wind of devilish malignancy blew from the Arctic regions, I went to
Windsor, in order to compare the castle as it is with the castle as
Turner saw it, and to see if it is true, as a landscape expert assures
me, that the heightening of the towers has ruined it. Studying the
castle from various points of view, I was consistently impressed by its
adequacy, its mediaeval dominance, and its satisfying solidity.
Spring being so bitterly cold, I left the streets, where there is no
central heating, and where I could catch no glimpse of any one in the
least like Mistress Anne Page, and took refuge first in St. George's
Chapel and then in the State Apartments. The chapel as a whole grows in
beauty, even though new monuments interrupt its lines. The light, coming
from a sky scoured by the northern breeze, was of the most lucid, so
that every detail of the lovely ceiling was unusually visible, while
even in the sombre choir, with its dark stalls and hanging banners and
memorials of the Knights of the Garter, one could see almost distinctly.
It is interesting to have as near London as this a sacred building so
like those which we normally do not enter until we have crossed the
Channel.
I was alone in the chapel, but in the State Apartments made one of a
party of thirty to forty, chiefly soldiers, led round by a guide.
Anything less like Harrison Ainsworth than this guide I cannot imagine;
or, indeed, the inside of any castle less like the fateful and romantic
fortress of that storyteller's dream. Henry VIII's suit of armour we
certainly saw, but the guide's hero is a later king, George IV., who
subjected every room to his altering hand. Of Herne the Hunter there was
not a sign. The most sinister thing there was the bed in the Council
Chamber where visiting monarchs (referred to by the guide as "The
Royals") sleep, one of whom not so very long ago was the Kaiser. "I wish
he was in it now," a bloodthirsty tripper muttered darkly in my ear.
The King's furniture struck me as too ornate, but he has some wonderful
pictures. The guide seemed to dwell with most affection upon a landscape
by Benjamin West, but I remember with more vividness and pleasure a
series of portraits of Henrietta, queen of Charles I., by Van Dyck: one
by the door, and two others flanking the fire-place of the superb Van
Dyck room. There is also a Rubens room containing, among many more
pretentious things, a fascinating portrait of the painter's second wife
and a family group devised on what was, to me, a new principle. The
parents are here seen in the company of their ten children; but, if the
guide is to be believed, on the original canvas only the parents and a
small proportion of this brood were depicted, space being left for the
insertion of the others as year by year they made their appearance. The
scheme offers problems. Since the eldest child looks ten or eleven and
the youngest is a baby, we must suppose (always if the guide is not
misinformed) that the painter added ageing touches to the whole group at
each new sitting.
When one hunts in packs there is little opportunity to examine crowded
walls, and there were many pictures of which I should like to see more
at leisure. Among them was a Rembrandt, a Correggio, a Titian, a
Honthorst, and two Canalettos. There are the punctual carvings by
Grinling Gibbons in Charles II.'s dining-room and elsewhere. Other
outstanding articles are the jewelled throne once belonging to the King
of Candy; the armour of the King's Champion, that obsolete but
picturesque functionary; and the portraits of all the winners of
Waterloo, at home and in the field, except any private soldiers.
On leaving the castle I walked an incredible number of miles down an
impeccably straight road to the equestrian statue that stands out so
bravely against the sky on the hill that closes the vista: Snow Hill.
The statue is of George III., and it is a fine bold thing. Not in the
same class with Verrocchio's bronze horseman in Venice, or Donatello's
bronze horseman in Padua, but impressive by its bigness and superior to
either of those masterpieces in its site, which is not, however, so
commanding as that eminence at Valley Forge which is dominated by
Anthony Wayne on his metal steed. And then I found a really good
confectioner's, whose first two initials correspond startlingly to my
own, and, in the company of frozen Etonians not less greedy than I, ate
little pots of jam until it was time to catch the train.
VIII
THREE LITTLE BACKWATERS
I was saying just now something in praise of the museum of London's
streets: how much entertainment it offered to the eyes of soldiers on
leave. But whether or not soldiers valued it, there is no such
inveterate or more curious wanderer in that museum than myself, and I
wish I had more time to spend in it. So many discoveries to make! I
have, for example, but now stumbled upon Meard Street. I was passing
through Wardour Street, and noting how the old curiosity shops are
giving way to cinema companies (in the window of one of which a waxen
Charlie Chaplin in regal robes is being for ever photographed by a waxen
operator whose hand turns the wheel from dawn to dusk--a symbol of
perpetual "motion"), when suddenly I noticed, running eastwards, a
little row of pure eighteenth-century facades. It was Meard Street, and,
passing along it, I examined these survivals of the London of Johnson
and Sterne with delight, so well preserved are they, with their
decorated portals intact, and in two or three cases the old pretty
numbers still remaining. Why I mention Sterne is for the reason that it
was in Meard Street (according to the invaluable Wheatley and
Cunningham's "London, Past and Present," which sadly needs expanding)
that Kitty Fourmantel, the fair friend of the author of "Tristram
Shandy," lived; and it does not decrease the pleasure of dallying here
to see, in fancy, the lean figure of that most unclerical of clerks in
Holy Orders hurrying along to pay her his respects. Wheatley and
Cunningham can tell us only of two old Meard Streetians, the other being
an architect, new to me, named Batty Langley, and even then their house
numbers are not given. It would be no unamusing task for an antiquary
with human instincts to dig and delve until he had re-peopled every
residence.
My second little street--disregarded by Wheatley and Cunningham
altogether--has only just come into my own consciousness: Goodwin's
Court, which runs from St. Martin his lane to Bedfordbury. It is not a
street at all, merely an alley, one side of which, the south, is the
least Londonish row of dwellings you ever saw, and the other side is the
back doors of the houses on the south of New Street--that busiest and
cheerfullest of old-world shopping centres, where Hogarth's ghost still
walks. New Street is famous in literature by reason of the "Pine Apple"
eating-house where Dr. Johnson in his penury dined regularly for
eightpence: six-pennyworth of meat, one pennyworth of bread, and a penny
for the waiter, receiving better attention than most of the clients
because the penny for the waiter was omitted by them. Take it all round,
New Street (which has not been new these many decades) is not so
different now, the small tradesman being the last thing in the world to
change.
But it was of Goodwin's Court that I was going to write, and of its odd
houses--for each one is like the last, not only architecturally but
through the whim of the tenants too, each one having a vast bow window,
and each window being decorated with a muslin curtain, in front of which
is a row of pots containing a flowerless variety of large-leaved plant,
created obviously for the garnishing of such unusual spaces. Where these
strange plants have their indigenous homes I cannot say--I am the least
of botanists--nor do I particularly care; but what I do want to know is
when their beauty, or lack of it, first attracted a dweller in Goodwin's
Court and why his taste so imposed itself on his neighbours. But for
this depressing foliage I should not mind living in Goodwin's Court
myself, for it is quiet and central--not more than a few yards both from
the Westminster County Court and several theatres. But it would be
necessary for peace of mind first to find out who Goodwin was.
My third little street, which also is an alley untrodden by the foot of
horse, is not a new discovery but an old resort: Nevill's Court, running
eastwards off Fetter Lane, the Nevill (if Wheatley and Cunningham tell
the truth) being Ralph Nevill, Bishop of Chichester, in the thirteenth
century: much of the property about here, it seems, being still in the
possession of that see. The great charm of Nevill's Court is that it
has, right in the midst of the printing world, gardens; within sound of
countless printing presses, the Nevill Courtiers can grow their own
vegetables. Each house has its garden, while the centre house, a stately
double-fronted Jacobean mansion, has quite a big one. The Court has also
a fruiterer's shop, presided over by one of the most genial and
corpulent fruiterers--I almost wrote the fruitiest fruiterers--in the
world (what a wonderful word "fruiterer" is!), and a Moravian chapel.
But these things are as nothing. The most precious treasures of Nevill's
Court that I observed as I walked through it one day in late February
were its buds. On each shrub in each garden were authentic green buds:
trustworthy promises that some day or other another spring was really
coming. And they were the first buds I had seen. It is an exciting
experience, worthy of London, that one's first earnest of the
renaissance should be given by a court off Fetter Lane.
IX
A SELF-MADE STATUE
Not the least of the Zoological Gardens' many attractions is their
inexhaustibility. There is always something new, and--what is not less
satisfactory--there is always something old that you had previously
missed. How is that? How is it that one may go to the Zoo a thousand
times and consistently overlook one of its most ingratiating denizens,
and then on the thousand-and-first visit come upon this creature as
though he were the latest arrival?
There the quaint little absurdity was, all that long while, as ready to
be seen as to-day, but you never saw him, or, at any rate, you never
noticed him. The time was not yet.
Yesterday, for me, the hour of the Prairie Marmot struck.
I had been watching a group of wounded soldiers drifting round the Zoo.
It was very hot, and they were bored. They stopped at each cage, it is
true, but with only a perfunctory interest in most; but when suddenly
one of the little free squirrels made his appearance in the middle of a
path, a galvanic current ran through them, and their visit to the Zoo
became an event. Every member of the company made an individual effort
to coax and conciliate the little scamp; but in vain. The squirrel had
the time of its life. It went through its whole repertory of rapidities
and evasions. It approached, and then, with lightning swiftness,
retreated. It sat up and it crouched; it waved its tail and was waved by
it. It looked a thousand ways at once. It was shy and it was bold, but
it was never bold enough; no soldier, with whatever outstretched bribe,
could ever quite get it. There is, however, caprice in these matters,
for when a lieutenant who had been looking on stooped down and held out
a nut, the squirrel instantly took it and sat perfectly still beside him
while eating it.
No doubt the squirrel takes a pleasure in its capricious flirtations
with danger, but certain it is that it would lose very little fun and no
food at all if it were always friendly; while the joy and excitement--I
am sure excitement is the word--of the lords of creation and their
families who visit the Zoo would be enormously greater.
Moving on, I was conscious, for the first time, of the Prairie Marmot.
Countless are the times that I have passed the enclosure which, though
the Prairie Marmot shares it with the grey squirrel, its North American
compatriot, really belongs to neither of them, but to pigeons and
sparrows. No doubt you know this enclosure; it has on one side of it the
aquarium where the diving-birds pursue their live prey with such
merciless zest and punctuality every day at 12 and 5, and on the other
is the sculptured group of the giant negro in conflict with the angry
mother of cubs.
Coming unconsciously upon this enclosure, I was suddenly aware of the
oddest statuette. Pigeons, squirrels, and sparrows were moving
restlessly about in the eternal quest for food, and in their midst,
obviously made of stone, although coloured to resemble fur, was the
rigid effigy, some ten inches high, of as comic a creature as a human
artist ever designed. There this figure stood, without a flicker. And
then, a small girl with a bag approaching the railings, he came to life
in a flash, the perpendicular suddenly gave way to the horizontal, and
he trotted down to meet her much as any other rodent would do.
The Prairie Marmot is a rat-like creature, but blunter, stockier, twice
as big, and light brown in colour. The learned, of course, after their
wont, know him by a lengthier and more imposing name. Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell, for example, who controls the Zoo so ably and with such
imagination, would never say Prairie Marmot on those occasions when he
has questions to ask as to its well-being in captivity. Nothing so
commonplace. "And, by the way," he would add, having been satisfied as
to the good health of the elephants and the water-beetles, the avadavats
and the hartebeests,--"and, by the way, how is the _Cynomys
Ludovicianus_? Does he seem to thrive? Does he prosper and multiply, or
is the competition of the _Columba Londiniensis_" (meaning the
Metropolitan pigeon) "too much for him?" But, whatever you call him, the
Prairie Marmot remains a most ingratiating creature, and when you see
him with his two tiny hands holding a monkey-nut and consuming it with
eager bites you feel that it must have been for him that the well-worn
phrase, "to sit up and take nourishment," was coined.
In the unimportant intervals between these two actions--this vertical
eating and the sudden transformation of himself into stone, which is his
greatest gift and which he does so often that he has worn his poor tail
into a threadbare stump--the Prairie Marmot is of no particular
interest. He just creeps about or disappears into his crater in the
bank. But as his own statue--so perfect as not only to be the despair
but the bankruptcy of sculptors--he is terrific. And the change is so
swift. One moment he is on all fours, and the next he is a rock, as
though a magician had waved his wand.
Henceforth no visit to the Zoo will be, to me, complete without a few
minutes' contemplation of the _Cynomys Ludovicianus_ in his quick-change
turn.
X
CROWDS--AND A BAD SAMARITAN
Practical jokers wishing to collect a crowd--and this has always been
one of their choicest efforts--stand still and intent, gazing upwards.
Even before the aeroplane was invented no lure was so powerful as this.
In a few minutes hundreds of people will assemble, all looking up, while
the humorist melts away. Probably were London a city of the blind there
would be no concourses at all, for it is to see that brings us together.
Crowds are always looking.
I came upon two little compact knots of people the other day, in both of
which I was struck by the unanimity with which every eye was, literally,
fixed on the same object. Both crowds consisted wholly of men:
twenty-five perhaps, watching, in Aldwych, a girl motor-mechanic at work
on a broken car; while close by, another knot surrounded a Human
Marvel--a red-headed boy who, lacking arms, had trained his feet to
inscribe moral sentiments in coloured chalks on a slate; which, for
feet, is a marvellous thing.
As I watched all these people with hungry eyes and time to spare, I
reflected on the generosity of this great London of ours in the matter
of side-shows, so that there is always something for the loiterer to
look at. During the War the soldier on leave, with too much time on his
hands and no British Museum to beguile him (for it was then closed),
having to find his own British Museum in the streets, was rarely
disappointed of entertainment. Armless Wonders may be rare, but there
was certain to be a road-mender at work in one spot and a horse down in
another, so all was well! As for me, I like to become a member of a
crowd as much as anybody, but the Armless Wonder's poor toes looked so
desperately cold on this particular nipping day that sheer personal
discomfort urged me onwards. But for that I might be there still.
The temper of crowds indicates that mankind in the lump is genial stuff.
When standing among our fellows, watching whatever "cynosure" has been
provided by the Mother of Cities, even the worst of us become innocent:
very children for inquisitiveness. Our community of curiosity leads to
such an extreme as the exchange of remarks. The mere fact that two
strangers are looking at the same thing, though it be only an
asphalt-boilers' cauldron, brings them into harmony, and for the moment
(or hour and a half) they are not strangers but friends. Then, at last
tearing themselves away, they freeze again. Alas, for this tearing away!
The saddest thing about every crowd is that it has, some time, some day,
to dissolve. Roads are mended, horses get on their legs again, men
recover from fits. Hence eyes that arrived expectant sooner or later
will be satiated. That is our tragedy.
But crowds, although normally amiable, can be ugly too, and very
changeable. A friend of mine, who is of a high adventurous impulsiveness
and brimming with humanity, had a taste of the mob's caprice, when from
sheer kind-heartedness he assumed one evening, in Piccadilly Circus, the
care of a homing Scotch soldier who, in an expressive idiom, had become
by reason of too much conviviality "lost to the wide."
Never was a brave warrior more in need of a helper, and my friend threw
himself into the task with a zest and thoroughness that should place him
high in any decently-constructed Honours List. With infinite difficulty
the journey to Euston was performed, by lift and tube, by pullings and
pushings, by shakings and holdings-up, by entreaty and threat.
But a point was reached, in the station itself, where the man lay down
with a supernatural solidity that no outside effort could affect. Such
efforts as had to be made were the signal for the crowd to arrive, and
arrive it did. So far, however, from giving my friend any assistance or
sympathy, let alone admiration for his quixotry and public spirit, this
particular crowd instantly took hold of the situation by the wrong
handle and assumed an attitude of hostility and censure. "Hitting him
when he's down!" said one. "I call it disgusting," said another, "giving
soldiers drink like that." "That's a nice thing, to make the poor fellow
drunk!" said a third. "Ought to be ashamed of himself," said a fourth,
"giving drink to our brave lads!"--and the chorus grew.
My friend tells me that he was never so astonished in his life; and
truly it is a comic situation--to give up one's time and strength in
order to act the Good Samaritan to an unfortunate victim, and then be
accused of being the victimizer. He was angry then, but he laughs now,
and I wish you could hear him tell the story.
XI
BEFORE AND AFTER
To my astonishment I could find no trace of the old publishing house
which I had so often visited; nothing but scaffolding and boardings.
Like so many London premises it had "come down" almost in a night. But
my resentment was a little softened when looking through the chinks
between the boards I discovered that the supplanting building was to be
a theatre. I could see the bare bones of an auditorium, the deep
foundations for the stage and so forth. And as I stood peering there I
tried to realise some of the excitement and fun which were to be
engendered among those girders and stones, so soon to be animated by
that blend of mirth and thrills which makes a theatrical night's
entertainment? To-day the place was a wilderness; to-morrow crowds would
be gathered there. How bright would be the lights, how gay the music,
how the walls, now mere skeletons, would echo and re-echo to laughter
and applause!
All new building is exciting, but there was something peculiarly
attractive in the thought that this great hole in the ground was, when
ultimately enclosed by its bricks and mortar and decoration, to be a
friendly playhouse.
What so cheerless as iron girders and scaffold poles? What so enkindling
as the overture to a play in a crowded, anticipatory theatre?
As I stood at the opening in the hoarding, thinking these thoughts and
becoming every moment an object of deeper suspicion to a watchful
constable, it was borne in upon me that I had not so very long ago
witnessed the very antithesis of the present scene. I say not so very
long ago, meaning distance in time; only three or four years. But in
history a distance vast indeed; for that was before the War, in the
spacious days when travellers could leave England on an impulse, as they
can no more, and passports were seldom needed, and France was gay, and
Italy was careless, and Louvain had a library, and sovereigns were made
not of paper but of gold. Strange, remote Utopian period! At that time
when I had so different a spectacle before my eyes, I was in that
beautiful land where decay is lovely too--I mean, of course, Italy--and
the particular part of Italy was the brown city of Verona, at which I
was stopping for a few hours on the way from Venice, to see the ruins of
the Roman theatre.
These ruins can for several reasons very easily be overlooked by
travellers. One is that the lure of the Coliseum is so powerful;
another, that the wonderful church of S. Zeno must first be visited, and
there is then often little time for anything else but the tombs of the
Scaligers and poor Juliet's reputed last earthly tabernacle. The Roman
theatre, moreover, is rather out of the way; and, well, is not the
Coliseum Roman theatre enough? So you see how easy it is not to do
Verona full justice. And a further obstacle to the examination of the
theatre's ruins is that they demand agility and endurance in no meagre
supply, for one has to climb to great heights, and leap chasms and
descend perilously, like a mountain goat. And Verona is usually
exceedingly hot.
Yet no one visiting Verona should miss this ghost of a playhouse, for,
having seen it, another gap in one's mental picture of Roman
civilisation is filled. It is there possible to visualize the audience
arriving, traversing the long passages in search of their seats,
recognising their friends, jesting in their saturnine way, and then
sitting down to the joys of the performance. Terence and Plautus at
Westminster thereafter should become twice as interesting.
Ruined as it is, the theatre yet retains enough for the imagination to
build upon, and it illustrates, too, the stationary character of
dramatic architecture. Upon the ancient scheme our modern erectors of
theatres have grafted only trifling inessential modifications; the main
lines are the same. Possibly if anything, there has been a decline, for
one thinks of a Roman architect as being thorough enough to test the
view of the stage from every point of the house, whereas in England
there are, I am sure, architects who have never thought it worth while
to visit the gallery.