As We Are and As We May Be, Walter Besant [the reading strategies book TXT] 📗

should be attempted and these resolutions passed. For my own part, considering the needlessness of drink in such a place, the abundant facilities provided outside, and the enormous additional trouble, danger, and expense entailed by letting drink be sold in a place where there will be every evening thousands of young people, I am quite sure that the governing body--that is to say, the chosen representatives of East London--will never admit it within their walls.

We do not trust the working man. We have given over to him the whole of the power. All the power there is we have given to him, because he stands in an enormous majority. We have made him absolute master of this realm of Great Britain and Ireland. What could we do more for a man whom we blindly and implicitly trusted? Yet the working man, for whom we have done so much, we have not yet begun to trust.



SUNDAY MORNING IN THE CITY

On Saturday afternoon, when the last of the clerks bangs the great door behind him and steps out of the office on his way home; when the shutters of the warehouses are at last all closed; there falls upon the street a silence and loneliness which lasts from three o'clock on Saturday till eight o'clock on Monday--a sleep unbroken for forty-one long hours. In the main arteries, it is true, there is always a little life; the tramp of feet never ceases day or night in Fleet Street or Cheapside. But in all the narrow streets branching north and south, east and west, of the great thoroughfares there is silence--there is sleep. This Sabbath of forty hours' duration is absolutely unparalleled in any other City of the world. There is no other place, there never has been any other place, in which not only work ceases, but where the workers also disappear. In that far-off City of the Rabbis called Sambatyon, where live the descendants of the Ten Tribes, the river which surrounds and protects the City with its broad and mighty flood, too strong for boats to cross, ceases to flow on the Sabbath; but it is not pretended that the people cease to live there. Of no other City can it be said that it sleeps from Saturday night till Monday morning.

An attempt is made to awaken the City every Sunday morning when the bells begin to ring, and there is as great and joyful a ringing from every church tower or steeple as if the bells were calling the faithful, as of old, by the hundred thousand; they go on ringing because it is their duty; they were hung up there for no other purpose; hidden away in the towers, they do not know that the people have all gone away, and that they ring to empty houses and deserted streets. For there is no response. At most one may see a solitary figure dressed in black stuff creeping stealthily along like a ghost on her way from the empty house to the empty church. When the bells leave off silence falls again, there is no one in the street. One's own footsteps echo from the wall; we walk along in a dream; old words and old rhymes crowd into the brain. It is a dead City--a City newly dead--we are gazing upon the dead.


Life and thought have gone away
Side by side.
All within is dark as night.
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door
So frequent on its hinge before.


Silence everywhere. The blinds are down in every window of the tall stack of offices, the doors are all closed, if there are shutters they are up, there are no carte in the streets, no porters carry burdens, there are no wheelbarrows, there is no more work done of any kind or sort. Even the taverns and the eating-shops are shut--no one is thinking of work. To-morrow--Monday--poverty will lift again his cruel arm, and drive the world to work with crack of whip. The needle-woman will appear again with her bundle of work; the porters, the packers, the carmen, the clerks, the merchants themselves will all come back--the vast army of those who earn their daily bread in the City will troop back again. But as for to-day, nobody works; we are all at rest; we are at peace; we are taking holiday.

This is the day--this is the time--for those who would study the City and its monuments. It is only on this day, and at this time, that the churches are all open. It is only on this day, and at this time, that a man may wander at his ease and find out how the history of the past is illustrated by the names of the streets, by the houses and the sites, and by the few old things which still remain, even by the old things, names and all, which have perished. The area of the City is small; its widest part, from Blackfriars to the Tower, is but a single mile in length, and its greatest depth is no more that half a mile But it is so crowded and crammed full of sites sacred to this or that memory of its long life of two thousand busy years, there is so much to think of in every street, that a pilgrim may spend all his Sunday mornings for years and never get to the end of London City. I should hardly like to say how many Sunday mornings I have myself spent in wandering about the City, Yet I can never go into it without making some new discovery. Only last week, for instance, I discovered in the very midst of the City, in its most crowded part, nothing less than a house--with a private garden. I had thought that the last was destroyed about four years ago when they pulled down a certain noble old merchant's mansion, No, there is one other stall left; perhaps more. There are gardens, I know, belonging to certain Companies' Halls; there is the ivy-planted garden of Amen Court; there are burying-grounds laid out as gardens; but this is the only house I know in the City which has a private garden at the back. One must not say where it is, otherwise that garden will be seized and built upon. This the owner evidently fears, for he has surrounded it by a high wall, so that no one shall be able to seize it, no rich man shall covet it, and offer to buy it and build great warehouses upon it, and the underground railway shall not dig it out and swallow it up.

In such journeyings and wanderings one must not go with an empty mind, otherwise there will be neither pleasure nor profit. The traveller, says Emerson, brings away from his travels precisely what he took there. Not his mind but his climate, says Horace, does he change who travels beyond the seas. In other words, if a man who knows nothing of archaeology goes to see a collection of flint implements, or a person ignorant of art goes to see a picture gallery, he comes away as ignorant as he went, because flint implements by themselves, or pictures by themselves, teach nothing. They can teach nothing. So, if a man who knows nothing of history should stand before Guildhall on the quietest Sunday in the whole year he will see nothing but a building, he will hear nothing but the fluttering wings of the pigeons. And if he wanders in the streets he will see nothing but tall and ugly houses, all with their blinds pulled down. Before he goes on a pilgrimage in the City he must first prepare his mind by reading history. This is not difficult to find. If he is in earnest he will get the great 'Survey of London,' by Strype and Stow, published in the year 1720 in two folio volumes. If this is too much for him, there are Peter Cunningham, Timbs, Thornbury, Walford, Hare, Loftie, and a dozen others, all of whom have a good deal to tell him, though there is little to tell, save a tale of destruction, after Strype and Stow.

Thus, before he begins he should learn something of Roman London, Saxon London, Norman London, of London medieval, London under the Tudors, London of the Stuarts, and London of the Georges. He should learn how the municipality arose, gaining one liberty after another, and letting go of none, but all the more jealously guarding each as a sacred inheritance; how the trade of the City grew more and more; how the Companies were formed, one after the other, for the protection of trade interests. Then he should learn how the Sovereign and great nobles have always kept themselves in close connection with the City, even in the proudest times of the Barons, even in the days when the nobles were supposed to have most despised the burgesses and the men of trade. He should learn, besides, how the City itself, its houses, and its streets, grew and covered up the space within the wall, and spread itself without; he should learn the meaning of the names--why one street is called College Hill and another Jewry and another Minories. Armed with such knowledge as this, every new ramble will bring home to him more and more vividly the history of the past. He will never be solitary, even at noon on Sunday morning even in Suffolk Street or Pudding Lane, because all the streets will be thronged with figures of the dead, silent ghosts haunting the scenes where they lived and loved and died, and felt the fierce joys of venture, of risk, and enterprise.

But let no man ramble aimlessly. It is pleasant, I own, to wander from street to street idly remembering what has happened here; but it is more profitable to map out a walk beforehand, to read up all that can be ascertained about it before sallying forth, and to carry a notebook to set down the things that may be observed or discovered.

Or, which is another method, he may consider the City with regard to certain divisions of subjects. He may make, for instance, a special study of the London churches. The City, small as it is, formerly contained nearly 150 parishes, each with its church, its burying-ground, and its parish charities. Some of these were not rebuilt after the Great Fire, some have been wickedly and wantonly destroyed in these latter days. A few yet survive which were not burned down in that great calamity. These are St. Helen and St. Ethelburga; St. Katherine Cree, the last expiring effort of Gothic, consecrated by Archbishop Laud; All Hallows, Barking, and St. Giles. Most of the existing City churches were built by Wren, as you know. I think I have seen them nearly all, and in every one, however externally unpromising, I have found something curious, Interesting, and unexpected--some wealth of wood-carving, some relic of the past snatched from the names, some monument, some association with the medieval city.

Of course, it is well to visit these churches on the Saturday afternoon or Monday morning, when they are swept before and after the service; but as one is never quite certain of finding them open, it is, perhaps, best to take them after service on the Sunday. If you show a real interest in the church, you will find the pew-opener or verger pleased to let you see everything, not only the monuments and the carvings in the church, but also the treasures of the vestry, in which are preserved many interesting things--old maps, portraits, old deeds and gifts, old charities--now all clean swept away