Out and About London. Thomas Burke
passing the tragedy of the closing pages, the book and the life it pictures call to every one of us with song in his blood and the spirit of April in his heart.
It first appeared as a feuilleton in a Paris daily, and Murger, with characteristic insouciance, wrote his instalments only a few hours before the time when they were due for the printer; and when he was stumped for material, he invented a little story. Hence that singularly beautiful tale, slammed into the middle of the book – the Story of Francine's Muff – which forms the opening scene of Puccini's opera founded on the novel. The book has neither balance nor cohesion, and in this it catches its note from its theme. It is a cinematographic succession of scenes, tender and passionate and gay; swift and hectic. He invented and employed the picture-palace manner in literature before the picture-palace was even conceived. The very style is feverish, and from it one visualizes the desperately merry Bohemian slaving with pen and paper in his high garret, and whipping his flagging brain with fierce stimulant, while the printer's boy sits on the doorstep.
It stands alone. There is no book in the literature of the world quite like it. It is the challenge of youth and beauty to the world; and if we – grown wise and weary in the struggle – find a note of ferocity and extravagance in the challenge, then let us judge with understanding, and remember that it is a case of the fine and the weak against the brutal and the ignorant. Murger's voice is the voice of protesting youth. He is illogical; so is youth. He is furious; so is youth. He is heroic; so is youth. He is half-mad with indignation and half-mad with the joy of living; so is youth. It is by its very waywardness and disregard of values that the book captures us.
There is no other book in which the spirit of Paris breathes more easily. Here we have the essential Paris, just as in Thomas Dekker we have the essential London. Poets, novelists and essayists have set themselves again and again to ensnare the elusive Paris between the covers of a book; but Murger alone – though he writes of Paris in 1830 – has succeeded. Those who have never been to Paris should first read his book; then, when they do go, they will experience the sense of coming back to some known place.
It was this insidious book that first tempted youth to escape from a hidebound world; showed it the way out – a way beset by delightful hazards. It offered to all the golden boys and girls a new Utopia, and they were fain to visit it. That it was a false world troubled them not at all. The green glass, the delirious midnight hours, and the pale loveliness of Mimi and Musette were, perhaps, shackles as binding and as fearful as those of Convention. But anything to escape from the irk and thrall of their narrow realities; so away they went, and the end of the story is written in the archives of the Morgue.
After seventy years, however, the middle way has been found. There are few tragedies to-day in the Quartier Latin, and very little gaiety or kindliness; none of the old adventurous spirit. Things are going too well in the studio-world these days. Chelsea and Montmartre have been invaded by the American dilettanti, whose lives are one long struggle to be Bohemians on a thousand a year. If, however, there be those who regard this state of things as an improvement on the old, then let it be remembered that this way was only found after Murger had wrecked his own life and the lives of those who followed so gaily the unkind path down which he led them. It is a pitiful catalogue; the more pitiful since so many of the young dead are anonymous – the young men who might, had they lived, have given the world so much of beauty, but who were unable to pull up short of the precipice. Some of them, of course, we know: Gerard de Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Ernest Dowson; and their London monument is the Café Royal.
At half-past nine all fun ceased, but we had picked up a bunch from Fleet Street, one of whom was taking home two bottles of whisky. So we moved to "another place," and ordered black coffees which drank tolerably well – after some swift surreptitious business with a corkscrew. Later, we strolled across Oxford Street to what remained of the German Quarter. We visited various coffee-bars, where our genial comrade with the bottles again did his duty; did it beautifully, did it splendidly, did it with Vine Street at his ear. And in a grey street off Tottenham Court Road we found a poor man's cabaret. In the back room of a coffee-bar an entertainment was proceeding. Two schonk boys, in straw hats, were at a piano, assisted by an anæmic girl and a real coal-black coon, who gave us the essential rag-times of the South. The place was packed with the finest collection of cosmopolitan toughs I had ever seen in one room. The air, physical and moral, was hardly breathable, and as the boys were spoiling for a row, one misinterpreted glance would have brought trouble – and lots of it. At different tables, voices were raised in altercation, when not in lusty song, and the general impression the place gave me was that it was a squalid, dirty model of the old Criterion Long Bar. All the meaner, more desperate citizens of the law-breaking world were gathered here; and, though we had broken a few by-laws ourselves that night, we were not anxious to be led into any more shattering of the Doraic tables. So at midnight we adjourned to "another place," and drank dry gingers until three o'clock in the morning. Then, to a Turkish Bath, and so to bed; not very merry, but as cheered in the spirit as the humble, useless citizen is allowed to be in a miserable, hole-and-corner way in war-time.
It had been a sorry experience, this round of visits, in 1917, to quarters last seen in 1914; and it made me curious to know how other familiar nooks had received the wanton assault of kings. In the haphazard sketches that follow I have tried to catch the external war-time atmosphere of a few of the old haunts, so far as a poor reporter may. Later, perhaps, a better hand than mine will discover for us the essential soul of London under siege; and these rough notes may be of some service, since all remembrance of that time was blown away from most minds by the maroons of Armistice Day.
BACK TO DOCKLAND
From my earliest perceiving moments, docks and railway stations have been, for me, the most romantic spots of the city in which I was born and bred. Quays and wharves, cuts, basins, reaches, steel tracks and passenger trains, and all that belonged to the life of the waterside and the railway, spoke to me of illimitable travel and distant, therefore desirable, things.
This feeling I share, I suppose, with millions of other men and children who have been reared in coast cities, and whose minds respond to the large invitations offered by sooty smoke-stacks or the dim outline of a station roof. And if these things pierced the complacence of one's days in the past, how much deeper and more significant their message in those four dreadful years, when men fared forth in ships and trains to new perils unimagined in the quieter years.
That apart, I see docks and railway stations not in their economic or historic aspect, but in the picturesque light, as, perhaps, the most emphatic glory of London. For London's major architectural beauties I care little. Abbeys, cathedrals, old churches, museums, leave me cold; the fine shudder about the shoulders I suffer most sharply before those haphazard wizardries of brick and iron flung together by the exigencies of modern commerce. Their fortuitous ugliness achieves a new beauty. A random eye-full of such townscapes may yield only an impression of squalor, but many acres of squalor produce, by their very vastness, something of the sublime. Belching chimneys, flaring furnaces, the solemn smell of wet coal mingled with that of tar and bilge-water, and the sight of brown sails and surly funnels and swinging cranes – in these misshapen masses I find that delight that others receive from contemplation of Salisbury Cathedral or a spire of Wren's.
The docks of London lie closely in a group – Wapping, Shadwell, Rotherhithe, Poplar, Limehouse, Isle of Dogs, Blackwall, and North Woolwich, and each possesses its own fine-flavoured character. You may know at once, without other evidence than that afforded by the sense of smell, whether you stand in London Docks, Surrey Commercial Docks, West India Docks, Millwall Docks, or Victoria and Albert Docks. To me, the West and East India Docks are soaked in the bright odour and placid clamour of the East, with something of feminine allure in the quality of their appeal. Victoria and Albert Docks I find gaunt and colourless. Surrey Commercial Docks remind me of some coarse merchant from the Royal Exchange, stupidly vulgar in speech, clothes and character.
The East and West India Docks I have treated elsewhere. Of the others, the most exciting are Millwall and London Docks – though of the latter I fear one must now speak in the past tense. Shadwell High Street and St. George's, which border the London Docks, are no longer themselves. All is now charged with gloom, broken only by the anæmic lights of a few miserable mission-halls and coffee-bars for the