Essays in London and Elsewhere BY HENRY JAMES NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS I \ / 1/ Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reseniei. NOTE The first of these Papers was written with a cer- tain reference to the admirable illustrations, by Mr. Pennell, with which on its original appearance in The Century it was accompanied. When the notice of Pierre Loti and that of MM. de Goncourt were first published (in The Fortnightly -Review) the latest volumes of these authors had not appeared. I ) CONTENTS PAGE London i James Russell Lowell 44 Frances Anne Kemble 81 Gustave Flaubert 121 Pierre Loti 151 The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt . 186 Browning in Westminster Abbey .... 222 Henrik Ibsen 230 Mrs. Humphry Ward 253 Criticism * . . . 259 An Animated Conversation 267 Pts / LONDON There is a certain evening that I count as virtually a first impression — the end of a wet, black Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March. There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned gray, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of was a fresh beginning. No doubt I had a mystic presci- ence of how fond of the murky modern Babylon I was one day to become ; certain it is that as I look back I find every small circumstance of those hours of ap- proach and arrival still as vivid as if the solemnity of an opening era had breathed upon it. The sense of approach was already almost intolerably strong at Liverpool, where, as I remember, the perception of the English character of everything was as acute as a surprise, though it could only be a surprise without a shock. It was expectation exquisitely gratified- superabundantly confirmed. There was a kind of wonder, indeed, that England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be ; but the wonder would have been greater, and all the pleasure absent, if the sensation had not been violent. It seem? to sit there again like a visiting presence, as ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE it sat opposite to me at breakfast at a small table a window of the old coffee-room of the Adelphi Hotel — the unextended (as it then was), the unimproved, the unblushingly local Adelphi. Liverpool is not a romantic city, but that smoky Saturday returns to me as a supreme success, measured by its association with the kind of emotion in the hope of which, for the most part, we betake ourselves to far countries. It assumed this character at an early hour — or rather, indeed, twenty- four hours before— with the sight, as one looked across the wintry ocean, of the strange, dark, lonely freshness of the coast of Ire- land. Better still, before we could come up to the city, were the black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, windiest light. Spring was already in the air, in the town ; there was no rain, but there was still less sun — one wondered what had become, on this side of the world, of the big white splotch in the heavens ; and the gray mildness, shading away into black at every pretext, appeared in itself a promise. This was how it hung about me, between the window and the lire, in the coffee-room of the hotel — late in the morning for breakfast, as we had been long disembarking. The other passengers had dispersed, knowingly catching trains for London (we had only been a handful) ; I had the place to myself, and I felt as if I had an ex- clusive property in the impression. I prolonged it, I sacrificed to it, and it is perfectly recoverable now, with the very taste of the national muffin, the creak LONDON 3 of the waiter's shoes as he came and went (could anything be so English as his intensely professional back ? it revealed a country of tradition), and the rustle of the newspaper I was too excited to read. I continued to sacrifice for the rest of the day; it didn't seem to me a sentient thing, as yet, to in- quire into the means of getting away. My curiosity must indeed have languished, for I found myself on the morrow in the slowest of Sunday trains, pottering up to London with an interruptedness which might have been tedious without the conversation of an old gentleman who shared the carriage with me arid to whom my alien as well as comparatively youthful character had betrayed itself. He instructed me as to the sights of London, and impressed upon me that nothing was more worthy of my attention than the great cathedral of St. Paul. " Have you seen St. Peter's in, Rome ? St. Peter's is more highly embel- lished, you know ; but you may depend upon it that St. Paul's is the better building of the two." The impression I began with speaking of was, strictly, that of the drive from Euston, after dark, to Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square. It was not lovely — it was in fact rather horrible ; but as I move again through dusky, tortuous miles, in the greasy four- wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to commit myself, I recognize the first step in an initia- tion of which the subsequent stages were to abound in pleasant things. It is a kind of humiliation in a great city not to know where you are going, and Mor- ley's Hotel was then, to my imagination, only a vague 4 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE ruddy spot in the general immensity. The immensity was the great fact, and that was a charm ; the miles of housetops and viaducts, the complication of junc- tions and signals through which the train made its way to the station had already given me the scale. The weather had turned to wet, and we went deeper and deeper into the Sunday night. The sheep in the fields, on the way from Liverpool, had shown in their demeanor a certain consciousness of the day ; but this momentous cab-drive was an introduction to rigidities of custom. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the dark- ness. The custom of gin — that was equally rigid, and in this first impression the public-houses counted for much. Morley's Hotel proved indeed to be a ruddy spot ; brilliant, in my recollection, is the coffee-room fire, the hospitable mahogany, the sense that in the stupendous city this, at any rate for the hour, was a shelter and a point of view. My remembrance of the rest of the evening — I was probably very tired — is mainly a remembrance of a vast four-poster. My little bedroom candle, set in its deep basin, caused this monument to project a huge shadow and to make me think, I scarce knew why, of " The Ingolds- by Legends." If at a tolerably early hour the next day I found myself approaching St. Paul's, it was not wholly in obedience to the old gentleman in the railway-carriage: I had an errand in the City, and LONDON 5 the City was doubtless prodigious. But what I mainly recall is the romantic consciousness of pass- ing under Temple Bar and the way two lines of "Henry Esmond" repeated themselves in my mind as I drew near the masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren. " The stout, red-faced woman " whom Esmond had seen tearing after the stag-hounds over the slopes at Windsor was not a bit like the effigy " which turns its stony back upon St. Paul's and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill." As I looked at Queen Anne over the apron of my hansom — she struck me as very small and dirty, and the vehicle ascended the mild incline without an effort — it was a thrilling thought that the statue had been familiar to the hero of the incomparable novel. All history appeared to live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind. To this hour, as I pass along the Strand, I take again the walk I took there that afternoon. I love the place to-day, and that was the commencement of my passion. It appeared to me to present phe- nomena and to contain objects of every kind, of an inexhaustible interest ; in particular it struck me as desirable and even indispensable that I should pur- chase most of the articles in most of the shops. My eyes rest with a certain tenderness on the places where I resisted and on those where I succumbed. The fragrance of Mr. Rimmel's establishment is again in my nostrils ; I see the slim young lady (I hear her pronunciation) who waited upon me there. Sa- cred to me to-day is the particular aroma of the 6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE hair-wash that I bought of her. I pause before the granite portico of Exeter Hall (it was unexpectedly narrow and wedge-like), and it evokes a cloud of associations which are none the less impressive be- cause they are vague ; coming from I don't know where — from Punch, from Thackeray, from old vol- umes of the Illustrated London News turned over in childhood ; seeming connected with Mrs. Beecher Stowe and " Uncle Tom's Cabin." Memorable is a rush I made into a glover's at Charing Cross — the one you pass going eastward, just before you turn into the station ; that, however, now that I think of it, must have been in the morning, as soon as I issued from the hotel. Keen within me was a sense of the importance of deflowering, of despoiling the shop. A day or two later, in the afternoon, I found myself staring at my fire, in a lodging of which I had taken possession on foreseeing that I should spend some weeks in London. I had just come in, and, having attended to the distribution of my lug- gage, sat down to consider my habitation. It was on the ground floor, and the fading daylight reached it in a sadly damaged condition. It struck me as stuffy and unsocial, with its mouldy smell and its decoration of lithographs and wax-flowers — an im- personal black hole in the huge general blackness. The uproar of Piccadilly hummed away at the end of the street, and the rattle of a heartless hansom passed close to my ears. A sudden horror of the whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of LONDON 7 homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming ; whether or no she was " careful of the type," she was as indifferent as Nature herself to the single life. In the course of an hour I should have to go out to my dinner, which was not supplied on the premises, and that effort assumed the form of a desperate and dangerous quest. It appeared to me that I would rather remain dinnerless, would rather even starve, than sally forth into the infernal town, where the natural fate of an obscure stranger would be to be trampled to death in Piccadilly and his car- cass thrown into the Thames. I did not starve, however, and I eventually attached myself by a hundred human links to the dreadful, delightful city. That momentary vision of its smeared face and stony heart has remained memorable to me, but I am happy to say that I can easily summon up others. II It is, no doubt, not the taste of every one, but for the real London-lover the mere immensity of the place is a large part of its merit. A small London would be an abomination, as it fortunately is an im- possibility, for the idea and the name are beyond everything an expression of extent and number. Practically, of course, one lives in a quarter, in a plot ; but in imagination and by a constant mental act of reference the sympathizing resident inhabits the whole — and it is only of him that I deem it worth while to speak. He fancies himself, as they say, for 8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE being a particle in so unequalled an aggregation ; and its immeasurable circumference, even though un- visited and lost in smoke, gives him the sense of a social, an intellectual margin. There is a luxury in the knowledge that he may come and gO without being noticed, even when his comings and goings have no nefarious end. I don't mean by this that the tongue of London is not a very active member ; the tongue of London would indeed be worthy of a chapter by itself. But the eyes which at least in some measure feed its activity are fortunately for the common advantage solicited at any moment by a thouasnd different objects. If the place is big, every- thing it contains "is certainly not so ; but this may at least be said, that if small questions play a part there, they play it without illusions about its impor- tance. There are too many questions, small or great; and each day, as it arrives, leads its children, like a kind of mendicant mother, by the hand. Therefore perhaps the most general characteristic is the ab- sence of insistence. Habits and inclinations flourish and fall, but intensity is never one of them. The spirit of the great city is not analytic, and, as they come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treat- ment offensively earnest or indiscreetly thorough. There are not many — of those of which London dis- poses with the assurance begotten of its large ex- perience — that wouldn't lend themselves to a ten- derer manipulation elsewhere. It takes a very great affair, a turn of the Irish screw or a divorce case lasting many days, to be fully threshed out. The LONDON 9 mind of Mayfair, when it aspires to show what it really can do, lives in the hope of a new divorce case, and an indulgent providence — London is positively in certain ways the spoiled child of the world — abun- dantly recognizes this particular aptitude and hu- mors the whim. The compensation is that material does arise ; that there is great variety, if not morbid subtlety ; and that the whohs of the procession of events and topics passes across your stage. For the moment I am speaking of the inspiration there may be in the sense of far frontiers ; the London-lover loses himself in this swelling consciousness, delights in the idea that the town which encloses him is after all only a paved country, a state by itself. This is his condition of mind quite as much if he be an adoptive as if he be a matter-of-course son. I am by no means sure even that he need be of Anglo-Saxon race and have inherited the birthright of English speech ; though, on the other hand, I make no doubt that these ad- vantages minister greatly to closeness of allegiance. The great city spreads her dusky mantle over in- numerable races and creeds, and I believe there is scarcely a known form of worship that has not some temple there (have I not attended at the Church of Humanity, in Lamb's Conduit, in company with an American lady, a vague old gentleman, and several seamstresses ?), or any communion of men that has not some club or guild. London is indeed an epit- ome of the round world, and just as it is a common- place to say that there is nothing one can't "get" IO ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE there, so it is equally true that there is nothing one can't study at first hand. One doesn't test these truths every day, but they form part of the air one breathes (and welcome, says the London-hater — for there is such a benighted ani- mal — to the pestilent compound). They color the thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the world ; they min- gle with the troubled light to which the straight, un- garnished aperture in one's dull, undistinctive house- front affords a passage and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent me- dium of the sky, where the smoke and the fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the day and season of the year, the emanations of industries and the reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset — as you never see any source of radiance you can't in the least tell — all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy. They form the undertone of the deep, perpetual voice of the place. One remembers them when one's loy- alty is on the defensive; when it is a question of in- troducing as many striking features as possible into the list of fine reasons one has sometimes to draw up, that eloquent catalogue with which one confronts the hostile indictment — the array of other reasons which may easily be as long as one's arm. According to these other reasons, it plausibly and conclusively stands that, as a place to be happy in, London will LONDON 1 1 never do. I don't say it is necessary to meet so ab- surd an allegation except for one's personal compla- cency. If indifference, in so gorged an organism, is still livelier than curiosity, you may avail yourself of your own share in it simply to feel that since such and such a person doesn't care for real greatness, so much the worse for such and such a person- But once in a while the best believer recognizes the im- pulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the temple of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp. It is at such hours as this that he reflects with elation that the British capital is the particular spot in the world which communicates the greatest sense of life. Ill The reader will perceive that I do not shrink even from the extreme concession of speaking of our capi- tal as British, and this in a shameless connection with the question of loyalty on the part of an adoptive son. For I hasten to explain that if half the source of one's interest in it comes from feeling that it is the property and even the home of the human race — Hawthorne, that best of Americans, says so some- where, and places it in this sense side by side with Rome — one's appreciation of it is really a large sym- pathy, a comprehensive love of humanity. For the sake of such a charity as this one may stretch one's allegiance ; and the most alien of the cockneyfied, though he may bristle with every protest at the inti- mation that England has set its stamp upon him, is free to admit with conscious pride that he has sub- 12 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE mitted to Londonization. It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capital of the human race happens to be British. Surely every other peo- ple would have it theirs if they could. Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an in- teresting field of inquiry ; but as they have not yet let it slip, the writer of these lines professes without scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. For, after all, if the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of people of our incompara- ble English speech. It is the headquarters of that strangely elastic tongue ; and I make this remark with a full sense of the terrible way in which the idi- om is misused by the populace in general, than whom it has been given to few races to impart to conversa- tion less of the charm of tone. For a man of letters who endeavors to cultivate, however modestly, the medium of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne and Emerson, who cherishes the notion of what it has achieved and what it may even yet achieve, Lon- don must ever have a great illustrative and suggest- ive value, and indeed a kind of sanctity. It is the single place in which most readers, most possible lovers, are gathered together ; it is the most inclusive public and the largest social incarnation of the lan- guage, of the tradition. Such a personage may well let it go for this, and leave the German and the Greek to speak for themselves, to express the grounds of their predilection, presumably very different. When a social product is so vast and various it may be approached on a thousand different sides, LONDON 13 and liked and disliked for a thousand different rea- sons. The reasons of Piccadilly are not those of Camden Town, nor are the curiosities and discour- agements of Kilburn the same as those of Westmin- ster and Lambeth. The reasons of Piccadilly — I mean the friendly ones — are those of which, as a general thing, the rooted visitor remains most con- scious ; but it must be confessed that even these, for the most part, do not lie upon the surface. The ab- sence of style, or rather of the intention of style, is certainly the most general characteristic of the face of London. To cross to Paris under this impression is to find one's self surrounded with far other stand- ards. There everything reminds you that the idea of beautiful and stately arrangement has never been out of fashion, that the art of composition has always been at work or at play. Avenues and squares, gar- dens and quays, have been distributed for effect, and to-day the splendid city reaps the accumulation of all this ingenuity. The result is not in every quarter interesting, and there is a tiresome monotony of the " fine " and the symmetrical, above all, of the deathly passion for making things " to match." On the other hand, the whole air of the place is architectural. On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents — the London-lover has to confess to the existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgi- est commonness. Thousands of acres are covered by low black houses of the cheapest construction, without ornament, without grace, without character, or even identity. In fact, there are many, even in 14 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE the best quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient, and above all of so diminutive a type (those that are let in lodg- ings — such poor lodgings as they make — may serve as an example), that you wonder what peculiarly lim- ited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The great misfortune of London, to the eye (it is true that this remark applies much less to the City), is the want of elevation. There is no architectural impres- sion without a certain degree of height, and the Lon- don street-vista has none of that sort of pride. All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the general great- ness, and the manner in which that makes a differ- ence for the better in any particular spot ; so that, though you may often perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner, it never occurs to you that this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent mystifications, which flatters and super- fuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, mag- nifies distances and minimizes details, confirms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes everything, it makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which constitute an orna- ment not elsewhere to be matched, and give the place a superiority that none of its uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such a luxury of space in the centre of the town that they form a part of the LONDON 15 impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming to them — I have seen them look delightfully romantic, like parks in novels, in the wettest winter: — and there is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are, after all, not in Kent or Yorkshire ; and these things, whatever they be — rows of " eligible " dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions — take such an effective gray-blue tint that a clever water-colorist would seem to have put them in for pictorial reasons. The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the Londoner twitted with his low stand- ard may point to it with every confidence. In all the town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so fine ; the only reproach it is open to is that it begs the question by seeming— in spite of its being the pride of five millions of people — not to belong to a town at all. The towers of Notre Dame, as they rise, in Paris, from the island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. Equally admirable is the large, river-like manner in which the Serpentine opens away between its wood- 1 6 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE ed shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge (whose very banisters, old and ornamental, of yellow- ish-brown stone, I am particularly fond of), you enjoy on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens as you go towards Bayswater, an altogether enchant- ing vista — a foot-path over the grass, which loses it- self beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if the place were a " chase." There could be nothing less like London in general than this particular mor- sel, and yet it takes London, of all cities, to give you such an impression of the country. IV It takes London to put you in the way of a purely rustic walk from Notting Hill to Whitehall. You may traverse this immense distance — a most compre- hensive diagonal — altogether on soft, fine turf, amid the song of birds, the bleat of lambs, the ripple of ponds, the rustle of admirable trees. Frequently have I wished that, for the sake of such a daily lux- ury and of exercise made romantic, I were a govern- ment-clerk living, in snug domestic conditions, in a Pembridge villa — let me suppose — and having my matutinal desk in Westminster. I should turn into Kensington Gardens at their northwest limit, and I should have, my choice of a hundred pleasant paths to the gates of Hyde Park. In Hyde Park I should follow the water-side, or the Row, or any other fancy of the occasion ; liking best, perhaps, after all, the Row in its morning mood, with the mist hanging over the dark-red course, and the scattered early riders LONDON 17 taking an identity as the soundless gallop brings them nearer. I am free to admit that in the Season, at the conventional hours, the Row becomes a weariness (save perhaps just for a glimpse, once a year, to re- mind one's self how much it is like Du Maurier) ; the preoccupied citizen eschews it, and leaves it for the most part to the gaping barbarian. I speak of it now from the point of view of the pedestrian ; but for the rider as well it is at its best when he passes either too early or too late. Then, if he be not bent on compar- ing it to its disadvantage with the bluer and boskier alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, it will not be spoiled by the fact that, with its surface that looks like tan, its barriers like those of the ring on which the clown stands to hold up the hoop to the young lady, its empty benches and chairs, its occasional orange-peel, its mounted policemen patrolling at intervals like ex- pectant supernumeraries, it offers points of real con- tact with a circus whose lamps are out. The sky that bends over it is frequently not a bad imitation of the dingy tent of such an establishment. The ghosts of past cavalcades seem to haunt the foggy arena, and somehow they are better company than the mashers and elongated beauties of current seasons. It is not without interest to remember that most of the salient figures of English society during the present century — and English society means, or rather has hith- erto meant, in a large degree, English history — have bobbed in the saddle between Apsley House and Queen's Gate. You may call the roll if you care to, and the air will be thick with dumb voices and dead names, like that of some Roman amphitheatre. 2 / 1 8 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE It is doubtless a signal proof of being a London- fd lover quand mime that one should undertake an apol- * /e ogy for so bungled an attempt at a great public place g- as Hyde Park Corner. It is certain that the improve- /e ments and embellishments recently enacted there have n " only served to call further attention to the poverty of i - the elements and to the fact that this poverty is ter- e ribly illustrative of general conditions. The place is the beating heart of the great West End, yet its main features are a shabby, stuccoed hospital, the low park- r gates in their neat but unimposing frame, the draw- ing-room windows of Apsley House and of the com- P monplace frontages on the little terrace beside it ; to |t which must be added, of course, the only item in the e whole prospect that is in the least monumental — the r arch spanning the private road beside the gardens of r Buckingham Palace. This structure is now bereaved [> of the rueful effigy which used to surmount it — the j 1 Iron Duke in the e;uise of a tin soldier — and has not ls been enriched by the transaction as much as mightts have been expected.* There is a fine view of Picca-P"" j dilly and Knightsbridge, and of the noble mansions, y as the house-agents call them, of Grosvenor Place, f together with a sense of generous space beyond the [ vulgar little railing of the Green Park ; but, except for the impression that there would be room for some- thing better, there is nothing in all this that speaks to the imagination : almost as much as the grimy desert j * The monument in the middle of the square, with Sir Edgar j Boehm's four fine soldiers, had not been set up when these words were written. LONDON 19 of Trafalgar Square the prospect conveys the idea of an opportunity wasted. All the same, on a fine day in spring it has an ex- pressiveness of which I shall not pretend to explain the source further than by saying that the flood of life and luxury is immeasurably great there. The edifices , are mean, but the social stream itself is monumental, i and to an observer not positively stolid there is more \ excitement and suggestion than I can give a reason \ for in the long, distributed waves of traffic, with the 1 steady policemen marking their rhythm, which roll to- gether and apart for so many hours. Then the great, 'dim city becomes bright and kind, the pall of smoke iturns into a veil of haze carelessly worn, the air is colored and almost scented by the presence of the •biggest society in the world, and most of the things ithat mest the eye — or perhaps I should say more of them, for the most in London is, no doubt, ever the .^■ealm of the dingy — present themselves as "well ap- pointed." Everything shines more or less, from the window-panes to the dog-collars. So it all looks, with its myriad variations and qualifications, to one who purveys it over the apron of a hansom, while that ve- hicle of vantage, better than any box at the opera, ^spurts and slackens with the current, jj It is not in a hansom, however, that we have figured jour punctual young man, whom we must not desert as pe fares to the southeast, and who has only to Cross Hyde Park Corner to find his way all grassy again, jl have a weakness for the convenient, familiar, tree- (less, or almost treeless, expanse of the Green Park 20 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE and the friendly part it plays as a kind of encourage- 5 ment to Piccadilly. I am so fond of Piccadilly that Ijj am grateful to any one or anything that does it a ser-j ', vice, and nothing is more worthy of appreciation than the southward look it is permitted to enjoy just after it passes Devonshire House — a sweep of horizon which it would be difficult to match among other haunts of men, and thanks to which, of a summer's j day, you may spy, beyond the browsed pastures of/ the foreground and middle distance, beyond the cold \j chimneys of Buckingham Palace and the towers of^ Westminster and the swarming river-side and all the/ j southern parishes, the hard modern twinkle of thej,' roof of the Crystal Palace. If the Green Park is familiar, there is still less o the exclusive in its pendant, as one may call it — for it literally hangs from the other, down the hill — the rem- nant of the former garden of the queer, shabby old pal ace whose black, inelegant face stares up St. James's Street. This popular resort has a great deal of char acter, but I am free to confess that much of its char- acter comes from its nearness to the Westminste < slums. It is a park of intimacy, and perhaps th( , most democratic corner of London, in spite of its be- ing in the royal and military quarter and close to al: kinds of stateliness. There are few hours of the day when a thousand smutty children are not sprawling over it, and the unemployed lie thick on the grass and l cover the benches with a brotherhood of greasy cor- ' duroys. If the London parks are the drawing-rooms j and clubs of the poor — that is, of those poor (I admit I LONDON 21 it cuts down the number) who live near enough to them to reach them — these particular grass-plots and alleys may be said to constitute the very salon of the slums. I know not why, being such a region of greatness — great towers, great names, great memories ; at the | foot of the Abbey, the Parliament, the fine fragment J of Whitehall, with the quarters of the Guards of the ' sovereign right and left — but the edge of Westminster Revokes as many associations of misery as of empire. ,The neighborhood has been much purified of late, but it still contains a collection of specimens — though it is far from unique in this — of the low, black ele- rnent. The air always seems to me heavy and thick, rand here more than elsewhere One hears old England "• — the panting, smoke-stained Titan of Matthew Ar- nold's fine poem^draw her deep breath with effort, t^n fact one is nearer to her heroic lungs, if those organs are figured by the great pinnacled and fretted talking- jtiouse on the edge of the river. But this same dense pnd conscious air plays such everlasting tricks to the ieye that the Foreign Office, as you see it from the {bridge, often looks romantic, and the sheet of water it .overhangs poetic — suggests an Indiah palace bathing fits feet in the Ganges. If our pedestrian achieves such a comparison as this he has nothing left but to [go on to his work — which he will find close at hand. jHe will have come the whole way from the far north- jwest on the green — which is what was to be demon- strated. 22 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE V I feel as if I were taking a tone almost of boastful- ness, and no doubt the best way to consider the mat- ter is simply to say — without going into the treachery! of reasons — that, for one's self, one likes this part or: the other. Yet this course would not be unattended with danger, inasmuch as at the end of a few such professions we might find ourselves committed to a tolerance of much that is deplorable. London is so clumsy and so brutal, and has gathered together so * many of the darkest sides of life, that it is almost ri-j diculous to talk of her as a lover talks of his mistress,! and almost frivolous to appear to ignore her disfigure-j ments and cruelties. She is like a mighty ogress who* devours human flesh ; but to me it is a mitigating cir- cumstance — though it may not seem so to every one — that the ogress herself is human. It is not in wan- tonness that she fills her maw, but to keep herselt alive and do her tremendous work. She has no timd for fine discriminations, but after all she is as good- natured as she is huge, and the more you stand up to' her, as the phrase is, the better she takes the joke of it. It is mainly when you fall on your face before her that she gobbles you up. She heeds little what she i takes, so long as she has her stint, and the smallest \ push to the right or the left will divert her wavering bulk from one form of prey to another. It is not to j be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her company ; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, and to live with her successfully is an education of the LONDON 23 temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy. She gives one a surface for which in a rough world one can never be too thankful. She may take away reputations, but she forms character. She teaches her victims not to "mind," and the great danger for them is perhaps that they shall learn the lesson too well. It is sometimes a wonder to ascertain what they do mind, the best -seasoned of her children. Many of them assist, without winking, at the most unfathom- able dramas, and the common speech of others de- notes a familiarity with the horrible. It is her theory that she both produces and appreciates the exquisite; but if you catch her in flagrant repudiation of both responsibilities and confront her with the shortcom- ing, she gives you a look, with a shrug of her colossal ^houlders, which establishes a private relation with .you for evermore. She seems to say : " Do you really :ake me so seriously as that, you dear, devoted, vol- untary dupe, and don't you know what an immeasura- ble humbug I am?" You reply that you shall know • t henceforth ; but your tone is good-natured, with a ,iOuch of the cynicism that she herself has taught you ; /or you are aware that if she makes herself out better "han she is, she also makes herself out much worse. ,She is immensely democratic, and that, no doubt, is part of the manner in which she is salutary to the in- dividual , she teaches him his " place " by an incom- parable discipline, but deprives him of complaint by letting him see that she has exactly the same lash for every other back. When he has swallowed the lesson 24 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE he may enjoy the rude but unfailing justice by which, | under her eye, reputations and positions elsewhere esteemed great are reduced to the relative. There are so many reputations, so many positions, that su- j pereminence breaks down, and it is difficult to be so ) rare that London can't match you. It is a part of her j good-nature and one of her clumsy coquetries to pre- j tend sometimes that she hasn't your equivalent, as when j she takes it into her head to hunt the lion or form a ] ring round a celebrity. But this artifice is so trans- J parent that the lion must be very candid or the celeb- . rity very obscure to be taken by it. The business is / altogether subjective, as the philosophers say, and the / great city is primarily looking after herself. Celeb- ! rities are convenient — they are one of the things that; people can be asked to "meet" — and lion -cutlets, put upon the ice, will nourish a family through pe- riods of dearth. This is what I mean by calling London democratic. You may be in it, of course, without being of it ; but from the moment you are of it — and on this point your own sense will soon enough enlighten you — you belong to a body in which a general equality prevails. However exalted, however able, however rich, however renowned you may be, there are too many people at least as much so for your own idiosyncrasies to count. I think it is only by being beautiful that you may really prevail very much ; for the loveliness of woman it has long been noticeable that London will go most out of her way. It is when she hunts that particular lion that she becomes most dangerous ; then there LONDON 25 are really moments when you would believe, for all the world, that she is thinking of what she can give, not of what she can get. Lovely ladies, before this, have paid for believing it, and will continue to pay in days to come. On the whole the people who are least deceived are perhaps those who have permitted them- selves to believe, in their own interest, that poverty is not a disgrace. It is certainly not considered so in London, and indeed you can scarcely say where — in virtue of diffusion — it would more naturally be ex- empt. The possession of money is, of course, im- mensely an advantage, but that is a very different thing from a disqualification in the lack of it. Good-natured in so many things in spite of her cyn- ical tongue, and easy-going in spite of her tremendous pace, there is nothing in which the large indulgence of the town is more shown than in the liberal way she looks at obligations of hospitality and the margin she allows in these and cognate matters. She wants above all to be amused ; she keeps her books loosely, doesn't stand on small questions of a chop for a chop, and if there be any chance of people's proving a diversion, doesn't know or remember or care whether they have " called." She forgets even if she herself have called. In matters of ceremony she takes and gives a long rope, wasting no time in phrases and circumvallations. It is no doubt incontestable that one result of her in- ability to stand upon trifles and consider details is that she has been obliged in some ways to lower rather portentously the standard of her manners. She cul- tivates the abrupt — for even when she asks you to 26 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE dine a month ahead the invitation goes off like the crack of a pistol — and approaches her ends not ex- actly par quatre chemins. She doesn't pretend to attach importance to the lesson conveyed in Mat- thew Arnold's poem of "The Sick King in Bokhara," that, "Though we snatch what we desire, We may not snatch it eagerly." London snatches it more than eagerly if that be the only way she can get it. Good manners are a suc- cession of details, and I don't mean to say that she doesn't attend to them when she has time. She has it, however, but seldom — que voulez-vous ? Perhaps the matter of note-writing is as good an example as an- other of what certain of the elder traditions inevitably have become in her hands. She lives by notes — they are her very heart-beats ; but those that bear her sig- nature are as disjointed as the ravings of delirium, and have nothing but a postage-stamp in common with the epistolary art. VI If she doesn't go into particulars it may seem a very presumptuous act to have attempted to do so on her behalf, and the reader will doubtless think I have been punished by having egregiously failed in my enumeration. Indeed nothing could well be more difficult than to add up the items — the column would be altogether too long. One may have dreamed of turning the glow — if glow it be — of one's lantern on LONDON 27 each successive facet of the jewel ; but, after all, it may be success enough if a confusion of brightness be the result. One has not the alternative of speak- ing of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is im- measurable — embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak ? Inevitably there must be a choice, and I know of none more scientific than simply to leave out what we may have to apologize for. The uglinesses, the "rookeries," the brutalities, the night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when they are cleared out before closing — there are many elements of this kind which have to be counted out before a genial summary can be made. And yet I should not go so far as to say that it is a condition of such geniality to close one's eyes upon the immense misery ; on the contrary, I think it is partly because we are irremediably conscious of that dark gulf that the most general appeal of the great city remains exactly what it is, the largest chapter of human accidents. I have no idea of what the future evolution of the strangely mingled monster may be ; whether the poor will improve away the rich, or the rich will expropriate the poor, or they will all continue to dwell together on their present imperfect terms of intercourse. Certain it is, at any rate, that the im- pression of suffering is a part of the general vibra- tion ; it is one of the things that mingle with all the others to make the sound that is supremely dear to the consistent London-lover — the rumble of the 28 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE tremendous human mill. This is the note which, in all its modulations, haunts and fascinates and in- spires him. And whether or no he may succeed in keeping the misery out of the picture, he will freely confess that the latter is not spoiled for him by some of its duskiest shades. We are far from liking Lon- don well enough till we like its defects : the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chim- ney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December after- noons. There is still something that recalls to me the en- chantments of children — the anticipation of Christ- mas, the delight of a holiday walk — in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the oth- er. There are winter effects, not intrinsically sweet, it would appear, which somehow, in absence, touch the chords of memory and even the fount of tears ; as, for instance, the front of the British Museum on a black afternoon, or the portico, when the weather is vile, of one of the big square clubs in Pall Mall. I can give no adequate account of the subtle poetry of such reminiscences ; it depends upon associations of which we have often lost the thread. The wide colonnade of the Museum, its symmetrical wings, the high iron fence in its granite setting, the sense of the misty halls within, where all the treasures lie — these LONDON 29 things loom patiently through atmospheric layers which instead of making them dreary impart to them something of a cheer of red lights in a storm. I think the romance of a winter afternoon in London arises partly from the fact that, when it is not alto- gether smothered, the general lamplight takes this hue of hospitality. Such is the color of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which I positively like best when the fog loiters upon their monumental stair- cases. In saying just now that these retreats may easily be, for the exile, part of the phantasmagoria of home- sickness, I by no means alluded simply to their solemn outsides. If they are still more solemn within, that does not make them any less dear in retrospect, at least, to a visitor who is bent upon liking his London to the end. What is the solemnity but a tribute to your nerves, and the stillness but a refined proof of intensity of life? To produce such results as these the balance of many tastes must be struck, and that is only possible in a very high civilization. If I seem to intimate that this last abstract term must be the cheer of him who has lonely possession of a foggy library, without even the excitement of watching for some one to put down the magazine he wants, I am willing to let the supposition pass, for the apprecia- tion of a London club at one of the empty seasons is nothing but the strong expression of a preference for the great city — by no means so unsociable as it may superficially appear — at periods of relative abandon- ment. The London year is studded with holidays, 30 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE blessed little islands of comparative leisure — intervals of absence for good society. Then the wonderful English faculty for "going out of town for a little change " comes into illimitable play, and families transport their nurseries and their bath-tubs to those rural scenes which form the real substratum of the national life. Such moments as these are the para- dise of the genuine London-lover, for then he finds himself face to face with the object of his passion ; he can give himself up to an intercourse which at other times is obstructed by his rivals. Then every one he knows is out of town, and the exhilarating sense of the presence of every one he doesn't know becomes by so much the deeper. This is why I pronounce his satisfaction not an un- sociable, but a positively affectionate emotion. It is the mood in which he most measures the immense humanity of the place, and in which its limits recede furthest into a dimness peopled with possible illustra- tions. For his acquaintance, however numerous it may be, is finite ; whereas the other, the unvisited London, is infinite. It is one of his pleasures to think of the experiments and excursions he may make in it, even when these adventures don't particularly come off. The friendly fog seems to protect and en- rich them — to add both to the mystery and security, so that it is most in the winter months that the imag- ination weaves such delights. They reach their cli- max, perhaps, during the strictly social desolation of Christmas week, when the country-houses are filled at the expense of the metropolis. Then it is that I am LONDON 31 most haunted with the London of Dickens, feel most as if it were still recoverable, still exhaling its queer- ness in patches perceptible to the appreciative. Then the big fires blaze in the lone twilight of the clubs, and the new books on the tables say, " Now at last you have time to read me," and the afternoon tea and toast, and the torpid old gentleman who wakes up from a doze to order potash-water, appear to make the assurance good. It is not a small matter either, to a man of letters, that this is the best time for writing, and that during the lamplit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. Those to whom it is forbidden to sit up to work in the small hours may, between November and March, enjoy a semblance of this luxury in the morning. The weath- er makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image. VII Of course it is too much to say that all the satis- faction of life in London comes from literally living there, for it is not a paradox that a great deal of it con- sists in getting away. It is almost easier to leave it than not to, and much of its richness and interest proceeds from its ramifications, the fact that all Eng- land is in a suburban relation to it. Such an affair it is in comparison to get away from Paris or to get into it. London melts by wide, ugly zones into the 32 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE green country, and becomes pretty insidiously, inad- vertently — without stopping to change. It is the spoiling, perhaps, of the country, but it is the making of the insatiable town, and if one is a helpless and shameless cockney that is all one is obliged to look at. Anything is excusable which enlarges one's civic consciousness. It ministers immensely to that of the London-lover that, thanks to the tremendous sys- tem of coming and going, to the active, hospitable habits of the people, to the elaboration of the railway- service, the frequency and rapidity of trains, and last, though not least, to the fact that much of the loveli- est scenery in England lies within a radius of fifty miles — thanks to all this he has the rural picturesque at his door and may cultivate unlimited vagueness as to the line of division between centre and circumfer- ence. It is perfectly open to him to consider the re- mainder of the United Kingdom, or the British em- pire in general, or even, if he be an American, the total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, as the mere margin, the fitted girdle. Is it for this reason — because I like to think how great we all are together in the light of heaven and the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of our glorious tongue, in which we labor to write arti- cles and books for each other's candid perusal, how great we all are and how great is the great city which we may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of our race — is it for this that I have a singular kind- ness for the London railway-stations, that I like them aesthetically, that they interest and fascinate me, and LONDON 33 that I view them with complacency even when I wish neither to depart nor to arrive ? They remind me of all our reciprocities and activities, our energies and curiosities, and our being all distinguished together from other people by our great common stamp of per- petual motion, our passion for seas and deserts and the other side of the globe, the secret of the impres- sion of strength — I don't say of social roundness and finish — that we produce in any collection of Anglo- Saxon types. If in the beloved foggy season I de- light in the spectacle of Paddington, Euston, or Wa- terloo — I confess I prefer the grave northern stations — I am prepared to defend myself against the charge of puerility ; for what I seek and what I find in these vulgar scenes is at bottom simply so much evidence of our larger way of looking at life. The exhibition of variety of type is in general one of the bribes by which London induces you to condone her abomina- tions, and the railway-platform is a kind of compen- dium of that variety. I think that nowhere so much as in London do people wear — to the eye of observa- tion — definite signs of the sort of people they may be. If you like above all things to know the sort, you hail this fact with joy ; you recognize that if the English are immensely distinct from other people, they are also socially — and that brings with it, in England, a train of moral and intellectual consequences — ex- tremely distinct from each other. You may see them all together, with the rich coloring of their differences, in the fine flare of one of Mr. W. H. Smith's bookstalls — a feature not to be* omitted in any enumeration of 3 34 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE the charms of Paddington and Euston. It is a focus of warmth and light in the vast smoky cavern-, it gives the idea that literature is a thing of splendor, of a dazzling essence, of infinite gas-lit red and gold. A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tan- talizing air of clever new things. How brilliant must the books all be, how veracious and courteous the fresh, pure journals ! Of a Saturday afternoon, as you wait in your corner of the compartment for the starting of the train, the window makes a frame for the glowing picture. I say of a Saturday afternoon, because that is the most characteristic time — it speaks most of the constant circulation and in particular of the quick jump, by express, just before dinner, for the Sunday, into the hall of the country-house and the forms of closer friendliness, the prolonged talks, the familiarizing walks which London excludes. There is the emptiness of summer as well, when you may have the town to yourself, and I would dis- course of it — counting the summer from the first of August — were it not that I fear to seem ungracious in insisting so much on the negative phases. In truth they become positive in another manner, and I have an endearing recollection of certain happy ac- cidents attached to the only period when London life may be said to admit of accident. It is the most lux- urious existence in the world, but of that especial luxury — the unexpected, the extemporized — it has ir'i general too little. In a very tight crowd you can't scratch your leg, and in London the social pressure is so great that it is difficult to deflect from the pei-"-- LONDON 35 pendicular or to move otherwise than with the mass. There is too little of the loose change of time ; every half-hour has its preappointed use, written down month by month in a little book. As I intimated, however, the pages of this volume exhibit from Au- gust to November an attractive blankness ; they rep- resent the season during which you may taste of that highest kind of inspiration, the inspiration of the mo- ment. This is doubtless what a gentleman had in mind who once said to me, in regard to the vast resources of London and its having something for every taste, " Oh, yes ; when you are bored or want a little change you can take the boat down to Blackwall." I have never had occasion yet to resort to this par- ticular remedy. Perhaps it's a proof that I have never been bored. Why Blackwall ? I indeed asked myself at the time ; nor have I yet ascertained what distractions the mysterious name represents. My interlocutor probably used it generically, as a free, comprehensive allusion to the charms of the river at large. Here the London-lover goes with him all the way, and indeed the Thames is altogether such a wonderful affair that he feels he has distributed his picture very clumsily not to have put it in the very forefront. Take it up or take it down, it is equally an adjunct of London life, an expression of London manners. From Westminster to the sea its uses are commer- cial, but none the less pictorial for that ; while in the other direction — taking it properly a little further up 36 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE — they are personal, social, athletic, idyllic. In its recreative character it is absolutely unique. I know of no other classic stream that is so splashed about for the mere fun of it. There is something almost droll and at the same time almost touching in the way that on the smallest pretext of holiday or fine weather the mighty population takes to the boats. They bump each other in the narrow, charming chan- nel ; between Oxford and Richmond they make an uninterrupted procession. Nothing is more sugges- tive of the personal energy of the people and their eagerness to take, in the way of exercise and advent- ure, whatever they can get. I hasten to add that what they get on the Thames is exquisite, in spite of the smallness of the scale and the contrast between the numbers and the space. In a word, if the river is the busiest suburb of London, it is also by far the prettiest. That term applies to it less of course from the bridges down, but it is only because in this part of its career it deserves a larger praise. To be con- sistent, I like it best when it is all dyed and disfigured with the town and you look from bridge to bridge — they seem wonderfully big and dim — over the brown, greasy current, the barges and the penny-steamers, the black, sordid, heterogeneous shores. This pros- pect, of which so many of the elements are ignoble, etches itself to the eye of the lover of " bits " with a power that is worthy perhaps of a better cause. The way that with her magnificent opportunity London has neglected to achieve a river-front is, of course, the best possible proof that she has rarely, in LONDON 37 the past, been in the architectural mood which at present shows somewhat inexpensive signs of settling upon her. Here and there a fine fragment apologizes for the failure which it doesn't remedy. Somerset House stands up higher perhaps than anything else on its granite pedestal, and the palace of Westminster reclines — it can hardly be said to stand — on the big parliamentary bench of its terrace. The Embank- ment, which is admirable if not particularly interesting, does what it can, and the mannered houses of Chelsea stare across at Battersea Park like eighteenth-century ladies surveying a horrid wilderness. On the other hand, the Charing Cross railway-station, placed where it is, is a national crime ; Milbank prison is a worse act of violence than any it was erected to punish, and the water-side generally a shameless renunciation of effect. We acknowledge, however, that its very cynicism is expressive ; so that if one were to choose again — short of there being a London Louvre — be- tween the usual English irresponsibility in such mat- ters and some particular flight of conscience, one would perhaps do as well to let the case stand. We know what it is, the stretch from Chelsea to Wap- ping, but we know not what it might be. It doesn't prevent my being always more or less thrilled, of a summer afternoon, by the journey on a penny-steam- er to Greenwich. VIII But why do I talk of Greenwich and remind myself of one of the unexecuted vignettes with which it had been my plan that these desultory and, I fear, some- 38 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE what incoherent remarks should be studded? They will present to the reader no vignettes but those I which the artist who has kindly consented to associ- c ate himself with my vagaries may be so good as to bestow upon them. Why should I speak of Hamp- stead, as the question of summer afternoons just \ threatened to lead me to do after I should have ex- hausted the subject of Greenwich, which I may not even touch ? Why should I be so arbitrary when I have cheated myself out of the space privately in- tended for a series of vivid and ingenious sketches of ' the particular physiognomy of the respective quarters ' of the town? I had dreamed of doing them all, with, their idiosyncrasies and the signs by which you shall know them. It is my pleasure to have learned these signs — a deeply interesting branch of observation— - but I must renounce the display of my lore. I haven't the conscience to talk about Hampstead, and what a pleasant thing it is to ascend the lonjj hill which overhangs, as it were, St. John's Wood and begins at the Swiss Cottage — you must mount from there, it must be confessed, as you can — and pick up a friend at a house of friendship on the top, and stroll with him on the rusty Heath, and skirt the gar- den-walls of the old square Georgian houses which survive from the time when, near as it is to-day to London, the place was a kind of provincial centre, with Joanna Baillie for its muse, and take the way by the Three Spaniards — I would never miss that — and look down at the smoky city or across at the Scotch firs and the red sunset. It would never do to make LONDON 39 a tangent in that direction when I have left Kensing- ton unsung and Bloomsbury unattempted, and have said never a word about the mighty eastward region — the queer corners, the dark secrets, the rich sur- vivals and mementoes of the City. I particularly re- gret having sacrificed Kensington, the once-delight- ful, the Thackerayan, with its literary vestiges, its quiet, pompous red palace, its square of Queen Anne, its house of Lady Castlewood, its Greyhound tavern, where Henry Esmond lodged. But I can reconcile myself to this when I reflect that I have also sacrificed the Season, which doubt- less, from an elegant point of view, ought to have been the central morceau in the panorama. I have noted that the London-lover loves everything in the place, but I have not cut myself off from saying that his sympathy has degrees, or from remarking that the sentiment of the author of these pages has never gone all the way with the dense movement of the British carnival. That is really the word for the pe- riod from Easter to midsummer ; it is a fine, decorous, expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks are not of velvet or silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh and blood, the material of the most beautiful com- plexions in the world. Holding that the great inter- est of London is the sense the place gives us of mul- titudinous life, it is doubtless an inconsequence not to care most for the phase of greatest intensity. But there is life and life, and the rush and crush of these weeks of fashion is after all but a tolerably mechan- ical expression of human forces. No one would deny 40 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE that it is a more universal, brilliant, spectacular on , than can be seen anywhere else , and it is not a den -- feet that these forces often take the form of wome n extremely beautiful. I risk the declaration that th . e London season brings together year by year an ui 1- equalled collection of handsome persons. I say notl ii- ing of the ugly ones; beauty has at the best beeih allotted to a small minority, and it is never, at thel: most, anywhere, but a question of the number by' which that minority is least insignificant. There are moments when one can almost forgive i the follies of June for the sake of the smile which tire sceptical old city puts on for the time, and which, as. I noted in an earlier passage of this disquisition, fair. y breaks into laughter where she is tickled by the vor- tex of Hyde Park Corner. Most perhaps does she seem to smile at the end of the summer days, when the light lingers and lingers, though the shadovs lengthen and the mists redden and the belated riders, with dinners to dress for, hurry away from the tram- pled arena of the Park. The population at that hour surges mainly westward and sees the dust of the day's long racket turned into a dull golden haze. There is something that has doubtless often, at this particular moment, touched the fancy even of the bored and the biases in such an emanation of hospitality, of waiting dinners, of the festal idea and the whole spectacle of the West End preparing herself for an evening six parties deep. The scale on which she entertains is stupendous, and her invitations and " reminders " are as thick as the leaves of the forest. LONDON 41 For half an hour, from eight to nine, every pair of wheels presents the portrait of a diner-out. To con- sider only the rattling hansoms, the white neckties and " dressed " heads which greet you from over the apron in a quick, interminable succession, conveys the overwhelming impression of a complicated world. Who are they all, and where are they all going, and whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens and gaping portals and marshalled flunkies are pre- pared to receive them, from the southernmost limits of a loosely-interpreted, an almost transpontine Bel- gravia, to the hyperborean confines of St. John's Wood ? There are broughams standing at every door and carpets laid down for the footfall of the issuing if not the entering reveller. The pavements are empty now, in the fading light, in the big sallow squares and the stuccoed streets of gentility, save for the groups of small children holding others that are smaller — Ameliar-Ann intrusted with Sarah Jane — who collect, wherever the strip of carpet lies, to see the fine ladies pass from the carriage or the house. The West End is dotted with these pathetic little gazing groups ; it is the party of the poor — their Sea- son and way of dining out, and a happy illustration of " the sympathy that prevails between classes." The watchers, I should add, are by no means all children, but the lean mature also, and I am sure these wayside joys are one of the reasons of an inconvenience much deplored — the tendency of the country poor to flock to London. Those who dine only occasionally or never at all have plenty of time to contemplate those with whom the custom has more amplitude. 42 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE However, it was not my intention to conclude these! remarks in a melancholy strain, and Heaven knows( that the diners are a prodigious company. It is as, moralistic as I shall venture to be if I drop a very soft sigh on the paper as T affirm that truth. Are they all illuminated spirits and is their conversation the ripest: in the world ? This is not to be expected, nor should'. I ever suppose it to be desired that an agreeable so-: ciety should fail to offer frequent opportunity for in- tellectual rest. Such a shortcoming is not one of the sins of the London world in general, nor would it be just to complain of that world, on any side, on grounds of deficiency. It is not what London fails to do that strikes the observer, but the general fact that she does everything in excess. Excess is her highest reproach, and it is her incurable misfortune that there is really too much of her. She overwhelms you by quantity and number — she ends by making human life, by making civilization, appear cheap to you. Wherever you go, to parties, exhibitions, concerts, " private views," meetings, solitudes, there are already more people than enough on the field. How it makes you understand the high walls with which so much of Eng- lish life is surrounded, and the priceless blessing of a park in the country, where there is nothing animated but rabbits and pheasants and, for the worst, the im- portunate nightingales ! And as the monster grows and grows forever, she departs more and more — it must be acknowledged — from the ideal of a conven- ient society, a society in which intimacy is possible, in which the associated meet often and sound and LONDON 43 select and measure and inspire each other, and rela- tions and combinations have time to form themselves. The substitute for this, in London, is the momentary concussion of a million of atoms. It is the difference between seeing a great deal of a few and seeing a little of every one. " When did you come — are you ' going on'?" and it is over; there is no time even for the answer. This may seem a perfidious arraignment, and I should not make it were I not prepared, or rather were I not eager, to add two qualifications. One of these is that, cumbrously vast as the place may be, I would not have had it smaller by a hair's- breadth or have missed one of the fine and fruitful impatiences with which it inspires you and which are at bottom a heartier tribute, I think, than any great city receives. The other is that out of its richness and its inexhaustible good-humor it belies the next hour any generalization you may have been so simple as to make about it. 1888. Je fr JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I. V After a man's long work is over and the sound :: his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held \ high place find his image strangely simplified and sun a- marized. The hand of death, in passing over it, h?as smoothed the folds, made it more typical and gener?al. The figure retained by the memory is compressied and intensified ; accidents have dropped away fron?i it and shades have ceased to count ; it stands, sharpbly, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather tha^n, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. We cut t ; ne silhouette, in a word, out of the confusion of life, we save and fix the outline, and it is with his eye on this profiled distinction that the critic speaks. It is tiis function to speak with assurance when once his im- pression has become final ; and it is in noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occasion as a critic. It is not that due conviction is absent*; it is only that the function is a cold one. It is not that the final impression is dim ; it is only that it is made on a softer side of the spirit than the critical sense. The process is more mystical, the deposited image is in- sistently personal, the generalizing principle is that of loyalty. I can therefore not pretend to write of James JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 45 Russell Lowell in the tone of detachment and classi- fication ; I can only offer a few anticipatory touches for a portrait that asks for a steadier hand. It may be professional prejudice, but as the whole color of his life was literary, so it seems to me that we may see in his high and happy fortune the most sub- stantial honor gathered by the practice of letters from a world preoccupied with other things. It was in look- ing at him as a man of letters that one drew closest to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is the idea that to my sense his name most promptly evokes ; and though it was not by any means the only idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to be found in it. He carried style — the style of litera- ture — into regions in which we rarely look for it : into politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into stammering civic dinners and ponderous anniversa- ries, into letters and notes and telegrams, into every turn of the hour — absolutely into conversation, where indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit. Any friendly estimate of him is foredoomed to savor potently of reminiscence, so that I may mention how vividly I recall the occasion on which he first struck me as completely representative. The association could only grow, but the essence of it was all there on the eve of his going as minister to Spain. It was late in the summer of 1877 ; he spent a few days in London on his way to Madrid, in the hushed gray August, and I remember dining 46 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE with him at a dim little hotel in Park Street, whiclj I had never entered before and have never enteref" since, but which, whenever I pass it, seems to looj at me with the melancholy of those inanimate thing e that have participated. That particular evening rV" mained, in my fancy, a kind of bridge between hr" old bookish and his new worldly life ; which, howeve 1 £ had much more in common than they had in distintf*"' y tion. He turned the pages of the later experience with very much the same contemplative reader's sens'.e with which in his library he had for years smoked the student's pipe over a thousand volumes : the only difference was that a good many of the leaves were still to cut. At any rate, he was enviably gay and amused, and this preliminary hour struck me literally as the reward of consistency. It was tinted with the promise of a singularly interesting future, but the saturated American time was all behind it, and what was to come seemed an ideal opportunity for the nourished mind. That the American years had been diluted with several visits to Europe was not a flaw in the harmony, for to recollect certain other foreign occasions — pleasant Parisian and delightful Italian strolls — was to remember that, if these had been months of absence for him, they were for me, on the wings of his talk, hours of repatriation. This talk was humorously and racily fond, charged with a perfect drollery of reference to the oilier country (there were always two — the one we were in and the one we weren't), the details of my too sketchy con- y I ception of which, admitted for argument, he showed JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 47 lendless good-nature in filling in. It was a joke, fi polished by much use, that I was dreadfully at sea f' about my native land ; and it would have been pleas- ant indeed to know even less than I did, so that I might have learned the whole story from Mr. Lowell's lips. His America was a country worth hearing about, a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that in Europe one knew him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt that this conscious- ness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him and for his friends he was one of the most whimsical, one of the wittiest of human beings, so that he could play with his patriotism and make it various. All the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums through much of his finest verse — almost the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry con- tains — the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress. Above all, it was a particular allegiance to New England — a quarter of the earth in respect to which the hand of long habit, of that affection which is usually half convenience, never let go the prime idea, the standard. New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her origines ; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past. " The Biglow Papers " show to what a tune he could play with his patriotism — all literature contains, I think, 48 ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE no finer sport ; but he is serious enough when he J_ speaks of the L ..." strange New World, that yit wast never young,