Letters from England/Hyde Park
Hyde Park
AND when I felt most depressed in this country of England—it was an English Sunday, blighted by unutterable boredom—I made my way along Oxford Street; I simply wanted to go eastwards, so as to be nearer my native land, but I made a mistake in the direction and journeyed due west, whereupon I found myself by Hyde Park. It is there known as Marble Arch, because of a marble gateway, which leads nowhere; I really do not know why it stands there. I felt rather sorry for it, so I went to inspect it; and while doing so, I saw something and hurried up to see what it was, because of the crowds of people that were there. And when I realized what was happening, I at once felt more cheerful.
It was a large open space, and anyone who like to, can bring along a chair or a platform or nothing at all, and can start talking. After awhile he has five or twenty or three hundred people listening to him; they answer him, raise objections, nod their heads and some times they join the orator in singing sacred or profane hymns. Sometimes an opponent gets the people on to his side and begins to hold forth on his own; sometimes the crowd divides by a mere splitting and swelling like the lowest organisms and cell colonies. Some clusters are of a firm and steadfast consistency, others perpetually crumble and overflow, increase in size, become distended, multiply or scatter. The larger churches have perambulating pulpits, but most of the orators simply stand on the ground, suck at a moist cigarette and preach about vegetarianism, about God, about education, about reparations, or about spiritualism. Never in my life have I seen anything like it.
Because, sinful man that I am, I had not been present at any preaching for several years, I went to listen. Prompted by modesty I joined only a small and quiet group; the speaker there was a hunch-backed youth with fine eyes, evidently a Polish Jew; after some considerable time I realized that his subject was merely schooling, and I passed over to a large crowd where an old gentleman in a top-hat was jumping about in a pulpit. I ascertained that he represented some Hyde Park Mission; he flung his hands about so much that I was afraid he would tumble over the hand-rail. At another crowd a middle aged lady was preaching; I am by no means opposed to feminine emancipation, but the female voice, you know—well, one simply cannot listen to it. As a public speaker woman has been handicapped by nature on account of her vocal organs. When a lady speechifies, I always have the feeling that I am a small boy and that my mamma is scolding me. Why this English lady with the pince-nez was scolding I did not properly comprehend; I only know that she was shouting to us that we should look into our hearts. At another crowd a Catholic was preaching beneath a high crucifix; for the first time in my life I beheld the proclaiming of the faith to heretics. It was extremely nice and concluded with song, in which I attempted to sing alto; unfortunately I did not know the tune. A few crowds were devoted exclusively to song; in their midst a little man takes his stand with a baton, gives the note and the whole crowd sings, and indeed in a very decent and polyphonic manner. I wanted to listen in silence, for I don’t belong to this parish, but my neighbour, a gentleman in a top-hat, urged me to sing too, so I sang aloud and glorified the Lord without words and without tune. A pair of lovers comes this way, the youth takes the cigarette from his mouth and sings, the girl also sings, an old lord sings, and a youth with a cane under his arm sings, and the shabby little man in the midst of the circle gracefully conducts as in Grand Opera; no thing here has pleased me so much before. I sang with two other churches besides this and listened to a sermon on Socialism and to the gospel of a Metropolitan Secular Society; I stood for a while by some tiny debating groups; one extremely tattered gentleman was vindicating the conservative principles of society, but he spoke with such a dreadful Cockney accent that I did not understand him at all.
His adversary was an evolutionary socialist, who had every appearance of being a superior bank clerk. Another group comprised only five members; there was a brown Indian, a one-eyed man wearing a cap, a stout Armenian Jew and two taciturn men with pipes; the one-eyed man declared with a fearful pessimism that “something is sometimes nothing,” while the Indian advocated the more cheerful view that “something is sometimes something,” which he repeated twenty times in very tumbledown English. Then there was an old fellow standing there who held a long cross and on it a banner with the inscription, “Thy Lord calleth thee”; he was saying something in a weak and husky voice, but nobody was listening to him. So I, a lost foreigner, came to a standstill and supplied him with an audience of one. Then I wanted to go my way, for it was already night; but I was stopped by a man in a nervous state, but I do not know what he said to me; I told him that I was a stranger, that London was a terrible affair, but that I was fond of the English; that I had already been about the world a little, but that few things pleased me so much as the orators in Hyde Park. Before I had told him all this twenty people were standing round and quietly listening; I might have endeavoured to found a new church, but no sufficiently indubitable article of faith occurred to me, and besides I do not know English well enough, so I cleared off.
Behind the railings in Hyde Park the sheep were grazing; and when I looked at them, one, evidently the oldest, stood up and began to bleat; so I listened to its sheepish preaching, and not until it had had its say did I go home, contented and purified as if after divine service. I might make this a starting point for admirable reflections on democracy, the English character, the need for faith and other things; but I would rather leave the whole occurrence in its natural beauty.