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

by George Augustus Sala

NINE O’CLOCK P.M.: HOUSE OF CALL FOR THE VICTORIA AUDIENCE.

Do you ever read the supplement of the “Times” newspaper? Of course you do; at least, you must diurnally peruse one column at least of that succursal to the monster journal, specially interesting to yourself. Almost every one who can read is anxious to consult the “Times” every morning for one purpose or other. Either he requires information about a ship that is going out, or a ship that should be come home; about a purse he has lost, or a bank-note he has found; about a situation he wants, or a clerkship he has advertised for competition; about the wife he has run away from, or the son who has run away from him; about the horse he wishes to sell, or about the Newfoundland pup he wants to buy; about his debtor’s bankruptcy, or his own insolvency; about the infallible remedy for all diseases, for which he has promised to send a recipe on the receipt of twelve postage-stamps; or the best curative pills advertised for hypochondriasis and dyspepsia; about the cheapest sherries, and the best second-hand broughams; about pianofortes for the million, sales by auction, money to be lent, or money wanted to borrow; and, chiefest of all, about the “births, deaths, and marriages,” which announcements are the prime and favourite reading of the female sex. Indeed, I know one lady—young, comely, accomplished, good-natured, and married—who never even condescends to glance at a line of the colossal “Times” newspaper, beyond the “Births, Marriages, and Deaths;” and very good reading she declares them to be.

There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I know not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), having reference to dancing. I don’t allude to the casinos, or masquerades, or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge about, stare at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without ever shaking a leg; but to the advertisements of the professors of dancing and “drawing-room deportment,” who really mean business, and give instruction in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their academies daily and nightly all over London, from the farthest East to the extremest West. Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a boy, in the grim Parisian pension, or school boarding-house attached to the College where I had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a certain obese professor, to whom my parents and guardians paid a certain quarterly sum for my instruction in the poetry of motion. I remember him well, for whenever we took our walks abroad in Paris, we could scarcely pass a dead wall without seeing it placarded, or a porte cochère without seeing it hung, with a little yellow black framed bill, screened with a wire trellis-work, proclaiming “Boizot” and his “cours de danse.” This was in ’39; yet last winter in Paris the same walls and portes cochères still sounded the praises of Boizot. He appears to be immortal, like Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye-snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby of the sauce. The square toqued and black-gowned professors of the College Bourbon—now Lycée Bonaparte—could by dint of locking me up in cellars, making me kneel across sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with ferulas (for corporal punishment never—oh! never—enters into the scheme of French education), impel me to construe Cæsar indifferently well; but Boizot, in all his cours de danse, failed in teaching me the difference between cavalier seul and en avant deux—between the pastorale and the chaine des dames. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your humble servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct me in the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most lamentable fiasco, although he resorted to his famous specific of stamping on the pupil’s toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the right steps to the right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing all my waltzing on his toes; and he flung me away from him at last, denouncing me as a hopeless butor, ganache, cretin, and cancre—a Vandal, a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth—the three first being terms perfectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which it is difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that Boizot left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on good authority that I once danced a hornpipe at the wedding-breakfast of a maritime relation of mine; but the exploit, if ever accomplished, was due more, I opine, to the salmon and cucumber of the nuptial feast than to the certaminis gaudia of dancing. I essayed seriously once more to waltz at a Kursaal ball at a German watering-place. How I tore a lady’s dress, how I tripped myself up, how I was covered with shame, and had the finger of scorn pointed at me, are yet matters of history at Bubbelbingen Schlaggasenberg. Thither I will return no more. Again, when I visited Russia, the first letter of introduction I presented on my arrival at St. Petersburg brought me an invitation to a grand ball. It was—Oh, horror! a diplomatic ball; there were not half a dozen persons in plain clothes in the ball-room; and I stood lonely and forlorn among a crowd of brilliant guardsmen, be-starred and be-ribboned ministers, plenipotentiaries, and embroidered attachés, who are proverbially the best dancers in Europe. I had not even the miserable safety-valve of crossing over and talking to the non-dancing dowagers, for, according to Russian custom—one which would delight the irreverent Mr. Spurgeon—the ladies remain at one end of the salon, and the gentlemen at the other—a relic of Orientalism—and in strict isolation, during the intervals between the dances. I was in despair, and about either to rush out or to recite “My name is Norval,” with a view towards exciting curiosity and inspiring terror, when the gracious lady who did the honours for the ball-giving minister, who was a bachelor, asked me if I didn’t dance? I didn’t say that I had a sprained ankle, that I was hot, or tired, but I told the truth for once, and said honestly that I couldn’t. “Don’t you smoke, then?” she continued, glancing at me with a sort of pitying expression, as though she were thinking, “I wonder what this gawky Englishman can do?” I replied that I could smoke a little; whereupon, with her own fair hands, she opened a door and inducted me to an apartment, where a score of Boyards and secretaries of legation were smoking Havannahs, playing préférence, and sipping whisky-punch, and where I stopped till two o’clock in the morning, became very popular, and positively sang a comic song. At evening parties in England, alas! they seldom have a smoking-room, and so I don’t go to them. A non-dancing man becomes speedily known in society, and the women shun him.

I can’t help thinking (of course, on the fox and sour grapes principle), whenever I see a very accomplished male dancer, as when I look upon a first-rate amateur billiard-player, on the immense amount of time the man must have wasted to acquire a useless and frivolous art. Yet I remember the fox and the grapes, and suppress my rising sneer. Dancing to those who like it, and can dance gracefully, is an innocent and cheerful recreation. It does my heart good sometimes to see the little tiny children in our crowded London courts and alleys waltzing and polkaing to the Italian organ-grinder’s music; and I shall be sorry for the day when some new Oliver Cromwell or Puritan government—we may have another in time—may denounce and put down “public dancing and dancing academies.”

But why should the dancing academy column in the “Times” advertisements possess more than general attractions for me? Is it that I have a sneaking inclination to visit one of these establishments as a pupil; take six private lessons from Miss Leonora Geary, or Mrs. Nicholas Henderson—I could never dare to face Madame Mélanie Duval, or the Semiramis of dancing mistresses, Madame Michau Adelaïde—study the fashionable steps in secret, and then burst upon the world as an adept in the Schottische, the Cellarius, and the Deux Temps? Alas! I do not even know the names of the fashionable dances of the day, and very probably those to which I have alluded are by this time old fashioned, out of date, rococo, and pigtaily. But I have a theory that every man must dance before he dies, and that of the choreographic art we may say as of love—

“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see,

Who is, or was, or is to be.”

And I shall dance, I suppose, some of these days, although my nerves be shrunk, my blood be cold, and hair white, and Death scrape away on the fiddle, as in Hans Holbein’s shudder-giving panorama.