But why do I talk of Greenwich and remind myself of one of the
unexecuted vignettes with which it had been my plan that these
desultory and, I fear, somewhat incoherent remarks should be studded?
They will present to the reader no vignettes but those which the artist
who has kindly consented to associate himself with my vagaries may be
so good as to bestow upon them. Why should I speak of Hampstead, as the
question of summer afternoons just threatened to lead me to do after I
should have exhausted the subject of Greenwich, which I may not even
touch? Why should I be so arbitrary when I have cheated myself out
of the space privately intended for a series of vivid and ingenious
sketches of the particular physiognomy of the respective quarters of
the town? I had dreamed of doing them all, with their idiosyncrasies
and the signs by which you shall know them. It is my pleasure to have
learned these signs—a deeply interesting branch of observation—but I
must renounce the display of my lore.
I have not the conscience to talk about Hampstead, and what a pleasant
thing it is to ascend the long hill which overhangs, as it were, St.
John’s Wood and begins at the Swiss Cottage—you must mount from there,
it must be confessed, as you can—and pick up a friend at a house of
friendship on the top, and stroll with him on the rusty Heath, and
skirt the garden walls of the old square Georgian houses which survive
from the time when, near as it is to-day to London, the place was a
kind of provincial centre, with Joanna Baillie for its muse, and take
the way by the Three Spaniards—I would never miss that—and look down
at the smoky city or across at the Scotch firs and the red sunset. It
would never do to make a tangent in that direction when I have left
Kensington unsung and Bloomsbury unattempted, and have said never
a word about the mighty eastward region—the queer corners, the dark
secrets, the rich survivals and mementoes of the City. I particularly
regret having sacrificed Kensington, the once-delightful, the
Thackerayan, with its literary vestiges, its quiet, pompous red palace,
its square of Queen Anne, its house of Lady Castlewood, its Greyhound
tavern, where Henry Esmond lodged.
But I can reconcile myself to this when I reflect that I have also
sacrificed the Season, which doubtless, from an elegant point of view,
ought to have been the central _morceau_ in the panorama. I have noted
that the London-lover loves everything in the place, but I have not
cut myself off from saying that his sympathy has degrees, or from
remarking that the sentiment of the author of these pages has never
gone all the way with the dense movement of the British carnival. That
is really the word for the period from Easter to midsummer; it is a
fine, decorous, expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks
are not of velvet or silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh and blood,
the material of the most beautiful complexions in the world. Holding
that the great interest of London is the sense the place gives us
of multitudinous life, it is doubtless an inconsequence not to care
most for the phase of greatest intensity. But there is life and life,
and the rush and crush of these weeks of fashion is after all but a
tolerably mechanical expression of human forces. Nobody would deny
that it is a more universal, brilliant, spectacular one than can be
seen anywhere else; and it is not a defect that these forces often take
the form of women extremely beautiful. I risk the declaration that the
London season brings together year by year an unequalled collection
of handsome persons. I say nothing of the ugly ones; beauty has at the
best been allotted to a small minority, and it is never, at the most,
anywhere, but a question of the number by which that minority is least
insignificant.
There are moments when one can almost forgive the follies of June for
the sake of the smile which the sceptical old city puts on for the
time and which, as I noted in an earlier passage of this disquisition,
fairly breaks into laughter where she is tickled by the vortex of Hyde
Park Corner. Most perhaps does she seem to smile at the end of the
summer days, when the light lingers and lingers, though the shadows
lengthen and the mists redden and the belated riders, with dinners
to dress for, hurry away from the trampled arena of the Park. The
population at that hour surges mainly westward and sees the dust of the
day’s long racket turned into a dull golden haze. There is something
that has doubtless often, at this particular moment, touched the fancy
even of the bored and the _blasés_ in such an emanation of hospitality,
of waiting dinners, of the festal idea, of the whole spectacle of
the West End preparing herself for an evening six parties deep. The
scale on which she entertains is stupendous, and her invitations and
“reminders” are as thick as the leaves of the forest.
For half an hour, from eight to nine, every pair of wheels presents
the portrait of a diner-out. To consider only the rattling hansoms,
the white neckties and “dressed” heads which greet you from over the
apron in a quick, interminable succession, conveys the overwhelming
impression of a complicated world. Who are they all, and where are
they all going, and whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens
and gaping portals and marshalled flunkies are prepared to receive
them, from the southernmost limits of a loosely interpreted, an almost
transpontine Belgravia, to the hyperborean confines of St. John’s
Wood? There are broughams standing at every door, and carpets laid
down for the footfall of the issuing if not the entering reveller.
The pavements are empty now, in the fading light, in the big sallow
squares and the stuccoed streets of gentility, save for the groups of
small children holding others that are smaller—Ameliar-Ann intrusted
with Sarah Jane—who collect, wherever the strip of carpet lies, to see
the fine ladies pass from the carriage or the house. The West End is
dotted with these pathetic little gazing groups; it is the party of the
poor—_their_ Season and way of dining out, and a happy illustration of
“the sympathy that prevails between classes.” The watchers, I should
add, are by no means all children, but the lean mature also, and I am
sure these wayside joys are one of the reasons of an inconvenience
much deplored—the tendency of the country poor to flock to London.
They who dine only occasionally or never at all have plenty of time to
contemplate those with whom the custom has more amplitude. However, it
was not my intention to conclude these remarks in a melancholy strain,
and goodness knows that the diners are a prodigious company. It is as
moralistic as I shall venture to be if I drop a very soft sigh on the
paper as I confirm that truth. Are they all illuminated spirits and is
their conversation the ripest in the world? This is not to be expected,
nor should I ever suppose it to be desired that an agreeable society
should fail to offer frequent opportunity for intellectual rest. Such
a shortcoming is not one of the sins of the London world in general,
nor would it be just to complain of that world, on any side, on grounds
of deficiency. It is not what London fails to do that strikes the
observer, but the general fact that she does everything in excess.
Excess is her highest reproach, and it is her incurable misfortune that
there is really too much of her. She overwhelms you by quantity and
number—she ends by making human life, by making civilisation, appear
cheap to you. Wherever you go, to parties, exhibitions, concerts,
“private views,” meetings, solitudes, there are already more people
than enough on the field. How it makes you understand the high walls
with which so much of English life is surrounded, and the priceless
blessing of a park in the country, where there is nothing animated but
rabbits and pheasants and, for the worst, the importunate nightingales!
And as the monster grows and grows for ever, she departs more and
more—it must be acknowledged—from the ideal of a convenient society,
a society in which intimacy is possible, in which the associated meet
often and sound and select and measure and inspire each other, and
relations and combinations have time to form themselves. The substitute
for this, in London, is the momentary concussion of a million of
atoms. It is the difference between seeing a great deal of a few and
seeing a little of every one. “When did you come—are you ‘going on?’”
and it is over; there is no time even for the answer. This may seem a
perfidious arraignment, and I should not make it were I not prepared,
or rather were I not eager, to add two qualifications. One of these
is that, cumbrously vast as the place may be, I would not have had it
smaller by a hair’s-breadth or have missed one of the fine and fruitful
impatiences with which it inspires you and which are at bottom a
heartier tribute, I think, than any great city receives. The other is
that out of its richness and its inexhaustible good-humour it belies
the next hour any generalisation you may have been so simple as to make
about it.
1888.
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