Commerce helped the people's resolve to be gay. You could buy a bag of confetti for a halfpenny; for the same sum a stick adorned with bright paper streamers, or a tuft of gorgeously-dyed flax. A penny provided a tartan cap in paper, wearing which one might be quite ridiculously gay. The oceans had been dredged and the earth rifled for the people's holiday. Shellfish of all sorts, bananas from the West Indies, plums from Spain, roses from Kent and Surrey, pine-apple tinned at Singapore, bright nacre shells from Australian beaches, little love-birds from Papua trained as "fortune-tellers" to pick out a paper telling you of the happiness in store for you—all these were at your service; and the standard price was one penny. A few coppers opened up for the holiday Englishman the resources of a whole Empire.
Over all lowered a grey sky. But what mattered that! The factory girls danced on the gravel paths to the music of barrel organs (sometimes, indeed, of the humble mouth organ), danced often with verve, and always with hilarity. The Australian larrikin and his "donah" dance at "down the harbor" picnics with a fixed solemnity of face, as if performing some weird corybantic rite. The London coster and his girl are determinedly merry. The merriment may be in some cases forced, but it is forced with grit. A dance on the road is broken up to allow a cart to slowly creep past. It is resumed with perfect good humour, and with the same gay whoops.
Yet there is nothing orgiastic in the merriment. Among the many many thousands you may notice here and there a man and—far worse sight—occasionally a girl the worse for drink, prompting the thought that if public opinion won't keep women out of the bars the licensing law should; but the great mass of the crowd is quite sober: the merriment is not vinous.
If dancing, shouting, or "spooning"—discouraged neither by the gaze of the public nor the dampness of the weather—did not amuse, there were more intellectual amusements. You might have your head read for a penny, your character diagnosed by your eye for the same sum; or you might see an old man making a fairly good pretence of hanging himself, and he left it to your honesty to subscribe the penny.
The Englishman take his pleasures sadly? Not a bit of it. That roar from the Old Bull and Bush, the crackling laughter around all the booths and from all the crowded paths, tell that the Englishman can become very gay on quite slight encouragement.
A day at Southend, another great "popular place of amusement," gives the same impression of resolute gaiety. A good-humoured crowd packs the cheap-trip trains. There are more passengers than seats; and young fellows take it amiably in turn to stand, leaving the elders and the womenfolk to sit throughout. At Southend there is no beach, as one understands the term elsewhere—a scimitar curve of gleaming sand on which blue waves break, showing their white teeth in smiles. The "beach" is just a flat, which at high tide the sea covers, to leave it at low tide a wide muddy expanse of marshy soil. But the seaside trippers make the best of it. The cliffs are thronged with happy picnickers. The beach is dotted with waders, who go out many hundreds of yards along the wet flat, and in some mysterious way enjoy themselves. Where at last the water starts there are bathers disporting from boats. A pier which stretches out its long straightness and suggests a task rather than a pleasure, is filled with happy promenaders, who sniff up the smell of the seaweed and recognise it as ozone. They mostly wear yachting caps, or some other costume sign of the seaside, and an air of nautical adventure.
Yes, the Englishman has a great faculty of enjoying himself. I am indeed struck, in many aspects of life, at the Englishman's faculty of being cheerful under what one would consider depressing conditions. The Englishman does not hesitate to take his girl to the cemetery to court her. A London friend asked me, with real enthusiasm, to look at the "fine view" from his flat, and it looked out on an old Plague Cemetery, where the victims of the London plague nourish the green of the trees. The Englishman take his pleasures sadly? Rather he takes his sadnesses pleasurably.
It is the Englishman of the industrial classes I have pictured amusing himself. As to the richer folk, is there anything fresh to be said? Does not every one at least think that he knows? Have not "society" novelists innumerable, from "Ouida" downwards, given us studies of English "society" people at play, making the home life of the duke open for inspection by the meanest intelligence? Are there not numberless penny and halfpenny papers carrying on the good work to this day?
If one can contrive to put out of one's mind all that nonsense and observe with intelligence, one will find that the middle-class Englishman and the rich Englishman amuse themselves after very much the same manner as do the people of the poorer classes. They refine on the methods, but the spirit is the same. At heart, the Englishman of all classes loves feasting and boisterous jollity. Education and breeding may modify his tastes, but they are still there. Au fond, the typical Englishman likes best a joke that has a savour of the "practical" in it. Give him his natural rein, and duke's son, cook's son—if there are any English cooks left to have sons—will lightly incline his thoughts to horseplay when he wishes to be genuinely amused.
Yet perhaps this, too, passes. I remember thinking so, Lord Mayor's Day 1909, when the procession through the city proved to be not a "show," but a display of the defence guards of the nation. Perhaps this may be taken as a hint of a growing earnestness in English life, of a recognition of stern struggles to come and only to be met with resolved and steady vigour. It had, of a surety, some significance—the sudden casting off on the city's great festival day of an old habit of childish play and the putting in its place of a display of soldiers and sailors, and boys who will one day be soldiers and sailors. Of some significance, too, was the ready, popular acquiescence in the change. Crowds that had been for years regaled on such occasions with broad pantomime, all fun and levity, were faced of a sudden with serious drama—soldiers in glittering mail, still more impressive soldiers in uniforms of the colour of earth; Boy Scouts playing at being soldiers and enjoying the most wholesome game; war paraphernalia of wagons and field telegraphs and field hospitals, and guns of all kinds, from the great mastiff siege-guns drawn by eight horses, which the Navy taught the Army to make mobile, down to the vicious little terrier pom-poms. And the people cheered the change. There was no hint at a protest against the departure from the stage of the old vanities. After a quieter method than that which came of Savonarola's teaching, but none the less surely, they had gone to destruction, and in their place was a dutiful parade of citizens armed for the defence of their homes: and the people approved. The Balaclava veterans and the Boy Scouts shared the honours of the day. Gog and Magog were not; but the crowd would have its symbolism, and cheered the ideal of tried valour, the ideal of aspiring youth, as they saw them seriously personified.