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Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




LONDON FILMS

BY W. D. HOWELLS



[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT]



CONTENTS


I. METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

II. CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS

III. SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

IV. THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

V. THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

VI. SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION

VII. IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

VIII. THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

IX. CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

X. SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHTSEEING

XI. GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

XII. TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

XIII. AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

XIV. A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

XV. FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

XVI. HENLEY DAY

XVII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY NORTHERN

XVIII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY SOUTHERN

XIX. ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

XX. PARTING GUESTS




ILLUSTRATIONS


HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH

THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK

ROTTEN ROW

A BLOCK IN THE STRAND

ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

THE HORSE GUARDS, WHITEHALL

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER

A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE THAMES AT HENLEY

THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY

THE TOWER OF LONDON

ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET

LONDON BRIDGE

THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS

THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB'S TIME

CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES

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

STAPLE INN, HOLBORN

CLIFFORD'S INN HALL

ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THE-FIELDS

HYDE PARK IN OCTOBER

THAMES EMBANKMENT




I

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS


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

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

What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of self-
question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning of April,
after devious delays in the South and West of England, is destined to
have printed upon his mental films a succession of meteorological
changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest
as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the
weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite
as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having
one's proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own
affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of
sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes censorious. If I were to
be a little honester still, I should confess that I do not know of any
place where the month of April can be meaner, more _poison_, upon
occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its moments of relenting,
of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is the reverse of its
obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in a grateful
tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the
joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you can
all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden glut of
delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the soul to
overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England
is incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is of
public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for
the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time
and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The
English weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the
personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were
influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life,
and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care,
irrespective of the interests of the mass. This may be a little too
fanciful, and I do not insist that it is scientific or even
sociological. Yet I think the reader who rejects it might do worse than
agree with me that the first impression of a foreign country visited or
revisited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the season.

Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day, that
there was a lower or a higher pressure in a part of Scotland, just as I
might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the
lakes. "Now," I said to myself, "we shall have something like real
weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going to
be decisively this or that." But I could not see that the weather
following differed from the weather we had been having. It was the same
small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm, cold,
damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day
often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the sun was
unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a bitter
wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the
spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark,
the golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches;
and round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream.
Full of this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.

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

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

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

"So careful of the single type"

of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the matter of
complexion, if we count that a proof of health, we are quite out of it
in comparison with the English, and beside them must look like a nation
of invalids. There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to
afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not buy with us. I
do not say the color does not look a little overdone in cases, or that
the violent explosion of pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of
small children, does not make one pause in question whether paste or
putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to be too critical.
Putty and paste, apart from association, are not pretty tints, and pinks
and roses are; and the English children look not only fresher but
sturdier and healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do not
know; but I doubt if the English live longer than we for living less
comfortably. The lower classes seem always to have colds; the middle
classes, rheumatism; and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears.
Rheumatism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not mind what one
said) is universal in England, and all ranks of society have the
facilities for it in the in-doors cold in which they otherwise often
undeniably flourish. At the end, it is a question of whether you would
rather be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the first course
and they choose the last.

If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the experience of
the careful observer that there is a summit of healthful looks in
England, which we do not touch in America, whatever the large table-land
or foot-hill average we reach; and in like manner there is an
exceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it, rarely enough,
in the London streets, which one never encounters with us. I am not
envying the one, or at least not regretting the other. Distinction is
the one thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too much; only,
in America, we pay too much for too many other things to take any great
comfort in our want of distinction. I own the truth without grief or
shame, while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I enjoy
other spectacles for which I cannot help letting the English pay too
much. I was not appreciably the poorer myself, perhaps I was actually
the richer, in seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the
aristocratic region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an
elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement
before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that
his distinction was passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but
hers I beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane
that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen
gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such
keeping that there was nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various
black. She looked not only authoritative; people often do that with us;
she looked authorized; she had been empowered by the vested rights and
interests to look so her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her,
any more than in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the
high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, handsome houses where,
in the cellary or sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the
rheumatic pangs of which the comparative warmth of the outer air had
momentarily relieved her stately bulk.

But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime,
they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have
come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and
mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such soft
masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to complain
of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves
have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can smell
it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds insist, and in the air is
that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the year
long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with
every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have presently in
the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a subtile haze,
which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness, and lies upon
the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a dream made
visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this substance yourself,
so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble
earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a part,
very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful consciousness. It is
flattering, but you feel like warning him not to go in-doors, or he will
lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know
that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not be April
there till well into June.




II

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS


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

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

One reason, I think, why London is so much more striking is in the
unbroken line which the irregularly divided streets often present to the
passer. Here is a chance for architecture to extend, while with us it
has only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block which is the
extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another
reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the
effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower
Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts
you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either
hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet
Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the
sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day
is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often
have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a
lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty
and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently
thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green
light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses
render the rifts between more impressively chasmal. The tremendous
volume of life that flows through the narrow and winding channels past
the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks which the lesser
buildings form, is such that the highest tide of Broadway or Fifth
Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling and towering
omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous
hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts,
donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way
amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering
the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had
run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You
are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella
on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across your knees,
and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the
largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the universe.

[Illustration: FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH]

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

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

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

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