Chapter VI: Part 6

Across the Serpentine in the children’s paradise of Kensington Gardens we should find that the Board Walk and the “Round Pond” lose none of their drawing-power with the years and that the fountains and flowers are as beautiful and as highly prized as ever. There is the additional attraction of having a chance, by keeping a sharp eye on the tops of the tall ash-trees, of catching a glimpse of Peter Pan preparing to fly home to his mother’s window.

The exclusive shades of Green Park and St. James’s have a convenient nearness that entices hundreds from the roaring thoroughfares of the neighborhood, and at this hour their old elms and graceful bowers give impartially of their repose and peace to hearts that are heavy and hearts that are gay. It would seem inevitable that thoughts must come of the royal and princely companies that once trod these ways—of Charles II, at least, strolling in St. James’s surrounded by his dogs, pausing a while to feed his ducks and then tripping gayly up the “Green Walk” for a chat with Nell Gwynn over the garden wall, while scandalized John Evelyn hurries home to make note in his journal of “a very familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nelly.”

The London social season being at its height during May, June, and July, while Parliament is in session, belated clerks wending homeward between seven and eight o’clock find the great houses occupied and dinner-parties in progress with as much universality as a New York clerk, under like circumstances at home, would expect to see in December. All Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico is indulging in feasting and merriment, and the austere aloofness of their retired squares, with central parks high-fenced in iron from contact with the “ordinary person,” is broken by the whirl of the carriages and motors of arriving guests. The sudden flood of soft lights from the reception hall as Hawkins throws open the door, and the quick and noiseless disappearance of the conveyances, is all of a moment and our clerk finds himself disconsolately gazing at the frowning front of some solid, ivy-grown, and altogether charming old mansion, through whose carefully-drawn window draperies only the slightest of beams dares venture forth to him. Were he to indulge such a passion for walking as characterized Lord Macaulay,—said to have passed through every street of London in his day,—he would find the same thing in progress at this hour in all the exclusive region that lies in the purlieus of Buckingham Palace. Dignity, riches, elegance, and power would be his in hasty, grudging glimpses—and then the dim square again and the high iron fence. The London square, indeed, seems decorative only—trees, turf, flowers, and the fence, and the surrounding houses playing dog-in-the-manager. This is not always without its bewilderment to foreigners; and so confirmed a traveler as Théophile Gautier puzzled over the matter considerably before he dismissed it with the conclusion that it is probably satisfaction enough to the owners to have kept other people out.

If our clerk were to take the “tube” at Brompton Road and come out at Whitechapel Station in the East End, he would see the other side of the story with a vengeance. To quote Gautier again, “to be poor in London is one of the tortures forgotten by Dante.” Here the air is stifling with dirty dust, and thousands of miserable, unkempt creatures with wan and pasty faces feed, when they can muster a penny, on a choice of “black puddings,” pork-pies, “sheep-trotters,” or the mysterious, smoking “faggots.” In old Ratcliffe Highway, which is now St. George Street, they make out by munching kippers carried in hand as they go their devious ways. An occasional stale fish from Billingsgate is that much better than nothing. Yiddish seems to be the prevailing national tongue east of Aldgate Pump, and if you understand it there will be no trouble over the signs and announcements. With characteristic Hebrew thrift it is always “open season” for buyers. Each product has its special habitat. Toys or other sweatshop articles come from Houndsditch, shoes from Spitalfields, leather goods from Bermondsey, beef remnants from Smithfield, left-over poultry from Leadenhall, vegetable “seconds” from Covent Garden, birds are to be had in Club Row, meat and clothing in Brick Lane, and a general outfitting in Petticoat Lane which the reformers have rechristened Middlesex Street. As for a “screw o’ baccy” or a “mug o’ bitter,” the “pub” of any corner will answer. The University Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall are doing what men can to better conditions, but so have others tried for ages—yet here is the malodorous East End practically as unwashed and unregenerate as of old. The glimpses one catches of squalor and filth up narrow passages and of the damp and grimy “closes” that remind you of Hogarth’s drawings are apt to content the most curious, unless he be an insatiable investigator, indeed, and is willing to take his chances of being “burked.” Hand on pocket you thread narrow alleys where people are said to have been offered attractive bargains on their own watches when they reached the other end. Here after the day’s work is over and the “moke” and barrow safely stabled for the night, with a “Wot cher, chummy; ’ow yer ’oppin’ up?” our industrious coster friends, ’Arry and ’Arriet, make merry among pals at a “Free and Easy,” or lay out a couple of “thri’-p’ny bits” for seats in a local theatre, whence they emerge between acts for a “’arf-en’-’arf” or a “pot-o’-porter” with instant and painfully frank opinions if “it ’yn’t fustryte.” Dinner at “The Three Nuns,” of course, is only for state occasions. They are the people, just the same, to get most out of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday or a picnic at Epping Forest any time. With them originated in days gone most of the catchy street-cries for which London was long curiously noted. But one hears no more “Bellows to Mend!” or “Three Rows a Penny Pins!” or “Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive oh!” or “Sweet Blooming Lavender, Six Bunches a Penny!” or “One a Penny, two a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!” or the traditional tune of “Buy a Broom!” or the barrow-woman’s “Ripe Cherries!” and “Green Rushes O!” You may, however, have a chance at “’Taters, all ’ot!” or “Three a Penny, Yarmouth Bloaters; ’ere’s yer Bloaters!” After all, it takes a very limited inspection of the East End to wish them all in Hyde Park, as the flag falls at seven-thirty, to join the hundreds of men and boys there who are out of their clothes before the signal is barely given and taking an evening plunge in the Serpentine.

Between the truffles of Mayfair and the “faggots” of Whitechapel lies the region of the menu with which the average Londoner is most familiar and which he is now exploring with profound earnestness according to his lights and shillings. Dining, as every one knows, is an important expression of the British conscience, a solemn rite of well-nigh religious momentousness. The traditional fate of the uninvited guest is his in double measure who ventures to intrude between the Briton and his beef. One might “try it on,” perhaps, on the Surrey Side where they incline to “dining from the joint” around six o’clock—though nothing short of compulsion should take a sight-seer to South London after nightfall. The shabby Southwark shore of dingy wharves and grimy sheds is half concealed in drifting shadows raised by the uncertain light of flickering gas jets and the net results are not worth the trouble of walking London Bridge, unless we except the picture of quiet dignity and mellow beauty presented by the ancient church of St. Saviour. This rare old survivor finely expresses by night the subtle sense of a long-continued veneration and the finger-touches of the passing years. And to think that St. Saviour’s was doing parish duty and was a delight to look upon long before the Globe Theatre of Shakespearean fame had reared a neighboring head! But the gloom of the Surrey Side is thicker and more discomforting than the fog. Long, monotonous, cheerless streets, poorly lighted and scantily employed after dark, emerge from drab perspectives of gloaming and fade sullenly away into others. The scattered pedestrians one encounters reflect by solemn countenance the prevailing depression and seem able to take but little heart of courage as they go their melancholy ways. The whole region appears given over to breweries, potteries, factories, and hospitals. By night Lambeth Palace itself takes on the universal brewery aspect. You even detect a vatish look to the Greenwich Observatory and mistrust some trace of beer in the famous meridian. And then the tarry hotels of Greenwich must add their quota to the general dejection by offering everything in the world in the way of fish excepting its celebrated whitebait, which was, of course, the one thing you had come for. The lights of St. George’s Circus—the Leicester Square of South London—may be few in point of fact, but they seem highly exhilarating down there; nor are you to scorn the good cheer of the comfortable old tavern hard by that rejoices in the extraordinary name of “The Elephant and Castle.” There may also be a kindly feeling for the Old Kent Road where Chevalier’s coster “knock’d ’em,” but otherwise the breweries win. There is one on the sacred site of the old Globe Theatre, something like one where stood the Tabard Inn whence Chaucer started his immortal Pilgrims for Canterbury, and you will find a brazen gin palace if you search for “The White Hart Inn,” of “Henry VI” and “Pickwick Papers.” Poor old Southwark! Her glorious days of light have passed!

“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head,
That it seems as if ‘she’ said,
‘They are gone.’”

Even Southwark is not much duller at this hour than that ancient nucleus that is still styled the “City.” Where the leading commercial centres and money markets of the world were in frenzied activity, two or three hours ago, a few belated pedestrians now go clattering along echoing and deserted streets with an unhappy air of apology. No section of London undergoes so amazing a transformation each day; nor is any other so drear and cheerless by the suddenness of contrast—attesting the keenness of Lowell’s observation that nothing makes so much for loneliness as the sense of man’s departure. There is little dining now in the region where Falstaff once reveled at “The Boar’s Head” and the Shakespearean coterie at “The Mermaid Tavern.” The low, windowless, stolid Bank of England gropes like a blindman toward Wellington on his horse before the lofty Corinthian portico of the Royal Exchange, and the massive, sombre Mansion House of the Lord Mayor suggests some ruined temple of Paestum. “Gog” and “Magog” slumber in the dusty recesses of the old Guildhall, and the pigeons nest in its blackened eaves unstartled by the impassioned oratory of government ministers at banquets. But it is the time of times to attend the sweet chiming of Bow Bells, under the dragon in the beautiful tower that Wren built for St. Mary’s, and one could almost wish to have been born cockney if only to have heard them ringing from babyhood. The winding and gloomy little streets whose names recall so much in the lives of the Elizabethan literati entice one craftily, like so many Bow runners, into the purlieus of the Tower, within the shadows of whose momentous walls cabmen drowse securely on the boxes of dusty four-wheelers. To the imaginative stranger its bright fascination by day suffers a night-change into something gruesomely repellent, and the “beef-eaters” do not protect the crown jewels half so effectively as do the headless shades of Lady Jane Grey and Henry’s unhappy queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Doubtless there are safer thoroughfares on earth than Lower Thames Street in the early evening, but they would not lead to as diverting a neighborhood. The wharves and storehouses may not be as tumultuous as by day, but the fastidious wayfarer encounters at Billingsgate enough strength of language and odor to satisfy. Tom Bowling is entertaining Black-eyed Susan at some East End “hall,” but the “pubs” are roaring with “the mariners of England that guard our native seas.” Still, cutty-pipes are glowing at Wapping Old Stairs, and the heaving turmoil of the shipping in the “Pool,” with swaying riding-lights dotting the vast tangle of masts and cordage, prepares you for the shock of the amazing human wave that is ever surging with a ceaseless roar across old London Bridge. Caught in the strong current of that billow one washes back to Wellington and his horse and drifts aimlessly along under the raised awnings of the tailor shops of Cheapside, with scarce time for a grateful hand-wave to hushed and shadowed St. Augustine’s for the “Ingoldsby Legends” its former rector gave us, before he finds himself high and dry in Paternoster Row and the bookish churchyard of St. Paul’s. The great cathedral is imposing, without doubt, and no one would think of saying that Wren did not earn the two hundred pounds per annum he received during the thirty-five years it took him to build it;—and yet it can hardly be expected to appear over-cheerful by night, when it is chill and gloomy and repellent by day with the sun powerless to warm the tessellated floor and stiff, gloomy monuments with the brightest colors of its stained-glass windows—futile to rival even the moon in that vision of Keats as she

“Threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.”

The moon, however, will aid us now in quickening into life the rich memories that adhere to the surrounding churchyard and to Paternoster Row, where so many generations of authors and publishers in dingy shops and inns and coffee-houses have debated the launching of immortal books. Every English-published volume must still start its race from neighboring Stationers’ Hall.

The foolish stranger who chooses such an hour for a tramp about the “City” will breathe more freely, after he has exorcised the last whimpering shade of Newgate and “the poor prisoners of the ‘Fleet,’” as he hurries along Ludgate Hill and attains unto his heart’s desire at Fleet Street. Thence on, it is all the primrose way. No matter what the hour or season, he can never be companionless in the “Highway of Letters” for its very excess of material and immaterial presences. In its brief and narrow course of a few hundred yards, the richest in literary associations of any region on earth, the weather-beaten, irregular fronts of its old stone houses look down affectionately, and perhaps pityingly, on hurrying journalists and anxious authors, as they have been doing for ages. The leisurely diner of the old school who clings to the mellow places of inspiring associations is pretty sure to be going along Fleet Street at this time, intent on a chop and kidneys and a mug of stout at “The Cock,” preferred of Tennyson, or a beefsteak-pudding and toby of ale at the sand-floored “Cheshire Cheese” palpitant with memories of autocratic and snuffy Dr. Johnson exploding with “Sirs,” of good-natured Goldsmith, crotchety Reynolds, impassioned Burke, merry Garrick, and all the others of that deathless company. The usual evening idler and aimless stroller always makes Fleet Street a part of his pleasant itinerary, and it matters little to him that the sidewalks are narrow and the crowd uncomfortably large, when he can beguile each yard or two by lingering glances up dim and fascinating little rookery courts full of mysterious corners and deep shadows whose paving-stones have reëchoed the tread of so many sons of fame. The lights may not be as bright nor as numerous as in the Strand, nor the shops as attractive, but they are non-existent to the sentimentalist who is seeing Izaak Walton in his hosier shop at the Coventry Lane corner and Richard Lovelace in dingy quarters up Gunpowder Alley, and is peering wistfully through the arched gateway to the Temple for a glimpse of Lamb’s birthplace or Fielding’s home or Goldsmith’s grave or a sight of those delightful “old benchers,” brusque “Thomas Coventry,” methodical “Peter Pierson,” and gentle “Samuel Salt.” Doubtless he is able even to detect the rich aroma of the chimney-sweeps’ sassafras tea in the neighborhood of “Mr. Read’s shop, on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street.”

The shadows fall away with startling suddenness as Fleet Street becomes the Strand at Temple Bar. The jolliest uproar of all London storms impetuously along that modern Rialto all the way into Trafalgar Square. Brilliant lights, shop displays of every description, theatres, hotels, and restaurants create a profusion of excitement for the gay and jostling crowd that harries you perilously near to the curb and the heavy wheels of the ponderous busses.

And what an amazing institution the London bus is! The Strand might still be the Strand if St. Mary’s and St. Clement Danes were effaced from its roadway, but what if the busses went! Gladstone’s partiality for these archaic contrivances was extreme, which naturally disposed Disraeli to take the other side and champion the fleeting hansom—“the gondola of London,” as he aptly styled it. And, indeed, much may be said in commendation of the omnipresence, economy, and convenience of the latter, and of its friendly way of flying to one’s aid at the merest raising of the hand to whisk you away at breakneck speed and through a thousand hairbreadth escapes to any possible destination you may indicate. But the majority vote with Gladstone, nevertheless, and take their ease on a bus-top. It is true that in the profusion of advertising signs you may not always be certain whether you are bound for Pear’s Soap or Sanderson’s Mountain Dew, but with blissful indifference you pocket the long ticket, and, ensconced among the glowing pipe-bowls in the dusk of a “garden-seat,” “rumble earthquakingly aloft.” What a delight it is to hear the cockney conductor drawl “Chairin’ Crauss,” “Tot’nh’m Court Rauwd,” “S’n Jimes-iz Pawk,” and the rest of it! From your heaving perch beside the ruddy-faced driver in his white high hat you observe that your ark keeps turning to the left,—the English rule of the road,—and that now you must look down instead of up to find the placards on the trolley posts that mark the stopping-places of the trams. You see belated solicitors and barristers hurrying out of the great gray courts of justice, and above the heads of the pedestrians you may study the gloomy arches of Somerset House or the ornate Lyceum where Sir Henry Irving reigned or the neat little Savoy where Gilbert and Sullivan won spurs and fortune. It is a great satisfaction to look down in comfort on the elbowing throng you have escaped, with its jostling and its stereotyped “I’m sorry,”—the top-hats and the caps, the actors, bohemians, professional men, tourists, tramps, beggars, thieves, Tommy Atkins in “pill-box” and “swagger,” blue-coated and yellow-legged boys of Christ’s Hospital, red-coated bootblacks, barmaids in turndown collars, well-dressed and shabbily-dressed women, as well as that particularly flashy brand to whom you return a “_Vade retro, Satanus!_” to her “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance.” No wonder when Kipling’s “Private Ortheris” went mad of the heat in India that he babbled of the Adelphi Arches and the Strand!

In the lull before the turning of the evening tide toward the opera and the theatre there is opportunity for each to indulge his _penchant_. What the shops of Fleet Street and the Strand show in general, the windows of specialists elsewhere are presenting in particular and with increased elaboration. Regent Street will draw the fanciers of pictures, leather goods, perfumes, and jewelry; Bond Street, rare paintings and choice porcelains; Wardour Street, curios and antiques; Stanway Street, silver and embroidery; Charing Cross Road, old bookstalls; and Hatton Garden, diamonds,—the same Hatton Garden that Queen Elizabeth gave a slice of to a favorite courtier and threatened the Bishop of Ely in a brief but sufficient note to hurry up with the necessary details or “I will unfrock you, by God!” This methodical fashion of grouping certain interests in definite localities is carried even further; as, for example, should you feel the need of a physician it is not necessary to wade through the thirty-five hundred pages of Kelly’s Post-Office Directory, but take a taxi to Harley Street where any house can supply you. No matter where you ramble, surprises and delights await you. It will be found so to those in particular who stroll down Oxford Street—with thoughts, perhaps, of De Quincey when a starved and homeless little boy groping a timorous and whimpering way down this street as he clutched the hand of his new acquaintance; or of Hazlitt’s dramatic struggle with hunger and poverty—and suddenly, on reaching High Holborn, catch their first glimpse of the picturesque beauty of mediæval Staple Inn. There are few lovelier spots in all London, and the sparrows still chatter there as clamorously every evening as they did when Dr. Johnson frowned up at them from the manuscript of “Rasselas,” or when Dickens lived and worked there, or when Hawthorne visited and revisited it with increasing delight.

The princely spaces in the neighborhood of Buckingham Palace are quite as attractive at this hour as when the afternoon sun is warm along fair Piccadilly—“radiant and immortal street,” said Henley—and the gay coaches clatter back toward Trafalgar Square with blasts of horn and jangling chains. The Mall, the Grand Walk for ages, fairly exhales class and pride in the deepening dusk of the late English twilight. The clubmen of Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, in their fine, imposing old houses, are taking up the question of the evening’s amusements with as much bored listlessness by the aristocrats at Brooks’s as rakish enthusiasm by the country gentlemen of Boodle’s. Signs of approaching activity are even to be observed in the stately mansions of exclusive Park Lane—a street that half the business men of London hope to be rich enough to live in some day; so effectually has time effaced the memory of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and the rest of the air-dancing specialists who figured here in chains in the days when Tyburn Hill was a name to shudder over.

But the appeal of the “halls,” which began when the curtains of the Alhambra and the Pavilion went up at seven-thirty, grows almost imperative as the hour wears around toward eight. The rank of waiting cabs up the middle of Haymarket is thinned to the merest trickle. “Heavy swells” of clubdom and the West End are strolling in groups across the wide, statue-dotted expanse of Trafalgar Square, stopping to scratch matches on the lions of Nelson’s Column or General Gordon’s granite base. The artists are forsaking the studios of Chelsea, the real bohemians—not the pretenders of the Savage Club and the Vagabond dinners—the cheap restaurants and the performing monkeys of Soho, the students their quiet quarters in Bloomsbury and the forty miles of book-shelves of the British Museum, the musicians their Baker Street lodgings up Madame Tussaud’s way, the literary people their charming Kensington, and even the gay Italians are deserting the organ-grinding on Saffron Hill and the disorder of St. Giles—and all are rapidly moving on Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and the Strand. There they will view the elaborate ballets according to their means; from the “pit” for a shilling, or from a grand circle “stall” for seven shillings sixpence, with another sixpence to the girl usher for a programme loaded with advertisements. It is the hour when Pierce Egan would have summoned “Tom and Jerry” to be in at the inaugural of the night life of the great city, and Colonel Newcome would have marched Clive out of the “Cave of Harmony” to hear less offensive entertainers at the “halls.” It is the time Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights” has invested with the richest potentiality for adventure, and when, in consequence, any polite tobacconist is likely suddenly to disclose himself as a reigning sovereign in disguise. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, you may be sure, are never in their Baker Street lodgings at such a time as this. In the preliminary uproar about the bars of the favorite cafés and in the flashing of electric signs, glare of lights, and rush of hansoms and motors, one may discern the beginnings of “a night of it” for many whom the early sun will surprise with bleared eyes and battered top-hats about the coffee-booths of Covent Garden. And, indeed, unless you have access to a club, night-foraging is a highly difficult undertaking in London. Every restaurant closes down at half an hour after midnight; and thereafter, unless you come across a chance “luncheon-bar” that defies the authorities, or a friendly cabman introduces you to a “shelter,” you may have to content yourself with a hard-boiled egg at a coffee-stall. Many a sturdy Briton trudging along behind his linkman could have found better accommodation two hundred years ago when the watch went by with stave and lantern and cried out that it was two o’clock and a fine morning.

With Big Ben in Parliament Watch Tower throwing his full thirteen tons into an effort to advise as many Londoners as possible that it is eight o’clock at last, and with a band concert in progress in the Villiers Street Garden of the Embankment, as agreeable a lounging-place as one could desire is the beautiful expanse of Waterloo Bridge. Not only is the prospect fair and inspiring, but the great bridge itself is worthy of it. Said Gautier, “It is surely the finest in the world”; said Canova, “It is worthy of the Romans.” Pallid and broad and long, and so level that its double lines of fine lights scarcely rise to the slightest of arcs, it rests with rare grace on its nine sweeping arches and spans the Thames just where the great bend is made to the east. One looks along it northward and sees the lamps of Wellington Street fade into the blurring dazzle of the Strand and Longacre, and southward to find the converging lights of Waterloo Road sending a bright arrow straight to the heart of Southwark. The greensward of the flowered and statued Embankment sweeps across and back on either side of its northern end, and palace hotels, Somerset House and the huge glass roof of Charing Cross Station bulk large at hand. Eastward the Ionic columns of Blackfriars Bridge and the strutting iron arches of Southwark Bridge stalk boldly across the serene river, and southwestward the broad arch of Westminster Bridge offers Parliament cheer to glum Lambeth. It would be the most natural mistake in the world to suppose the trim buildings of St. Thomas Hospital, on the Surrey bank, a favored row of handsome detached summer villas, with owners of strong political influence to be able to build on the fine long curve of the Albert Embankment, having no less a vis-à-vis than the terraces and glorious Gothic pile of Parliament buildings on their thousand feet of “noblest water front in the world.”

Only the mind’s eye may look farther on to Chelsea and take note of the tall plane-trees of Cheyne Walk, and re-people the red brick terraces and homely old houses with Sir Thomas More entertaining Erasmus and Holbein, with Addison and Steele in revelry at Don Saltero’s coffee-house, with Byron at home in the amazing disorder of Leigh Hunt’s cottage, with Tennyson smoking long pipes with Carlyle, with Turner and Whistler bending over their palettes, and with Rossetti, Swinburne, and Meredith courting the Muses under a common roof and in a common brotherhood.

To the observer on Waterloo Bridge the deep roar of the city comes out dulled and subdued. Bells chime softly and the whistles of the river-craft sound, from time to time, with sudden and startling shrillness. Long shafts of light shake out from either bank and spots of color from signal lamps dot the nearer rim. All outside is a bright dazzle, with patches of deep shadow and heavy ripples from the brown-sailed lighters and pert steamers that move across the shining reaches. The gloomy Southwark shore is blurred and uncertain in light mists, and the roof masses of the frowning city lift the ghostly fingers of Wren’s slender spires and cower beneath the indistinct and cloudlike silhouette of the dome of St. Paul’s. The prospect is that of a vast, confused expanse of indistinguishable, shadowy blending of buildings and foliage whose remoter verges merge into a soft violet blur, and over all of it rages a wild snowstorm of tiny pin-point lights. Under the arches of the bridge old Father Thames moves serenely seaward, the most ancient and yet ever the youngest member of the community. From his continual renewal of life one could believe that in some long-forgotten time he had won this reward when he, too, had achieved the Holy Grail among the stout knights up Camelot way “in the dayes of Vther pendragon when he was kynge of all Englond and so regned.” With true British reserve he whispers to a stranger no word of such secrets as once he confided at this bridge to Dickens, of the savagery and cruelty of this London that has driven so many of its desperate children to peace within his sheltering arms,—

“Mad with life’s history,
Glad to death’s mystery
Swift to be hurled—
Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of the world.”

Looking from one of these bridges on the proud, powerful, self-sufficient city, Wordsworth was once moved to exclaim that “earth has not anything to show more fair.” Certainly it has few things to show more stirring and impressive, few to move the heart more profoundly, few that in achievement, resourcefulness, and power embody more completely to men of to-day

“The grandeur that was Rome.”

NAPLES

8 P.M. TO 9 P.M.

Drifting lazily of a summer evening over the Bay of Naples in a brown old fishing felucca with a friendly ancient boatman for companion, careless of time or direction; the night winds soft; the moon clear; indolent boating-parties in joyous relaxation all about; languorous, plaintive songs of Italy near by and far away; Vesuvius glorious and mysterious in the purple offing, and the gray old city, touched with silver, beaming down from all her crescent hillsides,—here, indeed, is the stuff of which day dreams are compounded! Chimes in shadowy belfries take soft, musical notice of the hour; and my thoughts recede with those fading echoes and retrace the bright and pleasant stages that have led me this evening into an environment of such charm and romance.

Thus, then, it was. Two hours ago, as I loitered along the crowded Via Caracciolo on the Bay front and watched Neapolitan Fashion take the air, I again encountered my Old Man of the Sea at his landing-place,—swarthy, wrinkled Luigi of the hoop earrings and faded blue trousers rolled to the knees. Little was he bothering his grizzled head over the frivolity that fluttered above him; and yet it was, in fact, a charming show. Old Luigi makes a mistake, in my opinion, in ignoring the elegant _passeggiata_; for afternoon promenading on the Caracciolo is something that most of Naples will do more than lift its head to see. Besides, what an attractive setting it has! The boasted park, the Villa Nazionale, arrays the western front in a pleasant old woods of broad and shady trees, along the water side of which stretches the handsome boulevard of the Caracciolo. The distinguishing mark is thus supplied to divide society between the carriage set who hector it here and along the Villa’s winding drives, and those lesser lights who venture to raise their heads secure from snubs in the promenading spaces under the trees and before the cafés and bandstand. With the latter, as the elders salute friends, renew acquaintances, and exchange civilities with jubilant exclamations, delighted shrugs, and storms of exultant gestures, the younger men, in flannel suits and foppish canes, flirt desperately by twirling their waxed little mustaches, and the snappy-eyed signorinas respond in kind by a subtle and discrete use of the fan. The contemplative promenader will stroll along the cool, statue-lined _allées_, issuing forth from time to time to enjoy the brisk music of the band. The hardened idler will take a mean delight in penetrating the retired and romantic retreats in the neighborhood of the Pæstum Fountain and thus arousing whole coveys of indignant lovers who have regarded this region as peculiarly their own from time immemorial; in the event of threatened reprisals the disturber can seek sanctuary in the renowned Aquarium, just at hand, and there spend his time to better advantage in contemplating octopi and sensitive plants, and all sorts of astonishing fishes. But the real show, of course, is _en voiture_. With a clatter and dash along they come: The _jeunesse dorée_, with straw hats cocked rakishly, shouting loudly to their horses and sawing desperately on the reins; young beauties in the latest word of milliner and modiste loll back in handsome victorias, reveling in the sensation they are creating, and with great black eyes flashing in curious contrast to the studied placidity of their quiet faces; consequential senators down from Rome; fat merchants trying to appear at ease; and all the usual remnants of the fashionable rout. On the wide sidewalks the promenaders proceed leisurely and with more good-humored democracy: prim little girls with governesses; romping schoolboys in caps of all colors; back-robed students; long-haired _artisti_; and priests by the score strolling sedately and gesturing earnestly with dark, nervous hands.

To all this brave parade Luigi turns a blind eye and a deaf ear; but he always manages to see me, I have noticed. This afternoon his programme was the attractive one of a sail down to the Cape of Posilipo for a fish-dinner at a rustic little _ristoranti_, with the table to be spread under a chestnut-tree on a weathered stone terrace at the water’s edge where the spray from an occasional wave-top could spatter the cloth and I might fleck the ashes of my cigar straight down into the Bay. This old fellow can interest any one, I believe, when he wrinkles up into his insinuating and enthusiastic grin and plays that trump card, “And after dinner, if the signore wish, we can drift about the Bay or sail over toward Capri and Sorrento.” Naturally, this is my cue to enter. Into the boat I go; off come hat, coat, collar, and tie, and up go sleeves to the shoulder. I am allowed the tiller, and the genial old fisherman stretches at his ease beside the slanting mast and lights a long, black, quill-stemmed cheroot. Now for comfort and romance and all the delights of Buchanan Read’s inspired vision:

“I heed not if
My rippling skiff
Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff;—
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”

From all garish distractions our little boat bore us in rippling leisure along the picturesque Mergellina front and under the long, villa-dotted heights of the Posilipo hillside, whose shadows crept slowly out on the waters as Apollo drove his flaming chariot beyond the ridge to seek the dread Sibyl of Cumæ. Nature has always been partial to her gay, irresponsible Naples, and this afternoon she seemed resolved to outdo herself in clothing it with charm and beauty. Under the setting sun the entire sky over Posilipo became a gorgeous riot of crimson and gold, and the opposite Vesuvian shore basked with indolent Oriental listlessness in a brilliant deluge that penetrated the deepest recesses of its vineyards and fruited terraces. Through this magic realm of richest color we floated lightly, silently responsive to the varying phases of the calm and glorious sunset hour. In deepest content

“my hand I trail
Within the shadow of the sail.”

The region to which we lifted our eyes is one of veritable poet-worship. How incredible to think that on this hillside Lucullus has lived and Horace strolled and Virgil mused over his deathless verse! Look again, and under a clump of gnarled old trees one sees the latter’s venerated tomb. Over these waters came the pious Æneas with his Trojan galleys to question the Cumæan Sibyl; and since the age of fable what fleets of Carthage have passed around Cape Miseno, what barks of savage pirates, what brazen triremes of Rome, what armadas of Spain and navies of all the world! It staggers the mind to attempt to recall the scenes of war and pillage that have been enacted under the frowning brows of these storied hills during the last three thousand years.

The wonderful sail was all too brief, and almost before I was aware the goal was at hand, and I stepped ashore at the _ristoranti_ approved of Luigi and entered upon the promised joys. It was all as he had predicted; with possibly the exception of a few details he had discreetly neglected to warn me against. That it required four determined efforts and a threat of police to get the proper change when I came to settle the bill is really no jarring memory at all. It is the usual experience with the “forgetful” Neapolitan restaurant keeper. And what are foreigners for, anyway? And was it not worth something extra to have dined face to face with this glittering Bay, with the panorama of Naples on one hand and a sunset over Cape Miseno on the other? So with many bows and mutual civilities I parted with the zealous boniface and rejoined the waiting felucca. A light shove, and the shadows of the terrace fell behind us and we were out again on the Bay. Such are the alluring stages, among others, that may bring one eventually to an evening’s moonlight sail at Naples.

Just now the bells rang eight. Luigi grows sentimental. Again he declines my cigars, stretches at his ease and produces another quilled specimen of government monopoly such as, when at home, he lights at the end of a smouldering rope dangling in a tobacco shop of the Mercato. In the gathering gloom one sees little now of the trellised paths of Posilipo, the white marble villas with their balconies and terraces, or the brilliant clustering roses gay against the glossy green of groves of lemons and oranges. In the darkness of the firs each cavern and grotto of this legend-haunted headland disappears and one can barely make out the wave-washed Rock of Virgil, at the farthest extremity, where, the Neapolitans will tell you, the poet was wont to practice his enchantments. The ruddy sky pales over the mouth of Avernus and the Elysian Fields, and Apollo abandons us to Diana and the broad flecking of the lights of Parthenope. We swing a wide circle in the offing. Between us and the distant rim of water-front lamps hundreds of light craft are idly floating. Romantic, pleasure-loving Naples has dined and taken to the water, to cheer its heart with laughter and song. Like glowworms the lights of the little boats lift and sway with the movement of the waves; while seaward, the drifting torches of fishermen flare in search of _frutti di mare_.

Like an aged beauty Naples is at her best by night, when the ravages of time are concealed. Lights glitter brightly along the shore line from Posilipo to Sorrento and all over the hillsides, and even beyond Sant’ Elmo and the low white priory of San Martino the palace-crowned heights of Capodimonte, where the paper-chases of early spring afford so much diversion to the young gallants of the court. Popular restaurants up the hillsides are marked by groups of colored lights. A thick spangle of lamps proclaims the progress of some neighborhood _festa_. The moon is full; the sky brilliant with enormous stars. In the distance the curling smoke of Vesuvius glows with a sultry red or fades fitfully into gloomy tones, as suits that imperious will which threescore of eruptions have rendered absolute. But, as all the world knows, this aged beauty of a city that “lights up” so well by night is far from “plain” by day. Then appears the charm and distinction of the original way she has of parting her hair, as it were, with the great dividing rocky ridge that runs downward from Capodimonte to Sant’ Elmo and then on to Pizzofalcone, “Rock of the Falcon.” She even secures a coquettish touch in the projecting point, like an antique necklace pendant, at the centre of her double-crescented shore, where juts a low reef and at its end rests the ancient, blackened Castello dell’Ovo,—on a magically supported egg, they say,—the accredited theatre of so many extravagant adventures. And by day she looks down in indolent content through the half-closed eyes of ten thousand windows and surveys a glorious sea of milky blue, brimming tawny curving beaches crowned with white villas in luxuriant groves and vineyards, expanding in turquoise about soft headlands and dim precipices, and bearing, on its smooth, restful bosom in the far, faint offing, magical islands of pink and pearl that seem no more than tinted clouds.

A shoal of skiffs hangs under the black hull of a belated liner, whose rails are crowded with new arrivals delighted at so picturesque and enthusiastic a reception, and whose silver falls merrily into the inverted umbrellas of the boys and girls who are singing and dancing in the little boats by the light of flaming torches. Very shortly these visitors will learn that the interest they excite in Neapolitans is to be measured very strictly in terms of ready cash. Secretly, they will be despised. There is no smile-hid rapacity comparable with that encountered here. The incoming steamer has not yet warped into her berth before the Neapolitan has begun his campaign for money. Beggars crawl out on the pier flaunting their hideous deformities and wailing for _soldi_, and insulting cabmen lie in ambush at the gates. At no other port does a foreigner disembark with so much embarrassment. He goes ashore feeling like a lamb marked for the shearing, and lives to fulfill the expectation with humiliating dispatch. It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that the customs-officers occasionally catch strange flashes of transmarine interests that must puzzle them not a little. As an instance, the first person to land from the steamer I was on was a young American athlete in desperate quest of the latest daily paper, and bent, as we presumed, upon securing instant word of some matter of great and immediate importance. He succeeded; but what was our astonishment to behold him a minute later leap and shout for joy and announce to every one about him that Princeton had again won the Yale baseball series and remained the college champions!

Naples, to-night, is vibrant with song; faithful to her ancient myth of the nymph Parthenope, whose sweet singing long lured men to destruction until Ulysses withstood it and the chagrined goddess cast herself into the sea and perished and her body floated to these shores. Parthenope’s children here do not destroy people by their singing now, but rather delight and revitalize them. Mandolins and guitars are throbbing softly on every hand and the old familiar songs of Naples fill the air. “Traviata,” “Trovatore,” and the “Cavalleria” reign prime favorites. To be sure, there is no escaping the linked sweetness of the wailing “Sa-an-ta-a Lu-u-ci-a,” nor that notion of perpetual and hilarious youth conveyed in the ubiquitous “Funiculì-Funiculà.” In martial staccato, as of old, Margarita, the love-lorn seamstress, is jestingly warned against Salvatore,—“_Mar-ga-rì, ’e perzo a Salvatore!_”—and the skittish “Frangese” recites for the millionth time the discouraging experience of the giddy young peddler who undertook to barter his “pretty pins from Paris” in exchange for kisses that would only bring “a farthing for five” in Paradise. More than one singer is deploring the heartless coquetry of “La Bella Sorrentina,” while as many more appeal amorously to the charming Maria with promises of “beds of roseleaves,”—

“Ah! Maria Marì!
Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”

We take an æsthetic interest in the Pagliaccian ravings of Canio, and grieve for the “little frozen hands” of “La Bohème”; while, by way of contrast, all the peace and serenity of moonlight comes to us in the chaste, stately measures of the pensive “Luna Nova.” Serenades seem twice serenades when breathed in the soft, lissome dialect of Naples. There is no tiring of the impassioned refrain of “Sole Mio”:—

“Ma n’ atu sole
Cchiu bello, ohinè,
’O sole mio
Sta nfronte a te!”

And what sufficient word can be said of the lovely “A Serenata d’ ’e Rrose”? It is impossible not to rejoice with these soulful tenors in that

“The glinting moonbeams look like silver pieces
Flung down among the roses by the breezes,”—

or to respond to the plaintive intensity of the appealing cry:—

“Oj rrose meje! Si dorme chesta fata
Scetatela cu chesta serenata!”

Like old Ulysses, the swift little felucca soon stops its ears to these fascinating distractions, and bears Luigi and me off into the purple darkness. The prison-capped rock of Nisida drops astern with all its august memories of Brutus and his devoted Portia, and its repugnant ones of Queen Joanna, the very bad, and King Robert, the very good. In the moonlit path the distant cliffs of Procida, isle of romance and beauty, loom afar, but we distinguish no faintest echo of the bewildering _tarantella_ music that is danced there in its perfection. What a different spectacle its observers are enjoying from the stale perfunctory performances of the Sorrento hotels, which the tourists see at two dollars a head. For the _tarantella_, well done, is the intensest and most expressive of dances. All the emotions of the lover and his coquettish sweetheart are aptly portrayed—the advances, rebuffs, encouragements, slights, and final triumph. The Procida dance is a revelation when rendered out of sheer delight—_con amore_, as the Italians say.

An occasional faint light marks dissolute Rome’s favorite place of revelry, Baiæ the magnificent. In its heyday every house, as we read, was a palace; and it has been said that every woman who entered it a Penelope came out a Helen. Through their faded green blinds no light may be seen in the yellow stone houses of neighboring Puteoli where Paul, Timothy, and Luke took refuge in the early days of the Faith. Stolid pagan Rome had little time for them, considering that Cumæ was just around the headland, with Dædalus landing from his flight from Crete and the frantic Sibyl, at the very Jaws of Avernus, screaming her “Dies iræ! Dies illa!”

Distant Ischia appears a huge ghostly blot, mysterious and solemn. Scarce an outline can be caught of its fabled, crag-hung castle, chambered as the very nautilus and eloquent of the unhappy Vittoria Colonna. How often has Michael Angelo climbed with sighs that old stone causeway where now the fishermen mend their blackened nets! Ischia never wants for devotees, however, and already a quarter-century has sufficed to dull the horror of that July night when Casamicciola paid its quota of three thousand lives to the dread greed of the earthquake. To-day one lingers, undisturbed by such memories, amidst the pretty whitewashed cottages set in olive groves and vineyards, loiters among the picturesque straw plaiters of Lacco, or dreams to the drowsy tinkle of goat bells in the myrtle and chestnut groves on the slopes of Mont’ Epomeo.

Shadowy Capri, isle of enchantment, lies soft and dim off the Sorrento headland as we swing our little vessel toward the city. It seems only a delightful dream that a few mornings ago my _déjeuner_ was served on a cool terrace of the Quisisana there, and that I looked down over the coffee-urn on olive groves and sloping hillsides green with famous vineyards. With joy I relive the row around its precipitous shores, the eerie swim in the elfland of the Blue Grotto, the drive down the white, dusty road from the lofty perch of Anacapri to the pebbly beaches of Marina Grande, before a fascinating, unfolding panorama of verdant lawns, fruited terraces, snowy villas, and bold cliffs crowned with fantastic ruins. Sinister Tiberius and his unspeakable companions have small place in our permanent memories of Capri; one is more apt to recall the charming blue and white Virgin in the cool grotto beside the old Stone Stairs.

A faint rim of lights on the mainland marks Sorrento, and a patch nearer the city, Castellammare; and were we nearer, the great white hotels would doubtless be found brilliant and musical. Could we but see it now, we should find the moonlit statue of Tasso in the little square vastly more tolerable than by day, and this would be a pleasant hour to spend on the old green bench before it absorbed in stirring thoughts of the “Gerusalemme Liberata” in the place where its author was born. Monte Sant’ Angelo looms above Castallammare spectre-like in night shadows, and the royal ilex groves must be taken on faith. The crested hoopoes, crowned of King Solomon, have long been asleep on the mountain-sides, but Italian Fashion, devoted to its Castellammare, having idled and rested all day in the _bagni_, now flirts and dances at the verandaed _stabilimenti_. An occasional faint breath of fragrance recalls the floral luxuriance that is so notable here—the gorgeous scarlet geraniums, snowy daturas, cactus, and aloe, festoons of smilax, and the carmine oleanders that they call “St. Joseph’s Nosegay.”

Far away to the southeastward, vague and ghostly headlands are dimming toward regions of rarest beauty—Amalfi, Majori, Cetara, Salerno. In our happy thoughts the smooth, white Corniche road lies like a delicate thread along the green mountain-sides,—those Mountains of the Blest, whose rounded brows home the nightingale, whose shoulders are terraces of fruits of the tropics and whose storied feet rest eternally on white beaches that glisten in the blue waters of a matchless bay. A memory this, compounded of pebbly, curving shores sweeping around soft, distant headlands; lustrous groves of pomegranates and oranges; picturesque fishing hamlets of little stone houses nestled away in deep, shady inlets; the patter and shuffle of barefooted women trotting steadily through the dust under great hampers of lemons; sunburned workmen singing homeward through the dusk; the shouts and laughter of bare-headed fishermen drawing their red-bottomed boats up on the shore; and the low, contented singing of your Neapolitan coachman who, as twilight falls, looks long and dreamily out to sea and no longer cracks his whip over the weary little Barbary ponies that are drawing you up the dusty heights toward the cool rose-pergola of the Cappuccini. Visitors, reluctantly departing, will never forget this land “where summer sings and never dies,” and must ever after feel with Longfellow:—

“Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees,
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.”

We distinguish Torre Annunciata, abreast of our speeding boat, by the evil redolence of its swarming fish markets and the boisterous shouting of its many children at _mora_; and, in striking contrast, one thinks of grim Pompeii, farther inland,—“la città morta,”—hushed and prostrate in moonlit desolation. At the neighboring Torre del Greco we can fancy the coral fishers, who may not yet have left for the season’s diving off Sicily, to be smoking black cheroots along the wharves and planning lively times when they market their coral and Barbary ponies in November. Certainly there is little to suggest the peace that Shelley found here. Few shores are more dramatic than those of this Vesuvian Campagna Felice. Resina hangs gloomily over the entrance to the entombed Herculaneum, and Portici lights up but half-heartedly, abashed that all her royal Bourbon palaces should now be housing only schoolboys. About both villages and for miles inland any one may see the wrath of Vesuvius in dismal evidence in twisted lava rock of weird and sinister shapes. But there is a fullness of life on these shores to-night, increasing as our boat advances; individual houses multiply into villages, and villages overlap into a solid mass that is Naples’s East End. We pick our way among the clustering boats, and around long piers with little lighthouses at their ends, and presently Luigi abandons his cheroot, stands up by the mast and shouts shrill and mysterious hails, and shortly up we come to our landing at a flight of dripping stone steps at the tatterdemalion Villa del Popolo, sea-gate to the noisiest, dirtiest, most crowded (and so most characteristic) section of all Naples. A passing of silver from me, from Luigi a twisted smile and a regretful “buon riposo,”—the last, I fear, that I shall ever hear from him,—and I take leave of my amiable companion for the sputtering lights and exciting diversions of the swarming Carmine Gate and Mercato. From the tide-washed Castello dell’ Ovo to the prison heights of Sant’ Elmo and the charming cloisters of San Martino, and from the huts of the Mergellina fishermen to far beyond where I am standing on the eastern front of the city, all Naples is sparkling with lights and humming with an intense and multi-phased tumult.