Humanity: an Interlude

Except for some fine works of art, which seem to be there by accident,
the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble
cut out, and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris
and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance
and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure;
but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of
roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others,
but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion,
they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.
For the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort
which charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts;
they are torturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life
with the same whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence.
The enemies of France can never give an account of her infamy or decay
which does not seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which
the Nationalists of France say about their own nation. They taunt and
torment themselves; sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves.
Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself,
it made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is
the same from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola.
The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth.
The new realists torture men morally for a physical truth.

Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain.
Its indecencies are not regrettable incidents in an
everlasting revolution. It has none of the things which make good
Frenchmen love Paris; it has only the things which make unspeakable
Englishmen love it. It has the part which is cosmopolitan--
and narrows; not the part which is Parisian--and universal.
You can find there (as commonly happens in modern centres)
the worst things of all nations--the DAILY MAIL from England,
the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels of France,
and the drinks of America. But there is no English broad fun,
no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration, and,
above all, no French tradition of fighting for an idea.
Though all the boulevards look like Parisian boulevards,
though all the shops look like Parisian shops, you cannot look
at them steadily for two minutes without feeling the full
distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters
like Clemenceau and Deroulède.

. . . . .

For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels I began
to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again; and I
had impulsively got