London--Changing And Unchanging

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Title:     London--Changing And Unchanging
Author: Richard Le Gallienne [More Titles by Le Gallienne]

I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience.

Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English pork-pie--after ten years in America.

And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm.

Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a brass-plate. For a moment, I wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great gratitude, that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs. Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town. Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond music.

To me this thought is full of reassurance, whatever be the murmurs of change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her lamp-lighters.

Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the competition of taxis--

Like dragon-flies,
The hansoms hover
With jewelled eyes,
To catch the lover.

Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky.

Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save, maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of "change."

There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees no necessity of change.

In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive conservation for those buildings which more and more England will realize as having a lasting value for her spirit.

So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them in their graves.

Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past.

England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally young.

New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle of celestial fire.

LONDON, May, 1913.

[The end]
Richard Le Gallienne's essay: London--Changing And Unchanging

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