HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS
"I have seen various places ... which have been rendered
interesting by great men and their works; ... I seem to have
made friends with them in their own houses; to have walked
and talked, and suffered and enjoyed with them.... Even in
London I find the principle hold good in me.... I once had
duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and
severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a
neighbourhood in which Dryden lived; and though nothing
could be more commonplace, and I used to be tired to the
heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out
of my way purely that I might pass through Gerrard Street,
and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant
thought."--_Leigh Hunt._
"Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure
of it. There is a shellfish which builds all manner of
smaller shell into the walls of its own. A house is never a
home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred
lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and
you can tell what the occupant is."--_Oliver Wendell
Holmes._
[Illustration: _At the Club._]
The most curious thing about London houses, and especially
characteristic of our national reserve, is the fact that we can, as a
rule, tell nothing at all about them until we get inside the sacred
enclosure. A Londoner's house is the shell that hides him from the
world; our houses are, to the foreigner, as enigmatic and as exclusive
as we ourselves. But, once past the magic gateway, once past the
Cerberus at the door, you come upon an interior often unguessed and
undreamed of. The contrast is striking. What can be more dully
monotonous, more unromantic, than the row of brick and stucco
house-fronts that face the average large square or street? Yet it is
ten to one that, inside, hardly one of these will exactly resemble the
other, either in taste, architecture, or even general plan. Even the
"long unlovely street" of Tennyson's disapproval may, and does, often
hide unsuspected treasures. Who, for instance, would suspect the
existence of the Greek bas-reliefs, the painted ceilings, the
colonnades and statues in some of the old Bloomsbury houses? Who would
imagine the curious "Soane Museum" in the quiet house in Lincoln's Inn
Fields? the dignified Georgian spaciousness in the old mansions of
Bedford Square? the gorgeous interior of the sombre houses of Bruton
Street? the picture-galleries of Piccadilly and Mayfair? or the
Eastern magnificence and opulence of some of the Park Lane mansions?
For in London, as a rule, there are but few external signs to denote
wealth. Even in our riches, we do not wear our heart on our sleeve.
From a survey of these, as a rule, unimposing facades, we can imagine
the uninitiated foreigner wondering where in the world the people of
the richest city in the universe live. He may, even if intelligent,
wander at large through London, and notice nothing of beauty, or even
of interest. Was it not Madame de Stael who, lodged as she was in
uninspiring Argyll Street, said unkindly, but not, perhaps, without
some reason, with regard to her immediate surroundings that "London
was a province in brick"? But London houses have other and deeper
associations than those of mere riches; the association with mighty
spirits of the past, poets dead and gone, great men of action, kings,
warriors, statesmen; the infinite multitude of those who, "being dead,
yet live." And in some cases, even though the houses themselves have
vanished, yet the places where they stood are still sacred.
Thus,--though it is perhaps difficult to define the exact boundaries
of the old Stuart Palace of Whitehall, or to say where was the special
site of the historic Cockpit,--yet, do they not lend a glory and an
attraction to all the district of Westminster? Do not the purlieus of
the unromantic Borough High Street, murky as these often are, recall
Chaucer's famous Tabard Inn, of Canterbury pilgrims' fame? and does
not the much-abused Griffin, on its Temple Bar pedestal, memorialise
the older and too obstructive arch, where of old the dreadful heads of
political scapegoats were displayed?
Vanished, and every year still vanishing, treasures! Sooner or later,
no doubt, the edifices made sacred by history and association must go
the way of all brick and masonry; yet even such landmarks as Turner's
poor riverside cottage at Chelsea, or Carlyle's modest abode in Cheyne
Walk, it will be sad to part with. That curious humanity that Charles
Dickens gave to houses makes itself again felt in their fall;
dwellings are not immortal, any more than were their great occupants.
There is no picturesque decay in London; what is not of use must go:
it dare not cumber the precious ground. Therefore, the few remaining
timbered fronts of London are gone or going; only recently some
picturesque old red-roofed houses, in the close vicinity of New Oxford
Street, were condemned and destroyed; Staple Inn, indeed, has been
saved and patched up, owing to the prompt action of a band of public
benefactors. Blocks of houses, forming whole streets, are continually
washed away in the tide of progress; Parliament Street has
disappeared; the old Hanway Street, as it once was, has lately gone;
Holywell Street is of the past; the demolition of this latter, though,
indeed, urgently needed for the widening of the "straits" of the
Strand, was not without its special sadness. The decay of houses that
are at once picturesque and historical is, of course, doubly
afflicting; yet even ugly houses often retain the charm of association
to those who know what memories are bound up with them. Here romance
and history serve to lend the beauty that is lacking. Thus, Ruskin's
prosaic home in Hunter Street, Thackeray's commonplace mansion in
Onslow Square; the house in Half Moon Street where Shelley sat "like a
young lady's lark," in a projecting window, "hanging outside for air
and song;" even that dark corner in Mecklenburgh Square where Sala
kept his curios and bric-a-brac, all have their peculiar charm. Dr.
Johnson's house in Gough Square, Fleet Street; the so-called "Old
Curiosity Shop" in Lincoln's Inn Fields; John Hunter's house in
Leicester Square--are all threatened with demolition. And, even apart
from historic interest, how sad is the frequent fall of London's old
landmarks! Tottering buildings, mere derelicts of time, old houses----
"whose ancient casements stare,
With sad, dim eyes, at the departing years."
Instinct as they are with the pathos of humanity, the sword of
Damocles hangs over them all.
If great men's houses, or the houses that great men have ever,
temporarily, lived in, could all be designated by some unobtrusive
memorial tablet, such, for instance, as the Carlyle bas relief at
Chelsea,--or even a plain inscription such as those recently placed on
John Ruskin's birthplace in Hunter Street, Reynolds's house in
Leicester Square, and Sir Isaac Newton's in St. Martin's Street,--what
an interest would it not lend to even "long and unlovely" London
streets! For the romance of houses is not divined by instinct; and
even the taste of a Morris or a Rossetti has not always left its mark
on their London abodes. That Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Darwin,
the Rossettis, William Morris, have all lived in and about Bloomsbury,
is not patent to the casual visitor. Does not even the plain
inscription, "Poeta Inglese, Shelly," (_sic_) lend an added glamour to
the Lung' Arno of Pisa?
The dividing line between history and fiction is not always very
strongly marked; and this leads us to consider yet another aspect of
the question. A curious literary interest sometimes attaches to
certain houses, an interest hardly less deep for being partly, or even
purely, fictitious. Among the many novelists who have made themselves
responsible for this, none, perhaps, have been more prominent than
Charles Dickens. Dickens, whose knowledge of London was, like his own
Sam Weller's, "extensive and peculiar," has invested certain houses,
certain localities, with an almost human sentiment and pathos.
Thackeray has also done much, yet not so much as his contemporary,
towards making London stones famous. The tenants of "historic houses"
in this sense--houses on whom these and other writers have conferred
immortality--are, of course, merely the "ghosts of ghosts," and yet,
how real, how persistent are they, with the majority of us! Harry
Warrington enjoying the May sun from his pleasant window in Bond
Street; old Colonel Newcome kneeling among the "Grey Friars" of the
Charterhouse; the pretty old house and garden in Church Street,
Kensington, where Miss Thackeray's charming heroine, Dolly, lived;
little David Copperfield at the waterside blacking warehouse; poor
weeping Nancy on the steps of Surrey Pier, by London Bridge; ragged Jo
at the grating of the squalid burying-ground: they and their sorrows
are more real, more vivid, to us than the actual sufferings of the boy
Chatterton, the "Titanic" agony of spoiled Byron, or the short glories
of Lady Jane Grey. And, indeed, when we call to mind the gay vision of
the "ladies of St. James's" taking the air, we think as much of such
personages as Thackeray's beautiful Beatrix, wayward and heartless,
and of her solemn cousin, Colonel Esmond,--as of Mrs. Pepys, in her
noted "tabby suit," or of my Lady Castlemaine herself, in all her
beauty, attended by her royal admirer.
Such are the "byways of fiction" in London! Next to Dickens, in
whose persuasive company we have wandered from Fact to Fiction, Dr.
Johnson is, perhaps, of all our great Londoners, the most prominent.
To him, indeed, the everlasting noise and bustle of the capital,
"the roaring of the loom of time," was ever dear. Sayings of his
about London have, in many cases, almost passed into household
words: "He who is tired of London is tired of existence"; "Sir, let
us take a walk into Fleet Street"; "I think the full tide of
existence is at Charing Cross." Dr. Johnson had a great admiration
for Fleet Street, which he thought finer than anything he knew. The
old doctor's well-known figure, so often painted, in the ancient
full-bottomed wig, and rusty clothes, yet, for us, haunts the shades
of the Strand, yet lingers near his old haunts, fumbling in the
displayed stores of the second-hand book shops. "The old philosopher
is still among us, in the brown coat and the metal buttons."
Johnson's London houses,--Gough Square, Bolt Court, Johnson's Court,
and many others; Johnson's favourite Fleet Street taverns, notably
the famous "Cheshire Cheese," with its well-known literary coterie;
these are almost too familiar to need description; they, and the
Johnsonian element they recall, are bound up intimately with
London's eighteenth-century history. There is scarcely any street
so little altered, since then, in its characteristics, as Fleet
Street. And if the Fleet Street of our own day, with its still
irregular houses, its occasional glimpses, down some alley, of the
shining river which it skirts, is picturesque,--what must it have
been in Johnson's day, when its shops yet displayed their gay
projecting signs? when "timbered fronts" and gables were the rule;
when the charming dress of the day, with its gay satins and ruffles,
knee breeches and buckles, was the mode? Though, for that matter,
the old doctor himself, the essential spirit of the Fleet Street of
the time, can hardly have been a fashionable figure:
"It must be confessed," says Boswell, "that his ... morning
dress was sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes
looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled,
unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt
neck and the knees of his breeches were loose, his black
worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of
unbuckled shoes by way of slippers."
Doctor Johnson was, indeed, a faithful Londoner. He lived in no less
than sixteen London houses (among them, several "Inns"), all situated
in and around Holborn and the Strand. Nearly all of these abodes have
now disappeared, or are unidentified; only the Gough Square house
still exists. It is picturesque, chiefly on account of its age; it
stands back out of Fleet Street, in a little court, and has been often
sketched. It is a corner house, numbered seventeen (marked by a
tablet), and remains, in externals at least, much as Johnson left it
140 years ago, though internally it is a network of dusty offices.
Johnson's Court (not named from him), where he also lived, is now
swallowed up in "Anderton's Hotel." In Gough Square the greater part
of the celebrated Dictionary was written; here Johnson's wife died,
and here he "had an upper room fitted up like a counting-house in
which he gave to the copyists their several tasks." It was, however,
in Bolt Court, his last house, that the curious army of pensioners
lived whom this strange old scholar-philanthropist collected round
him:
[Illustration: _Wych Street._]
"His strange household of fretful and disappointed
alms-people seems as well known as our own. At the head of
these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor (a blind
old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial
poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her
daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these
fretful and quarrelsome old dames Dr. Johnson has himself
sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale: 'Williams
hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love
Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael)
loves none of them."
These old waifs and strays were not, apparently, even always grateful.
But, in any case, the annoyance of "such a menagerie of singular
oddities" must have driven him more and more to his clubs, and
especially to his favourite haunt the "Cheshire Cheese." This ancient
tavern, still existing in its pristine simplicity in Wine Office
Court, "and," says Hare, "the most perfect old tavern in London," is
the classic retreat where Johnson and Goldsmith held their court;
Johnson in the window-seat, and Goldsmith on his right hand. To
American tourists, I gather, it is a specially sacred place of
pilgrimage. In that low, dark, sanded parlour of the "Cheshire
Cheese," you might easily imagine yourself in some rural retreat,
miles away from London, though so close in fact to the din and
civilisation of Fleet Street. Not only far from London, but far away
back in the eighteenth century. Can such things be, you wonder, in the
London of our day? You sit in Johnson's time-honoured seat, under his
brass-plate inscription, and his picture; darkened oak panelling lines
the walls; artistic Bohemians blow smoke-wreaths over their toasted
cheese and whiskies, hilariously in yonder corner; and even the
waiters are not of the uncommunicative, cut-and-dried modern sort, but
rather the cheery, jovial order of Dickens's time. One of them brings
you the "visitors' book"; two ponderous tomes filled with brilliant
sketches by well-known artists, some of the sketches amiably
suggestive of the sketchers having supped "not wisely, but too well";
another tells you, with all the pride of long association, that "the
place has not changed one whit since Johnson's time"; and yet a third,
with an expansiveness rare indeed in London, will point out to you
"Goldsmith's favourite window-seat."
Oliver Goldsmith, the erratic genius who "wrote like an angel, and
talked like poor Poll," was one of Johnson's satellites, another
shining light of old Fleet Street. He had the artistic temperament
indeed, for when he was not in the clutches of the bailiffs, he was
usually revelling in absurd extravagance. Goldsmith's last lodging, in
No. 2, Brick Court, Temple, he furnished with ridiculous lavishness,
dressing himself to match, in "Tyrian-bloom satin with gold buttons."
Dr. Johnson must sometimes have been tried by his friend, as the
following story shows: (Newbery, Goldsmith's publisher, had apparently
refused further advances to his impecunious client):
"I received one morning" (Boswell represents Johnson to have
said), "a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great
distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me,
begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent
him a guinea and promised to come to him directly. I
accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that
his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was
in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already
changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a
glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he
would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by
which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a
novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked
into it and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon
return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for L60. I
brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not
without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used
him so ill."
The MS. was that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, but the whole picture
really suggests a scene from Dickens's _Pickwick_. Oliver Goldsmith
acted at one time as "reader"--curious combination!--to prim old
Samuel Richardson, the printer-novelist, at the latter's
printing-office in the south west corner of Salisbury Square,
communicating with the court, No. 76, Fleet Street. Richardson, also,
had once befriended Johnson, and the worthy doctor was for ever
praising his friend, and abusing his compeer in fiction, Henry
Fielding, whom he called "a barren rascal."
"Sir" (said Johnson), "there is more knowledge of the heart
in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_." Some
one present here remarked that Richardson was very tedious.
"Why, Sir," replied Johnson, "if you were to read Richardson
for the story, your impatience would be so great that you
would hang yourself. But you must read him for the
sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to
the sentiment."
But if Richardson is tedious, Johnson was nothing if not prejudiced;
though, after all, he has no less a person than Macaulay on his side;
Macaulay, who declared that were he to be wrecked on a desert island
with only one book, he would choose _Clarissa_, sentiment and all, for
his sole delectation.
Hogarth, the painter, it is said, once met Johnson at Richardson's
printing-office; when, seeing "a person standing in the room shaking
his head and rolling himself about in a ridiculous manner, he
concluded he was an idiot, whom his relations had put under the care
of Mr. Richardson as a very good man.... To his great surprise,
however, this figure stalked forward to where he was, and all at once
burst into an invective against George II.... Hogarth looked at him in
astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the
moment inspired."
Richardson's own home was, however, at some distance from his Fleet
Street printing-office; as far, indeed, as North End, Fulham. His
house there, which still stands, is one of two named "The Grange";
that nearest the Hammersmith Road. Here, in his garden-house, the
novelist wrote his somewhat long-winded romances, indulged his amiable
vanity, and indited his letters, with their touches of playfully
elephantine wit, to "Lady Bradshaigh" and his other fair
correspondents.
It is this very house, "The Grange," old-fashioned, red-brick,
sedate, that, by another of Fate's curious ironies, was for
twenty-seven years the home and studio of Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
Strange contrast, indeed, between the prosy, fussy, precise old
painter-novelist, and the most ideal and imaginative of our modern
painters!
"When the painter first settled here, the house stood in the
midst of fields on the outskirts of London. Now, whole rows
of new streets have sprung up on every side, the fields are
built over, and omnibuses and district trains have their
stations within a stone's throw. But the leafy trees and
sheltered garden of the painter's house remain, a green
oasis in the sandy waste. From the noise and dust of crowded
thoroughfares we step into the quiet garden with its shady
lawns and gay flower borders, its fine old mulberry-tree and
rows of limes. Here snowdrops and crocuses blossom in the
early spring, and later in the year, blue irises and white
lilies, sunflowers and hollyhocks grow tall under the ivied
wall. And here, at the end of the garden, among the flowers
and leaves, is the studio where the master worked."
Here, then, in the historic "garden-house," where Richardson once
wrote, and received his friends Hogarth and Johnson, was Burne-Jones's
studio, where he imagined that
"land of clear colours and stories
In a region of shadowless hours,"
described by Swinburne the poet in the lovely dedication of his poems
to his friend and Master in another art, begging that they may find
place, "for the love of lost loves and lost times," in the painter's
created paradise; "Receive," he cries,
"in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes."
It is a far cry from Fleet Street to Fulham, whither we have wandered
in company of Richardson and his friends, and we must retrace our
steps. All these sages and worthies of Fleet Street were, of course,
more or less connected with the great engine of the Press, then
comparatively in its childhood, but now, though grown to mighty
dimensions, occupying still the same sacred and classic ground. The
Jupiters of the Press have from the first wielded their sceptres in
Fleet Street and its immediate neighbourhood. And not only the
newspaper press, but all sorts of lampoons, political skits, libellous
pamphlets, and the like, had here their home in early days. Here that
meteoric and unstable wit, Theodore Hook, devoted his misapplied
genius to the editing of the then scurrilous journal _John Bull_, (a
paper whose _metier_ was the satirising of society); his favourite and
thoughtful axiom being "that there was always a concealed wound in
every family, and the point was to strike exactly at the source of
pain." The primary object of the paper, which was started in
"Johnson's Court" in 1820, was the slandering of the unfortunate Queen
Caroline, wife of George IV. The death of the Queen soon reforming the
_John Bull_, it altered to dulness, and declined in sale; its first
editor is, indeed, now mainly remembered by one of his early
escapades, the famous "Berners Street hoax." This was a wild practical
joke played on a harmless widow lady, living at 54, Berners Street.
Hook, it seems, had made a bet that "in one week that nice quiet
dwelling should be the most famous in all London;" and, the bet being
taken, he forthwith wrote many hundred letters to tradesmen, ordering
goods and visits of every kind, from coals to cranberry tarts, from
attorneys to popular preachers. The street became, of course,
absolutely blocked with traffic, Hook himself enjoying the "midday
melodrama" from an apartment he had himself hired in a house opposite.
Such wholesale destruction was the result that the _enfant terrible_,
being suspected, had to sham illness, until the affair had blown over.
Theodore Hook was a Londoner of the Londoners, with "a gigantic
intellect and no morals," added to the peculiar resourcefulness and
adaptability of the typical cockney. Nevertheless, even this
unprincipled buffoon and wit, petted by royalty and fashion, and left
to die, a drunken worn-out spendthrift at last--must, he, too, have
had his bad moments. There is a peculiar and haunting horror attaching
to the story (told in his _Life and Letters_), of how, when passing
by his birthplace in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, Hook pointed to a
spot nearly opposite the house where he was born, saying, "There by
that lamp-post stood Martha the Gypsy."
The Strand, still picturesque, narrow, and tortuous, is now nearly
entirely given up to shops, newspaper offices and theatres; but at No.
149 (once a lodging-house and now a newspaper office), the actress
Mrs. Siddons stayed when she first came up to London, and here she
supped joyfully with her father and husband, to celebrate her first
London success. Less changed is the historic Temple, where that
constant Londoner, Charles Lamb, lived so long, and of which he has
left us such lovely descriptions. Indeed, Charles Lamb is one of those
Londoners of whom, like Dickens, Milton, and Johnson, it is difficult
to say where they have _not_ lived in the great metropolis. Milton,
perhaps, is, however, an extreme case: for he not only lived in a
score of different residences, but further puzzles the conscientious
topographer by being married in three different churches and buried
piecemeal; having been also disinterred at various times, and his
remains scattered,--a thing manifestly unfair to the future historian.
Ruskin, also, the latter-day apostle and critic, has been very
catholic in his London dwellings. Born in humble Hunter Street,
Bloomsbury, he migrated later with his parents to Herne Hill and
Denmark Hill, with a short interlude of married life in Park Street.
The Denmark Hill house, so far from the centre of things as to be
almost suburban, is yet a goal of pilgrimage to Ruskin's faithful
disciples. Denmark Hill, now so overbuilt, so lined and scored with
railways, was, some sixty years ago, still a very desirable
residential region. Does not Thackeray locate his Misses Dobbin,
Amelia's Major's sisters, there?--in that fine villa, too, with
"beautiful graperies and peach-trees," which delighted little Georgy
Osborne. The smaller house on Herne Hill, where little John Ruskin
spent his boyhood, is at the present day unattractive enough; but the
Denmark Hill villa near by, taken later when the family launched out,
has still its charm. It, too, is a "fine villa," or rather country
mansion, not unlike the description of the Misses Dobbin's abode, and,
like it, full of peach-trees that, growing on old walls, still bear
abundantly. Readers of _Praeterita_ will remember how, when Mr. Ruskin
became "of age, and B.A., and so on," his father and mother decided on
moving that short way to the larger house; and how "everybody said how
wise and proper"; and how "the view from the breakfast-room into the
field was really very lovely"; and how the family lived for some
quarter of a century here in much "stateliness of civic domicile."
"The house itself" (says Mr. Ruskin) "had every good in it,
except nearness to a stream, that could with any reason be
coveted by modest mortals. It stood in command of seven
acres of healthy ground ... half of it in meadow sloping to
the sunrise, the rest prudently and pleasantly divided into
an upper and lower kitchen garden; a fruitful bit of
orchard, and chance inlets and outlets of woodwalk, opening
to the sunny path by the field, which was gladdened on its
other side in springtime by flushes of almond and double
peach blossom. Scarce all the hyacinths and heath of
Brantwood redeem the loss of these to me; and when the
summer winds have wrecked the wreaths of our wild roses, I
am apt to think sorrowfully of the trailings and climbings
of deep purple convolvulus which bloomed full every autumn
morning round the trunks of the apple trees in the kitchen
garden."
That hedge of almond blossom is still gay in spring, and the "shabby
tide of progress" has not touched the old house, which, garden, field,
orchard and all, is still virtually the same as it was in Ruskin's
time. No. 163, Denmark Hill, is its designation;--a big, roomy,
detached mansion, a real "rus in urbe." Much like other large suburban
villas, the house itself; yet this is the spot whence emanated _Modern
Painters_, that early work of genius that assured the young writer's
fame. There is the "study" that Mr. Ruskin used, his "workroom above
the breakfast-room"; there, above it again, is his bedroom, looking
straight south-east, giving "command of the morning clouds,
inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought." There, still, is the
little reservoir made by Mr. Ruskin in engineering zeal, a canal said
by the neighbours to have cost L5 every time he had it filled, in vain
attempt to make a little rivulet, or Alpine sluice, for watering! For,
although "of age and a B.A.," the chief reason, as Mr. Ruskin
ingenuously confesses, why his soul yearned for the Denmark Hill
house, was, that "ever since I could drive a spade, I had wanted to
dig a canal, and make locks on it, like Harry in "Harry and Lucy." And
in the field at the back of the Denmark Hill house I saw my way to a
canal with any number of locks down to Dulwich." ... "But," he adds
sorrowfully, "I never got my canal dug, after all! The gardeners
wanted all the water for the greenhouse. I resigned myself ... yet the
bewitching idea never went out of my head, and some waterworks were
verily set aflowing twenty years afterwards."
Yet, be the actual bricks and mortar never so prosaic, there is a
strange fascination about the dwellings where great men have lived and
died. Benjamin Disraeli was born, like Ruskin, in the shades of
Bloomsbury, and, again like him, migrated, later, to Mayfair on his
marriage. The late Lord Beaconsfield remained, however, always
faithful to the West End. In his Park Lane house (No. 29) he lived
over thirty years; removing then to No. 2, Whitehall Gardens, and
finally dying, after a short tenancy, at 19, Curzon Street. It was a
cold and inclement spring, a blast of Kingsley's much belauded
"north-easter," to which he succumbed. That unassuming house in Curzon
Street was, for the moment, the world's centre. "It was half-past six
in the morning that the final bulletin of the dying statesman's
condition was placed on the railings to inform the crowd who, even at
that early hour, waited for intelligence."
Mr. Gladstone, too, has had as many London houses as his great rival,
with perhaps, stormier residences in them. There is the house, for
instance, in Harley Street, where the mob smashed the great man's
windows at the time of his unpopularity over the Eastern question.
And No. 10, Carlton House Terrace, is the mansion where he lived for
so many years at the zenith of his fame. Is his spirit, I wonder,
clean vanished, forgotten there, and does no record of him remain?
Perhaps the militant spirits of Disraeli and Gladstone still linger,
if anywhere, about Downing Street; that narrow street of which Carlyle
says that "it is evident to all men that the interests of one hundred
and fifty millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there
carried on"; and where No. 10, that dingy old house which has been the
temporary home of successive Prime Ministers, as well as the official
head-quarters of the Government, "focuses more historic glamour than
any other house in London." Hook said wittily of Downing Street:
"There is a fascination in the air of this little
_cul-de-sac_; an hour's inhalation of its atmosphere affects
some men with giddiness, others with blindness, and very
frequently with the most oblivious boastfulness."
Lord Rosebery used 10, Downing Street, for official purposes; Lord
Salisbury did not use it at all. Many historic scenes have been
enacted, and many momentous questions settled, within its walls. It
was in its entrance hall, trodden by the feet of successive
generations of politicians, that Wellington and Nelson met for the
only time in their lives, both waiting to see the Minister, and
neither knowing who the other was. They naturally entered into
conversation, but it was not until afterwards that they knew to whom
they had been speaking. The house itself is solid and substantial,
without any architectural attractiveness, and to the casual observer
suggests nothing different from thousands of other London dwellings.
From the outside, no one would imagine it to be commodious, but it has
some very large apartments; and the old council chamber, the principal
features of which are the book-lined walls, massive pillars, and
heavy, solid furniture, remains much as it was in Walpole's day. Here
many conferences of Ministers have been held, and the most delicate
affairs of State settled. The Cabinet Councils have, however, not
always been held here. Mr. Gladstone preferred to hold them in his own
more cosy room on the floor above; and Lord Salisbury preferred to
hold them at the Foreign Office. Next door is the official residence
of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The entrance to the Foreign Office
and the Colonial Office is opposite. Which of these great buildings,
with their numerous passages and annexes and waiting-rooms, is the
original of Dickens's "Circumlocution Office," it would be invidious
even to attempt to discover.
Nowhere is the curious unexpectedness of London houses better
exemplified than in the building known as Sir John Soane's Museum, on
the north side of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here to all
seeming, stands an ordinary dwelling-house;--its front, it is true,
somewhat of the ornate kind,--but utterly misleading, so far as its
outer appearance is concerned, to the passer-by. Nor does the illusion
stop at the hall-door. For there is here an air of homely
friendliness, of quiet welcome, that is altogether at variance with
any preconceived ideas that the visitor may have formed about museums
in general. Several dignified family servants of irreproachable
demeanour lie in wait for the stranger and kindly escort him round. It
is not till you have passed the Rubicon of the double dining-room, yet
arranged exactly as in the lifetime of the founder, that you begin to
realise that you are in a museum, not in a private mansion. And the
realisation is even then difficult, for the family butlers have a
familiar way of alluding to "Sir John," the donor, as though he were
alive and in the next room, thus:
"Sir John gave L140 for these Hogarths," says the Chief Butler,
indicating the well-known _Rake_ series, and speaking with a degree of
intimacy of "Sir John" that positively startled me, till I remembered
that the gentleman in question died some sixty years ago.
"Oh, er, very Hogarthian!" I remark somewhat bashfully, for indeed
the pictures are hardly all of them pleasing to the uninitiated. "I
wonder that Sir John could like to live with them!"
"Yes, indeed! some of them _are_ very gross," says the Mentor; and I
almost wish that I had held my peace.
The panels of the mysterious room that contains the Hogarths afford a
wonderful example of how to hang many pictures in a limited space.
They open at the touch of a spring, disclosing not only inner walls of
pictures, but also their own inner sides similarly adorned. Through
the walls thus magically opened a glimpse is obtained of a little
basement room called "The Monk's Parloir," adorned with carving and
statuary. Sir John Soane was, of course, the architect of the existing
Bank of England, and interesting architectural drawings, beside
innumerable imaginary palaces by him, abound in the museum. The chief
treasure of the collection, the hieroglyphic-covered alabaster
sarcophagus of Seti I., father of the great Rameses, lies in the
basement; which is, indeed, entirely filled with works of "antiquity
and virtue"; the "backs" and basements of three adjoining houses being
utilised for the required space. To judge from the wide variety among
the objects collected, Sir John Soane must have been a man of
cosmopolitan tastes, and possessed of an interesting personality.
Perhaps he found some comfort in art for the tragedies of his later
life; for his two sons (whose quaint portraits, in youthful blue and
silver, are to be seen in the museum) died in his lifetime. At any
rate, that Sir John was a man of some humour seems to be sufficiently
attested by the curious _post-mortem_ joke that he perpetrated on his
trustees! For, when leaving his treasures to the nation, and
specifying especially that the house was to be left precisely as he
had lived in it, he appended to his will three codicils, directing
that three mysterious sealed cupboards in his museum-house should not
be opened till respectively thirty, fifty, and sixty years after his
death! This was accordingly done, expectation rising higher in each
decade; and lo! on each occasion nothing was found but a few worthless
papers, relating either to antiquated accounts, or to still more
antiquated family disagreements!
There is, at the present time, despite the encroachments of a modern
and generally iconoclastic London, now a wholesome spirit of
veneration abroad, which tends not only towards the preservation of
ancient and historical buildings, but also towards the acquisition of
the homes that have been lived in and made beautiful by the celebrated
men of our own day. Of this kind is "Leighton House," bought since
Lord Leighton's death by the effort of a private committee, and now
opened free to the nation. The rooms and internal arrangement are, as
in the case of the "Carlyle House," left as nearly as possible in
their original condition, and though of necessity much of the valuable
furniture and accessories have been removed, yet the many sketches and
drawings illustrative of the painter's life-work that fill the walls
do something to dispel the unavoidable sense of incompleteness. It is
interesting to wander through the beautifully-proportioned rooms, to
gaze into the well-tended, sun-lit garden, with its gay geranium beds
and its green lawn; to sit in the mysterious semi-darkness of the
"Arab Hall," and look up into its gold-encrusted dome; to listen to
the mournful splash of the tiny fountain in its marble basin;--and
yet, "wanting is--what?"
"When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead."
It will always be a question how far the mere dwelling of a great
painter is worth thus preserving in its integrity, when once the magic
of his presence, his genius, has deserted it, and the growing work of
his art no longer adorns its walls. The committee of the "Leighton
House" have done their work with judgment and care, and, if the
inevitable comparison occurs to those who saw it in the life time or
during the "show days" of its late master, of former life and
splendour with present gloom and sadness, this is only in the nature
of things. The blue tiles that the painter loved still adorn, in
bird-of-paradise like splendour, the wide, massive staircase; the
water still tinkles in the Pompeian atrium as of old; and the master's
art can still be studied in the many drawings and reproductions that
fill, so far as they can, the places left by greater works.
Hertford House, in Manchester Square, the sumptuous home of the
Wallace collection, bequeathed to the nation by Lady Wallace in 1898,
is the most important of the nation's artistic legacies. Though in a
sense historic--for it is the "Gaunt House" of _Vanity Fair_, and its
former owner, Lord Hertford, was caricatured as the Marquis of
Steyne;--yet, as it is mainly as a picture gallery that it must be
noticed, it has fallen most conveniently into a previous chapter.
But the historical houses of London are innumerable, and my space is
but limited. History is written in many kinds. And the greater portion
of the fine houses of the metropolis, the palaces of Mayfair, Pall
Mall, Kensington, possess historic interest of their own; interest,
indeed, often unknown and unsuspected by any but the privileged few,
because unvisited and generally inaccessible. Of these are
Chesterfield House, in South Audley Street, the home of the author of
the famous _Letters_, where the poor scholar Johnson waited patiently
for interviews with his noble patron; Apsley House,--the pillared
facade of which is so well known to travellers on the humble omnibus
as it passes Hyde Park Corner,--the abode of the "Iron Duke," that old
man in the blue coat and white trousers, to the last the people's
idol, whose daily appearances, in old age, were here awaited patiently
by expectant crowds; Lansdowne House, Devonshire House, Sutherland
House, Bridgewater House, splendid mansions on or near the "Green
Park," famed, like so many others, for their picture galleries;
Sutherland House, often now hospitably thrown open for gatherings of
"the people," is said to be the finest private mansion in London: "I
have come," a Queen is reported to have said to a former Duchess of
Sutherland, "from my house to your palace."
Many of the splendid old mansions of Stuart times have, indeed, gone;
yet in some instances they have risen again from their ashes to new
spheres of interest. Thus, old Montague House in Bloomsbury, old
Burlington House in Piccadilly, old Somerset House in the Strand, have
been rebuilt and utilised by Government as National Collections or
offices. Where lovely ladies of the Restoration trailed their sheeny
silks in Lely-like voluptuousness, where court gallants presented
odes, and court dandies took snuff and patronage, now sweet girl
graduates pace the galleries, spectacled lady-students copy "old
masters," Academy pupils study "the antique." The contrast is
picturesque as well as strange. Does one not sometimes, as twilight
falls, seem to hear the ghostly "swish" of the court beauties' dresses
along a deserted British Museum Gallery, or seem to see in a stone
Venus, with uplifted arm, an insufficiently clad fair lady of the
olden time? It is but fancy, yet such is the charm of history and of
historic association.
Ghosts of our own fancy may, and do, wander at their will in London's
misty galleries; but ghosts, better authenticated, are popularly
supposed to haunt a few of London's old houses. Thus, No. 50, in
Berkeley Square has gained undesirable notoriety as the "Haunted
House," and many extraordinary tales have from time to time been told
as to its ghostly manifestations. Berkeley Square has, undeniably, a
solid and old-time look that fits in well with the gloomy tradition;
it has the best and most ancient plane-trees of any London square, and
its fine old iron-work, with occasional torch-extinguishers (used by
the "link-boys" of sedan chairs in Stuart times), are all in keeping
with the old-world spirit. Nevertheless, Berkeley Square has other and
sadder associations than those of mere ghosts. For in No. 45,--a house
specially noted for its iron-adornments,--the great Lord Clive,
founder of the British Empire in India, committed suicide in 1774. "In
the awful close," says Macaulay, "of so much prosperity and glory,"
some men only saw the horrors of an evil conscience; but Clive from
early youth had been subject to "fits of strange melancholy," while
now his strong mind was sinking under physical suffering, and he took
opium for a distressing complaint.
In Berkeley Square (No. 38) is the town house of Lord Rosebery, once
the residence of Lady Jersey, and the place whence her mother,--the
daughter of Child, the banker,--eloped to marry the Earl of
Westmorland, in 1782.
It were, however, an invidious, as well as an impossible task, to name
all London's historic houses. What street in London is, indeed, not
"historic" in a sense? Houses may be pulled down, but even thus their
locality knows them still. Is not even Turner the painter's squalid,
dirty house in Queen Anne Street, now razed, yet recalled to the
passer-by, by the tablet affixed to the houses that have since sprung
up on its site? "Unlovely" Wimpole Street is sacred to the shade of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that "small, pale person, scarcely
embodied at all." It was from this house, No. 50, that she wrote her
impassioned love-letters, and, after years of chronic invalidism, ran
away, secretly and romantically, to marry a brother-poet. The
picturesque chambers known as "the Albany,"--a byway out of
Piccadilly,--recall Lord Macaulay, Lord Byron, Lord Lytton. Curzon
Street suggests the famous parties, in the early nineteenth century,
of the sisters Mary and Agnes Berry, the friends of Horace Walpole. In
Soho,--a district famous in old days for an artistic, and
semi-Bohemian fraternity, whose houses emulated Turner's in
dirt,--lived the painters Northcote, Mulready, Fuseli, Stothard,--and
Flaxman the sculptor. At 28, Poland Street, lived William Blake, the
poet-painter, the half-crazy, but wholly charming, seer and mystic;
here he wrote his _Songs of Experience_ and of _Innocence_, and drew
his _Visionary Portraits_. (The story of Blake and his wife, "reciting
passages from _Paradise Lost_, and enacting Adam and Eve, in
character," belongs, however, not to dingy gardenless Poland Street,
but to Hercules Buildings, then a modest Lambeth suburb). In Poland
Street, in 1811, lived also Shelley in early youth, with his friend
and biographer Hogg; the latter being attracted, says Shelley, by the
name of the street, "because it reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and
freedom":
"A paper (says Hogg) in the window of No. 15 announced
lodgings.... 'We must lodge there, should we sleep even on
the step of a door.' ... Shelley took some objection to the
exterior of the house, but we went in.... There was a back
sitting-room on the first floor, somewhat dark but quiet,
yet quietness was not the prime attraction. The walls of the
room had lately been covered with trellised paper.... This
was delightful. He went close to the wall and touched it.
'We must stay here; stay for ever.' Shelley had the bedroom
opening out of the sitting room, and this also was
overspread with the trellised paper."
But every part of London has its historic interest--is, in a sense, a
city peopled by the dead. "Where'er you tread is haunted, holy
ground." That spot, in that quiet, narrow street,--Mayfair,
Bloomsbury, Soho or Westminster,--where you chance to live, and toil,
and suffer, and enjoy,--has known many others in its time,--others
before you: men in stocks, and wigs, and laced ruffles, and
knee-breeches; women in brocades, ruffs, and farthingales; children in
long stiff skirts and prim stomachers: who, in their turn, likewise
lived, and toiled, and enjoyed, and suffered.... Is it not this
romance of London, this mysterious past life of hers, guessed and
unguessed, that makes us welcome, and recognise as real friends, the
types of a Thackeray, a Dickens? See, for instance, how a mere
allusion to Thackeray puppets serves to immortalise with a touch, the
prosaic, if fashionable, Clarges and Bond Streets: Clarges Street,
"where Beatrix Bernstein held her card parties, her Wednesday and
Sunday evenings, save during the short season when Ranelagh was open
on a Sunday, where the desolate old woman sat alone, waiting
hopelessly for the scapegrace nephew that her battered old heart had
learned to love."
"Here, Baroness Bernstein takes her chocolate behind the
drawn curtains; she is the Beatrix Esmond of brighter days
and fortunes.... There are the windows of Harry
Warrington's lodgings in Bond Street, 'at the court end of
the town;' geraniums and lobelias flourish in them to this
day, and no doubt they are let to some sprig of fashion; but
to me they are Harry's rooms, hired from Mr. Ruff, the
milliner's husband; and the 'Archie' or 'Bertie' in
possession to-day is a mere interloper, whom Gumbo would
have politely shown downstairs."--(_Byways of Fiction in
London._)
Not less has Dickens done with the lower life of the Great City. And
has not Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Ritchie), with a touch of her father's
picturesque and vivid genius, glorified that "Old Court Suburb," Old
Kensington, in her well-known novel of that name? Here, in Kensington,
at No. 2, Palace Green, then considerably more countrified than now,
Thackeray died in 1863. Here, too, is the red brick Kensington Palace,
built by William and Mary in what Leigh Hunt called "Dutch solidity,"
famous as Queen Victoria's birth-place, and also more sadly
reminiscent of poor Caroline of Brunswick, the ill-fated and cruelly
used wife of George IV.
Holland House is one of the most interesting and historically
important buildings in Kensington. It stands near Campden Hill, in
beautiful and spacious gardens, the same gardens where the youthful
George III. used to flirt with the lovely Sarah Lennox; the lady
dressed as a shepherdess, playing at haymaking while the King rode by:
a youthful and a pleasant idyll, in contrast with the lady's very
chequered after life! Holland House, says Mr. Hare, "surpasses all
other houses in beauty, rising at the end of the green slope, with its
richly-sculptured terrace, and its cedars, and its vases of brilliant
flowers." The house was originally built in 1607, though its
characteristic wings and arcades were all added later by the first
Earl of Holland, the same who was beheaded in the Royalist wars. After
his execution Holland House was confiscated by the Parliamentary
generals; being, however, restored in 1665 to the disconsolate widow,
who comforted herself by indulging privately here in the theatricals
so strictly forbidden by the Puritan Government. Early in the
eighteenth century Holland House became associated with Addison (of
_Spectator_ fame); he lived here for some three years after his
ambitious marriage with Charlotte, Countess of Warwick, a marriage
which, despite its splendour, report says was not happy for the
bridegroom. According to Dr. Johnson, it was more or less "on terms
like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan
is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy
slave.'" But the chief interest of Holland House lies in its having
been for so many years the centre of a great literary and political
_coterie_, and the resort of Whig orators and politicians. In the
lifetime of the third Lord Holland, who died in 1840, the house was at
the height of its splendour as a world-renowned intellectual centre.
Holland House still exists in its integrity, though Macaulay long ago
prophesied mournfully that
"The wonderful city may soon displace those turrets and
gardens which are associated with so much that is
interesting and noble--with the courtly magnificence of
Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the councils of
Cromwell, with the death of Addison."
"The gardens of Holland House" (says Mr. Hare) "are unlike anything
else in England. Every turn is a picture.... A raised terrace, like
some of those which belong to old Genoese palaces, leads from the
house high amongst the branches of the trees to the end of the flower
garden.... Facing a miniature Dutch garden here is "Rogers' Seat,"
inscribed:
"Here Rogers sat, and here for ever dwell
With me those pleasures that he sings so well."
Lord Macaulay's last residence was, as I have said, "Holly Lodge." In
this secluded villa, high walled-in from the outer world, were the two
requisites for an author's ideal of happiness, a library and a garden.
The house bears a memorial tablet. Here the great writer died while
quietly seated in his library chair, his book open beside him; a
peaceful close of a busy life.
I have named a few of our great Londoners; yet they, indeed, are but
few among the vast galaxy of the bright particular stars who, even in
our day, still enlighten with their spirit their former dwellings and
surroundings. It is their human interest that so transfigures London
stones; it is the mighty dead of England, the "choir invisible,"
"of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live....
To make undying music in the world"--
that lend to their city such enchantment. Surely something of this
feeling,--of this enchantment--is ours when we think of the long roll
of great spirits who illumined the archives of the past. There is a
magic, a glamour, in London streets, that affects the strongest heads
and hearts. All honour to them--to poor human nature,--that it is so.
Not only, let us hope, to the mad poet-painter Blake was it given to
"meet the Apostle Paul in Piccadilly." We, too, may, if we will, walk
with Milton in Cripplegate, may share Byron's Titanic gloom in the
quaint Albany precincts, may wander with Charles Lamb in those Temple
Gardens that he so loved, and may listen with him and Dickens to the
pleasant tinkle of the rippling water in secluded Fountain Court. We
inherit these associations, and we may--inestimable privilege--see our
London, our "towne of townes, patrone and not compare," through the
eyes of all the great men who loved her in the past.
"The dull brick houses of the square,
The bustle of the thoroughfare,
The sounds, the sights, the crush of men,
Are present, but forgotten then.
"With such companions at my side
I float on London's human tide;
An atom on its billows thrown,
But lonely never, nor alone."
[Illustration: _Cricket in the Parks._]