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NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 
 
 AND 
 
 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 y 
 
 BY 
 
 R. E. FRANCILLON, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " PEARL AND EMERALD.' 
 
 LONDON : 
 SMITH, ELDER AND CO, 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 
 
 1872. 
 
 [all rights reserved.] 
 
7R Vl*f 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE "GLOBE NEWSPAPER." 
 
i 
 
 
 c 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE following short sketches bear sufficient signs 
 of their ephemeral production. This I put for- 
 ward as an explanation rather than as an apology. 
 The " National Characteristics " are meant, not to 
 be exhaustive, but to bring out some salient 
 points in ourselves and in our neighbours to which 
 habit and conventional judgments are apt to blind 
 us. It is not my fault if they sometimes appear 
 paradoxical. The " Flora and Fauna of London " 
 is a slight attempt to grasp some portion of the 
 poetry that clings far more to city bye-ways than 
 to country lanes. London is the greatest of all 
 poems : and it is well to suggest how the pilgrim 
 of the flag-stones may find food for fancy without 
 spending so much as a penny at a book-stall. 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface iii 
 
 I. Alphonse , I 
 
 II. Hans 9 
 
 III. Giuseppe 1 7 
 
 IV. Juan 25 
 
 V. Ali 31 
 
 VI. Jonathan , 38 
 
 VII. Patrick 45 
 
 VIII. Alexander 52 
 
 IX. David 59 
 
 X. John 66 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Among the "Gods" 77 
 
 II. Among the Stars 82 
 
 III. Among the Grasshoppers 87 
 
 IV. Among the Stalks 92 
 
 V. Among the Blight 97 
 
 VI. Among the Caterpillars 102 
 
 VII. Among the Molluscs 107 
 
 VIII. Among the Sunflowers 112 
 
 IX. Among the Rooks 117 
 
 X. Among the Cages 122 
 
 XI. Among the Water-lilies 127 
 
 XII. Among the Sparrows 133 
 
NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 L 
 ALPHONSE. 
 
 " Could some power the giftie gie us, to see 
 ourselves as others see us," we should see — 
 something altogether unlike our real selves. A 
 Meess Anglaise y with her flat ringlets, her long 
 waxen face, and projecting teeth, is — in spite of 
 Gavarni, of the Charivari, nay, of M. Taine 
 himself — not more unlike the English girl than 
 is the Frenchman whom tourists see through their 
 travelling spectacles unlike the Frenchman whose 
 real image is reflected upon the naked retina, 
 but not conveyed to the brain. We are, perhaps, 
 more generous in our judgment of our neighbours 
 
 T 
 
2 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 than they are of us ; but, unfortunately, even 
 envy does not mislead so much as generosity. 
 The classic saying, " They do these things better 
 in France," which Sterne, the original ancestor 
 of English humour, meant to be taken — not 
 exactly literally, is a leading case in the common 
 art of misunderstanding irony. 
 
 Hogarth has much to answer for, besides the 
 mistake of thinking that the idle apprentice always 
 comes to the gallows, and that the industrious 
 always becomes Lord Mayor. The anatomical 
 caricature whom he, and no officer of the guard, 
 put on duty at Calais gate, is not the least like 
 any French soldier that ever was or that ever 
 will be. The scarecrow refugees whom he depicted 
 tripping out of church in their land of refuge 
 were not, one may be sure, the sons and daughters 
 of the Huguenot gentlemen who fought so fiercely 
 and so stoutly for their faith in the Cevennes. 
 But Hogarth was an Englishman : and so to 
 this day, even those who have with their own 
 eyes beheld the real French soldier, strong, active, 
 well-fed, and broad-shouldered, though not rivalling 
 the lofty moving tower we call a Guardsman, will 
 
ALPHONSE. 3 
 
 still talk with contempt of his physique as though 
 Waterloo had been an easy victory to win, or the 
 Malakof a playground. Englishmen seem to need 
 English air for the proper use of their eyes. 
 There are very good people who have lived for 
 years at Tours or Boulogne, and who have not 
 been able, in spite of all their experience, to free 
 themselves from the strange delusion that our 
 nearest neighbours are distinguished for wit and 
 polish above all nations of the civilized world. A 
 lady has been known to travel from Calais to 
 Marseilles, a butt for stares such as only your 
 true-bred Frenchmen can stare, and a victim of 
 frantic crushes at tables d'hote and elsewhere such 
 as only a herd of hungry Frenchmen can form, 
 and yet hold to the nursery legend that these 
 monsieurs are the very pink of politeness, and her 
 own countrymen a race of Polar bears. It is 
 very strange. After much consideration, a long 
 course of reading, and careful comparison, I have 
 come to the conclusion that the conventional 
 Frenchman is something as follows : — His name is 
 Alphonse, unless it happens to be Jules. He is 
 slight, meagre, but graceful in make, olive com- 
 
4 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 plexioned, with white teeth, and a good crop of 
 glossy hair, worn a la porcupine. He is quick in 
 speech, and gesticulatory in manner ; frivolous, 
 perhaps, but lively, witty, gay, and ready at 
 repartee ; careless of time and money, and not 
 over moral in his domestic relations ; but courteous 
 to all men, and gallantly, even chivalrously, polite 
 to les dames. His daily life he has made so 
 agreeable, down to every detail, that he may be 
 excused for not being able to translate the w r ord 
 Home. His taste in every art, up to that of 
 cookery, is delicate and refined, while his quick 
 sense of honour makes him as considerate of 
 others as he wishes others to be of him. Laugh 
 at him, caricature him as we may, these traits 
 still lie at the bottom of our loudest laughter, and 
 our grossest caricatures. Le voila, the Frenchman. 
 Le voila le Chameau ! It is all as false as perjury 
 itself, every word. Behold the true Alphonse, as 
 he is — which is not quite the same as what he 
 ought to be. 
 
 Alphonse — why do we always think of him as 
 Alphonse ? — is so far from being slight or meagre 
 that he achieves the dignity of embonpoint when 
 
ALPHONSE. 5 
 
 broadshouldered young Englishmen can still wear 
 a lady's girdle. I am talking of the typical 
 Alphonse, be it understood, not of the few million 
 exceptions that are, of course, to be found here 
 and there. So far is he from being specially 
 favoured in point of chevelure — though I admit 
 the porcupine — that a gathering of Frenchmen of 
 any class, to a spectator enjoying a bird's-eye 
 view, in no way differs from one of British savants, 
 who have a traditional right to the smoothly- 
 polished crown. There is no reason to think that 
 Parisian dentists complain of slackness of trade, 
 while the olive complexion — which ought, by the 
 way, according to literal interpretation, to be a 
 shade of dull green — is about as common north 
 of Provence or Gascony as in Middlesex. In 
 figure, he is less inclined to be graceful than 
 clumsy. Under these circumstances, vivacity can 
 scarcely be expected ; and Alphonse — not the con- 
 ventional Alphonse — is not vivacious. His soul is 
 too much engrossed with the funds, with the shop, 
 with the grim politics of the transitory minute, 
 to have much room for esprit — the delicate bouquet 
 which vanished for ever in the foul reek of the 
 
6 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 guillotine eighty years ago. A witty Englishman 
 is a rare bird, but a witty Frenchman, whatever 
 may have been the case in by-gone days, is a 
 veritable black swan. As to humour — tell a good 
 story, such as ears may hear without reddening, 
 to our typical Alphonse, and you will see. It is 
 France, not England, which is the true nation 
 bourgeoise, the nation of shopkeepers. Alphonse, 
 our typical Alphonse, is eight times out of ten a 
 shopkeeper in some form ; nine times out of ten 
 he has the soul of one. He is economical to 
 niggardliness, and takes care not only of the francs, 
 but of the centimes, and pockets his lumps of 
 sugar. The flaneur, the petit creve, is not the 
 typical Alphonse — he works laboriously for his 
 dull pleasures, and measures his satisfaction in 
 them by the sous he saves. And, alas ! it is not 
 Alphonse who makes room for you at table, or 
 who apologises for having trodden on your train — 
 it is your compatriot, whom you have nevertheless 
 labelled " Bear." And gaiety — is it found among 
 the children who do not know how to play, the 
 young men who know how to play only too well, 
 the young girls who are buried out of sight until 
 
ALPHONSE. 7 
 
 the day of sale, or the keen-eyed business women, 
 who make such admirable commercial partners in 
 maturer years ? 
 
 It would take a volume to trace Alphonse in 
 all his Protean forms — to analyse him, and to point 
 out where, how and why the rule ceases and the 
 exception begins. He, too, has his varieties — his 
 types and sub-types, his orders, genera, and 
 species. Only, when you meet him, see which 
 portrait he most resembles — that which I have 
 drawn, or that of his great grandfather, who died 
 long ago, but which we still obstinately regard as 
 of more than photographic fidelity. Why will we 
 insist upon keeping up a fiction of the ancien 
 regime, with all graceful vices and buried graces ? 
 Perhaps in time we may get rid of the delusion 
 that, while our labourers and artisans drink ale 
 and gin, Alphonse, ouvrier, is content with eau 
 sucree, or with harmless and wholesome wine. 
 Perhaps we shall one day learn that national 
 resemblances, at any given period, are more 
 numerous than national differences, and that indi- 
 vidual peculiarities are no index to the character- 
 istics of a people. 
 
8 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 It is hard to say of a nation that it has lost 
 its race of gentlemen. But of France it must be 
 said that her great and still progressing revolution 
 has sacrificed her caste of gentlemen — such a caste 
 as once, with all its vices, made French society- 
 synonymous with grace, brilliancy, and courtesy. 
 Assertive self-consciousness has taken the place 
 of well-bred ease, and the conventional traditions 
 are built upon a foundation of shifting sand which 
 may be, or may not be, transforming itself gradu- 
 ally into a rock of rough and self-reliant virtues. 
 It may be hard to give up our picturesque 
 Alphonse of tradition, and to take another in his 
 room. But the true Alphonse is a fact, and a 
 very solid fact besides ; and it is not a little ridi- 
 culous on our part to insist upon setting up the 
 ghost of his grandfather in his place, and calling 
 it the Frenchman of the present day. 
 
( 9 ) 
 
 II. 
 
 HANS. 
 
 If there was one person in the world whom we 
 thought we knew, that man was Hans. How, in 
 fact, should we fail to comprehend our own first 
 cousin ? Not that we were very proud of the 
 relationship. We had laughed at him and sneered 
 at him ever since the Reverend Peter Pindar, who 
 did not reverence many things, took to flying at 
 such small game as Madame Schwellenberg. Of 
 course we knew him. It was nothing to us that 
 there were such distinctions as Swabia, Austria, 
 Saxony, Brandenburg, Hans was Hans, whether 
 in lively Vienna or un-lively Berlin. There have 
 been benighted foreigners ignorant enough to 
 imagine that an English milord habitually appears 
 in the park with the kilt and philabeg of old 
 
io NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 Gaul. Is it wonderful, therefore, that we who of 
 course are neither benighted nor foreigners, should, 
 model all the tetes carries, as the French call the 
 Germans, upon one type, and that our typical 
 Hans should be as conventional as the stage 
 Irishman ? 
 
 Let us endeavour to clothe with flesh that 
 ghostly Hans. The task ought not to be hard, 
 for it would be hard to find his bones. He is 
 something of the build of the conventional Low 
 Dutchman — who, by the way, thanks to Alva's 
 soldiers, is often as much Spanish in feature and 
 complexion as a peasant of Connemara. Hans 
 is of low stature, pale and flabby complexion, 
 colourless eyes, protected by spectacles, and scanty 
 flaxen hair. He smokes Knaster by the hundred- 
 weight, and washes it down with butts of Bairisch 
 beer. Parallel with these occupations he dreams 
 over transcendental philosophy, which, to our 
 common sense, seems like dreaming over the 
 smoke that curls slowly from his china bowl. 
 He was a hot duellist in his short span of youth, 
 and wears the seam of a sabre cut that he will 
 carry to the grave. He is a pattern husband, and 
 
HANS. II 
 
 his great holiday is to give to little Hans and 
 Gretchen the treat of a Christmas tree. Of 
 course we do not forget that Germany is the land 
 of learning and of intellectual culture. But we 
 distrust the learning that ends in a Strauss, and 
 the music that develops into a Wagner. We are 
 speaking of the type that rises before our eyes 
 when we hear the name of Hans, the product of 
 brat-wurst and sauer-krant, of Kant and Jean 
 Paul. There was once a celebrated professor who 
 had never put on his boots for twenty years. 
 We feel certain that professor's name was Hans. 
 Some of us despised him, but without hatred ; 
 others liked him, and his quiet, kindly, homely 
 ways, but made him a sort of national butt all 
 the same. 
 
 Suddenly — could it be that we were wrong ? — 
 there marched across the Rhine a man, wearing 
 spectacles it is true, and of cold, not to say 
 repellent manners. But he was as tall, as broad- 
 shouldered, as firm on his legs and as strong in 
 his arms as a picked English grenadier. His 
 characteristic was a crushing force of will " With- 
 out haste, but without rest," as Gothe says, he had 
 
12 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 made up his mind that something had to be done, 
 and he did it, with no pause for dreaming by the 
 way. He was an intelligent machine, rather than 
 a man ; superior to wear and tear, to hunger and 
 fatigue. He had learned not only strength, but 
 its economy. Nothing unnecessary he did : but 
 he stayed at nothing. On principle he could be 
 deliberately cruel, and did not even soften the 
 weight of a heavy blow by one apparent touch of 
 human sympathy. We knew, for a fact, that this 
 was the real typical Hans — the noble, the peasant, 
 the artist, the shopman, the student, the professor 
 — all were there, and yet, to look for our old Hans 
 was to look in vain. He was prompt, practical, 
 hard, energetic, sudden, thorough. Could it be 
 the same ? Or was this a startling instance 
 indeed of the mutual ignorance between, nations 
 of the same blood, and almost of the same tongue ? 
 It was, and it was not the same. The Hans 
 whom we had known had never been — he had 
 been the exception, not the type even of so much 
 as a university town. We must remember that 
 nations are, after all, but aggregates of men. On 
 that principle, if Hans has been a dreamer, his 
 
HANS. 13 
 
 dreams have been very like other men's waking. 
 Germany, that we have deemed so slow, is the 
 swiftest country in the world, therefore is Hans 
 the swiftest of men. Go to the Latin races to 
 look for dreams and dreamers. German literature, 
 for instance, equals, if it does not more than equal, 
 our own. Yet ours has been the slow growth of 
 more than three centuries — the German, the rapid 
 growth of but little more than one. German 
 political life has almost reached maturity in half 
 the time. Heine, who was not a German, and 
 who had the contempt of a foreigner for Hans, 
 taunted him with his slowness in not doing and 
 becoming all things in a day. Little cared Hans 
 for the sharp lashes of the witty Jew. He was 
 growing in the stem — not shooting out random 
 branches that are cut off before fruit can come. 
 The typical Hans has, in short, a perfect mania 
 for the practical. All he does, all he thinks, all 
 he reads, all he dreams — if he must be said to 
 dream — are tasks to which he sets himself with a 
 deliberate end in view. It may be that his object 
 is to save a competence, it may be that it is to 
 trace the derivation of a word, or to enjoy himself, 
 
14 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 or to swindle, or to invent a system of theology. 
 But in any case he is not content till he has gone 
 as far as the day's length will permit, and the 
 day's task is done. He has none of the cynic's 
 humour. All things are worth doing, and all 
 things must be done thoroughly, or not at all. 
 No wonder the typical Hans has few words to 
 spare. No wonder that he is self-absorbed — not 
 to say selfish — in his paths and in his aims. Add 
 to this that he has, as a rule, the physical endu- 
 rance of an elephant, and you have described 
 Genius — something beyond our mere common 
 sense, however we may boast, to understand. No 
 wonder that Hans runs into cloudy sentiment as 
 a relief from hard realities, and seeks rest from 
 labour in fanciful speculation. It was even so that 
 the First Napoleon chose for his mental recreation 
 the poems of Ossian — at first sight the most 
 uncongenial to such a mind. No wonder, too, 
 that, when brought into contact with lighter- 
 hearted and brighter races, the hand of Hans 
 feels like a cold grasp of steel. It crumpled up 
 the petals of Italy as Gotz of the iron hand 
 would have plucked a flower. As for his home- 
 
HANS. 15 
 
 liness what home is that where the wife is but 
 cook and stocking-mender, without an idea in 
 common with her lord and master save that of 
 work, which, in her case, degrades her out of 
 the bright intelligence and gracious ways that 
 ought to be the birthright of every woman in the 
 world ? The home of Hans is in himself: he does 
 but eat and sleep in the warmth of the stove. 
 There is no man so falsely represented, even in 
 his own literature, as Hans. His literature is so 
 purely poetic just because he himself is such pure 
 prose. He cannot write in prose ; but he can live 
 it, and he lives it sternly, with no thought of com- 
 fort as an end, or of turning aside to gather the 
 few flowers that grow by the way. If they come 
 of themselves, it may be well ; if not, perhaps all 
 the better. 
 
 On the whole, I consider that Hans is a man 
 who first of all loves an idea of some sort, then 
 himself, and then all things and persons that are 
 serviceable to either of the two. That he is cold, 
 not by nature, but because he is self-absorbed. 
 That he is inclined to sentiment and to poetry 
 because he is practical to the very core. That he, 
 
16 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 as long as he can live his own life, is careless of 
 what others think of him. That he is great in art 
 because art also is a form of work, and therefore 
 worth the doing just as much as digging in the 
 fields. Lastly, that all his other qualities, good, 
 bad, and indifferent, are developed from these. 
 Of course I am keeping to the typical Hans : nor 
 do I refuse to regard the millions of his brethren 
 who are different from him in the details that 
 everywhere distinguish man from man. But at 
 the apparent, not real, transformation of Hans 
 we can wonder no more. Men and nations alike 
 are capable of all things when actuated by an all- 
 mastering and living idea, and when they have 
 the will and the power to do with all their might 
 all that their right hand finds to do, for the sake 
 of doing it, and not for the sake of daily comfort 
 or empty fame. 
 
( i7 ) 
 
 III. 
 
 GIUSEPPE. 
 
 The average Englishman of Goldsmith's days 
 may be excused for judging the Italian from the 
 specimens who bore upon their inflated shoulders 
 the whole weight of the lyric stage. No doubt 
 Lord Allcash, in Fra Diavolo, is a very exact 
 portrait of an Englishman. It is a well-known 
 habit of Englishmen to travel in curl papers and 
 green veils, with all their wives' diamonds packed 
 up in a hand valise for security, and to make 
 " Oh, yes," and " Shocking," do duty for con- 
 versation. It is also well known that an Italian is 
 a gifted, but wayward being, who lives a life of 
 melody and maccaroni ; who is either a Papal 
 fanatic or political conspirator, according to cir- 
 cumstances, and who translates summum bonum by 
 
 2 
 
1 8 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 
 
 dolce far niente. It is supposed to be rather a 
 privilege to be acquainted with a " signor n — why, 
 it is hard to say, unless a " signor " is a remarkable 
 and interesting creature by right of not being 
 either Mr. or Monsieur. At the same time it is 
 the fashion to conceive that no Englishman can 
 understand an Italian : that while we represent 
 hard, prosaic common sense he represents the last 
 feeble flash of whatever poetry still lingers as a 
 reality among men. And yet we cannot forget 
 either historic Italy, or be blind to the active life 
 that seethes in her to-day. No wonder that the 
 habitue of the Opera is confused. In effect, we 
 have made up our minds to decline Italia accord- 
 ing to the rules of the feminine declension. She 
 has been called the " Niobe of Nations ; " and a 
 weeping statue she shall remain, in spite of every- 
 thing. Giuseppe — we are not so far out in our 
 typical name — shall be a maccaroni-munching 
 lazzarone, a dreamer, subject to the malady of 
 eternal childhood. No wonder that we do not 
 comprehend him and his ways, for we will not see 
 the glaring fact that there is no one so like an 
 Englishman as the typical Italian — be he from 
 
GIUSEPPE. 19 
 
 Rome, Naples, Florence, or Turin. No one is 
 so like the typical Italian as the typical English- 
 man. 
 
 We ought to be ashamed of being imposed 
 upon by tricks of manner, which are no more part 
 of the essence of the Italian than our tricks of 
 manner are of ourselves. The Neapolitan's warmth 
 of nature is no more to be measured by his 
 warmth of manner than rigidity of tongue or limb 
 is to be taken as the index to the true nature of 
 the Englishman or Piedmontese. Had we all of 
 us Giuseppe's flashing dark eyes and mobile mouth 
 — mere accidents that they are — we also should 
 show all our passing impulses in the same demon- 
 strative way. It is mere slander to call the Italian 
 insincere. Only he unconsciously shows his tran- 
 sient feelings, w T hile our grey eyes are incapable of 
 showing those that take their root in our souls. It 
 is absurd to say that we Englishmen have not our 
 full share of insincerity — it is nothing more than 
 that climate has given us the advantage of being 
 unable to express as much as we wish to be 
 thought to mean. There never was a dark-eyed 
 man yet, of whatever nation he might be, who was 
 
20 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 not open to the charge of insincerity ; never a 
 grey-eyed man who was not held to be cold and 
 reserved : while, in reality, the true difference 
 between them might lie all the other way. And, 
 as with men, so with nations, which are made up 
 of men. 
 
 It is true that the Italian forgets his protesta- 
 tions of eternal devotion when your back is turned, 
 and he finds himself in a position to make the 
 same protestations to your deadliest enemy. What 
 would you ? It is nothing more than oiling the 
 hard wheels of human life to be on comfortable 
 terms with all. It is true that with the traditional 
 esprit fort of his country — has not Italy been the 
 cradle of free thought since the days of Dante ? — 
 he retains the superstitions of the nursery. Is it 
 not well to stand well with all the powers that are ? 
 He keeps a conscience, and finds it sometimes 
 clash with nineteenth-century doctrines of liberty, 
 to which his living eyes cannot be blind, so he 
 temporises, and if he can no longer believe in the 
 Pope he follows Garibaldi, and sends for the 
 priest when the physician of the body warns 
 him that he must die. But in all these things 
 
GIUSEPPE. 21 
 
 does he differ so widely, in principle, from 
 ourselves. 
 
 There is but little of the suppleness with which 
 he is credited in the nature of the Italian. It is on 
 principle that he seeks to be all things to all men. 
 Know him well and you will find that he has a 
 strong individual character of his own. He is not 
 like the natives of la Grande Nation, of whom, if 
 you know one, you know all. He is in the first 
 place an Italian, then a Milanese, Venetian, or 
 Neapolitan, then the offspring of a parish, different 
 from all other parishes ; and, lastly, the Giuseppe 
 who differs from all other Giuseppes as much as 
 the letter A differs from the letter B. His sole 
 national characteristic is that, unless he comes 
 from the north, he has dark hair and bright eyes. 
 In all other respects, you must know Italy as you 
 know England before you can pretend to say that 
 you know in what way he differs from you. You 
 may know an Italian, but the typical Italian you 
 cannot know. The typical Italian exists nowhere 
 beyond the pages of Childe Harold or the walls of 
 Covent Garden. He is not Fra Diavolo, and yet 
 he may be Fra Diavolo, and a great deal more. 
 
22 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 He is not, typically, the Garibaldino, nor the 
 Cordino, nor the tenore, nor the lazzarone, nor — 
 but what end is there to the catalogue of what he 
 may or may not be ? The Italian may be any- 
 thing. He may be the professional cavalier 
 serviente, who spends his days in saving another 
 man's wife the trouble of flirting her own fan ; or 
 he may be the reckless soldier, or the devoted 
 priest, or the chevalier d? Industrie, or the operatic 
 tenor, the brilliant poet, the flashy poetaster, the 
 astronomer, the political economist, the engineer 
 of Mont Cenis, the Mazzini, the Cavour. The 
 typical Italian is as versatile as the typical 
 Englishman. How therefore can we understand 
 him any more than we can understand ourselves ? 
 Giuseppe is as tall, as broad-shouldered, as strongly 
 made as an Englishman — "barring the beef." He 
 is cool and steady in fight, without the boasted 
 elan of the grande armee, but without the tendency 
 to panic which is the natural result of elan. He is 
 our rival in respect of the grosser forms of gour- 
 mandise, and if he stays his appetite with rice and 
 maccaroni — why, if we had not good mutton, we 
 should become maccaroni eaters too. It is a mis- 
 
GIUSEPPE. 23 
 
 take, moreover, to accuse Giuseppe of being an 
 imaginative creature. There are but two countries 
 in the world wherein common sense reigns supreme 
 over logic, reason, experience, all sense, in short, 
 which is uncommon — and these are England and 
 Italy. An Italian — the typical Italian, I mean — 
 thinks more of taxes than of ideas, and, in spite of 
 conventional tradition, amuses himself very much 
 on system, as though, as w T ith us, amusement were 
 a natural part of the day's toil that has to be got 
 through. He is theoretically fond of change, but 
 slow to improve, and his first question always is, 
 Will it pay or save ? Giuseppe is a born economist, 
 at least in the matter of half-pence : and if he only 
 possessed a little more national energy— but the 
 parallel is interminable. I cannot help feeling 
 that an Englishman should be shy, not to say 
 humble, in judging Italy. It may be patriotic to 
 modestly confess our inability to understand, but 
 it is, at the same time, to deny a bond of sym- 
 pathy which ought to be the pride of the two 
 greatest nations of the modern world. Every 
 sarcasm launched at Italy is reflected from the 
 cliffs of Albion. Florence is a home to English- 
 
24 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 men — London to Giuseppe, such as to neither can 
 be Paris or Berlin. Nor have we, with all our 
 wealth of iron and coal, carried out one idea — 
 steam apart — which had not its birth in the land 
 which was once the appanage of Rome. 
 
( 2 5 ) 
 
 IV. 
 
 JUAN. 
 
 Cervantes, Le Sage, and Beaumarchais are our 
 authorities for the manners and customs of Juan. It 
 is observable that very few people, comparatively, 
 are acquainted with a live Spaniard, so that the 
 fellow-countrymen of Cid Rodrigo y Diaz share 
 with their national hero a quasi-poetic cha- 
 racter. Once upon a time not to know Juan 
 was much the same as not to know anything 
 beyond the limits of a country town. Spain was 
 to the far North, South, East, and West what 
 England is now ; and even more, for it was rather 
 easier to hold the world in one's hand than it has 
 become since the days when the map of America 
 was more barren than that of Central Africa. 
 But we do not take for our typical Juan the ship- 
 mates of Columbus and Pizarro, the soldiers of 
 
26 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 Alva, or those who fought either in the Bay of 
 Lepanto or — with not quite such good success — 
 in our narrow seas. Of course it is necessary 
 to prefix to his name the title of " Don," and to 
 translate his name into the Italian Giovanni. 
 The ladies of Cadiz, whom Childe Harold found 
 so fascinating, would, it is needless to say, scarcely 
 fail to bring flirtation into fashion if there was 
 ever a time or country in which it was a thing 
 unknown. Now it is absolutely necessary that 
 the lover, whether of romance or comedy — and 
 it is there alone that we find our typical Juan — 
 should be furnished with a guitar, or at least 
 with a mandoline. So a guitar we accordingly 
 give him, and even idealise that very sorry instru- 
 ment until its feeble tinkle becomes poetical, 
 if not very musical. With that instrument we 
 send him forth to conquer, not the Indies, but 
 Donna Inez, who, as all the world knows, 
 likes nothing so well as to be woke up at the 
 cold hours of morning to listen to a serenade. 
 In personal appearance Juan is decidedly in- 
 teresting. He is glued to a cigarette, and lives 
 upon garlic and pumpkins. He earns his living 
 
JUAN. 27 
 
 by shouting " Bravo toro ! " at bullfights : so that, 
 according to the laws of trade as they exist in 
 more prosaic lands, his tailor must be content 
 to wait a considerable time before he is paid for 
 that gorgeous costume a la Matador. The in- 
 trigues in which he is hourly engaged would 
 drive an ambassador to despair ; out of gestures 
 and fan-flutterings he has constructed a code of 
 diplomacy far superior to that of the Atlantic 
 Cable itself. At the same time he is grave, dig- 
 nified, and as ready at the knife as the conven- 
 tional alderman. In fact, if all accounts be true, 
 the land of Juan is a rechauffe of a great many 
 things, which, except the garlic, are very charming 
 and very impossible. 
 
 A visit to Seville is, it must be owned, a 
 little disappointing : a visit to Madrid still more. 
 Even as the Englishman who has carefully 
 trained himself out of books in the accent of 
 the most " choice Castilian " finds it anything 
 but the pronunciation recognised in Castile, so 
 does the reader of tradition find himself, though 
 his voyage is over, still at sea. " Cosas d'Espana " 
 — things of Spain — are peculiar; but they are 
 
28 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 not much more peculiar than other things else- 
 where. Juan is there in the flesh, but the spi- 
 ritual charm is gone. One very soon finds out 
 that what is most beautiful at a distance may- 
 become not only very unpicturesque, but very 
 disagreeable. A beggar boy by Murillo is a 
 magnificent study : so is a monk by Velasquez ; 
 and at a fancy ball, on an English brunette, there 
 is nothing so charming as a Spanish costume. 
 But Murillo and Velasquez were painters great 
 enough to have found equally good subjects to 
 idealise Whitechapel, and Donna Inez thinks 
 nothing so becoming as a bonnet fresh from the 
 boulevards. As to Juan himself, it is true that 
 he is fond of tobacco and content with the worst 
 cookery in the world — when he can get nothing 
 better, but I have never found that his forte is 
 sentiment, or that he is able to get his living 
 out of bull-fights and serenades. He may be 
 always in love, but he for the most part shows 
 it by lounging over a newspaper at the cafe. From 
 the poetic atmosphere which hides his country 
 from the outer world he inhales not a single 
 breath. To him the history of his country dates 
 
JUAN. 29 
 
 from the to-morrow which never comes ; and, on 
 that ground, he considers himself nothing if not 
 a politician. He belongs to whichever of the 
 thirteen parties his need of dollars leads him to 
 choose, and spends the dollar, when he gets it, 
 not in feeing Donna Clara's waiting maid, but in 
 making experiments as to how far a dollar w r ill go. 
 He is — it must be said — a rather cold-blooded 
 animal. His eyes still flash, but the good rich 
 Arab blood has long begun to turn thin — or, as he 
 would prefer to call it, blue. There is something 
 terribly unsatisfactory about Juan. Everything 
 about him seems to turn mean and sour. By 
 politics he seems to understand the art of better- 
 ing himself at the expense of his neighbours, and 
 it is doubtful if he is really moved to enthu- 
 siasm even by the fullest rhetoric in which poli- 
 ticians of his stamp are the most prone to indulge. 
 He lives temperately and poorly, not because he 
 is a philosopher, but because all his desires could 
 be wrapped up in a packet no larger than a 
 cigarette paper — and that there is no symptom 
 of largeness of soul. Being human, he wants 
 something : but he does not know what he wants, 
 
30 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 
 
 so he welcomes anything like a change — even a 
 game at revolution — in order to escape from the 
 national ennui. I am aware that I am flying in 
 the face of all tradition when I call Juan the 
 type of the lymphatic temperament pushed to 
 its utmost verge. It is not his soul that speaks 
 in his warm skin, his dignified aspect, and his 
 flashing eyes. These come down to him from 
 other days when his fathers the Goths were strug- 
 gling for supremacy with his mothers the Moors. 
 Juan is the degenerate descendant of a northern 
 race left to decay in an uncongenial land. But 
 tradition, bestowed by genius, clings : and no 
 doubt every one who has visited Juan at home 
 has looked for what he expected to see, and 
 found it accordingly. It is very easy to create 
 poetry everywhere, far more easy than to read 
 plain prose — and Juan, if not Inez, is very plain 
 indeed. Let us by all means enjoy the dream 
 that the fairy land of Don Quixote is the Spain 
 of to-day, and therein build a castle before which 
 Juan may pose gracefully with his guitar. The 
 real Castle of Indolence, wherein Juan really 
 dwells, has been built by far less artistic hands. 
 
( 3i ) 
 
 V. 
 
 ALL 
 
 The genii whom children raise are not those such 
 as the child James Watt raised, like the fisherman 
 of the Arabian Nights, from the spout of an 
 innocent tea-kettle. They are those which 
 swarmed round the Sultan's couch at the magic 
 words of Scheherazade. They swarm round the 
 couch of Ali still, whether he dreams amid the 
 roses of Damascus, the bales of Bassorah, the 
 minarets of Constantinople, or the fountains and 
 love-songs of Ispahan. Five concentric circles 
 enclose the chamber of Ali, and hide him from our 
 waking eyes. First come the houris and peris, 
 with finger-tips rosy as those of Aurora, with faces 
 like the full moon. The second is a circle of 
 comedy, of calendars, of hunchbacks, of barbers 
 
32 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 through whom walks the great Caliph Haroun, 
 attended by Giaffar and Mesrour. The third is 
 composed of all who have sung and written in the 
 East when the East was young : the fourth, of all 
 who have sung and written of the East since the 
 East has grown old. The fifth is the circle of the 
 Djinn, who have made the Orient an oasis in a 
 desert of steam, and who make a man's first 
 sight of the Golden Horn an era in the history 
 of his days. And it is through these misty 
 mysteries that we look upon Ali ; he is the magic 
 centre, the type of what the child, holding 
 Haroun's hand, and voyaging with Sinbad, will 
 not allow the man to disbelieve in his maturer 
 years. 
 
 Withdraw, then, shapes of steam made black 
 and foul with the price and prose of coal, and let 
 Ali emerge from his chamber into the outer day. 
 What guise will he take but one, whether he be 
 Turk, Arab, or Persian, emir, barber, or slave ? 
 His head will be swathed in the folds of the sacred 
 turban, his figure will be draped in robes, his 
 beard will hide his breast, and the jewelled hilt of 
 his curved scimitar will be ready to his hand. 
 
ALL 33 
 
 Bismillah ! Sit down by him on the divan, 
 whence he never rises, but reclines all day long in 
 dignified repose : let him clap his hands that the 
 attendant negro may bring coffee and the chi- 
 bouque : and let us find in the flesh the type of 
 that wondrous East which, as it has been, so is, 
 and ever will be. Thrust aside that stiff* figure, in 
 frock coat and fez, who stands in the way as you 
 advance with shoeless feet over the floor, and who 
 looks as though he had taken an ale-cork for the 
 glass of his fashion and the mould of his form. 
 He is smoking a cigar : you came to inhale the 
 dreamy fumes of the narghile. He addresses you 
 in French — he must be the dragoman. You ask 
 for Ali. Alas ! the magic rings, iris-hued as soap 
 bubbles, have vanished into air. The ale-cork 
 is Ali. 
 
 He has not forgotten his old-fashioned Eastern 
 courtesy — the best, if not the most sincere, form 
 of courtesy in the world. He will not just yet 
 introduce you to the ladies of his family, but he 
 will ask you to dinner, and go with you to the 
 opera afterwards, where you will hear the " Tro- 
 vatore " performed by singers who have not 
 
 3 
 
34 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 succeeded too well in Naples or Milan. He will 
 talk to you of progress and the Eastern question 
 as intelligently, and almost as intelligibly, as an 
 habitue of Pall Mall. And yet there is an inde- 
 finable something about him, as about his here- 
 ditary enemy the Russian, that makes you feel 
 that if he is not the Ali of whom you dreamed, he 
 has only put off the turban without donning 
 such a hat as your own. The fez is a com- 
 promise. His limbs are stiff and awkward in 
 the very shooting jacket in which we feel most at 
 ease. There is a buttoned-up appearance about 
 him, and a straightness, as though he were 
 momentarily afraid of giving way. I am speaking, 
 of course, more particularly of the Turkish or 
 dominant Ali, for though the tendency is true of 
 all, there is no railway yet to Teheran. The fact 
 is, the Turk feels himself standing on a thin plank, 
 on which he must pose, as it were, on one leg, in 
 order to retain his balance, and practise the goose- 
 step in order to keep up a semblance of getting 
 on. Ali is trying to grow young, and thinks that 
 by a severe process of tight lacing with red tape 
 he will reduce himself into Occidental formality. 
 
ALL 35 
 
 Only it will not do. A man does not imbibe the 
 Western spirit by suddenly finding out that 
 champagne is not forbidden by the Koran. The 
 Indians of the West were not put in sympathy 
 with their persecutors by force of fire-water, nor 
 did that pioneer of civilization enable them to hold 
 what was once their own. There is no force but in 
 race and in being true to its traditions, not only in 
 spirit, but in form. It was the old AH, almost 
 such as he was when Mahomet launched him from 
 the desert, that needed a Sobieski to drive him 
 from Vienna, and a Charlemagne to keep him 
 beyond the Pyrenees. The new AH is something 
 of an esprit fort. He can read, and he reads the 
 newspapers. He does not despise the Giaour — he 
 hates and tries to ape him. He has become useful 
 as a kind of feather-bed between the Levant and 
 the Black Sea. Even his wife no longer wonders 
 at the strange and distorted figures of her Western 
 sisters : she, too, has heard of a pannier and a 
 chignon, if all tales of the harem be true. If she 
 retains her veil, some sceptics are inclined to think 
 it is on the same ground as that on which certain 
 ladies were once supposed to go masked to the 
 
36 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 playhouse, to conceal something else than beauty. 
 She will soon learn the compensatory qualities of 
 a bonnet of the newest fashion, and then the veil 
 itself will go. Jealousy is not a modern failing, 
 and it is not so easy to drop a sack silently in 
 the Bosphorus as it used to be. Gas has thrown a 
 cruel glare over the mysteries of the Golden Horn. 
 But, as I have said, race is race. To cease to be 
 one thing is not to become another. If London 
 were to ape Constantinople the effect would not be 
 more grotesque than for Constantinople to mimic 
 London. The East and the West cannot sympa- 
 thize, and for the East to strive with success after 
 Western development is as hopeless as for the 
 West to endeavour to stand still. It is only to 
 substitute frivolity for earnestness, the fez for the 
 turban. It depends upon the feelings of each of 
 us to decide whether we would for the sake of 
 romance retain the East in all its hideous glory, or 
 whether, for the sake of the triumph of steam, we 
 would let it sink into the realms of historic 
 mythology. For my part, when I wish to journey 
 Eastward, I take M. Galland for my dragoman, 
 and shall not be altogether content when a railway 
 
ALL 37 
 
 junction is opened at Sinai. A pilgrimage should 
 be something real, not a thing to be managed by a 
 tour-monger as if it were a cheap trip to Heme 
 Bay. However, like all things else, Ali must be 
 taken as he is found. Only it is not merely a 
 matter for sentimental regret that what he is 
 should be no longer what he has been. He was 
 the natural guardian of all that is most sacred in 
 the history of the world. He has become an 
 undeveloped stoker. The steam genii are closing 
 round him, and before long, we may expect to see 
 the lands he should for the world's sake guard 
 from Western desecration turned into another 
 paradise of railways and hotels — as real as our 
 own, and perhaps managed almost as badly. 
 When that time comes, I do not know that the 
 downfall of the Crescent will have been an un- 
 diluted advantage. It at least admitted the fact 
 that there are a few matters in which the world is 
 at its best when standing still. 
 
38 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 JONATHAN. 
 
 The typical American is called Jonathan because 
 it scarcely ever happens that Jonathan is his real 
 name. On the same principle, called by ancient 
 grammarians and modern pedants lucus a non 
 lucendoy he is also popularly termed a Yankee, 
 because a certain proportion of his fellow-citizens 
 happen to be born in the half-dozen little States 
 of New England — the only territory whose inhabi- 
 tants have a recognised right to that illustrious 
 title. Let him hail from Tennessee, Louisiana, 
 even from California, he is still a Yankee. Even 
 so a native of old England, whether from Cornwall 
 or Northumberland, is of course a Londoner, all 
 the same. With a becoming scorn of transatlantic 
 things, we ignore distinctions whether of race or 
 
JON A THAN, 39 
 
 of geography, and take the great Elijah Pogram — 
 an institution of course totally unknown among 
 ourselves — as the typical specimen of those whom 
 Englishmen, when in an affectionate mood, call 
 brothers, on the ground, presumably, that they are 
 mainly of Irish or German extraction. In short, 
 the typical Jonathan, dressed like a scarecrow in 
 the rags of a humour that is ever fresh though 
 ever stale, is about as true to nature as John Bull. 
 
 There is no need to repeat the work of carica- 
 turists by describing the typical " Yankee," who 
 stands alike for the Xew York Knickerbocker, for 
 the peaceful graduate of Harvard, for the bowie- 
 bearing backwoodsman, for the representative of a 
 " First Family of Virginia " — for all the types and 
 classes that go to make up a nation as varied as 
 the whole of Europe put together. We know him 
 by heart, and his conventional eccentricities form a 
 literature and a picture gallery by themselves. 
 The strange part of the matter is that while most 
 of us have been acquainted with compatriots of 
 that bird whose home is in the setting sun, few of 
 us have found in him the offensive conventionality 
 made up of one part maniac, one part charlatan, 
 
40 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 one part boor, and one part rogue. Beyond 
 certain peculiarities of speech, dress, and accent, 
 which are peculiarities because they are not our 
 own, and certain political notions which are wrong, 
 because England — as some think, happily — is not 
 yet an outlying territory of the Great Republic, we 
 have been in each case content to admit that our 
 acquaintance afforded a piquant and pleasant 
 exception to the manners and customs of the 
 Jonathan in whom, nevertheless, we are deter- 
 mined to believe. Be it so. The travelled 
 American whom most of us have met may not 
 be a fair representative of the American at home. 
 What are the characteristics which, without re- 
 garding subordinate types, distinguish the true 
 American, be he Yankee or not Yankee, from the 
 rest of the world ? 
 
 The answer lies in one word. Barnum was an 
 American, and the Americans believed in Barnum. 
 Joseph Smith, who invented Mormonism, was a 
 citizen of America, and the Americans — at least 
 a great many of them — believed in Joseph Smith. 
 Spiritualism and all other words of a similar termi- 
 nation, free-love, and all other institutions with a 
 
JONATHAN. 41 
 
 similar prefix, talk valued in proportion to tallness, 
 promises believed in proportion to impossibility 
 of performance, hero worship of men who are not 
 heroes, theories without facts and imaginary facts 
 not to be explained by theories, are essentially 
 of transatlantic growth and transatlantic cultiva- 
 tion. The Land of Jonathan plumes itself upon 
 its sharpness. It should rather pride itself upon 
 its childlike innocence — upon its verdant credulity. 
 Charlatans do not flourish where dupes do not 
 abound. There is nothing that Jonathan will not 
 greedily swallow, from a new system of cosmogony 
 to a manufactured mermaid, a woolly horse, or a 
 belief that he is far too smart or 'cute to be taken 
 in. The last is the well-known craze that brands 
 personal, and therefore national credulity. We do 
 not plume ourselves upon our smartness. We, in 
 our modesty, thought it was ourselves who were to 
 be the dupes of the Indirect Claims — not the 
 voters who did not see through that most trans- 
 parent of election " dodges." But it is not we who 
 try to scrape wooden nutmegs. We call believers 
 in Fanchette, and in the wretched revenants who 
 talk in chairs and tables, by their proper and not 
 
42 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 complimentary names. It is we, alas ! who send a 
 supply of Scotch journalists, Irish agitators and 
 English adventurers to take advantage of a unique 
 historical instance of national simplicity. Such 
 is Jonathan's expressed admiration for smartness, 
 that it is impossible to mistake it for anything but 
 the common reverence of humanity for a quality 
 most foreign to the nature of him who admires. 
 In short, only flatter his belief in his own acute- 
 ness, and you may get him to take in anything 
 you please — and the harder it is to swallow, the 
 more anxious he is to prove his strength of diges- 
 tion by forcing it down. 
 
 Of course, where there are dupes there will be 
 charlatans of all kinds, but I contend that the 
 greatest American charlatans whom we take for 
 our conventional type are seldom native born. 
 Nor do I forget the class, comparatively small 
 as it is, of cultured Americans who believe that 
 Boston is the intellectual centre of the world. 
 Boston has reflected European culture not un- 
 happily, but that scarcely removes the virtue of 
 simplicity from those who fancy that America has 
 a literature of her own. Nor, on the other hand, 
 
JONATHAN. 43 
 
 do I forget the gross frauds, as gigantic beside the 
 frauds of other lands as Niagara beside a Welsh 
 waterfall. The more gigantic and impudent the 
 fraud, the wider must be the field of those who 
 have been taken in. So obvious is all this, that it 
 is simply amazing how the typical Jonathan has 
 ever found a place even in the airy world of inter- 
 national illusions. With regard to other aspects 
 of his distinctive character, the view is not so 
 clear. He is certainly delightfully self-assertive, 
 and that may be one result of his fundamental 
 credulity. It may also be a reason for our taking 
 him not for what he is, but for what he seems to 
 be. But it must not be forgotten that national 
 credulity is a pow T er in the world, and a very 
 dangerous power. It implies earnestness — earnest- 
 ness that may take the form of a life and death 
 struggle for a false and deluded cause. If a man, 
 or nation, is simple enough to believe that he has 
 a mission, or that to grow rich is the whole duty 
 of man, or that place-hunting is a worthy form of 
 ambition, or that the welfare of the world depends 
 upon the result of a party struggle, let his friends 
 and neighbours beware. Credulity is almost 
 
44 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 
 
 synonymous with fanaticism, and people may be 
 fanatics, not only in faith or in politics, but in 
 fashion or greed. And on the surface of the seeth- 
 ing sea of wild and disordered fancies, demanded 
 by an ever-devouring thirst for what is strange 
 and new, will inevitably float the few who force 
 their personality upon the careless eyes of the 
 outer world. The bird of America is, in truth, 
 less the eagle than the heron, and we have con- 
 fused the hawk with the quarry on which it preys. 
 No doubt where the herons gather there will the 
 hawks abound. The result is not edifying : but 
 we ought, at least, to be just enough not to hold 
 the feeble gullibility of the typical many respon- 
 sible for the unveiled voracity of the untypical few. 
 
( 45 ) 
 
 VII. 
 
 PATRICK. 
 
 IRELAND is an exceptionally fortunate country. 
 The accepted type of every other nation in the 
 world is but a caricature of the reality, reproducing 
 only its burlesque features, and not always even 
 these. But the world has entered into a vast con- 
 spiracy to paint Patrick in oil of roses instead of 
 the ordinary distemper. Erin is the belle of the 
 company of nations — made, not to take part in 
 the rough struggle for existence, but to be petted, 
 to laugh and be gay under the most adverse cir- 
 cumstances, to live a rainbow life of April tears 
 and smiles, and to be loved in a sentimental 
 fashion in spite of a few charming faults, and 
 because of many pleasant follies. Patrick has no 
 responsibilities. All he has to do, in society and 
 
46 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 in literature, is to be frolicsome even to the point 
 of head-breaking. The earth's circle is one gigantic 
 horse-collar for him to grin through. He must 
 enjoy everything, from a wake to a wedding, and 
 when he is saddest you may be sure that some 
 witty word is nearest to the tip of his tongue. 
 Every school-boy, thanks to Lever and others, 
 knows the typical Irishman. Barring a few 
 scoundrels of informers, land agents, and attorneys, 
 he is the most genial, jovial, hospitable, frank, 
 easy-going, warm-hearted, amusing, affectionate, 
 kind, generous, grateful, impulsive of human 
 beings. It is as impossible to be seriously angry 
 with Patrick as with a spoiled child, and the sharp 
 word melts into sympathetic laughter at the 
 drollery of his gambols. His slight dash of im- 
 pudence and vulgarity only add a piquancy to this 
 
 privileged child of nature. Above all, he overflows 
 
 ■ 
 with robust life, and bears the carte blci7iche, which 
 
 is the blessed brand of all men who have high 
 
 animal spirits, and the courage to let themselves 
 
 go. There are people who accuse him of being 
 
 untruthful and uncomfortable in his habits. But 
 
 he is a charming companion all the same — and, 
 
PA TRICK'. 47 
 
 who looks for perfection in one who is labelled as a 
 savage ? 
 
 It once fell to my agreeable lot to arrive by 
 train at Dublin in company with a typical Saxon. 
 We took a car together to carry us to our hotel. 
 After a minute or two my companion burst into a 
 fit of laughter. As nothing very amusing had 
 happened since we left our native shores I natur- 
 ally asked the reason. " What witty fellows even 
 the carmen are here ! " exclaimed the Saxon. 
 " Fancy a London cabman saying anything like 
 that ! " Now to my certain knowledge the only 
 w r ords our driver had uttered were, " A car, your 
 honour ? " But he was an Irishman, and whatever 
 he said was to be laughed at accordingly. My 
 companion felt himself bound to give our rather 
 solemn and sour-faced carman credit for all the 
 humour of tradition. And so it is throughout this 
 wonderful island. In the matter of wit, for example, 
 I very much fear that you take away the spirit if 
 you take away the brogue, just as American 
 humour evaporates if deprived of its real or 
 imaginary nasality. It is the accent, not the 
 matter, which we Cockneys laugh at, not with, 
 
48 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 in nine cases out of ten ; and there is no doubt an 
 easy " way " about the " English " of pure Cork or 
 Dublin quality that is itself the germ of laughter. 
 Let everybody consider his experiences calmly. 
 I have known witty Irishmen, but the witty 
 Englishman is not quite unknown, while almost 
 every Irishman is devoid of humour in the true 
 sense of the word. A bull is neither wit nor 
 humour, and collections of Irish wit and humour 
 are nothing more than collections of unconscious 
 bulls. Humour implies a readiness to give and 
 take, not a propensity to answer a word with a 
 blow. The Irishman has always been a duellist 
 by nature, and it is doubtful if a duellist was ever 
 conspicuous for a sense of humour. He cannot 
 bear to think he is being laughed at, and is prone 
 to suspect insult in the lightest word. Indeed, 
 whatever he may have been once upon a time, 
 when we knew nothing about him, the typical 
 Patrick is generally rather a gloomy fellow, though 
 seldom taciturn. And no wonder, considering his 
 climate and his reputation — so galling to any man 
 of spirit — of being little better than a hot-tempered, 
 good-natured buffoon. Then again his leading idea 
 
PATRICK. 49 
 
 is destructive of geniality. You cannot be in his 
 company four minutes without hearing four terrible 
 words — " The wrongs of Oireland." Be the colour 
 he affects orange or green, the difference lies in 
 nothing but hue. How his countrymen — the most 
 popular and appreciated of races — are trampled on 
 and despised, how his beautiful island is desolate 
 with no one to aid her, how the penurious Saxon 
 will not buy her railways, or transfer Manchester 
 and Windsor to the Bog of Allen, make up the 
 old, old story. Patrick is not only the typical 
 Irishman, but the typical man with a grievance. 
 He hears the " Melodies " running through a sym- 
 phony of Beethoven. This perpetual self-conscious- 
 ness is the key to his character. Patrick is not 
 impudent. He is shy — and there is nothing that 
 seems so like impudence as the self-assertion of a 
 man who fancies that his claims are not allowed. 
 He always feels that you are somehow holding 
 him in hostility or ridicule. He even extends his 
 suspicions to his own countrymen. The hatred of 
 an Irishman for every other Irishman throws, in its 
 intensity, the friendship of a Scotchman for every 
 other Scotchman into the shade. Many will be 
 
 4 
 
50 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 ashamed of being natives of their own country, 
 even while they no less declaim about its wrongs. 
 Patrick can never get it out of his head, falsely 
 enough, that he belongs to an inferior, despised, 
 and rejected nation, and insists upon his view till 
 he almost makes the world think it the true one. 
 He wastes himself in plaintive patriotism, and, with 
 the sensitive temperament of unproductive genius, 
 prefers to be trampled on and unhappy. In short, 
 misery is his joy, for it gives him the right to be a 
 martyr. At the same time, who can deny that the 
 character which clings to defeat has necessarily 
 much that is beautiful ? The Irishman can live 
 and die for an idea, all the more triumphantly in 
 proportion as it is hopeless and absurd. That is 
 the highest praise that can be given to any man. 
 Were it not for a quick eye to a bargain, and to 
 getting all he can out of a scramble for places and 
 pensions that entail no work, Patrick, though 
 inclined to be a bore with his eternal wrongs, 
 would have few essentially ignoble qualities. But 
 there is something wrong about everything. If he 
 is warm, he is seldom staunch ; if he is staunch, he 
 probably has Scotch blood in him and is not 
 
PATRICK. 51 
 
 genial. He is not ungrateful, but is gifted with 
 the convenience of a very short memory. He is 
 eminently hospitable, but he is quite as willing to 
 be so at the expense of others as at his own. He 
 receives favours as the payment of a debt, but 
 bestows them as a matter of generosity. Alto- 
 gether, he is as unintelligible to others as he is 
 to himself; and what is more to the purpose, he 
 wishes to be taken for what he is not, and by dint 
 of eloquence succeeds. He is not frank, for he 
 hides his thoughts and feelings from the prying 
 Saxon as if his very existence were a State secret. 
 Enough has surely been said to show that while 
 the conventional Patrick is a piece of absurd, if 
 delightful burlesque, the true Patrick is an enigma. 
 Let us not, in our wild attempts to do him justice, 
 forget to leave Ireland a few wrongs. No nation 
 can ever be happy except in its own way, and if 
 we were so happy as to succeed in making Ireland 
 happy, Irishmen would be happy no more, 
 
52 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 ALEXANDER. 
 
 " Alexander, King of Macedon," as is well 
 known, " conquered all the world but Scotland." 
 Therefore the Scotchman may fairly call himself 
 the greater Alexander whom friends affectionately, 
 foes enviously, have corrupted into the undignified 
 " Sandy," or even " Sawney." The Scotchman has 
 many foes, and it is only doing him justice to say 
 that he is more than a match for them. It is only 
 the donkey that seeks to devour the thistle. 
 
 Englishmen as a rule do not like Scotchmen, 
 and have taken their cue from that arch-Philistine 
 Dr. Johnson, who owes most of his fame to one 
 of the nation he hated and despised — a singular 
 instance of the process of heaping coals of fire. 
 
ALEXANDER. 53 
 
 That cue has led to the present comedy character 
 — the typical Alexander, as painted by the 
 Southron. We do not go so far as to picture him, 
 as Alphonse does, for ever dressed in a kilt and 
 philabeg. That delusion has died away with the 
 banishment of the splendid Highlander of our 
 infancy from the tobacconists' doors, and survives 
 only on the lyric stage, where Lucy of Lammer- 
 moor w T ears the tartan of a Highland clan. But 
 w r e do picture him for ever dressed in a character 
 costume. He is red-haired, tall, with long limbs, 
 harsh features, and high cheek-bones. His accent 
 is unmistakable — the typical Alexander always 
 hails from Aberdeen. The result of a post-mortem 
 examination would be to find " Bawbee " written 
 w T here Calais was engraved in the case of our First 
 Mary. His skull is held to be of abnormal thick- 
 ness, so that he does not laugh at a joke till three 
 w r eeks after it is made, and not even then if the 
 end of the third w r eek falls on Sunday. He alone 
 can properly appreciate the poetry of Burns, 
 seeing that he alone can understand what we are 
 pleased to term its " Doric." He can, and does, 
 drink at one sitting as much mountain dew as 
 
54 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 
 
 would kill a miserable South Briton ; and, above 
 all things, he is true and loyal to his friends to the 
 marrow of his backbone. 
 
 I like the feeling that leads a man first to 
 think of his own blood, then of his father's friends, 
 then of his countrymen, and not till afterwards 
 of the rest of the world. It is honest, natural, 
 and wholesome, giving human relationships the 
 proper degrees of precedence. A man who cares 
 for the world before his own kith and kin cannot 
 care very warmly for anybody. A cosmopolitan 
 philanthropist is a man with a very long title, but 
 he is apt to forget that charity has anything to 
 do with home — far less to remember that home is 
 not a bad beginning. But as Scotchmen, even 
 when personal enemies, will stand together like 
 men of one clan, shoulder to shoulder, and will 
 always help one another through thick and thin, 
 it is impossible that we can be quite right in 
 setting down the Scotchman as a cold-blooded 
 animal. Froissart, with his " perfervidum ingeniurn 
 Scotorum" the glowing Scotch nature, was nearer 
 the mark than we. A man who is earnest about 
 everything, must needs be calm, grave, and chary 
 
ALEXANDER. 55 
 
 of words. And a Scotchman, the typical Alex- 
 ander, is desperately earnest about everything — 
 religion, politics, history, the poetry of Burns, the 
 character of his own Queen Mary, the transcend- 
 ental philosophy, the merits of haggis, — every- 
 thing that touches Scotland, whether specially or 
 as part of the universe. A Scotch sergeant is in 
 earnest about his drill, a Scotch gardener about 
 his roses, a Scotch schoolboy about his Latin. 
 What is more, he is not, like the German, earnest 
 only for his own or for his w r ork's sake. He is 
 in earnest about human causes, past and present: 
 and if they are hopelessly lost, unpopular, or 
 unpractical, so much the better — he can throw 
 himself into them more keenly. It was not the 
 English Jacobites who survived Culloden, nor is 
 it Englishmen who can launch themselves hotly 
 into historic sympathies, not with any practical 
 political view, but with the enthusiasm of chivalry. 
 I think this to be at the root of the Scottish 
 character — the feeling that makes every Scotchman 
 a knight errant, not to say a Don Quixote, in 
 some cause or other, in spite of a calculating turn 
 proper to a poor country that has always been 
 
56 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 more fertile in pounds Scots than in pounds sterling. 
 I cannot — who can ? — when thinking of Scotland, 
 keep out of mind the names of Wallace, of Claver- 
 house, of Walter Scott, of a hundred others who 
 make a historic round table : and all out of one 
 small nation not so populous as London alone. 
 It is impossible to help a little enthusiasm : it is 
 difficult not to confine oneself to combating more 
 Scotorum the popular belief that the Scot is 
 " canny," and that there the matter ends. No 
 wonder that his literature, with one or two great 
 exceptions, has been barren. Men who throw 
 themselves into life are seldom writers, and so 
 much the better for them. They are not apt to 
 cultivate the graces of manner or style, and they 
 are apt to be blind to the wit and humour that, as 
 a rule, spring from the cynicism that finds in all 
 earnestness something ridiculous. There is no 
 doubt, consequently, that Scottish humour lacks 
 wit, facility, and cruelty. Scotchmen have no turn 
 for epigrams, and cannot understand them. There- 
 fore, while there are no truer friends, there are 
 many pleasanter companions : and Alexander 
 himself generally prefers the congenial society of 
 
ALEXANDER. 57 
 
 his own countrymen. He goes out into the great 
 world, for by nature he is not provincial : but it 
 is as an adventurer rather than as a colonist — to 
 fight and overcome rather than to find a home. Of 
 course, too, being very much in earnest, without 
 appreciating the humour of circumstances, he is 
 often stiff and shy — almost always close and 
 reserved. But when he does let himself go, he 
 goes with a vengeance. His hard head alone will 
 carry him farther in a rapid race than other men. 
 It is not only at social gatherings that he will be 
 the last to fall beneath the table. The humour 
 of Scotland lies in pathos — the protest of the 
 warm heart against the rough outside and the 
 hard brain — and what is there more pathetic in 
 the world ? 
 
 Such is Alexander. If you are not a fellow- 
 countryman you may find him a dangerous rival — 
 unscrupulous, even, for he is no more the slave of 
 conviction when he is in the right than when he 
 is in the wrong. He will not be ready to extend 
 his sympathies to your hostile point of view : nor 
 will he, because he happens to know you, feel 
 bound to treat you as a friend. But if you need 
 
58 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 a friend, servant, or master on whom you can 
 rely, make him one, and you will not repent to 
 your dying day — as long as you do not speak ill 
 of Robert Burns. 
 
( 59 ) 
 
 IX. 
 
 DAVID. 
 
 David is the long for Taffy, a name intimately 
 associated with Cambrian larceny and Saxon 
 reprisal. It is interesting to observe how types 
 form themselves in infancy. People who make 
 tours in Wales continually complain of the way 
 in which they leave their money upon the road 
 with very little to show for it, either in the way 
 of pleasure or information. The same accident 
 is apt to happen to travellers elsewhere. But no 
 one is taught in childhood that Hans or Alphonse 
 carried off a leg of beef. That unfortunate 
 nursery ballad is, I fear, at the root of the typical 
 David, aided as it is by pictures of market 
 women in steeple hats, and the absurd admission 
 of Lindley Murray that W is a consonant and not 
 
60 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 a vowel. From these three elements — an un- 
 feminine liking for beaver, and a tendency to 
 consonants and larceny — the Saxon mind has, 
 after the manner of Cuvier, who could construct 
 a skeleton from a bone, evolved its typical Cam- 
 brian. Mr. Matthew Arnold has but confused 
 people's minds with his views of the Celtic ele- 
 ment in literature and national character. We 
 accept his views of course, because he ought to 
 know. But we stand a little puzzled before a 
 thief who has a genius for music and metaphysics, 
 and a poet who cannot vocalise. There is no 
 doubt that between the Welshman and the 
 Englishman there is a great gulf fixed. We can- 
 not learn his language, he will not learn ours. 
 While our labourers are busy over pipes and beer, 
 the Welsh hinds are recreating themselves with 
 Calvin's five points and Eisteddfodau. Wales 
 is still a foreign land — foreign in its language, its 
 thoughts, and its ways. It is rather shameful 
 that it should be so,' and that we should be con- 
 tent to base our international knowledge on 
 picture-books and primers. In the first place, it 
 is a little unfair to set down David as a thief a 
 
DAVID. 61 
 
 priori. I am not going to enter into a eulogy 
 of all Welsh things, not having the advantage of 
 being born beyond the Marches, and of being 
 therefore, by right and duty, more hopelessly 
 patriotic even than a cockney. But I must sug- 
 gest, in justice to every Ap Hugh, Ap Morgan, 
 and Ap Howell that a return should be moved 
 for of the number of kid gloves presented to judges 
 of assize, and of the district of Great Britain to 
 which they were forwarded by the glover. That 
 question being disposed of, it only remains to 
 consider the Welshman, secondly as to what he 
 is, and firstly as to what he is supposed to be. 
 
 Secondly, then— it is appropriate in dealing 
 with foreign matters to reverse the natural order 
 of things — David is a Celt : a term which, as we 
 use it often, must be assumed to mean something. 
 He is intensely obstinate : he will not believe that 
 the language of the bards is worse or less con- 
 venient to him than our own. The Saxons, 
 whose offspring we are proud to be, showed much 
 the same sort of obstinacy after the battle of 
 Hastings. He is singularly good at making a 
 bargain, and looks upon the Englishman as na« 
 
62 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 tural food for plunder — a not uncommon error. 
 He is facile and pliable, in spite of linguistic 
 obstinacy, and tries to appear all things to all 
 men, unless you touch his natural pride, when he 
 flies out into shrill and towering passion. He is 
 descended from Noah— of course no Englishmen 
 are — and can trace his pedigree, which is certainly 
 a distinction. He is born a Dissenter, and talks 
 Radicalism in his cradle. I do not know that we 
 have any other special views about Wales and 
 the Welsh, except that our typical David lives 
 among mountains, is familiar with goats and 
 eagles, and exists principally upon butter and 
 cheese. He is of course as cleanly, pious, moral, 
 and avaricious as mountaineers traditionally are. 
 "Point d' argent point de Suisse" — no money, no 
 Welshman. Firstly, then — there is no doubt but 
 that there are mountains in Wales, though goats 
 and eagles are becoming obsolete. But as to his 
 race, has it never struck those who have studied 
 such matters at first, and not at second hand, 
 that he is very different from other so-called Celtic 
 races — the Irishman, the Manxman, and the High- 
 lander ? The fact is, he has in him a large ad- 
 
DA VI D. 63 
 
 mixture of the blood that conquered, not of 
 that which was subdued. The language of Wales 
 contains a Roman element, not the result of lite- 
 rary importation, but bound up with common 
 words. I must content myself with assertion, not 
 having inclination to set out a philological voca- 
 bulary. There is a popular tradition that the 
 Romans drove the Britons into the Western moun- 
 tains. So they did, and followed them, and there 
 they remained w T hen the legions w r ere withdrawn. 
 There are as many "Ponts" and "Strads" and 
 so forth in Wales as in the kingdoms of Kent 
 or Northumberland, and you will look for tokens 
 of Danes and Saxons in vain. Now w 7 here the 
 Celtic race has come in conflict with the Latin 
 race, the latter has triumphed : and therefore, I 
 take it, the Welshman has as much in him of the 
 Roman as of the savage wiiom the Roman found. 
 He is not brilliant like the true Celt : he has the 
 plodding industry of the masters of the world. 
 Like them he is stubborn, and stands on his dignity 
 of race and person. He is grave and practical 
 in his humour, with a tendency to rhetoric 
 rather than poetry, which comes from the heart 
 
64 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 and not the brain. He has a stupidity peculiarly 
 his own. It is not the gross stupidity peculiar 
 to the Saxon boor, but it is that stupidity which 
 will not permit a man to understand that he is a 
 provincial. A Welshman cannot get it out of his 
 head that he belongs to the greatest, most im- 
 portant, most central race in the world. To him 
 London is provincial : he is in the world's capital 
 when he is in his own country town. His an- 
 cestors the Romans thought the same — the only 
 difference being that they managed to impress 
 their belief upon other people too. But, as the 
 modern Welshman cannot do that, he makes up 
 for it by acting as though he had done so. To 
 sneer or speak lightly of Wales, to say that 
 Welshwomen are not the most beautiful in the 
 world, that Welsh music is not the most musical, 
 Welsh poetry not the most poetic, Welsh mutton 
 not the tenderest — as in fact it is — Welsh scenery 
 not the loveliest, Welshmen not the cleverest, 
 Wales not the most wonderful, is to elicit a cry 
 of agony. He bristles with prickles, and if you 
 touch his country you touch him. Being essen- 
 tially provincial, he is, if not necessarily narrow- 
 
DA VID. 65 
 
 minded, devoid of the urbane humour, and there 
 is no doubt that the typical Welshman is rather 
 prone to be suspicious of his friend. Mutual trust 
 and confidence is not the result of a life bound up 
 with country villages. It comes from wide know- 
 ledge of the world, and the world the true Welsh- 
 man does not care to know. He is not at home 
 out of Wales, and carries his native valley on his 
 back wherever he goes. But, if he does not trust 
 his friends, how shall he trust the stranger ? 
 " Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes " — I fear the 
 Saxons, though they bring us gifts — was put into 
 the mouth of the Trojan, a common ancestor of 
 Wales and Rome. If we think he wants to cheat 
 us, he thinks we want to cheat him. That is the 
 true philosophy of the story of the mutton bone, 
 which, after all, cuts both ways. The Welshman 
 would be like the Roman if he could. He is as 
 philosophic, as literary, as obstinate, as patriotic, 
 as dignified in all his tendencies. If England were 
 not England, he would no doubt condescend to be 
 less provincial and more imperial. As things are, 
 he might fairly accept facts, and, by becoming 
 more English, become yet more Roman. 
 
 5 
 
66 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 X. 
 
 JOHN. 
 
 THERE is, of course, nothing remarkable in the 
 fact that Alphonse, Hans, David, Patrick, and the 
 rest of them draw strange pictures of John. But 
 it is not a little peculiar to notice how curiously 
 careful he is to misrepresent and caricature himself. 
 One would think us to be the shyest country in 
 the world, or else the most cunning, to see the way 
 in which we throw about printer's ink, as if we 
 were all literary cuttle fish, to blind the eyes of our 
 friends and foes. We delight in looking at our- 
 selves neither as we are, nor as we wish to be. 
 We laugh at the red-haired, long-whiskered and 
 sloping-shouldered imbecile, with the long teeth, 
 who stands in the Charivari for " Sir Brown, 
 Milord Anglais," but we do not treat ourselves 
 
JOHN. 67 
 
 with any greater fidelity to nature. " The English 
 painted by themselves " make up not a portrait 
 gallery, but a museum of monstrosities. I do not 
 quarrel with my countrymen for claiming a mono- 
 poly in the name of John. I have known a few 
 Englishmen who were christened otherwise, but on 
 the whole I suppose there are few families in which 
 the name of John is entirely unknown. It certainly 
 has a curious affinity to the name of Smith, which, 
 oddly enough, has no correlative among the Latin 
 races. But I do quarrel with our choosing to add 
 to the name of John the surname of Bull. That 
 yery unhappy thought of Arbuthnot has been pro- 
 ductive of evil that is something more than merely 
 pictorial. John Bull is even still the conventional 
 Englishman. I am ashamed to recall his charac- 
 teristics. He is a bumpkin, a clown, and a boor. 
 His gross, stupid animalism speaks in every feature 
 and every limb. He is bloated, red-faced, and 
 weighs twenty stone. He not only eats beef till 
 he becomes bovine, but drinks beer till he thinks 
 beer, and habitually wears top-boots in the draw- 
 ing-room. The comic journals of a country are 
 generally supposed to reveal its true characteristics, 
 
68 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 grotesquely, if you will, in manner, but faithfully 
 in spirit. Therefore we know what will be thought 
 of us in future times. Not only so, but we have 
 taken a traditional kind of shame-faced pride in 
 the lout whom we dare to call a likeness of our- 
 selves. His very girth we account a grace, and 
 distrust any but the brutal virtues. No wonder 
 that other nations take us at our word and hold us 
 for the bites that we claim to be. 
 
 We are most of us still proud of being English- 
 men. But the justice of our pride lies in the fact 
 that we are in every respect unlike John Bull. If 
 we weighed twenty stone, could we be the best 
 horsemen to be found after the Tartars ? Could 
 we lead the way up the Alps, and win the race to 
 the North Pole ? Were we bumpkins, clowns, or 
 boors, could we be the most aristocratic of all 
 nations, next to none — with a passion for comfort, 
 which is only another name for the highest sort of 
 refinement, and a fastidiousness which is in itself 
 a mark of a thin moral skin ? Were we mere 
 broad shouldered but narrow-minded Minotauri — 
 but science, commerce, literature, stand wonder- 
 struck at the idea. No : we have our faults, but 
 
JOHN. 69 
 
 these are not of them. On the contrary, our faults 
 are precisely the reverse of those of John Bull. I 
 cannot say the same of merits, for the conventional 
 John Bull has no merits either in body or soul, to 
 judge from his personal appearance, except a look 
 of apoplectic health and a purse well provided. 
 
 The main characteristic of the true John — not 
 Bull — is that he has no common characteristic at 
 all. There is no typical Englishman. It is easy to 
 distinguish an Englishman at a glance from a 
 foreigner, but that is the result of his individuality, 
 not of his nationality. Of a foreigner whose indi- 
 vidual character is strongly pronounced physically, 
 and who shaves sufficient to show it, we invariably 
 say " He looks like an Englishman." This is 
 what Goldsmith meant by calling us a nation of 
 humorists. Our minds and thoughts vary as 
 much as our climate, and our bodies as much as 
 our minds. Hence almost every man has tastes 
 and ways that render him strange to his fellow- 
 countrymen. It has been observed of a French 
 crowd at a great spectacle, that every man has the 
 same impulse at the same moment, and expresses 
 it in the same word. If one exclaims " magnifiqite" 
 
70 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 all exclaim " magnifique" if one superbe, all superbe 
 — not taking it up one from another, but in chorus, 
 as if there were but one voice to the crowd. In 
 England, though we are slaves to fashion, out of 
 a self-consciousness of our individual eccentricities, 
 unanimous impulse is almost unknown. It is not 
 we who experience panics in battle : and if fire 
 panics are not unknown that is because we are 
 human beings, and women are in such cases 
 mingled with men. This characteristic takes a 
 twofold form. Some it makes selfishly intolerant : 
 others it throws into eager sympathy with the 
 thoughts and workings of other minds. We are the 
 most bigoted of bigots when we are sure we are 
 right : the most timid of sceptics when we are 
 not sure that we are not wrong. In fact, an open- 
 minded Englishman, as most Englishmen are when 
 young, is seldom quite sure of his own mind. 
 There are so many ideas floating round him, with 
 somebody to say something for all of them, that 
 he must perforce take refuge either in bigotry or 
 scepticism. So he temporises, and contents him- 
 self in practice with what is certain, finding in 
 tradition and in conventional custom a substitute 
 
JOHN. 7i 
 
 for the trouble of having to make up his opinions. 
 Therefore the Englishman is essentially a " respect- 
 able " man. He leads the common life of those 
 immediately about him, not so much because he 
 thinks it right, as because he has to choose between 
 the comfort he loves and the very uncomfortable 
 strain of perpetual self-assertion. At last submis- 
 sion becomes a habit, and he looks upon displays 
 of eccentricity as rather weak-minded — as, in fact, 
 they mostly are. The result of this is, however, a 
 greater amount of unconscious hypocrisy than can 
 well be found in any other part of the world. You 
 can scarcely ever tell what an Englishman really 
 is from what he seems. Indeed, so much does 
 prudent common sense teach him to subdue his real 
 nature that it is not unfair to judge by contraries. 
 We are always astonishing one another, and we 
 seldom know even our dearest friends till chance 
 breaks down the icy barriers of habit, and shows 
 that Englishmen are men. We hold ourselves back 
 till the occasion comes : and that I take to be the 
 cause of our enduring strength, which we do not 
 exhaust by frittering it away in hourly outlettings. 
 There is no doubt, however, that while strength is 
 
72 NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 increased by repression, readiness of emotion is 
 destroyed. The emotional artistic temperament 
 is produced by indulgence and cultivation. And 
 so among us genius must, in order to be recognised, 
 dare more, and dare to be more eccentric, than in 
 countries where singularity is not looked upon as a 
 sign of weakness. So, also, the pursuit of the arts 
 most allied to genius is still, among us, looked 
 upon as a mark of singularity like a bizarre 
 costume. Like other people we cannot be : and 
 so to be like other people is, of course, our aim. 
 Failure makes us perhaps a little awkward, and 
 gives us a reputation for want of sympathy which 
 we are really the last to deserve. "As many 
 men, so many minds." He differs essentially from 
 Alphonse by keeping up the traditions and the 
 spirit of courtesy. From Hans by caring more 
 for the results of work than for work as in itself an 
 end, from Giuseppe by readiness to spend, from 
 Juan by richness of nature, from AH by origi- 
 nality, from Jonathan by incredulity, from Alex- 
 ander by love of comfort, from Patrick by a sense 
 of humour, from David by being able to appreciate 
 the fact that there are other people besides himself 
 
JOHN, 73 
 
 in the world. But he almost resembles the Welsh- 
 man in his belief that his own country is the centre 
 and capital of the universe, the Scotchman in his 
 want of expansion, the Irishman in his physical 
 activity, the American in his love of all things 
 new, the Oriental in his slavery to fashion, the 
 Spaniard in superstition, the Italian in versatility, 
 the Frenchman in being the biped which is called 
 man. Enough, however, has been said to show 
 that, if not the pleasantest nation in the world we 
 are certainly the most remarkable : and that with 
 all our faults we are not, in our type, a horde of 
 boors or bulls. 
 
FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 i. 
 
 AMONG THE "GODS." 
 
 The Romans had their first-class gods and their 
 second-class gods. So we, who imitate them in so 
 many things, have our " gods " who pay sixpence 
 for the privilege of Olympus and our gods who 
 pay half-a-crown for a more exalted elysium, 
 To-night, while we have five sixpences, we mount 
 into the loftier region. We are at the Opera. 
 
 Your ladyship thinks that the opera is made 
 for such as you ? You, bouquet-bearing mortal 
 that you are, are unaware, even with the aid of a 
 lorgnette, of the presence of those who sit in a 
 world above the chandelier. You do not even 
 
78 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 glance up at them : but they, in a double sense, 
 look down on you. They are a conceited race, 
 though yours is the highway of the crush-room, 
 theirs the byeway of the back-stairs. They are 
 the true fanatici per la musica, not you, who put 
 on kid gloves, and arrive comfortably in your 
 carriage at the end of the overture. Music, like 
 war, is no kid-gloved affair with them. Long 
 before the doors open they crowd through the 
 narrow entrance and up the steep and stuffy 
 stairs that lead to their paradise : for a good 
 three-quarters of an hour they rejoice in purga- 
 tory and breathe without oxygen. And then the 
 rush when the bolts are drawn ! You would not 
 do as much were the ghost of Pasta to return to 
 take a last " farewell." Well may they think it is 
 to them that singers sing. Well may they expect 
 some gratitude for going through so much to hear 
 what, alas, often in these degenerate days turns 
 out to be so little. The sixpenny gods are easily 
 pleased. Not so these. Hard seats and a hard 
 fight to gain them do not conduce to the languid 
 satisfaction proper to the boxes. They talk 
 between the acts : and then, how they criticize ! 
 
AMONG THE " GODS." 79 
 
 They seem to enjoy being displeased better than 
 being pleased. But their opinion, unless, like 
 Mezzofanti, one knows all the languages in the 
 world, is hard to gather. There is a lot of 
 German clerks, who have come, a volunteer claque, 
 to applaud Fralilein Katzkorff for old recollections' 
 sake of Vienna or Berlin. There sit Monsieur 
 and Madame, with the little Alphonse and the 
 little Alphonsine, for all the world as if they were 
 at home in the Porte St. Martin. These wear a 
 solemn air — to them, the theatre is a function : to 
 the Germans, a recreation only lacking beer. By 
 your side sits the twin brother of the Garibaldino 
 who, after a long day's march to Milan, spent his 
 only sou, not in maccaroni, but in a thousandth 
 hearing of " La Sonnambula." This one, for to- 
 night's sake, will starve for seven days. Be you 
 of what country you may, you will find fellow 
 countrymen — and fellow country-women, too — 
 with whom to fraternise, where liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity, politically and socially, are the 
 order of the day. It reeks with Bohemian air. 
 The English element is less interesting. It is 
 indeed less important, for you may sometimes 
 
80 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 sit out a whole performance, and not hear an 
 English word. Of course there are specimens 
 of that indescribable order of beings who are 
 found everywhere, and resemble nothing but flies 
 in amber. But most are able to point out with 
 pride some member of the chorus or orchestra 
 whom somebody that they know knows : or 
 others of whom are themselves struggling music 
 teachers or musicians, who have been extrava- 
 gant enough to spend upon the art that starves 
 them the hard earnings of half a day : and these 
 are the devoutest listeners of all. But only avoid 
 the old gentleman who " Saw Grisi, sir, in her best 
 days/' the middle-aged gentleman who is always 
 losing his place in his libretto, and the bandsman 
 off duty who drums with his heels to the music, 
 and you will do very well You can talk when 
 you want to talk, and listen when you want to 
 listen. What habitue of the stalls can do more ? 
 
 It was among the gods that De Quincey 
 dreamed opium dreams, listening in the intervals 
 of Grassini's song to the music of the Italian 
 language talked by Italian women. Perhaps 
 opium had something to do with this last plea- 
 
AMONG THE " GODS." 81 
 
 sure : for Italian talked by Italians is not the 
 most musical tongue in the world. Let us, 
 therefore, return to the music of the English 
 language, as it is spoken by English women in 
 the stalls. It may disturb the performance : but 
 for that I am too patriotic to care — and, as I have 
 already said, the seats of the gods are very hard. 
 
 6 
 
82 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 II. 
 
 AMONG THE STARS. 
 
 WHEN a troupe of travelling musicians — I trust 
 that prime donne will pardon the use of a title 
 that they share with the stars of fairs — arrives in 
 a country town, it is received with some amount 
 of awe. Such names as Corbacchione and Barba- 
 gianni, hitherto known only from the musical 
 advertisements and criticisms of The Times, become 
 no longer symbols for abstract ideas, but names 
 of audible men and women. No lady of well 
 regulated mind would receive them as guests : nor 
 does she so make any unfitting sacrifice of charity 
 in many cases. But she, especially if she is herself 
 an amateur, feels a half sympathetic interest, 
 
AMONG THE STARS. 83 
 
 tinged, of course, with the sweet flavour of impro- 
 priety in them and their ways. The waiters and 
 chambermaids of the Royal Hotel, where they 
 take up their quarters, are of course in the rela- 
 tion of the valet to the hero. But in the concert- 
 room what mysterious glory exhales from the 
 brow of the finely if not very tastefully dressed 
 lady who, every time she opens her lips, gains 
 for herself or her farmer — for prime dorine are 
 generally bought or hired — the price of a farm ! 
 It is of course presumed, even by those who know 
 nothing of her but what they hear — in a double 
 sense — that she is a woman like other women. 
 But somehow people who read novels, which now 
 very considerably run into art matters, take her 
 as the representative of a great, poetic, and 
 romantic career. If they go to the theatre, they 
 see her fed with applause, and turned into a living 
 statue of Flora. If they meet her in society, 
 they are themselves a little disappointed with her 
 style, but she is so surrounded by courtiers that 
 they are ashamed to own their disappointment 
 even to themselves. If they read the papers, they 
 read of her as if she were something altogether 
 
84 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 divine. Even her faults of style or intonation are 
 discussed with more solemnity than if they were 
 those of a statesman. The Chinese used to think 
 that there was no world outside their great wall. 
 So does the world of amateurs consider themselves 
 the outside Tartars, who look with longing eyes 
 upon the flowery fields, as they deem them, of 
 song. 
 
 Far different to the amateur is the star. She 
 has been brought up to the trade, and knows its 
 traditions. I am talking, remember, of an imagi- 
 nary orb. She is the vocal representative of a 
 glorious art — an art more soul-absorbing than 
 painting or poetry. Once, perhaps, she possessed 
 a little private enthusiasm of her own. Talk to 
 her now, and you will not be called upon to strain 
 your transcendental faculties. She will be best 
 pleased if you confine yourself to praise of herself, 
 and finding fault with her rivals. Not that she is 
 naturally jealous or more than ordinarily vain, but 
 business is business, and all is fair in trade as in 
 war. Besides, self-belief is a habit very easy to 
 acquire. She knows beforehand from what part of 
 the house the applause begins, where there is to be 
 
AMONG THE STARS. 85 
 
 an encore. She will even keep her show song back 
 to produce at the right moment. In that case, if 
 there is no encore, she will take one, all the same. 
 Her happiness in many of the bouquets thrown to 
 her must be small : she likes money, and bills 
 run high in Covent Garden, or in the marche aax 
 fleurs. If, as is commonly the case, she has a 
 fair share of common sense, she knows that the 
 people who crowd round her like moths round a 
 candle, are swept together by reflected vanity, or 
 by interest. They wish either to be patrons or 
 proteges. She finds no pleasure in delighting the 
 few who run after her voice, or her skill, or the 
 thousands who admire her because it is the 
 fashion. Her aspiration is a villa on the lake of 
 Como, with nothing to do : and when that is 
 fulfilled, she continues to take an interest not in 
 art, but in gossip about its personnel. She is, gene- 
 rally speaking, a very good sort of woman, in spite 
 of what people may say : but to entwine a prima 
 donna with poetic wreaths, is about as absurd as 
 to treat a cobbler as though, because his boots 
 were the fashion, he ought to have a public statue. 
 He does the best for himself, and so does she. 
 
S6 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 The true enthusiast, the true artist in song seldom 
 becomes a star. She — perhaps — has the reward 
 ascribed to virtue. A star may be glorious in 
 itself, it is true : but far more often it shines 
 with reflected light, and fashion is its sun. 
 
( §7 ) 
 
 III. 
 
 AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS. 
 
 The noisy insect into which Aurora turned Ti- 
 
 thonus sings, says the legend, not because it 
 chooses to sing, or because its song is sweet. It 
 sings because sing it must, unceasingly, until 
 it bursts in pieces with the perpetual strife to sing. 
 The latest addition to the live stock of a certain 
 horrible old crone who traded upon the beggary of 
 children must have had the blood royal of Tithonus 
 in her veins. I will come to her presently. Mean- 
 while, enough and to spare has been said of musical 
 miseries. All the world asserts that barrel organs, 
 ballad singers, pifferari, and errant bands are a 
 nuisance of the order intolerable. All the world 
 thinks — though it dares not own — that " benefit " 
 concerts, which benefit nobody ; " recitals," which 
 mean a solo performance upon a private trumpet, 
 
8$ FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 musical mornings, musical evenings, musical parties, 
 musical festivals, musical amateurs, connoisseurs, 
 professors, critics, and charlatans, are but the 
 development of a street nuisance upon a drawing- 
 room-scale. Talk of the pleasures of music ! Its 
 pleasures are like the visits of angels : its miseries 
 are as much with us as are the poor. Hateful 
 though it may be in politics, in Art there is no 
 principle so sound as that of " Liberty, Fraternity, 
 Equality " — above all, " Equality/' the key-note of 
 the three-hued symphony. The uncritical audience 
 of yonder Savoyard — the earliest instructor that 
 our princess of cicalce knew in our earliest years — is 
 listening for music's, not for fashion's sake. Beppo 
 himself is playing for a no more ignoble cause 
 than that which evokes the song of his more 
 aristocratic compatriots in the opera house across 
 the way. What is the essential difference between 
 the two ? Every now and then an artist astonishes 
 the stage by showing that the lyric soul may have 
 room for other things than a weekly salary. But 
 the street also is not without its artists, who, if not 
 so great in reputation, are in spirit equally true. 
 The owners of fastidious ears will doubtless prick 
 
AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS, 89 
 
 them with wonder. But I say boldly that of the 
 few artists, worthy of this much-abused name, to 
 whom I have listened w r ith a feeling that they 
 stood in a world wherein criticism becomes only 
 another name for impertinence, two hold a fore- 
 most and yet a common rank. One sang for glory 
 and for glory's gilded frame : the other for halfpence 
 without any glory that needed gilding. But, with 
 both, it was Art that stood above and in front of all. 
 Poor child ! It is hard to call what in others 
 is termed a graceful accomplishment, idle 
 vagabondism in you. Is not vagabondism the 
 very sign and seal of the artist nature — and in 
 what way is it more blameable to wander 
 from London street to London street than from 
 Vienna to San Francisco ? Perhaps you have 
 gipsy blood in your veins, and are a wanderer by 
 right of race as well as by right of nature. Has it 
 ever been remarked that nine street singers out of 
 ten have black hair and tawny skins ? This girl's 
 hair is as black as ebony, and her complexion — 
 but that is not so easy to tell. We are standing 
 not far from Bow Street, where the law is investi- 
 gating the rights and wrongs of the wretched 
 
90 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 Beppo. Beppo also is a grasshopper ; and his 
 compelling fate is the padrone. But listen. "That 
 is not a bad voice," you say : "who knows what it 
 might have been with training ? " " Not a bad 
 voice," indeed ! It is a glorious voice : and, as to 
 training, it is not so much instruction as oppor- 
 tunity that is needed to make it that of a Sontag 
 or of a Malibran. She is the very queen of grass- 
 hoppers, though her robes are tatters. Her com- 
 pelling fate is Nature. Her blind soul does not 
 know it : but it is not for the sake of stray 
 halfpence that she wastes her treasure. As for 
 what her life is when she is not singing vile words 
 to viler tunes — well, it may be no worse than if she 
 had been an opera queen — a queen, not among 
 grasshoppers, but among dragon-flies. There are 
 countries in which she would have been caught 
 and trained. London is not one of them. We are 
 ants : we have no fellow-feeling with grasshoppers. 
 The rattle of our streets drowns all but the song of 
 the lark, who sings to the skies alone, though he 
 cannot see them through his prison-bars, and to 
 the sod which has to stand to him for the whole 
 green world. In a few months' time her song will 
 
AMONG THE GRASSHOPPERS. 91 
 
 be cracked and hoarse, with London rain and 
 wind and fog, and worse things even than these. 
 In a year, where will she be ? Perhaps she will 
 have followed her dead voice : perhaps she in her 
 turn will have turned impresario, of beggar children. 
 In either case, Nature has mocked Art by bestow- 
 ing one of the sweetest and most gracious of her 
 gifts in vain. But mere street ballad singer, street 
 beggar as she is, and will have been to the end, 
 she will have done more than most of us. 
 Scarcely one in a generation bears the fruit of 
 song — how few even bear the blossom ! Is it to 
 enter into the forbidden world to fancy that 
 Nature gives not one of her gifts in vain — that 
 song, though existing but in promise, is the true 
 soul of a born artist, be she prima donna assoluta 
 or be she but prima cicala — first of grasshoppers ? 
 In that case, when you hear a street singer, with 
 her hoarse, cracked voice, think, not of the torment 
 to your eyes and ears, but of what she might have 
 been. This is no fable, though it set out with 
 one. The grasshopper, with her one strident note, 
 is not the less a singer because she is slain by 
 song. 
 
92 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 IV. 
 
 AMONG THE STALKS. 
 
 Once upon a time, a long time ago, the making of 
 nosegays was one of the simplest arts known in 
 Eden or anywhere. Nothing was needed but to 
 pull a handful of cowslips from the nearest 
 meadow, or of anemones from the hedge, and to 
 bind the stalks together with a tendril of the wild 
 clematis, which some call traveller's joy. But we, 
 in our cleverness, have changed all that, even 
 though we may not go quite so far as Sganarelle, 
 who, on his own authority, transferred the heart 
 from the left to the right side. It is probable that 
 the hearts of men and women are where they 
 have always been, and that all who have been 
 children have in them still a quiet place for wild 
 flowers. Only the ingenuity of florists has raised 
 
AMONG THE STALKS. 93 
 
 a wire fence between the heart and the blossoms 
 that nature bids it fear. 
 
 Bouquets — I cannot call them by so unprimi- 
 tive a word as nosegays — are now manufactured 
 by w r iring together into a symmetrical pattern 
 gaudy petals and heavily-fragrant blossoms, while 
 the stalks are thrown away as an incumbrance to a 
 kid-gloved hand. Covent Garden, wherein we are 
 now 7 standing, is the metropolis of these bouquets. 
 But it is something more. It is itself a bouquet. 
 Here are not only the bright petals of flowers but 
 of flower buyers, who lay down gold with hands 
 that would grace Aurora. Here is not only the 
 scent of blossoms, but the perfume of the memories 
 of the Piazza's flowery days. And here also are the 
 stalks that are thrown away. 
 
 I do not mean only the stalks of cabbages, the 
 empty pods of peas and beans, and the thorny 
 shreds through which roses drew their life from the 
 soil before they had been transplanted from the 
 bed to the bouquet. Everybody knows Covent 
 Garden at noon. Then it is in blossom. Most 
 people know it, or rather have seen it — for the 
 knowledge of the early sparrow 7 is shared with few 
 
94 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 — in the fresh, cold dawn, when market gardens, 
 like very woods of Birnam, march into London as 
 into another Dunsinane, bearing with them their 
 diamonds of country dew. Even the tenants of 
 front rooms in the innumerable inns overlooking 
 the waggons do not complain of a clamour that 
 wakes them only to send them to sleep again. 
 But it is not always noon or dawn. Covent 
 Garden is not always the Convent Garden — a city 
 sanctuary where rose abbesses rule over lily and 
 violet nuns — a floral cathedral in the midst of an 
 unfragrant world. There are some few hours of 
 night when even Covent Garden tries to sleep, and 
 when the stalks forget in dreams that they have 
 forgotten to bear flowers. 
 
 She who sleeps in a torpor of exhaustion, 
 among baskets for pillows, and with the night air 
 for her covering, is a stalk. She is a stalk that 
 once upon a time — how long ago it seems ! — drew 
 from the soil the sap that feeds the flowers. Her 
 pillow then was that of health and growth : her 
 coverlet the air of home. There is more in his 
 doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants than even 
 Gothe, its inventor, knew. He called the develop- 
 
AMONG THE STALKS. 95 
 
 ment of flowers from roots a progression not from 
 imperfection to perfection, but from strength to 
 weakness — from health to disease. First comes 
 the stem or stalk, firmly planted in the soil of 
 earth, which, for flowers, never ceases to be the soil 
 of Eden. Then the branches spread themselves as 
 if to grasp all the outer air. Then, as the sap 
 grows weaker, come the leaves, to shield the plant 
 from the very sunshine towards which it strains. 
 Lastly, break out the flowers, to end either in 
 seasonable fruit, or in — a bouquet, to be gathered, 
 carried through a ball-room or crush-room, 
 caressed, and tossed aside. So from above that 
 woman, who sleeps, let us hope, and dreams, we 
 may be sure, among the refuse both of roses and 
 of cabbages, may we, in like fashion, draw aside 
 the transparent foliage of her dreams, until the 
 constable's bull's-eye flashes upon her from the 
 piazza and warns her that there is no rest for such 
 as she. The artificially wired blossoms have long 
 ago — or lately, what matters it ? — dropped away 
 from their wires. The leaves are no longer there 
 either to shelter from the scorching sun, or to 
 receive the freshness of the rain. The root is torn 
 
96 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 up from the soil This is the process of the manu- 
 facture of a bouquet. And what has become of the 
 stalk? It lies here among the rejected waste of 
 Covent Garden, whence Waterloo-bridge is not fan 
 It may be thither that the glare of the lantern will 
 bid this human stalk "move on," and our great 
 river will carry to the sea the refuse of a garland. 
 Yes, Covent Garden is in every sense a bouquet. 
 Its market-place is the very type of those who 
 snatch among its shreds and refuse such dreams as 
 may come between the close of a black night and 
 the coming of a misty morning, bringing with it 
 the cartwheels of the busy day to crush into the 
 mire the stalks that had once borne blossoms in- 
 the fields. 
 
( 97 
 
 V. 
 
 AMONG THE BLIGHT. 
 
 In my wanderings to discover the saddest possible 
 thing that the world contains, I thought it fit to 
 confine myself in the first place to my own country, 
 and in the second place to London, simply because 
 England contains London, and London contains 
 all things. But once lodged here, the search 
 became more difficult. It was hard to choose 
 between the arches of the river-bridges, the prisons, 
 and the drawing-rooms. But at last I came to a 
 door, on the lintel of which suddenly flashed out 
 the word "Eureka? It was a hospital for sick 
 children. I am not going to describe its locality or 
 its organisation. It is a bad principle to satisfy at 
 second hand the curiosity that ought to satisfy 
 itself by becoming charity. But does any one 
 
 7 
 
98 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 remember how sometimes, when the morning is 
 young and the glass is at " set fair," when there is 
 not a cloud in the sky, and the day lives in hope 
 instead of memory, there comes an obscure dark- 
 ness which is not mist, or the presage of fertilizing 
 rain ? The country people call it " blight," and its 
 whole purpose is to destroy. It is one of those 
 instruments of nature that seem to us to be wholly 
 malevolent. Thunderstorms, though they devastate 
 the fields, have their benevolent as well as their 
 glorious side. But blight, though less widely 
 destructive, is both wholly hideous and wholly 
 evil. 
 
 Here is one little child, who has seen eight 
 years, of which each has been a winter. It was 
 not born a cripple. Had its mother been a negress 
 or a Sioux, its limbs would be as straight and its 
 life as strong as that of any of its brothers and 
 sisters who are brought up in the forcing houses 
 that we call nurseries. Its sin has been that it was 
 born in the most civilized city in the world, over 
 one half of which the sun shines gloriously, while 
 over the other half— or is it more than half? — 
 spreads the stormless blight of bad nursing, worse 
 
AMONG THE BLIGHT. 99 
 
 food, and worst air. That day should end in night, 
 is fitting : but that the twelve hours of midnight 
 should strike with the first hour of dawn — have I 
 not discovered the saddest sight in the world ? 
 Look at those small rays of hands, which nature 
 made to grow till they could wield the axe or 
 hammer, and which our second nature might have 
 taught even to hold the pen. Look how the 
 features, w T hich were meant to smile till strong life 
 made them grave, have in eight years of childhood 
 only learned to express the patience of hopeless 
 resignation. Look at the limbs that ought to be 
 stretching themselves out into the air of the fields, 
 even if only into the fields of St. Martin or of 
 St. Giles, striving with those of other children, not 
 which can run the fastest, but which can lie most 
 still. And then turn from bed to bed, and think 
 upon the suffering of innocence — a paradox which 
 is purely human : and of how that suffering falls 
 hardest upon the children of the poor, who most of 
 all need the strength of shoulders and of hands. 
 These cannot compensate for defects of body by 
 the triumph of mind over the strength or over the 
 weakness of matter. Here is another child that 
 
ioo FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 has undergone one of the most terrible operations 
 of surgery : another whose life is only being pro- 
 longed for a few short months in order that it may 
 die of disease instead of starvation — each, unable 
 to reach out his hands, reaching out his eyes, with 
 touching greed, for the wooden horse, or piece of 
 coloured card, that stands to him for so much of 
 the universe as is not contained in the words 
 deformity and disease. Even if any one of these 
 lives to be old in years, he will never have known 
 what it is to be young. The day of life is reversed, 
 and the infant is born into the seventh age. 
 
 And yet, in the midst of premature disease, and 
 in the face of death, who comes hand in hand with 
 birth, one sees through the veil of blight the outline 
 of something which is not that of the destroying 
 angel. We are in London, and in the midst of 
 roaring streets and stifling lanes. But through the 
 shadow the passing wheels are unheard, and the 
 reek of the close courts is filtered and purified. If 
 the blight has forced its way within the walls — if 
 the sunshine and the showers are left without, it 
 has called forth the care of human gardeners who 
 neglect too much the wild and healthy blossoms 
 
AMONG THE BLIGHT. 101 
 
 that are exposed to the scorching of the sun and 
 the rush of the storm. If only there could be a 
 children's hospital for all — for the strong plants as 
 well as for the weak, for lives that need to be 
 restrained, as well as for lives that need to be 
 saved ! These sad, sickly, but resigned faces, these 
 feeble but patient hands, these minds closed to all 
 tfie evils of the world but one, all these children 
 who are, save in innocence, all things that children 
 ought not to be, have learned in childhood the 
 fiction, better than truth, that the earth is ruled by 
 kindness, and the truth that death is not a thing 
 to be feared. No : sad, unaccountable as it is that 
 blight should be carried by the breeze that carries 
 day-break, I must wander farther before I can 
 say that I have found the saddest thing in the 
 world. 
 
102 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 VI. 
 AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 
 
 ROSE is the best possible tint for spectacle glasses. 
 They render the poverty of other people invisible, 
 they give pleasant names to unpleasant things, 
 they call a spade anything except what it really 
 is, and by a severe process of translation, have 
 turned Grub Street, St. Mary Axe, into Milton 
 Street, in the same unsavoury locality. But no 
 spectacles however exquisitely tinted, can turn a 
 caterpillar into a butterfly. If they could, how 
 glorious the world w T ould be — and how full the 
 Abbey would be of tombs ! But, as things are, 
 the ways that Goldsmith trod are trodden still. 
 We often bandy compliments about Grub Street 
 being no more : but we do not change things by 
 changing names. 
 
AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 103 
 
 It is difficult to be geographically exact. But 
 the modern Grub Street — I like to use the good 
 old name ; it is redolent of poetry and of pathos, 
 in spite of its unpoetic sound — may be taken to lie 
 within a circle of byeways that radiate from Covent 
 Garden as a centre. To you, that quarter of 
 London, our mother of mystery, is but the land 
 of music, of theatres, of late suppers, and of early 
 peas. This is because you keep to the highivays 
 of the world. Turn down this narrow winding 
 alley and enter this untempting tavern door. You 
 must not mind if your rose-coloured lenses are 
 dimmed by the smoke of shag, by the fumes of 
 malt, and by clouds of spirituous steam. You will 
 see typified for you many another tavern in many 
 another winding alley within the cast of a stone. 
 You have passed the threshold of a land wherein 
 all things are upside down. 
 
 The " Wormwood Arms" — that will pass for 
 a generic name — is a dilapidated house of the days 
 of the earlier Georges. It possesses historic and 
 classic traditions. But it is a failure now : and it 
 is here that gather the Failures — men who have 
 taken to the underground ways of literature because 
 
104 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 they were, or more probably thought themselves, 
 unfitted for safer and easier ways. Has it ever 
 occurred to those who study the secret of success 
 to fathom the philosophy of failure ? They will 
 here find a whole hospital of cases. These men 
 are the caterpillars, who, with the making of 
 butterflies in them, will never become butterflies. 
 Each lacks some one little thing — each has some 
 slight moral or mental twist that keeps him under 
 the water of life, on which many a worse man 
 triumphantly swims. There is nothing so terribly 
 bitter as to be almost good enough — to miss the 
 centre by just the fraction of a line when to miss, 
 even by the fraction of a line, is to fail. Make up 
 to Jack Hacker, there in the corner which is by 
 prescription. From one, learn all. He is a wit 
 and a scholar — nay, he is a gentleman, though a 
 rough one, still in spite of loud talk and a suit of 
 clothes that would disgrace a militiaman in mufti. 
 He keeps himself from starving by his pen, not 
 even himself knows how, but beyond that he has 
 always failed. He was the son of a man of 
 fortune, even of rank, and was intended for the 
 Church or the Bar. But he was plucked for his 
 
AMONG THE CATERPILLARS. 105 
 
 Little-go, though capable of examining for honours. 
 He never played billiards without just missing 
 the stroke that was to ensure him victory. He 
 never backed a horse but it was beaten by a neck. 
 He never wrote a line, good or bad, but he was 
 told that " it would very nearly do." He missed 
 winning a wife — a girl whom he treasures still in 
 his heart in a secret and shamefaced way — just 
 because, as ill-luck would have it, he in those days 
 the soberest of men, drank one glass too much — 
 he has often done so since, poor fellow ! — on the 
 eve of his wedding day. By just one second he 
 invariably loses the post or the train. When things 
 were at their w r orst he tried the coward's escape 
 from trouble, but even in this he failed. So he 
 joined his fellows at the " Wormwood Arms," in 
 Weevil Lane. It is his substitute for home. He 
 and they have become what the prosperous and 
 successful ignore, and have to accept failure as 
 they best may, some defiantly, some querulously, 
 some desperately, and some patiently. Even when, 
 by chance, the lane turns at last, and some cater- 
 pillar does happen to become a butterfly, the trans- 
 formation of their comrade does but little good 
 
106 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 to them. He spreads his wings in the sunlight of 
 editorial air, and forgets too often that he too was 
 once even as these. And then his old friends unite 
 to abuse him, and all his works and ways. For 
 their creed is that to fail is to deserve to succeed : 
 that to succeed in to deserve to fail. And some- 
 times the creed is not wrong, sad and bitter though 
 it may be. 
 
 Go into the libraries of our great museums, 
 and you will see to what a last pass the drudgery 
 of hack work still brings men — aye, and women 
 too. It is simply terrible to see there the haggard 
 faces, the wasted frames, the hopeless aspect of 
 many who cannot even reach to the consolations 
 of the " Wormwood Arms." No : Grub Street is 
 not swept away. It has but changed its name 
 and widened its area — that is all. 
 
( io7 ) 
 
 VII. 
 
 AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. 
 
 DURING the months which contain the letter a R" 
 in their names, I cannot help regarding that inte- 
 resting creature which is " neither fish, nor flesh, 
 nor good red herring" — the oyster — as the true 
 height of human happiness. I do not mean as an 
 edible, delicious though he is, but as a type. He 
 has a home, far down among the depths whence 
 the wildest tempest is not strong enough to tear 
 him. The waves roll and the winds roar over him, 
 but he is great in his safe and self-sufficing calm. 
 He has but to open his mouth or door and all 
 his wants are supplied. He is an eminently 
 respectable and respected mollusc — the cynic of 
 the sea. He is destined to be valued even above 
 his merits — at the rate of something like half-a- 
 
io8 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 crown a dozen. He is protected both by nature 
 and by legislation : and, when his career is run, 
 or rather stood out, it is to receive, by way of 
 epitaph, the thanks of some grateful fellow- 
 creature for benefits conferred. No wonder, with 
 so sublime an example daily before our eyes, we 
 do our best to emulate our fellow-native. Do we 
 not turn London into a gigantic oyster bed, and 
 cling to its bricks with all the force of our fibres, 
 hiding as much as possible from the risks of sun- 
 shine and of air ? Do we not bring comforts to 
 our mouths and doors, so that we have but to open 
 them to take them in ? Are we not proud of 
 being the cynics of the world's sea ? Do not we 
 also value ourselves even at something more than 
 half-a-crown for a dozen of us ? And if we can 
 in the course of our life find one grateful fellow- 
 creature who will speak kind words of us after we 
 are gone, do we not also feel that we have not 
 lived in vain ? 
 
 But, alas for human, if not for molluscous, per- 
 versity ! One fine morning the letter " R " slips 
 away from the month's name. It leaves a little 
 hole through which pierces a ray of what is to be 
 
AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. 109 
 
 the summer sun, fragant with the breeze that has 
 swept over the flowers of the sea. It is May, the 
 mother of June. The swallow has long since taken 
 his passage for the sources of the Nile. We open 
 our shells just a little, and our rock does not feel 
 quite so soft as usual. The scent of the first 
 strawberry, the first stray taste of hay that some 
 imaginative people fancy they can catch even in 
 the Temple, the chance sight of such words as 
 Baden, Bruges, Prague, in the tables of an obsolete 
 continental Bradshaw, seem suddenly to set the 
 heart of the stork or swallow beating in the 
 bivalve. Daily, humdrum life, though it may 
 breed the pearl, seems to prove that pearl-breed- 
 ing is, after all, a disease. Every well-regulated 
 mind is seized with a glorious desire to be a little 
 insane. The mollusc develops more swiftly than 
 the laws of Darwin, and even amid the depths of 
 the rocks feels the budding of inconsistent wings. 
 
 There are paradoxical people who hold that 
 London is pleasantest w T hen emptiest. The streets 
 are no longer crowded. Cabs and peaches are 
 cheap and plentiful. To dine en ville becomes 
 almost comfortable. The drop in the ocean 
 
no FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 expands into an almost recognisable wave. On 
 the other hand, travelling is more full of trouble 
 than ever. Most things and places are more beau- 
 tiful in the imagination than in their reality, while 
 the history of a tour is little more than a record 
 of trivial troubles and very untrivial bills. Were 
 it not for the longing that makes absence of dis- 
 comfort the greatest discomfort of all, how happy 
 would the imprisoned oyster be ! It is something 
 more than the shame of not being like her neigh- 
 bours that induces even a lady to draw down her 
 front blinds and live in her back rooms rather than 
 confess that she has not gone out of town, or to 
 make the payment of a morning call in summer 
 time the offering of an insult. It is that the soul 
 of the oyster has outgrown its shell. It would 
 fain be for a while one of those homeless, ram- 
 bling, Bohemian fishes that have no rock and breed 
 no pearls, but are carried by wandering currents 
 into the shark's jaws. We may bivalvise ourselves 
 as hard as we please, but the instinctive love of 
 novelty is too strong — we are still passage birds in 
 soul. When the grass seems to peep between the 
 flags of Regent-street and the clover in Pall-mall, 
 
AMONG THE MOLLUSCS. in 
 
 then the billowy clouds insist not on suggesting a 
 rainfall, but the Alps — the Thames, on talking of 
 the sea whereto it flows. Home-sickness is bad 
 enough, but nothing can compare with the sick- 
 ness of the swallow that pines to flee away. 
 What then must be the desire of the oyster ? It 
 must transcend that of the moth for the star. 
 
 Yes — if the lot of the mollusc be happier than 
 that of the bird, then the sea anemone must be 
 more blessed than the oyster, more blessed than 
 the anemone the stone to which it clings. But 
 though the swallow loves its nest, and can fly to it 
 as straight as an arrow, over the mazes of a thou- 
 sand miles, he leaves it w r hen instinct makes home 
 no longer home. It is well that we, would-be 
 oysters as we are, cannot rid ourselves of our 
 feathered souls. It is well to be able to indulge 
 in the luxury of discomfort sometimes, even if it 
 is only to keep up our knowledge that comfort, 
 shut up in a shell, is not a very noble thing. 
 
112 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 
 
 I HAD not paid a visit to the Temple since, ten 
 years ago, I was a fellow guest with the curate of 
 my parish and his eldest daughter at a lunch party 
 in the chambers of my friend Jack Limpet. They 
 were on a visit to London in the month of May, 
 and I think that the young lady enjoyed Palm- 
 court better than Exeter Hall. Yesterday I had 
 to plunge into its labyrinths again, alone. 
 
 The blossom into which Clytie was turned by 
 her too great love for the patron of the Muses 
 must have been the earliest sundial. I do not 
 remember that there was any muse of law, though 
 Themis has always been on terms of cousinship, if 
 not of sisterhood, with the daughters of Memory. 
 But I do know that the courts of the Temple are 
 
AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 113 
 
 remarkable for the number of those puzzling horo- 
 logical instruments into which Clytie's golden dials 
 afterwards developed themselves. It is true that 
 on my visit yesterday I found a clock on the turret 
 of the new hall : but I was to some extent con- 
 soled by hearing the dinner hour proclaimed as of 
 old by the primitive and unmelodious cow's horn. 
 Tempora mutantur is the commonest of posies for 
 the face of a sundial. The glory of the Temple is 
 more than half departed with its walk by the edge 
 of the Thames. The older it grows, the more it 
 becomes new. It is no more the Temple of Gold- 
 smith, of Charles Lamb, or even of Thackeray, 
 than of the knights of the Horse or Lamb. If 
 Ruth Westwood, nee Pinch, is still living, and 
 were she to make a sentimental journey to the old 
 fountain, she would make it in vain. Well, sic 
 aqua est — another motto for a sunflower in brick 
 or stone. It is something, in these days of pro- 
 gress, that the Temple has not been swept away 
 in steam. But, after all, if " times are changed," 
 " non nos mutamur in Mis " — we have not changed 
 with them. 
 
 The Temple is the basilica of melancholy. 
 
 8 
 
U4 FL OR A AND FA UNA OF L OND ON 
 
 Burton might have made an exhaustive analysis 
 of his favourite science without stirring out into 
 Fleet-street. It laughs loudly, it eats and drinks 
 hard, it is magnificently idle, it works desperately. 
 It is not the abode of all the virtues, but the great 
 virtue it has of living its life intensely. Such is 
 the fascination of this intense life that men who 
 have once lived in it cling to it with a kind of 
 feline fondness. They attach themselves to its 
 bricks as if they were barnacles on a ship's side. 
 They cling, though it is the grave of as many 
 hopes and good intentions as it contains paving- 
 stones. Ah, here at last is No. 23, Palm-court, 
 with as many names upon its door-posts as if a 
 colony of rabbits had learned that three inches of 
 white paint may be let for ten pounds a year. 
 Here once more is Jack Limpet's name. That 
 tall, broad-shouldered fellow who entertained Alice 
 and her father and myself so hospitably, and was 
 so profuse with his high spirits and champagne. 
 He might have made his fortune in Queensland 
 thrice over in these last ten years. He might 
 have become the husband of Alice and of a con- 
 stituency too, had he pleased. But he dropped 
 
AMONG THE SUNFLOWERS. 115 
 
 into this bed of sunflowers. He had dipped into 
 "the lives of the Chancellor's" and turned towards 
 the woolsack as Clytis to the sun. He sits from 
 ten till four in a cupboard attached to our Salle 
 des pas perdus y bandying chaff that passes for wit, 
 and listening to flights of forensic dulness. He is 
 not paid a shilling for his trouble : but he thinks 
 his presence indispensable. He reads the Law 
 Reports regularly, and does nothing else all day. 
 Is not law notoriously a jealous mistress, and do 
 not attorneys always avoid the man who has more 
 than one iron in the fire ? If only that one iron 
 were a magnet ! And this life he has been leading 
 ever since the lunch party ten years ago — ten 
 years spent in trying to keep the wolf on the other 
 side of the oak. This is the life that he calls 
 following a profession. It is not a profession — it is 
 a habit, and a miserable habit besides. And this, 
 and worse than this, is the way in which hundreds 
 and thousands of men have spent and are spending 
 the best part of their lives — in which scores and 
 hundreds spend the whole. Even if fortune or a 
 lucid interval saves him from the w r orst bitterness 
 of the end of a life-long failure — even if this hope- 
 
u6 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 less strife against hope by chance succeeds, it will 
 be too late. Jack may possibly become Sir John ; 
 but I do not think that on her tomb will Alice be 
 styled " Dame." His red bag will have come to 
 contain his heart, and the means of happiness will 
 have become the end. " Pereunt et imputantur" 
 says the dial opposite his chambers — " The hours 
 perish and it is to us they are imputed." I think 
 that I have at last discovered the saddest sight of 
 all. It is " call night " in the Temple — in a 
 garden of hopes which strain after a sunshine 
 never gained until sunset, and seldom gained even 
 then. 
 
( H7 ) 
 
 IX. 
 AMONG THE ROOKS, 
 
 THERE are rooks and rooks, There is the rook 
 that preys upon the farmer's wheat, and the rook 
 that preys upon the human pigeon. The latter is 
 common enough among us : he is the true Corvus 
 Londinensis. But what of these half-dozen black 
 rooks in their nests among still blacker London 
 trees ? There is no wheat, late or early, whereon 
 to fatten within many a mile of Holborn Bars. 
 Unless they can feed on red tape, or on the 
 crumbs of not too early breakfasts, they ought 
 to starve. 
 
 Not everybody is aware that there are real 
 rooks in London still. That fact in natural history 
 is known by experience only to the tenants of 
 chambers on the west side of Gray's-inn-square. 
 
u8 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 Some zealous sportsmen have actually tried upon 
 these rusty wings their skill in the use of the air 
 gun, to the wonder of a savant below, who rushed 
 to his desk and wrote a treatise, afterwards 
 read before some learned society, " On the Fall- 
 ing Sickness among Rooks and Crows." Their 
 existence should also be patent to the loungers in 
 Gray's Inn Gardens, only — like the snakes in 
 Ireland — there are none. The rooks are a race 
 of Alexander Selkirks — monarchs of all they 
 survey. 
 
 It is a weekday, and within a stone's throw of 
 the busiest part of London : and it is more solitary 
 than Wimpole Street on a wet Sunday. And yet 
 it is not solitary. Have you quite forgotten that 
 you were once a schoolboy, and knew how to 
 climb a tree ? If not, then clamber up this elm, 
 and see what is to be seen. You will not see a 
 living form. But you will see many a living soul. 
 That is Lord Chancellor Bacon, who planted the 
 very tree on which you are perched, seeking in 
 vain for the summer-house from which he used to 
 enjoy the view of Hampstead and Highgate : you 
 cannot catch a glimpse of them, even from your 
 
AMONG THE ROOKS. 119 
 
 tree. Lord Burleigh meets him : he, too, lodged 
 in the Inn — and shakes his head more pro- 
 foundly over what we call our " statesmanship " 
 than he did when he heard the first tidings of the 
 Spanish invasion. Things are altered, he thinks, 
 since the-days of Good Queen Bess, whose "glorious 
 and immortal memory " is still solemnly drunk by 
 barristers and students in Spanish wine over the 
 tables of Spanish oak — relics of the wreck of the 
 Armada— that she gave to the hall. But what 
 strange figures are these ? As we rooks live, 'tis 
 Puck and Peas Blossom, Oberon and Titania, 
 Theseus and Hippolyta, Helena and Hermia, and 
 Bottom the Weaver. At their head is he of the 
 high, bald forehead and pointed beard — their poet 
 and ours. They sweep over the rank sward, leav- 
 ing fairy rings — past the chapel, on to the hall. 
 Yes, you may forget the statecraft of Burleigh, 
 the wisdom of Bacon, but you cannot forget that 
 this inn of court, where the rooks still caw like 
 lawyers at Nisi Prius, beheld the first performance 
 of the Midsummer Night's Dream. We are among 
 deed-boxes, dust, and debt, but we are in Fairy- 
 land, 
 
120 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 Once a romance had its rise in those ground- 
 floor chambers now occupied by some artist, 
 journalist, or attorney — by any one but a barrister, 
 for the bar fights shy of this corner of legal 
 Bohemia. One fine summer's evening a party of 
 students sat at the window over their wine. A 
 pretty nursemaid, airing her charge in the garden 
 — more frequented then — was not averse to a little 
 conversation. By and by she was prevailed upon, 
 by way of jest, to hand the infant into the room. 
 She was seen to pass round the corner on her way 
 to reclaim it at the door, but was never seen again. 
 The young men found themselves in the joint 
 possession of a fine little girl of some nine months 
 old. Making her a sort of " Figlia del Reggi- 
 mento," they bound themselves to be thenceforth 
 the protectors and godfathers of her whom they 
 christened Emma Gray. Is not that an idea for 
 the beginning of a novel ? She might be a duke's 
 daughter, and in the last chapter marry the hand- 
 somest of her godfathers. What an opening for a 
 plot there would be — one young girl forming a 
 link to bind together a dozen men with hostile 
 interests and conflicting characters. It is the fitter 
 
AMONG THE ROOKS. 121 
 
 subject for romance, for of her after life history 
 tells us nothing. Only one may be sure that the 
 cawing of rooks sounded all her life long like a 
 melody running through the discordant London 
 roar. That unmusical music is full of vague, 
 suggestive, dreamy harmonies when it sounds 
 among green fields and sunny hills. How much 
 more suggestive is it of contrasts and of memories 
 when it grates upon the ear in that oasis of silence 
 in a desert of sound which we call Gray's Inn. 
 
122 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 X. 
 
 AMONG THE CAGES. 
 
 The whole natural history of London may be read 
 in its ornithology. To begin with, every grade of 
 society is represented by its feathered population, 
 caged or uncaged, from the sparrow that gains its 
 living from the streets, in the face of the watchful 
 constabulary of the tiles, to the almost royal 
 parrot, who has a whole household at command, 
 and is treated as though he were a prince 
 bewitched by an evil genii, or like some popular 
 statesman whose random words, though repeated 
 for the thousandth time, are gathered up as 
 though they were pearls. Every race is typified 
 by our fellow biped, from our own native finches 
 who, in captivity, become the bourgeoisie of British 
 birds, to the gorgeous strangers who cross the sea 
 
AMONG THE CAGES. 123 
 
 from Malacca or Peru. Again, they have their 
 proper quarters of the town. Just as one goes to 
 Whitechapel to look for a German, to Soho for a 
 Frenchman, and to Hatton Garden for an Italian, 
 so do the thrushes congregate in St. Giles's, the 
 rooks by Holborn, and the canaries in Spitalfields* 
 Of individual character there is no need to speak. 
 They are as various as among women — who are 
 not so very various, after all. Probably thief does 
 not differ from thief much more than sparrow from 
 sparrow, or more than lawyer from lawyer, crow 
 from crow. All are leaves of the world's tree, 
 which differ in microscopic detail, but grow and 
 live and wither in the same seasons and by the 
 same law. 
 
 People may say what they will about the 
 weight of bricks and paving-stones that imprisons 
 the human heart of London, which must be 
 beating somewhere, even though it be so hard to 
 read, so hard even to find. Why, those who have 
 ears to hear through the rattle and whirl of the 
 streets cannot listen for a single instant without 
 catching the music of its pulsations. Buried deep 
 it may be, but its very depth renders it only the 
 
124 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 more deeply vocal. The soprano song of the 
 woods, when caged, only turns to the contralto 
 voice which contains the true pathos of song — the 
 voice which comes from the imprisoned heart, not 
 only from the throat which sings just because it 
 was made to sing. It is but that we ourselves 
 have no time, perhaps no power, to sing. We 
 have to free our hearts by deputy, as the Japanese 
 are said to pray. Only we may be sure that the 
 song is in our case none the less sweet and 
 musical for being caged, or for our deputies being 
 the innocent singers that they are. It is fitting 
 that angels should be represented with feathered 
 wings. 
 
 I have said that canaries are a feature of 
 Spitalfields. It must surely be by force of 
 contrast if it is by force of any reason at all. 
 Indeed, the love for this special kind of birds 
 amounts to a passion, for which some people 
 strive to account by tracing a subtle connection 
 between the descendants of the exiles of the 
 Azores and the descendants of the exiles of 
 Auvergne, who muster in that quarter strongly 
 still. There may be something in such sympathy : 
 
AMONG THE CAGES. 125 
 
 but, be this as it may, yonder old fellow who is 
 slouching round the corner has not a drop of 
 French blood, however remote, in his veins. He 
 is neither a weaver nor the great grandson of a 
 weaver. He is prematurely broken down by 
 misery and gin. He spends half his days in 
 public-houses, the other half in prison-cells. He 
 never knew a letter of the alphabet, but he has 
 been a good workman in his time, though never a 
 sober one. But in those days, though he never 
 had a wife or child, or knew father or mother, he 
 had a home ; and solely to keep that home 
 together he toiled hard during his sober hours and 
 kept himself from crime. He literally lived for a 
 fellow-creature, and that fellow-creature was a bird. 
 He had to keep a roof over its head, and to save 
 sufficient halfpence from the barman's till to keep 
 it in health and luxury. Does that seem in- 
 credible ? To him it seemed the most natural 
 thing in the world — and not only natural to him, 
 but to many of his neighbours too, who were by 
 no means a colony of fine ladies 01 tender-hearted 
 girls. He had bought the bird for a bargain from 
 a canary-fancier, who was a broken-down pugilist : 
 
126 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 but the golden notes of its song somehow pre- 
 vented his trying to sell it again. It seemed to 
 penetrate among the unconscious possibilities of 
 what might have been. He even fought battles in 
 its honour in the spirit, if not according to the 
 forms, of ancient chivalry. It was thus that he 
 fell at last into the clutches from which he had so 
 long tried to keep himself free. A street fight led 
 to a week or two in gaol : and when he came out 
 again the bird had long been starved. His one 
 song was silent ; and he himself became the caged 
 gaol-bird that you see. 
 
 Such are London birds, that learn in captivity 
 to sing for us our hidden songs, and to build their 
 nests in hearts instead of leaves. 
 
( 127 ) 
 
 XL 
 
 AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 
 
 A STUDENT of London's natural history who, in 
 order that his work may be complete, feels himself 
 bound to devote a chapter to its water-lilies, is in 
 the position of the celebrated naturalist who wrote 
 that celebrated chapter upon the snakes of Ireland. 
 Thanks to St. Patrick, the chapter was unique for 
 brevity. It is needless to add that, by one gazing 
 from any of the river bridges, no water or any 
 other lilies are to be seen, unless there be a Citizen 
 or Iron boat bearing that name. But there was 
 once, in days before London was dreamed of, a 
 certain goddess, well known at Memphis and 
 Alexandria. Her name was Isis. She wore a 
 garland of lotus-flowers, which are nothing less or 
 more than the water-lilies of the Nile, which was 
 nothing more or less than Cleopatra's Thames. 
 
128 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 She was veiled from head to foot, and that veil 
 never was lifted by any profane hand. Whether 
 she was a barbaric Venus, or whether she was like 
 the skeleton at her country's feasts, no one but her 
 priests could say. London is the Isis among cities ; 
 and for that reason, whether the Thames bear 
 water-lilies or no, we are among the water-lilies, 
 whatever they may be, that form her garland. 
 She, like her mythological prototype, is veiled : 
 nor are there many eyes able to pierce below her 
 rags and her fine clothes. But once in the twenty- 
 four^ hours she throws off her disguise: and the 
 hour she chooses for her self-revelation is when she 
 thinks there are no eyes to see. Indeed, it is more 
 true to say, not that she throws off her veil, but 
 that her veil falls from her when she is sleeping 
 among the lotus flowers of dreams — the only kind 
 of lotus-eating our days, wherein it is never after- 
 noon, permit us to know. 
 
 I have spoken of one hour in the twenty-four. 
 Rather should I have spoken of one half-hour in 
 the eight-and-forty. It is for not more than thirty 
 short and sudden minutes that London is freed 
 from rags and robes. It is not more than thirty 
 
AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 129 
 
 minutes that stand between the last man who goes 
 to bed at night and the first who rises in the 
 morning, between the latest bird and the earliest 
 worm. Few people know there is such a time at 
 all. The theatres are over long ago. The earliest 
 market waggons have not yet passed out of sight 
 of the gardens that form the fringe of the veil. 
 Even the ball at which you have been playing at 
 enjoying yourself has received its apotheosis in the 
 last after-supper galop. Say that it has been in 
 the south-western region, built upon marshes in 
 whose midst the abbey was once a solitary island 
 as well as a sanctuary, w 7 here houses stand for 
 long-forgotten water-lilies. You are the worse for 
 want of oxygen — for nothing more. For once let 
 us be superior to the temptation of waking from 
 his sleep on the box the driver of what Mr. Disraeli 
 was once pleased to call a gondola. The term is 
 more appropriate than ever. The canals of Venice, 
 the dead city, are not so silent, so solitary, so dead, 
 as these London streets, fresh from the builder's 
 hand. You, in dress-clothes, have suddenly left 
 behind an atmosphere in which you vainly thought 
 yourself admirably clothed and in your sane mind, 
 
 9 
 
130 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 to pass the threshold of a world in which you 
 feel like Oberon in a drawing-room. The tables 
 are turned. 
 
 The outlines of stucco are as clear and sharp 
 in the grey light as if new chiselled in marble by 
 the hands of fairy tomb-sculptors. No kitchen 
 fires as yet are lighted to blear them into strokes 
 traced on damp blotting paper. You feel, for once, 
 what it is to be alone in an unknown and unrecog- 
 nised world. You are a stranger in the streets 
 which are as familiar to you by day as your own 
 staircase, or the country lanes in which you used 
 to ramble once upon a time. There is something 
 in the atmosphere that is altogether new and 
 strange. If it is your fate to pass through 
 St. James's Park, you can hardly find your way. 
 The pond blossoms with imaginary water-lilies : 
 even Buckingham Palace looks imposing. In the 
 flesh you are at home, in the spirit you are a 
 stranger. In the streets you notice names, numbers, 
 combinations of doors and windows, that you never 
 noticed before. All things have suffered a change 
 in the uniform grey air. The pavement, trodden 
 by so many heels, devotes itself to multiply your 
 
AMONG THE WATER-LILIES. 131 
 
 own footsteps a hundred times, until you feel pain- 
 fully as though there were nothing in all London 
 but you, and as though yourself w r ere changed into 
 sound. Even the two policemen, always to be 
 found conversing at stray corners where no tres- 
 passer but a cat ever comes, and whose tramp, as 
 they part, sounds like a muffled repetition of your 
 own rapid tread, take upon themselves an appear- 
 ance of phantoms. You would laugh at the thought 
 were laughter possible in an air in which you fear 
 to wake even the echoes. If you are of a nervous 
 temper, no dream that the early lateness of the 
 hour will permit you to steal from morning will 
 feel so like a dream. You are fatigued in body. 
 and morbidly unfatigued in mind. You are awake 
 and asleep. Yours are the only waking eyes, the 
 only moving limbs, in a world of life. Your brain 
 becomes morbidly conscious of the slightest sight, 
 of the slightest sound : while nothing is to be seen 
 but a vista of straight lines — nothing to be heard 
 but your own footfall. London has grown mysti- 
 cally beautiful — her veil has fallen. But — what is 
 that primrose tint, creeping up through, not along, 
 the sky ? You have a hundred times witnessed the 
 
132 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON 
 
 saffron glow of a fire. But this — it is sunrise ! 
 Yes, the sun rises, even in London. Hurry home- 
 ward, for the charm is about to fade. That is a 
 spiral of smoke curling into the air, to blot out the 
 first beam of the dawn. Isis is waking. She is 
 donning her weeds, that stand to her for lotus- 
 flowers. 
 
 There is nowhere but in the one half-hour of 
 London's sleep that a man can feel himself to be 
 alone. Between the hedges he hears the song of 
 birds, even though it be reduced to the hoot of the 
 owl. Nature never sleeps — not even among her 
 alps and seas. London sleeps for one short half- 
 hour, but in that short half-hour she turns all 
 things into a dream. Life is her veil. When life 
 sleeps she wakes, and becomes, not the metropolis 
 of the world, but of the land in which Oberon is 
 king — king even over those who dance by night 
 and hide themselves from her in the counting- 
 house by day. For thirty minutes London lives 
 without life, and teaches those who know her not 
 how little she is known. 
 
( 133 ) 
 
 XII, 
 
 AMONG THE SPARROWS. 
 
 Why has no 'painter, without funds to carry him 
 far afield in search of novelty, made a reputation 
 by turning into a picture a subject that he may 
 find without going more than a mile or two — 
 perhaps not a hundred yards — from home ? The 
 broad walk of St. James's Park, as we late risers 
 know it, is not picturesque. In its recognized 
 hours it is a parade ground for cabs, perambulators, 
 guardsmen, and cockneys. It has its uses : but 
 the useful is not of necessity the beautiful. But 
 there is one hour of the four-and-twenty of a 
 spring day when it is absolutely beautiful. And 
 that hour is when the sun first rises, and the 
 
 9-3 
 
134 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 sparrows hold clamorous parliament before they 
 set out upon the chase of the early worm. 
 
 Before the kitchen fires are lighted, not even 
 the boasted atmosphere of Paris or Florence is 
 clearer, brighter, or fresher than ours. So pure 
 are then the outlines of our dullest streets, that 
 our palaces look almost imposing, and our monu- 
 ments almost like the works of art that they 
 pretend to be. The new-leaved trees, glittering 
 with sunlit dew, show no symptoms of town save 
 in their blackened stems. Through them, its grey 
 walls tinged with rose, break glimpses of the 
 abbey. Even the barbarous clock-tower adds to 
 the effect when its gilding reflects the morning's 
 gold. It is a scene in which the very sparrows, 
 cockneys as they are, seem to sing a country 
 song. 
 
 But it is this terrible London of ours, after all. 
 The sparrows' chatter dispels a charm. They are 
 the destroyers of dreams. You, who are drinking 
 in the freshness of morning, are either outwatching 
 the night or anticipating the day. But in either 
 case you are the owner of a bed from which you 
 have just risen, or in which you are about to lie 
 
AMONG THE SPARROWS. 135 
 
 down. Not so those who come back from dream- 
 land into life at the summons of these birds. As 
 you pass, the benches wake up slowly, and yield 
 again to the streets what they had gathered from 
 the streets the night before. Who are all these — 
 whence do they come, and whither do they go ? 
 There is no sadder sight than to see how the 
 beauty of nature may for an hour triumph over 
 an atmosphere of bricks and mortar, but cannot, 
 even for an hour, hold its own against the misery 
 for which there are no bricks and mortar to build 
 a home. That is no common pauper who is just 
 stretching out his ill-rested limbs. Do you re- 
 member Rockett of St. Margaret's — the most 
 brilliant scholar and best dressed man of his year ? 
 Some labelled him bishop : some prime minister. 
 Well — that starved, blotched, ragged fellow is he. 
 Is it drink that has brought him to this ? Is it 
 dice ? Is it overwhelming fate ? Pass by on the 
 other side, unless you are so greedy of gratitude as 
 to w T ish to be abjectly thanked for the price of a 
 roll at the nearest coffee-stall. On the same bench 
 still sleeps, despite the sparrows, a man who was 
 once a millionaire, a director of railways and 
 
136 FLORA AND FAUNA OF LONDON. 
 
 mines, But he has gone under the waves of life — 
 to-morrow, look for him under the waters of the 
 Thames. On the next is one who came to town 
 six weeks ago to turn his brains and 20/. into 
 gold. He was poet, painter, musician, actor — 
 what matters what he was in his own conceit when 
 he has spent his last penny, and is neither energetic 
 enough nor rogue enough to turn another ? He 
 wakes from dreams of fame to find himself between 
 a forger flying from the police, and a drunken 
 cripple. None of these, except the last, but is 
 prouder than the refuse of the casual ward. But 
 not far off is one who is in a worse plight still : 
 for it is a woman. May she not wake too soon to 
 her daily life, unless the dreams of home with 
 which the sparrows' twitter fills her sleeping ears 
 are too terrible to bear. 
 
 No : it is no wonder, after all, that no painter 
 has made this his out-door studio. He would be 
 more of a cynic than it is in the nature of a true 
 artist to be, were he able to fix his mind upon the 
 glittering leaves, the fresh air, and the distant 
 abbey that is our historic sanctuary. He could 
 not have the heart to paint for wealth or fame in 
 
AMONG THE SPARROWS. 137 
 
 an atmosphere of failure, disappointment, and 
 despair. Perhaps not one of those around him 
 may chance to be the hero or heroine of a true 
 tragedy : but there is none, drunk or sober, who 
 is in sympathy with the breeze of daybreak, or 
 the merry chatter of the birds. 
 
 THE END. 
 
LONDON I 
 
 PRINTED BY SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 
 
 OLD BAILEY, E.C. 
 
BY 7 HE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Just Published, in One Volume, Crown 8vo., with Four 
 Illustrations. 
 
 PEARL AND EMERALD : 
 
 A TALE OF GOTHAM. 
 By R. E. FRANCILLON. 
 
 LONDON: 
 SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 
 

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