The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick, because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day he will, perhaps, begin a fashion of using much more white, in brick and tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever. Ruddy roofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London, until it looks—fading eastwards—as though it were itself some effect of a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.

The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a multitude of imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it does in the ships and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town seem to be utterly choked and filled.

When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life in the air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things, but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man, woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep, the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman’s life itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London visibly works at nothing but transformation.

The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north, where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge, the lashes of the eyes of earth and sky, are more perceptible than they are in London, even with a west wind. Here the fiery Ariel has no delicate companionship, no one near but Caliban.

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Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty

Transcriber’s Notes:

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