THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON
--"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players...."--_Shakespeare._
"O gleaming lamps of London, that gem the City's crown,
What fortunes lie within you, O lights of London Town!"--
_G. R. Sims, Ballads of Babylon._
As I was travelling, one day in winter, by the familiar and homely
'bus whose "hue is green and gold"; not however, the "St. John's Wood"
'bus, but that humbler and more business-like one which runs between
Victoria and King's Cross, I observed, as we ascended Long Acre, a
young woman get in at Bow Street, followed by a "lady friend" at Drury
Lane. They were hot, untidy, and, as to their attire, muddy,
be-bugled, and be-plushed; also, one of them carried a large and
equally be-bugled baby. After their first salutations, they panted for
a few minutes, out of breath; then:--
"I've got it, duckie," cried the Bow Street charmer, a young woman
with a big black fringe, and the owner of the overdressed and
pasty-faced baby.
"What have you got, dearie?" inquired her friend, who wore a dirty
blouse that had once been yellow, under a heavy plush fur-trimmed cape
(the month was November). The 'bus sat expectant.
"'E's made me a thief!" (The 'bus, to a man, or rather, woman,
started.) "I told 'im as I'd give 'im no peace till 'e did; I was
bound to go back an' back, till 'e give me somethin'. An' now,
sweetie, I'm one er the forty thieves, at a quid a week, and find
nothin'. Ain't _that_ somethin'?"
A light broke in upon the wondering 'bus, and all the auditors
peacefully resumed their papers or their reflections. Of course, it
was the Drury Lane pantomime! It was stupid of us not to have guessed
it before, for the "dearie," "duckie" and "sweetie" ought to have
suggested it at once! Also, the dresses of the two interlocutors,
which, now that I looked at them again, seemed to have on the beholder
that peculiar effect of combined smartness and disorder that, for some
reason or the other, distinguishes the "pro;" the "pro,"--that is,--of
the lower ranks of the theatrical profession.
_The_ profession (as it is expressively and somewhat exclusively
called by its devotees) embraces, of course, as many "sorts and
conditions of men" as the equally large profession of newspaper
writers. While it still remains a cruel fact that any one picked up
"drunk and incapable" in a London street is usually described in next
day's _Police News_ as either a journalist or an actress, there can
yet be no doubt that the Bohemianism of the past, so far as the higher
class of the theatrical world is concerned, is going out of fashion.
With few exceptions, it is only among the lower ranks of "pros," or in
music-halls, that it largely exists. These exceptions are, usually, to
be found among those who have suddenly risen from obscurity on the
theatrical firmament, to shine as bright "stars" for some brief
period. Nowhere is success so sudden, so overwhelming, so blinding as
it is in this vast city of London; and nowhere, alas! is that success
so soon over, forgotten, eclipsed. The deity of one season is forsaken
in the next; the Ruler-of-the-Universe must perforce return to his
hovel, and, to say truth, he generally takes the change badly. London
has a short memory. But the medal has its pleasanter reverse side.
For, _per contra_, the young woman who has for years, maybe, blushed
unseen in Camberwell, wasted her sweetness on seaside "fit-ups," and
lorded it in third-rate provincial companies, may, suddenly, by some
unexpected turn of Fortune's wheel, find herself elevated to the
highest salaries in the profession. From a penurious lodging in the
slums,--a daily "third return" from Gower Street,--she may rise,
almost in the twinkling of an eye, to L40 a week, a flat in Mayfair,
and a daintily-clipped poodle!
It is, of course, the fame of such sudden successes that suffices to
"turn the heads" of ignorant neophytes, who are but too apt to forget
the common maxim, that "the many fail, the one succeeds." Thus it is
that the stage has been for years flooded with girls of all classes,
all eager for distinction, and all, alas! desiring "the palm without
the dust!" Rising actresses have, as a rule, but one ambition--to act
in London, to charm London audiences. Better, some think, a three-line
part at the Lyceum than a "juvenile lead" at Leamington; better twenty
weeks of the Criterion than a cycle of the Counties; better a
curtain-raiser in the Haymarket than Shakespeare's Rosalind at
Darlington or Preston. Hence the cruel and heart-rending
"struggle-for-life" among young actresses in this big city of London;
hence the weeks of slow starvation in Bloomsbury lodgings or Soho
garrets, waiting for work that never comes. It is, indeed, for them,
the "dust without the palm." Disappointed hopes, shattered ambitions,
tragic suicides,--what stories could some of those Bloomsbury garrets
tell!
"O cruel lamps of London, if tears your light could drown,
Your victims' eyes would weep them, O lights of London Town."
Theatrical managers are callous; they can, indeed, hardly be
otherwise, for the stage, like journalism, is scarcely "a charitable
institution"; and the supply of stage applicants is far greater than
the demand. When a new play is to be produced at a theatre, see how
its waiting-rooms and grimy staircases are daily crowded with young
men and women, all eager, all well-dressed, and all anxiously trying
to conceal their often desperate need of money. For they must always
be well-dressed; no self-respecting manager will ever think twice of a
shabby or dowdy young woman; and dress is difficult to procure on a
starvation diet.
In certain quarters of the Strand and of Soho, "ladies" are to be
found who act as superior "old clothes" dealers, buying, at cheap
rates, the fine dresses of society butterflies from the maids of these
latter, and retailing them again at enhanced prices to the poor
neophytes in the theatrical profession. The custom, no doubt, is
advantageous to all parties concerned; to the fine lady, who must not
be seen more than three or four times in the same gown; to the maid,
to whom the said gowns are "perquisites"; and, lastly, to the poor
girl who must, _coute que coute_, procure her brocades, her gold lace
and tinsel for her provincial tours. (London managers usually provide
the ladies' dresses themselves; the men of the company, on the other
hand, must provide their own.)
Though actors and actresses live, nowadays, in all parts of London,
yet, perhaps, they most incline to Bloomsbury and Soho, which classic
region they have, indeed, haunted for centuries. In old Tudor and
Shakespearean times Shoreditch and Bankside were the favoured spots,
just as, later on, Covent Garden with its "Piazza," its Opera-houses,
and its general air of Bohemianism, became the chosen locality. The
histrionic art is no longer solely associated with Covent Garden and
Bohemianism; indeed, the stars of the profession now belong, rather,
to the smartest "set" in society; they often inhabit Mayfair,--and all
doors, even those of royalty,--are open to them. But, just as the
"rank and file" of the profession still haunt the classic
neighbourhood of the "Garden," so the large bulk of actors and
actresses are still to be found in the adjacent and convenient
districts of Soho and Bloomsbury. In Bloomsbury, especially, are
yearly rising innumerable red-brick flats, abodes largely tenanted by
the theatrical profession. Their surroundings tell of them; "by their
fruits ye shall know them." Hair-dressing shops, florists' shops,
cheap jewellery shops, all these betray the tastes of the profession,
and all these abound in the neighbourhood.
The pantomimes, owing to the enormous number of people they employ, as
well as to the great fillip they give to certain trades and
occupations, play no inconsiderable part in the vast web of London
life. That the Pantomime, as a yearly pageant, has so much increased
in glory of recent times, is due mainly to the efforts of the late Sir
Augustus Harris, who may, indeed, be said to have reached the
high-water-mark of splendour in the Christmas show. Many hundreds of
girls and women, often married and supporting families, are employed
in the vast choruses of the Drury-Lane Theatre,--"the Lane" as it is
called in local parlance; many hundreds of men, scene-shifters,
carpenters, mechanics, and the like, are required for the production
of its stupendous effects. Pantomime-land is, indeed, to those who
know it, a country and a life in itself. From autumn to spring its
rigors last; from October to March its workers labour. A few weeks
before Christmas, the annual fever is at its height. Not only grown
people, but children too, are pressed into the service; hence, no
doubt, the pretty "steps" daily practised, throughout the year, by
Cockney girl children before street-organs. Yet, the class whence
these children are drawn is generally a more or less superior one;
superior, at any rate, to that which one would naturally imagine.
Once, in walking down Museum Street, I chanced to get just behind
three nice little girls and their mother. It was a foggy, murky
evening, and they were evidently taking the direct route for Drury
Lane. They were pretty children, red-cloaked, rosy-cheeked, and neatly
shod, and they tripped along demurely, holding each other's hands;
their mother, neat also, if a little threadbare, walking behind them,
keeping a careful and approving eye on her little flock.
"Yes, they're all engaged for the winter at the 'Lane,'" she told me,
in response to my sympathetic inquiry. "And it's a great help to me,
it is, indeed; for my husband's ill, and he doesn't ever expect to get
much better.... They're in the 'Flower Ballet'; the eldest, Lina,
she's a Pansy; and the two younger ones, they're both Daisies....
Quite a short scene; they're off in twenty minutes.... Interfere with
their schooling? nothing to speak of, and they enjoy it. Yes, I take
'em there, and fetch 'em back, twice every day; I can make shift to
leave my husband for that time ... and I don't like 'em to run the
streets alone.... But here we are...." a sudden lifting of the fog, a
sudden glare of light, and then the Pansy, the Daisies, and their
maternal attendant, were swallowed by the big jaws of the devouring
"Lane."
A lady who went on the pantomime stage, by special favour, for one
night only, for the sake of the experience, has entertainingly related
her adventures. Decked for the evening in a gay cavalier's hat, a
velvet cloak, gorgeous trappings, and "tights," she got through her
allotted part very creditably, though with no little nervousness. The
tights specially distressed her, and she was hardly consoled by the
wardrobe-mistress's kind assurance, that the cloak was "so very
ample!" What struck her principally, in the whole thing, was the good
humour and high spirits of the ladies of the chorus and ballet, who
all of them joked and laughed incessantly, called each other by pet
names, and seemed, like children, to know no care or trouble in the
world. For the moment they enjoyed, or appeared to enjoy, the whole
thing, and yet some of these very girls were, she knew, poor married
women whose lives were filled with domestic cares. These regular
winter engagements must, indeed, have been welcome, for their earnings
averaged from 25_s._ to 30_s._ a week for six evening performances,
with extra pay for the daily matinees.
The pantomime is, however, hardly good to count on as a living, being,
after all, but intermittent; the rank-and-file of the people engaged
in the pantomime business have therefore often other avocations, and
are not all full-blown "pros" with ambitions and yearnings. Not for
such as these are the cruel disappointments, the insulting slights,
the heart-rending procrastinations that break the spirit of so many
young men and maidens in the "profession." If some of these could,
indeed, know all that was in store for them, would they so gaily have
embraced the theatrical career? It is a pity that they cannot be first
disillusioned by a year's apprenticeship; yet even that might be of no
avail, for when once they have experienced the magic glamour of the
footlights, there is, indeed, little hope of return. Yet, to the
outsider, who has never felt this glamour, there seems to be but
little attraction about even a London stage rehearsal. The theatre is
usually dark, and always dirty; the actors, especially those in
secondary parts, seem but little impressed or interested; dressed,
too, in their ordinary clothes, they look foolish, and their fine
sentiments seem out of place. Even the protagonists are a trifle
chilly: when Juliet or her next-of-kin unromantically munches
sandwiches, seated on a dusty box in the wings; when Romeo, or his
more modern prototype, uses language more convincing than elegant; and
when both are addressed with almost painful familiarity by the dirty
"call-boy," the glamour of the whole thing is apt, so far as the
spectator is concerned, to be somewhat dispelled. Then, the manager is
peremptory; the unhappy author quivers with emotion--and generally
also with cold--in the stalls; people have a decided tendency to lose
their tempers, and the onlooker is reduced to wonder dumbly,--whether
things can possibly "pull themselves together" for the imminent "first
night,"--and how in the world the dingy, draughty theatre can
conceivably transform itself into the home of glory, wealth, and light
that the favoured audience of the "premiere" know. These things are
certainly an experience.
[Illustration: _The "Gods."_]
"Good society," says M. Taine (in his _Notes on England_), "does not
go to the theatres, with the exception of the two opera houses, which
are the exotic and hothouse plants of luxury, and in which the prices
of admission are enormous, and evening dress is imperative. As to the
others, the audience is recruited from among the lower middle class."
This, although it contains a small element of truth, is, nevertheless,
a manifest exaggeration. For smart society is a great supporter of the
drama, and even royalty, whose attendance in the theatre is always
announced beforehand by the supply of white silk programmes in the
royal box, occasionally vouchsafes its presence. Especially is there
always a great _furore_ over the procuring of "first night" seats at
the best London theatres. So far, indeed, as the audience of the
stalls is concerned, the "first-nighters" are, more or less, always
the same people; influential magnates, editors, aristocratic "patrons
of the drama," and a certain proportion of smart London people, those
of whom it has come to be known that they make a point of attending
every "first night" of any distinction. Sometimes invitations are
issued; sometimes, it is a case of making early application. The
_entree_ to certain first nights is a kind of social distinction.
Often a supper party is given after the performance, on the cleared
stage; at such gatherings a spirit of geniality prevails, and smart
society does obeisance generally to the bright particular stars of the
drama. With the more plebeian pit and gallery it is otherwise. These
unreservedly express their feelings, and, after first representations,
voice the sentiments of the multitude. These, if the curtain be at all
belated in rising, raise the house by din and hubbub; the noise that
they make, indeed, is apt to scare the uninitiated; it resembles a
revolution on a small scale. The pit and gallery are very intent on
getting their money's worth; for they always pay for their seats, and
pay, not only in coin of the realm, but in sad and weary hours of
waiting in the cold, drizzled street. Who has not noticed, on days of
bright spring weather and dreary autumn alike, a long crowd of patient
men and women waiting uncomplainingly in a long file till the theatre
doors should open and admit them? At the Lyceum, the file,--and this
not only on first nights,--extends far round the corner into the
Strand. At the Haymarket Theatre, or the newer Her Majesty's,--it
reaches far up towards Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes a few among the
patient crowd have provided themselves with campstools; sometimes,
too, kindly managers or thoughtful ladies like Miss Ellen Terry send
out five o'clock tea to the suffering humanity nearest to the theatre
doors; and, certainly, the "cup that cheers" must prove exceptionally
cheering when one has waited for it in the chilly street ever since 9
A.M.! For very important first-night performances, nine, or at latest
10 A.M. is essential if the playgoer would make at all sure of the
front row. It is a long day's picnic; yet the crowd remains ever
amiable and stoical. One may, indeed, learn not a little of philosophy
and bonhomie from that motley crew, who,--whether they be ladies from
the suburbs, calmly eating sandwiches,--superior artisans taking "a
day off,"--city clerks,--shop-girls,--or dressmakers' apprentices come
to study the prevailing modes,--are all uniformly cheerful. From hour
to hour homely jest and rough witticism enliven the day's tedium, and
testify to the unfailing good temper and love of fair play of London
crowds.
The pit is a sacred institution of London. We may, if we choose,
sympathise with the long hours of waiting pit-door crowds, but woe
betide him who would thoughtlessly attempt to do away with the system.
One manager, indeed, did recently attempt this; but a riot nearly
supervening, he had perforce to take refuge in a judicious compromise.
The Londoner is ever conservative in his tastes as well as in his
politics. Ladies are allowed to wear their headgear in the pit; and
the large erections they sometimes don testify more to their vanity
than to their philanthropy. One sometimes hears a faint protest
against such exaggerated types of millinery: "I 'ope I sha'n't 'ave to
sit be'ind that 'at," a depressed pittite has been heard to murmur
when entering the theatre just after a "lydy" with one of these
alarming concoctions.
Where are the tastes of "the people" with regard to plays? It is
difficult to generalize. The gallery love melodrama; they also like a
good deal of moral sentiment, which they will often loudly
approve;--to the extent, sometimes, of even offering advice on the
situation to the actors. This is why the _Message from Mars_, a
morality taken straight from Dickens, went so directly home to "the
great heart of the British people." M. Taine complains that the
English have no national comedy; that all their comedies are adapted
from the French; "is it," he asks, "because of English reserve?" But,
though the pit and gallery are generally serious, they are yet not
serious enough for Ibsen; "I consider that there piece blasphemious,"
a disgusted artisan once said to me of the _Master-Builder_; "that
'ere shillin' I spent on it was clean thrown away; I went out arter
the fust act." The majority of young men and maidens love comic opera,
which seems, indeed, to be one of the paying "lines" in the London of
to-day. Music-halls flourish; it is an eloquent sign of the times that
the large and ornate "Palace Theatre,"--opened, with such a flourish
of trumpets, a few years ago as the "New English Opera House," and
known far and wide by its flashes of brilliant search-light,--should
now have descended to a "variety" show. The great middle-class
supports Shakespeare and the "legitimate" drama; shop-girls, and
dressmakers' apprentices, like the "society" plays of the St. James's
and kindred theatres, because they offer some opportunity for seeing
the ways of that "high-life" from which they are themselves excluded.
Millinery and costume are most important factors in the modern
theatre; I know of many well-to-do girls who never think of buying
their season's hats and gowns till they have first seen them on Mrs.
Patrick Campbell, Mrs. Tree, or Miss Winifred Emery. And _The Price of
Peace_, a feeble, but immensely successful Drury Lane melodrama, owed
its success to the fact that it brought before the eyes of the
proletariat, in a variety of well-constructed scenes, all the select
haunts and fashions of the great world: Tea on the Terrace; a Wedding
in Westminster Abbey; a Debate in the House of Commons; a Ball in
Park-Lane, &c., &c. Such pieces are, of course, not the only
favourites; good comedies are very popular, and English people,
despite M. Taine, still like to laugh. Yet, take it all round, "Good
Society," with, preferably, a judicious admixture of melodrama and
sentiment, is the really paying thing with the pit and gallery.
If the murky London daylight in the theatre shows a mournful change
from its nocturnal glories, even sadder is the contrast between the
splendid entrance hall, or lobby, blazing with welcome lights, and the
dark, grimy, and generally wretched "stage-door," which opens, mostly,
into some gloomy back-street, and seems, to the uninitiated at least,
to have no connection at all with the theatre. Here, the manners of
the stage acolytes are altogether to match with the outward show, and
there would appear to exist some traditional and transmitted dislike
to soap-and-water. Strange stories some of these stage doors could
tell! The stage door of the "Adelphi," for instance, where poor
William Terriss was brutally murdered by the criminal lunatic whom he
had befriended,--does it not still give to its old locality a
suggestion of blood and tears? Are not the vicissitudes, too, of
theatres as striking and as dramatic in their way as those of other
historic houses? Now they are great and well-known; then disaster
overtakes them, and their very names, for years, are forgotten,--till
at last they go the way of old bricks and mortar. In their final dirt
and disgrace they hardly recall the scenes of their former triumphs.
One might, indeed, become superstitious when one sees how Fortune
seems to befriend certain theatres, and as persistently to frown on
others. As for some old playhouses,--their day once over, their place
knows them no more.... The old Prince of Wales's Theatre, for
instance, in Tottenham Street, so famous in the early triumphs of the
Bancrofts and Kendals,--who recalls it in its present ruin and
discomfiture? The Salvation Army has lately taken pity on it; but
apparently its hour has now come, and with its adjacent
tenement-houses in Pitt Street, where its green-rooms were, it lies at
the mercy of fate and the hammer.
The London theatres are nearly all of them in crowded situations, and
often so devious and unexpected are the ways by which they are reached
that if the city were at some distant age dug out from oblivion like
that of Pompeii, the results might be even more puzzling to the
antiquary. The stalls, for instance, of the Criterion Theatre are deep
underground, reached by myriad carpeted stairs; even the upper circles
are well below the street. And what a strange and indecipherable
"crypto-porticus" would the "Twopenny Tube" prove to some future
Middleton of the ages? In central parts, London, indeed, seems a city
built in several superimposed layers: layers, too, not successive, but
coeval.
The life of London, always intense, burns at its highest pressure in
and near Piccadilly Circus, and a restless activity reigns here all
through the long hours of day and night. For this is, so to speak, one
of the main doorways of the immense ant-heap; like ants, too, people
seem to swarm incessantly, to go and come, in inconsequent but
feverishly active sequence. Here is a blaze of light, a perpetual
throng of "London's gondola," the hansom-cab, a confused medley of
many sounds, that ceases not, but fades only after midnight; when the
"heart of London," that never sleeps, subsides in the early hours of
the morning into a dulled and general hum.
At Piccadilly, the foreign element from Leicester Square and Soho
meets the native one. The French, Italian, and German tongues are,
indeed, frequently heard all over London; but in the neighbourhood of
Leicester Square, the visitor really might, especially on a sunny
fogless day, imagine himself in Paris or Berlin. The shops have
foreign names: "Blanchisserie Fine" alternates with "Deutsche
Droguenhandlung" or "Vino Scelto"; French waiters and Italian cooks
stand, white-capped and white-aproned, smilingly at the doors of their
respective restaurants; cheap and fair hostelries for wandering
foreigners, with beds as low in price as two shillings per night, rise
towering on every side. It is said that the French colony, in
particular, of Leicester Square and Soho owes its origin to the early
French refugees who, at various stormy periods, have sought shelter
here from the internal dissensions of their own country. It has been
said that, as far north as Seven Dials, the organ-grinders still find
the "Marseillaise" the most lucrative tune to play; and this may well
be so, though I myself have generally found, at least among the rising
generation, the latest music-hall song or dance to be in the
ascendant. There is another subject I would fain touch on here, at the
risk even of irrelevance; it refers to the Soho style of _coiffure_.
That there is a special fashion in ladies' hair-dressing peculiar to
every district in London, is a fact which every passing visitor must
soon recognize; thus, while in Clerkenwell model-lodging-houses it is
generally (except for one short hour or two on Sundays),--Hinde's
curlers,--in Seven Dials it is mostly of the "touzled" order, and in
the West End of the classic "New Greek style." Here, in Leicester
Square, it has a partly-French, partly-theatrical air, being generally
parted in the middle, and brought, in smooth, dark, exaggerated Early
Victorian loops, well over the ears. But details are more important
than people imagine. "Nothing," says M. Gabriel Mourey, "so reveals a
woman's psychology as her way of doing her hair." And the observant
Frenchman goes on to draw certain quaint inferences from the English
girl's style of _coiffure_, and her neatly braided tresses, careless
of such aids to beauty as stray curls or "meches folles;" a severe
style that, according to this writer, "forms a rude contrast to the
spiritual charm of her face, her Burne-Jonesian refinement of
feature." ... As to the manner of hair-dressing betraying the
personality, "nothing," he adds paradoxically, "could be more true of
the typical Englishwoman, who never of her own free will, allows you
to see a fraction of her real self, but draws into her shell of
reserve with the same jealous reclusiveness that makes her bind her
hair in such dull, tight, regular uniformity."
M. Mourey is certainly more polite to us than was M. Taine, who said
unkindly that Englishwomen had big feet, as large as those of
watermen, "and gait and boots in keeping"; also, that "it is
impossible to train one's self to endure their long projecting
teeth;" the effect, he supposes, of a carnivorous diet! "The point of
view," again, not merely Anglophobia! The red-whiskered Englishman
dressed in blatant checks;--his long-toothed gaunt spouse,--how long
will these ridiculous fictions haunt the French mind? But even M.
Taine would have been happy in Soho. Here, even the Englishwoman is
less aggressively English; indeed, she blends, in indescribable
medley, the qualities both of the _Belle of New York_ and of the
Parisian boulevards! Soho, however, is remarkable for other things
than mere hairdressing. For the gastronomic talent that the French so
naturally possess causes this whole district, including the
neighbouring Covent Garden, to be noted, not only for many
second-class "eating-houses," but also for good and moderately priced
places to dine. The vast reform in this respect that has taken place
of late years all over London probably owes not a little to these
early pioneers in the art.
With the multiplication of cheap and good restaurants has grown in
equal ratio the importation of Swiss and Italian waiters. These, every
year, emigrate from their romantic valleys to our foggy shores, and
work out their three, four, or five years in an alien land, partly for
the sake of better wages, partly for that of learning the English
language--an accomplishment without which no foreign waiter is now
considered fully equipped. With unsparing thrift, they save the
greater part of their wages; and they acquire the language as quickly
as they can; with these two possessions they return to their own
country, where they may either at once demand a higher salary,--or, if
already well-to-do, buy a small holding and "settle down." When they
first arrive in London, they are generally very young men, who come in
faith and hope to the rumoured "golden land" of England, leaving their
lovely native valley and their romantic homesteads with no less
courage and resolution than, in mediaeval times, would have drawn them
forth, at a mercenary's wage, to the bloody field of war. The late Mr.
J. A. Symonds, whose sympathies with, and knowledge of, the
Swiss-Italian waiter are well known, has, he tells us, often wondered
why the Alpine peasant goes through such cruel and comfortless
expatriation. "The answer," he says, "is very simple:
"He wants to make money, and has the most resolute
intention, after making it, to settle down at home and live
the pleasant life of his forefathers in the mountains. In
olden days he would have fought on any and every battlefield
of Europe to get cash. But European history has turned over
a new leaf. 'Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis,' and
the Swiss make more by _Fremdenindustrie_ than they could do
by foreign military service in this age."
Landing in London with a small and hardly-saved pittance in their
pockets, these lads usually live, as cheaply as may be, in and about
Soho and Covent Garden, until such time as they can obtain employment.
Switzerland, and especially Canton Ticino, furnishes a large part of
the London waiters; yet all Italy, too, contributes her share. Even
from one of the lonely hill-towns of the Apennines, three elegant
youths, faultlessly attired,--servants of the inn, but whom I had
imagined from their superior manners to be resident aristocrats,--once
begged me to take them into my service, as footmen, cooks,
knife-and-boot-boys, anything; "anything, madame, just to get a
footing in England." Though the desirability of these as servants in
private houses might, perhaps, be doubtful,--yet it is certain that in
restaurants or hotels,--in quickness and in reliability,--the Swiss or
Italian waiter far excels the English one. He rarely loses his temper.
I have seen one waiting, single-handed, upon at least fifty impatient
diners, and contenting every one. We can teach them very little. Yet
they like to learn of us all they can. "I have learned a few things in
England," the son and waiter in a little Swiss inn once said to me; a
pleasant, rosy-cheeked youth, just over twenty, recently returned from
a two years' service in London to the parental hostelry in a lonely,
narrow valley. "Yes, I have learned something very fine." And he drew
my attention to the quaint white-washed walls of the inn, made hideous
by Japanese fans and cheap paper rosettes, &c.
"You are English?" he went on, with a pleased smile: "ah, then, you
know my place in London, Scott's?"
(By "Scott's," he designated, as it turned out, the oyster-bar at the
top of the Haymarket, which locality he apparently considered to
represent the sum and total of "smart" London life.)
"Ah, I shall do this place up in fine style," he said, looking
contemptuously round him at the modest but picturesque paternal inn.
"Why, you will hardly know it again next year! I shall have the
salle-a-manger pypered"--(he had learned the cockney dialect well),
"pypered with bunches of fruit, flowers, monkeys--all in the English
manner--ah! you will see! I shall wake them all up!"
And the "salle-a-manger," with its old black-panelled walls, was so
much prettier as it was!
To be a waiter, however, even an "oyster-bar" waiter, is a superior
position to that of a mere porter; and to be porters, "boots," hotel
drudges of any and every description, "just to get a footing," is the
primary aim of these sturdy aliens. Not only money and future
advantage, but also what is known as the "Wanderlust," is, perhaps,
yet another factor in the impulse that drives them from their homes.
However this may be, rarely do they stay in the land of their bondage
beyond the allotted time; still more rarely do they "colonize" in our
sense of the word; but have ever before them, through all their
struggles and hardships, the thought of the peaceful mountain home and
honest competency that shall be theirs in middle age.... Poor lads!
when I see you, worn and shabby, waiting, perhaps, in that long,
pitiful black line of seedy applicants, now hopeful, now despairing of
engagement, outside the big London restaurants, I confess to a
tightness in my throat, thinking how, like Calverley's little Savoyard
of Hatton Garden:
"Far from England, in the sunny
South, where Anio leaps in foam,
Thou wast bred, till lack of money
Drew thee from thy vine-clad home."
Surely the traveller who returns, yearly, from his pleasant tour in
Alpine valleys, might always, here in foggy London, yield to the
motive that prompts him, after a well-served dinner, to "give to the
poor devil" an extra sixpence, reflecting, meanwhile, that he is
thereby hastening the happy, far-off time when that "poor devil,"
enriched by years of painful toil and honest endeavour, may return to
his valley, his home, his boyhood's love perhaps, and his own little
patch of tillage.
The great monument of the "Fremden-Industrie" in London, as well as
the focus and centre of the Swiss-Italian immigrants, is, of course,
the establishment known as "Gatti's." Everyone knows the "Adelaide
Gallery," and the palatial, velvet-cushioned restaurant that fronts
the Strand. What were the beginnings of this great business? The
brothers Agostino and Stefano Gatti, chocolate-makers, ice-cream
princes, theatrical managers,--who has not heard of them from time
immemorial?--has not their fame, in melodrama no less than in
meringues, been almost a household word? In 1868, already they were
naturalized as Englishmen; yet Mr. Agostino Gatti, native of Ticino,
was none the less elected as a representative to the supreme Swiss
Federal Assembly. The two brothers began modestly, in a small way;
they managed everything themselves; standing, daily, shirt-sleeved, at
their desk at receipt of custom, they were familiar figures of the
past. They succeeded on the principle of Dickens's honest grocer, Mr.
Barton, who made it his boast that "he was never above his business,
and he hoped his business would never be above him!" The "Maison
Gatti," the brothers' private house, stands in dignified Bedford
Square; and the firm of Gatti, the heads of which are still to be seen
in their shops, has doubtless amassed a large fortune. That fortune
was well deserved; for the Gattis were among the pioneers in the
reforming of restaurants.
"There is no more curious sight in London," writes the
chronicler of the Gattis, "than the Adelaide Gallery between
five and seven o'clock in the evening. From the door which
opens into the street which runs by the graveyard of St.
Martin's Church, to the handsome frontage which opens into
the Strand, every table is occupied by a remarkable
assemblage of men, women, and children. The husband brings
his wife, the mother brings her children, the lover brings
his sweetheart, and the Church, the stage, the press--each
sends its representatives. Tragedies and comedies have been
enacted over those marble-topped tables which, if they were
related, would make the fortune of a thousand playwrights."
[Illustration: _Ice-cream Barrow._]
The ice-cream trade, however, with which the brothers Gatti largely
identified themselves, is carried on, on inferior lines, to-day in
Hatton Garden, Little Saffron Hill, and Clerkenwell. Here is the
poorer Italian colony; organ-grinders, ice-cream-barrow-men,
"hokey-pokey" sellers, and their like. Here, among a population of
more or less honest toilers, congregate the waifs and strays of
civilisation, people who, owing perhaps to their peripatetic and
uncertain trade, could hardly help being loafers, even were they not
mainly Neapolitans to boot: a difficult word, which has been corrupted
by the low English in the vicinity, into first "Nappleton" and then
simply "Appleton." City improvements have, however, ousted the chief
Neapolitan colony from Great and Little Saffron Hills; and Eyre Street
Hill, with its adjacent slums and alleys, is now their peculiar haunt.
In the worst byways, and after dark, this is said to be a dangerous
quarter to visit, Neapolitans being always proverbially ready with the
knife.... Nevertheless, on fine spring days, it is not unpicturesque;
the gay dresses of the women, the groups of handsome, dark-eyed
youths, and the merry, brightly-clad children, lending almost an
Italian charm to the scene. And the charming, curly-haired boys--the
pretty and pathetic Savoyard, with his beloved monkey in a red
coat--who does not know them? The men have other resources, as well as
ice-creams and street-organs. Some of them hire themselves out as
artists'-models to the big studios, a business which is well paid, and
to which the picturesque Italian beauty well lends itself. Some, more
skilled, are perhaps modellers of stucco images, which are hawked
about the streets by others; some are knife-grinders, who go about
with a wheel, and make, it is said, the best earnings of all. In the
summer these poor exotics from the land of the sun manage to live, no
doubt, pretty tolerably; in the winter, surely not even the
chestnut-roasting apparatus that they hawk from street to street can
suffice to keep them warm! They generally live in human rabbit
warrens, under the patronage of a "padrone," a sort of modified and
amiable slave-dealer, who imports them from their native land, and
pockets, as price, a share of their earnings. They live poorly and
frugally: and those of us who know the long street of Portici, will
not, in the fouler air of London, expect much from their homes in the
way of cleanliness. Yet the Italian women who, with their "men" and
their babies, accompany the street organs, are generally trim and
smiling, and, so far as foot-gear and general neatness of appearance
is concerned--are immeasurably the superiors of their English
slum-sisters.
[Illustration: _The Organ-grinder._]
The Italian woman seems, indeed,--in London, at any rate,--always
vastly superior to the Italian man. She is religious; she goes, as a
rule, regularly to her "Chiesa Cattolica." She is cleaner, smarter,
pleasanter; she does most of the work; she often does the principal
part of the organ-pushing--while her loafing partner slouches along by
her side, yearning, doubtless, for his "polenta" and his midday
siesta. She helps--indeed, her entire family, down to the babies,
help--in the matutinal manufacture of the mysterious "hokey-pokey,"
whence, in the early morning hours, her "court" is a perfect babel of
chatter and noise, and Eyre Street Hill becomes a strange sight for
the inexperienced Londoner. Not only Neapolitans, but Sicilians,
Tuscans, Venetians, are represented; indeed, the dialects and the
slang used are so unlike, that the different circles of this Italian
colony often themselves fail to understand one another. In the
evenings, and generally on their doorsteps, the men play "mora," and
gamble; while the women, for their part, patch clothes, chatter, and
gesticulate in true native fashion. Later, the lord of creation,
leaving his lady at home, goes off to the "Club Vesuvio" or to the
"Club Garibaldi," where dancing goes on to a tune struck up by a
fiddler, and the lowest type of London girls, befeathered, shawled,
and dishevelled in true East-End fashion, dance with dirty and
brigand-like Italian men. It is a strange life, and stranger still is
the manner in which various types and nationalities have thus for
generations "squatted down" in special districts of the metropolis,
and filled them with their traditions, their atmosphere, their
personality.
Many other colonies are to be seen in London; it is the most polyglot
of cities. For those interested in such matters, nothing would give a
better idea of the many-sided life of the metropolis than to take a
long Sunday walk through its various districts. To quote the words of
a recent writer:
"Sunday is, above all days, the day for such excursions,
because there are none of the distractions of every-day
life, or the bustle of business affairs. It is on Sunday you
can see how polyglot London is, how the gregarious
foreigners, herding together, occupy whole districts, living
their own life, following the manners and customs of their
own country, enjoying their own forms of religion,
amusement, and business."
The Yiddish colony of Whitechapel, the Jewish Ghetto; the Asiatic
colony in Poplar and the Dock neighbourhood generally; these and
others display all the picturesqueness, the local colour, the
kaleidoscopic life that many travellers go to distant lands to
experience. In London, all peoples, and all classes, have their
traditional strongholds, which are known and labelled. Thus,
Bayswater, where the "high life" among the Asiatic colonists makes its
home, is generally spoken of by foreigners as "Asia Minor." Here live
the rich and cultured Orientals, those who have come over for
pleasure, business, trade, or education; as for their poorer brethren,
they live out in Poplar, Shadwell, or anywhere in the near vicinity of
the East India Docks.
These Asiatics of the East End are a strange and motley crew; brought
in by every steamer, every heavily-cargoed ship from the East, every
trader "dropping down with costly bales." On the largest ships, say
those of the P. and O. Company, vessels of some 7,000 tons, there will
be perhaps some 120 Orientals on board, and, with such contingents
continually arriving, there is, naturally, in the East End, a large
foreign, though ever-shifting, population. Curious are the corruptions
of Indian words one hears, and strange indeed are the sights and
sounds among Malays, Chinese, and Indians. The famous opium dens of
the East End, turned to such dramatic account not only in Dickens's
_Edwin Drood_, but also, at a later day, in the _Sherlock Holmes_
sequence of stories, are now much restricted in their horrors by
police supervision. They used to be devils' haunts, famed for robbery
and vice--traps set to catch the unwary Asiatic; but missionary work,
combined with the clearances made by the East London Railway, has
effected great improvement in the opium den of to-day. In the words of
the writer before-mentioned:
"It looks like a private house, and no noise is permitted,
for it is necessary to keep it as private as possible to
prevent police interference. For they are invariably
gambling dens also, and the Asiatic who goes to gamble still
burns his joss-stick before the idol set up inside, in order
to propitiate his deity and get good luck. Though repellant
in appearance, there is a certain picturesqueness about the
interior of these places. The shrine stands just inside the
door, and there is a pungent odour from the ever-burning
incense, while vases of artificial flowers, mingling among
such queer votive offerings as biscuits and cups of tea,
give it a strange appearance. The Canton matting, which is
largely used in the rooms, gives a little local colour, and
the _personnel_ of the place is of a decided polyglot order.
You may possibly see one or two men lying about sleeping off
the results of their opium debauch: but gambling seems to be
the main feature."
Nevertheless, even in these "reformed" dens, the home-coming sailor,
or the imprudent Lascar, may find himself tempted to his undoing and
"cleaned out" of all his hard-won earnings. Or he may possibly be
"knifed," and, if the criminal escape, in this region of obscure and
unknown "byways," even the experienced police may be hard set to find
him. It is, indeed, a true "Vanity Fair," this East End of London, for
poor Christian and Faithful, fresh from the sea and all its dangers.
The Yiddish colony is also a city by itself. The Jews who foregather
in Whitechapel are mostly of Polish, Russian, or German extraction,
and their talk, to unused ears, sounds like a strange German lingo,
unpleasantly whined through the nose. Indeed, it closely resembles
German; the word "Yiddish" itself being but a corruption of the German
"Juedisch," or Jewish. These people, whose "interpreters" figure
largely at nearly every police-court brawl in Whitechapel, Shoreditch,
and Spitalfields, may be said to be a law and a dispensation to
themselves. They crowd, in their numbers, into dirty tenement houses,
in yet dirtier streets; streets in which they barter, buy and sell
with all the instinct and all the indomitable energy of their race.
Here are the tailors' sweating dens, so often deplored by
philanthropic "commissions"; here human toil is reduced, for the
benefit of the "middleman," to its lowest possible price. The
so-called "Jewish slave-market," to the existence of which attention
has been called in the Press, is a strange and unpleasing custom. Here
the Jewish "slave-owner" is, more or less, in the place of the Italian
"padrone" already referred to, in that he imports human material, and
"farms out" human labour:
"Any one who devotes a Sunday or two to visiting the
open-air markets in the Jewish quarter, will have noticed on
the fringe of the markets groups of men, sometimes with
women and children. If you are under the convoy of a Jewish
acquaintance who 'knows the ropes,' he will tell you that it
is a 'hiring fair.' But it has a suspiciously close
approximation to a slave market."
Leases of human labour, sold, at starvation wages for the victims, to
the highest bidder, are not unnatural to a slum Yiddish population
whose whole life is spent in barter. The Jewish colony in the East End
now numbers some 35,000 souls:
"Only recently Lord Rothschild described it as a 'new
Poland,' and said that it was the business of the nation
'first to humanise it and then Anglicise it.' It certainly
wants humanising."
The cosmopolitanism of London tends to draw to it the sweepings, as
well as the choice spirits,--the worst, as well as the best,--of all
other nations and climes. "Hell is a city much like London," said the
poet Shelley; and he spoke truth. Views, religious and otherwise,
differ largely as to what Hell may be; one opinion, however, may be
safely hazarded; that it will at any rate be cosmopolitan.
[Illustration: _A Sale at Christie's._]