And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and decorous attention to the music, and bearing themselves far more like a congregation than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast mass of them join in the choruses; and when, at the first bar of the sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hearers all stand up, the singers in the orchestra seem to me like priests. In truth, I think that to hear an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away from those grand performances wiser and better men. There is a natural disinclination to return—at least, immediately—to frivolous and trivial pursuits, after listening to those solemn and ennobling strains. I know that some exist upon whom music has no effect whatsoever; but I believe that the vast majority of mankind are influenced for good or evil by the sound of music. The most heartless woman in the world whom I know, cries when she hears “Kathleen ma vourneen.” Napoleon could never listen to “Lascio ch’io piango la cruda sorte,” without crossing himself. How grandly does John Dryden set forth this theory in his immortal St. Cecilian Ode! with what exquisite art has he shown us Alexander moved to alternate joy, pride, shame, weeping, frenzy, as old Timotheus sweeps the lyre in varied strains!
TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL.
Now, in sober broughams and in hack-cabs—driven, I hope, by regenerated cabmen, who give tickets before they are asked for them, and never charge more than thirty per cent. above the legal fare—or haply, if the night be fine, on foot, the serious audience, well cloaked and bonneted, leave the hall. For half an hour afterwards, the Exeter Hall side of the Strand, both east and west, is dotted with serious groups in search of the last omnibus, or, perchance, boldly walking home. I wonder how many of the serious ones know anything of the thoroughfare. They may traverse it at noonday, or pass down it every morning for twenty years in omnibuses on their way to the city; but do they know anything of the night aspect of that most mysterious of London thoroughfares? It is better, perhaps, that they should not.
Minute by minute they grow scarcer, and by ten minutes to eleven there are no serious groups in the Strand. They are all gone home to supper—hot ones, very probably, for the serious world is not at all unaddicted to good living—and sober. I, too, have liberty to go and sup, if I so choose; but not, alas! to bed. Still have I work to do, and for some hours.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY.
It is Eleven o’Clock post meridian, and I am once more thrown, with my clock on my hands, on the great world of London. The insatiable, restless metropolis is as busy in the night as in the day season; there is no respite, no cessation, in its feverish activity. One set or class of mortals may, quite worn and worried out, cast themselves on beds more or less hard, and sleep; but, forthwith, another section of the population arise like giants refreshed—the last hour of the night to some is the commencement, the opening day, to others; and an innumerable army of conscripts are ready to relieve one another in mounting the guard of London Life.
Eleven o’clock, and thousands are yet in the streets, tens of thousands still in the pursuit of the avocations by which they earn their daily (or nightly) bread, hundreds of thousands awake, busy, and stirring. The children of the aristocracy and some sections of the middle classes are gone to bed—save those who have been so good that their fond parents have taken them to the play, which entertainment they are now enjoying, with delightful prospects superadded of “sitting up” to supper, perchance of oysters, afterwards. But the children of the poor do not dream of bed. They are toddling in and out of chandlers’ shops in quest of ounces of ham and fragments of Dutch cheese for father’s supper; they are carrying the basket of linen—mother takes in washing—to the residences of clients; they are eliminating the most savoury-looking bits of plaice or flounders from the oleaginous pile in the fried-fish shop; they are fetching the beer and the “clean pipe” from the public-house; nay—not unfrequently, alas! assisted by a lean baby in arms—they are fetching father himself home from the too-seductive establishment of the licensed victualler. Eleven o’clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes; then, by the steady and industrious mechanic, the final calumet is smoked, the borrowed newspaper read, the topics of the day, the prospects of the coming week, discussed with the cheery and hard-working helpmate who sits by the side of her horny-handed lord, fills his pipe, pours out his beer, and darns the little children’s hose.