Every morning I get up early, and, going straight to the window, I see
half London from an eighth-storey. I see factory chimneys poetised, and
the sign of a great lion against the sky, and the dome of St. Paul’s
rising magically out of the mist, and pearl-coloured minarets round
about the horizon, and Waterloo Bridge suspended like a dream over the
majestic river-, and all that sort of thing. I am obliged, in spite of
myself, to see London through the medium of the artistic sentimentalism
of ages. I am obliged even to see it through the individual eyes of
Claude Monet, whose visions of it I nevertheless resent. I do not want
to see, for example, Waterloo Bridge suspended like a dream over the
majestic river. I much prefer to see it firmly planted in the plain
water. And I ultimately insist on so seeing it. The Victoria Embankment
has been, and still is, full of pitfalls for the sentimentalist in art
as in sociology; I would walk warily to avoid them. The river at dawn,
the river at sunset, the river at midnight (with its myriad lamps, of
course)!... Let me have the river at eleven a. m. for a change, or at
tea-time. And let me patrol its banks without indulging in an orgy of
melodramatic contrasts.
I will not be carried away by the fact that the grand hotels, with their
rosy saloons and fair women (not invariably or even generally fair!),
look directly down upon the homeless wretches huddled on the Embankment
benches. Such a juxtaposition is accidental and falsifying. Nor will I
be imposed upon by the light burning high in the tower of St. Stephen’s
to indicate that the legislators are watching over Israel. I think of
the House of Commons at question-time, and I hear the rustling as two
hundred schoolboyish human beings (not legislators nor fathers of their
country) simultaneously turn over a leaf of two hundred question-papers,
and I observe the self-consciousness of honourable members as they walk
in and out, and the naïve pleasure of the Labour member in his enormous
grey wideawake, and the flower in the buttonhole of the white-haired and
simple ferocious veteran of democracy, and the hobnobbing over stewed
tea and sultana on the draughty terrace.
Nor, when I look at the finely symbolic architecture of New Scotland
Yard, will I be obsessed by the horrors of the police system and of the
prison system and by the wrongness of the world. I regard with fraternal
interest the policeman in his shirt-sleeves lolling at a fourth-floor
window. Thirty, twenty, years ago people used to be staggered by the
sudden discovery that, in the old Hebraic sense of the word, there
was no God. It winded them, and some of them have never got over it.
Nowadays people are being staggered by the sudden discovery that there
is something fundamentally wrong with the structure of society. This
discovery induces a nervous disease which runs through whole thoughtful
multitudes. I suffer from it myself. Nevertheless, just as it is certain
that there is a God, of some kind, so it is certain that there is
nothing fundamentally wrong with the structure of society. There is
something wrong--but it is not fundamental. There always has been and
always will be something wrong. Do you suppose, O reformer, that when
land-values are taxed, and war and poverty and slavery and overwork
and underfeeding and disease and cruelty have disappeared, that the
structure of society will seem a whit the less wrong? Never! A moderate
sense of its wrongness is precisely what most makes life worth living.
*****
[Illustration: 0147]
Between my lofty dwelling and the river is a large and beautiful garden,
ornamented with statues of heroes. It occupies ground whose annual value
is probably quite ten thousand pounds--that is to say, the interest on a
quarter of a million. It is tended by several County Council gardeners,
who spend comfortable lives in it, and doubtless thereby support their
families in dignity. Its lawns are wondrous; its parterres are full of
flowers, and its statues are cleansed perhaps more thoroughly than the
children of the poor. This garden is, as a rule, almost empty. I use it
a great deal, and sometimes I am the only person in it. Its principal
occupants are well-dressed men of affairs, who apparently employ it, as
I do, as a ground for reflection. Nursemaids bring into it the children
of the rich. The children of the poor are not to be seen in it--they
might impair the lawns, or even commit the horrible sin of picking the
blossoms. During the only hours when the poor could frequent it, it
is thoughtfully closed. The poor pay, and the rich enjoy. If I paid my
proper share of the cost of that garden, each of my visits would run me
into something like half-a-sovereign. My pleasure is being paid for up
all manner of side-streets. This is wrong; it is scandalous. I would,
and I will, support any measure that promises to rectify the wrongness.
But in the meantime I intend to have my fill of that garden, and to
savour the great sensations thereof. I will not be obsessed by one
aspect of it.
The great sensations are not perhaps what one would have expected to
be the great sensations. Neither domes, nor towers, nor pinnacles, nor
spectacular contrasts, nor atmospheric effects, nor the Wordsworthian
“mighty heart”! It is the County Council tram, as copied from Glasgow
and Manchester, that appeals more constantly and more profoundly than
anything else of human creation to my romantic sensibility “Yes,” I am
told, “the tram-cars look splendid at night!” I do not mean specially
at night. I mean in the day. And further, I have no desire to call them
ships, or to call them aught but tram-cars. For me they resemble just
tram-cars, though I admit that when forty or fifty of them are crowded
together, they remind me somewhat of a herd of elephants. They are
enormous and beautiful; they are admirably designed, and they function
perfectly; they are picturesque, inexplicable, and uncanny. They pome to
rest with the gentleness of doves, and they hurtle through the air
like shells. Their motion--smooth, delicate and horizontal--is always
delightful. They are absolutely modern, new, and original. There was
never anything like them before, and only when something different and
better supersedes them will their extraordinary gliding picturesqueness
be appreciated. They never cease. They roll along day and night without
a pause; in the middle of the night you can see them glittering away to
the ends of the county. At six o’clock in the morning they roll up over
the horizon of Westminster Bridge in hundreds incessantly, and swing
downwards and round sharply away from the Parliament which for decades
refused them access to their natural gathering-place. They are a
thrilling sight. And see the pigmy in the forefront of each one, rather
like a mahout on the neck of an elephant, doing as he likes with the
obedient monster! And see the scores of pigmies inside, each of them,
black dots that jump out like fleas and disappear like fleas! The loaded
tram stops, and in a moment it is empty, and of the contents there is
no trace. The contents are dissolved in London.. . . And then see London
precipitate the contents again; and watch the leviathans, gorged,
glide off in endless procession to spill immortal souls in the evening
suburbs!
*****
But the greatest sensation offered by the garden, though it happens
to be a mechanical contrivance, is entirely independent of the County
Council. It is--not the river--but the movement of the tide. Imagination
is required in order to conceive the magnitude, the irresistibility,
and the consequences of this tremendous shuttle-work, which is regulated
from the skies, rules the existence of tens of thousands of people,
and casually displaces incalculable masses of physical matter. And the
curious human thing is that it fails to rouse the imagination of the
town. It cleaves through the town, and yet is utterly foreign to it,
having been estranged from it by the slow evolutionary process. All
those tram-cars roll up over the horizon of Westminster Bridge, and
cross the flood and run for a mile on its bank, and not one man in every
tenth tram-car gives the faintest attention to the state of the river.
A few may carelessly notice that the tide is “in” or “out,” but how
many realise the implications? For all they feel, the river might be a
painted stream! Yo wonder that the touts crying “Steamboat! Steamboat!”
have a mournful gesture, and the “music on board” sounds thin, like a
hallucination, as the shabby paddle-wheels pound the water! The cause
of the failure of municipal steamers is more recondite than the yellow
motor-cars of the journals which took pride in having ruined them.
And the one satisfactory inference from the failure is that human nature
is far less dependent on nonhuman nature than vague detractors of the
former and devotees of the latter would admit. It is, after all, rather
fine to have succeeded in ignoring the Thames!