The reader will perceive that I do not shrink even from the extreme
concession of speaking of our capital as British, and this in a
shameless connection with the question of loyalty on the part of an
adoptive son. For I hasten to explain that if half the source of one’s
interest in it comes from feeling that it is the property and even
the home of the human race,—Hawthorne, that best of Americans, says so
somewhere, and places it in this sense side by side with Rome,—one’s
appreciation of it is really a large sympathy, a comprehensive love
of humanity. For the sake of such a charity as this one may stretch
one’s allegiance; and the most alien of the cockneyfied, though he
may bristle with every protest at the intimation that England has
set its stamp upon him, is free to admit with conscious pride that
he has submitted to Londonisation. It is a real stroke of luck for
a particular country that the capital of the human race happens to
be British. Surely every other people would have it theirs if they
could. Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an
interesting field of enquiry; but as they have not yet let it slip, the
writer of these lines professes without scruple that the arrangement is
to his personal taste. For, after all, if the sense of life is greatest
there, it is a sense of the life of people of our consecrated English
speech. It is the headquarters of that strangely elastic tongue; and
I make this remark with a full sense of the terrible way in which the
idiom is misused by the populace in general, than whom it has been
given to few races to impart to conversation less of the charm of tone.
For a man of letters who endeavours to cultivate, however modestly,
the medium of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne and Emerson, who
cherishes the notion of what it has achieved and what it may even yet
achieve, London must ever have a great illustrative and suggestive
value, and indeed a kind of sanctity. It is the single place in which
most readers, most possible lovers, are gathered together; it is
the most inclusive public and the largest social incarnation of the
language, of the tradition. Such a personage may well let it go for
this, and leave the German and the Greek to speak for themselves, to
express the grounds of _their_ predilection, presumably very different.
When a social product is so vast and various, it may be approached
on a thousand different sides, and liked and disliked for a thousand
different reasons. The reasons of Piccadilly are not those of Camden
Town, nor are the curiosities and discouragements of Kilburn the same
as those of Westminster and Lambeth. The reasons of Piccadilly—I mean
the friendly ones—are those of which, as a general thing, the rooted
visitor remains most conscious; but it must be confessed that even
these, for the most part, do not lie upon the surface. The absence
of style, or rather of the intention of style, is certainly the
most general characteristic of the face of London. To cross to Paris
under this impression is to find one’s self surrounded with far other
standards. There everything reminds you that the idea of beautiful
and stately arrangement has never been out of fashion, that the art of
composition has always been at work or at play. Avenues and squares,
gardens and quays, have been distributed for effect, and to-day the
splendid city reaps the accumulation of all this ingenuity. The result
is not in every quarter interesting, and there is a tiresome monotony
of the “fine” and the symmetrical, above all, of the deathly passion
for making things “to match.” On the other hand the whole air of the
place is architectural. On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous
chapter of accidents—the London-lover has to confess to the existence
of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness. Thousands
of acres are covered by low black houses of the cheapest construction,
without ornament, without grace, without character or even identity.
In fact there are many, even in the best quarters, in all the region
of Mayfair and Belgravia, of so paltry and inconvenient, especially
of so diminutive a type (those that are let in lodgings—such poor
lodgings as they make—may serve as an example), that you wonder what
peculiarly limited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The
great misfortune of London to the eye (it is true that this remark
applies much less to the City), is the want of elevation. There is no
architectural impression without a certain degree of height, and the
London street-vista has none of that sort of pride.
All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the
accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way,
appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the
general greatness, and the manner in which that makes a difference
for the better in any particular spot; so that, though you may often
perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner, it never occurs to you that
this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent
mystifications, which flatters and superfuses, makes everything brown,
rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and minimises details, confirms
the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes
everything, it makes its own system of weather and its own optical
laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which constitute an
ornament not elsewhere to be matched, and give the place a superiority
that none of its uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such
a luxury of space in the centre of the town that they form a part of
the impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity
altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky.
There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming
to them—I have seen them look delightfully romantic, like parks in
novels, in the wettest winter—and there is scarcely a mood of the
appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high
things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the
spaces vaster by reminding you that you are, after all, not in Kent
or Yorkshire; and these things, whatever they be—rows of “eligible”
dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions—take such an
effective grey-blue tint that a clever water-colourist would seem to
have put them in for pictorial reasons.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ST. JAMES’S PARK
Duke of York’s column]
The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary
nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the Londoner, twitted
with his low standard, may point to it with every confidence. In all
the town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so fine; the only
reproach it is open to is that it begs the question by seeming—in spite
of its being the pride of five millions of people—not to belong to a
town at all. The towers of Notre Dame, as they rise in Paris from the
island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively
than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond
the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. Equally delectable is the large
river-like manner in which the Serpentine opens away between its wooded
shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge (whose very banisters,
old and ornamental, of yellowish-brown stone, I am particularly fond
of), you enjoy on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens as
you go towards Bayswater, an altogether enchanting vista—a foot-path
over the grass, which loses itself beneath the scattered oaks and elms
exactly as if the place were a “chase.” There could be nothing less
like London in general than this particular morsel, and yet it takes
London, of all cities, to give you such an impression of the country.