Glasgow. -- Origin of the Name. -- Rapid Growth of the City. --
St. Mungo's Injunction to Donald. -- James Watt and the Clyde.
-- George Square. -- Exhibition of Sculpture in the open Air. --
Royal Exchange. -- Wellington again. -- Wanted an Umbrella. --
The Cathedral. -- How it was saved by a Gardener. -- The
Streets. -- Kelvingrove Park. -- The University. -- The Streets
at Night. -- The Tartan Shawls a Godsend. -- The Populace. --
Pity for the poor little Children. -- Sunday Lectures in
Glasgow. -- To the Station, and let us be off.
If, as Shelley has said, "Hell is a city much like London," Glasgow must
be very much like the dungeon where Satan shuts up those who do not
behave themselves.
The word "Glasgow" is of Celtic origin, and, it appears, means _Sombre
Valley_.
The town has not given the lie to its name.
I have travelled from the south of England to the north of Scotland;
I have seen every corner of the great towns, and I do not hesitate to
give the palm to Glasgow: it is the dirtiest, blackest, most
repulsive-looking nest that it was ever given to man to inhabit.
I am bound to say that the Scotch themselves, so justly proud of their
old Scotland, dare not take it upon themselves to defend Glasgow: they
give it over to the visitor, not, however, without having added, as a
kind of extenuating circumstance:
"There is money in it."
* * * * *
At the time of the Reformation, Glasgow was but an insignificant little
town with five thousand inhabitants. At the commencement of this century
it contained about eight thousand. To-day it is the most important city
of Scotland, a city which holds, including the suburbs, very nearly a
million souls, tortured by the passion for wealth or by misery and
hunger.
If the importance of the place is recent, the place itself dates back
more than thirteen centuries. It was indeed in 560 that Saint Mungo
founded a bishopric there, and no doubt, to try the faith of Donald,
whom he had just converted to Christianity, he said to him, as he put an
umbrella into his hands with strict injunctions never to part with it:
"For thy sins, Donald, here shalt thou dwell."
Glasgow is the home of iron and coal. Coal underground, coal in the air,
coal on people's faces, coal everywhere!
There rise thousands of high chimneys, vomiting flames and great clouds
of smoke, which settle down on the town and, mixing with the humidity of
the streets, form a black, sticky mud that clogs your footsteps. No one
thinks of wearing elastic-side boots. They would go home with naked
feet if they did. Glasgow people wear carmen's boots, strongly fastened
on with leather laces.
I assure you that if you were to fall in the street, you would leave
your overcoat behind when you got up.
* * * * *
The neighbourhood of the sea and the Clyde has been, and still is, a
source of prosperity and opulence to the town; and here it behoves me to
speak of the Scotch energy, which has made of this stream a river
capable of giving anchorage to vessels drawing twenty-four feet of
water.
In 1769, the illustrious James Watt was directed to examine the river.
At that time small craft could scarcely enter the river even at high
water. Watt indeed found that, at low tide, the rivulet--for it was
nothing else--had but a depth of one foot two inches, and at high tide
never more than three feet three inches.
To-day you may see the largest ironclads afloat there. This gigantic
enterprise cost no less than L10,300,000.
It was on the Clyde that Henry Bell, in 1812, launched the first
steamboat. Since then the banks of the Clyde have been lined with vast
shipbuilding yards, which turn out from four to five hundred vessels a
year.
Glasgow always had a taste for smoke. Before the war of American
Independence, this town had the monopoly of the tobacco commerce.
Colossal fortunes were realised over the importation of the Virginian
weed in the end of the last century. At present Glasgow trades in coal,
machinery, iron goods, printed calico, etc.
The Glasgow man has been influenced by his surroundings. The climate is
dull and damp, the man is obstinate and laborious; the ground contains
coal and iron for the Clyde to carry to sea, and so the man is a trader.
And, indeed, what is there to be done in Glasgow but work? Out-of-door
life is interdicted, so to speak; gaiety is out of the question;
everything predisposes to industry and thought. People divide their time
between work and prayer, the kirk and the counting-house; such is life
in Glasgow.
* * * * *
And now let us take a stroll, or rather let us walk, for a stroll
implies pleasure, and I certainly cannot promise you that.
The most striking feature of Glasgow is George Square. It is large, and
literally crowded with statues, a regular carnival. It looks as if the
Glasgow folks had said: "We must have some statues, but do not, for all
that, let us encumber the streets with them; let us keep them out of the
way in a place to themselves. If a visitor likes to go and look at them,
much good may it do him." At a certain distance the effect is that of a
cemetery, or picture to yourself Madame Tussaud's exhibition _a la belle
etoile_.
When I say _a la belle etoile_, it is but a figure of speech in Glasgow.
In this exhibition of sculpture, I discover Walter Scott, Robert Burns,
David Livingstone, James Watt, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Thomas
Campbell, and Sir Robert Peel. Some are on foot, some on horseback.
There are none driving, but there is Scott who, in the centre of this
Kensal Green, is perched on the summit of a column eighty feet high. It
is enough to make the tallest chimney of the neighbourhood topple over
with envy. By dint of a little squeezing, it would be easy to make room
for a dozen more statues.
In Queen's Street, quite close to George Square, we find the Royal
Exchange--an elegant building in the Corinthian style--in front of which
stands an equestrian statue of gigantic dimensions.
It is Wellington--the inevitable, the eternal, the everlasting
Wellington.
Oh, what a bore that Wellington is!
This statue was erected at the expense of the town for a sum of L10,000.
Wellington will never know what he has cost his compatriots.
Let us go up George Street, turn to the left by High Street, towards the
north-east, and we shall come to the Cathedral, the only one which the
fanatic vandalism of the Puritans spared. I was told in Scotland that
this is how it escaped. The Puritans had come to Glasgow in 1567 to
destroy the Cathedral of Saint Mungo. But a gardener, a practical Scot
of the neighbourhood, reasoned with them in the following manner:
"My friends, you are come with the meritorious intention of destroying
this temple of popery. But why destroy the edifice? It will cost a mint
of money to build such another. Could not you use this one and worship
God in it after our own manner?"
The Puritans, who were Scots too, saw the force of the argument and the
cathedral was saved.
The edifice is gothic, and very handsome. I recommend especially the
crypt, under the choir. The windows are most remarkable.
Around the cathedral is a graveyard containing fine monuments. I read on
a tablet, put up in commemoration of the execution of nine covenanters
(1666-1684) the following inscription, which shows once more how they
forgive in Scotland. Here is the hint to the persecutors:
"_They'll know at resurrection day
To murder saints was no sweet play._"
Let us return down High Street as far as Argyle Street, the great artery
of Glasgow.
After a few minutes' walking, we come to Buchanan Street, the
fashionable street of Glasgow--I mean the one which contains the
fashionable shops, the Regent Street of this great manufacturing city.
The houses are well-built, I do not say tastefully, but solidly. This
might be said indeed of the whole town: it is dirty, but substantial.
Let us push on to Sanchyhall Street, and there turn to the west. We
presently come to the park of Kelvingrove, undulating, well laid out,
and surrounded with pretty houses: it is the only part of Glasgow which
does not give you cold shivers. Among the well-kept paths, flowerbeds,
and ponds, you forget the coal-smoke for awhile. At the end of the park
runs the Kelvin, a little stream which you cross to get to Gilmore Hill,
on the summit of which stand the buildings of the university. The
interior of these buildings is magnificent.
The Bute Hall is one of the finest halls I ever saw: 108 feet long, 75
broad, and 70 high. A splendid library and all the comfortable
accessories, which they are careful to supply studious youth with in
this country. The university cost more than half-a-million. With the
exception of a few other parks--which, however, cannot be compared to
those of London--there is nothing more to be seen in Glasgow, and if
your business is transacted, go to your hotel, strap your luggage, and
be off.
But if you prefer it, we will arm ourselves with umbrellas and return to
the streets, and see what kind of people are to be met there.
That which strikes one at a first visit, is that from five in the
afternoon almost every respectable-looking person has disappeared, and
the town seems given over to the populace. Like the City proper in
London, Glasgow is only occupied by the superior classes during business
hours. From four to five o'clock there is a general stampede towards the
railway stations. The _employe_, who earns two or three hundred a year,
has his villa or cottage in the suburbs. The rich merchant, the
engineer, the ironmaster, all these live far from the city.
The streets of Glasgow, from six or seven in the evening, are entirely
given up to the manufacturing population--the dirtiest and roughest to
be seen anywhere, I should think.
I have seen poverty and vice in Paris, in London, in Dublin, and
Brussels, but they are nothing to compare to the spectacle that Glasgow
presents. It is the living illustration of some unwritten page of Dante.
"But there is money in Glasgow."
* * * * *
The lower-class women of London do wear a semblance of a toilette: fur
mantles in rags, battered, greasy hats with faded flowers, flounced
skirts in tatters--an apology for a costume, in short.
But here, there is nothing of all that. No finery, not even a hat. The
tartan seems to take the place of all.
The attributions of this tartan are multiple. It is as useful to the
women of the lower classes in the great Scotch towns as the reindeer is
to the Laplander.
This tartan serves them as a hood when it is cold; as an umbrella when
it rains; as a blanket in winter nights; as a mattress in summer ones;
as a basket when they go to market; a towel when they do their own and
their children's dry-polishing; a cradle for their babies, which they
carry either slung over their back, Hottentot fashion, or hanging in
front, like the kangaroos. When poverty presses hard, the tartan goes to
the pawnbroker's shop, whence it issues in the form of a sixpence or a
shilling, according to its value. After living in them they live on
them, and so these useful servants pass from external to internal use,
and appease the hunger or thirst of their owners for a day or two. A
very godsend this tartan, as you see.
A Glasgow police inspector told me that, having one day to make a search
at a pawnbroker's in the town, he had found more than fifteen hundred of
these shawls on the premises. "Many of those poor borrowers are Irish,"
he said. Did he say this to pass on to a neighbour that which seemed to
him a disgrace to his own country? In any case, it is a fact that there
are a great number of Irish in Glasgow.
No doubt poverty, with its accompaniments of shame and vice, exists in
all great cities; but here it has a distressing aspect that it presents
in no other country. The Arab beggar makes one smile as he majestically
drapes around him his picturesque, multicoloured rags; the lazzarone,
lying on the quay of Naples under the radiant Italian sky, is a prince
compared to the wretch who drags out his existence in the dirty streets
or garrets of Glasgow.
"But there is money in Glasgow."
In Paris, the newspapers are sold in shops or pretty kiosks kept by
clean, tidy, respectable women. In London and other large English towns,
the papers are cried in the streets by low-class men and boys. In
Glasgow and Edinburgh the work is done by ragged children, who literally
besiege you as you walk the streets: poor little girls half-naked,
shivering, and starving, with their feet in the mud, try to earn a few
pence to appease their own hunger, or, perhaps, furnish an unnatural
parent with the means of getting tipsy. Others have a little stock of
matches that they look at with an envious eye, one fancies, as one
thinks of Andersen's touching tale.
Oh, pity for the poor little children!
In a country so Christian, so philanthropic, can it be that childhood is
abandoned thus? Asylums for the aged are to be seen in plenty, and is
not youth still more interesting than age, and must it needs commit some
crime before it has the right to enter some house of refuge?
I cannot tell you how sad the sight of those poor little beings,
forsaken of God and man, made me feel.
But how shall I describe my feelings when, having drawn the attention of
a Scotchman who was with me to one of these pitiful little creatures, I
heard him say:
"Do not stop, the immorality of those children is awful."
No, it is not possible; it must be a bad dream, a hideous nightmare.
"It is a fact," said my companion, who knows Glasgow as he knows
himself.
"But there is money in it."
It seems incomprehensible that these children should not be reclaimed,
still more incomprehensible that no one seeks to do it. The money spent
in statues of Wellington would more than suffice, and the Iron Duke
would be none the worse off in Paradise.
Yes, this is what may be seen in Glasgow, in that city so pious, that to
calm the feelings of some of the inhabitants, the literary and
scientific lectures which used to be given to the people on Sunday
evenings in Saint Andrew's Hall have had to be discontinued.
Heaven be thanked, Glasgow is not Scotland, and we can go and rejoice
our eyes in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Braemar, and elsewhere, and admire the
lakes and the blue mountains.