II
Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row—a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a "bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas-day, and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for another year. This information was given me on the occasion of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told that all the washerwomen were intoxicated, and that, as it would take them some time to revive, I must not count upon a relay of "fresh things." I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One of the incidental agréments of life in the latter city had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable blanchisseuse was not in liquor is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense hair, and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her; I could talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talking, to the door, and with a brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.
I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not strictly accurate, and that at the end of three months I had another array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much en évidence, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most unfavourable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky, the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weatherproof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway stations overflowed, and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the distorting medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially, the British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic want of charm. A Christmas-day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curbstone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker Street—a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is pictorial in spite of details—from its dark-green, misty parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such contemplations this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so much human life gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of every possible kind, and that is the interest of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a brighter strain.
I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon—walked from Piccadilly across the Green Park and through that of St. James. The parks were densely filled with the populace—the elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact, and beneath the gothic arches the odour was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too numerous. Wherever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough in the field. You are a tight fit in your place, wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and perpetual association is rather irritating. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park"—an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the profane pleasure-grounds of London, in the midst of "superfluous herds," and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without feeling this impression confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be rather shaken in the presence of a limited group. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper class I suppose this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks, they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some of the more romantic forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten, and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-moulded faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.
The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as absolutely unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous—especially among the younger ones. Here the same distinction is to be made—the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are physically very well turned out. Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and remoter neighbours, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West End pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have, it at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilisations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many—and some of them have a high pictorial value.