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Title: London
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Photographer: Alvin Langdon Coburn
Release date: May 7, 2020 [eBook #62048]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON ***
LONDON
[Illustration]
LONDON
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
WITH TEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
[Illustration]
LONDON: PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN AND
EDMUND D. BROOKS & THEIR FRIENDS
1914
LONDON
There is an old London story that has never lost its loveliness for me.
It was about a stout old lady from the country, who travelled round and
round the Underground Railway in a circle, because at each station she
tried to get out backwards, and at each station the guard pitched her in
again, under the impression that she was trying to get in. It is a
beautiful story; doing honour alike to the patience of the female sex
and the prompt courtesy of the male; it is a song without words. But
there is another and milder version (perhaps we might dare to say a more
probable version) of the same story. It describes an aged farmer and his
daughter travelling the same sad circle, and failing to alight anywhere,
partly because of the _impedimenta_ of country parcels, but partly also
because they were almost satisfied with the staring names of the places
set up on the Underground Railway. They thought the “Mansion House” was
rather a dark place for the Lord Mayor to live in. They could detect no
bridges through the twilight of “Westminster Bridge,” nor any promising
park in “St. James’ Park Station.” They could only suppose that they
were in the crypts of “The Temple”; or buried under the foundations of
“The Tower.”
Nevertheless, I am not quite so certain that this cockney tale against
countrymen scores so much as is supposed. The rustic saw the names at
least; and nine times out of ten the names are nobler than the things.
Let us suppose him as starting westward from the Mansion House, where he
commiserated the dim captivity of the Lord Mayor. He would come to
another equally gloomy vault in which he would read the word
“Blackfriars.” It is not a specially cheery word; but it goes back, I
imagine, to that great movement, at once dogmatic and democratic, which
gave to its followers the fierce and fine name of the “Dogs of God.” But
at the worst, the mere name of Blackfriars Station is more dignified
than the Blackfriars Road. He would pass on to the Temple; and surely
the mere word “Temple” is more essential and eternal than either the
rich lawyers in its courts, or the poor vagabonds on its Embankment. He
will go on to Charing Cross, where the noblest of English knights and
kings set up a cross to his dead queen. But unless his rustic erudition
informs him of the fact, he will gain little by getting out of the
train, and going to the larger station. Neither porters carrying luggage
nor trippers carrying babies, will encourage any conversation about the
original sacredness of the spot. He will stop next at a yet more sacred
spot, the station called Westminster Bridge, from which he can visit, as
Macaulay says, “the place where five generations of statesmen have
striven, and the place where they sleep together.” By walking across the
street from this station he can enter the House of Commons. But, if he
is wise, he will stop in the train. He will then arrive at St. James’
Park; and (as Mr. Max Beerbohm has truly remarked) he will not meet St.
James there.
Yet these mere names that he has seen on a dingy wall, like
advertisements, are really the foundation stones of London; and it is
right that they should (as it were) be underground. The mere fact that
these five names, in a row along the riverside, all bear witness to an
ancient religion would tell the rustic in the railway train (supposing
him to be of elaborate culture and lightning deduction) the great part
of the history of London. The old Temple Church still stands, full of
the tombs of those great and doubtful heroes who signed themselves with
the sign of Christ, but who came, rightly or wrongly, to be stamped by
their neighbours with the seal of Antichrist. The old Charing Cross is
gone; but its very absence is as much of a historical monument as
itself. For the Puritans pulled it down merely for being a cross; though
(as it says in a humorous song of the period) Charing Cross had always
refrained from uttering a word against the authority of the Parliament.
But these old things, though fundamental, are fragmentary; and whether
as ruins or merely as records, will tell the stranger little of what
London has been and is, as distinct from Paris or Berlin or Chicago.
London is a mediaeval town, as these names testify; but its soul has
been sunk deeper under other things than any other town that remembers
mediaevalism at all. It is very hard indeed to find London in London.
There is a story (one among many) that there was a settlement before the
Romans came, which occupied about the same space that is now occupied by
Cannon Street Station. In any case, it is probable that the seed of the
city was sown somewhere about that slope of the riverside. The Romans
made it a great town but hardly their greatest town, and the barbarism
of the ninth century left it bare. Its second or third foundation as a
predominant city belongs, like many such things, to the genius and
tenacity of Alfred. He did not indeed hold it as a capital of England,
but rather as an outpost of Wessex. From his point of view, London was a
suburb of Wantage. But he saw the practical importance of its position
towards the river mouth; and he held it tight. The Norman Conquest
clinched the condition, which was roughly symbolized by the Tower of
London, which for many centuries was a trophy captured and recaptured by
opposite factions. But, in the main, London had one political character
from first to last. It was always, for good or evil, on the side of the
Parliament and against the King. Six hundred years ago, it was the
citizens of London who had to stand the charge of the strongest of the
Plantagenets in his youth, on the downs round Lewes. Four hundred years
afterwards, it was the citizens of London who held the high places of
Buckinghamshire, when the army of Charles I threatened London from
Oxford. Later still, the Londoners stood solidly against James II and
splendidly against George III. Whether Parliament was worth such
fidelity, whether the merchants of the Thames were wise to tie
themselves so entirely to the grandees of the counties, is no subject
for this place. But that the tradition of the town was sincere and
continuous cannot be doubted. To this day the Lord Mayor of London is
probably proud that the King of England can only enter London by his
leave. That fact is as close a summary of the purely political history
of London as one could want. It exactly expresses the victory of the
merchants over the central power. It is often observed that the French
think the Lord Mayor of London more important than the King. They are an
acute people.
This rather surly love of liberty (or rather of independence) is written
in the straggling map of London, and proclaimed in its patchwork
architecture. There is in it something that every Englishman feels in
himself, though he does not always feel it to be good; something of the
amateur; something of the eccentric. The nearest phrase is the negative
one of “unofficial.” London is so English, that it can hardly be called
even the capital of England. It is not even the county town of the
county in which it stands. That title, I believe, belongs to Brentford,
which legend credits with two kings at once, like Lacedaemon. It is
just London. As his French friend said about Browning, its centre is not
in the middle. The Parliament sits in London, but not in the City, of
London; the City of London is not under the London County Council; and
in spite of the opinion of General Choke, the Sovereign does not live in
the Tower. Crowded and noisy as it is, there is something shy about
London: it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does not like to be
asked what it is for. In this, there is not a little of its history as a
sort of half-rebel through so many centuries. Hence it is a city of side
streets that only lead into side streets; a city of short cuts--that
take a long time. There have been recent changes in the other direction,
of course; but the very name of one of them, unintentionally illustrates
something not native to the place. A more broad and sweeping
thoroughfare, in the Continental manner, was opened between the Strand
and Holborn, and called Kingsway. The phrase will serve for a symbol.
Through all those creative and characteristic epochs, there was no
King’s Way through London. There was nothing Napoleonic; no roads that
could be properly decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with
his cannon. It had something of the licence and privilege of that
Alsatia that was its sore; the little impenetrable kingdom of rascals
that revelled down in Whitefriars, where now rascals of a more mournful
kind write Imperialist newspapers. One might call mediaeval London a
rabbit warren; save that the Trainbands who took their pikes, and
’prentices who caught up their clubs at a bell or a beacon, were
certainly anything but rabbits.
I have said that this eccentricity, amounting to secrecy, remains in the
very building of London. Some of the finest glimpses of it are got as if
through the crack of a door. Our fathers gained freedom of vision
through the gap in a fence; just as they often gained freedom of speech
through a flaw in an Act of Parliament. In their glorious visions of
height or distance, there is always something of the keyhole; just as in
their glorious fights for law or liberty, there was always something of
the quibble. There is no finer effect than St. Paul’s from the foot of
its hill in delicate and native weather; for the English climate (I may
remark) is the finest in the world. I assume, of course, that the
spectator is a serious mystic (that is, a materialist also) and
appreciates the bodily beauty of heights, which should always be seen
from below. The Devil takes us to the top of an exceeding high
mountain, and makes us dizzy; but God lets us look at the mountain. Yet
this mountain made by man can only be seen in London by “sighting;” by
getting it between two houses, as a pilot steers between two rocks. Get
the sighting wrong and you will see only a public-house, or (what is
much worse) a shop full of newspapers. Had either a French or a Prussian
temple commanded such an eminence, the whole hill would have been swept
bare as with a sabre and studded with statues and gardens, that it might
be seen from afar. Only I should not like it so much. But then I was
born in London.
PLATES
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
I. THE MANSION HOUSE.
II. THE TOWER.
III. THE TEMPLE.
IV. THE EMBANKMENT.
V. WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.
VI. PARLIAMENT FROM THE RIVER.
VII. BIG BEN.
VIII. ST. PAUL’S FROM BANKSIDE.
IX. THE THAMES.
X. “ST. PAUL’S FROM THE FOOT OF ITS HILL.”
[Illustration: I]
[Illustration: II]
[Illustration: III]
[Illustration: IV]
[Illustration: V]
[Illustration: VI]
[Illustration: VII]
[Illustration: VIII]
[Illustration: IX]
[Illustration: X]
CHISWICK PRESS: CHAS. WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS WERE PRINTED BY THE
MEZZOGRAVURE COMPANY, LONDON.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON ***
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