London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

Here there is precisely the possibility of that inter-reflection of
sunshine and warm light, from house to facing house, which in its gentle
splendour is the chief loveliness of summer in southern cities, where
walls are here and there blank, and tenderly coloured. Reflected light is
the beauty of shadows, and really one may see a shadow faintly so
transformed in the course of the delicate curves of City streets. Such
curves are not in the wider streets; they are beautiful, apart from the
chances and changes of light which they foster, and many a narrow street
leading to the right and to the left out of Cheapside, or some other of
the central London ways, takes curves as subtle as those of a swimming
fish's tail. Otherwise London curves are distressingly ugly and
dreary--those of a crescent, for example. But as much as the crescent
offends, the light wave of a fish's-tail street pleases the eye, with its
fine deflections. A wave of this kind is frequent enough in villages, but
a certain height in the houses gives it all its character in London.
Some of these alleys, on one side at least, have also the charm, which is
the rarest thing in town, of a certain steepness in incline. They dip as
they waver, with a motion that tells of a direction towards water. Whether
in village or town there is sea or river, a hidden Mediterranean or a
hidden Thames, at the level to which the sway and swing of the path will
settle. And throughout London the direction of streets seems to be a
rather secret thing, and misleading--the sign of a town that has not been
ordered as a machine is ordered, but has felt its way like an organism.
Slight tendencies, convergences, divergences, lead the streets wandering
and draw lines long astray. Old and forgotten causes have brought to pass
the slight misgoing that first takes the streets apart--old rights or the
accidents of private liberty; and what these began the chances of sequence
have ended, a mile astray. Doubtless, besides, the swing of the river has
tended to set streets a-flowing too.
But the downward fluctuation of little City streets towards the water is a
briefer thing, and as full of drawing as the upper line of a flexible fan
foreshortened. The long straying streets are too vague for drawing. In
these City lanes, too, there is some rest for the eyes from the infinite
detail of the street, and even from the tyranny of windows. Only in their
warehouses are to be found spaces of plain wall, but unluckily the plain
wall is also black.

THE CLIMATE OF SMOKE

It is some little treason to a natural storm to admire too eagerly the
mimic wrack and menace of the paltry tempest of the smoke. Only by
acknowledging the climate of London to be more than half an artificial
climate, and by treating our own handiwork--the sky of our
manufacture--with a relative contempt, are we excused for thinking the