LETTER OF 1875.—When I look at the unused bits of ground around a farm
or cottage, I sometimes think what they would be worth at the back of a
London house.
But even in the front of their houses in a London court, are the poor
much better off? I go sometimes on a hot summer evening into a narrow
court, with houses on each side. The sun has heated them all day, until
it has driven nearly every inmate out of doors. Those who are not at the
public-house are standing or sitting on their doorsteps, quarrelsome,
hot, dirty; the children are crawling or sitting on the hard, hot
stones, till every corner of the place looks alive. Everyone looks in
everyone else’s way; the place echoes with words not of the gentlest.
Sometimes on such a hot summer’s evening, in such a court, when I am
trying to calm excited women shouting their execrable language at one
another, I have looked up suddenly and seen one of those bright gleams
of light the summer sun sends out just before he sets, catching the top
of a red chimney-pot, and beautiful there, though too directly above
their heads for the crowd below to notice it much. But to me it brings
sad thought of the fair and quiet places far away, where it is falling
softly on tree and hill and cloud, and I feel that that quiet, that
beauty, that space would be more powerful to calm the wild excess about
me than all my frantic striving with it.
Leicester Square shows us another thing: such places must be made
bright, pretty and neat—a small place which is not so becomes painfully
dreary; it is quite curious to notice how little one feels shut in when
the barriers are lovely, or contain beautiful things which the eye can
rest on. The small enclosed leads which too often bound the view of a
back dining-room in London oppress one like the walls of a prison; but a
tiny cloistered court of the same size will give a sense of repose; and
colour introduced into such spaces will give them such beauty as will
prevent one from fretting against the boundaries. Strange and beautiful
instance this of how—if we recognize the limitations appointed for us,
accept them, and deal well with what is given—the passionate longing for
more is taken away and a great peace hallows all.