Part 4

We tried hard once to tempt an inflexible gate-keeper to let us in,--just to have a look at it. It was of no use. We assured him we should do no harm, and (as the most delicate means of suggesting a recompense) offered to pay the expenses of any trustworthy person he might choose to send to look after us. He was adamant,--no strangers were allowed in. We appealed to his feelings,--like Rolla and the sentinel,--asked him (in terms we considered adapted to his mental cultivation) how he would like to be a poet wrecked in sight of inspiration. His expressed opinion was that we were making fun of him.

He was not, however, a bad fellow; his sternness was a matter of duty, not constitution. He was touched by our disappointment, and sought to console us by the assurance that we had lost nothing; "that there was nothing to be seen in the tree; that it was about the ugliest he ever see in the whole park; and as for Herne the Hunter, it was nothing but a pack of old woman's rubbage."

However, neither our niggardly exclusion from the sight of the old tree, nor the materialist consolations of our friend the gate-keeper, can efface the impression on our mind of the grim forest-fiend haunting the old park like a family spectre.

There is no satisfactory legend of Herne the Hunter. Vague tradition states that he was a keeper in the forest in Elizabeth's reign, who, having committed some crime which occasioned his dismissal, hung himself on the tree. This is a view of the case we cannot think of taking. The idea of a discharged flunkey committing suicide on a mere sentimental consideration of wages and perquisites is a sorry foundation for the magnificent "demon business" indicated by Shakespeare. Our notion is of something far more weird and fiendish,--a story of fearful crimes and unhallowed compacts; something in the nightmare German ballad style....

It is a long lane that has no turning; we mean the Long Walk is. Passing through a handsome pair of lodge-gates, we emerge fairly into the Great Park.

Now we are in the Forest.

When we inform our reader that our first impulse is to run as fast as our legs can carry us, he will doubtless require an explanation.

Assuming that it is a fine day we have chosen for our ramble, in the first place we are surrounded by a bright and rarefied atmosphere, whose inhalation, to quote a lamented writer, is a process something between breathing and drinking. The scene has changed, as if by magic. The barrier we have just passed would seem to be a fairy circle, shutting out all matters pertaining to human life. Castles and towns are things we must have dreamt of somewhere long ago. We are in a vast solitude of grassy mounds and giant trees, in all their native luxuriance, spreading as far as the eye can reach. The stillness would be appalling but for the clamor of a million birds. We have heard of a native of Piccadilly, who, spending a night in the country for the only time in his life, declared that he had been unable to sleep, the confounded birds made such a noise. If we had a grudge against that native (and doubtless if we knew him we should not be long in forming one, as we certainly should not like him), and had it in our power to punish him in our own way, we should condemn him to sling a hammock on one of the trees in Windsor Great Park, and roost there for a week; for the birds in Windsor Great Park are the noisiest in the world.

These are the combined causes of an effect similar to that of laughing-gas, or something to drink, leading to gymnastic results such as we have indicated....

The rabbits of Windsor Park, by the way, are endowed with matchless impudence. They treat you with a familiarity which borders too close on contempt to be gratifying. They will scarcely get out of your way. They sit comfortably before their holes, lazily watching you go past with as much indifference as a country gentleman seated at his own door would the passing of a travelling tinker. The same may be said of the game generally with which the park abounds. The flocks of deer will go on browsing comfortably till you almost tread on their little black noses. Then there will be a short listless consultation as to whether you are a person to be tolerated or not. The leader will probably give a verdict in the negative, and they turn slowly round, all showing their powder-puffs of tails at once in the most insulting manner, and strut a few yards off, when they recommence their endless meal, merely regarding you as something of a bore and a nuisance, but in no serious light whatever.

Once we started a pheasant; he would not even pay us the compliment of flying. We ran at him violently; he ran a few yards off, and commenced pecking at something. We threw a stone at him; he ducked his head a little,--no more. We waved our hands and cried "Shoo!" in the most approved manner, demonstrations to which he would not condescend to pay the slightest attention. We ran towards him again; he ran away from us a short distance, and then before our very eyes roosted on an old rail with unmistakable intentions of going to sleep. This was insufferable. We could almost have knocked him down with our walking stick, and were sufficiently exasperated to think of trying, when the appearance of a game-keeper on the horizon suddenly made us look in an opposite direction, and commence a careful search for botanical specimens.

This tameness, which is shocking to us, is very different from the trusting innocence of Alexander Selkirk's happy family, who were

"So unaccustomed to man."

It is the insolent security of a privileged class. They know you are not allowed to shoot them, and the airs they give themselves are intolerable....

Descending a cool valley densely wooded with magnificent Scotch firs, we come to a bridge crossing a placid-looking lake of considerable dimensions. The stranger generally thinks this is Virginia Water; he is a little disappointed,--thinks it hardly merits the reputation it has earned for beauty,--but, on the whole, is not dissatisfied. He thinks it is probably a little better farther on, on one side or the other; he wonders which he ought to try; he is, however, loath to explore either till he has ascertained whether there is really anything to be seen or not (for your speculative sight-seer is a cautious fellow, and has a great objection to being taken in). Seeing a lodge-gate a little ahead, he proceeds there to ask whether there is any more of Virginia Water than what he has just left; not but what that was very delightful,--he merely wishes to know. The lodge-keeper laughs sardonically, and, good-naturedly blessing the stranger's eyes, tells him that is none of Virginia Water; then, with a look of contemptuous pity, seizes him by the arm, leads him impatiently to a little gate opening on to a thick wood, thrusts him in, and, bidding him follow his nose, returns to the lodge, satisfied at having nothing more to do with a person of _that_ scale of intelligence.

Our plan is to follow the lodge-keeper's precept and the stranger's example. We pass through the little gate, and after a few seconds' walk through the wood, come unexpectedly on a very novel and delightful scene, of which we cannot speak in higher terms than to say that it fully merits the florid eulogium of the original edition of the _Royal Windsor Guide_, already quoted.

We are standing on the brink of an immense lake, whose extent alone is sufficient to do away with all ideas of its artificial origin. This is completely enclosed by densely wooded acclivities, rising almost from the water's edge, one above the other, in agreeable perspective, so as to exclude the slightest glimpse of the world beyond. On one side of the lake a broad pathway of dark-green grass, yielding like a rich Turkey carpet to the tread, extends from one end of the lake to the other. Immediately on the left, the shelving woods begin to rise. There is not a sound to be heard except a gentle murmur of the trees, that never ceases.

The scene is not very romantic; but there is no earthly reason why it should be; it is very peaceful and very charming, suggesting all sorts of pleasant quiet-life recreations. The lake would not have suited Wordsworth, but it would have been the very thing for Izaak Walton. You could not get much poetry out of the woods, but you could get capital picnics in them; and there be those who despise poetry, but where is the ascetic who would turn up his nose at a picnic?

As we proceed, the view of the lake gets more extensive. The cool breeze from it, and the soft springy turf scarcely six inches above the level of the water, make the walk very agreeable. One feature is particularly worth mentioning; some of the largest and most beautiful specimens of that most dainty of English trees, the silvery birch, are to be seen gracefully dipping their light branches into the lake. At length the pathway takes a turn up into the wood, from which we soon emerge into an open space, where we come across an object that really startles us,--a classic temple in ruins!

These ruins are of course not genuine. At a second glance we recognize the masquerading tendencies of George IV., as developed by Sir Jeffrey Wyattville. There is, however, no objection to the exercise of such a whim in what was never intended to serve any other purpose than that of a gentleman's pleasure-ground. Moreover, the ruin has some claims to be considered as a work of art of no mean merit. The design is admirable, and the semblance of decay is wonderfully imitated. The broken columns seem to have lain there for ages. Huge trees obtrude themselves between the shattered fragments as if they had grown there since the building had fallen to ruin. Some portions are completely hidden by masses of ivy and lichen, apparently the growth of centuries. Altogether the thing is admirably "got up," and makes us think what a stage-manager Sir Jeffrey Wyattville would have made for arranging a Christmas spectacle.

We should remark that the materials, consisting of columns of red and gray granite and porphyry, and several marble statues, are of veritable antiquity. The greater portion were transferred from the outer court of the British Museum, the remainder being from the Elgin collection. The reason of the building being called the Temple of Augustus was probably because Sir Jeffrey thought that name would do for it quite as well as any other, in which case we quite agree with him....

The Great Park is rich in varied woodland scenery. There are not only fine thriving oaks, throwing out their gigantic arms, but sturdy pollards without end, which seem to have set time and season and decay at defiance. They are gnarled and knotted, twisted and distorted, yet at the same time sound and vigorous at heart. The beeches, too, may be seen of all ages and sizes, picturesque and beautiful in their decay, but while in full vigor, and dotted with their sparkling leaves, they are the richest ornament of the wood.... The size of some of the trees is enormous; one beech-tree, near Sawyer's Lodge, measuring, at six feet from the ground, thirty-six feet round. It is now protected from injury, and nature seems to be doing her best towards repairing the damage which its exposure to the attacks of man and beast has produced. It must once have been almost hollow, but the vacuum has been nearly filled up. One might almost fancy that liquid wood, which had afterwards hardened, had been poured into the tree. There is no bark on this extraneous substance; but the surface is smooth, hard, and without any appearance of decay.

THE ASPECT OF LONDON.

HIPPOLYTE TAINE.

[Taine's "English Literature" has in itself added a new work to the world's best literature of far more value than many of those with which it deals. In his "Notes on England" he gives us thoughtful impressions of the country itself, from which we select his pen-picture of the great city on the Thames. The picture is not an inspiring one. He could not avoid comparing in his mind this fog-haunted capital with the brighter aspect of his native Paris.]

Sunday in London in the rain; the shops are shut, the streets are almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas in the desert of squares and streets have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.

I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it, one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things. One's feet churn water; there is water everywhere,--filthy water impregnated with an odor of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a steamboat appear as spots upon blotting-paper. After an hour's walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the city, one has the spleen; one meditates suicide. The lofty lines of fronts are of sombre brick, the exudations being incrusted with fog and soot. Monotony and silence; yet inscriptions on metal or marble speak and tell of the absent master, as in a large manufactory of bone-black closed on account of a death.

A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand which is called Somerset House. Massive and heavy piece of architecture, of which the hollows are inked, the porticoes blackened with soot, where, in the cavity of the empty court, is a sham fountain without water, pools of water on the pavement, long rows of closed windows,--what can they possibly do in these catacombs?

It seems as if the livid and sooty fog had even befouled the verdure of the parks. But what most offends the eye are the colonnades, peristyles, Grecian ornaments, mouldings, and wreaths of the houses all bathed in soot. Poor antique architecture, what is it doing in such a climate? The flutings and columns in front of the British Museum are begrimed as if liquid mud had been poured over them. St. Paul's--a kind of Pantheon--has two ranges of columns: the lower range is entirely black; the upper range, recently scraped, is still white, but the white is offensive: coal-smoke has already plastered it with its leprosy.

These spots are melancholy, being the decay of the stone. And these nude statues in memory of Greece! Wellington as a fighting hero, naked under the dripping trees of the park! That hideous Nelson, stuck on his column with a coil of rope in the form of a pig-tail, like a rat impaled on the top of a pole! Every form, every classical idea, is contrary to nature here. A swamp like this is a place of exile for the ark of antiquity. When the Romans disembarked here they must have thought themselves in Homer's hell, in the land of the Cimmerians. The vast space which, in the south, stretches between the earth and the sky, cannot be discovered by the eye; there is no air; there is nothing but liquid fog; in this pale smoke objects are but fading phantoms. Nature has the look of a bad drawing in charcoal, which some one has rubbed with his sleeve.

I have just spent half an hour on Waterloo Bridge. The Houses of Parliament, blurred and indistinct, appear in the distance but a wretched pile of scaffolding; nothing is discernible, and, more particularly, nothing is living, except a few steamboats skimming along the river, black, smoky, unwearied insects. A Greek watching their passengers embarking and disembarking would have thought of the Styx. He would have found that to exist here was not to live; in fact, life here is different from what it is in his country; the ideal has altered with the climate. The mind quits the without to retire within itself, and there creates a world. Here one must have a comfortable and well-ordered home, clubs, societies, plenty of business, many religious and moral preoccupations; above all, instead of abandoning one's self to the influence of exterior impressions, it is necessary to extrude all the sad promptings of unfriendly Nature, and fill up the great void wherein melancholy and tedium would take up their abode.

[After this gloomy image of a rainy London, and a description of the Sunday church services, the writer proceeds in a more complimentary vein.]

The population numbers three millions and a quarter; that makes twelve cities like Marseilles, ten cities like Lyons, two cities like Paris, put together; but words upon paper are no substitutes for the sensation of the eyes. It is necessary to take a cab several days in succession, and proceed straight on towards the south, the north, the east, and the west, during a whole morning, as far as the uncertain limits where houses grow scanty and the country begins.

Enormous, enormous,--this the word which always recurs. Moreover, all is rich and well ordered; consequently they must think us neglected and poor. Paris is mediocre compared with these squares, these crescents, these circles and rows of monumental buildings of massive stone, with porticoes, with sculptured fronts, these spacious streets. There are sixty of them as vast as the Rue de la Paix. Assuredly Napoleon III. demolished and rebuilt Paris only because he had lived in London. In the Strand, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in the neighborhood of London Bridge, in twenty places, there is a bustling crowd, a surging traffic, an amount of obstruction which our busiest and most frequented boulevard cannot parallel. Everything is on a large scale here: the clubs are palaces; the hotels are monuments; the river is an arm of the sea; the cabs go twice as fast; the boatmen and the omnibus conductors condense a sentence into a word; words and gestures are economized; actions and time are turned to the utmost possible account; the human being produces and expends twice as much as among us.

From London Bridge to Hampton Court are eight miles,--that is, nearly three leagues of buildings. After the streets and quarters erected together, as one piece, by wholesale, like a hive after a model, come the countless pleasure retreats, cottages surrounded with verdure and trees in all styles,--Gothic, Grecian, Byzantine, Italian, of the Middle Age, or the Revival, with every mixture and every shade of style,--generally in lines, or clusters of five, ten, twenty of the same sort, apparently the handiwork of the same builder, like so many specimens of the same vase or the same bronze. They deal in houses as we deal in Parisian articles. What a multitude of well-to-do, comfortable, and rich existences! One divines accumulated gains, a wealthy and spending middle class quite different from ours, so pinched, so straitened. The most humble, in brown brick, are pretty by dint of tidiness; the windows sparkle like mirrors; there is nearly always a green and flowery patch; the front is covered with ivy, honeysuckle, and nasturtiums.

The entire circumference of Hyde Park is covered with houses of this sort, but finer, and those in the midst of London retain a country look. Each stands detached in its square of turf and shrubs, has two stories in the most perfect order and condition, a portico, a bell for the tradespeople, a bell for the visitors, a basement for the kitchen and the servants, with a flight of steps for the service; very few mouldings and ornaments; no outside sun-shutters; large, clear windows which let in plenty of light; flowers on the sills and at the portico; stables in a mews apart, in order that their odors and sight might be kept at a distance; all the external surface covered with white, shining, and varnished stucco; not a speck of mud or dust; the trees, the turf, the flowers, the servants, prepared as if for an exhibition of prize products.

How well one can picture the inhabitant after seeing his shell! In the first place, it is the Teuton who loves nature, and who needs a reminder of the country; next, it is the Englishman who wishes to be by himself on his staircase as in his room, who could not endure the promiscuous existence of our huge Parisian cages, and who, even in London, plans his house as a small castle, independent and enclosed. Besides, he is simple, and does not desire external display; on the other hand, he is exacting in the matter of condition and comfort, and separates his life from that of his inferiors. The number of such houses at the Westend is astonishing. The rent is nearly five hundred pounds; from five to seven servants are kept; the master expends from twelve to twenty-four hundred pounds a year. There are ten of these fortunes and these lives in England to every one in France.

The impression is the same when visiting the parks; the taste, the area are quite different from what is the case among us. St. James's Park is a genuine piece of country, and of English country; huge old trees, real meadows, a large pond peopled with ducks and water-fowl; cows and sheep, in an enclosed space, fed on the grass, which is always fresh. There are even sheep in the narrow green border that surrounds Westminster Abbey; these people love the country in their hearts. It is sufficient to read their literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Thomson to Wordsworth and Shelley, to find proofs of this. What a contrast to the Tuileries, the Champs-Elysees, the Luxembourg! As a rule, the French garden, that of Louis XIV., is a room or gallery in the open air, wherein to walk and converse in company; in the English garden, such as they have invented and propagated, one is better alone; the eyes and the mind converse with natural things. We have arranged a park on this model in the Bois de Boulogne; but we have committed the blunder of placing therein a group of rocks and waterfalls; the artifice is discovered at a glance, and offends; English eyes would have felt it.

[A description of Regent's Park follows, with some words on the English love of out-door exercise. Piccadilly and Hyde Park are next mentioned.]

Hyde Park is the largest of them all, with its small rivulet, its wide greensward, its sheep, its shady walks, resembling a pleasure park suddenly transported to the centre of a capital. About two o'clock the principal alley is a riding-ground; there are ten times more gentlemen and twenty times more ladies on horseback than in the Bois de Boulogne on its most frequented days; little girls and boys of eight ride on ponies by the side of their father; I have seen ample and worthy matrons trolling along. This is one of the luxuries. Add to it that of having servants. For instance, a family of three persons which I visited keeps seven servants and three horses. The mother and daughter gallop in the park daily; they often pay visits on horseback; they economize in other things,--in theatre-going, for example; they go but seldom to the theatre, and when they do it is to a box which has been presented to them. This vigorous exercise appears indispensable for health; young girls and ladies come here even when it rains....