Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, No. 33, November 1877

by Various

I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore, taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this dishonorable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of it. I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it—that I had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along the empty vista of the Drive in Hyde Park, have beheld, for almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis—either on the first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with the members of Parliament, or on the fifteenth when the grouse-shooting began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the departure of everything genteel, and the four millions of persons who remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having remained in town, I have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and steal abroad only under cover of the darkness—a line of conduct imposed by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed always had a theory that few things could be more pleasant than during the hot weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to one's self. If it were necessary, I could point with some exultation to the fact that I have never come so near as on the present occasion to an opportunity of testing my theory; and I must add that I have now tested it under circumstances which have deprived the experiment of half of its value.

To make it perfect, the summer should be very hot and the house in which you live very cool. You should keep it cool by keeping it dark—just dark enough not to prevent you from reading a charming old book as you lie on the sofa in one of the lighter rooms. Your costume as you lie on the sofa and wander about from chamber to chamber should be of the most imponderable; in fact, you should have on almost no clothes at all. To increase the comfort of your undressedness you must have no fellow-inmates but the servants, who remain below stairs and adapt themselves to the temperature as best they can. They are free, of course, to sit in the cellar. And then you must have several other resources—resources which, if you are an American, you may be pardoned for believing to be most easily secured in the case of your trying your experiment in your native land. The carpets must all have been taken up and the floors covered with straw matting in pale, tender colors. There must be an everlasting gush of the coldest water into a bath big enough for you, if the fancy takes you, to drown yourself in. You must have plenty of peaches and pears, of grapes and melons. You must commit unseen excesses in the consumption of ice-cream. You must sit in the evening on a balcony and, looking up and down the empty street, see here and there in other balconies the gleam of a white robe in the darkness.

These harmless conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best (or the worst) the highest flights of the thermometer in the British Islands are not particularly startling. People live with closed windows in August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a more obvious ornament of the market at mid-summer than at Christmas. This matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost ashamed of alluding—the fact that the beauty and luxury of the country—that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as "English comfort"—is a distinctly limited and restricted, an essentially private, affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English "fruit" as a rather audacious plaisanterie, though I could see very well what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone of contemptuous generalization by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen. They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and after a long delay, reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only "fruit" that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote seemed disposed to generalize: this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that in Devonshire, in Warwickshire, in Norfolk, in Dorset and in twenty other English counties whose names they had certainly heard, the most beautiful peaches and melons might be seen growing in considerable numbers in the most admirably organized hot-houses in the depths of the most extensive and picturesque properties. My auditors tossed their heads, of course, at the counties, the peaches and melons, the admirable hot-houses and the extensive properties; and indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to Buckingham Palace these reflections were but scantily consoling. But these are the things they have had in mind, the reasonable English people whom in other countries I have heard upholding the superiority of English fruit. I have heard them argue the case most resolutely against Frenchmen and Americans, but, in reality, the contending parties were talking about two very different things. One side was talking about fruit as a luxury, and the other about fruit as a necessity. The Englishman was thinking of the soft-colored, smooth-skinned peaches that he had been invited down into Dorsetshire to eat at eight o'clock in the evening at a brilliantly-lighted table: the American and the Frenchman were thinking of these articles as they importuned you from heaped-up fruit stalls in your daily walk. The difference brings me back to what I referred to as the "private" character of this particular branch of English comfort. A stranger may spend a summer in London and never be reminded of the existence of pears and grapes. Those establishments known in America as fruit-stalls are conspicuous by their absence, and their office is in no appreciable degree supplied by the inns, the restaurants or the clubs. I believe there are peaches of great rotundity to be obtained at Covent Garden market at half a crown apiece, but Covent Garden is hardly on the line of one's daily strolls. The irritated stranger, therefore, sitting down to gooseberries at a "palace" hotel, may be pardoned for unflattering generalizations. He gradually learns, if he remains in England, that the relation of hotels and restaurants to the life of the country is here essentially different from what it is elsewhere. It may be said, generally, that such places, at their best, represent the maximum comfort of the community. The traveller in England must teach himself that they represent the minimum, and he must learn the further lesson that "English comfort"—the comfort which, as I said just now, is known and venerated all over the world—means, strictly, the maximum comfort, the privilege, of a small minority, of the opulent and luxurious class. To make good inns and good restaurants there must be a comfortable bourgeoisie, for people of great fortune are able to do things in a way that makes them independent of a public fund of entertainment.

It is to this public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But one's liking for London—a stranger's liking at least—is at the best an anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly more difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest, entertainment and delight: what I mean is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusty, fierce and unbeautiful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at least with a kind of grudging satisfaction, and finds something warm and comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its heavy pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that every one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing. If it has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither the seat, the ice nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to your profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of these delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is idle—every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are too genteel, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own: they have those special resources which I mentioned a while since. They are always rich, and are naturally independent of communistic pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your café noir handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and encamp for the evening under a row of colored lamps upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess live on a single floor up several pairs of stairs. They are, however, I think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how serious a danger it appears. It is not of the fear of contact with the great herd of one's unknown fellow-citizens that I speak: it is of the possibility of meeting individuals with whom in the business of life one has had some sort of formal relations—one's grocer, one's bootmaker, one's apothecary, even one's solicitor. To an American, a Frenchman, an Italian, there is of necessity nothing alarming in such an incident: there is at the worst a way of taking it easily. But as it looms up before an Englishman it has the power of making him extremely uncomfortable; and, combined with a corresponding anxiety on the part of the inferior himself, this prospective discomfort operates as a chronically deterrent force. These, however, are mysteries which I should not have allowed myself to deal with so parenthetically. I have ventured to do so because there is a very familiar illustration of the phenomenon I speak of. It may be found in the usual demeanor of English servants. If you "meet" an English servant—that is, if you encounter him at a moment when he is not literally executing an order for you—if you are left in a room with him, if you pass him in the hall, if you are confronted with him in the portico, you perceive that his effort is immediately to spare you a possibly offensive realization of his presence. He has been taught that at such times he is uncomfortable to you—that you don't, mentally as it were, know what to do with him. His place in the universe is to answer your bell, and from your point of view he should only exist by intermission. He has been trained to adapt himself to this point of view, and he does so with remarkable success. He not only rigidly abstains from bidding you good-morning, but he abstains equally from responding to the good-morning which in a moment of culpable inconsistency you may have offered him. A couple of months since, paying a visit to a friend in the country, I drove to the door with a gentleman whom I had met at the station, and who was engaged in the same pleasant errand as myself. The butler who admitted us stood motionless and inarticulate as we crossed the threshold, with his eyes, in the manner of butlers, fixed upon our boots. He was a very admirable servant, and having, in the course of twenty-four hours, taken the measure of this fact, I on the following day called my companion's attention to it. My companion was an Englishman, but he was young and perhaps foolishly sentimental. "Oh yes, he's an excellent servant," he said, "but he might give one a faint sign of recognition when one arrives."—"You had seen him, then," I asked, "before?"—"I have stayed in the house half a dozen times, and half a dozen times on departing I have given him the sidelong tip; yet whenever I arrive he gives me a stony stare, as if I were a perfect stranger." But the stony stare, for butlers, is not simply the English custom: I think it may be said that it is the English ideal.

I have wandered very far from the potential little tables for ices in—where shall I say?—in Oxford street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should hover about them. I am afraid they would not be very pleasant. In such matters everything hangs together, and I am afraid that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonize with the scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle,—these, I confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair. At this time, however, one's social studies must, at the least, be studies of low life, for wherever you may go for a stroll or to spend your summer afternoon the unfashionable side of things is uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of weary British tramps. You see among them some magnificent specimens of weariness. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their purple necks and car-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats, make them look like stage villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of penal servitude—that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some one with those huge square heels that are turned up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half England, and of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic attractiveness. These six feet of brown grass are their present sufficiency, but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next, and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.

The month of August is so unfashionable in London that going a few days since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but half a dinner. The hotel (where you are supposed to be able to obtain one of the best dinners in England) had put out its stoves and locked up its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban dining-places. I don't know how it may be at this time with Richmond, but the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to the element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All genteel people leave London after the first week in August, ergo those who remain behind are not genteel, and cannot therefore rise to the conception of a "fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready? I had other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I hasten to declare that during the genteel period the dinner at Greenwich is the best of all dinners. It begins with fish and it continues with fish: what it ends with—except songs and speeches and affectionate partings—I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed; for I do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly indiscreet I should risk an allusion to the particular banquet which was the occasion of my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich cuisine. I should say that it is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever and distinguished men before the large windows that look out upon the broad brown Thames. The ships swim by as if they were part of the entertainment and put down in the bill: the afternoon light fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. We partake of any number of those sauces with which, according to the French adage, one could dine upon one's grandmother. To speak of the particular merits of my companions would indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a high appreciation of the manly frankness and robustness of English conviviality. The stranger—the American at least—who finds himself in the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in the magnificent temperament of the race. This seems to him one of the finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention. It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old society—a society in which every one that a newcomer meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire—whose songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the most finished art.

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a loss as to how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the sooty fronts: in these rigidly-unfeatured edifices it is impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect their hideousness. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges: above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer is dingy and begrimed: it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an harmonious dinginess; and the whole picture, glazed over with the glutinous London mist, becomes a masterpiece of bituminous-looking color. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and in its own sombre fashion it is extremely picturesque. Like so many of the aspects of English civilization that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of being serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses, the dreary people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical picturesqueness hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British empire.

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich Observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child in woodcuts in school geographies, and in the corners of large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house standing among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an ineffable joy to run straight down that bank. Close at hand was usually something printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography—the countries of fantastic outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the spot from which longitude is calculated; there was the plain little façade with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old to find that I did not forthwith proceed to taste of this delight. There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent dwarfish chestnut trees, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the waterside, and the great pompous buildings of the old hospital, which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into a kind of naval academy.

Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was—a great green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing cricket. I always like an English common: it may be curtailed and cockneyfied, as this one was—which had lamp-posts stuck about on its turf and a fresh-painted banister all around—but it is sure to be one of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich, and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a nursery of British valor. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon another common, where local color was still more intense. The scene was very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and the evening being beautiful it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk. There were half a dozen cricket-matches: the soldiers were playing against the lads in corduroys. At one end of this peaceful campus martius, which stretches over a hilltop, rises an interminable façade—one of the fronts of the artillery barracks. It has a very honorable air, and more windows and doors, I imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept places of ingress to officers' quarters. Everything that looks out upon it is military—the distinguished college (where the French prince imperial lately studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp—a collection of the tidiest plank huts—on the other; a hospital, on a well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in the town below there are a great many more military matters—barracks on an immense scale; a dock-yard that presents an interminable dead wall to the street; an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be "five miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame the most craven spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way to the railway-station at the bottom of the hill; but before departing I had spent half an hour in strolling about the common in vague consciousness of certain emotions that are called into play (I speak but for myself) by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of this great country. The glimpse may be of the slightest: it stirs a peculiar sentiment. I know not what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an admiration for the greatness of England. The greatness of England: that is a very pregnant phrase, but I am not using it analytically. I use it only as it sounds in the imagination of any American who really enjoys the enjoyable parts of this head-spring of his patriotism. I mean the great part that England has played in history, the great space she has occupied, her tremendous might, her far-stretching sway. That these clumsily-general ideas should be suggested by the sight of some infinitesimal fraction of the English administrative system may seem to indicate a too hysterical cast of fancy; but if so, I must plead guilty to the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or less set one thinking of the glory of this little island, which has manufactured the means of so vast a dominion? This is more than I can say; and all I shall attempt to say is, that in the difficult days that are now elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds his meditations singularly quickened. It is the picturesque element in English history that he has chiefly cared for, and he finds himself wondering whether the picturesque epoch is completely closed. It is a moment when all the nations of Europe seem to be doing something, and he waits to see what England, who has done so much, will do. He has been meeting of late a good many of his country-people—Americans who live on the Continent and pretend to speak with assurance of continental ways of feeling. These people have been passing through London, and many of them are in that irritated condition of mind which appears to be the portion of the American sojourner in the British metropolis when he is not given up to the delights of the historic sentiment. They have affirmed with emphasis that the continental nations have ceased to care a straw for what England thinks; that her traditional prestige is completely extinct; that General Ignatieff twisted Lord Salisbury round his finger; and that the affairs of Europe will be settled quite independently of the power whose capital is on the Thames. England will do nothing, will risk nothing: there is no cause bad enough for her not to find a selfish interest in it—there is no cause good enough for her to fight about it. Poor old England is exploded: it is about time she should haul in her nets. To all this the sympathetic stranger replies that, in the first place, he does not believe a word of it; and, in the second place, he does not care a fig for it—care, that is, what the continental nations think. If the greatness of England were really waning, it would be to him as a personal grief; and as he strolls about the breezy common at Woolwich, with all those mementoes of British dominion around him, he is quite too softly exhilarated to admit discomposure.