When eight million men and women decide to live together on the same
spot things are bound to happen.
London, in lineal descent from Thebes and Rome, is one of those queer
massings together of humanity which Civilization dumps on a small
plot of earth before handing the lease of Destiny, not knowing
whether to laugh or cry about it. Great cities are strange
inevitable phenomena. It is wrong to compare them with hives, for in
a hive the wish of the individual has been sacrificed unquestioningly
to the good of the community. Had we ascended from the bee perhaps
the greatest happiness we could achieve would be an unspectacular
death in the service of the London County Council. But in London, as
in all modern cities, it is the individual who counts. Our eight
millions split themselves up into ones and twos: little men and
little women dreaming their private dreams, pursuing their own
ambitions, crying over their own failures, and rejoicing at their own
successes.
Fear built the first cities. Men and women herded behind a wall so
that they might be safe. Then came trade; and cities grew into lucky
bags in which men dipped for profit. Essentially they remain lucky
bags to this day. London's millions pour into London and carry off
their loot every Friday; but that, thank heaven, is not the whole
story. A city develops Tradition and Pride. London has greater
tradition and pride than any other city in the world.
So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate
that ancient memory which is London--a thing very like family
tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity--and
I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed,
and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through
London as it has surged through every great city in the history of
civilization. Here is every human emotion. Here in this splendid
theatre the comedy and the tragedy of the human heart are acted day
and night. Love and treachery, beauty and ugliness, laughter and
tears chase one another through the streets of London every minute of
the day, often meeting and mixing in the strangest fashion, because
London is just a great mass of human feeling, and Man, never clearly
labelled "Hero" or "Villain" as in melodrama, is capable of so much
moral complexity that you might almost say that good and bad exist in
him at the same moment.
Had I been born a few thousand years ago I feel sure that I could
have written much the same book about Thebes or Babylon, because the
only things that change radically in life are fashions and
inventions. The human heart was patented long ago and the Creator
has not seen fit to bring out a later model.
After dinner one night a woman fixed large eyes on me and confided
that in a previous incarnation she had been Cleopatra. She was my
tenth Cleopatra. She told me that there was no romance in modern
life, and, looking a little withdrawn as if remembering some
Alexandrian indiscretion, she said: "No surprise, no--you know what I
mean?--no real poetry."
I always think it best not to argue with queens; but I believe that
the surprise, the romance, and the poetry of a modern city are
fiercer than they were in the past. The drama of the ancient
autocracies was played with so small a cast. The rest was suffering.
People with large eyes were never in their past lives anything less
than queens or princes, and thus their naturally vivid memories of a
small and brilliant circle dim a recollection of the dumb majority
beneath their wills. In spite of the supply of desirable lamps in
Bagdad the census of owner-drivers must have been quite negligible,
so that the average inhabitant must have lived through the romance of
those days sitting in the same patch of sun, bitten by insects and
trodden on by negroes.
In London, and in the free cities of this modern world, the drama of
life widens, the characters increase and the unchanging human heart,
no happier perhaps in the long run, beats less timorously than it
did, yet leaping in sympathy to the same old loves and fears and
hates.
Every day our feelings vibrate to some stray unimportance. Life is
full of portentous triviality. Is it not strange that our minds
often refuse to recognize some sensation--a word like a worn-out
boot--while they react immediately to something so small as to be
almost foolish? You may be bored stiff by the front page of the
evening paper, but you go home remembering some common thing seen or
heard; some little humanity: the sight of a man and a girl choosing a
child's cot, two people saying good-bye at a street corner, the quiet
hatred in a man's eyes--or the love....
Let us now go out into London.