LONDON AT NIGHT.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144859, 10 December 1915, Page 7

LONDON AT NIGHT.

SOME CURIOUS CONTRASTS. The now regulations for the further darkening of London (says a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian) remind one of something which use is gradually accustoming us to, so that we hardly notice what in pre-war davs would have set every nerve tingling. The aspect of London now is terribly expressive of this, the most sinister and awful war known since the exterminating battles of antiquity. Tho curious definite spots of light thrown bv the half-darkened lamps in the darkness of streets and squares make, in perspective, combinations such os Aubrey Beardsley in his' weirdest art might hove devised. When the strangeness is further quickened by the intervention and shadows of trees or of arcades the scene is yet more a thing of phantasmagoria. The buses, too, with their rod lights under tho stoira throwing a hell-fire effect on the conductor and on the passengers as they flit out and in, are something much more disquieting than any Mophistophelian effect of the stage. One wishes Irving were alive today to see this macabre London. It is far stranger than Paris, although the long colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the lights and shadows at any of tho great towering city gates are, of course, much grander in scale and more telling in the reiterating impression. But these things now are hardly noticed by tho London public, which goes about its work and pleasure, breaking into song and oven into dance steps, as if London and its glassy streets were still lit up as for a ball. ’ They think no more of it than the soldiers so in the trenches with their ape-like masks and respirators and devices against poison gas, although if »ny actor-manager had a vision of these apparitions he would have thought that he bad-reached tho final point for a ballet of horrors to have excited his most jaded stallholders and to “have set children screaming.”