The French have inherited (and are
by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of) a big religious
debate. Those who side with the national religion and tradition
emphasize their opinion in every possible way--so do their opponents.
You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for instance, and it is quite
on the cards that the leading article of each will be a disquisition
upon the philosophy of religion, the one, the "Depeche" of Toulouse,
militantly, and often solently atheist; the other as militantly
Catholic.
You don't get that in Pamplona, and you don't get it in Saragossa. What
you get there is a profound dislike of being interfered with, ancient
and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monasteries, and
the colleges, and with all this a curious, all-pervading indifference.
One might end this little train of thought by considering a converse
test of what the eye-opener is in travel; and that test is to talk to
foreigners when they first come to England and see how they tend to
discover in England what they have read of at home instead of what they
really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your
foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its
main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is like a
garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just published
by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went
through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert;
he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay.
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