II

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is

really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is

suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the

huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a

half-hearted hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a moment, for

a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past

winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in

a row—a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday

and a “bank-holiday,” if I remember aright, had joined hands with a

Christmas Day and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude.

I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character,

for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn’t fear; it

would not come round again for another year. This information was given

me on the occasion of that surprising interruption of one’s relations

with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period.

I was told that all the washerwomen were intoxicated and that, as it

would take them some time to revive, I must not count upon a relay of

“fresh things.” I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this

statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning

back. One of the incidental _agréments_ of life in the latter city

had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young

woman with a large basket protected by a snowy napkin on her arm, and

on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap which was an irresistible

advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_

was not in liquor is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was

always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank expressive eye,

her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon

her crisp, dense hair and her well-made dress adjusted and worn. I

talked with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved

about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her

light step carried her off again, talking, to the door, and with a

brighter smile and an “Adieu, monsieur!” she closed it behind her,

leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature

a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and

fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision

of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle

of whiskey! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance and

almost frightened me away.

[Illustration: IN ST. JAMES’S PARK]

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my

fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not

strictly accurate and that at the end of three months I had another

array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing

occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched,

though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of

the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they

were very much _en évidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for

getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired

to the background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered;

the streets were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were

rare; but the “masses” were all abroad and making the most of their

holiday, so that I strolled about and watched them at their gambols.

The heavens were most unfavourable, but in an English “outing” there

is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky

city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky, the grimy crowds wandered

with a kind of weatherproof stolidity. The parks were full of them,

the railway stations overflowed, the Thames embankment was covered.

The “masses,” I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even

when observed through the distorting medium of London bad weather.

There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky

London holiday; it suggests so many and such interestingly related

reflections. Even looked at superficially the capital of the Empire

is one of the most appealing of cities, and it is perhaps on such

occasions as this that I have most felt its appeal. London is ugly,

dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and

decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of,

the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the

streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their

intrinsic want of charm. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday uncovers the

ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow

pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls,

corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff

window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black

line resembling a slice of curbstone. There is not an accessory, not a

touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty.

If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I

find in it what Thackeray found in Baker Street—a delightful proof

of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home.

There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would

seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger

effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not

made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier

kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is

pictorial in spite of details—from its dark-green, misty parks, the

way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling,

and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an

atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a

play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aërial

gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such contemplations

this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only part of it. What

completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made

in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any

given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense

of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from

their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so much human

life gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon you with so

many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from

it. But they are of every possible kind, and that is the interest of

London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season

were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with

these was mingled a brighter strain.

[Illustration: BAKER STREET]

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon—walked from

Piccadilly across the Green Park and through that of St. James. The

parks were densely filled with the populace—the elder people shuffling

about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling

over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey, I found a dense

group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them

and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible

to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into

the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact,

and beneath the gothic arches the odour was not that of incense. I

gradually gave it up, with that very modified sense of disappointment

that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is

a frequent form of philosophy, for you soon learn that there are,

selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow

mortals are too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation.

At the theatre, at a concert, an exhibition, a reception, you always

find that, before you arrive, there are people enough in the field.

You are a tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too

many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger

of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were,

swallows up quality, and the perpetual sense of other elbows and knees

begets a yearning for the desert. This is the reason why the perfection

of luxury in England is to own a “park”—an artificial solitude. To

get one’s self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded

turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of the grassy

shade, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly

precious. But I walked back through the profane pleasure-grounds of

London, in the midst of “superfluous herds,” and I found the profit

of vision that I never fail to derive from a great English assemblage.

The English are, on the whole, to my eyes so appreciably the handsomest

people in Europe—remembering always, of course, that when we talk of

the frequency of beauty anywhere we talk of a minor quantity, more

small or less small—that it takes some effort of the imagination to

believe that the appearance requires demonstration. I never see a large

number of them without feeling this impression confirmed; though I

hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be much shaken in the

presence of a limited group. I suspect that a great English crowd would

yield a larger percentage of _regular_ faces and tall figures than any

other. With regard to the upper class, I suppose this is generally

granted; but, with all abatements, I should extend it to the people

at large. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer as

regular, nature, in them, must have clung hard to the higher ideal.

They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their

garments have that sooty surface which has nothing in common with the

continental costume of labour and privation. It is the hard prose of

misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This

is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of

the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them, in

hobnailed boots, as a hint of what may be in store for their wearers.

Then it is not too much to say that two thirds of the London faces,

as the streets present them, bear in some degree or other the traces

of alcoholic action. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive

masks is considerable; a source of depression, for the spectator,

not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured

have evidently been planned on lines of high superficial decency. A

very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the

distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes

from the slums and purlieus of this duskiest of modern Babylons—the

pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures.

These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any

other place that suggest an equal depth of degradation. But when such

exceptions are taken the observer still notes the quantity and degree

of facial finish, the firmness of type, if not always its fineness,

the clearnesses and symmetries, the modelled brows and cheeks and

chins, the immense contribution made to his impression, above all, by

the elements of complexion and stature. The question of expression

is another matter, and one must admit at the outset, to have done

with it, that expression here in general lacks, even to strangeness,

any perceptible intensity, though it often has among the women,

and adorably among the children, an indescribable shy delicacy. I

have it at heart, however, to add that if the English are handsomer

than ourselves they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think all

the European peoples more richly ugly than the American: we are far

from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which

flourish on soils socially more rank. American ugliness is on the side

of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and

monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are

many—and some of them have a high plastic, historic, romantic value.