COLOSSAL LONDON.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 43, 25 October 1890, Page 8

COLOSSAL LONDON.

We do not like London well enough till we like its defects ; the dense darkness 6f much of its winter, the soot in the chimney pots—and everywhere else—the early lamplight, the brown blur of the bouses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford street or the Strand on December afternoons. Excess is London’s highest reproach and it is her incurable misfortune that there is really too much of her. She overwhelms you by quantity and number—she ends by making human life, by making civilization, appear cheap to you. Wherever you go—to parties, exhibitions, concerts, ‘ private views,’ meetings, solitudes—there are already more people than enough in the field. And as the monster grows and grows for ever, she departs more and more—it must be acknowledged—from the ideal of a convenient society, a society in which intimacy is possible, in which the components meet often, and, sound and measure and elect and inspire each other, and relations and combinations have time to form themselves. The substitute for this, in London, is the momentary concussion of a million of atoms.