Читать книгу Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague онлайн

4 страница из 28

And then there comes in Defoe with his marvellous photographic realism of fiction, and tells us of the horrors of the Plague with a fidelity which those who had lived among them could, we fancy, hardly have approached.

From sources such as these—from Pepys and Defoe, as well as from the more sober pages of the stately Evelyn, it is that Miss Manning takes much of the mise-en-scène of her “Tale of the Great Plague”; and we find, as historic evidence accumulates around us, how true her imaginary picture is.

It was a happy thought which made the story begin on old London Bridge—happier still, readers will now think when they see Mr. Herbert Railton’s beautiful drawings. Something we learn of the stress of the time as we recall, with Mistress Cherry, the strange pageants which the bridge-dwellers watched from their windows. They saw the double tide, portent of unknown woes. They saw how the mighty Strafford went serenely to his death, and the old Archbishop passed up and down under guard on the long days of his weary trial. They saw the King come to his own again—and some of them may have looked out of windows that wet Sunday night in 1662 when Mr. Pepys had left his singing of “some holy things” and went back by water, shooting the rapids under “the bridge (which did trouble me) home, and so to bed.” The life on the bridge must have been something which an Englishman’s experience of to-day can hardly help to picture. Something of it we may fancy as we enter an old shop on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, or look out upon it and the Arno from the long corridor that connects the Uffizi with the Pitti. But on that narrow space is no such crowded life as on old London Bridge—no such dangers for foot-passengers, drivers, and horsemen. To picture this in seventeenth-century England we must cross near mid-day from Stamboul towards Pera by the far-famed Galata Bridge. Scarce anywhere but in Florence and in Constantinople can we now recall what sights old London Bridge must have witnessed. Mr. Railton sees them, though, very clearly, and we are more than content to see with his eyes. Something idealised they are, perhaps. Old London Bridge was hardly so beautiful, surely, as he pictures it; and his drawings, perhaps, are more like what the houses ought to have been than ever they were. “More Nurembergy than Nuremberg,” says Mr. Ruskin of some of Prout’s famous work. We may say it of Mr. Railton’s old London; and high praise it is. And as Mr. Railton brings back to us the scenes, so Mr. Jellicoe gives us the persons of old time in their habits as they lived.