Part 2 (1/2)
”The Eternal Saki from the Bowl hath poured Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour----”
while this senseless block of stone lives for ever, regardless of the tides of humanity that ebb and flow ceaselessly about its feet. Has it not been a ”silent witness” of the pageants of the magnificent Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty? Its hieroglyphics record its erection by Thotmes III., before the Temple of the Sun in _On_ (Heliopolis), where it remained for the first 1600 years of its existence, and (says Mr. Hare) witnessed the slavery and imprisonment of the patriarch Joseph. The obelisk has had a strange and eventful history. Removed to Alexandria shortly before the Christian era, it was never erected there, but lay for years p.r.o.ne in the sand. Then, in 1820, Mahomet Ali presented it to the British nation; with, however, no immediate result. For, the difficulties of removal being great, no advantage was taken of the offer, till, in 1877, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Erasmus Wilson gave the necessary funds, amounting to 10,000. A special cylinder boat was made for the obelisk, but even with its removal its adventures were not ended, for, in the Bay of Biscay, the vessel encountered a terrific storm, and the crew of the s.h.i.+p that towed it, in peril of their lives, cut it adrift. For days it was lost, till a pa.s.sing steamer happened to sight the strange-looking object and picked it up, earning salvage on it.
The granite is said to be slowly disintegrating and the hieroglyphics therefore becoming less deeply scored, by the action of the London smoke and mist--the mist glorified poetically by Mr. Andrew Lang in his ”Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle”;
”Ye giant shades of Ra and Tum, Ye ghosts of G.o.ds Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument in London mist!
”Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb, That once were read of him that ran When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum, Wild music of the Bull began; When through the chanting priestly clan Walk'd Ramses, and the high sun kiss'd This stone, with blessing scored and ban-- This monument in London mist.
”The stone endures though G.o.ds be numb; Though human effort, plot, and plan Be sifted, drifted, like the sum Of sands in wastes Arabian.
What king may deem him more than man, What priest says Faith can Time resist While _this_ endures to mark their span-- This monument in London mist?”--
It has been objected that Cleopatra's needle ought to have been placed somewhere else; for instance, in the centre of the Tilt Yard, opposite the Horse Guards. But it is, as I said, typical of Londoners to find fault with their monuments; and it is difficult to agree with the writer who described it as in its present position ”adorning nothing, emphasising nothing, and by nothing emphasised.” M. Gabriel Mourey, for instance, who, though a Frenchman, is also a lover of London, brings it very charmingly into his ”impression” of the scene from Charing-Cross Bridge:
”I go every morning to Charing-Cross Bridge, to gaze on the 'magical effects' produced by fog and mist on the Thames.
The buildings on the sh.o.r.es have vanished; there, where recently seethed an enormous conglomeration of roofs, chimneys, the perpetual encroachment of interminable facades, all that insentient life of stones,--heaped to lodge human toil, suffering, happiness,--seems to be now only a desert of far-reaching waters. The river has immeasurably widened, has extended its sh.o.r.es to the infinite. Such immensity is terrible ... the atmosphere is heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight that presses down, penetrates into ears and mouth, seems even to hang about the hair. We might, indeed, be existing in a kind of nothingness, except for the perpetual pa.s.sage of trains--trains that shake the floor of the bridge, and jar our whole being with metallic vibrations.... The wooden sheds of the landing-stage, backed by the stone steps and parapet,--with, further on, the thin spire of Cleopatra's Needle, an unimagined network of lines,--appear suddenly out of nothingness; it might be a fairy city rising all at once; here are revealed the gigantic buildings of the Savoy Hotel, and yonder, farther on, those of Somerset House, as the fog gradually lifts; the whole effect is suggestive of a negative under the chemical action of the developer. There is, however, no distinctness; the negative is a fogged one; outlines are only distinguished with difficulty; and everything, in this strange and sad monochrome, seems to acquire a vast and altogether fantastic size. The sky, however, moves; thick, ragged clouds unravel themselves, in colour a dirty yellow fringed with white; they might well be great folds of torn curtains entangled in each other, curtains of dingy wadding, thickly lined, and edged with faint gold. But the light is too feeble to reflect itself, and the water below continues to flow dully, as though weighed down with the burden of that heavy sky; the pleasure-steamers, indeed, seem to cleave it with painful toil, to force a pathway, soon again closed; a pathway of which scarcely a trace remains, only a slow, sluggish undulation, soon lost in the general distracting cohesion of all and everything.”
It may be interesting here to recall Lord Tennyson's sonnet, and the story told of it by his son:
”When Cleopatra's Needle was brought to London, Stanley asked my father to make some lines upon it; to be engraven on the base. These were put together by my father at once, and I made a note of them:
_Cleopatra's Needle._
”Here, I that stood in On beside the flow Of sacred Nile, three thousand years ago!-- A Pharaoh, kingliest of his kingly race, First shaped, and carved, and set me in my place.
A Caesar of a punier dynasty Thence haled me toward the Mediterranean sea, Whence your own citizens, for their own renown, Thro' strange seas drew me to your monster town.
I have seen the four great empires disappear!
I was when London was not! I am here!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The ”Top” Season._]
Waterloo Bridge, crossing the Thames at Somerset House, was built by Rennie in 1817. Canova considered it ”the n.o.blest bridge in the world, and worth a visit from the remotest corners of the earth.” It was at first intended to call it the ”Strand” Bridge; but it was eventually named ”Waterloo,” in honour of the victory just won. Yet Waterloo Bridge is not without its dismal a.s.sociations. So many people, for instance, have committed suicide from it, that it has been called the ”English Bridge of Sighs.” It suggests Hood's ballad of the ”Unfortunate”:
”The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and s.h.i.+ver: But not the dark arch Or the black flowing river.”
Waterloo Bridge has indeed been the last resource of many an unhappy human moth--attracted by ”the cruel lights of London”--to whom
”When life hangs heavy, death remains the door To endless rest beside the Stygian sh.o.r.e.”
Dante Rossetti, who painted his terrible picture of the lost girl found by her old lover on a London bridge at dawning, has well realised the ineffable sadness of the wrecks made by this whirlpool of London.
The Victoria Embankment, and indirectly also this splendid Waterloo Bridge, have given cause for one of the most eloquent diatribes of our greatest aesthetic critic. Mr. Ruskin, though he cannot but admire the vast curve of Waterloo Bridge, where the Embankment road pa.s.ses under it, ”as vast, it alone, as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions,” yet finds, in the wretched attempts at decoration on the Embankment, and in the sad want of ”human imagination” of the English architect, windmills apt and ready to his lance. Unlike the Rialto, the ”Waterloo arch,” he remarks plaintively, ”is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite”:
”We have lately been busy,” he says, ”embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of n.o.ble adornment. For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and give l.u.s.tre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, toward the road, we put, for advertis.e.m.e.nt's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury: and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wits' end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or three millions of London street doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry-boxes.”
Much, however, may be forgiven to Mr. Ruskin. On the other hand, the view from Waterloo Bridge is thus described by the late Mr. Samuel Butler:
”When ... I think of Waterloo Bridge and the huge wide-opened jaws of those two Behemoths, the Cannon Street and Charing Cross railway stations, I am not sure that the prospect here is not even finer than in Fleet Street. See how they belch forth puffing trains as the breath of their nostrils, gorging and disgorging incessantly those human atoms whose movement is the life of the city. How like it all is to some great bodily mechanism.... And then ... the ineffable St. Paul's. I was once on Waterloo Bridge after a heavy thunderstorm in summer. A thick darkness was upon the river and the buildings upon the north side, but just below, I could see the water hurrying onward as in an abyss, dark, gloomy and mysterious. On a level with the eye there was an absolute blank, but above, the sky was clear, and out of the gloom the dome and towers of St. Paul's rose up sharply, looking higher than they actually were, and as though they rested upon s.p.a.ce.”
Mr. Astor's charming estate office, one of the prettiest buildings in London, facing the Embankment, close to the Temple Gardens, is yet another instance of that latter-day change from palace to office, already mentioned. At Blackfriars, the Victoria Embankment ends, and tall, many-storied warehouses crowd down to the water's edge, in picturesque though dingy medley, with, behind them, the blackened dome of St. Paul's, attended by its sentinel spires,--St. Paul's, that has nearly all the way stood out prominently in the distance, making this, by universal consent, the finest view in all London. The n.o.ble effect of Wren's great work is indeed, apparent from all points; but it is the river and the wharves that, no doubt, form its best and most fitting foreground. As we near London Bridge, the dirt of the vast highway gains upon us; but, it must be confessed, its general picturesqueness is thereby immeasurably increased. Dirt, after all, is always so near akin to picturesqueness. The mud-banks and the mud become more constant, the bustle and hum of the great city are everywhere evident. Barges are moored under the tall warehouses; workmen stand in the storing-places above, hauling up the goods from the boats with ropes and pulleys; it is a scene of ceaseless activity, an activity too, which increases as you descend the stream. On the one side, the slums and warehouses of Upper Thames Street; on the other, the yet slummier purlieus of busy, often-burned-down Tooley Street.
Thames Street, like its adjoining Billingsgate, is, I may remark, nearly always muddy, whatever the time of year. On rainy days, it is like a Slough of Despond. If by chance you wish to land at All Hallows or London Bridge Piers, you must first climb endless wooden and slippery steps, then wend your way carefully, past threatening cranes, and along narrow alleys between high houses, alleys blocked by heavy waggons, from which tremendous packages ascend, by rope, to top stories; alleys where there is barely room for a solitary pedestrian to wedge himself past the obstruction. Barrels of the delicious oyster, the obnoxious ”c.o.c.kle,” the humble ”winkle”; loud scents that suggest the immediate neighbourhood of the ubiquitous ”kipper”; these, mingled with the shouts of fish-wives and porters, greet you near that Temple of the Fisheries, Billingsgate. The enormous Monument, which stands close by, may be said to be in the dirtiest, dingiest portion of this dingy region. ”Fish Street Hill” the locality is called; and it certainly is no misnomer.