§ 2.

So, then, although it carries us a certain distance, that bundle of street analyses, even if it were considerably enlarged, must not be looked upon as final. The alternative method, of course, is the eclectic—a searching out of “notes,” of the vistas, the groupings, the buildings, that leap incisively out from the mass and engage the memory—an arrangement of these things in some considered order.

And to such a collection that bunch of street-portraits (their subjects, to be frank, having been chosen rather less off-handedly than might appear) forms an admirable nucleus. And since it is at the moments of arrival and departure that the nerves are most sensitive to aspects—since it is, in consequence, the first or the last glimpse of a place that remains, for most of us, its practical, portable symbol—the collection should next include a note of the way Liverpool reveals herself at each of her four great vestibules—at the Landing Stage, at the Exchange Station, at Lime Street Station, at the Central Station.

From within the railings that fringe the tiny courtyard outside the last, for instance, it is as a neatly compacted vista of twinkling shops, of converging roofs, minarets, and flag-poles, that, in the day-time, she rather alluringly presents herself. There is much delicate cross-hatching of shade and shine, much blithe gold-lettering on the walls. There are flower-sellers on the kerb, a string of hansoms glisten in the roadway, an electric car, double-decked and yellow, surges down the hill from Ranelagh Street and provides the due top-note.... Emphatically, a most efficient place, this Liverpool, glossy and high-stepping, at once elegant and active. And with nightfall it emerges as a place of quite exceptional loveliness. That checked curve of the receding buildings, giving the prospect depth without diminution, grades the lights without disparting them, knits them together, both the near and the far, into one exquisitely modulated chorus. Moon-green, mistletoe-white, orange, amethyst, and pearl, are their principal colours, and in this chamber of converging lines the massed clusters branch and leap and linger with the most wonderful effect of tender ardency.... Emphatically, a place, this Liverpool, possessing very singular possibilities of beauty.

The Liverpool that awaits one outside the orifices that lead from Exchange Station, however, is of a vastly different quality.[3] Roofed with a remote, unimportant sky, floored (say) with a vague shimmer from recent rain, and hung monotonously about with carefully unobtrusive buildings, it seems less like one of the central spaces of the City than a mere ante-chamber to rooms—possibly magnificent, possibly squalid—that lie somewhere beyond; and in the mornings, when the hosts from the northern suburbs are pouring silently through, that effect is irresistibly emphasized. It is all neutral, non-committal. The solitary stains of colour are the hoardings that flame up before the Moorfields entrance, and the immemorial fruit-barrow that picks out against the grey in Bixteth Street.

One’s impression of the Lime Street Liverpool, again, is always tinged by the consciousness of that superb stretch of “smutted Greek,” Liverpool’s most deliberate effort in the direction of sustained architectural spectacle, which one sees just the moment before or just the moment after. Without that consciousness, the flat-chested, multi-windowed, watery-complexioned hotels that droop, perhaps a little dismally, down the hill opposite, and the uncertain traffic that spreads itself thinly out upon the vast road-spaces in between, would probably not convince one that their claim to dignity was extraordinary. But as it is, they do seem to catch a kind of magnificence, a magnificence that is positively almost shared by the little ragged sentry-box of the Punch and Judy show set oddly down, like a grandfather’s clock, plump in the middle distance—a queer axis for the cars that curve clangorously about it. As one advances, the black chine of St. George’s Hall, a long grey ripple of steps lapping its base, thrusts forward more and more emphatically, and so one passes into sight of that plateau of classicism—St. George’s Hall, the Museum, the Library, the Walker Art Gallery, which Mr. Hay has described so perfectly upon another page.

Deliberately majestical here, gravely featureless in Tithebarn Street, elegant from the Central, Liverpool achieves within the last of her four porticoes an order of effects more urgent and memorable still. For it is behind the Landing Stage that many of the car routes of the City terminate, and the great space of unshadowed roadway, empty of all buildings save the new-sprung Dock Offices, is really a brave platform on which the cars endlessly wheel and interlace. By daylight it is wonderful enough: the long files of maroon and yellow monsters curving, separating, recoiling; the constant scream and clangour of their onset; the rich white bulk of the Dock Board building floating serenely above the press. But towards evening, when every car becomes a great cresset of prisoned flame, the golden plenty of it all, the intricate splendour of this vast terrace of racing and receding fire, is a thing to leave the senses glutted and overborne. Liverpool is no longer a place of architecture, grave or dignified. It is a mere spectacle, a piece of golden pageantry. And even the beauty of the dominating building, ivory and pale rose as it accepts the sunset, luminous and firm-bodied as an eastern cloud at the end of a day of wind, seems no more than a fit accessory to the fabric of woven lights astir below.

§ 3.

It is one or other of those vignettes that stands for Liverpool in the minds of all but all those who live without her walls; but there still remains another touch or two to add before the symbol we are attempting to create can be called completed, before this inevitable, initial slab of what must begin to appear uncommonly like sheer “word-painting” (crude word for a cruder occupation) can be brought to a close. Already we have taken the sense of a group of her central ways; already we have surprised her at each of her four great doorways. It now remains to brush in a connecting note or two, an episode or so from the less formal interspaces:

An appreciation, say, of one of those admirable fortalice-like structures, the warehouses, which clamp all the lower end of the mass and convert the little connecting roadways into canyons of sumptuous gloom. Four-square and massive, they are always shapely; the old stock brick, hand-made, of which so many of them are built, gives them a fine hunger for ripe colouring; and from their vertical lines of doorways—six, eight, ten, a dozen, of them superimposed in a slot that runs from roof to base—they gain the power to charge their austerity with something very near to positive elegance....

A reference to one other of the connecting ways: thin sabre wounds of light drawn across the dense body of offices—to such a one as Leather Lane, for instance, slipping stealthily from Tithebarn Street to Dale Street, a sun-bright tremor of traffic, dainty and diminished as an image in a lens, flickering delicately across its outlet....

An impression of some such typical grouping of the mobile and the architectural as one gets, say, at the top of one of the three parallel ways—Chapel Street, Water Street, James Street—which run down from the centre towards the River: a crawling steep of men, cars, carriages, and drays; the flags and signs of a horde of shipping offices accompanying its descent; slow masts and a couple of great funnels moving seriously beyond. Or of such another grouping as one finds being repeated, over and over again, at the base of the brown stone curtain that falls from St. Nicholas’ Churchyard to the street below: a troop of sandwichmen, their beat ended, piling their placards against the wall; a couple of ramping Clydesdales—head-chains glinting, feet asplay for purchase—taking the Chapel Street hill; an aproned carter swinking at their heads; a white-flecked mound of cotton-bales lurching stolidly at their heels; high over all, sailing equably against the blue, the fretted top-gallant of the Church....

A memorandum of one of the older (not the old—there are none) scraps of the City, pushed a little to one side, antiquated before they are antique: of that jolly little pot-bellied barber’s shop at the foot of Mount Pleasant (Mr. Hay has described that, too), and of how the slick new mass of the juxtaposed University Club crushes it into insignificance—a ready-made metaphor; or of that delightful Georgian residence in Wolstenholme Square, not far from Bold Street, with lorries clattering about its mild old cobbles, and a trio of extremely dirty tinsmiths bullying a carter from the top of its dignified stairway....

An appreciation of that tumultuary roofscape one surveys from the steps of the Art Gallery, a thing to be seen against the afterglow, a clean-verged, leaping monochrome of mauve on chrysoprase....

And there you have the main letters in the alphabet of masonry which Liverpool uses to write out some part of her confessions.

§ 4.

Now, it may be observed that I have made no reference whatever to some of the most conspicuous majuscules in that alphabet. I have said nothing, for instance, about the Municipal Offices, nor of the Town Hall, nor of the Sailors’ Home, nor of the new Cotton Exchange, nor of the old Custom House, nor of a dozen other much-photographed architectural plums. This is not laxity, nor a sudden dearth of adjectives, nor a disgust with the business of scene-painting. There is, as they say, a reason; and if I disclose that reason, the confessions which those dropped capitals bestud may tend to grow more legible. Such disclosure might serve, at all events, to suggest a co-ordinating theory, to provide a kind of zoetrope into which those detached impressions and Mr. Hay’s pictures may equally be fitted, and which, judiciously twirled, may induce them all to swim into a single animate and breathing image.

The fact is, then, that when Liverpool desires most to impress she expresses least. When she draws herself together for a splendid outburst, she grows inarticulate. Her considered effects are mostly affectations. So that to pick out those effects, to arrange all the majuscules together, is not merely to print her confession in another type: it is to print a confession of another type. One omits these deliberate, self-consciously impressive things from one’s notes, not because Liverpool contains very little of such things, but rather because such things contain very little of Liverpool.

For the spirit behind this fabric is essentially a spirit absorbed in other matters than the deliberate, preconsidered capture of the beautiful.... Out of the several characteristics we have already noted—the swiftness of the City’s growth, its glittering modernity, its tireless, deft adjustment of alien activities to a common end, its tenacious efficiency and alertness—out of these things in conjunction does there not already begin to emerge (we are all invincible anthropomorphists in these matters) some kind of quite consistent Personality—the genius of the place, if you will—the handy embodiment, at any rate, of the main instincts which this specially environed congeries has tended to throw into exceptional relief? For myself, I see it always as a blunt Rodinesque figure, sternly thewed, tensely poised, strenuously individual, tenacious of the actual, impatient of mere dreams, energetic rather than adventurous, a lover, above everything, of efficiency—efficiency, testing and twisting things with earnest, untiring fingers, whittling things down to the valid, irreducible core.... It is not from fingers like those that one looks to receive many frail white images of beauty. And whether this reading of the essential psychology of the place be true or false, it is certain that the men of Liverpool have never been overprone to sheer Æstheticism. The vivid day of their City has been crammed with leaping episodes, it has left no spare strength for flourishes, and they have expressed themselves throughout in terms of a naked and practical utility. Such purely decorative effects as have from time to time been judiciously introduced become in consequence effects which it is vastly easy to misunderstand. Take, for instance, that lordly plateau-load of classical furniture at Lime Street—a feature that would seem utterly to contradict, but that in reality beautifully confirms, this non-Æsthetic reading of the City’s nature. Raking among the ruins of the place a thousand years hence, when steamships are unknown and the Mersey is silted up, some earnest archÆologist will come upon those (in both senses of the word) imposing remains, and will promptly be deceived. He will speak with rapture of the “sharp bright edge of high Hellenic culture” that must have glittered about the community which could produce such stately monuments; and he will probably have a good deal to say about the civic decadence of his contemporaries. But archÆology (not, perhaps, for the first time) will have been mistaken. These clean-limbed columns and great porticoes and pediments were not upreared by a race of Phryne-worshipping hedonists. Directly regarded, therefore, they are misleading, uncharacteristic; but in an indirect way they are very characteristic indeed. One would ask for no better proof of a man’s lack of native appetite for literature than that he had read through, in turn, the whole of the hundred best books. Similarly, this wholesale, uncompromising adoption of an architectural mode already traditional, already innumerable times approved, is a most convincing proof of the existence of that spirit of honest and tenacious practical efficiency of which I have spoken. When it came to a matter of beauty, they made beauty a business, they captured it by brute strength and logic. There was nothing tentative, experimental, about the effort; there was no attempt at realizing some splendid, unprecedented dream; line for line, mass for mass, it was the stolid, efficient reproduction of masses and lines about whose loveliness there was no possibility of question. And so the beautiful sequence of buildings which stands for Liverpool’s most deliberate piece of architectural Æstheticism is really a testimony to the beauty-disregarding spirit of naked utilitarianism which her endless and imminent activities have made inevitable.

§ 5.

And it is precisely to this beauty-disregarding spirit of utilitarianism again that one traces some of the most memorable and significant pieces of beauty that the place possesses—more memorable and significant than the St. George’s Hall group, because vastly more vital and characteristic. For Liverpool, in spite of herself, and quite unconsciously, is a place of exceeding beauty. Out of that hard turmoil of tangible interests and endeavours a very splendid and reassuring happening has sprung. In honest and shrewd response to instant necessities, the city has been carved and kneaded into the lean lines of practical effectiveness; and those lines have joined wonderfully together to make any number of unpremeditated glories. Loveliness has descended unawares. Built frankly for use, it seems to have attained, by processes almost as organic as those of outer nature, a very singular and moving impressiveness. That drama of leaping roof-tops seen from the Walker Art Gallery, that chamber of co-ordinated lights seen from the Central Station, that racing flood of gold beneath the Dock Board building, are examples of the sort of thing I mean. It is in these natural and instinctive creations, frankly utilitarian, and not in her self-conscious trafficking with loveliness, that Liverpool grows most sensuously magnificent. A curve of sunless canal with clustered chimneys rising solemnly about; a pit of railway sidings, warehouses ranged round, one proud white plume of smoke moving slowly across it; long glittering reaches at the Docks; a black stretch of suburb crawling out, myriad-speared, across the sunset; a mass of warehouses blotting out the stars; hot vistas in the markets, ripe and fierce with colour; burning evening skies, unintentionally clipped and framed by the pillars of the Town Hall portico; roof-adjusted rods of sunlight creating unexpected carnivals; perspectives forming and vanishing; great horses moving in procession; swift, imperative assonances—momentary, irrecoverable—between traffic and grouped buildings: these and a thousand others of the same spontaneous kind are the passages of her life, the native gestures, that linger in the memory like a cadence, that colour her aspect with an abiding dignity and graciousness.

And this is, after all, to say little more than that Liverpool possesses in deep measure that strange accidental beauty of the modern city which is a thing so new to the world that the arts have not yet learned to teach men how to enjoy it. But in Liverpool (exceptional, once more, because typical, typical because exceptional) that beauty exists in a state of singular purity. It is a beauty that is the result, above everything, of a naked response in stone and iron to certain clear imperative necessities: such a response catching, as it would seem, some of the beauty and authority that inevitably attach to every articulate expression of a vital impulse. And in Liverpool those responses have been especially clean and unentangled. The place is self-contained: it has never run to booths and show-places; it has no associations, romantic or historic, to attract the gaper; it has never had to sustain a pose, and only rarely been tempted to attempt one; and these facts, and the fact that its growth has been continuous, that there has nowhere been any shrinkage or debilitation, have made it possible for the garment of buildings to be fitted to the authentic body of its energies with an absolute closeness and integrity. There are no loose folds, no adaptations, very few adhesive insincerities. The whole thing is supremely vital and athletic; and therefore it everywhere discloses that strong and moving graciousness, as yet almost wholly uncelebrated, which is as elemental and unaffected as the strong, forthright graciousness of its River.

§ 6.

Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the setting of this central stage, its scenery and back-cloths. Let me now attempt to indicate, as uninvidiously as may be, one or two of the more prominent actors: themselves, of course, equally symptomatic, equally the choice and the mouthpiece of that Rodinesque deus ex machina couched invisibly behind.

Place aux dames, by all means.... Of the maturer actresses, however, I confess I speak with a certain degree of diffidence. It is always dangerous to generalize on such a topic, and when the generalization inclines to be not wholly laudatory, to the danger of being guilty of inaccuracy is added that of floundering into blank discourtesy. But I will have, at least, the courage of my impressions. Sifting them, I incline to suggest that the more mature of the women-folk whom one discerns here, among the central shops—driving, walking, shopping—seem somehow not wholly to succeed. The efforts of an earlier day seem to have left their marks—sometimes in a certain exiguity, more often in a certain inexiguity; and, facially, one rather deplores the absence of anything in the nature of that enduring patrician basis which sometimes makes (as one seems to remember) the inevitable touches of attrition touches almost to be welcomed—touches that refine, clarify, take distinction a delicate step further. Here and there, in a Bold Street carriage, or in some one of the more guarded roadways of the south-eastern suburbs, a silvery face will flash out with a cameo-like precision; but their incidence is rare—quite rare enough, it seems to me, to be accepted as significant. The general note wavers instead between something almost touchingly fade and something too tenacious of qualities which, however charming in themselves, have rather lost their personal propriety.... So one hesitatingly generalizes. For the rest, there is an infinitude of kindliness; and one suspects that it would sometimes much prefer to break away, more often than it has the right to do, into frankest homeliness. One is never tempted to deplore a too vulgar display of mere culture.

But of the younger of the female players I speak with a notable access of assurance. There, beyond question, do I seem to detect the presence of a very distinct type, and (still more reassuring) of a type that is vastly pleasant. More, I have, for the first part at least of this judgment, the confirmation of a friend in whose flair for social qualities I repose, for the best of reasons, the most absolute confidence. “I can tell them anywhere, anywhere,” she assures me: in Paris, at Nice, in Scotland, it seems, the Liverpool jeune fille stands apart. To the latter part of my judgment, it is true, she subscribes only an assent that is dimmed by a vague qualification or so, perhaps not wholly inexplicable. She hints, for one thing, at a kind of gaucherie; but that, I am convinced, is unfair. One may suggest, indeed, not without justice, a certain lack of finesse, but that is by no means the same thing. Gaucherie implies a kind of inefficiency, an inadequacy that trends towards clumsiness, and anything short of an absolute efficiency is flatly uncharacteristic of the sort of girl I mean. Whether she speaks or walks, buys a hat or wears one, plays golf or the piano, it is always the consummate apportionment of means to end that most impresses one; and if one rarely finds her indulging in the frailer, more elusive, artifices of femininity—in those so alluringly deliquescent touches of speech, voice, emotion, gesture, and so forth—in all the subtle craft of implication, for instance—it is by no means because her methods stumble before they reach her ideals, but simply because her ideals include none of those fine, diaphanous practices. Her vision of the world is as distinct and sharp as Mr. Bernard Shaw’s (Mr. Shaw, indeed, would unreservedly admire her); her emotions are robustious and definite; and she makes all this instantly quite clear, even to the outsider, in her manner of speaking to her coachman as she steps into her brougham, or in the strong delicacy of the colours with which she so charmingly and undisguisedly emphasizes the clear colour of her eyes.

I grow intimate, it will be perceived, and, in order to grow more intimate still, let me appoint a flesh-and-blood heroine. She is a woman who always seems to me perfectly to achieve exactly what her sister-players, one in this way, one in that, succeed in attaining only approximately. She certainly, at any rate, perfects and epitomizes, in the most delightful fashion, what one singles out as their main tendencies—their main physical tendencies, that is, and therefore, no doubt, their main sub-physical tendencies as well. She is tall and large-limbed, more Hebe than Diana, with the grace of swiftness rather than of languor, and a mode of gowning that deals directly with the body’s needs, and so, the body being so admirably fashioned, immensely rejoices the eye. Bronze and rose (here one inevitably tends toward dithyramb; but these Liverpool complexions, too good to be untrue, are really quite memorable) meet distractingly in her face’s colouring, and I will not deny an occasional freckle or so. She speaks an English that is clean and well picked in a voice that is so satisfied that it needs all its firmness to keep it from complacency, and she has no discoverable accent. She lives at Sefton Park in one of the rather ineffective houses we will criticize in the next chapter, and, as often as not, comes to town by electric car. (London, I hear, still looks askance at its County Council cars, but in Liverpool they are, and always have been, quite the thing.) She is most herself when she walks. Her stride is not evasive. Golf has helped to solidify it. She writes a most excellent letter, reads a good deal, cares nothing for Mr. Yeats, a great deal for Tolstoi, is (rather unexpectedly) a devotee of Bach, and can play the Chaconne very vividly. She is at once shrewd and tender, cool-headed and warm-hearted. And although she protests that she has “a soul above self-coloured papers,” her regard for sacred things, on the one hand, is as free from sickliness as her regard for secular things, on the other, is free from crudity and ill-taste.

She stands, then, that highly satisfactory young animal, for all that, in their several ways, the majority of the younger women-folk tend to rival; not only those who pass from brougham to shop in the clear morning brightness of Church Street and Bold Street, but also those others, even more truly native to these central quarters, whom one observes hurrying here a few hours earlier, and leaving, with something more of leisureliness, in the neighbourhood of six and seven: the less fortunate, but scarcely less reassuring sisterhood whose business it is to wait at the thither end of that passage from brougham to shop, and produce such hats, ribbons, laces, flowers, as our heroine may desire. Physically, indeed, these shop-girls of Liverpool have a charm that rather astonishes the stranger; and they, too, are remarkably efficient self-gowners. To pass down Lord Street and Church Street on some spring evening, with the ebbing daylight tactfully erasing any of the lines the stress of the long, close hours may have left on the young faces, and the flowering lights of the City flinging little splashes of piquancy among them, is to be charmed into accepting the physical beauty of women as one of the especial attributes of these rapid commercial streets.

§ 7.

As for the male members of the company, they avow, of course, an unusually complete immersion in occupations unmuscular and theoretical: Liverpool’s exceptional freedom from industrialism—other than the secluded industrialism of the Docks—making her, in this conspicuous white-fingered urbanity of her workers, once more especially typical of one of the chief modes of modern civic life. All manual labour being, broadly speaking, tidily banished to the Docks, these central spaces are left entirely at the disposal of the dock-labourer’s soft-handed collaborators—the clerk, the merchant, the broker. Every morning, from nine to ten, the tide of these spruce actors pours astonishingly in. They cram and encrust the cars, they traverse, with a neat, fashionable air, that mild ante-room in Tithebarn Street; they flood thickly up from the River—an agreeably apparelled army that gives a fine air of prosperity to all the streets, and that will shortly settle down, in a thousand unseen cells, to its extraordinary and so modern labours, dealing always with symbols instead of actualities, with signatures instead of people, with bills of lading instead of bales and boxes, flinging tons of merchandise from continent to continent with the flick of a pen—a queer, Shalott-like existence of whispers and reflections.

But in spite of these unmuscular rites, and in spite of those elegant costumes, it must not be imagined that the ritualists are themselves unmuscular. It is by no means a white-faced and dyspeptic clan, this clerical tribe of Liverpool. And, for my own part, I like to believe that it is the River once more which has secured for these clerks, merchants, bankers, brokers, their rather conspicuous emancipation from the proverbial physical defects of the sedentary. The place, anyhow, is very clearly pledged to athleticism, as those rows of physical culture magazines which chromatically tessellate the pavements of Water Street and Chapel Street would alone suffice to make quite evident. And certainly, even if it be not wholly responsible for this remorseless pursuit of muscularity, the River gives that pursuit all manner of exceptional advantages. The long series of famous golf-links that lie amongst the sand-dunes at New Brighton, at Leasowe, at Hoylake, at Formby, at Blundellsands, at Birkdale; the numerous salt-water swimming-baths; the sailing clubs; the briny, gale-cleansed spaces of aromatic gold, free to all who care to use them, that curve endlessly about the coast; the mere proximity of the Landing Stage and the presence of the cordial and bracing airs that enfilade the streets of offices behind it—all these things must have tended to give athleticism an especial point and vigour. The River has made one-half of Liverpool a race of quill-drivers; but it has also made them a race of exceptionally deep-lunged and brown-faced quill-drivers.

Take, for instance, the case of L——. L——, nearer twenty than thirty, is a clerk in a bank here, and he, like our free-striding heroine, presents a clear and accurate summary of the tendencies one notes in the innumerable clerks who fill the close-packed offices all about him. He lives “across the water” at New Brighton, choosing that because of the half-hour’s river crossing morning and evening. (He spends that half-hour walking steadfastly round and round the upper deck, hat in hand, practising—if he can do so unobtrusively—an elaborate and, I am sure, highly painful system of respiration.) He goes to the swimming-bath twice a week in winter, five or six times in summer, dodging down there, if possible, at moments that are perhaps, from a mere purist’s point of view, not entirely his own. But in these matters L—— is no mere purist. He does his work well (he is really a most excellent servant), and that suffices. He is paid £140 a year for doing it well, and that, too, suffices. It suffices for three £3 3s. suits per annum, for subscriptions to a football club, to a cricket club, to a tennis club, for a sixth share of the expenses of running a small yacht, for a £13 summer holiday, and for his various trim necessities. He is a close student of the science of “fitness,” regarding “fitness” (very properly) as a thing much superior to any mental abnormality, and the shilling which suffices for his daily lunch is not expended without due dietetical considerations. Just now it is vegetarianism. Thereafter he repairs to one of those surprising underground smoking cabarets—places where an Oriental easefulness and languor loom dimly through a blue narcotic veil—which Liverpool, probably because of her emphatic clericalism, provides in such extreme abundance, and there, in the company of other seekers after fitness, he sips, and smokes, and nibbles one of the two biscuits with which he is provided (never both—that would be a grave faux pas), and discusses athleticism until a quarter of an hour after the time he should be back at his desk. He is lithe, clean-shaven, temperate, unmarried, and, in spite of his contes, probably strictly celibate as well. He reads, but books are of interest to him chiefly because they remind him of life, give him a fresh appetite for the fit and pleasant things of life; thus, he praises Harland because his people—Anthony and the rest—are “so immensely decent.” He is not inordinately religious, but the traditional piety of his people is a thing he contentedly accepts. He may one day migrate (“going abroad” is a familiar topic in this City of lowly paid clerks and multitudinous cheap and obvious modes of exit), and if he does he will certainly score. If he stays at home he will wind up with a small bank managership and as much in the way of golf and week-ends as £250 a year will permit him to use as a salve for the obedient monotony of small bank management.

That is one type of player. Another, and much older, is to be found gravely pacing among those sober buildings in Brunswick Street. Self-made, but never blatant; successful because of his common sense and his genius for hard work, and remaining common-sensible and hard-working in spite of his success; vested with a dignity that sometimes verges on stolidity; suspicious of sentiment in life, but an admirer of Bouguereau in art, he is pre-eminently the kind of man who ought always to be commemorated in a steel engraving, never in a photograph. He has had much to do with the creation of his City, and certain of her newer propensities awaken in him a vague sensation of alarm. Wealthy, he is a collector rather than an amateur, but a friend rather than a host. Not without a rich vein of humour, he still takes politics quite seriously. His house (if his family be amenable) has a strong mahogany flavour; if his family be vigorous, that vague feeling of disquietude pursues him there, where he is compelled to fit into an incongruous bungalow-full of art nouveau tenuities.

Thus, in spite of the fact that he, more than any of the others, often startles one by his resemblance to the tense Rodinesque figure beyond, he finds himself already being surrounded by a steady flow of new modes and influences. E——, for example, is the vigorous son of one of these admirable persons; and E—— believes in bungalows, thinks consistent dignity undignified, and has acquired for mahogany a distaste which he believes to be instinctive. I doubt, myself, whether he has the essential capacity of his parent; but his practice (he is a solicitor) is good and whenever one catches his alert, rather thin, diligently groomed face in the City, he seems extraordinarily full of business. He is a member of a club, but uses it rarely: there is little club life in Liverpool. His idea of conversation is to get one alone, and talk shop with extreme diligence and (to be just) much charm. In spite of his art nouveau proclivities, he has less sincere taste for the arts than his Bouguereau-appreciating father; but he has a great stock of criteria, numbers a local portrait-painter among his friends, and at the Private View of the Autumn Exhibition has a neat, intelligent appraisement for every notable picture in the room. He never makes discoveries there, and of course his range is limited. He has a word of judicious praise for Hornel (whom his father still honestly dislikes), but Steer has not yet emerged from the unimportant section he vaguely calls Impressionist; but within those limits his efficiency is surprising: yes, he is unmistakably intelligent. He is not quite sure of the University: actually, unconsciously, he is just a little afraid of all that it stands for; and the University, although it makes a friend of him, has, in private, an attitude not wholly antithetical to pity.... That splitting up—that friendly specialization and intelligent exchange when needed—of culture, of business instincts, of dilettantism—so different from the inclusive interests, almost the independent universality, both of demand and supply, that marked his father—I find quite profoundly characteristic of the Liverpool of the present moment.

§ 8.

Well, there, in their most characteristic rÔles, are some of the chief of the players who step efficiently, efficiently, through the six days’ traffic of this well-set central stage. I have said nothing, it will be seen, of their nationalities. That is partly because national characteristics in Liverpool have a way of bowing to the local spirit—or rather, to put it more accurately, because various national characteristics have contributed to a local spirit that an Englishman, a Scotchman, or a Welshman finds it easy and proper to adopt. Thus, there are any number of clerks in the North and South Wales Bank (whose Head Office is here) who are perfect replicas of L——, and E—— pÈre, for all his typical Liverpolitanism, is really a pure-bred Scot. And it is partly, too, because any real consideration of this alluring question of race would lead to what would be, in this most cosmopolitan of places, a quite endless business: the discussion, namely, of how the pattern of the local spirit has been affected by the presence of those charming peoples who draw such bright exotic threads through the social fabric.

Into all that, unhappily, I have here no space to enter, nor can I even, much as I would desire, describe the changes of cast and play which occasionally take place: the pale Maeterlinckian drama, for instance, which is invariably presented at the close of the six days’ traffic, making a mild hyphen between Saturday’s curtain and Monday’s overture—a coming and going of unknown people among wide echoes and empty roadways, with the sleepy Sunday buildings looking down in a kind of vacant puzzlement.... Or that other performance, not in the least Maeterlinckian, by which the Sunday quiet is succeeded—the great Rabelaisian drama of the Bank Holiday, presented by an entirely fresh company with new costumes and new effects. The lumpish dialect of South Lancashire echoes everywhere about the stage on such occasions. The Landing Stage is a prolonged ballet in red and white and inordinately electric blue. And although the Cotton Market and the Stock Exchange are utterly deserted, the appearance in the streets of a strange, pinkish, tissue-wropt substance described (perhaps apocryphally?) as “Liverpool Rock” would seem to testify to the discovery, and to the whole-souled encouragement, of a hitherto unsuspected local industry.

And I would have liked, too, to celebrate in some measure the change that sweeps over the City with the oncoming of night. It is in her native unconsidered gestures, as I have said, far more than in her studied poses, that the essential beauty of Liverpool is most perfectly revealed; and it is at night, when the aid of the sunlight is ended and the sky is a forgotten tale and even the stars are of as little moment as moths that palely flutter outside the windows of a lighted palace, that Liverpool becomes most elemental and instinctive. Abandoned by external nature, she becomes most natural, and therefore attains her most conspicuous beauty. Those electric cars, of course, designed purely for utility, with no thought of spectacle, give to her nocturnes their special individualizing note; so that whilst she has nothing to correspond to that astonishing golden spray of hansoms which makes midnight Piccadilly a place of almost intolerable magnificence, she has her own rich code, just as characteristic, and of but little less a loveliness. Down London Road, down Renshaw Street, the crocus-coloured rivers pour into the vortex of light that boils beneath the great cliffs of Saint George’s Hall, so terrible in their nocturnal shapelessness. Moon-green arc-lamps, that only Baudelaire could properly describe, hang, strange fruits, above the golden turmoil; and it is through courses fledged by sun-gold and canopied by this moon-green that the fluent saffron finally escapes. It sweeps down Dale Street and Water Street, it sweeps down Church Street and James Street, and so pours out, in the end, upon that streaming terrace by the water-side.

§ 9.

So, inevitably, we return in the end to the River, the beautiful source of all this beauty, the magnificent architect of all this golden triumph. I have spoken already of its daylight loveliness, of the elemental hungers that it both feeds and fosters, of its cordial ministry to all that is most panic in men’s blood. But with the advent of night it, too, suffers a deep and splendid change. Renouncing this medicative disloyalty, it frankly surrenders itself to the City’s rule, and becomes a peaceful province of urbanity. The lights of the City make golden chains about it, golden lights from the City patrol its deep recesses. It is the hour of reconciliations. The City is more elemental than by day, the River is less elemental, and a long sustained harmony unites the flaming tides of the streets and the darkened causeway of the tide. Even the boats have shared the transformation. So eminently business-like beneath the sun, they are now changed to shining presences, romantically visiting the night. Topaz, emerald, and ruby are their chosen favours, and widespread robes of cramoisie and gold reflections trail sumptuously about them as they move.