PIERROT ABROAD.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 183, 1 August 1908, Page 14

PIERROT ABROAD.

THE WORLD OF LONDON. I have been wrestling for three days with an inclination to shirk writing of London. The theme is too great. It staggers one to think of tnls vast aggregation of people, of interests, of inventions. Even the motor-cars —a few hundred when I left London—arc now tens of thousands. And they perhaps have wrought more change than all else put together. Once the cab-bells were the most characteristic of London sounds. Now one first notices a queer buzzing chorus, as of an infinite number of giant wasps, below which the cab-bells are weak and silly pretenders. Motor-ears j of every kind fill the air with their oily ■ reek, from the small newsboy's tricycle l to the omnibus and the great lumber ( ing van. I But it is the totality of London that . amazes afresh—that amazes the more in . that London has visibly grown yet bigger I than before. It is a totality that terri- , fics, because for one wrong that comes . to the surface ten thousand must lie \ below that vast ever-rippling expanse of J human existence. To be one in six mil- , lion parts of a huge, smoothly running j machine is to be either always emotion- . less or sometimes crushed by the sense , of dreadful insignificance. It matters . not whether you swagger or whether you . cower, whether you laugh or weep, aye, and whether you are a saint or a sinner— you will be accepted for what you are, Eilently, calmly, mechanically. The battered child is taken from beneath the horses' hoofs gently, and certainly deftly; but the disaster is accepted as necessary, merely as an inevitable mishap in the working of the great macnine that has '. become familiar from its frequency. In New Zealand I dreamt of the Franco- . British Exhibition—called here "The ' Great White City." But once in London . all is an exhibition—you need no special [ marshalling of the curious and the novel. ' A new device beckons you to endless J shop windows. Here you are invited to . inspect a new railway running 150 miles J an hour (admission by .je pamphlet of L the inventor) ; there you see a roller ■ blotter of porous clay, or a wonderful . sort of mill that really sharpens instead iof merely chipping pencils; there again . you are confronted by new devices in electric radiators, or new and more brilt liant forms of lighting. Models of ma- . chinery are working in shop windows through miles of strer;ts : —some of it t machinery that is to transform and rejuvLiiate a weary old world. And yet the atmosphere is not one of hope. To be frank, Old England has lost some of her heart. There is little of the old spirit of immeasurable superiority; al- \ most every Englishman with whom I have spoken has seen ghosts, ghastly portents of coming evil. No one seems now to think of the perpetual supremacy of the British race—(to have denied which ten years ago would have been a grossly unpatriotic imputation). Some, indeed, with pitiless logic have already partitioned, the Empire, ahoting Australasia to a victorious Japan! That, of course, is a rare conclusion even now; but that it is possible shows how far national assurance has suffered a decline. The bogey of "Socialism"—in colonial language, Liberal-Labourism—has also struck terror into the heart of many; and not always for selfish reasons. I have tried to point out that the measures so dreaded have produced no dreadful results with us. But I am met with the arguments that (1) general employment is in an overcrowded population only possible at something like the present figure, and that (2) England can only raise wages and lower hours on condition of a similar step by the Continental nations with whom she is in direct and active competition. "Your population is sparse, and industrial competition practically doea I not exist; therefore the analogy does not hold good," is the effect of the argument that I have heard not only from the well-to-do classes, but even among the workers themselves. I quote this reasoning, specious rather than convincing, not because I believe in it (as the more attentive of my readers will realise), but for the sake of fairness to often perfectly honest opponents of Brit- : ish "Socialism." Then, old age pensions are to "pauperise"!—such "pauperism" being held to be something much more dreadful than even starvation itself. 1 Great still the potency of a catchword! ! But the world of London still goes : on its way, in an endless procession of : I vehicles, propelled by every practicable ' I force, and pours out of its three hundred ' ! railway stations, with the same stoical ' j indifference, the same mechanical performance of specialised functions, as though that world were a factory, and the larger problems did not exist! After all, the life here is anaesthetic against ■ i generalised pains anil sorrows. You oan . only think, as I am thinking i now, by sitting in a spacious • suburban garden, hearing nothing 1 but the buzz of a mowing machine, : and the occasional buzz of a passing i motor-car. In the heart of things you, i become the wheel again—at the best , the travelling metal ball that carries the ' coins to the desk of the cashier. The ant-hill is in everlasting, tireless motion; the ants have to leave it even to fee] I the sense of weariness of their task. Even enthusiasm gets so quickly tempered. To-night lam to hear Tetrazzini at Covent Garden, but I have been more I excited over a band of country players. ' It is merely in the fitness of thing 3 that I should hear the world's allegedly finest prima donna—and I shall be as ready to growl if she fails to satisfy an almost impossible standard; as if a "bush-whac-ker" tragedian were to break down in his lines in a tenth-rate, ill-ventilated theatre. The audience ■will number duchesses and perhaps princes, but they will merely be part of a slightly more complicated machine; they will mean little more to mc than the patronage of the mayor of a remote provincial town. But London has a wondrous fascination all the same—at least until its vast- [ ness is once more taken for granted [ I (as one takes for granted every material r I benefit -the world has to offer), and I always provided that you run with and , are not crushed by the machine. The L other day (June, nothwithstanding), ! after a week of beautifying sunshine, a I dense fog suddenly came down and reduced great buildings to ,41111 grey, ; shadowy phantoms. But in a few minutes brilliant lights burst forth from a thousand shop-windows; electric advertisements showed their beautiful colours (turning to account the ill-wind—or obscuring absence of wind) ; and the restaurants, festooned with coloured lamps, became within as fairyland, with brightly-uniformed bandsmen to lend music's aid to make one forget the oppressive dulness without. The other side of the picture? Pallid women selling newspapers, weary" children trading foi hard-won half-pennies, and a vast toiling multitude to whom; those restaurants are palaces as remote and' impenetrable as that of Haroufi al-Rasctiid to a beggar boy. Wonderful, joyous, varied, suffering, cruel London!