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<h2>THE ROADS</h2> On Westminster Bridge at early morning Wordsworth thought of the heart of London, but a view of London in the long day and night of movement, when the mystery of sleep is away, suggests not the involuntary heart of men, but their wilful feet. The roads, which are lonely messengers in the far-off country, crowd together here, and hustle one another to give footing to the tramp of the people. London has a fantastic look, as though there were nothing to do but make haste to be gone. To look at London from some point of height—a rare opportunity—is to trace these ways of passionate escape. The roads, indeed, seem eager, but you know that the crowds who, by these curves and knots, these straight lines, and these intent, narrow, dark grey levels, traced with narrower steel, elude the town, are in no more than jog-trot haste, and wear no look of fugitives. Of them and of their detail there is no sign in this distant prospect. The movement of the people in London is here no more perceptible than the molecular motion in a diamond. <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/i_074tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image A Coffee Stall. </div> But the roads are all expressive of this energy of flight from a centre. They are, as it were, signs of a perpetual explosion; they are the fringe of the mêlée, the shooting, streaming outbreaks of the photosphere of London. They hunt and are hunted. They fly from the city of confusion. It is only by escaping that they become visible, and out of the uncertainty of the smoke the hasty roads clear themselves as they make for light and the open ground. It seems as though the steady strength of their curves did in itself express some force and impulse. The railways run; their foreshortened sweeps and reaches look like the swinging and swaying of resolute motion. The town would shoulder them, but they evade and slip through, slender and keen,[Pg 27] with a stroke of their flying heels. They crawl, but they crawl with the dominant level and liberty of flight in air. They begin in the tangle of the town, but smoothly untie themselves and pass away single and swift. No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail. The others jostle one another as they hurry from town, and must needs relax their eagerness in order to climb the hills—brief and little ones though these are. The roads pause on the mounds, they hesitate at crossways, and they dip into slight and shallow valleys, whence they do not see the riot of walls and roofs from out of which they go. The azure June hardly leaves a trace of the local grey of smoke. All, by some accident of aspect, is a vague blue, although the smoke, seen from the Greenwich heights, leaves nothing unveiled, cancels the horizon, and barely lets the lovely dome of St. Paul’s show a dark blue form upon the close background of thick and sunny air. And blue, like the rest, is that one wide road which takes here so majestic a sweep—the river. It is the river of chimneys; they stand, on either bank, as unequal in growth as a group of children; they crowd together, they stand apart, they straggle, but if they have any law, it is the river’s. They mark its path as reeds and rushes might do in meadows. The hidden reaches are traced by this black growth, followed and discovered. The chimneys will hardly let the river go, but cling to the track of his waters when the town is dwindling eastwards, and stand conspicuous among the flats when the houses have at last, at last, ceased. Apart from the river they are almost as rare in London as in Naples, and it is not to them we owe the chief part of our ‘sky,’ but to the steamers, to the trains, and, more than all, to the unnumbered houses. If ever London is to be restored to her own mists—not to great brightness, but to the tender exhalations that are now burlesqued by smoke, to the true climate of nature, the marshes, and the north, it will obviously be the work of laws touching the houses rather than the factories. The river is perpetually overhung, involved, tangled, in that indefinite and unshapely cloud. It looks blue from the Greenwich hill, but not blue with the blue of pure sunny waters; it is blue because blue is the trick of this midsummer light seen from this one point. The blue road lies open and flat, from the dazzling confusion of the west, whence it comes, to the dimmer confusion of the north, whither the great curve tends. It is a road more level than the tyrannously level rails, but there is no haste in it. The unceasing motion of the tidal Thames seems to make it wait about the bridges of London. The accustomed versifier himself will hardly bid it flow on, so often is it seen to flow back. Because it is so constantly chidden and driven by the sea, the long tendency, brought from its first source and kept between so many fields and over all the noisy weirs, is concealed. That flowing lurks still, but you cannot find it among the rhythmic tides. It is not expressed, and there is no sense of the final sea in the coming and going of these turbid waters. The unceasing seaward flow is their secret. [Pg 28]But it is only upon this ambiguous road of the river that any human motion is perceptible in this distant view. Barges are seen to float heavy and flat, and at certain points there is the vague suggestion of some stir at wharf or pier. Otherwise the scene keeps all its hurry out of sight and hearing. But for the vague shifting and alteration of the light, London might be a painted city. The little figure of man is so quenched, incredibly. His town keeps the black crowds and their voices out of reach, and it is difficult to believe in the noise, so deaf is the distance. London is at the mercy of her roads, and it is no wonder the fancy should give them life. And now it is for their coming, not their going, that they seem in haste. The town has covered up the original and all-fruitful earth; her pavements seal up all the springs of earthly life, and her roads are loaded with the fruits of earth unsealed. It is upon her, then, that the roads are turned with boat, train, and cart charged with her bread. What flocks and herds are daily hunted into the unproductive town, the town wherefrom nothing, nothing—for all its factories—takes birth; the town that visibly burns up, with never-ceasing reek of the never-ceasing burning, the substance of the world. The flame of life is fed fully in a thousand forms, and the flame of fire, smouldering in the furnaces at the foot of these chimneys, is the sign of the enormous sacrifice.     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> <div class="figcenter"><ANTIMG src="images/i_078tmb.jpg" alt="" /> Larger Image</div> VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.     [Pg 29] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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