The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

by Frances Power Cobbe

Even if a man sincerely prefer country life, and transfer his abode from London to the rural districts, he still retains a latent satisfaction at having lived once in the very centre of human interests, close to the throbbing heart of the world. The old squire, who has been too gouty and too indolent to run up to town for twenty years, will still brighten up at the names of the familiar streets and play-houses, and will tell anecdotes, the chief interest of which seems to lie in the fact that he formerly lodged in Jermyn Street, or bought his seals at the corner of Waterloo Place, or had his hair cut in Bond Street, preparatory to going to the play in Drury Lane.

As volunteers enjoy a field day with the manœuvres and marches, so a Londoner experiences a dim sense of pleasure in forming part of the huge army of four millions of human beings who are for ever moving hither and thither, and yet strangely bringing about, not confusion, but order. The Greek philosophers and statesmen, who thought such a little tiny “Polis” as Athens or Sparta (not an eighth part of one postal district of London) almost a miracle of divine order, would have fallen down and worshipped at the shrine of Gog and Magog for having provided that a whole nation should be fed, housed, clothed, washed, lighted, warmed, taught, and amused for years and generations in a single city eight miles long. It is impossible not to feel an ever fresh interest and even surprise in the solution of so marvellous a problem as this human ant-hill presents, and Londoners themselves, perhaps even more than their visitors, are wont to watch with pleasant wonder each occurrence which brings its magnitude to mind: the long quadruple train of splendid equipages filing through Hyde Park of a summer afternoon; the scene presented by the river at the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race; or the overwhelming spectacle of such crowds as greeted the Queen on her Jubilee.

The facility wherewith a busy-minded person, possessed of moderate pecuniary resources, can carry out almost any project in London, is another great source of the pleasure of town life. At every corner a cab, a hansom, an omnibus, an underground station, or a penny steamboat, is ready to convey him rapidly and securely to any part of the vast area; and a post-pillar or post-office or telegraph office, to forward his letter or card or telegram. He has acquired the privilege of Briareus for doing the work of a hundred hands, while the scores of penny and half-penny newspapers give him the benefit of the hundred eyes of Argus to see how to do it.

Not many people seem to notice wherein the last and greatest of London pleasures, that of London society, has its special attraction. It is contrasted with the very best society which the Country can ever afford, by offering the charm of the imprévu. There are always indefinite possibilities of the most delightful and interesting new acquaintances or of the renewal of old friendships in London: whereas even in the most brilliant circles in the country we are aware, before we enter a house, that our host’s choice of our fellow-guests must have lain within a very narrow and restricted circle, and that, if a stranger should happily have fallen from the skies into the neighborhood, his advent would have been proclaimed in our note of invitation. Now it is much more piquant to meet an agreeable person unexpectedly than by formal rendezvous; and, for that large proportion of mankind who are not particularly agreeable, it is still more essential that they should be presented freshly to our acquaintance. Other things being equal, a Stranger Bore is never half so great a bore as a Familiar Bore, of whose boredom we have already had intimate and painful experience. There yet hangs about the Stranger Bore somewhat of the mists of early day, and we are a little while in piercing them and thoroughly deciding that he is a bore and nothing better. Often, indeed, for the first hour or two of acquaintanceship, he fails to reveal himself in his true colors, and makes remarks and tells anecdotes the dulness of which we shall only thoroughly recognize when we have heard them repeated on twenty other occasions. With our own Familiar Bore no illusion is possible. The moment we see him enter the room, we know everything that is going to be said for the rest of the evening, and Hope itself escapes out of Pandora’s box. Thus, even if there were proportionately as many bores in London as in the provinces, we should still, in town, enjoy a constant change of them, which would considerably lighten the burden. This, however, is very far from being the case; and the stupid wives of clever men and the dull husbands of clever wives, who alone smuggle into the inner coteries (few people having the effrontery to omit them in their invitations), are so far rubbed up and instructed in the best means of concealing their ignorance, silliness, or stupidity, that they are often quite harmless and inoffensive, and even qualified to shine with a mild reflected lustre in rural society in the autumn. Certain immutable laws made and provided by society against bores are brought sooner or later to their knowledge. They do not tell stories more than five minutes long in the narration, nor rehearse jokes till they fancy they can recall the point, nor entertain their friends by an abridgment of their own pedigree, or by a catalogue of the ages, names, heights, and attainments in the Latin grammar of their hopeful offspring. To all this sort of thing the miserable visitor in the country is liable to be subjected in every house the threshold of which he may venture to cross; for, even if his host and hostess be the most delightful people, they generally have some old uncle or aunt, or privileged and pompous neighbor, with whom nobody has ever dared to interfere in his ruthless exercise of the power to bore, and who will fasten on a new-comer just as mosquitoes do on fresh arrivals at a seaport after having tormented all the old inhabitants.

And if London Bores are as lions with drawn teeth and clipped claws, London pleasant people on the other hand are beyond any doubt the pleasantest in the world; more true and kind and less eaten up by vanity and egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile-minded as the very cleverest German.

Again, a great charm of London is that wealth is of so much less social weight there than anywhere else. It is singular what misapprehensions are current on this subject, and how apt are country people to say that money is everything in town, whereas the exact converse of the proposition is nearer the truth. In a country neighborhood, the man who lives in the largest house, drives the handsomest horses, and gives the most luxurious entertainments is allowed with little question to assume a prominent position, be he never so dull and never so vulgar; and, though respect will still be paid to well-born and well-bred people of diminished or narrow fortune, their position as regards their nouveau riche neighbors is every year less dignified or agreeable. Quite on the contrary in town: with no income beyond what is needful to subscribe to a club and wear a good coat, a man may take his place (hundreds do so take a place) in the most delightful circles, welcomed by all for his own worth or agreeability, for the very simple and sufficient reason that people like his society and want nothing more from him. In a city where there are ten thousand people ready to give expensive dinners, it is not the possession of money enough to entertain guests which can by itself make the owner an important personage, or cause the world to overlook the fact that he is a snob; nor will the lack of wealth prevent those thousands who are on the look-out only for a pleasant and brilliant companion from cultivating one, be he never so poor. The distinction between the rural and the urban way of viewing a new acquaintance as regards both birth and fortune is very curiously betrayed by the habit of townsfolk to ask simply “what a man may be” (meaning, “Is he a lawyer, a littérateur, a politician, a clergyman,—above all, is he a pleasant fellow?”) and that of country gentry invariably to inquire, “Who is he?” (meaning, Has he an estate, and is he related to the So-and-so’s of such a place?) It is not a little amusing sometimes to witness the discomfiture of both parties when a bland old gentleman is introduced in London to some man of world-wide celebrity, whose antecedents none of the company ever dreamed of investigating, and the squire courteously intimates, as the pleasantest thing he can think of to say, that he “used to meet often in the hunting field a gentleman of that name who had a fine place in Cheshire,” or that “he remembers a man who must surely have been his father—a gentleman-commoner of Christchurch.”

For those men and women—numerous enough in these days—who hold rather pronounced opinions of the sort not relished in country circles, who are heretics regarding the religious or political creed of their relatives and neighbors, London offers the real Broad Sanctuary, where they may rest in peace, and be no more looked upon as black sheep, suspicious and uncomfortable characters, the “gentleman who voted for Topsy Turvey at the last election,” or “the lady who doesn’t go to church on Sundays.” In town, not only will their errors be overlooked, but they will find scores of pleasant and reputable persons who share the worst of them and go a great deal further, and in whose society they will soon begin to feel themselves by comparison quite orthodox, and perhaps rather conservative characters.

And lastly, besides all the other advantages of London which I have recapitulated, there is one of which very little note is ever taken. If many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost by living there, many sharp and weary pains also therein find a strange anodyne. There is no time to be very unhappy in London. Past griefs are buried away under the surface, since we may not show them to the unsympathizing eyes around; and present cares and sorrows are driven into dark corners of the mind by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts which inevitably take their place. A man may feel the heart-ache in the country, and wander mourning by the solitary shore or amid the silent winter woods. But let him go, after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into the busy London streets, and be obliged to pick his way amid the crowd; to pass by a score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over by an omnibus, give a penny to a streetsweeper, push through the children looking at Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail a hansom and drive to his office or his chambers,—and at the end of the hour how many thoughts will he have given to his sorrow?

Before it has had time to sink into his mind, many days of similar fuss and business will have intervened; and by that time the edge of the grief will be dulled, and he will never experience it in its sharpness. Of the influence of this process, continually repeated, on the character, a good deal might be said; and there may be certainly room to doubt whether thus perpetually shirking all the more serious and solemn passages of life is conducive to the higher welfare. After we have suffered a good deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter every new experience and drink every cup to the dregs has been exchanged for the dread of strong emotions and the weariness of grief which belong to later years, there is an immense temptation to spare our own hearts as much as we can; and London offers the very easiest way, without any failure of kindness, duty, or decorum, to effect such an end. Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy and unselfish sorrow are not things to be lightly tampered with; and it is to be feared that the consequences of any conscious evasion of their claims must always be followed by that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our hearts and the disbelief in the sympathy of our neighbors. We have made love and friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes impossible to continue to believe they are real to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter be not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it merely come in the natural course of things that the business and variety of town life prevent us from dwelling on sorrows which cannot be lightened by our care, it seems a better alternative than the almost infinite durability and emphasis given to grief in the monotonous life of the country.

If these be the advantages of Town life, however, there are to be set against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse justly urges, half those quickly following sensations and ideas which constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights, forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there is no particularly fine scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the country at all) the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, out of the same number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher’s shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer’s dray, a score of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in agony from their tight bearing-reins while the coachman flicks them with his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odors the great majority will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden with bones and offal, the insufferable effluvium of the city cook-shops; and last—not least—pervading every street and shop and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling and sight. The golden silence when broken at all is disturbed only by the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on the return home at evening, or the exquisite “sough” of the night wind as it passes over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town, we have the relentless roar and rattle of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally, to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the thin walls of our house, as if there were no partitions between us and the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the sufferings of the senses in London,—surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications of the flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place between our feelings and our intellect,—a sense, not of being tired and wanting rest, for that is the natural and wholesome alternative of all strong and sustained exercise of our faculties, but of being “like dumb driven cattle,” and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air, but our walks through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, but it does us little good; and sleep, but we waken up before half the night is past with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of engagements and duties that we cannot break loose. We can only break down; and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things has lasted a little too long.