If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years
and years.
This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment
it is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too
general.
We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower
since he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the
very next Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for
fifteen years, because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-
East. Another says that he should like to have us 'read up' London
in the red-covered Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and
systematically. Another, a flower of the nobility, confesses that
he never mounted the top of an omnibus in the evening for the sake
of seeing London after dark, but that he thinks it would be rather
jolly, and that he will join us in such a democratic journey at any
time we like.
We think we get a kind of vague apprehension of what London means
from the top of a 'bus better than anywhere else, and this vague
apprehension is as much as the thoughtful or imaginative observer
will ever arrive at in a lifetime. It is too stupendous to be
comprehended. The mind is dazed by its distances, confused by its
contrasts; tossed from the spectacle of its wealth to the
contemplation of its poverty, the brilliancy of its extravagances to
the stolidity of its miseries, the luxuries that blossom in Mayfair
to the brutalities that lurk in Whitechapel.
