Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

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 Præterita 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 £5 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 £140 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!"