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diff --git a/old/50152-0.txt b/old/50152-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index eb85a55..0000000 --- a/old/50152-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3888 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook, Liverpool, by Dixon Scott, Illustrated by J. -Hamilton Hay - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - - -Title: Liverpool - - -Author: Dixon Scott - - - -Release Date: October 7, 2015 [eBook #50152] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - - -***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIVERPOOL*** - - -E-text prepared by Shaun Pinder, Fay Dunn, and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made -available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) - - - -Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this - file which includes the original illustrations. - See 50152-h.htm or 50152-h.zip: - (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50152/50152-h/50152-h.htm) - or - (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50152/50152-h.zip) - - - Images of the original pages are available through - Internet Archive. See - https://archive.org/details/liverpool1907scot - - -Transcriber’s note: - - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). - - Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=). - - Words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE. - - The page numbers in the “List of Illustrations” refer to - the original positions of the plates in the book. - - - - - -LIVERPOOL - - - * * * * * * - -IN THE SAME SERIES - -EACH CONTAINING 24 FULL-PAGE -ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR - -EACH =6s.= NET - -DEVON--NORTH -DEVON--SOUTH -IRELAND -JAMAICA -THE UPPER ENGADINE -NORWEGIAN FJORDS -PARIS - -PUBLISHED BY -ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK -SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. - -AGENTS - -AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY - 64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK - -CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD. - 27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO - -INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD. - MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY - 309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA - - * * * * * * - - -[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL.] - - -LIVERPOOL - -Painted by - -J. HAMILTON HAY - -Described by - -DIXON SCOTT - -With 25 Full Page Illustrations in Colour - - - - - - - -[Illustration: Publisher’s monogram, A&CB] - -London -Adam and Charles Black -1907 - -Published August, 1907 - - - - -TO MY NEPHEW OR NIECE - - - - -WRITER’S NOTE - - -Neither guide-book nor history nor commercial estimate, this Book -merely attempts the much less laborious task of handing on the instant -effect produced by that active, tangible quantity, the Liverpool of the -present day; and its Writer has therefore been forced to rely, almost -as completely as its Illustrator, upon the private reports of his own -senses rather than upon the books and testimonies of other people. None -the less he has managed to incur a little sheaf of debts, and these, -although he is unable to repay, he is anxious at least to acknowledge. -By far the greatest measure of his gratitude is due, not for the first -time, to his friend Mr. John Macleay--lacking whose suggestion the -Book would never have been begun--lacking whose counsel it would, -when finished, have been even less adequate than it now remains; but -he desires as well to offer his especial thanks to Professor Ramsay -Muir, who generously permitted him to read certain chapters of the -recently published “History of Liverpool” in proof; to Dr. E. W. -Hope, Liverpool’s Medical Officer of Health, for courteous responses -to various inquiries; to Mr. G. T. Shaw (of the Liverpool Athenæum), -Mr. A. Chandler (of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board), Mr. H. Lee -Jones, Mr. T. Alwyn Lloyd, and Mr. William Postlethwaite, all of whom -have provisioned him with much more information than he has found it -possible to use. To them, and to all those other creditors whose names -have not been mentioned but who may be equally inclined to deplore the -waste of good material, he would protest that their assistance might -have had a more commensurate practical result if only they could have -persuaded those implacable niggards, space and time, to imitate their -eager liberality. - - - - -CONTENTS - - -CHAPTER I - -THE RIVER - - PAGE -Its dominion over the City--The historical result--Liverpool - and the nineteenth century--Youth and age--Liverpool’s dual - paradox--The River as reconciler--Its physical influence--Its - psychological--As a maker of pageants--The traveller’s report 1 - - -CHAPTER II - -THE DOCKS - -Liverpool’s distribution--The great fan--Ramparts--The - seven-mile sequence--Unhuman romance--Loot of - cities--Labyrinthine effort--Efficiency--The key to the - labyrinth--A relic--Brown and blue--The new drama--A river - progress--Advents--The Landing-Stage--Arrivals and - departures--The bridges from New York to London 22 - - -CHAPTER III - -THE CITY - -The problem--A bunch of street portraits--Lord Street, North - John Street, Whitechapel, Stanley Street--Bold Street, - Brunswick Street, Victoria Street--The four vestibules--Lime - Street, Church Street, Tithebarn Street, the River-side - terrace--Episodes and intermediaries--The general - interpretation--The stage manager--Typical - actresses--And actors--The Sunday quietude--Bank holiday - incursions--The City at night 43 - - -CHAPTER IV - -THE SUBURBS - -Rejuvenation--Car influences--Sociabilities and - processes--Seaforth to Southport--Bootle’s - independence--The universal trend--Damocles and - Litherland--Walton’s tragedy--The Grand - National--Everton--Squeezed Dye-wood--From Anfield to the - South--The two spinsters--Liverpool’s Bloomsbury--The outer - curve--Cabbage Hall to Mossley Hill--Sefton - Park--Garston to the centre--Dingle and melodrama--The - cross-river cubicles--Bidston Hill 93 - - -CHAPTER V - -THE SLUMS - -The black dream--A fulcrum--The docks and their - levers--The people of the abyss--Dialect, priests and a - postulate--Esther--The suburban attitude--A matter of - technique--Marooned--Ameliorations--The official - tides--Free-lance efforts--The approach of the - change--Portents--The Liverpool of the future 141 - - - - -LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS - - -THE TOWN HALL _Frontispiece_ - - FACING PAGE - -BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER 8 - -THE LANDING-STAGE, SOUTH END 16 - -THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK 22 - -DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE ALBERT DOCK 28 - -CUSTOM HOUSE FROM THE SALTHOUSE DOCK 32 - -THE “LUCANIA” 40 - -BOLD STREET 46 - -LIME STREET STATION 50 - -LIME STREET WITH WELLINGTON MONUMENT 54 - -ELECTRIC CAR TERMINUS, PIER-HEAD 56 - -LITTLE SHOP, MOUNT PLEASANT 60 - -THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL 62 - -ST. JOHN’S MARKET 68 - -ST. NICHOLAS’ CHURCH AND THE LAST OF TOWER BUILDINGS 70 - -ST. PETER’S CHURCH 76 - -EVENING AT NEW BRIGHTON 82 - -THE WALKER ART GALLERY: INTERIOR 86 - -OVERHEAD RAILWAY FROM JAMES STREET 92 - -THE HORNBY LIBRARY 96 - -OLD HAYMARKET 106 - -CALDERSTONES PARK 128 - -HERCULANEUM DOCK 136 - -BIDSTON HILL 138 - -ALBERT DOCK: TWILIGHT 142 - - - - -LIVERPOOL - - - - -CHAPTER I - -THE RIVER - - -§ 1. - -That fine fellow (a Scotchman, I understand) who so handsomely -acknowledged the thoughtfulness displayed by Providence in -“constraining the great rivers of England to run in such -convenient proximity to the great towns” would have found in -Liverpool-on-the-Mersey an altogether exceptional opportunity -for thanksgiving. For it is upon her River, with a very singular -completeness, that the existence of this great, complex, modern -organism unanimously depends. Rob her of her duties as port and -harbour, and she becomes impossible. Other duties, of course, she -has: among the labyrinths of effort which her million people have -created all about them, you will find tobacco-factories, corn-mills, -soap-works, breweries, sugar-refineries, and a dozen other quite -flourishing industrial exploits; but these, even if they were not -in large measure directly derived from the River itself--the voice -of the River, so to say, announcing itself in other dialects--are -never really fundamental. They could be plucked away, as her famous -Potteries were plucked away at the opening of the nineteenth century, -as her Chemical Works were plucked away some decades later, without -producing anything but the mildest and most parochial of disturbances. -Certainly, there would be no crisis: the great machine would still -throb equably, the procession of her continually advancing life would -still move magnificently on. But if you rob her of her river-born -attributes, you leave her utterly dismantled. Let the river-estuary -silt up, as river-estuaries have been known to do, as this one is -constantly endeavouring to do, and the whole elaborate structure -instantly crumbles and subsides. In London there are a score of -Londons, in Glasgow a dozen Glasgows; but here there is only one -Liverpool--Liverpool-on-the-Mersey. - -That is the great fact of her life. And its significance is chief, not -merely because Liverpool owes her actual existence to the River, but -also because the whole quality, the “virtue,” of that existence has -been determined by the completeness of the dependency. It is not simply -that it is upon this broadly curving estuary, as upon some broadly -curving scimitar, that Liverpool has had wholly to rely in slashing -her way to the position she now maintains; it is also (and, from our -present point of view, chiefly) that her fidelity to that weapon has -induced certain habits of poise, of outlook, of ideal, which are now -her most essential characteristics. The influence is disclosed, as we -shall see, in all manner of ways. It drenches the local atmospheres, -private, social, civic, with a distinctive colour. It is revealed in -the nature of the men in her streets, and in the nature of the streets -about the men. It is the deciding element in that inherent spirit of -the place which those men and those streets at once prefigure and -evoke, and which it is the main purpose of this book, with the aid of -those men and streets, to attempt in some measure to enclose. Some of -the channels of the influence are direct and obvious enough, others -are indirect and secret; and one of the more obvious and one of the -most secret are connected with the fashion in which that dependence has -affected her history in the past. - - -§ 2. - -The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s -emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of -supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for -its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as -I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered -together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and -sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a -constantly increasing forcefulness.[1] But it was not until the later -decades of the eighteenth century that the real opportunity arrived. -It was among the alarums and excursions of the amazing period which -then began, among its endless industrial sallies and revolutions, its -fabulous commercial conquests, that the weapon was for the first time -granted the scope it needed to swing with full effect. And therefore it -was within a space of extraordinary brevity--within the leaping years -of a single century, indeed--that the City achieved its greatness, and -assumed the aspect which it wears to-day. - -[1] The details of these activities have been set out more perfectly -than ever before, and with a union of concision and lucidity which it -is impossible to praise too highly, in Professor Ramsay Muir’s recent -“History of Liverpool.” - -The direct consequences of that are obvious enough. Liverpool becomes, -quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a -place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. -Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together -from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its -houses are houses, not merely of recent birth, but pioneer houses, -planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed -meadow-land and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in -large measure, a city without ancestors. - -That is sufficiently manifest. But what is not so manifest, and -what robs these sept-centenary celebrations, these pageants and -retrospective ardours, of any too great tincture of incongruity, is -the fact that the River which has washed these interior traditions and -memorials away has also restored them in another place and form. It has -established, at the gates of the City, a far more perdurable monument -to antiquity than any that architecture could contrive. For, whilst -they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of -the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of -land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with -one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain -of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours -their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched -its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire -something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful -quantities. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, they inevitably pass -into vital touch with the earlier wielders of the weapon: with the -dim fisher-folk who were its eldest users; with the cluster of serfs -who received their first “charter” of privileges seven hundred years -ago; with the Irish traders of the seventeenth century; with the -slave-traders of the eighteenth; with the merchants who watched the -dawn of the day of the last great onset. The River becomes in this way -a kind of Cathedral, a place heavy with traditions, full of the sense -of old passions. - -This is clearly not the sort of influence that one can measure with a -foot-rule or sum up in a syllogism; but in this nuance of endeavour -and in that, in characteristics which it would be impossible briefly -to define, but which may perhaps appear in the pages which follow, -the effect, I feel, is made faintly, delightfully apparent. The sheer -youth of the place has been granted something of the dignity of age. -The audacities and vigours of the century which gave it birth have -been tinged with a certain gravity and largeness. The very force -which has made the place so superbly youthful and athletic, so -finely unhampered by the rags of outworn modes, has also granted it -that intimate sense of history, that heartening and annealing influence -of ancient ardours vitally and romantically recalled, without which a -city, as a nation, is but an army without music and banners. - - -§ 3. - -[Illustration: BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER] - -And it is this complete dependence of City upon River, too, which -helps largely to explain what are certainly the two main paradoxes of -her daily life: the fact that she is of all cities at once the most -heterogeneous in composition, and in exposition the most homogeneous; -and the fact, again, that her commercial interests are extravagantly -world-wide, and her civic interests extraordinarily local. They are -characteristics, these two, which never fail to attract the observer -extremely--perhaps, even, extremely to puzzle him. He remarks the -cosmopolitan population, the nomadic life so many of them lead, the -disturbing flux and bustle of the traveller-strewn pavements; and in -face of these things he discovers, to his huge surprise, that the civic -spirit of this variegated and distracted junction is more puissant -and concerted than that of any other city in the kingdom. He knows -that she is, in effect, little more than a great gateway between West -and East; he knows that her merchants are chiefly middlemen, that the -prime function of the place is to fetch and carry, to bring from hither -and forward there; and yet he finds the whole affair looming up into -a stubborn Rodinesque independence, achieving this and that original -thing with an unexpected air of finality, and maintaining always an -aloofness, a clear and unmistakable individuality, that seems utterly -incongruous in the midst of the involved world-movements swaying so -frantically about her. - -Of the accuracy of his observation, at all events, there is room for -little question. At every turn of the City’s social and municipal -life those two salient antithetical characteristics are vividly -displayed. Liverpool is boldly different. She possesses, it seems, a -singular faculty for moulding and co-ordinating. The peoples of the -world pour through her streets, but they never interrupt her energetic -introspectiveness. Fragments of this and that exotic race remain; they -settle down, they breed, they pour their alien habits, their alien -modes of thought, speech, religion, into the communal veins; but there -is no perceptible change. The same emphatic lines of activity sweep on; -the same special type is faithfully reproduced.... Liverpool, it seems -to me, is astonishingly self-absorbed. It is her own problems that -chiefly interest her, and she has a habit of solving these problems for -herself on self-invented lines. She has striven to work out--she is, as -we shall see, still intently striving to work out--in ways of her own -devising, the salvation of her proletariate. She has created a society -that is quite untinged by the colours of the county. She has bred her -local school of painters. Her politics are a strange sort of democratic -conservatism. She is more civic than national, and the newspapers of -this most cosmopolitan of English towns tend to reflect the movements -of the City rather than the movements of the nation. And yet, she is -not provincial. Manchester, her nearest neighbour, has her finely -national _Guardian_, and touches the actual life of the metropolis with -a far greater intimacy and frequency; and yet, of the two, Manchester -is clearly the more provincial. For provinciality, after all, is but a -subordination to the metropolis, a reflection, half deliberate, half -unconscious, of the life that goes on spontaneously at the centre. -Well, Liverpool would be spontaneous, too. She will imitate no one, -not even London. She will be her own metropolis. And those who have -marked the clear efficiency of her designs, the unique mingling of -American alertness and Lowland caution which colours the spirit that -lives behind her very positive efforts, will admit that she has come -bewilderingly near success. - - -§ 4. - -Much of this unexpected loyalty to certain salient attributes, -unvarying and individual, is due, no doubt, to the brevity of the -period in which her final growth took place: the pressure and intensity -of the moment begot, of necessity, a kind of concentrated civism. And -much of it, too, is due to a certain physical peculiarity which it -is perhaps worth while remarking. The City and the River, of course, -have now become a roaring avenue between the hemispheres; but none -the less, Liverpool, in a certain narrow, internal sense, cannot be -regarded as other than side-tracked. Unlike Manchester, she lies some -distance away from the great highways that link north with south, -and even to-day the tradition of London’s remoteness still to some -extent adheres. This isolation--an isolation that was felt very keenly -in the early days of her growth--must have helped, in some measure, -to breed that spirit of independence and self-reliance. She had to -fight for herself. Her River made her too strong to be crushed by -the disadvantage, and gave her more than all the power she needed to -transform that initial weakness into a positive stimulus to especially -emphatic effort. - -So the River reappears; and I like to think that it is, in the end, -to the influence of that superbly dominating presence, even more than -to the influence of these factors of concentrated growth and isolated -station, that the City’s paradoxically assonant announcements are to -be attributed. It is, as we have seen, the City’s _raison d’être_, -the chief orderer and distributer of her people’s vocations; and in -that way alone it interweaves class with class, provides merchant, -clerk, seaman, and dock-labourer with a common unifying interest. -But with this dictation of tasks, with this provision of a tangible -_leit motiv_ that runs through and conjoins the efforts of several -hundred thousand workers, the co-ordinating influence of the River can -scarcely be believed to end. As a controller of physique, for instance, -slowly reconciling disparities, its effect must be incalculably -potent. It is a reservoir of tonic airs; it renews and revivifies the -common atmosphere; it sets a crisp brine-tang in the heart of every -inhalation. Some kind of mental and physical conformity, not easily -to be defined, but still remarkable, that democratic sting quite -conceivably creates; and some kind of subtle solidarity, too, must -certainly result from the constant, unforgettable presence of a piece -of outer Nature possessing so large a share of unremitting loveliness. -From the fierce beauty of the River, indeed, there is no possibility -of escape: its scale is so vast; it thrusts itself so exultantly upon -one. It is not only the strange powers that belong to moving waters -that it exercises; it trails with it as well, into the very core of the -City, a great attendant sweep of unsullied and inviolable skyscape, and -burns great sunsets, evening after evening, within full gaze of the -town. The imaginative effect of all this insistent pageantry cannot, -indeed, be easily overestimated. And I certainly believe that it is one -of the great forces that weld this diverse city-full into so curious a -unanimity. - - -§ 5. - -[Illustration: THE LANDING STAGE--SOUTH END.] - -In view of all this vital domination of the City by its River, there is -something singularly appropriate in the nature of the first impression -created by Liverpool on the traveller who approaches her from the -sea. That first impression is, quite inevitably, an impression of a -great river with a city vaguely and ineffectively attached. He has -left New York, let us say, a week before, and New York remains on his -memory as an intricate, high-piled monument of stone and iron, crowding -upon and overshadowing the waters of the Upper Bay. No such effect -of dominating human interests salutes him as he steams up the river -towards New Brighton from the Bar. The south-swinging curve of the -coast hides the City for a while, and for a while he sees nothing but -a long, low line of bourgeois villas, sitting comfortably among the -sandhills on his left, and the great sky-snipping lattice of the New -Brighton Tower rising, not inelegantly, ahead. The houses on his left -increase; Waterloo and Seaforth shine pleasantly in the sun; and from -the base of the Tower, behind the domed and glittering pier that swims -delicately out into the water from its root, more bourgeois villas -and a great plenitude of white sea-promenades, stretching away up the -coast to Egremont, up, beyond sight, to Seacombe, carry out the note -of mild watering-place delights. It is all very charming, thinks the -visitor, but it doesn’t particularly suggest any furious commercial -maelstrom.... The town swings into foreshortened vision, flat and -docile beyond the racing tide: a mild, smoke-softened, wavering of -roofs, a sporadic spire or so, a dozen and a half of chimney-stalks, -and the dun cloud overhead--the constant cloud that ought certainly -to speak impressively of industry, but that seems, somehow, on the -contrary, to mitigate all the efforts (none of them very energetic) -that the City makes in the direction of mass and lordliness. With the -steep uprising of the Seaforth battery comes the first of the dumb -grey miles of granite that stretch up-river to the Stage. They testify -nothing to man’s sovereignty, these great dock-walls; they seem--if, -indeed, they seem of human origin at all--no more than an enforced -defence-work; and the quiet rigging discernible behind them, and the -funnels of a hidden liner, carry on that idea of the River’s superior -strength--a strength sufficient to pass the grey barriers and create a -second kingdom in the plains beyond. A couple of little towers, perched -on the wall, make pseudo-romantic notes--absent, archaic, meaningless. -A great warehouse, four-square and stolid, with blind eyes, is set -heavily down like a dull box--a box that may be full or empty, but that -is undoubtedly shut and locked, whose key has undoubtedly been mislaid. -More warehouses, all equally immobile, sullenly succeed it; and then -the Landing-stage itself, low and level and a trifle dingy, begins -to run humbly alongside, spirting out at intervals a little squeal -of advertisement-begotten colour. And still there is no resounding -manifestation from the City. The fretted tower of St. Nicholas makes a -neatly punctured patch upon the sky; the Town Hall Dome shows vaguely; -there is an unexplained glitter from the baseless crest of the Royal -Insurance Office. But the solitary building within sight that swerves -up with any unmistakable authority is the building of the Mersey Docks -and Harbour Board. - -And beneath, or beside, all this flatness and domesticity, the Mersey -itself reels and swaggers splendidly. It is turgid and tumultuous; its -bustling highways interlace alarmingly; there is a constant shouting -and hooting and dancing of eager craft. Higher up-stream, the vast salt -lake of the Sloyne holds a brace of liners, each, as it would seem, -more massive than the town; and a tall imperturbable frigate sways -graciously out towards the sea, bursting into white sail-bloom as she -goes.... - -Nor, when he steps ashore, and climbs up Water Street to the City’s -hub, does that effect of the River’s supremacy utterly forsake him. -Salt airs from the sea pursue him; strange tongues salute his ears; -far-brought merchandise is plucked hither and thither about him as he -goes. And even when he passes through the heart of the City and into -the suburbs beyond, and through the belt of these into the open country -that stretches towards the east, the sting of the brine will from time -to time assault him, and he will hear the endless crying of sea-birds, -and he will watch the grey, innumerable gulls as they rise and fall -above the red wake of the plough. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE DOCKS - - -§ 1. - -[Illustration: THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK.] - -As Liverpool lies deployed upon the South Lancashire landscape, -she falls into the shape of an all but fully unfurled fan. The -root bone-work of that fan, its unwebbed handle-part, is formed by -the commercial apparatus of the place, the municipal apparatus, -and--pleasantly conjoined to these hard masculine concerns--the more -feminine region of the great shops, the flowers, the carriages, the -shopping women. All this has been compactly tugged down towards its -central wharves by that inevitable arbiter the River; it forms the -area, busy but uninhabited, which the traveller enters the moment he -steps ashore. In it are the streets of offices, the banks, the various -Exchanges--Cotton, Corn, Produce, Stock--and occasional dense masses -of warehouses; all about these--a pattern of dull jewels, say, on the -grey essential framework--there lie the great official buildings--the -Town Hall, the Municipal Offices, St. George’s Hall, the Art Gallery, -and so forth--with here and there, more vigorously flashing, the glassy -bulbs that tip the railways; and there, finally--a series of decorative -flourishes--curve the bright ways of the emporia. Next, to right and -left of this clean-picked fabric, appear, like two swart brush-strokes, -the twin quags of the slums--their position, too, explicitly defined -by the River; and beyond these, again, drooping down V-wise towards -the handle in the centre, but for the rest holding consistently aloof, -spread the vast, indeterminate plumes of the suburbs, curving round -from the river-side at Seaforth, away through the open country, and so -back to the river-side at Garston. - -Thus, the whole congeries splits up, it will be seen, rather more -automatically than is usual, into just those four great divisions which -every modern city is theoretically supposed to display. Here and there, -of course, a divergency appears: over at Linacre, for instance, a group -of industrial exploits--match-works, dye-works, a tannery--have lunged -out towards the open, have tended to create out there their own special -circle of suburb, their own little patch of slum. Over at Garston, -again, there is a somewhat similar happening; and across the River, -on the shores of the Wirral Peninsula, Birkenhead, with its Town Hall -and its Docks, makes an attempt to complete that tangential impulse -which the River has interrupted. But, for the most part, the two main -facts in Liverpool’s career--the precipitancy of her uprising and the -singleness of her purpose--have served to make her adherence to that -basic plan a singularly faithful one;[2] and I propose, therefore, to -take advantage of it in this book, dealing in the third chapter with -that central region of shops and offices and civic architecture, the -formal van of the army; in the fourth chapter with the plumes of the -fan, the skirmishing sweep of the suburbs; and in the fifth with those -dusky smears of the underworld. - -[2] It is interesting to observe that in this, as in so many other -matters (the strength of her civic spirit, for instance; the nature of -her municipal exploits; the conspicuous attention she is giving to the -specifically urban problem of the Housing of the Poor; her constant -devotion to the specifically urban business of locomotion), the -abnormal circumstances of Liverpool’s growth have made her an unusually -faithful embodiment of certain of the most essential of modern urban -impulses. She is, as I have said, boldly different; and it is of the -body of that difference that she should be thus clearly representative: -there being nothing, in actuality, quite so exceptional as the typical. -On the one hand, that is to say, she is exceptional because she is -typical; on the other, she is typical because she is exceptional. - -But before I approach even the first of these, there remains yet -another region, perhaps more memorable, certainly more remarkable, -than them all: that queer specialized region of the Docks, the most -extensive thing of its kind in the world, which runs all along -the littoral, from Dingle in the south to Seaforth in the north, -sustaining, both pictorially and essentially, practically the whole of -that great fan of masonry, making a kind of long entrenchment, behind -which the army of the City is drawn up: the elaborately forged handle, -really, which Liverpool has constructed in order that she may grip her -weapon more effectively. - - -§ 2. - -It is a region, this seven-mile sequence of granite-lipped lagoons, -which is invested, as may be supposed, with some conspicuous properties -of romance; and yet its romance is never of just that quality which -one might perhaps expect. It is not here, certainly, in spite of -the coming and going of great ships, and the aching appeal of brine, -that the mind is moved to any deep sense of kinship with the folk -who wielded the river-weapon in old days. The place is as modern as -the town, as purged of traditions as the town, and the drama that -goes on here is one that has never been enacted in the world before. -Its effectiveness, indeed (I do not now speak of its efficiency), is -a thing that aligns with no preconceived notions of effectiveness. -Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing almost in excess -both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other--too -immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense -of human handicraft--this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed, -to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues -and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting -under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that -have long passed out of their control.... - -[Illustration: DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE ALBERT DOCK.] - -That, certainly, is the first impression--an impression that has -nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity -of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of -the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely -patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth -imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a sea-bird gravely -dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the -sun, the sudden emergence in the midst of this solemnity of some great -fever of monstrous echoing activity. Afterwards, of course, as the -senses grow accustomed to the new order of things, to the frightening -spaciousness and the bursts of tangled effort, there ensues another -attitude. Names catch the eye: Naples, Hong-Kong, Para; and the -imagination gets its practised opportunity. The sudden activities, -too--the clustered, wrangling cranes, perched on their high roofs, -and pecking tirelessly; the bound, leaning carcass of the ship below -them, bleeding from a score of wounds, the cranes about her own masts -adding to the riot; the long sheds, ringing with echoes, dappled with -tiny figures delving in a long ruin of all the goods of the world--they -begin to affect the mind more intimately. You find yourself in the -shadow of some slab hill of cotton-bales, or peering up the slopes of -a swelling cone of grain, a sibilant alp of gold, and you begin to -envision the anæmic spinster who will one day wrap herself in some part -of that sodden mound, or the white hen, in some dreamful farmyard, -that will one day peck this grain.... Or you come down to the Docks -after nightfall, passing out of the greasy silence of the northern -streets, under the terrace of the Overhead Railway, and so through the -gates behind the Huskisson. The air is troubled with a soft sustained -groaning: the _Saxonia_ (let us say) is at her berth discharging. She -arrived from Boston on Thursday, she will sail again on Tuesday, and -every instant, day and night, that soft moaning will continue. And that -direful sound, and the torment of labour going forward, in a shower of -green light, beneath the vague riven masses of the liner, serve somehow -to drive you on to thoughts concerning Liverpool’s efficiency and -tirelessness, concerning the bigness of her interests. - - -§ 3. - -And gradually, too, the system of the labyrinth begins to emerge. -That first period of bewilderment, of bewilderment that was almost -fear, when you crept along narrow shelves running between dead water -and warehouse wall, and watched the vistas unfolding, some gloomy, -some naked, some clotted with ships as a mill-dam is clotted with -drift-wood; when you crossed bridge after bridge, from granite islands -to granite mainland, and heard the wailful voices of men coming -desperately out of the distances, and decided with a sickening sense -of despair that the whole thing had swollen utterly out of hand, -that those ships would never be extricated, those giant forces never -recaptured--that bewilderment is followed by the certainty that -specific things will always be going on in specific places, and that -the whole litter of events is really made up of two or three constantly -recurring happenings. It becomes plain, for instance, that in one -branch of the Huskisson you will always find the brick-red and black -funnels of the Cunarders, and in another the cream and black of the -White Star. You learn, again, that in the Wellington one or other of -Glynn’s boats will always be unloading grain from the Danube, that -cotton from the Brazils and india-rubber from the Amazon will always be -found in the sheds beside the Queens, and grapes and wines from Spain -in the next dock to that, and rice from Calcutta over in the Toxteth. -An austere elevator in the Coburg insists on the constant attendance -of grain-barges; a mustard-coloured stain on the rim of the Harrington -stands for cotton-seed meal from Galveston; silver-hulled coasters, -their spars and rigging hanging in tender meshes against the blue, fill -the quiet reaches of the Salthouse; and in the cloisters surrounding -the sunless quadrangle of the Waterloo, men are always moving, as Mr. -Hay has painted them, in a deep warm tumult of golden dusk. One-seventh -of all the ships in the world, it is true, laden with fabulous loot, -are driven along these intricate waterways, are penned in these -monstrous interwoven cells; and one-third of all the goods the Kingdom -receives, one-fourth of all the goods she sends away, pass through -these great sheds and cumber these endless quays. But those vast herds, -charging so wonderfully across the plains of the Seven Seas, hold here -for the end of their flight a space that is measured by inches; -and you may, therefore, in spite of its enormity, map out the whole -labyrinth in your mind either chromatically or topographically, either -by the names of companies or in terms of grapes and silks and dyes and -precious ores, just as your temperament inclines. - -[Illustration: CUSTOM HOUSE FROM THE SALTHOUSE DOCK.] - - -§ 4. - -But however neatly familiarity may thus label the place and tie it up -into little packages of effort, that first sense of the superhumanity -of the drama going on here never for an instant lightens. The actors -employed, whether the liners themselves, or the gaunt roof-cranes, -or the dire monsters that effect the coaling, or the deliberate jaws -of the dock-gates, are designed on so immensely loftier a scale than -the rather draggled humans who run to and fro in their shadows, -watched by the great silences, that they inevitably upraise the -expectations to their own gigantic measure. Only in one brief corner -of this seven-mile harbourage is it possible to return once more to -the intimate human romance, the traditional drama, of harbours and -sea-traffickings. It is a little basin between the Coburg Dock and the -Brunswick Half Tide, and there, for a little while longer, beneath an -old-world quay, brown sails dip softly in a quiet haven. Fishermen -sit and smoke above them, nets hang in the sun, low buildings with -broken, domestic roofs run round a cobbled square; and in one corner a -pier-master’s cottage has its ivy, its curtains, its canary in a wicker -cage. It is a relic that serves only to italicize the change. A pace to -the right of it, a pace to the left, the new world of draggled humans -and unhuman gestures is awaiting one: a world where the blues of those -jerseys, the warm browns of those sails, have faded into the sad blues -and yellows of mechanics’ overalls. From the cyclopean platform of -granite, frowned upon by a cirque of raw cliff, and patterned with the -shaggy heads and shoulders of half-embedded liners, which lies at one -end of the chain, through all the rigid convolutions of honey-coloured -water which lead to the interminable clangour of the Atlantic berths -at the other, it is a place, invariably, where a new relation has -been established between man and the outer seas. It is in hieroglyphs -of granite and water, in monstrous shapes and silences, that the -bare-handed individual and the naked element make their communications; -and in the face of this terrible script it is not strange that the -writer should be forgotten. The efficiency of Liverpool, yes; but -never, quite, the efficiency of the people of Liverpool. - - -§ 5. - -I went down the other evening, for instance, to see the _Baltic_ -and the _Campania_ come in to their berths. They had both arrived -that morning from New York, they had landed their passengers and -their mails at the Stage, and all afternoon they had been lying in -mid-stream, two steep-shored islands, with the ferry-boats passing -beneath them and silver clouds of gulls ranging about their coasts. And -now, the tide being at the full, they had awakened wonderfully to life, -and were moving processionally down the flood. A brace of tugs marched -at the head of each, one a little to starboard, one to port, and in the -wake of each another tug nodded and dipped. - -It was a grey evening; a cold wind pressed upon the tide, slats of rain -broke upon the surface. But the sight of that pageant out there in -the stillness warmed the grey as with fire. It stirred the heart like -music; it was as elemental in appeal as music. It fingered a new range -of emotions, untouched by the doings of men. It was a progress as brave -and unhuman as the progress of clouds across the sky. - -The great moment came when they curved slowly about in the dusk, and -began to move imperturbably across the flood to where the head-light -of our pier upheld a cold gleam against the grey. The wind beat about -them as they advanced, flurries of rain beset them, but neither the -wind nor the rain, nor the racing tide, nor the narrowness of the -granite-guarded opening they had to enter, seemed in the least to -trouble that impassive progress. And then they were upon the gap, and -the sheer walls were crushing about their flanks, and a vague tumult -of sounds drifted down the air, and so they passed through, with a -kind of contemptuous precision, into the dead reaches beyond. One -admired, one marvelled, but it was never the admiration one gives to -human things. That vague drift of sound, the dim peering faces away up -there on the bridge, the little group of men running with a rope along -the quay--they all seemed quite irrelevant--little happenings to which -the lordly shapes remained profoundly indifferent. It was to them, to -those lordly shapes, that the homage went out; theirs was the courage -and the beauty and the wise strength. And when one lighted porthole, -and then another, revealed rooms filled with living people, it became -scarcely possible to resist a cry. The monster, after all, beneath -this impassivity, was really crammed and feverish with some dreadful -parasitic life.... It is a sensation not dissimilar to that which one -gets when, standing in Hyde Park on some clear spring morning, one -surveys the far landscape rising and falling away in the east, and -then suddenly realizes with a stound that all that palely gleaming -country-side is riddled with caverns enclosing living men. - - -§ 6. - -After the starkness and rigour of the Docks, the Landing Stage itself, -the half-mile raft, moored to the City’s gates, which forms their -centre-piece, presents a somewhat dilettante appearance, almost, -indeed, a sentimental. It certainly makes amends, at any rate, for the -absence of the human note in the theatre that stretches away at either -end of it. Half of Liverpool uses it as a matter of business, the other -half as a matter of health and pleasure, and it presents all day long -the appearance of a democratic promenade. It is, in fact, the finest -of Liverpool’s parks, furnished with its sheet of water, provided -with its cafés, its bookstalls, its seats. Merchants and clerks from -the contiguous bone-part of the fan slip down here at lunch-time, -mothers bring their children from the recesses of the suburban plume. -The actual people of Liverpool are here at last to be seen in vital -conjunction with the weapon they employ. All that is vivid in the -movements of great waters is made into a bright piece of their lives, -a familiar picture on the walls of their living-room. A breeze is -blowing, maybe, and all the wide surface is curded and laced with -foam. The foam makes a silver lattice up which the golden roses of the -morning climb and burn. The scent of their blooming has coloured the -dreams of the ages. - -Nor is even the utilitarian, the northern, end of the Stage, where the -great liners, the _Baltics_ and _Campanias_, discharge and accept their -passengers and mails, altogether free from that effect of festival. -The mass of the steamer blots out the sky, indeed, and it is thus in -a cistern of shade that the actual leave-takings are effected and the -baggage plucked aboard. But there is always so much of briskness, -of white-handed briskness, of silks and uniforms and an active -sociability, that the gloom becomes a positive aid to the drawing-room -sparkle of it all. Deep amongst those monstrous shapes and silences -at the Docks all the real effort has gone forward--the loading, the -coaling, even the embarkation of the emigrants--and having suffered -that in secret, the liner simply plays the part of stolid protector -of intimacies. The human drama is never very obvious: there are more -tears and tension at any of the great railway-stations; and although -the actual severance of the ship from its moorings--breaking away, as -it seems from a distance, like a solid lump of the land--does make some -restoration of that unhuman drama of elemental quantities, the massed, -fluttering handkerchiefs, the lines of upturned faces by the water’s -edge, keep the moment intimate and gallant. - -[Illustration: THE LUCANIA.] - -More of the real emotion of distance, of destinies astonishingly -contravened, belongs to the instant of the steamer’s arrival. The naked -fact of the departure is always somewhat misted, and the last severance -gradually prepared for, by the way the process extends: the steamer -protects the Stage for an hour or so, the nerves are habituated. But -the incoming of the liner is a different matter. It is a smear in the -sky, it is a neatly pencilled apparition, it is a towering event in -the River, it is a vast door barring out the west, all in the briefest -space of time: from start to climax the event leaps up through a swift -crescendo of incident, and the little figures trooping an instant -later over the high gangways that are really bridges from New York to -London have a fine aura of adventure. To see all this accomplished in -some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale -flowers on the far-drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the -world’s possibilities of beauty and romance. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE CITY - - -§ 1. - -How to set about conveying the sense of this great mass of minutely -reticulated architecture without instantly growing too pedantic -on the one hand or too vaguely general on the other--that is the -problem--always, in this business of civic portraiture, a very present -one--that now begins to grow especially insistent. For the Docks, -after all, in spite of their unhuman magnitude, do resolve themselves, -as we have seen, into a fairly compact cycle of recurrences; and the -Suburbs, again, unfolding themselves in their order, do provide a clear -and vital method of attack; and the Slums, unhappily, cling loyally -throughout to one dolorous code. But here, in this imposing van of -the civic army, there is neither loyalty to sole effect nor specific -rotation of several effects. Each building is more or less deeply -individualized; every street has its especial quality; and about the -bases of all these fretted cliffs, down all these changeful ravines, -the mutable tides of the traffic charge and ebb unceasingly.... How is -the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a -pitiful couple of thousand words?... - -One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to -speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed -alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather -superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops -equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident -glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. One would like to -contrast it with one of the ways that branch out from it--with North -John Street, for instance, bleak-faced and sombre, constantly resonant -with heavy traffic from the Docks, but made suddenly magnificent by -the rocketting cream and gold of the foreshortened Royal Insurance -building at its head; or with Whitechapel, again--a street, for all its -proximity, of so profoundly different a quality: a street that seems -always to be attempting to override, by dint of cheap cafés, clothiers, -boot-shops, and the like, the coarse utilitarian note that insists -on lumbrously emerging from Crosshall Street, from Stanley Street, -from the neighbouring clangorous Goods depots: a country tripper of -a street, shamefacedly endeavouring to conceal the presence of its -obviously autochthonous companions. - -And one would like, again, to speak of Stanley Street itself, chief of -those autochthonous companions, a narrow and difficult ravine, mostly -sunless, always noisy, whose bed is encumbered from end to end with -floats and lorries and waiting carters, and whose walls are provision -offices, provision warehouses, and the sheer grey flanks of the G.P.O. -From a gash in those grey flanks a blood-red stream of post-office vans -and motors is jerked out intermittently. The air is thick with swinging -boxes and heavy or keen with the most astounding range of odours: with -slab cheesy odours and searching fruity ones; with exotic odours that -one sniffs uncertainly, for which one can find no closer definition -than nice or nasty; and, supereminently, running through them all, -the wild decivilizing smell of wet deal cases--a smell that always -arouses a certain unemotional cotton-broker of one’s acquaintance to an -inconvenient but rather touching hunger for some particular place of -dim forest silences. - -[Illustration: BOLD STREET.] - -And then one would like to appraise the elusive atmosphere of Bold -Street--that intimate, elegant avenue of rare fabrics and shopping -women and the ripe, drumming ripple of automobiles--the Bond Street of -Liverpool, whose wood pavements make a sudden chosen silence in the -midst of the clatter, which is held beautifully inviolate from electric -cars and sandwichmen, and at the head of whose discreet vista the -tower of St. Luke’s rises gravely up, faintly remindful of the manner -in which the towers of Sainte Gudule survey that other road of women -and priceless elegancies in Brussels. And with this so purely feminine -apartment one would proceed to contrast, properly enough, some such -exclusively male possession as Brunswick Street. It, too, is highly -chosen and conserved, and the sober, archaic front of the old Heywood’s -Bank at the upper end of it prepares one at the outset for exactly -the unostentatious sobriety of the lower, where it passes under the -influence of the Corn Exchange. It seems to reflect, and the brokers -one meets there seem exceptionally to reflect as well, something of -the spirit of that fine race of merchants who wore leathern watchguards -but stocked a most excellent port, whose word was good for thousands -and who lunched at the little tavern which still stands there, like an -old-fashioned waiter, with so engaging an air of homely dignity. - -And it would be impossible, of course, to avoid comparing Brunswick -Street with that other exclusively masculine quarter, Victoria Street, -which passes, in spite of its consistent virility, through three -successive phases. In the first, where it lies between North John -Street and the Post Office, it has an almost Stanley Street-like -aspect--a wider and less viscid Stanley Street, with the red stream of -mail-vans exchanged for a black swarm of clerks and merchants, hiving -about the Produce Exchange. In the second it grows aridly official, -the fidgety pomp of the Post Office towering away on the right, the -Revenue Offices marching with much cold grey dignity on the left. -And, finally, in its third phase, it grows positively dramatic and -unintentionally spectacular: the offices of the town’s protagonistic -newspapers, the _Post_ and the _Courier_, confront one another -threatfully--silent at sunset, but romantically vociferous towards -dawn, and, from close beside them, one gets (especially on a morning -of sunshine) the most delightful glimpse of the entirely noble sweep -of architecture that rises up--dreaming, reduced, subtile--beyond the -quick, green flash that sings out from among the statuary of St. John’s -Gardens. - -And so one could go on, disengaging the essential spirit of street -after street, hoping that all the readings, taken together, would build -up into the gross effect of the whole thing, would cleanly spell out -the essential spirit of the City. As, indeed, they no doubt would. But -in the way of the adoption of that course there lies one rather serious -objection. To make its final result veracious, it would have to be -followed with uncompromising thoroughness; and if it were followed with -uncompromising thoroughness this chapter would never end. - - -§ 2. - -So, then, although it carries us a certain distance, that bundle of -street analyses, even if it were considerably enlarged, must not -be looked upon as final. The alternative method, of course, is the -eclectic--a searching out of “notes,” of the vistas, the groupings, -the buildings, that leap incisively out from the mass and engage the -memory--an arrangement of these things in some considered order. - -[Illustration: LIME STREET STATION] - -And to such a collection that bunch of street-portraits (their -subjects, to be frank, having been chosen rather less off-handedly -than might appear) forms an admirable nucleus. And since it is at the -moments of arrival and departure that the nerves are most sensitive -to aspects--since it is, in consequence, the first or the last -glimpse of a place that remains, for most of us, its practical, -portable symbol--the collection should next include a note of the way -Liverpool reveals herself at each of her four great vestibules--at the -Landing Stage, at the Exchange Station, at Lime Street Station, at the -Central Station. - -From within the railings that fringe the tiny courtyard outside the -last, for instance, it is as a neatly compacted vista of twinkling -shops, of converging roofs, minarets, and flag-poles, that, in the -day-time, she rather alluringly presents herself. There is much -delicate cross-hatching of shade and shine, much blithe gold-lettering -on the walls. There are flower-sellers on the kerb, a string of -hansoms glisten in the roadway, an electric car, double-decked and -yellow, surges down the hill from Ranelagh Street and provides the due -top-note.... Emphatically, a most efficient place, this Liverpool, -glossy and high-stepping, at once elegant and active. And with -nightfall it emerges as a place of quite exceptional loveliness. -That checked curve of the receding buildings, giving the prospect -depth without diminution, grades the lights without disparting them, -knits them together, both the near and the far, into one exquisitely -modulated chorus. Moon-green, mistletoe-white, orange, amethyst, and -pearl, are their principal colours, and in this chamber of converging -lines the massed clusters branch and leap and linger with the most -wonderful effect of tender ardency.... Emphatically, a place, this -Liverpool, possessing very singular possibilities of beauty. - -The Liverpool that awaits one outside the orifices that lead from -Exchange Station, however, is of a vastly different quality.[3] -Roofed with a remote, unimportant sky, floored (say) with a vague -shimmer from recent rain, and hung monotonously about with carefully -unobtrusive buildings, it seems less like one of the central spaces -of the City than a mere ante-chamber to rooms--possibly magnificent, -possibly squalid--that lie somewhere beyond; and in the mornings, when -the hosts from the northern suburbs are pouring silently through, that -effect is irresistibly emphasized. It is all neutral, non-committal. -The solitary stains of colour are the hoardings that flame up before -the Moorfields entrance, and the immemorial fruit-barrow that picks out -against the grey in Bixteth Street. - -[3] I speak here of what always seems to me to be its most -characteristic moment. That it should sometimes be profoundly -different, that it should often present itself, for example, as a -prolonged splutter of lorries fighting up from the Docks--agitated -enough, then, in all conscience, and daubed with much raw colour--is -but a testimony to that baffling mutability which seems, in this -matter, to make capture of the _vraie vérité_ even more impossible than -usual. - -[Illustration: LIME STREET, WITH WELLINGTON MONUMENT.] - -One’s impression of the Lime Street Liverpool, again, is always -tinged by the consciousness of that superb stretch of “smutted -Greek,” Liverpool’s most deliberate effort in the direction of -sustained architectural spectacle, which one sees just the moment -before or just the moment after. Without that consciousness, the -flat-chested, multi-windowed, watery-complexioned hotels that droop, -perhaps a little dismally, down the hill opposite, and the uncertain -traffic that spreads itself thinly out upon the vast road-spaces in -between, would probably not convince one that their claim to dignity -was extraordinary. But as it is, they do seem to catch a kind of -magnificence, a magnificence that is positively almost shared by the -little ragged sentry-box of the Punch and Judy show set oddly down, -like a grandfather’s clock, plump in the middle distance--a queer axis -for the cars that curve clangorously about it. As one advances, the -black chine of St. George’s Hall, a long grey ripple of steps lapping -its base, thrusts forward more and more emphatically, and so one -passes into sight of that plateau of classicism--St. George’s Hall, -the Museum, the Library, the Walker Art Gallery, which Mr. Hay has -described so perfectly upon another page. - -Deliberately majestical here, gravely featureless in Tithebarn Street, -elegant from the Central, Liverpool achieves within the last of her -four porticoes an order of effects more urgent and memorable still. -For it is behind the Landing Stage that many of the car routes of the -City terminate, and the great space of unshadowed roadway, empty of all -buildings save the new-sprung Dock Offices, is really a brave platform -on which the cars endlessly wheel and interlace. By daylight it is -wonderful enough: the long files of maroon and yellow monsters curving, -separating, recoiling; the constant scream and clangour of their onset; -the rich white bulk of the Dock Board building floating serenely -above the press. But towards evening, when every car becomes a great -cresset of prisoned flame, the golden plenty of it all, the intricate -splendour of this vast terrace of racing and receding fire, is a thing -to leave the senses glutted and overborne. Liverpool is no longer a -place of architecture, grave or dignified. It is a mere spectacle, -a piece of golden pageantry. And even the beauty of the dominating -building, ivory and pale rose as it accepts the sunset, luminous and -firm-bodied as an eastern cloud at the end of a day of wind, seems no -more than a fit accessory to the fabric of woven lights astir below. - -[Illustration: ELECTRIC CAR TERMINUS--PIER HEAD.] - - -§ 3. - -It is one or other of those vignettes that stands for Liverpool in the -minds of all but all those who live without her walls; but there still -remains another touch or two to add before the symbol we are attempting -to create can be called completed, before this inevitable, initial slab -of what must begin to appear uncommonly like sheer “word-painting” -(crude word for a cruder occupation) can be brought to a close. Already -we have taken the sense of a group of her central ways; already we -have surprised her at each of her four great doorways. It now remains -to brush in a connecting note or two, an episode or so from the less -formal interspaces: - -An appreciation, say, of one of those admirable fortalice-like -structures, the warehouses, which clamp all the lower end of the mass -and convert the little connecting roadways into canyons of sumptuous -gloom. Four-square and massive, they are always shapely; the old stock -brick, hand-made, of which so many of them are built, gives them a -fine hunger for ripe colouring; and from their vertical lines of -doorways--six, eight, ten, a dozen, of them superimposed in a slot that -runs from roof to base--they gain the power to charge their austerity -with something very near to positive elegance.... - -A reference to one other of the connecting ways: thin sabre wounds of -light drawn across the dense body of offices--to such a one as Leather -Lane, for instance, slipping stealthily from Tithebarn Street to Dale -Street, a sun-bright tremor of traffic, dainty and diminished as an -image in a lens, flickering delicately across its outlet.... - -An impression of some such typical grouping of the mobile and the -architectural as one gets, say, at the top of one of the three parallel -ways--Chapel Street, Water Street, James Street--which run down from -the centre towards the River: a crawling steep of men, cars, carriages, -and drays; the flags and signs of a horde of shipping offices -accompanying its descent; slow masts and a couple of great funnels -moving seriously beyond. Or of such another grouping as one finds being -repeated, over and over again, at the base of the brown stone curtain -that falls from St. Nicholas’ Churchyard to the street below: a troop -of sandwichmen, their beat ended, piling their placards against the -wall; a couple of ramping Clydesdales--head-chains glinting, feet -asplay for purchase--taking the Chapel Street hill; an aproned carter -swinking at their heads; a white-flecked mound of cotton-bales lurching -stolidly at their heels; high over all, sailing equably against the -blue, the fretted top-gallant of the Church.... - -A memorandum of one of the older (not the old--there are none) scraps -of the City, pushed a little to one side, antiquated before they are -antique: of that jolly little pot-bellied barber’s shop at the foot -of Mount Pleasant (Mr. Hay has described that, too), and of how the -slick new mass of the juxtaposed University Club crushes it into -insignificance--a ready-made metaphor; or of that delightful Georgian -residence in Wolstenholme Square, not far from Bold Street, with -lorries clattering about its mild old cobbles, and a trio of extremely -dirty tinsmiths bullying a carter from the top of its dignified -stairway.... - -[Illustration: THE LITTLE SHOP, MOUNT PLEASANT.] - -An appreciation of that tumultuary roofscape one surveys from the -steps of the Art Gallery, a thing to be seen against the afterglow, a -clean-verged, leaping monochrome of mauve on chrysoprase.... - -And there you have the main letters in the alphabet of masonry which -Liverpool uses to write out some part of her confessions. - - -§ 4. - -Now, it may be observed that I have made no reference whatever to -some of the most conspicuous majuscules in that alphabet. I have -said nothing, for instance, about the Municipal Offices, nor of the -Town Hall, nor of the Sailors’ Home, nor of the new Cotton Exchange, -nor of the old Custom House, nor of a dozen other much-photographed -architectural plums. This is not laxity, nor a sudden dearth -of adjectives, nor a disgust with the business of scene-painting. -There is, as they say, a reason; and if I disclose that reason, the -confessions which those dropped capitals bestud may tend to grow more -legible. Such disclosure might serve, at all events, to suggest a -co-ordinating theory, to provide a kind of zoetrope into which those -detached impressions and Mr. Hay’s pictures may equally be fitted, and -which, judiciously twirled, may induce them all to swim into a single -animate and breathing image. - -The fact is, then, that when Liverpool desires most to impress she -expresses least. When she draws herself together for a splendid -outburst, she grows inarticulate. Her considered effects are mostly -affectations. So that to pick out those effects, to arrange all the -majuscules together, is not merely to print her confession in another -type: it is to print a confession of another type. One omits these -deliberate, self-consciously impressive things from one’s notes, not -because Liverpool contains very little of such things, but rather -because such things contain very little of Liverpool. - -[Illustration: THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL.] - -For the spirit behind this fabric is essentially a spirit absorbed -in other matters than the deliberate, preconsidered capture of the -beautiful.... Out of the several characteristics we have already -noted--the swiftness of the City’s growth, its glittering modernity, -its tireless, deft adjustment of alien activities to a common -end, its tenacious efficiency and alertness--out of these things -in conjunction does there not already begin to emerge (we are all -invincible anthropomorphists in these matters) some kind of quite -consistent Personality--the genius of the place, if you will--the handy -embodiment, at any rate, of the main instincts which this specially -environed congeries has tended to throw into exceptional relief? For -myself, I see it always as a blunt Rodinesque figure, sternly thewed, -tensely poised, strenuously individual, tenacious of the actual, -impatient of mere dreams, energetic rather than adventurous, a lover, -above everything, of efficiency--efficiency, testing and twisting -things with earnest, untiring fingers, whittling things down to the -valid, irreducible core.... It is not from fingers like those that one -looks to receive many frail white images of beauty. And whether this -reading of the essential psychology of the place be true or false, -it is certain that the men of Liverpool have never been overprone to -sheer æstheticism. The vivid day of their City has been crammed with -leaping episodes, it has left no spare strength for flourishes, and -they have expressed themselves throughout in terms of a naked and -practical utility. Such purely decorative effects as have from time to -time been judiciously introduced become in consequence effects which -it is vastly easy to misunderstand. Take, for instance, that lordly -plateau-load of classical furniture at Lime Street--a feature that -would seem utterly to contradict, but that in reality beautifully -confirms, this non-æsthetic reading of the City’s nature. Raking among -the ruins of the place a thousand years hence, when steamships are -unknown and the Mersey is silted up, some earnest archæologist will -come upon those (in both senses of the word) imposing remains, and -will promptly be deceived. He will speak with rapture of the “sharp -bright edge of high Hellenic culture” that must have glittered about -the community which could produce such stately monuments; and he will -probably have a good deal to say about the civic decadence of his -contemporaries. But archæology (not, perhaps, for the first time) will -have been mistaken. These clean-limbed columns and great porticoes and -pediments were not upreared by a race of Phryne-worshipping hedonists. -Directly regarded, therefore, they are misleading, uncharacteristic; -but in an indirect way they are very characteristic indeed. One -would ask for no better proof of a man’s lack of native appetite for -literature than that he had read through, in turn, the whole of the -hundred best books. Similarly, this wholesale, uncompromising adoption -of an architectural mode already traditional, already innumerable times -approved, is a most convincing proof of the existence of that spirit -of honest and tenacious practical efficiency of which I have spoken. -When it came to a matter of beauty, they made beauty a business, they -captured it by brute strength and logic. There was nothing tentative, -experimental, about the effort; there was no attempt at realizing some -splendid, unprecedented dream; line for line, mass for mass, it was -the stolid, efficient reproduction of masses and lines about whose -loveliness there was no possibility of question. And so the beautiful -sequence of buildings which stands for Liverpool’s most deliberate -piece of architectural æstheticism is really a testimony to the -beauty-disregarding spirit of naked utilitarianism which her endless -and imminent activities have made inevitable. - - -§ 5. - -And it is precisely to this beauty-disregarding spirit of -utilitarianism again that one traces some of the most memorable and -significant pieces of beauty that the place possesses--more memorable -and significant than the St. George’s Hall group, because vastly -more vital and characteristic. For Liverpool, in spite of herself, -and quite unconsciously, is a place of exceeding beauty. Out of that -hard turmoil of tangible interests and endeavours a very splendid and -reassuring happening has sprung. In honest and shrewd response to -instant necessities, the city has been carved and kneaded into the -lean lines of practical effectiveness; and those lines have joined -wonderfully together to make any number of unpremeditated glories. -Loveliness has descended unawares. Built frankly for use, it seems -to have attained, by processes almost as organic as those of outer -nature, a very singular and moving impressiveness. That drama of -leaping roof-tops seen from the Walker Art Gallery, that chamber of -co-ordinated lights seen from the Central Station, that racing flood -of gold beneath the Dock Board building, are examples of the sort of -thing I mean. It is in these natural and instinctive creations, frankly -utilitarian, and not in her self-conscious trafficking with loveliness, -that Liverpool grows most sensuously magnificent. A curve of sunless -canal with clustered chimneys rising solemnly about; a pit of railway -sidings, warehouses ranged round, one proud white plume of smoke moving -slowly across it; long glittering reaches at the Docks; a black stretch -of suburb crawling out, myriad-speared, across the sunset; a mass of -warehouses blotting out the stars; hot vistas in the markets, ripe and -fierce with colour; burning evening skies, unintentionally clipped -and framed by the pillars of the Town Hall portico; roof-adjusted -rods of sunlight creating unexpected carnivals; perspectives forming -and vanishing; great horses moving in procession; swift, imperative -assonances--momentary, irrecoverable--between traffic and grouped -buildings: these and a thousand others of the same spontaneous kind -are the passages of her life, the native gestures, that linger in the -memory like a cadence, that colour her aspect with an abiding dignity -and graciousness. - -[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S MARKET.] - -And this is, after all, to say little more than that Liverpool -possesses in deep measure that strange accidental beauty of the modern -city which is a thing so new to the world that the arts have not yet -learned to teach men how to enjoy it. But in Liverpool (exceptional, -once more, because typical, typical because exceptional) that beauty -exists in a state of singular purity. It is a beauty that is the -result, above everything, of a naked response in stone and iron to -certain clear imperative necessities: such a response catching, as -it would seem, some of the beauty and authority that inevitably attach -to every articulate expression of a vital impulse. And in Liverpool -those responses have been especially clean and unentangled. The place -is self-contained: it has never run to booths and show-places; it has -no associations, romantic or historic, to attract the gaper; it has -never had to sustain a pose, and only rarely been tempted to attempt -one; and these facts, and the fact that its growth has been continuous, -that there has nowhere been any shrinkage or debilitation, have made -it possible for the garment of buildings to be fitted to the authentic -body of its energies with an absolute closeness and integrity. There -are no loose folds, no adaptations, very few adhesive insincerities. -The whole thing is supremely vital and athletic; and therefore it -everywhere discloses that strong and moving graciousness, as yet -almost wholly uncelebrated, which is as elemental and unaffected as -the strong, forthright graciousness of its River. - - -§ 6. - -Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the setting of this central stage, -its scenery and back-cloths. Let me now attempt to indicate, as -uninvidiously as may be, one or two of the more prominent actors: -themselves, of course, equally symptomatic, equally the choice and -the mouthpiece of that Rodinesque _deus ex machina_ couched invisibly -behind. - -[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS CHURCH AND THE LAST OF TOWER BUILDINGS.] - -_Place aux dames_, by all means.... Of the maturer actresses, however, -I confess I speak with a certain degree of diffidence. It is always -dangerous to generalize on such a topic, and when the generalization -inclines to be not wholly laudatory, to the danger of being guilty -of inaccuracy is added that of floundering into blank discourtesy. -But I will have, at least, the courage of my impressions. Sifting -them, I incline to suggest that the more mature of the women-folk -whom one discerns here, among the central shops--driving, walking, -shopping--seem somehow not wholly to succeed. The efforts of an earlier -day seem to have left their marks--sometimes in a certain exiguity, -more often in a certain inexiguity; and, facially, one rather deplores -the absence of anything in the nature of that enduring patrician -basis which sometimes makes (as one seems to remember) the inevitable -touches of attrition touches almost to be welcomed--touches that -refine, clarify, take distinction a delicate step further. Here and -there, in a Bold Street carriage, or in some one of the more guarded -roadways of the south-eastern suburbs, a silvery face will flash out -with a cameo-like precision; but their incidence is rare--quite rare -enough, it seems to me, to be accepted as significant. The general note -wavers instead between something almost touchingly _fade_ and something -too tenacious of qualities which, however charming in themselves, -have rather lost their personal propriety.... So one hesitatingly -generalizes. For the rest, there is an infinitude of kindliness; and -one suspects that it would sometimes much prefer to break away, more -often than it has the right to do, into frankest homeliness. One is -never tempted to deplore a too vulgar display of mere culture. - -But of the younger of the female players I speak with a notable -access of assurance. There, beyond question, do I seem to detect -the presence of a very distinct type, and (still more reassuring) -of a type that is vastly pleasant. More, I have, for the first part -at least of this judgment, the confirmation of a friend in whose -_flair_ for social qualities I repose, for the best of reasons, the -most absolute confidence. “I can tell them anywhere, anywhere,” she -assures me: in Paris, at Nice, in Scotland, it seems, the Liverpool -_jeune fille_ stands apart. To the latter part of my judgment, it -is true, she subscribes only an assent that is dimmed by a vague -qualification or so, perhaps not wholly inexplicable. She hints, -for one thing, at a kind of gaucherie; but that, I am convinced, -is unfair. One may suggest, indeed, not without justice, a certain -lack of finesse, but that is by no means the same thing. Gaucherie -implies a kind of inefficiency, an inadequacy that trends towards -clumsiness, and anything short of an absolute efficiency is flatly -uncharacteristic of the sort of girl I mean. Whether she speaks or -walks, buys a hat or wears one, plays golf or the piano, it is always -the consummate apportionment of means to end that most impresses one; -and if one rarely finds her indulging in the frailer, more elusive, -artifices of femininity--in those so alluringly deliquescent touches -of speech, voice, emotion, gesture, and so forth--in all the subtle -craft of implication, for instance--it is by no means because her -methods stumble before they reach her ideals, but simply because her -ideals include none of those fine, diaphanous practices. Her vision of -the world is as distinct and sharp as Mr. Bernard Shaw’s (Mr. Shaw, -indeed, would unreservedly admire her); her emotions are robustious and -definite; and she makes all this instantly quite clear, even to the -outsider, in her manner of speaking to her coachman as she steps into -her brougham, or in the strong delicacy of the colours with which she -so charmingly and undisguisedly emphasizes the clear colour of her eyes. - -I grow intimate, it will be perceived, and, in order to grow more -intimate still, let me appoint a flesh-and-blood heroine. She is a -woman who always seems to me perfectly to achieve exactly what her -sister-players, one in this way, one in that, succeed in attaining only -approximately. She certainly, at any rate, perfects and epitomizes, -in the most delightful fashion, what one singles out as their main -tendencies--their main physical tendencies, that is, and therefore, -no doubt, their main sub-physical tendencies as well. She is tall and -large-limbed, more Hebe than Diana, with the grace of swiftness rather -than of languor, and a mode of gowning that deals directly with the -body’s needs, and so, the body being so admirably fashioned, immensely -rejoices the eye. Bronze and rose (here one inevitably tends toward -dithyramb; but these Liverpool complexions, too good to be untrue, are -really quite memorable) meet distractingly in her face’s colouring, -and I will not deny an occasional freckle or so. She speaks an English -that is clean and well picked in a voice that is so satisfied that it -needs all its firmness to keep it from complacency, and she has no -discoverable accent. She lives at Sefton Park in one of the rather -ineffective houses we will criticize in the next chapter, and, as -often as not, comes to town by electric car. (London, I hear, still -looks askance at its County Council cars, but in Liverpool they are, -and always have been, quite the thing.) She is most herself when she -walks. Her stride is not evasive. Golf has helped to solidify it. She -writes a most excellent letter, reads a good deal, cares nothing for -Mr. Yeats, a great deal for Tolstoi, is (rather unexpectedly) a devotee -of Bach, and can play the Chaconne very vividly. She is at once shrewd -and tender, cool-headed and warm-hearted. And although she protests -that she has “a soul above self-coloured papers,” her regard for sacred -things, on the one hand, is as free from sickliness as her regard for -secular things, on the other, is free from crudity and ill-taste. - -[Illustration: SAINT PETER’S CHURCH.] - -She stands, then, that highly satisfactory young animal, for all that, -in their several ways, the majority of the younger women-folk tend -to rival; not only those who pass from brougham to shop in the clear -morning brightness of Church Street and Bold Street, but also those -others, even more truly native to these central quarters, whom one -observes hurrying here a few hours earlier, and leaving, with something -more of leisureliness, in the neighbourhood of six and seven: the less -fortunate, but scarcely less reassuring sisterhood whose business it is -to wait at the thither end of that passage from brougham to shop, and -produce such hats, ribbons, laces, flowers, as our heroine may desire. -Physically, indeed, these shop-girls of Liverpool have a charm that -rather astonishes the stranger; and they, too, are remarkably efficient -self-gowners. To pass down Lord Street and Church Street on some -spring evening, with the ebbing daylight tactfully erasing any of the -lines the stress of the long, close hours may have left on the young -faces, and the flowering lights of the City flinging little splashes -of piquancy among them, is to be charmed into accepting the physical -beauty of women as one of the especial attributes of these rapid -commercial streets. - - -§ 7. - -As for the male members of the company, they avow, of course, an -unusually complete immersion in occupations unmuscular and theoretical: -Liverpool’s exceptional freedom from industrialism--other than the -secluded industrialism of the Docks--making her, in this conspicuous -white-fingered urbanity of her workers, once more especially typical of -one of the chief modes of modern civic life. All manual labour being, -broadly speaking, tidily banished to the Docks, these central spaces -are left entirely at the disposal of the dock-labourer’s soft-handed -collaborators--the clerk, the merchant, the broker. Every morning, from -nine to ten, the tide of these spruce actors pours astonishingly in. -They cram and encrust the cars, they traverse, with a neat, fashionable -air, that mild ante-room in Tithebarn Street; they flood thickly up -from the River--an agreeably apparelled army that gives a fine air of -prosperity to all the streets, and that will shortly settle down, in -a thousand unseen cells, to its extraordinary and so modern labours, -dealing always with symbols instead of actualities, with signatures -instead of people, with bills of lading instead of bales and boxes, -flinging tons of merchandise from continent to continent with the flick -of a pen--a queer, Shalott-like existence of whispers and reflections. - -But in spite of these unmuscular rites, and in spite of those elegant -costumes, it must not be imagined that the ritualists are themselves -unmuscular. It is by no means a white-faced and dyspeptic clan, this -clerical tribe of Liverpool. And, for my own part, I like to believe -that it is the River once more which has secured for these clerks, -merchants, bankers, brokers, their rather conspicuous emancipation from -the proverbial physical defects of the sedentary. The place, anyhow, -is very clearly pledged to athleticism, as those rows of physical -culture magazines which chromatically tessellate the pavements of Water -Street and Chapel Street would alone suffice to make quite evident. And -certainly, even if it be not wholly responsible for this remorseless -pursuit of muscularity, the River gives that pursuit all manner of -exceptional advantages. The long series of famous golf-links that -lie amongst the sand-dunes at New Brighton, at Leasowe, at Hoylake, -at Formby, at Blundellsands, at Birkdale; the numerous salt-water -swimming-baths; the sailing clubs; the briny, gale-cleansed spaces of -aromatic gold, free to all who care to use them, that curve endlessly -about the coast; the mere proximity of the Landing Stage and the -presence of the cordial and bracing airs that enfilade the streets -of offices behind it--all these things must have tended to give -athleticism an especial point and vigour. The River has made one-half -of Liverpool a race of quill-drivers; but it has also made them a race -of exceptionally deep-lunged and brown-faced quill-drivers. - -[Illustration: EVENING AT NEW BRIGHTON.] - -Take, for instance, the case of L----. L----, nearer twenty than -thirty, is a clerk in a bank here, and he, like our free-striding -heroine, presents a clear and accurate summary of the tendencies one -notes in the innumerable clerks who fill the close-packed offices all -about him. He lives “across the water” at New Brighton, choosing that -because of the half-hour’s river crossing morning and evening. (He -spends that half-hour walking steadfastly round and round the upper -deck, hat in hand, practising--if he can do so unobtrusively--an -elaborate and, I am sure, highly painful system of respiration.) He -goes to the swimming-bath twice a week in winter, five or six times in -summer, dodging down there, if possible, at moments that are perhaps, -from a mere purist’s point of view, not entirely his own. But in these -matters L---- is no mere purist. He does his work well (he is really -a most excellent servant), and that suffices. He is paid £140 a year -for doing it well, and that, too, suffices. It suffices for three -£3 3s. suits per annum, for subscriptions to a football club, to a -cricket club, to a tennis club, for a sixth share of the expenses of -running a small yacht, for a £13 summer holiday, and for his various -trim necessities. He is a close student of the science of “fitness,” -regarding “fitness” (very properly) as a thing much superior to any -mental abnormality, and the shilling which suffices for his daily -lunch is not expended without due dietetical considerations. Just now -it is vegetarianism. Thereafter he repairs to one of those surprising -underground smoking cabarets--places where an Oriental easefulness -and languor loom dimly through a blue narcotic veil--which Liverpool, -probably because of her emphatic clericalism, provides in such -extreme abundance, and there, in the company of other seekers after -fitness, he sips, and smokes, and nibbles one of the two biscuits -with which he is provided (never both--that would be a grave _faux -pas_), and discusses athleticism until a quarter of an hour after -the time he should be back at his desk. He is lithe, clean-shaven, -temperate, unmarried, and, in spite of his _contes_, probably strictly -celibate as well. He reads, but books are of interest to him chiefly -because they remind him of life, give him a fresh appetite for the -fit and pleasant things of life; thus, he praises Harland because -his people--Anthony and the rest--are “so immensely decent.” He is -not inordinately religious, but the traditional piety of his people -is a thing he contentedly accepts. He may one day migrate (“going -abroad” is a familiar topic in this City of lowly paid clerks and -multitudinous cheap and obvious modes of exit), and if he does he will -certainly score. If he stays at home he will wind up with a small bank -managership and as much in the way of golf and week-ends as £250 a year -will permit him to use as a salve for the obedient monotony of small -bank management. - -That is one type of player. Another, and much older, is to be found -gravely pacing among those sober buildings in Brunswick Street. -Self-made, but never blatant; successful because of his common sense -and his genius for hard work, and remaining common-sensible and -hard-working in spite of his success; vested with a dignity that -sometimes verges on stolidity; suspicious of sentiment in life, but -an admirer of Bouguereau in art, he is pre-eminently the kind of man -who ought always to be commemorated in a steel engraving, never in a -photograph. He has had much to do with the creation of his City, and -certain of her newer propensities awaken in him a vague sensation of -alarm. Wealthy, he is a collector rather than an amateur, but a friend -rather than a host. Not without a rich vein of humour, he still takes -politics quite seriously. His house (if his family be amenable) has a -strong mahogany flavour; if his family be vigorous, that vague feeling -of disquietude pursues him there, where he is compelled to fit into an -incongruous bungalow-full of _art nouveau_ tenuities. - -[Illustration: THE WALKER ART GALLERY--INTERIOR.] - -Thus, in spite of the fact that he, more than any of the others, often -startles one by his resemblance to the tense Rodinesque figure beyond, -he finds himself already being surrounded by a steady flow of new modes -and influences. E----, for example, is the vigorous son of one of these -admirable persons; and E---- believes in bungalows, thinks consistent -dignity undignified, and has acquired for mahogany a distaste which -he believes to be instinctive. I doubt, myself, whether he has the -essential capacity of his parent; but his practice (he is a solicitor) -is good and whenever one catches his alert, rather thin, diligently -groomed face in the City, he seems extraordinarily full of business. -He is a member of a club, but uses it rarely: there is little club -life in Liverpool. His idea of conversation is to get one alone, and -talk shop with extreme diligence and (to be just) much charm. In spite -of his _art nouveau_ proclivities, he has less sincere taste for the -arts than his Bouguereau-appreciating father; but he has a great stock -of criteria, numbers a local portrait-painter among his friends, and -at the Private View of the Autumn Exhibition has a neat, intelligent -appraisement for every notable picture in the room. He never makes -discoveries there, and of course his range is limited. He has a -word of judicious praise for Hornel (whom his father still honestly -dislikes), but Steer has not yet emerged from the unimportant section -he vaguely calls Impressionist; but within those limits his efficiency -is surprising: yes, he is unmistakably intelligent. He is not quite -sure of the University: actually, unconsciously, he is just a little -afraid of all that it stands for; and the University, although it makes -a friend of him, has, in private, an attitude not wholly antithetical -to pity.... That splitting up--that friendly specialization and -intelligent exchange when needed--of culture, of business instincts, -of dilettantism--so different from the inclusive interests, almost the -independent universality, both of demand and supply, that marked his -father--I find quite profoundly characteristic of the Liverpool of the -present moment. - - -§ 8. - -Well, there, in their most characteristic rôles, are some of the chief -of the players who step efficiently, efficiently, through the six -days’ traffic of this well-set central stage. I have said nothing, -it will be seen, of their nationalities. That is partly because -national characteristics in Liverpool have a way of bowing to the -local spirit--or rather, to put it more accurately, because various -national characteristics have contributed to a local spirit that an -Englishman, a Scotchman, or a Welshman finds it easy and proper to -adopt. Thus, there are any number of clerks in the North and South -Wales Bank (whose Head Office is here) who are perfect replicas of -L----, and E---- _père_, for all his typical Liverpolitanism, is really -a pure-bred Scot. And it is partly, too, because any real consideration -of this alluring question of race would lead to what would be, in this -most cosmopolitan of places, a quite endless business: the discussion, -namely, of how the pattern of the local spirit has been affected by the -presence of those charming peoples who draw such bright exotic threads -through the social fabric. - -Into all that, unhappily, I have here no space to enter, nor can I -even, much as I would desire, describe the changes of cast and play -which occasionally take place: the pale Maeterlinckian drama, for -instance, which is invariably presented at the close of the six days’ -traffic, making a mild hyphen between Saturday’s curtain and Monday’s -overture--a coming and going of unknown people among wide echoes and -empty roadways, with the sleepy Sunday buildings looking down in a -kind of vacant puzzlement.... Or that other performance, not in the -least Maeterlinckian, by which the Sunday quiet is succeeded--the great -Rabelaisian drama of the Bank Holiday, presented by an entirely fresh -company with new costumes and new effects. The lumpish dialect of South -Lancashire echoes everywhere about the stage on such occasions. The -Landing Stage is a prolonged ballet in red and white and inordinately -electric blue. And although the Cotton Market and the Stock Exchange -are utterly deserted, the appearance in the streets of a strange, -pinkish, tissue-wropt substance described (perhaps apocryphally?) as -“Liverpool Rock” would seem to testify to the discovery, and to the -whole-souled encouragement, of a hitherto unsuspected local industry. - -And I would have liked, too, to celebrate in some measure the -change that sweeps over the City with the oncoming of night. It is -in her native unconsidered gestures, as I have said, far more than -in her studied poses, that the essential beauty of Liverpool is most -perfectly revealed; and it is at night, when the aid of the sunlight -is ended and the sky is a forgotten tale and even the stars are of as -little moment as moths that palely flutter outside the windows of a -lighted palace, that Liverpool becomes most elemental and instinctive. -Abandoned by external nature, she becomes most natural, and therefore -attains her most conspicuous beauty. Those electric cars, of course, -designed purely for utility, with no thought of spectacle, give to -her nocturnes their special individualizing note; so that whilst -she has nothing to correspond to that astonishing golden spray of -hansoms which makes midnight Piccadilly a place of almost intolerable -magnificence, she has her own rich code, just as characteristic, and -of but little less a loveliness. Down London Road, down Renshaw Street, -the crocus-coloured rivers pour into the vortex of light that boils -beneath the great cliffs of Saint George’s Hall, so terrible in their -nocturnal shapelessness. Moon-green arc-lamps, that only Baudelaire -could properly describe, hang, strange fruits, above the golden -turmoil; and it is through courses fledged by sun-gold and canopied by -this moon-green that the fluent saffron finally escapes. It sweeps down -Dale Street and Water Street, it sweeps down Church Street and James -Street, and so pours out, in the end, upon that streaming terrace by -the water-side. - - -§ 9. - -So, inevitably, we return in the end to the River, the beautiful -source of all this beauty, the magnificent architect of all this -golden triumph. I have spoken already of its daylight loveliness, -of the elemental hungers that it both feeds and fosters, of its -cordial ministry to all that is most panic in men’s blood. But with -the advent of night it, too, suffers a deep and splendid change. -Renouncing this medicative disloyalty, it frankly surrenders itself -to the City’s rule, and becomes a peaceful province of urbanity. The -lights of the City make golden chains about it, golden lights from -the City patrol its deep recesses. It is the hour of reconciliations. -The City is more elemental than by day, the River is less elemental, -and a long sustained harmony unites the flaming tides of the streets -and the darkened causeway of the tide. Even the boats have shared the -transformation. So eminently business-like beneath the sun, they are -now changed to shining presences, romantically visiting the night. -Topaz, emerald, and ruby are their chosen favours, and widespread robes -of cramoisie and gold reflections trail sumptuously about them as they -move. - -[Illustration: OVERHEAD RAILWAY FROM JAMES STREET.] - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -THE SUBURBS - - -§ 1. - -If one wanted very badly to indulge a passion for historical -retrospect, this chapter, of course, would provide the great -opportunity. For although it is customary to regard them as mere -upstarts, the Suburbs of Liverpool, like the suburbs of so many great -towns, are really much more venerable than the City itself. West -Derby, for instance, was a place of power and dignity when Liverpool -was a mere huddle of patched cabins on the marshes away below; and -Bootle, Litherland, Crosby, Walton, Kirkdale, Smithdown, Wavertree, and -Toxteth, unlike the place that now looks down upon them patronizingly, -are all distinguished by references in Doomsday Book. But in spite of -this, and although, as we shall see, some faint odour of antiquity -still here and there survives, yet to make anything more than the -barest mention of their fine old memories and traditions would be to -create a very false impression of the aspect they present to-day. It -would be quite possible, I imagine, to wander through Kirkdale for a -lifetime (an inspiring pilgrimage) without once suspecting that it owed -anything to any other era than excessively mid-Victorian; and to tell -over the far-off things that made Smithdown and Toxteth names of terror -or magnificence in old days would be to give about as fair an idea of -the expression now worn by those sober neighbourhoods as a description -of the old tithe-barn that once stood there would give of that cautious -ante-room in Tithebarn Street. The Suburbs are certainly older than the -City, but the City has infected them with her youthfulness. They do, -in cold fact, grow younger every day. - -[Illustration: THE HORNBY LIBRARY.] - -This double process of suburb-subordination and suburb-rejuvenescence -has always, of course, been dependent upon the progress of the arts of -locomotion; and its latest and swiftest phase was undoubtedly heralded -by the clangour of the gong on the first electric car. It is her -cars, as we have seen, that perfect Liverpool’s most characteristic -beauty. It is her cars, again, that have helped to perfect her -characteristic homogeneity and compactness, that have helped to bind -the whole sprawling mass, City and Suburb and all, more and more -tightly together, both physically and sentimentally, into one unigenous -organism. The London suburb, save in such districts as are tapped by -the Tube and its companions, is a fairly self-contained community; -it has its own shops, interests, concerts, society; and even in many -of our smaller towns and cities the general effect is that of a -number of self-interested _colonies_ pouncing upon the central spaces -for the mere means of life, and then returning to their own private -recesses to dispose of them. But in Liverpool the Suburbs tend more -and more to part with their independence, to “pool” their interests -and enjoyments, to form themselves into a kind of family party ranged -round the brightly burning grate of the City. And they grow more -like a family party, not only because of this absorption in a common -atmosphere, but also because of the increasing freedom which marks -their intercourse one with another. That division of the residential -semicircle into specific social _faubourgs_--Scotch engineers in -Bootle, for instance, Welsh builders in Everton, merchants in Sefton -Park--which subsisted very definitely until quite recently, is now in -large measure being broken down. Interfusion of social states goes on -with constantly increasing rapidity. Families who now migrate with -the utmost nonchalance from, say, Kirkdale to Aigburth, confident of -finding somewhere there precisely the strata to which they have been -accustomed, would have looked on such a flight only last generation as -being almost as impossible, almost as profoundly charged with social -significations, as a transfer from Poplar to Park Lane; and were -content, as I well know, to live and die and inherit without stirring, -without dreaming of forsaking an equally static coterie of friends. -Well, the chief agent in breaking down these social divisions was also -that art of locomotion to the encouragement of which Liverpool, as -I have said, has so peculiarly devoted herself, and the latest, the -most democratic, and the most mobile of the creations of that art, -the electric car, has inevitably increased that fluidity in a very -remarkable degree.[4] The overhead wires that bring every suburb into -vital connexion with the centre are like the radiating nerves of the -organism, flushing all the extremities with one sympathetic life. - -[4] It is impossible to doubt that Liverpool’s conspicuous devotion -to the business of locomotion--a devotion that is briefly evidenced -by the significant association of her name with the first railway, -the first canal, one of the first sub-river underground railways, -the first electric overhead railway, the first sustained application -of electricity to long-distance railway traction, and now with these -electric road cars--owed its first impulse to that comparative -isolation of her early situation to which I referred in the first -Chapter, and that the eager continuance of that devotion was largely -due to the function of universal carrier which was afterwards imposed -upon her. It is equally impossible to doubt that it was that early -isolation which helped, at the outset, to foster her spirit of -independent and concerted effort. And it is, therefore (to me, at any -rate), rather a pleasant reflection, and not perhaps a wholly useless -one, that the circumstance which primarily and directly induced that -essential solidarity was also the circumstance which created the tools -for riveting it; and that the creation of those tools was considerably -aided by the apparition of precisely those forces which seemed to -threaten her with a disrupting cosmopolitanism. - - -§ 2. - -It is by the presence of these wires, then, that you may recognize -the great suburb-reaching thoroughfares, the raying bones of our all -but unfurled fan, and by taking up a position at one of the central -junctions--that river-side terrace would be an excellent place--you may -traverse them all in turn, and examine almost all the details of the -residential plume, with no more trouble than is caused by stepping from -pavement to car-platform, from car-platform back again to pavement. -Seaforth tips the first bone; Litherland the second; Walton, Aintree -and Fazakerley, Everton and Anfield, Cabbage Hall, Tuebrook and West -Derby, variously feather the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth; whilst -Fairfield, Old Swan and Knotty Ash, Edge Hill and Wavertree, Sefton -Park and Mossley Hill, Dingle, Aigburth and Garston, fledge the -remaining branches in the east and south. - -Great Howard Street, Derby Road, and Rimrose Road, the three nominal -sections of the first of these plangent ways, are tipped, as I say, -by Seaforth, and to reach Seaforth they have to bore their way -through the dense landscape of warehouses and timber-yards that lies -behind the northern docks. But out beyond Seaforth, through Waterloo, -Blundellsands, Altcar (its rifle-ranges crackling like a coffee-mill), -Formby, Freshfield, and Birkdale, that other humming river of -electricity, the most western arm of the Lancashire and Yorkshire -Railway, whose course the road from the first pretty closely follows, -drains (or, rather, feeds) a constantly spreading, bungalow-saturated -district of _bonne bourgeoisie_. It is all very prosperous, this new -rubicund neighbourhood: sand-hills and wide shore spread between it -and the sea; half a dozen golf-links accompany its brisk march by -the railway-side; and that march can really scarcely be regarded as -completed until the railway terminates, and plutocracy flames up in -a last supreme outburst, twenty miles away from Liverpool, among the -bathing-vans and pierrots of Southport: for Southport, too, in spite -of plutocratic hauteur, is being rapidly induced by locomotion to play -the part of Liverpool’s accessory. And Southport presents, anyhow, a -series of little paradoxes in appearance upon which one could desire -to linger. It is, for instance, at once the chosen home of countless -millionaires, and the chosen resort of countless cheap day-trippers. -(Although that, indeed, if all local tales be true, is less fundamental -a paradox than might perhaps be supposed.) Antitheses--at any rate -superficial antitheses--are in consequence engagingly plentiful, and at -night the place crowns this distracting effect by assuming all the airs -and graces of the Continent. Lights thickly sown among the prolonged -verdure of its central boulevard, a red-coated band and endless -promenaders, little tables beneath the trees--yes, it is all, to the -eye, very perfectly arranged.... And then, suddenly, disastrously, -there emerges the slow accent, the toilsome facetiousness, of -Chowbent.... But it is still very charming to have so many of the -materials of illusion so ingeniously provided; and one looks back at -evenings spent there, discreetly companioned, with a very quick tinge -of pleasure. - -As for Seaforth itself, the first link in this chain of seaside -settlements--well, it, naturally, is the least personable of them -all. “The slums of the future,” say the pessimists sententiously; and -already a notable greyness begins to creep over its tightly packed -workmen’s cottages. It seems especially deplorable, for the shore of -the place (unbelievably peppered in the summer heats with naked pinkish -youngsters) is clean and fair enough, New Brighton glitters pleasantly -across the estuary, the Welsh hills heave up in the distance, and the -great ships of the world promenade before its parlour windows. A -little further along the coast, towards Waterloo, the Marconi station -leans upon its tall central mast like a sentry on his spear, and -listens to the cries of other great ships fighting in the clutch of -some blind Atlantic storm. - -Not far away, and even more conspicuous, a high, livid convent, -many-windowed and forbidding, rises up out of the sand; and on its -flat roof, remote against the sky, you may sometimes see the good -nuns pacing to and fro together, or leaning solitarily against the -wind. They must survey a bold and various prospect. On the one hand -the level floor of the sea, here dusked, there silvered, marbled by -voyaging clouds, runs out until it meets a wide pure sky. Poised at -the western extreme of the long horizon blade, Anglesey rests like a -sapphire, and the hem of all the air that sweeps away to the south -is braided thereafter by the woven hills of Wales. From them the eye -stoops successively to the shimmering aura of the Dee, to the embossed -interspace of the Wirral, to the bright-mailed river down below, and -so to the louring masses of the City, ranging darkly out towards the -east, a creation more terribly unhuman than even the mountains or the -sea. Lastly, there is the scaly back of the suburb lying beneath, and, -beyond it, unfolding between that spreading blackness in the south and -a rim of purple woodland in the north, a fair carpet of meadowland -and cornfield runs clear and away. A rare white farm or so, set in -that green tranquillity, invest it with a kind of homely joy. And the -tender outlines of a sister convent near at hand, rising gravely among -the serene devices of its trees, touch that joy with a patience as of -evening. - - -§ 3. - -But although it thus provides a very gracious incident in the -landscape, that sister convent, the Convent of Our Good Shepherd down -at Ford, plays no small part in increasing the dolour of the second -of our great northward-driving roadways. For its annexe, hidden among -those trees, is one of the chief of Liverpool’s Catholic cemeteries, -and since this second “bone” (Scotland Road, Stanley Road, Linacre -Road, are its successive names) passes through the very heart of the -Irish quarter of Liverpool, it follows that a grim pageant of rococo -hearses, plumes, and jaded mourners passes constantly along this -thoroughfare every Sunday in the year. It certainly stands in no need -of these aids to sobriety. Quite on its own merits it succeeds in being -the most profoundly depressing highway in all Liverpool. It plunges, -the moment it leaves the City, into the tawdry litter of shops that -edge the northern slum, and it is defamed, all thereabout, by the -sour sights and sounds and smells (the sights and sounds and smells -which we are to investigate in the next chapter) which the northern -slum exudes. It runs, after that, along the ragged fringe of the grey -curtain of shoddy streets that droops drearily down from the stooping -shoulder of Everton. And it winds up, at Linacre, with an altogether -abominable jangle of raw street-ends, waste lands, gasometers, and -factories. Its solitary moment of even comparative cheerfulness, -indeed, is to be set down to the credit of Bootle. At Bootle you catch -a glimpse of a couple of parks; a broad avenue--trim, well-treed, and -topped by an elegant spire--sweeps proudly across your track; and signs -of free-stone and prosperity are not wanting. Lacking that respite, -this arrow-straight four-mile stretch from the Old Haymarket to the -terminus at Linacre Road would infallibly induce neurasthenia. - -[Illustration: OLD HAYMARKET] - -Not that Bootle ever receives the slightest acknowledgment for this -fine alleviating effort. It is a curious thing, but no Liverpolitan -to whom you may ever speak will permit himself to refer to Bootle -except in tones of an amused contempt. In part, no doubt, this is a -result of Bootle’s obstinate, exotic retention of her independence. -In spite of the identity of interests, in spite of the physical -absorption which long ago took place, Bootle still clings vehemently -to her separate Boroughship; and not all the engines of suasion or -attack (and both sorts have been energetically applied) that Liverpool -can level against her seem able to encompass the surrender. Vividly -exceptional, breaking up, at any rate theoretically, the co-ordination -that would else be almost universal, she still adheres to all the -formulæ of a separate social and municipal existence: appointing her -own Mayor, lodging him in an impressive Town Hall, making him the hub -of a brightly revolving wheel of emphatically local sociabilities. -And Liverpool, incensed, no doubt, by this gross transgression of the -physical and sentimental laws that rule her life, responds with a dole -of contempt. - -It is terribly unfair, of course; for Bootle, in spite of the fact -that its dockside quarters are not places of an overwhelming lucency -and charm, really does possess many gentle and engaging attributes, -not least among them being the spasmodic presence in its midst (even -yet in larger numbers than elsewhere) of the most delightful broad -Scotch seagoing engineers--sitters (when in port) in stifling back -sitting-rooms--smokers of incomparable cigars (on which duty may or -may not have been paid)--possessors of a very precise knowledge of -the healing virtues of strong waters.... And yet, in spite of the -unfairness of that contempt, one can’t help feeling that perhaps, -after all--independence or no independence--something of the sort was -inevitable. Frankly, what is to be expected by a place so unhappily -named? Its absurdity is crushing. Bootle, tootle, footle--and not -another rhyme-sound in the language. _Buckingham Palace, Bootle_; -_White Nights, Bootle_: clearly, note-paper could affect no address, -from the most stately to the most charming, that it would not instantly -convert to screaming farce. And to protest that the name is of the -most honourable antiquity is by no means to avoid the consequences. It -simply invests the whole business with an extra tinge of tragedy. - -Independence of another sort, as yet untouched by tragedy, and -awakening in the soul of the Liverpolitan something more like envy -than contempt, is to be found at Litherland, which lies just beyond -that raucous Linacre terminus, a few steps nearer to the cemetery at -Ford. They are steps that provide an effective study in contrasts. They -carry one across a frail little swing-bridge; and whilst one end of -the bridge is immersed in that bad-tempered outburst of industrialism, -the other shares an atmosphere of positively Quakerish demureness. -Mild old Georgian residences, placidly sunning themselves among their -groves and lawns, are respectfully waited upon by an irresistible -village street of shops and inns and a post office. In the mildest and -sunniest residence of all the Urban District Council has comfortably -established itself; the village fire-escape sits contentedly upon the -lawn; and the orchard at the rear has been contrived into an alley -echoing with bird-song, where councillors and counselled may foregather -with their evening pipes.... It is that highly prosaic thing, the Leeds -and Liverpool Canal, that has apparently served to keep this idyll -unspotted by the world. It curves like a defensive moat between the -bird-song and the harsh imbroglio a biscuit’s-throw beyond, and upon -the frail structure that crosses it not the most reckless electric car -in the world would ever dream of venturing. It is the weakness of that -bridge that has proved the place’s strength. - -It was in the very shadow of that enviable fire-escape, by the way, -that I heard of another and a subtler way in which the electric car -carries on its business of subversion. My informant was an Urban -District retainer, whom I found, the other afternoon, bedding out the -Urban District geraniums. I spoke to him regarding the pleasantness -of the neighbourhood, praised its quiet, its salubrity, and so forth. -He merely subscribed a perfunctory assent. Judging that my pæan was -considered to lack the appropriate degree of fervour, I redoubled -my efforts. I waxed really eloquent. Superlatives abounded. But my -strophe aroused no antistrophe. The more loudly did I extol, indeed, -the gloomier and more perfunctory became his replies. At last I touched -on rates, and that proved the last straw. “They’re only two shillings -and ninepence,” he burst out wrathfully--I think it was two shillings -and ninepence; anyhow, something quite preposterously minute--“and over -in Liverpool folks is paying eight or nine shillin’.” It certainly -seemed an extraordinary sort of grievance.... And then “They use our -cars,” he went on savagely--“they use our cars an’ libries an’ baths. -Why shouldn’t they help to pay for ’em?... But they can’t ’old out for -ever; Liverpool will nab the place some o’ these fine days.” And he -glanced at the genteel old stucco with an air of malevolent triumph. - -The man, it will be seen, was himself a Liverpolitan, and I dare say -he voiced very fairly the general Liverpolitan sentiment in these -matters. “You use our cars; clearly, then, you must be one of us; so -quit this foolish pose of independence.” And one day, no doubt, it -will quit the pose perforce. Liverpool will “nab” it, the moat will be -stoutly bridged, a troop of electric cars will storm across, and the -quiet little gathering among the trees will be rudely broken up and -submerged. - - -§ 4. - -To witness the actual consummation of such a ravagement, it is only -necessary to follow the next “bone” as far as Walton-on-the-Hill. -Walton, to my mind, stands as a perfect embodiment of all the mingled -tragedy and triumph of this great process of suburb overthrow. For -centuries her Church was the proud hub of the parish in which Liverpool -was but an inconsiderable hamlet; and even so late as the last year -of the seventeenth century she compelled Liverpool to regard her as -its parochial superior, and to tramp every Sunday three miles out to -her and three miles back. There is little pride left to the old Church -now. It stands, bleak and friendless, in the midst of a dull pool of -gravestones; smoke from a railway siding blackens its walls; the cars -roar triumphantly past its very gates; it has been compelled to guard -its dead with rows of iron railings. In the lanes that cower behind -it, too, defeat is equally apparent: scraps of villagedom hunted down -by a rabble of red-faced tenements; a mass of garish brick squatting -blatantly in the ruins of a cornfield; jerry-builders evicting old -residents from the cottages they have lived in for half a century; -the old Hall, in its nest of trees, lying fouled and rifled. In the -shadow of the Church there is a little cottage that has the reputation, -significantly enough, of being the only thatched cottage in Liverpool. -It is delicately complexioned, daintily windowed, and altogether very -fragrant and delightful. But the poor soul, one fancies, is not long -for this world. A frenzied hoarding, horrent and gibbering, raves above -it on one side; on the other some kind of corrugated iron affair screws -its blunt shoulder into the frail old bones.... One seems to catch a -gleam of piteous supplication behind the leaded panes. - -But just beside the Church one gets the modern touch that seems to make -amends. It is from here that the great new road--wide, much-foliaged, -grass-platted--begins the journey which is to result in a curving -band of ordered white and green being drawn right through the mass of -eastern suburbs: a noble avenue which posterity will pace delightedly, -thinking kind thoughts of 1907. It is an admirable project, and a fine -salve for outraged sentiment. It sets the seal on Walton’s defeat: more -even than the red-faced streets does it signalize her absorption in the -mass; but it is none the less a thing one welcomes with enthusiasm. -Thatch, after all, is not the final excellence of life. - - -§ 5. - -And, in any case, if Walton still thirsts for redress, she can surely -regard herself as amply revenged by her sister suburb, Aintree. -For Aintree, to no inconsiderable proportion of the inhabitants -of the British Isles, is a vastly more important place than -Liverpool--Liverpool, indeed, for them, deriving its sole significance -from the fact that it is a well-trained and useful attendant at -Aintree’s door. The secret, of course, is the Grand National--most -searching of all the national rhapsodies we strum on horse-flesh--which -is performed here every spring. - -Big race-meetings don’t vary very much; and Grand National Day at -Aintree presents much the same features as one finds elsewhere. There -are the same great stands, looking, from a proletarian distance, -like boxes crammed with flowers; the same sliding bourdon from the -betting-rings; the same sudden drift of music that means that Majesty -has arrived, that Majesty is mounting the Stand, that Majesty’s -binoculars are even now compressing the whole astonishing landscape -into one bright little picture for Majesty’s eyes. Follows, as always, -the remote, wavering crescent at the starting-point; the delicate -stream of coloured scraps, blowing as before a wind, rising and -falling here and there in easy, soundless undulations; the faint, raw -crash of sound as the stream flutters beneath the quivering sparkle of -the Stands. And afterwards, the usual black flood of people pouring -across the plain, the usual sententious groups about the jumps, the -usual rancid litter, the inevitable dizzy smell of trodden turf. - -Only, right at the end, there is one amendment to note. The traditional -hotchpotch of home-returning vehicles has been replaced by something -else. Away in the centre of the City some one in a little office signs -an order; and when the mob pours out, it discovers long glittering -files of electric cars awaiting it at the entrance. So, independently -propelled no longer, but packed sociably together, they sweep back -to the heart of the City, past the sad walls of Walton Church, a -magnificent official cavalcade. - - -§ 6. - -Walton’s drab neighbours on the other side, too, have also their -sporting associations, and, in consequence, some measure of -independent fame. Each Saturday afternoon throughout the winter grey -clouds of sound drift over all this northern district and out into -the country beyond: rivalling for a time the brazen rumours from -the River which are always visiting these airs. They rise from the -great football-grounds at Everton and Anfield, where some tens of -thousands of enthusiasts, incredibly packed together (any number of the -worst-paid of L----’s understudies among them), indulge, week after -week, a passion for vicarious athletics. - -There is always something rather heartsome about the sound of distant -cheering, and in this case one welcomes these tumults with an especial -enthusiasm. It would probably be unjust to suggest that they stand -for the most positive moment in the lives of the cheerers, but it -is certainly true that they provide the most positive note in the -whole of the dull regions that surround them. Towards Stanley Park, -indeed, in Anfield, there is a momentary touch of something that is -almost sprightliness; and over in Everton, near the hill from which -De Quincey admired the view of distant Liverpool, there is a flavour -of dignified decay. But, for the rest, there are only labyrinthine -miles of gardenless, spiritless streets, neither new nor old, neither -vicious nor respectable--always tragically null and inchoate. They -involve Kirkdale; they trail out towards Cabbage Hall; they trudge -past Newsham Park, and so away towards the south. The main ribs strike -across them here and there, distributing a little colour--paper-shops, -tobacconists’, sweet-shops, the rich phials of a drug-store, butchers’ -slabs covered with intricate runes of red and yellow; but these -respites are desperately restricted. The gleam dies away as quickly as -the sound of the car-gongs; the web slinks back into its old monotony, -into that grey neutrality which seems, somehow, to be far baser and -more vitiating than the brute positive blackness of the slums. - -To explain these regions, to see them (as we ought to see them) as -something more than a dull and featureless enigma, it is needful -to regard them in relation to the City, to see them as one of the -essential whorls in the great hieroglyph which is Liverpool. Looked -at in this way, they do begin to reveal a kind of meaning, even to -assume a kind of magnificence. They mean that Liverpool demands, for -the prosecution of her so colourful adventures, the services of so many -thousands of grey lives, the efforts of a great brotherhood content to -labour all day long on her behalf in exchange for permission to return -at nightfall just here, to make themselves a home in just this stretch -of barren twilight. She cannot let them go further afield; she cannot -grant them space enough for brightness. This much she can afford them, -and no more. - -So regarded, all this drabness becomes something much more terrible -and magnificent than a mere neutral foil to the City’s beauty, a mere -grey passage which throws the purple into relief. It becomes one of the -sources of that beauty, one of the processes by which that beauty was -attained--a grey and dreadful ritual observed by the City in the hope -of being granted strange powers. These dull houses are so much squeezed -dye-wood. Their colour, their brightness, have gone to stain the rich -fabric of the City’s enterprise, to paint the romantic emblem by which -she is known in dim corners of the earth, to illuminate the saga of her -career. And, remembering this, it becomes almost possible to regard the -dwellers in these regions less as prisoners in a dull and sorrowful -gaol than as priests in the recesses of some twilit temple, gravely -and honourably fulfilling sacred offices. - - -§ 7. - -At the same time, it is, no doubt, only too easy to overestimate -the heaviness of the twilight. Here is human nature packed thick -and thick, and where there is human nature, there romance is also. -Theoretically, therefore, the whole place is seething with adventure, -and each one of these drab doorways is an entrance to a palpitating -epic. Theoretically, all this monotony is but a mask, and beneath it -there are warm human features, quick and variable with terror and -pity and passion and quiet joy. It may be so; but those doors remain -implacably closed, the mask is never dropped; all this great romance -is writ in cipher. Here and there a phrase emerges: a couple of youths -whispering at a corner; a woman wrapped in a shawl singing drearily -in an empty street; an old man solemnly tapping at a door; a child -running screaming from a curtainless house; and one fingers them for a -little, and pores over them, but in the end is always forced to push -them despairingly aside. The key is lacking; they remain enigmatic; and -one might wander these grey sad streets for ever and learn nothing of -their secrets. Every house is inarticulate; a menacing dumbness broods -over the whole region. - -And it is by personal associations alone that those secrets can be -surprised. Directories carry us a little way: they tell us that two -cabmen, a draper’s assistant, a cotton-porter, a stoker, a bricklayer, -and a carter, live in that half-dozen liver-coloured brick boxes; and -the knowledge certainly invests the place (it is a street in Anfield) -with a tinge of actuality. But there are so many other things we -require to know about that bricklayer--the colour of his wife’s eyes, -for instance; whether he prefers hot-pot or Irish-stew; whether his -youngest has yet had the measles. At Sefton Park, at Blundellsands, -qualities analogous to these are easily discoverable, even by the -outsider; but here they are hidden away beneath an unfathomable -monotony. To discover the romance, to taste the secret drama that -makes Anfield and Everton and Cabbage Hall habitable, it would be -necessary to live in each of them in turn, to have an initiating friend -in every road.... Thus, in a little street behind Netherfield Road -there live a couple of dear old maiden ladies, whom the progress of -education has prevented from teaching and taught to starve, and whose -training has made them determined to starve respectably, in private; -and knowledge of them and of their drama has made, for me, that street -a shade less cryptic. And then, again, over in Edge Hill there is a -little bed-sitting-room overlooking a stale back-yard where I used to -go once a week to hear the Kosmos put in order by a poet who wrote -bad verses, but quoted good ones. To the outsider Edge Hill must -seem as inscrutably monotonous as its neighbours. But I know better. -It revealed itself to me, in those days, as a wonderful avenue to all -manner of tender and high-hearted possibilities; and I still recall -evenings spent in the Botanic Gardens over there, with my poet mouthing -some splendid scarlet thing from Whitman or Shelley in the afterglow, -when the place seemed positively surcharged with vital and dramatic -loveliness. - - -§ 8. - -But revealing experiences of this sort are inevitably limited, and, -lacking any great store of them, one is content to fall back on broad -summaries, to say that this crepuscular region stretches from Anfield -and Everton in the north, below Newsham Park, through Edge Hill, and -so towards Wavertree in the south. It has its degrees of neutrality, -of course--amenities creep occasionally in--but for the most part -it remains a region whose intimate meanings are concealed by its -monotony, but whose monotony gives it in the mass a deep and terrible -significance. - -And below this tract, gravely introducing its later passages to the -City, there marches a dull, highly respectable quarter of streets and -squares (rare episodes, these latter, in Liverpool), of which, again, -one can only protest that it is really much more impressive than it -seems. There is Abercromby Square, where the Bishop lives; there is -Oxford Street, upon which the shade of Aubrey Beardsley is reported -to make an occasional shrinking descent; there are Catherine Street, -Bedford Street, Chatham Street, all earnestly pleading for geranium -boxes; and Rodney Street, where many doctors and one small green -slab combine to surround Gladstone’s birthplace with an appropriate -atmosphere of dignity. And so at length to the verge of the hill that -cups the City, with the Philharmonic Hall making one part of it a -place, on winter nights, of ringing hoofs and thronging audiences, and -the University, in another, looking gravely down upon the rooftops of -the tense and vivid City which it is its duty by scholarship to serve. - -And on the other side of that dumb territory there always sweep the -suburbs that have the green fields for their neighbours: the suburbs -that here delicately woo the country and there vulgarly accost it, -and now stop short at the sight of it with a gorgeous affectation -of surprise, and now stealthily seduce it into all manner of morbid -episodes; but whose essential business is always, by this device or by -that, to lure the fields into the state of urbanity, to establish fresh -colonies and receptacles for the constantly swelling mass that seethes -behind. Cabbage Hall, the northernmost, plays the part of stealthy -seducer, dribbling out among the fields in colourless disorder, -entrapping them in the dreariest fashion, without a hint of glamour. -Next comes West Derby, a group of clean-faced cottages standing about -its car-terminus like smocked village children gaping prettily at a -lurid visitor, its neatly dignified church and deer-scattered park -reflecting the outburst of ripe, authentic aristocracy that makes -the country-side beyond so unexpectedly, so exotically, old English. -And after West Derby come Knotty Ash and Old Swan: the first, in -one’s pocket vision of it, a jolly stage-setting of taverns with -farm-carts before them, of tiny, twinkling pinafores pouring out of a -village school, of a neat spire (a property it doesn’t, however, do -to investigate too closely) rising above a grove of realistic trees; -the second--suffering in places from a bad attack of the scarlet-fever -which is now ravaging domestic architecture--leading to a long surge -of ambiguous ways and broken ends that spills out finally among the -fields near Wavertree. The country on which it breaks has qualities -of richness; little coils of woodland lie pleasantly among leaning -meadows; and right in the midst of it, like a fleck of pure foam far -cast by the muddy wave of the town, lie the lawns and gardens of -Calderstone, the latest of Liverpool’s parks. - -[Illustration: CALDERSTONES PARK.] - - -§ 9. - -For parkland proper, however, it is needful to return to the smoke. -Wavertree lies at the end of the Smithdown Road bone of the fan. The -next bone pierces that Bloomsbury-like district of highly respectable -squares, and so comes out upon the tail of a long regiment of trees -making a fine effort to live up to their reputation of being a -boulevard. This is Princes Avenue, and Princes Avenue (familiarity -breeding uncontempt) is sometimes spoken of in the same breath as -Berlin’s Unter den Linden. But although the conjunction is scarcely -wise, this broad way of trees and churches makes a wholly pleasant -approach to the suavest of Liverpool’s inner suburbs; and it leads, -too, to a deftly-handled space of open air, where it is certainly -possible to think of the Champs Elysées without a blush. Sefton -Park, although it may not serve so deeply human a purpose as, say, -Stanley Park in the north, is certainly quite the most perfectly -fashioned of Liverpool’s open spaces; and although it is the largest, -it never commits the mistake that large parks sometimes make of -endeavouring to appear like a piece of virginal country. It is always -mannered, self-conscious, full of effects that are in the right sense -“picturesque”; and the sheep that feed in one part of it do not seem -much less deliberately decorative in intention than the peacocks that -everywhere admirably strut and flower. To find one of these peacocks -(the white one preferably) self-consciously posing on a meadow of -rhythmical daffodils is to discover the true spirit of park artistry -symbolized with absolute perfection. - -Eminently Parisian in the morning, when the nurse-girls bring their -charges here, and gossip and read and scold and perfunctorily play -ball precisely as the _bonnes_ do in the Champs Elysées, Sefton Park -grows unmistakably British in the sacred hour that lapses between tea -and dinner. For then young athletes like L----, and Hebes like our -heroine, fill all its tennis-courts with a white-limbed energy.... It -is not exactly a white-limbed energy that one observes in the adjoining -bowling-green; and its laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures may -conceivably be regarded as striking rather a dissonant note amongst -the clean-cut decorative activities which surround it. But none the -less the sociologist in one eagerly welcomes and commemorates them. For -their apparition is another evidence of that coalescence of strata with -strata which is one of the features of suburb life just now. They mean -that laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures can live nowadays in -the once exclusive neighbourhood hereabout; can demand, for their own -especial pleasures, some share of the glittering accessory with which -this suave neighbourhood once rather royally provided itself. - - -§ 10. - -But the neighbourhood that immediately environs the Park still remains -fairly costly and responsible, and that it seems a little to fall short -of absolute impressiveness is doubtless largely due to the overwhelming -nature of its accessory. And then, too, it should be remembered, these -yellow, uneasy houses came before the bungalow had taught a reasonable -compromise between dignity and domesticity. A little further away, up -towards Mossley Hill, the success is notably greater. Grave roads, -filled with that indescribable hushed exclusiveness which only tall, -ripe, sandstone walls and overarching leafage have power to confer, -lead up the hill towards the Church. There are deliberate lodges and -sudden glimpses of deep-breathing lawn; life grows leisurely and -communicative; the silence is full of confessions. - -The Church itself, bulking monumentally against the sky, continues the -warm, grave intimacy: even the green stillness that encircles it seems -fuller of humanity than all the acres, dense with flesh and blood, -over at Everton and Anfield. It is always worth while, therefore, to -step through to the farther wall. There, in a flash, you find you -have come again to the uttermost edge of the town. A great landscape -leaps suddenly out from beneath your feet, woods curve distantly about -it, sweet airs bring a company of quiet sounds. A chalk line being -softly ruled across the green map means that half a hundred people -who have just had tea in town will see the buses in the Euston Road -before dinner. A vague smear on the far sky stands for Widnes and -poison. A fainter smear above the tree-tops to the right reveals the -neighbourhood of Garston. - - -§ 11. - -And with Garston we reach the tip of the last of the plumes of our fan. -Viewed _de profil_--as, for instance, from the River--it would appear -to be furnished chiefly with gasometers. The concomitants of gasometers -are as invariable as those of race-meetings: Garston is grimy. -Considered more closely, however, it breaks up a little, and reveals -here and there some wholly pleasant incidents. And on its inland side -it yields very gracefully to the influence of the shadowed lanes from -Allerton. - -The rib that joins it to the centre, sweeps, in the first place, -through an easy, spacious district of private parks and well-preserved, -middle-aged mansions, and, in the last place, through the débris -of the southern slums. Its name in this last phase is Park Lane. -If, perceiving that, the visitor feel impelled to smile as at an -anticlimax, he would perhaps do well to hesitate; for this Park Lane -has probably a wider reputation than any other thoroughfare in Europe. -In and about this débris stand the sailors’ quarters, the foreign -quarters, the Chinese Colony, the emigrants’ lodging-houses, the -Sailors’ Home; and the street that threads these things (“Parkee Lanee -Street” the coolies call it) is spoken of affectionately in every -corner of the Seven Seas. Park Lane probably spells home to half the -sailors in the world. - -Midway in its course this last rib separates the decaying gentility -south of Princes Park from the frankly homespun suburb of the Dingle. -But even the Dingle, since it marches cheek by jowl with the River, -cannot escape being occasionally infected with romance. There is one -little row of apparently quite subdued little tenements, for instance, -whose lives must really be one long debauch of raw sensation. I do not -insist upon the haunting presence of the Fever Hospital at one end of -them; nor upon that of the lean bridge which stalks appallingly across -a ramping railway-siding at the other; for these are incidents of a -sort that make other neighbourhoods tremendous. But these cottages -have perched themselves exactly on the brink of the ragged cliff which -surrounds that ultimate dock, the Herculaneum, and beneath them a group -of black monsters are always at work plucking trucks of coal bodily -from the railway and plunging them into the bowels of chained ships. -Further over, there are the peering heads and shoulders of embedded -liners; further, again, the wide manuscript of the River, lurid with -adventure; and, beyond that, the stony slopes of the Wirral. Nor is -this all; for immediately below their doorsteps some thousands of -gallons of petroleum are stored in the live rock, and somewhere beneath -their kitchen floors the Midland expresses race and hammer all day long. - -[Illustration: HERCULANEUM DOCK.] - -Certainly, if it is roaring melodrama one thirsts for, the Dingle, in -spite of its drabness, is clearly the place to dwell. - - -§ 12. - -I have just spoken of the stony slopes of the Wirral. The stones, of -course, are houses, and the houses form themselves into suburbs, and -those suburbs troop all about the coast, and pour inland, and tend -to fill all the green peninsula with pleasant cubicles. But of those -suburbs and all the tranquil spaces they lead to and enclose I must not -now attempt to speak. Their qualities are many: river and sea, heather, -champaign, woven coppice, and swart fir-wood grant them a procession of -aspects no mere generalization could include. Port Sunlight set out as -though for an old English festival; Eastham with its woods and booths; -New Ferry and Rock Ferry, the stony slopes that lead at length to -Birkenhead; Birkenhead itself, a march played like a dirge; Seacombe, -Egremont, New Brighton, promenade-linked, wide-shored, flickering out -into all manner of watering-place delights; Leasowe, whose sea-beaten -coppices are wonderful in spring with ranks of praying white and -hymning purple; Hoylake, with its famous links and golfing fishermen; -Thurstaston, with its legendary hills and dear memories; Heswall, -sunset-saturated among its heaths; Prenton, with its pine-woods and -its water-tower; Oxton, mellow and meticulous upon its height: so do -I content myself with naming them, and, so naming them, add one word -of admiration for the dainty fashion in which, in her green chamber, -Wirral makes the beds for so many of the workers in the streets across -the way. - -[Illustration: BIDSTON HILL.] - -But there is one place in the Wirral about which I must inevitably -add another word. Both practically and sentimentally, indeed, -Bidston Hill belongs to Liverpool: practically because it is the -property of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and because its -Pharos plays so large a part in directing the courses of the fleets; -sentimentally--well, sentimentally for a dozen excellent good reasons. -It would be from here, no doubt, in the old days, that the traveller -from the south would catch his first glimpse of the River and the -hamlet; it is from here that generation after generation of townsfolk -have come to see their City in its bulk; it is here still that they -bring the good stranger, hoping secretly that he will find their -Liverpool a rather wonderful and alluring sort of place. And certainly -it is from here, among this almond-scented gorse, that Liverpool builds -up most perfectly into a visible entity. The City and its outposts -draw easily together; the Dock Board Building makes an ivory nucleus; -and Walton Church on the left, and Mossley Hill Church on the right, -seem, in actuality, as they are in essence, but two organic incidents -in the great design of which it forms the centre. The bird-song and -the dumbness, the green spaces and the grey, the hid tragedies, the -fair buildings, the lavish, roaring ways, are now merged wonderfully -together, and, in their fusion, form one supreme attribute, nameless -because it is unhuman. Smoke-scarves of her own weaving and vapours -of the air binding her and her children together, Liverpool broods -there in the sunshine, sole and indivisible, a splendid seaward-facing -Presence. And the River flames at her feet. - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE SLUMS - - -§ 1. - -She couches there like a vast Presence, seaward-facing but inly -brooding, and, indeed, it is profoundly true that the remote adventures -she surveys draw much of their range and splendour from the darkness of -her private dreams. For in a manner much more direct and unescapable -than those dumb grey regions in the east, these black abysses of her -underworld are intimately bound up with the chief sources of her -efficiency and power. It is their main purpose to provide the human -fulcrum demanded by those monstrous levers at the Docks, and the -strange motions of those engines are of a nature that inevitably leave -the flesh hideously excoriated and crushed. The bedraggled humans -whom we saw running hither and thither among the unhuman silences -and uproars are drawn almost wholly from the Slums, and it is, quite -undisguisedly, the incalculable necessities of those silences and -uproars that have condemned them to the slums and kept them prisoned -there. - -[Illustration: THE ALBERT DOCK.] - -For it is not that the wage of a dock-labourer is insufficient to grant -life its decencies. It would, on the contrary, be quite possible for a -dock-labourer, constantly employed, to live in one of the suburbs--out, -say, at Seaforth--and come to the wharves each day by electric car. But -the majority of these men are not constantly employed, and much of that -inconstancy would seem to be inevitable. Ships come, ships go, and the -tide of labour waxes and wanes as ceaselessly as the tides about it, -and vastly more capriciously. And thus not more than twenty-five per -cent. of these workers receive a full and constant wage; quite fifty -per cent. average less than one-half; and fully a quarter are fortunate -if they are permitted to work a couple of days a week. For the greater -number of these ministers to Liverpool’s efficiency, then, the Slums, -obviously, are inevitable. Equally inevitably, the Slums form a -topographical annexe to the Docks, a hinterland behind its gates. Out -of the bodies of the battered and congested people who crowd there -Liverpool contrives a suave unguent, more dreadful than adipocere, -which enables the great ships to slide so smoothly to their berths. - - -§ 2. - -That, then, is the first broad feature of Liverpool’s poverty--the -frankness and completeness with which it is involved in the processes -which grant her all her wealth. I have already spoken of its physical -distribution: two dirty smears, one on either hand of the clean-swept -central spaces. Of the two, the northern is the larger; and together -they probably contain some six thousand adults and some thirteen -thousand children. Of these (and this is the second and more interior -peculiarity), the majority are either Irish or of Irish descent.[5] It -follows, therefore, that here alone in Liverpool do you get a specific -dialect. They speak a bastard brogue: a shambling, degenerate speech of -slipshod vowels and muddied consonants--a cast-off clout of a tongue, -more debased even than Whitechapel Cockney, because so much more -sluggish, so much less positive and acute. It follows, too, that the -ruling religion of these quarters is Roman Catholicism. There are about -a dozen Catholic churches actually in the Slums, and to pass suddenly -into one of them out of the stench and uproar of some dishevelled -court is to taste again, in a very peculiar measure, the sweet, rich -silence that has so often broken on one’s palate in the towns and -villages of the Continent. Here, as on the Continent, too, the people -slip in and out all day long, genuflecting, sitting in apathetic -huddles, going back once more to their sorrowful outer world. And you -constantly see the figures of priests moving to and fro among the lanes -and alleys. - -[5] The northern Slum forms a large part of the only English -constituency returning a Nationalist Member to the House. - - -§ 3. - -It would be an easy matter to add to this list of the region’s -peculiarities: to speak of its food--chiefly bread and tea, with, upon -occasion, the viler parts of pig; of its queer parasitic industries; of -its dress, its habit of early marriage, its extravagant fecundity. But -to do this would be simply to repeat, with a difference, that oldest -and unhappiest of slum-induced habits, the habit of regarding the -people who live there as, in some sort, a race apart. We speak largely -of the Underworld, the People of the Abyss, the Submerged Tenth, and -gradually we drift into a way of considering them as a strange breed -of degenerates, mattoids, morlocks.... It is an offence that all the -friendships I have formed amongst these people make me especially -anxious to avoid. They are all, really, much more like the suburbans -than the suburbans are themselves. Each one of these so bedraggled -humans is really a rinsed and expurgated bundle of just those passions -and emotions which form the unalterable nucleus of every character in -the world. Life for them, you see, is so astonishingly shorn of the -complexities and elaborations. All its circumstances--those levers at -the Docks amongst others--have tended to fine everything down to the -blunt, primary facts; and it is here, accordingly, and not amongst the -lettuce-eaters who read Nietzsche in lonely country cottages, that you -may discover the authentic simple life. They are always undisguisedly -face to face, for instance, with that most ancient and inveterate of -human problems, the problem of getting food. They start, so to say, -from scratch. They tear the day’s vitality out of their own vitals. -They know the pains of hunger on the one hand, the pains of satisfying -hunger on the other; and they are constantly preoccupied with the -fundamental human business of reconciling that great antithesis. It -is the same throughout. Birth and Death, Hunger, Love and Hate, the -Terrors of Damnation and the Hope of Heaven, become constant and -vehement companions. The bones of life show through. Here, certainly, -_plus ça change plus c’est la même chose_. And the people who live here -are simply our simplified selves. - - -§ 4. - -Take, for example, the case of Esther--of Esther (I’m sorry) -Grimes. She lives in one of those blind-backed courts off Blenheim -Street--quite one of the most malodorous corners in the whole of -Liverpool’s Underworld. Her father (like so many of the fathers here: -they seem to wear rather worse than the women) is dead, and Esther -keeps herself and a vile-tempered, rheumaticky old gargoyle-crowned -stick of a mother by tramping amazing distances through the northern -suburbs--Anfield, Kirkdale, and so on--selling “stuff.” “Stuff” is -Liverpool Irish for cheap fruits and vegetables, and she carries her -ill-favoured tomatoes or oranges or whatever it may be in a great -basket poised on a turban perched on the top of her head. Also, she -bellows. By getting to the market by six in the morning and steadily -walking and bellowing until five o’clock at night she can sometimes -make quite as much as twelve shillings a week, which is more than she -used to make in the tin-works. (It was Mr. Upton Sinclair, by the way, -who really expelled her from there. “The Jungle” had some unsuspected -sequels in this and that odd corner of the world.) She wears one of -those local accretions of innumerable petticoats which so successfully -attain all a crinoline’s ugliness without any of its precision, and her -mass of red hair is scraped back into a tumbling knot above her neck, -and drawn over the forehead of her pointed face in a broad fringe. -She speaks the hideous jargon of the district, and when the suburban -sees her in his own streets thus fringed, petticoated, bawling, and -besmeared, he very naturally wonders what kind of preposterous nature -must lurk beneath so preposterous an exterior. - -But I know Esther very well indeed, and I protest that she is not in -the least preposterous, that she is not, essentially, anything but -particularly normal. I am convinced, indeed, as Grant Allen was of -Hedda Gabler, that “I take her in to dinner twice a week.” She has all -the essential, the root qualities: she is just, she is generous, she -is sociable. She loves cleanliness and good colours. She has a fine -appetite for pleasure, and the right, needful touch of _diablerie_. -All that she lacks is an adequate mode of expression, the flexile, -elaborate technique which would enable her to grant these things a -gracious and orderly embodiment.... If you could invest her with -certain possibilities of dress (the dress that Mr. Charles Ricketts -designed the other day for Miss McCarthy would suit her admirably), -could get her hair heaped up and back, and so round across her forehead -in the curve that would rhyme with the feat curve of her chin, she -would present, if not a figure of intolerable beauty, at least one of -very singular vividness and charm.... Well, just in the same way with -that essential bundle of root qualities which she possesses: grant -them a similar appropriate equipment, and you would get an equally -delightful result. But as it is, hammered out on the patched and -tuneless instrument she has been provided with, all the fine human -music of which she is so full sounds fearfully like so much deliberate -discordancy. Her sociability, for instance: she is compelled to -express that by sitting on a sour doorstep in the midst of a raucous -group of messy neighbours. Her affection, again: she can only display -that by lovingly cursing her mother, and by swinking all day on her -behalf instead of getting married--as she so easily might do. She is -just; but perhaps the only dignified example of her justness that I -can produce is her remark (remember, she is one of the devoutest of -Catholics) that probably the folks who insist upon leaving tracts for -her really mean very well at bottom. She is fond of cleanliness; and -the proof of that is to be found in the fact that she spends vastly -more pains upon her toilet than many even second-rate actresses. It is -not her fault that the results are incommensurate with her efforts. -When one has to get all the water one uses from a little dribbling -pump in the middle of a filthy court; when one has to carry it in a -leaky meat-tin up a slimy stairway to a fœtid room; when one has to -wash (without soap) in the same meat-tin, and do one’s fringe without -a looking-glass; when one has to do all this on a diet of bread and -tea, and under a constant hail of reproaches from a rheumaticky old -gargoyle, then it becomes distinctly easy to expend an enormous amount -of energy without obtaining any very ravishing result. The result in -Esther’s case is that you get an apparition so preposterous and streaky -that well-meaning old ladies in the public streets are often moved to -remonstrate with it on the subject of untidiness. I have heard them. -I have also heard Esther’s replies.... She has, as I say, the needful -touch of _diablerie_. - - -§ 5. - -As with Esther, so with the majority of those about her. They are -not plaster saints, and they are not morlocks: they are simply a -community of amiably-intentioned life and laughter loving men and -women and children, with the average amount of pluck and the average -amount of cowardice, all exceedingly human and sinful and lovable -and amorous and faithful and absurd and vain, and all compelled, by -some strange swirl of outer circumstance, to spend their strength in -a warfare waged on prehistoric lines. Here and there, of course, the -skin self-protectingly toughens, malformities creep in, the Beast -gets its appalling opportunities. Those levers at the Docks produce -some sickening results.... But I do not want to heap up horrors. -That, indeed, would be an easy thing to do. But it is even easier -to misunderstand those exterior horrors which constantly do present -themselves. That dirt, as we have seen, does not mean a love of dirt or -a lack of energy; it simply stands for lack of proper tools. - -Those clustered slatterns on the doorsteps do not really symbolize -degeneracy; they merely emblematize that delicate and wholesome spirit -which finds its projection elsewhere in the pleasant devices of our -drawing-rooms. That ghastly uproar in a place of stench and wailing -children simply means that the spleen which you and I, armed with a -host of ingenious little instruments, twist and contrive into this and -that elaborate code of moods and attitudes, is there being published -abroad in the only fashion available. And it is not the fault of these -people, nor in the least their essential desire, it is wholly the fault -of the uncouth apparatus at their disposal, that their embodiment of -that other wholesome and delicate human instinct--the instinct for -Pleasure--should have taken the form of the crude lights and shocks of -a corner tavern. - -No, down here in the blackness and the slime, it is not, for the most -part, any strange, incalculable brood that has its spawning-place; and -I would like these two regions to remain in your imagination rather as -a couple of far, unwholesome islands, primitive with jungle and morass, -on which some thousands of twentieth century civilians, bankrupt of -even the necessities, have been planked astonishingly down. - - -§ 6. - -Now, it is obviously not in the nature of things that Liverpool should -permit all the resultant discordancies and malformities--the constant -waste of effort, the constant and preposterous clothing of civil -bodies in a barbarous dress--without making some very notable efforts -to provision and equip those islands. Much of this black disorder -forms, as I have said, a large part of the price she pays for her -efficiency--these people have been marooned here by the necessities of -her own prosperous voyages--and although her passion for efficiency -will never permit her to reduce the blackness by decreasing the -efficiency, that very passion has always made her supremely anxious -to beat down the price as far as possible. In no other city in the -country, certainly, have the questions of feeding the poor, of housing -them, nursing them, washing them, received more earnest and controlled -attention; and upon the shores of these strange islands far-sounding -official tides are constantly flinging this and that of necessity, of -comfort, of direction. Into the details of all these efforts I have -now no space to enter; nor, indeed, would such entry fall within the -scope of this book. But you get their presence visualized, you get the -vital sense of the activity of all these forces, when you turn some -drab corner among the hovels and the rank disorder and come suddenly in -sight of one of the clean, decisive blocks of Corporation dwellings: -leash, personable structures, balconied and symmetrical, made up of -course upon course of fit and habitable flats, and glittering at -night with an unexpected blithesomeness and order. You get the same -assurance, again, in the public wash-houses planted here and there--the -first of their kind in the kingdom; and again in the occurrence of -those neat-handed depots for distributing sterilized milk which dot a -white pattern all about the blackness. - -And always about these coasts, augmenting the gifts of the controlled -official tides, there constantly wheels and dips an active fleet -of friendly privateers. It is to them, indeed, that one’s natural -inclination is always to look most hopefully: they are obviously -human, they bring camaraderie and affection--needful things that the -milk depots are not compelled to supply. You get all that side of the -thing admirably symbolized by those open-air concerts (also, I fancy, -the first of their sort in the kingdom) organized by one of the most -successful of these free-lance expeditions, which fill the darkest of -the courts, night after night, with actual, colourful music.... So -that all these islanders, Esther and the rest, are not to be pictured -as living in absolute isolation. Through the chaotic crowd of them -there constantly move, very vitally and wonderfully, certain reassuring -visitants--some shrewd, some benignant, some sentimental, but all -enormously in earnest; and for my own part I never recall the dull -bleared speech that prevails there without hearing, too, the dainty -broken English, the daintier laughter, of a certain Swiss worker who -chaffs them and mothers them and bullies them, and whom they love -exceedingly, or without seeing the spare figure of that fine Founder of -a noble secular order whom seven thousand children know by name, and -who can pass anywhere among these morasses, at any hour of the day or -night, and receive nothing but a welcome of elemental friendliness. - - -§ 7. - -So that, in one way and another, the islanders begin to get their -apparatus, the People of the Abyss, if you prefer to call them so, -their share of light and laughter; and some day, perhaps, these two -dull smears may even be wholly erased. And one speaks of such an event -with the more of hopefulness because there are not lacking certain -signals of a wide and deep change that is about to pass over, that -has, indeed, already begun to pass over, the great organism of which -they form so intimate a part. I do not speak now of a mere change in -the social attitude towards these people; I speak rather of those -profounder alterations of character, of purpose, of ideal, which -must run their apparently unrelated course before any such specific -attitude can be affected at all stably and significantly. All this -blackness and disarray is, after all, too fundamental to vanish before -any self-conscious and deliberate endeavours; it can only disappear -by a kind of accident, the almost unintended by-product of other and -alien processes; and it is, therefore, neither to the efforts of these -fine workers, nor to the validity and zeal of that glittering official -machinery, that one turns, on the last analysis, for the true portents -of the change. It is rather to the talk going on in the cafés, to the -books in the booksellers’ windows, to the remote suburban firesides -where very different matters are being quietly discussed, to the -efforts apparent in the ateliers. And in all these places, it seems to -me, there are to be discerned the signs of the dawn of another epoch in -the City’s history. - -Liverpool passes out of her pubescence. The swift straight lines of -her eager and yet so strangely dignified uprising begin to swerve -out now into ample curves, begin to enclose another spaciousness, a -larger and more considerate leisure. One finds it evidenced in the -social atmosphere of the place, in an increasing suavity and ripeness -to be discovered there. It appears again in the part played by the -University--a part of ever-increasing confidence and intimacy on the -one hand, of ever-increasing acceptability on the other. It is to -be detected in the religious life of the place, in the aspirations -which surround the great Cathedral which is now splendidly uprising -in her midst. It is disclosed in the revealing mirror of the arts. -In her latest and most perfect piece of architecture, the luminous -building, so significantly isolated, that serenely dominates her -central wharves, she seems, almost for the first time, to have -confessed herself in beauty perfectly, and she has done that because -the nature of the confession had already suffered change. A new poet, -too, has wonderfully arisen in the midst of these hitherto almost -songless workers; and in the painters’ quarters there is a momentous -stir of schism and disputation. Already the old art of the place, -called into existence by its spirit of independence, but limited by -the typical demands of so strenuous an atmosphere, begins to give way -a little before the advances of an art that concedes nothing to the -citizen, that sits frankly apart among its own visions.... In a little -bronze-hung studio, poised high above one of the central ways, a woman -is dealing with pigment in a fashion more sensitive and personal than -any that has been known in Liverpool before. Well, in the quality of -her work I find some confession of the forces that are producing the -profound unanimous change which may lead, among other things, to the -dispersal of the darkness of the underworld. - -So that in the end this dull stain may vanish. I have called it -a dream--a black mood out of which the City dreadfully gathers -inspiration for her battles. Like other dreams, it may one day draw to -its close. But when it is over the dreamer, too, will have changed; -that, at least, is inevitable. Just in what manner these subtle -and various mutations will affect her character, her aspect, it is -impossible even to suggest. It may be that this growing sensitiveness -will soften in some measure the fingers we have seen probing, so -tirelessly, so tirelessly, for the hard unmitigable fact. Or it may be -that she will discover some wonderful union between these qualities, -will maintain a double dominion, losing nothing of her ardour, gaining -much of this new tranquillity. It is impossible to predict. This much -alone is certain: that the next book which essays her portraiture will -have to deal with a strangely different subject. - - - - -INDEX - - -Abercrombie, Lascelles, 161 - -Abercromby Square, 126 - -Aigburth, 97, 99, 134 - -Aintree, 99, 115 - -Aintree Racecourse, 116 - -Allerton, 134 - -Altcar 100 - -Anfield, 99, 118, 123 _seq._, 133, 148 - -Architecture, 6, 43, 60, 61, 66, 128, 161 - -Aristocracy, 12, 128 - -Art, 12, 84, 86, 160 _seq._ - -Art Gallery, 23, 60, 65, 86 - -_Art nouveau_, 85 - -Athleticism, 76, 80, 118 - -Autumn Exhibition, 86 - - -Bach, 76 - -_Baltic_, 35, 40 - -Bank Holiday in Liverpool, 89 - -Banking, 23, 83, 88 - -Bar, the, 17 - -Beardsley, Aubrey, 126 - -Beauty of Liverpool, 28, 34, 36, 39, 42, 52, 55, 66 _seq._, 90 _seq._, - 95, 140 - -Bedford Street, 126 - -Bidston Hill, 139 - -Bidston Lighthouse, 139 - -Birkdale, 80, 100 - -Birkenhead, 24, 138 - -Bixteth Street, 53 - -Blenheim Street, 148 - -Bloomsbury, 129 - -Blundellsands, 80, 100, 124 - -Bold Street, 46, 59, 71, 76 - -Bootle, 93, 96, 106 _seq._ - -Botanic Gardens, 125 - -Breweries, 2 - -Brokers, 47, 78 - -Brunswick Half Tide Dock, 34 - -Brunswick Street, 47, 48, 84 - -Brussels, 47 - - -Cabbage Hall, 99, 119, 124, 127 - -Cafés, 82, 160 - -Calderstones Park, 129 - -_Campania_, 35, 40 - -Canals, 67, 98, 110 - -Cathedral, 161 - -Catherine Street, 126 - -Catholicism, 105, 144, 151 - -Central Station, 51, 55, 67 - -Champs Elysées, 130, 131 - -Changing modes, 85, 87, 160 _seq._ - -Chapel Street, 58, 59, 80 - -“Charter,” 8 - -Chatham Street, 126 - -Chemical Works, 2 - -Chinese Colony, 135 - -Church Street, 51, 76, 77, 91 - -Civic spirit, 9, 10, 13, 25, 87, 88, 163 - -Clerks, 15, 78 _seq._ - -Club life, 85 - -Coburg Dock, 34 - -Commerce, 5, 9, 28, 30, 32, 120, 143 - -Convent of Our Good Shepherd, 105 - -Corn Exchange, 23, 47 - -Corn-mills, 2 - -Corporation dwellings, 156 - -Cosmopolitanism, 9, 10, 87, 88, 135 - -Cotton, 29, 59 - -Cotton Exchange, 23, 60, 89 - -County, the, 12, 128 - -_Courier_, 49 - -Court concerts, 157 - -Crosby, 93 - -Crosshall Street, 45 - -Croxteth, 128 - -Cunard Line, 31 - -Custom House, 60 - - -Dale Street, 58, 91 - -Dee, 104 - -De Quincey, 119 - -Derby Road, 100 - -Dialect, 75, 89, 102, 144, 149, 158 - -Dingle, 26, 99, 135, 137 - -Directories, 123 - -Dock-labourer, 15, 78, 142 _seq._ - -Dock offices, 20, 55, 56, 67, 139, 161 - -Docks, extent of the, 18, 26 _seq._, 30 _seq._ - drama of the, 26 _seq._, 33 _seq._, 67, 136 - system of the, 31 _seq._, 43 - and the slums, 141 _seq._, 146, 153 - -Dress, 74, 75, 77, 149, 150 - - -E----, 84, 85, 88 - -Eastham, 138 - -Edge Hill, 99, 124 - -Efficiency, 13, 30, 35, 51, 62, 65, 74, 141, 143, 155 - -Egremont, 17, 138 - -Eighteenth century, 5, 8 - -Electric cars, 55, 75, 90, 95, 97, 110, 111, 117 - -Emigrants, 40, 135 - -Emigration, 83 - -Environment, 17 _seq._, 21, 103, 127 _seq._, 133, 137 - -Everton, 96, 99, 106, 124, 133 - -Exchange Station, 51, 52, 78, 94 - - -Fairfield, 99 - -Fazakerley, 99 - -Football, 118 - -Ford, 105, 109 - -Formby, 80, 100 - -Freshfield, 100 - -Future, 64, 102, 160, 163 - - -Garston, 24, 99, 134 - -General Post Office, 46, 48 - -Gladstone, 126 - -Glasgow, 3 - -Golf, 76, 138 - -Golf-links, 80, 100, 138 - -Grain, 29 - -Grand National, 116 - -Great Howard Street, 100 - -Grimes, Esther, 147, 158 - - -Harland, Henry, 83 - -Harrington Dock, 32 - -Herculaneum Dock, 35, 136 - -Heswall, 138 - -Heywood’s Bank, 47 - -History, 4, 5, 9, 93, 113, 160 - -Homogeneity, 9 _seq._, 62, 95, 98 - -Horses, 59, 68 - -Housing problem, 12, 25, 156 - -Hoylake, 80, 138 - -Huskisson Dock, 29, 31, 35 - - -Independence, 10 _seq._, 14, 25, 63, 69, 98, 162 - -Industries, 2, 24, 145, 148 - -Irish, 105, 144 - -Irish traders, 8 - -Isolation, 13, 14, 98 - - -James Street, 58, 91 - -“The Jungle,” effect of, 149 - - -Kirkdale, 93, 94, 97, 119, 148 - -Knotty Ash, 99, 128 - -Knowsley, 128 - - -L----, 81, 88, 118, 131 - -Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 100 - -Landing Stage, 18, 19, 36, 38 _seq._, 51, 55, 80, 89 - -Leasowe, 80, 138 - -Leather Lane, 58 - -Library, 55 - -Lime Street, 53, 54, 63 - -Lime Street Station, 58 - -Linacre, 24, 106, 109 - -Linacre Road, 105 - -Literature, 76, 83, 160, 161 - -Litherland, 93, 99, 109, 111 - -Locomotion, 25, 95, 97 - -London, 3, 12, 14, 42, 90, 95 - -London Road, 91 - -Lord Street, 44, 77 - - -Mahogany, 85 - -Manchester, 12, 13 - -_Manchester Guardian_, 12 - -Marconi Station, 103 - -Markets 67 - -Merchants, 10, 15, 48, 78, 83, 96 - -Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, 139. - See also Docks and Dock offices - -Midland Railway, 137 - -Milk depots, 157 - -Moorfields, 53 - -Mossley Hill, 99, 132 - -Mossley Hill Church, 133, 140 - -Mount Pleasant, 59 - -Municipal Offices, 23, 60 - -Museum, 55, 65 - -Music, 74, 76, 127, 158 - - -Netherfield Road, 124 - -New Brighton, 17, 80, 81, 102, 138 - -New Brighton Tower, 17 - -New Ferry, 138 - -Newsham Park, 119, 125 - -Newspapers, 12, 42 - -New York, 17, 35, 42 - -Nietzsche, 146 - -Nineteenth century, 5, 6 - -Nocturnal Liverpool, 52, 90 - -North John Street, 45, 48 - - -Old Haymarket, 106 - -Old Swan, 99, 128 - -Open-air concerts, 157 - -Overhead Railway, 29, 98 - -Oxford Street, 126 - -Oxton, 138 - - -Park Lane, 97, 135 - -Parks, 39, 106, 119, 129 _seq._, 140 - -Philharmonic Hall, 127 - -Piccadilly, 90 - -Politics, 12, 84, 144 - -Port Sunlight, 137 - -_Post_, 49 - -Potteries, 2 - -Prenton, 138 - -Princes Avenue, 129 - -Princes Park, 135 - -Produce Exchange, 23, 48 - -Provinciality, 12 - -Public washhouses, 156, 157 - -Punch and Judy show, 54 - - -Queen’s Dock, 31 - - -Ranelagh Street, 51 - -Rates, 111 - -Religion, 76, 83, 105, 144, 151, 161 - -Renshaw Street, 91 - -Revenue Offices, 48 - -Rifle-ranges, 100 - -Rimrose Road, 100 - -River Mersey, predominance of, 2 _seq._, 14 _seq._, 20, 22 _seq._ - social influence of, 3 _seq._, 10 _seq._, 25, 63, 68, 98, 142 - and Liverpool’s history, 4 _seq._ - topographical effect of, 22 _seq._ - influence of, on physique and imagination, 15 _seq._, 39, 79 _seq._, - 92, 102, 118, 136 - by day, 20, 36, 40, 42, 58, 102 _seq._, 135, 136 - at night, 91, 92 - -Rock Ferry, 138 - -Rodney Street, 126 - -Royal Insurance Office, 19, 45 - - -Sailors’ Home, 60, 135 - -Salthouse Dock, 32 - -_Saxonia_, 29 - -School of Painters, 12, 161, 162 - -Scotch, 87, 88, 96, 108 - -Scotland Road, 105 - -Seacombe, 17, 138 - -Seaforth, 17, 18, 23, 26, 99, 100, 102, 103, 142 - -Sefton Park, 75, 96, 99, 124, 130 - -Self-absorption, 11 - -Sept-centenary celebrations, 5, 6 - -Seventeenth century, 8, 113 - -Shaw, G. Bernard, 74 - -Shipping offices, 58 - -Shop-girls, 77 - -Shoppers, 75 - -Simple life, 146 - -Sinclair, Upton, 148 - -Slave-traders, 8 - -Slums, distribution of, 23, 24, 143, 144 - of the future, 102, 159 _seq._ - Northern, 105, 144 _seq._ - Southern, 135, 144 _seq._ - and Liverpool’s efficiency, 141, 143, 155 - and the docks, 141 _seq._, 146, 153 - and the suburbs, 120, 146, 148, 152 - peculiarities of, 143 _seq._ - workers amongst the, 155 _seq._ - -Smithdown, 93, 94 - -Smithdown Road, 129 - -‘Smutted Greek,’ 49, 54, 63 _seq._ - -Soap-works, 2 - -Society, 6, 11, 12, 96, 128, 159 - -Southport, 101 - -Squares, 126, 129 - -St. George’s Hall, 23, 54, 55, 65, 66, 91 - -St. John’s Gardens, 49 - -St. Luke’s Church, 47 - -St. Nicholas’ Church, 19, 58 - -Stanley Park, 119, 130 - -Stanley Road, 105 - -Stanley Street, 45, 46, 48 - -Stock Exchange, 23, 89 - -Street-portraits, 44 _seq._ - -Suburbs, their history, 94 _seq._ - and electric cars, 95 _seq._, 99, 110, 111, 112, 117, 119 - interfusion and communism of, 96 _seq._, 107, 109, 112, 115, 117, - 131, 140 - distribution of, 43, 99, 126 _seq._ - drabness of northern and eastern, 119 _seq._ - country-side, 127 _seq._ - cross-river, 137 _seq._ - -Sugar-refineries, 2 - -Sunday in Liverpool, 88, 105 - -Swiftness of Liverpool’s growth, 5 _seq._, 9, 13, 25, 62, 69, 93 - -Swimming-baths, 80, 81 - - -Thatch, 115 - -Thurstaston, 138 - -Tithebarn Street, 52, 53, 55, 58, 78, 94 - -Tobacco factories, 2 - -Tolstoi, 76 - -Town Hall, 19, 23, 60, 68 - -Toxteth, 93, 94 - -Toxteth Dock, 32 - -Tuebrook, 99 - -Typical Liverpolitans, 71 _seq._, 131, 149 _seq._ - - -Underground Railway, 98 - -University, 86, 127, 161 - -University Club, 59 - -Utilitarianism, 63, 65, 66, 90, 155, 156 - - -Victoria Street, 48 - - -Walker Art Gallery, 55, 67, 86 - -Walton, 93, 99, 113, 118 - -Walton Church, 113, 117, 140 - -Walton Hall, 114 - -Warehouses, 19, 23, 46, 57, 67, 100 - -Water Street, 58, 80, 91 - -Waterloo, 17, 100 - -Waterloo Dock, 32 - -Wavertree, 93, 99, 129 - -Wellington Dock, 31 - -Welsh, 87, 96 - -West Derby, 93, 99, 128 - -White Star Line, 31 - -Whitechapel, 45 - -Widnes, 134 - -Wirral, the, 24, 104, 136 _seq._ - -Wolstenholme Square, 59 - -Women, 71 _seq._, 75, 149, 153 - - -Yeats, W. B., 76 - - - -BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD - - - - - * * * * * * - - - - -Transcriber’s note: - -Footnotes have been moved to the end of the paragraph to which they -refer. - -Inconsistent hyphenation and variant spelling are retained. - - - -***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIVERPOOL*** - - -******* This file should be named 50152-0.txt or 50152-0.zip ******* - - -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: -http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/5/0/1/5/50152 - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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