r .^Wr '^dfcwl ^ f Class 3!'G92 Book E2. CopightN? COFVRIGHT DEPOSIK f I BOHEMIA IN LONDON A SOHO RESTAURANT Bohemia in London BY ARTHUR RANSOME AUTHOR OF "THB SOULS OF THK STREETS " THB STONE LADY," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRED TAYLOR NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1907 ■^ \\ UtfRARY of CONGRESS Two Gobies Reeelvetf OCT 26 *90r ^ CopyntW Entiy ^^r 2C fool CLASS4 XXC, N6. COPY tt. Copyright, 1907, by DODD, MEAD & COMPANY Published October, igoy TO M. P. SHIEL NOTE This book would never have been begun if it had not been for the friendly suggestion of Miss Ocean Lee. It would never have been finished but for the strenuous scold- ing and encouragement of Mr, Hughes Massie. It would be worse than it is if my friends, especially Mr. Edward Thomas, had been less generous of their advice, Carlyle Studios, July, 1907. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER PAGE Planning books and writing them — The material of the book — Paris and London — ^The method of the book — The word " Bohemia " — Villon — Grub Street — Hazlitt and Reynolds — Petrus Borel, Gautier, Murger — Modern Bohemia — Geography 3 AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA Walking home in the morning — ^^Coffee-stalls — Haz- litt, De Quincey, Goldsmith — The grocer's van — The journey — " Love for Love " at the World's End — ^The first lodging — Furniture — The first night in Bohemia 15 OLD AND NEW CHELSEA Don Saltero's— Smollett— Franklin— The P.B.— Car- lyle and Hunt — Carlyle's house — Chelsea and the river — Rossetti in Cheyne Walk — Whistler's dinner-party — and Steele's — ^Turner's house — ^The Embankment 33 A CHELSEA EVENING An actor — " Gypsy " — A room out of a fairy tale — guests — " Opal hush " — Singing and Stories — Going home 51 CONTENTS IN THE STUDIOS PAGE The Studio — Posing the model — Talking and painting — The studio lunch — The interrupter — ^Artists* models — The Chelsea Art Club — The Langham Sketch Club — Sets in the Studios — Hospitality . 69 THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA London full of countrymen — Hazlitt in the Southamp- ton — Burrow and the publisher — Bampfylde's life — The consolation of the country — Country songs from an artist's model — ^A village reputation . 87 OLD AND NEW SOHO Pierce Egan — " Life In London " — De Quincey In Greek Street — Thackeray — Sandwiches and ba- nanas — Barrel-organs — ^The Soho restaurants — Beguinot's — ^The Dieppe — B rice's — The waiters 10 1 COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO Casanova at the Orange — ^The Moorish — ^The Alge- rian — the Petit Riche — The Bohemian In the Provence — Newspaper proprietors In the Europe 121 THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA The Charing Cross Road — Book-buying — " The Anatomy of Melancholy " — The ordinary shop — Richard Savage pawning books — Selling review copies — Gay and the bookshops — Lamb and ** street readers " — Market-stalls — ^True Book- men — Old ladies — ^Tom Folio — ^A prayer to my publishers . ., 137 CONTENTS OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET PAGE Johnson and Boswell — Goldsmith and Doctor Kenrlck — Hazlitt and Charles Lamb — De Quincey and Coleridge at the Courier office — The " Tom and Jerry " times — Dickens — Elizabethan Fleet Street — Fleet Street on a sunny morning — ^The pedes- trians — Mitre Court — Salisbury Court — The Cock — The Cheshire Cheese — ^The Rhymers' Club— The Press Club— Cafes in Fleet Street— A Fleet Street Talking Club 153 SOME NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES An organ of enlightened criticism — ^An editor — Methods of work — The gay way with reviewing — Log-rolling — Our circulation — Another editor — ^Two more — The Bohemian magazines — Finan- ciers and poets 175 WAYS AND MEANS Literary Ghosting — " An author to be let " — ^Borrow- ing Chatterton — Waiting for your money — Pen- ury and art — Extravagance the compensation for poverty — Scroggen — ^A justifiable debauch . . 193 TALKING, DRINKING AND SMOKING The true way for enjoyment — " Tavern crawls " — The right reader — Doctor Johnson — Ben Jonson — Beaumont — Gay — Herrick — " The Ballad of Nappy Ale " — Keats — William Davies — The Rules of the old talking clubs — To the reader . 209 CONTENTS OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD A NOVELIST A PAINTER A GIPSY POET PAGE Steele — The Kft-Cats — Dickens and red-hot chops — Lamb — Leigh Hunt's cottage — " Sleep and Poe- try " — Hazlitt on Leigh Hunt — Leigh Hunt's friends — Modern Hampstead— The salons — ^The conversation — The Hempstead poets .... 229 A WEDDING AN BOHEMIA Bride and bridegroom — The procession — Madame of the restaurant — Creme de Menthe — The morning 241 255 267 275 CONCLUSION Crabbe in 1781 and in 1817 — Bohemia only a stage in a man's life — ^The escape from convention — Prac- tical matters — Hazlitt and John Lamb — ^The farevi^ell to Bohemia — Marriage — Success — Quod erat demonstrandum 283 ILLUSTRATIONS I A SoHo Restaurant The Coffee Stall . RossETTi's House in Cheyne Walk Work The Artist's Model In the Moorish Cafe . " Comfort and Secluded Luxury The Wild Bohemian A Bookshop .... The Bookstalls of the Charing Cross Road Doctor Johnson's House in Gough Square .... Fleet Street .... The Old Cheshire Cheese The Editor .... The Novelist The River from Battersea Bridge . Frontispiece Fach ig page i6 ' it 42^ K 74/ tt 94 ' tt 124 ' (( 128 tt 130/ (t 140 148 (( " 154 a " 158 tt " 164 tt " 176 tt " 256 tt " 278 Ce livre est toute ma jeunesse; Je Vai fait sans presque y songer. II y paraity je le confesse, Et faurais pu le corriger, Mais quand Vhomme change sans cesse, Au passe pourquoi rien changer? Va-t'en, pauvre oiseau passager; Que Dieu te mene a ton adresse! " INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER WHEN authors are honest to them- selves, they admit that their books are failures, in that they are never quite what they wished to make them. A book has a wilful way of its own, as soon as it is fairly started, and somehow has a knack of cheating its writer out of itself and changing into something different. It is usually a reversal of the story of " Beauty and the Beast." The odious beast does not become a prince; but a wonderful, clear, brilliant-coloured dream (as all books are before they are written) turns in the very hands of its author into a monster that he does not recognise. I wanted to write a book that would make real on paper the strange, tense, joyful and despair- ing, hopeful and sordid life that is lived in Lon- don by young artists and writers. I wanted to present life in London as it touches the people who come here, like Whittingtons, to seek the gold of fame on London pavements. They are conscious of the larger life of the town, of the struggling millions earning their weekly wages, of the thousands of the abyss who earn no wages and drift from shelter to shelter till they die; 4 BOHEMIA IN LONDON they know that there is a mysterious East End, full of crowded, ill-conditioned life; they know that there is a West End, of fine houses and a more elaborate existence; they have a confused knowledge of the whole, but only a part be- comes alive and real, as far as they themselves are concerned. That part is the material of which I hoped to make this book. There are a dozen flippant, merry treatises on Bohemia in London, that talk of the Savage Club, and the Vagabond dinners, and all the other consciously unconventional things that like to consider themselves Bohemian. But these are not the real things; no young poet or artist fresh to London, with all his hopes unreal- ised, all his capacity for original living unspent, has anything to do with them. They bear no more vital relation to the Bohemian life that is actually lived than masquerades or fancy dress balls bear to more ordinary existence. Mem- bers of the Savage Club, guests of the Vaga- bonds have either grown out of the life that should be in my book, or else have never lived in it. They are respectable citizens, dine com- fortably, sleep in feather-beds, and find hot water waiting for them in the mornings. It is, perhaps, the unreality of their pretences that makes honest outsiders who are disgusted at the imitation, or able to compare them with the inhabitants of the Quartier or Montmartre, say INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 5 that there is no such thing as Bohemia in London. But there is; and anyone who considers the number of adventurous young people fresh from conventional homes, and consequently ready to live in any way other than that to which they have been accustomed, who come to town with heads more full of poetry than sense, must realise how impossible it is that there should not be. Indeed, it is likely that our Bohemia, certainly in these days, is more real than that of Paris, for the Quartier is so well advertised that it has become fashionable, and Americans who can afford it go there, and almost out- number the others who cannot afford anything else. Of course, in London too, there are people who are Bohemians for fun; but not so many, because the fun in London is not an organised merriment that anyone may enjoy who can pay for it. Visitors to London do not find, as they do in Paris, men waiting about the principal streets, offering themselves as guides to Bohe- mia. The fun is in the life itself, and not to be had less cheaply than by living it. I wanted to get into my book, for example, the precarious, haphazard existence of the men who dine in Soho not because it is an uncon- ventional thing to do, but because they cannot usually afford to dine at all, and get better and merrier dinners for their money there than else- 6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON where, the men who, when less opulent, eat mussels from a street stall without unseemly amusement at the joke of doing so, but as sol- emnly as you and I eat through our respectable meals, solacing themselves meanwhile with the thought of high ideals that you and I, being better fed, find less real, less insistent. It was a difficult thing to attempt; if I had simply written from the outside, and announced that oddly dressed artists ate bananas in the streets, that is all that could be said; there is an end of it, the meaning, the essence of the thing is lost, and it becomes nothing but a dull observation of a phenomenon of London life. There was nothing for it but to confess, to write in the first person of my own uncomfortable happy years, and to trust that the hall mark of actual experience would give blood and life, at least to some parts of the picture. Now that would have been very pleasant for me, in spite of the risk that a succession of pictures con- nected by an ego, should seem a conceited ego exhibiting itself by means of a succession of pictures. But there was another bother; for the life would not have been expressed if there were no suggestion of the older time, the memories of famous artists and writers that contribute to make the poetry of the present. Now it was impossibly ludicrous to be continually flying off from the detailed experience of an insignifi- INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 7 cant person like myself, to dismiss in a cursory sentence men like Johnson, Hazlitt, or Sir Rich- ard Steele. Separate chapters had to be written on historical Bohemia, giving in as short a space as possible something of the atmosphere of remi- niscence belonging to particular localities. There are consequently two separate threads intertwisted through the book, general, histor- ical, and descriptive chapters, as impersonal as an egotist could make them, chapters on Chel- sea, Fleet Street, Soho, and Hampstead, and any number of single incidents and talks about dif- ferent aspects of Bohemian life — in short, all the hotch-potch that would be likely to come out if a Bohemian were doing his best to let someone else understand his manner of living. A chapter on the old bookstalls will jostle with an account of the Soho coffee-houses. One chapter will be a straightforward narrative of an adventure, another a discussion of the amaz- ing contrast between the country and the town, the life of the Bohemians and the places from which they come. The whole, I had hoped, would give something like an impression of the untidy life itself. Bohemia is an abominable word, with an air of tinsel and sham, and of suburban daughters who criticise musical comedies seriously, and remind you twice in an afternoon that they are 8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON quite unconventional. But the best dictionaries define it as: " (i) A certain small country; (2) The gypsy life; (3) Any disreputable life; (4) The life of writers and painters " — in an order of descent that is really quite pleasant. And on consulting a classic work to find syn- onyms for a Bohemian, I find the following: " Peregrinator, wanderer, rover, straggler, rambler, bird of passage, gadabout, vagrant, scatterling, landloper, waif and stray, wastrel, loafer, tramp, vagabond, nomad, gypsy, emi- grant, and peripatetic somnambulist." If we think of the word in the atmosphere of all those others, it is not so abominable after all, and I cannot find a better. I suppose Villon is the first remembered Bohemian poet. He had an uncomfortable life and an untidy death. Hunted from tavern to tavern, from place to place, stealing a goose there, killing a man here in a drunken brawl, and swinging from a gibbet in the end, he is a worthy example for the consideration of all young people who wish to follow literature or art without any money in their pockets. But even his fate would not deter them. Indeed, when I was setting out, I even wished to emu- late him, and was so foolish as to write to an older friend that I wanted to be such another vagabond as Villon, and work and live in my own free way. The conceit of it, the idiocy — INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 9 and yet, it is something to remember that you have once felt like that. My friend wrote back to me that of all kinds of bondage, vagabond- age v^as the most cruel and the hardest from v^hich to escape. I believe him now, but then I adventured all the same. Looking from Villon down the centuries, Grub Street seems to be the next important historical fact, a street of mean lodgings where poor hacks wrote rubbish for a pittance, or starved — not a merry place. And then to the happy time in England, when the greatest English critic, William Hazlitt, could write his best on a dead player of hand fives; when Reynolds, the friend of Keats, could write a sonnet on appearing before his lady with a black eye, " after a casual turn up," and speak of " the great men of this age in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism!'^ Then we think of the Romantics in France. There was the sturdy poet, Petrus Borel, set- ting up his " Tartars' Camp " in a house in Paris, with its one defiant rule pasted on the door: " All clothing is prohibited." There was Balzac, writing for a fortnight on end without leaving his garret. There was Theophile Gau- tier, wishing he had been born in the pomp of ancient days, contenting his Grecian instincts by writing Mademoiselle de Maupin in six weeks in a big, bare room, with foils and boxing gloves lo BOHEMIA IN LONDON lying always ready for the other Romantics who shared the place with him, and played the Porthos and the Aramis with a noble scorn for the nineteenth century. There was the whole jolly crowd that clapped Hernani into fame, and lasted bravely on through Murger's day — Murger, with his Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, and his melancholy verdict, " Bohemia is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital, or the Morgue." And now, to-day, in this London Bohemia of ours, whose existence is denied by the ignorant, all these different atmospheres arc blended into as many colours as the iridescence of a street gutter. Our Villous do not perhaps kill people, but they are not without their tavern brawls. They still live and write poetry in the slums. One of the best books of verse published in recent years was dated from a doss- house in the Marshalsea. Our Petrus Borels, our Gautiers, sighing still for more free and spacious times, come fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, write funny sonnets lamenting the age of Casanova, and, in a pleasant, harmless way, do their best to imitate him. Our Rey- noldses are mad over football, and compose verse and prose upon the cricket field. Our Romantics strut the streets in crimson sashes, carry daggers for their own delight, and fence and box and compose extravagant happy tales. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER ii Grub Street has broken up into a thousand gar- rets, but the hacks are still the same. And, as for Murger's young men, as for Collin, as for Schaunard with his hundred ways of obtaining a five-franc piece, why, I knew one who lived well for a year on three and sixpence of his own money and a handsome borrowing face. "Where are they all?" you ask. "Where is the Quartier?" It is difficult to give an answer without telling lies. For London is more unwieldy than Paris. It is impossible to draw a map, and say, pointing with a finger, " Here are artists, here romantic poets, here playwrights, here writers of polemic prose." They are scattered over a dozen districts, and mingled all together. There are only a few obvious grouping points. The newspapers, of course, are in Fleet Street, and the writers find that much of their life goes here, in the taverns and coffee-houses round about. The British Museum is in Bloomsbury, and students take lodgings in the old squares and in the narrow streets that run up to the Gray's Inn Road. The Charing Cross Road is full of bookshops where all, when they can afford it, buy. Soho is full of restaurants where all, when they can afford it, dine. And Chelsea, dotted with groups of studios, full of small streets, and cheap lodgings, is alive with artists and writers, and rich with memories of both. AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 1HAD hesitated before coming fairly into Bohemia, and lived for some time in the house of relations a little way out of London, spending all my days in town, often, after a talking party in a Bloomsbury flat or a Fleet Street tavern, missing the last train out at night and being compelled to walk home in the early morning. Would I were as ready for such walks now. Why then, for the sake of one more half hour of laugh and talk and song, the miles of lonely trudge seemed nothing, and all the roads were lit with lamps of poetry and laughter. Down Whitehall I would walk to Westminster, where I would sometimes turn into a little side street in the island of quiet that lies behind the Abbey, and glance at the win- dows of a house where a poet lived whose works were often in my pocket, to see if the great man were yet abed, and, if the light still glowed be- hind the blind, to wait a little in the roadway, and dream of the rich talk that might be pass- ing, or picture him at work, or reading, or per- haps turning over the old prints I knew he loved. IS i6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON Then on, along the Embankment, past the grey mass of the Tate Gallery, past the bridges, looking out over the broad river, now silver speckled in the moonlight, now dark, with bright shafts of light across the water and sparks of red and green from the lanterns on the boats. When a tug, with a train of barges, swept from under a bridge and brought me the invariable, unaccountable shiver with the cold noise of the waters parted by her bows, I would lean on the parapet and watch, and catch a sight of a dark figure silent upon her, and wonder what it would be like to spend all my days eternally passing up and down the river, seeing ships and men, and knowing no hours but the tides, until her lights would vanish round a bend, and leave the river as before, moving on past the still lamps on either side. I would walk on past Chelsea Bridge, under the trees of Cheyne Walk, thinking, with heart uplifted by the unusual wine, and my own youth, of the great men who had lived there, and wondering if Don Saltero's still knew the ghosts of Addison and Steele — and then I would laugh at myself, and sing a snatch of a song that the evening had brought me, or perhaps be led suddenly to simple matters by the sight of the bright glow of light about the coffee-stall, for whose sake I came this way, instead of crossing the river by Westminster or Vauxhall Bridge. THE COFFEE STALL AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 17 There is something gypsyish about coffee- stalls, something very delightful. Since those days I have known many: there is one by Ken- sington Church, where I have often bought a cup of coffee in the morning hours, to drink on the paupers' bench along the railings; there is another by Notting Hill Gate, and another in Sloane Square, where we used to take late sup- pers after plays at the Court Theatre; but there is none I have loved so well as this small untidy box on the Embankment. That was a joyous night when for the first time the keeper of the stall recognised my face and honoured me with talk as a regular customer. More famous men have seldom made me prouder. It meant some- thing, this vanity of being able to add " Evening, Bill! " to my order for coffee and cake. Coffee and cake cost a penny each and are very good. The coffee is not too hot to drink, and the cake would satisfy an ogre. I used to spend a happy twenty minutes among the loafers by the stall. There were several soldiers sometimes, and one or two untidy women, and almost every night a very small, very old man with a broad shoulder to him, and a kindly eye. The younger men chaffed him, and the women would laughingly offer to kiss him, but the older men, who knew his history, were gentler, and often paid for his cake and coffee, or gave him the luxury of a hard-boiled egg. He had once owned half the 1 8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON boats on the reach, and been a boxer in his day. I believe now that he is dead. There were others, too, and one, with long black hair and very large eyes set wide apart, attracted me strangely, as he stood there, laughing and talk- ing scornfully and freely with the rest. One evening he walked over the bridge after leaving the stall, and I, eager to know him, left my coffee untasted, and caught him up, and said something or other, to which he replied. He adjusted his strides to mine, and walked on with me towards Clapham. Presently I told him my name and asked for his. He stopped under a lamppost and looked at me. *' I am an artist," said he, " who does not paint, and a famous man without a name." Then, angry perhaps at my puzzled young face, he swung off without say- ing good-night into one of the side streets. I have often wondered who and what he was, and have laughed a little sadly to think how characteristic he was of the life I was to learn. How many artists there are who do not paint; how many a man without a name, famous and great within his own four walls! He avoided me after that, and I was too shy ever to question him again. Often the dawn was in the sky before I left the coffee-stall and crossed the river, and then the grey, pale mist with the faint lights in it, and the mysterious ghosts of chimneys and AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 19 bridges, looming far away, seemed the most beautiful thing in life, one of those promises that are fairer than reality. It was easy to be a poet, gazing into that dream that hung over the river; easy to be a painter, with that delicate picture in my eyes. Sometimes, in the middle of the bridge I choked in my throat, and walked on as fast as I could, with my eyes straight before me, that I might leave it, before spoiling that beautiful vision by another even in a little less perfect. The rest of the journey lay between red brick houses, duteously asleep ; ugly flats, ugly villas, as like to each other as the sheets from a print- ing press, lined the roads, until my eyes were rested from their ugliness by a mile and a half of green and sparsely wooded common land, sometimes young and almost charming on a dewy morning, sometimes old, ragged, and miserable in rain. Then I had to turn once more into the wilderness of brick, through which I passed to the ugliest and most abomina- ble of London's unpleasing suburbs. I do not know quite what it is that leads artists and writers and others whose lives are not cut to the regular pattern, to leave their homes, or the existences arranged for them by their relations, for a life that is seldom as com- fortable, scarcely ever as healthful, and nearly always more precarious. It is difficult not to 20 BOHEMIA IN LONDON believe that the varying reasons are one in essence as they are one in effect, but I cannot find fewer than three examples, if all cases are to be illustrated. There is young Mr. William Hazlitt, after being allov^ed to spend eight years doing little but v^alking and thinking, suddenly returns to his childhood's plan of becoming an artist, v^orks like mad, gets a commission to copy Titians in the Louvre, lives hugger-mugger for four months in Paris, and returns to spend three years tramping the North of England as an itinerant portrait painter. De Quincey, on the other hand, v^alks out from his school gates, w^ith twelve guineas (ten borrowed) in his pockets, to his adventurous vagabondage on the Welsh hills, for no more urgent reason than that his guardians' ideas do not jump with his in the matter of sending him instantly to college. These are the men marked out early for art or literature. The one sets out because his old ones are not in sufficient subservience to him, the other because they think him a genius and allow him to do what he wants. In both of these cases the essential reason seems to be that when either wants anything he wants it pretty badly. But besides these there are the men who, like Goldsmith, take up an art by accident or necessity in later years, and more often than not are sent into the world because they are AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 21 failures at home, and given their fifty guineas to clear out by an Uncle Contarine who wishes to relieve his brother's or sister's anxieties rather than those of his nephew. Things were so a hundred years ago, and they arc still the same. I was very young, and mad to be a Villon, hungry to have a life of my own. My wishes told my conscience twenty times a day that my work (my work!) could but ill progress in a house where several bustling lives were vividly lived in directions opposite to my own desires. I think my relations must have been quite as anxious to get rid of me. At last I spent a morning prowling round Chelsea, and 2 2 BOHEMIA IN LONDON found an empty room with four windows all in good condition, and a water supply two floors below, at a rent of a few shillings a week. I paid for a week in advance and went home, or- dering a grocer's van to call after lunch. The van drew up before the door. I announced its meaning, packed all my books into it, a railway rug, a bundle of clothes and my one large chair, said good-bye to my relations, and then, after lighting my clay pipe, and seating myself com- placently on the tailboard, gave the order to start. I was as Columbus setting forth to a New World, a gypsy striking his tent for unknown woods; I felt as if I had been a wanderer in a caravan from my childhood as I loosened my coat, opened one or two more buttons in the flan- nel shirt that I wore open at the neck, and saw the red brick houses slipping slowly away behind me. The pride of it, to be sitting behind a van that I had hired myself; to carry my own belongings to a place of my own choosing; to be absolutely a free man, whose most distant de- sires seemed instantly attainable. I have never known another afternoon like that. It was very warm, and the bushes in the tiny suburban gardens were grey with dust, and dust clouds blew up from the road, and circled about the back of the van, and settled on my face and in my nostrils as I broadened my chest and snuffed the air of independence. As we came AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 23 through the busier thoroughfares, errand boys, and sometimes even loafers, who should have had a greater sympathy with me, jeered at my pipe and my clothes, doubtless encouraged by the boy who sat in front and drove, and was (I am sure of it) carrying on a winking con- versation. But I minded them no more than the dust. For was I not now a free Bohemian, on my way to the haunts of Savage, and Goldsmith, and Rossetti, and Lamb, and Whistler, and Steele, and Carlyle, and all the others whose names and histories I knew far better than their works! No, I will not do myself that injustice; I knew nothing of Carlyle's life, but his " Sartor Resartus " was my Bible; I knew little of Lamb, but I had had '^ Elia " bound privily in the covers of a school Caesar, to lessen the tedium of well-hated Latin lessons I remember being called upon to construe, and, with unthinking enjoyment, reciting aloud to an astonished class and master the praises of Roast Pork. I knew the works of these two better than their lives. And Carlyle had lived in Chelsea, whither my grocer's van of happiness was threading the suburban streets, and Lamb had lived in a court only a stone's throw from the office of the little newspaper whose payments for my juvenile essays had helped my ambition to o'erleap the Thames and find a lodging for itself. Over the Albert Bridge we moved as 24 BOHEMIA IN LONDON leisurely as the old horse chose to walk in the August sun, and then a little way to the left, and up to the King's Road, by way of Cheyne Walk and Bramerton Street, past the very house of Carlyle, and so near Leigh Hunt's old home that I could have changed the time of day with him had his kindly ghost been leaning from a window. And I thought of these men as I sat, placid and drunk with pride, on the tailboard of the van. Pipe after pipe I smoked, and the floating blue clouds hung peacefully in the air behind me, like the rings in the water made by a steady oarsman. Their frequency was the only circumstance that betrayed my nervousness. We turned into the King's Road, that was made to save King Charles's coach horses when he drove to see Nell Gwynne. We followed it to the World's End, where I thought of Con- greve's " Love for Love," and having the book with me in the van, I glanced, for pleasure, in the black print, though I knew the thing by heart, to the charming scene where Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight banter each other on their indiscretions; you remember: Mrs. Foresight taunts her sister with driving round Covent Garden in a hackney coach, alone, with a man, and adds that it is a reflection on her own fair modesty, whereupon sprightly Mrs. Frail re- torts : " Pooh! here's a clutter, why should it reflect AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 25 upon you? I don't doubt but that you have thought yourself happy in a hackney coach be- fore now. If I had gone to Knightsbridge, or to Chelsea, or to Spring Gardens, or Barn Elms with a man alone, something might have been said." "Why, was I ever in any of these places? What do you mean, sister? " " Was I? What do you mean? " " You have been at a worse place? " " I at a worse place, and with a man! " " I suppose you would not go alone to the World's End?" "The World's End? What, do you mean to banter me? " " Poor Innocent! You don't know that there is a place called the World's End? I'll swear you can keep your countenance purely; you'd make an admirable player. . . . But look you here, now — ^Where did you lose this gold bodkin? — Oh, sister, sister!" "My bodkin?" " Nay, 'tis yours; look at it." "Well, if you go to that, where did you find this bodkin? Oh, sister, sister — sister every way." Was ever a more admirable little scene to read upon the tailboard of a van on a hot sum- mer's day? I made my boy pull up and go in at the tavern and bring out a couple of pints of 26 BOHEMIA IN LONDON ale, old ale, one for me, for once his lord and my own master, and one for him to drink my health in, and the health of William Congreve, who doubtless drank here many years ago, when green fields spread between here and West- minster, and this was a little inn, a naughty little inn, where gay young men brought gay young women to talk private business in the country. I saw them sitting in twos outside the tavern with a bottle of wine before them on a trestle- board, and a pair of glasses, or perhaps one be- tween them, graven with the portrait of a tall ship, or a motto of love and good fellowship. And then, when the ale was done, we went on, and I forgot old Chelsea, the riverside vil- lage in the fields, to think upon how I was to spend the night in this new Chelsea, haunted, it was true, by the ghosts of winebibbers and painters and poets, but, to me who was to live in it, suddenly become as frightening and as solitary as an undiscovered land. In a street of grey houses we stopped at a corner where an alley turned aside; we stopped at the corner house, which was a greengrocer's shop. Slipping down from the tailboard of the van, I looked up at the desolate, curtainless win- dows of the top floor that showed where I was to sleep. The landlord was an observant, uncomfort- able wretch, who ran the shop on the ground AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 27 floor, though in no way qualified for a green- grocer, a calling that demands something more of stoutness and juiciness of nature than ever he could show. He watched with his fingers in the pockets of his lean waistcoat the unloading of my van, without offering to help us, and when my vassal and I had carried the things up into the bare top room, he came impertinently in, and demanded " if this were all I had brought? Where was my furniture? He was for none of your carpet-bag lodgers." " I am just going out to get my furniture," I replied, and, as if by accident, let him see my one gold piece, while from another pocket I paid the boy the seven shillings agreed upon as the hire of the van, with an extra shilling for himself. He watched unimpressed, till I moved towards the door with such an air that he withdrew with a little more deference, though he chose to descend the stairs before me. I hated him. His manner had almost been a damper on my happiness. From the nearest grocer's shop I bought three shillings' worth of indifferently clean packing- cases, and paid an extra sixpence to have them taken home at once. I went on along the Ful- ham Road, buying apples, and cheese, and bread, and beer, till my pockets and arms were laden with as much as they could carry. When I returned, the boxes had been delivered, and 28 BOHEMIA IN LONDON my landlord was standing indignant in the middle of my room. "You must understand " he began at once. My temper was up. " I do," I replied. " Have you the key of the door? Thank you. Good-night," and smiled happily to myself as the shuffling footsteps of that mean-spirited greengrocer died away down the stairs. The lodging was a large square place, and did not (I admit it now, though I would have shot myself for the thought then) look very cheerful. Bare and irregular boards made its floor; its walls were dull grey-green; my books were piled in a cruelly careless heap in one corner, my purchases in another; the pile of packing cases in the middle made it appear the very lumber room it was. The boxes were soon arranged into a table and chairs. Two, placed one above the other on their sides, served for a cupboard. Three set end to end made an admirable bed. Indeed, my railway rug gave it an air of comfort, even of opulence, spread carefully over the top. The cheese was good, and also the beer, but I had forgotten to buy candles, and it was growing dark before that first untidy supper was finished. So I placed a packing-case chair by the open window, and dipped through a volume of poetry, an anthology of English ballads, that AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 29 had been marked at ninepence on an open book- stall in the Charing Cross Road. But I did not read much. The sweet sum- mer air, cool in the evening, seemed to blow a kiss of promise on my forehead. The light was dying. I listened for the hoot of a steamer on the river, or the bells of London churches; I heard with elation the feet of passengers, whom I could see but dimly, beating on the pavement far below. A rough voice was scolding in the room under mine, and someone was singing a song. Now and again I looked at the poetry, though it was really too dark to see, and a thou- sand hopes and fears flitting across the page carried me out of myself, but not so far that I did not know that this was my first night of free- dom, that for the first time in my life I was alone in a room of my own, free to live for poetry, for philosophy, for all the things that seemed then to matter more than life itself. I thought of Crabbe coming to London with three pounds in his pockets, and a volume of poems; I thought of Chatterton, and laughed at myself, but was quite a little pleased at the thought. Brave dreams flooded my mind, and I sat content long after it was dusk and smoked, and sent with infinite enjoyment puffs of pale smoke out into the night. I did not go to bed at all, but fell asleep leaning on the window sill, to wake with a cold in my head. OLD AND NEW CHELSEA OLD AND NEW CHELSEA CHELSEA has waged more than a hundred years' war with the common sense of the multitude. Long before Leigh Hunt settled with his odd household in Upper Cheyne Row, with Carlyle for a neighbour, Chelsea had begun to deserve its reputation as a battlefield and bivouacking ground for art and literature. Somewhere about 1690 an inventive barber and ex-servant called Salter, who renamed him- self Don Saltero, with an eye to trade, set up at No. 18 Cheyne Walk a coffee-house and mad museum. Those who wished for coffee visited the museum, and those who came to view the curiosities — ^which were many and various, including a wild man of the woods, and the tobacco pipe of the Emperor of Morocco — re- freshed their minds with coffee. Some trades seem invented to provide the material of de- lightful literature; barbers especially are men whom the pen does but tickle to caress. Don Quixote met such an one in the adventure of the 33 34 BOHEMIA IN LONDON helmet; Shibli Bagarag of Shiraz, the shaver of Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son of ShuUum, was a second; and Don Saltero seems to have been just such an- other. Steele v^rote a laughing, friendly por- trait of him in the Tatler: " When I came into the Coffee House I had no time to salute the Company before my Eye was taken by ten thousand Gimcracks round the Room, and on the Ceiling. When my first as- tonishment was over comes to me a Sage of a thin and meagre Countenance; which aspect made me doubt whether Reading or Fretting had made him so philosophick. But I very soon perceived him to be of that Sect which the An- cients called Ginquistae; in our Language Tooth Drawers. I immediately had a respect for the man; for these practical philosophers go upon a very rational Hypothesis, not to cure but to take away the Part affected. My Love of Mankind made me very benevolent to Mr. Salter, for such is the name of this Eminent Barber and Antiquary." Steele was not the only man of letters who loved the place. Doctor Tobias Smollett, when he lived in Chelsea, used to stroll in here of an afternoon. On Sundays he was busy feeding poor authors at his own house on " beef, pud- ding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert's Entire butt-beer," but on week days he went OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 35 often to Don Saltero's, where he may have seen Benjamin Franklin, a journeyman printer, duti- fully examining the place as one of the London sights. Indeed, against the inexcusable auto- biography of that austere, correct fellow we must set the fact of his swim back from Chelsea down to Blackf riars. We can forgive him much righteousness for that. But Steele's is the pleas- antest memory of the old museum. I think of the meagre barber, proud of his literary patrons, serving coffee to them in the room decorated with gimcracks on ceiling, walls, and floor; but I should have loved above all to see Steele swing in, carelessly dressed, with his whole face smil- ing as he showed Mr. Salter his little advertise- ment in the lazy pages of the Tatler, fresh and damp from the press. Though No. 18 has long been a private house, Chelsea still knows such characters as the man who made it famous. I lost sight of one of them only a year or two ago. I forget his name, but he called himself the " P. B.,'' which letters stood for " The Perfect Bohemian.'' He wrote most abominably bad verses, and kept a snug little restaurant in the Fulham Road, a happy little feeding house after the old style, now, alas! fallen into a more sedate proprietorship. Half a dozen of us used to go there at one time, and drank coffee and ate fruit stewed by the poet himself. We sat on summer evenings in a small 36 BOHEMIA IN LONDON partly roofed yard behind the house. Creepers hung long trails with fluttering leaves over green painted tables, and, as dark came on, the P.B. v^ould light Japanese lanterns that swung among the foliage, and then, sitting on a table, would read his poetry aloud to his customers. The restaurant did not pay better than was to be expected, and the P.B. became an artist's model. He was fine-looking, with curly hair, dark eyes, a high brow, and the same meagreness about his face that Steele noticed in the ingenious barber. I hope he made a fortune as a model. He must have been an entertaining sitter. I had been looking for a picture of old irregu- lar family life when I came on Carlyle's de- scription of the Hunts. It is curious how slowly Bohemia changes. The last fifty years, that have altered almost everything else, have left the little Bohemian family life that there is very like this, at any rate in essentials : " Hunt's household. Nondescript! Un- utterable! Mrs. Hunt asleep on cushions; four or five beautiful, strange, gypsy-looking chil- dren running about in undress, whom the lady ordered to get us tea. The eldest boy, Percy — a sallow black-haired youth of sixteen, with a kind of dark cotton nightgown on — went whirl- ing about like a familiar, pervading everything; an indescribable dreamlike household. . . . Hunt's house excels all you have ever heard of OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 37 ... a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in literature. In his family room, where are a sickly large wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children, you will find half a dozen old rickety chairs gathered from half a dozen different hucksters, and all seem- ing engaged, and just pausing, in a violent horn- pipe. On these and round them and over the dusty table and ragged carpets lie all kinds of litter — books, paper, eggshells, and, last night when I was there, the torn half of a half-quar- tern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a book-case and a writing table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a King, apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a window sill himself if there is no other, and then, folding closer his loose flowing " muslin cloud " of a printed nightgown, in which he al- ways writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man (who is to be beyond measure happy yet), which again he will courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go." As for Carlyle's own house, just round the corner, he left a description of that, too, in a letter to his wife, written to her when he took it. "... on the whole a most massive, roomy, sufficient old house, with places, for example, 38 BOHEMIA IN LONDON to hang, say, three dozen hats or cloaks on, and as many curious and queer old presses and shelved closets (all tight and well painted in their way) as would satisfy the most covetous Goody: rent thirty-five pounds. . . . We lie safe at a bend of the river, away from all the great roads, have air and quiet hardly inferior to Craigenputtock, an outlook from the back windows into more leafy regions, with here and there a red high-peaked old roof looking through, and see nothing of London except by day the summits of St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and by night the gleam of the great Babylon, affronting the peaceful skies. The house itself is probably the best we have ever lived in — a right old strong roomy brick house built nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, and likely to see three races of these modern fashionables come down." There it stands still, and in a way to fulfil the prophecy. The houses have closed in about its quiet street. The little villagery of Chelsea has been engulfed in the lava stream of new cheap buildings. The King's Road thunders with motor 'buses and steam vans, but here in this quiet Cheyne Row the sun yet falls as peace- fully as ever on the row of trees along the pave- ment, and, over the way, on the stiff front of the " sufficient old house," in at the windows where Carlyle sat and smoked long pipes with Tenny- OLD AND NEW CHELSEA son, and talked to " my old friend Fitzgerald, who might have spent his time to much better purpose than^ in busying himself with the verses of that old Mahome- tan blackguard," Omar Khayyam. They tell me that upstairs is still the double-walled room where so many groans were hurled at unnecessary noises and the evils of digestion, and where, in spite of all, so many great books came alive on the paper. There is a medallion on the front of the house, and visitors are allowed to nose about inside. But it is better to forget the visitors, as you look down that shady street on a summer's day, and to think only of the old poet-phi- losopher who was so happy there and so miserable, and 39 40 BOHEMIA IN LONDON loved so well the river that flows stately past the foot of the street. There, looking out over the water, from the narrow gardens along Cheyne Walk, you may see his statue, the patron saint of so many wilfully bad-tempered fellows, who cannot, as he could, vindicate their bad- temper by their genius. The river made Chelsea the place it is, a place different specially from every other suburb of the town. Mr. G. K. Chesterton says he loves Battersea, " because it is the only suburb that re- tains a local patriotism." Chelsea has a local patriotism, too, but of another kind, the patriot- ism of members of the foreign legion. Chelsea does not breed artists, she adopts them; but they would die for her. But apart from this patriot- ism, she has a local atmosphere that has nothing to do with the artists, the feeling of a riverside village that not even the rival highway of the King's Road has been able to destroy. Chelsea was once such a place for Londoners as Chert- sey is now. People came there to be near the river. Visitors to the World's End, then the limit of fashion, where gallants brought their Mrs. Frails, came by boat. Big country houses were built round about. Sir Thomas More's house, where he entertained Holbein and the ob- servant Erasmus, was built in 1521 where Beau- fort Street is now, and had " a pleasajnt prospect of the Thames and the fields beyond." And all OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 41 the best memories of old Chelsea rest in the nar- row stately fronted houses along Cheyne Walk, or in the little taverns by the riverside, or in the narrov^ streets that run up from the Embank- ment, just as the village streets might have been expected to run up from the banks of the stream v^hen, in the old days, people came here to bathe and be merry in the sunshine. Three of those Cheyne Walk houses must be mentioned here. In 1849 some members of the nev^ly-established Pre-Raphaelite Brother- hood looked over No. 16, " v^ith v^hich they v^ere greatly taken. It is capable of furnishing four good studios, with a bedroom, and a little room that would do for a library, attached to each. * P. R. B.' might be written on the door, and stand for * Please Ring the Bell ' to the pro- fane. . . ." How cheerful that is! But the house was not taken till a dozen years after- wards, when Rossetti, whose life had been broken by the death of his wife nine months before, took it with Swinburne and Meredith. In the back garden he kept all manner of strange beasts — zebus, armadillos, and the favourite of all, the wombat, an animal almost canonised by the Pre-Raphaelites. " Do you know the wom- bat at the Zoo?" asked Rossetti, before he had one of his own, " a delightful creature, the most comical little beast." They used in the early days to make pilgrimages to Regent's Park on 42 BOHEMIA IN LONDON purpose to see it, and in Lady Burne-Jones's life of her husband she records how the windows in the Union at Oxford, whitened while Morris and Rossetti and the rest were decorating, were covered with sketches of wombats in delightful poses. I wish I could get a picture of one to make a jolly island in the text of this book. Going west along Cheyne Walk, past Oakley Street and the statue of Carlyle, past old Chelsea Church, we come to Whistler's lofty studio- house, a grey magnificence of which it is impos- sible to tire. Here lived Whistler in his own way, and flaunted his own way of living. He had some sport with his life. There is a tale told of him before he lived here, when he had the White House in Tite Street, that is very perti- nent to this book, and is the more interesting in that it is the duplicate of one Sir Richard Steele's exploits. Mr. William Rossetti gives the story in his big book of reminiscences, and Johnson in almost the same terms tells the same tale of Steele, who is known to have rented a house somewhere along the waterside. Here is the Steele story; the Whistler is exactly similar, but I have not the book in the house : " Sir Richard Steele one day having invited to his house a great number of persons of the first quality, they were surprised at the number of liveries which surrounded the table; and after dinner, when wine and mirth had set them free ROSSETTI'S HOUSE IN CHEYNE WALK OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 43 from the observations of a rigid ceremony, one of them inquired of Sir Richard how such an expensive train of domestics could be consistent with his fortunes. Sir Richard very frankly confessed that they were fellows of whom he would willingly be rid. And then, being asked why he did not discharge them, declared that they were bailiffs, who had introduced them- selves with an execution, and whom, since he could not send them away, he had thought it convenient to embellish with liveries, that they might do him credit while they stayed." Johnson does not say whether it was in Chelsea that this occurred. So it is safer, and at least as pleasant, to read Whistler for Steele, and imagine the dinner party in Tite Street. The humour of it would have delighted either of these very different men. Whistler must have carried it off with a superb nicety, but it is not told that his friends paid up, and set him free, as they did for Dick Steele. It is possible he would have resented it. Further along Cheyne Walk, beyond Batter- sea Bridge, where the stately houses dwindle into a regular little riverside street, with cottages, and nondescript shops, and nautical taverns, with old quays and landing stairs just over the way, is No. 118, a tiny red-tiled house, a little below the level of the street, set back between an inn and a larger house, behind 44 BOHEMIA IN LONDON faded wooden palings, and a few shrubs. There are birds' nests in the creepers that cover the walls and twist about the windows. Here Turner lived under an assumed name (they thought him an old sea captain) and climbed the roof to watch the sunsets, as a retired sailor might watch for small shipping coming down the river. Here he died in 1851, a tired old man, only a few years after Ruskin had proved to the world that of all modern painters he was the greatest and least honoured. Now, in the twentieth century, the riverside streets only live their old lives in the minds of the young and unsuccessful who walk their pavements in the summer evenings. Those who rent houses in Tite Street or in Cheyne Walk live nicely and reverently. They are either more respectable than Steele or Whistler or less magnificent. Bohemia has moved a little further from the river. The river has given place to the King's Road as Chelsea's main artery, and now the old exuberant life is lived not in the solemn beautiful houses by the water- side, nor in the taverns by the deserted quays, but in the studios and squares and narrow streets along the other thoroughfare. There is Glebe Place, full of studios; there is Bramerton Street, and Flood Street, and then there is modern Chel- sea, a long strip of buildings cut by narrow OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 45 streets, between the King's Road and the Ful- ham Road. Studios are dotted all about, and at least half the ugly, lovable little houses keep a notice of "Apartments to Let" permanently in the windows, an apt emblem of the continual flitting that is charateristic of the life. But there is a time in the evening when the irregulars of these days cross the King's Road and unsurp the Bohemia of the past. When it grows too dark for painters to judge the colours of their pictures, they flock out from the studios, some to go up to Soho for dinner, some to stroll with wife or friendly model in the dusk. The favourite promenade is along Cheyne Walk, where the lamps shining among the leaves of the trees cast wavering shadows on the pave- ments. Only the black-and-white men, work- ing against time for the weekly papers, plug on through the dark. Now and again, walking the streets, you may look up at a window and see a man busily drawing, with a shaded lamp throwing a bright light on the Bristol-board before him. For myself, I soon discovered that the dusk was meant for indolence, and always, a little before sunset, threaded my way to the King's Road, and so to the river. I would leave the spider strength of the Albert Bridge behind me, and stroll on past Battersea Bridge to a promontory of embankment just beyond, the best of all places for seeing the sunsets up the 46 BOHEMIA IN LONDON river, and the blue mists about those four tall chimneys of the electric generating station. I used to lean on the balustrade there and watch the green and golden glow fade away from the sky where those great obelisks towered up, and think of Turner on the roof of the little house close by; I would watch the small boats bobbing on their ropes, and listen for the noises of the King's Road behind the buildings to the right, or the clangour of the factories on the other side of the water. And then I would turn, and watch the butterflies of fire flash out of the dusk and perch along the bridge in glit- tering clusters. As the dark fell, lights shone out along the Embankment, climbed slowly up the rigging of the boats by the wharf, and lit up the square windows of the houses and taverns by the waterside. Often, walking along, when the reflections followed me with long indexes across the water as I moved, when the tugs coming round the bend of the river lit up their red and green, when over everything hung that mist so miraculously blue that it took a Whistler to perceive it, I have thought of the old times when kings and philosophers bathed in the reeds here, and when at night there were no lights at all, except where the sailors were merry in a tavern, or a Steele was giving a party in one of the big houses. I have thought of Chelsea OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 47 and her river in those days, and Chelsea and her river in ours, and then, as I have looked again along the glimmering Embankment, or seen a poet and a girl pass by arm-in-arm, with eyes wide open to that spangled loveliness that smiles undaunted by the stars, I have thought it not impossible that we are the more fortunate in knowing Chelsea now. A CHELSEA EVENING A CHELSEA EVENING CHELSEA seemed, in spite of all its memories, a desolate, lonely place when I woke sitting on the packing case by the window of my lodging on the morning after my arrival. It became populous with friends, through circumstances so typical of the snowball growth of acquaint- anceship, and of one kind of Chelsea life, that they deserve a description in detail. The only man I knew in Chelsea was a Jap- anese artist who had been my friend in even earlier days, when both he and I had been too poor to buy tobacco. We had known each other pretty well, and he had come to Chelsea some months before. I called on him, and found him lodging in a house where he shared a sitting- room with an actor. This man, called Wilton, was such an actor that he seemed a very cari- cature of his own species. It was a delight to watch him. He was lying at full length on a dilapidated sofa, so arranged that he could, without moving, see his face in a mirror on the other side of the room. He was very long, and in very long fingers he held a cigarette. Some- 51 52 BOHEMIA IN LONDON times, with the other hand, he would rumple the thick black hair over his forehead, and then he would open his eyes as wide as he could, and glance with satisfaction towards the looking- glass. The Japanese, twinkling with mirth, was seated straddlewise round the back of a chair by the fireplace, and was trying eagerly, with short flashes of uncertain English, to reason the actor into a piece of common sense about his pro- fession. He jumped up when I came in, and the actor languidly introduced himself. Then they continued the discussion. Wilton refused to believe that observation was in any way neces- sary to his art. " Pluck," he said, with a magnificent gesture, " your characters from your own heart and soul. If I act a king, I will be a king in my own right, and find all majesty and pride in my own con- sciousness." I thought privily that he might find that easy, but the Japanese, reasoning more seriously, con- tinued: " But if you were going to act an idiot or a drunkard, would not you " " No, I would not. Every man, or all great men, have all possibilities within them. I could be divinely mad without ever wasting time in watching the antics of a madman." " But do you tell us you would dare to act the drunkard without watching to see how he walks, and how he talks and sings? Would you A CHELSEA EVENING 53 act an old woman and get true like, without see- ing first an old woman to copy the mumbling of her lips?" "Ah," said the actor, with delighted logic, " but I would never act an old woman. And you are losing your temper, my dear fellow. Some day, when you consider the matter more calmly, you will realise that I am right. But do not let men of genius quarrel over an argu- ment." And then, as the Japanese smiled unperceived at me, and rolled a cigarette, the superb Wilton turned himself a little on the sofa, rearranged a cushion beneath his elbow, and began a long half-intoned speech about newspapers, the folly of reading them, the inconceivable idiocy of those who write for them, and so forth, while I agreed with him at every point, and the Japanese, who knew by means of livelihood, chuckled quietly to himself. The actor was happy. Flattered by my con- tinual agreement, the billows of his argument rolled on and broke with increasing din along the shores of silence. The only other sound be- sides the long roll of his impassioned dogma was the low murmur of my assent. Give a fool a proselyte, and he will be ten times happier than a sage without one. Wilton must have enjoyed that afternoon. He thought he had a proselyte in me, and he talked like a prophet, till I won- 54 BOHEMIA IN LONDON dered how it could be possible for any one man's brain to invent such flood of nonsense. 1 was happy under it all if only on account of the quiet quizzical smile of the Japanese, who was mak- ing a sketch of the orator's face. The end of it was that he fell in love with an audience so silent, so appreciative, and decided that he must really have me with him that night, at the house of a lady who once a week gave an open party for her friends. I was wanted, it was clear, as a foil to his brilliance. It was at least an adventure, and I agreed to come. What was the lady's name, I asked, and what was she? He was too impatient to go on with his ha- rangue to tell me anything except that she was an artist, and that at her rooms I would meet the best poets and painters and men and women of spirit in the town. " Indeed," he added, " I go there myself, regularly, once a week." A red-haired serving maid brought up tea at this moment, before he had again got fairly into the swing of his discourse, and he withheld his oratory to give directions for us, as to the quantities of milk and sugar we should mix for him, together with a little general information on the best methods of drinking tea. The Japan- ese set a chair by the sofa for him, and I carried him his cup and saucer, and a plate of bread and butter from the table. He ate and drank in A CHELSEA EVENING 55 silence for a moment, and then broke out again in florid talk about slavery on sugar plantations, the text being the two lumps which, at his orders, had been placed in his saucer. After tea he went on talking, talking, talking, until eight in the evening, when he went upstairs to put on a clean collar and to rearrange his hair. Presently he reappeared, with a curl above his forehead. He suggested that we should start. The Japanese excused himself from accompany- ing us, and went down to the river to make studies for some painting upon which he was engaged. We set off together down the Fulham Road, in the most beautiful light of a summer evening. There was a glow in the sky that was broken by the tall houses, and the tower of the workhouse lifted bravely up into the sunset. Below, in the blue shadows of the street, people were moving, and some of the shops had lights in them. It was a perfect night, and completely wasted on the actor, and indeed on me too, for I was intent on observing him. Now and again, as he strode along the pavement, a girl would turn to look at his tall figure, and it was plain that he noticed each such incident with pleasure. When we came among the shops he would now and again do his best to catch sight of himself in the glasses of the windows, and occasionally to this end would stop with a careless air, and light a cigarette, or roll one, or throw one away 56 BOHEMIA IN LONDON into the road. The whole world was a pageant to him, with himself a central figure. At last we turned to the right, between houses with narrow gardens and little trees in front of them, and then to the right again, till we stopped at the end of a short street. ** Her name is Gypsy," he said dramatically. " No one ever calls her anything else." Then he swung open the garden gate, walked up the steps of the house, and knocked vigorously on the door. Through a window on the left I had caught a glimpse of a silver lamp, and a brazen candle- stick, and a weird room in shaded lamplight. I was tiptoe with excitement. For I was very young. Someone broke off in a song inside, and quick steps shuffled in the passage. The door was flung open, and we saw a little round woman, scarcely more than a girl, standing in the threshold. She looked as if she had been the same age all her life, and would be so to the end. She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk, like the frills on a red Indian's trousers. She welcomed us with a little shriek. It was the oddest, most uncanny little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It made me very shy. It was obviously an affecta- tion, and yet seemed just the right manner of welcome from the strange little creature, " god- A CHELSEA EVENING 57 daughter of a witch and sister to a fairy," who uttered it. She was very dark, and not thin, and when she smiled, with a smile that was pecu- liarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the door they were the eyes of a joyous, excited child meeting the guests of a birthday party. The actor shook hands, and, in his annoying, laughable, dramatic manner, introduced me as "a clever young man who has read philosophy." I could have kicked him. "Come in!" she cried, and went shuffling down the passage in that heavy parti-coloured dress. We left our hats and followed her into a mad room out of a fairy tale. As soon as I saw it I knew she could live in no other. It had been made of two smaller chambers by the removal of the partition wall, and had the effect of a well-designed curiosity shop, a place that Gautier would have loved to describe. The walls were dark green, and covered with bril- liant-coloured drawings, etchings, and pastel sketches. A large round table stood near the window, spread with bottles of painting inks with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books ; it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn in the middle of it, in which incense was burning. A woolly monkey 58 BOHEMIA IN LONDON perched ridiculously on a pile of portfolios, and grinned at the cast of a woman's head, that stood smiling austerely on the top of a black cupboard, in a medley of Eastern pottery and Indian gods. The mantel-shelves, three stories high, were laden with gimcracks. A low bookcase, crammed and piled with books, was half hidden un- der a drift of loose pieces of music. An old grand piano, on which two brass bedroom can- dlesticks were burning, ran back into the inner room, where in the darkness was a tall mirror, a heap of crimson silks, and a low table with an- other candle flickering among the bottles and glasses on a tray. Chairs and stools were crowded everywhere, and on a big blue sofa against the wall a broadly whiskered picture- dealer was sitting, looking at a book of Jap- anese prints. We had scarcely been introduced to him, and settled into chairs, while the little woman in the orange coat was seating herself on a cushion, when a quick tap sounded on the window-pane. "The Birds!" she cried, and ran back into the passage. A moment or two later she came back, and a pair of tiny artists, for all the world like happy sparrows, skipped into the room. The actor knew them, and welcomed them in his magnificent way. They were the Benns, and had but recently married; she modelled in clay and wax, and he was painter newly come from Paris. A CHELSEA EVENING 59 Two people better deserving their nickname would be hard to find. They flitted about the place, looking at the new prints hung on the walls, at the new china toy that Gypsy had been unable to deny herself, and chattering all the time. Benn and I were soon friendly, and he presently asked me to visit his studio. Just as he gave me a card with his address upon it, for which he had to ask his wife, he was caught by a sudden remembrance, and turning about asked Gypsy point blank across the broadside of con- versation, " I say, you haven't such a thing as a big sword, have you? " Oh, yes, but she had, and in a minute the two little people were look- ing at a gigantic two-edged sword, as long as either of them, that hung from a hook on the wall. The actor, with a delighted exhibition of grace and height, reached it easily down, and Benn was for swinging it at once, with all the strength that he had, if his wife had not instantly brought him to sense and saved the place from devastation. Instead, he described the picture he was painting. The central figure, he told us, was to be an old knight looking regretfully at the armour and weapons he had used in his youth. This was the very sword for his pur- pose. Just then there was another tap, and two women came in together. The first was a tall, dark Scottish girl, with a small head and a beau- 6o BOHEMIA IN LONDON tiful, graceful neck, very straight and splendid (I called her the Princess at once in my fan- tastic boyhood), and the other a plump, jolly American. As soon as the shaking of hands was all over someone asked Gypsy for a song. " Got very little voice to-night," she coughed, " and every- body wants something to drink first. But I'll sing you a song afterwards." She went through to the table with the glasses in the inner room. "Who is for opal hush?" she cried, and all, except the American girl and the picture dealer, who preferred whisky, declared their throats were dry for nothing else. Wondering what the strange-named drink might be, I too asked for opal hush, and she read the puzzlement in my face. "You make it like this," she said, and squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass of red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam rose shimmering to the brim. " The Irish poets over in Dublin called it so ; and once, so they say, they went all round the town and asked at every public-house for two tall cymbals and an opal hush. They did not get what they wanted very easily, and I do not know what a tall cymbal may be. But this is the opal hush." It was very good, and as I drank I thought of those Irish poets, whose verses had meant much to me, and sipped the stuff with reverence as if it had been nectar from Olympus. A CHELSEA EVENING 6i When everybody had their glasses, Gypsy came back into the front part of the room, and, sitting in a high-backed chair that was covered with gold and purple embroideries, she cleared her throat, leaned forward so that the lamplight fell on her weird little face, and sang, to my surprise, the old melody: * O the googoo bird Is a giddy bird, No other is zo gay. O the googoo bird is a merry bird, Her zingeth all day. Her zooketh zweet flowers To make her voice clear, And when her cryeth googoo, googoo, The zummer draweth near." Somehow I had expected something else. It seemed odd to hear that simple song drop word by word in the incense-laden atmosphere of that fantastic room. After that she chanted in a monotone one of the poems from Mr. Yeats's "Wind Among the Reeds": " I went out into the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread." • • • • • And then the stately Scottish girl sat down at the old piano, and after playing an indolent 62 BOHEMIA IN LONDON little melody over the faded yellow keys, brought out in tinkling sweetness the best of all the songs that have ever come to London from the sea. Nearly all the company knew it by heart and sang together: " Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies, Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain ; For we've received orders for to sail for Old England, And we may never see you, fair ladies, again. " So we'll rant and we'll roar, like true British sailors. We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas. Until we strike anchor in the channel of Old England; From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues." It is no wonder that such a lad as I was then should find the scene quite unforgettable. There was the beautiful head of the pianist, swaying a little with her music, and the weird group beside her — Gypsy in the orange coat leaning over her shoulder, the two small artists, on tiptoe, bending forward to remind them- selves of the words, the hairy picture-dealer smiling on them benignantly, the actor posing against the mantelpiece, the plump American leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, a cigarette between her lips, with the background of that uncanny room, with the silver lamp, the tall column of smoke A CHELSEA EVENING 63 from the incense urn, and the mad colours, that seemed, like the discordant company, to har- monise perfectly in those magical surround- ings. When the song was done, the actor told me how its melody had been taken down from an old sailor in this very room. The old fellow, brought here for the purpose, had been shy, as well he might be, and his mouth screwed into wrinkles so that no music would come from it. At last they made him comfortable on a chair, with a glass and a pipe, and built a row of screens all around him, that he might not be shamed. After a minute or two, when the smoke, rising in regular puffs above the screens, told them that he had regained his peace of mind, someone said, "Now, then!" and a trembling whistling of the tune had given a musician the opportunity to catch the ancient melody on the keyboard of the piano. They had thus the pride of a version of their own, for they did not know until much later that another had already been printed in a song-book. Presently the American girl begged for a story. Gypsy had spent some part of her life in the Indies, and knew a number of the old folk tales, of Annansee the spider, another Brer Rabbit in his cunning and shrewdness, and Chim Chim the little bird, and the singing turtle, and the Obeah Woman, who was a 64 BOHEMIA IN LONDON witch, "wid wrinkles deep as ditches on her brown face." She told them in the old dialect, in a manner of her own. Fastening a strip of ruddy tow about her head, so that it mingled with her own black hair, she flopped down on the floor, behind a couple of lighted candles, and, after a little introductory song that she had learned from a Jamaican nurse, told story after story, illustrating them with the help of wooden toys that she had made herself. She told them with such precision of phrasing that those who came often to listen soon had them by heart, and would interrupt her like children when, in a single word, she went astray. To hear her was to be carried back to the primitive days of story-telling, and to understand, a little, how it was that the stories of the old minstrels were handed on from man to man with so little change upon the way. That was my first evening of friendliness in Chelsea. For a long time after that I never let a week pass without going to that strange room to listen to the songs and tales, and to see the odd parties of poets and painters, actors and actresses, and nondescript irregulars who were there almost as regularly as I. Sometimes there would be half a dozen of us, sometimes twenty. Always we were merry. The evening was never wasted. There I heard poetry read as if the ghost of some old minstrel had de- A CHELSEA EVENING 65 scended on the reader, and shown how the words should be chanted aloud. There I heard stories told that were yet unwritten, and talk that was so good that it seemed a pity that it never would be. There I joined in gay jousts of caricature. There was a visitors' book that we filled with drawings and rhymes. Every evening that we met we used its pages as a tournament field, " And mischievous and bold were the strokes we gave, And merrily were they received.'* There, too, we used to bring our work when we were busy upon some new thing, a painting, or a book, and work on with fresh ardour after cheers or criticism. The party broke up on that first night soon after the stories. We helped Gypsy to shut up the rooms and dowse the lights, and waved our good-nights to her as we saw her disappear into the house next door where she lodged. At the corner of the street the Benns and I were alone, to walk the same way. We went down the Fulham Road together, those two small people chattering of the new picture, and I, swinging the great sword that was to pose for it, walking by the side of them, rejoicing in my new life and in the weight and balance of the sword, a little pleased, boy that I was, to 66 BOHEMIA IN LONDON be so much bigger than they, and wondering whether, if I swung the sword with sufficient violence, I had the slightest chance of being rebuked by a policeman for carrying a drawn weapon in the streets. IN THE STUDIOS IN THE STUDIOS A LARGE bare room, with no furni- ture but a divan or a camp-bed, a couple of chairs, an easel, and a model-stand made of a big box that holds a few coats and hats and coloured silks that do duty in a dozen pictures ; a big window slanting up across the roof, with blinds to tem- per its light; canvases and old paintings with- out frames leaning against the walls ; the artist, his coat off ready for work, strolling up and down with a cigarette between his lips, looking critically and lovingly at the canvas on the easel, and now and again pulling out his watch : that is a fair picture of a studio at about half-past ten on a workaday morning. There is a tap on the door. *^ Come in!" and a girl slips into the room, apologises for the thousandth time in her life for being so late, and proceeds to change her clothes for the costume that will make her the subject he wants for his picture, and then, taking the chair on the top of the costume-box, assumes the pose in which she yesterday began to sit. While she has been getting ready, he has made 69 70 BOHEMIA IN LONDON his last preparations, and turned the key in the door, so that no chance outsider may stumble in and discompose his model. He looks at his rough drawing, and then at the girl. " We'll get to work now — Your arm was hanging a little further back — Yes — And your head is not quite — That's better — So — Arc you easy? We had it natural yesterday " "How is this?" She alters herself slightly, and the artist steps back to have another look in order to arrange the drapery. " There's only one thing wrong now," he will say. " We must just get that dark shadow that there was below your knee." The girl twists her skirt over, so that it falls in a crease, and gives the streak of dark that he had missed. "That's it. Well done, Serafinal" he ex- claims, and is instantly at work. He has already arranged the blinds over the window so that the light is as it was when he began the painting. As he paints he tries to keep up some kind of conversation with the girl, so that her mind may be alive, and not allow her to go rigid like a lay figure. "You are giving me the whole day?" he will ask, although the matter has been settled already. Gradually, as he grows absorbed in the paint- IN THE STUDIOS 71 ing, he has even less brain to spare, and the talk becomes more and more mechanical; but if Serafina is the right kind of model she will do her share of keeping herself amused. "What have you got for lunch? " she asks. " Four eggs!" "What way shall we cook them, do you think? " " You know how to scramble them. Four eggs are enough for that? " "Yes. I'll scramble them — you have milk? —and butter?" " Got them first thing this morning. By the way, I met Martin at breakfast. YouVe posed for him, haven't you?" And so the talk goes on, like the talk of pup- pets, she just passing the time, trying to keep interested and real without moving out of her pose; he slashing in the rough work, bringing head, neck, shoulders, the turn of the waist, the fold of the skirt, into their places on the canvas. Then he begins to paint in the details, and is able to tell her what he is about. " I've done with the right arm for the present. Busy with the face," he says, and she is able to move her arm with relief, and bend it to and fro if it is getting cramped. It is far more tiring than you would think to remain motionless in a particular pose. The model stiffens insensibly, so that an interval of 72 BOHEMIA IN LONDON rest is as necessary for the success of the paint- ing as it is for her own comfort. For a minute or two she will be luxurious in leaving her pose, and he will walk anxiously up and down, look- ing at the picture, seeking faults, and plotting what to do next with it. And then, with less trouble than at first, she will take her pose again, and he will paint on, and talk emptiness as before. At last his wrist begins to tire, and he glances at his watch. ''We'll have lunch now. I expect you are ready for it, too.'' He puts down brush and palette, and flings himself on a divan opposite the easel, where he can see the picture. For he works on at it in his head, even when he is not painting. She slips down from the model- stand and puts a match to the little oil stove on the soap box in the corner, takes the eggs and milk and butter out of the cupboard, and sets about making ^ufs brouilles, the favourite dish of half the studios in the world. Then she will come and look at the picture, and tell him how well and rapidly it is coming together, and what a nice splash of colour the crimson silk gives where the light falls on it. They will sit down to lunch if there is a table, or if not, will walk about the room, eating the ^SS- ^^'ith spoons out of saucers, and munching bread and butter. The kettle will be boiling IN THE STUDIOS 73 briskly on the stove, and they will make a little brew of coffee, and take a quarter of an hour of leisure, with cigarettes and coffee-cups, before going on with the w^ork. They are lucky if they can work on long after four o'clock without another knock sound- ing at the door. There are as many again lazy fellows who go about to w^aste time as there are hard-working artists. Surely enough, when the picture is all juicy and pliable, when all is going as a painter loves it best, there will come a tap at the locked door. " Oh, curse! " says the artist under his breath, and paints on, pretending not to hear. Tap comes the knock again. He flings down his brushes, turns the key, and opens the door to the interrupter, one of those pleasant, friendly people who never seem to have anything to do. " Oh, it's you, is it? " he says, as graciously as he can. " Come in." The man, genial, full of chatter, as they all are, comes in, volubly apologetic. " Look here," he says, '' don't let me disturb your work. Oh, hullo! How are you, Serafina? He's doing well w^ith you this time. You'll be in all the papers, my dear, and then you'll be too proud to pose for any but swells. Yes, I'll have a cigarette; and now, look here, don't stop work- ing on my account. Go on painting. I'll be making you two some tea." 74 BOHEMIA IN LONDON For a few minutes, as he warms the tea- pot, and brings the tea out of the cupboard, and drops in the recognised four teaspoonfuls, one for each of them, and one for the pot, the painter works desperately on. Presently the interrupter walks up to have another look at the picture. He stands at the painter's elbow, buttering the bosom of a loaf of bread, and cutting it off in thick rounds. "What are you going to put in, to bring the light up into that corner? " he asks, pointing with the butter-knife. " I was thinking of a silver pot: what do you think yourself? Anyhow, Serafina, weVe earned our tea." So work comes to an end for the day. That is the sole virtue of the inter- rupter — he keeps other people from overwork- ing themselves, and Serafina at least is grateful. All three will discuss the picture; how its lights and shadows are to be arranged into repose, and prevented from playing battledore and shuttlecock with the observer's eye; what colours are to be heightened, what toned down ; what artifice of detail, what careful obscurity is to be introduced, and where; and so on, in a jargon incomprehensible to the lay mind, as the talk of any other trade. The discussion is not only between the artists; Serafina will bear her share, and likely enough make the most useful of the suggestions. For artist's models are not hampered, like the painters themselves, by WORK. IN THE STUDIOS 75 knowing too much, and at the same time they are not ignorant as the ordinary picture buyer is ignorant. Some of them have been brought up in the studios from their earliest childhood, and all spend so much of their lives with the artists, and watch so many pictures from their inception to their failure or success, that they have a very practical knowledge of what makes a painting good or bad, and are often able to help a picture in other ways than by posing for it. Indeed, most of them talk of the men for whom they pose as " my artists," and take a most personal interest in the fortunes of their pictures. A model is as happy as the painter when she can say, " I was in the New Gallery this year, or the Acad- emy, in many differ- ent paint- ings." They are a class very much misunder- stood. A girl who poses for an artist is not the immoral, aban- doned woman that the suburbs suppose her. She picks up some-, thing of an education, she learns 76 BOHEMIA IN LONDON something of art, she lives as interestingly, as usefully and as honestly as many of the people who condemn her. Many an artist owes his life to the Serafina, the Rosie, or the Brenda who, coming one morning to ask for a sitting, has found him ill and alone, with nobody to nurse him but an exasperated caretaker. Many a man has been kept out of the hospital, that dread of Bohemia, by the simple, kind-hearted model who has given up part of her working day to cooking his food for him, when he was too weak to do it himself, and then, tired after the long sittings, has brought her work with her, and sat down and sewed in his studio through the evening, and talked cheerful rubbish to him that has kept him from utter disheartenment. There is rich material for novelists in the lives of these girls. One would have liked to be an actress, but had not a good enough voice. Another would have served behind a counter, if some artist had not noticed her, begged her to allow him to paint her, and then, recom- mending her to his friends, shown her this way to a livelihood. Some have stories that read like penny novelettes, and, tired of oppressive stepmothers, or guardians, or elder sisters, have deliberately left their homes, and, perhaps knowing a few artists, have taken up this work so that they might have their own lives to themselves. Some are even supporting their IN THE STUDIOS 77 mothers and younger brothers or sisters. In nearly all cases they come to the studios through the accident of meeting a discerning artist in the street, and to some this accident happens so early that they are practically models all their lives. One child used to come to read fairy stories with me, and to cut out paper figures (a most joyous game), who had posed for artists since she was three years old, and was now fourteen. Her mother had been badly treated by her father, and the little girl and her two elder sisters had made enough to keep the family without his help. All three were very beautiful. Both the elder ones married artists, and the little girl told me when last I saw her that, so far as she was concerned, she was going to marry either an artist or a member of Parliament. Another model had been a gypsy, another was a genuine trans- planted specimen of the rare species dairymaid as Izaak Walton knew it, another the runaway daughter of a shopkeeper in the North of France; the list could be made interminable. As for the men models, they are not so numerous as the girls, and less interesting. They are nearly all Italians, tired of organ- grinding or ice-cream making, or else handsome old soldiers, or good-looking men who have come down in the world. Some of them are picturesque enough. One morning, still in bed, jZ BOHEMIA IN LONDON in lodgings over some studios, I heard a noise in my workroom, and jumping up, flung open the door, thinking to surprise my burglar in the act. In the middle of the room stood a charm- ing old fellow, with a small knobbly head, very red skin, blue seafaring eyes, and a wispy white beard round cheeks and chin. He thought I was an artist, he said, and had come to see if he could be useful. We breakfasted, and he be- came talkative at once. He had been a sailor, had done well about the world, and had settled in California as a storekeeper, when he had been ruined by a big fire. '^ That was because I took Our Lord to mean insurance, when He said usury. It was set clear to me afterwards, but it was too late then, my stuff was gone." Since that time he had drifted, too old to pick up again, too proud to give in and enter the work- house. He had worked his way to England on a ship he had once commanded, and an artist painting shipping had met him walking about the docks, and told him he could make a living as a model. ^' And I'm doing it," he said, " and it's not a bad life. There's hard times, and there's times rough on an old man, but I'm not so weak yet, thanks be, and I get tidily along. Yes. I'll have another pipe of that tobacco. It isn't often you gents have the right stuff." But this has been a long digression from Serafina, the painter, and the interrupter, whom IN THE STUDIOS 79 we left taking tea and discussing the pic- ture. What do they do next? Perhaps if the day- light has not gone, and the interrupter has not been thoroughly efficient, a little more work may be done after tea. But it is more likely that the painter will wash his brushes, and go up to Soho to dine with the in- terrupter, possibly taking Serafina with him, if she has noth- ing to do with her evening. Or he may go to one of the artists' clubs. In the old days there was no club i n Chelsea, and the art- ists used to feed and talk at the Six Bells Tavern, the public-house in the King's Road, or else at one or other of the small inns along the riverside. I do not think the story of the founding of the Chelsea Art Club, in 8o BOHEMIA IN LONDON Church Street, has been printed before. It had been proposed that, as Chelsea had so long been associated with art, an exhibition should be held to illustrate the work of the principal painters who lived here. Meetings were held in the Six Bells, and a committee was appointed to report on the possibilities of the scheme. All the artists concerned met in one of the Manresa Road studios, with Mr. Stirling Lee, the sculp- tor, in the chair, to hear the result. Whistler and half a dozen other famous artists were there. The report was duly read, when someone got up and said that surely there was something that Chelsea needed more than an exhibition, and that was a club. " Club, club, club ! " shouted everybody, and the exhibition was completely forgotten at once, and has never been held to this day. A Teutonic gentleman proposed that they should rent a room for the club in the Pier Hotel, which he pronounced, after the manner of Hans Breitmann, "Bier." Whistler rose, in his most dignified, most supercilious manner. " Gentlemen," he said, slowly, " Gentlemen, let us not start our club in any beer hotel — let us start our club CLEAN." The result was the Chelsea Art Club, in a house of its own, the meeting place of all the Chelsea artists, and the centre of half the fun, the frivolity, the gossip of Chelsea studio life. Another famous artists' club is the Langham IN THE STUDIOS 8i Sketch Club, whose rooms are close behind the Queen's Hall. Artists meet there regularly, and draw and make pictures all in a room together, with a time limit set for the performance. At intervals they exhibit the harvest of their even- ings on the walls. They have also merry parties, for men only, when the doors are opened by fantastical figures, and scratch enter- tainments go on all the time, and there are songs and jovial recitations. Nights there are as merry as any, and the rooms are full of cele- brated men, and men about to be celebrated; for the club does not tolerate bunglers. The painter might go to one of those places; or else, after a supper in Soho, or m one of the very few little restaurants in Chelsea, he might spend the evening in someone else's studio, per- haps in the same block or buildings as his own, for few of the studios are isolated, and there are often three, five, eight, or more under a single roof. The studio life is almost like the life of a university, with its friendliness, its sets, and their haughty attitude towards each There is the set that scorns the Academy and all its works, whose members never cross the threshold of Burlington House, and smile a lit- tle pityingly if you mention an R.A. with any- thing but contempt. For them the ideals and ex- hibitions of the new English movement, unless 82 BOHEMIA IN LONDON indeed they are bold Ishmaels and have forever shaken the dust of exhibitions from their feet. Then there is the rather amusing set of people who laugh at the Academy, but recognise that it is the best picture shop in Europe, and exhibit there for their pocket's sake. And then there is the set made up largely of old Academy students, and of men with wives (who will, no matter what you say to them, care for material success), who regulate all their work by the Academy standards, beg advice from the R.A.'s, and live and die a hundred times in hope and despair between the sending i n day and the day of last re- jections from that most au- gust, most oli- garchic, most British of in- stitutions. The men of each set have IN THE STUDIOS 83 a habit of dropping in to talk away their even- ings in particular studios. It is curious this: how one studio will be chosen without arrange- ment, by accident as it seems, and yet be made by custom so regular a rendezvous that its visi- tors would scarcely know what to do if they were asked to meet anywhere else. If you arc at dinner in Soho with men of one set, then after- wards by some natural attraction you find the party setting out for Brown's place; if with men of another set, then assuredly before the night is out you will be smoking a cigarette at Robin- son's. It is not that the man whose studio is so honoured is the cleverest, the leader of the set — he is often a mere camp-follower in whatever movement may be afoot. It is not even that he has the most comfortable rooms — one favourite studio is the poorest in a building, and so ill- furnished that if you visit it you are wise to bring your own chair. I do not know what the reason is. Some men are best in their kennels, others best out of them; and the atmosphere of some kennels is more companionable than that of others ; there can be nothing else. About nine o'clock the painter, if he has not gone to a club, will arrive, without particu- lar effort, at one of these more hospitable studios. Perhaps there will be a piano in a corner, with a man playing over its keys in the dark. An- other man will be looking at the prints in a book 84 BOHEMIA IN LONDON by the light of a candle. Perhaps there will be a witty little model telling stories and keeping everybody laughing. Perhaps there will be no more than a couple of friends, who no longer find talk necessary for intercourse, but can be perfectly contented in tobacco smoke and each other's silence. They will greet him when he comes with a question about the new picture. He will tell them, of course, that it is going to be a failure, and they will tell him not to be a fool. And then they will sit on, smoking, playing chess, singing, talking of their plans for the year, or the idiosyncrasies of a refractory picture buyer, or the abominable vanity of some stout gentle- man who wants to look slim in a portrait, and so on and so on. Late at night they will sep- arate, and he will go home to have a last look at the picture, anxiously, sleepily, holding a flick- ering candle; and then to sleep on the camp-bed in the corner of the studio, to dream of work and of the picture as he would like it to be, un- accountably more beautiful than he can make it, until he wakes next morning, hurries over the road to the cook-shop for his breakfast, and back again to be impatiently ready for the arrival of Serafina, late as usual, after the custom of her kind. And so go twenty-four hours of an artist's life. THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA WILLIAM HAZLITT THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA IONDON is full of people who keep the country in their hearts, and the life J of studios, taverns, and newspaper of- -^ fices is lived by many who would scorn the name of Londoner. One thinks himself a Devon man, another is a Scot, another, though he works in London all the year, calls the Lake Mountains home. It is so now; it has been so ever since the green fields drew away from London, and made town and country two hostile, different things. Hazlitt, talking meta- physically in the little tavern under Southamp- ton Buildings, or seated in his favourite corner there, with a pot of ale before him for custom's sake, and a newspaper before his eyes, listening to the vain talk of " coffee-house politicians," must often have congratulated himself on hav- ing been able to ask from his heart for " the clear blue sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner — and then to thinking." He can never have forgotten that he was more than the townsman, in that he had known the Great North Road. 87 88 BOHEMIA IN LONDON Borrow was another of your countrymen in town. You remember — when he wished to fight his way among the hack writers with "Ancient Songs of Denmark, heroic and romantic, with notes philological, critical, and historical," or " The Songs of Ap Gwilym, the Welsh bard, also with notes critical, philolog- ical, and historical " — his disconcerting inter- view with the publisher: " I am very sorry, sir," says Borrow, " to hear that you cannot assist me. I had hoped " "A losing trade, I assure you, sir; literature is a drug. Taggart (this to his clerk), what o'clock is it? " " Well, sir, as you cannot assist me, I will now take my leave; I thank you sincerely for your kind reception, and will trouble you no longer." " Oh, don't go. I wish to have some further conversation with you, and perhaps I may hit on some plan to benefit you. I honour merit, and always make a point to encourage it when I can; but — Taggart, go to the bank, and tell them to dishonour the bill twelve months after date for thirty pounds which becomes due to-morrow. I am dissatisfied with that fellow who wrote the fairy tales, and intend to give him all the trouble in my power. Make haste. . . ." I'll warrant Borrow was helped to keep his THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 89 upper lip straight then, and afterwards, when he was dismally translating into German the publisher's own philosophical treatise, that proved the earth to be shaped like a pear and not " like an apple, as the fools of Oxford say," by the thought of country roads, and horses gal- loping, and his own stout legs that could walk with any in England, and his arms that could swing a hammer to a blacksmith's admiration. And what of Bampfylde in an older time, who was not able, like Hazlitt and Borrow, to see the country again and again, but came here from it, to live miserably, and die with its vision in his heart? Southey, grave, hard- working, respectable as he was, felt something of the tragedy of that countryman's irregular life. Through the sedate and ordered phrases of this letter of his to Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, the vivid, unhappy life of the man bursts through like blood in veins. The letter is long, but I quote it almost in full : Keswick, M^y 10, 1809. "Sir: " . . . It gives me great pleasure to hear that Bamp- fylde's remains are to be edited. The circumstances which I did not mention concerning him are these. They were related to me by Jackson, of Exeter, and minuted down Im- mediately afterwards, when the Impression which they made upon me was warm. " He was the brother of Sir Charles, as you say. At the time when Jackson became Intimate with him he was just 90 BOHEMIA IN LONDON in his prime, and had no other wish than to live in solitude, and amuse himself with poetry and music. He lodged in a farmhouse near Chudleigh, and would oftentimes come to Exeter in a winter morning, ungloved and open-breasted, before Jackson was up (though he was an early riser), with a pocket full of music or poems, to know how he liked them. His relations thought this was a sad life for a man of family, and forced him to London. The tears ran down Jackson's cheeks when he told me the story. * Poor fellow,* he said, * there did not live a purer creature, and, if they would have let him alone, he might have been alive now.' " When he was in London, his feelings, having been forced out of their proper channel, took a wrong direction, and he soon began to suffer the punishment of debauchery. The Miss Palmer to whom he dedicated his Sonnets (afterwards, and perhaps still. Lady Inchiquin)was niece to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Whether Sir Joshua objected to his addresses on account of his irregularities in London, or on other grounds, I know not; but this was the commencement of his madness. He was refused admittance into the house; upon this, in a fit of half anger and half derangement, he broke the windows, and was (little to Sir Joshua's honour) sent to Newgate. Some weeks after this happened, Jackson went to London, and one of his first inquiries was for Bamp- fylde. Lady Bampfylde, his mother, said she knew little or nothing about him; that she had got him out of Newgate, and he was now in some beggarly place. 'Where?' 'In King Street, Holborn, she believed, but she did not know the number of the house.' Away went Jackson, and knocked at every door till he found the right. It was a truly misera- ble place ; the woman of the house was one of the worst class of women in London, She knew that Bampfylde had no money, and that at that time he had been three days without food. When Jackson saw him there was all the levity of madness in his manner; his shirt was ragged and black as a coal-heaver's, and his beard of a two months' growth. Jack- THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 91 son sent out for food, and said he was come to breakfast with him; and he turned aside to a harpsichord in the room, liter- ally, he said, to let him gorge himself without being noticed. He removed him from thence, and, after giving his mother a severe lecture, obtained for him a decent allowance, and left him, when he himself quitted town, in decent lodgings, earnestly begging him to write. "But he never wrote ; the next news was that he was in a private madhouse, and Jackson never saw him more. Almost the last time they met, he showed several poems, among others, a ballad on the murder of David RIzzIo ; such a ballad! said he. He came that day to dine with Jackson, and was asked for copies. * I burned them,' was the reply ; * I wrote them to please you ; you did not seem to like them, so I threw them in the fire.' After twenty years' confine- ment he recovered his senses, but not till he was dying of consumption. The apothecary urged him to leave Sloane Street (where he had always been as kindly treated as he could be) and go into his own country, saying that his friends in Devonshire would be very glad to see him. But he hid his face and answered, ' No, sir ; they who knew me what I was, shall never see me what I am.' . . ." His was a different case from that of Hazlitt leaving Wem, of De Quincey running from school, or of Goldsmith setting out from Lissoy. It is a sad story this of the strength of the town, of its coarse fingers on the throat of a wild bird, and I should like to pretend that there are no Bampfyldes in Bohemia to-day who have lost their poetry in London, and dare not go back to their own country, " lest those who knew them what they were, should see them what they are." It is a terrible thing to feel ashamed in 92 BOHEMIA IN LONDON the presence of the hills, and fearful that the spring has lost its power of refreshment. But there are many stronger men, who have come to London because poetry or pictures will not support them in the villages they love, and carry a glad pride in their hearts that softens the blows, and eases the difficulties of the town. It is something as you walk disconsolate down a publisher's stairs, like a little boy from a whip- ping, to be able to pull up your despair with a stout breath, a toss of your head, a thought of the wind in your face, and the straight road over the moorland, with the peewits overhead; some- thing, when eating a hard-boiled egg at a coffee- stall, to remember another occasion, when in greater straits you were less pusillanimous, and tossed away your last eightpence to feed and sleep royally in a little village inn, ready to face the world with empty purse and cheerful heart in the sunshine of the morning. Ay, it is a great thing to be a countryman, to know the smell of the hay when a cart rolls by to Covent Garden, and to dream in Paternoster Row of the broad open road, with the yellowhammer in the hedge and the blackthorn showing flower. It is a very joyous thing for a countryman in town, when some small thing from the Happy Land breaks through the gloom or weariness or excitement of his irregular life, like a fountain in the dusk. For example, I THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 93 have seldom been happier in Bohemia than when two old country songs that have, so far as I know, never been written down were sung to me in some dingy rooms over a set of studios by an artist's model I had never seen before. There was a yellow fog outside, and a lamp burned on my desk, in the ashamed manner of a lamp in daylight. It does not matter what article my brain was flogging itself to produce, for the article was never written. My landlady had brought me up some beef and fried onions in a soup plate, but things were altogether too woeful for the enjoyment of lunch, when some- one tapped at my door, and almost instantly a 94 BOHEMIA IN LONDON dainty, slight girl, with a little brown felt hat on her head and a green cloak about her, opened the door and smiled at me from the threshold. " Do you need a model? " she asked. I was so glad to see anything so young and fresh and beautiful in the dull lamplight of that fog-choked room, so heartened by the very sight of her, that I almost forgot to answer, and then, in an agony of fear lest she should go at once, when she saw that she was not in a studio, explained very awkwardly that I was very glad she had called, that it was an unpleasant day, that, that .... and could she stop to lunch. She laughed, a clear country laugh, that made it possible for me to laugh, too ; and in a moment the gloom seemed to have vanished for the day, as she sat down as pretty as you please to share my beef and onions. We came at once to talk of the country, and, afterwards, when we pulled our chairs up to the fire, and she let me light a cigarette for her, she was telling me of her old life, before she came to London, where she lived in a little vil- lage in Gloucestershire. Playing with the cigarette in her fingers, she told me how she used to get up to make her brother's breakfast before he went out to labour on the farm, how before that she had been at the village school, and how, when they had all been children, her THE ARTIST'S MODEL THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 95 old grandmother had used to sing to them every evening songs she had learned in her youth. '' Did she remember any of the songs?" I asked, hoping, and yet telling myself to expect no more than the modern jingles that have been made popular by print. " Why, yes, she remembered a few, but she could not sing as well as her old grandmother." And then, after a little entreaty, in that little dark, dusty room in Bohemia, she came out with this ballad in a simple, untrained voice that was very well suited to the words: Oh, it's of a fair damsel in Londin did dwell ; Oh, for wit and for beauty her none could excel. With her mistress and her master she served seven year, And what followed after you quickely shall hear. Oh, I took my box upon my head. I gained along, And the first one I met was a strong and able man. He said, " My pretty fair maid, I mean to tell you plain. I'll show to you a nearer road across the counterey." He took me by the hand, and he led me to the lane ; He said, " My pretty fair maid, I mean to tell you plain, Deliver up your money without a fear or strife. Or else this very moment I'll take away your life." The tears from my eyes like fountains they did flow. Oh, where shall I wander? Oh, where shall I go? And so while this young feller was a feeling for his knife, Oh, this beautiful damsel, she took away his life. 96 BOHEMIA IN LONDON I took my box upon my head. I gained along, And the next one I met was a noble gentleman. He said, " My pretty fair maid, where are you going so late? " And what was that noise that I heard at yonder gate ? " I fear that box upon your head to yourself does not belong. To your master or your mistress you have done something wrong ; To your mistress or your master you have done something ill, For one moment from trimbeling you really can't stand still." To my master or my mistress I have done nothing ill ; But I feel within my own dear heart it's a young man I do kill. He dem'ded my money, but I soon let him know, And now that able feller lies bleeding down below. This gentleman got off his boss to see what he had got ; He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some shot; He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some ball, And a knife and a whistle, more robbers for to call. This gentleman blew the whistle, he blew it both loud and shrill. And four more gallant robbers came trimbling down the hill. Oh, this gentleman shot one of them, and then most speedilee. Oh, this beautiful damsel, she shot the other three. " And now, my pretty fair maid, for what you have done, I'll make of you my charming bride before it is long. I'll make of you my own dear bride, and that very soon, For taking of your own dear path, and firing off a goon." THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 97 It was a strange thing to hear the gentle, lazy melody that carried those words in the foggy little London room. It was the stranger to hear the words and the air from a girl like this one, who had now taken off her hat, and lay back in the rickety deck-chair, smoothing her tangled golden head, and ready for another cigarette. The setting was London of London: the song and its melody carried the very breath of the country into the room; the girl, an artist's model, smoking cigarettes, ready I have no doubt to compare with knowledge the merits of cherry brandy and benedictine, and yet as happy in singing that old tune as her grandmother had been long ago in the far-away Gloucestershire cottage. Soon after that she stood up, laughing because there was no mirror, to put on her little hat. I begged her to stay and come to dinner with me in Soho, but she had a business engagement, to pose for a pen-and-ink illustrator in the evening. She left me, and it was as if the blue sky had shown for a moment through the clouds and disappeared. The afternoon was foggy London once again, and Gloucestershire seemed distant as the Pole. In talking of countrymen and their comforts in town, I cannot think how I forgot to men- tion the consolation of a village reputation far away. When editors refuse your works, and 98 BOHEMIA IN LONDON Academies decline to hang your pictures, you have always the reflection of the lady of the nursery rhyme: " There was a young lady of Beverley Whose friends said she sang very cleverly; * She'll win great renown In great London town/ So said the good people of Beverley. " But in London this lady of Bevereley Found all her best notes fell but heavily; And when this she did find, She said, 'Never mind, They still think me a songbird at Beverley.* " It is a reflection often made by countrymen in town. OLD AND NEW SOHO LoFd s OLD AND NEW SOHO OHO has always been a merry place. Even at the time when Keats wrote scornfully of it in a letter to Hay- don: " For who would go Into dark Soho, To chatter with dank-haired critics, When he might stay In the new-mown hay And startle the dappled prickets?" — even then there were plenty of fellows, more merry than critical, who sported as playfully in its narrow streets as ever poets did in hayfields. A street out of Soho Square, now so heavily odorous of preserved fruit, from the factory at the corner, was for a time the home of so re- doubtable a merrymaker, so sturdy a Bohemian, as Pierce Egan, the author of " Life in London, or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Haw- thorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis." A jolly book indeed, whose very lOl I02 BOHEMIA IN LONDON pictures but Thackeray has described them in a manner inimitable by any clumsy, careful fellow : " First there is Jerry arriving from the country, in a green coat and leather gaiters, and being measured for a fashionable suit at Co- rinthian House, by Corinthian Tom's tailor. Then away for the career of pleasure and fashion. The Park! delicious excitement! The theatre! the saloon!! the greenroom!!! Raptu- rous bliss — the opera itself! and then perhaps to Temple Bar, to knock down a Charley there! There are Jerry and Tom, with their tights and little cocked hats, coming from the opera — very much as gentlemen in waiting on Royalty are habited now. There they are at Almack's itself, amidst a crowd of highbred personages, with the Duke of Clarence himself looking at their dancing. Now, strange change, they are in Tom Cribbs' parlour, where they don't seem to be a whit less at home than in fashion's gilded halls: and now they are at Newgate, seeing the irons knocked off the malefactors' legs previous to execution. . . . Now we haste away to mer- rier scenes: to Tattersall's (ah, gracious pow- ers! what a funny fellow that actor was who performed Dicky Green in that scene at the play!) ; and now we are at a private party, at which Corinthian Tom is waltzing (and very gracefully, too, as you must confess) with OLD AND NEW SOHO 103 Corinthian Kate, whilst Bob Logic, the Ox- onian, is playing on the piano! " I can never see this giddy, rampant book with- out thinking of a paragraph in it, that shows us, through the Venetian-coloured glass of Mr. Egan's slang: " Mr. Hazlitt, in the evening, lolling at his ease upon one of Ben Medley's elegant couches, enjoying the reviving comforts of a good tinney (which is a fire), smacking his chaffer (which is his tongue) over a glass of old hock, and top- ping his glim (which is a candle) to a classic nicety, in order to throw a new light upon the elegant leaves of Roscoe's ^ Life of Lorenzo de Medici,' as a composition for a New Lecture at the Surrey Institution. This is also Life in London." I like to think of Hazlitt at Ben Medley's, who was " a well-known hero in the Sporting World, from his determined contest with the late pugilistic phenomenon, Dutch Sam." It is pleasant, is it not? Almost as delightful as that glimpse of him driving back from the great fight between Hickman and Neate, when " my friend set me up in a genteel drab great coat and green silk handkerchief (which I must say became me exceedingly)." Pierce Egan knew well the Bohemian life of his day. There is a story that is a better com- pliment to his spirit than his head. Some of I04 BOHEMIA IN LONDON his friends lifted him, dead drunk after a masquerade, into a cab, put some money in his pocket, gave the cabby his address, and an- nounced that he was a foreign nobleman. Off drives the cabby, and finds the house, with ten bell-pulls, ringing to the rooms belonging to the different tenants. Cheerfully, as one with no- bility in his cab, he tugs the whole ten. From every window indignant night-capped heads deny relationship with any foreign nobleman. " But I've brought him from the masquerade, and he's got money in his pocket." Instantly everybody in the house runs downstairs and out into the street. Egan's wife recognised her errant husband, and, with the help of the other lodgers, carried him to his room. He was out on the spree again the following day. Egan was a gay fellow, wrote voluminously, lived vigorously, and if he did not deserve it in any other way, fully earned the title of a Man of Letters by a passage in the dedication of his most famous book to his Majesty George IV.: " Indeed, the whole chapter of ' Life in London ' has been so repeatedly perused by your Majesty, in such a variety of shapes, from the elegant A, the refined B, the polite C, the lively D, the eloquent E, the honest F, the stately G, the peep o' day H, the tasteful I, the manly J, the good K, the noble L, the stylish M, the brave N, the liberal O, the proud P, the long- OLD AND NEW SOHO 105 headed Q, the animated R, the witty S, the flash T, the knowing U, the honourable V, the con- summate W, the funny X, the musical Y, and the poetical Z, that it would only be a waste of your Majesty's valuable time to expatiate fur- ther upon this subject." But Soho has known more lettered men than Egan. De Quincey, young and new to London, before he had lost the poor woman of the streets who, out of her own penury, bought port wine for him when he was likely to die on a doorstep in Soho Square, found lodging in an unfur- nished house in Greek Street. The ground floor of the house was occupied by a rascally lawyer, whose best quality was a devotion to literature that led him to shelter the boy scholar, or at least to allow him to sleep on the floor of nights with waste papers for a pillow, and an old horse-blanket for a covering, that he shared with a hunger-bitten child. Hazlitt rests in the graveyard of St. Anne's, Wardour Street, having put off the wild, nervous tangle of joys and miseries, hopes and disappointments, and violent hates, that he sum- marised on his death-bed as a happy life. He died in Frith Street. In Gerrard Street, Dryden lived at No. 43, and doubtless found it very convenient for walk- ing down of an afternoon to the coffee-houses about Covent Garden. Burke lived for a time io6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON at No. 37, and the greatest of all clubs, The Club, of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds, met at the Turk's Head Tavern in the same street. There were clubs here in the early nineteenth century, and Thackeray described one of them in " The Newcomes " : " Wc tap at a door in an old street in Soho: an old maid with a kind, comical face opens the^ door, and nods friendly, and says, * How do, sir? ain't seen you this ever so long. How do, Mr. Noocom?' * Who's here?'^ 'Most every- body's here.' We pass by a little snug bar, in which a trim elderly lady is seated by a great fire, on which boils an enor- mous kettle ; while two gentlemen are attacking a cold sad- dle of mutton and West Indian pickles : hard by Mrs. Nokes the landlady's elbow — with mutual bows — we recog- fPr OLD AND NEW SOHO 107 nise Hickson the sculptor, and Morgan, in- trepid Irish chieftain, chief of the reporters of the Morning Press newspaper. We pass through a passage into a back room, and are received with a roar of welcome from a crowd of men, almost invisible in the smoke." All the districts of London that have once made themselves a special atmosphere, keep it with extraordinary tenacity. Fleet Street is one example, Soho is another. The Turk's Head has disappeared, Thackeray's club is not to be found; but every Tuesday a dozen, more or less, of the writers of the day meet at a little res- taurant in the very street where Goldsmith and Johnson walked to meet their friends. This is the Mont Blanc, a very old house, whose walls have once been panelled. In the rooms upstairs the mouldings of the panels can be felt plainly through the canvas that has been stretched across them and papered to save the cost of painting. And all over Soho are similar small meeting places, where irregulars of all sorts flock to lunch and dine. Still, in some of the upper rooms of the streets where De Quincey walked to warm himself before sleeping on the floor, the student life goes on. Still in some of the upper windows may be seen the glitter of a candle-light where a scholar, probably foreign, pores over a book in the hours when the British Museum is closed to him. And in a hundred of io8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON the small rooms in the piles of Soho flats, small rooms furnished with a bed, a chair, and a table that also serves for a washing-stand, are there young actors and actresses, studying great parts and playing small ones, eager to be Macduff and content meanwhile to represent the third witch on the boards of a suburban theatre, copying the mannerisms of Miss Edna May, and keeping alive by smiling at the pit from the medley of the ballet. It is odd to think of the days when a shilling dinner was beyond achievement, when a sand- wich and a couple of bananas seemed a supper for a Shakespeare. Yet those were happy days, and had their luxuries. There are sandwiches and sandwiches. In one of the narrower streets that run up from Shaftesbury Avenue towards Oxford Street, there is a shop whose proprietor is an enthusiast, a facile virtuoso in their manu- facture. He is an amateur in the best sense, and no selfish, arrogant fellow who will allow none but himself to be men of taste. You stand in the middle of his shop, with all kinds of meats arranged on the shelves about you, a knife on every dish. Veal, potted liver, chicken artfully prepared, pate de fote gras or a substitute, tongue spiced and garnished, tongue potted and pressed, lobster paste, shrimp paste, cockle paste, OLD AND NEW SOHO 109 and half a hundred other luscious delicacies, wait in a great circle about you, like paints on a palette; while you stand hesitating in the middle, and compose your sandwich, a touch of this, a taste of that, a suspicion of this, a sprinkling of that again, while he, at once a skilful craftsman and a great genius, does the rough handiwork, and executes your design, often, like the great man of the art school, contributing some little de- tail of his own that is needed for perfection, and presents you finally with the complete work of art, cut in four for convenient eating, for six- pence only, an epicurean triumph, and enough of it to sustain you till the morning. After your sandwich, you will find, in Little Pulteney Street, if I am not mistaken in the name, a man with bananas on a hand barrow, and likely enough an Italian woman with a red or green shawl about her head, turning the handle of a barrel-organ. With these things it is easy to be happy. How happy I used to be, walking along that street peeling and eating my bananas, while my heart throbbed bravely to the music of the organ. Sometimes a couple of children would be dancing in the street, as nautch girls might enliven the supper of an Indian potentate; and often someone would be singing the words to the barrel-organ's melodies. What were the favourite tunes? Ah yes : no BOHEMIA IN LONDON " Dysy, Dysy, give me yer awnser, do ; I'm arf cryzy all fur the love of you," and " As you walk along The Bar de Bullong With a independent air, You 'ear the girls declare There goes the millyonaire, The man wot broke the benk at Monte Carlo" Yes; those were very happy days, and you, O reader, lose much if the fulness of your purse, or the delicacy of your ear, deprives you of such an enjoyment. When your income rises beyond the content- ment of bananas and sandwich for dinner, or earlier, when the sale of a picture, or a longer article than usual, entitles you to a tremulous extravagance, you have an adventurous choice to make among the Soho restaurants. Every evening after half-past six or seven Soho takes on itself a new atmosphere. It is grubby and full of romantic memory by day. At night it is suddenly a successful place, where the proprie- tors of little restaurants are able to retire upon the fortunes they have made there. The streets, always crowded with foreigners, now suffer odder costumes than in daylight. Artists, poets, writers, actors, music-hall performers, crowd to the special restaurants that custom reserves for their use. I do not know how many small eat- OLD AND NEW SOHO iii ing-houses there are in Soho; though I set out once, in a flush of recklessness at the sale of a book, to eat my way through the lot of them; the plan was to dine at a different restaurant every night, taking street by street, until I had ex- hausted them all, and could retire with un- rivalled experience. The scheme fell through, partly because I fell in love with one or two places, so that my feet insisted on carrying me through their doors, when my conscience an- nounced that duty to the programme demanded a supper elsewhere, and partly because of a relapse into impecuniosity that compelled a return to the diet of bananas and sandwiches. Alas, that this should be a record of fact! What mansions of the stomach could I not describe, what sumptuous palaces, where wine and Munich lager flow from taps on every table, where food is as good in the mouth as in pros- pect, where landlords and proprietors stand upon their dignity, and refuse money as an insult to their calling. How perfectly could I reconstruct Soho in a gastronomic dream. Un- fortunately I am bound as tight to fact as to penury. The first Soho restaurant I knew was Roche's, now Beguinot's, in Old Compton Street. A lean painter took me; it was a foggy night, and we crossed Cambridge Circus with difficulty, and then, almost groping our way along the 112 BOHEMIA IN LONDON pavement, found the door, and stepped into the glamour and noise of the long room that you enter from the street. The painter wished to show me the whole place. We went right through to the inner room where we so often dined in later years, and downstairs to the hot little inferno, where a few brave spirits descend to feed and talk. The painter nodded to men in both rooms, and then turned to me. "This is Bohemia," he said; "what do you think of it? " We went back into the front room and sat down behind the long table, so that I could see the whole place, and observe the people who came in. Opposite our long table were half a dozen small ones placed along the wall, and at one of these sat a very splendid old man. His long white hair fell down over the collar of his velvet coat, and now and again he flung back his head, so that his hair all rippled in the light, and then he would bang his hand carefully upon the table, so as not to hurt it, and yet to be impressive, as he declaimed continually to a bored girl who sat opposite him, dressed in an odd mixture of fashion and Bohemianism. They seemed a queer couple to be together, until the painter told me that the man was one of the old set, who had come to the place for years, and remem- bered the old mad days when everyone dressed in a luxuriously unconventional manner, like so OLD AND NEW SOHO 113 many Theophile Gautiers. The painter, who was a realist, referred scornfully to the old fellow as " a piece of jetsam left by the roman- tic movement." There have been such a number of romantic movements in the last thirty years that it was impossible to know what he meant. But the tradition is still current at the Soho dinner tables that there were a few grand years in which we rivalled the Quartier in costume, and outdid Montmartre in extravagant conversa- tion. It was pathetic to think of the old Roman- tic as a relic of that glorious time, alone in his old age, still living the life of his youth. All down our long table there were not two faces that did not seem to me then to bear the imprint of some peculiar genius. Some were assuredly painters, others journalists, some very obviously poets, and there were several, too, of those amateur irregulars, who are always either exasperating or charming. The painter pointed out man after man by name. There was So-and- So, the musical critic ; there was somebody else, who painted like Watteau: "ridiculous ass," commented my realistic friend; there was So- and-So, the editor of an art magazine; there a fellow who had given up art for a place in his father's business, but yet kept up his old acquaintanceships with the men more faithful to their ideals. These Soho dinners are excellently cooked 114 BOHEMIA IN LONDON and very cheap. Only the wine is dearer in England than in France. There you can get a carafon for a few pence, and good it is. But here the cheapest half-bottle is tenpence, and often disappointing. The wise drink beer. It is Charles Godfrey Leland who, in his jovial scrap of autobiography, ascribes all the vigour and jolly energy of his life to the strengthening effects of Brobdingnagian draughts of lager beer drunk under the tuition of the German stu- dent. It is good companionable stuff, and a tankard of it costs only sixpence, or less. In the same street with Beguinot's, a little nearer Piccadilly Circus, there is the Dieppe, a cheaper place, but very amusing. We used to feed there not for the sake of the food so much as for the pictures. Round the walls are several enormous paintings, some of which suggest Bot- ticelli's Primavera in the most ridiculous man- ner, only that all the figures are decently clothed in Early Victorian costume. It is a real joy to dine there, and observe them. They are the dearest funny pictures that I know. On the other side of the street is a white- fronted restaurant kept by a Monsieur Brice, to whom, through several years, I have been faith- ful. Night after night I have walked through the glitter and the dusk of the Soho streets, past the little tobacco shop where they sell real Caporal tobacco, one whiff of which transports OLD AND NEW SOHO 115 you as if in an enchanted cloud to the BouP Mich', where the chansonniers sing their own ballads, to the Bal BuUier and the students' balls, and make you a Parisian in a moment. I have walked along there night after night, and turned in at the small side door, and through into the little white back room, where the best of waiters kept a corner table. What suppers have vanished in that inner room, how many bottles of dark Munich beer have flowed to their appointed havens. Here the Benns, that little painter and his wife, used to join us, and sit and talk and smoke, planning new pictures that were to be better than all that had been done before, talking over stories as yet unwritten, and enjoying great fame in obscurity. Here, too, used other friends to come, so that we often sat down a merry half-dozen at the table, and enjoyed ourselves hugely, and also other people. That is one of the chief merits of Soho dinners— the company is always entertaining. Some- times there would be an old philosopher at the table opposite, who would solemnly drink his half-bottle, and then smoke a cigarette over some modern book. One day he leaned across towards our table with HaeckeFs " Riddle of the Universe " in his hand. " Read this book, young people," he said; "but you should read it as you read Punch:' That was his introduc- tion to our party, and thenceforward, when he ii6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON had finished his meal, he would always smoke his cigarette with us, and, smoothing his white beard with a pensive hand, employ himself upon our instruction in philosophy. On other evenings ; strangers would come in, and we would guess their ideals from their manners of unfolding their napkins — the gay flourish meant the artist, the deliberate disen- tanglement the man of prose, the careless fling the poet, and so on — or perhaps one of our enigmas would join in our talk, and puzzle us the more. So many of the faces were far from ordinary, so many had the inexpressible some- thing in their lines that suggests an interesting mind. We were content to let them remain enigmas, and construed them each one of us to please himself. Once there was a wedding party at a longer table, made by joining the three small ones at one side of the room. The bride was a pretty model, the man a tousled artist; probably, we agreed, a very inferior craftsman, but certainly an excellent fellow, since he insisted on our joining his company, which was made up of others like himself, with their attendant ladies. He and his bride were off to Dieppe for an in- expensive honeymoon, so that the feast could not be prolonged. At half-past eight the supper was done, and in a procession of hansom cabs we drove to Victoria, and cheered them off by OLD AND NEW SOHO 117 the evening boat train, the two of them leaning out of the window and tearfully shouting of their devotion to art, to each other, and to us, an excited heterogeneous crowd, who sang "Auld Lang Syne," "God Save the King," " The Marseillaise," and the Faust " Soldiers' Chorus," according to nationality, in an in- extricable tangle of discord. That was a great night. The Boulogne, the Mont Blanc, Pinoli's, the France, and many another little restaurant knew us in those days; there was scarcely one, from B rice's and the Gourmet's in the south, to the Venice, at the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, that had not suffered our merry dinner parties. There was not one that was not in some way or other linked with a memory of delight. The waiters, Auguste, Alphonse, Jean, le gros Paul, le grand Renard, all were our friends, and joked with us over our evil dialect and our innumer- able acquaintance. It was le grand Renard, that great man, who elaborated the jest of greet- ing us every time, as soon as we entered, with " Ah, bon soir. Messieurs. Your friend M'sieur So-and-So has not been here to-day, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So," as far as his breath would carry him in an incoherent string of fantastic names, real and invented, that delighted us every time. COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO THE day that Casanova, travelling as the Chevalier de Seingalt, arrived in London, he strolled some little way from his lodging through the old streets of Soho, then, as now, the Italian quarter. Presently he says, " I saw a lot of people in a coffee-house, and I went in. It was the most ill-famed cofifee-house in London, and the meeting place of the scum of the Italian population. I had been told of it at Lyons, and had made up my mind never to go there; but chance often makes us turn to the left when we want to go to the right. I ordered some lemonade, and was drinking it, when a stranger who was seated near me took a news-sheet from his pocket, printed in Italian. He began to make corrections in pencil on the margin, which led me to suppose he was an author. I watched him out of curiosity, and noticed that he scratched out the word ancora, and wrote it at the side, anchora. This barbarism irritated me. I told him that for four centuries it had been written without an A. " ^ I agree with you,' he answered, ^ but I am 121 122 BOHEMIA IN LONDON quoting Boccaccio, and in quotations one must be exact.' " ^ I humbly beg your pardon ; I see you are a man of letters.' " * A very modest one ; my name is Martinelli.' " ^ I know you by reputation ; you are a cousin of Casabigi's, who has spoken of you; I have read some of your satires.' " * May I ask to whom I have the honour of speaking? ' " ^ My name is Seingalt. Have you finished your edition of the " Decameron "? ' " * I am still working at it, and trying to get more subscribers.' " ^ Will you allow me to be of the number? ' " He put me down for four copies, at a guinea a copy, and was surprised to hear I had only been in London an hour. " ^ Let me see you home,' he said ; * you will lose your way else.' " When we were outside he told me I had been in the Orange Coffee-House, the most disrepu- table in all London. " * But you go.' " * I go because I know the company, and am on my guard against it.' " * Do you know many people here? ' " ^ Yes, but I only pay court to Lord Spencer. I work at literature, am all alone, earn enough for my wants. I live in furnished lodgings, I COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 123 own twelve shirts and the clothes I stand up in, and I am perfectly contented.' " That dialogue might serve well enough for an exaggerated description of our own day. For the people of this book are willing to drink any- where but in the more tame and expensive places of the West End. They " know the com- pany and are on their guard against it," and go cheerfully where they may get most amusement at the smallest cost. The coffee-houses best loved by the Bohe- mians are not so disreputable as the Orange; I doubt if their reputations can have gone far beyond Soho. But they have atmospheres of their own; and they are not places where you are likely to meet anyone oppressively more respectable or better dressed than yourself. I am thinking of two small houses in particular — ^^The Moorish Cafe" and "The Algerian." Besides these there are many others, and a few neater, more luxurious, more expensive, that help to wean the Bohemian from Bohemia; and then there are the big drinking palaces by Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, where he goes when he needs the inspiration of a string band, or the interest of a crowd of men and women. Near the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, on the left-hand side as you walk towards Soho Square, is a small green-painted shop, with a 124 BOHEMIA IN LONDON window full of coffee cups, and pots, and strainers of a dozen different designs. Looking through the window, that is dimmed likely enough with steam, you may see a girl busied with a big coffee-grinding machine, and watch the hesitant blue flames of the stove on which the coffee is stewed. Opening the door, you step into a babble of voices, and find yourself in a tiny Moorish cafe. The room is twisted and narrow, so that you must have a care, as you walk, for other people's coffee cups upon the small round tables. At every table men will be sitting, blowing through their half- closed lips long jets of scented smoke that dis- turb continually the smoke-filled atmosphere. Some will be playing at cards, some at back- gammon, some talking eagerly among them- selves. Dark hair, dark eyes, sallow-skinned faces everywhere, here and there a low-caste Englishman, and sometimes, if you are lucky, a Bohemian in emerald corduroy, lolling broadly on his chair and puffing at a porcelain pipe. Sit down near him, and it is ten to one that you will be engaged in a wordy battle of acting, of poetry, or of pictures before the sedi- ment has had time to settle in your coffee. The coffee is thick and dark and sweet; to drink it alone, and to smoke with it an Eastern cigarette, is to hear strange Moorish melodies, to dream of white buildings with green-painted "a S X «o O o M COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 125 porticoes, to see the card-players as gambling dragomans, to snatch at a coloured memory from the Arabian Nights. The material for the dream is all about you; gaudy pictures in bright blues and oranges hang on the walls; there is Stamboul in deliciously impossible perspective, there the tomb of the Prophet, there an Otto- man warship, there Noah's Ark, with a peacock on the topmast, a serpent peering anxiously from a porthole, and Noah and his family flaunting it in caftans and turbans on the poop ; from the brackets of the flickering incandescent lamps are hung old Moorish instruments, tar- boukas, and gambas, dusty, with slackened strings, and yet sufficient, in the dream, to send the tunes of the desert cities filtering through the thick air of the room. " The Algerian " is in Dean Street, close by the Royalty Theatre, where Coquelin played Cyrano de Bergerac and kept a whole party, French painters and English writers, quavering between laughter and tears, uplifted with pride that there could be such men as Cyrano, and joy that there was yet such an actor as Coquelin. It is on the same side of the street, a plain, square window, thoroughly orthodox, with " The Al- gerian Restaurant" written over the top. Behind a small counter sits Madame, knit- ting, smiling to all her acquaintance that come in, and selling neat brown packages of wonder- 126 BOHEMIA IN LONDON ful coffee. Beyond is an inner room, whose walls are covered with cocoanut matting, and decorated with tiny mirrors, and advertisements of special drinks. If you can get a corner seat in that crowded little room, you may be happy for an evening, with a succession of coffees and a dozen cigarettes. Sometimes there will be a few women watching the fun, but more often there will be none but men, mostly French or Italian, who play strange card games and laugh and curse at each other. There used to be a charming notice on the wall, which I cannot re- member accurately. ANYONE CAUGHT GAMBLING OR PLAYING FOR MONEY Will be kicked into the gutter and not picked up again. PROPRIETOR. It ran something like that, but it has now been replaced by a less suggestive placard. Also there used to be another room down- stairs, a gay companionable place, where I have played a penny whistle and seen some dancing to my music. Here we used to come after sup- per, to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and argue according to custom. Here would young COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 127 Frenchmen bring their ladies, and talk freely in their own tongue. Here would we, too, bring our young women. It used to amuse me to notice the sudden hush that fell on the talk of all the couples and argumentative people when the grim Police Inspector and his important body- guard stumped heavily down the stairs, stood solemnly for a moment in the middle of the room, and then went slowly up the stairs again —and the flood of excited chatter in several lan- guages that followed their disappearance. It is impossible to leave the Algerian without remembering the wonderful big dog who used to be a visitor in the room below. He was a very large ruddy collie. Left to himself he was an easy-going fellow who would accept the hos- pitality of anybody who had anything to spare; but his master had only to say one word, and he would not dip his nose in the daintiest, pret- tiest dish of coffee in the world. He was a gentleman of nice manners; if his master di- rected his attention to any lady who happened to be there, and whispered in his silky ear, " Tou- jours la politesse," immediately, with the gravity of an Ambassador, he would walk across and lift a ceremonial paw. It is sad that the room is now filled with lumber that was once so gay with humanity. But perhaps it will be opened again. Close round the corner opposite the Algerian 128 BOHEMIA IN LONDON is a pretty white cafe, with a big window of a thousand little leaded panes, through which it is impossible to see. The whole suggestion of the outside is comfort and secluded luxury. And indeed so it is ; you go there when you are a success; or, not being one of the famous or opulent, when, having just sold a book or a pic- ture, you feel as if you were. Its air is very different from the friendly untidiness of the other two places. White cloths are on the tables, a little cut-glass is scattered about, and there are red and white flowers in silver vases — it is all so neat that I would not describe it, if it were not a favourite place of the more fortunate of the Bohemians, and if it had not been so sweet a suggestion of what might sometime be. I came here in the pride of my first twenty- guinea cheque, and was introduced with due ceremony to Jeanne downstairs — pretty little Jeanne, who says most mournfully that someone has told her from the lines of her hand that she will not be married till she is two-and-thirty — eleven whole years to wait. My companion was a literary agent, who showed me three successes, two novelists and a critic, out of the half-dozen people who were sitting at the other tables. I almost wished he had not brought me, until Jeanne came back with black coffee in tall straight glasses, and some excellent cigarettes, when I changed my mind, and thought how I COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 129 often I would come here, if the world should turn good critic, and recognise in solid wealth the merit of my masterpieces. Across Shaftesbury Avenue, past the stage doors of Daly's and the Hippodrome, through the narrow asphalt passage that is often crowded with ballet girls and supers, walking up and down before the times of their performances at one or other theatre, you find your way into the brilliance of Leicester Square. The Alhambra and the Empire fill two sides of it with light, and Shakespeare stands on a pedestal between them, resting his chin on his hand in melancholy amazement. Downstairs at the corner of the Square there is the drinking-hall of the Provence, a long L-shaped room, with a band playing in a corner, and smaller rooms opening out of the first, and seeming a very multitude of little caverns from the repetition of the mirrors with which they are lined. There are frescoes on the walls of the larger room, of gnomes swilling beer, and tumbling headfirst into vats, and waving defi- ance at the world with all the bravado of a mug of ale. Fat, pot-bellied littl& brutes they are, and so cheerfully conceived that you would almost swear their artist had been a merry fellow, and kept a tankard on the steps of his ladder where he sat to paint them. There is always a strange crowd at this place I30 BOHEMIA IN LONDON — dancers and singers from the music-halls, sad women pretending to be merry, coarse women pretending to be refined, and men of all types grimacing and clinking glasses with the women. And then there are the small groups indifferent to everything but the jollity and swing of the place, thumping their beer mugs on the table over some mighty point of philosophy or criti- cism, and ready to crack each others' heads for joy in the arguments of Socialism or Universal Peace. I was seated at a table here one night, ad- miring the picture in which a gnome pours some hot liquid on another gnome who lies shrieking in a vat, when I noticed a party of four men sitting at a table opposite. Three were obviously hangers-on of one or other of the arts, the sort of men who are proud of knowing an actor or two to speak to, and are ready to talk with importance of their editorial duties on the Draper's Compendium or the Toyshop Times. The fourth was different. A huge felt hat banged freely down over a wealth of thick black hair, bright blue eyes, an enormous black beard, a magnificent manner (now and again he would rise and bow profoundly, with his hat upon his heart, to some girls on the other side of the room), a way of throwing his head back when he drank, of thrusting it forward when he spoke, an air of complete abandon to the moment and ft COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 13 the moment's thought; he took me tremendously. He seemed to be delighting his friends with im- promptu poetry. I did a mean but justifiable thing, and carried my pot of beer to a table just beside him, where I could see him better, and also hear his conversation. It was twaddle but such downright, spirited, splendid twaddle, flung out from the heart of him in a grand, care- less way that made me think of largesse royally scattered on a mob. His blue, twinkling eyes decided me. When, a minute or two later, he went out, I followed, and found him vociferat- ing to his gang upon the pavement. I pushed in, so as to exclude them, and asked him: "Are you prose or verse?" " I write verse, but I dabble in the other thing " It was the answer I had expected. "Very good. Will you come to my place to- morrow night at eight? Tobacco. Beer. Talk. " I love beer. I adore tobacco. Talking is my life. I will come." " Here is my card. Eight o'clock to-morrow. Good-night." And so I left him. He came, and it turned out that he worked in a bank from ten to four every day, and played the wild Bohemian every night. His beard was a disguise. He spent his evenings seeking for adventure, he said, and apologised to me for earning an honest living. He was really delight- ful. So are our friendships made; there is no 132 BOHEMIA IN LONDON difficulty about them, no diffidence; you try a man as you would a brand of tobacco; if you agree, then you are friends ; if not, why then you are but two blind cockchafers who have collided with each other in a summer night, and boom away again each in his own direction. Over the road there is the Cafe de TEurope where, also downstairs, there is an even larger drinking-hall. Huge bizarre pillars support a decorated ceiling, and beneath them there are a hundred tables, with variegated maroon-col- oured cloths, stained with the drippings of tank- ards and wine-glasses. There is a band here, too, in a balcony halfway up the stairs. This place, like all the other cafes, is not exclusively Bohe- mian ; we are only there on sufferance, in isolated parties, and it is a curious contrast to look away to the clerks, demimondaines, and men-about- town, sitting at the other tables ; faces that have left their illusions with their youth, faces with protruding lips and receding chins, weak, fool- ish faces with watery eyes, office boys trying to be men, and worn-out men trying to be boys, and women ridiculously dressed and painted. We used to go there most when we were new to journalism, and we found it a great place for planning new periodicals. Eight or nine of us used to meet there, and map out a paper that was to startle the town, and incidentally give us all the opportunities that the present race of mis- COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 133 guided editors denied. We would select our politics, choose our leader-writers, and decide to save quarrels by sharing the dramatic criticism between us all. We would fight lustily over the title, and have a wrangle over the form. Some would wish to ape the Saturday Review, some would desire a smaller, more convenient shape for putting in the pocket, and others, commer- cially minded, would suggest a gigantic size that might make a good show on the bookstalls. We would stand lagers again and again, proud in the knowledge of our new appointments, leader- writers, editors, dramatic critics every one of us. And then, at last, after a whole evening of beer and extravagance, and happy pencilled cal- culations of our immediate incomes, based on a supposed sale of 100,000 copies weekly (we were sure of that at least), we would come sud- denly to fact. The Scotch poet, whom we usually elected business manager on these occa- sions, would smile grimly, and say, " Now, gen- tlemen, the matter of finance. There will be printers and papermakers to pay. Personally, and speaking for myself alone, I will give all that I possess." "And how much is that?" we would cry, al- though we guessed. " Well " — and he would make great show of rummaging his pockets — " it seems that I was cleaned right out of bullion by that last lot of 134 BOHEMIA IN LONDON beer. O'Rourke, it's your turn to stand. Waiter — ^waiter, this gentlemen wants another round of lagers." This was the invariable end, and at closing time, having swung from the glory of news- paper proprietorship to the sordid penury of sharing our coppers in order to pay all 'bus fares home, we would walk along Cranbourn Street to Piccadilly Circus, and separate for the night. THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA WHERE the Charing Cross Road swirls up by the Hippodrome in a broad curve to Cambridge Cir- cus and Oxford Street, it drops, for the short space of a few hundred yards, all shout and merriment and boisterous! efflorescence of business, and becomes as sedate and proper an old street as ever exposed books on open stalls to the public fingers. The motor-'buses may rat- tle up the middle of the road on their rollicking dance to Hampstead, the horse-pulled 'buses may swing and roll more slowly and nearer the gutter; no matter, for the pavements are quiet with learning and book-loving. All through the long summer afternoons, and in the winter, when the lamps hang over the shelves, books old, new, second and third hand, lie there in rows, waiting, these the stout old fellows, for Elias to carry them off under their arms; waiting, these the lit- tle ones, for other true book-lovers to pop them in their pockets. The little brown Oxford clas- sics, the baby Virgil, the diminutive volumes of Horace and Catullus seem really to peak and shrivel on the shelves, suffocated in the open 137 138 BOHEMIA IN LONDON air, and longing, like townsmen for the town, for a snug, square resting-place against the lin- ing of a smoking coat. All about them are in- numerable bound magazines, novels of Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray, novels of later times marked at half price, old sermons from sold vic- arage libraries, old school grammars, and here and there the forgotten immortals of the 'nineties, essays published by Mr. John Lane, and poets with fantastic frontispieces. Against the window panes, behind the books, hang prints, Aubrey Beardsleys now, and designs by Housman and Nicholson, where once would Rowlandsons have hung, Bartolozzis, or perhaps an engraved portrait of Johnson or Goldsmith, done by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or perhaps again a selection of Amazing Beauties from the " Garland " or the " Keepsake " or the " Offering." Summer and winter, book-buyers range up and down the street; book-buyers who mean to buy, book-buyers who would buy if they could, and book-buyers who have bought, and are now tormenting themselves by looking for bargains that they might have made, choicer than those they have already clinched. There is a rare joy in picking books from the stalls without the in- terference of any commercial fingers; a great content in turning over the pages of a book, a Cervantes perhaps, or a Boccaccio, or one of the eighteenth-century humourists, catching sight THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 139 here and there of a remembered smile, and chuckling anew at the remembrance, putting the book down again, rather hurriedly, as if to de- cide once for all that you must not buy it, and then picking up another and repeating the per- formance. And then, the poignant, painful self- abandon when at last you are conquered, and a book leads you by the hand to the passionless little man inside the shop, and makes you pay him money, the symbol, mean, base, sordid in itself, but still the symbol, that the book has won, and swayed the pendulum of your emotions past the paying point. I remember the buying of my " Anatomy of Melancholy" (that 1 have never read, nor ever mean to — I dare not risk the sweetness of the title) ; two big, beautiful volumes, with a paper label on the back of each, they stood imperious on the shelves. I had seven-and-sixpence in the world, and was on my way up to Soho for din- ner. I took one volume down, and turned the thick old leaves, and ran my eye over the black print, broken and patterned by quotations in italics, Latin quotations everywhere making the book a mosaic in two languages. To sit and smoke in front of such a book would be elysium. I could, of course, have got a copy at a library — but then I did not want to read it. I wanted to own it, to sit in front of it with a devotional mind, to let my tobacco smoke be its incense, to I40 BOHEMIA IN LONDON worship its magnificent name; and here it was in such a dress as kings and hierarchs among books should wear. If I were ever to have a Burton, this Burton would I have. I remember I laid the book down, and stoically lit a pipe, before daring to look at the flyleaf for the pen- cilled price. Just then another man, one with the air of riches, walked casually up to the stall, and, fearful for my prize and yet timorous of its cost, I seized it and turned with trembling fingers back to the beginning : " Two vols. S/-:' Turning my purse inside out, I went in, with the two volumes and the three half-crowns, to come to some agreement with the bookseller. He let me have the books, but dinner vanished for that night, as the meats from the table of Halfdan the Black, and I had to walk to Chel- sea. But what a joyous walk that was in the early autumn evening! Those two heavy vol- umes, one under each arm, swung me up the hill from Piccadilly as if they had been magic wings. The feel of them on my sides sent my heart beat- ing and my face unto smiles. One of the volumes was uncut — UNCUT. My landlord met me at the door with my bill. ^' The Devil!" my heart said; " I will attend to it," uttered my lips; and upstairs, penniless, by the light of a candle, that is, after all, as Elia has it, " a kindlier luminary A BOOKSHOP THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 141 than sun or moon," I spent three hours cutting that volume, leaf by leaf, happier than can well be told. There is something more real about this style of buying books than about the dull mercenary method of a new emporium. It is good, granted, to look about the shelves of a new bookshop, to see your successful friends and the authors you admire outglittering each other in smart, gold- lettered, brilliant-coloured bindings; to pick up pretty little editions of your favourite books — • what pretty ones there are nowadays, but how sad it is to see a staid old folio author compelled to trip it in a duodecimo ; all that is pleasant enough, but to spend money there is a sham and a fraud; it is like buying groceries instead of buying dreams. And then, too, the people who buy in the ordinary shops are so disheartening. There is no spirit about them, no enthusiasm. You can- not sympathise with them over a disappointment nor smile your congratulations over a prize — they need neither. They are buying books for other people, not to read themselves. The books they buy are doomed, Christmas or birthday presents, to lie about on drawing-room tables. I am sorry for those people, but I am sorrier for the books. For a book is of its essence a talkative, companionable thing, or a meditative and wise; and think of the shackling monotony of life on 142 BOHEMIA IN LONDON a drawing-room table, unable to be garrulous, being uncut, and unable to be contemplative in the din of all that cackle. The others, who deal at the second-hand shops, come there of a more laudable purpose, to buy books for themselves — or to sell them, if their libraries have become insufferably fuller than their purses. This last case is at once sor- rowful and happy: sad for the heart pangs of playing the traitor to a book by handing it back to a bookseller, happy in that other people, per- haps you, perhaps I, have then a chance of buy- ing it. It is an odd thing, by the way, that sumptuous volumes are always easiest to part with; a ragged, worn old thing, especially if it is small, tugs at our feelings, so that we cannot let it go, whereas a school prize or an elegant present — away with it. They say that little women are the longest loved. It is difficult for us to sympathise with Lord Tyrconnel, when in withdrawing his patronage from Richard Sav- age he alleged that, " having given him a col- lection of valuable books stamped with my own arms, I had the mortification to see them in a short time exposed to sale upon the stalls, it be- ing usual with Mr. Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take his books to the pawnbroker." How many presentation copies, in large paper and vellum, have not gone in a like manner? Though nowadays we deal direct with the book- THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 143 seller, and do not soothe our con- sciences with the pre- tence of intended re- demption that is pos- sible when a pawn- broker receives the books. This leads me conveniently to an- other subject. Many young authors find help towards a live- lihood by selling the copies of new works that come to them for praise and blame from the newspapers. I remember, when first my reviewing began, thinking it unfair to their writ- ers thus to place books they had sent for nothing to the papers at once upon the second-hand stalls. But presently as a Christmas season came on, and children's books and sensational novels poured in in their dozens and their twenties, the pile in the corner of my room grew beyond all bearing, for I would not insult the books that had been purchased in their own right by giving 144 BOHEMIA IN LONDON them these foundling newcomers as neighbours on the shelves. I was driven to reasoning again, and soon proved, with admirable comfortable logic, that an advertisement, or a piece of good advice, from so able a pen as my own must be worth more to an author than the chance sale of a copy on the stalls. I sent immediately for a bookseller, and from that time on he called each Monday to remove the mangled corpses of the week before. This practice, which is very generally adopted and makes a pleasant little addition to many meagre incomes, is the explanation of the quantities of glowing new novels and other books (some of them, to the discredit of the reviewing profession, uncut) that can be seen marked down to half or a third the published price in almost any bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It is a temptation to buy the books of your friends in this easy way. I have often hesitated over a Masefield, or a Thomas, and the works of half a score of little poets. But God deliver me from such baseness. These shops are not the stalls that delighted Lamb, and Gay before him. Those were far- ther east, some in Booksellers' Row, now cleared away by the improvements in the Strand, some in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, some close by St. Paul's, where in the alleys round about a few such shops may still be found. The City shops were those that Gay describes: THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 145 " Volumes on shelter'd stalls expanded lie, And various science lures the learned eye; The bending shelves w^ith pond'rous scholiasts groan, And deep divines to modern shops unknown: Here, like the bee, that on industrious wing Collects the various odours of the spring. Walkers at leisure learning's flowers may spoil. Nor watch the wasting of the midnight oil. May morals snatch from Plutarch's tattered page, A mildew'd Bacon or Stagira's sage. Here saunt'ring 'prentices o'er Otway weep. O'er Congreve smile, or over D * * sleep.'* Gay, walking "with sweet content on foot, wrapt in his virtue and a good surtout," the first covering, perhaps, being scanty enough, loved this impecunious public so much better than his own more opulent patrons that he prayed to his publisher, Bernard Lintot, " a great sput- tering fellow," who must have been vastly an- noyed at his author's unbusinesslike fancies: " O Lintot, let my labours obvious lie. Ranged on thy stall, for every curious eye; So shall the poor these precepts gratis know. And to my verse their future safeties owe." Lamb loved them, too. "There is a class of street readers," he says, "whom I can never contemplate without affection — the poor gentry, who, not having the wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stall —the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious 146 BOHEMIA IN LONDON looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they * snatch a fearful joyi' " Some of the older-fashioned stalls remain, but they are solitary. They do not sing together like the morning stars. They are isolated her- mits, often in strange surroundings. In the open markets held in the shabbier streets, where flar- ing naphtha lights swing over barrows like those set up once a week in the squares of little country towns, I have often stood in the jostling crowd of marketers, to turn over old, greasy, tattered covers. There is an aloofness about the bookstall even there, where it stands in line with a load of brussels sprouts and cabbages on one side, and a man selling mussels and whelks on the other. The bookstall, even in its untidiness, has always the air of the gentleman of the three, come down in the world, perhaps, but still one of a great family. I have sometimes been tempted to alopogise to the bookseller for tak- ing a penn'orth of cockles and vinegar while looking at his books. It seemed etiquette not to perceive that grosser, less intellectual stalls existed. There are similar book barrows in the market streets of the East End, and some in Earring- THE BOOKSHOPS OF BOHEMIA 147 don Street, where I have heard of bargains picked up for a song. But I have never visited them. There are good second-hand shops up the Edgeware Road, and I got Thorpe's " Northern Mythology " for threepence in Praed Street. But my favourite of all the iso- lated shops is a queer little place at the dip of Bedford Street, where it drops into the Strand. It has but a lean row of books ranged on a nar- row table in front of the window, but its prints are superb. There are maps sometimes, and often old hand-coloured caricatures, figures with balloons full of jokes blowing from their mouths, hanging behind the glass or fluttering in the doorway. And, though the books are so few, I seldom pass the shop without seeing office boys from the Bedford Street or Henrietta Street oflEices skimming through them, now look- ing at one, now at another, until their tardy consciences hurry them at last upon their mas- ters' errands. Still, if we except Paternoster Row, mainly occupied by publishers, the Charing Cross Road is the only street whose character is wholly book- ish. By these shops alone are there always a crowd of true bookmen. There are the clerks who bolt their lunches to be able to spend half an hour in glancing over books. There are reviewers selling newspaper copies. There are book-collectors watching for the one chance in 148 BOHEMIA IN LONDON ten thousand that brings a prize into the four- penny box. There are book-lovers looking for the more frequent chance that brings them a good book at a little price, or lets them read it without buying it. I have met old ladies there, with spectacles, and little bonnets with purple ribbons, eating buns before going back to the Museum to read, scanning over the bookshelves, like birds peck- ing for crumbs over the cobbles. And some- times I have met really old ladies, like Mrs. , who told me she had sat on Leigh Hunt's knee, and put strawberries into his mouth; old ladies who remember the old days, and the old bookshops, and come now to the Charing Cross Road for old sake's sake, just as a man reads over again a book that he read in his childhood for that reason alone. There was an old gen- tleman, too, whom I loved to see striding across the street from shop to shop, dodging the 'buses as he crossed, with a long grey beard that di- vided at his chin and blew over his shoulders, and a huge coat, all brown fur without, that flapped about his legs. There was another, too, with a white forehead and an absent eye, and thin black clothes with pockets bagged out by carrying libraries. I caught him once looking at a book upside down, deep in some dream or other: he came to himself suddenly, and saw that he had been observed — I loved him for D •< O fi<