The Ugliness and the Charm of London.

London, July 3, 1902.

Vastness and dinginess are the two features of London which make the deepest impression upon the visitor from America. Byron's description is exact—

Up to the time of Sir Richard Whittington, in the sixteenth century, the burning of coal in London was considered such a nuisance that it was punished by death. A dispensation to burn coal was first made in favor of Whittington, and this innovation on his part has affected the great city, of which he was four times Lord Mayor, infinitely more than the success of his celebrated venture in bringing up and selling a cat, which enabled him to lay the foundation of other investments. Yet the story of the cat is known to boys and girls the world over, while the story of the coal is known to comparatively few, even of their elders.

Coal serves the same purposes in London that it does elsewhere, of course. But, while elsewhere it warms only thousands of people, and makes steam for only thousands of factories, locomotives, and steamboats, here it warms and works for more than five millions. The output of smoke from this unparalleled consumption of coal is, of course, something enormous, and when we consider that the weather itself is frequently, perhaps I may say generally, dull, heavy and thick, with an amount of clouds and rain unknown to our brilliant American climate, it is not strange that the fogs of London are the thickest and most dangerous in the world, sometimes producing complete darkness at midday, and necessitating the lighting of the gas, as though it were midnight, and at other times producing a peculiar gloom, which is so impervious to light itself that the traffic of the streets has to be stopped for hours. Nor is it strange that the city is begrimed to an extraordinary degree from one end to the other.

I have a friend in America, whom I sometimes jestingly call an "Anglomaniac," because he admires Great Britain and her belongings so much. I once accused him of trying to convince me that the sky was bluer and the grass greener in Canada than in the United States—and who speaks of the blackness of the London buildings as "richness." It is interesting to find that he is supported in this view by some of the best writers on London. Hare, for instance, in speaking of St. Paul's Cathedral, emphasizes this point, "Sublimely impressive in its general outlines, it has a peculiar sooty dignity all its own, which, externally, raises it immeasureably above the fresh, modern-looking St. Peter's at Rome. G. A. Sala says, in one of his capital papers, that it is really the better for 'all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up every day from their foul and grimy censers.' Here and there only is the original grey of the stone seen through the overlaying blackness." Nathaniel Hawthorne, too, says, "It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black." By the way, the whole cost of St. Paul's, which was nearly four million dollars, was paid by a tax on every chaldron of coal brought into the port of London, "on which account it is said that the cathedral has a special claim of its own to its smoky exterior."

Whatever one may think of these views, as to the Æsthetic value of soot on great stone buildings like St. Paul's, it must be admitted by all that London, as a whole, is intensely ugly. Henry James, speaking of one of the fashionable quarters of the city, says, "As you walk along the streets, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight, stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curbstone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty." In the indictment thus brought against one quarter of the city, it will be observed that there are other counts besides the soot, such as the monotony and plainness of the architecture and the character of the building materials, and in both particulars London does compare very unfavorably with some other cities.

There are, of course, some very handsome stone buildings, such as the British Museum, the new Parliament Buildings, many of the churches, and some of the government offices and private residences, but most of the houses are constructed of ugly brownish yellow brick, and capped with rigid rows of chimney pots. The same thing is true of English towns in general, and is one of the most obvious points of inferiority on their part to the cities and towns of Scotland. Of Glasgow as it was in the eighteenth century, then, of course, but a small place in comparison with its present size, Sir Walter Scott wrote, in Rob Roy, "The principal street was broad and important, decorated with public buildings of an architecture, rather striking than correct in point of taste, and running between rows of tall houses, built of stone; the fronts of which were occasionally richly ornamented with mason-work—a circumstance which gave the street an imposing air of dignity and grandeur, of which most English towns are in some measure deprived, by the slight, unsubstantial, and perishable quality and appearance of the bricks with which they are constructed." Of the later Glasgow of his time, Hawthorne said, "It is the stateliest city in the kingdom." The adjective was well chosen. Those solid, strong, stone-built Scotch cities, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and others, are stately, as no English cities of brick are or can be; though there is also a suggestion of sombreness or severity about them, which seems to belong to that dour, grey land of the North; so that, after all, the Scottish cities do not afford the strongest contrast to London's dingy masses of brick. To find that, we must look to some of the cities of the Continent, especially Paris, the cleanest, brightest, and most beautiful of all the great capitals of the world. The Parisian climate is clearer, there is less fog and smoke, the houses are built of a white stone that gives the city a singular fairness to the eye, quite different from the rather gloomy greyness of the Scottish cities, and, of course, antipodal to the brick and grime of London. Moreover, the streets of Paris, driven this way and that through squalid tenement districts by Baron Hausmann, in his renovation of the city thirty or forty years ago, are broad and splendid thoroughfares, abounding in pure air, bright sunlight and green trees, all as different as possible from the cramped and tortuous streets and alleys of the British metropolis. "London has had no aedile like Hausmann." Few things add so much to the attractiveness of great cities as handsome streets along the water fronts. In Paris, on both sides of the Seine throughout its entire course in the city, are broad, well-paved, and well-shaded Quais, flanked by noble rows of stone buildings, while in London the Victoria Embankment is almost the only worthy improvement along the Thames. This Embankment is unquestionably a fine work, but as one walks along the broad stone pavement of it, the view he gets on the other side of the river is made up principally of dirty wharves and hideous warehouses.

In many respects, also, London is untidy. Orange peel, paper and trash are much in evidence. Why should there not be street scavengers like those who keep even the small towns in France and Germany quite free from that kind of litter?

Strictly speaking, London is not a city, but, as Madame de Stael called it, "a province of brick," and it looks as though it might become a continent, for, though there are already more people in it than in the whole of Scotland, and more than twice as many as in the whole of Norway, it is still growing rapidly. It has more than three thousand miles of streets. In spreading thus, the great city has reached out to, and absorbed, many towns that once stood around it. By the way, this accounts, to some extent for the fact that so many streets in London have the same name. I venture to think that the most preposterous and vexatious system of nomenclature ever in vogue is that which has been employed for the streets of London. Until quite recently there were 166 different streets in this city bearing the name of New, 151 Church, 129 Union, 127 York, 119 John, 109 George, and so on. Of late some part of this infuriating ambiguity has been removed by certain changes, but enough of it still remains to baffle and puzzle the visitor, and to cause him the loss of much valuable time and some temper.

I have not flattered London. The picture drawn above is repulsive. Perhaps some of my readers are ready to ask whether such a place can be attractive. Yes. Bulwer says of it, in Ernest Maltravers, "The public buildings are few, and, for the most part, mean; the monuments of antiquity not comparable to those which the pettiest town in Italy can boast of; the palaces are sad rubbish; the houses of our peers and princes are shabby and shapeless heaps of bricks. But what of all this? The spirit of London is in her thoroughfares—her population! What wealth—what cleanliness—what order—what animation! How majestic, and yet how vivid, is the life that runs through her myriad veins!" Externally, Paris is incomparably more beautiful than London, but the fundamental characteristics of the French people are not to be named with those of the British. The charm of London is deeper than that of Paris; it wears better; it lasts longer.

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell, as they sat in the Mitre Tavern, in the centre of the city, "the happiness of London is not to be conceived, but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we sit than in all the rest of the kingdom." And again, "He who is tired of London is tired of existence."

It is the history of the city and the character of the people, rather than the shape and color of their houses, that give London her abiding charm. And, with her vast treasures of literature, science, and art, what a paradise the great smoky city is to all readers and students, in spite of her wretched climate, and her oppressively dingy tout ensemble!

It is only fair to add that the famous French sculptor, M. Rodin, has recently been expressing his admiration for the smoky British metropolis, declaring that "nothing could be more beautiful than the rich, dark, and ruddy tones of London buildings, in the grey and golden haze of the afternoon."