by Will Durant
He survived three years more. He died on January 20, 1779, aged sixtytwo. On February 1 his corpse was borne to Westminster Abbey by members of Britain’s highest nobility, and was deposited in the Poets’ Corner at the foot of Shakespeare’s monument.
VI. LONDON
Johnson’s first view of London (1737) was one of virtuous horror:
Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female Atheist talks you dead.*80
These, of course, were but some aspects of London, chosen to feed the rage of unplaced youth. Three years later Johnson described London as “a city famous for wealth and commerce and plenty, and for every other kind of civility and politeness, but which abounds with such heaps of filth as a savage would look on with amazement.”81 The civic authorities, at that time, left street cleaning to the citizen, who was commanded to keep in neat repair the pavement—or earth—before his house. In 1762 the Westminster Paving Acts arranged for municipal cleaning of streets, collection of rubbish, paving and repair of main thoroughfares, and establishment of an underground sewerage system; soon other sections of London followed suit. Elevated footpaths protected pedestrians, and gutters drained the streets. New streets were laid out in straight lines, houses were built more durably, and the venerable metropolis effused a more genteel odor.
There was no public fire department, but insurance companies maintained private hose brigades to limit their losses. Coal dust and fog sometimes collaborated to blanket the city with a pall so thick that one could not tell friend from foe. When the sky was visible certain streets were bright with colorful shops. On the Strand the largest and richest stores in Europe displayed behind their windows the products of half the world. Not far away were a thousand shops of a hundred crafts, and here and there were potteries, glass factories, smithies, breweries. The noises of artisans and tradesmen, of carriages and horses, of hawkers and street singers, contributed to the din and sense of life. If one wished a quieter scene and cleaner air he could saunter in St. James’s Park, or watch fascinating ladies swing their spreading skirts and show their silken shoes on the Mall. In the morning one could buy fresh milk from maids who milked cows on the park green. In the evening he might prowl, like Boswell, for a filie de joie , or wait for the night to cover a multitude of sins. Farther west one could ride or drive in Hyde Park. And there were the great amusement resorts: Vauxhall with its colorful crowds, its acres of gardens and arbored walks, and Ranelagh with its spacious tiered Rotunda, where Mozart performed when a child of eight.
The poor had alehouses, the middle and upper classes had clubs, and there were taverns for all. There was the Boar’s Head, and the Mitre, where the Great Cham supped, and the Globe, dear to Goldsmith, and the Devil’s Tavern, which had entertained famous figures from Jonson to Johnson. There were two Turk’s Heads—one a coffee shop on the Strand, the other a tavern in Gerrard Street, which became the home of The Club. Women as well as men came to taverns, and some were for sale. In clubs like White’s or Almack’s (which became Brooks’s) the well-to-do could drink and gamble in select privacy. And there were the theaters, with all the excitement of their competition and the radiance of their stars.
Near the theaters were brothels. Preachers complained that “to the said plays and interludes great numbers of mean, idle, and disorderly people do commonly resort, and after the performance is over from thence they go to bawdy houses.”82 Nearly all classes who could afford it patronized prostitutes, and agreed in condoning the habit as unavoidable in the current state of male development. There were some colored courtesans who drew customers even from the nobility; Boswell describes Lord Pembroke as exhausted after a night in “a black bawdy house.”83
Slums continued. In the lower orders it was not unusual for a family to live in one room of a tenement. The very poor lived in damp, unheated cellars, or in garrets with leaky roofs; some slept on bunks or in doorways or under booths. Johnson told Miss Reynolds that “as he returned to his lodgings about one or two o’clock in the morning he often saw poor children asleep on thresholds and stalls and that he used to put pennies into their hands to buy them a breakfast.”84 A magistrate informed Johnson that in any week over twenty Londoners died of starvation.85 Now and then epidemics ran through the city. Even so, its population rose from 674,000 in 1700 to 900,-000 in 1800,86 presumably due to immigration by landless peasants, and to the growth of commerce and industry.
The Thames and its docks were crowded with merchantmen and their cargoes. “The whole surface of the Thames,” wrote a contemporary, “is covered with small vessels, barges, boats, and wherries, passing to and fro, and, below the three bridges, such a forest of masts for miles together, that you would think all the ships of the universe were here assembled.”87 Two new bridges were added in this period: Blackfriars and Battersea. Canaletto, coming to London from Venice (1746, 1751), painted magnificent views of city and river; prints from these vedute enabled educated Europeans to realize how London had grown to be the chief port of the Christian world.
Never since ancient Rome (excepting Constantinople) had history known so vast and rich and complex a city. In St. James’s Palace the King and Queen and their attendants, the court and its ceremonies; in the churches fat prelates mumbling hypnotic formulas, and humble worshipers resting from reality and begging divine aid; in Parliament House the Lords and the Commons playing the game of politics with souls as their pawns; in Mansion House the Lord Mayor and his liveried aides laying down ordinances about chapels and brothels, and wondering how to control the next epidemic or mob; in the barracks soldiers gaming, wenching, and profaning the air; in the shops the tailors curving their spines, plumbers inhaling lead, jewelers, watchmakers, cobblers, hairdressers, vintners, hurrying to meet the demands of ladies and gentlemen; in Grub Street or Fleet Street the hack writers puffing up clients, tumbling ministries, challenging the King; in the prisons men and women dying of infection or graduating to greater crimes; in the tenements and cellars the hungry, the unfortunate, and the defeated multiplying their like eagerly and forever.
With all this both Johnson and his biographer loved London. Boswell admired “the liberty and the whims … and curious characters, the immense crowd and hurry and bustle of business and diversion, the great number of public places of entertainment, the noble churches and the superb buildings, … the satisfaction of pursuing whatever plan is most agreeable without being known or looked at”88—the protective, erosive anonymity of the crowd. And Johnson, relishing and deepening. “the full flow of London talk,” settled the matter with one authoritative line: “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.”89
CHAPTER XXX
The Age of Reynolds
1756-90
I. THE MUSICIANS
THIS England loved great music, but could not produce it.
Appreciation abounded. In Zoffany’s picture The Cowper and Gore Families we see the part that music played in cultivated homes. We hear of the hundreds of singers and performers that were brought together for the Handel Commemoration Concert in 1784. The Morning Chronicle of December 30, 1790, announced, for the ensuing months, a series of “Professional Concerts,” another of “Ancient Concerts,” “Ladies’ Subscription Concerts” for Sunday evenings, oratorios twice a week, and six symphony concerts to be conducted by the composer himself—Joseph Haydn;1 this rivaled the musical wealth of London today. Just as Venice made choirs from orphans, so the “Charity Children” of St. Paul’s Cathedral gave annual performances, of which Haydn wrote, “No music has ever moved me so much in my life.”2 Concerts and light operas were presented in the Ranelagh Rotunda and the Marylebone Gardens. A dozen societies of amateur musicians gave public performances. The English predilection for music was so widely known that a score of v
irtuosos and composers came to the island—Geminiani, Mozart, Haydn, Johann Christian Bach; and Bach remained.
The taste for serious opera declined in England after Handel’s surfeit. Some enthusiasm returned when Giovanni Manzuoli opened the 1764 season in Ezio; Burney described his voice as “the most powerful and voluminous soprano that has been heard on our stage since Farinelli.”3 This was apparently the last triumph of Italian opera in England in that century. When the Italian opera house in London was burned down (1789), Horace Walpole rejoiced, and hoped it would never be rebuilt.4
If there were now no memorable British composers, there were two eminent historians of music, whose works appeared in the same year, 1776—the annus mirabile of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Wealth of Nations, not to speak of the American Declaration of Independence. Sir John Hawkins’ five-volume General History of the Science and Practise of Music was a work of careful scholarship, and though he himself—attorney and magistrate—was not a musician, his appraisals have stood well amid the flux of critical opinion. Charles Burney was organist at St. Paul’s and the most sought-for musical teacher in England. His handsome face and amiable personality, added to his accomplishments, won him the friendship of Johnson, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, Gibbon, and Reynolds—who made an attractive portrait of him gratis.5 He traveled through France, Germany, Austria, and Italy to get materials for his General History of Music, and spoke with firsthand knowledge of the leading composers who were then alive. About 1780 he reported that “old musicians complain of the extravagance of the young, and these again of the dryness and inelegance of the old.”6
II. THE ARCHITECTS
English builders now offered a lively contest between Gothic and classical revivals. The grandeur of the old cathedrals, the vestigial splendor of stained glass, the ivied ruins of medieval abbeys in Britain, stirred the imagination to idealize the Middle Ages, and fell in with the developing Romantic reaction against classic couplets, cold columns, and oppressive pediments. Horace Walpole engaged a succession of second-rate architects to rebuild his “Strawberry Hill” at Twickenham in Gothic form and ornament (1748-73); he gave years of finical care to making his home the very palladium of the anti-Palladian style. Year after year he added rooms, until there were twenty-two; one, “the Gallery,” housing his art collections, was fifty-six feet long. Too often he used lath and plaster instead of stone; even a first glance reveals a fragility forgivable in interior decoration but unpardonable in external structure. Selwyn called Strawberry Hill “gingerbread Gothic,”7 and another wit reckoned that Walpole had outlived three sets of crenellated battlements,8 which had to be repeatedly restored.
Despite these experiments, Palladio and Vitruvius remained the tutelar deities of English architecture in the second as in the first half of the eighteenth century. The classic spirit was reinforced by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and it was spread by descriptions of classic ruins in Athens, Palmyra, and Baalbek. Sir William Chambers defended the Palladian view in his Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), and added example to precept by rebuilding Somerset House (1776-86) with a vast façade of Renaissance windows and Corinthian porticoes.
A remarkable family of four brothers, John, Robert, James, and William Adam, came out of Scotland to dominate English architecture in this half century. Robert left the strongest impress upon his time. After studying in the University of Edinburgh he spent three years in Italy, where he met Piranesi and Winckelmann. Noting that the private palaces praised by Vitruvius had disappeared from the Roman scene, and learning that one remained relatively intact, the palace of Diocletian at Spalato (now Split in Yugoslavia), he made his way to that ancient Dalmatian capital, spent five weeks making measurements and drawings, was arrested as a spy, was freed, wrote a book about his researches, and came back to England resolved to use Roman styles in British building. In 1768 he and. his brothers leased for ninety-nine years a tract of sloping land between the Strand and the Thames, and erected on it the famous Adelphi Terrace—a district of fine streets and handsome houses on an embankment supported by massive Roman arches and vaults; here some dramatic notables lived, from Garrick to Bernard Shaw. Robert designed also some famous mansions, like Bute’s Luton Hoo (i.e., house at Luton, thirty miles north of London). “This,” said Johnson, “is one of the places I do not regret having come to see”;9 and he was hard to please.
By and large the classic orders won the battle against the Gothic revival. Many of the great palaces of this age, like Carlton House in London and Harewood House in Yorkshire, were in the neoclassic style. Walpole did not live to see Gothic return in triumph and splendor in the Houses of Parliament (1840-60).
III. WEDGWOOD
The Adam brothers were not content with designing buildings and interiors; they built some of the loveliest furniture of the time. But the great name here is Thomas Chippendale. In 1754, at the age of thirty-six, he published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director, which was to the art of furniture what Reynolds’ Discourses were to painting. His characteristic products were chairs with slim “ribbon backs” and charming legs. But also he delighted the lords and ladies of George Ill’s reign with cabinets, writing tables, commodes, bookcases, mirrors, tables, and fourposter beds—all elegant, mostly novel, generally frail.
The frailty continued in the work of Chippendale’s rival, George Hepplewhite, and their successor, Thomas Sheraton; they seemed converted to Burke’s theory that in art, as in life, beauty must be frail. Sheraton carried lightness and grace to their apex. He specialized in satinwood and other beautifully grained products; he polished them patiently, painted them delicately, and sometimes inlaid them with metal ornaments. In his Cabinet Dictionary (1802) he listed 252 “master cabinet makers” working in or near London. The upper classes in England now rivaled the French in the refinement of their furniture and interior appointments.
They were giving a lead to the French in designing gardens and parks. Lancelot Brown earned the nickname “Capability” because he was so quick to see the “capabilities” offered by his clients’ grounds for fantastic—and expensive—designs; in this spirit he laid out gardens at Blenheim and Kew. The fashion in gardens ran now to the exotic, unexpected, or picturesque. Miniature Gothic temples and Chinese pagodas were used as outdoor ornaments; Sir William Chambers, in decorating the Kew Gardens (1757-62), introduced Gothic shrines, Moorish mosques, and Chinese pagodas. Funerary urns were favorite garden glories, sometimes holding the ashes of departed friends.
The ceramic arts had an almost revolutionary development. England was producing glass as fine as any in Europe.10 The Chelsea and Derby potteries turned out delightful figures in porcelain, usually in the styles of Sèvres. But the busiest ceramic center was the “Five Towns” in Staffordshire—chiefly Burslem and Stoke-on-Trent. Before Josiah Wedgwood the industry was poor in methods and earnings; the potters were coarse and letterless; when Wesley first preached to them they pelted him with mud; their houses were huts, and their market was restricted by impassable roads. In 1755 a rich deposit of kaolin—hard white clay like that used by the Chinese—was discovered in Cornwall; but that was two hundred miles from the Five Towns.
Wedgwood began at the age of nine (1739) to work at the potter’s wheel. He received little schooling, but he read much; and his study of Caylus’ Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines, et gauloises (1752-67) inspired him with ambition to reproduce and rival classic ceramic forms. In 1753 he started his own business at the Ivy House Works, and built around it, near Burslem, a town which he called Etruria. He attacked with the energy of a warrior and the vision of a statesman the conditions that hampered the industry. He arranged better transport for the kaolin of Cornwall to his factories; he campaigned—and helped to pay—for the improvement of roads and the building of canals; he was resolved to open avenues from the Five Towns to the world. Heretofore the English market for fine pottery had been dominated by Meissen, Delft, and Sèvres;
Wedgwood captured the domestic, then much of the foreign, trade; by 1763 his potteries were annually exporting 550,000 pieces to the Continent and North America. Catherine the Great ordered a dinner set of a thousand pieces.
By 1785 the Staffordshire potteries were employing fifteen thousand workers. Wedgwood introduced specialization of labor, established factory discipline, paid good wages, built schools and libraries. He insisted on good workmanship; an early biographer described him as stamping about his shops on his wooden leg, and breaking with his own hand any pot that showed the least flaw; usually, in such cases, he chalked on the careless artisan’s bench the warning “This won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood.”11 He developed precision tools, and bought steam engines to power his machines. As a result of his large-scale production of commercial pottery, pewter went out of general use in England. His output ranged from earthenware pipes for London drains to the most exquisite vessels for Queen Charlotte. He divided his offerings between “Useful” and “Ornamental.” For the latter he frankly imitated classic models, as in his luxurious agate vases; but also he developed original forms, especially the famous jasper ware with Greek figures delicately embossed in white on a base of blue.