THE LONDONERS IN FESTIVITY. T HERE are many very just views
which may be taken of the great festivity of Tuesday. It is quite true to say, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said, in his simple but very true and forcible sermon, that it brought home the unity of the family, the unity of the State, and the unity, if not of the Church, of those common religious faiths which are wider and deeper than any one Church, with very great power to the minds of the least reflective among the spectators. It is quite true, also, to say, and very desirable to remember, that it showed very power- fully the attachment of the people to the present form of Govern- ment, though perhaps there has been something of exaggeration of the mere sentiment of the matter ; and perhaps more than any one likes to own is due to the feeling, frankly expressed by a worthy oilman to a lady of our acquaintance on the day after the ceremony, that "we is pretty comfortable as we is, and if the Prince had died, everything would have been dubious-like." Again, it is quite true to say that the ceremony illustrated forcibly the craving of the English people for a little more of the life of public outward enjoyment and festivity than they usually obtain, and that it showed their by no means inconsider- able ability to extemporise expressions of rejoicing,—though there was a want of that sharp public criticism which should have put down promptly the happily rare, though individually ostentatious, attempts of some to advertise their own business adventures under the pretence of contributing to the expressions of public joy ; (as one of several instances, one of the great banners stretched across High Holborn contained an announcement of a certain "grand performance "). But certainly, what struck us most in the scene of Tuesday was the latent pathos beneath the joyous and decorative efforts and effects of the great city ; the wistful- ness which was so expressive precisely because the people could say so little and were compelled to let everything be inferred from the minimum of external sign ;—the perfect content with which hundreds of thousands of people, straining their necks and eyes to see as much as possible, accepted the imperfect vision of the tops of a few grand coaches, and the heads of a few coachmen and horses in gorgeous trappings, —appearances representing, of course, to their
minds the moral certainty that at that moment the Queen and Prince and Princess of Wales were passing in an open carriage sedulously bowing to right and left,—as a discharge in full of all that they had hoped from the labour and risk at the cost of which they had obtained this not very impressive vision ; and, finally, the clumsiness with which the various would-be festal inscriptions described the inarticulate gladness of the nation. All these things brought home with marvellous force, to those who thought about the mat- ter at all, the habitual joylessness of the life which seemed to be behind this momentary ebullition of joy, just as those grimy streets over which the wreaths and banners fluttered, and the huge sea of sallow faces, intent on the momentary glimpse of the Monarch, seemed to say much more of the leaden-coloured years which could alone have made this instant of vivid excitement so desir- able, than of the gladness of the hour itself. When one looked at the accumulated smoke of ages, which rested, for instance, and always rests, on High Holborn, and which formed the permanent background to which all the ornament was affixed, there was something very touching in the gay flags and paper wreaths of coloured flowers with whieh that long grim avenue of unlovely toil was decked out, and by which it was transfigured into a certain degree of geniality and vivacity, just as the long streams of the half-washed, or unwashed, as they pressed on in the lines of the procession and illumination, and greedily drank in the unaccus- tomed gaiety, made one even more sensible of the heaviness of the cloud that yearned so much for sunshine, than of the ray of sunshine itself.
And the feeling of pathos was strengthened by the extreme limitation and feebleness of the imagination displayed, not, indeed, by the masses of the people, but by the tradespeople and shopkeepers, in the various inscriptions. Here and there a word or two from the Scriptures, such as "Let the nations rejoice," here and there a common-place ejaculatory blessing like "God bless the Queen and the Prince of Wales," here and there an inarticulate effort at originality, like the following,—
" To God, who spared his life, To Jenner, Gull, and Lowe, Our Queen and Princess-wife, Our gratitude we owe."
—here and there a transparency of the Prince and Princess look- ing sentimentally at each other,—generally, however, nothing but "Albert and Alexandra," or " A.A.," with perhaps (at night) the Royal arms or a crown in a gas star,—such were the efforts of
the worthy Londoners to express a most genuine feeling in a true way. There was hardly a single effort at indirect, playful, or humorous homage such as Paris would have made if capable of a like mood of enthusiasm. The licensed victuallers never thought of glorifying the famous glass of ale by which, as some maintained, the Prince's life was saved, and so penetrating the heart of the Alliance with a shaft from a royal bow ; nor did the loyal Cor- poration of the City conceive the idea,—(since even complimentary executions are no longer to be thought of),—of illuminating the
top of Temple Bar with an effigy of Sir Charles Dilke's head in the spot where a few centuries ago it would have been most un- questionably (and unjustly) placed. Nor did the public instruc- tors themselves set any example of life. At the Daily Telegraph, for instance, where one naturally hoped to see some allegorical parable of the embodiment of the "Cosmic forces" in the form of Mr. Glad-
stone, there was no device of a notable kind at all. In short, there
was hardly the faintest sign of any activity of the popular mind to be found in the inscriptions or illuminations, though the arrangements of the flags and wreaths in Holborn and Oxford Street did show a real improvement in the popular taste over anything that Loudon had formerly beheld. Taken absolutely, the crowds of eager, vacant faces half irradiated by the excitement of the day, were a pathetic sight; though if compared with the same crowds on any like occasion years ago, there was, no doubt, a clear advance in good-nature and intelligence. The personal character of the occasion really did affect them. It was obvious that they greatly preferred the more personal illuminations to the merely brilliant ones. Crowds lingered long in front of the poorest transparencies of the
Prince and Princess, while they only moved rapidly past the most brilliant blazes of coloured light, like Mr. Poole's magnificent illumination in Savile Row, and the very simple, though tasteful and effective illumination of both façades of the Duke of Buc- cleugh's house in Whitehall.
Next to the half-pathetic impressions left on the mind by the mere ardour of the popular desire to see so very little as the great
mass of the people standing in the streets could see at so great a cost of effort and danger, and by the sight of so many half- squalid faces lit up with passing gleams of pleasure as they gazed at bright lights and bright colours in the illuminated streets, the chief interest of the festivity was the mere sight it afforded of the dense masses of the people. The beholders did not know probably that they were much better worth looking at than the beheld,—that there was no sight in the royal procession at all equal to that of the on-lookers, but so it was. To anyone who saw, as, for instance, the present writer did, the whole broad arms of Waterloo Place filled to overflowing by a dense mass of human beings, with constant streams from behind pouring down into it out of the funnel of Regent Street, the sense of multitude must have been quite born anew ; even more so than in St. Paul's itself, where the still greater numbers were cut up by the divisions of the great church, and where the light could not fall with such marvellous effect as it did here upon the mass of white faces as they strained with hats off, so far as it was in the power of the wearers to take them off, towards the Queen's carriage. Waterloo Place alone, even full as it was to the very brim, would probably not hold more than nine or ten thousand people, and yet the multitudi- nous effect was something quite startling, as the living mass swayed to and fro, now recoiling under the efforts of the mounted police and the blue-jackets from the line of the procession, and now swaying back again as a fresh accession of living pressure from the uplands of Regent Street gave the vast crowd a new urgency of tension. The wonder of the effect might be seen in the face of the little Prince, who, though he had his father's arm around him, was evidently quite unprepared for this solid mass of humanity, and felt its terrible power for good or ill with the full freshness of childhood. The people certainly afforded a far grander spectacle than they looked upon. Roofs, balconies, stands, pave- ments, and streets full of faces to overflowing, were the mere harmonious frames in which the magic effect of such a moving sea of human life as Waterloo Place contained, was set. Nor at the seaside itself could you feel more keenly the horror of tem- pest than you did there ;—such a sea of people in savage anger instead of in eager and complacent excitement would have been more terrible to look at than any of the most deadly instruments of war. Fortunately, an English crowd of that kind is not like a similar French crowd, full of explosive elements ; the gunpowder is there, but it is like gunpowder guarded by Gale's patent, with several grains of uninflam- mable good-humour between neighbouring grains of inflammable passion. On Tuesday, at least, the crowd was not political. Mr. Disraeli was cheered, but cheered mainly, we imagine, as a Parliamentary 'character,' not as a Conservative statesman. Mr. Lowe was faintly cheered in some parts of the line and faintly hissed in others ; but there was very little tendency indeed to political demonstration. Even Colonel Henderson, the Chief Commissioner of the London Police, seemed to be more popular than any political hero, and was heartily welcomed as he rode along the lines of the procession giving orders to his officers. Indeed, even as regards the Royal Family itself we should have said that the mass of the people were rather hearty than enthusiastic. The violent enthu- siasm appeared to be all reserved for the ladies of the Upper Ten Thousand,—the dowagers in the clubs,—and seemed to be lavished even more on the Duke of Edinburgh than on the Prince or Queen, some of them almost shrieking with excitement, and, if our hysterical contemporary the Daily Telegraph may be trusted, quite weeping into the necks of the people beneath them, as they dear-Duked and God-blessed him, and flapped their handkerchiefs as if they wished to send him a favouring breeze. There was nothing of this sort of hysterical enthusiasm in the masses. It was rather kindly heartiness, sturdy, good-natured pleasure in the appearance of their own reigning family, in whom they felt a sort of national right.
On the whole, Tuesday's festivities left behind them a strong sense of pathos and a strong sense of power,—pathos in the spectacle of that eagerness of desire for a little change and external brightness, which made people go through London in pleasure- vans so crammed and close that one baby was positively suffocated on its mother's knees, and power in the wonderful impression produced of the solidity and good-humour of the great masses of people who paraded the streets from morning to midnight without committing a single extraordinary crime, or once being
guilty of any act of collective selfishness towards the feebler persons among themselves. There was more of the courtesy of
some Continental crowds than was ever seen before in London streets ; and though there was of course plenty of brutal language and some dangerous rushes, the people, as a whole, certainly had both more wistful intelligence in their eyes and more kindly forbearance than on any previous occasion ; they were leas dan- gerous, though they were more numerous and collected in heavier masses than ever.
Previous page
