Part 1

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LONDON IMPRESSIONS

LONDON IMPRESSIONS

ETCHINGS AND PICTURES IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY WILLIAM HYDE

AND ESSAYS BY ALICE MEYNELL

WESTMINSTER ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO. 2 WHITEHALL GARDENS 1898

LIST OF PICTURES

FULL-PAGE PLATES

THE RIVER ETCHING _Frontispiece_

WESTMINSTER ABBEY PHOTOGRAVURE _facing page_ 2

TERRIBLE LONDON Do. " 4

AN IMPRESSION Do. " 6

END OF A WINTER DAY Do. " 8

UTILITARIAN LONDON Do. " 10

KENSINGTON GARDENS Do. " 12

NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY Do. " 14

THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER Do. " 16

ST. PAUL'S AT DAWN Do. " 18

WATERLOO BRIDGE Do. " 20

BELOW BRIDGE Do. " 22

ST. PAUL'S FROM WATLING STREET Do. " 24

THE VICTORIA TOWER Do. " 28

PLATES IN THE TEXT

ST. PAUL'S IN A STORM PHOTOGRAVURE _On Title-page_

A CHEAP MARKET Do. _page_ v

A FORGOTTEN CORNER Do. " 1

THE NERVES OF LONDON Do. " 6

THE EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT Do. " 9

TREES ETCHING " 12

THE LAST BOAT PHOTOGRAVURE " 19

BELOW BRIDGE Do. " 22

A BACK STREET Do. " 24

A COFFEE STALL Do. " 26

RAIN, SMOKE, AND TRAFFIC Do. " 29

WESTMINSTER ETCHING " 31

LIST OF ESSAYS

PAGE

THE LONDON SUNDAY 1

A PILGRIM 4

THE EFFECT OF LONDON 6

THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE 9

THE TREES 12

CHELSEA REACH 16

THE SPRING 19

BELOW BRIDGE 22

THE ROADS 26

THE SMOULDERING CITY 29

THE LONDON SUNDAY

This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The phrase is never varied--a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, 'Oh, the London Sunday!' and another, 'It must be too dreadful for foreigners!' and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater number do not know even so much.

Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as far as the eye may see--a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow, wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the morning and to the east in the evening--suns in rows, and suns that run fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do nothing--not even much talking--they give a false air of lawlessness to the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly, in great numbers in the open spaces--the vague lands on the other side of Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their houses in the free afternoon.

In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly as to get a continuous Sunday impression--the day and the people flowing, unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through 'town,' through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.

Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent. But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of the race--squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise, but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey.

Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks. Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the Blue-Coat School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary's in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white a golden rose. St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind, and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition--a Dickens tradition, it seems--of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of the congregations: in this open church there are but three people, exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.

There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long, staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet. Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind to sift the darkness from the sunlight.

A PILGRIM

Now and then a firefly strays from the vineyard into the streets of an Italian city, and goes quenched in the light of the shops. 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. Indestructibly fragile, the most delicate of all the visible signs of the breeze, it goes to town, makes light of the capital, sets at nought the thoroughfares and the omnibuses, especially flouts the Park, one may suppose, where it does not grow. It hovers and leaps at about the height of first-floor windows, by many a mile of dull drawing-rooms, a country creature quite unconverted to London and undismayed. This _flâneur_ makes as little of our London as his ancestor made of Chaucer's.

Sometimes it takes a flight on a stronger wind, and its whiteness shows dark with slight shadow against bright clouds, as the whiter snow-flake also looks dark from its shadow side. Then it comes down in a tumult of flight upon the city. It is a very strong little seed-pod, set with arms, legs, or sails--so ingeniously set that though all grow from the top of the pod their points together make a globe; on these it turns a 'cart-wheel' like a human boy--like many boys, in fact, it must overtake on its way through the less respectable of the suburbs--only better. Every limb, itself so fine, is feathered with little plumes that are as thin as autumn spider-webs. Nothing steps so delicately as that seed, or upon such extreme tiptoe. But it does not walk far; the air bears the charges of the wild journey.

Thistle-seeds--if thistle-seeds they be--make few and brief halts, then roll their wheel on the stones for a while, and then the wheel is a-wing again. You encounter them in the country, setting out for town on a south wind, and in London there is not a street they do not recklessly stray along. For they use our arbitrary streets; it does not seem that they make a bee-line over the top of the houses, and cross London thus. They use the streets which they treat so lightly. They conform, for the time, to human courses, and stroll down Bond Street and turn up Piccadilly, and go to the Bank on a long west wind--their strolling being done at a certain height, in moderate mid-air.

They generally travel wildly alone, but now and then you shall see two of them, as you see butterflies go in couples, flitting at leisure at Charing Cross. The extreme ends of their tender plumes have touched and have lightly caught each other. But singly they go by all day, with long rises and long descents as the breeze may sigh, or more quickly on a high level way of theirs. Nothing wilder comes to town--not even the scent of hay on morning winds at market-time in June; for the hay is for cab-horses, and it is at home in the clattering mews, and has a London habit of its own.

White meteor, lost star, bright as a cloud, the seed has many images of its radiant flight. But there is only one thing really like it--the point of light caught by a diamond, with the regular surrounding rays.

THE EFFECT OF LONDON

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. In cities abroad, for instance, you find some blank spaces of wall on the fronts of the houses, narrow spaces in the north, but wider and wider as you go south. In other cities is here and there a closing of the eyelids with a smoothing of the faces of the streets; here alone the unshuttered windows are set close together; the street glances and chatters with the false vivacity of these perpetual windows. Shops and windows run into rows all but touching one another, or what interval there might have been betwixt is, by the care of architects, in some manner harassed and beset.

Add to this the black garments of the crowd, which make every man conspicuous in the light, and the abrupt and minute patches of white--exceedingly pure white of sharp shapes and angles--scattered throughout the drifting and intercrossing multitude. The white of a footman's shirt, the white of the collars of innumerable men, the white letters of advertisements, the white of the label at the back of cabs and hansoms, and many and many another little square, triangle, and line of white, are visible to the utmost distances. They have an emphasis that is never softened; nothing, except snow, could be whiter; and nothing, perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the street view.

There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is, perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field, where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless, pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the distance of mountains.

Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still young--the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash, all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. 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. Summer and day make the streets impossible for the painter. 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.

But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness. Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming fish's tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and dreary--those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent offends, the light wave of a fish's-tail street pleases the eye, with its fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.

Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. 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. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart--old rights or the accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has tended to set streets a-flowing too.

But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain wall is also black.

THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE

It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial climate, and by treating our own handiwork--the sky of our manufacture--with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description. The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are 'lurid' to no very grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the circumference be made of--mist from mountain heights or vapour from that series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of his long, distributed lights, and straight, infallible, divergent shadows that pick off the points and pinnacles of a thousand distances. The lowering sun will not permit the smoke to show so shapeless, so lifeless, so unbounded as it is; he takes his place in the middle of a wheel, and commands at any rate a mechanical order.

Otherwise, and without a sun lowered into your picture, the smoke-mingled sky is the most unplanned in the world. It has no confederacy, and no direction. Nothing leads, and there are no figures, no troops, no companies; there is no history, nor approach. The smoke is helpless. It is perpetually subject to gravitation; no wind makes it buoyant, and no electric impetus lifts it against a wind. It constantly and drearily drops, as you may see if you look against any London horizon; the minute shower that it carries never ceases and never lifts, but sifts down momently from the low sky into which the chimneys raised it at first. That one upward spring was all its life. Thenceforth it does but drift until it is all shed, to the last black atom, upon the face of the town.

And yet you may, twenty times a day in London, hear the smoke called cloud. Thunderstorms are announced as lurking in the heart of the powerless bosom of the smoke, and showers are threatened where there never was anything so fresh as a drop of rain. The puny darkness is supposed capable of lightnings, and out of the grime is expected the thunderbolt. The splendid name of the cloud is given to this poor local vesture of decay; no use or custom seems sufficient to make the London sky of mechanical suspension familiar to the citizen; when he faces it at the end of a brief distance he calls it by the names proper to the celestial heights, and he is hardly convinced of the truth when he sees it walk his streets.

But, indeed, he might have learned long ago that there is no life in his storm, and that when thunder comes it wears a different gloom. The worst is that with the authentic darkness of cloud comes so often the imitation, and a town tempest is not only mocked, but hidden and covered, by the pother of mere smoke, so that the citizen does not well learn to distinguish. But he who has ever really known the cloud will not make that ignominious confusion. He knows the difference in storm, and so much more the greater difference in sunshine; he will not call by the name of cloud a thing that shows the dark shadow grimly enough, but never the light sweetly, and is naturally incapable of white.