ot. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to
it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively
signalling the meaning of the mystery.

This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city
is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while
Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious
ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may
not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no
brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol--a message
from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The
narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention,
the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick
has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every
slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate
covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even
under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert
this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably
human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that
the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at
ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh
might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be
possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's souls
have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder
and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But
since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson)
decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the
great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must
give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of
pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or
the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested
in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the
Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers.
In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to
present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves
in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and
manners may easily be conceived by anyone w