The Soul of London/Chapter 4
LONDON AT LEISURE
CHAPTER IV
LONDON AT LEISURE
I was talking some time ago to a timekeeper in one of the 'bus yards in the west of London. In a sort of very clean square of stables horses stood patiently in couples with their traces hooked over their backs, the chains jingling a little, and yardmen with their braces about their loins bent over pails of water into which they stirred a powder of coarse oatmeal. A big man in painfully clean-washed corduroys came furtively and hesitatingly under the square entrance arch. His eyes wandered round, resting with a look of acquaintance and friendship upon the small litters of straw that lay outside each of the house doors. He began fumbling in an inner pocket painfully for his testimonials, his "character." The timekeeper said, "No, mate, no job here," and the man, after staring again at the straw, turned away without a word spoken, painfully shy, tired, and mutely disappointed, slowly as if he had all the time of the world upon his hands. They had had five men like him already in the yard that same morning.
This particular man appealed to me—and upon the whole you cannot hope to find in London anything much more pathetic, in a small way, than the peculiar "action" of a genuine labourer seeking work, his slow and heavy movements, his vacant and undecided air, his evident not knowing what to do with his hands, and all the signs that go to tell of a hungry and undesired leisure, and the fact that, as a rule, you cannot do anything in the world really to help him. This man was one of a great many employees in a soap factory that the vagaries of one of our Napoleons of Finance had lately caused to "shut down". It was a hopeless bankruptcy at a time when trade was too slow to make it feasible for the debenture-holders to carry on the work. All the hands had been thrown as if out of a barrow to find other holes somewhere in London. This man had been for a fortnight without a job, and he said it seemed precious likely he wouldn't get one for a good bit.
He had walked that morning from East Ham way right across to Hammersmith but his case was not a particularly poignant one. He had a missis but no kids, and his missis did a bit of charing for a Mrs. North and a Mrs. Williamson. He had been, as a boy, a wagoner's mate—one of those boys who walk with a brass-bound whip beside a team either in the cart or in the plough—in Lincolnshire. But things had seemed a bit slow down there and he had come up to London to find shorter hours, lighter jobs, better pay, and the chance to save a bit—to find, in fact, these streets paved with gold.
"Mart's well be back there," he said, with a humorous smile, as if the idea were absurd. For London, if its work, even from the outside, have the mysterious and magnetic attraction of an immense gambling table, may, and inevitably does, rob those it attracts of that tremulous and romantic idea. The gambling becomes a hard and almost unceasing struggle, with the pay proportionately worse, with the hours really longer because the work is so much more strenuous. But London itself and for itself takes a hold of the hearts of men; along with disillusionments grows up a hunger, like a new sense, for London only. These men in the mass never go back. When I offered to this particular man to write to a farmer who I knew was in want of a hand he looked at me as if I must be joking. He groped in his mind for a reason. "The missis would never hear of it," he said. "Besides—" His power of invention seemed to break down till he got out: "Oh, London's the place!" His eyes roved along the sides of a cab that was passing and up the front of an establishment called, I think, the West London Stores. "London's the place," he repeated. I objected that he could not see much of London inside a soap factory. He considered for a moment and said: "No, but it's the Saturday afternoons and Sundays." He paused. "It's when ye have your leisure." He continued with the air of one trying to explain something difficult to a stupid person or a child: "It's the dinner hour with your mates and the snacks of talk between whiles loading barrows. Don't you see?" He paused again for a long time and then added: "London's the place." He could not think of going back.
Thus what London attracts with the mirage of its work shining across the counties and the countries, London holds with the glamour of its leisure. We never go back, never really and absolutely: London for those who have once, for however short a space, been Londoners, is always on the cards, is always just beyond the horizon. We may "go back" to the country for our health's sake, for our children’s health's sake, if we can. We may "go back" in a sense to the Colonies because we are not fitted for life or for work in London. But all the time London is calling; it calls in the middle of our work, it calls at odd moments like the fever of spring that stirs each year in the blood. It seems to offer romantically, not streets paved with gold but streets filled with leisure, streets where we shall saunter, things for the eye to rest on in a gray and glamorous light, books to read, men to be idle with, women to love.
If the idea of the "working classes" seems to call up a picture of the black plains of the East End, the picture when the "leisured classes" are in consideration is that of a circumscribed parallelogram of rows of tall buildings. It is a square block like a fortress that we all, more or less, are besieging—the little plot of ground bounded on the south by Piccadilly, on the west by the railings of Hyde Park, on the north by Oxford Street and on the east by Bond Street. It stands fairly well for where we should all live if we were "really rich", it represents, as far as London is concerned, our castles in the air whether we should be contented with a small, bright house in one of the angles of Mayfair, with a suite of rooms in the P——— that overlooks the Green Park, or whether we should be contented with nothing less than one of the palaces in Park Lane.
These streets are quiet, for London, and bright and well swept and almost joyous. From their exclusiveness one steps out so easily into Rotten Row, which stands for the high-water mark of out-of-doors laziness in the modern world; and, if the clubs from which, as from an opera-box, one looks out across the parks towards Buckingham Palace—if those clubs are not, for social traditions, for standing, for gravity, or for place, "in it" with the older clubs near Pall Mall or about Whitehall, they are at least more pagan in the sense of being more humanly enjoyable to the uninitiated. A man can, in these places, lounge so utterly and entirely.
And that, in essentials, is the charm of social life in London. There are not any really rigid barriers; one has so immense a choice within the limits of any purse. There are in London institutions that are rigidly exclusive, but these are so rare as to be merely the spice of the large dish. This, of course, is only the case comparatively with the other capitals of the world.
It is, for instance, impossible for a French outsider to "get into" the real society of the Faubourg St. Germain; a relatively great number of quarterings are needed, a certain tradition, a certain habit of mind, a certain, let us say, inanity. It is also relatively impossible in Berlin to "get into" the military, or the blood aristocracies. Money cannot do it, or personal charm, or immense talents. It is absolutely impossible in Vienna where society is ruled by a Court, and that Court absolutely insists on quarterings as a social qualification. It is, I should say, with certain modifications the same in St. Petersburg and in Rome. It is almost more markedly so in Madrid and Lisbon. In all these places a man is "placed"; he knows his place and it is known for him.
But in London, comparatively speaking, a man stands pretty well by what he is or by what he has. He cannot, or course, occupy the throne but, given the temperament or the wealth he can sit in almost any other chair. Essentially, the other capitals ask a man to be something; London society asks him to give something—whether dinners or personal charm, whether financial tips or a soothing personal effacement.
It is probably this last characteristic that is the most essential, or, at least, the most attainable. It is that that, as it were, gives every man his chance. Paradoxically enough the reason for it is that London society is made up of such intensely individual types that the comparatively characterless man is absolutely essential. He fills up holes, he tones down dinner parties, he may be relied on not to jar, not to shine—not to worry one's nerves. In a society which is made up very much of strong individualities more or less constantly at war, self-effacement has a charm; the listener grows very precious.
And, upon the whole, in the other capitals of the world the thing is very exactly the other way round. In societies where the essential quality is birth, individuals are rare. In those closed ranks men are very much alike, and women—in character, in point of view, in gesture, in speech. In consequence an individuality tells. It is not, as in London, questioned, doubted and mistrusted; it is, if the individual belongs to the society, welcomed as a rather pleasant relief from the dead level.
The fascination of life in London is essentially its freedom. In society of the one type you may do very much what you like short of eating peas with a knife, wearing a felt hat with a frock coat, or a coloured tie with evening dress. You may, in the realm of ideas, be as heterodox as you please; you may "pass" being a Roman Catholic, a Buddhist, even a Jew or Mohammedan. (Obviously it is not good form to intrude your personal views in mixed company, but you are allowed your freedom of private thought.) But in, say, Catholic circles in France, entry is barred to a man suspected of being a Protestant or a Republican.
But if, on the one hand, private freedom of views is permissible in London, the rule that you must not express in Society any views at all is so rigid, that any infringement of it causes a shudder. It is a want of tact. Examined into minutely, you will find again, as the basis of this characteristic, the individual unit. There is not any London type. London is a meeting place of all sorts of incongruous types, and, if you must not utter your views, it is simply because you run so sure a risk of hurting the feelings of every individual near you. In Catholic circles abroad you may talk freely of the Deity, the Virgin, the Saviour, or the Saints, because what is thought about these divinities is rigidly defined. In London society you may be—it is considered commendable to be—devout in private, but it is a shuddering offence to mention the Deity in company. Similarly all metaphysical topics, all political matters going below the surface or likely to cause heat, the consideration of sexual questions, the mention of the poor or the suffering, are avoided. This is, in origin, because your neighbour at dinner has his or her private views, and has a right to them. You do not enquire into them, you do not know them, and you cannot air your own views because they will probably give offence.
The net result is to make London conversations singularly colourless; but they become singularly unexhausting. No call is made upon your brain or your individuality; it is precisely not "good form" to make any kind of display. You may be yourself as much as you please, but it must be yourself in a state of quiescence. No strain at all is put upon you, because it is the height of good manners to have no manners at all.
This of course is most noticeable abroad, where the Londoner is celebrated for his atrociously bad manners. He does not bow over his hat on entering a room; he sits down on any chair, he has no gesticulations of pleasure, he stops short at being well groomed and undemonstrative. There is not, in fact, any etiquette in London, there is only a general rule against obtruding your personality—a general rule against animation in society. "Die verstaendigste and geistreichste aller europaeischen Nationen hat sogar die Regel, 'never interrupt', das elfte Gebot genannt," says Schopenhauer.[1] But obviously if you never interrupt you must have schooled yourself to care little for the discussion you have in hand, or you must avoid the discussion of subjects you care for.
Essentially we may say that the other great societies of Europe prescribe rigid codes of manners, and a member of society attains to self-respect by his knowledge of these codes. He tries in fact to do something. London society has no code, it prescribes an attitude of mind. You do not enter a London drawing-room with one, three or six bows; you do not kiss your hostess's hand. But you lounge in and get through that ceremonial contact as best suits you. You try to show no impressment at all. For it may be said that, in London, the mark of the leisured class is to be without restraint. One may go even further: to be conscious of any restraint is to be guilty of bad manners.
For supposing a severe moralist frown, at a dinner, because the guests, being all intimate, calling each other by familiar nicknames, sit unbracing genially, ladies and all, with their feet on the table. The frown will—and, after all, quite rightly—be set down as a piece of "unsoundness". For, in the first place, what does a moralist—a man with an occupation or a mission—seek in this particular galley? It is—this particular leisured class—circumscribed and walled in; it circumscribes itself, too. It is, as it were, a deer park within London; a Zoological Gardens within the ring of a Regent's park.
If we may call the very poor—the sweated workers—a caput mortuum of the body politic, beyond hope of being raised, beyond hope of being moralized upon because they are always at work: so, in the London of Leisure we may call this other class above hope of being touched, above hope of being moralised upon—because they are always at leisure. It is unprofitable for the moralists to worry about them: they have reverted to savagery, really. Having no work they must needs disport themselves—and the occupation of the idle must necessarily tend towards display. Emulation in display tends, humanity being poor humanity, towards barbarism. (Not towards primitive barbarism, be it said, for that devotes all its energies towards the straitening of its tribal laws, of its moral and ceremonial observances. It veils its women; prescribes fasts; enjoins hygienic ablutions, abstinence from certain meats, usuries, fornications, and the depicting of actual objects.)
But this other barbarism, which comes after a race, a Society, or a family, has passed upwards through the painful strata of observances and of tribal laws, is a breaking of all bonds. It is humanity drawing a deep breath, "going fanti", running amuck through the laws of public opinion. It is the man that is in all of us breaking loose and seeking to wallow. It may not go further than putting our feet on the dining table, than pouring champagne cup upon our host's head, or, as an amiable bishop put it the other day, "neighing after our neighbours' wives," but, having arrived at that stage, these "sets" begin again to evolve their tribal laws, so that not to put up our feet, not to pour champagne cup, or not to "neigh" is to be an enemy to that particular republic. This phenomenon does not matter, it is past banning and past curing. You cannot learn any moral lesson from a Malay running amuck—and, as the Chinese proverb has it, "It would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea house." Thus it is really much better for the moralist not to think about them. If, in the guise of a Savonarola, he fill them with fear for their immortal souls, it will not mean any more than a hysterical revival. In the body politic they do not "count", they are a shade more hopeless than the very poor, they will run their course towards ruin, physical decay, or towards that period of life when ginger being no longer hot in a mouth that has lost all savours, they will become aged devotees and perhaps make for edification.
No doubt to the passionate reformer, of whatever code, the idea of so many individuals living the life of beasts is horribly disturbing. (I know, indeed, one reformer who was driven to fits of rage at the waste of time in a family of the leisured class. They had lived at this particular reformer's house in the country, and apparently washed themselves ten times a day.) But no doubt, too, this phenomenon makes for good to the body politic.
Work is the original curse of mankind because it is the original medicine. We may go on working till we drop, occupying our minds, keeping our bodies sound—but the moment we drop work our minds decay, our bodies atrophy, it is all over with us in this world. As with individuals so with the Body Politic, or with London, the modern World Town.
Whilst, in essentials, it is a Town of Work it keeps all on going; it sweats out at the top these atrophied individuals, or it sweats them out at the bottom (they hang around the street posts and make books outside the doors of public houses); and thus Work, the medicine, purges the unhealthy corpuscles of the blood or revenges itself of the too healthy. For if we may call the poor loafer the unhealthy, we must call the rich leisured class the too healthy. In one way or another their ancestors, their family, their gens, have worked too much for them: they are left without the need to labour. If, then, these families, these "sets", could preserve a stolid middle course, if they could live for ever within their incomes, restrict their families, and remain leisured for ever, the end of London would indeed be near. But human nature steps in.
So whilst there is emulation there is hope. We shall, it is to be trusted, go on, "cutting dashes" until we drop out, until our children sink down to rise up again fighting, or until we die out, childless and forgotten, unhealthy corpuscles, purged and got rid of. There would be a greater danger to London if this Leisured Class were to spread very far; but that, for a city so vast, must mean an accumulation of wealth inconceivable, and in these latter days practically impossible. Rome decayed because, being mistress of the world, she robbed the whole world and lived profusely, rioting for centuries upon the spoils of primeval empires. But there is no such hope any longer for London; she has her too urgent competitors, and the primeval empires have been by now too often gutted to leave any very substantial pickings. So that the wealth of London has to be gained by work, and this fortress of the leisured class remains as a lure, as a sort of Islands of the Blest, glamorous in the haze above Park Lane and Mayfair, an incentive to health because wealth means leisure; wealth means work, and work health. A nobler incentive would of course be nobler, and no doubt it might be more valuable when attained. But perhaps an all-seeing Providence arranges the world in the best way for the child that is man, for the child that will train, harden itself, strive and race—upon no matter what cinder track—for a prize cup that is of no intrinsic value, for a championship that carries nothing with it but the privilege to struggle and retain the honour, or to rest, grow fat, and decay.
So, save for the very few whom the reformers influence, and save for the very few whom philosophy really makes wise, and the very few whose wings have been singed—for all the really healthy and not self-conscious humanity of the world that is London, this mirage of the Leisured Class, hanging above the smoke of the roofs, appearing in the glamour of the morning dreams, gilding how many castles, in how many airs, is the incentive to life in London.
"It takes a good deal out of you", this leisured life of display. You rush more or less feverishly, gathering scalps of one sort or another; being "seen" in the record number of places where anyone who is anyone can be seen; you pack your days with drives on coaches, fencing matches, luncheons, afternoons, dressings and re-dressings, dinners, the founding of new religions in drawing rooms, polo matches, cricket matches, standing against walls at dances, neighing perhaps after your friends' wives, seeking heaven knows what at operas, theatres, music halls, dashing out into the home counties and back, or really and sensuously enjoying the music of a good concert. At any rate you live very full and laborious days, seeking excitements—until finally excitement leaves you altogether. If you are really in luck, if you are really someone, each of these events of your day is "something". Each concert is something portentous and, in the world of music perhaps, makes history. Each religion that you see founded is to the sociologist something really significant, each cricket match a real "event" in which the best muscle and the best brain of the day is striving, delivering beautiful balls and making deft and beautiful strokes. But each of these things sinks back into the mere background of your you. You are, on the relentless current of your life, whirled past them as, in a train, you are whirled past a succession of beautiful landscapes. You have "seen" such and such a social event as you have seen, say, Damascus, from a saloon window.
You carry away from it a vague kaleidoscope picture—lights in clusters, the bare shoulders of women, white flannel on green turf in the sunlight, darkened drawing rooms with nasal voices chanting parodies of prayers, the up and down strokes of fiddle bows, the flicker of fifty couples whirling round before you as with a touch of headache you stood in a doorway, a vague recollection of a brilliant anecdote, the fag end of a conversation beneath the palms of a dimmed conservatory, and a fatigue and a feverish idea that if you had missed any one of these unimportant things you would have missed life.
But, if you had been a beanfeaster who missed a beanfeast, or if you had been a Saturday footballer who missed one match, you might have missed so much more of your life. And, indeed, since life is no more than a bundle of memories, your life is so much shorter, since you remember seasons, not events. It is with you: "The season when good old Hinds had his place in Cadogan Square;" or, "The year, don't you remember? when we used to drink barley water", or, "Hermit's year". But the Saturday footballer remembers so many glorious Saturdays relieved by so many blank weeks. He remembers the splendid crowded journeys back—"The time when Old Tommy sang 'Soldiers of the Queen'"—"The time when we had the cask of beer on the luggage rack coming back from playing Barnes"—"The time when Black and Moses stuck the ticket collector under the seat and kept him there till Waterloo."
So the life of seasons and years is shorter, swifter, more regretful, less filled. And, the breaks being less marked, the life itself is the more laborious and less of a life. For it is in the breaks, in the marking time, that the course of a life becomes visible and sensible. You realise it only in leisures within that laborious leisure; you realise it, in fact, best when, with your hands deep in your trousers pockets, or listless on your watch-chain, you stand, unthinking, speculating on nothing, looking down on the unceasing, hushed, and constantly changing defile of traffic below your club windows. The vaguest thoughts flit through your brain: the knot on a whip, the cockade on a coachman's hat, the sprawl of a large woman in a victoria, the windshield in front of an automobile. You live only with your eyes, and they lull you. So Time becomes manifest like a slow pulse, the world stands still; a four-wheeler takes as it were two years to crawl from one lamp-post to another, and the rustle of newspapers behind your back in the dark recesses of the room might be a tide chafing upon the pebbles. That is your deep and blessed leisure: the pause in the beat of the clock that comes now and then to make life seem worth going on with. Without that there would be an end of us.
For, whether we are of the leisured class, whether we are laundry-women, agricultural labourers, dock labourers, or bank clerks, it is that third state that makes us live. Brahmins" would call it contemplation; the French might use the word, assoupissement. It would be incorrect to call it reverie since it is merely a suspension of the intellectual faculties; it is a bathing in the visible world: it is a third state between work and amusement—perhaps it is the real Leisure.
It is not obviously a product of London alone. For your agricultural labourer who hangs over a gate at dusk, just gently swinging a foot and gazing, wrapt unthinking and voluptuous, at black and white, at speckled, at bright red and flame-plumaged poultry on the green below him, tastes it very well along with the flavour of the straw in his mouth—and the women who, after their hard days, stand above the half doors of cottages and gaze at nothing. But with them it is not a third state, since it takes the place of amusement as well as rest. Your London dock labourer really has this third state, since along with his hard physical work he has his sing-songs, his club nights, his visits to music halls, his nights when he takes his "missus" to the theatre. I knew one very good fellow, a plasterer's labourer, hardworking, making good money, and as regular as a church clock. His hobby was chaffinches. In the mornings before work and in the evenings he gave a certain amount of time to teaching his birds to pipe. At nightfalls he would go to his public house for a couple of pints of ale and a few pipes. On a Saturday afternoon he was shaved and went to a club where there were singing and debates. He always came home sober enough to put beside his bed—he was a bachelor—a pailful of treacle beer that he had brewed himself, and an indiarubber tube.
And there on a Sunday he would lie nearly through the day sucking up the treacle beer through the tube and gazing at the ceiling, thinking nothing at all, letting his eyes follow the cracks in the plaster from one wall to another, backward and forward for ever. Late in the afternoon he would get up, dress himself carefully in his best; wrap his chaffinch cages in old handkerchiefs, and, carrying them, saunter along Petticoat Lane, look restfully at the cages of birds exposed for sale, meditating a purchase for next year, passing the time of day with a Jew or two, and losing himself, stolid, quiet, and observant, in the thick crowd. He would come to a greengrocer's shop, the door open, the interior a black and odorous darkness, where you trod upon cabbage leaves and orange paper. Behind this was another dark room, in the centre of which a ladder stood up going into an upper loft through a trap-door. This loft was the "Cave of Harmony" where, in the light of brilliant gas jets were held the contests of the piping chaffinches. There, taking the gas jets for a fiercer sun, the little birds sang shrilly and furiously one against another, the attentive crowd of faces around them, thrown into deep shadows and strong lights, hard featured and intense, with every eye fixed upon the small and straining singer, fingers ticking off turns in the song and a silence broken by no shuffling of feet and no clearing of throats.
So, having scored his "marks", our friend would go slowly and soberly home; set another pailful of treacle beer to brew against next Sunday morning, and put himself quietly to bed.
Thus his life was perfectly regular and calm; hard muscular work giving place to sober amusement, dashed once a week with that intense leisure of lying still, looking at the ceiling and thinking nothing. On off days, bank holidays and the like, he would take his cages, wrapped up, under his arm, out into Epping Forest. For these chaffinch fanciers have a notion—no doubt it is a true one—that unless their captive birds refresh their memory of the wild song by chanting against free chaffinches in the woods or parks, they will lose the brilliance of their note, and finally mope and die. There are in London many thousands of men like this.
Chaffinches, bullfinches, prize bantams, prize rabbits, whippets, bull terriers, canaries, and even pigs occupy their leisure moments, and are regarded with pride by their wives, and awe by their young children. These breeders and fanciers are mostly country born, deliberate, gentle, sober, with a pipe generally in the corner of the mouth, from which come rare jets of smoke accompanying words as rare and as slow. And their "fancies" provide them with that companionship of animals that is such a necessity to the country-bred Englishman. It gives them a chance to get rid of some of the stores of tenderness towards small living things which, for lack of words, they cannot so well lavish on their wives and children. I have known a carter who did not apparently trouble himself in the least about illnesses in his own house, driven to a state of distraction because one of his old companions, a draught-horse, was on the point of death.
They give him, too, these "fancyings", not only the chance to gaze ineffably, like the agricultural labourer, at the motions of animals, but the chance of emulation, the chance, if you will, of sharing in a sport. That, as it were, is what London supplies, and what makes London in a way both attractive and salutary. For we may say that the man who ceases to compete ceases to be a perfect man, and, in the actual stages of heavy manual work there is no room for emulation. It is true that in the country you have ploughing matches, but they touch only the very few; you have cottage garden prizes, but those are artificially fostered "from above", and, indeed, they call for efforts too like those of the everyday work to afford much of an occupation for a man's leisure.—So that, as a rule, these prizes flourish most in the neighbourhood of the small towns, and fall to railway signalmen, cobblers and the non-agricultural. Starling and sparrow shoots are, of course, mere bank holiday carouses, not the hobbies that are necessary for the everyday life of a man. Thus the country districts are depleted.
And, inasmuch as the arts are matters of association, we, loving a picture, a melody, a verse, because for obscure reasons it calls up in us forgotten memories of times when we were young, in love or happy, so these "fancies" which are Arts, call up in the hearts of these countrymen become town-labourers, moods like those they felt in forgotten green fields. I know a man who breeds pheasants in the green enclosure of a City churchyard, and when, towards October in the early black mornings of that tiny and shut-in square, roofed in from the sky by plane leaves high up near the steeple, overlooked by the gleaming plate-glass windows of merchants' offices, these noble birds utter their shrill, prolonged and wild crockettings, like peals of defiant laughter, their owner says rhapsodically: "Doesn't it make you think of Norfolk?" It makes me think of covert rides in Kent, dripping with dew, and of the clack of the beaters' sticks and their shrill cries; but all the same it makes that City caretaker have all the sensuous delight of the green fields of his youth.
Nevertheless, he comments; "It's better here nor there.—Down there it meant forty shillings if the keeper caught you so much as smelling a pheasant's neck feather."—Here he needed no gun license, and they paid him ten times over for their keep, and kept his hands nicely full.
So the birds with their delicate gait, high and dainty spurred steps, and peering, brilliant necks, seek unceasingly for issues from the closed railings of the churchyard, and contribute all that, in London, is needed to keep their owner there for ever. I knew a Rye fisherman, a lazy, humorous scoundrel, who never went to sea when he had the price of a pint in his pocket. He grew tired of that life and became a door-keeper in some Southwark chemical works. He spends his leisure time with his hands in his pockets, leaning over the river wall, spitting into the eddies of the water and commenting on the ineptitude of the men on the dumb barges. Their sweeps dip up and down, to all appearances senselessly and futilely, and H——— comments that ne'er a one of them ever seems to know that twenty yards in shore there's a current that would take them down three miles an hour faster. H——— will scull you down to Greenwich for a pipe of tobacco just for the fun of the thing; whereas five shillings, in the old days, would not have induced him to scull you down from Rye to the harbour mouth, a matter of two miles. Sails, he used to say, were his business, oars being against nature.—But London has changed that, making of former toils present leisure.
Your London 'bus-driver takes his days off sitting on the front seat of an omnibus with his head close to that of the driver at work, just as the sailor lounges round harbours, glances along ropes with quietened but still professional eyes.—He gets in this way the feeling of leisure "rubbed in" and, without anxieties, his mind is kept employed by the things he best understands. And it is because in London there are so many things to see, so many anecdotes to be retailed, such a constant passing of material and human objects, that London holds us.
I do not know that it really sharpens our wits: I fancy that it merely gives us more accidental matters on which to display them, more occurrences to which to attach morals that have been for years crystallised in our minds.—I was listening to the observations of two such 'bus drivers. They were like this: of a red-nosed fourwheel driver: "Now then old danger signal!" To a driver of a very magnificent state carriage: "Where are you going with that glass hearse?" Of a very small man conducting a very tall lady across the road: "I reckon he wants a step ladder when he kisses her goodnight!"
Whereupon the driver who hadn"t made the remark muttered: "Just what I was going to say, Bill. You took the very words out of my mouth."—Thus these famous witticisms of the London streets are largely traditional and common property. No doubt London breeds a certain cast of mind by applying men's thoughts to a similar class of occurrences, but the actual comments float in the air in class and class. In the classes that are as a rule recruited from the country, the type of mind is slower, more given to generalisation, less topical, more idealising. It is broader, in fact, because it has two experiences of life, and depends less upon the daily papers.
The children of these countrymen are quite different. The power of generalisation has left them altogether, with their town breeding; their conversation is a collection of town topics, their allusions are gathered from the interests of daily papers, they have international nicknames for the food in cheap eating houses and for common objects.—Thus whiskers become "Krugers"; slices of German sausage are "Kaiser's telegrams"; macaroni is called "A. J. B."—out of a fancied resemblance to the entwined legs of the Prime Minister of a certain epoch. Thus for the Londoner the "facts" of the daily and weekly press take the place of any broad generalisations upon life.
It takes, too, for at least the poorer classes, the place of animal "fancies"; it dictates, the daily and weekly press, their very hobbies. For to a man with an individuality—and the countryman has a strong and knotted one as a rule—his hobby is his mental anodyne. To the real Londoner the press is that. You get the distinction strongly in this way. My Lincolnshire waggoner become a soapmaker's hand, has his bit of cold steak wrapped up in a fragment of newspaper six weeks old. At lunch time he spells out from this, laboriously, a report of the trial of a solicitor for embezzling £40,000. He says slowly: "Well, well: why do the Law always breed rogues and ruin fools?"—a general speculation. He reads the report of a wife unfaithful to her husband who has been fighting in South Africa, and he says: "You can't trust a woman out of your sight . . . Reckon he didn't beat her oft enow . . . A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, the otter you beat 'em the faithfuller they be"—and many more speculations of a general kind.
But his son, an office boy, his overseer, a smart London born workman, the clerks in his office, his general manager, the directors of the Company he serves; these sit morning after morning in their city-going trains, with the sheets held up before them, swallowing "news" as they swallow quick lunches later on. These things pass through their quiescent minds as under the eyes of the clubman that string of vehicles: "The Play that Failed; A Chat with the Manager"—"Varieties in Weather"—"Scorned Woman's Vengeance"—"'Objected to Fireguards'"—"Comedy in the County Court"—"Slavery to Drugs; Alarming Growth of the Opium Habit"—"Country's Loneliness; Mental Isolation of the Cultured"—"Infant Motorists; The Automobile as an Adjunct to the Nursery"—"Home Rule for Egypt; Khedive's interest in an Organised Agitation"—"Married to a Scoundrel"—"Batch of Stabbing Cases". All these things flicker through the dazed and quiescent minds without leaving a trace, forgotten as soon as the first step is made upon the platform at Mark Lane or the Mansion House Stations—as much forgotten as any telegraph pole that flickered past the train window out towards the suburbs. Very salient and very characteristic figures may make a certain mark upon the mind—the German Emperor is, for some reason or another, particularly impressive to the lower order of Londoner—"Kaiser's telegrams" is an evidence of it. He will evoke some such comment as "Willie's a bit dotty", but practically never such trite general reflections as that immense power, immense isolation, or immense conspicuousness, will drive a man to eccentricities of speech and action. And indeed, anyone who made such an observation aloud, would run the risk of being silenced with: "Oh, don't talk like a book here." Or: "When we want to hear a preacher, we go to the City Temple." In a country cottage, on the other hand, the remark would be considered, accepted, and even commented on. This dislike for generalisations is as a rule set down as an English trait. An English trait it is not: but the London habit of mind it is. Probably, too, it is what has made conversation in London a lost art. It gives one something of a shock to read in Emerson: "English stories, bon-mots, and table talk are as good as the best of the French. In America we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained to the same perfection: for the range of nations from which London draws, and the steep contrasts of conditions create the picturesque in society, as a broken country makes picturesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because dressing for dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage everything good. Much attrition has worn every sentence to a bullet."
An American writing that passage to-day would be accused of irony, since we no longer utter sentences at dinners. Yet when we consider the ages of Johnson, of the Prince Regent, even when we think of the Table Talk of Shirley, we must remember—and we must wonder what has become of that mighty stream. And we must wonder why we will no longer listen to talkers: why a talker is something we resent; why, in fact, a conversational artist strikes us nowadays as "a bounder".
The really good raconteurs of the Brummel type did survive in London, as very old men, into the late 'eighties: the mild, splendid, whiskered creatures of the Crimea still talked; the mild, splendid, and bearded creatures of the 'seventies still told anecdotes "à propos of" some general idea or other; nowadays we tell a "good story" with diffidence, being afraid of being taken for a sort of Theodore Hook or professional diner out. But, as a general rule, London limits itself to: "Did you see that extraordinary case in the So-and-so to-day? . . . " or "Have you read Such-and-such a novel? Seen such a play? Or such a picture show?" and it comments: "Rotten, I think", without reason given for the condemnation.
Partly, no doubt, it is because we have become so "democratic", as Emerson puts it, that society resents any monopolist of talk. Perhaps, too, the Englishman never did really enjoy being talked to or "entertained". (Indeed an American hostess has put it on record that an English guest commented to her the other day, "But, we don't want to be entertained.") But, undoubtedly, conversation began to go out of fashion when the phrase: "He speaks like a book" was first used invidiously. It marked the bifurcation of the English language: the distinction between our spoken and our written tongue. For this the periodical press must be held responsible.
London was always press-ridden. In the days of Johnson—who invented the Magazine—the Newspapers would make a prodigious fuss; they could drive a lady so sensible as Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi almost to distraction, with comments upon her debated marriage, and supply the Town with Talk—as opposed to Conversation—about such a matter as that Piozzi marriage, for days, months and years on end. And earlier, even, Defoe, who was the first of the Journalists, made Town Talk out of solid facts, unsolid fiction, or practical projects. But books still monopolised the airy realms of philosophical speculations; preachers still retained the sole right to lecture upon divinity—and books and preachers entered intimately into the lives of men and women. People read "Clarissa" by the year, and debated, at dinner tables, as to the abstract proprieties of the case of Pamela. The Generalisation flourished; Conversation in consequence was possible.
But, with the coming of the Modern Newspaper, the Book has been deposed from its intimate position in the hearts of men. You cannot in London read a book from day to day, because you must know the news, in order to be a fit companion for your fellow Londoner. Connected thinking has become nearly impossible, because it is nearly impossible to find any general idea that will connect into one train of thought: "Home Rule for Egypt", "A Batch of Stabbing Cases", and "Infant Motorists". It is hardly worth while to trace the evolution of this process. In the '70's-'80's the Londoner was still said to get his General Ideas from the leader writers of his favourite paper. Nowadays even the leader is dying out.
So that, in general, the Londoner has lost all power of connected conversation, and nearly all power of connected thought. But if his dinner-table has become democratized, and he will not suffer a connected talker among his friends, he still retains some liking for duly licensed preachers, some respect for the official talker or moralist. Generally speaking, he sets apart one day in seven for this individual, and, generally speaking, that one day is the Sabbath.
The stolid London of squares and clean streets, to the westward, still retains something of its Sunday morning hush: the pavements are empty, and as if whitened, and where there are the large detached houses, with bits of garden, and large old trees, the town still has its air of being a vast cemetery of large mausoleums, that no one ever visits. Then indeed that third state, the deep leisure, settles upon the middle London of the professional and merchant classes. There is a stillness, a hush. Breakfast is half-an-hour or an hour later than on other days, the perfume of coffee, the savour of bacon, of fish, of sausages, floats on a softer and stiller air. The interminable rumble of all the commissariat wagons, of butchers', of greengrocers', of stores' carts, all that unending procession that on week days rattles and reverberates throughout the morning, is stilled. In the unaccustomed quiet you can hear the decent hiss of the kettle on its tripod, you can hear the rustle of stiff petticoats coming down from the second floor, you can hear even the voices of the servants in the kitchen, just suggested, as if down there an interminable monologue were being carried on.
And beside the breakfast dishes there lie, still, the Sunday papers. As a rule there are two of these, strips of white, and strips of buff, like supplementary table-napkins. The more venerable contain practically no news; they are glanced at to see the "Prices" of the day before. But the arms that support these sheets are not the nervous, hurried arms of the week day; the glances meander down the columns. There is time, there is plenty of time—as if the reader in that hush and pause, realised and felt, just for once, that he is after all a creature of Eternity, with All Time before him. There is an opulence, a luxury of minutes to be bathed in, as it were, in that sort of London Sunday, that makes one understand very well why that part of London is so loth to part with its Sabbath.
The Sunday paper is now, I should say, a much more general feature than it used to be. It invades the most Sabbatarian breakfast tables. But I remember that, as a boy, I used to have to walk—in Kensington—nearly two miles to procure an "Observer" for my father, every Sunday morning. (It was considered that the exercise was good for me, lacking my daily walk to school.) And the paper-shop was a dirty, obscure and hidden little place that during the week carried on the sale, mostly, of clandestine and objectionable broad sheets directed against the Papists. The Sunday paper, in fact, was shunned by all respectable newsagents—and, in consequence the Sunday breakfast table was a much less restful thing, since no book of sermons beside the plate could equal that respectable anodyne.
All over the town these sheets, as if they were white petals bearing oblivion, settle down, restful and beneficent, like so many doses of poppy seed. In the back-yards of small cottages, separated one from another by breast-high modern palings you find by the hundreds of thousands (it is certified by accountants) ———'s Weekly News; ———'s Weekly Paper; ———'s News of the Week; and, on each back doorstep, in his shirt sleeves, in his best trousers and waistcoat, voluptuously, soberly and restfully, that good fellow, the London mechanic, sits down to read the paper.
And, in general, those Sunday and Weekly Papers preach to a considerable extent. One middle class favourite contains at least six different headings under which can be found reflections on social subjects, on sporting subjects, on religious subjects, even on subjects purely jocular and on such abstruse matters as "Are Clever Women Popular?" And the mechanics' Weeklies have sturdy "tones" of their own; they fulminate against the vices, meannesses and hypocrisies of the wealthy; they unveil the secrets of Courts; they preach patriotism or the love of God. So that, even if he no longer go to church or chapel, the Londoner on Sunday mornings, before his Sunday dinner, gets as a rule his dose of general reflections. And it is characteristic of him that, although he cannot bear preaching that he might have to answer—conversational preaching—he dearly loves the preacher who is beyond his reach. He will listen to sermons, to funeral orations, to public speeches, to lectures; he loves no novel that has not a moral basis of one kind or another, that has not some purpose or other, that does not preach some sermon; upon the stage he likes most of all moralising old men and heroic generalisations in favour of one virtue or another. But it is characteristic of the strong lines that he draws between life and the arts, that although he is never tired of seeing a Hamlet upon the stage he will call a Hamlet of private life morbid, dangerous, unhealthy and insupportable.
Thus, in the London of leisure, any social intercourse between men and women is nowadays become almost impossible. For no man can be himself without sooner or later proclaiming whatever may be the particular moral that he draws from life. He could not really utter his thoughts without revealing the fact that he loves virtue, or does not; or that he considers there is such a thing as virtue, or is not. He is therefore driven, the social Londoner at his leisure, to action instead of to speech. He puts his feet on the dinner table; beguiles his after dinners with cards, with recitations, with mechanical pianos, with the theatres, with moonlight automobile drives or with watching skating competitions on artificial ice. He plays golf; he witnesses cricket matches, football matches, billiard matches; he goes to two-penny gaffs in Mile End or parades in dense and inarticulate crowds of young men and young girls, for hours of an evening, in front of the shops of the great highways.
And these paradings are, for the million or so of the young people of this huge world that is London, the great delight, the great feature of a life otherwise featureless enough. In externals one parade is like another, but the small gradations are infinite. Thus in one parade there will be a great number of sets each of the same social level; each set with its gossip, its chaff, its manner of accost, its etiquette, its language. You get, as it were, an impression of entering one vast family party amid the rustle of feet, of dresses, the clitter-clatter of canes, the subdued shrieks of laughter, the hushed personal remarks. As a rule in all these parades, in the Fleet Street "Monkey Walk" as at Shepherd's Bush; in Islington as in Mile End Road; the youths early in the evening stand in knots, cloth cape not consorting with bowler hats and straw-yards with neither. They talk with a certain ostentation and a certain affectation of swagger, boasting, or acting as chorus in praise of one another. The girls parade up and down arm in arm, white aprons being shunned by stuff dresses, and feather hats shunning the straws perched forward over the eyes. Heads steal round swiftly over shoulders as line of girls passes knot of youths, and at these electric moments the voices grow higher and little shoves and nudges pass like waves in a field of corn. There is not any psychical moment for pairing off, but the process begins as the kindly dusk falls. A youth slips away from a knot, a girl hangs back from a line, till little by little the knots dwindle away altogether and there are no more lines.
The ceremonials of the actual greeting are astonishingly various and more rigidly observed than the etiquette of the Court of Spain. In Westbourne Grove the young shop assistant raises his bowler, drawls "How are you, Miss ———?" for all the world as they do in Rotten Row. In the Mile End Road and in Shepherd's Bush the factory girls slap likely youths violently upon the back and are violently poked in the side for answer, both girl and young man uttering obscenities positively astounding, without any obscene intention in the world. And then commences, mysterious and ceremonial, the walking out, the period of probation, the golden age. For, after all, it is a golden age, an age of vague emotions, of words uttered, insignificant, but fraught with more meaning in each absurd syllable than in all the tirades of Romeo to the moon: "Do you like fringes?" "Um!—ah!—um!—Well—." "There, you are a one———." "I dote on blue eyes———."
So that, by nine o'clock, the parades are full of couples, orderly, quiet, moving unceasingly up and down, with conversation utterly exhausted, with the glamorous fall of light and shade, with titillating emotions, with inscrutable excitements, rustling, supremely alive and supremely happy, with here and there a violent heartache, and here and there a great loneliness. And here for the good democrat is the best sight—the really good sight—of London at leisure, since here is London, the great London of the future, the London that matters to the democrat, in the making. This is London really young, really pagan, really idyllic, really moral, really promising a future to the race, really holding its population by the spell that nothing will ever break, the spell of contagious humanity and of infinite human contacts. These are the Londoners who will never go back.
So by her leisure moments London holds us. And if you desire a sight, equally impressive, of London at leisure, go down Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner on a pleasant summer day. On the right of you you have all those clubs with all those lounging and luxuriating men. On the left there is a stretch of green park, hidden and rendered hideous by recumbent forms. They lie like corpses, or like soldiers in a stealthy attack, a great multitude of broken men and women, they, too, eternally at leisure. They lie, soles of boots to crowns of heads, just out of arm's reach one from the other for fear of being rifled by their couch-mates. They lie motionless, dun-coloured, pitiful and horrible, bathing in leisure that will never end. There, indeed, is your London at leisure; the two ends of the scale offered violently for inspection, confronting and ignoring steadily the one the other. For, in the mass, the men in the windows never look down; the men in the park never look up.
In those two opposed sights you have your London, your great tree, in its leisure, making for itself new sap and new fibre, holding aloft its vigorous leaves, shedding its decayed wood, strewing on the ground its rotten twigs and stuff for graveyards.
- ↑ "The most understanding and most spiritual of all the European nations (the English) has named the rule 'never interrupt', the eleventh commandment."—Parerga and Paralipomena. "Über Lärm und Geraüsch", p. 679.