V. FROM LOUIS LEVERETT, IN BOSTON, TO HARVARD TREMONT, IN PARIS.
November.
The scales have turned, my sympathetic Harvard, and the beam that
has lifted you up has dropped me again on this terribly hard spot.
I am extremely sorry to have missed you in London, but I received
your little note, and took due heed of your injunction to let you
know how I got on. I don't get on at all, my dear Harvard--I am
consumed with the love of the farther shore. I have been so long
away that I have dropped out of my place in this little Boston
world, and the shallow tides of New England life have closed over
it. I am a stranger here, and I find it hard to believe that I ever
was a native. It is very hard, very cold, very vacant. I think of
your warm, rich Paris; I think of the Boulevard St. Michel on the
mild spring evenings. I see the little corner by the window (of the
Cafe de la Jeunesse)--where I used to sit; the doors are open, the
soft deep breath of the great city comes in. It is brilliant, yet
there is a kind of tone, of body, in the brightness; the mighty
murmur of the ripest civilisation in the world comes in; the dear
old peuple de Paris, the most interesting people in the world, pass
by. I have a little book in my pocket; it is exquisitely printed, a
modern Elzevir. It is a lyric cry from the heart of young France,
and is full of the sentiment of form. There is no form here, dear
Harvard; I had no idea how little form there was. I don't know what
I shall do; I feel so undraped, so uncurtained, so uncushioned; I
feel as if I were sitting in the centre of a mighty "reflector." A
terrible crude glare is over everything; the earth looks peeled and
excoriated; the raw heavens seem to bleed with the quick hard light.
I have not got back my rooms in West Cedar Street; they are occupied
by a mesmeric healer. I am staying at an hotel, and it is very
dreadful. Nothing for one's self; nothing for one's preferences and
habits. No one to receive you when you arrive; you push in through
a crowd, you edge up to a counter; you write your name in a horrible
book, where every one may come and stare at it and finger it. A man
behind the counter stares at you in silence; his stare seems to say
to you, "What the devil do YOU want?" But after this stare he never
looks at you again. He tosses down a key at you; he presses a bell;
a savage Irishman arrives. "Take him away," he seems to say to the
Irishman; but it is all done in silence; there is no answer to your
own speech,--"What is to be done with me, please?" "Wait and you
will see," the awful silence seems to say. There is a great crowd
around you, but there is also a great stillness; every now and then
you hear some one expectorate. There are a thousand people in this
huge and hideous structure; they feed together in a big white-walled
room. It is lighted by a thousand gas-jets, and heated by cast-iron
screens, which vomit forth torrents of scorching air. The
temperature is terrible; the atmosphere is more so; the furious
light and heat seem to intensify the dreadful definiteness. When
things are so ugly, they should not be so definite; and they are
terribly ugly here. There is no mystery in the corners; there is no
light and shade in the types. The people are haggard and joyless;
they look as if they had no passions, no tastes, no senses. They
sit feeding in silence, in the dry hard light; occasionally I hear
the high firm note of a child. The servants are black and familiar;
their faces shine as they shuffle about; there are blue tones in
their dark masks. They have no manners; they address you, but they
don't answer you; they plant themselves at your elbow (it rubs their
clothes as you eat), and watch you as if your proceedings were
strange. They deluge you with iced water; it's the only thing they
will bring you; if you look round to summon them, they have gone for
more. If you read the newspaper--which I don't, gracious Heaven! I
can't--they hang over your shoulder and peruse it also. I always
fold it up and present it to them; the newspapers here are indeed
for an African taste. There are long corridors defended by gusts of
hot air; down the middle swoops a pale little girl on parlour
skates. "Get out of my way!" she shrieks as she passes; she has
ribbons in her hair and frills on her dress; she makes the tour of
the immense hotel. I think of Puck, who put a girdle round the
earth in forty minutes, and wonder what he said as he flitted by. A
black waiter marches past me, bearing a tray, which he thrusts into
my spine as he goes. It is laden with large white jugs; they tinkle
as he moves, and I recognise the unconsoling fluid. We are dying of
iced water, of hot air, of gas. I sit in my room thinking of these
things--this room of mine which is a chamber of pain. The walls are
white and bare, they shine in the rays of a horrible chandelier of
imitation bronze, which depends from the middle of the ceiling. It
flings a patch of shadow on a small table covered with white marble,
of which the genial surface supports at the present moment the sheet
of paper on which I address you; and when I go to bed (I like to
read in bed, Harvard) it becomes an object of mockery and torment.
It dangles at inaccessible heights; it stares me in the face; it
flings the light upon the covers of my book, but not upon the page--
the little French Elzevir that I love so well. I rise and put out
the gas, and then my room becomes even lighter than before. Then a
crude illumination from the hall, from the neighbouring room, pours
through the glass openings that surmount the two doors of my
apartment. It covers my bed, where I toss and groan; it beats in
through my closed lids; it is accompanied by the most vulgar, though
the most human, sounds. I spring up to call for some help, some
remedy; but there is no bell, and I feel desolate and weak. There
is only a strange orifice in the wall, through which the traveller
in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent
sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at
last their meaning; they appear to constitute a somewhat stern
inquiry. A hollow impersonal voice wishes to know what I want, and
the very question paralyses me. I want everything--yet I want
nothing--nothing this hard impersonality can give! I want my little
corner of Paris; I want the rich, the deep, the dark Old World; I
want to be out of this horrible place. Yet I can't confide all this
to that mechanical tube; it would be of no use; a mocking laugh
would come up from the office. Fancy appealing in these sacred,
these intimate moments, to an "office"; fancy calling out into
indifferent space for a candle, for a curtain! I pay incalculable
sums in this dreadful house, and yet I haven't a servant to wait
upon me. I fling myself back on my couch, and for a long time
afterward the orifice in the wall emits strange murmurs and
rumblings. It seems unsatisfied, indignant; it is evidently
scolding me for my vagueness. My vagueness, indeed, dear Harvard!
I loathe their horrible arrangements; isn't that definite enough?
You asked me to tell you whom I see, and what I think of my friends.
I haven't very many; I don't feel at all en rapport. The people are
very good, very serious, very devoted to their work; but there is a
terrible absence of variety of type. Every one is Mr. Jones, Mr.
Brown; and every one looks like Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown. They are
thin; they are diluted in the great tepid bath of Democracy! They
lack completeness of identity; they are quite without modelling.
No, they are not beautiful, my poor Harvard; it must be whispered
that they are not beautiful. You may say that they are as beautiful
as the French, as the Germans; but I can't agree with you there.
The French, the Germans, have the greatest beauty of all--the beauty
of their ugliness--the beauty of the strange, the grotesque. These
people are not even ugly; they are only plain. Many of the girls
are pretty; but to be only pretty is (to my sense) to be plain. Yet
I have had some talk. I have seen a woman. She was on the steamer,
and I afterward saw her in New York--a peculiar type, a real
personality; a great deal of modelling, a great deal of colour, and
yet a great deal of mystery. She was not, however, of this country;
she was a compound of far-off things. But she was looking for
something here--like me. We found each other, and for a moment that
was enough. I have lost her now; I am sorry, because she liked to
listen to me. She has passed away; I shall not see her again. She
liked to listen to me; she almost understood!
