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.
THE HEADSMAN
Et cependant, toute grandeur, toute puissance, toute subordination repose sur l’exécuteur: il est l’horreur et le lien de l’association humaine. Otez du monde cet agent incompréhensible; dans l’instant même l’ordre fait place au chaos, les trônes s’abîment, et la société disparaît.
Joseph de Maistre.