I
They differed greatly from each other, but there was something to be
said for each. There seemed in respect to the first a high consensus
as to its being a pity that any stranger should ever miss the Derby
Day. Every one assured me that this was the great festival of the
English people and that one didn’t really know them unless one had
seen them at it. So much, since it had to do with horse-flesh, I could
readily believe. Had not the newspapers been filled for weeks with
recurrent dissertations upon the animals concerned in the ceremony?
and was not the event, to the nation at large, only imperceptibly less
momentous than the other great question of the day—the fate of empires
and the reapportionment of the East? The space allotted to sporting
intelligence in a compact, eclectic, “intellectual” journal like the
“Pall Mall Gazette,” had seemed for some time past a measure of the
hold of such questions upon the native mind. These things, however,
are very natural in a country in which in “society” you are liable
to make the acquaintance of some such syllogism as the following. You
are seated at dinner next a foreign lady who has on her other hand a
communicative gentleman through whom she is under instruction in the
art of the right point-of-view for English life. I profit by their
conversation and I learn that this point-of-view is apparently the
saddle. “You see, English life,” says the gentleman, “is really English
country-life. It’s the country that is the basis of English society.
And you see, country-life is—well, it’s the _hunting_. It’s the hunting
that is at the bottom of it all.” In other words “the hunting” is the
basis of English society. Duly impressed with this explanation, the
American observer is prepared for the huge proportions of the annual
pilgrimage to Epsom. This pilgrimage, however, I was assured, though
still well worth taking part in, is by no means so characteristic as
in former days. It is now performed in a large measure by rail, and
the spectacle on the road has lost many of its earlier and most of
its finer features. The road has been given up more and more to the
populace and the strangers and has ceased to be graced by the presence
of ladies. Nevertheless, as a man and a stranger, I was strongly
recommended to take it, for the return from the Derby is still, with
all its abatements, a classic show.
I mounted upon a four-horse coach, a charming coach with a yellow
body and handsome, clean-flanked leaders; placing myself beside the
coachman, as I had been told this was the point of vantage. The coach
was one of the vehicles of the new fashion—the fashion of public
conveyances driven, for the entertainment of themselves and of the
public, by gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby Day all the coaches that
start from the classic headquarters—the “White Horse” in Piccadilly—and
stretch away from London toward a dozen different and well-selected
goals, had been dedicated to the Epsom road. The body of the vehicle
is empty, as no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thirteen
places on the top. On the Derby Day, however, a properly laden coach
carries a company of hampers and champagne-baskets in its inside
places. I must add that on this occasion my companion was by exception
a professional whip, who proved a friendly and amusing cicerone.
Other companions there were, perched in the twelve places behind me,
whose social quality I made less of a point of testing—though in the
course of the expedition their various characteristics, under the
influence of champagne, expanded so freely as greatly to facilitate the
process. We were a society of exotics—Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans.
There were only two Britons, and these, according to my theory, were
Australians—an antipodal bride and groom on a centripetal wedding-tour.
The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of London, is sufficiently
pretty; but the part of it which most took my fancy was a district
preëminently suburban, the classic community of Clapham. The vision
of Clapham had been a part of the furniture of one’s milder historic
consciousness—the vision of its respectable common, its evangelical
society, its rich drab humanity, its goodly brick mansions of the
Georgian era. I now seemed really to focus these elements for the
first time, and I thought them very charming. This epithet indeed
scarcely applies to the evangelical society, which naturally, on
the morning of the Derby Day and during the desecrating progress of
the Epsom revellers, was not much in the foreground. But all around
the verdant if cockneyfied common are ranged commodious houses of
a sober red complexion, from under whose neo-classic pediments you
expect to see a mild-faced lady emerge—a lady in a cottage-bonnet
and mittens, distributing tracts from a green silk satchel. It would
take, however, the very ardour of the missionary among cannibals to
stem the current of heterogeneous vehicles which at about this point
takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears them in its rumbling,
rattling tide. The concourse of wheeled conveyances of every possible
order here becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top of the coach
proportionately absorbing. You begin to perceive that the brilliancy
of the road has in truth departed and that a sustained high tone of
appearance is not the note of the conditions. But when once you have
grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous. You perceive that
you are “in” for the vulgar on an unsurpassable scale, something
blatantly, unimaginably, heroically shocking to timid “taste;”
all that is necessary is to accept this situation and look out for
illustrations. Beside you, before you, behind you, is the mighty London
populace taking its _ébats_. You get for the first time a notion of
the London population at large. It has piled itself into carts, into
omnibuses, into every possible and impossible species of “trap.”
A large proportion of it is of course on foot, trudging along the
perilous margin of the middle way in such comfort as may be gathered
from fifteen miles’ dodging of broken shins. The smaller the vehicle,
the more rat-like the animal that drags it, the more numerous and
ponderous its human freight; and as every one is nursing in his lap a
parcel of provender as big as himself, wrapped in ragged newspaper,
it is not surprising that roadside halts are frequent and that the
taverns all the way to Epsom (it is wonderful how many there are) are
encompassed by dense groups of dusty pilgrims, indulging liberally in
refreshment for man and beast. And when I say man I must by no means
be understood to exclude woman. The female contingent on the Derby
Day is not the least remarkable part of the London outpouring. Every
one is prepared for “larks,” but the women are even more brilliantly
and resolutely prepared than the men; there is no better chance to
follow the range of type—not that it is to be called large—of the
British female of the lower orders. The lady in question is usually
not ornamental. She is useful, robust, prolific, excellently fitted
to play the somewhat arduous part allotted to her in the great scheme
of English civilisation, but she has not those graces which enable her
to lend herself easily to the decoration of life. On smaller holidays,
or on simple working-days, in London crowds, I have often thought she
had points to contribute to the primary fine drawing, as to head and
shoulders, of the Briton of the two sexes as the race at large sketches
them. But at Epsom she is too stout, too hot, too red, too thirsty,
too boisterous, too strangely accoutred. And yet I wish to do her
justice; so I must add that if there is something to which an American
cannot refuse a tribute of admiration in the gross plebeian jollity
of the Derby Day, it is not evident why these dowdy Bacchantes should
not get part of the credit of it. The striking thing, the interesting
thing, both on the outward drive and on the return, was that the
holiday was so frankly, heartily, good-humouredly taken. The people
that of all peoples is habitually the most governed by decencies,
proprieties, rigidities of conduct, was for one happy day unbuttoning
its respectable straight-jacket and affirming its large and simple
sense of the joy of life. In such a spectacle there was inevitably much
that was unlucky and unprofitable; these things came uppermost chiefly
on the return, when demoralisation was supreme, when the temperament
of the people had begun really to take the air. For the rest, to
be dressed with a kind of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and
violently flushed, to laugh perpetually at everything and at nothing,
thoroughly to enjoy, in short, a momentous occasion—all this is not, in
simple persons of the more susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime.
[Illustration: THE START FOR THE DERBY]
The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and disposed by nature
herself in sympathetic prevision of the sporting passion. It is
something like the crater of a volcano without the mountain. The outer
rim is the course proper; the space within it is a vast, shallow,
grassy concavity in which vehicles are drawn up and beasts tethered
and in which the greater part of the multitude—the mountebanks, the
betting-men, and the myriad hangers-on of the scene—are congregated.
The outer margin of the uplifted rim in question is occupied by the
grand stand, the small stands, the paddock. The day was exceptionally
beautiful; the charming sky was spotted over with little idle-looking,
loafing, irresponsible clouds; the Epsom Downs went swelling away
as greenly as in a coloured sporting-print, and the wooded uplands,
in the middle distance, looked as innocent and pastoral as if they
had never seen a policeman or a rowdy. The crowd that spread itself
over this immense expanse was as rich representation of human life
off its guard as one need see. One’s first fate after arriving, if
one is perched upon a coach, is to see the coach guided, by means
best known to the coachman himself, through the tremendous press of
vehicles and pedestrians, introduced into a precinct roped off and
guarded from intrusion save under payment of a fee, and then drawn
up alongside of the course, as nearly as possible opposite the grand
stand and the winning post. Here you have only to stand up in your
place—on tiptoe, it is true, and with a good deal of stretching—to
see the race fairly well. But I hasten to add that seeing the race is
indifferent entertainment. In the first place you _don’t_ see it, and
in the second—to be Irish on the occasion of a frolic—you perceive it
to be not much worth the seeing. It may be fine in quality, but in
quantity it is inappreciable. The horses and their jockeys first go
dandling and cantering along the course to the starting-point, looking
as insubstantial as sifted sunbeams. Then there is a long wait, during
which, of the sixty thousand people present (my figures are imaginary),
thirty thousand declare positively that they have started, and
thirty thousand as positively deny it. Then the whole sixty thousand
are suddenly resolved into unanimity by the sight of a dozen small
jockey-heads whizzing along a very distant sky-line. In a shorter space
of time than it takes me to write it, the whole thing is before you,
and for the instant it is anything but beautiful. A dozen furiously
revolving arms—pink, green, orange, scarlet, white—whacking the flanks
of as many straining steeds; a glimpse of this, and the spectacle is
over. The spectacle, however, is of course an infinitesimally small
part of the purpose of Epsom and the interest of the Derby. The finer
vibration resides presumably in having money on the affair.
When the Derby stakes had been carried off by a horse of which I
confess I am barbarous enough to have forgotten the name, I turned
my back to the running, for all the world as if I too were largely
“interested,” and sought entertainment in looking at the crowd. The
crowd was very animated; that is the most succinct description I can
give of it. The horses of course had been removed from the vehicles,
so that the pedestrians were free to surge against the wheels and
even to a certain extent to scale and overrun the carriages. This
tendency became most pronounced when, as the mid-period of the day
was reached, the process of lunching began to unfold itself and every
coach-top to become the scene of a picnic. From this moment, at the
Derby, demoralisation begins. I was in a position to observe it, all
around me, in the most characteristic forms. The whole affair, as
regards the conventional rigidities I spoke of a while since, becomes
a real _dégringolade_. The shabbier pedestrians bustle about the
vehicles, staring up at the lucky mortals who are perched in a kind of
tormentingly near empyrean—a region in which dishes of lobster-salad
are passed about and champagne-corks cleave the air like celestial
meteors. There are nigger-minstrels and beggars and mountebanks and
spangled persons on stilts and gipsy matrons, as genuine as possible,
with glowing Oriental eyes and dropping their _h_’s; these last offer
you for sixpence the promise of everything genteel in life except the
aspirate. On a coach drawn up beside the one on which I had a place,
a party of opulent young men were passing from stage to stage of the
higher beatitude with a zeal which excited my admiration. They were
accompanied by two or three young ladies of the kind that usually
shares the choicest pleasures of youthful British opulence—young
ladies in whom nothing has been neglected that can make a complexion
superlative. The whole party had been drinking deep, and one of
the young men, a pretty lad of twenty, had in an indiscreet moment
staggered down as best he could to the ground. Here his cups proved
too many for him, and he collapsed and rolled over. In plain English
he was beastly drunk. It was the scene that followed that arrested my
observation. His companions on the top of the coach called down to
the people herding under the wheels to pick him up and put him away
inside. These people were the grimiest of the rabble, and a couple
of men who looked like coal-heavers out of work undertook to handle
this hapless youth. But their task was difficult; it was impossible
to imagine a young man more drunk. He was a mere bag of liquor—at once
too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted. He lay in a helpless heap
under the feet of the crowd—the best-intoxicated young man in England.
His extemporised chamberlains took him first in one way and then in
another; but he was like water in a sieve. The crowd hustled over him;
every one wanted to see; he was pulled and shoved and fumbled. The
spectacle had a grotesque side, and this it was that seemed to strike
the fancy of the young man’s comrades. They had not done lunching,
so they were unable to bestow upon the accident the whole of that
consideration which its high comicality deserved. But they did what
they could. They looked down very often, glass in hand, during the
half-hour that it went on, and they stinted neither their generous,
joyous laughter nor their appreciative comments. Women are said to
have no sense of humour; but the young ladies with the complexions did
liberal justice to the pleasantry of the scene. Toward the last indeed
their attention rather flagged; for even the best joke suffers by
reiteration, and when you have seen a stupefied young man, infinitely
bedusted, slip out of the embrace of a couple of clumsy roughs for the
twentieth time, you may very properly suppose that you have arrived at
the furthest limits of the ludicrous.
[Illustration: THE FINISH OF THE DERBY]
After the great race had been run I quitted my perch and spent the
rest of the afternoon in wandering about the grassy concave I have
mentioned. It was amusing and picturesque; it was just a huge Bohemian
encampment. Here also a great number of carriages were stationed,
freighted in like manner with free-handed youths and young ladies with
gilded hair. These young ladies were almost the only representatives
of their sex with pretensions to elegance; they were often pretty and
always exhilarated. Gentlemen in pairs, mounted on stools, habited in
fantastic sporting garments and offering bets to whomsoever listed,
were a conspicuous feature of the scene. It was equally striking that
they were not preaching in the desert and that they found plenty
of patrons among the baser sort. I returned to my place in time to
assist at the rather complicated operation of starting for the drive
back to London. Putting in horses and getting vehicles into line
seemed in the midst of the general crush and entanglement a process
not to be facilitated even by the most liberal swearing on the part
of those engaged in it. But little by little we came to the end of
it; and as by this time a kind of mellow cheerfulness pervaded the
upper atmosphere—the region of the perpendicular whip—even those
interruptions most trying to patience were somehow made to minister
to jollity. It was for people below not to get trampled to death or
crunched between opposing wheel-hubs, but it was all for them to manage
it. Above, the carnival of “chaff” had set in, and it deepened as the
lock of vehicles grew denser. As they were all locked together (with
a comfortable padding of pedestrians at points of acutest contact),
they contrived somehow to move together; so that we gradually got away
and into the road. The four or five hours consumed on the road were
simply an exchange of repartee, the profusely good-humoured savour
of which, on the whole, was certainly striking. The chaff was not
brilliant nor subtle nor especially graceful; and here and there it was
quite too tipsy to be even articulate. But as an expression of that
unbuttoning of the popular straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile
since, it had its wholesome and even innocent side. It took indeed
frequently an importunate physical form; it sought emphasis in the use
of pea-shooters and water-squirts. At its best, too, it was extremely
low and rowdyish. But a stranger even of the most refined tastes might
be glad to have a glimpse of this popular revel, for it would make him
feel that he was learning something more about the English people. It
would give a meaning to the old description of England as merry. It
would remind him that the natives of that country are subject to some
of the lighter of the human impulses, and that the decent, dusky vistas
of the London residential streets—those discreet creations of which
Thackeray’s Baker Street is the type—are not a complete symbol of the
complicated race that erected them.