FORD MADOX FORD

England and the English

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
SARA HASLAM

This book is dedicated to Paul, a fine companion in the city and the country

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

 

ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH

 

The Soul of London

Introductory

 

Chapter I. From a Distance

No mental image of London from a distance. – ‘He knows his London’. – What he knows. – The born Londoner. – The provincial immigrant. – His preconceptions. – His aloneness. – His induction. – He becomes the Londoner. – London, an abstraction. – Its forgetfulness. – Its tolerance. – Its assimilative powers. – London, a permanent World’s Fair. – Mental images of former Londoners. – London illimitable. – Trafalgar Square. – A horse down.. – The Saturday-night market. – Class views. – What the Londoner sees from afar. – The foreigner’s view of London. – The Londoner confronted with this view. – Its effect on him. – His ignorance of London. – London, a background. – What we remember of London. – London manifesting itself on the clouds.

 

Chapter II. Roads into London

Where the country ends. – The three Londons. – The psychological. – The Administrative County. – Natural London. – The ring of blackened tree trunks. – Elms. – The new carriages. – Entering on a motor car. – Its effects on the mind. – Distances to be thought of in new terms. – Entering on an electric tram. – The possibility of looking round. – A manifestation of the modern spirit. – The electric tram at night. – Its romantic appearance. – Entering London on a bicycle. – Its tiresomeness. – The just-outside-London ’bus. – Entering London on foot. – In a gipsy caravan. – The most intolerant method of entry. – The defect of rapid transit. – The Londoner abroad no longer sought after. – London the product of roads. – The Thames. – Roads historically considered. – The watermen. – The pampered jades of Belgia. – Climbing skywards versus spreading out. – Strata of past Londons. – Workmen’s dwellings. – Georgian houses. – ‘Parades’. – The speculative builder. – The pathos of his products. – A fairylike effect near the Obelisk. – Entering London on a market wagon. – The dawn sounds of London. – Entering London by barge. – No longer a common method. – Entering London by railway. – The goods depôt. – The approach of the millennium. – The London landscape from a train window. – Its pathos. – Uncompleted histories. – A builder of the Pyramid of Cheops.

 

Chapter III. Work in London

The oldest road. – Gravesend. – Its significance for sailors. – Thames barges. – The two kinds of work. – Their union. – Tilbury dock. – The chief officer. – The invisible rope. – The two ends of London. – The secret of London. – The millionaire. – The ferryman. – The Italians. – The streets paved with gold. – The modern appeal. – Former adventurers. – The immense crowd. – Buonaparte – Other Napoleons – The spirit of modern work. – X. – P. – Hobbies. – Methods of individual work. – Routine work. – The necessity for asserting an individuality. – Women workers. – The matchbox maker. – Her ideals. – The very poor. – The caput mortuum. – The obverse and reverse of the medal. – The periodical press – The cabinet-maker. – The personal element. – Municipal Trading. – The bank clerk. – Stanley. – The cement works. – New processes. – The battle field.

 

Chapter IV. London at Leisure

The omnibus yard. – In search of work. – ‘London’s the place’. – Why London holds us. – The beleaguered fortress. – The leisured classes. – Social life. – London freedom. – Schopenhauer on English Society. – Towards barbarism. – The town of work. – The islands of the blest. – The exhaustion of leisure in London. – The real good time. – The third State. – The chaffinch fancier. – Other ‘fanciers’. – ‘The pheasant raiser. – The Rye fisherman. – London’s humour. – Its diffusion. – The power of generalisation. – Effect on the countryman of the Daily Press. – Effect on the Londoner. – Emerson on London conversations. – The disappearance of the raconteur. – Londoner’s disinclination to listen to unlicensed preachers. – The London Sabbath. – The Sunday papers. – The two Hamlets. – ‘The parades’. – London in the making. – Londoners in decay.

 

Chapter V. Rest in London

The cloisters of our Valhalla. – The unknown author. – The waste of individualities. – The pleasantest size for a graveyard. – The cemetery. – Athens versus Kensington High Street. – The Londoner. – The impossibility of finding him. – The death of the Spirit of Place. – The individualist and his neighbours. – At Pèrela-Chaise. – The discussion in the cloisters. – The school boys. – The disappearance of the great figure. – Spring clouds. – The forgotten hills. – The stern reformer. – Building improvements. – ‘History’ ends with the young Pretender. – The beginning of ‘movements’. – The ideal city of the reformer. – The end of furniture. – Utopia. – The alternative. – The end of London. – The elements. – The charity school. – The garden plots. – The Monastic reformers. – ‘That neurasthenia joke’. – The sick farm labourer. – A race that will survive. – London from a distance. – The cloud.

 

The Heart of the Country

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Introductory. The Country of the Townsman

 

The Restaurant. – The Islands of the Blest. – The man from the Heart of the Country. – The mirage. – The change in our language. – The permanence of the idea. – Leaving town. – Each man’s heart. – The great view. – The ‘note’ of the country one of pain. – The empty room. – The belief in romance. – The watcher by the bedside. – The country in inverted commas. – The Antæus town. – The scientists. – The townsman’s difficulty in becoming a countryman. – He discovers his ignorance. – The stages of a country life. – The townsman’s induction. – The landowner’s point of view. – The child in the country. – The slum child. – The hopper. – The railway porter. – Going to a cricket match. – Views. – ‘What a lot a fellow could do if he owned all that’.

 

Chapter I. Between the Hedgerows

The individuality of roads. – Turnpikes. – The ghosts on them. – Solitary roads. – The real roads of the country. – What the country is. – The railway hedgerows. – Quicksets. – The two points of view. – Different travellers. – Tramps. – Their castles in Spain. – The tooth-comb tramp. – His fear of solitude. – Other tramps. – Their ideals. – The German poet. – The townsman and the tramp. – Travellers who might be rescued. – The Union. – Remarkable paupers. – The carrier’s cart. – Its users. – Its route. – Gossip. – The countryman’s memory. – A judgment on ‘Old F——’. – The cart in a river. – Rustic independence. – The townsman learns his place. – Cap-service. – The welcome home. – The return to the land. – The Covent Garden porter. – Moving. – Its costliness. – The farm waggon in the British Museum. – The captive waggoner. – Where there is an exchange. – By-roads. – Who uses them. – The squirrel on the high-road. – Market-day. – Country centres.

 

Chapter II. Across the Fields

Getting the lie of the land. – The man who loves his home. – The man who loves the footpaths. – The country in undress. – New Place. – The loafer gains dignity. – The Midland squire. – The squire abroad. – Trespassing. – The number of paths across England. – Pilgrim ways. – Pack tracks. – Cinder paths. – The student of nature. – Nature and the countryman. – The oil beetle. – To what end? – Linky. – White, ominous of death. – The townsman and nature books. – Hasty pudding. – The old looker. – The sunset. – Potato digging. – The countryman and the supernatural. – The sick nurse. – The inquest. – Bizarre beliefs. – The feeling of familiarity. – Refuge from one’s self. – The hunting field. – Other field sports. – The naturalist. – The breakdown. – The invalid and the mirror. – The vocation of the fields.

 

Chapter III. In the Cottages

The two-dwelling house. – Meary. – Her appearance. – Her philosophy. – Her biography. – Her folk-lore. – Her religious beliefs. – Her man. – She meets a ghost. – Her daily life. – Her death. – Her money. – The belief in hoardings. – Its counter-part in France. – A conversation in the Café de l’Espérance. – The peasant and retiring. – Improvidence. – Money spent on drink. – Children. – Old couples. – The informer’s descendants. – Rest in the country. – The power of the peasant. – His want of corporate self-consciousness. – The peasant’s print. – The absence of youths in the country. – The village maiden.

 

Chapter IV. Toilers of the Field

Driven in by the weather. – The retired soldier. – The looker. – Sunshine. – Their views of men who wear black coats. – Cases in Chancery. – The countryman’s reason for keeping a shut head. – Differences in dialect. – The countryman, a man of the world. – What you expect of a gentleman. – The carpenter and the Financier. – S. – His venerability. – He annexes a guinea. – W——n. – A comparatively honest man. – His industry. – His toleration of other people’s thefts. – His biography. – His humble ambition. – His mates. – The influence of woodlands upon character. – A woodland Heart of the Country. – Bad villages. – The parson’s power for good or evil. – The countryman and the Church. – The countryman and superstitions. – Ghosts. – Witches and White doctors. – The countryman and death. – N—— and how he died. – The Yorkshire stonemason. – The raw material of the world.

 

Chapter V. Utopias

D——d. – Its glories. – Superlatives. – Its uninterestingness. – The old story. – Great houses not based on the plough. – The use of ascertaining what is the best cowhouse. Cold storage. – The usual castle in Spain. – English country life and outdoor life. – Climate responsible for this. – Returning from hunting. – Parallel afforded by the sagas. – The country house in wet weather. – Lack of intellectual interest in the country. – The real landowner. – His problems. – Landowning no longer pays. – The small landowner. – His love for his acres. – The tenant farmer large and small. – The small farmer the real stumbling-block. – A personal view. – A personal Utopia. – Scheme for a syndicate possessed of a million pounds sterling. – A career. – Town legislation for the country. – Cottages and the truck-system. – A dream. – Conflicting Utopias. – The man from Lincolnshire. – The Northerners. – The Tory. – The advanced thinker. – The political economist. – Return to nature derided. – Another Utopia. – Babel. – The awakening.

 

L’Envoi. ‘By Order of the Trustees…’

The field auction. – The sheep. – The buyers assemble. – The sale begins. – Why we never laugh at tools. – In the idiot’s shed. – The auctioneer. – A public jester. – The country paper at Michaelmas. – The passing of farmers. – Change, the note of all countrysides. – Old Hooker. – His team of black oxen. – ‘It isn’t the same place at all’. – The invisible presence of the dead. – The odiousness of restorations. – The eventual acceptability of other changes. – A late October walk. – The unchanging valley. – Leaders of caravans.

 

The Spirit of the People

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Chapter I. The People from the Outside

The professor of history. – The Spirit of the People bloodthirsty. – The siege of Münster. – Qualifications. – The moral of English history. – The death of kings. – Executions. – The romantic movement. – The humane crowd. – The dog. – The sheep. – Foreign views. – Sentimentality. – The Englishman and animals. – Natur-Schwärmerei. – An ancient characteristic. – Anthropomorphism. – The German view of nature. – The Latin. – Shooting women. – The Boer War. – A lack of ferocity. – Police and hooligans. – The special province of the race. – Living comfortably together.

 

Chapter II. The Road to the West

The conquests of England. – ‘All these fellows are ourselves’. – Foreign leaders. – The African Englishman. – Cricket. – Schoolboy history. – 1066. – The Normans were the first Anglo-Saxons. – The Anglo-Saxons not English. – Julius Caesar an Englishman. – The fight. – The foreign English. – The Americans not English. – The railway journey. – A foreigner hardly a man. – Why this is so. – The American view of history. – Insularity. – Cathedrals and rosegardens. – The English not a race. – A colony of bad eggs. – ‘Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s rolling tide’. – Wanderers.

 

Chapter III. The Melting Pot

The town. – The country. – Their lessons. – Rural depopulation. – The traveller in baby-linen. – Psychological ages. – The ice age. – A fanciful projection. – The beginning of the modern world. – Henry VIII’s Spanish expedition. – Dr W.G. Grace. – Thomas Cromwell. – Machiavelli. – Dominant types. – My grandfather’s diary. – ‘I love Dutch William’. – Victorian ideals. – The history class. – The short history. – Mr E. – Why he resigned. – Puritanism – A liberal relative. – The abolition of the monasteries. – The great rebellion. – The revolution. – Germanising. – Various speculations. – Odessa Jews. – The land of freedom.

 

Chapter IV. Faiths

A book to read. – The English Bible horrible. – Church service. – The British Deity. – Jehovah. – The lack of Purgatory. – Protestantism. – The Methodist revival. – The coronation of the Virgin. – Currents. – The decadence of theology. – The Athanasian Creed. – The immortality of the soul. – Sustained discussion. – Vague faith. – Japanese not Methodists. – The Indian prince. – Where God comes in. – Taceat mulier in ecclesia. – The first church of Christian Science. – The odd colony. – Vocal women and silent men. – The ladies’ paper. – Women and the Press. – Women and the Arts. – Women and Religion. – Women and Catholicism. – How God suffered. – Jesus and the modern Englishman. – Christism. – The Englishman’s code. – Do as you would be done by.

 

Chapter V. Conduct

The function of the law. – Not to avenge but to restore. – The sheepshearer. – ‘Oh, well, it is the law’. – Mr Justice ——. – His psychology. – The English lawyer. – The difference between English law and French justice. – The Strand and a verdict. – The benefit of the doubt. – The Hanover Jack. – The struggle between legislators and lawyers. – Benefit of clergy. – The flaw in the indictment. – English optimism. – A railway station scene. – Leopold II. – Want of imagination. – Dread of emotion. – ‘Things’. – Delicacy. – Two illustrations. – A parting. – Good manners. – The secret of living. – ‘You will play the game’.

 

L’Envoi

The doctor at the play. – The actress. – ‘Think of her temptations’. – The Englishman a poet. – What a poet is. – Other views of life. – The Englishman’s fanatical regard for truth. – The child’s first lie. – The defects of the English system. – The difference between honour and probity. – The Englishman and the sun-dial. – ‘Magna est veritas’. – Practical mysticism. – Cleanliness a mystical virtue. – Sportsmanship a mystical virtue. – The Englishman the type of the future. – The rules of bridge. – The English language. – Its adaptability. – Foreign strains in England. – The Englishman’s want of imaginative sympathy. – The cook and the birds. – Exports to Canada. – The Englishman and subject races. – His love for settled ideas. – His reputation for hypocrisy. – His childishness. – Nostalgia. – My country, right or wrong.

 

Appendix

Author’s Note to England and the English: An Interpretation (New York: McLure, Phillips and Co.), 1907

 

About the Author

Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet

Copyright

Introduction

Ford Madox Ford published the trilogy of books that make up England and the English between 1905 and 1907. Part of a wave of such texts, it investigates England and Englishness1 with originality, in impressionist style and in ways that provide an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal Modernist writer. Though a work of non-fiction, the trilogy eschews superficially factual history; it shares characteristics with novels of the time – Ford’s and others’. The ‘when’ of Englishness is as stimulating to Ford as the ‘where’, the ‘why’ or the ‘how’ – and we see Ford’s nineteenth-century roots here, as well as early examples of the Modernist quest to ‘make it new’. Between them, the books form a trilogy of tenses: they gradually peel back layers of the past: Ford conceived of the Soul of London as a book celebrating modernity, dedicated to the present and the future; the Heart of the Country looked to rural places, older than cities; the Spirit of the People travelled further back still. ‘For the Country was before the Town’, Ford writes in the introduction to the American edition of the trilogy, ‘but, before either…was the People itself’.2

On publication of the first volume, The Soul of London, on 2 May 1905, the Daily Mail called it, ‘the latest and truest image of London, built up out of a series of negations, that together are more hauntingly near to a composite picture of the city than anything we have seen before’.3 It devoted a full column to the book, recognising in its interest both something of the zeitgeist and Ford’s brilliant, painterly, technique. Such texts were popular at the time, especially when they expressed the contemporary fascination with threats to Englishness: notions of urban chaos or flux, degeneration and decline.4 H.G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay (1909), one of his most successful novels, is a good example of this trend, and The Soul of London also exploits it to a degree. The second two volumes of the trilogy represent the necessary concomitant escape to the country version of Englishness, one which is also a flight into the past. Yet The Soul of London is primarily excited about the modern varieties of vibrant Englishness that only the city can provide. London is ‘illimitable’, ‘kaleidoscopic’ and resonates with the voices, experiences, memories and aspirations of its countless inhabitants.

The Contemporary Context

Books like Ford’s, which debated Englishness, were in vogue for several reasons: perhaps most obviously because of the focus afforded and encouraged by the turn of the century. The act of looking forward also involved looking back. Readers of the 1890s, state Michael Neve and Mike Jay, were ‘positively engulfed with imaginative constructions of the next century’.5 When these included such schemes as the plan for a Channel Tunnel, Englishness was perceived as under threat, and in need of reevaluation and support. ‘Invasion literature’ – novels and pamphlets that envisioned the defilement of the island, some of which were linked to the Channel Tunnel project – enjoyed record sales figures from a fascinated and appalled population during the years from 1900 to 1914.6 In a nice variation on this theme, Ford also sees similar invasive forces at work from within the country, as a result of industry. Such hostile forces inflict a mortal blow on the ‘natural’ – i.e. what existed there before their incursion. Whereas the ‘river is a natural way […] railroads tunnel through hills […] and crash through the town itself, boring straight ways into the heart of it with a fine contempt for natural obstacles’ (The Soul of London, p. 38). The sexual imagery implicit in the Channel Tunnel, and in railway tunnels, is significant too: fears of miscegenation went with those of invasion.7

The second Boer War (1899–1902) was another important factor in fuelling the debate on Englishness because, as Linda Colley has noted, the construction of national identity depends on an obviously hostile Other, against which it can range and define itself.8 Reflection on this war, and contemporary notions of a weakening urban workforce – showing the decline from a pastoral English ideal represented by George Eliot’s Adam Bede, for example – actually fed into one another, because of the scrutiny under which the (largely male, working-class) fighting population was put. Sir William Taylor, the Surgeon-General, wrote in 1904 of the ‘alarming proportion of the young men of this country, more especially among the urban population, who are unfit for military service on account of defective physique’ (1900, p. 290). If England was to be physically strong, the message seemed to be, that strength would come not from industrial centres, but from rural havens. At the beginning of The Heart of the Country (p. 120) Ford mentions reading an ‘organ of advanced thought’ propagating such theories. Worryingly, he reports that by 1906, in the opinion of this journal, ‘country stock’ was considered to be too different from the city type and thus, his reader infers, incompatible for regenerative purposes. Even when men were looked for in rural areas for such purposes, however, they were not necessarily there. According to Alun Howkins, the forced migration between the 1870s and the 1890s had worked ‘only too well’, and he states somewhat dramatically that ‘there were no men left on the land’.9 For the popular conception of Englishness – one reliant on theories of hereditary urban degeneration, or ‘physical deterioration’ as Ford describes it in The Soul of London10 – to be satisfied, they had to be persuaded to return.

For related and additional reasons, what Weiner calls a ‘suspicion of material and technological development and […] exclusion of industrialism’ in England fomented around the end of the century and encouraged a polarised perception of England as either ‘workshop’ or ‘shire’ (recall here the current popularity of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings).11 Ideas of progress associated with the one came up against the nostalgia fundamental to the other. This kind of polarity was popular, and effective, in literature, and not just with those like William Morris who were known for their utopian dream visions. Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Thomas had all contributed to its success, and would continue to do so. Writers like Ford, Henry James and Joseph Conrad were more equivocal in their analysis of the polarity of city versus country, as Ford’s trilogy bears out. In their representations of rural and urban landscapes, one was not necessarily superior to the other: both could be seen to have their place in the modern literary conception of Englishness.

The Modern Context

In our own time, a second wave of new books questioning English (and sometimes by extension British) identity has provided the best possible context for republication of Ford’s contribution to the debate. Examples include Norman Davies’ The Isles, John Redwood’s The Death of Britain, Jeremy Paxman’s The English, Simon Heffer’s Nor Shall my Sword, Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy, and numerous works of fiction, such as those mentioned below. Renewed focus was placed on Englishness as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, and it seems as though this occurred for reasons similar to those of a century earlier. In 2000, the Falklands had been the most recent war fought in the interests of British sovereignty, and elements of the media coverage of this event left little doubt as to its catalytic function in relation to ideas of nationhood. Indeed, there were those who claimed that the war was intended to shift energies away from domestic discontent in this way.

In addition, as shipyards, mines and steelworks closed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, difficult questions about technology and industry, and progress, were being asked. Such closures, and other factors such as those mentioned above, helped to create the impression that notions of Englishness were shifting again. Those notions that were foregrounded could easily be mapped onto ideas from the fin-de-siècle, for, in a final echo of the past, debates have arranged themselves around the same polarity as those of a hundred years ago. One reader of Scruton’s Elegy pointed out the ‘absence of urban England, let alone immigrant England’ in the book – which means, curiously enough, that in some ways Ford’s text would read as the more current.12 (By p. 12 of The Soul of London, Ford is discussing all the nationalities involved in creating a composite photograph of ‘the Londoner’, which he also names ‘the Modern’.)

In a review of a novel by Christopher Hart called Harvest, in June 1999, D.J. Taylor identified a ‘new movement in English fiction’. He describes this new movement (and in a way the adjective seems hardly to be justified) as ‘provincial, if not rural, focused on an older England outside the urban sprawl, and symptomatic of a revolt against literary London’s gargantuan obsession with the western postal districts and, ultimately, itself’.13 Re-vivifying Hardy, The Harvest is set on the borders of contemporary ‘Wessex’ – this virtual place still being one of the clearest-ever examples of the literary contribution to the construction of Englishness. But at this new turning point, the predictable polarity remains to be contended with. Martin Amis in London Fields (whose dust jacket claims that in his focus on a richly diverse part of London Amis ‘dissects the nature of a society as it hurtles towards the end of the millennium’) and The Information, Peter Ackroyd’s biography of London, the enormous success of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, each provide evidence of a continuing celebration of all that is quintessentially modern in urban life. Waterstone’s Booksellers capitalised on this mirror image of Taylor’s ‘new movement’ by publishing a Guide to London Writing in 1999. It was advertised with a quotation: ‘England is a small island. The world is infinitesimal. But London is illimitable’. In a tribute to the genre’s roots, the quotation came not from these new millennial writings, but from The Soul of London (p. 15).

Ford’s trilogy can profitably be read against this backdrop. City and country both feature strongly in the record of his impressions of England and the English. These impressions represent still-felt cultural needs regarding the mythologies of the English countryside (the idea that, in Stanley Baldwin’s phrase, ‘England is the country, and the country is England’14). They also challenge them, with kaleidoscopic word-pictures that project aspects of London with a breathless excitement borne of the Modernist project. For these reasons, it is important that each book is read in the light of the others – relatively. Ford’s representation of the ‘town’ is necessary in order for that of the ‘country’ to be set against it, but it is much too simplistic to see Ford as simply adding to the pile of ‘urban degeneration’ literature. Publication of these books in one volume helps each to be read more subtly, and more successfully, too.

Biographical Background and Publication of the Trilogy

Ford Madox Ford was born on 17 December 1873, the first child of Catherine Madox Brown’s marriage to the German music critic, Francis Hueffer. He didn’t actually change his name to Ford until 1919, somewhat unusually after fighting in the war (the Madox he had taken earlier as a symbol of the strength of his relationship with his grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown). The way in which he constructs, and views, London, ‘from a distance’, at the outset of the trilogy, may well have something to do with his conception of his own personal and critical distance from the English life and lives he was setting out to record. He describes himself in The Spirit of the People as ‘a man of no race and few ties – or of many races and many ties’ (p. 325). Consciousness of his mainland European heritage and roots infuses his writerly persona in more books than these, and he travelled, partly in order to maintain these roots, from a young age. He lived in some of the great cities of the world, including London, Paris and New York. London was the city that he knew as he began to write the trilogy, however; he had been born on its outskirts, and he had already lived there for periods when he moved there again in January 1904.

Ford’s artistic abilities were partly due to the family into which he was born (he was related to Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as to Ford Madox Brown). He began to write in 1891, publishing a fairy story written for his sister Juliet, illustrated by Madox Brown. More fairytales followed, and then a biography of his grandfather, before Edward Garnett brought another outsider to the English literary establishment to call. Ford met the Ukrainian-born, sea-faring writer Joseph Conrad in 1898. This was the beginning of a period of collaboration between the two which resulted in joint novels and, more significantly, in the development of literary impressionism, the technique Ford uses to such brilliant effect in this trilogy. Perhaps as a result of this collaborative stimulation, The Soul of London represented Ford’s first literary success. (To Alan Hill, this alone is good reason for investigating the book further.15)

Continuing the organic imagery in the titles of the volumes, The Heart of the Country was published the year after The Soul of London, on 9 May, and also received good reviews. Dedicated to Henry James, the volume bespeaks Ford’s debt to this other companion author who was fascinated by Englishness from the position of outsider. James’s essay, ‘London’, published in 1888, which I discuss below, had also possibly provided more direct inspiration for Ford in his current project. (More immediately, Ford heard that James was planning a book on London as he was writing The Soul of London; a letter from James in April 1904 reassures Ford that his project was ‘relegated to a dim futurity’.16) Max Saunders places the trilogy, from The Heart of the Country onwards, in the developing ‘Edwardian preoccupation with a folk-culture that was rapidly disappearing’. This may be one reason for the attention paid to its publication by Edward Thomas, C.F.G. Masterman and Edward Garnett, among others.17 Thomas coined the phrase ‘the south country’ in a poetry collection published later than Ford’s trilogy, in 1908; the phrase recurs in literature of and about the time as a way of encoding the rural vision of Englishness. According to Robert Colls, there was indeed what he calls a ‘revival’ of interest in ‘folk studies’ and local archaeology around this time. He puts this down to a sense of social and political unrest, both domestic and international, which caused a flight into the nation’s ‘racial and rural essence’.18 As one expression of this flight, chapter 5 in The Spirit of the People is called ‘Utopias’; rather than being a ‘no-place’, Ford’s initial image of utopia is an agricultural variety that he knows exists.

The Spirit of the People appeared in 1907, and had a less happy birth than the previous two volumes. This was due to a combined failure in Ford’s relationship with his agent and his publisher. Unlike the earlier volumes, the book didn’t cause a stir, a fact that Ford miserably put down to a lack of effort on behalf of his publishers, Alston Rivers. It was perhaps less easy to market, in terms of the contemporary atmosphere, as the volume is less focused than its partners, and ranges widely in history, psychology, religion and politics. In its analysis of the English character, however, it discusses sexual repression in a way that reveals a germ of the story of Ford’s greatest book, The Good Soldier (1915).

Technique

Key terms associated with particular techniques appear in the trilogy, some of which relate to Ford’s Modernist credentials, and to his collaboration with Conrad, and others to contemporary imagistic fashions. Overall, his style entails a series of ‘moments of vision’, built up to sections of prose in which Ford makes his case. Often part of this case-making is structured along the lines of ‘I know someone who…’, ‘I met a woman who…’. In an example from The Heart of the Country, Ford discusses field labourers he has known, building towards a final image of ‘Everyman, this final pillar of the state’ who is, for Ford, the ‘heart of the heart of the country’ (pp. 197–8). This anecdotal style can be distracting, unless one bears in mind that it is an integral part of a philosophy that privileges the ordinary encounter, the individual meeting and sharing of minds, and makes them representative. It is a not uncommon way of constructing ‘travel writing’, or that devoted to cultural observation. Henry James adopted it in his essay on London, and in many other examples of his travel writing (see English Hours). In one of the most famous examples of books about Englishness, H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927), the same technique can be observed. (He meets, for example, the last bowl turner in England, who reveals to him the secrets of his rural trade.)

One of the techniques that Ford practises throughout is alluded to a number of times in the first pages of the text, in the repetition of the word ‘impression’. The debate as to the extent of self-consciousness necessary to a writer’s professional existence pre-dated Ford (it was particularly associated with Matthew Arnold, amongst others, in the latter half of the nineteenth century) but in the years before the First World War the issue became an essential part of literary life.19 On one side of the divide were the avowed impressionists, derided by Irving Babbitt as ‘the last effete representatives of romanticism’. Michael Levenson characterises impressionism ‘as both a precise rendering of objects and an unrepentant subjectivising’: as attention to detail, in other words, in what one saw, and in what one felt and remembered.20 Opposed to the impressionists were those, like Babbitt, for whom art was primarily about self-transcendence. Although perhaps most relevant in discussion of fiction, the impressionist debate is played out, as we shall see, in other writing of the period. It is an impressionist approach that Hillaire Belloc describes in 1900 as he begins his book on Paris:

There comes, I suppose [he writes in the preface], to every one who has felt keenly the modern impression of a place he loves, a desire to know its changing past, the nature and experience that it draws from the centuries, and the platform upon which there can be constructed some little of that future which he will never see… [A man] will end by making a record that is as incomplete and fragmentary… as are the notes and letters we keep to remind ourselves of absent friends […] This book belongs, then, to that kind of history (if it can be called history at all) which is as superficial and as personal as a traveller’s drawing or as the notes of a man’s diary.21

Ford found himself very much on the side of the impressionists and, with Conrad, developed the style into one for which they would both become known. With grim humour Ford relates the potential cost of their choice: ‘Impressionists were considered to be bad people: Atheists, Reds, wearing red ties with which to frighten householders’.22 Nonetheless, impressionism, which distrusted facts when it came to representing human experience and instead embraced the multiple truths of how something seemed and looked and felt, was important enough for them both to take the professional risk.

For Ford, impressionism was, above all, about the ability to ‘make you see’; it was about using layered perspectives, of time, as well as of space. So Ford isn’t interested in facts in his trilogy. He doesn’t want to tell us about the ‘720 firms of hat manufacturers employing 19,000 operatives’ (p. 3), he’s interested in how those facts are experienced, in showing what things look like and feel like from different angles, through different lenses, with different focal points. It’s no coincidence that a favourite image in the trilogy is the ‘composite photograph’. By this, Ford means the overlaying of visual images so that each retains its essence but contributes to a multiple whole. (Not so long before, photography had been criticised as a ‘democracy of the portrait’, a description that perhaps helps to contextualise further Ford’s interest in everyday experience.23) Sometimes, Ford uses the composite photograph as a way of representing character (see The Spirit of the People, p. 270), and sometimes as a means of interweaving past and present time (see The Spirit of the People, p. 266).

‘Rendering’, another key term in the trilogy, is closely related to impressionism. Ford uses it to mean the opposite of making a definitive record. It is associated with impressionism because rendering involves suggesting. The emphasis in artistic terms is on the act of representation, on the approach and re-approach to the experience of the object or event in question. Together, these responses help to indicate Ford’s contribution to Modernism – one that is, perhaps, most evident in the first volume of the trilogy, where the chaos and complexity of the city demands such literary treatment.

The visual intent and impact of Ford’s technique in this trilogy is closely related to the nature of its imagery. One of the most extraordinary, and bizarre, examples of this is the body of the country, complete with organs, blood, and spiritual dimensions. Country roads and hedgerows, for example, are the vessels which pump the blood from the heart of the country: market days are ‘pulse days’ (The Heart of the Country, pp. 146–8). Most powerfully, though, Ford focuses on this body’s digestive powers, locating them in the capital city. He uses the phrase ‘modern juices’ to describe London’s ability both to erase the differences between its inhabitants, and to re-define them, on the other side of digestion, as it were (The Soul of London, pp. 12–13). Striking as this is, it is not entirely original to Ford. Such organic imagery was popular at the time, and Henry James’s famous essay on London (first published in 1888) provides a possible model for the hungry beast that Ford at times depicts in his trilogy.24 James describes London as ‘like a mighty ogress who devours human flesh’, needing the nourishment to maintain her levels of vivacity and to do her ‘work’.25 Ford develops this image, however (if he was aware of it). James’s is a Darwinian vision, in which it is the weak who are ‘gobbled up’ as fuel. In The Soul of London, it is all of those who go to make up the Modern Spirit who are oozed over, and turned into London’s own, before their individual memories and perceptions are allowed to re-assert themselves in Ford’s celebration of difference.

The Soul of London

True to Ford’s impressionist ethos, this book offers many pictures of the city, some of which seem to contradict each other. The tension between the city as a place that fosters individuality, and one which takes it away, is not resolved. The ‘immense crowd’ of the city, to which Ford refers from time to time, has much in common with Gustave le Bon’s dystopic depiction of the primitiveness and savagery found when large numbers of individuals congregate and agitate, filling the lone watcher with fear.26 The enormous range of individual sights of one’s fellow human beings and their experiences of life, which Ford takes such pains to represent, can be ‘nerve-shattering’, because there is simply too much to recognise and respond to (The Soul of London, p. 90). (One is reminded of the ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’ with which George Eliot describes the ability to be ‘aware of all ordinary human life’, an overwhelming ability because of the frequency of ordinary tragedy.27) What we are experiencing here is partly the result of Ford’s own terrible encounters with agoraphobia and nervous illness (serious episodes of which began in 1904), but in the excitement propagated by the city there is always the fear of chaos if such excitement goes ‘too far’.

In general, however, the ‘kaleidoscope’ of human experiences, to which the city gives the receptive writer access, is to be celebrated as one of the truths of modern existence. Living in the city is comparable to a journey by train, during which one sees a variety of landscapes: geographical, emotional and psychological. All human life is there; the other side of the ‘nerve-shattering’ plurality is the way in which ‘London holds us’ – by this Ford means ‘fascinates/enthrals’ – as she shows us ‘many things’ (The Soul of London, p. 79). The final pages of the book construct an optimistic vision of a ‘London of the Future’ that continues to preserve the stories of the past.

In terms of contributions to the debate on Englishness, The Soul of London and the Spirit of the People both provide Ford’s perspective on what became known as the ‘Great Man cult’, part of a debate initiated by the Victorians. In an essay on the rivalry between champions of Wellington and Napoleon (both of whom are mentioned on several occasions in the trilogy), Iain Pears relates the rise of this cult to the ‘arrival of the Victorian worship of self-discipline’. In the earlier volume, Ford laments the passing of the Great Figure, attributing it to the way in which the size of the population in London prevents towering figures from asserting themselves (p. 94). In contrast, in The Spirit of the People, he develops the theory of the ‘Great Man of his type’ in a retrospective historical analysis, beginning with Thomas Cromwell (p. 271), whom he credits with ‘welding England into a formidable whole’. The Great Man may have retreated in modern life, but he is essential to Ford’s historical vision of Englishness.

The Heart of the Country

The utopian theme is strong in the second volume (in which the ‘country’ is mainly that of Kent). There’s no doubt that the country is, above all, intended to be seen as a corrective to city living, a place from which regenerative strength can be drawn when the excitement of the city proves too much. Ways into and through the countryside are focal points in this text: web-like structures reveal and create the links between the communities and individuals that make up the rural population. Like bloodlines, they connect the village cottages that compete with the country labourer for Ford’s depiction of the ‘heart of the heart of the country’. It is the village aspect of the countryside that is often called on elsewhere to illustrate Englishness: H.V. Morton states that ‘the village that symbolises England sleeps in the sub-conscious of many a townsman’.28 George Sturt illustrates the kind of mythical organic community that proliferated in literature, as he laments the loss of Englishness. Unsurprisingly, his focus is ‘a village’, one ‘inhabited by Peasantry: rounded in by its own self-supporting toil, and governed by its own old-world customs’.29 Ford’s text, too, contributes to the belief that country people were tougher than town-dwellers, and, in a manner similar to Hardy, depicts the importance of the relationship between character and place. Divorce from one’s roots is impoverishing, and it is the natural base of those roots that provides most strength in the face of a changing world. Ford avoids the temptation towards sentimentality in his depiction of the countryside. Mirroring the structure of the trilogy as a whole, the effects of lack of comfort, poor diet, and ill-education, are shown, as well as the positive aspects of country living.

The many images of the tramp in The Heart of the Country are significant in Ford’s depiction of Englishness. In Roy Porter’s Myths of the English, an essay is devoted to the rise of the ‘romantic and sentimental tramp of the Edwardians’;30 Henry James is seduced by the ‘romantic attractiveness’ of the same construct in English Hours (p. 100). This primarily literary figure – no one did much sociological research into vagrant life at the time – symbolised the rejection of authority and the ‘encroachments of business and city life’ (Myths of the English, pp. 99, 106). A rural figure in fantasy, the tramp guarded primitive secrets and country codes; Ford’s tramps have ‘gone back into the heart of the country and become one with the ravens’ (p. 135). They inhabit a different world even from those who live in the country, offering a commentary from their perspective as outsiders that is of value to Ford – and other writers of the time – because of what Porter calls their ‘innocuous anarchy’ (p. 5). They represent the old ways, old knowledge, and can be called up as repositories of Englishness, but they offer no real threat to the status quo. That attribute belongs to the ‘Grim Reaper’ whom Ford conjures up in ‘L’Envoi’ – the auctioneer who presides over enforced and painful change due to the death or bankruptcy of local inhabitants. But even he is unable to vanquish the ploughman, with whom Ford leaves us (p. 227), one who seems to walk straight out of Ford and into Hardy’s ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ nine years later, without changing at all.

The Spirit of the People

This is the book in which Ford uses the image of the composite photograph to such productive effect. He finds it a useful means to illustrate the merging of times as well as of spaces and objects, as he ranges through history in his discussion of the English character and spirit. Building on the idea of the Great Man cult, Ford develops a theory of the representative type of an age, one that can be compared with other types from other ages in the search for physical and emotional similarities and differences. He refers to a composite photograph that he has had made of some of Holbein’s sketches of ‘typical Englishmen’ of his day (p. 270). Curiously (and humorously) enough, the result reminds him of W.G. Grace. In opposition to this robust portrayal of the English character, Ford explores further the theory of degeneration (p. 265), finding some evidence to support it in both the declining birth-rate and the movement of the population from the countryside to the town. Here, he also assesses the characteristics that make up the typical Englishman. Unsurprisingly, as he tries to impose a narrative, the issues can become confused, especially when he attempts to discuss race and the relationship between ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’. In general, however, the pictures Ford paints are lucid, though perhaps provocative; his forays into Protestantism versus Catholicism, and the law are especially stimulating. Furthermore, the book comes into its own when the theme is repression.

The crowd, as discussed in the Soul of London, re-emerges in Ford’s consideration of society here. It is presented less symbolically (and perhaps neurotically) than in the earlier volume, because, with sociological intent, Ford wants to compare the English crowd with that of other nations. On the other hand, he displays the same nervousness at the power of large numbers of people congregated together – as well as an impressionist style – that we encountered before. The brutal behaviour of policemen that figures in his analysis of the crowd, and that Ford acknowledges even as he dismisses it as uncommon, lends a more distinct flavour to this volume of the trilogy (pp. 237–8, 244–6).

Finally, as the book draws to a close, Ford takes us back to the beginning of the trilogy with his celebration of the variety that makes up the English character. This is the ‘type of the future’ (p. 232) not in any narrow jingoistic sense, but in the sense that, throughout its history, this type has been forged by the encounter with new and different perspectives. Unable to resist the call of myth in his final sentences, Ford resorts to a beautifully written passage about the way in which England has made the English. It is an England that is green and fertile, but one that, nevertheless, exerts its influence over the city on which it depends for its literary construction, and for its fame.

1 This is different from ‘Britishness’. Ford concentrates on English landscapes, urban and rural, throughout this trilogy.

2 England and the English: An Interpretation (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1907), xviii.

3 Quoted by Max Saunders in Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I, 195.

4 In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1902), Alfred Austin writes of the city as a place of ‘ungraceful hurry and worry, perpetual postmen’s knocks, an intermittent shower of telegrams’. The quotation comes from Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 45. Late Victorian novels, like Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), also provide examples of the widespread theory of urban degeneration.

5 Introduction to 1900: A Fin-de-Siècle Reader (London: Penguin, 1999), xiii.

6 Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 66.

7 See my article ‘Ford’s Training’ in Max Saunders and Robert Hampson (eds), Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) for an analysis of this subject.

8 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994), 5.

9 Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’ in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 67.

10 See The Soul of London, p. 103. Ford evidently isn’t convinced by the validity of this popular notion, turning it into a kind of joke in the text by questioning when it began to strike men down and making it an ancient rather than a modern problem. However, not surprisingly due to the subject matter, he comes closer to accepting some of the parameters of this debate in the later books.

11 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 5.

12 Andy Beckett, in a review of England: An Elegy, The Englishman’s Handbook, by Idries Shah, and Utopian England: Community Experiments 1901–1945, by Dennis Hardy, Guardian, 21 October 2000.

13 D.J. Taylor, in a review of The Harvest, Guardian, 19 June 1999.

14 Jeremy Paxman quotes a substantial chunk of the speech in which this phrase was coined in chapter eight, ‘There Always was an England’, of his book The English (London: Penguin, 1999), 143.

15 Introduction to the Everyman edition of The Soul of London (London: Everyman, 1995), xix. (This is the only volume of the trilogy to have been published by Everyman.)

16 Letter quoted by Max Saunders in A Dual Life, I, 165.

17 See Max Saunders, A Dual Life, I, 220.

18 Robert Colls, ‘Englishness and the Political Culture’ in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, 47.

19 Christopher Gillie calls it Hebraism versus Hellenism, or ‘conscience’ versus ‘consciousness’, following Matthew Arnold’s coinage in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold identified two basic attitudes of mind, one moral and practical, the other cultural and aesthetic, to which he gave these names (Movements in English Literature 1900–1940, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), 4.

20 Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 36.

21 Hillaire Belloc, Paris (London: Edward Arnold, 1900), vii.

22 See the extract from Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance quoted in the Norton edition of The Good Soldier (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 276.

23 Peter Gay quotes this phrase (which dates from 1867) in Pleasure Wars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 57.

24 Robert Colls and Philip Dodd suggest that ‘society-as-organism’ analogies were increasingly common in both fiction and non-fiction around 1900: Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 7.

25 Henry James, ‘London’ in Alma Louise Lowe (ed.), English Hours (London: Heinemann, 1960), 17.

26 An extract from The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896) is published in 1900, 152–3.

27 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 226.

28 H.V. Morton, In Search of England (London: Methuen, 1984), 2. (This text was first published in 1927.)

29 This image appears in Sturt’s journals, and is quoted by David Gervais in Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112.

30 M.A. Crowther, ‘The Tramp’ in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 92.

A Note on the Text

This edition essentially reproduces the text of the first editions of the three books, published by the London firm Alston Rivers in 1905, 1906 and 1907. I have silently amended typographical errors and some inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation. The trilogy has never been published as one volume in the UK. It has been given the same title as the one-volume edition published by McClure and Phillips in New York in 1907. This one-volume edition retained the same individual book titles (it was divided into Books I, II, and III), and substantially the same chapter titles as the English version. It added sixteen black and white illustrations of urban, mainly identifiably London, scenes (originally intended by Ford, along with others, for the English edition).

I took the decision not to use the American edition as a copytext because of substantial differences between it and its English forerunners. These include the omission of two whole chapters (‘Introductory’ and ‘Utopias’, from Book II, The Heart of the Country), and different beginnings to many other chapters, particularly in the first two books, which were tailored for an American audience. However, the Author’s Note to the American edition is published here as an appendix.

Such that exists of manuscripts for the books (The Heart of the Country is most complete) is located at the Cornell University Library. Known as the Lowee Collection, the manuscripts were donated by Stella Bowen’s daughter Julia.

With the exception of the editorial notes, which are indicated by asterisks, all notes in the text are Ford’s. All ellipses are Ford’s.

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Paul Clark, Nick Freeman, Olwen Haslam, Max Saunders and Paul Skinner for information, help and advice in the preparation of this volume. I also owe a debt of thanks to all those who attended the Ford conference in Wisconsin, Madison in 2002 for their enthusiasm for this project.

The Soul of London

A SURVEY OF A MODERN CITY

‘A Traveller? By my faith you have good reason to be sad!’

Introductory

MOST of us love places very much as we may love what, for us, are the distinguished men of our social lives. Paying a visit to such a man we give, in one form or another, our impressions to our friends: since it is human to desire to leave some memorial that shall record our view of the man at the stage he has reached. We describe his manners, his shape, his utterances: we moralise a little about his associates, his ethics, the cut of his clothes; we relate gossip about his past before we knew him, or we predict his future when we shall be no more with him. We are, all of us who are Londoners, paying visits of greater or less duration to a Personality that, whether we love it or very cordially hate it, fascinates us all. And, paying my visit, I have desired to give some such record.

I have tried to make it anything rather than encyclopaedic, topographical, or archaeological. To use a phrase of literary slang I have tried to ‘get the atmosphere’ of modern London – of the town in which I have passed so many days; of the immense place that has been the background for so many momentous happenings to so many of my fellows.

A really ideal book of the kind would not contain ‘writing about’ a town: it would throw a personal image of the place on to the paper. It would not contain such a sentence as: ‘There are in the city of —— 720 firms of hat manufacturers employing 19,000 operatives.’ Instead there would be a picture of one, or two, or three hat factories, peopled with human beings, where slow and clinging veils of steam waver over vats and over the warm felt on cutters’ slabs. And there would be conveyed the idea that all these human beings melt, as it were, into the tide of humanity as all these vapours melt into the overcast skies.

Similarly, in touching upon moral ideas, a book about places must be passionate in its attempt after truth of rendering; it must be passionless in the deductions that it draws. It must let neither pity for the poor nor liking for established reputations and clean floors, warp its presentations where they bear, say, upon the Housing Question. Its business is to give a picture of the place as its author sees it; its reader must seek in other books, statistics, emotional views, or facts handy for political propaganda.

This author’s treatment of historic matters must again be ‘presentations’; and he must select only such broad tendencies, or such minute historic characters as bear straight upon some aspect of his subject. The historic facts must illustrate, must cast a light upon modern London, if that is what is being presented. There must be no writing about Dr Johnson’s chair in a certain tavern merely because it appeals to the author. The reader will find details of all such things in other books – this author’s endeavour should be to make the Past, the sense of all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing of this child of all the ages, like a constant ground-bass beneath the higher notes of the Present. In that way the book might, after a fashion, forecast even the Future and contain prophecies. It should, in fact, be instinct with the historic sense which will afford apt illustrations, rather than the annalist’s industry, or the love of the picturesque.

That sense of the picturesque will, however, be both a salvation and a most dangerous stumbling-block. In a turning off an opulent high street, there is a court with the exterior aspect of which I am very familiar. It is close to a large freestone town hall and to a very tall red-brick fire station. It is entered by a square archway through which you get a glimpse of dazzlingly white cottages that, very obviously, were once thatched, but that now have pretty red tiles. It is flagged with very large, old stones. It is as picturesque as you can imagine; it is a ‘good thing’ for descriptive writing, it might be legitimate to use it. But the trouble is that it is old – and, if the book were all old things, deluding by a love for the picturesque of antiquity, it would give a very false and a very sentimental rendering of London.

But the author might desire to illustrate the tendency of parasitic humanity to lurk in the shadow of wealthy high streets. – This court would be an excellent illustration: it is peopled with ‘bad characters’, male and female. Or he might desire to illustrate the economic preposition that letting small houses to bad characters is more profitable than selling the land for the erection of flats. Here, again, the court would be an illustration; its extreme cleanliness, neatness and good repair would go to prove how careful that landlord was to prevent the condemnation of his rookery on sanitary grounds.

The author then must be careful not to sentimentalise over the picturesque. His business is to render the actual. His heart may be – it ought to be – torn at the sight of great hoardings, raised for the house-breakers, round narrow courts, old streets, famous houses. He ought to be alive to the glamour of old associations, of all the old associations in all their human aspects. But he ought to be equally inspired with satisfaction because work is being done; because dark spots are being cleared away; because new haunts are being formed for new people around whom will congregate new associations. And he ought to see that these new associations will in their turn grow old, tender, romantic, glamorous enough. He should, in fact, when he presumes to draw morals, be prepared to draw all the morals. – He must not only sniff at the ‘suburbs’ as a place of small houses and dreary lives; he must remember that in each of these houses dwells a strongly individualised human being with romantic hopes, romantic fears, and at the end, an always tragic death. He must remember that the thatched, mud-hovels that crowded round the Tower of original London, were just as dull, just as ordinary, just as commonplace; that men in them lived lives, according to their scale, just as squalid and just as unromantic – or just as alert and just as tragic. This author – this ideal author – then, must be passionately alive to all aspects of life. What picturesqueness there is in his work must arise from contrasts – but actual contrasts vividly presented. This is what gives interest to a work of art; and such a work must, before all things, be interesting.

It is along these lines that I have tried to work: one falls, no doubt very far short of one’s ideal. But, for my own part, if this particular work gives a number of readers pleasure, or that counterpart of pleasure which is pain; if it awakens a Londoner here or there to an interest in the human aspects of his London; or if a man who loves London here and there throughout the world and across many seas is aroused to a bitter sweet remembering of old days, if in fact its note rings true to a section of mankind, I should call myself satisfied.

I should like, if it can be done unobtrusively, to disarm criticism of the title of this book. It appears pretentious; it appears ‘soulful’; it does little to indicate the scope of the book. But alas! If the critic will read the Table of Contents, and will then think for a minute or so of what one word will describe this whole hotchpotch, he will, whilst condemning, drop something like a tear for one who has been trying to find a better title, not for a minute or so, but for many months.

F.M.H.

CHAPTER I

From a Distance

THOUGHT of from sufficiently far, London offers to the mind’s eye singularly little of a picture. It is essentially ‘town’, and yet how little of a town, how much of an abstraction. One says, ‘He knows his London’, yet how little more will he know of London than what is actually ‘his’. And, if by chance he were an astronomer, how much better he might know his solar system.

It remains in the end always a matter of approaches. He has entered it – your man who knows his London – in one or other more or less strongly featured quarter; in his Bloomsbury of dismal, decorous, unhappy, glamorous squares; in his Camden Town of grimy box-like houses, yellow gas and perpetual ring of tram-horse hoofs; his eyes have opened to it in his Kensington, his Hoxton, his Mayfair or his Shoreditch. He has been born in it, or he has been drawn into it; he has gone through in it the slow awakening of a childhood. Or, coming an adolescent, his eyes have been opened more or less swiftly, with more or less of a wrench, to that small portion of it that is afterwards to form a ‘jumping-off place’ into that London that he will make ‘his’.

And, with its ‘atmosphere’ whatever it is, with its ‘character’ whatever it may be, with the odd touches that go to make up familiarity and the home-feeling, the shape of its policemen’s helmets, the cachet of its shop fronts, effects of light cast by street lamps on the fog, on house fronts, on front garden trees, on park railings, all these little things going towards its atmosphere and character, that jumping-off place will remain for him, as it were, a glass through which he will afterwards view, a standard by which he will afterwards measure, the London that yet remains no one’s.

It makes in essentials little enough difference whether he be born in a London quarter, or whether he came, a young provincial, raw and ready to quiver at every sensation, super-sensitised to every emotion. If, as a London child, he has wandered much in the streets, there will remain to him always an odd sensation of being very little, of peering round the corners of grey and gigantic buildings upon greyer vistas of buildings more gigantic – so, with a half touch of awe, we scramble, as relatively little in maturity, round the base of an out-jutting cliff into what may prove a grey cove or what may be a great bay. It is the sense of making discoveries, of a world’s opening-up.

In both, at the start, there will be the essential provincialism. The London child, with his unconscious acknowledgement of impersonal vistas, of infinite miles of unmeaning streets, of horizons that are the blur of lamps in fogs, simultaneously acknowledges personalities, local oddities, local celebrities of whom Shepherd’s Bush, Highgate or Knightsbridge may be proud. For the provincial adolescent there will be the squire with his long beard and gouty walk, the mayor with his shop in the high street, the doctor with his face screwed up as if he were tasting the full bitterness of one of his own potions. The London child, however, will earlier overcome his awe of personalities. He will wonder at the man, sallow, tiny, wizened and skew-featured, who, with the whispered reputation of a miser able to roll himself in sovereigns, and a hazy identity in a child’s mind with, say, Sweeny Todd the Demon Barber, sells him spring-pistols, catapult elastic and alley-taws in the dim and evil light of a small shop with windows obscured by broadsheets and penny dreadfuls. He will attach a certain significance to the grimy stretch of waste ground – it will by now have been, ah, so long since ‘built over’ – on which he played cricket with meat tins for a wicket, or fought a dismal battle with a big boy from ‘another school’. But these local feelings sink very soon into the solid background of memories. He will discover other catapult sellers, he will find playing fields larger and more green, he will have it brought home to him that there are so many of every sort of thing in the world, just as, sooner or later, it will come home to him that there are so very many others of as little import in the scale of things as the catapult seller, the green fields, – and as himself.

For, sooner or later, the sense of the impersonality, of the abstraction that London is, will become one of the most intimate factors of his daily life. And sooner rather than later it will become one for the young provincial.

He will have had his preconceptions: he will have seen photographs of ‘bits’, of buildings, of bridges. He will have had his vague idea of a bulbous domed St Paul’s with a queer fragment of Ludgate Hill, standing isolated at a corner of the Green Park; of Nelson’s Column and the Monument, of the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace – all hazily united into one ‘view’ by a river Thames that is hazily suggested, green and leafy, by his own Severn, his own Stour, his own Ouse, or Adur. But this picture will vanish finally and irrecoverably, like our own preconceived notions of an individual we have long thought of, whom we meet at last to find so entirely – and so very obviously – different.

The emotions of his journey to town – and they are emotions from within so much more than impressions from without – will last him until he is settled, more or less, for good in his lodgings, his cellar or his boarding house. They will last him, at least until his things are unpacked, his credentials presented, his place found – or until he finds, after how many disillusionments, that he may never in all probability find any place at all. The point is that, till then, he will not have any time to ‘look about him’.

II

BUT the last thing that, even then, he will get is any picture, any impression of London as a whole, any idea to carry about with him – of a city, in a plain, dominated by a great building, bounded by a horizon, brought into composition by mists, great shadows, great clouds or a bright and stippled foreground. It is trite enough to say that the dominant note of his first impression will be that of his own alone-ness. It is none the less the dominant note of London; because, unless he is actually alone he will pay no attention to London itself. He will talk with his companions of his or their own affairs; he will retain the personal note, shutting out the impersonal, stalling it off instinctively.

But our young provincial being for his first time cast absolutely loose will get then his first impression of London – his first tap of the hammer. He will stand perhaps at a street corner, perhaps at his own doorstep, for a moment at a loss what to do, where to go, where to turn. He will not ever have been so alone. If he were intent upon getting a complete picture of London he might be – we might imagine him – setting out self-consciously, his eyes closed during the transit, to climb the heights of Hampstead, the top of the Monument, the Dome of St Paul’s. But he will not.

London, with its sense of immensity that we must hurry through to keep unceasing appointments, with its diffuseness, its gatherings up into innumerable trade-centres, innumerable class districts, becomes by its immensity a place upon which there is no beginning. It is, so to speak, a ragoût of tit-bits so appealing and so innumerable – of Gower’s tombs and Botticelli’s, of miles of port-wine cellars or of the waxen effigies of distinguished murderers – that your actual born-not-made Londoner passes the whole dish by. He is like the good Scot whose haggis is only eaten by conscientious tourists; like the good North German whose alt-bier soup appears at table only for the discomfiture of the English or American cousin. He will not visit his Tower today because there will always remain an eternity in which to see it; he will not, tomorrow, ensue at the Millbank National Gallery a severe headache, because that Gallery will always be there.

Our young provincial, in fact, until he has finished, as a separate entity, his sightseeing, does not become even a potential Londoner. He has to exhaust that as he will have to exhaust the personalities, the localities, that for the time being will make up his ‘world’. He must have had squeezed swiftly into him all the impressions that the London child has slowly made his own. He must have asked all the ways that are to carry him to and from his daily work; he must be able to find instinctively his own front-door, his own keyhole, his own string that in a noisome cellar pulls the latch, or his own bundle of rags in the corner of a railway arch. Daily details will have merged, as it were, into his bodily functions, and will have ceased to distract his attention. He will have got over the habit of relying, in these things, upon personal contacts. He will have acquired an alertness of eye that will save him from asking his way. On his ‘Underground’ he will glance at a board rather than inquire of a porter; on ’bus-routes he will catch instinctively, on the advancing and shapeless mass of colour and trade announcements, the small names of taverns, of Crosses, of what were once outlying hamlets; he will have in his mind a rough sketch map of that plot of London that by right of living in he will make his own. Then he will be the Londoner, and to the measure of the light vouchsafed will know his London. Yet, to the great majority of Londoners whose residence is not an arrière boutique London will remain a matter of a central highway, a central tunnel or a central conduit, more or less long; a daily route whose two extremities are a more or less permanent sleeping place, and a more or less permanent workshop – a thing, figured on a map, like the bolas of certain South Americans, a long cord with balls at the extremities. At the one there will gradually congregate the parts of a home, at the other, the more or less familiar, more or less hypnotising, more or less congenial, surroundings of his daily work. It will be a matter of a daily life passing unnoticed.

III

LONDON itself will become the merest abstraction. He will not moralise upon London. Occasionally a periodical will inform him with notes of exclamation, that London is a very remarkable thing. He will read, ‘London more than all else in the scenery of England gives food for thought; this for awe and wonder, not for boasting, is unique’ – and he will acquiesce. Nevertheless awe and wonder are the last things he will feel.

London, in fact, is so essentially a background, a matter so much more of masses than of individuals, so much more, as it were, a very immense symphony orchestra than a quartette party with any leader not negligible, that its essential harmony is not to be caught by any human ear. It can only be treated as a ground bass, a drone, on top of which one pipes one’s own small individual melody. A human aggregation, it leaves discernible so very little of the human that it is almost as essentially a natural product as any great stretch of alluvial soil. Your marshy delta was brought down in the course of a thousand years or so. Raindrops, born a long way up in the hills, united to run through fissures in the earth, through soil-drains, through runnels in the moss of woods, through channels in the clay of sodden fields, each drop bearing infinitesimal grains of what, towards the sea at the end, becomes alluvial soil – each drop quarried, each drop carried, each drop endured for its moment, and then went hence and was no more seen. It left the grain of loam it had carried. So precisely out of the clouds of the nations, drops have been born. It is that oblivion, that ‘being no more seen’, that is, in matters human, the note of London. It never misses, it never can miss anyone. It loves nobody, it needs nobody; it tolerates all the types of mankind. It has palaces for the great of the earth, it has crannies for all the earth’s vermin. Palace and cranny, vacated for a moment, find new tenants as equably as the hole one makes in a stream – for, as a critic, London is wonderfully open-minded.

On successive days it will welcome its king going to be crowned, its general who has given it a province, its enemies who have fought against it for years, its potentate guest from Teheran – it will welcome each with identically rapturous cheers. This is not so much because of a fickle-mindedness as because since it is so vast it has audiences for all players. It forgets very soon, because it knows so well that, in the scale of things, any human achievement bulks very small.

It cherishes less than any other town the memory of its mighty dead. Its message for humanity is that it is the business of man to keep all on going, not to climb on to pinnacles. Its street names are those of ground-landlords; its commemorative tablets, on house fronts, are no more to be read than any epitaphs in any churchyards. It is one gigantic pantheon of the dead level of democracy; and, in its essentials it is a home neither for the living nor the dead.

If in its tolerance it finds a place for all eccentricities of physiognomy, of costume, of cult, it does so because it crushes out and floods over the significance of those eccentricities. It, as it were, lifts an eyelid and turns a hair neither for the blue silk gown of an Asiatic, the white robes of a Moor, the kilts of a Highlander, nor the silk hat, inscribed in gold letters with a prophecy of retribution or salvation, of a religious enthusiast. In its innumerable passages and crannies it swallows up Mormon and Mussulman, Benedictine and Agapemonite, Jew and Malay, Russian and Neapolitan.* It assimilates and slowly digests them, converting them, with the most potent of all juices, into the singular and inevitable product that is the Londoner – that is, in fact, the Modern. Its spirit, extraordinary and unfathomable – because it is given to no man to understand the spirit of his own age – spreads, like sepia in water, a tinge of its own over all the world. Its extraordinary and miasmic dialect – the dialect of South Essex – is tinging all the local speeches of England. Deep in the New Forest you will find red brick houses trying to look like London villas; deep in the swamps of coastal Africa you will find lay white men trying to remain Londoners, and religious white men trying to turn negroes into suburban chapel worshippers.

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 today, striking the imagination of posterity, may catch and preserve an entirely individual representation of the London of today. 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 today, 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 today. 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 overhanging upper storeys, of a river that was a highway forever 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 ‘as a 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, windswept, 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 Haussmann, 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 grey 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.

An intelligent foreigner running through a town of strongly marked features may carry away a definite impression of its character and its life, although he will inevitably go astray in point of statistics, of etiquette, or local history. But of London no foreignness, which implies an openness to impressions – and no clear intelligence, can, in the lump, make much.

A Paris journalist lamented the gross indecency of London in the matter of the nude. He had taken his first walk in London with a lady friend, near the Serpentine, during the hours when bathing is permitted. An Italian royal Marchioness sighed because there were no birds in England. She had, on the occasion of an international function, spent three November days as a royal guest in Buckingham Palace. A Portuguese diplomatist never travelled in England save armed to the teeth. On his first journey from Dover to London he had been rather roughly handled by cardsharpers. An American commercial magnate speaks of London as the most radiant and friendly place, because his first impression was at a private house, of the white cap and apron, pink cheeks, low voice, and welcoming smiles of a housemaid at the door. I have never been able to persuade a Jesuit Father, a friend of my own, to visit London, because of Bill Sikes and Fagin’s academy for thieves.

Away from his town, with no picture of his own in his mind, that is what the Londoner will be brought up against – a Cimmerian* district where, in a gloom so dense that no bird can see to carry straws to its nest, naked men run pallidly in and out of crowds of cardsharpers, lightened here and there by housemaids, shadowed always by starvation, drink, crime, and the drippings of tallow candles that are to be seen in plates after Cruikshank. He won’t, if he has any contact with foreigners, ever get away from it.

Seated at a continental card-table with a ‘quite nice’, capped and mittened, smiling old lady, he will find the game suddenly suspended. The courteous and restrained smile with which a good Catholic asks a heretic about the outrageous practices of his sect, will beam upon the old lady’s face. She will say that she cannot understand how anyone so obviously humane and sympathetic as the particular Londoner before her, can bear to walk the streets of London town, where, at all moments and on all sides, people suddenly drop dead of starvation. She will resume her deal.

Confronted with this particular ‘View of London’ your Londoner can only gasp. He will realise that his amiable hostess has been reading, in her local paper, a quotation from his Registrar General’s returns. And, for purposes of refutation, the trouble is that he knows nothing about the figures. He does not feel assured whether, according to the Return, 75, 750, or 7,500 people died of starvation during the past year. He does not know whether ‘cases of death from exposure accelerated by want’ are included. He has a hazy notion that no one in London need die of starvation, seeing that there are workhouses. But as a rule he knows nothing of the workings of Poor Law Relief. He knows so little of his London.

He may even, as a result, have added to his particular picture of the place, the dim and disturbing image of a lank-haired, hollow checked, glaring eyed, pale woman, – a Spectre of Starvation with, in the bulge of an old shawl, the suggestion of a naked, frozen baby. He will not have seen them in the Kensington-plus-Cornhill that is his London. But an intangible cloud-like population of white-faced misery, may come suddenly to disturb his ideas of Hoxton or Highgate, of Shoreditch or of Canning Town. Or the comparatively contented mechanician is suddenly confronted with his continental confrère’s picture of the luxury, the profusion, the lust, the wantonness, of a foreign view of Hyde Park. In front of the dark eyes, the flashing teeth, the blue blouse, he will grow uncomfortably uncertain whether, outside his own Walthamstow of small pleasant houses, all the valley of the Thames is not Sodom and Gomorrah. Once away from the few facts that he can, as it were, catch hold of with his hands, he knows, your Londoner, so appallingly little of his London. It isn’t his business; he has his own affairs. In the gigantic tool-basket of a place he can find pretty well whatever he needs. He will be surprised if others cannot.

VI

LONDON is a great, slipshod, easy-going, good-humoured magnet; those it attracts are much of a muchness with itself. They have not any corporate spirit in particular. And the Londoner when talked to by inhabitants of other considerable towns is apt to be violently confronted with what he hasn’t. It is not only that in Essen or Düsseldorf he will learn that he has no factories each employing sixteen skilled chemists continually analysing slag-heaps for by-products; that he has not any secondary schools worth the mention; that his workmen are not efficiently organised, or that his capitalists do not squeeze the last drop of blood out of their men. But nearer home he will learn more severe lessons.

Let him go to one of the larger towns well outside his Home Counties, and he will have it forced in on him that he has no municipal buildings costing well-nigh a million, that he has no ship-canals, that his atmosphere has not half the corrosive properties that it should have to betoken the last word of wealth, of progress, and of commercial energy. He will be told that he has nothing worth having, and that he is infinitely too proud of what he has. Yet as a rule the accusation is unkind. However proud the Londoner may be of his personality, of his wife, of his wine, or of the poultry run in his back garden, the last thing he would think of being proud of is London. His most considerable exhibition of pride will appear in his mild disgust, if he is mistaken for a provincial. He is singularly useless as a Defender of the city’s fame. He will know of a Mansion House, but he will probably not know whether it is a municipal place of business or merely the residence of a chief magistrate; he will have a vague idea that something goes on at Spring Gardens. He would not, on the other hand, be certain whether London contained a university, or, tucked away in some corner, a ship canal. He goes through life with the comforting thought that somewhere there are people one might ask, or very good postal directories. In Rhenish-Westphalia he will be assured that London is already as deserted as Bruges. His eyes will have told him that that is not the case today. But, set there in the hideous heart of the German competition he so much dreads, confronted by the blackened landscape, by miles of grey slag mounds, by horizons obscured with rusty cinder heaps, by heaps of sand, by heaps of rust, by clouds of green, of red, of purple, or of black smoke, by dirt of the foulest and labour of the obviously grimmest, he will not be certain of the day-after-tomorrow of London. He will almost certainly not know that, in the marshes round Purfleet, he has factories larger, more modern, better capitalised, more solvent, and a landscape more blackened and more grim.

The Westphalian will say: ‘Oh yes, it is all over’, and before the Londoner’s mental picture of his little bit of the city and suburbs there will rise up a view of the stained and deserted façades of a London like Bruges, with swarms of pauper children tumbling over the doorsteps, and an old grey horse cropping the grass between the flagstones of Threadneedle Street. He will not in the least know what reserves of wealth or of energy his London may have.

VII

ABOVE all his London, his intimate London, will be the little bits of it that witnessed the great moments, the poignant moods of his life; it will be what happened to be the backgrounds of his more intense emotions.

Certain corners of streets, certain angles of buildings, the spray of dishevelled plane-trees, certain cloud-forms, gusts of white smoke, odours, familiar sounds – these, in their remembrance will wring his heart. He will have noticed them, or hardly noticed them, glancing aside in his moments of terror, of perplexity, of passion, of grief. And the remembrance of them, a long way away, will bring up again, tempered by the glamour of memory, by the romance of old days, the reflection of those griefs, of those terrors, of those old piteousnesses.

For London is before all things an incomparable background; it is always in the right note, it is never out of tone. A man may look down out of dim windows upon the slaty, black, wet misery of a squalid street, upon a solitary flickering lamp that wavers a sooty light upon a solitary, hurrying passer’s umbrella. He may have received a moment before the first embrace of a woman, or a moment before his doctor may have told him that he is not very long for this world. He will stand looking down; and a sudden consonance with his mood, of overwhelming and hardly comprehensible joy, of overwhelming and hardly fathomable pain, a sudden significance will be there in the black wet street, in the long wavering reflections on the gleaming paving-stones, in the engrossed hurry of the passer-by. It will become, intimately and rightly, the appropriate background for a beginning of, or for a farewell from life – for the glow of a commenced love or for the dull pain of a malady ending only in death. It is that, more than anything, that London has ready for every man.

It can provide a background for everything. With the sympathy of the weeping heavens, or the irony of other men’s unconcern, it remains always a background; it never obtrudes. A man may be so soothingly alone – with his joys as with his griefs.

We may hurry across the great stretches and folds of a park, with a glamorous smirched sunset, curling clouds over the distant houses, wisps of mist becoming palpably blue against thorn trees and the call of a closing space and of a closing in day, indescribably mournful and distant. We may hurry to our triumph of love, to our bankruptcy, to our end or our beginning of the world. Or we may be driven behind a slipping, frightened horse through grey empty streets, among whirls of small hard snowflakes, to a house where there are the titter and bustle of a wedding, or where on the stairs there are the heavy footfalls and muffled breathings of men carrying down the coffin of our best friend in the world. The background for either mood will be the right one. It is these things that come back to us at a distance and in odd ways. I have known a man, dying a long way from London, sigh queerly for a sight of the gush of smoke that, on a platform of the Underground, one may see, escaping in great woolly clots up a circular opening, by a grimy, rusted iron shield, into the dim upper light. He wanted to see it again as others have wished to see once more the Bay of Naples, the olive groves of Catania. Another wanted – how very much he wanted! – to see once more the sort of carpet of pigeons on the gravel in front of a certain museum steps; the odd top-hatted unpresentable figure of a battered man, holding a paper of bun crumbs, with pigeons on his shoulders, on his hands, crowding in between his feet and fluttering like an aureole of wings round his head.

London is a thing of these ‘bits’. It is seldom that one sees at one time as much of it as one may always see of any country town. It has nothing, it never had anything, worth talking of as a spectacular expression of humanity, of that incongruous jumble of races that is in England. It has no Acropolis, no Forum Romanum, no Champs Elysées; it has not so much as a Capitol or a Nevski Prospekt. The tombs of its kings, its Valhalla, its Senate, are, relatively to London nowhere in particular. Viewed from a distance it is a cloud on the horizon. From the dark, further side of the Surrey hills at night, above the inky sky line of heather, of pine tops, of elms, one may see on the sky a brooding and sinister glow. That is London – manifesting itself on the clouds. 

* Mormon and Mussulman: a member of the American Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a Muslim.
Agapemonite: a member of a fanatical revivalist sect dating from 1849.

* Cimmerian: dense darkness, derived from Cimmerii, an ancient people fabled to live in perpetual darkness.