e
true--if you look at real life and say what you think of it, you shock
our modern sense of propriety. We may talk about drainage and
ventilation, and the advantages of soap, but there we must stop. Keep
the outside clean, but don't look within. Thus is it our writers make
such blunders. For instance, good-meaning Mrs Stowe, after she had
written Uncle Tom, came here to be lionized, and to write a book about
us. She did so, and a very poor book it was. But I must quote one
passage from "Sunny Memories." In writing of a visit she paid to the
Jardin Mobile in Paris, she writes, "Entrance to this Paradise can be
had, for gentlemen a dollar, ladies _free_; this tells the whole story.
Nevertheless, do not infer that there are not respectable ladies there;
it is a place so remarkable that very few strangers stay long in Paris
without taking a look at it. And though young ladies residing in Paris
never go, and matrons very seldom, yet occasionally it is the case that
some ladies of respectability look in. Nevertheless, aside from the
impropriety inherent in the very nature of the waltzing, there was not a
word, look, or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were
all decent, and, if there was vice, it was vice masked under the guise of
polite propriety. How different, I could not but reflect, is all this
from the gin-palaces of London! There, there is indeed a dazzling
splendour of gas-lights, but there is nothing artistic, nothing refined,
nothing appealing to the imagination. There are only hogsheads and
barrels, and the appliances for serving out strong drink; and there for
one sole end--the swallowing of the fiery stimulant--come the nightly
thousands, from the gay and well-dressed to the haggard and tattered, in
the last stage of debasement. The end is the same, by how different
paths! Here they dance along the path to ruin with flowers and
music--there they cast themselves bodily, as it were, into the lake of
fire." A more unfair comparison, I think, was never drawn; a
drinking-shop is much the same everywhere, and in Paris as well as in
London, people, to use Mrs Stowe's own words, cast themselves bodily into
the lake of fire. We have our Jardin Mobile, but of course Mrs Stowe
never went there--as we have known good people confessing to entering
theatres in Germany or France who on no account would have gone near one
at home. If Mrs Stowe had confessed to going to Cremorne, she would have
be