I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again
after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of
course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial
travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of
these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in
Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic
cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that,
were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel
as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with
which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically
strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home
everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this
England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London
again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long
and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It
is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London
and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the
past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return
to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one
who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of
my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her
face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my
heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the
hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many
a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange
to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning
towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to
find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and
Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the
first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience.
Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in
rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties
in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel
hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that
there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English
pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition,
that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I
had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize
how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English
pork-pie--after ten years in America.
And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and
courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in
the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am
enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of
superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my
own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America
as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for
all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard
long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and,
though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping
soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as
"Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm.
Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and
signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came
on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I
wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude,
that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of
Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were
smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was
changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old
piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from
their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a
spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who
rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs.
Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted
cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor
coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but
not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted
loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal
spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the
only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town.
Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I
noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight,
to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was
a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced,
like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond
music.
To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of
change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her
lamp-lighters.
Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more
horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from
extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and
even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of
taxis--
Like dragon-flies,
The hansoms hover
With jewelled eyes,
To catch the lover.
Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of
Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is
unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still
flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their
mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky.
Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today
than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial
town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been
improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I
mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid
transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to
do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the
civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are
probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save,
maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these
things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old
nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new
weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's
Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of
"change."
There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new
great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the
play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera
House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is
a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees
no necessity of change.
In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the
broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which
seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the
necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive
conservation for those buildings which more and more England will
realize as having a lasting value for her spirit.
So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism
as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar
heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than
to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal
spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of
them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral,
or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who
will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them
in their graves.
Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new
theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a
far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I
can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of
course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the
reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and
so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in
the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up
expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's
destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced
not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own
internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice
crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with
girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new
unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past.
England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was
some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the
least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing
that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of
those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb,
approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally
young.
New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are
dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity
which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once
more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May
weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always,
shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle
of celestial fire.
LONDON, May, 1913.