 Broadway Comes Back by Jack Crawford. Since last I wrote for these pages, many plays have come and gone along our Manhattan Highway, sacred to Dionysus. A philosopher who should chance to take up his tub and place it at the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street would have before his eyes many examples of the mutability of human affairs wherewith to feed his meditations. The star that dazzled last week outshining the largest electric sign is now as far from our mythical philosophers can as Betelgeuse. But if I am not careful, I shall grow sentimental over Broadway and its swiftly turning wheel of dramatic fortune. There are enough sentimental persons roaming Broadway as it is. The second daintily finished production of the season, the first was The Young Visitors. To pass on was The Beggar's Opera, another illustration that one has to be careful when using a light touch upon the keys of Broadway's instrument. Instead of pleasant harmony, you may find only silence. This eighteenth century ballad opera, remote ancestor of musical comedy, with old quaint heirs in picturesque quality, did not repeat in New York its London success. The scenery and costumes by my brother-in-law—advertisement—see, love it, Fraser—were, if you will permit me to say so, charming. But The Beggar's Opera demands an audience to whom stage history and stage traditions have a meaning. Sir James Berry's Mary Rose seems to me a pulling play. At first I thought I must be too literal-minded to understand what the author meant. After listening carefully, however, to the exposition of this play by several of my friends, some of whom argue with much emphasis, I am still puzzled. Each friend gave me a different explanation. Now, as a general principle, a play should be enjoyed without explanation. Apply this to Mary Rose, and you discover yourself floored as one of Dickens' characters has it. You have, it is true, enjoyed some of it, but you will go away with question marks sticking all over your mind. As the play has been published, the best thing is to leave the puzzle for the solution of each individual. As for me, I shall return to Dear Brutus and let who will worry over Mary Rose. Eugene O'Neill must certainly be considered for the present one of the important American dramatists. It is true that Chicago did not think so highly of Beyond the Horizon as New York did, but agreement should be attained when the Emperor Jones travels westward. And now Mr. O'Neill is giving us, at special matinees, different. There is a quality of pessimism in Mr. O'Neill's point of view that is not especially American. Nevertheless, he is a sincere artist and is working hard to interpret what he sees. I shall return again in another issue to this drama. Another important American play is Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Betts, her own dramatization of her novel. This is the second of Mr. Brock Pemberton's productions, the first being Enter Madame. Mr. Pemberton has kept up the high standard of acting, which he set for a goal in his earlier offering. Again, a controversy has raged, because Miss Gale gave her play a happy ending. At least it now ends with a marriage. The very critics who indict Mr. O'Neill for pessimism, because his plays end unhappily, score Miss Gale for changing hers. Of course, the real question is whether any given ending is logical. Hero, married to Claudio, at the conclusion of much ado about nothing, never struck me as a particularly happy ending. An ending is not necessarily happy, because the author says it is. Miss Gale, however, has defended herself with great cleverness, and on the whole with reason. In any event, Miss Lulu Betts is one of the plays to see. Next to be mentioned is Sacha Gautry's Debarot, in a rhymed translation by Granville Barker. It is a dramatization of staged traditions. The story of Debarot, the famous clown of the Phenambules Paris. As a play, its charm depends upon the acting and the production, both of which are excellent. Mr. Lionel Atwell plays the lead with skill and finesse. There has been much critical controversy aroused by Mr. Barker's translation, particularly concerning his rhymes. The lines are short, and of irregular length. Some of the actors come down rather heavily on the rhymes, and modern ears are not accustomed to rhyme upon the stage. On the whole, however, the deliberate choice of conventionalized language patterns for a play of artificial atmosphere is an interesting experiment. As for the critics, they are forever complaining that nothing new crosses their paths, yet when something new does come, they grumble and compare the new with something old which it does not resemble. Mr. William Archer, who has spent many years in teaching us all how to write plays, has achieved success in the most difficult, technically, of all fields, melodrama. Let us turn back and read playmaking. Melodrama is difficult because no one can write a good melodrama unless he allows himself to be swept along by his own story. You must believe yourself. You must not condescend to melodrama. The Green Goddess, with the incomparably suave villainy of Mr. George Arlis, is a rattling good story. It is as old as the Vedantic hymns, and all the more satisfying for that reason. Once a year, all good playgoers should be rewarded by seeing one excellent melodrama. It clears the head. The most comfortable position in the theatre is to sit a whole evening on the edge of your chair. See, Mr. Arlis, and you will do this, is more to say this month than there is room to say, El Idian. Our Broadway season has finally arrived at a stirring climax. In passing, I may do little more this month than refer to St. John Irvine's mixed marriage, and to Johann Sigurd Johnson's event of the Hills. The latter is an Icelandic drama in an 18th century setting. It is gloomy, possibly morbid, but of undeniable interest. There are other plays worth dropping in to see, but further comment must be left for another time, and the future, likewise, holds a promise that of John Drinkwater's Mary Stewart. In short, drama seems to be once more on its feet in New York. Twenty-five years ago the schoolchildren used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singing recitative between the utterance of an episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust. I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated from the physiology class. The most striking line of it was this. The shin bone is the longest bone in the human body. What an inestimable bone. It would have been if all the corporeal and spiritual facts pertaining to man had thus been tunefully and logically inculcated in our youthful minds. But what we gained in anatomy, music, and philosophy was meager. The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned back to those school days for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined forth from those hard benches I could not recall one that treated of the voice of agglomerated mankind. In other words, of the composite vocal message of massed humanity. In other words, of the voice of a big city. No, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the song of the poet, the ripple of the brook, the meaning of the man who wants five dollars until next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of the pharaohs, the language of flowers, the step lively of the conductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at 4 a.m. Certain large-eared ones even assert that they are wise to the vibrations of the tympanum produced by concussion of the air emanating from Mr. H. James. But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city I went out for to see? First I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a hat with flowers on it, in ribbons and ends of things flittered here and there. Tell me, I said stammeringly, for I have no voice of my own. What does this big or enormous or whopping city say? It must have a voice of some kind. Does it ever speak to you? What do you interpret its meaning? It is a tremendous mass, but it must have a key. Like a Saratoga trunk, asked Aurelia. No, said I. Please do not refer to the lid. I have a fancy that every city has a voice. Each one has something to say to the one who can hear it. What does the big one say to you? All cities, said Aurelia, judiciously, say the same thing. When they get through saying it there is an echo from Philadelphia. So they are unanimous. Here are four million people, said I, scholastically, compressed upon an island which is mostly lambs surrounded by wall-street water. The conjunction of so many units into so small a space must result in an identity, or rather a homogeneity that finds its oral expression through a common channel. It is, as you might say, a consensus of translation, concentrating in a crystallized general idea which reveals itself in what may be termed the voice of the city. Can you tell me what it is? Aurelia smiled wonderfully. She sat on the high stoop. A spray of insolent ivy bobbed against her right ear. A ray of impudent moonlight flickered upon her nose. But I was adamant, nickel-plated. I must go and find out, I said. What is the voice of this city? Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York. I continued, in a rising tone, had better not hand me a cigar and say, old man, I can't talk for publication. No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, I will. I, Philadelphia, says, I should. New Orleans says, I used to. Louisville says, don't care if I do. St. Louis says, excuse me. Pittsburgh says, smoke up. Now, New York. Aurelia smiled. Very well, said I. I must go elsewhere and find out. I went into a palace, tile-floored, cherub-sailinged, and square with the cop. I put my foot on the brass rail and said to Billy Magnus, the best bartender in the diocese, Billy, you've lived in New York a long time. What kind of a song and dance does this old town give you? What I mean is, doesn't the gab of it seem to kind of bunch up and slide over the bar to you and a sort of amalgamated tip that hits off the burg in a kind of an epigram with a dash of bitters and a slice of—excuse me a minute, said Billy—somebody's punching the button at the side door. He went away, came back with an empty tin bucket, again vanished with it full, returned and said to me, That was maim. She rings twice. She likes a glass of beer for supper. Her and the kid. If he ever saw that little skeez-ex of mine, brace up in his high chair, and take his beer and—but say, what was yours? I get kind of excited when I hear them two rings. Was it the baseball score or gen-fizz you asked for? Ginger ale, I answered. I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the corner. The cops take kids up, women across, and men in. I went up to him. If I'm not exceeding the spiel limit, I said, Let me ask you. You see New York during its vocative hours. It is the function of you and your brother cops to preserve the acoustics of the city. There must be a civic voice that is intelligible to you. At night, during your lonely rounds, you must have heard it. What is the epitome of its turmoil and shouting? What does the city say to you? Friend, said the policeman, spending his club, it don't say nothing. I get my orders from the man higher up. Say, I guess you're all right. Stand here for a few minutes and keep an eye open for the roundsmen. The cop melted into the darkness of the side street. In ten minutes he had returned. Married last Tuesday, he said, half-gruffly. You know how they are. She comes to that corner at nine every night for a—comes to say hello. I generally managed to be there. Say, what was it you asked me a bit ago? What's doing in the city? Oh, there's a roof garden, or two just opened. Twelve blocks up. I crossed a crow's foot of streetcar tracks, and skirted the edge of an umbrageous park, an artificial diana, gilded, heroic, poised, wind-ruled, on the tower, shimmered in the clear light of her namesake in the sky. Along came my poet, hurrying, hatted, haired, emitting dactyls, spondies, and dactyls. I seized him. Bill, said I. In the magazine he is Cleon. Give me a lift. I'm on assignment to find out the voice of the city. You see, it's a special order. Ordinarily a symposium comprising the views of Henry Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Irwin, and Charles Schwab would be about all. But this is a different matter. We want a broad poetic, mystic vocalization of the city's soul and meaning. You are the very chap to give me a hint. Some years ago a man got at the Niagara Falls and gave us its pitch. The note was about two feet below the lowest G on the piano. Now you can't put New York into a note, unless it's better endorsed than that. But give me an idea of what it would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it we must take the tremendous crash of the chords of the day's traffic, the laughter and music of the night, the solemn tones of Dr. Parkhurst, the ragtime, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cabwheels, the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of fountains on the roof gardens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry vendor, and the covers of everybody's magazine, the whispers of the lovers in the parks. All these sounds must go into your voice, not combined, but mixed, and of the mixture, an essence made, and of the essence, an extract, an audible extract, of which one drop shall form the thing we seek. Do you remember, asked the poet, with the chuckle, that California girl we met at Stiver's Studio last week? Well, I'm on my way to see her. She repeated that poem of mine, the tribute of Spring, word for word. She's the smartest proposition in this town just at present. Say, how does this confounded tie look? I spoiled four before I got one to set right. And the voice that I ask you about? I inquired. Oh, she doesn't sing, said Cleon. But you ought to hear her recite, my angel of the inshore wind. I passed on. I cornered a newsboy, and he flashed at me prophetic pink papers that outstripped the news by two revolutions of the clock's longest hand. Son, I said, while I pretended to chase coins in my penny pocket, doesn't it sometimes seem to you as if the city ought to be able to talk? All these ups and downs and funny business and queer things happening every day? What would it say, do you think, if it could speak? Quit you kidding, said the boy. What paper do you want? I got no time to waste. It's Magged Birthday, and I want thirty cents to get her a present. Here was no interpreter of the city's mouthpiece. I bought a paper, and I consigned its undeclared treaties, its premeditated murders, and unfought battles, to an ash-can. Again I repaired to the park, and sat in the moonshade. I thought and thought, and wondered why none could tell me what I asked for. And then, as swift as light from a fixed star the answer came to me. I arose and hurried, hurried, as so many reasoners must, back around my circle. I knew the answer, and I hugged it in my breast as I flew, faring lest someone would stop me and demand my secret. Aurelia was still on the stoop. The moon was higher, and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her side, and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting moon, and go asunder, quite pale and discomfited. And then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights, our hands somehow touched, and our fingers closed together and did not part. After half an hour, Aurelia said, with that smile of hers, Do you know you haven't spoken a word since you came back? That, said I, nodding wisely, is the voice of the city. End of The Voice of the City by O. Henry. REVERY. by George Song. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. REVERY. by George Song. FOR THE TAILS OF THE CITY'S COMPELATION. I know of no city in the world where strolling reverie is more agreeable than in Paris. If the poor pedestrian, through heat and cold, meets innumerable tribulations there, it must also be confessed that in the fine days of spring and autumn, if he knows his own happiness, he is a privileged mortal. For my part I like to recognize that no vehicle from the sumptuous equipage to the modest hack can be compared for sweet and smiling reverie with the pleasure of making use of two good legs on the asphalt or pavement obeying the whim of their proprietor. Let him who will regret ancient Paris, my intellectual faculties have never permitted me to know its perimeters, although like so many others I have been brought up there. Today what great fist does, too straight for the artistic eye but eminently sure, allow us to go on for a long while with our hands in our pockets, without going astray and without being forced every moment to consult the officer at the corner or the affable grocer along the way. It is dangerous, I must confess, to be distraite in the center of a large city which is not obliged to trouble itself about you when you do not condescend to take care of yourself. Paris is still far from finding a system of veritable safety that would separate the locomotion of horses from that of human beings, and that would succeed in suppressing, without prejudicing business necessities, those hand-trucks of which I am inclined in passing to complain a little. I would dare to maintain that absent-minded people for the hundred perils that they still run in Paris benefit by the compensation of a hundred thousand real and intimate joys. Whosoever possesses this precious infirmity of preoccupation will join me in saying that I am not maintaining a paradox. In the atmosphere, in the view, and in the sound of Paris, there is I know not what personal influence that is not to be found elsewhere. Nowhere is the charm characteristic of the temperate climate more delightfully manifested with its moist air, its rose skies, marked or pearly with the most vivid and delicate tents, the brilliant windows of its shops lavish with motley color, its river neither too narrow nor too broad, the soft clearness of its reflections, the easy gate of its population, active and lounging at the same time, its confused noises in which everything is harmonized, every sound that of the water population as well as that of the city, having its proportions and distributions wonderfully fortuitous. At Bordeaux, or at Rouen, the voices and movement of the river dominate everything, and one might say that its life is on the water. At Paris, life is everywhere. Therefore everything there seems more alive than elsewhere. The new garden, arranged in dales and dotted baskets of exotic flowers, is never anything more than the petit triannot of the classic decadence and the English garden of the beginning of the present century, perfected in the sense of multiplying the turns and accidental features in order to realize the aspect of natural landscape within a limited space. In our opinion, nothing is less justifiable than that title of landscape garden, which nowadays eventually takes unto himself in his provincial town. Even in the more extensive spaces that Paris consecrates to this fiction, do not hope to find the charm of nature, the smallest nook of the rocks of Fontainebleau, or of the wooded hill of Auvoin, the slenderous casquette of La Gaye-Hurse, or the least known of the meanderings of the Arles, has an aspect, a savor, a penetrating power altogether different from the most sumptuous compositions of our Parisian landscape. If you want to see the garden of the creation, do not go to the end of the world. There are 10,000 of them in France, in spots where nobody is occupied and of which no one has any notion. Seek and you will find. But if you want to see the decorative garden, par excellence, you have it in Paris. And let us say it once that it is a ravishing invention. It is decoration and nothing else. Make up your mind to that, but adorable and marvelous decoration. Science and taste have joined hands there. Make your reverence. It is a youthful household. The exotic vegetable world, which has gradually revealed its treasures to us, is beginning to inundate us with its riches. Every year brings us a series of unknown plants, many of which doubtless have already enriched the Arbles and troubled the notions of worried classifiers, but of whose aspect, color, shape, and life we are ignorant. The many conservatories of the city of Paris possess a world of marvels which constantly grows and in which skillful and learned horticulturists may become initiated into the secrets of the preservation and reproduction proper to each species. Study has been given to the temperament of these poor exotics that perpetually vegetated in an artificial heat. It has been discovered that some that were reputed delicate possess quite a rustic vigor, whilst others, more mysterious, could not endure under our skies as severe cold as they patiently endured in their native earth. But, like animals, plants are susceptible of education, and I doubt not that the time will come when more than one that now has to be coaxed in order to live among us will come to produce fruits or shoots gladly. We shall then have gratis before our eyes during every hour of fine season, tropical forms, perhaps arboricent ferns that are already easy to transport under glass, notwithstanding their respectable age of several hundreds of centuries, splendid orchids, colossal Latanya palms, shafts of vegetable columns whose age seems to mount to the age of the flowers of the coal-beds, sedutated leaves ten meters in length that look as if they had fallen from another planet, foliage of such brilliant colors as to eclipse that of the flowers, gramanacea resembling clouds more than herbs, mosses lovelier than the velvet of our looms, perfumes unknown to the combinations of industrial chemistry, and, finally, gigantic living plants placed within the reach of everybody. Let us halt here. Let us dream a little. Since having passed our first astonishment and expressed our first admiration, our imagination carries us into distant regions, into still desert, isles, and into those unknown solitudes once the courageous and enthusiastic naturalists has brought us these treasures at the peril of his life. With regard to perils, we must not speak only of the caprices of the sea, of the venom of the rattlesnakes, and of the hurtful appetite of savage animals and indigenous cannibals, certain of whom are fond of white flesh with tomato sauce. The plants themselves sometimes pose us more prompt and direct means of defense, witness the beautiful nettle that we have seen covered with a natural, silvery, viscous lie that we may touch, but that is provided beneath with purple colored hairs of which the slightest contact with the skin causes death. Be comforted, it will not leave its glass prison. We therefore wander in some thousands of leagues from the Paris Marceau. The rich decoration that environs us cannot long keep up the illusion for us. Too many diverse regions, too many countries differing greatly, and far distant from one another, have contributed to this ornamentation which presents itself as an artistic resume of creation. We necessarily fly from one to another on the wings of intuition, and ashamed of the number of things of which we are still ignorant, we are seized with the desire to travel in order to learn, or to learn in order to travel with pleasure and fruitfulness. Shall we leave the decorative gardens without dreaming about the delightful hydraulic trifles that now plays so great a role in our embellishments? Clarified by the rapid motion, the water is always a music and radiance, the charm of which art cannot shatter. I have seen naturalist artists absolutely furious against these ruinous playthings that pretend to remind them of nature and that they treat as purile and monstrous counterfeits. They said, let them bring us the rocky and virtuous wells of Tivoli with their whirls of impetuous water, or let them give us back the blowing tritons of Versailles, the hydraulic concerts of the gardens of Frascati, and all the Rococo Follies, rather than these false grottos and lying cascades. It is falsifying all the notions of the true, all the laws of taste, and all the sentiment of a generation that they pretend they are making artistic and learned, they were indignant, and we could not calm them. Shall we share their anger? No. Between the reality and the accepted, between art and nature, there is a medium necessary for the sedentary enjoyment of a large majority of people. What a number of poor citizens never have, and never will see, the picturesque sights of Spain, Switzerland, and Italy, and the enchantments of one's own view of the great features of mountain and forests, of lake and torrent, except through the fictions of our theatres and gardens. It is impossible to provide them with real specimens. We must limit ourselves to the copy of a detail, a nook, or an episode. I cannot bring you the ocean. Be content with a reef and a wave. This detail would not gain in the least by having its already considerable proportions centumpled in cost. It would not be more real. All that can be demanded of us is to make it pretty, and in this respect our hydraulic playthings are without reproach. Formally, they were much more costly, and transported us into a mythological world of marble or bronze, which was not more successful in realizing the antique style or the poetry of the Grecian gardens and temples. They have long formed a separate style, entirely fanciful, which indeed has its own charm, but which we must leave where it is. Apollo and his nymphs, Neptune and Amphitrethe, have nothing more to say to us unless they speak to us of Louis XIV and his court. The thought of our epoch aims at making us love nature. Romanticism has disembarrassed us of the fetishes that did not allow us to see her, to understand her, and to love her for herself. What we want to teach our children is that grace is in the tree, and not in the hama-dryad that formerly dwelt in it. That the water is as beautiful on the rock as in the marble. That the dreadful rock itself has its physiognomy, its color, and its cherished plant, the wreathings of which make a wonderful tapestry for it. That the grotto-work has no need of symmetry and a clothing of shells. It is only a question of imitating, with a truth-loving skill, their natural dispositions and their monumental, easy or fantastic poses. Later on, if our children see how real nature works, they will only enjoy her the more, and they will remember the grottos of La Chambre, Manson, and the butchement. As we recall with pleasure and tenderness, the little frail plant that we cultivate in our window, and that we see blowing strong and glorious in our country. End of REVERY by JOURSON THE EDGE FOR LOVE by Paul Bourget. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, reading by Bologna Times. THE EDGE FOR LOVE by Paul Bourget. For the Tales of the City's Compilation. When I submitted the plan of my inquiry upon the age for love to the editor-in-chief of the boulevard, the highest type of French literary paper, he seemed astonished that an idea so journalistic, that was his word, should have been evolved from the brain of his most recent acquisition. I had been with him two weeks, and it was my first contribution. Give me some details, my dear Labarth, he said, in a somewhat less insolent manner than was his want. After listening to me for a few moments, he continued, That is good. You will go and interview certain men and women, first upon the age at which one loves the most, next upon the age when one is most loved, Is that your idea, and now to whom will you go first? I have prepared a list, I replied, and took from my pocket a sheet of paper. I had jotted down the names of a number of celebrities, whom I proposed to interview, on this all-important question, and I began to read over my list. It contained two ex-government officials, a general, a Dominican father, four actresses, two cafe concert singers, four actors, two financiers, two lawyers, a surgeon, and a lot of literary celebrities. At some of the names my chief would nod his approval, at others, he would say curtly, with an affectation of American manners. Bad, strike it off, until I came to the name I had kept for the last, that of Pierre Faussier, the famous novelist. Strike that off, he said, shrugging his shoulders, he is not on good terms with us. And yet, I suggested, is there anyone whose opinion would be of greater interest to reading men as well as to women? I had even thought of beginning with him. The devil you had, interrupted the editor-in- chief, it is one of Faussier's principles not to see any reporters. I have sent him ten if I have one, and he has shown them all the door. The boulevard does not relish such treatment, so we have given him some pretty hard hits. Nevertheless, I will have an interview with Faussier for the boulevard, was my reply. I am sure of it. If you succeed, he replied, I'll raise your salary. That man makes me tired with his scorn of newspaper notoriety. He must take his share of it, like the rest. But you will not succeed. What makes you think you can? Permit me to tell you my reason later. In forty-eight hours you will see whether I have succeeded or not. Go, and do not spare the fellow. Decidedly, I had made some progress as a journalist, even in my two weeks' apprenticeship, if I could permit Pascal to speak in this way of the man I most admired among living writers. Since that not far distant time, when tired of being poor, I had made up my mind to cast my lot with a multitude in Paris. I had tried to lay aside my old self, as lizards do their skin, and I had almost succeeded. In a former time, a former time that was but yesterday, I knew, or in a drawer full of poems, dramas, and half-finished tales, I had proof of it, that there had once existed a certain Jules Labarth, who had come to Paris with the hope of becoming a great man. That person believed in literature, with a capital L, in the ideal. Another capital in glory, a third capital. He was now dead and buried. Would he, some day, his position assured, began to write once more from pure love of his art? Possibly, but for the moment I knew only the energetic, practical Labarth, who had joined the procession with the idea of getting into the front rank, and of obtaining, as soon as possible, an income of thirty thousand francs a year. What would it matter to this second individual if that vile Pascal should boast of having stolen a march on the most delicate, the most powerful of the heirs of Balzac, since I, the new Labarth, was capable of looking forward to an operation which required about as much delicacy as some of the performances of my editor-in-chief? I had, as a matter of fact, assured means of obtaining the interview. It was this. When I was young and simple, I had sent some verses and stories to Pierre Forture, the same verses and stories, the refusal of which, by four editors, had finally made me decide to enter the field of journalism. The great writer was travelling at this time, but he had replied to me. I had responded by a letter to which he again replied, this time with an invitation to call upon him. I went. I did not find him. I went again. I did not find him that time. Then a sort of timidity prevented my returning to the charge. So I had never met him. He knew me only as the young Elia of my two epistles. This is what I counted upon to extort from him the favour of an interview which he certainly would refuse to a mere newspaper man. My plan was simple, to present myself at his house to be received, to conceal my real occupation, to sketch vaguely a subject for a novel in which there should occur a discussion upon the age for love, to make him talk, and then when he should discover his conversation in print. Here I began to feel some remorse, but I stifled it with the terrible phrase, The Struggles for Life, and also by the recollection of numerous examples culled from the firm with which I now had the honour of being connected. The morning after I had had this very literary conversation with my honourable director, I rang at the door of the small house in the Rue de Borde-Valmore, where Pierre Fauchering lived, in a retired corner of Passey. Having taken up my pen to tell a plain unvarnished tale, I do not see how I can conceal the wretched feeling of pleasure, which, as I rang the bell, warmed my heart at the thought of the good joke I was about to play on the owner of this peaceful abode. Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I had decided upon, there has always left a trace of envy for those who have triumphed in the melancholy struggle for literary supremacy. It was a real disappointment to me when the servant replied, ill-humouredly, that M. Fauchering was not in Paris. I asked when he would return. The servant did not know. I asked for his address. The servant did not know that. Poor lion, who thought he had secured an anonymity for his holiday. A half-hour later I had discovered that he was staying for the present at the Chateau des Probes, near Nemois. I had merely had to make inquiries of his publisher. Two hours later I bought my ticket at the Gare de Léon for the little town chosen by Balzac. As the scene for his delicious story of Ursule Miroet, I took a travelling bag and was prepared to spend the night there. In case I failed to see the master that afternoon, I had decided to make sure of him the next morning. Only seven hours after the servant, faithful to his trust, had declared that he did not know where his master was staying, I was standing in the hall of the Chateau, waiting for my card to be sent up. I had taken care to write on it a reminder of our conversation of the year before, and this time after a ten-minute wait in the hall, during which I noticed with singular curiosity and malice, two very elegant and very pretty young women, going out for a walk. I was admitted to his presence. Aha! I said to myself, this, then, is the secret of his exile. The interview promises well. The novelist received me in a cozy little room, with a window opening onto the park, already beginning to turn yellow with the advancing autumn. A wood fire burned in the fireplace and lighted up the walls, which were hung with flowered critton, and on which could be distinguished several colored English prints representing cross-country rides in the jumping of hedges. Here was the worldly environment with which Fauchery is so often reproached, but the books and papers that littered the table bore witness that the present occupant of this charming retreat remained a substantial man of letters. His habit of constant work was still further attested by his face, which I admit gave me all at once a feeling of remorse for the trick I was about to play him. If I had found him the snobbish pretender whom the weekly newspapers were in the habit of ridiculing, it would have been a delight to outwit his diplomacy. But no, I saw, as he put down his pen to receive me, a man about fifty-seven years old, with a face that bore the marks of reflection, eyes tired from sleeplessness, a brow heavy with thought, who said, as he pointed to an easy chair, You will excuse me, my dear Confraire, for keeping you waiting. I, his dear Confraire, ah, if he had known! You see, and he pointed to the page still wet with ink, that man cannot be free from the slavery of furnishing copy, one has less facility at my age than at yours. Now, let us speak of yourself. How do you happen to be at Nemois? What have you been doing since the story, and the verses you were kind enough to send me? It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals. When a man has loved literature as I loved it at twenty, he cannot be satisfied at twenty-six to give up his early passion, even at the bidding of implacable necessity. So Pierre Fauchere remembered my poor verses. He had actually read my story. His illusion proved it. Could I tell him at such a moment that since the creation of those first works I had despaired of myself and that I had changed my gun to the other shoulder? The image of the boulevard office rose suddenly before me. I heard the voice of the editor-in-chief saying, Interview Fauchere, you will never accomplish that. So, faithful to my self-imposed role, I replied, I have retired to Nemois to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wish to consult you, my dear master. It seemed to me it may possibly have been an illusion that at the announcement of the so-called title of my so-called novel, A Smile and a Shadow, flitted over Fauchere's eyes and mouth, a vision of the two young women I had met in the hall came back to me. Was the author of so many great masterpieces of analysis about to live a new book before writing it? I had no time to answer this question, for, with a glance at an onyx base containing some cigarettes of Turkish tobacco, he offered me one, lighted one himself, and began first to question, then to reply to me. I listened while he thought aloud, and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works. He was the first of the great writers of our day, whom I had thus approached on something like terms of intimacy. As we talked, I observed the strange similarity between his spoken and his written words. I admired the charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of imagination, his super-abundant intelligence, the liveliness of his impressions in his total absence of arrogance and of pose. There is no such thing as an age for love, he said in substance, because the man capable of loving, in the complex and modern sense of love, as a sort of ideal exaltation, never ceases to love. I will go further. He never ceases to love the same person. You know the experiment that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness consisted. He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood. Then he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other. In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type. Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life, we should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most inconsistent have cherished one in the same being through five or six or even twenty different embodiments. The main point is to find out at what age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image they have constantly born within themselves. For them that would be the age for love. The age for being loved? He continued. The deepest of all the passions I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my masters, a poet, and he was sixty years old at the time. It is true that he still held himself as erect as a young man. He came and went with a step as light as yours. He conversed like riverol. He composed verses as beautiful as Divinis. He was besides very poor, very lonely, and very unhappy, having lost one after another, his wife, and his children. You remember the words of Shakespeare's more? She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. So it was that this great artist inspired in a beautiful, noble, and wealthy young Russian woman a devotion so passionate that because of him she never married. She found a way to take care of him day and night in spite of his family during his last illness, and at the present time having bought from his heirs all of the poet's personal belongings, she keeps the apartment where he lived, just as it was at the time of his death. That was years ago. In her case she found in a man three times her own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried in her heart. Look at Gerta, at La Martine, and at many others. To depict feelings on this high plane you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of today. In order that a 60-year-old lover should appear neither ridiculous nor odious you must apply to him what the elder Cornel so proudly said of himself in his lines to the Marquis. Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there. As he spoke the master had such a light of intellectual certainty in his eyes that to me he seemed the embodiment of one of those great characters he had been urging me to describe. It made me feel that the theory of this man himself almost a sexagenarian that at any age one may inspire love was not unreasonable. The contrast between the world of ideas in which he moved and the atmosphere of the literary shop in which for the last few months I had been stifling was too strong. The dreams of my youth were realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production of thirty volumes and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration of the beautiful saying, Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly. His slender figure bespoke the austerity of long hours of work. His firm mouth showed his decision of character. His brow, with its deep furrows, had the paleness of the paper over which he so often bent, and yet the refinement of his hands so well cared for. The sober elegance of his dress and an aristocratic air that was natural to him showed that the finer professional virtues had been cultivated in the midst of a life of frivolous temptations. These temptations had been no more of a disturbance to his ethical and spiritual nature than the academic honors, the financial successes, the numerous additions that had been his. With all he was an awfully good fellow, for after having talked at great length with me he ended by saying, Since you are staying in Nemours I hope to see you often, and today I cannot let you go without presenting you to my hostess. What could I say? This was the way in which a mere reporter on the boulevard found himself installed at a five o'clock tea table in the salon of a chateau where surely no newspaper man had ever before set foot and was presented as a young poet and novelist of the future to the old Marquis de Prove, whose guest the master was. This amiable white-haired dowager questioned me upon my alleged work, and I replied equivocally with blushes which the good lady must have attributed to bashful timidity. Then as though some evil genius had conspired to multiply the witnesses of my bad conduct, the two young women, whom I had seen in going out, returned in the midst of my unlooked-for visit. Ah, my interview with the student of femininity, upon the age for love, was about to have a living commentary. How it would illumine his words to hear him conversing with these new arrivals? One was a young girl of possibly twenty, a Russian, if I rightly understood the name. She was rather tall, with a long face lighted up by two very gentle black eyes, singular in their fire and intensity. She bore a striking resemblance to the portrait attributed to Fronzio in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, which goes by the name of the man in black, because the color of his clothes and his mantle. About her mouth and nostrils was that same subdued nervousness, that same restrained feverishness which gives to the portrait its striking qualities. I had not been there a quarter of an hour before I had guessed from the way she watched and listened to Foscheri, what a passionate interest the old master inspired in her. When he spoke, she paid rapt attention. When she spoke to him, I felt her voice shiver, if I may use the word. And he, he, glorious writer, surfaced with triumphs, exhausted by his labors, seemed, as soon as he felt the radiance of her glance of ingenuous idolatry, to recover that vivacity, that elasticity of impression, which is the sovereign grace of youthful lovers. I understand now why he cited Gerta and the young girl of Marion Bad, said I to myself with a laugh, as my hired carriage sped on toward Nemours. He was thinking of himself. He is in love with that child, and she is in love with him. We shall hear of his marrying her. There's a wedding that we'll call forth copy, and when Pascal hears that I witnessed the courtship, but just now I must think of my interview. Won't Foscheri be surprised to read it, day after tomorrow, in his paper? But does he read the papers? It may not be right, but what harm will it do him? Besides, it's a part of the struggle for life. It was by such reasoning, I remember, the reasoning of a man determined to arrive, that I tried to lull to sleep the inward voice that cried, you have no right to put on paper to give to the public what this noble writer said to you, supposing that he was receiving a poet, not a reporter. But I heard also the voice of my chief, saying, you will never succeed, and this second voice I am ashamed to confess triumphed over the other with all the more ease, because I was obliged to do something to kill time. I reached Nemours too late for the train, which would have brought me back to Paris, about dinner time. At the old end they gave me a room which was clean and quiet, a good place to write, so I spent the evening until bedtime, composing the first of the articles, which were to form my inquiry. I scribbled away under the vivid impressions of the afternoon, my powers as well as my nerves spurred by a touch of remorse. Yes, I scribbled four pages which would have been no disgrace to the journal de Gancard, that exquisite manual of the perfect reporter. It was all there, my journey, my arrival at the Chateau, a sketch of the quaint eighteenth-century building, with its fringe of trees and its well-kept walks, the master's room, the master himself and his conversation, the tea at the end, and the smile of the old novelist in the midst of a circle of admirers, old and young. It lacked only a few closing lines. I will add these in the morning, I thought, and went to bed with a feeling of duty performed. Such is the nature of a writer. Under the form of an interview I had done, and I knew it, the best work of my life. What happens while we sleep? Is there unknown to us a secret and irresistible ferment of ideas, while our senses are closed to the impressions of the outside world? Certain it is that, on awakening, I am apt to find myself in a state of mind very different from that in which I went to sleep. I had not been awake ten minutes before the image of Pierre Fourchet came up before me, and at the same time, the thought that I had taken of base advantage of the kindness of his reception of me became quite unbearable. I felt a passionate longing to see him again, to ask his pardon for my deception. I wished to tell him who I was, with what purpose I had gone to him, and that I regretted it. But there was no need of a confession. It would be enough to destroy the pages I had written the night before. With this idea I arose. Before tearing them up, I reread them. And then any writer will understand me. And then they seemed to me so brilliant that I did not tear them up. Focherie is so intelligent, so generous was the thought that crossed my mind. What is there in this interview, after all, to offend him? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Even if I should go to him again this very morning and tell him my story, and that upon the success of my little inquiry, my whole future as a journalist might depend, when he found that I had had five years of poverty and hard work without accomplishing anything, and that I had had to go on to a paper in order to earn the very bread I ate, he would pardon me, he would pity me, and he would say, publish your interview. Yes, but what if he should forbid my publishing it? But no, he would not do that. I passed the morning in considering my latest plan. A certain shyness made it very painful to me. But it might at the same time conciliate my delicate scruples, my amor proper, as an ambitious chronicler, and the interest of my pocketbook. I know that Pascal had the name of being very generous with an interview article, if it pleased him. And besides, had he not promised me a reward if I succeeded with Focherie? In short, I had decided to try my experiment when, after a hasty breakfast, I saw, unstepping into the carriage I had had the night before, a Victoria with coat of arms drive rapidly past, and was stunned at recognizing Focherie himself, apparently lost in a gloomy reverie that was in singular contrast to his high spirits of the night before. A small trunk on the coachman's seat was a sufficient indication that he was going to the station. The train for Paris left in twelve minutes, time enough for me to pack my things palmel into my valise, and hurriedly to pay my bill. The same carriage, which was to have taken me to the Château d'Iprobe, carried me to the station at full speed, and when the train left I was seated in an empty compartment opposite the famous writer, who was saying to me, you two deserting memoirs, like me you work best in Paris. The conversation, begun in this way, might easily have led to the confession I had resolved to make. But in the presence of my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness. Moreover he inspired me with a curiosity, which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of circumstances, from a telegram, from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the Château, where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before. But that the expression of his face should have changed, as it had, that in eighteen hours he should have become the care-worn, discouraged being he now seemed. When I had left him so pleased with life, so happy, so assiduous in his attentions to that pretty girl, Mademoiselle de Roussée, who loved him, and whom he seemed to love, was a mystery which took complete possession of me, this time without any underlying professional motive. He was to give me the key before we reached Paris. At any rate I shall always believe that part of his conversation was in an indirect way a confidence. He was still unstrung by the unexpected incident which had caused both his hasty departure and the sudden metamorphosis in what he himself, if he had been writing, would have called his intimate heaven. The story he told me was persvargas, as Bale loved to say. His idea was that I would not discover the real hero. I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things. It was apropos of the supposed subject of my novel, O irony, apropos of the real subject of my interview that he began. I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may love and be loved at any age, I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice. I should like to share with you a human document, as they say today, which is in itself a drama with a denomé. But I must ask you not to use it, for the secret is not my own. With the assurance of my discretion he went on. I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them. The girl married someone else, and almost immediately afterward she died. My friend lived. Someday you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed that first ineffable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves. He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone, and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words, how many times he has said to me, in others I have always looked for her, and as I have never found her I have never truly loved anyone but her. And had she loved him I interrupted. He did not think so, replied Foshery. At least she had never told him so. Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age, or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had, at last, discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the timbre of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases, describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness both present and, at the same time, retrospective for the dead through the living, the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins, the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation, imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he seized distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small, delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning. What then? I asked as he paused. My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror hung nearby where he could compare his present with his former face, the man he was with the man he had been. He never told me, and I never asked what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through his age, which was so apparent it was his youth which this child loved? Did he remember with a keenness that was all too sad that other who had never given him a kiss like that, at a time when he might have returned it? I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the purity, the soul of a man of twenty. A few hours after this conversation, I found myself once more in the office of the boulevard, seated in Pascal's den, and he was saying, Already, have you accomplished your interview with Pierre Fauchere? He would not even receive me, I replied boldly. What did I tell you? he sneered, shrugging his big shoulders. We'll get even with him on his next volume. But you know, Labarth, as long as you continue to have that innocent look about you, you can't expect to succeed in newspaper work. I bore with the ill-humour of my chief. What would he have said, if he had known that I had in my pocket an interview, and in my head an anecdote, which were material for a most successful story? And he has never had either the interview or the story. Since then I have made my way in the line, where he said I should fail, I have lost my innocent look, and I earned my thirty thousand francs a year and more. I have never had the same pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit to Nemours. I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I wanted to, since, with all my laborious work, I have never written a book. And yet, when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented me from committing toward a dearly-loved master, a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, if you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it. And this is the reason, now that Foshery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has come for me to relate my first interview. There is none of which I am more proud. End of The Age for Love by Paul Bourget A Day in London by Théophile Gaultier This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, reading by Bologna Times. A Day in London by Théophile Gaultier for The Tales of the City's Compilation. After leaving Gravesend, the lower boundary of the Port of London, stores, warehouses, and yards crowd together and mass with quite a picturesque irregularity. To the left rise the two cupulas of the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, through the open colonnade of which we catch a glimpse of park depths with great trees, producing a charming effect. Seated on the steps of the peristyle, the invalids watch the departure and arrival of the ships that form the subject of their souvenirs and conversations, and the sharp scent of the sea again delights their nostrils. Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of this fine building. Greenwich faces the Isle of Dogs, which, however, is not completely an island, but lies in a loop of the Thames of which skillful use has been made. It is here that the West India Company has excavated its docks. The East India docks, much smaller and less frequented, are to the right, a little higher up and at the extremity of the curve made by the river. The West India docks are something enormous, gigantic, fabulous, and almost beyond human proportions. They are the work of Cyclops and Titans. Above the tops of the houses, shops, embankments, flights of steps, and all the hybrid constructions that line the banks of the river, you see a prodigious forest of ships' masts extending to infinity, an inextricable mass of rigging, spars, and cordage that, by the density of their lacing, would shame the most fibrous bind weeds of an American version forest. Here it is that are built, refitted, and repaired, that innumerable army of vessels that go out in search of the riches of the world in order afterwards to pour them into that bottomless gulf of misery and luxury called London. The West India docks can hold 300 vessels. A canal dug parallel with the docks, cutting through the aisle of dogs and called the city canal, shortens the distance it would take to double the point by three or four miles. The commercial docks on the opposite bank, the London docks, and the St. Catherine docks just below the tower, are no less wonderful. And the commercial docks are the biggest sellers in the world. The wines of Spain and Portugal are stored there. Besides these, there are private docks and basins. Each instant, amid a group of houses, you see a ship take up position. The yards put out the eyes of the windows. The spars penetrate into the rooms and the cut waters seem to be making breaches in the doors of the shops, like ancient battering rams. The houses and ships live in the most touching and cordial intimacy. At high tide, the yards become basins and receive ships. Flights of steps, slips constructed of stone, granite, and brick mount and descend from the river to the houses. London has her arms plunge into her river up to the elbows. A regular quay would obstruct the familiarity between the river and the city. This is again in picturesqueness, for nothing is more horrible than those eternal straight lines prolonged in spite of everything with which modern civilization is so stupidly infatuated. England is only a dockyard. London is only a port. The sea is the natural fatherland of the English. They take such delight in it that many of their great lords spend their lives in making the most dangerous voyages in little vessels equipped and managed by themselves. The Yacht Club has no other aim than to encourage and favor this taste. The land is so unpleasing to them that they have a hospital stationed in the middle of the Thames and a great hulk which serves the sailors who are ill in the port of London. The fronts of all these houses are turned towards the river, for the Thames is London's great highway, the artery from which the veins branch to carry life and circulation into the body of the city. Therefore, what a riot of inscriptions and signs. Letters of all colors and sizes cover the edifices from top to bottom. The characters often reach the height of one's story. The houses, thus streaked, plecarded, and variegated with lettering, when seen from the middle of the Thames, present the most outlandish appearance. I was not a little surprised to see the tower intact. It has lost nothing of its ancient physiognomy. It is still there with its high walls, its sinister attitude, and its low arch, the Trader's Gate, under which a black boat, more sinister than Charon's bark, brought criminals in and came to carry the condemned away to death. The tower is not, as its name would seem to indicate, a donjon or solitary belfry. It is a regular Bastille, a cluster of towers connected by walls, a fortress surrounded by moats supplied by the Thames, with cannons and drawbridges, a fortress of the Middle Ages, at least as serious as our Vincennes, containing a chapel, a treasury, an arsenal, and a thousand other curiosities. We were approaching the end of our voyage. A few more turns of the wheel and the steamboat touched the Custom House Quay, where the passenger's trunks would not be examined till tomorrow, for in London, Sunday, is observed as scrupulously as the Sabbath by the Jews in Jerusalem. I shall never forget the magnificent spectacle presented to my eyes. The big arches of London Bridge reached across the river with their five great limbs and stood out somberly against a background of setting sun. The disc, fiery like a shield, reddened in a furnace, was sinking exactly behind the central arch, which traced a black segment of incomparable boldness and vigor above the orb. A long trail of fire scintillated and trembled upon the rippling waves, violent smoke and mist bathed space as far as Southwark Bridge, the vaguely sketched arches of which were scarcely perceptible. To the right, a little in the background, flamed the gilded ronds of the summit of the tall column erected to commemorate the fire of 1666. To the left, the Belfry of St. Clive, projected above the roofs, monumental chimney stacks that might be taken for vote of columns of Ionic or Doric capitals, were they not in the habit of vomiting smoke, in a most happy manner broke the horizon lines and accentuated the orange and pale lemon tents of the sky with their strong tones. On turning round, behind you is a red naval city with quarters and streets of vessels, for it is at this the first of the London bridges that ships stop. We disembarked. When the cab was rapidly rolling through the streets between the Custom House and High Holborn, I looked out of the window and was greatly astonished at the solitude and profound silence that reigned. You might have called it a dead town, one of those cities inhabited by people turned to stone that oriental stories tell of. All the shops were shut, and no human faces appeared at the windows. Occasionally, a rare figure passed along the walls like a shadow. The stoleful and deserted aspect so strongly contrasted with the idea of noise in animation that I had formed of London that I could not get over my surprise till at length I remembered that it was Sunday, and the London Sunday had been held up to me as the ideal of weariness. On that day, which with us, at least for the common people, is a day of joy, promenade, dress, feasting, and dancing, on the other side of the channel is spent in inconceivable sadness. The taverns close at midnight on Saturday. The theatres do not open. The shops are hermetically shut up, and it would be very difficult for a man to get anything to eat unless he has made provision beforehand. Life seems to be suspended. The machinery of London ceases to work, like the wheels of a clock when you put your finger on the pendulum. For fear of profaning, dominical solemnity, London does not dare to move. It will scarcely allow itself even to breathe. On that day, after having listened to the pastor of the sect in which he belongs, every good Englishman shuts himself up within the walls of his house to meditate on the Bible, to offer his weariness to God, and to enjoy in front of a big coal fire the happiness of being at home, and of being neither a Frenchman nor a Papist, a source of inexhaustible bliss. At midnight the charm is broken. Circulation that had stopped for a moment starts again. The houses lie open. Life returns to this great body that had fallen into lethargy. The dominical Lazarus is resuscitated at the brazen voice of Monday and resumes its march. The shops are slow to open. Paris gets up earlier than London. It is not till about 10 a.m. that London begins to awake. It is true that it goes to bed much later. Since the occupants are not yet up, let us take note of the dwellings. Let us describe the nest before the bird. The English houses have no port cushions, and scarcely any have a courtyard. An area with railings separates them from the path. In this basement, the kitchen offices are placed. Coal, bread, meat brought on a kind of hollowed plank, and all provisions go in that way without causing the master any inconvenience. The stables are generally in separate buildings, sometimes at some distance. Brick is the ordinary basis of construction. English bricks are usually yellow ochre and hue, which in my opinion cannot compare with the red and warm tones of our own. Houses built of bricks of this color have a sickly and unwholesome appearance that is disagreeable to the eye. There are rarely more than three stories. And these have only two or three windows each, for generally a house is occupied by only one family. A flight of white stone stubs, thrown like a drawbridge over the moat, leading to the kitchen offices, connects the house with the street, and the door, painted like oak, is often adorned with a brass plate on which are written the name and quality of the owner. Such are the characteristic features of the real English house. What gives quite an individual aspect to London, in addition to the width of its streets and the loneliness of its houses, is the uniformly black hue that covers everything. Nothing is sadder or more lugubrious, for this black possesses nothing of the brown and strong tents that time gives to old buildings in more southern climes. It is an imperceptible and subtle grime that clings to everything, penetrates everywhere, and from which nothing can protect itself. You would say that all the monuments were powdered with black lead. The immense quantity of coal consumed in London in warming houses and inferences is one of the chief causes of this general mourning of the edifices, the most ancient of which have literally the appearance of having been painted with blacking. This effect is particularly noticeable in the statues. Newgate prison, with its bossages and worm-eaten stones, the old church of Saint Saviour, and some Gothic chapels, the names of which I forget, seem to have been built of black granite, rather than to have been darkened by the years. This prevailing hue would suffice to explain the traditional spleen of the English. The Dome of Saint Paul's, a heavy counterfeit of Saint Peter's, Rome, and edifice of the family of the Pantheon and the Escurus, with its humped cupola and two square belfries cruelly suffers from the influence of the London atmosphere. Notwithstanding the efforts to keep it white, it is always black, at least on one side. It is vang to coat it with paint. The imperceptible carbon in solution in the fog works quicker than the painter's brush. Saint Paul's is an additional example to prove that the cupola is a form that belongs to the east and that the skies of the north require to be cut by the needles and sharp angles of Gothic architecture. The London sky, even when it is unclouded, is of a milky blue in which grey predominates. The azure is sensibly paler than that of the sky of France. There, the evenings and mornings are always bathed and mist and drowned in vapours. London steams in the sun like a sweating horse or a boiling cauldron, and this produces in open spaces those admirable effects of light so well rendered by the English water colorists and engravers. In the finest weather it is difficult, clearly, to see Southwark bridge from London Bridge, which, however, are not far apart. This mist that overspreads all, softens all harsh angles, veils the poverty of construction, enlarges the perspective, and gives mystery and vagueness to the most aggressive objects. By its means, a factory chimney easily becomes an obelisk. A shop of mean architecture assumes the air of a Babylonian terrace, and a pitiful row of columns changes into a palmarine portico. The symmetrical eridity of civilization and the vulgarity of the forms she makes use of are softened or disappear entirely thanks to this beneficent veil. The streets were becoming animated. Laborers, with white aprons tied at the waist, were on their way to work. Butcher boys were carrying meat in their wooden troughs. Carriages were passing with the rapidity of lightning. Omnibuses, brilliant with color and varnish, bedisoned with gold letters announcing their destinations, followed one another with scarcely an interval, with passengers outside and conductors standing on a ledge beside the door. These omnibuses travel very fast, for London is so vast, so enormous a city, that there the need of rapidity makes itself felt more keenly than in Paris. This activity of locomotion is in strange contrast with the impassive air, and the flimatic and cold physiognomy, to say nothing more, of all these imperturbable passengers. The English move quickly like the dead in the ballad, and you cannot read any desire of arriving in their eyes. They run, and they do not seem to be in a hurry. They always go straight ahead like a cannonball, do not turn round when jostled, and do not beg pardon when they jostle anyone else. Even the women walk with a quick step that would do honor to grenadiers marching to his salt, and with that geometrical and manly gate by which an English woman is recognized on the continent, and which excites the laughter of the Parisian child, the children even make haste on their way to school. The Thames is to London, what the Boulevard is to Paris, the principal line of circulation. Only on the Thames the omnibuses are replaced by little steamboats. Nothing is more delightful than these little voyages that cause to defile past you, like a moving panorama, the picturesque banks of the river. You thus pass all the bridges of London. You can admire the three iron arches of Southwark Bridge, so bold and strut, so wide in extent. The ionic columns that give such an elegant appearance to Blackfriars Bridge, and the dork pillars of such robust and solid shape of Waterloo Bridge, surely the finest in the world. On leaving Waterloo Bridge, through the arches of Blackfriars Bridge, you see the gigantic silhouette of Saint Paul's rising above an ocean of roofs, among the spires and belfries of Saint Marlebone, Saint Benet, and Saint Matthew with a portion of a quay thronged with boats, barks, and storehouses. From Westminster Bridge you discover the ancient abbey of that name, lifting into the haze its two lofty square towers that recall the towers of the Notre-Dame and Paris, and that have a sharp turret at each angle, and the three strange openwork belfries of Saint John the Evangelist, without counting the saw-teeth formed by the spires of distant chapels, the factory chimneys, and the house roofs. Vauxhall Bridge, worthily ends the perspective. Forgive me if I am always talking of the Thames, but its ceaselessly moving panorama is something so novel and so impressive that it is hard to get away from it. A forest of three masters in the heart of a capital is the finest spectacle that human industry can present to the view. Starting from Waterloo Bridge we will reach the Strand by Wellington Street and walk along it, from the pretty little church of St. Mary so singularly situated in the middle of the street. The Strand, which is quite wide, is decked on both sides by sumptuous and splendid shops, which, though not possessing perhaps the coquettish elegance of those of Paris, yet have an air of wealth and luxurious abundance. Here we find displayed stocks of prints in which we can admire the masterpieces of the English graver, so supple, so soft, so suggestive of color, and unhappily employed upon the worst designs in the world. Regent Street, which has arcades like the Rue de Rivelli, Piccadilly, Paul Mall, Haymarket, the Italian opera, which may best be compared with the Odeon in Paris, Carleton Place, and St. James Park. The Queen's Palace, with its triumphant arch imitated from that of the Carousel, rendered this part of the city one of the most brilliant in London. The architecture of the houses, or rather of the palaces that constitute the district occupied by the wealthy classes, is altogether impressive and monumental, although of a hybrid and often equivocal composition. Never have there been so many columns and pediments, even in an antique city. Surely the Greeks and Romans were never so Greek or Roman as the subjects of his Britannic majesty. You walk between two rows of Parthenons that is flattering. You see nothing but temples of Vesta and Jupiter, Sator, and the illusion would be complete if you do not read among the intercolumnations such inscriptions as Gas Company and Life Insurance. These colonnades and pediments, at first glance, do not fail to produce a certain effect of splendor, but all this magnificence is for the most part produced by Mastic or Romans meant, for stone is very scarce in London. It is in the new churches especially that the English architectural genius displays the most peculiar cosmopolitanism and makes the strangest confusion of styles. Above an Egyptian pylon extends a Greek order mingled with open Roman arches. The holes are mounted by a Gothic spire. This would make the meanest Italian peasant shrug his shoulders with pity. With very few exceptions, all the modern monuments are in this style. The English are rich, active, and industrious. They can forge iron, tame steam, twist matter in every way, and invent machinery of terrifying power. They can be great poets, but art, properly so called, will always be lacking to them. Form in itself will always escape them. They feel this, and it irritates them. It wounds their national pride. They understand that at bottom, notwithstanding their prodigious material civilization, they are merely varnished barbarians. Lord Elgin, who was so violently anathematized by Lord Brian, committed a useless sacrilege. The Parthenon, Baugh Reliefs, did not inspire anybody when brought to London. The plastic gift is refused to the nations of the North. The Sun, which places objects in relief, accentuates their outlines and gives its true form to everything, illumines those pale regions with too oblique array. And then the English are not Catholics. Protestantism is as fatal as Islamism to the arts, and perhaps more so. In a country, artists can be only pagans or Catholics. In a country where the temples are only great square chambers, without pictures or statues or ornaments, where gentlemen in three-decker wigs talk to you seriously, and with many biblical allusions of papist idols and the great horror of Babylon, art can never attain great heights. For the noblest end of statuary in painting is to fix in marble and on canvas the divine symbols of the religion in use in one's own country and period. Thiddeus carved the Venus, and Raphael painted the Madonna, but neither the one nor the other was Anglican. London may become Rome, but she certainly will never be Athens. The latter position seems to be reserved for Paris. There we find gold, power, material development in the highest degree, a gigantic exaggeration of all that can be done with money, patience, and will, the useful and the comfortable, but not the agreeable and the beautiful. Here, intelligence, grace, flexibility, finesse, easy comprehension of harmony and beauty, in one word, Greek qualities. The English will excel in all that can possibly be done, and more especially in what is impossible. They will establish a Bible society in Peking. They will arrive at Timbuktu in white gloves and patent leather shoes in a condition of complete respectability. They will invent machinery to produce six hundred thousand pairs of stockings a minute, and they will even discover new countries in which to market their stockings. But they will never make a hat that a French grisette would put on her head. If taste could be bought, they would pay high for it. Happily, God has reserved to himself the distribution of two or three little things over which the gold of the mighty upon earth has no power, genius, beauty, and happiness. However, in spite of these criticisms of detail, the general effect of London is one that causes astonishment and a sort of stupor. It is really a capital in the sense of civilization. Everything is grand, splendid, and arranged according to the last degree of perfection. If anything, the streets are too wide, too big, too well lighted. The care of material facilities is carried to the utmost degree. In this respect, Paris is at least a hundred years behind London. The English houses are very flimsily built, for the ground they occupy does not belong to the builder. The whole land in the city is possessed, as in the Middle Ages, by a very small number of great lords or millionaires who permit building operations there for a price. This permission is purchased for a certain time, and it is so arranged that the house does not last longer than the lease. For this reason, in addition to the fragility of the materials employed, London is renewed every 30 years and is able, as they say, to follow the progress of civilization. Added to this, the fire of 1666 made a complete clearance, which for my part I greatly regret, because I am not greatly fascinated by modern architecture, but prefer the picturesque to the comfortable. The English spirit is naturally methodical. In the streets, everybody naturally takes the right hand side and regular streams of people going up and down are formed. A handful of soldiers suffices for London, and even police have small occupation. I cannot remember having seen a single company of soldiers. The policemen, with numbered helmet on head and bracelet on sleeve, to show that they are on duty, stroll about with a tranquil and philosophical air, with no other weapons, but a little staff hardly two feet in length, and thus traverse the most populous districts. This immense circulation of people, this terrible movement that gives one the vertigo is, so to speak, left to itself, and thanks to the good sense of the throng, no accident happens. The appearance of the populace is more miserable than in Paris. With us, the workmen, the people of the lower orders, where clothes made for them. Of course, it is true, but of a special kind and that evidently has always belonged to them. If their vest is in holes today, we know that originally they wore it when new. The grisettes and laborers are neat and clean, notwithstanding the simplicity of their dress. But in London, that is not the case. Everybody wears a tailcoat, a pair of trousers, and a tall hat, even the wretch who opens the door of your cab. The women all wear a hat and a long skirt, so that at first sight you think you see women of a superior class who have fallen into distressed circumstances, either through misconduct or misfortune. This arises from the fact that in London the common people dress in cast-off clothes, and from degradation to degradation the coat of a gentleman ends by covering the back of a gutter snipe, and the satin bonnet of a duchess covers the head of an ignoble drudge. Even in St. Giles, in that sad Irish quarter, which in horror and dirt surpasses anything that can be imagined, you see hats and black coats often worn without shirts and buttoned over the skin that shows through their wrents. St. Giles, however, is only a few steps away from Oxford Street and Piccadilly. This contrast is very violent. Without gradual transition you pass from the most glaring opulence to the vilest misery. Carriages do not go down these alleys full of puddles in which ragged children are crawling, and where big girls with disheveled hair, bare legs and arms, and a tattered shawl tied across the breast, stare at you with a haggard and savage look. What suffering, what famine, is to be read on those faces so emaciated, worn, cadaverous, worn and pinched with cold. There you find poor wretches who have always been famished since the day they were born. They all live on steamed potatoes and very seldom have bread to eat. From privation the blood of these unfortunates becomes impoverished and turns from red to yellow as medical men have affirmed. On the houses of some of these dwellers and saint-trials there are such notices as furnished cellar for a single gentleman. This ought to give you a sufficient idea of the place. I had the curiosity to enter one of these basements, and I assure you I have never seen anything so bare. It would seem impossible for human beings to exist in such ovals. It is true that they die there by the thousand. This is the reverse of the metal of every civilization. Monstrous fortunes are explained by frightful miseries. In order that a few may devour a great deal, many must fast. The higher the palace is raised, the deeper must be the foundations, and nowhere is this disproportion so manifest as in England. To be poor in London seems to me to be one of the tortures forgotten by Dante in his spiral of sufferings. To possess gold is so visibly the sole recognized merit that the English poor despise themselves and humbly accept the arrogance and disdain of the easy and wealthy classes. The English, who talk so much about the idols of the Papists, ought not to forget that the golden calf is the most infamous idol of all, and the one that exacts the most sacrifice. The squares, which are very numerous, are a happy corrective of the fetidness of these sewers. The plus rail in Paris can convey the best idea of an English square, a square as a base surrounded by houses of uniform architecture. The center being a garden planted with great trees and enclosed by iron railings, it's swore of emerald green affords delightful repose to eyes tired by the somber hues of the sky and the edifices. The squares often communicate one with another and occupy much ground. Splendid squares and the vicinity of Hyde Park are inhabited by the nobility. No shop nor storehouse is allowed to disturb the aristocratic quietude of these elegant retreats. Nothing could be more charming than these extensive enclosures, so tranquil, green, and fresh. It is true that I never saw anybody walking in these attractive gardens to which each of the tenants has a key. It is sufficient for them to be able to keep others out. The squares and the parks form one of the chief charms of London. St. James Park, close to Paul Mall, is a delightful promenade. You go down into it by a wide flight of steps, worthy of Babylon, which is situated at the foot of the Duke of York's column. The walk along the Egyptian terrace of Carlton Place is wide and beautiful, but what pleased me above all was the large sheets of water thronged with herons, ducks, and other aquatic birds. The English excel in the art of giving to artificial gardens a romantic and natural appearance. Westminster, the towers of which peep above the clumps of trees admirably closes the view on the riverside. Hyde Park, where the horses and carriages of fashion parade, looks quite rural and contrafied by the extent of its water and green slopes. It is not a garden, but a landscape. You are astonished to find such large open spaces in a city like London. Regents Park, that contains the zoological gardens and is bordered by palaces in the style of the Guard Mubelle and the Minister of Marine and Paris, is truly enormous. You can lose yourself in it. An undulation of the surface of which very skillful use has been made produces most picturesque effects. End of A Day in London by Theophile Gaultier. The String Quartet by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, reading by Bologna Times. Well, here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages, not a few, even, I venture to believe, landals with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads from one end of London to the other, yet I begin to have my doubts. If, indeed, it's true, as they're saying, that Regent Street is up and the treaty signed, and the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent, not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza, it's after effects. If I bethink me of having forgotten to write about the leak in the larder, and left my glove in the train, if the ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept accordually the hand which is perhaps offered hesitatingly. Seven years since we met. The last time in Venice. And where are you living now? Well, the late afternoon suits me the best, though, if it weren't asking too much. But I knew you at once. Still, the war made a break. If the mines shot through by such little arrows, and for human society compels it, no sooner is one launched than another presses forward. If this engenders heat, and in addition they've turned on the electric light. If saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires, if it's all the facts I mean, and the hats, the furboas, the gentlemen's swallowtail coats, and pearl type pens that come to the surface, what chance is there? Of what? It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of everything. I sit here believing I can't now say what, or even remember the last time it happened. Did you see the procession? The king looked cold. No, no, no. But what was it? She's bought a house at Monesbury. How lucky to find one! On the contrary, it seems to me pretty sure that she, whoever she may be, is damned, since it's all a matter of flats and hats and seagulls, or so it seems to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit passive on a gilt chair, only turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if I'm not mistaken, that we're all recalling something furtively, seeking something. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the sit of cloaks and gloves, whether to button or unbutton? Then watch that elderly face against the dark canvas. A moment ago, urbane and flushed, now tosturn and sad, as if in shadow. Was it the sound of the second violin tuning in the ante room? Here they come, four black figures carrying instruments and seat themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light, rest the tips of their bows on the music stand with a simultaneous movement, lift them, lightly poise them, and, looking across the player opposite, the first violin counts one, two, three. Flourish, spring, virgin, burst, the pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains, jet, drops, descend, but the waters of the ron flow swift and deep, race under the arches and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish. The spotted fish, rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where it's difficult this, conglomeration of fish all in a pool, leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins, and such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round, free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air, curl like thin shavings from under a plain, up and up. How lovely goodness is in those who stepping lightly go smiling through the world. Also in jolly old fish wives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick when they walk from side to side, hum-ha. That's an early Mozart, of course. But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair. I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music. I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine, or an indecent story, now. I could relish that. The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. Ha, ha! I'm laughing. What had? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite. But suppose, suppose, hush. The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face. I hear your voice, and the birds singing as we pass the ozure bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow, joy, joy, woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow, crash. The boat sinks, rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf then, tapering to a dusky wreath, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor ceasing, abates its tenderness, but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out, until, in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify, soar, sob, sink, to rest, sorrow and joy. Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied. I say all's been settled. Yes, laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves, falling, falling, ah, but they cease, one rose leaf falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute, dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flitters waveringly. It won't reach us. No, no, I notice nothing. That's the worst of music, these silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say? There's old Mrs. Monroe, feeling her way out, blinder each year, poor woman, on this slippery floor. Eyeless, old age, gray-headed, sphinx. There she stands on the pavement, beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus. How lovely, how well they play! How, how, how! The tongue is but a clapper, simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat, next me, are bright and pleasing as a child's rattle. The leaf on the plain tree flashes green through the chink in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting. How, how, how, hush! These are the lovers on the grass. If, madam, you will take my hand. Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls. Then these are the embraces of our souls. The lemons nod ascent. The swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into mid-stream. But to return, he followed me down the corridor, and as we turned the corner, trod on the lace of my petticoat. What could I do but cry, ah, and stop to finger it? At which he drew his sword, made passes as if he were stabbing something to death, and cried, mad, mad, mad! Whereupon I screamed, and the prince, who was writing, in the large vellum book, in the aureal window, came out in his velvet skull-cap, and furred slippers snatched a rapier from the wall. The king of Spain's gift, you know, on which I escaped, flinging on this coat to hide the ravages to my skirt, to hide. But listen, the gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such witty exchange of compliment, now culminating in a sob of passion, that the words are indistinguishable through the meaning. Though the meaning is plain enough, love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss, all floated out on the gayest ripple of tender endearment, until the sound of the silver horns, at first far-distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if cenuchales were saluting the dawn, or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers. The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish, are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets, and supported by clarions, there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars, tramp and trumpeting, clang and clanger, firm establishment, fast foundations, march of myriads, confusion and chaos trod to earth, but this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble, hangs enduring, stands unshakable, nor does a face, nor does a flag, greet or welcome. Leave then to perish your hope, droop in the desert, my joy, naked advance, bear are the pillars, auspicious to none, casting no shade, resplendent, severe, back then I fall, eager no more. Despairing only to go, find the street, mark the buildings, greet the apple woman, say to the maid who opens the door, a starry night, good night, good night, you go this way? Alas, I go that. End of The String Quartet by Virginia Wolfe