Eastern Europe, full of the immobile misery of thrashed horses, and the Irishman leaning out over the ship's rail, as she goes, to curse England. Here is the highlycoloured, sharply-accented life of a port; you sniff queer juxtapositions; a tonic curiosity aerates your mind and you feel as if you were travelling. ness. VI The face of every town has its delicious differentWhat urban countenance is so amusingly demure as that of Stratford-on-Avon, with its set air of contained geniality, animated leisure, ordered complacency, everything with a note of reference in it to the auriferous Bard. For warmth give me red Knutsford: it glows like a firelit room full of old masters in heavy gilt frames; its mellow, settled habitableness the sum of all that men and women neither poor nor very rich could think of, in about nine hundred years, to make their town good to live in. Even Penrith, the windy little town of temperance inns, where trains take breath for a minute on their way to Scotland, and the cramped steep streets are full on Tuesday mornings of shambling, plunging cows and of tall blue-eyed men with lean reddish-brown faces-Penrith has a braced, hardy look of its own. But of all cities, London, after all, is surely the finest to look at. You find it out if you have lived there in your youth, and then been long away, but sometimes revisit the place. You see it then with effectually opened eyes, as the man who has long been in some tropical wild sees rural England revealed while his train comes up from Plymouth through two hundred miles of trimmed, fenced garden, half-miraculous, half-laughable and wholly endearing. Fleet Street when the lamps are being lit on a clear evening; Southwark, its ramshackle wharves and mud foreshores, seen from Waterloo Bridge at five o'clock on a sunny June morning, the eighteenth-century bank of the river looking across to its nineteenth-century bank; the Temple's enclaves of peace where, the roar of the Strand comes so softened, you hear the lowest chirp of a sparrow, twenty yards away, planted clear and edgy, like a little foreground figure, on that dim background of sound; the liberal arc of a mighty circle of buildings massed above the Embankment, drawn upon the darkness in dotted lines of light, as a night train brings you in to Charing Cross; the long line of big ships dropping noiselessly down the silent river, past Greenwich and Grays, on the ebb of a midnight high tide-O, there are endless courses to this feast. And it changes incessantly. Westminster Hall and the Abbey may give you a faint illusion of permanence, just as the Matterhorn does, though it is falling down into the valleys all day. But quit your London for some thirty years and then come back and look. Wych Street, unwidened since the Plague, has disappeared; Clare Market is gone, so is New Inn; the island church west of old Temple Bar is islanded now with a vengeance, right out in mid-stream, with the buses flowing all round it-it that used, like a Thames ait, to hug the northern bank, with only a small back-water of roadway between; a little farther west along the Strand there has vanished that curious old constriction of a London artery, the pinched gut where the thud of the East-and-West traffic used to fall almost silent as all the horses slowed down to walk through the strait. And where is the old Globe Theatre, with its redolent name? And the Olympic, whose plaster and brick must surely have been all a-tingle with the quaint ingenuous tushery of "strong" Victorian drama, as old fiddles are with all the melody ever made on them? And, then the catacombish Opéra Comique, into which your youthful feet would descend as into a mine, leaving behind the blessed light of day? What, "all my pretty ones?" Yea, and the old Strand Theatre too, on the south of the Strand, where "Our Boys" reigned in glory. 66 Yet it is all perfectly right. Let everything—almost everything change with a will, in any city that you love. People gush and moan too much about the loss of ancient buildings of no special note—“ landmarks" and "links with the past." In towns, as in human bodies, the only state of health is one of rapid wasting and repair. Wych Street, Clare Market, New Innthey matter about as much as so many hairs or the tips of so many nails of some beloved person. The time for misgiving would come if the architectural tissues of London ever ceased to be swiftly dissolved and renewed. Woe unto her only when, like Ravenna or Venice, she buries no longer her architectural dead but keeps their bodies about her till they and she all mortify together into one great curio of petrifaction, like some antique mummy, a prodigy of embalmment. Kingsway, Aldwych and all the demolitions that made way for them were salutary signs of molecular activity in London's body. The Old Bailey was no bitter loss. Over Christ's Hospital itself the wise lover of London soon wiped away his tears. In the great ages of art, buildings have not been regarded as if immortality were their due. It is but an invalidish modern notion that any house which is handsome or has had an illustrious tenant ought to be coddled into the preternatural old age which the Struldbrugs of Gulliver found to be so disappointing. Cities whose health is robust are never content to live, as it were, on their funded capital of achievement in building or anything else; they push on; they think more of building well now than of not pulling down. And no cities are so excitingly beautiful as those in which architecture is still alive and at work, as it is in London to-day. Their faces are both ancient and young, without disharmony, for all good work, of any time or kind, can live at peace with the rest. The old looks and the young looks play a chequer-work over such faces; it may be as pleasant as any that patches of light and shadow make on the side of a hill on days of sunshine and blown cloud. T JOYS OF THE STREET Within this hour it will be dinner-time: I HERE are islands in the Pacific where one of your prime aims in life is not to be killed in your bed the next time your house is blown down by a hurricane. The hurricanes come at intervals of a few years; even earthquakes are quite on the cards; however your house may be built, it will have to come down. And so, when people build in those parts, they do not try to put up any cloud-capped towers or gorgeous palaces of stone; better far to have one side of a light match-box fall in on your head while you sleep than to have the most handsomely vaulted roof of massy marble or veined alabaster do the same thing. So the houses are built lightly of wood, the whole of each on one floor. If they have to be big, as a hospital has, they are made with a rich abundance of doors, so that, as soon as the air or the earth is smitten with frenzy, all the more helpless inmates can be swiftly carried out and laid down in the open. As you would imagine, the architecture of places like this has a vivid eloquence of its own. To the reconnoitring eyes on every approaching ship it cries out the severe conditions on which life is retained in that island. |