"'And what,' cries Cupid, 'will save us?'
Says Apollo: 'Modernize Rome!
What inns! Your streets too, how narrow!
Too much of palace and dome!'
"'O learn of London, whose paupers
Are not pushed out by the swells!
Wide streets, with fine double trottoirs;
And then—the London hotels!'"
Between the "Inns" of my youth and these "Hotels" of to-day the difference is so great that they can scarcely be recognized as belonging to the same family. Under the old dispensation all was solid comfort, ponderous respectability, and the staid courtesy of the antique world; under the new it is all glare and glitter, show and sham; the morals of the Tuileries and the manners of Greenwich Fair. The building is something between a palace and a barrack, with a hall of marble, a staircase of alabaster, a winter garden full of birds and fountains, and a band which deafens you while you eat your refined but exiguous dinner. Among these sumptuosities the visitor is no longer a person but a number. As a number he is received by the gigantic "Suisse" who, resplendent in green and gold, watches the approach to the palace; as a number he is registered by a dictatorial "Secretary," enshrined in a Bureau; as a number he is shot up, like a parcel, to his airy lodgings on the seventh floor; as a number he orders his meals; as a number he pays his bill. The whole business is a microcosm of State Socialism: Bureaucracy is supreme, and the Individual is lost in the Machine. But, though the courtesies and the humanities and even the decencies of the old order have vanished so completely, the exactions remain much the same as they were. There is, indeed, no courtly landlord to bow, like a plumper Sir Charles Grandison, over the silver salver on which you have laid your gold; but there are gilt-edged porters, and moustached lift-men, and a regiment of buttony boys who float round the departing guest with well-timed assiduity; and the Suisse at the door, as he eyes our modest luggage with contemptuous glare, looks quite prepared, if need be, to extort his guerdon by physical force.
The British Inn, whatever were its shortcomings in practice, has been glorified in some of the best verse and best prose in the English language. It will, methinks, be a long time before even the most impressionable genius of the "Bodley Head" pens a panegyric of the London Hotel.
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