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London Impressions

<div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>     <h1>LONDON IMPRESSIONS</h1>     <h1>LONDON IMPRESSIONS</h1>   <h3>ETCHINGS AND PICTURES IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY</h3> <h2>WILLIAM HYDE</h2>   <h3>AND ESSAYS BY</h3> <h2>ALICE MEYNELL</h2>     <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_004tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div>     WESTMINSTER ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO. 2 WHITEHALL GARDENS 1898     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> [Pg v] <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_006tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> A Cheap Market.     LIST OF PICTURES <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="images"> <tr><td colspan="4" align="center">FULL-PAGE PLATES</td></tr> <tr><td>THE RIVER</td><td align="center">Etching</td><td colspan="2" align="right">Frontispiece</td></tr> <tr><td>WESTMINSTER ABBEY</td><td align="center">Photogravure</td><td>facing page</td><td align="right">2</td></tr> <tr><td>TERRIBLE LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">4</td></tr> <tr><td>AN IMPRESSION</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">6</td></tr> <tr><td>END OF A WINTER DAY</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">8</td></tr> <tr><td>UTILITARIAN LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">10</td></tr> <tr><td>KENSINGTON GARDENS</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">12</td></tr> <tr><td>NIGHT SCENE, BERMONDSEY</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">14</td></tr> <tr><td>THE CLOCK TOWER, WESTMINSTER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">16</td></tr> <tr><td>ST. PAUL’S AT DAWN</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">18</td></tr> <tr><td>WATERLOO BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">20</td></tr> <tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">22</td></tr> <tr><td>ST. PAUL’S FROM WATLING STREET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">24</td></tr> <tr><td>THE VICTORIA TOWER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">28</td></tr> <tr><td> </td></tr> <tr><td>[Pg vi]</td></tr> <tr><td colspan="4" align="center">PLATES IN THE TEXT</td></tr> <tr><td>ST. PAUL’S IN A STORM</td><td align="center">Photogravure</td><td colspan="2" align="right">On Title-page</td></tr> <tr><td>A CHEAP MARKET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">page</td><td align="right">v</td></tr> <tr><td>A FORGOTTEN CORNER</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">1</td></tr> <tr><td>THE NERVES OF LONDON</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">6</td></tr> <tr><td>THE EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">9</td></tr> <tr><td>TREES</td><td align="center">Etching</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">12</td></tr> <tr><td>THE LAST BOAT</td><td align="center">Photogravure</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">19</td></tr> <tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">22</td></tr> <tr><td>A BACK STREET</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">24</td></tr> <tr><td>A COFFEE STALL</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">26</td></tr> <tr><td>RAIN, SMOKE, AND TRAFFIC</td><td align="center">Do.</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">29</td></tr> <tr><td>WESTMINSTER</td><td align="center">Etching</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right">31</td></tr></table>     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> [Pg vii] <h2>LIST OF ESSAYS</h2> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="essays"> <tr><td> </td><td> </td><td align="right">PAGE</td></tr> <tr><td>THE LONDON SUNDAY</td><td> </td><td align="right">1</td></tr> <tr><td>A PILGRIM</td><td> </td><td align="right">4</td></tr> <tr><td>THE EFFECT OF LONDON</td><td> </td><td align="right">6</td></tr> <tr><td>THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE</td><td> </td><td align="right">9</td></tr> <tr><td>THE TREES</td><td> </td><td align="right">12</td></tr> <tr><td>CHELSEA REACH</td><td> </td><td align="right">16</td></tr> <tr><td>THE SPRING</td><td> </td><td align="right">19</td></tr> <tr><td>BELOW BRIDGE</td><td> </td><td align="right">22</td></tr> <tr><td>THE ROADS</td><td> </td><td align="right">26</td></tr> <tr><td>THE SMOULDERING CITY</td><td> </td><td align="right">29</td></tr></table>     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_011tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> THE RIVER.     [Pg 1] <h2>THE LONDON SUNDAY</h2> This seems to be a thing that all exclaim against, and but few see. The phrase is never varied—a sure sign of lack of experience. One cries, ‘Oh, the London Sunday!’ and another, ‘It must be too dreadful for foreigners!’ and before the topic disappears something yet vaguer has been said, in a flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater number do not know even so much. <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/i_013tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image A Forgotten Corner. </div> Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as far as the eye may see—a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow, wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the morning and to the east in the evening—suns in rows, and suns that run fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do nothing—not even much talking—they give a false air of lawlessness to the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the women, who needs must[Pg 2] balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly, in great numbers in the open spaces—the vague lands on the other side of Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their houses in the free afternoon. In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly as to get a continuous Sunday impression—the day and the people flowing, unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through ‘town,’ through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing. Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent. But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets are almost white, and in this light-grey London, colourless but clear, you realise how much man darkens and blackens the earth in these latitudes by his mere presence. The natural surface of the world, it seems, is rather blond than dark; the quarry is white, and the harvest bright; with which agrees the delicate, high, and sensitive soft colour of the body. It is a pity that mere black, brown, and grey dyes should so change the colour of the race—squalid dyes, in which are steeped the unchanged and the unwashed garments of these quite innumerable young men. It may be noted that the great majority of the London Sunday women are fresh to see. We all know that there are alleys and corners where the women look otherwise, but those who take their part in this Sunday, so famous in allusions, who join in the day-long movement on foot and load the tramcars, are clean and cleanly clad. In Shoreditch and along the out-stretching Kingsland Road the all-brilliant sun strikes flashes from white dresses and gilds fair hair attractively arranged. This is one of the surprises of the journey. Another surprise is that you fall in love with the City steeples, and find it dull to pass out of their influence of serenity and fancy to come amongst the Gothic towers and spires of the suburbs. These last are studious and consistent, properly retrospective, and full of principle and history. Moreover, they are well seen, for they stand in the wide dwarf town, with nothing of their own measure except the Board Schools. All the shabbier suburbs are dwarfs, and none drop so suddenly and go so near the ground as the suburbs of the north-east. But there are too many Gothic towers; whereas of the lovely spires of Wren and of his followers we shall have no more. No one, it seems, plots to recapture that signal inspiration, so delicate, so inventive, so full of dignity and freaks. Nothing is quite so beautiful as the spire of Bow, but it must be permitted to admire a slender steeple in Shoreditch, and one close to the Blue-Coat [Pg 3]School, the much less ingenious one by the Post Office, even the prankish one near the Mansion House, besides the beautiful St. Mary’s in the Strand, and the only less charming St. Clement Danes. And all these lily-like spires have kept, more or less, their paleness in the smirched and spotted town. They are fine against all the London skies, and never more beautiful than with a bright grey sky, and the half-sunshine of a characteristic London day on their happy little cupolas and small and exquisite columns, except, perhaps, when a westering sun makes their white a golden rose. St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, has but a squat spire, set with flourishing little urns; but it has many trees tossing in the summer wind, and in its garden a fountain where the pigeons and sparrows bathe together. Across the geraniums and lobelias of another quadrangle, full of sun and translucent shadow, you may see the gold of the altar-lights, and white surplices gilded with that gold. The tradition—a Dickens tradition, it seems—of the desolate City church is still true as to the numbers of the congregations: in this open church there are but three people, exceedingly devout; but the old woman, the beadle, the gloom are gone.   <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_016tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> WESTMINSTER ABBEY.   There is one respect in which Sunday flatters the town. It fills with iron blinds and shutters the hollows of the shops whereby London usually looks as though the houses found a kind of helpless security in their long, staggering, lateral union, a prop for houses that have lost their feet. Again, it helps the summer to put out many fires, and helps the live wind to sift the darkness from the sunlight.     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> [Pg 4] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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