wrote Byron, when sore beset; but the remark cannot be said to bear
the stamp of truth. Nine tenths of the poet’s love for nature was
irritation at the boundless injustice and the sterling stupidity of
man. He would never have expressed so much general benevolence had
Europe in his time been the tourist-trodden platform it is to-day.
We might, were we disposed to be reasonable, bear in mind the
humiliating fact that we too are aliens, out of harmony with our
surroundings, and marring, as far as in us lies, the charm of ancient
street or the still mountain side. Few of us, however, are so candid as
Mr. Henry James, who, while detesting his fellow travellers, frankly
admits his own inherent undesirability. “We complain,” he says, “of a
hackneyed and cockneyized Europe; but wherever, in desperate search
of the untrodden, we carry our much-labelled luggage, our bad French,
our demand for a sitzbath and pale ale, we rub off the bloom of local
colour, and establish a precedent for unlimited intrusion.”
This is generous, and it is not a common point of view. “Americans
do roam so,” I heard an Englishwoman remark discontentedly in Cook’s
Paris office, where she was waiting with manifest impatience while
the clerk made up tickets for a party of trans-Atlantic kindred. It
never seemed to occur to her that she was not upon her own native
heath. The habit of classifying our distastes proves how strong is
our general sense of injury. We dislike English tourists more than
French, or French more than English, or Americans more than either,
or Germans most of all,--the last a common verdict. There is a power
of universal mastery about the travelling Teuton which affronts our
feebler souls. We cannot cope with him; we stand defeated at every turn
by his resistless determination to secure the best. The windows of the
railway carriages, the little sunny tables in the hotel dining-rooms,
the back seats--commanding the view--of the Swiss _funiculaires_;--all
these strong positions he occupies at once with the strategical genius
of a great military nation. No weak concern for other people’s comfort
mars the simple straightforwardness of his plans, nor interferes with
their prompt and masterly execution. Amid the confusion and misery
of French and Italian railway stations, he plays a conqueror’s part,
commanding the services of the porters, and marching off triumphantly
with his innumerable pieces of hand luggage, while his fellow tourists
clamour helplessly for aid. “The Germans are a rude, unmannered race,
but active and expert where their personal advantages are concerned,”
wrote the observant Froissart many years ago. He could say neither more
nor less were he travelling over the Continent to-day.
Granted that the scurrying crowds who infest Italy every spring, and
Switzerland every summer, are seldom “children of light;” that their
motives in coming are, for the most part, unintelligible, and their
behaviour the reverse of urbane;--even then there seems to be no real
cause for the demoralization that follows in their wake, for the sudden
and bitter change that comes over a land when once the stranger claims
it as his own. It is the cordial effort made to meet the tourist
halfway, to minister to his supposed wants, and to profit by his
supposed wealth, that desolates the loveliest cities in the world, that
flouts the face of nature, and rasps our most tender sensibilities.
Venice turned into a grand bazaar, Vaucluse packed with stalls for the
sale of every object which ought never to be found there, the Falls
of the Rhine lit up by electricity, like the transformation scene of
a ballet;--is it our misfortune or our fault that these things may be
directly traceable to us? Do we _like_ to see a trolley-car bumping
its way to Chillon, or to find the castle entrance stocked with silver
spoons, and wooden bears, and miniature Swiss châlets? Shall I confess
that I watched a youthful countrywoman of my own carrying delightedly
away--as an appropriate souvenir of the spot--a group consisting of
Mother bear sitting up languidly in bed, Nurse bear wrapping Infant
bear in swaddling-cloths, and Doctor bear holding a labelled bottle of
medicine? There seemed a certain incongruity about the purchase, and a
certain lack of sensibility in the purchaser. Chillon is not without
sombre associations, nor poetic life; and if Byron’s “Prisoner” no
longer wrings our hearts, still youth is youth,--or, at least, it used
to be,--and the
seven columns, massy and grey,
were at one time part of its inheritance. Is it better, I wonder, to
begin life with a few illusions, a little glow, a pardonable capacity
for enthusiasm, or to be so healthily free from every breath of
sentiment as to be capable--at eighteen--of buying comic bears within
the melancholy portals of Chillon.
Travelling, like novel-writing, is but a modern form of activity; and
tourists, like novelists, are increasing at so fearful a rate of speed
that foreign countries and library shelves bid fair to be equally
overrun. There _was_ a time when good men looked askance both upon the
page of fable, and upon those far countries where reality was stranger
than romance. “I was once in Italy myself,” confesses the pious Roger
Ascham; “but I thank God my abode there was but nine days.” Nine days
seem a scant allowance for Italy. Even the business-like traveller
who now scampers “_more Americano_” over Europe is wont to deal more
generously with this, its fairest land. But in Roger Ascham’s time nine
days would hardly have permitted a glimpse at the wonders from which he
so swiftly and fearfully withdrew.
Now and then, as years went by, men with a genuine love of roving
and adventure wandered far afield, unbaffled by difficulties, and
unscandalized by foreign creeds and customs. James Howell, that
most delightful of gossips and chroniclers, has so much to say in
praise of “the sweetness and advantage of travel,” that even now
his letters--nearly three hundred years old--stir in our hearts the
wayfarer’s restless longing. After being “toss’d from shore to shore
for thirty-odd months,” he can still write stoutly: “And tho’ these
frequent removes and tumblings under climes of differing temper were
not without some danger, yet the delight which accompany’d them was
far greater; and it is impossible for any man to conceive the true
pleasure of peregrination, but he who actually enjoys and puts it into
practice.” Moreover, he is well assured that travel is “a profitable
school, a running academy, and nothing conduceth more to the building
up and perfecting of a man. They that traverse the world up and down
have the clearest understanding; being faithful eye-witnesses of those
things which others receive but in trust, whereunto they must yield an
intuitive consent, and a kind of implicit faith.”
In one respect, however, Howell was a true son of his day, of the day
when Prelacy and Puritanism alternately afflicted England. For foreign
cities and foreign citizens he had a keen and intelligent appreciation;
nothing daunted his purpose, nor escaped his observation; but he
drew the line consistently at the charms of nature. The “high and
hideous Alps” were as abhorrent to his soul as they were, a century
later, to Horace Walpole’s. It was the gradual--I had almost said the
regrettable--discovery of beauty in these “uncouth, huge, monstrous
excrescences” which gave a new and powerful impetus to travel. Here at
least were innocent objects of pilgrimage, wonders uncontaminated by
the evils which were vaguely supposed to lurk in the hearts of Paris
and of Rome. It was many, many years after Roger Ascham’s praiseworthy
flight from Italy that we find Patty More, sister to the ever-virtuous
Hannah, writing apprehensively to a friend:--
“What is to become of us? All the world, as it seems, flying off to
France, that land of deep corruption and wickedness, made hotter
in sin by this long and dreadful Revolution. _The very curates in
our neighbourhood have been._ I fear a deterioration in the English
character is taking place. The Ambassador’s lady in Paris could not
introduce the English ladies till they had covered up their bodies.”
This sounds rather as though England were corrupting France.
Perhaps, notwithstanding the truly reprehensible conduct of the
curates,--for whom no excuse can be made,--the exodus was not so
universal as the agitated Mrs. Patty seemed to think. There were
still plenty of stay-at-homes, lapped in rural virtues, and safe from
contamination;--like the squire who told Jane Austen’s father that
he and his wife had been quarrelling the night before as to whether
Paris were in France, or France in Paris. The “Roman Priest Conversion
Branch Tract Society” gave to bucolic Britain all the Continental
details it required.
But when the “hideous Alps” became the “matchless heights,” the
“palaces of Nature,” when poets had sung their praises lustily, and
it had dawned upon the minds of unpoetic men that they were not
merely obstacles to be crossed, but objects to be looked at and
admired;--_then_ were gathered slowly the advance guards of that mighty
army of sight-seers which sweeps over Europe to-day. “Switzerland,”
writes Mr. James gloomily, “has become a show country. I think so more
and more every time I come here. Its use in the world is to reassure
persons of a benevolent imagination who wish the majority of mankind
had only a little more elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a
thousand years, and as elevating certainly as mountains five miles high
can make it. I expect to live to see the summit of Mount Rosa heated by
steam-tubes, and adorned with a hotel setting three dinners a day.”
The last words carry a world of weight. They are the key-note of
the situation. Tourists in these years of grace need a vast deal
of food and drink to keep their enthusiasm warm. James Howell lived
contentedly upon bread and grapes for three long months in Spain.
Byron wrote mockingly from Lisbon: “Comfort must not be expected by
folks that go a-pleasuring;” and no one ever bore manifold discomforts
with more endurance and gayety than he did. But now that the “grand
tour”--once the experience of a lifetime--has become a succession
of little tours, undertaken every year or two, things are made easy
for slackened sinews and impaired digestions. The average traveller
concentrates his attention sternly upon the slowness of the Italian
trains, the shortness of the Swiss beds, the surliness of the German
officials, the dirt of the French inns, the debatableness of the
Spanish butter, the universal and world-embracing badness of the
tea. These things form the staple topics of discussion among men and
women who exchange confidences at the table d’hôte, and they lend a
somewhat depressing tone to the conversation, which is not greatly
enlivened by a few side remarks connecting the drinking water with the
germs of typhoid fever. It is possible that the talkers have enjoyed
some exhilarating experiences, some agreeable sensations, which they
hesitate--mistakenly--to reveal; but they wax eloquent on the subject
of cost. “The continual attention to pecuniary disbursements detracts
terribly from the pleasure of all travelling schemes,” wrote Shelley in
a moment of dejection; and the sentiment, couched in less Johnsonian
English, is monotonously familiar to-day. Paying for things is a great
trouble and a great expense; and the tourist’s uneasy apprehension
that he is being overcharged turns this ordinary process--which is not
wholly unknown at home--into a bitter grievance. To hear him expatiate
upon the subject, one might imagine that his fellow creatures had
heretofore supplied all his wants for love.
Great Britain had sent her restless children out to see the world
for many years before faraway America joined in the sport, while
the overwhelming increase of German travellers dates only from the
Franco-Prussian War. Now the three armies of occupation march and
countermarch over the Continent, very much in one another’s way, and
deeply resentful of one another’s intrusion. “The English”--again I
venture to quote Froissart--“are affable to no other nation than their
own.” The Americans--so other Americans piteously lament--are noisy,
self-assertive, and contemptuous. The fault of the Germans, as Canning
said of the Dutch,--
Is giving too little and asking too much.
All these unlovely characteristics are stimulated and kept well to the
fore by travel. It is only in our fellow tourists that we can recognize
their enormity. When Mr. Arnold said that Shakespeare and Virgil would
have found the Pilgrim Fathers “intolerable company,” he was probably
thinking of poets and pietists shut up together in fair weather and
in foul, while the little Mayflower pitched its slow way across the
“estranging sea.”
It requires a good deal of courage to quote Lord Chesterfield seriously
in these years of grace. His reasonableness is out of favour with
moralists, and sentimentalists, and earnest thinkers generally. But
we might find it helpful now and then, were we not too wrapped
in self-esteem to be so easily helped. “Good breeding,” he says
thoughtfully, “is a combination of much sense, some good nature, and a
little self-denial for the sake of others, with a view to obtain the
same indulgence from them.” Here is a “Tourist’s Guide,”--the briefest
ever penned. We cannot learn to love other tourists,--the laws of
nature forbid it,--but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of
their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some
common exchange of recognition and amenity.