Part 26 (1/2)
of Regent's Park; and, certainly, after a close experience of the ”human animal,” the rest of the mammalia, unoffending, harmless, and discreetly caged, often occur as quite a pleasant contrast. (I wonder that the simile did not occur to Lord Beaconsfield himself; it is certainly in his line.) Thackeray also, who enjoyed the Zoo greatly, saw, as befitted a great novelist, the human side of it: ”If I have cares on my mind,” he wrote, ”I come to the Zoo, and fancy they don't pa.s.s the gate; I recognise my friends, my enemies, in countless cages.” Yes, the Zoo is an unfailing pleasure; I can conscientiously recommend it, with one word of caution: Do not choose a very hot day for the excursion: be careful to go a little to windward of the feline race, and eschew the monkey house as much as possible. Poor Sally the chimpanzee is dead, alas! of consumption, and none of her successors, surely, can make up for the very unendurable temperature that has ever to be maintained round them. Monkeys are sad victims to pulmonary disease; every London fog kills, it is said, a few of them. The reptile house is, however, cool and pleasant; and the ponds for aquatic birds are very charming resorts. Altogether, if the great carnivora and the great crowds be shunned, the Zoological Garden becomes distinctly pleasant; its walks, moreover, have all the unexpectedness of ”Alice's”
peregrinations in the ”Live-Flower-Garden,” where, continually, round some bowery corner, she came face to face with strange and uncanny-looking beasts. Just so, in the Zoological Gardens, you may suddenly chance upon an amiable, blinking Owl, or a casual Parrot, or a wondering Pelican, peering at you round some bush in the shrubbed pathway. Yet another caution: Do not be tempted, under any circ.u.mstances, to ride the Elephant. Its saddle has a knife-board seat adapted only to juveniles; those of the Society's servants who a.s.sist you to mount the beast are uncomfortably facetious; and when you are at last safely on top, you feel positively vindictive towards the small children who, down in the depths below you, trifle with your life by offering your elephant a bun.
The Botanical Gardens, enclosed by the ring drive called ”The Inner Circle,” are, perhaps, best known to Londoners by their three big flower-shows, held in May and June; important functions which are thronged by all the world of rank and fas.h.i.+on.
But, delightful as are these open s.p.a.ces and public gardens, there is, perhaps, a homelier charm in one's very own London garden,--one's own private _rus in urbe_. I myself never pa.s.s through any part of suburban or semi-suburban London by railway, without looking at all the back-gardens of the small houses. Oliver Wendell Holmes says that a man's belongings and house are an index of his character; but, surely, his garden, or even his yard, is more so. The nature, for instance, that can willingly content itself with a clothes-line and six mouldy cabbage-stalks, while the neighbouring London yards flaunt the golden sunflower, or the graceful foxglove,--reflects, surely, its own shallowness. And if in central London the poor have no small yard even, is there not always a window sill, where from some biscuit tin (in North-Italian fas.h.i.+on,) or from some painted wooden crate, flowers may spring, and rejoice the heart of many a poor wanderer, dreaming, like Wordsworth's Susan, of country meadows and streams? Even the sins of a fried-fish shop may be redeemed by yellow trails of ”creeping jenny” from a box above it; even the powerful aroma of ”sheeps'
trotters” may be almost forgotten in the enjoyment of a stray plant of musk, treasured in some poor man's window-corner. It may be only ”a weakly monthly rose that don't grow, or a tea-plant with five black leaves and one green,” yet it reflects pleasantly, none the less, the owner's saving grace of taste. To some, this kind of humble garden has a charm all its own. ”My gardens,” said Gray the poet proudly, ”are in the windows like those of a lodger up three pair of stairs in Petticoat Lane, or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under the same roof that I do.” There is, I believe, a society for the cultivation of ”window-gardening” among the poor, a society that gives prizes to the best results; the movement is a good one, and really deserves encouragement. To beautify the dull and often ugly lives of the London poor,--what society could have a much worthier aim? How many a hideous slum--some ”Rosemary Lane,” or ”Hawthorn Lane,”--has been redeemed from utter gloom by some sprig of greenery, some frond of sickly fern, some crippled and stunted plant brought there, at some time, by some good angel of the poor?
As to the occasional gardens of the larger houses, these, when they do exist, have, to the faithful Londoner, a beauty all their own; shut in and hidden, they have something of the quiet of old cathedral closes, as well as the charm of unexpectedness. And then--last, best of all! they hang out their ”pavilions of tender green” without giving any trouble in that ”spring cleaning,” so trying to London housewives.
Of course, however, London gardens do not thrive without affection and interest. If neglected, they die; if tended, they repay your care with a grat.i.tude almost human. Too often the making of gardens in London is on this wise:--First, the workman, or gardener, levies an a.s.sortment of old sardine tins, kettles and other household rubbish; next, he arranges a good solid layer of brickbats; then he levels the ”parterre” with a few old sacks and coats; then, finally, he fills up the c.h.i.n.ks with a little dank, sour, half-starved London soil--”dirt”
is indeed the only name for it!--adding a thin layer of it over the whole. Then the garden is considered ”finished,” and ready for the credulous to sow their seeds. Such a London garden--a catwalk rather than a thing of beauty--is perhaps only redeemed from utter dreariness by an occasional plane-tree.
Plane-trees, which thrive in London because of their tidy habit of shedding their sooty bark yearly, are luxuriant all over the metropolis, but especially so in Bloomsbury. Here also lived Amy Levy, most pathetic of London poets, and here she watched and loved her tree.
”Green is the plane-tree in the square, The other trees are brown; They droop and pine for country air; The plane-tree loves the town.
”Here, from my garret-pane, I mark The plane-tree bud and blow, Shed her recuperative bark, And spread her shade below.
”Among her branches, in and out, The city breezes play; The dun fog wraps her round about; Above, the smoke curls grey.
”Others the country take for choice, And hold the town in scorn; But she has listened to the voice Of city breezes borne.”
The purple _clematis jackmanii_, which flowers so well in the Regent's Park terraces and in Kensington, flowers also yearly on a certain sunny balcony in Tavistock Square; the iris hangs out its brilliant flags every summer in St. Pancras Churchyard--close under those smoke-begrimed Caryatids whose sad eyes gaze ever, not on to the Peiraeus and to the Aegean Sea, but towards the dreary and everlastingly murky Euston Road.
Even gra.s.s will grow in shut-in, walled Bloomsbury gardens; it may, indeed, sometimes require treating as an ”annual”; but what of that?
If the difficulties of the London garden are great, why, so are its joys.
Cats are, of course, the primal difficulty. We know how lately the ”Carlyle House” in Chelsea was cursed with them; it is said, also, that a certain eccentric lady once lived with a family of some eighty-six cats, in a house in Southampton Row. The descendants of these cats must, one thinks, still haunt the neighbourhood, to judge from the number that prowl in it. Cats, in London, often become wild animals, and lose all their domestic charm. ”Cats,” as the little Board School essayist navely wrote: ”has nine liveses, which is seldom required in this country 'cos of yumanity.” The ”yumanity” in question seems, however, to be rather at a discount in London. For cats' owners have a distracting habit of going away for the summer and leaving the poor beasts, so to speak, ”on the parish.” Five such cats, starving and sick, have I, to my own knowledge, gently released from a cruel world at a neighbouring chemist's. A little boy--one ”of the streets streety,” once held poor p.u.s.s.y while the quietus--of prussic acid--was administered: ”Won't I jest?” he said with glee when asked to officiate. ”Won'erful stuff, that 'ere, Miss!” he remarked at the close of the sad ceremony; adding, admiringly, ”w'y, that ket did'nt mow once!” ”What are you going to do with her?” I inquired of the youth, who now carried the corpse dangling by one leg. ”Throw 'er over the fust garding wall I come to,” he replied, grinning. Thus, I reflected, the poor London garden is still the victim!
A dead cat may be an awkward visitor, but the surviving cats are the bane of London gardens. Their courts.h.i.+ps--on the garden-wall--are long and musical, causing even the merciful to yearn for a syringe at all costs. The sparrows are a far lesser evil. They, indeed, eat the garden seeds; nothing on earth is sacred to a London sparrow or robin.
It is impossible, by any system, however well-devised, to outwit them.
They are afraid of nothing. Set up an elaborate scarecrow in the garden; for the s.p.a.ce, perhaps, of one hour it will puzzle them; but in a day or two they will hop and twitter familiarly about it, even to the extent of pecking bits of thread from it for their impertinent nests. Get a toy cat and place it on the flower-bed; in twenty-four hours they will have discovered that the thing is a hollow sham, and will sit comfortably in the warmth of its artificial fur. But one forgives them; for the birds, after all, are the chief joy of London gardens. Their twitter is sweet on spring mornings; in winter, the robins and sparrows may be tamed by feeding, almost to the extent of coming into the house itself for crumbs; and, in the summer, if you set them a shallow bath every day for their disporting, they will rejoice your heart by their watery antics. Robins and sparrows are alike charming; the robins are the stronger; a single robin, pecking about on the garden step for his breakfast, will scatter a host of sparrows; but it is the sparrows, after all, that form the real bird population of London. Though they appreciate a quiet back garden, they seem also to delight in the noise, traffic, and bustle of the streets.
Their cleverness, and their strength too, surpa.s.s belief; they even seem to have aesthetic tastes (did I not see, last month, a sparrow decorate its nest with an overhanging sprig of laburnum, or ”golden chain?”); and they are, besides, as irrepressible as the London street arabs, with whom they have much in common; for they are the ”gamins”
of the bird world. For their parental instinct, on the other hand, there is, in London at least, not much to be said; their way of dealing with their recalcitrant offspring would seem to be a trifle overbearing, for in early spring small, half-fledged corpses are often to be found, dropped unkindly from nests into back-gardens. But, perhaps, as the small boy said of King Solomon, ”havin' so many, they can afford to be wasteful of 'em.” There are, indeed, many. On the statue of Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, in Russell Square,--a figure, rising erect, in the curious taste of the time, from a nest of cupids and clouds,--sparrows have built many nests. The c.h.i.n.ks in the giant's robe are black, in spring, with their tiny heads; the curly hair of the cupids is fluffed with their downy feathers.
I have elsewhere touched on the great picturesqueness of London views--a picturesqueness always more or less coloured and influenced by romance and by history: the past and the present, the natural and the artificial--all blended into one glory:--
”glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, ... the glory of going on, and still to be.”
Especially beautiful are the effects of light that are obtainable on early summer mornings, or on lurid, stormy, autumn evenings--evenings when the sun sinks with such splendour of attendant fires as is rarely seen away from the great city. The vivid effects are largely increased by the smoky atmosphere. What more mysteriously fine, for instance, than the view of St. Paul's, looking up Ludgate Hill, with, in the foreground, the railway bridge, emitting smoke, raised high above the narrow street: and the black, thin spirelet of St. Martin's, as the attendant ”aiguille” leading the eye up to the colossal dome of grey St. Paul's?--
”Here, like a bishop, upon dainties fed, St. Paul lifts up his sacerdotal head; While his lean curates, slim and lank to view, Around them point their steeples to the blue.”
Or what, on a fine morning of summer, can be more inspiring than the white and silver harmonies of Cheapside, dominated by the pale tower of St. Mary-le-Bow? Or the sublimity of the Houses of Parliament, that embattled ma.s.s with its tall tower, backed by stormy, gold-edged threatening clouds, through which the sunlight breaks? ”Sky and cloud and smoke and buildings are all mingled as if they belonged to each other, and man's work stretching heavenward is touched with the sublimity of nature.” Or Trafalgar Square, as I saw it lately, on a winter twilight; its tall pillars grey-black against a lurid sky, its fountain alchymised to a molten ma.s.s of pearl-white, its geysers to sparkling brilliants, a ”nocturne” of silver and gold? Or the Turneresque brilliance of light and splendour on the river--that river to which London owes all her prosperity and all her fame--that river of which already, with true feeling and eighteenth-century artificiality, Alexander Pope wrote:--
”her figured streams in waves of silver rolled, And on her banks Augusta rose in gold.”
But of all the views of London, perhaps none is so fine, and certainly none is so comprehensive, as that which may be obtained, under favourable conditions, from Primrose Hill--that ”little molehill,” as it has been called, ”in the great wen's northern flank.” It is a splendid and inspiring panorama. Few people know of it; yet it is a sight not to be forgotten. Go thither on a clear spring or summer evening, three-quarters of an hour before sunset, and you will be richly repaid. What a view! Grime and dinginess are as they were not; the smoky atmosphere is transformed, as if by magic, to a golden, transparent haze--mellowing, brightening, idealising. ”Who,” as a recent writer says, ”would have imagined that this grimy, smoky wilderness of houses, with its factories and its slums, ... could ever look like the fair and beautiful city of some ethereal vision, embosomed in trees and full of glorious stately monuments? It is even so. Regent's Park lies below, a frame of restful greenery. To the left rises Camden Town--prosaic neighbourhood!--up a gentle slope. In the evening sunlight it is transfigured into a ma.s.s of brightness and colour, rising in clear-cut terraces, like some fair city on an Italian hill-top. St. Pancras Station is a thing of beauty, with a Gothic spire, and lines like those of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Hard by rises the dome of the Reading-Room of the British Museum, embowered in trees--a stately witness to the learning of a continent. St. Paul's soars up grandly above its sister spires, in misty purple--dominating feature of the city--as St. Peter's in Rome.