The fact is, then, that when Liverpool desires most to impress she expresses least. When she draws herself together for a splendid outburst, she grows inarticulate. Her considered effects are mostly affectations. So that to pick out those effects, to arrange all the majuscules together, is not merely to print her confession in another type: it is to print a confession of another type. One omits these deliberate, self-consciously impressive things from one’s notes, not because Liverpool contains very little of such things, but rather because such things contain very little of Liverpool.
THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL.
For the spirit behind this fabric is essentially a spirit absorbed in other matters than the deliberate, preconsidered capture of the beautiful.... Out of the several characteristics we have already noted—the swiftness of the City’s growth, its glittering modernity, its tireless, deft adjustment of alien activities to a common end, its tenacious efficiency and alertness—out of these things in conjunction does there not already begin to emerge (we are all invincible anthropomorphists in these matters) some kind of quite consistent Personality—the genius of the place, if you will—the handy embodiment, at any rate, of the main instincts which this specially environed congeries has tended to throw into exceptional relief? For myself, I see it always as a blunt Rodinesque figure, sternly thewed, tensely poised, strenuously individual, tenacious of the actual, impatient of mere dreams, energetic rather than adventurous, a lover, above everything, of efficiency—efficiency, testing and twisting things with earnest, untiring fingers, whittling things down to the valid, irreducible core.... It is not from fingers like those that one looks to receive many frail white images of beauty. And whether this reading of the essential psychology of the place be true or false, it is certain that the men of Liverpool have never been overprone to sheer æstheticism. The vivid day of their City has been crammed with leaping episodes, it has left no spare strength for flourishes, and they have expressed themselves throughout in terms of a naked and practical utility. Such purely decorative effects as have from time to time been judiciously introduced become in consequence effects which it is vastly easy to misunderstand. Take, for instance, that lordly plateau-load of classical furniture at Lime Street—a feature that would seem utterly to contradict, but that in reality beautifully confirms, this non-æsthetic reading of the City’s nature. Raking among the ruins of the place a thousand years hence, when steamships are unknown and the Mersey is silted up, some earnest archæologist will come upon those (in both senses of the word) imposing remains, and will promptly be deceived. He will speak with rapture of the “sharp bright edge of high Hellenic culture” that must have glittered about the community which could produce such stately monuments; and he will probably have a good deal to say about the civic decadence of his contemporaries. But archæology (not, perhaps, for the first time) will have been mistaken. These clean-limbed columns and great porticoes and pediments were not upreared by a race of Phryne-worshipping hedonists. Directly regarded, therefore, they are misleading, uncharacteristic; but in an indirect way they are very characteristic indeed. One would ask for no better proof of a man’s lack of native appetite for literature than that he had read through, in turn, the whole of the hundred best books. Similarly, this wholesale, uncompromising adoption of an architectural mode already traditional, already innumerable times approved, is a most convincing proof of the existence of that spirit of honest and tenacious practical efficiency of which I have spoken. When it came to a matter of beauty, they made beauty a business, they captured it by brute strength and logic. There was nothing tentative, experimental, about the effort; there was no attempt at realizing some splendid, unprecedented dream; line for line, mass for mass, it was the stolid, efficient reproduction of masses and lines about whose loveliness there was no possibility of question. And so the beautiful sequence of buildings which stands for Liverpool’s most deliberate piece of architectural æstheticism is really a testimony to the beauty-disregarding spirit of naked utilitarianism which her endless and imminent activities have made inevitable.
§ 5.
And it is precisely to this beauty-disregarding spirit of utilitarianism again that one traces some of the most memorable and significant pieces of beauty that the place possesses—more memorable and significant than the St. George’s Hall group, because vastly more vital and characteristic. For Liverpool, in spite of herself, and quite unconsciously, is a place of exceeding beauty. Out of that hard turmoil of tangible interests and endeavours a very splendid and reassuring happening has sprung. In honest and shrewd response to instant necessities, the city has been carved and kneaded into the lean lines of practical effectiveness; and those lines have joined wonderfully together to make any number of unpremeditated glories. Loveliness has descended unawares. Built frankly for use, it seems to have attained, by processes almost as organic as those of outer nature, a very singular and moving impressiveness. That drama of leaping roof-tops seen from the Walker Art Gallery, that chamber of co-ordinated lights seen from the Central Station, that racing flood of gold beneath the Dock Board building, are examples of the sort of thing I mean. It is in these natural and instinctive creations, frankly utilitarian, and not in her self-conscious trafficking with loveliness, that Liverpool grows most sensuously magnificent. A curve of sunless canal with clustered chimneys rising solemnly about; a pit of railway sidings, warehouses ranged round, one proud white plume of smoke moving slowly across it; long glittering reaches at the Docks; a black stretch of suburb crawling out, myriad-speared, across the sunset; a mass of warehouses blotting out the stars; hot vistas in the markets, ripe and fierce with colour; burning evening skies, unintentionally clipped and framed by the pillars of the Town Hall portico; roof-adjusted rods of sunlight creating unexpected carnivals; perspectives forming and vanishing; great horses moving in procession; swift, imperative assonances—momentary, irrecoverable—between traffic and grouped buildings: these and a thousand others of the same spontaneous kind are the passages of her life, the native gestures, that linger in the memory like a cadence, that colour her aspect with an abiding dignity and graciousness.
ST. JOHN’S MARKET.
And this is, after all, to say little more than that Liverpool possesses in deep measure that strange accidental beauty of the modern city which is a thing so new to the world that the arts have not yet learned to teach men how to enjoy it. But in Liverpool (exceptional, once more, because typical, typical because exceptional) that beauty exists in a state of singular purity. It is a beauty that is the result, above everything, of a naked response in stone and iron to certain clear imperative necessities: such a response catching, as it would seem, some of the beauty and authority that inevitably attach to every articulate expression of a vital impulse. And in Liverpool those responses have been especially clean and unentangled. The place is self-contained: it has never run to booths and show-places; it has no associations, romantic or historic, to attract the gaper; it has never had to sustain a pose, and only rarely been tempted to attempt one; and these facts, and the fact that its growth has been continuous, that there has nowhere been any shrinkage or debilitation, have made it possible for the garment of buildings to be fitted to the authentic body of its energies with an absolute closeness and integrity. There are no loose folds, no adaptations, very few adhesive insincerities. The whole thing is supremely vital and athletic; and therefore it everywhere discloses that strong and moving graciousness, as yet almost wholly uncelebrated, which is as elemental and unaffected as the strong, forthright graciousness of its River.