GAY YOUNG LONDON.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2678, 11 August 1913, Page 8

GAY YOUNG LONDON.

(By a Middle-aged Citizen.) Only yesterday I picked up a newspaper and read again a plaint that has constantly cropped up of late —that the modern Londoner is taciturn, saturnine, and preoccupied; that ho hustlea along the streets with a frown on his brow, care in his eyes, and mirthless lips; that the strenuous age and its struggle for life has cast a gloom on Cockaigne and its old gay heart is dead./ For the life of me I cannot see it. Now I am, as here superscribed, a middle-aged Londoner, just about to cross that detestable river of Forty, shivering on the brink of it. Let resigned ancients say what they like about the consolations of age —there are no consolations of forty; the tenth decade is a Rubicon and the fortieth birthday is its ford by which tnere is no return. And so many tilings are left behind. A “flair" for armchairs and a palate for cigars do not console one for a pulse for romance and a finer for adventure. Tar don all this, for it ! eels to m' argument. If there is any true in a man’s life when his outlook is mjihpoised, his observation calm, and hi* judgment sound (if somewnat ( .notionloss) it should be now. That is why—•it this exasperating age of forty—l can ai hast claim to look on my Lon,ion through lenses unstained by sentiimo ntalism • Aftci I read that lugubrious ddiriment of the harassed Londoner wth tha morose scowl I left my clue for a walk of observation through the streets of this now Inferno with its nulla ns of citizen-spooks. I went with an open mind —nay, not with an open m'nd. for 1 sallied forth depressed by the shadow of that baleful anniversary, embittered t)v t,he comments of divers ghouls (clustering like bats in the gloom of olcl--1,0. do i club) that they were surprised, to find I was .so young. All thought and circumstance conspired to make me see London with the oyo of the r ew pessimism. i ran only honestly say that I felt young myself, and had forgotoen forty l> ,■ the hi mo I had walk’d up Fleet street' dallied through the cosmopolitan Strand, crossed inspiring winch-’ Tiafalgar vSquare with us laughing fountains that Londoners so seldom look at. treated myself to a double course of St. Martin’s Lane —London's Via Juvenilia, always an eye tonic, for its bright and clean-knit girls who go tripping to theatre rehearsals; traversed Leicester Square. Coventry street, Piccadilly. Bond sleet. tho whole length of Oxford street—-a parterre of IT- -down Regent street —London’s piece of the Continent —to Charing Cross again—and thence “home, and to mv wife, poor wretch!" And. like Pepys, 1 found this London of mine a mighty pleasant place. [(, is such a vital, changeful, adventurous city of youthfulness that, more than for all otlicr things, I envy young Londoners for their heritage of the new London. It is as different from tho London of my own school days ns one ran imagine—as different as a gay oil painting from a sepia monotone, a bassoon solo from a full orchestra. Some of the colors may he garish and some of the notes too loud. Here and there is a gap in tho new London mosaic, for all its brilliancy. 1 sometimes wonder what sort of a pang comes to Londoners—long abroad —who return to find that the hansom cat) has gone and the old London music of its hells will chime no more. London has changed in so many ways its whole appearance —Its whole life — that the hare recital of them would make tin’s an epitaph. There wore so many drab things we middle-aged people remember that have gone into 'imho ; drab newspapers, drab streets, drab shops, drab restaurants, drab trains, drab advertisements —and drab people. Were they tho possessions that made London so happy- of obi? Did we chuckle over those yard-long reports of political speeches (that I heard Lord Bosehery unkindly exhume for b. brilliant badinage last week)? Did wn find cheer in columns of “ ’Orrihle Trajidies"? Did we exult in our slowiogging gloom of mephitic railway tunnels? Was our Cocknov humour only

i kept, alive by those coarse and bacchanal music-halls, and our London wtfs only fiirhihihed by those fusty ‘ theatres? Or was our ]alighter oniv light because we heavily dined in stodgy and sombre restaurants —and | made, finally, our London Sunday a | thine of morbid and Ood-unthankine ■ gloom that filled the foreigner with amazement ? And the drah people, flood Heavens! | how drah we were when every middleclass Londoner went attired as if a.t i any moment ho might bn bidden io a funeral, and ('Very middle-class woman | dressed as if she were a perambulating I rummage-sale! The on I standing foa- | turn in our new London cheerfulness is lies broadening down of “fashion.” I l '- vast drapery and millinery stores land the popular tailors have made i comedy attire a matter of common self- ! respect for the million. Good and he- | earning clothing is half-way to human j '•elf-rnspcet—itself half the secret of happiness. , Wo am told that, the hustle of modern life is responsible for this haggard I aspect the pessimists see in our faces io the world. I do not deny the hustle, but I take it that it is caused at least as much by our universal share m pleasure as our universal sham in the work of London. And who will deny that for ono pleasure held out to the mass of Londoners of old there are a hundred to-day? Twenty years ago relatively few people spent money freely and gaily in the West End. The central shopping and pleasure resorts wore more or lass a terra clausa to the average suburbanite. Lights, music, and dainty meals were not for the million. Just think of the allurements London holds out to-night. Not for the wealth and fashion only that have found her the pleasure capital of Europe, but for us modestly prospering workers who earn our pay in this hivo of stirring life —such varied play i and myriad-colored pleasures as no city 1 has ever before offered in all history. Think of this maze of peoples that could pocket ancient Homo ami Babylon and take now Paris as an annexe. . b’nk of London, lit for her nightly carnival —mile upon rniilo of streets, gala.vied, starred, cressoted, and flaming with restaurants, theatres, musichalls, and picture palaces. And how healthy are all these saturnalia. “Modern Babylon” tho critics call us. But. look you, this Babylon, for all its frivolity, is silent after one o’clock. The sweepers are already garnishing it with squeegee and hose for i's cool workaday morning. It has no use for the hectic small hours of Berlin, and no patrons now for its own “coal holes” and night houses of the ’sixties. If wo are not happy here, working ' -I'd okaying bard, and sleeping hard thereafter, wherein is human happiness? I deny tho unhappiness. In ray walk through London I saw all round mo the happy and eager faces of alert and healthy people; I heard only the chatter of innocent amusement and the clamour of full life. The Sane Century has sete its young ««al on London.