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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: London Impressions
+       Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Illustrator: William Hyde
+
+Release Date: June 16, 2010 [EBook #32842]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON IMPRESSIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LONDON IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  IMPRESSIONS
+
+  ETCHINGS AND PICTURES
+  IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY
+  WILLIAM HYDE
+
+  AND ESSAYS BY
+  ALICE MEYNELL
+
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+  WESTMINSTER
+  ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO.
+  2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
+  1898
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Cheap Market._
+
+Swan Electric Engraving Co]
+
+
+LIST OF PICTURES
+
+FULL-PAGE PLATES
+
+
+  THE RIVER                  ETCHING           _Frontispiece_
+
+  WESTMINSTER ABBEY          PHOTOGRAVURE    _facing page_  2
+
+  TERRIBLE LONDON                 Do.               "       4
+
+  AN IMPRESSION                   Do.               "       6
+
+  END OF A WINTER DAY             Do.               "       8
+
+  UTILITARIAN LONDON              Do.               "      10
+
+  KENSINGTON GARDENS              Do.               "      12
+
+  NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY         Do.               "      14
+
+  THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER    Do.               "      16
+
+  ST. PAUL'S AT DAWN              Do.               "      18
+
+  WATERLOO BRIDGE                 Do.               "      20
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE                    Do.               "      22
+
+  ST. PAUL'S FROM WATLING STREET  Do.               "      24
+
+  THE VICTORIA TOWER              Do.               "      28
+
+
+
+
+PLATES IN THE TEXT
+
+
+  ST. PAUL'S IN A STORM      PHOTOGRAVURE     _On Title-page_
+
+  A CHEAP MARKET                  Do.               _page_  v
+
+  A FORGOTTEN CORNER              Do.                 "     1
+
+  THE NERVES OF LONDON            Do.                 "     6
+
+  THE EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT         Do.                 "     9
+
+  TREES                      ETCHING                  "    12
+
+  THE LAST BOAT              PHOTOGRAVURE             "    19
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE                    Do.                 "    22
+
+  A BACK STREET                   Do.                 "    24
+
+  A COFFEE STALL                  Do.                 "    26
+
+  RAIN, SMOKE, AND TRAFFIC        Do.                 "    29
+
+  WESTMINSTER                ETCHING                  "    31
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ESSAYS
+
+
+                        PAGE
+
+  THE LONDON SUNDAY        1
+
+  A PILGRIM                4
+
+  THE EFFECT OF LONDON     6
+
+  THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE     9
+
+  THE TREES               12
+
+  CHELSEA REACH           16
+
+  THE SPRING              19
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE            22
+
+  THE ROADS               26
+
+  THE SMOULDERING CITY    29
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER.]
+
+
+
+
+THE LONDON SUNDAY
+
+
+This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The
+phrase is never varied--a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, 'Oh,
+the London Sunday!' and another, 'It must be too dreadful for foreigners!'
+and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a
+flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is
+little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater
+number do not know even so much.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Forgotten Corner._]
+
+
+Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another
+thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as
+far as the eye may see--a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow,
+wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses
+are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey
+houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that
+the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the
+morning and to the east in the evening--suns in rows, and suns that run
+fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the
+plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London
+Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of
+doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell
+whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of
+making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some
+excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of
+older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the
+further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do
+nothing--not even much talking--they give a false air of lawlessness to
+the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their
+clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their
+bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the
+women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to
+spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly,
+in great numbers in the open spaces--the vague lands on the other side of
+Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their
+houses in the free afternoon.
+
+In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to
+the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly
+as to get a continuous Sunday impression--the day and the people flowing,
+unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through 'town,'
+through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and
+unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the
+distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has
+set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.
+
+Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are
+deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown
+places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent.
+But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the
+absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets
+are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you
+realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by
+his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather
+blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which
+agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a
+pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of
+the race--squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the
+unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted
+that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We
+all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise,
+but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who
+join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and
+cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road
+the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair
+hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey.
+
+Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find
+it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come
+amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are
+studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and
+history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf
+town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the
+shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the
+ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic
+towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall
+have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal
+inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks.
+Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be
+permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the
+Blue-Coat School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even
+the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary's
+in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these
+lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched
+and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never
+more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a
+characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and
+exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white
+a golden rose. St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with
+flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind,
+and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe
+together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of
+sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and
+white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition--a Dickens tradition,
+it seems--of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of
+the congregations: in this open church there are but three people,
+exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.
+
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]
+
+
+There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron
+blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks
+as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long,
+staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet.
+Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind
+to sift the darkness from the sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIM
+
+
+Now and then a firefly strays from the vineyard into the streets of an
+Italian city, and goes quenched in the light of the shops. The stray and
+waif from 'the very country' that comes to London is a silver-white seed
+with silken spokes or sails. There is no depth of the deep town that this
+visitant does not penetrate in August--going in, going far, going through,
+by virtue of its indescribable gentleness. The firefly has only a wall to
+cross, but the shining seed comes a long way, a careless alien but a
+mighty traveller. Indestructibly fragile, the most delicate of all the
+visible signs of the breeze, it goes to town, makes light of the capital,
+sets at nought the thoroughfares and the omnibuses, especially flouts the
+Park, one may suppose, where it does not grow. It hovers and leaps at
+about the height of first-floor windows, by many a mile of dull
+drawing-rooms, a country creature quite unconverted to London and
+undismayed. This _flâneur_ makes as little of our London as his ancestor
+made of Chaucer's.
+
+Sometimes it takes a flight on a stronger wind, and its whiteness shows
+dark with slight shadow against bright clouds, as the whiter snow-flake
+also looks dark from its shadow side. Then it comes down in a tumult of
+flight upon the city. It is a very strong little seed-pod, set with arms,
+legs, or sails--so ingeniously set that though all grow from the top of
+the pod their points together make a globe; on these it turns a
+'cart-wheel' like a human boy--like many boys, in fact, it must overtake
+on its way through the less respectable of the suburbs--only better. Every
+limb, itself so fine, is feathered with little plumes that are as thin as
+autumn spider-webs. Nothing steps so delicately as that seed, or upon such
+extreme tiptoe. But it does not walk far; the air bears the charges of the
+wild journey.
+
+Thistle-seeds--if thistle-seeds they be--make few and brief halts, then
+roll their wheel on the stones for a while, and then the wheel is a-wing
+again. You encounter them in the country, setting out for town on a south
+wind, and in London there is not a street they do not recklessly stray
+along. For they use our arbitrary streets; it does not seem that they make
+a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the
+streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human
+courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the
+Bank on a long west wind--their strolling being done at a certain height,
+in moderate mid-air.
+
+
+[Illustration: TERRIBLE LONDON.]
+
+
+They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of
+them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing
+Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have
+lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises
+and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level
+way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town--not even the scent of hay on
+morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and
+it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.
+
+White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of
+its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it--the point
+of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.
+
+
+
+
+THE EFFECT OF LONDON
+
+
+It is no wonder if the painters of London are somewhat eager for the help
+of smoke. A simple glance at the streets--and the glance that would
+appreciate so mingled a sight as that of London must be simple--shows you
+that the detail of our streets is the closest detail in the world. Nowhere
+else do the houses, the carriages, and the people, all alike, wear the
+minute spots of hard colour that make a London street by bright daylight
+look so sharp and small. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some
+blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the
+north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and
+there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the
+streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the
+street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual
+windows. Shops and windows run into rows all but touching one another, or
+what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects,
+in some manner harassed and beset.
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Nerves of London._]
+
+
+Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man
+conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of
+white--exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles--scattered
+throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a
+footman's shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white
+letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and
+hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of
+white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is
+never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing,
+perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the
+street view.
+
+
+[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION.]
+
+
+There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not
+these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for
+instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is,
+perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short
+patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the
+olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no
+liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on
+the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and
+beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to
+make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things
+in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field,
+where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers
+eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending
+obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless,
+pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach
+with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the
+distance of mountains.
+
+Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between
+Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still
+young--the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash,
+all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with
+colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this
+nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in
+the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of
+omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harness, to all the broken,
+inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.
+
+In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to
+anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill,
+and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots,
+its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets
+impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and
+characteristic--not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the
+recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting
+are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the
+walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a
+glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there
+is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine,
+with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a
+Londoner.
+
+But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are
+perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness.
+Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of
+sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle
+splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where
+walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is
+the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so
+transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such
+curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the
+chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street
+leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of
+the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming
+fish's tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and
+dreary--those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent
+offends, the light wave of a fish's-tail street pleases the eye, with its
+fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but
+a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.
+
+Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is
+the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as
+they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether
+in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterranean or a
+hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will
+settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a
+rather secret thing, and misleading--the sign of a town that has not been
+ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism.
+Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering
+and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass
+the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart--old rights or the
+accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence
+have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has
+tended to set streets a-flowing too.
+
+But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a
+briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan
+foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In
+these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite
+detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their
+warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain
+wall is also black.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: END OF A WINTER DAY.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Embankment at Night._]
+
+
+THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE
+
+
+It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the
+mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by
+acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial
+climate, and by treating our own handiwork--the sky of our
+manufacture--with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the
+effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description.
+The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are 'lurid' to no very
+grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never
+would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that
+there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system
+in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is
+bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the
+circumference be made of--mist from mountain heights or vapour from that
+series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a
+million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel
+a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of
+his long, distributed lights, and straight, infallible, divergent shadows
+that pick off the points and pinnacles of a thousand distances. The
+lowering sun will not permit the smoke to show so shapeless, so lifeless,
+so unbounded as it is; he takes his place in the middle of a wheel, and
+commands at any rate a mechanical order.
+
+Otherwise, and without a sun lowered into your picture, the smoke-mingled
+sky is the most unplanned in the world. It has no confederacy, and no
+direction. Nothing leads, and there are no figures, no troops, no
+companies; there is no history, nor approach. The smoke is helpless. It is
+perpetually subject to gravitation; no wind makes it buoyant, and no
+electric impetus lifts it against a wind. It constantly and drearily
+drops, as you may see if you look against any London horizon; the minute
+shower that it carries never ceases and never lifts, but sifts down
+momently from the low sky into which the chimneys raised it at first. That
+one upward spring was all its life. Thenceforth it does but drift until it
+is all shed, to the last black atom, upon the face of the town.
+
+And yet you may, twenty times a day in London, hear the smoke called
+cloud. Thunderstorms are announced as lurking in the heart of the
+powerless bosom of the smoke, and showers are threatened where there never
+was anything so fresh as a drop of rain. The puny darkness is supposed
+capable of lightnings, and out of the grime is expected the thunderbolt.
+The splendid name of the cloud is given to this poor local vesture of
+decay; no use or custom seems sufficient to make the London sky of
+mechanical suspension familiar to the citizen; when he faces it at the end
+of a brief distance he calls it by the names proper to the celestial
+heights, and he is hardly convinced of the truth when he sees it walk his
+streets.
+
+But, indeed, he might have learned long ago that there is no life in his
+storm, and that when thunder comes it wears a different gloom. The worst
+is that with the authentic darkness of cloud comes so often the imitation,
+and a town tempest is not only mocked, but hidden and covered, by the
+pother of mere smoke, so that the citizen does not well learn to
+distinguish. But he who has ever really known the cloud will not make that
+ignominious confusion. He knows the difference in storm, and so much more
+the greater difference in sunshine; he will not call by the name of cloud
+a thing that shows the dark shadow grimly enough, but never the light
+sweetly, and is naturally incapable of white.
+
+And yet the artificial climate of London is at its best when it is very
+obvious, and when it has strong scenes of sunset or storm to deal with.
+The time when it is insufferable is noonday or full afternoon on a
+cloudless day in summer, when there is not wind enough to drift it,
+helpless, out of town, and when it is not thick enough to keep the sun
+away. It makes the sunshine ugly. No beauty, even artificial or obvious,
+belongs to the smoke then, and it plays no antic pranks in mimicry of
+cloud. It has no shadow and no menace; it has no opportunity for
+stage-plays; it is disconcerted, and cannot make a penny theatre of its
+London. Every one must know such days, of which the essence should have
+been their purity, plain and splendid. By their light is the smoke seen to
+be nothing in the world but a sorry smirch. The horizon is thickened with
+it, and there it wreaks its chief 'effects,' but all near things are also
+oppressed by it; the spirit of the sunshine is gone, and a blazing sun
+upon miles of blue slate roofs and yellow houses, with the thin
+uncleanness of smoke just showing in the blaze, is actually that
+impossibility--sunshine without beauty.
+
+
+[Illustration: UTILITARIAN LONDON.]
+
+
+After this, let us grant the smoke the tragi-comedy of its successes.
+These are generally connected with Westminster; it finds matter fitted to
+its manner in the surrounding architecture, and in the westward opening.
+It suppresses a great deal that is not very presentable, on the
+working side of the river, and it reveals what is Gothic on the other
+bank. It has a trick of being ashamed of its origin, for it hustles the
+long chimneys out of sight. It does really surprising things with the
+beautiful dome of St. Paul's; the very formlessness of its presence seems
+to give more value to that fine form. It has a way of showing the noble
+tops of clouds while it loses their bases in vagueness, which is not
+without beauty. You cannot see from what heavenly ranges of highlands
+those summits tower, and if they stand into the sunshine their isolation
+is the more remote and splendid. But even this is but a handy bit of
+scene-shifting; it touches no more than the fancy.
+
+There is another effect of the London climate, besides the effect of sky
+scenery, and that is the local colour wherewith the characteristic smoke,
+mingled with a little rain to make a general water-colour, has painted the
+surfaces of the town in variants of black. The citizen who--unaware of
+such things as the quarter of the wind--takes his umbrella for fear of the
+thunderous look of a tremendous smoke-storm to leeward, is apt to take the
+touch of soot for the touch of time. Nevertheless, the two dark colours
+are quite unlike; time is browner, and has a depth in the tone, whereas
+soot is greyer, and at its blackest has no depth. It gives a shallow
+colour; and even those who love their sky streaked and tumbled into the
+chaos of smoke should not be allowed to defend the _aquarelle_ that
+colours their buildings.
+
+It is true that we no longer offer columns of the Doric order for
+treatment by London water-colours; but all the Doric columns we already
+have are left subject to this extraordinary substitute for the colouring
+of a Laconic sun. We have discovered that terra-cotta and tiles resist the
+work of the climate, and no doubt London at a glance presents a less
+coal-blackened face than it once wore. But too much of the surface of
+London is still the work of that dashing impressionist, the climate.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE TREES
+
+
+The high trees that stand stirring and thrilling in the squares in summer
+do taste of darkness; night drives home a thousand shadows--thin and
+subtle flocks--to fold within the iron railings and to shelter in corners
+of the worn and unfragrant grass till morning. But the single trees that
+have their roots under grey pavements, and that breathe in the little
+accidental standing-places of the wayside, the railed-in corners left by
+the chance-medley of London streets--these have the strange fate to be in
+perpetual light. They never are washed in darkness; they never withdraw
+into that state and condition of freedom, into that open hiding-place,
+that untravelled liberty, that wild seclusion at home, that refuge without
+flight, that secret unconcealed, that solitude unenclosed, that
+manumission of captives, that opportunity of Penelope--darkness.
+
+The leaves of the street-side tree flutter bright emerald green through
+the whole night (out of town the discolouring night) of leafy summer. That
+local colour is never quenched, as human blushes are quenched at night. It
+rather takes a more conspicuous quality, under the closeness of the
+electric light; it is sharply green. Whereas the day has its mists and
+veils, and may at times darken a tree nearly black, by setting the sky
+alight behind it, the night has none of these shadows. The light of night
+is stationary and unchangeable, and there are some solitary trees here and
+there that undergo the unshifting illumination at the closest quarters;
+the light that knows no hours and makes no journey gleams near upon the
+motion of the leaves and glosses their faces. It is beforehand with the
+twilight, so that the dusk when it comes finds the place taken, and it
+will not let the tree go until the light of day flows in fully, and dawn
+is over.
+
+
+[Illustration: KENSINGTON GARDENS.]
+
+
+The sharp green of the plane-tree is never covered, nor are the delicately
+sprinkled spots of the poplar-leaves mingled and massed, in these solitary
+citizen trees. It is in the avenues and glades of Kensington Gardens
+that Night has her way. There amends are made for the common day by a
+double mystery. Not a tree is so much as to be known by name; all kinds
+sigh together in the dark. The mass is sombre and alive, but betrays
+neither leaf nor colour. As violently as the spirit of the woods was
+driven away, through all the long daylight, by the sound, the breath, the
+blackness, and the stamp and seal of London, which permit nothing
+visible--not a blade of grass--to go unmarked by the proprietorship of
+this despotic city; so swiftly as the spirit of the woods was hooted and
+stared into banishment by day, so quickly, so intently, and in such a
+union of multitude does it softly return by night. Solitude comes, the
+movement of the forest comes, and remoteness, which by day must be sought
+where it abides, comes at a stride to London, and sits in the branches of
+the trees. Profound is the forest and august the sky whence the great and
+melancholy spirit of the woods comes to restore these daily altered elms.
+
+Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its
+northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness
+and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is
+the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies
+straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked,
+unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute;
+the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to
+you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the
+majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the
+gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never
+bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft
+encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you
+see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also
+precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.
+
+By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were,
+disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly
+in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can
+take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at
+night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey.
+
+Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington
+Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight
+has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin
+until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the
+influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the
+June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so
+fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as
+though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender
+leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering
+glimpses of sky go through.
+
+If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and
+take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in
+orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look
+more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon
+the separate leaves.
+
+Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the
+dark itself. She touches the high places of avenues within sound of the
+London wheels, and they become as simple as tree-tops at Verona. But,
+indeed, the moon is plainly seen to bring this dignity and liberty from
+the simple skies. All the world knows her to be like that lady of the
+poets who spoke to none that was not worthy, because before she talked
+with men she 'knighted them with her smile.' It is one of the tyrannies
+wreaked by the electric light and the gas-lamps upon the street-side tree
+that they keep away from it the glimpses of the moon. Not only is secret
+darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves
+softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed
+upon its leaves.
+
+As to these lights of London lamps, their beauty, which is so great, seems
+to depend almost entirely upon the sky. See them as they glow in the long
+unequal curves that follow the subtly misleading directions of the streets
+of London, and in all their brilliancy they make but a common show--pretty
+enough, but not beautiful. But let any lamp or line of lamps come into
+visible relation with the sky--any sky, whether a mysterious night-sky
+softly embrowned, or a night-sky swept pure by a west wind, or the most
+ordinary grey of any average evening--and the lamp has indescribable
+beauties. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street
+lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its
+invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric
+lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and
+splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling
+lamp together make--or so it seems to me--one of the most beautiful sights
+that eyes can see--the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This
+carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was
+generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with
+the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden
+lights--electric lamps or gas lamps--have the beauty of fire, but the
+white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be
+seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.
+
+London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they
+make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the
+chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their
+squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels
+down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some
+machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves.
+Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and
+white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, and
+perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps
+of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the
+streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue
+between you and the houses opposite.
+
+
+[Illustration: NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY.]
+
+
+The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it
+rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops,
+silent elsewhere, upon its open leaves.
+
+
+
+
+CHELSEA REACH
+
+
+The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily
+continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take
+them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for
+stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would
+hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design;
+what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it
+were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing
+as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that
+it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer.
+When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a
+better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in
+consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last
+bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of
+uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank.
+Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused--as
+doubtless they were--of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might
+well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. '_Le
+coeur a ses raisons!_' The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like
+another. While, then, uniformity is one of the 'reasons of the heart' of a
+County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons
+of their own hearts.
+
+The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne
+Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is
+an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this
+is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding,
+unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it,
+but above it, on its further side--that is, between it and the vaguest
+beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks
+like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and
+cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets
+of Fulham--true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it
+is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may
+be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and
+Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great
+city. The distinction of London was once that it was not a great city
+but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the
+raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there
+was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except
+Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of
+Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is
+somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and
+offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of
+Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand,
+the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London
+keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy
+shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at
+least is, for a space, _grande ville_. We cannot altogether grudge its
+Embankment.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]
+
+
+But if there is a mile of London village left--and therefore of the most
+London-like London--it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council's
+heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in
+its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of
+the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the
+river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of
+long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business
+as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of
+wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is
+the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey _coteaux_, though this
+is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the
+right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight.
+You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the
+light the view is animating.
+
+Inasmuch as the Thames flows here north-eastward, when you look to the
+south-west by Chelsea Reach, in the early afternoon of windy spring, you
+look at once towards the gates of light, the gates of the wind, and the
+gates of the river. There seems to be one sole spring and source in the
+day. The way is, beyond description, open. For the waterway is the flat of
+the world, and everywhere else in London are houses; here is a real
+horizon. Here you get the proportions of a great sky, as you get the
+proportions of a great church when there are no benches on the floor to
+shorten them. The clouds come upon the south-west wind of the early year,
+a little cold with the strength of freshness, and not with chill, and give
+and withhold a hundred lights.
+
+Those who do not like the name of mud should see how these lights are
+answered by the floor of mud in simple silver and steel. Twice a day the
+motion of the wave is there, twice a day the still shore. With that
+cradling change go the changes of the boats and barges at the wharves. All
+is life, but there is no colour, except where you very dimly perceive that
+a sail is red as the sails are on the Adriatic. It is a view to teach
+painting, to teach seeing. We have not such another school in London as
+Chelsea Reach. If Chelsea ever becomes _grande ville_ too, the shape of
+the river will be altered, and the profile of that curve, sharp and fine
+with masts against the west will be abolished: there will be no beauty of
+tides, no silver wet mirror, no barges.
+
+There is nothing quite like Chelsea. The spoiling of Chelsea will not be
+the same thing as the spoiling of the country by pushing on a suburb, for
+instance; for in that case there is country beyond, only deferred. But
+there is no Cheyne Walk, no Chelsea, further up the river, or anywhere in
+the world of rivers.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S AT DAWN.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Last Boat._]
+
+
+THE SPRING
+
+
+There is a splendid spring in town, and it happens to agree with the
+country spring as to the time of appearing; but it is another show, and of
+another spirit. The difference is curiously complete; it was, no doubt, to
+be looked for in the avenues, in the sward, in the winding water, and in
+the Park generally, considered as a landscape. But how is the grass itself
+London grass? Not only in its acre of intense green, but in the space of a
+square foot that might, one would think, be anywhere, it is London grass.
+The leaves, the blades, are London growth. You cannot evade the spirit of
+place by shutting out the sky, the railings, the people, or the gravel.
+Even if you go close and make acquaintance, as a child does, with the
+roots, you are aware that it is not the grass of England that you have
+there, but the grass of London.
+
+The leaves of the trees have so vulgar a contrast in the black of stems,
+branches, and twigs, that they are from the first obviously not the leaves
+of the woods. They are all the better admired by many eyes, for whom the
+modest contrasts of nature are not enough; and you may hear the black and
+green of the parks praised for this same immoderate effect of colour. But
+the grass has nothing to tell that tale of the London winter which the
+branch tells; it is this year's; it has no past; it is innocent, and
+answerable to the sun for merely its few inches of simple green. It might
+be supposed to have the graces of an alien in London. But it has them not
+at all; it comes up a Londoner. You cannot be really intimate with it; and
+when it puts up its little flower, and your child brings it home to you
+hot from a clenched hand, even then it has nothing, nothing whatever, of
+the fields. You put it into water to flatter the child, but even there,
+given by that little alien hand, and so isolated from its park and its
+railings, it is unmistakably the grass of its own soil; it manifestly
+could never have been romping with little young dandelions on the side of
+a village road, or tossed by visiting winds scented with meadows.
+
+The London spring is a good thing, but it is another thing. It is only
+because of the accident by which the real spring and the London spring
+appear at the same time of the year that they have come to bear the same
+name, and even to be confused together by the insensitive. A handful from
+the hedgerows twenty miles away--a handful, already half faded, of mingled
+things at random, grass and herbs, not free from traces of white and warm
+rustic dust--an authentic little heap from the real spring, would show at
+once to all apprehensive eyes what the difference really is. And yet there
+must be careless or worldly birds that do not know it. Otherwise we should
+not hear such songs from the remotest river-sides sung within Kensington
+Gardens. Let no one pretend, however, that the bees are deceived or
+indifferent.
+
+Nor let it be said that the difference is superficial. That is precisely
+untrue; it is the likeness that is superficial, and the difference
+essential. The London spring is a brilliant image of the real spring. It
+is fresh when the real April is fresh; and when it grows dim you could
+match it with specimens from the country wayside. Nay, soot and smoke
+themselves cannot disguise the real spring growth and make it look like
+the London. That can easily be proved. After two weeks in which you are
+unconvinced of May by the green and dazzling parks, you will get the very
+thrill of May from a square yard of very young nettles and young weeds of
+many kinds, seen from a railway carriage and touched with the railway
+dust. There is cleaner grass by the Speke Monument, but this that grows by
+the railway is out of town; it is of another kind; it is of the other
+spring. Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier,
+and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority,
+and spring was real.
+
+Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the
+absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep
+difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by
+mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home,
+and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it
+better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. Childhood has had
+it so near, and has learned it once for all, and will never be deceived,
+nor will the man who has had a childhood near living earth; he knows that
+the springs are two. He knows, for he remembers that he knew, the spirit
+of the place. That is an aura that lies near the ground. It is a warm
+atmosphere that does not rise, but breathes by little garden plots in
+corners; is the very spirit of rivulets and brooks; lurks amongst the
+maiden-hair that covers the fresh waters of Mediterranean hillsides, and
+amongst the gravel of old sunny garden terraces; is so caught in moss that
+the air where moss grows seems to imprison it; and passes quick into the
+nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers--ground-ivy, and
+things that are not so tall as grass--are entangled with the spirit of
+place. Low box hedges are intricate with it, and with the spirit of
+antiquity, because they are no higher than the heads of very little
+children, whose hearts conceive antiquity and the genius of places. They
+know the breath of the parks well. What children know--what they
+knew--we have never forgotten. And yet all the differences which they
+learned--the difference between the weak odour of soot and the gentle
+odour of earth, and the difference between the click of the bit and the
+sound of the bee--are not the real difference between the town spring and
+the spring of the natural world. They are mere signs and proofs; the fact
+lies deep and close; there are two springs.
+
+
+[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE.]
+
+
+And yet, across all boundaries, across the frontier of the suburbs, what
+is this strange scrap of the real May of the natural world dropped into
+the midst of the May of London? A scrap of that true spring alighted in
+the midst of the very winter would hardly look so strange as this shred of
+the very spring in the spring of town. It is but some accidental grass or
+leaf that has been shed and sown by some west wind upon the edges of the
+tiles of a little old poor roof in town. Not into the parks did it fly,
+not amongst the flower-walks or on the great sward, emerald green. It
+hovered and flitted into the middle of town, a little flock of wild lives.
+The enormous spring, the May of all the earth, unmarked, disguised by a
+delusive likeness to the London spring, has visited the town. It is a
+dainty _incognito_. It signals to those who know; but if Vestries
+recognised it--and supposing they cared enough for roofs of that kind,
+which they do not--they would take that grass up by the roots.
+
+
+
+
+BELOW BRIDGE
+
+
+The first impression, and, needless to say, the longest, is that of the
+many miles of wharves compared with the few miles of embankments, drives,
+and of the holiday river generally. Not only have the black and brown
+warehouses, the chimneys, and the cranes possession of the whole right
+bank of the London Thames, but they hold both banks of the lower Thames
+through league-long reaches and noble curves, and such changes of aspect,
+sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky.
+
+
+[Illustration: _Below Bridge._]
+
+
+Besides this slow variation of light, in which the view wheels under the
+wheeling cloud, there is no lack of variety along the dusky banks of the
+river of commerce. The subsidence of height along the warehouses as the
+river draws further and further from the middle of London is an incident
+of continuous interest, interrupted now and then, but holding on
+persistently, until the carrying river flows through a dark-gabled, low,
+and long village towards the eastern woods and heights and the further
+fields.
+
+
+[Illustration: BELOW BRIDGE.]
+
+
+Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense
+interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye
+instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses
+that are no houses--somewhat as the _biblia abiblia_ of Charles Lamb are
+among books,--you find the face of a single human little house, its timber
+looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse
+harbour-master's title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt
+in--propped in the serried row that has the sightless aspect of a
+barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the
+picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach
+to beauty than any street of 'handsome' houses with columns and porticoes
+in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent
+Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is
+a good deal of plain wall, which--unless a building be in every way
+wrong--gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once
+the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With
+this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt.
+
+True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings--'works,' these
+seem to be, not warehouses--that touch the extremity of possible ugliness
+and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without
+exaggeration, black. These are very few--two or three at the most--and all
+on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken,
+pointed, and very various.
+
+Low as it is, it is always--seen from the deck of a boat--the very
+skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats,
+warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing
+appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the
+movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of
+river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass
+through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map
+that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.
+
+The swarthiness, the darkness of the colour--a brownish grey--is to be
+insisted upon; yet to none but a careless eye does the lower Thames seem
+all brown and grey. The dull hues are shot with one single prevailing
+colour--red. Innumerable red-tiled roofs are seen as the turn of the river
+shows their dusky sides; iron sheds are ruddled with the red that signs
+flocks of country sheep; shutters are red over warehouse windows (this is
+a Sunday view), and everywhere are the red sails of Venice, dyed in the
+selfsame dye, only differently lighted. Even when there is a difficulty in
+fixing the place of this negroid blush, it is perceptibly there. It is
+latent, even when no red sail rises between grey water and grey sky; it
+lurks in hollows and inlets so darkly as to be almost black. Then suddenly
+the scarlet of a huge black and scarlet steamer comes along and gives you
+the colour without a shred of mystery, without charm, and with the most
+definite division. Besides the red, there is nothing that is coloured
+except a stack of timber now and then--raw wood with precisely the colours
+of a wheatfield in August--and the piled-up hay of a red-sailed barge
+loaded down to the water. These are not many on the Sunday river, but
+Sunday clears the colours by clearing the air. There is exceedingly little
+smoke; its sign is upon the whole river-side, it has re-drawn everything
+in black, as a child might go over a water-colour with his black pencils,
+but between you and the natural clouds there is nothing but fresh air,
+quick with the movement that seems perpetually to follow this grey
+waterway. Or now and then, at long intervals, a single flimsy puff of
+smoke comes between mast and sky; it is brown, the steam is white, and
+the cloud silver grey; and through each of these three with a various
+gleam filters the flying sunshine.
+
+Sunday seals the faces of the barns and turns the key upon the leagues of
+wharves; but it leaves all the cranes and masts etched in their thousands
+upon the low horizon. These make the thicket of the Thames-side, a
+deciduous, narrow wood winding east, south-east, and north, and standing
+everywhere in its brief winter of a day, having shed sails and burdens and
+put away noise. There is nothing in the handsome London of high houses so
+delicate as these lifted lances against the sky. Hop-gardens or vineyards,
+or the slender rows of sticks that carry pea plants and beans in rustic
+gardens, make the same play with light, and let it through as fine a
+design.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Back Street._]
+
+
+Here is nothing of the sharp black and white detail that is the most
+salient thing in London streets; everything is painted softly; all the
+darks are dull; in a word, the scene is simple, and this the streets are
+never. It is simplicity, indeed, that makes all the buildings (except only
+the 'works' above mentioned) more than tolerable. There are no
+advertisements. This means much to eyes too well used to those shreds and
+tatters of the wall. That commerce which makes so much paltry show in the
+West is here perfectly grave and quiet; it makes serious announcements,
+not advertisements, of the things that occupy navies. You see 'Pickles'
+and other names that launch a thousand ships, written large over various
+landing-places, and the names of the owners of warehouses are broad across
+their fronts; or you are reminded how little you know of the affairs of
+the place by the frequent name of 'Sufferance Wharf' among the cranes. It
+cannot possibly be said that this lettering is beautiful, but it is not
+nearly so bad as the lettering in the streets we know. Needless to say,
+you shall not see a scrap of gilding below bridge, except a momentary
+tawdriness near the pier of some excursion place, where there are unseen
+Cockney gardens at hand--no gilding, nor white, nor any kind of blue.
+Seeing that bad blue is the worst thing in the far-off town of paint and
+pleasure, the dark and reddish river-side of work has here again one of
+its obscure advantages.
+
+
+[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S FROM WATLING STREET.]
+
+
+The work, almost all pausing in this summer Sunday, is obviously, to
+judge by its instruments and chips, mainly the inhuman work of machines.
+Nevertheless, wherever there are boats there is that arm of Hercules which
+is heroic, and therefore greater, though much weaker, than the arm of
+iron; and even on this day you may see the toil of the arm against the
+mass of the heavy river, as two men stand to row their broad barge up
+stream. It is the most primitive contest after all. Their figures strain
+back on the long oar until they are stretched nearly straight horizontally
+before they slowly gather themselves and grow erect again. Nothing suits
+the river so well as the barge with its level load, flat as the water
+itself. Nothing a-tiptoe there; but the very surface of the world reaching
+to the sea, and the long river feeling for that level far inland.
+
+The dusky voyage darkens, for the Thames turns towards the north; anon it
+takes a pale grey splendour, the sky shines, and the delicate intricacy of
+masts that mar nothing of the simple view seems to be rather itself
+luminous than dark against the light; flying birds are lost as they pass
+in the upper brilliance. It is but that the Thames has swung towards the
+south again.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROADS
+
+
+On Westminster Bridge at early morning Wordsworth thought of the heart of
+London, but a view of London in the long day and night of movement, when
+the mystery of sleep is away, suggests not the involuntary heart of men,
+but their wilful feet. The roads, which are lonely messengers in the
+far-off country, crowd together here, and hustle one another to give
+footing to the tramp of the people. London has a fantastic look, as though
+there were nothing to do but make haste to be gone. To look at London from
+some point of height--a rare opportunity--is to trace these ways of
+passionate escape. The roads, indeed, seem eager, but you know that the
+crowds who, by these curves and knots, these straight lines, and these
+intent, narrow, dark grey levels, traced with narrower steel, elude the
+town, are in no more than jog-trot haste, and wear no look of fugitives.
+Of them and of their detail there is no sign in this distant prospect. The
+movement of the people in London is here no more perceptible than the
+molecular motion in a diamond.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Coffee Stall._]
+
+
+But the roads are all expressive of this energy of flight from a centre.
+They are, as it were, signs of a perpetual explosion; they are the fringe
+of the _mêlée_, the shooting, streaming outbreaks of the photosphere of
+London. They hunt and are hunted. They fly from the city of confusion. It
+is only by escaping that they become visible, and out of the uncertainty
+of the smoke the hasty roads clear themselves as they make for light and
+the open ground. It seems as though the steady strength of their curves
+did in itself express some force and impulse. The railways run; their
+foreshortened sweeps and reaches look like the swinging and swaying of
+resolute motion. The town would shoulder them, but they evade and slip
+through, slender and keen, with a stroke of their flying heels. They
+crawl, but they crawl with the dominant level and liberty of flight in
+air.
+
+They begin in the tangle of the town, but smoothly untie themselves and
+pass away single and swift. No other road looks so resolute in flight as
+the rail. The others jostle one another as they hurry from town, and must
+needs relax their eagerness in order to climb the hills--brief and little
+ones though these are. The roads pause on the mounds, they hesitate at
+crossways, and they dip into slight and shallow valleys, whence they do
+not see the riot of walls and roofs from out of which they go.
+
+The azure June hardly leaves a trace of the local grey of smoke. All, by
+some accident of aspect, is a vague blue, although the smoke, seen from
+the Greenwich heights, leaves nothing unveiled, cancels the horizon, and
+barely lets the lovely dome of St. Paul's show a dark blue form upon the
+close background of thick and sunny air. And blue, like the rest, is that
+one wide road which takes here so majestic a sweep--the river. It is the
+river of chimneys; they stand, on either bank, as unequal in growth as a
+group of children; they crowd together, they stand apart, they straggle,
+but if they have any law, it is the river's. They mark its path as reeds
+and rushes might do in meadows. The hidden reaches are traced by this
+black growth, followed and discovered. The chimneys will hardly let the
+river go, but cling to the track of his waters when the town is dwindling
+eastwards, and stand conspicuous among the flats when the houses have at
+last, at last, ceased. Apart from the river they are almost as rare in
+London as in Naples, and it is not to them we owe the chief part of our
+'sky,' but to the steamers, to the trains, and, more than all, to the
+unnumbered houses. If ever London is to be restored to her own mists--not
+to great brightness, but to the tender exhalations that are now burlesqued
+by smoke, to the true climate of nature, the marshes, and the north, it
+will obviously be the work of laws touching the houses rather than the
+factories.
+
+The river is perpetually overhung, involved, tangled, in that indefinite
+and unshapely cloud. It looks blue from the Greenwich hill, but not blue
+with the blue of pure sunny waters; it is blue because blue is the trick
+of this midsummer light seen from this one point. The blue road lies open
+and flat, from the dazzling confusion of the west, whence it comes, to the
+dimmer confusion of the north, whither the great curve tends. It is a road
+more level than the tyrannously level rails, but there is no haste in it.
+The unceasing motion of the tidal Thames seems to make it wait about the
+bridges of London. The accustomed versifier himself will hardly bid it
+flow on, so often is it seen to flow back. Because it is so constantly
+chidden and driven by the sea, the long tendency, brought from its first
+source and kept between so many fields and over all the noisy weirs, is
+concealed. That flowing lurks still, but you cannot find it among the
+rhythmic tides. It is not expressed, and there is no sense of the final
+sea in the coming and going of these turbid waters. The unceasing seaward
+flow is their secret.
+
+But it is only upon this ambiguous road of the river that any human motion
+is perceptible in this distant view. Barges are seen to float heavy and
+flat, and at certain points there is the vague suggestion of some stir at
+wharf or pier. Otherwise the scene keeps all its hurry out of sight and
+hearing. But for the vague shifting and alteration of the light, London
+might be a painted city. The little figure of man is so quenched,
+incredibly. His town keeps the black crowds and their voices out of reach,
+and it is difficult to believe in the noise, so deaf is the distance.
+
+London is at the mercy of her roads, and it is no wonder the fancy should
+give them life. And now it is for their coming, not their going, that they
+seem in haste. The town has covered up the original and all-fruitful
+earth; her pavements seal up all the springs of earthly life, and her
+roads are loaded with the fruits of earth unsealed. It is upon her, then,
+that the roads are turned with boat, train, and cart charged with her
+bread. What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town,
+the town wherefrom nothing, nothing--for all its factories--takes birth;
+the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the
+never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is
+fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the
+furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous
+sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]
+
+
+
+
+THE SMOULDERING CITY
+
+
+Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly
+burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little
+chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring
+whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name
+and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to
+finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to
+these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in
+perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured
+in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is
+overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages
+of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the
+mobile creature close within his gates.
+
+
+[Illustration: _Rain, Smoke and Traffic._]
+
+
+If there is little show of that multitudinous presence, there is a
+broadcast sign of it. 'No smoke without a fire'; and the sky of London
+continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence
+of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by
+a folding and unfolding of banners of darkness. The quicker and hotter the
+enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and
+confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible
+under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall
+with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush,
+and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.
+
+Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town
+away from these dark latitudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of
+dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick
+softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green
+of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer--all this stirs and
+lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between
+seven and eight o'clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is
+wanting--the white surface that would look beautiful in western sunshine.
+All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent
+Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white
+there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint
+gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for
+white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail--especially
+where it is gently populous--to hold up some tempered white to the rosy
+sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white
+hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage
+wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow,
+has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks;
+and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as
+when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.
+
+The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind
+blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick
+or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find
+something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick,
+because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly
+thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds
+with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day
+he will, perhaps, begin a fashion of using much more white, in brick and
+tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever.
+Ruddy roofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they
+are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that
+their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and
+their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a
+high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming
+colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London,
+until it looks--fading eastwards--as though it were itself some effect of
+a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot
+eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.
+
+The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a multitude of
+imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it
+does in the ships and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and
+the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is
+trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and
+runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the
+burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town
+seem to be utterly choked and filled.
+
+When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life
+in the air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things,
+but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily
+under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of
+immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city
+of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of
+fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life
+feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its
+consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man,
+woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames
+far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep,
+the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman's life
+itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London
+visibly works at nothing but transformation.
+
+The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in
+London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north,
+where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and
+the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge,
+the lashes of the eyes of earth and sky, are more perceptible than they
+are in London, even with a west wind. Here the fiery Ariel has no delicate
+companionship, no one near but Caliban.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of London Impressions, by William Hyde and Alice Meynell.
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+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: London Impressions
+       Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Illustrator: William Hyde
+
+Release Date: June 16, 2010 [EBook #32842]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON IMPRESSIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive.)
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>LONDON IMPRESSIONS</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>LONDON<br />IMPRESSIONS</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>ETCHINGS AND PICTURES<br />IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY</h3>
+<h2>WILLIAM HYDE</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>AND ESSAYS BY</h3>
+<h2>ALICE MEYNELL</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p><a name="title" id="title"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_004tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_004.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">WESTMINSTER<br />ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO.<br />2 WHITEHALL GARDENS<br />1898</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_006tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_006.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center"><i>A Cheap Market.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><strong>LIST OF PICTURES</strong></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="images">
+<tr><td colspan="4" align="center">FULL-PAGE PLATES</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE RIVER</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Etching</span></td><td colspan="2" align="right"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>WESTMINSTER ABBEY</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Photogravure</span></td><td><i>facing page</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">2</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>TERRIBLE LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_4">4</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>AN IMPRESSION</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_7">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>END OF A WINTER DAY</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_8">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>UTILITARIAN LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>KENSINGTON GARDENS</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_15">14</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_17">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>ST. PAUL&#8217;S AT DAWN</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>WATERLOO BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_21">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_23">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>ST. PAUL&#8217;S FROM WATLING STREET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_25">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE VICTORIA TOWER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="4" align="center">PLATES IN THE TEXT</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ST. PAUL&#8217;S IN A STORM</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Photogravure</span></td><td colspan="2" align="right"><a href="#title"><i>On Title-page</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A CHEAP MARKET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center"><i>page</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A FORGOTTEN CORNER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE NERVES OF LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>TREES</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Etching</span></td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE LAST BOAT</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Photogravure</span></td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A BACK STREET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A COFFEE STALL</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>RAIN, SMOKE, AND TRAFFIC</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>WESTMINSTER</td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Etching</span></td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>LIST OF ESSAYS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="essays">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right"><span class="smcaplc">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE LONDON SUNDAY</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A PILGRIM</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_4">4</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE EFFECT OF LONDON</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE TREES</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>CHELSEA REACH</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE SPRING</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE ROADS</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE SMOULDERING CITY</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><a name="front" id="front"></a></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_011tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_011.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">THE RIVER.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE LONDON SUNDAY</h2>
+
+<p>This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The
+phrase is never varied&mdash;a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, &#8216;Oh,
+the London Sunday!&#8217; and another, &#8216;It must be too dreadful for foreigners!&#8217;
+and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a
+flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is
+little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater
+number do not know even so much.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_013tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_013.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>A Forgotten Corner.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another
+thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as
+far as the eye may see&mdash;a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow,
+wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses
+are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey
+houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that
+the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the
+morning and to the east in the evening&mdash;suns in rows, and suns that run
+fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the
+plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London
+Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of
+doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell
+whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of
+making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some
+excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of
+older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the
+further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do
+nothing&mdash;not even much talking&mdash;they give a false air of lawlessness to
+the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their
+clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their
+bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the
+women, who needs must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to
+spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly,
+in great numbers in the open spaces&mdash;the vague lands on the other side of
+Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their
+houses in the free afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to
+the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly
+as to get a continuous Sunday impression&mdash;the day and the people flowing,
+unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through &#8216;town,&#8217;
+through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and
+unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the
+distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has
+set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are
+deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown
+places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent.
+But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the
+absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets
+are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you
+realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by
+his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather
+blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which
+agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a
+pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of
+the race&mdash;squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the
+unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted
+that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We
+all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise,
+but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who
+join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and
+cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road
+the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair
+hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey.</p>
+
+<p>Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find
+it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come
+amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are
+studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and
+history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf
+town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the
+shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the
+ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic
+towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall
+have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal
+inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks.
+Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be
+permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the
+Blue-Coat <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even
+the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary&#8217;s
+in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these
+lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched
+and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never
+more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a
+characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and
+exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white
+a golden rose. St. Botolph&#8217;s, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with
+flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind,
+and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe
+together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of
+sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and
+white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition&mdash;a Dickens tradition,
+it seems&mdash;of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of
+the congregations: in this open church there are but three people,
+exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_016tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_016.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">WESTMINSTER ABBEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron
+blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks
+as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long,
+staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet.
+Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind
+to sift the darkness from the sunlight.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+<h2>A PILGRIM</h2>
+
+<p>Now and then a firefly strays from the vineyard into the streets of an
+Italian city, and goes quenched in the light of the shops. The stray and
+waif from &#8216;the very country&#8217; that comes to London is a silver-white seed
+with silken spokes or sails. There is no depth of the deep town that this
+visitant does not penetrate in August&mdash;going in, going far, going through,
+by virtue of its indescribable gentleness. The firefly has only a wall to
+cross, but the shining seed comes a long way, a careless alien but a
+mighty traveller. Indestructibly fragile, the most delicate of all the
+visible signs of the breeze, it goes to town, makes light of the capital,
+sets at nought the thoroughfares and the omnibuses, especially flouts the
+Park, one may suppose, where it does not grow. It hovers and leaps at
+about the height of first-floor windows, by many a mile of dull
+drawing-rooms, a country creature quite unconverted to London and
+undismayed. This <i>fl&acirc;neur</i> makes as little of our London as his ancestor
+made of Chaucer&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes it takes a flight on a stronger wind, and its whiteness shows
+dark with slight shadow against bright clouds, as the whiter snow-flake
+also looks dark from its shadow side. Then it comes down in a tumult of
+flight upon the city. It is a very strong little seed-pod, set with arms,
+legs, or sails&mdash;so ingeniously set that though all grow from the top of
+the pod their points together make a globe; on these it turns a
+&#8216;cart-wheel&#8217; like a human boy&mdash;like many boys, in fact, it must overtake
+on its way through the less respectable of the suburbs&mdash;only better. Every
+limb, itself so fine, is feathered with little plumes that are as thin as
+autumn spider-webs. Nothing steps so delicately as that seed, or upon such
+extreme tiptoe. But it does not walk far; the air bears the charges of the
+wild journey.</p>
+
+<p>Thistle-seeds&mdash;if thistle-seeds they be&mdash;make few and brief halts, then
+roll their wheel on the stones for a while, and then the wheel is a-wing
+again. You encounter them in the country, setting out for town on a south
+wind, and in London there is not a street they do not recklessly stray
+along. For they use our arbitrary streets; it does not seem that they make
+a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the
+streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human
+courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the
+Bank on a long west wind&mdash;their strolling being done at a certain height,
+in moderate mid-air.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_021tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_021.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">TERRIBLE LONDON.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of
+them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing
+Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have
+lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises
+and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level
+way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town&mdash;not even the scent of hay on
+morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and
+it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.</p>
+
+<p>White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of
+its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it&mdash;the point
+of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE EFFECT OF LONDON</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_024tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_024.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>The Nerves of London.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>It is no wonder if the painters of London are somewhat eager for the help
+of smoke. A simple glance at the streets&mdash;and the glance that would
+appreciate so mingled a sight as that of London must be simple&mdash;shows you
+that the detail of our streets is the closest detail in the world. Nowhere
+else do the houses, the carriages, and the people, all alike, wear the
+minute spots of hard colour that make a London street by bright daylight
+look so sharp and small. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some
+blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the
+north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and
+there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the
+streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the
+street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual
+windows. Shops and windows run into rows all but touching one another, or
+what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects,
+in some manner harassed and beset.</p>
+
+<p>Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man
+conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of
+white&mdash;exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles&mdash;scattered
+throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a
+footman&#8217;s shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white
+letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and
+hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of
+white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is
+never softened; nothing,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> except snow, could be whiter; and nothing,
+perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the
+street view.</p>
+
+<p>There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not
+these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for
+instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is,
+perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short
+patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the
+olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no
+liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on
+the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and
+beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to
+make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things
+in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field,
+where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers
+eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending
+obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless,
+pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach
+with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the
+distance of mountains.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_026tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_026.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">AN IMPRESSION.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between
+Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still
+young&mdash;the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash,
+all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with
+colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this
+nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in
+the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of
+omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harness, to all the broken,
+inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to
+anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill,
+and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots,
+its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets
+impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and
+characteristic&mdash;not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the
+recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting
+are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the
+walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a
+glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there
+is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine,
+with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a
+Londoner.</p>
+
+<p>But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are
+perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness.
+Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of
+sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle
+splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where
+walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so
+transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such
+curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the
+chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street
+leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of
+the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming
+fish&#8217;s tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and
+dreary&mdash;those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent
+offends, the light wave of a fish&#8217;s-tail street pleases the eye, with its
+fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but
+a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.</p>
+
+<p>Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is
+the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as
+they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether
+in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterranean or a
+hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will
+settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a
+rather secret thing, and misleading&mdash;the sign of a town that has not been
+ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism.
+Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering
+and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass
+the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart&mdash;old rights or the
+accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence
+have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has
+tended to set streets a-flowing too.</p>
+
+<p>But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a
+briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan
+foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In
+these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite
+detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their
+warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain
+wall is also black.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_031tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_031.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">END OF A WINTER DAY.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_033tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_033.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center"><i>The Embankment at Night.</i></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE</h2>
+
+<p>It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the
+mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by
+acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial
+climate, and by treating our own handiwork&mdash;the sky of our
+manufacture&mdash;with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the
+effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description.
+The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are &#8216;lurid&#8217; to no very
+grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never
+would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that
+there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system
+in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is
+bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the
+circumference be made of&mdash;mist from mountain heights or vapour from that
+series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a
+million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel
+a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of
+his long, distributed lights, and straight, infallible, divergent shadows
+that pick off the points and pinnacles of a thousand distances. The
+lowering sun will not permit the smoke to show so shapeless, so lifeless,
+so unbounded as it is; he takes his place in the middle of a wheel, and
+commands at any rate a mechanical order.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, and without a sun lowered into your picture, the smoke-mingled
+sky is the most unplanned in the world. It has no confederacy, and no
+direction. Nothing leads, and there are no figures, no troops, no
+companies; there is no history, nor approach. The smoke is helpless. It is
+perpetually subject to gravitation; no wind makes it buoyant, and no
+electric impetus lifts it against a wind. It constantly and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> drearily
+drops, as you may see if you look against any London horizon; the minute
+shower that it carries never ceases and never lifts, but sifts down
+momently from the low sky into which the chimneys raised it at first. That
+one upward spring was all its life. Thenceforth it does but drift until it
+is all shed, to the last black atom, upon the face of the town.</p>
+
+<p>And yet you may, twenty times a day in London, hear the smoke called
+cloud. Thunderstorms are announced as lurking in the heart of the
+powerless bosom of the smoke, and showers are threatened where there never
+was anything so fresh as a drop of rain. The puny darkness is supposed
+capable of lightnings, and out of the grime is expected the thunderbolt.
+The splendid name of the cloud is given to this poor local vesture of
+decay; no use or custom seems sufficient to make the London sky of
+mechanical suspension familiar to the citizen; when he faces it at the end
+of a brief distance he calls it by the names proper to the celestial
+heights, and he is hardly convinced of the truth when he sees it walk his
+streets.</p>
+
+<p>But, indeed, he might have learned long ago that there is no life in his
+storm, and that when thunder comes it wears a different gloom. The worst
+is that with the authentic darkness of cloud comes so often the imitation,
+and a town tempest is not only mocked, but hidden and covered, by the
+pother of mere smoke, so that the citizen does not well learn to
+distinguish. But he who has ever really known the cloud will not make that
+ignominious confusion. He knows the difference in storm, and so much more
+the greater difference in sunshine; he will not call by the name of cloud
+a thing that shows the dark shadow grimly enough, but never the light
+sweetly, and is naturally incapable of white.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the artificial climate of London is at its best when it is very
+obvious, and when it has strong scenes of sunset or storm to deal with.
+The time when it is insufferable is noonday or full afternoon on a
+cloudless day in summer, when there is not wind enough to drift it,
+helpless, out of town, and when it is not thick enough to keep the sun
+away. It makes the sunshine ugly. No beauty, even artificial or obvious,
+belongs to the smoke then, and it plays no antic pranks in mimicry of
+cloud. It has no shadow and no menace; it has no opportunity for
+stage-plays; it is disconcerted, and cannot make a penny theatre of its
+London. Every one must know such days, of which the essence should have
+been their purity, plain and splendid. By their light is the smoke seen to
+be nothing in the world but a sorry smirch. The horizon is thickened with
+it, and there it wreaks its chief &#8216;effects,&#8217; but all near things are also
+oppressed by it; the spirit of the sunshine is gone, and a blazing sun
+upon miles of blue slate roofs and yellow houses, with the thin
+uncleanness of smoke just showing in the blaze, is actually that
+impossibility&mdash;sunshine without beauty.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_036tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_036.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">UTILITARIAN LONDON.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>After this, let us grant the smoke the tragi-comedy of its successes.
+These are generally connected with Westminster; it finds matter fitted to
+its manner in the surrounding architecture, and in the westward opening.
+It suppresses a great deal that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>is not very presentable, on the
+working side of the river, and it reveals what is Gothic on the other
+bank. It has a trick of being ashamed of its origin, for it hustles the
+long chimneys out of sight. It does really surprising things with the
+beautiful dome of St. Paul&#8217;s; the very formlessness of its presence seems
+to give more value to that fine form. It has a way of showing the noble
+tops of clouds while it loses their bases in vagueness, which is not
+without beauty. You cannot see from what heavenly ranges of highlands
+those summits tower, and if they stand into the sunshine their isolation
+is the more remote and splendid. But even this is but a handy bit of
+scene-shifting; it touches no more than the fancy.</p>
+
+<p>There is another effect of the London climate, besides the effect of sky
+scenery, and that is the local colour wherewith the characteristic smoke,
+mingled with a little rain to make a general water-colour, has painted the
+surfaces of the town in variants of black. The citizen who&mdash;unaware of
+such things as the quarter of the wind&mdash;takes his umbrella for fear of the
+thunderous look of a tremendous smoke-storm to leeward, is apt to take the
+touch of soot for the touch of time. Nevertheless, the two dark colours
+are quite unlike; time is browner, and has a depth in the tone, whereas
+soot is greyer, and at its blackest has no depth. It gives a shallow
+colour; and even those who love their sky streaked and tumbled into the
+chaos of smoke should not be allowed to defend the <i>aquarelle</i> that
+colours their buildings.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that we no longer offer columns of the Doric order for
+treatment by London water-colours; but all the Doric columns we already
+have are left subject to this extraordinary substitute for the colouring
+of a Laconic sun. We have discovered that terra-cotta and tiles resist the
+work of the climate, and no doubt London at a glance presents a less
+coal-blackened face than it once wore. But too much of the surface of
+London is still the work of that dashing impressionist, the climate.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_039tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_039.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>THE TREES</h2>
+
+<p>The high trees that stand stirring and thrilling in the squares in summer
+do taste of darkness; night drives home a thousand shadows&mdash;thin and
+subtle flocks&mdash;to fold within the iron railings and to shelter in corners
+of the worn and unfragrant grass till morning. But the single trees that
+have their roots under grey pavements, and that breathe in the little
+accidental standing-places of the wayside, the railed-in corners left by
+the chance-medley of London streets&mdash;these have the strange fate to be in
+perpetual light. They never are washed in darkness; they never withdraw
+into that state and condition of freedom, into that open hiding-place,
+that untravelled liberty, that wild seclusion at home, that refuge without
+flight, that secret unconcealed, that solitude unenclosed, that
+manumission of captives, that opportunity of Penelope&mdash;darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The leaves of the street-side tree flutter bright emerald green through
+the whole night (out of town the discolouring night) of leafy summer. That
+local colour is never quenched, as human blushes are quenched at night. It
+rather takes a more conspicuous quality, under the closeness of the
+electric light; it is sharply green. Whereas the day has its mists and
+veils, and may at times darken a tree nearly black, by setting the sky
+alight behind it, the night has none of these shadows. The light of night
+is stationary and unchangeable, and there are some solitary trees here and
+there that undergo the unshifting illumination at the closest quarters;
+the light that knows no hours and makes no journey gleams near upon the
+motion of the leaves and glosses their faces. It is beforehand with the
+twilight, so that the dusk when it comes finds the place taken, and it
+will not let the tree go until the light of day flows in fully, and dawn
+is over.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_041tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_041.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">KENSINGTON GARDENS.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The sharp green of the plane-tree is never covered, nor are the delicately
+sprinkled spots of the poplar-leaves mingled and massed, in these solitary
+citizen trees. It is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>in the avenues and glades of Kensington Gardens
+that Night has her way. There amends are made for the common day by a
+double mystery. Not a tree is so much as to be known by name; all kinds
+sigh together in the dark. The mass is sombre and alive, but betrays
+neither leaf nor colour. As violently as the spirit of the woods was
+driven away, through all the long daylight, by the sound, the breath, the
+blackness, and the stamp and seal of London, which permit nothing
+visible&mdash;not a blade of grass&mdash;to go unmarked by the proprietorship of
+this despotic city; so swiftly as the spirit of the woods was hooted and
+stared into banishment by day, so quickly, so intently, and in such a
+union of multitude does it softly return by night. Solitude comes, the
+movement of the forest comes, and remoteness, which by day must be sought
+where it abides, comes at a stride to London, and sits in the branches of
+the trees. Profound is the forest and august the sky whence the great and
+melancholy spirit of the woods comes to restore these daily altered elms.</p>
+
+<p>Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its
+northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness
+and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is
+the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies
+straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked,
+unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute;
+the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to
+you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the
+majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the
+gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never
+bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft
+encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you
+see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also
+precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.</p>
+
+<p>By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were,
+disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly
+in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can
+take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at
+night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey.</p>
+
+<p>Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington
+Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight
+has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin
+until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the
+influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the
+June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so
+fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as
+though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender
+leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering
+glimpses of sky go through.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and
+take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in
+orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look
+more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon
+the separate leaves.</p>
+
+<p>Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the
+dark itself. She touches the high places of avenues within sound of the
+London wheels, and they become as simple as tree-tops at Verona. But,
+indeed, the moon is plainly seen to bring this dignity and liberty from
+the simple skies. All the world knows her to be like that lady of the
+poets who spoke to none that was not worthy, because before she talked
+with men she &#8216;knighted them with her smile.&#8217; It is one of the tyrannies
+wreaked by the electric light and the gas-lamps upon the street-side tree
+that they keep away from it the glimpses of the moon. Not only is secret
+darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves
+softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed
+upon its leaves.</p>
+
+<p>As to these lights of London lamps, their beauty, which is so great, seems
+to depend almost entirely upon the sky. See them as they glow in the long
+unequal curves that follow the subtly misleading directions of the streets
+of London, and in all their brilliancy they make but a common show&mdash;pretty
+enough, but not beautiful. But let any lamp or line of lamps come into
+visible relation with the sky&mdash;any sky, whether a mysterious night-sky
+softly embrowned, or a night-sky swept pure by a west wind, or the most
+ordinary grey of any average evening&mdash;and the lamp has indescribable
+beauties. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street
+lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its
+invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric
+lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and
+splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling
+lamp together make&mdash;or so it seems to me&mdash;one of the most beautiful sights
+that eyes can see&mdash;the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This
+carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was
+generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with
+the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden
+lights&mdash;electric lamps or gas lamps&mdash;have the beauty of fire, but the
+white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be
+seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.</p>
+
+<p>London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they
+make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the
+chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their
+squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels
+down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some
+machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves.
+Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and
+white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>and
+perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps
+of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the
+streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue
+between you and the houses opposite.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_046tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_046.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it
+rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops,
+silent elsewhere, upon its open leaves.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHELSEA REACH</h2>
+
+<p>The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily
+continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take
+them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for
+stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would
+hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design;
+what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it
+were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing
+as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that
+it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer.
+When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a
+better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in
+consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last
+bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of
+uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank.
+Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused&mdash;as
+doubtless they were&mdash;of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might
+well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. &#8216;<i>Le
+c&oelig;ur a ses raisons!</i>&#8217; The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like
+another. While, then, uniformity is one of the &#8216;reasons of the heart&#8217; of a
+County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons
+of their own hearts.</p>
+
+<p>The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne
+Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is
+an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this
+is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding,
+unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it,
+but above it, on its further side&mdash;that is, between it and the vaguest
+beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks
+like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and
+cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets
+of Fulham&mdash;true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it
+is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may
+be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and
+Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great
+city. The distinction of London was once that it was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>not a great city
+but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the
+raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there
+was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except
+Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of
+Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is
+somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and
+offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of
+Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand,
+the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London
+keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy
+shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at
+least is, for a space, <i>grande ville</i>. We cannot altogether grudge its
+Embankment.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_051tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_051.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>But if there is a mile of London village left&mdash;and therefore of the most
+London-like London&mdash;it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council&#8217;s
+heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in
+its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of
+the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the
+river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of
+long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business
+as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of
+wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is
+the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey <i>coteaux</i>, though this
+is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the
+right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight.
+You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the
+light the view is animating.</p>
+
+<p>Inasmuch as the Thames flows here north-eastward, when you look to the
+south-west by Chelsea Reach, in the early afternoon of windy spring, you
+look at once towards the gates of light, the gates of the wind, and the
+gates of the river. There seems to be one sole spring and source in the
+day. The way is, beyond description, open. For the waterway is the flat of
+the world, and everywhere else in London are houses; here is a real
+horizon. Here you get the proportions of a great sky, as you get the
+proportions of a great church when there are no benches on the floor to
+shorten them. The clouds come upon the south-west wind of the early year,
+a little cold with the strength of freshness, and not with chill, and give
+and withhold a hundred lights.</p>
+
+<p>Those who do not like the name of mud should see how these lights are
+answered by the floor of mud in simple silver and steel. Twice a day the
+motion of the wave is there, twice a day the still shore. With that
+cradling change go the changes of the boats and barges at the wharves. All
+is life, but there is no colour, except where you very dimly perceive that
+a sail is red as the sails are on the Adriatic. It is a view to teach
+painting, to teach seeing. We have not such another school in London as
+Chelsea Reach. If Chelsea ever becomes <i>grande ville</i> too, the shape of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+the river will be altered, and the profile of that curve, sharp and fine
+with masts against the west will be abolished: there will be no beauty of
+tides, no silver wet mirror, no barges.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing quite like Chelsea. The spoiling of Chelsea will not be
+the same thing as the spoiling of the country by pushing on a suburb, for
+instance; for in that case there is country beyond, only deferred. But
+there is no Cheyne Walk, no Chelsea, further up the river, or anywhere in
+the world of rivers.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_056tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_056.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">ST. PAUL&#8217;S AT DAWN.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span><br /></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_058tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_058.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center"><i>The Last Boat.</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>THE SPRING</h2>
+
+<p>There is a splendid spring in town, and it happens to agree with the
+country spring as to the time of appearing; but it is another show, and of
+another spirit. The difference is curiously complete; it was, no doubt, to
+be looked for in the avenues, in the sward, in the winding water, and in
+the Park generally, considered as a landscape. But how is the grass itself
+London grass? Not only in its acre of intense green, but in the space of a
+square foot that might, one would think, be anywhere, it is London grass.
+The leaves, the blades, are London growth. You cannot evade the spirit of
+place by shutting out the sky, the railings, the people, or the gravel.
+Even if you go close and make acquaintance, as a child does, with the
+roots, you are aware that it is not the grass of England that you have
+there, but the grass of London.</p>
+
+<p>The leaves of the trees have so vulgar a contrast in the black of stems,
+branches, and twigs, that they are from the first obviously not the leaves
+of the woods. They are all the better admired by many eyes, for whom the
+modest contrasts of nature are not enough; and you may hear the black and
+green of the parks praised for this same immoderate effect of colour. But
+the grass has nothing to tell that tale of the London winter which the
+branch tells; it is this year&#8217;s; it has no past; it is innocent, and
+answerable to the sun for merely its few inches of simple green. It might
+be supposed to have the graces of an alien in London. But it has them not
+at all; it comes up a Londoner. You cannot be really intimate with it; and
+when it puts up its little flower, and your child brings it home to you
+hot from a clenched hand, even then it has nothing, nothing whatever, of
+the fields. You put it into water to flatter the child, but even there,
+given by that little alien hand, and so isolated from its park and its
+railings, it is unmistakably the grass of its own soil; it manifestly
+could never have been romping with little young dandelions on the side of
+a village road, or tossed by visiting winds scented with meadows.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>The London spring is a good thing, but it is another thing. It is only
+because of the accident by which the real spring and the London spring
+appear at the same time of the year that they have come to bear the same
+name, and even to be confused together by the insensitive. A handful from
+the hedgerows twenty miles away&mdash;a handful, already half faded, of mingled
+things at random, grass and herbs, not free from traces of white and warm
+rustic dust&mdash;an authentic little heap from the real spring, would show at
+once to all apprehensive eyes what the difference really is. And yet there
+must be careless or worldly birds that do not know it. Otherwise we should
+not hear such songs from the remotest river-sides sung within Kensington
+Gardens. Let no one pretend, however, that the bees are deceived or
+indifferent.</p>
+
+<p>Nor let it be said that the difference is superficial. That is precisely
+untrue; it is the likeness that is superficial, and the difference
+essential. The London spring is a brilliant image of the real spring. It
+is fresh when the real April is fresh; and when it grows dim you could
+match it with specimens from the country wayside. Nay, soot and smoke
+themselves cannot disguise the real spring growth and make it look like
+the London. That can easily be proved. After two weeks in which you are
+unconvinced of May by the green and dazzling parks, you will get the very
+thrill of May from a square yard of very young nettles and young weeds of
+many kinds, seen from a railway carriage and touched with the railway
+dust. There is cleaner grass by the Speke Monument, but this that grows by
+the railway is out of town; it is of another kind; it is of the other
+spring. Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier,
+and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority,
+and spring was real.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the
+absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep
+difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by
+mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home,
+and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it
+better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. Childhood has had
+it so near, and has learned it once for all, and will never be deceived,
+nor will the man who has had a childhood near living earth; he knows that
+the springs are two. He knows, for he remembers that he knew, the spirit
+of the place. That is an aura that lies near the ground. It is a warm
+atmosphere that does not rise, but breathes by little garden plots in
+corners; is the very spirit of rivulets and brooks; lurks amongst the
+maiden-hair that covers the fresh waters of Mediterranean hillsides, and
+amongst the gravel of old sunny garden terraces; is so caught in moss that
+the air where moss grows seems to imprison it; and passes quick into the
+nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers&mdash;ground-ivy, and
+things that are not so tall as grass&mdash;are entangled with the spirit of
+place. Low box hedges are intricate with it, and with the spirit of
+antiquity, because they are no higher than the heads of very little
+children, whose hearts conceive antiquity and the genius of places. They
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>know the breath of the parks well. What children know&mdash;what they
+knew&mdash;we have never forgotten. And yet all the differences which they
+learned&mdash;the difference between the weak odour of soot and the gentle
+odour of earth, and the difference between the click of the bit and the
+sound of the bee&mdash;are not the real difference between the town spring and
+the spring of the natural world. They are mere signs and proofs; the fact
+lies deep and close; there are two springs.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_061tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_061.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">WATERLOO BRIDGE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And yet, across all boundaries, across the frontier of the suburbs, what
+is this strange scrap of the real May of the natural world dropped into
+the midst of the May of London? A scrap of that true spring alighted in
+the midst of the very winter would hardly look so strange as this shred of
+the very spring in the spring of town. It is but some accidental grass or
+leaf that has been shed and sown by some west wind upon the edges of the
+tiles of a little old poor roof in town. Not into the parks did it fly,
+not amongst the flower-walks or on the great sward, emerald green. It
+hovered and flitted into the middle of town, a little flock of wild lives.
+The enormous spring, the May of all the earth, unmarked, disguised by a
+delusive likeness to the London spring, has visited the town. It is a
+dainty <i>incognito</i>. It signals to those who know; but if Vestries
+recognised it&mdash;and supposing they cared enough for roofs of that kind,
+which they do not&mdash;they would take that grass up by the roots.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h2>BELOW BRIDGE</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_064tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_064.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>Below Bridge.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The first impression, and, needless to say, the longest, is that of the
+many miles of wharves compared with the few miles of embankments, drives,
+and of the holiday river generally. Not only have the black and brown
+warehouses, the chimneys, and the cranes possession of the whole right
+bank of the London Thames, but they hold both banks of the lower Thames
+through league-long reaches and noble curves, and such changes of aspect,
+sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Besides this slow variation of light, in which the view wheels under the
+wheeling cloud, there is no lack of variety along the dusky banks of the
+river of commerce. The subsidence of height along the warehouses as the
+river draws further and further from the middle of London is an incident
+of continuous interest, interrupted now and then, but holding on
+persistently, until the carrying river flows through a dark-gabled, low,
+and long village towards the eastern woods and heights and the further
+fields.</p>
+
+<p>Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense
+interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye
+instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses
+that are no houses&mdash;somewhat as the <i>biblia abiblia</i> of Charles Lamb are
+among books,&mdash;you find the face of a single human little house, its timber
+looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse
+harbour-master&#8217;s title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt
+in&mdash;propped in the serried row <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>that has the sightless aspect of a
+barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the
+picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach
+to beauty than any street of &#8216;handsome&#8217; houses with columns and porticoes
+in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent
+Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is
+a good deal of plain wall, which&mdash;unless a building be in every way
+wrong&mdash;gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once
+the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With
+this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt.</p>
+
+<p>True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings&mdash;&#8216;works,&#8217; these
+seem to be, not warehouses&mdash;that touch the extremity of possible ugliness
+and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without
+exaggeration, black. These are very few&mdash;two or three at the most&mdash;and all
+on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken,
+pointed, and very various.</p>
+
+<p>Low as it is, it is always&mdash;seen from the deck of a boat&mdash;the very
+skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats,
+warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing
+appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the
+movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of
+river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass
+through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map
+that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_066tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_066.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">BELOW BRIDGE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The swarthiness, the darkness of the colour&mdash;a brownish grey&mdash;is to be
+insisted upon; yet to none but a careless eye does the lower Thames seem
+all brown and grey. The dull hues are shot with one single prevailing
+colour&mdash;red. Innumerable red-tiled roofs are seen as the turn of the river
+shows their dusky sides; iron sheds are ruddled with the red that signs
+flocks of country sheep; shutters are red over warehouse windows (this is
+a Sunday view), and everywhere are the red sails of Venice, dyed in the
+selfsame dye, only differently lighted. Even when there is a difficulty in
+fixing the place of this negroid blush, it is perceptibly there. It is
+latent, even when no red sail rises between grey water and grey sky; it
+lurks in hollows and inlets so darkly as to be almost black. Then suddenly
+the scarlet of a huge black and scarlet steamer comes along and gives you
+the colour without a shred of mystery, without charm, and with the most
+definite division. Besides the red, there is nothing that is coloured
+except a stack of timber now and then&mdash;raw wood with precisely the colours
+of a wheatfield in August&mdash;and the piled-up hay of a red-sailed barge
+loaded down to the water. These are not many on the Sunday river, but
+Sunday clears the colours by clearing the air. There is exceedingly little
+smoke; its sign is upon the whole river-side, it has re-drawn everything
+in black, as a child might go over a water-colour with his black pencils,
+but between you and the natural clouds there is nothing but fresh air,
+quick with the movement that seems perpetually to follow this grey
+waterway. Or now and then, at long intervals, a single flimsy puff of
+smoke comes between mast and sky; it is brown,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> the steam is white, and
+the cloud silver grey; and through each of these three with a various
+gleam filters the flying sunshine.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_069tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_069.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>A Back Street.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Sunday seals the faces of the barns and turns the key upon the leagues of
+wharves; but it leaves all the cranes and masts etched in their thousands
+upon the low horizon. These make the thicket of the Thames-side, a
+deciduous, narrow wood winding east, south-east, and north, and standing
+everywhere in its brief winter of a day, having shed sails and burdens and
+put away noise. There is nothing in the handsome London of high houses so
+delicate as these lifted lances against the sky. Hop-gardens or vineyards,
+or the slender rows of sticks that carry pea plants and beans in rustic
+gardens, make the same play with light, and let it through as fine a
+design.</p>
+
+<p>Here is nothing of the sharp black and white detail that is the most
+salient thing in London streets; everything is painted softly; all the
+darks are dull; in a word, the scene is simple, and this the streets are
+never. It is simplicity, indeed, that makes all the buildings (except only
+the &#8216;works&#8217; above mentioned) more than tolerable. There are no
+advertisements. This means much to eyes too well used to those shreds and
+tatters of the wall. That commerce which makes so much paltry show in the
+West is here perfectly grave and quiet; it makes serious announcements,
+not advertisements, of the things that occupy navies. You see &#8216;Pickles&#8217;
+and other names that launch a thousand ships, written large over various
+landing-places, and the names of the owners of warehouses are broad across
+their fronts; or you are reminded how little you know of the affairs of
+the place by the frequent name of &#8216;Sufferance Wharf&#8217; among the cranes. It
+cannot possibly be said that this lettering is beautiful, but it is not
+nearly so bad as the lettering in the streets we know. Needless to say,
+you shall not see a scrap of gilding below bridge, except a momentary
+tawdriness near the pier of some excursion place, where there are unseen
+Cockney gardens at hand&mdash;no gilding, nor white, nor any kind of blue.
+Seeing that bad blue is the worst thing in the far-off town of paint and
+pleasure, the dark and reddish river-side of work has here again one of
+its obscure advantages.</p>
+
+<p>The work, almost all pausing in this summer <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>Sunday, is obviously, to
+judge by its instruments and chips, mainly the inhuman work of machines.
+Nevertheless, wherever there are boats there is that arm of Hercules which
+is heroic, and therefore greater, though much weaker, than the arm of
+iron; and even on this day you may see the toil of the arm against the
+mass of the heavy river, as two men stand to row their broad barge up
+stream. It is the most primitive contest after all. Their figures strain
+back on the long oar until they are stretched nearly straight horizontally
+before they slowly gather themselves and grow erect again. Nothing suits
+the river so well as the barge with its level load, flat as the water
+itself. Nothing a-tiptoe there; but the very surface of the world reaching
+to the sea, and the long river feeling for that level far inland.</p>
+
+<p>The dusky voyage darkens, for the Thames turns towards the north; anon it
+takes a pale grey splendour, the sky shines, and the delicate intricacy of
+masts that mar nothing of the simple view seems to be rather itself
+luminous than dark against the light; flying birds are lost as they pass
+in the upper brilliance. It is but that the Thames has swung towards the
+south again.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_071tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_071.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">ST. PAUL&#8217;S FROM WATLING STREET.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE ROADS</h2>
+
+<p>On Westminster Bridge at early morning Wordsworth thought of the heart of
+London, but a view of London in the long day and night of movement, when
+the mystery of sleep is away, suggests not the involuntary heart of men,
+but their wilful feet. The roads, which are lonely messengers in the
+far-off country, crowd together here, and hustle one another to give
+footing to the tramp of the people. London has a fantastic look, as though
+there were nothing to do but make haste to be gone. To look at London from
+some point of height&mdash;a rare opportunity&mdash;is to trace these ways of
+passionate escape. The roads, indeed, seem eager, but you know that the
+crowds who, by these curves and knots, these straight lines, and these
+intent, narrow, dark grey levels, traced with narrower steel, elude the
+town, are in no more than jog-trot haste, and wear no look of fugitives.
+Of them and of their detail there is no sign in this distant prospect. The
+movement of the people in London is here no more perceptible than the
+molecular motion in a diamond.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_074tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_074.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>A Coffee Stall.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>But the roads are all expressive of this energy of flight from a centre.
+They are, as it were, signs of a perpetual explosion; they are the fringe
+of the <i>m&ecirc;l&eacute;e</i>, the shooting, streaming outbreaks of the photosphere of
+London. They hunt and are hunted. They fly from the city of confusion. It
+is only by escaping that they become visible, and out of the uncertainty
+of the smoke the hasty roads clear themselves as they make for light and
+the open ground. It seems as though the steady strength of their curves
+did in itself express some force and impulse. The railways run; their
+foreshortened sweeps and reaches look like the swinging and swaying of
+resolute motion. The town would shoulder them, but they evade and slip
+through, slender and keen,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> with a stroke of their flying heels. They
+crawl, but they crawl with the dominant level and liberty of flight in
+air.</p>
+
+<p>They begin in the tangle of the town, but smoothly untie themselves and
+pass away single and swift. No other road looks so resolute in flight as
+the rail. The others jostle one another as they hurry from town, and must
+needs relax their eagerness in order to climb the hills&mdash;brief and little
+ones though these are. The roads pause on the mounds, they hesitate at
+crossways, and they dip into slight and shallow valleys, whence they do
+not see the riot of walls and roofs from out of which they go.</p>
+
+<p>The azure June hardly leaves a trace of the local grey of smoke. All, by
+some accident of aspect, is a vague blue, although the smoke, seen from
+the Greenwich heights, leaves nothing unveiled, cancels the horizon, and
+barely lets the lovely dome of St. Paul&#8217;s show a dark blue form upon the
+close background of thick and sunny air. And blue, like the rest, is that
+one wide road which takes here so majestic a sweep&mdash;the river. It is the
+river of chimneys; they stand, on either bank, as unequal in growth as a
+group of children; they crowd together, they stand apart, they straggle,
+but if they have any law, it is the river&#8217;s. They mark its path as reeds
+and rushes might do in meadows. The hidden reaches are traced by this
+black growth, followed and discovered. The chimneys will hardly let the
+river go, but cling to the track of his waters when the town is dwindling
+eastwards, and stand conspicuous among the flats when the houses have at
+last, at last, ceased. Apart from the river they are almost as rare in
+London as in Naples, and it is not to them we owe the chief part of our
+&#8216;sky,&#8217; but to the steamers, to the trains, and, more than all, to the
+unnumbered houses. If ever London is to be restored to her own mists&mdash;not
+to great brightness, but to the tender exhalations that are now burlesqued
+by smoke, to the true climate of nature, the marshes, and the north, it
+will obviously be the work of laws touching the houses rather than the
+factories.</p>
+
+<p>The river is perpetually overhung, involved, tangled, in that indefinite
+and unshapely cloud. It looks blue from the Greenwich hill, but not blue
+with the blue of pure sunny waters; it is blue because blue is the trick
+of this midsummer light seen from this one point. The blue road lies open
+and flat, from the dazzling confusion of the west, whence it comes, to the
+dimmer confusion of the north, whither the great curve tends. It is a road
+more level than the tyrannously level rails, but there is no haste in it.
+The unceasing motion of the tidal Thames seems to make it wait about the
+bridges of London. The accustomed versifier himself will hardly bid it
+flow on, so often is it seen to flow back. Because it is so constantly
+chidden and driven by the sea, the long tendency, brought from its first
+source and kept between so many fields and over all the noisy weirs, is
+concealed. That flowing lurks still, but you cannot find it among the
+rhythmic tides. It is not expressed, and there is no sense of the final
+sea in the coming and going of these turbid waters. The unceasing seaward
+flow is their secret.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>But it is only upon this ambiguous road of the river that any human motion
+is perceptible in this distant view. Barges are seen to float heavy and
+flat, and at certain points there is the vague suggestion of some stir at
+wharf or pier. Otherwise the scene keeps all its hurry out of sight and
+hearing. But for the vague shifting and alteration of the light, London
+might be a painted city. The little figure of man is so quenched,
+incredibly. His town keeps the black crowds and their voices out of reach,
+and it is difficult to believe in the noise, so deaf is the distance.</p>
+
+<p>London is at the mercy of her roads, and it is no wonder the fancy should
+give them life. And now it is for their coming, not their going, that they
+seem in haste. The town has covered up the original and all-fruitful
+earth; her pavements seal up all the springs of earthly life, and her
+roads are loaded with the fruits of earth unsealed. It is upon her, then,
+that the roads are turned with boat, train, and cart charged with her
+bread. What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town,
+the town wherefrom nothing, nothing&mdash;for all its factories&mdash;takes birth;
+the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the
+never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is
+fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the
+furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous
+sacrifice.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_078tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_078.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+<p class="center">VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE SMOULDERING CITY</h2>
+
+<p>Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly
+burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little
+chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring
+whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name
+and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to
+finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to
+these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in
+perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured
+in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is
+overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages
+of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the
+mobile creature close within his gates.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i_080tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_080.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a><br />
+<p class="center"><i>Rain, Smoke and Traffic.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>If there is little show of that multitudinous presence, there is a
+broadcast sign of it. &#8216;No smoke without a fire&#8217;; and the sky of London
+continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence
+of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by
+a folding and unfolding of banners of darkness. The quicker and hotter the
+enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and
+confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible
+under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall
+with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush,
+and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.</p>
+
+<p>Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town
+away from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> these dark latitudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of
+dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick
+softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green
+of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer&mdash;all this stirs and
+lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between
+seven and eight o&#8217;clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is
+wanting&mdash;the white surface that would look beautiful in western sunshine.
+All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent
+Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white
+there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint
+gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for
+white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail&mdash;especially
+where it is gently populous&mdash;to hold up some tempered white to the rosy
+sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white
+hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage
+wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow,
+has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks;
+and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as
+when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.</p>
+
+<p>The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind
+blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick
+or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find
+something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick,
+because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly
+thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds
+with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day
+he will, perhaps, begin a fashion of using much more white, in brick and
+tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever.
+Ruddy roofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they
+are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that
+their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and
+their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a
+high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming
+colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London,
+until it looks&mdash;fading eastwards&mdash;as though it were itself some effect of
+a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot
+eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.</p>
+
+<p>The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a multitude of
+imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it
+does in the ships and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and
+the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is
+trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and
+runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the
+burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town
+seem to be utterly choked and filled.</p>
+
+<p>When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life
+in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things,
+but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily
+under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of
+immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city
+of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of
+fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life
+feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its
+consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man,
+woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames
+far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep,
+the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman&#8217;s life
+itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London
+visibly works at nothing but transformation.</p>
+
+<p>The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in
+London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north,
+where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and
+the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge,
+the lashes of the eyes of earth and sky, are more perceptible than they
+are in London, even with a west wind. Here the fiery Ariel has no delicate
+companionship, no one near but Caliban.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_082tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<a href="images/i_082.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">Edinburgh: T. and A. <span class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to Her Majesty</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><b>Transcriber&#8217;s Notes:</b></p>
+
+<p>Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to a nearby paragraph break.</p>
+
+<p>The text in the list of illustrations is presented as in the original text, but the links
+navigate to the page number closest to the illustration&#8217;s loaction in this document.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
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@@ -0,0 +1,1731 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: London Impressions
+       Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Illustrator: William Hyde
+
+Release Date: June 16, 2010 [EBook #32842]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON IMPRESSIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LONDON IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  IMPRESSIONS
+
+  ETCHINGS AND PICTURES
+  IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY
+  WILLIAM HYDE
+
+  AND ESSAYS BY
+  ALICE MEYNELL
+
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+  WESTMINSTER
+  ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO.
+  2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
+  1898
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Cheap Market._
+
+Swan Electric Engraving Co]
+
+
+LIST OF PICTURES
+
+FULL-PAGE PLATES
+
+
+  THE RIVER                  ETCHING           _Frontispiece_
+
+  WESTMINSTER ABBEY          PHOTOGRAVURE    _facing page_  2
+
+  TERRIBLE LONDON                 Do.               "       4
+
+  AN IMPRESSION                   Do.               "       6
+
+  END OF A WINTER DAY             Do.               "       8
+
+  UTILITARIAN LONDON              Do.               "      10
+
+  KENSINGTON GARDENS              Do.               "      12
+
+  NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY         Do.               "      14
+
+  THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER    Do.               "      16
+
+  ST. PAUL'S AT DAWN              Do.               "      18
+
+  WATERLOO BRIDGE                 Do.               "      20
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE                    Do.               "      22
+
+  ST. PAUL'S FROM WATLING STREET  Do.               "      24
+
+  THE VICTORIA TOWER              Do.               "      28
+
+
+
+
+PLATES IN THE TEXT
+
+
+  ST. PAUL'S IN A STORM      PHOTOGRAVURE     _On Title-page_
+
+  A CHEAP MARKET                  Do.               _page_  v
+
+  A FORGOTTEN CORNER              Do.                 "     1
+
+  THE NERVES OF LONDON            Do.                 "     6
+
+  THE EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT         Do.                 "     9
+
+  TREES                      ETCHING                  "    12
+
+  THE LAST BOAT              PHOTOGRAVURE             "    19
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE                    Do.                 "    22
+
+  A BACK STREET                   Do.                 "    24
+
+  A COFFEE STALL                  Do.                 "    26
+
+  RAIN, SMOKE, AND TRAFFIC        Do.                 "    29
+
+  WESTMINSTER                ETCHING                  "    31
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ESSAYS
+
+
+                        PAGE
+
+  THE LONDON SUNDAY        1
+
+  A PILGRIM                4
+
+  THE EFFECT OF LONDON     6
+
+  THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE     9
+
+  THE TREES               12
+
+  CHELSEA REACH           16
+
+  THE SPRING              19
+
+  BELOW BRIDGE            22
+
+  THE ROADS               26
+
+  THE SMOULDERING CITY    29
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER.]
+
+
+
+
+THE LONDON SUNDAY
+
+
+This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The
+phrase is never varied--a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, 'Oh,
+the London Sunday!' and another, 'It must be too dreadful for foreigners!'
+and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a
+flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is
+little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater
+number do not know even so much.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Forgotten Corner._]
+
+
+Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another
+thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as
+far as the eye may see--a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow,
+wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses
+are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey
+houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that
+the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the
+morning and to the east in the evening--suns in rows, and suns that run
+fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the
+plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London
+Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of
+doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell
+whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of
+making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some
+excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of
+older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the
+further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do
+nothing--not even much talking--they give a false air of lawlessness to
+the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their
+clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their
+bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the
+women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to
+spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly,
+in great numbers in the open spaces--the vague lands on the other side of
+Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their
+houses in the free afternoon.
+
+In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to
+the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly
+as to get a continuous Sunday impression--the day and the people flowing,
+unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through 'town,'
+through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and
+unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the
+distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has
+set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.
+
+Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are
+deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown
+places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent.
+But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the
+absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets
+are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you
+realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by
+his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather
+blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which
+agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a
+pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of
+the race--squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the
+unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted
+that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We
+all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise,
+but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who
+join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and
+cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road
+the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair
+hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey.
+
+Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find
+it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come
+amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are
+studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and
+history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf
+town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the
+shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the
+ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic
+towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall
+have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal
+inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks.
+Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be
+permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the
+Blue-Coat School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even
+the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary's
+in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these
+lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched
+and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never
+more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a
+characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and
+exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white
+a golden rose. St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with
+flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind,
+and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe
+together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of
+sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and
+white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition--a Dickens tradition,
+it seems--of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of
+the congregations: in this open church there are but three people,
+exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.
+
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]
+
+
+There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron
+blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks
+as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long,
+staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet.
+Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind
+to sift the darkness from the sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIM
+
+
+Now and then a firefly strays from the vineyard into the streets of an
+Italian city, and goes quenched in the light of the shops. The stray and
+waif from 'the very country' that comes to London is a silver-white seed
+with silken spokes or sails. There is no depth of the deep town that this
+visitant does not penetrate in August--going in, going far, going through,
+by virtue of its indescribable gentleness. The firefly has only a wall to
+cross, but the shining seed comes a long way, a careless alien but a
+mighty traveller. Indestructibly fragile, the most delicate of all the
+visible signs of the breeze, it goes to town, makes light of the capital,
+sets at nought the thoroughfares and the omnibuses, especially flouts the
+Park, one may suppose, where it does not grow. It hovers and leaps at
+about the height of first-floor windows, by many a mile of dull
+drawing-rooms, a country creature quite unconverted to London and
+undismayed. This _flaneur_ makes as little of our London as his ancestor
+made of Chaucer's.
+
+Sometimes it takes a flight on a stronger wind, and its whiteness shows
+dark with slight shadow against bright clouds, as the whiter snow-flake
+also looks dark from its shadow side. Then it comes down in a tumult of
+flight upon the city. It is a very strong little seed-pod, set with arms,
+legs, or sails--so ingeniously set that though all grow from the top of
+the pod their points together make a globe; on these it turns a
+'cart-wheel' like a human boy--like many boys, in fact, it must overtake
+on its way through the less respectable of the suburbs--only better. Every
+limb, itself so fine, is feathered with little plumes that are as thin as
+autumn spider-webs. Nothing steps so delicately as that seed, or upon such
+extreme tiptoe. But it does not walk far; the air bears the charges of the
+wild journey.
+
+Thistle-seeds--if thistle-seeds they be--make few and brief halts, then
+roll their wheel on the stones for a while, and then the wheel is a-wing
+again. You encounter them in the country, setting out for town on a south
+wind, and in London there is not a street they do not recklessly stray
+along. For they use our arbitrary streets; it does not seem that they make
+a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the
+streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human
+courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the
+Bank on a long west wind--their strolling being done at a certain height,
+in moderate mid-air.
+
+
+[Illustration: TERRIBLE LONDON.]
+
+
+They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of
+them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing
+Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have
+lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises
+and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level
+way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town--not even the scent of hay on
+morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and
+it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.
+
+White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of
+its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it--the point
+of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.
+
+
+
+
+THE EFFECT OF LONDON
+
+
+It is no wonder if the painters of London are somewhat eager for the help
+of smoke. A simple glance at the streets--and the glance that would
+appreciate so mingled a sight as that of London must be simple--shows you
+that the detail of our streets is the closest detail in the world. Nowhere
+else do the houses, the carriages, and the people, all alike, wear the
+minute spots of hard colour that make a London street by bright daylight
+look so sharp and small. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some
+blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the
+north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and
+there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the
+streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the
+street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual
+windows. Shops and windows run into rows all but touching one another, or
+what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects,
+in some manner harassed and beset.
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Nerves of London._]
+
+
+Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man
+conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of
+white--exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles--scattered
+throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a
+footman's shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white
+letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and
+hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of
+white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is
+never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing,
+perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the
+street view.
+
+
+[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION.]
+
+
+There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not
+these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for
+instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is,
+perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short
+patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the
+olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no
+liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on
+the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and
+beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to
+make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things
+in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field,
+where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers
+eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending
+obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless,
+pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach
+with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the
+distance of mountains.
+
+Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between
+Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still
+young--the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash,
+all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with
+colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this
+nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in
+the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of
+omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harness, to all the broken,
+inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.
+
+In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to
+anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill,
+and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots,
+its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets
+impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and
+characteristic--not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the
+recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting
+are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the
+walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a
+glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there
+is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine,
+with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a
+Londoner.
+
+But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are
+perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness.
+Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of
+sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle
+splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where
+walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is
+the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so
+transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such
+curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the
+chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street
+leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of
+the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming
+fish's tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and
+dreary--those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent
+offends, the light wave of a fish's-tail street pleases the eye, with its
+fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but
+a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.
+
+Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is
+the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as
+they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether
+in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterranean or a
+hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will
+settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a
+rather secret thing, and misleading--the sign of a town that has not been
+ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism.
+Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering
+and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass
+the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart--old rights or the
+accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence
+have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has
+tended to set streets a-flowing too.
+
+But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a
+briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan
+foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In
+these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite
+detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their
+warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain
+wall is also black.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: END OF A WINTER DAY.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Embankment at Night._]
+
+
+THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE
+
+
+It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the
+mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by
+acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial
+climate, and by treating our own handiwork--the sky of our
+manufacture--with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the
+effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description.
+The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are 'lurid' to no very
+grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never
+would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that
+there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system
+in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is
+bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the
+circumference be made of--mist from mountain heights or vapour from that
+series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a
+million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel
+a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of
+his long, distributed lights, and straight, infallible, divergent shadows
+that pick off the points and pinnacles of a thousand distances. The
+lowering sun will not permit the smoke to show so shapeless, so lifeless,
+so unbounded as it is; he takes his place in the middle of a wheel, and
+commands at any rate a mechanical order.
+
+Otherwise, and without a sun lowered into your picture, the smoke-mingled
+sky is the most unplanned in the world. It has no confederacy, and no
+direction. Nothing leads, and there are no figures, no troops, no
+companies; there is no history, nor approach. The smoke is helpless. It is
+perpetually subject to gravitation; no wind makes it buoyant, and no
+electric impetus lifts it against a wind. It constantly and drearily
+drops, as you may see if you look against any London horizon; the minute
+shower that it carries never ceases and never lifts, but sifts down
+momently from the low sky into which the chimneys raised it at first. That
+one upward spring was all its life. Thenceforth it does but drift until it
+is all shed, to the last black atom, upon the face of the town.
+
+And yet you may, twenty times a day in London, hear the smoke called
+cloud. Thunderstorms are announced as lurking in the heart of the
+powerless bosom of the smoke, and showers are threatened where there never
+was anything so fresh as a drop of rain. The puny darkness is supposed
+capable of lightnings, and out of the grime is expected the thunderbolt.
+The splendid name of the cloud is given to this poor local vesture of
+decay; no use or custom seems sufficient to make the London sky of
+mechanical suspension familiar to the citizen; when he faces it at the end
+of a brief distance he calls it by the names proper to the celestial
+heights, and he is hardly convinced of the truth when he sees it walk his
+streets.
+
+But, indeed, he might have learned long ago that there is no life in his
+storm, and that when thunder comes it wears a different gloom. The worst
+is that with the authentic darkness of cloud comes so often the imitation,
+and a town tempest is not only mocked, but hidden and covered, by the
+pother of mere smoke, so that the citizen does not well learn to
+distinguish. But he who has ever really known the cloud will not make that
+ignominious confusion. He knows the difference in storm, and so much more
+the greater difference in sunshine; he will not call by the name of cloud
+a thing that shows the dark shadow grimly enough, but never the light
+sweetly, and is naturally incapable of white.
+
+And yet the artificial climate of London is at its best when it is very
+obvious, and when it has strong scenes of sunset or storm to deal with.
+The time when it is insufferable is noonday or full afternoon on a
+cloudless day in summer, when there is not wind enough to drift it,
+helpless, out of town, and when it is not thick enough to keep the sun
+away. It makes the sunshine ugly. No beauty, even artificial or obvious,
+belongs to the smoke then, and it plays no antic pranks in mimicry of
+cloud. It has no shadow and no menace; it has no opportunity for
+stage-plays; it is disconcerted, and cannot make a penny theatre of its
+London. Every one must know such days, of which the essence should have
+been their purity, plain and splendid. By their light is the smoke seen to
+be nothing in the world but a sorry smirch. The horizon is thickened with
+it, and there it wreaks its chief 'effects,' but all near things are also
+oppressed by it; the spirit of the sunshine is gone, and a blazing sun
+upon miles of blue slate roofs and yellow houses, with the thin
+uncleanness of smoke just showing in the blaze, is actually that
+impossibility--sunshine without beauty.
+
+
+[Illustration: UTILITARIAN LONDON.]
+
+
+After this, let us grant the smoke the tragi-comedy of its successes.
+These are generally connected with Westminster; it finds matter fitted to
+its manner in the surrounding architecture, and in the westward opening.
+It suppresses a great deal that is not very presentable, on the
+working side of the river, and it reveals what is Gothic on the other
+bank. It has a trick of being ashamed of its origin, for it hustles the
+long chimneys out of sight. It does really surprising things with the
+beautiful dome of St. Paul's; the very formlessness of its presence seems
+to give more value to that fine form. It has a way of showing the noble
+tops of clouds while it loses their bases in vagueness, which is not
+without beauty. You cannot see from what heavenly ranges of highlands
+those summits tower, and if they stand into the sunshine their isolation
+is the more remote and splendid. But even this is but a handy bit of
+scene-shifting; it touches no more than the fancy.
+
+There is another effect of the London climate, besides the effect of sky
+scenery, and that is the local colour wherewith the characteristic smoke,
+mingled with a little rain to make a general water-colour, has painted the
+surfaces of the town in variants of black. The citizen who--unaware of
+such things as the quarter of the wind--takes his umbrella for fear of the
+thunderous look of a tremendous smoke-storm to leeward, is apt to take the
+touch of soot for the touch of time. Nevertheless, the two dark colours
+are quite unlike; time is browner, and has a depth in the tone, whereas
+soot is greyer, and at its blackest has no depth. It gives a shallow
+colour; and even those who love their sky streaked and tumbled into the
+chaos of smoke should not be allowed to defend the _aquarelle_ that
+colours their buildings.
+
+It is true that we no longer offer columns of the Doric order for
+treatment by London water-colours; but all the Doric columns we already
+have are left subject to this extraordinary substitute for the colouring
+of a Laconic sun. We have discovered that terra-cotta and tiles resist the
+work of the climate, and no doubt London at a glance presents a less
+coal-blackened face than it once wore. But too much of the surface of
+London is still the work of that dashing impressionist, the climate.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE TREES
+
+
+The high trees that stand stirring and thrilling in the squares in summer
+do taste of darkness; night drives home a thousand shadows--thin and
+subtle flocks--to fold within the iron railings and to shelter in corners
+of the worn and unfragrant grass till morning. But the single trees that
+have their roots under grey pavements, and that breathe in the little
+accidental standing-places of the wayside, the railed-in corners left by
+the chance-medley of London streets--these have the strange fate to be in
+perpetual light. They never are washed in darkness; they never withdraw
+into that state and condition of freedom, into that open hiding-place,
+that untravelled liberty, that wild seclusion at home, that refuge without
+flight, that secret unconcealed, that solitude unenclosed, that
+manumission of captives, that opportunity of Penelope--darkness.
+
+The leaves of the street-side tree flutter bright emerald green through
+the whole night (out of town the discolouring night) of leafy summer. That
+local colour is never quenched, as human blushes are quenched at night. It
+rather takes a more conspicuous quality, under the closeness of the
+electric light; it is sharply green. Whereas the day has its mists and
+veils, and may at times darken a tree nearly black, by setting the sky
+alight behind it, the night has none of these shadows. The light of night
+is stationary and unchangeable, and there are some solitary trees here and
+there that undergo the unshifting illumination at the closest quarters;
+the light that knows no hours and makes no journey gleams near upon the
+motion of the leaves and glosses their faces. It is beforehand with the
+twilight, so that the dusk when it comes finds the place taken, and it
+will not let the tree go until the light of day flows in fully, and dawn
+is over.
+
+
+[Illustration: KENSINGTON GARDENS.]
+
+
+The sharp green of the plane-tree is never covered, nor are the delicately
+sprinkled spots of the poplar-leaves mingled and massed, in these solitary
+citizen trees. It is in the avenues and glades of Kensington Gardens
+that Night has her way. There amends are made for the common day by a
+double mystery. Not a tree is so much as to be known by name; all kinds
+sigh together in the dark. The mass is sombre and alive, but betrays
+neither leaf nor colour. As violently as the spirit of the woods was
+driven away, through all the long daylight, by the sound, the breath, the
+blackness, and the stamp and seal of London, which permit nothing
+visible--not a blade of grass--to go unmarked by the proprietorship of
+this despotic city; so swiftly as the spirit of the woods was hooted and
+stared into banishment by day, so quickly, so intently, and in such a
+union of multitude does it softly return by night. Solitude comes, the
+movement of the forest comes, and remoteness, which by day must be sought
+where it abides, comes at a stride to London, and sits in the branches of
+the trees. Profound is the forest and august the sky whence the great and
+melancholy spirit of the woods comes to restore these daily altered elms.
+
+Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its
+northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness
+and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is
+the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies
+straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked,
+unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute;
+the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to
+you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the
+majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the
+gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never
+bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft
+encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you
+see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also
+precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.
+
+By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were,
+disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly
+in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can
+take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at
+night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey.
+
+Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington
+Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight
+has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin
+until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the
+influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the
+June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so
+fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as
+though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender
+leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering
+glimpses of sky go through.
+
+If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and
+take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in
+orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look
+more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon
+the separate leaves.
+
+Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the
+dark itself. She touches the high places of avenues within sound of the
+London wheels, and they become as simple as tree-tops at Verona. But,
+indeed, the moon is plainly seen to bring this dignity and liberty from
+the simple skies. All the world knows her to be like that lady of the
+poets who spoke to none that was not worthy, because before she talked
+with men she 'knighted them with her smile.' It is one of the tyrannies
+wreaked by the electric light and the gas-lamps upon the street-side tree
+that they keep away from it the glimpses of the moon. Not only is secret
+darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves
+softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed
+upon its leaves.
+
+As to these lights of London lamps, their beauty, which is so great, seems
+to depend almost entirely upon the sky. See them as they glow in the long
+unequal curves that follow the subtly misleading directions of the streets
+of London, and in all their brilliancy they make but a common show--pretty
+enough, but not beautiful. But let any lamp or line of lamps come into
+visible relation with the sky--any sky, whether a mysterious night-sky
+softly embrowned, or a night-sky swept pure by a west wind, or the most
+ordinary grey of any average evening--and the lamp has indescribable
+beauties. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street
+lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its
+invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric
+lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and
+splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling
+lamp together make--or so it seems to me--one of the most beautiful sights
+that eyes can see--the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This
+carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was
+generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with
+the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden
+lights--electric lamps or gas lamps--have the beauty of fire, but the
+white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be
+seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.
+
+London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they
+make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the
+chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their
+squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels
+down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some
+machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves.
+Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and
+white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, and
+perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps
+of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the
+streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue
+between you and the houses opposite.
+
+
+[Illustration: NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY.]
+
+
+The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it
+rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops,
+silent elsewhere, upon its open leaves.
+
+
+
+
+CHELSEA REACH
+
+
+The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily
+continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take
+them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for
+stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would
+hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design;
+what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it
+were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing
+as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that
+it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer.
+When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a
+better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in
+consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last
+bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of
+uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank.
+Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused--as
+doubtless they were--of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might
+well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. '_Le
+coeur a ses raisons!_' The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like
+another. While, then, uniformity is one of the 'reasons of the heart' of a
+County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons
+of their own hearts.
+
+The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne
+Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is
+an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this
+is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding,
+unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it,
+but above it, on its further side--that is, between it and the vaguest
+beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks
+like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and
+cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets
+of Fulham--true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it
+is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may
+be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and
+Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great
+city. The distinction of London was once that it was not a great city
+but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the
+raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there
+was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except
+Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of
+Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is
+somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and
+offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of
+Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand,
+the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London
+keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy
+shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at
+least is, for a space, _grande ville_. We cannot altogether grudge its
+Embankment.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]
+
+
+But if there is a mile of London village left--and therefore of the most
+London-like London--it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council's
+heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in
+its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of
+the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the
+river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of
+long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business
+as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of
+wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is
+the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey _coteaux_, though this
+is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the
+right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight.
+You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the
+light the view is animating.
+
+Inasmuch as the Thames flows here north-eastward, when you look to the
+south-west by Chelsea Reach, in the early afternoon of windy spring, you
+look at once towards the gates of light, the gates of the wind, and the
+gates of the river. There seems to be one sole spring and source in the
+day. The way is, beyond description, open. For the waterway is the flat of
+the world, and everywhere else in London are houses; here is a real
+horizon. Here you get the proportions of a great sky, as you get the
+proportions of a great church when there are no benches on the floor to
+shorten them. The clouds come upon the south-west wind of the early year,
+a little cold with the strength of freshness, and not with chill, and give
+and withhold a hundred lights.
+
+Those who do not like the name of mud should see how these lights are
+answered by the floor of mud in simple silver and steel. Twice a day the
+motion of the wave is there, twice a day the still shore. With that
+cradling change go the changes of the boats and barges at the wharves. All
+is life, but there is no colour, except where you very dimly perceive that
+a sail is red as the sails are on the Adriatic. It is a view to teach
+painting, to teach seeing. We have not such another school in London as
+Chelsea Reach. If Chelsea ever becomes _grande ville_ too, the shape of
+the river will be altered, and the profile of that curve, sharp and fine
+with masts against the west will be abolished: there will be no beauty of
+tides, no silver wet mirror, no barges.
+
+There is nothing quite like Chelsea. The spoiling of Chelsea will not be
+the same thing as the spoiling of the country by pushing on a suburb, for
+instance; for in that case there is country beyond, only deferred. But
+there is no Cheyne Walk, no Chelsea, further up the river, or anywhere in
+the world of rivers.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S AT DAWN.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Last Boat._]
+
+
+THE SPRING
+
+
+There is a splendid spring in town, and it happens to agree with the
+country spring as to the time of appearing; but it is another show, and of
+another spirit. The difference is curiously complete; it was, no doubt, to
+be looked for in the avenues, in the sward, in the winding water, and in
+the Park generally, considered as a landscape. But how is the grass itself
+London grass? Not only in its acre of intense green, but in the space of a
+square foot that might, one would think, be anywhere, it is London grass.
+The leaves, the blades, are London growth. You cannot evade the spirit of
+place by shutting out the sky, the railings, the people, or the gravel.
+Even if you go close and make acquaintance, as a child does, with the
+roots, you are aware that it is not the grass of England that you have
+there, but the grass of London.
+
+The leaves of the trees have so vulgar a contrast in the black of stems,
+branches, and twigs, that they are from the first obviously not the leaves
+of the woods. They are all the better admired by many eyes, for whom the
+modest contrasts of nature are not enough; and you may hear the black and
+green of the parks praised for this same immoderate effect of colour. But
+the grass has nothing to tell that tale of the London winter which the
+branch tells; it is this year's; it has no past; it is innocent, and
+answerable to the sun for merely its few inches of simple green. It might
+be supposed to have the graces of an alien in London. But it has them not
+at all; it comes up a Londoner. You cannot be really intimate with it; and
+when it puts up its little flower, and your child brings it home to you
+hot from a clenched hand, even then it has nothing, nothing whatever, of
+the fields. You put it into water to flatter the child, but even there,
+given by that little alien hand, and so isolated from its park and its
+railings, it is unmistakably the grass of its own soil; it manifestly
+could never have been romping with little young dandelions on the side of
+a village road, or tossed by visiting winds scented with meadows.
+
+The London spring is a good thing, but it is another thing. It is only
+because of the accident by which the real spring and the London spring
+appear at the same time of the year that they have come to bear the same
+name, and even to be confused together by the insensitive. A handful from
+the hedgerows twenty miles away--a handful, already half faded, of mingled
+things at random, grass and herbs, not free from traces of white and warm
+rustic dust--an authentic little heap from the real spring, would show at
+once to all apprehensive eyes what the difference really is. And yet there
+must be careless or worldly birds that do not know it. Otherwise we should
+not hear such songs from the remotest river-sides sung within Kensington
+Gardens. Let no one pretend, however, that the bees are deceived or
+indifferent.
+
+Nor let it be said that the difference is superficial. That is precisely
+untrue; it is the likeness that is superficial, and the difference
+essential. The London spring is a brilliant image of the real spring. It
+is fresh when the real April is fresh; and when it grows dim you could
+match it with specimens from the country wayside. Nay, soot and smoke
+themselves cannot disguise the real spring growth and make it look like
+the London. That can easily be proved. After two weeks in which you are
+unconvinced of May by the green and dazzling parks, you will get the very
+thrill of May from a square yard of very young nettles and young weeds of
+many kinds, seen from a railway carriage and touched with the railway
+dust. There is cleaner grass by the Speke Monument, but this that grows by
+the railway is out of town; it is of another kind; it is of the other
+spring. Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier,
+and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority,
+and spring was real.
+
+Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the
+absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep
+difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by
+mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home,
+and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it
+better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. Childhood has had
+it so near, and has learned it once for all, and will never be deceived,
+nor will the man who has had a childhood near living earth; he knows that
+the springs are two. He knows, for he remembers that he knew, the spirit
+of the place. That is an aura that lies near the ground. It is a warm
+atmosphere that does not rise, but breathes by little garden plots in
+corners; is the very spirit of rivulets and brooks; lurks amongst the
+maiden-hair that covers the fresh waters of Mediterranean hillsides, and
+amongst the gravel of old sunny garden terraces; is so caught in moss that
+the air where moss grows seems to imprison it; and passes quick into the
+nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers--ground-ivy, and
+things that are not so tall as grass--are entangled with the spirit of
+place. Low box hedges are intricate with it, and with the spirit of
+antiquity, because they are no higher than the heads of very little
+children, whose hearts conceive antiquity and the genius of places. They
+know the breath of the parks well. What children know--what they
+knew--we have never forgotten. And yet all the differences which they
+learned--the difference between the weak odour of soot and the gentle
+odour of earth, and the difference between the click of the bit and the
+sound of the bee--are not the real difference between the town spring and
+the spring of the natural world. They are mere signs and proofs; the fact
+lies deep and close; there are two springs.
+
+
+[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE.]
+
+
+And yet, across all boundaries, across the frontier of the suburbs, what
+is this strange scrap of the real May of the natural world dropped into
+the midst of the May of London? A scrap of that true spring alighted in
+the midst of the very winter would hardly look so strange as this shred of
+the very spring in the spring of town. It is but some accidental grass or
+leaf that has been shed and sown by some west wind upon the edges of the
+tiles of a little old poor roof in town. Not into the parks did it fly,
+not amongst the flower-walks or on the great sward, emerald green. It
+hovered and flitted into the middle of town, a little flock of wild lives.
+The enormous spring, the May of all the earth, unmarked, disguised by a
+delusive likeness to the London spring, has visited the town. It is a
+dainty _incognito_. It signals to those who know; but if Vestries
+recognised it--and supposing they cared enough for roofs of that kind,
+which they do not--they would take that grass up by the roots.
+
+
+
+
+BELOW BRIDGE
+
+
+The first impression, and, needless to say, the longest, is that of the
+many miles of wharves compared with the few miles of embankments, drives,
+and of the holiday river generally. Not only have the black and brown
+warehouses, the chimneys, and the cranes possession of the whole right
+bank of the London Thames, but they hold both banks of the lower Thames
+through league-long reaches and noble curves, and such changes of aspect,
+sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky.
+
+
+[Illustration: _Below Bridge._]
+
+
+Besides this slow variation of light, in which the view wheels under the
+wheeling cloud, there is no lack of variety along the dusky banks of the
+river of commerce. The subsidence of height along the warehouses as the
+river draws further and further from the middle of London is an incident
+of continuous interest, interrupted now and then, but holding on
+persistently, until the carrying river flows through a dark-gabled, low,
+and long village towards the eastern woods and heights and the further
+fields.
+
+
+[Illustration: BELOW BRIDGE.]
+
+
+Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense
+interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye
+instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses
+that are no houses--somewhat as the _biblia abiblia_ of Charles Lamb are
+among books,--you find the face of a single human little house, its timber
+looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse
+harbour-master's title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt
+in--propped in the serried row that has the sightless aspect of a
+barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the
+picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach
+to beauty than any street of 'handsome' houses with columns and porticoes
+in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent
+Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is
+a good deal of plain wall, which--unless a building be in every way
+wrong--gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once
+the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With
+this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt.
+
+True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings--'works,' these
+seem to be, not warehouses--that touch the extremity of possible ugliness
+and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without
+exaggeration, black. These are very few--two or three at the most--and all
+on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken,
+pointed, and very various.
+
+Low as it is, it is always--seen from the deck of a boat--the very
+skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats,
+warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing
+appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the
+movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of
+river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass
+through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map
+that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.
+
+The swarthiness, the darkness of the colour--a brownish grey--is to be
+insisted upon; yet to none but a careless eye does the lower Thames seem
+all brown and grey. The dull hues are shot with one single prevailing
+colour--red. Innumerable red-tiled roofs are seen as the turn of the river
+shows their dusky sides; iron sheds are ruddled with the red that signs
+flocks of country sheep; shutters are red over warehouse windows (this is
+a Sunday view), and everywhere are the red sails of Venice, dyed in the
+selfsame dye, only differently lighted. Even when there is a difficulty in
+fixing the place of this negroid blush, it is perceptibly there. It is
+latent, even when no red sail rises between grey water and grey sky; it
+lurks in hollows and inlets so darkly as to be almost black. Then suddenly
+the scarlet of a huge black and scarlet steamer comes along and gives you
+the colour without a shred of mystery, without charm, and with the most
+definite division. Besides the red, there is nothing that is coloured
+except a stack of timber now and then--raw wood with precisely the colours
+of a wheatfield in August--and the piled-up hay of a red-sailed barge
+loaded down to the water. These are not many on the Sunday river, but
+Sunday clears the colours by clearing the air. There is exceedingly little
+smoke; its sign is upon the whole river-side, it has re-drawn everything
+in black, as a child might go over a water-colour with his black pencils,
+but between you and the natural clouds there is nothing but fresh air,
+quick with the movement that seems perpetually to follow this grey
+waterway. Or now and then, at long intervals, a single flimsy puff of
+smoke comes between mast and sky; it is brown, the steam is white, and
+the cloud silver grey; and through each of these three with a various
+gleam filters the flying sunshine.
+
+Sunday seals the faces of the barns and turns the key upon the leagues of
+wharves; but it leaves all the cranes and masts etched in their thousands
+upon the low horizon. These make the thicket of the Thames-side, a
+deciduous, narrow wood winding east, south-east, and north, and standing
+everywhere in its brief winter of a day, having shed sails and burdens and
+put away noise. There is nothing in the handsome London of high houses so
+delicate as these lifted lances against the sky. Hop-gardens or vineyards,
+or the slender rows of sticks that carry pea plants and beans in rustic
+gardens, make the same play with light, and let it through as fine a
+design.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Back Street._]
+
+
+Here is nothing of the sharp black and white detail that is the most
+salient thing in London streets; everything is painted softly; all the
+darks are dull; in a word, the scene is simple, and this the streets are
+never. It is simplicity, indeed, that makes all the buildings (except only
+the 'works' above mentioned) more than tolerable. There are no
+advertisements. This means much to eyes too well used to those shreds and
+tatters of the wall. That commerce which makes so much paltry show in the
+West is here perfectly grave and quiet; it makes serious announcements,
+not advertisements, of the things that occupy navies. You see 'Pickles'
+and other names that launch a thousand ships, written large over various
+landing-places, and the names of the owners of warehouses are broad across
+their fronts; or you are reminded how little you know of the affairs of
+the place by the frequent name of 'Sufferance Wharf' among the cranes. It
+cannot possibly be said that this lettering is beautiful, but it is not
+nearly so bad as the lettering in the streets we know. Needless to say,
+you shall not see a scrap of gilding below bridge, except a momentary
+tawdriness near the pier of some excursion place, where there are unseen
+Cockney gardens at hand--no gilding, nor white, nor any kind of blue.
+Seeing that bad blue is the worst thing in the far-off town of paint and
+pleasure, the dark and reddish river-side of work has here again one of
+its obscure advantages.
+
+
+[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S FROM WATLING STREET.]
+
+
+The work, almost all pausing in this summer Sunday, is obviously, to
+judge by its instruments and chips, mainly the inhuman work of machines.
+Nevertheless, wherever there are boats there is that arm of Hercules which
+is heroic, and therefore greater, though much weaker, than the arm of
+iron; and even on this day you may see the toil of the arm against the
+mass of the heavy river, as two men stand to row their broad barge up
+stream. It is the most primitive contest after all. Their figures strain
+back on the long oar until they are stretched nearly straight horizontally
+before they slowly gather themselves and grow erect again. Nothing suits
+the river so well as the barge with its level load, flat as the water
+itself. Nothing a-tiptoe there; but the very surface of the world reaching
+to the sea, and the long river feeling for that level far inland.
+
+The dusky voyage darkens, for the Thames turns towards the north; anon it
+takes a pale grey splendour, the sky shines, and the delicate intricacy of
+masts that mar nothing of the simple view seems to be rather itself
+luminous than dark against the light; flying birds are lost as they pass
+in the upper brilliance. It is but that the Thames has swung towards the
+south again.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROADS
+
+
+On Westminster Bridge at early morning Wordsworth thought of the heart of
+London, but a view of London in the long day and night of movement, when
+the mystery of sleep is away, suggests not the involuntary heart of men,
+but their wilful feet. The roads, which are lonely messengers in the
+far-off country, crowd together here, and hustle one another to give
+footing to the tramp of the people. London has a fantastic look, as though
+there were nothing to do but make haste to be gone. To look at London from
+some point of height--a rare opportunity--is to trace these ways of
+passionate escape. The roads, indeed, seem eager, but you know that the
+crowds who, by these curves and knots, these straight lines, and these
+intent, narrow, dark grey levels, traced with narrower steel, elude the
+town, are in no more than jog-trot haste, and wear no look of fugitives.
+Of them and of their detail there is no sign in this distant prospect. The
+movement of the people in London is here no more perceptible than the
+molecular motion in a diamond.
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Coffee Stall._]
+
+
+But the roads are all expressive of this energy of flight from a centre.
+They are, as it were, signs of a perpetual explosion; they are the fringe
+of the _melee_, the shooting, streaming outbreaks of the photosphere of
+London. They hunt and are hunted. They fly from the city of confusion. It
+is only by escaping that they become visible, and out of the uncertainty
+of the smoke the hasty roads clear themselves as they make for light and
+the open ground. It seems as though the steady strength of their curves
+did in itself express some force and impulse. The railways run; their
+foreshortened sweeps and reaches look like the swinging and swaying of
+resolute motion. The town would shoulder them, but they evade and slip
+through, slender and keen, with a stroke of their flying heels. They
+crawl, but they crawl with the dominant level and liberty of flight in
+air.
+
+They begin in the tangle of the town, but smoothly untie themselves and
+pass away single and swift. No other road looks so resolute in flight as
+the rail. The others jostle one another as they hurry from town, and must
+needs relax their eagerness in order to climb the hills--brief and little
+ones though these are. The roads pause on the mounds, they hesitate at
+crossways, and they dip into slight and shallow valleys, whence they do
+not see the riot of walls and roofs from out of which they go.
+
+The azure June hardly leaves a trace of the local grey of smoke. All, by
+some accident of aspect, is a vague blue, although the smoke, seen from
+the Greenwich heights, leaves nothing unveiled, cancels the horizon, and
+barely lets the lovely dome of St. Paul's show a dark blue form upon the
+close background of thick and sunny air. And blue, like the rest, is that
+one wide road which takes here so majestic a sweep--the river. It is the
+river of chimneys; they stand, on either bank, as unequal in growth as a
+group of children; they crowd together, they stand apart, they straggle,
+but if they have any law, it is the river's. They mark its path as reeds
+and rushes might do in meadows. The hidden reaches are traced by this
+black growth, followed and discovered. The chimneys will hardly let the
+river go, but cling to the track of his waters when the town is dwindling
+eastwards, and stand conspicuous among the flats when the houses have at
+last, at last, ceased. Apart from the river they are almost as rare in
+London as in Naples, and it is not to them we owe the chief part of our
+'sky,' but to the steamers, to the trains, and, more than all, to the
+unnumbered houses. If ever London is to be restored to her own mists--not
+to great brightness, but to the tender exhalations that are now burlesqued
+by smoke, to the true climate of nature, the marshes, and the north, it
+will obviously be the work of laws touching the houses rather than the
+factories.
+
+The river is perpetually overhung, involved, tangled, in that indefinite
+and unshapely cloud. It looks blue from the Greenwich hill, but not blue
+with the blue of pure sunny waters; it is blue because blue is the trick
+of this midsummer light seen from this one point. The blue road lies open
+and flat, from the dazzling confusion of the west, whence it comes, to the
+dimmer confusion of the north, whither the great curve tends. It is a road
+more level than the tyrannously level rails, but there is no haste in it.
+The unceasing motion of the tidal Thames seems to make it wait about the
+bridges of London. The accustomed versifier himself will hardly bid it
+flow on, so often is it seen to flow back. Because it is so constantly
+chidden and driven by the sea, the long tendency, brought from its first
+source and kept between so many fields and over all the noisy weirs, is
+concealed. That flowing lurks still, but you cannot find it among the
+rhythmic tides. It is not expressed, and there is no sense of the final
+sea in the coming and going of these turbid waters. The unceasing seaward
+flow is their secret.
+
+But it is only upon this ambiguous road of the river that any human motion
+is perceptible in this distant view. Barges are seen to float heavy and
+flat, and at certain points there is the vague suggestion of some stir at
+wharf or pier. Otherwise the scene keeps all its hurry out of sight and
+hearing. But for the vague shifting and alteration of the light, London
+might be a painted city. The little figure of man is so quenched,
+incredibly. His town keeps the black crowds and their voices out of reach,
+and it is difficult to believe in the noise, so deaf is the distance.
+
+London is at the mercy of her roads, and it is no wonder the fancy should
+give them life. And now it is for their coming, not their going, that they
+seem in haste. The town has covered up the original and all-fruitful
+earth; her pavements seal up all the springs of earthly life, and her
+roads are loaded with the fruits of earth unsealed. It is upon her, then,
+that the roads are turned with boat, train, and cart charged with her
+bread. What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town,
+the town wherefrom nothing, nothing--for all its factories--takes birth;
+the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the
+never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is
+fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the
+furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous
+sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]
+
+
+
+
+THE SMOULDERING CITY
+
+
+Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly
+burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little
+chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring
+whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name
+and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to
+finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to
+these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in
+perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured
+in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is
+overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages
+of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the
+mobile creature close within his gates.
+
+
+[Illustration: _Rain, Smoke and Traffic._]
+
+
+If there is little show of that multitudinous presence, there is a
+broadcast sign of it. 'No smoke without a fire'; and the sky of London
+continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence
+of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by
+a folding and unfolding of banners of darkness. The quicker and hotter the
+enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and
+confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible
+under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall
+with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush,
+and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.
+
+Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town
+away from these dark latitudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of
+dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick
+softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green
+of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer--all this stirs and
+lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between
+seven and eight o'clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is
+wanting--the white surface that would look beautiful in western sunshine.
+All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent
+Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white
+there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint
+gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for
+white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail--especially
+where it is gently populous--to hold up some tempered white to the rosy
+sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white
+hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage
+wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow,
+has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks;
+and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as
+when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.
+
+The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind
+blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick
+or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find
+something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick,
+because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly
+thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds
+with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day
+he will, perhaps, begin a fashion of using much more white, in brick and
+tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever.
+Ruddy roofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they
+are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that
+their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and
+their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a
+high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming
+colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London,
+until it looks--fading eastwards--as though it were itself some effect of
+a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot
+eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.
+
+The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a multitude of
+imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it
+does in the ships and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and
+the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is
+trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and
+runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the
+burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town
+seem to be utterly choked and filled.
+
+When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life
+in the air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things,
+but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily
+under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of
+immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city
+of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of
+fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life
+feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its
+consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man,
+woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames
+far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep,
+the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman's life
+itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London
+visibly works at nothing but transformation.
+
+The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in
+London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north,
+where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and
+the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge,
+the lashes of the eyes of earth and sky, are more perceptible than they
+are in London, even with a west wind. Here the fiery Ariel has no delicate
+companionship, no one near but Caliban.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of London Impressions, by Alice Meynell
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