Part 17 (1/2)
CHELSEA
_A LONDON MOMENT_
_Often have I, in my desolate years, Flogged a jaded heart in loud saloons; Often have I fled myself with tears, Wandering under pallid, pa.s.sionate moons._
_Often have I slunk through pleasured rites, Lonely in the tumult of decay; Often marked the hectic London nights Flowing from the violet-lidded day._
_Yet, because of you, the world has been Kindlier. Oh, little heart-o'-rose, I have glimpsed a beauty seldom seen In this labyrinthine mist of woes._
_Beauty smiles at me from common things, All the way from Fleet Street to the Strand; Even in the song the barmaid sings I have found a fresh enchanted land._
_Pa.s.s me by, you little vagrant joy.
Brush me from your delicate mimic world.
Nothing of you now can e'er annoy, Since your beauty has my heart empearled._
_Pa.s.s me by; and only let me say: Glad I am for pain of loving you, Glad--for, in the tumult of decay, Life is n.o.bler than I ever knew._
AN ART NIGHT
CHELSEA
”The choicest bit of London!” That is William Dean Howells' impression of Chelsea. And, if you would perceive rightly the soul of Chelsea, you must view it through the pearl-grey haze of just such a temperament as that of the suave American novelist. If you have not that temperament, then Chelsea is not for you; try Hampstead or Streatham or Bayswater.
Of all suburbs it is the most subtle. It has more soul in one short street than you will find in the whole ma.s.s of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. There is something curiously feminine and intoxicating in the quality of its charm, something that evokes the silver-pensive mood.
One visions it as a graceful spinster--watered silks, ruffles, corkscrew curls, you know, with lily fingers caressing the keys of her harpsichord. Pa.s.s down Cheyne Walk at whatever time you will, and you are never alone; little companies of delicate fancy join you at every step. The gasworks may gloom at you from the far side. The L.C.C. cars may hum and clang. But fancy sweeps them away. It is like sitting amid the barbarities of a Hyde Park drawing-room, in the emerald dusk, listening to the pathetic wheezing of a musical-box, ridiculously sweet:--
Oh, don't you remember the days when we roamed, Sweet Phillis, by lane and by lea?
Whatever you want in Chelsea--that you will find, a.s.suming, of course, the possession of the Chelsea temperament. Whistler discovered her silvern beauty when he first saw her reclining by the river, beautifying that which beautifies her. All about Chelsea the colours seem to chime with their backgrounds as though they loved them; and when the lamps are lighted, flinging soft shadows on sixteenth and seventeenth-century gables and doorways and pa.s.sages, then she becomes a place of wonder, a Bagdad, a treasure-ground for the artist.
And the artists have discovered her. Chelsea has much to show.
Hampstead, Kensington, Mayfair--these be rich in gilt-trapping names, but no part of England can produce such a s.h.i.+ning array of names, whose greatness owes nothing to time, place, or social circ.u.mstance: the names of those whose greatness is of the soul, and who have shaken the world with the beauty they have revealed to us. But Art has now taken possession of her, and it is as the studio of the artist that Chelsea is known to-day. Step this way, if you please. We draw the curtain. _Vie de Boheme!_ But not, mark you, the _vie de Boheme_ of Murger. True, Rodolphe and Marcel are here, and Mimi and Musette. But the studio is not the squalid garret that we know. We have changed all that. Rodolphe writes light verse for the ”largest circulations.” Mimi draws fas.h.i.+on plates, and dresses like the d.u.c.h.ess of the novelettes. Marcel--well, Marcel of Chelsea may be poor, but his is only a relative poverty. He is poor in so far as he dines for two s.h.i.+llings instead of five. The Marcel of to-day who is accustomed to skipping a meal by stress of circ.u.mstances doesn't live in Chelsea. He simply couldn't do it; look at the rents. He lives in Walworth Road or Kentish Town. No; there is a _vie de Boheme_ at Chelsea, but it is a Bohemia of coffee liqueurs and Turkish cigarettes.
The beginnings of the delectable suburb are obscure. It seems to have a.s.sumed importance on the day when Henry VIII ”acquired” its manor, which led to the building of numerous sycophantic houses. The d.u.c.h.ess of Monmouth had a residence here, with the delightful John Gay as secretary. Can one imagine a modern d.u.c.h.ess with a modern poet as secretary? The same house was later occupied by the gouty dyspeptic Smollett, who wrote all his books at the top of his bad temper. Then came--but one could fill an entire volume with nothing but a list of the goodly fellows.h.i.+p of Chelsea.
The book about Chelsea has yet to be written. Such a book should disclose to us the soul of the place, with its eternal youth and eternal antiquity. It should introduce us to its charming ghosts--it is difficult to name one disagreeable person in this pageant; even the cantankerous Smollett was soothed when he came under its spell. It should enable us to touch finger-tips, perhaps make closer acquaintance, with Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Hans Holbein, Thomas Shadwell (forgotten laureate), Carlyle, Whistler, Edwin Abbey, George Meredith, Swinburne, Holman Hunt, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Oscar and Willie Wilde, Count d'Orsay, George Eliot, and a host of lesser but equally adorable personalities whose names must come ”among those present.” It should show us its famous places. It should afford us peep-holes into the studios of famous artists--Augustus John's studio is a revelation in careful disarrangement; it should take us round a ”Show Sunday”; it should reconstruct the nave gaieties of Cremorne; and, finally, it should recreate and illumine all the large, forgotten moments in the lives of those apostles of beauty whose ruminations and dreams the soul of Chelsea has fused with more of herself than men may know; ending, perhaps, with a disquisition on the effects of environment on the labours of genius.
Such a book must be done by a stranger, an observer, one with a gracious pen, a delicate, entirely human mind. There is one man above all who is divinely appointed for the task.
Please, Mr. W. D. Howells, will you write it for us?
I was strolling in philosophic mood down the never-ending King's Road, one November night, debating whether I should drop in at the Chelsea Palace, or have just one more at the ”Bells,” when I ran into the R.B.A.
He is a large man, and running into him rather upsets one's train of thought. When I had smoothed my nose and dusted my trousers, I said: ”Well, what about it?” He said: ”Well, what about it?”