If I could but write the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever touched a pen. Balzac—whom everybody talks of and nobody has read, because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a translation till quite lately—Zola, who professes to be realistic, who is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the masterpiece of all fiction, Les Misérables; all three of them, the entire host of manuscript-makers, I am sure I could vanquish them all, if I could only write the inside life of Fleet Street.
Not in any grace of style or sweeping march of diction, but just pencil-jotted in the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor, well-dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a train, so, without choice of language, but hustling the first words anyhow, as it were, into the first compartment. If I could only get Alere to tell me all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep. For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has written yet.
If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!
Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirtsleeves, swigging his stout, smoking on the sly, working with all the genius of an inspired mechanic one moment and dropping into absolute idleness the next, spending infinite pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very life depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting off the next till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, gossiping, dreaming over old German works, and especially dreaming over Goethe, humming old German songs—for he had been a great traveller—sometimes scrawling a furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign print, collecting stray engravings, wandering hither and thither.
Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller, printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet, kindhearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street, carpetbag man, gentleman shaken to pieces.
He worked in his shirtsleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong company—very strong meat—but no vile word left his lips.
There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coarsest surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer’s ink in the whitest of clean shirtsleeves, fit to wear with the abhorred dress-coat.
In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches, done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase—it was his own furniture—were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied.
Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in the North Sea—a savage fight between sail and gale—horses in the meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the Black Forest, studies from the nude—Parisian models, Jewesses, almost life-size, a drayman heaving up a huge tankard, overshadowing his face like Mount Atlas turned over his thumb, designs to illustrate classical mythology, outlines expressing the ideas of Goethe—outlines of Marguerite and Faust among the roses—“He loves me; he loves me not,” big-armed Flemish beauties with breasts as broad as the Zuyder-Zee was deep in the song, roofs of Nuremberg, revolutionary heroes charging their muskets in the famous year ’48, when Alere had a bullet through his hat, in Vienna, I think; no end to them.
Sometimes when Alere had done no work for a month or two, and his ten pounds were spent, if he wanted a few guineas he would take a small selection of these round to the office of a certain illustrated paper; the Editor would choose, and hand over the money at once, well aware that it was ready money his friend needed. They were not exactly friends—there are no friends in London, only acquaintances—but a little chummy, because the Editor himself had had a fiery youth, and they had met in sunny Wien. That was the only paper that ever got sketches out of Alere.
If only Alere would have gone and sketched what he was asked to sketch! Ah! there is the difference; he could not do it, his nature would not let him; he could draw what he saw with his own eyes, but not what other people wanted him to see. A merry income he might have made if he would only have consented to see what other eyes—common, vulgar eyes—wanted to see, and which he could so easily have drawn for them.
Out of these piles of varied sketches there were two kinds the Editor instantly snapped at: the one was wild flowers, the other little landscape bits.
Wild flowers were his passion. They were to Flamma as Juliet to Romeo. Romeo’s love, indeed, rushed up like straw on fire, a great blaze of flame; he perished in it as the straw; perhaps he might not have worshipped Juliet next year. Flamma had loved his wild flowers close upon forty years, ever since he could remember; most likely longer, for doubtless the dumb infant loved the daisies put in his chubby
