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.
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