London Films | Page 2

the first few days
in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in
1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one
earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 1897,
with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm

one in the diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I
hope the pages following will bear witness.
What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of self-
question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning of April,
after devious delays in the South and West of England, is destined to
have printed upon his mental films a succession of meteorological
changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest
as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the
weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite
as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having
one's proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own
affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of
sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes censorious. If I were to
be a little honester still, I should confess that I do not know of any
place where the month of April can be meaner, more poison, upon
occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its moments of relenting,
of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is the reverse of its
obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in a grateful
tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the joy
of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you can all
but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden glut of delight, a
great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the soul to overflowing,
which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England is
incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is of public
largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for the
greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time and
harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The English
weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the personal
preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were influenced by
the same genius which operates the whole of English life, and allows
each to identify himself as the object of specific care, irrespective of the
interests of the mass. This may be a little too fanciful, and I do not
insist that it is scientific or even sociological. Yet I think the reader
who rejects it might do worse than agree with me that the first
impression of a foreign country visited or revisited is stamped in a
sense of the weather and the season.

Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day,
that there was a lower or a higher pressure in a part of Scotland, just as
I might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the
lakes. "Now," I said to myself, "we shall have something like real
weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going to
be decisively this or that." But I could not see that the weather
following differed from the weather we had been having. It was the
same small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm,
cold, damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The
day often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the
sun was unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a
bitter wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the
spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark, the
golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches; and
round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream. Full of
this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.
If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that is
why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a
thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they
go indoors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively
realizing that they will be more comfortable with it than in the
atmosphere awaiting them. If their houses could be built reversible, so
as to be turned inside out in some weathers, one would be very
comfortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that the English
rain did not wet you, and he might have