Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

by George Augustus Sala

THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.

I am not aware whether any of my present generation of readers—people are born, and live and die, so fast now-a-days—remember a friend of mine who dwelt in an out-of-the-way place called Tatty-boy’s Rents, and whom I introduced to the public by the name of Fripanelli. He was a music-master—very old, and poor, and ugly; almost a dwarf in stature, wrinkled, decrepit; he wore a short cloak, and the boys called him “Jocko;” indeed, he was not at all unlike a baboon in general appearance. But Fripanelli in his time—a very long time ago—though now brought to living in a back slum, and teaching the daughters of chandlers’ shopkeepers, had been a famous professor of the tuneful art. He knew old Gaddi—Queen Caroline’s Gaddi—well: he had been judged worthy to preside at the pianoforte at Velluti’s musical classes; and he had even written the music to a ballet, which was performed with great éclat at the King’s Theatre, and in which the celebrated Gambalonga had danced. To me, Frip. had an additional claim to be regarded with something like curiosity mingled with reverence; for he had positively been, in the halcyon days of youth, the manager of an Italian opera company, the place of whose performance was—wherever do you think?—the Pantheon, in Oxford Street. Now, as I stand in the lively bazaar, with the prattling little children, and the fine flounced ladies, I try to conjure back the days when Fripanelli was young, and when the Pantheon was a theatre. From here in the vestibule—where the ornamented flower-pots, and the garden-chairs of complicated construction, and the busts with smoky cheeks and noses, and marvellously clubbed heads of hair, have their locus standi—from here sprang the grand staircase. There was no Haydon’s picture of Lazarus for our grandfathers and grandmothers in hoops and powder—you must remember that Fripanelli looks at least two hundred and fifty years of age, and is currently reported to be ninety—to stare at as they trotted up the degrees. Yonder, in the haven of bygone mediocrities in the picture-gallery, may have been the crush-room; the rotunda at the back of the bazaar, where now the vases of wax-flowers glimmer in a perpetual twilight, must have been the green-room; the conservatories were dressing-rooms, and the stage door was undoubtedly in Great Marlborough Street. How I should have liked to witness the old pigtail operas and ballets performed at the Pantheon, when Fripanelli and the century were young. “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” “Orestes and Pylades,” “Daphnis and Chloë,” “Bellerophon,” “Eurydice,” the “Clemency of Titus,” the “Misfortunes of Darius,” and the “Cruelty of Nero”—these were the lively subjects which our grandfathers and grandmothers delighted to have set to Italian music. Plenty of good heavy choruses, tinkle-tankling instrumental music, plaintive ditties, with accompaniments on the fife and the fiddle, and lengthy screeds of droning recitatives, like the Latin accidence arranged for the bagpipes. Those were the days of the unhappy beings of whom Velluti and Ambrogetti were among the last whom a refined barbarity converted into soprani. The Italians have not many things to thank the first Napoleon for; yet to his sway in Italy humanity owes the abolition of that atrocity. They dig up some of the worthy old pigtail operas now, and perform them on our modern lyric stage. A select audience of fogies, whose sympathies are all with the past, comes to listen, and goes to sleep; and “Iphigenia in Aulis,” or “Ariadne in Naxos,” is consigned to a Capuletian tomb of limbo. Days of good taste are these, my masters, when aristocratic ears are tickled by the melodious naughtinesses of the great Casino-and-Codliver-oil opera, the “Traviata;” by the Coburg melodrama, mingled with Mrs. Ratcliffe’s novel, and finished with extracts from Guicciardini’s “Annals”—called the “Trovatore,” [who was it fried that child, or broiled him, or ate him: Azucena, Leonora, the Conde di Luna, Mrs. Harris, all or any of them?] or by the sparkling improbabilities of “Rigoletto,” with its charming Greenacre episode of the murdered lady in the sack. We manage those things so much better now-a-days. And the ballets, too; do you know positively that in the pig-tail opera times, the lady dancers wore skirts of decent length? do you know that Guimard danced in a hoop that reached nearly to her ankles, and that Noblet wore a corsage that ended just below her armpits, and a skirt that descended far below her knees? Do you know, even, that Taglioni, and Ellsler, and Duvernay, the great terpsichorean marvels of twenty years since, disdained the meretricious allurements of this refined and polished age, that calls garters “elastic bands,” and winces at a grant of twenty pounds a year for providing living models for the students of the Dublin Academy?—that strains at these gnats, and swallows the camel of a ballet at the opera! Oh, stupid old pig-tail days, when we could take our wives and sisters to hear operas and see ballets, without burning with shame to think that we should take, or they suffer themselves to be taken, to witness a shameless exhibition, fit only for the blasé patricians of the Lower Empire!

In the memoirs of old Nollekens, the sculptor, you will find that he was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera at the Pantheon, to which he had a life admission—it did not last his life though, I am afraid—and that he sat in the pit with his sword by his side, and a worsted comforter round his neck. This must surely, however, have been before the days of Fripanelli’s management. It is hard to say, indeed, for the Pantheon has been so many things by turns and nothing long. Once, if I mistake not, there was wont to be an exhibition of wax-work here; once, too, it was famous as a place for masquerades of the most fashionable, or, at least, of the costliest description. Here Charles Fox and Lord Maldon, with dominoes thrown over their laced clothes, and masks pressed upon their powdered perukes, reeled in from the chocolate houses and the E. O. tables; here, so the legends say, the bad young prince, who afterwards became a worse old king, the worthless and witless wearer of the Prince of Wales’s three ostrich plumes—here George III.’s eldest born met the beautiful Perdita. He ill-treated her, of course, afterwards, as he ill-treated his wives (I say wives, in the plural number, do you understand?) and his mistresses, his father, his friends, and the people he was called upon to govern. He lied to, and betrayed, them all; and he was Dei gratiâ, and died in the odour of civil list sanctity, and they have erected a statue to his disreputable memory in Trafalgar Square.

Soft, whisper low, tread softly: the Pantheon was once a church! Yes, there were pews in the area of the pit, and free-sittings in the galleries. There is a singing, buffooning place in Paradise Street, Liverpool, where they dance the Lancashire clog-hornpipe, yell comic songs on donkeys’ backs, perform acrobatic feats, juggle, strum the banjo, clank the bones, belabour the tambourine, stand on their heads, and walk on the ceiling. This place is called the Colosseum, but it was once a chapel. The pews, with very slight alteration, yet exist, and on the ledges where the hymn-books were wont to lie, stand now the bottles of Dublin stout and ginger-pop. I do not like these violent revolutions, these galvanic contrasts. They are hideous, they are unnatural, they are appalling. To return to the Pantheon—I still follow the legends—after it had been a masquerading temple and a wax-work show, and then a church, it was changed once more into a theatre; but mark what followed. One Saturday night the company were playing “Don Giovanni,” and midnight had struck before the awful tramp of the Commendatore was heard re-echoing through the marble corridors of the libertine’s palace, and the last tube of maccaroni stuck in Leporello’s throat; but when, the finale being at its approach, and to cap the climax of the catastrophe, twelve demons in flame-coloured garments, and bearing torches flaming with resin, rose from trap-doors to seize the guilty Don, the manager, who had been watching the scene from the wing, rushed on the stage with a screech of horror, crying out, “There are thirteen! There are thirteen!” And so there were! A solitary demon, with flaming eyes, a tail of incredible length, and bearing two torches, appeared, no man knew whence—he hadn’t come up a trap to the foot-lights (the audience screaming and fainting by scores), danced a ghastly pas seul, cut six, and disappeared in a blaze of livid-coloured fire, which had not been provided in the usual iron pans by the property man.[6] Whether he took Don Giovanni or the manager away with him the legend does not state; but it is certain that the latter went bankrupt a month afterwards, of course as a punishment for his sins; whereupon the lease of the Pantheon was purchased by a sober-minded speculator, who forthwith converted it into a bazaar, as which it has greatly thriven ever since.

I am very fond of buying toys for children; but I don’t take them to the Pantheon for that purpose. I fear the price of the merchandise which the pretty and well-conducted female assistants at the stalls have to sell. I have been given to understand that incredible prices are charged for India-rubber balls, and that the quotations for drums, hares-and-tabors, and Noah’s arks, are ruinously high. I have yet another reason for not patronising the Pantheon as a toy mart. It frequently happens that I feel slightly misanthropic and vicious in my toy-dealing excursions, and that my juvenile friends have sudden fits of naughtiness, and turn out to be anything but agreeable companions. Woe betide the ill-conditioned youngsters who cause me to assume the function of a vicarious “Bogey!” But I serve them out, I promise you. To use a transpontine colloquialism, ungenteel but expressive, I “warm them.” Not by blows or pinches—I disdain that; not by taking them into shops where they sell unwholesome pastry or deleterious sweetstuff—I have no wish to impair their infantile powers of digestion; though both processes, I have been given to understand, are sometimes resorted to by child-quellers; but I “warm” them by taking them into toy shops and buying them ugly toys. Aha! my young friends! who bought you the old gentleman impaled on the area railing while in the act of knocking at his own street door, and who emitted a dismal groan when the pedestal on which he stood was compressed? Who purchased the monkey with the horrible visage, that ran up the stick? who the dreadful crawling serpent, made of the sluggishly elastic substance—a compound of glue and treacle, I believe—of which printers’ rollers are made, and that unwound himself in a shudderingly, reptile, life-like manner on the parlour carpet? Who brought you the cold, flabby toad, and the centipede at the end of the India-rubber string, with his heavy chalk body and quivering limbs, the great-grandfather of all the irreverent daddy-long-legs who wouldn’t say their prayers, and were taken, in consequence, by those elongated appendages, and thrown, with more or less violence, downstairs? This is about the best method I know for punishing a refractory child. There is another, an almost infallible and Rarey-like process of taming juvenile termagants in the absence of their parents; but it entails a slight modicum of physical cruelty. Say that you are left alone with a child, too young to reason with, and who won’t behave himself. Don’t slap him: it is brutal and cowardly on your part; besides, it leaves marks, and you don’t want to make an enemy of his mother. Don’t make faces at him: it may spoil the beauty of your own countenance, and may frighten him out of his little wits. Shake him. Shake him till he becomes an animated whirligig. He isn’t appalled; he is only bewildered. He doesn’t know what on earth the unaccustomed motion means: then wink at him, and tell him that you will do it again if he doesn’t behave himself; and it is perfectly wonderful to see to what complete submission you can reduce him. It is true that a grown person must be a callous brute to try such measures with a defenceless infant; but let that pass—we can’t get on in the world without a little ruffianism. I have heard, even, that in the matrimonial state a good shaking will from time to time—but soft!

The young ladies who serve behind the counters at the Pantheon, are much given to working the spiky cobweb collars in which our present belles delight, and which are worked in guipure, or crotchet, or application, or by some other process with an astounding name of which I am profoundly ignorant. To their lady customers they behave with great affability. The gentlemen, I am pleased, though mortified to say, they treat with condescension mingled with a reserved dignity that awes the boldest spirit. It is somewhat irritating, too, to know that they can be as merry as grigs among themselves when they so choose; and it is a bending of the brows, a clinching of the fists, and a biting of the lips matter, to see them flitting from stall to stall, romping with one another in a pastoral manner, and retailing merry anecdotes, which may possibly be remarks on your personal appearance. Yet I have known a man with large whiskers (he went to the bad, and to Australia, and is now either high in the government or in the police over there) to whom a young lady assistant in the Pantheon, on a very wet day, once lent a silk umbrella. But he was always a bold man, and had a winning way with the sex.

It is time, if you will excuse my mentioning it, that we should quit this labyrinth of avenues between triple-laden stalls, all crowded with ladies and children, whose voluminous jupons—the very babes and sucklings wear crinoline now—render locomotion inconvenient, not to say perilous. Pass the refreshment counter, where they sell the arrowroot cakes, which I never saw anywhere else, and let us enter the conservatory—a winter garden built long ere Crystal Palaces or Jardins d’Hiver were dreamt of, and which to me is as pleasant a lounge as any that exists in London: a murmuring fountain, spangled with gold and silver fish, and the usual number of “winking bubbles beading at the brim;” and good store of beautiful exotic plants and myriad-hued flowers. The place is but a niche, a narrow passage, with a glass roof and a circle at the end, where the fountain is, like the bulb of a thermometer; but to me it is very delightful. It is good to see fair young faces, fair young forms, in rainbow, rustling garments, flitting in and about the plants and flowers, the fountain and the gold fish. It is good to reflect how much happiness and innocence there must be among these pretty creatures. The world for them is yet a place for flirting, and shopping, and dancing, and making themselves as fair to view as they and the looking-glass and the milliner can manage. The world is as yet a delightful Pantheon, full of flowers—real, wax, and artificial, and all pleasant—sandal-wood fans, petticoats with worked edges, silk stockings, satin shoes, white kid gloves, varnished broughams, pet dogs, vanille ices, boxes at the opera, tickets for the Crystal Palace, tortoise-shell card-cases, enamelled visiting-cards, and scented pink invitation notes, with “On dansera” in the left-hand bottom corners, muslin slips, bandoline, perfumes, ballads and polkas with chromo-lithographed frontispieces, and the dear delightful new novels from Mudie’s with uncut leaves, and mother-o’-pearl paper knives with coral spring handles to cut them withal. They have kind mammas and indulgent port-wine papas, who bring them home such nice things from the city. They sit under such darling clergymen, with curls in the centre of their dear white foreheads; they have soft beds, succulent dinners, and softly-pacing hacks, on which to ride in coquettish-looking habits and cavalier hats. John the footman is always anxious to run errands for them; and their additional male acquaintance is composed of charming creatures with white neckcloths, patent leather boots, irreproachable whiskers, and mellow tenor voices. Oh! the delightful world; sure, it is the meilleur des mondes possible, as Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss maintained. It is true that they were at school once, and suffered all the tyranny of the “calisthenic exercises” and the French mark, or were, at home, mewed up under the supervision of a stern governess, who set them excruciating tasks; but, oh! that was such a long time since, they were so young then—it was ever such a long time ago. You silly little creatures! it was only the day before yesterday, and the day after to-morrow——. But “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” and regard not old Time as he is a-flying. For my part, I will mingle no drop of cynicism in the jewelled cup of your young enjoyment; and I hope that the day after to-morrow, with unkind husbands and ungrateful children, with physic-bottles and aches and pains, and debts and duns, may never come to you, and that your pretty shadows may never be less.

You see that I am in an unusual state of mansuetude, and feel for the nonce inclined to say, “Bless everybody”—the Pope, the Pretender, the Pantheon, the pretty girls, and the sailors’ pig-tails, though they’re now cut off. Every sufferer from moral podagra has such fits of benevolence between the twinges of his gout. But the fit, alas! is evanescent; and I have not been ten minutes in the conservatory of the Pantheon before I begin to grumble again. I really must shut my ears in self-defence against the atrocious, the intolerable screeching of the parrots, the parroquettes, the cockatoos, and the macaws, who are permitted to hang on by their wicked claws and the skin of their malicious beaks to the perches round the fountain. The twittering of the smaller birds is irritating enough to the nervously afflicted; but the parrots! ugh! that piercing, long-continued, hoarse shriek—it is like a signal of insane communication given by a patient at Hanwell to a brother lunatic at Colney Hatch. The worst of these abominable birds is, that they cannot or will not talk, and confine themselves to an inarticulate gabble. However, I suppose the fairest rose must have its thorns, and the milkiest white hind its patch of darker colour; so it is incumbent on us, in all charity, to condone the ornithological nuisance which is the main drawback to a very pretty and cheerful place of resort. Only, I should like to know the people who buy the parrots, in order that I might avoid them.

As we entered by Oxford Street, with its embeadled colonnade, it becomes our bounden duty to quit the building by means of that portal which I assumed to have been in days gone-by the stage-door of the pig-tail opera-house, and which gives egress into Great Marlborough Street. I can’t stand the parrots; so, leaving my aunt (I wish she would lend me a hundred pounds), and my cousin (I wish she would lend me a kiss, and more sincerely do I wish that either of them existed in the flesh, or elsewhere but in my turbid imagination); leaving these shadowy relatives genteelly bargaining (they have already purchased a papier maché inkstand and a coral wafer-stamp), I slip through the conservatory’s crystal precincts, inhale a farewell gust of flower-breeze, pass through a waiting-room, where some tired ladies are resting till their carriages draw up, and am genteelly bowed out by affable beadle No. 2.