VI

If she doesn’t go into particulars it may seem a very presumptuous

act to have attempted to do so on her behalf, and the reader will

doubtless think I have been punished by having egregiously failed in

my enumeration. Indeed nothing could well be more difficult than to

add up the items—the column would be altogether too long. One may have

dreamed of turning the glow—if glow it be—of one’s lantern on each

successive facet of the jewel; but, after all, it may be success enough

if a confusion of brightness be the result. One has not the alternative

of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is

no such thing as the whole. It is immeasurable—its embracing arms never

meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them

is it most important to speak? Inevitably there must be a choice, and I

know of none more scientific than simply to leave out what we may have

to apologise for. The uglinesses, the “rookeries,” the brutalities, the

night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when

they are cleared out before closing—there are many elements of this

kind which have to be counted out before a genial summary can be made.

And yet I should not go so far as to say that it is a condition of

such geniality to close one’s eyes upon the immense misery; on the

contrary, I think it is partly because we are irremediably conscious

of that dark gulf that the most general appeal of the great city

remains exactly what it is, the largest chapter of human accidents.

I have no idea of what the future evolution of the strangely mingled

monster may be; whether the poor will improve away the rich, or the

rich will expropriate the poor, or they will all continue to dwell

together on their present imperfect terms of intercourse. Certain it

is, at any rate, that the impression of suffering is a part of the

general vibration; it is one of the things that mingle with all the

others to make the sound that is supremely dear to the consistent

London-lover—the rumble of the tremendous human mill. This is the

note which, in all its modulations, haunts and fascinates and inspires

him. And whether or no he may succeed in keeping the misery out of the

picture, he will freely confess that the latter is not spoiled for him

by some of its duskiest shades. We are far from liking London well

enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its

winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early

lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in

Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.

There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of

children—the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday

walk—in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of

them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste

time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier

Soho on the other. There are winter effects, not intrinsically sweet,

it would appear, which somehow, in absence, touch the chords of memory

and even the fount of tears; as for instance the front of the British

Museum on a black afternoon, or the portico, when the weather is vile,

of one of the big square clubs in Pall Mall. I can give no adequate

account of the subtle poetry of such reminiscences; it depends upon

associations of which we have often lost the thread. The wide colonnade

of the Museum, its symmetrical wings, the high iron fence in its

granite setting, the sense of the misty halls within, where all the

treasures lie—these things loom patiently through atmospheric layers

which instead of making them dreary impart to them something of a cheer

of red lights in a storm. I think the romance of a winter afternoon

in London arises partly from the fact that, when it is not altogether

smothered, the general lamplight takes this hue of hospitality. Such

is the colour of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which

I positively like best when the fog loiters upon their monumental

staircases.

In saying just now that these retreats may easily be, for the exile,

part of the phantasmagoria of homesickness, I by no means alluded

simply to their solemn outsides. If they are still more solemn within,

that does not make them any less dear, in retrospect at least, to

a visitor much bent upon liking his London to the end. What is the

solemnity but a tribute to your nerves, and the stillness but a refined

proof of the intensity of life? To produce such results as these the

balance of many tastes must be struck, and that is only possible in a

very high civilisation. If I seem to intimate that this last abstract

term must be the cheer of him who has lonely possession of a foggy

library, without even the excitement of watching for some one to put

down the magazine he wants, I am willing to let the supposition pass,

for the appreciation of a London club at one of the empty seasons is

nothing but the strong expression of a preference for the great city—by

no means so unsociable as it may superficially appear—at periods of

relative abandonment. The London year is studded with holidays, blessed

little islands of comparative leisure—intervals of absence for good

society. Then the wonderful English faculty for “going out of town for

a little change” comes into illimitable play, and families transport

their nurseries and their bath-tubs to those rural scenes which form

the real substratum of the national life. Such moments as these are

the paradise of the genuine London-lover, for he then finds himself

face to face with the object of his passion; he can give himself up to

an intercourse which at other times is obstructed by his rivals. Then

every one he knows is out of town, and the exhilarating sense of the

presence of every one he doesn’t know becomes by so much the deeper.

This is why I pronounce his satisfaction not an unsociable, but a

positively affectionate emotion. It is the mood in which he most

measures the immense humanity of the place and in which its limits

recede farthest into a dimness peopled with possible illustrations. For

his acquaintance, however numerous it may be, is finite; whereas the

other, the unvisited London, is infinite. It is one of his pleasures to

think of the experiments and excursions he may make in it, even when

these adventures don’t particularly come off. The friendly fog seems

to protect and enrich them—to add both to the mystery and security, so

that it is most in the winter months that the imagination weaves such

delights. They reach their climax perhaps during the strictly social

desolation of Christmas week, when the country-houses are crowded at

the expense of the capital. Then it is that I am most haunted with the

London of Dickens, feel most as if it were still recoverable, still

exhaling its queerness in patches perceptible to the appreciative. Then

the big fires blaze in the lone twilight of the clubs, and the new

books on the tables say, “Now at last you have time to read me,” and

the afternoon tea and toast, and the torpid old gentleman who wakes

up from a doze to order potash-water, appear to make the assurance

good. It is not a small matter either, to a man of letters, that this

is the best time for writing, and that during the lamplit days the

white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle

of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid

and absorbent. Those to whom it is forbidden to sit up to work in the

small hours may, between November and March, enjoy a semblance of this

luxury in the morning. The weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight

and muffles the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but

excellent for the image.