LIVERPOOL CHAPTER I THE RIVER 1. |
  That fine fellow (a Scotchman, I understand) who so handsomely acknowledged the thoughtfulness displayed by Providence in “constraining the great rivers of England to run in such convenient proximity to the great towns” would have found in Liverpool-on-the-Mersey an altogether exceptional opportunity for thanksgiving. For it is upon her River, with a very singular completeness, that the existence of this great, complex, modern organism unanimously depends. Rob her of her duties as port and harbour, and she becomes impossible. Other duties, of course, she has: among the labyrinths of effort which her million people have created all about them, you will find tobacco-factories, corn-mills, soap-works, breweries, sugar-refineries, and a dozen other quite flourishing industrial exploits; but these, even if they were not in large measure directly derived from the River itself—the voice of the River, so to say, announcing itself in other dialects—are never really fundamental. They could be plucked away, as her famous Potteries were plucked away at the opening of the nineteenth century, as her Chemical Works were plucked away some decades later, without producing anything but the mildest and most parochial of disturbances. Certainly, there would be no crisis: the great machine would still throb equably, the procession of her continually advancing life would still move magnificently on. But if you rob her of her river-born attributes, you leave her utterly dismantled. Let the river-estuary silt up, as river-estuaries have been known to do, as this one is constantly endeavouring to do, and the whole elaborate structure instantly crumbles and subsides. In London there are a score of Londons, in Glasgow a dozen Glasgows; but here there is only one Liverpool—Liverpool-on-the-Mersey. That is the great fact of her life. And its significance is chief, not merely because Liverpool owes her actual existence to the River, but also because the whole quality, the “virtue,” of that existence has been determined by the completeness of the dependency. It is not simply that it is upon this broadly curving estuary, as upon some broadly curving scimitar, that Liverpool has had wholly to rely in slashing her way to the position she now maintains; it is also (and, from our present point of view, chiefly) that her fidelity to that weapon has induced certain habits of poise, of outlook, of ideal, which are now her most essential characteristics. The influence is disclosed, as we shall see, in all manner of ways. It drenches the local atmospheres, private, social, civic, with a distinctive colour. It is revealed in the nature of the men in her streets, and in the nature of the streets about the men. It is the deciding element in that inherent spirit of the place which those men and those streets at once prefigure and evoke, and which it is the main purpose of this book, with the aid of those men and streets, to attempt in some measure to enclose. Some of the channels of the influence are direct and obvious enough, others are indirect and secret; and one of the more obvious and one of the most secret are connected with the fashion in which that dependence has affected her history in the past. § 2. The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a constantly increasing forcefulness.[1] But it was not until the later decades of the eighteenth century that the real opportunity arrived. It was among the alarums and excursions of the amazing period which then began, among its endless industrial sallies and revolutions, its fabulous commercial conquests, that the weapon was for the first time granted the scope it needed to swing with full effect. And therefore it was within a space of extraordinary brevity—within the leaping years of a single century, indeed—that the City achieved its greatness, and assumed the aspect which it wears to-day. The direct consequences of that are obvious enough. Liverpool becomes, quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its houses are houses, not merely of recent birth, but pioneer houses, planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed meadow-land and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in large measure, a city without ancestors. That is sufficiently manifest. But what is not so manifest, and what robs these sept-centenary celebrations, these pageants and retrospective ardours, of any too great tincture of incongruity, is the fact that the River which has washed these interior traditions and memorials away has also restored them in another place and form. It has established, at the gates of the City, a far more perdurable monument to antiquity than any that architecture could contrive. For, whilst they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful quantities. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, they inevitably pass into vital touch with the earlier wielders of the weapon: with the dim fisher-folk who were its eldest users; with the cluster of serfs who received their first “charter” of privileges seven hundred years ago; with the Irish traders of the seventeenth century; with the slave-traders of the eighteenth; with the merchants who watched the dawn of the day of the last great onset. The River becomes in this way a kind of Cathedral, a place heavy with traditions, full of the sense of old passions. This is clearly not the sort of influence that one can measure with a foot-rule or sum up in a syllogism; but in this nuance of endeavour and in that, in characteristics which it would be impossible briefly to define, but which may perhaps appear in the pages which follow, the effect, I feel, is made faintly, delightfully apparent. The sheer youth of the place has been granted something of the dignity of age. The audacities and vigours of the century which gave it birth have been tinged with a certain gravity and largeness. The very force which has made the place so superbly youthful and athletic, so finely unhampered by the rags of outworn modes, has also granted it that intimate sense of history, that heartening and annealing influence of ancient ardours vitally and romantically recalled, without which a city, as a nation, is but an army without music and banners. § 3. Birkenhead from the River BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER And it is this complete dependence of City upon River, too, which helps largely to explain what are certainly the two main paradoxes of her daily life: the fact that she is of all cities at once the most heterogeneous in composition, and in exposition the most homogeneous; and the fact, again, that her commercial interests are extravagantly world-wide, and her civic interests extraordinarily local. They are characteristics, these two, which never fail to attract the observer extremely—perhaps, even, extremely to puzzle him. He remarks the cosmopolitan population, the nomadic life so many of them lead, the disturbing flux and bustle of the traveller-strewn pavements; and in face of these things he discovers, to his huge surprise, that the civic spirit of this variegated and distracted junction is more puissant and concerted than that of any other city in the kingdom. He knows that she is, in effect, little more than a great gateway between West and East; he knows that her merchants are chiefly middlemen, that the prime function of the place is to fetch and carry, to bring from hither and forward there; and yet he finds the whole affair looming up into a stubborn Rodinesque independence, achieving this and that original thing with an unexpected air of finality, and maintaining always an aloofness, a clear and unmistakable individuality, that seems utterly incongruous in the midst of the involved world-movements swaying so frantically about her. Of the accuracy of his observation, at all events, there is room for little question. At every turn of the City’s social and municipal life those two salient antithetical characteristics are vividly displayed. Liverpool is boldly different. She possesses, it seems, a singular faculty for moulding and co-ordinating. The peoples of the world pour through her streets, but they never interrupt her energetic introspectiveness. Fragments of this and that exotic race remain; they settle down, they breed, they pour their alien habits, their alien modes of thought, speech, religion, into the communal veins; but there is no perceptible change. The same emphatic lines of activity sweep on; the same special type is faithfully reproduced.... Liverpool, it seems to me, is astonishingly self-absorbed. It is her own problems that chiefly interest her, and she has a habit of solving these problems for herself on self-invented lines. She has striven to work out—she is, as we shall see, still intently striving to work out—in ways of her own devising, the salvation of her proletariate. She has created a society that is quite untinged by the colours of the county. She has bred her local school of painters. Her politics are a strange sort of democratic conservatism. She is more civic than national, and the newspapers of this most cosmopolitan of English towns tend to reflect the movements of the City rather than the movements of the nation. And yet, she is not provincial. Manchester, her nearest neighbour, has her finely national Guardian, and touches the actual life of the metropolis with a far greater intimacy and frequency; and yet, of the two, Manchester is clearly the more provincial. For provinciality, after all, is but a subordination to the metropolis, a reflection, half deliberate, half unconscious, of the life that goes on spontaneously at the centre. Well, Liverpool would be spontaneous, too. She will imitate no one, not even London. She will be her own metropolis. And those who have marked the clear efficiency of her designs, the unique mingling of American alertness and Lowland caution which colours the spirit that lives behind her very positive efforts, will admit that she has come bewilderingly near success. § 4. Much of this unexpected loyalty to certain salient attributes, unvarying and individual, is due, no doubt, to the brevity of the period in which her final growth took place: the pressure and intensity of the moment begot, of necessity, a kind of concentrated civism. And much of it, too, is due to a certain physical peculiarity which it is perhaps worth while remarking. The City and the River, of course, have now become a roaring avenue between the hemispheres; but none the less, Liverpool, in a certain narrow, internal sense, cannot be regarded as other than side-tracked. Unlike Manchester, she lies some distance away from the great highways that link north with south, and even to-day the tradition of London’s remoteness still to some extent adheres. This isolation—an isolation that was felt very keenly in the early days of her growth—must have helped, in some measure, to breed that spirit of independence and self-reliance. She had to fight for herself. Her River made her too strong to be crushed by the disadvantage, and gave her more than all the power she needed to transform that initial weakness into a positive stimulus to especially emphatic effort. So the River reappears; and I like to think that it is, in the end, to the influence of that superbly dominating presence, even more than to the influence of these factors of concentrated growth and isolated station, that the City’s paradoxically assonant announcements are to be attributed. It is, as we have seen, the City’s raison d’Être, the chief orderer and distributer of her people’s vocations; and in that way alone it interweaves class with class, provides merchant, clerk, seaman, and dock-labourer with a common unifying interest. But with this dictation of tasks, with this provision of a tangible leit motiv that runs through and conjoins the efforts of several hundred thousand workers, the co-ordinating influence of the River can scarcely be believed to end. As a controller of physique, for instance, slowly reconciling disparities, its effect must be incalculably potent. It is a reservoir of tonic airs; it renews and revivifies the common atmosphere; it sets a crisp brine-tang in the heart of every inhalation. Some kind of mental and physical conformity, not easily to be defined, but still remarkable, that democratic sting quite conceivably creates; and some kind of subtle solidarity, too, must certainly result from the constant, unforgettable presence of a piece of outer Nature possessing so large a share of unremitting loveliness. From the fierce beauty of the River, indeed, there is no possibility of escape: its scale is so vast; it thrusts itself so exultantly upon one. It is not only the strange powers that belong to moving waters that it exercises; it trails with it as well, into the very core of the City, a great attendant sweep of unsullied and inviolable skyscape, and burns great sunsets, evening after evening, within full gaze of the town. The imaginative effect of all this insistent pageantry cannot, indeed, be easily overestimated. And I certainly believe that it is one of the great forces that weld this diverse city-full into so curious a unanimity. § 5. The Landing Stage—South End THE LANDING STAGE—SOUTH END. In view of all this vital domination of the City by its River, there is something singularly appropriate in the nature of the first impression created by Liverpool on the traveller who approaches her from the sea. That first impression is, quite inevitably, an impression of a great river with a city vaguely and ineffectively attached. He has left New York, let us say, a week before, and New York remains on his memory as an intricate, high-piled monument of stone and iron, crowding upon and overshadowing the waters of the Upper Bay. No such effect of dominating human interests salutes him as he steams up the river towards New Brighton from the Bar. The south-swinging curve of the coast hides the City for a while, and for a while he sees nothing but a long, low line of bourgeois villas, sitting comfortably among the sandhills on his left, and the great sky-snipping lattice of the New Brighton Tower rising, not inelegantly, ahead. The houses on his left increase; Waterloo and Seaforth shine pleasantly in the sun; and from the base of the Tower, behind the domed and glittering pier that swims delicately out into the water from its root, more bourgeois villas and a great plenitude of white sea-promenades, stretching away up the coast to Egremont, up, beyond sight, to Seacombe, carry out the note of mild watering-place delights. It is all very charming, thinks the visitor, but it doesn’t particularly suggest any furious commercial maelstrom.... The town swings into foreshortened vision, flat and docile beyond the racing tide: a mild, smoke-softened, wavering of roofs, a sporadic spire or so, a dozen and a half of chimney-stalks, and the dun cloud overhead—the constant cloud that ought certainly to speak impressively of industry, but that seems, somehow, on the contrary, to mitigate all the efforts (none of them very energetic) that the City makes in the direction of mass and lordliness. With the steep uprising of the Seaforth battery comes the first of the dumb grey miles of granite that stretch up-river to the Stage. They testify nothing to man’s sovereignty, these great dock-walls; they seem—if, indeed, they seem of human origin at all—no more than an enforced defence-work; and the quiet rigging discernible behind them, and the funnels of a hidden liner, carry on that idea of the River’s superior strength—a strength sufficient to pass the grey barriers and create a second kingdom in the plains beyond. A couple of little towers, perched on the wall, make pseudo-romantic notes—absent, archaic, meaningless. A great warehouse, four-square and stolid, with blind eyes, is set heavily down like a dull box—a box that may be full or empty, but that is undoubtedly shut and locked, whose key has undoubtedly been mislaid. More warehouses, all equally immobile, sullenly succeed it; and then the Landing-stage itself, low and level and a trifle dingy, begins to run humbly alongside, spirting out at intervals a little squeal of advertisement-begotten colour. And still there is no resounding manifestation from the City. The fretted tower of St. Nicholas makes a neatly punctured patch upon the sky; the Town Hall Dome shows vaguely; there is an unexplained glitter from the baseless crest of the Royal Insurance Office. But the solitary building within sight that swerves up with any unmistakable authority is the building of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. And beneath, or beside, all this flatness and domesticity, the Mersey itself reels and swaggers splendidly. It is turgid and tumultuous; its bustling highways interlace alarmingly; there is a constant shouting and hooting and dancing of eager craft. Higher up-stream, the vast salt lake of the Sloyne holds a brace of liners, each, as it would seem, more massive than the town; and a tall imperturbable frigate sways graciously out towards the sea, bursting into white sail-bloom as she goes.... Nor, when he steps ashore, and climbs up Water Street to the City’s hub, does that effect of the River’s supremacy utterly forsake him. Salt airs from the sea pursue him; strange tongues salute his ears; far-brought merchandise is plucked hither and thither about him as he goes. And even when he passes through the heart of the City and into the suburbs beyond, and through the belt of these into the open country that stretches towards the east, the sting of the brine will from time to time assault him, and he will hear the endless crying of sea-birds, and he will watch the grey, innumerable gulls as they rise and fall above the red wake of the plough.
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