The Weekly Machen
Here we have an example of Machen’s journalism at its best. By recalling earlier days and expressing a bittersweet reflection of lost things, he writes more as a poet than a newspaperman. The magic remains more than century later as Machen conjures anemoia—a sense of nostalgia for a time never experienced—in a twenty-first century reader.
The Gondola of London:
Hail! And Farewell to the Hansom
by
Arthur Machen
September 24, 1914
There is a certain formal, ancient, and gracious place in the western regions of London.
Here there are the broad sweep of park-like lawns, the solemn growth of overshadowing trees, basins of still water. There is a holy well within these grave borders—it will be news to most Londoners that such relics of former religion have survived so near at hand to them—but for the most part the air is heavy with a later antiquity.
The scene is set in the period of Queen Anne, the last Stuart sovereign of these realms; her palace is rich and dim and red in its robe of old state, and here London has its Museum. Hither I came to view the latest addition to the curious and rare and forgotten things that have been stored within Kensington Palace.
I saw no modern thing till I came to the Palace door, and asked the policeman on duty where the latest exhibit in the Museum was stored, and when he heard what I wanted to see, he grinned hugely and directed me to the Orangery.
There are no oranges there now; there is only the one curiosity that I came to see.
On it is a number—10,591—and the inscription on a brass plate:—
Presented to the
London Museum
By
Mr. and Mrs. Donald A. MacAlister,
May, 1912
This rarity is a hansom cab; and already the visitors to the Museum have begun to lift the shafts gravely, to poise them judiciously, to cast an interested and serious regard at the whole concern, as if they would say: “It was thus, then, that our forefathers made their way about the London streets in the old days; here was the horse; on that perch the driver sat; within was a place for the travellers.”
The hansom has got to the London Museum: and though it may still flit uneasily like a bird of night about London streets in lessening and ever lessening numbers, here in the Orangery its doom is fixed and made evident. Henceforth its place is with the Roman Galley, with all the contrivances of far, forgotten years; we shall speak of it as we speak of the British war-chariots, of the ships in which the Vikings sailed of the brave Revenge, of Georgian coaches, lumbering and splendid, of that “fabulosus” cabrioily that bore Mr. and Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Cluppins to the house with the door in Goswell-street.
Chauffeur and “Cabby”
Well: it is inevitable, and there is no help for it. London swelled and swelled to a huge extent, flooded over the fields, engulfed the woods, swallowed villages and country towns till the traversing of it in the old fashion meant a day’s journey. And then we found out the new way, and the taxicabs flash and flit to and fro, and the few remaining hansom cabs seem to lag and falter; the smart trot of the old days has become a slug’s sorry pace.
It cannot be helped, and London being London, one must get about in it as quickly as possible; but do not let us imagine that nothing is lost. There was a gaiety about the old hansoms that the taxicab quite misses. The drivers were sometimes surly and insolvent and swindling rascals, but often they were merry fellows, with glittering hats and a glittering style of speech, and a bright flower in their buttonholes that went well with the smart turn-out before them. The modern chauffeur is all very well, a careful and experienced mechanic for the most part: but no more fit to compare with the hansom cabman at his best than is the driver of an express train to be set beside the immortal Weller.
The sight of that pathetic brass-plated, catalogued hansom in the museum set me thinking of the London that I first knew, the London of thirty-two years ago, and I feel convinced that this London was an infinitely more cheerful place, a smarter place, if you like, than the London of today.
Thirty Years Ago
Formerly almost all the theatres were concentrated in the Strand; and by consequence the pavements of that street soon after eleven at night were crowded with dense masses of cheery people. Some of them are still to be found on the old ways, but many of them have gone to Shaftesbury-avenue; and the two halves do not give the same measure of gaiety that the whole once afforded.
And I am sure that the shops in the main streets are not so good as in those old days; they, too, are dispersed, and have reestablished themselves, here and there, in ones and twos, and scattered groups in streets leading out of Bond-street, which thirty years ago were purely residential.
In the places of these shops cheap restaurants and tea rooms and dealers in job lots, and vendors of imitation jewellery have established themselves; shabbiness and sham finery have penetrated to ground that was once splendid.
And in this gayer London of the early eighties the hansom cab was a predominant and delightful feature.
Lord Beaconsfield—the last English statesman who had any clear perceptions of anything whatever—really gave us the word of the enigma when he called our old ringing, jingling hansom “the gondola of London.” The phrase is poetry, and like all poetry, essential truth.
For it is certainly true that, somehow or other—I don’t know how, and I cannot explain why—the hansom was always a carriage of enchantment and romance and mystery.
If one thinks of it, it was a queer-looking vehicle; the driver was strangely and wildly perched in high air above the body of the cab, as far as might be from the horse which he usually drove so skilfully.
And the wheels were high, and one got oddly to one’s place past these wheels, and an Arabian Night might have fathered the contrivance by which the glass windows came doubling and contorting and clattering down on a rainy night. Ah! in those long-off, misty days, then the lamps glittered, then the bells rang sweetly, gaily, then the horse’s hoofs beat music from the road; as we drove swiftly to fairyland, as we swung round by leafy-shadowed streets that led in those days to paradise.
In 1942
Some day we shall all go, I trust, for one more hansom drive. It may be, perhaps, to-morrow, it may be in 1942; but they mistake who think that 10, 591 has made its last journey.
Serius, ocius; sooner or later, you and I will be walking along common London road—perhaps they will be continuous moving platforms on that day when the lot falls out of the urn—and suddenly we shall hear the clink of the harness and the jingling of the bells and the merry beating of the horses’ hoofs, and a good clear cry from the driver.
And we shall climb up in the old fashion and discover the secret of the lamps and of the stars, and anew the street that led us before to fairyland.
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