The Prehistoric Railway Station
A railway station is an admirable place, although
Ruskin did not think so; he did not think so because
he himself was even more modern than the railway station.
He did not think so because he was himself feverish,
irritable, and snorting like an engine. He could
not value the ancient silence of the railway station.
“In a railway station,” he said, “you
are in a hurry, and therefore, miserable”; but
you need not be either unless you are as modern as
Ruskin. The true philosopher does not think
of coming just in time for his train except as a bet
or a joke.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered
is to be late for the one before. Do this, and
you will find in a railway station much of the quietude
and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of
the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building;
it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and,
above all, it has recurrence or ritual. It is
dedicated to the celebration of water and fire the
two prime elements of all human ceremonial. Lastly,
a station resembles the old religions rather than the
new religions in this point, that people go there.
In connection with this it should also be remembered
that all popular places, all sites, actually used
by the people, tend to retain the best routine of
antiquity very much more than any localities or machines
used by any privileged class. Things are not
altered so quickly or completely by common people
as they are by fashionable people. Ruskin could
have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the
Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside
the stations. The great palaces of pleasure which
the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar
names. Their names are either snobbish, like
the Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like
the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in a third-class
carriage from the nearest circle station to Battersea
to the nearest circle station to the daily news,
the names of the stations are one long litany of solemn
and saintly memories. Leaving Victoria I come
to a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle;
thence I go to Westminster Bridge, whose very name
alludes to the awful Abbey; Charing Cross holds up
the symbol of Christendom; the next station is called
a Temple; and Blackfriars remembers the mediaeval
dream of a Brotherhood.
If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the
million feet of the crowd. At the worst the
uneducated only wear down old things by sheer walking.
But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.
