HAMPSTEAD HEATH.
Hampstead Heath! What a world of delight seemed concentrated in that name in the days of childhood, when donkey-riding was not yet too undignified an amusement, and a gallop ‘cross country’ through the bracken and furze struck terror into the heart of nurse or parent, and covered the rider with glory! Such feats of horsemanship now belong to the irrevocable past; but yet no part of the great ‘province of houses’ known as London brings such pleasant memories as the quaint old village on its northern outskirts and the wild breezy heath that bounds it. Even now, Hampstead is rather in London, than of it, and keeps up customs that have died out elsewhere. There, on the fifth of November, a gallant procession takes its way through its steep winding streets, and the centuries mingle with as little regard to accuracy as they might do in a schoolboy’s dream the night before an examination in history. Gallant Crusaders in chain-mail, with the red cross embroidered on their flowing white mantles, jostle very nineteenth-century Guardsmen, who in their turn seem to feel no surprise at seeing Charles I. in velvet doublet and lace collar talking amicably to a motley, spangled harlequin. But were the inhabitants in this their yearly carnival to picture the history of their village and of the notable personages who have lived in it, they might make a pageant as long and varied as any that imagination can invent.
The manor of Hampstead was given by Edward the Confessor to the monks of Westminster; and subsequent monarchs conferred on them the neighbouring manors of Belsize and Hendon. It was at Hendon Manor-house that Cardinal Wolsey made his first halt when journeying from Richmond to York after his disgrace. At that time, however, Hampstead itself had no great claim to notice, its inhabitants being, we are told, chiefly washerwomen, whose services were in great demand among the inhabitants of London. That this peaceful if humble occupation could be carried on, proves at least that the wolves which, according to Dame Juliana Berners’s Boke of St Albans, abounded among the northern heights of London in the fifteenth century, had been exterminated by the end of the sixteenth. The wild-boar lingered longer; and so late as 1772, we hear of the hunting of a deer in Belsize Park. This, however, can scarcely be regarded as genuine sport, as it is advertised to take place among other amusements intended to allure visitors to Belsize House, which had been opened as a pleasure-house by an energetic individual of the name of Howell. He describes in his advertisement all the attractions of the place, and promises for the protection of visitors that ‘twelve stout fellows completely armed will patrol between Belsize and London.’
Early in the eighteenth century chalybeate wells were discovered at Hampstead, and as they were recommended by several physicians, the hitherto quiet village became a fashionable and dissipated watering-place. Idle London flocked there: youths who were delighted to show their finery in a new place; girls who were young enough to delight in the prospect of dancing all night; gamblers of both sexes; wits and fops. They danced, lost their money at cards and dice, talked scandal of each other, and drank of the chalybeate well, which Sam Weller has characterised for all generations as ‘water with a taste of warm flat-irons,’ till Hampstead lost its novelty, and the company went elsewhere to go through the same programme.
Among the crowd of nonentities that frequent the Hampstead Wells there is one notable figure, that of Richard Steele. In 1712, Steele retired from London to a small house on Haverstock Hill, on the road to Hampstead. Here, doubtless, his friend and fellow-labourer Addison visited him; and the two would find in the humours and follies of the company at the Wells material for the next number of the Tatler, the publication of which had now been going on for three years. Let us picture the two friends passing together through the gay company—Steele, radiant, we may be sure, in gay apparel, seizing at once on the humorous characteristics of the scene; while Addison would tone down his companion’s exuberant fancy, and draw his own thoughtful moralisings from the follies he witnessed. On summer evenings they would walk on the Heath, and admire the view across the swelling green slopes to the town of Harrow, where one day was to be educated my Lord Byron, a young gentleman who would win greater fame as a poet than even Addison’s acquaintance—a protégé to begin with, an enemy at last—the lame Catholic gentleman, Mr Alexander Pope.
The friendship between Steele and Addison must ever remain a puzzle. They had talent in common, Steele having the more original genius, Addison the more cultivated taste; but otherwise there seems no point of contact between the natures of graceless, impulsive, erring, loving Dick, and his cold, conscientious, methodical comrade. To our century, as to his own, Steele is ‘Dicky;’ the king made him Sir Richard, and on the strength of his title he took a fine house in Soho Square, and swaggered more than ever, and increased his expenses and his debts, but to all the world he was Dicky Steele still; whereas, had the honour of a baronetcy befallen Mr Secretary Addison, can we doubt that to all posterity he would have been known as ‘Sir Joseph?’ Yet these two men, unlike each other as they were, united to perform in an unobtrusive fashion a great work; they purified English literature, and did much to reform English manners. In a society which had learned to regard truth, honesty, and virtue as absurd, they showed, not the wickedness of vice—no one would have listened to that—but its folly. When the fops and gamblers found that they, as well as the honest men they sneered at, could be made the subject of satire, they began to doubt if their cherished amusements were such essential characteristics of ‘men of spirit’ as they had fancied. The gulf that lies between the comedies of Wycherley and those of Sheridan was first opened by the gentle raillery of the Tatler and the Spectator. The later dramatist had no keener moral sense than the earlier, but he lived in an atmosphere which, though by no means pure, was healthier than that breathed by his predecessor; and in which it was necessary that virtue, however weak, should in the end defeat the vice that tried to trade upon its feebleness.
Of the clear-cut grace of style that distinguished the writing of the Spectator there is no need to speak; it still remains the model of English prose, while the tiny, whitish-brown sheet, the perusal of which used to add to the flavour of Belinda’s morning chocolate, was the progenitor of the immense mass of periodical literature that surrounds us to-day. But if the two friends had done nothing more than give us—Steele the first sketch, Addison the finished portrait, of old-fashioned, kind, eccentric Sir Roger de Coverley, they would have deserved a high and loving place in our memory.
Thirty years later, the figure of another literary man was to be seen at Hampstead. Not so gorgeous as Dick, not so precise as Addison, is slovenly, tea-drinking, long-worded Samuel Johnson; but he is their legitimate successor, nevertheless. He, too, is a man of letters, living by the produce of his pen, and appealing for support to the public, and not to the kindness or charity of private patrons. Indeed, he scorns such condescending patronage, as a certain stinging letter to Lord Chesterfield remains to testify. In 1748, Mrs Johnson, for the sake of the country air, took lodgings at Hampstead; and there her husband wrote his satire, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Johnson did not spend all his time at Hampstead, for he was obliged to return and drudge in smoky London in order to provide for her comfort. Boswell tells us that ‘she indulged in country air and good living at an unsuitable expense; and she by no means treated her husband with that complacency which is the most engaging quality in a wife.’ Yet Johnson loved faithfully and mourned sincerely the querulous, exacting woman, a quarter of a century older than himself, and cherished an undoubting belief in her beauty; while all save him perceived that if she had ever possessed any—which they doubted—it had long disappeared.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Hampstead became the dwelling-place of two famous lawyers, both of them Scotch—Lords Erskine and Mansfield. Thomas Erskine, youngest son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, and ‘a penniless lad with a lang pedigree,’ began life as a midshipman; but disliking the service, he, after his father’s death, invested the whole of his little patrimony in the purchase of an ensigncy in the 1st Foot. When, some years later, he felt his true vocation to be the bar, he was burdened with the responsibility of a wife and children; and it was only by the exercise of economy nearly approaching privation that he succeeded in maintaining himself during the three years’ study that must elapse before he was called to the bar. Even when he received his qualification, it seemed that he was to fail through lack of opportunity to display his talents; but opportunity came at last, and his brilliant career led to the Lord Chancellorship of England, a peerage, and the Order of the Thistle. All the power of his oratory and of his ever-increasing influence was devoted to the promotion of freedom, civil and religious. He stood up boldly for the independence of juries against the bullying of judges; he advocated concessions to the Catholics; and carrying his love of mercy and justice beyond the human race, he brought into parliament a bill for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The measure failed; for popular feeling on the subject was then such as is expressed in the famous couplet—
Things is come to a pretty pass,
When a man mayn’t wollop his own jackass.
But before Erskine died, it had become law.
William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, was the eleventh of the fourteen children of Viscount Stormont, of the castle of Scone, in Perthshire. So poor was his lordship, that, as we are told by Mansfield’s biographer, the only fare he could provide for those fourteen mouths—which though high-born, were every whit as hungry as if they had been peasants’—was oatmeal porridge. The family was Jacobite in politics, so its fortunes were little likely to improve; but by the influence of Bishop Atterbury, who was at heart a Jacobite too, little Willie was admitted to Westminster School. He made good use of his time there; and by listening to the debates in Westminster Hall he became enamoured of the law, and resolved to devote himself to it. Difficulties enough lay before him; but by the aid of an indomitable perseverance, a gentle manner, and a voice so musical that none could listen to it unmoved, he conquered them all. Throughout his legal career he was noted for strict integrity and justice. He advocated free trade and religious toleration, and used every effort in his power to decrease the waste of time and money in the business of law-courts; but his greatest title to honour is that he was the first to decide that no slave could remain a slave on English soil.
Early in this century, the year after Waterloo was fought, Hampstead was familiar with the forms of three men to whom life gave only scorn, insult, and disappointment, yet whose memory lingers about it and makes it hallowed ground. In 1816, Leigh Hunt lived at Hampstead in a part called the Vale of Health; and there Keats, who lodged in the village, and Shelley were his frequent visitors. Each of the three was more or less a martyr. For the crime of describing the Prince Regent—whose memory as George IV. is not highly honoured—as an ‘Adonis of fifty,’ Hunt was thrown into prison; while the political reviews and journals abused his graceful poems and scholarly essays as if they had been firebrands, to extinguish which every exertion must be made. They succeeded in torturing him, in reducing him to poverty and dependence, but they did not succeed in changing Leigh Hunt’s convictions. He would not bow down to the Adonis of fifty.
Shelley was rather a visitor than a resident at Hampstead Heath; but Keats composed not a few of his poems here. The sorrows of his sorrowful life had not yet reached their climax in 1816. Already he was struggling with poverty, disease, and hopeless, passionate love; but he had not yet published those poems which were to rouse such wrath in the bosoms of a few critics, and such delight in thousands of readers. But at Hampstead most of them were written. Here he breathed life into the long dead myth of Endymion, surrounding it with such a wealth of description as seems scarcely possible to a youth of such limited experience. Can commonplace Hampstead Heath, the chosen resort of Bank-holiday excursionists, be the prototype of that Grecian valley where the goddess of night stooped to kiss Endymion! Here were written the sad story of The Pot of Basil and the legend of The Eve of St Agnes; here, in 1819, was composed that most exquisite Ode to a Nightingale, which, even were it his only production, might place Keats among our greater poets.
The memory loves to trace the footsteps of departed greatness; but even did no such recollections as these endear Hampstead Heath, it would still be precious as a spot where half-asphyxiated Londoners may inhale a fresh untainted breeze, and children may romp to their hearts’ content. ‘I like Hampstead Heath much better than Switzerland,’ says a small boy in one of Du Maurier’s sketches in Punch. ‘But you haven’t seen Switzerland,’ objects his sister, a practical young lady a year or two older. ‘O yes; I have seen it on the map,’ is his reply. And if he had really visited Switzerland, the little fellow would perhaps still have preferred the broken, sandy soil, the grass and ferns, of Hampstead Heath.
Du Maurier is the Heath’s own artist. He lives on its borders, and most of the backgrounds of his out-of-door sketches are borrowed from its scenery. He may daily be seen there—till lately accompanied by his dog Chang, the great St Bernard whose portrait has so often appeared in the pages of Punch. But, alas! Chang is no more; he has fallen a victim to consumption and heart-disease, and Hampstead weeps for him. Seldom has any dog been so widely lamented. ‘He is mourned by a large circle of friends,’ said the World, ‘and the family of which he was so long a member is inconsolable for his loss.’