Reader, do you know the Cave of Harmony? If you do not, so much the
better. If you are one of its _habitues_, I fear no words of mine can
make you forsake it. It is said the Cave is altered since we were
there--so much the better; Thackeray, I think, had something to do with
that reform--and that now nothing objectionable is sung. Still, I doubt
whether drinking and harmony after 12 P.M. can do much good. You and I,
it may be, are old men,
"Ruin'd trunks on wither'd forks,
Empty scarecrows you and I."
We have run through youth with money in our pockets and time on our
hands, and have seen all that life can offer, and know, what so many do
not, that pleasure's cup but sparkles near the brim. What we have done
and been has been wine working on the fiery impulses of young blood, but
now, sir, with our hair turning grey and our eyes growing dim, shall we
not lift up a warning voice, and ask youth to pause ere it take the final
plunge which for years, it may be for ever, shall estrange it from
innocence, and peace, and God.
It is midnight in the great city in which we write. For a while sorrow
and care are veiled from the eyes of men, and to the poorest and most
toilworn come pleasant dreams. The shops have long been closed, the roar
of the streets has died away, the theatres have discharged their jaded
crowds, and as we walk along, meeting now and then a poor drunkard
reeling home--or a policeman silently patrolling the streets--or one of
the unfortunates, by turns man's victim and curse--or some of the
votaries of dissipation who are awake when other men are asleep--we
realize all the grandeur and poetry and magnificence of London by night,
and wonder not that Savage and Johnson should have found such a
fascination in the scene, and that other sons of genius have read such
sermons in its eloquent stones. Let us stroll towards Covent Garden--in
another hour it will be ringing with the oaths and execrations of
seemingly all the market gardeners in Middlesex--and enter that doorway
indicated by the glare of gas; come with me down these stairs, and into
that room, the door of which the waiter holds obligingly open. Let us
stand here while we recover from the effect of the fumes of grog and the
smoke of tobacco. You find yourself in a room holding perhaps 1200
gentlemen; look around, this is a respectable place, this Cave of
Harmony, there are no poor people here. We have heavy swells,
moustached, and with white kids--officers in the army--scions of noble
houses--country gentlemen, and merchants, and lawyers in town on
business--literary men, medical students, and old fogies, with every
moral sensibility dead, who have sat here for years listening to the same
songs and the same outpourings; they could tell you something, these old
fogies--what changes they have seen, as one generation after another of
students and rakes and men about town have thought it fast to sup every
night within these walls; of course the majority in the room are clerks,
and commercial gents, and fellows in Government situations, learning here
the extravagance which in time will compel them to commit frauds and
forgery, and eventually perhaps land them in a felon's jail. For the
Cave of Harmony is not a cheap place to sup at. The chop and baked
potatoes are excellent but dear, and four or five shillings is a sum soon
spent if you do as every one here does,--take your pint of stout, and
three or four glasses of grog; and the chances are you will meet a
friend, who will persuade you to make a night of it and stroll West with
him, where you will see Vice flaunting more finely and with greater
bravery than in any other capital in Europe. But let us drop these
considerations. We are at one end of a long room, at the other is a
raised platform, on which is a piano, and in front of which some
half-dozen gentlemen are seated--these are the performers. Their faces
you know well enough, for they are in much repute for dinners at the
London Tavern or the Freemasons, and the last time I dined with the
Indigent Blind--with a High Church dignitary in the chair--we had the
whole half-dozen to assist; they are good singers, I willingly confess,
and sing many of them touching songs of youth, and hope, and true love,
and home--but they don't sing the better for singing during the small
hours and in a drinking saloon. That little Hebrew, who has been at it,
he tells me, for upwards of forty years, is not an improvisatore like
Theodore Hook, but he does it well enough for an audience good-natured
and a little the worse for drink. The imitations of a barnyard, with its
cows, and geese, and turkeys, and other live stock, by that poor, seedy,
needy, smiling German, are amusing to hear once, but every one here has
heard them over and over again. What they need is something richer, and
more spicy, as they term it. You see they are getting tired of
sentimental songs, and war songs, and madrigals, and glees. They don't
want to hear--
"I know a maiden fair to see,"
or,
"Down in a flowery vale,
All on a summer morning,"
or,
"In going to my lonely bed
As one that would have slept."
They are careless when Podder sings "Kathleen Mavourneen," and are
indifferent to the manner in which Brown renders
"Beautiful Venice, city of song."
In old times, before the obscenity of the place was done away with,
towards early morning it seemed a perfect Babel. A favourite's name was
sounded--it was repeated with every variety of emphasis in every corner
of the room; the tables were struck with drunken fists till the tumult
became a perfect storm; the master of the place raps the table with an
auctioneer's hammer--"Silence, gentlemen, if you please, Mr --- will sing
a comic song;" and immediately a man in a beggar's costume, and with the
face of an idiot, jumps upon the stage. His appearance was a signal for
a whirlwind of applause. He sang, with accompanying action, some dozen
verses of doggerel, remarkable for obscenity and imbecility. You looked
around, but not a blush did you see in that crowded room; not one single
head was held down in shame; not one high-spirited gentleman rushed
indignantly from the place. On the contrary, the singer was greeted with
the most lavish expression of applause, continued so loudly and so long
that again the proprietor had to announce, "Mr --- will sing another
comic song." But this time the comic singer would not dress for his
part, and you saw a young, good-looking, well-dressed, gentlemanly fellow
voluntarily degrading himself for the pleasure of men more degraded
still. You tell me the comic singer is a happy fellow, that he gets six
guineas a-week, that he lives in a nice little cottage in the
Hampstead-road. I know better than you; the man I write of, after having
been the attraction of the Cave of Harmony for years, after having been
feasted by the nobility and gentry, after having led a career of pleasure
on the most extravagant scale, will go down yet young as a beggar to one
of our sea-port towns, and, after craving in vain a refuge from the
winter's cold and a crust of bread, will die in the workhouse, and be
buried in a pauper's grave. How many of the gay young fellows now around
us will have a similar termination to their career! I never can pass the
Cave of Harmony without thinking of the comic singer as last I saw
him--in the very flush of health and life, stimulated by wine and
applause, little dreaming of the workhouse in which he was so soon to beg
for room to die. But this exhibition is of the past,--the place is
reformed; and how it is patronized is clear, when I state that on the
night of the marriage of the Princess Royal, there were consumed in it 21
dozen kidneys, 478 chops, 280 Welsh rabbits, 1500 glasses of stout, and a
hogshead of pale ale.