out, there were plum and peach trees in the gardens which emulated the
earlier daring of the almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the
greengages that come there after they have ceased to come from France
are as good as our own when the curculio does not get them; but the
efflorescence of the peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they
never fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally
sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances are against them.
Perhaps the fruits of the fields and orchards, if not of the streets,
would do better in England if the nights were warmer. The days are often
quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so decidedly that even
in that heated fortnight in July a blanket or two were never too much.
In the spring a day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of the
afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid.
X
SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
I had a very good will towards all the historic temples in London, and I
hope that this, with the fact that I had seen them before, will pass
for my excuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed had some
self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul's, of which I said to myself
I ought to see it again; there might be an emotion in it. I passed and
repassed it, till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I
entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of other tardy
visitors who had come at the closing hour. After this unavailing visit,
the necessity of going again established itself in me, and I went
repeatedly, choosing, indeed, rainy days when I could not well go
elsewhere, and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy of
its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.
Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that St. Paul's always
seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and
decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster
Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often
grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times
far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a
bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his
dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much
mind the heavy presence of the Fames or Britannias of the earlier
nineteenth century celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement
in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when the national
type was least able to inspire grief with an artistic expression. The
statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period,
and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than
the Fames or the Britannias.
The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much as at that list
of London bishops, which, if you are so lucky as to come on it by chance
where it is inscribed beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense
of the long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops of the
Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly Latin names; bishops of the
Saxon and Danish times remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops
of the Norman time, with appellations that again flow upon the tongue;
bishops of the English time, with designations as familiar as those
in the directory: what a record! It moves you more than any of those
uniformed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, and it speaks
more eloquently of the infrangible continuity, the unbroken greatness of
England.
My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other English
cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to think, that England was
overgothicized, and that I should be glad, or at least relieved,
by something classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That
architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the English faith,
which continues the ancient tradition in terms not ceremonially very
distinct from those of Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York
to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences which were all in
favor of the elder fane. The minster now asserted its superior majesty,
and its mere magnitude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its
clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty windows, as they
held their own in my memory, dwarfed St. Paul's as much physically as
spiritually.
A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces of the London
temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir;
a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest
period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen
again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long
lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the
genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine.
Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built
after the plans of the most skilful architects of their time and race,
and both are monuments to civilizations which had outlived mystery.
I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey than to St. Paul's, but
I had from the first so profoundly and thoroughly naturalized myself
to the place that it was like going back to a home of my youth. It was,
indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; and if I might
advise any reader who still has his first visit to Westminster
Abbey before him, I would counsel him not to go there much past his
twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in
the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so
short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a
prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could
otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and
how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets'
Corner and read the words, “Oh, rare Ben Jonson!” The good Ben was never
so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well
enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try
reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself,
and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a
wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous
emotion the tears came.
I am not sensible of having been grouped with others in charge of a
verger, but a verger there must have been, and at my next visit there
must equally have been one; he only entered, rigid, authoritative,
unsparing, into my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely
separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that he was going with
a flock of other docile tourists. I suppose it would be possible to see
Westminster Abbey without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be
safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second visits, but that my
memory rejected him as unfit for association with fames and names made
so much of in death that it seemed better than life in all dignified
particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my chances of getting
along for a few centuries on earth.
I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary
evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite
interest; and in my next-to-last visit I found him most intelligibly
accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty
which used to be carried in the funeral processions of the English kings
and queens. He bade us wait till he had dismissed all his flock but
ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into
some upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen
Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in
life, and very startlingly lifelike in the way they showed unconscious
of us. Doubtless there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and
with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain,
shrewd, masterful face of Elizabeth, and the obstinate good sense and
ability that dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into
them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish that art had so
preserved all the great embodiments of history.
I hope it was some better motive than the sightseer's that at least
partly caused me to make myself part of the congregation listening to
a sermon in the Abbey on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But
the stir of the place's literary associations began with the sight of
Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like him, in the grand simplicity
of his looks, as he was when he lived; and then presently the effigies
of all the “dear sons of memory” began to reveal themselves, medallion
and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory and inscription. We
went and sat, for the choral service, under the bust of Macaulay, and,
looking down, we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his grave.
It might have been the wounded sense of reverence, it might have been
the dread of a longer sermon than we had time for, but we left before
the sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt little public
garden which lies by the Thames in the shadow of the Parliament Houses;
and who has said the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand years
old, but some day they will be, and then those who cavilled at them
when they were only fifty will be sorry. For my part I think them as
Gothically noble and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic,
too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew from the ground
there far into the gray sky to which their architecture is native. It
was a pale, resigned afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted
heat in it, which a recent rain had slightly abated, and we were glad of
a memoriferous property which it seemed to exhale. Suddenly in the midst
of that most alien environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom
we had last parted twenty years before in the woods beside Lake George,
and whose apparition at once implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so
sensational is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if it is so,
why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and we were in the shadow of
the Parliament Houses again, and no longer in that of the forest which
did not know it was Gothic.
We were going to hang upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge for the
view it offers of the Houses, to which the spacious river makes itself
a foreground such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in this
cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the pleasure of realizing
the statue of Cromwell which has somehow found place where it belongs
in those stately precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his
sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend of Parliaments than
Charles whom he slew, but he was such a massive piece of English history
that the void his effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons must
have ached for it before.
When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found
a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday
streets. The roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the
crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd.
The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a
silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best,
and the children strayed along the streets without playing, or lagged
homeward behind their parents. There were no vehicles except those of
pleasure or convenience; the omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar;
our cab-horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the noisiest thing
we heard. The trees in the squares and places hung dull and tired in the
coolish, dusty atmosphere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon
passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties of experience
which, after all, one does not impart. Those who like, as I do, the
innocence which companions the sophistication of London will frequent
Kensington Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has set the
seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then seems peculiarly the
playground of little children in the care of their nurses, if they are
well-to-do people's children, and in one another's care if they are poor
people's. All over England the tenderness of the little children for the
less is delightful. I remember to have seen scarcely any squabbling, and
I saw abundance of caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies
of almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if it were
a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This goes on in spite of a
reciprocal untidiness which is indescribable; for the English poor
children have the very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch
have dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering of
filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think, perhaps, they wash
up a little when they come to play in Kensington Gardens, to sail their
ships on its placid waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter
the palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as they do
in troops, they are commonly in charge of their teachers; and their
raptures of loyalty in the presence of those reminders that queens,
too, must have once been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are
doubtless as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and
political associations. Since William III. built the palace and laid out
the gardens that he might dwell within easy reach of his capital, but
out of its smoke and din, the place has not lost the character which
his homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially sweet and
commendable because of its relation to the good Victoria's childhood.
One does not forget “great Anna's” drinking tea there in the Orangery
so nobly designed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is dearest
because Victoria spent so many of her early days in it, and received
there the awful summons literally to rise from her dreams and come and
be queen of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke of
poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet provided even for the
election of young girls to the presidency; and though we may prefer our
prosaical republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of such an
incident in the mother monarchy.
The Temple was another of the places that I did not think I should visit
again, because I had so pleasant and perfect a memory of it, which I
feared to impair. More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in
the chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and then went out
and wandered about in the wet, for it was raining very diligently. I
cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it
was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first
images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the
Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as
I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to
unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them
then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such
sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted
gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler after our drive from
the Thames Embankment and began to walk up towards the Temple Church.
I will not ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will merely
have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies of the crusaders
lying cross-legged in the pavement of the circle to which one enters.
According to the strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our
party, these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture since she
saw them first. It was not merely that they had uncrossed their legs and
crossed them another way, or some such small matter; but that now
they lay side by side, whereas formerly they had better accommodated
themselves to the architectural design, and lain in a ring with their
long-pointed toes pointing inward to the centre. Why they should have
changed, we could not understand; the verger said they had not; but
he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly in a limp sort on
keeping the door locked so that people could not get away without
his help, and must either fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple
Church, indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cunningham says
that the two edifices most worth visiting are the church and the
Middle Temple Hall, which I now preferred luxuriously to leave in my
remembrances of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party,
straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the empty courts, and
envying, not very actively, the lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking
old brick dwellings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this day,
but I am told they are practically of both sexes, and that when married
they are allowed to domesticate themselves in these buildings in
apartments sublet to them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law,
but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are subject only to a
semicentennial ejection, so that I do not know where a young literary
couple could more charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children
would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the Temple paths and
on the Temple lawns. At one house, a girl was vaguely arriving with a
band-box and parcels, and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint,
remote date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash of our
period came to us through the Strand gate softened to a mellow roar. The
noise was not great enough, we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman
in court dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the top
of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith's grave, and leaning
forward with one hand extended as if, in the spirit of the present
_entente cordiale_, he was calling our attention to the fact that the
garlands and streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the walls
about him were in the mother-clime of a real American redness.
It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else of our own
inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all our sojourns we had
never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically
memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the
noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire
of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the
fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the
tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as
that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must count that
last day of our September in London as spent in such sort as to be of
unsurpassed if not unrivalled impression, because of the visit which we
then so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we had almost
not paid it at all.
The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and naval museum; with
the swords and saddles and uniforms and other equipments of divers
English heroes in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the
two most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I was not so
vain of my reading about battles as not to be glad of seeing how the
men-of-war deployed at Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops
were engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of the cannons'
mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when Blücher modestly appeared at one
corner of the plan in time to save the day. “But we should 'ave 'ad it,
without 'im?” a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously inquired
of the custodian. “Oh, we should 'ave 'ad the victory, anyway,” the
custodian reassured him, and they looked together at some trophies of
the Boer war with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I
do not know whether they shared my psychological interest in that
apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which, in this place, as in several
others in England, invests the spiritual squalor of war-memories with
the glamour of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities.
Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers in their ideals shed
such a light upon the sad business of their lives as almost to ennoble
it. One feels that with a little more qualification on the creative side
they could have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps, but,
say, historical novelists.
There is some question among other authorities which window of the
Banquetting House the doomed king passed through upon the scaffold to
the block; but the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a choice
of windows, and as to a space broken through the wall, he had never
heard of it. But we were so well satisfied with his window as to
shrink involuntarily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal
substance showed through the shadowy illusion of passing hansoms and
omnibuses, like the sole fact of the street, the king's voice rising
above the noises in tender caution to a heedless witness, “Have a care
of the axe; have a care,” and then gravely to the headsman: “When I
stretch out my hands so, then--” The drums were ordered beaten, so that
we could not hear more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs and
'busses to the horse-guards sitting shrunken on their steeds, and passed
between them into the park beyond where the beds of flowers spread their
soft autumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day.
[Illustration: THE HORSE GUARDS, WHITEHALL]
XI
GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
I liked walking through St. James's and through Green Park, especially
in the late afternoon when the tired poor began to droop upon the
benches, and, long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to
strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face downward, among its
odorous roots. There was often the music of military bands to which
wide-spreading audiences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St.
James's there were seats along the borders of the ponds where, while
the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good deal of energetic
courting went on. Besides, both were in the immediate neighborhood of
certain barracks where there was always a chance of military, and were
hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. But the resort
of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park,
to which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July,
conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory
doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected
to find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The
Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be better dressed than the
New-Yorker of the same class, and the women especially make a bolder
attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on
the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and if it was not
the most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to
breathlessness; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms
sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was
hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emulated as well as they
could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting
and flirting at the same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the
young fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of the
swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled them in their
aberrations from formality.