Nothing else matters - 1914 Author:William Samuel Johnson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CONFIDENCES "/"HILDE," I murmured, keeping my eyes fixed on the marble lovers of the Fountain of the Medicis— Paris, once she has bewitched you, lay... more »s your heart bare. She forces avowals. The great mother-confessor, she bids you unveil your soul to itself; and her absolutions, uttered with Gallic prodigality of gesture, bring comfort. She is so ancient-wise, that Paris, and so foolish-young, that we are sure she understands. And she bids you tell the secret, so unveiled, to your oldest friend, or in his default to the next child of Paris you meet, to a stray dog, a flower, a tree—or to anything. And if the secret chances to be love!—' "Childe," said I; and the sunlight, sifted and shaken by the green vibrations overhead, struck up from the water and fluttered warm on the bodies of those marble lovers. Paris!—the Franks—and "frankness," which is to be like unto a Frank in Arcadian candour. Therein, surely, is the key to the art of this race, to its passionate self-expression. The key to its literature, too, with its ingenuous, ingratiating egotism. Just the naked heart talking, both. And when one becomes Parisian, lives in the focal point where the refracted rays of that racial Frank frankness meet and burn—why, one melts, willy-nilly. The old Puritan walls round the emotions crumble; the thick scholastic dams round the fluid mind wash away; rheumatic reserves (for our Teutonic reserves are just gout of the soul) become flexible and—why, one talks, willy-nilly. "Infant," said I.—Ovid tells the story of those marble lovers and an egregiously dull story it is, to my thinking. Acis and Galateathey are, cuddling at the foot of a crag, while Polyphemus, huge, bronze, glowering, watches from above— A dull story; but Paris has drawn it forth from its antiquity, has...« less