CHAPTER IX
LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS
Those persons upon whom the spirit of the past has power—and it has not power upon every mind!—are aware of the mysterious charm that invests certain familiar spots and objects, in all old cities. London, to observers of this class, is a never-ending delight. Modern cities, for the most part, reveal a definite and rather a commonplace design. Their main avenues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect their main avenues. They are diversified with rectangular squares. Their configuration, in brief, suggests the sapient, utilitarian forethought of the land-surveyor and civil engineer. The ancient British capital, on the contrary, is the expression—slowly and often narrowly made—of many thousands of characters. It is a city that has happened—and the stroller through the old part of it comes continually upon the queerest imaginable alleys, courts, and nooks. Not far from Drury Lane Theatre, for instance, hidden away in a clump of dingy houses, is a dismal little graveyard—the same that Dickens has chosen, in his novel of Bleak House, as the sepulchre of little Jo's friend, the first love of the unfortunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped in the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded into the twilight of obscurity by the thick-clustering habitations of men.† The Cripplegate church, St. Giles's, a less lugubrious spot and less difficult of access, is nevertheless strangely sequestered, so that it also affects the observant eye as equally one of the surprises of London. I saw it, for the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a little before twilight, and when the service was going on within its venerable walls. The footsteps of John Milton were sometimes on the threshold of the Cripplegate, and his grave is in the nave of that ancient church. A simple flat stone marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless foot tramples over that hallowed dust. From Golden Lane, which is close by, you can see the tower of this church; and, as you walk from the place where Milton lived to the place where his ashes repose, you seem, with a solemn, awe-stricken emotion, to be actually following in his funeral train. At St. Giles's occurred the marriage of Cromwell.‡ I remembered—as I stood there and conjured up that scene of golden joy and hope—the place of the Lord Protector's coronation in Westminster Hall; the place, still marked, in Westminster Abbey, where his body was buried; and old Temple Bar, on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his mutilated corse was finally exposed to the blind rage of the fickle populace. A little time—a very little time—serves to gather up equally the happiness and the anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness and the littleness of human life, and to cover them all with silence.
† That place has been renovated and is no longer a disgrace.
‡ The church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by Queen Maud. It was demolished in 1623 and rebuilt in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell, who saved Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, in 1651, is in the churchyard.
But not always with oblivion. Those quaint churches, and many other mouldering relics of the past, in London, are haunted with associations that never can perish out of remembrance. In fact the whole of the old city impresses you as densely invested with an atmosphere of human experience, dark, sad, and lamentable. Walking, alone, in ancient quarters of it, after midnight, I was aware of the oppressive sense of tragedies that have been acted and misery that has been endured in its dusky streets and melancholy houses. They do not err who say that the spiritual life of man leaves its influence in the physical objects by which he is surrounded. Night-walks in London will teach you that, if they teach you nothing else. I went more than once into Brooke Street, Holborn, and traced the desolate footsteps of poor Thomas Chatterton to the scene of his self-murder and agonised, pathetic, deplorable death. It is more than a century (1770), since that "marvellous boy" was driven to suicide by neglect, hunger, and despair. They are tearing down the houses on one side of Brooke Street now (1877); it is doubtful which house was No. 4, in the attic of which Chatterton died, and doubtful whether it remains: his grave—a pauper's grave, that was made in a workhouse burial-ground, in Shoe Lane, long since obliterated—is unknown; but his presence hovers about that region; his strange and touching story tinges its commonness with the mystical moonlight of romance; and his name is blended with it for ever.
On another night I walked from St. James's Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of Cardinal Wolsey), and viewed the ground that Charles the First must have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. The story of the slaughter of that king, always sorrowful to remember, is very grievous to consider, when you realise, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and death, his exalted fortitude and his bitter agony. It seemed as if I could almost hear his voice, as it sounded on that fateful morning, asking that his body might be more warmly clad, lest, in the cold January air, he should shiver, and so, before the eyes of his enemies, should seem to be trembling with fear. The Puritans, having brought that poor man to the place of execution, kept him in suspense from early morning till after two o'clock in the day, while they debated over a proposition to spare his life—upon any condition they might choose to make—that had been sent to them by his son, Prince Charles. Old persons were alive in London, not very long ago, who remembered having seen, in their childhood, the window, in the end of the Whitehall Banquet House—now a Chapel Royal and all that remains of the ancient palace—through which the doomed monarch walked forth to the block. It was long ago walled up, and the palace has undergone much alteration since the days of the Stuarts. In the rear of Whitehall stands a bronze statue of James the Second, by Roubiliac (whose marbles are numerous, in the Abbey and elsewhere in London, and whose grave is in the church of St. Martin), one of the most graceful works of that spirited sculptor. The figure is finely modelled. The face is dejected and full of reproach. The right hand points, with a truncheon, toward the earth. It is impossible to mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of this memorial; and equally it is impossible to walk without both thought that instructs and emotion that elevates through a city which thus abounds with traces of momentous incident and representative experience.
The literary pilgrim in London has this double advantage—that while he communes with the past he may enjoy in the present. Yesterday and to-day are commingled here, in a way that is almost ludicrous. When you turn from Roubiliac's statue of James your eyes rest upon the retired house of Disraeli. If you walk in Whitehall, toward the Palace of Westminster, some friend may chance to tell you how the great Duke of Wellington walked there, in the feebleness of his age, from the Horse Guards to the House of Lords; and with what pleased complacency the old warrior used to boast of his skill in threading a crowded thoroughfare,—unaware that the police, acting by particular command, protected his revered person from errant cabs and pushing pedestrians. As I strolled one day past Lambeth Palace it happened that the palace gates were suddenly unclosed and that His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury came forth, on horseback, from that episcopal residence, and ambled away towards the House of Lords. It is the same arched portal through which, in other days, passed out the stately train of Wolsey. It is the same towered palace that Queen Elizabeth looked upon as her barge swept past, on its watery track to Richmond. It is for ever associated with the memory of Thomas Cromwell.
In the church, hard by, rest the ashes of men distinguished in the most diverse directions—Jackson, the clown; and Tenison, the archbishop, the "honest, prudent, laborious, and benevolent" primate of William the Third, who was thought worthy to succeed in office the illustrious Tillotson. The cure of souls is sought here with just as vigorous energy as when Tillotson wooed by his goodness and charmed by his winning eloquence. Not a great distance from this spot you come upon the college at Dulwich that Edward Alleyn founded, in the time of Shakespeare, and that still subsists upon the old actor's endowment. It is said that Alleyn—who was a man of fortune, and whom a contemporary epigram styles the best actor of his day—gained the most of his money by the exhibition of bears. But, howsoever gained, he made a good use of it. His tomb is in the centre of the college. Here may be seen one of the best picture-galleries in England. One of the cherished paintings in that collection is the famous portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse—remarkable for its colour, and splendidly expositive of the boldness of feature, brilliancy of countenance, and stately grace of posture for which its original was distinguished. Another represents two renowned beauties of their day—the Linley sisters—who became Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. You do not wonder, as you look on those fair faces, sparkling with health, arch with merriment, lambent with sensibility, and soft with goodness and feeling, that Sheridan should have fought duels for such a prize as the lady of his love; or that those fascinating creatures, favoured alike by the Graces and the Muse, should in their gentle lives have been, "like Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable." Mary, Mrs. Tickel, died first; and Moore, in his Life of Sheridan, has preserved a lament for her, written by Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which—for deep, true sorrow and melodious eloquence—is worthy to be named with Thomas Tickel's monody on Addison or Cowper's memorial lines on his mother's picture:—
"Shall all the wisdom of the world combined
Erase thy image, Mary, from my mind,
Or bid me hope from others to receive
The fond affection thou alone couldst give?
Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be
My friend, my sister, all the world to me!"
Precious also among the gems of the Dulwich gallery are certain excellent specimens of the gentle, dreamy style of Murillo. The pilgrim passes on, by a short drive, to Sydenham, and dines at the Crystal Palace—and still he finds the faces of the past and the present confronted, in a manner that is almost comic. Nothing could be more aptly representative of the practical, ostentatious phase of the spirit of to-day than is this enormous, opulent, and glittering "palace made of windows." Yet I saw there the carriage in which Napoleon Buonaparte used to drive, at St. Helena—a vehicle as sombre and ghastly as were the broken fortunes of its death-stricken master; and, sitting at a table close by, I saw the son of Buonaparte's fiery champion, William Hazlitt.
It was a gray and misty evening. The plains below the palace terraces were veiled in shadow, through which, here and there, twinkled the lights of some peaceful villa. Far away the spires and domes of London, dimly seen, pierced the city's nightly pall of smoke. It was a dream too sweet to last. It ended when all the illuminations were burnt out; when the myriads of red and green and yellow stars had fallen; and all the silver fountains had ceased to play.
