Walter Lionel George

“ There are other places, fanciful as Verrey’s. There is Bellomo’s, in Jermyn Street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow back room filled with agreeable young couples. Bellomo’s is rather like a young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its wallpaper of faded gold, and its moulded, early Victorian frieze. There is something solid about its dumb waiters; Bellomo’s is somehow benevolent.
But then Verrey’s and Bellomo’s are within limited flights of fancy. The curious gastronome will, in London, easily find queerer places and foods. ”

“ To lunch at the Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober; its luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, too, is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment ”

“ The whole object of civilisation is to pamper us, to get rid of nature. Nature is all very well in the summer numbers of the magazines; it looks very pink and scented with hay, but real nature is rather cold, damp, earwiggy, dark, always ill-drained, and much less healthy than London. The object of civilisation is to reduce the struggle for life, and to make the material side of it pleasant enough to be forgotten. ”

“ PLAYGROUNDS It is strange that the theatre should matter in a nation such as ours, which has gained a reputation for liberalism and tolerance, being tolerant because it cared for nothing, and liberal because it understood little. The vogue of the theatre reflects the character of urban England, which is as frivolous as that of urban Italy is dour; because it is the symbol of pleasure, easily attained and still more easily digested, it can always find room in the newspaper, where the affairs of the nation flicker and the claims of art are unmet. ”

“ The cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on horseback, by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, for the first time, movement could be reproduced. The reproduction of movement was a new pleasure, and so the mob clamoured for it. Carry yourself back to your first film and, be you as highbrowed as you like, you will not deny that you enjoyed those febrile races, those people falling out of windows, crashing through ceilings, the violent opening and shutting of doors, the rush of flying crockery. ”

“ I like it better, with its bay windows, so built that no article of furniture will fit it, with its awful ingle nooks, its sham gables and its sham dormer windows, than the awful old Georgian houses near Lamb’s Conduit Street, where, crowded together under a ceiling still flecked with gold, on which naked cherubs sprawl, a dozen Russian furriers sit and scratch. For the hideous modern house can at least be clean; it is small; it is washable; a through draught can be arranged; a very little it opens the window on life. ”

“ When one looks at the map, particularly if it is on a large6 scale, London looks like a splash, rather longer than it is broad, with railway lines radiating in all directions, rather like a spider’s web, the centre being tenanted by whoever you like. And one thinks of Dick Whittington gaily treading in the spider’s web. But, in fact, one does not come out of the everywhere into the here of London. One melts into London, and one hardly knows how one comes to abandon the rest of the world. ”

“ They sing well, these young women, they dance well; they do it too well; women of the older tradition, such as Victoria Monks and Nellie Wallace are still themselves: they do not do it so well, but they do it. These are not trained, like the young women, but they have grown up and discovered themselves; they do not act joy or distress: they cut joy or distress out of common life and lay it down on the bare planks. All that is going, for the music-hall is growing refined. ”

“ Indeed, that is what oppresses the curious when he considers the wanderers: what becomes of them when they are no longer strong enough to ply their strange trades and to range the world? Are our workhouses full of crossing-sweepers who sweep no more? Perhaps it is not so tragic, after all, to have been a crossing-sweeper and to end in the workhouse; I cannot imagine a crossing-sweeper murmuring with Mr Kipling: ‘Me that ’ave been what I’ve been!’ for he has never been more than what Mr Tim Healy would call a movable fixture. ”

“ True, in his halls appear all those men who carry on the old tradition and glorify the flesh: George Robey, Sam Stern, Ernie Mayne, Sam Mayo, who sing the crude joy of poor life, which is found in drunken sprees and conjugal misunderstandings, but which yet is true life. Little by little their songs grow less broad. Sam Mayo would not, at a Stoll hall, sing the ditty which used to delight the old Middlesex: ‘Ching Chang, wing wang, bing, bang, boo,’ nor would Dutch Daly sing about the larks in May. Our old comedians are limiting their humours, discolouring their noses, rolling their umbrellas. ”

“ The true suburbs lie farther out. You have to go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marché before you can find such a place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete. Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. ”

“ Thus, when one passes through London, from old Victorian street to inner suburb, then to outer suburb, until one comes to the spreading country of Tooting Bec Common, when one has seen the homes of the rich, their marble solemnity, when one has seen those of the poor in the grimy suburbs that cluster, and emerges at last into those clean suburban streets, where in almost every window an aspidistra wilts in its pot, one may grow a little doubtful of the social revolution. We educate the poor, and sometimes we give them their chance: the next step is the aspidistra. ”

“ But under all that, under all that theatrical charm was buried the same old thing, the bad old house made to fit the bad new time.
Yet, the poor are not as unhappy as they look. They do not, in the accepted sense, live a life of pleasure, but to say that they have no pleasures, or can have none because they are poor, is a mistake. The poor have cheap pleasures, pleasures which many of us do not care for, and they take no part in what we choose to call pleasures. If I were compelled to say something sweeping, I should say that the rich have less pleasures than the poor ”

“ In London, few streets and not many squares are alike. The detestable institution of the leasehold has had this good result, that few ground landlords in central London have built the houses they own. They have merely imposed upon the leaseholder the obligation to build a good house worth so much. As a result, the leaseholder has built what he fancied, and, therefore, London is not the result of the schemes of some horrid central office, but of the oddities and taste of thousands of men. ”

“ I have seen Ernie Mayne, Ella Shields, and others rouse the house with one song and half-fail with another. The theatre-goer, who, on the whole, is not a music-hall-goer, is usually either in a smug condition, or over-conscious of his digestive process. Nearly all the pit and upper circle, and the bulk of the dress circle, feel that they are indulging in a respectable spree. ”

“ For let there be no confusion: art and the theatre are not the same thing; almost one might say that if a play possesses artistic quality it holds a passport to eternity, with this difference, that many things lost in eternity are remembered. A little more may be said of this further on.
London has always been a city of theatres, perhaps because we have, for many centuries, laboured under the Puritan tradition: its bitterness has attached to the theatre a glamour foreign to it in hotter lands. ”

“ The secret of a city’s exploration does not lie in the dutiful following of itineraries, but rather in a lover-like submission to its moods. One should eat in various places, not only within the stereotyped square mile which, in London, in Paris, or in Petrograd, is loudly labelled as the foreigner’s restaurant. One must seek culinary adventure far afield, at Harrow, and at Tulse Hill, in Piccadilly and Norton Folgate; and let me assure you that there exists a subtle difference between the cooking at the Cheapside A.B.C. and its fellow in the Brixton Road. ”

“ It is a terrible commentary upon fame that when you erect a statue to a man he becomes invisible. You pass a statue every day, but you never look at it, you pass it. Nobody cares for statues, except the birds, who make them a venue for love and war. Christopher Wren did say that if you required a monument you should look about you; thus does the London population. ”

“ People less definable float through my mind: a young girl who had been told that she looked like a Russian, and thenceforth appeared attired in a red sarafan; a young man with black locks massed upon his eyebrows, locks he often tossed back to show the running water of his pale eyes. There was a young woman who believed in asceticism; as she looked rather like a brick, I was told that her beliefs had never been put to a rude test. There was another young woman, too, who seriously informed any marble table that she believed in reincarnation, and that within her breathed the soul of Shelley. ”

“ Yes, Ernie Mayne may still sing his songs of Araby, but little by little he is being borne down by the American raconteur, whose impropriety is always in the best of taste, by the ragtime dancer, by the wandering Italian fiddler, by the respectable eccentric at the piano, by the juggler, by the refined soprano, who sings ‘God send you back to me, over the mighty sea,’ or, ‘There’s a little mother always yearning for the ones that long to roam.’ It’s all getting so clean, so precious pure. The old comedian will not last long. ”

“ She is aloof, alone. She is so entirely under restraint; knows so well how, at last, to let her voice swell and underline her point; she knows so well how not to waste during a song the power of her splendid blue eyes, but to reserve them for that final point. Thus she should wield astonishing power, yet does not quite; she lacks grossness; like Wish Wynne, her art is a little too delicate to get across. ”

“ Or, one upon the steps of a house, the other on a balustrade, they will face each other with swishing tails, and so remain in immense motion within the same spot, an infinity of provocation in every shiver of their sleek flanks; you, human, shall not know whether they are minded to love or war. ”

“ The majority of men seem to approach life as pigs do the trough. Visit a West End restaurant, and you will be sure. In that trough are not only curds and whey, and truffles, and other suitable dainties; but excessive clothes and jewellery, honours, false social values, irrelevant powers; so long as the Gadarene crowd nuzzle and fight about that trough, so long will many of those, who are not Gadarene in the spirit, be infected with envy and desire, so long will they be driven to shrillness and self-advertisement, so long drawn by popularity and repelled by fame. ”

“ When Londoners say ‘London,’ they mean Piccadilly, Selfridges, Covent Garden, that sort of thing, and that is not London. London is Tottenham and Chiswick, the ‘Paragon,’ Mile End, Walker’s Court and what it sells, and the black doss places under the railway arches. London is Houndsditch, where everybody looks bad, and Cornwall Gardens where everybody looks good. London is a congress-house of emotions. ”

“ You can’t drowse in a music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, in his elaborately luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, addresses his first and infinitely disabused bow to the audience, to the time when he calls upon the band to produce the smallest possible scrap of ‘God Save the King,’ and hurries out loyalty on the wings of ragtime, there is no flagging. ”

“ English vice was overrated. Indeed, to this day, I am sure that there is very little vice in England, that the Londoner, particularly, is a flighty creature, who kills virtue with his mouth, who tells unpleasant stories about the deeds of other people, and paints the town red with the assistance of his fancy socks. They are cowards, really, and most of them, when they slip at all, seem to slip ignobly into the rare satisfaction of a purely animal instinct ”