a malefactor of any importance she would have been hustled into a cab
and lost to sight. Happily, however, she was only a common brawler or
disturber of the peace, and therefore there was no cab. I say happily,
because it is rarely that one sees people so cheered up on a dull cold
day as every one seemed to be who caught sight of her between Gerrard
Street, where the policeman put that deadly grip upon her, and Vine
Street, where she vanished into the station. Watching the effect of her
impact on the street, "Captured to make a London holiday" is the form of
words that ran through my mind.
When we turned from Gerrard Street into Wardour Street we were about
thirty strong. When we turned from Wardour Street into Shaftesbury
Avenue we were forty-five strong, for as the glad news spread we
increased amazingly. It is a point of honour with Londoners to accompany
the fallen on their way. Not to jeer at them, although our absence
would be kinder, nor to sympathize with them; merely to be in whatever
is going on. If our prevalent expression is one of amusement, that is
because we are being entertained, and entertained free. No malice.
And so we proceeded. Every now and then the young woman, who had one of
those thin white faces that often mark the excitable and even the not
quite sane, and who, I fancy, had been drinking, would have stopped, to
enlarge upon her grievance; but the policeman urged her ever onward,
always with those terrible official fingers encircling her arm.
The retinue became alarming, like a food queue on the march. Little boys
who a moment ago had no hopes of any such luck screamed the tidings to
other little boys in the by-ways and these, in their turn, shrieked out
to others, so that reinforcements scampered down Rupert Street and Great
Windmill Street to swell the concourse. In one little boy I watched
horror struggle with joy. "They've pinched a lady!" he exclaimed in
shocked tones, and then hurried to the head of the line to miss nothing
of the outrage. The people on the tops of motor-buses stood up. At
Piccadilly Circus the traffic was suspended.
A pathetic young woman in a long brown overcoat having tried for just a
few moments too long to enter a house in Gerrard Street (to which, for
all I know, she had a perfect right), all London was disorganised!
And so she crossed Regent Street, passed the Piccadilly Hotel, and at
the alley leading to Vine Street was swallowed up. The most eager of the
adults and all the small boys penetrated the alley too, but the rest,
with one last longing look, melted away and resumed the ordinary tedium
of life. The thrill was over....
But the squalor of that march! What she had done I have no notion, but
she was well punished for it long before Vine Street was reached. I hope
that magistrates sometimes take these distances into consideration.
II
A DOOR-PLATE
But for having lived in London long enough to know the rules, or, in
other words, to be aware that nothing is out of place there, I might
have thought of the door-plate which, in Fetter Lane, suddenly caught my
eye as an incongruity. But no; I am inured, and therefore I merely
looked at it twice instead of only once, and passed on with a head full
of mental and intensely uncivic pictures of undauntable men, identical
in patience and hopefulness, standing hour after hour at the ends of
piers all round ours coasts, watching their lines. For the words on the
door-plate were these: "British Sea Anglers' Society."
I shall continue to deny that the notice was out of place, but a certain
oddity (not uncommon in London) may be conceded, for Fetter Lane
otherwise has less marine association than any street that one could
name; and angling is too placid, too philosophic, too reclusive a sport
to be represented by an office absolutely on the fringe of that
half-square mile of the largest city in the world given over to fierce,
feverish activity; where printing presses are at their thickest, busy
and clattering, day and night, in the task of providing Britons with
all--and a little more--of the news, and a fresh sensation for every
breakfast table. Except that upon the breakfast table is often to be
found the herring in one or other of its posthumous metamorphoses, there
is no connecting link whatever. And why one has to belong to a society
with a door-plate in Fetter Lane before drawing mackerel from Pevensey
Bay, or whiting from the Solent, is a question to answer which is beside
the mark; although that fish can be caught from the sea without
membership of this fraternity I myself can testify--for was I not once
in the English Channel in a small boat in the company of two conger eels
and a dogfish, whose noisy and acrobatic reluctance to die turned what
ought to have been a party of pleasure into misery and shame; and shall
I ever forget the look of dismay (a little touched by triumph) on the
face of a humane English girl visiting Ireland, when, after she had
pulled in an unresisting pollock at the end of a trawl line and the
boatman had taken it from the hook and beaten it sickeningly to death
with an iron thole pin, she heard him say, as later, he handed the fish
to a colleague on the landing-stage, "The young lady killed it"?
But this is not London--far, indeed, from it!--although an excellent
example of London's peculiar and precious gift of starting the mind on
extra-mural adventures. The sea, however, is, in reality too, very near
the city, and the closeness of London's relations with it can be tested
in many delightful ways. Although, for example, the natural
meeting-place of those two old cronies, Father Thames and Neptune, is
somewhere about Gravesend, Neptune, as a matter of fact, comes for a
friendly glass with Gog (I almost wrote Grog) and Magog right up to
town. If you lean over the eastern parapet of London Bridge, just under
the clock which has letters instead of numerals, you will see the
stevedores unloading all kinds of wonderful sea-borne exotic
merchandise. The other morning I was the guest of a skipper of one of
these vessels, and sat in his cabin (which smelt, authentically, of
tobacco smoke as only a cabin can,) with his first engineer, and ate
ship's biscuits and heard first-hand stories of the sinking of the
_Titanic_, together with details of a romance in the European quarter of
a certain African port all ready to the magic hand of Mr. Conrad. Twelve
minutes later I was in a club in Pall Mall!
But there is no need to enter a cabin, although that is, of course, the
pleasantest way, for if you wander down to the Tower you can sit on an
old cannon on the quay and have the music of cordage in your ears, and
if you climb to the top of the Tower Bridge the scene below you has the
elements of a thousand yarns. And there are streets near the docks which
might have been cut out of Plymouth or Bristol. Now and then, indeed,
London may be said to be actually on the sea.
Such excursions are for the hours of light. In the hours of darkness I
used to have, years ago, a favourite river-side refuge. In those days,
when cabmen asked for custom instead of repulsing it, and public-houses
remained open until half-past 12 a. m., I had for fine summer nights,
after a dull play or dinner, a diversion that never failed; and this was
to make my way--if possible with a stranger to such sights and scenes,
and an impressionable one--to the Angel at Rotherhithe and watch the
shipping for an hour. The Angel is difficult of access, but once there
you might be at Valparaiso. It is a quarter of a mile below the Tower
Bridge on the south bank, with a wooden balcony overhanging the water,
and a mass of dark creaking barges moored below. Here on the balcony we
used to sit, while the great ships stole by at quarter speed, groping
for their moorings, and strange lights appeared and disappeared, and
voices hailed each other and were answered, and little sinister rowing
boats moved here and there on unknown missions, and perhaps an excursion
steamer, back very late from Margate, with its saloon all lighted and a
banjo bravely making merry to the bitter end, would glide past towards
London Bridge; and such is the enchantment of ships and shipping that
not even she could break the spell.
May the Angel survive the deluge! If not, I must carry out the dream of
my life, and make friends with the captain of a Thames tug.
III
ANGEL ADVOCACY
For more than half a century the humourist gravelled for matter has
found the ugliness of the Albert Memorial an easy escape from his
difficulties. To mention it is to raise a laugh.
But is it so ugly?
Conceiving that the time was ripe to put my own authentic impressions
above hearsay, I have made a pilgrimage to this shrine and subjected it
to the most careful examination.
I was amply repaid. Alike when resting on the comfortable seats around
its enclosure, taking in the structure as a whole, or when scrutinising
its sculptures at close range, I was pleasantly entertained, and I came
to the decision that the Albert Memorial not only has more in it to
attract than to repel, but is a very remarkable summary of the triumphs
of Science and Art: as good a lesson book as bronze and stone could
compile.
But even if this judgment is wrong, and the Albert Memorial really
deserves the facile execration by you and me which so long has been its
portion, that is not all. The subject is by no means closed. For you and
I are not everybody; we are getting old and tired and exacting, and we
are more disposed to complain of what we miss than to be happy with what
we find. There are, in the world, others whose attitude is simpler than
ours, whose views quite possibly are more important, to whose by no
means foolish eyes the Albert Memorial is beyond praise--adequate,
stimulating, splendid. I mean children.
Sir Gilbert Scott, the designer of the Albert Memorial, knowing, either
consciously or subconsciously--but the result is the same--that the
principal frequenters of Kensington Gardens are children, behaved
accordingly.
Those coloured pinnacles, those queens and angels high up in the sky
under the golden cross, those gay mosaics against the blue, fill
children with wondering delight. The emblematical groups of
statuary--America with its buffalo and Red Indian, Asia with its
elephant, Africa with its giant negro--must be thrilling, too; and when
it comes to the great men around the base--the musicians (Gluck's head
is really masterly), the poets, with Homer between Shakespeare and
Milton, the painters, with Turner transformed to elegance, the
architects, the sculptors, all so capable and calm and bland, and all
exactly the same height--I am with the children in their admiration.
This mass meeting of the intelligentsia is a reminder of all that is
best in literature and art, but most noticeably does it bring back the
memory of great buildings--an unusual emphasis being laid upon those
commonly anonymous and taken-for-granted masters, the architects.
Indeed, such is this emphasis that Giotto and Michael Angelo each comes
into the scheme twice, once as painter and again for structural genius.
The Albert Memorial contains all the materials for a pageant; it is, in
fact, a pageant crystallised; and if the myriad figures in the frieze
and in the groups were one moonlight night released by the magician who
turned them to stone and, coming to life, were to march through
Kensington Gardens, they would make, not only an impressive sight, as
they wound among the trees, with Asia's elephant leading, but as
representative a procession of the shining ones of the earth as Mr.
Louis Napoleon Parker could invent.
It is my belief that if only a few jackdaws could be persuaded to make
their home in its higher crevices, the Albert Memorial would
automatically take its place among the worshipful structures and be
mocked at no more. For that is what is needed. Beneath the jackdaw's
wing, where so many of our cathedrals repose, sanctity and authority
would be conferred upon it. As one looks up to the golden summit, one is
conscious of the absence of this discriminating and aloof yet humanizing
bird, black against the sky, critical if not actually censorious in his
speech, and an unmistakable indication that the building is noteworthy.
IV
THE SOANE HOGARTHS
No sooner was Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields open
again, after its long closure, than I hastened there to renew
acquaintance with that remarkable, almost incredible, pictorial
document, Hogarth's "Election" series. Modern elections are frequent
enough to add piquancy to the comparison, but apart from that it is
instructive to see in what spirit our not very remote ancestors
approached the ordeal of being returned to Parliament. The world may not
have advanced very perceptibly in many directions, but, if Hogarth is
trust-worthy, only a master of paradox could successfully maintain that
no progress is to be noted in the manufacture of legislators.
Not, however, that everything here depicted is obsolete. Far from it.
The groundwork is the same, and probably will always be so, but there is
now less coarseness. There is also more order, more method. And one has,
furthermore, to remember that Hogarth was a synthetic satirist, and a
rather wicked wit to boot. He assembled his puppets rather than found
them all together, and it amused him to heighten effects and to score
off his pet butts when he could. All these allowances, however, being
made, I fancy that the "Election" series has a good deal of old England
in it.
The series begins with the entertainment given by the two candidates of
the Court Party to their supporters, and even among Hogarth's works this
scene is remarkable for the number of things that are occurring at once.
No one excelled our English master in this crowding of incident, not
even Breughel or Teniers. While one of the candidates is, doubtless for
strictly political reasons, permitting himself to be caressed by an old
woman, a small girl abstracts his gold ring, and a man singes his wig
with a clay pipe. In the street outside the room is a procession of the
rival party, throwing through the window half-bricks, one of which is
seen to have just smashed a gentleman's head, while another gentleman,
injured at a slightly more remote period of the campaign, is being
anointed with spirits without, while he consumes spirits within. At the
end of the table the mayor of the independent borough, having been
reduced by too many oysters and too much liquor to a state of collapse,
is being bled by a surgeon. An orchestra, including a left-handed
fiddleress and the bagpipes, plays throughout; and a small boy, in
spite of the mayor's condition, continues to mix punch in a mash tub.
All this at once!
That was overnight. The next day the canvassing begins, and it is
superfluous to state that bribery and corruption are rife. Here, again,
is a wealth of synchronous occurrence. On the left are seen two gay
ladies persuading one of the candidates to buy trinkets for them from a
pedlar. That could hardly be done to-day, at any rate so openly; but
another of the incidents is of all time: a conversation between two men,
a barber and a cobbler, in which the barber explains how a certain naval
engagement was won, symbolising the ships by pieces of a broken clay
pipe, very much as tap-room tacticians for many years to come will be
reconstructing the battle of Jutland or the retreat from Mons.
Then the polling. Here is more simultaneous confusion. In a panic the
agent has collected every possible voter, including the maimed, the
blind, and even the idiotic, and they are attesting before the officer,
while protests against their validity as voters are being urged by the
opposite party's lawyer. The candidates themselves are on the hustings,
and in the distance Britannia's coach has broken down!
Finally, we see the Chairing of the Members--one of whom is depicted in
the foreground, very insecure on his crazy throne, while the shadow of
the other's approach is visible on a wall. That chairing has gone out
should be a source of extraordinary relief at Westminster. Indeed, were
it still the custom, many a modern man--and certainly all the fat
ones--would decide to seek fame elsewhere than in Parliament. Hogarth's
candidate was peculiarly unfortunate in his bearers, one of whom has
just been hit on the head by a flail, and another has collided with an
old woman who was thrown down by a runaway litter of pigs. Meanwhile,
the man with the flail fights a sailor with a cudgel, the cause of the
combat being apparently the presence of a performing bear and a monkey;
and, overcome by the fracas, a lady faints. Elsewhere, in the inn on the
left, the defeated party are consoling themselves with a banquet, a
practice that has by no means died out.
Only those who have been through the agonies and excitements of an
election can say how far Hogarth has ceased to be a faithful delineator
of his fellow-countrymen; but one thing is certain, and that is that
time has done nothing to impair the liveliness of his record.
V
GREENWICH HOSPITAL
After being shut for some years--to protect it from certain dissatisfied
ladies who in the dim and distant past took it out of pictures if they
did not get the vote--the Painted Hall at Greenwich was again opened in
1919, not, I hope, to close its doors to the public any more. All people
interested in our naval history and the men who made it must acquire the
Greenwich habit (although whitebait and turtle soup are no longer
available to sustain them at the adjacent "Ship"), but in particular
should the Nelson devotees be happy, for the Painted Hall is rich in
portraits of him, portraits of his friends, pictures of scenes in his
life, pictures of his death, and personal relics. Indeed this Hall is to
Nelson what the Invalides is to Napoleon. Sir John Thornhill (with whose
daughter Hogarth ran away) may have covered its walls and its ceiling
with Stuarts and allegory--at three pounds the square yard for the
ceiling work and one pound for the walls--but it is not of Stuarts and
allegory that one thinks, it is of the most fascinating and romantic and
sympathetic of British heroes and the greatest of our admirals.
Nelson is brought very near us. Among the personal relics are the very
clothes he was wearing when he died on the _Victory_, the codicil to his
will, written in his big left-hand characters and witnessed by the
friend, Captain Hardy, in whose arms he sank. On a neighbouring wall is
Turner's great lurid painting of the _Victory_ in action, while
elsewhere in the Museum will be found a model of the whole battle, with
the _Victory_ closely engaged with the _Redoubtable_, from whose
mizzen-top the fatal bullet is supposed to have been fired.
There are many other intimate souvenirs; and once there were more, but
thieves intervened. From those stolen in a burglary many years ago (the
windows have since had bars put to them) the only one to be regained was
Nelson's gold watch; and this was found--where do you think? Hidden in a
concertina somewhere in Australia. But after those wanderings and
vicissitudes it now reposes again in safety in the Painted Hall, for all
hero-worshippers to covet.
Complete as the Nelson collection appears to be, one realises, on
reflection, that only as a sailor is he celebrated here. We see him in
every aspect of his fighting career; we see his friends: sturdy old
William Locker, who was a governor of this Hospital, and others; we see
his admirals and captains. But of Emma Hamilton no trace!
The Painted Hall, from Wren's design, was built by William and Mary. The
Museum fills several rooms in an adjacent building which was to have
been a riverside palace for Charles II. It is notable chiefly for its
relics of the other hero of Greenwich Hospital, Sir John Franklin. It is
also rich in models of ships, but of models of ships I personally can
very quickly have a surfeit; rather would I sit beside the Thames and
watch the real vessels go by--the big tramp steamers homing laden from
abroad or leaving in ballast for the open sea; the little busy tugs,
with their retinue of lighters; and the brown-sailed barges moving
swiftly with the stream. The other day there was a merry breeze under a
cloudless sky, and the air was filled with the music of the Greenwich
symphony, which is played by an orchestra entirely composed of foghorns
and hooters.
But Greenwich is amphibious. The river may not be for all tastes; there
is the park too, with its avenues climbing to the heights of Blackheath.
The deer have gone; but the Observatory remains, for the accurate
adjustment of watches, and there is the distant prospect of London of
which the great landscape painters used to be so fond, from the corner
of the terrace. It is much the same as when Turner and others limned it,
save that to-day the dome of St. Paul's seems to rise from the very
middle of the Tower Bridge.
VI
KEW IN APRIL
Kew Gardens in the old days used to be largely a German paradise, for
the Teutons in our midst found them more like their own pleasaunces,
although wanting in beer, than any other London resort. But when I was
last there, in 1919, I heard no German tones. A few French voices
mingled with the thrushes and blackbirds; and a number of American
soldiers, not unaccompanied by British beauty, sat on secluded seats.
The rest of us were natives, promenading with true national decorum,
carefully obeying all the laws concerning birds'-nesting, throwing paper
about, smoking, and (in the glass-houses) keeping to the right, without
the observance of which scientific botany cannot prosper. And for some
reason or other (connected no doubt with the universal advance in the
cost of life which has been agreed upon as necessary or salutary) we
were all forced to pay a penny for admission.
It annoys me to think that not until the Germans vacated the gardens was
this entrance fee charged. To them (as to us for generations) Kew was
free; now that they have disappeared, one of the results of their
provocative belligerence is that it is free no longer!
Although early yet both for flower and leaf, the daffodils were already
millions strong, and would be stronger; in the rock garden the
saxifrage's tender mauve clusters were to be seen, and there was a patch
of the lovely _Antennaria Plantagenia_ at its best. But the most
beautiful object at the moment--and that which I went especially to
see--was the Yulan, the Chinese magnolia, _Magnolia conspicua_, in
nearly full bloom. Imagine a great tree with black boughs and twigs
exquisitely disposed, from which burst ten thousand lilies of a dazzling
purity. No buds, no leaves; nothing but these myriad serene white
flowers springing from the hard wood. The position of the tree adds to
the strangeness and beauty of it, for it is remote from anything formal,
between the biggest glass-house and the edge of the arboretum. On
Saturday, seen against an indigo thunderbank, it was unearthly in its
luminosity.
I have to thank the rain for driving me into the Royal Palace, which,
though I have known Kew for so many years, I had never entered before.
In this pleasant mansion, red brick without and white panelling within,
and smaller than would satisfy the requirements of any war profiteer
to-day, poor old George III. passed part of the clouded evening of his
long reign. The rooms retain certain of their pictures--chiefly Dutch
flower and bird subjects, very gloomy and congested, and a large
portrait of "Farmer George," done by the famous Miss Linwood in
woolwork--and there are a few pieces of dreadful ancient furniture in
one of the Queen's apartments; but otherwise they are empty.
In spite of the associations of the palace--the deranged old monarch and
his stuffy Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (recollections of Fanny
Burney's "Diary" and of Peter Pindar's "Lousiad" kept chasing each other
through my mind)--the general feeling in it is one of cheerfulness, the
result, I fancy, as much of the proportions and whiteness of the rooms
as of its situation in the green sanctuary.
VII
ROYAL WINDSOR