It was probably a mistake to stop at Portsmouth. I had done so,
however, in obedience to a familiar theory that seaport towns abound
in local colour, in curious types, in the quaint and the strange.
But these charms, it must be confessed, were signally wanting to
Portsmouth, along whose sordid streets I strolled for an hour, vainly
glancing about me for an overhanging façade or a group of Maltese
sailors. I was distressed to perceive that a famous seaport could be
at once untidy and prosaic. Portsmouth is dirty, but it is also dull.
It may be roughly divided into the dockyard and the public-houses.
The dockyard, into which I was unable to penetrate, is a colossal
enclosure, signalised externally by a grim brick wall, as featureless
as an empty blackboard. The dockyard eats up the town, as it were, and
there is nothing left over but the gin-shops, which the town drinks
up. There is not even a crooked old quay of any consequence, with
brightly patched houses looking out upon a forest of masts. To begin
with, there are no masts; and then there are no polyglot sign-boards,
no overhanging upper stories, no outlandish parrots and macaws perched
in open lattices. I had another hour or so before my train departed,
and it would have gone hard with me if I had not bethought myself of
hiring a boat and being pulled about in the harbour. Here a certain
amount of entertainment was to be found. There were great ironclads,
and white troop-ships that looked vague and spectral, like the floating
home of the Flying Dutchman, and small, devilish vessels whose mission
was to project the infernal torpedo. I coasted about these metallic
islets, and then, to eke out my entertainment, I boarded the Victory.
The Victory is an ancient frigate of enormous size, which in the days
of her glory carried I know not how many hundred guns, but whose only
function now is to stand year after year in Portsmouth waters and
exhibit herself to the festive cockney. Bank-holiday is now her great
date; once upon a time it was Trafalgar. The Victory, in short, was
Nelson’s ship; it was on her huge deck that he was struck, and in her
deep bowels he breathed his last. The venerable shell is provided with
a company of ushers, like the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey,
and is hardly less solid and spacious than either of the land-vessels.
A good man in uniform did me the honours of the ship with a terrible
displacement of _h_’s, and there seemed something strange in the way it
had lapsed from its heroic part. It had carried two hundred guns and a
mighty warrior, and boomed against the enemies of England; it had been
the scene of one of the most thrilling and touching events in English
history. Now, it was hardly more than a mere source of income to the
Portsmouth watermen, an objective point for Whitsuntide excursionists,
a thing a pilgrim from afar must allude to very casually, for fear of
seeming vulgar or even quite serious.