I said something to this effect without calling forth much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race and that other nations—such as the Germans and the Americans—might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He scoffed at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Tyne good-humoredly spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British quarterlies then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and resented my modest literary reputation for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants—men against whose wits I could sharpen my own.
I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London.
CHAPTER X
SOME MORE ABOUT LONDON
“London sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere expression of temperament anyhow.
New York and America are all so new, so lustful of change. Here, in these streets, when you walk out of a morning or an evening, you feel a pleasing stability. London is not going to change under your very eyes. You are not going to turn your back to find, on looking again, a whole sky line effaced. The city is restful, naïve, in a way tender and sweet like an old song. London is more fatalistic and therefore less hopeful than New York.
One of the first things that impressed me, as I have said, was the grayish tinge of smoke that was over everything—a faint haze—and the next that as a city, street for street and square for square, it was not so strident as New York or Chicago—not nearly so harsh. The traffic was less noisy, the people more thoughtful and considerate, the so-called rush, which characterizes New York, less foolish. There is something rowdyish and ill-mannered about the street life of American cities. This was not true here. It struck me as simple, sedate, thoughtful, and I could only conclude that it sprang from a less stirring atmosphere of opportunity. I fancy it is harder to get along in London. People do not change from one thing to another so much. The world there is more fixed in a pathetic routine, and people are more conscious of their so-called “betters.” In so far as I could judge on so short a notice, London seemed to me to represent a mood—a uniform, aware, conservative state of being, neither brilliant nor gay anywhere, though interesting always. About Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and the Strand I suppose the average Londoner would insist that London is very gay; but I could not see it. Certainly it was not gay as similar sections in New York are gay. It is not in the Londoner himself to be so. He is solid, hard, phlegmatic, a little dreary, like a certain type of rain-bird or Northern loon, content to make the best of a rather dreary situation. I hope not, but I felt it to be true.
I do not believe that it is given any writer to wholly suggest a city. The mind is like a voracious fish—it would like to eat up all the experiences and characteristics of a city or a nation, but this, fortunately, is not possible. My own mind was busy pounding at the gates of fact, but during all the while I was there I got but a little way. I remember being struck with the nature of St. James’s Park which was near my hotel, the great column to the Duke of Marlborough, at the end of the street, the whirl of life in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus which were both very near. The offices I visited in various nearby streets interested me, and the storm of cabs which whirled by all the corners of the region of my hotel. It was described to me as the center of London; and I am quite sure it was—for clubs, theaters, hotels, smart shops and the like were all here. The heavy trading section was further east along the banks of the Thames, and between that and Regent Street, where my little hotel was located, lay the financial section, sprawling around St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England. One could go out of this great central world easily enough—but it was only, apparently, to get into minor centers such as that about Victoria Station, Kensington, Paddington, Liverpool Street, and the Elephant and Castle.
I may be mistaken, but London did not seem either so hard or foreign to me as New York. I have lived in New York for years and years and yet I do not feel that it is My city. One always feels in New York, for some reason, as though he might be put out, or even thrown out. There is such a perpetual and heavy invasion of the stranger. Here in London I could not help feeling off-hand as though things were rather stable and that I was welcome in the world’s great empire city on almost any basis on which I wished myself taken. That sense of civility and courtesy to which I have already so often referred was everywhere noticeable in mail-men, policemen, clerks, servants. Alas, when I think of New York, how its rudeness, in contrast, shocks me! At home I do not mind. With all the others I endure it. Here in London for the first time in almost any great city I really felt at home.
But the distances! and the various plexi of streets! and the endless directions in which one could go! Lord! Lord! how they confounded me. It may seem odd to make separate comment on something so thoroughly involved with everything else in a trip of this kind as the streets of London; but nevertheless they contrasted so strangely with those of other cities I have seen that I am forced to comment on them. For one thing, they are seldom straight for any distance and they change their names as frequently and as unexpectedly as a thief. Bond Street speedily becomes Old Bond Street or New Bond Street, according to the direction in which you are going; and I never could see why the Strand should turn into Fleet Street as it went along, and then into Ludgate Hill, and then into Cannon Street. Neither could I understand why Whitechapel Road should change to Mile End Road, but that is neither here nor there. The thing that interested me about London was that it was endless and that there were no high buildings—nothing over four or five stories as a rule—though now and then you actually find eight- and nine-story buildings—and that it was homey and simple and sad in some respects. I remember thinking how gloomy were some of the figures I saw trudging here and there in the smoke-grayed streets and the open park spaces. I never saw such sickly, shabby, run-down-at-the-heels, decayed figures in all my life—figures from which all sap and juice and the freshness of youth and even manhood had long since departed. Men and women they were who seemed to emerge out of gutters and cellars where could be neither light nor freshness nor any sense of hope or care, but only eloquent misery. “Merciful heaven!” I said to myself more than once, “is this the figure of a man?” That is what life does to some of us. It drains us as dry as the sickled wheat stalks and leaves us to blow in wintry winds. Or it poisons us and allows us to fester and decay within our own skins.