THE CITY
§ 1.
How to set about conveying the sense of this great mass of minutely
reticulated architecture without instantly growing too pedantic
on the one hand or too vaguely general on the other--that is the
problem--always, in this business of civic portraiture, a very present
one--that now begins to grow especially insistent. For the Docks,
after all, in spite of their unhuman magnitude, do resolve themselves,
as we have seen, into a fairly compact cycle of recurrences; and the
Suburbs, again, unfolding themselves in their order, do provide a clear
and vital method of attack; and the Slums, unhappily, cling loyally
throughout to one dolorous code. But here, in this imposing van of
the civic army, there is neither loyalty to sole effect nor specific
rotation of several effects. Each building is more or less deeply
individualized; every street has its especial quality; and about the
bases of all these fretted cliffs, down all these changeful ravines,
the mutable tides of the traffic charge and ebb unceasingly.... How is
the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a
pitiful couple of thousand words?...
One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to
speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed
alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather
superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops
equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident
glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. One would like to
contrast it with one of the ways that branch out from it--with North
John Street, for instance, bleak-faced and sombre, constantly resonant
with heavy traffic from the Docks, but made suddenly magnificent by
the rocketting cream and gold of the foreshortened Royal Insurance
building at its head; or with Whitechapel, again--a street, for all its
proximity, of so profoundly different a quality: a street that seems
always to be attempting to override, by dint of cheap cafés, clothiers,
boot-shops, and the like, the coarse utilitarian note that insists
on lumbrously emerging from Crosshall Street, from Stanley Street,
from the neighbouring clangorous Goods depots: a country tripper of
a street, shamefacedly endeavouring to conceal the presence of its
obviously autochthonous companions.
And one would like, again, to speak of Stanley Street itself, chief of
those autochthonous companions, a narrow and difficult ravine, mostly
sunless, always noisy, whose bed is encumbered from end to end with
floats and lorries and waiting carters, and whose walls are provision
offices, provision warehouses, and the sheer grey flanks of the G.P.O.
From a gash in those grey flanks a blood-red stream of post-office vans
and motors is jerked out intermittently. The air is thick with swinging
boxes and heavy or keen with the most astounding range of odours: with
slab cheesy odours and searching fruity ones; with exotic odours that
one sniffs uncertainly, for which one can find no closer definition
than nice or nasty; and, supereminently, running through them all,
the wild decivilizing smell of wet deal cases--a smell that always
arouses a certain unemotional cotton-broker of one’s acquaintance to an
inconvenient but rather touching hunger for some particular place of
dim forest silences.
[Illustration: BOLD STREET.]
And then one would like to appraise the elusive atmosphere of Bold
Street--that intimate, elegant avenue of rare fabrics and shopping
women and the ripe, drumming ripple of automobiles--the Bond Street of
Liverpool, whose wood pavements make a sudden chosen silence in the
midst of the clatter, which is held beautifully inviolate from electric
cars and sandwichmen, and at the head of whose discreet vista the
tower of St. Luke’s rises gravely up, faintly remindful of the manner
in which the towers of Sainte Gudule survey that other road of women
and priceless elegancies in Brussels. And with this so purely feminine
apartment one would proceed to contrast, properly enough, some such
exclusively male possession as Brunswick Street. It, too, is highly
chosen and conserved, and the sober, archaic front of the old Heywood’s
Bank at the upper end of it prepares one at the outset for exactly
the unostentatious sobriety of the lower, where it passes under the
influence of the Corn Exchange. It seems to reflect, and the brokers
one meets there seem exceptionally to reflect as well, something of
the spirit of that fine race of merchants who wore leathern watchguards
but stocked a most excellent port, whose word was good for thousands
and who lunched at the little tavern which still stands there, like an
old-fashioned waiter, with so engaging an air of homely dignity.
And it would be impossible, of course, to avoid comparing Brunswick
Street with that other exclusively masculine quarter, Victoria Street,
which passes, in spite of its consistent virility, through three
successive phases. In the first, where it lies between North John
Street and the Post Office, it has an almost Stanley Street-like
aspect--a wider and less viscid Stanley Street, with the red stream of
mail-vans exchanged for a black swarm of clerks and merchants, hiving
about the Produce Exchange. In the second it grows aridly official,
the fidgety pomp of the Post Office towering away on the right, the
Revenue Offices marching with much cold grey dignity on the left.
And, finally, in its third phase, it grows positively dramatic and
unintentionally spectacular: the offices of the town’s protagonistic
newspapers, the _Post_ and the _Courier_, confront one another
threatfully--silent at sunset, but romantically vociferous towards
dawn, and, from close beside them, one gets (especially on a morning
of sunshine) the most delightful glimpse of the entirely noble sweep
of architecture that rises up--dreaming, reduced, subtile--beyond the
quick, green flash that sings out from among the statuary of St. John’s
Gardens.
And so one could go on, disengaging the essential spirit of street
after street, hoping that all the readings, taken together, would build
up into the gross effect of the whole thing, would cleanly spell out
the essential spirit of the City. As, indeed, they no doubt would. But
in the way of the adoption of that course there lies one rather serious
objection. To make its final result veracious, it would have to be
followed with uncompromising thoroughness; and if it were followed with
uncompromising thoroughness this chapter would never end.
§ 2.
So, then, although it carries us a certain distance, that bundle of
street analyses, even if it were considerably enlarged, must not
be looked upon as final. The alternative method, of course, is the
eclectic--a searching out of “notes,” of the vistas, the groupings,
the buildings, that leap incisively out from the mass and engage the
memory--an arrangement of these things in some considered order.
[Illustration: LIME STREET STATION]
And to such a collection that bunch of street-portraits (their
subjects, to be frank, having been chosen rather less off-handedly
than might appear) forms an admirable nucleus. And since it is at the
moments of arrival and departure that the nerves are most sensitive
to aspects--since it is, in consequence, the first or the last
glimpse of a place that remains, for most of us, its practical,
portable symbol--the collection should next include a note of the way
Liverpool reveals herself at each of her four great vestibules--at the
Landing Stage, at the Exchange Station, at Lime Street Station, at the
Central Station.
From within the railings that fringe the tiny courtyard outside the
last, for instance, it is as a neatly compacted vista of twinkling
shops, of converging roofs, minarets, and flag-poles, that, in the
day-time, she rather alluringly presents herself. There is much
delicate cross-hatching of shade and shine, much blithe gold-lettering
on the walls. There are flower-sellers on the kerb, a string of
hansoms glisten in the roadway, an electric car, double-decked and
yellow, surges down the hill from Ranelagh Street and provides the due
top-note.... Emphatically, a most efficient place, this Liverpool,
glossy and high-stepping, at once elegant and active. And with
nightfall it emerges as a place of quite exceptional loveliness.
That checked curve of the receding buildings, giving the prospect
depth without diminution, grades the lights without disparting them,
knits them together, both the near and the far, into one exquisitely
modulated chorus. Moon-green, mistletoe-white, orange, amethyst, and
pearl, are their principal colours, and in this chamber of converging
lines the massed clusters branch and leap and linger with the most
wonderful effect of tender ardency.... Emphatically, a place, this
Liverpool, possessing very singular possibilities of beauty.
The Liverpool that awaits one outside the orifices that lead from
Exchange Station, however, is of a vastly different quality.[3]
Roofed with a remote, unimportant sky, floored (say) with a vague
shimmer from recent rain, and hung monotonously about with carefully
unobtrusive buildings, it seems less like one of the central spaces
of the City than a mere ante-chamber to rooms--possibly magnificent,
possibly squalid--that lie somewhere beyond; and in the mornings, when
the hosts from the northern suburbs are pouring silently through, that
effect is irresistibly emphasized. It is all neutral, non-committal.
The solitary stains of colour are the hoardings that flame up before
the Moorfields entrance, and the immemorial fruit-barrow that picks out
against the grey in Bixteth Street.
[3] I speak here of what always seems to me to be its most
characteristic moment. That it should sometimes be profoundly
different, that it should often present itself, for example, as a
prolonged splutter of lorries fighting up from the Docks--agitated
enough, then, in all conscience, and daubed with much raw colour--is
but a testimony to that baffling mutability which seems, in this
matter, to make capture of the _vraie vérité_ even more impossible than
usual.
[Illustration: LIME STREET, WITH WELLINGTON MONUMENT.]
One’s impression of the Lime Street Liverpool, again, is always
tinged by the consciousness of that superb stretch of “smutted
Greek,” Liverpool’s most deliberate effort in the direction of
sustained architectural spectacle, which one sees just the moment
before or just the moment after. Without that consciousness, the
flat-chested, multi-windowed, watery-complexioned hotels that droop,
perhaps a little dismally, down the hill opposite, and the uncertain
traffic that spreads itself thinly out upon the vast road-spaces in
between, would probably not convince one that their claim to dignity
was extraordinary. But as it is, they do seem to catch a kind of
magnificence, a magnificence that is positively almost shared by the
little ragged sentry-box of the Punch and Judy show set oddly down,
like a grandfather’s clock, plump in the middle distance--a queer axis
for the cars that curve clangorously about it. As one advances, the
black chine of St. George’s Hall, a long grey ripple of steps lapping
its base, thrusts forward more and more emphatically, and so one
passes into sight of that plateau of classicism--St. George’s Hall,
the Museum, the Library, the Walker Art Gallery, which Mr. Hay has
described so perfectly upon another page.
Deliberately majestical here, gravely featureless in Tithebarn Street,
elegant from the Central, Liverpool achieves within the last of her
four porticoes an order of effects more urgent and memorable still.
For it is behind the Landing Stage that many of the car routes of the
City terminate, and the great space of unshadowed roadway, empty of all
buildings save the new-sprung Dock Offices, is really a brave platform
on which the cars endlessly wheel and interlace. By daylight it is
wonderful enough: the long files of maroon and yellow monsters curving,
separating, recoiling; the constant scream and clangour of their onset;
the rich white bulk of the Dock Board building floating serenely
above the press. But towards evening, when every car becomes a great
cresset of prisoned flame, the golden plenty of it all, the intricate
splendour of this vast terrace of racing and receding fire, is a thing
to leave the senses glutted and overborne. Liverpool is no longer a
place of architecture, grave or dignified. It is a mere spectacle,
a piece of golden pageantry. And even the beauty of the dominating
building, ivory and pale rose as it accepts the sunset, luminous and
firm-bodied as an eastern cloud at the end of a day of wind, seems no
more than a fit accessory to the fabric of woven lights astir below.
[Illustration: ELECTRIC CAR TERMINUS--PIER HEAD.]
§ 3.
It is one or other of those vignettes that stands for Liverpool in the
minds of all but all those who live without her walls; but there still
remains another touch or two to add before the symbol we are attempting
to create can be called completed, before this inevitable, initial slab
of what must begin to appear uncommonly like sheer “word-painting”
(crude word for a cruder occupation) can be brought to a close. Already
we have taken the sense of a group of her central ways; already we
have surprised her at each of her four great doorways. It now remains
to brush in a connecting note or two, an episode or so from the less
formal interspaces:
An appreciation, say, of one of those admirable fortalice-like
structures, the warehouses, which clamp all the lower end of the mass
and convert the little connecting roadways into canyons of sumptuous
gloom. Four-square and massive, they are always shapely; the old stock
brick, hand-made, of which so many of them are built, gives them a
fine hunger for ripe colouring; and from their vertical lines of
doorways--six, eight, ten, a dozen, of them superimposed in a slot that
runs from roof to base--they gain the power to charge their austerity
with something very near to positive elegance....
A reference to one other of the connecting ways: thin sabre wounds of
light drawn across the dense body of offices--to such a one as Leather
Lane, for instance, slipping stealthily from Tithebarn Street to Dale
Street, a sun-bright tremor of traffic, dainty and diminished as an
image in a lens, flickering delicately across its outlet....
An impression of some such typical grouping of the mobile and the
architectural as one gets, say, at the top of one of the three parallel
ways--Chapel Street, Water Street, James Street--which run down from
the centre towards the River: a crawling steep of men, cars, carriages,
and drays; the flags and signs of a horde of shipping offices
accompanying its descent; slow masts and a couple of great funnels
moving seriously beyond. Or of such another grouping as one finds being
repeated, over and over again, at the base of the brown stone curtain
that falls from St. Nicholas’ Churchyard to the street below: a troop
of sandwichmen, their beat ended, piling their placards against the
wall; a couple of ramping Clydesdales--head-chains glinting, feet
asplay for purchase--taking the Chapel Street hill; an aproned carter
swinking at their heads; a white-flecked mound of cotton-bales lurching
stolidly at their heels; high over all, sailing equably against the
blue, the fretted top-gallant of the Church....
A memorandum of one of the older (not the old--there are none) scraps
of the City, pushed a little to one side, antiquated before they are
antique: of that jolly little pot-bellied barber’s shop at the foot
of Mount Pleasant (Mr. Hay has described that, too), and of how the
slick new mass of the juxtaposed University Club crushes it into
insignificance--a ready-made metaphor; or of that delightful Georgian
residence in Wolstenholme Square, not far from Bold Street, with
lorries clattering about its mild old cobbles, and a trio of extremely
dirty tinsmiths bullying a carter from the top of its dignified
stairway....
[Illustration: THE LITTLE SHOP, MOUNT PLEASANT.]
An appreciation of that tumultuary roofscape one surveys from the
steps of the Art Gallery, a thing to be seen against the afterglow, a
clean-verged, leaping monochrome of mauve on chrysoprase....
And there you have the main letters in the alphabet of masonry which
Liverpool uses to write out some part of her confessions.
§ 4.
Now, it may be observed that I have made no reference whatever to
some of the most conspicuous majuscules in that alphabet. I have
said nothing, for instance, about the Municipal Offices, nor of the
Town Hall, nor of the Sailors’ Home, nor of the new Cotton Exchange,
nor of the old Custom House, nor of a dozen other much-photographed
architectural plums. This is not laxity, nor a sudden dearth
of adjectives, nor a disgust with the business of scene-painting.
There is, as they say, a reason; and if I disclose that reason, the
confessions which those dropped capitals bestud may tend to grow more
legible. Such disclosure might serve, at all events, to suggest a
co-ordinating theory, to provide a kind of zoetrope into which those
detached impressions and Mr. Hay’s pictures may equally be fitted, and
which, judiciously twirled, may induce them all to swim into a single
animate and breathing image.
The fact is, then, that when Liverpool desires most to impress she
expresses least. When she draws herself together for a splendid
outburst, she grows inarticulate. Her considered effects are mostly
affectations. So that to pick out those effects, to arrange all the
majuscules together, is not merely to print her confession in another
type: it is to print a confession of another type. One omits these
deliberate, self-consciously impressive things from one’s notes, not
because Liverpool contains very little of such things, but rather
because such things contain very little of Liverpool.
[Illustration: THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL.]
For the spirit behind this fabric is essentially a spirit absorbed
in other matters than the deliberate, preconsidered capture of the
beautiful.... Out of the several characteristics we have already
noted--the swiftness of the City’s growth, its glittering modernity,
its tireless, deft adjustment of alien activities to a common
end, its tenacious efficiency and alertness--out of these things
in conjunction does there not already begin to emerge (we are all
invincible anthropomorphists in these matters) some kind of quite
consistent Personality--the genius of the place, if you will--the handy
embodiment, at any rate, of the main instincts which this specially
environed congeries has tended to throw into exceptional relief? For
myself, I see it always as a blunt Rodinesque figure, sternly thewed,
tensely poised, strenuously individual, tenacious of the actual,
impatient of mere dreams, energetic rather than adventurous, a lover,
above everything, of efficiency--efficiency, testing and twisting
things with earnest, untiring fingers, whittling things down to the
valid, irreducible core.... It is not from fingers like those that one
looks to receive many frail white images of beauty. And whether this
reading of the essential psychology of the place be true or false,
it is certain that the men of Liverpool have never been overprone to
sheer æstheticism. The vivid day of their City has been crammed with
leaping episodes, it has left no spare strength for flourishes, and
they have expressed themselves throughout in terms of a naked and
practical utility. Such purely decorative effects as have from time to
time been judiciously introduced become in consequence effects which
it is vastly easy to misunderstand. Take, for instance, that lordly
plateau-load of classical furniture at Lime Street--a feature that
would seem utterly to contradict, but that in reality beautifully
confirms, this non-æsthetic reading of the City’s nature. Raking among
the ruins of the place a thousand years hence, when steamships are
unknown and the Mersey is silted up, some earnest archæologist will
come upon those (in both senses of the word) imposing remains, and
will promptly be deceived. He will speak with rapture of the “sharp
bright edge of high Hellenic culture” that must have glittered about
the community which could produce such stately monuments; and he will
probably have a good deal to say about the civic decadence of his
contemporaries. But archæology (not, perhaps, for the first time) will
have been mistaken. These clean-limbed columns and great porticoes and
pediments were not upreared by a race of Phryne-worshipping hedonists.
Directly regarded, therefore, they are misleading, uncharacteristic;
but in an indirect way they are very characteristic indeed. One
would ask for no better proof of a man’s lack of native appetite for
literature than that he had read through, in turn, the whole of the
hundred best books. Similarly, this wholesale, uncompromising adoption
of an architectural mode already traditional, already innumerable times
approved, is a most convincing proof of the existence of that spirit
of honest and tenacious practical efficiency of which I have spoken.
When it came to a matter of beauty, they made beauty a business, they
captured it by brute strength and logic. There was nothing tentative,
experimental, about the effort; there was no attempt at realizing some
splendid, unprecedented dream; line for line, mass for mass, it was
the stolid, efficient reproduction of masses and lines about whose
loveliness there was no possibility of question. And so the beautiful
sequence of buildings which stands for Liverpool’s most deliberate
piece of architectural æstheticism is really a testimony to the
beauty-disregarding spirit of naked utilitarianism which her endless
and imminent activities have made inevitable.
§ 5.
And it is precisely to this beauty-disregarding spirit of
utilitarianism again that one traces some of the most memorable and
significant pieces of beauty that the place possesses--more memorable
and significant than the St. George’s Hall group, because vastly
more vital and characteristic. For Liverpool, in spite of herself,
and quite unconsciously, is a place of exceeding beauty. Out of that
hard turmoil of tangible interests and endeavours a very splendid and
reassuring happening has sprung. In honest and shrewd response to
instant necessities, the city has been carved and kneaded into the
lean lines of practical effectiveness; and those lines have joined
wonderfully together to make any number of unpremeditated glories.
Loveliness has descended unawares. Built frankly for use, it seems
to have attained, by processes almost as organic as those of outer
nature, a very singular and moving impressiveness. That drama of
leaping roof-tops seen from the Walker Art Gallery, that chamber of
co-ordinated lights seen from the Central Station, that racing flood
of gold beneath the Dock Board building, are examples of the sort of
thing I mean. It is in these natural and instinctive creations, frankly
utilitarian, and not in her self-conscious trafficking with loveliness,
that Liverpool grows most sensuously magnificent. A curve of sunless
canal with clustered chimneys rising solemnly about; a pit of railway
sidings, warehouses ranged round, one proud white plume of smoke moving
slowly across it; long glittering reaches at the Docks; a black stretch
of suburb crawling out, myriad-speared, across the sunset; a mass of
warehouses blotting out the stars; hot vistas in the markets, ripe and
fierce with colour; burning evening skies, unintentionally clipped
and framed by the pillars of the Town Hall portico; roof-adjusted
rods of sunlight creating unexpected carnivals; perspectives forming
and vanishing; great horses moving in procession; swift, imperative
assonances--momentary, irrecoverable--between traffic and grouped
buildings: these and a thousand others of the same spontaneous kind
are the passages of her life, the native gestures, that linger in the
memory like a cadence, that colour her aspect with an abiding dignity
and graciousness.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S MARKET.]
And this is, after all, to say little more than that Liverpool
possesses in deep measure that strange accidental beauty of the modern
city which is a thing so new to the world that the arts have not yet
learned to teach men how to enjoy it. But in Liverpool (exceptional,
once more, because typical, typical because exceptional) that beauty
exists in a state of singular purity. It is a beauty that is the
result, above everything, of a naked response in stone and iron to
certain clear imperative necessities: such a response catching, as
it would seem, some of the beauty and authority that inevitably attach
to every articulate expression of a vital impulse. And in Liverpool
those responses have been especially clean and unentangled. The place
is self-contained: it has never run to booths and show-places; it has
no associations, romantic or historic, to attract the gaper; it has
never had to sustain a pose, and only rarely been tempted to attempt
one; and these facts, and the fact that its growth has been continuous,
that there has nowhere been any shrinkage or debilitation, have made
it possible for the garment of buildings to be fitted to the authentic
body of its energies with an absolute closeness and integrity. There
are no loose folds, no adaptations, very few adhesive insincerities.
The whole thing is supremely vital and athletic; and therefore it
everywhere discloses that strong and moving graciousness, as yet
almost wholly uncelebrated, which is as elemental and unaffected as
the strong, forthright graciousness of its River.
§ 6.
Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the setting of this central stage,
its scenery and back-cloths. Let me now attempt to indicate, as
uninvidiously as may be, one or two of the more prominent actors:
themselves, of course, equally symptomatic, equally the choice and
the mouthpiece of that Rodinesque _deus ex machina_ couched invisibly
behind.
[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS CHURCH AND THE LAST OF TOWER BUILDINGS.]
_Place aux dames_, by all means.... Of the maturer actresses, however,
I confess I speak with a certain degree of diffidence. It is always
dangerous to generalize on such a topic, and when the generalization
inclines to be not wholly laudatory, to the danger of being guilty
of inaccuracy is added that of floundering into blank discourtesy.
But I will have, at least, the courage of my impressions. Sifting
them, I incline to suggest that the more mature of the women-folk
whom one discerns here, among the central shops--driving, walking,
shopping--seem somehow not wholly to succeed. The efforts of an earlier
day seem to have left their marks--sometimes in a certain exiguity,
more often in a certain inexiguity; and, facially, one rather deplores
the absence of anything in the nature of that enduring patrician
basis which sometimes makes (as one seems to remember) the inevitable
touches of attrition touches almost to be welcomed--touches that
refine, clarify, take distinction a delicate step further. Here and
there, in a Bold Street carriage, or in some one of the more guarded
roadways of the south-eastern suburbs, a silvery face will flash out
with a cameo-like precision; but their incidence is rare--quite rare
enough, it seems to me, to be accepted as significant. The general note
wavers instead between something almost touchingly _fade_ and something
too tenacious of qualities which, however charming in themselves,
have rather lost their personal propriety.... So one hesitatingly
generalizes. For the rest, there is an infinitude of kindliness; and
one suspects that it would sometimes much prefer to break away, more
often than it has the right to do, into frankest homeliness. One is
never tempted to deplore a too vulgar display of mere culture.
But of the younger of the female players I speak with a notable
access of assurance. There, beyond question, do I seem to detect
the presence of a very distinct type, and (still more reassuring)
of a type that is vastly pleasant. More, I have, for the first part
at least of this judgment, the confirmation of a friend in whose
_flair_ for social qualities I repose, for the best of reasons, the
most absolute confidence. “I can tell them anywhere, anywhere,” she
assures me: in Paris, at Nice, in Scotland, it seems, the Liverpool
_jeune fille_ stands apart. To the latter part of my judgment, it
is true, she subscribes only an assent that is dimmed by a vague
qualification or so, perhaps not wholly inexplicable. She hints,
for one thing, at a kind of gaucherie; but that, I am convinced,
is unfair. One may suggest, indeed, not without justice, a certain
lack of finesse, but that is by no means the same thing. Gaucherie
implies a kind of inefficiency, an inadequacy that trends towards
clumsiness, and anything short of an absolute efficiency is flatly
uncharacteristic of the sort of girl I mean. Whether she speaks or
walks, buys a hat or wears one, plays golf or the piano, it is always
the consummate apportionment of means to end that most impresses one;
and if one rarely finds her indulging in the frailer, more elusive,
artifices of femininity--in those so alluringly deliquescent touches
of speech, voice, emotion, gesture, and so forth--in all the subtle
craft of implication, for instance--it is by no means because her
methods stumble before they reach her ideals, but simply because her
ideals include none of those fine, diaphanous practices. Her vision of
the world is as distinct and sharp as Mr. Bernard Shaw’s (Mr. Shaw,
indeed, would unreservedly admire her); her emotions are robustious and
definite; and she makes all this instantly quite clear, even to the
outsider, in her manner of speaking to her coachman as she steps into
her brougham, or in the strong delicacy of the colours with which she
so charmingly and undisguisedly emphasizes the clear colour of her eyes.
I grow intimate, it will be perceived, and, in order to grow more
intimate still, let me appoint a flesh-and-blood heroine. She is a
woman who always seems to me perfectly to achieve exactly what her
sister-players, one in this way, one in that, succeed in attaining only
approximately. She certainly, at any rate, perfects and epitomizes,
in the most delightful fashion, what one singles out as their main
tendencies--their main physical tendencies, that is, and therefore,
no doubt, their main sub-physical tendencies as well. She is tall and
large-limbed, more Hebe than Diana, with the grace of swiftness rather
than of languor, and a mode of gowning that deals directly with the
body’s needs, and so, the body being so admirably fashioned, immensely
rejoices the eye. Bronze and rose (here one inevitably tends toward
dithyramb; but these Liverpool complexions, too good to be untrue, are
really quite memorable) meet distractingly in her face’s colouring,
and I will not deny an occasional freckle or so. She speaks an English
that is clean and well picked in a voice that is so satisfied that it
needs all its firmness to keep it from complacency, and she has no
discoverable accent. She lives at Sefton Park in one of the rather
ineffective houses we will criticize in the next chapter, and, as
often as not, comes to town by electric car. (London, I hear, still
looks askance at its County Council cars, but in Liverpool they are,
and always have been, quite the thing.) She is most herself when she
walks. Her stride is not evasive. Golf has helped to solidify it. She
writes a most excellent letter, reads a good deal, cares nothing for
Mr. Yeats, a great deal for Tolstoi, is (rather unexpectedly) a devotee
of Bach, and can play the Chaconne very vividly. She is at once shrewd
and tender, cool-headed and warm-hearted. And although she protests
that she has “a soul above self-coloured papers,” her regard for sacred
things, on the one hand, is as free from sickliness as her regard for
secular things, on the other, is free from crudity and ill-taste.
[Illustration: SAINT PETER’S CHURCH.]
She stands, then, that highly satisfactory young animal, for all that,
in their several ways, the majority of the younger women-folk tend
to rival; not only those who pass from brougham to shop in the clear
morning brightness of Church Street and Bold Street, but also those
others, even more truly native to these central quarters, whom one
observes hurrying here a few hours earlier, and leaving, with something
more of leisureliness, in the neighbourhood of six and seven: the less
fortunate, but scarcely less reassuring sisterhood whose business it is
to wait at the thither end of that passage from brougham to shop, and
produce such hats, ribbons, laces, flowers, as our heroine may desire.
Physically, indeed, these shop-girls of Liverpool have a charm that
rather astonishes the stranger; and they, too, are remarkably efficient
self-gowners. To pass down Lord Street and Church Street on some
spring evening, with the ebbing daylight tactfully erasing any of the
lines the stress of the long, close hours may have left on the young
faces, and the flowering lights of the City flinging little splashes
of piquancy among them, is to be charmed into accepting the physical
beauty of women as one of the especial attributes of these rapid
commercial streets.
§ 7.
As for the male members of the company, they avow, of course, an
unusually complete immersion in occupations unmuscular and theoretical:
Liverpool’s exceptional freedom from industrialism--other than the
secluded industrialism of the Docks--making her, in this conspicuous
white-fingered urbanity of her workers, once more especially typical of
one of the chief modes of modern civic life. All manual labour being,
broadly speaking, tidily banished to the Docks, these central spaces
are left entirely at the disposal of the dock-labourer’s soft-handed
collaborators--the clerk, the merchant, the broker. Every morning, from
nine to ten, the tide of these spruce actors pours astonishingly in.
They cram and encrust the cars, they traverse, with a neat, fashionable
air, that mild ante-room in Tithebarn Street; they flood thickly up
from the River--an agreeably apparelled army that gives a fine air of
prosperity to all the streets, and that will shortly settle down, in
a thousand unseen cells, to its extraordinary and so modern labours,
dealing always with symbols instead of actualities, with signatures
instead of people, with bills of lading instead of bales and boxes,
flinging tons of merchandise from continent to continent with the flick
of a pen--a queer, Shalott-like existence of whispers and reflections.
But in spite of these unmuscular rites, and in spite of those elegant
costumes, it must not be imagined that the ritualists are themselves
unmuscular. It is by no means a white-faced and dyspeptic clan, this
clerical tribe of Liverpool. And, for my own part, I like to believe
that it is the River once more which has secured for these clerks,
merchants, bankers, brokers, their rather conspicuous emancipation from
the proverbial physical defects of the sedentary. The place, anyhow,
is very clearly pledged to athleticism, as those rows of physical
culture magazines which chromatically tessellate the pavements of Water
Street and Chapel Street would alone suffice to make quite evident. And
certainly, even if it be not wholly responsible for this remorseless
pursuit of muscularity, the River gives that pursuit all manner of
exceptional advantages. The long series of famous golf-links that
lie amongst the sand-dunes at New Brighton, at Leasowe, at Hoylake,
at Formby, at Blundellsands, at Birkdale; the numerous salt-water
swimming-baths; the sailing clubs; the briny, gale-cleansed spaces of
aromatic gold, free to all who care to use them, that curve endlessly
about the coast; the mere proximity of the Landing Stage and the
presence of the cordial and bracing airs that enfilade the streets
of offices behind it--all these things must have tended to give
athleticism an especial point and vigour. The River has made one-half
of Liverpool a race of quill-drivers; but it has also made them a race
of exceptionally deep-lunged and brown-faced quill-drivers.
[Illustration: EVENING AT NEW BRIGHTON.]
Take, for instance, the case of L----. L----, nearer twenty than
thirty, is a clerk in a bank here, and he, like our free-striding
heroine, presents a clear and accurate summary of the tendencies one
notes in the innumerable clerks who fill the close-packed offices all
about him. He lives “across the water” at New Brighton, choosing that
because of the half-hour’s river crossing morning and evening. (He
spends that half-hour walking steadfastly round and round the upper
deck, hat in hand, practising--if he can do so unobtrusively--an
elaborate and, I am sure, highly painful system of respiration.) He
goes to the swimming-bath twice a week in winter, five or six times in
summer, dodging down there, if possible, at moments that are perhaps,
from a mere purist’s point of view, not entirely his own. But in these
matters L---- is no mere purist. He does his work well (he is really
a most excellent servant), and that suffices. He is paid £140 a year
for doing it well, and that, too, suffices. It suffices for three
£3 3s. suits per annum, for subscriptions to a football club, to a
cricket club, to a tennis club, for a sixth share of the expenses of
running a small yacht, for a £13 summer holiday, and for his various
trim necessities. He is a close student of the science of “fitness,”
regarding “fitness” (very properly) as a thing much superior to any
mental abnormality, and the shilling which suffices for his daily
lunch is not expended without due dietetical considerations. Just now
it is vegetarianism. Thereafter he repairs to one of those surprising
underground smoking cabarets--places where an Oriental easefulness
and languor loom dimly through a blue narcotic veil--which Liverpool,
probably because of her emphatic clericalism, provides in such
extreme abundance, and there, in the company of other seekers after
fitness, he sips, and smokes, and nibbles one of the two biscuits
with which he is provided (never both--that would be a grave _faux
pas_), and discusses athleticism until a quarter of an hour after
the time he should be back at his desk. He is lithe, clean-shaven,
temperate, unmarried, and, in spite of his _contes_, probably strictly
celibate as well. He reads, but books are of interest to him chiefly
because they remind him of life, give him a fresh appetite for the
fit and pleasant things of life; thus, he praises Harland because
his people--Anthony and the rest--are “so immensely decent.” He is
not inordinately religious, but the traditional piety of his people
is a thing he contentedly accepts. He may one day migrate (“going
abroad” is a familiar topic in this City of lowly paid clerks and
multitudinous cheap and obvious modes of exit), and if he does he will
certainly score. If he stays at home he will wind up with a small bank
managership and as much in the way of golf and week-ends as £250 a year
will permit him to use as a salve for the obedient monotony of small
bank management.
That is one type of player. Another, and much older, is to be found
gravely pacing among those sober buildings in Brunswick Street.
Self-made, but never blatant; successful because of his common sense
and his genius for hard work, and remaining common-sensible and
hard-working in spite of his success; vested with a dignity that
sometimes verges on stolidity; suspicious of sentiment in life, but
an admirer of Bouguereau in art, he is pre-eminently the kind of man
who ought always to be commemorated in a steel engraving, never in a
photograph. He has had much to do with the creation of his City, and
certain of her newer propensities awaken in him a vague sensation of
alarm. Wealthy, he is a collector rather than an amateur, but a friend
rather than a host. Not without a rich vein of humour, he still takes
politics quite seriously. His house (if his family be amenable) has a
strong mahogany flavour; if his family be vigorous, that vague feeling
of disquietude pursues him there, where he is compelled to fit into an
incongruous bungalow-full of _art nouveau_ tenuities.
[Illustration: THE WALKER ART GALLERY--INTERIOR.]
Thus, in spite of the fact that he, more than any of the others, often
startles one by his resemblance to the tense Rodinesque figure beyond,
he finds himself already being surrounded by a steady flow of new modes
and influences. E----, for example, is the vigorous son of one of these
admirable persons; and E---- believes in bungalows, thinks consistent
dignity undignified, and has acquired for mahogany a distaste which
he believes to be instinctive. I doubt, myself, whether he has the
essential capacity of his parent; but his practice (he is a solicitor)
is good and whenever one catches his alert, rather thin, diligently
groomed face in the City, he seems extraordinarily full of business.
He is a member of a club, but uses it rarely: there is little club
life in Liverpool. His idea of conversation is to get one alone, and
talk shop with extreme diligence and (to be just) much charm. In spite
of his _art nouveau_ proclivities, he has less sincere taste for the
arts than his Bouguereau-appreciating father; but he has a great stock
of criteria, numbers a local portrait-painter among his friends, and
at the Private View of the Autumn Exhibition has a neat, intelligent
appraisement for every notable picture in the room. He never makes
discoveries there, and of course his range is limited. He has a
word of judicious praise for Hornel (whom his father still honestly
dislikes), but Steer has not yet emerged from the unimportant section
he vaguely calls Impressionist; but within those limits his efficiency
is surprising: yes, he is unmistakably intelligent. He is not quite
sure of the University: actually, unconsciously, he is just a little
afraid of all that it stands for; and the University, although it makes
a friend of him, has, in private, an attitude not wholly antithetical
to pity.... That splitting up--that friendly specialization and
intelligent exchange when needed--of culture, of business instincts,
of dilettantism--so different from the inclusive interests, almost the
independent universality, both of demand and supply, that marked his
father--I find quite profoundly characteristic of the Liverpool of the
present moment.
§ 8.
Well, there, in their most characteristic rôles, are some of the chief
of the players who step efficiently, efficiently, through the six
days’ traffic of this well-set central stage. I have said nothing,
it will be seen, of their nationalities. That is partly because
national characteristics in Liverpool have a way of bowing to the
local spirit--or rather, to put it more accurately, because various
national characteristics have contributed to a local spirit that an
Englishman, a Scotchman, or a Welshman finds it easy and proper to
adopt. Thus, there are any number of clerks in the North and South
Wales Bank (whose Head Office is here) who are perfect replicas of
L----, and E---- _père_, for all his typical Liverpolitanism, is really
a pure-bred Scot. And it is partly, too, because any real consideration
of this alluring question of race would lead to what would be, in this
most cosmopolitan of places, a quite endless business: the discussion,
namely, of how the pattern of the local spirit has been affected by the
presence of those charming peoples who draw such bright exotic threads
through the social fabric.
Into all that, unhappily, I have here no space to enter, nor can I
even, much as I would desire, describe the changes of cast and play
which occasionally take place: the pale Maeterlinckian drama, for
instance, which is invariably presented at the close of the six days’
traffic, making a mild hyphen between Saturday’s curtain and Monday’s
overture--a coming and going of unknown people among wide echoes and
empty roadways, with the sleepy Sunday buildings looking down in a
kind of vacant puzzlement.... Or that other performance, not in the
least Maeterlinckian, by which the Sunday quiet is succeeded--the great
Rabelaisian drama of the Bank Holiday, presented by an entirely fresh
company with new costumes and new effects. The lumpish dialect of South
Lancashire echoes everywhere about the stage on such occasions. The
Landing Stage is a prolonged ballet in red and white and inordinately
electric blue. And although the Cotton Market and the Stock Exchange
are utterly deserted, the appearance in the streets of a strange,
pinkish, tissue-wropt substance described (perhaps apocryphally?) as
“Liverpool Rock” would seem to testify to the discovery, and to the
whole-souled encouragement, of a hitherto unsuspected local industry.
And I would have liked, too, to celebrate in some measure the
change that sweeps over the City with the oncoming of night. It is
in her native unconsidered gestures, as I have said, far more than
in her studied poses, that the essential beauty of Liverpool is most
perfectly revealed; and it is at night, when the aid of the sunlight
is ended and the sky is a forgotten tale and even the stars are of as
little moment as moths that palely flutter outside the windows of a
lighted palace, that Liverpool becomes most elemental and instinctive.
Abandoned by external nature, she becomes most natural, and therefore
attains her most conspicuous beauty. Those electric cars, of course,
designed purely for utility, with no thought of spectacle, give to
her nocturnes their special individualizing note; so that whilst
she has nothing to correspond to that astonishing golden spray of
hansoms which makes midnight Piccadilly a place of almost intolerable
magnificence, she has her own rich code, just as characteristic, and
of but little less a loveliness. Down London Road, down Renshaw Street,
the crocus-coloured rivers pour into the vortex of light that boils
beneath the great cliffs of Saint George’s Hall, so terrible in their
nocturnal shapelessness. Moon-green arc-lamps, that only Baudelaire
could properly describe, hang, strange fruits, above the golden
turmoil; and it is through courses fledged by sun-gold and canopied by
this moon-green that the fluent saffron finally escapes. It sweeps down
Dale Street and Water Street, it sweeps down Church Street and James
Street, and so pours out, in the end, upon that streaming terrace by
the water-side.
§ 9.
So, inevitably, we return in the end to the River, the beautiful
source of all this beauty, the magnificent architect of all this
golden triumph. I have spoken already of its daylight loveliness,
of the elemental hungers that it both feeds and fosters, of its
cordial ministry to all that is most panic in men’s blood. But with
the advent of night it, too, suffers a deep and splendid change.
Renouncing this medicative disloyalty, it frankly surrenders itself
to the City’s rule, and becomes a peaceful province of urbanity. The
lights of the City make golden chains about it, golden lights from
the City patrol its deep recesses. It is the hour of reconciliations.
The City is more elemental than by day, the River is less elemental,
and a long sustained harmony unites the flaming tides of the streets
and the darkened causeway of the tide. Even the boats have shared the
transformation. So eminently business-like beneath the sun, they are
now changed to shining presences, romantically visiting the night.
Topaz, emerald, and ruby are their chosen favours, and widespread robes
of cramoisie and gold reflections trail sumptuously about them as they
move.
[Illustration: OVERHEAD RAILWAY FROM JAMES STREET.]