It takes London to put you in the way of a purely rustic walk from
Notting Hill to Whitehall. You may traverse this immense distance—a
most comprehensive diagonal—altogether on soft, fine turf, amid the
song of birds, the bleat of lambs, the ripple of ponds, the rustle of
admirable trees. Frequently have I wished that, for the sake of such
a daily luxury and of exercise made romantic, I were a Government
clerk living, in snug domestic conditions, in a Pembridge villa,—let
me suppose,—and having my matutinal desk in Westminster. I should turn
into Kensington Gardens at their northwest limit, and I should have
my choice of a hundred pleasant paths to the gates of Hyde Park. In
Hyde Park I should follow the water-side, or the Row, or any other
fancy of the occasion; liking best, perhaps, after all, the Row in
its morning mood, with the mist hanging over the dark-red course, and
the scattered early riders taking an identity as the soundless gallop
brings them nearer. I am free to admit that in the Season, at the
conventional hours, the Row becomes a weariness (save perhaps just
for a glimpse once a year, to remind one’s self how much it is like
Du Maurier); the preoccupied citizen eschews it and leaves it for the
most part to the gaping barbarian. I speak of it now from the point of
view of the pedestrian; but for the rider as well it is at its best
when he passes either too early or too late. Then, if he be not bent
on comparing it to its disadvantage with the bluer and boskier alleys
of the Bois de Boulogne, it will not be spoiled by the fact that, with
its surface that looks like tan, its barriers like those of the ring on
which the clown stands to hold up the hoop to the young lady, its empty
benches and chairs, its occasional orange-peel, its mounted policemen
patrolling at intervals like expectant supernumeraries, it offers
points of real contact with a circus whose lamps are out. The sky that
bends over it is frequently not a bad imitation of the dingy tent of
such an establishment. The ghosts of past cavalcades seem to haunt the
foggy arena, and somehow they are better company than the mashers and
elongated beauties of current seasons. It is not without interest to
remember that most of the salient figures of English society during
the present century—and English society means, or rather has hitherto
meant, in a large degree, English history—have bobbed in the saddle
between Apsley House and Queen’s Gate. You may call the roll if you
care to, and the air will be thick with dumb voices and dead names,
like that of some Roman amphitheatre.
It is doubtless a signal proof of being a London-lover _quand même_
that one should undertake an apology for so bungled an attempt at
a great public place as Hyde Park Corner. It is certain that the
improvements and embellishments recently enacted there have only served
to call further attention to the poverty of the elements and to the
fact that this poverty is terribly illustrative of general conditions.
The place is the beating heart of the great West End, yet its main
features are a shabby, stuccoed hospital, the low park-gates, in their
neat but unimposing frame, the drawing-room windows of Apsley House and
of the commonplace frontages on the little terrace beside it; to which
must be added, of course, the only item in the whole prospect that is
in the least monumental—the arch spanning the private road beside the
gardens of Buckingham Palace. This structure is now bereaved of the
rueful effigy which used to surmount it—the Iron Duke in the guise of
a tin soldier—and has not been enriched by the transaction as much as
might have been expected.[1] There is a fine view of Piccadilly and
Knightsbridge, and of the noble mansions, as the house-agents call
them, of Grosvenor Place, together with a sense of generous space
beyond the vulgar little railing of the Green Park; but, except for
the impression that there would be room for something better, there is
nothing in all this that speaks to the imagination: almost as much as
the grimy desert of Trafalgar Square the prospect conveys the idea of
an opportunity wasted.
None the less has it on a fine day in spring an expressiveness of
which I shall not pretend to explain the source further than by saying
that the flood of life and luxury is immeasurably great there. The
edifices are mean, but the social stream itself is monumental, and to
an observer not purely stolid there is more excitement and suggestion
than I can give a reason for in the long, distributed waves of traffic,
with the steady policemen marking their rhythm, which roll together
and apart for so many hours. Then the great, dim city becomes bright
and kind, the pall of smoke turns into a veil of haze carelessly
worn, the air is coloured and almost scented by the presence of the
biggest society in the world, and most of the things that meet the
eye—or perhaps I should say more of them, for the most in London is,
no doubt, ever the realm of the dingy—present themselves as “well
appointed.” Everything shines more or less, from the window-panes
to the dog-collars. So it all looks, with its myriad variations and
qualifications, to one who surveys it over the apron of a hansom, while
that vehicle of vantage, better than any box at the opera, spurts and
slackens with the current.
[Illustration: IN THE GREEN PARK]
It is not in a hansom, however, that we have figured our punctual young
man, whom we must not desert as he fares to the southeast, and who has
only to cross Hyde Park Corner to find his way all grassy again. I have
a weakness for the convenient, familiar, treeless, or almost treeless,
expanse of the Green Park and the friendly part it plays as a kind
of encouragement to Piccadilly. I am so fond of Piccadilly that I am
grateful to any one or anything that does it a service, and nothing is
more worthy of appreciation than the southward look it is permitted to
enjoy just after it passes Devonshire House—a sweep of horizon which
it would be difficult to match among other haunts of men, and thanks
to which, of a summer’s day, you may spy, beyond the browsed pastures
of the foreground and middle distance, beyond the cold chimneys of
Buckingham Palace and the towers of Westminster and the swarming
river-side and all the southern parishes, the hard modern twinkle of
the roof of the Crystal Palace.
If the Green Park is familiar, there is still less of the exclusive
in its pendant, as one may call it,—for it literally hangs from the
other, down the hill,—the remnant of the former garden of the queer,
shabby old palace whose black, inelegant face stares up St. James’s
Street. This popular resort has a great deal of character, but I am
free to confess that much of its character comes from its nearness to
the Westminster slums. It is a park of intimacy, and perhaps the most
democratic corner of London, in spite of its being in the royal and
military quarter and close to all kinds of stateliness. There are few
hours of the day when a thousand smutty children are not sprawling over
it, and the unemployed lie thick on the grass and cover the benches
with a brotherhood of greasy corduroys. If the London parks are the
drawing-rooms and clubs of the poor,—that is of those poor (I admit it
cuts down the number) who live near enough to them to reach them,—these
particular grass-plots and alleys may be said to constitute the very
_salon_ of the slums.
I know not why, being such a region of greatness,—great towers, great
names, great memories; at the foot of the Abbey, the Parliament, the
fine fragment of Whitehall, with the quarters of the sovereign right
and left,—but the edge of Westminster evokes as many associations
of misery as of empire. The neighbourhood has been much purified of
late, but it still contains a collection of specimens—though it is
far from unique in this—of the low, black element. The air always
seems to me heavy and thick, and here more than elsewhere one hears
old England—the panting, smoke-stained Titan of Matthew Arnold’s fine
poem—draw her deep breath with effort. In fact one is nearer to her
heroic lungs, if those organs are figured by the great pinnacled and
fretted talking-house on the edge of the river. But this same dense and
conscious air plays such everlasting tricks to the eye that the Foreign
Office, as you see it from the bridge, often looks romantic, and the
sheet of water it overhangs poetic—suggests an Indian palace bathing
its feet in the Ganges. If our pedestrian achieves such a comparison as
this he has nothing left but to go on to his work—which he will find
close at hand. He will have come the whole way from the far northwest
on the green—which is what was to be demonstrated.
V
I feel as if I were taking a tone almost of boastfulness, and no
doubt the best way to consider the matter is simply to say—without
going into the treachery of reasons—that, for one’s self, one likes
this part or the other. Yet this course would not be unattended with
danger, inasmuch as at the end of a few such professions we might find
ourselves committed to a tolerance of much that is deplorable. London
is so clumsy and so brutal, and has gathered together so many of the
darkest sides of life, that it is almost ridiculous to talk of her as a
lover talks of his mistress, and almost frivolous to appear to ignore
her disfigurements and cruelties. She is like a mighty ogress who
devours human flesh; but to me it is a mitigating circumstance—though
it may not seem so to every one—that the ogress herself is human. It
is not in wantonness that she fills her maw, but to keep herself alive
and do her tremendous work. She has no time for fine discriminations,
but after all she is as good-natured as she is huge, and the more you
stand up to her, as the phrase is, the better she takes the joke of
it. It is mainly when you fall on your face before her that she gobbles
you up. She heeds little what she takes, so long as she has her stint,
and the smallest push to the right or the left will divert her wavering
bulk from one form of prey to another. It is not to be denied that the
heart tends to grow hard in her company; but she is a capital antidote
to the morbid, and to live with her successfully is an education of
the temper, a consecration of one’s private philosophy. She gives one a
surface for which in a rough world one can never be too thankful. She
may take away reputations, but she forms character. She teaches her
victims not to “mind,” and the great danger for them is perhaps that
they shall learn the lesson too well.
It is sometimes a wonder to ascertain what they do mind, the best
seasoned of her children. Many of them assist, without winking,
at the most unfathomable dramas, and the common speech of others
denotes a familiarity with the horrible. It is her theory that she
both produces and appreciates the exquisite; but if you catch her in
flagrant repudiation of both responsibilities and confront her with
the shortcoming, she gives you a look, with a shrug of her colossal
shoulders, which establishes a private relation with you for evermore.
She seems to say: “Do you really take me so seriously as that, you
dear, devoted, voluntary dupe, and don’t you know what an immeasurable
humbug I am?” You reply that you shall know it henceforth; but your
tone is good-natured, with a touch of the cynicism that she herself
has taught you; for you are aware that if she makes herself out better
than she is, she also makes herself out much worse. She is immensely
democratic, and that, no doubt, is part of the manner in which she
is salutary to the individual; she teaches him his “place” by an
incomparable discipline, but deprives him of complaint by letting him
see that she has exactly the same lash for every other back. When he
has swallowed the lesson he may enjoy the rude but unfailing justice
by which, under her eye, reputations and positions elsewhere esteemed
great are reduced to the relative. There are so many reputations, so
many positions, that supereminence breaks down, and it is difficult to
be so rare that London can’t match you. It is a part of her good-nature
and one of her clumsy coquetries to pretend sometimes that she hasn’t
your equivalent, as when she takes it into her head to hunt the lion or
form a ring round a celebrity. But this artifice is so very transparent
that the lion must be very candid or the celebrity very obscure to be
taken by it. The business is altogether subjective, as the philosophers
say, and the great city is primarily looking after herself. Celebrities
are convenient—they are one of the things that people are asked to
“meet”—and lion-cutlets, put upon ice, will nourish a family through
periods of dearth.
This is what I mean by calling London democratic. You may be in it, of
course, without being of it; but from the moment you _are_ of it—and
on this point your own sense will soon enough enlighten you—you belong
to a body in which a general equality prevails. However exalted,
however able, however rich, however renowned you may be, there are too
many people at least as much so for your own idiosyncrasies to count.
I think it is only by being beautiful that you may really prevail
very much; for the loveliness of woman it has long been noticeable
that London will go most out of her way. It is when she hunts that
particular lion that she becomes most dangerous; then there are really
moments when you would believe, for all the world, that she is thinking
of what she can give, not of what she can get. Lovely ladies, before
this, have paid for believing it, and will continue to pay in days
to come. On the whole the people who are least deceived are perhaps
those who have permitted themselves to believe, in their own interest,
that poverty is not a disgrace. It is certainly not considered so in
London, and indeed you can scarcely say where—in virtue of diffusion—it
would more naturally be exempt. The possession of money is, of course,
immensely an advantage, but that is a very different thing from a
disqualification in the lack of it.
Good-natured in so many things in spite of her cynical tongue, and
easy-going in spite of her tremendous pace, there is nothing in which
the large indulgence of the town is more shown than in the liberal
way she looks at obligations of hospitality and the margin she allows
in these and cognate matters. She wants above all to be amused;
she keeps her books loosely, doesn’t stand on small questions of a
chop for a chop, and if there be any chance of people’s proving a
diversion, doesn’t know or remember or care whether they have “called.”
She forgets even if she herself have called. In matters of ceremony
she takes and gives a long rope, wasting no time in phrases and
circumvallations. It is no doubt incontestable that one result of her
inability to stand upon trifles and consider details is that she has
been obliged in some ways to lower rather portentously the standard
of her manners. She cultivates the abrupt—for even when she asks you
to dine a month ahead the invitation goes off like the crack of a
pistol—and approaches her ends not exactly _par quatre chemins_. She
doesn’t pretend to attach importance to the lesson conveyed in Matthew
Arnold’s poem of “The Sick King in Bokhara,” that,
“Though we snatch what we desire,
We may not snatch it eagerly.”
London snatches it more than eagerly if that be the only way she
can get it. Good manners are a succession of details, and I don’t
mean to say that she doesn’t attend to them when she has time. She
has it, however, but seldom—_que voulez-vous_? Perhaps the matter of
note-writing is as good an example as another of what certain of the
elder traditions inevitably have become in her hands. She lives by
notes—they are her very heart-beats; but those that bear her signatures
are as disjointed as the ravings of delirium, and have nothing but a
postage-stamp in common with the epistolary art.