London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

effects in any sense beautiful. Let us avoid serious words of description.
The whirls of floating smoke that darken the sunset are 'lurid' to no very
grand purpose; and the threat from even twice as many kitchen fires never
would be terrible. It is a tale signifying nothing. Let us grant that
there is now and then an effect of handsome grime, but there is no system
in this scenery of smoke. What form seems at times to declare itself is
bestowed by the light. The sun rules from a centre, whatever the
circumference be made of--mist from mountain heights or vapour from that
series of successive fleeting solitudes, the ocean, or refuse from a
million fireplaces; and from this reigning centre his rays seem to compel
a kind of organism. There is no chance-medley where he rules, because of
his long, distributed lights, and straight, infallible, divergent shadows
that pick off the points and pinnacles of a thousand distances. The
lowering sun will not permit the smoke to show so shapeless, so lifeless,
so unbounded as it is; he takes his place in the middle of a wheel, and
commands at any rate a mechanical order.
Otherwise, and without a sun lowered into your picture, the smoke-mingled
sky is the most unplanned in the world. It has no confederacy, and no
direction. Nothing leads, and there are no figures, no troops, no
companies; there is no history, nor approach. The smoke is helpless. It is
perpetually subject to gravitation; no wind makes it buoyant, and no
electric impetus lifts it against a wind. It constantly and drearily
drops, as you may see if you look against any London horizon; the minute
shower that it carries never ceases and never lifts, but sifts down
momently from the low sky into which the chimneys raised it at first. That
one upward spring was all its life. Thenceforth it does but drift until it
is all shed, to the last black atom, upon the face of the town.
And yet you may, twenty times a day in London, hear the smoke called
cloud. Thunderstorms are announced as lurking in the heart of the
powerless bosom of the smoke, and showers are threatened where there never
was anything so fresh as a drop of rain. The puny darkness is supposed
capable of lightnings, and out of the grime is expected the thunderbolt.
The splendid name of the cloud is given to this poor local vesture of
decay; no use or custom seems sufficient to make the London sky of
mechanical suspension familiar to the citizen; when he faces it at the end
of a brief distance he calls it by the names proper to the celestial
heights, and he is hardly convinced of the truth when he sees it walk his
streets.
But, indeed, he might have learned long ago that there is no life in his
storm, and that when thunder comes it wears a different gloom. The worst
is that with the authentic darkness of cloud comes so often the imitation,
and a town tempest is not only mocked, but hidden and covered, by the
pother of mere smoke, so that the citizen does not well learn to