The huge city perhaps never imprest the imagination more than when
approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless
lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most
impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks,
quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and
stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can
anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained.
It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of these ascents
when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as
because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to
be forgotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which
connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to
the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the
aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon may have vied with London in
circumference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open
spaces; the modern Babylon is a dense mass of humanity....
The Empire and the commercial relations of England draw representatives of
trading committees or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the
faces and costumes of the Hindu, the Parsee, the Lascar and the ubiquitous
Chinaman mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and
America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what
the great Palace of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile
Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will
not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London.
Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest
products are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put
money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which
grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great
cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese
industry is as much at your service here, if you have the all-compelling
talisman in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Benares,
Yokohama, or Peking. That London is the great distributing center of the
world is shown by the fleets of the carrying trade of which the countless
masts rise along her wharves and in her docks. She is also the bank of the
world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of commerce and the
precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the
bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam.
The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat.
How can the five millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything
needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruits
which can hardly be left beyond a day? Here again we see reason for
excepting to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, and concluding that tho
there may be fraud and scamping in the industrial world, genuine
production, faithful service, disciplined energy, and skill in
organization, can not wholly have departed from the earth. London is not
only well fed, but well supplied with water and well drained. Vast and
densely peopled as it is, it is a healthy city. Yet the limit of practical
extension seems to be nearly reached. It becomes a question how the
increasing multitude shall be supplied not only with food and water, but
with air.
The East of London, which is the old city, is, as all know, the business
quarter. Let the worshiper of Mammon when he sets foot in Lombard Street
adore his divinity, of all whose temples this is the richest and the most
famous. Note the throng incessantly threading those narrow and tortuous
streets. Nowhere are the faces so eager or the steps so hurried, except
perhaps in the business quarter of New York. Commerce has still its center
here; but the old social and civic life of the city has fled. What once
were the dwellings of the merchants of London are now vast collections of
offices. The merchants dwell in the mansions of the West End, their clerks
in villas and boxes without number, to which when their offices close they
are taken by the suburban railways. On Sunday a more than Sabbath
stillness reigns in those streets, while in the churches, the monuments of
Wren's architectural genius which in Wren's day were so crowded, the
clergyman sleepily performs the service to a congregation which you may
count upon your fingers.
It is worth while to visit the city on a Sunday. Here and there, in a back
street, may still be seen what was once the mansion of a merchant prince,
ample and stately, with the rooms which in former days displayed the pride
of commercial wealth and resounded with the festivities of the olden time;
now the sound of the pen alone is heard. These and other relics of former
days are fast disappearing before the march of improvement, which is
driving straight new streets through the antique labyrinth. Some of the
old thoroughfares as well as the old names remain. There is Cheapside,
along which, through the changeful ages, so varied a procession of history
has swept. There is Fleet Street, close to which, in Bolt Court, Johnson
lived, and which he preferred, or affected to prefer, to the finest scenes
of nature. Temple Bar, once grimly garnished with the heads of traitors,
has been numbered with the things of the past, after furnishing Mr.
Bright, by the manner in which the omnibuses were jammed in it, with a
vivid simile for a legislative deadlock....
Society has migrated to the Westward, leaving far behind the ancient
abodes of aristocracy, the Strand, where once stood a long line of
patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may
still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the
Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square,
now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too
ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer
House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at
St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair; but the general
tide of fashion has swept far beyond.
In that vast realm of wealth and leisure, the West End of London, the eye
is not satisfied with seeing, neither the ear with hearing. There is not,
nor has there ever been, anything like it in the world. Notes of
admiration might be accumulated to any extent without aiding the
impression. In every direction the visitor may walk till he is weary
through streets and squares of houses, all evidently the abodes of wealth,
some of them veritable palaces. The parks are thronged, the streets are
blocked with handsome equipages, filled with the rich and gay. Shops blaze
with costly wares, and abound with everything that can minister to luxury.
On a fine bright day of May or early June, and days of May or early June
are often as bright in London as anywhere, the Park is probably the
greatest display of wealth and of the pride of wealth in the world. The
contrast with the slums of the East End, no doubt, is striking, and we can
not wonder if the soul of the East End is sometimes filled with bitterness
at the sight. A social Jeremiah might be moved to holy wrath by the
glittering scene. The seer, however, might be reminded that not all the
owners of those carriages are the children of idleness, living by the
sweat of another man's brow; many of them are professional men or chiefs
of industry, working as hard with their brains as any mechanic works with
his hands, and indispensable ministers of the highest civilization. The
number and splendor of the equipages are thought to have been somewhat
diminished of late by the reduction of rents.
The architecture of the West End of London is for the most part drearily
monotonous; its forms have too plainly been determined by the builder, not
by the artist, tho since the restoration of art, varieties of style have
been introduced, and individual beauty has been more cultivated. It is the
boundless expanse of opulence, street after street, square after square,
that most impresses the beholder, and makes him wonder from what
miraculous horn of plenty such a tide of riches can have been poured.
A beautiful city London can not be called. In beauty it is no match for
Paris. The smoke, which not only blackens but corrodes, is fatal to the
architecture as well as to the atmosphere. Moreover, the fine buildings,
which if brought together would form a magnificent assemblage, are
scattered over the immense city, and some of them are ruined by their
surroundings. There is a fine group at Westminster, and the view from the
steps under the Duke of York's column across St. James's Park is
beautiful. But even at Westminster meanness jostles splendor, and the
picture is marred by Mr. Hankey's huge tower of Babel rising near. London
has had no edile like Haussmann.
The Embankment on the one side of the Thames is noble in itself, but you
look across from it at the hideous and dirty wharves of Southwark. Nothing
is more charming than a fine water street; and this water street might be
very fine were it not marred by the projection of a huge railway shed. The
new Courts of Law, a magnificent, tho it is said inconvenient, pile,
instead of being placed on the Embankment or in some large open space, are
choked up and lost in rookeries. London, we must repeat, has had no edile.
Perhaps the finest view is that from a steamboat on the river, embracing
the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Temple, with St. Paul's
rising above the whole.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY [Footnote: From "The Sketch Book." Published by G.P.
Putnam's Sons.]