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Obviously public life grows more private every day. The French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not in sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have been legally impossible.
Perhaps equality has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own undogmatic Nephelococcygia, with the ineffable scandals of Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and febrile passion which characterises the French press.
When the first rough and ready facsimiles of the famous Bordereau and of the authentic letters of Captain Dreyfus were published side by side, it struck me with an immediate amazement to conceive that any person who had given even the most casual attention to this study of handwriting could possibly have supposed that the various documents had emanated from the same hand.
But I afterwards learnt that the telegram had perplexed him quite as much as it perplexed me. A great success? What could it be? He racked his mind in vain. He reviewed all the phases and aspects of the Dreyfus case, wondering whether this or that had happened, but not suspecting the public revelations which were then impending, the tragedy which was being enacted.
It has undoubtedly been adopted at times for the furtherance of purely despotic or arbitrary aims; but if ever it was justified such was the case during the Dreyfus agitation. If the Government had not connived, for purposes of its own, at the proceedings of what the French call the 'militarist' party, there would have been no turmoil at all.
The future looked blank; but M. Loubet was elected President, and a feeling of great relief followed. I have reason to believe that M. Zola regards the death of President Faure as the crucial turning-point in the whole Dreyfus business.
Quite an intimate friend he had, named Twine, who lost his grip on the perch, so to speak, about six years back. Mr. Twine dwelt during the working hours of the day in a sort of cage of iron, like that of Dreyfus, in the basement of the Capitol.
With Zola this is not precisely so, though his books still sell; the only interregnum being the time when the Dreyfus affair was agitating France. Then the source of Zola's income dried up like a rain pond in a desert. Later on he had his revenge. The figures for the sale of Zola up to the end of 1911 are very instructive. His collected works number forty-eight volumes.
I have previously mentioned that during the first week or so of his sojourn in England he had refused to look at newspapers and at least so it seemed to me had sought to banish the Dreyfus affair and his own troubles from his mind, much as one might seek to drive away a hateful nightmare. But before long he again fell under the spell and followed the course of events with the keenest interest.
Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes: of German books and Universities Harnack Renan, for whom she had the greatest admiration Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things German colonies, that she thought were "all nonsense" Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent reaction in France the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete.
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