Chapter 2

The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the
top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace
gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it
were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real
horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally
missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict
it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals
and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of
vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But
the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that
there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity,
and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through a
criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals." But here
there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway
engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by
their common contempt for the people. Here there were churches;
only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites
or Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast
crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks of
civilization. But though one never knew, in one sense, what one
would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not
see--anything really great, central, of the first class, anything
that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable our
emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked
entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which
lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real
possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of
the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a
thunderbolt.

"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy
abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very vileness
of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the
victory of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have
to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a
fourth-rate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the
majority of people here are good people. And being good is an
adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world.
Besides--"

"Go on," I said.