nearness; I am one with them in their ideas and
aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and
penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain this by atavism? Was there a
French man or woman in my family some half dozen generations ago? I have
not inquired. The English I love, and with a love that is foolish--mad,
limitless; I love them better than the French, but I am not so near to
them. Dear, sweet Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the
elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned with spreading
trees, and the weald and the wold, the very words are passionately
beautiful ... southern England, not the north--there is something Celtic in
the north,--southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces;--a smock
frock is to me one of the most delightful things in the world; it is so
absolutely English. The villages clustered round the greens, the spires of
the churches pointing between the elm trees.... This is congenial to me;
and this is Protestantism. England is Protestantism, Protestantism is
England. Protestantism is strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism is
eunuch-like, dirty, and Oriental.... Yes, Oriental; there is something even
Chinese about it. What made England great was Protestantism, and when she
ceases to be Protestant she will fall.... Look at the nations that have
clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The
Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs
limp in the incense silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and
revere Cromwell.

* * * * *

_Garcon, un bock!_ I write to please myself, just as I order my
dinner; if my books sell I cannot help it--it is an accident.

But you live by writing.

Yes, but life is only an accident--art is eternal.

* * * * *

What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style; there is nothing you
won't find in Zola from Chateaubriand to the reporting in the
_Figaro_.

He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper's shop; if
the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who
created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.

And his last novel "l'Oeuvre," how terribly spun out, and for a franc a
line in the "Gil Blas." Not a single new or even exact observation. And
that terrible phrase repeated over and over again--"La Conquete de Paris."
What does it me