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LONDON FILMS

BY W. D. HOWELLS



[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT]



CONTENTS


I. METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

II. CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS

III. SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

IV. THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER

V. THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

VI. SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION

VII. IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

VIII. THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

IX. CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

X. SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHTSEEING

XI. GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

XII. TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

XIII. AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

XIV. A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

XV. FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

XVI. HENLEY DAY

XVII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY NORTHERN

XVIII. AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY SOUTHERN

XIX. ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

XX. PARTING GUESTS




ILLUSTRATIONS


HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH

THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK

ROTTEN ROW

A BLOCK IN THE STRAND

ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

THE HORSE GUARDS, WHITEHALL

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER

A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE THAMES AT HENLEY

THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY

THE TOWER OF LONDON

ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET

LONDON BRIDGE

THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS

THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB'S TIME

CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES

BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE)

STAPLE INN, HOLBORN

CLIFFORD'S INN HALL

ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THE-FIELDS

HYDE PARK IN OCTOBER

THAMES EMBANKMENT




I

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS


Whoever carries a mental kodak with him (as I suspect I was in the habit
of doing long before I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of
the different exposures. This can be determined only by the process of
developing, which requires a dark room and other apparatus not always at
hand; and so much depends upon the process that it might be well if it
could always be left to some one who makes a specialty of it, as in the
case of the real amateur photographer. Then one's faulty impressions
might be so treated as to yield a pictorial result of interest, or
frankly thrown away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye.
Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust the result,
whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness of the reader, who will
surely, if he is the right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the
blurred details, to soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a
subordination giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This
is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my
little pictures are superficial, I shall not be able to gainsay him. I
can only answer that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but
at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of those who would
prefer some such result as the employment of the Roentgen rays would
have given, if applied to certain aspects of the London world.

Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a life-long
dweller. To the sojourner scarcely more will vouchsafe itself than to
the passing stranger, and it is chiefly to home-keeping folk who have
never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak
with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the
impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could
have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days
in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in
1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one
earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 1897,
with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm
one in the diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I
hope the pages following will bear witness.

What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of
self-question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning
of April, after devious delays in the South and West of England,
is destined to have printed upon his mental films a succession of
meteorological changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as
willing to be honest as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow
that probably the weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then
behaving with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is
that at home, having one's proper business, one leaves the weather
to look after its own affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the
necessary idleness of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes
censorious. If I were to be a little honester still, I should confess
that I do not know of any place where the month of April can be meaner,
more _poison_, upon occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its
moments of relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is
the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in
a grateful tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white
light, the joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds
which you can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden
glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the
soul to overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of
England is incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is
of public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for
the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time
and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The
English weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the
personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were
influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life,
and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care,
irrespective of the interests of the mass. This may be a little
too fanciful, and I do not insist that it is scientific or even
sociological. Yet I think the reader who rejects it might do worse than
agree with me that the first impression of a foreign country visited or
revisited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the season.

Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day, that
there was a lower or a higher pressure in a part of Scotland, just as
I might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of
the lakes. "Now," I said to myself, "we shall have something like real
weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going
to be decisively this or that." But I could not see that the weather
following differed from the weather we had been having. It was the same
small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm, cold,
damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day
often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the sun was
unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a bitter
wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the
spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark,
the golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches;
and round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream.
Full of this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.

If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that
is why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a
thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go
indoors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively
realizing that they will be more comfortable with it than in the
atmosphere awaiting them. If their houses could be built reversible,
so as to be turned inside out in some weathers, one would be very
comfortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that the English
rain did not wet you, and he might have argued that the English cold
would not chill you if only you stayed out