The charms of poetic contrast are always great in London. While standing in a dingy byway of some city church—St. Olave's, Hart Street, or St. Jude's, Whitechapel,—does not the deep music of the organ,—resounding from inside the building,—fill the listener with a strange feeling almost akin to tears? Not even outside a country church is one so affected. Here it seems to bring the calm of Eternity into the fitful fever of the moment. The picturesqueness, alone, of religion, is so great, that, to the determined agnostic London would surely lose half its charm. And who could work among the London poor without, at least, something of the feeling so beautifully expressed in Matthew Arnold's well-known lines?
"'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.
"I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
'Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?'—
'Bravely!' said he; 'for I of late have been
Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.'
"O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam—
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home."
Toynbee Hall, of course, is of modern design; but there are still many good old-time houses in the East-end,—now deserted and left stranded by the tide of fashion. Of these is Essex House, in the Mile-End-Road, (opposite Burdett-Road), now no longer residential, but used by Mr. Ashbee as the convenient location for his well-known "Guild and School of Handicraft." Built partly by a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, with panelled rooms, oak staircase, and large garden, its solid dignity is well suited to its new and living purpose. Mr. Ashbee,—the founder and moving spirit of the Guild—was himself a worker at Toynbee Hall, where, indeed, in a small "Ruskin class" held in 1886-7, the school had its beginning. So one thing grows out of another, and a sturdy plant sends out its offshoots.
Thus Toynbee Hall, and kindred institutions, show the West-end in the East; now let us turn to the East-end in the West. This is not so difficult to find; "the poor," indeed, "we have always with us," and in some of London's most fashionable streets the saddest sights of all may be seen. Slums of a sort are to be found near most of the fashionable West-end squares; and, even within the precincts of aristocratic Mayfair, the expensive fish-shop in Bond-Street,—where, during long summer days, enormous blocks of ice, tempting to the eye, glitter like some Rajah's diamond,—entertains a motley crew of poor folk on Saturday nights, when it makes a practice of giving away its remaining stock. Bond Street is, in a manner, the "Aldgate High Street" of the fashionable world: here, at four o'clock or so in the afternoon, are to be seen the "gilded youth,"—the dandies of the day;—here the smart world flock for afternoon tea; and here fine ladies walk even unattended, and satisfy, as eagerly as their Whitechapel sisters, their feminine cravings for shop-windows. Who was it who first said that no real woman could ever pass a hat-shop? The truth of this remark may here be attested. The very smartest of motor-cars,—of horses,—of "turn-outs" generally,—may be seen blocking the narrow Piccadilly entrance of this thoroughfare from which deviates as many mysterious byways as from Cheapside itself. Very much sought after are all these tiny streets; indeed, the tide of fashion has been ever faithful to this special part of the metropolis. Did not Swift once write to "Stella," of the neighbouring Bury Street; "I have a first floor, a dining-room and bedroom, at eight shillings a week,—and plaguey dear!"? But,—even considering the vast difference in money value since Swift's day,—we have to pay a good deal more than that now for similar accommodation in this quarter.
But, yet further West, between Bond Street and Hyde Park, are Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, the very focus of fashion, in whose neighbourhood rents rise proportionately. Here, too, are many unexpected and charming byways. Behind the vestry in Mount Street, for instance, in the passage that leads into the church in Farm Street, you might think yourself thousands of miles away from Mayfair. This church in Farm Street,—the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception,—is famous as a Jesuit centre; here it was that Henry Manning, afterwards Cardinal, was "received" on Passion Sunday, 1851.
Other byways there are, too, of a less attractive kind; the byways where dwell the "poor relations," so to speak, of the Aristocracy and the "Smart Set"; the impoverished ladies whose sense of propriety would lead them to dwell even in a wheelbarrow, could that wheelbarrow only be drawn up on the fashionable side of the street! They are "backmewsy" little streets of saddening aspect, such as Dickens's typical "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square," that contained the residence of Mr. Tite Barnacle, with "squeezed houses," each with "a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat pocket" ... the house a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of mews, so that when the footman opened the door, he "seemed to take the stopper out." Dickens's picture is still a portrait that many will recognise:
"Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen's families, who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an establishment much frequented about early morning and twilight, for the purchase of wine-bottles and kitchen-stuff. Punch's shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the élite of the beau monde."