Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the common level than it once was, as often happens with rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinction of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away, Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approached, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt. This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving. It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land they were to ennoble with the first great republican experiment of our race, after the commonwealth failed to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because of a want of imagination in both people and protector, who could not conceive of a state without an hereditary ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father, till another son of another father came back to urge his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time and place; but we ourselves who grew up where there had never been kings to craze the popular fancy, could not conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years and more, and even then some of us thought of having one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom-house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did, last.

  We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled away to cool themselves in different parts of the American wilderness. It was much later that the place became famous for the declaration of the three tailors of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have begun, a public appeal with the words: “We, the people of England,” and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street is more suggestive of them than of those who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and commonplace thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street, and who so largely form the ancestry of the American people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should be glad to think characteristic of our nation in one of the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted American bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better homes than the London poor could otherwise have known.

  Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of freedom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, under which we walked the length of the long, dull, noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth colony came from. The church is an uninteresting structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly believed that some part of the Clink was still to be detected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave’s or St. Tooley’s, and wandered on through their shades, among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain floury laborers who had cleared a space among the wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and, above all, the Globe.

  Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not in mind. England has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place and extending his vast shadow over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now another embarrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St. Saviour’s Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour’s. Outside it has been pitilessly restored in a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural beauty lingers, especially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard’s sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the drama
tist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare’s younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the “moral Gower” who so insufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St. Saviour’s, and we were almost a year too early for the painted window which now commemorates him.

  One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed through, and I dare say they were not the best, the broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground and fall from the clouds. But many people live there, and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it was one o’clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting by the early closing which shuts the stores of London so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our way through them to the parapet for a final look at that stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a kingdom.

  [Footnote: While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific erudition of my friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my statements. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they prove mistaken.]

  We were going from St. Saviour’s in Southwark where Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton’s effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our history through his daughter’s elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wantonness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in London. One curled herself round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young sycamores flicker over her velvet flank; the third arched a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accompanying us into the church. There was not much for us to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire, and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much because he had directed the publication of the first complete version of the English Bible, as because he had borne the name of a chief character in The Blithedale Romance. I am afraid that if the cat could have supposed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I should not have known how to justify myself by explaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illustriously connected with America through that coincidence than many more historical scenes.

  The early closing had already prevailed so largely in the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree’s at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for getting into any church, but we looked about us too carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law of Virginia. That was what we said to console ourselves afterwards; but now, since we were, however unwittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that his part in them was alleged against him, and did something to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is said to have helped in designing the church, and that the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arundel could have found his bones to put it over, are sufficiently irrelevant details.

  The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after paying this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the former occupying the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better when, by an accident happier than that which befell us at St. Catherine Cree’s, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-Yorker’s interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship’s company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help the Dutch found the Tammany r�gime, which still flourishes at the Hudson’s mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the misgiving which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set him right. “Oh, ‘e did mike it ‘ere, sir. They’ve been and searched the records,” she said, so that the reader now has it on the best authority.

  I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assurance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the blocks of the wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story. London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories.

  As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate Street to the sequestered place before the church of the Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dissolved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to the “Germans” as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beg
innings of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it. Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch, renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways, notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters and parcels would be received there for them; this somehow intimated that the refugees could not have found it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half round the world. Cunningham says that “the church contains some very good decorated windows, and will repay examination,” but, like the early-closing shops all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday afternoon, and we had to come away contenting ourselves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impartially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker travellers, but they will readily find the church in the rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts there, and judge for themselves.

  Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bowbells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the several prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it without making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to jail in spite of the jury’s verdict of acquittal; such things could then be easily done. In self-justification they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that made a very perfect case for their worships, as the reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth in Maria Webb’s story of The Penns and the Penningtons. As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh converted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote to him in Newgate: “Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests to the end of the world ... Live in love. Shun all manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He will bless you.”