ROMANCE AND THE WALLACE PICTURES

Dull Streets London and London--The Rebuilder again Old Paris The Heart of the Matter A Haunt of Men External Romance Dickens and Stevenson The True Wandering Knight The Beautiful Serpentine London Fogs Whistler The Lookout down the River Park Lane Dorchester House Tyburn-Famous Malefactors The Fortunate John Smith The Wallace Collection Rembrandt and Velazquez Andrea del Sarto Our Dutch Masters Guardi and Bonington Miniatures and Sevres.

THE more I wander about London the less wanderable in, for a stranger, does it seem to be. Those who live in it and necessarily must pass through one street in order to get to another are not troubled by squalor and monotony; but what can the traveller make of it who comes to London bent upon seeing interesting things? What can he make of the wealthy deserts of Bayswater? of the grimy Vauxhall Bridge Road? of the respectable aridity of the Cromwell Road, which goes on for ever? of the dull monotony of Gower Street? What can he make of the hundreds of square miles of the East End? And what, most of all, of the interminable districts of small houses which his train will bisect on almost every line by which he can re-enter London after one of his excursions to the country? Nothing. He will not try twice.

And yet these poorer districts are London in the fullest sense of the word, although for the most part when we say London we mean the Strand and Piccadilly. But the Strand and Piccadilly might go and it would not really matter: few persons would suffer extremely; whereas were Poplar or Bermondsey, Kentish Town or Homerton, to fall in ruins or be burnt, thousands and thousands of Londoners would have lost all and be utterly destitute.

It perhaps comes to this, that there is no one London at all. London is a country containing many towns, of which a little central area of theatres and music halls, restaurants and shops, historic buildings and hotels, is the capital; and it is this capital that strangers come to see. For the most part it is this capital with which the present pages are concerned. London for our purposes dwindles down to a very small area where most of her visitors spend all their time the Embankment, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly, Regent Street and the British Museum, the Strand and Ludgate Hill, the Bank and the Tower. That is London to the ordinary inquisitive traveller. Almost everything that English provincials, Americans and other foreigners come to London to see, is there.

The more I know of London, the more I am impressed by "the timid orbits of Londoners. Indeed, so fixed are most of us in our grooves that you might say that the only Londoners who habitually leave the beaten track are the drivers of taxis and messenger boys.

Ask your London friends what they have been doing to-day, and you will quickly discover how circumscribed are their movements in this vast, fascinating and endlessly new and varied city. Most will say that they went to the office in the morning, out to lunch at the regular Place, back in the evening, always by the same routes. Even those who are not in business, and therefore should be free to explore, did as little. They walked to this shop or that, to this club or that, on somewhere to lunch, then some more shopping or clubbing, and so home again, chiefly by accustomed routes. Ask either set of people to name anything new that they saw during the day any London thing that they hadn't seen before and most of them will be unable to do so.

PICCADDILY LOOKING EAST

I suppose there are to be found a few Londoners who treat this city as a naturalist treats the country-side, and are always investigating, scrutinising, hoping for treasure-trove. I hope so. Such a one I used to be, before I had too much to do, and such a one I still am in a less adventurous way. Only the other day, for instance, did I (at great personal peril) ascertain precisely the situation of the angular stone which marks the exact position of Tyburn Gallows, sixty-nine feet north of the tablet on the railings by the Marble Arch. Motor 'buses and taxis did their best to put an end to my inquisitive career, but persistence prevailed. And only recently did I fully realise the beauty and unexpectedness of that isolated Georgian mansion in Rochester Row, which is now, I believe, the Grenadier Guards' hospital. I am one of the few enterprising strangers, unconnected with Westminster School, who watch cricket in Vincent Square and who know that all through September the most exciting unadvertised matches can be seen free at Lord's.

The odd thing is that though London has its villages, the villagers are Londoners, too. Life among streets moulds urban characters; just as life among hedges and fields moulds rural characters. Not yet, for instance, does the rustic have to look each way before he can cross the road, but the Londoners must ever do it ; and such vigilance leaves its mark. The result is that the provincial villager, when he comes to town, is instantly to be detected. He has a score of non-metropolitan characteristics, apart altogether from his clothes and boots, while the London villager, even though he never leaves Church Street, Kensington, or Upper Street, Islington, or Artillery Row, or Berwick Street, or the Mile End Road, or the Boro' High Street, is still of the centre.

These streets, which I have named almost at random, are at some distance from each other, and their differences are therefore not remarkable: but one of the strangest things about London is the differences that you can find between streets that actually adjoin. Walk, for example, up Bond Street, and turn to the left into Oxford Street, on the south side, and notice how completely the people have changed. On the north side of Oxford Street, where the great drapery houses are, you find a few women who are to be seen also in Bond Street; on the south side, none. Or turn out of Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road on the west side and notice how the people have changed. Walk out of the cosmopolitan Strand into Fleet Street and notice how women vanish. You find a few in St. Paul's Churchyard, again drawn together by the lure of clothes ; but in Cheapside the realm of men is again entered, and there are no more women until White-chapel. At evening all this city region empties. Where has everyone gone? Each to his own village.

A tidal wave of utilitarianism has lately rolled over the city and done irreparable mischief, and London no longer offers much harvest for the gleaner of odds and ends of old architecture, quaint gateways, unexpected gables. Such treasures as she still retains in the teeth of the rebuilder are well known: such as Staple Inn and the York Water Gate, a house or two in Chelsea (mostly doomed), the city churches, a corner or two near Smithfield, Butcher's Row, Aldgate, and so forth. She has nothing, for example, comparable with the Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris, where one may be rewarded every minute by some beautiful relic of the past. London, one would say, should be first among cities where symbols of the past are held sacred, but in reality is the last.

Hence I am only too conscious as we walk up Park Lane (having returned to No. 1 London to begin again), that we shall be wandering in streets that present little or no attraction to the stranger from the shires or the pilgrim from over seas. For beyond some mildly interesting architecture Mayfair streets can offer nothing to anyone that is not interested in their past inhabitants. Better to have stuck to Piccadilly or Oxford Street, with their busy pavements : much better, perhaps, and at the same time to have accepted the fact that London is before all things a city of living men and women.

That is what the traveller must come to see London's men and women, her millions of men and women. If he would eat, drink and be merry, he must go elsewhere; if he would move in beautiful and spacious thoroughfares, he must go elsewhere ; if he would see crumbling architecture or stately palaces, he must go elsewhere; but if he has any interest in the human hive, this is the place. He can study it here day and night for a year, and there will still be vast tracts unknown to him.

For a great city of great age and a history of extraordinary picturesqueness and importance, London is nearly destitute of the external properties of romance. But although, except here and there and those in the more placid and law-abiding quarters, such as the Inns of Court the dark gateway and the medieval gable are no more, I suppose that no city has so appealed to the imagination of the romantic novelist. The very contrast between the dull prosaic exterior of a London street and the passions that may be at work within is part of the allurement.