THE PLAGUE-SPOT OF EUROPE PARIS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7800, 20 November 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE PLAGUE-SPOT OF EUROPE PARIS.

• .. .f Let there be a spot anywhere in the Europe of tonriits where cholera prevails, and the newspapers ring with it. Yet there is Always i a plague-spot in Europe through which men of all nations, characters, and creeds pass daily, and no one seems to care. The Paris of the Parisian —the saored stretch of asphalt from the Rue Vivienne to the Boulevard de la Madeleine— a thing not without its precedents in history, but happily without its parallel in the modern world. It is the habitat of the moral plague. Although it is by no means the centre ol intellectual scepticism—for there is nothing more foreign to the Boulevards than metaphysics—it is the one concrete society where the logical results of scepticism are the only rule of life. No doubt it would be unjust to the capital of civilisation" to assume that religion and morals, decency and family life, have not still some footholds within it. But the typical Paris, the New Jerusalem of la jeunc France, has little concern with these things. I am only a passer-by, who still believes in God and duty, and I cannot do justice to its unique, delirious charm; but I know no better formula than that which 1 borrow from one of the most famous risque novelists of th® day# The exiled Parisian looked out upon the beauty of the fields and woods, and his thoughts leaped back to "his beloved boulevard, which at that hour was glittering like a Milky Way. He saw the flaring porticoes of the theatres, the warming crowd that passed before the gay shop-windows, the seething life of the streets. His nostrils remembered the peculiar odours of the evening boulevard, that subtle compound of gas, tobacco, and underground kitchens, crossed by gusts of perfume from the flower-shop doors. Whiffs of air came to him from club salons, from behind the scenes, from r actresses' rooms, mingled with the hot smell of the theatre stairs as the audience crowded out, with the strong scent of costly furs and of goldembroidered mantles, and of the shoulders of women." It is on these things, and such as these, that the fever of the Boulevards is fed, the contagion of which scatters a fine dust of morbid germs in lesser towns and quiet country-sides, not to speak of those which are carried further afield upon the yellow wings of Parisian novels. All French writers talk of Paris as a centre of intellectual activity. In certain fields of exact science, such as physiology and engineering, good work is done. Yet in the main it is true of the city of the Boulevards that the brain is the handmaid of the senses. Her glory and her aim is pleasure for pleasure's sakenot recreation, for she tires herself only with overexcitement not recruiting for new work, for the day of creation never comes. And by a reasonable logic the true Parisian finds that pleasure of this sort is in the main a matter of sensation. There is the theatre, it is true ; but what a theatre ! Take the greatest drama of the greatest Frenchman of the time, and you have in "Hernani" a kaleidoscope of melodramatic, not to say impossible situations, unrelieved by a single sketch of human character or by a single paragraph of great poetry, excepting only a misplaced monologue upon the Empire. Bat it is not the Theatre Franfais, nor even the glided pretentiousness of the Opdra, which foe Parisian thinks of when he names the ■Stage. It is the theatre of the Boulevards, the Foließ Bergeres, and the rest, spiced, in his backward mind, with a dash of the cafe chantant. It is not tragedy, nor even the comedy of manners. It is the|delicate titillation of the jaded sense, by a suggestive situation and an equivocal mot. A parallel to the debasement of the stage might be tiken through the other arts ; bat for the passer-by it may suffice to walk through the Salon of any year, and calculate what percentage of the pictures are studies of the female nude, without either the pure intention of the masters or the exouse of an intelligible meaning. There are darker sides of the picture on which it is better not to dwell. Those who care to know to what length brutality can go, may make for themselves a little collection of the literature of the pavement, of the kiosques, and of all the book-shops, not excluding the most respectable; or they may note the number of advertisements in apy week of those bals de nuit which have no ra'usOn d'etre except their impropriety. If the life is sensual, it is still more selfish. The jlaneur cares for no being on earth - or beyond it except himfcelf. To begin with, he is an " {-sprit fort," a " iibre panseur." He has come t3 recognise, if not by painful study, at least by the all-pervading spirit of the age, that religion is effete; that spiritual theories or aspirations offend against the faith of this generation ; that the man of true enlightenment believes in Christ as little as in Confucius, and in the God of his fathers no more than in the great god Pan.

All this has now become so axiomatic that in the State schools throughout France the law demands that in teaching morals there shall be no mention of religion, whereby, as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, their moral teaching becomes futile; and that Paris, in the Tan as always, has forbidden its teachers even to use the name of God. A frank materialism, recognising fully the saving truth of the survival of the fittest, is the rock upon which the new religion is being built. The whole duty of man is to get as much out of life, and to pay as little for it, as he may. The freedom of the will, if it exists, is the power, unique in the world, to break the laws of nature when they hamper his desires, and to blow his brains out when the game is hp. The only spectre that haunts the wise man is the shadow of a possible ennui. The seconds that pass without their appropriate pulsations are a mysterious dispensation of evil. Bad cookery, dull society, and marriage are the modern equivalents of the devil. For, in a world emancipated from the hampering delusion of a spiritual life, the relations of men and women must obviously change. Marriage is a social convention, to the yoke of which, until farther order, some people, for special reason*, must submit. But to marry antil he cannot help it, or to expect any continuing happiness or fidelity when be does, would be, in the true Parisian, an inept apoatacy. Not to marry is the best of all; but, having married, then by far the next best thing is to return as soon as possible to the liberty out of which you came. Love, considered in the light of progressive science, is no longer a union of souls, but a relation of bodies, as passing as beauty or desire. It is not even Venus Urania; it is the Satyrs back again.

One asks, If this be so, how does society persist at all? For this is the war of all against all, in which the applied science of existence is, as M. de Camors said to his son, "to use women for pleasure, men for mastery, and to despise both." The answer is that even on the Boulevard des Italiens the logic of human life is, happily, not wholly logical. In the deepest dyed habitu6 there survives some dim organic remembrance of the nobler "things his ancestors believed, even if they did not practise them. It is not in Paris alone that the moral catastrophe of scepticism is retarded, possibly for generations, by the persistence of forgotten creeds. And then, besides the regulations of police, there are in Paris, as everywhere, those secondary codes enforced by the direful (sanctions of society which are not overturned by any philosophy, because they rest on none. In England certain things would be "respectable," and certain others would be impossible to a "gentleman," if religion and morals were forgotten. In France the man who would ruin your wife or wreck his home without a qualm would recoil in genuine horror from anything, however laudable, which was forbidden by the " code of honour." The duties of Hernani to his wife are as dust in the balance compared to the honourable obligation of an oath " upon his father's head."

And after all, here, as everywhere and always, society has its inner lines of defence in the better morality of women. The Man of the Boulevards and his compeerti abroad may laugh at the feminine mania for going to church and the feminine weakness for belief and prayer; bat they would have reason to rue the -day when these things ceased to be. Society has always rested and must rest upon the stable basis of the family. In the world whose poles are the Bois de Boulogne and the Boia de Vincennes, the men are doing all they can to root up that basement stone by stone. The women, not alone by choice, but by necessity, are struggling to hold it together. Which will 2?.? Are there yet the ten righteous men Within tho city? Will there be any voice savage as Savonarola, and winning like tiaoordaire, to hold up their childish atheism to scorn, and convince their world of sin and of righteousness »nd of judgment ?, Or mutt he fire and sword of civil anarchy and a&iTOto." 6 ™' "" 01 ,ht