intelligibly compared because they are both the effect of an indefinite
succession of anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and
sometimes promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one another.
Each has been mainly built at the pleasure of the private person, with
the community now and then swooping down upon him, and turning
him out of house and home to the common advantage. Nothing but our
racial illogicality has saved us from the effect of our racial anarchy in
the social structure as well as the material structure, but if we could see
London and New York as lawless in the one way as in the other, we
should perhaps see how ugly they collectively are.
The sum of such involuntary reflection with me has been the perception
that London was and is and shall be, and New York is and shall be, but
has hardly yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally, as
she is one-third less numerically, than London. In her future she has no
past, but only a present to retrieve; though perhaps a present like hers is
enough. She is also one less architecturally than London; she is two-
thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if I more closely
examine my pocket vision, I am afraid that I must hedge from this
modest claim, for we have as yet nothing to compare with at least a half
of London magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen or
eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her actual age. As we go
fast in all things, we may then surpass her; but this is not certain, for in
her more deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time the
materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the pocket vision,
seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden,
and some vast rocketing hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for
the contrast with those miles of imperial and municipal architecture
which in London make you forget the leagues of mean little houses,
and remember the palaces, the law-courts, the great private mansions,
the dignified and shapely flats, the large department stores, the
immense hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind.
One reason, I think, why London is so much more striking is in the
unbroken line which the irregularly divided streets often present to the
passer. Here is a chance for architecture to extend, while with us it has
only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block which is the
extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another
reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all
the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower
Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts
you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on
either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and
Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you
with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the
day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather
often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous
smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an
effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the
shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of
the yellowish-green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and
the meaner houses render the rifts between more impressively chasmal.
The tremendous volume of life that flows through the narrow and
winding channels past the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks
which the lesser buildings form, is such that the highest tide of
Broadway or Fifth Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling
and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the
impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts,
donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way
amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and
covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it
had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You
are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your
umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across
your knees, and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of
being part of the largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the
universe.
[Illustration: FLEET STREET AND ST. DUNSTAN'S CHURCH]
It is an emotion which supports the American visitor even against
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