London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

perhaps, makes so salient a part of the enormous fragmentariness of the
street view.

There might be as much detail in some other scenes, but that they have not
these shreds and patches of black and white. Of all landscape, for
instance, that of the small culture of Italy and of parts of the East is,
perhaps, the most minute. A little rill of vine is crossed by a short
patch of corn, and among all the sprinkled foliage of fruit-trees, the
olive, with the smallest leaf of all, is the most constant. There is no
liberty, and your sight is taken in a net of green crops; it is trapped on
the ground by tendrils of cucumber, and cannot rise because of maize and
beans, nor can it fly for branches. No tract of grass is wide enough to
make a space of quiet green, and the eyes are kept busy by delicate things
in perpetual interchange. It is not the multitude of a wide clover-field,
where one stroke of the breeze turns a million little faces of flowers
eastwards, for there is hardly any repetition, but an unending
obstruction. Nor can you see anything that is quite simple, unless,
pushing aside a branch of fig-tree with this hand, and a bough of peach
with that, you lift your eyes to the indescribable simplicity of the
distance of mountains.
Or there is infinite detail in a Thames-side bank of woods between
Maidenhead and Cookham, when all the leaves are out, and all still
young--the characteristic local green of beech, alder, poplar, and ash,
all still unlike each other and undarkened; every separate leaf faced with
colour and light, and backed by mystery and shadow. But yet neither this
nor anything else in nature shows the innumerable minuteness of London in
the sun. The summer sun sends a peremptory summons to every patch of
omnibus, red or blue, to every scrap of harness, to all the broken,
inconsequent accents, all equal, all divided, and all leaping to light.
In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to
anything in nature. Clouds wing one way, streams flow, trees toss, thrill,
and remain, but the crowd moves all ways without ever changing its spots,
its dull violence of colour and contrast. Summer and day make the streets
impossible for the painter. But the summer of London is most local and
characteristic--not only in the west, when the scent of mignonette and the
recurrent click of the bearing-rein and bit where carriages stand waiting
are the very signs of town; summer at the Bank, summer that gives to the
walls of Lombard Street a faint hint of reflected light, and fills at a
glance ten thousand serried windows with the images of the sun. If there
is everywhere a lack of spirit and sweetness, it is only that sunshine,
with every tree and every flower, is converted to London and turns a
Londoner.
But such charm as there may still be in the touches of the sun are
perceptible rather in the few streets that keep their ancient narrowness.