London Films | Page 4

they choose the last.
If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the experience of the
careful observer that there is a summit of healthful looks in England,
which we do not touch in America, whatever the large table-land or
foot-hill average we reach; and in like manner there is an exceptional
distinction of presence as one encounters it, rarely enough, in the
London streets, which one never encounters with us. I am not envying
the one, or at least not regretting the other. Distinction is the one thing
for which I think humanity certainly pays too much; only, in America,
we pay too much for too many other things to take any great comfort in
our want of distinction. I own the truth without grief or shame, while I
enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I enjoy other spectacles for
which I cannot help letting the English pay too much. I was not
appreciably the poorer myself, perhaps I was actually the richer, in
seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the aristocratic region where
I was taking my walk, the encounter of an elderly gentleman and lady
who bowed to each other on the pavement before me, and then went
and came their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was

passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I beheld active,
positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane that helped her steps,
herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a
straight well-fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was
nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various black. She looked not
only authoritative; people often do that with us; she looked authorized;
she had been empowered by the vested rights and interests to look so
her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her, any more than in the
black trees and their electric-green buds in the high-fenced square, or in
the vast, high, heavy, handsome houses where, in the cellary or
sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the rheumatic pangs of
which the comparative warmth of the outer air had momentarily
relieved her stately bulk.
But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime,
they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have
come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and
mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such
soft masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to
complain of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound,
the leaves have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you
can smell it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds insist, and in the
air is that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the
year long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive
with every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have
presently in the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a
subtile haze, which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness,
and lies upon the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a
dream made visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this substance
yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom,
or rumble earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of
being a part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful
consciousness. It is flattering, but you feel like warning him not to go
in-doors, or he will lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it
yourself you know that it is still winter within the house walls, and will
not be April there till well into June.

II
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS
It might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that there is no such thing
as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive
perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis of
inference, and in now taking my tenth or twentieth look at London I
have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as
to see what London is like by making constantly sure what it is not like.
A pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same purpose. That
is a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty obedient to a just municipal
control, of a grandeur studied and authorized in proportion and relation
to the design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly realized on
lines nobly imagined. But New York and London may always be