Town_, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street, Strand, was once the dwelling
of Benjamin Franklin, and he adds, with the manliness which is always
such a curious element of his unmanliness: “What a change along the
shore of the Thames in a few years (for two centuries are less than a
few in the lapse of time) from the residence of a set of haughty nobles,
who never dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a tradesman, to
that of a yeoman's son, and a printer, who was one of the founders of a
great state!”
Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street, Strand, a state
which led in the attempted dismemberment of that great state, and nearly
wrought its ruin, had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was
there John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina, which still,
I believe, remains its organic law. One has one's choice among the
entirely commonplace yellow brick buildings, which give the street the
aspect of an old-fashioned _place_ in Boston. The street was seriously
quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot-passengers
sauntering through it, and certain clerklike youth entering and issuing
from the doors of the buildings which had the air of being law-offices.
We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated
colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in
Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the
Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the corkscrew
stairs leading to it, did we find there tombs and tablets? I am not
sure, but I am sure we found the tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a
_History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, and who while
in Parliament strongly favored “distressing the Americans,” as the
king wished, and made a speech in support of the government measure
for closing the port of Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge
for that, but I could not give myself to his monument with such
cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and volatile
old letter-writer James Howell, which also I found in that triforium,
half-hidden behind a small organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in
the dimness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this, after
looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus College in Oxford, where
he studied the humanities that enabled him to be so many things to so
many masters, that I took all his chiselled praises for granted.
I made what amends I could for my slight of the Mortons in the Temple
Church, by crossing presently to Clifford's Inn, Strand, where the
very founder of Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself was
sometime student of the law and a dweller in these precincts. It is now
the hall of the Art Workers' Guild, and anywhere but in London would
be incredibly quiet and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern
neighborhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and roistering
antipuritan, who set up his May-pole at Wollaston, and danced about it
with his debauched aboriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles
Standish marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such ungodly doings
at the muzzles of his matchlocks.
[Illustration: CLIFFORD'S INN HALL.]
It must have been another day that we went to view the church of St.
Botolph without Aldersgate, because some of the patrician families
emigrating to Massachusetts were from that parish, which was the home
of many patrician families of the Commonwealth. In St. Andrew's Holborn,
the Vanes, father and son, worshipped, together with the kindred of many
that had gone to dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior,
after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our visit was smelling of
varnish; most London churches smell of mortar, when in course of
their pretty constant reparation, and this was at least a change.
St. Stephen's Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as the
spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport, who was the founder of
New Haven, but it will attract the unlocalized lover of liberty because
it was also the parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom
Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for trouble. It had a
certain sentiment of low-churchness, being very plain without and within
not unlike an Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England town.
One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean court, out of a business
neighborhood, jostled by commercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats
who were expressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy with
the past if not with the present of St. Andrew's.
St. Martins-in-the-Fields, where General Oglethorpe, the founder of
Georgia, was baptized, was, in his time, one of the proudest parishes of
the city, and the actual church is thought to be the masterpiece of the
architect Gibbs, who produced in the portico what Cunningham calls “one
of the finest pieces of architecture in London.” Many famous people were
buried in the earlier edifice, including Nell Gwynne, Lord Mohun, who
fell in a duel with the Duke of Hamilton, as the readers of _Henry
Esmond_ well know, and Farquhar the dramatist. Lord Bacon was baptized
there; and the interior of the church is very noble and worthy of him
and of the parish history. Whether General Oglethorpe drew upon his
native parish in promoting the settlement of Georgia, I am not so sure
as I am of some other things, as, for instance, that he asked the king
for a grant of land, “in trust for the poor,” and that his plan was to
people his colony largely from the captives in the debtors' prisons. I
love his memory for that, and I would gladly have visited the debtors'
prisons which his humanity vacated if I could have found them, or if
they had still existed.
The reader who has had the patience to accompany me on these somewhat
futile errands must have been aware of making them largely on the lordly
omnibus-tops which I always found so much to my proud taste. Often,
however, we whisked together from point to point in hansoms; often we
made our way on foot, with those quick transitions from the present to
the past, from the rush and roar of business thoroughfares to the deep
tranquillity of religious interiors, or the noise-bound quiet of ancient
church-yards, where the autumn flowers blazed under the withering autumn
leaves, and the peaceful occupants of the public benches were scarcely
more agitated by our coming than the tenants of the graves beside them.
The weather was for the most part divinely beautiful, so tenderly and
evenly cool and warm, with a sort of lingering fondness in the sunshine,
as if it were prescient of the fogs so soon to blot it. The first of
these came on the last day of our research, when suddenly we dropped
from the clouded surfaces of the earth to depths where the tube-line
trains carry their passengers from one brilliantly lighted station to
another. We took three of the different lines, experimentally, rather
than necessarily, in going from St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street,
hard by the Bank of England, to the far neighborhood of Stoke Newington;
and at each descent by the company's lift, we left the dark above
ground, and found the light fifty feet below. While this sort of transit
is novel, it is delightful; the air is good, or seems so, and there is
a faint earthy smell, somewhat like that of stale incense in Italian
churches, which I found agreeable from association at least; besides,
I liked to think of passing so far beneath all the superincumbent death
and all the superambulant life of the immense immemorial town.
[Illustration: ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THE-FIELDS.]
We found St. Mary Woolnoth closed, being too early for the Sunday
service, and had to content ourselves with the extremely ugly outside of
the church which is reputed the masterpiece of Wren's pupil Hawksmoor;
while we took for granted the tablet or monument of Sir William Phipps,
the governor of Massachusetts, who went back to be buried there after
the failure of his premature expedition against Quebec. My friend had
provided me something as remote from Massachusetts as South Carolina in
colonial interest, and we were presently speeding to New River, which
Sir Hugh Myddleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke Newington
to all the streets of London, and so originated her modern water-supply.
This knight, or baronet, he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist,
to be of the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of the first
South Carolinians then and since. It is at least certain that he was a
Welshman, and that the gift of his engineering genius to London was
so ungratefully received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his
enterprise. The king claimed a half-interest in the profits, but the
losses remained undivided to Myddleton. The fact, such as it is, proves
perhaps the weakest link in a chain of patriotic associations which, I
am afraid the reader must agree with me, has no great strength anywhere.
The New River itself, when you come to it, is a plain straightforward,
canal-like water-course through a grassy and shady level, but it is
interesting for the garden of Charles Lamb's first house backing upon
it, and for the incident of some of his friends walking into it one
night when they left him after an evening that might have been rather
unusually “smoky and drinky.” Apart from this I cared for it less than
for the neighborhoods through which I got to it, and which were looking
their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and richest among
the low trees of Highbury Fields, where, when we ascended to them
from our tubular station, the lawns were of an electric green in their
vividness. In fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog
lends itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the prevailing
commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into a semblance of beauty in
spite of itself. The rows upon rows of humble brick dwellings in the
streets we passed through were flattered into cottage homes where one
would have liked to live in one's quieter moods, and some rather stately
eighteenth-century mansions in Stoke Newington housed one's pride the
more fittingly, because of the mystery which the fog added to their
antiquity. It hung tenderly and reverently about that old, old parish
church of Stoke Newington where, it is story or fable, they that bore
the body of the dead King Harold from the field of Hastings made one
of their stations on the way to Waltham Abbey; and it was much in the
maundering mind of the kindly spectator who could not leave off pitying
us because we could not get into the church, the sexton having just
before gone down the street to the baker's. It followed us more and more
vaguely into the business quarter where we took our omnibus, and where
we noted that business London, like business New York, was always of the
same complexion and temperament in its shops and saloons, from centre
to circumference. Amid the commonplaceness of Islington where we changed
omnibuses, the fog abandoned us in despair, and rising aloof, dissolved
into the bitterness of a small cold rain.
XIX
ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
The fog, through that golden month of September (September is so silvern
in America), was more or less a fact of the daily weather. The morning
began in a mellow mistiness, which the sun burned through by noon; or
if sometimes there was positive rain, it would clear for a warm sunset,
which had moments of a very pretty pensiveness in the hollows of Green
Park, or by the lakes of St. James's. There were always the bright beds
of autumn flowers, and in Hyde Park something of the season's flush
came back in the driving. The town began to be visibly fuller, and I
was aware of many Americans, in carriages and on foot, whom I fancied
alighting after a continental summer, and poising for another flight to
their respective steamers. The sentiment of London was quite different
at the end of September from the sentiment of London at the beginning,
and one could imagine the sort of secondary season which it revisits in
the winter. There was indeed no hint of the great primary season in the
sacred paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where the inverted
penny chairs lay with their foreheads in the earth; and the shrivelled
leaves, loosened from their boughs in the windless air, dropped
listlessly round them.
[Illustration: HYDE PARK IN OCTOBER.]
At night our little Mayfair Street was the haunt of much voluntary
minstrelsy. Bands of cockney darkeys came down it, tuning their voices
to our native ragtime. Or a balladist, man or woman, took the centre,
and sang towards our compassionate windows. Or a musical husband and
wife placed their portable melodeon on the opposite sidewalk, and
trained their vocal and instrumental attack upon the same weak defences.
It was all in keeping with the simple kindliness of the great town whose
homelikeness arises from its immense habitability. This always strikes
the New-Yorker, whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful
New-Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the ampler
metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted spaces where man
may peacefully dwell, or quietly lodge over-night, in his own city. In
assimilating each of the smaller towns or villages which it has made
itself up of London has left them so much of their original character
that though merged, they are not lost; and in cases where they have been
so long merged as to have experienced a severance of consciousness, or
where they are only nominally different sections of the vast whole,
they have each its own temperament. It would be quite impossible for one
finding one's self in Bloomsbury to suppose one's self in Belgravia, or
in any of the Kensingtons to fancy one's self in Mayfair. Chelsea is as
temperamentally different from Pimlico as the City from Southwark, and
Islington, again, though it speaks the same language as Whitechapel,
might well be of another tongue, so differently does it think and feel.
The names, and a hundred others, call to the stranger from the sides
and fronts and backs of omnibuses, until he has a weird sense that they
personally knew him long before he knew them. But when once domesticated
in any quarter he is so quickly at home in it that it will be the centre
of London for him, coming to and going from it in a local acceptance
which he cannot help feeling a reciprocal kindliness. He might do this
as a mere hotel-dweller, but if he has given hostages to fortune by
going into lodgings, and forming even indirect relations with the
tradesmen round the corners, the little stationers and newsmen, the
nearest bookseller, the intelligent female infants in the post-office
(which is always within a minute's walk), and perhaps conversed with the
neighboring policeman, or has taken cabs so often from the neighboring
rank as to be recognizable to the cabmen, then he is more quickly and
thoroughly naturalized in the chosen region. He will be unworthy of many
little friendlinesses from his fellow-citizens if he does not like them,
and he will miss, in refusing the image of home which is offered him,
one of the rarest consolations of exile.
At a distance from London (say as small a distance, in time if not
space, as Bath), you will hear it said that everybody is well in London,
but in London you will find that the hygienic critics or authorities
distinguish. All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are
relaxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange then that
London should be likewise subdivided. Mayfair, you will hear, is very
bracing, but Belgravia, and more particularly Pimlico, on which it
borders, is terribly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, Chelsea again is bracing,
and as for South Kensington it stands to reason that it is bracing
because it is very high, almost as high as Mayfair. If you pass from
your Pimlico borderland of Belgravia to either of those regions you are
certainly not sensible of any sharp accent, but there is no telling what
a gradual rise of eight or ten feet may make in the quality of the air.
To the stranger all London seems a vast level, with perhaps here and
there the sort of ground-swell you may note from your car-window in the
passage of a Western plain. Ludgate Hill is truly a rise of ground, but
Tower Hill is only such a bad eminence as may gloomily lift itself in
history irrespective of the actual topography. Such an elevation as our
own Murray Hill would be a noticeable height in London, and there are no
such noble inequalities as in our up-town streets along the Hudson. All
great modern cities love the plain surfaces, and London is not different
from Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or St.
Petersburg, or Milan in this; New York is much more mountainous, and
Boston is a Sierra Nevada in comparison.
Yet, I suppose there must be something in the superstition that one part
of London is more bracing or more relaxing than another, and that there
is really, however insensibly, a difference of levels. That difference
of temperaments which I have mentioned, seems mostly intimated in the
size and age of the houses. They are larger and older in Bloomsbury,
where they express a citizen substance and comfort; they are statelier
about the parks and squares of Belgravia, which is comparatively a new
settlement; but there are more little houses among the grandeurs of
Mayfair which is of the same social quality, though many of its streets
crossing from Piccadilly have quite gone to shops and family hotels
and lodgings. It is more irregular and ancient than Belgravia, and its
grandeurs have a more casual air. The historic mansions crowded by the
clubs towards Hyde Park Corner, and grouped about the open space into
which Piccadilly falters there, or following the park in the flat curve
of Park Lane, have not the effect of withdrawal and exclusion of the
Belgravian mansions; beyond which again there is a world of small
dwellings of fainter and fainter self-assertion till they fade into the
hopeless plebeian unconsciousness of Pimlico, whose endless streets are
without beauty or dignity. Yet beyond this lost realm Chelsea redeems
itself in a grace of domestic architecture and an atmosphere of esthetic
associations which make it a favorite abode of the tastes as well as the
means. Kensington, where you arrive after what seems hopeless straggling
through the roaring thoroughfare prolonging the Fleet-and-Strand-derived
Piccadilly, is of almost equal artistic and literary appeal, but
is older and perhaps less actual in its claims upon the cultivated
sympathies. In either of these regions the polite American of definite
resources might, if banished from the republic, dwell in great material
and spiritual comfort; but if he chose Chelsea for his exile, I do
not know that I should blame his preference. There he would have the
neighborhood of many charming people whom to know for neighbors would
add a certain grace to existence, although he might not otherwise know
them. Besides he would have, beyond the Thames, the wooded stretch of
Battersea Park, if his dwelling, as it very well might, looked out upon
the river and across it; and in the distance he would have the roofs
and chimneys of that far Southwark, which no one seems anxious to have
nearer than, say, the seventeenth century, and yet which being a part of
London must be full of perfectly delightful people.
[Illustration: THAMES EMBANKMENT.]
Even if you make-believe that Southwark bears some such relation
to London as Jersey City bears to New York (but the image is very
imperfect) still New York, you are aware, can never domesticate the
Hudson as London has domesticated the Thames. Our river is too vast,
too grand, if you will, ever to be redeemed from its primitive wildness,
much less made an intimate part of the city's life. It may be laced with
ferries and bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave with its
swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and bridged hereafter,
again and again, but its mere size will keep it savage, just as a
giant, though ever so amiable and good-natured, could not imaginably be
civilized as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among rivers
the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average, and is therefore
perfectly proportioned to the little continent of which it is the Amazon
or the Mississippi. If it were larger it would make England ridiculous,
as Denmark, for instance, is made ridiculous by the sounds and estuaries
that sunder it. But the Thames is of just the right size to be held in
London's arms, and if it is not for her the graceful plaything that the
Seine is for Paris, it is more suited to the practical nature of London.
There are, so far as I noted, no whispering poplars planted by the
brink of the Thames, but I feel sure that if there were, and there were
citizens fishing their years away in their shade, they would sometimes
catch a fish, which the life-long anglers in the Seine never do.
That forms a great difference, expressive of a lasting difference of
character in the two capitals. Along the Thames the trees are planted on
the successive Embankments, in a beautiful leafy parkway following its
course, broken here and there by public edifices, like the Parliament
buildings, but forming a screen mostly uninterrupted, behind which a
parade of grandiose hotels does not altogether hide itself from the
river. Then the national quality of the English stream is expressed in
the succession of bridges which span it. These are uglier than any that
cross the Seine; each one, in fact, is uglier than the other, till
you come to the Tower Bridge, which is the ugliest of all. They have a
strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to the stranger who
lounges on their parapets and looks down upon the grimy little steamers
scuttling under them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over
the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an admirable point for
viewing the clumsy craft of all types which the falling tide leaves
wallowing in the iridescent slime of the shoals, showing their huge
flanks, and resting their blunt snouts on the mud-banks in a slumberous
content.
It is seldom that the prospect reveals a vessel of more dignified
proportions or presence, though in my drives along one of the
Embankments I came upon a steamer of the modest size which we used to
think large when we crossed the Atlantic in it, but which might be swung
among the small boats from the davits of a latter-day liner. This
vessel always had an admiring crowd about it, and I suppose it had some
peculiar interest for the public which did not translate itself to me.
As far as the more visible commerce of the more sight-seen parts of the
Thames is concerned, it is as unimpressive as may be. It has nothing of
the dramatic presence of the shipping in the Hudson or the East River,
with its light operatic touches in the gayly painted Sound and North
River steamboats. You must go as far at least as Stepney on the Thames
before you begin to realize that London is the largest port, as well as
the largest city, in the world.