Mystic London, Charles Maurice Davies [best novels of all time TXT] 📗

imposing gate the visitor will find extensive cricket-grounds interspersed with broad pastures, whose flocks are the reverse of Arcadian in hue. Cricket-balls whiz about us like shells at Inkermann; and the suggestive "Thank you" of the scouts forces the passer-by into unwonted activity as he shies the ball to the bowler. Then there are roundabouts uncountable, and gymnasia abundant. There are bosquets for the love-makers, and glassy pools, studded with islands innumerable, over which many a Lady of the Lake steers her shallop, while Oriental sailor-boys canoe wildly along. There are flower-beds which need not blush to be compared with Kew or the Crystal Palace. But it is not with such that we are now concerned. On one of those same lakes over which, on Saturday evening, sailors in embryo float their mimic craft—and one young gentleman, slightly in advance of the rest, directs a very miniature steamship—we see boards suggesting that daily, from four to eight a.m., the Orientals may immerse themselves in the limpid and most tempting waters. The depth, they are paternally informed, increases towards the centre, buoys marking where it is six feet; so that our Eastern friends have no excuse for suicide by drowning.

East London birds are early birds, and to catch them at their bath you must be literally up with the lark. Towards six o'clock is the most fashionable hour for our metropolitan Pactolus; and, as it is some miles distant from what can, by any stretch of courtesy, be called the West End, and as there are no workmen's trains on a Sunday morning, a long walk or cab drive is inevitable for all who would witness the disporting of our amphibious Orientals. Rising thus betimes on a recent "Sunday morning before the bells did ring," I sped me to the bathing pond, judiciously screened off by shrubs from the main path. It was between the appointed hours that I arrived; and, long before I saw anything, the ringing laughter of the young East reached me through the shrubs. Threading the path which led to the lake, I found the water literally alive with men, boys, and hobbledehoys, revelling in the water like young hippopotami on the Nile. Boys were largely in the ascendant—boys from ten to fifteen years of age swam like young Leanders, and sunned themselves on the bank, in the absence of towels, as the preparative to dressing, or smoked their pipes in a state of nature. It is only just to say that while I remained, I heard little if any language that could be called "foul." Very free and easy, of course, were the remarks, and largely illustrative of the vulgar tongue; not without a share of light chaff directed against myself, whose presence by the lake-side puzzled my young friends. I received numerous invitations to "peel" and have a dip; and one young urchin assured me in the most patronizing way possible that he "wouldn't laugh at me" if I could not get on. The language may not have been quite so refined as that which I heard a few days before from the young gentlemen with tall hats and blue ties at Lord's; but I do say advisedly that it would more than bear comparison with that of the bathers in the Serpentine, where my ears have often been assailed with something far worse than anything I heard in East London. In the matter of clothes, too, the apparel of our young friends was indeed Eastern in its simplicity; yet they left it unprotected on the bank with a confidence that did honour to our common humanity in general, and to the regulations of Victoria Park in particular. Swimming in some sort was almost universal among the bathers, showing that their visit to the water was not an isolated event in their existence, but a constant as it is a wholesome habit. The Oriental population were for the most part apparently well fed; and one saw there lithe and active frames, either careering gracefully along in the old style of swimming, or adopting the new and scientific method which causes the human form divine to approach very nearly to the resemblance of a rather excited grampus.

But inexorable Time warns the youthful bathers that they must sacrifice to the Graces; and some amusing incidents occur during the process. Generally speaking, though the amount of attire is not excessive, considerable effort in the way of pinning and hitching is required to get things in their proper places. A young gentleman was reduced to inexpressible grief, and held up to the scorn of his fellow-bathers, by the fact that, in the course of his al fresco toilette, one of his feet went through his inexpressibles in an honourable quarter, instead of proceeding by the proper route; the error interested his friends vastly—for they are as critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their long immersion—for theirs was no transient dip—grew paler still after they had discussed the pipe or cigar demanded of them by rigorous custom. Fashion reigns supreme among the gamins of the East as well as among the ladies of the West. Off they went, however, cleaner and fresher than before—tacitly endorsing by their matutinal amusement the motto that has come down from the philosopher of old, and even now reigns supreme from Bermondsey to Belgravia, that "water is a most excellent thing."

The day may arrive perhaps when, having embanked the Thames, we shall follow suit to the Seine and the Rhine, by tenanting it with cheap baths for the many. Until we do so, the stale joke of the "Great Unwashed" recoils upon ourselves, and is no less symptomatic of defective sanitary arrangements than the possibility of a drought in Bermondsey. But we are forgetting our bathers. They have gone, leaving the place to solitude—some, I hope, home to breakfast, others out among the flower-walks or on the greensward. It is a gloomy, overcast, muggy, unseasonable July morning; and the civil attendant by the lake-side tells me that the gathering has not been so large as usual. The young Orientals—as is the custom of their race—love sunshine. They get little enough of it, Heaven knows. The next bright Sunday morning, any one who happens to be awake between the hours mentioned, and who would like to add to his experiences of metropolitan existence, may do a worse thing, and see many a less pleasant sight, than if he hailed a hansom and drove by the principal entrance of Victoria Park to our Eastern Bath.

CHAPTER XXI. AMONG THE QUAKERS.

There is no more engaging or solemn subject of contemplation than the decay of a religious belief. Right or wrong, by that faith men have lived and died, perhaps for centuries; and one cannot see it pass out from the consciousness of humanity without something more than a cursory thought as to the reasons of its decadence. Being led by exceptional causes to take a more than common interest in those forms of belief which lie beyond the pale of the Church of England, I was attracted by a notice in the public journals that on the following morning the Society of Friends would assemble from all parts of England and open a Conference to inquire into the causes which had brought about the impending decay of their body. So, then, the fact of such decay stood confessed. In most cases the very last persons to realize the unwelcome truth are those who hold the doctrines that are becoming effete. Quakerism must, I felt, be in a very bad condition indeed when its own disciples called together a conference to account for its passing away. Neither men nor communities, as a rule, act crowner's 'quest on their own decease. That faith, it was clear, must be almost past praying for which, disbelieving, as our modern Quietism does, the efficacy of assemblies, and trusting all to the inward illumination of individuals, should yet summon a sort of Quaker Œcumenical Council. I thought I should like to probe this personal light myself, and by inquiring of one or two of the members of the body, learn what they thought of the matter. I was half inclined to array myself in drab, and tutoyer the first of the body I chanced to encounter in my walks abroad. But then it occurred to me how very seldom one did meet a Quaker nowadays except in the "month of Maying." I actually had to cast about for some time before I could select from a tolerably wide and heterogeneous circle of acquaintance two names of individuals belonging to the Society of Friends; though I could readily remember half a dozen of every other culte, from Ultramontanes down to Jumpers. These two, at all events, I would "interview," and so forestall the Conference with a little select synod of my own.

It was possible, of course, to find a ludicrous side to the question; but, as I said, I approached it seriously. Sydney Smith, with his incorrigible habit of joking, questioned the existence of Quaker babies—a position which, if proven, would, of course, at once account for the diminution of adult members of the sect. It was true I had never seen a Quaker infant; but I did not therefore question their existence, any more than I believed postboys and certain humble quadrupeds to be immortal because I had never seen a dead specimen of either. The question I acknowledged at once to be a social and religious, not a physiological one. Why is Quakerism, which has lived over two hundred years, from the days of George Fox, and stood as much persecution as any system of similar age, beginning to succumb to the influences of peace and prosperity? Is it the old story of Capua and Cannæ over again? Perhaps it is not quite correct to say that it is now beginning to decline; nor, as a fact, is this Conference the first inquiry which the body itself has made into its own incipient decay. It is even said that symptoms of such an issue showed themselves as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century; and prize essays have been from time to time written as to the causes, before the Society so far fell in with the customs of the times as to call a council for the present very difficult and delicate inquiry. The first prize essay by William Rountree attributes the falling off to the fact that the early Friends, having magnified a previously slighted truth—that of the Indwelling Word—fell into the natural error of giving it an undue place, so depriving their representations of Christian doctrine of the symmetry they would otherwise have possessed, and influencing their own practices in such a way as to contract the basis on which Christian fellowship rests. A second prize essay, called "The Peculium," takes a still more practical view, and points out in the most unflattering way that the Friends, by eliminating from their system all attention to the arts, music, poetry, the drama, &c., left nothing for the exercise of their faculties save eating, drinking, and making money. "The growth of Quakerism," says Mr. T. Hancock, the author of this outspoken essay, "lies in its enthusiastic tendency. The submission of Quakers to the commercial tendency is signing away the life of their own schism. Pure enthusiasm and the