To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the
book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is
as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and
Hampton Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs
at first between Fulham’s episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham’s
playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is
English. There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities
of the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a
dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop
over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of
mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the south
side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses,
artistic, literary, administrative people’s residences, that stretches
from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums.
What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses
crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the
architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into
the second movement of the piece with Lambeth’s old palace under your
quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge is
ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the
round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New Scotland
Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised
miraculously as a Bastille.
For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Cross
railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the north
side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian
architecture, and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys,
shot towers, advertisements on the south. The northward skyline grows
more intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for
Wren. Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is
reminded again of the original England, one feels in the fretted sky
the quality of Restoration Lace.
And then comes Astor’s strong box and the lawyers’ Inns.
(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along
the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle’s offer of three hundred
pounds a year....)
Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored her
nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound going
through reeds—on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.
And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of
the sea. Blackfriars one takes—just under these two bridges and just
between them is the finest bridge moment in the world—and behold,
soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a
jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether
remote, Saint Paul’s! “Of course!” one says, “Saint Paul’s!” It is the
very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved,
detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter’s, colder, greyer,
but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, only
the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it,
every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly
by regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut
blackly into its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the
traffic permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a
cloud into the grey blues of the London sky.
And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you
altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in the
London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is
altogether dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great
warehouses tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls
circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters,
and one is in the port of the world. Again and again in this book I
have written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty
degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy.
For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dear
neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a gap among
the warehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings
so provincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest,
most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to the
ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and
confirmation of Westminster’s dull pinnacles and tower. That sham
Gothic bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea!
But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third
part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and
precedence; it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening
reaches through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great
sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous
confusion of lighters, witches’ conferences of brown-sailed barges,
wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars,
and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock
open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all
are church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and
worn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships
that were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new
growths. And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no
comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one
feels that the pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly
monstrous, and first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane,
and then this company set to work and then that, and so they jostled
together to make this unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we
dodged and drove eager for the high seas.
I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a London
County Council steamboat that ran across me. _Caxton_ it was called,
and another was _Pepys_, and another was _Shakespeare_. They seemed so
wildly out of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to
take them out and wipe them and put them back in some English
gentleman’s library. Everything was alive about them, flash ing,
splashing, and passing, ships moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut,
barges going down with men toiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl
with the wash of shipping, scaling into millions of little wavelets,
curling and frothing under the whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all
we drove. And at Greenwich to the south, you know, there stands a fine
stone frontage where all the victories are recorded in a Painted Hall,
and beside it is the “Ship” where once upon a time those gentlemen of
Westminster used to have an annual dinner—before the port of London got
too much for them altogether. The old façade of the Hospital was just
warming to the sunset as we went by, and after that, right and left,
the river opened, the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach
after reach from Northfleet to the Nore.
And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern sea.
You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, siroo,
siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent—over which I once fled from
the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp—fall away on the right hand
and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze, and
the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing
sturdy tugs, are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They
stand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killing
of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the
phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are gone, and
I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space.
We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to
talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom
and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the
Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions,
glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river
passes—London passes, England passes...