University of Virginia Library

A song of the typical city,
A song and a wail!

Let not the Londoner chancing to read
Deem that I purpose him evil
In choosing his city for type of the world's great bane!—
His city earth's mightiest, and to me best known:
For the like would I say, some difference granted,
Of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago,
And of such imitations as here we have built us, the nearest we may,
By the banks of the Liffey and Lagan.

Far though I am from thee now,
London, still do I hear
In the chambers of memory's shell,
The buzz and the hum and the cries,
The surges and sighs of the streets,
And all thy multitudinous movement of men:
Let them once on the heart take hold,
And, surely, it never will wholly escape their enchantment again.
Yet what but an idle excitement is it, a drunkard's dram?
Vain and pernicious;—for what profit is it for ever to gaze on the outward eyes of the man,
As he passes masked and the springs of his being are hidden?
Small and poor is the wisdom that this can give;
But the shadows of thought it raises, the pulse it quickens,
And makes us dream that we live.

How shall I begin my wail,
This November's morning frosty-fair?
In glittering crystal air;—
The sun uprising in a sky unclouded?
The mere repeats the rugged mountain,
Ev'n to its smallest stone;
And the clear peak, pointing downward,
Completes, with phantom underworld
More fair, the world that is.

Thus for me begins the day,
That for many an hour shall lead me
On by many a shining bay
And curving sand:
And my thought takes a sudden start,—
Leaps, from this world of beauty,
To the city, that lies a-choking,
In coils of the grimy cold:
For I know that the fog has its grip
This morn on the throat of London.

Here, where the air is pure and sweet,
Few there are to breathe it:
Here where earth is jewel-bright,
Rare the eyes to heed it.
And I hear the mighty voice of the cities cry
“What doom upon the race is this,
That myriad lungs are stifling,
And countless eyes are blinded,
While the wide sky its azure space unfolds,
And the broad winds blow free?”
Yea, and I hear the winds and hear the sea
Singing to men,
“Ah! by what doom impell'd,
Hapless ones, do ye forget us,
Who sang your cradle-song for many an age;—
Who roughly-kind your weakness trained to strength,
And gave your cheeks the rose:—
Torn from our arms your might decays,
Pale grows your bloom:
We only can restore your strength and beauty:
Come back to us, for we still love you well.”

But vain the loud call of the woods and waves,
The fields' low voices vain:
For over each city, behold!
A demon, that men have evoked,
But no longer control,
And now their despot imperious,—
The ghost of the sunlight that died long ago,
They have summoned to toil again,
Monstrous and mightier growing,
Faster and faster makes the huge engine fly,
That sucks to the whirling centre,
The multitudes helpless,
Engulfing the lives of them,
Not for his pain unavenged!

London, by thy most giant demon ruled,
Have I escaped from thee,
His power rejected, defied?
Vocal I make the wail of the wind and sea,
In protest against thee, his work.

Though thou callest thyself the chief city of earth
And the centre of men,
So proud is thy boasting,
And rival hast none in thy vastness or wealth,
Let us look to thee closely,
Let us ask if thou art a delight unto men,
Or a joy to the race that has made thee!

And first, let us ask what is best that is in thee,
That wealth can create, or the poor may enjoy:—
Rich houses luxurious,
Theatres, pictures, and music,
Museums of things that are curious and rare;—
Miscellaneous shows,
Intellectual converse,
The crowds in the streets.

Who that loves things that are fair to the sight,
Can delight in thee, London?
What are thy houses so dingy without,
Though within they be furnished superbly?
What are thy treasures, gems, sculptures, or painting,
Though counted among them,
Those walls where ten square yards or so
With Turner's mimic summers glow:—
Galleries, where lie the fragments fair
Still sighing for the golden air
Of Greece, where they were shaped to be
Beautiful immortally;
Undreaming of their last sad goal
Of exile to the land of coal,
Far from the marble-mountain land?
Though these supremest treasures thine,
And many another, what are all
But jewels hidden, buried in some huge mine,
With endless tunnels of gloom?
So dreadful, so vast is the ugliness-ocean,
Wherein thou art sunken.
Vainly thou strivest to make thyself beautiful,
Vainly dost labour with arch and ogee,
With portal and column enwreathed and entwisted,
To build a few streets of thee fairer.
For the breath of thine own darkness descends upon thee dreadfully;
Thy pit's breath shut down on thee by the indignant heaven:
And smothers in pungent stinging blackness,
Now oozy and moist, now rasping and dry;—
Now steadfast, unmoving;—
Now restless and rolling from quarter to quarter
A dismal inferno of tawny horror:—
Worlds of aerial hideousness,
The clouds of the darkness of heaven, dragged down and impregnate of hell:—
Drowned in that flood,
How vain are the poor little cressets of beauty
Thou seekest to light on thy housefronts;
Yea, and they perish as surely,
As dieth among them the rose,
In thy cankering air.

(Sad flow'rs of the city, ye roses æsthetic, as pallid and bloomless
As plants that have grown without sun;—
Fit blossoms are ye for the living? Nay, surely,
Such rather as grow in the gardens of Hades,
With scents that are sweet for the mummy, and colours that dazzle the dead.)
Yet, when spring lifts up the curtain of the darkness for a while,
Ere the summer lays its burden on the pavement and the tile;—
Ere the white-faced, perspiring crowd
Pants beneath the thunder-cloud,
Bright are thy fashionable streets in mid-May,
Where the wave of life beats brick shores all day,
And the best-dress'd men and women,
And the carriages and horses,
Make the Row and Bond Street gay;
Yet 'tis strange, if town and street
Have delights that are so sweet,
How the pride of life luxurious ever loves to take its play
By the fragments of the country that still linger in thy midst,
Under boughs that keep the beauty of the May:
Wealth must have the country in the town,
And chooses well;
So this we grant thee, London,
By the borders of thy parks there are streets, some half-a-dozen,
Where life may seem a pleasure for an hour,
For a day:—
A day, that hardly shall make bright a year
With all its dusty splendour: ah! to be
In lonely nook, wherein the sea
Whispers its love-plaint secretly,
For the sea-birds heed not though they hear!
And oh! as the price of a perch of brightness what dreariest leagues!
For one little drop of a doubtful elixir what millions of souls are squeezed!
Here are the park and palace, the wealthy street and the square;
And culture is here at her highest:—
But the pendent of gay Piccadilly's the dismal East London lane;
And the ball-room that glitters with flowers and jewels,
And dresses of brilliantest tissue, the radiant ladies wear;—
Let whoso exults in the splendour fail not to think of the cost,—
The human existence a-rot in the loathsome Whitechapel lair!

Great is the toil that is in thee,
And many the thoughts thou breedest:
Whereto tendeth thy labour?
Thy thought—is it great?
Morning and evening, evening and morning,
From suburb to city, from city to suburb,
Thou shovellest thy heaps of humanity.
And when they sink into quiet, older and wearied at evening,
What the result of their toil, and dreary routine of the day?
Entries in ledgers mostly, and goods sold over the counter.
And many there are whose work is to write,
Or to print the work of the writer,
And their toil most of it vain.
And many there are whose work is only to play,
And the play is mainly idle distraction and chatter,
And gazing at useless sights:
But these, being rich, gather round them
To feed, and clothe and serve them and make them sport,
A multitude vast, miscellaneous: and on these
Others depend, and more again upon these,
Like bee upon bee in the cluster:
So year after year the lines of the weary streets
Grow, grow endlessly.
And mighty the sprouting of chimneys and flagging of soft green acres:
And ever higher and broader towers the dome,
That hangs like a vast extinguisher o'er thee, London!

Home of horror! sunless heart of an empire, whose feet melt in the fervid orient:
Whose face is mirror'd back to it, magnified many times from the convex world,
From the dry, hot southern island, while its arm
Around the northern continent stretches frczen:—
Into thee, lo! the east and the south and the north
Pour their treasures in vain!
The life and the wholesome strength of the comely England round thee,
Of glowing India, of scorch'd Australia, of Canada's bracing frosts;
Yea, and the life of the great wild waves of the sea,
In every climate rolling;—
All are into thee drawn,
All by thee are transmuted,
Not into wholesome vigour of muscle and mind,
To guide with skilful strength the team of the plunging empire:
But part into nerveless tissue of vanity turned,
And the rest into mountainous, dark-hued corpulence,
Half poison and half disease.

So many have passed along this street to-day,
So many will pass to-morrow:
Throw out a net and catch thee a dozen to-day,
And twelve to-morrow;
And the dozen will be not all too like to the twelve:
But make the number thou catchest a score of hundreds,
And quickly grows the average likeness closer;
Till, sampling, knowest the million, that hurrieth by thee,
Exactly like the million that went before:
And dear to the statistician are similar millions,
Though individual being be nothing at all.

And the millions clash and grind each other to slime,
Soft and smooth:
And the atoms lie closely packed, as drops in a pool,
And though each be a human miracle, each is alike
In outward seeming:
Like garments out of the factory at one price:
In decent meanness, ugly neatness,
Not at all an inspiring sight.

Man needs space,
Like the great tree to spread his boughs;—
Space and light.
Where hath he grown most strong but in the wilds,
In the northern forest lonely,
By the fjord and icy mountain?
Where most fair and wise?
But by southern cape and islet,
Where the dainty fertile earth
Gave him delicate wholesome fare;
And the sea with arms enwinding,
And the mountains' barren beauty,
Held him apart with space to breathe and grow?
Not in Pekin, nor in Babylon
Shalt thou seek for man at greatest;
Nor hath London with her teeming numbers
Art his like to breed:
Though perchance she may import him;
Not on soil like hers, but far far other,
Thrives the giant seed.

Bees are many in the hive:
Who hath taken census of the ant-hill?
Though earth might feed more ants than men,
Man is the lord of earth and not the ant.
Let him beware of dwindling to the insect,
While his swarms increase:
Let him remember this,—
That England surely were a greater land,
Peopled by a million giants,
Than by a hundred million dwarfs.

How can the soul be little that loves great things?
Or mighty the spirit, the bounds of whose flight are small?
Has the sparrow that hops on the house-roof eagle's wings?
Can the lion into the rat-trap fall?

Yet let me not forget:
One thing thou hast, O London, that is great;
Even thy wretchedness:
Yea and from this springs thy one flower most fair;—
The souls devoted, who labour,
Some for the moment, and some with the larger scope,
To cure the ill that is in thee!

Surely, O city, thou shalt not exist in vain!
Nor fruitless thy sufferings be!
For the task appointed thee this and no other,
The humanization of man.
Out of the wilds it was thine to pluck him,
To tame the strength over fierce;
To destroy the individual sufficiency,—
To make him dependent on others,—
To teach him the arts and inventions that crown him the lord of the earth.

Yet these things although thou doëst,
Heed let us take thou dost not o'erdo them,
Corrupting by pleasure, degrading by meanness, blinding and breaking by pain.
Still, though for many a year thy might shall increase,
I praise thee but little;
Seeing thee mainly a palace of pleasure and pride,
Built on a dungeon of woe.
Storehouse of trifles and toys,—
Of ornaments, gawds,
Of things manufactured,
Whose world of the dead artificial o'erwhelmeth the world of the living;—
Congress of horrors and sorrows,
Meeting of terrible waters,
What med'cinal plant for the ills of the future is seen by the banks of thee springing?
Valley of the shadow of death!
Wherethrough men march by millions,
Art thou humanity's only road
To the land of light beyond?