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HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

LONDON FILMS

By W. D. HOWELLS

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1905

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Copyright, 1905, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published October, 1905.

CONTENTS

COAPTER ^"^ "

I. Meteorological Emotions 1

II. Civic and Social Comparisons, mostly Odious 10

III. Shows and Side-Shows of State 22

IV. The Dun Year's Brilliant Flower .... 35
V. The Sights and Sojqnds of the Streets . . 47

VI. Some Misgivings as to the American Invasion 56

VII. In the Gallery of the Commons 68

VIII. The Means of Sojourn 74

IX. Certain Traits of the London Springtime . 82
X. Some Voluntary and Involuntary Sight-
seeing 88

XI. Glimpses of the Lowly and the Lowlier . 100

XII. Twice-Seen Sights and Half-Fancied Facts 118

XIII. An Afternoon at Hampton Court .... 137

XIV. A Sunday Morning in the Country. . . 150
XV. Fishing for Whitebait 159

XVI. Henley Day 165

XVII. American Origins— Mostly Northern ... 178

XVIII. American Origins— Mostly Southern ... 203

XIX. Aspects and Intimations 222

XX. Parting Guests 232

ILLUSTRATIONS

HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT Frontispiece

FLEET STREET AND ST, DUNSTAN's CHURCH Facing p. 12

THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE . " 18

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK " 24

ROTTEN ROW " 38

A BLOCK IN THE STRAND " 48 -'

ST, Paul's cathedral " 80 -^

WESTMINSTER ABBEY " 86 '

the horse guards, WHITEHALL " 98 '

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER " 160"

A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE THAMES AT HENLEY .... " 168

THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY " 174

THE TOWER OF LONDON " 184

ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET " 186

LONDON BRIDGE " 188

THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS " 190-

THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB's TIME . . " 192

CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES " 194 -

BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE) " 196

staple inn, holborn " 214

Clifford's inn hall " 216

ancient church of st. martins-in-the-fields ... " 218 '

hyde park in october " 222

thames embankment " 226

LONDON FILMS

LONDON FILMS

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

WHOEVER carries a mental kodak with him (as
I suspect I was in the habit of doing long before
I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of the
different exposures. This can be determined only by
the process of developing, which requires a dark room
and other apparatus not always at hand; and so much
depends upon the process that it might be well if it
could always be left to some one who makes a specialty
of it, as in the case of the real amateur photographer.
Then one's faulty impressions might be so treated as to
yield a pictorial result of interest, or frankly thrown
away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye.
Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust
the result, whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness
of the reader, who will surely, if he is the right sort of
reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to soften
the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a subordi-
nation giving due relief to the best meaning of the print.
This is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any
one shall say that my little pictures are superficial, I
shall not be able to gainsay him. I can only answer

1

LONDON FILMS

that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but
at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of
those who would prefer some such result as the em-
ployment of the Roentgen rays would have given, if
applied to certain aspects of the London world.

Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a
life-long dweller. To the sojoiu-ner scarcely more will
vouchsafe itself than to the passing stranger, and it is
chiefly to home-keeping folk who have never broken
their ignorance of London that one can venture to
speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving
which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns
of differing lengths and dates. One could have used
the authority of a profound observer after the first few
days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks
stretching to months in 1882 and 1883, clouded rather
than cleared the air through which one earliest saw
one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and
1897, with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have
but served to confirm one in the diffident inconclusion
on all unportant points to which I hope the pages fol-
low^ing will bear witness.

^Vhat appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid
a shimmer of self-question, is that any one coming to
London in the beginning of April, after devious delays
in the South and West of England, is destined to have
printed upon his mental films a succession of meteoro-
logical changes quite past computation. Yet if one
were as willing to be honest as one is willing to be
graphic, one would allow that probably the weather
on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving
with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference
is that at home, having one's proper business, one
leaves the weather to look after its own affairs in its

2

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness
of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes cen-
sorious. If I were to be a little honester still, I should
confess that I do not know of any place where the month
of April can be meaner, more 'poison, upon occasion,
than in New York. Of course it has its moments of
relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase
which is the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when
the heart melts to it in a grateful tenderness for the wide,
high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the joy of the
flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you
can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a
sudden glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of
pure joy, filling the soul to overflowing, wdiich the more
scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England is in-
capable of at least so instantly unparting. Our weather
is of public largeness and universal apphcation, and
is perhaps rather for the greatest good of the greatest
number; admirable for the seed-time and harvest, and
for the growing crops in the seasons between. The
English weather is of a more private quality, and ap-
portioned to the personal preference, or the personal
endurance. It is as if it were influenced by the same
genius which operates the whole of English hfe, and
allows each to identify himself as the object of specific
care, irrespective of the interests of the mass. This
may be a little too fanciful, and I do not insist that it
is scientific or even sociological. Yet I think the reader
who rejects it might do worse than agree with me that
the first impression of a foreign country visited or re-
visited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the
season.

Nothing made me so much at home in England as
reading, one day, that there was a lower or a higher

LONDON FILMS

pressure in a part of Scotland, just as I might have
read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the
lakes. "Now," I said to myself, "we shall have some-
thing like real weather, the weather that is worth
telegraphing ahead, and is going to be decisively this
or that." But I could not see that the weather follow-
ing differed from the weather we had been having. It
was the same small, individual weather, offered as it
were in samples of warm, cold, damp and dry, but
mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day
often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found
that the sun was unobtrusively shining; then it rained,
and there was rather a bitter wind; but presently it was
sunny again, and you felt secure of the spring, for the
birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark, the
golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various
finches; and round and over all the rooks were calling
like voices in a dream. Full of this certainty of spring
you went in-doors, and found it winter.

If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very
well, and that is why the Enghsh, who have been
philosophizing their climate for a thousand and some
odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go
in-doors they take all the outer air they can with them,
instinctively realizing that they will be more comfort-
able w^ith it than in the atmosphere awaiting them. If
their houses could be built reversible, so as to be turned
inside out in some weathers, one would be very com-
fortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that
the English rain did not wet you, and he might have
argued that the English cold would not chill you if
only you staj^ed out-of-doors in it.

Why will not travellers be honest with foreign coim-
tries? Is it because they think they may some day

^ 4

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

come back? For my part, I am going to be heroic, and
say that the in-doors cold in England is constant suffer-
ing to the American born. It is not that there is no
sizzling or crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing regis-
ter; but that the grate in most of the houses that the
traveller sees, the public-houses namely, seems to have
shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Elxeter,
for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral,
one found a bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart
pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm. I
might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite
the same of the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I
pause before arriving at the grate of London, it is be-
cause daring must stop somewhere. I think it is
probable that the American, if he stayed long enough,
would heed the injunction to suffer and be strong from
the cold, as the Englishman has so largely done, but I
am not sure. At one point of my devious progress to
the capital I met an Englishman who had spent ten
years in Canada, and who constrained me to a mild
deprecation by the wrath with which he denounced the
in-doors cold he had found everywhere at home. He
said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years
behind in such matters; and I could not deny that,
even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the
hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back
behind one. To be warm all round in an English house
is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds
the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of
draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find
the window has been put down, but this is not merely to
let in some of the outside warmth; it is also to make a
current of air to the open door. Even if the window
has not been put down, it has always so much play in its

5

LONDON FILMS

frame, to allow for swelling from the damp, that in any-
thing like dry weather the cold whistles round it, and
you do not know which way to turn your mediaeval
back.

In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there
were radiators, but not hot ones, and in a dining-room
where they were hot the natives found them oppressive,
while the foreigners were warming their fingers on the
bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to
pretend that the suffering they experience has not ap-
parently resulted in the strength they see. Our con-
temporary ancestors are a splendid-looking race, in the
higher average, and if in the lower average they often
look pinched and stunted, why, we are not ourselves
giants without exception. The ancestral race does
often look stunted and poor; persons of small build and
stature abound; and nature is

"So careful of the single type"

of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the
matter of complexion, if we count that a proof of health,
we are quite out of it in comparison with the English,
and beside them must look hke a nation of invalids.
There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to
afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not
buy with us. I do not say the color does not look a
little overdone in cases, or that the violent explosion of
pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of small children,
does not make one pause in question whether paste or
putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to
be too critical. Putty and paste, apart from association,
are not pretty tints, and pinks and roses are; and the
English children look not only fresher but sturdier and

6

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do
not know; but I doubt if the English live longer than
we for living less comfortably. The lower classes seem
always to have colds; the middle classes, rheumatism;
and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears. Rheu-
matism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not
mind what one said) is universal in England, and all
ranks of society have the facilities for it in the in-doors
cold in which they otherwise often undeniably flourish.
At the end, it is a question of whether you would rather
be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the
first course and they choose the last.

If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the
experience of the careful observer that there is a summit
of healthful looks in England, which we do not touch
in America, whatever the large table-land or foot-hill
average we reach; and in like manner there is an ex-
ceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it,
rarely enough, in the London streets, which one never
encounters with us. I am not envying the one, or at
least not regretting the other. Distinction is the one
thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too
much; only, in America, we pay too much for too many
other things to take any great comfort in our want of
distinction. I own the truth without grief or shame,
while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I
enjoy other spectacles for which I cannot help letting
the Enghsh pay too much. I was not appreciably the
poorer myself , perhaps I was actually the richer, in
seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the aristocratic
region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an
elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other
on the pavement before me, and then went and came
their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was

LONDON FILMS

passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I
beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the
tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion,
with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well-
fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was
nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various black.
She looked not only authoritative; people often do that
with us; she looked authorized; she had been empowered
by the vested rights and interests to look so her whole
life; one could not be mistaken in her, any more than
in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the
high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, hand-
some houses where, in the cellary or sepulchral cold,
she would presently resume the rheumatic pangs of
which the comparative warmth of the outer air had
momentarily relieved her stately bulk.

But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of
the English clime, they have all turned themselves into
allures and delights. There have come three or four
days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and mellow a
warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with
such soft masses of white clouds, that one wonders what
there was ever to complain of. In the parks and in the
gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves have grown
perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can
smell it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds in-
sist, and in the air is that miraculous lift, as if nature,
having had this banquet of the year long simmering, had
suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with every
gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have
presently in the way of summer. From the delectable
vision rises a subtile haze, which veils the day just a
little from its own loveliness, and lies upon the sighing
and expectant city like the substance of a dream made

8

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this sub-
stance yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or
whisk by in your hansom, or rumble earthquakingly
aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a
part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful con-
sciousness. It is flattering, but you feel like warn-
ing him not to go in-doors, or he will lose you and
all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know
that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not
be April there till well into June.

II

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS

IT might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that
there is no such thing as positive fact, but only-
relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive perception
of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only
basis of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twen-
tieth look at London I have been careful to keep about
me a pocket vision of New York, so as to see what Lon-
don is like by making constantly sure what it is not Uke.
A pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same
purpose. That is a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty
obedient to a just municipal control, of a grandeur
studied and authorized in proportion and relation to the
design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly
realized on lines nobly imagined. But New York and
London may always be intelligibly compared because
they are both the effect of an indefinite succession of
anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and some-
times promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one
another. Each has been mainly built at the pleasure
of the private person, with the community now and
then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of
house and home to the common advantage. Nothing
but our racial illogicality has saved us from the effect
of our racial anarchy in the social structure as well as the
material structure, but if we could see London and

10

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

New York as lawless in the one way as in the other,
we should perhaps see how ugly they collectively are.
The sum of such involuntary reflection with me
has been the perception that London was and is and
shall be, and New York is and shall be, but has hardly
yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally,
as she is one-third less numerically, than London.^ In
her future she has no past, but only a present to retrieve;
though perhaps a present like hers is enough. She is
also one less architecturally than London; she is two-
thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if
I more closely examine my pocket vision, I am afraid
that I must hedge from this modest claim, for we have
as yet nothing to compare with at least a half of London
magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen
or eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her
actual age. As we go fast in all things, we may then
surpass her; but this is not certain, for in her more
deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time
the materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the
pocket vision, seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn
Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and some vast rocketing
hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for the con-
trast with those miles of imperial and municipal archi-
tecture which in London make you forget the leagues
of mean little houses, and remember the palaces, the
law-courts, the great private mansions, the dignified and
shapely flats, the large department stores, the immense
hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind.

One reason, I think, why London is so much more
striking is in the unbroken line which the irregularly
divided streets often present to the passer. Here is a
chance for architecture to extend, while with us it has
onlv a chance to tower, on the short up-town block
^ XI

LONDON FILMS

which is the extreme dimension of om^ proudest edifice,
pubUc or private. Another reason is in the London
atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects,
while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind
on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight
avenue which distracts you from the varied common-
place of the commercial structures on either hand is the
loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet
Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm
you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of
the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the
picturesque would choose, or may rather often have
without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous
smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky,
you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no
other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens
or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-
green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and
the meaner houses render the rifts between more im-
pressively chasmal. The tremendous volume of life
that flows through the narrow and winding channels
past the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks
which the lesser buildings form, is such that the highest
tide of Broadway or Fifth Avenue seems a scanty ebb
beside it. The swelling and towering omnibuses, the
huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous
hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-
carts, donkey - carts, handcarts, and bicycles which
fearlessly find their way amid the turmoil, with foot-
passengers winding in and out, and covering the side-
walks with their multitude, give the effect of a single
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the
channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till

12

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CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a
molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your
umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public water-
proof apron across your knees, and feel in supreme
degree the insensate exultation of being part of the
largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the
universe.

It is an emotion which supports the American visitor
even against the immensity he shares, and he is able to
reflect that New York would not look so relatively
little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a capital
on the same lines as London. If New York were, like
London, a political as well as a commercial capital, she
would have the national edifices of Washington added
to the sky-scrapers in which she is now unrivalled,- and
her competition would be architecturally much more
formidable than it is. She would be the legislative
centre of the different States of the Union, as London
is of the different counties of the United Kingdom; she
would have collected in her borders all their capitols
and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity,
would valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one
must now recoil on her behalf. She could not, of course,
except on such rare days of fog as seem to greet Eng-
lishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the
adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders;
her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it
shows larger than it is; no mist clothes the sky-scraper
in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar into the
clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the
low buildings cower unrelieved about their bases.
Nothing could be done in palliation of the comparative
want of antiquity in New York, for the present, at
least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment

13

LONDON FILMS

of her destiny she will be one day as old as London
now is.

If one thinks, however, how old London now is, iv
is rather crazing; much more crazing than the same
sort of thought in the cities of lands more exclusively
associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the
present; there seems nothing above the past, or only
so thin a layer of actuality that you have scarcely the
sense of it. In England you remember with an effort
Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and the
long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English;
the living interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense
that you cannot penetrate them and consort quietly
with the dead alone. Men whose names are in the di-
rectory as well as men whose names are in history,
keep you company, and push the shades of heroes,
mart)Ts, saints, poets, and princes to the wall. They
do not shoulder them willingly out of the way, but
helplessly; there is no place in the w^orld where the
material present is so reverently, so tenderly mindful
of the material past. Perhaps, therefore, I felt safe in
so largely leaving the English past to the English pres-
ent, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger
for the old which the new American brings with him to
Europe, I now w^nt about enjoying the modern in its
manifold aspects and possibly fancying characteristic
traits where I did not find them. I did not care how
trivial some of these w^ere, but I hesitate to confide
to the more serious reader that I was at one moment
much interested in what seemed the growing informal-
ity of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in the streets
and parks, or thought I noted it.

To my vision, or any illusion, they wore every sort of
careless cap, slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort

14

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

of tunic, jacket, and cutaway. The top-hat and frock-
coat still appear, but their combination is evidently no
longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime
functions. I do not mean to say that you do not
often see that stately garment on persons of author-
ity, but only that it is apparently not of the suprem-
acy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the
eighties and nineties of the last century. Certainly,
when it comes to the artist at Truefitt's wearing a
frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help
asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet,
when one has said this, one must hedge from a con-
jecture so extreme. The king wears a frock-coat, a
long, gray one, with a white top -hat and lavender
gloves, and those who like to be like a king conform to
his taste. No one, upon his life, may yet wear a frock
and a derby, but many people now wear top - hats,
though black ones, with sack - coats, with any sort of
coats; and, above all, the Londoner affects in summer a
straw hat either of a flat top and a pasteboard stiffness,
or of the operatically picturesque Alpine pattern, or of a
slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often the
derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of
other nations has now become their pleasure, and, with
the English genius of doing what they like, it may be
that they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the
effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The con-
ventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but
how long this will remain, who can say? The simple-
hearted American, arriving with his scrupulous dress
suit in London, may yet find himself going out to dinner
with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets
or tennis flannels.
If, however, the men's dress in England is informal,

15

LONDON FILMS

impatient, I think one will be well within the lines of
safety in saying that above everything the English
women's dress expresses sentiment, though I suppose it
is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic
of our women's dress is expressive of personal chic;
in either case the dressmaker, male or female, has im-
personally much to do with it. Under correction of
those countrywomen of ours who will not allow that
the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture
to say that their expression of sentiment in dress is
charming, but how charming it comparatively is I
shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold
as to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender
fluency of youth than some realizations of the American
ideal; and that after the azaleas and rhododendrons
in the Park there is nothing in nature more suggestive
of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes
in which the wearers flow by the flowery expanses in
carriage or on foot. The colors worn are often as coura-
geous as the vegetable tints; the vaporous air softens
and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told would
shriek aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the
shades worn tend to soft pallors, lavender, and pink, and
creamy white. A group of girlish shapes in these colors,
seen newly lighted at a doorway from a passing carriage,
gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect
of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am
not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a
scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an
endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a by-
gone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a
graceful page, on many a glowing canvas.

Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the
word for the present dress of Englishwomen. It forms

16

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

in itself a lovely picture to the eye, and is not merely
the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is
therefore the more difficult of transference to the
imagination of the reader who has not also been a spec-
tator, and before such a scene as one may witness in a
certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after church
in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening,
the boldest kodak may well close its single eye in despair.
As yet even the mental photograph cannot impart the
tints of nature, and the reader who wishes to assist at
this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself.
At the right moment of the ripening London season the
foliage of the trees is densely yet freshly green and
flatteringly soft to the eye; the grass below has that
closeness of texture which only English grass has the
secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododen-
drons and azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue,
and the drifted clouds in it are washed clean of their
London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these beautiful
women begin to appear about the time when you may
have bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for
that day. Some drift from the carriages that draw up
on the drive beside the sacred close where they are to
sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others
glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles
left afar, perhaps that they may give themselves the
effect of coming informally. They arrive in twos and
threes, young girls commonly with their mothers, but
sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and
with the rainbow range in their delicately floating,
delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their
gowns, always express sentiment, even when they can-
not always express simplicity; and the just observer is
obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if

17

LONDON FILMS

not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very
great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of
feature which is able to be patrician without being
unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do
not carry themselves well, it takes an American woman
to see it. They move naturally and lightly — that is,
the young girls do; mothers in England, as elsewhere,
are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are
as handsome in their well-wearing English way as their
daughters.

Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron
barriers, and in one of these the arriving groups of au-
thorized people found other people of their kind, where
the unauthorized people seemed by common consent
to leave them. There was especially one enclosure
which seemed consecrated to the highest comers ; it was
not necessary that they should make the others feel
they were not wanted there; the others felt it of them-
selves, and did not attempt to enter that especial isary
ring, or fairy triangle. Those within looked as much
at home as if in their own drawing-rooms, and after the
usual greetings of friends sat down in their penny chairs
for the talk which the present kodak would not have
overheard if it could.

If any one were to ask me how I knew that these
beautiful creatures were of supreme social value, I
should be obliged to own that it was largely an assump-
tion based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch person-
ally in the matter they might have been women come
to see the women who had not come. Still, if the effects
of high breeding are visible, then they were the sort
they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old
and young, had the aristocratic air which is not aggres-
sive, the patrician bearing which is passive and not

18

THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

active, and which in the Enghsh seems consistent with
so much that is human and kindly. There is always
the question whether this sort of game is worth the
candle; but that is a moral consideration which would
take me too far from the little scene I am trying to sug-
gest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the
English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene
was the constant movement of distinguished figures
within the sacred close, and up and down the paths
past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The
distinguished figures were apparently not the least
molested by the multiplied and concentrated gazes of
the on-lookers, who were, as it were, outside the window,
and of the street. What struck one accustomed to the
heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where
any such scene would be so inexpressibly impossible,
was the almost wholly English personnel of the crowd
within and without the sacred close. Here and there
a Continental presence, French or German or Italian,
pronounced its nationality in dress and bearing; one of
the many dark subject races of Great Britain was repre-
sented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black hair and
eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various
colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves one
was aware of some other Americans. But these ex-
ceptions only accented the absolutely English domi-
nance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less
evident in the observed than in the observers, where,
beyond the barrier, which there was nothing to prevent
their passing, they sat in passive rows, in passive pairs,
in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers
were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the
hands folded on the top of the stick express a pause
in the emotions and the energies which has its pathos.

19

LONDON FILMS

There were women among them, of course, but the
women were also of the age when the keener sensibiUties
are taking a rest; and such aliens of their sex as qualified
the purely English nature of the affair lost whatever
was aggressive in their difference.

It was necessary to the transaction of the drama
that from time to time the agents of the penny-chair
company should go about in the close and collect money
for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly
solved, how the ladies who had com.e unattended man-
aged, with their pocketless dresses, to carry coins un-
equalled in bulk since the iron currency of Sparta; or
whether they held the pennies frankly in their hands
till they paid them away. In England the situation,
if it is really the situation, is always accepted with im-
pUcit confidence, and if it had been the custom to bring
pennies in their hands, these ladies would have no
more minded doing it than they minded being looked
at by people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate
superiority.

With us the public affirmation of class, if it were
imaginable, could not be imaginable except upon the
terms of a mutinous protest in the spectators which
would not have been less real for being silent. But
again I say the thing would not have been possible with
us in New York; though in Newport, where the aristo-
cratic tradition is said to have been successfully trans-
planted to our plutocratic soil, something analogous
might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that tradi-
tion does not come to flower in the open American air;
it is potted and grown under glass; and can be carried
out-doors only under special conditions. The American
must still come to England for the realization of certain
social ideals towards which we may be now straining, but

20

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS

which do not yet enjoy general acceptance. The reader
who knows New York has but to try and fancy its best,
or even its better, society dispersing itself on certain
grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or after-
noon; or, on some week-day evening, leaving its equipages
along the drives and strolling out over the herbage; or
receiving in its carriages the greetings of acquaintance
who make their way in and out among the wheels.
PoUce and populace would join forces in their several
sorts to spoil a spectacle which in Hyde Park appeals,
in high degree, to the aesthetic sense, and which might
stimulate the historic imagination to feats of agreeable
invention if one had that sort of imagination.

The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society
which we have not yet lived long enough to have known,
and which we very probably never shall know. Such
civilization as we have will continue to be pubHc and
impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its
specific events will remain within walls. It could not
manifest itself outside without being questioned, chal-
lenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear
reasons why it is well so.

Ill

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

WE are quite as domestic as the English, but with
us the family is of the personal life, while with
them it is of the general life, so that when their domes-
ticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one
feels it strange. One has read of something like this
without the sense of it which constantly penetrates one
in London. One must come to England in order to
realize from countless little occasions, little experiences,
how entirely Enghsh life, public as well as private,
is an affair of family. We know from our reading how
a comparatively few families administer, if they do not
govern, but we have still to learn how the other families
are apparently content to share the form in which au-
thority resides, since they cannot share the authority.
At the very top — I offer the conjecture towards the
solution of that mystery which constantly bewilders
the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty — is, of
course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the
American is that it is revered because it is the royal
family. But possibly a truer interpretation of the fact
would be that it is dear and sacred to the vaster British
public because it is the royal family. A bachelor king
could hardly dominate the English imagination like a
royal husband and father, even if his being a husband
and father were not one of the implications of that tacit

22

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

Constitution in whose silence English power resides.
With us, family has less and less to do with society,
even; but with the English it has more and more to do,
since the royal family is practically without political
power, and not only may, but almost must, devote
itself to society. It goes and com.es on visits to other
principalities and powers; it opens parhaments; it lays
corner-stones and presides at the dedication of edifices
of varied purpose ; it receives deputations and listens to
addresses; it holds courts and levees; it reviews regi-
ments and fleets, and assists at charity entertainments
and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races;
it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalt-
ed presences for their prosperity. These events seem
public, and if they were imaginable of a democracy
like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order
of English things they are social, they are domestic,
they are from one family to every other family directly
or indirectly; the king is for these ends not more a
royalty than the rest of his family, and for the most
part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts
are few. Things that in a repubhc are entirely personal,
as marriages, births, christenings, deaths, and burials,
whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect
royalty, of public and national concern, and it would
not be 'easy to show how one royal act differed from
another in greater or less publicity.

If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a wilhng-
ness to generalize from wholly insufficient grounds, and
take the chances of hitting or missing, you might affirm
a domestic simplicity of feeling in some phases of func-
tions exalted far beyond the range of republican experi-
ences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence
which we sometimes have cabled to our press at home,

23

LONDON FILMS

by more than usually ardent enterprise, one may have
read that the king held a levee at St. James's; and one
conceived of it as something dramatic, something his-
toric, something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one
happened to be walking in Pall Mall on the morning of
that levee, one saw merely a sort of irregular coming
and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as regarded
the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot.
A thin fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly by-
standers lined the curbstone, and looked at the people
arriving in the carriages, victorias, hansoms, and four-
wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered dignitaries
of the church; and military and naval officers made their
way through the fringe and crossed the street among
the wheels and horses. No one concerned seemed to
feel anything odd in the effect, though to the unwonted
American the sight of a dignitary in full canonicals or
regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is
not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by ro-
mance. At one moment a middle-aged lady in the line
of vehicles put her person well out of the window of her
four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her
driver in something. She may not have been going
to the levee, but one felt that if she had been she
would still have done what it abashed the alien to
see.

We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English
in matters of English state ; we, who have no state at all
require them to live up to theirs, just as quite plain, el-
derly observers expect every woman to be young and
pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly
the secret of enduring so much state as the English
have lies in knowing how and when to shirk it, to drop
it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon this fact,

24

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

if it is a fact, would find bis knuckles warningly rapped
when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed
empty of etiquette. But the rapping would be very
gentle, very kindly, for this is the genius of English rule
where it is not concerned with criminal offence. You
must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but
you are "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden
in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is
again the difference between the social and the public,
which is perhaps the main difference between an oli-
garchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more
spared in the one and the self-respect in the other,
though this is saying it too loosely, and may not be say-
ing it truly; it is only a conjecture with which I am par-
leying while I am getting round to add that such part
of the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was
vastly more of it, was much less filling to the imagination
than a glimpse which I had of a court one night. I am
rather proud of being able to explain that the late
queen held court in the early afternoon and the present
king holds court at night; but, lest any envious reader
suspect me of knowing the fact at first-hand, I hasten
to say that the glimpse I had of the function that night
only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving
out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human,
through a thin rain, the blood-red figures of the coach-
men and footmen gowned from head to foot in their
ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of
the coach between them, and the horses trampling
heraldically before out of the legendary past. The
want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly
blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so su-
preme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague
splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab

25

LONDON FILMS

flashed by them, moving in a slow hne towards the front
of Buckingham Palace.

The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of
which would enrich my page beyond the dreams of
fiction, and it is said that in the time of the one-o'clock
court they used to receive a full share of the attention
which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow.
They were often halted, as that night I saw them
halting, in their progress, and this favored the plebeian
witnesses, who ranged along their course and invited
themselves and one another to a study of the looks
and dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both.
The study and the comment must have had their limits;
the observed knew how much to bear if the observers
did not know how little to forbear; and it is not probable
that the London spectators went the lengths which
our outsiders go in trying to verify an English duke
who is about to marry an American heiress. The Lon-
don vulgar, if not better bred than our vulgar, are better
fed on the sight of social grandeur, and have not a life-
long famine to satisfy, as ours have. Besides, whatever
gulf birth and wealth have fixed between the English
classes, it is mystically bridged by that sentiment of
family which I have imagined the ruling influence in
England. In a country where equality has been glori-
fied as it has been in ours, the contrast of conditions
must breed a bitterness in those of a lower condition
which is not in their hearts there; or if it is, the alien
does not know it.

What seems certain is the interest with which every
outward manifestation of royal and social state is fol-
lowed, and the leisure which the poor have for a vicari-
ous indulgence in its luxuries and splendors. One
would say that there was a large leisure class entirely

26

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

devoted to these pleasures, which cost it nothing, but
which may have palled on the taste of those who pay
for them. Of course, something like this is the case
in every great city; but in London, where society is
enlarged to the bounds of the national interests, the
demand of such a leisure class might very well be sup-
posed to have created the supply. Throughout the
London season, and measurably throughout the London
year, there is an incessant appeal to the curiosity of the
common people which is never made in vain. Some-
where a drum is throbbing or a bugle sounding from
dawn till dusk; the red coat is always passing singly or
in battalions, afoot or on horseback; the tall bear-skin
cap weighs upon the grenadier's brow,

"And the hapless soldier's sigh,"

if it does not ^^run in blood down palace walls," must
often exhale from lips tremulous with hushed profanity.
One bright, hot morning of mid-July the suffering from
that cruel folly in the men of a regiment marching from
their barracks to Buckingham Palace and sweltering
under those shaggy cliffs was evident in their distorted
eyes, streaming cheeks, and panting mouths. But why
do I select the bear-skin cap as peculiarly cruel and
foolish, merely because it is archaic? All war and all
the images of it are cruel and foolish.

The April morning, however, when I first carried out
my sensitized surfaces for the impression which I hoped
to receive from a certain historic spectacle was very
different. There was even a suggestion of comfort in
'^the archaic bear-skins; they were worn, and they had
been worn, every day for nearly two hundred years, as
part of the ceremonial of changing the regimental

27

LONDON FILMS

colors before Buckingham Palace. I will not be asked
why this is imperative; it has always been done and
probably always will be done, and to most civilian on-
lookers will remain as unintelligible in detail as it was
to me. When the regiment was drawn up under the
palace windows, a part detached itself from the main
body and went off to a gate of the palace, and continued
mysteriously stationary there. In the mean time the
ranks left behind closed or separated amid the shouting
of sergeants or corporals, and the men relieved them-
selves of the strain from their knapsacks, or satisfied
an exacting military ideal, by hopping at will into the
air and bouncing their knapsacks, dragging lower
down, up to the napes of their necks, where they rested
under the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A
couple of officers, with swords drawn, walked up and
down behind the ranks, but, though they were tall,
fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment
of their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give
the scene any such poignant interest as it had from the
men in performing a duty, or indulging a privilege, by
hopping into the air and bouncing their knapsacks up
to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable
delay, but was doubtless requisite for the transaction,
the detachment sent for the change of colors returned
with the proper standards. The historic rite was then
completed, the troops formed in order, and marched
back to their barracks to the exultant strains of their
band.

The crowd outside the palace yard, which this daily
sight attracts, dispersed reluctantly, its particles doubt-
less holding themselves ready to reassemble at the
slightest notice. It formed a small portion only of the
population of London which has volunteer charge of

28

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

the goings and comings at Buckingham Palace, Cer-
tain of its members are on guard there from morning
till night, and probably no detail of ceremony escapes
their vigilance. If asked what they are expecting to
see, they are not able to say; they only know that they
are there to see what happens. They make the most
of any carriage entering or issuing from the yard; they
note the rare civihans who leave or approach the palace
door on foot, the half-dozen plain policemen who stand
at their appointed places within the barrier which none
of the crowd ever dreams of passing must share its in-
terest. Neither these policemen nor the sentries who
pace their beat before the high iron fence are ap-
parently willing to molest the representatives of the
public interest. On the April morning in case, during
the momentary absence of the policeman who should
have restrained the crowd, the sentry found himself
embarrassed by a spectator who had intruded on his
beat. He faltered, blushing as well as he could through
his high English color, and then said, gently, " A little
back, please," and the intruder begged pardon and
retired.

In the simple incident there was nothing of the ner-
vousness observable in either the official or the offi-
cious repositories of the nationality which one sees in
Continental countries, and especially in Germany. It
was plain that England, though a military power, is
not militarized. The English shows of force are civil.
Nowhere but in England does the European hand of iron
wear the glove of velvet. There is always an English
war going on somewhere, but one does not relate to it
the kindly-looking young fellows whom one sees suffer-
ing under their bear-skin caps in the ranks, or loitering at
liberty in the parks, and courting the flattered girls

29

LONDON FILMS

who flutter like moths about the flame of their red
jackets, up and down the paths and on the pubUc .
benches. The soldiers are under the law of military
obedience, and are so far in slavery, as all soldiers are,
but nothing of their slavery is visible, and they are the
idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the pict-
uresqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great
London spectacle. It is said that they sometimes
abuse their apparent supremacy, and that their uniform
generally bars them from places of amusement; but one
sees nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the
public ways, where one sometimes sees them pushing
baby-carriages to free the nurse-maids to more unre-
stricted flirtation, or straying over the grass and under
the trees with maids who are not burdened by any
sort of present duty.

After all, as compared with the civilians, they are
few even in that game of love which is always playing
itself wherever youth meets youth, and which in London
is only evident in proportion to the vastness of the
city. Their individual life is, like that of the royalty
which they decorate, public more than private, and one
can scarcely dissociate them, with all their personal
humility, from the exalted figures whose eminence
they directly or indirectly contribute to throw into
relief. I do not mean that they are seen much or little
in the king's company. The English king, though he
wears many land and sea uniforms, is essentially civilian,
and though vast numbers of soldiers exist for his state
in London, they do not obviously attend him, except
on occasions of the very highest state. I make this
observation rather hazardously, for the fact, which I
feel bound to share with the reader, is that I never saw
in London any of the royalties who so abound there.

30

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

I did, indeed, see the king before I left England, but it
was in a place far from his capital, and the king was the
only one of his large family I saw anywhere. I hope
this will not greatly disappoint my readers, especially
such as have scruples against royalties; but it is best
to be honest. I can be quite as honest in adding that
I had always a vague, underlying curiosity concerning
royalty, and a hope that it would somehow come my
way, but it never did, to my knowledge, and somehow,
with the best will towards it, I never went its way.
This I now think rather stupid, for every day the morn-
ing papers predicted the movements of royalty, which
seemed to be in perpetual movement, so that it must
have been by chance that I never saw it arriving or
departing at the stations where I was often doing the
same.

Of course, no private person, not even the greatest
nobleman, let alone the passing stranger, can possibly
arrive and depart so much as the king and queen, and
their many children, grandchildren, nephews, and
nieces, and cousins of every remove. For the sover-
eigns themselves this incessant motion, though mitigated
by every device of loyal afTection and devotion on the
part of their subjects, must be a great hardship, and
greater as they get into years. The king's formal
office is simply to reign, but one wonders when he finds
the time for reigning. He seems to be always setting
out for Germany or Denmark or France, when he is not
coming from Wales or Scotland or Ireland; and, when
quietly at home in England, he is constantly away
on visits to the houses of favored subjects, shooting
pheasants or grouse or deer; or he is going from one
horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden-
party or whatever corresponds in England to a church

31

LONDON FILMS

sociable. It is impossible to enumerate the pleasures
which must poison his life, as if the cares were not
enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much
liked and is so amiable and active, the perpetual move-
ment affects the plebeian foreigner as something terri-
ble. Never to be quiet; never to have a stretch of those
long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to
later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample
strange cookeries; to sleep under a different preacher
every Sunday, and in a different bed every night; to
wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions,
three or four times a day; to receive every manner of
deputation, and try to show an interest in every manner
of object — who would reign on such terms as these, if
there were any choice of not reigning?

Evidently such a career cannot be managed without
the help, the pretty constant help, of armed men; and
the movement of troops in London from one point to
another is one of the evidences of state which is so
little static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight,
and makes one wish one were a child that one might
fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement of a great
mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a
flaming squad, or a single vidette spurring on some
swift errand, with his pennoned lance erect from his
toe and his horse-hair crest streaming behind him. The
soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of civil
life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spec-
tator as they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme
attraction in their sort for the newly arrived American
is the pair of statuesque warriors who motionlessly sit
their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse-Guards,
and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they
were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's

32

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

shop. When I first arrived in London in the earhest
of those sad eighteen-sixties when our Enghsh brethren
were equipping our Confederate brethren to sweep our
commerce from the seas, I think I must have gone to
see those images at the Horse-Guards even before I
visited the monuments in West^vrister Abbey, and they
then perfectly filled my vast expectation; they might
have been Gog and Magog, for their gigantic stature.
In after visits, though I had a sneaking desire to see
them again, I somehow could not find their place,
being ashamed to ask for it, in my hope of happening
on it, and I had formed the notion, which I confidently
urged, that they had been taken down, like the Welling-
ton statue from the arch. But the other day (or month,
rather), when I was looking for Whitehall, suddenly
there they were again, sitting their horses in the gate-
ways as of yore, and as woodenly as if they had never
stirred since 1861. They were unchanged in attitude,
but how changed they were in person: so dwarfed, so
shrunken, as if the intervening years had sapped the
juices of their joints and let their bones fall together,
like those of withered old men!

This was, of course, the unjust effect of my original
exaggeration of their length and breadth. The troops
that I saw marching through the streets where we first
lodged were fine, large men. I myself saw no choice
in the different bodies, but the httle housemaid much
preferred the grenadier guards to the Scotch guards;
perhaps there was one grenadier guard who lent beauty
and grandeur to the rest. I think Scotch caps are much
gayer than those busbies which the grenadiers wear,
but that, again, is a matter of taste; I certainly did
not think the plaid pantaloons with which the Scotch
guards hid the knees that ought to have been naked

33

LONDON FILMS

were as good as the plain trousers of their rivals. But
they were all well enough, and the officers who saun-
tered along out of step on the sidewalk, or stoop-shoul-
deredly, as the English military fashion now is, followed
the troops on horseback, were splendid fellows, who
would go to battle as simply as to afternoon tea, and
get themselves shot in some imperial cause as imper-
sonally as their men.

There were large barracks in our neighborhood where
one might have glimpses of the intimate life of the
troops, such as shirt-sleeved figures smoking short pipes
at the windows, or red coats hanging from the sills, or
sometimes a stately bear-skin dangling from a shutter
by its throat-latch. We were also near to the Chelsea
Hospital, where soldiering had come to its last word in
the old pensioners pottering about the garden-paths or
sitting in the shade or sun. Wherever a red coat ap-
peared it had its honorable obsequy in the popular in-
terest, and if I might venture to sum up my impres-
sion of what I saw of soldiering in London I should
say that it keeps its romance for the spectator far more
than soldiering does in the Continental capitals, where
it seems a slavery consciously sad and clearly discerned.
It may be that a glamour clings to the English soldier be-
cause he has voluntarily enslaved himself as a recruit,
and has not been torn an unwilling captive from his
home and work, like the conscripts of other countries.
On the same terms our own military are romantic.

IV
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

I HAD thought — rather cheaply, as I now reaUze — of
offering, as a pendant for the scene of Fashion Meet-
ing Itself in the Park on the Sunday noons and after-
noons which I have tried to photograph, some picture of
open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have
decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be
found any week-day evening, when the weather is fair,
on the grassy stretches which the Park rises into some-
what beyond the sacred close of high life. This space
is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is
higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion
as embowering foliage gives. There are no trees on
any side for many acres, and the golden-red sunset
glow^ hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the
low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of
one sultry day which I have in mind. From all the
paths leading up out of Piccadilly there was a streaming
tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly turfed,
and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes
which a more impassioned imagination than mine
might figure as the dead and wounded in some field
of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides having
no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a
conscience against its unreality. Those people, mostly
young people, are either sitting there in gossiping groups,

35

LONDON FILMS

or whispering pairs, or singly breathing a mute rapture
of release from the day's work. A young fellow lies
stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above
the newspaper which the lingering light allows him to
read; another has an open book under his eyes; but
commonly each has the companionship of some fearless
girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which
with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands
beside the sea, but which is here without that extreme
effect which the bathing-costume imparts on our beaches.
These young people stretched side by side on th^ grass
in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a
suggestion of the

''Bella eta dell' oro "

not to be had elsewhere in our iron civilization. One
might accuse their taste, but certainly they were more
interesting than the rows of young men perched on the
top course of the fence, in a wide variety of straw hats,
or even than the red-coated soldiers who boldly occupied
the penny chairs along the walks and enjoyed each the
vigorous rivalry of girls w^orshipping him on either hand.
They boldly occupied the penny chairs, for the
danger that they would be made to pay was small.
The sole collector, a man well in years and of a benevo-
lent reluctance, passed casually among the rows of
seats, and took pennies only from those who could most
clearly afford it. There was a fence round a pavilion
where a band was playing, and within there were spend-
thrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the
music could be perfectly well heard without charge out-
side. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience
of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in
numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicy-

36

THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

cling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed
a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long after-
glow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began
to pierce the clear heavens. But there was always
enough kindly obscurity to hide emotions that did not
mind being seen, and to soften the details which could
not be called beautiful. As the dark deepened, the
prone shapes scattered by hundreds over the grass looked
like peaceful flocks whose repose was not disturbed by
the human voices or by the human feet that incessantly
went and came on the paths. It was a touch, however
illusory, of the rusticity which lingers in so many sorts
at the heart of the immense city, and renders it at un-
expected moments simple and homelike above all other
cities.

The evening when this London pastoral offered itself
was the close of a day of almost American heat. The
mercury never went above eighty-three degrees, but
the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think
a good deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye
from the lurid horizons paling upward into the dull,
unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily overcast or
heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came
also from the thronged streets, in which the season had
scarcely begun to waver, and the pulses of the plethoric
town throbbed with a sense of choking fulness. The
feverish activity of the cabs contributed to the effect of
the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated
themselves into every crevice of the frequent "blocks,"
where the populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their
arrest of the artificial movement of air, sweltered in the
sun, and the classes in private carriages of every order
and degree suffered in a helpless equality with the per-
spiring masses.

37

LONDON FILMS

Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of
straw hats; and where one lately saw only the variance
from silken cylinders to the different types of derbies
and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape of
panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence
of the low, flat - topped hard - brimmed things that
mocked with the rigidity of sheet-iron the conception
of straw as a light and yielding material. Men with as
yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember
when the American picked himself out in the London
crowd by his summer hat, but now, in his belated con-
formity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt to be one of
the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming
processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No
shape of straw hat is peculiar to any class, but the
slouching panama is for pecuniary reasons more the
wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in
front and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater
acceptance with youth; age and middle -age wear its
weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora form; and now
and then one saw the venerable convention of the cock-
aded footman's and coachman's silk hat mocked in
straw. No concession more extreme could be made to
the heat, and these strange cylinders, together with the
linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the
excesses in which the English are apt to indulge their
common -sense when they decide to give way to it.
They have apparently decided to give way to it in
the dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park,
where individual caprice is the sole law that obtains
amid a general anarchy.

The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and sug-
gests the daring thought that, if ever their race decides
to get on without government of any sort, they will rid

38

THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

themselves of it with a thoroughness and swiftness past
the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with
all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have
discarded the traditional costumes of Rotten Row.
The young girls and young men in flapping panamas,
in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave cer-
tainly an agreeable livehness to the spectacle, which
their elders emulated by expressions of taste as person-
al and unconventional. A lady in the old-fashioned
riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating veil
recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to
lose weight, in a brief emergence from the past to which
she belonged. One man similarly hatted, but frock-
coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy of note; but
no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as
distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so
much to the sense of liberation from the heat as the
others who, when it reached its height, frankly confessed
its power by riding in greatly diminished numbers. By
twelve o'clock scarcely one left of all those joyous
youths, those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy
children, matched in size with their ponies, as the elders
were in their different mounts, remains to distract the
eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs
and the promenaders between them.

It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting
show of what seemed society at home than the Sunday-
afternoon reception in the consecrated closes on the
grass. People who knew one another stopped and
gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and
tried to ignore them. But that could not have been
easy. The women whom those handsome, aristocratic
men bowed over, or dropped into chairs beside, or
saluted as they went by, were very beautiful women,

LONDON FILMS

and dressed with that sentiment which has already been
celebrated. Their draperies fluttered in the gay breeze
which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them with
tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the Hfe
of a picture to be seen nowhere else. It was not neces-
sary to know just who, or just of what quality they
were, in order to reaHze their loveliness.

Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had
still something of its early summer freshness; but in its
farther stretches it was of our August brown, and in
certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The trees
themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and
the wind blew showers of yellowing leaves from their
drooping boughs. Towards the close of the season, on
the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of those conse-
crated social closes, to which I am always returning
with a snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance
of the great weary army which would possess the pleas-
ure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers had left it.
Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had
cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there,
with their faces in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy
heaps and coils where the delicate foot of fashion had
pressed the green herbage. As among the spectators
I thought I noted an increasing number of my country-
men and women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied
more and more of them in the hired turnouts which
cannot long keep their secret from the critical eye.
These were as obvious to conjecture as some other
turnouts, which I fancied of a decayed ancestrality :
cumbrous landaus and victorias, with rubberless tires,
which grumbled and grieved in their course for the
passati tempi, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the
parvenu carriages, and for all the types of motors which

40

THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

more and more invade the drives of the Park. They
had a Uterary quahty, and were out of Thackeray and
Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society noveUsts
great enough for them to be out of.

If such novehsts had not been wanting I am sure I
should not be left with the problem of an extremely
pretty and charming woman whose scarf one morning
so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside
another extremely pretty and charming woman, that
he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer,
who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she
in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly
equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack,
would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic
meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down
the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, ex-
quisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in
a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would
fix even the exact social value of that companion of a
lady stopped in chat by that other lady, who was always
hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance.
The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor w^as
she now made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx-
patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid of story
could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little
foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her
drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and
scornful in her relation to the encounter from which
she remained excluded? The lady who had left her
standing rejoined her and they drifted off together
into the vast of the unfathomed, but not, I like to
believe, the unfathomable.

When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course
it did not break. That would have been a violence of

41

LONDON FILMS

which EngUsh weather would not have been capable.
There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a trap
were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It
softly gave way in a gradual, delicious coolness, which
again mellowed at the edges, as it were, and dissolved
in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain might
finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the
"anguish of the solstice," as we had felt it in London,
and by the time the first shower insinuated itself we
were in the heart of the Malvern Hills.

Of course, this heated term was not as the heated
terms of New York are ; but it excelled them in length,
if not in breadth and thickness. The nights were al-
ways cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights
do not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would
have been unendurable, but in London one woke each
morning with renewed hope and renewed strength.
Very likely there were parts of London where people
despaired and weakened through the night, but in these
polite perspectives I am trying to exclude such places;
and whenever I say "one" in this relation, I am imagin-
ing one of the many Americans who witness the London
season perhaps oftener from the outside than the inside,
but who still can appreciate and revere its facts.

The season was said to begin very late, and it was
said to be a very "bad" season, throughout May, when
the charges of those who live by it ordinarily feel an
expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become difficult,
become impossible; when the rents of apartments
double themselves, and apartments are often not to be
had at any price; when the face of the cabman clouds
if you say you want him by the hour, and clears if you
add that you will make it all right with him; when
every form of service begins to have the courage of its

42

THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

dependence; and the manifold fees which ease the
social machine seem to lubricate it so much less than
the same fees in April; when the whole vast body of
London groans with a sense of repletion such as no
American city knows except in the rare congestion pro-
duced by a universal exposition or a national conven-
tion. Such a congestion is of annual occurrence in
London, and is the symptomatic expression of the sea-
son; but the symptoms ordinarily recognizable in May
were absent until June in the actual year. They were
said to have been suppressed by the reluctance of the
tardy spring, and again by the king's visit to Ireland.
As the king is the fountain of social prosperity it is
probable that he had more to do with delaying the sea-
son than the weather had; but by what one hears said
of him he would not have willingly delayed it. He is
not only a well-meaning and well-doing prince, one
hears from people of every opinion, but a promoter of
peace and international concord (especially with France,
where his good offices are believed to have been pe-
culiarly effective), and he is, rather more expectedly,
a cheerful sovereign, loving the gayety as well as the
splendor of state, and fond of seeing the world enjoy

itself. ^ ^ ^ ,

It is no betrayal of the national confidence to repeat
what every one says concerning the present outburst
of fashion, that it is a glad compliance with the kmg's
liking; the more eager because of its long suppression
during the late queen's reign and the more anxious
because of a pathetic apprehension inspired by the well-
known serious temperament of the heir-apparent to
the throne. No doubt the joyful rebound from the
depression of the Boer war is also still felt; but for
whatever reason London life is gay and glad, it is cer-

43

LONDON FILMS

tainly making its hay while the sun shines, and it mixes
as many poppies and daisies with the crop as possible
against the time when only grass may be acceptable. In
other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in
the masses as well as the classes is the inspiration of the
court, while the free personal preferences expressed are
probably the effect of that strong, that headstrong, in-
stinct of being like one's self, whether one is like others
or not, which has always moulded precedence and tra-
dition to individual convenience with the English.
One would not have said that a frock-coat of lustrous
black alpaca was just the wear for a tall middle-aged
gentleman in a silk hat and other scrupulous appoint-
ments; but when he appeared in it one hottest Sunday
afternoon in that consecrated close of Hyde Park, and
was welcomed by the inmost flower-group of the gor-
geous parterre, one had to own a force of logic in
it. If a frock-coat was the proper thing for the occa-
sion in general, then the lightest and coolest fabric
was the thing for that occasion in particular. So the
wearer had reasoned in sublime self-reliance, and
so, probably, the others reasoned in intelligent acqui-
escence.

Just what quality he had the courage of one could
not have guessed at a distance, and he must remain
part of the immense question which London continues
for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that he
looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type
of man looked undistinguished, but when the season
began to make London over, the pavement of Piccadilly
sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking.
They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty
of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature.
, They were doubtless the result of a natural selection, to

44

THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

which money for buying perfect conditions had con-
tributed as much as the time necessary for growing a
type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only
now and then hard or cruel; but one need not be espe-
cially averse to the English classification of our species
to feel that they had cost more than they were worth.
The very handsomest man I saw, with the most per-
fectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicate-
ly aquiUne to be particularly patrician), was a groom
who sat his horse beside Rotten Row, waiting till his
master should come to command the services of both.
He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not
be said that he had cost the nation too much time and
money, it might still be conjectured that he had cost
some one too much of something better.

Next after these beautiful people I think that in the
multitudinously varied crowd of London I saw no men
so splendidly, so brilliantly, so lustrously handsome as
three of those imperial British whose lives are safer,
but whose social status is scarcely better than that of our
negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native
dress, and white-turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who
suddenly filed out of the crowd, looking more mystery
from their liquid eyes than they could well have cor-
roborated in word or thought, and bringing to the
metropolis of the West the gorgeous and foolish mag-
nificence of the sensuous East. What did they make
of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or with-
out rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferi-
ority in the imperial scheme? If looks went for what
looks rarely do, except in women, they should have
been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were
simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races
which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under

45

LONDON FILMS

British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this
home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or
memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and
then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the
crowd.

V

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

THE specialization of those fatuous Orientals, tran-
sient as it was, was of far greater duration than
that of most individual impressions from the London
crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a power-
ful light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific
wavelet ; but these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred
record with the most instantaneous apparatus. What
remains of the vision of that long succession of streets
called by successive names from Knightsbridge to Lud-
gate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you
are scarcely more aware of the single life than of any
given ripple in a river. Men, women, children form
the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in order
to give it the collective immensity which abides in your
mind's eye.
. To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is
archaic. Except for the few slow stages that lumber
up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly anything of
the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of
our continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment
and amusement that one finds it still prevailing in
London, quite as if it were not as gross an anachronism
as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and
bewilderingly painted over with the names of its desti-
nations, and clad with signs of patent medicines and
new plays and breakfast foods in every color but the

47

LONDON FILMS

colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it rumbles
forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a
steamer when they put the table-racks on. Seen from
the pavement, or from the top of another omnibus,
it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the single ex-
ample, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses
coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in
the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tre-
mendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole
populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and
lurching with the elephantine gait of things which can
no more capsize than they can keep an even pace. Of
all the sights of London streets, this procession of the
omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common
herd of Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft
seems to suffer a change into something almost as
rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary or less
than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby
businesses that preoccupy the most of us; they are
conquering princes, making a progress in a long triumph,
and looking down upon a lower order of human beings
from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent
dignity that they whom they look down upon are not
merely the drivers of trucks and wagons of low degree,
but often ladies of title in their family carriages, under
the care of the august family coachman and footman,
or gentlemen driving in their own traps or carts, or fares
in the hansoms that steal their swift course through
and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always the most
monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in
bulk and height; they form the chief impulse of the
tremendous movement, and it is they that choke from
time to time the channel of the mighty torrent, and
helplessly hold it in the arrest of a block.

48

A BLOCK IN THE STRAND

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

No one can forecast the moment when, or the place
where, a block may happen ; but mostly it occurs in mid-
afternoon, at the intersection of some street where a
line of vehicles is crossing the channel of the torrent.
Suddenly all is at a stand-still, and one of those wonder-
ful English policemen, who look so slight and young
after the vast blue bulks of our Irish force, shows himself
in the middle of the channel, and holds back its rapids
with the quiet gesture of extended hands. The currents
and counter-currents gather and press from the rear
and solidify, but in the narrow fissure the policeman
stands motionless, with only some such slight stir of his
extended hands as a cat imparts to her "conscious tail"
when she waits to spring upon her prey.

The mute language of his hands, down to the lightest
accent of the fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of
those concerned in its interpretation, and is telepathically
despatched from the nearest to the farthest driver in
the block. While the policeman stands there in the
open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not seem
as if the particles of the mass could detach themselves
for such separate movement as they have at the best.
Softly, almost imperceptibly, he drops his arms, and lets
fall the viewless barrier which he had raised with them;
he remains where he was, but the immense bodies he
had stayed liquefy and move in their opposite courses,
and for that time the block is over.

If ever London has her epic poet, I think he will sing
the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must
be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too
lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on
wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play
of fancy in that impetuous form. We have the hansom
with us, but it does not perform the essential part in

49

LONDON FILMS

New York life that it does in London life. In New
York you may take a hansom; in London you must.
You serve yourself of it as at home you serve yourself
of the electric car; but not by any means at the same
rate. Nothing is more deceitful than the cheapness of
the hansom, for it is of such an immediate and constant
convenience that the unwary stranger's shilling has
shpped from him in a sovereign before he knows, with
the swift succession of occasions when the hansom seems
imperative. A 'bus is inexpensive, but it is stolid and
bewildering; a hansom is always cheerfully intelligent.
It will set you down at the very place you seek ; you need
walk neither to it nor from it; a nod, a glance, summons
it or dismisses. The 'bus may be kind, but it is not
flattering, and the hansom is flattering as well as kind;
flattering to one's pride, one's doubt, one's timid hope.
It takes all the responsibility for your prompt and un-
erring arrival; and you may trust it almost implicitly.
At any point in London you can bid it go to any other
with a confidence that I rarely found abused. Once, in-
deed, my cabman carried me a long way about at mid-
night, and when he finally left me at my door, he was
disposed to be critical of its remoteness, while he apolo-
gized for the delay. I suggested that in a difficulty
like his a map of London would be a good thing; but
though he was so far in drink as to be able to take the
joke in good part, he denied that a map would be of
the least use to a cabman. Probably he was right; my
map was not of the least use to me; and his craft seemed
to feel their way about through the maze of streets
and squares and circles by the same instinct that serves
a pilot on a river in the dark. Their knowledge is a
thing of the nerves, not of the brains, if there is a
difference; or if there is none, then it is an affair of the

50

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

subliminal consciousness, it is inspiration, it is genius.
It could not well be overpaid, and the cabmen are care-
ful that it is not underpaid. I heard, indeed, of two
American ladies who succeeded in underpaying their
cabman; this was their belief resting upon his solemn
declaration; but I myself failed in every attempt of the
kind. My cabman always said that it was not enough;
and then I compromised by giving him too much.
Many stories are told of the abusiveness of the class,
but a simple and effective rule is to overpay them at
once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one
cast a sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his
down-stretched palm, and drive off in thankless silence;
but any excess of payment was met with eager gratitude.
I preferred to buy the cabman's good-will, because I
find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the
good-will of people whom I do not care the least for,
and I did not see why I should make an exception of
cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an extor-
tionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who
drove me to the station, and said: "I'll have to get
another sixpence for this, sir." "Well," I returned,
with a hardihood which astonished me, "you won't
get it of me." But I was then leaving London, and
was no longer afraid. Now, such is the perversity of
the human spirit, I am sorry he did not get the other
sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of jus-
tice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose
habits of prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even
in your own interest to suffer yourself to be plundered a
little; it stimulates the imagination of the plunderer to
high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which eventu-
ate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the
party left a shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I

51

LONDON FILMS

had, after my custom and principle, overpaid, and who
had left us at a restaurant upon our second thought
against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put
down. We duly despaired, but we went and saw the
pictures, and when we came out of the gallery there was
our good cabman lying in wait to identify us as the
losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is
it credible that if he had been paid only his legal fare
he would have been at such virtuous pains? It may,
indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not worth more
than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was
actuated by self-interest, but this is a view of our com-
mon nature which I w^ill not take.

One hears a good deal of the greater quiet of London
after New York. I think that what you notice is a
difference in the quality of the noise in London. What
is with us mainly a harsh, metallic shriek, a grind of
trolley wheels upon trolley tracks, and a wild battering
of their polygonized circles upon the rails, is in London
the dull, tormented roar of the omnibuses and the in-
cessant cloop-cloop of the cab-horses' hoofs. Between
the two sorts of noise there is little choice for one who
abhors both. The real difference is that in many
neighborhoods you can more or less get away from the
specialized noises in London, but you never can do this
in New York. You hear people saying that in these
refuges the London noise is mellowed to a soft pour of
sound, like the steady fall of a cataract, which effectively
is silence; but that is not accurate. The noise is broken
and crushed in a huge rumble without a specialized
sourtd, except when, after midnight, the headlong
clatter of a cab-horse distinguishes itself from the pre-
vailing bulk. But the New York noise is never broken
and crushed into a rumble; it bristles with specific

52

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

accents, night and day, which agonizingly assort them-
selves one from another, and there is no nook or corner
where you can be safe from them, as you can measurably
be in London.

London is, if anything, rather more infested than
New York with motors, as the English more simply and
briefly call automobiles. The perspective is seldom
free of them, and from time to time the air is tainted
with their breath, which is now one of the most char-
acteristic stenches of civilization. They share equally
with other vehicles the drives in the parks, though their
speed is tempered there to the prevalent pace. They
add to the general noise the shuddering bursts of their
swift percussions, and make the soul shrink from a fore-
cast of what the aeroplane may be when it shall come
hurtling overhead with some peculiar screech as yet
unimagined. The motor plays an even more promi-
nent part in the country than in London, especially in
those remnants of time which the English call week-
ends, and which stretch from Friday afternoon to the
next Monday morning. It is within these limits that
people are ordinarily "asked down," and as the host
usually lives from five to ten miles from the nearest
station, the guest is met there by a motor which hurls
him over the intervening ground at the speed of the train
he has just left. The motor is still the rich man's pleas-
ure, as the week-end is his holiday; and it will be long
before the one will be the poor man's use, or the other
his leisure. For the present he must content himself,
in England, at least, with his own legs, and with the
bank-holiday which now comes so often as to be dreaded
by his betters when it lets him loose upon their travel
and sojourn in excursional multitude. This is not
Ukely ever to come under question of affecting the Lon-

53

LONDON FILxMS

don season, as one heard the week-end accused of doing.
It was theorized that people went out of town so much,
in order to be at home in the country for their friends,
that with two afternoons and three nights lost to the
festivities of London, the season was sensibly if not
vitally affected. But that was in the early weeks of it.
As it grew and prospered through the latter half of
June and the whole of July, the week-end, as an inimical
factor, was no longer mentioned. It even began to be
recognized as an essential element of the season. Like
the king's visits to Denmark, to Ireland, to Germany, it
really served to intensify the season.

At this point, I find it no longer possible to continue
celebrating that great moment in the social life of a vast
empire without accusing myself of triviality and hypoc-
risy. I have become aware that I really care nothing
about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with
most English people who have passed the heyday of
their youth, perhaps without having drunk deeply, or at
all, of the dehrious fountain of fashion, it is much the
same. The purpose that the season clearly serves is
annually gathering into the capital great numbers
of the people best worth meeting from all parts of the
world-wide English dominion, with many aliens of
distinction, not counting Americans, who are held a
kind of middle species by the natives. It is a time
of perpetual breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners,
receptions, concerts, and for those who can bear it,
balls till the day of twenty-four hours' pleasure begins
again, with the early rites of Rotten Row. Those who
have a superfluity of invitations go on at night from
one house to another till they fall lifeless into bed at
their own. One may fancy, if one likes, that they show
the effects of their pleasure the next day, that many a

54

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

soft cheek pales its English rose under the flapping
panama hats among the riders in the Park, and that,
lively as they still are, they tend rather to be phantoms
of delight. But perhaps this is not so. What is cer-
tain is that for those who do not abuse the season it is a
time of fine as well as high enjoyment, when the alien,
or the middle species, if he is known, or even tolerably
imagined, may taste a cup of social kindness, of hos-
pitality, deeper if not richer than any in the world. I
do not say that one of the middle species will find in it the
delicate, the wild, the piquant flavors of certain remem-
bered cups of kindness at home; and I should not say
this even if it were true; but he will be an ungrateful
and ungracious guest if he criticises. He will more
wisely and justly accuse himself of having lost his
earlier zest, if he does not come away always thinking,
*'What interesting people I have met!"

VI

SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION

IT is perhaps more than possible that among the
interesting people one meets at luncheons and teas
and dinners, there will be, or have been, other Americans;
and this suggests the perilous question whether the
English like the Americans better than formerly. An
Englishman might counter by asking whether the
Americans like the English better than formerly; but
that would not be answering the question, which I
hope to leave very much where I found it. Yet Amer-
icans have heard and read so much of their increasing
national favor with their contemporary ancestors that
they may be excused if not satisfied in a curiosity as
to the fact. Is the universal favor which an emotional
and imaginative press like ours has portrayed them as
presently enjoying in England a reality, or is it one of
the dreams which our press now and then indulges,
and of which the best that can be said is that they do
no harm?

One not only hears of this favor at home, but when
one goes to England one still hears of it. To be sure
one hears of it mainly from Americans, but they have
the best means of knowing the fact; they are chiefly
concerned, and they are supported in their belief by the
almost unvaried amenity of the English journals, which

56

THE AMERICAN INVASION

now very rarely take the tone towards Americans
formerly habitual with them. Their change of tone
is the most obvious change which I think Americans
can count upon noting when they come to England, and
I am far from reckoning it insignificant. It did not
happen of the newspapers themselves; it must be the
expression of a prevalent mood, if not a very deeply
rooted feeling in their readers. One hears of their in-
terest, their kindness, not from the Americans alone;
the English themselves sometimes profess it, and if
they overestimate us, the generous error is in the right
direction. At the end it must cease to be an error, for,
as we Americans all know, we need only to be better
understood in order to be more highly prized. Be-
sides, liking is much oftener the effect of willing than
has been supposed.

But if the case were quite the contrary, if it were
obvious to the casual experience of the American trav-
eller or sojourner in England, that his nationality was
now liked less rather than more there, I should still be
sorry to disturb what is at the worst no worse than
a fond illusion. The case is by no means the con-
trary, and yet in consenting to some reason in the
iridescence which the situation wears in the American
fancy I should wish to distinguish. For a beginning I
should not wish to go farther than to say that the sort
of Englishmen who have always liked Americans,
because they have liked the American ideal and the kind
of character realized from it, now probably like them
better than ever. They are indeed less critical of our
departure from our old ideal than some Americans,
perhaps because they have not foreseen, as such Amer-
icans have foreseen, the necessary effect in American
character. They can still allow themselves the pleasure

57

LONDON FILMS

which comes from being confirmed in an impression by
events, and in that pleasure they may somewhat
romance us; but even such EngUshmen are not bhndly
fond of us. The other sort of Enghshmen, the sort
that never hked our ideal or our character, probably now
Uke us as little as ever, except as they have noted our
change of ideal, and expect a change of character. To
them we may very well have seemed a sort of civic
dissenters, with the implication of some such quality of
offence as the notion of dissent suggests to minds like
theirs. We had a political religion like their own,
with a hierarchy, a ritual, an establishment all complete,
and we violently broke with it. But it is safe to con-
jecture that this sort of Englishman is too old or too
old-fashioned to live much longer; he suffers with the
decay of certain English interests which the American
prosperity imperilled before it began to imperil English
ideals, if it has indeed done so. His dying out counts
for an increase of favor for us; we enjoy through it a
sort of promotion by seniority.

But a new kind of Englishman has come up of late
years, and so far as he is friendly to us his friendliness
should be more gratifying than that even of our older
friends. He has been in America, either much or little,
and has come to like us because he has seen us at home.
If such an Englishman is rich and noble, he has seen
our plutocracy, and has liked it because it is lively and
inventive in its amusements and profusely original in
its splendors; but he need not be poor and plebeian to
have seen something of our better life, and divined
something of our real meaning from it. He will not
be to blame if he has not divined our whole meaning;
for we are at present rather in the dark as to that our-
selves, and certainly no American who met him in

58

THE AMERICAN INVASION

EnMand could wish to blame him, for his cordiality
forms the warmest welcome that the American can
have there. If he has been in America and not liked
us or our order or ideal, he has still the English good-
nature and if you do not insist upon bemg taken na-
tionally, there are many chances that he will take you
personally, and if he finds you not at all hke an Ainer-
fcan, he will like you, as he liked others in America whom
he found not at all like Americans.

It is the foible, however, of many Americans, both
at home and abroad, that they want to be taken na-
tionally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyonu
any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples
even by others whom we do not love, and ^^^ wish to
be loved in the lump. We would like to believe tha
somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and
evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long
had a grudge against the English, we would be par-
ticularly glad to forget it in a sense of En^'^h re
spect a^rd affection. We would fain believe that the
English have essentially changed towards us but
we might easily deceive ourselves, as we could re-
alize if we asked ourselves the reasons for such a

""'Thf English are very polite, far politer than they
have been represented, and they will not wittingly
wound the American visitor, unless for just cause hke
business, or the truth. Still, I should say that the Amer-
ican will fare best with them if he allows himself to be
taken individually, rather than typically. One s na-
tionality is to others, after a first moment of surprise a
bore and a nuisance, which cannot be got out of the
way too soon. I cannot keep my interest m a German
or an Italian because he is such; and why should not

59

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it be the same with an EngUshman in regard to Ameri-
cans? If he thinks about our nationahty at all, in
its historical character, it is rather a pill, which he
may be supposed to take unwillingly, whether he be-
lieves we were historically right or not. He may say
just things about it, but he will say them more for the
profit of Englishmen than for the pleasure of Amer-
icans. With our pleasure nationally an Englishman is
very little concerned, and either he thinks it out of
taste to show any curiosity concerning us, in the bulk,
or else he feels none. He has lately read and heard a
good deal of talk about us ; but I doubt if it has indeUbly
impressed him. If we have lately done things which
in their way could not be ignored, they could certainly
be forgotten, and many Englishmen, in spite of them,
still remain immensely incurious about us. The Amer-
ican who wishes to be taken nationally by them must
often inspire them with a curiosity about us, before he
can gratify it, and that is a species of self-indulgence
which leaves a pang.

The English have, or they often express, an amiable
notion of us as enormously rich, and perhaps they think
we are vain of our millionaires, and would be flattered
by an implication of wealth as common to us all as our
varying accent. But it is as hard for some of us to
jive up to a full pocket as for others to live up to a full
brain. It is hard even to meet the expectation that you
will know, or know about, our tremendously moneyed
people; but here is a curiosity which you do not have
to inspire before you gratify it, for it exists already,
while as to our political affairs, or even our military
or naval affairs, not to speak of our scientific or literary
affairs, the curiosity that you gratify you must first
have inspired.

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THE AMERICAN INVASION

Their curiosity as to our riches does not judge the
EngUsh, as might be supposed. They are very romantic,
with a young, lusty appetite for the bizarre and the
marvellous, as their taste in fiction evinces; and they
need not be contemned as sordid admirers of money
because they wish to know the lengths it can go to with
the people who seem to be just now making the most
money. Their interest in a phenomenon which we our-
selves have not every reason to be proud of, is not
without justification, as we must allow if we consider
a little, for if we consider, we must own that our greatest
achievement in the last twenty or thirty years has been
in the heaping up of riches. Our magnificent success
in that sort really eclipses our successes in every other,
and the average American who comes abroad must be
content to shine in the reflected glory of those Americans
who have recently, more than any others, rendered
our name illustrious. If we do not like the fact all
that we have to do is to set about doing commen-
surate things in art, in science, in letters, or even in
arms.

It will not quite do to say that the non-millionaire
American enjoys in England the interest mixed with
commiseration which is the lot of a poor relation of the
great among kindly people. That would not be true,
and possibly the fact is merely that the name American
first awakens in the English some such associations
with riches as the name South African awakened before
it awakened others more poignant and more personal.
Already the South African had begun to rival the Amer-
ican in the popular imagination; as the Boer war fades
more and more into the past, the time may come when
we shall be confusedly welcomed as Africanders or
South Americans.

61

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If I were to offer what I have been saying as my opin-
ions, or my conclusions from sufficient observations I
should be unfair, if not uncandid. The sum of what
one sees and hears in a foreign country is as nothing
to the sum of what one does not see and hear; and the
immense balance may be so far against the foregoing
inferences that it is the part of mere prudence to declare
that they are not my opinions or conclusions, but are
only impressions, vague and hurried, guesses from
cursory observations, deductions from slight casual
incidents. They are mere gleams from social facets,
sparks struck out by chance encounter, and never
glancing lights from the rarefied atmosphere in which
the two nations have their formal reciprocities. For
all that I have really the right to say from substantial
evidence to the contrary, I might very well say that
the English value us for those things of the mind and
soul which we are somewhat neglectful of ourselves,
and I insist the more, therefore, that it is only their
love of fairy-tales which is taken with the notion of an
opulence so widespread among us as to constitute us a
nation of potential, if not actual, millionaires.

They would hasten to reproach me, I am afraid, for
speaking of England, though merely for purposes of
illustration, as a foreign country. One is promptly told
that Americans are not regarded as foreigners in Eng-
land, and is left to conjecture one's self a sort of com-
promise between English and alien, a little less kin than
Canadian and more kind than Australian. The idea
has its quaintness; but the American in England has
been singularly unfortunate if he has had reason to be-
lieve that the kindness done him is not felt. What has
always been true of the English is true now. They
do not say or do the thing which is not, out of polite-

62

THE AMERICAN INVASION

ness; their hypocrisies, if they have any, are for their
God, and not for their fellow-man. When they talk of
their American brethren, they mean it; just as when
they do not talk of them so they mean something less,
or nothing at all. The American who wishes to be
taken nationally, may trust any expression friendly to
our nation that he hears ; but still I think he will have a
better time if he prefers being taken personally. That
is really making one's self at home in a different, I will
no longer say a foreign, country; the English are eager
hosts, and wish you to make yourself at home — if they
like you. Nationally we cannot make ourselves, or
be made at home, except in the United States. To any
other people, to people sometimes claiming to be nearer
than the first degree of cousinship, our nationality,
taking it in bulk, is necessarily a mystery. We are so
very like them; why should we be so very unlike them?
The difference puzzles them, annoys them; why seek
points of it, and turn them to the light? The same
mystery distresses the American when the points of
their difference are turned to the light. A man's na-
tionality is something he is justly proud of, but not till
it is put aside can the man of another nation have any
joy of him humanly, spiritually. If you insist upon
talking to the English about American things, you
have them in an unknown world, a really unknowable
world, as you yourself know it; and you bewilder and
weary them, unless they are studying Americanism,
and then they still do not understand you. You are
speaking English, but the meaning is a strange tongue.
I say again that I do not know why any one should
wish to be caressed for his nationality. I think one
might more self-respectfully wish to be liked for one's
self than joined with a hundred million compatriots,

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and loved in the lump. If the English, however, are
now trying to love us nationally we should be careful
not to tax their affections too heavily, or demand too
much of them. We must remember that they are more
apt to be deceived by our likeness to themselves than
by our unlikeness. AVhen an Englishman and an Amer-
ican meet on common ground they have arrived from
opposite poles. The Englishman, though he knows the
road the American has come, cannot really imagine
it. His whole experience of life has taught him that
if you have come that road, you are not the kind of
man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road,
or else you are another kind of man. He revolves in a
maze of hopeless conjecture; he gives up trying to guess
your conundrum, and reads into you the character of
some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes you
after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not
for your nation. All the same he may not know it,
and may think he likes you because you are an agreeable
American.

My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying
(that, on such dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an
inference from which I shrink a little ; it seems so very
bold, so very contrary to recent prepossessions. But the
candor which I would be so glad not to practise, obliges
me to say that I think the American who is himself
interesting, would have been as welcome in England
twenty-five years ago as at this day, and he would not
have been expected to be rich, or to have the acquaint-
ance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote pe-
riod, certain fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied
the English taste for wildness in us. There had been
Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been other
Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows.

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THE AMERICAN INVASION

There had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise,
of an American fineness, which might be as well in its
way as the American wildness, and the American who
had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a
liking ready for him then as the wild American found
earlier, or the rich American finds later.

In fact, interesting Americans have always been per-
sonally liked in England, if I must really go to the
extreme of saying it. AVhat the English now join in
owning, if the question of greater kindness between the
two countries comes up, is that their ruling class made
a vast mistake in choosing, officiously though not offi-
cially, the side of the South in our Civil War. They
own it frankly, eagerly. But they owned the same
thing frankly, if not so eagerly, twenty-five years ago.
Even during the Civil War, I doubt if an acceptable
American would have suffered personally among them.
He would have suffered nationally, but he has now and
then to suffer so still, for they cannot have the same
measure of his nationality as he, and they necessarily
tread upon its subtile circumferences here and there.

From the very beginning of Americanism the case
has been the same. The American in England during
the Civil War was strangely unfortunate if he did not
meet many and great Englishmen who thought and
felt with him; and if there were now any American so
stricken in years as to be able to testify from his own
experience of the English attitude towards us in the
War of Independence, he could tell us of the outspoken
and constant sympathy of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Wal-
pole, and their like, with the American cause — which
they counted the English cause. He could tell of the
deep undercurrent of favor among the English people,
which the superficial course of power belied and at last

65

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ceased to control, in our earlier vital war as well as in
our later.

So much for that consideration of us nationally, which
I do not think England, in her quality of hostess, is
bound to show her several American guests. I do not
blame her that the sympathy of her greatest sons, so
far as it has been shown us nationally, has been shown
in her interest, which they believed the supreme in-
terest of mankind, rather than in our interest, which it
is for us to believe the supreme interest of mankind.
Even when they are talking America they are thinking
England; they cannot otherwise; they must; it is im-
perative; it is essential that they should. We talk of
England on the same terms, with our own inner version.

There is another point in this inquiry which I hesitate
to touch, and which if I were better advised I should
not touch — that is, the English interest in the beauty
and brilliancy of our women. Their charm is now
magnanimously conceded and now violently confuted
in their public prints; now and then an Englishman
lets himself go — over his own signature even, at times —
and denounces our women, their loveliness, their liveli-
ness, their goodness, in terms which if I repeated them
would make some timider spirits pause in their resolu-
tion to marry English dukes and run English society.
But his hot words are hardly cold before another Eng-
lishman comes to the rescue of our countrywomen, and
lifts them again to that pinnacle w4iere their merits
quite as much as the imagination of their novelists have
placed them. Almost as much as our millionaires
they are the object of a curiosity which one has not
had to inspire. Where, in what part, in which favored
city, do they most abound ? What is the secret of their
dazzling wit and beauty, the heart of their mystery?

66

THE AMERICAN INVASION

The most ardent of their votaries must flush in generous
deprecation when those orphic inquiries flow from hps
quite as divine as their own.

For the rest, if there is really that present liking for
Americans in England, which we must wish to touch
with all delicacy as the precious bloom of a century-
plant at last coming to flower, the explanation may be
sought perhaps in an effect of the English nature to
which I shall not be the one to limit it. They have
not substantially so much as phenomenally changed
towards us. They are, like ourselves, always taking
stock, examining themselves to see what they have on
hand. From time to time they will, say, accuse them-
selves of being insular, and then, suddenly, they invite
themselves to be continental, to be French, to be Ger-
man, to be Italian, to be Bulgarian, or whatever; and
for a while they believe that they have become so. All
this time they remain immutably English. It is not that
they are insensible of their defects; they tell themselves
of them in clamorous tones; and of late, possibly, they
have asked themselves why they are not what they
think the Americans are in certain things. If the logic
of their emotions in this direction were a resolution to
like all the Americans with a universal affection, I should
admire their spirit, but I should feel a difficulty in its op-
eration for a reason which I hesitate to confess; I do not
like all the Americans myself.

VII
IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

IN speaking of any specific social experience it is al-
ways a question of how far one may pardonably
err on the side of indiscretion; and if I remember here
a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons — in
a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a
cathedral crypt — it is with the sufficiently meek hope of
keeping well within bounds which only the nerves can
ascertain.

The quaintness of the place may have contributed
to an uncommon charm in the occasion; but its charm
was perhaps a happy accident which would have tried
in vain to repeat itself even there. It ended in a visit
to the House, where the strangers were admitted on
the rigid terms and in the strict limits to which non-
members must submit themselves. But one might
well undergo much more in order to hear John Burns
speak in the place to which he has fought his right under
a system of things as averse as can be imagined to a
working-man's sharing in the legislation for working-
men. The matter in hand that night chanced to be one
peculiarly interesting to a believer in the people's doing
as many things as possible for themselves, as the body
politic, instead of leaving them to a variety of bodies
corporate. The steamboat service on the Thames had
grown so insufficient and so inconvenient that it was

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IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

now a question of having it performed by the London
County Council, which should be authorized to run lines
of boats solely in the pubhc interest, and not merely
for the pleasure and profit of directors and stockholders.
The monstrous proposition did not alarm those fears of
socialism which anything of the kind would have roused
with us; nobody seemed to expect that blowing up the
Parliament buildings with dynamite would be the next
step towards anarchy. There was a good deal of hear-
hearing from Mr. Burns's friends, with some friendly
chaffing from his enemies as he went on, steadily and
quietly, with his statement of the case; but there was
no serious opposition to the measure which was after-
wards carried in due course of legislation.

I was left to think two or three things about the
matter which, though not strictly photographic, are
yet so superficial that they will not be out of place here.
Several members spoke besides Mr. Burns, but the labor
leader was easily first, not only in the business quality
of what he said, but in his business fashion of saying it.
As much as any of them, as the oldest-familied and
longest-leisured of them, his manners had

"that repose
Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere,'^

and is supposed to distinguish them from those of the
castes of Smith and Brown. But I quickly forgot this
in considering how far socialism had got itself realized
in London through the activities of the County Council,
which are so largely in the direction of municipal control.
One hears and reads as little of socialism now in London
as in New York, but that is because it has so effectually
passed from the debated principle to the accomplished
fact. It has been embodied in so many admirable

LONDON FILMS

works that the presumption is rather in favor of it as
something truly conservative. It is not, as with us,
still under the ban of a prejudice too ignorant to know
in how many things it is already effective; but this is,
of course, mainly because English administration is so
nmch honester than ours. It can be safely taken for
granted that a thing ostensibly done for the greatest
good of the greatest number is not really done for the
profit of a few on the inside. The English can let the
County Council put mmiicipal boats on the Thames
with the full assurance that the County Council will
never be in case to retire on a cumulative income from
them.

But apparently the English can do this only by laying
the duty and responsibility upon the imperial legislat-
ure. It was droll to sit there and hear a body, ulti-
mately if not immediately charged with the welfare of
a state conscious in every continent and the islands of
every sea, debating whether the municipal steamboats
would not be too solely for the behoof of the London
suburb of West Ham. England, Scotland, Ireland,
Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand,
with any of their tremendous interests, must rest in
abeyance while that question concerning West Ham
was pending. We, in our way, would have settled it
by the vote of a Board of Aldermen, subject to the veto
of a mayor; but we might not have settled it so justly
as the British Parliament did in concentrating the collec-
tive wisdom of a world-empire upon it.

The House of Commons took its tremendous respon-
sibility lightly, even gayly. Except for the dramatic
division into government and opposition benches, the
spectacle was in no wise impressive. There was a
restless going and coming of members, as if they could

70

IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMIMONS

not stand being bored by their duties any longer, and
then, after a brief absence, found strength for them.
Some sat with their hats on, some with their hats off;
some with their legs stretched out, some with their legs
pulled in. One could easily distinguish the well-known
faces of ministers, who paid no more heed, apparently,
to what was going on than the least recognizable mem-
bers unknown to caricature. The reporters, in their
gallery, alone seemed to give any attention to the pro-
ceedings, but doubtless the speaker, under his official
wig, concerned himself with them. The people ap-
parently most interested were, like myself, in the vis-
itors' gallery. From time to time one of them asked
the nearest usher who it was that was speaking; in his
eagerness to see and hear, one of them would rise up
and crane forward, and then the nearest usher would
make him sit down; but the ushers were generally very
lenient, and upon the w^hole looked quite up to the level
of the average visitor in intelligence.

I am speaking of the men visitors; the intellectual
light of the women visitors, whatever it was, was much
dispersed and intercepted by the screen behind which
they were placed. I do not know why the women should
be thus obscured, for, if the minds of members were in
danger of being distracted by their presence, I should
think they would be still more distracted when the ele-
ment of mystery was added to it by the grille. Seen
across the whole length of the House from the men's
gallery the women looked as if tightly pressed against
the grille, and had a curiously thin, phantasmal ef-
fect, or the effect of frescoed figures done very flat.
To the imaginative spectator their state might have
symbolized the relation of women to Parliamentary
politics, of which we read much in English novels, and
6 71

LONDON FILMS

even English newspapers. Women take much more
interest in poUtical affairs in England than with us;
that is well known; but it may not be so well known
that they are in much greater enjoyment of the fran-
chise, if the franchise is indeed a pleasure. I do not
know whether they vote for school-committeemen, or
whether there are school-committeemen for them to vote
for; but they may vote for guardians of the poor, and
may themselves be voted for to that office; and they
may vote for members of the Urban Councils and the
County Councils if they have property to be taxed by
those bodies. This is the right for which our Revolu-
tion was made, though we continue, with regard to
women, the Georgian heresy of taxation without repre-
sentation; but it is doubtful to the barbarian whether
good can come of women's mixing in parliamentary
elections at which they have no vote. Of course, with
us a like interference would be taken jocosely, ironically;
it would, at the bottom, be a good joke, amusing from
the tendency of the feminine temperament to acts of
circus in moments of high excitement; but whether the
Englislmien regard it so, the English alone know.
They are much more serious than w^e, and perhaps they
take it as a fit manifestation of the family principle
which is the underlying force of the British Constitution.
One heard of ladies who were stumping (or whatever
is the English equivalent of stumping) the country on
the preferential tariff question and the other questions
which divide Conservatives and Liberals; but in spite
of these examples of their proficiency the doubt re-
mained whether those who have not the suffrage can
profitably attempt to influence it. Till women can
make up their minds to demand and accept its respon-
sibilities, possibly they will do best to let it alone.

72

IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

When they want it they will have it; but until they do,
it may not be for nothing, or even for the control of the
members' wandering fancies, that the House of Com-
mons interposes between them and itself the grille
through which they show like beauteous wraiths or
frescoes in the flat. That screen is emblematic of
their real exclusion from the higher government which
their social participation in parhamentary elections,
and the men's habit of talking politics with them,
flatter them into a delusive sense of sharing. A woman
may be the queen of England, but she may not be
one of its legislators. That must be because women
like being queens and do not really care for being
legislators.

VIII
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

THE secular intensification of the family life makcb
it possible for the English to abandon their secular
domesticity, when they will, without apparent detri-
ment to the family life. Formerly the English family
which came up to London for the season or a part of it
went into a house of its own, or, in default of that, went
into lodgings, or into a hotel of a kind happily obso-
lescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the
hotels which abound in London, of a type combining
more of the Continental and American features than
the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold,
grim, and silently rapacious, heavy in appointments
and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel
is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a
home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all
ruinous. It has a table-d'hote dinner at separate tables
and a fair version of the French cuisine. If it is one of
the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dear-
est, and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every
way than our cheaper. The supply has created a de-
mand which apparently did not exist before, and the
Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a
hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the
American with being.

In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants

74

THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

in great number and variety, he has become a diner and
luncher at restaurants. Whether he has been able to
exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once
supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle
species, cannot say, but it is evident that at his hotel
or his restaurant he dines or lunches as publicly as ever
the American did or does; and he has his friends to din-
ner or lunch without pretence of a private dining-room.
One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by
its facility to those excesses of hospitality which are such
a drain on English incomes; but again that is something
of which an outsider can hardly venture to have an
opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern
hotel and restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are push-
ing the old-fashioned lodging as well as the old-fashioned
hotel out of the general favor, and have already driven
them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a level
where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species.
In the streets neighboring on Piccadilly there are
many apartments which are effectively small hotels,
where you pay a certain price for your rooms, and a
certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave
this neighborhood if you want the true lodging where
you pay for your apartment, and order the provisions
which are cooked for you, and which are apportioned
to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is not seri-
ously affected by the reality that your provisions are
also apportioned to the needs of your landlord's family.
Even then, the ideal remains beautiful, and you have
an image, somewhat blurred and battered, of home,
such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your
landlord is the butler who has married the cook, your
valeting and cooking approach as nearly perfection as

you can hopefully demand.

75

LONDON FILMS

It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities
of the appointments over which an air of decent reti-
cence is cast, and it will have been quite useless to try
guarding all the points at which you might be plundered.
The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and perhaps
in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging
you are promptly and respectfully personalized; your
tastes are consulted, if not gratified; your minor wants,
in which your comfort lies, are interpreted, and possibly
there grows up round you the semblance, which is not
altogether deceitful, of your o\^m house.

The theory is admirable, but I think the system is
in decay, though to say this is something like accusing
the stability of the Constitution. Very likely if some
American ghost were to revisit a well-known London
street a hundred years from now, he would find it still
with the legend of "Apartments" in every transom;
and it must not be supposed that lodgings have by any
means fallen wholly to the middle, much less the lower
middle, classes. In one place there was a marquis over-
head; in another there was a lordship of unascertained
degree, who was heard on a court night being got ready
by his valet and the landlord's whole force, and then
marking his descent to his cab by the clanking of his
sword upon the stairs, after which the joint service
spent a good part of the night in celebrating the event
at a banquet in the basement. At two lodgings in a
most unpretentious street, it was the landlords' boast
that a royal princess had taken tea with their tenants,
who were of the quality to be rightfully taken tea with
by a royal princess; and at certain hours of the after-
noon during the season it was not uncommon to see
noble equipages standing at the doors of certain apart-
ments with a full equipment of coachmen and foot-

76

THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

men, ana ladies of unmistakable fashion ascending and
descending by the carriage - steps like the angels on
Jacob's ladder. It could be surmised that they were
visiting poor relations, or modest merit of some sort,
but it was not necessary to suppose this, and upon the
whole I prefer not.

The search for lodgings, which began before the sea-
son was conscious of itself, was its own reward in the
pleasures it yielded to the student of human nature and
the lover of mild adventure. The belief in lodgings
was a survival from an age of faith, when in the early
eighteen-eighties they seemed the most commodious
and desirable refuge to the outwandering American
family which then first proved them. The fragmentary
outwanderers who now visited London, after an absence
of twenty-two years, did not take into account the fact
that their apartment of long ago was the fine event of
the search, prolonged for weeks, of two friends, singu-
larly intelligent and rarely versed in London; they
took it as a type, and expected to drive directly to its fel-
low. They drove indirectly to unnumbered lodgings
unlike it and unworthy of its memory, and it was not
until after three days that they were able to fix upon a
lodging that appeared the least remote from their ideal.
Then, in a street not too far from Mayfair, and of the
quality of a self-respectful dependant of Belgravia, they
set up their breathless Lares and panting Penates, and
settled down with a sense of comfort that grew upon
them day by day. The place undeniably had its charm,
if not its merit. The drawing-room chairs were in a
proper pattern of brocade, and, though abraded at their
edges and corners, were of a tasteful frame; the arm-
chairs, covered like the sofa in a cheerful cretonne, lent
the parting guest the help of an outward incline; the

77

LONDON FILMS

sofa, heaped with cushions, could not conceal a broken
spring, though it braved it out with the consciousness
of having been sat upon by a royal princess who had
once taken tea in that lodging. But the other appoint-
ments, including a pretty writing-desk and a multitude
of china plates almost hiding the wall-paper, were un-
fractured, and the little dining-room was very cosey.
After breakfast it had the habit of turning itself into a
study, where one of the outwanderers used to set himself
down and ask himself with pen and ink what he honest-
ly thought and felt about this England which he had
always been more or less bothering about. The inquiry
took time which he might better have spent in day-
dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven,
with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots
mezzotinted against it. He might have more profitably
wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow-
brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their
clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle dis-
tance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered
outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy back-
yards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with
the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green
points of electric light: the same sort of light that
showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing
under them. Inquiries into English civilization can
always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man,
and I put them down roughly in behalf of a futile phi-
losopher who ought to have studied them in their inex-
haustible detail.

He could not be reproached with insensibility to his
domestic circumstance, from the combination of cook
and butler which took him into its ideal keeping to the
unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron who

78

THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

had the dining-room floor, and was represented through
his open door by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly
valeted clothes. The valeting in that house was unex-
ceptionable, and the service at table was of a dress-
coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever
eaten ^ there. The service throughout was of a gravity
never relaxed, except in the intimate moments of
bringing the bath in the morning, when the news of the
day before and the coming events of the present day
were suggestively yet respectfully discussed.

The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of
their most fortunate inspirations in sight-seeing to the
suggestions of the landlord, whose apartments I would
in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There was,
indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made
by some envious trunk; but there was nothing of the
frowziness, the shabbiness of many of those houses in
the streets neighboring Mayfair where many Americans
are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house
on the borders of Belgravia.

The Americans I am imagining had first carried on
their search in those genteel regions, which could hardly
have looked their best in the last moments of prepara-
tion before the season began. The house-cleaning which
went on in all of them was no more hurried than the ad-
vance of the slow English spring outside, where the buds
appeared after weeks of hesitation, and the leaves un-
folded themselves at long leisure, and the blossoms de-
liberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better
stay in than come out. Day after day found the lodg-
ing-houses with their carpets up, and their furniture
inverted, and their hallways and stairways reeking
from slop-pails or smelling from paint-pots, and with
no visible promise of readiness for lodgers. They were

79

LONDON FILMS

pretty nearly all of one type. A young German or
Swiss — there for the language — came to the door in the
coat he had not always got quite into, and then sum-
moned from the depths below a landlord or landlady to
be specific about times and terms, to show the rooms,
and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest dim
and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the thresh-
old and worn to the quick by the cleansing of number-
less feet; and an indescribable frowziness prevailed which
imparted itself to the condition of widowhood dug up
by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes
there responded to his summons a clerical, an almost
episcopal presence, which was clearly that of a former
butler, unctuous in manner and person from long serv-
ing. Or sometimes there would be something much
more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth;
in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond
the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of
holding in the background unsurmised charges for
electric lights, for candles, for washing, for baths, for
boots, and for what-know-I, after the most explicit
declaration that the first demand included everything.
Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that
when the season began, or after the first of May the rent
would be doubled.

The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled
drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted cham-
bers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white
counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier
mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind
courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby
antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall
showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of
recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of

80

By courtesy of Loiidini Stermscoptc and Photograph Company

ST. Paul's cathedral

THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

pseudo-sesthetic rugs. The drawing-room expected to
be the dining-room also, and faintly breathed the stale-
ness of the meals served in it. If the front windows
often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows
had no air but that of the sunless spaces which successive
architectural exigencies had crowded with projecting
cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement sky-
lights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages
and the stairs were never visible except after dark; even
then the foot rather than the eye found the way. Yet,
once settled in such a place, it developed possibilities of
comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest hope-
fulness could not have forecast. The meals came up
and could be eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English
hotels have good and nearly all English lodgings bad,
could be exchanged for tea; the service was always well-
intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid
twice as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so
ill-used as you might have been.

It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs,
is unsteady on its feet from the competition of the great
numbers of those large, new, reasonably cheap, and
admirably managed hotels. Yet the lodging-houses
remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions,
throughout the land, and if the English are giving them
up they are renouncing them with national delibera-
tion. The most mysterious fact concerning them is
that they are, with all their multitude, so difficult to
get, and are so very bad when you have got them.
Having said this, I remember with fond regret particular
advantages in every lodging of my acquaintance.

IX
CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

THE painting -up which the apartments, as they
always call themselves, undergo inside and out, in
preparation for the season, is a rite to which all London
bows during April as far as it can afford it. The lodg-
ing-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh
green its front door and window - frames, or perhaps
reddening its area railing; but private houses pretend-
ing to be smart clothe themselves from eave to base-
ment in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints sus-
ceptible of the soonest harm from the natural and
artificial climates of London. While the paint is fresh,
or "wet," the word by which you are warned from its
contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives
the gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the
boxes of brilliant flowers at every window-sill, promises
a gayety which the season realizes in rather unusual
measure. It is said that the flowers at the windows
must be renewed every month, against the blight of
the London smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot
be renewed so often, it is of perhaps a little more durable
beauty. For a month of preparation, while the house-
fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters
emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful
trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor,
and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the

82

TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of
another London season.

If the American's business or pleasure takes him out
of town on the edge of the season and brings him back
well over its border, he will have an agreeable effect
from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs
he left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion
will have got in its work, and the streets, the pavements,
the parks will have responded with a splendor, a gayety
earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more
those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the
passing feet will be oftener those going to luncheon and
afternoon tea, and not so solely those hurrying to or
lagging from the toils of the day. Even the morning
trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to
arrive with multitudes fresher and brighter than those
which arrived before the season began. I do not know
whether it was in tribute to the joyful time that a house-
maid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and
whitening up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore
a long, black train and a bolero hat and jacket, and I do
not say that this is the usual dress of the London house-
maid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting
on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all
the London steps wear in the morning. One might as
well pretend that the may is consciously white and red
on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares in honor
of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so
with no apparent literary association, but the American
must always feel as if he were quoting the name from
an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly
appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom al-
most as long as its namesake month endures. But that
is no great wonder : when a tree has worked as hard as a

83

LONDON FILMS

tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is natu-
rally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on
for weeks.

The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their
silken fulness; the trees stood densely, softly, darkly
rounded in the dim air, and they did not begin to shed
their foliage till almost two months later. But I think
I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the
London trees as one evening in the grounds of a country
club not so far out of London as not to have London
trees in its grounds. They were mostly oaks, beeches,
and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide,
slow water, which could not be called a stream, and they
hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists.
The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density
as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I de-
clared which the birds were singing their vespers in.
There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I
think must have been singing in the heart of the mist,
and which probably mistook it for a tree of like sub-
stance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life;
and really the place w^as enchanting, with its close-
cropped, daisy - starred lawns, and the gay figures of
polo-players coming home from a distant field in the
pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June.

The birds are heard everywhere in London through
that glowing month, and their singing would drown
the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab-
horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens
of the houses back together and form innumerable
shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty
of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the
American city-dweller, who never sees anything but
clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but

84

TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more
spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses
throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.

The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest,
London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it
where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in
the street which was almost Belgravian was not without
its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really
warm days came (and they came at the time appointed
by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a
coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends
building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph
for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be
making some very gravelly garden-beds along the wall
when the hen proclaimed her achievement, and he called
his children and their mother to rejoice with him. His
oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his
lodgers came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am
sure the royal princess would have done if she had been
taking tea there that afternoon.

He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man,
and though his aspirates were dislocated, his heart,
however he miscalled it, was in the right place. We
had many improving conversations, by which I profited
more than he ; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of
every class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively
upon the rights of his station. In England you feel that
you cannot trespass upon the social demesne of the
lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the
premises. The social inferiors have a convention of
profound respect for the social superiors, but it some-
times seemed provisional only, a mask which they ex-
pected one day to drop ; yet this may have been one of
those errors which foreigners easily make. What is

85

LONDON FILMS

certain is that the superior had better keep to his place,
as the inferior keeps to his. Across the barrier the
classes can and do exchange much more kindness than
we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this
is not a good time to say that the English manner to
dependants is beyond criticism. The consideration for
them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things if
they please, and they are invariably and distinctly
thanked for the smallest service. There are no doubt
exceptions to the kindness which one sees, but I did not
see the exceptions. The social machinery has so little
play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the
grind of class upon class might be intolerable. With
us in America there is no love lost between rich and
poor; unless the poor are directly and obviously depen-
dent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with
one another, as they never seem in England. Very
possibly that perfect English manner from superiors
is also a convention, like the respect of the inferiors,
but it is a becoming one.

This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to
say my landlord, who told me that when he first took
that house a flock of starlings used to visit him in the
spring. He did not tell me that his little house stood
in the region of Nell Gwynne's mulberry-gardens; his
knowledge was of observation, not of reading; and he
was a gossip only about impersonal things. Concerning
his lodgers he was as a grave for silence, and I fancy
this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the
national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak
once of a young German lodger whom he had kept
from going to a garden-party in full evening-dress, but
the incident was of a remoteness which excused its
mention. What had impressed him in it was the for-

86

TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

eigner's almost tearful gratitude when he came home
and acknowledged that he had found everybody in the
sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him
to wear.

While the may was still hesitating on the hawthorns
whether to come out, there were plum and peach trees
in the gardens which emulated the earlier daring of the
almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the
greengages that come there after they have ceased to
come from France are as good as our own when the
curculio does not get them; but the efflorescence of the
peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they never
fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally
sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances
are against them. Perhaps the fruits of the fields and
orchards, if not of the streets, would do better in Eng-
land if the nights were warmer. The days are often
quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so de-
cidedly that even in that heated fortnight in July a
blanket or two were never too much. In the spring a
day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of
the afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid.

SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY
SIGHT-SEEING

I HAD a very good will towards all the historic
temples in London, and I hope that this, with the
fact that I had seen them before, will pass for my ex-
cuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed
had some self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul's, of
which I said to myself I ought to see it again; there
might be an emotion in it. I passed and repassed it,
till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I
entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of
other tardy visitors who had come at the closing hour.
After this unavailing visit, the necessity of going again
established itself in me, and I went repeatedly, choosing,
indeed, rainy days when I could not well go elsewhere,
and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy
of its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.

Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that
St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted
St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very
hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey
in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey
are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they
are in the taste of times far enough back to have become
rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death
starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me

88

VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century;
but I do very much mind the heavy presence of the
Fames or Britannias of the earUer nineteenth century
celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement
in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when
the national type was least able to inspire grief with
an artistic expression. The statesmen, the ecclesiastics,
the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about
in stone with no more interest for the spectator than
the Fames or the Britannias.

The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much
as at that list of London bishops, which, if you are so
lucky as to come on it by chance where it is inscribed
beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense of the
long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops
of the Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly
Latin names; bishops of the Saxon and Danish times
remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops of
the Norman time, with appellations that again flow
upon the tongue; bishops of the English time, with
designations as familiar as those in the directory: what
a record! It moves you more than any of those uni-
formed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen,
and it speaks more eloquently of the infrangible con-
tinuity, the unbroken greatness of England.

My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other
English cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to
think, that England was overgothicized, and that I
should be glad, or at least relieved, by something
classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That
architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the
English faith, which continues the ancient tradition in
terms not ceremonially very distinct from those of
Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York

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to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences
which' were all in favor of the elder fane. The minster
now asserted its superior majesty, and its mere magni-
tude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its
clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty
windows, as they held their own in my memory, dwarfed
St. Paul's as much physically as spiritually.

A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces
of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined
by the electric blaze in the choir ; a monotonous chanting
filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period
of the church, and the sense of something pagan that
had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived,
the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St.
Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man,
not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine.
Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were
ordered to be built after the plans of the most skilful
architects of their time and race, and both are monu-
ments to civilizations which had outUved mystery.

I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey
than to St. Paul's, but I had from the first so profoundly
and thoroughly naturalized myself to the place that it
was like going back to a home of my youth. It was,
indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old;
and if I might advise any reader who still has his first
visit to Westminster Abbey before him, I would counsel
him not to go there much past his twenty-fourth year.
If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the
year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the Enghsh
December, so short as to be red all through with a sense
of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset.
Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell
him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and

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how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up
in the Poets' Corner and read the words, " Oh, rare Ben
Jonson!" The good Ben was never so constantly
rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well
enough from having tried to read him in days when I
was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning
then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the
riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a
wealth of poetry w^iich he had not actually enjoyed;
and in this generous emotion the tears came.

I am not sensible of having been grouped with others
in charge of a verger, but a verger there must have been,
and at my next visit there must equally have been one;
he only entered, rigid, authoritative, unsparing, into
my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely
separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that
he was going with a flock of other docile tourists. I
suppose it would be possible to see Westminster Abbey
without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be
safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second
visits, but that my memory rejected him as unfit for
association with fames and names made so much of in
death that it seemed better than life in all dignified
particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my
chances of getting along for a few centuries on earth.

I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for
he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of
such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next-
to-last visit I found him most intelligibly accessible to
my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty
which used to be carried in the funeral processions of
the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till
he had dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then,
for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some

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upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence
of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they
had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly life-
like in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubt-
less there were others, but those are the ones I recall,
and with their identity I felt the power that glared
from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Eliza-
beth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that
dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into
them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish
that art had so preserved all the great embodiments of
history.

I hope it was some better motive than the sight-
seer's that at least partly caused me to make myself part
of the congregation listening to a sermon in the Abbey
on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the
stir of the place's literary associations began with the
sight of Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like
him, in the grand simplicity of his looks, as he was when
he lived; and then presently the effigies of all the "dear
sons of memory" began to reveal themselves, medallion
and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory
and inscription. We went and sat, for the choral ser-
vice, under the bust of Macaulay, and, looking down,
we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his
grave. It might have been the wounded sense of
reverence, it might have been the dread of a longer
sermon than we had time for, but we left before the
sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt
little public garden which lies by the Thames in the
shadow of the Parliament Houses; and who has said
the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand
years old, but some day they will be, and then those
who cavilled at them when they were only fifty will be

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

sorry. For my part I think them as Gothically noble
and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic,
too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew
from the ground there far into the gray sky to which
their architecture is native. It was a pale, resigned
afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted heat
in it, which a recent rain had sHghtly abated, and we
were glad of a memoriferous property which it seemed
to exhale. Suddenly in the midst of that most alien
environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom
we had last parted twenty years before in the woods
beside Lake George, and whose apparition at once
implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so sensa-
tional is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if
it is so, why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and
we were in the shadow of the Parliament Houses again,
and no longer in that of the forest which did not know
it was Gothic.

We were going to hang upon the parapet of West-
minster Bridge for the view it offers of the Houses,
to which the spacious river makes itself a foreground
such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in
this cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the
pleasure of realizing the statue of Cromwell which has
somehow found place where it belongs in those stately
precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his
sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend
of Parliaments than Charles whom he slew, but he was
such a massive piece of English history that the void his
effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons
must have ached for it before.

When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of
the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove
homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The

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roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the
crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle,
shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant
than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense
everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and
the children strayed along the streets without playing,
or lagged homeward behind their parents. There were
no vehicles except those of pleasure or convenience; the
omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar; our cab-
horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the
noisiest thing we heard. The trees in the squares and
places hung dull and tired in the coolish, dusty atmos-
phere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon
passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties
of experience which, after all, one does not impart.

Those who like, as I do, the innocence which compan-
ions the sophistication of London will frequent Kensing-
ton Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has
set the seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then
seems peculiarly the playground of little children in
the care of their nurses, if they are well-to-do people's
children, and in one another's care if they are poor
people's. All over England the tenderness of the little
children for the less is delightful. I remember to have
seen scarcely any squabbling, and I saw abundance of
caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies of
almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if
it were a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This
goes on in spite of a reciprocal untidiness which is in-
describable; for the English poor children have the
very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch have
dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering
of filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think,
perhaps, they wash up a little when they come to play

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

in Kensington Gardens, to sail their ships on its placid
waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter the
palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as
they do in troops, they are commonly in charge of their
teachers; and their raptures of loyalty in the presence
of those reminders that queens, too, must have once
been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are doubtless
as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and
political associations. Since William III. built the
palace and laid out the gardens that he might dwell
within easy reach of his capital, but out of its smoke
and din, the place has not lost the character which his
homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially
sweet and commendable because of its relation to the
good Victoria's childhood. One does not forget ^' great
Anna's " drinking tea there in the Orangery so nobly de-
signed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is
dearest because Victoria spent so many of her early
days in it, and received there the awful summons lit-
erally to rise from her dreams and come and be queen
of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke
of poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet
provided even for the election of young girls to the
presidency; and though we may prefer our prosaical
republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of
such an incident in the mother monarchy.

The Temple was another of the places that I did not
think I should visit again, because I had so pleasant
and perfect a memory of it, which I feared to impair.
More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in the
chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and
then went out and wandered about in the wet, for it
was raining very diligently. I cannot say, now, just
where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was

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down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a
way the first images of places always remain, however
blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a
dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next
saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September
day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in
which I had left them then, but from the pensive asso-
ciations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as
that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my
wonted gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler
after our drive from the Thames Embankment and be-
gan to walk up towards the Temple Church. I will not
ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will mere-
ly have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies
of the crusaders lying cross-legged in the pavement
of the circle to which one enters. According to the
strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our party,
these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture
since she saw them first. It was not merely that they
had uncrossed their legs and crossed them another way,
or some such small matter; but that now they lay side
by side, whereas formerly they had better accommo-
dated themselves to the architectural design, and lain
in a ring with their long-pointed toes pointing inward
to the centre. AVhy they should have changed, we
could not understand; the verger said they had not;
but he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly
in a limp sort on keeping the door locked so that people
could not get away without his help, and must either
fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple Church,
indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cun-
ningham says that the two edifices most worth visiting
are the church and the Middle Temple Hall, which I
now preferred luxuriously to leave in my remembrances

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party,
straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the
empty courts, and envying, not very actively, the
lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking old brick dwell-
ings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this
day, but I am told they are practically of both sexes,
and that when married they are allowed to domesticate
themselves in these buildings in apartments sublet to
them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law,
but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are
subject only to a semicentennial ejection, so that I do
not know where a young literary couple could more
charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children
would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the
Temple paths and on the Temple lawns. At one house,
a girl was vaguely arriving with a band-box and parcels,
and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint, remote
date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash
of our period came to us through the Strand gate soft-
ened to a mellow roar. The noise was not great enough,
we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman in court
dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the
top of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith's
grave, and leaning forward with one hand extended
as if, in the spirit of the present entente cordiale, he was
calling our attention to the fact that the garlands and
streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the
walls about him were in the mother-clime of a real Amer-
ican redness.

It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else
of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all
our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that
famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death
of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble

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remnant of that ancient palace of the Enghsh kings
which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece
of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest,
saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues
of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as
that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I
must count that last day of our September in London
as spent in such sort as to be of unsurpassed if not un-
rivalled impression, because of the visit which we then
so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we
had almost not paid it at all.

The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and
naval museum; with the swords and saddles and uni-
forms and other equipments of divers English heroes
in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the two
most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I
was not so vain of my reading about battles as not
to be glad of seeing how the men-of-war deployed at
Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops were
engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of
the cannons' mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when
Bliicher modestly appeared at one corner of the plan
in time to save the day. "But we should 'ave 'ad it,
without 'im?" a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously
inquired of the custodian. "Oh, we should 'ave 'ad
the victory, anyway," the custodian reassured him, and
they looked together at some trophies of the Boer war
with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I do
not know whether they shared my psychological inter-
est in that apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which,
in this place, as in several others in England, invests
the spiritual squalor of war-memories with the glamour
of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities.
Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers

VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

in their ideals shed such a light upon the sad business of
their lives as almost to ennoble it. One feels that with
a little more qualification on the creative side they could
have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps,
but, say, historical novelists.

There is some question among other authorities
which window of the Banquetting House the doomed
king passed through upon the scaffold to the block; but
the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a
choice of windows, and as to a space broken through
the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so
well satisfied with his window as to shrink involunta-
rily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal
substance showed through the shadowy illusion of pass-
ing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the
street, the king's voice rising above the noises in ten-
der caution to a heedless witness, " Have a care of the
axe; have a care," and then gravely to the headsman:
"When I stretch out my hands so, then — " The
drums were ordered beaten, so that we could not hear
more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs
and 'busses to the horse - guards sitting shrunken on
their steeds, and passed betw^een them into the park be-
yond where the beds of flowers spread their soft au-
tumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day.

XI

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

I LIKED walking through St. James's and through
Green Park, especially in the late afternoon when
the tired poor began to droop upon the benches, and,
long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to
strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face down-
ward, among its odorous roots. There was often the
music of military bands to which wide-spreading audi-
ences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St. James's
there were seats along the borders of the ponds where,
while the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good
deal of energetic courting went on. Besides, both were
in the immediate neighborhood of certain barracks
where there was always a chance of military, and were
hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty.
But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers
is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot,
hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken
that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and
seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected
to find in it, but these people though poor were not
tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be
better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class,
and the women especially make a bolder attempt than
ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put
on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and

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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The
afternoon was sultry to breathlessness ; yet a young
mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along
in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she
was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emu-
lated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in
which the great world was flitting and flirting at the
same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the young
fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of
the swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled
them in their aberrations from formality.

There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the
people to sit under, but there was almost a superabun-
dance of flowers in glaring beds, and there were pieces
of water, where the amateur boatman could have the
admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely
encircling the ponds. To watch them and to walk up
and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on
the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases
to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea,
seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea
Park could do. We ourselves ordered tea, knowing the
quality and quantity of the public English ice, which is
so very minute that you think it will not be enough, but
which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want.
The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and
a crowd of envious small boys thronged the railing that
parted us from the general public, till the spectacle of
their hungry interest became intolerable. We con-
sulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our
question as to the moral and social effect of sixpence
worth of buns on those boys; he decided that it would
at least not form an example ruinous to the peace of his
tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag

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that seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even
half a bushel of buns will not go round the boys m Bat-
tersea Park, and we had to choose as honest a looking
boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him
to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and
hope, as he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with
the whole troop at his heels, that he would be faithful
to the trust.

So very mild are the excitements, so slight the inci-
dents, so safe and tame the adventures of modern
travel! I am almost ashamed when 1 think what a
swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real
imagination would have been having in London when
so little was happemng to me. There was, indeed, one
night after dinner when for a salient moment I had
hopes of something different. The maid had whistled
for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door
where we stood waiting, when out of the shadows across
the way two figures sprang, boarded the cab, and bade
the cabman drive them away under our very eyes.
Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o'clock, prom-
ised a series of stirring experiences; and an American
lady, long resident in England, encouragingly said, on
hearing of the outrage, "Ah, that's London!^^ as if I
might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the sort;
but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the
security and gentleness with which life is operated in
the capital of the world is one of the kind things makes
you forget its immensity. Your personal comfort and
safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mis-
take yourself for one of very few people instead of so
many.

London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and

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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

deliberation, and if it hurried or worried, it would be
like the precession of the equinoxes getting a move
on, and would shake the earth. The street events
are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely
spent in the streets, I saw the body of only one acci-
dent worse than a cab-horse falling; but that was early
in my stay when I expected to see many more. We
were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and
were walking by the hospital of the same name just
as a cab drove up to its gate bearing the body of the
accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face
hung upon his breast and whose limp arm another
young man of the same station in life held round his
own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside him.
A crowd was already following, and it gathered so
quickly at the high iron fence that the most censorious
witness could hardly see with what clumsiness the
wounded man was half -dragged, half -lifted from the
cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the
ground till he could be duly carried into the hospital.
It may have been a casualty of the many incident to
alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single combat,
which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediseval
atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic
dignity which would have come in the way of a more
heroical imagination.

It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however
characteristic of the observer, that I made haste to
forget it as I entered the church-yard under the Nor-
man arch which has been foi' some years gradually
finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole
church, indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it
was one of the first effects I saw) of that rescue of the
past from the present which is perpetually going on all
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LONDON FILMS

over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and the
crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an iron-
worker's shop; and modern life still pressed close upon it
in the houses looking on the graves of the grassless
church-yard. With women at the windows that opened
on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens,
and doing other household offices, the place was like
something out of Dickens, but something that yet had
been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of
the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by
arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than
good before he turned monk) who founded the Cister-
cian monastery there in the twelfth century would
hardly have missed anything if he had returned to ex-
amine the church. He would have had the advantage,
which he could not have enjoyed in his life-time, of his
own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and he might have
been interested to note, as we did, that the painter Ho-
garth had been baptized in his church six hundred years
after his own time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent
Norman architecture might have been less; it is possible
he would have preferred the Gothic which was coming in
when he went out.

The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray,
dim, twilighted as with the closes of the days of a thou-
sand years; and in the pale ray an artist sat sketching a
stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a loss in
not having looked to see how he was making out, but
the image of the pew-opener remains compensatively
with me. She was the first of her sort to confront me
in England with the question whether her very intelligent
comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry.
She was a little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca
dress, and a world-old black bonnet, who spared us no

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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

detail of the church, and took us last into the crypt, not
long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now
used as a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish,
which is still full of the poor. The chapel was equipped
with a large bier and tall candles, frankly ready for any
of the dead who might drop in. The old countries do
not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger
countries do.

We came out into the imperfect circle before the gate-
way of the church, and realized that it was Smithfield,
where all those martyrs had perished by fire that the
faith of the world might live free. There can be no
place where the past is more august, more pathetic,
m.ore appealing, and none I suppose, where the activ-
ities of the present, in view of it, are more offensive.
It is all undermined with the railways that bring the
day's meat-provision to London for distribution through-
out the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm
with butchers' wagons laden with every kind and color
of carnage, prevalently the pallor of calves' heads,
which seem so to abound in England that it is wonderful
any calves have them on still. The wholesale market
covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at
some central point, you find yourself amid endless
prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole car-
casses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings,
and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material,
so that you come away wishing to live a vegetarian ever

after.

The emotions are not at one's bidding, and if one calls
upon them, they are very apt not to come. I promised
myself some very signal ones, of a certain type, from
going to the Sunday market of the Jews m what was
once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning

105

LONDON FILMS

up and clearing out of the slums, has got itself called
by some much finer and worthier name. But, really, I
had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on our
own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I
had been led to expect it would. The blazing forenoon
of my visit was more than half gone, and yet there was
no clothes' auction, which was said to be the great thing
to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be every-
thing else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long
booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat,
fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and
shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry finery,
children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one an-
other indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with
an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill
screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild,
slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently
unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic
crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means
so marked as in New York, though there was a greater
number of red Jews than I had noted before. The
most monumental features of the scene were the gor-
geous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals
along the street, and arranged with seats, like swings,
for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know
their tonnage; apparently they have a passion for know-
ing it.

The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt
its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that
he questioned the poHcemen for some very squalid or
depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in
the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because
the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned
up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse

106

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

hnt to take me on top of a tram-car and show me how
very thotugWy it had been reformed and cleaned up.
In Ir de the'whole length of Whit^chapel Road to where

ronce iniquitous rejon ceased f^—^^J 'Z
in a most respectable resurrection as Stepney, witti oiu

ashirec houses which looked happy, h-mle- homes
I ci only be bidden imagine avenues of m.qu ty
brancWng off on either hand. But I actually saw noth-
£ slumlke; indeed, with a current of cool east w md

n'our fTces, which the motion of the tram -mforcec, tt.e

wfl=> <:itill as much or more London beyond.

Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than
it used to be in the days before slummmg (now .tsel
of Se pit) began to exploit it. _ At any rate I thought
that in mv present London sojourn I found less un
Su hing'estitution than in the more hopeless or more
shamlss days of 1882-3. In those days I remem-
berTeing taken by a friend, much concerned for my
knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful
Seu where I saw and heard and smelled thmgs qmte
as bad as any that I did long afterwards m the over-
tenanted regions of New York. My memory is still
STted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who
5ed bhnking from one hole in the wall to another, wi h
httle OT nothing on, and of other creatures much m
lauorld loudly scolding and quarreUing, with squahd
S f idhood scattered about -derfoot, a.d vague
Shanes of sickness and mutilation, and all ^^^ ^ime a
Sn2 and selling of loathsome second - hand rags.
She'mTdst of it'there stood, like figures of a monu-

LONDON FILMS

ment erected to the local genius of misery and dis-
order, two burly figures of half-drunken men, threaten-
ing each other with loud curses and shaken fists under
the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes
dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the
throat-latch of his helmet. When the men should strike,
I was aware that it would be his instant duty, as the
guardian of the public peace, to seize them both and hale
them away to prison. But it was not till many years
afterwards that I read in his well-remembered efhgy
the allegory of civiUzation which lets the man-made
suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it,
and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is
worth less than an ounce of cure.

I would very willingly have seen something of this
kind again, but, as I say, I happened not to see it. I
think that I did not see or hear even so much simple
drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may
have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I
had passed more gin-palaces, flaring through their hell-
litten windows into the night; but this may have been
because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did
not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and
coming out of such places in draggle-tailed processions
in those wicked days; but now I only once saw women
drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night,
when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the
thirst of the morrow, for all through the Sunday idle-
ness it cannot be slaked enough. It was a hot night,
and the bar-room door stood open, and within, fronted
by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men-
kind, those poor silly things stood drooping against the
wall with their beer -pots dangling limply from their
hands, and their mouths fallen open as if to catch the

108

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the tongues
of their admired male companions. They did not look
very bad; bad people never do look as bad as they are,
and perhaps they are sometimes not so bad as they look.
Perhaps these were kind, but not very wise, mothers
of families, who were merely relieving in that moment
'of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's
work. 1 may have passed and repassed in the street
some of the families that they were the mothers of;
it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose oppres-
siveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to
share with the reader, and the street children seemed
to have been roused to uncommon vigilance by it.
They played about far into the night, unrebuked by
their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little
girls were always lugging, shared their untimely wake-
fulness if not their activity. There was seldom any
crying among them then, though by day the voice of
grief and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy.
If their mothers did not call them in-doors, their fathers
were still less exacting. After the marketing, which
took place in the neighboring avenue, where there began
to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon,
father and mother alike seemed to have renounced their
domestic cares and to have liberated their offspring to
the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.

As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see
much of it, and I heard less, though that might have
been because I did not look or listen in the right places.
With that, as with everything else in London, I took
my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports
of a lady in Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of
mutual friends from assaulting another lady. She,
however, though she excelled in violence, did not equal

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LONDON FILMS

in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long,
long hour threatened an invisible bicyclist under our
windows in that humbler quarter already described
as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had apparently
been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who,
in a moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned
that he had not sounded the warning bell. In making
this confession he had evidently apologized with his
forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently
forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the
future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted
his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped
and brought back to the miserable error of his con-
fession. The whole ground was then gone over again,
and again pardon with warning was given. Even a
glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman's voice
rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he seemed
to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before
by the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up
at the prospect of his escape. I do not know how the
affair ended; perhaps it never ended; but exhausted
nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its
continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured
person was, if not drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when
the sensibilities are keenest and self-respect is most
alert. An American could not, at least, have been so
tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an
Englishman could.

It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative
drunkenness of the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the
hope and example of the human race in so many things,
that much if not most of our American drunkenness is
alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely native.
If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early

110

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

years of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous,
were added to the sum of our home-born intoxication,
there could be no doubt which was the greater. As it is, I
am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more drunken
men in London than in New York; and when I think
of the Family Entrance, indicated at the side-door of
every one of our thousands of saloons, I am not sure I
can plume myself on the superior sobriety of our drink-
ing men's wives. As for poverty — if I am still partially
on that subject — as for open misery, the misery that
indecently obtrudes itself upon prosperity and begs
of it, I am bound to say that I have met more of it
in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in
London. Such misery may be more rigidly policed in
the English capital, more kept out of sight, more quelled
from asking mercy, but I am sure that in Fifth Avenue,
and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between that
avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more
deserving or undeserving poverty has made itself seen
and heard to my personal knowledge than in Piccadilly,
or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane, or the squares
and places which are the London analogues of oui' best
residential quarters.

Of course, the statistics will probably be against me —
I have often felt an enmity in statistics — and I offer
my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be
sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of
that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two
further in behalf of my observations. After we returned
to London, in September, I used to stroll much among
the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass
of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the
omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours
of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more

111

LONDON FILMS

interesting than they probably were, either asleep or
awake, and if I could really have got inside their minds
I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I
had penetrated the consciousness of as many people of
fashion in the height of the season. But what I wish
to say is that, w^hether sleeping or waking, they never,
any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise inti-
mated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered
it myself, it was another thing, and it was not refused to
the extent of a shilling by the good fellow whose conver-
sation I bought one afternoon when I found him, sitting
up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle
and thread. I asked him of the times and their badness,
and I hope I left him with the conviction that I believed
him an artisan out of work, taking his misfortune brave-
ly. He was certainly cheerful, and we had some agree-
able moments, which I could not prolong, because I did
not like waking the others, or such of them as might
be sleeping.

I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery
to be cheerful seemed to be rather trivial, and I was bet-
ter pleased with the impassioned bearing of a pair who
passed me another day as I sat on one of the benches
beside the path where the trees were dropping their
hstless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I
might judge from their having each a babe in their
arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They
were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely
threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined;
they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to
the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and
pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate
tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror
which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the

112

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

best effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a
little way before I gained courage to speak to the man,
who seemed to have been sick, and looked more miser-
able, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I
asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed
in a ghastly pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his
luck. He owned that he was, and in guarantee of his
good faith took the shilling I offered him. If his need
had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sov-
ereign; but one must not fly in the face of the Providence,
which is probably not ill-advised in choosing certain of us
to be reduced to absolute destitution. The man smiled a
sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his teeth in a sort of
pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife, gloomily
unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk
back to my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had
not embodied, society to her.

I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest
that came to my knowledge in London; but I do not
insist that it was genuine, and if any more scientific
student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my trag-
edy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize
the sentimental American stranger, and do him out of
one of his ill-got shillings, I will not gainsay him. I
merely maintain, as I have always done, that the condi-
tions are alike in the Old World and the New, and that
the only difference is in the circumstances, which may
be better now in New York, and now in London, while
the conditions are always bad everywhere for the poor.
That is a point on which I shall not yield to any more
scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time
my light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to
another pair on the grass of the slope not far off in

front of me,

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LONDON FILMS

Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair
of quite well-dressed young people had thrown them-
selves, side by side, on the September grass as if it
had been the sand at any American seashore, or the
embrowned herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps
the shelving ground was dryer than the moist levels
where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but
I do not think it would have mattered to that tender
pair if it had been very damp; so warmly were they
lapped in love's dream, they could not have taken
cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their
open-air love-making to that in public places at home,
and contrast it with the decorum of Latin countries
where nothing of the kind is known. If anything,
English lovers of this type are franker than with us,
doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the Eng-
lish nature; and they seem to be of a better class. One
day when I was sitting in a penny chair in Green Park,
the agent of the company came and collected the rent
of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely
chosen an inconspicuous situation w^here I should not
be found, and it was long past the end of the season,
when no company should have had the heart to collect
rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmur-
ing, and as the young man who sold me a ticket good for
the whole day at a penny, was obviously not pressed with
business, I tried to recoup myself by a little conversation.

*^I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I
don't see many of your chairs occupied."

"Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a
few taken at night, sir — over there in the hollow." I
looked a leading question, and he went on : " Young peo-
ple come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet

place and out of the w^ay." ^

114

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

"Oh yes Where they're not molested by the un-
emDloved?" I oast a generalizing glance over the dead
and wounded of the battle of life strewn about the
grass of an adjacent space.

"Well that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do
nothing but sleep all day, and then after dark they get
up and begin to prowl. They spy, some of em on the
young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and black-
mail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work
if they could get it."

I perceived that my friend was a capitahst, and i sus-
pected him of bemg one of the directors of the penny-
chair company. But perhaps he thought me a capi-
al t, toTand fancied'that I would like to have h.m
deer; the unemployed. Still he may have been ngh
about the blackmailing; one must live, and the mnocen
courage of open-air courtship in London offers occasions
of wifful misconstruction. In a great city, the sense
of being probably unnoted and unknown among is
myriads must eventuate in much indifference to ones
surroundings. How should a young couple on an
omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the seat opposite
could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which
they renewed their love after some previous falling

out?

"But I was hurt, Will, dear.
" Oh, I'm so sorry, dear."
"Iknow, Will, dear."
"But it's all right now, dear?'

"Oh yes. Will, dear."

Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it
down; it ought to be sacred; and nothing but my ze^al
in these social studies could make me profane it. Who
would not have been the careless brute this young man

LONDON FILMS

must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweet-
ness of such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on
misbehavior. He was a nice-looking young fellow, but
she was nicer, and in her tender eyes there seemed more
wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to
temper justice with mercy.

Sometimes women do not know when to temper
mercy with justice. I fancied this the error of the fond
nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her peram-
bulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the side-
walk in order to keep up with the tall grenadier who
marched with his head in the air, and let her make this
show of being in his company, but not once looking at
her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls
are always with, the military, so that it is said to be
comparatively easy to keep servants in the neighborhood
of the barracks, or even in those streets that the troops
habitually pass through, and may be conveniently
gloated upon from attic-windows or basement areas.
Probably much of the natural supremacy of the male of
our species has been lost in all ranks of society through
the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men
in civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace
on their coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely
they could still knock women about as they used, and
be all the more admired. It is a point w^orth consider-
ing in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.

A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory
with those I eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus-
top, was a silent pair I noted one day in St. Paul's.
They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had apparently
lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where
every monument is more forbidding than another, and
had sunk down on a seat by themselves, and were try-

116

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

ing to get back a little courage by furtively holding
each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of a
human interest larger than any London characteristic.
So, in a little different sort, was the rapture of a couple
behind a tree on whom a friend of mine came suddenly
in St. James's Park at the very moment when the eager
he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who
had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission,
fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right;
but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a
'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way
from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from
the seat she had taken next him. The witness was
going up to a dentist in that region, and professed that
in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the furies
of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after
all.

XII

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

LONDON is so manifold (as I have all along been
i saying) that it would be advisable, if one could, to
see it in a sort of severalty, and take it in the successive
strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it could
best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans;
then one could give himself to its political or civic in-
terest, another to its religious memories and associa-
tions, another to its literary and artistic records ; no one
American, however cultivated, could do justice to all
these claims, even with life and health of an expectation
beyond that of the most uncultivated American. Be-
sides this suggestion I should like to offer a warning, and
this is, that no matter with what devoted passion the
American lover of London approaches her he must not
hope for an exclusive possession of her heart. If she
is insurpassably the most interesting, the most fascinat-
ing of all the cities that ever were, let him be sure that
he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it, but
he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival
before him in devotion to any aspect of her divinity.
It is not for nothing that poets, novelists, historians,
antiquarians have been born in England for so many
ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of
her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wall-
spaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described

118

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full
of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the
American, come he never so numerously, will find out-
numbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of
hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their islands I
had occasion to observe how fond the English were of
English travel and English objects of interest, and
wherever I went in London there were Englishmen
elbowing me from the front rank, not rudely, not un-
kindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an
alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been
used as a foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at
shrines of the beautiful or memorable. I do not know
how it is now, but in those days there was nothing in
the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza,
or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for
Rome, there was no such thing as doing as the Romans
do in such places, because there w^ere apparently no
Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty
of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about Lon-
don far greater than you can ever inspire them with for
New York.

Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which
they must have been visiting all their lives, there were,
at least, a thousand Englishmen for every cultivated
American we could make sure of when we went there;
and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to
the general public, this overwhelming majority of natives
must have come on orders from Fellows of the Society
such as we had supposed would admit us much more
selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded,
and if it had been, still it would have been delightful
on a summer afternoon, of that hovering softness, half-
cloud, half-sun, which the London sky has the patent

9 119

LONDON FILMS

of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with their
may, were Uke cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it
then was and would be at sunset; and there was a den-
sity of grass underfoot and foliage overhead in which
one's own childhood found itself again, so that one felt
as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange
beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years
old. But I cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the
same degree, and so had better not insist upon the
animals; the herds of elephants, the troops of lions
and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the
mass-meetings of anthopoid apes. Above and beyond
these in their strangeness w^ere the figures of humanity
representative of the globe-girdling British empire, in
their drawers and turbans and their swarthy skins,
who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me,
in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien
shapes in Central Park, but there they are somehow at
once less surprising and less significant than these
Asian and African forms; they will presently be Amer-
icans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperial-
ings were already British and eternally un-English.
They frequented the tea - tables spread in pleasant
shades and shelters, and ate buns and bread-and-butter,
like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes
roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English
complexions with an effect of mystery irreconcilable
forever with the matter-of-fact mind behind their bland
masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos,
Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them
so that we were faint for the tea from which they kept
us at the crowded tables in the gardens or on the ve-
randas of the tea-houses. But we were not so insatiable
of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British

120

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

whom one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special
advantage. Our Sunday was in the season, and the sea-
son had conjecturably quahfied it, so that one could
sometimes feel oneself in company better than one's own.
The children were well-dressed and admirably well-be-
haved; they justly outnumbered their elders, and it was
obviously their day. But it was also the day of their
elders, who had made excuse of the children's pleasure
in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were
not so much their elders, and the young aunts and
uncles, who were naturally cousins, lost themselves at
times a little way from the children and maids, in the
quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the
tranquil waters with one another. They were then
more interesting than the strangest Malays and Hindoos,
and I wonder what these made of them, as they con-
templated their segregation with the other thronging
spectators.

We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo;
we were there quite voluntarily; but among the places
which we promised ourselves not to visit again were the
South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery;
and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith
with ourselves in regard to the last. We went^ to it
again not once, but several times, and always with an
increasing sense of its transcendent representativity.^ It
is not merely that for all the schools of painting it^ is
almost as good as going to the continental countries
where they flourished, and is much easier. It is not
only that for English history, as it lives in the portrait-
ure of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courte-
sans and heroes and statesmen, it is the past made per-
sonal to the beholder and forever related to himself,
as if he had seen those people in the flesh. It is,

121

LONDON FILMS

above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms
crowded with the pictures and statues and busts of the
Enghshmen who have made England England in every
field of achievement that is oppressively, almost crush-
ingly wonderful. Before that swarming population
of poets, novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of
painters, sculptors, architects; of astronomers, mathe-
maticians, geologists, physicians; of philosophers, theolo-
gians, divines; of statesmen, politicians, inventors, act-
ors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great
of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but
must dwindle in number till our past seems as thinly
peopled as our continent. It is in these rooms that the
grandeur of England, historically, resides. You may,
if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this,
and at some point find her less great than the greatest
of her overgrown or overgrowing daughters, but from
the presence of that tremendous collectivity, that pop-
ulous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census
can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in
the welcome obscurity to which you plunge among the
millions of her capital, that in all-round greatness we
have hardly even the imagination of her transcendence.
AVell towards fifty years had passed between my first
and last visits to London, but I think I had kept for it
throughout that long interval much more of the earlier
sentiment than for any other city that I have known.
I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that
this sentiment was continuous through the smell of the
coal -smoke, or that the smoke formed a solution in
which all associations were held, and from which they
were, from time to time, precipitated in specific mem-
ories. The peculiar odor had at once made me at home
in London, for it had probably so saturated my first

122

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

consciousness in the little black, smoky town on the
Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a
most intimate element when I now inhaled it. But
apart from this personal magic, the London smoke has
always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is
mostly the smoke which gives "atmosphere," softens
outlines, tenderly blurs forms, makes near and far the
same, and intenerisce il cuore, for any him whose infant
sense it bathed. No doubt it thickens the constant
damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog ; but it is
over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objection-
able, it is wholly deplorable, indeed, when it descends
in those sooty particles, the blacks; but in all my London
sojourns I have had but one experience of the blacks,
and I will not condemn the smoke because of them. It
gives a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sun-
rises and the early winter sunsets, the beauty of which
dwells still in my mind from my first London sojourn.
In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the noons to
the softest effulgence ; in the summer it was a veil in the
air which kept the flame of the heated term from doing
its worst. It hung, diaphonous, in the dusty perspec-
tives, but it gathered and thickened about the squares
and places, and subdued all edges, so that nothing cut
or hurt the vision.

I was glad of that, because I found one of my greatest
pleasures in looking at the massed tree-forms in those
gardened - groves, which I never penetrated. The
greater parks are open to the public, but the squares
are enclosed by tall iron fences, and locked against the
general with keys of which the particular have the keep-
ing in the houses about them. It gave one a fine shiver
of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look through their
barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while

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their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over
the trim walks. Sometimes it was even young ladies
who sat reading, or, at the worst, governesses. But
commonly the squares were empty, though the grass
so invited the foot, and the benches in the border of the
shade, or round the great beds of bloom, extended their
arms and spread their welcoming laps for any of the par-
ticular who would lounge in them.

I remember only one of these neighborhood gardens
which was open to the public, and that was in the poor
neighborhood which we lodged on the edge of, equally
with the edge of Belgravia. It was opened, by the
great nobleman who owned nearly the whole of that
part of London, on all but certain days of the week,
with restrictions lettered on a board nearly as big as the
garden itself; but I never saw it much frequented, per-
haps because I usually happened upon it when it was
locked against its beneficiaries. Upon the whole, these
London squares, though they flattered the eye, did not
console the spirit so much as the far uglier places in
New York, or the pretty places in Paris, which are free
to all. It can be said for the English way that when
such places are free to all they are not so free to some,
and that is true. In this world you have to exclude
either the many or the few, and in England it is rather
the many who are excluded. Being one of those shut
out, I did not like the English way so well as ours, but
if I had had keys to those locks, I should not now dare
ask myself which principle I should have preferred. It
would have been something like choosing between popu-
lar government and family government after having
been created one of the governing families.

Life, I felt, would be sensibly dignified if one could
spend some months of every year of it in a mansion

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looking down into the leafy tops of those squares.
One's mansion might not always have the company of
the most historical or patrician mansions; sometimes
these are to be found in very unexpected and even in-
conspicuous places; but commonly the associated dwell-
ings would be ample, if not noble. They would rarely
be elbowed by those structures, not yet quite so frequent
in London as in New York, which lift themselves in an
outer grandeur unsupported by the successive levels
of the social pretence within. I should say that with
the English, more than with us, the perpendicular is
still socially superior to the horizontal domestication.
Yet the London flats are of more comfortable and taste-
ful arrangement than ours. They are better lighted
always, never having (as far as I know) dark rooms
blindly staring into airless pits; and if they are not so
well heated, that is because the English do not wish,
or at least expect, to be heated at all. The elevator is
not so universal as with us, but the stairways are easier
and statelier. The public presence of the edifice is
statelier, too; but if you come to state, the grandest of
these buildings must deny its denizens the splendor of
flunkeys standing before its door, on a day or night of
social function, as one sees them standing by the steps
or portals of some mansion that houses a single family.
To which of the flat-dwellers would they be supposed
to belong, if they grouped themselves at the common
entrance? For anything specific in their attendance
they might almost as well be at the next street-corner.
rTime and again, in these pages, I have paid my duty,
which has been my grateful pleasure, to the birds which
haunt the squares, and sing there. You are not obliged
to have a householder's key in order to hear them; and
when the hawthorns and the horse-chestnuts blossomed

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you required a proprietorial right as little. Somehow,
my eye and ear always disappointed themselves in the
absence of rooks from such places. My senses ought to
have been better instructed than to expect rooks in
London, but they had been so educated to the sight and
sound of rocks everywhere else in England that they
mechanically demanded them in town. I do not even
know what birds they were that sang in the spaces;
but I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply
edging their song next the street; and where the squares
were reduced to crescents, or narrow parallelograms,
or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect that this
edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so
densely interwoven in the squares.

I have spoken hitherto of that passion for dress to
which all the womanhood of England has so bewitch-
ingly abandoned itself, and which seemed to have reached
an undue excess in the housemaid in a bolero hat and a
trained skirt, putting that white on the front steps
which is so universal in England that if the sun missed
it after rising he might instantly go down again in the
supposition that it was still night. It must always be a
woman who whitens the steps ; if a man-servant were to
do it any such dreadful thing might happen as would
follow his blacking the boots, which is alienably a female
function. Under the circumstances one hears much
of the general decay of excellence in woman-servants in
London. They are far less amiable, patient, respectful,
and faithful than when their mistresses were young.
This may be from the fact that so many more employ-
ments besides domestic service seem to be open to girls.
Apparently very young girls are preferred in the innu-
merable postal-stations, if one may judge from the chil-
dren of tender years who sell you stamps, and take your

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

telegrams and register your letters. I used at first to
tremble for a defective experience, if not a defective in-
telligence in them, but I did not find them inadequate
to their duties through either. Still their employment
was so phenomenal that I could not help remarking
upon it. None of my English friends seemed to have
noticed it, till at last one, who had noticed it, said he
believed it was because the government found them
cheap, and was in that way helping repay itself for the
enormous expenses of the Boer War.

In the London shops I did not think women were so
generally employed as in our own, or those of the Con-
tinent. But this may have been a conclusion from
careless observation. In the book-stores to which I
most resorted, and which I did not think so good as
ours, I remember to have seen but one saleswoman.
Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large stores
where women's goods, personal and household, are
sold, and which I again did not think comparable to
ours. Seldom in any small shop, or even book-stall or
newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge.
But at the street - markets, especially those for the
poorer customers, market-women were the rule. I
should say, in fine, that woman was a far more domes-
tic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the
beast of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German
cities great or small ; but I am not going to sentimental-
ize her lot in England. Probably it is only compara-
tively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and
lowest its hardship is attested by the stunted stature,
and the stunted figure of the ordinary English lower-
class woman. Even among the elect of the afternoon
parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great
an average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show

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with us, where they form the patriciate which our plu-
tocracy has already flowered into. But there was a
far greater average of tall young men than with us;
which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a
masculine distinction.

As for those great department stores with which the
question of women relates itself inevitably, I have cur-
sorily assumed our priority in them, and the more I
think of them, the more I am inclined to believe m3^self
right. But that is a matter in which women only may
be decisive; the nice psychology involved cannot be
convincingly studied by the other sex. I will venture,
again, however, so far into this strange realm as to say
that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so
good in London as in New York, though when one re-
members the two Bond Streets, and Oxford, and lower
Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of claiming
superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty-
third streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts
of Third and Sixth avenues to which ladies' shopping
has spread. After all, perhaps there is but one London,
in this as in some other things.

^ Among the other things are hardly the restaurants
which abound with us, good, bad, and indifferent. In
the affair of public feeding, of the costUest, as well as
the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot menus,
safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in
the world, not to say the universe. It is not only that
we make the openest show of this feeding, and parade
it at windows, whereas the English retire it to curtained
depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it ubiq-
uitously, perpetually. In both London and New York
it is exotic for the most part, or, at least, on the higher
levels, and the administration is in the hands of those

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

foreigners who take our money for learning English
of us. But there is no such range of Italian and French
and German restaurants in London as in New York,
and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so
good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be
English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive
in expression; in everything culinary the island touch
seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far
from home, when the lunch came prematurely, we
found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and
our wicked hope was in a little Italian trattoria which
opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial
effect as an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blos-
soms. There was a strictly English company within,
and the lunch was to the English taste, but the touch
was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the
Tiber or on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

At the great restaurants, where one may see fashion
lunching, the kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration
with Sherry's or Delmonico's, but the entourage was less
oppressively glaring, and the service had more moments
of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a prin-
cipal part of the drama. That is often the case with
us in the simpler sort of eating-houses, where it is the
neat hand of Phyllis that serves rather than that of the
white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of either color
or any nationality. My profoundest and distinctest
impression of Phyllidian service is from a delightful
lunch which I had one golden noonday in that famous
and beautiful house, Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, which
remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in
which Sir John Crosby proudly built it from his grocer's
and woolman's gains in 1466. It had afterwards added
to it the glory of lodging Richard III., who, both as

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protector and as sovereign-prince made appointments
there, in Shakespeare's tragedy of him, for the Lady
Anne, for Catesby, and for the "First Murderer," whom
he praises for his thoughtfulness in coming for the
"warrant," that he might be admitted to their victim.

"Well thought upon; I have it here about me.
When you have done, repair to Crosby place."

Probably the First Murderer lunched there, four hundred
years ago, "when he had done as I did now"; but,
in the mean time, Henry VIIL had given Crosby Place
to a rich Italian merchant, one Anthony Bonvice;
later, ambassadors had been received in it; the first
Earl of Northampton had enlarged it, and dwelt in it
as lord mayor; in 1638 the East India Company had
owned it, and later yet, in 1673, it was used for a Pres-
byterian meeting-house; but in 1836 it was restored to
its ancient form and function. I do not know how long
it has been an eating-house, but I hope it may long
remain so, for the sensation and refreshment of Amer-
icans who love a simple and good refection in a mediaeval
setting, at a cost so moderate that they must ever after-
wards blush for it. You penetrate to its innermost
perpendicularity through a passage that enclosed a
"quick-lunch" counter, and climb from a most noble
banquet-hall crammed with hundreds of mercantile
gentlemen "feeding like one" at innumerable little
tables, to a gallery where the musicians must have sat
of old. There it was that Phyllis found and neat-
handedly served my friend and me, gently experiencing
a certain difficulty in our combined addition, but mas-
tering the arithmetical problem presently, and taking
our tip with an air of surprise which it never created in

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

any of the English-learning Swiss, French, or Italian
Strephons who elsewhe e ministered to us.

The waitresses at Crosby Place were of a girlish dig-
nity which never expected and was never visibly offered
the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that
strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens
of thousands of London public-houses she stands with
her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banal-
ities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim
regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness
against her background of bottles and decanters; but
the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior
as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel ;
and I thought it to the honor of the lunchers that they
seemed all to know it. The gentle influence of her
presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood
where, another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was
misled by the mediieval aspect of the entrance, and
where I found waitresses again instead of waiters.. But
nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting
the manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those
repeated A. B. C. cokl-lunch places of the Aerated Bread
Company, where a chill has apparently been imparted
to their bearing by the temperature of the food they
serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be
rather that a New England severity in them is the
effect of the impersonal relation of served and server
which no gratuity humanizes.

It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the
employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres.
Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose
glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it
is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds him-
self asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the pro-

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gramme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the
play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been
always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, six-
pence for their programmes and feel no asperity at being
so plundered. The true explanation may be found,
after all, in the discovery, akin to the government's, that
their service is cheaper than men ushers' would be.
Children of as tender years as those who manage the
postal-stations, go round with tea and coffee between
the acts, as with us the myriad-buttoned ice-water boy
passes; but whereas this boy returns always with a
tray of empty glasses, I never saw a human being drink
either the tea or coffee offered by those female infants
in any London theatre.

Let it be not supposed, however, that I went much
to London theatres. I went perhaps half a dozen times
in as many weeks. Once settled in my chair, I might
well have fancied myself at home in a New York theatre,
except that the playing seemed rather better, and the
English intonation not quite so scrupulously English
as that which our actors have produced after a con-
scientious study of the original. I heard that the Eng-
lish actors had studied the American accent for a play
imported from us; but I did not see this play, and I
am now very sorry. The American accent, at least,
must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from
the reproductions of our parlance which I heard in
private life by people who had sojourned, or merely
travelled, among us. These were so unfailingly delight-
ful, that one could not have wished them more like.

The arriving and departing of theatre-goers by night
adds sensibly to the brilliancy of the complexion of
London. The flare of electricity in the region of the
theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

of September, and recalled the gayety of the season
for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this
splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even
in the height of the season it was one of the things that
distinguished itself among the various immense impres-
sions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to
characterize them, transitory; they were effects of ad-
ventitious circumstances; they were not structural in
their origin. The most memorable aspect of the Strand
or Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately
architecture, but its moments of fog or mist, when its
meanest architecture would show stately. The city
won its moving grandeur from the throng of people astir
on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying
or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of
Westminster and Parliament did not seem in them-
selves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of
night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative
emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the
proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Traf-
algar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being?
It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow
the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the
Place de la Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with
its suggestions of old steel-engravings of Athens. Of
course St. Paul's has a prodigious opportunity, as the
multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its
fagade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for
bit, there is not quite any bit in London like that edi-
fice of smutted Greek on which the newly arrived
American looks from his breakfast-table in his Liverpool
hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far from
thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to
the London architecture. Pure white marble is all very

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well, and the faint rose that the stone takes from a
thousand years of ItaUan sunsets is not bad; but the
black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul's lends wall and
dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the elec-
tric glare of tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches
the columns which rise, more or less casually as it seems,
from the London streets and squares, and one almost
hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the
fronts of the aristocratic mansions. It is like having
an old picture restored; perhaps it has to be done, but
it is a pity.

The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of
large houses of the proudest nobility in the world, are
by no means overwhelming. They hold their primacy
among the other pieces of domestic architecture, as their
owners hold their primacy in society, very quietly, if
very stolidly, and one would have, I fancy, to come
much harder against them than one would be allowed
to do, in order to feel their quality intimately. There
they are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of
Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair,
and the different squares and gardens and places;
and certain of them may be visited at certain times
on application by the tourist. But that is a barren
pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the
simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The
charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great
houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now
and then such a house gave evidence of high social
preparation during the season in flinging out curtained
galleries or pavilions towards the street, if it stood back;
if it stood flush upon the sidewalk a group of fifteen or
twenty flunkeys, and the continual arrest of carriages
would attest its inward state ; but the genius of the race

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

is to keep its own to itself, even its own splendors and
grandeurs, except on public occasions when it shines
forth in incomparable magnificence.

If London, then, is not habitually grandiose, or mon-
umental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with
much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that
it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery,
curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers every-
where mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of
birds heard through the staccato of cabs, and the muffled
bellow of omnibuses. You may not like London, but
you cannot help loving it. The monuments, if I may
keep coming back to them, are plain things, often, with
no attempt upon the beholder's emotions. In the proc-
ess of time, I suspect that the Albert Memorial will not
be the most despised among them, for it expresses, even
if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat
stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does
not stand mum, like the different shy, bashful columns
stuck here and there, and not able to say what they
would be at.

If one comes to the statues there are, of course, none
so good as the Farragut in Madison Square, or the Logan
on the Lake front at Chicago, and, on the whole, I remem-
ber those at Washington as better. There are not so
many English kings standing or riding about as one
would expect; the English kings have, indeed, not been
much to brag of in bronze or marble, though in that I
do not say they are worse than other kings. I think,
but I am not sure, that there are rather more public
men of inferior grade than kings, though this may be
that they were more impressive. Most noticeable was
the statue of Disraeli, which, on Primrose Day, I saw
much garlanded and banked up with the favorite flower

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of that peculiarly rustic and English statesman. He
had the air of looking at the simple blossoms and for-
bearing an ironical smile; or was this merely the fancy
of the spectator? Among the royal statues is that of
the Charles whom they put to death, and who was so
unequal in character though not in spirit to his dread
fate. It was stolen away, and somewhere long hid by
his friends or foes, but it is now to be seen in the collec-
tion of Trafalgar Square, so surely the least imposing
of equestrian figures that it is a pity it should ever
have been found. For a strikingly handsome man, all
his statues attest how little he lent himself to sculpture.
Not far away is another equestrian statue, which
never failed to give me a start, when I suddenly came
upon it in a cab. It looked for an instant quite like
many statues of George Washington, as it swept the air
with its doffed hat, but a second glance always showed
it the effigy of George the Third, bowing to posterity
with a gracious eighteenth-century majesty. If it were
possible, one would like to think that the resemblance
mentioned had grown upon it, and that it in the case
of Americans was the poor king's ultimate concession
to the good -feeling which seems to be reuniting the
people he divided.

XIII
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

THE amiable afternoon of late April which we chose
for going to Hampton Court, made my return to
the place after an interval of twenty odd years, a sort
of triumphal progress by embowering the course of our
train with plum and pear and cherry trees in a white
mist of bloom. Long before we reached the country
these lovely apparitions abounded in the back-yards of
the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran
between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely
flowers; when we got to open expanses where nature
could find room to spread in lawns that green English
turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies and sunny
with dandelions. The poets used to call that sort of
thing enamelling, and it was not distasteful, in our ap-
proach to such a kindly, artificial old place as Hampton
Court, to suppose that we were passing through enam-
elled meads. Under the circumstances we might have
expected our train to purl, in default of a stream to
perform the part, and I can truly say of it that it arrived
with us in a mood so pastoral that I still cannot under-
stand why we did not ask for a fly at the station in a
couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our
prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our
taking it for the little distance to the palace, which it
would have been so much pleasanter to walk.

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Yet, I do not know but we were instinctively wise in
coming to the entrance of the fine old paved court-
yard with a certain suddenness: if we had left it much
more time the grass between the bricks might have over-
grown them, and given an air of ruin to precincts that
for centuries have been held from decay, in the keeping
of life at once simple and elegant. Though Hampton
Court has never been the residence of the English kings
since the second George gave the third George an en-
during disgust for it by boxing the ears of the boy
there in a fit of grandfatherly impatience, it has been
and is the home of many English gentlefolk, rarely
privileged, in a land of rare privileges, to live in apart-
ments granted them by royal favor. In former times
the privilege was now and then abused by tenants who
sublet their rooms in lodgings; but the abuse has long
been broken up, and now there cannot be, in the whole
earth, a more dignified dwelling for the dowager of a
distinguished or merely favored family than such as the
royal pleasure freely grants at Hampton Court. Doubt-
less the crumpled rose-leaf is there, as it is everywhere,
but unless it is there to lend a faint old-fashioned odor
as of pot-pourri to life in those apartments, I do not be-
lieve that it abounds in any of them.

The things I had chiefly in mind from my former
visit were the beauties of the Stuarts' time, and of Sir
Peter Lely's pencil, in the galleries of the palace, and the
secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar place in a
corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid
my devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly
declare that I did not find it looking a day older since
I had seen it last in 1882. It could hardly have said
as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two
himdred years old to begin with, and consoled myself

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so
young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think
it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish
to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the
unaging antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this
moment be glad to share the youthful spirit of the
sunken garden which I passed on my way to the famous
vine, and in which with certain shapes of sculpture and
blossom, I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor-
vitse in the taste of a world more childlike than ours, and
at the same time so much older. The Dutch taste of it
all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from the
Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by
the good William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly
good in comparison with all their predecessors from
Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the
Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in
that long arbor of clipped wych-elms, near the sunken
garden, called Mary's bower, which, on our April after-
noon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs to
break into leaf.

We did not penetrate its perspective, for it seems
one of the few things at Hampton Court barred to the
public. Everywhere else the place is free to the visit-
or, who may walk as he pleases on its garden - paths,
or over its close-woven turf, or sit out of the sun under
its dense black yews, or stroll beneath the oaks by the
banks of the Long Canal. If the canal is Dutch, the
burly trees which lounge about at their pleasure in the
park, impart the true English sentiment to the scene;
but, for my part, I did not care to go far from the bor-
ders of the beds of hyacinths and tulips and daffodils.
The grass sighed with secret tears under the foot, and
it was better to let the fancy, which would not feel the

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need of goloshes, rove disembodied to the bosky depths
into which the oaks thickened afar, dim amid the vapor-
laden air. From the garden-plots one could look, dry-
shod, down upon the Thames, along which the pretty
town of Hampton stretches, and in whose lively current
great numbers of house-boats tug at their moorings. The
Thames beside the palace is not only swift but wide,
and from the little flowery height on which we sur-
veyed these very modernest of pleasure-craft they had a
remove at which they were lost in an agreeable mystery.
Even one which we were told belonged to a rich Amer-
ican could not alienate itself from the past when there
were no United States, and very few united colonies.
The poorest American, if he could not have a lodgement
in the palace (and I do not see how the royal bounty
could extend to one of our disinherited condition), or
one of the pleasant Hampton houses overlooking the
river, might be glad to pass the long, mild English
summer, made fast to the willowy bank of the Thames,
without mosquitoes or malaria to molest him or make
him afraid in his dreamful sojourn.

By all the laws of picturesque dealing with other times
the people whose portraits we had seen in the galleries
ought to have been in the garden or about the lawns
in hospitable response to the interest of their trans-
Atlantic visitors; but in mere common honesty, I must
own they were not. They may have become tired of
leaving their frames at the summons of the imagina-
tions which have so often sought to steal their color for
a dull page, and to give the charm of their tragedy or
comedy to a passage which otherwise would not move.
I do not blame them, and I advise the reader not to
expect a greater complaisance of them than we experi-
enced. But in all that densely -storied England, where

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

every scene has memories accumulated one upon an-
other till the sense aches under them, I think there is
none that surpasses, if any vies with this.

What makes the charm of Hampton Court is that from
first to last it lies in an air clearer of fable or tradition
than that which involves most other seats of power. For
we do like to know what we are dealing with, in the past
as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves
real, we love reality in other people, whether they still
live or whether they died long ago. If they were people
of eminence, we gratify in supreme degree the inextin-
guishable passion for good society innate in every one
by consorting with royalties and titles whom we may
here know as we know our contemporary equals, through
facts and traits even better ascertained. At Hamp-
ton Court we are really at home with the great parvenu
who began the palace in such magnificence that none
of the successive princes have excelled it in design, and
who when his fear of the jealous tyrant compelled him
to offer it to his king, could make such a gift as no sub-
ject ever before laid at the feet of a sovereign. The
grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry
VIII., in the sufferance and the performance of that
extortion are as sensible in the local air as if they were
quaUties of some event in our own day, and the details
of the tyrant's life in the palace remain matters of as
clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the
recent taking off of the Servian king and queen. The
annals are so explicit that no veil of uncertainty hangs
between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the
throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard as in
an instantaneous photograph escaping from her prison-
chamber and running through the gallery to implore
the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if a

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phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched
woman's screams when she is pursued and seized and
carried back, while the king continues devoutly in
the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward VI.
relates itself as distinctly to the palace where he was
born; and one is all but personally witness there to
the strange episode of Elizabeth's semi- imprisonment
while Bloody Mary, now sister and now sovereign,
balanced her fate as from hand to hand, and hesi-
tated whether to make her heiress to a throne or to a
crown of martyrdom. She chose wisely in the end, for
Elizabeth was fitter for mortal than immortal glory;
and for the earthly fame of Mary Queen of Scots Eliza-
beth in her turn did not choose unwisely, however un-
wittingly, when amid her coquetting and counselling
with her statesmen and lovers at Hampton Court she
drew the toils closer and closer about her victim. But
here I ought to own that all this is a reflected light
from after - reading, and not from my previous knowl-
edge of the local history. In making my confession,
however, I am not sure that the sort of general ig-
norance I brought to it was not a favorable medium
through which to view Hampton Court. If you come
prepared with the facts, you are hampered by them and
hindered in the enjoyment of the moment's chances.
You are obliged to verify them, from point to point,
but if you learn them afterwards you can arrange them
in your memories of the scene, where you have wandered
vaguely about in a liberal and expansive sense of un-
limited historical possibilities. I am able now to realize,
without having missed one charm of our spring after-
noon in those entrancing bounds that the son of Mary
Stuart was as fond of Hampton Court, when he came
there king, as EUzabeth herself.

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

It was there that James I. confronted and confuted
the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their com-
plaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow-
beating so hammered their hard metal that he tem-
pered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his
son ; it was there that Charles began the famous quarrel
with his queen which ended in his deporting Henrietta
Maria's French adherents, or, as he wrote Buckingham,
" dryving them away, lyke so many wylde beastes . . .
and soe the Devill goe with them"; it was there that
more importantly when an honorable captive of Parlia-
ment, he played fast and loose, after the fashion he
was born to, with Cromwell and the other generals
who would have favored his escape, and even his restora-
tion to the throne, if they could have found any truth
in him to rest a treaty on. It was at Hampton that
Cromwell, when the palace became his home, first put
on something of royal state, always with lapses through
his bonhomie into good-fellowship with his officers, and
never with any help from his simple-hearted wife; that
the death of his daughter, amid these fitful glories, broke
his heart, and he drooped and sickened to his own end,
which a change to the different air of Whitehall did not
delay; that after the little time of Richard Cromwell's
protectorate, Hampton Court had another royal lord in
the second Charles, who repeated history in a quarrel
with his queen, for none of the good reasons which the
first Charles had in the like contention. The father's
tergiversations with Cromwell may be supposed to have
given a glamour of kingcraft to his sojourn later, but the
bad part which the son took against his wife was without
one dignifying circumstance. One reads with indigna-
tion still hot how he brought the plain little Portuguese
woman there for their honeymoon, and brightened it

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for her by thrusting upon her the intimacy of his mis-
tress Lady Castlemaine; how he was firm for once in his
yielding Hfe, when he compelled Clarendon to the base
office of coaxing and frightening the queen who had
trusted the old man as a father; how, like the godless
blackguard he was, the "merry monarch," swore "before
Almighty God," in his letter to the chancellor, that he
was "resolved to go through with this matter" of forcing
his paramour upon his wife, with the added threat,
" and whomsoever I find my Lady Castlemaine's enemy"
in it, "I do promise upon my word to be his enemy
as long as I live." It is less wonderful that the im-
happy creature whose spirit he broke should have been
crushed, than that the English people, to whom the king's
bad life was an open book, should have suffered him.
But perhaps, even this was less wonderful than their
patience with the harsh virtue of the Puritans. It is
not well to be good, or make others be good at the cost
of every ease and grace of life, and though it seems
strange and sad to us republicans that the mighty
English commonwealth should have been supplanted
by such a monarchy as that restored in Charles, it may
not be so strange as it was sad. The life which attests
itself in the beauties of Lely and of Kneller on the walls
of Hampton Court, when it began to have its free course
was doubtless none the purer for having been frozen at
its source. The world is a long time being saved from
itself, and it has had to go back for many fresh starts.
If the beautiful women whose wickedness is recorded
by the court painters in a convention of wanton looks,
rather than by a severally faithful portraiture, can be
regarded simply as a part of the inevitable reaction
from a period when men had allowed women to be
better, we shall not have so much difficulty in showing

144

AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

them mercy. If only after a lapse of twenty years they
would not look so much like old acquaintances who had
kept their youth too well, one need certainly not be
shy of them. Even if all the beauties were as bad as
they were painted, there are many other women not
ostensibly bad whose pictures fill Hampton Court; but,
knowing what galleries are, how mortally fatiguing to
every fibre, I should not think of making the reader
follow me through the long rooms of the palace, and I
will now own that I even spared myself many details in
this second visit of mine.

Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never
ceases to be most intimately interesting down to the day
of that third George who had his ears boxed there. The
second James had almost as little to do with it as our last
king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else
that he had no time for the place where other sovereigns
before and after him took their pleasure. But William
and Mary seemed to give it most of their leisure ; to the
great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if it were
a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Ken-
sington. His queen planted it and kept it to his fancy
while he was away fighting the Stuarts in Ireland; and
when she was dead, he continued to pull down and build
up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the
sort of ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the
unsparing present always touches the past. He sick-
ened towards his end there, and one day his horse
stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in
the park where the kings from Henry VIII. down had
chased the deer), fell with him and hurt him past sur-
gery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly after-
wards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers
at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed

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so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat.
They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's time,
when under a dull sovereign the civility of England
brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem
of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite
artificial flower which it ever bore ; for it was at Hamp-
ton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the
poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in
the matchless numbers of The Rape of the Lock.

Such pleasure - parties as that in which the lovely
Arabella Fermor lost her curl under the scissors of Lord
Petre, must have had the best of the gayety, in the time
of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself, writing
of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life
as one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was
fairest and brightest and wittiest, if not wisest in Eng-
land graced it, and the names of Bellenden and Lepell
and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and
Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that
must have been so heavy even at Hampton Court in
these reigns. After all, it is the common people who
get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house
for which they have paid comes back to them, as palaces
are not unapt finally to do; and it is not unimaginable
that collectively they bring as much brilliancy and
beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers
did in their mutually hampered pleasures.

Though the Georges began to divide the palace up
into the apartments for the kind of permanent guests
of the state who now inhabit them, it was not until
well into the time of the late queen that the galleries
and gardens were thrown open, without price or re-
striction, to the public. Whose ver the instinct or in-
spiration was, the graciousness of it may probably be

146

AN AFTERNOON AT HMIPTON COURT

attributed to the mother-hearted sovereign whose good-
ness gave English monarchy a new lease of life in the
affections of her subjects, and raised loyalty to a part
of their religion. I suppose that actual rags and dirt
would not be admitted to Hampton Court, but I doubt
if any misery short of them would be excluded. Our
fellow-visitors were of all types, chiefly of the humbler
English, and there were not many obvious aliens among
them. With that passion and pride in their own which
sends them holidaying over the island to every point
of historic or legendary interest, and every scene famous
for its beauty, they strayed about the grounds and gar-
den-paths of Hampton Court and through the halls of
state, and revered the couches and thrones of the dead
kings and queens in their bed-chambers and council-
chambers, and perused the pictures on the walls, and
the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest they did not seem
persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their en-
joyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it,
and possibly it was even greater without that. They
could not have got so much hurt from the baleful beau-
ties of Charles's court without their history as with it,
and where they might not have been protected by their
ignorance, they were saved by their preoccupation with
one another, for they mostly hunted the objects of in-
terest in courting couples.

We were going, after we had shared their sight-seeing,
to enjoy the special privilege of visiting one of the pri-
vate apartments into which the palace has been so
comfortably divided up. But here, I am sorry to say,
I must close the door in the reader's face, and leave him
to cool his heels (I regret the offensiveness of the ex-
pression, but I cannot help it) on the threshold of the
apartment, at the top of the historic staircase which

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he will have climbed with us, until we come out again.
I do not mind telling him that nothing could be more
charmingly homelike, and less like the proud discomfort
of a palace, than the series of rooms we saw. For a
moment, also, I will allow him to come round into the
little picturesque court, gay with the window-gardens
of its quaint casements, where we can look down upon
him from the leads of our apartment. He ought to
feel like a figure in an uncommonly pretty water-
color, for he certainly looks like one, under the clustering
gables and the jutting lattices. But if he prefers com-
ing to life as a sight-seer he may join us at the door of
Cardinal Wolsey's great kitchen, now forming part of
our hostess's domain. The vast hearth is there yet, with
its crane and spit, and if the cardinal could come back
he might have a dinner cooked at it for Edward VII.
with very little more trouble than for Henry VIII.
three or four hundred years ago. "But what in the
world," the reader may ask me, putting his hand on an
old sedan-chair, which is somewhere in the same base-
ment, if not in the kitchen itself, "is this?" I answer
him, quite easily: "Oh, that is the Push," and explain
that though now mounted on wheels, instead of poles,
the sedan-chair is still in actual use, and any lady-
dweller in the apartments has the right of going to a
dinner, or for what I know a "rout" in it, wherever it
can be propelled within the precints of the palace.

I suppose it is not taken out into the town, and I do
not know that the ladies of the apartments ever visit
there. In spite of this misgiving, Hampton remains
one of the innumerable places in England where I should
like to live always. Its streets follow the Thames, or
come and go from the shores so pleasantly, that there
is a sense of the river in it everywhere; and though I

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

suppose people do not now resort to the place so much
by water as they used, one is quite free to do so if one
Hkes. We had not thought, however, to hire a water-
man with his barge in coming, and so we poorly went
back by the train. I say poorly in a comparative sense
only, for there are many worse things in the world than
running up to London in the cool, the very cool, of an
April evening from Hampton Court. At such an hour
you see the glad young suburban husbands, who have
got home for the day, digging in the gardens at the backs
of the pretty houses which your train passes, and the
glad young wives, keeping round after them, and seeing
they do not make play of their work. A neat maid in a
cap pushes a garden-roller over the path, or a peram-
bulator with a never-failing baby in it. The glimpse
of domestic bliss is charming; and then it is such a com-
fort to get back to London, which seems to have been
waiting, like a great plain, kind metropolis-mother, to
welcome you home again, and ask what you would rather
have for dinner.

XIV
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

THE invention of Week-Ends is a feat of the English
social genius dating since long after my stay of
twenty-odd years ago. Like so many other English
mysteries it is very simple, and consists of dedicating
the waste space of time between Friday afternoon and
Monday forenoon to visits out of town. It is the time
when, if you have friends within reasonable, or even
unreasonable reach of London, you are asked down.
Science has ascertained that in this interval of fifty or
sixty hours no one can do anything, and that the time
had better be frankly given up to pleasure.

Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no
such intervals between sights, or perhaps between en-
gagements, and we found a whole week-end beyond our
grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend it
here or there in the country. That was why we were
going down to the place of a friend one Sunday morning
instead of a Friday evening and coming back the same
day instead of the next. But we were glad of our piece
of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grate-
ful for the Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the
most perfect of its kind. There used to be such Sun-
days in America when people were young, and I suppose
there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if
you are no longer so very young you will be more apt

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

to find them in England, where Sunday has been study-
ing, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in just
what proportion to blend the blue and white in its wel-
kin, and to unite warmth and coolness in its air.

I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church
that morning, but our third-class compartment was
filled with people going into the country for the day;
fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for an
endless time in the fields and woods, which are often
free in that much-owned England, while the may was
yet freshly red and white on the hawthorns in the first
week in June. Among our fellow - passengers that
morning a young mother, not much older than her five
children, sat with her youngest in her arms, while the
other four perched at the edge of the seat, two on each
side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare of red
cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came
to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had
to help. One's heart must go with these holiday-makers
as they began to leave the train after the last suburban
stations, where they could feel themselves fairly in the
country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such
motherly looking country, and yet young with spring-
time, and of a breath that came balmily in at the open
car-windows; and the trees stood about in the meadows
near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing
it was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being
much good for fuel or lumber they could stand for ages
and ages, and shelter the sheep and cattle without
danger of the axe.

At our own station we found our host's motor waiting
for us, and after waiting for some one else, who did not
come by the next train, it whisked us much sooner than
we could have wished over the nine miles of smooth road

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stretching to his house. The Enghsh are always telUng
you, if you are an American, how the Americans think
nothing of distances, and they apparently derive their
belief from the fact that it is a thousand miles from
New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to
San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we
do not step casually aboard a train for either of those
places, or, indeed, without much moral and material
preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being
shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware
attaches to you from our supposed contempt of space,
you could make out a very pretty case against them, in
convicting them of an even greater indifference to dis-
tances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and
accepting invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a
run from London down to Ultima Thule for a week is
thought nothing of, or much less of than a journey from
New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more
in the English social scheme than the other is in ours;
and perhaps the distance at which a gentleman will live
from his railroad-station in the country is still more
impressive. The American commuter who drives night
and morning two or three miles after leaving and before
getting his train, thinks he is having quite drive enough;
if he drives six miles the late and early guest feels him-
self badly used; but apparently such distances are not
minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come
to devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled
away by a public fly, they seem not to have been re-
garded as evils.

For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil.
Every foot, every inch of the way was delightful, and
we only wished that our motor could have conceived of
our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

had made it indifferent. There were some villages in
the course of that swift flight where we could have
willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with
gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards
and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for
millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church-
going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene,
our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort
of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves
are the symbol of our race's rustic Sunday leisure every-
where; and the main difference that I could note between
our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they
would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls,
and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very
well sit on the tops of hedges.

If one part of England can be said to be more charm-
ing than another, and I suppose that there are odds in
its loveliness, I think there can be no doubt but we were
that day in one of the most beautiful regions within an
hour's reach of London. We were pretty constantly
mounting in our motor-flight from the station; the up-
lands opened round us, and began to roll far away tow-
ards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very
stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency
of English downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and
this we had from the windows and gardened levels of
our friends' house even more than from the highroad,
which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way
of its own. Mountains would have been out of key
with the landscape; downs were just right.

I do not know why the house was the more agreeable
for being new, and for being the effect of our friends'
immediate and not their ancestral fancy, quite as it
would have been with most of our friends' country-

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houses at home. We certainly had not come to England
for newness of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the
shrubberies being new; and my content was absolute
when I heard from our friends that they had at one time
thought of building their house of wood : the fact seemed
to restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built
continent which I had so willingly forsaken only a few
weeks before.

But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than
that it shall render us some fleeting image of the nearest
and dearest things of home ? What I had reasonably or
logically come to England for was nature tamed to the
hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of some-
thing wild, something savage - looking, gaunt, huge,
rugged, I rejoiced with an insensate pleasure in its like-
ness to the roughest aspect of America that association
could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but
it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some
others, and I will own that when our friends took us the
walk over the downs which they had promised us,
nothing could have gladdened me so much as to enter a
secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart-
track growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and
finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths
of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have
been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering
out of memory of the clearing where the young pines
and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the
giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out
over its snows and mosses.

The masses of the red may and the white may which
stood here and there in the border of the yews, might
have been the blossom of the wilding apple-trees which
often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints,
but I could recall nothing that was quite American
when once we had plunged into the shadow of these
great yews, and I could not even find their like in the
English literature which is the companion of American
nature. I could think only of the weird tree - shapes
which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so
mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave
Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as
if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his
illustrations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval
moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame
to bear what witness we can to the fact.

The yew-tree's shade in Gray's Elegy had not pre-
pared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never
imagined them of the vastness I beheld. The place had
its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations
of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish
flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less
protected than now, or when its wood was more employed
in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London
used to come out to the forest by night and lop away
great limbs of the yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of
timber-merchants. From time to time my host put
his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a
tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry
decay without that endeavor some other trees make to
cover the stump with a new growth. The down, he
told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his
horse or his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not
know whose forest rights, if any one's, were especially
violated in these cruel midnight outrages on the yews;
but some one must have had the interest to stop it.

I would not try to say how far the common extended,

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or how far its privileges; but the land about is mostly
held in great estates, like most of the land in England,
and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie
the popular privileges. I fancied a sjnubol of these
in the game keeper-whom we met coming out of the
wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently
sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheas-
ants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his
custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met
in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now
seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I
would not for the sake of the books where I have known
so many of his sort, have him the least different from
what he was.

The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is
usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liber-
ties. By the time we got back to lunch we could have
believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had
been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after
the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time,
which we were to take at a famous house in the neigh-
borhood, the temperature was all right again; it was
more than all right in the cold current of air which the
motor created. In the course of that post - luncheon
talk our host brought out a small porcelain bust of Wash-
ington, in very Continental blue, which he said was one
of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the
time of our Revolution to express the feeling of our Eng-
lish sympathizers in the struggle which gave English
liberty a new lease. One reads of this sympathy, how
wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but
till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not real-
ized it. The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at
our ignorance with his accustomed blandness, and I hope

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

he will never regret being given to one of us as a testi-
mony of the amity which had largely endured for our
nation from and through the most difficult times. The
gift lent our day a unique grace, and I could only hope
that it might be without a surprise too painful that our
English Washington would look upon the American
Republic of his creation when we got home with
him; I doubted if he would find it altogether his
ideal.

The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down
to the house where we were going, I do not know how
many miles, for our afternoon tea. The house was
famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in ex-
istence; but I am not going to transfer the burden of
my slight knowledge of its past to the mind of the
reader. I will only say that it came into the hands of
the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of
its owners' heads, a means of acquisition not so dis-
tasteful to him as to them, and after its restitution
to the much decapitated family it continued in their
possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a
vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind,
rising upon a gentle level of fields and meadows, with
nothing dramatically picturesque in the view from its
straight-browed windows. The present owner, who
showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in
consideration of our early train, has the generous pas-
sion of leaving the old place as nearly as he can in the
keeping of its past; and I was glad to have him to agree
with me that the Tudor period was that in which Eng-
lish domestic comfort had been most effectually studied.
But my satisfaction in this was much heightened by
my approval of what he was simultaneously saying
about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not pub-
is?

LONDON FILMS

lishing serial fiction : in his own newspaper, he said, he
had a story running all the time.

The old and the new kiss each other constantly
in England, and I perceived that this vividly modern
possessor of the most perfect Tudor house existing was,
with the intense actuality of his interests and ambitions,
as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom.
When we came out of the house and walked towards
the group we had left under a spreading oak (or it might
have been an elm; the two are much of the same habit
in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have
fancied one's self in any most picturesque period of the
past, if it had not been for the informality of the men's
dress. Women are always of the past in the beauty
of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking
across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their
pretty gowns of our day, could easily have stepped out
of an old picture, or continued in it as they sat in their
wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.

XV

FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

AN incident of the great midsummer heat, was an
jLjL excursion down the Thames which took us far from
the society atmosphere so relaxing to the moral fibre
of the mere witness of the London season. The change
was not to the cooler air which had been imagined, but
it immersed us for the space of the boat's voyage to and
from Greenwich among those social inferiors who are
probably the moral betters of their superiors, but whose
company does not always seem the spiritual baptism
it doubtless is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly
of the classes which are lower as well as middle, and the
sole worldly advantage they had of us was that they
were going where they wished, and we were going where
we must. We had started for Richmond, but as there
proved to be no boat for Richmond, we decided to take
the boat which was for Greenwich, and consoled our-
selves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor
of many parliamentary and literary feasts which that
fish has furnished. A whitebait dinner, what would not
one suffer of human contiguity for it, even though it
could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early
hour?

It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the
Greenwich boat puffed up to her landing at Westminster
Bridge, and the lower middle classes streamed aboard.

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She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat,
and she was of a failing line which the London County
Council is about to replace by a line of municipal boats,
without apparently alarming, in the English, the sen-
sibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there
is any talk of government transportation. The official
who sold me tickets might have been training himself
for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly
explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my
inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in
American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard.
He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat
struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which
passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the
tide towards Greenwich.

Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark
and the grandeur of the Westminster shore, which is
probably the noblest water-front in the world. Near
and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial
masses of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we
passed, varied their grouping with one another, and
with the leafy domes and spires which everywhere
enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great
succession ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it
does to the mind's eye, but to the body's eye, the Tower
is rather histrionic than historic. It is like a scenic
reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage;
and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the
County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to
be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the
Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the pur-
chase: New York could easily build a London Tower
that would look worthier of its memories than the real
one, without even making it a sky-scraper.

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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it
is so true as it is that after passing the Tower the one
shore of the Thames begins to lose its dignity and beauty,
and to be of hke effect with the other, which is the
Southwark side, and hke all the American river-sides
that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds,
and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the
shipping in the stream does little to console. That is
mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners,
clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or
shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the for-
est of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River
and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between
low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of
slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of
the river brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.

Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bath-
ing from the slimy shoals, running down to the water
on planks laid over them, and splashing joyously into
the filthy solution with the inextinguishable gladness
of their years. They looked Hke boys out of the pur-
lieus of Dickens's poverty-world, and all London water-
side apparitions are more or less from his pages. The
elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated hotel to which
we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as
much of his invention as if he had created him from the
dust of the place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul
into him. He had a queer pseudo-respectful shuffle
and a sidelong approach, with a dawning baldness at
the back of his head, which seemed of one quaUty with
these characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with
the greasiness of long serving. Asked for whitebait, he
destroyed the illusion in which we had come at a blow.
He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if

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we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any
call for it now, and they did not keep it. Then he
smiled down upon us out of an apparently humorous
face in which there was no real fun, and added that we
could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon
mayonnaise was therefore what we had, and except that
it was not whitebait, it was not very disappointing; we
had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it,
we were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a
fly which we wished to take for a drive, in the absence
of whitebait. But a fly required, in Greenwich, an
interview with a stableman and a negotiation which,
though we were assured it would be fairly conducted,
we decided to forego, and contented ourselves with
exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmos-
phere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The
room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite rea-
son, and the room in which the ministry used to have
their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before
whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some
state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms
that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a
full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate fore-
ground— it was as much earth as water that lapped the
shore — a small boy wading out to a small boat and pro-
viding himself a sorrowful evening at home with his
mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves and trousers in
the solution. Some young men in rowing costume
were vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of
filling in their outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaint-
ance we had made in coming, was hurrying to get out of
the river into the freshness of the sea, and this was all
of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to
see.

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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of
balls and parties, which, though not imaginably of the
first social quality, must have given his middle-aging
hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in summer.
He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the
gallery of the old naval college on the way back to our
boat, and saw us to the door, and fairly out into the
blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat, and we utilized
every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, ruiming from
tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every
available portico and colonnade. But once inside the
great hall where England honors her naval heroes and
their battles, it was deliciously cool. It could not have
been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid
air, for they all represented the heat of battle, with
fire and smoke, and the work of coming to close quarters,
with

"hot gun-lip kissing gun."

The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals
and other sea-dogs of England whose portraits relieved
the intolerable spread of the battle scenes; and it was
best of all in the many pictures and effigies and relics
of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of
his great time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon;
everywhere his face showed the impassioned dreamer,
the poet; and once more gave the lie to the silly notion
that there is a type of this or that kind of great men.
When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we
perceived that the whole place we were in was a temple
to Nelson, and that whatever minor marine deities had
their shrines there, it was in strict subordination to him.
England had done what she could for them, who had
done so much for her; but they seem consecrated in

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rather an out-of-the-way place, now that there is no
longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their worship ;
and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before
choosing just their apotheosis.

By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion,
it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped
from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the
first-class shelter of the awning at her stern. Even
there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the
small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solu-
tion; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves
to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide
among the lower middle classes. They were mostly
good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment harsher
than pity even when they were not good. Still it was
not just the sort of day when one could have wished
them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich.
Perhaps they were only incidentally given it, but it
must have been from a specific generosity that several
children in arms were fed by their indulgent mothers
with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had prob-
ably had no whitebait.

XVI

HENLEY DAY

OUR invitation to the regatta at Henley, included
luncheon in the tent of an Oxford college, and a
view of the races from the college barge, which, with
the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed
down the Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry
between the crews of the two great English universities.
There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited
through the air in default of water for towing them to
Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of house-
boats stretching up and down the grassy margin of the
stream, along the course the rowers were to take. As
their contest was the least important fact of the occa-
sion for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a
clear notion which came off winner in any of the events,
I will try not to trouble the reader with my impressions
of them, except as they lent a vivid action and formed
a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles
under the sun. I have hitherto contended that class-
day at Harvard was the fairest flower of civilization,
but, having seen the regatta at Henley, I am no longer
so sure of it.

Henley is no great way from London, and the quick
pulse of its excitement could be sensibly felt at the
station, where we took train for it. Our train was one
of many special trains leaving at quarter-hourly inter-

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vals, and there was already an anxious crowd hurrying
to it, with tickets entithng them to go by that train
and no other. It was by no means the youthful crowd
it would have been at home, and not even the over-
whelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now
politely prevails with us in almost her European num-
bers, was here in no greater evident force; but gray-
haired fathers and uncles and elderly friends much
more abounded; and they looked as if they were not
altogether bent upon a vicarious day's pleasure. The
male of the English race is of much more striking pres-
ence than the American; he keeps more of the native
priority of his sex in his costume, so that in this crowd,
I should say, the outward shows were rather on his
part than that of his demurely cloaked females, though
the hats into which these flowered at top gave some hint
of the summer loveliness of dress to be later revealed.
They were, much more largely than most railway-sta-
tion crowds, of the rank which goes first class, and in
these special Henley trains it was well to have booked
so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive uncrumpled,
for the second-class and third-class carriages were packed
with people.

There seemed so many of our fellow-passengers, that
reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge
of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste
to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside the
station which were to take us to the scene of the races.
Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these
vehicles, or for the more public brakes and char-a-bancs
and omnibuses plying to the same destination; and so
far from falling victims to covert extortion in the matter
of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded
with the price of the drive. This was about double the

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HENLEY DAY

ordinary price, and so soon does human nature adjust
itself to conditions that I promptly complained to an
English friend for having had to pay four shillings for a
drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home.
In my resentment I tried to part foes with my driver,
who mildly urged that he had but a few days in the
year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded so ill that
when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day,
I amicably took him again for the return to the station.

Of the coming and going through the town of Henley
I keep the sort of impression which small English towns
give the passing stranger, of a sufficiently busy commer-
cial life, doing business in excellent shops of the modern
pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a familiar
picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned
annual or stage - setting or illustrated Christmas - story
they are out of. I never could pass through such a
town without longing to stop in it and know all about
it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated
my longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could
have had each other to ourselves in the interest of an
intimate acquaintance. It looked most worthy to be
known, and I have no doubt that it is full of history
and tradition of the sort which small towns have been
growing for centuries throughout England.

But we had only that one day there, and in our haste
to give it to the regatta we could only make sure of
driving over a beautiful picture-postal bridge on our
way to the meadows by whose brink our college barge
was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain.
It was really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar
with boat-racing in the Thames where the Thames is
still the Isis at Oxford, and was as wholly without the
motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many

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other barges and house-boats set broadside to the shore
for a mile up and down as closely as they could be lined,
it was of a comfortable cabin below and of a pleasant
gallery above, with an awning to keep off the sun or
rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather
to send. But that day the weather had no whims; it
was its pleasure to be neither wet nor hot, but of a de-
licious average warmth, informed with a cool freshness
which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact,
youth came back in all the holiday sights and scents to
the elderly witness who ought to have known better
than to be glad of such things as the white tents in the
green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the sun-
light by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages
thronging up and down the road, or standing detached
from the horses in the wayside shadow, where the
trodden grass, not less nor more than the wandering
cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus-
days and Fourths of July. But such things lift the
heart in spite of philosophy and experience, and bid it
rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene every-
where elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncra-
sies of time and place. Certain of these might well
touch the American half-brother with a sense of differ-
ence, but there was none that perhaps more suggested
it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board
that these or those grounds in the meadows were this
or that lady's, who might be supposed waiting in pro-
prietory state for her guests within the pavilion of her
roped-off enclosure. Together with this assertion of
private right, and the warning it implied, was the ex-
pression of yet elder privilege in the presence of the
immemorial wanderers who had their shabby camps
by the open wayside and offered the passer fortune at

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HENLEY DAY

so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford
to buy a prophecy of prosperity from them; I do not
know why they proposed to sell with these favorable
destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make.

These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can nat-
uralize, are a fact of every English holiday without
which it would not be so native, as the English them-
selves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and in-
tensely insular through the prevalence of more and
more Americans among them. Most of our fellow-
guests on that Oxford barge were our fellow-country-
men, and I think now that without their difference
there would have been wanting an ult mately pene-
trating sense of the entirely English keeping of the affair.
The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I hope, a novel zest
to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to
offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed
to grow and open flower-like from the water, until it was
a blossom which covered the surface with its petals.

The course for the races was marked off midway from
either shore by long timbers fastened end to end and
forming a complete barrier to the intrusion of any of
the mere pleasure-craft. Our own shore was sacred
to barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I re-
member rightly, was devoted to the noisy and muscular
expansion of undergraduate emotion, but, it seems to
me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it
were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own
side. Still the impression of something rather more
official in the arrangements of that shore persists with
me.

There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing
began, but as this throughout was the least interest of
the affair for any one but the undergraduates, and the

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nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I will keep my
promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced
some minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather un-
impressive hand-bell. Then a pistol-shot was fired;
and then, after the start far up the course, the shells
came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed
that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked
from their waists up as our university crews do, or used
to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at
New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows
slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculptu-
resque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for
the signal to come to eager life. I think that American
moment was more thrilling than any given moment
at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a col-
lege barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored
spectator, I am not going to own that it equals as a
view-point the observation-train, with its successive
banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of
handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast
of the racing crew^s beside the stately course of the
Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I think it best to
withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should
decide in favor of Henley.

There was already a multitude of small boats within
the barriers keeping the race-course open, and now and
then one of these crossed from shore to shore. They
were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and
snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply
rounded craft, new to my American observance, and
called cockles, very precisely adapted to contain one
girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed on the
young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or
that should overset the ticklishly balanced shell. She

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HENLEY DAY

might assist her eyes in trimming the boat with a red or
yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her
gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must
be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink,
lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for
the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution
seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that
while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were
afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleido-
scope's vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As
the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was
more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park
had taken water, and though in such a scene as that
which spread its soft allure before us, it was not quite
imaginable that all the loveliness one saw was of the
quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near Stan-
hope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the
beauty was not as well - born as it was well - dressed.
Those house-boats up and down the shore must mainly
have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and of
those who had come from the four quarters to Henley
for the day, not every one could have been an actress
with her friends, though each contributed to the effect
of a spectacle not yet approached in any pantomime.
There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and
forth among the house-boat people ; and I was told that
it was even more than correct for a young man to ask a
house-boat girl to go out with him in one of the small
boats on the water, but how much this contributed to
keep the scene elect I do not know.

If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality
as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a
visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of
bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This

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ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept
one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's
college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the
eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time,
and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a
pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected
pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or
playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For,
it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic
crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and
this gave the affair its pathos. Not that negro min-
strelsy as the English have interpreted the sole Amer-
ican contribution to histrionic art, is in itself pathetic,
except as it is so lamentably far from the original; but
that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is
sorrowful; and there were many different artists there
who were working hard. Sometimes it was the man
who sang and the woman who played; but it was always
the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to
have the greater enterprise and perseverance. Of course
in the case of the blackened minstrels, some man ap-
pealed to the love of humor rather than the love of
beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case
of an old-time plantation darkey who sang the familiar
melodies with ^ the slurring vowels and wandering as-
pirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half
blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more
effective than the other could have been. A com-
pany of young men in masks with a piano in their boat,
which one played while another led the singing in an
amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting
their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager be-
cause they were, as our English friends believed, under-
graduates on a lark.

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HENLEY DAY

They were no better-natured than the rest of the
constantly increasing multitude. The boats thickened
upon the water as if they had risen softly from the bot-
tom to which any panic might have sent them; but the
people in them took every chance with the amiability
which seems to be finally the thing that holds England
together. The English have got a bad name abroad
which certainly they do not deserve at home; but per-
haps they do not think foreigners worthy the considera-
tion they show one another on any occasion that masses
them. One lady, from her vantage in the stern of her
boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a tremen-
dous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked
round and smiled, as if it had been a caress, which it
probably was, in disguise. But they were all kind and
patient with one another whether in the same boat or
not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a
boat should be managed; they bumped and punched
one another wildly; but the occupants of the boat
assailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a
smiling acceptance of its apology, and passed on the
incident to another boat before or beside them. From
the whole multitude there came not one loud or angry
note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene
it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the
universal good-humor. The women were there to show
themselves in and at their prettiest, and to see one
another as they lounged on the cushions or lay in the
bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their
hats and parasols; the men were there to make the
women have a good time. Neither the one nor the
other seemed in the least concerned in the races, which
duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and
firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal

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came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure-
craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, soft-
ly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the
water, so that you could have walked from the barrier
to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have
suggested that the situation might have had its perils.
Any panic must have caused a commotion that would
have overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged
their freight to helpless death. But the spectacle smiled
securely to the sun, which smiled back upon it from a
cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than English
ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our lunch-
eon in the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the grassy
shore.

To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long
tables, and served one another from the dishes put
before us. There was not the ambitious variety of
salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have
seen at Harvard Class-Day spreads, but there were the
things that stay one more wholesomely and substan-
tially, and one was not obliged to eat standing and
hold one's plate. Everything in England that can be
is adjusted to the private and personal scale; everything
with us is generalized and fitted to the convenience of the
greatest number. Later, we all sat down together at
afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as
breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits.

I believe some races were rowed while we were eating
and drinking, but we did not mind. We were not there
for the races, but for the people who were there for the
races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time,
the multitude of them seemed to have increased, and
where I had fancied that not one boat more could have
been pressed in, half a dozen had found room. The

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HENLEY DAY

feat must have been accomplished by main strength
and awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place
indeed for skill to evince itself; but people pushed about
in the most incredible way when they tried to move,
though mostly they did not try; they let their boats lie
still, and sway with the common movement when the
water rose and sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them.
There were more and more people of the sort that there
can never be enough of, such as young girls beautifully
dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not
hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer
hats. It was the fairy multitude of Harvard Class-Day
in English terms, and though Henley never came at
any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expres-
sion which Class-Day used to reach when all its youthful
loveliness banked itself on the pine-plank gradines en-
closing the Class-Day elm, and waited the struggle for
its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in the
presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves
from a society ultimately, if not immediately, vaster.
It was rather dreadful perhaps to reflect that if all that
brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had been en-
gulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly
replaced by as much more, not once but a score of
times.

I will not pretend that this thought finally drove me
from the scene, for I am of a very hardy make when it
comes to the most frightful sort of suppositions. But
the afternoon was wearing away, and we must go some-
time. It seemed better also to leave the gayety at its
height: the river covered with soft colors, and the
barges and house-boats by the brink, with their com-
panies responsive in harmonies of muslin and gauze
and lace to those afloat; the crowds on the opposite

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shore in constant movement, and in vivid agitation
when the bell and the pistol announced a racing event.
We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our
way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass,
weaving the web of fate and selling brooms and brushes
in the intervals of their mystical employ, or cosily gos-
siping together; and then we took for the station the
harmless fly which we had forever renounced as preda-
tory in the morning.

It was not yet the rush-hour for the run back to Lon-
don, and we easily got an empty compartment, in which
we were presently joined by a group of extremely hand-
some people, all of a southern type, but differing in age
and sex. There were a mother and a daughter, and a
father evidently soon to become a father-in-law, and
the young man who was to make him so. The women
were alike in their white gowns, and alike in their dark
beauty, but the charms of the mother had expanded in
a bulk incredible of the slender daughter. She and her
father were rather silent, and the talk was mainly be-
tween the mother and the future of the girl. They first
counted up the day's expenses, and the cost of each dish
they had had at luncheon. " Then there was the cham-
pagne," the lady insisted. "It isn't so much when you
count that out; and you know we chose to have it."
They all discussed the sum, and agreed that if they
had not wanted the champagne their holiday would
not have cost inordinately. "And now," the mother
continued to the young man, " you must order that box
for the opera as soon as ever you reach the hotel. Order
it by telephone. Give the girl your boutonniere; that
will jolly her. Get a four-guinea box opposite the royal
box."

As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class

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HENLEY DAY

seat, her little feet could not reach the floor, and the
effort with which she bent forward was heroic. The
very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was almost
ecUpsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gen-
tleman in the opposite corner spoke a word now and
then, but for the most part silently smelled of tobacco.
The talk which the mother and future son-in-law had
to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own
affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do
not know Vv^hy they should have wished to crush us
with their opulence since they would not have chosen
to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of
opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly hand-
some people, in the dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which
I am afraid our own race can never achieve. Yet with
all this evident opulence, with their resolute spirits, with
their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon
which they could have made less expensive if they had
not chosen to gratify themselves in it, with their pros-
pect of a four-guinea box, opposite the box of royalty,
at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic
than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never
imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they
were a radiantly enviable party returning from a brilliant
day at Henley.

XVII

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

THE return in mid-September to the London which
we left at the end of July, implicates a dramatic
effect more striking than any possible in the mere tour-
ist's experience. In the difference between this London
and that you fully realize the moral and physical magni-
tude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to
bursting with the tide of manifold life ; the later London
lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere
sense of what it has been through. The change is
almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be
witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a
city which still holds all its six millions except a few
hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a cer-
tain part of London has in September, for the brilliant
and perpetual movement of those hundred thousands
was what gave it repletion.

The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Picca-
dilly and the streets of shops is all away at country-
houses or at the sea-side or in the mountains of the
island or the continent. The comely young giants
who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the
paths of the Park are off killing grouse ; scarcely a livery
shows itself; even the omnibus -tops are depopulated;
long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks; the stately pro-
cession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts at

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the
tormented regiments of soldiers are at peace in their
barracks; a strange quiet has fallen on that better quarter
of the town which is really, or unreally, the town. With
this there is an increase of the homelike feeling which is
always present, with at least the happy alien, in London;
and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and cen-
tralized in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the
theatres. There, indeed, the season seems to have
returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses and the
stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of
its summer joy.

One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I
met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and
the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the
church parade wore in life through those halcyon days
when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition
put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but
upon the whole it failed. It may have been an im-
pulse from this vision that carried me as far as
Hyde Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick
or the dead, in the chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning
up the edges of the road. In the consecrated closes,
where the vanished children of smartness used to stand
or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walk-
ing, the inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered,
with their legs in the air, on the wet grass, and the drip-
ping leaves smote damply together overhead. Another
close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I
saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had
showered over-night, and the ground must still have been
wet where a score of the bodies of the unemployed, or at
least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun. They
were having their holiday, but they did not make me

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feel as if I were still enjoying my outing so much as
some other things: for instance, the colored minstrelsy,
which I had heard so often at the sea-side in August, and
which reported itself one night in the Mayfair street
which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and
touched our hearts with the concord of our native airs
and banjos. We were sure they were American darkies,
from their voices and accents, but perhaps they were not
as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who
came down the place at high noon with her large baby
in her arms, swaying it from side to side as she sang a
plaintive ballad to the skies, and scanned the windows
for some relenting to her want.

The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the
season had used so hard, were many of them putting
themselves in repair against the next time of festivity,
and testifying to the absence of their world. One day
I found the solitude rather more than I could bear with-
out appeal to that vastly more multitudinous world of
the six millions who never leave London except on busi-
ness. I said in my heart that this was the hour to go and
look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in
wait for me in St. Paul's, and I had no sooner mounted
an omnibus-top for the journey through Piccadilly, the
Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found the other omni-
bus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied.
To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had
formed the almost universal head-covering of the 'bus-
top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but
they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us
when September begins. They had never so much rea-
son to be here as with us, and they might have had al-
most as much reason for lingering as they had for com-
ing. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

well as among the omnibus- toppers, and the pedestrians
abashed me by their undiminished myriads. As they
streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent of eager life,
and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels
as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my
theory of a decimated London. It was not the tenth
man who was gone, nor the hundredth, if even it was
the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis mocked
with its millions the notion of nobody left in town be-
cause a few pleasurers had gone to the moors or the
mountains or the shores.

Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle
of September, the trivial kodak could not bear to dwell
on the mortuary aspects which the fashionable quarters
of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance
of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek
those springs or sources of the American nation which
may be traced all over England, and which rather abound
in London, trusting chances for the involuntary glimpses
which are so much better than any others, when you
can get them. In different terms, and leaving apart the
strained figure which I cannot ask the reader to help me
carry farther, I went one breezy, cool, sunny, and rainy
morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps,
and philosophize my reflections in the researches before
us. Our rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows
Barking, conveniently founded just opposite the Mark
Lane District Railway Station, some seven or eight hun-
dred years before I arrived there, and successively de-
stroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair
that I could safely lean against it while waiting for my
friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood.
The street before it might have been a second-rate
New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, ex-

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cept for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted
yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public-
houses. There was a continual coming and going of
trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of
hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all
heedless, if not unconscious, of the Tower of London
close at hand, whose dead were so often brought from
the scaffold to be buried in that church.

Our own mission was to revere its interior because
William Penn was baptized in it, but when we had got
inside we found it so full of scaffolding and the litter of
masonry, and the cool fresh smell of mortar from the res-
torations going on that we had no room for the emotions
we had come prepared with. With the compassion of a
kindly man in a plasterer's spattered suit of white, we
did what we could, but it was very little. I at least was
not yet armed with the facts that, among others, the head-
less form of Archbishop Laud had been carried from the
block on Tower Hill and laid in All Hallows; and if I
had known it, I must have felt that though Laud could
be related to our beginnings through his persecution
of the Puritans, whom he harried into exile, his interment
in All Hallows was only of remote American interest.
Besides, we had set out with the intention of keeping
to the origins of colonies which had not been so much
studied as those of New England, and we had first
chosen Penn as sufficiently removed from the forbidden
ground. But we had no sooner left the church where
he was baptized, to follow him in the much later interest
of his imprisonment in the Tower, than we found our-
selves in New England territory again. For there,
round the first corner, under the foliage of the trees and
shrubs that I had been ignorantly watching from the
church, as they stiffly stirred in the September wind,

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

was that Calvary of so many martyr - souls, Tower
Hill.

It is no longer, if it ever was, a hill, or even a per-
ceptible rise of ground, but a pleasant gardened and
planted space, not distinguishable from a hundred
others in London, with public offices related to the
navy closing it mostly in, but not without unofficial
public and private houses on some sides. It was per-
haps because of its convenience for his professional
affairs that Admiral Penn had fixed such land-going
residence as an admiral may have, in All Hallows Bark-
ing parish, where his great son was born. "Your late
honored father," his friend Gibson wrote the founder of
Pennsylvania, "dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the
east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall."
But the memories of honored father and more honored
son must yield in that air to such tragic fames as those
of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these and
the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir
Harry Vane, once governor of Massachusetts, who died
here among those whom the perjured second Charles
played false when he came back to the throne of the
perjured first Charles. In fact you can get away from
New England no more in London than in America; and
if in the Tower itself the long captivity of Sir Walter
Raleigh somewhat dressed the balance, we were close
upon other associations which outweighed the discovery
of the middle south and of tobacco, a thousandfold.

Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the
common level than it once was, as often happens with
rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinc-
tion of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the
general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not
now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away,

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Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approach-
ed, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories
which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower
towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical
river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic
modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the
bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it,
and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we
had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look
as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the
stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between
Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the
fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and
their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking
for New England, if indeed the thing really happened.
Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said
so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt.
This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water
was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting
in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with
various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced
in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving.
It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the
present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny
were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land
they were to ennoble with the first great republican
experiment of our race, after the commonwealth failed
to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because of a
want of imagination in both people and protector, who
could not conceive of a state without an hereditary
ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father,
till another son of another father came back to urge
his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a
right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the

184

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time
and place ; but we ourselves who grew up were there had
never been kings to craze the popular fanc}^, could not
conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years
and more, and even then some of us thought of having
one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now
had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last
read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of
American beginnings was made when Cromwell was
forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom-
house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice
now on the site of whatever building then stood there,
and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace,
whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I
did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did, last.
We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower
Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once
a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its
inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled
away to cool themselves in different parts of the Amer-
ican wilderness. It was much later that the place
became famous for the declaration of the three tailors
of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have
begun, a public appeal with the words : " We, the people
of England," and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street
is more suggestive of them than of those who went into
exile for their religious and political faith. In the
former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and
poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly
gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and common-
place thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly
mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course,
and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of
plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street,

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LONDON FILMS

and who so largely form the ancestry of the American
people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there
is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should
be glad to think characteristic of our nation in one of
the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted Amer-
ican bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better
homes than the London poor could otherwise have
known.

Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom
Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of free-
dom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and
for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the
viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway,
under which we walked the length of the long, dull,
noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church of
St. Olave, or Glaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose
name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted,
for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that
sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth
colony came from. The church is an uninteresting
structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better
with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers
who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their
silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the
boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly
believed that some part of the Clink was still to be de-
tected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and
we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave's
or St. Tooley's, and wandered on through their shades,
among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and
damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those
dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know
whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the
place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain

186

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

floury laborers who had cleared a space among the
wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were
pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events
of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside,
of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for
if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the
home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy
quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its
past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have
to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres
as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and,
above all, the Globe.

Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively
blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and
blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a
hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the
sympathetic American in England. It is really easier
to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large
air where the objects of your interest are placed at
ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where
you will find them crowding and elbowing one another,
and perhaps treading down and pushing back others
of equal import which you had not in mind. Eng-
land has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds,
and her visionary children press so thick about her
knees, that you cannot well single one specially out
when you come close; it is only at a distance that you
can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and
study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman
who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than
halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of
her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you
wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside
was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place

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LONDON FILMS

and extending his vast shadow over the region we had
so troublesomely passed through, but now another em-
barrassment of riches attended us. We were going to
visit St. Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the
son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long
before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at
Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have
dreamed of naming after him another college in another
Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through
the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits
and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal,
what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond
Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud
with coming and going at some railway station. Here
we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place,
and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour's. Out-
side it has been pitilessly restored in a later English
version of the Early English in which it was built, and
it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such
feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within
much of the original architectural beauty lingers, es-
pecially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not
there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's
sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church
than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer
fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Ed-
mund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger
brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont
and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again
the poet John Gower, the "moral Gower" who so in-
sufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and
Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a
painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so
many actors buried in it that the church is full of the

188

Copi/rig/it, 19UJ, Iw Atvin Lunt/don Coburn

LONDON BRIDGE

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little
Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the
outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more
welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites.
Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John
Harvard in St. Saviour's, and we were almost a year
too early for the painted window which now commem-
orates him.

One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it,
for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a
quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London
seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed
through, and I dare say they were not the best, the
broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain
against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground
and fall from the clouds. But many people live there,
and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of
clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it
was one o'clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting
by the early closing which shuts the stores of London
so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our
way through them to the parapet for a final look at that
stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly
as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a
kingdom.*

* While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the
problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the
knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these
researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed
myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham,
which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which
unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near
six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any
fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific
erudition of mv friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington,
who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my state-

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LONDON FILMS

We were going from St. Saviour's in Southwark where
Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city
where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's effigy Hes in the
chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our his-
tory through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter
Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wanton-
ness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous
reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at
the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we
did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of
the most admirable cats in London. One curled herself
round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was
formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge;
another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses
the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young
sycamores flicker over her velvet flank; the third arched
a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accom-
panying us into the church. There was not much for us
to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing
that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire,
and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly
fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in
the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus
and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much
because he had directed the publication of the first
complete version of the English Bible, as because he
had borne the name of a chief character in The Blithedale
Romance. I am afraid that if the cat could have sup-
posed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it
would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I
should not have known how to justify myself by ex-

ments. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur
to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they
prove mistaken.

190

THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS
(From an old print)

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

plaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illus-
triously connected with America through that coinci-
dence than many more historical scenes.

The early closing had already prevailed so largely in
the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we
were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree's
at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for
getting into any church, but we looked about us too
carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who
was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law
of Virginia. That was what we said to console our-
selves afterwards; but now, since we were, however un-
wittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind
the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan
descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with
ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that
his part in them was alleged against him, and did some-
thing to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is
said to have helped in designing the church, and that
the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and
would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arun-
del could have found his bones to put it over, are suffi-
ciently irrelevant details.

The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with
him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street,
down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of
Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred
there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses
as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after pay-
ing this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately
bulk of India House, and think of the former occupying
the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in
compensation for coming so late to his work there. It
was still better when, by an accident happier than that

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which befell us at St. Catherine Cree's, we unexpectedly
entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the
church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-
Yorker's interest from the picturesque fact that Henry
Hudson and his ship's company made their communion
in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to
the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help
the Dutch found the Tammany regime, which still
flourishes at the Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive
Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not
know why my genealogist should have had the mis-
giving which he expressed within the overhearing of
the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set
him right. " Oh, 'e did mike it 'ere, sir. They've been
and searched the records," she said, so that the reader
now has it on the best authority.

I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assur-
ance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces
of Early English architecture, and its look of being
chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the
heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener
mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which
pervade all old churches. But these things are of the
nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be
intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St.
Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city,
that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or clos-
ing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their foot-
ways and wheeiways, so that we got from point to point
in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other
associations that rivalled those w^e had more specifically
in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance,
literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms
that started up from the stones and the blocks of the

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every
step. As I have already tried to express, it is always
the same story. London is too full of interest, and
when I thought how I could have gone over as much
ground in New York without anything to distract me
from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those
thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing
but my denser ignorance saved me from their density,
as I hurried with my friend through air that any igno-
rance less dense would have found impassable with
memories.

As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only
when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate
Street to the sequestered place before the church of the
Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and
the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the
Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dis-
solved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to
the "Germans" as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish
diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beginnings
of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was
first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and
who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it.
Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the
more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch,
renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways,
notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters
and parcels would be received there for them; this some-
how intimated that the refugees could not have found
it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half
round the world. Cunningham says that "the church
contains some very good decorated windows, and will
repay examination," but, like the early - closing shops
all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday

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afternoon, and we had to come away contenting our-
selves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too
freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impar-
tially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker
travellers, but they will readily find the church in the
rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts
there, and judge for themselves.

Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to
follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bow-
bells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and
through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the sev-
eral prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it with-
out making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and
his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were
forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to
jail in spite of the jury's verdict of acquittal; such
things could then be easily done. In self- justification
they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that
made a very perfect case for their worships, as the
reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth
in Maria Webb's story of The Penns and the Penningtons.
As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh con-
verted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote
to him in Newgate: "Son William, if you and your
friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your
plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests
to the end of the world. . . . Live in love. Shun all
manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He
will bless you."

Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned
is left; a spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of
building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monu-
ment to him who was brave in such a different way from
his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly

194

i

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, com-tly
son would achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was
cast there the second time in three months, that he
wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, and three
minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a
letter to Parliament explaining the principles of Quaker-
i -.1 ..nd he protested to the sheriff of London against
lie cruelties practised by the jailors of Newgate on
prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich
and well-born preferred to suffer with these humble
victims; and probably his oppressors were as glad to be
rid of him in the end as he of them.

One may follow Penn (though we did not always fol-
low him to all, that Saturday afternoon), to many other
places in London: to the Tower, where he was impris-
oned on the droll charge of " blasphemy,^' within stone's
throw of All Hallow's Barking, where he was christened;
to Grace Church Street, where he was arrested for preach-
ing; to Lincoln's Inn, where he had chambers in. his
worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to
school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the
"rules" of the prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt
awhile almost in hiding from the creditors who were
pressing him, probably for the public debt of Pennsyl-
vania.

We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited
the church of St. Sepulchre hard by, and vainly at-
tempted to enter, because Roger Williams was christ-
ened there, and so connected it with the coming of tol-
eration into the world, as well as with the history of the
minute province of Rhode Island, which his spirit so
boundlessly enlarged. We failed equally of any satis-
factory effect from Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate,
possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred

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and five years before, and because my friend could not
quite make out which neighboring street it was where the
mother of the Wesley s was born. But we did what
we could with the shield of the United States Consulate-
General in the Place, and in an adjoining court we had
occasion for seriousness in the capers of a tipsy French-
man, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and
was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently
vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not
insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that
life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the
antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no
true photographer.

After all, we did not find just the street, much less
the house, in which Susannah Annesley had lived before
she was Mrs. Wesley, and long before her sons had
imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had
borne its message to General Oglethorpe's new colony
of Georgia. She lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury
Square, that place sacred to so many varying mem-
ories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased it,
because they would not have the service from the book
of Common Prayer read over them. There her dust
mingles with that of John Bunyan, of Daniel de Foe,
of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard,
and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others.
The English crowd one another no less under than
above the ground, and their island is as historically as
actually over-populated. As I have expressed before,
you can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a
certain association without being importuned by a
score of others as interesting or more so. I have, for
instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor of
Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who

196

By courtesy of London Stereoscopic and Photograph Comj'any

BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE)

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

was silenced for his Puritanism in his church of St.
Giles Cripplegate, because I should have to confess that
when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from
the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley,
and John Wesley, and the Georgian Methodists to the
far mightier fame of Milton, who hes interred there,
with his father before him, with John Fox, author of
The Book of Martyrs, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who
sailed the western seas when they were yet mysteries,
with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of Shakespeare's Sir
Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a
youth of twenty-one, to EUzabeth Bowchier. Again,
I have had to ask myself, what is the use of pamfully
following up the slender threads afterwards woven into
the web of American nationaUty, when at any moment
the clews may drop from your heedless hands in your
wonder at some which are the woof of the history of the
world? I have to own even here that the more storied
dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay
among them Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of In-
crease and Cotton.

That is a place which one must wish to visit not once,
but often, and I hope that if I send any reader of mine
to it he will fare better than we did, and not find it shut
to the public on a Sunday morning when it ought to
have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of
England are quite past the comprehension of even such
semi-aliens as the Americans, and must baffle entire
foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen the
Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane,
which are licit, if not legal, and that Sunday morning
before we found Bunhill Fields fast closed, we had found
a market for poor Christians wide open in Whitecross
Street near by. It was one of several markets of the

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kind which begin early Saturday evening, and are
suffered by a much-winking poUce to carry on their
traffic through the night and till noon the next day.
Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes
from a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public
morals in London begin to urge the hucksters and their
customers to have done with their bargaining, and get
about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither per-
suasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the
police sometimes call in the firemen and rake the market-
place with volleys from the engine-hose. This is doubt-
less effective, but at the hour when we passed through
as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could
bear, it was still far from the time for such an extreme
measure, and the market was flourishing as if it were
there to stay indefinitely.

Everything immediately imaginable for the outside
or inside of man seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds,
boots and shoes, hats and caps, glassware, iron-ware;
fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English hazel-
nuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to
ripen on the way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally
smelling to heaven ; but, above all, flesh meats of every
beast of the field and every bird of the barn-yard,
with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and
strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and
hides and claws and feathers and other less namable
refuse. There was a notable absence among the huck-
sters of that coster class which I used to see in London
twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the
swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used
to distinguish the coster. But among the customers,
whose number all but forbade our passage through the
street, with the noise of their feet and voices^ there

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls
and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever
were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down,
and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped
with narrow - brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In
their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place,
but they looked as if their hearts were, and if no word
came from their lips with its true quality, but with that
curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke
a sound business dialect.

When we traversed the dense body of the market and
entered Roscoe Street from Whitecross, we were sur-
prisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet befitting
the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual
clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave
of George Fox, because of his relation to our colonial
history in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and we
thought it well to look into the Friends' Meeting-house
on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we
might have brought with us from Whitecross Street.
A mute sexton welcomed us at the door, and held back
for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular interior,
where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk
as Fox might have preached to in just such a place.
The only difference was that they now wore artless
versions of the world's present fashions in dress, and not
the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with
Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only
the antiquated simplicity of the time when Quakerism
began ; and the people we now saw were more fitly dressed
than if they had worn it. We sat with them a quarter
of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders
on the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands,
apparently more deeply lost in it than the rest. Then

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LONDON FILMS

we had freedom (to use their gentle Quaker parlance)
to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.

Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill
Fields, but he owns there is no memorial of him there;
and there is a stone to mark his grave in the grassy
space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street.
If that is really his last resting-place, he lies under the
shadow of a certain lofty warehouse walls, and in the
shelter of some trees which on that sunny First Day
morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by
which the English foliage confesses before the fall it
drops sere and colorless to the ground. Some leaves
had already fallen about the simple monumental stone,
and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still.

I will own here that I had more heart in the researches
which concerned the ancestral Friends of all mankind,
including so much American citizenship, than in follow-
ing up some other origins of ours. The reader will per-
haps have noticed long before that our origins were
nearly all religious, and that though some of the Amer-
ican plantations were at first the effect of commercial
enterprise, they were afterwards by far the greater
part undertaken by people who desired for themselves,
if not for others, freedom for the forms of worship for-
bidden them at home. Our colonial beginnings were
illustrated by sacrifices and martyrdoms even among
the lowliest, and their leaders passed in sad vicissitude
from pulpit to prison, back and forth, until exile became
their refuge from oppression. No nation could have a
nobler source than ours had in such heroic fidelity to
ideals; but it cannot be forgotten that the religious
freedom, which they all sought, some of them were not
willing to impart when they had found it; and it is
known how, in New England especially, they practised

200

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN

the lessons of persecution they had learned in Old Eng-
land. Two provinces stood conspicuously for toleration,
Rhode Island, for which Roger Williams imagined it
the first time in history, and Pennsylvania, where, for
the first time, William Penn embodied in the polity of
a state the gospel of peace and good-will to men. Neither
of these colonies has become the most exemplary of our
commonwealths; both are perhaps, for some reasons,
the least so in their sections; but, above all the rest,
their earlier memories appeal to the believer in the
universal right to religious liberty and in the ideal of
peaceful democracy which the Quakers alone have
realized. The Quakers are no longer sensibly a moral
force ; but the creed of honest work for daily bread, and
of the equalization of every man with another which
they lived, can never perish. Their testimony against
bloodshed was practical, as such a testimony can still
be, when men will; their principle of equality, as well as
their practise of it was their legacy to our people, and
it remains now all that differences us from other na-
tions. It was not Thomas Jefferson who first imagined
the first of the self-evident truths of the Declaration,
but George Fox.

We went, inappropriately enough, from where George
Fox lay in his grave, level with the common earth, to
where, in Finsbury Pavement, the castellated armory
of the Honourable Artillery Company of London recalls
the origin of the like formidable body in Boston. These
gallant men were archers before they were gunners,
being established in that quality first when the fear of
Spanish invasion was rife in 1585. They did yeoman
service against their own king in the Civil War, but
later fell into despite and were mocked by poets no more
warlike than themselves. Fletcher's "Knight of the

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Burning Pestle" was of their company, and Cowper's
" John Gilpin " was " sl train-band captain." Now, how-
ever, they are so far restored to their earUer standing
that when they are called out to celebrate, say, the
Fourth of July, or on any of the high military occasions
demanding the presence of royalty, the King appears
in their uniform.

XVIII
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

OUTSIDE the high gate of Bunhill Fields, we could
do no more than read the great names lettered
on the gate-posts, and peer through the iron barriers
at the thickly clustered headstones within. But over
against the cemetery we had access to the chapel where
John Wesley preached for thirty years, and behind which
he is buried. He laid the corner-stone in 1777 amid
such a multitude of spectators that he could scarcely
get through to the foundation, Cunningham says.
Before the chapel is an excellent statue of the great
preacher, and the glance at the interior which we suf-
fered ourselves showed a large congregation listening
to the doctrine which he preached there so long, and
which he carried beyond seas himself to ourselves, to
found among us the great spiritual commonwealth
which is still more populous than any of those dividing
our country.

The scene of his labors here was related for me by
an obscure association to such a doctrinally different
place as Finsbury Chapel, hard by, where my old friend.
Dr. Moncure D. Conway preached for twenty years.
Whatever manner of metaphysician he has ended, he
began Methodist, and as a Virginian he had a right to a
share of my interest in that home of Wesleyism, for it
was in Virginia, so much vaster then than now, that

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Wesleyism spread widest and deepest. If any part of
Wesley's mission tended to modify or abolish slavery,
then a devotion to freedom so constant and generous as
Conway's should link their names by an irrefragable,
however subtle, filament of common piety. I wished
to look into Finsbury Chapel for my old friend's sake,
but it seemed to me that we had intruded on worship-
pers enough that morning, and I satisfied my longing
by a glimpse of the interior through the pane of glass
let into the inner door. It was past the time for sing-
ing the poem of Tennyson which "Tom Brown" Hughes
used to say they always gave out instead of a hymn
in Finsbury Chapel; and some one else was preaching
in Conway's pulpit, or at his desk. I do not know
what weird influence of sermonizing seen but not heard
took the sense of reality from the experience, but I
came away feeling as if I had looked upon something
visionary.

It was no bad preparation for coming presently to
the church of All Hallows in the Wall, where a bit of the
old Roman masonry shows in the foundations of the
later defences, of which indeed, no much greater length
remains. The church, which is so uninterestingly ugly as
not to compete with the relic of Roman wall, stands at
the base of a little triangle planted with young elms
that made a green quiet, and murmured to the silence
with their stiffening leaves. It was an effect possible
only to that wonderful London which towers so massive-
ly into the present that you are dimib before the evi-
dences of its vast antiquity. There must have been a
time when there was no London, but you cannot think
it any more than you can think the time when there
shall be none. I make so sure of these reflections that
I hope there was no mistake about those modest breadths

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

of Roman masonry; its rubble laid in concrete, was
strong enough to support the weightiest consideration.

I am the more anxious about this because my friend,
the genealogist, here differed with the great Cunning-
ham, and was leading me by that morsel of Roman
London to St. Peter's Lane, where he said Fox died,
and not to White Hart Court, where my other authority
declares that he made an end two days after preaching
in the Friends' Meeting-house there. The ignorant dis-
ciple of both may have his choice ; perhaps in the proc-
ess of time the two places may have become one and
the same. At any rate we were able that morning to
repair our error concerning St. Catherine Cree's, which
we had unwittingly seen before, and now consciously
saw, for Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's sake. It had the
look of very high church in the service which was cele-
brating, and I am afraid my mind was taken less by the
monument of Sir Nicholas than by the black-robed
figure of the young man w^ho knelt with bowed head at
the back of the church and rapt me with the memory
of the many sacerdotal shapes which I used to see do-
ing the Hke in Latin sanctuaries. It is one of the few
advantages of living long that all experiences become
more or less contemporaneous, and that at certain
moments you cannot be distinctly aware just when
and where you are.

There was little of this mystical question when our
mission took us to Whitechapel, for there was nothing
there to suggest former times or other places. I did,
indeed, recall the thick - breathed sweltering Sunday
morning when I had visited the region in July; but it
is all now so absolutely and sordidly modern that one
has no difficulty in believing that it was altogether dif-
ferent when so many Southern and especially Virginian

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emigrations began there. How many settlers in New
Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also
were recruited from it, I know not ; but the reader may
have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at first-
hand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names
of the first quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in
the colonizing times, was a region of high respectability,
and not for generations afterwards the perlieu it became,
and has now again somewhat ceased to be.

The first exiles from it were not self-banished for
conscience' sake, like those at a later date when the
Puritans went both to Massachusetts where they re-
volted further, and to Virginia where they ultimately
conformed. The earlier out-goers, though they might
be come-outers, were part of the commercial enterprise
which began to plant colonies north and south. The
Plymouth Company which had the right to the country
as far northward as Nova Scotia and westward as far
as the Pacific, and the London Company which had as
great scope westward and southward as far as Cape
Fear, had the region between them in common, and they
both drew upon Whitechapel, and upon Stepney be-
yond, where I had formerly fancied the present White-
chapel resuming somewhat of its ancient respectability.
It is then a "spacious fair street," as one of Cunning-
ham's early authorities describes it, and it is still " some-
what long," so long indeed that our tram was a half-
hour in carrying us through it into Stepney. About
the time of the emigrations De Foe saw it, or says he
saw it (you never can be sure with De Foe) thronged
"with the richer sort of people, especially the nobility
and gentry from the west part of the town, . . . with
their families and servants," escaping into the country

from the plague.

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

The "offscourings" of London, which the companies
carried rather more to the southward than the north-
ward with us, were hardly scoured off in Whitechapel,
which was a decent enough ancestral source for any
American strain. As for Stepney, then as now the
great centre of the London shipping, she has never
shared the ill-repute of Whitechapel, at least in name.
Cunningham declares the region once "well-inhabited,"
and the sailors still believe that all children born at sea
belong to Stepney Parish. By an easy extension of
this superstition she is supposed to have had a motherly
interest in all children born beyond seas, including, of
course, the American colonies, and she is of a presence
that her foster-folk's descendants need not be ashamed
of. Our tram took us now and then by an old mansion
of almost manor-house dignity, set in pleasant gardens;
and it followed the shore of the Thames in sight of the
masts of ships whose multitude brought me to disgrace
for having, on my way to Greenwich, thought poorly
of London as a port, and which, because of her riparian
situation, made Stepney the scene of the great strike of
the London dockers, when they won their fight under
the lead of John Burns.

Our lovely weather cooled slightly as the afternoon
wore away, but it was bright and mild again when we
came another day towards Stepney as far as the old
church of St. Dunstan. It is an edifice of good perpen-
dicular Gothic, with traces of early English and even of
later Norman, standing serene in a place of quiet graves
amid the surrounding turmoil of life. The church-
yard was full of rustling shrubs and bright with beds of
autumnal flowers, from which the old square tower
rose in the mellow air. Divers of our early emigrants
were baptized in St. Dunstan's, namely, the wife of

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Governor Bradford of Plymouth, with many of our ship-
men, notably that Master ^A'illoughby, who established
the ship -yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts. I like
better to associate with it our beginnings, because here
I first saw those decorations for the Thanksgiving
festival which the English have lately borrowed from
us, and which I found again and again at various points
in my September wanderings. The pillars were wreathed
with the flowers and leaves of the fall; the altar was
decked with apples and grapes, and the pews trimmed
with yellow heads of ripe wheat. The English Thanks-
giving comes earlier than ours, but it remembers its
American source in its name, and the autumn comes
so much sooner than with us that although the " parting
summer lingering blooms delayed" in St. Dunstan's
church-yard, the fallen leaves danced and whirled about
our feet in the paths.

There is witness of the often return of the exiles to
their old home in the quaint epitaph which a writer in
The Spectator (it might have been Addison himself) read
from one of the flat tombstones:

"Here Thomas Taffin lyes interred, ah why?
Born in New England, did in London die."

"I do not wonder at this," Dr. Johnson said of the
epitaph to Boswell. "It would have been strange if
born in London he had died in New England."

The good doctor did indeed despise the American
colonies with a contempt which we can almost reverence ;
but the thing which he found so strange happened to
many Londoners before his time. One of the least
worthy and less known of these was that George Down-
ing, who came back from Boston, where he was grad-
uated at Harvard, and took the title of baronet from

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

Charles II., in return, apparently, for giving his name
to that famous Downing Street, ever since synonymous
with English administration. If he has no other claim
to our interest, that is perhaps enough; and the Amer-
ican who is too often abashed by the humility of our
London origins may well feel a rise of worldly pride in
the London celebrity of this quandam fellow-citizen.
His personality is indeed lost in it, but his achievement
in laying out a street, and getting it called after him,
was prophetic of so much economic enterprise of ours
that it may be fairly claimed as a national honor.

Of those who preferred not to risk the fate Dr. John-
son held in scorn, multitudes perished at Whitechapel
of the plague which it was one of the poor compensa-
tions of life in New England to escape. They would all
have been dead by now, whether they went or whether
they stayed, though it was hard not to attribute their
present decease solely to their staying, as we turned over
the leaves of the old register in St. Mary Matfelon's,
Whitechapel. The church has been more than once
rebuilt out of recollection of its original self, and there
were workman still doing something to the interior; but
the sexton led us into the vestry, and while the sunlight
played through the waving trees without and softly
illumined the record, we turned page after page, where
the names were entered in a fair clear hand, with the
given cause of death shortened to the letters, pi, after
each. They were such names as abounded in the colo-
nies, and those who had borne them must have been of
the kindred of the emigrants. But my patriotic inter-
est in them was lost in a sense of the strong nerve of
the clerk who had written their names and that "pi."
with such an unshaken hand. One of the earlier dead,
in the church -yard without, was a certain ragman,

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Richard Brandon, of whom the register says: "This
R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of
Charles the First."

From the parish of St. Botolph by Aldgate, on the
road from Houndsditch to Whitechapel, came many of
those who settled in Salem and the neighboring towns
of Massachusetts. It is now very low church, as it
probably was in their day, with a plain interior, and
with the crimson foliage of the Virginia-creeper staining
the light like painted glass at one of its windows. The
bare triangular space in front of the church was once a
pit where the dead of the plague were thrown, and in
the sacristy is a thing of yet grislier interest. My
friend made favor with some outlying authority, and an
old, dim, silent servitor of some sort came back with
him and took from a sort of cupboard, where it was kept
in a glass box, the embalmed head of the Duke of Suf-
folk, which he lost for his part in the short-lived usurpa-
tion of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. Little was left
to suggest the mighty noble in the mummy-face, but the
tragedy of his death was all there. It seemed as if the
thoughts of the hideous last moment might still be
haunting the withered brain, and the agony of which
none of the dead have yet been able to impart a sense
to the living, was present in it. As he who was showing
us the head, turned it obligingly round in view of the ex-
pected shilling, and tilted it forward that we might see
the mark of the axe in the severed neck, one seemed to
see also the things which those sunken eyes had looked on
last : the swarming visages of the crowd, the inner fringe
of halberdiers, the black - visored figure waiting beside
the block. As the doomed man dragged himself to the
scaffold, how pale that face in the glass box must have
been, for any courage that kept him above his fate. It

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that
such a devilish thing as the death - punishment should
still be, and that governments should keep on surpass-
ing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruel-
est murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever vis-
ited that church in remembrance of the fact that his
people came from the same parish ; if he saw the mortal
relic which held me in such fascination that I could
scarcely leave the place even when the glass box had
been locked back to its cupboard, and if the spirits of
the dead sometimes haunt their dust, there must have
been a reciprocal intelligence between the dead and the
living that left no emotion of the supreme hour unim-
parted.

We visited St. Sepulchre's where the truly sainted
Roger Williams was baptized, and found entrance one
day after two failures to penetrate to its very unattrac-
tive interior. We were lighted by stained - glass win-
dows of geometrical pattern and a sort of calico or ging-
ham effect in their coloring, to the tablet to Captain
John Smith, whose life Pocahontas, in Virginia, with
other ladies in divers parts of the world, saved, that we
might have one of the most delightful, if not one of the
most credible, of autobiographies. He was of prime
colonial interest, of course, and we were not taken from
the thought of him by any charm of the place; but
when we had identified his time-dimmed tablet there
was no more to do at St. Sepulchre's. The church is at
the western end of Old Bailey, and in the dreadful old
times when every Friday brought its batch of doomed
men forth from the cells, it was the duty of the bell-
man of St. Sepulchre's to pass under the prison walls
the night before and ring his bell, and chant the dismal
lines :

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'All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die;
Watch all, and pray, the hour is drawing near,
That you before the Almighty must appear;
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not to eternal flames be sent.
And when St. Sepulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.

Past twelve o'clock."

When we consider what piety was in the past, we need
not be so horrified by justice. Sentiment sometimes
came in to heighten the effect of both, and it used to
present each criminal in passing St. Sepulchre's on the
way to Tyburn with a nosegay, and a little farther on
with a glass of beer. The gardened strip of what once
must have been a graveyard beside the church could
hardly have afforded flowers enough for the pious rite. It
was frequented, the day of our visit, by some old men
of a very vacant-looking leisure, who sat on the benches
in the path; and the smallest girl in proportion to the
baby she carried that I ever saw in that England where
small girls seem always to carry such very large babies,
tilted back and forth with it in her slender arms, and
tried to make-believe it was going to sleep.

The reader who prefers to develop these films for
himself must not fail to bring out the surroundings of
the places visited, if he would have the right effect.
Otherwise he might suppose the several sanctuaries
which we visited standing in a dignified space and hal-
lowed quiet, whereas, all but a few were crowded close
upon crowded streets, with the busy and noisy indiffer-
ence of modern life passing before them and round them.
St. Giles-in-the-Fields, which we visited after leaving St.
Sepulchre, was the church in which Calvert, the founder

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

of Maryland, was baptized, of course before he turned
Catholic, since it could not very well have been after-
wards. At the moment, however, I did not think of
this. I had enough to do with the fact that Chapman,
the translator of Homer, was buried in that church, and
Andrew Marvell, the poet, and that very wicked Coun-
tess of Shrewsbury, the terrible she who held the Duke
of Buckingham's horse while he was killing her husband
in a duel. I should, no doubt, have seen this mem-
orable interior if it had still existed, but it was the in-
terior of a church which was taken down more than a
hundred years before the present church was built.

We visited the church on the way to Lincoln's Inn
Fields, turning out of Holborn round the corner of the
house, now a bookseller's shop, where Garrick died. I
mention this merely as an instance of how the famous
dead started out of the over-populated London past
and tried at every step to keep me from my proper
search for our meaner American origins. I was going
to look at certain mansions, in which the Lords Balti-
more used to live, and the patriotic Marylander, if he
have faith enough, may identify them by their arches
of gray stone at the first corner on his right in coming
into the place from Holborn. But if he have not faith
enough for this, then he may respond with a throb of
sympathy to the more universal appeal of the undoubted
fact that Lord Russell was beheaded in the centre of the
square, which now waves so pleasantly with its elms
and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king,
wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the
cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that,
and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy "as inde-
cent," Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson
had prayed with him, " laid his head on the block at a

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spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was
cut off at two strokes.''

Cunningham is certainly very temperate in calling
Lincoln's Inn Fields "a noble square." 1 should my-
self call it one of the noblest and most beautiful in
London, and if the Cal verts did not dwell in one of the
stately mansions of Arch Row, which is " all that Inigo
Jones lived to build" after his design for the whole
square, then they might very well have been proud to
do so. They are not among the great whom Cunning-
ham names as having dwelt there, and I do not know
what foundation the tradition of their residence rests
upon. What seems more certain is that one of the Cal-
verts, the first or the second Lord Baltimore, was buried
in that church of St. Dunstan's in the West, or St. Dun-
stan's Fleet Street, which was replaced by the actual
edifice in 1833.

The reader, now being got so near, may as well go on
with me to Charing Cross, where in the present scene
of cabs, both hansoms and four - wheelers, perpetually
coming and going at the portals of the great station and
hotel, and beside the torrent of omnibuses in the Strand,
the Reverend Hugh Peters suffered death through the
often broken faith of Charles II. In one of the most de-
lightful of his essays, Lowell humorously portrays the
character of the man who met this tragic fate : a restless
and somewhat fatuous Puritan divine, who, having
once got safely away from persecution to Boston, came
back to London in the Civil War, and took part in the
trial of Charles I. If not one of the regicides, he was
very near one, and he shared the doom from which the
treacherous pardon of Charles 11. was never intended
to save them. I suppose his fatuity was not incom-
patible with tragedy, though somehow we think that

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

absurd people are not the stuff of serious experi-
ence.

Leigh Hunt, in that most deUghtful of all books about
London, The Town, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street,
Strand, was once the dwelling of Benjamin Franklin,
and he adds, with the manliness which is always such a
curious element of his unmanliness: "What a change
along the shore of the Thames in a few years (for two
centuries are less than a few in the lapse of time) from
the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never
dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a
tradesman, to that of a yeoman's son, and a printer,
who was one of the founders of a great state!''

Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street,
Strand, a state which led in the attempted dismember-
ment of that great state, and nearly wrought its ruin,
had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was there
John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina,
which still, I believe, remains its organic law. One has
one's choice among the entirely commonplace yellow
brick buildings, which give the street the aspect of an
old-fashioned place in Boston. The street was seriously
quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot-
passengers sauntering through it, and certain clerklike
youth entering and issuing from the doors of the build-
dings which had the air of being law-offices.

We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very
attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to
him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs
and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church.
But when we had climbed to the triforium by the cork-
screw stairs leading to it, did we find there tombs and
tablets? I am not sure, but I am sure we found the
tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a History of the
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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who while
in Padiament strongly favored "distressing the Amer-
icans," as the king wished, and made a speech in sup-
port of the government measure for closing the port of
Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge for that,
but I could not give myself to his monument with such
cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and
volatile old letter-writer James Howell, which also I
found in that triforium, half -hidden behind a small
organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in the dim-
ness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this,
after looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus
College in Oxford, where he studied the humanities that
enabled him to be so many things to so many masters,
that I took all his chiselled praises for granted.

I made what amends I could for my slight of the
Mortons in the Temple Church, by crossing presently
to Clifford's Inn, Strand, where the very founder of
Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself
was sometime student of the law and a dweller in these
precincts. It is now the hall of the Art Workers' Guild,
and anywhere but in London would be incredibly quiet
and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern neigh-
borhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and
roistering antipuritan, who set up his May -pole at
Wollaston, and danced about it with his debauched
abcriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles Standish
marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such
ungodly doings at the muzzles of his matchlocks.

It must have been another day that we went to view the
church of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, because some
of the patrician families emigrating to Massachusetts
were from that parish, which was the home of many
patrician families of the Commonwealth.- In St. An-

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

drew's Holborn, the Vanes, father and son, worshipped,
together with the kindred of many that had gone to
dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior,
after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our
visit was smelling of varnish; most London churches
smell of mortar, when in course of their pretty constant
reparation, and this was at least a change. St. Stephen's
Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as
the spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport,
who was the founder of New Haven, but it will attract
the unlocalized lover of liberty because it was also the
parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom
Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for
trouble. It had a certain sentiment of low-churchness,
being very plain without and within not unlike an
Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England
town. One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean
court, out of a business neighborhood, jostled by com-
mercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats who were ex-
pressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy
with the past if not with the present of St. Andrew's.

St. Martins-in-the-Fields, where General Oglethorpe,
the founder of Georgia, was baptized, was, in his time,
one of the proudest parishes of the city, and the actual
church is thought to be the masterpiece of the architect
Gibbs, who produced in the portico what Cunningham
calls "one of the finest pieces of architecture in Lon-
don." Many famous people were buried in the earlier
edifice, including Nell Gwynne, Lord Mohun, who fell
in a duel with the Duke of Hamilton, as the readers of
Henry Esmond well know, and Farquhar the dramatist.
Lord Bacon was baptized there; and the interior of the
church is very noble and worthy of him and of the
parish history. Whether General Oglethorpe drew

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upon his native parish in promoting the settlement of
Georgia, I am not so sure as I am of some other things,
as, for instance, that he asked the king for a grant of
land, "in trust for the poor," and that his plan was to
people his colony largely from the captives in the debt-
ors' prisons. I love his memory for that, and I would
gladly have visited the debtors' prisons which his hu-
manity vacated if I could have found them, or if they
had still existed.

The reader who has had the patience to accompany
me on these somewhat futile errands must have been
aware of making them largely on the lordly omnibus-
tops which I always found so much to my proud taste.
Often, however, we whisked together from point to
point in hansoms; often we made our way on foot, with
those quick transitions from the present to the past,
from the rush and roar of business thoroughfares to the
deep tranquillity of religious interiors, or the noise-
bound quiet of ancient church-yards, where the autumn
flowers blazed under the withering autumn leaves, and
the peaceful occupants of the public benches were
scarcely more agitated by our coming than the tenants
of the graves beside them.

The weather was for the most part divinely beautiful,
so tenderly and evenly cool and w^arm, with a sort of
lingering fondness in the sunshine, as if it were prescient
of the fogs so soon to blot it. The first of these came on
the last day of our research, when suddenly we dropped
from the clouded surfaces of the earth to depths where
the tube-line trains carry their passengers from one
brilliantly lighted station to another. We took three
of the different lines, experimentally, rather than neces-
sarily, in going from St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard
Street, hard by the Bank of England, to the far neigh-

218

ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THEFIELDS

AMERICAN ORIGINS-MOSTLY SOUTHERN

borhood of Stoke Newington; and at each descent by
the company's Uft, we left the dark above ground, and
found the hght fifty feet below. While this sort of
transit is novel, it is delightful; the air is good, or seems
so, and there is a faint earthy smell, somewhat like that
of' stale incense in Italian churches, which I found
agreeable from association at least; besides, I liked to
think of passing so far beneath all the superincumbent
death and all the superambulant life of the immense
immemorial town.

We found St. Mary Woolnoth closed, being too early
for the Sunday service, and had to content ourselves
with the extremely ugly outside of the church which is
reputed the masterpiece of Wren's pupil Hawksmoor;
while we took for granted the tablet or monument of
Sir William Phipps, the governor of Massachusetts,
who went back to be buried there after the failure of his
premature expedition against Quebec. My friend had
provided me something as remote from Massachusetts
as South Carolina in colonial interest, and we were
presently speeding to New River, which Sir Hugh Myd-
dleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke
Newington to all the streets of London, and so originated
her modern water-supply. This knight, or baronet,
he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist, to be of
the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of
the first South Carolinians then and since. It is at least
certain that he was a Welshman, and that the gift of
his engineering genius to London was so ungratefully
received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his enter-
prise. The king claimed a half-interest in the profits, but
the losses remained undivided to Myddleton. ^ The fact,
such as it is, proves perhaps the weakest link in a chain
of patriotic associations which, I am afraid the reader

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LONDON FILMS

must agree with me, has no great strength anywhere.
The New River itself, when you come to it, is a plain
straightforward, canal -like water -course through a
grassy and shady level, but it is interesting for the gar-
den of Charles Lamb's first house backing upon it, and
for the incident of some of his friends walking into it
one night when they left him after an evening that
might have been rather unusually "smoky and drinky."
Apart from this I cared for it less than for the neighbor-
hoods through which I got to it, and which were looking
their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and
richest among the low trees of Highbury Fields, where,
when we ascended to them from our tubular station, the
lawns were of an electric green in their vividness. In
fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends
itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the pre-
vailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into
a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon
rows of humble brick dwellings in the streets we passed
through were flattered into cottage homes where one
would have liked to live in one's quieter moods, and
some rather stately eighteenth - century mansions in
Stoke Newington housed one's pride the more fittingly,
because of the mystery which the fog added to their
antiquity. It hung tenderly and reverently about
that old, old parish church of Stoke Newington where,
it is story or fable, they that bore the body of the dead
King Harold from the field of Hastings made one of
their stations on the way to AValtham Abbey; and it was
much in the maundering mind of the kindly spectator
who could not leave off pitying us because we could not
get into the church, the sexton having just before gone
down the street to the baker's. It followed us more
and more vaguely into the business quarter where we

220

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN

took our omnibus, and where we noted that business Lon-
don, Hke business New York, was always of the same
complexion and temperament in its shops and saloons,
from centre to circumference. Amid the commonplace-
ness of Islington where we changed omnibuses, the fog
abandoned us in despair, and rising aloof, dissolved into
the bitterness of a small cold rain.

XIX

ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

THE fog, through that golden month of September
(September is so silvern in America), was more or
less a fact of the daily weather. The morning began
in a mellow mistiness, which the sun burned through
by noon; or if sometimes there was positive rain, it
would clear for a warm sunset, which had moments of
a very pretty pensiveness in the hollows of Green Park,
or by the lakes of St. James's. There were always the
bright beds of autumn flowers, and in Hyde Park some-
thing of the season's flush came back in the driving.
The town began to be visibly fuller, and I was aware of
many Americans, in carriages and on foot, whom I
fancied alighting after a continental summer, and
poising for another flight to their respective steamers.
The sentiment of London was quite different at the end
of September from the sentiment of London at the be-
ginning, and one could imagine the sort of secondary
season which it revisits in the winter. There was in-
deed no hint of the great primary season in the sacred
paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where
the inverted penny chairs lay with their foreheads in
the earth ; and the shrivelled leaves, loosened from their
boughs in the windless air, dropped listlessly round
them.

At night our little Mayfair Street was the haunt of

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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

much voluntary minstrelsy. Bands of cockney darkeys
came down it, tuning their voices to our native rag-
time. Or a balladist, man or woman, took the centre,
and sang towards our compassionate windows. Or a
musical husband and wife placed their portable melodeon
on the opposite sidewalk, and trained their vocal and in-
strumental attack upon the same weak defences.

It was all in keeping with the simple kindliness of the
great town whose homelikeness arises from its immense
habitability. This always strikes the New-Yorker,
whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful New-
Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the
ampler metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted
spaces where man may peacefully dwell, or quietly
lodge over-night, in his own city. In assimilating each
of the smaller towns or villages which it has made itself
up of London has left them so much of their original
character that though merged, they are not lost ; and in
cases where they have been so long merged as to have
experienced a severance of consciousness, or where they
are only nominally different sections of the vast whole,
they have each its own temperament. It would be
quite impossible for one finding one's self in Blooms-
bury to suppose one's self in Belgravia, or in any of the
Kensingtons to fancy one's self in Mayfair. Chelsea is
as temperamentally different from Pimlico as the City
from Southwark, and Islington, again, though it speaks
the same language as Whitechapel, might well be of
another tongue, so differently does it think and feel.
The names, and a hundred others, call to the stranger
from the sides and fronts and backs of omnibuses, until
he has a weird sense that they personally knew him
long before he knew them. But when once domesti-
cated in any quarter he is so quickly at home in it that

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LONDON FILMS

it will be the centre of London for him, coming to and
going from it in a local acceptance which he cannot help
feeling a reciprocal kindliness. He might do this as a
mere hotel-dweller, but if he has given hostages to
fortune by going into lodgings, and forming even in-
direct relations with the tradesmen round the corners,
the little stationers and newsmen, the nearest book-
seller, the intelligent female infants in the post-office
(which is always within a minute's walk), and perhaps
conversed with the neighboring policeman, or has taken
cabs so often from the neighboring rank as to be recog-
nizable to the cabmen, then he is more quickly and
thoroughly naturaHzed in the chosen region. He will
be unworthy of many little friendlinesses from his
fellow-citizens if he does not like them, and he will miss,
in refusing the image of home which is offered him, one
of the rarest consolations of exile.

At a distance from London (say as small a distance,
in time if not space, as Bath), you will hear it said that
everybody is well in London, but in London you will
find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish.
All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are re-
laxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange
then that London should be likewise subdivided. May-
fair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and
more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terri-
bly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, Chelsea again is bracing,
and as for South Kensington it stands to reason that it
is bracing because it is very high, almost as high as
Mayfair. If you pass from your Pimlico borderland of
Belgravia to either of those regions you are certainly
not sensible of any sharp accent, but there is no telling
what a gradual rise of eight or ten feet may make in
the quality of the air. To the stranger all London seems

224

ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

a vast level, with perhaps here and there the sort of
ground-swell you may note from your car-window in
the passage of a Western plain. Ludgate Hill is truly
a rise of ground, but Tower Hill is only such a bad
eminence as may gloomily lift itself in history irrespec-
tive of the actual topography. Such an elevation as
our own Murray Hill would be a noticeable height in
London, and there are no such noble inequalities as in
our up -town streets along the Hudson. All great
modern cities love the plain surfaces, and London is
not different from Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Paris, or
Berlin, or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Milan in this;
New York is much more mountainous, and Boston is a
Sierra Nevada in comparison.

Yet, I suppose there must be something in the super-
stition that one part of London is more bracing or more
relaxing than another, and that there is really, however
insensibly, a difference of levels. That difference of
temperaments which I have mentioned, seems mostly
intimated in the size and age of the houses. They are
larger and older in Bloomsbury, where they express a
citizen substance and comfort; they are statelier about
the parks and squares of Belgravia, which is compara-
tively a new settlement; but there are more little houses
among the grandeurs of Mayfair which is of the same
social quality, though many of its streets crossing from
Piccadilly have quite gone to shops and family hotels
and lodgings. It is more irregular and ancient than
Belgravia, and its grandeurs have a more casual air.
The historic mansions crowded by the clubs towards
Hyde Park Corner, and grouped about the open space
into which Piccadilly falters there, or following the park
in the flat curve of Park Lane, have not the effect of
withdrawal and exclusion of the Belgravian mansions;

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LONDON FILMS

beyond which again there is a world of small dwellings
of fainter and fainter self-assertion till they fade into
the hopeless plebeian unconsciousness of Pimlico, whose
endless streets are without beauty or dignity. Yet
beyond this lost realm Chelsea redeems itself in a grace
of domestic architecture and an atmosphere of sesthetic
associations which make it a favorite abode of the
tastes as well as the means. Kensington, where you
arrive after what seems hopeless straggling through the
roaring thoroughfare prolonging the Fleet-and-Strand-
derived Piccadilly, is of almost equal artistic and literary
appeal, but is older and perhaps less actual in its claims
upon the cultivated sympathies. In either of these
regions the polite American of definite resources might,
if banished from the republic, dwell in great material
and spiritual comfort; but if he chose Chelsea for his
exile, I do not know that I should blame his preference.
There he would have the neighborhood of many charm-
ing people whom to know for neighbors would add a
certain grace to existence, although he might not other-
wise know them. Besides he would have, beyond the
Thames, the wooded stretch of Battersea Park, if his
dwelling, as it very well might, looked out upon the
river and across it; and in the distance he would have
the roofs and chimneys of that far Southwark, which
no one seems anxious to have nearer than, say, the
seventeenth century, and yet which being a part of
London must be full of perfectly delightful people.

Even if you make-believe that Southwark bears
some such relation to London as Jersey City bears to
New York (but the image is very imperfect) still New
York, you are aware, can never domesticate the Hudson
as London has domesticated the Thames. Our river
is too vast, too grand, if you will, ever to be redeemed

226

ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

from its primitive wildness, much less made an intimate
part of the city's hfe. It may be laced with ferries and
bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave
with its swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and
bridged hereafter, again and again, but its mere size
will keep it savage, just as a giant, though ever so ami-
able and good-natured, could not imaginably be civilized
as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among
rivers the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average,
and is therefore perfectly proportioned to the little
continent of which it is the Amazon or the Mississippi.
If it were larger it would make England ridiculous, as
Denmark, for instance, is made ridiculous by the sounds
and estuaries that sunder it. But the Thames is of
just the right size to be held in London's arms, and if it
is not for her the graceful plaything that the Seine is
for Paris, it is more suited to the practical nature of
London. There are, so far as I noted, no whispering
poplars planted by the brink of the Thames, but I feel
sure that if there were, and there were citizens fishing
their years away in their shade, they would sometimes
catch a fish, which the life-long anglers in the Seine
never do. That forms a great difference, expressive
of a lasting difference of character in the two capitals.
Along the Thames the trees are planted on the successive
Embankments, in a beautiful leafy parkway following
its course, broken here and there by public edifices, hke
the Parliament buildings, but forming a screen most-
ly uninterrupted, behind which a parade of grandiose
hotels does not altogether hide itself from the river.
Then the national quality of the English stream is ex-
pressed in the succession of bridges which span it.
These are uglier than any that cross the Seine ; each one,
in fact, is uglier than the other, till you come to the

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Tower Bridge, which is the ugUest of all. They have a
strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to
the stranger who lounges on their parapets and looks
down upon the grimy little steamers scuttling under
them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over
the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an ad-
mirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types
which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent
slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and
resting their blunt snouts on the mud-banks in a slum-
berous content.

It is seldom that the prospect reveals a vessel of more
dignified proportions or presence, though in my drives
along one of the Embankments I came upon a steamer
of the modest size which we used to think large when
we crossed the Atlantic in it, but which might be swung
among the small boats from the davits of a latter-day
liner. This vessel always had an admiring crowd about
it, and I suppose it had some peculiar interest for the
public which did not translate itself to me. As far as
the more visible commerce of the more sight-seen parts
of the Thames is concerned, it is as unimpressive as
may be. It has nothing of the dramatic presence of the
shipping in the Hudson or the East River, with its light
operatic touches in the gayly painted Sound and North
River steamboats. You must go as far at least as
Stepney on the Thames before you begin to realize that
London is the largest port, as well as the largest city, in
the world.

There are certain characteristics, qualities, of London
which I am aware of not calling aright, but which I
will call sentiments for want of some better word. One
of them was the feel of the night-air, especially late in
the season, when there was a waste and weariness in it

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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

as if the vast human endeavor for pleasure and success
had exhaled its despair upon it. Whatever there was of
disappointment in one's past, of apprehension in one's
future, came to the surface of the spirit, and asserted its
unity with the collective melancholy. It was not ex-
actly a WeJtschrnerz; that is as out-dated as the roman-
tic movement; but it was a sort of scientific relinquish-
ment, which was by no means scornful of others, or too
appreciative of one's own unrecognized worth. Through
the senses it related itself to the noises of the quiescing
city, to the smell of its tormented dust, to the whiff of a
casual cigar, or the odor of the herbage and foliage in
the park or square that one was passing, one may not be
more definite about what was perhaps nothing at all.
But I fancy that relinquishment of any sort would be
easier in London than in cities of simpler interest or
smaller population. For my own part I was content to
deny many knowledges that I would have liked to be-
lieve myself possessed of, and to go about clothed in my
ignorance as in a garment, or defended by it as by
armor. There was a sort of luxury in passing through
streets memorable for a thousand things and as dense
with associations as Long Island with mosquitoes when
the winds are low, and in reflecting that I need not be
ashamed for neglecting in part what no man could
know in whole. I really suppose that upon any other
terms the life of the cultivated American would be
hardly safe from his own violence in London. If one
did not shut one's self out from the complex appeal
to one's higher self one could hardly go to one's tailor
or one's hatter or one's shoemaker, on those missions
which, it is a national superstition with us, may be
more inexpensively fulfilled there than at home. The
best way is to begin by giving up everything, by frankly

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saying to yourself that you will not be bothered, that
man's days of travel are full of trouble, and that you
are going to get what little joy you can out of them as
you go along. Then, perhaps, on some errand of quite
ignoble purport, you will be seized with the knowledge
that in the very spot where you stand one of the most
significant things in history happened. It will be quite
enough for you, as you inhale a breath of the London
mixture of smoke, dust, and fog, that it is something like
the air which Shakespeare and Milton breathed when
they were meditating the works which have given so
many international after-dinner orators the assurance
of a bond of amity in our common language. Once, in
driving through one of the dullest streets imaginable,
I chanced to look out of the side-window of my hansom,
and saw on a flying house-wall a tablet reading: "Here
lived John Dry den," and though Dry den is a poet to
move one to tenderness as little as may be, the tears
came into my eyes.

It is but one of a thousand names, great in some sort
or other, which make sojourn in London impossible, if
one takes them to heart as an obligation to consciousness
of her constant and instant claim. They show you
Johnson's house in Bolt Court, but it only avails to vex
you with the thought of the many and many houses of
better and greater men which they will never show you.
As for the scenes of events in fiction you have a plain
duty to shun them, for in a city where the great facts
of the past are written so deep upon the walls and
pavement one over another, it is folly which can be
forgiven only to the vacancy of youth to go looking for
the places where this imaginary thing happened. Yet
this claim of folly has been recognized, and if you wish
to indulge it, you can do so at little trouble. Where

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the real localities are not available they have fictitious
ones, and they show you an Old Curiosity Shop, for
instance, which serves every purpose of having been the
home of Little Nell. There are at least three Cock
Taverns, and several Mitres, all genuine; and so on.
Forty odd years ago I myself, on first arriving in London,
lodged at the Golden Cross, because it was there that
David Copperfield stopped; and I was insensately
pleased the other day that there was still a hotel of that
name at the old stand. Whether it was the old inn, I
did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I doubt
if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee-
room"; more probably you have a table d^hdte meal
served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just
beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly
waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very
likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that
the recreant American whom I heard telling an English-
man there in those disheartening days, of our civic
corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that
he himself had bought votes, as many as he wanted, in
the city of Providence; and though I could deny the
general prevalence of such venality at least in my own
stainless state of Ohio, I did not think to suggest that
in such a case the corruption was in the buyer rather
than the seller of the votes, and that if he had now
come to live, as he implied, in a purer country, he had
not taken the right way to be worthy of it. But at
twenty-four you cannot think of everything at once,
and a recreant American is so uncommon that you need
hardly, at any age, provide for him.

i6

XX

PARTING GUESTS

HOWEVER the Golden Cross Inn may have inwardly
or outwardly changed, the Golden Cross Hotel
keeps its old place hard by the Charing Cross station,
which is now so different from the station of the earlier
day. I do not think it is one of the most sympathetic
of the London ' stations. I myself prefer rather the
sentiment of the good old Euston station, which con-
tinues for you the feeling of arrival in England, and keeps
you in the glow of landing that you have, or had in the
days when you always landed in Liverpool, and the
constant Cunarders and Inmans ignored the upstart pre-
tensions of Southampton and Plymouth to be ports of
entry from the United States. But among the stations
of minor autobiographical interest. Charing Cross is un-
doubtedly the first, and you may have your tenderness
for it as the place where you took the train for the night-
boat at Folkestone in first crossing to the continent.
How strange it all was, and yet how not unfriendly; for
there is always a great deal of human nature in England.
She is very motherly, even with us children who ran
away from home, and only come back now and then to
make sure that we are glad of having done so. In the
lamp-broken obscurity of the second-class carriage I
am aware still of a youthful exile being asked his destina-
tion, and then his derivation, by a gentle old lady in the

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PARTING GUESTS

seat opposite (she might have been Mother England in
person), who, hearing that he was from America where
the civil war was then very unpromising, could only
say, comfortingly: "And very glad to be out of it, /
dare say!" He must protest, but if he failed to con-
vince, how could he explain that part of his high mission
to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was
to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers
which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon
our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had
eventually to do little or no sweeping of that sort; for no
privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he de-
voted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the
chief of those ports.

It was the first of many departures from London,
where you are always more or less arriving or departing
as long as you remain in England. It is indeed an
axiom with the natives that if you want to go from any
one point to any other in the island it is easier to come
to London and start afresh for it, than to reach the point
across country. The trains to and from the capital are
swifter and more frequent, and you are not likely to lose
your way in the mazes of Bradshaw if you consult the
indefinitely simplified ABC tables which instruct you
how to launch yourself direct from London upon any
objective, or to recoil from it. My impression is that
you habitually drive to a London station as nearly in
time to take your train as may be, and that there is very
little use for waiting-rooms. This may be why the
waiting-room seems so small and unattractive a part of
the general equipment. It never bears any such pro-
portion to the rest as the waiting-rooms in the great
Boston stations, or even that of the Grand Central in
New York, and is by no chance so really fine as that of

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LONDON FILMS

the Atchison and Topeka at Omaha, or that of the Lake
Shore at Pittsburg. Neither the management nor the
chmate is so unkind as to keep intending passengers
from the platforms, where they stand talking, or walk
up and down, or lean from their carriage-doors and
take leave of attendant friends with repeated pathos.
With us it is either too cold or too hot to do that, and at
all the great stations we are now fenced off from the
tracks, as on the Continent, and unless we can make
favor with the gateman, must despatch our farewells
before our parting dear ones press forward to have their
tickets punched. But at no London station, and far
less at any provincial station in England, are you sub-
jected to these formalities; and the English seem to
linger out their farewells almost abusively, especially
if they are young and have much of life before them.

Charing Cross has the distinction, sole among her
sister stations, of a royal entrance. There is no doubt
a reason for this; but as royalty is always coming and
going in every direction, it is not easy to know why the
other stations do not provide themselves with like
facilities. One cannot imagine just how the king and
queen get in and out of the common gateway, but it
has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross, no
matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither
has any other station a modern copy of a Queen
Eleanor's Cross, but this is doubtless because no other
station was the last of these points where her coffin was
set down on its way from Lincoln to its final resting-
place in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret
their lack after you have seen such an original cross as
that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety
which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was
faithful and earnest, it was not somehow the art of

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PARTING GUESTS

1291. One feels no greater hardness in the ParUamen-
tary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony
fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern
work, and refuses to be softened by any effect of the
mellowing London air. It looks out over the scurry
of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the rain-
fall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as
anything in the Strand. It is only an instance of the
constant futility of the restoration which, in a world so
violent or merely wearing as ours, must still go on, and
give us dead corpses of the past instead of living images.
Fortunately it cannot take from Charing Cross its pre-
eminence among the London railway stations, which is
chiefly due to its place in the busy heart of the town,
and to that certain openness of aspect, which some-
times, as with the space at Hyde Park Corner, does the
effect of sunniness in London. It may be nearer or
farther, as related to one's own abode, but it has not
the positive remoteness from the great centres, by force
of which, for instance, Waterloo seems in a peripheral
whirl of non-arrival, and Vauxhall lost somewhere in
a rude borderland, and King's Cross bewildered in a
roar of tormented streets beyond darkest Bloomsbury.
Even Paddington, which is of a politer situation, and is
the gate of the beautiful West-of-England country, has
not the allure of Charing Cross; even Euston which so
sweetly prolongs the old-fashioned Liverpool voyage
from New York, and keeps one to the last moment in a
sense of home, really stays one from London by its
kind reluctance. It is at Charing Cross alone that you
are immediately and unmistakably in the London of
your dreams.

I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or de-
parted from all the great stations, but I will not make

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LONDON FILMS

so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid that I was, more
strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of so
marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures
in it, and gave me an illusion of Italy, though I was
explicitly there because of an American origin in the
baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do not
remember the name of that little church, but it stood
among autmim flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny
morning, where the reader will easily find it. Of Vic-
toria station I am many times certain, for it was from
it that we at last left London, and that at the time of
an earlier sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which
stamped our sense of the world's metropolis with a
completeness which it had hitherto disappointingly
wanted.

It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover,
but not imcommonly dull for an evening of the English
November, and we did not notice that we had emerged
from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the
corridors of the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a
confident spirit of our party declared to be smoke, in
expression of the alarming conviction that the house
was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed troubled
by the smoke, however, and with a prompt recurrence
to the reading which makes the American an intimate
of the English circumstance though he has never per-
sonally kno'wn it, we realized that what seemed smoke
must be a very marked phase of London fog. It did
not perceptibly thicken in-doors that night, but the
next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day
after the next. All the same the town was invisibly
astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments
between total and partial blindness. The usual motives
and incentives were at work in the business of men,

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PARTING GUESTS

more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking.
From the height of an upper window one could look
down and feel the city's efforts to break the mesh of its
weird captivity, with an invisible stir in all directions,
as of groping. Of course, life had to go on, upon such
terms as it could, and if you descended from your
window that showed nothing, and went into the street,
and joined the groping, you could make out something
of its objects. With a cabman who knew his way, as a
pilot knows his way on a river in a black night, you
could depart and even arrive. In the course of your
journey you would find the thoroughfare thick with
hesitating or arrested traffic. At one place you would
be aware of a dull, red light, brightening into a veiled
glare, and you would have come upon a group of horses,
detached from several omnibuses, and standing head to
head till they might hopefully be put to and driven
on again. The same light, with the torches carried by
boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly
creeping forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of
flame made by the cab-lamps were craning their necks
forward, or twitching them from side to side. Through
the press foot-passengers found their way across the
street, and imaginably in the dark that swallowed up
the sidewalks, they were going and coming on errands
that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they
could know which way they were going, or how they
could expect to reach any given point.

Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest,
and there it was a greenish-yellow, like water when you
open your eyes and look at it far below the surface.
Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in
a square, or with a park on one side, the vapor thick-
ened into blackness and seemed to swell, a turbid tide,

237

LONDON FILMS

overhead and underfoot. It hurt your straining eyes,
and got into your throat, and burned it Uke a sullen
steam. If your cab stopped, miraculously enough, at
the address given, you got out incredulous and fearful
of abandonment. When you emerged again, and found
your cab waiting, you mutely mounted to your place
and resumed your strange quality of something in a
dream.

So, all that day the pall hung upon the town, and all
the next. The third day the travellers were to sail
from Liverpool, and there was some imperative last-
shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous
cab, and started for Bond Street. In a few moments
the cab was in the thick of the fog and its consequences,
a tangle of stationary vehicles with horses detached,
or marking time, without advancing either way. A
trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof,
and a trembUng voice asked the cabman: "Do you
think you can go on?" "I think so, sir." The horse's
head had already vanished; now his haunches faded
away. Towards the dashboard the shafts of another
cab came yawing, and again the eager voice quavered:
"Do you think you can get back?" " Oh yes, sir," the
answer came more cheerfully, and the shopping was
done a week later in Twenty-third Street.

There is an insensate wish in the human witness to
have nature when she begins misbehaving do her worst.
One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps
is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent
type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the
secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must
form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we
had experienced. But you see the blizzard once in a
generation or a century, while if you are good, or good

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PARTING GUESTS

enough to live in London, you may see a charac-
teristic fog almost any year. It is another case in
which the metropolis of the New World must yield to
the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do
not say but the fog in which we left New York, on
March 3, 1904, was not as perfect as our great London
fog. But the New York fog was only blindingly white
and the London fog blindingly black, and that is a
main difference.

The tender and hesitating mist with which each day
of our final September in London began, must not be
confused in the reader's mind with a true London fog.
The mist grew a little heavier, day by day, perhaps;
but only once the sun failed to burn through it before
noon, and that was one of the first days of October, as
if in September it had not yet lost the last of its summer
force. Even then, though it rained all the forenoon,
and well into the afternoon, the weather cleared for a
mild, warm sunset, and we could take the last of our
pleasant walks from Half-Moon Street into St. James's
Park.

When the last day of our London sojourn came, it
was fitly tearful, and we had our misgivings of the
Channel crossing. The crossing of the day before had
been so bad that Pretty Polly, who had won the St.
Leger, held all England in approving suspense, while
her owners decided that she should not venture to the
defeat that awaited her in France, till the sea was
smoother. But in the morning the papers prophesied
fair weather, and it was promised that Pretty Polly
should cross. Her courage confirmed our own, and
we took our initial departure in the London fashion
which is so different from the New York fashion. Not
with the struggle, personally and telephonically, in an

239

LONDON FILMS

exchange of bitter sarcasms prolonged with the haughty
agents of the express monopoly, did we get our bag-
gage expensively before us to the station and toUow in
a costly coupe, but with all our trunks piled upon two
reasonable four-wheelers, we set out contemporane-
ously with them. In New York we paid six dollars
for our entire transportation to the steamer; in London
we paid six shillings to reach the Victoria station with
our belongings. The right fare would have been five;
the imagination of our cabman rose to three and six
each, and feebly fluttered there, but sank to three, and
did not rise again. At our admirable lodging the land-
lady, the butler and the chambermaid had descended
with us to the outer door in a smiling convention of
regret, the kindly Swiss boots allowed the street porter
to help him up with our trunks, and we drove away in
the tradition of personal acceptability which bathes
the stranger in a gentle self-satisfaction, and which
prolonged itself through all the formalities of registering
our baggage for the continent at the station, of bribing
the guard in the hope of an entire first-class compart-
ment to ourselves and then sharing it with four others
similarly promised its sole use, and of telegraphing to
secure seats in the rapide from Calais to Paris.

Then we were off in a fine chill, small English rain
through a landscape in which all the forms showed like
figures in blotting-paper, as Taine said, once for all.
After we had run out of the wet ranks of yellowish-
black city houses, and passed the sullen suburbs,

"All in a death-doing autumn-dripping gloom,"

we found ourselves in a world which was the dim ghost
of the English country we had so loved in the summer.
On some of the trees and hedgerows the leaves hung

240

PARTING GUESTS

dull yellow or dull red, but on most they were a blacken-
ing green. The raw green of the cold flat meadows^
the purplish green of the interminable ranks of cabbages,
and the harsh green of the turnip-fields, blurred with the
reeking yellow of mustard blOom, together with the
gleaming brown of ploughed fields, formed a prospect
from which the eye turned with the heart, in a rapturous
vision of the South towards which we were now swiftly
pulsing.

THE END

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