I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess
that one has spent the month of so-called social August in London; and
I will therefore, taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the
very outset to this poorness of spirit. I might attempt some ingenious
extenuation of it; I might say that my remaining in town had been the
most unexpected necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend
I liked it—that I had done it in fact for the perverse love of the
thing; I might claim that you don’t really know the charms of London
until on one of the dog-days you have imprinted your boot-sole in
the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along the empty vista
of the Drive, in Hyde Park, have beheld, for almost the first time in
England, a landscape without figures. But little would remain of these
specious apologies save the bald circumstance that I had distinctly
failed to pack and be off—either on the first of August with the ladies
and children, or on the thirteenth with the members of Parliament, or
on the twelfth when the grouse-shooting began. (I am not sure that
I have got my dates right to a day, but these were about the proper
opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the departure of everything
genteel, and the three millions of persons who remained behind with me
have been witnesses of my shame.
I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having lingered in town, I
have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger,
I have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day
and steal abroad only under cover of the darkness—a line of conduct
imposed by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism
of the weekly papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native
residents who allow themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable
season. I have indeed always held that few things are pleasanter,
during very hot weather, than to have a great city, and a large house
within it, quite to one’s self. Yet these majestic conditions have
not embellished my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received an
impression that in London it would be rather difficult for a visitor
not having the command of a good deal of powerful machinery to find
them united. English summer weather is rarely hot enough to make it
necessary to darken one’s house and denude one’s person. The present
year has indeed in this respect been “exceptional,” as any year is,
for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the
people are, to alien eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best
(or the worst) even the highest flights of the thermometer in the
united Kingdom betray a broken wing. People live with closed windows
in August very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye
no appreciable difference in the character—that is in the thickness
and stiffness—of their coats and boots. A “bath” in England, for the
most part, all the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a
sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a more obvious
ornament of the market at midsummer than at Christmas. This matter of
peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples of
that fact to which a commentator on English manners from afar finds
himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost
ashamed of alluding—the fact that the beauty and luxury of the country,
that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as “English
comfort,” is a limited and restricted, an essentially private, affair.
I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English fruit
as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well what
was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone of
contemptuous generalisation by a couple of my fellow countrywomen. They
had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their hotel,
had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest
pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur was
proportionate. This personage bowed and retired, and, after a long
delay, reappearing, placed before them with an inimitable gesture a
dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon investigation that
these acrid vegetables were the only things of succulence that the
establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the
irony of the situation that the establishment was as near as possible
to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote seemed
disposed to generalise: this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to give
me a pretext for assuring them that on a thousand fine properties the
most beautiful peaches and melons were at that moment ripening either
under glass or in warm old walled gardens. My auditors tossed their
heads of course at the fine properties, the glass, and the walled
gardens; and indeed at their place of privation close to Buckingham
Palace such a piece of knowledge was but scantily consoling.
[Illustration: PICCADILLY, NEAR DEVONSHIRE HOUSE]
It is to a more public fund of entertainment that the desultory
stranger in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather;
and as I have implied that there is little encouragement in England
to such an appeal it may appear remarkable that I should not have
felt London, at this season, void of all beguilement. But one’s
liking for London—a stranger’s liking at least—has at the best a kind
of perversity and infirmity often rather difficult to reduce to a
statement. I am far from meaning by this that there are not in this
mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest, entertainment, and
delight: what I mean is that, for one reason and another, with all its
social resources, the place lies heavy on the imported consciousness.
It seems grim and lurid, fierce and unmerciful. And yet the imported
consciousness accepts it at last with an active satisfaction and
finds something warm and comfortable, something that if removed would
be greatly missed, in its portentous pressure. It must be admitted,
however, that, granting that every one is out of town, your choice of
pastimes is not embarrassing. If you have happened to spend a certain
amount of time in places where public manners have more frankness
London will seem to you scantly provided with innocent diversions.
This indeed brings us back simply to that question of the absence of
a “public fund” of amusement to which reference was just now made.
You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open air,
to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither
the seat, the ice, nor the band; but on the other hand, faithful at
once to your interest and your detachment, you may supply the place
of these delights by a little private meditation on the deep-lying
causes of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing
is idle—every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not
be accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one
traces a connection between the absence of ices and music and the
essentially hierarchical plan of English society. This hierarchical
plan of English society is the great and ever-present fact to the
mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of life that does not in
some degree betray it. It is really only in a country in which a good
deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of “refinement,” as
we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on
a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The better sort
are too “genteel” and the inferior sort too base. One must hasten to
add too, in justice, that the better sort are, as a general thing,
quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own; they have
those special resources to which I alluded a moment since. They are
persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work
with extraordinary smoothness. If you can sit on a terrace overlooking
gardens and have your _café noir_ handed you in old Worcester cups
by servants who are models of consideration, you have hardly a decent
pretext for going to a public house. In France and Italy, in Germany
and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and encamp for the
evening, under a row of coloured lamps, upon the paving-stones, but it
is ten to one that the count and countess live on a single floor and
up several pair of stairs. They are, however, I think, not appreciably
affected by considerations which operate potently in England. An
Englishman who should propose to sit down, in his own country, at a
café-door, would find himself remembering that he is pretending to
participations, contacts, fellowships the absolute impracticability of
which is expressed in all the rest of his doings.
The study of these reasons, however, would lead us very far from
the potential little tables for ices in—where shall I say?—in Oxford
Street. But, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should
hover about any such articles of furniture. I am afraid they would not
strike us as at the best happily situated. In such matters everything
hangs together, and I am certain that the customs of the Boulevard
des Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonise with the
scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left
and a detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle—these
strike one as some of the more obvious features of the affair. Yet at
the season of which I write one’s social studies must at the least
be studies of low life, for wherever one may go for a stroll or to
spend the summer afternoon the comparatively sordid side of things is
uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who
are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are
always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently
pass, and are always an occasion for deep wonder. But your wonder
will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of the recumbent
British tramp. You perceive among them some rich possibilities. Their
velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their purple necks and
ear-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats, make them look
like stage-villains of realistic melodrama. I may do them injustice,
but consistent character in them mostly requires that they shall have
had a taste of penal servitude—that they shall have paid the penalty of
stamping on some weaker human head with those huge square heels that
are turned up to the summer sky. Actually, however, they are innocent
enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished
philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half
England, and of being pennilessly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes
their romantic attractiveness. These six square feet of brown grass are
their present sufficiency; but how long will they sleep, whither will
they go next, and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to
wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.
[Illustration: THE SHIP, GREENWICH]
The month of August is so uncountenanced in London that, going a few
days since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to
get but half a dinner. The celebrated hotel had put out its stoves
and locked up its pantry. But for this discovery I should have
mentioned the little expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief
to the monotony of a London August. Greenwich and Richmond are,
classically, the two suburban dining-places. I know not how it may be
at this time with Richmond, but the Greenwich incident brings me back
(I hope not once too often) to the element of what has lately been
called “particularism” in English pleasures. It was in obedience to
a perfectly logical argument that the Greenwich hotel had, as I say,
locked up its pantry. All well-bred people leave London after the first
week in August, _ergo_ those who remain behind are not well-bred, and
cannot therefore rise to the conception of a “fish dinner.” Why then
should we have anything ready? I had other impressions, fortunately, of
this interesting suburb, and I hasten to declare that during the period
of good-breeding the dinner at Greenwich is the most amusing of all
dinners. It begins with fish and it continues with fish: what it ends
with—except songs and speeches and affectionate partings—I hesitate to
affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed; for I do know, in a vague
way, that the tail of the creature is elaborately and interminably
fleshy. If it were not grossly indiscreet I should risk an allusion to
the particular banquet which was the occasion of my becoming acquainted
with the Greenwich _cuisine_. I would try to express how pleasant it
may be to sit in a company of clever and distinguished men before the
large windows that look out upon the broad brown Thames. The ships swim
by confidently, as if they were part of the entertainment and put down
in the bill; the light of the afternoon fades ever so slowly. We eat
all the fish of the sea, and wash them down with liquids that bear no
resemblance to salt water. We partake of any number of those sauces
with which, according to the French adage, one could swallow one’s
grandmother with a good conscience. To touch on the identity of my
companions would indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate
in marking a high appreciation of the frankness and robustness of
English conviviality. The stranger—the American at least—who finds
himself in the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a
convivial purpose becomes conscious of an indefinable and delectable
something which, for want of a better name, he is moved to call their
superior richness of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of
the individual in the magnificent temperament of the people. This seems
to him one of the finest things in the world, and his satisfaction
will take a keener edge from such an incident as the single one I may
permit myself to mention. It was one of those little incidents which
can occur only in an old society—a society in which every one that a
newly-arrived observer meets strikes him as having in some degree or
other a sort of historic identity, being connected with some one or
something that he has heard of, that he has wondered about. If they
are not the rose they have lived more or less near it. There is an old
English song-writer whom we all know and admire—whose songs are sung
wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I
just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must needs be his
great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls
out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the
most finished art.
I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming
old park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous
observatory is perched. To do the thing completely you must take
passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon
the Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking,
take a stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an
irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I scarce know
how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich.
It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being afloat, and to
be recommended rather to the enquiring than to the fastidious mind.
It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the crowdedness,
the intensely commercial character of London. Few European cities have
a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has expended more
ingenuity in producing a sordid river-front. For miles and miles you
see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the
sooty faces: in buildings so utterly expressionless it is impossible
to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of the wide
turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect
the dismal image. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal
tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges;
above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and
basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer
is dingy and gritty—it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company
as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong
chiefly indeed to the classes bereft of lustre, assume an harmonious
greyness; and the whole picture, glazed over with the glutinous London
mist, becomes a masterly composition. But it is very impressive in
spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and though it is ugly
it is anything but trivial. Like so many of the aspects of English
civilisation that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit
of expressing something very serious. Viewed in this intellectual light
the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses,
the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities become richly suggestive.
It sounds rather absurd, but all this smudgy detail may remind you of
nothing less than the wealth and power of the British empire at large;
so that a kind of metaphysical magnificence hovers over the scene, and
supplies what may be literally wanting. I don’t exactly understand the
association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East
India Docks, or pass under the dark hugely-piled bridges, where the
railway trains and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel
a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in
especial, seem the very pillars of the empire aforesaid.
It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive and unprofitable
reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the
Greenwich observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The
sight of this useful edifice gave me a pleasure which may at first
seem extravagant. The reason was simply that I used to see it as a
child, in woodcuts, in school geographies, and in the corners of large
maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended
in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were
hung so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and
these corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house
perched among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with
the most engaging steepness. I used always to think of the joy it
must be to roll at one’s length down this curved incline. Close at
hand was usually something printed about something being at such and
such a number of degrees “east of Greenwich.” Why east of Greenwich?
The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the
place a mysterious importance and seemed to put it into relation
with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography—the countries
of unintentional outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas.
Yet there it stood the other day, the precise point from which the
great globe is measured; there was the plain little façade with the
old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so
delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly
old to find that I was not even tempted to begin. There are indeed a
great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in
the most adventurous fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and
footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all
its own. It is filled with magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which
I know nothing but that they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts,
planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary
girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there
are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children;
and from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening
Thames and the moving ships and the two classic inns by the waterside
and the great pompous buildings, designed by Inigo Jones, of the old
Hospital, which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and
converted into a naval academy.
[Illustration: KENSINGTON GARDENS]
Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of
the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door
open and found myself, by a thrilling transition, upon Blackheath
Common. One had often heard, in vague, irrecoverable, anecdotic
connections, of Blackheath: well, here it was—a great green, breezy
place where lads in corduroys were playing cricket. I am, as a rule,
moved to disproportionate ecstasy by an English common; it may be
curtailed and cockneyfied, as this one was—which had lamp-posts stuck
about on its turf and a fresh-painted banister all around—but it
generally abounds in the note of English breeziness, and you always
seem to have seen it water-coloured or engraved. Even if the turf be
too much trodden there is to foreign eyes an intimate insular reference
in it and in the way the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over
it and drizzle down their grey light. Still further to identify this
spot, here was the British soldier emerging from two or three of the
roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his
foppish little cane in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery,
and I asked him where he had come from. I learned that he had walked
over from Woolwich and that this feat might be accomplished in half an
hour. Inspired again by vague associations I proceeded to accomplish
its equivalent. I bent my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in
a general way, to be a nursery of British valour. At the end of my half
hour I emerged upon another common, where the water-colour bravery had
even a higher pitch. The scene was like a chapter of some forgotten
record. The open grassy expanse was immense, and, the evening being
beautiful, it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk. There
were half a dozen cricket-matches, both civil and military. At one
end of this peaceful _campus martius_, which stretches over a hilltop,
rises an interminable façade—one of the fronts of the Royal Artillery
barracks. It has a very honourable air, and more windows and doors, I
imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade
before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept
places of ingress to officers’ quarters. Everything it looks out upon
is in the smartest military trim—the distinguished college (where the
poor young man whom it would perhaps be premature to call the last of
the Bonapartes lately studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of
model camp, a collection of the tidiest plank huts, on the other; a
hospital, on a well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in
the town below there are a great many more military matters: barracks
on an immense scale; a dockyard that presents an interminable dead
wall to the street; an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to
admit me) declared to be “five miles” in circumference; and, lastly,
grogshops enough to inflame the most craven spirit. These latter
institutions I glanced at on my way to the railway-station at the
bottom of the hill; but before departing I had spent half an hour in
strolling about the common in vague consciousness of certain emotions
that are called into play (I speak but for myself) by almost any
glimpse of the imperial machinery of this great country. The glimpse
may be of the slightest; it stirs a peculiar sentiment. I know not
what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an admiration for the
greatness of England. The greatness of England; that is a very off-hand
phrase, and of course I don’t pretend to use it analytically. I use it
romantically, as it sounds in the ears of any American who remounts the
stream of time to the head waters of his own loyalties. I think of the
great part that England has played in human affairs, the great space
she has occupied, her tremendous might, her far-stretching rule. That
these clumsily-general ideas should be suggested by the sight of some
infinitesimal fraction of the English administrative system may seem to
indicate a cast of fancy too hysterical; but if so I must plead guilty
to the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or less set one thinking
of the glory of this little island, which has found in her mere genius
the means of such a sway? This is more than I can tell; and all I shall
attempt to say is that in the difficult days that are now elapsing
a sympathising stranger finds his meditations singularly quickened.
It is the imperial element in English history that he has chiefly
cared for, and he finds himself wondering whether the imperial epoch
is completely closed. It is a moment when all the nations of Europe
seem to be doing something, and he waits to see what England, who
has done so much, will do. He has been meeting of late a good many of
his country-people—Americans who live on the Continent and pretend to
speak with assurance of continental ways of feeling. These people have
been passing through London, and many of them are in that irritated
condition of mind which appears to be the portion of the American
sojourner in the British metropolis when he is not given up to the
delights of the historic sentiment. They have declared with assurance
that the continental nations have ceased to care a straw for what
England thinks, that her traditional prestige is completely extinct
and that the affairs of Europe will be settled quite independently of
her action and still more of her inaction. England will do nothing,
will risk nothing; there is no cause bad enough for her not to find a
selfish interest in it—there is no cause good enough for her to fight
about it. Poor old England is defunct; it is about time she should
seek the most decent burial possible. To all this the sympathetic
stranger replies that in the first place he doesn’t believe a word of
it, and in the second doesn’t care a fig for it—care, that is, what
the continental nations think. If the greatness of England were really
waning it would be to him as a personal grief; and as he strolls about
the breezy common of Woolwich, with all those mementoes of British
dominion around him, he vibrates quite too richly to be distracted by
such vapours.
He wishes nevertheless, as I said before, that England would _do_
something—something striking and powerful, which should be at once
characteristic and unexpected. He asks himself what she can do, and
he remembers that this greatness of England which he so much admires
was formerly much exemplified in her “taking” something. Can’t she
“take” something now? There is the “Spectator,” who wants her to
occupy Egypt: can’t she occupy Egypt? The “Spectator” considers this
her moral duty—enquires even whether she has a right _not_ to bestow
the blessings of her beneficent rule upon the down-trodden Fellaheen.
I found myself in company with an acute young Frenchman a day or two
after this eloquent plea for a partial annexation of the Nile had
appeared in the supersubtle sheet. Some allusion was made to it, and my
companion of course pronounced it the most finished example conceivable
of insular hypocrisy. I don’t know how powerful a defence I made of it,
but while I read it I had found the hypocrisy contagious. I recalled
it while I pursued my contemplations, but I recalled at the same time
that sadly prosaic speech of Mr. Gladstone’s to which it had been a
reply. Mr. Gladstone had said that England had much more urgent duties
than the occupation of Egypt: she had to attend to the great questions
of—— What were the great questions? Those of local taxation and the
liquor-laws! Local taxation and the liquor-laws! The phrase, to my
ears, just then, sounded almost squalid. These were not the things
I had been thinking of; it was not as she should bend anxiously over
these doubtless interesting subjects that the sympathising stranger
would seem to see England in his favourite posture—that, as Macaulay
says, of hurling defiance at her foes. Mr. Gladstone may perhaps
have been right, but Mr. Gladstone was far from being a sympathising
stranger.
1877.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]