[3] I speak here of what always seems to me to be its most characteristic moment. That it should sometimes be profoundly different, that it should often present itself, for example, as a prolonged splutter of lorries fighting up from the Docks—agitated enough, then, in all conscience, and daubed with much raw colour—is but a testimony to that baffling mutability which seems, in this matter, to make capture of the vraie vérité even more impossible than usual.
LIME STREET, WITH WELLINGTON MONUMENT.
One’s impression of the Lime Street Liverpool, again, is always tinged by the consciousness of that superb stretch of “smutted Greek,” Liverpool’s most deliberate effort in the direction of sustained architectural spectacle, which one sees just the moment before or just the moment after. Without that consciousness, the flat-chested, multi-windowed, watery-complexioned hotels that droop, perhaps a little dismally, down the hill opposite, and the uncertain traffic that spreads itself thinly out upon the vast road-spaces in between, would probably not convince one that their claim to dignity was extraordinary. But as it is, they do seem to catch a kind of magnificence, a magnificence that is positively almost shared by the little ragged sentry-box of the Punch and Judy show set oddly down, like a grandfather’s clock, plump in the middle distance—a queer axis for the cars that curve clangorously about it. As one advances, the black chine of St. George’s Hall, a long grey ripple of steps lapping its base, thrusts forward more and more emphatically, and so one passes into sight of that plateau of classicism—St. George’s Hall, the Museum, the Library, the Walker Art Gallery, which Mr. Hay has described so perfectly upon [another page].
Deliberately majestical here, gravely featureless in Tithebarn Street, elegant from the Central, Liverpool achieves within the last of her four porticoes an order of effects more urgent and memorable still. For it is behind the Landing Stage that many of the car routes of the City terminate, and the great space of unshadowed roadway, empty of all buildings save the new-sprung Dock Offices, is really a brave platform on which the cars endlessly wheel and interlace. By daylight it is wonderful enough: the long files of maroon and yellow monsters curving, separating, recoiling; the constant scream and clangour of their onset; the rich white bulk of the Dock Board building floating serenely above the press. But towards evening, when every car becomes a great cresset of prisoned flame, the golden plenty of it all, the intricate splendour of this vast terrace of racing and receding fire, is a thing to leave the senses glutted and overborne. Liverpool is no longer a place of architecture, grave or dignified. It is a mere spectacle, a piece of golden pageantry. And even the beauty of the dominating building, ivory and pale rose as it accepts the sunset, luminous and firm-bodied as an eastern cloud at the end of a day of wind, seems no more than a fit accessory to the fabric of woven lights astir below.
ELECTRIC CAR TERMINUS—PIER HEAD.
§ 3.
It is one or other of those vignettes that stands for Liverpool in the minds of all but all those who live without her walls; but there still remains another touch or two to add before the symbol we are attempting to create can be called completed, before this inevitable, initial slab of what must begin to appear uncommonly like sheer “word-painting” (crude word for a cruder occupation) can be brought to a close. Already we have taken the sense of a group of her central ways; already we have surprised her at each of her four great doorways. It now remains to brush in a connecting note or two, an episode or so from the less formal interspaces:
An appreciation, say, of one of those admirable fortalice-like structures, the warehouses, which clamp all the lower end of the mass and convert the little connecting roadways into canyons of sumptuous gloom. Four-square and massive, they are always shapely; the old stock brick, hand-made, of which so many of them are built, gives them a fine hunger for ripe colouring; and from their vertical lines of doorways—six, eight, ten, a dozen, of them superimposed in a slot that runs from roof to base—they gain the power to charge their austerity with something very near to positive elegance....