A LONDON REVERIE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

To ask other readers questions about A London Reverie , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. A beautiful pale blue that has faded slightly with age see the image I uploaded for this edition A five star beauty, looking forward to reading this. Sep 20, GoldGato rated it really liked it Shelves: Sometimes I just love to take my time completing a book, particularly when it is a collection of artwork I can't even draw circles. Joseph Pennell's sketches of London scenes and landmarks made for some quiet downtime in the evening where I had the time to slowly digest his work, while also digesting endless cups of cocoa.

Yes, this is a hot cocoa book. This is the pre-World War I view of London. Buildings long since vanished, landscapes forever changed. It was a slower life, still tinged with Sometimes I just love to take my time completing a book, particularly when it is a collection of artwork I can't even draw circles. It was a slower life, still tinged with innocence. It is thrilling to get in, thrilling to jog alone with the horse's back and ears in front, and the animal steam rising; thrilling to hear the jingle, the creak of harness, to see the shafts wobbling in the harness The introductory essay by J.

Squire is superb and his brief, but very concise, descriptions of each print are marvelous. Each print gets its own full page with the short notes on the opposite page. Sir Edwin Landseer's lions, in Trafalgar Square, wearing the look of resignation which is begotten of the hearing of much oratory.

So many cups of hot cocoa. View all 7 comments. Janet rated it liked it Apr 10, Bedford Row, blessed legacy, is unchanged; so, for all I know or care , is Victoria Street, except for the recent alterations to the Army and Navy Stores. I see no change in Northumberland Avenue; two vile and soulless ranges suitably introduced by the dull Grand Hotel, which stands where Northumberland House once flaunted its lion. Waterloo Bridge, centre of the finest vista in London, is on crutches and possibly doomed.

Devonshire House, not externally a beautiful building, but quiet, homely, surrounded by gravelled space, and guarded by the finest pieces of weathered Portland stone extant, fell yesterday. It gave place to a building which might have been the legitimate glory of Dayton, Ohio, or Memphis, Tennessee. Yesterday, also, fell Grosvenor House, a rather ugly building, apart from its screen on the side street, but one not dwarfing the lovely little balconied and bow-fronted Regency rows which made Park Lane the rich in smallish houses, aristocracy temperately putting on a show of domesticity over the trees and the [2] pastoral expanse the pleasantest thing in London, for all the roar of buses under its windows.

A great squat block of flats has gone up in its place, with a touch of good taste and restraint about it which only makes its offence more noticeable. The transformation, though still local, is as noticeable as a gap in a man's front teeth. There are no great monuments of architecture in Park Lane, and no buildings so sacred because of their associations that people will feel obliged to agitate for their preservation.

It was merely a pleasant back-scene over the Park, with an atmosphere of rus in urbe and urbs in rure. Its integrity has gone; a building has been erected which stands amid the others like Gulliver among the Lilliputians; there is no longer any proportion there and the rest may as well be destroyed.

The old Park Lane could never have existed in any other city than London, though its less impressive kinsmen might be found in corners of Brighton or Cheltenham. The new, at best, will merely be a discreet version of Park Avenue, New York, a slightly more Anglo-Saxon sister of streets in the neighbourhood of the Bois de Boulogne, a rather less blatant analogue to the grandest boulevards of Charlottenburg.

Park Lane is in process of evanishment; and at this moment of writing the old walls of the Bank of England are falling in clouds of dust. The old Empire Theatre which was certainly ugly, but was unpretentious and of its epoch has gone, whilst the disconsolate statue of Shakespeare broods over the vacancy; and Exeter Hall, preserved in Pennell's line, has also gone. Architectural treasures these certainly were not, and each of them had unpleasing associations, though of widely differing kinds; but the brave show each tried to make was of a kind that must now appear to us pathetically modest: Many of Pennell's drawings are records of streets and edifices that no longer exist.

Not only the physical appearance has passed. Twenty years in any era will bring a change: This was the pre-War world. Examine Pennell's pictures, and you will find not merely buildings that have disappeared, but modes of costume and transport which have gone, never to return. It is the world of the early nineteen-hundreds.

It is a time before the jolly vulgarity of Earl's Court had leap-frogged westward to the White City, and then to Wembley, now in its turn deserted. I cannot fix the exact year if the drawings do all date from any one year , because I never can recall the precise dates and sequences of women's sleeves and hats. There was but this was certainly much earlier the leg-of-mutton sleeve, the most repulsive and abnormal distortion to which the slaves of fashion had subjected themselves since the days of Queen Elizabeth, wiggish extravagances being excepted.

There were the sleeves that had a hunch above the shoulders, the sleeves that ballooned below the shoulder and were then tight, the sleeves that were tight all the way down until they came to a widening at the wrist. Skirts were always long, and had to be held up, gracefully or awkwardly; hats were usually large, either towering like wedding-cakes or undulant and plumy like the hat of Gainsborough's Duchess. In the country, yokels were still sitting on the benches outside village inns and drinking the healths of General French and in the West of England General Buller.

The traffic, commerce apart, consisted of horse-buses—the Monster, the Royal Blue, the Fulham White, and so on—and jingling leisurely hansoms. A dozen or so of [4] these still remain amongst us, almost as odd as sedan-chairs. Now and then some sentimentalist, having a quarter of an hour free, will take one of them, and recover, with a twinge of the heart, the sensations of his youth.

In those days, beyond all things, they were fleet. There were the buses; there were the four-wheelers; but the hansoms were the Atalantas. These poor jog-trotting survivals as we think them seemed then to be prodigies of perfect springing, elimination of friction, balance, comfort, and speed. We had hardly started the horse's feet clumping merrily, the wood-and-glass apron-doors shut cosily, the body jigging with the resilience of an air-cushion, the bells ringing , than we drew up before the dim-lit portico, sprang out to assist our whitely voluminous lady to alight, rang a bell or watched a latch-key turning, shook a reluctant parting hand, heard a door bang, and trotted off again into the empty dim-lit streets.

I take one sometimes; I wonder if any of my readers do! It is thrilling to get in, thrilling to jog alone with the horse's back and ears in front, and the animal steam rising; thrilling to hear the jingle, the creak of harness, to see the shafts wobbling in the harness, to be aware of that tough old man on the box behind and above the dark compartment, who suddenly will slacken his horse's pace, lift the little high shutter, and ask for a specific direction.

But what crawling, what miscalculation of times! Everything passes us, our lamps are faint to the point of exhaustion, our driver is a withered survival; the jolting is fatiguing.

All is tolerable merely as an anachronism that stimulates the memory. Otherwise means of transport were still Victorian, Dickensian even. And the social and political structure were survivals also. In the year there was a great discussion as to whether the nineteenth century had begun in that year or was to begin in the next; the Kaiser, who was incapable of understanding that there never had been a year 0, characteristically [5] pronouncing in favour of In point of fact the twentieth century began in , if we are to consider centuries as eras.

Much, no doubt, had gone which had been in evidence during Victoria's prime. Dukes no longer wore their garters, nor rustics their smocks; hatchments were no longer displayed outside houses of death, though tan was still laid outside houses of sickness, and hearses were still cornered by the panoply of plumes.

Yet every line regiment had its scarlet uniform and peculiar facings. The King's cousins were still encumbered by German names, Schleswig-Holstein, Battenberg, and Teck; and they seemed very thick on the ground. Balfour was Prime Minister; Mr. George Wyndham, young and handsome, was getting into trouble about Ireland; Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, not long since an England cricketer, was in trouble about Chinese indentured labour meant to work the mines in the newly conquered Transvaal, the Union of South Africa and the Dutchmen's Revenge not having been dreamt of.

The social and imperial organisations which Disraeli had known were still intact. The debates of the House of Lords were still followed with close interest, not to mention those of the House of Commons. None of the Victorian political threads had yet been followed to the middle of the maze. The Coaching Club was going strong; no American had as yet successfully invaded Wimbledon; the ragged and bare-footed urchins of Barnardo's advertisements still infested the doorsteps of the slums.

Ireland would always be a source of trouble, but it was an agreeable place to hunt in. Babus would get ideas into their heads, but the Mutiny had taught its lesson and the redcoats had the situation well in hand, except for the perennial sharp-shooting on the North-West Frontier. A clever public-school boy could not do much better than enter the Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty-three, govern half a kingdom, and retire, still young, with a pension of a thousand a year, which in those days, and with those prices and taxes, meant luxury.

The Russians had been momentarily dangerous, but the young Czar had shown idealism with his peace-rescript, he might be trusted gradually to liberalise the country undeterred by the bombs of the Nihilists , and the cut of his features and of his beard made him extraordinarily like the Prince of Wales. Russia was well on the way to taking its full share in the civilisation of Western Europe, backward though the moujiks undoubtedly were. The volatile German Emperor, with his flashing eyes and upturned moustaches, was doubtless magniloquent and bombastic, and did talk a little too much about his new toy, the German Navy, a thing that Germany could not possibly need; yet he always appeared, and friendlily smiled, on occasions of family grief or rejoicing, a gallant figure on his proud charger, in processions.

Change was ahead of us. The Sick Man of Europe was also indeterminately doomed. China, too, might break up. But all was for the best; the clouds were no bigger than a man's hand; never did we think of aeroplanes over cities, tanks, poison-gas, thousands of miles of trenches, four years of war, many millions of dead, the crashings of thrones, the obliteration of the old map of Europe. It was the calm before the storm; and its storms were storms in a teacup of Wedgwood.

There was no international menace that might not be removed by a Lord Mayor's banquet preceded by a blaring [7] procession to the Guildhall—the Czar, the Kaiser, the French President, the Shah of Persia, the King of Siam, they were all one to the cheerful cockney populace, and were all heartily cheered.

London was then, as it is now, unique among capitals: It is the seat of the Court and of the Government and Parliament; it is the unchallengeable centre of social life; it is the headquarters of all the learned professions; it is an immense manufacturing society; it is the financial centre of the Empire; it is Britain's greatest port. A man may possibly regret the agglomeration of so many energies and so many populations.

In Germany the old capitals still retain some importance; the publishers, for example, of Munich vie with those of Berlin. Paris is not a port, and New York is not the seat of Government; Edinburgh and Glasgow have separate characters. A pity, it may arguably be, that the Kings of England and their Parliaments did not choose to remain at Oxford or Winchester or even Reading, relieving London of part of its present congestion.

There are those who hate all cities so large that an hour's walk cannot bring you to the edge of them. William Morris was another. These men were sorry for what had happened; yet were they also sorry that it had happened to London. He may have seen if they were there in his day the shining and stalwart sentries on their black steeds outside the Horse Guards; he may have leisurely floated down the Thames for a fish-dinner at the Ship, Greenwich.

No man who has once lived in London, wandered about it, examined its nooks and crannies, entered into its variegated and richly traditional life, could honestly say that he wished it all wiped out, even if he shared Cobbett's and Morris's views about industrialism, paper money, and the decay of rural England. There would be many things that he could not bear to destroy. And for every man there would be different things; the place, the city, the congeries of history being so vast. How vast it is!

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I, who have lived in London for twenty years and constantly explored it out of curiosity, suddenly check myself and realise what great lacunae there are in my knowledge of it. My map of London contains as many blank spaces as did the map of Africa in Mungo Park's day. It is perfectly true that I know the centre of London though there are still streets between Piccadilly and Oxford Street into which I have strayed once or never at all, and which may contain the oddest and most charming unknown things , and that I have visited most of the hidden Churches of the City.

It is true that the East Central district has few secrets which I do not share: I know Southwark Cathedral and the lovely inn-yard which adjoins it; the Inns of Court, every court of every inn; the library of St. Paul's, the cellars of the Bank, most of the panelled rooms and [9] Samuel Scotts of the City Companies I have been in Barking Church and Tottenham Churchyard; I am familiar with Gilbert Scott's magnificent new church at Northfleet, and with Rahere's; with the Minories, the environs of the Tower, the whole length of Little Thames Street, and more than one old riverside public-house at Wapping.

I have watched the deer cantering at Richmond, and the masts spiring over the houses on both banks of the River in the East. I am acquainted with Dirty Dick's, the Hole in the Wall, the Soane Museum, the Dulwich Gallery, Browning Hall, and Ruskin Park; with the new road to Sidcup and the new cut to Esher; and with most of the main roads by which a motor-car can pass out of London into England, wild nature, and the established past. Yet, if I look at a map, I find myself immediately confronted with wide districts of which I know only the names, and perhaps a few historical associations.

Willesden Junction I know, but not Willesden; Brondesbury as a station on the railway, but not as the possible site for a story by Mr. With at least half London I am totally unacquainted; and I am not less curious than most. Every Londoner-born, every provincial who comes to live in [10] London, has his own London. For no two individuals, probably, is this unconscious selection the same: There are probably tens of thousands of Jews in Whitechapel who have never seen, or even heard of, Portland Place; there are certainly many people in Portland Place who have vaguely heard of Whitechapel, but only as an outlying territory, like the Andamans or the Solomon Islands, which has to be administered, and may, at any moment, be liable to give trouble.

There is a London of the unthinking Rich: There is a London of the stupid American, and a London of the cultivated American, who goes far and wide in search of a background with which his own country does not yet provide him.

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There is a London of the Chelseaite and the Bloomsburyite; there is a London, frequented and beloved by Mr. Tomlinson, and intimately known by Conrad, which begins at Tower Hill and goes eastwards; a marine London, a London of docks, and spars, returned and battered ships, crimps and Chinamen, merchandise and anecdotes from the Seven Seas, tea-chests, bales and anchors, the smells of salt, tar, bilge-water, and river-mud. A man knows and loves Acton, but hardly knows where Tottenham is; a man regards Streatham as the secondary centre of the universe, the City being its only superior; a man lives in Tooting, and finds it difficult to believe that Finchley, with its glitter of trams and shops, exists.

Yet for all of them, however widely London may spread, however discrete its parts may become, there is a general awareness of London, and there is a central and nodal part of London which they regard as common property, symptomatic and symbolical of the whole chaotic and magnificent business. In exile they feel it acutely. It is even possible to imagine a group of [11] British exiles, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, giving were a sudden picture or wireless message to be encountered three cheers for the British Museum.

London is a hotch-potch, but it still has a heart and a soul. Even the most sprawling octopus has organs. They very seldom pull down anything ugly in London. When they do, as in the Strand, old shoddy is usually replaced by new. Yet, whatever disappears, men will, as time goes by, regret it; and what had not even the humblest grace of form will take in memory a presence, a bloom, a luminosity from that vanished youth with which it was associated.



There are men of my generation who, at this moment, when that flimsy and dingy little restaurant of Appenrodt's is being demolished, will merely remark that it is an ugly obstruction and ought to go in the interests both of traffic and the eye; yet who, when it has gone, will feel, if it be casually mentioned, the pang it cannot give them now. Life is a tissue of farewells, and every change is a reminder of it; but here, in the death of such a building, is a symbol of a death which even in life we have experienced, our own death which we have survived, the death of our youth.

Before the century is out there will be greybeards to whom the Bush Building will be a part of the old London they first knew—what the County Fire Office, with its arcade and its Britannia, was to us. To-day it is too new to have become firmly part of anyone's fabric of retrospect.

To others that great white rectilinear block stands upon an empty triangle of waste, where for years no foot trod behind the palings, and the rubble-covered earth was clothed with sparse grass, and then, invisible seeds coming one by one on the invisible wind, a tangle of vagrant weeds grew there, a garden for untidy Nature in the heart of the smoke and the bricks, Flora Londiniensis reconstituted—fifty sorts of flowers, with pink swathes of the rose-bay willow-herb spiring over all.

Every hour old [12] beams, newly naked to the sky, are battered down in pathetic ruin, a fresh gap is opened in one of our ten thousand streets, foundations are dug, bricks laid, new signs stuck up. Every year the fringes of London extend: London is in perpetual flux. Yet, in retrospect, it is not a shifting background one sees, but a fixed one, mysteriously arrested at some moment and seeming to have been immutable for years: This London that has gone, though relics of it surround us on every side, saw our youth and was a part of our youth, our youth that is a country which is lost.

There are other provinces, and for no two persons is that whole country the same. How ample a province! What market squares full of gaitered farmers, traps, and cattle! What drives at night between hedges, with the horse's feet clopping and rings of light from the square-lamps hovering along the broken gathering darkness at each side! Days—no, not days, for the divisions of days are forgotten—of climbing, sailing, swimming, picnicking, games in empty houses, or candles and books in bed at night, the creak of footsteps on the stairs. A great organ, like a painted Giant's Causeway, thundering in the Guildhall, while the massed choir ladies all in white, sopranos with red sashes, contraltos with blue sang choruses of the Messiah.

The Salvation Army bands lugubriously braying in the empty streets, or suddenly encountered, marching, with a rabble behind them, round a corner. Dim Queen Victoria's first Jubilee and the unveiling of a monument; a golden tip from a strange gentleman whose head was high out of sight. A wain of red clover in the dusk of an archway; runnels of water threading the star-patterns on the yellow bricks of a stable-yard; horses in loose boxes; a dog that lost its puppies; a water-ford with the wheels axle-deep; the ragged pinnacle of a ruined castle emerging from steep woods; air-gun practice in a shed; a warm chaffinch, stone-dead, its ruddy breast so smooth, its white-barred wings lifted to find the bloody hole; a stab of remorse.

A heavy dirty-jacketed rook, dead in a furrow, dingy black, maggoty when it was turned. Daisy chains, ripe apples from the tree, bird's-foot trefoil that is a lotus , wet red moss-rose. Scented coffee grinding in one window, waxen barbers' busts in the next, the beauty of an ironmonger's and a corn-chandler's, the little sailor-suited figures in a tailor's window, cheese, oranges, the desiccated rings of grocer's apples.

Thus will the endless chain of association draw bright images from that inexhaustible well. Then older days at school, and an imperceptible frontier had been crossed, never to be traversed again. At a certain time childhood was behind and we were ashamed of ever having been children, unlearned, [14] undisciplined simpletons, silly little fools and asses. Childhood had given place to first youth; we had learned to curb our suffering; but no shock-absorber, alas, was needed to mitigate the force of the assaults of beauty and of fact.

It was in childhood that we apprehended, with awed delight, the heavenly bodies, the seasons and weather, earth, sea and sky, the kinds of people and of animals, flowers and trees, and received most sharply the treasures of sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch. That is not sentimentality: Every category of impressions came to us in childhood with a vividness and poignancy not to be recovered: It was then that we learnt the solitude of the hills and the sweet companionship of the rivers, the wonder of wide primroses in the woods and hard blackberries in the brakes, looked first at trout lying in a bridge's shadow, drank through our nostrils the strange empty savour of river water as we swam.

It was then that with intensest pleasure we watched the rooster crow from his dunghill, fed from our fingers the sucking calf, patted the bristly hide of the lazy sow. That capacity for complete reception, complete delight, complete self-forgetfulness, departed with childhood; later youth, at school and at Cambridge, brought its treasures of scene and society; and, for me, at least, London does not enter into that part of the tapestry where youth was passing through its second transition, dipping at random into the various worlds of books, aware for the first time of the rumour of conflicting ideas, newly acquainted with the names of the great ones of the world, serenely supercilious about them, but undeniably shy when any of them physically appeared.

To others, born and bred in London, the place must mean things it can never mean to me. My own first sight of it was when I was eighteen, steaming eternally into Paddington on a [16] cold, damp, gloomy December day, with something like terror closing in on me at the magnitude of the thing and its legend—a feeling that always returns when there comes to my nostrils the sharp coppery reek of a great railway terminus.

That terror no man or woman bred in London can have known. As we sped in through the ever-increasing density, until we slowed down under the smoke-blackened cliffs outside the great cavern of Paddington, my heart stood still and I trembled. I tried to laugh at myself and could not; and dismounted with awe. The horror wore off: There were occasional week-ends and three or four weeks. I knew the environs of St. Pancras and Queen's Club staying in a lodging near this last, and a boarding-house, full of young Indians and indeterminate elderly ladies, in Woburn Place?

The City I knew but as something strange, almost mythical, full of narrow streets, traffic, classic porticoes, and unexpected sooty churches, that one passed through on the way to Liverpool Street. When, in search of some friend, I took a hansom to Kensington or, with very strict attention to my instructions about trains, went out to sup near Clapham Common or the Crystal Palace, I knew no more about the wildernesses of houses I travelled through or over than I do now about the dismal wastes of Chicago.

Once or twice I passed the Abbey on buses and disliked the towers; occasionally I passed St. Paul's and wondered if I should ever climb the Dome for the view. I did not know the names of most of the buildings I saw: In my first year at Cambridge I even had the idea that New Oxford Street and Holborn were of a peculiarly metropolitan importance. London, shorn of its original awe, was a shapeless and featureless thing of unknown size, a body without a soul, that meant nothing to me.

On occasional visits one might travel to Queen's Club for the Rugby match and spend the evening with haphazard undergraduates drinking new liqueurs in foreign restaurants; or go to the theatre; gradually increasing ones knowledge of the stations [17] on the Inner Circle, and learning to distinguish between Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch. But London as a whole was as yet virgin of associations, either personal or historical.

I shall never forget, but can never clearly remember, the first true inkling I had of its size. In I walked from Devonshire to London, taking a holiday from employment on a local newspaper, in the guise of a penniless tramp, sleeping in haystacks a rat ran across my face in the dark , pheasant-copses the rain dripping all night, the pheasants chuckling , and Casual Wards. I broke the journey at Oxford, shaved and borrowed clothes, spent several agreeable days, punted on the Cher, talked to a Rhodes scholar about Petronius, played a good deal of billiards, first encountered Father Ronald Knox in his infant glory and a red tie, acquired the fare to Reading, and, resuming the bedraggled mackintosh and the tieless collar, left the disgusted porter of Balliol behind me.

I take it, an unusual collocation. I had walked from Maidenhead to Isleworth on a damp Saturday afternoon in May, and reached the workhouse when the lights were already being lit. Whilst I was undressing a tough customer with cunning eyes, a red nose, a black moustache, and a bristly chin, asked me if I had surrendered any money. Observing that I did not need it he demurred; and, realising that I could not be a professional, he gave me a few words of advice about not arriving at Casual Wards so late in the evening.

I slept with difficulty on a thin blanket laid over large unresisting diamonds of wire that left red patterns on my thighs and back. The morning, as I had carefully arranged, was Sunday morning. No stone-breaking on Sundays: I was released early, after a plate of thin porridge, with a hunk of stale bread, that I ate as I walked down the [18] street. And I tramped from there to Chelsea, where my best friend was to be found. What a walk for an unaccustomed man not versed in the past of all those neighbourhoods: Size, squalor, lack of purpose, were the dominant impressions on one new to it all.

Not one thing interested me the whole way: Were I to take that journey again to-day it would be all different, though the tentacles of the Devouring Town have stretched out even farther than they had twenty years ago. Then the London suburbs were mere names to me: I knew nothing of their past nor of their relative positions; nor did I know what delights may in any of them be lurking round the next corner.

All those miles, in worn boots with a greasy handkerchief still round a blistered heel, did I trudge, not for a moment even aware that the Thames was half the time within easy reach, and that the banks of the Thames were strewn with the charming relics of rural civilisation. The Kraken, modern London, devours and devours, yet the hard skulls and timbers of its prey remain intact within its capacious folds.

A London Reverie by Joseph Pennell

As I went through Brentford I might have thought of its antiquity, its two Kings, the Elizabethan playwrights who used to gather at the Pigeons, the merry jests of George Peele. Whether I knew of these things I cannot now say; but I do know that I did not then connect them with what I saw.

I passed the gate of Syon House and knew nothing of it; the approach to Kew Bridge and was unaware of it, of the great domesticated landscape on the other side, the palm house, the orangery, Sir William Chambers's pagoda; Kew Gardens then were to me a name without a local habitation, and no memory of their lilacs perfumed the neighbourhoods around them.

Just behind the squalid respectabilities of Gunnersbury lay intact the riverside village street of Strand-on-the-Green, fine Augustan mansions, tumble-down cottages, ancient pubs with little balconies overlooking the brown tides of the Thames and the sleeping hulls of fishing-boats which, within living memory, had sailed from here to the Nore, past all the traffic and history of London, on their proper business.

The poplars one year were pollarded, and for days [20] two crows, which had always nested in them, flew bewildered round the ghost of its crown, in search of what was gone for ever. Of what was, and what was to be, on that drab distant Sunday, I was utterly unaware, seeing only the streets, trams and people, not knowing when I crossed the frontiers of all these indistinguishable boroughs, insensitive to the remains of the villages they had been, or any painful modern efforts to recover for them something of individuality and give them new centres and a touch of new dignity.

Utterly unaware, I was plodding mechanically onward, asking always the way to King's Road, near the end of which was a shabby square I had once visited. A few days followed. We went to a meeting at which there spoke, with a fine sweeping certainty about all things, a younger Bernard Shaw with a redder beard. We sat on twopenny seats over the Serpentine while night came over and the long reflections of the lamps brightened on the water. I saw several extraordinary little men in buildings off Fleet Street who were unable to suggest to me even the smallest job at the lowest salary.

I took, with an attempt at hope, a letter of introduction to H. Massingham from an old friend, who had not seen him for years, but had often bicycled with him in Battersea Park in a past age when that exercise, in that curious place, was fashionable. He asked me what I was prepared to write about.

The wrinkled nutcracker smile was not unkindly, but there was no promise in it. He saw young aspirants every day, no doubt. Years later we became acquainted and he evidently did not remember me; nor did I ever tell him that for a day I had pinned my last hopes on him.

He was a jaundiced politician, and had no understanding of men; but generous of soul and attractive when you were with him. I last met him by accident, one sunny morning in August , on the step of the Pilgrims' Inn at Glastonbury. We talked for five minutes and went off [21] in our respective cars: The office doors of the Nation , the halfpenny dailies, and Pearson's Weekly —where I only just missed thirty shillings a week as a judge of Limerick competitions—closed behind me. I worked off the spleen by walking from London, through Winchester to Salisbury, in just over forty-eight hours.

Chelsea at two; Guildford—with the gas-lamps shining melancholy on laurels outside—at half-past ten. Then, by error in the dark, Godalming; then Farnham; Alton in the early morning, with a small hot brown loaf from a baker's just opened. Two nights out, sleeping rough by snatches, heaven knows where. I had never seen that road before, and now I know every turn on it. A train from Salisbury and I was back at my point d'appui. It wasn't entirely solitary.

There were good men on that struggling newspaper; and I had a few friends in the town, as well as others, in Cambridge, in London, and wandering with the wind, who sent me news of the progress of the Union, of international comity, of the young Crichtons of my time, of literary life in Copenhagen, hotels in Florence, missions in India, and football in Singapore. I played occasionally for scratch rugger teams, and watched a good deal of football on Saturday afternoons.

On Saturdays and evenings off there were communings with naval officers in bars, or meetings with the revolutionaries in Ruskin Hall or the open market-place. Yet, mostly it was work, and work at night; the machines drumming behind and below; the boys coming up for the little wads of copy; the scramble soon after midnight; the respite when all had gone down and it was now for the printers to finish the job; the wait for the first damp and sticky copy with everything miraculously sobered and strengthened in type, and miraculously fitting; the supper, or very early breakfast, of cocoa and cheese, under the lamps; the fearless mice who leapt on the littered table and sat up nibbling the fragments of cheese.

It seems, in retrospect, charming and amusing: Yet, it was stagnation and suspense, all this; and in London I resumed the progress of my youth. Two years of waiting; an opportunity of sorts; and I began a real acquaintance with London. London for me, as for how many thousands of others, is a part of that most critical and crucial period of youth, the period of awakened intellect and fulfilled emotion.

It was not the London of the rich nor the London of the poor—though these became gradually known: Shakespeare's paradox acquired meaning after him: For me, when I entered it, I lived in that shabby Chelsea square of which I spoke. My landlady was a decayed French baroness, whose husband, long ago, had been Ambassador to Mexico, perhaps for I cannot remember to the Mexico of Maximilian, gallant and unfortunate Hapsburg, who ended his life where was it I saw in youth a picture, a woodcut, peaked post-men's caps and baggy trousers: Being French, she was an expert in omelettes; into which she always contrived to introduce fragments of cinder and enamel from the vehicle; but she gave me several admirable French books, and her old brain was as intelligent as her grey hair was disordered.

A London Reverie

Thence did I sally in the mornings to send the most recondite metropolitan views and information to hungry minds in the country—first with It was the evenings and the week-ends that mattered. Contemporaries had gathered from the University; they had got in touch with other young men who in some singular way had acquired intelligence, knowledge, and even wit, without ever going to the University; and in all the circles of ardour and enlightenment there were as many women as men. They were not bobbed or shingled, but they seemed so. London in those days, and at that stage of one's life, was liberation.

It was possible to talk to young women, who knew all about music and economics, on even the most alarming subjects, without feeling, or at any rate betraying, the slightest embarrassment.