Part 10

In the centre of Manchester the same architect has erected a larger building, a Town-hall, which cost £1,000,000. Rich and admirable as it is, it is not, on account of the crowding of houses around it, and the irregularity of the ground upon which it is built, so effective in appearance as the Assize Court. The interior decoration is remarkable for the beautiful variety of colors secured by a careful mingling of English, Scotch, and Irish granites grouped as double stems in the balustrade of a spiral stairway. The Irish granite is a bluish-gray, the Scotch has a faint red tint, and the English Shapfels has salmon-colored spars, which are as large as raisins. They all take a beautiful polish, and I think that for a large public building the effect is better than if they were marble.

Manchester has shown good sense and good taste in having employed Mr. Ford Madox Brown to paint six, at least, of the panels in the great hall of this Town-hall. These mural paintings are not surpassed by any recent work of the kind which I have seen. Mr. Madox Brown is pre-eminent for his archæological knowledge and poetic conceptions, and his genius has been at its best in these noble works. At the time of this writing three panels have been finished. The first represents the Romans building a fort at Mancenion (Manchester), anno 60. Agricola, Governor of Britain, is represented with a centurion beside him, examining a parchment plan of the Camp; a standard-bearer holds the silken Dragon-standard--emblem borrowed from the “barbarians”--which floats in the wind. The Legionaries are doing mason-work; Britons bear the stones and cement. Agricola’s wife and little boy are in the scene. The second panel represents the Baptism of Edwin, at York, in the year 627. The artist follows the account of Bede, who says that a small wooden church was hastily erected for this purpose on the site where York Minster now stands, but has introduced a Roman mosaic floor. In his noble picture of Edwin he has been inspired by Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Paulinus:”

“Mark him, of shoulders curved, and stature tall, Black hair, and vivid eye, and meagre cheek, His prominent feature like an eagle’s beak; A man whose aspect doth at once appall And strike with reverence.”

The third panel is the Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester. One less acquainted than this artist with ancient fact might be surprised at the beardless, boyish appearance of the escaping Danes; but it is true that the Vikings began their adventures early--at the age of fifteen, it is said--and became respectable married men a few years later. The town-folk are hurling missiles at the retreating party, one of which--thrown by a young woman from a house--strikes down the “Raven” standard. Mr. Madox Brown’s further designs include “The establishment of Flemish Weavers in Manchester, 1330;” “William Crabtree (draper, of Broughton, near Manchester) observing the transit of Venus, 1639;” and “The Decree Court Leet that all weights and measures are to be tested, 1566.” No man is better able to invest with beauty these events connected with the history of Manchester. Mr. Madox Brown is using for these mural paintings the “Gambier-Parry” process. The medium consists of a mixture of wax, resin, and essential oil, with which the stucco of the wall is coated and the colors ground. Every color ever used with oil, water, or fresco is admissible with this medium; and the surface when dry is without shine, while yet the utmost luminosity pertaining to any other method is attainable with it. It seems likely to become the general mode in this climate, and has given equal satisfaction to Sir F. Leighton and Mr. Madox Brown.

One other of the immense buildings which have become so characteristic of the populous centres of England I must mention, namely, the new Midland Railway-station, at St. Pancras, in London. This is probably the finest railway-station in the world, and it is the chief work of Sir Gilbert Scott. It is a vast pile, of which every outward detail is graceful and substantial, its turrets and great clock-tower superb. This immense building conveys, however, an unpleasant impression of being out of place. It implies a park, or at least a larger and more picturesque space than the irregular and ugly one at King’s Cross, to secure the perspective needed for any sight of it as a whole. Entering, we find ourselves beneath a vast span of iron and glass, almost like a sky. The front part of the building is a hotel. It has been decorated by Robert Sang, and furnished by Gillow, in the most expensive style, and certainly presents some rich interiors. The reading-room has green cloth-paper, and a ceiling gay with huge leaf frescoes; it is divided by a double arch with gilded architraves. The mantel-pieces are of dark marble, with two small pillars of yellow marble set on either side. The coffee-room has a general tone of drab, with touches of gold in the paper, and a sort of sarcophagus chimney-piece, surmounted by an antique mirror of bevelled glass. The sitting-room has red floral paper, and an imitation mosaic ceiling. One of the bedrooms which I visited had deep-green paper, with gold lines and spots, and bed-curtains somewhat similar. The furniture was of heavy oak, tastefully carved. The halls and corridors have a dado of fine dark brown tiles, and bright fleur-de-lis paper above. All of which was rich, costly, and, with slight exceptions, by no means gaudy. Yet I could not altogether like it, or think the decorations entirely appropriate for a hotel. It looked as if there had been more exercise of ingenuity to find things costly than to find things beautiful. The _salon_, the reading-room, may naturally be made gorgeous, but the bedroom ought to be more quiet. One does not desire to sleep amid purple and gold. The traveller who needs rest may well spare these things--which, however, he knows will not spare him; for if there is gold paper on the wall, there will be gold paper in the bill.

For its purpose it would be difficult to fancy, impossible to find, a more complete structure than “The Criterion,” which the great London caterers, Messrs. Spiers & Pond, have erected at Piccadilly Circus. This building includes social and private dining-rooms, room for _table d’hôte_, hall for public banquets and balls, restaurant, and buffet; and beneath all these a theatre large enough to entertain a thousand people. The architect, Mr. Thomas Verity, plainly had it in his mind to raise a great gastronomic temple, and when one enters the door, what he sees on every side is the apotheosis of eating. Through an archway we enter, and find ourselves amid the French Renaissance. The façade outside, and the door-way, with its glazed framing and superb bronze columns, make one feel that he is about to dine superbly. Really he does dine remarkably well, though the French Renaissance hardly extends to the culinary art of the establishment, for that would imply a revolution in the Briton’s constitution. Mr. Wyon has placed some fair sculptures, the Seasons, etc., in the niches and on spandrels of the wall outside, but the inside decorations of Mr. Simpson are truly, in the words of Messrs. Spiers & Pond, “upon a scale which has hitherto never been attempted.” The grand hall rises squarely through three stories to a light Mansard-roof, from which sunburners blaze down at night, and outside of which is a promenade commanding a fine view of London. All of the sides of this grand and lofty hall are of tiles made for this establishment, and combining to form large pictures, the subjects of which were designed and painted by A. W. Coke. Over the right-hand door, leading to the restaurant, is a semi-classical scene of youth and maid by the sea-side gathering in fish; on the opposite side, over the door opening into the buffet, is a picture of two girls in a wheat field, where there is an apple-tree, the one attending to the sheaves, the other to the apples; around the lower hall are--still in tile mosaic--large figures of Euterpe and Terpsichore (for there will be music and dancing above), Pomona, Flora, Bacchus, and, of course, Diana, goddess of venison. The floor of the hall is as fine as any mosaic in London, and is adorned at the edges with the monograms of the firm. In the restaurant there are all manner of allegorical figures on the walls, the Seasons, and the genii which dig and delve and hunt, all with the object that humanity shall be fed. In the buffet there are charming tile pictures representing chubby boys and girls; one party up the tree gathering fruits, the other beneath catching the same and putting them into baskets; in each picture a different tree and fruit. On one side of the main stairway is the figure of a boy stealing up to a bird’s nest, over which a bird hovers; opposite, the boy has the nest, the bird flies away. This device is not immoral; it means that plovers’ eggs are on the bill of fare. One of the finest things in this staircase is an ebony hand-railing, three inches in diameter, with plated silver mountings. Also a very fine effect has been produced by framing the door-ways in white majolica, although greater simplicity in the designs than human faces festooned with flowers would, I suspect, have been better. I must not omit to mention that the cornice inside the grand hall, at the top of the first and here floorless story, has the unique ornament of sentences from Shakspeare running all around the walls, with picturesque lettering:

“None here, he hopes, In all this noble bevy, has brought with her One care abroad: he would have all as merry As first-good company, good wine, good welcome, Can make good people.”

* * * * *

“A good digestion to you all: and, once more, I shower a welcome on you;--Welcome all.”

So it is that money enough enables common folk now to dine in palaces and enjoy banquets quite as royally served and surrounded as Bluff Harry offered to Cardinal Wolsey and the lords and ladies at the Presence Chamber in York Place. But even that monarch could not have entertained his guests so luxuriously in one particular as Messrs. Spiers & Pond theirs; for these, having dined, may pass through a door and descend by a stairway adorned with Muses and mirrors, and rich with floral clusters, to a theatre all glorious in blue and gold, cushioned chairs, boxes with curtains of yellow satin and lace, and a good drab background to set them off, and pass the rest of the evening in enjoyment of well-acted comedies or operettas.

So far as most of the hotels and restaurants of London are concerned, one may with satisfaction follow the advice of the Duke of Gloster to Anne, in the first act of _Richard III._:

“Leave these sad designs To him that hath more cause to be a mourner, And presently repair to Crosby Place.”

For the old Gothic palace in the City, which Sir John Crosby built on a piece of land with one hundred and ten feet frontage, for which he paid a little over eleven pounds, which his widow sold to the duke who afterward became Richard III., and which in Shakspeare’s time had fallen to the richest of Lord Mayors (Sir John Spencer), has now followed the course of so many royal buildings, and become the banqueting-hall of the public.

Crosby Hall is haunted by memories of the great. It gives flavor to everything one eats in it to know that it has been celebrated by Shakspeare, that from the year in which it was built (1466) it was associated with whatever has been most romantic in the history of London. Here Sir John Rest was installed as Lord Mayor in the days (1516) when the Lord Mayor’s Show meant something. The civic procession which accompanied him contained four giants, one unicorn, one dromedary, one camel, one ass, one dragon, six hobby-horses, and sixteen naked boys. Here resided Sir Thomas More, Under-treasurer and Lord High Chancellor of England. Here he wrote his best works, and received the visits of Henry VIII. Here Erasmus visited the author of _Utopia_, whose domestic life he described: “With him you might imagine yourself in the academy of Plato; but I should do injustice to his house by comparing it to the academy of Plato, where numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes moral virtues, were the subjects of discussion; it would be more just to call it a school and an exercise of the Christian religion. All its inhabitants, male and female, applied their leisure to liberal studies and profitable reading, although piety was their first care. No wrangling, no idle word, was heard in it; every one did his duty with alacrity, and not without a temperate cheerfulness.” In 1672 the hall was arranged for Non-conformist meetings. For ninety-seven years it was devoted to this purpose, and among those who preached here was Thomas Watson, who wrote the famous tract (_Heaven Taken By Storm_) which converted Colonel Gardiner. It is not wonderful that its old splendors then began to depart. The _Mercury_ of May 23, 1678, advertised a sale at Crosby Hall, where would be disposed of, among other things, “tapestry hangings, a good chariot, and a black girl about fifteen years of age.” Then it became the office of the old East India Company; next a literary and scientific institute; next a wholesale wine warehouse; and at length came into the hands of its present proprietors, who have restored it to its original purpose by making it a banqueting-hall. They have preserved it, and stained its windows with portraits and pictures representing all its history. The decorations are in perfect keeping with the beautiful Gothic style of the building, and the colors seem to have expanded on it as a flower on its stem. One seems to be dining here in an older Guildhall and at a daily Lord Mayor’s banquet, with ancient Shakspearian characters for company. It is particularly entertaining to observe what a rich frieze can be secured for a hall in England by a skilful arrangement of the historic shields and coats of arms which belong to the country; while if some beautiful central figure on wall or glass is desired, it may be obtained in any one of the suggestive and mystical devices which are associated with the olden time--the boar, the lamb with its flag, and so on.

But neither the Criterion nor Crosby Hall furnishes, as I think, the same degree of beauty appropriate to dining-halls as may be found at the South Kensington Museum. Here one of the rooms was intrusted for decoration to Mr. Poynter, for a time President of the Art School there. He has made exquisite designs for the tiles of which the walls are altogether composed. The simple blue and white colors, and the purely decorative character of the figures thus made, make one almost regret that these figures are not Chinese instead of classic or allegorical, in which case one might eat with a feeling of comfortable seclusion in a china dish. The regular dining-room in the Museum was intrusted to Morris & Co., who have placed on the upper part of the walls a rich floral decoration of embossed plaster, colored (gray-green) by hand. The lower part of the wall, extending over two yards from the floor, consists of panels, on each of which is painted, on a gold ground, some allegorical figure. These figures represent the sun, the moon, and signs of the zodiac; they were designed by Burne Jones, and bear too much of that mystical light and expression which invest all forms and faces evoked by his magic touch to be gastronomically suggestive. In this respect neither Burne Jones nor the young artist (Murray) who painted his designs could rival the decorator of the Criterion; but one may dine at South Kensington amid one of the pleasantest little picture-galleries in existence. When Ralph Waldo Emerson was last in London, a poet who wished to give him a dinner conceived the happy thought of bringing him here, and the sage of Concord no doubt approximated his friend Alcott’s ideal of “dining magnificently;” even the “bowls of sunshine” with which A. would replace wine were supplied by the rich stained windows of Morris, and by the brilliant white-and-gold of the restaurant which separates the two rooms so exquisitely decorated.

There is no doubt that the barbaric element in English taste received a fresh accession of vigor with the advent of the Georges to England. What it was capable of, and what it found pleasing to the aristocratic butterflies who flitted around him whom they adored as “the first gentleman in Europe,” may be discovered in the Pavilion, at Brighton. That building may be regarded as the physiognomical monument of George IV. It is his cerebral interior projected into stone and decoration. The secret stairways and passages leading up to fictitious wardrobes, really door-ways to rooms which his majesty desired to visit, represent the prince that sent horsemen to trample down laborers at Peterloo, whose only guilt was to discuss their wrongs; the bizarre carvings, which make fine stone look like terra-cotta, illustrate the fop who had come to prefer figment to fact. The interior decorations do not represent so well the monarch whom Thackeray analyzed, and found in his h nds only a heap of pad, paint, gold-lace, but no man at all. Those frescoes were made during the first furor which occurred in England about Chinese and Japanese art; and, though ludicrously gorgeous, they are not without a certain interest, arising from the boundless freedom of their design and colors. How this can be it will be difficult for my reader to imagine, when he is told that the walls are covered with large dragons (life size, one might say, if dragons existed), serpents, wild cormorant-like birds, all having a grand field-day amid ladies and pleasure-grounds. The pillars are like barbers’ poles, with the archæological serpent twined around each instead of the red stripe. The Pavilion is said to have found in Mr. P. T. Barnum its only admirer. English critics have been rather hard upon it. Sydney Smith said that the structure looked “as if the dome of St. Paul’s had come down to Brighton and pupped.” William Cobbett thought that “a good idea of the building might be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners.” The main intent of the building is to imitate a Chinese pagoda, and it was with that aim that the Prince of Wales (for he seems to have been mainly his own architect) committed this enormity. Two years ago the British Association for the Advancement of Science gathered for its charming summer _séances_ at Brighton, and the rooms of the Royal Pavilion were placed at their service. Never were the sessions of the Association so well housed, but it was amusing to witness the difficulty which even eminent savants had in the rivalry between the attractions of the wall-papers and the scientific papers. On the whole, it is to be feared that the grotesque ornaments left by the Regent carried the day. On one occasion, when a discussion occurred in the anthropological section on serpent-worshippers, the dragons and serpents on the wall were so appropriate that the room had the appearance of being frescoed for the archæological purposes of the day. But the ordinary contrast between the severe disquisitions of the scientific men and the luxuriant and barbaric colors and forms of the Pavilion was not so great as I witnessed recently in the same place. In the room which above all the rest might be regarded as the temple of vanity, a hundred ritualistic gentlemen and ladies had gathered to hold a prayer-meeting! In the evening there was a ball in the same room, and then it appeared plainly what had been the final cause of the Brighton Pavilion. I may add that the large building which George IV. erected for his stable, and whose roof is a vast dome, is now the chief concert-room of Brighton, and that another outlying building of the place is occupied by a fair picture-gallery, a good museum, and a capital library. Huish, in his _Memoirs of George IV._, says: “Nothing could exceed the indignation of the people when the civil list came before Parliament, in May, 1816, and £50,000 were found to have been expended in furniture at Brighton, immediately after £534,000 had been voted for covering the excess of the civil list, occasioned entirely by the reckless extravagance of the Prince Regent, whose morning levees were not attended by men of science and of genius, who could have instilled into his mind wholesome notions of practical economy; but the tailor, the upholsterer, the jeweller, and the shoemaker were the regular attendants of his morning recreations.” These mechanics were no doubt the worthiest folk who frequented the building they had made so fine, and probably most of them had to take their pay in royal smiles; but it would have relieved the indignant minds of the middle classes, who chiefly had to supply the exorbitant civil list, if they could have foreseen that their money was destined in the end to supply their favorite watering-place with an agreeable, instructive, and useful institution.