Part 2

And yet the artificial climate of London is at its best when it is very obvious, and when it has strong scenes of sunset or storm to deal with. The time when it is insufferable is noonday or full afternoon on a cloudless day in summer, when there is not wind enough to drift it, helpless, out of town, and when it is not thick enough to keep the sun away. It makes the sunshine ugly. No beauty, even artificial or obvious, belongs to the smoke then, and it plays no antic pranks in mimicry of cloud. It has no shadow and no menace; it has no opportunity for stage-plays; it is disconcerted, and cannot make a penny theatre of its London. Every one must know such days, of which the essence should have been their purity, plain and splendid. By their light is the smoke seen to be nothing in the world but a sorry smirch. The horizon is thickened with it, and there it wreaks its chief 'effects,' but all near things are also oppressed by it; the spirit of the sunshine is gone, and a blazing sun upon miles of blue slate roofs and yellow houses, with the thin uncleanness of smoke just showing in the blaze, is actually that impossibility--sunshine without beauty.

After this, let us grant the smoke the tragi-comedy of its successes. These are generally connected with Westminster; it finds matter fitted to its manner in the surrounding architecture, and in the westward opening. It suppresses a great deal that is not very presentable, on the working side of the river, and it reveals what is Gothic on the other bank. It has a trick of being ashamed of its origin, for it hustles the long chimneys out of sight. It does really surprising things with the beautiful dome of St. Paul's; the very formlessness of its presence seems to give more value to that fine form. It has a way of showing the noble tops of clouds while it loses their bases in vagueness, which is not without beauty. You cannot see from what heavenly ranges of highlands those summits tower, and if they stand into the sunshine their isolation is the more remote and splendid. But even this is but a handy bit of scene-shifting; it touches no more than the fancy.

There is another effect of the London climate, besides the effect of sky scenery, and that is the local colour wherewith the characteristic smoke, mingled with a little rain to make a general water-colour, has painted the surfaces of the town in variants of black. The citizen who--unaware of such things as the quarter of the wind--takes his umbrella for fear of the thunderous look of a tremendous smoke-storm to leeward, is apt to take the touch of soot for the touch of time. Nevertheless, the two dark colours are quite unlike; time is browner, and has a depth in the tone, whereas soot is greyer, and at its blackest has no depth. It gives a shallow colour; and even those who love their sky streaked and tumbled into the chaos of smoke should not be allowed to defend the _aquarelle_ that colours their buildings.

It is true that we no longer offer columns of the Doric order for treatment by London water-colours; but all the Doric columns we already have are left subject to this extraordinary substitute for the colouring of a Laconic sun. We have discovered that terra-cotta and tiles resist the work of the climate, and no doubt London at a glance presents a less coal-blackened face than it once wore. But too much of the surface of London is still the work of that dashing impressionist, the climate.

THE TREES

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; they never withdraw into that state and condition of freedom, into that open hiding-place, that untravelled liberty, that wild seclusion at home, that refuge without flight, that secret unconcealed, that solitude unenclosed, that manumission of captives, that opportunity of Penelope--darkness.

The leaves of the street-side tree flutter bright emerald green through the whole night (out of town the discolouring night) of leafy summer. That local colour is never quenched, as human blushes are quenched at night. It rather takes a more conspicuous quality, under the closeness of the electric light; it is sharply green. Whereas the day has its mists and veils, and may at times darken a tree nearly black, by setting the sky alight behind it, the night has none of these shadows. The light of night is stationary and unchangeable, and there are some solitary trees here and there that undergo the unshifting illumination at the closest quarters; the light that knows no hours and makes no journey gleams near upon the motion of the leaves and glosses their faces. It is beforehand with the twilight, so that the dusk when it comes finds the place taken, and it will not let the tree go until the light of day flows in fully, and dawn is over.

The sharp green of the plane-tree is never covered, nor are the delicately sprinkled spots of the poplar-leaves mingled and massed, in these solitary citizen trees. It is in the avenues and glades of Kensington Gardens that Night has her way. There amends are made for the common day by a double mystery. Not a tree is so much as to be known by name; all kinds sigh together in the dark. The mass is sombre and alive, but betrays neither leaf nor colour. As violently as the spirit of the woods was driven away, through all the long daylight, by the sound, the breath, the blackness, and the stamp and seal of London, which permit nothing visible--not a blade of grass--to go unmarked by the proprietorship of this despotic city; so swiftly as the spirit of the woods was hooted and stared into banishment by day, so quickly, so intently, and in such a union of multitude does it softly return by night. Solitude comes, the movement of the forest comes, and remoteness, which by day must be sought where it abides, comes at a stride to London, and sits in the branches of the trees. Profound is the forest and august the sky whence the great and melancholy spirit of the woods comes to restore these daily altered elms.

Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked, unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute; the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.

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.

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; then the tender leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering glimpses of sky go through.

If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon the separate leaves.

Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the dark itself. 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. Not only is secret darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed upon its leaves.

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. I have seen a grey blue sky at the earliest moment when street lamps were alight at all, and radiant against the light grey of its invisible and equal clouds an electric lamp has been reared: an electric lamp of cold white light, pure and keen, and armed with intense and splendid arrows that would pierce day itself. Light grey sky and thrilling lamp together make--or so it seems to me--one of the most beautiful sights that eyes can see--the most refined, most severe, and most exquisite. This carbon electric light is so much disliked because, no doubt, it was generally seen under the glass and iron of a railway station. Seen with the sky it cannot but be seen to be most beautiful. The golden lights--electric lamps or gas lamps--have the beauty of fire, but the white lamp has the beauty of light. The golden, too, however, cannot be seen at their best but in one picture with the sky.

London at night has begun, of late, so to multiply her lights that they make all her scenery. A search-light suddenly draws the eye up to the chimney-pots (sweetly touched, they too, on the westernmost of their squalid sides) and to the unbroken sky; and then at once the eye travels down its shaft, revealing clouded air; and here a puff of steam from some machine at work on the new underground railway takes colour on its curves. Or the search-light makes the programme of a music-hall to shine black and white upon the wall; anon, an advertisement is written in light, and perpetually among the even progress of the carriage lights flit the lamps of bicycles. And if, from a heart of glowing lights, you look into the streets, you find them so filled with blue air that there is evident blue between you and the houses opposite.

The street-corner tree has always the golden gas and the blue air; upon it rains a sky that is not seen to darken for rain, and you hear the drops, silent elsewhere, upon its open leaves.

CHELSEA REACH

The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable. The Houses of Parliament have an air as though you could take them on along the river towards Chelsea without any necessity for stopping. But that very suggestion prompts its own refusal. No man would hold this characteristic to be one that makes for the beauty of a design; what there is of a really fine building never prompted the wish that it were to be prolonged. And although an embanking wall is not the same thing as a building, yet of even an embankment it may be said that the fact that it is already very long is at any rate a poor reason for making it longer. When the thing is not altogether admirable, it would be hard to urge a better reason for making no more of it. This is worth saying in consideration of a recent measure of improvement directed against the last bit left of the Chelsea foreshore. The measure was urged on the plea of uniformity, which obviously has reference to the beauty of the bank. Therefore when the protesters against the change were accused--as doubtless they were--of opposing it for reasons of sentiment, they might well answer that the County Council also has reasons of sentiment. '_Le coeur a ses raisons!_' The feeling for uniformity is a sentiment, like another. While, then, uniformity is one of the 'reasons of the heart' of a County Council, the inhabitants of Cheyne Walk are free to press reasons of their own hearts.

The Embankment stops short at its westward end, in the course of Cheyne Walk, just below the place where the river leaves a little bend which is an inlet, an incident, of the long Reach. Call the curve a gulf, and this is a little bay within it. The bay is a small, forgotten, abiding, unremarked shore, with a great deal of modern London not only below it, but above it, on its further side--that is, between it and the vaguest beginnings of the country. Nevertheless, it is not modern at all. It looks like the overlooked little bits of cottage, tiled cottage-roof, and cottage front-garden, that are to be seen forgotten in the roaring streets of Fulham--true bits of village in the depths of town. But in any case it is to go, even though the gulf is saved. Let us say at once that there may be two intelligible opinions as to the Embankment at Westminster and Charing Cross. There is something due to the worldly dignity of a great city. The distinction of London was once that it was not a great city but a great village. It was a little town, widespread; and until the raising of some of the best of the new buildings on the left bank, there was nothing conspicuously fine to contradict the village character except Somerset House. The great stations and the busy Gothic of the Houses of Parliament were not influential enough for this. Now, however, it is somewhat different. Two buildings at least in the line of new hotels and offices seem good enough to make rules. They are not of the dignity of Somerset House, but they will serve. For a space, then, where they stand, the village-London is done away. And only for a village-London, a London keeping its own distinctive character, would a broken, accidental, muddy shore, with its tidal rhythm of mud and wave, be fit. This left bank at least is, for a space, _grande ville_. We cannot altogether grudge its Embankment.

But if there is a mile of London village left--and therefore of the most London-like London--it is at Chelsea. The reason of the County Council's heart, even, ought to confess thus much. And the village-character is in its vitality on the curving foreshore of this long Reach. A great part of the district near is a village of yesterday, and mean enough, but the river-side of wharf and barge and tidal change is a village river-side of long ago. It is lowly enough, not mean at all. It is the scene of business as old as civilisation; man-power and horse-power, and the movement of wind and water, seem to do the greater part of the work among them. It is the counterpart of spade cultivation on the Jersey _coteaux_, though this is all river and that all earth; but both are simple. The chimneys on the right bank are a long way off, the gasworks higher up are out of sight. You can forget the great bridges down stream; and looking towards the light the view is animating.

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. The clouds come upon the south-west wind of the early year, a little cold with the strength of freshness, and not with chill, and give and withhold a hundred lights.

Those who do not like the name of mud should see how these lights are answered by the floor of mud in simple silver and steel. Twice a day the motion of the wave is there, twice a day the still shore. With that cradling change go the changes of the boats and barges at the wharves. All is life, but there is no colour, except where you very dimly perceive that a sail is red as the sails are on the Adriatic. It is a view to teach painting, to teach seeing. We have not such another school in London as Chelsea Reach. If Chelsea ever becomes _grande ville_ too, the shape of the river will be altered, and the profile of that curve, sharp and fine with masts against the west will be abolished: there will be no beauty of tides, no silver wet mirror, no barges.

There is nothing quite like Chelsea. The spoiling of Chelsea will not be the same thing as the spoiling of the country by pushing on a suburb, for instance; for in that case there is country beyond, only deferred. But there is no Cheyne Walk, no Chelsea, further up the river, or anywhere in the world of rivers.

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 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.

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 grass 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 grass 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, 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. 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 grass 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.