London

LONDON


BY G. K. CHESTERTON WITH TEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
LONDON: PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR ALVIN LANGDON COBURN AND EDMUND D. BROOKS & THEIR FRIENDS 1914


THERE is an old London story that has never lost its loveliness for me. It was about a stout old lady from the country, who travelled round and round the Underground Railway in a circle, because at each station she tried to get out backwards, and at each station the guard pitched her in again, under the impression that she was trying to get in. It is a beautiful story; doing honour alike to the patience of the female sex and the prompt courtesy of the male; it is a song without words. But there is another and milder version (perhaps we might dare to say a more probable version) of the same story. It describes an aged farmer and his daughter travelling the same sad circle, and failing to alight anywhere, partly because of the impedimenta of country parcels, but partly also because they were almost satisfied with the staring names of the places set up on the Underground Railway. They thought the “Mansion House” was rather a dark place for the Lord Mayor to live in. They could detect no bridges through the twilight of “Westminster Bridge,” nor any promising park in “St. James’ Park Station.” They could only suppose that they were in the crypts of “The Temple”; or buried under the foundations of “The Tower.”
Nevertheless, I am not quite so certain that this cockney tale against countrymen scores so much as is supposed. The rustic saw the names at least; and nine times out of ten the names are nobler than the things. Let us suppose him as starting westward from the Mansion House, where he commiserated the dim captivity of the Lord Mayor. He would come to another equally gloomy vault in which he would read the word “Blackfriars.” It is not a specially cheery word; but it goes back, I imagine, to that great movement, at once dogmatic and democratic, which gave to its followers the fierce and fine name of the “Dogs of God.” But at the worst, the mere name of Blackfriars Station is more dignified than the Blackfriars Road. He would pass on to the Temple; and surely the mere word “Temple” is more essential and eternal than either the rich lawyers in its courts, or the poor vagabonds on its Embankment. He will go on to Charing Cross, where the noblest of English knights and kings set up a cross to his dead queen. But unless his rustic erudition informs him of the fact, he will gain little by getting out of the train, and going to the larger station. Neither porters carrying luggage nor trippers carrying babies, will encourage any conversation about the original sacredness of the spot. He will stop next at a yet more sacred spot, the station called Westminster Bridge, from which he can visit, as Macaulay says, “the place where five generations of statesmen have striven, and the place where they sleep together.” By walking across the street from this station he can enter the House of Commons. But, if he is wise, he will stop in the train. He will then arrive at St. James’ Park; and (as Mr. Max Beerbohm has truly remarked) he will not meet St. James there.