Many other notable buildings might, of course, be mentioned, but space is limited. Enough, however, has been said to show that Londoners are still slaves to architectural fashion, and that the now prevailing mode is for red-brick and terra-cotta. Indeed, the London of the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century, will surely be "picked out" by future antiquaries by lines and "holdings" of red, just as the limits of the Georgian and early-Victorian classical fever are now shown by white Doric and Ionic pediments and columns, gleaming from beneath their invading mantle of soot. Some people say, by the way, that the present love of terra-cotta as building material, partly arises from the fact that it can be washed. If this be true, then it only shows that the Londoner of to-day is wanting in appreciation of the before-mentioned "artistic value" of soot. It may be, that, like the tailless fox of the fable, we admire what we must perforce put up with, or what we are accustomed to. Yet, it has always seemed to me that London's chief beauty lies in this all-pervading grime, mellowing, softening, harmonizing. M. Taine, we know, did not hold this view; is it, indeed, to be expected from any one but a true, a born Londoner? St. Paul's blackened festoons of sculptured roses; the grimy cupids, nestling on the pedestals of the Russell family's statues in the Bloomsbury squares; the mournful Greek frieze on the Athenæeum Club, in Pall Mall;—yes, even the sooty resignation of the St. Pancras caryatids; does not the pall of soot, which so afflicts the Southerner, seem to convey something of London's spirit, humanity, Ego, in fact? Who, for instance, will maintain that the blackness of St. Paul's itself does not immeasurably add to the grandeur of its effect? As G. A. Sala said:
"It is really the better for all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine; and are still flinging up every day from their foul and grimy censers."
Who, also, will not own that the new Tate Gallery, erected at such expense by Sir Henry Tate's munificence on the old site of Millbank Prison, is not improving, year by year, by the combined action of London's river, fogs, and soot? It already looks less incongruously white amid its murky surrounding wharves; less like a frosted wedding-cake, less aggressively Greek near the grey Gothic pile of neighbouring Westminster. And what of that picturesque railway station of St. Pancras, picturesque with the combined glamour of blue London mist and distance, towering like some shadowy mediæval fortress over the murky modernity of the Euston Road! (Even the Euston Road, saddest and least inspiring of thoroughfares, can, on occasion, be glorified.) In one of London's lurid autumn sunsets, the large red sun, obscured through fog and mist, sinks slowly behind the embattled towers of St. Pancras, lending it such an appearance of romance that even a French writer (not, however, M. Taine!) has called it:
"A monumental railway-station, like a cathedral with its arched windows, its turrets, and enormous belfry, all of red-brick, which the weather darkens so prettily."
And has not the misty glory of soot and river fog appealed to Turner, the artist; appealed, in turn, to all the painters who have at all penetrated to the spirit of the beauty and the mystery of London? Even M. Taine, so severe otherwise upon London's sooty palaces, is compelled to admit, reluctantly, some charm, after all, in this "huge conglomeration of human creation," and to confess that "the shimmering of river-waves, the scattering of the light imprisoned in vapour, the soft whitish or pink tints which cover these vastnesses, diffuse a sort of grace over the prodigious city, having the effect of a smile upon the face of a shaggy and blackened Cyclops."
The "Cyclops" is maligned and traduced by tradition, and the smile on his blackened face is often beautiful. We call London ugly, mostly from mere custom, but very few among us trouble to look and judge for ourselves. "I wonder," once said Archbishop Benson, "who out of the many thousands who daily pass St. Paul's, ever look up at it." And it is so with all London's great and historic buildings. Church spires and towers were supposed, in the simple days of old, to carry the eye and the mind up to Heaven; but what chance have they, poor things, when, even on one of London's delightful grey-blue skies of summer, no one heeds them, or their message? Like Bunyan's "Man with the Muckrake," we fix our eyes ever steadily on the ground; the only London stones that attract our notice being its jutting kerb-stones, its sounding asphalt and macadamized pavements ... we fix our attention on the dull, dead levels; we lose "the fair illuminated letters, and have no eye for the gilding." Yet we still scoff at our own historic city, not because we ever look at it on our own account, but because we have always been taught that it is the right thing to do so.
It is a curious fact that the fine passages which everybody knows and quotes about the Stones of London, all refer to them in ruins. Macaulay placed his New Zealander on a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Shelley pictured London as "an habitation of bitterns," and the piers of Waterloo Bridge as "the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers." Rossetti overthrew the British Museum in order to leave the archæologists of some future race in confusion as to the ruins of London and Nineveh. Ruskin, who had so much that is bright and beautiful to say of the Stones of Venice, dismissed London with a warning of prophetic doom; saw her stones crumbling "through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction." It is surely time that some new and ardent spirit—some twentieth-century Ruskin—with eyes no longer set upon the dear dead past, should fix his gaze on what is grand and significant in the Stones of London, while still they stand the one upon the other; and, seeing, should reveal to the world something of the sombre glory of its greatest city.
INDEX
A
"Adam" decorations, [246], [462]
Addison, [80], [179], [383]
Adelaide Gallery, the, [290]
Advertisement, art of, in London, [320]
Aggas's Map, [5], [187]
Ainger, Canon, [146]
Albany, the, [380]
Albert Bridge, [26], [224]
Albert Embankment, the, [32]
Albert Hall, [213], [468]
Albert Memorial, [397]
All Hallows Staining, tower of, [55], [81]
"Almack's," [181]
Amen Court, [97]
American Tourists in London, [299]
Ancient Tomb-portraits, [348]
Anne Askew, burning of, [65]
Antiquarian zeal, [55]
Appian Way, our, [193]
Apsley House, [378]
Arnold, Sir Edwin, on a mummy-case, [336]
Arnold, Matthew, on Kensington Gardens, [395];
on the legend of Westminster Abbey, [188];
lecture at Toynbee Hall, [174]
Artists in Kensington, [217]
Ashbee, C. R., [176]
"Asia Minor," [295]
Asiatics in the East End, [295]
Astor Estate Office, [42]
"Augusta," [2], [21]