being one of the directors of the penny-chair company. But perhaps he
thought me a capitalist, too, and fancied that I would like to have
him decry the unemployed. Still he may have been right about the
blackmailing; one must live, and the innocent courage of open-air
courtship in London offers occasions of wilful misconstruction. In a
great city, the sense of being probably unnoted and unknown among its
myriads must eventuate in much indifference to one's surroundings. How
should a young couple on an omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the
seat opposite could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which
they renewed their love after some previous falling out?
“But I was hurt, Will, dear.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry, dear.”
“I know, Will, dear.”
“But it's all right now, dear?”
“Oh yes, Will, dear.”
Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it down; it ought to be
sacred; and nothing but my zeal in these social studies could make me
profane it. Who would not have been the careless brute this young man
must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweetness of
such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on misbehavior. He was a
nice-looking young fellow, but she was nicer, and in her tender eyes
there seemed more wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to
temper justice with mercy.
Sometimes women do not know when to temper mercy with justice. I fancied
this the error of the fond nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her
perambulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the sidewalk in order
to keep up with the tall grenadier who marched with his head in the air,
and let her make this show of being in his company, but not once looking
at her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls are always
with the military, so that it is said to be comparatively easy to keep
servants in the neighborhood of the barracks, or even in those streets
that the troops habitually pass through, and may be conveniently gloated
upon from attic-windows or basement areas. Probably much of the natural
supremacy of the male of our species has been lost in all ranks of
society through the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men in
civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace on their
coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely they could still knock
women about as they used, and be all the more admired. It is a point
worth considering in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.
A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory with those I
eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus-top, was a silent pair I noted
one day in St. Paul's. They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had
apparently lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where
every monument is more forbidding than another, and had sunk down on
a seat by themselves, and were trying to get back a little courage by
furtively holding each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of
a human interest larger than any London characteristic. So, in a little
different sort, was the rapture of a couple behind a tree on whom a
friend of mine came suddenly in St. James's Park at the very moment when
the eager he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who had not
the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the
place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear
the affianced of a 'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the
way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had
taken next him. The witness was going up to a dentist in that region,
and professed that in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the
furies of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after all.
XII
TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
London is so manifold (as I have all along been saying) that it would be
advisable, if one could, to see it in a sort of severalty, and take it
in the successive strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it could
best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans; then one
could give himself to its political or civic interest, another to
its religious memories and associations, another to its literary and
artistic records; no one American, however cultivated, could do justice
to all these claims, even with life and health of an expectation beyond
that of the most uncultivated American. Besides this suggestion I should
like to offer a warning, and this is, that no matter with what devoted
passion the American lover of London approaches her he must not hope for
an exclusive possession of her heart. If she is insurpassably the most
interesting, the most fascinating of all the cities that ever were, let
him be sure that he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it,
but he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival before him
in devotion to any aspect of her divinity. It is not for nothing that
poets, novelists, historians, antiquarians have been born in England
for so many ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of her
earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wallspaces but has been fondly
noted, studied, and described in prose, or celebrated in verse. English
books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the
American, come he never so numerously, will find outnumbering him in the
pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in
their islands I had occasion to observe how fond the English were of
English travel and English objects of interest, and wherever I went
in London there were Englishmen elbowing me from the front rank, not
rudely, not unkindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an
alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been used as a
foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at shrines of the beautiful
or memorable. I do not know how it is now, but in those days there was
nothing in the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza,
or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for Rome, there was
no such thing as doing as the Romans do in such places, because there
were apparently no Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty
of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about London far greater than
you can ever inspire them with for New York.
Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which they must
have been visiting all their lives, there were, at least, a thousand
Englishmen for every cultivated American we could make sure of when we
went there; and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to the
general public, this overwhelming majority of natives must have come on
orders from Fellows of the Society such as we had supposed would admit
us much more selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded,
and if it had been, still it would have been delightful on a summer
afternoon, of that hovering softness, half-cloud, half-sun, which the
London sky has the patent of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with
their may, were like cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it then was
and would be at sunset; and there was a density of grass underfoot and
foliage overhead in which one's own childhood found itself again, so
that one felt as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange
beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years old. But I
cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the same degree, and so had
better not insist upon the animals; the herds of elephants, the
troops of lions and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the
mass-meetings of anthropoid apes. Above and beyond these in their
strangeness were the figures of humanity representative of the
globe-girdling British empire, in their drawers and turbans and their
swarthy skins, who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me,
in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien shapes in
Central Park, but there they are somehow at once less surprising and
less significant than these Asian and African forms; they will presently
be Americans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperialings were
already British and eternally un-English. They frequented the
tea-tables spread in pleasant shades and shelters, and ate buns and
bread-and-butter, like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes
roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English complexions with
an effect of mystery irreconcilable forever with the matter-of-fact mind
behind their bland masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos,
Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them so that we were
faint for the tea from which they kept us at the crowded tables in
the gardens or on the verandas of the tea-houses. But we were not so
insatiable of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British whom
one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special advantage. Our Sunday
was in the season, and the season had conjecturably qualified it, so
that one could sometimes feel oneself in company better than one's own.
The children were well-dressed and admirably well-behaved; they justly
outnumbered their elders, and it was obviously their day. But it was
also the day of their elders, who had made excuse of the children's
pleasure in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were not so
much their elders, and the young aunts and uncles, who were naturally
cousins, lost themselves at times a little way from the children and
maids, in the quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the
tranquil waters with one another. They were then more interesting than
the strangest Malays and Hindoos, and I wonder what these made of
them, as they contemplated their segregation with the other thronging
spectators.
We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo; we were there quite
voluntarily; but among the places which we promised ourselves not to
visit again were the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery;
and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith with ourselves in
regard to the last. We went to it again not once, but several times, and
always with an increasing sense of its transcendent representativity. It
is not merely that for all the schools of painting it is almost as good
as going to the continental countries where they flourished, and is
much easier. It is not only that for English history, as it lives in the
portraiture of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courtesans and
heroes and statesmen, it is the past made personal to the beholder and
forever related to himself, as if he had seen those people in the flesh.
It is, above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms crowded with
the pictures and statues and busts of the Englishmen who have made
England England in every field of achievement that is oppressively,
almost crushingly wonderful. Before that swarming population of poets,
novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of painters, sculptors,
architects; of astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, physicians;
of philosophers, theologians, divines; of statesmen, politicians,
inventors, actors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great
of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but must dwindle in
number till our past seems as thinly peopled as our continent. It is
in these rooms that the grandeur of England, historically, resides. You
may, if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, and at
some point find her less great than the greatest of her overgrown
or overgrowing daughters, but from the presence of that tremendous
collectivity, that populous commonwealth of famous citizens whose
census can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in the welcome
obscurity to which you plunge among the millions of her capital, that
in all-round greatness we have hardly even the imagination of her
transcendence.
Well towards fifty years had passed between my first and last visits to
London, but I think I had kept for it throughout that long interval much
more of the earlier sentiment than for any other city that I have known.
I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that this sentiment
was continuous through the smell of the coal-smoke, or that the smoke
formed a solution in which all associations were held, and from which
they were, from time to time, precipitated in specific memories. The
peculiar odor had at once made me at home in London, for it had probably
so saturated my first consciousness in the little black, smoky town on
the Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a most intimate
element when I now inhaled it. But apart from this personal magic, the
London smoke has always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is
mostly the smoke which gives “atmosphere,” softens outlines, tenderly
blurs forms, makes near and far the same, and _intenerisce il cuore_,
for any him whose infant sense it bathed. No doubt it thickens the
constant damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog; but it is
over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objectionable, it is wholly
deplorable, indeed, when it descends in those sooty particles, the
_blacks;_ but in all my London sojourns I have had but one experience of
the blacks, and I will not condemn the smoke because of them. It gives
a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sunrises and the early winter
sunsets, the beauty of which dwells still in my mind from my first
London sojourn. In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the noons to the
softest effulgence; in the summer it was a veil in the air which kept
the flame of the heated term from doing its worst. It hung, diaphonous,
in the dusty perspectives, but it gathered and thickened about the
squares and places, and subdued all edges, so that nothing cut or hurt
the vision.
I was glad of that, because I found one of my greatest pleasures in
looking at the massed tree-forms in those gardened-groves, which I never
penetrated. The greater parks are open to the public, but the squares
are enclosed by tall iron fences, and locked against the general with
keys of which the particular have the keeping in the houses about them.
It gave one a fine shiver of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look
through their barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while
their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over the trim walks.
Sometimes it was even young ladies who sat reading, or, at the worst,
governesses. But commonly the squares were empty, though the grass so
invited the foot, and the benches in the border of the shade, or round
the great beds of bloom, extended their arms and spread their welcoming
laps for any of the particular who would lounge in them.
I remember only one of these neighborhood gardens which was open to the
public, and that was in the poor neighborhood which we lodged on the
edge of, equally with the edge of Belgravia. It was opened, by the great
nobleman who owned nearly the whole of that part of London, on all but
certain days of the week, with restrictions lettered on a board nearly
as big as the garden itself; but I never saw it much frequented, perhaps
because I usually happened upon it when it was locked against its
beneficiaries. Upon the whole, these London squares, though they
flattered the eye, did not console the spirit so much as the far uglier
places in New York, or the pretty places in Paris, which are free to
all. It can be said for the English way that when such places are free
to all they are not so free to some, and that is true. In this world you
have to exclude either the many or the few, and in England it is rather
the many who are excluded. Being one of those shut out, I did not like
the English way so well as ours, but if I had had keys to those locks, I
should not now dare ask myself which principle I should have preferred.
It would have been something like choosing between popular government
and family government after having been created one of the governing
families.
Life, I felt, would be sensibly dignified if one could spend some months
of every year of it in a mansion looking down into the leafy tops of
those squares. One's mansion might not always have the company of the
most historical or patrician mansions; sometimes these are to be found
in very unexpected and even inconspicuous places; but commonly the
associated dwellings would be ample, if not noble. They would rarely be
elbowed by those structures, not yet quite so frequent in London as in
New York, which lift themselves in an outer grandeur unsupported by the
successive levels of the social pretence within. I should say that with
the English, more than with us, the perpendicular is still socially
superior to the horizontal domestication. Yet the London flats are of
more comfortable and tasteful arrangement than ours. They are better
lighted always, never having (as far as I know) dark rooms blindly
staring into airless pits; and if they are not so well heated, that is
because the English do not wish, or at least expect, to be heated at
all. The elevator is not so universal as with us, but the stairways are
easier and statelier. The public presence of the edifice is statelier,
too; but if you come to state, the grandest of these buildings must deny
its denizens the splendor of flunkeys standing before its door, on a day
or night of social function, as one sees them standing by the steps or
portals of some mansion that houses a single family. To which of
the flat-dwellers would they be supposed to belong, if they grouped
themselves at the common entrance? For anything specific in their
attendance they might almost as well be at the next street-corner.
Time and again, in these pages, I have paid my duty, which has been my
grateful pleasure, to the birds which haunt the squares, and sing there.
You are not obliged to have a householder's key in order to hear them;
and when the hawthorns and the horse-chestnuts blossomed you required
a proprietorial right as little. Somehow, my eye and ear always
disappointed themselves in the absence of rooks from such places. My
senses ought to have been better instructed than to expect rooks in
London, but they had been so educated to the sight and sound of rooks
everywhere else in England that they mechanically demanded them in town.
I do not even know what birds they were that sang in the spaces; but
I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply edging their song
next the street; and where the squares were reduced to crescents, or
narrow parallelograms, or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect
that this edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so densely
interwoven in the squares.
I have spoken hitherto of that passion for dress to which all the
womanhood of England has so bewitchingly abandoned itself, and which
seemed to have reached an undue excess in the housemaid in a bolero hat
and a trained skirt, putting that white on the front steps which is so
universal in England that if the sun missed it after rising he might
instantly go down again in the supposition that it was still night. It
must always be a woman who whitens the steps; if a man-servant were to
do it any such dreadful thing might happen as would follow his blacking
the boots, which is alienably a female function. Under the circumstances
one hears much of the general decay of excellence in woman-servants in
London. They are far less amiable, patient, respectful, and faithful
than when their mistresses were young. This may be from the fact that so
many more employments besides domestic service seem to be open to
girls. Apparently very young girls are preferred in the innumerable
postal-stations, if one may judge from the children of tender years who
sell you stamps, and take your telegrams and register your letters. I
used at first to tremble for a defective experience, if not a defective
intelligence in them, but I did not find them inadequate to their duties
through either. Still their employment was so phenomenal that I could
not help remarking upon it. None of my English friends seemed to have
noticed it, till at last one, who _had_ noticed it, said he believed it
was because the government found them cheap, and was in that way helping
repay itself for the enormous expenses of the Boer War.
In the London shops I did not think women were so generally employed
as in our own, or those of the Continent. But this may have been a
conclusion from careless observation. In the book-stores to which I most
resorted, and which I did not think so good as ours, I remember to have
seen but one saleswoman. Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large
stores where women's goods, personal and household, are sold, and which
I again did not think comparable to ours. Seldom in any small shop, or
even book-stall or newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge.
But at the street-markets, especially those for the poorer customers,
market-women were the rule. I should say, in fine, that woman was a far
more domestic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the beast
of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German cities great or small;
but I am not going to sentimentalize her lot in England. Probably it is
only comparatively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and lowest
its hardship is attested by the stunted stature, and the stunted figure
of the ordinary English lower-class woman. Even among the elect of
the afternoon parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great an
average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show with us, where
they form the patriciate which our plutocracy has already flowered into.
But there was a far greater average of tall young men than with
us; which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a masculine
distinction.
As for those great department stores with which the question of women
relates itself inevitably, I have cursorily assumed our priority in
them, and the more I think of them, the more I am inclined to believe
myself right. But that is a matter in which women only may be decisive;
the nice psychology involved cannot be convincingly studied by the other
sex. I will venture, again, however, so far into this strange realm as
to say that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so good in
London as in New York, though when one remembers the two Bond Streets,
and Oxford, and lower Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of
claiming superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty-third
streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts of Third and Sixth
avenues to which ladies' shopping has spread. After all, perhaps there
is but one London, in this as in some other things.
Among the other things are hardly the restaurants which abound with
us, good, bad, and indifferent. In the affair of public feeding, of
the costliest, as well as the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot
menus, safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in the world,
not to say the universe. It is not only that we make the openest show of
this feeding, and parade it at windows, whereas the English retire it
to curtained depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it
ubiquitously, perpetually. In both London and New York it is exotic
for the most part, or, at least, on the higher levels, and the
administration is in the hands of those foreigners who take our money
for learning English of us. But there is no such range of Italian and
French and German restaurants in London as in New York, and of what
there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper
restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and
unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch
seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when the
lunch came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly
shut, and our wicked hope was in a little Italian _trattoria_ which
opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial effect as
an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blossoms. There was a strictly
English company within, and the lunch was to the English taste, but the
touch was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the Tiber or on
the Riva degli Schiavoni.