The Chelsea which people have in mind when they speak of the Chelsea school of painting is more inland and is gathered about the King's Road. It is from this quarter rather than from riverside Chelsea that the soft-hatted men with bull-fighters' whiskers and the bobbed-haired girls set forth on their nightly invasion of the Cafe Royal.

In an earlier chapter I have said something of Whistler's discovery of the river at Chelsea. Certainly it is here that the urban Thames has most character. By London Bridge it is busier and more important and pretentious ; by the Embankment it is more formal and well behaved; but at Chelsea it is at its best : without the fuss and the many bridges of its city course; without the prettiness and flannels of its country course: open, mysterious, and always beautiful with the beauty of gravity.

The Thames never seems to me to belong to London as it should. It is in London, but it is not part of London's life. We walk beside it as little as possible; we cross it hurriedly without throwing it more than a glance; we rarely venture on it. London in fact takes the Thames for granted, just as it takes its great men. If it led anywhere it might be more popular ; but it does not. It can carry but few people home, and those are in too much of a hurry to use it; nor can it take us to the theatre or the music hall. That is why a service of Thames steamers will never pay. No one fishes in it from the sides, as Parisian idlers fish in the Seine; no one rows on it for pleasure; no one, as I have already said, haunts its banks in the search for old books and prints. Our river is not interesting to us: its Strand, one of our most crowded streets, has to be a hundred yards inland to become popular. We do not even with any frequency jump into the Thames to end our woes. Living and dying we avoid it.

The only non-utilitarian purpose to which we put the river is to feed the gulls from its bridges. During the past few years the feeding of these strange visitants has become quite a cult, so much so that on Sundays the boys do a roaring trade with penny bags of sprats. There is a fascination in watching these strong wilful birds with the cruel predatory eye and the divinely pure plumage as they swoop and soar, dart and leap, after a crumb or a fish. Every moment more gulls come and more, materialised out of nowhere, until the air just seethes with,beating wings and snapping beaks. In summer they find food enough on the sea shore: it is only in winter that they come up the Thames in any numbers for London's refuse and charity.

When walking from Chelsea towards Westminster one day in the early spring of this year I saw these gulls at rest. They were on the shore of the Battersea side (somewhere near the spot where Colonel Blood hid in the rushes to shoot Charles II as he bathed) hundreds strong, beautiful white things against the grey mud. It was a fine afternoon and the sun made their whiteness still more radiant.

While I was standing watching them, and realising how beautiful the Chelsea river is, I was once again struck by the impression of great speed which one can get from river traffic moving at really quite a slow rate. A tug came by drawing three or four empty barges. Until this invasion of unrest set in the river had been a perfect calm not a movement on the surface, nothing but green water and blue sky, and the gulls, and Battersea Park's silent and naked trees. Suddenly this irruption. The tug was making perhaps twelve knots (I have no means of judging), but the effect was of terrific swiftness. She seemed with her attendant barges to flash past. I imagine the narrowness of the river to have something to do with this illusion, because at sea, where a much higher rate is attained, there is no sense of speed at all. (It is true that steamers which were as far apart as the eye could reach a few minutes ago will meet and leave each other in an incredibly short space of time; but the impression then filling the mind is not so much of the speed of the boats as of the mysterious defeat of distance.) And the quality of the speed of this tug boat had nothing of brutality or insolence in it, as a motor car has : it had gaiety, mirth, a kind of cheery impudence. It soothed as well as astonished.

On the same afternoon I was minded to enter the Tate Gallery just to look at Whistler's exquisite nocturne of old Battersea Bridge, which is the perfect adaptation to an English subject of the methods of the Japanese print and conveys the blue mystery of a London night on the river as no other painter has ever done. I have seen all Whistler's work: I have seen his portrait of his mother, and his portrait of Carlyle, and his portrait of Miss Alexander. I have seen his wonderful waves and his decorations for the Peacock Room. I have seen his Princesse du Pays de la Porcelains and his Connie Gilchrist ; his etchings (the Black Lion Wharf stands before me as I write) and his Songs on Stone; and masterly as it all is, I believe that his London river pictures are his finest work are the work he was born to do above all other men. In his portraits artifice is visible as well as art ; in his best river scenes art conquers artifice.