Post-Prandial Philosophy

12. A Squalid Village

Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world

should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!

I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or

Vienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed,

comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxford

with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is

the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to

compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city,

and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.

No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look at

London side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of those

is a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still,

even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist upon

that point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London,

most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted on

this issue, that they really don't know what is meant by a town, or a

fine town, when they see one. And don't suppose it's because London is

in Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks:

for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and

Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling,

invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from

anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford,

Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine

streets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But the

Strand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street--good Lord, deliver us!

One more _caveat_ as to my meaning. When I cite among real towns

Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of art

those beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higher

question. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others of

less importance--lag behind in those external features and that general

architectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broad

sense, "This is a fine city." Florence, for example, contains more

treasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yet

Florence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to be

compared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but even

with Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far more

treasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is a

handsome, well-built, regular town, while London--well, I will spare you

the further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalid

village. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that a

town, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works of

art or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, its

architecture, its external and visible decorations and places--the

Louvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elys**, the Place de l'Op**.

Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has no

decorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simply

and ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of any

sort--in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas--it is only a

village, and a painfully uninteresting one.

Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. They

become so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulled

and blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great towns

before I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense of

surprise at its unmitigated ugliness.

Get on top of an omnibus--I don't say in Paris, from the Palais Royal to

the Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to the

Palais de Justice--and what do you see? From end to end one unbroken

succession of noble and open prospects. I'm not thinking now of the

Grande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection of

medi*** buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our one

sole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confine

myself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, and

might have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been any

public spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (But

unhappily there was neither.) Recall to mind as you read the strikingly

handsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the Northern

Station down the great central Boulevards to the Gare du Midi--all built

within our own memory. Then think of the prospects that gradually unfold

themselves as you rise on the hill; the fine vista north towards Sainte

Marie de Schaarbeck; the beautiful Rue Royale, bounded by that charming

Parc; the unequalled stretch of the Rue de la R*****, starting from the

Place Royale with Godfrey of Bouillon, and ending with the imposing mass

of the Palais de Justice. It is to me a matter for mingled surprise and

humiliation that so many Englishmen can look year after year at that

glorious street--perhaps the finest in the world--and yet never think to

themselves, "Mightn't we faintly imitate some small part of this in our

wealthy, ugly, uncompromising London?"

I always say to Americans who come to Europe: "When you go to England,

don't see our towns, but see our country. Our country is something

unequalled in the world: while our towns!--well, anyway, keep away from

London!"

With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment,

there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admire

the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in

Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the

Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see

whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What

street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with

Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in

Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even

with the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get on

the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid

sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that

line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to

lie over all Southern England.

Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks like

a shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. And

that's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse of

hap-hazard houses.

"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few

new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic,

English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive

new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness,

through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is

all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height

of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue.

Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile

attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all

at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still

make the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there was

really no London, not even a village; there was only a scratch

collection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at the

centre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed to

the bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the petty

scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun

the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in

making the congeries of villages into--I do not say a city, for that is

almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate

Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent

struggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling.

London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull and

marshy bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was

forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco,

when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries.

Then fire destroyed all her medi*** architecture, leaving her only

Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But

brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of

the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of

naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins

hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling

indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to

house its metropolis in a squalid village?"

We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful

name is Vested Interest.