So that, in one way and another, the islanders begin to get their apparatus, the People of the Abyss, if you prefer to call them so, their share of light and laughter; and some day, perhaps, these two dull smears may even be wholly erased. And one speaks of such an event with the more of hopefulness because there are not lacking certain signals of a wide and deep change that is about to pass over, that has, indeed, already begun to pass over, the great organism of which they form so intimate a part. I do not speak now of a mere change in the social attitude towards these people; I speak rather of those profounder alterations of character, of purpose, of ideal, which must run their apparently unrelated course before any such specific attitude can be affected at all stably and significantly. All this blackness and disarray is, after all, too fundamental to vanish before any self-conscious and deliberate endeavours; it can only disappear by a kind of accident, the almost unintended by-product of other and alien processes; and it is, therefore, neither to the efforts of these fine workers, nor to the validity and zeal of that glittering official machinery, that one turns, on the last analysis, for the true portents of the change. It is rather to the talk going on in the cafés, to the books in the booksellers’ windows, to the remote suburban firesides where very different matters are being quietly discussed, to the efforts apparent in the ateliers. And in all these places, it seems to me, there are to be discerned the signs of the dawn of another epoch in the City’s history.

Liverpool passes out of her pubescence. The swift straight lines of her eager and yet so strangely dignified uprising begin to swerve out now into ample curves, begin to enclose another spaciousness, a larger and more considerate leisure. One finds it evidenced in the social atmosphere of the place, in an increasing suavity and ripeness to be discovered there. It appears again in the part played by the University—a part of ever-increasing confidence and intimacy on the one hand, of ever-increasing acceptability on the other. It is to be detected in the religious life of the place, in the aspirations which surround the great Cathedral which is now splendidly uprising in her midst. It is disclosed in the revealing mirror of the arts. In her latest and most perfect piece of architecture, the luminous building, so significantly isolated, that serenely dominates her central wharves, she seems, almost for the first time, to have confessed herself in beauty perfectly, and she has done that because the nature of the confession had already suffered change. A new poet, too, has wonderfully arisen in the midst of these hitherto almost songless workers; and in the painters’ quarters there is a momentous stir of schism and disputation. Already the old art of the place, called into existence by its spirit of independence, but limited by the typical demands of so strenuous an atmosphere, begins to give way a little before the advances of an art that concedes nothing to the citizen, that sits frankly apart among its own visions.... In a little bronze-hung studio, poised high above one of the central ways, a woman is dealing with pigment in a fashion more sensitive and personal than any that has been known in Liverpool before. Well, in the quality of her work I find some confession of the forces that are producing the profound unanimous change which may lead, among other things, to the dispersal of the darkness of the underworld.

So that in the end this dull stain may vanish. I have called it a dream—a black mood out of which the City dreadfully gathers inspiration for her battles. Like other dreams, it may one day draw to its close. But when it is over the dreamer, too, will have changed; that, at least, is inevitable. Just in what manner these subtle and various mutations will affect her character, her aspect, it is impossible even to suggest. It may be that this growing sensitiveness will soften in some measure the fingers we have seen probing, so tirelessly, so tirelessly, for the hard unmitigable fact. Or it may be that she will discover some wonderful union between these qualities, will maintain a double dominion, losing nothing of her ardour, gaining much of this new tranquillity. It is impossible to predict. This much alone is certain: that the next book which essays her portraiture will have to deal with a strangely different subject.

INDEX

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD