The Soul of London/Introductory
INTRODUCTORY
MOST of us love places very much as we may love what, for us, are the distinguished men of our social lives. Paying a visit to such a man we give, in one form or another, our impressions to our friends: since it is human to desire to leave some memorial that shall record our view of the man at the stage he has reached. We describe his manners, his shape, his utterances: we moralise a little about his associates, his ethics, the cut of his clothes; we relate gossip about his past before we knew him, or we predict his future when we shall be no more with him. We are, all of us who are Londoners, paying visits of greater or less duration to a Personality that, whether we love it or very cordially hate it, fascinates us all. And, paying my visit, I have desired to give some such record.
I have tried to make it anything rather than encyclopaedic, topographical, or archaeological. To use a phrase of literary slang I have tried to "get the atmosphere" of modern London—of the town in which I have passed so many days; of the immense place that has been the background for so many momentous happenings to so many of my fellows.
A really ideal book of the kind would not contain "writing about" a town: it would throw a personal image of the place on to the paper. It would not contain such a sentence as: "There are in the city of ——— 720 firms of hat manufacturers employing 19,000 operatives." Instead there would be a picture of one, or two, or three hat factories, peopled with human beings, where slow and clinging veils of steam waver over vats and over the warm felt on cutters' slabs. And there would be conveyed the idea that all these human beings melt, as it were, into the tide of humanity as all these vapours melt into the overcast skies.
Similarly, in touching upon moral ideas, a book about places must be passionate in its attempt after truth of rendering; it must be passionless in the deductions that it draws. It must let neither pity for the poor nor liking for established reputations and clean floors, warp its presentations where they bear, say, upon the Housing Question. Its business is to give a picture of the place as its author sees it; its reader must seek in other books, statistics, emotional views, or facts handy for political propaganda.
This author's treatment of historic matters must again be "presentations"; and he must select only such broad tendencies, or such minute historic characters as bear straight upon some aspect of his subject. The historic facts must illustrate, must cast a light upon modern London, if that is what is being presented. There must be no writing about Dr. Johnson's chair in a certain tavern merely because it appeals to the author. The reader will find details of all such things in other books—this author's endeavour should be to make the Past, the sense of all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing of this child of all the ages, like a constant ground-bass beneath the higher notes of the Present. In that way the book mighty after a fashion, forecast even the Future and contain prophecies. It should, in fact, be instinct with the Historic sense which will afford apt illustrations, rather than the annalist's industry, or the love of the picturesque.
That sense of the picturesque will, however, be both a salvation and a most dangerous stumbling-block. In a turning off an opulent High Street, there is a court with the exterior aspect of which I am very familiar. It is close to a large freestone Town Hall and to a very tall red-brick Fire Station. It is entered by a square archway through which you get a glimpse of dazzlingly white cottages that, very obviously, were once thatched, but that now have pretty red tiles. It is flagged with very large, old stones. It is as picturesque as you can imagine; it is a "good thing" for descriptive writing, it might be legitimate to use it. But the trouble is that it is old—and, if the book were all old things, deluding by a love for the picturesque of antiquity, it would give a very false and a very sentimental rendering of London.
But the author might desire to illustrate the tendency of parasitic humanity to lurk in the shadow of wealthy High Streets.—This court would be an excellent illustration: it is peopled with "bad characters," male and female. Or he might desire to illustrate the economic proposition that letting small houses to bad characters is more profitable than selling the land for the erection of flats.—Here, again, the court would be an illustration; its extreme cleanliness, neatness and good repair would go to prove how careful that landlord was to prevent the condemnation of his rookery on sanitary grounds.
The author then must be careful not to sentimentalise over the picturesque. His business is to render the actual. His heart may be—it ought to be—torn at the sight of great hoardings, raised for the house-breakers, round narrow courts, old streets, famous houses. He ought to be alive to the glamour of old associations, of all the old associations in all their human aspects.—But he ought to be equally inspired with satisfaction because work is being done; because dark spots are being cleared away; because new haunts are beings formed for new people around whom will congregate new associations. And he ought to see that these new associations will in their turn grow old, tender, romantic, glamorous enough. He should, in fact, when he presumes to draw morals, be prepared to draw all the morals.—He must not only sniff at the "Suburbs" as a place of small houses and dreary lives; he must remember that in each of these houses dwells a strongly individualised human being with romantic hopes, romantic fears, and at the end, an always tragic death. He must remember that the thatched, mud-hovels that crowded round the Tower of original London, were just as dull, just as ordinary, just as commonplace; that men in them lived lives, according to their scale, just as squalid and just as unromantic—or just as alert and just as tragic. This author—this ideal author—then, must be passionately alive to all aspects of life. What picturesqueness there is in his work must arise from contrasts—but actual contrasts vividly presented. This is what gives interest to a work of art; and such a work must, before all things, be interesting.
It is along these lines that I have tried to work; one falls, no doubt very far short of one's ideal. But, for my own part, if this particular work gives a number of readers pleasure, or that counterpart of pleasure which is pain; if it awakens a Londoner here or there to an interest in the human aspects of his London; or if a man who loves London here and there throughout the world and across many seas is aroused to a bitter sweet remembering of old days, if in fact its note rings true to a section of mankind, I should call myself satisfied.
I should like, if it can be done unobtrusively, to disarm criticism of the title of this book. It appears pretentious; it appears "soul-ful"; it does little to indicate the scope of the book. But alas! If the critic will read the Table of Contents, and will then think for a minute or so of what one word will describe this whole hotchpotch, he will, whilst condemning, drop something like a tear for one who has been trying to find a better title, not for a minute or so, but for many months.