TEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL.
Exists there, in the whole world, civilised or uncivilised, a nation of such inveterate grumblers as the English? We grumble at everything. We are five-and-twenty millions of bears afflicted with perpetually sore heads. Are we charged sixpence extra for a bed? is the tail of our mutton-chop underdone? does our mockturtle soup disagree with us? is a railway train late? or the requisite amount of hop deficient in our pale ale? does an Italian itinerant split our ears while we are endeavouring to solve the Seventh Problem in the First Book of Euclid? does the editor or manager refuse to return the manuscript of our poems or our farces? do we buy a silk dress that turns out to be nine-tenths cotton? are we surcharged by the commissioners of income-tax, (they say I make a thousand a year, I say I don’t make a hundred and fifty; but may difference of opinion never, et cetera)? forthwith we call for pen, ink, and paper, and indite a letter to the “Times,” that providential safety-valve for the great legion of grumblers. What are our public meetings but organised arenas of grumbling? what the “leaders” in our Sunday newspapers but extra facilities for grumbling after we have been grumbling all the week? I think it was Mr. Horace Mayhew, in his “Model Men and Women,” who told the story of a waiter at a city tavern, who took but one holiday in the course of the year, and then enjoyed himself by paying a visit to another waiter at another tavern, and assisting him in laying the knives and forks. In like manner the ordinarily-understood holiday for the gentlemen of the daily press—there being no diurnals published on Sunday—is Saturday; whereupon, after lying in bed somewhat longer than usual on the sixth day’s morning, they indulge in the dulce desipere in loco, by writing stinging leading articles in the journals which publish editions on the Sabbath. This is due to their inveterate propensity for grumbling. And, mark me, this licensed and acknowledged grumbling is the surest safeguard of our liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our snug roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and smile at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained in the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few months’, and sometimes a few years’ grumbling, we find that the wrong exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have had no barricades ad interim, no fusillades, no bombardment of private houses, no declarations of the “solidarity” of anybody, no confiscations, no deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by experience of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the people were very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into the limbo of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions upon grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily receives deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures he won’t guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no sooner does our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the speech that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write a much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin to grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the address which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the session, parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and witnesses are grumbling at the committee; and in outlying boroughs vicious electors are grumbling at the members of the Commons’ House of Parliament. The country newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. The barristers grumble at the judge, and the judge at the jury. The public grumbles at the way soldiers are treated by the officers, and the soldiers (who are about the only citizens who are not addicted to grumbling) go out and fight and win battles, at which we at home grumble, because so many lives have been lost. And I daresay the Prime Minister grumbles because he has the gout, and the Queen on her throne grumbles because “Punch” caricatures the Prince Consort, and “Punch” grumbles because the Prince Consort does not often enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being obliged to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not half amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the price of the marriage license, at the doctor’s bill for our first child’s measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the physician tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into our purer, better Fielding’s aphorism in “Vanity Fair”—“Ah! vanitas vanitatum? Who of us has not his hobby, or, having it, is satisfied?” Yet there is much virtue in having at least liberty to grumble.
These thoughts come over me as I wend my way at Ten o’Clock at night along the New Road—what do they call it now? Euston Road, Pancras Road, Paddington Road—que scais-je—towards the suburban district of Pentonville. It won’t be suburban much longer; for Clerkenwell and Islington, Somers Town and Finsbury, are hemming it in so closely that it will be engulphed some of these days by a brick-and-mortar torrent, like the first Eddystone Lighthouse. A pleasant spot once was Pentonville, haunted by cheery memories of Sir Hugh Myddleton, the New River Head, Sadlers’ Wells Theatre, and the “Angel” at Islington—which isn’t (at least now-a-days, and I doubt if it ever was) at Islington at all. They began to spoil Pentonville when they pulled down that outrageously comic statue of George IV., at Battle Bridge. Then they built the Great Northern Railway Terminus—clincher number one; then an advertising tailor built a parody of the Crystal Palace for a shop—clincher number two (I am using a Swivellerism). The pre-ordinate clincher had been the erection of the hideously lugubrious penitentiary. However, I suppose it is all for the best. The next step will be to brick up the reservoir, and take down that mysterious tuning-fork looking erection, which no doubt has something to do with the water supply of London, and the New River Head; then they had better turn the Angel into a select vestry-room or a meeting-house for the Board of Works; and then, after that, I should advise them to demolish the “Belvidere.”
Whose connection with grumbling you shall very speedily understand. At this famous and commodious old tavern, one of the few in London that yet preserve, not only a local but a metropolitan reputation, there is held every Saturday evening—ten o’clock being about the time for the commencement of the mimic Wittenagemotte—one of those meetings for political discussion, and the “ventilation” of political questions, whose uninterfered with occurrence, not only here, but in Fleet Street, in Bride Lane, and in Leicester Square, so much did rouse the ire of the sbirri, and mouchards, and unutterable villany of Rue de Jérusalem spydom, in the employ of his Imperial Majesty, Napoleon III.
I have run the gauntlet of most of these harmless symposia of political talk; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim acquaintance. I have been one of the Alumni of “Cogers” or “Codger’s” Hall, Bride Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was addressed as “My Noble Grand” by the speaker. I have attended a meeting at the Forum, held at the Green Dragon,[11] Fleet Street, where visitors are invited to join in the discussion; and where, one evening, joining in the discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my political views, and a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out of the window; from which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by the advent of a friendly Templar, who had dropped in from chambers to the Forum to oil his rusty eloquence in time for the coming Western Circuit. I have dropped in, too, occasionally, at Mr. Wyld’s Reading-Room, in Leicester Square, and have listened to much drouthy eloquence on subjects home and foreign. But nowhere have I seen such tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris have depicted, in the gloomiest of colours, as images of the political discussion meetings of perfide Albion. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of blood on the table, the chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder—to be subsequently used for the conflagration of the Thames—the orator addressing his hearers from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges erected on a coffin; or dissentient members launching abuses, charged with fulminating mercury, at an unpopular speaker’s head. Dark and dangerous meetings, of dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place in London. Oppressed, despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles, do meet in holes and corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech, denunciation and sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet Street, to Bride Lane, to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to Pentonville, to find them. The doors of those mysterious meeting-places are “tiled” as securely as Freemasons’ lodges. Now and then a traitor, by lies and hypocrisy, gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be discovered in his treason. He dies within the year.
TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE.”
The “Belvidere” is distinguished above its kindred discussion halls, by its eminently respectable aspect. The subjects broached are bold enough, and are as boldly treated; but you are puzzled to reconcile the full-blown democracy of some of the speakers, with their mild, bank-account-possessing, rate-and-tax-paying, housekeeping appearance. They bark but do not bite. The usages and prestige of the place, too, demand a certain amenity in discussion and forbearance in reply, which throws an extra tinge of respectability over the whole. Looking at this spacious, handsome room, panelled and pillared, comfortably and brilliantly lit, with its doubled rows of mahogany tables covered with bottles and glasses full of steaming compounds that do comfort the flesh outwardly and rejoice the spirit inwardly—in strict moderation, mind; looking at this burly, substantial auditory, ensconced in their cosy chairs, smoking their cigars, and listening with attentive ears to the orator; looking at the thoughtful waiter slipping from table to table, administering refreshment and receiving orders with a subtle swiftness, yet taking, I will be bound, an ardent mental interest in the discussion; looking at the grave chairman in his comfortable high-raised fauteuil—you might fancy this to be one of the parochial “representative councils,” as vestries are now queerly christened, or a freemasons’ lodge, when, “labour” being over, “refreshment” commences, or an ordinary club of middle-class men accustomed to meet one another, and talk upon the topics of the day over a social glass. And, in truth, were you to suppose this, you would not be so very far out in your calculation. These are, indeed, vestrymen—or representative councillors—freemasons, benefit-club, middle-class men. But the topic of the night is invested with authority, and its discussion is subject to rules; and the highest compliment I can pay to the “Belvidere” is that, if in that other Discussion Hall, held between the months of March and August, in a green-leather and oak-carving furnished chamber, nigh unto the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, as much sobriety, decorum, and persistence in adhering to the matter in hand were shown, as in this convivial parliament, the business of the nation would progress much better, and we should have much less cause to grumble at most things.