The Soul of London/Chapter 5
REST IN LONDON
CHAPTER V
REST IN LONDON
In the black and dismal cloisters of our Valhalla—for still for London's heroes it is "Victory or Westminster Abbey," though Nelson, who uttered the words, is buried under all the stones of St. Paul's—there is a small, pale mural tablet. "In memory of Elizabeth, Dear Child," it reads, and sets us thinking of all sorts of dead children, dear in their day, and now how utterly unremembered, as wavelets are forgotten! And recumbent before it is a blackened paving stone, smoothed with the attrition of thousands of the feet of Londoners, of American tourists, of Members of Parliament, of prostitutes, of school boys. It states that here lie the remains of so and so many monks who died of the plague so and so many centuries ago.
When I was last in that dim place a man with a quick, agitated step hurried up and down the cloisters like a dog nosing out a rabbit in a hedge. He had a penetrating eye, a sharp nose, and high, thin cheekbones. He caught my glance and suddenly stretched out a hand. His voice was sonorous and rather pompous, with the ore rotundo in which Victorian poets used to read their own poems to one another. He uttered:
Happy are they that do slumber and take their solace here
For they cease from their labours and have known the worst.
He added, confidentially and confidently that: into this fane his corpse would be translated by his thousand votaries of the day to come. His name was one that posterity would not willingly let die.
His name was Tockson; he was by trade a cobbler, and he was rather a good poet. I really believe that Posterity might be none the worse if it ever come to read some of the verses that, with his own hands, he printed at odd moments on grocers' bag-paper and stored in the back of his shop. He troubled no reigning sovereign and no established poet with his verses; he never sent them to papers; sometimes he wrapped up repaired boots in an odd sheet, and he was not in the least discontented or in the least mad, unless it be a madness to trust in the literary judgement of Posterity and to take "Marlowe's mighty line" (the words were for ever on his lips) as a model.
He liked these cloisters, he said, because he could "contemplate the memorials" of forgotten monks, legislators, children and philanthropists freezing in the cold and soot outside the walls, whilst it was his destiny to be "translated" from Kensal Green Cemetery into the inner warmth of the "fane". And it pleased him to recite his verses there, because there, it seemed to him, they sounded better than in Clerkenwell.
He came to see me once or twice, then I lost touch with him, and going down to Clerkenwell, found that his little shop had another tenant. He had been run over by a brewer's dray. His verses—half a hundred-weight of them—had been removed by a medical student from the hospital to which he had been taken. There were vague ideas in Clerkenwell that they were going to be made into a book, so that Posterity may still benefit, and his dust, which duly lies in Kensal Green, may still ensue "translation". London is full of such men—poets, generals, framers of laws, men of great mechanical talents, of great strength of will, of lofty intellects. They get called "characters" because they never have the chance, or have not the luck, the knack of self-advertisement, the opening to use their talents, their wills, their intellects. And this is the heaviest indictment that can be brought against a city or a world—that it finds no employment for its talents, that it uses them merely to form layers, as it were, of fallen leaves, that it blunts our sense of individualities.
This London does more than any other place in the world. As a city, it seems, as has been said, not only to turn Parsees into Londoners but to make us, who are Londoners, absolutely indifferent to the Parsees, the Kaffirs, the pickpockets or the men of genius we may pass in its streets. It blunts, by its vastness, their peculiarities, and our interest it dulls. So that it seems to be a City formed, not for you and me, not for single men, but for bands of Encyclopaedists, Corporations, Societies. Speaking roughly, we may say that the pleasantest size for a graveyard—and what is London but a vast graveyard of stilled hopes in which the thin gnat-swarm of the present population dances its short day above the daily growing, indisturbable detritus of all the past at rest?—the pleasantest size for a graveyard is one in which each man and woman at rest could rise up and proclaim: "In my day I played a part. I had an influence upon the whole community here. Who is here that does not know my virtues and my vices? I planted the chestnut that gives all that shade on the green." But imagine the great London "Cemeteries"—for they are graveyards no longer—those vast stretches of heavy clay land, desecrated with all manner of hideous and futile excrescences that no passer-by will be caught to look at, appealing like piteous beggars in endless rows for the charity of your glance; the trees that appear half unreal in the mistiness because they are such that no one would place anywhere but in a "Cemetery"; the iron railings that are grotesque because they serve to keep nothing within a space that no living mortal is anxious to enter. But no doubt it is the penalty of being dead that one's memorial should be grotesque: the penalty of fighting against oblivion which is irresistible and pitiless. And, no doubt, it is with the sense of the fitness of things that London, the city of oblivion, consigns her dead to the distance of dim and grim suburbs.
At any rate, there they take their rest and grow forgotten. For it is impossible to imagine the ghost of, say, Macadam, if Macadam be buried in a London cemetery—rising up at the end of some dreary and immense vista, and calling to its fellows: "I made my mark in my day: I influenced you all." That unfamiliar voice would arouse no other spirit; late comers would answer sleepily: "Oh, our roads are all wood and asphalte now. Who are you?"
And, if that for all units be the pleasantest for our resting-places, it is also the most human of units for those still labouring on this earth. For, as soon as a city becomes a mass of Corporations, individualities die out and are wasted of necessity. We may consider Athens, which was a city not more vast than is Kensington High Street: probably its inhabitants were not really more cultured or more wise, but certainly they had, each one of them, better chances of influencing all their fellow inhabitants. And that for humanity would seem, in the Individualist's eyes, to be the best of social units. Only the most hardened of Democrats, seeing humanity not as poor individuals but as parts of a theory, as negligible cog-wheels of a passionless machine, would deny that, from a human point of view Athens was better than Kensington High Street, or than Westminster itself. So London casts oblivion upon her dead and clouds out the individualities of her living.
We talk of the Londoner and we firmly believe there is a Londoner: but there is none. If, in walking along the streets we open our eyes, if we search for him, we never meet him. We see men like Jews, men like Arviragus, men with a touch of the negro, costermongers with the heads of Julius Caesars, but the Londoner we never see—and the search is painful. An awakened sense of observation is in London bewildering and nerve-shattering, because there are so many things to see and because these things flicker by so quickly. We drop the search very soon. And these great crowds chill out of us the spirit of altruism itself, or make of that spirit a curse to us. Living in a small community we know each member of it. We can hope to help, or to be interested in, each man and woman that we meet on the roads, or we can at least pay to each one the tribute of a dislike. But that, in London, is hopeless. The most we can do is to like or dislike bodies of men. If we read the "Morning ———" we have a contempt for the readers of the "Daily ———", although we know personally no such reader. If we take so much interest in our town as to be Moderates—or the reverse—we may dislike our opponents. If we be working men we despise the professional classes and distrust all others. But the individual factor has gone and the power of the individual over the mass.
What prophet shall make London listen to him? Where is London's "distinguished fellow citizen?" These things are here unknown, and humanity, as the individual, suffers. Economically the city gains. Social reformers, those prophets who see humanity as the gray matter of a theory, would make our corporations more vast, our nations still more boundless, for the sake of fiscal efficiency, for the avoidance of overlapping, in order to make our electric light more cheap or our tram services more adequate. The London County Council should control all South England from the North Foreland to the Land's End. But what we gain thus in the rates we must inevitably lose in our human consciousness and in our civic interests. Londoners, says the Individualist, take no interest in their municipal affairs because the spirit of place has gone. A certain vestry inscribes its dustcarts "R.B.K."—the Royal Borough—but the proud title was gained not by any wish of the inhabitants of the Court suburb, but because of some energetic mayor or borough alderman struggling to gain for himself an infinitesimal moment of Royal attention. What Socrates of London would commence a discourse, "Oh, men of London!"— "ὁτι ὔμεις, ὀ ἄνδρες Αθηναιοι . . ."
What Londoner, asks the Individualist, cares about Westminster? Nelson did at sea, and some people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., are thinking about this cradle of the spirit of their race, this old heart of England. But, for the Londoner, there is a convenient station on the Underground, and the name occurs frequently in the endless patter of many bus conductors. So Westminster, as an architectural whole, as a place with strong features, a great history, a place of countless anecdotes whispering from every stone, Westminster is wasted on London. Yet it is the heart of England; the cradle of its laws, of its empire, of its, on the whole, beneficent influence upon the comity of nations. So London extinguishes thoughts about places.
There is in each man of us an Individualist strain more or less strong, and in each, a more or less strong flavour of the Theorist who sees mankind only in the bulk. I imagine the Individualist-half of a man musing like this: "I inhabit a large, pompous, gloomy London house whose atrocious architecture, in any other spot on the globe, would preclude any idea of my ever countenancing it to the extent of becoming its tenant. Two doors off there lives the greatest violinist in the world, next door an old lady who sat on the knee of George IV; her mind is alive with the most vivid of anecdotes of a century or so—and next door on the other side is a girl with a face as beautiful as that of Helen of Troy, a delicate and tremulous walk, a proud neck, a radiant costume. Yet, here, I care nothing about any one of them. They are "the people next door." For here in London we have no more any neighbours.
"In a smaller community I should choose my house carefully; I should talk to and admire the violinist, listen to and rave about the old lady, and no doubt fall in love with the girl like Helen of Troy. But here, her face will launch no ships; the old lady will find no Boswell to record her table talk; the violinist will die and, after his name has filled a decently small space in the obituary columns, will go to his rest in some cemetery—and will ensue oblivion. Had he been born in Argos, in a golden age, he would be now the twin of Apollo—or his name would have been one of the attributes of that composite mystery. So London has dulled my love of the arts, my taste for human gossip—my very manhood."
"Vous rappelez-vous, dit-il, une réflexion d'Auguste Comte: (L'humanité est composée de morts et de vivants. Les morts sont de beaucoup le plus nombreux)? Certes, les morts sont de beaucoup les plus nombreux. Par leur multitude et la grandeur du travail accompli, ils sont les plus puissants. Ce sont eux qui gouvernent; nous leur obéissons. Nos maîtres sont sous ces pierres. Voici le législateur qui a fait la loi que je subis aujourd'hui, l'architecte qui a bâti ma maison, le poète qui a créé les illusions qui nous troublent encore, l'orateur qui nous a persuadés avant notre naissance. . . . Qu'est-ce qu'une génération de vivants, en comparaison des générations innombrables des morts? Qu'est-ce que notre volonté d'un jour, devant leur volonté mille fois séculaire? . . . Nous révolter contre eux, le pouvons-nous? Nous n'avons pas seulement le temps de leur désobéir!
"Enfin, vous y venez, docteur Socrate! s'écria Constantin Marc; vous renoncez au progrès, à la justice nouvelle, à la paix du monde, à la libre pensée, vous vous soumettez à la tradition. . . . "[1]
This, of course, was written of Paris where, indeed, those at rest are more remembered, since there Parisians hold once each year a tremendous festival of the dead. But it might stand at least as well, in those Westminster cloisters, for the shadows that are for ever flying over this London of ours. It epitomises the two habits of mind. For the Individualist, the humanist, sees his dead and his living as human beings: Law givers, architects, poets who trouble us still with their Illusions, orators who provide the catch-words that still influence us and our minds. He may stand, that Individualist, for the London that is eternally passing and past. He sees figures in that mist. But the words of his opponent, the man of the future; "Progress", the "New Spirit of Justice", the "World's Peace", are always abstractions. Looking forward, looking into the mists of the future, the future whose men are unborn, he sees no figures. And looking at Westminster Abbey he thinks of Building Enactments.
And there, where the great towers rise up, grim and black, where the memorials cower at the base of walls grim and black, where fountains stand in the weeping light of obscure and useless cloisters that suggest the gaunt and blackened skeletons of obsolete faiths, obsolete pursuits, obsolete hopes and obsolete despairs; where there are all sorts of courts and alleys of old houses that seem to whisper of faded virtues, faded vices, faded pleasures, dead crimes—that seem to whisper of all the Past, and that are being swept away along with all their "character", all their romance, by Building Improvement Schemes—in that Westminster, where suddenly you come upon boys' figures, flickering in white jerseys, playing football in a small square, the very heart of England, there the old Individualist and the man whose eyes look forward may very well confute each other unanswerably. For, says the Theorist that is in all of us, in that abbey and in that cloister, how many legislators will not be found, venial, selfish, treacherous, legislators who inflicted upon us laws under which we still groan? how many poets who wrote ignoble verse from which the art of poetry still suffers? how many orators who started ignoble, base, and harmful catch-words that still sway our mobs, that still govern our corporate lives?
And, looking at those school boys playing football, your Individualist will retort: "Observe that red-headed boy with a squint, with the low forehead, the bad skull; observe that good, honest, stupid looking muscular boy by the goal posts; observe that dark, shifty, clever little rat of a chap dodging like a weasel with the ball: what will your Corporations of the future be like when those are the units, when you have swept away the love of place with your improvement schemes, when you have swept away all fear of public opinion by weakening our every individual tie? Do you imagine, really, that 'To-morrow will be like to-day but much more sweet?' Do you imagine that poor humanity will ever be other than poor humanity?"
So the shadow passes over their argument—the shadow of the Passing that seems, in that heart of the nation, to be for ever on the point of overwhelming those old things. Yet, as a matter of fact, it never really overwhelms them until the new things have already grown old. For all of old Westminster will not be swept away, there will still remain a fragment of the ancient monastery wall, pieces of the cloisters, old Georgian courts, when already the improved buildings of to-day will be found to be inadequate, insanitary, smoke-begrimed for certain, picturesque probably, possibly glamorous, and surely very old. For once a building rests upon the soil of London, it seems to grapple to the earth as if with hooks far stronger than steel; just as once a man is at rest upon his bier he is so strong that it needs four others to take him to his resting place. And, upon the whole, the Philosopher in us, the part which observes passionlessly, will be upon the side of the friend of the future.
Poor humanity, which works out its own destinies, has given its vote unconsciously against the Individualist. Catch-words, the illusions of the poets, the streets paved with gold, have drawn these great bodies into this great city. And, inasmuch as the Philosopher is a person who accepts the accomplished things, he must accept along with it the Corporations, the gradual death of altruisms, of creeds, of humanities and of the individual as a factor of public life. The great figures of the last century—like the Ruskins, the Bismarcks, the Napoleons, the Tennysons, the Gladstones—have passed away, because no man can now appeal largely enough to affect the immense public. What single great figure is there in the world of whom it could be said that the noise of his death being cried in a suburban street of liver-coloured brick boxes would cause half a dozen blinds to be pulled down, or half a dozen figures to come to the doors to hear the news? There is no such name.[2]
So it seems as if the Great Figure as a human factor has gone, and it seems as if London will never again know another Dr. Johnson, although at a hundred street corners you might meet men as wise, as mordant, as dogmatic, as unhappy, as vivacious, as great Figures.
This, however, is not an indictment of London. It is rather the mere statement of losses in a great balance sheet. We have lost great figures, old buildings, all touch with history, much of Christian kindness, much of our fear of public opinion, much of our capacity for interest in our fellow men, much of our powers of abstract reasoning, much of our old faiths.
We have gained a certain amount of public efficiency, the avoidance of much "overlapping", a dim sort of idea of how the world may be carried forward, a comfortable indifference to many sham observances, class distinctions, and personal infringements of the social codes; and gradually we are evolving a practical means of living together in the great city. If the profit side of the account sheet seems unsubstantial, that is only because of poor humanity's innate inability to see, to understand, the good of its own day—because of the sentimentality of poor humanity that will continue to think an old faith more attractive than an efficient system of local government. We are, after all, still troubled by the illusions of our dead poets. So speaks the Philosopher, who stands midway between the Individualist and the Theorist. . . .
Outside in the woods it is spring, and Nature is preparing for her tremendous waste of individual leaves, birds, gnats, and small and great beasts. There may be sun there, and certainly the sap is stirring, or there may be cloud shapes to be seen, and there is always a sky. But I stand in my window and look down the long perspective of a street. It vanishes, dwindles, grows uncertain, and fades into a black and uniform opacity. There is no sky, or the sky has descended upon earth like a gray pall. There is no colour visible anywhere but gray save for the red of a letter box that seems to float, blotted, in vapour, and the white triangular tops of the lamp-posts. Through the gloom hail falls steadily and close, like fine rain, and behind it everything is flat, dim, as if the house fronts, the garden walls, the pavements, were cloudy forms printed in gray upon a large cloth.
Suddenly spaces exists: it is as if a red torch were shaken in the air and quenched. That is lightning, a reminder of the outside world that we have half forgotten. A broad shaft of sunlight reddens for an instant, in the distance, the white square face of a house whose dark windows seem to peer back like gloomy eyes: it fades, and the eye is drawn upwards to an immense and sullen glow, the edge of a heavy cloud that towers perpendicularly on high. The vast pall of vapour that overspreads London, becomes for that moment visible and manifest on account of that rift in its surface. It joins again, the blackness descends once more, the hail, the colourlessness of all the world. The houses once more look like clouds.
And indeed it is impossible, without an effort, to dissociate in our minds the idea of London from the idea of a vast cloud beneath a cloud as vast. The memory cannot otherwise conceive of all these gray buildings, of all these gray people. You do not, for instance, call up in your mind all the houses you would pass between Charing Cross and Knightsbridge: they fade into one mass, and because that mass is one you will never touch and finger, it seems cloudlike enough. But all the limitless stretches of roofs that you have never seen, the streets that you will never travel, the miles and miles of buildings, the myriads of plane-trees, of almonds, of elms—all these appalling regions of London that to every individual of us must remain unknown and untraversed—all those things fuse in our minds into one cloud. And the Corporations, the Water Boards, the Dock Boards, the Railway Organisations, the bodies of men who keep the parks in order, the armies who sweep in the streets—all these are cloudlike too. They seem unnatural, all these things, and London itself is at times apt to seem unreal. So that when we come across a park with sharp folds in the land, sharp dips, sudden rises, it is almost astonishing that anything so natural and so real should remain in the heart of this cloud beneath a cloud. For, little by little, the Londoner comes to forget that his London is built upon real earth: he forgets that under the pavements there are hills, forgotten water courses, springs and marshland.
And beneath and amongst all those clouds—thunderclouds, the cloud of buildings, the clouds of corporations—there hurries still the great swarm of tiny men and women, each one hugging desperately his own soul, his own hopes, his own passions, his own individuality. To destroy these individualities is impossible. I am acquainted with a reformer, however, whose ideal of impersonality is so close, so stern, and so unflinching that he would abolish all names of persons, substituting numbers. He would have all men and women who perform any public functions, all candidates for State examinations, go masked and dressed in cloaks that should destroy all distinction of figure and limbs. Physical beauty must be concealed, physical defects must be "levelled up"; personality must go.
This, of course, is la justice nouvelle—the new justice; and it is obvious that these impersonal corporations of the future cannot work ideally without some such precautions against favouritism, or against the "personal magnetism" that gives sway over crowds. But, in the meantime, those days seem far enough off. Our street-corner Johnsons if they cannot any longer get the ear of the world are none the less Johnsons; our unpublished poets are none the less poets. It is only the audience that is unreachable, and perhaps it is only the world that is the loser. But, after all, no doubt it matters little. What is of importance is whether the sum of human happiness be affected in this great town.
Westminster Building Improvements sweep away whole crowds of human associations: they run up barracks that apparently are distinguished by no single merit. But those Georgian houses that are disappearing, swept away in their day houses older, streets narrower, halls where still greater history was made. Those Georgian streets, courts, culs-de-sac stood mostly for brocaded coats, for powdered wigs, for brilliant talkers, great gamblers, women very dissolute and men very coarse; they stood, in fact, rather for still-life gossip than for national actions, rather for Memoirs than for "History." But the older streets that they displaced stood for kings, great nobles, great churchmen. Westminster Hall—which has given place to that great ugly box with its futile tracery of misplaced ornaments—Westminster Hall saw History. The times then were less spacious, and, London being so much smaller, the really insignificant acts of kings, nobles, and churchmen "counted" to an extent that no single act of any one man could to-day count.
And that tendency is inevitable as the world grows broader, as the cities stretch out. "History" becomes impossible. It was already, as far as London was concerned, over and done with when the young Pretender failed in the '45. Had he taken London, sacked the City, crowned himself in Westminster, misruled, caused new revolutions to foment, new deeds of blood and rapine to set the stones of the Court whispering, history might have continued to be made until near our own day. Nay, even London itself might have been checked for a century or two of its growth, since turbulence and the civil wars inevitable to the Stuarts would have delayed the coming of Arkwrights and Kays, have put back the clock of our industrial developments, have influenced the fate of the whole world. But history of that type ended with Culloden.
The Chronicler had to turn his pen to the accounts of the great impersonal movements, as: "It was then that cotton spinning was established"; "It was then that, great depression having overtaken the agricultural districts, immense bodies of the rural populations moved into the great towns." The race of memoir writers began to discover the witty, the sensible, the profusely dressed, or the profligate Great Figures. Now those, too, are done with, since, as the background grows, the figure dwindles in proportion and loses its importance amongst the vaster crowds upon the canvas. We have no longer, as it were, pictures of Sir Thomas Gresham, M, burning in the presence of the King the King's I.O.U.s to a fabulous amount. Instead, in the historic picture of to-day, it is "the Sovereign" (who is now much less a human being than the representative of a political theory) "attending service at St. Paul's, met by the Lord Mayor" (whose name nine-tenths of London ignores), "the Sheriffs and the Corporation of the City of London". The City itself has no longer any visible bounds, walls, or demarcations; it is a postal district, "E.C.", an abstraction still playing at being an individuality. On our new chronicle-canvas the Lord Mayor is a tiny speck that Sir Thomas Gresham, M, of the older picture could swallow; the Sovereign is not much larger; the spectators make a large bulk, and the major part of the composition is filled up with London, the impersonal buildings, the columns, pilasters, the shop fronts, the advertisement posters—the cloud.
The man with an eye to the future may even wonder whether those heavy buildings—that cloud pressing so heavily upon the hills and the marshes of the ancient river mouth—may not be little more than an obsolete incubus, or at least an obsolescent one. The point is whether the "old building", the heavy permanent mass of stone, timber, and brick is not a mere survival of the worship of the spirit of the hearth. The point is whether, except for that sentimental reason, portable buildings of corrugated iron, of woven wire—even for the summer, of paper—might not be more sanitary, more in keeping with the spirit of the age, less of a tie to the people of the future, our children; for as London weakens the human ties, so it weakens the spirit of the family and the spirit of hospitality. I knew, for instance, an old gentleman who would never quarrel with anyone in his own house, because of his respect for his own roof; he would quarrel with no one under a friend's roof out of respect for his friend's. He would not even write an unfriendly letter in his own or a friend's house. Consequently if he wanted to "have it out with" a man he had to invite him to some public place, or, if he wanted to write to the Times, denouncing some public "job", he would retire to the nearest hotel and call for a pint of claret, pens and paper. He would himself acknowledge that these proceedings were rather exaggerated, but his instinctive feelings in the matter were so strong that not even the necessity of a bath chair in extreme old age could prevent his going to that hotel for that purpose.
That feeling, I fancy, has died out, or is dying, in London. We have slackened all these ties, and the sanguine reformer foresees also a gradual decay of respect for family portraits. It is, after all, to house heirlooms, he says, that we build great houses or inhabit them. We collect our grandfather's old, too heavy, insect-infected chairs and chiffoniers, punch bowls, spoons or bedsteads. These things are full of cobwebs, dirt, microbes; and the old houses, that are largely our ideals still, are still more insanitary and demoralising. We have even a London proverb: "Three moves are worse than a fire"; that is because we have too much of this unwieldy bric-a-brac. Really, says this reformer, we ought in the interests of hygiene to cultivate an extreme cleanliness, and that is only possible with a minimum of furniture. We should promote, as far as possible, portability in our houses, because ground that has been dwelt upon too long loses its resilience, its power of assimilating human debris.
Thus we must pull down our London; burn our ancestral furniture; melt down our punch bowls; recognise that our associations as far as they are ancestral, are so many cobwebs; and send the best of old family portraits into the Museums.—These last will soon—says the Reformer, seeing his dream as a reality of to-morrow—be the sole heavy buildings to raise lofty roofs and turrets above the plateau of small houses—houses of aluminium, of woven wire, of corrugated iron, of paper pulp; small houses containing only a mat or two, a vase for flowers, a cooking stove; houses that we shall pack on to motor cars when the fit moves us to go out into the fields for a month or two, or when business becomes slack in London itself, or when we desire to "air" our camping site.
The obsolete system of land tenure would facilitate this; the growing restlessness of the people; the desire for change of scene; the dearth of domestic labour; and, above all, according to this Reformer, the fact that no house ought to be more than twenty years old.
I suppose that such a London with its portable houses, its masked and numbered inhabitants (perhaps we should arrive at such a pitch of impersonality that a child would recognise its mother, like a sheep, by the sense of smell)—this London would be sane, sanitary, and beneficent to the human race. Most of us, being poor humanity, a prey to the illusions of dead poets, will shudder at what is raw and naked in this idea. But what is the alternative London that is offered us by the man who upholds the Past?
It is a vast stretch of mounds, a gigantic quagmire with here and there a pillar of a mediaeval church serving as a perch for a hawk's nest, and here and there a clump of trees, descendants of those in our parks, in whose shadow foxes and badgers shall herd, on whose tops the herons shall nest. The praiser of Times Past will tell us that the breed is deteriorating physically: it is growing hopelessly neurasthenic; it is losing its business energy. It has sapped all the blood from the counties; it is closing its doors to emigrants from the countries. It is breaking with the old Social Conventions: it is running blindly to perdition.
And indeed this picture of an immense Town, shut off from the rest of the world, black, walled in, peopled by gibbering neurasthenics, a prey to hysterias, useless for work, getting no pleasures from horrible self indulgences—this image of a City of dreadful Night is appalling enough. And its logical end would be that wide desolation, those mounds, those quagmires.
For, supposing that Physical Deterioration to exist, we must lose our business capacities; a sound mind going with a healthy body, London must lose her trade. The small houses on the outskirts would first lose their populations. Imagine then all those horrible little hutches that have spread out over Essex.—Slates will come loose, rain trickle in, frosts split asunder the walls, naked rafters clutch at the skies, until at last all that great uninhabited region of damp ground will have its thin plastering of rubble, of rubbish, levelled on the ground and making small mounds for the couch grass to cover with its thick tangle. And, as trade ebbs and ebbs from this city of neurasthenics, the Vestries, the Corporations, the Conservancies, will lack the money with which to fight the Thames, that great friend that made London, that great enemy that ultimately shall overwhelm it. A very little want of attention to the sewers, the embankments and the up-river locks would swamp at each tide all the City and all London. The sliding sands would get into motion beneath St. Paul's; all the hidden streams and rivulets that London has forgotten would swell, burst their bonds, and beneath the ground eat into the foundations of the houses. (I know, for instance, a London dwelling where a spring has suddenly and invincibly burst its way through the kitchen stairs so that the house has had to be abandoned.)
We who walk about the streets forget the elements; we hardly ever realise by what minute and meticulous patching up the great city is rendered water-tight and air-tight—with tiny slates on the roofs and tiny tiles in the sewers, or with what constant filling up of fresh materials the roadway of the Victoria Embankment is kept from becoming a mere swamp. But you may realise this last if you go, in heavy weather upon any kind of vehicle, along this the worst of London's great roads that flaunts itself against the remorseless forces of nature.
And who, says the praiser of Times Past, would live in London if it did not pay him? London has become a mere bazaar, a mere market. Its associations have gone; its humanity has gone; it is uninhabitable for its atmosphere, for its inhuman solitude, for its indifference to architecture, for its pulling down of old courts.
So, in this image, London, an immense galleon, drifts down the tideway of the ages, threatened imminently by those black and sulphurous clouds, Neurasthenia, Decay, and the waters of the Earth. So, in the other image, it will—humanity being redeemable—become a gigantic, bright, sanitary and sane congeries of little white houses that can be folded up and carried off in the night. On the one hand there will at last be Rest in London; on the other—humanity being redeemable—there will never be rest at all, but the great city will go staggering along through a series of changes in the nature of man.
But the contemplative portion of our psychologies seems to reply to these extremists that there is never any change in the nature of man. Furniture is, it is true, getting lighter and more flimsy; but the natural man will go on accumulating as much of it as he can, or as much as his servants or his wife can dust. And his grandson will go on—with variations dictated by the Fashions of his day—treasuring such of his grandfather's heavier and most costly pieces as he imagines will do credit to the family. There passes one's window every morning a Charity School: a hundred and twenty girls, each in gray skirts, gray cloaks, heavy boots, and straw hats. They have been drilled to adopt as nearly as possible a stereotyped walk, an odd sort of swing from the hips, and shuffle of the toes on the ground. They have eaten the same food, slept in the same long dormitories.—Turning off one's street there is a long narrow road of small houses, each precisely alike in dingy and indistinguishable architecture, each the same in rent, in chimneys, in window space.—Here, then, are stereotyped citizens and stereotyped houses.
Yet, in spite of the efforts of the good nuns to sap the individual spark in each of those girls, each has a different swing of the hips, cock of the shoulder, glance from the eye. And, in spite of the effort of the architect or jobbing builder to render each of those house-boxes indistinguishable from the other, each has an entirely different atmosphere. Here a door has been painted green, here a handle has been polished till it shines like gold, here the curtains are clean, here a window has been broken and replaced with gummed paper. So that from each of those houses a soul seems to peep forth, differing from each other soul. My bedroom window being very high, I look down into innumerable tiny garden plots when I dress. In the first the tenant is out every morning directing his gardener to put in bulbs, to roll a tiny shell-path, to re-arrange a rockery, to stick up little boxes for the starlings to nest in. In the next the tenant has had the whole space tiled and reddened to save the trouble of attending to it. In the next there is nothing but blackened and sodden grass. Thus, in these stereotyped pocket-handkerchief squares of a quarter where one would imagine the solid Middle Class to be most uniform and alike, individualities stamp themselves upon the very waste ground.
So that, to those who love their fellow-men, it seems unnecessary to fear much. Even in the Utopia London of masks, dominoes, and, in place of names, numbers, it seems unlikely that one pair of eyes will not gleam more brightly through the eyelets, one domino be worn more jauntily, or one voice be the more thrilling. And the range being less wide, the minute differences will be all the more apparent. Even to-day class and class of us go seeking appointments in uniforms that, if individuality could be blotted out, would surely do it. We go to offices in high hats, frock coats, trousers cut alike, or in bowlers, broadcloth, or corduroys. But there is difference enough between wearer and wearer of these uniforms.
Tall blocks of office buildings are crushing out the associations of the Westminster courts, alleys, and squares. We see terracotta ornamental excrescences, meaning nothing to us; heavy masses that, to those of us who care about architectural proportions, are repulsive, because, for us, they have no associations. The Memoirists have not yet written them up. But to our great grandchildren these excrescences will have meanings and associations, these heavinesses will be suggestive, because we, their ancestors, lived amongst these things our pathetic, petty, and futile lives.
When Westminster was still an ecclesiastical islet with a drawbridge, odd roads and quaint figures, there were men who grumbled because apple orchards had taken the place of swamps where the wild geese cried all night. And there were monks who rejoiced that new stone salting houses had taken the place of the old, rotting wooden curing huts. They thought their houses looked better, just as nearly all London thinks the office buildings look better than the eighteenth-century rabbit-warrens of small houses. And there were others who foresaw gigantic and impersonal futures for the Church, the Minster, or for Mankind. And your Abbot Samson found his Jocelynd of Brakelond to be a Boswell for him.
Even the Great Figure still lives: for humanity craves for admiration to give and to take. In the streets you will still hear: "Oh, such a one: he's a one-er," in the Clubs they still say: "So and so is rather a good man, isn't he?" whether So and So be a surgeon, an admiral, or the administrator of a province in Upper Burma. So the populations of the many towns that form London jog along together towards their inevitable rest. The associations that are forming around our Street Improvements are none the less poignant, because they are less historic in the large. For the poignancy of these things comes from the man, without regard to the object to which it attaches.
These sayings without doubt are so many platitudes: but if we consider Rest in London, we have to consider the Future, and to consider the Future, we must deal in generalisations, which are brave platitudes. There remains then the question of Physical Deterioration. "That Neurasthenia joke," said a modern doctor, a man looking half Jew, half negroid, but young and alert with beady eyes behind large spectacles, "It's as old as the hills. Jezebel was Neurasthenic; so was Lot's wife when she looked back; so was the writer of the book of Job. So was Edward II; so was Shakespeare, or whoever wrote 'Timon of Athens.' If we've deteriorated physically, when did the deterioration begin?" He paced up and down his consulting-room smiling, and tapped his patient on the shoulder with a stethoscope. "We've improved: we're improving. Why, my dear sir, what was old age in the mediaeval centuries? A man—a king—was worn out, crippled with rheumatism, too heavy-bellied to mount his horse before he was forty-five. As to the common people, they died like flies: they had no stamina, no power of resisting disease. Town life isn't unhealthy: the art of sanitation did not begin until the towns grew large. Did you ever see an old farm-house? Where did they build them? Always in hollows, in muddy, airless bottoms, to be near water—you understand: near water—and they drained into that water—and they were plague houses all of them.
"Did you ever have to do with a sick farm labourer? Those fellows! Why, they fold their hands and die for a touch of liver. Their life doesn't hold them because it contains no interest. Half their healthy hours are spent in mooning and brooding: they all suffer from dyspepsia because of their abominable diet of cheese and tea. Why, I'd rather attend fifty London street rats with half a lung apiece than one great hulking farm bailiff. Those are the fellows, after all, the London scaramouches, for getting over an illness.
"Don't you see, my dear sir, your problem is to breed disease-resisting men, and you won't do it from men who mope about fields and hedges. No! modern life is a question of towns. Purify them if you can: get rid of smoke and foul air if you can. But breed a race fitted to inhabit them in any case."
That indeed is the problem which is set before London—the apotheosis of modern life. For there is no ignoring the fact that mankind elects to live in crowds. If London can evolve a town type London will be justified of its existence. In these great movements of mortality the preacher and the moralist are powerless. If a fitted race can be bred, a race will survive, multiply and carry on vast cities. If no such race arrive the city must die. For, sooner or late, the drain upon the counties must cease: there will be no fresh blood to infuse. If it be possible, in these great rule of thumb congeries, "sanitary conditions" must be enforced; rookeries must be cleared out; so many cubic feet of air must be ensured for each individual. (And it must be remembered that, for the Christian era, this is a new problem. No occidental cities, great in the modern sense, have existed, none have begun to exist until the beginning of the Commercial Ages. The problem is so very young that we have only just begun to turn our attention to it.)
But, if the rest that comes with extinction is not to be the ultimate lot of London, the problem must solve itself either here or there—in the evolution either of a healthy city or of a race with a strong hold upon life. We know that equatorial swamps have evolved tribes, short legged, web-footed, fitted to live in damp, in filth, in perpetual miasmas. There is no reason therefore why London should not do as much for her children. That would indeed be her justification, the apology for her existence.
The creatures of the future will come only when our London indeed is at rest. And, be they large-headed, short legged, narrow-chested, and, by our standards, hideous and miserable, no doubt they will find among themselves women to wive with, men to love and dispute for, joys, sorrows, associations, Great Figures, histories—a London of their own, graves of their own, and rest. Our standards will no longer prevail, our loves will be dead; it will scarcely matter much to us whether Westminster Abbey stand or be pulled down: it will scarcely matter to us whether the portraits of our loves be jeered at as we jeer at the portraits of the loves, wives, mistresses and concubines of Henry VIII. Some of us seek to govern the Future: may their work prosper in their hands; some of us seek to revive, to bathe in, the spirit of the Past: surely great London will still, during their lives, hold old courts, old stones, old stories, old memories. Some of us seek relief from our cares in looking upon the present of our times. We may be sure that to these unambitious, to these humble, to these natural men, who sustain their own lives through the joys, the sorrows, and the personalities of the mortal creatures that pass them in the street, wait upon them at table, deliver their morning bread, stand next to them in public-house bars—to these London with its vastness that will last their day, will grant the solace of unceasing mortals to be interested in.
In the end we must all leave London; for all of us it must be again London from a distance, whether it be a distance of six feet underground, or whether we go to rest somewhere on the other side of the hills that ring in this great river basin. For us, at least, London, its problems, its past, its future, will be at rest. At nights the great blaze will shine up at the clouds; on the sky there will still be that brooding and enigmatic glow, as if London with a great ambition strove to grasp at Heaven with arms that are shafts of light. That is London writing its name upon the clouds.
And in the hearts of its children it will still be something like a cloud—a cloud of little experiences, of little personal impressions, of small, futile things that, seen in moments of stress and anguish, have significances so tremendous and meanings so poignant. A cloud—as it were of the dust of men's lives.
THE END.
CHISWICK PRESS: PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
- ↑ "Do you remember, he said, a reflexion of Auguste Comte: (Humanity is composed of the dead and of the living. The dead are much the more numerous)? Certainly the dead are much the more numerous. By their multitude, and on account of the greatness of the work they have accomplished, they are the more powerful. It is they who govern: we obey them. Our masters are beneath these stones. Here lie the legislator who made the law I submit to to-day, the architect who built my house, the poet who created the illusions that trouble us still, the orator who influenced our minds before we were born. . . . What is one generation of the living compared to the innumerable generations of the dead? What is our will, dating only from to-day, before their wills that are a thousand centuries old? Revolt against them? Are we strong enough? We have not even time to disobey them.' 'There you are then, Doctor Socrates,' cried Constantin Marc; 'you renounce Progress, the New Justice, the World's Peace, Free Thought; you submit yourself to Tradition.'"
- ↑ This of course is an exaggeration on the part of the Philosopher, who looking too closely at the present forgets that one of his young friends—or he himself—may stand revealed to Posterity as a great figure. But, except, perhaps, for a single politician, it is difficult to find one man whose name to-day would be familiar in every street of this London.