It is, no doubt, not the taste of every one, but for the real
London-lover the mere immensity of the place is a large part of its
savour. A small London would be an abomination, as it fortunately is
an impossibility, for the idea and the name are beyond everything an
expression of extent and number. Practically, of course, one lives in
a quarter, in a plot; but in imagination and by a constant mental act
of reference the accommodated haunter enjoys the whole—and it is only
of him that I deem it worth while to speak. He fancies himself, as they
say, for being a particle in so unequalled an aggregation; and its
immeasurable circumference, even though unvisited and lost in smoke,
gives him the sense of a social, an intellectual margin. There is a
luxury in the knowledge that he may come and go without being noticed,
even when his comings and goings have no nefarious end. I don’t mean by
this that the tongue of London is not a very active member; the tongue
of London would indeed be worthy of a chapter by itself. But the eyes
which at least in some measure feed its activity are fortunately for
the common advantage solicited at any moment by a thousand different
objects. If the place is big, everything it contains is certainly not
so; but this may at least be said—that if small questions play a part
there, they play it without illusions about its importance. There
are too many questions, small or great; and each day, as it arrives,
leads its children, like a kind of mendicant mother, by the hand.
Therefore perhaps the most general characteristic is the absence of
insistence. Habits and inclinations flourish and fall, but intensity
is never one of them. The spirit of the great city is not analytic,
and, as they come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treatment
drearily earnest or tastelessly thorough. There are not many—of those
of which London disposes with the assurance begotten of its large
experience—that wouldn’t lend themselves to a tenderer manipulation
elsewhere. It takes a very great affair, a turn of the Irish screw or
a divorce case lasting many days, to be fully threshed out. The mind
of Mayfair, when it aspires to show what it really can do, lives in
the hope of a new divorce case, and an indulgent providence—London is
positively in certain ways the spoiled child of the world—abundantly
recognises this particular aptitude and humours the whim.
The compensation is that material does arise; that there is a great
variety, if not morbid subtlety; and that the whole of the procession
of events and topics passes across your stage. For the moment I am
speaking of the inspiration there may be in the sense of far frontiers;
the London-lover loses himself in this swelling consciousness,
delights in the idea that the town which encloses him is after all
only a paved country, a state by itself. This is his condition of mind
quite as much if he be an adoptive as if he be a matter-of-course
son. I am by no means sure even that he need be of Anglo-Saxon race
and have inherited the birthright of English speech; though, on the
other hand, I make no doubt that these advantages minister greatly
to closeness of allegiance. The great city spreads her dusky mantle
over innumerable races and creeds, and I believe there is scarcely
a known form of worship that has not some temple there (have I not
attended at the Church of Humanity, in Lamb’s Conduit, in company with
an American lady, a vague old gentleman, and several seamstresses?) or
any communion of men that has not some club or guild. London is indeed
an epitome of the round world, and just as it is a commonplace to say
that there is nothing one can’t “get” there, so it is equally true that
there is nothing one may not study at first hand.
One doesn’t test these truths every day, but they form part of the air
one breathes (and welcome, says the London-hater,—for there be such
perverse reasoners,—to the pestilent compound). They colour the thick,
dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in
the world; they mingle with the troubled light to which the straight,
ungarnished aperture in one’s dull, undistinctive house-front affords
a passage and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious
tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent
medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general,
the strangely undefined hour of the day and season of the year, the
emanations of industries and the reflection of furnaces, the red
gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset—as you never see any
_source_ of radiance, you can’t in the least tell—all hang together
in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremoveable canopy.
They form the undertone of the deep, perpetual voice of the place.
One remembers them when one’s loyalty is on the defensive; when it is
a question of introducing as many striking features as possible into
the list of fine reasons one has sometimes to draw up, that eloquent
catalogue with which one confronts the hostile indictment—the array
of _other_ reasons which may easily be as long as one’s arm. According
to these other reasons it plausibly and conclusively stands that, as a
place to be happy in, London will never do. I don’t say it is necessary
to meet so absurd an allegation except for one’s personal complacency.
If indifference, in so gorged an organism, is still livelier than
curiosity, you may avail yourself of your own share in it simply to
feel that since such and such a person doesn’t care for real richness,
so much the worse for such and such a person. But once in a while the
best believer recognises the impulse to set his religion in order,
to sweep the temple of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp. It is
at such hours as this that he reflects with elation that the British
capital is the particular spot in the world which communicates the
greatest sense of life.