THE UGLINESS AND THE CHARM OF LONDON.
LONDON, _July 3, 1902_.
Vastness and dinginess are the two features of London which make the
deepest impression upon the visitor from America. Byron's description
is exact--
"A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amid the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tip-toe through their sea-coal canopy;
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head--and there is London town."
Up to the time of Sir Richard Whittington, in the sixteenth century,
the burning of coal in London was considered such a nuisance that it
was punished by death. A dispensation to burn coal was first made in
favor of Whittington, and this innovation on his part has affected the
great city, of which he was four times Lord Mayor, infinitely more than
the success of his celebrated venture in bringing up and selling a cat,
which enabled him to lay the foundation of other investments. Yet the
story of the cat is known to boys and girls the world over, while the
story of the coal is known to comparatively few, even of their elders.
Coal serves the same purposes in London that it does elsewhere, of
course. But, while elsewhere it warms only thousands of people,
and makes steam for only thousands of factories, locomotives, and
steamboats, here it warms and works for more than five millions.
The output of smoke from this unparalleled consumption of coal is,
of course, something enormous, and when we consider that the weather
itself is frequently, perhaps I may say generally, dull, heavy and
thick, with an amount of clouds and rain unknown to our brilliant
American climate, it is not strange that the fogs of London are the
thickest and most dangerous in the world, sometimes producing complete
darkness at midday, and necessitating the lighting of the gas, as
though it were midnight, and at other times producing a peculiar
gloom, which is so impervious to light itself that the traffic of the
streets has to be stopped for hours. Nor is it strange that the city is
begrimed to an extraordinary degree from one end to the other.
[Sidenote: The Æsthetic Value of Soot.]
I have a friend in America, whom I sometimes jestingly call an
"Anglomaniac," because he admires Great Britain and her belongings so
much. I once accused him of trying to convince me that the sky was
bluer and the grass greener in Canada than in the United States--and
who speaks of the blackness of the London buildings as "richness." It
is interesting to find that he is supported in this view by some of
the best writers on London. Hare, for instance, in speaking of St.
Paul's Cathedral, emphasizes this point, "Sublimely impressive in its
general outlines, it has a peculiar sooty dignity all its own, which,
externally, raises it immeasureably above the fresh, modern-looking St.
Peter's at Rome. G. A. Sala says, in one of his capital papers, that it
is really the better for 'all the incense which all the chimneys since
the time of Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up
every day from their foul and grimy censers.' Here and there only is
the original grey of the stone seen through the overlaying blackness."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, too, says, "It is much better than staring
white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery
of black." By the way, the whole cost of St. Paul's, which was nearly
four million dollars, was paid by a tax on every chaldron of coal
brought into the port of London, "on which account it is said that the
cathedral has a special claim of its own to its smoky exterior."
Whatever one may think of these views, as to the æsthetic value of soot
on great stone buildings like St. Paul's, it must be admitted by all
that London, as a whole, is intensely ugly. Henry James, speaking of
one of the fashionable quarters of the city, says, "As you walk along
the streets, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded
with soot and fog, pierced with their straight, stiff window-slits,
and finished, by way of cornice, with a little black line resembling
a slice of curbstone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of
architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty." In the
indictment thus brought against one quarter of the city, it will be
observed that there are other counts besides the soot, such as the
monotony and plainness of the architecture and the character of the
building materials, and in both particulars London does compare very
unfavorably with some other cities.
[Sidenote: Brick vs. Stone.]
There are, of course, some very handsome stone buildings, such as the
British Museum, the new Parliament Buildings, many of the churches,
and some of the government offices and private residences, but most of
the houses are constructed of ugly brownish yellow brick, and capped
with rigid rows of chimney pots. The same thing is true of English
towns in general, and is one of the most obvious points of inferiority
on their part to the cities and towns of Scotland. Of Glasgow as it
was in the eighteenth century, then, of course, but a small place
in comparison with its present size, Sir Walter Scott wrote, in _Rob
Roy_, "The principal street was broad and important, decorated with
public buildings of an architecture, rather striking than correct in
point of taste, and running between rows of tall houses, built of
stone; the fronts of which were occasionally richly ornamented with
mason-work--a circumstance which gave the street an imposing air of
dignity and grandeur, of which most English towns are in some measure
deprived, by the slight, unsubstantial, and perishable quality and
appearance of the bricks with which they are constructed." Of the
later Glasgow of his time, Hawthorne said, "It is the stateliest city
in the kingdom." The adjective was well chosen. Those solid, strong,
stone-built Scotch cities, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and others,
are stately, as no English cities of brick are or can be; though there
is also a suggestion of sombreness or severity about them, which seems
to belong to that dour, grey land of the North; so that, after all,
the Scottish cities do not afford the strongest contrast to London's
dingy masses of brick. To find that, we must look to some of the cities
of the Continent, especially Paris, the cleanest, brightest, and most
beautiful of all the great capitals of the world. The Parisian climate
is clearer, there is less fog and smoke, the houses are built of a
white stone that gives the city a singular fairness to the eye, quite
different from the rather gloomy greyness of the Scottish cities, and,
of course, antipodal to the brick and grime of London. Moreover, the
streets of Paris, driven this way and that through squalid tenement
districts by Baron Hausmann, in his renovation of the city thirty or
forty years ago, are broad and splendid thoroughfares, abounding in
pure air, bright sunlight and green trees, all as different as possible
from the cramped and tortuous streets and alleys of the British
metropolis. "London has had no aedile like Hausmann." Few things add so
much to the attractiveness of great cities as handsome streets along
the water fronts. In Paris, on both sides of the Seine throughout its
entire course in the city, are broad, well-paved, and well-shaded
_Quais_, flanked by noble rows of stone buildings, while in London the
Victoria Embankment is almost the only worthy improvement along the
Thames. This Embankment is unquestionably a fine work, but as one walks
along the broad stone pavement of it, the view he gets on the other
side of the river is made up principally of dirty wharves and hideous
warehouses.
In many respects, also, London is untidy. Orange peel, paper and trash
are much in evidence. Why should there not be street scavengers like
those who keep even the small towns in France and Germany quite free
from that kind of litter?
[Sidenote: Immensity and Multitude.]
Strictly speaking, London is not a city, but, as Madame de Stael called
it, "a province of brick," and it looks as though it might become a
continent, for, though there are already more people in it than in
the whole of Scotland, and more than twice as many as in the whole of
Norway, it is still growing rapidly. It has more than three thousand
miles of streets. In spreading thus, the great city has reached out to,
and absorbed, many towns that once stood around it. By the way, this
accounts, to some extent for the fact that so many streets in London
have the same name. I venture to think that the most preposterous and
vexatious system of nomenclature ever in vogue is that which has been
employed for the streets of London. Until quite recently there were 166
different streets in this city bearing the name of New, 151 Church, 129
Union, 127 York, 119 John, 109 George, and so on. Of late some part
of this infuriating ambiguity has been removed by certain changes, but
enough of it still remains to baffle and puzzle the visitor, and to
cause him the loss of much valuable time and some temper.
[Sidenote: The Body is More than Raiment.]
I have not flattered London. The picture drawn above is repulsive.
Perhaps some of my readers are ready to ask whether such a place can
be attractive. Yes. Bulwer says of it, in _Ernest Maltravers_, "The
public buildings are few, and, for the most part, mean; the monuments
of antiquity not comparable to those which the pettiest town in Italy
can boast of; the palaces are sad rubbish; the houses of our peers and
princes are shabby and shapeless heaps of bricks. But what of all this?
The spirit of London is in her thoroughfares--her population! What
wealth--what cleanliness--what order--what animation! How majestic,
and yet how vivid, is the life that runs through her myriad veins!"
Externally, Paris is incomparably more beautiful than London, but the
fundamental characteristics of the French people are not to be named
with those of the British. The charm of London is deeper than that of
Paris; it wears better; it lasts longer.
"Sir," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell, as they sat in the Mitre Tavern,
in the centre of the city, "the happiness of London is not to be
conceived, but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say
there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten
miles from where we sit than in all the rest of the kingdom." And
again, "He who is tired of London is tired of existence."
It is the history of the city and the character of the people, rather
than the shape and color of their houses, that give London her abiding
charm. And, with her vast treasures of literature, science, and art,
what a paradise the great smoky city is to all readers and students,
in spite of her wretched climate, and her oppressively dingy _tout
ensemble_!
It is only fair to add that the famous French sculptor, M. Rodin,
has recently been expressing his admiration for the smoky British
metropolis, declaring that "nothing could be more beautiful than the
rich, dark, and ruddy tones of London buildings, in the grey and golden
haze of the afternoon."