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LONDON FILMS
BY W. D. HOWELLS
[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT]
CONTENTS
I. METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
II. CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS
III. SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
IV. THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
V. THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
VI. SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION
VII. IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
VIII. THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
IX. CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
X. SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHTSEEING
XI. GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
XII. TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
XIII. AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
XIV. A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
XV. FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
XVI. HENLEY DAY
XVII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY NORTHERN
XVIII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY SOUTHERN
XIX. ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
XX. PARTING GUESTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH
THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK
ROTTEN ROW
A BLOCK IN THE STRAND
ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
THE HORSE GUARDS, WHITEHALL
WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER
A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE THAMES AT HENLEY
THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY
THE TOWER OF LONDON
ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET
LONDON BRIDGE
THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS
THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB'S TIME
CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES
BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE)
STAPLE INN, HOLBORN
CLIFFORD'S INN HALL
ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THE-FIELDS
HYDE PARK IN OCTOBER
THAMES EMBANKMENT
I
METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
Whoever carries a mental kodak with him (as I suspect I was in the habit
of doing long before I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of
the different exposures. This can be determined only by the process of
developing, which requires a dark room and other apparatus not always at
hand; and so much depends upon the process that it might be well if it
could always be left to some one who makes a specialty of it, as in the
case of the real amateur photographer. Then one's faulty impressions
might be so treated as to yield a pictorial result of interest, or
frankly thrown away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye.
Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust the result,
whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness of the reader, who will
surely, if he is the right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the
blurred details, to soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a
subordination giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This
is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my
little pictures are superficial, I shall not be able to gainsay him. I
can only answer that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but
at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of those who would
prefer some such result as the employment of the Roentgen rays would
have given, if applied to certain aspects of the London world.
Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a life-long
dweller. To the sojourner scarcely more will vouchsafe itself than to
the passing stranger, and it is chiefly to home-keeping folk who have
never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak
with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the
impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could
have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days
in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in
1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one
earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 1897,
with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm
one in the diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I
hope the pages following will bear witness.
What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of
self-question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning
of April, after devious delays in the South and West of England,
is destined to have printed upon his mental films a succession of
meteorological changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as
willing to be honest as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow
that probably the weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then
behaving with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is
that at home, having one's proper business, one leaves the weather
to look after its own affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the
necessary idleness of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes
censorious. If I were to be a little honester still, I should confess
that I do not know of any place where the month of April can be meaner,
more _poison_, upon occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its
moments of relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is
the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in
a grateful tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white
light, the joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds
which you can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden
glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the
soul to overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of
England is incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is
of public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for
the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time
and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The
English weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the
personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were
influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life,
and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care,
irrespective of the interests of the mass. This may be a little
too fanciful, and I do not insist that it is scientific or even
sociological. Yet I think the reader who rejects it might do worse than
agree with me that the first impression of a foreign country visited or
revisited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the season.
Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day, that
there was a lower or a higher pressure in a part of Scotland, just as
I might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of
the lakes. “Now,” I said to myself, “we shall have something like real
weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going
to be decisively this or that.” But I could not see that the weather
following differed from the weather we had been having. It was the same
small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm, cold,
damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day
often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the sun was
unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a bitter
wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the
spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark,
the golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches;
and round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream.
Full of this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.
If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that
is why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a
thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go
indoors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively
realizing that they will be more comfortable with it than in the
atmosphere awaiting them. If their houses could be built reversible,
so as to be turned inside out in some weathers, one would be very
comfortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that the English
rain did not wet you, and he might have argued that the English cold
would not chill you if only you stayed out-of-doors in it.
Why will not travellers be honest with foreign countries? Is it because
they think they may some day come back? For my part, I am going to be
heroic, and say that the in-doors cold in England is constant suffering
to the American born. It is not that there is no sizzling or crackling
radiator, no tropic-breathing register; but that the grate in most of
the houses that the traveler sees, the public-houses namely, seems to
have shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Exeter, for example,
where there is such a beautiful cathedral, one found a bedroom grate of
the capacity of a quart pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm.
I might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite the same of
the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I pause before arriving at the
grate of London, it is because daring must stop somewhere. I think it
is probable that the American, if he stayed long enough, would heed the
injunction to suffer and be strong from the cold, as the Englishman has
so largely done, but I am not sure. At one point of my devious progress
to the capital I met an Englishman who had spent ten years in Canada,
and who constrained me to a mild deprecation by the wrath with which
he denounced the in-doors cold he had found everywhere at home. He said
that England was a hundred, five hundred, years behind in such matters;
and I could not deny that, even when cowering over the quart pot to warm
the hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one.
To be warm all round in an English house is a thing impossible, at least
to the traveller, who finds the natives living in what seems to him a
whorl of draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find the window
has been put down, but this is not merely to let in some of the outside
warmth; it is also to make a current of air to the open door. Even if
the window has not been put down, it has always so much play in its
frame, to allow for swelling from the damp, that in anything like dry
weather the cold whistles round it, and you do not know which way to
turn your mediaeval back.
In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there were radiators,
but not hot ones, and in a dining-room where they were hot the natives
found them oppressive, while the foreigners were warming their fingers
on the bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to pretend
that the suffering they experience has not apparently resulted in the
strength they see. Our contemporary ancestors are a splendid-looking
race, in the higher average, and if in the lower average they often look
pinched and stunted, why, we are not ourselves giants without exception.
The ancestral race does often look stunted and poor; persons of small
build and stature abound; and nature is
“So careful of the single type”
of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the matter of
complexion, if we count that a proof of health, we are quite out of it
in comparison with the English, and beside them must look like a nation
of invalids. There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to
afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not buy with us. I
do not say the color does not look a little overdone in cases, or that
the violent explosion of pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of
small children, does not make one pause in question whether paste or
putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to be too critical.
Putty and paste, apart from association, are not pretty tints, and
pinks and roses are; and the English children look not only fresher but
sturdier and healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do not
know; but I doubt if the English live longer than we for living less
comfortably. The lower classes seem always to have colds; the middle
classes, rheumatism; and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears.
Rheumatism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not mind what
one said) is universal in England, and all ranks of society have the
facilities for it in the in-doors cold in which they otherwise often
undeniably flourish. At the end, it is a question of whether you would
rather be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the first course
and they choose the last.
If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the experience
of the careful observer that there is a summit of healthful looks in
England, which we do not touch in America, whatever the large
table-land or foot-hill average we reach; and in like manner there is an
exceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it, rarely enough,
in the London streets, which one never encounters with us. I am not
envying the one, or at least not regretting the other. Distinction is
the one thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too much; only,
in America, we pay too much for too many other things to take any great
comfort in our want of distinction. I own the truth without grief or
shame, while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I enjoy
other spectacles for which I cannot help letting the English pay too
much. I was not appreciably the poorer myself, perhaps I was actually
the richer, in seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the
aristocratic region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an
elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement
before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that
his distinction was passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but
hers I beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane
that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen
gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such
keeping that there was nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various
black. She looked not only authoritative; people often do that with us;
she looked authorized; she had been empowered by the vested rights and
interests to look so her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her,
any more than in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the
high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, handsome houses where,
in the cellary or sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the
rheumatic pangs of which the comparative warmth of the outer air had
momentarily relieved her stately bulk.
But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime,
they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have
come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and
mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such soft
masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to complain
of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves
have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can smell
it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds insist, and in the air is
that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the year
long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with
every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have presently
in the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a subtile haze,
which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness, and lies
upon the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a dream made
visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this substance yourself,
so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble
earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a part,
very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful consciousness. It is
flattering, but you feel like warning him not to go in-doors, or he will
lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know
that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not be April
there till well into June.
II
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS
It might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that there is no such thing
as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive
perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis
of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twentieth look at London I
have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as to
see what London is like by making constantly sure what it is not like. A
pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same purpose. That is
a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty obedient to a just municipal
control, of a grandeur studied and authorized in proportion and relation
to the design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly
realized on lines nobly imagined. But New York and London may always be
intelligibly compared because they are both the effect of an indefinite
succession of anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and sometimes
promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one another. Each has been
mainly built at the pleasure of the private person, with the community
now and then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of house and
home to the common advantage. Nothing but our racial illogicality has
saved us from the effect of our racial anarchy in the social structure
as well as the material structure, but if we could see London and New
York as lawless in the one way as in the other, we should perhaps see
how ugly they collectively are.
The sum of such involuntary reflection with me has been the perception
that London was and is and shall be, and New York is and shall be, but
has hardly yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally, as
she is one-third less numerically, than London. In her future she has no
past, but only a present to retrieve; though perhaps a present like
hers is enough. She is also one less architecturally than London; she
is two-thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if I more
closely examine my pocket vision, I am afraid that I must hedge from
this modest claim, for we have as yet nothing to compare with at least
a half of London magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen or
eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her actual age. As we go
fast in all things, we may then surpass her; but this is not certain,
for in her more deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time the
materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the pocket vision,
seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and
some vast rocketing hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for the
contrast with those miles of imperial and municipal architecture
which in London make you forget the leagues of mean little houses, and
remember the palaces, the law-courts, the great private mansions, the
dignified and shapely flats, the large department stores, the immense
hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind.
One reason, I think, why London is so much more striking is in the
unbroken line which the irregularly divided streets often present to the
passer. Here is a chance for architecture to extend, while with us it
has only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block which is the
extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another
reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all
the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower
Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts
you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either
hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet
Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the
sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day
is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often
have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and
a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty
and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently
thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green
light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses
render the rifts between more impressively chasmal. The tremendous
volume of life that flows through the narrow and winding channels past
the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks which the lesser
buildings form, is such that the highest tide of Broadway or Fifth
Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling and towering
omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous
hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts,
donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way
amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering
the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had
run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You
are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella
on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across your knees,
and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the
largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the universe.
[Illustration: FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH]
It is an emotion which supports the American visitor even against the
immensity he shares, and he is able to reflect that New York would not
look so relatively little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a
capital on the same lines as London. If New York were, like London, a
political as well as a commercial capital, she would have the national
edifices of Washington added to the sky-scrapers in which she is now
unrivalled, and her competition would be architecturally much more
formidable than it is. She would be the legislative centre of the
different States of the Union, as London is of the different counties
of the United Kingdom; she would have collected in her borders all their
capitols and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, would
valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one must now recoil on her
behalf. She could not, of course, except on such rare days of fog as
seem to greet Englishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the
adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of such
a helpless sincerity that nothing in it shows larger than it is; no mist
clothes the sky-scraper in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar
into the clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the low
buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. Nothing could be done in
palliation of the comparative want of antiquity in New York, for the
present, at least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment
of her destiny she will be one day as old as London now is.
If one thinks, however, how old London now is, it is rather crazing;
much more crazing than the same sort of thought in the cities of lands
more exclusively associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the
present; there seems nothing above the past, or only so thin a layer
of actuality that you have scarcely the sense of it. In England you
remember with an effort Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and
the long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English; the living
interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense that you cannot penetrate
them and consort quietly with the dead alone. Men whose names are in the
directory as well as men whose names are in history, keep you company,
and push the shades of heroes, martyrs, saints, poets, and princes
to the wall. They do not shoulder them willingly out of the way, but
helplessly; there is no place in the world where the material present
is so reverently, so tenderly mindful of the material past. Perhaps,
therefore, I felt safe in so largely leaving the English past to the
English present, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger
for the old which the new American brings with him to Europe, I now went
about enjoying the modern in its manifold aspects and possibly fancying
characteristic traits where I did not find them. I did not care how
trivial some of these were, but I hesitate to confide to the more
serious reader that I was at one moment much interested in what seemed
the growing informality of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in the
streets and parks, or thought I noted it.
To my vision, or any illusion, they wore every sort of careless cap,
slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort of tunic, jacket, and cutaway.
The top-hat and frock-coat still appear, but their combination is
evidently no longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime
functions. I do not mean to say that you do not often see that stately
garment on persons of authority, but only that it is apparently not of
the supremacy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the eighties
and nineties of the last century. Certainly, when it comes to the artist
at Truefitt's wearing a frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot
help asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, when one has
said this, one must hedge from a conjecture so extreme. The king wears a
frock-coat, a long, gray one, with a white top-hat and lavender gloves,
and those who like to be like a king conform to his taste. No one, upon
his life, may yet wear a frock and a derby, but many people now wear
top-hats, though black ones, with sack-coats, with any sort of coats;
and, above all, the Londoner affects in summer a straw hat either of a
flat top and a pasteboard stiffness, or of the operatically picturesque
Alpine pattern, or of a slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often
the derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of other
nations has now become their pleasure, and, with the English genius of
doing what they like, it may be that they overdo their pleasure. But
at the worst the effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The
conventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but how long this
will remain, who can say? The simple-hearted American, arriving with
his scrupulous dress suit in London, may yet find himself going out to
dinner with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets or tennis
flannels.
If, however, the men's dress in England is informal, impatient, I
think one will be well within the lines of safety in saying that above
everything the English women's dress expresses _sentiment_, though I
suppose it is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic
of our women's dress is expressive of personal chic; in either case the
dressmaker, male or female, has impersonally much to do with it. Under
correction of those countrywomen of ours who will not allow that
the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture to say that their
expression of sentiment in dress is charming, but how charming it
comparatively is I shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold
as to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender fluency of youth
than some realizations of the American ideal; and that after the azaleas
and rhododendrons in the Park there is nothing in nature more suggestive
of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes in which the
wearers flow by the flowery expanses in carriage or on foot. The colors
worn are often as courageous as the vegetable tints; the vaporous air
softens and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told would shriek
aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the shades worn tend to soft
pallors, lavender, and pink, and creamy white. A group of girlish
shapes in these colors, seen newly lighted at a doorway from a passing
carriage, gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect of that
sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in liking.
Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught,
which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a bygone
age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful page, on
many a glowing canvas.
Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the word for the present
dress of Englishwomen. It forms in itself a lovely picture to the eye,
and is not merely the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is
therefore the more difficult of transference to the imagination of the
reader who has not also been a spectator, and before such a scene as one
may witness in a certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after church
in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening, the boldest
kodak may well close its single eye in despair. As yet even the mental
photograph cannot impart the tints of nature, and the reader who wishes
to assist at this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself. At
the right moment of the ripening London season the foliage of the trees
is densely yet freshly green and flatteringly soft to the eye; the grass
below has that closeness of texture which only English grass has the
secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododendrons and azaleas
are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it are
washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these
beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have bidden
yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from the
carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where they
are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others glide
on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar, perhaps
that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally. They
arrive in twos and threes, young girls commonly with their mothers,
but sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and with
the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging
draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even
when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is
obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity,
sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring
alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without
being unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do not carry
themselves well, it takes an American woman to see it. They move
naturally and lightly--that is, the young girls do; mothers in England,
as elsewhere, are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are as
handsome in their well-wearing English way as their daughters.
Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron barriers, and in one
of these the arriving groups of authorized people found other people of
their kind, where the unauthorized people seemed by common consent to
leave them. There was especially one enclosure which seemed consecrated
to the highest comers; it was not necessary that they should make
the others feel they were not wanted there; the others felt it of
themselves, and did not attempt to enter that especial fairy ring, or
fairy triangle. Those within looked as much at home as if in their own
drawing-rooms, and after the usual greetings of friends sat down in
their penny chairs for the talk which the present kodak would not have
overheard if it could.
If any one were to ask me how I knew that these beautiful creatures were
of supreme social value, I should be obliged to own that it was largely
an assumption based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch personally in
the matter they might have been women come to see the women who had not
come. Still, if the effects of high breeding are visible, then they were
the sort they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old and young,
had the aristocratic air which is not aggressive, the patrician
bearing which is passive and not active, and which in the English seems
consistent with so much that is human and kindly. There is always the
question whether this sort of game is worth the candle; but that is a
moral consideration which would take me too far from the little scene I
am trying to suggest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the
English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene was the constant
movement of distinguished figures within the sacred close, and up and
down the paths past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The
distinguished figures were apparently not the least molested by the
multiplied and concentrated gazes of the on-lookers, who were, as it
were, outside the window, and of the street. What struck one accustomed
to the heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where any such scene
would be so inexpressibly impossible, was the almost wholly English
personnel of the crowd within and without the sacred close. Here and
there a Continental presence, French or German or Italian, pronounced
its nationality in dress and bearing; one of the many dark subject races
of Great Britain was represented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black
hair and eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various
colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves one was aware of
some other Americans. But these exceptions only accented the absolutely
English dominance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less evident
in the observed than in the observers, where, beyond the barrier, which
there was nothing to prevent their passing, they sat in passive rows,
in passive pairs, in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers
were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the hands folded on the
top of the stick express a pause in the emotions and the energies which
has its pathos. There were women among them, of course, but the women
were also of the age when the keener sensibilities are taking a rest;
and such aliens of their sex as qualified the purely English nature of
the affair lost whatever was aggressive in their difference.
[Illustration: THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE]
It was necessary to the transaction of the drama that from time to time
the agents of the penny-chair company should go about in the close and
collect money for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly
solved, how the ladies who had come unattended managed, with their
pocketless dresses, to carry coins unequalled in bulk since the iron
currency of Sparta; or whether they held the pennies frankly in their
hands till they paid them away. In England the situation, if it is
really the situation, is always accepted with implicit confidence, and
if it had been the custom to bring pennies in their hands, these ladies
would have no more minded doing it than they minded being looked at by
people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate superiority.
With us the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could
not be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the
spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But
again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New York;
though in Newport, where the aristocratic tradition is said to have been
successfully transplanted to our plutocratic soil, something analogous
might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that tradition does not come to
flower in the open American air; it is potted and grown under glass;
and can be carried out-doors only under special conditions. The American
must still come to England for the realization of certain social ideals
towards which we may be now straining, but which do not yet enjoy
general acceptance. The reader who knows New York has but to try and
fancy its best, or even its better, society dispersing itself on certain
grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or afternoon; or, on some
week-day evening, leaving its equipages along the drives and strolling
out over the herbage; or receiving in its carriages the greetings of
acquaintance who make their way in and out among the wheels. Police and
populace would join forces in their several sorts to spoil a spectacle
which in Hyde Park appeals, in high degree, to the aesthetic sense, and
which might stimulate the historic imagination to feats of agreeable
invention if one had that sort of imagination.
The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society which we have
not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably
never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be
public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its
specific events will remain within walls. It could not manifest
itself outside without being questioned, challenged, denied; and upon
reflection there might appear reasons why it is well so.
III
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
We are quite as domestic as the English, but with us the family is of
the personal life, while with them it is of the general life, so that
when their domesticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one
feels it strange. One has read of something like this without the
sense of it which constantly penetrates one in London. One must come
to England in order to realize from countless little occasions, little
experiences, how entirely English life, public as well as private, is
an affair of family. We know from our reading how a comparatively few
families administer, if they do not govern, but we have still to learn
how the other families are apparently content to share the form in which
authority resides, since they cannot share the authority. At the very
top I offer the conjecture towards the solution of that mystery which
constantly bewilders the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty--is,
of course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the American
is that it is revered because it is the _royal_ family. But possibly a
truer interpretation of the fact would be that it is dear and sacred to
the vaster British public because it is the royal _family_. A bachelor
king could hardly dominate the English imagination like a royal husband
and father, even if his being a husband and father were not one of the
implications of that tacit Constitution in whose silence English power
resides. With us, family has less and less to do with society, even; but
with the English it has more and more to do, since the royal family is
practically without political power, and not only may, but almost
must, devote itself to society. It goes and comes on visits to other
principalities and powers; it opens parliaments; it lays corner-stones
and presides at the dedication of edifices of varied purpose; it
receives deputations and listens to addresses; it holds courts and
levees; it reviews regiments and fleets, and assists at charity
entertainments and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races;
it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalted presences for
their prosperity. These events seem public, and if they were imaginable
of a democracy like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order
of English things they are social, they are domestic, they are from one
family to every other family directly or indirectly; the king is for
these ends not more a royalty than the rest of his family, and for the
most part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts are few.
Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births,
christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy
are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it
would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in
greater or less publicity.
If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willingness to generalize
from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or
missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some
phases of functions exalted far beyond the range of republican
experiences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence which we
sometimes have cabled to our press at home, by more than usually ardent
enterprise, one may have read that the king held a levee at St. James's;
and one conceived of it as something dramatic, something historic,
something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one happened to be walking
in Pall Mall on the morning of that levee, one saw merely a sort of
irregular coming and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as
regarded the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. A thin
fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly bystanders lined
the curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages,
victorias, hansoms, and four-wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered
dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their
way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and
horses. No one concerned seemed to feel anything odd in the effect,
though to the unwonted American the sight of a dignitary in full
canonicals or regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is
not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by romance. At one moment
a middle-aged lady in the line of vehicles put her person well out of
the window of her four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her
driver in something. She may not have been going to the levee, but one
felt that if she had been she would still have done what it abashed the
alien to see.
We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English in matters of
English state; we, who have no state at all require them to live up to
theirs, just as quite plain, elderly observers expect every woman to
be young and pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly the
secret of enduring so much state as the English have lies in knowing how
and when to shirk it, to drop it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon
this fact, if it is a fact, would find his knuckles warningly rapped
when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed empty of
etiquette. But the rapping would be very gentle, very kindly, for this
is the genius of English rule where it is not concerned with criminal
offence. You must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but
you are “requested” to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh
imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between
the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between
an oligarchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more spared in the
one and the self-respect in the other, though this is saying it too
loosely, and may not be saying it truly; it is only a conjecture with
which I am parleying while I am getting round to add that such part of
the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was vastly more of it,
was much less filling to the imagination than a glimpse which I had of
a court one night. I am rather proud of being able to explain that the
late queen held court in the early afternoon and the present king holds
court at night; but, lest any envious reader suspect me of knowing
the fact at first-hand, I hasten to say that the glimpse I had of the
function that night only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving
out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human, through a thin
rain, the blood-red figures of the coachmen and footmen gowned from head
to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of the
coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of
the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld
in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so supreme
that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior
courtward equipages, as my cab flashed by them, moving in a slow line
towards the front of Buckingham Palace.
[Illustration: SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK]
The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of which would
enrich my page beyond the dreams of fiction, and it is said that in the
time of the one-o'clock court they used to receive a full share of the
attention which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow. They
were often halted, as that night I saw them halting, in their progress,
and this favored the plebeian witnesses, who ranged along their course
and invited themselves and one another to a study of the looks and
dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both. The study and the
comment must have had their limits; the observed knew how much to bear
if the observers did not know how little to forbear; and it is not
probable that the London spectators went the lengths which our outsiders
go in trying to verify an English duke who is about to marry an American
heiress. The London vulgar, if not better bred than our vulgar, are
better fed on the sight of social grandeur, and have not a lifelong
famine to satisfy, as ours have. Besides, whatever gulf birth and wealth
have fixed between the English classes, it is mystically bridged by
that sentiment of family which I have imagined the ruling influence in
England. In a country where equality has been glorified as it has been
in ours, the contrast of conditions must breed a bitterness in those of
a lower condition which is not in their hearts there; or if it is, the
alien does not know it.
What seems certain is the interest with which every outward
manifestation of royal and social state is followed, and the leisure
which the poor have for a vicarious indulgence in its luxuries and
splendors. One would say that there was a large leisure class entirely
devoted to these pleasures, which cost it nothing, but which may have
palled on the taste of those who pay for them. Of course, something like
this is the case in every great city; but in London, where society is
enlarged to the bounds of the national interests, the demand of such a
leisure class might very well be supposed to have created the supply.
Throughout the London season, and measurably throughout the London year,
there is an incessant appeal to the curiosity of the common people which
is never made in vain. Somewhere a drum is throbbing or a bugle sounding
from dawn till dusk; the red coat is always passing singly or in
battalions, afoot or on horseback; the tall bear-skin cap weighs upon
the grenadier's brow,
“And the hapless soldier's sigh,”
if it does not “run in blood down palace walls,” must often exhale
from lips tremulous with hushed profanity. One bright, hot morning of
mid-July the suffering from that cruel folly in the men of a regiment
marching from their barracks to Buckingham Palace and sweltering under
those shaggy cliffs was evident in their distorted eyes, streaming
cheeks, and panting mouths. But why do I select the bear-skin cap as
peculiarly cruel and foolish, merely because it is archaic? All war and
all the images of it are cruel and foolish.
The April morning, however, when I first carried out my sensitized
surfaces for the impression which I hoped to receive from a certain
historic spectacle was very different. There was even a suggestion of
comfort in the archaic bear-skins; they were worn, and they had been
worn, every day for nearly two hundred years, as part of the ceremonial
of changing the regimental colors before Buckingham Palace. I will not
be asked why this is imperative; it has always been done and probably
always will be done, and to most civilian onlookers will remain as
unintelligible in detail as it was to me. When the regiment was drawn up
under the palace windows, a part detached itself from the main body and
went off to a gate of the palace, and continued mysteriously stationary
there. In the mean time the ranks left behind closed or separated amid
the shouting of sergeants or corporals, and the men relieved themselves
of the strain from their knapsacks, or satisfied an exacting military
ideal, by hopping at will into the air and bouncing their knapsacks,
dragging lower down, up to the napes of their necks, where they rested
under the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A couple of officers,
with swords drawn, walked up and down behind the ranks, but, though they
were tall, fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment of
their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give the scene any
such poignant interest as it had from the men in performing a duty,
or indulging a privilege, by hopping into the air and bouncing their
knapsacks up to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable delay,
but was doubtless requisite for the transaction, the detachment sent for
the change of colors returned with the proper standards. The historic
rite was then completed, the troops formed in order, and marched back to
their barracks to the exultant strains of their band.