CHAPTER XV

HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS

I have seen various places. . . . which have been rendered interesting by great men and their works; I seem to have made friends with them in their own houses; to have walked and talked, and suffered and enjoyed with them. . . . Even in London I find the principle hold good in me. . . . I once had duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a neighbourhood in which Dryden lived; and though nothing could be more commonplace, and I used to be tired to the heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out of my way purely that I might pass through Gerrard Street, and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant thought.”—

Leigh Hunt.

"Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shellfish which builds all manner of smaller shell into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is."-Oliver Wendell Holmes.

THE most curious thing about London houses, and especially characteristic of our national reserve, is the fact that we can, as a rule, tell nothing at all about them until we get inside the sacred enclosure. A Londoner's house is the shell that hides him from the world; our houses are, to the foreigner, as enigmatic and as exclusive as we ourselves. But, once past the magic gateway, once past the Cerberus at the door, you come upon an interior often unguessed and undreamed of. The contrast is striking. What can be more dully monotonous,

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more unromantic, than the row of brick and stucco housefronts that face the average large square or street? Yet it is ten to one that, inside, hardly one of these will exactly resemble the other, either in taste, architecture, or even general plan. Even the long unlovely street" of Tennyson's disapproval may, and does, often hide unsuspected treasures. Who, for instance, would suspect the existence of the Greek bas-reliefs, the painted

ceilings, the colonnades and statues in some of the old Bloomsbury houses? Who would imagine the curious "Soane Museum" in the quiet house in Lincoln's Inn Fields? the dignified Georgian spaciousness in the old mansions of Bedford Square? the gorgeous interior of the sombre houses of Bruton Street? the picture-galleries of Piccadilly and Mayfair? or the Eastern magnificence and opulence of some of the

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Park Lane mansions? For in London, as a rule, there are but few external signs to denote wealth. Even in our riches, we do not wear our heart on our sleeve. From a survey of these, as a rule, unimposing façades, we can imagine the uninitiated foreigner wondering where in the world the people of the richest city in the universe live. He may, even if intelligent, wander at large through London, and notice nothing of beauty, or even of interest. Was it not Madame de Stael who, lodged as she was in uninspiring Argyll Street, said unkindly, but not, perhaps, without some reason, with regard to her immediate surroundings that "London was a province in brick"? But London houses have other and deeper associations than those of mere riches; the association with mighty spirits of the past, poets dead and gone, great men of action, kings, warriors, statesmen ; the infinite multitude of those who, "being dead, yet live." And in some cases, even though the houses themselves have vanished, yet the places where they stood are still sacred. Thus, though it is perhaps difficult to define the exact boundaries of the old Stuart Palace of Whitehall, or to say where was the special site of the historic Cockpit,-yet, do they not lend a glory and an attraction to all the district of Westminster? Do not the purlieus of the unromantic Borough High Street, murky as these often are, recall Chaucer's famous Tabard Inn, of Canterbury pilgrims' fame? and does not the much-abused Griffin, on its Temple Bar pedestal, memorialise the older and too obstructive arch, where of old the dreadful heads of political scapegoats were displayed?

Vanished, and every year still vanishing, treasures! Sooner or later, no doubt, the edifices made sacred by history and association must go the way of all brick and masonry ; yet even such landmarks as Turner's poor riverside cottage at Chelsea, or Carlyle's modest abode in Cheyne Walk, it will be sad to part with. That curious humanity that Charles Dickens gave to houses makes itself again felt in their fall; dwellings are not immortal, any more than were their great occupants. There is

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no picturesque decay in London; what is not of use must go ; it dare not cumber the precious ground. Therefore, the few remaining timbered fronts of London are gone or going; only recently some picturesque old red-roofed houses, in the close vicinity of New Oxford Street, were condemned and destroyed; Staple Inn, indeed, has been saved and patched up, owing to the prompt action of a band of public benefactors. Blocks of houses, forming whole streets, are continually washed away in the tide of progress; Parliament Street has disappeared; the old Hanway Street, as it once was, has lately gone; Holywell Street is of the past; the demolition of this latter, though, indeed, urgently needed for the widening of the "straits" of the Strand, was not without its special sadness. The decay of houses that are at once picturesque and historical is, of course, doubly afflicting; yet even ugly houses often retain the charm of association to those who know what memories are bound up with them. Here romance and history serve to lend the beauty that is lacking. Thus, Ruskin's prosaic home in Hunter Street, Thackeray's commonplace mansion in Onslow Square; the house in Half Moon Street where Shelley sat "like a young lady's lark," in a projecting window, "hanging outside for air and song; even that dark corner in Mecklenburgh Square where Sala kept his curios and bric-à-brac, all have their peculiar charm. Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square, Fleet Street; the so-called "Old Curiosity Shop" in Lincoln's Inn Fields; John Hunter's house in Leicester Square

-are all threatened with demolition. And, even apart from historic interest, how sad is the frequent fall of London's old landmarks! Tottering buildings, mere derelicts of time, old houses

"whose ancient casements stare, With sad, dim eyes, at the departing years."

Instinct as they are with the pathos of humanity, the sword of Damocles hangs over them all.

If great men's houses, or the houses that great men have ever,

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temporarily, lived in, could all be designated by some unobtrusive memorial tablet, such, for instance, as the Carlyle bas relief at Chelsea, or even a plain inscription such as those recently placed on John Ruskin's birthplace in Hunter Street, Reynolds's house in Leicester Square, and Sir Isaac Newton's in St. Martin's Street,—what an interest would it not lend to even "long and unlovely" London streets! For the romance of houses is not divined by instinct ; and even the taste of a Morris or a Rossetti has not always left its mark on their London abodes. That Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Darwin, the Rossettis, William Morris, have all lived in and about Bloomsbury, is not patent to the casual visitor. Does not even the plain inscription, "Poeta Inglese, Shelly," (sic) lend an added glamour to the Lung' Arno of Pisa?

The dividing line between history and fiction is not always very strongly marked ; and this leads us to consider yet another aspect of the question. A curious literary interest sometimes attaches to certain houses, an interest hardly less deep for being partly, or even purely, fictitious. Among the many novelists who have made themselves responsible for this, none, perhaps, have been more prominent than Charles Dickens. Dickens, whose knowledge of London was, like his own Sam Weller's, "extensive and peculiar," has invested certain houses, certain localities, with an almost human sentiment and pathos. Thackeray has also done much, yet not so much as his contemporary, towards making London stones famous. The tenants of "historic houses" in this sense-houses on whom these and other writers have conferred immortality-are, of course, merely the "ghosts of ghosts," and yet, how real, how persistent are they, with the majority of us! Harry Warrington enjoying the May sun from his pleasant window in Bond Street; old Colonel Newcome kneeling among the "Grey Friars" of the Charterhouse; the pretty old house and garden in Church. Street, Kensington, where Miss Thackeray's charming heroine, Dolly, lived; little David Copperfield at the waterside