700-Year Newsreel

THE STREETS OF LONDON -- Thomas Burke--Scribner ($3.75).

The Streets of London is a rich distillation of writings on London by Londoners of every century. Distiller Thomas Burke, who discovered Limehouse as a boy, is now 53, a gentleman of letters; and his book is sometimes a little fat-mouthed with life-ran-very-high-in-those-days antiquarianism. But his subject has recently become titanic.

Only the masked violence of time can finally destroy London. But its streets, now being more monstrously manhandled than ever in their history, are bound to emerge from this war profoundly altered in shape and spirit. Through them has run for centuries the life and soul of a great people. In Burke's abundant data this life and soul are glimpsed in brief, suggestive fragments, as though in a 700-year newsreel, whose end is yesterday's bomb.

For centuries, London life had an almost Mediterranean vitality. Its medieval and Elizabethan fairs were riots; its May Days were wide-open phallic festivals; its murders were as common as dirty looks. The streets by day were deafening, by night as dark as doom, at all times filthy enough to guarantee the survival only of the fittest. Londoners were so energetic that despite a generous round of fairs, festivals, bear-baitings and other formal diversions, they repeatedly broke forth in impromptu mass hell-raising. They loved sport, splendor, cruelty, gayety, anarchy. There was no regular police force in London until 1829.

The 17th-century dictatorship of the Puritans, thinks Burke, cast a blight over these high spirits from which London never recovered. Its energy remained; its gayety did not. In the 18th century, London girls no longer went maying into the fields to be deflowered; instead May Day workmen cadged pennies around town like little boys; Elizabethan violence gave way to the swinish japes of the well-born "Mohocks" and Regency bucks. Industrialism thickened London's misery and thinned its spirits still more. Victorian street children (next to Victorian factory children) were the most wretched in England's history; and by the end of the century the mantle of the Mohocks had fallen on a bathetic species called the Rowdy-Dowdy Boys, to whom hell-raising meant tipsy harmonizing on the top of a hansom.

The physical city tamed too. Gothic extravagance yielded to gracious Georgian fac,ades; Disraeli snorted over London's architectural insipidity. The criminals, the riffraff and the poor were vital; the rest of the nation was one sallow hunk of middle-class mutton. Where berserk bulls had once been a traffic problem, "scorchers" on bicycles were called a public menace. The last gold sovereigns of England sang on the counters of World War I. Most revealing of all was the history of city lighting: after centuries of blackness, a slow, fuliginous dawn of lanterns and dim cressets, then mirrored lamps and gas, then the star-destroying terrors of electricity, then the icy twitching of neon; and now, suddenly, the starlit darkness, as profound as that of Norman times.

In that darkness the battered, drained and dry-wrung people of London still reveal their incredible fibre. They have endured Puritanism, mercantilism, industrialism, sinking physically, among the nations of Europe, from the first grade to the third. But Europe's once strongest stock survived the plagues and the Great Fire, and it now turns the worst rage that modern war can wreak into just another trial to be confronted. In confronting it, Londoners have rediscovered their chief racial faculty, once wild, now disciplined: a casual, bottomless courage.

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