The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most
marked collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since I
came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr.
George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter
period. Mr. George Odger, it will perhaps be remembered, was an English
radical agitator of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a
perverse desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the
useful profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that
opens but to the refined. But he was a useful and honourable man, and
his own people gave him an honourable burial. I emerged accidentally
into Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle
was one I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but
I managed to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was
drawn up beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at
the play. Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call
it a tragedy; but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to
be magnificent—the finest of the year. The ceremony had been taken
in hand by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament,
and it had the character of a great popular manifestation. The hearse
was followed by very few carriages, but the _cortège_ of pedestrians
stretched away in the sunshine, up and down the classic decorum of
Piccadilly, on a scale highly impressive. Here and there the line was
broken by a small brass band—apparently one of those bands of itinerant
Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for
the rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the
dregs of the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan
mob, men and women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent,
who had scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their
passage, and were making a sort of solemn “lark” of it. Very solemn
it all was—perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along
in an interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front
of my hansom I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the
under side, the wrong side, of the London world. The procession was
filled with figures which seemed never to have “shown out,” as the
English say, before; of strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and
stumbled in the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe them
more minutely, but I found the whole affair vaguely yet portentously
suggestive. My impression rose not simply from the radical, or, as
I may say for the sake of colour, the revolutionary, emanation of
this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironic sky; but from the same
causes I had observed a short time before, on the day the Queen went to
open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking straight down into
Westminster and over the royal procession, were gathered a group of
banners and festoons inscribed in big staring letters with mottoes and
sentiments which might easily have given on the nerves of a sensitive
police department. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne
claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded
and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several sweeping
reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country. These
signals of unreason were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if
they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental Dwarf
at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the authorities have
a shorter patience and where revolutionary placards at the base of
the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde fall in with no recognised
scheme—such is the effect of the whirligig of time—of the grand style
or of monumental decorum. I was therefore the more struck on both of
the occasions I speak of with the admirable English practice of letting
people alone—with the frank good sense and the frank good humour and
even the frank good taste of it. It was this that I found impressive
as I watched the manifestation of Mr. Odger’s underfed partisans—the
fact that the mighty mob could march along and do its errand while the
excellent quiet policemen—eternal, imperturbable, positively loveable
reminders of the national temperament—stood by simply to see that the
channel was kept clear and comfortable.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY, FROM THE MEADOWS]
When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger’s
friends—three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was
hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there
was not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable,
the rain incessant, and the fact that all your friends were away
gave you plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the
reverse of enlivening. But all your friends had gone thither (this
is the unanimity I began by talking about), and to restrict as much
as possible the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which,
at the best, so much of London social life consists, it seemed wise
to bring within the limits of the dull season any such excursion as
might have been projected in commemoration of the first days of spring.
After due cogitation I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover,
taking Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous journey that
I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an account. But I have
dallied so much by the way that I have come almost to my rope’s end
without reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artistically,
by relating that I put myself in the humour for remote adventure by
going down the Thames on a penny steamboat to the towers of Julius.
This was on the Saturday before Easter, and the City was as silent as
the grave. “London’s lasting shame” was a memory of my childhood, and,
having a theory that from such memories the dust of the ages had better
not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But
the Tower—_the_ Tower—is very good, and much less cockneyfied than I
supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; very grey and historical,
with the look that vivifies (rather lividly indeed) the past. I could
not get into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was
consequently relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen
fellow starers in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled
at will through the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the
lounging soldiers of the garrison, who seemed to connect the place, for
the backward-reaching fancy, with important events.