Ford Madox Hueffer

“ One would, quite literally, never get any for'arder if one stayed to inquire to the end of every tragi-comedy of which, on one's road, one caught a glimpse. And it is unpractical to wish that every bricklayer and mortar carrier who added his wall to the infinite number already existing should be able to sign his work as an artist signs his picture. But that, too, is a universal sentiment and a "note" of all roads into London, a note of London itself. It arises out of the innate altruism that there is in us all, or out of the universal desire to "know." ”

“ One coffee-stall, gray-hooded and with a pale lamp, does not break the spell, nor twenty; one house of call, nor a hundred. Even the shouts of Covent Garden or the footsteps on the cobbles, and the undertones of the loafers before the tiny black brick houses of the little hay market, seem thin and ghostly without the immense and kindly ground-bass of London awake. ”

“ One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children's calls. And for me at least it is melancholy to think that hardly one of all these lives, of all these men, will leave any trace in the world. One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life. As the train pauses one looks down into a main street—and all streets are hardly recognizable from a height. A 'bus is before the steps of a church, a ragged child turns a catherine wheel in the road, and holds up her hand to the passengers. ”

“ For myself, when on a train into London, I feel almost invariably a sense of some pathos and of some poetry. To the building up of this railway, of this landscape of roofs, there went so many human lives, so much of human endeavour, so many human hopes. Small houses, like the ranks of an infinite number of regiments caught in the act of wheeling, march out upon the open country ”

“ To really descend, not in body alone, but with the spirit receptive, into this whirl and crash, to see men running with set faces, at the continual risk of their lives, that they may link up wagons bringing screws from Birmingham, corn from Canada, pine-planks from Norway, pork from the United States, to whirl oneself in the whirl of it, is to be overcome with convictions. We live in spacious times. Humanity is on the march somewhere, tomorrow the ultimate questions shall be solved and the soul of man assuaged. ”

“ Or one may grow bewildered to the point of losing hold of one's identity amid the crash and charge of goods trucks. There are great open spaces all over London where the transfers are made from line to line. At night they are most active. Electric lights glare and seem to drop sparks from very high in the air, blue and mistily; rails glimmer here and there underfoot like marsh pools of water; hooded trucks seem to wander alone and to charge each other in all the black distances. ”

“ You may pick out upon the pavement any strange object; a tall negro with a blue birds-eye handkerchief round his head, eating, with the motions of a large ape, winkles out of a blue paper bag—or a girl with extremely brilliant red hair. You pick them out from a distance and watch them for a minute or two; you may look down at passing, you may look round. The other day I saw from the top of an electric tram, very far away, above the converging lines in the perspective of a broad highway of new shops, a steam crane at work high in the air on an upper storey. ”

“ And, indeed, all the dawn sounds of London have that quality of thinness—the hoot of locomotives, the thunder peals of shunting trucks, the clatter of cab-horse hoofs, the rhythmical stepping of one's own four great horses. Even the immensely loud awakening of the London birds seems small and circumscribed.
The railways seem to make London commence where the chimney pots begin to be in forests. In comparison with the Thames they are at the other end of the scale. The River is a natural way ”

“ These people are not mere picturesque survivals; their number increases day by day as poorer men find the hurry of modern life too great; but I cannot claim to have entered London in a pikey's cart. I fancy, however, that looking at things through the small square of a back window, being at home in the middle of strange things, the sense too of being very aloof from the rest of the world must make one's point of view rather a special one. One would become more or less of a foreign observer. ”

“ It is not so much that the speed is very great, there is always the statutory limit, a sort of nightmare; but the motorist is too low down as a rule, the air presses against the eyes and half closes them; he has a tendency to look forward along the road, to see more of vehicles and of pedestrians than of the actual country or the regiments of buildings. He grows a little aloof, a little out of sympathy; he becomes more intent about keeping a whole skin on himself and on his car than about the outer world. ”

“ Paris has been merely the administrative city. In England administration has remained with fair constancy at Westminster, near enough to the centre of the country. Wealth has always come into England by the Thames at London. At any rate in later centuries, the tendency has been for the Administration to settle near the centres of wealth, [1] and the combined attractions have made the tract of marsh and flat ground in the lower basin of the river the centre of the Arts, of the Industries, of the Recreations and of the moral 'tone', not for England alone but for wider regions of the earth. ”

“ But all the empty streets giving out echoes that one never hears during the day, all the vacant blinds, the sinister, the jocular, the lugubriously inquiring, or the lamentable expressions that windows give to houses asleep, all the unsmoking chimneys, the pale skies, and the thought of all these countless thousands lying invisible, with their souls, in sleep, parted from their bodies—all these things give an effect, in its silence, immense, stealthy, and overpowering. ”

“ That attitude, backed up by that sense of being at home, is the worst that one could assume; it kills even tolerance for the habits of others. It is the reason why the days of most rapid travelling are the days of most frequent misunderstandings between the races of mankind. Your foreigner, reaching his London in a Pullman car, has been during his whole journey in an hotel, very much like one of his own hotels, not very much unlike his own home. ”

“ Whilst the pen is actually on my paper London is spreading itself from Kew towards Hounslow, towards Richmond, and towards Kingston, and on its other bounds towards how many other outlying places? The electric tram is doing all this.
To come into a city by means of one of these new, swift carriages, to come from any distance, say by a motor car, is to fly too fast for any easy recognition of the gradual changes from country to town. There are hedgerows, church towers moving rapidly as if drawn along among clumps of trees, on the horizon ”

“ The natural features of London are obscured, but they underlie the others patiently. They are the hills that made possible the basin of the Thames, the oldest of all the roads into London; they are the old marshes and flat lands on which it was so easy to build. ”

“ It is possible in the contagion of these things to see the opening up of Empires wider of sway than Rome, clearer of sight than Greece, kinder of heart than Carthage, purer in joy than was to be had among the hanging gardens of Babylon. ”

“ Ten years ago tall flats for the comfortable and tall dwellings for workmen seemed to have solved the question. The latter are already discredited, the former have always been disliked, and London is once more sending out bee swarms of small houses. We may consider that the thousands and thousands of small brick, slate-roofed cottages on the flats and low hills of south Essex are the contribution of "workmen's fares". These, though still growing, are old-fashioned already, so quickly do we move. ”

“ The square fronts of houses peep down on you as you run beneath; constant footbridges overhead give to the thin light of day a constant shudder and quiver. We, who are not made for strong impressions, are ourselves inclined to shudder. ”

“ It was impressive enough—the modern spirit expressing itself in terms not of men but of forces, we gliding by, the timbers swinging up, without any visible human action in either motion. No doubt men were at work in the engine-belly of the crane, just as others were very far away among the dynamos that kept us moving. ”

“ What the automobile is to the comfortable classes the electric tram is becoming to the poorer. It is a means of getting into town. It does not, however, produce the same psychological effects. For one thing, the speed is not so great, and you have not the least anxiety as to what it may choose to run into; if you want to see things you are at a greater height, your range of sight is much longer. ”

“ The great rectangular blaze glides along with a heavy, impersonal groan of sound that is like a new form of silence, the figure of the mechanician in front has a backward rake like that of a man in the bows of a boat ”

“ Old places of entertainment, like the Horns Assembly Rooms, flourish, and large theatres spring up along the tram-lines. I think there are no local daily papers, though in the dark heart of the docks knots of men stand round blank walls. On these journalists, having the same relation to those of Fleet Street as the pavement artist has to Academicians, chalk in capital letters details of the last murders, divorces, and wrecks. ”

“ And the one and the other are apt to find that every man's hand is against him.
Yet if that be the defect, the product of the quality of rapid transit is London itself. France has its Ministry of Roads and Bridges, and that is probably why Paris is not France: we have none, and London is England. It began by London's settling on the best placed highway in Europe, and England is still very much tied to the Thames. ”

“ There is the psychological London, where the London spirit is the note of life, there is the Administrative County, and there is the London of natural causes, the assembly of houses in the basin of the lower Thames. ”

“ And the people of the poorer suburbs do their shopping in their own High Streets. Where great local emporia have not crushed out altogether the "local tradesman," shoppers with string bags still nod at the greengrocer and the oilman when passing or when making their purchases.
One cannot, therefore, limit psychological London by the glow on its sky, to the sphere of influence of the stores, or to the Administrative County. ”

“ Crowds move slowly in front of these—it is not possible to hurry even on the broad pavements, and most people move leisurely, with the head a little to one side, looking at the large windows, carrying parcels. Then there are more old houses behind old trees, or behind little terraces, then, more new shops. A brand new theatre, immense, domed, suddenly holds aloft, at its very apex, a large allegorical figure that appears on the point to soar over all these buildings and all these people. ”

“ One has been accustomed to drive on a bus from Kensington to Piccadilly Circus in the half hour. One has seen the tall flats by Sloane Street for some minutes, Apsley House for some more minutes, and one was used to look down on the Green Park from a certain angle for a certain space of leisurely transit. These things have their familiar aspects.
They grow unfamiliar on the motor car. The motorist is, as I have said, low down, he pulls up before no buildings; narrow streets like the old Kensington High Street present the aspect of tortuous defiles ”

“ In these parts you hardly see a discontented face, and never a morbid one. Right in to the very bottom of the Waterloo Road, and nearly up to Westminster Bridge, old villas, new houses and new shops lie side by side, or stare at one another. They are all mixed together, it is not possible to get any zones to "synchronise", it is not possible to say "early Georgian London had reached here, middle Victorian here, the railways produced this district, the short stages this". They are dropped down in terraces anywhere, nearer Whitehall, or further away. But the general effects is a pleasant one. ”

“ He has gone through none of the processes of travel, none of his edges have been rubbed off, he is not necessarily the best type of Russian. He is quite ready to kick a porter and be cursed for it. He dislikes the place he has come to, and records his hasty impressions in letters home that may become so many international causes of misunderstanding. ”

“ These ruined temples where he camped for the night became little pieces of London; and we have lately had a Viceroy of India lamenting that Tottenham Court Road has stretched into the zenanas of the native states.
Yet in many places within the Administrative County the tendency is all towards "localising," or towards remaining separate centres. In Hampstead, for instance, the older residents buy most things of the local tradesmen, and newer families imitate them for sentimental or for social reasons. In poorer neighbourhoods this is much more the case. ”

“ It goes at a good pace, and it is the sign that you have reached the sphere of influence of the very outer suburbs. I at least have never entered London by road without meeting or passing one of them.
They are due to the enterprise of large job masters near the great tram and London omnibus termini; they are the signs of London's reaching out its arms still further; they are really the pioneers. In older days they started from Whitehall, from the Bank, from the Borough, and were called Short Stages. As real London spreads they cease to pay ”