The lost Napoleon is a part of a mountain range. Several miles of
it--say six. When you stand at the right viewpoint and look across the
plain, there, miles away, stretched out on his back under the sky, you
see the great Napoleon, sleeping, with his arm folded upon his breast.
You recognize him at once and you catch your breath and a thrill goes
through you from head to foot--a most natural thing to happen, for you
have never been so superbly astonished in your life before, and you
realize, if you live a century, it is not likely that you will ever
encounter the like of that tremendous surprise again. You see, it is
unique. You have seen mountain ridges before that looked like men lying
down, but there was always some one to pilot you to the right viewpoint,
and prepare you for the show, and then tell you which is the head and
which the feet and which the stomach, and at last you get the idea and
say, “Yes, now I see it, now I make it out--it is a man, and wonderful,
too.” But all this has damaged the surprise and there is not much
thrill; moreover, the man is only a third-rate celebrity or no celebrity
at all--he is no Napoleon the Great. But I discovered this stupendous
Napoleon myself and was caught wholly by surprise, hence the splendid
emotion, the uplifting astonishment.
We have all seen mountains that looked like whales, elephants, recumbent
lions--correctly figured, too, and a pleasure to look upon--but we did
not discover them, somebody pointed them out to us, and in the same
circumstances we have seen and enjoyed stately crags and summits known
to the people thereabouts as “The Old Man’s Head,” “The Elephant’s
Head,” “Anthony’s Nose,” “The Lady’s Head,” etc., and we have seen
others that were named “Shakespeare’s Head,” and “Satan’s Head,” but
still the fine element of surprise was in almost all cases wanting.
The Lost Napoleon is easily the most colossal and impressive statue in
the world. It is several miles long; in form and proportions it is
perfect. It represents Napoleon himself and not another; and there is
something about the dignity and repose of the great figure that stirs
the imagination and half persuades it that this is not an unsentient
artifice of nature, but the master of the world sentient and
dreaming--dreaming of battle, conquest, empire. I call it the Lost
Napoleon because I cannot remember just where I was when I saw it. My
hope, in writing this, is that I may move some wandering tourist or
artist to go over my track and seek for it--seek for it, find it, locate
it exactly, describe it, paint it, and so preserve it against loss
again.
My track was down the Rhône; I made the excursion ten or eleven years
ago in the pleasantest season of the year. I took a courier with me and
went from Geneva a couple of hours by rail to the blue little Lake
Bourget, and spent the night in a mediæval castle on an island in that
little lake. In the early morning our boat came for us. It was a roomy
open boat fifteen or twenty feet long, with a single pair of long oars,
and with it came its former owner, a sturdy big boatman. The boat was
mine now; I think I paid five dollars for it. I was to pay the boatman a
trifling daily wage and his keep, and he was to take us all the way down
the Rhône to Marseilles. It was warm weather and very sunny, but we
built a canvas arch, like a wagon cover, over the aftermost third of the
boat, with a curtain at its rear which could be rolled up to let the
breeze blow through, and I occupied that tent and was always
comfortable. The sailor sat amidships and manned the oars, and the
courier had the front third of the boat to himself. We crossed the lake
and went winding down a narrow canal bordered by peasant houses and
vineyards, and after about a league of this navigation we came in sight
of the Rhône, a troubled gray stream which went tearing past the mouth
of the peaceful canal at a racing gait. We emerged into it and laid in
the oars. We could go fast enough in that current without artificial
aid. During the first days we slipped along down the curving bends at a
speed of about five miles an hour, but it slackened later.
Our days were all about alike. About four in the afternoon we tied up at
a village and I dined on the greensward in front of the inn by the
water’s edge, on the choicest chickens, vegetables, fruit, butter, and
bread, prepared in French perfection and served upon the whitest linen;
and as a rule I had the friendly house cat and dog for guests and
company and willing and able helpers. I slept in the inn; often in clean
and satisfactory quarters, sometimes in the same room with the cows and
the fleas. I breakfasted on the lawn in the morning with cat and dog
again; then laid in a stock of grapes and other fruits gathered fresh
from the garden and some bottles of red wine made on the premises, and
at eight or nine we went floating down the river again. At noon we went
ashore at a village, bought a freshly caught fish or two, had them
broiled, got some bread and vegetables, and set sail again at once. We
always lunched on board as we floated along. I spent my days reading
books, making notes, smoking, and in other lazy and enchanting ways, and
had the delightfulest ten-day voyage I have ever experienced.
It took us ten days to float to Arles. There the current gave out and I
closed the excursion and returned to Geneva by rail. It was twenty-eight
miles to Marseilles, and we should have been obliged to row. That would
not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and I
do not like work even when another person does it.
I think it was about the eighth day that I discovered Napoleon. My notes
cover four or five days; there they stop; the charm of the trip had
taken possession of me, and I had no energy left. It was getting toward
four in the afternoon--time to tie up for the day. Down ahead on the
right bank I saw a compact jumble of yellowy-browny cubes stacked
together, some on top of the others, and no visible cracks in the mass,
and knew it for a village--a village common to that region down there; a
village jammed together without streets or alleys, substantially--where
your progress is mainly _through_ the houses, not _by_ them, and where
privacy is a thing practically unknown; a village which probably hadn’t
had a house added to the jumble for five hundred years. We were anywhere
from half a mile to a mile above the village when I gave the order to
proceed to that place and tie up. Just then I glanced to my left toward
the distant mountain range, and got that soul-stirring shock which I
have said so much about. I pointed out the grand figure to the courier,
and said:
“Name it. Who is it?”
“Napoleon!”
“Yes, it is Napoleon. Show it to the sailor and ask him to name it.”
The sailor said, “Napoleon.” We watched the figure all the time then
until we reached the village. We walked up the river bank in the morning
to see how far one might have to go before the shape would materially
change, but I do not now remember the result. We watched it afterward as
we floated away from the village, but I cannot remember at what point
the shape began to be marred. However, the mountains being some miles
away, I think that the figure would be recognizable as Napoleon along a
stretch of as much as a mile above and a mile below the village, though
I think that the likeness would be strongest at the point where I first
saw it--that is, half a mile or more above the village.
We talked the grand apparition over at great length and with a strong
interest. I said I believed that if its presence were known to the world
such shoals of tourists would come flocking there to see it that all the
spare ground would soon be covered with hotels; and I think so yet. I
think it would soon be the most celebrated natural curiosity on the
planet, that it would be more visited than Niagara or the Alps, and that
all the other famous natural curiosities of the globe would fall to a
rank away below it. I think so still.
There is a line of lumbering and thundering great freight steamers on
the Rhône, and I think that if some man will board one of them at Arles
and make a trip of some hours upstream--say from three to six--and keep
an eye out to the right and watch that mountain range he will be certain
to find the Lost Napoleon and have no difficulty in rediscovering the
mighty statue when he comes to the right point. It will cost nothing to
make the experiment, and I hope it will be done.
NOTE.--Mark Twain’s biographer rediscovered it in 1913. It is some
miles below Valence, opposite the village of Beauchastel.
SOME NATIONAL STUPIDITIES
(1891-1892)
The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable
ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.
This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is
universal. The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing
valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.
Take the German stove, for instance--the huge white porcelain monument
that towers toward the ceiling in the corner of the room, solemn,
unsympathetic, and suggestive of death and the grave--where can you find
it outside of the German countries? I am sure I have never seen it where
German was not the language of the region. Yet it is by long odds the
best stove and the most convenient and economical that has yet been
invented.[5]
To the uninstructed stranger it promises nothing; but he will soon find
that it is a masterly performer, for all that. It has a little bit of a
door which you couldn’t get your head into--a door which seems foolishly
out of proportion to the rest of the edifice; yet the door is right, for
it is not necessary that bulky fuel shall enter it. Small-sized fuel is
used, and marvelously little of that. The door opens into a tiny cavern
which would not hold more fuel than a baby could fetch in its arms. The
process of firing is quick and simple. At half past seven on a cold
morning the servant brings a small basketful of slender pine sticks--say
a modified armful--and puts half of these in, lights them with a match,
and closes the door. They burn out in ten or twelve minutes. He then
puts in the rest and _locks_ the door, and carries off the key. The work
is done. He will not come again until next morning. All day long and
until past midnight all parts of the room will be delightfully warm and
comfortable, and there will be no headaches and no sense of closeness or
oppression. In an American room, whether heated by steam, hot water, or
open fires, the neighborhood of the register or the fireplace is
warmest--the heat is not equally diffused through the room; but in a
German room one is as comfortable in one part of it as in another.
Nothing is gained or lost by being near the stove. Its surface is not
hot; you can put your hand on it anywhere and not get burnt. Consider
these things. One firing is enough for the day; the cost is next to
nothing; the heat produced is the same all day, instead of too hot and
too cold by turns; one may absorb himself in his business in peace; he
does not need to feel any anxieties or solicitudes about his fire; his
whole day is a realized dream of bodily comfort.
The German stove is not restricted to wood; peat is used in it, and coal
bricks also. These coal bricks are made of waste coal dust pressed in a
mold. In effect they are dirt and in fact are dirt cheap. The brick is
about as big as your two fists; the stove will burn up twenty of them in
half an hour, then it will need no more fuel for that day.
This noble stove is at its very best when its front has a big square
opening in it for a _visible_ wood fire. The real heating is done in the
hidden regions of the great structure, of course--the open fire is
merely to rejoice your eye and gladden your heart.
America could adopt this stove, but does America do it? No, she sticks
placidly to her own fearful and wonderful inventions in the stove line.
She has fifty kinds, and not a rational one in the lot. The American
wood stove, of whatsoever breed, is a terror. There can be no
tranquillity of mind where it is. It requires more attention than a
baby. It has to be fed every little while, it has to be watched all the
time; and for all reward you are roasted half your time and frozen the
other half. It warms no part of the room but its own part; it breeds
headaches and suffocation, and makes one’s skin feel dry and feverish;
and when your wood bill comes in you think you have been supporting a
volcano.
We have in America many and many a breed of coal stoves, also--fiendish
things, everyone of them. The base-burner sort are handy and require but
little attention; but none of them, of whatsoever kind, distributes its
heat uniformly through the room, or keeps it at an unvarying
temperature, or fails to take the life out of the atmosphere and leave
it stuffy and smothery and stupefying.
It seems to me that the ideal of comfort would be a German stove to heat
one’s room, and an open wood fire to make it cheerful; then have
furnace-heat in the halls. We could easily find some way to make the
German stove beautiful, and that is all it needs at present. Still, even
as it is to-day, it is lovely, it is a darling, compared with any
“radiator” that has yet been intruded upon the world. That odious gilded
skeleton! It makes all places ugly that it inhabits--just by contagion.
It is certainly strange that useful customs and devices do not spread
from country to country with more facility and promptness than they do.
You step across the German border almost anywhere, and suddenly the
German stove has disappeared. In Italy you find a foolish and
ineffectual modification of it, in Paris you find an unprepossessing
“adaptation” of our base-burner on a reduced pattern.
Fifteen years ago Paris had a cheap and cunning little fire kindler
consisting of a pine shaving, curled as it came from the carpenter’s
plane, and gummed over with an inflammable substance which would burn
several minutes and set fire to the most obdurate wood. It was cheap and
handy, but no stranger carried the idea home with him. Paris has another
swift and victorious kindler, now, in the form of a small black cake
made of I don’t know what; but you shove it under the wood and touch a
match to it and your fire is made. No one will think to carry that
device to America, or elsewhere. In America we prefer to kindle the fire
with the kerosene can and chance the inquest. I have been in a multitude
of places where pine cones were abundant, but only in the French Riviera
and in one place in Italy have I seen them in the wood box to kindle the
fires with.
For perfect adaptation to the service required, look at the American gum
shoe and the American arctic. Their virtues ought to have carried them
to all wet and snowy lands; but they haven’t done anything of the kind.
There are few places on the continent of Europe where one can buy them.
And observe how slowly our typewriting machine makes its way. In the
great city of Florence I was able to find only one place where I could
get typewriting done; and then it was not done by a native, but by an
American girl. In the great city of Munich I found one typewriting
establishment, but the operator was sick and that suspended the
business. I was told that there was no opposition house. In the
prodigious city of Berlin I was not able to find a typewriter at all.
There was not even one in our Embassy or its branches. Our
representative there sent to London for the best one to be had in that
capital, and got an incapable, who would have been tarred and feathered
in Mud Springs, Arizona. Four years ago a typewritten page was a seldom
sight in Europe, and when you saw it it made you heartsick, it was so
inartistic, and so blurred and shabby and slovenly. It was because the
Europeans made the machines themselves, and the making of nice machinery
is not one of their gifts. England imports ours, now. This is wise; she
will have her reward.
In all these years the American fountain pen has hardly got a start in
Europe. There is no market for it. It is too handy, too inspiring, too
capable, too much of a time saver. The dismal steel pen and the
compass-jawed quill are preferred. And semi-liquid mud is preferred to
ink, apparently, everywhere in Europe. This in face of the fact that
there is ink to be had in America--and at club rates, too.
Then there is the elevator, lift, _ascenseur_. America has had the
benefit of this invaluable contrivance for a generation and a half, and
it is now used in all our cities and villages, in all hotels, in all
lofty business buildings and factories, and in many private dwellings.
But we can’t spread it, we can’t beguile Europe with it. In Europe an
elevator is even to this day a rarity and a curiosity. Especially a
curiosity. As a rule it seats but three or four persons--often only
two--and it travels so slowly and cautiously and timorously and piously
and solemnly that it makes a person feel creepy and crawly and scary and
dismal and repentant. Anybody with sound legs can give the continental
elevator two flights the start and beat it to the sixth floor. Every
time these nations merely import an American idea, instead of importing
the concreted thing itself, the result is a failure. They tried to make
the sewing machine, and couldn’t; they are trying to make fountain pens
and typewriters and can’t; they are making these dreary elevators,
now--and patenting them! Satire can no further go.
I think that as a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and
that Europe develops a borrowed American idea backward. We borrowed gas
lighting and the railroad from England, and the arc light from France,
and these things have improved under our culture. We have lent Europe
our tramway, telegraph, sewing machine, phonograph, telephone, and
kodak, and while we may not claim that in these particular instances she
has developed them backward, we are justified in claiming that she has
added no notable improvements to them. We have added the improvements
ourselves and she has accepted them. Why she has not accepted and
universally adopted the improved elevator is a surprising and puzzling
thing. Its rightful place is among the great ideas of our great age. It
is an epoch maker. It is a concentrator of population, and economizer of
room. It is going to build our cities skyward instead of out toward the
horizons.[6] It is going to enable five millions of people to live
comfortably on the same ground space that one million uncomfortably
lives on now. It is going to make cheap quarters for Tom, Dick, and
Harry near their work, in place of three miles from it, as is the rule
to-day. It is going to save them the necessity of adding a six-flight
climb to the already sufficient fatigue of their day’s labor.
We imitate some of the good things which we find in Europe, and we ought
to imitate more of them. At the same time Europe ought to imitate us
somewhat more than she does. The crusty, ill-mannered and in every way
detestable Parisian cabman ought to imitate our courteous and friendly
Boston cabman--and stop there. He can’t learn anything from the guild in
New York. And it would morally help the Parisian shopkeeper if he would
imitate the fair dealing of his American cousin. With us it is not
necessary to ask the price of small articles before we buy them, but in
Paris the person who fails to take that precaution will get scorched. In
business we are prompt, fair, and trustworthy in all our small trade
matters. It is the rule. In the friendliest spirit I would recommend
France to imitate these humble virtues. Particularly in the kodak
business. Pray get no kodak pictures developed in France--and especially
in Nice. They will send you your bill to Rome or Jericho, or
whithersoever you have gone, but that is all you will get. You will
never see your negatives again, or the developed pictures, either. And
by and by the head house in Paris will demand payment once more, and
constructively threaten you with “proceedings.” If you inquire if they
mailed your package across the frontier without registering it, they are
coldly silent. If you inquire how they expected to trace and recover a
lost package without a post-office receipt, they are dumb again. A
little intelligence inserted into the kodak business in those regions
would be helpful, if it could be done without shock.
But the worst of all is, that Europe cannot be persuaded to imitate our
railway methods. Two or three years ago I liked the European methods,
but experience has dislodged that superstition. All over the Continent
the system--to call it by an extravagant term--is sufficiently poor and
slow and clumsy, or unintelligent; but in these regards Italy and France
are entitled to the chromo. In Italy it takes more than half an hour to
buy a through ticket to Paris at Cook & Sons’ offices, there is such a
formidable amount of red tape and recording connected with the vast
transaction. Every little detail of the matter must be written down in a
set of books--your name, condition, nationality, religion, date, hour,
number of the train, and all that; and at last you get your ticket and
think you are done, but you are not; it must be carried to the station
and stamped; and even that is not the end, for if you stop over at any
point it must be stamped again or it is forfeited. And yet you save time
and trouble by going to Cook instead of to the station. Buying your
ticket does not finish your job. Your trunks must be weighed, and paid
for at about human-being rates. This takes another quarter of an hour of
your time--perhaps half an hour if you are at the tail of the
procession. You get paper checks, which are twice as easy to lose as
brass ones. You cannot secure a seat beforehand, but must take your
chances with the general rush to the train. If you have your family with
you, you may have to distribute them among several cars. There is one
annoying feature which is common all over the Continent, and that is,
that if you want to make a short journey you cannot buy your ticket
whenever you find the ticket office open, but must wait until it is
doing business for your particular train; and that only begins, as a
rule, a quarter of an hour before the train’s time of starting. The cars
are most ingeniously inconvenient, cramped, and uncomfortable, and in
Italy they are phenomenally dirty. The European “system” was devised
either by a maniac or by a person whose idea was to hamper, bother, and
exasperate the traveler in all conceivable ways and sedulously and
painstakingly discourage custom. In Italy, as far as my experience goes,
it is the custom to use the sleeping cars on the day trains and take
them off when the sun goes down. One thing is sure, anyway: if that is
not the case, it will be, presently, when they think of it. They can be
depended upon to snap up as darling an idea as that with joy.
No, we are bad enough about not importing valuable European ideas, but
Europe is still slower about introducing ours. Europe has always--from
away back--been neglectful in this regard. Take our admirable postal and
express system, for instance. We had it perfectly developed and running
smoothly and beautifully more than three hundred years ago; and Europe
came over and admired it and eloquently praised it--but didn’t adopt it.
We Americans.... But let Prescott tell about it. I quote from the
_Conquest of Peru_, chapter 2, vol. 1:
As the distance each courier had to perform was small, they ran over
the ground with great swiftness, and messages were carried through the
whole extent of the long routes at the rate of a hundred and fifty
miles a day. Their office was not limited to carrying dispatches. They
brought various articles. Fish from the distant ocean, fruits, game,
and different commodities from the hot regions of the coast were taken
to the capital in good condition. It is remarkable that this important
institution should have been found among two barbarian nations of the
New World long before it was introduced among the civilized nations of
Europe. By these wise contrivances of the Incas, the most distant
parts of the long-extended empire of Peru were brought into intimate
relations with each other. And while the capitals of Christendom, but
a few hundred miles apart, remained as far asunder as if seas had
rolled between them, the great capitals Cuzco and Quito were placed in
immediate correspondence. Intelligence from the numerous provinces was
transmitted on the wings of the wind to the Peruvian metropolis, the
great focus to which all the lines of communication converged.
There--that is what we had, three hundred and twenty-five years before
Europe had anything that could be called a businesslike and effective
postal and express service. We are a great people. We have always been a
great people, from the start: always alive, alert, up early in the
morning, and ready to teach. But Europe has been a slow and discouraging
pupil from the start; always, from the very start. It seems to me that
something ought to be done about this.
-----
Footnote 5:
Compare with his remarks on the same subject, in “Marienbad--A Health
Factory,” written about a year earlier.
Footnote 6:
This was good prophecy. There were no skyscrapers in New York City
when it was written.
THE CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN HAMBURG
(1892)
I believe I have never been so badly situated before as I have been
during these last four weeks. To begin with, the time-hallowed and
business-worn thunderbolt out of the clear sky fell about the 18th of
August--people in Hamburg dying like flies of something resembling
cholera! A normal death rate of forty a day suddenly transformed into a
terrific daily slaughter without notice to anybody to prepare for such a
surprise! Certainly that was recognizable as that kind of a thunderbolt.
It was at this point that the oddity of the situation above referred to
began. For you will grant that it is odd to live four weeks a
twelve-hour journey from a devastating plague nest and remain baffled
and defeated all that time in all your efforts to get at the state of
the case there. Naturally one flies to the newspapers when a pestilence
breaks out in his neighborhood. He feels sure of one thing, at any rate:
that the paper will cast all other interests into the background and
devote itself to the one supreme interest of the day; that it will throw
wide its columns and cram them with information, valuable and otherwise,
concerning that great event; and that it will even leave out the idle
jaunts of little dukes and kinglets to make room for the latest plague
item. I sought the newspapers, and was disappointed. I know now that
nothing that can happen in this world can stir the German daily journal
out of its eternal lethargy. When the Last Day comes it will note the
destruction of the world in a three-line paragraph and turn over and go
to sleep again.
This sort of journalism furnishes plenty of wonders. I have seen
ostensible telegrams from Hamburg four days old, gravely put forth as
news, and no apology offered. I have tracked a news item from one paper
to another day after day until it died of old age and fatigue--and yet
everybody treated it with respect, nobody laughed. Is it believable that
these antiquities are forwarded by telegraph? It would be more rational
to send them by slow freight, because less expensive and more speedy.
Then, the meagerness of the news meal is another marvel. That department
of the paper is not headed “Poverty Column,” nobody knows why. We know
that multitudes of people are being swept away daily in Hamburg, yet the
daily telegrams from there could be copied on a half page of note paper,
as a rule. If any newspaper has sent a special reporter thither he has
not arrived yet.
The final miracle of all is the character of this daily dribble of
so-called news. The wisest man in the world can get no information out
of it. It is an Irish stew made up of unrelated odds and ends, a mere
chaotic confusion and worthless. What can one make out of statistics
like these:
Up to noon, 655 cases, 333 deaths. Of these 189 were previously
reported.
The report that 650 bodies are lying unburied is not true. There are
only 340, and the most of these will be buried to-night.
There are 2,062 cases in the hospitals, 215 deaths.
The figures are never given in such a way as to afford one an
opportunity to compare the death list of one day with that of another;
consequently there is no way of finding out whether the pest abates or
increases. Sometimes a report uses the expression “to-day” and does not
say when the day began or ended; sometimes the deaths for several days
are bunched together in a divisionless lump; sometimes the figures make
you think the deaths are five or six hundred a day, while other figures
in the same paragraph seem to indicate that the rate is below two
hundred.
A day or two ago the word cholera was not discoverable at all in that
day’s issue of one of our principal dailies; in to-day’s issue of the
same paper there is no cholera report from Hamburg. Yet a private letter
from there says the raging pestilence is actually increasing.
One might imagine that the papers are forbidden to publish cholera news.
I had that impression myself. It seemed the only explanation of the
absence of special Hamburg correspondence. But it appears now, that the
Hamburg papers are crammed with matter pertaining to the cholera,
therefore that idea was an error. How does one find this out? In this
amazing way: that a daily newspaper located ten or twelve hours from
Hamburg describes with owl-eyed wonder the stirring contents of a
Hamburg daily journal _six days old_, and yet gets from it the only
informing matter, the only matter worth reading, which it has yet
published from that smitten city concerning the pestilence.
You see, it did not even occur to that petrified editor to bail his
columns dry of their customary chloroform and copy that Hamburg journal
entire. He is so used to shoveling gravel that he doesn’t know a diamond
when he sees it. I would trust that man with untold bushels of precious
news, and nobody to watch him. Among other things which he notes in the
Hamburg paper is the fact that its supplements contained one hundred of
the customary elaborate and formal German death notices. That
means--what nobody has had reason to suppose before--that the slaughter
is not confined to the poor and friendless. I think so, because that
sort of death notice occupies a formidable amount of space in an
advertising page, and must cost a good deal of money.
I wander from my proper subject to observe that one hundred of these
notices in a single journal must make that journal a sorrow to the eye
and a shock to the taste, even among the Germans themselves, who are
bred to endure and perhaps enjoy a style of “display ads” which far
surpasses even the vilest American attempts, for insane and outrageous
ugliness. Sometimes a death notice is as large as a foolscap page, has
big black display lines, and is bordered all around with a coarse
mourning border as thick as your finger. The notices are of all sizes
from foolscap down to a humble two-inch square, and they suggest
lamentation of all degrees, from the hundred-dollar hurricane of grief
to the two-shilling sigh of a composed and modest regret. A newspaper
page blocked out with mourning compartments of fifty different sizes
flung together without regard to order or system or size must be a
spectacle to see.
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Todes-Anzeige. |
| ------------- |
| |
| Theilnehmenden Freunden und Bekannten hierdurch |
| die schmerzliche Nachricht, daß mein lieber Freund |
| und langjähriger, treuer Mitarbeiter |
| |
| Rudolf Beck |
| |
|gestern Abend an einem Herzschlag plötzlich verschieden |
|ist. |
| |
| =Langen=, den 5. September 1892. |
| |
| Otto Steingoetter |
| |
| Firma =Beck & Steingoetter=. |
| |
| Die Beerdigung findet Dienstag, den 6. Sept., |
| Nachmittags 3½ Uhr, statt. |
| 25958 |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
The notice copied above is modest and straightforward. The advertiser
informs sympathizing friends and acquaintances that his dear friend and
old and faithful fellow laborer has been suddenly smitten with death;
then signs his name and adds “of the firm of Beck & Steingoetter,” which
is perhaps another way of saying that the business will be continued as
usual at the old stand. The average notice is often refreshed with a
whiff of business at the end.
The 100 formal notices in the Hamburg paper did not mean merely 100
deaths; each told of one death, but many of them told of more--in some
cases they told of four and five. In the same issue there were 132
one-line death notices. If the dates of these deaths were all stated,
the 232 notices together could be made the basis of a better guess at
the current mortality in Hamburg than the “official” reports furnished,
perhaps. You would know that a certain number died on a certain day who
left behind them people able to publish the fact and pay for it. Then
you could correctly assume that the vast bulk of that day’s harvest were
people who were penniless and left penniless friends behind. You could
add your facts to your assumption and get _some_ sort of idea of the
death rate, and this would be strikingly better than the official
reports, since they give you no idea at all.
To-day a physician was speaking of a private letter received here
yesterday from a physician in Hamburg which stated that every day
numbers of poor people are snatched from their homes to the pest houses,
and that that is the last that is heard of a good many of them. No
intelligible record is kept; they die unknown and are buried so. That no
intelligible record is kept seems proven by the fact that the public
cannot get hold of a burial list for one day that is not made impossible
by the record of the day preceding and the one following it.
What I am trying to make the reader understand is, the strangeness of
the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is
close to us, and yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be
if the stage were in China. We sit “in front,” and the audience is in
fact the world; but the curtain is down and from behind it we hear only
an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into history as the
disaster without a history. And yet a well-trained newspaper staff would
find a way to secure an accurate list of the new hospital cases and the
burials daily, and would do it, and not take it out in complaining of
the foolishness and futility of the official reports. Every day we know
exactly what is going on in the two cholera-stricken ships in the harbor
of New York. That is all the cholera news we get that is worth printing
or believing.
All along we have heard rumors that the force of workers at Hamburg was
too small to cope with the pestilence; that more help was impossible to
get; and we have seen statements which confirmed these sorrowful facts;
statements which furnished the pitiful spectacle of brave workers dying
at their posts from exhaustion; of corpses lying in the halls of the
hospitals, waiting there because there was no worker idle; and now comes
another confirmatory item; it is in the physician’s letter above
referred to--an item which shows you how hard pressed the authorities
are by their colossal burden--an item which gives you a sudden and
terrific sense of the situation there; for in a line it flashes before
you this ghastly picture, a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going
along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four
corpses!
QUEEN VICTORIA’S JUBILEE
(1897)
So far as I can see, a procession has value in but two ways--as a show
and as a symbol; its minor function being to delight the eye, its major
one to compel thought, exalt the spirit, stir the heart, and inflame the
imagination. As a mere show, and meaningless--like a Mardi-Gras march--a
magnificent procession is a sight worth a long journey to see; as a
symbol, the most colorless and unpicturesque procession, if it have a
moving history back of it, is worth a thousand of it.
After the Civil War ten regiments of bronzed New York veterans marched
up Broadway in faded uniforms and bearing faded battle flags that were
mere shot-riddled rags--and in each battalion as it swung by, one noted
a great gap, an eloquent vacancy where had marched the comrades who had
fallen and would march no more! Always, as this procession advanced
between the massed multitudes, its approach was welcomed by each block
of people with a burst of proud and grateful enthusiasm--then the head
of it passed, and suddenly revealed those pathetic gaps, and silence
fell upon that block; for every man in it had choked up, and could not
get command of his voice and add it to the storm again for many minutes.
That was the most moving and tremendous effect that I have ever
witnessed--those affecting silences falling between those hurricanes of
worshiping enthusiasm.
There was no costumery in that procession, no color, no tinsel, no
brilliancy, yet it was the greatest spectacle and the most gracious and
exalting and beautiful that has come within my experience. It was
because it had history back of it, and because it was a symbol, and
stood for something, and because one viewed it with the spiritual
vision, not the physical. There was not much for the physical eye to
see, but it revealed continental areas, limitless horizons, to the eye
of the imagination and the spirit.
A procession, to be valuable, must do one thing or the other--clothe
itself in splendors and charm the eye, or symbolize something sublime
and uplifting, and so appeal to the imagination. As a mere spectacle to
look at, I suppose that the Queen’s procession will not be as showy as
the Tsar’s late pageant; it will probably fall much short of the one in
Tannhäuser in the matter of rich and adorable costumery; in the number
of renowned personages on view in it, it will probably fall short of
some that have been seen in England before this. And yet in its major
function, its symbolic function, I think that if all the people in it
wore their everyday clothes and marched without flags or music, it would
still be incomparably the most memorable and most important procession
that ever moved through the streets of London.
For it will stand for English history, English growth, English
achievement, the accumulated power and renown and dignity of twenty
centuries of strenuous effort. Many things about it will set one to
reflecting upon what a large feature of this world England is to-day,
and this will in turn move one, even the least imaginative, to cast a
glance down her long perspective and note the steps of her progress and
the insignificance of her first estate. In this matter London is itself
a suggestive object lesson.
I suppose that London has always existed. One cannot easily imagine an
England that had no London. No doubt there was a village here 5,000
years ago. It was on the river somewhere west of where the Tower is now;
it was built of thatched mud huts close to a couple of limpid brooks,
and on every hand for miles and miles stretched rolling plains of fresh
green grass, and here and there were groups and groves of trees. The
tribes wore skins--sometimes merely their own, sometimes those of other
animals. The chief was monarch, and helped out his complexion with blue
paint. His industry was the chase; his relaxation was war. Some of the
Englishmen who will view the procession to-day are carrying his ancient
blood in their veins.
It may be that that village remained about as it began, away down to the
Roman occupation, a couple of thousand years ago. It was still not much
of a town when Alfred burned the cakes. Even when the Conqueror first
saw it, it did not amount to much. I think it must have been short of
distinguished architecture or he would not have traveled down into the
country to the village of Westminster to get crowned. If you skip down
350 years further you will find a London of some little consequence, but
I believe that that is as much as you can say for it. Still, I am
interested in that London, for it saw the first two processions which
will live longer than any other in English history, I think; the date of
the one is 1415, that of the other is 1897.
The compactly built part of the London of 1415 was a narrow strip not a
mile long, which stretched east and west through the middle of what is
now called “the City.” The houses were densest in the region of
Cheapside. South of the strip were scattering residences which stood in
turfy lawns which sloped to the river. North of the strip, fields and
country homes extended to the walls. Let us represent that London by
three checker-board squares placed in a row; then open out a New York
newspaper like a book, and the space which it covers will properly
represent the London of to-day by comparison. It is the difference
between your hand and a blanket. It is possible that that ancient London
had 100,000 inhabitants, and that 100,000 outsiders came to town to see
the procession. The present London contains five or six million
inhabitants, and it has been calculated that the population has jumped
to 10,000,000 to-day.
The pageant of 1415 was to celebrate the gigantic victory of Agincourt,
then and still the most colossal in England’s history.
From that day to this there has been nothing that even approached it but
Plassey. It was the third and greatest in the series of monster
victories won by the English over the French in the Hundred Years’
War--Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt. At Agincourt, according to history,
15,000 English, under Henry V, defeated and routed an army of 100,000
French. Sometimes history makes it 8,000 English and 60,000 French; but
no matter, in both cases the proportions are preserved. Eight thousand
of the French nobility were slain and the rest of the order taken
prisoners--1,500 in number--among them the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon
and Marshal Boucicaut; and the victory left the whole northern half of
France an English possession. This wholesale depletion of the
aristocracy made such a stringent scarcity in its ranks that when the
young peasant girl, Joan of Arc, came to undo Henry’s mighty work
fourteen years later she could hardly gather together nobles enough to
man her staff.
The battle of Agincourt was fought on the 25th of October, and a few
days later the tremendous news was percolating through England.
Presently it was sweeping the country like a tidal wave, like a cyclone,
like a conflagration. Choose your own figure, there is no metaphor known
to the language that can exaggerate the tempest of joy and pride and
exultation that burst everywhere along the progress of that great news.
The king came home and brought his soldiers with him--he and they the
idols of the nation, now. He brought his 1,500 captive knights and
nobles, too--we shall not see any such output of blue blood as that
to-day, bond or free. The king rested three weeks in his palace, the
Tower of London, while the people made preparations and prepared the
welcome due him. On the 22d of December all was ready.
There were no cables, no correspondents, no newspapers then--a
regrettable defect, but not irremediable. A young man who would have
been a correspondent if he had been born 500 years later was in London
at the time, and he remembers the details. He has communicated them to
me through a competent spirit medium, phrased in a troublesome mixture
of obsolete English and moldy French, and I have thoroughly modernized
his story and put it into straight English, and will here record it. I
will explain that his Sir John Oldcastle is a person whom we do not know
very well by that name, nor much care for; but we know him well and
adore him, too, under his other name--Sir John Falstaff. Also, I will
remark that two miles of the Queen’s progress to-day will be over ground
traversed by the procession of Henry V; all solid bricks and mortar,
now, but open country in Henry’s day, and clothed in that unapproachable
beauty which has been the monopoly of sylvan England since the creation.
Ah, where now are those long-vanished forms, those unreturning feet! Let
us not inquire too closely. Translated, this is the narrative of the
spirit-correspondent, who is looking down upon me at this moment from
his high home, and admiring to see how the art and mystery of spelling
has improved since his time!