LONDON RIVER.*
Ms. Tow.rssoic, the author of these charming and rhapsodical sketches, has struck the sailor's note in his choice of a title, for by seamen a river is commonly called by the name of the principal town upon it. The Thames is London River, the Crouch in Essex is Burnham River, and so on. Mr. Tomlinson is one of those who have an insatiable water-sense. To him no road is so satisfying or so romantic as a road of water, and probably he is not very happy when he is far away from water. A river is of all roads the most significant because it leads everywhere. Readers of Mr. Conrad will remember his lyrical meditations in more than one story when he describes the wonders of London's water highway and peoples the river again with a ghostly pro- cession of the majestic souls who have sailed along it to go to their successes or their failures, their doom or their glory, their adventures or the disgrace on which they greatly gambled, in the uttermost parts of the sea. Taine in his Notes sur Angleterre said that the only proper way to approach London was by the river. Only by seeing the water traffic and by passing through the miles of docks, warehouses, and factories could you under- stand the meaning of London.
There could be no more startling contrast in anything that has a unity of its own than is presented by the upper and lower Thames. Mr. Tomlinson, with his sea-going soul, says nothing of the upper Thames. Its gentle and more languorous beauties are not for him ; his thoughts and memories are with the open wastes of the Kent and Essex marshes where the expanding reaches bear great ships to the sea. And these austere splendours are not blotted out for him even by the smoke of the cement works and the repairing yards which smudges the sky overhead and turns the sun to the colour of bronze. He prefers the view from a certain hill above Woolwich to the famous view from Richmond Hill. We should like to have had Sir Walter Scott's opinion on that subject, for all the romantic appreciation of Sir Walter Scott was engaged by Richmond, and we do not know that he ever looked upon the Thames from the heights above Woolwich. What would he have thought of the grand spectacle of Greenwich Hospital as one sees it as an immense Venetian Palace when one comes in a boat round the corner into Greenwich Reach ? We do know, however, what Arthur Young thought of the lower Thames, and that highly experienced critic described the view from Laindon Hill in Essex as one of the finest in the world. When Gray wrote there was probably no factory smoke, but evidently what moved him was not so much the woods and fields with the broad river between, but the nearness to the sea and the coming and going of the ships. " In the East," he wrote, " the sea breaks in upon you and mixes its white transient sails and glittering blue expanse with the deeper and brighter greens of the woods and corn."
Londoners know all too little of the lower river, perhaps because it is difficult to tell how to come by a sight of it in the reaches immediately below London—it is so walled in by wharves, warehouses, and the forbidden land of docks. Now that our old friend the penny steamer no longer plies, it is hard indeed to see London River below bridges. Anybody who is determined to see that sight in the best possible way could not do better than scrape acquaintanceship with the master of a Thames sailing barge and beg a passage. The handling of a Thames sailing barge, threading its way through the crowded river, is one of the nine wonders of navigation. The barge skipper never seems to be at fault ; he never loses his calmness or his skill, and yet he does not even look like a sailor. Nowhere in the world is a larger spread of canvas handled by so small a crew. It is done, of course, by labour-saving devices—with the help of the great sprit and the brailing up of the loose. footed sail. Look at an anchored barge with her mast up, and you will see that the sail is not hauled down ; it is merely brailed up as the curtain in a theatre is sometimes drawn up into the wings.
The bargee is full of prejudice and superstition, but he is not more conservative than any other sailor man who uses the Thames Estuary. Leigh-on-Sea is the producer of the bawley, a type of craft which has a loose-footed mainsail, but would otherwise be called a cutter. But go round the corner past the Gunfleet sands to Brightlingsea and you will find that the bawley rig is almost unknown. Every smack there has its Mainsail set on a boom. Go fifteen or twenty miles further to Harwich and you will find that the bawley has reappeared London River. By H. M. Tomlbason. London : Queen. 43d. net.]
There is no accounting for tastes ; and yet every fisherman, whatever rig he favours, knows that he is right.
For Mr. Tomlinson the romance of London River begins at the end of Fenchurch Street at what is sometimes known as Poverty Corner. He says that if you wanted a bunch of men to run a little river steamer with a freeboard of six inches out to Delagoa Bay, you could engage them all at this corner or
at the taverns just up the turning. Lot us give an example of Mr. Tomlinson's quality of feeling when he is writing about a ship -
" I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships, the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift skywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian ship was as memorable as a Greek statue. It is a ship's sheer which gives loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely poised, sure of herself, in profile. She was so slight a body, so tall and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness. And to her beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull parish a notable place. She was of wood, painted white. Her masts were of pine, veined with amber. Her white hull, with the drenching's of the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as though tinctured with the virtue of the ocean. The verdigris of her sheathing was vivid as green light ; and the languid dock water, the colour of jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own. You could believe there was a soft radiation from that ship's sides which fired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, a delicate and faery light which soon expired."
Mr. Conrad might have written that, and if he had we think he would have been pleased with it. There are other passages as good in the book, and yet we would not say that the book as a whole is what we fancy Mr. Tomlinson could write and we hope still will write. His manner is as a rule so oblique, so glancing, that the impressions he conveys are not nearly positive enough. His manner would be admitted by anyone to be what is called " distinguished " ; but is it really more clever to be indirect than to be direct ? We call to mind a certain passage in which Mr. Masefield described the setting forth of the transports from a Greek island carrying troops to the Dardanelles. That was writing of the most direct kind, and it had something which Mr. Tomlinson generally lacks.
The best pages in the book, and they are very good indeed, deal with the work of the Thames fish carriers, not in London River itself but offshore. In the following passage Mr. Tomlin. son describes how the crew of the carrier Windhover' collected full boxes of fish and distributed empty ones :-
" These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the Windhover canted away. Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth and transient hollow. Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck by skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties ; the boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away, and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened and strengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and disap- pointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-cked gulls and gannets, and all in that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the creative word had been spoken only five minutes before."
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