London Films

William Dean Howells

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849657796
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

In 'London Films' Mr. Howells certainly maintains his deserved reputation. His delightful essays are characterized by a genial sympathy quite unlike any other author's of the present time. It is this sympathy with his subject that gives the charm to the book. There is a broad indefiniteness or lack of mathematical accuracy that gives a pleasing literary tone to the book. He writes of the royal family, its movements and customs, although confessing the royal family has rarely come his way. Mr. Howells is decidedly pro-British. In many respects they excel us. He calls the appearance of the English dames authorized rather than authoritative, and says the dignity of the old people of both sexes is not matched in America. In its buildings and effects London excels New York. The dress of the English girl is contrasted with that of the American. Mr. Howells finds the American girl has more chic and the English more sentiment. His preference is clearly for the sentiment. While granting the sentiment in the English girl's dress to exceed the American girl's, you still have the choice of whether you want all that sentiment or not. The difference in dress is certainly an expression of the general difference in English and American character. Americans in general will probably let the sentiment go. Of course, as regards style Mr. Howells stands, with some few others, at the top of the writers of today.

XVII. AMERICAN ORIGINS—MOSTLY NORTHERN

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

The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Piccadilly and the streets of shops is all away at country-houses or at the sea-side or in the mountains of the island or the continent. The comely young giants who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the paths of the Park are off killing grouse; scarcely a livery shows itself; even the omnibus-tops are depopulated; long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks; the stately procession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts at nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the tormented regiments of soldiers are at peace in their barracks; a strange quiet has fallen on that better quarter of the town which is really, or unreally, the town. With this there is an increase of the homelike feeling which is always present, with at least the happy alien, in London; and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and centralized in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the theatres. There, indeed, the season seems to have returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses and the stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of its summer joy.

One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the church parade wore in life through those halcyon days when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but upon the whole it failed. It may have been an impulse from this vision that carried me as far as Hyde Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick or the dead, in the chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning up the edges of the road. In the consecrated closes, where the vanished children of smartness used to stand or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walking, the inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered, with their legs in the air, on the wet grass, and the dripping leaves smote damply together overhead. Another close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had showered over-night, and the ground must still have been wet where a score of the bodies of the unemployed, or at least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun. They were having their holiday, but they did not make me feel as if I were still enjoying my outing so much as some other things: for instance, the colored minstrelsy, which I had heard so often at the sea-side in August, and which reported itself one night in the Mayfair street which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and touched our hearts with the concord of our native airs and banjos. We were sure they were American darkies, from their voices and accents, but perhaps they were not as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who came down the place at high noon with her large baby in her arms, swaying it from side to side as she sang a plaintive ballad to the skies, and scanned the windows for some relenting to her want.

The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the season had used so hard, were many of them putting themselves in repair against the next time of festivity, and testifying to the absence of their world. One day I found the solitude rather more than I could bear without appeal to that vastly more multitudinous world of the six millions who never leave London except on business. I said in my heart that this was the hour to go and look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in wait for me in St. Paul's, and I had no sooner mounted an omnibus-top for the journey through Piccadilly, the Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found the other omnibus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had formed the almost universal head-covering of the 'bus-top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us when September begins. They had never so much reason to be here as with us, and they might have had almost as much reason for lingering as they had for coming. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as well as among the omnibus-toppers, and the pedestrians abashed me by their undiminished myriads. As they streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent of eager life, and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my theory of a decimated London. It was not the tenth man who was gone, nor the hundredth, if even it was the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis mocked with its millions the notion of nobody left in town because a few pleasurers had gone to the moors or the mountains or the shores.

Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle of September, the trivial kodak could not bear to dwell on the mortuary aspects which the fashionable quarters of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek those springs or sources of the American nation which may be traced all over England, and which rather abound in London, trusting chances for the involuntary glimpses which are so much better than any others, when you can get them. In different terms, and leaving apart the strained figure which I cannot ask the reader to help me carry farther, I went one breezy, cool, sunny, and rainy morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps, and philosophize my reflections in the researches before us. Our rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows Barking, conveniently founded just opposite the Mark Lane District Railway Station, some seven or eight hundred years before I arrived there, and successively destroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair that I could safely lean against it while waiting for my friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood. The street before it might have been a second-rate New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, except for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public-houses. There was a continual coming and going of trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all heedless, if not unconscious, of the Tower of London close at hand, whose dead were so often brought from the scaffold to be buried in that church.

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

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

Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the common level than it once was, as often happens with rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinction of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away, Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approached, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt. This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving. It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land they were to ennoble with the first great republican experiment of our race, after the commonwealth failed to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because of a want of imagination in both people and protector, who could not conceive of a state without an hereditary ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father, till another son of another father came back to urge his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time and place; but we ourselves who grew up where there had never been kings to craze the popular fancy, could not conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years and more, and even then some of us thought of having one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom-house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did, last.

We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled away to cool themselves in different parts of the American wilderness. It was much later that the place became famous for the declaration of the three tailors of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have begun, a public appeal with the words: “We, the people of England,” and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street is more suggestive of them than of those who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and commonplace thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street, and who so largely form the ancestry of the American people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should be glad to think characteristic of our nation in one of the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted American bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better homes than the London poor could otherwise have known.

Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of freedom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, under which we walked the length of the long, dull, noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth colony came from. The church is an uninteresting structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly believed that some part of the Clink was still to be detected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave's or St. Tooley's, and wandered on through their shades, among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain floury laborers who had cleared a space among the wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and, above all, the Globe.

Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not in mind. England has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place and extending his vast shadow over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now another embarrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St. Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour's. Outside it has been pitilessly restored in a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural beauty lingers, especially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the “moral Gower” who so insufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St. Saviour's, and we were almost a year too early for the painted window which now commemorates him.

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

[Footnote: While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were sup...