Memories of London

THIRTY-FIVE years ago, like many a wiser moth before and after me, I set my face for London. What I knew of it was what any American boy of English descent knows : “ London cries,” Dick Whittington, something of the town’s history and as much of its geography, and the young Queen, — she seemed young always, because as a child I remember hearing of the Princess Victoria and her coronation. But to me there was a more potent attraction than even old London. I had been reading and re-reading with enthusiasm that first volume of Modern Painters. I had in a weak and blind way begun the study of art in a country town, where there was no instruction and very little help, and the glowing eulogies of Turner, the splendid fallacies and witching rhetoric of the Graduate of Oxford, had woven a spell around me which left me with one overruling purpose in life, — to go to London, see the pictures of Turner, and learn the great secret of my art.

Dick Whittington was scarcely more naive, if more fortunate. I had sold a picture for thirty dollars, and decided to go to London and stay as long as it lasted ! I had never been away from home. I knew little more than a child of the value of money, had never paid for a lodging or a dinner, and thirty dollars, I calculated, would keep me six weeks. I had all the unquestioning faith of utter ignorance of the highways or byways of the world. I would follow the sun when he was visible, and the moon when he was not, and determined, without taking counsel of any one, what was to be done. The question of a passage troubled me no more than it did the Israelites fleeing from Pharaoh. I felt that I should get across, and the proverbial New York merchant was my deus ex machina. Thomas Tileston offered me a passage on one of his liners to Liverpool, and the old Garrick, splendid sailing ship of eight hundred tons, Captain Asa Eldridge, wafted me across. The captain took kindly to me, and eased my obligations to the hotel-keeper in Liverpool, so that I got to London with half of my thirty dollars in my pocket.

I had left New York at the end of December ; the Hudson was filled with floating ice, the Jersey hills were covered with snow. I found the shores of England green, and the fields like ours in early spring. I arrived at Euston Square late in the afternoon of a mild and smoky day of January, a third-class passenger, with my luggage, a tiny leather valise, under my arm, which, with a Spanish cloak, was all my impedimenta ; and fearful of further expense and of pillaging landlords if I trusted my three sovereigns to their sheltering roofs, I bought a two-penny loaf and walked the streets all night. I had a letter of introduction from G. P. Putnam, the publisher, to his correspondent Thomas Delf, and, inquiring my way across London to his office in Paternoster Row, I was sitting by his doorway on my valise when he came in the morning. He directed me to a quiet lodging-house in Bouverie Street, kept by an honest landlady, and I installed myself in a bedroom, which was also to be my studio, at six shillings a week, including the cooking of my breakfast.

In the years which have since passed I have many times returned to London, and am as familiar with it as a Londoner born, so that to find a new thing in it would indeed surprise me; but there come now and then days, or rather moments, in the winter, when the smoke settles down and fills the streets with its dusky veil and shadowless mystery, when the yellow sky even at noon of a quiet day hardly allows a red sun to be seen at odd moments, and when both unite with the pungent odors of the coal smoke to recall this first visit, and I cannot describe the witchery and delight of that dreamy and weird recollection, which is like that of a past existence, formless, indefinable, but a part of my very life.

I write from a new home in a quarter of the great city which at the time in question was the country. We speak of the rapid changes in our American cities, but nothing like the changes of London can exist with us. Growth is not a change of this kind. Paris alone, in certain respects, can show such metamorphoses as London. But on the whole. Paris, as I saw it at this first visit to the Old World, was more like the Paris one sees now than was London of 1850 like the London of to-day. The mere question of growth is a minor matter. London was not the metropolis of the world in 1850, and now it is. Then it was only a huger provincial town. The Londoner in general measured nothing but himself, and nobody came to London for anything but hardware, good walking-boots, saddles, etc.; now it is the entrepôt of the civilized world. The World’s Fair of 1851 and succeeding similar displays of what cosmopolite industry can do, the common arrival of ocean steamers, rare at the time I am writing of, have changed the entire character of London life and business and the tone of its society. It is not merely in the fact that 48,000 houses were built in the capital in the last year, or that you find colonies of French, Italians, Russians, Greeks in it, but that the houses are no longer what they were, inside or out, and thus the foreigner is an assimilated ingredient in its philosophy. All this has come since 1850.

Sitting by my coal fire, which flames ruddily and flickeringly, and fills the room with the smoky aroma all know who have once been in any English city, the meditation my subject provokes runs to melancholy and a regret, sentimental certainly, but pathetic, for the days when this veiled sunshine and pungent atmosphere first became familiar to me. I shut my senses close to go back, as only old men can, when the new fact fades and the first impression comes out like an old picture over which some bungler has badly painted a new one.

Between my quarter, which was then a straggling hamlet and is now a continuous part of London, and London itself there was then a wide stretch of green fields and kitchen gardens. The whole quarter of South Kensington, Earl’s Court, Baron’s Court, and Raven’s Court has grown up and continued London to Hammersmith; but there was a green expanse with hawthorn hedges, where one heard the lark and rook, and saw far away the faint blue of the hills of Norwood, Clapham, and Wandsworth, where now, as far as the towers of the Crystal Palace, is an almost unbroken mass of houses. With very few exceptions the men I then knew are gone ; and when I walk out, as I used to, by the road that runs still from Brompton to Hammersmith, the stately houses that line the streets are little more than tombstones to me.

Amongst the very few letters I had to people in London was one from Mr. Putnam to S. C. Hall, then editor of the Art Journal, who gave me another to a now dead and forgotten landscape painter, J. B. Pyne, one of the most consummate of his craft that England has produced, and who lived within a pistol shot of the site of my present residence, on what was a country road ; and every Sunday afternoon I walked from my lodgings to his house, measuring the distance by the milestones as I went along, — six miles, of which half were amongst the fields. He used to keep in baronial style a place at his dinner-table for every comer, and there one met a society wholly devoted to art. Pyne was an admirable talker, and few men whom I have met had larger ideas of his art, or greater generosity in imparting his instruction to learners. As an artist he was never popular : his art was far too refined and averse from the qualities that catch the uneducated eye. He had not great genius, but a talent which came near it, and he was surpassed in general power by no one of his contemporaries except Turner, of whom he was an ardent admirer and to a certain extent a follower. There was in his art a certain dash of the artificial, and a limitation in method of treatment which is invariably the concomitant of talent when unaccompanied by genius. Talent alone, be it great or little, runs in grooves, be-

trays its identity in every movement, is always recognizable. Talent with imagination — that is, real creative power, the capacity to make new things and find new paths — is genius. Though Pyne’s talent ran always in a groove, it was a large and noble one, and it is safe, I think, to predict that his pictures will, when another century is half gone, rank amongst the very best his generation has left. He was too much led by theory, but this is a common defect of talent when coupled with intellect only, which makes overmuch account of the instruction that cost it so great labor; while genius, aware that the best in what it does is a gift of its peculiar inspiration, does not plume itself on the lower excellences. Pyne had caught from Turner the greater landscape motives, the appreciation of light and space, which, with a subtle feeling for the harmony and play of color and grace in his composition, allied him more closely in style to the great master than to any other contemporary, and to careless observers caused him to be esteemed a mere imitator of Turner, which he was very far from being. His executive power was very great, and, being proud of it, he was sometimes ostentatious of it; but he never, like some of his most successful contemporaries, descended to tricks of execution or vulgar bravura. He sometimes painted imitations of the great landscape masters, partly as studies and partly as tours de force, and, being accustomed to travel in his own groove, he proceeded very well in any other painter’s when once he got into it. I have no doubt that some of Pyne’s recollections of Turner’s pictures, which were never copies but emulations, will sell for original Turners when their centennial comes round; and as he was more careful in the method of painting and painted with fewer alterations than Turner, it is possible that these imitations will then be so much better preserved that they will be taken for the best examples of the great painter’s mariner. Pyne told me of his having painted a picture in the manner of Ruysdael which, though sold as an imitation, was finally established as by the master himself; and one day, having received an invitation from one of the leading dealers to see a new Ruysdael, he was not a little surprised to find his own work. He at once undeceived the dealer by only removing a little paint in one corner and discovering his signature, which he had concealed there for this contingency. Notwithstanding the disclosure, the picture was sold as a Ruysdael, but to whom Pyne could not learn.

Of all the English landscape painters whose work I have known, except Turner, Pyne was the most productive. His extraordinary facility and certainty of execution, having no repentirs and no labor lost, enabled him, as he used to express it, to keep a picture manufactory. Yet nothing was ever slighted. Pictures were often in hand for two or three years ; and so studious was he of their permanence that he made careful account of the effect of time on his pigments, although in their finished state they might have a raw look which age, he said, would cure. He used to say that the men who wanted their pictures to appear at their best when they were first seen had to pay the penalty in their future estimation, but he preferred that his should be at their best for future times. With all his methodical way of picture-making, he never fell off in his sincerity and conscientious care for the quality of his pictures. In a letter from him from the Italian lakes, written in 1852, I find a passage which betrays something both of the good and evil of his manner of studying nature, which he commonly did with great painstaking and exactitude : —

“ Perhaps you may not think it too much twaddle if I state to you my present method of procedure. First of all, then, I am vastly assisted in my present undertaking by having with me my wife and two friends. One of them, a gentleman of six feet, and not weighing more than eleven stone, is the best hunter-down of the picturesque in landscape of any one I ever knew. The other assists in devoting himself to outline details and close studies of any portion that may be worth the time. This, you can readily imagine, enables me to make an untrammeled but elaborate colored drawing of the subject under effect, as, should I lose anything of locality or character in selecting a treatment which, to a great extent, may preclude both the one and the other, I am enabled in any future work to fall back upon my friend’s outlines, which are superb for fidelity and character, and the colored studies. This, you will say, is an expensive way for a private artist to attack a country, but I see no other mode equally efficient, and fancy that it will be productive of results.”

At the time I am writing of, Ruskin’s influence on public taste was almost supreme, and the men whose works he praised had an undue share of popularity. Pyne was never in favor with him ; probably, to a great extent, because he never would waste time in elaborating foregrounds, though for delicacy of painting in his distances, and for absolute fidelity in actual views, nobody in England has ever approached him, and, with very few exceptions, he has never been equaled in the making up of his picture, which, without being imaginative, was always agreeable. Other reasons for Ruskin’s not liking him were, perhaps, his emulation of Turner’s most characteristic qualities, which would not be grateful to one who insisted that Turner was the only artist who had them, and the animosity between Pyne and Harding, who was Ruskin’s drawing-master, and very largely influenced his opinions in his earlier phases. Ruskin always observed the most contemptuous silence with regard to Pyne’s work, and this, with the hostility of the Royal Academy, kept the appreciation of his art within a small circle ; but there he was held at his full value, which is, in my own opinion, that of one of the greatest of landscape painters. What is most singular in regard to his work is that no pictures of their epoch come so rarely to the hammer.

To the hospitality of Mr. Hall I owe nearly all my earliest knowledge of London art and artists. He gave me a letter to Harding, a burly, solid, and typical Englishman, full of common sense, and utterly destitute of imagination or poetic feeling. He had a surprisingfacility of execution, whether in oil or water-color, a thorough feeling for the pictorial in nature ; and his work was, on the whole, as prosaic and antipathetical as painting could be. As one of the leaders in the movement towards naturalism, which destroyed the last life of the old English poetical school of landscape painting, and ushered in that of realism more or less complete, he holds his place. To Mr. Hall I owe also the acquaintance of Creswick, facile painter of glade and grove, of brook and hedgerow ; too facile, indeed, and flimsy, with a pretty perception of the poetry of sun and shade, yet too fond of tricks of the brush and the suggestive result of little labor. He, too, was a genuine Englishman, hospitable, cordial. His work had much of the charm of free nature to me then ; it is now so many years since I saw the marks of his brush that I am disposed to wonder how much of the old admiration I should feel in seeing it again.

Hall introduced me to many of the lesser magnates of the palette also, and I owe to him many pleasant memories of old London. I think the last time I saw him was at the private view of one of the exhibitions, with his critic preparing the annual dose of praise or blame, and heard him call his penman to “ scourge this fellow well ” for him. But critics of that calibre were then of small account when Ruskin spoke.

To Leslie — our American painter we thought him — I had a letter from Durand, then president of our Academy. A thoughtful, refined, gentlemanly personage, distinguished and reserved in a quite English way, was Leslie. I saw him in his studio, and, ceremony done, he gave me, on leaving, a card to see Mr. Holford’s collection of old masters, and there our acquaintance ended. I imagine that American patriotic admiration had wearied him. To Holford’s I went with Glass, a hearty, friendly compatriot, always glad to be of any use to Americans. He was then painting his celebrated picture of the Duke of Wellington going to the Horse-Guards, the last portrait of the Iron Duke, which proved a little fortune to him, bringing him, with ephemeral fame, many commissions. To him I owe a glimpse of Wellington, a thing to remember. Kind-hearted fellow, but for him how many lonely days had been mine in my six months in London ; for my slender remnant of the scanty provision of pounds sterling had been increased by fifty more, sent me by a brother when he found with what a little purse I had provoked fortune. And with this I held on until high summer, and went home in August.

One of the kindest of my London friends was Wehnert, an Englishman of German descent, pupil of Paul Delaroche, and an illustrator of extraordinary facility, whose illustrations of Grimm’s household tales may survive in the memory of many; and his Prisoner of Gisors, engraved by the Art Union of London, a powerful romantic work, will be known to more as one of the most notable works of that epoch. In those days, when we had no great luminary in popular art like Millais, and sensations for the great public were rare, the Prisoner of Gisors was a great success. It was painted entirely in two days. Wehnert was a rapid illustrator, and was accustomed, after his day’s work was over, to take a block home with him, and complete a design in the evening. His brain could not support the demands he made on it, and he paid in an early death, his intellect as well as his physical strength all gone, the penalty for his mental excesses; an instance of how the world often gets the least result from its best material. Wehnert had technical powers of a very high order which the public never called for, and which his narrow circumstances left him no leisure to apply gratuitously, as he would gladly have done. He was but one of the many examples which acquaintance with the inner life of the artist race uncovers to us, of genius buried under daily wants. In his general knowledge of art in its highest forms I have never known an English artist his equal. His life hid a sad romance, the story of which he carried to his grave.

In pursuit of the principal object of my journey, I spent most of my time in quest of Turner’s work, which, though not in nature what Ruskin’s encomiums had led me to anticipate, had, especially the water-colors of the middle period, a powerful fascination for me. I hunted them out in every collection or dealers’ stock in which they appeared ; the most constantly visited amongst them being the gallery of Mr. Griffiths, Turner’s own dealer, to whom he sent all the pictures which he wished to sell, reserving for his gallery in Queen Anne Street the major part, which even then he intended for the nation, and which, with others, are now in the National Gallery. Griffiths was a worshiper of Turner’s art, and seeing my enthusiasm he made me welcome always, and told me of anything of Turner’s momentarily visible; so that in my residence in London I probably saw more of the artist’s work than the generality of his English admirers had seen. His delight in any genuine appreciation of the master was charming, and it seemed as if he regard-

ed himself as born to be Turner’s business man. He had made a considerable fortune, and he attributed his success to Turner’s patronage and advice never to buy a picture to sell again, but to make it an invariable rule to sell on commission, and only really good pictures. He used to tell me with great reserve and a diplomatic manner, as if Turner were only to be spoken of by stealth, many anecdotes of his life. James Lenox, of New York, had, he related, a great desire to purchase the Old Téméraire, and offered Turner for it £5000, which the artist refused, when Lenox offered him a blank check, which he as decidedly pushed back. Several of his countrymen, who had subscribed a sum of £5000 to purchase several of the pictures in his own gallery for the national collection, he as decisively refused, adding, however, “ But the nation shall have them, all the same.” Griffiths said to me that he would not hesitate to offer, if it were not futile, £100,000 for the pictures which Turner then retained. Yet he was considered avaricious; and Wehnert, who had once lived in a house adjoining his, told me that he sometimes came home with a single herring for his dinner, and cooked it himself. Of course I was desirous to meet the great man face to face, and speak to him, but even Griffiths did not venture to give me an introduction. Turner’s nominal residence was in Queen Anne Street, where he was never to be found except by appointment on business, his real residence being an obscure and dingy house in Chelsea, which only his most intimate associates knew, and where he would not be visited. Where and when he painted his pictures at that time no one seemed to know, but they were so far completed on the varnishing days of the Academy that they were said to come in only sketched out, and were often entirely changed on those days. His rapidity of execution was something unequaled in the records of modern art, and few of the old masters, even, could have surpassed him. His quickness of perception was extraordinary, and Creswick told me a very characteristic case of it. Creswick had sent to the Academy exhibition a sea-side picture — a waste of sandy shore, the surf coming in with a sea-wind and rain, and, amidst the sedge, a horse. Something was wrong with the horse, but no one at the moment could tell, and it was finally decided to ask Turner to come in and criticise it. Creswick found him in one of the galleries at work on his picture. He had only passed through the room where the Creswick hung, and apparently without looking at anything in it; but when Creswick asked him to come and tell him what was the matter with his picture, he replied, “ Turn him round,” which was the solution of the puzzle; for the painter had never noticed that a horse always stands with his tail to a rainstorm.

As I was overlooking some drawings by Turner at Griffiths, one day, a tall, spare, blonde gentleman entered, examined the pictures in a leisurely and studious way, and after a little conversation with Griffiths, came over, and began to talk of them to me in a manner that showed his great familiarity with them and Turner’s work in general. When he left I asked Griffiths who he was, and he replied, with a look of great glee at the surprise in store for me, “ Ah! that’s the Oxford Graduate.” I was surprised, for the Boanerges pungency of the Modern Painters had given me a very different ideal of Ruskin, whose manner was as quiet and undogmatic as that of a well-bred woman. Nothing could be less like the savage and withering criticisms I had read in his book than the gentle, questioning manner of discussion which was the man’s real habit. This was the beginning of a long friendship, which lasted, with not infrequent correspondence, for twenty years. I received an invitation to visit him in his charming home at Denmark Hill, where from the drawingroom windows one could then look out on the Surrey downs, and where I spent many hours looking over his superb collection of Turner drawings. He is still, and may he long be, of the living and here, “ di lo non ragionam.”

One day I got a long note from Griffiths, saying that Turner was coming to the gallery on business the next morning, and that if I could arrive some time before the hour appointed for his visit I might stay in and see him; but he was very much annoyed at having people come there when he did. I was there, of course, early, and as it was understood that when Turner was expected no one should be admitted just previously, I was alone in the gallery with Griffiths, when the porter ushered in a very little man, with an old-fashioned black coat and tall hat, slightly corpulent, carrying himself curiously erect, as if he were determined not to lose a fraction of an inch of his diminutive stature, with his brows thrown forward, a clear, bright eye, and a snappish gleam in it which reminded me, with his slightly aquiline nose, of an eagle. He was not in good humor, evidently, and Griffiths saw it, but he had determined to give me a pleasure I had longed for even at the risk of disturbing Turner’s temper. So he bearded the lion, calling me up and introducing me as a young American artist who had come to England to study his pictures, and would be glad, before leaving, to take him by the hand. I naturally stepped forward and put out my hand, at which Turner, with a malicious air, put his hand behind him, looking me squarely in the eyes. Confused and entirely disconcerted at the rudeness, I turned away, and went back to the pictures, paying no more attention to Turner. When I looked at him again he held out his hand, smiling, and with a hearty hand-shake we made acquaintance, talking of his pictures, and especially of those of a period of which Mr. Lenox had bought a fine example. “Ah,” said he, to conclude that subject, “ I wish they were all put in a blunderbuss and fired away.” He would say nothing of painting or of his preferences amongst his works, and on the whole his manner was one of extreme modesty in speaking of himself or them. Finally Griffiths, and not Turner, reminded me that “ Mr. Turner had business to transact,” whereupon the artist gave me another cordial hand-shake and good-by, and begged me, if I came to England again, to come and see him. But his manner of discourse was so laconic that I had some hesitation in so interpreting his words, which, literally as I can transcribe them, were thus : (nod, looking me pleasantly in the face) “ Well — come to England again ” (nod, nod, another hand-shake, nod).

When I saw Griffiths, next day, he seemed overjoyed at my reception by the master. He had never, he said, known him to treat but one man so cordially as he had me, that other being George Cattermole. He saw that Turner, when he came in, was in a furious temper, and fully expected him to insult me, and was immensely surprised and delighted at the turn things took. I was to leave London in a few days for America. If the interview and invitation had but been earlier I might have seen the old painter where few men have seen him, at home. He was dead before I came back to England again. The year I was in London was the last in which his works were in the Academy exhibition, and I saw them fresh from the retouching of varnishing day, vague, luminous, splendid in color, space, and air. I have seen them since, mere wrecks, the lights gone black, the shadows chilled, the transparent color grown opaque and dead, and in the whaling subjects, the composition scarcely recognizable. He refused to sell them even from the exhibition, though offered $6000 for the four small can-

vases. Pictures which had left the Academy unsold he declined to sell afterward. When a buyer made him an offer for the Old Téméraire, he replied, “ You might have bought it from the Academy for £250, and would n’t, and you can’t have it now.” One is not surprised that the public was indifferent to such pictures as Caligula’s Bridge, and others of its class, for even Ruskin never understood their merits, and called them “ nonsense pictures ; ” but that the superb Crossing the Brook and Old Téméraire should have gone out of the exhibition unsold is stupefying, and would be incredible were it not that Watts’s pictures, the only work of the day in England worthy the same regard as Turner’s, are treated as Turner’s were fifty years ago, — reverenced by the wise and sympathetic few, and absolutely ignored by the picture buyers, even by the dealers, just as his great contemporary, Millet, was in France. As for Turner’s most advanced pictures they could not have been appreciated by any considerable public, and it is improbable that they ever will be, for the most of them are fast disappearing. The Apollo Seizing the Python, the grandest, me judice, of all his compositions, though of his middle period, is blackened, cracked, and more obscured than a picture of the fifteenth century. Most of the oil pictures are injured, some quite ruined, while the water-colors are rarely much changed except for a certain character of age which comes to watercolor. But Turner was a water-color painter ; he never learned properly to use oils. He was forever experimenting, and it is only by chance that a picture was painted in so solid a manner as to have preserved its best qualities to our time ; so that the best of the oil pictures do not, and probably when finished did not, suffice to give a complete estimate of the art of Turner. Of his intellectual power and imaginative intensity we can only get an adequate idea by the Apollo, the Hesperides, and the compositions of that class, and of these not one remains so little changed as to give us as good a notion of the original perfections as we can get even of the pictures of Titian ; while the full knowledge of his power as a colorist can even now only be obtained from his watercolors of about 1840 to 1850,—for his art made continual progress while his faculties were unimpaired.

Turner was certainly one of the most remarkable examples of the contradictions of human nature on record. Not only do his parsimony and munificence, his outrageous bearishness and the attachment he inspired in some of his friends, stand in strong contrast, but the intellectual elevation and extraordinary sense of beauty and refinement in his works is in inexplicable antagonism with the gross and almost incredible sensuality and brutality of the man. The reconciliation of his life and works will be an eternal puzzle for the philosopher and student of æsthetics. If there were any relation between art and life, certainly in the case of Turner, whose artistic powers were the most lofty and intense as well as the most individual the history of art can point to, we might hope to see the reflex of the personal character in the art. Of the private history of the man we have, unfortunately, almost no data. The only considerable correspondence he ever had was with the person known as Mrs. Booth, who was his housekeeper and mistress, and the letters were lost to us by the stupid and unfortunate threat of one of the artist’s executors to take them from her by process of law, if she did not give them up, on which she at once threw them into the fire.

Turner appeared so strong and cleareyed when I saw him, there was such a vivacity in his movements, his eye flashed so as he looked from Griffiths to me when I was introduced, like an eagle at two assailants, that death seemed years removed. Certainly the vigor of his execution in his last pictures, the curious audacity with which he turned accidents of the material into details, was not inferior, in the power shown, to any kind of his work. But in the year following he died — like Titian, not too soon to show us what he could do at his best, nor so early as to leave us to lament the cessation of an unique art before it had done its best and begun to show symptoms of decay. Not his eye nor his hand, but his purpose, had come to its decline, and his latest work shows a want of serious intention which is not visible in the work of 1840. I

am glad to have seen the old man and touched the most magic-working hand of my time, if not of all time. Virgilium vidi tantum, but even that glimpse was something to cherish in my memories of old London.

The Londoner of that day was in general a rude and ill-mannered cub, of whichever sex. The Englishman of breeding and travel was then, as now, the first of his kind, the most courteous and chivalric of Aryans ; but the average John Bull and his wife and children had seen little of foreigners and thought every departure from English ways and appurtenances a violation of the mutual obligations of a related humanity. It was prior to the Crimean war and the World’s Fair, and the English homestayer had no knowledge of the manners or apparel of the stranger, and hardly admitted him within his gates. My Spanish cloak, shelter in many a winter’s storm at home, was the signal when I went out in London for a running fire of jeers and gibes, and, with a blue cloth cap in place of the imperative stove-pipe hat of those days in England, made me sufficiently conscious that I was a stranger in the land. “ Hi, Bill! ” sings out one of the younger roughs, “ here goes King Edward!” at which Bill was in the habit of responding, “ Hi! hi!” with a derisory yell from all the accompanying embryo ruffians. Various and numerous were the salutations of this unkempt world as I came and went; and as I had a custom of dining in Whitechapel Saturday and Fulham Sunday, I saw the longest dimension of London every week, and tried the temper of the citizen in his various wards with frequency. Justice impels me to say that the further east one went the further one got from anything resembling sweetness and light. There were sections where I dared not venture, for the swarming insolence of the juvenility on the sidewalk brought up the windows of the densely populated alleys, and this led to demonstrations which may have been jocular, but were more likely to become larcenous, and which quickly ended my explorations. I asked a policeman one day which was the most dangerous quarter of London, and he replied, “ Oh, for a policeman Leman Street,” and he mentioned in particular a narrow street, the name of which I have forgotten, and which has now disappeared. I tried it on a bright spring day, but beat a retreat in less time than I had expected, even with the policeman’s warning. The vixenish and ruffianly faces that saluted me from the windows, and some of which followed their gibes into the street so quickly as to indicate the intention of putting acts in the forefront, led me to prefer the more spacious Leman Street, whence I had come. The trivial missiles of the playful youth did me no harm, and their guying was quite as innocuous ; but the sudden emergence of various indurated-looking individuals where no man was before visible, and the jocular salutations they made me, such as, “ Hi, Frenchy! ” and “ I say, guv’ner, can’t ye give us a shillin’ ? ” or, ‘ I’d like to drink yer ’ealth, sir,” said in a very confident and familiar way, with similar bits of information, proved to me that there was no wisdom to be got there that would not cost more than it was worth to me. The old Seven Dials was a den of filth and drunkenness, and in some of the narrow streets which radiated from it or crossed the main avenues, like a huge spider web, it was uncomfortable as well as unsafe to go at midday, unless accompanied by a policeman ; indeed, the whole region between there and Soho was grewsome to pass through. And not always was chaff merely vocal: throwing mud at an outsider was a favorite amusement of the population, and woe to the curious man who went staring about and betraying a newness to the place.

Great cities quicken the wits of their denizens, and of the lower classes the lower wits. They twig the foreigner or the provincial by the wag of his head, even if he speak not, and recognize the unhabituated by his curious look at the windows as he passes by. The saying of the Yorkshire man, when seeing a stranger pass through his village, — “ A stranger! ’eave ’arf a brick at him,” — has become a standing joke, but it is probably only a survival of the manner in which the eighteenth-century Briton regarded all foreigners, and which is still seen in the contempt of the lower classes for everything foreign, and the overweening sense which even some of the better classes entertain of a definite and demonstrable superiority to all the world beside. Now they are used to beards and mustaches and foreign fashions of dress, but at the time which I am describing it was quite common to hear disparaging and insulting remarks from people of the middle classes when a person appeared invested with a noticeable peculiarity ; and these things were said as one would make comments on the cattle or horses that passed by, as if the speakers could not possibly entertain the idea that they could be offensive to the objects of them. The lady whose family 1 visited at Whitechapel had some occasional knowledge of Americans, and one day, offering to introduce an English friend who was going out to America to an American lady who was to be a passenger on the same ship, was surprised at the offer being declined. When she persisted in urging it, the English emigrant lady replied, “ But you know it is useless, as I cannot speak a word of American.”

The great Exhibition broke down this Chinese wall, and to a certain degree made the English people understand that a foreigner did not come into the country merely to be insulted and to make fun for the superior nation. To say that they know much now of the foreigner would be to go too far. I remember a story of secession times which was told me by a Western bishop of the American Episcopal Church, who came on a mission, Seward regnante, to endeavor to influence the public opinion in England through churchmen, and accordingly urged all the well-known considerations on one of his fellow bishops of the English Church, who, after hearing them all, replied, “ But, my dear brother, Providence evidently intended you to be different nations, for it put the Isthmus of Darien between you ; ” and this was after the war had been for some time occupying the eager attention of England.

I was frequently asked where I had learned English, and whether there were many people in America as white as I was; and the post-office refused point blank to send my letters to San Francisco via New York, as the San Francisco mails went by way of South America at double the American postage. A well-known landscape painter, still living, was discoursing of the Thames, and said, as if to astonish me, “Would you believe that the Thames is from mouth to source above one hundred and fifty miles long ? ” “ Why, my dear fellow,” I replied, “ we have rivers in America long enough to wind round the whole of England and leave enough to tie a good big bowknot.” He looked at me in silent stupefaction for a moment, and then said, “ Well, I know you to be a truth-telling man, Stillman, or I should pronounce that what we call ‘ an American.’ ”

When I left they were just beginning the construction of the World’s Fair building, the preparation and cause of a new era for England. Now it is hard to find a familiar object which has not been converted at least to some new use. The underground railway has undermined the city, and the “ American railways ” with their horse-cars, so vehemently abused and refused by London for years, traverse all the suburbs. The picturesque river-side London, so full of suggestions of subjects for painters, and the Thames Embankment have changed the entire aspect of the river, and every year new green fields are buried in bricks and mortar, and the London fog grows denser and the winter more grim.

I have been many times in London since that first visit, and every time I return I recall the strangeness of the life to me as I walked down Holborn, carrying my little leather valise, and how, as I passed through St. Paul’s churchyard, a cockney fellow, going the opposite way with two girls, his friends, and seeing that I was a foreigner, thought to make game of me, English fashion. So, begging me pompously to give him the honor of carrying my valise, and dancing around me in buffoonish entreaty, the girls and he laughed in excruciating merriment, until, I making no reply, but waiting to see the end, they tired. Leaving his hold of my valise the fellow turned to go his way, all the people round laughing too, when, as he committed his back fairly to me, I took a quick step after him, and succeeded in somewhat accelerating his leisurely pace. Never turning his head again, the bystanders laughing, and he not, this time, he went straight through the churchyard into Cheapside. I might now walk Cheapside itself in Mohawk costume, and be only wondered at as an advertisement.

Yesterday I walked along a splendid avenue cut through the old dense mass of dingy and crowded tenements of Soho and Seven Dials, one of two crossing in this section. The entire bank of the Thames is changed, but the little penny steamers still run up and down as they used to, the same primitive barges with engines; the captain still stands on the bridge and calls to the boy at the scuttle, and he again down to the engineer, “ Ease her, stop her, back her,” and ‘'Go ahead,” again, as if no call were known. It is curious, this obstinate resistance to all change not forced on the Englishman by competition. The Thames penny boats are the property of a company which holds a monopoly of carrying passengers on the river, and till that monopoly is broken we shall go up and down Father Thames, as in 1850, on a boat without a shelter for passengers when it rains, and which would not be used in New York harbor for a tug. One must have been here an entire generation to measure conservative England’s progress. Eppur si muove—the ice has broken up, and all England is in motion.

W. J. Stillman.