WITH PICTURES BY W. J. GLACKENS
AFTER a few days I went to London for the first time,—I do not count the night of my arrival, for I saw nothing but the railway terminus,—and, I confess, I was not greatly impressed. I could not help thinking on this first morning, as we passed from Paddington, via Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Piccadilly, and other streets to Regent Street and the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, that it was beautiful, spacious, cleanly, dignified, and well ordered, but not astonishingly imposing. Fortunately, it was a bright and comfortable morning, and the air was soft. There was a faint, bluish haze over the city, which I took to be smoke; and certainly it smelled as though it were smoky. I had a sense of great life, but not of crowded life, if I manage to make myself clear by that. It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important. At every turn, X. was my ever-present monitor. We must have passed through a long stretch of Piccadilly, for X. pointed out a line of clubs, naming them the St. James’s Club, the Savile Club, the Lyceum Club, and then St. James’s Palace.
I was duly impressed. I was seeing things which, after all, I thought, did not depend so much upon their exterior beauty or vast presence as upon the distinction of their lineage and connections. They were beautiful in a low, dark way, and certainly they were tinged with an atmosphere of age and respectability. After all, since life is a figment of the brain, such built-up notions of things are in many cases really far more impressive than the things themselves. London is a fanfare of great names; it is a clatter of vast reputations; it is a swirl of memories and celebrated beauties and orders and distinctions. It is almost impossible any more to disassociate the real from the fictitious or, better, the spiritual. There is something here which is not of brick and stone at all, but which is purely a matter of thought. It is disembodied poetry, noble ideas, delicious memories of great things; and these, after all, are better than brick and stone. The city is low, generally not more than five stories high, often not more than two, but it is beautiful. And it alternates great spaces with narrow crevices in such a way as to give a splendid variety. You can have at once a sense of being very crowded and of being very free. I can understand now Browning’s desire to include “poor old Camberwell” with Italy in the confines of romance.
Drawn by W. J. Glackens
“X. WAS MY EVER-PRESENT MONITOR”
The thing that struck me most was that the buildings were largely a golden yellow in color, quite as if they had been white, and time had stained them. Many other buildings looked as though they had been black originally and had been daubed white in spots. The truth is that it was quite the other way about. They had been snow-white and had been sooted by the smoke until they were now nearly coal-black. Only here and there had the wind and rain whipped bare white places which looked like scars or the drippings of lime. At first I thought, “How wretched!” Later, “This effect is charming.”
We are so used to the new and shiny and tall in America, particularly in our larger cities, that it is very hard at first to estimate a city of equal or greater rank, which is old and low and, to a certain extent, smoky. In places there was more beauty, more surety, more dignity, more space than most of our cities have to offer. The police had an air of dignity and intelligence such as I have never seen anywhere in America, and it was obvious at a glance. The streets were beautifully swept and clean, and I saw soldiers here and there in fine uniforms, standing outside palaces and walking in the public ways. That alone was sufficient to differentiate London from any American city. We rarely see our soldiers. They are too few. I think what I felt most of all was that I could not feel anything very definite about so great a city, and that there was no use trying.
The first thing that took my attention in the stores was the clerks, but I may say the stores and shops themselves, after New York, seemed small and old. New York is new; the space given to the more important shops is considerable. In London it struck me that the space was not much and that the woodwork and walls were dingy. One can tell by the feel of a place whether it is exceptional and profitable, and all of these were that; but they were dingy. The English clerk, too, had an air of civility, I had almost said servility, which was different. They looked to me like persons born to a condition and a point of view, and I think they are. In America any clerk may subsequently be anything he chooses, ability guaranteed, but I’m not so sure that this is true in England. Anyhow, the American clerk always looks his possibilities, his problematic future; the English clerk looks as though he were to be one indefinitely.
X. and I were through with our first impressive round of sight-seeing by one o’clock, and he explained that we would go to a popular, hotel grill. All my life, certainly all my literary life, I had been hearing of this hotel, its distinction, its air; and now I said to myself, “Here I am, and I shall be able to judge it for myself.” We stopped at a barber’s for a few minutes to be shaved, and, to my astonishment, I saw a barber-shop which anywhere in America would be considered ridiculous. It was not a dirty barber-shop; you could see plainly that it was clean, well-conditioned, and probably enjoyed a profitable patronage: but for smallness, meanness, the age of the woodwork and the chairs, commend me to America of, say, 1865. It was the poorest little threadbare thing I have yet seen in that line. X. spoke of it as “his barber’s.”