AT THE CAFE DE LA PAIX
As love-making in which we have no share is apt to be either tantalising or monotonous, I propose to skip the next fortnight and introduce myself to the reader at a moment when I am once more alone.It is about six o'clock on a summer afternoon, I am in Paris, and seated at one of the little marble tables of the Cafe de la Paix, dreamily watching the glittering tide of gay folk passing by,--"All happy people on their way To make a golden end of day."Meditatively I smoke a cigarette and sip a pale greenish liquor smelling strongly of aniseed, which isn't half so interesting as a commonplace whiskey and soda, but which, I am told, has the recommendation of being ten times as wicked.I sip it with a delicious thrill of degeneration, as though I were Eve tasting the apple for the first time,--for "such a power hath white simplicity." Sin is for the innocent,--a truth which sinners will be the first to regret.It was so, I said to myself, Alfred de Musset used to sit and sip his absinthe before a fascinated world.It is a privilege for the world to look on greatness at any moment, even when it is drinking.So I sat, and privileged the world.
It will readily be surmised from this exordium that--incredible as it may seem in a man of thirty--this was my first visit to Paris.You may remember that I had bought Orlando's tickets, and it had occurred to Sylvia and me to use them.Sylvia was due in London to fulfil a dancing engagement within a fortnight after our arrival; so after a tender good-bye, which there was no earthly necessity to make final, I had remained behind for the purposes of study.Though, logically, my pilgrimage had ended with the unexpected discovery of Sylvia Joy, yet there were two famous feminine types of which, seeing that I was in Paris, Ithought I might as well make brief studies, before I returned to London and finally resumed the bachelorhood from which I had started.These were the grisette of fiction and the American girl of fact.Pending these investigations, I meditated on the great city in the midst of which I sat.
A city! How much more it was than that! Was it not the most portentous symbol of modern history? Think what the word "Paris" means to the emancipated intellect, to the political government, to the humanised morals, of the world; not to speak of the romance of its literature, the tradition of its manners, and the immortal fame of its women.France is the brain of the world, as England is its heart, and Russia its fist.Strange is the power, strange are the freaks and revenges, of association, particularly perhaps of literary association.Here pompous official representatives may demur; but who can doubt that it is on its literature that a country must rely for its permanent representation? The countries that are forgotten, or are of no importance in the councils of the world, are countries without literature.Greece and Rome are more real in print than ever they were in marble.Though, as we know, prophets are not without honour save in their own countries and among their own kindred, the time comes when their countries and kindred are entirely without honour save by reason of those very prophets they once despised, rejected, stoned, and crucified.Subtract its great men from a nation, and where is its greatness?
Similarly, everything, however trifling, that has been written about, so long as it has been written about sufficiently well, becomes relatively enduring and representative of the country in which it is found.To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark is that Shelley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted; and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded, confess its tremendous debt to Keats:
a tenth part genuine song, the rest moon, stars, silence, and John Keats,--such is the nightingale.The real truth about a country will never be known till every representative type and condition in it have found their inspired literary mouthpiece.
Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of another from the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible or prejudiced writers,--and really it is rather in what those writers leave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliable data of national character.
