Liverpool

by Dixon Scott

The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a constantly increasing forcefulness.[1] But it was not until the later decades of the eighteenth century that the real opportunity arrived. It was among the alarums and excursions of the amazing period which then began, among its endless industrial sallies and revolutions, its fabulous commercial conquests, that the weapon was for the first time granted the scope it needed to swing with full effect. And therefore it was within a space of extraordinary brevity—within the leaping years of a single century, indeed—that the City achieved its greatness, and assumed the aspect which it wears to-day.

[1] The details of these activities have been set out more perfectly than ever before, and with a union of concision and lucidity which it is impossible to praise too highly, in Professor Ramsay Muir’s recent “History of Liverpool.”

The direct consequences of that are obvious enough. Liverpool becomes, quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its houses are houses, not merely of recent birth, but pioneer houses, planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed meadow-land and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in large measure, a city without ancestors.

That is sufficiently manifest. But what is not so manifest, and what robs these sept-centenary celebrations, these pageants and retrospective ardours, of any too great tincture of incongruity, is the fact that the River which has washed these interior traditions and memorials away has also restored them in another place and form. It has established, at the gates of the City, a far more perdurable monument to antiquity than any that architecture could contrive. For, whilst they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful quantities. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, they inevitably pass into vital touch with the earlier wielders of the weapon: with the dim fisher-folk who were its eldest users; with the cluster of serfs who received their first “charter” of privileges seven hundred years ago; with the Irish traders of the seventeenth century; with the slave-traders of the eighteenth; with the merchants who watched the dawn of the day of the last great onset. The River becomes in this way a kind of Cathedral, a place heavy with traditions, full of the sense of old passions.

This is clearly not the sort of influence that one can measure with a foot-rule or sum up in a syllogism; but in this nuance of endeavour and in that, in characteristics which it would be impossible briefly to define, but which may perhaps appear in the pages which follow, the effect, I feel, is made faintly, delightfully apparent. The sheer youth of the place has been granted something of the dignity of age. The audacities and vigours of the century which gave it birth have been tinged with a certain gravity and largeness. The very force which has made the place so superbly youthful and athletic, so finely unhampered by the rags of outworn modes, has also granted it that intimate sense of history, that heartening and annealing influence of ancient ardours vitally and romantically recalled, without which a city, as a nation, is but an army without music and banners.

§ 3.

BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER

And it is this complete dependence of City upon River, too, which helps largely to explain what are certainly the two main paradoxes of her daily life: the fact that she is of all cities at once the most heterogeneous in composition, and in exposition the most homogeneous; and the fact, again, that her commercial interests are extravagantly world-wide, and her civic interests extraordinarily local. They are characteristics, these two, which never fail to attract the observer extremely—perhaps, even, extremely to puzzle him. He remarks the cosmopolitan population, the nomadic life so many of them lead, the disturbing flux and bustle of the traveller-strewn pavements; and in face of these things he discovers, to his huge surprise, that the civic spirit of this variegated and distracted junction is more puissant and concerted than that of any other city in the kingdom. He knows that she is, in effect, little more than a great gateway between West and East; he knows that her merchants are chiefly middlemen, that the prime function of the place is to fetch and carry, to bring from hither and forward there; and yet he finds the whole affair looming up into a stubborn Rodinesque independence, achieving this and that original thing with an unexpected air of finality, and maintaining always an aloofness, a clear and unmistakable individuality, that seems utterly incongruous in the midst of the involved world-movements swaying so frantically about her.

Of the accuracy of his observation, at all events, there is room for little question. At every turn of the City’s social and municipal life those two salient antithetical characteristics are vividly displayed. Liverpool is boldly different. She possesses, it seems, a singular faculty for moulding and co-ordinating. The peoples of the world pour through her streets, but they never interrupt her energetic introspectiveness. Fragments of this and that exotic race remain; they settle down, they breed, they pour their alien habits, their alien modes of thought, speech, religion, into the communal veins; but there is no perceptible change. The same emphatic lines of activity sweep on; the same special type is faithfully reproduced.... Liverpool, it seems to me, is astonishingly self-absorbed. It is her own problems that chiefly interest her, and she has a habit of solving these problems for herself on self-invented lines. She has striven to work out—she is, as we shall see, still intently striving to work out—in ways of her own devising, the salvation of her proletariate. She has created a society that is quite untinged by the colours of the county. She has bred her local school of painters. Her politics are a strange sort of democratic conservatism. She is more civic than national, and the newspapers of this most cosmopolitan of English towns tend to reflect the movements of the City rather than the movements of the nation. And yet, she is not provincial. Manchester, her nearest neighbour, has her finely national Guardian, and touches the actual life of the metropolis with a far greater intimacy and frequency; and yet, of the two, Manchester is clearly the more provincial. For provinciality, after all, is but a subordination to the metropolis, a reflection, half deliberate, half unconscious, of the life that goes on spontaneously at the centre. Well, Liverpool would be spontaneous, too. She will imitate no one, not even London. She will be her own metropolis. And those who have marked the clear efficiency of her designs, the unique mingling of American alertness and Lowland caution which colours the spirit that lives behind her very positive efforts, will admit that she has come bewilderingly near success.