Alarms and Discursions | Page 4

with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to
forty-three hansom cabmen."
"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside
the radius."
"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do
they only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry
into Cockney.
"'My heart leaps up when I behold A sky-sign in the sky,'
"as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the older

English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The
Classics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.
"'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'
"or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning
"'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.';
"I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never
realized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why?
It is because I have left it for ever."
"If you will take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly
endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern
notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs
and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and
Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London
because they had had quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery
topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the
country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last words. You
hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest place on
the planet. And if by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come
down this green country lane you would utter a yell of joy."
Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible
sternness.
"Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the true
country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does
utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic
does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments
that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient
tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real rustic. I
believe that the streets of London are paved with gold; and I mean to
see it before I die."
The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that lane,

and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my
Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its
yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: "To cut it short,
then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won't like
it. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?"
"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my Country
Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for
your other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country,
but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly
suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be
the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I
am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to
London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and
wants to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I
am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as
rustics love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version
of The Golden Treasury)--
"'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves, Forbode not any
severing of our loves. I have relinquished but your earthly sight, To
hold you dear in a more distant way. I'll love the 'buses lumbering
through the wet, Even more than when I lightly tripped as they. The
grimy colour of the London clay Is lovely yet,'
"because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and
quiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of
man that it is."

The Nightmare
A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces
in the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth
and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger
upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to

whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in