London

LONDON

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

WITH TEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN

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LONDON

LONDON

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

WITH TEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN

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LONDON: PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN AND
EDMUND D. BROOKS & THEIR FRIENDS
19 1 4

LONDON

T HERE is an old London story that has
never lost its loveliness for me. It was
about a stout old lady from the country, who
travelled round and round the Underground
Railway in a circle, because at each station she
tried to get out backvvards, and at each station
the guard pitched her in again, under the im-
pression that she was trying to get in. It is a
beautiful story; doing honour alike to the pati-
ence of the female sex and the prompt courtesy
of the male; it is a song without words. But
there is another and milder version (perhaps
we might dare to say a more probable version)
of the same story. It describes an aged farmer
and his daughter travelling the same sad circle,
and failing to alight anywhere, partly because
of the Ùnþed'imenta of country parcels, but
partly also because they were almost satisfied
with the staring names of the places set up on
the Underground Railway. They thought the
" Mansion House" was rather a dark place for
7

the Lord Mayor to live in. They could detect
no bridges through the twilight of " Westmin-
ster Bridge," nor any promìsing park in " St.
James' Park St
tion." They could only sup-
pose that they were in the crypts of "The
Temple"; or buried under the foundations of
" The Tower."
Nevertheless, I am not quite so certain that
this cockney tale against countrymen scores
so much as is supposed. The rustic saw the
names at least; and nine times out of ten the
names are nobler than the things. Let us su p-
pose him as starting westward from the
Mansion House, where he commiserated the
dim captivity of the Lord Mayor. He would
come to another equally gloomy vault in which
he would read the word "Blackfriars." It is not
a specially cheery word; but it goes back, I
imagine, to that great movement, at once dog-
maticanddemocratic, which gave to its followers
the fierce and fine name of the " Dogs of God."
But at the worst, the mere name of Blackfriars
Station is more dignified than the Blackfriars
Road. He would pass on to the Temple; and
surely the mere word "Temple" is more es-
sential and eternal than either the rich la\vyers
in its courts, or the poor vagabonds on its
Embankment. He will goon toCharingCross,
8

where the noblest of English knights and
kings set up a cross to his dead queen. But
unless his rustic erudition informs him of the
fact, he will gain little by getting out of the
train, and going to the larger station. Neither
porters carrying luggage nor trippers carrying
babies, will encourage any conversation about
the original sacredness of the spot. He will
stop next at a yet more sacred spot, the station
called Westminster Bridge, from which he can
visit, as Macaulay says, "the place where five
generations of statesmen have striven, and the
place \vhere they sleep together." By \valking
across the street from this station he can enter
the House of Commons. But, if he is wise, he
will stop in the train. He will then arrive at
St. James' Park; and (as Mr. Max Beerbohm
has truly remarked) he will not meet St. James
there.
Yet these mere names that he has seen on
a dingy wall, like advertisements, are really the
foundation stones of London; and it is right
that they should (as it were) be underground.
The mere fact that these five names, in a row
along the riverside, all bear witness to an an-
cient religion would tell the rustic in the railway
train (supposing him to be of elaborate culture
and lightning deduction) the great part of the
9 B

history of London. The old Temple Church
still stands, full of the tombs of those great
and doubtful heroes who signed themselves
with the sign of Christ, but who came, rightly
or wrongly, to be stamped by their neighbours
with the seal of Antichrist. The old Charing
Cross is gone; but its very absence is as much
of a historical monument as itself. For the
Puritans pulled it down merely for being a
cross; though (as it says in a humorous song
of the period) Charing Cross had always re-
frainedfrom uttering a word against theauthor-
ity of the Parliament. But these old things,
though fundamental, are fragmentary; and
whether as ruins or merely as records, will tell
the stranger little of what London has been
and is, as distinct from Paris or Berlin or
Chicago. London is a mediaeval town, as these
names testify; but its soul has been sunk deeper
under other things than any other town that
remem bers mediaevalism at all. It is very hard
indeed to find London in London.
There is a story (one among many) that there
was a settlement before the Romans came,
which occupied about the same space that is
now occupied by Cannon Street Station. In
any case, it is probable that the seed of the city
,vas sown somewhere about that slope of the
10

riverside. The Romans made it a great town
but hardly their greatest town, and the barbar-
ism of the ninth century left it bare. Its
second or third foundation as a predominant
city belongs, like many such things, to the
genius and tenacity of Alfred. He did not in-
deed hold it as a capital of England, but rather
as an outpost of Wessex. From his point of
view, London was a suburb of Wantage. But
he saw the practical Ï1nportance of its position
towards the river mouth; and he held it tight.
The Norman Conquest clinched the condition,
which was roughly symbolized by the Tower
of London, \vhich for many centuries was a
trophy captured and recaptured by opposite
factions. But, in the main, London had one
political character from first to last. It was
always, for good or evil, on the side of the
Parliament and against the King. Six hundred
years ago, it was the citizens of London who
had to stand the charge of the strongest of the
Plantagenets in his youth, on the downs round
Lewes. Four hundred years afterwards, it was
the citizens of London who held the high places
of Buckinghamshire, when thearmyofCharlesI
threatened London from Oxford. Later still,
the Londoners stood solidly against James II
and splendidly against George I I I. Whether
II

Parliament was worth such fidelity, whether
the merchants of the Thames were wise to tie
themselves so entirely to the grandees of the
counties, is no subject for this place. But that
the tradition of the town was sincere and con-
tinuous cannot be doubted. To this day the
Lord Mayor of London is probably proud that
the King of England can only enter London
by his leave. That fact is as close a summary
of the purely political history of London as
one could want. It exactly expresses the vic-
tory of the merchants over the central power.
It is often observed that the French think the
Lord Mayor of London more important than
the King. They are an acute people.
This rather surly love of liberty (or rather
of independence) is written in the straggling
map of London, and proclaimed in its patch-
work architecture. There is in it something
that every Englishman feels in himself, though
he does not always feel it to be good; some-
thing of the amateur; something of the eccen-
tric. The nearest phrase is the negative one
of "unofficia1." London is so English, that it
can hardly be called even the capital of Eng-
land. It is not even the county town of the
county in which it stands. That title, I believe,
belongs to Brentford, which legend credits
12

with t\VO kings at once, like Lacedaemon. It is
just London. As his French friend said about
Browning, its centre is not in the middle. The
Parliament sits in London, but not in the City,
of London; the City of London is not under
the London County Council; and in spite of
the opinion of General Choke, the Sovereign
does not live in the Tower. Crowded and noisy
as it is, there is something shy about London:
it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does
not like to be asked what it is for. In this, there
is not a little of its history as a sort of half-
rebel through so many centuries. Hence it is
a city of side streets that only lead into side
streets; a city of short cuts-that take a long
time. There have been recent changes in the
other direction, of course; but the very name of
one of them, unintentionally illustrates some-
thing not native to the place. A more broad and
sweeping thoroughfare, in the Continental
manner, was opened between the Strand and
HoIborn, and called Kingsway. The phrase
will serve for a symbol. Through all those
creative and characteristic epochs, there was no
King's Way through London. There was no-
thing Napoleonic; no roads that could be pro-
perly decorated with his victories, or properly
cleared \vith his cannon. It had something of
13

the licence and privilege of that Alsatia that
was its sore; the little impenetrable kingdom of
rascals that revelled down in Whitefriars,
where now rascals of a more mournful kind
write Imperialist newspapers. One might call
mediaeval London a rabbit warren; save that
the Trainbands who took their pikes, and 'pren-
tices \vho caught up their clubs at a bell or a
beacon, were certainly anything but rabbits.
I have said that this eccentricity, amounting
to secrecy, remains in the very building of Lon-
don. Some of the finest glimpses of it are got
as if through the crack of a door. Our fathers
gained freedom of vision through the gap in a
fence; just as they often gained freedom of
speech through a flaw in an Act of Parliament.
In their glorious visions of height or distance,
there is always something of the keyhole; just
as in their glorious fights for law or liberty,
there was always something of the quibble.
There is no finer effect than 5t. Paul's from the
foot of its hill in delicate and native weather;
for the English climate (I may remark) is the
finest in the world. I assume, of course, that
the spectator is a serious mystic (that is, a ma-
terialist also) and appreciates the bodily beauty
of heights, which should always be seen from
below. The Devil takes us to the top of an ex-
14

ceeding high mountain, and makes us dizzy;
but God lets us look at the mountain. Yet this
mountain made by man can only be seen in
London by "sighting;" by getting it between
t\VO houses, as a pilot steers behveen two rocks.
Get the sighting wrong and you will see only
a public-house, or (what is much worse) a shop
full of ne\vspapers. Had either a French or a
Prussian temple commanded such an eminence,
the whole hill would have been swept bare as
with a sabre and studded \vith statues and gar-
dens, that it might be seen from afar. Only I
should not like it so much. But then I was
born in London.

15

PLATES

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I. THE MANSION HOUSE.
II. THE TOWER.
III. THE TEMPLE.
IV. THE EMBANKMENT.
V. WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.
VI. PARLIAMENT FROM THE RIVER.
VII. BIG BEN.
VII I. ST. PAUL'S FROM BANKSIDE.
IX. THE THAMES.
X. " ST. PAUL'S FROM: THE FOOT OF ITS HILL."

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CHISWICK PRESS: CHAS. WHiTTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCER V LANE, LONDON.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS WERE PRINTED BY THE
MEZZOGRAVURE COMPANY, LONDON.