food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that
one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High
Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge,
after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the
jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of
water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it
drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."
In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being,
if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but
the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter
that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only
incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic
theme of Dinner.
The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than
in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested
all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once
entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at
Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin
that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in
sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy
demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with
green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear
of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions
of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be
a great and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the
incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets
always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected,
comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of
"A roast and a ragout,
And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."