MR. F. HARRISON ON ENGLISH CITIES.
WE have read Mr. Frederic Harrison's lecture on " Cities," or rather the reports of his lecture—which will, we hope, appear in extenso in one of the magazines—with mingled feelings of delight and vexation. We enjoy, as usual, like all other human beings who can appreciate it, the charm of his style—a style like a fine stream, so rapid, yet so pellucid —and for once we are in most cordial sympathy with his thought ; but then, alas ! like all other city reformers, we want help, and he gives us none at all. Now that he agrees to make the government, though not the administration, of London one and indivisible, he offers no tangible suggestion of any kind, and does not even, as reported, attempt to account for the failure to make our cities pleasant, upon which he is so eloquent. As to the fact of failure, we fear he is wholly right. The English have built cities all over the world, under all sorts of
conditions and in almost all climates ; they have made those cities orderly, healthy, and for the rich fairly comfortable— though the degrees of comfort to be obtained in West London, East London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Calcutta, New York, and Melbourne vary to an inexplicable extent—bat they have not made them happy places for their whole population, or filled them with civic life, or invested them with the attraction which undoubtedly belonged to many cities alike of Greece and Rome. We must, of course, in any comparison make allowance for the fact that we know little of slave-life in the ancient cities, or at least do not realise it; that neither in Rome nor Greece was there a benevolence like that of to-day; and that the lower quarters of the cities alike of Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor were probably worse slums, filled with a more sickly people, than any which exist in England. Still, they were cities in very truth, strongly bound communities, with a deep and varied life, intent on making themselves beautiful, attracting the very highest classes, full of public buildings, gay with public festivals, and alive with public means of enjoyment. There was a life in them like the life of Paris, of which we have here no example. The free citizens, at all events, benefited by their cities, loved them, were proud of them, devoted their fortunes to them, and above all, lived in them, as our free citizens—and we still have a similar class—do not. Our cities are healthy beyond all precedent, and, Rome excepted, probably rich beyond all com- pare; but they are dull abodes, usually wanting in beauty, seldom adorned with really admirable public buildings, filled with houses which give no pleasure to the eye, and over a great part of their area squalid, monotonous, and dingy beyond belief. There are plenty of enjoyments for the rich, but few for the population ; there are scarcely any festivals ; civic common life is mainly felt either in political contests or discussions about taxation ; the best class hold aloof from it, declaring the cities intolerable ; and the masses, except in their personal security, benefit little by the existence of the organisations amid which they live. Life for the majority is deprived of all the pleasantness which belongs to life in the country,—the air, the water, the trees, and the scenery ; while it has no compensa- tions, except such as are derivable from the presence of great numbers, and the consequent possibility, quite as strongly felt by the poor as the rich, of picking out a society. There is a want of lighteomeness and pleasantness in our cities, of a genial and pleasant common life, which is depressing, and which is not wholly explained either by the climate or the habit of burning coal in such a way that it emits masses of sulphurous fumes. We could cure the smoke nuisance if we chose to do it. The climate of Vienna is not much better than that of London, but Vienna has not the London gloom ; and New York, with its exhilarating atmosphere, is just as sad as Liverpool, and, by the accounts of all travellers, more tainted with an air of civic vulgarity.
Mr. Harrison attributes our failure, in part at least, to the immense size of our cities ; but is that criticism well founded ? The ancient cities, Rome excepted, were smaller no doubt in population, and smaller yet in the numbers of the people with whom the prerogative of action rested. Even in a third-rate city, the class which alone lived in any true sense must often have included less than five thousand males, who, dwelling together for centuries, must have formed for many purposes a sort of corporate body, intensely interested, in both senses of the word, in the beauty, pleasantness, and completeness of their corporate life. We suppose, if West London were owned and governed by some ten thousand persons who lived their lives in it, married in it, and thought of it as we do of a country, were all by comparison rich, and were all penetrated with the idea that their importance rose and fell with their city's grandeur or amenity, they would in a century make West London a very pleasant place. Still, many of our country-towns possess some of the old conditions, are filled with well-to-do populations, limited in number, and not changing very fast ; yet in most of them a dingy dullness is allowed to reign supreme. We have seen a good many of them, and Exeter is the only one in which civic vitality is visibly vigorous ; and how little have the citizens of Exeter done com- pared with what they might have accomplished ! They have all the conditions—climate, space, wealth, and civic pride—and they would probably do anything which they thought would ennoble their city; and yet, after all, how little they do to make it a place where people who could choose would consent to live with
hearty cordiality ! The difference must, after all, be in the people and we wish Mr. Harrison would tell us what, in his mind, the source of the difference is. Why, for instance, do not the big English people who take such an interest in national politics, take as keen a one in municipal politics, live in their cities, beautify their cities, and govern their cities ? They do in Italy, where the city Mayor is constantly some great noble, and where the work of beautification, sanitation, and " grand& cation "—there is no such word, but there ought to be—is being just now pushed on with almost too reckless a vigour. The usual explanation is that the Englishman being fond of rural life, and the country being even more secure than the town, when he is able to choose he chooses the country and deserts the town ; but is the explanation quite true P Is it not the want of amenity in the town, and its presence in the country, which drives the rich away P They say that great people live in London every year longer than they did, and their district is beginning to be the pleasantest of English cities. The grand city of " S.W." has no civic life, and contains tob many societies for a corporate life of any kind ; but it is becoming well built, it is healthy beyond precedent, it is full of pleasant open spaces, and though deficient in public buildings, it is so full of private buildings of the best kind, that it is becoming architecturally attractiv8. There is, however, little return to the habit of living in other cities, and little prospect of it in the future. Every- body complains of the disagrentene of city life, and nobody seems to think that the persevering work of a few years, carried out upon an intelligent plan and with the persistency Englishmen show in all other business, would remove most of them. London is too big for men to encounter its necessities ; but suppose the magnates of Leeds to decide that they would abolish smoke, open parks, clear away rookeries relentlessly, open wide planted squares in the densest quarters, establish baths, theatres, and libraries in adequate profusion, make every building beautiful, and either by force of opinion or a local Act, render
most houses freehold, thereby introducing at once variety and painstaking architecture, would the undertaking be beyond
their powers ? We are sure they will not do it, at least not in' that rapid and determined way ; but we do not quite see why. The people would be with them, and unless the people opposed, the magnates could get any amount of statutory power, for though Parliament adheres to ridiculous formulas, and is far too jealous of its private-Bill prerogatives, it would, if sure of the local public assent, let a city like Leeds try almost' any experiment it pleased. The cost is too great ? Cost and time are almost interchangeable terms, and if the citizens could stick to a plan for a generation, they could find money for almost anything ; and the tone once set, and the work once advanced to a visible point, they would be helped with gifts every year. No doubt much would still remain to be done, for there would be no common religions cere;. monials—imagine Churchmen and Dissenters combining fa' ti"ic quarterly religious festival—no secular festivals, and no common outdoor occasions of display ; but if there were the will, these also might be created. It is the will that is required, and the reason of the want of will is as great a puzzle to us as it evidently is to Mr. Harrison. We should presume it to be the love of secluded home life, but that we do not see this operate to alienate men from national affairs, which ought to be only just more interesting than those of the Municipality. It is not any want of sympathy between classes, for the wish to make the lives of all brighter is rising into it passion, and if not checked by the spread of Socialism, will yet be a dominant one; and it is certainly not the want Of that public fortune for lack of which the cities of Greece and Rome, after their misfortunes, at length decayed. We can but hope that the strongest cause is want of knowledge of what might be done—want, in fact, of a mental ideal of what a city should be—for if that is the case, the want may be supplied by teaching ; and every lecture like Mr. Harrison's, which tell% us picturesquely what has been, may help to supply it.
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