I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay
in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art
and millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin
if he were studying music and municipal control; or to Amsterdam
if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he
were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the
human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time;
or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient
life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in
insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them;
or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them.
No: I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane
man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.
But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole
vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old
fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run
town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part
of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's
pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious
suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back
streets; or its still more dismal slums - or anything that is London's.
To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite
a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing
to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways
in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come,
full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal
history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. It
is a still greater joy to find it - house or court or pump or what
not - looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen
Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere
the player, came this way. It is fine to be riding through the
country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of
your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place
called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill
of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find
these spots.
I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic
economies of an English barber shop.
