The _kaiserstadt_ of the world, this grim and grey old London! And the river of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest, I suppose, it might be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the lower Potomac, and no doubt the Mississippi, even at St. Louis, could swallow it without rising a foot--but it leads from London Bridge to every coast and headland of the world! Of all the pathways used by man this is the longest and the greatest. And not only the greatest, but the loveliest. Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its hills, the Amazon its stupendous reaches. Not one of these can match the wonder and splendour of frail St. Stephen's, wrapped in the mists of a summer night, or the cool dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic mount, or the iron beauty of the bridges, or the magic of the ancient docks, or the twinkling lights o' London, sweeping upward to the stars....
For the American professional seeker after the night romance of Paris, the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still a brilliant verity. The phrase is "_une belle poire_." And its Yankee equivalent is "sucker."
The French, as the world knows, are a kindly, forgiving people; and though they cast the epithet, they do so in manner tolerant and with light arpeggio--of Yankee sneer and bitterness containing not a trace. They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand of some maundering beggar, with commingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. For in the Frenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood of Lafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans, he yet, detesting, sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled yokels, uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of comical posturing in ostensible un-Latin lech, vainglorious and spying--children into whose hands has fallen Zola, children adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for those things out of life that, groped for, are lost--that may come only as life comes, naturally, calmly, inevitably.
But the Frenchman, he never laughs at us; that would his culture forbid. And, if he smile, his mouth goes placid before the siege. His attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Comstock come to the hill of Hörselberg in Thuringia, there to sniff and snicker in Venus's crimson court. His attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Tristan _en voyage_ for a garden of love and roses he can never reach. His attitude, the attitude of an old and understanding professor, shaking his head musingly as his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the autumnal fragrances of life, giggle covertly over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over the nudes of Manet, over even the innocent yearnings of the bachelor Chopin.