Every morning I get up early, and, going straight to the window, I see half London from an eighth-storey. I see factory chimneys poetised, and the sign of a great lion against the sky, and the dome of St. Paul’s rising magically out of the mist, and pearl-coloured minarets round about the horizon, and Waterloo Bridge suspended like a dream over the majestic river-, and all that sort of thing. I am obliged, in spite of myself, to see London through the medium of the artistic sentimentalism of ages. I am obliged even to see it through the individual eyes of Claude Monet, whose visions of it I nevertheless resent. I do not want to see, for example, Waterloo Bridge suspended like a dream over the majestic river. I much prefer to see it firmly planted in the plain water. And I ultimately insist on so seeing it. The Victoria Embankment has been, and still is, full of pitfalls for the sentimentalist in art as in sociology; I would walk warily to avoid them. The river at dawn, the river at sunset, the river at midnight (with its myriad lamps, of course)!... Let me have the river at eleven a. m. for a change, or at tea-time. And let me patrol its banks without indulging in an orgy of melodramatic contrasts.
I will not be carried away by the fact that the grand hotels, with their rosy saloons and fair women (not invariably or even generally fair!), look directly down upon the homeless wretches huddled on the Embankment benches. Such a juxtaposition is accidental and falsifying. Nor will I be imposed upon by the light burning high in the tower of St. Stephen’s to indicate that the legislators are watching over Israel. I think of the House of Commons at question-time, and I hear the rustling as two hundred schoolboyish human beings (not legislators nor fathers of their country) simultaneously turn over a leaf of two hundred question-papers, and I observe the self-consciousness of honourable members as they walk in and out, and the naÏve pleasure of the Labour member in his enormous grey wideawake, and the flower in the buttonhole of the white-haired and simple ferocious veteran of democracy, and the hobnobbing over stewed tea and sultana on the draughty terrace.
Nor, when I look at the finely symbolic architecture of New Scotland Yard, will I be obsessed by the horrors of the police system and of the prison system and by the wrongness of the world. I regard with fraternal interest the policeman in his shirt-sleeves lolling at a fourth-floor window. Thirty, twenty, years ago people used to be staggered by the sudden discovery that, in the old Hebraic sense of the word, there was no God. It winded them, and some of them have never got over it. Nowadays people are being staggered by the sudden discovery that there is something fundamentally wrong with the structure of society. This discovery induces a nervous disease which runs through whole thoughtful multitudes. I suffer from it myself. Nevertheless, just as it is certain that there is a God, of some kind, so it is certain that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the structure of society. There is something wrong—but it is not fundamental. There always has been and always will be something wrong. Do you suppose, O reformer, that when land-values are taxed, and war and poverty and slavery and overwork and underfeeding and disease and cruelty have disappeared, that the structure of society will seem a whit the less wrong? Never! A moderate sense of its wrongness is precisely what most makes life worth living.
0147
Between my lofty dwelling and the river is a large and beautiful garden, ornamented with statues of heroes. It occupies ground whose annual value is probably quite ten thousand pounds—that is to say, the interest on a quarter of a million. It is tended by several County Council gardeners, who spend comfortable lives in it, and doubtless thereby support their families in dignity. Its lawns are wondrous; its parterres are full of flowers, and its statues are cleansed perhaps more thoroughly than the children of the poor. This garden is, as a rule, almost empty. I use it a great deal, and sometimes I am the only person in it. Its principal occupants are well-dressed men of affairs, who apparently employ it, as I do, as a ground for reflection. Nursemaids bring into it the children of the rich. The children of the poor are not to be seen in it—they might impair the lawns, or even commit the horrible sin of picking the blossoms. During the only hours when the poor could frequent it, it is thoughtfully closed. The poor pay, and the rich enjoy. If I paid my proper share of the cost of that garden, each of my visits would run me into something like half-a-sovereign. My pleasure is being paid for up all manner of side-streets. This is wrong; it is scandalous. I would, and I will, support any measure that promises to rectify the wrongness. But in the meantime I intend to have my fill of that garden, and to savour the great sensations thereof. I will not be obsessed by one aspect of it.
The great sensations are not perhaps what one would have expected to be the great sensations. Neither domes, nor towers, nor pinnacles, nor spectacular contrasts, nor atmospheric effects, nor the Wordsworthian “mighty heart”! It is the County Council tram, as copied from Glasgow and Manchester, that appeals more constantly and more profoundly than anything else of human creation to my romantic sensibility “Yes,” I am told, “the tram-cars look splendid at night!” I do not mean specially at night. I mean in the day. And further, I have no desire to call them ships, or to call them aught but tram-cars. For me they resemble just tram-cars, though I admit that when forty or fifty of them are crowded together, they remind me somewhat of a herd of elephants. They are enormous and beautiful; they are admirably designed, and they function perfectly; they are picturesque, inexplicable, and uncanny. They pome to rest with the gentleness of doves, and they hurtle through the air like shells. Their motion—smooth, delicate and horizontal—is always delightful. They are absolutely modern, new, and original. There was never anything like them before, and only when something different and better supersedes them will their extraordinary gliding picturesqueness be appreciated. They never cease. They roll along day and night without a pause; in the middle of the night you can see them glittering away to the ends of the county. At six o’clock in the morning they roll up over the horizon of Westminster Bridge in hundreds incessantly, and swing downwards and round sharply away from the Parliament which for decades refused them access to their natural gathering-place. They are a thrilling sight. And see the pigmy in the forefront of each one, rather like a mahout on the neck of an elephant, doing as he likes with the obedient monster! And see the scores of pigmies inside, each of them, black dots that jump out like fleas and disappear like fleas! The loaded tram stops, and in a moment it is empty, and of the contents there is no trace. The contents are dissolved in London.. . . And then see London precipitate the contents again; and watch the leviathans, gorged, glide off in endless procession to spill immortal souls in the evening suburbs!
But the greatest sensation offered by the garden, though it happens to be a mechanical contrivance, is entirely independent of the County Council. It is—not the river—but the movement of the tide. Imagination is required in order to conceive the magnitude, the irresistibility, and the consequences of this tremendous shuttle-work, which is regulated from the skies, rules the existence of tens of thousands of people, and casually displaces incalculable masses of physical matter. And the curious human thing is that it fails to rouse the imagination of the town. It cleaves through the town, and yet is utterly foreign to it, having been estranged from it by the slow evolutionary process. All those tram-cars roll up over the horizon of Westminster Bridge, and cross the flood and run for a mile on its bank, and not one man in every tenth tram-car gives the faintest attention to the state of the river. A few may carelessly notice that the tide is “in” or “out,” but how many realise the implications? For all they feel, the river might be a painted stream! Yo wonder that the touts crying “Steamboat! Steamboat!” have a mournful gesture, and the “music on board” sounds thin, like a hallucination, as the shabby paddle-wheels pound the water! The cause of the failure of municipal steamers is more recondite than the yellow motor-cars of the journals which took pride in having ruined them.
And the one satisfactory inference from the failure is that human nature is far less dependent on nonhuman nature than vague detractors of the former and devotees of the latter would admit. It is, after all, rather fine to have succeeded in ignoring the Thames!
