The pit is a sacred institution of London. We may, if we choose, sympathise with the long hours of waiting pit-door crowds, but woe betide him who would thoughtlessly attempt to do away with the system. One manager, indeed, did recently attempt this; but a riot nearly supervening, he had perforce to take refuge in a judicious compromise. The Londoner is ever conservative in his tastes as well as in his politics. Ladies are allowed to wear their headgear in the pit; and the large erections they sometimes don testify more to their vanity than to their philanthropy. One sometimes hears a faint protest against such exaggerated types of millinery: "I 'ope I sha'n't 'ave to sit be'ind that 'at," a depressed pittite has been heard to murmur when entering the theatre just after a "lydy" with one of these alarming concoctions.
Where are the tastes of "the people" with regard to plays? It is difficult to generalize. The gallery love melodrama; they also like a good deal of moral sentiment, which they will often loudly approve;—to the extent, sometimes, of even offering advice on the situation to the actors. This is why the Message from Mars, a morality taken straight from Dickens, went so directly home to "the great heart of the British people." M. Taine complains that the English have no national comedy; that all their comedies are adapted from the French; "is it," he asks, "because of English reserve?" But, though the pit and gallery are generally serious, they are yet not serious enough for Ibsen; "I consider that there piece blasphemious," a disgusted artisan once said to me of the Master-Builder; "that 'ere shillin' I spent on it was clean thrown away; I went out arter the fust act." The majority of young men and maidens love comic opera, which seems, indeed, to be one of the paying "lines" in the London of to-day. Music-halls flourish; it is an eloquent sign of the times that the large and ornate "Palace Theatre,"—opened, with such a flourish of trumpets, a few years ago as the "New English Opera House," and known far and wide by its flashes of brilliant search-light,—should now have descended to a "variety" show. The great middle-class supports Shakespeare and the "legitimate" drama; shop-girls, and dressmakers' apprentices, like the "society" plays of the St. James's and kindred theatres, because they offer some opportunity for seeing the ways of that "high-life" from which they are themselves excluded. Millinery and costume are most important factors in the modern theatre; I know of many well-to-do girls who never think of buying their season's hats and gowns till they have first seen them on Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Mrs. Tree, or Miss Winifred Emery. And The Price of Peace, a feeble, but immensely successful Drury Lane melodrama, owed its success to the fact that it brought before the eyes of the proletariat, in a variety of well-constructed scenes, all the select haunts and fashions of the great world: Tea on the Terrace; a Wedding in Westminster Abbey; a Debate in the House of Commons; a Ball in Park-Lane, &c., &c. Such pieces are, of course, not the only favourites; good comedies are very popular, and English people, despite M. Taine, still like to laugh. Yet, take it all round, "Good Society," with, preferably, a judicious admixture of melodrama and sentiment, is the really paying thing with the pit and gallery.
If the murky London daylight in the theatre shows a mournful change from its nocturnal glories, even sadder is the contrast between the splendid entrance hall, or lobby, blazing with welcome lights, and the dark, grimy, and generally wretched "stage-door," which opens, mostly, into some gloomy back-street, and seems, to the uninitiated at least, to have no connection at all with the theatre. Here, the manners of the stage acolytes are altogether to match with the outward show, and there would appear to exist some traditional and transmitted dislike to soap-and-water. Strange stories some of these stage doors could tell! The stage door of the "Adelphi," for instance, where poor William Terriss was brutally murdered by the criminal lunatic whom he had befriended,—does it not still give to its old locality a suggestion of blood and tears? Are not the vicissitudes, too, of theatres as striking and as dramatic in their way as those of other historic houses? Now they are great and well-known; then disaster overtakes them, and their very names, for years, are forgotten,—till at last they go the way of old bricks and mortar. In their final dirt and disgrace they hardly recall the scenes of their former triumphs. One might, indeed, become superstitious when one sees how Fortune seems to befriend certain theatres, and as persistently to frown on others. As for some old playhouses,—their day once over, their place knows them no more.... The old Prince of Wales's Theatre, for instance, in Tottenham Street, so famous in the early triumphs of the Bancrofts and Kendals,—who recalls it in its present ruin and discomfiture? The Salvation Army has lately taken pity on it; but apparently its hour has now come, and with its adjacent tenement-houses in Pitt Street, where its green-rooms were, it lies at the mercy of fate and the hammer.
The London theatres are nearly all of them in crowded situations, and often so devious and unexpected are the ways by which they are reached that if the city were at some distant age dug out from oblivion like that of Pompeii, the results might be even more puzzling to the antiquary. The stalls, for instance, of the Criterion Theatre are deep underground, reached by myriad carpeted stairs; even the upper circles are well below the street. And what a strange and indecipherable "crypto-porticus" would the "Twopenny Tube" prove to some future Middleton of the ages? In central parts, London, indeed, seems a city built in several superimposed layers: layers, too, not successive, but coëval.
The life of London, always intense, burns at its highest pressure in and near Piccadilly Circus, and a restless activity reigns here all through the long hours of day and night. For this is, so to speak, one of the main doorways of the immense ant-heap; like ants, too, people seem to swarm incessantly, to go and come, in inconsequent but feverishly active sequence. Here is a blaze of light, a perpetual throng of "London's gondola," the hansom-cab, a confused medley of many sounds, that ceases not, but fades only after midnight; when the "heart of London," that never sleeps, subsides in the early hours of the morning into a dulled and general hum.
At Piccadilly, the foreign element from Leicester Square and Soho meets the native one. The French, Italian, and German tongues are, indeed, frequently heard all over London; but in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, the visitor really might, especially on a sunny fogless day, imagine himself in Paris or Berlin. The shops have foreign names: "Blanchisserie Fine" alternates with "Deutsche Droguenhandlung" or "Vino Scelto"; French waiters and Italian cooks stand, white-capped and white-aproned, smilingly at the doors of their respective restaurants; cheap and fair hostelries for wandering foreigners, with beds as low in price as two shillings per night, rise towering on every side. It is said that the French colony, in particular, of Leicester Square and Soho owes its origin to the early French refugees who, at various stormy periods, have sought shelter here from the internal dissensions of their own country. It has been said that, as far north as Seven Dials, the organ-grinders still find the "Marseillaise" the most lucrative tune to play; and this may well be so, though I myself have generally found, at least among the rising generation, the latest music-hall song or dance to be in the ascendant. There is another subject I would fain touch on here, at the risk even of irrelevance; it refers to the Soho style of coiffure. That there is a special fashion in ladies' hair-dressing peculiar to every district in London, is a fact which every passing visitor must soon recognize; thus, while in Clerkenwell model-lodging-houses it is generally (except for one short hour or two on Sundays),—Hinde's curlers,—in Seven Dials it is mostly of the "touzled" order, and in the West End of the classic "New Greek style." Here, in Leicester Square, it has a partly-French, partly-theatrical air, being generally parted in the middle, and brought, in smooth, dark, exaggerated Early Victorian loops, well over the ears. But details are more important than people imagine. "Nothing," says M. Gabriel Mourey, "so reveals a woman's psychology as her way of doing her hair." And the observant Frenchman goes on to draw certain quaint inferences from the English girl's style of coiffure, and her neatly braided tresses, careless of such aids to beauty as stray curls or "mèches folles;" a severe style that, according to this writer, "forms a rude contrast to the spiritual charm of her face, her Burne-Jonesian refinement of feature." ... As to the manner of hair-dressing betraying the personality, "nothing," he adds paradoxically, "could be more true of the typical Englishwoman, who never of her own free will, allows you to see a fraction of her real self, but draws into her shell of reserve with the same jealous reclusiveness that makes her bind her hair in such dull, tight, regular uniformity."
M. Mourey is certainly more polite to us than was M. Taine, who said unkindly that Englishwomen had big feet, as large as those of watermen, "and gait and boots in keeping"; also, that "it is impossible to train one's self to endure their long projecting teeth;" the effect, he supposes, of a carnivorous diet! "The point of view," again, not merely Anglophobia! The red-whiskered Englishman dressed in blatant checks;—his long-toothed gaunt spouse,—how long will these ridiculous fictions haunt the French mind? But even M. Taine would have been happy in Soho. Here, even the Englishwoman is less aggressively English; indeed, she blends, in indescribable medley, the qualities both of the Belle of New York and of the Parisian boulevards! Soho, however, is remarkable for other things than mere hairdressing. For the gastronomic talent that the French so naturally possess causes this whole district, including the neighbouring Covent Garden, to be noted, not only for many second-class "eating-houses," but also for good and moderately priced places to dine. The vast reform in this respect that has taken place of late years all over London probably owes not a little to these early pioneers in the art.
With the multiplication of cheap and good restaurants has grown in equal ratio the importation of Swiss and Italian waiters. These, every year, emigrate from their romantic valleys to our foggy shores, and work out their three, four, or five years in an alien land, partly for the sake of better wages, partly for that of learning the English language—an accomplishment without which no foreign waiter is now considered fully equipped. With unsparing thrift, they save the greater part of their wages; and they acquire the language as quickly as they can; with these two possessions they return to their own country, where they may either at once demand a higher salary,—or, if already well-to-do, buy a small holding and "settle down." When they first arrive in London, they are generally very young men, who come in faith and hope to the rumoured "golden land" of England, leaving their lovely native valley and their romantic homesteads with no less courage and resolution than, in mediæval times, would have drawn them forth, at a mercenary's wage, to the bloody field of war. The late Mr. J. A. Symonds, whose sympathies with, and knowledge of, the Swiss-Italian waiter are well known, has, he tells us, often wondered why the Alpine peasant goes through such cruel and comfortless expatriation. "The answer," he says, "is very simple:
"He wants to make money, and has the most resolute intention, after making it, to settle down at home and live the pleasant life of his forefathers in the mountains. In olden days he would have fought on any and every battlefield of Europe to get cash. But European history has turned over a new leaf. 'Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis,' and the Swiss make more by Fremdenindustrie than they could do by foreign military service in this age."
Landing in London with a small and hardly-saved pittance in their pockets, these lads usually live, as cheaply as may be, in and about Soho and Covent Garden, until such time as they can obtain employment. Switzerland, and especially Canton Ticino, furnishes a large part of the London waiters; yet all Italy, too, contributes her share. Even from one of the lonely hill-towns of the Apennines, three elegant youths, faultlessly attired,—servants of the inn, but whom I had imagined from their superior manners to be resident aristocrats,—once begged me to take them into my service, as footmen, cooks, knife-and-boot-boys, anything; "anything, madame, just to get a footing in England." Though the desirability of these as servants in private houses might, perhaps, be doubtful,—yet it is certain that in restaurants or hotels,—in quickness and in reliability,—the Swiss or Italian waiter far excels the English one. He rarely loses his temper. I have seen one waiting, single-handed, upon at least fifty impatient diners, and contenting every one. We can teach them very little. Yet they like to learn of us all they can. "I have learned a few things in England," the son and waiter in a little Swiss inn once said to me; a pleasant, rosy-cheeked youth, just over twenty, recently returned from a two years' service in London to the parental hostelry in a lonely, narrow valley. "Yes, I have learned something very fine." And he drew my attention to the quaint white-washed walls of the inn, made hideous by Japanese fans and cheap paper rosettes, &c.