49 chapters
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49 chapters
I—ARTISTIC EVENING
I—ARTISTIC EVENING
T he first invitation I ever received into a purely Parisian interior might have been copied out of a novel by Paul Bourget. Its lure was thus phrased: “ Un peu de musique et d’agréables femmes .” It answered to my inward vision of Paris. My experiences in London, which fifteen years earlier I had entered with my mouth open as I might have entered some city of Oriental romance, had, of course, done little to destroy my illusions about Paris, for the ingenuousness of the artist is happily indestr
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II—THE VARIÉTIÉS
II—THE VARIÉTIÉS
T he filth and the paltry shabbiness of the entrance to the theatre amounted to cynicism. Instead of uplifting by a foretaste of light and magnificence, as the entrance to a theatre should, it depressed by its neglected squalour. Twenty years earlier it might have cried urgently for cleansing and redecoration, but now it was long past crying. It had become vile. In the centre at the back sat a row of three or four officials in evening dress, prosperous clubmen with glittering rakish hats, at a d
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III—EVENING WITH EXILES
III—EVENING WITH EXILES
I lived up at the top of the house, absolutely alone. After eleven o’clock in the morning, when my servant left, I was my own doorkeeper. Like most solitaries in strange places, whenever I heard a ring I had a feeling that perhaps after all it might be the ring of romance. This time it was the telegraph-boy. I gave him a penny, because in France, much more than in England, every one must live, and the notion still survives that a telegram has sufficient unusualness to demand a tip; the same with
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IV—BOURGEOIS
IV—BOURGEOIS
Y ou could smell money long before you arrived at the double portals of the flat on the second floor. The public staircase was heated; it mounted broadly upwards and upwards in a very easy slope, and at each spacious landing was the statue of some draped woman holding aloft a lamp which threw light on an endless carpet, and on marble mosaics. There was, indeed, a lift; but who could refuse the majestic invitation of the staircase, deserted, silent, and mysterious? The bell would give but one tin
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V—CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
V—CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
Q uite early in the winter evening, before the light had died out of the sky, central Paris was beginning to be pleasurably excited. The aspect of the streets and of the cafés showed that. One saw it and heard it in the gestures and tones of the people; one had a proof of it in oneself. The whole city was in a state of delightful anxiety; and it was happy because the result of the night, whatever fate chose to decide, could not fail to be amusing and even thrilling. All the thoroughfares converg
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VI—RUSSIAN IMPERIAL BALLET AT THE OPERA
VI—RUSSIAN IMPERIAL BALLET AT THE OPERA
S ylvain’s is the only good restaurant in the centre of Paris where you can dine in the open air, that is to say, in the street. Close by, the dark, still mass of the Opéra rises hugely out of the dusk and out of the flitting traffic at its base. Sylvain’s is full of diners who have no eyes to see beyond the surfaces of things. By virtue of a contract made between Sylvain’s and the city, the diners are screened off from the street and from the twentieth century by a row of high potted evergreens
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I—THE RESTAURANT
I—THE RESTAURANT
Y ou have a certain complacency in entering it, because it is one of the twenty monster restaurants of London. The name glitters in the public mind. “Where shall we dine?” The name suggests itself; by the immense force of its notoriety it comes unsought into the conversation like a thing alive. “All right! Meet you in the Lounge at 7.45.” You feel—whatever your superficial airs—that you are in the whirl of correctness as you hurry (of course late) out of a taxi into the Lounge. There is somethin
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II—BY THE RIVER
II—BY THE RIVER
E very morning I get up early, and, going straight to the window, I see half London from an eighth-storey. I see factory chimneys poetised, and the sign of a great lion against the sky, and the dome of St. Paul’s rising magically out of the mist, and pearl-coloured minarets round about the horizon, and Waterloo Bridge suspended like a dream over the majestic river-, and all that sort of thing. I am obliged, in spite of myself, to see London through the medium of the artistic sentimentalism of ag
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III—THE CLUB
III—THE CLUB
I t was founded for an ideal. Its scope is national, and its object to regenerate the race, to remedy injustice, and to proclaim the brotherhood of mankind. It is for the poor against the plutocrat, and for the slave against the tyrant, and for democracy against feudalism. It is, in a word, of the kingdom of heaven. It was born amid immense collisions, and in the holy war it is the official headquarters of those who are on the side of the angels. In its gigantic shadow the weak and the oppressed
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IV—THE CIRCUS
IV—THE CIRCUS
T he flowers heaped about the bronze fountain are for them. And so that they may have flowers all day long, older and fatter and shabbier women make their home round the fountain (modelled by a genius to the memory of one whose dream was to abolish the hardships of poverty), with a sugar-box for a drawing-room suite and a sack for a curtain; these needy ones live there, to the noise of water, with a secret society of newspaper-sellers, knowing intimately all the capacities of the sugar-box and s
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V—THE BANQUET
V—THE BANQUET
I n every large London restaurant, and in many small ones, there is a spacious hall (or several) curtained away from the public, in which every night strange secret things go on. Few suspect, and still fewer realise, the strangeness of these secret things. In the richly decorated interior (sometimes marked with mystic signs), at a table which in space reaches from everlasting to everlasting, and has the form of a grill or a currycomb or the end of a rake—at such a table sit fifty or five hundred
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VI—ONE OF THE CROWD
VI—ONE OF THE CROWD
H e comes out of the office, which is a pretty large one, with a series of nods—condescending, curt, indifferent, friendly, and deferential. He has detestations and preferences, even cronies; and if he has superiors, he has also inferiors. But whereas his fate depends on the esteem of a superior, the fate of no inferior depends on his esteem. When he nods deferentially he is bowing to an august power before which all others are in essence equal; the least of his inferiors knows that. And the lea
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I—NIGHT AND MORNING IN FLORENCE
I—NIGHT AND MORNING IN FLORENCE
A mid the infantile fluttering confusion caused by the arrival of the Milan express at Florence railway station, the thoughts of the artist as he falls sheer out of the compartment upon the soft bodies of hold-alls and struggling women, are not solely on the platform. This moment has grandeur. This city was the home of the supreme ones—Dante, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Brunelleschi. You have entered it.. . . Awe? I have never been aware of sentiments of awe towards any artists, save Charles B
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II—THE SEVENTH OF MAY, 1910
II—THE SEVENTH OF MAY, 1910
I t was an exquisitely beautiful Italian morning, promising heat that a mild and constant breeze would temper. The East was one glitter. Harmless clouds were loitering across the pale sky, and across the Piazza children were taking the longest way to early school, as I passed from the clear sunshine into the soft transparent gloom of one of the great pantheons of Italy—a vast thirteenth-century Franciscan church, the largest church ever built by any mendicant Order—carved and decorated and paint
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III—MORE ITALIAN OPERA
III—MORE ITALIAN OPERA
G eographical considerations made it impossible for me to be present at the performance of La Traviata , which opened the Covent Garden season. I solaced myself by going to hear, on that very night, another and better opera of Verdi’s, Aida , in a theatre certainly more capacious than Covent Garden, namely, the Politeamo Fiorentino, at Florence. Florence is a city of huge theatres, which seem to be generally empty, even during performances, and often on sale. In the majority of them the weather
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I—THE HÔTEL TRISTE
I—THE HÔTEL TRISTE
B ecause I am a light and uneasy sleeper I can hear, at a quarter to six every morning, the distant subterranean sound of a peculiarly energetic bell. It rings for about one minute, and it is a signal at which They quit their drowsy beds. And all along the Riviera coast, from Toulon to San Remo, in the misty and chill dawn, They are doing the same thing, beginning the great daily conspiracy to persuade me, and those like me, that we are really the Sultan, and that our previous life has been a dr
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II—WAR!
II—WAR!
W e were in the billiard-room—English men and women collected from various parts of the earth, and enjoying that state of intimacy which is somehow produced by the comfortable click of billiard balls. It is extraordinary what pretty things the balls say of a night in the billiard-room of a good hotel. They say: “You are very good-natured and jolly people. Click. Women spoil the play, but it’s nice to have them here. Click. And so well-dressed and smiling and feminine I Click. Click. Cigars are g
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III-“MONTE”
III-“MONTE”
Monte Carlo—the initiated call it merely “Monte”—has often been described, in fiction and out of it, but the frank confession of a ruined gambler is a rare thing; partly because the ruined gambler can’t often write well enough to express himself accurately, partly because he isn’t in the mood for literary composition, and partly because he is sometimes dead. So, since I am not dead, and since it is only by means of literary composition that I can hope to restore my shattered fortunes, I will giv
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IV—A DIVERSION AT SAN REMO
IV—A DIVERSION AT SAN REMO
T he Royal Hotel, San Remo, has the reputation of being the best hotel, and the most expensive, on the Italian Riviera. It is the abode of correctness and wealth, and if a stray novelist or so is discovered there, that is only an accident. It provides distractions of all kinds for its guests: bands of music, conjuring shows, dances; and that week it provided quite a new thing in the way of distraction, namely, an address from Prebendary Carlile, head of the Church Army, which was quite truthfull
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I—FIRST JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
I—FIRST JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
J ust to show how strange, mysterious, and romantic life is, I will relate to you in a faithful narrative a few of my experiences the other day—it was a common Saturday. Some people may say that my experiences were after all quite ordinary experiences. After all , they were not. I was staying in a little house, unfamiliar to me, and beyond a radius of a few hundred yards I knew nothing of my surroundings, for I had arrived by train, and slept in the train. I felt that if I wandered far from that
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II—SECOND JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
II—SECOND JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST
W e glided swiftly into the forest as into a tunnel. But after a while could be seen a silvered lane of stars overhead, a ceiling to the invisible double wall of trees. There were these stars, the rush of tonic wind in our faces, and the glare of the low-hung lanterns on the road that raced to meet us. The car swerved twice in its flight, the second time violently. We understood that there had been danger. As the engine stopped, a great cross loomed up above us, intercepting certain rays; it sto
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III—THE CASTLE GARDENS
III—THE CASTLE GARDENS
O n the night of the Feast of Saint Louis the gardens of the palace are not locked as on other nights. The gardens are within the park, and the park is within the forest. I walked on that hot, clear night amid the parterres of flowers; and across shining water, over the regular tops of clipped trees, I saw the long façades and the courts of the palace: pale walls of stone surmounted by steep slated roofs, and high red chimneys cut out against the glittering sky. An architecture whose character i
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IV—AN ITINERARY
IV—AN ITINERARY
I have lived for years in the forest of Fontainebleau, the largest forest in France, and one of the classic forests—I suppose—of the world. Not in a charcoal-burner’s hut, nor in a cave, but in a town; for the united towns of Avon and Fontainebleau happen to be in the forest itself, and you cannot either enter or quit them without passing through the forest; thus it happens that, while inhabiting the recesses of a forest you can enjoy all the graces and conveniences of an imperial city (Fontaine
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I—THE HOTEL ON THE LANDSCAPE
I—THE HOTEL ON THE LANDSCAPE
I do not mean the picturesque and gabled construction which on our own country-side has been restored to prosperity, though not to efficiency, by Americans travelling with money and motor-cars. I mean the uncompromising grand hotel—Majestic, Palace, Métropole, Royal, Splendide, Victoria, Belle Vue, Ritz, Savoy, Windsor, Continental, and supereminently Grand—which was perhaps first invented and compiled in Northumberland Avenue, and has now spread with its thousand windows and balconies over the
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II—THE EGOIST
II—THE EGOIST
A little boy, aged about eight, with nearly all his front teeth gone, came down early for breakfast this morning while I was having mine. He asked me where the waiters were, and rang. When one arrived, the little boy discovered that he could speak no French. However, the waiter said “Café?” and he said “One”; but he told me that he also wanted buns. While breakfasting, he said to me that he had got up early because he was going down into the town that morning by the Funicular, as his mother was
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III—THE BLAND WANDERER
III—THE BLAND WANDERER
I n the drawing-room to-night an old and solitary, but blandly cheerful, female wanderer recounted numerous accidents at St. Moritz: legs broken in two places, shoulders broken, spines injured; also deaths. Further, the danger of catching infectious diseases at St. Moritz. “One very large hotel, where everybody had influenza,” etc. These recitals seemed to give her calm and serious pleasure. “Do you think this place is good for nerves?” she broke out suddenly at me. I told her that in my opinion
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IV—ON A MOUNTAIN
IV—ON A MOUNTAIN
L ast week I did a thing which you may call hackneyed or unhackneyed, according to your way of life. To some people an excursion to Hampstead Heath is a unique adventure: to others, a walk around the summit of Popocatapetl is all in the year’s work. I went to Switzerland and spent Easter on the top of a mountain. At any rate, the mountain was less hackneyed at that season than Rome or Seville, where the price of beds rises in proportion as religious emotion falls. It was Marcus Aurelius Antoninu
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I—THE GATE OF THE EMPIRE
I—THE GATE OF THE EMPIRE
W hen one comes back to it, after long absence, one sees exactly the same staring, cold white cliffs under the same stars. Ministries may have fallen; the salaries of music-hall artistes may have risen; Christmas boxes may have become a crime; war balloons may be in the air; the strange notion may have sprouted that school children must be fed before they are taught: but all these things are as nothing compared to the changeless fact of the island itself. You in the island are apt to forget that
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II—AN ESTABLISHMENT
II—AN ESTABLISHMENT
W hen I returned to England I came across a terrific establishment. As it may be more or less novel to you I will attempt to describe it, though the really right words for describing it do not exist in the English language. In the first place, it is a restaurant, where meals are served at almost any hour—and not meals such as you get in ordinary restaurants, but sane meals, spread amid flowers and diaper. Then it is also a crèche, where babies are tended upon scientific principles; nothing that
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III—AMUSEMENTS
III—AMUSEMENTS
I t is when one comes to survey with a fresh eye the amusements of the English race that one realises the incomprehensibility of existence. Here is the most serious people on earth—the only people, assuredly, with a genuine grasp of the principles of political wisdom—amusing itself untiringly with a play-ball. The ball may be large and soft, as in football, or small and hard, as in golf, or small and very hard, as in billiards, or neither one thing nor the other, as in cricket—it is always a bal
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IV—MANCHESTER
IV—MANCHESTER
O ver thirty years ago I first used to go to Manchester on Tuesdays, in charge of people who could remember Waterloo, and I was taken into a vast and intricate palace, where we bought quantities of things without paying for them—a method of acquisition strictly forbidden in our shop. This palace was called “Rylands.” I knew not what “Rylands” was, but from the accents of awe in which the name was uttered I gathered that its importance in the universe was supreme. My sole impression of Manchester
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V—LONDON
V—LONDON
T here are probably other streets as ugly, as utterly bereft of the romantic, as Lots-road, Chelsea, but certainly nothing more desolating can exist in London. It was ten years since I had seen it, and now I saw it at its worst moment of the week, about ten o’clock of a Sunday morning. Some time before I reached it I heard a humming vibration which grew louder and more impressive as I approached. I passed (really) sixty-eight seagulls sitting in two straight rows on the railings of a deserted Co
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VI—INDUSTRY
VI—INDUSTRY
M y native heath, thanks to the enterprise of London newspapers and the indestructibility of picturesque lies, has the reputation of being quite unlike the rest of England, but when I set foot in it after absence, it seems to me the most English piece of England that I ever came across. With extraordinary clearness I see it as absurdly, ridiculously, splendidly English. All the English characteristics are, quite remarkably, exaggerated in the Potteries. (That is perhaps why it is a butt for the
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I—THE HANBRIDGE EMPIRE
I—THE HANBRIDGE EMPIRE
W hen I came into the palace, out of the streets where black human silhouettes moved on seemingly mysterious errands in the haze of high-hung electric globes, I was met at the inner portal by the word “Welcome” in large gold letters. This greeting, I saw, was part of the elaborate mechanics of the place. It reiterated its message monotonously to perhaps fifteen thousand visitors a week; nevertheless, it had a certain effectiveness, since it showed that the Hanbridge Theatres Company Limited was
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II—THE MYSTERIOUS PEOPLE
II—THE MYSTERIOUS PEOPLE
A ccording to Whitaker’s Almanac, there are something under a million of them actually at work, which means probably that the whole race numbers something over two millions. And, speaking broadly, no one knows anything about them. The most modern parents, anxious to be parental in a scientific manner, will explain to their children on the hearth the chemistry of the fire, showing how the coal releases again the carbon which was absorbed by the plant in a past age, and so on, to the end that the
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III—FIRST VOYAGE TO THE ISLE OF MAN
III—FIRST VOYAGE TO THE ISLE OF MAN
I t seemed solid enough. I leaned for an instant over the rail on the quarter away from the landing-stage, and there, at the foot of the high precipice formed by the side of the vessel, was the wavy water. A self-important, self-confident man standing near me lighted a black cigar of unseemly proportions, and threw the match into the water. The match was lost at once in the waves, which far below beat up futilely against the absolutely unmoved precipice. I had never been on such a large steamer
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IV—THE ISLAND BOARDING-HOUSE
IV—THE ISLAND BOARDING-HOUSE
W hen you first take up your brief residence in the private hotel, as they term it—though I believe it is still called boarding-house in the plain-spoken island—your attitude towards your fellow-guests is perfectly clear; I mean your secret attitude, of course. Your secret attitude is that you have got among a queer and an unsympathetic set of people. At the first meal—especially if it be breakfast—you glance at them all one by one out of the corners of your eyes, and in that shrewd way of yours
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V—TEN HOURS AT BLACKPOOL
V—TEN HOURS AT BLACKPOOL
M anchester is a right place to start from. And the vastness of Victoria Station—more like London than any other phenomenon in Manchester—with its score of platforms, and its subways romantically lighted by red lamps and beckoning pale hands, and its crowds eternally surging up and down granitic flights of stairs—-the vastness of this roaring spot prepares you better than anything else could for the dimensions and the loudness of your destination. The Blackpool excursionists fill the twelfth pla
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I—AN EVENING AT THE SMITHS’
I—AN EVENING AT THE SMITHS’
M r. Smith returns to his home of an evening at 6:30. Mr. Smith’s home is in a fairly long street, containing some dozens of homes exactly like Mr. Smith’s. It has a drawing-room and a dining-room, two or three bedrooms, and one or two attics, also a narrow hall (with stained glass in the front door), a kitchen, a bathroom, a front garden, and a back garden. It has a service of gas and of water, and excellent drains. The kitchen range incidentally heats the water for the bathroom, so that the ba
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II—THE GREAT MANNERS QUESTION
II—THE GREAT MANNERS QUESTION
L et us forget that it is a home. Let us conceive it as a small collection of people living in the same house. They are together by accident rather than by design, and they remain together rather by inertia than by the fitness of things. Supposing that the adult occupants of the average house had to begin domestic life again (I do not speak of husbands and wives), and were effective^ free to choose their companions, it is highly improbable that they would choose the particular crew of; which the
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******
******
Mr. Smith is extravagant. He has an extravagant way of looking at life. On his own plane Mr. Smith is a haughty nobleman of old days; he is royal; he is a born hangman of expense. “What?” cries Mr. Smith, furiousi. “Me extravagant! Why, I have always been most careful! I have had to be, with my income!” He may protest. But I am right. The very tone with which he says: “With my income!” gives Mr. Smith away. What is the matter with Mr. Smith’s income? Has it been less than the average? Not at all
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IV—THE PARENTS
IV—THE PARENTS
L et us look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith one evening when they are by themselves, leaving the children entirely out of account. For in addition to being father and mother, they are husband and wife. Not that I wish to examine the whole institution of marriage—people who dare to do so deserve the Victoria Cross! My concern is simply with the effects of the organisation of the home—on marriage and other things. Well, you see them together. Mr. Smith has done earning money for the day, and Mrs. Smith has
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V—HAMIT’S POINT OF VIEW
V—HAMIT’S POINT OF VIEW
Y ou may have forgotten young Harry Smith, whom I casually mentioned in my first section, the schoolboy of fifteen. I should not be surprised to hear that you had forgotten him. He is often forgotten in the home of the Smiths., Compared with Mr. Smith, the creator of the home, or with the lordly eldest son John, who earns his own living and is nearly engaged, or with Mary, who actually is engaged, young Harry is unimportant. Still, his case is very interesting, and his own personal impression of
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VI—THE FUTURE
VI—THE FUTURE
T he cry is that the institution of the home is being undermined, and that, therefore, society is in the way of perishing. It is stated that the home is insidiously attacked, at one end of the scale, by the hotel and restaurant habit, and, at the other, by such innovations as the feeding-of-school-children habit. We are asked to contemplate the crowded and glittering dining-rooms of the Midland, the Carlton, the Adelphi, on, for instance, Christmas Night, when, of all nights, people ought! to be
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I—IN WATLING STREET
I—IN WATLING STREET
U pon an evening in early autumn, I, who had never owned an orchard before, stood in my orchard; behind me were a phalanx of some sixty trees bearing (miraculously, to my simplicity) a fine crop of apples and plums—my apples and plums, and a mead of some two acres, my mead, upon which I discerned possibilities of football and cricket; behind these was a double greenhouse containing three hundred pendent bunches of grapes of the dark and aristocratic variety which I thought I had seen in Piccadil
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II—STREET TALKING
II—STREET TALKING
F ew forms of amusement are more amusing and few forms of amusement cost less than to walk slowly along the crowded central thoroughfares of a great capital—London, Paris, or Timbuctoo—with ears open to catch fragments of conversation not specially intended for your personal consumption. It, perhaps, resembles slightly the justly blamed habit of listening at keyholes and the universally practised habit of reading other people’s postcards; it is possibly not quite “nice.” But, like both these hab
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III—ON THE ROAD
III—ON THE ROAD
T he reader may remember a contrivance called a bicycle on which people used to move from one place to another. The thing is still employed by postmen in remote parts. We discovered a couple in the stable, had them polished with the electroplate powder and went off on them. It seemed a strange freak. Equally strange was the freak of quitting Fontainebleau, even for three days. I had thought that no one ever willingly left Fontainebleau. Everybody knows what the roads of France are. Smooth and st
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IV—A TRAIN
IV—A TRAIN
A t the present moment probably the dearest bed of its size in the world is that to be obtained on the Calais-Mediterranean express, which leaves Calais at 1.05 every afternoon and gets to Monte Carlo at 9.39 the next morning. This bed costs you between £4 and £5 if you take it from Calais, and between £3 and £4 if you take it from Paris (as I did), in addition to the first-class fare (no bagatelle that, either!), and, of course, in addition to your food. Why people should make such a terrific f
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V—ANOTHER TRAIN
V—ANOTHER TRAIN
A fter six hours’ continuous sleep, I felt full of energy and joy. There were no servants to sadden by their incompetence; so I got up and made the tea and prepared the baths, and did many simple domestic things, the doing of which personally is the beginning of “the solution of the servant problem,” so much talked about. Shall we catch the 9.25 fast or the 9.50 slow? Only my watch was going among all the clocks and watches in the flat. I looked at it from time to time, fighting against the inst
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