kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration with Sherry's or Delmonico's, but
the _entourage_ was less oppressively glaring, and the service had more
moments of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a principal
part of the drama. That is often the case with us in the simpler sort of
eating-houses, where it is the neat hand of Phyllis that serves rather
than that of the white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of either
color or any nationality. My profoundest and distinctest impression of
Phyllidian service is from a delightful lunch which I had one golden
noonday in that famous and beautiful house, Crosby Place, Bishopsgate,
which remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in which Sir John
Crosby proudly built it from his grocer's and woolman's gains in 1466.
It had afterwards added to it the glory of lodging Richard III., who,
both as protector and as sovereign-prince made appointments there, in
Shakespeare's tragedy of him, for the Lady Anne, for Catesby, and for
the “First Murderer,” whom he praises for his thoughtfulness in coming
for the “warrant,” that he might be admitted to their victim.
“Well thought upon; I have it here about me.
When you have done, repair to Crosby place.”
Probably the First Murderer lunched there, four hundred years ago, “when
he had done as I did now”; but, in the mean time, Henry VIII. had given
Crosby Place to a rich Italian merchant, one Anthony Bonvice; later,
ambassadors had been received in it; the first Earl of Northampton
had enlarged it, and dwelt in it as lord mayor; in 1638 the East
India Company had owned it, and later yet, in 1673, it was used for a
Presbyterian meeting-house; but in 1836 it was restored to its ancient
form and function. I do not know how long it has been an eating-house,
but I hope it may long remain so, for the sensation and refreshment of
Americans who love a simple and good refection in a mediaeval setting,
at a cost so moderate that they must ever afterwards blush for it.
You penetrate to its innermost perpendicularity through a passage
that enclosed a “quick-lunch” counter, and climb from a most noble
banquet-hall crammed with hundreds of mercantile gentlemen “feeding like
one” at innumerable little tables, to a gallery where the musicians
must have sat of old. There it was that Phyllis found and neat-handedly
served my friend and me, gently experiencing a certain difficulty in our
combined addition, but mastering the arithmetical problem presently, and
taking our tip with an air of surprise which it never created in any of
the English-learning Swiss, French, or Italian Strephons who elsewhere
ministered to us.
The waitresses at Crosby Place were of a girlish dignity which never
expected and was never visibly offered the familiar pleasantries which
are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In
tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on
beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banalities with persons beyond the
counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened
loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the
waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of
any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel; and I thought it to the honor of
the lunchers that they seemed all to know it. The gentle influence
of her presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood where,
another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was misled by the mediaeval
aspect of the entrance, and where I found waitresses again instead
of waiters. But nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting the
manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those repeated A. B. C.
cold-lunch places of the Aerated Bread Company, where a chill has
apparently been imparted to their bearing by the temperature of the food
they serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be rather that a
New England severity in them is the effect of the impersonal relation of
served and server which no gratuity humanizes.
It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as
ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of
a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is
to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds himself asked sixpence
for that necessary evil, the programme. But, now I come to think of it,
most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always
used to paying, ancestrally and personally, sixpence for their
programmes and feel no asperity at being so plundered. The true
explanation may be found, after all, in the discovery, akin to the
government's, that their service is cheaper than men ushers' would be.
Children of as tender years as those who manage the postal-stations,
go round with tea and coffee between the acts, as with us the
myriad-buttoned ice-water boy passes; but whereas this boy returns
always with a tray of empty glasses, I never saw a human being drink
either the tea or coffee offered by those female infants in any London
theatre.
Let it be not supposed, however, that I went much to London theatres.
I went perhaps half a dozen times in as many weeks. Once settled in my
chair, I might well have fancied myself at home in a New York theatre,
except that the playing seemed rather better, and the English intonation
not quite so scrupulously English as that which our actors have produced
after a conscientious study of the original. I heard that the English
actors had studied the American accent for a play imported from us; but
I did not see this play, and I am now very sorry. The American accent,
at least, must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from the
reproductions of our parlance which I heard in private life by people
who had sojourned, or merely travelled, among us. These were so
unfailingly delightful, that one could not have wished them more like.
The arriving and departing of theatre-goers by night adds sensibly to
the brilliancy of the complexion of London. The flare of electricity in
the region of the theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart of
September, and recalled the gayety of the season for the moment to the
desolate metropolis. But this splendor was always so massed and so vivid
that even in the height of the season it was one of the things that
distinguished itself among the various immense impressions. The
impressions were all, if I may so try to characterize them, transitory;
they were effects of adventitious circumstances; they were not
structural in their origin. The most memorable aspect of the Strand or
Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately architecture, but
its moments of fog or mist, when its meanest architecture would show
stately. The city won its moving grandeur from the throng of people
astir on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or
liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and
Parliament did not seem in themselves spectacular; they needed the
desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative
emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of
their keeping in the memory. Is Trafalgar Square as imposing as it
has the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants
somehow the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the Place de
la Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with its suggestions of old
steel-engravings of Athens. Of course St. Paul's has a prodigious
opportunity, as the multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its
facade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for bit, there is
not quite any bit in London like that edifice of smutted Greek on
which the newly arrived American looks from his breakfast-table in
his Liverpool hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far
from thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to the London
architecture. Pure white marble is all very well, and the faint rose
that the stone takes from a thousand years of Italian sunsets is not
bad; but the black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul's lends wall and
dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the electric glare of
tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches the columns which rise, more or
less casually as it seems, from the London streets and squares, and one
almost hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the fronts of
the aristocratic mansions. It is like having an old picture restored;
perhaps it has to be done, but it is a pity.
The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of large houses of
the proudest nobility in the world, are by no means overwhelming. They
hold their primacy among the other pieces of domestic architecture,
as their owners hold their primacy in society, very quietly, if very
stolidly, and one would have, I fancy, to come much harder against
them than one would be allowed to do, in order to feel their quality
intimately. There they are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood
of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the
different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be
visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a
barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler
and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly
old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its
monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high social
preparation during the season in flinging out curtained galleries or
pavilions towards the street, if it stood back; if it stood flush upon
the sidewalk a group of fifteen or twenty flunkeys, and the continual
arrest of carriages would attest its inward state; but the genius of the
race is to keep its own to itself, even its own splendors and grandeurs,
except on public occasions when it shines forth in incomparable
magnificence.
If London, then, is not habitually grandiose, or monumental, or
beautiful, what is it? I should say, with much fear of contradiction and
scornful laughter, that it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky,
cornery, curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers everywhere
mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of birds heard through the
staccato of cabs, and the muffled bellow of omnibuses. You may not like
London, but you cannot help loving it. The monuments, if I may keep
coming back to them, are plain things, often, with no attempt upon the
beholder's emotions. In the process of time, I suspect that the Albert
Memorial will not be the most despised among them, for it expresses,
even if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat
stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does not stand
mum, like the different shy, bashful columns stuck here and there, and
not able to say what they would be at.
If one comes to the statues there are, of course, none so good as the
Farragut in Madison Square, or the Logan on the Lake front at Chicago,
and, on the whole, I remember those at Washington as better. There are
not so many English kings standing or riding about as one would expect;
the English kings have, indeed, not been much to brag of in bronze or
marble, though in that I do not say they are worse than other kings.
I think, but I am not sure, that there are rather more public men
of inferior grade than kings, though this may be that they were more
impressive. Most noticeable was the statue of Disraeli, which, on
Primrose Day, I saw much garlanded and banked up with the favorite
flower of that peculiarly rustic and English statesman. He had the air
of looking at the simple blossoms and forbearing an ironical smile, or
was this merely the fancy of the spectator? Among the royal statues is
that of the Charles whom they put to death, and who was so unequal in
character though not in spirit to his dread fate. It was stolen away,
and somewhere long hid by his friends or foes, but it is now to be seen
in the collection of Trafalgar Square, so surely the least imposing of
equestrian figures that it is a pity it should ever have been found.
For a strikingly handsome man, all his statues attest how little he lent
himself to sculpture.
Not far away is another equestrian statue, which never failed to give me
a start, when I suddenly came upon it in a cab. It looked for an instant
quite like many statues of George Washington, as it swept the air with
its doffed hat, but a second glance always showed it the effigy of
George the Third, bowing to posterity with a gracious eighteenth-century
majesty. If it were possible, one would like to think that the
resemblance mentioned had grown upon it, and that it in the case of
Americans was the poor king's ultimate concession to the good-feeling
which seems to be reuniting the people he divided.
XIII
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
The amiable afternoon of late April which we chose for going to Hampton
Court, made my return to the place after an interval of twenty odd
years, a sort of triumphal progress by embowering the course of our
train with plum and pear and cherry trees in a white mist of bloom. Long
before we reached the country these lovely apparitions abounded in
the back-yards of the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran
between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely flowers; when we
got to open expanses where nature could find room to spread in lawns
that green English turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies
and sunny with dandelions. The poets used to call that sort of thing
enamelling, and it was not distasteful, in our approach to such a
kindly, artificial old place as Hampton Court, to suppose that we were
passing through enamelled meads. Under the circumstances we might have
expected our train to purl, in default of a stream to perform the part,
and I can truly say of it that it arrived with us in a mood so pastoral
that I still cannot understand why we did not ask for a fly at the
station in a couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our
prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our taking it for
the little distance to the palace, which it would have been so much
pleasanter to walk.
Yet, I do not know but we were instinctively wise in coming to the
entrance of the fine old paved courtyard with a certain suddenness: if
we had left it much more time the grass between the bricks might have
overgrown them, and given an air of ruin to precincts that for centuries
have been held from decay, in the keeping of life at once simple and
elegant. Though Hampton Court has never been the residence of the
English kings since the second George gave the third George an
enduring disgust for it by boxing the ears of the boy there in a fit of
grandfatherly impatience, it has been and is the home of many English
gentlefolk, rarely privileged, in a land of rare privileges, to live in
apartments granted them by royal favor. In former times the privilege
was now and then abused by tenants who sublet their rooms in lodgings;
but the abuse has long been broken up, and now there cannot be, in
the whole earth, a more dignified dwelling for the dowager of a
distinguished or merely favored family than such as the royal pleasure
freely grants at Hampton Court. Doubtless the crumpled rose-leaf is
there, as it is everywhere, but unless it is there to lend a faint
old-fashioned odor as of _pot-pourri_ to life in those apartments, I do
not believe that it abounds in any of them.
The things I had chiefly in mind from my former visit were the beauties
of the Stuarts' time, and of Sir Peter Lely's pencil, in the galleries
of the palace, and the secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar
place in a corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid my
devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly declare that I
did not find it looking a day older since I had seen it last in 1882.
It could hardly have said as much for me, but I reflected that I had not
been two hundred years old to begin with, and consoled myself as I could
in my consciousness that I was really not so young by twenty odd years
as I once was. Yet I think it must be a dull and churlish nature which
would wish to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the unaging
antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this moment be glad to share
the youthful spirit of the sunken garden which I passed on my way to the
famous vine, and in which with certain shapes of sculpture and blossom,
I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor-vitae in the taste of a
world more childlike than ours, and at the same time so much older. The
Dutch taste of it all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from
the Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by the good
William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly good in comparison with all
their predecessors from Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the
Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in that long arbor of
clipped wych-elms, near the sunken garden, called Mary's bower, which,
on our April afternoon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs
to break into leaf.
We did not penetrate its perspective, for it seems one of the few things
at Hampton Court barred to the public. Everywhere else the place is free
to the visitor, who may walk as he pleases on its garden-paths, or over
its close-woven turf, or sit out of the sun under its dense black yews,
or stroll beneath the oaks by the banks of the Long Canal. If the canal
is Dutch, the burly trees which lounge about at their pleasure in the
park, impart the true English sentiment to the scene; but, for my part,
I did not care to go far from the borders of the beds of hyacinths and
tulips and daffodils. The grass sighed with secret tears under the foot,
and it was better to let the fancy, which would not feel the need of
goloshes, rove disembodied to the bosky depths into which the oaks
thickened afar, dim amid the vapor-laden air. From the garden-plots one
could look, dry-shod, down upon the Thames, along which the pretty
town of Hampton stretches, and in whose lively current great numbers of
house-boats tug at their moorings. The Thames beside the palace is not
only swift but wide, and from the little flowery height on which we
surveyed these very modernest of pleasure-craft they had a remove at
which they were lost in an agreeable mystery. Even one which we were
told belonged to a rich American could not alienate itself from the
past when there were no United States, and very few united colonies. The
poorest American, if he could not have a lodgement in the palace (and I
do not see how the royal bounty could extend to one of our disinherited
condition), or one of the pleasant Hampton houses overlooking the river,
might be glad to pass the long, mild English summer, made fast to the
willowy bank of the Thames, without mosquitoes or malaria to molest him
or make him afraid in his dreamful sojourn.
By all the laws of picturesque dealing with other times the people whose
portraits we had seen in the galleries ought to have been in the garden
or about the lawns in hospitable response to the interest of their
trans-Atlantic visitors; but in mere common honesty, I must own they
were not. They may have become tired of leaving their frames at the
summons of the imaginations which have so often sought to steal their
color for a dull page, and to give the charm of their tragedy or comedy
to a passage which otherwise would not move. I do not blame them, and I
advise the reader not to expect a greater complaisance of them than we
experienced. But in all that densely-storied England, where every scene
has memories accumulated one upon another till the sense aches under
them, I think there is none that surpasses, if any vies with this.
What makes the charm of Hampton Court is that from first to last it lies
in an air clearer of fable or tradition than that which involves most
other seats of power. For we do like to know what we are dealing with,
in the past as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves
real, we love reality in other people, whether they still live or
whether they died long ago. If they were people of eminence, we gratify
in supreme degree the inextinguishable passion for good society innate
in every one by consorting with royalties and titles whom we may here
know as we know our contemporary equals, through facts and traits even
better ascertained. At Hampton Court we are really at home with the
great parvenu who began the palace in such magnificence that none of the
successive princes have excelled it in design, and who when his fear
of the jealous tyrant compelled him to offer it to his king, could make
such a gift as no subject ever before laid at the feet of a sovereign.
The grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry VIII., in the
sufferance and the performance of that extortion are as sensible in the
local air as if they were qualities of some event in our own day, and
the details of the tyrant's life in the palace remain matters of as
clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the recent taking off
of the Servian king and queen. The annals are so explicit that no veil
of uncertainty hangs between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the
throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard as in an instantaneous
photograph escaping from her prison-chamber and running through the
gallery to implore the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if
a phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched woman's screams
when she is pursued and seized and carried back, while the king
continues devoutly in the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward
VI. relates itself as distinctly to the palace where he was born;
and one is all but personally witness there to the strange episode of
Elizabeth's semi-imprisonment while Bloody Mary, now sister and now
sovereign, balanced her fate as from hand to hand, and hesitated whether
to make her heiress to a throne or to a crown of martyrdom. She chose
wisely in the end, for Elizabeth was fitter for mortal than immortal
glory, and for the earthly fame of Mary Queen of Scots Elizabeth in
her turn did not choose unwisely, however unwittingly, when amid her
coquetting and counselling with her statesmen and lovers at Hampton
Court she drew the toils closer and closer about her victim. But here I
ought to own that all this is a reflected light from after-reading,
and not from my previous knowledge of the local history. In making my
confession, however, I am not sure that the sort of general ignorance I
brought to it was not a favorable medium through which to view Hampton
Court. If you come prepared with the facts, you are hampered by them and
hindered in the enjoyment of the moment's chances. You are obliged to
verify them, from point to point, but if you learn them afterwards you
can arrange them in your memories of the scene, where you have wandered
vaguely about in a liberal and expansive sense of unlimited historical
possibilities. I am able now to realize, without having missed one charm
of our spring afternoon in those entrancing bounds that the son of
Mary Stuart was as fond of Hampton Court, when he came there king, as
Elizabeth herself.