Alice Meynell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town away from [Pg 30] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”