THE EAST AND THE WEST
"Behold how far the East is from the West!"
"A forest of houses, between which ebbs and flows a stream
of human faces, with all their varied passions--an awful
rush of love, hunger, and hate--for such is
London."--_Heine._
"To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond," says Carlyle, "what a
different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina
of both was, most likely, the same." "A distinct Universe," adds
Thackeray in the same spirit, "walks about under your Hat, and under
mine." This latter reflection occurs to me often as I walk about
London, and note all its many "sorts and conditions" of men. There is
here, especially, everything in the "point of view." From the West to
the East is a wide difference; yet, between the two, how many minor
differences?
London, indeed, is hardly like a single city; it is rather like many
cities rolled into one. Here, more than anywhere else, you realize
that "it takes all sorts to make a world"; for the inhabitants vary
quite as widely as do those of foreign countries. It was Disraeli who
said, with much cynical truth:
"The courts of two cities do not so differ from one another
as the court and the city in their peculiar ways of life and
conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St. James's,
notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the
same language, are a distinct people from those of
Cheapside."
[Illustration: _A Railway Bookstall._]
Between the people of the East, and those of the West, it is not
merely a question of distance; for, as a matter of fact, the two types
are often closely interwoven. Thus, there is an "East in the West,"
where, not infrequently, slums and mean streets lie in near
juxtaposition to squares of lordly pleasure-houses, and where recently
erected "model dwellings" for workmen flourish in the very hearts of
the Grosvenor and Cadogan Estates; and there is a "West in the East,"
as testified by the pleasant wide streets of comfortable roomy houses
that abound in the near suburbs of East and South London. Yet, it may
be broadly stated that every part of London has manners peculiar to
itself, as unvarying, in their way, as were the laws of the Medes and
Persians; with, also, one principal dividing-line,--that intangible
line separating the East End from the West End. Here are a few of the
differences between the two:
The West End has all the money and all the leisure; the East End
monopolizes most of the labour, and nearly all of the dirt. The West
End numbers a few thousands of floating population; the East End, a
million or so of pretty constant inhabitants. Yet, by some strange
association of ideas, it is to this small "West End" that we allude
when we speak of "all London," and to which the daily papers refer
when in August and September they assure us that "there is absolutely
no one left in town." The manners and customs of each are dissimilar;
both indulge in slang of a kind; but, while the East End usually cuts
off the initial letter of its words, the West-End drops the final one.
The West End is shocked by the East, but then, the East End is just as
much shocked, for its part, by the West. If the "lady" is full of
righteous scorn for the "factory hand" who spends her hard-won
earnings on a feathered hat and a plush cape, the slum-dweller is, on
the other hand, quite equally scandalized at the "lady's" brazen
boldness in wearing a _decollete_ dress: "To think of 'er 'avin' the
fice ter go hout with them nyked showlders, 'ow 'orrid!" the factory
girl will say, from out the street-door crowd at an evening "crush."
Even a veiled Turkish lady, from the secluded harem, could hardly show
more genuine feeling at the unpleasant spectacle. No, our ways are not
as their ways. Their conventionalities are quite as strict, even
stricter, than ours. Possibly to them, even our speech sounds just as
faulty as theirs to us; probably they think us very ill-bred because
we do not constantly reiterate the words "Mrs. Smith," or "Mrs.
Jones," when addressing the said ladies; or cry immediately, "Granted,
Miss, or Sir," in reply to "I beg your pardon!" At any rate, we must,
to them, seem chilly and unresponsive. Then, the books we read, if
they understood them, would often greatly shock the slum-dwellers; the
pictures we hang in our parlours would horrify them. Servants do not
come from the slums or even from the lowest class; yet I have myself,
out of regard for their feelings, had to "sky" the most beautiful
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ of Titian, and turn the photograph of a masterpiece
by Praxiteles with its face ignominiously to the wall. And it's "'ow
you can go to that there National Gallery, 'm, and look at them
pictures of folkses without a rag on 'em, well, it beats me, it do
indeed!" After all, and once more, the difference is all in "the point
of view!"
[Illustration: _The City Train._]
But, if the East and the West have their wide and radical differences,
between the two there are, as I said, many recurring types. And the
constant Londoner, were he suddenly to be brought, blindfolded, to
some hitherto unknown spot in the city or near suburbs, would soon
know his whereabouts by the look of the people he encountered. Thus,
you may know Bloomsbury by its Jews, as well as by a population
remarkable for general frowsiness, a look of "ingrained" dirt, and an
indescribable air of having seen better days; Chelsea, by a certain
art-serged female, and long-haired male community with an
artistic,--and, yes,--perhaps a well-pleased and self-satisfied air;
the "City," by its black-coated business men; Whitechapel, by its
coster girls with fringes; Somers Town and Lisson Grove, by their
odoriferous cats and cabbages; Mayfair, by its sleek carriage-horses,
and also by the very superior maids and butlers you meet in its silent
streets. Or, perhaps, by the straw that occasionally fills the quiet
square corners, sounding the sad note of Death. I have seen a slum
child dying of cancer in a crowded garret,--baked by the August
sun,--covered with flies,--in a noisy alley; but only rich people's
nerves require soothing at the last!
Miss Amy Levy has written a haunting little poem on this subject:
"Straw in the street, where I pass to-day,
Dulls the sound of the wheels and feet.
'Tis for a failing life they lay
Straw in the street.
"Here, where the pulses of London beat,
Someone strives with the Presence Grey--
Ah, is it victory or defeat?
"The hurrying people go their way,
Pause and jostle and pass and greet;
For life, for death, are they treading, say,
Straw in the street?"
"London," says a French writer, "resembles, in its size and luxury,
Ancient Rome." But, if Ancient Rome, he adds, weighed heavily upon
its toiling slaves, "how heavily does not our modern Rome weigh,
also, upon the labouring class!" The hanging gardens of Park Lane
are in as great, and greater contrast to the Somers Town, Drury
Lane, and Deptford slums, as were ever the Palaces of the Palatine
to the slaves' quarters. London is the best city in the world to be
rich in, the worst to be very poor in; as it is the best city for
happiness, the worst for misery. It is the Temple of Midas, where
everything,--from a coffin to a hired guest,--from the _entree_ to
an "exclusive" mansion to a peer's status,--can be bought with
money. Here, more than anywhere else, money is imperatively needed.
Even the poor hawkers who live in unspeakable slums, lined with cats
and cabbages, in Lisson Grove, might, if they lived in the country,
at least have clean cottages, gardens, and pure air. With the same
income on which you are poor in town, you will be well-to-do, nay,
rich in the country. House-rent,--indirect taxation,--the vicinity
of tempting shops,--and amusements take the surplus. The attractions
of town must indeed be great to the poor; for, if their wages be
higher, their life is infinitely lower. But it is the same in all
classes. It is often said that the rich, who own so many large and
luxurious country estates, houses, and gardens, are ill-advised to
come up to town and spend hot Mays and Junes in baking Belgravia or
Mayfair; but, after all, they only share the tastes of the majority.
Man is a gregarious animal, and loves his kind. Similarly, if you
were to make a "house-to-house visitation" in some wretched Lisson
Grove or East End slum, and inquire diligently of every inhabitant,
whether they would prefer to "go back and live in the lovely
country," their answer, I am convinced, would be firmly in the
negative. East and West are alike in this.
But the key-note of the East End of London, apart from its big
thoroughfares, is not so much squalor or poverty, as desperate,
commonplace monotony, such as is described by Mrs. Humphry Ward in
_Sir George Tressady_, "long lines of low houses,--two storeys always,
or two storeys and a basement,--all of the same yellowish brick, all
begrimed by the same smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern,
every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner 'public'
on either side, flaming in the hazy distance." The East End is very
conservative, and in its better houses there is a conservatism even in
the blinds, which are, almost invariably, of cheap red rep or cloth,
alternated by dirty "lace." With the poorest tenants, of course,
blinds are at a discount; and grimy paper fills the frequent holes in
the panes.
Yet, it is a mistake to suppose, as is more or less the popular
theory, that the average East Ender's life is all unmitigated gloom.
Take, for instance, the life of the honest, hard-working artisan and
his family. He may live in "mean streets"; but use is everything; and
they are not "mean" to him. Possibly, from his point of view, the
two-pair back, the frowsy street, are "a sight more homely and cosy"
than rich people's area gates and chilly grandeur. If the West End
takes its pleasure by driving in the Park, the East, on the other
hand, finds its relaxation on the tops of 'buses and trams, in walking
about the flaring, gas-jetted street, in looking into shop windows, or
in driving about in all the pride of a private, special coster's cart.
If the rich do not know how the poor live, the poor, on the other
hand, have but a hazy idea of how the rich live. If you asked the
average slum-dweller how the rich spend their day, they would most
likely say, "in drinking champagne and driving in motor cars." Thus
the classes mutually do each other injustice. If the poor, for a
while, could live the life of the rich, they would vote it terribly
slow; Calverley was not so far out when he suggested slyly that
"Unless they've souls that grovel,
Folks _prefer_ in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls."
The poor of the East End have their special plays, their theatres,
their "halls," their cheap popular amusements. And they have other
minor compensations. They "eat hearty" when they do eat; they do not
fall ill from dyspepsia or have to go to Carlsbad; or if they do
suffer from M. Taine's favourite complaint, "the spleen" (which is
unusual in a working man), they remedy it by a little harmless
correction of their wives. Or if a poor woman's child is ill, she does
not suffer for want of medical advice; she bundles it up quickly in a
shawl, and runs with it to the nearest hospital, where, if the
authorities are somewhat curt, she at any rate gets plenty of sympathy
from all the other mothers in the big hospital waiting-room. Even that
large, shabby crowd that, on visiting-days, await the opening of the
hospital doors, so unutterably pathetic to the looker-on, is not,
perhaps, without its alleviations. It is a mercy that we do not all
like the same thing; and that, while the rich are exclusive, the poor
will enjoy society of almost any kind: "We shall 'ave to leave our
lodgin's, 'm, over them nice mews," a poor woman said to me lately, in
a mournful tone. "The landlord, he's takin' the place down; an' I
shall miss the 'orses' feet at night, somethin' shockin'; _they was
sech comp'ny like_." Here, surely, is a case where one man's poison
may be another man's meat!
As for the children of the working classes, they, unless their parents
are lazy or given to drink, really have, often, a far better time of
it, so far as their own actual enjoyment is concerned, than the more
repressed children of the rich. The pavement is their property, the
streets are their world; the beautiful, dazzling, magical,
ever-changing streets, with their myriad attractions, their boundless
possibilities. Then, the children of the poor are not brought up as
useless luxuries, but, from tender years, are required to contribute
their share of help to the household; and what the average child loves
above all things is to feel itself of use. Dirt and grime are of no
account whatever to the child; and old clothes are always far more
comfortable than new to play about in. The "shades of the prison
house" may close in, later, about the children of the poor, when they
must go to service, to the factory, to the shop; but, in their early
years, their life has its attractions.
Of course, however, with the families of the drunkard, the shiftless,
the lazy, the case becomes altogether different. Drifting hopelessly
from one slum to another, these soon help to swell the sad ranks of
the "submerged tenth": poor creatures whose misery shivers in fireless
garrets and damp cellars, whose empty stomachs call in vain for food;
and whose only outlook is the workhouse, the "big villa" as they call
it; an institution, however, that they will only enter from dire
necessity, regarding it, as a rule, with wholesome dislike and
disfavour.
There are many churches and chapels all over London, yet the very poor
rarely attend any of them. Indeed, very few London working men's wives
attend any religious service, unless, that is, they happen to boast of
a new hat or bonnet.... They will, however, receive the "visitor" or
"tract-lady" with a sort of chilly grandeur; and, though their
acquaintance with Holy Writ is generally slight, through all life's
troubles their favourite text is ever this: "It is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven." Thus, they are always, so to speak, comforting
themselves for the enforced payment of the insurance of hard work and
poor fare in this life by the assurance of paid-up capital with
interest, in the next! Poor, hard-worked mothers of the slums! who
would grudge you that harmless and unfailing consolation?
[Illustration: _Bank Holiday._]
Nor is the "country,"--except in strictly limited quantities,--such an
unfailing consolation to the children of the poor, as some would have
us imagine. (That it is such a priceless advantage to their health is,
no doubt, partly owing to the fact that it is generally associated
with good and wholesome food.) The children like the "real country"
for a day or two;--afterwards, they are too often conscious of slight
boredom. At first, they delight in the fact that "it's so green all
rarnd,--right to the sky,--with no roads, and no walls,--and no
trespsin boards,--and no pleecemen;" but these joys have their
limitations,--and, after a fortnight's holiday,--even poor slum
children are generally glad to get back home. Even in tender
youth,--the country is a cult that requires some learning. "The
country is dreadful slow,"--a little girl of the great city once
remarked with painful frankness,--"no swings, no rahnd-abarts, no
penny-ice men, no orgins, no shops, no nothink;--jest a great bare
field only." Here, again, is the difference of "the point of view!"
Go into that glittering Armida-Palace, the busy Whitechapel Road, and
watch the scene at nightfall. The weather may be cold or mirk; the
weather matters little; the skies may be glum and starless, but a
galaxy of light, from innumerable gas jets and shop fronts, floods the
busy street. Here is, certainly, no lack of life and amusement; the
crowd laughs, jostles, and chatters, as if no such thing as care or
struggle existed. It is a motley crowd. Handsome dark-eyed Jewesses
with floppy hair and long gold earrings; coster girls "on the spree,"
dressed in their gaudy best; staid couples doing their weekly
marketing; here and there a happy family round a stall, eating
"winkles" composedly with the help of pins, or demolishing saucerfuls
of the savoury cockle; vendors of penny toys; all these, combined with
the voluble "patter" of the lively shop-boys, make a veritable
pandemonium. Shops are full; barrows of all kinds drive a brisk trade;
velvet-cushioned trams ply up and down the big highway, which extends,
apparently almost into infinity, up the long Mile End Road.
(Tram-lines, in London, seem more or less confined to the uninspiring
North and East and their suburbs.) Ugly and uninvigorating enough by
day, the streets, by night, invest themselves with mysterious glamour
and brightness. Like some murky theatre when the deceiving footlights
are lit, this, too, is a "stage illusion," and it is a wise one. For
all the East End does its shopping by gaslight; now only it begins to
enjoy its day. Seen in such kaleidoscopic glare of light, even the
Whitechapel Road has its attractions. Yet through it all one sometimes
sees sad sights. Many public-houses dot these thoroughfares, shining
like meteors through the nocturnal mists; and here and there, truth
to tell, a bevy of red-faced women may be seen through the
plate-glass, whose unhappy infants are stationed in shabby
perambulators outside; their eyes, by dint of vain straining towards
their natural guardians, painfully acquiring that squint that would
seem to be the birthright of so many of the London poor.
In strange contrast with the din and bustle of Aldgate and its network
of wide streets, are the collegiate buildings of Toynbee Hall, in
Commercial Street, close by. This is a curious little oasis in the
wilderness, a most unexpected by-way in busy, glaring Whitechapel. To
Canon and Mrs. Barnett, who have devoted their lives towards making
Toynbee Hall what it is, is due the chief honour for the successful
working of this Institution, primarily intended to bring "sweetness
and light" into the darkened, unlovely lives of the London poor. The
name of Arnold Toynbee, the young and enthusiastic Oxford man and
reformer, has been immortalised in this place, the first of the
University Settlements in London. Toynbee died young, of overwork and
overpressure; in a sense a martyr to his cause; yet the work of this
latter-day apostle has already had large results, and his creed has
had many followers. To him, dying in his youthful zeal, Tennyson's
lines seem specially appropriate:
"So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be,
How know I what had need of thee,
For thou wert strong as thou wert true?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"O hollow wraith of dying fame,
Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-infolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name."
In some ways, Toynbee Hall, and its successive, and kindred
institutions, seem like late revivals of the monastic system of the
middle ages. Toynbee Hall is a hall in the academic sense,--and
shelters successive batches of some twenty residents,--young
university men of strong convictions,--who come here both to learn and
to teach;--to teach their less fortunate brothers,--to learn how the
poor live. At its hospitable door the sick and suffering apply for
help and succour; here charity,--charity, too, of the kind that
"blesseth him that gives and him that takes,"--is freely
given,--without narrow restrictions of sectarianism or dogma--and it
does more than this.
For,--unlike the monastic system,--Toynbee Hall is specially devised to
help the individual soul of the poor worker in busy London to rise above
its often base and mean surroundings. The late Matthew Arnold, in his
well-remembered lecture at Toynbee Hall,--taught the possibility of
"following the gleam" even in the "gloom" of the East-End,--and of
helping Nature, by the aid of books and of art, from sinking under
"long-lived pressure of obscure distress." Books and art are great
tonics. The ancient monasteries dissuaded,--if anything,--knowledge, and
aspiration generally, in the "masses": Toynbee Hall encourages and
promotes it; it is thus a physician to the mind even more than to the
body. It raises the aims, improves the tastes, and widens the horizons
of its disciples; it satisfies the cravings of the poor for better
things; but it must first inculcate such cravings. Within its walls the
poor and struggling artisan may enjoy concerts, lectures, pictures;--may
learn, too, from the best teachers,--and profit by many of the
advantages of university life. There are not only lecture-rooms, but
reception-rooms,--dining-rooms,--a library;--the latter a much-valued
institution in the neighbourhood. Many pleasant social gatherings are
held here;--not only of working men,--but also of factory
girls,--shop-hands,--pupil-teachers,--who come here,--these latter,--to
cast off the "codes" and dry bones of learning, and acquire a little of
its warmer, fuller humanity.
Toynbee Hall is not the only place in East London where such works
are carried on. Oxford House, Bethnal Green,--and Mansfield House,
Canning Town,--are, among others,--institutions more or less of the
kind; and the Passmore Edwards Institute, in Tavistock Place, has
similar aims. But to Toynbee Hall is due the introduction of yearly
loan Exhibitions of good pictures for the East End,--originated by
Canon Barnett, and still successfully carried on by his unwearying
exertions.
The charms of poetic contrast are always great in London. While
standing in a dingy byway of some city church--St. Olave's, Hart
Street, or St. Jude's, Whitechapel,--does not the deep music of the
organ,--resounding from inside the building,--fill the listener with a
strange feeling almost akin to tears? Not even outside a country
church is one so affected. Here it seems to bring the calm of Eternity
into the fitful fever of the moment. The picturesqueness, alone, of
religion, is so great, that, to the determined agnostic London would
surely lose half its charm. And who could work among the London poor
without, at least, something of the feeling so beautifully expressed
in Matthew Arnold's well-known lines?
"'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.
"I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
'Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?'--
'Bravely!' said he; 'for I of late have been
Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_.'
"O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam--
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home."
Toynbee Hall, of course, is of modern design; but there are still many
good old-time houses in the East-end,--now deserted and left stranded
by the tide of fashion. Of these is Essex House, in the Mile-End-Road,
(opposite Burdett-Road), now no longer residential, but used by Mr.
Ashbee as the convenient location for his well-known "Guild and School
of Handicraft." Built partly by a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, with
panelled rooms, oak staircase, and large garden, its solid dignity is
well suited to its new and living purpose. Mr. Ashbee,--the founder
and moving spirit of the Guild--was himself a worker at Toynbee Hall,
where, indeed, in a small "Ruskin class" held in 1886-7, the school
had its beginning. So one thing grows out of another, and a sturdy
plant sends out its offshoots.
Thus Toynbee Hall, and kindred institutions, show the West-end in the
East; now let us turn to the East-end in the West. This is not so
difficult to find; "the poor," indeed, "we have always with us," and
in some of London's most fashionable streets the saddest sights of all
may be seen. Slums of a sort are to be found near most of the
fashionable West-end squares; and, even within the precincts of
aristocratic Mayfair, the expensive fish-shop in Bond-Street,--where,
during long summer days, enormous blocks of ice, tempting to the eye,
glitter like some Rajah's diamond,--entertains a motley crew of poor
folk on Saturday nights, when it makes a practice of giving away its
remaining stock. Bond Street is, in a manner, the "Aldgate High
Street" of the fashionable world: here, at four o'clock or so in the
afternoon, are to be seen the "gilded youth,"--the dandies of the
day;--here the smart world flock for afternoon tea; and here fine
ladies walk even unattended, and satisfy, as eagerly as their
Whitechapel sisters, their feminine cravings for shop-windows. Who was
it who first said that no real woman could ever pass a hat-shop? The
truth of this remark may here be attested. The very smartest of
motor-cars,--of horses,--of "turn-outs" generally,--may be seen
blocking the narrow Piccadilly entrance of this thoroughfare from
which deviates as many mysterious byways as from Cheapside itself.
Very much sought after are all these tiny streets; indeed, the tide of
fashion has been ever faithful to this special part of the metropolis.
Did not Swift once write to "Stella," of the neighbouring Bury Street;
"I have a first floor, a dining-room and bedroom, at eight shillings a
week,--and plaguey dear!"? But,--even considering the vast difference
in money value since Swift's day,--we have to pay a good deal more
than that now for similar accommodation in this quarter.
But, yet further West, between Bond Street and Hyde Park, are
Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, the very focus of fashion, in whose
neighbourhood rents rise proportionately. Here, too, are many
unexpected and charming byways. Behind the vestry in Mount Street, for
instance, in the passage that leads into the church in Farm Street,
you might think yourself thousands of miles away from Mayfair. This
church in Farm Street,--the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate
Conception,--is famous as a Jesuit centre; here it was that Henry
Manning, afterwards Cardinal, was "received" on Passion Sunday, 1851.
Other byways there are, too, of a less attractive kind; the byways
where dwell the "poor relations," so to speak, of the Aristocracy and
the "Smart Set"; the impoverished ladies whose sense of propriety
would lead them to dwell even in a wheelbarrow, could that wheelbarrow
only be drawn up on the fashionable side of the street! They are
"backmewsy" little streets of saddening aspect, such as Dickens's
typical "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square," that contained the residence
of Mr. Tite Barnacle, with "squeezed houses," each with "a ramshackle
bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp
waistcoat pocket" ... the house a sort of bottle filled with a strong
distillation of mews, so that when the footman opened the door, he
"seemed to take the stopper out." Dickens's picture is still a
portrait that many will recognise:
"Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor
Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous
little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with
lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen's families,
who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their
window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal
chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind
end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an
establishment much frequented about early morning and
twilight, for the purchase of wine-bottles and
kitchen-stuff. Punch's shows used to lean against the dead
wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining
elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made
appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were
two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of
Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of
their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation;
and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let
(which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the
house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the
most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the
elite of the _beau monde_."
But to the millionaire's dwelling, located at that period in Harley
Street, Cavendish-Square, the novelist is hardly more polite:
"Like unexceptionable society" (he says), "the opposing rows
of houses in Harley Street were very grim with one another.
Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much
alike in that respect, that the people were often to be
found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the
shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of
the way with the dullness of the houses. Everybody knows how
like the street the two dinner-rows of people who take their
stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform
twenty houses, all to be knocked and rung at in the same
form, all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended
off by the same pattern of railing, all with the same
impracticable fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures
in their heads, and everything without exception to be taken
at a high valuation--who has not dined with these? The house
so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-window, the
stuccoed house, the newly-fronted house, the corner house
with nothing but angular rooms, the house with the blinds
always down, the house with the hatchment always up, the
house where the collector has called for one quarter of an
Idea, and found nobody at home--who has not dined with
these?"
Dickens, on the whole, is kinder to his thieves' kitchens and debtors'
prisons, even to Fagin and his crew; for he allows them, at any rate,
to boast occasionally of an "Idea." But the "Smart Set," with the
plutocrats and the Merdles, has moved westward since the days of the
Early-Victorian novelists; and "Harley Street, Cavendish Square," is
now mainly medical.
The smart ladies often seen shopping in Bond Street from neat
broughams and landaus, drawn by high-stepping horses, are mainly
people whose names figure largely in the so-called "society" papers;
their goings and comings, be they aristocratic or theatrical, are all,
therefore, carefully noted by the ubiquitous "lady reporter;" terrible
fate of the well-known or well-born! But it is an age of
advertisement; and who shall say entirely on which side the fault
lies? Where these leaders of society shop now, other generations of
fair dead ladies, gone "with the snows of yesteryear," have in their
turn enjoyed the dear delights of lace, millinery, and jewels. Here
the "ladies of St. James's," in the eighteenth century, revelled in
their "lutestrings," "dimitys," "paduasoys"; and, to flaunt it over
their less fortunate sisters, bought the very newest new thing in
turbans. Piccadilly, doubtless, looked a trifle brighter and smarter
in those days of less smoke, as befitted the "court end of the town;"
and the young "swells" of the day presented a braver array in their
laces, ruffles, and knee-breeches. Then, as now, the Holbein-like Gate
of St. James's Palace, dignified in sober red-brick, stood sentinel at
the bottom of St. James's Street,--the street thus alluded to by
Sheridan:
"The Campus Martius of St. James's Street,
Where the beaux' cavalry pace to and fro,
Before they take the field in Rotten Row."
[Illustration: _In Regent Street._]
St. James's Street, with all its byways and purlieus, has always been
greatly in request for exclusive and smart clubs, as well as for
bachelors' lodgings of the luxurious kind. It has also literary
associations. St. James's Place, where Addison lived, was also noted
for the residence of the old banker-poet Samuel Rogers; this was his
home for fifty-five years, and here, at No. 22, he gave his famous
"literary breakfasts." Of old the most exclusive gathering in this
region was "Almack's," ruled by the famous Lady Jersey, "the seventh
heaven of the fashionable world." It is situated in King Street, and
is now "Willis's Rooms." St. James's, as a rule, is "exclusive" enough
still; but the neighbourhood has in other ways gone through many
changes. The great house built by Nash for the Regent,--Carlton House,
beyond Pall Mall,--has vanished like Aladdin's Palace, and has left in
its place only one big column, a flight of noble steps, and a stately
terrace of palatial mansions,--Carlton-House-Terrace, overlooking the
Mall. This Phoenix-like spirit of London, ever rising anew on its own
ashes, was always dear to Thackeray. Here is one of his inimitable
passages on the subject, thrown off at random:
"... I remember peeping through the colonnade at Carlton
House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I
can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place.
The place? What place? The palace exists no more than the
palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is but a name now. Where be the
sentries who used to salute as the Royal chariots drove in
and out? "The chariots, with the kings inside, have driven
to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into
darkness, and the echoes of their drums are rolling in
Hades." Where the palace once stood, a hundred little
children are paddling up and down the steps to St. James's
Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the
Athenaeum Club; as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the
United Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social
Exchange of London now--the mart of news, of politics, of
scandal, of rumour--the English forum, so to speak, where
men discuss the last despatch from the Crimea, the last
speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now
and then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the
past rather than with the present, it is a memorial of old
times and old people, and Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look!
About this spot, Tom of Ten Thousand was killed by
Koenigsmarck's gang. In that red house Gainsborough lived,
and Culloden Cumberland, George III.'s uncle. Yonder is
Sarah Marlborough's palace, just as it stood when that
termagant occupied it. At 25, Walter Scott used to live; at
the house, now No. 79, and occupied by the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs.
Eleanor Gwynn, comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's
chair issued from under yonder arch! All the men of the
Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen
Walpole's chariot and Chatham's sedan; and Fox, Gibbon,
Sheridan, on their way to Brookes's; and stately William
Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas; and Hanger and Tom
Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron limping into
Wattier's; and Swift striding out of Bury Street; and Mr.
Addison and Dick Steele, both perhaps a little the better
for liquor; and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York
clattering over the pavement; and Johnson counting the posts
along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley's window;
and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a
gimcrack just bought out at Christie's; and George Selwyn
sauntering into White's."--Thackeray: _The Four Georges_, p.
72.
[Illustration: _Piccadilly._]
Pall Mall, the street of palaces and palatial clubs _par excellence_,
is one of London's handsomest highways. It has for three centuries
been the Fleet Street of the well-to-do poets, of the leisured
literary world; for what, indeed, could poverty ever have in common
with Pall Mall? Defoe, in his day, wrote thus of it:
"I am lodged in the street called Pall Mall, the ordinary
residence of all strangers, because of its vicinity to the
Queen's Palace, the Park, the Parliament House, the
theatres, and the chocolate and coffee houses, where the
best company frequent. If you would know our manner of
living, 'tis thus:--We rise by nine, and those that frequent
great men's levees find entertainment at them till eleven,
or, as at Holland, go to tea tables. About twelve, the
_beau-monde_ assembles in several coffee or chocolate
houses; the best of which are the Cocoa Tree and White's
chocolate houses, St. James's, the Smyrna, Mr. Rochford's,
and the British coffee houses; and all these so near one
another that in less than one hour you see the company of
them all."
This sounds, truly, a pleasant enough life;--and its counterpart of
the present day is,--allowing for altered customs,--no doubt equally
pleasant. The taverns mentioned have given place to spacious
club-houses, all more or less modern; and the day has, in the last two
centuries, come to begin earlier and end later. Coffee-houses, in
Defoe's time, were the necessary ladders to rising fame talent; thus,
the boy Chatterton, starving and unknown in cruel London, sought to
allay his mother's anxiety by writing to her: "I am quite familiar at
the Chapter coffee-house (St. Paul's), and know all the geniuses
there."
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pall Mall was a pretty
suburban promenade, and its "sweet shady side," sung by the poets, was
really no misnomer, as a row of elms fringed it, both north and
south. And it is still an aristocratic region, despite the "business"
air that has of late invaded it. Of the people you meet here,--elderly
gentlemen with nothing, perhaps, very remarkable about them, to
outward view;--or smart young men, with well-polished boots and hats,
and faultless dress-coats,--it is safe to say that a fair number will
have distinguished themselves in one way or another; either in the
working of their country's government, or in the fighting of their
country's battles. But, here as elsewhere, England is uncommunicative,
and you may pass angels unawares.
Just behind Pall Mall is the aristocratic St. James's Square--already,
alas! invaded by the modern builder:
"She shall have all that's fine and fair,
And ride in a coach to take the air,
And have a house in St. James's Square,"--
--runs the old ballad. Though St. James's Square now contains a fair
sprinkling of Government and other offices,--yet its clientele is
still somewhat ducal. Nevertheless, this Square, too, recalls
something of the seamy side of life. "What," says Lord Rosebery,
referring to London's many associations, "can be less imposing, or
less interesting in themselves,--than the railings of St. James's
Square? Yet, you cannot touch those railings--hideous as they are and
dull as are the houses that surround them--without thinking that
Johnson and Savage, hungry boys, starved by their kind mother, London,
who attracted men of letters to her, walked round that square one
summer night and swore they would die for their country."
Yes,--this, in some way, seems "the best of all possible worlds,"--and
London, in such surroundings, the best of all possible cities to live
in. Yet, here, too, the East is still present in the West. Round the
corner, as I gaze, comes a pitiful group,--a tawdry woman, her voice
raucous and suggestive of gin, holding by the hand two children, a
boy and a girl,--all singing, or making believe to sing, in chorus:
"'Ark! ar ark, my sowl! Angelic songs are swellin',
From Hearth's green fields--and Hoceant's way-be shore--
'Ark, ar-ark,--"
Alas! the notes are hardly suggestive of angelic visitants. The chubby
little boy is crying, the tears making streaky marks down his dirty
little face. "I'm so cowld, so cowld, mammy," "'Owld yer
row!"--admonishes his sister, in the intervals of her husky
accompaniment.... The sodden voice of the mother is so terrible that I
am moved to give her a shilling to go away and remove her poor
suffering babies.... But,--at the angle of Waterloo Place,--another
phantom is stationed; a wretchedly-clothed creature, evidently on the
look-out for a job. He might himself be an incarnation of Famine. His
cheeks are hollow and cadaverous; his eyes are dulled and hopeless; he
shivers in the bleak raw December air;--in the "best of all possible
worlds,--the richest of all possible cities".... The mere "cab-horse's
charter" is not for such as he! Ungrateful country, that deals so ill
with her children, giving them too often "stones for bread!"
"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the
enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a
London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted,
and through their gap the nearest human beings who were
famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
company--feasting and fancy-free--if, pale with sickness,
horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body,
they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of
every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast
to them--would only a passing glance, a passing thought be
vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relations
of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the
intervention of the house wall between the table and the
sick-bed--by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are
indeed all that separate the merriment from the misery."
It is an effective contrast. But, perhaps the most vivid and pathetic
sketch of the Submerged of the Great City is that of John Davidson's
weird and haunting ballad: "The Loafer":
"I hang about the streets all day,
At night I hang about;
I sleep a little when I may,
But rise betimes the morning's scout;
For through the year I always hear
Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.
"My clothes are worn to threads and loops;
My skin shows here and there;
About my face like seaweed droops
My tangled beard, my tangled hair;
From cavernous and shaggy brows
My stony eyes untroubled stare.
"I move from eastern wretchedness
Through Fleet Street and the Strand;
And as the pleasant people press
I touch them softly with my hand,
Perhaps to know that still I go
Alive about a living land.
"I know no handicraft, no art,
But I have conquered fate;
For I have chosen the better part,
And neither hope, nor fear, nor hate.
With placid breath on pain and death,
My certain alms, alone I wait."
[Illustration: _Speshul!_]