Dearest Alma,—I came here from Rouen this day week, and have more than once sat down to write to you; but my heart was too full, and the words would not come, until to-day. Since we parted—since at your loving intercession I consented to wander abroad for a year, and to write you the record of my doings from time to time—I have been like a man in the Inferno, miserable, despairing, thinking only of the Paradise from which he has fallen; in other words, my sole thought has been of the heavenly days now past, and of you.
Well, I must not talk of that; I must conquer my passionate words and try to write coldly, dispassionately, according to promise, of the things that I have seen. That I can do so at all, will be a proof to you, my darling, that I am already much better. Another proof is that I am almost able (as you will see when you read on) to resume my old British prerogative of self-satisfied superiority over everything foreign, especially over everything French. It is extraordinary how thoroughly national even a cold-blooded cosmopolite becomes when he finds himself daily confronted by habits of thought he does not understand.
I am staying at a small hotel on the Paris side of Versailles, within easy reach of the gay city either by train or tram. I have exchanged my white neckcloth for a black necktie, and there is nothing in my dress or manner to mark me out for that most disagreeable of fishes out of water—a Parson in Paris! I see my clerical brethren sometimes, white-tied, black-coated, broad-brim’d-hatted, striding along the boulevards defiantly, or creeping down bye-streets furtively, or peeping like guilty things into the windows of the photograph shops in the Rue Rivoli. As I pass them by in my rough tourist’s suit, they doubtless take me for some bagman out for a holiday; and I—I smile in my sleeve, thinking how out of place they seem, here in Lutetia of the Parisians.
But my heart goes out most to those other brethren of mine, who draw their light from Rome. One pities them deeply now, in the time of their tribulation, as they crawl, forlorn and despised, about their weary work. The public prints are full of cruel things concerning them, hideous lampoons, unclean caricatures; what the Communist left surviving the journalist daily hacks and stabs. And indeed, the whole of this city presents the peculiar spectacle of a people without religion, without any sort of spiritual aspiration. Even that vague effluence of transcendental liberalism, which is preached by some of their leading poets and thinkers, is pretty generally despised, Talking with a leading bookseller the other day concerning your idol, Victor Hugo, and discussing his recent utterances on religious subjects, I found the good bourgeois to be of opinion that the great poet’s brain was softening through old age and personal vanity! The true hero of the hour, now all the tinsel of the Empire is rubbed away, is a writer named Zola, originally a printer’s devil, who is to modern light literature what Schopenhauer is to philosophy—a dirty, muddy, gutter-searching pessimist, who translates the ‘anarchy’ of the ancients into the bestial argot of the Quarties Latin.
It has been very well said by a wit of this nation that if on any fine day the news arrived in Paris that ‘God was dead,’ it would not cause the slightest astonishment or interest in a single salon; indeed, to all political intents and purposes the Divinity is regarded as extinct. A few old-fashioned people go to church, and here and there in the streets you see little girls in white going to confirmation; but the majority of the people are entirely without the religious sentiment in any form. A loathsome publication, with hideous illustrations, called the Bible pour Rire, is just now being issued in penny numbers; and the character of its humour may be guessed when I tell you that one of the pictures represents the ‘bon Dieu,’ dressed like an old clothesman, striking a lucifer on the sole of his boot, while underneath are the words, ‘And God said, Let there be Light!’ The same want of good taste, to put reverence aside as out of the question, is quite as manifest in the higher literature, as where Hugo himself, in a recent poem, thus describes the Tout-Puissant, or All-Powerful:-
Pris d’un vieux rhumatisme incurable à l’échine,
Après avoir créé le monde, et la machine
Des astres pêle-mêle au fond des horizons,
La vie et l’engrenage énorme des saisons,
La fleur, l’oiseau, la femme, et l’abîme, et la terre,