“Why don’t we live here, gran’da?” asked the child. The old man gave no other answer than a weak laugh.
“Why don’t I have a house like that?” continued the child, pointing to a bright doll’s-house displayed upon a stall, and trying to drag her guardian towards it.
The old man still only laughed feebly, as he shuffled past the attraction, and before the thought had struck me that I might have purchased a cheap pleasure by giving this house to the child, they were both lost in the pushing, laughing crowd.
This incident naturally set me thinking about toys, and their effect in increasing the amount of human happiness. I asked myself if I, ——, a respectable, middle-aged man of moderate means, was free from the influence of these powerful trifles. I was compelled, in all the cheap honesty of self-examination, to answer “No.” I felt, upon reflection, that I was even weaker than the poor child I had just seen. The chief toy that I was seeking for was an ideal house that I had never been able to find. I was led away by a vague sentiment about the poetry of neighbourhoods—a secret consuming passion for red-brick—a something that could hardly be weighed or spanned; the echo of an old song; the mists of a picture; the shadow of a dream. She was led away by no such unsubstantial phantoms. Her eyes had suddenly rested, for a few moments, upon her childish paradise, and a few shillings would have made her happy. I, on the contrary, had exhausted years in searching for my paradise, but without a prospect of success.
The fact is, I have got an unfortunate habit of looking back. I am fond of the past, though only in a dreamy, unsystematic way. My history is a little out of order, and I am no authority upon dates; but I like to hover about places. I cannot tell the day, the hour, or even the year in which the battle of Sedgemoor occurred; but I have gloated over the old roadside mill from which the Duke of Monmouth watched his losing contest, and the old houses at Bridgewater, whose roofs were then probably crowded with women and children. I have even been through the straggling village of Weston Zoyland, and into the sanded tavern where the late Lord Macaulay resided for weeks while he wrote this portion of his history. I have heard the landlord’s proud account of his distinguished guest, and how “he worrited about the neighbourhood.” This interesting fact, so I am informed, is duly recorded, upon my authority, in the latest edition of Men of the Time. My only objection to the late Lord Macaulay is, that he was one of these men of the time—of my own time. If Gibbon had been the careful historian of Sedgemoor, the village pothouse would have had a finer old crusted flavour, to my taste. The sentiment that governs me scarcely blooms under a hundred years, neither more nor less. I cannot learn to love the Elizabethan times—they are too remote. I have no more real sympathy with fifteen hundred and fifty, than with eighteen hundred and fifty. I can tolerate the seventeenth century; but the eighteenth always “stirs my heart, like a trumpet.”
Notwithstanding all this, I am not an obstructive man; I am not a “fogey.” I take the good the gods provide me. I have no prejudices against gas; though I wish it could be supplied without so much parochial quarrelling. It may generate poison, as certain chemists assert; but it certainly generates too many pamphlets and public meetings. I use the electric telegraph; I travel by the railway; and I am thankful to their inventors and originators. The moment, however, I leave the railway, I plunge rapidly into the past. I never linger, for a moment, at the bright, new, damp, lofty railway hotel (I hate the name of hotel, although I know it springs from hostelry); nor amongst the mushroom houses that rally round the station. My course is always through the distant trees, beyond the dwarfish, crumbling church, whose broad low windows seem to have taken root amongst the flat, uneven tombstones, into the old town or village, into its very heart—its market-place—and up to the brown old door of its oldest inn. I know everything that can be said against such places. They are very yellow; they have too strong a flavour of stale tobacco-smoke; their roofs are low, and their floors have a leaning either to one side or the other. Their passages are dark, and often built on various levels; so that you may tumble down into your bed-chamber, or tumble up into your sitting-room, shaking every tooth in your head, or possibly biting your tongue. These may be serious drawbacks to some people, but they are not so serious to me, and I am able to find many compensating advantages. The last vestige of the real old able-bodied port lingers only in such nooks and corners, and is served out by matronly servants, like housekeepers in ancient families. I know one inn of the kind where the very “boots” looks positively venerable. He wears a velvet skull-cap that Cardinal Wolsey might have been proud of; he has saved ten thousand pounds in his humble servitude, and is a large landed proprietor in the county. Prosperity has not made him inattentive. No one will give your shoes such an enduring polish, or call you up for an early train with such unerring punctuality.
With these sentiments, fancies, and prejudices in favour of the past, joined to a fastidious, quaintly luxurious taste, and limited funds, it is hardly to be wondered at that I have searched long and vainly for my ideal dwelling. I might, perhaps, have found it readily enough in the country, but my habits only allowed me to seek it in town. I am a London man—London born and London bred—a genuine cockney, I hope, of the school of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. I cannot tear myself away from old taverns, old courts and alleys, old suburbs (now standing in the very centre of the town), old print-shops, old mansions, old archways, and old churches. I must hear the London chimes at midnight, or life would not be worth a jot. I hear them, as they were heard a century and more ago, for they are the last things to change; but forty or fifty years have played sad havoc with land, and brick, and stone. Fire has done something; metropolitan improvements have done more. Not only do I mourn over what is lost, but what is gained. The town grows newer every day that it grows older. I know it must be so; I know it ought to be so; I know it is a sign of increased prosperity and strength. I see this with one half of my mind, while I abhor it with the other. I cannot love New Oxford Street, while St. Giles’s Church and old Holborn still remain. I have no affection for Bayswater and Notting-hill, but a tender remembrance of Tyburn Gate. I feel no sensation of delight when I hear the name of St. John’s Wood or the Regent’s Park; and Camden Town is a thing of yesterday that I treat with utter contempt. If I allow my footsteps to wander along Piccadilly and through Knightsbridge, they turn down, on one side, into Chelsea, or up, on the other side, into Kensington, leaving Brompton unvisited in the middle. I am never tired of sitting under the trees in Cheyne Walk; of walking round the red bricks and trim gravel pathways of Chelsea Hospital; of peeping through the railings at Gough House, or watching the old Physic Garden from a boat on the river. I am never weary of roaming hand-in-hand with an amiable, gossiping companion, like Leigh Hunt, listening to stories at every doorstep in the old town, and repeopling faded, half-deserted streets with the great and little celebrities of the past. I never consider a day ill spent that has ended in plucking daisies upon Kew Green, or in wasting an hour or two in the cathedral stillness of Charter-House Square. I am fond of tracing resemblances, perhaps imaginary, between Mark Lane and Old Highgate, and of visiting old merchants’ decayed mansions far away in tarry Poplar. I could add a chapter to Leigh Hunt’s pleasant essay upon City trees,[14] and tell of many fountains and flower-gardens that stand under the windows of dusky counting-houses.
Humanizing as such harmless wandering ought to be, it seems only to make me break a commandment. I am sorely afraid that I covet my neighbour’s house. When I find the nearest approach to my ideal—my day-dream—my toy dwelling—it is always in the occupation of steady, unshifting people. Such habitations, in or near London, seem to descend as heirlooms from generation to generation. They are never to be let; they are seldom offered for sale; and the house agent—the showman of “eligible villas”—is not familiar with them. I will describe the rarity.
It must be built of red brick, not earlier than 1650, not later than 1750, picked out at the edges with slabs of yellow stone. It must not be too lofty, and must be equally balanced on each side of its doorway. It must stand detached, walled in on about an acre of ground, well surrounded by large old trees. Its roof must be sloping, and if crowned with a bell-turret, so much the better. Its outer entrance must be a lofty gate of flowered ironwork, supported on each side by purple-red brick columns, each one surmounted by a globe of stone. Looking through the tracery of this iron gate, you must see a few broad white steps leading up to the entrance-hall. The doorway of this hall must be dark and massive, the lower half wood and the upper half window-framed glass. Over the top must be a projecting hood-porch filled with nests of wood-carving, representing fruit, flowers, and figures, brown with age. Looking through the glass of the hall-door, you must see more carving like this along the lofty walls; and a broad staircase with banisters, dark as ebony, leading up to a long narrow window, shaded by the rich wings of a spreading cedar-tree. The rooms of this mansion will necessarily be in keeping with its external features, presenting many unexpected, irregular closets and corners, with, perhaps, a mysterious double staircase leading down to the cellars, to which a romantic, unauthenticated story is attached. Such houses are none the worse for being filled with legends; for having one apartment, at least, with a reputed murder-stain upon its floor; and for being generally alluded to as Queen Elizabeth’s palaces, although probably not built for nearly a century after that strong-minded monarch’s death. The window-shutters are none the worse for being studded with alarm-bells, as thick as grapes upon a fruitful vine; as an additional comfort is derived from the security of the present, when we are made to reflect upon the dangers of the past. A few rooks will give an additional charm to the place; and it will be pleasant, when a few crumbs are thrown upon the gravel, to see a fluttering cloud of sparrows dropping down from the sheltering eaves.
With regard to the neighbourhood in which such a house should stand, it must be essentially ripe. Better that it should be a little faded; a little deserted; a little unpopular, and very unfashionable; than so dreadfully raw and new. It should have a flavour of old literature, old politics, and old art. If it is just a little obstructive and High Tory—inclined to stand upon the ancient ways—no sensible man of progress should blame it, but smile blandly and pass on. It will, at least, possess the merit, in his eyes, of being self-supporting; asking for, or obtaining no government aid. While Boards of Works are freely supplied with funds to construct the new, there is no board but unorganized sentiment to maintain the old.