The Age of Elegance (17 page)

reply to Erfurt and the Tuileries—was the Conservatory, which was not so much an adjunct to a palace as a miniature Gothic cathedral conceived by a
fin-de-siecle
voluptuary, with a nave and aisles formed by clusters of carved pillars, stained glass windows and a ceiling whose glazed traceries flooded the marble pavement with light. And at the west end a low, wide Gothic door opened on to lawns, weeping trees, the multi-coloured fans of peacocks' tails and the setting sun.

Yet in spite of all that the Regent had to show his guests, his florid affability, the magnificent food and wine, the gold plate and candles, the evening was not a success. The heat—as always in his palaces— was intense. The old Queen, who during half a century in England had preserved the rigid etiquette of the petty German Court of her youth, petrified the conversation. Throughout the stately and interminable meal the Regent made repeated attempts to break the ice, but the Grand Duchess—the only member of the party who could converse in all three languages—was determined to help no one. Afterwards, when the palace filled with guests, the stiff little Queen took her place under the canopy in the Throne-Room and hundreds of women in low-necked, high-waisted satin dresses, attended by sworded, white-stockinged gentlemen in court-dress and uniform, defiled before her, their heads adorned with plumes. The Czar was left with nothing to do but stand and watch. He amused himself by quizzing the younger and prettier women.

The failure of the evening was complete when the Regent, with portly grace, brought forward his exquisitely groomed but ageing favourite, the Marchioness of Hertford. Like all English ladies, she was dying to talk to the saviour of Europe. But when his host presented her, the Czar, who had been told all about her by the Grand Duchess, merely bowed. The Regent, knowing him to be a little deaf and supposing he had not heard, repeated loudly, "This is my Lady Hertford." Alexander still said nothing. The lady made a deep curtsey, gave him the haughtiest of glances and withdrew. The fate of the visit, Countess Lieven thought, was written in that glance.
¹

Next morning the Czar rode almost round London before breakfast. Emerging from the royal parks, he saw it first from

¹
Havelock, 271, 278.

Westminster Bridge as it lay asleep in the morning sun—upstream the terraced trees and grey, ghostly houses in front of Westminster Hall, the new Millbank Penitentiary and the low, willowed banks; downstream the tottering old taverns and warehouses of Scotland Yard, the gardens of Northumberland House, the conical water-tower of York Buildings, Somerset House rising like a Venetian palace from the water, and Paul's dome floating above the houses and spires. And binding Westminster to the city, the city to the world, and man to the ages, the great stream flowed seawards, green and grey, with white and brown sails and wherries and tossing barges on its bosom. Then, having gazed on that famous spectacle, the Czar rode on over the high, balustraded bridge, with its bays and hooped lamp-posts, towards the Surrey shore.

A few years before, St. George's Fields had been an open plain crossed by highways, crowded all day with horsemen and carriages and forming at night a constellation of twinkling lamps across the marshy meadows. But now its view of London and Westminster was blotted out by a mass of mean, ill-constructed buildings. All that the Czar saw were rows of small dwellings and bleak factories rising on the last remaining meadows—a poor, unsavoury, squatters' town. Passing the Obelisk at the junction of the Borough and Greenwich roads, he followed the dull, wide highway into Southwark.

Suddenly emerging from the Borough High Street he came once more on the river. Beyond it lay a city with a straight, uniform skyline, its parapets crowned with a halo of stone belfries, almost as many, it seemed, as there were masts in the river. Above them the cliffs of an immense cathedral carried the eye upwards to a remote golden cross and ball. The dome on which these symbols rode belonged to a different world from the houses below which, shrouded by the smoke of the chimneys,
¹
were so close round the temple's base that they seemed to be crowding into its portals. For, if above the level of the houses the city belonged to God, below it Mammon reigned, grudging every foot of ground. Yet the worshippers of God and Mammon alike had observed in their building the rules of proportion and good sense. In all London north of the river there scarcely seemed a house not in keeping with its neighbours.

¹
The cross, 340 feet high, was approximately eight and a half times higher than the 40-foot skyline of the principal streets below. Ackermann,
Microcosm,
III, 151; Summerson,
Georgian London,
45.

Between the eye and this classical city lay the source from which it drew its wealth—the river, no longer, as in the reaches below Westminster, given over to purposes of pleasure but lined with wharves, warehouses, timber-yards and manufactories. Spanning it was a bridge dating from the remote past. Its dark camel-back was no longer crowned with houses and shops, but beneath it the stream, narrowed into cataracts, poured down through arches where wheels sucked water into iron cylinders with a noise like artillery. On either side of the steep slope, crowded with carts and pedestrians, were bowers in whose recesses old women sat selling apples and sweetmeats.
¹
Below the bridge the sky was dark with masts, and the river almost hidden by the throng of barges and wherries.

Then up the cobbled, odoriferous incline of Fish Street the Czar passed into "the great emporium of men, riches, arts and intellectual power"—Georgian London. It was a city built without a plan and yet with a common and clearly conceived purpose, not imposed by some grandiloquent King but to serve the needs of a community of merchants who, nursed in a classical tradition, had learnt that, to be free, man must express himself within a framework of order. Controlled since the Great Fire by Building Acts which laid down the ceiling-heights, types of materials and number of storeys to be used in every class of street, London in
1814
was at the acme of its ordered and mannered beauty, mellowed by time and still untouched by the hand of the Gothic improver. There were no palaces and few large buildings, but street after street of unpretentious, uniform, exquisitely proportioned three- and four-storeyed houses of brown and grey brick, their skylines of parapet, tile and chimney-stack broken only by trees and the white stone of Wren's belfries. The roadways were mostly straight and, in relation to their height, wide, with flagstoned pavements guarded from the traffic by posts and with wrought-iron railings before the houses. Every house had the same sober, unadorned face of freestone-bordered sash, the same neat white pillars on either side of the pedimented door, the same stone steps over the area crowned by a lamp-post. Only in the beautifully moulded doors and brightly polished knockers, with their lion masks, wreaths and urns, did the English instinct for individuality break through that

¹
Among them the good woman whom George Borrow found there reading "blessed Moll Flanders."
Lavengro
.

all-pervading, almost monotonous framework. There, and in the narrow, winding lanes and courts behind the Georgian facade, glimpsed through archways from which came whiffs of laystall and stable and where ragged children swarmed in darkness and cobblers sat at hutches with low open doors.

Unlike the fashionable West End, the City was awake. Postmen in scarlet coats with bells and bags were going from door to door, porter-house boys were scurrying home with pewter mugs from last night's suppers, bakers in white aprons were shouting "Hot loaves!" Small chimney-sweeps carrying brushes, hawkers with bandboxes on poles, milk-maids, with the manure of suburban cow-sheds on their feet and pails suspended from yokes across their shoulders, were crying their wares, competing with the bells of dust-carts and the horns of newsvendors. On the pavements apprentices, freshly risen from their masters' counters, were taking down the shutters of bow-fronted, multi-paned windows, and ragged urchins were leap-frogging over the posts. When they saw the tall horseman and his Cossack attendants with their sheepskin cloaks and long lances, they came shouting after. Brewers' drays, drawn slowly by draught-horses as big as elephants, vast hooded wagons with wheels like rollers, carts with hay for the London markets, stopped in the middle of the road; bullocks on their way to Smithfield were driven by drovers into corners and yards, women with baskets left their pitches in the gutter, and the aged Jehus of the rickety hackney-coaches, waiting at their stands, stood up on their boxes to huzza. So did slaveys in mob caps leaning out of upper windows, and pale-faced merchants' clerks hurrying along the pavements to their counting-houses. Even the old blind Tobits, who leant against the railings of the Mansion House, came running after the clattering hoofs, clutching their wallets, staves and crutches, their dogs barking beside them.

As the stately Muscovite, with a smile on his little curving mouth, threaded his way through the long defde of Coleman Street and across the cobbled immensities of Finsbury Square, the wealth and splendour of the City became ever more apparent. The shop-windows with their silks, muslins and calicoes, china and glass-ware, jewels and silver, glittered with everything the heart of man could desire. The streets, unlike those of Continental cities, were wide and clean, with sweepers plying their
trade with doffed cap at every
crossing. The pavements were thronged with citizens in high hats and neat broadcloth, men with big noses, lantern jaws and resolute mouths, loose-limbed young giants whose frank looks bespoke the assurance of perfect freedom, brightly-coloured, elegant gowned girls carrying shopping baskets, children bowling hoops, females with exuberant faces and billowing breasts, paunchy old men with grog-blossom complexions and heaving buttocks, workmen in aprons and padded leather jackets, raree-show men carrying the mysteries of their trade on their backs, women selling canaries from wicker cages on church walls. There were no police to control them, yet there was no confusion. And behind the facade of the unassuming houses the commerce of the universe was being carried on, as clerks entered into ledgers transactions which had drawn into the Thames the products of America, Africa and the Indies and sent them out again, enriched and transformed by the skill of England's artificers and the foresight and courage of her capitalists.

Along either side of the long straight City Road the houses grew thinner. The Czar crossed Old Street, catching a glimpse of the gloomy facade of St. Luke's hospital for the insane, with its Hogarthian figures of Melancholy and Raving Madness; then followed the highway westwards across decaying fields where market gardens and scraggy hedgerows gave way to the sprawl of monotonous, unfinished rows and cre
scents of th
in-bricked, two-storeyed, jerry-built houses. The scents of June meadows mingled with the acrid smell of brick-kilns, labourers in dust-stained fustian leant against the posts, and vegetable-carts, donkeys with panniers, and top-heavy, elongated stage-coaches competed for the crest of the road. Beyond the premises of the New River Water Company and the half-rustic theatre of Sadler's Wells, where nightly a young clown called Grimaldi held the Cockney apprentices entranced, the highway passed through Pentonville. Here wooden palings took the place of pavements, and cottages with cobbled roofs succeeded streets and terraces, and, where the City stretched its long, polypus arm into the Middlesex meadows, a new town of small houses nestled among the elms to the north, inhabited by clerks and retired tradesmen, some of whom could be seen at their doors tending minute gardens. A mile farther on, past the Islington turnpike, another brand-new settlement of terraced brick boxes, each with fanlight and tenuous, pathetic aspiration to gentility and elegance, housed yet another community of clerks—the acolytes of England's new commercial religion.
¹

As the Czar continued westwards along the old track from Islington to Paddington—now the northern border of the capital—the landscape took on a more countrified aspect. The highway was lined with gardens and pleasure-bowers with wooden arbours and mulberry trees—the resort of city tradesmen's famihes on summer Sabbaths. To the north the fields, dotted with dairy-farms and merchants' week-end boxes, gently climbed the wooded crests of Highgate and Hampstead. To the south the new streets and squares of Bloomsbury and Marylebone were only a meadow's length away, ending—a little incongruously for so much magnificence—in a rough builder's paling covered with advertising bills. It seemed incredible to the Czar that so many private citizens should have the wealth to build and inhabit such houses. At one point on the highway workmen were busy on the foundations of a new town which the Regent, taking advantage of the reversion of Marylebone Park to the Crown, was planning to rival Napoleon's unfinished western
faubourg
of Paris. Here an enormous circus of aristocratic mansions, grouped round elysian groves and lawns, was to look southwards to Carlton House down an imperial avenue.

After passing the Yorkshire Stingo pleasure gardens at Lisson Grove and Mr. Lord's cricket ground—now scheduled for building —the Czar reached the Edgware Road at the half-mile stone and, turning south, saw before him the wooden Tyburn turnpike and the northern wall of Hyde Park. Even here, where a few years before all had been country, a continuous line of houses bordered the roadway to the east. Only westwards, where their windows looked across the Paddington meadows to the heights beyond West-bourne, and herds of pigs were fattening for the London hotels, did the country seem secure from the encroachments of the town.
²

During the next three weeks the Czar and his companions saw— from the outside—something of London's life. They visited its public

¹
It was here, at Somers Town, that a few years later Charles Dickens, who was to voice their aspirations and chronicle their lives of seedy struggle, came to live with his father.

²
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II. 18. See also Chancellor, Plate 79; Simond, I, 29-30. For this description of London as seen by Alexander on his early morning ride through the City, see
inter alia,
Ackermann,
Microcosm, passim;
Acketmann,
Repository,
I, 102, 187, 330; II, 50; Ashton, II, 200-1, 213, 228, 232-6, 277-9; John Britton,
passim;
Borrow,
Lavengro;
Broughton,
n,
153;