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

by George Augustus Sala

I should be wilfully deceiving you, and unworthy the name I have been always striving to gain—that of a faithful chronicler—if I were to lead you to imagine that the brilliant theatre is full only of rank, fashion, wealth, and happiness. Are any of the terms I have used synonymous, I wonder. There are many aching hearts, doubtless, beneath all this jewellery and embroidery; many titled folks who are thinking of pawning their plate on the morrow, many dashing young scions of aristocracy, who, between the bars of the overture, are racking their brains as to how on earth they are to meet Mephibosheth’s bill, and whether a passage through the Insolvent Court would not be, after all, the best way out of their difficulties. And in the great equality that dress-coats, bare shoulders, white neckcloths, and opera-cloaks make among men and women, how much dross and alloy might we not find among the gold and silver! In the very next box to the mother of the Gracchi, resplendent among her offspring, in her severe beauty, is poor pretty lost Mrs. Demmymond, late Miss Vanderplank, of the Theatres Royal. The chaste Volumnia, who only comes to the opera once in the season, and always goes away before the commencement of the ballet, is elbowed in the crush-room by Miss Golightly, who has one of the best boxes that Mr. Sams can let, and who comes with a head of flaxen hair one night, and with raven black tresses the next. Captain Spavin, of the 3rd Jibbers, shudders when he finds his next-stall neighbour to be his long-suffering tailor; and Sir Hugh Hempenridge, baronet, is covered with confusion when he feels the hawk-glance of little Casay, the sheriff’s officer (and none so bravely attired as he) darted full at him from Fops’ Alley.

Fops’ Alley! The word reminds me of bygone operatic days, and I sigh when, looking round the house, I remember how Time, the destroyer, has left a mark, too, upon these cari luoghi. It is true that many of those reminiscences may not be worth sighing for; but is there not always something melancholy in the fading away of old associations? Where is the Omnibus Box? The longitudinal den answering to the Loge Infernale at Paris, and the Fosse aux Lions at Madrid, yet has its customary locality over the orchestra, on the Queen’s side of the proscenium; but where are its brilliant, witty, worthless occupants? But one, the gay young prince, who, if report says true, kicked, with his own royal foot, through the panels of the door of communication leading from the Omnibus Box to the stage, and for that night—the night of the famous Tamburini and Coletti disturbance—locked by special order of M. Laporte, has become a Respectable, holds high office, does his work well, and occupies himself far more with the subjects of soldiers’ kit and barrack accommodation, than with squabbles between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But where are the rest? Where the dashing spirits and impetuous madcaps of twenty years since? One is in a lunatic asylum, and another is paralytic, and a third is prowling about the gambling-places on the Rhine, and the last I saw of a fourth, was once, in 1852, descending the stairs of the Hotel des Bains, at Dieppe, when a companion, drawing me on one side as a broken, bowed, decrepit, sunken-eyed, gray-headed, prematurely-aged man passed us tottering on a stick, whispered to me, “See! there goes D’Orsay;” who died a fortnight afterwards.

A Liberal, I hope—a Democrat, if you will—on some not unimportant public topics, I cannot help a species of meek wailing Conservatism upon the decadence of some of our social institutions. This is the age of abolition—of doing away with and putting down. They have robbed our grenadiers of their worsted epaulettes. The beefeaters in the Tower have been deprived of those scarlet and embroidered tunics, that contrasted so quaintly with the pantaloons and highlows of everyday life, and thrust into buttoned-up coats and brass buttons. The barristers’ wigs will go next, I suppose, and the cocked-hat of the parish beadle—his red plush shorts and buckled shoon are already departed. I have fears for the opera; I tremble for the days when there will be bonnets in the upper tiers and paletots in the pit. When I mind the opera first, it was a subaltern’s, and not a sergeant’s, guard that kept watch and ward under the portico. The officer on duty had a right of entrance ex officio into the pit, and it was splendid to see him swinging his bearskin and flashing his epaulettes in Fops’ Alley. The very name of Fops’ Alley is becoming obsolete now. The next generation will forget its locality. In those days, on drawing-room nights, the men used to come in their court suits and uniforms, their stars and badges, the ladies in their ostrich plumes and diamond necklaces, only taking off their trains. There were opera-hats in those days—half moon cocked-hats; now the men carry Gibuses like pancakes. The link boys are disappearing—the leather-lunged, silver-badged fellows, who shouted so sonorously that Lady Sardanapalias’ carriage stopped the way. And the glories of the operatic stage; are not those inconstant singing birds fled now? Can all the Arditis in the world compensate for Costa, with his coat thrown back, and those immortal, tight-fitting white kid gloves? He was the first man who ever succeeded in parting his hair down the back; and now, he too is growing bald, and he has cajoled Grisi the mellifluous, and Mario the heroic, to pipe their nightingale notes among the coach-builders of Long Acre, and the fried-fish shopmen of Drury Lane. Of the glorious unequalled, unapproachable Four—Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache—who once electrified the world in the “Puritani,” three are dead: the first is in Covent Garden provoking malevolent criticism. Where are the other Four, the Terpsichorean quartett, the immortals who danced the pas de quatre! Ah! Mademoiselle Piccolomini, you are very arch and pretty; ah! Mademoiselle Marie Taglioni, you are a spirituelle and graceful dancer; but you are not the giants and giantesses of the old Dead Days.

“You little people of the skies,

What are you when the sun shall rise!”

But the sun is set, and there is darkness, and I am afraid that I am prosing in re her Majesty’s Theatre, as old playgoers will prose about Jack Bannister, sir, and Dowton, and Munden, and Fawcett.

There is lately come to town, at least within these latter years, an Italian gentleman by the name of Verdi, to whose brassy screeds, and tinkling cymbalics, it is expected that all habitués of the opera must listen, to the utter exclusion and oblivion of the old musical worthies who delighted the world with their immortal works before Signor Verdi was born. I have brought you to her Majesty’s Theatre, and this is unfortunately a Verdi night. You may listen to him, but I won’t. Thersites Theorbo, the editor of the “Spinet” (with which is incorporated that famous musical journal the “Jew’s Harp”), may accuse me of being “perfunctory,” or of being an ass—no one minds Thersites Theorbo, knowing him to be a good fellow, much bemused in Cavendish tobacco and counterpoint; but I will shut my eyes, and muse upon the bygone glories of the opera. The place is a mass of memories. Things and books, and scenes and men, and stories, come teeming on my brain as I sit in my stall, heedless of Signor Verdi and his musical machinations. From that shelf, well known to me, where nestle my dog’s-eared Rabelais, my Montaigne, my annotated edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, my Shakspeare, and my beloved Jeremy Taylor, I take down garrulous old Pepys, and read—“Jan. 12, 1667. With my Lord Brouncker to his house, there to hear some Italian Musique, and here we met Tom Killigrew, Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who had prepared a play for the Opera, which Sir T. Killigrew do intend to have up; and here he did sing one of the acts. He is himself the poet as well as the musician, and did sing the whole from the words without any musique prick’d, and played all along on a harpiscon most admirably, and the composition most excellent.” And then I mind me of an advertisement in the “London Gazette,” in 1692, setting forth how “the Italian lady that is lately come over, that is so famous for singing, will sing at the concerts at York Buildings during the season.” The season! There was a “season” in William the Deliverer’s time, then. So I call to mind Dick Steele’s serio-comic announcement in the fourth number of the “Tattler,” of how “Letters from the Haymarket inform us that on Saturday night last the opera of ‘Pyrrhus and Demetrius’ was performed with great applause.” Then from the beginning of Italian opera in England, a grand trunk line extending to our days, I shunt off on to innumerable little branches and loop-lines. I see the Faustina and the Cuzzoni coming to blows—Sir Robert Walpole backing the first, his lady the second. I am, for the nonce, an ardent partisan of Mrs. Tofts. Then I have a vision of Mrs. Fox Lane, in a hoop of preternatural size, bidding General Crewe get out of her house, because he professed his ignorance as to whom Signora Mingotti was—the Mingotti who told Dr. Burney that she had “been frequently hissed by the English for having a toothache, a cold, or a fever, to which the good people of England will readily allow every human being to be liable except an actress or a singer.” And then I bow down in awe before the radiant shadow of Farinelli, great and good, unmoved by misfortune, unspoilt by fame—Farinelli, whose dulcet notes cured a Spanish king of madness, who was thought worthy to receive the decorations of the orders of St. Jago and of Calatrava—Farinelli, of whom honest Will Hogarth could not help falling a little foul in the “Rake’s Progress,” but who was, nevertheless, as singularly modest and upright as he was unprecedentedly gifted in his art. Unprecedentedly! recall the word. I bow before a greater shadow, though of one who wrote, and sang not, save to his pretty wife.[9] I see a little boy, in a grave court suit, and his young locks curling like the tendrils of the vine, sitting before the harpsichord in the orchestra of the great theatre of Milan. It is the first night of a new opera, and the opera is his—this almost suckling. Upstairs, in a box near the chandelier, is the little man’s father, sobbing, and smiling, and vowing candles to the Virgin, if his dear child’s opera succeeds. And it does succeed, and all Milan is full of that small maestro’s, that maestrino’s fame, the next day. I see him again, years afterwards, grown to be a slight, vivacious little personage, in a scarlet pelisse and a cocked-hat. He is standing behind the scenes at the wing of the Imperial Theatre at Vienna, and it is again the first night of the performance of a new opera—his own. There is a singer in a Spanish costume, and who must be, I take it, a species of barber. When he sings a song, commencing “Non più andrai farfallone amoroso,” the little man in the scarlet pelisse and cocked-hat begins to beat his palms together in applause, and murmurs “Bravo! Bravo! Benucci!” But when the singer winds up in that magnificent exercitation to Cherubino, “Alla vittoria! Alla gloria militar!” the house comes down with applause. The people shout out; the fat-headed musicians in the orchestra beat their violin bows violently against their desks, and (quite in defiance of operatic discipline) cry “Bravo! Bravo! Viva! viva! grande maestro!” I see the same little man lying sick and pining on his bed at Salzburg. The intrigues of Salieri, the ingratitude of courts, the quick forgetfulness of the public, are nothing to him now. Little does it matter if he have been indeed poisoned with aqua tofana, or if he be dying of that common, but denied disease, a broken heart. He has written the Requiem (recreant Sussmayer will strive to rob him even of that fame after death), and his last hour is approaching. The poor Swan dies; and then the sluice-gates of my eyes are opened, and I remember that this was Johann Wolfgang von Mozart.

Upon my word and honour there is Van Poggi, the chorus-singer, on the stage. I am recalled at once from dreamland to actualities. There is an old operatic saying that her Majesty’s Theatre, in the Haymarket, could not be complete without Van Poggi, and now behold that lyrical Widdicomb. According to the same tradition—not always trustworthy—Van Poggi was the identical chorus-singer who assisted Velluti to alight from his barge the night the last of those male soprani made his first appearance (in the opera of the “Crociato in Egitto”) before an audience who had almost forgotten the fame of the Pacchierottis, the Rubinellis, and the Marchesis. Van Poggi wears wonderfully well. Nobody knows his exact nationality: whether he is a Dutchman, a Dane, or an Italian. His residence has never been precisely ascertained. The management have no occasion to rout him up, for he is always punctual at rehearsal. During the vacation he retires to Paris, where he tells his friends that he is to be found between ten and four every day in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. During the London season you may contemplate Van Poggi between the same hours in Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop in the Quadrant, at whose door he generally stands in a Spanish cloak faced with velvet. He never sang any better or any worse than he sings now; he was never promoted to play the smallest separate part, such as is from time to time assigned to the gentleman who appears in the bills as Signor N. N., or non nominato. It is believed that Van Poggi would faint if he had to deliver a line of recitative. Yet there is a very general opinion in operatic circles that her Majesty’s Theatre would come to hopeless grief if Van Poggi were not among the chorus. At the commencement of the season there are always anxious inquiries at the box-office as to whether Van Poggi is secured; and a reply being given in the affirmative, the lovers of the lyrical drama breathe freely, and the subscription progresses. No one knows what became of Van Poggi in the dark and dismal interregnum during which Mr. Lumley was compelled to close his doors. Mysterious offers of better parts, and better salaries, had, it is reported, been made to Van Poggi, emanating from a quarter not a hundred miles from Bow Street, Covent Garden; but the patriotic chorister scornfully refused them. He was still seen to haunt Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop at the commencement of the musical season; then he suddenly disappeared; and whether he went abroad, or wrapped himself in the Spanish cloak and so lay torpid for two years like a dormouse, must for ever remain a matter for speculation. But it is certain that when the Haymarket Phœnix arose from its ashes, and light once more shone on its amber satin curtains, there was Van Poggi, at the first chorus rehearsal, as fresh as paint, and looking better than ever. And it is moreover reported, that when his Excellency, whom a combination of political difficulties (which began about the time some English grenadiers were sent out to Gallipoli) had forced to leave this country, and who did not return for upwards of three years, when his Excellency Baron —— made his first visit to his beloved opera-house, the piece of the evening being “Lucia di Lammermoor,” he swept the ranks of those preposterous sham Highlanders, who are discovered singing a sham hunting chorus, anxiously with his lorgnette, and at last cried out with a satisfied accent: “Bon, voilà Van Poggi.” He had recognised that chorus-singer in his kilt, and was thenceforth persuaded that the opera season was safe.

There is a new ballet to-night, in which the enchanting little Pocchini, most modest and most graceful of modern danseuses, is to appear; and Signor Verdi’s opera is very long, and I am aweary of his figments, and cannot sit them out. Besides, I want your presence, trusty friend and companion, always in the interest of “Twice Round the Clock.” We have a little business to transact; and as it is getting towards nine o’clock, we had better transact it at once. Leave we then the dazzling temple, let us hie to an obscure retreat, to your servant known, where we can leave our opera-glasses, divest ourselves of our white cravats, and throw paletots over our evening dress. There, a few touches, and the similitude of swells is taken away from us. Now let us plunge into a labyrinth of narrow streets to attain our unfashionable goal, for, upon my word, our destination is a pawnbroker’s shop.