Part 15

When I returned to England I came across a terrific establishment. As it may be more or less novel to you I will attempt to describe it, though the really right words for describing it do not exist in the English language. In the first place, it is a restaurant, where meals are served at almost any hour--and not meals such as you get in ordinary restaurants, but sane meals, spread amid flowers and diaper. Then it is also a crèche, where babies are tended upon scientific principles; nothing that a baby needs is neglected. Older, children are also looked after, and the whole question of education is deeply studied, and advice given. Also young men and women of sixteen or so are started in the world, and every information concerning careers is collected and freely given out.

Another branch of the establishment is devoted to inexpensive but effective dressmaking, and still another to hats; here you will find the periodical literature of fashion, and all hints as to shopping. There is, further, a very efficient department of mending, highly curious and ingenious, which embraces men’s clothing. I discovered, too, a horticultural department for the encouragement of flowers, serving secondarily as a branch of the crèche and nursery. There is a fine art department, where reproductions of the great masters are to be seen and meditated upon, and an applied art department, full of antiques. It must mention the library, where the latest and the most ancient literatures fraternise on the same shelves; also the chamber-music department.

Lastly, a portion of the establishment is simply nothing but an uncommon lodging-house for travellers, where electric light, hot water bottles, and hot baths are not extras. I scarcely expect you to believe what I say; nevertheless I have exaggerated in nothing. You would never guess where I encountered this extraordinary, this incredible establishment. It was No. 137 (the final number) in a perfectly ordinary long street in a residential suburb of a large town. When I expressed my surprise to the manager of the place, he looked at me as if I had come from Timbuctoo. “Why!” he exclaimed, “there are a hundred and thirty-six establishments much like mine in this very street!” He was right; for what I had stumbled into was just the average cultivated Englishman’s home.

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You must look at it as I looked at it in order to perceive what an organisation the thing is. The Englishman may totter continually on the edge of his income, but he does get value for his money. I do not mean the poor man, for he is too unskilled, and too hampered by lack of capital, to get value even for what money he has. Nor do I mean the wealthy man, who usually spends about five-sixths of his income in acquiring worries and nuisances. I mean the nice, usual professional or business islander, who by means of a small oblong piece of paper, marked £30 or so, once a month, attempts and accomplishes more than a native of the mainland would dream of on £30 a week. The immense pyramid which that man and his wife build, wrong side up, on the blowsy head of one domestic servant is a truly astonishing phenomenon, and its frequency does not impair its extraordinariness.

The mere machinery is tremendously complex. You lie awake at 6-30 in the uncommon lodging-house department, and you hear distant noises. It is the inverted apex of the pyramid starting into life. You might imagine that she would be intensely preoccupied by the complexity of her duties, and by her responsibility. Not a bit. Open her head, and you would find nothing in it but the vision of a grocer’s assistant and a new frock. You then hear weird bumps and gurgling noises. It is the hot water running up behind walls to meet you half-way from the kitchen. You catch the early vivacity of the crèche. A row overhead means that a young man who has already studied the comparative anatomy of cigars is embarking on life. A tinkling of cymbals below--it is a young woman preparing to be attractive to some undiscovered young man in another street.

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The Englishman’s home is assuredly the most elaborate organisation for sustaining and reproducing life in the world--or at any rate, east of Sandy Hook. It becomes more and more elaborate, luxurious, and efficient. For example, illumination is not the most important of its activities. Yet, you will generally find in it four different methods of illumination--electricity, gas, a few oil lamps in case of necessity, and candles stuck about. Only yesterday, as it seems, human fancy had not got beyond candles. Much the same with cookery. Even at a simple refection like afternoon tea you may well have jam boiled over gas, cake baked in the range, and tea kept hot by alcohol or electricity.

I am not old, but I have known housewives who would neither eat nor offer to a guest, bread which they had not baked. They drew water from their own wells. And the idea of a public laundry would have horrified them. And before that generation there existed a generation which spun and wove at home. To-day the English household is dependent on cooperative methods for light, heat, much food, and several sorts of cleanliness. True (though it has abandoned baking), the idea of cooperative cookery horrifies it! However, another generation is coming! And that generation, while expending no more energy than ourselves, will live in homes more complicatedly luxurious than ours. When it is house-hunting it will turn in scorn from an abode which has not a service of hot and cold water in every bedroom and a steam device for “washing up” without human fingers. And it will as soon think of keeping a private orchestra as of keeping a private cook--with her loves and her thirst.

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Leave England and come hack, and you cannot fail to see that this generation is already knocking at the door. When it once gets inside the door it will probably be more “house-proud,” more inclined to regard the dwelling as its toy, with which it can never tire of playing, than even the present generation. Such is a salient characteristic which strikes the returned traveller, and which the foreigner goes back to his own country and talks about--namely, the tremendous and intense pre-occupation of the English home with “comfort”--with every branch and sub-branch of comfort.

“_Le comfort anglais_” is a phrase which has passed into the French language. On spiritual and intellectual matters the Englishman may be the most sweetly reasonable of creatures--always ready to compromise, and loathing discussion. But catch him compromising about his hot-water apparatus, the texture of a beefsteak, or the flushing of a cistern!

III--AMUSEMENTS

It is when one comes to survey with a fresh eye the amusements of the English race that one realises the incomprehensibility of existence. Here is the most serious people on earth--the only people, assuredly, with a genuine grasp of the principles of political wisdom--amusing itself untiringly with a play-ball. The ball may be large and soft, as in football, or small and hard, as in golf, or small and very hard, as in billiards, or neither one thing nor the other, as in cricket--it is always a ball.. Abolish the sphere, and the flower of English manhood would perish from ennui.

The fact is, speaking broadly, there is only one amusement worth mentioning in England. Football dwarfs all the others. It has outrun cricket. This is a hard saying, but a true one. Football arouses more interest, passion, heat; it attracts far vaster crowds; it sheds more blood. Having beheld England, after absence, in the North and in the South, I seem to see my native country as an immense football ground, with a net across the Isle of Wight and another in the neighbourhood of John o’ Groat’s, and the entire population stamping their feet on the cold, cold ground and hoarsely roaring at the bounces of a gigantic football. It is a great game, but watching it is a mysterious and peculiar amusement, full of contradictions. The physical conditions of getting into a football ground, of keeping life in one’s veins while there, and of getting away from it, appear at first sight to preclude the possibility of amusement. They remind one of the Crimean War or the passage of the Beresina. A man will freeze to within half a degree of death on a football ground, and the same man will haughtily refuse to sit on anything less soft than plush at a music-hall. Such is the inexplicable virtue of football.

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Further, a man will safely carry his sense of fair play past the gate of a cricket field, but he will leave it outside the turnstiles of a football ground. I refer to the relentless refusal of the man amusing himself at a football match to see any virtue in the other side. I refer to the howl of execration which can only be heard on a football ground. English public life is a series of pretences. And the greatest pretence of all is that football matches are eleven a side. Football matches are usually a battle between eleven men and ten thousand and eleven; that is why the home team so seldom loses.

The football crowd is religious, stern, grim, terrible, magnificent. It is prepared to sacrifice everything to an ideal. And even when its ideal gets tumbled out of the First League into the Second, it will not part with a single illusion. There are greater things than justice (which, after all, is a human invention, and unknown to nature), and this ferocious idealism is greater than justice. The explanation is that football is the oldest English game--far older than cricket, and it “throws back” to the true, deep sources of the English character. It is a weekly return to the beneficent and heroic simplicity of nature’s methods.

Another phenomenon of the chief English amusement goes to show the religious sentiment that underlies it. A leading Spanish toreador will earn twenty thousand pounds a year. A leading English jockey will make as much. A music-hall star can lay hands on several hundreds a week. A good tea-taster receives a thousand a year, and a cloakroom attendant at a fashionable hotel can always retire at the age of forty. Now, on the same scale, a great half-back, or a miraculous goalkeeper with the indispensable gift of being in two places at once, ought to earn about half a million a year. He is the idol of innumerable multitudes of enthusiasts; he can rouse them into heavenly ecstasy, or render them homicidal, with a turn of his foot. He is the theme of hundreds of newspapers. One town will cheerfully pay another a thousand pounds for the mere privilege of his citizenship. But his total personal income would not keep a stockbroker’s wife in hats! His uniform is the shabbiest uniform ever donned by a military genius, and he is taught to look forward to the tenancy of a tied public-house as an ultimate paradise!

To the unimpassioned observer, nothing in English national life seems more anomalous than this. It can be explained solely by stern religious sentiment. Call it pagan if you will, but even pagan religions were religious. The truth is that so foul a thing as money does not enter into the question. A footballer is treated like a sort of priest. “You have this rare and incommunicable gift,” says the public to him in effect. “You can, for instance, do things with your head that the profane cannot do with their hands. It is no credit to you. You were born so. Yet a few years, and the gift will leave you I Then we shall cast you aside and forget you. But, in the meantime, you are like unto a precious vase. Keep yourself, therefore, holy and uncracked. There is no money in the career, no luxury, no soft cushions, nothing but sprained ankles, broken legs, abstinence, suspensions, and a pittance, followed by ingratitude and neglect. But you have the rare and incommunicable gift I And that is your exceeding reward.”

In view of such an attitude, to offer the salary of a County Court judge to a footballer would be an insult.

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After indulging in the spectacle and the vocal gymnastics of a football match, the British public goes home to its wife, hurries her out, and they stand in the open street at a closed door for an hour, or it may be two hours, stolidly, grimly, fiercely, with obstinate chins, on pleasure bent. They are determined to see that door open, no matter what the weather. Let it rain, let it freeze, they will stand there till the door opens. At last it does open, and they are so superbly eager to see what they shall see that they tumble over each other in order to arrive at the seats of delight. That which they long to witness with such an ardent longing is usually a scene of destruction. Let an artiste come forward and simply guarantee to smash a thousand plates in a quarter of an hour, and he will fill with enraptured souls the largest music-hall in England. Next to splendid destruction the British public is most amused by knockabout comedians, so called because they knock each other about in a manner which would be fatally tragic to any ordinary persons.

Though this freshly-obtained impression of the amusements of the folk is perfectly sincere and fair, it is fair also to assert that the folk shine far more brightly at work and at propaganda than at play. The island folk, being utterly serious, have not yet given adequate attention to the amusement of the better part of themselves. But far up in the empyrean, where culture floats, the directors of the Stage Society and Miss Horniman are devoting their lives to the question.

IV--MANCHESTER

Over thirty years ago I first used to go to Manchester on Tuesdays, in charge of people who could remember Waterloo, and I was taken into a vast and intricate palace, where we bought quantities of things without paying for them--a method of acquisition strictly forbidden in our shop. This palace was called “Rylands.” I knew not what “Rylands” was, but from the accents of awe in which the name was uttered I gathered that its importance in the universe was supreme. My sole impression of Manchester was an impression of extreme noise.

Without shouting you could not make yourself heard in the streets. Ten years later, London-road Station had somehow become for me the gate of Paradise, and I was wont to escape into Manchester as a prisoner escapes into the open country.

After twenty years’ absence in London and Paris I began to revisit Manchester. My earliest impression will be my last. Still the same prodigious racket; the same gigantic altercation between irresistible iron and immovable paving stones! With the addition of the growling thunder of cars that seem to be continually bumping each other as if they were college eights! Lunch in a fashionable grill-room at Manchester constitutes an auditory experience that could not be matched outside New York. In the great saloon there is no carpet on the polished planks of the floor, and the walls consist of highly resonant tiles, for Manchester would not willingly smother the slightest murmur of its immense reverberations. The tables are set close together, so that everybody can hear everybody; the waiters (exactly the same waiters that one meets at Monte Carlo or in the Champs Elysées) understand all languages save English, so that the Britisher must shout at them. Doors are for ever swinging, and people rush to and fro without surcease. It is Babel. In the background, a vague somewhere, an orchestra is beating; one catches the bass notes marking the measure, and occasionally a high squeak in the upper register. And superimposed on this, the lusty voice of a man of herculean physique passionately chanting that “a-hunting we will go.”

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One looks through the window and, astonished, observes one of those electric cars flying hugely past without a sound. The thunder within has challenged and annihilated the heaviest thunder without. The experience is unique. One rushes forth in search of silence. Where can silence dwell in Manchester? The end of every street is a mystery of white fog, a possible home of silence. But no! Be sure that if one plucks out the heart of the mystery one will find a lorry preceded by at least eight iron hoofs. The Art Gallery! One passes in. Clack! Clack! Clack! It is the turnstile. And all afternoon the advent of each student of the fine arts, of each cultivated dilettante, is announced by Clack! Clack! Clack! Two young men come in. Clack! Clack! Clack! Turner’s “Decline of Carthage” naturally arrests them. “By Jove!” says one, “that was something to tackle!” Clack! Clack! Clack! Out again, in search of silence. But over nearly every portal curves the legend: “Music all day.” And outside the music-halls hired bawlers are bawling to the people to come in. At last, near the Infirmary, one sees a stationary cab, and across the window of this cab is printed, in letters of gold, the extraordinary, the magic, the wonderful, the amazing word:

“Noiseless.”

Ah! The traditional, sublime humour of cabmen!

But if my impression has remained, and even waxed, that Manchester would be an ideal metropolis for a nation of deaf mutes, my other early impression, of its artistic and intellectual primacy, is sharply renewed and intensified. Of late, not only by contact with Manchester men, but by the subtle physiognomy of Manchester streets and the revealing gestures of the common intelligent person, I have been more than ever convinced that there is no place which can match its union of intellectual vigour, artistic perceptiveness, and political sagacity.

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Long and close intercourse with capitals has not in the slightest degree modified my youthful conception of Manchester, my admiration for its institutions, and my deep respect for its opinion. London may patronise Manchester as it chooses, but you can catch in London’s tone a secret awe, an inward conviction of essential inferiority. I have noticed this again and again. I know well that my view is shared by the fine flower of Fleet-street, and no dread of disagreeable insinuations or accusations shall prevent me from expressing my sentiments with my customary directness. There is no department of artistic, intellectual, social, or political activity in which Manchester has not corporately surpassed London. And there have been very few occasions on which, when they have differed in opinion, Manchester has been as wrong as London.

It is, of course, notorious that London is still agitated by more than one controversy which was definitely settled by Manchester twenty years ago in the way in which London will settle it twenty years hence. Manchester is too proud to proclaim its fundamental supremacy in the island (though unalterably convinced of it), and no other city would be such a fool as to proclaim it; hence it is not proclaimed. But it exists, and the general knowledge of it exists.

The explanation of Manchester is twofold. First, its geographical situation, midway between the corrupting languor of the south and the too bleak hardness of the north. And, second, that it enjoys the advantages of a population as vast as that of London, without the disadvantages of either an exaggerated centralisation or of a capital. London suffers from elephantiasis, a rush of blue blood to the head, vertigo, imperfect circulation, and other maladies. Bureaucratic and caste influences must always vitiate the existence of a capital, and I do not suppose that any great capital in Europe is the real source of its country’s life and energy. Not Rome, but Milan! Not Madrid, but Barcelona! Not St. Petersburg, but Moscow! Not Berlin, but Hamburg and Munich! Not Paris, but the rest of France! Not London, but the Manchester area!

V--LONDON

There are probably other streets as ugly, as utterly bereft of the romantic, as Lots-road, Chelsea, but certainly nothing more desolating can exist in London. It was ten years since I had seen it, and now I saw it at its worst moment of the week, about ten o’clock of a Sunday morning. Some time before I reached it I heard a humming vibration which grew louder and more impressive as I approached. I passed (really) sixty-eight seagulls sitting in two straight rows on the railings of a deserted County Council pier, and on a rusty lantern at the head of the pier was a sixty-ninth seagull, no doubt the secretary of their trade union.

A mist lay over the river and over a man reading the “Referee” on an anchored barge, and nobody at all seemed to be taking any notice of the growing menace of this humming vibration. Then I came to a gigantic building, quite new to me--I had not suspected that such a thing was--a building which must be among the largest in London, a red brick building with a grandiose architectural effect, an overpowering affair, one of those affairs that man creates in order to show how small and puny he himself is. You could pile all the houses of a dozen neighbouring streets under the colossal roof, of that erection and leave room for a church or so. Extraordinary that a returned exile, interested in London, could have walked about London for days without even getting a glimpse of such hugeness.

It was shut up, closed in, mysterious, inviolable. The gates of its yards were bolted. It bore no legend of its name and owner; there was no sign of human life in it. And the humming vibration came out of it, and was visibly cracking walls and windows in the doll’s-houses of Lots-road that shook at its feet. Lots-road got up to that thunder, went to bed to that thunder, ate bacon to it, and generally transacted its daily life. I gazed baffled at the building. No clue anywhere to the mystery! Nothing but a proof of the determined tendency on the part of civilisation to imitate the romances of H. G. Wells!

A milkman in a striped apron was ringing and ringing angrily at the grille of a locked public-house. I hate to question people in the street, but curiosity concerning a marvel is like love, stronger than hate.

“That?” said the milkman peevishly. “That’s the generating stytion for the electric rilewys.”

“Which railways?” I asked.

“All of ‘em,” said he. “There’s bin above sixty men killed there already.”

*****

Who would have supposed, a few years ago, that romance would visit unromantic Lots-road in this strange and terrible manner, cracking it, smashing it, deafening it, making the vases rattle on its mantelpieces, and robbing it of sleep? Lots-road is now the true romantic centre of London. (It would probably prefer to be something else, but it is.) It holds the true symbol of the development of London’s corporate life.

You come to an unusual hole in the street, and enter it, and find yourself on a large floor surrounded by advertisements of whisky and art furniture. The whole floor suddenly sinks with you towards the centre of the earth, far below sewers. You emerge into a system of tunnels, and, guided by painted white hands, you traverse these tunnels till you arrive at a precipice. Then a suite of drawing-rooms, four or six, glides along the front of the precipice. Each saloon is lighted by scores of electric lamps, and the steel doors of each are magically thrown wide open. An attendant urges you to come in and sit down. You do so, and instantly the suite of rooms glides glittering away with you, curving through an endless subterranean passage, and stopping now and then for two seconds at a precipice. At last you get out, and hurry through more tunnels, and another flying floor wafts you up out of the earth again, and you stagger into daylight and a strange street, and when your eyes have recovered themselves you perceive that the strange street is merely Holborn.. . . And all this because of the roaring necromancers’ castle in Lots-road! All this impossible without the roaring necromancers’ castle!

People ejaculate, “The new Tubes!” and think they have described these astounding phenomena. But they have not.

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