a critical foreigner, whose impressions of london i collected, (a thing one does to foreigners because that at least is common ground), gave words to the usual complaint of the continental: london was a mean-looking city; its bricks were dirty; it used so little stone; lacked we stone? and the buildings were low. and some stuck out beyond the common frontage, while some set back. and so on, the whole served with the usual sauce made up mainly of respect for our practical spirit and our commercial success, the things we are not proud of because, indeed, they are ours.
almost every foreigner has that impression of london, and he mistakes the spirit of our city so much that, to restore him, one has to show him typical american architecture such as selfridge’s, kingsway, or older buildings of greater majesty, such as the quadrant or the terraces round regent’s park. failing stone, we exhibit stucco, and the intelligent foreigner discerns no irony in the epigram on nash:—
‘augustus, at rome, was for building renowned,
and of marble he left what of brick he had found;
but is not our nash, too, a very great master?
he finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster.’
now stucco is an unfairly scorned material; it produces a pleasantly smooth surface, which weathers to creamy-olive, and, indeed, its only crime is that it conceals brick. brick and tile are two of our most delightful materials; people do wrong to sneer at them just because poor cottages are so built. red brick, when not too large, such as the delightful little tudor brick, is smiling and domestic. the progress of building has, in this case, proved a retrogress for art. nowadays, the big red bricks are so angular, so perfectly cemented that most blocks of flats approximate to102 workhouses, while the yellow brick now current should be reserved for public buildings of special distinction, such as national memorials and academies of painting. but the little red brick that you could hold in your hand, the irregular lines of which bespoke a temperament, which fitted tenderly into patchy cement, as an almond of alabaster into the green velvet of its sheath, was quite another kind of stone. still, we must take our stones as we find them, and i do not agree with the intelligent foreigner who thinks london a mean city. many of us find the fine continental cities, such as new paris, new barcelona, and new frankfurt, as painful to live in as might be the agricultural hall. the houses are too high, their flanks too white, their alignment dull as a righteous life. when one considers towns like new york, one wonders how the inhabitant finds his way home. by scent, i suppose, for little can his eyes help him among those vast buildings, all alike.
in london, few streets and not many squares are alike. the detestable institution of the leasehold has had this good result, that few ground landlords in central london have built the houses they own. they have merely imposed upon the leaseholder the obligation to build a good house worth so much. as a result, the leaseholder has built what he fancied, and, therefore, london is not the result of the schemes of some horrid central office, but of the oddities and taste of thousands of men. that is why our sky-line is so broken, why, in berkeley square, we find two charming little, narrow houses close to a tall block of flats; that is why, in oxford street, tottering little shops, built under william iv., hug the tube station and its monster hotel. variety is the salt of london life.
the tube, 9.30 a.m.
where london has, to a certain extent, abandoned variety, and that to good purpose, is in the squares. london, more than any in the world, is a city of squares; a feudal remnant has there set most of the important houses, while those of the vassals were placed in the side streets, and those of the churls in the mews. the squares imply social classifications, and though many of them, such as golden square, soho square, regent square, have103 fallen into the hands of the poor or of commerce, they all began by being centres of polite society. to this day there is something in a square that no other thoroughfare has; a sort of measured enclosedness, a finished privacy. the garden in the middle that none enter save lovers and cats, a garden sometimes sooty, sometimes kept trim by a gardener born old, is cut off from the rough movement of the city. those who have been interested enough to penetrate into the green part of cavendish square or craven hill gardens, will know that there one is as truly lost as in any lane of west anglia. those green spots are almost untrodden, and, to all visitors, are virginal. the impression of privacy extends also to the houses; though these may differ they do not vastly do so. the contrasts between them are those which appear among the members of a family. all are, to a certain extent, traditional, and it is mainly in the squares that you find remnants of georgian london.
most of georgian london has fallen into the hands of the tenement maker, because the people of the georgian period built in districts now populous, such as clapham, highbury, soho, chalk farm, because the leases were long and the houses good enough to make it unbusinesslike to pull them down. still, some georgian london, and especially some london of william iv., has preserved its old, flat face, sober and dignified, yet has been modernised, internally, by anachronistic organs such as the bathroom, the telephone, electric light. those houses are delightful, for the adventure of the present has purged them of the sins of the past. such houses as the one now tenanted by messrs thornton smith, in soho square, the small houses with the adams doorways that make up the adelphi, the slim exquisiteness of westminster in barton street or north street, all these, by their very form, suggest that inside all is order and courtesy. those houses were built when land was cheap, when we did not need to pile smith upon jones and call the result cornucopia court, or what not; in those days they did not need to store coal in the pantry, and, for historic reasons, they did not combine the bathroom with the kitchens. still, these are only survivals, and though the late104 william willett did what he could near avenue road to restore the georges under an edward, the georgian house is dead. it is too large; it leaves aside the servant problem; its rooms are too square, difficult to light, difficult to furnish in a period when furniture is small and tortured in design. it is almost as dead as the elizabethan house, which is only a curiosity.
people still talk of cloth fair, but if you go to smithfield you will find no cloth fair now, only a dirty little back street, not at all the scenery which sir herbert beerbohm tree would have thought suitable for the entry of bolingbroke into london. if you are wise, you will at once step back farther into the past and enter st bartholomew’s, where arches and pillars, broad and solid as those of hell, will make you understand the mosaic quality of the christian faith. in st bartholomew’s, that is black and dispassionate, dwells no gentle redeemer, but the spirit of the lord of hosts.
true, there is crosby hall, though it is hard to shake off the connection between crosby hall and chops, for i knew it best in the days when, there, one ate chops (and sirloin, yes, sirloin). in those days, in the city, crosby hall was really an elizabethan place, a mullioned old house, with sunken beams. for most of the day it held people who ate a great deal, drank a great deal, and bellowed, and played billiards, and flirted with the waitresses, and made bets, and told undesirable stories. yes, it was real shakespeare, all the time. but one day they pulled down crosby hall and re-erected it in chelsea, near the end of oakley street; the last time i went in they were holding an exhibition of arts and crafts, which proved that leather might be compelled to assume many forms it didn’t like. i never saw it again. then there is st ethelburga, the little wooden church in bishopsgate, which takes, i believe, a special interest in seamen. a pleasant little church, for there is something very human and pre-fire in its having let off its frontage to an optician. (i wonder whether the optician and the incumbent both labour under the motto of usebius.)
but if georgian london has left so little, and elizabethan105 london hardly anything, it is not so of the victorian period, which still hangs over most of the city like the shadow of a great tree which will not let the flowers grow. nearly all the houses in central london are victorian; most are early victorian, because the building rush in the ’eighties and ’nineties affected mainly the suburbs, where a ribald ?stheticism combined with the discovery of the quaint by charles dickens. now the victorian period was neither picturesque nor quaint; it looked upon that sort of thing as indecent. it liked a plain house for a plain man, and the victorian man got his house. in another fifty years or so, when time has done with the houses of the ’sixties, on their tombstone shall be inscribed: ‘eight steps and a brass knocker, such are the wages of virtue.’ some think that too much evil is spoken of the victorian period, and that much that was solid, sound, truly english came to fruition in those days. for my part, i think that the victorian period was nothing but a bad dream, that the english are essentially the people who drank sack, and danced round the maypole, just as now they drink beer and go to the cinema. the english are a pleasure-loving people, an emotional, perhaps a hysterical people; they are gay, improvident, thriftless, adventurous, reckless people; there is little to pick between them and the neapolitans. yes, there has been a lot of respectability and talk of carriage folk, and heavy sideboards, and being shocked, and all that sort of thing; but i submit that english history extends farther back than 1830, that there were happy days before the english grew oppressed with their new respectability, which arose slowly out of the sudden growth of wealth among numbers of ill-educated people. before the ’thirties there were only two kinds of people: those who did what they were told, and those who did what they liked. the factory had begun to take shape in 1770; towards 1830 occurred the rise, all over the midlands and north, of small workshops that became mills. this turned some members of the working class into capitalists. as the workshops grew, the working class population grew round them and formed towns. to serve the needs of these towns shops arose; these became prosperous, and produced106 another fairly rich class, the shopkeeping class. from the ’sixties onwards, the workshops, warehouses, and shops grew so much that those who, once upon a time, were scriveners, became managers and agents. this produced a third class of ill-educated people endowed with some money.
the result was soon felt: we had created the middle class, and as, in those days, the middle class was still conscious of the upper class, realised itself as lowly bred, it concluded that the only way of living up to its new money was to be more moral and especially more refined than either the upper class or the lower class. that is the origin of the red damask curtains, of the english sunday (which once upon a time was debauched and delicious), of wax fruit, tall hats, black silk, jet, and such like horrors.
but is that the end? no. round about 1890, the middle class having made still more money, having split itself up into upper middle class and lower middle class, having sent its sons to the public schools and universities, its daughters to brussels or dresden, began swiftly to slough off the old virtues which it no longer needed. the daughters went to dances under slender chaperonage; some of them became fabians; red paper was scraped off and replaced by brown; jacobean furniture came in; respectable people began to dine at hotels and, what was much more fatal, to lunch at restaurants. bridge came in ... cigarettes crept in. i do not say the middle class is dead, but when you are tempted to think that the victorian period represented, in english history, anything but an accident, anything but the formulation of a class, then consider most of your young acquaintances, and ask yourself, honestly, whether those very people, fifty years ago, would not have gone to funerals with weepers tied round their hats. to-day, there is a continuous impulse in the middle class to grow smart, fast, intellectual, all that. call this progress or call it decay, never mind; i submit that it exhibits victorian respectability as merely a stage in the development of english people, and that we are tending towards a time when the jolly 1780’s will live again with something hectic and abandoned thrown in. the english people are a light people, a gay people, and the famous107 period 1830–1880 was, after all, a short period in the eight hundred years odd which separate us from the conqueror. it was a period of reconstruction, and the english emerged from it as new english, not very different from the old english. we have digested our money; of course, england was sleepy while she did that; those who believe that that sleep was natural to her suffer from illusion. now she has begun to spend the resultant energy. bustles, daguerreotypes, sunday rest, and whiskers, pecksniff will find all that in another region.
pecksniff will also, at least i hope so, if he is to be happy, find the victorian house. it was not a bad house inside, in spite of its vast, incoherent basement, the ell at the back of the drawing-room, and the shameful servants’ bedrooms; it was a roomy house, but there was too much in it for the cockroach and the mouse. most of bayswater, paddington, kensington, and marylebone, are victorian; all depend upon slave labour. few of those houses can be managed properly on less than three servants; some are still run by one servant assisted by the young ladies, who do the dusting, but the importance of the point lies in this: with one servant they are dirtily run; with two servants they are barely run. they are full of corners, corridors, cupboards; they collect dust, and eat up light. in days when flesh and blood was cheap, when you could easily get young girls to wear the skin off their knees on the steps, the edifice stood up pretty well. but those days are gone; the servant problem is partly due to the victorian house, which became almost too much to bear when the servants developed enough to understand that there were things they need not bear. what will replace it, we do not yet know. it is too early to talk of a revolutionary change into blocks of flats with common kitchens, common dining-rooms, and common nurseries; all that will come, has come, is extending, but it is not yet general. the first step is the break-up of the victorian house into maisonettes. you can see this going on all over central london, where two families now share a house built for one. others are being absorbed by the boarding-house. briefly, we are packing closer into the old spaciousness, partly because we do not need108 it for the purposes of ostentation, partly because we cannot afford it.
still, there is much left of old, bleak london, highbury crescent, warwick street (pimlico), mornington crescent, and many others. there is, about those places, what there is more proximately about bayswater, a sense of past comfort, dating back to the days when comfort meant red paper in the hall, brown paint, thick stuff curtains, polished boards, large and straight chairs with hard seats for the young, stuffed seats for the old. those houses were comfortable in a frowzy way; they were houses in which one ate a great deal, slept a great deal, drank a great deal, and thought within the limits of genteel taste. little by little people began to stay up later, so had less time to sleep; then, their fathers having drunk too much, they found that their inherited constitutions did not allow of similar excess, while the intrusive foreigner brought in his curious dishes which taught us to eat less, if more peculiarly. picture galleries were opened on sunday, concerts were held upon that day; matinees, cinemas, other pleasures, all these things making a continual call upon time and purse, have stolen some of its privileges from the old home, until it ceased to be home in the sacramental sense, a pleasure in itself, and turned into a dormitory. the bleak old houses of london have responded to this movement, by breaking up into maisonettes, converting themselves into boarding-houses and lodgings; there are now few claimants to their five floors; indeed, the five floors grow more and more disliked. to-day, when you walk along a street such as mornington crescent, whose gray face wears the inscription: ‘joy forbidden,’ you are to a certain extent, labouring under an illusion, for the life behind those gray fronts is not gray. it is, more and more, the life of people who have no roots, who have settled for a short time in rooms, whose employment is precarious, whose fortunes are small, people who live on small weekly wages, or even on social piracy, whose presence must cause uneasiness among the portly victorian ghosts. inside those houses live few families, because no families of wealth care to live in such districts, while poor109 families cannot afford the servants to keep such houses clean. so their dwellers are, many of them, adventurers, semi-respectable people who have something to do with the stage, or who are in a sort of way in the city. they never want the windows cleaned, and when they sit down at the victorian writing-desk with the waggly legs, they care little if it is not dusted: they blow. that is the end of those old houses; to-day, most of them are spinning out the last of their long leases in a truly victorian way: keeping up appearances, and pretending to be as respectable as ever.
an absent desert
the cromwell road
in south kensington and bayswater, the bleakness is less complete, because those districts are dimly in the west end, with a little too much end about it. they are ‘possible’ districts, as the phrase goes among some of us; a ‘possible’ district is one the name of which can be stamped upon one’s note-paper. the tenants of bayswater and south kensington number many of the old-fashioned people who like quiet places, comfortable homes, in some cases gardens, but many more are making of those places a jumping-off ground. they pass through bayswater or south kensington on the way to mayfair, belgravia, and marylebone; they are already well-to-do, and intend to be better-to-do; in those places they associate with the people who, once upon a time, were very well-to-do and are now less so; those districts are social junctions. but everywhere the boarding-house is gaining ground, and nowhere does one see this so well as in cromwell road. cromwell road is a remarkable street; its length has, on a warm and hazy day, a quality of eternity. it seems to have no beginning, no end; one might walk for ever along its broad stretch, between those high walls; a prison yard must be like that. this does not mean that i dislike cromwell road; far from it; i visit it at least once a week, for purposes of meditation. one can meditate in cromwell road, because nothing ever seems to have happened there; it certainly looks as if nothing could happen. it holds no tragedy, no comedy. you pass along the endless series of houses, all of which have four and a half or five and a half floors, the half being accounted for by the servants’ rooms, to which the victorian builder never accorded a complete floor; they are nearly110 all alike, having five to nine steps, a porch on pillars, and a flat face; the only difference between one house and another is the age of their lease, the age being revealed by the condition of the paint: some were repainted three years ago, some two years, some recently. white, gray, black, such is their symphony. if you look in at the windows of the dining-room you will generally see a large mahogany table: in the middle of this stands a heavy brass pot; in the brass pot grows a big green fern. behind the green fern, and always facing the window, stands a colossal sideboard, surmounted by a mirror against which is outlined a tantalus and sometimes, which is very regrettable, a cruet. (you do not see a bottle of salad-dressing in cromwell road, but a little farther west you do.) near the tantalus sometimes dwell a silver cup or two. on one side of the room you discern a mantelpiece, decorated with coloured pots, a large, black marble clock, suitably representing a tomb. there may also be some brass ash-trays and bowls of obviously indian pattern. the carpet one cannot see, but i feel sure that it is generally a red and blue turkey. that is old cromwell road, grandpapa’s old cromwell road, comfortable in its stifled sort of way. rail as i may at the victorian period, i have a vague liking for those old solidities, that mean pleasant, saddleback chairs, pipes (not cigarettes), the spectator, port, and evenings devoted to the reading of travel books and memoirs (not novels). dull, but solid, and in cromwell road one is aware of a certain merit in solidity because it finds itself at the point of flux between the old civilisation and the new.
the new civilisation has already set its teeth into cromwell road. the houses are unchanged, but a great many have been bought up and joined together, decorated with stained glass, re-named as hotels. these have fancy pots instead of brass pots, ferns from strange bournes; curtains of lesser conventionality; looking out from a window you no longer see mary jane in a pink dress, but a sombre face, which may be that of a musician or a poet; or of a balkanic waiter stained with political conspiracy. the inhabitants of those hotels are americans, provincials, people111 who have grown tired of housekeeping and like to buy it ready-made; they number many widows who behave as if they were conscious of a transitory condition, actors, unattached people of all kinds. these are not the old cromwell road people; they are a new type, which you might call the cromwell light-roadster, people who drive up in taxis at all times, and even after eleven o’clock. kensington means nothing to them; not one of them will ever be an alderman. they are breaking up the cromwell road, and many of those who read these lines will see cromwell road without a private dwelling-house, except that here and there a pair of very old maids, accompanied by some very fat dogs, will stick to the old house. they will groan at the taxis which stop at the grand imperial next door, send out an old retainer to warn off the street band, and grumble at the electric underground, just as they grumbled at the smoky steam underground. then they will die, and the grand imperial will extend its possessions.
the grand imperial is extending all over london. not only have hotels, undreamt of twenty years ago, sprung up at unexpected corners near the strand and over the tube stations, not only have they taken over anything between two and six private houses at a time, but they are buying up site after site: a big one in piccadilly near down street, also the st george’s hospital site, perhaps. they are extending everywhere, communising life. it is all very well saying that the hotel is a sign of the decadent luxury of the day, but that is not true. in the first place there is in hotels no such thing as decadent luxury; all that the best offer are things such as plenty of light, air, space to move in, electric light when you want it, hot water day and night, a telephone by your bedside, a comfortable common room to write in, a band to amuse you while you have your meals; such like simple, obvious things which make up the ordinary comfort of life. the old-fashioned people look upon this as luxury, but i submit that the facility of having a hot bath when you want it is a natural thing, and one of the first things that a developing civilisation should give us all. some people seem to think it112 morally wrong to be comfortable, and it shocks one to think that so many of our best minds should, for so long, have been working out ideas for pleasant and harmonious heating, lighting, cooking, only to be told that they are pampering us. the whole object of civilisation is to pamper us, to get rid of nature. nature is all very well in the summer numbers of the magazines; it looks very pink and scented with hay, but real nature is rather cold, damp, earwiggy, dark, always ill-drained, and much less healthy than london. the object of civilisation is to reduce the struggle for life, and to make the material side of it pleasant enough to be forgotten. if that is not true, then let us back to the caveman forthwith.
the truth is that hotels are not luxurious and not dear. it sounds dear to pay a pound a day for a bedroom and your board, which is what one paid before the war, but if one reflects that for that pound one also has the use of excellent common rooms, that one pays nothing whatever for all sorts of racking things such as gas, electric light, water rate, borough rate, inhabited house duty, house repairs, that one owes nothing to the sweep, no tips to tradesmen, it is not dear. one has the space one needs to live in, and that is the essence of the old-fashioned opposition to hotel life: it does away with the large number of rooms that people used to think they needed, rooms in which they shut themselves up behind closed windows and drawn blinds. the old-fashioned hate the simplification of life; they do not like to think that people need no longer tie themselves down, define and label themselves: hotels are meant for those who do not go to the zoo.
beasts at the zoo
indeed, the zoo is a tragic hint of the period we have just left behind. it was founded in 1826, its object being, of course, ‘to further the study of animal life,’ but it did not very long retain that character. the only character it retained was a sort of brutal insensibility, a capacity for not understanding what it means to animals, accustomed to run forty miles a day, or to fly out of sight, to find themselves boxed up in small cages. the treatment of animals in the victorian period was very like the treatment of113 children; people meant well by their children, which did not prevent their constraining them to immobility on sundays, forcing them into careers they disliked, or into marriages with people they detested. they were a sentimental and brutal generation, mainly because they were stupid. so the zoo, which is now a vulgar gapery, remains as one of the ugly blots inherited by our people; i hope to live long enough to see parliament pass an act for its suppression. it seems to me indecent that people who do not know the difference between a leopard and a yak should, any afternoon, for sixpence or a shilling, or on sundays if they are the friends or the servants of a fellow, line up in hundreds outside cages anything between six feet and thirty feet long, to see wretched animals pace up and down, up and down eternally, or tragic birds hop from an upper stick to a lower stick and then back again, not one of them with the space for a full spring or a flight, sentenced to penal servitude for life, a sentence which we inflict on no man except for murder. i agree with mr galsworthy that the zoo is one of the saddest and most disgusting sights in the world. at least, i know that i never leave the zoo, which i seldom visit, because it hurts me, without feeling a partner in a national crime. you can defend vivisection by saying that it has valuable medical results. i know nothing about that, but you cannot defend the zoo by saying that you give some snivelling boy an opportunity to know what the mandril looks like. what is the use (i put it on the lowest ground, that of use) of knowing what a mandril looks like? and if it is of any use, is that use not counterbalanced by the poison poured into that boy, which is that he shall consent to the life-long imprisonment of a helpless creature?
this zoo question was discussed in the weekly dispatch some years ago; i think that one of the points, in defence, was that most of the animals were born in the zoo, and, knowing not liberty, could not be unhappy. that may be, even if nothing in you answers when you look into the eyes of the animals in those empty cages where there is nothing to do, when all their nature, thousands of generations of it, is calling in their blood to hunt and to fly. is not the test this: would you be satisfied if at birth your son114 were placed in a room eight feet by four, and told to grow up in it? do you really believe that he would be content when he reached manhood? even if he had never known freedom. the truth is represented by opinions such as that of the secretary of the zoo, doctor chalmers mitchell, who summed up mr galsworthy’s attack on the zoo by saying: ‘mr galsworthy knows nothing about the subject. his attack is rubbish, pure rubbish.’ it may be that, on second thoughts, doctor chalmers mitchell might find one or two more arguments to put up against mr galsworthy, but this one, while not lacking in force, somehow fails to convince. one is more impressed by the argument of mr j. d. hamlyn, an animal trainer, who said: ‘after the war, the business of importing animals will go on exactly as it did before. in the first place, too much capital is at stake, too much money has been expended to give up the trade altogether.’ the only comment i have to make on this is that this argument was continually used, first in the west indies, and later in the southern states of america, when it was suggested that we should do away with slavery.
yes, the zoo carries on to-day the old tradition of victorian brutality. but enough of the zoo, and of its visitors, so like the yokels at a fair, that guffaw with their heads through horse collars. i would rather think that in a few of those victorian places, sweet old ladies in mauve silk and lace serve tea in rockingham cups, which they dust themselves for fear of sarah jane. one such place is crescent grove. that is the sort of place one would like to live in, when one feels rather older. it is near clapham common, and, of course, it is a blind alley, so that no rude traffic may pass up and down when the milkman has finished his melodious round. the houses are clean, stuccoed, comfortable. the knockers are cleaned every day. the glass is cleaned often, the curtains are changed, and i am sure that when they go up, a whiff of lavender spreads. crescent grove is, perhaps, a little too clean; in those rooms where everything has its place, just as in the past every one had his place, there must be so much order and regularity of life that, as mirbeau said: ‘on doit rudement s’embêter115 là-dedans.’ still, at the very end of crescent grove, there is one house that should be preserved as a monument of its period. of course, it is double-fronted; in front are planted evergreens, and there is a drive. by the side runs a large garden beyond a wall; on the other side of the wall one hears children at play. that is the house to which father came back round about 1860, with his top hat and his mutton-chop whiskers. if this description does not convince you, let me give you the clinching fact: it is a private road. yet crescent grove stands very near to the suburbs. not far are streatham, tooting, the new streets of clapham and brixton. imbedded among the new streets are old houses with columns, plaster fronts, stucco mouldings, squares surrounding a single column that bears a moulting golden eagle, but the suburbs are overwhelming them. these are not the inner suburbs, such as brixton, where the feeling is, on the whole, one of poverty and dirt. those inner suburbs have a certain vigour of coarse life; thus, the brixton road is a place of immense activity, notably round the great, open-air ironmonger, williamson’s bonanza; there are shops and shops, nearly all of the multiple type, salmon and gluckstein, maypole dairies, home and colonials, the shops that private ortheris must have raved of in his indian delirium. likewise, in kilburn, where the kilburn bon marché and b. b. evans struggle in zealous commercialism. those inner suburbs are hardly suburbs now, for the trams run through them and bleed them of their population; tubes tap them; everywhere the motor-buses stop. the true suburbs lie farther out. you have to go well beyond the brixton bon marché before you can find such a place as streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete. those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. it is a new order, for all those houses are small, manageable, clean, modern, in every way satisfactory, except that they are all alike, made for people who may not be all alike, but116 tend so to become. for if one buys one’s food, one’s clothes, one’s furniture at the same big, local store, and if one takes one’s literature from the same bookstall, one attains to a sort of nationality. but it is not the nationality of the village, where local effort can develop into art, because it develops slowly and creeps back upon itself. in the suburbs everything is supplied on the model of central london, and is turned out in hundreds of thousands by machines. perhaps the houses are made by machines. maybe, one day the people will be made by machines. near those streets, all alike, generally survives an older quarter of poor streets where live the ‘little women,’ the sweep, the turncock, the dependents of the semi-poor; there, also, small shopkeepers live by undercutting the big stores. they do this by selling the vegetables that are too stale for the stores, by washing the linen which cannot be sent to the steam laundry because it would fall to pieces, and especially by lowering their own standard of living to the lowest possible level. they are the last ramparts of suburban individualism, and they will not last long. as time goes on, the bigger villa streets, many of whose houses have pretensions, exemplified by their architecture of concrete and tile, by their barbarous roofs which make evil, dusty corners in the rooms, by the select flowers in their front gardens, will turn away from those little shops and, more and more, deal with whiteley’s and harrod’s.
thus, when one passes through london, from old victorian street to inner suburb, then to outer suburb, until one comes to the spreading country of tooting bec common, when one has seen the homes of the rich, their marble solemnity, when one has seen those of the poor in the grimy suburbs that cluster, and emerges at last into those clean suburban streets, where in almost every window an aspidistra wilts in its pot, one may grow a little doubtful of the social revolution. we educate the poor, and sometimes we give them their chance: the next step is the aspidistra. the aspidistra goes to the grammar school; clever aspidistra wins a scholarship and goes to oxford. then a house is taken, let us say, in barkston gardens; instead of the117 aspidistra it is marguerites in the window boxes. the marguerite goes to oxford as a matter of course, and may give place to a lily in a green art-pot. by that time it understands nothing. if it retains its money, the marguerite goes on having marguerites potted in the window-boxes by the nurseryman; if it loses its money, it goes back to the aspidistra. upon this gloomy botanical note i close this chapter.
