I
There is a certain evening that I count as virtually a first
impression,—the end of a wet, black Sunday, twenty years ago, about
the first of March. There had been an earlier vision, but it had
turned to grey, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of was a
fresh beginning. No doubt I had mystic prescience of how fond of
the murky modern Babylon I was one day to become; certain it is
that as I look back I find every small circumstance of those hours
of approach and arrival still as vivid as if the solemnity of an
opening era had breathed upon it. The sense of approach was already
almost intolerably strong at Liverpool, where, as I remember, the
perception of the English character of everything was as acute as a
surprise, though it could only be a surprise without a shock. It was
expectation exquisitely gratified, superabundantly confirmed. There was
a kind of wonder indeed that England should be as English as, for my
entertainment, she took the trouble to be; but the wonder would have
been greater, and all the pleasure absent, if the sensation had not
been violent. It seems to sit there again like a visiting presence,
as it sat opposite to me at breakfast at a small table in a window of
the old coffee-room of the Adelphi Hotel—the unextended (as it then
was), the unimproved, the unblushingly local Adelphi. Liverpool is not
a romantic city, but that smoky Saturday returns to me as a supreme
success, measured by its association with the kind of emotion in the
hope of which, for the most part, we betake ourselves to far countries.
It assumed this character at an early hour—or rather, indeed,
twenty-four hours before—with the sight, as one looked across the
wintry ocean, of the strange, dark, lonely freshness of the coast of
Ireland. Better still, before we could come up to the city, were the
black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low
that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest,
windiest light. Spring was already in the air, in the town; there was
no rain, but there was still less sun—one wondered what had become, on
this side of the world, of the big white splotch in the heavens; and
the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext, appeared
in itself a promise. This was how it hung about me, between the window
and the fire, in the coffee-room of the hotel—late in the morning for
breakfast, as we had been long disembarking. The other passengers
had dispersed, knowingly catching trains for London (we had only
been a handful); I had the place to myself, and I felt as if I had an
exclusive property in the impression. I prolonged it, I sacrificed to
it, and it is perfectly recoverable now, with the very taste of the
national muffin, the creak of the waiter’s shoes as he came and went
(could anything be so English as his intensely professional back? it
revealed a country of tradition), and the rustle of the newspaper I was
too excited to read.
I continued to sacrifice for the rest of the day; it didn’t seem to me
a sentient thing, as yet, to enquire into the means of getting away.
My curiosity must indeed have languished, for I found myself on the
morrow in the slowest of Sunday trains, pottering up to London with an
interruptedness which might have been tedious without the conversation
of an old gentleman who shared the carriage with me and to whom my
alien as well as comparatively youthful character had betrayed itself.
He instructed me as to the sights of London and impressed upon me
that nothing was more worthy of my attention than the great cathedral
of St. Paul. “Have you seen St. Peter’s in Rome? St. Peter’s is more
highly embellished, you know; but you may depend upon it that St.
Paul’s is the better building of the two.” The impression I began
with speaking of was, strictly, that of the drive from Euston, after
dark, to Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square. It was not lovely—it was
in fact rather horrible; but as I move again through dusky, tortuous
miles, in the greasy four-wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me
to commit myself, I recognise the first step in an initiation of which
the subsequent stages were to abound in pleasant things. It is a kind
of humiliation in a great city not to know where you are going, and
Morley’s Hotel was then, to my imagination, only a vague ruddy spot
in the general immensity. The immensity was the great fact, and that
was a charm; the miles of housetops and viaducts, the complication
of junctions and signals through which the train made its way to the
station had already given me the scale. The weather had turned to
wet, and we went deeper and deeper into the Sunday night. The sheep in
the fields, on the way from Liverpool, had shown in their demeanour a
certain consciousness of the day; but this momentous cab-drive was an
introduction to the rigidities of custom. The low black houses were
as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent
corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still
than the darkness. The custom of gin—that was equally rigid, and in
this first impression the public-houses counted for much.
Morley’s Hotel proved indeed to be a ruddy spot; brilliant, in my
recollection, is the coffee-room fire, the hospitable mahogany, the
sense that in the stupendous city this, at any rate for the hour,
was a shelter and a point of view. My remembrance of the rest of the
evening—I was probably very tired—is mainly a remembrance of a vast
four-poster. My little bedroom-candle, set in its deep basin, caused
this monument to project a huge shadow and to make me think, I scarce
knew why, of “The Ingoldsby Legends.” If at a tolerably early hour the
next day I found myself approaching St. Paul’s, it was not wholly in
obedience to the old gentleman in the railway-carriage: I had an errand
in the City, and the City was doubtless prodigious. But what I mainly
recall is the romantic consciousness of passing under the Temple Bar,
and the way two lines of “Henry Esmond” repeated themselves in my mind
as I drew near the masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren. “The stout,
red-faced woman” whom Esmond had seen tearing after the staghounds over
the slopes at Windsor was not a bit like the effigy “which turns its
stony back upon St. Paul’s and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate
Hill.” As I looked at Queen Anne over the apron of my hansom—she struck
me as very small and dirty, and the vehicle ascended the mild incline
without an effort—it was a thrilling thought that the statue had been
familiar to the hero of the incomparable novel. All history appeared to
live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind.
To this hour, as I pass along the Strand, I take again the walk I
took there that afternoon. I love the place to-day, and that was the
commencement of my passion. It appeared to me to present phenomena,
and to contain objects of every kind, of an inexhaustible interest;
in particular it struck me as desirable and even indispensable that I
should purchase most of the articles in most of the shops. My eyes rest
with a certain tenderness on the places where I resisted and on those
where I succumbed. The fragrance of Mr. Rimmel’s establishment is again
in my nostrils; I see the slim young lady (I hear her pronunciation)
who waited upon me there. Sacred to me to-day is the particular aroma
of the hair-wash that I bought of her. I pause before the granite
portico of Exeter Hall (it was unexpectedly narrow and wedge-like), and
it evokes a cloud of associations which are none the less impressive
because they are vague; coming from I don’t know where—from “Punch,”
from Thackeray, from volumes of the “Illustrated London News” turned
over in childhood; seeming connected with Mrs. Beecher Stowe and “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.” Memorable is a rush I made into a glover’s at Charing
Cross—the one you pass, going eastward, just before you turn into the
station; that, however, now that I think of it, must have been in the
morning, as soon as I issued from the hotel. Keen within me was a sense
of the importance of deflowering, of despoiling the shop.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S, FROM LUDGATE HILL]
A day or two later, in the afternoon, I found myself staring at my
fire, in a lodging of which I had taken possession on foreseeing that
I should spend some weeks in London. I had just come in, and, having
attended to the distribution of my luggage, sat down to consider
my habitation. It was on the ground floor, and the fading daylight
reached it in a sadly damaged condition. It struck me as stuffy and
unsocial, with its mouldy smell and its decoration of lithographs and
wax-flowers—an impersonal black hole in the huge general blackness.
The uproar of Piccadilly hummed away at the end of the street, and the
rattle of a heartless hansom passed close to my ears. A sudden horror
of the whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of homesickness
which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel,
and above all overwhelming; whether or no she was “careful of the
type,” she was as indifferent as Nature herself to the single life. In
the course of an hour I should have to go out to my dinner, which was
not supplied on the premises, and that effort assumed the form of a
desperate and dangerous quest. It appeared to me that I would rather
remain dinnerless, would rather even starve, than sally forth into
the infernal town, where the natural fate of an obscure stranger would
be to be trampled to death in Piccadilly and have his carcass thrown
into the Thames. I did not starve, however, and I eventually attached
myself by a hundred human links to the dreadful, delightful city. That
momentary vision of its smeared face and stony heart has remained
memorable to me, but I am happy to say that I can easily summon up
others.