dispersed reluctantly, its particles doubtless holding themselves ready
to reassemble at the slightest notice. It formed a small portion only
of the population of London which has volunteer charge of the goings and
comings at Buckingham Palace. Certain of its members are on guard there
from morning till night, and probably no detail of ceremony escapes
their vigilance. If asked what they are expecting to see, they are not
able to say; they only know that they are there to see what happens.
They make the most of any carriage entering or issuing from the yard;
they note the rare civilians who leave or approach the palace door on
foot, the half-dozen plain policemen who stand at their appointed places
within the barrier which none of the crowd ever dreams of passing must
share its interest. Neither these policemen nor the sentries who pace
their beat before the high iron fence are apparently willing to molest
the representatives of the public interest. On the April morning in
case, during the momentary absence of the policeman who should have
restrained the crowd, the sentry found himself embarrassed by a
spectator who had intruded on his beat. He faltered, blushing as well
as he could through his high English color, and then said, gently, “A
little back, please,” and the intruder begged pardon and retired.
In the simple incident there was nothing of the nervousness observable
in either the official or the officious repositories of the nationality
which one sees in Continental countries, and especially in Germany. It
was plain that England, though a military power, is not militarized.
The English shows of force are civil. Nowhere but in England does the
European hand of iron wear the glove of velvet. There is always an
English war going on somewhere, but one does not relate to it the
kindly-looking young fellows whom one sees suffering under their
bear-skin caps in the ranks, or loitering at liberty in the parks, and
courting the flattered girls who flutter like moths about the flame of
their red jackets, up and down the paths and on the public benches.
The soldiers are under the law of military obedience, and are so far in
slavery, as all soldiers are, but nothing of their slavery is visible,
and they are the idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the
picturesqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great London spectacle.
It is said that they sometimes abuse their apparent supremacy, and that
their uniform generally bars them from places of amusement; but one sees
nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the public ways, where
one sometimes sees them pushing baby-carriages to free the nurse-maids
to more unrestricted flirtation, or straying over the grass and under
the trees with maids who are not burdened by any sort of present duty.
After all, as compared with the civilians, they are few even in that
game of love which is always playing itself wherever youth meets youth,
and which in London is only evident in proportion to the vastness of
the city. Their individual life is, like that of the royalty which they
decorate, public more than private, and one can scarcely dissociate
them, with all their personal humility, from the exalted figures whose
eminence they directly or indirectly contribute to throw into relief. I
do not mean that they are seen much or little in the king's company. The
English king, though he wears many land and sea uniforms, is essentially
civilian, and though vast numbers of soldiers exist for his state in
London, they do not obviously attend him, except on occasions of the
very highest state. I make this observation rather hazardously, for the
fact, which I feel bound to share with the reader, is that I never saw
in London any of the royalties who so abound there.
I did, indeed, see the king before I left England, but it was in a place
far from his capital, and the king was the only one of his large family
I saw anywhere. I hope this will not greatly disappoint my readers,
especially such as have scruples against royalties; but it is best to
be honest. I can be quite as honest in adding that I had always a
vague, underlying curiosity concerning royalty, and a hope that it would
somehow come my way, but it never did, to my knowledge, and somehow,
with the best will towards it; I never went its way. This I now think
rather stupid, for every day the morning papers predicted the movements
of royalty, which seemed to be in perpetual movement, so that it must
have been by chance that I never saw it arriving or departing at the
stations where I was often doing the same.
Of course, no private person, not even the greatest nobleman, let alone
the passing stranger, can possibly arrive and depart so much as the king
and queen, and their many children, grandchildren, nephews, and
nieces, and cousins of every remove. For the sovereigns themselves this
incessant motion, though mitigated by every device of loyal affection
and devotion on the part of their subjects, must be a great hardship,
and greater as they get into years. The king's formal office is simply
to reign, but one wonders when he finds the time for reigning. He seems
to be always setting out for Germany or Denmark or France, when he is
not coming from Wales or Scotland or Ireland; and, when quietly at home
in England, he is constantly away on visits to the houses of favored
subjects, shooting pheasants or grouse or deer; or he is going from one
horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden-party or whatever
corresponds in England to a church sociable. It is impossible to
enumerate the pleasures which must poison his life, as if the cares were
not enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much liked and
is so amiable and active, the perpetual movement affects the plebeian
foreigner as something terrible. Never to be quiet; never to have a
stretch of those long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to
later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample strange cookeries;
to sleep under a different preacher every Sunday, and in a different bed
every night; to wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions,
three or four times a day; to receive every manner of deputation, and
try to show an interest in every manner of object--who would reign on
such terms as these, if there were any choice of not reigning?
Evidently such a career cannot be managed without the help, the pretty
constant help, of armed men; and the movement of troops in London from
one point to another is one of the evidences of state which is so little
static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, and makes one wish one
were a child that one might fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement
of a great mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a flaming
squad, or a single vidette spurring on some swift errand, with his
pennoned lance erect from his toe and his horse-hair crest streaming
behind him. The soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of
civil life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spectator as
they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme attraction in their sort
for the newly arrived American is the pair of statuesque warriors
who motionlessly sit their motionless steeds at the gates of the
Horse-Guards, and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they
were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's shop. When I first
arrived in London in the earliest of those sad eighteen-sixties when our
English brethren were equipping our Confederate brethren to sweep our
commerce from the seas, I think I must have gone to see those images
at the Horse-Guards even before I visited the monuments in Westminster
Abbey, and they then perfectly filled my vast expectation; they might
have been Gog and Magog, for their gigantic stature. In after visits,
though I had a sneaking desire to see them again, I somehow could not
find their place, being ashamed to ask for it, in my hope of happening
on it, and I had formed the notion, which I confidently urged, that they
had been taken down, like the Wellington statue from the arch. But the
other day (or month, rather), when I was looking for Whitehall, suddenly
there they were again, sitting their horses in the gateways as of yore,
and as woodenly as if they had never stirred since 1861. They were
unchanged in attitude, but how changed they were in person: so dwarfed,
so shrunken, as if the intervening years had sapped the juices of their
joints and let their bones fall together, like those of withered old
men!
This was, of course, the unjust effect of my original exaggeration of
their length and breadth. The troops that I saw marching through the
streets where we first lodged were fine, large men. I myself saw no
choice in the different bodies, but the little housemaid much preferred
the grenadier guards to the Scotch guards; perhaps there was one
grenadier guard who lent beauty and grandeur to the rest. I think Scotch
caps are much gayer than those busbies which the grenadiers wear, but
that, again, is a matter of taste; I certainly did not think the plaid
pantaloons with which the Scotch guards hid the knees that ought to have
been naked were as good as the plain trousers of their rivals. But they
were all well enough, and the officers who sauntered along out of step
on the sidewalk, or stoop-shoulderedly, as the English military fashion
now is, followed the troops on horseback, were splendid fellows, who
would go to battle as simply as to afternoon tea, and get themselves
shot in some imperial cause as impersonally as their men.
There were large barracks in our neighborhood where one might have
glimpses of the intimate life of the troops, such as shirt-sleeved
figures smoking short pipes at the windows, or red coats hanging from
the sills, or sometimes a stately bear-skin dangling from a shutter
by its throat-latch. We were also near to the Chelsea Hospital, where
soldiering had come to its last word in the old pensioners pottering
about the garden-paths or sitting in the shade or sun. Wherever a red
coat appeared it had its honorable obsequy in the popular interest, and
if I might venture to sum up my impression of what I saw of soldiering
in London I should say that it keeps its romance for the spectator far
more than soldiering does in the Continental capitals, where it seems a
slavery consciously sad and clearly discerned. It may be that a glamour
clings to the English soldier because he has voluntarily enslaved
himself as a recruit, and has not been torn an unwilling captive from
his home and work, like the conscripts of other countries. On the same
terms our own military are romantic.
IV
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
I had thought--rather cheaply, as I now realize--of offering, as a
pendant for the scene of Fashion Meeting Itself in the Park on the
Sunday noons and afternoons which I have tried to photograph, some
picture of open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have
decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be found any
week-day evening, when the weather is fair, on the grassy stretches
which the Park rises into somewhat beyond the sacred close of high
life. This space is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is
higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion as embowering
foliage gives. There are no trees on any side for many acres, and the
golden-red sunset glow hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the
low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of one sultry day
which I have in mind. From all the paths leading up out of Piccadilly
there was a streaming tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly
turfed, and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes which a
more impassioned imagination than mine might figure as the dead and
wounded in some field of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides
having no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a conscience
against its unreality. Those people, mostly young people, are either
sitting there in gossiping groups, or whispering pairs, or singly
breathing a mute rapture of release from the day's work. A young
fellow lies stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above the
newspaper which the lingering light allows him to read; another has an
open book under his eyes; but commonly each has the companionship of
some fearless girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which
with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands beside the sea,
but which is here without that extreme effect which the bathing-costume
imparts on our beaches. These young people stretched side by side on the
grass in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a suggestion of
the
“Bella età, dell' oro”
not to be had elsewhere in our iron civilization. One might accuse their
taste, but certainly they were more interesting than the rows of young
men perched on the top course of the fence, in a wide variety of straw
hats, or even than the red-coated soldiers who boldly occupied the penny
chairs along the walks and enjoyed each the vigorous rivalry of girls
worshipping him on either hand.
They boldly occupied the penny chairs, for the danger that they would be
made to pay was small. The sole collector, a man well in years and of a
benevolent reluctance, passed casually among the rows of seats, and took
pennies only from those who could most clearly afford it. There was a
fence round a pavilion where a band was playing, and within there were
spendthrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the music could
be perfectly well heard without charge outside. It was, in fact, heard
there by a large audience of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their
wheels in numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicycling began
to pass several years ago. The lamps shed a pleasant light upon the
crowd, after the long afterglow of the sunset had passed and the first
stars began to pierce the clear heavens. But there was always enough
kindly obscurity to hide emotions that did not mind being seen, and
to soften the details which could not be called beautiful. As the dark
deepened, the prone shapes scattered by hundreds over the grass looked
like peaceful flocks whose repose was not disturbed by the human voices
or by the human feet that incessantly went and came on the paths. It
was a touch, however illusory, of the rusticity which lingers in so many
sorts at the heart of the immense city, and renders it at unexpected
moments simple and homelike above all other cities.
The evening when this London pastoral offered itself was the close of a
day of almost American heat. The mercury never went above eighty-three
degrees, but the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think a good
deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye from the lurid horizons
paling upward into the dull, unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily
overcast or heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came also
from the thronged streets, in which the season had scarcely begun to
waver, and the pulses of the plethoric town throbbed with a sense of
choking fulness. The feverish activity of the cabs contributed to
the effect of the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated
themselves into every crevice of the frequent “blocks,” where the
populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their arrest of the artificial
movement of air, sweltered in the sun, and the classes in private
carriages of every order and degree suffered in a helpless equality with
the perspiring masses.
Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of straw hats; and where
one lately saw only the variance from silken cylinders to the different
types of derbies and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape
of panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence of the low,
flat-topped hard-brimmed things that mocked with the rigidity of
sheet-iron the conception of straw as a light and yielding material.
Men with as yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember when the
American picked himself out in the London crowd by his summer hat, but
now, in his belated conformity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt
to be one of the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming
processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No shape of straw
hat is peculiar to any class, but the slouching panama is for pecuniary
reasons more the wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in front
and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater acceptance with youth;
age and middle-age wear its weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora
form; and now and then one saw the venerable convention of the cockaded
footman's and coachman's silk hat mocked in straw. No concession more
extreme could be made to the heat, and these strange cylinders, together
with the linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the excesses in
which the English are apt to indulge their common-sense when they decide
to give way to it. They have apparently decided to give way to it in the
dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park, where individual
caprice is the sole law that obtains amid a general anarchy.
[Illustration: ROTTEN ROW.]
The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and suggests the daring
thought that, if ever their race decides to get on without government
of any sort, they will rid themselves of it with a thoroughness and
swiftness past the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with
all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have discarded the
traditional costumes of Rotten Row. The young girls and young men in
flapping panamas, in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave
certainly an agreeable liveliness to the spectacle, which their elders
emulated by expressions of taste as personal and unconventional. A lady
in the old-fashioned riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating
veil recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to lose weight,
in a brief emergence from the past to which she belonged. One man
similarly hatted, but frock-coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy
of note; but no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as
distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so much to the
sense of liberation from the heat as the others who, when it reached
its height, frankly confessed its power by riding in greatly diminished
numbers. By twelve o'clock scarcely one left of all those joyous youths,
those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy children, matched in size
with their ponies, as the elders were in their different mounts, remains
to distract the eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs
and the promenaders between them.
It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting show of what
seemed society at home than the Sunday-afternoon reception in the
consecrated closes on the grass. People who knew one another stopped and
gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and tried to ignore
them. But that could not have been easy. The women whom those handsome,
aristocratic men bowed over, or dropped into chairs beside, or saluted
as they went by, were very beautiful women, and dressed with that
sentiment which has already been celebrated. Their draperies fluttered
in the gay breeze which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them
with tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the life of a picture to
be seen nowhere else. It was not necessary to know just who, or just of
what quality they were, in order to realize their loveliness.
Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had still something of
its early summer freshness; but in its farther stretches it was of our
August brown, and in certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The
trees themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and the wind
blew showers of yellowing leaves from their drooping boughs. Towards
the close of the season, on the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of
those consecrated social closes, to which I am always returning with a
snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance of the great weary army
which would possess the pleasure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers
had left it. Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had
cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there, with their faces
in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy heaps and coils where the
delicate foot of fashion had pressed the green herbage. As among the
spectators I thought I noted an increasing number of my countrymen and
women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied more and more of them in
the hired turnouts which cannot long keep their secret from the critical
eye. These were as obvious to conjecture as some other turnouts, which I
fancied of a decayed ancestrality: cumbrous landaus and victorias, with
rubberless tires, which grumbled and grieved in their course for
the _passati tempi_, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the parvenu
carriages, and for all the types of motors which more and more invade
the drives of the Park. They had a literary quality, and were out of
Thackeray and Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society novelists
great enough for them to be out of.
If such novelists had not been wanting I am sure I should not be left
with the problem of an extremely pretty and charming woman whose scarf
one morning so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside
another extremely pretty and charming woman, that he left her and came
and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her
scarf. Was she in a manner playing _him_ with it? A thoroughly equipped
society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me,
and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up
and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, exquisite
shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary
freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of
that companion of a lady stopped in chat by that other lady, who was
always hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance. The companion
was not of her acquaintance, nor was she now made of it; she stood
statue-still and sphinx-patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid
of story could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little foot
whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her drapery. Was she poor
and proud, or was she rich and scornful in her relation to the encounter
from which she remained excluded? The lady who had left her standing
rejoined her and they drifted off together into the vast of the
unfathomed, but not, I like to believe, the unfathomable.
When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course it did not
break. That would have been a violence of which English weather would
not have been capable. There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a
trap were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It softly gave way
in a gradual, delicious coolness, which again mellowed at the edges, as
it were, and dissolved in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain
might finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the “anguish
of the solstice,” as we had felt it in London, and by the time the first
shower insinuated itself we were in the heart of the Malvern Hills.
Of course, this heated term was not as the heated terms of New York are;
but it excelled them in length, if not in breadth and thickness. The
nights were always cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights
do not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would have been
unendurable, but in London one woke each morning with renewed hope and
renewed strength. Very likely there were parts of London where
people despaired and weakened through the night, but in these polite
perspectives I am trying to exclude such places; and whenever I say
“one” in this relation, I am imagining one of the many Americans who
witness the London season perhaps oftener from the outside than the
inside, but who still can appreciate and revere its facts.