Indeed, the Zoo is a tragic hint of the period we have just left behind. It was founded in 1826, its object being, of course, ‘to further the study of animal life,’ but it did not very long retain that character. The only character it retained was a sort of brutal insensibility, a capacity for not understanding what it means to animals, accustomed to run forty miles a day, or to fly out of sight, to find themselves boxed up in small cages. The treatment of animals in the Victorian period was very like the treatment of children; people meant well by their children, which did not prevent their constraining them to immobility on Sundays, forcing them into careers they disliked, or into marriages with people they detested. They were a sentimental and brutal generation, mainly because they were stupid. So the Zoo, which is now a vulgar gapery, remains as one of the ugly blots inherited by our people; I hope to live long enough to see Parliament pass an act for its suppression. It seems to me indecent that people who do not know the difference between a leopard and a yak should, any afternoon, for sixpence or a shilling, or on Sundays if they are the friends or the servants of a Fellow, line up in hundreds outside cages anything between six feet and thirty feet long, to see wretched animals pace up and down, up and down eternally, or tragic birds hop from an upper stick to a lower stick and then back again, not one of them with the space for a full spring or a flight, sentenced to penal servitude for life, a sentence which we inflict on no man except for murder. I agree with Mr Galsworthy that the Zoo is one of the saddest and most disgusting sights in the world. At least, I know that I never leave the Zoo, which I seldom visit, because it hurts me, without feeling a partner in a national crime. You can defend vivisection by saying that it has valuable medical results. I know nothing about that, but you cannot defend the Zoo by saying that you give some snivelling boy an opportunity to know what the mandril looks like. What is the use (I put it on the lowest ground, that of use) of knowing what a mandril looks like? And if it is of any use, is that use not counterbalanced by the poison poured into that boy, which is that he shall consent to the life-long imprisonment of a helpless creature?
This Zoo question was discussed in the Weekly Dispatch some years ago; I think that one of the points, in defence, was that most of the animals were born in the Zoo, and, knowing not liberty, could not be unhappy. That may be, even if nothing in you answers when you look into the eyes of the animals in those empty cages where there is nothing to do, when all their nature, thousands of generations of it, is calling in their blood to hunt and to fly. Is not the test this: would you be satisfied if at birth your son were placed in a room eight feet by four, and told to grow up in it? Do you really believe that he would be content when he reached manhood? even if he had never known freedom. The truth is represented by opinions such as that of the secretary of the Zoo, Doctor Chalmers Mitchell, who summed up Mr Galsworthy’s attack on the Zoo by saying: ‘Mr Galsworthy knows nothing about the subject. His attack is rubbish, pure rubbish.’ It may be that, on second thoughts, Doctor Chalmers Mitchell might find one or two more arguments to put up against Mr Galsworthy, but this one, while not lacking in force, somehow fails to convince. One is more impressed by the argument of Mr J. D. Hamlyn, an animal trainer, who said: ‘After the war, the business of importing animals will go on exactly as it did before. In the first place, too much capital is at stake, too much money has been expended to give up the trade altogether.’ The only comment I have to make on this is that this argument was continually used, first in the West Indies, and later in the southern states of America, when it was suggested that we should do away with slavery.
Yes, the Zoo carries on to-day the old tradition of Victorian brutality. But enough of the Zoo, and of its visitors, so like the yokels at a fair, that guffaw with their heads through horse collars. I would rather think that in a few of those Victorian places, sweet old ladies in mauve silk and lace serve tea in Rockingham cups, which they dust themselves for fear of Sarah Jane. One such place is Crescent Grove. That is the sort of place one would like to live in, when one feels rather older. It is near Clapham Common, and, of course, it is a blind alley, so that no rude traffic may pass up and down when the milkman has finished his melodious round. The houses are clean, stuccoed, comfortable. The knockers are cleaned every day. The glass is cleaned often, the curtains are changed, and I am sure that when they go up, a whiff of lavender spreads. Crescent Grove is, perhaps, a little too clean; in those rooms where everything has its place, just as in the past every one had his place, there must be so much order and regularity of life that, as Mirbeau said: ‘On doit rudement s’embêter là-dedans.’ Still, at the very end of Crescent Grove, there is one house that should be preserved as a monument of its period. Of course, it is double-fronted; in front are planted evergreens, and there is a drive. By the side runs a large garden beyond a wall; on the other side of the wall one hears children at play. That is the house to which father came back round about 1860, with his top hat and his mutton-chop whiskers. If this description does not convince you, let me give you the clinching fact: it is a private road. Yet Crescent Grove stands very near to the suburbs. Not far are Streatham, Tooting, the new streets of Clapham and Brixton. Imbedded among the new streets are old houses with columns, plaster fronts, stucco mouldings, squares surrounding a single column that bears a moulting golden eagle, but the suburbs are overwhelming them. These are not the inner suburbs, such as Brixton, where the feeling is, on the whole, one of poverty and dirt. Those inner suburbs have a certain vigour of coarse life; thus, the Brixton Road is a place of immense activity, notably round the great, open-air ironmonger, Williamson’s Bonanza; there are shops and shops, nearly all of the multiple type, Salmon and Gluckstein, Maypole Dairies, Home and Colonials, the shops that Private Ortheris must have raved of in his Indian delirium. Likewise, in Kilburn, where the Kilburn Bon Marché and B. B. Evans struggle in zealous commercialism. Those inner suburbs are hardly suburbs now, for the trams run through them and bleed them of their population; tubes tap them; everywhere the motor-buses stop. The true suburbs lie farther out. You have to go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marché before you can find such a place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete. Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. It is a new order, for all those houses are small, manageable, clean, modern, in every way satisfactory, except that they are all alike, made for people who may not be all alike, but tend so to become. For if one buys one’s food, one’s clothes, one’s furniture at the same big, local store, and if one takes one’s literature from the same bookstall, one attains to a sort of nationality. But it is not the nationality of the village, where local effort can develop into art, because it develops slowly and creeps back upon itself. In the suburbs everything is supplied on the model of central London, and is turned out in hundreds of thousands by machines. Perhaps the houses are made by machines. Maybe, one day the people will be made by machines. Near those streets, all alike, generally survives an older quarter of poor streets where live the ‘little women,’ the sweep, the turncock, the dependents of the semi-poor; there, also, small shopkeepers live by undercutting the big stores. They do this by selling the vegetables that are too stale for the stores, by washing the linen which cannot be sent to the steam laundry because it would fall to pieces, and especially by lowering their own standard of living to the lowest possible level. They are the last ramparts of suburban individualism, and they will not last long. As time goes on, the bigger villa streets, many of whose houses have pretensions, exemplified by their architecture of concrete and tile, by their barbarous roofs which make evil, dusty corners in the rooms, by the select flowers in their front gardens, will turn away from those little shops and, more and more, deal with Whiteley’s and Harrod’s.
Thus, when one passes through London, from old Victorian street to inner suburb, then to outer suburb, until one comes to the spreading country of Tooting Bec Common, when one has seen the homes of the rich, their marble solemnity, when one has seen those of the poor in the grimy suburbs that cluster, and emerges at last into those clean suburban streets, where in almost every window an aspidistra wilts in its pot, one may grow a little doubtful of the social revolution. We educate the poor, and sometimes we give them their chance: the next step is the aspidistra. The aspidistra goes to the grammar school; clever aspidistra wins a scholarship and goes to Oxford. Then a house is taken, let us say, in Barkston Gardens; instead of the aspidistra it is marguerites in the window boxes. The marguerite goes to Oxford as a matter of course, and may give place to a lily in a green art-pot. By that time it understands nothing. If it retains its money, the marguerite goes on having marguerites potted in the window-boxes by the nurseryman; if it loses its money, it goes back to the aspidistra. Upon this gloomy botanical note I close this chapter.
IX
CAFÉ ROYAL
CHAPTER IX
CAFÉ ROYAL
Why did they call it Café Royal? It has nothing of the opulent white and gold quality which naturally would go with such a name, nothing expensive or elaborate. Here and there, in the only room I know, namely, the café itself, is an escutcheon impressed with the letter N. It makes one think of Napoleon, and the name Café Royal clashes still more. But, after all, that matters very little, for who cares what the Café Royal was? or under whose auspices it was founded. I suppose that for antiquity it treads upon the heels of Verrey’s; it has a flavour of 1870 rather than 1860; what matters much more is that the Café Royal always savours of the day, that it concentrates within itself more of the feeling of the day, as exemplified by current art, than any other spot in this country. Thus, when calling this chapter Café Royal, I do not mean to devote it to an anecdotic study of the famous tavern, but rather to those things which it represents and contains, to some slight impression of the arts as they develop, flourish, and wilt in this city. The Café itself should never have been called Royal, for an eternal opposition exists between the pomp of such a name and the rebellious young arts; in no essential do they oppose the royal suggestion, but they are remote therefrom, live in a world where the values are different, not related to class or fortune, artificial, perhaps, but created in virtue of a private political economy. Thus, the Café Royal should have been called something dashing and picturesque, such as ‘Café des Mille Colonnes,’ or ‘Café de la Pomme Vermeille.’ How well it would have looked, sparsely decorated with rubicund apples painted by Cézanne! As it is, the Café Royal is a very large room in Regent Street. Its ceiling, a mass of gold scrollings that embrace frescoes darkened by smoke and time into the colour of old masters, is sustained by many columns with a golden base and a green stem. Round that stem intertwine golden leaves from which hang golden grapes. The effect of the Café is one of rather excessive gilding: the walls are crowded with gilt figures and baskets of flowers that leave space only for many mirrors; as if the wall had been hidden away at the behest of some obscure modesty. Yet the effect is pleasant, for this gold is old and tarnished. It has nothing blatant, and the whole effect is one of comfortable decency, as if this excessive room had been built by a parvenu, but had been lived in so long by his successors as to lose the parvenu spirit. The furnishing, plain tables with marble tops, long seats with red plush backs, also resolve themselves into good-humoured comfort, while, at the end, a prince of bars with something like ten score bottles, each one filled with something individual, produces an impression of eclectic welcome.
The Café Royal may have been built to astound, but nowadays it is just the comfortable background of people who like to drink a little, to pay moderately, and to talk enormously. The conversations at the Café Royal are not, probably, such as would make a good book of memoirs, but its mixed public has, at one time or another, numbered everybody who did something (whatever that may mean), so that many good things and many spiteful ones are spoken every day under its golden roof. Before the war, the violent young men and the much more violent young women seemed to meet there every night, with an almost sacramental air, to discuss, that is to scarify, reputations. That was good, for Renan was right when he said that if a young man, aged twenty, had not always ready a mouthful of insults for his predecessors, he would pronounce no judgments fit to be heard when he attained the age of forty.
