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<h2>BELOW BRIDGE</h2> <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/i_064tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image Below Bridge. </div> The first impression, and, needless to say, the longest, is that of the many miles of wharves compared with the few miles of embankments, drives, and of the holiday river generally. Not only have the black and brown warehouses, the chimneys, and the cranes possession of the whole right bank of the London Thames, but they hold both banks of the lower Thames through league-long reaches and noble curves, and such changes of aspect, sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky. Besides this slow variation of light, in which the view wheels under the wheeling cloud, there is no lack of variety along the dusky banks of the river of commerce. The subsidence of height along the warehouses as the river draws further and further from the middle of London is an incident of continuous interest, interrupted now and then, but holding on persistently, until the carrying river flows through a dark-gabled, low, and long village towards the eastern woods and heights and the further fields. Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses that are no houses—somewhat as the biblia abiblia of Charles Lamb are among books,—you find the face of a single human little house, its timber looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse harbour-master’s title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt in—propped in the serried row [Pg 23]that has the sightless aspect of a barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach to beauty than any street of ‘handsome’ houses with columns and porticoes in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is a good deal of plain wall, which—unless a building be in every way wrong—gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt. True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings—‘works,’ these seem to be, not warehouses—that touch the extremity of possible ugliness and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without exaggeration, black. These are very few—two or three at the most—and all on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken, pointed, and very various. Low as it is, it is always—seen from the deck of a boat—the very skyline. From that low point of view the scene is made of river and boats, warehouses, and sky. Of the thronging town beyond, on either bank, nothing appears; you have got rid of streets, and, with streets, of all the movement, the rattle, the people, the inland perspectives. The face of river-side buildings looks almost unbroken; it lets no glimpse pass through. There might be marshes or fields beyond; it is only by the map that you know these two dark banks to be the edges and hems of cities.   <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_066tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> BELOW BRIDGE.   The swarthiness, the darkness of the colour—a brownish grey—is to be insisted upon; yet to none but a careless eye does the lower Thames seem all brown and grey. The dull hues are shot with one single prevailing colour—red. Innumerable red-tiled roofs are seen as the turn of the river shows their dusky sides; iron sheds are ruddled with the red that signs flocks of country sheep; shutters are red over warehouse windows (this is a Sunday view), and everywhere are the red sails of Venice, dyed in the selfsame dye, only differently lighted. Even when there is a difficulty in fixing the place of this negroid blush, it is perceptibly there. It is latent, even when no red sail rises between grey water and grey sky; it lurks in hollows and inlets so darkly as to be almost black. Then suddenly the scarlet of a huge black and scarlet steamer comes along and gives you the colour without a shred of mystery, without charm, and with the most definite division. Besides the red, there is nothing that is coloured except a stack of timber now and then—raw wood with precisely the colours of a wheatfield in August—and the piled-up hay of a red-sailed barge loaded down to the water. These are not many on the Sunday river, but Sunday clears the colours by clearing the air. There is exceedingly little smoke; its sign is upon the whole river-side, it has re-drawn everything in black, as a child might go over a water-colour with his black pencils, but between you and the natural clouds there is nothing but fresh air, quick with the movement that seems perpetually to follow this grey waterway. Or now and then, at long intervals, a single flimsy puff of smoke comes between mast and sky; it is brown,[Pg 24] the steam is white, and the cloud silver grey; and through each of these three with a various gleam filters the flying sunshine. <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/i_069tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image A Back Street. </div> Sunday seals the faces of the barns and turns the key upon the leagues of wharves; but it leaves all the cranes and masts etched in their thousands upon the low horizon. These make the thicket of the Thames-side, a deciduous, narrow wood winding east, south-east, and north, and standing everywhere in its brief winter of a day, having shed sails and burdens and put away noise. There is nothing in the handsome London of high houses so delicate as these lifted lances against the sky. Hop-gardens or vineyards, or the slender rows of sticks that carry pea plants and beans in rustic gardens, make the same play with light, and let it through as fine a design. Here is nothing of the sharp black and white detail that is the most salient thing in London streets; everything is painted softly; all the darks are dull; in a word, the scene is simple, and this the streets are never. It is simplicity, indeed, that makes all the buildings (except only the ‘works’ above mentioned) more than tolerable. There are no advertisements. This means much to eyes too well used to those shreds and tatters of the wall. That commerce which makes so much paltry show in the West is here perfectly grave and quiet; it makes serious announcements, not advertisements, of the things that occupy navies. You see ‘Pickles’ and other names that launch a thousand ships, written large over various landing-places, and the names of the owners of warehouses are broad across their fronts; or you are reminded how little you know of the affairs of the place by the frequent name of ‘Sufferance Wharf’ among the cranes. It cannot possibly be said that this lettering is beautiful, but it is not nearly so bad as the lettering in the streets we know. Needless to say, you shall not see a scrap of gilding below bridge, except a momentary tawdriness near the pier of some excursion place, where there are unseen Cockney gardens at hand—no gilding, nor white, nor any kind of blue. Seeing that bad blue is the worst thing in the far-off town of paint and pleasure, the dark and reddish river-side of work has here again one of its obscure advantages. The work, almost all pausing in this summer [Pg 25]Sunday, is obviously, to judge by its instruments and chips, mainly the inhuman work of machines. Nevertheless, wherever there are boats there is that arm of Hercules which is heroic, and therefore greater, though much weaker, than the arm of iron; and even on this day you may see the toil of the arm against the mass of the heavy river, as two men stand to row their broad barge up stream. It is the most primitive contest after all. Their figures strain back on the long oar until they are stretched nearly straight horizontally before they slowly gather themselves and grow erect again. Nothing suits the river so well as the barge with its level load, flat as the water itself. Nothing a-tiptoe there; but the very surface of the world reaching to the sea, and the long river feeling for that level far inland. The dusky voyage darkens, for the Thames turns towards the north; anon it takes a pale grey splendour, the sky shines, and the delicate intricacy of masts that mar nothing of the simple view seems to be rather itself luminous than dark against the light; flying birds are lost as they pass in the upper brilliance. It is but that the Thames has swung towards the south again.   <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_071tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> ST. PAUL’S FROM WATLING STREET.     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> [Pg 26] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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