bar of grey was split with a sword of silver and morning lifted
itself laboriously over London. From the spot where Turnbull and
MacIan were sitting on one of the barren steeps behind Hampstead,
they could see the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and
largely in the grey and growing light, until the white sun stood
over it and it lay at their feet, the splendid monstrosity that
it is. Its bewildering squares and parallelograms were compact
and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which
man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon
Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene
signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and
passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by
deserts or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can
only be invoked by the sight of the enormous genius of man
applied to anything other than the best. Turnbull, the old
idealistic democrat, had so often reviled the democracy and
reviled them justly for their supineness, their snobbishness,
their evil reverence for idle things. He was right enough; for
our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic. And
after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years
as sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in
Hampstead and saw what gods they are. Their achievement seemed
all the more heroic and divine, because it seemed doubtful
whether it was worth doing at all. There seemed to be something
greater than mere accuracy in making such a mistake as London.
And what was to be the end of it all? what was to be the ultimate
transformation of this common and incredible London man, this
workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in
Cheapside? Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself
the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who