uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within
the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism
of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come
up sometimes from London, bringing with them an atmosphere of
publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional
gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the
capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers,
theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to
order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of
Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean
shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up
for the winter.
The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom
artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then,
for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a
party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom
with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while
bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and
onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however,
the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists,
numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the
majority of their kind have flown.
The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too
many to be specified. In a collection of various nationalities, many of
whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair
earth, how could it well be otherwise? It may be observed, however, that
here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where
habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is
_not_, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, _en règle_ to
vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge
acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three
Golden Balls.
Once upon a time, in a Barbizon _auberge_, a certain famous artist and
incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident
of his releasing a friend's valuables from durance.
"The moment I turned in at the Mont de Piété," he said, "_my_ watch took
fright, and stopped ticking on the spot."
That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Piété,
found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye
Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned
from corn-field and meadow.
During the short halt the Bohemian's watch was so largely and frequently
_en évidence_ as to attract attention.
"Yes," he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, "I've just got it
back from a two-years' visit to 'my uncle'."
Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.
"What time is it, Mr. S----?" asked Sophia Primrose, amiably disposed to
resuscitate a forlorn joke.
A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian. For Dean propriety was
already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at
having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the
house-top,--that his watch was again with his "uncle."
Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely
beyond the dread of yet eating "mad cow" travel third-class. But Dean
artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip
quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets
are other than at least second. Our Bohemian was once presented with a
second-class ticket to London. As he scrambled in upon the unwonted
luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.
"The first time we ever travelled second-class in our lives," murmured
Materfamilias.
"I too," responded the cheeky Bohemian.
Another difference between Dean Bohemianism and Continental is
characteristic of the whole race whose land this is. Whereas artists in
France, Italy, and Germany are of gregarious habit and gather for their
summers in rural inns, where they form a community by themselves, the
Dean artist sets up his own vine and fig-tree and has a temporary home,
if ever so small and mean. The farm-houses and cottages of the Dean are
filled with lodgers, all dining at separate tables and living as aloof
from each other as the true Briton always lives. There are advantages in
this aloofness, but it certainly lacks the _camaraderie_, the jolly
good-fellowship, of those picturesque _auberges_ and _osterie_ where
twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof,
meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free,
artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and
adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every
artistic theory possible to the sane and insane mind.
In one of these Continental _auberges_ rough boards a foot in width ran
in one unbroken line round the four sides of the _salle-à-manger_. These
boards were perhaps hazily intended for seats, but their real office
was to hold all the artistic rubbish--smashed color-tubes, broken
stretchers, ragged canvases, discarded palettes, disreputable paint-rags
and oil-tubes--the _auberge_ possessed. But every sunset, as the stream
of artists set in from forest and field, the boards came into other
service. All the work of the day was ranged upon them along the wall,
and while the painters sat at meat comment and criticism grew rampant,
every canvas coming in for its share. That many good lessons were given
and taken in this wise _va sans dire_. That also artistic progress was
punctuated not unseldom with "_bêtise_," "_imbécile_," "_nom du chien_,"
"you're a goose," and "you're another," goes equally without saying to
all who know the unrestraint of artistic Bohemia and the usual attitude
of the human mind under criticism.
The walls of this _salle-à-manger_ were--and are--arranged with panels,
in which _messieurs les artistes_ exercised their skill. It is a marked
peculiarity of these artistic communities that no branch of art is so
popular as caricature. Sometimes these caricatures are amiable,
sometimes the reverse. Thus, when a certain blithe widow was represented
colossally upon the wall with a little man in her eye, the likenesses
were so good and the truth of the caricature so palpable that the widow
herself was moved to as quick laughter as the others. But when American
Palmer worked all day upon a panel to create a sunny sea laughing
radiantly back at a sunny sky, while fantastic lateen-sailed craft
floated like bits of jewelled color between, it was mean, to say the
least, of Scotch Willie to take advantage of the American's departure
and paint out those fairy boats, filling their places with horrible
bloated corpses, floating upon the bright water like a nightmare upon
innocent sleep.
It was in this same _auberge_ that our landlady made this piteous
supplication: "Caricature each other on the walls, _messieurs et
mesdames, si vous voulez_; make portrait busts of the bread and
figurines of the potatoes, and decorate the plates in whatever style of
art you please; but don't, _je vous en supplie_, don't blacken the
table-cloths before they are three days old."
Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation
chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles,
Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it
twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.
"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu_!" moaned Madame. "And only yesterday every
handkerchief upon the line came in bearing the noses of _messieurs et
mesdames_!"
Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial
being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite
eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and
the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping
over" into cloth annexes.
Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in
the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot. There the young
foreign-looking wife, in scarlet _birette_ and jaunty petticoats just
touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and
effective as any pictured _vivandière_, made tea and coffee over a
petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her
husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever
brightened canvas.
For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a
country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with
stars.
For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way
from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one
of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms
are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally
that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and
easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.
Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the
river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among
the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and
dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the
navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side
hostelries by night.
Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although
surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,--a circular cloak of it,
so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick
cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic
with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by
my Lady H----'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a
stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred
accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or
in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed
nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across
the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other
than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken,
and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the
philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where
artists were not and Ethel Cottages as yet unknown.
But where, tell me where, are not artists in England? And where, tell me
where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up
like the tents of an army with banners? For even painters must eat and
be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the
inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic
invasion is sure to find "Ethels" and "Mabels" in red brick and stunning
whitewash, and, like our row of laborers' cottages, cursed by artists,
but inhabited by them.
It was a _soulagement_ of our æsthetic discomfort that so long as we
remained hidden within it we never realized our own hideousness. Now and
then we saw the ugly squareness of our afternoon shadow upon our
aristocratically-gravelled front yard, but ordinarily we saw only dreamy
distances melting into piny duskiness against the far-off sky, the
serpent-like windings of the tranquil river, upon which its navy looked
like dust-motes, fair fields of golden grain, and the farm-houses and
cottages which looked upon our blank brickness with admiration and
wondered why we were despised of our less beautifully housed kind, when
our forks were four-pronged and of silvery seeming and our floors
carpeted to our sybaritic feet. It was only when we returned to our
Ethel after long tramps over the country-side, from a four-miles-distant
Norman tower or a ten-miles-away pre-Reformation abbey, now stable or
granary, that we figuratively beat our breasts and tore our hair because
Fate had not made us _real_ tramps, privileged to sleep in
pre-Reformation stables or 'neath pre-Reformation stars, rather than the
imitation tramps we were, wedded to the habits but loathing the aspect
of red-faced, staring Ethels.
What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss
Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote
her fascinating pages, "A Week in a House-Boat"! We could scarce catch a
glimpse of the river upon our tramps--and it was our constant silvery
accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song--without coming across these
ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths
below come to bask upon the surface. Hundreds of them dot the river
between Teddington and Oxford: once we counted ten between Ethel and the
wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous
hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by
artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week
or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting
river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day
after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or
back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom
primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every
summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and
cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want
to be a gypsy."
Some of these house-boats are miracles of microscopic luxury, doll-like
bedrooms and dining-rooms for pygmies. In some, also, marvels of
culinary skill are evolved in pocket-space by French _chefs_ who spend
their days creating the banquets to which the boaters invite their
_convives_ at evening, when the cold river-mists have driven the navy
into harbor for the night. Others are much simpler in construction and
furnishing, and the inhabitants live largely upon tinned and potted
viands and such light cooking as comes within the possibilities of
oil-stoves and fires of fagots on the banks. Still others--and we often
saw their lordly and corpulent owners reading the "Times" upon the
handkerchief space which serves for porch or piazza before their front
doors--move up and down the river from crack hotel to cracker, taking no
note of picturesque "bits" or of mooring-places where Paradise seems
come down to lodge between Berks and Bucks, caring naught that at this
point four exquisite churches and two interesting manor-houses are
within tramping-distance, at that a feudal castle and the fairest inland
picture that England and nature can offer their lovers, caring only that
at the "King" the trout are the best cooked on the whole river, at the
"Queen" the chops are divine, while at the "Prince" the _perdrix aux
truffes_ are worth mooring there a week for. These house-boaters are
generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their
time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,--and
they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,--exchanging
greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or
idling up and down the river in the luxurious small boats of their
river-made friends. This type of house-boater himself is generally
spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat
is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper,
one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives
during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing
new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!"
Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of
the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal
summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The
equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or
cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest
of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even
although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after
the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and
"Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious
England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on
its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and
frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the
Parks. All prosperous and proper London--the amusement is too costly for
'Arry--seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty
land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand,
every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side
tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in
yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of
highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the
whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival
since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.
One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we
spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman
who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It
is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age
to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a
swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier. Whether or not that
hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve
maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem
out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is
certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens
appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or
three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and
yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts
than like even swallows on the wing. The gabled and ivy-wreathed
Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands
but a few rods from the river's bank. Here, amidst decorous shrubbery,
upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with
gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests. Some
of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes,
and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness
which is the English bathing-dress. In their striped tights on land
these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when
they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild
pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into
the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would
almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor
yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent
upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths
beneath the bright water.
That is what it looks like. But a single glimpse into those cool dappled
depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals,
alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are. For London
does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample
traces of that disporting. We see those traces gleaming and glooming
there,--empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous
remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the
buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at
and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.
A favorite boating-trip is from Teddington up to Oxford, or _vice
versa_, spending a week or two on the way, and stopping at river-side
inns at night. In the season these inns are full to overflowing, and the
roughest and smallest of water-side hamlets holds its accommodations at
lofty premiums. A number of public pleasure-steamers and many private
steam-launches ply up and down, making the whole trip in two or three
days, drawing up at night at towns, and by day provoking curses both
loud and deep by the swash of their tidal waves against the liliputian
navy. Many of the merry boating-parties of men and women seek only
sleeping-accommodations at the inns, and do their own cooking upon bosky
islands, on the wooded or sunny banks of the river, by means of
kerosene- or charcoal-stoves and tiny tents. How appetizingly we have
thus smelt the broiling steak and grilled chop done to a turn even in a
camp frying-pan, as we tramped along the river heights and looked down
upon chatting groups below! How like airs of Araby the Blest the odors
of steaming coffee! how more stimulating than breath of fair Spice Isles
the pungent incense of hissing onions!
As a consequence of this return of Nature's children to Nature's breast,
the _genii loci_, the sylvan sprites, are all frightened inland from the
borders of the beautiful river. Except here and there where huge boards
threaten trespassers and announce that landing is forbidden upon this
Private Property, wild flowers will not grow, the grass looks trampled
and dim, the soft summer zephyrs play among empty paper bags and
relics of grocers' parcels, with sound and sentiment vastly unlike their
natural music among green, waving leaves. The river is spoiled for the
poet and the dreamer, and even the artist must choose his bits with
care. Hyde Park and Piccadilly have come up to the Thames; and what does
Hyde Park care for the poetry of dreaming nature, or what the
river-madmen for aught else than glorious expansion of muscle and
strengthening of sinew and the godlike sense of largeness and lightness
which comes with that strengthening and expanding?
Gliding up and down the river, one would suppose all London had taken to
boats. But we as trampists came to other conclusions as we pegged along
the white Berkshire highways, smooth and even as parquetted floors, day
after day. There the bicycle holds its own, and more too, being largely
adopted not only by genuine 'cyclists, but by others as well whose only
interest is to cover the ground as quickly as possible,--amateur
photographers lashed all over with apparatus, artists shapelessly ditto,
and pastoral postmen square-backed with letter-pouches. Women
tricyclists are only less numerous, and the dignity and modesty must be
crude indeed that find objections to this manner of feminine
peregrination. The costume is simple and plain,--close-fitting upper
garments, without fuss of furbelow, and plain close skirts, met at the
ankles by high buttoned boots. A lady's seat upon a tricycle is far less
conspicuous than upon a horse, her bodily motion is less, and the
movement of her feet scarcely more than is necessary to run a
sewing-machine. She sits at her ease in a perfectly lady-like manner,
and flies over the ground like a courser of the desert, if she pleases,
or rolls quietly and smoothly along, chatting easily with the
pedestrians who amble at her side.
Lady tricyclists attract no attention whatever in Oxford Street. Imagine
one flying down Broadway!