THE CHARM OF LONDON.
LORD ROSEBERY said on Monday that he hoped London had been much more beautiful than it now is, when in the times of the Plantagenets and Tudors a great line of palaces along the banks of the Thames connected the
City with Westminster, and that he hoped it might become again more beautiful than it now is, when our streets shall be "living storehouses of history" instead of long blanks of stucco, and he ventured to differ widely from Sir Walter Besant's assertion that London had never been more beautiful than it now is. And very likely Lord Rosebery is right, if we use the word " beautiful " in its ordinary sense of that which delights the eye by its symmetry and fairness. There are certainly many Eastern cities,—Damascus, for instance, and Constantinople,—whose gardens and groves present a far more picturesque appearance than London can ever present with its huge population. For let the streets become "living store- houses of history " as much as they may, the vast crowds which now swarm through the mighty City will effectually drive the palaces more and more into the distance. But if, instead of the beauty of London, we should speak of the charm of London, we should be inclined to say that London had never wielde
so great a charm as it does at the present time in-spite of its long stretches of stuccoed streets. For char& depends on the sense of power even more than on the sense of beauty.
Michael Angelo exerts even a greater charm than Raffael, and Alexander a greater charm than Hannibal. So London in the nineteenth century, with its crowds of ordered and orderly. labour, its storehousea of wealth, its treasures of learning, its mighty avenues of iron roads raying out to the ends of the kingdenr, and with the great river which carries the ships of all nations to the sea, exerts a far mightier charm on the imagination at this end of the nineteenth century than it could ever have exerted before. London has, indeed, a mental atmosphere which presses with a far greater force on the mind than that with which the physical atmosphere presses on the body. No one can live in it without being sensibly stirred by the consciousness of force, of which the evidence streams in on one at every pore. There is a kind of magnetism in the mere proximity of
so much energy and vivacity. The man who enters London from the country is sensible of a new stimulus and a clearer
consciousness of what life means and what it may produce than he had before. All this exerts a spell which cannot be wielded by groves of dates and gardens of roses, nor even by stately piles of marble architecture. London in the times of the Plantagenets and Tudors, London as Sir Walter Scott imagined it during the later Stuarts, never possessed such a charm as is put forth by the vast city of the present day, where genius and skill and knowledge and industry are all represented by hosts of minds acting in concert with each other to produce a result such as the world has not elsewhere to show. Even the thick air which so sadly impairs the beauty of London has sometimes had an imaginative charm of its own. Mr. Lowell used to say that there was nothing more delightful than the foggy sunsets of London, and Wordsworth felt its attraction when he said to Crabbe :—
" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness Like London with its own black wreath,— On which with thee. 0 Crabbe, forthlooking I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.'
Nor is that the only testimony which Wordsworth,—a solitary- minded man who lived chiefly amongst mountains and lakes, and cared nothing for the world,gtive to London, a testimony not called forth so much by its beauty as by its marvellous concentration of human foYce and life. In the famous sonnet on London seen from Westminster Bridge in the still- ness of a summer dawn, he dwelt on the latent power of the vision even more than its mere beauty :—
" Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep, And all that mighty heart is lying still !"
There is the charm of London, " that mighty heart " beating so close to one, whether wakeful and active or still in slumber. And everything adds to that charm which, like the river, brings the whole force of it before you,—partly by the con- trast of its comparative tranquillity, its ever unhastening and unresting current, partly by the great rush of commerce which it carries to and fro upon its bosom. Wordsworth felt justly enough that the bridges of London, which mark the break between the two great masses of population, and from which in comparative tranquillity you can get a view of the whole, are the very centres of the charm which London exerts over the mind. From Westminster Bridge you com- mand the very heart of the political life not merely of a great city, but of a great nation, and feel as if you could lay your hand on the main historical scenes of centuries of strife and passion. From London Bridge you command the very centre of mercantile London, see the masts of the shipping in the lower part of the river, and the great dome of St. Paul's towering over all that traffic as men's religion towers over their busy activities and eager hopes. And from Waterloo Bridge you command a view of both quarters of London, while the solid pile of Somerset House, which reminds you how great is even official London, though official London is but a drop in the ocean of London life, stands close at hand. There is nothing like the bridges of a great city for giving you just the breathing-space,- the offing, as it were,—necessary to enable you to stand apart from the great throng of humanity, and yet realise vividly what it means. If you plunge into the flood, you can no more realise the charm it has for the imagination; than a drowning man can realise the charm of the sea in which he is struggling for life. But when the throng is broken, even though it is always pouring its tide over the passage from one of the mighty fragments to the other, you can gaze upon the great tumult,—or the great silence which was tumult a few hours ago and will be tumult again in a few more hours, —and yet possess your own soul.
After all then, the chief spell of London is in the life and energy which it seems to add, and probably does really add, to the mind which feels that spell. We know that an electric current will develop a parallel current in a wire some mile or so distant from it, and that a message may even be involuntarily transmitted in this way from a wire between stations at sea to a wire on land at a moderate distance. In the same way, the mere rush of energy around you in London seems to transmit a certain portion of itself to any mind which is at work in the heart of London, and to brace it up as it were to a higher nervous tension. London is like an electric bath to those who need that sort of reinvigorating stimulus; nor do the sordid EtreAs impress you less in that respect,—perhaps even more on account of the greater mass of life that flows through them, —than the statelier streets. Lord Rosebery is quite right that the sordid streets make one melancholy when one reflects on the meanness of the life which they contain, on.- the squalor of the advertisements with which the poorer inhabitants are regaled, the misery of their want, and the unmitigated pangs which might be mitigated if the poor were not so near the very brink of destitution. But all that is a matter of reflection. When one does not reflect, the.- great tide of life that flows ceaselessly through the streets; adds not less, perhaps, as we have said, even more, to the impressiveness of London, than the richer and more comely life of the wealthier quarters. The great charm of London is in the magnitude and variety of its life, and the singular order which regulates it. To see the great tide of labour and organising thought flow into London day by day in waves as sure and steady as those of the advancing tide, and then ebb again in the evening as the labourers and the . organisers of labour rush back to their quiet homes, is even more impressive than to watch the flow and ebb of the sea on a line of beach. For we know how "the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon," but we do not know bow it is that all these atoms of eager desire, and ingenious imagination, and restless self-will, are controlled so as to constitute the. mighty whole of a city in which there is as much constancy and order as there is fullness of life.
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