Dixon Scott

“ For, whilst they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful quantities. ”

“ It is to be detected in the religious life of the place, in the aspirations which surround the great Cathedral which is now splendidly uprising in her midst. It is disclosed in the revealing mirror of the arts. In her latest and most perfect piece of architecture, the luminous building, so significantly isolated, that serenely dominates her central wharves, she seems, almost for the first time, to have confessed herself in beauty perfectly, and she has done that because the nature of the confession had already suffered change. ”

“ The long series of famous golf-links that lie amongst the sand-dunes at New Brighton, at Leasowe, at Hoylake, at Formby, at Blundellsands, at Birkdale; the numerous salt-water swimming-baths; the sailing clubs; the briny, gale-cleansed spaces of aromatic gold, free to all who care to use them, that curve endlessly about the coast; the mere proximity of the Landing Stage and the presence of the cordial and bracing airs that enfilade the streets of offices behind it—all these things must have tended to give athleticism an especial point and vigour. ”

“ It is a reservoir of tonic airs; it renews and revivifies the common atmosphere; it sets a crisp brine-tang in the heart of every inhalation. Some kind of mental and physical conformity, not easily to be defined, but still remarkable, that democratic sting quite conceivably creates; and some kind of subtle solidarity, too, must certainly result from the constant, unforgettable presence of a piece of outer Nature possessing so large a share of unremitting loveliness. From the fierce beauty of the River, indeed, there is no possibility of escape: its scale is so vast ”

“ It becomes one of the sources of that beauty, one of the processes by which that beauty was attained—a grey and dreadful ritual observed by the City in the hope of being granted strange powers. These dull houses are so much squeezed dye-wood. Their colour, their brightness, have gone to stain the rich fabric of the City’s enterprise, to paint the romantic emblem by which she is known in dim corners of the earth, to illuminate the saga of her career. ”

“ For centuries her Church was the proud hub of the parish in which Liverpool was but an inconsiderable hamlet; and even so late as the last year of the seventeenth century she compelled Liverpool to regard her as its parochial superior, and to tramp every Sunday three miles out to her and three miles back. There is little pride left to the old Church now. It stands, bleak and friendless, in the midst of a dull pool of gravestones; smoke from a railway siding blackens its walls; the cars roar triumphantly past its very gates; it has been compelled to guard its dead with rows of iron railings. ”

“ Renouncing this medicative disloyalty, it frankly surrenders itself to the City’s rule, and becomes a peaceful province of urbanity. The lights of the City make golden chains about it, golden lights from the City patrol its deep recesses. It is the hour of reconciliations. The City is more elemental than by day, the River is less elemental, and a long sustained harmony unites the flaming tides of the streets and the darkened causeway of the tide. Even the boats have shared the transformation. ”

“ You find yourself in the shadow of some slab hill of cotton-bales, or peering up the slopes of a swelling cone of grain, a sibilant alp of gold, and you begin to envision the anæmic spinster who will one day wrap herself in some part of that sodden mound, or the white hen, in some dreamful farmyard, that will one day peck this grain.... Or you come down to the Docks after nightfall, passing out of the greasy silence of the northern streets, under the terrace of the Overhead Railway, and so through the gates behind the Huskisson. ”

“ A couple of little towers, perched on the wall, make pseudo-romantic notes—absent, archaic, meaningless. A great warehouse, four-square and stolid, with blind eyes, is set heavily down like a dull box—a box that may be full or empty, but that is undoubtedly shut and locked, whose key has undoubtedly been mislaid. More warehouses, all equally immobile, sullenly succeed it; and then the Landing-stage itself, low and level and a trifle dingy, begins to run humbly alongside, spirting out at intervals a little squeal of advertisement-begotten colour. ”

“ Sefton Park, although it may not serve so deeply human a purpose as, say, Stanley Park in the north, is certainly quite the most perfectly fashioned of Liverpool’s open spaces; and although it is the largest, it never commits the mistake that large parks sometimes make of endeavouring to appear like a piece of virginal country. It is always mannered, self-conscious, full of effects that are in the right sense “picturesque”; and the sheep that feed in one part of it do not seem much less deliberately decorative in intention than the peacocks that everywhere admirably strut and flower. ”

“ Liverpool’s exceptional freedom from industrialism—other than the secluded industrialism of the Docks—making her, in this conspicuous white-fingered urbanity of her workers, once more especially typical of one of the chief modes of modern civic life. All manual labour being, broadly speaking, tidily banished to the Docks, these central spaces are left entirely at the disposal of the dock-labourer’s soft-handed collaborators—the clerk, the merchant, the broker. Every morning, from nine to ten, the tide of these spruce actors pours astonishingly in. ”

“ One admired, one marvelled, but it was never the admiration one gives to human things. That vague drift of sound, the dim peering faces away up there on the bridge, the little group of men running with a rope along the quay—they all seemed quite irrelevant—little happenings to which the lordly shapes remained profoundly [Pg 38] indifferent. It was to them, to those lordly shapes, that the homage went out; theirs was the courage and the beauty and the wise strength. ”

“ Liverpool’s most deliberate effort in the direction of sustained architectural spectacle, which one sees just the moment before or just the moment after. Without that consciousness, the flat-chested, multi-windowed, watery-complexioned hotels that droop, perhaps a little dismally, down the hill opposite, and the uncertain traffic that spreads itself thinly out upon the vast road-spaces in between, would probably not convince one that their claim to dignity was extraordinary. ”

“ It is that highly prosaic thing, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, that has apparently served to keep this idyll unspotted by the world. It curves like a defensive moat between the bird-song and the harsh imbroglio a biscuit’s-throw beyond, and upon the frail structure that crosses it not the most reckless electric car in the world would ever dream of venturing. It is the weakness of that bridge that has proved the place’s strength. ”

“ It is in her native unconsidered gestures, as I have said, far more than in her studied poses, that the essential beauty of Liverpool is most perfectly revealed; and it is at night, when the aid of the sunlight is ended and the sky is a forgotten tale and even the stars are of as little moment as moths that palely flutter outside the windows of a lighted palace, that Liverpool becomes most elemental and instinctive. Abandoned by external nature, she becomes most natural, and therefore attains her most conspicuous beauty. ”

“ It is in these natural and instinctive creations, frankly utilitarian, and not in her self-conscious trafficking with loveliness, that Liverpool grows most sensuously magnificent. A curve of sunless canal with clustered chimneys rising solemnly about; a pit of railway sidings, warehouses ranged round, one proud white plume of smoke moving slowly across it; long glittering reaches at the Docks; a black stretch of suburb crawling out, myriad-speared, across the sunset; a mass of warehouses blotting out the stars; hot vistas in the markets, ripe and fierce with colour ”

“ For Liverpool, in spite of herself, and quite unconsciously, is a place of exceeding beauty. Out of that hard turmoil of tangible interests and endeavours a very splendid and reassuring happening has sprung. In honest and shrewd response to instant necessities, the city has been carved and kneaded into the lean lines of practical effectiveness; and those lines have joined wonderfully together to make any number of unpremeditated glories. Loveliness has descended unawares. ”

“ We speak largely of the Underworld, the People of the Abyss, the Submerged Tenth, and gradually we drift into a way of considering them as a strange breed of degenerates, mattoids, morlocks.... It is an offence that all the friendships I have formed amongst these people make me especially anxious to avoid. They are all, really, much more like the suburbans than the suburbans are themselves. Each one of these so bedraggled humans is really a rinsed and expurgated bundle of just those passions and emotions which form the unalterable nucleus of every character in the world. ”

“ Half of Liverpool uses it as a matter of business, the other half as a matter of health and pleasure, and it presents all day long the appearance of a democratic promenade. It is, in fact, the finest of Liverpool’s parks, furnished with its sheet of water, provided with its cafés, its bookstalls, its seats. Merchants and clerks from the contiguous bone-part of the fan slip down here at lunch-time, mothers bring their children from the recesses of the suburban plume. The actual people of Liverpool are here at last to be seen in vital conjunction with the weapon they employ. ”

“ Out of the several characteristics we have already noted—the swiftness of the City’s growth, its glittering modernity, its tireless, deft adjustment of alien activities to a common end, its tenacious efficiency and alertness—out of these things in conjunction does there not already begin to emerge (we are all invincible anthropomorphists in these matters) some kind of quite consistent Personality—the genius of the place, if you will—the handy embodiment, at any rate, of the main instincts which this specially environed congeries has tended to throw into exceptional relief? ”

“ How is the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a pitiful couple of thousand words?...
One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. ”

“ Deliberately majestical here, gravely featureless in Tithebarn Street, elegant from the Central, Liverpool achieves within the last of her four porticoes an order of effects more urgent and memorable still. For it is behind the Landing Stage that many of the car routes of the City terminate, and the great space of unshadowed roadway, empty of all buildings save the new-sprung Dock Offices, is really a brave platform on which the cars endlessly wheel and interlace. ”

“ The actors employed, whether the liners themselves, or the gaunt roof-cranes, or the dire monsters that effect the coaling, or the deliberate jaws of the dock-gates, are designed on so immensely loftier a scale than the rather draggled humans who run to and fro in their shadows, watched by the great silences, that they inevitably upraise the expectations to their own gigantic measure. Only in [Pg 34] one brief corner of this seven-mile harbourage is it possible to return once more to the intimate human romance, the traditional drama, of harbours and sea-traffickings. ”

“ Independence of another sort, as yet untouched by tragedy, and awakening in the soul of the Liverpolitan something more like envy than contempt, is to be found at Litherland, which lies just beyond that raucous Linacre terminus, a few steps nearer to the cemetery at Ford. They are steps that provide an effective study in contrasts. They carry one across a frail little swing-bridge; and whilst one end of the bridge is immersed in that bad-tempered outburst of industrialism, the other shares an atmosphere of positively Quakerish demureness. ”

“ And this is, after all, to say little more than that Liverpool possesses in deep measure that strange accidental beauty of the modern city which is a thing so new to the world that the arts have not yet learned to teach men how to enjoy it. But in Liverpool (exceptional, once more, because typical, typical because exceptional) that beauty exists in a state of singular purity. ”

“ That, certainly, is the first impression—an impression that has nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a sea-bird gravely dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the sun, the sudden emergence in the midst of this solemnity of some great fever of monstrous echoing activity. ”

“ Next comes West Derby, a group of clean-faced cottages standing about its car-terminus like smocked village children gaping prettily at a lurid visitor, its neatly dignified church and deer-scattered park reflecting the outburst of ripe, authentic aristocracy that makes the country-side beyond so unexpectedly, so exotically, old English. ”

“ It is not only the strange powers that belong to moving waters that it exercises; it trails with it as well, into the very core of the City, a great attendant sweep of unsullied and inviolable skyscape, and burns great sunsets, evening after evening, within full gaze of the town. ”

“ The air is thick with swinging boxes and heavy or keen with the most astounding range of odours: with slab cheesy odours and searching fruity ones; with exotic odours that one sniffs uncertainly, for which one can find no closer definition than nice or nasty; and, supereminently, running through them all, the wild decivilizing smell of wet deal cases—a smell that always arouses a certain unemotional cotton-broker of one’s acquaintance to an inconvenient but rather touching hunger for some particular place of dim forest silences. ”

“ To see all this accomplished in some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale flowers on the far-drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the world’s possibilities of beauty and romance. ”

“ For provinciality, after all, is but a subordination to the metropolis, a reflection, half deliberate, half unconscious, of the life that goes on spontaneously at the centre. Well, Liverpool would be spontaneous, too. She will imitate no one, not even London. She will be her own metropolis. And those who have marked [Pg 13] the clear efficiency of her designs, the unique mingling of American alertness and Lowland caution which colours the spirit that lives behind her very positive efforts, will admit that she has come bewilderingly near success. ”

“ It is an admirable project, and a fine salve for outraged sentiment. It sets the seal on Walton’s defeat: more even than the red-faced streets does it signalize her absorption in the mass; but it is none the less a thing one welcomes with enthusiasm. Thatch, after all, is not the final excellence of life.
§ 5.
And, in any case, if Walton still thirsts for redress, she can surely regard herself as amply revenged by her sister suburb, Aintree. ”

“ But there is always so much of briskness, of white-handed briskness, of silks and uniforms and an active sociability, that the gloom becomes a positive aid to the drawing-room sparkle of it all. Deep amongst those monstrous shapes and silences at the Docks all the real effort has gone forward—the loading, the coaling, even the embarkation of the emigrants—and having suffered that in [Pg 41] secret, the liner simply plays the part of stolid protector of intimacies. The human drama is never very obvious: there are more tears and tension at any of the great railway-stations ”

“ In a little bronze-hung studio, poised high above one of the central ways, a woman is dealing with pigment in a fashion more sensitive and personal than any that has been known in Liverpool before. Well, in the quality of her work I find some confession of the forces that are producing the profound unanimous change which may lead, among other things, to the dispersal of the darkness of the underworld. ”

“ At every turn of the City’s social and municipal life those two salient antithetical characteristics are vividly displayed. Liverpool is boldly different. She possesses, it seems, a singular faculty for moulding and co-ordinating. The peoples of the world pour through her streets, but they never interrupt her energetic introspectiveness. ”

“ Liverpool becomes, quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. ”

“ The air is troubled with a soft sustained groaning: the Saxonia (let us say) is at her [Pg 30] berth discharging. She arrived from Boston on Thursday, she will sail again on Tuesday, and every instant, day and night, that soft moaning will continue. And that direful sound, and the torment of labour going forward, in a shower of green light, beneath the vague riven masses of the liner, serve somehow to drive you on to thoughts concerning Liverpool’s efficiency and tirelessness, concerning the bigness of her interests. ”

“ Out of the bodies of the battered and congested people who crowd there Liverpool contrives a suave unguent, more dreadful than adipocere, which enables the great ships to slide so smoothly to their berths. ”

“ It is not from fingers like those that one looks to receive many frail white images of beauty. And whether this reading of the essential psychology of the place be true or false, it is certain that the men of Liverpool have never been overprone to sheer æstheticism. The vivid day of their City has been crammed with leaping episodes, it has left no spare strength for flourishes, and they have expressed themselves throughout in terms of a naked and practical utility. ”

“ In the lanes that cower behind it, too, [Pg 114] defeat is equally apparent: scraps of villagedom hunted down by a rabble of red-faced tenements; a mass of garish brick squatting blatantly in the ruins of a cornfield; jerry-builders evicting old residents from the cottages they have lived in for half a century; the old Hall, in its nest of trees, lying fouled and rifled. In the shadow of the Church there is a little cottage that has the reputation, significantly enough, of being the only thatched cottage in Liverpool. ”

“ Well, the chief agent in breaking down these social divisions was also that art of locomotion to the encouragement of which Liverpool, as I have said, has so peculiarly devoted herself, and the latest, the most democratic, and the most mobile of the creations of that art, the electric car, has inevitably increased that fluidity in a very remarkable degree. [4] The overhead wires that [Pg 98] bring every suburb into vital connexion with the centre are like the radiating nerves of the organism, flushing all the extremities with one sympathetic life. ”

“ It is a beauty that is the result, above everything, of a naked response in stone and iron to [Pg 69] certain clear imperative necessities: such a response catching, as it would seem, some of the beauty and authority that inevitably attach to every articulate expression of a vital impulse. And in Liverpool those responses have been especially clean and unentangled. The place is self-contained: it has never run to booths and show-places; it has no associations, romantic or historic, to attract the gaper; it has never had to sustain a pose, and only rarely been tempted to attempt one ”