LONDON

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7868, 2 August 1911, Page 7

LONDON

WHAT AN ANTIPODEAN SEES HOW AN ANCIENT CITY IS RENEW. ING ITS YOUTH. (By tho Rov. W. H. Fitchett.) London is something more than tha capital c£ England; it belongs to the Umpire, and every Australian or New Zealander feels—or ought to feel—that lie has a share in it. He is made richer by every new element of strength that awakens in it, and poorer by all tho forces in it which make for failure. And how London looks to an Austiuliau, reasonably familiar with the physiognomy of most of tho great cities of tho : world, and who revisits it after an iuj terval of some sis years, ought to be of interest to readers on this side of the world.

London is, in a word, a new city. It has undergone, perhaps, a greater trans-' formation than any other great city that can be named lias known during the same period. Many of its ancient features, of course, survive. Its crowds are as vast as ever; itsi streets as interminable, the scale of its life as overwhelming. Wo in Australia or New Zealand can hardly realise a crowd on the London scale. On Bank Holiday, for example, a week ago, no less than 500,000 persons paid for admission to what is known as the White City—an exhibition supposed to be a reflex of the Hrapiro—recently opened. Who has over seen, on Australian c oil, a crowd of 560,009 5 It is as though the entire population of Sydney, of Melbourne, of four Adelaides, or of five Aucklands, were emptied in a single day upon a paddock of about sixty acres. On Coronation Day—this is written a week before It arrives—exports predict a crowd of, say, 2,000,000 people, with 40,000 police to keep order, and 55,000 soldiers to line tho streets. A crowd of 2,000,000! . What tears a modern Xerxes might weep over the sight! But tho crowds in the streets on ordindays, and before Coronation Day arrives, are almost on a scale as terrifying. It is customary to call London “cruel/'’ Who does not know what bit* ter—and beautiful—prose Do Quincey expended on that ** stony-hearted stepmother," Oxford street. And tho scale, the unending rush of its crowds, does give London, in some moods, a cruel aspect. To a visitor, the vast city, in spite of its 7,900,000 people, may bo the loneliest spot in tho world. There are so many people, and all so busy, so ab-‘ sorbed. The stranger feels as'though, he wore a single grain of human sand, in-somo dreadful human Sahara. And. it is the quality of sand that its atoms have no relation to each other.

Yet the present writer has always felt that London is simply tho most cour- - teous and helpful city in tho world. It has a very "human” atmosphere. Stop a Londoner in tho busiest street in tho city, at tho busiest moment of tho dayv and ask him for some bit of local information. He -will stop, listen, give his? whole attention to the matter, go outof his way to be helpful; and do it all with a frank cheerfulness nothing lestf than delightful. What countless debts of gratitude all strangers in Loudon owe to the patience and good temper of the hurrying and absorbed Londoner. But it is the'new aspect London wears which arrests attention. It has a changed physiognomy, and Londoners themselves are unconscious—or only imperfectly conscious—-of tho change, because they thomsel/es are part of it. But tho newcomer recognises it, and tries . tk analyse it. There is, for one thing, a new and quicker pulse in tho whole visible life of the city. The traffic of the street? has grown in volume, but it has changed ir. character. It has gained enormously in speed. Tho taxicabs are as thick as sandflies, and as' active. The motoromnibuses and the energy with which, they are driven, the new electric tramway cars —the cleanest, quickest, and biggest in tho world —these give quite a ufew physiognomy to the street life of London. ■ Where else in the world can such n scene be witnessed as, say, Oxford street, or Piccadilly Circus, or the streets that converge on the Bank present? These streets have always been packed, as a Canadian river,, is packed with drifting ice. But now the "ice” is gone; these streets are so many vehicular Niagaras. And, as a result, the general street life of London has a new aspect. The quicker movement extends ’ to the footpath.. To one who comes back to London after an absence of five or six years the effect is as though a familiar face had in the interval gained a quite now animation. A new look of eagerness and purpose has crept into it, with an old suggestion, indeed, of a quickened intelligence. COOLNESS AND SKILL.

And it is not merely a change in the pa-c© of things that the spectator sees; it is a change in the spirit. When analysed there are some wonderful moral elements in the new traffic. An Australian stares with breathless and admiring wonder at the dash of tho taxicabs, the adroitness as well as tho speed of tho huge motor-omnibuses, as of so many elephants on wheels. And it is not a question of mere mechanics. The human factors in the scene—the drivers and the driving—are more wonderful than the things driven. The coolness, the steady nerve, the quick senses, the swift judgment, tho unfaltering vigilance, the skill that can graze the edge of disaster and jot escape it—nil these are nothing less than wonderful.

The Londoner was always a good fight ing man, from the days of the trainbands downwards. But all the qualities of good soldiership are visible in the streets of the city, in taxicabs and motor-omnibuses, and all busy in tho service of peace. The new traffic will certainly develop a new human typo of its own. It will be silent in speech, spare in build, with an liidian quickness of the senses and a sea captain’s capacity for cool judgment and instant decision.

Then the regulation of the new traffic has visibly a new scale and intelligence. Order, method, sleepless oversight run like invisible threads through tho apparent confusion of the scone. In New York, the tramway companies are said to extract huge dividends from the unfortunate passengers who cannot find a seat, but have to hang on tho straps; but in London no omnibus or tramway car is apparently allowed to carry a single passenger for whom it cannot find a seat.

The spectator who has seen many cities thinks of the street railways of Chicago, the struggling crowds in tho tramway cars in San Francisco, of the triplet stream of lawless traffic which makes life a peril at the entrance to the Place Vendome, in Paris. Then he looks a( tho figure of the London policeman, standing—silent. vigilant. despotic —at fixed points along all the London streets, end he realises that this torrent of rushing vehicles is under the reign of law. LONDON NOISES. • ' The street noises of London have undergone a subtle change of note. Tho srojieral volume of sound is not less,, but it is different. The noisy battle of rough wit betwixt costermonger and omnibus-driver is a thing of the pastThe man holding the guiding-wheel of

tlio taxicab lias no time to waste in Bpecfli. Tier new London driver is, and will be, a silent, man. The. rattle >.< the old omnibuses, the clatter of the ironshod horse hoofs on the wooden blocks aro Bono. Instead, we have, the hoot of the taxicab, the grind—sometimes as of a glacier on rook—of the motor-omni-bus. '.rim new note of the Uindoa streets is certainly less human and more mechanical than it was live years ago. The architectural aspect of t-melon, ol coarse, changes slowly. 'The spirit ot Sir <lhristuphor , Wren still dominates not to say oppresses—the city. The new War Ollice, the great Church i louse which the Wesleyaus aro creeling m front of Westminster Abbey, show the touch of Wren's hand almost as much as St. Paul’s itself. It is part, indeed, of the , merit of Parry's Westminster towel —in its way almost as imoressne as the west front of Cologne Cathedral —and of the Byzantine spire of the new Homan Catholic cathedral in Victoria street, that: they represent a revolt from Wren’s formulae. Put for generations to corao it is probable that nearly all the churches and’ public buildings of London will bear Wren's signature. Nothing, again, can change the lean. Hat-breasted brick terraces of tho Georgian era which afflict whole suburbs. Still, the architectural aspect of London is changing. It has no skyscrapers of the New York type, and it is to be hoped will never be afflicted with them. Put the new hotels and the vast “mansions.” with their cliff-liko scale and outline, aro slowly giving a now architectural aspect to Loudon. And any day tho great city may wake up astonished to find it has a new colour scheme. Suppose, that by the discovery of some new fuel, or some new method of using our present fuel, London became smokeless. St. Paul's and tho Abbey, in that case, could resume, ■and keep, tho whiteness of their Caen stono as tho Parthenon. after three thousand years, keeps the whiteness of tho marble that knew tho touch of Phidias. And all the famoos statesmen and soldiers, dreaming in. stono or bronze on their pedestals, would become, in outward aspect, members of tbe white race again. In London, tho living crowds aro curiously fresh-faced. It is that freshness of look, due, apparently, to some antiseptic quality in tho uir, which makes London always look young. There are abundant signs of ago at the great social functions, but tho streets aro perennially young. What other great city in tho world has tho frcsh-complexioned crowds London knows? And this makes more absurd tho violent contrast betwixt ■the complexion worn by the statues of dead Englishmen on their pedestals, and that of tho actual living English,

A foreigner who judged the great statesmen and soldiers of our history hy :the effigies in stone Londoners possess of them, would certainly conclude that they belonged to some separate and negroid variety of the Anglo-Saxon race. Wellington. as he sits on his horse by the London Exchange, is as black us a CbnIgo negro. Poor Queen Anne, in front of St. Panl's, has to bo "cleaned" like a coal-grate, in order to keep a decent ■ complexion. All the heroic figures in Praia!gar sqnare are dusky tinted. Judged by complexion, it is a one-armed ■negro in a cocked hat that, looks so persistently towards Prance from, the top of the Trafalgar Column.

The forgotten George, in the upper right-hand comer of the square, seems ,to hare jnst emerged from a bath of fnl- It is a particularly inky variety of the black race who meditates on the gun under his feet, as Gordon; while Havelock, os he stands near by, prim and at attention, has the complexion of the sepoy ho blow from his guns. Some day—it mast be repeated—London, by a single conquest, the conquest of its own smoke—a feat certainly within the reach of science—London will gain a new colour scheme. Then the world will have a sum rise. It will be able to see how rich, how varied—if not how stately—the great city is. THE NEW ENGLAND.

‘Hut it is already a now London, •without waiting for any artistic miracle of Yhi* bind. If "by tho almanac it is one of the oldest, in aspect and spirit one of the youngest of the great cities trf the world. And not only London but —ns'the present writer, at least, thinks be * sees—Kngland itself has grown youngcc. It carries a Titan's burden, but it ib certainly not the “wearied Titan" of Matthew Arnold's verse. There is a new f forth in its politics, in its social life* fcn its business energy, and even—in ypots—in its literature. * Arr-fcif« may dispute over the wisdom nr folly of British politics, hat no ono pm deny to them the twin elements of courage n-nrl magnanimity. What courage was shown in the gift of self-gov-ernment to South Africa almost before the, sound of the guns in that sad battlefield had died awayf And what magnMTTMtiiy Great Britain shows to ail her fh-nfl-rm beyond the seas. She lost ftTirarica because she tried to impose a tax on a. single article of American consumption. To-day the Motherland does not put a single farthing tax on any of her offspring. • The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. The self-governing Dominions put a tax on every bale of British goods which comes into their ports. “It is magnificent, but it is not war," was the criticism of the French general as ho watched the rid© of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. “It is magnificent, but it is not politics," a critic might say as he watches colonies, which depend for safety upon the fleets of the Motherland, busy levying heavy duties upon all goods which come to them from the Motherland, But it is “politics"; and, tried by rwmlta, amazingly good politics. It secures of all wise policy, that whole-hearted loyalty of its members which is the first condition of health »md safety for any Empire. In the great function in ‘Westminster Abbey, just at hand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, four I '*. times over—to East,

■West, North and South in turn—will irßp-r the ohaHengo t

i “Sirs, —I dots present unto yon Kins iGcorgo, the undoubted King of this Irn Wherefore, all you who come ■rlrKi day to do your homage, axe you -ivilting to do the same?"

• Now. if any human voice—axclr:episcopal or other —could send that great challenge across tho seas to the outlying Dominions, and tho answer camo bade ,in some vast wave of sound, can any'ona doubt what it would bof London, Juno ISth.