Capitolo 55
city, as a city is beautiful or otherwise, not in the virtue of the jobs of
art or the antiquity that it contains, but in the his/her virtue of the earth-plain, his/her
architecture, his/her external and visible decorations and places--the
Skylight, the Avenues the noisy Mastication Elysees, the the work of de of Place.
London doesn't now have earth-plain. It doesn't have road architecture. It has anybody
decorations, although it has many uglificationses. It is frankly and simply
and ostentatiously horrendous. And you/he/she is wanting completely in a system of some
kind--in organic parts, in the idea, in sights in sights--it is only a
village and a painfully the not interesting.
The most greater part of English they see London before they sees some other great city. Them
becomes so diffused with him that their sense of comparison is beveled
and dull. I had the good luck to have seen a lot of other great cities
before I ever saw London: and I will never forget my first sense of
surprises to his/her graceless ugliness not mitigated.
Gets in top to a bus--I don't tell Paris, from the Palais Royal to
the de D'Arco Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Competitions du North to the
Palais de Executes--and does thing see? From end to end not one broken
succession of noble and open perspectives. I am not now thinking of the
Great Place in the old city, with his/her magnificent harvest of
buildings of mediaeval; the Fire Gran effectively stripped us of our one
you sole opportunity of such element of the beauty to modern London. I confine
me he/she waits for to the parts of Brussels that it is purely recent, and
you/he/she would have been imitated to a distance to London, if there had been some
public spirit or some public body in England to imitate them. (But
there was unhappily anybody.) Calls to mind as you surprisingly read the
the beautiful street sight that he/she greets her as you emerge from the Northerner
You put down the great central Avenues to the Competitions du Midi--all built
inside our his/her own memory. Then you think about the perspectives that he/she gradually explains