'In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'
I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government
money.
Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the
procession in his office coat.
So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my
twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems
something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited
about it--indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along
in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image
for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I
feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and
bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London
life.
The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by
the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens
singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands
of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and
the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure,
merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a
golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand
that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!
They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou
hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara,
where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods
surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the
quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its
wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses,
the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of
grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.
You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down
Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise
sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of
angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria
Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a
mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human
conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most
wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.
'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the
face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence
like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said
softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch
Street!'
By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was
standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon,
bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way,
and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the
passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out
'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus
quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights
which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought
a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to
call them 'daffadowndillies.'
'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the
east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern;
and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here
in London.
Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's
twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a
great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were
soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like
the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number
of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden
shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the
most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have
felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that
my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all
that.
Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the
Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single
personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous,
bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities,
could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even
they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret,
sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--
'... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ...
Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'
again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a
protest--moreover, it clears the air.
The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense
of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public
company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human
energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams
that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
corners of the City.
As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those
great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
to estimate and prophesy concerning them.
Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's
scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch
Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest'
seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.'
In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only
a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday
morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.
Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of
Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City
churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the
City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards
away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.
Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was
for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I
promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of
that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not
tell my dearest friend.
At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There
was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little
yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would
outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it
seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower
from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an
_immortelle_.