Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (638 page)

London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its assimilative powers, because it destroys all race characteristics, insensibly and, as it were, anaesthetically. A Polish Jew changes into an English Hebrew and then into a Londoner without any legislative enactments, without knowing anything about it. You may watch, say, a Berlin Junker, arrogant, provincial, unlicked, unbearable to any other German, execrable to anyone not a German, turning after a year or two into a presentable and only just not typical Londoner; subdued, quiet in the matters of collars, ties, coat, voice and backbone, and naturally extracting a “sir” from a policeman. London will do all this imperceptibly. And, in externals, that is the high-water mark of achievement of the Modern Spirit.

IV

IMMENSE without being immediately impressive, tolerant without any permanent preferences, attracting unceasingly specimens of the best of all earthly things without being susceptible of any perceptible improvement, London, perhaps because of its utter lack of unity, of plan, of the art of feeling, is the final expression of the Present Stage. It owes its being to no one race, to no two, to no three. It is, as it were, the meeting place of all Occidentals and of such of the Easterns as can come, however remotely, into touch with the Western spirit. Essentially unmusical, in it may be found, as it were “on show,” the best of all music. And it has at odd moments “on show” the best products of the cook, of the painter, of the flower-gardener, of the engineer, of the religious and of the scientists. It does without any architecture, because in essentials it is an assembly of tents beside a river, a perennial Nijni Novgorod bazaar, a permanent world’s fair. It is a place in which one exists in order to gain the means of living out of it; an epitome, an abstract of the Christian’s world, which he inhabits only to prepare himself for one more bright if less glamorous. Perhaps, for times to come, some individual of to-day, striking the imagination of posterity, may catch and preserve an entirely individual representation of the London of to-day. We have our individual presentations of so many vanished Londons. We have the town of a riverside, with steep, serrated warehouselike wharf-dwellings, dominated by a great Gothic cathedral. Through its streets wind improbably gigantic processions of impossibly large mediaeval horsemen. We have a Tudor London merging into the early Jacobean of the dramatists — a small, provincial-minded, crooked-streeted, gabled town, walled, circumscribed, still set in fields whose hedges public-minded citizens of the train-bands delighted to break down. We have the two Londons of the diarists — a London still of crooked streets, of a Gothic cathedral, with an essential stench, a glow of torches round house-ends with red crosses on low doors, a rumble of plague-carts. Then a London rising out of ashes, with streets, heaven knows, crooked enough, but having lost its cathedral and its gabled houses. So, perhaps, for the London of our day.

Some Clerk of the Admiralty is, without doubt, keeping, like Pepys, his diary; some journalist, like Defoe, is writing fraudulent memoirs; some caricaturist now before us, some novelist too much or too little advertised to-day, will succeed in persuading posterity that his London is the London that we live in but assuredly don’t know.

We may take that to be certain. Yet it is not so certain that his London will be as near the real thing as were, in their days, those of Pepys, of Hogarth, or even of Albert Smith. One may hazard that without chanting jeremiads to the art of to-day. But we may set it down that Pepys going out from Dover to welcome Charles II. had somewhere at the back of his head an image of his London — of a town of a few strongly marked features, of a certain characteristic outline, of jagged roofs, of over-hanging upper storeys, of a river that was a highway for ever clamorous with the cry of “Oars.”

So, too, had Hogarth when at Calais. Dickens, posting as the Uncommercial Traveller towards France over Denmark Hill, may almost have had an impression of a complete and comparatively circumscribed London. But so many things — as obvious as the enormously increased size, as secondary as the change in our habits of locomotion — militate against our nowadays having an impression, a remembered bird’s-eye-view of London as a whole.

The Londoner bites off from his town a piece large enough for his own chewing. We have no symbol of London comparable to the Lutetia of Paris; none to set beside the figure on the reverse of our copper coins. It is comparatively easy to have in the mind the idea of a certain green island familiar in its backward tilt towards the shores of Europe, familiar in its rugged outline, in its setting of silver sea. We may think of it as a bit of coloured marble-facing broken from a palace wall, with counties mottled in green, counties in pink, counties in buff, in blue, in yellow. We may think of it embossed in relief out of a robin’s-egg blue sea, with the misty white cliffs of Kent, the slate and marble of Devon, the serpentine of Cornwall, or the half-submerged rafts of the outer Hebrides forming the edges.

It is, in fact, comparatively easy to evoke a picture of England as a whole, still easier, perhaps, to think of this world as a green orange revolving round a candle, or as the pink and blue of a Mercator’s projection. One may sail easily round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer — one must of course qualify these generalisations with an “asa rule” — ever memorised a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks round it. For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.

V

A BRILLIANT, wind-swept, sunny day, with the fountains like hay-cocks of prismatic glitter in the shadow of Nelson’s Column, with the paving stones almost opalescent, with colour everywhere, the green of the orange trees in tubs along the façade of the National Gallery, the vivid blue of the paper used by flower-sellers to wrap poet’s narcissi, the glint of straws blown from horses’ feeds, the shimmer of wheel-marks on the wood pavement, the shine of bits of harness, the blaze of gold lettering along the house fronts, the slight quiver of the nerves after a momentarily dangerous crossing accentuating the perception — is that “London”? Does that rise up in your Londoner’s mind’s eye, when, in the Boulevard Haussman, or on the Pyramids, he thinks of his own places?

Or is it the chaotic crowd, like that of baggage wagons huddled together after a great defeat, blocked in the narrow ways of the City, an apparently indissoluble muddle of gray wheel traffic, of hooded carts, of ‘buses drawing out of line, of sticky mud, with a pallid church wavering into invisibility towards the steeple in the weeping sky, of grimy upper windows through which appear white faces seen from one’s level on a ‘bus-top, of half the street up, of the monstrous figure of a horse “down” — and surely there is no more monstrous apparition than that of a horse down in the sticky streets with its frantic struggles, the glancing off of its hoofs, the roll of eyes, the sudden apparition of great teeth, and then its lying still — is this, with its black knot of faces leaning a little over the kerbstone, with its suggestion of the seashore in the unconcerned, tarpaulin-shrouded figure of the traffic policeman — is this again “London”, the London we see from a distance?

Or do we see it in the glare of kerosene lamps, the diffused blaze of shop fronts, the slowly moving faces revealed for a moment, then as it were, washed out, of the serried, marketing crowds. They will be carrying string bags, carrying paper parcels, carrying unwrapped green stuff, treading on layers of handbills, treading on the white scrolls of orange peels, on small heaps of muddy sawdust, standing in shawled groups round the glare of red joints in butchers’ shops, standing in black groups round the carts of nostrum sellers, round the carts of dutch auctioneers; with ears deafened by the cries of vendors of all things meet for a Saturday night, by the incessant whistle of trams looming at a snail’s pace through the massed humanity; by the incessant, as if vindictively anvil-like, peals of notes of barrel organs. In a patch of shadow left in a vacant space, you will hardly make out the figure of a forlorn man standing still. With a pendent placard on his chest, announcing one of the ills of the flesh, he offers for sale things that you would think nobody could stop to buy, or indistinguishable quavers of melody that nobody could stay to hear. Is this again the London that comes to one at a distance?

For, almost assuredly, it will be some minute detail of the whole, we seeing things with the eye of a bird that is close to the ground. And with the eye of a bird seeking for minute fragments of seed, minute insects, tiny parasites, we also look for things that to us are the constituents of our mental or visual pabula. The tendency of “carriage folk” must be to think of the Saturday night market as nothing but the swinging doors of public-houses and of pawnshops, as nothing but the architectural arrangements of translucent gin bottles in pale shop windows. The marketer has his tendency to regard those he sees in carriages as insolent servants conducting people who “are no better than they should be.” The essential Bohemian must think of those whose sign visual is the aligned brass knockers of suburban streets, as sluggish-minded and intolerable. Thus, humanity not caring to think about what it does not like, the villa resident away from London will see a vision of “Parks” and “Gardens,” surrounded by uninteresting or repulsive districts of small houses; the working man thinks of High Streets, of small streets, of tenement blocks, set down on the fringes of villadom.

The limits of the classes are not of course so crudely definite but that there is an infinity of individual variants. There are the crowds of philanthropists who make swallow flights into slums, the mechanics who dream of their own carriages. There is room for millennialists who strive to create Garden Cities, for socialist prophets who read in the skies signs of an approaching Armageddon after which all men shall be alike in tastes as in habitation. But in the bulk the Londoner is anything rather than tolerant of a class not his own; the unfamiliar is almost inevitably the iniquitous.

We may, among the October partridges, have a sudden vision of a slinking, horribly suggestive pair of figures. We saw them as we walked gaily home from the very best ball of last season, in the pale delicate stillness of dawn, at the mouth of a black court, under the unclean light of a street lamp held out from a dirty wall by a bracket, as if an arm were holding a torch to comment on the blackness of the inwards of this earth. And those figures, slinking back into those shadows, may among the crisp stubble suddenly rise up and stand for London.

Or one may as a child, have crept out of a slum on a summer night, have climbed some area railings in a long street all railings, to peep in at a room where the delicate, tender light of candles shimmering on silver, on the shining shoulders of women, on the shining linen of men, contended with the delicate, tender light of the London sunset. And that picture may rise up for one in the shadows of a black Kentish barn, where in the hopping season straw-thatched hurdles pen off the darkness, and the air is heavy with the odour of hops, of rags, of humanity. But, essentially, the London that from afar the Londoner sees is his own parish, and his own parish is the part he knew in his youth, the human stratum from which he started. A man may have passed right across London in his life; he may have dropped as it were from ledge to ledge; he may have been born in Mayfair to fall in his traces, a sodden beast, outside a public-house of the Tower Hamlets. Or he may have been born in the fifth of a room in a Whitechapel ghetto, to die in a palace of Park Lane. Yet assuredly the London of the one will be, not the purlieus of Bankruptcy Buildings, not the shabby lodgings, not the dismal blind-yard in which sandwich-boards are given out, not any of the intermediate stages, but the West of his youth. He will die thinking himself a gentleman. And — one may hazard the induction — the standard by which the other will appraise the world-centre he has conquered will be the auction for the right to open the tabernacle in the synagogue, the inscriptions in the kosher shops, the grating of the
lingua-hebraica,
the casting of sins at the feast of the New Year into the tidal waters off the parapet of Custom House Wharf, the feather of the Day of Purification, that were his familiars when a young lad. The middle stages of neither will have counted as, in middle life, the mind lost its impressionability.

Besides which, to see London steadily and see it whole, a man must have certain qualities of temperament so exhaustive as to preclude, on the face of it, the faculties which go to the making — or the marring — of great fortunes. He must, it is true, have his “opportunities.” But before all things he must have an impressionability and an impersonality, a single-mindedness to see, and a power of arranging his illustrations cold-bloodedly, an unemotional mind and a great sympathy, a life-long engrossment in his “subject,” and an immense knowledge, for purposes of comparison, of other cities. He must have an avidity and a sobriety of intellect, an untirable physique and a delicately tempered mind. These things are antitheses.