Vissoye. It set forth the conversion of the Huns to Christianity
through the medium of a miracle vouchsafed to Zacheo, the legendary
apostle of Anniviers. The little stage was erected on a pleasant
hillside, the procession bearing the cross wound down from the
village church, the priests from all the neighbouring towns were
present, and the pious Valaisans--as overjoyed as if the Huns were
a matter of yesterday--sang a solemn _Te Deum_ in thanksgiving for
the conversion of their land. It would be hard to conceive of a drama
less profane; indeed, only religious fervour could have breathed
life into so much controversy; yet I had English friends, intelligent,
cultivated, and deeply interested, who refused to go with me to
Vissoye because it was Sunday afternoon. They stood by their guns,
and attended their own service in the drawing-room of the deserted
little hotel at Zinal; gaining, I trust, the approval of their own
consciences, and losing the experience of a lifetime.
Disapprobation has ever been a powerful stimulus to the Saxon mind.
The heroic measures which it enforces command our faltering homage,
and might incite us to emulation, were we not temperamentally
disposed to ask ourselves the fatal question, "Is it worth while?"
When we remember that twenty-five thousand people in Great Britain
left off eating sugar, by way of protest against slavery in the West
Indies, we realize how the individual Englishman holds himself
morally responsible for wrongs he is innocent of inflicting, and
powerless to redress. Hood and other light-minded humourists laughed
at him for drinking bitter tea; but he was not to be shaken by ridicule.
Miss Edgeworth voiced the conservative sentiment of her day when she
objected to eating unsweetened custards; but he was not to be chilled
by apathy.
The same strenuous spirit impelled the English to express their
sympathy for Captain Alfred Dreyfus by staying away from the Paris
fair of 1900. The London press loudly boasted that Englishmen would
not give the sanction of their presence to any undertaking of the
French Government, and called attention again and again to their
absence from the exhibition. I myself was asked a number of times
in England whether this absence were a noticeable thing; but truth
compelled me to admit that it was not. With Paris brimming over like
a cup filled to the lip, with streets and fair-grounds thronged, with
every hotel crowded and every cab engaged, and with twenty thousand
of my own countrymen clamorously enlivening the scene, it was not
possible to miss anybody anywhere. It obviously had not occurred to
Americans to see any connection between the trial of Captain Dreyfus
and their enjoyment of the most beautiful and brilliant thing that
Europe had to give. The pretty adage, "_Tout homme a deux pays: le
sien et puis la France_," is truer of us than of any other people
in the world. And we may as well pardon a nation her transgressions,
if we cannot keep away from her shores.
England's public utterances anent the United States are of the
friendliest character. Her newspapers and magazines say flattering
things about us. Her poet-laureate--unlike his great predecessor who
unaffectedly detested us--began his official career by praising us
with such fervour that we felt we ought in common honesty to tell
him that we were nothing like so good as he thought us. An English
text-book, published a few years ago, explains generously to the
school-boys of Great Britain that the United States should not be
looked upon as a foreign nation. "They are peopled by men of our blood
and faith, enjoy in a great measure the same laws that we do, read
the same Bible, and acknowledge, like us, the rule of King
Shakespeare."
All this is very pleasant, but the fact remains that Englishmen
express surprise and pain at our most innocent idiosyncrasies. They
correct our pronunciation and our misuse of words. They regret our
nomadic habits, our shrill voices, our troublesome children, our
inability to climb mountains or "do a little glacier work" (it sounds
like embroidery, but means scrambling perilously over ice), our
taste for unwholesome--or, in other words, seasoned--food. When I
am reproved by English acquaintances for the "Americanisms" which
disfigure my speech and proclaim my nationality, I cannot well defend
myself by asserting that I read the same Bible as they do,--for maybe,
after all, I don't.
The tenacity with which English residents on the Continent cling to
the customs and traditions of their own country is pathetic in its
loyalty and in its misconceptions. Their scheme of life does not
permit a single foreign observance, their range of sympathies seldom
includes a single foreign ideal. "An Englishman's happiness," says
M. Taine, "consists in being at home at six in the evening, with a
pleasing, attached wife, four or five children, and respectful
domestics." This is a very good notion of happiness, no fault can
be found with it, and something on the same order, though less perfect
in detail, is highly prized and commended in America. But it does
not embrace every avenue of delight. The Frenchman who seems never
to go home, who seldom has a large family, whose wife is often his
business partner and helpmate, and whose servants are friendly
allies rather than automatic menials, enjoys life also, and with some
degree of intelligence. He may be pardoned for resenting the attitude
of English exiles, who, driven from their own country by the
harshness of the climate, or the cruel cost of living, never cease
to deplore the unaccountable foreignness of foreigners. "Our social
tariff amounts to prohibition," said a witty Englishman in France.
"Exchange of ideas takes place only at the extreme point of
necessity."
It is not under such conditions that any nation gives its best to
strangers. It is not to the affronted soul that the charm of the
unfamiliar makes its sweet and powerful appeal. Lord Byron was
furious when one of his countrywomen called Chamonix "rural"; yet,
after all, the poor creature was giving the scenery what praise she
understood. The Englishman who complained that he could not look out
of his window in Rome without seeing the sun, had a legitimate
grievance (we all know what it is to sigh for grey skies, and for
the unutterable rest they bring); but if we want Rome, we must take
her sunshine, along with her beggars and her Church. Accepted
sympathetically, they need not mar our infinite content.
There is a wonderful sentence in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Marriage of
William Ashe," which subtly and strongly protests against the blight
of mental isolation. Lady Kitty Bristol is reciting Corneille in Lady
Grosville's drawing-room. "Her audience," says Mrs. Ward, "looked
on at first with the embarrassed or hostile air which is the
Englishman's natural protection against the great things of art."
To write a sentence at once so caustic and so flawless is to triumph
over the limitations of language. The reproach seems a strange one
to hurl at a nation which has produced the noblest literature of the
world since the light of Greece waned; but we must remember that
distinction of mind, as Mrs. Ward understands it, and as it was
understood by Mr. Arnold, is necessarily allied with a knowledge of
French arts and letters, and with some insight into the qualities
which clarify French conversation. "Divine provincialism" had no
halo for the man who wrote "Friendship's Garland." He regarded it
with an impatience akin to mistrust, and bordering upon fear. Perhaps
the final word was spoken long ago by a writer whose place in
literature is so high that few aspire to read him. England was
severing her sympathies sharply from much which she had held in
common with the rest of Europe, when Dryden wrote: "They who would
combat general authority with particular opinion must first
establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other
men."
Travellers' Tales
"Wenten forth in heore wey with mony wyse tales,
And hedden leve to lyen al heore lyf aftir."
_Piers Plowman_.
I don't know about travellers' "hedden leve" to lie, but that they
"taken leve" no one can doubt who has ever followed their wandering
footsteps. They say the most charming and audacious things, in
blessed indifference to the fact that somebody may possibly believe
them. They start strange hopes and longings in the human heart, and
they pave the way for disappointments and disasters. They record the
impression of a careless hour as though it were the experience of
a lifetime.
There is a delightful little book on French rivers, written some
years ago by a vivacious and highly imaginative gentleman named
Molloy. It is a rose-tinted volume from the first page to the last,
so full of gay adventures that it would lure a mollusc from his shell.
Every town and every village yields some fresh delight, some humorous
exploit to the four oarsmen who risk their lives to see it; but the
few pages devoted to Amboise are of a dulcet and irresistible
persuasiveness. They fill the reader's soul with a haunting desire
to lay down his well-worn cares and pleasures, to say good-bye to
home and kindred, and to seek that favoured spot. Touraine is full
of beauty, and steeped to the lips in historic crimes. Turn where
we may, her fairness charms the eye, her memories stir the heart.
But Mr. Molloy claims for Amboise something rarer in France than
loveliness or romance, something which no French town has ever yet
been known to possess,--a slumberous and soul-satisfying silence.
"We dropped under the very walls of the Castle," he writes, "without
seeing a soul. It was a strange contrast to Blois in its absolute
stillness. There was no sound but the noise of waters rushing through
the arches of the bridge. It might have been the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty, but was only one of the retrospective cities that
had no concern with the present."
Quiet brooded over the ivied towers and ancient water front.
Tranquillity, unconcern, a gentle and courteous aloofness
surrounded and soothed the intrepid travellers. When, in the early
morning, the crew pushed off in their frail boat, less than a dozen
citizens assembled to watch the start. Even the peril of the
performance (and there are few things more likely to draw a crowd
than the chance of seeing four fellow mortals drown) failed to awaken
curiosity. Nine men stood silent on the shore when the outrigger shot
into the swirling river, and it is the opinion of the chronicler that
Amboise "did not often witness such a gathering." Nine quiet men were,
for Amboise, something in the nature of a mob.
It must be remembered that Mr. Molloy's book is not a new one; but
then Touraine is neither new nor mutable. Nothing changes in its
beautiful old towns, the page of whose history has been turned for
centuries. What if motors now whirl in a white dust through the heart
of France? They do not affect the lives of the villages through which
they pass. The simple and primitive desire of the motorist is to be
fed and to move on, to be fed again and to move on again, to sleep
and to start afresh. That unavoidable waiting between trains which
now and then compelled an old-time tourist to look at a cathedral
or a chateau, by way of diverting an empty hour, no longer retards
progress. The motorist needs never wait. As soon as he has eaten,
he can go,--a privilege of which be gladly avails himself. A month
at Amboise taught us that, at the feeding-hour, motors came flocking
like fowls, and then, like fowls, dispersed. They were disagreeable
while they lasted, but they never lasted long. Replete with a
five-course luncheon, their fagged and grimy occupants sped on to
distant towns and dinner.
But why should we, who knew well that there is not, and never has
been, a quiet corner in all France, have listened to a traveller's
tale, and believed in a silent Amboise? Is there no limit to human
credulity? Does experience count for nothing in the Bourbon-like
policy of our lives? It is to England we must go if we seek for silence,
that gentle, pervasive silence which wraps us in a mantle of content.
It was in Porlock that Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan," transported,
Heaven knows whither, by virtue of the hushed repose that consecrates
the sleepiest hamlet in Great Britain. It was at Stoke Pogis that
Gray composed his "Elegy." He could never have written--
"And all the air a solemn stillness holds,"
in the vicinity of a French village.
But Amboise! Who would go to rural England, live on ham and eggs,
and sleep in a bed harder than Pharaoh's heart, if it were possible
that a silent Amboise awaited him? The fair fresh vegetables of
France, her ripe red strawberries and glowing cherries, her crisp
salads and her caressing mattresses lured us no less than the vision
of a bloodstained castle, and the wide sweep of the Loire flashing
through the joyous landscape of Touraine. In the matter of beauty,
Amboise outstrips all praise. In the matter of romance, she leaves
nothing to be desired. Her splendid old Chateau--half palace and half
fortress--towers over the river which mirrors its glory and
perpetuates its shame. She is a storehouse of historic memories, she
is the loveliest of little towns, she is in the heart of a district
which bears the finest fruit and has the best cooks in France; but
she is not, and never has been, silent, since the days when Louis
the Eleventh was crowned, and she gave wine freely to all who chose
to be drunk and merry at her charge.
If she does not give her wine to-day, she sells it so cheaply--lying
girt by vine-clad hills--that many of her sons are drunk and merry
still. The sociable habit of setting a table in the open street
prevails at Amboise. Around it labourers take their evening meal,
to the accompaniment of song and sunburnt mirth. It sounds poetic
and it looks picturesque,--like a picture by Teniers or Jan
Steen,--but it is not a habit conducive to repose.
As far as I can judge,--after a month's experience,--the one thing
no inhabitant of Amboise ever does is to go to bed. At midnight the
river front is alive with cheerful and strident voices. The French
countryman habitually speaks to his neighbour as if he were half a
mile away; and when a score of countrymen are conversing in this key,
the air rings with their clamour. They sing in the same lusty fashion;
not through closed lips, as is the custom of English singers, but
rolling out the notes with volcanic energy from the deep craters of
their throats. When our admirable waiter--who is also our best
friend--frees his soul in song as he is setting the table, the walls
of the dining-room quiver and vibrate. By five o'clock in the morning
every one except ourselves is on foot and out of doors. We might as
well be, for it is custom, not sleep, which keeps us in our beds.
The hay wagons are rolling over the bridge, the farmhands are going
to work, the waiter, in an easy undress, is exchanging voluble
greetings with his many acquaintances, the life of the town has
begun.
The ordinary week-day life, I mean, for on Sundays the market people
have assembled by four, and there are nights when the noises never
cease. It is no unusual thing to be awakened, an hour or two after
midnight, by a tumult so loud and deep that my first impression is
one of conspiracy or revolution. The sound is not unlike the hoarse
roar of Sir Henry Irving's admirably trained mobs,--the only mobs
I have ever heard,--and I jump out of bed, wondering if the President
has been shot, or the Chamber of Deputies blown up by malcontents.
Can these country people have heard the news, as the shepherds of
Peloponnesus heard of the fall of Syracuse, through the gossiping
of wood devils, and, like the shepherds, have hastened to carry the
intelligence? When I look out of my window, the crowd seems small
for the uproar it is making. Armand, the waiter, who, I am convinced,
merely dozes on a dining-room chair, so as to be in readiness for
any diversion, stands in the middle of the road, gesticulating with
fine dramatic gestures. I cannot hear what is being said, because
everybody is speaking at once; but after a while the excitement dies
away, and the group slowly disperses, shouting final vociferations
from out of the surrounding darkness. The next day when I ask the
cause of the disturbance, Armand looks puzzled at my question. He
does not seem aware that anything out of the way has happened; but
finally explains that "quelques amis" were passing the hotel, and
that Madame must have heard them stop and talk. The incident is
apparently too common an occurrence to linger in his mind.
As for the Amboise dogs, I do not know whether they really possess
a supernatural strength which enables them to bark twenty-four hours
without intermission, or whether they divide themselves into day and
night pickets, so that, when one band retires to rest, the other takes
up the interrupted duty. The French villager, who values all domestic
pets in proportion to the noise they can make, delights especially
in his dogs, giant black-and-tan terriers for the most part, of
indefatigable perseverance in their one line of activity. Their bark
is high-pitched and querulous rather than deep and defiant, but for
continuity it has no rival upon earth. Our hotel--in all other
respects unexceptionable--possesses two large bulldogs which have
long ago lost their British phlegm, and acquired the agitated yelp
of their Gallic neighbours. They could not be quiet if they wanted
to, for heavy sleigh-bells (unique decorations for a bulldog) hang
about their necks, and jangle merrily at every step. In the courtyard
lives a colony of birds. One virulent parrot which shrieks its
inarticulate wrath from morning until night, but which does--be it
remembered to its credit--go to sleep at sundown; three paroquets;
two cockatoos of ineffable shrillness, and a cageful of canaries and
captive finches. When taken in connection with the dogs, the hotel
cat, the operatic Armand, and the cook who plays "See, O Norma!" on
his flute every afternoon and evening, it will be seen that Amboise
does not so closely resemble the palace of the Sleeping Beauty as
Mr. Molloy has given us to understand.
All other sounds, however, melt into a harmonious murmur when
compared to the one great speciality of the village,--stone-cutting
in the open streets. Whenever one of the picturesque old houses is
crumbling into utter decay, a pile of stone is dumped before it, and
the easy-going masons of Amboise prepare to patch up its walls. No
particular method is observed, the work progresses after the fashion
of a child's block house, and the principal labour lies in dividing
the lumps of stone. This is done with a rusty old saw pulled slowly
backward and forward by two men, the sound produced resembling a
succession of agonized shrieks. It goes on for hours and hours, with
no apparent result except the noise; while a handsome boy, in a
striped blouse and broad blue sash, completes the discord by currying
the stone with an iron currycomb,--a process I have never witnessed
before, and ardently hope never to witness again. If one could
imagine fifty school-children all squeaking their slate pencils down
their slates together,--who does not remember that blood-curdling
music of his youth?--one might gain some feeble notion of the acute
agony induced by such an instrument of torture. Agony to the nervous
visitor alone; for the inhabitants of Amboise love their shrieking
saws and currycombs, just as they love their shrieking parrots and
cockatoos. They gather in happy crowds to watch the blue-sashed boy,
and drink in the noise he makes. We drink it in, too, as he is
immediately beneath our windows. Then we look at the castle walls
glowing in the splendour of the sunset, and at the Loire sweeping
in magnificent curves between the grey-green poplar trees; at the
noble width of the horizon, and at the deepening tints of the sky;
and we realize that a silent Amboise would be an earthly Paradise,
too fair for this sinful world.
The Chill of Enthusiasm
"Surtout, pas de zele."--TALLEYRAND.
There is no aloofness so forlorn as our aloofness from an
uncontagious enthusiasm, and there is no hostility so sharp as that
aroused by a fervour which fails of response. Charles Lamb's "D--n
him at a hazard," was the expression of a natural and reasonable frame
of mind with which we are all familiar, and which, though admittedly
unlovely, is in the nature of a safeguard. If we had no spiritual
asbestos to protect our souls, we should be consumed to no purpose
by every wanton flame. If our sincere and restful indifference to
things which concern us not were shaken by every blast, we should
have no available force for things which concern us deeply. If
eloquence did not sometimes make us yawn, we should be besotted by
oratory. And if we did not approach new acquaintances, new authors,
and new points of view with life-saving reluctance, we should never
feel that vital regard which, being strong enough to break down our
barriers, is strong enough to hold us for life.
The worth of admiration is, after all, in proportion to the value
of the thing admired,--a circumstance overlooked by the people who
talk much pleasant nonsense about sympathy, and the courage of our
emotions, and the open and generous mind. We know how Mr. Arnold felt
when an American lady wrote to him, in praise of American authors,
and said that it rejoiced her heart to think of such excellence as
being "common and abundant." Mr. Arnold, who considered that
excellence of any kind was very uncommon and beyond measure rare,
expressed his views on this occasion with more fervour and publicity
than the circumstances demanded; but his words are as balm to the
irritation which some of us suffer and conceal when drained of our
reluctant applause.
It is perhaps because women have been trained to a receptive attitude
of mind, because for centuries they have been valued for their
sympathy and appreciation rather than for their judgment, that they
are so perilously prone to enthusiasm. It has come to all of us of
late to hear much feminine eloquence, and to marvel at the nimbleness
of woman's wit, at the speed with which she thinks, and the facility
with which she expresses her thoughts. A woman who, until five years
ago, never addressed a larger audience than that afforded by a
reading-club or a dinner-party, will now thrust and parry on a
platform, wholly unembarrassed by timidity or by ignorance.
Sentiment and satire are hers to command; and while neither is
convincing, both are tremendously effective with people already
convinced, with the partisans who throng unwearyingly to hear the
voicing of their own opinions. The ease with which such a speaker
brings forward the great central fact of the universe, maternity,
as an argument for or against the casting of a ballot (it works just
as well either way); the glow with which she associates Jeanne d'Arc
with federated clubs and social service; and the gay defiance she
hurls at customs and prejudices so profoundly obsolete that the
lantern of Diogenes could not find them lurking in a village
street,--these things may chill the unemotional listener into apathy,
but they never fail to awaken the sensibilities of an audience. The
simple process, so highly commended by debaters, of ignoring all that
cannot be denied, makes demonstration easy. "A crowd," said Mr.
Ruskin, "thinks by infection." To be immune from infection is to
stand outside the sacred circle of enthusiasts.