London Impressions Part 2

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 gra.s.s itself London gra.s.s? Not only in its acre of intense green, but in the s.p.a.ce of a square foot that might, one would think, be anywhere, it is London gra.s.s.

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 gra.s.s of England that you have there, but the gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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, gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.ses quick into the nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers--ground-ivy, and things that are not so tall as gra.s.s--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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WATERLOO BRIDGE.]

And yet, across all boundaries, across the frontier of the suburbs, what is this strange sc.r.a.p of the real May of the natural world dropped into the midst of the May of London? A sc.r.a.p 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.ble curves, and such changes of aspect, sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 advertis.e.m.e.nts. 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 sc.r.a.p of gilding below bridge, except a momentary tawdriness near the pier of some excursion place, where there are unseen c.o.c.kney 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 pa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.]