The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or
utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does not shout
his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm of authority
and all London obeys. I think the reason why the Londoners turned
so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the
suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly.
They jarred the public peace--that must have been it.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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