Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. Here--I
speak of Utopian London--will be the traditional centre of one of
the great races in the commonalty of the World State--and here will
be its social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty
University here, with thousands of professors and tens of thousands
of advanced students, and here great journals of thought and
speculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science,
and a glorious fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, and
with a teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous
libraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About these centres
will cluster a great swarm of people, and close at hand will be
another centre, for I who am an Englishman must needs stipulate that
Westminster shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of several
seats, if you will--where the ruling council of the world assembles.
Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers about
wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and
beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate,
austere and courageous imagination of our race.
One will come into this place as one comes into a noble mansion.
They will have flung great arches and domes of glass above the wider
spaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far
overhead will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the
mild London air. It will be the London air we know, clear of filth
and all impurity, the same air that gives our October days their
unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriously
beautiful. We shall go along avenues of architecture that will be
emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the
Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken
to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took to
stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways will
go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of people, and very
speedily we shall find ourselves in a sort of central space, rich
with palms and flowering bushes and statuary. We shall look along an
avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowded
hotels, the hotels that are still glowing with internal lights, to
where the shining morning river streams dawnlit out to sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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